Transcript: Episode 51

"Have you ever felt guilty for bringing kids into this mess?"

Doug French: Are you relying on the air conditioning pretty heavily now? 

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: Oh, yeah. It's hot. It's very hot. It's too hot for me. I mean, like, remember when you were a kid and, like, your grandparents' friends all moved someplace like Arizona that was, like, no humidity? Did that happen?

Doug: What fantasy place are you referring to with no humidity?

Magda: When I was a kid I remember all these people were moving to Arizona, or the mountains where there was no humidity. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense. Why would you want to do that? And now I'm like, oh, I could move someplace where there was no humidity because it really isn't the heat as much as the humidity plus the heat for me. I just don't physically feel good in this humidity. And so it's like the air conditioner needs to be on for me to be dry as much as to make it cool. So I had the air conditioner on, but I've turned the air conditioner off so that you can hear me for this recording session. I have the ceiling fan on, so we're now on borrowed time before I spontaneously combust.

Doug: Do you remember when you and I went to Arizona?

Magda: Uh-huh.

Doug: And we were wondering why that discounted ticket was available and it's because they knew the weather was going to be completely abysmal.

Magda: I know. And it was like the only wet, cold weekend there had been in Phoenix in like the last 20 years.

Doug: And we tried to drive up into Sedona and they said, no, it's too snowy up there so we won't allow you to rent a car up there. We saw the map, the entire state had cloud cover apart from Tucson. We actually were like how long a drive is it from Phoenix to Tucson? Maybe we should, is that worth it?

Magda: I mean I kind of feel like that's what I get for trying to go someplace hot once in my life. Why did I want to go someplace that was hot? I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. I'm not a person who likes to be hot.

Doug: I don't know. No. And Arizona has like 128 degrees hot. Friends of mine would say you could walk on a parking lot and it would just squish beneath your feet.

Magda: I remember I was on a work trip to Phoenix once and we were in this very air conditioned building all day. And then, I mean, here's the thing about dry heat, right? Like wet heat, it's like you step out of a refrigerator into a bowl of soup. But in Arizona it was dry heat. And so I stepped out of this super air conditioned building and there was like literally a two second delay between coming out of the building and feeling the heat. And I was like, wow, this is fascinating when it's not all this moisture in the air. It really does take you a little bit of time to sense the difference in the temperature. It was very fascinating to me.

Doug: I've got to say, I've become reliant upon getting on the bike at least five times a week just because that's what buoys my mood in my never-ending goal for bodily and probiotic health. Between biking and my kombucha, that's what makes me able to sleep at night.

Magda: Biking and kombucha. Ha ha! Okay, I would just like to submit to the court that when I was in my kombucha phase, you were making fun of my kombucha. And now here we are, only 15 years later, and now you just pulled out a bottle of kombucha, cracked it, and chugged some.

Doug: Because your marketing campaign was intensely flawed because you kept the mother in the house. 

Magda: I didn't have a mother-in-law unit in the back. Where was I going to keep the mother? 

Doug: No, but I mean, I have a much more sanitized version of kombucha. I buy kombucha in a bottle and I drink it and then I recycle the bottle. I don't have to make it with this alien mass in my fridge.

Magda: You could cut your costs by like 90% if you would make your own kombucha.

Doug: Right, but I've also done my standard cost-benefit analysis and recognized that spending a little to be farther removed from how the sausage is made is money well spent.

Magda: There's somebody right now trying to figure out literally how to make sausage out of the mother of the kombucha. Vegan sausage made out of kombucha.

Doug: The things that metaphors inspire, you never know what's going to come next.

Magda: They're going to call their company like Sausage Mama or something like that.

Doug: Brats with kombucha. Kombuchawurst.

Magda: Kombuchawurst, yes.

Doug: Right. Well, I worked hard to get into a good mood this morning just because I kind of needed to be because this topic we're going to talk about is one that's kind of dogged me for the past couple of weeks. But what surprised me was you've been having these doubts for years.

Magda: What doubts? Which specific doubts? Because there are a lot of doubts I’ve been having for years.

Doug: I mean, yes, you'll need more information for this, right? Yes, we have to be more specific about it. But we were talking about when the Supreme Court said, essentially, the president can do what he wants within a lawyer's discretion, right? I'd heard predictions about that going back to like February and March when the court agreed to hear this or whenever it was, that this is what's going to happen. They're going to come back and say, The president's immune for certain things and not immune for others. And the court has to recognize what's an official act and what isn't, which basically opens up for a bunch of lawyer hard-ons from sea to shining sea, because everything is just going to be litigated into oblivion.

Magda: “A bunch of lawyer hard-ons from sea to shining sea.” That's like the fifth verse that no one sings.

Doug: And I mean that in a non-gender specific nature, because there are plenty of lady lawyers who have lady boners for the entire thing too, because it's just, it's going to keep them busy and rolling in billable hours forever. Amen. And you and I were talking about this in terms of really wondering where the country is, where it's headed. And again, when you think about the things we could never have anticipated in our lifetime, much less our kids' lifetime, the idea of how fundamentally different the world is. 

Magda: Well, I've been thinking about this really since Trump got elected, that we had actually no guardrails. We thought we had this great system set up where you had to have somebody who was coming into the presidency in good faith. And maybe it was somebody you didn't agree with. Like, Ronald Reagan did so much damage to the country, the Constitution, human beings. And still, it's the long tail. I mean, we would not have had as many people dying of communicable diseases, including HIV, had Ronald Reagan not been in power. However, Ronald Reagan wasn't saying, “I am trying to destroy every system in the United States.” As Trump is saying, although he's backed off Project 2025, but I mean, Donald Trump is not an ideologue at all. He doesn't care. It's just whoever backs him, he'll let them do whatever they want to do. He doesn't have any thoughts. He just goes where it looks like the money is. 

We just don't have any guardrails for that. And I think we all thought we did. I think people thought, “oh, we escaped from the British. We had to get rid of this monarchy and set up this system. And there was a lot of thought that went into it and a lot of trial and error. And, you know, the first few presidencies were completely screwed up. But, you know, we're in the groove. We've passed some other amendments. We've got this system set up.” And so now, that's coming home to roost. My entire life, I thought things could never go completely horribly because there were some adults who were in charge, who were behind the scenes, who were taking care of things. And then the election of Trump showed that there are no adults. We are the adults, and we have no idea what we're doing, and we don't have the ability to crack into those systems. Now, I do have to say that if Joe Biden wanted everybody to get back on his team, he could appoint five new Supreme Court justices this week and begin the process of getting them heard. And that would get everybody right back on his team with a quickness.

Doug: But wouldn't that just get enough people mad on the other side to the point where there'd be 37 judges when Trump takes office? I mean, it's an escalation.

Magda: Well, OK, but if the problem is people think that people aren't going to vote for Biden, right? Then all we need is a reason, for Biden to do something that makes people who weren't going to vote, vote for him. We don't need to attract Trump voters. They have the same lack of logic that Trump himself has, right? Which is why they like him. But we just need the people who are now so fed up with the entire thing that they're not going to vote. We just need them to show up and vote. That's all we need. And there's a reason it's called... 

Doug: Well, because we've seen that in Michigan. I'm talking about Michigan in 2016 when Trump won Michigan by 11,000 votes. And it turned out that over 80,000 people in Michigan showed up to the polls, most of whom voted Democrat down the ballot, but couldn't vote for Hillary and left it blank. 

Magda: Interesting.

Doug: And so between that and Jill Stein's influence, that took enough votes away from Hillary Clinton here in Michigan to give Trump all the electoral votes. And to be from Michigan and see this same rhetoric happening again, saying, I'm just going to show up at the polls and I'm going to vote down the ballot everything Democrat, but I'm going to leave Biden blank. That's the exact same thing. And in fact, I was reading a piece by Kevin Cruz this morning, and he was saying that people treat elections like they do consumerism. They figure, okay, if my wallet walks with me, I'll get this company to do what I want in order for me to patronize it again. Voting doesn't work that way.

Magda: This is the legacy of everybody going crazy over the free market.

Doug: Well, especially since the objectives aren't the same. If you are a political operative, your goal is to get 50.01% of the vote. That's all you need. And the fewer votes there are, the easier it is to get the majority of them.

Magda: Well, I want to point out something about the 2016 election in Michigan. Which is that there was a shit ton of voter interference in the city of Detroit. Everybody who knows me and knows that I've been working the polls knows that the first time I worked the polls, I went in and looked and saw how many precincts we have in the city of Detroit and determined that all they would have had to do in 2016 is prevent 23 voters at each precinct from voting for Hillary or the Democrat, right? And that was that missing 11,000 voters. So a lot of us are really focusing strictly on Get Out The Vote in the places where people are going to vote Democrat. And we just need to harness that same energy in the rest of the state. And it doesn't matter if you like the person who's the Democrat. All you are trying to do here is to prevent Project 2025 from happening. Nobody's asking you to wear a button. Nobody's asking you to phone bank or tell anybody that you like this person. You can even lie and say you didn't vote for president. You can lie and say you voted for some third party, you voted for the worm brain guy, whatever, as long as you actually do cast a ballot in whichever way works in your state for the Democratic candidate for president.

Magda: I wanted to kind of focus on any political discussions we have with our kids because this is the first election where both our kids are eligible to vote. And I've talked to both of them a lot about how they feel about things with no assumptions because when you're 22 and 19, you feel very different about the world than when you're 78 and 2000 like you and I are.

Magda: I'd like to clarify that I'm 78.

Doug: Yeah, I left that open to interpretation, but there you go. What turned it for me, I thought, was just the ongoing battle of profit versus protection. The main forces are basically saying how much money can the rich boomer class have versus how much can we spend on infrastructure and helping those who need it. And the shareholder class has reached the tipping point now. They are so powerful that they can make companies do anything. And so many companies, especially those who are silent about this election, there's a big piece I read about how as outspoken as some of these companies were in 2020 and 2021, they're not saying a word now because saying anything means you're going to alienate at least half of your customer base. And so they're just recognizing that having a useful idiot in the White House is good for business, right? Remember Les Moonves? And talking about CBS News, he's like, “horrible for the country, but great for business”?

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: If that's all that the most powerful people in this country are thinking about, not about what's right, but what's profitable, that's what sensed it for me. Because given the 2017 tax cut that went through, and they had that huge press conference and all the Republicans high-fived saying, look how much money that we've extracted into this minority class of already rich people. They now have the power to buy up the media, to buy whatever they want, to finance whatever they want, and make sure that this useful idiot does what they tell him to do. Like he goes to the oil industry and says, you know what? If I'm in charge, there'll be no restrictions on where you put pipelines.

Magda: You know, this idea that like technology now connects us all. Well, the fact is we've all been connected anyway. Like, we can talk about pollution over here until we're blue in the face, but it's also corporations on the other side of the world that are just putting crap into the environment and it's all connected. And I think people don't want to talk about that. People don't want to recognize that. People don't want to think that they have any kind of responsibility for that.

Doug: Do you talk to Thomas at all about what he sees on TikTok? Because I know he sees a ton of “Genocide Joe” stuff on TikTok.

Magda: I know. I don't talk to him as much about what he sees on TikTok. I talk to him a lot more about what he thinks. And what I know is that he really hates Joe Biden. And he really hates Trump and thinks that Trump is a homicidal maniac. I don't think that young adults are fooled into thinking that they are the same. They know that Trump is a Trojan horse to absolute and utter destruction. But I don't know if they understand how big the difference functionally they are. Because I think they're at that stage in life in which, it matters more what you think than what you actually do in a lot of ways. And so they see Joe Biden doing these things that they find absolutely reprehensible. And they see Trump doing these things that they find absolutely reprehensible. But I don't think they really understand that the idea of the 40-hour work week is still kind of precarious, and that could disappear in a heartbeat. Nobody will be guaranteed PTO. 

Doug: But hasn’t it already disappeared?

Magda: Okay, come on, Doug. Come on. There are regulations and there are laws that companies have to follow, and people have to be paid overtime over a certain amount. That all goes away. By this time next year, If Trump wins, there will be no such thing as overtime. There will be no such thing as the minimum wage. There will be no such thing as the FDA anymore. And kids don't understand that because that part of the system, it just exists. You go into the store and you can look at the nutrition information. There's a sell by date, blah, blah, blah. They don't understand that that's because of regulations and laws.

Doug: Right. That's the battle I was talking about, protection versus profit. And he wants to get rid of NOAA. People are relying on NOAA, especially in Texas right now, who are getting hammered by Beryl. Whenever I talk to anybody about political thoughts, my first thought is, okay, what are these based on? Where are you getting your information from? And I know where I get mine from. I try to read as much as I can from sources I trust.

Magda: Well, they're just watching sources that they trust, right? I mean, like, I don't think you can be like, “oh, these kids, they're so dumb.” What's the difference between watching and reading?

Doug: No, no, no. I didn't say they were dumb. I said, I'm just wondering where they get their information from and what that information is that forms the ideas they have. Because I know there's a lot of focus on “Genocide Joe.”

Magda: I mean, what it seems like you're arguing here is that young adults who are old enough to vote, but, you know, under age 25, are getting a different set of information than we have available to us.

Doug: Well, it's available. They just don't dwell on the wonky stuff. I think they just had a different view of the world. When you think about forgiving student loan debt, the things that the stability that this administration has offered us, you've got to think of the whole picture and not focus on this horrid war in Gaza as the one thing that's going to have you penalize Joe at the polls. There's so much to his administration that I don't think a lot of younger people are made aware of.

Magda: Right. So what's the solution? I mean, the solution is we tell them, right? You know, I mean, you teased this episode of this podcast by saying that we had a plan and you know, the plan's not going to save us, right? There's no guarantee that this plan is going to save us, but I can't do nothing. The only thing that I can do is find as many of these younger non-voters as I can. And I'm starting with five, and then I'm going to do more if I can reach five of them. And I am going to convince them to register to vote.

I will help them register to vote in any way that I can. I think a thing that we oldsters need to bear in mind is that in a lot of states, you can't just register online to vote the day before the election. And this generation is very used to being able to do things at the last minute, as long as they're before the deadline, online. And so they're not used to having to go in person, or call ahead or make an appointment ahead of time and then go do it within a certain amount of time, just because that's not how their world functions, right? So we need to help them. I'm going to help guide people into how do you register to vote in the place that you live and help them make a plan to get there. 

If everybody who is afraid of the results of this election would reach out to the non-voters they know, hold their hands. And there are some states that put up big barriers to registering to vote. Some states that ask for all kinds of documentation that people might not understand that they have, that they don't know how to get, that kind of stuff. So we need to commit to helping people make sure they're registered to vote well within the deadline, and then making sure that people can actually get to the polls and vote and that they're able to take whatever they need. Make sure they know how it's going to go so they don't get discouraged. And also make sure that they know that their one vote does actually count.

Because the only advantage that we have over the oligarchy and these shareholders who are trying to control everything, is numbers. That's all we have. Because there's a reason it's called Project 2025. Like the way the population is aging, if this doesn't work for them now in this election, the next election four years from now is going to be so much more difficult for them because so many of their people will have died. And so many of our people will now be a voting age that we’ll just have, the numbers will be skewed even more in favor of us.

Doug: So you think it's a Boomer thing?

Magda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it's Silent Generation and Boomer. I mean, like all these people, all these Josh Hawley types and all these guys are getting so much press, and yes, Evangelicals and these super conservative Catholics are getting so much press, but that's not the majority of Gen Xers. It's certainly not the majority of millennials and it's absolutely not the majority of Gen Z. See, I think that's a bit skewed, though.

Doug: You know, if you just say, like, these are all older people who are going to die out, I think that's false.

Magda: I'm not saying that conservatism is going to go away, because I think as long as there are human beings, there are going to be some human beings who just don't want to think about things, who just want to default to the conservative point of view. But we know that this country is becoming less white, and less conservative. That's the numbers.

Doug: But they're going to have the larger proportion of the money, which is all you need.

Magda: Right, but they already do have a larger proportion of the money.

Doug: That's what I'm saying. And they're using this money.

Magda: So what do you do? Roll over? Just die? 

Doug: No, you don't. In fact, what I wanted to ask you was, where are you focusing these efforts? Because, I mean, I'm going to be very active. I've joined the Michigan Democrats. And, you know, we're back in play again. We're purple again. Even though everything has shifted very blue with Big Gretch. And, by the way, Democratic Party, I know you want her to be president, but you can't have her. She's ours.

Magda: I disagree.

Doug: She's even said she's not going to do it.

Magda: I absolutely disagree.

Doug: Well, she's said, she's come out and said, we support Joe.

Magda: I don't want Big Gretch to run now. I want Big Gretch to run in 2028. And I think she'd be an amazing president. I think we just slide Jocelyn Benson in as governor because Jocelyn Benson has fucking ovaries of steel. Oh, my God. She's like crazy badass.

Doug: That's the biography right there.

Magda: You know, she lives in Detroit and her house has been swatted a gazillion times.

Doug: No, she's a hard ass. No doubt. No, I'm saying what about this is you're in Massachusetts, which is pretty reliably blue.

Magda: It doesn't matter. We just need numbers. We just need numbers.

Doug: But doesn't it make sense to focus your efforts on places that are most vulnerable to go either way?

Magda: Yeah. But I mean, oh, my God.

Doug: So where are you focusing your efforts and how are you going about it?

Magda: Okay, this is the most conservative place I've ever lived, by the way, living here in Massachusetts.

Doug: Well, they elected Mitt Romney as governor. I mean, they do go both ways.

Magda: Well, yeah, but I mean, this town is much more conservative than any of the other places I've lived. Now, the places I've lived are Detroit, Ann Arbor, New York City, Toledo.

Doug: Yeah, that's a low bar to clear, yeah.

Magda: Yeah, but.

Doug: I mean, is it MAGA conservative or just WASPy conservative?

Magda: Both. Absolutely both. There are people who are not conservative everywhere. And those people need help to find and join together with the other people who are not conservative so that they're not afraid to show up and vote that way. I mean, for me, I'm really just going after the people that I know. And so I'm going to identify the people I know here who are under 30, who are not registered to vote, make sure they get registered, help them make plans to vote. But other than that, I'm just going for the people in Detroit that I know that are under 30 who may not be registered to vote and help them register. And then I think after that, I'm going to try to figure out how I can tap into some people that I know in Ohio, because Ohio is a really purple state. And Ohio has been sort of tending toward red. But I mean, you know, for years and years and years and years and years and years and years, you look at a map and Toledo, Cleveland, Youngstown–Youngstown's very blue–Columbus and a little bit of Cincinnati are very, very blue. And it's just these other areas, the more rural areas that are so red and they're just taking over disproportionately. It also doesn't help that the governor is who the governor is, but I mean, he's done. He's term-limited out.

Doug: They elected him though. That's the thing. I think Ohio, remember Ohio was like, as Ohio goes, so goes the country. How many years in a row? And then they went red and that streak is over because they're pretty reliably red now.

Magda: I think that a lot of that is propaganda. And a lot of that is because people have been held down and scared from voting, and there's been a lot of just sort of reinforcement of these MAGA ideas. Like Toledo was so reliably blue forever and ever and ever because of unions. And then just Trump hit them with the rhetoric and nobody understands that Trump is like the worst thing for business ever. If you want your company to go bankrupt, yes, indeed, follow Trump. But I think people just bought this whole like “he's good for business” line without actually looking into it. So I think people have been fooled, and I think we need to, A, provide people a path back, right? Like, “you thought this thing about him, and now you know that that's not actually the way it is.” 

I think we were trying to make people fall in love with Hillary and make people fall in love with Joe. And as a person who's never been even remotely in love with either of those people and who has just sort of always had to hold her nose and vote, I think you can't gaslight people into liking someone that they just feel icky about. But you can say to them, do you want to still have a 40-hour work week? Do you want to still have overtime pay? Do you want to still have a pension? Because if you want those things, then you have to vote for whoever is in the D column, and that's where your heroism lies, is in making a sacrifice by voting for someone that you don't personally like, but that's going to save you and is going to save your kids and your grandkids and everyone else.

Doug: When you think of the way that media are for profit, I mean, they look forward to elections. That's like, that's their Black Friday because you can air messages about culture wars and immigration and all of these things that are made to seem like they matter more than they do because those are the ones that people cling to and become radicalized by. And when you talk to our kids about how that's happening, I mean, my challenge has been just how cynical my kids have already become. You know, you shouldn't be this sure that the system is rotten and bought.

Magda: Why not? 

Doug: Well... 

Magda: I mean, because, like that same argument is why people were telling me that I was supposed to not tell my kids when there was a school shooting. “Oh, make sure they don't find out.”

Doug: Oh, no, no, no. I'm not trying to withhold information from them. I'm just lamenting the fact that when I was 18, things were very different than when our kids are 18.

Magda: That's absolutely true. And when you were 18, Reagan had just come out of the presidency and had utterly destroyed huge parts of the United States. I don't think there's anything wrong with questioning and being a little bit bitter and a lot bit skeptical, because all those people who just watched that “It's Morning in America” ad and voted for Reagan because of that, I would love to say they should be ashamed of themselves, but they shouldn't be ashamed of themselves because nobody wanted them to know. Everybody wanted them to stay innocent. So I'd rather have kids who aren't innocent.

Doug: No, that's true. And when I think about it, I voted for the first time in 1984 when Ronald Reagan took every state except Minnesota, where Mondale is from. That's the first and last Republican I ever voted for. I think the kids are a great source of finding out just what new voters are thinking, because I think I read somewhere Millennials and Gen Z are going to be 44% of the electorate this year. I love the plan. I think the plan is to try and work with people to recognize the entire picture and not just what grabs the headlines, because so many people are conditioned to just look at the headline and move on, and recognize that there's a lot of dealing that's making things look bigger than they are, which convinces people in many cases to vote against their own interests because they're not paying attention.

Magda: I think the question is, how do we allow space for other people who are in the younger demographic to come to the same decisions that both of our children have come to? Because the last I spoke to each of the kids separately, both of them were planning to vote and were absolutely voting for whatever Democrat was the presidential candidate. And they have opinions. Neither of them likes Joe Biden any more than I do. But they are committed to vote because they understand that they can't not vote. And you just hold your nose and you do it. I think it's absolutely and utterly worthless to try to gaslight people into liking or wanting something that they don't like and don't want. I have no interest in convincing anyone that Joe Biden is a great person or the best candidate. If Joe Biden steps down–and I don't have any opinion on this either–I am team whoever is in the Democratic nomination, right?

But we need to give people space to say, “I fucking hate this. And I'm going to do something that makes me feel shitty because the alternative is to destroy my world as I know it.” I think that's how we – that's where we need to get people to.

Doug: Can we talk about why you don't like Joe Biden?

Magda: There are a lot of reasons I don't like Joe Biden. But, I mean, what it starts out with is the Anita Hill hearings and the way he treated her. And there's nothing, he's never actually apologized for that. And I think he still doesn't really realize what he did to her and to every woman in the entire world because of the way he treated her. So, I mean, if I'm a single issue voter, like, maybe that's it. But I just, there's a lot of reasons. He's essentially way, way, way, way, way, way, way too conservative for me.

I did not want him to be the vice president and I certainly didn't want him to return back. And I was having a discussion with some friends at dinner last night about this. And one of them said that she thought that he was really the only candidate that could have beaten Trump in 2020. And that may be possible. That actually may be possible. But it doesn't make me like him and it didn't make me happy to vote for him. Just like it won't make me happy to vote for him personally if he's the one that is the Democratic nominee in November.

But I also wasn't raised to think that I had to like the candidate. Like every time my mom went to vote, she has this little pewter pin in the shape of a peanut that she wears every time she goes to vote. And it reminds her of the one and only time that she got to vote for a candidate that she really, really thought was great. And that was Jimmy Carter. And we know how that turned out. She votes Democrat. She phone banks. She's a volunteer for the Democratic party, all this kind of stuff without really personally liking a lot of those candidates. That's not what it's about. You don't have to personally like them and they don't have to be aligned a hundred percent with your views. Like a lot of them are aligned, like maybe 60% with my views, but the other, you know, the other party’s aligned like negative 6%.

Doug: Well, when you talk about convincing people, because I think what really flummoxes a lot of people, people have really strong opinions about things. But when you press them on the why, they kind of clam up.

Magda: People clam up because they don't want to be told they're wrong.

Doug: And they don't know. They just like, they're very comfortable in their own ideology. “I've decided this and I'm going to defend it and I have to be right.”

Magda: You don't have to have a reason to not like someone.

Doug: I think you do. In an election.

Magda: Really? Yeah. Okay. Maybe, possibly, this is because you're a man. But when you're a woman, you are gaslighted your entire life into being in situations that are not necessarily safe. And also being told to avoid your intuition. And you have to have a reason that you have to be able to articulate about why the situation makes you feel unsafe. And if you can't articulate the reason that the situation makes you feel unsafe, you're told “you're not giving people a chance.” Or your feelings or your experience is wrong. And then when you do get hurt in some way by that situation, oh, it was just a fluke. So my experience tells me that when I get a bad feeling about somebody, I need to just avoid that person. And I would never tell anyone that they needed a reason to avoid someone they thought was unsafe.

Doug: All right. We're headed down a different road here. I mean, I'll just...

Magda: Yeah, we absolutely are. We absolutely are. But you can't tell someone you have to like the person you're voting for if they don't like the person. 

Doug: No, I'm not. 

Magda: If you have to convince someone with reasons to like someone, that's not actually them liking someone.

Doug: You can, yeah, you can like the policies that they brought about. Like, I like capping insulin prices. I like more labor protections. 

Magda: I love that. 

Doug: You just saw last week the updated Social Security estimates, and it's going to last a little longer than they thought. And if it's issue driven, don't you think you're being gaslit if you're being told that immigrants are the only issue that you can run on when there's so much infrastructure that Biden has restored? There's so many issues, wonky stuff, boring stuff, like how in Project 2025, he wants to be able to fire non-ideological members of like the General Accounting Office. And he wants to change their filing status so that they can be fired for cause if they don't agree with you politically, that kind of thing.

Magda: Yeah, absolutely.

Doug: That doesn't get any headlines. The only headline is border, border, border, and Fox News will be more than happy to oblige to keep their people scared.

Magda: Okay, your issue here is that Fox News are liars? Because I think that's pretty established.

Doug: No, no, I'm saying that we need to counter that message. And when you convince people to vote, you say, this is what you're not hearing about.

Magda: That's fine. That's not the same thing as liking someone.

Doug: Right. You don't have to like them. And I think we're saying the same thing because you don't like him because of his misogyny. 

Magda: Right. 

Doug: But still, the policies that he's brought out are the ones that, A, preserve democracy, which is nice, but B, are actually doing things, especially for people our age.

Magda: Well, right. But I mean, OK, Doug, here's the thing: I think Elizabeth Warren would have been a much better and more productive president over the last four years than Joe Biden would have. And that's what my point is here. I think that we need to figure out a way to make it okay for people to vote for the person who's there because it's not productive to think about who we could have had instead of Biden. And that's also why I wouldn't go through the process of trying to remove Joe Biden from the ballot now, and there are people who are. I think that's a misuse of energy. I think the use of energy is figure out how to make it OK for any one given person to vote for the Democrat who's the candidate. And it sounds like for you that way is to point out all the great things that have been done. For me, the way is to point out all of the horrible things that will happen if we don't vote for them. And it's great. People need to have different approaches. But there's no part of my approach that involves trying to deny feelings that you have about people that you don't like.

You want to talk about getting focused on issues. Let's talk about the time that I asked my dad for help when I was in Algebra 2 in high school. And my dad dug in and made sure that I understood completely every single issue around what we were studying in Algebra 2. And I went into that test and I got a D on that test because in the fury about understanding everything, I had neglected to memorize any formulas. I don't want that to happen. I don't want people to get so into the issues that they don't just simply go out and vote. You know, in 2020 at my precinct that I work at in Detroit, I got a whole bunch of new voters who had registered to vote specifically for the purposes of voting against Trump. And yes, some people came in and said, “I'd like to vote for Biden,” but I had a whole lot of people coming in and saying, “Where do I vote against Trump?” Right. I had a dozen people come in and say, I haven't voted in 10 years, 20 years. Somebody said they hadn't voted in 25 years, and they came in to vote because they wanted to vote against Trump. That's the energy we need. We need people who don't want to be engaged in any other way, who just want to come in and vote because that's the bulwark that we have right now.

Doug: See, that's why we make a good team, I think, because we do have the combined efforts.

Magda: Because I never let you talk? You keep saying I'm not letting you talk.

39:01

Doug: No, no, no. That's not at all. You're lathered up. I was actually hoping we could hose off for a second here because there are passions on both sides. And one of us is fighting a fool's errand, and I think it's me.

Magda: My air conditioning is off. I'm so hot. I'm literally steamed.

Doug: I know. I can see the vapors coming off you.

Magda: Mike and I went out for ice cream last night. We were sitting there, and he looked at me, and he's like, your glasses are all fogged up. I'm like, I know. I'm just so hot. You know, sitting outside, and my glasses are just fogging up right there.

Doug: I'm going to find you one of those cold caps.

Magda: Oh, my God. I need, like, an entire cold suit. Head to toe cold suit.

Doug: Yeah. You should just get some kind of head to toe garment that's made with pockets and just fill it with ice and just slog about.

Magda: That would be a lot of ice maintenance. I can tell you that.

Doug: It's interesting because I think we both agree what we want to happen, but we're both, we're butting heads here on the best strategy to do it just because you want to demonize the other side and which is already going on and plenty in the media. My hope is, can we at least just say, let's put that aside for a minute and have a granular approach of what's actually happening, not what's being trumpeted and over aggrandized to grab your attention.

Magda: If your way gets people to fill out the ballot and vote, that's great.

Doug: And either way, we're talking about the term that I have come to love, which is “productive anxiety.” The whole idea of recognizing that we're all anxious about something and action is a great way to offset however anxious you feel about what's about to happen. And recognizing you can only do what's within your control. The alternative to acting in a way that you think makes incremental change and being the change you want to see is just doom scrolling and turning yourself into an unproductive couch lather.

Magda: “Couch lather.”

Doug: Which I know is an unfortunate choice of words given how moist everything is there.

Magda: I'm not always annoyed by moistness, but when it's 90 degrees outside, yes.

Doug: Well, it was 61 here this morning.

Magda: Oh, shit. I don't need to hear that.

Doug: You'll be back here before you know it. See, that's your productive anxiety. You're going to be anxious and eager to have 50-degree mornings again, and that's what's going to encourage you to move back here.

Magda: Seriously.

Doug: When the time comes. This became something I did not anticipate, but I'm glad it happened. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

Magda: Right.

Doug: When you and I fleshed out this idea as a discussion topic, we were thinking, a lot of people aren't having kids anymore. Our birth rate is in the dumper.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: And it's all about people's lack of trust in the future of our country. And then I was saying like, I was coming around to feeling that way. And then you told me you've been abiding this for, you've been Biden this issue since the kids were young.

Magda: I've been feeling guilty about having brought kids into a situation that they have no control over and no real hope for. Right. And it's not, it's not just this election. It wasn't like, eight years ago, I was like, “oh my God, in 2024, things are going to be worse than I can possibly imagine so I feel guilty about that now.” I just have felt guilty about the fact that there's no real hope for jobs in our economy, right? Like when you and I came out of college, you could come out of college with a degree in literally anything, 

get some entry-level job and then work your way up and be assured that you were going to be able to support yourself and your family and have some kind of retirement and not be constantly awake worrying about bills or whether you were able to have a kid or whether you would be able to ever go on vacation or own a car or things like that. And those aren't things that our kids can take for granted at all. They don't know what's going to happen. Why would they even go to college if they spend four years in college and all this money that they don't have and that their parents don't have to go to college and then they come out and there's no real hope for jobs? And I think that's what kids are looking at. I also think they feel like the earth isn't even going to exist in 50 years because of all the environmental problems. They're just depressed. And I didn't have any idea that I was bringing kids into a situation that was so untenable for them that they were going to either have to bluster through it or they were going to be so chronically depressed that all they could do is make memes to try to feel a little bit better. So I've been feeling guilty about this for a long time and I know I'm not the only one.

Doug: And I think that's the bottom line here. We should talk about having a discussion about breeders remorse.

Magda: Breeders remorse? Yeah. I mean, I would love to talk to other people who have breeders remorse. And I mean, I think because I wrote Ask Moxie for so long, people were able to say things to me that they weren't able to say to a lot of other people. So I've heard from a lot of people, especially women who had kids because they thought they were supposed to have kids and then realized that they didn't actually really enjoy parenting. They loved their children. There was no doubt of that. They loved their children. But they probably would have had happier lives had they not been parents. I haven't heard as many people saying that the conditions of the world are so bad and conditions specifically of the United States are so bad that they are feeling guilty about having brought kids, especially these people that they love, into this situation that seems a little bit hopeless a lot of the time.

Doug: It's particularly ironic that this is happening at a time when the Heritage Foundation is all for forced birth.

Magda: Well, yeah.

Doug: And how much political sway that they've built into the country's leadership, which has got a whole other story. This could have been eight podcasts. But in the end, we were talking about politics and if breeder's remorse is a thing with you and what effect will it have on our kids, whether they want to have kids or not. I don't think either of our kids is all that excited about being a parent.

Magda: No, I don't really think so either. I mean, I think they see it as a lot of struggle and it just isn't presented as being the thing you have to do anymore. You know?

Doug: This is going to be a discussion that's going to go on, I think. We're going to take it on to the Facebook group. I know you and I talk about it a lot. Hopefully, I mean, I just had some more kombucha to settle my gut after a discussion like this. When you're having a discussion that brings about more ulcers, have some more probiotic help. 

Anyway, thank you for listening to episode 51 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Friday and our bi-weekly newsletter every other Friday. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, please give us a review. We'll see you next week for episode 52. Until then, have as good a week as you can muster, and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.