Struggling With the Good News Cycle

After a weekend when an Anthropic researcher quit and warned AI could wipe out humanity within a decade, Sarah and Beth take on the questions listeners sent them about artificial intelligence, starting with what is actually being made and what it costs. They argue that the flyers-and-water critique is stuck in 2022 while frontier models and agents race ahead, and they take the Doomer scenarios seriously without buying that the doom is just sales copy. Beth explains why "can't we just unplug it" would mean unplugging the internet; Sarah argues nobody trained these models on a soul, and that's where we need to put our chips. They disagree on whether building superintelligence was ever the right call, and agree that fear isn't enough to bring to the table with our kids, our employers, or Congress. Then, Outside of Politics, a conversation about quitting: Jessica Strawser's The Quitters Club, Lindsay Crouse's case for opting out, and the biggest things each of them has walked away from. If you missed our live show in Minneapolis, the full recording is available in our shop for $15: https://pantsuitpolitics.myshopify.com/ Support the show and get access to News Briefs, Spicy Live bonus episodes, and community: https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Twenty-five years ago today, and Sarah and Beth close out the re-share of their 2018 series on September 11 with the two hardest parts. First, the road from 9/11 to Iraq, from "we will wipe terrorism off the face of the earth" to an occupation that hired loyalists over experts, and a real disagreement between the two of them about whether George W. Bush was a bad man or just a bad president. They end at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, where each of them chose one life to be grateful for, Kathy Mazza and CeeCee Lyles, and where the museum asks you to look up at the photos in exactly the way people on the ground had to that day. Parts one through three came out Wednesday. If you missed our live show in Minneapolis, the full recording is available in our shop for $15: https://pantsuitpolitics.myshopify.com/ Support the show and get access to News Briefs, Spicy Live bonus episodes, and community: https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week marks twenty-five years since the September 11 attacks, and Sarah and Beth are re-sharing the five-part series they made in 2018 to do what they felt the country never quite did: process it. Today's episode holds parts one, two, and three. First, a careful, flight-by-flight walk through the morning of September 11, 2001, with attention to the people who improvised when no plan existed for what was happening, from flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney to Rick Rescorla to the passengers of Flight 93. Then they travel back eighty years, to the borders drawn after World War I, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the conditions that produced al Qaeda, with help from Middle East expert Kerry Anderson. Then they ask how we missed it, and find the answer in an FBI and CIA built to distrust each other, an overcorrection after Watergate that stopped agents from sharing what they knew, and two future hijackers living in the United States that the CIA never told the FBI about. It is a hard listen in places, made with care for everyone who carries the day with them. Parts four and five, the road to Iraq and the Memorial, follow on Friday. If you missed our live show in Minneapolis, the full recording is available in our shop for $15: https://pantsuitpolitics.myshopify.com/ Support the show and get access to News Briefs, Spicy Live bonus episodes, and community: https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a mailbag day, and Sarah and Beth work through everything the Substack Premium community sent in — starting with the Lindsay Clancy jury deadlock and whether the legal system is built to answer a question like this one, then into a new round of tariffs and how this administration keeps finding new legal doors no matter what the Supreme Court says. They spend real time on a listener question about whether the evangelical church can repent from Trumpism, working through what happens when politics and religion try to answer the same question about human freedom on two completely different timelines — and where they land differently along the way. They set the record straight on what Project 2025 actually says about the FDA, talk about who benefits from a weakened food and drug regulatory system, and take on the bigger question of how to keep functioning when people can't agree on the same reality anymore. Then it's the midterms: Sarah's optimistic, Beth's braced for anything, and both explain why. Outside of Politics, they get into what's worth correcting in kids and what's worth letting go of as they get older, the particular chaos of the first weeks back at school, and a rapid-fire round covering summer highs and lows, on-camera style, Sarah Bareilles's new album, early holiday traditions, and who they'd most like to interview under truth serum. If you missed our live show in Minneapolis, the full recording is available in our shop for $15 — a substantial discount, and well worth your time. That virtual option exists because of the generosity of Fearless Finance and Substack. And if you haven't already, check out this week's bonus live conversation with Jen Hatmaker on Substack. One quick heads up: next week is Labor Day, so we're recording Tuesday instead of Monday, which means the next episode lands in your feeds on Wednesday instead of Tuesday. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Subscribe so you never miss one. Support the show and get access to News Briefs, Spicy Live bonus episodes, and community: https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pantsuit-politics/id1055348656 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37qY4LmXijGefBvzR0lWKt Follow us on Instagram: @pantsuitpolitics — Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. Produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meta just settled with 47 states for roughly $17 billion over claims it built a product designed to addict teenagers, and Flock cameras are facing a backlash that runs from Lexington's city council all the way to Capitol Hill. Sarah and Beth connect the two stories: both are about building first and asking permission basically never. They dig into whether this is big tech's big tobacco moment, why the product changes in the settlement should probably apply to adults too, what a national license plate database actually does to civil liberties, and where the two of them land very differently on traffic cameras. Underneath it all is Beth's argument that we are increasingly being asked to live in excerpts, and Sarah's that we are chasing a zero-risk society that does not exist. Then Outside of Politics, they come home from Minneapolis with a joy hangover from the first-ever Spice Conference and talk about what four hundred people in one room says about the community they've built. Still Listening is coming — a pop-up book club built around our first book, with free discussion guides and a big online session with Sarah and Beth. Sign up to participate here: https://forms.gle/FnSiAH9uD9GSX4g38 Support the show and get access to News Briefs, Spicy Live bonus episodes, and community: https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah and Beth dig into the new executive order on childhood vaccines and the request for information the Department of Health and Human Services issued on August 24 — what "shared clinical decision making" actually means, why unbundling the MMR shot asks far more of families than this administration has shown any willingness to make possible, and how two measles deaths in Pennsylvania were both foreseeable and foreseen. Sarah talks candidly about the years she kept one of her own children on an alternate vaccine schedule and what it took to come back from it. Then Beth sits down with Beth Sumner of Grandparents for Vaccines, whose brother contracted polio in 1954, one year before the Salk vaccine became available, and who describes what that did to him and to their whole family across the next six decades. Outside of Politics, they get into the things from their youth that hold up, the things that really do not, and a genuinely contentious disagreement about whether "American Pie" is any good. Pantsuit Politics is in Minneapolis this weekend for its one and only live show of 2026. In-person tickets are sold out, but virtual tickets are still available and are buy one, get one half off. Pantsuit Politics is listener-supported. To join the community of paid subscribers who make the show possible, subscribe on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah opens by calling it what it is — a national day of mourning — and she and Beth spend the hour on the only thing anybody's feed is showing them: Dolly Parton, dead at 80. They trace the fork in the road that turned a prolific Hall of Fame country star into a global icon, from the podcast and the Drunk History episode to the Miley and Taylor of it all and America's unbelievable hunger for a unifying figure. Sarah makes the case that the most under-discussed thing about Dolly Parton is her shrewdness — saying no to Elvis, keeping her publishing, running a hyper-professional business out of Tennessee her whole life — and that she likes that woman a great deal more than the angel-on-earth version. Beth talks about using this week with her daughters to describe what a good life and a good death actually look like, and about what it means to come into enormous wealth from a background of being poor but happy. They get into the wigs as a shield, the sincerity underneath the artifice, the faith that ran through all of it, and how on earth she escaped the last ten years of polarization without ever making the statement everyone demanded. Along the way: the Imagination Library, the My People Fund, the Moderna money, Steel Magnolias, and why "I Will Always Love You" is a business breakup song. In-person tickets for our August 29 live show in Minneapolis are sold out, but virtual tickets are still available and are buy one, get one half off. This is our only live gathering in 2026: https://www.pantsuitpoliticsshow.com/p/2026-events Support the show and get access to Morning Assembly, bonus episodes, and the best community on the internet: https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah opens with a simple question — what's going on with the ladies? — and she and Beth spend the hour discovering that you can't answer it without first describing the sexism everyone is swimming in. They walk through head-of-household voting being discussed openly in respectable rooms, promotions blocked at the Pentagon on the basis of sex and race, and a bipartisan IVF provision for military families killed in committee. Then they turn to Natalie Harp, the aide who follows the president with a printer, and the strange insistence from her defenders that a thirty-five-year-old woman with enormous daily influence is somehow both above and below criticism. Sarah and Beth talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filming her egg retrieval and why Republicans are genuinely stuck on IVF, about Susie Wiles and Darline Graham and two very different theories of how a woman gets power, and about the women showing up in pink outside the Lindsay Clancy trial. Outside of Politics, they compare notes on nostalgia concerts: Sarah saw En Vogue, TLC, and Salt-N-Pepa in Franklin and is ready to tap out, while Beth saw Garth Brooks in Indianapolis and will take any live music ticket you offer her. In-person tickets for our August 29 live show in Minneapolis are sold out, but virtual tickets are still available and are buy one, get one half off. This is our only live gathering in 2026: https://www.pantsuitpoliticsshow.com/p/2026-events Support the show and get access to Morning Assembly, bonus episodes, and the best community on the internet: https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com The Korean skincare brand everyone is talking about. Our listeners get 20% off their entire order by using code PANTSUIT at jiyuskin.com/PANTSUIT #JIYU #ad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beth watched Christopher Nolan's Odyssey this summer and could not stop thinking about it as an extensive metaphor for American politics. We ended up talking about disorientation, the allies we've spit in the eye of, the moment Odysseus blinds the Cyclops he'd already escaped from, and whether America's time has come. Then, Outside of Politics, we're sharing part of our crossover with Knox and Jamie at The Popcast about the odyssey that is podcasting. In-person tickets for our August 29 live show in Minneapolis are sold out, but virtual tickets are still available and are buy one, get one half off. This is our only live gathering in 2026: https://www.pantsuitpoliticsshow.com/p/2026-events Support the show and get access to our new morning talk show, bonus episodes, and the best community on the internet: https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah and Beth are back together after summer break, and they're starting with the question everyone seems to be asking: was this summer the worst? They work through the cyclospora outbreak and what it means to not trust the salad or the information about the salad, the storms that keep coming, the war narrative that changed every forty-eight hours, and the new polling showing Trump losing ground with his strongest supporters. They dig into what the Michigan Senate primary did to Haley Stevens and what that says about the people who cover politics, why AOC calling Woke 1.0 crazy might be a gift to the Democratic Party, and why data centers can go up in months while a bridge takes ten years. Then, because dark times have always made good music, they hand out the first-ever Pantsuit Politics Music Awards — song of the summer, album of the summer, and new and noteworthy. We are in Minneapolis on August 29 — in-person tickets close Wednesday morning, and virtual tickets are buy one, get one free: https://www.pantsuitpoliticsshow.com/p/2026-events Support the show and get access to News Briefs, Spicy Live bonus episodes, and community: https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices