Episode 63: Transcript

"How broken are we?"

[Faint bugle music, then a cannon shot noise.]

Doug French: That's the cannon shot? [“Retreat” music starts up again.] Oh crap, there's more. How much more of this do we have to endure?

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: Just this.

Doug: Will there be more cannon shots? [Unrelenting music continues.] The funny thing is, it's so light, it's so faint from my end that I'm hearing a bunch of flutes. It feels like a bunch of recorders from an 8th grade class.

Magda: I am so glad that you finally got a chance to hear Retreat, the full cycle of Retreat, because I was beginning to feel a little bit like Big Bird and like these recordings were Snuffleupagus, because nobody else was hearing them. 

Doug: Right, but you live with other people who've heard it, right? I mean, this is not like…

Magda: Yes. And I mean, our children have heard it, but it's just, you know, like sort of the general public.

Doug: It was important for me to hear it.

Magda: Yes. 

Doug: Interesting.

Magda: Yes, I just feel like you thought I was, like, embellishing in some way. And I hadn't even told you it was like a full 90-second cycle of Retreat with a cannon shot right in the middle of it.

Doug: Well, you're an embellisher, but not for this.

Magda: Yeah. 

[Both laugh. Theme music fades in, plays, fades out.]

Magda: So I'm back on Bluesky. I never left Bluesky. I just signed up for Bluesky, made a couple of posts, didn't know what to do there. And so now apparently there's an influx of people to Bluesky. So I decided to try it again. So I've posted a photo of the cat. Maybe that'll get some more interaction.

Doug: I mean, we'll see. I don't know. We're all grasping for community here. But man, it just made a whole lot more sense when there was just the one playground. And now there's just so many that it just seems like we're even more siloed. You know, retreating to our various hidey holes, especially given that, you know, the worst bullies are trying to follow us and rub it in. That doesn't seem like any way for us to even think this is going to get better.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: I wanted to thank you for the MAD Magazine reference.

Magda: Oh, good.

Doug: The good news is at least I'm going to head out to Redford and see the MAD Magazine documentary, because we need a MAD Magazine now. It makes you wonder how viable it would even be now.

Magda: Seriously.

Doug: Because no one watches the same shows anymore, even. It's like all MAD Magazine did was make fun of network shows everybody watched or popular movies everybody had seen. And now there's no through line frame of reference for everybody.

Magda: Right, everything's too niche. They'd have to have MAD Magazine Netflix edition, MAD Magazine Hulu edition.

Doug: Boomer edition.

Magda: Right.

Doug: Because all the references too, right? You'd have to be like Millennials For Charlie XCX. By the way, Chappell Roan, I get it. I so get it.

Magda: Well, I hope so. I think everybody gets it.

Doug: I've been bopping around in my car listening to Chappell Roan for much of the last week, and it's been helpful, I've got to say.

Magda: Well, welcome.

Doug: It's serotonin to combat the cortisol.

Magda: Okay, I think Chappell Roan is fantastic. I don't feel like she's as counterculture as everybody seems, like people are like, wow, Chappell Roan, she's so weird. She's so counterculture. And I'm like... I don't see it.

Doug: She's just Lady Gaga and Madonna before her. Yeah. She's just a really outsized performer with a lot of talent, you know, and there'll be more after her too, but I'm enjoying her just as much as I enjoyed Harry Styles last album. That thing dominated my Spotify end of year report, whatever that thing is, you know, when that came out, I listened to that all the time. And then I was told as a 50-something-year-old man that my favorite artist is Harry Styles. I'm like, all right. Cause I guess I'd played everything else like once, you know, all the stuff that I, all the dad rock that I play and the new wave and the eighties stuff.

Magda: Do you remember when I figured out that I liked Harry Styles? I hadn't realized that I knew so many Harry Styles songs. And then I decided to see if I liked Harry Styles and played all the, you know, his top songs. And I was like, wait a minute. I like that song. Wait a minute. I like that song. I felt the same way when Doechii just released her latest album, which is amazing. And I was like, how do I not know Doechii? And then it turned out that I did. I knew many Doechii songs. I just didn't know that they were Doechii.

Doug: I remember there was a question on some social media platform talking about what do you miss most about your childhood? And the answer came back “Ownership.” You know, you could own the record. You could own the cassette, whatever format you wanted to, the 8-track, the CD. But now, you know, you pay for the right to rent the music. And that's where so much of our culture is going now. We don't own anything.

Magda: Right.

Doug: Because there's a lot more money in changing the price of things over time.

Magda: Even the things that you can own are just not necessarily as good quality.

Doug: I think it's that level of resentment. I mean, we're sitting here, we've been playing Monday morning quarterback now for a week, and I have been ignoring most of the left side finger pointing and just thinking more about what I had thought and really lamenting the fact that as much as I tried to keep myself from being siloed, I knew everybody was trying to keep me siloed and I was trying to fight against the current as best I could. But it turned out that riptide was pretty strong.

Magda: You're lamenting the fact that you were really just associating with people who were not Trump voters?

Doug: Well, but just the way that we all went into the election, we were all pretty jacked up. I even posted somewhere. I was like, “Michigan's going to come back for Kamala, bank on it.”

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: Because I really felt that. Maybe that was my outsized idea of what level of influencer anybody is. I don't even know what influencing is anymore because, I mean, Beyonce couldn't get people to vote for her. So what the hell chance have I got?

Magda: There are still millions of ballots that are missing. I am not convinced that the actual real votes of Michigan didn't go for Harris. That's not to say that too many people who should have known better didn't vote for Trump. I think it's two things. I think there was interference in the election. And I also think that a lot of people just don't really understand how life works. They don't understand the concept of tariffs. They don't understand inflation.

Doug: Well, so many people were Googling it the day after the election.

Magda: Uh-huh! Oh, I had some guy I went to high school with trying to tell me that tariffs were going to be good because they were going to “bring back manufacturing to the United States.” Like, are you kidding me? So somehow tariffs are going to fix all of the systemic problems that caused manufacturing to leave in the first place. So now somehow something? is going to just make them suddenly decide to build another factory, which is going to cost millions of dollars, and then employ people who have to be paid more than the people who are currently being paid to make these products. It just doesn't make any sense at all, but it's because people don't understand who pays the tariffs. The same way they thought that Donald Trump was going to be able to force Mexico to pay for a wall, they think somehow Donald Trump is going to be able to force these other countries to pay tariffs. And they seem to think that he's got magical powers that nobody else has.

Doug: Well, that gets to my main point, which was about canvassing, because I really love canvassing, as you know. But I'm looking at it now, and it seems quaint. Just the idea that I would go house to house and talk to people and that I would think that that would move the needle in any way, it just felt like I brought a spoon to a laser fight. When you flood voters with disinformation and obfuscate the truth, then the truth doesn't matter anymore. All you think about is, “you know what? I want eggs to be less expensive. And, I'm going to trust that, yes, this guy is reprehensible, but he's my reprehensible guy.

He represents me. He's just this amorphous bag of awful that I can imbue with my own ideas of what he'll do for me. And he has the weird gift,” as she says. And the UNC professor who was on The Daily Show, Tressie Cottom, meaning he can make you think that he's got your back. 

Magda: Right.

Doug: And he looks into the soul of people and knows what people want independent of what they say they want. And he's got enough people supporting that, enough really wealthy people who've taken over the algorithm, man, the algorithm is just killing us.

Magda: I saw something about some Russian official was like, “you know, Trump owes this win to help from Russia and now he's got to do us the favors we're calling in.” Stuff like that.

Doug: Right.

Magda: We're really, really screwed and you guys fell for it. Just wait until next summer when everything you're trying to buy costs double.

Doug: I think we're going to talk a lot today about like, what are we going to do now? How do we maintain our sanity? When you think about, you grow up thinking that actions have consequences and we've reached an age where they don't. And you can elevate the worst people to the highest levels of power and put Elon Musk in charge of reducing the federal budget by a third, as he thinks he can do. And I'm just thinking so much of what happened, as far as I'm concerned, I'm really not interested in scolding people for who did what when. All we can do going forward is think about how isolated and mean everybody is.

Doug: And I think the only hope we have is building some level of community, however small, and at least trying to interact with people as people as best we can, because if all they have is people telling you that Venezuelan gangs are taking over Denver after enough times, you're going to believe it.

Magda: This is going to turn into Point/Counterpoint because I disagree with you. I am going to form community with the other people with whom I'm already in community. There are a lot of them.

Doug: Yeah. 

Magda: I have absolutely no interest in giving benefit of the doubt, leeway, any kind of grace to people who voted to harm me, my children, my stepchildren, my parents, you, my husband, right?

Doug: Hey, I made the list. That's cool.

[Magda laughs]

Doug: Oh, yeah, well, I could lose my health care tomorrow and I'll never get back on.

Magda: Yeah, exactly. And the fact that these people just so casually voted against that and now they think we're still going to be buddy-buddy, right? 

Magda: What we wrote and published in Friday Flames last week is really how I'm feeling about all of this. I know that there are a lot of people who are really conflicted about how to treat people who voted for Trump.

Doug: Yep.

Magda: You know, there are all kinds of positions people can take these absolute positions, right? Like if you voted for Trump, you must have meant me and my trans children harm. Or people who voted for Trump didn't mean anybody any harm, they're just voting on the economy and inflation and all that kind of stuff, right?

Doug: Which is just dumb because he's going to deport half the working force and he's going to put tariffs and shoot everything up.

Magda: Yes, I know, I know, I know.

Doug: And economists all over the globe are saying it's going to trash the economy and bankrupt Social Security in six years.

Magda: Yes, people are already being laid off because of the tariffs that are coming. So I don't feel that having a position about people even matters, right? Like you don't need to decide what you think about your neighbor who's always super-nice to your trans kid’s face when they see them, but still voted for Trump. You don't have to decide what that means, right? You just have to decide how you're going to act to those people. 

Magda: And it's my experience that the people who voted for Trump because of their perceptions of inflation and their perceptions of whatever is happening and, you know, he promised he wasn't going to tax overtime and all this kind of stuff. Right. Those people get by in life by doing bad things and then claiming that they didn't really understand. And sometimes they genuinely don't because they know that if they don't take the time to understand something, then whatever decision they make, they're going to be forgiven for. 

Magda: I am tired of subsidizing those people's bad will, their carelessness, and the havoc and chaos that they wreak with my goodwill and my emotions. So I'm not going to say, “oh, it's OK, you didn't know.” Instead, what I'm going to say is “the information was out there” and I understand that they're not getting the same information that I am because they're watching Fox News or you know, whatever all this stuff is, they've chosen a different set of media and facts to look at than are out there. Right. But the information is out there. No one is hiding it from them.

Magda: And so I'm not going to subsidize somebody else's poor decisions with my energy, with my heart, with my love, with the time that I could be putting into creating community, helping other people who did not vote for Trump, even if they didn't love the Harris/Walz ticket, even if they knew that so much of politics is performative, right? If somebody can have voted for Harris while still not believing that Harris is a great person, then why couldn't everyone? You know, I'm just I'm not giving anybody a pass anymore. And so that just means that I'm not interacting with them. They can't be part of my group. If I'm in organizations that are filled with these people, then either I take over and edge them out or I just withdraw from that organization. Like, I'm not going to smile and be nice to you because you don't deserve it.

Doug: It is kind of amazing that people think that this guy who calls people names, who threatens violence, who is the coarsest of all people in terms of human contact, and they think he's the great uniter.

Magda: Would you leave your 14-year-old daughter alone in a room with him? That's a big test.

Doug: I wouldn't leave my 41-year-old daughter in the room with him.

Magda: Would you leave your cat alone in a room with him? I wouldn't. I mean, he's not a healthy, normal, typical person in any way. My friend Kimberly posted this today. She said, “One of the harshest pieces of advice I ever received was from one of my professors in my Master's of Social Work program. He said, ‘People rarely change. And when they do, it's because they're in pain, not because someone else wanted them to change.’” And then she has a whole takeaway that she had from it. But my takeaway when I read that is, A, yes, that's so true. And B, we have been asking these people to change their views, but without any repercussions. So they've not felt any pain and there's no reason for them to change unless they feel pain. And so now the pain is just going to be the natural consequence of not having anything to do with me and knowing that I think that they're shit. And, you know, for some people, that's going to be painful. For some people, it won't be painful. But I'm not going to subsidize people's basic decency. You don't have access to me. I will not be kind to you. I will not be polite to you. You do not exist anymore for me.

Doug: It never occurred to me that withholding my greatness would be painful to anybody. [Both laugh] Yeah. It's like, you know what? People will muddle through without talking to me over the course of several months. I'm just thinking more of these macro trends in terms of just how much money is in politics now and how readily it can be bought.

Magda: Yeah!

Doug: I mean, $16 billion.

Magda: Well, and what it means is we're pay-to-play now. I mean, Musk just swoops in at the last minute. He's like, “hey, I'm going to fund this. I'm going to fund that.”

Doug: Well, I'm just thinking more about that line, I think it's attributed to Mark Twain. But remember that line? “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes.” And I really think that all of this disinformation, we're trying to find a fundamental truth. The only saving we have lies in rediscovering that there is a fundamental truth somewhere. But there's so much more incentive to flood the media with bullshit, whereas all the best journalism needs to hide behind a paywall to survive. It's pretty easy to see how this trend is going to work out. There's more money and more incentive in just burying the truth in a lot of crap so that no one believes anything.

Magda: Yeah, I would agree with that.

Doug: I know I'm taking all my media consumption down to the studs. I have unsubscribed from almost everything and recognize now that I have to rebuild my sensibility about things. I'm still going to listen to what the other side is saying just because I'm so angry at myself for, again, just being susceptible to siloing as much as I thought I was aware of it.

Magda: Oh, so you're angry at yourself because you thought Harris was going to win.

Doug: I thought my anticipation for a Harris win was based upon an awareness of both sides, what both parties were thinking. There was no ground game anywhere when I was out talking to people. And it turns out they didn't need one. All they had was Twitter. And they had Newsmax and lots of right-wing media that was targeted at people of every age. And I guess I'm just trying to help explain. You know, Michigan went Democratic everywhere except for Harris.

Magda: Except for. Yeah. Yeah. It's all a little weird. But I mean, I don't think there's any point in being angry at yourself because you didn't know there were that many garbage people.

Doug: Well, that will always haunt me. I have always underestimated the number of garbage people in the country. You've known me for 30 years. That's my M.O.

Magda: I know, but I think that it's good. I'd rather be around somebody who is encountering enough wonderful people on a daily basis that they underestimate the number of garbage people there are than vice versa.

Doug: But I don't think they're all garbage people. I think they're lazy people. They are mean and they've been isolated and made to feel less than. They just feel like this guy will put them on his back and carry them to prominence.

They're so desperate to believe it that they thought it would happen the first time and it didn't happen.

Magda: I know.

Doug: But they're willing to believe it. Well, this time it'll work. I think they're just so desperate to have a guy who in their mind will upend the system that has kicked them to the curb. He's a blank slate to them in many ways. We know who he is. And for some reason that actually polled better. The idea that “We don't know Kamala that well, but we know Trump. He's horrid. But at least he's been president once, so he could do it again.” And the double standard in the media was also a big issue. And that's why, as I say, I'm just trying to think, what's the way forward here? And I think you build community, but you can't get so siloed. It's just, I just think one of the more damaging things of this election among the trillions that are about to happen in terms of separated families at the border, and terrible job loss and terrible inflation and all the rest of it. And catastrophic grift that is going to make everybody who just won so much richer at our expense is that their goal of dividing us will be complete.

Magda: I mean, that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago. And the solution is not within your control or my control because the only solution we could have would be to suddenly start getting along with the Trumpers.

Doug: Well, it's kind of like dealing with children when they're teenagers versus when they're adults. I mean, it's not in our scenario, I guess, but the point is like you can be more forgiving when a kid does something wrong and feigns ignorance or whatever else. But now it's like, you know what? You're 18.

You're on the hook for what you've done. I don't care why you did it. All I know is you've done this and your action is going to have an effect on me. Independent of what your motivations are. I don't care about your motivations. I don't care about mitigating circumstances. Off you go then. Unfortunately,

we're all going to find out since you're the fuckhead who didn't know what a tariff was until November 6th. 

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: Now, again, we're not saying that we're the parents in the scenario and everybody who voted for Trump is the kids. Because that's a pretty... a pretty pretentious position to take.

Magda: If my children had actually voted for Trump, I would consider myself a failure as a parent.

Doug: But you know what I mean? It's like, we're not on a pedestal here.

Magda: I'm not saying that you and I are the only people in this scenario who didn't vote for Trump, right? There are millions of people that are us. All we have to do is figure out how do we deal with the ones who made a genuinely horrible decision and are now trying to say, “oh, I didn't realize.”

Doug: It speaks to a level of empathy, too. I think because America has always been individualistic to the point where it can demonize the word socialism. What our media is so good at is taking something meant in the most benign way and turned into a pejorative, you know, to the point now where saying something is woke is a bad thing. Being a social justice warrior is a bad thing.

Magda: Well, I mean, people now are saying that the reason the Dems lost is because they were “too nice to trans people,” which is ridiculous considering that there were all those disgusting commercials the Trump campaign wrote just demonizing trans people and the Democrats didn't like actually, the Democratic Party, I mean, didn't fire back on those.

Doug: Amazing how all of these horrible issues have just suddenly vaporized into the ether. Like, you know, the border, the “invasion of the immigrants” is over.

Magda: He's always been like this. This is no surprise. I mean, I think sometimes I feel like New Yorkers, because we experienced him before he was running for president when he was just this weirdo private madman.

Doug: Calling for Obama's birth certificate, that kind of crap.

Magda: Yeah, and I mean like railroading those kids into, like, the “Central Park Five,” right. He's a horrible human being and has been so for decades.

Doug: I wonder now given these wacko cabinet proposals, because now he's testing the fealty of the Senate. Or in many cases doing what he can to work around the Senate like as he invented you know, the Department of Government Efficiency so that he could just elevate Elon and Vivek independent of Senate hearings and everything.

Magda: Right.

Doug: I wonder now if we've reached the I was only following orders stage.

Magda: Yeah, I think we have. I don't think there's any reason to believe that anything bad we think of can't happen. I do believe that there aren't going to be public institutions anymore.

Doug: It feels so fucked up to look at people who are now like the Arab-Americans in Dearborn who are already feeling like they got the shaft because of Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio.

Magda: I don't understand how they talked themselves into thinking that Trump wasn't going to sell them out. Like, has Trump ever done anything even remotely positive about Muslims ever?

Doug: Well, he tried to ban them from the country in 2017. How do you forget something ridiculous like that?

Magda: Come on!

Doug: I don't want these people to suffer. I mean, they're going to. And we all will. But it feels weird. There's a part of me who's like, you motherfuckers. That's not what I was raised to feel for human beings.

Magda: I absolutely understand why they didn't feel like in their hearts they could vote for Kamala Harris because of her position on the war in Gaza. That's the entire point of the party is to coalesce people and figure out how you can get different groups of voting blocks to come together. It's all about positioning. And I think what we heard that block of voters and also a lot of younger voters, like there were a lot of Gen Z who also were unable to vote for Kamala for the same reason. I mean, they said a year ahead they weren't going to vote for Kamala. And the party kind of just ignored them. You know, it's like everybody fucked around and found out.

Magda: I think the other thing is just don't roll over ahead of time. You know, don't pre-accede to their demands. I used to talk a lot in the first administration about just throwing sand in their gears, make everything they want to do as difficult and costly for them as possible.

Doug: But as far as media consumption, I mean, I've told you I got rid of the Washington Post. I got rid of Amazon Prime. I'm jettisoning a lot of things and it feels great, frankly.

Magda: Well, a friend who I trust a lot said, you know, I've been reading USA Today and they are shockingly like they did great reporting on the hurricanes. They're doing actual reporting and they're as close to neutral as I've been able to find. They're hitting it out of the park.

Doug: Yeah. USA Today and Teen Vogue.

Magda: USA Today is $5 for one year of online. 

Doug: God. 

Magda: So really, if you subscribe, if you read five articles, you've gotten more than your money's worth in that one year. What I'm appreciating about it is I think the person who writes the daily newsletter is doing a great job because I actually do read the newsletter.

Doug: Yeah.

Magda: How far through the looking glass are we that USA Today is now the paper of record?

Doug: Well, we're through the looking glass. I mean, that's the thing. There are so many trends that I've just exacerbated to a point of no return in terms of objective truth, in terms of who knows what education is going to be like if in fact the DOE is dissolved. I'm trying to think like someone who has 20,

30 years left on this earth and wants to make the most of it. I'm also trying to think of my young adult children who have to grow up in this and, you know, what do you say to them? I'm just thinking in terms of as much about the collective as I am about myself, because I am worried about several of my friends who are in much more vulnerable situations than I am. 

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: I'm keeping an eye on Obamacare and I'm keeping an eye on prices, of course, and affordability of things. I'm keeping my eye on elder care, but at the same time, being aware of what's going to happen to your stepdaughter.

Magda: Yeah, I think anybody who is in the direct line of fire needs to seriously consider getting out. But if you're not in the direct line of fire, maybe consider staying?

Doug: America is still going to be here, but the ties that make these states united are withering. We do all these things and throw everything back to the states. Then it's going to be like we're going to be living in the states we feel most comfortable in. That was the most compelling thing about discussions that I saw that Pete Buttigieg was talking about. One woman was talking to him saying, “Why does Kamala have to come to Michigan to fight for a woman's right to choose? That's already in our constitution. That's not an issue for us.” And he said, no, that's not the issue. That protection should not depend on state lines. I mean, if I'm married in Michigan, if I go to Indiana, to my hometown, am I not married anymore? I mean, there are certain things that deserve nationwide protection and that's all that's coming down. So we're all just kind of not so much leave the country as retreat to the states that are most friendly to what we need.

Magda: It's not a woman's fault, if she needs an abortion, that the state she's in doesn't think she should be allowed to have one. You know, I mean, you can say, “oh, well, you should only go live in certain states,” but that's not realistic for people.

Doug: No, for most people it isn't. And then, you know, if you're in Texas, you can't even leave to get an abortion. If you're caught trying to get healthcare elsewhere, you'll get snitched on.

Magda: Yeah. It's all just so horrible. It's so horrible. And I'm just so disgusted with people.

Doug: I'm trying to get in their heads more.

Magda: Why do you want to go to the sunken place?

Doug: It doesn't make me happy to shun people in that way. I get why the motivation is. I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'm just saying when I do that, that makes me feel like a dick for whatever reason. I don't know why. That's the way my brain's wired.

Magda: Because you’ve been conditioned to be nice. How many times does somebody have to punch you in the head, Doug, before you put up boundaries against them? I just see this as an entire nation of people who were either trained to be gaslit or trained to gaslight. And I'm not participating in this anymore.

Doug: No, I get that. But if you think about two paths ahead, one is fuck all those people. And the other is how can we bring those few moderates? Like I think to that graphic that was like a bunch of red people and blue people and like six people went from blue to red. It wasn't a wave. It was just a sliver of a margin that was brought over to the wrong side. They can be brought back to the right side.

Magda: People don't change by being asked to change. They change when something becomes painful to them.

Doug: I am feeling so out of date. I was so artificially buoyed by the conversations I was having, unaware that the only ground game the other side needed was to flood the airwaves with shit, and just obfuscate truth. It just feels as though face-to-face discussions were officially made obsolete.

Magda: Well, I mean, I think people have been feeling that way since political candidates went on TV, you know? I mean, remember the whole thing about how everybody said, wow, JFK has this unfair advantage because he's so much more photogenic and he just is so handsome when he's on TV and all this kind of stuff.

Doug: And he wore the dark suit, which framed his shoulders, and Nixon looked all ashen. Yeah, well, but the thing is, though, now a TV's in your pocket.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: Now people are spending six, seven hours a day looking at that. It's one thing to have it in your home, and another thing to have it at nonstop access all the time.

Magda: Well, you know, 50 years from now, it'll be embedded in our brains, so... [Laughs] You know what I mean? But I feel bad that you are recriminating yourself in any way for not having known because I'm not sure there was value in having known.

Doug: I'm not recriminating. It's disappointing. I didn't know, but I also knew the only thing I did know was to try to talk to people. I mean, that's all I could have done. I wouldn't have done anything different because we don't have the same firehose of shit that right wing media has. I mean, essentially now, if you have Trump Social and X, that's state media. Those two are going to merge at some point.

Magda: Yeah, I saw something about how Trump's Truth Social has all these data centers all over the country that are like equipped and ready to go to start broadcasting. That's weird and terrifying to me.

Doug: And even before that, Sinclair Broadcasting was buying up all of these local affiliates and turning them conservative. It's just there's an organization there. There's a level of attention to bombarding just enough people to believe what they need you to believe or worse, believe nothing. I don't know what else we're trying to accomplish with this episode, frankly, except to parse what went wrong. I mean, it's been a couple of weeks now. And some people are still emerging from their cocoons. I know, as I mentioned, I'm cutting my media consumption down to the studs, reassessing everything, where my money goes, where my attention goes.

Doug: I think legacy media misread the idea that Trump would be good for business a second term because there's enough exhaustion out there that I really don't need to read more about the outrage of capitulation and saying, “well, maybe we should hear him out,” just for the sake of access, which we're already seeing now.

Magda: Did they overplay their hand? I don't know. I mean, does Jeff Bezos want to own a failing paper? I don't know about that. But the thing is, these big papers that used to be sort of standing in the breach a little bit are all on their way out. And people aren't really taking them seriously anymore. So what's left?

Doug: Every paper in the country but one. endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. But it's like this big left-wing circle jerk, just kind of like watching all these individual left-wing podcasters appear on each other's podcasts. It's like, you know what? I'm so glad that Ezra Klein went on Pod Save America. What does that accomplish? [Magda guffaws] Zero things.

Magda: Yeah. I mean, the other thing I'm thinking about a lot is how complicated it has suddenly become to parent older because we just don't know what the country is going to look like in a year? And how do you make the best decisions for them that you can? And if they're over 18, how do you help them make the best decisions for themselves? You know, what if those decisions mean they want to leave the country? I mean, my fear used to just be that my kids would get drafted. And that is not my worst fear for my kids and for other people's kids now.

Doug: I guess from my own selfish viewpoint, I'd be like, yeah, I'll miss the hell out of you. I mean, I miss the hell out of them now. But the bottom line is if they were going to go travel anyway, I've always said reading and travel are the two best educators. So now's the time when you're not encumbered by life to go see as much as you can. So if that bonds with this shit show that our government's in, I mean, it could be worse. 

Magda:  But. If an adult kid had said three months ago, “hey, I'm going to try to leave the country. I think I'm going to be gone for about three years just traveling around or going to live someplace else.”

Doug: Yep.

Magda: You would have assumed that the kid was eventually going to come back, probably, unless they ended up getting a job or marrying somebody or something like that, right? In which case you'd work it out. At this point, I think if a kid says “I'm going to leave the country,” there is no...now,

there's no reason to assume that those kids will ever come back because there's no reason to assume that there's going to be anything for them to come back to that's in any way healthy for them to be a part of.

Doug: No, there's no reason to believe I'd stay either. You know, I mean, I'm gonna because I'm point person for my parents and I will be here for them as long as they need me. So I'm not going anywhere. But I think it's a really shitty thing to understand as a parent that if you love someone, you got to set them free. And if they're going to do what they got to do, if that path takes them away from you, it's a really shitty thing. I really admire and envy people whose families are all still pretty close together and can get together so easily for like the holidays or something. I mean, when you consider how much of heaven and earth and other planets are being moved to get my entire family under one roof for Thanksgiving next week. Oh, my God, the number of moving parts is a Rube Goldberg machine like you've never seen.

Magda: Well, and I mean, also, some of your family members voted for Trump, too. So it's not just going to be like a pure loving event.

Doug: Well, but that's the thing, though. It's not going to be a big deal because most of my family figured out not to vote for Trump, which is fantastic. In fact, let's talk about how lucky I feel that I don't have super-MAGA parents that a lot

of people our age have because they've just been sucked into that vortex never to be retrieved again. And my parents in their 80s were like, yeah, I'm not voting for this creep.

Magda: Yeah. I'm really glad your parents figured it out. But 

Doug: Then that's what I have to pursue. As a family member, it's up to me to decide which relationships in my life can withstand political differences and which ones can't. And my family members are going to withstand that. It's just going to be up to me to figure out how.

Magda: Well, we're lucky that you and I are divorced because I wouldn't have it.

Doug laughs heartily: That would have been something. Yeah, that would have been pacing around like a pair of cats.

Magda: I have many mottos. Number one being: Trust Jesus, but lock your car. But one of my mottos is: Punch Nazis. So, yeah.

Doug: Well, yeah, we've already figured out one of the many epitaphs for your grave would be, “She wouldn't have it.” Yeah. But that's how we worked as a co-parenting couple, I think, when it came to confronting teachers and things. The good cop, bad cop worked pretty well, I thought.

Magda: Yeah, it's true. I mean, you know, Mike's still trying to work out having to be good cop all the time. But, I mean, it's nice. There's nobody in his family that voted for Trump. So.

Doug: I was like, listen, you don't want to bring my ex-wife in on this because she will. 

Magda laughs loudly: Yeah. 

Doug: It’s pretty funny but are you having that situation where you have to decide? Is there a relationship in your life that could withstand political differences”

Magda: No, because. The bulk of them got cleared out after Ferguson. And then the few remaining ones that were left got cleared out after Trump number one. There was one person that I unfriended last week because she was just like, “Oh, it's all going to be fine. Everybody should just calm down and don't be alarmist.” And I said, “You know what? I'm sorry. This is the end of the road. Like if people aren't willing to take my fears seriously, we don't need to be friends anymore.” And I hit Post and then I hit Unfriend and that was it. So. And I don't think she's a bad person. I don't even think she voted for Trump.

But I just was like, look, the only way you can approach somebody who has big fears like that is to either provide solid, reasonable evidence that what they fear is not going to happen, or you sit with them in their fear and you don't diminish their fear.

Doug: Well, what's interesting too is kind of reassessing all your relationships from a much more pragmatic transactional viewpoint. It's like, I really want to look at this person and decide if there really is much value in pursuing any kind of interaction with them. I mean, it's one thing to decide to stop dating someone, but it feels as though my friend base, which luckily isn't going to see a lot of attrition because most of them think and vote the way I do, but still, it's like in our time left, how do we concentrate our efforts into relationships that fulfill us? In that same vein, how do we concentrate or allow ourselves to jettison the stuff that doesn't?

Magda: With friends, you can accept things that you wouldn't accept in a romantic partner or somebody who was, you know, your child or your parent. Right. So there's a much wider range of stuff, I think, for friends, just as there's a much wider range of closeness. Like you can be friends with somebody for decades and not be that close to them, but still be friends. And I think that's where it's been tricky for a lot of people is the you know if this is somebody that is just like an activity buddy does it matter how they feel. And I think in the past I would have said, “Oh, no, *I* can be big enough to accept a difference of opinion.” I'm done being big enough. I'm done subsidizing people. Somebody who is unwilling to look at facts and somebody who is just voting because they heard somebody say something about overtime pay or immigrants. Like, I don't want to play pickleball with them ,either.

Doug: You don't play pickleball with anybody.

Magda: I'm not against pickleball. I just have never played pickleball, and I don't see it as a thing I'm going to get into. It involves hand-eye coordination, so that's not my jam.

Doug: Plus, there's also building evidence that pickleball is terrible for older people because of all the bending things.

Magda: Really? Okay, but how can it be horrible for older people if it keeps them bending? I thought you were supposed to keep doing all this stuff. Don't they say that one of the things that keeps you out of long-term care is if

you live in a two-story house and you have to go up and down the stairs like two or three times a day?

Doug: Well, it's muscle development. Yeah, it's staying flexible and having protein and building your muscles so that you can move your back and you can support your body. But I've talked to people, especially orthopedic doctors who say so many older people are bending for the dead ball, right? Because it doesn't bounce. And it can serve up a lot of potential physical pitfalls.

Magda: I think we need to actually talk to somebody about pickleball. Let's do an episode about pickleball. But I am wondering if this is the kind of thing in which people were going from zero to pickleball, right? Like they were doing nothing and then they were starting to play pickleball and they were getting injured because they weren't trained up to be doing these things. Whereas if you started playing pickleball and you sort of gradually worked up to it, then you'd be fine to be bending over and stretching to hit the ball and all that kind of stuff.

Magda: And that it's really just almost the same thing as in that stupid Women's Health Initiative thing where like women were taking nothing and then suddenly 10 years later they hit them with the estrogen and that caused a problem. Whereas if they had started taking the estrogen and had been taking it all along, it wouldn't have been an issue.

Doug: Well, I'm just happy to stick to old man chair yoga. Yeah. Doing, you know, deep knee bends while leaning on my kitchen counter. Right.

Magda: You know what? Old man chair yoga is better than no yoga.

Doug: No, I feel better. I feel it's easier to get up out of bed in the morning. You know, when you subscribe to the idea of making sure you have enough protein, make sure your muscle tone's good. Swimming is great. I still love swimming. I mean, the only problem with swimming is that it's too solitary for me.

I do enjoy shooting the shit over a game of pickleball.

Magda: Well, you know, you could join a synchronized swimming team.

Doug: If anyone could find a way to shoot the shit while swimming, it's me.

[Both laugh]

Magda: It's true. It's true.

Doug: I'll set up some kind of communicative, you know, headset and we can shoot the breeze while we're doing laps. Yeah. Well, you know, there's been this fantasy that we were just like, you know what? Let's just divide the country in half. You do it your way. We'll do it our way. And we'll just see who's better off. We'll look at all the red states who are, you know, net negative when it comes to relying on federal funds. 

Magda: Right. 

Doug: So this is going to be an ongoing thing. I, you know, I wasn't even sure what this conversation would be, or even if we'd have it, but I appreciate feedback from everybody in terms of what the path ahead is, especially for people our age, because when you think about building community, I think we've all kind of scaled back our goals for how big a community we can even build at this point. If you don't already have one, you're really not going to build it, given all the fragmented ways that social media has evolved. And you're going to find your people. But it just seems like the more siloed we are, the more divided we are, the worse off we're going to be. And the even less likely anything will ever get done in this country again.

Magda: Well, plenty is going to get done in this country. A shitload. More is going to get done in this country in the next year than has in the past 40 years. Just absolutely stuff that we don't want to get done.

Doug: Well, if you're going to form the Principality of Magdania, let me know and I'll apply for citizenship.

Magda: You can have a position in my cabinet, Doug.

Doug: Ooh. Secretary of what?

Magda: Secretary of ‘80s Britpop.

Doug laughs: Sold! All right. There's a question for the listeners. What Cabinet position would I fit in best as one of the chief advisors in the Principality of Magdania? Thank you all for listening to episode 63, 64. I don't know which one it is, so I'm going to say a bunch of numbers and I'll splice in the one.

65, 62, 18…

Magda: Hike!

Doug: Of the When the Flames Go Up Podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been What in the Hell? When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles, LLC, and it's available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and our newsletter

every other Friday, Friday Flames. Thank you all for listening. I know it's really bleak out there for a lot of us and we're all trying to find a way forward. Hopefully you'll stick with us. and see some semblance of community in this little bitty podcast that, uh, I really love to do regardless of where my citizenship lies.

Doug: What are your passports going to look like?

Magda:  Same as all regular passports, except I'm thinking like a dusty rose colored cover.

Doug: Okay. That's sold. If I was ever on the fence about emigrating, I'm in the boat now. Anyway, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.