Is Elon Building or Destroying?

Discussion post for February 21, 2025

Destruction can be part of the building process; it certainly is a key part of Elon Musk’s approach to business and his new - legally ambiguous - role with DOGE. There is, however, a fine line between disruption and destruction. The tech mantra of “move fast and break things” can be dangerous, particularly when applied to the government. On today’s show, Sarah and Beth explore this idea and how the new Trump administration is letting Musk run full steam ahead.

Plus, they discuss the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy, most notably marked this week by Ukraine’s exclusion from the negotiating table with Russia. Outside of politics, Beth shares her new hack for managing her online shopping.

Topics Discussed

• Ukraine Excluded from Negotiations

• Is Elon Musk Building or Destroying Through DOGE?

• Outside of Politics: Online Shopping Strategies

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Episode Resources

• The Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders by Nathan Hodge (Amazon)

• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson (Amazon)

• A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently (The Ezra Klein Show)

Show Credits

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

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

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Episode Transcript

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

Beth [00:00:08] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics. If you are new to our show, welcome. We've been doing this for 10 years, and we have learned to take a different approach to the news. We don't chase headlines and we don't lean on outrage.

Beth [00:00:22] Doesn't mean we ignore our emotional reactions, we just tried to work through those together so that we can respond with curiosity and stay grounded and motivated, instead of anxious and depleted.

Sarah [00:00:33] And we're going to do that here for you today. We have both had very emotional reactions to the president attacking Ukraine. So we're going to work through that first. Then we're going to slow down and zoom out and talk about Doge and the federal government and whether we are building or destroying right now in America. And as always, we will end our episode with a little exhale what's on our mind Outside of Politics, and today it's our new approach to online shopping.

Beth [00:00:58] As with every episode, our goal is not to convince you of anything. It's to invite you along as we process the news and discuss our politics, so that you can do the same with the people in your lives. If you like our show, there is so much more for you on our Substack.

Sarah [00:01:12] Yes. Every morning from Monday through Thursday, I host Good Morning. It's a short summary of what's happening in the headlines. Thursdays is special. It's the Good News brief, and that's where I share positive trends, genuine good news that might have gotten missed. I don't do such and such town paid person medical bills-- not that that's not beautiful and important, but I really try to find good news articles that have broader impact. I just covered a great New York Times piece on the ways in which our juvenile incarceration rate has bottomed out and what led to that incredible breakthrough. So it's more along those lines on the Good News brief.

Beth [00:01:56] On Monday and Wednesday I host More to Say, where I spend 15 to 20 minutes digging beneath and around headlines so that hopefully we have more context and new questions and new ideas. As an example, in the past couple of weeks, I've covered everything from geothermal energy, to online dating, to corruption in the Trump administration. So it's wide ranging. I try to keep it fun and interesting and thoughtful, and the comments to those episodes are often just the most rewarding part of my week.

Sarah [00:02:25] Then on Thursday we come together for a spicy bonus episode of our show, and this one we lean a little bit more in the hot takes and also the outrage because, listen, we're human after all. We got to get it out somewhere. So that happens on Substack.

Beth [00:02:37] And if all that weren't enough, we've started recapping the new season of White Lotus because we needed a treat. We figured everyone else does, too.

Sarah [00:02:45] That sounds like a lot. It is. Our Substack is a little like a buffet. There's lots of options. You can take what you want and leave the rest. We have an amazing community there. You will learn just as much from the community in the comments as you do from us in the shows. I truly believe that. So please join us on Substack if you're interested. And now let's get to the show. We're going to talk about Ukraine. Beth, on Tuesday, the United States and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia to discuss the future of the war in Ukraine. Guess who was not at that meeting?

Beth [00:03:27] Ukraine. Ukraine was not at that meeting.

Sarah [00:03:29] No, Ukraine was not in that meeting nor were any leaders of Europe at that meeting. Completely excluded from this negotiation. Donald Trump had already spoken with Vladimir Putin the weekend before and since then has been-- I don't know how to describe it any other way, but attacking Vladimir Zelensky. And the people of Ukraine is calling him a dictator. They're trying to extort Ukraine. It's the only way I can think to describe it with this agreement that they'll have to pay back $500 billion. And I have to be honest, of all the things the Trump administration has done in the last 30 days, this is one of the ones that has upset me the most.

Beth [00:04:14] Why do you think that is?

Sarah [00:04:17] Because the cost here is an order of magnitude different than anything we were talking about in the United States. I'm not saying that there is not suffering. This is not the suffering olympics, okay? I know that with the brute force reordering of the federal government, there has been enormous suffering, particularly among our federal workers, much less among migrants and asylum seekers who are being detained, basically incarcerated without their documents. This is all horrendous. But we are talking about 80,000 people in Ukraine sacrificing their lives for the cause of freedom. They have lost 10 million people from their country, either due to occupation or people fleeing as refugees over the last 10 years because of Russian aggression. And this is a country that has given so much and sacrificed so much. And to see him speak about them this way, to be an American and be represented by someone who is just abdicating any sense of responsibility to people who are fighting for freedom, it's just so hard to stomach.

Beth [00:05:58] I have so many conflicting feelings about what's happening right now, because I really have been working at being open minded about any negotiating approach that would change the status quo here. This war of attrition, as you said, have has cost Ukraine so much. It is costing the Russian people so much. And I try to think of the Russian people as distinct from Vladimir Putin. Now North Korean soldiers are being sent to just die. They're just being sent off to die in this fight. And, again, the North Korean people distinct from Kim Jong Un very much so. So as much as I have kind of encoded in my neural pathways because of my age and life experiences, a pretty neocon approach to foreign policy, I'm trying to open my mind to the fact that we're three years in and this is stuck.

[00:06:52] So I am trying to be open minded to solutions I would not have generated that might get us unstuck. I think that's great, but you can do that without trying to rewrite what happened here. To say that Ukraine was the initial aggressor is either ignorant or compromised. That's just wrong. And to talk about Zelensky, who is the closest thing the world has had to a heroic political figure in a long time, as though he is a dictator and a grifter is a form of projection that makes me lose my mind. So I really agree with you that this is so consequential, in so many layers, the impact that it is going to have on our relationship with Europe, the way it broadcasts that America is an unreliable global partner. And worse than unreliable, we also will turn into a propaganda machine that does the bidding of autocrats throughout the world. It's bad.

Sarah [00:07:54] I agree with you. I'm open to different negotiation tactics. Both of us, I think, spoke honestly about what happened between Israel and Gaza and the fact that the Biden administration and the Trump administration, to my surprise, worked together to unstick it and get something done. But this is not that. These are bad negotiation tactics. You have the administration officials going Ukraine doesn't have a place; oh no, Ukraine has a place in negotiations. The underlings, because there's no policy and there's certainly no diplomatic process you go through before you speak, as in previous administrations, are just popping off, thinking they're following him. But then he weaves then they have to follow behind. And so it makes us look weak. Much less announcing. I mean, this is just basic negotiation 101. You announce to everyone that you're in a hurry, that these are your goals, this is what you want. This is just terrible negotiation tactics that clearly Vladimir Putin took advantage of if not, I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, I don't know, throw in some money in Trump crypto coin to back it up. I don't know how else to justify the meanness, the hard swerve.

[00:09:27] There is some here that is recognizable, right? He always is hard on our allies since 2016. This is a consistent pattern from Donald Trump. I'm going to go in and I'm going to go after the people who were supposed to be on my side, because this is about a transactional approach, not about a coalition. Recognizable. And he always seemingly props up the enemies to make himself look strong. But in the long term, are we better off because he pulled us out of the Iran nuclear deal? No, they're closer than they ever were. He gets a short term pop, but it doesn't actually make us safer or make us stronger, or make our enemies weaker in the long term. Russia was going into this week. They've sacrificed 200,000 people as basically cannon fodder when they didn't have a lot of population growth to depend on to begin with. Their economy is suffering. They were not in a strong position, but they are now thanks to us. I'm not saying that Ukraine was in a strong position. It wasn't. Zelensky acknowledged that. He acknowledged, like, I understand we're not going back to where we were territorially. We are going to have to cede some territory. But what is this? Again, I'm open to different approaches, but this is the same bullshit that leaves us weaker than we started.

Beth [00:10:58] It's also not isolationist.

Sarah [00:11:00] Right.

Beth [00:11:02] So if you think we spent too much money, we should stop spending money. Then I think he would say you guys have to work this out. We can't broker this deal for you. We can't focus on you. We're done. Nothing about his foreign policy right now, though, is isolationist. I don't see how it's America first because this is taking more responsibility. If you want Europe to step up to the plate, then why don't you say these European leaders need to get in a room with Vladimir Putin and figure this out. Put that pressure on them. He has the microphone to do it. He has more than the bully pulpit. He's so good at capturing the world's attention. But if he truly wanted America out of it, he could get America out of it. That's different.

Sarah [00:11:40] Instead, we're building guys a logo. It's the opposite. Every time he gets a microphone it's the opposite of what he claims he was going to do- putting America first. In no universe is putting America first volunteering to rebuild Gaza.

Beth [00:11:53] So I try to think about when he came of age in political awareness and what are the salient moments in his life. And I think that he shares with Vladimir Putin an admiration for the Soviet Union.

Sarah [00:12:06] But that doesn't make sense with his age. That's the part that's the most confusing to me. He's a boomer. He lived through the Cold War. That's so confusing to me.

Beth [00:12:13] I know, but the part of the Cold War that I think appeals to him is that there was a great power struggle because Russia was also great and America was great. Now, look, I don't think there's any question where Ronald Reagan would stand on this issue. If you try to ask yourself, what would Ronald Reagan do here? It is not what Donald Trump is doing. Ronald Reagan probably would have put Americans on the ground in Ukraine to fight the Russians. So this is not conservative to me and it is not directly tied to that period. But I think he admires empires and that's the way he's talking about America right now. When he talks about potentially using the military in Panama, when he talks about buying Greenland, it's expansionist. It is growing America's role in the world- not contracting it. And it's just doing it in a way that is more aligned with Putin's approach than with anything that we've seen in my lifetime at least from an American president.

Sarah [00:13:11] But they are bragging about undoing Ronald Reagan's legacy. I've read interviews from Trump administration officials that are like our biggest enemy is Reagan policy. Like that's what we're trying to undo. So they are going after that. And to me it's just so mind blowing that you would brag about negotiating the release of an American from Russia. They were held for years unjustly in Russia and then turn and say Russia was really wronged in this? You just had to negotiate an American out of their prison. Do you remember last week? What are we doing?

Beth [00:13:56] And Kudos for doing it. Thank God they did. I'm so happy that an American is home. Credit where due. But you're right. To not have clarity about who we're dealing with and to try to deceive the whole world to rewrite what happened in Ukraine, it's very consistent with the rewrite of January 6th here. He has to tell a new story because his ideas alone don't survive scrutiny. So they have to rewrite the story in order to have their ideas pass muster. And I would love to sit in a room with Marco Rubio and say, "Tell me what you really think. How do you feel about being an instrument of this?"

Sarah [00:14:37] Yeah. How are the Cubans that voted for Donald Trump going to feel about this alliance with Russia? I'm so confused. And, look, here's the thing. I think the other reason this is so upsetting to me is because foreign policy is just the president's purview. There's nothing really we can do about it until there's a different president. But Donald Trump came to power by doing what you were talking about at the beginning, by upending the assumptions and stating some realities about U.S. foreign policy that Americans were feeling and that no one in either party was articulating. And I really hope that there are people who have ambitions to either be the next Republican nominee for president or the next Democratic nominee for president, or the next independent nominee for president (let's dream big here) that say this is what foreign policy is. Not the whims of a man who responds only to the last strong man he had on the phone. Because this is just all driven by transactionalism and strength, because there's so much inconsistency even within this administration.

[00:15:59] Like you said, you have the isolationist- we're going to put America first. You have the expansionist, and then you have the people going after USAID using progressive justification for America's role in the world, going after America's soft colonialism and this truly very liberal critique of America's foreign policy and using that to justify the dismantling of USAID all within one administration. That is not a consistent foreign policy. It's wide open for not just critique, but dangerous situations. And so just like with domestic policy, just like with so much we've been talking about, what do we want it to look like? What do we want America's role in the world to look like? What is the next iteration of American foreign policy going to look like? I don't know if Americans know the answer to that. And so I think that's the tough one. I think we don't know. We don't really know who we want to be in the world anymore. Maybe it's not for the next ambitious person, but maybe it's for all of us to think about.

Beth [00:17:11] And that's why I try to be open minded. I truly am more comfortable with investing in defensive systems than offensive systems. That's more aligned with my values. To say how can America be safe no matter what's happening in the world? Versus be the most powerful, have the biggest guns, have the biggest nuclear weapons, have the biggest arsenal to go out and be on offense in the world. I am okay with that. If we are going to go more isolationist I think that that's something that I could learn to live with and that a lot of Americans would be comfortable with. I think people are tired of fighting fractional wars where we send some troops out into terribly dangerous situations, but we don't want to go too far and we don't want the public to really understand it, and we want to keep the sacrifice contained. I think there is a lot about generations now of foreign policy that hasn't served the country and it doesn't serve the world. So I'm here for a rewrite, but that doesn't feel like what this is. This feels like it is walking us and the entire world into some very dangerous situations. And it feels like the United States is being played while doing tremendous damage to a people who have shown strength and a willingness to fight for democracy in a way that we haven't in a long time.

Sarah [00:18:26] Well, that's my question to you. Because what I'm coming around to as I'm asking myself, what comes next? Where are we in this turnover in this new cycle? And is there a vision articulated that I think we can follow? The place I keep coming back to, and it's a place I was in in 2019 when we went on a Nuanced Nation tour and did these little sweet Google slide presentations as part of our show, I just think America is ready for bigness and I think Donald Trump is a cheap imitation of bigness. I think we need to put a lot of things on the table. that would have seemed bananas even two or three years ago. When we did it in 2019, mine was to uncap the house. I think we need more house of representative members; 435 people is not enough to be a responsive representation for 330 million. That's one of them. As you sat there and talked about our foreign policy and we're asking what comes next, is what comes next mandatory service for Americans? Would that be a big solution to what ails us to say, okay, it's time that we had mandatory service. We talked about mandatory citizen service, like mandatory volunteering like the AmeriCorps for everybody. But should a part of that be mandatory military service?

Beth [00:19:59] It's not my vision because I would like to see our military less engaged in the world, not more. I read a book a number of years ago about how often we are sending our military on what are essentially humanitarian missions. And the phrase that really jumped out at me at the beginning of the book was they are handing out water bottles and carrying AR-15 and it doesn't make sense. I think the book was called Armed Humanitarians, something like that. And people die in those missions. I would like a rethinking of what the military's responsibility is because I think the military, like a number of institutions, has been asked to be too many things. And I think that if every American had to do some type of service, the incentive would be for the military's responsibility to continue growing. So that's not the direction that I would want to go.

Sarah [00:20:55] But would it grow or would it clarify? Because the hard reality, what we say all the time, is those situations where people need water bottles where there is famine or conflict, they affect us. They lead to migration. They lead to upending of social orders that do not stay contained. So the idea that we have no role to play in the world as the world's most powerful country and military, to me it doesn't quite add up either. It's not pragmatic. What are we going to do if someone starts committing genocide? That's the question that hangs over all of this even though people have and do and are right now. So I just wonder if we're talking about a responsiveness, is it one of the big issues that we're so far removed from this? And isn't one of the ways to prevent that is to make it very real to all Americans?

[00:21:55] And maybe what it is it's when it's more responsive and people see it up close, then you're having people making decisions in the military who I know where allergic to DEI, but you had mandatory service. It's a much more diverse-- even though the military already is much more diverse in so many institutions. I'm not saying that they are terrible at this, but you get mandatory service, then you have a lot more congressional members. You have a lot more local politicians. You have teachers. You have everybody who understands either why that armed humanitarianism doesn't work or why it does. You know what I'm saying? I do wonder if that disconnection is at the core of our inconsistent foreign policy.

Beth [00:22:41] I hear that. I would want to think about it a lot more. I am not sold on it. I would rather invest in a service program that lets people serve their country in a lot of different ways. I just think anything that gets us out of ourselves would help tremendously. And I think our foreign policy is damaged by a lack of geography education. There are lots of pieces that I think factor into us as a public really not understanding what our commitments are in the world and who we want to be in the world. I think it's a project to say what is America's role in the world? Because you're absolutely right; I don't want to withdraw from the world. I think that's dangerous. In the most selfish respect, I think that's dangerous. And I also think it's ungenerous and inconsistent with my values and what I think are a lot of shared values in this country.

[00:23:28] But I think right now we are kind of lost on what our role is in the world and we decide crisis to crisis. And you can't make good decisions crisis to crisis. I want a rethinking of all of this, and I think there will be opportunities for that because of the ways that the Trump administration will disrupt what we've done before. And again I'm trying to keep my mind open to where some of those ideas will be good. They will not all be bad. I've said before and I will say again, I read all of project 2025, the Foreign Policy and Defense section was, I thought, extremely compelling. It was extremely compelling. I still would love to talk to the author of that section, because I think they are getting a number of things right. I think they are getting this approach to Ukraine, this specific approach to Trump's retelling of the story of what happened here gravely wrong.

Sarah [00:24:21] Well, that's a good transition into our next conversation. We want to talk about what is the Trump administration doing? Are they building or are they destroying? Much like everyone else our team has been in a constant conversation about Elon Musk and DOGE and the Trump administration's approach to the federal government. And we had a pretty extensive conversation on whether Elon himself is a builder or is a destroyer. I don't think his approach to any of his businesses-- I mean, at this point they're so vast and so diverse. From PayPal to Tesla to Space X to Starlink to Neuralink. I don't know if you can sum up his approach easily, but I was on the firm side of he has built some things. He has absolutely built some things. Now, I think his approach to building begins with destruction and demon mode, but I think arguing that Elon is all smoke and mirrors and has never built anything is inaccurate. But you've read the big treatise on Elon. You read the Walter Isaacson biography. So what's your perspective?

Beth [00:25:54] Well, I think all builders also have to be destroyers, so it is not a binary. And I think that he is quite comfortable with destroying to build his vision. I do think Elon Musk has vision. It is telling to me that we kick this segment off just by saying Elon and DOGE and everybody knows what that means. Something that did not exist a few months ago is now in the daily lexicon. He is excellent at capturing attention. He is excellent at moving what is just an idea in his head to something that is concrete and living and happening. He makes ideas go from unthinkable to inevitable. And a lot of people who've been really successful in creating things are like that. But you don't get any building without a whole lot of destruction along the way. I say none of that as an endorsement to his approach, but I want to be honest about the fact that he has just created a lot of things.

[00:27:03] We bought a Tesla model three when the first cars were coming out that were affordable for normal people. And to see the charging stations, it's not the car that impresses me, it's that in Kentucky we can drive almost anywhere and hit a Tesla Supercharger and the car maps that out for us and moves us from one place to another. That takes a lot of vision. That is a project that I don't know many other companies, institutions, governments that could have accomplished at that speed and with that efficiency. A lock got broken in the process. A whole lot are broken in the process. But still he made something. And I think that's his appeal to a lot of people. Yes, he breaks all the eggs, but he makes the omelet. And I'm ready for someone to make the omelet.

Sarah [00:27:54] Can I take us on a side tangent really quickly that, though?

Beth [00:27:58] I love a side tangent.

Sarah [00:27:59] When you're talking about vision, I cannot stop thinking about I think it was the Wall Street Journal piece about Elon and Sam Altman from OpenAI, another company he was instrumental in founding. These two are in a death field right now. But there was this reporting that when they first met and started working together, they would go to these dinners and have long conversations about the apocalypse and how they thought basically it was inevitable that AI would take over and destroy the planet and how they were going to get off and where they were going to go. And I thought, what? Wait, what? So his vision is fueled by the fact that he thinks these companies he's a part of are going to destroy humanity. He is clearly it used to be climate change. That's kind of actually where-- I don't know, find some hope is probably not the right word. I think over years of engaging more and more with Elon Musk than I would prefer, that he's just apocalyptic. It's either climate change or it's demographics or it's artificial intelligence. But he is inclined to apocalyptic thinking.

Beth [00:29:17] Absolutely.

Sarah [00:29:18] To think the vision is just that there's a ticking clock over his head at an given moment. And maybe that's just the fuel for demon mode and everything else. That seems very different to me than Donald Trump's approach to the world. Although, what does he care if it's apocalyptic? He's 78.

Beth [00:29:41] A lot of what the Isaacson biography made clear to me is that Elon Musk grew up where violence was a daily reality of life. And he has seen an amount of brutality that I personally cannot touch. I cannot relate to.

Sarah [00:30:00] And like world ending violence, like earth shattering violence. Not just crime. Violence in South Africa, a different level.

Beth [00:30:09] Yes. A range from the personal to the world ending. Like a range of violence. A constant reality of violence. The sense that nature itself is brutal. And so I think that if you have that in your neural pathways, then the consequences of the way that he is going in and allowing federal workers to be treated, for example, right now just doesn't register as a real consequence. Again, I'm not excusing it and he's not doing this alone. And it's wrong and it's awful. And it is shattering the faith of people who are incredible citizens of this country. Incredible patriots. It's terrible. Absolutely. And so please don't hear any of this as an excuse or an apology or a boosting of Ellen. I'm just trying to understand because here is the most powerful man in the world right now, what can we understand about him? And what I understand about him is that he believes in destruction as a fact of life, and he trusts himself to problem-solve and build through it. And that building path, I do think he believes in his bones, takes him eventually to some kind of colony in space.

Sarah [00:31:36] Yeah. That's what was so interesting to me; is this contrast between Jeff Bezos approach, which is we want to save this place and Elon's approach, which is no, this is lost. We have to get off this planet. That's so interesting to me to build so much and particularly to be concerned with the federal government, what does that have to do with getting you to Mars? I am trying to understand the motivations and the strategy and the vision, because that's the only way you can respond to something that you feel is wrong. Democratic politics is about persuasion. You have to persuade your fellow citizens that another vision is better for them and their families. I think what I've been responding to, particularly with regards to this upending of the federal government, is chaos is always an opportunity.

[00:32:32] I'm a person with a very high threshold for change- way higher than most people. I understand that about myself. But as you heard me say before, I'm up for big ideas. They don't scare me. It's not scary to say, but what if we just got rid of this department? Okay, you got my attention. What's your plan for that? I do think that we have been stuck for a long time. And this isn't a character judgment. This is how human beings and institutions and societies and nation states-- this is the cyclical thing that happens. It gets bad enough. People call out for change. They get the change. The status quo becomes a place of comfort for the majority of people and so they're going to protect it. And I think that's what we've had for so long with the federal government. Look, let me just confess, almost always, in this reporting about DOGE and Elon Musk, something will come up in the reporting that they're either reporting on or someone's correcting what they said or whatever it is, and I'll go, oh my God, I had no idea.

[00:33:40] Who knew that existed? Why are we doing that? And I am a person who studies politics. I'm a person who worked for the United States government as a Senate aide. I am not necessarily shocked by the breadth and depth of the federal government. It's just like I was reading a thing about the Presidio National Trust and how the federal government runs the park. And you just get into that and you're like, what are we doing here? Not because I think any of these purposes are bad, but I do think it's bad for democracy when they are so big and so wide that literally no American, including the Americans running the federal government, understand at all. What we built was something that was just waiting for someone to come in like Elon and blow it up because there's no way for anyone to protect it. It's too big. When it gets too big, it's easy to attack and that means it's hard to protect.

Beth [00:34:41] So when you read about Space X in the Isaacson biography-- and I'm sorry to keep citing it, but it is the most instructive point of reference that I have right now. It helped me imagine that the entire experience of dealing with NASA has convinced Elon that the government is an instrument of constraint only, not progress. And I think a lot of what he's doing right now is informed by his sense that the government is an instrument of constraint and we need to get it out of the way and unleash people who can see to the next thing. I think that is mixed in with his parenting experience and the transgender child and the public backlash to his perspective on that. There's a lot going on here. I think he's a person who probably is just constantly going through a lot of things and not dealing with them in a healthy way, and yet he does a lot and he can see a lot.

[00:35:45] Where I relate to some of this is recognizing that common sense (they like to talk about common sense) often dies in bigness. As you were just saying, as things get bigger, it is harder to say, well, you know what I meant. No, because now there are 6000 people who read your memo, and they are not all going to know what you meant. There's is no way in bigness to have a vibe of, well, let's just do what makes sense. And so we get things that don't make sense. My 14-year-old daughter just got her first job for the summer. Filling out the tax paperwork for a 14 year old summer job does not make sense. Nothing about it makes sense. The process to get a passport does not make sense. There are so many places where we interact with the government now, and it is slow and it is unwieldy. It feels purposefully hard.

[00:36:42] The ease with which we can do almost everything else in our lives highlight that our government is slow and unwieldy and purposefully hard in a lot of places. And you know who knows that better than anybody else? The people who work in it every day, who would love to fix it and get constrained in a bunch of different ways by things that they cannot fix. So I get where he's coming from, and I get that he trusts himself in a way that he doesn't trust anyone else. And I think that pride goes before the fall always. And I think that the way he's doing this is going to have generational damage. They're not going to be able to rehire all the people they accidentally fired.

Sarah [00:37:27] Yeah.

Beth [00:37:32] Just like the world is going to decide that America is not a reliable partner, a lot of talented people are going to decide that the government is an unreliable employer and it's not worth it. And I don't think those people are going to be rushing to work for the tech oligarchs who made it this way. So this is shaking things up, and I think some good will come of it, and I think a lot of difficulty will come of it. Which is sad because as some of the Republicans who are trying to very delicately nudge him in a different direction are saying he could do a lot of good if he would slow down and have a tiny bit of humility about this.

Sarah [00:38:12] Because they're not really still clear on what he's supposed to be doing. I can't decide if he's supposed to be making it more efficient, or supposed to be saving money, or supposed to be cutting the federal workforce, or supposed to be doing all three. Because all three seems like a tall order, and they seem to want to save money until someone points out you can't save money and you're going to get nowhere fast at these numbers if you're trying to save the amount of money you want to save. So it feels like the firing people became the goal, as opposed to saving money through salaries. We're just trying to shrink the federal workforce. That has now become the entire goal. Whether it saves us money or not, we just want to shrink the federal workforce. And then when someone points out that could make many, many things less efficient; why don't you pay attention to some of the processes that are already not that efficient and are going to be made exponentially harder when there are thousands and thousands of positions left unfilled, then we talk sideways around that goal as well.

[00:39:16] So it is frustrating because I do think there's so many particularly software issues where departments don't have the same software. There was a great piece in the times where the guy said when you heard Elon going on about the mine, it's real up in there where they store people's retirement records. And they take 60 days to process the federal workers retirement because all the systems are mismatched. That feels like a place that Elon could apply his expertise. But then then we're being told he's not even in charge of it. He's not a government employee. He's a special government employee. What they're saying on Truth Social, what they're saying to reporters versus what they're saying in court are also completely different from each other.

Beth [00:39:58] And I think that's because the government does still have some real constraints baked in. And when they go to court, they run up against those constraints. And so they backtrack. When Donald Trump is flying around on Air Force One with Elon and doing interviews with Elon in the Oval Office, it's something different than what gets put on paper where he's just a special government employee. He's only going to work 130 days this year, and he's going to file all these disclosures. Don't worry. Because there are real restraints baked into our system, and we're going to test all of those over the next couple of years. You're so right about not having identified goals. And one problem with the bigness in federal government is that there are so many agencies that there can't just be one goal. It would be nice to say we would like to shrink the discretionary budget by X percentage this year. But when you get into the details of that, it's extremely hard and you see that playing out among Republican senators saying but not my state.

[00:41:02] What my state is doing is important. We got here for a reason. I think that's the hard thing to acknowledge the status quo always is working for someone or it wouldn't be the status quo. And so unwinding all of this is going to take time and care and a vision. It should be unwound in a lot of places. We are doing things backwards in a lot of places. We have programs that really served someone when they started that probably should be revisited now. We have things we're not doing that we probably should be doing. I had an experience this week in my house. I've started using Claude more. Claude is like ChatGPT from anthropic, a different company, and I work with Claude a lot because I'm trying to teach myself how to use artificial intelligence. It's not going anywhere and I don't want to be left behind. And this week I realized I could not hire a writing coach that's better than Claude. It is the best, most detailed, thoughtful feedback on my writing that I have ever gotten anywhere.

Sarah [00:42:09] Wow.

Beth [00:42:09] I could not hire a person who does this as well as AI does. And that's weird and it's a little unsettling. It's also extremely helpful, and it tells me there's tremendous opportunity to change the way that we do things everywhere. Tremendous opportunity. I just wish they would get to it and see the people in the process as partners instead of as necessarily obstacles. There are people in the CDC who would get excited about those ideas. You're telling me that we can do this more efficiently? Hooray! You're telling me that we can start to incorporate new technology? Amazing. And instead they're just calling them Marxist and communist and lazy and useless and shoving them aside. The very people who could combine what they know with what he knows to great effect. It's a tragedy.

Sarah [00:43:05] Here's where I keep bumping up against the edges of my own brain. First, I want to say what I think I've learned from them that we should adopt. The we in opposition, resistance, Democratic Party, whatever. When you are protecting the institutions, when you're protecting the status quo, there are so many constituencies that you're looking out for. I think this is really what hamstrung the Biden administration. There was just too many constituencies. You cannot think big-- you can think big but you can't act big if you're looking out for climate activists and union organizers and social justice organizations and tech entrepreneur. Somebody is going to get left behind. Elon was one of them. They hurt his feelings because they didn't invite him to the electric car summit because they didn't want to piss off the union people because Elon's pretty anti-union. So you cannot act big without pissing people off. They don't care.

[00:44:14] They don't care. It's like a superpower they have. They act big because they don't care what Republican senator from the great state of Alabama is going to get mad because they're cutting federal funding, even though that's a huge source of Alabama's income. They don't care. They just say this is it. This is what we're doing. And I think what they're showing is the American people are hungry for that. Even the farmers. I've seen a lot of these videos where people say I'm a big Trump supporter or I've heard the reporting from the Venezuelan community who says, we supported Trump, but he didn't mean us. But I haven't heard anybody say I hate him; I'm a Democrat. Now have you? Everybody's like I'm still on board. I just thought he was going to think about me a little more clearly. There's a lot of power in saying we're going to do this, consequences be damned.

Beth [00:45:02] That's what I mean about every builder is also a destroyer. So I think one unfortunate thing that's happening in a lot of the postmortem for Democrats is that by saying there were too many constituencies, it sounds like you're saying and those constituencies are terrible. It's not wrong to have climate activists. It is also a fact that climate activists disagree about the path forward in so many respects, that you end up in litigation over how to build clean energy. You're trying to build something to deal with existential problems and people are going, but that's going to take a lot of water and that's going to displace a certain species. And it's true. Everybody has a point. When you decide to build something, some things are going to get destroyed in the process every single time. And so I do think you're right that the appeal of Trump, in many ways, is clarity about what he wants to build and a decision to just keep moving forward and not be constrained by other voices.

Sarah [00:46:08] It's so powerful he doesn't even have to achieve it. That's how powerful that attitude is. He's not a great builder in his personal life and definitely not in his first term. Now, he seems to have learned some things in the second term at least about the destroying part of building. But he's not even that good at that. It's so appealing. It's so intoxicating. It's so impactful politically he doesn't even have to deliver and he can change his mind a million times. But the idea that we're just going to do it- action. I think people are so hungry for action. And where I keep bumping into the edges of my brain is a new vision for the federal government. Because in so many areas, like I just articulated with the mandatory service, I think we need bigness. I think it's time to go big. I think it's time to build big. I think it's time to include people in a big way, I'm ready for bigness. I'm ready for some big solutions that make people real uncomfortable because they're so outside the norm of what we thought we could do. And I can't cross that or make that square with a federal government that I do believe was too big.

[00:47:24] You know me since we started this podcast, I was the gas in the car on the federal government. Government can solve problems. Government can solve problems. And now I'm like, okay, but wait, where did we go wrong here? How do I match this bigness with the fact that I think it got too big in so many ways? And I think it's the responsiveness. I think it's the feedback, the close to the ground impact of what's happening. Because what you hear a lot from these organizations and ministry of departments, dedicated public servants who believe in what they do, is like even on the ground they could see how their impact wasn't what they wanted it to be. They had the feedback and they couldn't do anything with it. And I think that's where we're missing it. And I don't think Ellen's going to get us any closer to that. I don't think DOGE is going to get us any closer to that. They're just destroying things right now. And even though I do think Elon has a record of building some things in the wake of that, he also seems (I'll put this kindly) highly distractible. And I think this is a long term vision. I don't even see a long term vision with these companies he's built that are very impactful. So I think we need a long term vision. Okay, if we don't want this federal government, what kind do we want? Same with the foreign policy.

Beth [00:48:59] I think that's a really hard question. And I think you're right that it is very hard to square what is politically necessary with what is politically wise in the long term. I was telling you in another conversation about Kentucky sports radio going to UK's campus and asking students to identify people by picture. And they all knew who Dave Portnoy was, the Barstool Sports guy, and almost none of them knew who Andy Beshear, our governor, was. And that tells me that even though we have really big government, it is not relevant to people. So what I've been thinking about is how can government be relevant in a positive way, whether it's city government or state government or national government. Because right now, if I'm honest, most of my experiences with government are experiences of annoyance, expense and constraint.

Sarah [00:49:54] Yeah.

Beth [00:49:56] So how can we have experiences of government at any level that feels like a runway for you to take off and do your best work and live your best life and create economic opportunity and create art and beauty and music and all the things that make life good. How can government facilitate that instead of constraining it? And I don't see a whole lot of vision for that anywhere right now. I think Josh Shapiro gets close to that when he talks about we want you to be able to come through any door and get what you need from state government. So I want to hear more thinking in that direction, because I don't know how the Democratic Party competes with the clarity of Trump until it decides we're going to let some things go in order to not just rebrand our party, but rebrand people's experiences with government at pretty much every level.

Sarah [00:50:50] Well, and I think Wes Moore, same thing with the bridge, and Josh Shapiro with the interstate. But they shouldn't have to be emergencies for us to get there. And I think that responsiveness, the relevancy it's not going to-- I'm going to get a little teary. It's not going to come from just one person. This mandatory service there's something of this that's really caught me, because it's going to take all of us. It's going to take what we experienced post-World War two, which was an entire generation of people who had on the ground experience with their government. And so there was trust because it wasn't just this veneer. That's all Trump is; it's a veneer of change. It's a veneer of trust. It's a veneer of responsiveness. And the paradox of that, of what he offers but doesn't deliver but still is a source of political strength, there's something there. People want a purpose. They want something to believe in, not just something to critique.

[00:52:07] They want a government. That's why they brand everything with this America is back, this wash of patriotism. Because people want that, but all they're doing is. Consolidating. Just like I don't think in China or Russia or Turkey or Hungary, that authoritarianism is any long term path to strength. It's all so brittle. What they're doing is brittle. If they're building anything, it's so brittle because it's about one guy. I was thinking to the party of it all, we talk about it's just Trump. But Trump's power over the last 10 years has been his ability to take over the Republican Party. It is built on a foundation of people power. It's because of the Republican Party. If at any point, particularly the second impeachment, they had turned and said, enough is enough-- still, to this day, I think if the Republican Party said enough is enough, it would crumble. It is brittle.

Beth [00:53:26] I agree.

Sarah [00:53:27] But there's always some truth in the paradox, right? That there are some people power there. There is an appeal to strength within our institutions. There is an appeal to participation in our institutions. But it's all coming from him and coming from Elon, this cheap veneer.

Beth [00:53:47] Okay, so I want to push into this a little bit from the other side because I think that's really well said. I think that there is a veneer from Democrats or the establishment, which I do think Trump voters are against Republicans as much as Democrats.

Sarah [00:54:07] The hardcore Trump voters. Probably not the middle, but yeah.

Beth [00:54:11] I think there has been a veneer of help and protection from the other side, too. So I think about my friend who has a child with severe disabilities navigating the structures that have been built and sold by politicians as protection for families like hers, has within the school system and now within the legal system cost thousands of dollars. Enormous expense at every turn just trying to get what her child needs. She has been treated with a lot of hostility as though she is an adversary instead of a constituent. And I think that's a lot of people's experience with government, with systems that are supposed to be for them. Democrats, in partnership with some Republicans, have built systems that are not that brittle. They are like iron clad, and they've kept a lot of people out, and they haven't been responsive to changes, and they haven't updated and modernized and haven't listened to the experiences that people have with them. The entire legal system is like this. I believe in the rule of law, but man, I don't want to be sued.

[00:55:33] I don't want to sue somebody. Because that process is so slow and miserable and expensive, and you are treated so poorly in it by design. I was trained as a lawyer to treat people poorly, as adversaries, because that's what zealous advocacy means. We have built systems-- there are veneers being built I think by Trump, I think you're right, that are brittle, that are going to come apart, that don't actually accomplish what the goal is being sold as. But man, that is true of everything that came before, too. And the problem is it's not brittle enough. It hasn't changed enough. It hasn't moved enough. And that's why I think this moment requires something so different than defense from people in opposition to Trump. Because there is a lot that happens every single day in the system that is indefensible. And it's important to be honest about that. To try to earn back people's trust and have ideas about what to do about it. But don't sound like you need a master's degree to follow them. I appreciated the conversation that Ezra Klein just had with Jake Auchincloss

Sarah [00:56:48] I was about to say the same thing.

Beth [00:56:50] That is not a conversation that the average person can follow. A value added tax discussion is not going to get us out of this. They're not bad ideas. I can agree in a lot of ways, but policy has become something so insular and so limited in terms of who can participate in it. And that's what we've got to work our way through here.

Sarah [00:57:12] Well, I was going to cite it because when you said we have made mistakes, I really appreciated that he was like we were wrong about school closures and we should apologize to people. Thank you. That's helpful. That's a helpful thing to hear from a politician.

Beth [00:57:25] I'm not trying to be critical. He was great in a number of ways. Like I said, I don't even disagree with a lot of it. But that conversation to me epitomized how removed-- that is why people know Dave Portnoy, not the governor of Kentucky. You know what I mean?

Sarah [00:57:39] To the iron clad nature of the federal government, again, the truth is in the paradox. Yes and clearly when that started because they're tearing it apart without even trying. A lot of this was just built on agreement. Gentlemen's agreements, including, apparently, some of our constitutional structure. There's a part of, again, all this reporting on the federal government that I think-- I know other people feel this way. I think they hear these things, these departments, and they hear these jobs within the federal government even, and they think that sounds important. I didn't even know it existed. Nobody asked me if I wanted to do that job. You know what I'm saying? Like whole ways of being that people feel completely excluded from. They're not necessarily disagreeing that it's bad work, but I think there's a resentment of like this is a whole universe that I didn't even know existed. I didn't know there was a job to do this. I didn't even know this was a thing our government did. No one asked me if I wanted to contribute and be a part of that. I think that builds the resentment that it's like there's a second United States of America that some people get to participate that some people don't even know exists.

Beth [00:59:06] Which is crazy in a country where public school is historically available. How is it that we have public schools and still a universe of opportunity within the government that so many people don't know about?

Sarah [00:59:24] Listen, I take that critique as a Democrat. I think it's completely fair. We have become so laser focused on protecting that we were also not building. We were also not building including anything sturdy on which to protect the populations we claimed to care about the most. We were protecting culture. We were policing language and the people we were trying to protect, from asylum seekers to transgender children, are less safe. They are less safe. We should be asking very difficult questions about why that is so, instead of doubling down on those approaches. I know people are tired already in our audience of hearing me say that. We got an email that said, it feels like you were just yelling at us or scolding us. It's because I'm yelling at myself. I have people in my life in those populations that I feel like I have failed, who are less safe, who feel less protected. And so I am asking myself those very difficult questions. And I am pushing so hard, like I said, against the edges of my own experience, my own expertise, my own brain to say what will work? What comes next? It's hard.

[01:01:25] It was much easier to just critique, to just point out the problems. That's an easy thing to do. It's painful in its own way. But having conversations about the problems isn't getting them solved. And so I don't want to do that anymore. I want to push. I want to struggle. I want to fight. It's that good girl trap, right? You don't try because you don't want to fail. You don't try to write the thing. You don't try to make the thing. You don't try to do anything because you don't want to fail. And so we were protecting things we knew we were good at. As a valedictorian, I'm very familiar with that approach to life. But I don't care if we fail. I just want to try. I want to try something new. And so there is a part of me that's like if they figure out a way to destroy and take the heat and somehow turn it into strength, I want to learn from that and I sure as hell want to be there when people are like we hate this, to go, okay, good, because I don't know what we should build next.

Beth [01:02:40] Yeah, that's what motivates me right now. I want to be a builder, and I want to contribute with the skills that I have to that. What I would love to be working on right now is a competitor to project 2025. I would be good at that. That uses the skills that I have. And I would like to put something together that an ordinary person could read that is not 900 pages long and filled with jargon. That an ordinary person could read that says this is the next vision. This is what we think should come next. They're doing what they're doing right now. And they have the power to do some of that and what they don't, the courts will deal with. But in the meantime this is where we think things should go. I would love to work on something like that.

[01:03:16] And again that's part of why I'm working so hard to protect my mental peace because you can't build if you are so weighed down by everything that's happening. I don't want to lose sight of the fact that we have different opportunities to be in that space. The more I talk with people who are in executive branch agency jobs right now, the more I understand that they cannot be in that space right now. It's so bad for them. I don't think people have any idea what some of these folks are being subjected to. Any idea. The indignity, the disrespect, the meanness, the just inability to do the work that they're there to do every day in the face of really serious things that we couldn't sleep if we knew about. It's terrible.

Sarah [01:04:04] Can I just say this is what I keep thinking about? This is a dumb example. The other day, I was in the drive-thru line for Penn Station, and this lady thought I sat there too long and she yelled at me. And you know that feeling when you're out and you're not expecting someone to scold you or yell at you, or be mean to you, or be rude to you, and how it just totally short circuits everything for, depending on the depth of what happened, hours, day? Just to think about if that happened to you at your job from the president over days and days and days, you just short circuit. You short circuit when someone's mean to you like that in a Walmart, much less if it rolls into your work inbox. Are you kidding me?

Beth [01:04:55] Yes. Especially when it's so undeserved.

Sarah [01:04:58] Right. It just comes out of nowhere and you're like, what?

Beth [01:05:01] So I don't expect everyone to be in a builder place right now because not everyone can be. I don't expect people who are running organizations that serve refugees to be in a builder place right now. There are different calls depending on our place.

Sarah [01:05:18] But you know what, though? Some people are like me. And some people you treat like that and the part of their brains that comes up with new ideas, they get a little radical. And I'm excited for those people and those personalities because they're there. There are people who got those emails and their brain exploded and they went, oh, is this what we're doing now? Because I have some radical ideas I've been working on for a long time, maybe you want to hear them. That's going to come, too. They're going to go to state government, they're going to go to local government, they're going to run for office. And it's going to be awesome because I know those people are out there. I know they are.

Beth [01:05:55] Yes. And that makes me excited, too. And if any of you would like me to help you create a document about your vision, I'd be so delighted to do it. This, to me, is why it's useful to kind of look at Elon Musk and say, are you building or are you destroying? What combination of those two things are you doing? What percentage is breaking out, and what can I learn from that? There's a whole list of two don'ts from Elon Musk and the approach that DOGE is taking to the federal government right now. But there are some useful bits in there. And that's why I like having these conversations where you try to excavate those useful bits and then deploy them to greater purpose.

Sarah [01:06:31] To destroying them. Greater purpose is the name of the game. I said on the news brief the other day; we are going to have to be adaptable. We're going to have to be nimble. We're going to have to dig deep within ourselves. We talked about on our bonus episode on Substack it's not going to be by getting mad about his plans for the rose garden. Picking our battles could not be more important. And not just picking our battles, but picking the place you can protect the energy for those solutions because that's the greater purpose right now. Their vision, if it exists at all, is brittle. So what is ours? We always end our show with talking about what's on our mind Outside of Politics, and Beth you have stumbled upon a new approach to online shopping. Because here's the paradox. I've articulated this many times on Substack. I really do feel like the treats are going to get us through. Sometimes when you're just taking a crisis day by day, we can't have any overarching approach to self-care. It's going to have to be a treat. We're just going to need a treat for the next hour to two hours, and that's all that we can get our hot little hands on. And for better or for worse, online shopping is the source of treats.

Beth [01:08:01] It is. It just quickly becomes a source of too many treats, and then I feel bad about myself when the treat has lost its purpose. So I think what I have stumbled on is a new old way because I love window shopping. I feel that I have been shopping if I have been out in the world looking at things and I don't buy anything. I'm very content in that experience and I think what I needed was a way to have that feeling in my online shopping. I get a lot of emails from stores that I love buying things from, and then I open them because that feels like a treat.

Sarah [01:08:36] We got a pause there. I hate a store email, but you like them. You feel like they're your treat. See, I'm like unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.

Beth [01:08:43] It's like a catalog in the mail for me. I love the catalog. I'm going through my inbox, it's a lot of horror a lot of day, and here's something that no one's asking me for anything. They are asking me for something, but doesn't feel like it feels like they're offering me something. Look at these amazing things we have for you. You've shopped here before, you'll probably like this. And some of those algorithms are great, right? You loved this dress. I bet you'd love this one, too. You loved this bag. I bet you would like this one too. So I open them, I look at them, and then I have this-- I think what I've realized is I have this fear that I am not going to be able to find that thing again in the wide digital world and so I will buy it because I like it enough that I don't want to lose it.

[01:09:27] And so my new approach is I just have a note in the Notes app on my phone and I put the link right there and I just keep a rolling wish list. And my birthday is coming up, so I sent that wish list to my husband. And he said what you need to do is power rank these. So this made the process even more effective because then I get to look at all these things that seem lovely to me again and really question how much do I want this? And so some things fall off and some things get added and they get moved around and reprioritized. And all of it is giving me like that fun treat like stimulus and response, even more of a treat if I think about something coming to me as a gift. But I'm not doing the dark side of online shopping because it's all kind of hypothetical.

Sarah [01:10:20] Well, I'm off fast fashion, so I've tried to end the dark side of online shopping. I'm also pretty much off Instagram, which was the source of all my fast fashion shopping. That was my New Year's resolution- no fast fashion. And that's helped a lot because that feels very empty. The treats feel a little like a quick sugar high and not really sustainable, especially when you have to go through your closet and get rid of all the fast fashion that you never wore, or you wore and it wasn't good enough. Do you know what I'm saying?

Beth [01:10:54] Yes.

Sarah [01:10:55] So I did formulate a wish list over Christmas, populated primarily from Anne Helen Peterson's very good Substack roundup she does a Christmas every year with gift suggestions and the New York Times gift guide, which I thought had lots of really great things on them. I didn't power rank them, which was a mistake because that also solves the problem of when we are all online shopping like that all the time. Boy, does gift giving get hard?

Beth [01:11:20] Yes it does.

Sarah [01:11:21] Oh my God, what are we going to buy for everybody? They buy everything they want anyway. So I think that's a part of it, too. But you know what? As you were talking I realized my approach to shopping is now I just shop when I travel. I used to never want to shop when I traveled. I was always so big on museums and clicking off the sites. And I've just realized that shopping is really great and clothing makes the most amazing souvenir. I have two pairs of shoes, kind of like fashion tennis shoes. One I bought in Japan, one I bought in Paris. I find those hard to put on and wear about in the day. Like my favorite articles of clothing, I put them on and I'm like I bought this sweater in Ireland. I bought this sweater on my last trip to New York with my friend. It doesn't even have to be far away.

[01:12:15] First of all, I want to shop in person, particularly for clothes. I'm 43 years old. I need to try it on. I don't know how to say this anymore plainly. Do you know what I'm saying? I don't care how good your AI version of the model and I pick her size. I don't care; it doesn't work. I want to try it on. And so that solves that problem. It imbues the item with an additional thing besides I just wanted to consume it. Now it's kind of special. It's linked to a memory and an experience. And so I'm just realizing I'm doing a lot of my shopping just when I travel. I got plenty of shit. It's not like I got a real inventory problem. You know what I'm saying? That's not the issue here. Let me just confess that right now. And it really makes it fun and special. Because even with the wish list, I did get some things off my wish list but some I picked out and I'm like I don't like this as much as I thought I would. Then I returned it.

Beth [01:13:16] I have on my list a wide range of things. So I have some books on my list that are sort of artsy books. Not books that I'm going to read for work and not fiction, just books that I think I would go back to for writing inspiration or things like that. So I have some books, I have some jewelry, I have some bags because I really like bags. So actually there are not a lot of clothes on my list. The thing about trying on for me is that I mostly buy all my clothes from two stores, so I pretty well understand how the sizes work and don't really need to try on. And one of them I can't. It's online only. So that solves those problems. I don't travel as much as you do, and I get very anxious when I buy things when I travel about suitcase space, especially if I'm flying.

Sarah [01:14:05] Or you just bring an extra one. Problem solved.

Beth [01:14:06] Yeah, I don't want to do that. I like to travel lightly so that is really not going to--

Sarah [01:14:11] No, not a extra suitcase. I have this bag that folds down tiny, but it opens up into a big bag so I don't have to carry a lot. But I have lots of ways to carry home. You know what I'm looking at right now? I'm looking at myself in the zoom and realizing my flannel I'm wearing is a Pendleton flannel I purchased in Oregon. That was my souvenir for Oregon.

Beth [01:14:33] That's fun. I'm just looking at my list, though, and realizing that a lot of what I have on it are kind of little things, too. Like I put a lipstick on it because I think some of what I have realized is that shopping online is so easy that the treat feel of it is diminishing for me. I have gotten to where I order so much that a package is not fun anymore. It's a thing to process. And so just anything that comes to me that I think this would be nice-- like the fact that I might not get it I think will make it more special if I do in a way that I haven't been accessing with my online shopping.

Sarah [01:15:09] Well, I do think with my wish list what I did was put things on there that felt just a little exorbitant. Like I really wouldn't probably spend this on myself, but I'm happy for my grandmother, too. Do you know what I'm saying?

Beth [01:15:23] I'm taking the opposite approach because I'm just looking at anything that I think I would normally click buy and saying, no, I don't need this. I definitely don't need it right now, but I would enjoy it and therefore it would be a good gift and so it goes in my note. It's not lost. I can retrieve it if I decide I really do need it at some point. It's here, but it also is something like totally reasonable. I would have no problem sending this list to my mom or my sister or anybody in my life who was just like I don't know what to get you.

Sarah [01:15:55] Okay, interesting. I have kept my wishlist from Christmas because I'm like, hey, you know what? This would be like a good reward for a goal I'm trying to achieve. If I do this, then I will purchase this. But I don't get a lot of packages. We get a lot of packages for family stuff, but I don't buy a lot of stuff. I also got to go through peaks and valleys. And I'm coming off a peak so I'm just like I don't want any more stuff for like a long time, which I think is, I hope, normal because I do it a lot. And so I think just the most important part, whatever you choose, to me, it's just more conscientiousness.

Beth [01:16:40] Yeah.

Sarah [01:16:41] So many companies profit model is built on scalability. They need a lot of people to do it. And the easiest way to get a lot of people to do anything is just to do something without thinking that hard about it. That's why everything, particularly around a company like Amazon is built for convenience so you don't think about it. Which is why I canceled my Amazon Prime. I think that's the most important part, is just bringing some conscientiousness to it. Because it's not just about like punishing yourself and saying I need to think hard about this because I'm a bad person. All that impact. It's also like when you're more conscientious about it, it is more enjoyable. Pleasure has to be conscientious. I think we think convenience is pleasure, but convenience is just. Convenience is not pleasure.

Beth [01:17:27] And that's why I think this has been such a good solution for me and my particular issues. It may not help anybody else, but it doesn't feel like deprivation. It feels like I'm just building in a new step to actually make it more enjoyable if these things do come into my life. It's like a little bit of friction built in that's nice. That's nice. And I do really enjoy maintaining my list now.

Sarah [01:17:56] We look forward to hearing if you found solutions to bringing a little more conscientiousness to your online or real world shopping. We love hearing from you guys always about your insights and feedback and experiences. Thank you for joining us for another episode. Make sure you subscribe to the show if you haven't already. And if you want even more Pantsuit Politics, join us on our Substack page. The link is in the show notes. We will be back in your ears on Tuesday for the new episode, and until then, keep it nuanced y'all.