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

Subscribe now

Episode Resources

In-person ticket sales for Minneapolis on August 29 are closed, but virtual tickets are still available — and they’re buy one, get one half off, so grab a friend and gather. This is our one and only live gathering in 2026: Pantsuit Politics 2026 Events

The Odyssey on Screen

• The Odyssey (2026 film) (Wikipedia)

• ‘The Odyssey’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Vast, Thrilling, Aloof Epic (Variety)

• Thrilling but uneven, ‘The Odyssey’ is a homecoming for Christopher Nolan (NPR)

• Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse (The Ezra Klein Show)

• Did Christopher Nolan ‘Christianize’ ‘The Odyssey’? (Deseret News)

• Circe by Madeline Miller (Penguin Random House)

Allies, Iran, and the Global Order

• Trump torches allies as Iran exposes limits of hard power (Axios)

• Kushner meets regional leaders as multiple conflicts roil Middle East (CNN)

One Too Many: Money, Betting, and the Midterms

• More than 150 Polymarket wallets may have traded on military secrets, research finds (Reuters via Al-Monitor)

• Crypto, AI and betting firms drive record spending in 2026 midterms (Crypto Briefing)

The $40 Trillion Threshold

• National debt reaches grim $40 trillion milestone. Here’s why that matters (CNN Business)

• US national debt passes record $40 trillion (Al Jazeera)

The Shifting Electorate

• The ever-evolving Latino vote is rapidly shifting away from Trump and Republicans (The Conversation)

Outside of Politics

• The Popcast with Knox and Jamie (Full crossover conversation)

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Penguin Random House) — our bonus Substack discussion is up today

• Tribe by Sebastian Junger (Hachette)

Episode Transcript

coming soon

Show Credits

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

The data center backlash continues

Two days in a row, our morning newsletters mentioned that voter discontent about data centers will seriously influence midterm elections.

The nat…

Read more

We still don’t have a name for this thing.

That’s a next week problem. Good Morning Live is on the table, and so is the question of whether we put the date in every day. We do know that we love this, we love that you love it, and we are …

Read more

The Lindsay Clancy trial is a tragedy on every level.

Lindsay Clancy killed her three children in 2023. The state of Massachusetts is now seeking justice. We’re searching for an understanding of what constitutes justice…

Read more

Today, Sarah and I work through whether this summer was really the worst. Outside of politics, our songs of the summer, best new album, and new and noteworthy artists.

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

Subscribe now

Episode Resources

We are in Minneapolis on August 29, and this is truly last call — in-person ticket sales close Wednesday morning. If you can’t get to Minnesota, virtual tickets are buy one, get one free: Pantsuit Politics 2026 Events

The Summer of Cyclospora

• Investigation of Multistate Outbreak of Cyclospora Illnesses: Iceberg Lettuce (FDA)

• Cyclospora Outbreak Linked to Iceberg Lettuce (CDC)

• Cyclospora Outbreak 2026: Map, Foods to Avoid, States Most Impacted as US Hits 22,000 Cases (TODAY)

The Fever Breaking: Polling, Fancy Farm, and the Midterms

• Even some Republican voters sour on Trump (Axios)

• Trump Says Voters Are Angry With Republicans—But Not With Him. Here’s What Polls Show (TIME)

• Fancy Farm focused on next year’s election, not midterms (Kentucky Lantern)

• McConnell discharged from rehab center, Senate return still unclear (Axios)

• Was Mitch McConnell’s dead body transported to Kentucky coroner? Here’s the truth (Snopes)

The Primaries and the Party

• Michigan Senate primary election results: Abdul El-Sayed defeats Haley Stevens (The Washington Post)

• Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, notching a Midwest victory for the left (NBC News)

• “This Week” Transcript 8-9-26: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Mark Esper (ABC News) — the “woke one was crazy” interview

• Graham Platner officially withdraws from the Maine Senate race (NBC News)

• Meet ‘Project 2029’ — and its war on the annoyance economy (NPR Planet Money)

• #MeToo didn’t go far enough (The Argument) and A look back at #MeToo (Slow Boring) — the Demsas/Yglesias exchange

AI, Data Centers, and the Wrong Prioritization

• $100B data center, gas-fired power plant to be developed around Paducah DOE site (Louisville Public Media)

• Hyperscale data center, natural gas-fired project planned for Paducah’s former nuclear plant (Kentucky Lantern)

• Texas Data Centers Suffer Brutal Collision With Reality (Futurism)

• Luigi Mangione pleads guilty to stalking slain UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson (Axios)

• Luigi Mangione posed as investor to get information on UnitedHealthcare ahead of shooting (NewsNation)

Outside of Politics: The Pantsuit Politics Music Awards

• Why Won’t We Admit Ella Langley Has the Song of the Summer? (Rolling Stone) — “Choosin’ Texas,” Sarah’s song of the summer

• Audrey Hobert — “Bowling Alley” (Official Video) — Beth’s song of the summer

• Who’s the Clown? by Audrey Hobert — Beth’s album of the summer

• The Great Divide by Noah Kahan — Sarah’s album of the summer, opening with “End of August”

• You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love by Olivia Rodrigo — a track-by-track breakdown (The Hollywood Reporter)

• Gracie Abrams & Audrey Hobert premiere “Mini Bar” (JamBase)

• Kacey Musgraves’ Country Homecoming: The Singer on New Album ‘Middle of Nowhere’ (Variety)

• Brandi Carlile’s Raging Cover of Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” Is for All of Us (Rolling Stone)

• Brandi Carlile — “Uninvited” at Newport Folk Fest 2026 (YouTube)

• Newport Folk Festival — Sarah’s bucket-list grown person festival, guides welcome

• Laufey — Beth’s new and noteworthy pick, by way of her daughter Ellen

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: All the stories that felt intense like something was building, like we’re powerless in the face of this building momentum, be it the diarrhea lettuce, be it the war that the narrative changed on about every 48 hours, be it the data centers, the flock cameras, the tech, like all this like building sense that like something terrible is going to happen, and no one is at the helm, and the people who are at the helm are lying to us constantly, I think contributes to this sense of my God , is this the worst summer ever? Are we in the worst timeline?

[00:00:48] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:50] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics, where we are back together in real time and space to ask an essential question collectively.

[00:01:01] Sarah: Collectively.

[00:01:02] Beth: Was this summer the worst?

[00:01:06] Sarah: I think it was. My stance, let me not reveal my hands too early, I think maybe yes.

[00:01:12] Beth: Okay. Let’s try to sort through it. We’re going to try to figure out together, was this summer the worst, collectively? And then were there any indicators of progress? Was anything surprisingly hopeful? Are we getting somewhere even through the worst?

[00:01:25] Sarah: Also yes. Okay, sorry. I spilled it.

[00:01:27] Beth:  I think so too.

[00:01:28] Sarah: Okay.

[00:01:29] Beth: And then we’re going to have the conversation that I really want to have coming off of my break. I want to talk about music, so we’re going to hand out some Pantsuit Politics music awards. There’s so much good music right now.

[00:01:38] Sarah: Yes. I love this.

[00:01:39] Beth: I’m excited to discuss.

[00:01:40] Sarah: Before we get started, we’re going to be in Minneapolis on August 27th.

[00:01:43] Beth: So soon.

[00:01:44] Sarah: So soon. If you cannot come in person, which you should, but if you cannot, we have virtual tickets available. Buy one, get one. So invite a friend. Wear your comfy pants. Be a beverage goblin. Have three drinks available, maybe like a cocktail, a water, a tea.

[00:02:03] Beth: A Diet Coke is fine.

[00:02:04] Sarah: A Diet Coke. And come join us for our virtual show. Even if you can’t watch live, get you a virtual ticket and you can watch it later. You don’t want to feel left out because sometimes there’s inside jokes. Sometimes there’s references. You just want to stay in the Pantsuit Politics zeitgeist. So get a virtual ticket to our show. We’ll put the link in the show notes.

[00:02:24] Beth: And if you can be there in person, which we would love the most, this is our true last call for those tickets. So we are going to close those ticket purchases on Wednesday morning. So truly last call to come be with us in person. But either way, be with us and other Pantsuit Politics listeners. It’s going to be the best.

[00:02:42] Sarah: That’s right.

[00:02:42] Beth: Next up, was this summer really bad? Did it fail? Do we give it an F? We’ll see. Sarah, it’s always illuminating to take a real step back from the news for me and see what I become aware of when I’m not deep in the details every day. And I got to say, this summer it’s weather and diarrhea. That’s just the bottom line.

[00:03:17] Sarah: Okay, but real paradox. But the World Cup broke through too, right?

[00:03:22] Beth: I was still working during the World Cup, so it doesn’t really count for me.

[00:03:25] Sarah: Tough to say. But yeah, that’s right. It’s got to be. That’s the problem. Maybe this summer just flamed out. Maybe we like front loaded the good stuff and I think maybe that is it.

[00:03:35] Beth: Used up the good stuff. Good theory.

[00:03:37] Sarah: Because we started so strong. We had our America 250. The World Cup just was a delight. But then the World Cup ended, and all we had was lettuce diarrhea.

[00:03:47] Beth: And storms.

[00:03:48] Sarah: And storms and...

[00:03:51] Beth: Maybe just storms is the word in general. Internal, external, everywhere storms.

[00:03:57] Sarah: Yes. Because look should we start with the cyclospora? Should we start with the lettuce diarrhea?

[00:04:03] Beth: Let’s get it over with.

[00:04:04] Sarah: Okay, so it’s a terrible virus. Also, this is contributing to like my vibe. My family got really sick this summer for the first time in like several years. We all got adenovirus, and it’s a brutal one. It lasted a long time. Both Nicholas and Felix had like multiple days of fever. We had just a cough forever.

[00:04:26] Beth: And this is happening while you’re on an RV, correct?

[00:04:28] Sarah: We’re on an RV, so that’s pretty bad.

[00:04:29] Beth: It was pretty bad.

[00:04:30] Sarah: But my medical friends are like, “No, it’s out there.” Like Felix got it at camp. His entire group chat from camp all had this virus and were so sick, and my friends in the medical field are like, “Yeah, it’s out there, and it lasts a long time and it’s brutal.” So like the cyclospora plus I felt like there was like a lot of like summer colds, summer viruses, like just like general sickness out there.

[00:04:54] Beth: Yeah. And allergies have been bad here too.

[00:04:57] Sarah: Yeah, so to me that’s like a combined thing contributing to the lettuce diarrhea story. And then even beyond just the physicality of how awful cyclospora is and how long it lasts and that there’s all these other sicknesses going around, it’s just this sense, I think, and particularly if you are opposed to this administration, that this was preventable. I vividly remember when he was sworn in, somewhere on Instagram I saw someone say, “Stop eating bagged lettuce now. They have stopped monitoring.” The FDA, the CDC, all these they don’t even have leaders right now. All the positions are empty, and RFK is just blowing shit up left and right. And I remember that. And Nicholas was like, “Yeah, I’m not going to buy bagged lettuce anymore,” because the way they chop it it’s like ground beef, right? If there’s anything in there, it spreads. And when this hit, I’m like this is why I stopped eating bagged lettuce a year ago because this was completely and foreseeable and infuriating that it was.

[00:06:04] Beth: And it’s a terrible feeling to not trust the produce. It’s a terrible feeling to be at a summer potluck and just look at the salad and think, “Can’t do it. Just can’t do it. I don’t trust this salad.”

[00:06:14] Sarah: We were on vacation. I want to eat a salad because you eat a lot of burgers and pizza, and you’re like, “Oh, I guess I’ll just continue to clog my arteries and my intestines because I can’t trust the lettuce.”

[00:06:28] Beth: And you can’t trust the information about the lettuce. Because again in just my scope of awareness, not the kind of deep dive I usually do, what I was hearing is they blamed this company, but then maybe not that company, but then yes maybe that company again. You know what I mean? The messaging is also incompetent. So it makes you skeptical of the lettuce and also the information about the lettuce, and that’s a really desperate place to be in the summer.

[00:06:57] Sarah: That’s the theme, right? All the stories that felt intense, like something was building, like we’re powerless in the face of this building momentum, be it the diarrhea lettuce, be it the war that the narrative changed on about every 48 hours, be it the data centers, the flock cameras, the tech, like all this building sense that something terrible is going to happen and no one is at the helm, and the people who are at the helm are lying to us constantly, I think contributes to this sense of “Oh my God, is this the worst summer ever? Are we in the worst timeline?”

[00:07:33] Beth: And I think what compounded that for me, too, was this sort of soap opera feeling connected to the administration. Because when I would try to tune back in, it would be like when I used to watch One Life to Live in the summers, but only in the summers. And I would realize it didn’t matter that I had been gone for the school year because the same things were really happening still on One Life to Live. So we’re still trying to fire Lisa Cook. We’re still trying to ban birthright citizenship. We’re still talking about building the wall here and there. We’re still doing tariffs and upsetting Canada, and we’re still anti-vax, and like Dr. Fauci is testifying in Congress. So the timelines feel blurred and messed up on top of that distrust and the diarrhea and the weather and the war.

[00:08:21] Sarah: Now, I will say I do feel in the midst of the shit storm that the sense that the fever is breaking around Donald Trump and people’s perception of him is very real. And we have polling about that this morning. There’s new polling that he is losing support among his strongest supporters. We’re not talking about the regular sort of back and forth shift. We’re talking about people who his support among Republicans used to be like 89% no matter what he did, and now it’s dropping, depending on how strong the Republican is, 12 to 20%. That is real. That is absolutely real.

[00:09:09] Beth: I want to know the extent to which you think that will have down slope effects for Congress, because that’s the real question. In November, how big of a deal is his support dropping for people on the ballot?

[00:09:25] Sarah: Before I get to that-- because I did have some like real life experiences that I felt were important and contributive to that understanding-- I do think that you can hear it’s like a devil and angel on everybody’s shoulders, especially if you do not support the administration, right? I feel like there’s this sense of “We just have to wait him out. We have to wait for him to leave office or die.” And that’s where we’re all just stuck. I’ve had that literal conversation with people.

[00:09:49] Beth: And that feeling in my own mind and body, I have to live with this. I I don’t want to ever talk about him again, and he is the president.

[00:09:56] Sarah: President of the United States. Correct.

[00:09:57] Beth: Yeah.

[00:09:58] Sarah: And this sense of but the midterms, it could matter. This matters. It’s breaking through. So I went to Fancy Farm, the picnic in Kentucky. It’s like the big political picnic. And nary a mention. James Comer’s the only person who brought Trump up, one time. They’ll say like what we’re accomplishing and what we’re doing. Lots of talk about the State House and State Senate in Kentucky and how they’re the ones getting everything done. Some talk of Republicans. But you could sense that this is not a united front. They don’t know what to do with him because so much of what he’s doing is historically unpopular. And you wouldn’t lean on a president in this situation under the best of circumstances, and I think we can all agree this is not the best of circumstances. So that was really interesting to watch play out in real time.

[00:10:53] Beth: That is interesting. I’m really trying, as I was thinking about coming back, to resist the temptation to ask questions like, what will this mean for other Republicans? Because I don’t want to do punditry. So if I listen to that instinct in myself, what I can say is that being away, taking a big step back, what I feel generally is a sense that no one is impressive right now. And I don’t know what that will mean, but I know that civically that’s not great.

[00:11:25] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:11:25] Beth: That the weather, the diarrhea, the war, those feelings are permeating feelings about the midterms too. I am not hearing a lot of, “Ooh, and I’m excited to go vote.” You know what I mean? It’s a little bit forlorn on every level.

[00:11:39] Sarah: Should we take a break and talk about some of the primaries?

[00:11:41] Beth: Let’s do that.

[00:11:42] Sarah: Speaking of voting.

[00:11:56] Beth: I do feel forlorn about the primary.

[00:12:00] Sarah: But there’s so much turnout, so clearly some people are riled up and ready to go. The turnout numbers are huge among Democrats in Michigan and Minnesota. People are getting out there and voting, that’s for sure.

[00:12:13] Beth: And I’m so thrilled, and that is exactly who we need to be, even if we feel forlorn. We need to still show up and do the thing. I had a little bit of is my industry making the world worse about the Michigan primary that I just need to workshop with you.

[00:12:28] Sarah: Okay.

[00:12:30] Beth: So you are close friends with Representative Haley Stevens. Because you are close friends with her, I have met her a few times and had nice meals with her. And to me, this is less about the fact that Abdul El-Sayed won that primary and more about the way that I watched Haley Stevens be characterized by people in our industry. The way that her voice, her looks, her clothes, her posture, the fact that she took money from AIPAC, every single thing about her was to a degree that I can’t remember witnessing about someone at her level, right? Who hadn’t become this national polarizing figure. Haley Stevens cares about manufacturing and infrastructure and she is the most delightful nerd. And for someone like her to be put through the wringer by people like us was really hard for me to watch. And I have always said doing this work, I just want to put good things in the river. I accept that we don’t control the river. There are a lot of different stuff. This made me question if there’s a river anymore. If there’s anything organic happening, if there’s anything real, if there’s any chance of putting good into the world in this kind of environment.

[00:13:50] Sarah: Yeah, and what has been so interesting is the algorithm has served up to me reels where people are like, “Man, she’s the greatest.

[00:13:58] I’m going to give her another shot.” They are doing the exact same thing they did to Hillary Clinton.

[00:14:02] Beth: Yeah.

[00:14:02] Sarah: We love you when you’re not running for something.

[00:14:04] Beth: Yeah.  Now that you lost, you’re great.

[00:14:07] Sarah: It’s just to me so much of what happened to Haley is sexism. It’s just sexism, and I know that there are real debates around establishment Democrats versus progressive Democrats and real policy debates about Israel and AIPAC. I concede all that, and so would she. And that debate is one thing, but the nastiness that was directed at her... And look, it’s not El-Sayed didn’t experience any racist. Sure. Islamophobic nastiness, too, and there is a certain amount of that. And look, never not once in my communication with Haley did she feel sorry for herself. She is just relentlessly positive and full of integrity, even in her private communications. And I think there is a bit of this that has become a part of this industry. But also to this constant feeling of yeah, it was shitty, and I feel like everybody’s like, “Enough” I do feel like there’s just more and more conversations about around the midterms, definitely around Graham Platner. That was another shitty part of this summer where people are like this isn’t working, and maybe we should go back to really having conversations about what kind of person is running for office, and is this person a person of character? Because here’s an interesting conversation that I have had several times over the last few weeks. Because the primary calendar was released by the Democratic Party, my mother asked me last night, “How do you feel about that?” I’m like, “I feel like people have not released their expectations about what matters and what doesn’t around presidential elections, and they’re still a little bit stuck in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, and we’re in a different space.” And it’s not that I don’t think it matters. It’s not that I don’t think that there are constituencies of the Democratic Party that should have more of a voice. I’m not sure if it matters as much as people think it does. Because Pete Buttigieg won the Iowa caucus, and I don’t think we’ve had a President Pete Buttigieg unless I’ve been in a coma. But to the Pete Buttigieg of it all, around these conversations around the presidential primary and leadership and the future of the Democratic Party, I’ve just started telling people, “If you made me pick right now who do I think would do the best job as president of the United States, it’s Pete Buttigieg.” And I’ve had so many people go, “Oh yeah, I agree with that.” People who are conservative.

[00:16:27] Beth: Yeah.

[00:16:27] Sarah: People who are progressive. People are like, “Yeah.” I thought, oh no, he doesn’t have a way to insert himself into this conversation in the primary horse race, and now I’m like maybe that’s not a bad thing. I would like to officially invite Pete Buttigieg to come back on Pantsuit Politics. I’d like to talk to him again now that he is not Secretary of Transportation. And around this conversation the thing I’ve been saying over and over again is you get this like is anybody going to vote for a gay candidate?” And I’m like, “The person who’s not going to vote for a gay candidate is not going to vote for a Democrat either way. Doesn’t matter.” So  who cares?

[00:17:09] Beth: I also think that fundamentally misunderstands some things about the way that people like a person but not a movement.

[00:17:18] Sarah: Yep.

[00:17:19] Beth: I think a lot of people who would support legislation that is not good for anyone who is in the LGBTQ umbrella would also feel really great about themselves if they voted for a gay person. I think we see a movement very differently than we see a person. Collectively, all of us in different kinds of spaces. I think that’s why you saw a lot of people feel really good about themselves for voting for Barack Obama even though they would support policies that are generally considered racist. It’s like we’re complicated, and we’re messy. To me, I see a path for someone like Pete because I feel everywhere across the board a sense that I want a person of character. I want a person who’s honest about who and what he’s about, and I think Pete does that really well. I think it’s so clear that he loves his kids. It’s so clear that he loves Chasten. It’s so clear that he has a vision for their family life that mirrors what a lot of us want for our family lives. And I think that he just exudes the sense of “If I don’t know it, I can study it and figure it out and I will do that.”

[00:18:26] Sarah: Yep.

[00:18:27] Beth: And not this hero thing. Like a learner. And I think people really appreciate that. What I’m not sure about is whether that works in Democratic primaries right now.

[00:18:39] Sarah: Here’s my question, though. And I really can’t even put my finger on why I do feel like Pete is not saddled with what AOC has so graciously given us as a new term, as woke one. She was in an interview and she said woke one was crazy. Because she has a lot to distance herself from. I think woke one, and we can get into what we ultimately think the impact was, did saddle for a lot of independent swing voters with this sort of reputation for the Democratic Party that socially they’ve lost the plot, and maybe there are some policies that I like, but this sort of identity politics has gone too far, and I don’t think he’s saddled with that. He was cringe and everybody was like the meritocracy, and he was, like, the poster child for that. To me, it’s like the Jon Ossoff of it all. Jon Ossoff can speak the way he can so forcefully in criticizing Israel because he’s Jewish and Pete could avoid a lot of the woke one performance politics because he was gay. And I do think you’re seeing this sort of interesting who can do that? Who can walk the center line because they have some sort of identity protection, identity shield. I don’t know what to call it any other way. I’m seeing glimmers of that in lots of congressional candidates too, that I think is fascinating.

[00:20:16] Beth: And it’s important to say I think it’s not centrist in terms of policy. I’m not even sure what that would mean right now, especially with newer issues where I don’t think there’s a clear consensus about where the parties land. So ‘woke one’ would say Pete cannot be saddled with that baggage because he’s a white guy from Indiana. And AOC is saddled with it because she is a woman of color from New York, and there’s probably some truth in that.

[00:20:41] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:20:42] Beth: That is why I think her willingness to step into this in a way that’s going to make so many people so very mad is a gift to the party because she also can make that comment and people still know and trust that she cares about communities that ‘woke one’ claim to serve.

[00:21:01] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:21:02] Beth: So I think it’s really smart and brave of her-- and I know that she didn’t originate the phrase-- but to grab onto this and make it a way that she says we’re moving on. You and I both loved this comment from James Carville that was reported- -

[00:21:17] Sarah: Always dependable.

[00:21:17] Beth: Where he said, one, it’s really smart that she’s doing it this year instead of next year. And two, that she doesn’t need to overexplain herself. She can just say, “I’m grown,” and people understand that. And I think that’s also true. I think a lot of us are ready to just be like, “We’ve lived a lot of life since COVID.” “Can we move on? I’m not going to hold your COVID-ness against you.”

[00:21:36] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:21:37] Beth: Please don’t hold mine against me. We’re grown, okay?

[00:21:40] Sarah: Okay. Here’s the thing, because I do think there were some interesting conversations and continue to be. I am not scared of debate, okay? I just want to say that as a Democrat. I am not scared to debate policy. I am not scared to debate campaign tactics. I do not have to walk in lockstep. If you think Mitch McConnell is dead, I’m perfectly happy looking at you and going, “That’s crazy. He’s not dead.” Okay? And I can hate Mitch McConnell’s legacy and despise the way that the gerontocracy runs in Congress and still tell you, “That’s crazy. Don’t say that.” I am done with the policing. I’m done with the Democratic Party needs to really figure out and decide. No, it’s going to be messy. Good. We have a lot of shit to work out. And especially around Woke One, I think there are so many interesting things to talk about. Not everybody was happy with her. I saw a tweet that was like what part are you talking about? I thought you were on board with defunding ICE, and I thought you were on board with Medicare for All.

[00:22:44] Beth: Hey, great questions. I love unraveling things.

[00:22:46] Sarah: Great. Wonderful. I think there was a great sort of conversation on the argument between Matt Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas about did Me Too work? We’re still getting all these insane sexual harassment, toxic workplace situations, particularly in Congress. And it’s like, look, and I’m definitely ready to talk about Medicare for All. It’s broken. It’s broken right now, and people are pissed off, and I’m one of them. I’m ready for big solutions. I’m ready for people to go, “This is how this is going to blow up if we try it this way.” I’m not scared. The stagnation I feel with the Trump administration means that I’m open to debates and conversations and policy proposals. I think Project 2029 is throwing some really interesting things up at the wall to see what sticks. Yeah, let’s do it. Fine. AOC wants to talk to me about how Woke One was crazy? Into it. I’m done feeling fear around any conversation, even on the internet it’s not allowed or going to get me in trouble or going to get somebody else in trouble. Nope, not doing that anymore. That’s the part of Woke One that I didn’t like and I’m not going to try that on again for love nor money.

[00:23:57] Beth: I agree. I never want to be afraid of new information or new perspectives or somebody using their voice in a different way. I also think that I’ve just done a lot of work in myself to not feel disrespected in light of that stuff. And I think that’s some of what I hear. I feel like a total outsider to the moderate versus progressive Democratic fight because even the moderates in that fight really care about and feel attached to the Democratic Party, and that’s just not where I am. Haley Stevens is to my left, right? One of her signature achievements when she worked in the Obama administration was the auto bailout. I didn’t support that. But I can still say this is a person of character. This is a person who does the job for the right reasons. This is a person who, if she is handed a binder, will read it cover to cover and mark it up with questions and notes and go in prepared. And that’s the kind of person I want in Congress, whether or not I think where they come out on any particular vote is where I would come out on that particular vote. I think that when I listen to someone like Haley defend the auto bailout, it would be easy for me to personally feel disrespected by that. But I don’t because I like and welcome that sort of debate. I think within the Democratic Party, as a person standing on the outside, the issue is that people feel disrespected by each other.

[00:25:18] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:25:19] Beth: That it’s not a contest of ideas. It’s, “You’re ruining this for all of us.” Pointed both ways, right? Pointed both ways. “You’re ruining this for all of us, and the stakes are so high, and because of you, the Republicans end up winning.” And the terms of that have to shift.

[00:25:36] Sarah: Yeah. And the stakes are high. But is there some place in which the stakes are so high we can’t have a debate, and we can’t ask questions, and we can’t be wrong about something and admit that we’re wrong about something? I don’t feel threatened by some sort of Republican machine. It’s getting real messy over there. If you asked me right now what I think is most likely for 2028, on their side, I think it is JD Vance with Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson as a third party candidate. So I’m not worried. They’re going to fall apart. They’re already falling apart because they have been so beholden to Donald Trump, who is not beholden to them. And so this is going to get real messy really fast. It already is. It already is like with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. And do we think that after the midterms, when the few moderate or pragmatic voices, particularly on the Republican side in the United States Senate are gone, that’s going to get any better? I don’t think so.

[00:26:46] Beth: This is the perpetual question for me because it’s so clear the two parties aren’t going to get it done.

[00:26:52] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:26:53] Beth: Nobody’s going to ever get it back together again. I don’t think. In a world where we cannot accept that Mitch McConnell was alive and in a rehab facility, and our governor who’s supposed to be one of the good guys contributed to that discourse.

[00:27:09] Sarah: Yep.

[00:27:09] Beth: I think a way that was influenced by my industry. Again, like this is another thing that really had me spiraling while I was out. In that world, we’re going to fracture. These two parties are going to fracture, and they should because it is all complicated, and we do need voices that push. We need voices that are what people identified with about Woke 1, that are way out in front of where a lot of people are. We need those people.

[00:27:32] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:27:33] Beth: And we need the people who are way behind where a lot of people are saying, “Hang on. What if, what this?” We need on this show you saying, “I’m ready to talk about Medicare for all,” and me saying, “Yeah, and also think about if we had Medicare for all and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were in charge of it.”

[00:27:49] Sarah: Oh, Lord.

[00:27:49] Beth: That is all needed in this country and way more. And so what I can’t figure out is if you had JD Vance and Marco Rubio on a ticket and Tucker Carlson as a third-party candidate, is the better Democratic response to scream and yell and browbeat each other until everybody consolidates behind a candidate again, whether that’s a Biden or a Bernie, whatever the modern incarnation of that is? Or is it better to let it be? Just recognize we are fractured. We have different visions. Let’s just run them all and see what happens.

[00:28:27] Sarah: I feel like with the Democratic Party that we are not as fractured as people think we are. Even with Bernie, Bernie didn’t start a third party. He put his ideas inside the Democratic Party. He ran as a candidate for the Democratic Party. And so if AOC is thinking about doing that, so will she. And to me I’m not even sure if there is a need for a third party. I kind of like the way the DSA is such a huge influence, but not the influence. We had mixed signals over the primaries this summer. You have Michigan, but you also have Minnesota, right? I just think in Wisconsin they’re complicated signals. Now, the issue for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, broadly, parties generally, I don’t see it as like we’re desperate for a we need a more progressive party on the Democratic side, even though it exists on the parties. To me, it’s just that the party system itself, the way it functioned and the way it consolidated power for so long is gone. It doesn’t exist that way anymore. It’s not out here building out these county parties and a bench for local offices. It’s like it’s not out there showing up in people’s lives so they understand this is why I’m a Democrat because it’s present, the Democratic Party is present in my life. They’re even breaking apart the sort of seniority system that people are furious with. The biggest signal to me coming out of so many of these primaries is the gerontocracy is done. Or if it’s not done, it’s on its way out. People are angry. They don’t want to see 80-year-olds serving as President of the United States or running to be the next senator for Massachusetts, okay? I just think that those signals are more about a broken party process as much as it is about the need for additional parties, and maybe that’s just different ways of saying the same thing. It just doesn’t function the way it used to, both in putting people on the bench, giving policy ideas, running primaries as it... There’s no smoke-filled room anymore, man.

[00:30:32] Beth: And I don’t think that comes back either because organization is such an uphill climb. To get people into any kind of group right now is really hard. But at the same time, everything you were saying I was agreeing and also adding “for now” in my head. Because there is this resurgence of people desiring community and desiring to be organized and work together. I think the gerontocracy will fade and then probably return at some point because you can easily imagine a world where we say, “Oof, we could use some maturity.” We could use some people who are willing to make some hard decisions because they’re working on a shorter timeline. You can imagine this all changing five times over even in the next two years.

[00:31:14] Sarah: To me, that’s like the conclusion about the shit storm and the lack of leadership. Is it’s just exacerbating the sense that change is coming too quickly. I think that’s a huge piece of the tech backlash. We talked about this at my family dinner last night. It’s happening so quickly. Things are changing, particularly with artificial intelligence, with the economy, with our understanding of the world, with the media. And the sense that our attention spans are shortening, and so they have to keep inundating us with entertainment and information to continue to feed the shortening attention spans, but then that contributes to the sense that there’s too much, and it’s overwhelming, and it’s changing too quickly, and there’s no one-- again, that’s why I think when Pope Leo steps forward and leads, it’s like it hits so hard. There’s no one who can help us make sense of all this, that can put all this change, all these new trends and influences and just events into a framework, into an understanding that makes sense, that contributes to positive change, that makes us feel like we’re working towards something.

[00:32:30] Beth: I also think it’s two things, that change is coming too quickly, but it’s the wrong change. And there are other things where we desire to see change, then it feels impossible.

[00:32:40] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:32:40] Beth: And it does make me mad that we can figure out how to scale up data centers. I’m not even opposed to artificial intelligence. I know there are some miraculous applications. I want those to happen. But it does make me mad that we can scale that up so fast, and we just aren’t putting that kind of energy into public education. We aren’t putting that kind of energy into roads, and bridges. It’s going to take 10 years to build a new bridge that connects Northern Kentucky to Cincinnati, but we can throw up these data centers all over the country and find the energy for them and integrate AI into literally every process that anyone uses in any app. That’s crazy to me.

[00:33:19] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:33:19] Beth: It’s like it’s the wrong prioritization. This is, in a way, showing our capabilities and that we have no shared values around how those capabilities are deployed, and that is the real rub for me.

[00:33:34] Sarah: Yeah. If any, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario, Elon Musk, any of those people listen to Pantsuit Politics, which I don’t believe they do, what I would say is, “If I were you, I would say we’re going to pause. We’re going to take everything we’ve already built and the capabilities we’ve already built, and we’re going to show people how this can improve their lives until everybody can see it in a real way, be it small businesses, be it bureaucracy, improving the sort of bureaucratic processes that people complain about in their lives.” I was struck so much around the coverage of Luigi Mangione’s trial and his confession in court where he said, “They were much more responsive when they thought I was a million-dollar investor wanting to invest in United than they ever were when I was a customer with back problems.” And I thought that’s it, right?” People think you just use everything. It’s all in service of the people who need it the least, and none of it improves my life. And until they get right with that and they understand that people have to see that it doesn’t just make Google Search a little bit better, but that it can improve all these different areas of their life. Listen, I think that’s yet to be seen. I think even the miraculous medical breakthroughs there’s glimmers, but it’s not like we’ve fixed it all yet and cured cancer. So I think that’s excellent about public education around so many areas of our life where people feel overwhelmed, that the system is not working for them. You need to prove this to the populace because you’re seeing that if you don’t, they’re going to, if not stop it, slow it down dramatically.

[00:35:17] Beth: And that’s a conversation that I would love to have with someone like Dario Amodei. He’s the CEO of Anthropic that makes Claude. I hear him in public statements trying to figure out how to communicate this. Trying to figure out how to do this with integrity. And I’m sure that I wouldn’t agree with every calculus that he makes along the way, but I think he’s a person worth digging in with a little bit to try to answer some of these questions and to think through the strategy. What’s so complex about that to me, though, is that he is the CEO of a private company.

[00:35:50] Sarah: Yeah. And so unique in comparison to other technological breakthroughs that happened  in the United States.

[00:35:59] Beth: It is and it isn’t, right? Because when I’m angry about that prioritization, I’ve had similar conversations about, like, why don’t they put the people at Disney in charge of voting, right? Because there are these places where you see private actors excelling at something, and you want the public process to have that sort of skill and innovation and capability and money behind it. And then you don’t because also that’s scary. The push/pull of that is really challenging. I guess I think that this AI backlash is much less about the land and the water and the temporary jobs versus permanent jobs. I think we’re arguing around some of the things at the heart of this, and I think a lot of the heart of this is not that people don’t want change. It’s this isn’t what we asked for. Can we get to the basics first? And I think that’s going to be more and more true as the weather continues to be challenging. Because in my area, I was just talking to a neighbor yesterday. The storms this summer have been bad and have been very damaging in a way that we haven’t experienced rapid fire like this before, and everyone’s posture is like, “This is how it’s going to be, and we need to adapt.” And if we see data centers being built but not regular buildings becoming more resilient, that is the crux of this problem to me.

[00:37:25] Sarah: Definitely that’s a perfect place to end our conversation about the summer because the weather is absolutely a part of that. There was just no escaping it. You go to Europe, places that usually are temperate, they had a brutal heatwave. France was on fire for much of the summer. We had a terrible wildfire season in the United States, lots and lots of smoke and just heat domes and the sense that things are getting hotter. We’re in the middle of a heat dome when we’re talking about the data center coming into Paducah and a natural gas plant that’s going to contribute to fossil fuel burning and global emissions. There’s a story in The New York Times that they’re burning diesel generators to run some of these data centers. Are you kidding me? In Texas, in the summer? Is anybody living in reality? It’s getting hotter. But the people in charge are not. The Trump administration is not. I don’t know if in their military barracks where all these administrative officials live together, if they just air condition the outside as well as the inside. I don’t know, man. But it’s just if we say it enough, the reality will become true. So what is our so what is our conclusion? Was this summer the worst?

[00:38:47] Beth: There’s a part of me that thinks this summer was probably like any other summer, that every summer has horrible things and signs of progress. And part of me thinks this summer was pretty bad in a number of ways.

[00:38:59] Sarah: I think it was pretty bad.

[00:39:00] Beth: And I think that all of that just comes down to leadership. You can get through the horrible things if you trust your leadership and you feel like everybody is working for the common good. And when you don’t feel that, it compounds the problems exponentially.

[00:39:11] Sarah: Yep. I think that’s right. And I think there were really lovely parts of the summer. I’m concerned they were too early. But even good things about the summer, this summer and every summer, there was this sense of the way things are changing make is going to make those harder and harder. Like with the heat, with the sickness, and just there was a lot. There was this sense of how we think about the summer is not really reflective of our lived reality, which contributes to the sense of “Ugh, this one was bad, and maybe the next one will be worse.” I don’t subscribe to that necessarily because there’s no stasis, and things will continue to change. Some things will get worse. Some things will get better. But I do think the second half of the summer was pretty rough. Pretty rough.

[00:39:58] Beth: Fortunately, as is a historic trend, dark times make good music.

[00:40:04] Sarah: Word.

[00:40:05] Beth: And we got some good music coming out, so we’re going to talk about that next. Okay, Sarah, I thought it would be fun rather than just generally discussing music to hand out some awards.

[00:40:25] Sarah: Okay.

[00:40:27] Beth: So I would like us to start with the song of the summer for us personally, not the song of the summer in the world. But like what is your song of the summer?

[00:40:38] Sarah: I’m a basic bitch, and so my song of the summer I believe is the song of the summer.

[00:40:43] Beth: Okay.

[00:40:43] Sarah: Which is Ella Langley’s Chewing Texas.

[00:40:45] Beth: It’s a good song.

[00:40:46] Sarah: Listen. It’s just such an earworm. It’s so good. And I think the reason I particularly liked it, so I was a little slow because arguably, this song has been out way before the summer and I think that often is what happens to a song in the summer. It’s gotten some legs over the first part of the year, so by the summer it’s really breaking through. My dad was the first person who said to me “You haven’t heard this song?” And then I heard it on the mix. Not the pop music radio because I listen to the radio, fun fact. That’s one of my analog activities. It shows up on the mix, and I’m like, “Oh whoa.” So I like the song. I think the song is just good generally, but I think what I really love about it is now everybody understands why country people like a good country song. I just feel like she tricked the world into admitting that country music is great. This is not country pop. This is not Post Malone’s version of country. This is just a country song, straight up. And I love her. I love that she’s gotten the whole world singing this twangy ass country song about your man leaving you for a girl in Texas. Round of applause all around.

[00:41:53] Beth: It is so Martina McBride reminiscent.

[00:41:56] Sarah: Yes.

[00:41:57] Beth: It could go right on... I had this Country Hits from Women CD in the ‘90s that this song could be comfortable on. Just scooched on in there. And I love that.

[00:42:06] Sarah:  Yes, 100% you would never notice.

[00:42:10] Beth: And listen, ‘90s country music is the best country music as we’ve established many times. If this brings us back into that kind of golden era of country music...

[00:42:19] Sarah: bring it.

[00:42:20] Beth: That’s a delight.

[00:42:21] Sarah: I’m in favor. I love it so much. So that’s my song of the summer.

[00:42:25] Beth: Okay. My song of the summer is less ubiquitous, but I am obsessed with it and I want to make the case that it should become your song of the summer, too, and the whole world’s. And you know I don’t do that. I’m not like everybody needs to like what I like. This song has something important to say. So my song of the summer is Bowling Alley by Audrey Hobert.

[00:42:44] Sarah: Okay.

[00:42:45] Beth: If you don’t know Audrey Hobert, she has written for Gracie Abrams, with Gracie Abrams for a while. They’re really good friends. And a lot of what I love in Gracie Abrams’ music I think comes from the Audrey Hobert influence. Because you know how Gracie Abrams kind of sounds like Taylor Swift fan girl, but with some irreverence sprinkled in that really doesn’t fit Taylor’s vibe?

[00:43:11] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:43:11] Beth: I think Audrey is the irreverence piece of that.

[00:43:14] Sarah: Okay.

[00:43:15] Beth: So she released an album called Who’s the Clown last August that I have spent all summer listening to on repeat. This is a no skips album for me. No skips. I mean that seriously, and I never say that. It’s so funny. It’s so touching. The more I listen to each song, the more I find there. It’s really fresh. She’s in a totally different phase of life than I have ever been in or will ever be in. The vibe though is like, “Hey, I’m young and glamorous and have a pretty charmed life, and also I’m such a weirdo.” And I always feel like such a weirdo. And I deeply relate to the I’m such a weirdo part. You know what I mean? So I love all of the cheekiness in her songs. Bowling Alley is my favorite because the premise is she’s come home from work after a crap day, and the chorus says, “I’ve got my creams on and my gown on.” She’s ready to hole up, and then she remembers that she was invited to a bowling alley, and it kind of sounds nice.

[00:44:14] And so she gets dressed again and she goes.

[00:44:16] Sarah: Yay.

[00:44:17] Beth: And she has a really good time, and then she’s ready to go home and put her creams and her gown back on. And I feel like she is saying to all of us, “Hey, even if you’ve gotten cozy at home, you should go back out. That’ll be fun. And then you can be cozy at home again. These things are not exclusive.”

[00:44:31] Sarah: Yes.

[00:44:32] Beth: It’s just a positive pro-social message right now that we need. It’s wonderful.

[00:44:37] Sarah: I love that. You had me at funny. I like a funny song.

[00:44:40] Beth: Yeah.

[00:44:40] Sarah: Kacey Musgraves has a new album out, way back to her country root. She has a hilarious song with Miranda Lambert on that. She writes the funniest country songs in my opinion, so I’m glad to see her leaning back into that.

[00:44:51] Beth: I’m happy to hear that too because that last album was not funny.

[00:44:54] Sarah: Not for me, no. And that’s why I am just endlessly enamored with Sabrina Carpenter. I think she is so funny. I could listen to Manchild 1,000 times and I will still laugh out loud to, “What are you wearing? I hope it’s ironic.” “What is that outfit? I hope it’s ironic.”

[00:45:11] Beth: Yeah.

[00:45:11] Sarah: I think it’s just so funny, and I like a funny song. I like a funny song.

[00:45:15] Beth: Every song on this album is funny. She has a song about how she finally bit the bullet and started watching Friends. And it makes her feel less lonely, and she feels like maybe she’s a Phoebe now. It just kind of works. Whatever is her deal kind of works. It’s phenomenal. And Gracie Abrams’ new album has a song that she co-wrote called Minibar that is kind of the runner-up for my song of the summer, where she talks about being at a party and she’s high and she thinks everybody knows. It’s incredible. It’s incredible. But Bowling Alley, everybody go listen to Bowling Alley. I think it’s going to make us a better people.

[00:45:48] Sarah: So she’s your song of the summer and your best album?

[00:45:50] Beth: Yes. But oh, man, Olivia Rodrigo’s new album is so good.

[00:45:54] Sarah: But I listened to it and I didn’t like it.

[00:45:57] Beth: You didn’t? What did you not like about it?

[00:46:00] Sarah: I thought it was a little repetitive.

[00:46:01] Beth: I think it’s so good. You thought it was what?

[00:46:02] Sarah: A little repetitive. A little. I like the one song that’s getting all the radio play. The main hit.

[00:46:10] Beth: Stupid Song?

[00:46:11] Sarah: Yeah, I think so.

[00:46:12] Beth: Or hang on. No. The single was Drop Dead.

[00:46:17] Sarah: Yeah, that one. I like that song.

[00:46:20] Beth: It’s a good song and Stupid Song is a great song ...

[00:46:22] Sarah: But my album despite what I just said about liking funny songs and wanting to be uplifted by my music, is End of August by Noah Kahan.

[00:46:32] Beth: Okay.

[00:46:32] Sarah: Yeah, he was on Jimmy Fallon. First of all, just think he’s charming.

[00:46:35] Beth: He is charming.

[00:46:36] Sarah: I just want to pinch his cheeks. I love him so much. He was on Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Fallon was asking about this album, and he was like, “It’s for if you’re sad. If it’s raining outside and you’re sad, this is the album for you.”

[00:46:48] Beth: You know what I love about Noah Kahan is how he seems to constantly be like this being famous thing’s weird.

[00:46:55] Sarah: I just love him. The album is so good. That first song, End of August, that this beautiful, like, little instrumental medley that kicks off the... it’s so soothing. I find it so comforting and beautiful. I have listened to Downfall one million times. I love it so much. And I’m a lyrics girl, okay? That’s why I like a funny song because I think it’s hard. It’s hard to land a joke in a song. It’s very hard. And it’s not that I don’t love melodies. Obviously Brandi Carlile is my girl, and so I love a beautiful voice. But also Brandi Carlile will land a line, and you’re like, “Oh, ouch.” Like one of my favorite lines I think it’s in End of August, and he’s “If these trees could talk, they’d probably just talk shit.” That we always say we’re going to do something, but we never do shit. I love his lyricism. I think he is such a clever songwriter. And I like to sing along with him. I just like him. I just think he’s a great guy. I have no idea if he is or not. I don’t read any gossip about him on purpose. But I do just enjoy his music. I think I also like this album so much because, listen, second albums after one makes you famous, the follow-up album, it’s a tough one. It’s a tough one, and I think he did it. I think it’s a great album.

[00:48:06] Beth: I love not knowing anything about people personally, too. I think the hardest thing for Olivia Rodrigo is the whole lore around her dating life and then the Taylor Swift fight. And I’m excited for what Taylor Swift creates next because now she’s married, so we don’t have to do the game of “Which ex-boyfriend is this?” I don’t want to do that. I just want to relate to the song and enjoy the song. And I think Olivia got closer to that with this album. Totally fair criticism that this is redundant. Big Feelings, that’s her thing. The chord progressions are pretty similar. Stupid Song is a lot like Driver’s License, but it is really good. And she does have a beautiful voice. She sounds

[00:48:42] Sarah: I’m not arguing with her talent.

[00:48:44] Beth: And also, that little chorus of Pisces and a Gemini, I love that.

[00:48:49] Sarah: Okay. Before we move on to the Brandi Carlile of it all, did you see her cover of Alanis Morissette’s Uninvited?

[00:48:56] Beth: You sent it to me, and I was so glad you did.

[00:48:59] Sarah: It’s so good.

[00:49:02] Beth: That song is a triumph.

[00:49:05] Sarah: I’m going to have a hot take. I’m going to say something controversial. I think it’s better than the original version.

[00:49:11] Beth: Brandi Carlile is a better singer.

[00:49:13] Sarah: That, and I think it hits harder coming from somebody older.

[00:49:17] Beth: I think that’s true too. I love Alanis Morissette. So no disrespect at all. But Brandi Carlile’s voice reinvents whatever she touches, even when she is doing something in a very faithful interpretation of the original. Yeah. It’s special.

[00:49:33] Sarah: To the summer music of it all. I’ve said before I’m not a big festival person, although that I feel really smart about seeing Noah Kahan at a festival like two summers ago. I really feel like that was a good choice. I want to go to the Newport Folk Festival. That’s where she did the cover.

[00:49:48] Beth: Yeah, that’d be fun.

[00:49:48] Sarah: And I’m like this is the one I want to go to. This feels like a grown person festival, first of all. It’s the festival I’ve probably watched the most live performances from. So I’m like I’m putting it on my list. I’m putting it on my bucket list. I think I want to go to the Newport Folk Festival. I bet there’s somebody in our audience who’s like a Newport Folk Festival expert. So I would like them to message us please, and be my guide. Thank you so much.

[00:50:09] Beth: The phrase grown person festival appeals to me strongly. So if you are aware of more grown person festivals I’d be really into that. I’m looking for we’re all sitting in our comfy chairs outside, but we’re together, and we’re singing along, and we’re celebrating, and we’re having a good time. And also we have some nice cheeses available.

[00:50:26] Sarah: Yeah. I don’t want mud. I don’t want people acting a fool.

[00:50:29] Beth: Yeah. I don’t want to smell marijuana the whole time. Sorry. Take a gummy if you need to. I don’t care, but I don’t want to smell it.

[00:50:33] Sarah: Yep. Okay. Okay. I feel like somebody’s going to answer the call. I feel good about this.

[00:50:35] Beth: Like maxi skirt situation.  That’s what I need.

[00:50:39] Sarah: Yeah. Okay. The vision is shared. Help us bring it to fruition. I feel confident. Okay,

[00:50:44] Beth: Okay, one more award.

[00:50:46] Sarah: Okay.

[00:50:46] Beth: Do you have anybody who’s new and noteworthy to you?

[00:50:49] Sarah: Probably not. I guess Ella Langley. I don’t feel like I listen to anything. I have actually a list now. Ever since we’ve talked about this, I guess my ears have been more open. I think the New York Times put out a list. My friend Sarah sent me an artist that I’m like, “Ooh, I think I’m very into this idea.” So check back with me in a few weeks, but not over the summer, no. I’m like listening to yacht rock. Let’s just be real.

[00:51:13] Beth: Okay. I have someone in mind. Now, I honestly do not know how new she is. She’s just new to me via my daughter Ellen, who is 11. Ellen loves Laufey. It is pronounced Lay-vay I think. It is spelled L-A-U-F-E-Y. She is from Iceland.

[00:51:31] Sarah: Okay.

[00:51:32] Beth: Okay. Talk about a voice. So interesting. Very throwback, but throwback to a mix of different genres and times. I feel some of what I felt listening to Amy Winehouse listening to her, but that’s a bad comparison in terms of the actual voice.

[00:51:51] Sarah: Okay.

[00:51:51] Beth: But that feeling of being taken somewhere both old and new at the same time that I had with Amy Winehouse.

[00:51:57] Sarah: Is it jazzy?

[00:51:59] Beth: Some of it is.

[00:52:00] Sarah: Okay.

[00:52:01] Beth: And it’s very funny. Again, there is a sense that she’s winking at you the whole time.

[00:52:06] Sarah: Okay.

[00:52:06] Beth: But it’s good. It’s really good, and I can listen to it over and over. And also, Ellen’s voice perfectly covers these songs and so it’s like a delight in my car all around. But I’m really into what she’s doing.

[00:52:22] Sarah: Okay. I’ll check it out. I’m excited.

[00:52:24] Beth: Okay, we did it. We did our first episode back.

[00:52:26] Sarah: We did it.

[00:52:28] Beth: I’m really happy about this.

[00:52:29] Sarah: I’m so happy to be back with you. You guys,

[00:52:30] Beth: I’m really grateful for the way that all of you receive our time away and how you understand that it’s necessary to be able to keep doing this after almost 11 years, and that it’s necessary for you, too, to come sometimes not be in the details of what’s going on in the news. So thank you so much for that. We’re trying out all kinds of new things over on Substack. We’d love for you to join us there, and we’ll be back here with you on Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.

Show Credits

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

Many of you tell us your favorite thing on Substack is when we’re together, and we happen to agree. So we’re going to be here every weekday morning at 9, live, talking through the headlines. Beth said it best: the format was starting to feel tired, and so was the whole damn world. We’re in charge, so we…

Read more

At the beginning of our family’s great RV road trip this summer, we visited with family in Texas and part of that family is my cousin-in-law Sara. We got to chatting about life and politics and I learned that Sara is a devoted Candace Owens listener. Sara is warm, funny, and completely all-in, and my que…

Read more

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

Subscribe now

Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Join us in Minneapolis on August 29 for our live show — and if you can’t get to Minnesota, virtual tickets are buy one, get one free right now, so you can stream everything on that stage straight to your couch. Get your tickets here!

Yellowbanks PAC

• Yellowbanks Political Action Committee — or send a check to PO Box 293, Owensboro, KY 42302

• Newly formed Yellowbanks SuperPAC readies for first election (Messenger-Inquirer)

The Hopelessness Polling

• Youth poll: Thumbs down on everything (Axios)

Outside of Politics: Meander Bookshop

• Meander Bookshop, inside Piper’s Tea & Coffee, Paducah, KY — follow along at meander.substack.com

• Follow Meander on Instagram and Facebook

• The Kitchen I Came Home To by Sara Bradley — signed pre-order copies exclusively through Meander

• Bookstore Romance Day at Meander this Saturday

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] John Mulligan: I can sleep a little better at night knowing that I’m actually doing something real and not just talking, not just opining on things. This is something real.

[00:00:18] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Beth is out for the remainder of this week, but we have a conversation that we both had with John and Cindy Mulligan that we are sharing with you today. John and Cindy live in Owensboro, Kentucky, and they have a project that I think is going to give everyone in this audience a great deal of hope. So we’re sharing that today. And then Outside of Politics, I’m going to give you a little insight into my new life as a baby bookseller and what that looks like day to day and week to week now that I’m about two and a half months in to this project. Before we get started, August 29th is our live show in Minneapolis. If you can’t get to Minnesota, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to miss it. We have virtual tickets. Everything on that stage, our conversation with Natalia Turfe and Minneapolis organizers, our America 250 contemplation, the trivia, all the fun, the singing, it’s going to be streamed directly to your couch. You can have the beverages of your choice and be in your comfy pants. We want you to join us. So the link to get your virtual tickets, which are buy one, get one free right now, are in the show notes. So get your tickets and join us wherever you are for our live show on August 29th. Up next, John and Cindy Mulligan

[00:01:54] I don’t know if it’s the heat. I don’t know if it’s the feeling of a long, sluggish summer, but I’ve had so many conversations over the last few days about a sense of hopelessness, a sense of dread, a feeling of being stuck. Opened up my inbox this morning, and there was an email from Axios about polling around 18 to 34-year-olds, and they’re just thumbs down on everything. They don’t trust either party. They’re worried about the economy. There’s no sense of hope or that the institutions or processes around us offer any path forward. But the antidote to despair isn’t just optimism, it’s agency, and that’s what the Mulligans have exercised. They live in Owensboro, Kentucky, in a deep red area. We share a congressman that I’m sure they feel as hopeless about as I do. And so by every metric, they should also be thumbs down on everything, right? Just waiting for the next presidential race or candidate to save us. But they’re not doing that. They’re not doing that. When we met with the Mulligans and were invited to the Yellow Banks PAC fundraiser to talk and speak and understand what they’re doing, it is one of my best days this year, honestly.

[00:03:28] I can come to tears just remembering it. Just seeing these people who had chosen to do something, to take action, to insert themselves where they live in their own communities and try to make a difference. It was wildly inspiring. I’ve been telling everyone in Paducah about it, and I can’t wait for you to hear the story of Yellow Banks PAC and how they came up with the idea, how they decided to start the work on it, how they continue to work on it. I just think it’s really an incredible story and example of taking the reins in your own community, exerting some agency, and finding some hope. So without further ado, here are John and Cindy Mulligan from Yellow Banks PAC

[00:04:20] Beth: John and Cindy, welcome to Pansy Politics.

[00:04:22] John Mulligan: Thank you. We’re honored to be here.

[00:04:24] Beth: We know you all through your daughter, Kim, who is one of our executive producers, and has become a real friend to us. You have allowed us to stay in your beautiful home in Owensboro a couple of times, and we’re so grateful. And the last time we were there, we had such a treat of getting to see your political work in the world. So will you just start off by telling us about the political action committee you formed and the story behind forming it?

[00:04:53] John Mulligan: As you mentioned, I’m John, and this is Cindy Mulligan. We live in Owensboro. I’m a semi-retired physician. Cindy cut short her career in laboratory work to raise our kids years ago. We’ve never been politically active over the years that much, but we’ve always believed in certain things, and that is that all people are created equal. And by that, all people. That everybody should have basic human rights, and that part of my medical training was the scientific method, reality-based, evidence-based decision-making, evidence-based treatments, evidence-based policies. We think that government should be the same way. And have grown somewhat concerned in recent years that the country, the state, our local community even, have started to drift away from that. And that’s why when we were approached last summer by some other community members we’ve known for years with the concept of creating a nonpartisan political action committee to start to bend the curve back in a better direction, somewhat independent of rigid party affiliations, more idea-based based on those three credo components that we just mentioned, it was hard to say no. Even though we’re not experienced with this activity, we’re not political operatives, we don’t have a degree in political science.

[00:06:26] Cindy Mulligan: Yeah. We’re learning.

[00:06:27] John Mulligan: But we’re concerned about the world that’s being created and set up for our kids and grandkids, and we would like to make a difference.

[00:06:37] Sarah: When we were asked to come to talk to your PAC, I just thought that we were doing a favor. I didn’t really think too much about it. And then we get there, and you start explaining the PAC, you start explaining your work, and I’m like, “Holy crap, this is genius. Everyone needs to hear about this.” I think the motivation is, dare I say, normal. I think many Americans feel exactly what you described, but many Americans also feel powerless in the face of those changes. And I think lots of people take action but it feels very individualized. And what you’ve done is taken action that is systematized and aimed at very specific goals. So tell us specifically about how the PAC came into being, how you decided on these goals. You found some like-minded people-- especially not hyper-partisan people-- and you decided to put this together.

[00:07:42] John Mulligan: I want Cindy to weigh in as well, but for me I don’t think there was any one triggering event. There wasn’t any road to Damascus moment, if you will. And I’ve thought these things for years, especially since 2016. And last summer we were approached by a local retired CPA and a business lady, people we knew already in the community, and they proposed this concept of a super PAC designed to more or less transcend party lines and operate based on the principles that I mentioned a minute ago. So that was really difficult to say no to. And Our CPA friend did all the paperwork, filled out all the filing with the state and federal government. We retained a political consulting company out of Louisville, and they’ve had a lot of experience in the politics in Kentucky. We set up a website, we set up a Facebook page, and we started having meetings, solicited help from the community.

[00:08:52] Cindy Mulligan: We have a lawyer.

[00:08:54] John Mulligan: We’re up to seven board members now. We’ve retained an election law attorney based in Louisville, which has been excellent. So we’ve laid all the proper groundwork.

[00:09:04] Sarah: Let me ask you this way. So many people that express the priorities that you have expressed, that I think are, like I said, shared by so many Americans, also feel discouraged and disempowered by the role money plays in politics. So how did you get to a space where you thought, “No, this doesn’t just have to be the purview of billionaires. We can also use PACs and super PACs to, instead of just feeling disempowered, use them for pro-democracy purposes”?

[00:09:37] John Mulligan: That’s a little tough for me to say personally-- because I can’t take credit for the idea. The idea was presented to me by these other people, and they were the ones who tumbled to the idea that, “Hey, we can play this game, too.” And if we can fight the battle of ideas, and I think we can, we can make some headway. We don’t kid ourselves that we’re going to start out at the national level or even the state level. We have to start small.

[00:10:07] Cindy Mulligan: That’s what I was going to say. This is a grassroots effort. I got involved because of the library issues. They started in with our library and now it’s stacked one way that we didn’t like. So we said something has to be done, so that’s what I liked about it. Because we wanted to start in the grassroots. We wanted to do local and then it can just work up from there.

[00:10:36] Sarah: It’s so smart because locally I feel so often the options are like you should run. If you don’t want to run for office, or you don’t want to be a political activist because you have a business or you have a professional career, and so you don’t want to be a party activist but you want to make a difference, I think presenting a PAC to somebody and saying why don’t we put our money together and then we can hire expert communicators and support candidates who we like, especially at the local level, I just think that’s enormously impactful and feels very innovative to me.

[00:11:11] Beth: It also gets to some of the factors that I think keep people out of politics. We talk a lot about dark money in the abstract. There’s an advantage for people being able to speak through a PAC instead of always in their own names, especially in a place as small as Owensboro. Can you talk a little bit about that piece of it?

[00:11:32] John Mulligan: Yes, absolutely. In fact, one of the key features that was presented to us by the two people I mentioned, was that this particular person knows Republicans and Democrats both around the community who would like to support political candidates but they fear for their careers, they fear for their businesses if it’s known that they’re supporting a certain candidate. And a super PAC is the perfect vehicle for someone like that because you can’t give anonymously, but it’s not as out there as giving directly to a party or to a party committee.

[00:12:15] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:12:16] John Mulligan: And it’s also not subject to the same limitations that direct contributions to party and party committees and candidates are, so it gives flexibility and maybe a tiny modicum of I wouldn’t say anonymity, but less conspicuous exposure.

[00:12:35] Cindy Mulligan: Yeah. That’s why we wanted to be a nonpartisan group.

[00:12:37] Sarah: Yeah. That makes so much sense to me. It feels like this is a way to fight back. We’ve talked a lot about gerrymandering. This is a way to fight back against the idea that hyperpartisans are the only ones who get a say. That hyperpartisans are the only ones who people listen to or who have a say because if you can’t outvote the hyperpartisans, maybe you can outspend them. Maybe you can get in front of some people and motivate them to vote, motivate them to get involved in the primaries, motivate them to get involved in the general, or even do some of the work y’all have done just about around issues and persuasion. It’s like we forget that people are persuadable.

[00:13:22] John Mulligan: That’s true. And it’s always bothered me a little bit that this concept that a billionaire or a really wealthy super PAC could flood the playing field with money and do whatever they want. If you have good ideas, persuadable ideas that we can all agree on, you can overcome that money discrepancy to some extent- at least we hope so.

[00:13:48] Cindy Mulligan: We all agree with probably more than we disagree on, so we were hoping to get some truth out there.

[00:13:56] John Mulligan: And we believe what Andy Beshear talks about, and that is that we’re all God’s children and that we all have more in common than we don’t have in common. And we have to look for common ground. We’ll never be united. There’s always disagreement, conflict, diversity of ideas, but we can come together enough to get things done.

[00:14:27] Beth: When we visited with you a couple months ago, you told us about supporting candidates in various elections. You also had just put up a billboard in the community to get to that issue and persuasion and putting truth out there kind of sensibility. So can you tell us about what you decided to start with, and how you made that decision, and how it’s gone?

[00:14:47] John Mulligan: I’m a physician, so I have a special interest in medical issues. I hate it that so many people don’t have access to medical care in this country. So many problems. But one small aspect of the problem that we chose to focus on for this introductory billboard that we put out was the big beautiful bill allowed a lot of Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, subsidies to expire and that directly has led to the loss of healthcare access to literally thousands of Kentuckians and several million people nationwide. So we just pointed that out in our billboard.

[00:15:31] Cindy Mulligan: And we wanted to get our name out there, so we thought that would be a good beginning.

[00:15:36] Sarah: I think the phrasing on the billboard is so smart, though. Tell people exactly what the billboard said.

[00:15:40] Cindy Mulligan: Oh, do you remember?

[00:15:41] John Mulligan: Oh.

[00:15:42] Cindy Mulligan: Was in February. No.

[00:15:43] John Mulligan: Yeah. Let me think.

[00:15:45] Sarah: It was like 30% Americans will lose their health insurance, and you just said, vote them out.

[00:15:50] John Mulligan: That’s right.

[00:15:51] Sarah: That was the part that struck with me.

[00:15:52] John Mulligan: Yeah. That’s right.

[00:15:53] Sarah: It stuck with me. Just vote them out.

[00:15:56] John Mulligan: I think it was something like 2,500 Davis Countians will lose their healthcare. Vote them out.

[00:16:01] Cindy Mulligan:  Vote them out. Yeah.

[00:16:03] Sarah: Yeah. I thought that was so smart. How did y’all decide to do a message like that?

[00:16:10] John Mulligan: Much discussion. We want it to be brief, hard-hitting, clear and fact-based, something that is irrefutable, that nobody can accuse us of any deception on. So there were so many options we had. That’s just the one we chose. We will be doing more of that.

[00:16:32] Cindy Mulligan: Yes.

[00:16:33] Sarah: Yeah, I was going to say, do you have your next billboard planned?

[00:16:35] John Mulligan: Not at this moment.

[00:16:36] Cindy Mulligan: We’re getting ready to have a meeting here at the end of the month to start getting some ideas going.

[00:16:42] Sarah: Did you have anecdotally someone say they saw the billboard?

[00:16:46] John Mulligan: We did. Quite a few people actually.

[00:16:47] Sarah: Good.

[00:16:48] John Mulligan: I don’t know viewership numbers. Could probably get that from the billboard company, but we had hoped that it might prompt a visit from the local TV station or the newspaper, but that didn’t happen. We have actually been interviewed by the newspaper.

[00:17:04] Cindy Mulligan: Yes.

[00:17:05] John Mulligan: With a little article that came out about our PAC here a few weeks ago.

[00:17:08] Sarah: Oh, good.

[00:17:09] Cindy Mulligan: We put a letter to the editor, and that prompted a call from the editor to have an interview with us, because we had sent out press releases for the billboard, but we didn’t get any hits on that. But then we sent a letter to the editor, and then they were like, “Oh.” And then they called and he and Jeff, our treasurer, had an interview and that was on the front page of the Owensboro paper.

[00:17:36] Beth: Sarah and I wanted to have you on because we think that what you’ve done here is a really nice template for other communities. So can you talk a little bit about the meetings, about how many people are showing up, what do those meetings feel like? I think it can feel very intimidating to get into this world, and what I saw from you all felt like a really lovely gathering of neighbors who care about the same things. So can you tell us a little bit about the meetings?

[00:18:04] Cindy Mulligan: We started early on and we invited just anybody that wanted to come to share ideas. We were trying to get board members. And then after a few months when we pretty much the board was set then, we started just having board meetings. So that’s what we’ve been doing with our consultant every other week. And right now we’re in our fundraising mode. That’s why now that at the end of May, we’re thinking, okay, now we need to start opening it and having bigger meetings again to get more ideas because we just seemed to get more done when we had a smaller group. And then working with our consultant too.

[00:18:42] John Mulligan: We was a little concerned about trolls who might infiltrate the meeting and try to do bad things. But as Cindy said, we’re winding down the major fundraising push for now. It won’t stop.

[00:18:57] Cindy Mulligan: We’ll always be fundraising.

[00:18:57] John Mulligan: But as the summer and fall progress, the plan is to move into more of direct messaging mode of activity, and that’ll crescendo in October leading right up to election day.

[00:19:14] Beth: Have you had people show up to just be disruptive?

[00:19:17] John Mulligan: No.

[00:19:18] Cindy Mulligan: No.

[00:19:19] Beth: Yeah, that’s a lot of work for a troll usually.

[00:19:21] Sarah: Yes. In a community where they have to look at people in the face, it’s a little different.

[00:19:24] Cindy Mulligan: We weren’t out there yet then--

[00:19:26] John Mulligan: We did hear the other day that there’s some disinformation out there about us already. We don’t know what that is, but that is something that we have heard. So I think we’re getting a little bit of attention.

[00:19:38] Sarah: Yeah. Good. That’s what you wanted, right?

[00:19:39] John Mulligan: Yeah, that’s right.

[00:19:39] Sarah: I think that’s what’s interesting is the mix of persuasion, communication, but you are, like, actively getting involved in some local races. How do you decide as a group what’s the mix going to be? This is a two-part question because I’m also really interested-- I think it’s so smart how many experts you guys have brought in like consultants and lawyers. It’s an intimidating world, but you seem to have found some good guides. So how did you decide when to call in an expert, and how do you decide where to spend your money?

[00:20:07] John Mulligan: We feel like we’re jumping into shark infested waters. We better have a shark cage. That means good legal counsel, people who know what they’re doing in the political consulting world, and who can run the data, tailor the demographics to who we want to target to maximize the efficient use of our limited resources. So that’s why we’ve tried really hard to cross all the T’s, dot all the I’s, not leave anybody an opening to damage us.

[00:20:44] Cindy Mulligan: We started out, we set up our own website, but then we clearly found out we needed a better website. So now we have a new website that has multiple pages. It’s at yellowbankspac.org, and you can also click to donate on that site.

[00:21:02] Sarah: Wait, tell us how you picked the name. Yellow Banks.

[00:21:06] John Mulligan: That’s a good question. Owensboro was founded in the late 1700s along the Ohio River. We’re not far from Evansville, as you guys know. The story that we’ve always been told, and I think there’s truth to it, is that when the white people first started coming to this part of the country down the Ohio River, they could see the bare earth on the riverbank at where Owensboro is now, and it was created by a large bison path, where the bison would go down to drink water from the river. So they said, “Oh, that riverbank looks yellow.” So they created a little village and called it Yellow Banks. And that’s a pretty widely known origin story around this area. That’s how we came up with it.

[00:21:52] Cindy Mulligan:  It’s also kind of changed.

[00:21:53] John Mulligan: Our logo consists of a somewhat stylized picture of a bison trotting on some yellow earth.

[00:21:59] Sarah: Love it.

[00:22:00] John Mulligan: So that’s where that came from.

[00:22:03] Beth: As other people get inspired by what you’re doing, I want to ask a sensitive question. Do you know about the average donation amount to the PAC? because this also does sound like something that is the province of very, very wealthy people and I just wonder how accessible it is.

[00:22:20] Cindy Mulligan: We’ve had anywhere from what, $25 to 5,000.

[00:22:24] John Mulligan: Yeah.

[00:22:25] Cindy Mulligan: Just all in there anywhere.

[00:22:27] John Mulligan: The majority of it has been on the lower side.

[00:22:29] Cindy Mulligan: Yes.

[00:22:30] John Mulligan: So it’s small donors at this point.

[00:22:32] Cindy Mulligan: And we do take recurring monthly. On our website there’s a place where you can give $50 a month or whatever.

[00:22:37] John Mulligan: A few people have already done that. Signed up to give us a little bit every month.

[00:22:41] Beth: I think that’s maybe the most beautiful piece of this to me. That it is something that whatever life looks like there is a way in. And there’s a way in through these vehicles that sound like they belong only to a very small number of people. So thank you so much for what you’re doing, and thank you for coming to talk with us about it.

[00:22:59] Sarah: And tell us again where everybody can find out information about the PAC.

[00:23:02] Cindy Mulligan: Yes. Yellowbankspac.org. And if anyone would like to send a check, we also have a PO box, PO Box 293, Owensboro, Kentucky 42302.

[00:23:14] Sarah: Here’s what I think. I think if anybody, and I imagine there will be some, wants to reach out to know how you did this so they can start it themselves, that’s great. But you should require a donation. You should be like, “we’ll happily share our expertise.”

[00:23:26] Cindy Mulligan: It’s all on our website.

[00:23:27] Sarah: You have to donate to the PAC in order to get some one-on-one time on how to do this in your own community.

[00:23:33] Cindy Mulligan: There you go.

[00:23:33] John Mulligan: Yeah, we are off to a good start. We’re very happy about where we are, but we will need more money if we’re hoping to make a big difference.

[00:23:40] Sarah: Can I ask personally how it’s made you feel about politics, about the future, being involved in this?

[00:23:50] Cindy Mulligan: I know it was scary to me at first because, like I said, I was registered Republican then I changed to Democrat, but that was way before, so I was never really that into it, but now I’m seeing stuff, I’m watching your all’s things all the time now because I’m a paid member now.

[00:24:10] Sarah: Oh, thank you.

[00:24:12] Cindy Mulligan: Yes.

[00:24:12] Beth: Thank you so much.

[00:24:13] Cindy Mulligan: And also I was going to say that I’m looking forward to seeing you guys in August,

[00:24:17] Sarah: oh, yay.

[00:24:17] Beth: That’s great.

[00:24:18] Cindy Mulligan: Kim and I are coming.

[00:24:20] John Mulligan: For me, a few minutes ago you mentioned the feelings of powerlessness that people experience, and I think there are millions of people all across the country who feel that way right now, and that includes me. It’s always included me for a long time. And it’s one of the reasons I agreed to take on this job, was that I haven’t done anything. All I’ve done is had opinions. And regardless of what happens to this PAC going forward, I think I can sleep a little better at night knowing that I’m actually doing something real- and not just talking, not just opining on things. This is something real. It’s small, at least for now, but we hope that it will turn into something. We have no intention of going away after the next election.

[00:25:08] Cindy Mulligan: Good.

[00:25:09] John Mulligan: We hope to grow and move into the 2028 cycle, and if things go well, expand our horizons and our ambitions and this thing might spread we hope.

[00:25:22] Sarah: Love it.

[00:25:23] Beth: I hope it does. Listen, as the daughter of someone who’s also very upset about the library situation in Owensboro, I’m greatly comforted that this is happening near my hometown and just so happy to know you all and watch it grow.

[00:25:38] Cindy Mulligan: Thank you.

[00:25:39] John Mulligan: Thank you so much. We appreciate you guys.

[00:25:42] Sarah: Thank you. Thank you again to the Mulligans for coming and talking to us. For Outside of Politics today, maybe you’ve heard I opened a bookshop, Meander Bookshop inside Piper’s Tea and Coffee in Paducah, Kentucky. Can you tell I’ve been saying that a lot on Instagram, for example? So I opened it at the beginning of June, so we’re looking at about two and a half months in so far. When I started, Peter, the owner of Piper’s, was like, “It takes you about three months. It’ll take you about three months to get the hang of things and understand how what your challenges are going to be and what your kind of weekly flow will look like.” And man, he’s not far off. Now, in the middle of this, I went on vacation for two weeks, which was very hard. It was a hard vacation. You heard about that on Tuesday. But leaving my little baby bookshop was also hard, and I learned a lot about being away. But I’ve had an easy off-ramp as far as being a brick-and-mortar owner because I barely have a brick-and-mortar. I don’t have to deal with point of sale or insurance or all this stuff because I’m inside Piper’s, which has been really nice. But it has still been really hard and overwhelming. I think about it all the time. I wake up thinking about it. There is so much to book selling.

[00:27:01] Now, the beating heart is still what I enjoy the most. When I’m in the bookshop and someone comes in and I what they call hand-sell them a book, I hand them a book and sell it to them, that’s still my favorite part. I don’t lack for opinions. I certainly don’t lack for opinions when it comes to books. But that part is still the center of the business. It is also super interesting to me what sells when I’m not there. It’s been endlessly fascinating to do what I call turn the table, which is a lot of what I spend my time on. I have a big table out in front of the little cubby that is the bookshop, so you have to walk around the corner to get into Meander, but as you walk in the coffee shop, there’s a big table, and that’s like my sales table. So I do themes. I was so excited about this summer music festival theme, and I did sell some of the books, but I bought way too many. I’m stuck with a lot of musician biographies and memoirs. If you’d like any of those, please stop in Meander. And figuring out what sells, like, what people will buy on impulse right there at the table is so interesting. Book sales in general, I’m a big reader. It’s not that I don’t pay attention to the it books, but seeing what actually sells, like watching Yesteryear dominate and then Calamity Club come in and take the top spot, I think that’s interesting.

[00:28:15] I told Beth, I said, “I think there’s a whole conversation about why Yesteryear and Calamity Club are the two best-selling books of the summer.” I think that part’s really interesting. The ordering is so overwhelming. I spent the last few weeks setting up what they call accounts with publishers so that I can order directly from the publishers. That was, like, such an intense bureaucratic process. So there’s just all that detail-oriented paperwork Lots of math. That’s not ever been my strong suit that I’m having to learn on the fly as I do this, which has been really interesting- not only learning about myself, but learning about the business. I really like the book-selling business. I think it’s so interesting. It’s going through a lot of change like everywhere else, like every other industry in the country right now. I think that’s been really interesting watching people deal with AI. I talked a little bit about the way people backlash to booksellers using artificial intelligence in their marketing, which I’m very sympathetic to because there is so much marketing, and there’s so much to do when you’re running a brick-and-mortar. And I don’t even have employees, and I’m not dealing with a lot of the stuff small businesses are dealing with, and there’s still just so much like events, marketing, turning the tables, stocking the shelves.

[00:29:24] It’s like you have to be a time traveler. You have to be thinking about what’s coming up. What are you prepared for? Do you have enough of that? What’s selling out? Should you buy more of that? Or if you buy more of that, are you going to be stuck with it? Like, all of that is so intense, and so I’m so sympathetic to people who are using tools. And let me be clear, I don’t use AI tools for design, but I do use AI tools for managing the business side of things. I do think it is not the highest and best use of my one wild and precious life to be filling in spreadsheets, so I definitely use tools to help me manage my databases. I think that is a really great use for AI especially if you’re a small business owner. But it is been really fun. It’s been a really creative exercise. I usually go in the afternoons almost every day. I have surprised Pantsuit Politics listeners, some of whom drove from very far away to visit my little bookshop. It was such a treat. It’s so fun to walk in and see someone in a Keep It Nuanced T-shirt. Really special the way you guys have supported us. It has been incredible both online and in person.

[00:30:32] And so I come in about every afternoon. The beginning of the week, I get my little sales report from Piper’s, and I make my orders, and I usually turn the table on Mondays. A big lesson I learned is that I should not make a big change on a Sunday. One Sunday I was in there I trashed everything, all the shelves, the table, and everybody came in. What was I thinking? Of course, Sunday’s going to be a busy day. So it was like people were, like, stepping around piles of books. That was a lesson learned. And so I’m trying to figure that out, the rhythm of my week, and of course that’s going to change now that school’s back in session and Pantsuit Politics is back full time. So just figuring out that flow of, like, when does it work for me to pay attention to this? Had a big exciting thing happen, which is Chef Sarah Bradley, who I know we all love, has decided to sell signed copies of her new cookbook called-- y’all, seriously, I teared up. I get goosebumps. I have goosebumps on my leg right now about to tell you the title. The title of her cookbook is The Kitchen I Came Home To. You don’t even need to know anything else about it, but it is fantastic and I’ve seen it.

[00:31:32] She is selling pre-ordered signed copies of her cookbook exclusively through Meander. So if you want one of those, I will put the link in the show notes and you can get your signed copy. I will send it to you with love when the book comes out on September 29th. So that’s been a really fun project. Kaitlin Jensen, who is a listener of Pantsuit Politics and sets her three romance novels exclusively in Paducah because she lived here for a time, and she sent me the first one, gosh, years ago. She came out with a third one. They’re adorable. And she is coming this weekend for Bookstore Romance Day on Saturday. We’re having a big event. I’m going to have my first author talk. I’m going to record it and turn it into a Meander podcast. So if you want to come to my little cute bookstore events but you don’t live anywhere near Paducah, hopefully that’ll be a way for you to listen in. The thing about having a small business like this, I’m learning-- and I knew this because this is how Pantsuit Politics is. You have more ideas than you have time. You have way more ideas than you have time to execute them. And so I’m trying to figure that out and the balance, but it is wonderful.

[00:32:33] And while I think there’s all these funny Instagram reels about people think book selling is sitting quietly reading a book in a shop, I have done that sometimes. I have sat in the bookstore and read books. So that’s been really special, but a lot of it is unpacking and putting price tag stickers on things and reorganizing the shelves, but I kind of all that too. So it’s been really fun. If you want to follow along with all my book-selling journey, meander.substack.com. You can subscribe to that Substack. I’m going to be sending out an email next week because let me give y’all a heads-up because I get a little bit more insight and forecasting when it comes to books, I guess is what I would say, like the new books coming out. If you have read a book that you have enjoyed in, let’s say, the last 15 years, I have news for you. That author has a new book coming out this fall. It’s bananas, guys. The fall releases are bananas. Min Jin Lee, who wrote Pachinko, one of my favorite novels in the last 10 years, her first book since Pachinko is coming out.

[00:33:35] Emily St. John Mandel of Station Eleven, she’s got a new book. John Green’s got a new book. It’s wild out there, guys. I’m reading like a crazy person right now trying to get in front of all these fall releases. So I’m going to be sending out an email about that soon, but it’s fun. Fall is fun. Summer was fun. I’m sure cozy season in the winter will be fun. I like the ebbs and flows of this and watching what people read. And I’ve been doing a series on Instagram about little books you can finish in a sitting. Those are my favorite to sell because people will be like, “Okay.” And I really think they’re, like, the secret to getting back into reading. it is a little book you can finish quickly. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lyons, which has been such a hit; I’ve read the first two. I think that’s the secret to their success. Especially the first several, they’re really short, and when you can read a little baby book like that, and you’re like, “Look at me, I read a book,” your brain was like, “Oh I remember. I love to finish a book.” So I love selling the little books, and I’ve been doing a little Instagram series on that.

[00:34:33] You can hear my energy as I’m talking about this, right? I’m just all over. I’m selling and also buying and also reading and also being in the shop and the creativity around events. I’ve got to start book club soon. That’s my next big project. But it’s great and I love it because it is really informing everything I think about here on Pantsuit Politics, like being in a retail space and encountering people and the public and watching them react to because I have all our Pantsuit Politics books out on the shelves. I actually have a lot of Beth’s recommendations on the shelves too. I should make her my official buyer because her romance reads are selling. But when I tell people I have a political podcast and I show them the books, and we kind of talk about that, that’s been really interesting. So it’s just I love input. I love people and books, and so it’s been really fun. Again, I just want to thank everybody who has either supported the bookshop through ourbookshop.org, or through buying Sarah’s cookbook or coming in person. It really means the world to me. And I know the executive producers of the show are planning a little trip in November, so that’s going to be really fun.

[00:35:43] I’m having a blast, and I really appreciate all of you reaching out and commenting and sharing your expertise. So many of you are booksellers yourselves. Lisa has been just one of our executive producers who owns The Bookshelf on Church. She’s just been incredible, so helpful. So thank you to everybody. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. Thank you to The Mulligans. Make sure and get your virtual tickets to our live show. And way to bury the lead, we will be back together next week, guys. We’ll be back together here, Beth and Sarah, at Pantsuit Politics. Until then, I hope you have the best weekend available to you.

Show Credits

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

Let me disclose my biases openly and transparently. I watched The Oprah Winfrey Show every weekday for most of its 25-year run. The show debuted in 1986, when I was five years old, and ended in 2011, when I was pregnant with Amos. I don’t remember the first time I watched Oprah. I only know I was always watching Oprah. I remember the first Book Club (Deep End of the Ocean!). I remember the first Favorite Things episode. I remember Tom Cruise jumping on the couch. I watched the show in high school, college, law school, and on the small TV that set on my desk as a legislative assistant in the U.S. Senate. I actually attended a taping in 1999, and Oprah gave every member of the audience a Christopher Radko ornament I still hang on my Christmas tree every year.

I often tell people Oprah raised me. It is only with the slightest bit of hyperbole. So much of how I operate in the world is informed by what I learned watching an hour of Oprah every weekday of my life for decades. Certainly, my career as a person who talks for a living is inextricably linked to what I watched Oprah do and what I continue to watch Oprah do: read voraciously, really listen to people’s pain, ask the hard or crazy or silly question, love the world. What I thought was possible and what I thought was possible for me cannot be separated from this woman.

I love Oprah. I love her very, very much, and I talk about it a lot and, in the past several years, I have started getting a pretty standard response.

What about Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil?

The critique goes like this: Oprah holds responsibility for platforming Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil. Whatever good Oprah has done is outweighed by how much harm these two men have caused.

I want to be clear. Oprah absolutely did platform these two men. I still remember the beef trial and Dr. Phil’s presence on the shows surrounding it. I still remember the first time Dr. Oz came on and told us what our poop should look like. Also, in fairness, these two are not the only problematic people Oprah platformed over the years. She was devoted to Bill Cosby. She hosted Jenny McCarthy when her memoir came out and let her share all her theories about vaccines and developmental disorders. We all remember The Secret.

Over 25 years and 4,561 episodes, Oprah’s success rate is not perfect. Dr. Oz, in particular, has chosen a dark path for a career as a public figure that Oprah helped him launch. However, when a legacy as deep and wide as Oprah’s is gets reduced in this way, I suspect some other forces are at play.

What else got platformed in those thousands of episodes?

While we all swim in an ocean of celebrity book clubs, there would be no Reese or Jenna or Dua Lipa without Oprah. When she decided to launch her television book club, people told her she was insane. It felt a little insane at the time, unless you were the child of a librarian, and then you were thrilled! Oprah picked hard books, challenging books. The Deep End of the Ocean is about a kidnapping, for goodness sakes! My favorite is when she would pick a classic and bring in all these literary professors and experts. I read Anna Karenina thanks to Oprah and loved every page.

I wouldn’t be the reader I am without Oprah, and she platformed hundreds of authors and revived the publishing industry along the way. Toni Morrison was already a genius, but Oprah made her a best-selling author. In the final decade of the show alone, 22 million+ copies of Oprah-branded editions of her book club selections sold in the US and around the world.

22 million.

Or what about Oprah’s Favorite Things? Her Christmas episode featuring her favorite products became a cultural juggernaut that platformed small business owners from around the country and the world. They were often women-owned or Black-owned companies who would experience up to a 10,000% jump in sales. These people paid off loans and sent their kids to college and employed thousands of people thanks to Oprah’s platforming.

Beyond money spent and careers changed, I truly believe Oprah’s legacy will always be letting people be heard, often around topics no one else was talking about. She was talking about AIDS when so many politicians still wouldn’t even say the word. She hosted Ellen’s coming-out moment. She disclosed openly her own childhood history of sexual abuse and continued to normalize speaking out. The law creating the national database of child abusers is called the Oprah Bill after she came to Congress to testify in 1991.

Every Oprah fan has their own story. The episode on safety (Never let yourself be taken to a second location!) that saved their lives. The conversation that convinced them to follow their dream or leave an abusive marriage or change the way they parented. And that’s just on the audience. What about on media? The impact from her philanthropic pursuits? People dedicate entire dissertations and careers to analyzing Oprah’s impact. The fact that I’m even trying to sum it up here is absurd. Almost as absurd and as trying to reduce it down to Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz.

Oprah’s legacy is robust, and honestly, she doesn’t need me to defend her. (You can hear her defend herself in this recent interview.) Not to mention, it’s ongoing. She’s still out here sharing books and her favorite things and talking about things that need to be talked about! (Here’s one of my recent favorites!)

However, what I learned from Oprah is to listen, and what I hear people saying when they use Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil as some kind of gotcha is this: Women, no matter how successful they are, will always be held responsible for the men in their lives. I hear that accountability is not proportional. That women operate in a zero-sum environment. It doesn’t matter how much you got it right if you screw up in a way we find unacceptable.

But I know that’s not true. I know that why people do what they do is complicated, even Dr. Oz, and that we lose nothing by centering people’s humanity. Making people easy villains and then sentencing those around them for their crimes is no path to justice.

I know that Oprah is flawed and human (remember the Tina Turner wig!?) and she’d be the first to tell you so. It was her being so willing to share that vulnerability that made her the cultural juggernaut that she is. It’s why people opened up to her. It’s why we all wanted to listen. It’s why we all still listen to her. Honestly, Oprah’s legacy is secure, but it’s not pure.

No one’s is, and we should stop requiring it to be.

I was going to do good news again today, but y’all — we have so many election results. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Connecticut. We’re doing a Wednesday News Brief.

Wisconsin, what is going on with the polling?

The polls had State Representative Francesca Hong — a democratic socialist, which is why everybody was paying attention — up 20 points over …

Read more

We’re headed to Minneapolis (and the Minnesota State Fairrrrrrr) in just a few short weeks. Our Minneapolis live show is on Saturday, August 29, and you do not have to be anywhere near Minnesota to be in the room with us.

Virtual tickets are here. Your couch, your comfy pants, the beverage(s) of choice and everything we’ve got planned on that stage (and it’s a lot!) streamed straight to you.

Talking with Minneapolis

We’ll be sitting down with Pastor Natalia Terfa and other Minneapolis activists to continue our conversation about what it was actually like to live through the ICE protests in their city. Not the version that made it to cable news version or an Instagram reel. The real story, from the people who were there — what they saw, what they learned, and what they continue to live with to this day.

Also: we are going to have FUN

We’ve spent all year deep in our America250 series, and we’re bringing everything we’ve learned to the stage — the surprising, the delightful, and the Ezra of it all. There will be trivia. There will be surprises. There will be group singing that you can join in as long as your family and pets don’t care!

This will be our America250 victory lap and I can’t wait to share what we’re taking with us into America’s next 250.

Here’s the thing about our live shows

Every time we do one, someone writes to us afterward and says some version of: I love the show but I didn’t know the live should would be so much FUN. Being in community to talk and laugh and connect is the whole reason we do this. And the virtual ticket means the room just got a whole lot bigger.

So if Minneapolis is a road trip too far, grab a virtual ticket and watch with us from wherever you are. Bring a friend who’s never listened. Bring your mom. Bring the group chat. Because we’ve got a special BOGO ticket offer!

Join us!

Hopefully, we’ll see you on August 29 either way.

Sarah

Topics Discussed

• Still at War with Iran? Trump Tells Axios He’s “Low-Keying It”

• Cost of Living Up, Wages Flat: Beef, Sparkling Water, and a July Jobs Report That Lost 23,000 Jobs

• Flock Cameras and the Surveillance Network We All Asked For

• The DSA, AOC, and Who Actually Leads the Democratic Party

• Outside of Politics: The Great RV Road Trip from Hell — Badlands, Wind Cave, Theodore Roosevelt, and Glacier

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

Subscribe now

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Join us in Minneapolis on August 29 for our live show and Spice Conference — and if you can’t make it in person, virtual tickets are available so you can watch along from home! Follow this link and click “Get Tickets,” then select the your preferred ticket type.

Episode Resources

Iran

• Trump to Axios: “We are low-keying it” with Iran (Axios)

The Economy

• July jobs report: US economy shed 23,000 jobs, a sudden reversal (NBC News)

• The Employment Situation — July 2026 (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

  Monica Andreasen

  $40,200,000,000 in Chicken Sandwiches

  That number is the Cathy family. The private, dynastic clan behind Chick-fil-A. Three siblings splitting a chicken sandwich empire like it’s a slow cooker recipe passed down at the reunion. Dan gets $13.7B. Bubba gets $13.7B. Trudy gets $13.7B. Forty billion, two hundred million dollars in total. And every one of those dollars was built on a business th…

  Read more

  a month ago · 2135 likes · 395 comments · Uncomfortable Truth by Monica

Surveillance & Flock Cameras

• The New York Times on Flock cameras

• How rogue officers turned a nationwide camera network into a tool for stalking (The Washington Post)

• Police cameras tracked one driver 526 times in four months, lawsuit says (NBC News)

The Democratic Party

• Platner’s Top Strategist on What Went Wrong | The Ezra Klein Show (The New York Times)

Outside of Politics: The RV Trip

• Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library — Plan Your Visit

• Medora Musical (Medora, ND)

• Pitchfork Steak Fondue (Medora, ND)

• Sun Tours — Blackfeet-owned tours of Glacier National Park

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Nicholas Holland: But then at the same time, like we literally have, Democratic operatives saying, “We’re going to do everything we can to save the party from the Democratic socialists and not get these people elected.” And it’s like, what are we doing? Don’t we mostly agree on these things? Isn’t the point that we mostly agree?

[00:00:30] Sarah Stewart Holland: Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:30] Nicholas Holland: And this is Nicholas Holland.

[00:00:32] Sarah Stewart Holland: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Beth is still out for another week on vacation, and Nicholas has generously agreed to come co-host with me. Nicholas is my husband, guys, in case you didn’t know.

[00:00:43] Nicholas Holland: 23 years.

[00:00:44] Sarah Stewart Holland: 23 years. I think that’s the last time you were on the show, we talked about being married for 20 years.

[00:00:48] Nicholas Holland: I think it’s been... Yeah, it’s been a long time.

[00:00:50] Sarah Stewart Holland: It’s been a minute. Okay.

[00:00:51] Nicholas Holland: They finally let me out.

[00:00:52] Sarah Stewart Holland: They finally unleashed. Today, we’re going to do a headline lightning round. We’re going to talk about Iran, the economy, and surveillance. And then we’re going to pivot. And since we’ve got two lifelong Democrats... actually, we’ll get into that. You’re the only true lifelong Democrat. I didn’t start out as a Democrat.

[00:01:11] Nicholas Holland: Yeah, I guess that’s right.

[00:01:12] Sarah Stewart Holland: We’re going to talk about--

[00:01:13] Nicholas Holland: Yeah, to the extent you can be one.

[00:01:14] Sarah Stewart Holland: We’re going to talk about the DSA and the state of the Democratic Party and check in with that. And then Outside of Politics, we’re going to talk about our RV road trip from hell.

[00:01:24] Nicholas Holland: Yes. We won’t call it a vacation, because it wasn’t one.

[00:01:27] Sarah Stewart Holland: Oh, man. All right. Before we get started, we want to encourage everybody to come to Minneapolis, and more importantly if you can’t come to Minneapolis, we have virtual tickets.

[00:01:36] Nicholas Holland: Awesome.

[00:01:37] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah. So Nicholas is going to be in Minneapolis. We’re going to do so many amazing things. We have mahjong lessons. Beth and I are going to go to the state fair. You can come too.

[00:01:45] Nicholas Holland: I’m going. Trust.

[00:01:46] Sarah Stewart Holland: It’s just been named the best state fair in the country.

[00:01:49] Nicholas Holland: It looks like it. I’ve looked at the food. I’m so excited

[00:01:50] Sarah Stewart Holland: I’m so excited. We’re going to have a live show.

[00:01:52] We’re going to have a spice conference. But if you cannot make it to Minneapolis the last weekend in August 29th, don’t worry. We have virtual tickets. The link is in the show notes, and you can get your virtual ticket to watch along. It’s going to be a very fancy live show recording. Not to brag.

[00:02:07] Nicholas Holland: Yeah, sponsored by Substack and Fearless Finance.

[00:02:08] Sarah Stewart Holland: That’s right. Like, there’s going to be audience reaction shots. It’s going to be fun. Okay. Next up, let’s talk about the headlines.

[00:02:14] Nicholas Holland: Let’s do it.

[00:02:27] Sarah Stewart Holland: First headline. We’re still at war with Iran.

[00:02:31] Nicholas Holland: But are we? I mean--

[00:02:33] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think so.

[00:02:34] Nicholas Holland: I think we’re still in conflict with Iran, but no one’s really doing a lot of war things right now.

[00:02:38] Sarah Stewart Holland: No, we’re low-keying it. Didn’t you hear? That’s what Trump told Axios. “We’re low-keying it.” He said, “It’s going to work out like a chess game.” Is that how you would describe chess games, that they just always work out? I don’t understand what that means.

[00:02:50] Nicholas Holland: I think he’s, again, suggesting that he has a plan that he doesn’t really have.

[00:02:54] Sarah Stewart Holland: He does not have a plan.

[00:02:55] Nicholas Holland: This has been the whole problem with this the whole time, right? Which has been they had some success in overturning one government, and they thought, “Oh, this’ll be easy.”

[00:03:04] Sarah Stewart Holland:  This’ll be easy. This’ll be a  breeze.

[00:03:05] Nicholas Holland: Ignoring I don’t know how many thousands of years of precedent and the fact that we’ve had in the last 30 years two never-ending wars in the same part of the world.

[00:03:15] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think they also fired all the Iranian experts.

[00:03:18] Nicholas Holland: That wouldn’t surprise me. And then they took advice from Pete Hegseth and Bibi Netanyahu, and that was apparently their mastermind group for this whole thing.

[00:03:26] Sarah Stewart Holland: Their mastermind group. And he is so foreign by the ‘80s, so he’s still very much in the, like, Iranian hostage crisis. He thinks we should have stuck it to them then, and so that’s forming all his ideas. Except it’s not. We’re not sticking it to anybody. He’s all over the map. He’s going to bomb them into oblivion. We’re low-key negotiating. We’re going to let their economic situation force their hand. That doesn’t make any sense. An authoritarian country. They don’t care how much people suffer. He doesn’t care how much people suffer.

[00:03:59] Nicholas Holland: It doesn’t seem like it. So that’s the rub, I think, for the other politicians who actually do have to get elected in November- which is he doesn’t really care. He’s full lame duck. He might be still be wearing For More Years hats, but he knows he’s on his way out the door.

[00:04:10] Sarah Stewart Holland: Also, side quest, he’s still not giving them any money for their campaigns from all his big piles of money.

[00:04:16] Nicholas Holland: I don’t know. It’s pretty wild out there. We’ll talk about elections later, but I just think the Iranians-

[00:04:21] Sarah Stewart Holland:  Look at the smile on my face. I was like, “He’s still not giving anybody money.”

[00:04:24] Nicholas Holland: I think the Iranians have found out through what they’ve managed to do that they have A pretty big stick to wield with the strait there. And that’s doesn’t require a lot of energy. It doesn’t actually require a lot of active patrolling really, or any active warfare. It just requires the threat of such, and it paralyzes shipping, which causes costs to go up, and I think they like the fact that the elections are soon. But I think you’re right. It doesn’t really pressure Trump very much, interestingly.

[00:04:50] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think there have been moments when he has felt the pressure. I think there have been moments in this erratic, chaotic negotiation, ceasefire, war-- I’m not sure what any of those words mean in this particular situation anymore-- where there was that moment where they came to him and were like, “There’s going to be an economic depression if you don’t let the foot off the gas right now.” And I think there’s been moments where it’s connected with him. But at the end of the day, I think the takeaway from this conflict will always be basically what you just said. They thought they couldn’t close the strait. That was always this out there in case scenario that everybody feared that no one expected, and he put them in a position where, why not try?

[00:05:31] Nicholas Holland: Why not give it a shot.

[00:05:31] Sarah Stewart Holland: And it’s not going to go back to before.

[00:05:34] Nicholas Holland: No, I don’t think so either.

[00:05:35] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think that’s why Saudi Arabia is exploring pipelines and other passageways. Those days are over. You can’t unknow what they know now.

[00:05:44] Nicholas Holland: But that’s 15 to 20 years down the line, probably, where we’re no longer using the strait if that’s even a possibility really. It again points to the fact that we’re still out here trying to live off fossil fuels instead of doing the things that we should be doing.

[00:05:56] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think the other takeaway might be that he’s the green president. I think it’s hilarious that ultimately his actions are going to accelerate, maybe not here yet, but definitely other places like Asia. Asia’s like, “Okay, well, now is the time.” Europe--

[00:06:11] Nicholas Holland: Meanwhile, we’re paying a company 1.2 billion not to build wind turbines.

[00:06:14] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay.

[00:06:14] Nicholas Holland: Yeah, going on Iran, quagmire.

[00:06:17] Sarah Stewart Holland: Quagmire.

[00:06:17] Nicholas Holland: Not great for Trump.  Not really great for anybody.

[00:06:20] Sarah Stewart Holland: In summary, relating to our next lightning round item, new reporting that the cost of living is going up and the wages are not keeping pace. Are you surprised by this headline? You go to the grocery store every week for our family.

[00:06:32] Nicholas Holland: I’m not surprised by this headline. On either side.

[00:06:33] Sarah Stewart Holland: What’s the worst grocery store item? Like, where have you seen it the most? Besides beef.

[00:06:38] Nicholas Holland: Besides beef?

[00:06:39] Sarah Stewart Holland: Beef’s the easy answer.

[00:06:40] Nicholas Holland: Beef is huge, yeah. Beef’s just crazy right now. I’m a big guy when it comes to the clearance meat.

[00:06:44] Sarah Stewart Holland: He loves clearance meat.

[00:06:44] Nicholas Holland: I’ve got the whole chest freezer full of things that say special on it. [ inaudible] Anyway, I don’t buy beef unless it’s on deep discount, about to expire, going to go in the deep freeze until I figure out what to do with it. It’s very rare that I do that. But it’s just everything. It’s sparkling water, for goodness sake. I know that sounds really shishy, but you used to be able to get a 12-pack of sparkling water at Aldi for $2.79, and now it’s 3.99. And you used to be able to get... milk’s expensive. Eggs were really expensive. They’ve come back to reality. But it’s just everything, it’s expensive.

[00:07:14] Sarah Stewart Holland: Remember I read you that article the other day. I found this article on Substack that I will look up and try to find again, about Chick-fil-A. But it was about how evil Chick-fil-A is. They were talking about how Chick-fil-A has raised their prices of a six-count, like 55% from 2014 to 2024. Yeah.

[00:07:29] Nicholas Holland: I eat more faster than you do, and this is across the board. This is you used to be able to get a Value Meal at McDonald’s, even in 2019, for I don’t know, seven bucks. Now they’re all 10.49.

[00:07:39] Sarah Stewart Holland: And I’m not making 30% more. Are you making 30% more?

[00:07:41] Nicholas Holland: I am not making 30% more. As much as I would like to say that I was, I’m not making 30% more.

[00:07:46] Sarah Stewart Holland: So it’s just blood from a stone. What are we doing here?

[00:07:50] Nicholas Holland: Eat at home more, even that’s getting tough.

[00:07:52] Sarah Stewart Holland: That’s getting expensive too.

[00:07:53] Nicholas Holland: But yeah, and the wage thing doesn’t surprise me either. I think we’re probably finally starting to see a little bit more of the AI effect on wages. I think businesses are nervous about hiring, and that means that suppresses wages. We just saw the unemployment report where we lost 23,000 jobs. Some people would say unexpectedly. I would say okay. I don’t think jobs reports have really been good for ages. I think we’ve had a few good pops, and then 90 days later they go, “Oh, we’re going to revise that down. It wasn’t 110,000 jobs made, it was actually 11,000 jobs made.”

[00:08:19] Sarah Stewart Holland: I don’t think we’re losing them to AI agents yet. I think they are spending a lot of money investing in AI technology that might or might not work yet, and so they’re not spending that money on people.

[00:08:33] Nicholas Holland: I could see that, sure.

[00:08:33] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah, I think that’s a huge part of it.

[00:08:34] Nicholas Holland:  Yeah, I think it’s a total number of factors, and I hate to be glib about it, but it’s a lot of things. Yeah. It’s a lot of things.

[00:08:40] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah. Okay, our final headline, speaking of AI, I’m sure this runs on AI, right? This came up in the comments of my conversation last week with Lacey, which is flock cameras. I hadn’t heard about them. You’d heard about them before?

[00:08:52] Nicholas Holland: Have you not heard about flock cameras?

[00:08:54] Sarah Stewart Holland: I don’t know.

[00:08:55] Nicholas Holland: Everybody’s like [crosstalk].

[00:08:56] Sarah Stewart Holland: They’re like people hate them.

[00:08:57] Nicholas Holland: Yeah.

[00:08:58] Sarah Stewart Holland: They’re pretty invasive. The New York Times has a big piece on flock cameras today that they’re scanning the cars. Actually, I did think I knew about them because I think I remember them from the ICE reporting because ICE uses them to track immigrants.

[00:09:08] Nicholas Holland: Yep.

[00:09:09] Sarah Stewart Holland: Police stations are using them. You say we have some here in Paducah?

[00:09:10] Nicholas Holland:  There are, I think, 13 or something here in Paducah.

[00:09:14] Sarah Stewart Holland: 13?

[00:09:15] Nicholas Holland: Yeah.

[00:09:15] Sarah Stewart Holland: So there’s apparently an app that’ll tell you where to drive so you don’t get in the flock camera.

[00:09:18] Nicholas Holland: Good luck.

[00:09:19] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah.

[00:09:21] Nicholas Holland: They’ll just put up more flock cameras, guys.

[00:09:23] Sarah Stewart Holland: And then I’m sure they’re using AI to process millions and millions of those licenses.

[00:09:25] Nicholas Holland: It’s the natural progression of everything, right? Which is like we’ve been using cameras on license plates for ages to charge people, tolls and tags.

[00:09:35] Sarah Stewart Holland: That’s true.

[00:09:35] Nicholas Holland: The technology got cheaper to where you didn’t have to have a toll road to justify the expense, and so now they just use them for everything. I think we all assumed this was where it was going. To me it’s like if you’ve ever seen a Bourne movie, it kind of feels like we didn’t have this already? And this wasn’t widespread already.

[00:09:50] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think about Minority Report all the time because I remember when they made Minority Report with Tom Cruise, and the eyeballs and everything. They said they talked to futurists to really get a sense of like what was coming our way. So how far are we from like they’re not tracking if you’ve stolen a car, they’ve seen a Flock camera, and you’ve stolen cars before, and you went to this house where there was an abandoned vehicle, and they think you were going to steal the car.

[00:10:09] Nicholas Holland: It’s circumstantial evidence. I guess you could try to prove it. That’s a tough one. But the truth is, again, like I have to say like is this that much different than a lot of what’s been going on? We’ve had red light cameras.

[00:10:17] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah.

[00:10:18] Nicholas Holland: We’ve had speeding cameras. We’ve had all these things. It just seems like they’re more prevalent, and they’re being used in more...

[00:10:23] Sarah Stewart Holland: I wonder if it’s because it’s a private company. There’s something about it being a private company.

[00:10:28] Nicholas Holland: I think some of that.

[00:10:29] Sarah Stewart Holland: You know what it is, though? No. There is something different here. Yes, we’ve had red light cameras, but they weren’t talking to all the other red light cameras.

[00:10:37] Nicholas Holland: True.

[00:10:37] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think that’s the thing that really changes the game.

[00:10:41] Nicholas Holland: It’s like tracking movement.

[00:10:41] Sarah Stewart Holland: There’s no escaping. It’s like everywhere you go. And we’re Americans, we don’t like people tracking us.

[00:10:47] Nicholas Holland: I dispute that, actually.

[00:10:48] Sarah Stewart Holland: We don’t like it even if we accept it on multiple levels.

[00:10:50] Nicholas Holland: We actually ask for it in many ways.

[00:10:53] Sarah Stewart Holland: I know. I will never forget, Beth and I were at a college campus, it was like one of the administrator’s living rooms, and we were talking about like algorithmic media. This was eight years ago. It was a long time ago. It was probably 2023 when we were doing a lot of college speaking. Somebody was like, “I don’t care if they track me.” I love it. Then they give me good recommendations. This was like a college student. This was somebody highly educated, and she was basically like, “It’s fine with me  you can track me.”

[00:11:19] Nicholas Holland: Yeah. But again I think it’s a little bit of the camel’s nose under the tent of like we’re all good with, Find My iPhone and Life360 and we all track our kids, and we all know exactly where our children are at all times.

[00:11:30] Sarah Stewart Holland: We should stop that.

[00:11:32] Nicholas Holland: You [ inaudible].

[00:11:33] Sarah Stewart Holland: No.

[00:11:33] Nicholas Holland: I think we should probably know where our children are as best we can, really.

[00:11:36] Sarah Stewart Holland: Why? Our parents didn’t know where we were all the time.

[00:11:40] Nicholas Holland: Yeah.

[00:11:41] Sarah Stewart Holland: And it’s fine.

[00:11:41] Nicholas Holland: I guess so.

[00:11:42] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah.

[00:11:43] Nicholas Holland: But if they could have, they would have.

[00:11:45] Sarah Stewart Holland: Your mother would have, for sure

[00:11:46] Nicholas Holland: Oh, no. Here we go.

[00:11:48] Sarah Stewart Holland: She had five kids and four boys.

[00:11:49] Nicholas Holland: She doesn’t listen.

[00:11:51] Sarah Stewart Holland: Just saying. No. Lynn doesn’t listen to the podcast.

[00:11:54] Nicholas Holland: That’s okay. I don’t think so. Others do, though. Maybe she’ll listen to this episode.

[00:11:58] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay. Are we done with our lightning round? Is there any pop culture things you want to add to the lightning round that you think are important?

[00:12:04] Nicholas Holland: I don’t think there’s pop culture things I want to add to the lightning round.

[00:12:06] Sarah Stewart Holland: Pop culture stories, hot takes. I have one I need to get off my chest. Where are my wedding pictures?

[00:12:10] Nicholas Holland: Your Taylor Swift indentured [ crosstalk].

[00:12:12] Sarah Stewart Holland: Where are my wedding pictures?

[00:12:14] Nicholas Holland: At this point, the issue is either gearing up for some big reveal. Like it’s going to be like in the--

[00:12:18] Sarah Stewart Holland: Like Vogue.

[00:12:19] Nicholas Holland: Something like that.

[00:12:20] Sarah Stewart Holland:  That’s been my theory the whole time.

[00:12:22] Nicholas Holland: Or she’s going to sell a book of them or you get one every time you buy the vinyl.

[00:12:26] Sarah Stewart Holland: I don’t care. I just want to see the wedding dress.

[00:12:28] Nicholas Holland: Individual vinyl printings of each song on her next album.

[00:12:30] Sarah Stewart Holland: I just want to see the wedding dress. I don’t need an album. But I would like to see the wedding dress.

[00:12:34] Nicholas Holland: I think you’re probably going to have to buy the 13th printing of Opal Eye Single to get that.

[00:12:38] Sarah Stewart Holland: Shut up.

[00:12:40] Nicholas Holland: But I digress.

[00:12:41] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay. Next up, we’re going to talk about the Democratic Party.

[00:12:43] Nicholas Holland: Let’s do it.

[00:12:57] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay, so I’m not actually a lifelong Democrat.

[00:13:00] Nicholas Holland: True.

[00:13:00] Sarah Stewart Holland: I did not become a Democrat till I was a freshman in college.

[00:13:01] Nicholas Holland:  Were you a registered Republican?

[00:13:04] Sarah Stewart Holland: Never. No. By the time I registered Demo-- cause remember I was a baby, so I didn’t turn... Dang, I don’t know.

[00:13:09] Nicholas Holland: Go back and look. Go to the tape.

[00:13:12] Sarah Stewart Holland: I would’ve registered the summer before my freshman year in college, and I was still, I think, a Republican. And then did I register as a Republican? I don’t remember registering as a party at all.

[00:13:24] Nicholas Holland: You definitely do in Kentucky.

[00:13:25] Sarah Stewart Holland: You have to, don’t you?

[00:13:26] Nicholas Holland:  Yeah, ‘ cause they’re closed primaries.

[00:13:29] Sarah Stewart Holland: I bet I registered as a Republican.

[00:13:30] Nicholas Holland: I bet you did. It’s okay. We forgive you.

[00:13:32] Sarah Stewart Holland: And then I changed it. You have always been a registered Democrat, haven’t you?

[00:13:35] Nicholas Holland: Always, ever since every day.

[00:13:36] Sarah Stewart Holland: Every day.

[00:13:37] Nicholas Holland: Every day I was able to be one. Even in kids’ school, even in elementary school, and they were like “Who do you want to vote for?”

[00:13:43] Sarah Stewart Holland:  When you were voting, doing the little baby presidential votes.

[00:13:47] Nicholas Holland: “Are you going to vote for Reagan or Mondale?” I was like, “Give me that Walter Mondale any day.”

[00:13:50] Sarah Stewart Holland: You voted for Mondale?

[00:13:51] Nicholas Holland: Of course I did.

[00:13:52] Sarah Stewart Holland: That’s hilarious.

[00:13:53] Nicholas Holland: Ronald Reagan was a nightmare. I don’t know who knew this.

[00:13:54] Sarah Stewart Holland:  No, I agree with that.

[00:13:57] Nicholas Holland: I knew this when I was five.

[00:13:58] Sarah Stewart Holland: Everything is bad because of Ronald Reagan. We’ve done a show on that. I will put it in the show notes.

[00:14:01] Nicholas Holland: Reagan was not well-loved in my household, let’s put it  that way.

[00:14:05] Sarah Stewart Holland: That was the same for me. My grandfather was a farmer.

[00:14:08] Nicholas Holland: He didn’t like Reagan.

[00:14:08] Sarah Stewart Holland: He hated Reagan.

[00:14:10] Nicholas Holland: This was also a big Democratic part of the state.

[00:14:11] Sarah Stewart Holland: It was a big Democratic part of the state at this time in the ‘80s.

[00:14:13] Nicholas Holland: For a long time, yeah.

[00:14:14] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay. We’re not talking about Reagan, though. We’re not talking about the Democratic Party of the ‘80s. We’re talking about the Democratic Party of the 2020s.

[00:14:19] Nicholas Holland: Such as it is.

[00:14:20] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay, so I asked I think Laura this question: If you had to vote right now for anybody being considered for the presidential primary, who would you vote for? So your options are, like, Pritzker, Newsom, Buttigieg, AOC, Wes Moore, Kamala.

[00:14:40] Nicholas Holland: I think I know the most about Buttigieg. I feel like I know him as a candidate pretty well.

[00:14:46] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah. Not your girlfriend? You love AOC.

[00:14:48] Nicholas Holland: I don’t know if we’re ready for AOC. We’ll see.

[00:14:50] Sarah Stewart Holland: Not because she’s a woman. Don’t start that bullshit with me.

[00:14:52] Nicholas Holland: It’s not because she’s a woman. We’ll have to see. I think that these midterms are going to tell us a lot about where people’s heads are at with a lot of issues. And I think that the lefter part of the Democratic Party is flexing a lot of muscle right now, and if they can win some general election seats. Then there’s a real conversation about whether she’s the best candidate or a better candidate. I just don’t know if people are quite ready for that. And I think she’s also been painted she’s the new Nancy Pelosi. She’s like-

[00:15:16] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah, she’s very villainized.

[00:15:17] Nicholas Holland: She’s a boogeyman, and so I think people hate her even though they don’t know anything about her really.

[00:15:21] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah, one of our friends said something like, “You like AOC?” And you were like, “Yeah.” Saturday night.

[00:15:26] Nicholas Holland: Yeah. And I think she’s an excellent candidate. I think she’s made an excellent congressperson. I think she’s done the right things to get the establishment Democrats--

[00:15:36] Sarah Stewart Holland: So her pragmatism doesn’t piss you off?

[00:15:39] Nicholas Holland: No, not really.

[00:15:40] Sarah Stewart Holland: Cause she’s lost people because she’s pragmatic.

[00:15:42] Nicholas Holland: I know. But what does that mean? What has she done that’s been pragmatic? She’s moderated some of her positions.

[00:15:48] Sarah Stewart Holland:  It’s not that what she’s done. It’s that she hasn’t done enough. She’s not out there chaining herself to shit.

[00:15:54] Nicholas Holland: And getting mad about Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer?

[00:15:57] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think so, yeah.

[00:15:57] Nicholas Holland: Listen, I think there’s a lot of criticisms to be made about the leadership of the Democratic Party right now. The establishment leadership. They suck. They’re bad at their jobs.

[00:16:03] Sarah Stewart Holland: That is not all the way true

[00:16:05] Nicholas Holland: The DNC has no money.

[00:16:07] Sarah Stewart Holland: No, that is true. But the candidates do.

[00:16:09] Nicholas Holland: And the reason they have no money is because there’s no leader of the Democratic Party right now. Not really.

[00:16:13] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay, I can’t believe I’m about to sit here and be a Chuck Schumer apologist.

[00:16:16] Nicholas Holland: Oh, here we go.

[00:16:18] Sarah Stewart Holland: Chuck Schumer did recruit candidates who have put races into play. That’s his primary job, and he has done a good job with some of it. Now, Maine got messed up, but Mary Peltola in Alaska is a great recruit. Roy Cooper in North Carolina is a great recruit, and he went to these people, and he was like, I wish he’d gone to Andy Beshear, not for nothing. And been like maybe he did, and be like, “This is your play.” But he did do some of that. Now, and Hakeem Jeffries, what is he supposed to do, back progressive challengers to members of his own caucus? That’s a crazy thing.

[00:16:48] Nicholas Holland:  I don’t know that’s what I’m asking. I’m asking for a little bit of... I don’t know. You got to give him some hope here. It just feels like they’re real nothing burgers when it comes to cheerleading the Democratic Party or leading the Democratic Party, or being the face of the Democratic Party. It’s very hard when you’re the party out of power, especially presidential power, to have that. But we have had it in the past.

[00:17:09] Sarah Stewart Holland: I mean, first of all, you don’t ever want to follow Nancy Pelosi. It’s a tough gig. Is it she’s good at her job? She did it for a long time. I think there’s two things here that have to be separated out, and I think they get all smooshed together when we talk about the Democratic Party and the future of the Democratic Party. We put legislators together with executive branch members, right? We’re talking about Gavin Newsom at the same time we’re talking about Hakeem Jeffries. Those jobs could not be more different. It’s

[00:17:35] Nicholas Holland: It ‘ s true, but historically you have had leaders in the party at the congressional level who actually make noise and do things. You know what I mean? John Boehner wasn’t a nobody.

[00:17:46] Sarah Stewart Holland: But they do things behind the scenes whipping votes.  They’re not out there leading.

[00:17:49] Nicholas Holland:  People forget who John Boehner was. I don’t know. I think you go back and you look at some of the 2000s and 2010s, there was a lot more attention paid to that congressional leadership because they weren’t out there doing something.

[00:18:01] Sarah Stewart Holland: Electorally?

[00:18:02] Nicholas Holland: Like legislatively they’re fighting over the debt ceiling. It’s gotten to be I think banal on the Republican side because they just do whatever Trump says.  There is no fight

[00:18:12] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s really to be laid at the Democratic Party’s feet. I think some of this is the dysfunctional nature of Congress and the dysfunctional nature of the parties themselves. The parties, the party structure, the way the power flow is in the party has been completely upended a lot because both the ideolog left and the ideolog right came in and said, “We don’t want seniority. We don’t want to have to pay our dues. We want to challenge incumbents.” And I’m not really sure that’s a lack of leadership or if it’s just the changing times.

[00:18:42] Nicholas Holland: Sure. So we digress a little bit here because we’re supposed to be talking about the Democratic Party. So what is the Democratic Party now? Who speaks for the Democratic Party in your estimation?

[00:18:49] Sarah Stewart Holland: Do you want my honest answer who still really speaks?

[00:18:51] Nicholas Holland: Sure.

[00:18:51] Sarah Stewart Holland: Who everybody listens to? Barack Obama.

[00:18:55] Nicholas Holland: I guess.

[00:18:56] Sarah Stewart Holland: Why do you think El-Sayed met with Barack Obama first. Barack Obama’s still the leader of the Democratic Party.

[00:19:03] Nicholas Holland: That’s pretty sad though, isn’t it?

[00:19:04] Sarah Stewart Holland: He was the last president.

[00:19:06] Nicholas Holland: And he was last in office 10 years ago.

[00:19:08] Sarah Stewart Holland: I’m just telling you.

[00:19:09] Nicholas Holland: And he has no ambitions for higher office.

[00:19:10] Sarah Stewart Holland: How long do you think Donald Trump will be out of office before he’s not the leader of the Republican Party?

[00:19:15] Nicholas Holland: I don’t know.

[00:19:15] Sarah Stewart Holland: Till he is in the ground? Till he’s in the ground.

[00:19:18] Nicholas Holland: I hope not, but I think you’re probably right. But I hope that’s not the case, but...

[00:19:22] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think it’s also to say who’s leading the Democratic Party is just so impossibly hard because of the way the party structure has changed, because the way Congress has changed, because the way our media has changed, because the way the voters themselves has changed. People don’t want expertise. They don’t want institutions. They don’t want any sort of like traditional understanding of leadership. Everybody just wants to fight all the damn time because that’s what the environment Donald Trump creates.

[00:19:51] Nicholas Holland: Do you think that’s why the Democratic socialists have gained ground because they’re fighting?

[00:19:55] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yes.

[00:19:56] Nicholas Holland: I think that’s an interesting theory. I’ve thought about it, why are they so ascendant? I think one of the reasons they’re so ascendant is because they talk about healthcare in a way that appeals to people.

[00:20:04] Sarah Stewart Holland: 100%.  I agree.

[00:20:05] Nicholas Holland: And I think that healthcare is the biggest issue on many people’s minds. Like that is the number one issue, and nobody else is really talking about it in a way that really pierces through, I think the other thing is I think they are very well organized, and they’re on the ground, and they are talking to people

[00:20:18] Sarah Stewart Holland:  Yeah, the ground with Mamdani is huge.

[00:20:21] Nicholas Holland: We’re still stuck in this. It went from where you used to have TV ads, now we just have a bunch of YouTube ads. And now it’s the same stuff and the reason that some of these candidates are winning-- the Wisconsin governor candidate, what’s her name? Song, is that her last name?

[00:20:31] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah.

[00:20:32] Nicholas Holland: And El-Sayed, and, all those guys.

[00:20:34] Sarah Stewart Holland: In Minnesota.

[00:20:36] Nicholas Holland: Sure.

[00:20:36] Sarah Stewart Holland: The lieutenant governor who we’ve had on the show.

[00:20:37] Nicholas Holland: Because they are they’re organizing better. They’re out there, they’re talking to people. And they care. They’re not just there to be like vote blue no matter who. They actually care about the candidate. They actually like the candidate and believe in the candidate maybe.

[00:20:46] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think the big X factor here too, when you talk about the way whatever is left of the party still functions, is fundraising. There was a really interesting moment where Ezra Klein had the guy who pushed Grant Platner. Now, he also worked for Mamdani. So he’s got one really big win and one really big fail. And he was talking about with the Democratic Party, the only thing they care about is fundraising. How much money can you raise? Who can you get on the phone with and raise X, Y, Z amount of money within this amount of time? And that is not what voters want. It’s certainly not what the progressive left want.

[00:21:24] Nicholas Holland: And it doesn’t get you results either.

[00:21:25] Sarah Stewart Holland: And I mean, look, if you look at the results, the Senate results in Michigan, Haley outspent him massively. But so it’s weird though, right? That’s such a paradox, this idea that people don’t like it because they feel like money buys elections. But then you have these results, then it’s clear that money doesn’t buy elections.

[00:21:44] Nicholas Holland: Money can buy a lot. The polling was that Haley Stevens was going to lose by 13 points, and she lost by what? Less than a point? Half a point? True.

[00:21:50] Sarah Stewart Holland: True. It was very close.

[00:21:52] Nicholas Holland: I think that whole race is very interesting to me, but I think the more interesting question to me, to get back to Derek Martini, is why are we fighting?

[00:22:02] Sarah Stewart Holland:  Cause that’s what we do because that’s what people want all the time. And it’s because that’s what the algorithm rewards.

[00:22:08] Nicholas Holland: In many ways I would say that this is the best opportunity for true left candidates in these places that are purple, true further left Democratic socialists, if that’s what you call them, candidates to win because you have a historically unpopular president doing historically unpopular things, and everybody who is in the Republican Party is just in lockstep with him, and the people who aren’t are all leaving, or they’ve been elected out or whatever. So it’s a real test of okay your other option is diarrhea forever, right? Or a candidate that maybe you think is a little too far left and kooky, and that, we’re k- going to paint them all as communist or whatever at this point. So it’s a good time for this in my view, at least historically as far as we might actually, some of these candidates might actually win, whereas I think in other times they probably would have less of a chance. But then at the same time we literally have Democratic operatives saying, “We’re going to do everything we can, to save the party from the Democratic socialists and not get these people elected.” And it’s like, what are we doing? Don’t we mostly agree on these things? Isn’t the point that we mostly agree?

[00:23:12] Sarah Stewart Holland: I don’t think that the DSA is the boogeyman some people make it out to be. And also, I think a lot of independent voters, moderate voters who participate mainly during the presidential are going to go absolutely not.

[00:23:33] Nicholas Holland: To Democratic socialist candidates.

[00:23:35] Sarah Stewart Holland: Or to a party that feels like it’s in lockstep with democratic socialists. But don’t you think although I say that, is that true? Donald Trump was not a moderate. Donald Trump had hitched his wagon to all kinds of radical right ideas, and people did not seem to care. So I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter what you’re linked to if you’re the right candidate. I

[00:23:55] Nicholas Holland: I think it is very, more than ever, candidates matter maybe. It’s going to be very individualized. Just for example in Hawaii there was this congressional race, two congressional districts in Hawaii, right? And there was a progressive challenger who lost.

[00:24:08] Sarah Stewart Holland: I mean, the progressives that defeat the odd mainly because people like an underdog. The media certainly likes those stories. When it goes the expected way of the status quo, they do not make the headlines, but there have been plenty of those races as well. Do I think if Pete Buttigieg as the candidate it matters at all how many Democratic socialists were elected during the midterms? I do not. I don’t think it matters. There’s not an ounce of Pete Buttigieg that gives, like, radical socialist. People are never going to buy that. Just like with Donald Trump, I think they told themselves, “Eh, he’ll make a deal with anybody. He’ll talk to anybody,” whatever.

[00:24:44] Nicholas Holland: He doesn’t really have fascistic tendencies.

[00:24:45] Sarah Stewart Holland: No. Exactly. So I think there’s a little bit of who you are. Now, do I think Kamala was more linked to that stuff? Yeah, I do because she’s from California. You can get into, like, all the sort of identity markers that people associate with this.

[00:24:59] Nicholas Holland: Here’s the one thing I will say, is that I like the vitality that some of this Democratic socialist stuff brings to the party.

[00:25:06] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah, there’s a generational angle to this for sure.

[00:25:10] Nicholas Holland: Exactly. For sure. I like that this, young people seem to be getting involved. I like that there are younger candidates. I am tired of old people running for everything.

[00:25:17] Sarah Stewart Holland: Amen.

[00:25:18] Nicholas Holland: Please, old people, stop running for everything.

[00:25:19] Sarah Stewart Holland: The old people are out of control.

[00:25:21] Nicholas Holland: If you’re older than me, you should stop running for things.

[00:25:24] Sarah Stewart Holland: You’re not that old. You’re only 47.

[00:25:25] Nicholas Holland: 47 years old. I’m saying  it’s pretty old, guys.

[00:25:28] Sarah Stewart Holland: That’s too young. Yeah. I think there is a generational component. I think there is a generational plus foreign policy, definitely with regards to Israel and Iran component that people are like, “No.” I just think there... we look back in the last 10 years and we think Donald Trump came over and took over the Republican Party, but it was slow, and it took time. And I don’t think this is what’s happening in the Democratic Party, but I do think there is turnover. Ideological turnover, generational turnover when it comes to ideas about Israel, fundraising, how Congress should work. Like, all of that. I think healthcare for sure.

[00:26:06] Nicholas Holland: Uncap the House.

[00:26:07] Sarah Stewart Holland: Uncap the damn House.

[00:26:09] Nicholas Holland: The Democratic Socialists are in favor of abolishing the Senate.

[00:26:13] Sarah Stewart Holland: That’s crazy.

[00:26:14] Nicholas Holland: This is a thing that is part of the I’m not sure what platform it is, but this is a thing that I read. This is some of the more extreme positions are like, “Get rid of the Senate.”

[00:26:21] Sarah Stewart Holland: I think the part that appeals to me is definitely the generational component, and definitely just the can you suggest a big change? I want to reform the Supreme Court. I want to uncap the House. I want to do something about Citizens United. Yes, please, I’m listening. If you will suggest something. Again, it’s like what you run on and what you can actually accomplish are two different things. Mamdani knows that. He has shown that repeatedly. AOC knows that. She has shown that repeatedly. And so it’s like whether you are a capable leader, whether you’re in the executive branch or the legislative branch, and understand the reality in front of you, there’s two different things. It will be interesting to see some of these DSA candidates get into Congress and see if they are just like a sort of Marjorie Taylor Greene, they’re just going to perform for the candidates and crow about... They don’t strike me like that. They don’t strike me that’s what they’ll do. But some of the members of the squad, Cori Bush lost twice and I think there’s a reason for that. They’re not all going to be the same.

[00:27:18] Nicholas Holland: But everyone still wants to subject everyone to the same purity test and the same-- it is exhausting, and I just wish we would... and when I say why are we fighting, that’s what I mean. We will destroy a candidate faster than the Republicans will, our own candidate faster than the Republicans will  destroy a candidate. It’s amazing..

[00:27:36] Sarah Stewart Holland: You are complaining about a purity test, but that’s what you apply to Oprah.

[00:27:40] Nicholas Holland: I’m not talking about Oprah right now.

[00:27:41] Sarah Stewart Holland: I am. I’m going to write a newsletter about Oprah this week. That’s on my list today. I’m tired of people rolling up in my DMs about Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil, so I’m going to write a newsletter about that because that’s what that is too. It’s a purity test, and you know it.

[00:27:54] Nicholas Holland: I don’t think it’s a purity test. I think it’s holding someone accountable for bringing people into the zeitgeist who are dangerous and gross.

[00:27:59] Sarah Stewart Holland: I’m not going to give away my argument.

[00:28:00] Nicholas Holland: Platforming nightmares.

[00:28:01] Sarah Stewart Holland: Platforming nightmares. I do think we still have a purity test. I don’t feel AOC doing that. But again I think it’s so hard not to mix and mingle, right? You start to talk about the DSA, and then you start to talk about Mamdani and AOC, who are incredible politicians, and for better or for worse, members of the Democratic Party.

[00:28:19] Nicholas Holland: Yeah. Who don’t align in everything the DSA does.

[00:28:22] Sarah Stewart Holland: So I think that is a straw man. Who cares? Let’s just see what people do once they’re in there, or what they’re promising on the stump.

[00:28:30] Nicholas Holland: Sure. But what’s exhausting is the journalists who already are like, “Okay, we’re going to take the Democratic Socialist platform, and we’re going to ask John Ossoff, for example.” They did this in a recent interview with John Ossoff. “Do you believe in abolishing ICE?” No. “Do you believe in defunding the police?” No.

[00:28:45] Sarah Stewart Holland: No.

[00:28:46] Nicholas Holland: Do you believe in whatever it was. And the one interesting answer he gave was, “Maybe.” I don’t even remember what it was to. Do you do you support, I don’t know, something about the Supreme Court maybe or something like that. But it’s like this is they’re going to be forced into saying, and this sounds stupid, but saying what they believe. But taking positions that are nuanced, but just based on--

[00:29:01] Sarah Stewart Holland: Like Kamala at the ACLU about trans people in prison?

[00:29:04] Nicholas Holland: I know. I know. All that is to say.

[00:29:06] Sarah Stewart Holland: But my question is this has already happened to the Republican Party. What can we learn? Because what I don’t want to happen, and I’m not really worried about this because I think so much of what happened in the Republican Party and the reason it was so successful in extracting and exiling moderates is because he was such an enforcer. And I can tell you right now as a Democrat, I will not be supporting any candidate that sort of takes that approach to the Democratic Party. I’m not really worried about one coming on the scene. I don’t see one appearing that would take that approach. “You’re either with us or you’re against us. If you’re not for abolishing ICE, you have to leave.” I’m not really worried about that. At the same time, there is a little bit of this... because my honest answer is I think the reason this is such a hard party problem is because it’s not a party problem, it’s an algorithmic media problem that rewards those purity tests. You have interest groups and now political influencers who their content is built on pushing that sort of purity test and those sort of moments. And to me, that is the issue. It’s not really a Democratic Party problem. It’s our media environment problem.

[00:30:23] Nicholas Holland: Sure. I think that’s right, but I think you’ve got to figure out a way to cut through that if you’re going to have success electorally, and you’ve got to find a way. And I think that’s why some of the Democratic Social stuff are successful is because they put people on the ground who are talking to people face to face and telling them, “Don’t just spout off a script. We’re not paying you to be here. You’re here on your own. You’re a volunteer. You’re here because you’re a community member.”

[00:30:44] Sarah Stewart Holland: And I think AOC has gotten very good at that too. And she gotten very good at the purity tests who come for her, and her social media presence is so strong, and she knows, like, how to sort of answer those attacks pretty successfully.

[00:30:56] Nicholas Holland: Her latest is to show us that she’s injecting herself with hormones to go through egg freezing.

[00:31:01] Sarah Stewart Holland: That’s a different episode that I’m not going to--

[00:31:03] Nicholas Holland: That’s interesting.

[00:31:04] Sarah Stewart Holland: I’m not going to have that conversation with a man either.

[00:31:05] Nicholas Holland: I hear you. It’s interesting thing to do. It’s interesting to announce that you’re doing it.

[00:31:09] Sarah Stewart Holland: Very.

[00:31:09] Nicholas Holland: Especially as a potential presidential candidate. There’s a lot of angles there. Y’all can have a long talk about that.

[00:31:13] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah. All right. We’re going to have a talk about our RV trip up next on Outside of Politics.

[00:31:19] Nicholas Holland: Let’s do it.

[00:31:33] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay, so your headline is to tell people what about our RV trip?

[00:31:36] Nicholas Holland:  Let’s go to camera one here.

[00:31:40] Sarah Stewart Holland: No, first let’s tell people. So we picked up Felix in Dallas. We drove up through Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, all the way to Glacier, Montana. 3,000-plus miles. Two weeks.

[00:31:56] Nicholas Holland: Back to Bozeman to fly out.

[00:31:58] Sarah Stewart Holland: A Class C motor home that we picked up in Dallas

[00:32:01] and dropped off in Bozeman. So that’s the trip. Now, what do you tell people? We saw four national parks.

[00:32:06] Nicholas Holland: Saw four national parks.  Seven states, eight states

[00:32:08] Sarah Stewart Holland: Wind Clove, Teddy Roosevelt, Badlands, and Glacier.

[00:32:12] Nicholas Holland: And the whole kind of the big theme of the trip was to see America.

[00:32:16] Sarah Stewart Holland: America.

[00:32:17] Nicholas Holland: See America, see Middle America, go to all these states that, you know--

[00:32:20] Sarah Stewart Holland:  Even though we live in middle America.

[00:32:22] Nicholas Holland: I know, but to see the states that nobody ever really goes to in terms of unless they have a reason to go there, so to speak. And we’re completists. We want to see all 50 states. We knew there were lovely people in all these states who would show us a wonderful time. And my top-line headline for our trip is we did a lot of great things. I would recommend doing most of the things that we did. I would not recommend doing them over 14 days, over 3,000 miles, in an RV with your entire family. And I also think that this is a PSA. This is not just a vendetta. It’s a vendetta and a PSA. Do not rent from Indie Campers. I don’t care how good a deal it is. I don’t care how flashy their website is. Their on-the-ground- support, their post-trip support is abysmal. We experienced a lot of trouble with our RV. We got almost no assistance from them. They are still trying to charge us for a thing we didn’t break. They are still trying to charge us twice for a thing that we didn’t break with different pictures. And so that’s just that’s my PSA for this trip, and we can get into more of that if you’d like. But Teddy Roosevelt National Park, beautiful. Teddy Roosevelt Library, absolutely worth doing.

[00:33:32] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay. Let’s go in order.

[00:33:34] Nicholas Holland: Okay, sorry.

[00:33:34] Sarah Stewart Holland: The RV trip, we drove we put this together. We hadn’t done this before.

[00:33:39] Nicholas Holland: Never driven an RV.

[00:33:40] Sarah Stewart Holland: I probably didn’t do enough of my own research. And about RV trips I was, like, so worried about emptying the septic tank, I didn’t look through, like, how long should we be driving over the course. So we drove too much. We drove too hard. We changed places. We changed spots too often. We didn’t stay in one spot long enough. Cause it’s just physically taxing, especially for him driving. We drove too much, too long, and switched overnight spots too often.

[00:34:08] Nicholas Holland: I think that’s correct.

[00:34:09] Sarah Stewart Holland: That’s the first thing. To what we saw, we saw...

[00:34:14] Nicholas Holland: badlands National Park.

[00:34:15] Sarah Stewart Holland: Badlands. Beautiful. Went in on sunset, but it was also hot. It was, like, over 100 degrees, so we couldn’t really hike it. But the sunset at Badlands was, like-

[00:34:22] Nicholas Holland: Incredible.

[00:34:23] Sarah Stewart Holland: Incredibly beautiful. Made it worth it.

[00:34:24] Nicholas Holland: Yeah.

[00:34:24] Sarah Stewart Holland: Made it worth it. Wind Cave, you know what, I’m just going to say fun.

[00:34:30] Nicholas Holland: I think Wind Cave, if we had not just been in Badlands, there’s a lot to recommend Wind Cave that’s not just the cave. The cave tour was neat.

[00:34:37] Sarah Stewart Holland: We had a great tour guide, but listen, we live near Mammoth Cave and we just went to Carlsbad Canyon, and those are better.

[00:34:42] Nicholas Holland: The caverns, yeah. They’re better. It’s the least good of the three cave systems in the national parks.

[00:34:46] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah.

[00:34:46] Nicholas Holland: There is plenty to do there, and it’s close to cool things as well. It’s in that Custer State Park area-ish.

[00:34:53] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah, that was great.

[00:34:53] Nicholas Holland: That’s the Black Hills, beautiful.

[00:34:55] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah, it’s really  beautiful.

[00:34:56] Nicholas Holland: And when we went and we saw mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Monument that’s being constructed or whatever, carved.

[00:35:04] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah.

[00:35:05] Nicholas Holland: All fantastic. And then from there we traveled up to North Dakota, to Medora, where we spent--

[00:35:11] Sarah Stewart Holland: we saw the Medora Musical.

[00:35:12] Nicholas Holland: Saw the Medora Musical. Incredible.

[00:35:13] Sarah Stewart Holland: We ate our steak fondue where they cook your steak on a pitchfork.

[00:35:17] Nicholas Holland: Yes.

[00:35:17] Sarah Stewart Holland: Great.

[00:35:18] Nicholas Holland: And we did the library.

[00:35:19] Sarah Stewart Holland: Okay, pause.

[00:35:21] Nicholas Holland: Pause.

[00:35:23] Sarah Stewart Holland: Y’all, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is probably one of the most beautiful architectural--

[00:35:32] Nicholas Holland: Stunning.

[00:35:33] Sarah Stewart Holland: Buildings I have seen in the United States in my life. I can’t think of a building that compares.

[00:35:38] Nicholas Holland: Yeah.

[00:35:39] Sarah Stewart Holland: It is gorgeous. It’s this pressed stone. There’s this walkthrough you turn the corner and the view of the Badlands is in front of you. And the center itself is r- Not the

[00:35:51] Nicholas Holland: Not the Badlands, but the Painted Canyons and National Park. Yeah.

[00:35:54] Sarah Stewart Holland: It is so beautiful. And the experience of the center itself is really cool. They have a ton of technology. Some of it is AI, and they do make pictures of you, but they’re very good.

[00:36:05] Nicholas Holland: Some stuff that’s just a little whiz-bang. I think it just exists to use some technology. But it’s interesting, and it does, I think, capture kids’ attention pretty well.

[00:36:12] Sarah Stewart Holland: Oh, yeah. And you go in the White House part, and they basically have a tree house because he had so many young kids. And so they built out this part, like, when you walk in the White House.

[00:36:19] Nicholas Holland: It’s like a play state. You can run around; the kids can run around and it’s really neat. There’s some neat stuff, and it definitely is worth doing.

[00:36:23] Sarah Stewart Holland: I loved it.

[00:36:24] Nicholas Holland: And then from there, I think we, tacking on Glacier was really aggressive.

[00:36:27] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah, but I’m so glad because it was the best part of the trip.

[00:36:29] Nicholas Holland: It was the great part of the trip.

[00:36:30] Sarah Stewart Holland: Also went to the rodeo, went to Three Forks Rodeo.

[00:36:32] Nicholas Holland: We did go to the rodeo.

[00:36:32] Sarah Stewart Holland: Which was awesome.

[00:36:33] Nicholas Holland: Rodeo was neat.

[00:36:35] Sarah Stewart Holland: But Glacier is just, oh, man, top five.

[00:36:38] Nicholas Holland: Yeah. Glacier was awesome, and Glacier was temperate, and that was the other thing that we really hot. We didn’t really plan for and couldn’t have planned for, which was that there was a heat dome in North Dakota and South Dakota. It was abysmally hot. In Wall particularly one day it was like 107 degrees. We were hoping to go to the northern part of this country and experienced some cooler temperatures 70 and 80 degrees, and we experienced 100 and something degrees.

[00:37:00] Sarah Stewart Holland: We did once we got to Glacier.

[00:37:02] Nicholas Holland: And then when we got to Glacier it was much more temperate and nice. But when you take an RV to Glacier you can’t really do a lot of things in Glacier.

[00:37:07] Sarah Stewart Holland: True.

[00:37:08] Nicholas Holland: Especially an RV of that size. We were in a 30-foot RV and that was a--

[00:37:11] Sarah Stewart Holland: we took Sun Tours, which was amazing. We highly recommend Sun Tours. It’s run by the local Blackfeet tribe. And it was a really cool tour, especially to learn about that tribe’s existence within that land, and their sort of connection to the land. I love that part.

[00:37:25] Nicholas Holland: And how basically United States of America just stole it from them also.

[00:37:28] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yes.

[00:37:29] Nicholas Holland: 100%.

[00:37:30] Sarah Stewart Holland: And then we got a ticket pretty easily the next day. I should say that. There’s a shuttle ticket. There’s lots of scary stuff on the internet how you’ll never get a shuttle ticket. It’s like Disney, but we got one pretty easily.

[00:37:38] Nicholas Holland: To be more specific, if you want to go up the Sun Road and you can take your own vehicle, or there are these shuttles that leave from either side of the park. And they sell a certain portion of the tickets several months in advance, and then they sell actually the majority of the tickets the day before, and it’s just a full-blown first come, first serve, good luck. And so you’re sitting there refreshing your app and hoping. And we were able to get some, but we were doing the thing. We were locked in. That will take you up to Logan Pass, which is the center of the Going-to-the-Sun Road, and from where you can do hikes. And we did the Hidden Lake hike.

[00:38:13] Sarah Stewart Holland: Which was awesome.

[00:38:13] Nicholas Holland: Just third day we were there, which was awesome.

[00:38:15] Sarah Stewart Holland: And we saw a  grizzly bear.

[00:38:16] Nicholas Holland: And we saw mountain goats from pretty close, and we saw bighorn sheep from pretty close. And we saw marmots, and we also saw a very close grizzly bear.  

[00:38:23] Sarah Stewart Holland: Why are you burying the lead? We saw a grizzly bear.

[00:38:26] Nicholas Holland: No, you didn’t burry. You said you saw a grizzly bear.

[00:38:29] Sarah Stewart Holland: It’s so exciting. I wish we’d had more time in Apgar. I really liked Apgar. We only stayed one night in the Apgar campground. And so I would love to--

[00:38:36] Nicholas Holland: Oh, that’s in the West Glacier area.

[00:38:36] Sarah Stewart Holland: And that was really beautiful. I would like to go back there and spend more time there. For sure. And the thing about our trip, not only did we overestimate our capacity in the best-case scenario, we all got sick.

[00:38:50] Nicholas Holland: Everybody.

[00:38:50] Sarah Stewart Holland: Felix, who we picked up at diabetes camp, brought the adenovirus into our RV. The only person who didn’t get it is Griffin because he’d already gotten it at his camp.

[00:38:58] Nicholas Holland: It was a very aggressive summer cold that I still have some symptoms of this many weeks later. I’m still coughing occasionally.

[00:39:05] Sarah Stewart Holland: Coughing, and it lasted a long time. Nicholas and Felix had hot fevers. It was bad.

[00:39:07] Nicholas Holland: We actually looked at each other at one point, I think in South Dakota, and on two separate days both said, “Should we just call this thing and go home?” And let’s also take note, and this is another piece of guidance, never take your child who’s already been away for three weeks at camp on a two-week vacation.

[00:39:24] Sarah Stewart Holland: Yeah.

[00:39:24] Nicholas Holland: We thought it was such a good idea. We knew that this was not just a possibility but a probability that he would be really cooked and done. We did not really estimate quite how much he was cooked and done and going to be cooked and done by the time it was all over. And we were all ready to be home. We dropped off the RV, and we went and saw The Odyssey, and it hit a little too close to home, guys. Just a little too close to home to be, like, on the last day of this trip, watching a three-and-a-half-hour movie about a guy who just wants to get home. It was hard.

[00:39:52] Sarah Stewart Holland: And I told our kids, I was like, “Man, it is a good thing we are hardcore travelers,” because if this had been our first foray into a two-week vacation as a family, as opposed to after we’d been to Japan, and Italy and England, and the Pacific Northwest, it would’ve been rough

[00:40:08] Nicholas Holland: And what a privilege it is to be able to travel all over this country and see all these places  and this free movement

[00:40:12] Sarah Stewart Holland: So many people have said to us “oh, that’s a dream, to take an RV trip like that.”

[00:40:16] Nicholas Holland: And it was. There was a lot of excitement, and we had a lot of anticipatory. We were so excited. And really, in truth, like we had some good days and it was fine. It was hard. It was hard. It was a struggle. It was hard. And it was more of a struggle than I wanted on a vacation.

[00:40:27] Sarah Stewart Holland: We really only turned on each other once, though.

[00:40:30] Nicholas Holland: I  don’t even remember it.

[00:40:33] Sarah Stewart Holland: We stayed on the same team. You were mean to me about the parking in downtown Iowa City. Unnecessarily. It was  fine parking.

[00:40:40] Nicholas Holland: This may come as a surprise to some of you all, but you can’t just park a 30-foot RV anywhere you want.

[00:40:44] Sarah Stewart Holland: I had three giant parking lots that we could have chosen from.

[00:40:49] Nicholas Holland: Sure. Either way, it’s all good.

[00:40:52] Sarah Stewart Holland: We made it.

[00:40:53] Nicholas Holland: We made it back.

[00:40:54] Sarah Stewart Holland: Thanks for coming on Pantsuit Politics.

[00:40:55] Nicholas Holland: Of course, anytime. In another three years, I’ll do it again.

[00:40:57] Sarah Stewart Holland: No, it’ll be more often than that, except for... Listen, the guest host everybody’s clamoring for is More Lacey. Listen, she’s popping.

[00:41:06] Nicholas Holland: Have to put her on retainer.

[00:41:07] Sarah Stewart Holland: I know. All right. Everybody have the best Tuesday available to you. On Friday, I will be sharing Beth and I’s conversation with the Mulligans. The headline of this episode coming on Friday is if particularly if you live in a red area, and you want to make a difference, and you want to do something, and you feel powerless, this is the episode for you. I cannot wait to share it.

[00:41:27] Nicholas Holland: Can’t wait to hear it.

[00:41:28] Sarah Stewart Holland: 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.

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

I am grateful to Sarah and Beth for the opportunity to add my thoughts on the recent podcast episode about organ transplantation. These words are my personal opinions and do not reflect those of my employer or any transplant organization.

I am a transplant nephrologist (kidney doctor) and have practiced since 2006. Not surprisingly, I was already quite familiar with Brian Rosenthal’s work prior to listening to this episode. It is important work, and calls attention to many systemic issues that have been raised within the transplant community for many years. But, as with most things, there is more nuance to this process.

There is the list. Yes, it is confusing. The most common question I get from patients is “what number am I on the list?” My answer is always “it depends.” Not all kidneys are created equal. When we get a kidney offer from our organ procurement organization (OPO), we have a very short period to decide whether to accept it or not, often with incomplete information about the donor.

We are making an educated guess as to not only whether we think the kidney will work, but also for how long, how well, and whether that makes sense for that particular patient. So yes, we do turn kidneys down, described as “too choosy.” It is important to understand that the flip side of passing on a kidney for someone is taking a kidney that doesn’t end up working well, or not at all. These are incredibly hard choices, often made in the middle of the night, during weekends, on holidays, birthdays, etc. They are made in good faith, by providers who are trying to do the right thing for their patients. Providers who are simultaneously held accountable for not taking enough organs, but also accountable if the organs they take do not perform well. We are constantly walking that tightrope, and if we veer too far one way or the other, our center will be flagged by the regulatory agencies that govern us. We don’t have a crystal ball but are often asked to behave as if we do.

The point was made that patients are mostly unaware that organs were offered for them that were not accepted. There are many times that marginal kidneys are offered for patients on our list that we would never consider. One kidney may be declined for multiple patients on our list before it is placed somewhere else. The reasons kidneys are declined are complicated and take time to explain. I am not arguing against transparency, I would love to be able to have these conversations with all the patients on our list and answer all their questions about why we turned down a particular kidney for them. Currently there is just not the time or manpower to do it in a meaningful way.

One of the major issues raised in the article and discussed was the out of sequence offers, i.e. “skipping down the list.” This is an area that absolutely needs reform, and I am glad it is improving. With the OPOs under regulatory pressure to place organs efficiently, there are very marginal kidneys that only the most aggressive transplant centers will take. That is how some of this behavior started, out of the desire to get those kidneys where they would be used. Most OPOs are legitimately trying to find the best place for organs to go. Those who aren’t should be identified and dealt with. No one is arguing about that. But we need to find a way to get those harder-to-place kidneys to those centers quickly, without making the entire system unfair and eroding trust. It is a work in progress, but I believe progress is happening.

Of course, the most disturbing aspect of this conversation is the instances where patients were taken for organ procurement that possibly did not meet criteria for brain death. This is exceedingly rare, but of course even one case is unacceptable. I welcome all safeguards in this area, and increased oversight here is necessary and welcome.

Mostly, I want listeners to know that this is a flawed system with deeply caring people that are doing their best within it. I have yet to meet a transplant surgeon, physician, nurse, procurement team, etc. that wishes harm upon a recipient, donor, or donor family. Sadly, they probably exist, but I think they are infinitely rarer than you might think after hearing this reporting. I worry that this may lead to people removing the organ donation symbol from their drivers’ licenses, and I was devastated to learn that Sarah had already done so (though glad she has informed her family of her wishes to consider donation). Organ donation is a beautiful way to give someone else life beyond your own death. Even with the challenges facing the transplant community, our priority is to honor these gifts, and the responsibility to steward them is not taken lightly. Please consider organ donation if you haven’t already. As my favorite bumper sticker says, “Don’t take your organs to heaven. Heaven knows we need them here.”

I would love to continue this conversation. I can be reached at ktrue72@gmail.com and I will be in Minneapolis in August! Hope to see you there!

The news in Paducah is the news everywhere: we’re getting a $100 billion data center. My friend Lacy Bowling joins me to sort through what the backlash gets right, what it gets wrong, and why nobody — local, state, or federal — has the trust to lead us through it. We talk water, power bills, natural gas, and the comment that stopped me in my tracks: “Happy it’s a hundred billion dollar investment when my family still lives paycheck to paycheck.” Then Outside of Politics, we’re pre-grieving (or not) our babies becoming high school seniors.

— Sarah

Topics Discussed

• Trump Appointments

• The Time to Be Bold

• Outside of Politics: The Sexiest Man Alive

Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Join us live in Minneapolis on August 29 — group singing, an after party, and Mahjong lessons from Sarah’s team!

The Paducah Data Center

• Hyperscale data center, natural gas-fired project planned for Paducah’s former nuclear plant (Kentucky Lantern)

• $100B data center, gas-fired power plant to be developed around Paducah DOE site (Louisville Public Media)

• Brookfield, NextEra to Develop $100B Data Center Campus at DOE’s Paducah Site (POWER Magazine)

Data Centers & the Backlash

• The A.I. Revolt Is Here (The Ezra Klein Show)

• Planned Texas data centers could emit significant pollution (Texas Tribune)

• Bell County passed a data center moratorium. Residents worry that work continues. (Kentucky Lantern)

• Data centers need massive power. They’re eyeing Kentucky’s idle industrial sites to get it. (Kentucky Lantern)

Outside of Politics

• This Is Happiness by Niall Williams (Bookshop.org)

• Giant-Sized Butterflies by Justin Roberts (Spotify)Episode Transcript

Episode Transcripts

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

[00:00:09] Lacey Bowling: And I’m Lacey Bowling.

[00:00:10] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, Lacey has joined me because it just so happens that the breaking news in our town of Paducah is also headline-making news around the country.

[00:00:24] Lacey Bowling: Around the country.

[00:00:25] Sarah: Literally, I saw it in the Wall Street Journal, I saw it in Bloomberg. And also it is a major news trend nationally, which is Paducah is getting a data center.

[00:00:37] Lacey Bowling: That’s the word.

[00:00:38] Sarah: So we’re going to talk about that today. On Outside of Politics, we’re going to talk about the fact that our beloved children are going to be seniors in high school.

[00:00:47] Lacey Bowling: What are we going to do?

[00:00:48] Sarah: I’m going to cry.

[00:00:49] Lacey Bowling: I’m not.

[00:00:50] Sarah: Okay. Before we get started, we have a live show coming up in Minneapolis. We would love for all of you to join us. It’s going to be amazing. We have an after party. We are going to sing during the show. Do you like group singing?

[00:01:01] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, sure.

[00:01:02] Sarah: Okay. That’s going to be a part of our Minneapolis show. I was, like, insistent.  It’s going to be great.

[00:01:07] Lacey Bowling: Okay. But it’s going to be your Minneapolis show, not mine.

[00:01:08] Sarah: Not yours. Mine.

[00:01:09] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:01:10] Sarah: Pantsuit Politics, the link is in the show note if you want to join us. We would love to have you. We have so many amazing things. My Mahjong team is coming and we’re going to teach Mahjong. Keesa and Deanna and Raynell, we’re going to come and play Mahjong with the people. Teach them our ways. I won three times out of five games.

[00:01:29] Lacey Bowling: Would it surprise you that I’ve never played Mahjong?

[00:01:30] Sarah: It would not.

[00:01:31] Lacey Bowling: Okay, good.

[00:01:34] Sarah: Okay, so up next, let’s talk about the data center.

[00:01:36] Lacey Bowling: Let’s talk about it.

[00:01:47] Sarah: All right. So the announcement was what? Tuesday?

[00:01:49] Lacey Bowling: It was a week announcement, but I don’t recall the day.

[00:01:52] Sarah: No, it wasn’t this Tuesday. No, it was last Tuesday. It was a week ago Tuesday.

[00:01:53] Lacey Bowling:  Everyone was there.

[00:01:54] Sarah: I wasn’t there.

[00:01:55] Lacey Bowling:  I wasn’t either actually. Didn’t get invited.

[00:01:59] Sarah: I definitely didn’t get invited.

[00:02:00] Lacey Bowling: No, me either.

[00:02:01] Sarah: Okay. So the data center in Paducah is coming from Brookfield Investment Firm. This is actually, fascinatingly enough, Mark Carney’s investment firm. Do you know who Mark Carney is? Mark Carney is the Prime Minister of Canada. Remember he went after Trump, and the left was going to lose in Canada, and then Trump started going after Canada, and then the left was, like, insurgent.

[00:02:19] Lacey Bowling: But that’s not Katy Perry’s boyfriend?

[00:02:21] Sarah: No. That’s the former Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau.

[00:02:23] Lacey Bowling: Okay, got it. Now I’m caught up.

[00:02:25] Sarah: Hey, listen.

[00:02:25] Lacey Bowling: Okay.

[00:02:26] Sarah: So this is his old investment firm building the data center. And then as a part of this deal, NextEra Energy--

[00:02:34] Lacey Bowling: I’m familiar.

[00:02:35] Sarah: Okay, is building a two gigawatt--

[00:02:38] Lacey Bowling: It’s a lot.

[00:02:39] Sarah: That’s a lot.

[00:02:40] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:02:41] Sarah: We just watched Back to the Future, and I think he needs a gigawatt to get back, and they have to have lightning, remember?

[00:02:46] Lacey Bowling: I remember the lightning.

[00:02:47] Sarah: That’s how I measure electricity, is how it compares to Back to the Future.

[00:02:49] Lacey Bowling:  I think that makes the most sense.

[00:02:51] Sarah: Thank you. So they are building a natural gas energy or power plant, basically, to in part Give power to the data center.

[00:03:04] Lacey Bowling: So much data.

[00:03:05] Sarah: Okay, is that how you understand it?

[00:03:07] Lacey Bowling: I understand it like it is a data center.

[00:03:11] Sarah: Do you know what a data center is?

[00:03:12] Lacey Bowling: Let me start where I know.

[00:03:13] Sarah: What you know, that’s good.

[00:03:15] Lacey Bowling: Okay. I know that I have Instagram. And I follow Willie Nelson. This is what I told you.

[00:03:20] Sarah: Correct.

[00:03:21] Lacey Bowling: And he said, “I don’t think we should have data centers.”

[00:03:24] Sarah: Correct.

[00:03:25] Lacey Bowling: And then I saw that there was going to be a data center where I live in our old Department of Energy Plant.

[00:03:33] Sarah: Yes, we’re going to get to that part

[00:03:35] Lacey Bowling: Yes. We’re going to get to that, I know. But I took it over, and I said, “Let me tell you what I know.”

[00:03:38] Sarah: Yep.

[00:03:39] Lacey Bowling: And that’s what I know. And Willie said said no.

[00:03:40] Sarah: Willie said no.

[00:03:41] Lacey Bowling: And I keep a--

[00:03:42] Sarah: Listen, Willie is not alone.

[00:03:43] Lacey Bowling: So many people say “We should not have a data center,” but that’s what I know.

[00:03:47] Sarah: Okay. So I think it’s really interesting to unpack what’s going on in Paducah because I think it is a really good sort of example of what there is to hate about data centers, about what people get wrong about all of this. There is a huge anti-data center backlash. The Democratic governor from Kansas just won by saying “We want a moratorium.”

[00:04:13] Lacey Bowling: Moratorium, I just Googled what that word meant. Which use data.

[00:04:15] Sarah: Yep, no more data centers. We’re going to say no data centers. Bernie supports a moratorium on data centers. So there’s anti-tech populous backlash is what I would say. So I think there’s a couple things. One, particularly in a place like Texas, where Willie Nelson is, there’s been a lot of discussion because they have water issues already.

[00:04:38] Lacey Bowling: Okay.

[00:04:39] Sarah: And so I think the first thing you hear a lot with data centers is water usage.

[00:04:45] Lacey Bowling: I’ve heard that.

[00:04:45] Sarah: That they just suck up all the water.

[00:04:47] Lacey Bowling: To cool the center.

[00:04:48] Sarah: To cool the center. Now, my understanding, especially about the data center coming to Paducah, is it is a closed loop system. They will take a very small amount of water out of the I guess Ohio. It’s not like it’s running low on water. It’s not the Colorado. And then that’s all they’ll use. They just use the same water over and over again. Now, those concerns were well placed in the beginning because they were just taking a massive amount of water. But you know what I heard today on the Ezra Klein Show, which just so happens to also be talking about data centers today because we’re in sync is that watching YouTube video uses more water--

[00:05:24] Lacey Bowling: I bet it does.

[00:05:25] Sarah: Than a data center because they’ve got it figured out basically. So the water issue to me is what comes up a lot. I think that is an old understanding of the environmental concerns around data centers. And even if it was still like a real current concern, not because they haven’t developed this closed loop technology, it would be less of a concern for us because we don’t live off the Colorado. We don’t have a water problem. Okay. So, no pun intended, I want to put the water in a bucket. So there’s water over there.

[00:05:52] Lacey Bowling: Is that a pun? Oh, okay.

[00:05:54] Sarah: So I don’t think we need to be concerned about the water.

[00:05:57] Lacey Bowling: Okay.

[00:05:58] Sarah: Now what have you heard about the noise pollution?

[00:06:00] Lacey Bowling: Oh, so noisy.

[00:06:02] Sarah: Yeah, very noisy.

[00:06:02] Lacey Bowling: A Willie Nelson concert noisy.

[00:06:04] Sarah: No, not good noisy. Bad noisy.

[00:06:05] Lacey Bowling: Bad noise.

[00:06:06] Sarah: Bad noise.

[00:06:06] Lacey Bowling: I’ve read about the noise, but I feel is that what people are really mad about is the noise?

[00:06:10] Sarah: I think it’s some of it. I think people are concerned. I talked to some people out in West Paducah, and they’re concerned about property values. So if this big, massive industrial site rolls in, and it creates a lot of noise, or it expands the industrial footprint. Because that’s the thing about Paducah is the data center, that’s what makes us unique too. Which it’s not like they’re taking out a forest to put in the data center. This is a federal piece of property. Which means we get almost no say in it.

[00:06:39] Lacey Bowling: That’s kind of what I was thinking. Because it was going to kind of be there already anyway.

[00:06:42] Sarah: It’s already was a gaseous diffusion plant. Which is another sort of unique situation with Paducah because we have this history of the processing of uranium. A lot of people in the community suffered health effects because of that. And so you already have this sort of like distrust in history of pollution and toxic chemicals. And and it’s super confusing. I was confused for a long time because I was like, are we getting a data center? There’s also talk of Peter Thiel’s company, General Matter, coming in and using the waste from the gaseous diffusion plant to do nuclear energy. Like, when I was a city commissioner, there was this PBS documentary where Bill Gates was like, “Paducah, Kentucky has enough nuclear tails, if we could figure out how to process these and create energy to power the whole United States.”

[00:07:26] Lacey Bowling: In Paducah?

[00:07:26] Sarah: In Paducah because we have the waste basically of processing their uranium, but it’s not just trash. It has the capacity if they got the technology right to create energy itself.

[00:07:37] Lacey Bowling: Which it feels like everybody works out there.

[00:07:39] Sarah: Yeah. They’ve been in the process of shutting down the plant. It’s a long process. See aforementioned nuclear waste.

[00:07:47] Lacey Bowling: So why do people, because what I understand about you is this podcast that you have goes to lots more people than just Paducah.

[00:07:55] Sarah: Absolutely.

[00:07:55] Lacey Bowling: This is what I’ve heard about it.

[00:07:56] Sarah: Yes.

[00:07:57] Lacey Bowling: As not really into it, but I’ve heard that it goes other places. The reason it matters is because maybe more so than noise or maybe pollution, is that a lot of people are concerned like Forbes Magazine, is it still a magazine? I don’t know, or maybe it’s just on data, but are talking about their electric bill. Utilities. Like, how much is this going to cost us down the road?.

[00:08:18] Sarah: Because even if we got this technology right, it’s not like it’s going to be ready tomorrow to power the data center. Okay, so this is where NextEra comes in.

[00:08:26] Lacey Bowling: Okay.

[00:08:26] Sarah: And I think this is an interesting. We’re like phase two. I feel like Paducah is like phase two of the rollout of these data centers. They’re learning things, right? So they learned we can’t just use up all the water. We have to have a closed loop system. We can’t just roll in and use the electricity because then people get pissed, their electricity rates go up, and they don’t like that. But did you know this? Okay, so that’s why in Paducah they’re building the natural gas power plant, but that’s on private property. Word on the street is that this acreage sold for $65 million. Why didn’t we buy land?

[00:08:59] Lacey Bowling: I don’t know.

[00:09:00] Sarah: Because put a pin in that, the idea that like some people are getting rich off this and everybody else is getting left behind.

[00:09:04] Lacey Bowling: People don’t like that either.

[00:09:05] Sarah: Super relevant. Okay, so at first, I’m like in the process of figuring out how I feel about this

[00:09:14] Lacey Bowling: Same, by the way.

[00:09:15] Sarah: Right? Maybe it’s because of Pantsuit Politics, maybe it’s just my personality. I don’t like the negative knee-jerk. I see this a lot in the bookstore world right now.

[00:09:24] Lacey Bowling: I’ve heard you have a bookstore.

[00:09:25] Sarah: I have a bookstore, Meander Bookshop, and it’s crazy. People will go after bookstores if they use AI to make a flyer.

[00:09:33] Lacey Bowling: I know. and elementary schools if they make a flyer.

[00:09:36] Sarah: Yes. People will come claws out, and listen, I understand.

[00:09:39] Lacey Bowling: Did you make an AI flyer?

[00:09:40] Sarah: No. I make them myself because I’m not trying to get the angry mob after me.

[00:09:43] Lacey Bowling:  You better not. But is Canva okay?

[00:09:45] Sarah: Yeah, I was going to say I use Canva, and there’s definitely generative AI properties on Canva.

[00:09:49] Lacey Bowling: Okay, I just  wanted to make sure.

[00:09:51] Sarah: I don’t know if it is okay. I’m sure to some people it’s not.

[00:09:52] Lacey Bowling: I’ll figure it out.

[00:09:53] Sarah: Like Wesley Bowling at Bowling Books in Murray.

[00:09:56] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:09:56] Sarah: He made one with MS Paint, and he said the college kids were coming in and being like, “Can I get a copy of that?”

[00:10:01] Lacey Bowling: What were they going to do with it?

[00:10:02] Sarah: Hang it in their dorm rooms.

[00:10:03] Lacey Bowling: Oh.

[00:10:04] Sarah: They loved it so much.

[00:10:05] Lacey Bowling: Okay, so MS Paint is okay.

[00:10:06] Sarah: MS Paint is definitely okay. He pulled out an old computer from the ‘90s and made his flyer. But I don’t like this pitchfork situation, like especially when you’re  talking about--

[00:10:15] Lacey Bowling: You don’t like pitchfork situations in anything.

[00:10:16] Sarah: Really any scenario.

[00:10:18] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:10:18] Sarah: And especially small business owners. I saw this post on Instagram today where this little bookshop in Australia issued this long apology, and I was like, “This is giving 2020, and I don’t love it.” I don’t love it, guys. People are using the tools. Being a small business owner is hard. Now, if you’re using AI to make an author photo without the author’s permission, yeah, that’s a problem. And I understand why even making a flyer it’s artistic theft. It’s a creative ethical problem because they’re using real artist’s thing to create the aesthetics of the flyer. But also the flyers are ugly. So but I’m not going to go pitchforks out for a small bookstore, man.

[00:10:54] Lacey Bowling: I think that what bothers me is that it’s not just flyers. So I think we really have to look at maybe our own selves a little. If that’s the thing. But that’s the problem.

[00:11:03] Sarah:  People don’t like to do that. They don’t want to do  that on Instagram anyway.

[00:11:09] Lacey Bowling: so during my research that I happened to do on the internet, which uses data-

[00:11:15] Sarah:  Which is also extractive and uses water and electricity and everything else.

[00:11:19] Lacey Bowling: Now, in my defense...

[00:11:20] Sarah: my favorite is people bitching about data centers. I love it so much.

[00:11:24] Lacey Bowling: That’s what I mean. That’s what I’m trying to say. My research was done 100,000% on the internet. And everybody’s upset about it on the internet. And we’re not really willing to give up the internet. And we’re not going back to even flip phones, I would assume, would probably be used data.

[00:11:42] Sarah: Now, half of the baristas in Piper use flip phones. Fun fact.

[00:11:44] Lacey Bowling: Okay, whatever, but they’re probably paid over the internet.

[00:11:49] Sarah: We’re recording this podcast on the internet.

[00:11:51] Lacey Bowling: And I’m just thinking are we committed to going back? And I don’t know that we are, so I guess I’m just torn because I like data too. But I also don’t like pollution.

[00:12:01] Sarah: No.

[00:12:01] Lacey Bowling: And so I don’t know what to do. What do I do?

[00:12:04] Sarah: Ugh.

[00:12:04] Lacey Bowling: But I don’t recycle that much, so I don’t know what to do.

[00:12:08] Sarah: So here’s the thing.

[00:12:09] Lacey Bowling: Are we talking about data centers? I can’t remember.

[00:12:10] Sarah: Yes.

[00:12:11] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, data.

[00:12:11] Sarah: First of all I’m going to be real clear. I’m not going after small business owners if they use AI. I’m not going to do it, guys. If you want to get mad and you want to boycott them, that’s fine. That’s not for me. Yeah. That’s not how I’m going to react.

[00:12:21] Lacey Bowling:  I bet there’s other things we could boycott them over.

[00:12:23] Sarah: For sure.

[00:12:24] Lacey Bowling:  If we wanted to.

[00:12:26] Sarah: If we wanted to. That’s not my jam. So the the bookstore AI usage aside. With the energy usage, so I think we’re still-- because some communities absolutely got screwed. Yeah. They rolled in. First of all, they used a ton of electricity. They drove the rates up. They did cause a lot of noise pollution.

[00:12:44] Lacey Bowling: Virginia.

[00:12:45] Sarah: Yes, they did extract water. But I think now that this... It’s not like things stay the same, either good or bad. And so these companies are absolutely because of this there was a lot of NDA usage with community officials. Yeah. Nondisclosure agreements. So they’re definitely adapting and saying “Okay, that’s not working. We’re going to use something new.” And people are stuck. And the reaction to phase one. And I think it’s important if you’re going to be opposed, which I think is 100% acceptable, and maybe where I’m going to ultimately end up, you got to be reactive to what’s in front of you and not just the the old narrative. So I think the water usage, I think they’ve largely addressed that. I think an incredibly positive part of our deal is there are no tax subsidies. They’re not getting any subsidies for this.

[00:13:32] Lacey Bowling: I’ve heard that.

[00:13:33] Sarah: I hate economic development subsidies. I think they’re bullshit. Hate’s probably strong. I think most of the time they’re bullshit. Like, when these kabillion-dollar sports stadiums gets tax subsidies and they build so they can build a newer, bigger one right next to the one, like in Nashville, that runs all over me.

[00:13:49] Lacey Bowling: I don’t really understand it enough to be like [ inaudible] I don’t get it.

[00:13:52] Sarah: I don’t. So I’m glad they’re not getting tax subsidies. That’s not true in other areas obviously. That’s the problem, too. It’s like, what am I going to say? I can say the water usage is okay. It’s a closed loop system. But also I don’t want to look at a community that’s had their water extracted and be like, “ Shut up.” Their harm is real.

[00:14:10] Lacey Bowling: And you shouldn’t. Their harm is real. They’re the owner of their story.

[00:14:12] Sarah: That’s right.

[00:14:12] Lacey Bowling: So they get to tell it.

[00:14:13] Sarah: So I think that’s there’s a lot of stories going on here. Which is the other, I think, thing we’re grappling with. So I am not worried personally about our energy rates going up, one, because Paducah is unique, not just because of the DOE site, but because Paducah Power and Jackson Purchase, we have energy competition. Paducah Power also struck this deal with a plant in Southern Illinois, none of which y’all care about or need to know the details. Yeah. But we have excess power anyway, and they’re building this natural gas power plant. Now, this is where we get into the pollution. The idea of having excess energy, particularly, because here’s the paying Peter to rob Paul. We want excess energy because everything’s electrifying, right? We want electric cars...

[00:14:57] Lacey Bowling: some people do.

[00:14:57] Sarah: Some people do.

[00:14:58] Lacey Bowling: Some people don’t.

[00:14:59] Sarah: We do. If you’re concerned about climate change, you want electric cars, right? You don’t want a combustion engine.

[00:15:03] Lacey Bowling: Yeah. Some

[00:15:03] Sarah: But they’re using fossil fuels to electrify for the data center. Natural gas is fossil fuels processing. It creates an enormous amount of air pollution. Now, if our power plant that they’re building to in part run the data center still has to go through state permitting. Will they have the newest technology in natural gas processing? Will they have, complex combustion engines and all this other stuff that helps with the air pollution? I don’t know. No one’s telling us anything. Which is a part of the problem.

[00:15:30] Lacey Bowling: I think that’s a big part of the problem, too. For one, I don’t think people trust the process.

[00:15:35] Sarah: That’s it.

[00:15:36] Lacey Bowling: And I don’t think people feel like they’ve been told the full truth, and we’ve not been... the word transparency floats to the top a lot for me.

[00:15:46] Sarah: Yep.

[00:15:47] Lacey Bowling: I don’t know. And then we host these events that are like, “Come to the community forum, where we will take your opinion-

[00:15:54] Sarah: But not do anything.

[00:15:55] Lacey Bowling: But not do anything with your feedback.

[00:15:57] Sarah: Yep.

[00:15:58] Lacey Bowling: Nor will we even pretend like you had a choice.

[00:16:01] Sarah: Yep.

[00:16:01] Lacey Bowling: And so maybe if you just told us from the beginning that we have, didn’t have a choice, I think we would’ve felt a little better.

[00:16:07] Sarah: Yes. I think that’s true. I think the trust, this is what I’ve been talking to people about since the announcement last--

[00:16:13] Lacey Bowling: Whatever.

[00:16:13] Sarah: Last week. Yeah. There’s no trust at any level for anyone to lead us through this. Our county judge executive is bombastic and-- he just said, like he said about a recent controversy I’m the CEO of the courthouse.” He acts like the king.

[00:16:32] Lacey Bowling: I did hear that.

[00:16:33] Sarah: So he’s the king, so he’s definitely not taking questions. Our Mayor George Bray is better, but that’s a very low, kind of a local leader I think can build some trust. Yeah, but it’s federal. But it’s federal. Yeah. And, even with this natural gas power plant, if we had a functioning EPA that the Trump administration wasn’t trying to gut at every possible opportunity. There’s a big piece in The New York Times today about how in Texas they are fast-tracking all these power. They’re running some of these power plants in Texas off diesel generators. Can you fathom how much pollution a massive amount of diesel generators-

[00:17:12] Lacey Bowling: No.

[00:17:13] Sarah: Produces in order to run a data center as big as they are?

[00:17:17] Lacey Bowling: No.

[00:17:18] Sarah: A lot.

[00:17:18] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, I don’t really understand. To me, I don’t get it.

[00:17:21] Sarah: No.

[00:17:21] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:17:22] Sarah: They have a lot of natural gas in Texas, so they’re also building a lot of natural gas power plants. They’re, fast-tracking the environmental review. Some of the activists in our community, like protecting McCracken County I think they’ve been really smart. Instead of just saying no, from the beginning they’ve been like, “We want an environmental review. We want an environmental impact study.” “You have to tell us what’s going to happen.”

[00:17:41] Lacey Bowling: But are you going to get one?

[00:17:43] Sarah: I don’t know. I feel a little more hopeful that it has to go through the Kentucky State permitting, which is not run by a Republican legislator- but is in fact under the executive branch with our governor, who has not been a part of this announcement, said he didn’t know about it. I’m a little skeptical of that.

[00:17:58] Lacey Bowling: We can’t even stop bad jalapenos from Chipotle.

[00:18:01] Sarah: The lettuce is making our butts explode. That’s the thing, too. There’s no, there’s definitely no trust. If this was the Obama administration, do we think there’d be this kind of backlash? Especially the backlash, it’s bipartisan to a large extent, but it is primarily coming from the left.

[00:18:15] Lacey Bowling: I don’t know, but this is what I do know. I don’t even know what I do know to be honest.

[00:18:20] Sarah: Nobody trusts that the Trump administration is going, and the federal government run by the Trump administration, not nobody, but most people, do not trust that they’re going to protect us from environmental pollutants. He says he wants clean air and water, but he guts every bureaucracy that’s supposed to protect against that.

[00:18:35] Lacey Bowling: This whole thing is part of the Trump administration’s plan, is to target old DOE sites, right? Yes. This is what I’m understanding.

[00:18:42] Sarah: Yes.

[00:18:43] Lacey Bowling: Which I didn’t understand before I used data to understand this whole thing. Was that this is part of the plan, is to find these sites that are not being used anymore. I actually used to work at one of these. That’s what I was telling you.

[00:18:54] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:18:54] Lacey Bowling: The one in Hawesville, Kentucky, that they’re trying to convert into a DOE site. Or not a DOE site, but to convert it into a data center.

[00:19:01] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:19:01] Lacey Bowling: For me, I just get so caught up in why didn’t we try so hard. Because right now we’re talking about this is economic development, and this is where we want to make sure that people have jobs, which my understanding is they’re only going to be temporary jobs, so we’re going to go in, create a bunch of construction jobs.

[00:19:15] Sarah: In our community, the data center won’t need a lot of workers, but the natural gas power plant will.

[00:19:20] Lacey Bowling: But then later, to run these data centers, they’re not going to use a lot of people.

[00:19:25] Sarah: No, it’s a lot of builders. But, that was true for the uranium enrichment plant.

[00:19:28] Lacey Bowling: Sure.

[00:19:29] Sarah: My grandmother talks about in the ‘50s when all the workers rolled in. That’s why you go through little towns like Kevil or Wickliffe.

[00:19:35] Lacey Bowling:  Even Paducah.

[00:19:36] Sarah: They feel like towns, but you’re like, “Where’d everybody go?” That’s because they had drive-in theaters out there, grocery stores, schools. And my grandmother’s talking about how they got te- they needed all these teachers for the workers’ kids, and they had to put teachers in who had just graduated high school.

[00:19:49] Lacey Bowling: But why didn’t we protect this hard when industry left these communities? Why didn’t we fight this hard? And I guess this is where I start to get a little bit in my role as, i- in my work, is to protect people that are underserved. They lost a lot of these jobs. My brother lost a job from a plant that made aluminum. But it was like at the federal level aluminum exports aren’t really used a lot more. Yeah. So he lost his job, but now we need another company to come in and save this community to bring in more jobs.

[00:20:21] Sarah: If someone you trusted, or at least who you didn’t have animosity towards, came to you and said, “We have these old industrial sites. We want to reuse them for the next wave of technology,” you’d be like okay.

[00:20:33] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, maybe.

[00:20:33] Sarah: Yeah. That doesn’t sound all bad.

[00:20:35] Lacey Bowling: It doesn’t sound all bad.

[00:20:36] Sarah: Because it’s the Trump administration and there’s no trust, they, people don’t trust the tech companies, people don’t trust the Trump administration. People don’t often trust their state officials. If I was Texas, I sure as hell wouldn’t trust my state officials. Especially around something like electricity.

[00:20:49] Lacey Bowling: But even locally, we don’t trust anyone.

[00:20:51] Sarah: No. And that’s the thing, it’s like I think that’s why I had a knee-jerk reaction to be supportive, because there’s a part of me that’s I don’t just want to add to the chorus of, I don’t have a solution, but not that.

[00:21:05] Lacey Bowling: Yeah. I just think it’s trickle-down, whatever this is trickling down to our local officials.

[00:21:11] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:21:11] Lacey Bowling: We’re starting to get to where we don’t trust anyone. And I don’t know if that was the plan. But that’s what it feels like we’re doing now. Yeah. Is like, I don’t know if we like anything.

[00:21:22] Sarah: No, that’s not going to work.

[00:21:23] Lacey Bowling: It’s not going to work.

[00:21:24] Sarah: That does not work long term. No, we got to do something. The idea that we’re opposed to everything..

[00:21:28] Lacey Bowling: Even AI flyers.

[00:21:29] Sarah: Even poor little independent bookstores just trying to get their marketing out the door.

[00:21:33] Lacey Bowling: And they’re just trying.

[00:21:34] Sarah: Sympathy. So that doesn’t work. Now, I think that’s a good point to take a quick break, because I want to get back and say a lot about not just the technology coming to your town, but the technology generally. I think we touched on this a little bit with the bookstores. I think it’s a lot of things. I think people don’t feel like AI is improving their lives.

[00:22:07] Lacey Bowling: They don’t?

[00:22:08] Sarah: I don’t think so.

[00:22:09] Lacey Bowling: Okay.

[00:22:10] Sarah: I don’t think so. Now, I’m going to say, I think it has improved mine.

[00:22:14] Lacey Bowling: I think people think it might be doing it. Why are they using it if it’s not?

[00:22:17] Sarah: Exactly. But I think people are using it for search.

[00:22:19] Lacey Bowling: Oh, yeah.

[00:22:20] Sarah: You know what I mean? I don’t think the average Joe is out there Claude coding.

[00:22:24] Lacey Bowling: I don’t know Claude, but...

[00:22:25] Sarah: now, I will say, and I’ve said this on the show, I used Claude in particular a lot to help set up my bookshop. I would not have been able to start this small business without artificial intelligence, and there has been a a huge surge in small business applications. And there’s a lot of speculation that’s why.

[00:22:38] Lacey Bowling: I’m sure it is.

[00:22:39] Sarah: Yeah. People cannot get access to tools and expertise.

[00:22:42] Lacey Bowling: Listen, thinking is hard.  You can quote me on that.

[00:22:46] Sarah: It is hard. We don’t want to outsource all of it.

[00:22:49] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:22:49] Sarah: And it does, and it’s like I think it’s interesting. It’s like what you talked about before. I understand all the ethical concerns. I don’t understand the way people cordon AI off and act as if it’s wholly and completely separate from the extractive issues and the ethical issues surrounding the internet.

[00:23:06] Lacey Bowling: They might be smarter than I can think about.

[00:23:08] Sarah: Okay. Let’s say it this way okay, so AI steals creative work.

[00:23:12] Lacey Bowling: Yes.

[00:23:14] Sarah: So does lots and lots of things on the internet.

[00:23:17] Lacey Bowling: Oh, for sure. I got

[00:23:18] Sarah: you.

[00:23:18] That was an issue. Dupes. We all love dupe videos. We do one million dupe videos. What do you think that is?

[00:23:25] Lacey Bowling: Oh, yeah.  I got you.

[00:23:26] Sarah: Like, when you shop at H&M, or you buy something from on Amazon. That’s different. So it’s not that I’m saying these ethical concerns aren’t real, but it is interesting to me that we focus in on this easy villain as if it is separate from all the other behavior in our lives.

[00:23:43] Lacey Bowling: Everybody lives in contradictions anyway.

[00:23:45] Sarah: True.

[00:23:46] Lacey Bowling: Everyone.

[00:23:47] Sarah: True.

[00:23:47] Lacey Bowling: My line is different than wherever it is, we put it. I know what I’m trying to say, but everybody has a line. It’s just inside. It’s just here.

[00:23:56] Sarah: It’s maybe not making sense to somebody else. It’s here.

[00:23:56] Lacey Bowling:  It does not make sense to anyone else.

[00:23:59] Sarah: I think people are not seeing as enough positive impact in their life to justify pollution or water use or noise pollution or decreased property rates. I think that’s the first thing.

[00:24:12] Lacey Bowling: I don’t think they think about it that much. Just like you’re saying, I don’t think they can see that line of delineation that’s what it is. Yeah. Because I know people that are writing grants with it.

[00:24:21] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:24:22] Lacey Bowling: Nonprofit.

[00:24:22] Sarah: Yeah. It’s got to expand the capacity of a nonprofit.

[00:24:24] Lacey Bowling: It has to.

[00:24:25] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:24:25] Lacey Bowling: People that are writing letters of recommendation with that stuff. Yep. Let me just whip this out really quickly because I don’t have time to do this. So maybe they’re just not able to quantify what they’re really doing with it. Yeah. But I think they’re doing it.

[00:24:38] Sarah: Yeah, they’re doing it. But they don’t think it’s AI.

[00:24:41] Lacey Bowling: They don’t think it’s AI.

[00:24:42] Sarah: They don’t think that’s real.

[00:24:44] Lacey Bowling:  They don’t think It’s AI. Because the only way they think AI exists is those stupid fires.

[00:24:49] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, but like imagery. And my kids are like nee- they get to the point where it’s like anything that’s highly produced, they’re like, “That’s AI. I’m not even sure that is.” It’s just becoming like a label.

[00:24:59] Lacey Bowling: Or like those introductions to the new teachers this year. Like everybody was doing that. Yeah. “Look, here’s our new teachers.” Yeah. Here they are,” and its clearly AI. Or the videos, like the deep fake videos.

[00:25:08] Sarah: But like there’s some applications that I don’t think are all negative. Like my dad, who’s on the opposite end of the political spectrum than me, we had a like conversation about the whole thing.

[00:25:15] Lacey Bowling:  And my whole Family, yes.

[00:25:17] Sarah: Yes. And he went and searched it on ChatGPT, and ChatGPT like was like this is true and this part isn’t.” And I’m like I would sure as hell prefer him to go get it from ChatGPT than wait for Mark Levin or Fox News to talk about it.” That’s not an all bad application.

[00:25:33] Lacey Bowling: I just don’t think people can see that they’re using it and that it’s has to be.

[00:25:40] Sarah: Yeah, that it has to come from somewhere.

[00:25:41] Lacey Bowling: Has to  come from somewhere.

[00:25:43] Sarah: And so here’s the thing. I think the actual negative reaction is probably less about the ethics of the creativity or the intelligence or what it was trained on. I don’t like to hear, as a bookstore owner, that they’re finding rare books- feeding them into the machines, and then throwing them away. Not my favorite. Yeah. Ugh, hate that. I think that’s less of it, though. I think that is, I think that’s part of some people’s real concerns, but I saw a comment on one of the Paducah articles and I thought, “That’s it.” Somebody said, “Happy it’s $100 billion investment when my family still lives paycheck to paycheck.”

[00:26:22] Lacey Bowling: I know that’s right.

[00:26:23] Sarah: And I thought, “That’s it.” I think, first of all, you hear the heads of these companies saying this is going to completely accelerate the gap between the rich and the poor.

[00:26:34] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:26:35] Sarah: Which is already massive. People already see expense everywhere, and some, look, some of those prices going up, definitely in healthcare, definitely in software expenses, and technological usage, and all kinds of ways we probably aren’t even fully aware of, is because these companies are investing in artificial intelligence, and they’re passing that price along.

[00:26:58] Lacey Bowling: We already know the middle class is eh. We know it doesn’t really exist anymore, but you’re right on, man. I don’t know what else to say about that.

[00:27:05] Sarah: I was in Philly this summer, and I watched I got excited, because I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s one of them.” It was one of those robot delivery people.

[00:27:13] Lacey Bowling: I’ve seen them.

[00:27:14] Sarah: Like the little ro lling...

[00:27:15] Lacey Bowling: yeah.

[00:27:16] Sarah: They’re about three feet high, and it was delivering something, and it rolled past a homeless man sleeping on the street. That’s what I’m saying. And I thought--

[00:27:22] Lacey Bowling: Wow. Yeah those cars.

[00:27:23] Sarah: Something’s not right there.

[00:27:25] Lacey Bowling: But that’s the way it is, and that’s the thing, is we can get... is it billion with a B?

[00:27:30] Sarah: Yeah. I’m pretty sure.

[00:27:31] Lacey Bowling: I know now that I said it out loud, it doesn’t feel right anymore.

[00:27:33] Sarah: Maybe it’s 100 million. It’s a lot of money.

[00:27:35] Lacey Bowling: It’s not 100 million. That’s like barely anything.

[00:27:37] Sarah: Yeah, that’s got to be more. But Elon’s a trillionaire, so we’ve got to be moving into it, but when people see that, they think it’s a $100 billion investment in our community.

[00:27:44] Lacey Bowling: It’s got to be. I’m going to keep saying, I’ll use data, look it up, but- ... a billion, $100 billion, we know the money exists. And I talk about this a lot in my work, like we’re moving people. We’re trying to move people from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. That’s what we’re trying to teach people. There is enough resources. You don’t have to hoard this. You don’t have... But the people that have they’re a little bit hoarding it, too.

[00:28:07] Sarah: They’re hoarding it for real. Also, friendly reminder if you did not hear Lacey on the previous episode of Fancy Politics, she is the head of Paducah Cooperative Ministries our local homeless shelter and food bank.

[00:28:17] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:28:17] Sarah: Listen, you’re trying to get people abundance to donate money, because you led a big old capital campaign to expand your services.

[00:28:22] Lacey Bowling: We did lead a capital campaign because we know there are people sleeping on the street.

[00:28:26] Sarah: And I think that’s this sort of like moral injury that is getting harder and harder to avoid, even if you aren’t on social media, even if you ignore the news. The sense that like I’m trying to live my life, but I see that some people, and a growing number of people, are getting left behind.

[00:28:45] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, robots are cool, but also I know a man that lives literally his van, and he’s just trying to get a job. And so we finally got him a job. It pays $16 an hour. Do you think that’s going to pay for a home?

[00:28:56] Sarah: No.

[00:28:57] Lacey Bowling: Absolutely not.

[00:28:58] Sarah: Not even in Paducah.

[00:28:59] Lacey Bowling: But we’re like, hey, isn’t it cool that these people had $100 billion?

[00:29:05] Sarah: Yeah. I think there are for real creative and ethical concerns with the technology, but I think the bigger undercurrent That I feel that’s fueling a lot of this is it’s just going to make them richer.

[00:29:20] Lacey Bowling: Of course.

[00:29:21] Sarah: And we’re the rest of us are going to get like even further left behind, especially when you talk about the middle class, which is a huge amount of knowledge workers. So they’re not just talking about I might not... It’s not just I might not get a piece of this pie. That’s one thing, and I think that’s like with TikTok and algorithmic media I feel it, I enjoy it. I don’t really care if they get rich off of it. Yeah. But now I’m going to... They’re going to get rich, and I might actively get more poor because my job might go away or my industry might go away or you’re making me train the AI to take over my job. So it’s not just that I’m not using the technology and I don’t see the impact in my life or maybe I’m not even making the connection, so maybe it’s there. It’s that I see it in my life. I don’t like what I see.

[00:30:01] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, I’ve asked several of our local officials, our local elected officials. I think it’s great that we’re going to get all these new folks that are coming in to work. But we already have people here who need jobs. Yeah. And so a lot of times people will say to me “Lacey, if you’re going to build a homeless shelter, that’s going to bring in more homeless people.”

[00:30:19] Sarah: Oh, dear.

[00:30:20] Lacey Bowling: And so my pushback has always been, so it’s okay to bring in people if you have a plan and you want them to work here and you consider them good.

[00:30:30] Sarah: Because there will be costs for bringing in all these people even temporarily to build.

[00:30:34] Lacey Bowling: Because we already have a housing shortage.

[00:30:35] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:30:36] Lacey Bowling: And so my question is, where will they live? Oh, we’ll figure it out. But when I ask where will the people that you already have that are already your citizens, many are the working poor, where will they live? The question is, “That’s not our problem.” So I don’t know what you call that. I don’t know what that, that is, but it doesn’t make sense to me.

[00:30:54] Sarah: No, I agree. And that’s what Nicholas--

[00:30:55] Lacey Bowling: Especially in a world that’s like America first. Or our people first. Yeah. Or don’t bring those people in or build a wall or build a... We don’t talk about that much anymore. Yeah. But build the boundaries so that we protect our people, but our people are poor. And our people need support.

[00:31:09] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:31:10] Lacey Bowling: Again, contradictions that are in our mind that don’t make sense. That’s the one.

[00:31:14] Sarah: And some of this I think is true in a lot of small towns. They don’t want change, even if it’s improved change. They want things to stay the same.

[00:31:21] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, of course. It’s easier that way.

[00:31:22] Sarah: They don’t want any threat to the status quo.

[00:31:24] Lacey Bowling: The status quo is really easy to manage.

[00:31:26] Sarah: Yeah, especially here.

[00:31:28] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, everywhere.

[00:31:28] Sarah: Maybe not New York City, but here I think there’s a sense of “I don’t want things to change. This sounds like change.” And again, I don’t want to have that reaction. And I think there could, and I think this is true of artificial intelligence, generally, any technological revolution- There will be costs. Inevitably. Having energy surplus could end really if electrification, if we get a new president and a new term that really innovates and incentivizes the electrification. Our grid is in trouble, so there’s a part of me that’s we have to improve our grid. But also, I really wish we were doing it like China and doing it with solar and wind and renewable energies, because there is a cost even to natural gas. Any kind of processing of fossil fuels, there’s a huge cost, and that’s the thing. We’re saying there’s no trust, but what you’re saying is also they don’t own that this isn’t going to be a total positive, which then continues to erode trust.

[00:32:24] Lacey Bowling: I’m so smart.  Did I say that?

[00:32:27] Sarah: You did.

[00:32:27] Lacey Bowling: Gosh.

[00:32:27] Sarah: That’s the thing. It’s no one will say this will be their downside.

[00:32:31] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:32:31] Sarah: That it might tax our school system. D- Best Community deals with this a lot. They’ve had Amazon d- processing centers- Yeah ... and they have FedEx and they have all these companies, and they just elected this crazy radical right-wing dude to their county judge executive because he basically came in and said, “I’m going to stop the growth.” And that was like, people were like, “Great.”

[00:32:49] Lacey Bowling: Great.

[00:32:49] Sarah: Thank you. So I think that you say, if you’re not honest with people, and honest even to say, “I, we don’t know all the negative consequences”

[00:32:55] Lacey Bowling:  I love that people say, “I’m not sure.”

[00:32:58] Sarah: I’m not sure exactly how this, how great or awful this could be. But people don’t want to hear that, and politicians are terrified to say it.

[00:33:04] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, because we might buy too much toilet paper all at once if you say, I’m not sure what might happen. We’ve seen this before.

[00:33:09] Sarah: We’ve seen that.

[00:33:09] Lacey Bowling:  We’ve seen this before.

[00:33:11] Sarah: And I didn’t like the ending, as Taylor says. And I don’t know how to get out of this. It’s again, I don’t want to be a knee-jerk active person. Laura Tremaine and I talked about this on Tuesday. We were talking about the end of reading and are people not reading less? I’ve heard that. And she’s yeah, I don’t want to be like, “Get off my lawn” about AI. Right? Especially because I use it.

[00:33:27] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:33:27] Sarah: We all use it. It’s crazy to me. Like with Google. You don’t Google anymore and click a website.

[00:33:34] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:33:34] Sarah: You can turn it off and some people do.

[00:33:35] Lacey Bowling: I don’t know how to turn it off. I should probably figure out how to do that.

[00:33:39] Sarah: You know how you’ll have to do it? Google it. Gemini will tell you how to turn it off. Okay. You know what I’m saying? Like that, so there’s a part of me that’s like, man, this is going to change so many things we’re not even thinking about. If you make your money building websites, but now people don’t go to the websites.

[00:33:51] Lacey Bowling: I know. You have to put all the little words under the pictures and stuff. I learned that.

[00:33:55] Sarah: Yeah, you got to, yeah, so because there’s an internet that now the artificial intelligence is reading, and I think that is scary. Just like I’m sure it was scary, I just read a l- lovely book called This Is Happiness about the electrification of a little town in Ireland.

[00:34:07] Lacey Bowling: That book sounds terrible.

[00:34:09] Sarah: Oh my God, it’s so good. I bet it’s so good though. It’s so sweet. I’m sorry to whoever wrote it. Nao Williams. I bet it’s great. It’s a great book. Don’t listen to her.

[00:34:13] Lacey Bowling: Don’t listen to me.

[00:34:14] Sarah: So it’s like I think there are going to be costs, and I think the fear is a natural reaction, and in many situations, like well-placed. But I don’t know what to, I don’t know how to, and this makes me cry because I love Paducah so much, like I, I don’t know how to- fill the void. I don’t know how to be contributive. I don’t want to just be-

[00:34:38] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:34:38] Sarah: A a knee-jerk negative. I want to help lead or organize or... there was somebody on Facebook who came on and was like, “It’s happening. So instead of just bitching about it on Facebook my little piece of the puzzle, I thought, I’m going to put up a thing at Meander and be like, ‘Don’t read Facebook comments. Read books that’ll help you understand this better.’” Yeah. And I’ve ordered a bunch of, like-

[00:34:56] Lacey Bowling: Books are so long, though.

[00:34:57] Sarah: I know, right?

[00:34:58] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:34:59] Sarah: So I’m like, maybe that can be, like, my little piece of the puzzle, and I try to talk to people because I know it will have negative impact. I also know I do think Protect McCracken County is smart to say we at least want the environmental impact, and I want to help call for that and demand that. But it’s just I think people are scared. People are afraid. There’s no real trust or leadership. But I don’t want to just go we’re fucked.

[00:35:21] Lacey Bowling: Yeah. You don’t want to do that.

[00:35:23] Sarah: No.

[00:35:24] Lacey Bowling: But I also don’t know what to do when people cry.

[00:35:25] Sarah: Sorry about that.

[00:35:26] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, you’re doing a good job.

[00:35:27] Sarah: You knew that was always a risk when you hang out  with me.

[00:35:29] Lacey Bowling: I do. Yeah. I know.

[00:35:31] Sarah: I cry a lot on Pansuit Politics.

[00:35:32] Lacey Bowling: Oh, that’s too bad. That’s too bad. You just have a lot of heart in there.

[00:35:37] Sarah: I do. And you do too.

[00:35:39] Lacey Bowling: I do. It just manifests differently.

[00:35:41] Sarah: It does.

[00:35:42] Lacey Bowling: It does. Usually it’s anger. Usually it comes out as anger. I like that one too. I do too.

[00:35:45] Sarah: But and it’s weird that I don’t have that reaction this time.

[00:35:49] Lacey Bowling: It’s okay.

[00:35:49] Sarah: Yeah. I really don’t have this sense of like just shut it down and because you can’t. And look, that would be a winning message. As a politician, it’s a winning message. As a podcaster, it’s a winning message. Yeah. If I want to just come on here and scare the shit out of people about data centers that would get a lot of listens.

[00:36:04] Lacey Bowling: It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere with this, with that because they’re just coming.

[00:36:09] Sarah: Yeah. And I do think nationally demanding from don’t want to hear... To me, again, it’s like when a politician comes out and says a moratorium on data centers I don’t necessarily think that’s bad. I think the, think a good way to slow down the technology, which, you know, all the AI workers signed this letter and said “We’re reaching singularity.” “This is getting scary. They’re... The, the computers are training themselves. The artificial intelligence is exceeding the boundaries we’re setting for it.” So in some ways, an logical way to slow down this tech that even the people building it say we should slow down, is to slow down the infrastructure that feeds it, like the data centers. So I’m not necessarily opposed to moratoriums.

[00:36:48] Lacey Bowling: Do you read The Kentucky Lantern at all?

[00:36:49] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:36:50] Lacey Bowling: Okay. So they reported that there was a moratorium on working on them, and then the construction company still shows up and works on it.

[00:36:56] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:36:57] Lacey Bowling: It’s in Pineville or Pikeville, I can’t recall. There’s just one letter difference, but-

[00:37:01] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:37:01] Lacey Bowling: They’re still showing up and, like-

[00:37:02] Sarah: That’s the thing, people don’t even trust if you put in these limitations. If they actually do stop. So I guess what I’d rather hear from politicians is their actual ideas- ... about how to regulate, about how to... I like, Beth and I talked about it, I like Bernie’s idea that we would just own half of it. If you’re going to build all this wealth then half of it should go back to the United States, because this isn’t th- unlike previous technological revolutions, like the internet electricity and some other p- parts of the American history, like this wasn’t government research. This is private research. This is private technology, and so that’s a little bit different, so I think for the government to step up and say, “If you’re going to do this, like the American people need to benefit in a real concrete way, not just this promise. Or warning of like a permanent underclass. I feel like we already have that.

[00:37:47] Lacey Bowling: As a callback to Tuesday that you referenced, I think it would be interesting to know that people research the, the laws that we’re doing, yeah. That would be really cool just for me to know.

[00:37:59] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:37:59] Lacey Bowling: As you being elected officials, are you studying what’s going on? Or are you just listening to--

[00:38:05] Sarah: The lobbyists who have access to make their case.

[00:38:07] Lacey Bowling: Which is paid for by the who want it.

[00:38:10] Sarah: Yes.

[00:38:10] Lacey Bowling: That would be helpful to me.

[00:38:12] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:38:12] Lacey Bowling: Are you doing the research on that as well? That would make me feel better.

[00:38:16] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:38:16] Lacey Bowling: And I don’t know if that’s true, because I’ve started working with-

[00:38:18] Sarah: I think politicians don’t see themselves as experts, and I think that’s sort of-

[00:38:22] Lacey Bowling: It’s not really great, because-

[00:38:24] Sarah: They see themselves as empowered by the voters, and so that means my instincts are to be rewarded, especially under Trump. I think he’s really fueled this idea of I don’t need to be... I don’t need to understand or be an expert. People voted for me because of who I my personality basically.

[00:38:37] Lacey Bowling: That’s unfortunate.

[00:38:37] Sarah: Yeah. And I think that’s the thing. because I also think it’s not good for politicians to feel that way. It’s not good for the average person to feel that way, and to feel like, I’ll just do some quick googling and now I’m an expert. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Do your own, everybody does their own research. But what does that mean? And I think we’re, the technology itself is outpacing our ability to understand it particularly through your sort of average citizen’s time they can devote to understanding it. And I think we really are reaching it’s like we reached the end of expertise, where we decided to trust experts, at the worst possible moment. Yeah. And I understand that experts used that expertise in a way that violated people’s trust, and they got a lot of things wrong. And also, I don’t know another way forward without depending on expertise. Expertise, yeah. Especially in a situation like this.

[00:39:30] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:39:31] Sarah: And so I’m like, but I think there’s just so much loss, and we’re at this weird spot where we can see all the holes. But what then?

[00:39:40] Lacey Bowling: Do they make consultants for coun- for countries that can just kind of come in and help us figure this out? because usually in a company- Yeah, you get an outside consultant ... we would bring in a consultant. Yeah.

[00:39:49] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:39:49] Lacey Bowling: This just feels like about the time to get a consultant.

[00:39:53] Sarah: Consultant. I don’t think they have them. I don’t think Donald Trump is hiring any consultants right now. I don’t.

[00:39:56] Lacey Bowling: You’re probably right about that.

[00:39:57] Sarah: And so I’m like, I think that’s it. I think it’s like all of this change is happening at this moment. There’s this outside change, but there’s also this real political, educational, cultural transition. And so we are, like, discombobulated. Yeah. We don’t know who to look to. We don’t know what to look to. I don’t want to just... And so everybody leans on the easiest emotion, which is anger.

[00:40:20] Lacey Bowling: Yeah. Have you been to therapy?

[00:40:23] Sarah: Everybody needs to be going to therapy.

[00:40:23] Lacey Bowling: I know.

[00:40:24] Sarah: That is the problem. What do you feel like you hear in your work? So you straddle two worlds. You’re with elected officials. You’re with the nonprofit leaders. But you’re also with people who are just struggling to get by. Or do they not care? They’re just trying to get-

[00:40:36] Lacey Bowling: No, they care so much a place to sleep. But they don’t get to exist in the worlds I get to exist in.

[00:40:42] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:40:42] Lacey Bowling: But yesterday I hung out with about six or seven guys in recovery. They were helping us restore some things at our shelter. We have a shelter that’s for it’s transitional. Yeah. So it’s more people that are going to stay for about four months. It’s not night by night. But they don’t talk a lot about data centers.

[00:40:57] Sarah: No.

[00:40:58] Lacey Bowling: They don’t talk a lot about that. They don’t get to have phones in recovery, in the, in their stages of recovery. But spent a lot of time talking to the guy I was telling you about. He’s just been staying on our property. He’s not in recovery, but he’s talking about how, just asinine it is that people think that they can just dictate what he has to do. And how it’s crazy that he’s thankful for this job that pays $16 an hour. But he, that’s all he can get right now. Yeah. It’s just like one step, one step, one step. But data center didn’t come up. No. The elected officials didn’t come up. If that’s what you’re, if that’s what you’re asking.

[00:41:34] Sarah: And I think that’s the other part of this sort of psychology that happens.

[00:41:40] Lacey Bowling: That’s tyranny of the moment. Like we get to have a future and talk about all these things. But what you’re talking about is, a lot of times we’re trying to .

[00:41:47] Sarah: And we think we’re speaking for everybody. We’re- For sure. That’s what bugs me, is this, this sense of I’m sticking up for the little guy.” And I’m like, “I think you’re just sticking up for people like you,” and that’s fine. You should do that. There’s nothing wrong with saying I’m speaking for the suburbanites. I’m speaking for the middle income knowledge worker.” That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong, but it’s like you have to fuel it with this additional sort of emotional weight of “I’m sticking up for everybody,” where, and I’m like, I’m not sure that’s true. I thought it was interesting that our local union came out and was like, “We support this.” Yeah. Like hardcore, this’ll make a lot of jobs for our members. Period.

[00:42:20] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:42:20] Sarah: And so I think it’s more complicated than everybody hates data centers.

[00:42:24] Lacey Bowling: Yeah. They talk a lot about needing housing. That, you know that’s kind of what we’re looking for. We’re just talking about we need houses.

[00:42:31] Sarah: Yeah. But you got to think, it will be interesting. So in the beginning, it will worsen the housing crisis. But if some of these jobs are temporary, then we’re going to build a lot of housing to hold people who will build the data center and will build the natural gas plant, and they will leave. And then we will might have a housing surplus.

[00:42:52] Lacey Bowling: Maybe.

[00:42:53] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:42:53] Lacey Bowling: But we’re willing to build houses for people that come in to work, but not people that want to live here and work. Yeah. Just wanted to make sure that’s clear.

[00:43:00] Sarah: Yep. No, I think that’s a really good point. Which stresses me out. Yes. That’s a reasonable thing to be stressed out about and frustrated. And that’s the thing, it’s just like everybody’s frustrated, but no one is offering any sort of leadership and narrative. And I know we’re just circling back around to a lack of trust and lack of leadership. I don’t really know if there’s another conclusion, at least for the next two years, which sucks, because this is all happening so quickly. Our data center will be built within the next two years.

[00:43:21] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:43:22] Sarah: And so it’s just we’re in a messy middle, and it sucks.

[00:43:26] Lacey Bowling: We’re going to have so much data.

[00:43:26] Sarah: Our political system might not look different in the next two years, but our personal, individual lives and families will. We’re going to talk about that up next, because we both have seniors in high school. Your daughter Madeline and my son Griffin have known each other since preschool?

[00:43:43] Lacey Bowling: Kindergarten.

[00:43:43] Sarah: Kindergarten. She didn’t go to first, or she didn’t go to Manuel preschool?

[00:43:47] Lacey Bowling: No. She went to Western Babies Daycare Preschool.

[00:43:50] Sarah: Man, how’d you get in there? That’s premium daycare to get into. That’s hard. You got to know somebody. Okay. So they’ve known each other since kindergarten.

[00:43:57] Lacey Bowling: I know somebody.

[00:43:58] Sarah: They’re so sweet. Is that not always because they’re teenagers, I know. 

[00:44:01] Lacey Bowling:  I keep that Little picture when they were like at a sleepover. They’re so sweet. So cute.

[00:44:06] Sarah: Now they’re seniors.

[00:44:07] Lacey Bowling: Seniors, starting next Wednesday.

[00:44:10] Sarah: I hate it.

[00:44:11] Lacey Bowling: You’ll be okay.

[00:44:12] Sarah: Actually, you know what? Interestingly enough I feel a little bit like I kind of processed it last year. I really leaned into how sad I was.

[00:44:22] Lacey Bowling: You did?

[00:44:24] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:44:24] Lacey Bowling: Why were you sad last year? ‘

[00:44:25] Sarah: Cause I knew it was coming. I was, like, pre-grieving.

[00:44:27] Lacey Bowling: You were pre-sad?

[00:44:28] Sarah: I was pre-grieving. Now I’m talking big right now.

[00:44:30] Lacey Bowling: Okay.

[00:44:31] Sarah: Let’s go to the first senior event and see if I don’t.

[00:44:33] Lacey Bowling: Senior breakfast.

[00:44:34] Sarah: Senior sunrise breakfast.

[00:44:36] Lacey Bowling: I’m sorry. Sunrise breakfast.

[00:44:37] Sarah: Sunrise breakfast at the--

[00:44:38] Lacey Bowling: Are you going to volunteer?

[00:44:40] Sarah: Hell, yeah.

[00:44:41] Lacey Bowling: What’s your job?

[00:44:42] Sarah: I’m the PTO vice president. So I’m just going to show up and be like, “I’m the PTO vice president.”

[00:44:45] Lacey Bowling: Do you have anything I could do?

[00:44:46] Sarah: I’m sure.   I was just kidding.

[00:44:48] Lacey Bowling: I’m not going.

[00:44:49] Sarah: But how are you feeling? How are you feeling about them graduating?

[00:44:51] Lacey Bowling: I feel okay. I feel I don’t know if she’s going to be able to take the trash out in her dorm room.

[00:44:56] Sarah:  I’m not worried About that at all.

[00:44:58] Lacey Bowling: These are the things that bother me. Is she going to be able to function?

[00:45:01] Sarah: No. Let me just tell you something. I don’t think about that ever, not one time, with Griffin.

[00:45:06] Lacey Bowling: What do you think about?

[00:45:07] Sarah: Griffin Stewart Holland

[00:45:08] Lacey Bowling: He’s fantastic.

[00:45:09] Sarah: He volunteers once a week at a local--

[00:45:10] Lacey Bowling: Every week he comes to Paducah Cooperative Ministry. He’s planted a little garden over there for me. He’s great. He has lots of conversations about things. Maybe I did something wrong. Is that what you’re implying? Madeline, her room is a mess. I love her. She’s so smart. Very sarcastic. Witty. She got great hair.

[00:45:28] Sarah: She does have great hair. That’s actually very true.

[00:45:30] Lacey Bowling: She has great hair.

[00:45:31] Sarah:  The hair is on point.

[00:45:32] Lacey Bowling: She can run fast.

[00:45:33] Sarah: No, I don’t ever worry about that. Griffin is hyper. He can make a whole meal. His room is clean.

[00:45:40] Lacey Bowling: Now that’s my son.

[00:45:41] Sarah: Now every once in a while, we’ll encounter a knowledge gap that is concerning. For example he borrowed my car.

[00:45:47] Lacey Bowling: Okay.

[00:45:48] Sarah: And he said, “How big is your tank? How do I know how much gas to put in it?” And I said, “What do you mean? You just turn it on till it clicks off.”

[00:45:55] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:45:56] Sarah: He’s like, “ Didn’t know it did that.” I was like, “oh, you’ve been driving for six months and you didn’t know?”

[00:46:00] Lacey Bowling: How does he put gas in his car?

[00:46:02] Sarah: He does the math.

[00:46:03] Lacey Bowling: Oh, my.

[00:46:04] Sarah: But then I actually fueled up his car. He has a Mini Cooper, and it’s hypersensitive. It clicks off all the time. So I think that’s what the problem was. Anyway, you do every once in a while. They’ll say something and you’ll be like, “Oh, no “ I love those texts from teens where it’s “Where do I buy the pasta water?” The pasta water. What’s my Social Security number?

[00:46:20] Lacey Bowling: Oh.

[00:46:21] Sarah: Just where you realize, oh, they don’t know things.

[00:46:22] Lacey Bowling: Madeline calls like 100 times a day to say “Hey, I’m making this poster.” She just wants me to know.

[00:46:29] Sarah: Oh, okay.

[00:46:30] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:46:30] Sarah: She just wants you to be informed.

[00:46:32] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:46:32] Sarah: No. Griffin wants me to not be informed. He would like me to not know anything that’s going on with his life, if possible.

[00:46:37] Lacey Bowling:  Madeline wants us to know everything.

[00:46:39] Sarah: No. So it’s going to be different, because the kids are different. But he is excited, and I am excited for him. I loved college. I cannot wait for him.

[00:46:47] Lacey Bowling: I loved college, too. Loved it. Now, the first year, I had to figure some things out. I didn’t know how to study.

[00:46:52] Sarah: Oh, no.

[00:46:53] Lacey Bowling: Now, Griffin knows how to study.

[00:46:54] Sarah: He figured that out. Griffin knows how to study. He’s got the flashcards. He’s got the flashcards, agenda planner. Let me tell you. Now, Amos, we’re still working on. Griffin’s got it down.

[00:47:02] Lacey Bowling: Now, Madeline she likes to wait till the day before.

[00:47:04] Sarah: She’ll learn.

[00:47:05] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:47:06] Sarah: You got to have consequences.

[00:47:06] Lacey Bowling: She’ll have to.

[00:47:07] Sarah: She’ll got to have consequences..

[00:47:08] Lacey Bowling:  got to have consequences. But my husband doesn’t ... He’s different than me.

[00:47:13] Sarah: Oh.

[00:47:13] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:47:14] Sarah: He procrastinates?

[00:47:16] Lacey Bowling: No, he just doesn’t want her to have consequences.

[00:47:17] Sarah: Oh, no. See, no.

[00:47:20] Lacey Bowling: He;s a Great guy.

[00:47:21] Sarah: Poor Holland children.

[00:47:23] Lacey Bowling: You’ve always given consequences

[00:47:24] Sarah: No, we are consequence heavy.

[00:47:25] Lacey Bowling: I remember early on hearing some of your stories.

[00:47:30] Sarah: Yeah. We’re mean.

[00:47:31] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:47:31] Sarah: Now, Nicholas is the baby of the bunch.

[00:47:34] Lacey Bowling: My husband’s the baby, too. I was the middle.

[00:47:36] Sarah: Less consequences. Yeah. And it shows. He’s got a lot of feigned helplessness. How do I do this? I’m like, this is not hard.

[00:47:42] Lacey Bowling: We call it weaponized incompetence.

[00:47:43] Sarah: Yes. Got a lot of that with the baby. We’re working on that. We got some time. He’s only 11. We got some time. We got some time. But yeah. No, Nicholas and I both had mothers that were, like, pretty hard asses, and so we bring that.

[00:47:55] Lacey Bowling: When I grew up, I didn’t have a curfew.

[00:47:57] Sarah:  That’s crazy.

[00:47:57] Lacey Bowling: We were just fairly  children.

[00:47:59] Sarah: I had a curfew, and if I was a minute late I was grounded for a week. My mom just needed to know by her clock. It didn’t matter what my clock said.

[00:48:05] Lacey Bowling: Lisa is going to let you know that. Everybody knows that’s your mom, right?

[00:48:08] Sarah: Okay.

[00:48:08] Lacey Bowling: Yeah I didn’t have one of those. If you weren’t coming home, you just needed to let someone know. Wow. There were five of us. I was the middle. No one was concerned about me.

[00:48:16] Sarah: Dang. That’s crazy.

[00:48:17] Lacey Bowling: Yeah. But seniors, yes. So my-

[00:48:20] Sarah: Seniors. You don’t got to walk

[00:48:21] Lacey Bowling: Now these, I’m, listen. It just goes to show you, whatever you think is going to be the issue- ... when, as a parent, it’s never that.

[00:48:30] Lacey Bowling: It’s not that.

[00:48:31] Sarah: I thought we needed to be so concerned about teen pregnancy- Yeah and teen drinking, and these children don’t leave their room. I’m like, “Do you want a beer?

[00:48:40] Lacey Bowling: Would you like a beer?”

[00:48:41] Lacey Bowling: My daughter comes home all the time. And I’m like, “Can you go somewhere?”

[00:48:44] Sarah: Can you go out? I was not home all weekend long.

[00:48:48] Lacey Bowling: No, me either.

[00:48:49] Sarah: I did not want to come home. They go at 1:00 for three hours, then they come home at 8:30. I’m like, “Why are you home?”

[00:48:52] Lacey Bowling: My daughter goes to the movies and comes right home.

[00:48:53] Sarah: What? Why?

[00:48:55] Lacey Bowling: Can you go anywhere else?

[00:48:56] Sarah: Anywhere else. We’ve made the homes too comfortable for them, is the thing. I think

[00:48:59] Lacey Bowling: that’s what it is.

[00:48:59] Sarah: Although my house was comfortable. I had my own room. I had to share a bathroom, but I had my own room and a TV in there. It’s the phones.

[00:49:06] Lacey Bowling: It’s the phones.

[00:49:07] Sarah: It’s data.

[00:49:08] Lacey Bowling: It’s the data. It’s

[00:49:10] Sarah: It’s the data. They

[00:49:10] Lacey Bowling: They have so much data.

[00:49:12] Sarah: They need a Nokia. They have so many sources.

[00:49:15] Lacey Bowling: They need a Nokia.

[00:49:15] Sarah: Nokia. They have so much source of serotonin, they don’t got to go out and drink.

[00:49:19] Lacey Bowling: I don’t know. Madeline comes home all the time. And I’m like well, “Why don’t you just go drive around?”

[00:49:22] Sarah: This is interesting. This is very important to Griffin in a college. He wants a college that’s very hardcore about tech usage and in-person hanging out and campus life.

[00:49:31] Lacey Bowling: What does that mean?

[00:49:31] Sarah: He wants a college that takes into account the d- we don’t want the kids to just be in their dorm rooms on their phone.

[00:49:37] He really- How does a college

[00:49:38] Lacey Bowling: enforce

[00:49:39] Sarah: that? Okay. So he likes Kenyon. And Kenyon has this big campus pathway or green. I didn’t go on this campus visit. Him and Nicholas went. And the rule is you cannot have your phone out there You have to be- How

[00:49:50] Lacey Bowling: does a college say that? How does a college say that?

[00:49:53] Sarah: I don’t know. They just do.

[00:49:54] Lacey Bowling: Okay.

[00:49:54] Sarah: And everybody likes it. And

[00:49:55] Lacey Bowling: Madeline wants a college that will allow her to be in a sorority.

[00:49:58] Sarah: Aha. That’s my girl right there. I loved being in a sorority.

[00:50:01] Lacey Bowling: No. I loved it. I was not in one. She-

[00:50:03] Sarah: I loved it.

[00:50:04] Lacey Bowling: I couldn’t afford one. That’s how

[00:50:04] Sarah: I know Beth. We were in the same sorority.

[00:50:06] Lacey Bowling: Oh my God. I was not in one. I couldn’t afford one. That was

[00:50:08] Sarah: very different at Transylvania University- Transy ... this tiny liberal arts school- ... than like an SEC school. I hope that goes without saying

[00:50:17] Lacey Bowling: Madeline, my daughter, wants to buy all the clothes that match- Oh, yeah. ... Everyone else’s clothes.

[00:50:21] Sarah: Yeah. OOTD

[00:50:22] Lacey Bowling: And they all have long hair.

[00:50:24] Sarah: And

[00:50:24] Lacey Bowling: I love that for her. Yes. I just don’t know where she came from because I’m not that. But I think that’s great for her, and she’s really pretty. She is. And I just--

[00:50:32] Sarah: It’s true.

[00:50:33] Lacey Bowling: We got to have different... we all have to have matching-ish clothes.

[00:50:37] Sarah: The bodycon dresses that look like swimsuits. You know how I feel about those.

[00:50:41] Lacey Bowling: Yeah.

[00:50:42] Sarah: I’m a post because I don’t have girls, so I got to fight that fight.

[00:50:45] Lacey Bowling: You’re not.

[00:50:45] Sarah: It’s easy for me to be a

[00:50:46] Lacey Bowling: post. Let me tell you something. You’re not in charge of that.

[00:50:47] Sarah: No.

[00:50:50] Lacey Bowling: You’re not in charge of it. Yeah. When they get the clothes, you say, “That looks great.”

[00:50:53] And if I don’t say, “That looks great.” “Oh, you don’t like it?” And I’m like, “I, I was just saying that I was not going to wear that.” “And all I was saying was I think that... What I meant to say was I, it’s fi- it’s fine.” “Oh, it’s fine?” What I meant to say was- ... it’s, I think it’s great. I think it’s stunning.”

[00:51:13] I

[00:51:13] Sarah: do that. I do. I don’t get in caught up about clothes.

[00:51:16] Lacey Bowling: But I do. I’m an Enneagram 1, so better is on my mind all the time. I think that’s probably not the best to have in a mother because I see a lot of room for improvement. Yeah. Does not mean I see flaws. You can’t say it.

[00:51:26] Sarah: I do, though.

[00:51:27] Lacey Bowling: And I get in trouble.

[00:51:27] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, of course you do.

[00:51:28] Sarah: If I had girls... God, I hate to say God knew what he was doing. Yeah. because I do wish I had a daughter, but ooh, man. No. It’s just the teens are sensitive.

[00:51:36] Lacey Bowling: They’re very sensitive, and she’s got a lot of thoughts. But she can’t always put them in the correct place she can’t always say them. Because we’ve got to match our friends, and we’ve got to do a lot of things. Yeah. But I think she’s fantastic. I’m an Enneagram 4.

[00:51:50] Sarah: Okay.

[00:51:50] Lacey Bowling: So I’m always brooding. A little moody.

[00:51:53] Sarah: I go four in stress.

[00:51:54] Lacey Bowling: I bet you do

[00:51:55] Sarah: And I think I’m all alone, and I’m the only person that can solve the problem.

[00:51:58] Lacey Bowling: Yes. I am all alone and I am the only person that can solve as a general rule.

[00:52:03] Sarah: Oh, no. Where do you go in health?

[00:52:04] Lacey Bowling: Two I think.

[00:52:05] Sarah: You’re pretty for corporate ministry.

[00:52:06] Lacey Bowling: I am so caring.

[00:52:08] Sarah: You are.

[00:52:08] Lacey Bowling: You remember you were in Market House Theatre once. And you sang the song Slipping Through My Fingers. Yep. Now, that song will get me going. I will cry a little bit with that, just a little.

[00:52:17] Sarah: Just one single tear.

[00:52:18] Lacey Bowling: Just one single tear. One single tear. And then I’m like, “Okay, it’s time to snap back in.”

[00:52:21] Sarah: Okay. Put it back.

[00:52:22] Lacey Bowling: Get back in this. Yeah. But that’s it. That’s what I think, schoolbag in hand.

[00:52:26] Sarah: Oh. Now, my song is a song by Justin Roberts, who’s a children’s artist, called Giant Size Butterflies.

[00:52:32] Lacey Bowling: Never heard of it.

[00:52:33] Sarah: So sweet. We’ll put the link in the show notes.

[00:52:36] Lacey Bowling: Can my song not be in the show notes.

[00:52:38] Sarah: Yeah. Your song should be in the show notes too. The kid has butterflies for the first day of school.

[00:52:42] Lacey Bowling: Oh.

[00:52:42] Sarah: And the second verse is the parents talking about when they brought the child home from the hospital and they had butterflies.

[00:52:48] Lacey Bowling: They didn’t know what to do. Yeah, you didn’t know what to do.

[00:52:50] Sarah: How did it go so fast? Time is a thief.

[00:52:53] Lacey Bowling: That’s what they say.

[00:52:54] Sarah: And I believe I just want to say I believe them. When people are like, “The days are long and the years are short,” I’m like, “I know. I’m soaking it up.”

[00:52:59] Lacey Bowling: But I didn’t believe them at first. I was like, “My God today.”

[00:53:01] Sarah: I believed. Yes.

[00:53:03] Lacey Bowling: I didn’t.

[00:53:04] Sarah: I remember when Griffin was born, for some reason, I like really attached to the first week. I was like, “I got to really soak up this first week because once this week is over.

[00:53:13] Lacey Bowling: See, I was never like that as a parent.

[00:53:13] Sarah: Oh, I was. I knew that it was going to go fast, and I really tried to soak it up. And I thought if I did, it would go slower, and it didn’t. It still went so fast.

[00:53:20] Lacey Bowling: It still went the same? But don’t you feel a little bit like now because all the moms, do they like ask you stuff now?

[00:53:26] Sarah: Oh, yeah. They email me for parenting advice.

[00:53:27] Lacey Bowling: Not these moms. I love these moms. But like moms you know. Do they talk to you or do they--

[00:53:32] Sarah: Oh, no. Yeah. For sure. And I tell them, “It goes fast, man.” Especially I know they’re like, “Oh, my gosh.” And you know what I tell them? You know what I tell them? I’m like, Babies, you think it’s so high stakes if they have a sleep schedule or they breastfeed or they’re formula fed. I’m like, “You don’t know stakes.” Wait till they’re older.

[00:53:44] Lacey Bowling: People said to me, “If it doesn’t matter in five years, it doesn’t matter today.”

[00:53:46] Sarah: That’s good. That’s good. I like that.

[00:53:48] Lacey Bowling: And I liked that because if they draw on their leg, who cares? Who

[00:53:51] Sarah: Who cares?

[00:53:52] Lacey Bowling: Who cares?

[00:53:53] Sarah: You got to pick your battles, man.

[00:53:54] Lacey Bowling: That’s the truth.

[00:53:55] Sarah: Yes.

[00:53:55] Lacey Bowling: Mostly, who cares?

[00:53:57] Sarah: I do care a lot about a lot of things. Let’s be honest. I do have a lot of opinions, and I have a lot of cares.

[00:54:01] Lacey Bowling: No, I have a lot of opinions about a lot of things.

[00:54:03] Sarah: Yeah. And I do care about my kids. I have a vision for them. I’m not going to lie. And I’m sure they’re going to disrupt it.

[00:54:08] Lacey Bowling:  If it’s injustice, I’m There.

[00:54:10] Sarah: There you go. That’s an Enneagram 1 thing.

[00:54:13] Lacey Bowling: Oh.

[00:54:13] Sarah: Justice is a way Enneagram 1 thing.

[00:54:14] Lacey Bowling: I’m also a Libra. I don’t know how that fits.

[00:54:16] Sarah: I can’t put all the pieces together. It’s

[00:54:17] Lacey Bowling: It’s justice.

[00:54:18] Sarah: You could ask Gemini though. I bet it could put all the pieces together.

[00:54:23] Lacey Bowling: So anyway, she’s going to go and I’m excited for her.

[00:54:26] Sarah: I’m excited. I’m getting into the like I’ve really adapted to like I have enjoyed this phase. I’m excited for him. I really do feel like I’ve kind of processed a lot of the emotions. Now, I’m talking real big. We’ll see how when we start rolling through the final. It’s breakfast, someone’s breakfast. The last this, the last that. We’ll see.

[00:54:41] Lacey Bowling: Don’t you remember Wide Open Spaces by The Chicks?

[00:54:43] Sarah: Yeah. I sung that on my way to college. That was the year it was huge. Okay.

[00:54:46] Lacey Bowling: Now it’s its time.

[00:54:47] Sarah: I know. Dad says check the oil.

[00:54:49] Lacey Bowling: Nobody checks the oil anymore.

[00:54:51] Sarah: No, he has to. He has to go to a real special place and get that little Mini Cooper’s oil changed, let me tell you what.

[00:54:55] Lacey Bowling: A special place, you’re a four. Listen It’s time to let them go. They need wide open spaces.

[00:55:01] Sarah: But they are not going forever.

[00:55:04] Lacey Bowling: Yeah, they are.

[00:55:05] Sarah: No.

[00:55:06] Lacey Bowling: Yes, they are.

[00:55:07] Sarah: They’ll be back in the summer.

[00:55:08] Lacey Bowling: No, they’re not.

[00:55:09] Sarah: Yes, they will.

[00:55:10] Lacey Bowling: No.

[00:55:11] Sarah: Mine will.

[00:55:12] Lacey Bowling: I loved it out there.

[00:55:13] Sarah: We just talked about how they like- I loved it out there ... they, how they like their homes. You don’t think they’re going to come back?

[00:55:17] Lacey Bowling: I hope they don’t.

[00:55:20] Sarah: No, I want them back for the summers

[00:55:22] Lacey Bowling: she has stuff in every room of her home.

[00:55:24] Sarah: Oh.

[00:55:25] Lacey Bowling: I can’t handle that. Every morning I wake up, I have to pick up stuff in every single room.

[00:55:30] Sarah: You need to stop picking up and you need to make her pick up so she can start learning.

[00:55:32] Lacey Bowling: Then my house will be disgusting, and I cannot handle that.

[00:55:35] Sarah: No. I think, one time I was just talking to Griffin.

[00:55:37] Lacey Bowling: Also, don’t tell me what to do.

[00:55:40] Sarah: I was talking to Griffin about it and he was like mom, I want to move back to Paducah.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay. Then I don’t feel as upset about this.”

[00:55:46] Lacey Bowling: Oh. Never mind.