The Cost of Truth Telling (And Why We Paid It)

We've begun. Hello. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Right now before you, we were live, which we're not, but we're... They get them died. Abby was picking an unruly eyebrow off of my eyebrows. And then I asked of her and my sister, how do people not have gray eyebrows? All I have are some eyebrows that have been over tweezed from the 80s and never grew back. And then now they're just mostly brown with 12 or 13 long gray ones sticking out. And I don't understand what other people are doing. They're dying them. How are people dying their eyebrows? When you go to get your hair done, you ask them to do your eyebrows. And it takes literally five minutes. I think that is malpractice on the part of your person. Do you do that? I do. I've never seen anyone in any hair salon getting their eyebrows dyed. Did you know that was a thing? Yeah. And I think you've done it before. I've never gotten my eyebrows dyed. Oh, I've gotten my eyebrows. I have gone to a place that is an eyebrow place and I have laid down. Have you ever had your eyebrows tinted a different color? No. I've had things carved into my eyebrows. Carved? Yes. I've had a knife. Microblading? Yes. Is that the blade part of microblading? They blade into your skin? Yes. And honestly, it was a bridge too far. I don't know if you know what you're talking about. I don't think that's it. That is possible. They literally put individual hairs in. Honey, that is not what happened. I was talking to the person. She said, this is a small knife. This is like tattooing something onto your... Oh, so they were tattooing you. They weren't blading you. I think they were. I think it was a very small knife. Okay. Well, someone who knows anything about anything we're talking about because clearly we do not, tell us the options available to middle-aged women about their eyebrows. It's also an option just to keep them gray. It's beautiful. For me, I feel like it's a little Frida revolution that every time I go to a place and they say, would you like us to clean up your eyebrows? As if, of course, you should clean up your eyebrows. I say, no, thank you. Is there any way you could make them bigger and more prominent? Because I feel like it's a little revolution. So I get them dyed so that they leap off of my face into other people's faces. But we should know the blading because that sounds aggressive and violent, frankly, violent. I don't think that needs to happen anymore. I'm thinking right now that I'm annoyed with everyone who's ever done my hair that they don't tell me about this. But then I also think it's a tricky position to be in for them because I'm thinking about it. Now I'm thinking of every time I've ever gotten a manicure and the person during the manicure looks at me and says, would you like me to add an appointment for your chin hairs? And I'm like, I didn't bring that up. Like I didn't know about it. Maybe they think I'm doing this on purpose. Right, right. That's her trademark, her chinny hair, mark trademark. Okay, speaking of webbies, this is a cool morning because we woke up and went about our little day and had our coffee. And then Allison wrote us a text. Allison from our team. Everyone knows Allison, right? But I don't know. I just want to make sure the Allison wrote to us and said, you guys, we just won a webby, which a webby is kind of like the Oscars for the internet. Which remember, we didn't win. So this means even more. Yes, we lost the Oscar, but we won the Emmy. Wait, no, we didn't win an Emmy. Webby. We won a webby. Misspoke. And since we won a webby, we are only four steps away from an egot. Okay, there's many reasons why we think this is cool this morning. Honestly, we are not good at celebrating anything that happens to us. No, you are not. Right. So over the last low so many decades that we have been working, we have gotten awards before. We have lost a lot of awards, but we've gotten awards and we just don't necessarily like feel them or they don't matter to us. Wait, they matter to us. But I think that you specifically, and Amanda, I don't know if you relate to this, but like, I don't know if it's an expectation or, or you're too afraid to be vulnerable to celebrate the thing, because that proves that you actually cared about the thing. And it was important to you. I think it's a test of vulnerability, the folks that struggle a lot to receive presents or celebrate like awards or whatever there. Yeah, I think that's probably true. And I think I don't ever celebrate things publicly because I think I have learned over the previous aforementioned low so many decades that sometimes it's hard for the public to celebrate a woman who's winning, right? That it's much easier for people to feel comfortable when a woman is not saying, yeah, here's a good thing I did. Yeah. Or is proud. Right. Proud. I think a proud woman is very hard for people to celebrate. Yeah, I get that. I'm not even like, completely judging it. I think it's in the air. It's in us. Amanda, how are you celebrating? Because I feel like you might be along the same lines as your sister Glennon. I feel grateful and gratified when things like that happen. But I think it's two parts. I think it's like, whatever's happening today is the thing that's more pressing, you know, that's just like, well, that happened, that's great. And what are we doing today kind of a vibe? But I also think it's, I think it's maybe kind of a leveling thing, because I also don't ever get upset if we don't win anything. I feel like it's like, you put out what you can, you do your best to put out the thing that you think is what you can do that is also what the world needs. And then you have no more control over it. So I don't feel like it means any more that you got the award than that you didn't get the award, as long as you're putting out the thing that you feel good about. So I don't know, I feel proud of what we've done. I think that in this case with the webby this time, it feels special because of two reasons. One, that all of that effort that we made to be independent, it feels like kind of a referendum on that because we did all that work to become independent, we were able to put out a lot of different type things that we couldn't before, which feels like maybe this webby is a response to and that feels very gratifying because it's connected to that particular thing. And then it also feels like, wow, we've been at this for five years. And it still means things to people that feels encouraging and exciting. Yeah, if we're doing this one, we're 70. Let's get specific about what Amanda was just referring to, which is the going independent. We haven't talked about that a lot. And I do want our community to understand a lot was going on behind the scenes that we weren't talking about upfront. Because sometimes when things are in the stage where they're falling apart, you have to just keep towing the line until you can understand or keep moving until the new thing is formed. And then you can see it clearly. And basically what happened over the last few years is what has happened to a lot of people in this space, which is that we had been for a long time tied to a large corporate media company who was producing the things we put out in the world in this podcast. What we found over time through many different small and big instances was that people who are committed to speaking what is true to them and what they see in the world that is true and are not able to censor themselves or adjust themselves in a way that matches the wind of the moment, we're having to make a decision, which they were having to sort of quiet themselves or realign themselves with people who were saying, we need you to tone it down. We need you to not say that word. We need you to stop saying fascism. We need you to not say Palestine. We need you to stop. And that was said to us in overt and covert ways. Over time, we realized we had no choice but to remove the middleman between us and you because the middleman needed to make the message different in order to kiss the ring of the fascist wind that was blowing. So what we did was spent a solid year maybe longer just learning every single thing we could about what these actual middlemen do, what a media company does, what they were trying to convince us we needed them for, and then we just slowly and messily figured out how to become it ourselves. And it was messy and long and painstaking and it was me and Abby and Amanda and Valerie and Audrey and Allison. And we just kind of figured it out and cobbled together something the best we could. We named it treat media because we were just like in a three day slumber party trying to figure out what the name is because that's always the fun part at the end. And we loved the word treat number one because we felt completely committed to creating art that is healing, but also that is delightful, art that delights and heals and treat means both of those things. And then also Allison who has since the beginning of this whole public journey for 20 years, however long this has been, you know I'm not good at time, forever, for a millennia has been the most solid, steady creative force, anchor, caretaker, wind of this whole freaking operation. Allison's mom, K.P., every time, as Allison was growing up, every time something good happened or Allison's mom wanted to give her something special, she would say this is going to be a real TR. And that was how she said treat. This is going to be a real treat, but it's kind of weird because it's longer than a treat. It's like a nickname that's actually longer. Anyway, so over time, Allison would always say to us every time something good happened like when a webby, this is a real TR, the word treat also has TR in it, which is together rising, which was the activism arm behind our operation for so long. It also has the word eat in it, which I'm, it's always helpful for me to remember. There was a lot of things we liked about it. You guys jump in, what are you thinking about this? Well, I think all of what you're saying is really so true. I think one of the most important things for me when we decided to do this is looking out in the media landscape. We just felt like we could figure this out and not because we didn't enjoy some of the people that we worked with because some of the people were great, but to have your own thing means that you're the ones that get to decide things, whether it's what you put on, whether it's who you're advertising with. It also gave me an incredible opportunity to start my own show with Julie and Billie Jean. Call to welcome to the party available wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you. Thank you, Amanda. And I think that with the way that the world kind of was feeling a year ago and the distrust that people are feeling so much with the media landscape, we just didn't want to have any barrier between us and our pod squads, right? Or party people like we call on welcome to the party. What we have found though, it was a lot of information that we were learning and it was hard to figure this all out. I've been like really impressed by all of us and proud of all of us because oftentimes what these middlemen do is that they pretend that it's really complicated behind this door and that we'll never be able to figure it out and it's just too hard and it's too complicated and that we will never understand. And what we have found is it is not too hard and it is not too complicated. Yes, it took time and effort by the three of us, but we have figured this thing out in a way that feels like really natural and true to all three of us because now we're not at the mercy of anybody else. This is us and we are not in a contract with a production company that forces us into publishing one million episodes a week to come to make that contract solid. You know what I mean? So it's just, I just feel happy. And approving. I mean, really, I think that systemic piece you just named is huge because it does feel like it mirrors a million times over in personal life and business life for people. But specifically that is the thing that the few things that you mentioned were what we could talk about and what we couldn't talk about, which we were constantly railing against. I mean, we weren't saying, okay, that sounds good. And so that was creating a lot of frustration and animosity and just resistance on all sides. Then, okay, downloads need to be X, so you need to put up Y number of episodes and the constant pressure of that where there's some kind of contractual obligation where that was not within our control of what we wanted to do and what we thought the audience wanted to receive. And then third, the approvals on ads, like what percentage of ad offers you need to accept. And so that's like the real nitty-gritty behind the scenes. And so I think opting out of that, and it needs to be named because we have the privilege to do so, because we have enough resources, because we're in a position to have a higher level on our integrity of what we wanted to talk about, then we had a need to receive the money from those advertisements that we wanted to be in a position to say, if that person doesn't want to pay us to do the ad, that's fine. We don't want to have that money as opposed to this person's offering and therefore you have to accept it. And that is a very privileged position, a privilege that we have worked really hard to cultivate. But since we are here, it didn't make any sense to be playing by rules that literally cost us too much in the integrity piece to deal with. So I think getting to this place where we can say, if it's something we want to do, we'll do it, is the greatest kind of freedom and liberation you can have. And we were privileged enough to have that. So what we needed to build around us was not there's someone holding all the cards. The cards are the production of your podcast, the cards are the ad sales, the cards are the amount of money that we are going to pay you for doing your podcast. In exchange for that, you give away all of these rights and you have all of these obligations. What we said is, we want to take all of the risk and all of the rights on ourselves. And then we want to choose who we work with. So we want to find initial who is producing our podcast in a beautiful way. We want to find an ad sales team that knows that they could bring us a thousand ads a week and we could accept all of them or none of them and they wouldn't have anything to say about it. So we started working with that ad sales team. We could pick who we wanted and the risk is, it doesn't work, in which case that's fine, because the other way was not working even more. And I think that does happen over and over and over again to say, okay, here's someone who has solved all the problems for you, whether it's a business or an employer or a partner, you don't have to think about anything. But there is always a cost to that. There is always an implicit or explicit bargain that you are making that curtail your choice and that forces you into things. And so that was, I think, the beauty of this, of being able to be in a position to be like, we don't want to have everything you're offering and we can take the risk of figuring it out knowing that whatever we decide, we can bear the consequences of. And you know, there's just this constant recurring theme that I have certainly noticed throughout my career where there's like a locked door of people who are like, just do your thing, you need us in this room to do this thing for you. And there is the repeated suggestion that the reason I shouldn't go into that room and ask questions about what's going on in that room is because it's just too complicated. The more times it becomes so uncomfortable that I actually have to go in that room and say, what I realized is that the door is usually closed not because what's going on there is too hard, but because what's going on there is too easy. Because the people at that table, they're so wise and skilled and doing things I can't understand. It's they have to keep me away because it's easy to understand what they're doing there. Because if I dug in and rolled up my sleeves and asked enough questions and stayed really awake and learned, we wouldn't need anyone at that table. For all the suggestions that we weren't going to be able to do it, that so much would be lost, I just want to say that the year and a half since treat has been created, we launched the We Can Do Hard Things book, which was a New York Times bestseller. We made our first co-produced, executive produced, our first film, which was nominated for an Oscar. Come see me in the Good Light. Go see it in the Good Light. Beautiful on Apple. We for the first time really completely took the reins of producing this podcast. We were just nominated for a Webby. We launched Welcome to the Party, which has been a phenomenon in the sports space and will continue to grow. And by the way, I just want to thank you both for that. Because I was thinking about this the other day, I didn't realize how much I missed the home that I built for myself called Women's Sports. And what you both offered me was this ability to create this thing and find the right people, which I did in Julie and I did in Billy. And the whole team at Welcome to the Party is just so phenomenal. And I love going to meetings. I cannot believe I'm saying that out loud. I can't either. Because Abby hates a meeting, y'all. Yes. The only thing she hates really. I know. I have a content meeting in a couple of hours. I'm excited to see my co-workers and friends and talk about all the things that are going on in Women's Sports. And I just didn't know that I needed this 10-year break away from Women's Sports to heal in a way that when I walked back in the door of Women's Sports, I was a different person. I've been able to soak up all the goodness, the incredible, I don't know, it's just home. And I'm grateful to you both. It's so beautiful. This is an ad, but it's really real talk about health, wellness, and menopause, which means this one is actually something many of you want to be listening to. I wonder if any of these experiences have happened to you recently. You've turned the thermostat down three times today while everyone else is reaching for a blanket. You've walked into a room and completely forgotten why. You found yourself calling your kids by the dog's name. 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It's something no one else is doing. It's the way that you see the world and dig in and show us what's underneath. Like you're like picking up a rock and showing us all the like cockroaches that are running around and then showing us the way out. And the thing we were talking about last night is that there are other people doing like hard hitting world changing, like pushing us forward. But it always feels like it's also kind of being done for the interwebs. Like it's being done for like the viral moments or the like to really nail it in a sound bite. That's not what you're doing. You're like going head to head toe to toe with these politicians, with these people and you are like holding them to account and letting us see things in a way that causes us not just to say fuck yeah, but causes us to say what next. Like people are, I don't know. There's investigative journalism inside of it, but also with the spirit and the righteousness and the fucking rage of a middle-aged woman who has children. Do you know what I mean? And it's so fucking good. And also by the way, you're a lawyer and you're smart as fuck and you, the way you present it, it's like so creative and it's so crafty and it's so smart. And like to be interviewing representative Rokana and to be able to like really go toe to toe with this guy who is incredible on camera and has all the talking points. I don't know. I just was like, please don't run for office because we need you to do this thing because this thing is just as important as and I think even more important to hold the feet to the fire of folks in Congress and our elected reps. Wow. Thank you. It feels as if what has happened with treat media, what has happened with what you're doing now, what Abby's doing now. I remember some point someone saying to me, since you all three are working together, the evolution of your work together will be a direct reflection of the three of yours relationships and the three of your relationships will be a direct reflection of the work each of what you do internally. It feels to me like when you take a step back, it is all of that. We have looked at the systems we were involved in, looked at our privilege, looked at all of it and said, actually, it's time to grow up. We don't need daddy. We don't actually need this person who's patting us on the head and telling us he knows more than we do and trying to tell us to be good girls. We're not going to be sleeping beauty anymore. We're going to wake up. We're going to learn this shit. We're going to just assume that we are as capable and smart, certainly as the next guy and that we can handle this. And not only did that happen, but the three of us did our individuation work. We always talked about love as being both held and free and also being fully free to be ourselves without stopping each other from being each other's selves. And I don't know how it happened, but it does look like that's happening. Like you're off doing your thing, which none of the three of us can do. Totally. You're off doing your thing in a new, healed, beautiful way that clearly neither of us can do. I'm writing again. Every morning she is in the chair writing. It's so fun. She won't tell me a single thing about the book though, which pisses me off. I haven't spoken a word about it to anyone for the first time and I'm like 60,000 words in. But do you see what I'm saying? That it feels like everything happens and you can't see any of it, but that every once in a while you can stop and say, oh my God, it looks like what happened looks like a manifestation of all of the things that we've been talking about on the podcast. We can do hard things. It's like we all went are doing our hardest thing right now. I know. I think that without the first four years of the pod, which felt to me like intensive therapy, I mean all of those books that we just bathed in and marinated in and we're like, we have absorbed your lesson. All of the wise people we talked to, all of the kind of questions that we pushed up against and the conflicts we had with each other as a result of those things, all of that I feel like made us in a position to be able to be blooming in different ways. I mean, I am an inertia queen. I would have been like, okay, you're going to be sitting there editing Glennon's books for the rest of your life. I would have been like, sounds great. It was all of the things, the conversations we were happening with on the pod and what that forced us all to be thinking about so much that I think led to Abby knowing that she could go do that, me being curious about what I'm curious about now and you Glennon not feeling like you had to keep doing everything to keep us having something to do. I think that's very interesting and it makes me feel really hopeful because it makes me think, like, I wonder if that is what it's done for our community. I hope that's true. I hope that if it happened for us and if people have been along the ride with us and thinking about and absorbing and confronting the same things, I mean, maybe it really has done that for a lot of people and that feels so special to me. That would be amazing. We've really done a lot of codependency work over the last year without really talking about it. We've done a lot of codependency and a lot of codependency work. Yes. Abby talked for a minute about how it felt for her to be, because she's kind of back in the sports world, but as a new self and you're doing this whole thing kind of just in a completely new way with this new, like, how does it feel to you to be doing the work you're doing? What is the experience like? I mean, it's been different with each episode. So we've done the billionaire one, the two-part Epstein series, the Jared Kushner CIA, Iran one, and then the one on Tuesday about Congress's dereliction of duty with Rep Kana. It feels cathartic and therapeutic to me. It feels very strongly about some things and I feel like I see it. It's like, see something, say something. It's like, I see it, but then I never really know how it's going to be received because it makes, I just have to trust if it makes a lot of sense in my head, then maybe it makes sense, but I don't always know that it will. And so it's been encouraging to have people respond so strongly. Like, I just feel like we live in such a tremendous overpowering force of gaslighting right now where if you have eyes to see, you can see that of course, of course, 12 people shouldn't have the same amount of money as half of the US population. Of course, those people didn't get there by fucking hard work. Of course, it's from this tax subsidy that you middle-class person paid for and we can point to it and show, but yet we tell ourselves that they got there because they're super clever when I can literally point to the part of the tax code that says that you paid for them to get rich. Like, of course, that doesn't make any sense, but we live under these stories that are so strong and so pervasive. And it makes sense that these stories are so strong and pervasive because there is a very compelling interest on us continuing to tell ourselves those stories because those stories are how the people in power not only got to that place, but keep that place. And so it makes sense that there are not as pervasive a counter story to that. And so I just feel excited. I keep thinking of it like a Jenga set where it's like each little thing might be so little. It's just a little bitty thing in the scheme of things, but when you pull it out and look at it, the rest of the structure gets a little less impenetrable. And there's just like a nerdy piece of it too. I sort of resent that there's so much on fire because what I really want to do is like, have you ever realized how half of the language and the words we use are results of colonialism? Did you ever think about why marriage as an institution exist? Do you ever think about like all of these little things that I think are so from a nerdy perspective fascinating and how they just kind of inserted themselves in our lives and then we just built our lives around them without questioning any of them and without thinking about how they reify our oppression every single day and we actively participate in that? And so like when you're sitting with your husband and you're like trying to figure out whether you're going to go by miss, miss or misses and you're like, how do you figure it out, dude? How do you decide between whether to go by Mr. Wait. So you don't choose your prefix based on your relationship status. So you just stay a full person your whole way. Well, you stay a whole person and you stay the person you were born as. They sure do. They sure as hell do. Which is keeping your last name. I mean, that's a whole nother thing. It's like, okay, so you get there and you're like, we think of it, it's just like a thing where it's, you're just deciding that based on, I don't know whether you're a feminist or not. Like it's a feminist litmus test. But we don't think about the fact that like that literally makes you untraceable to have the people you've made contacts with, to half of your resume, to half of your whole corporate or career structure. I mean, this is what I'm talking about. The way that I think about what you do Amanda, and this is because I'm like a little bit of a crime junkie, you know how like the detectives put up like on the wall, all of like the tax and all of the perpetrators and all of the things and maybe even a little map of some sort. And then they try to connect with rope or like, you know, colored rope from one thing to the other. And it feels like there are a million tax on your wall. And that you're just looking at it going, okay, but how does this connect to this? And what you do with each of your episodes is like you really like get the red color rope and you're like, this is why this is happening. And to me, it just creates this nice, easy to understand approach to really complicated subject matter. And the connecting of the pieces is what is so fascinating to me, because that takes an extraordinary amount of work, like a breath of knowledge. And also the thing that you're saying is like that it fascinates you, but it also like it irks you like, why does this even exist? And so I just want to say that like it what you do is like so what's the word it like you really try to dissect our culture in a way that's so cool. It's really beautiful, Sissy. Also, we need a new name for it. I can't believe this is not bullshit. This is you're not going to believe this bullshit is too long. You're not going to believe this bullshit is how we started. Yeah, if anyone has any ideas, send them. Today's episode is brought to you by Alma. A year from today, who do you want to be? Close your eyes for a second. Who is she? Is she less anxious? Does she actually sleep? Does she stop replaying that conversation at 2am? I spent so many years thinking I could just will myself into being that person alone with enough discipline, enough podcasts, enough books, and enough pretending. And then I found the right therapist and many things changed. Not because she fixed me, but because I finally stopped carrying all of it by myself. Alma makes it possible for you to find that person. Their directory has over 20,000 therapists, different specialists, backgrounds, identities, and 99% of them take insurance. You can even use their free insurance cost estimator so you know exactly what you'll pay before you book. A year from today isn't that far away, but it starts today. So get started now at helloalma.com slash weekend. That's helloalma.com slash weekend. 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Do you have any reactions to the Rokana episode? I have a couple reactions. Yeah. Wow. First of all, it was amazing. Your part we've already discussed. I mean, the amount of times that he seemed stunned by you and was like, actually, maybe you should run for office. And I was like, stay the fuck away from my sister, not today, Satan. Also, I did notice some things that I was like, okay, wait, why won't he answer? Like, why isn't he saying true things about Jeffries? Why is he glossing over this part about why they didn't bring the vote to end the war to the floor and trying to distract us from that? Get it on the record. The thing that drove me the most nuts, by the way, love him, will vote for him all the things. But I think I'm into the whole one foot in this world, world one foot in the next. I want to be like, I've learned this from the last election. I feel like I did a lot of, we're just not talking about these things. We got to get through, we got to get through, we got to get this person in and we're not going to talk about the thing. And that was, I think, a mistake. Not in what what I did, but the way I did it. And I want to do it different now, which is I still want to have one foot in this world and in reality and understand this is the system we live in and encourage people to vote for harm reduction when it's too late to have another option that's viable, but also tell the truth the whole time. Just be like, this is our best option. And these are the five reasons why this person sucks. Now go vote for them. I don't know what else to do than that. So I have those questions. I still felt like he was evasive on several things that made me wonder. The part that bothered me the most was when you were talking about how these people, these Democratic Congress people who are being so wishy-washy, who are not doing the hard thing, who are not saying probably even what they really believe. And the only explanation we have for that is that they are valuing their security. They're still just reading the room, doing the math, and they're going to keep saying the thing that is least likely to get them ousted from their seats until that thing changes and then they're going to say the next thing. This is how it works. There's no other explanation for that other than, especially now at this time when the country and planet is in so much peril because of these madmen. The fact that they're doing it cannot be explained as anything else other than an absolute decision to protect their own tiny, ridiculous positions in power to place that above their own children and grandchildren's future and the planet. It's a decision that they're making every single day. And when he said, yeah, they're protecting their own comfort and their position. And it's sad because these are good people. That is where I wanted to stop everyone and say, what does good mean? What do you mean? That is our problem. Where's the goodness? Point to me, to the person who has been elected, who swore to protect our constitution and the future of our children and yet is doing nothing. Point to the goodness. Where is this earned goodness that we are? No, no, that is not a good person. That is not a good leader. That is not, that is bad. It is bad and treason to protect your own tiny comfort instead of doing the job that we elected you to do that you swore to do. There's no goodness in that. So that really bothered me. It was a small thing he said that I think points to the root of a lot of shit. I don't even know what good is. I don't even know what that word means. And also, by the way, I don't need my electeds to be good. I need them to do their goddamn jobs. I don't care. I don't know what good is. I know what your votes have been. I don't need that. And I don't even know what anyone's definition of good is. Are you really nice to your grandkids? Do you buy Girl Scout cookies? Do you not yell at people at baseball games? Does that make you good? Because I don't give one flying fuck about that. I mean, I do want you to be nice to your grandkids. But like- Wasn't nice to your grandkids to let their planet go up in smoke? I don't think that's nice to your grandkids. Not for nothing. The idea of good, I think that you've identified something that is just endemic. Like, every time someone accuses someone of assault or of harassment or the invariable response from everyone who knows that person is, but he's a good man. But it doesn't matter. I literally, your perception of this person irrelevant to anything that we're talking about. So I don't think it's even personal perception. It's like how people think white means neutral or good. I think people just naturally defer to a man who is doing nothing or doing bad things. It's like that empathy that Kate Mann talks about. This like natural instinct for us to ascribe goodness or pity upon men that we just think good is this thing we ascribe to all of them. It's like their get out of jail free phrase. Maybe you're nice to your grandchildren. Maybe you tip your service people 20%. And then you don't vote in a way that's going to protect us. All of that is just lip service. It's a political tact and a ploy to make us be like, look over there and eagle. Like this politeness, this idea of civility or like an act as goodness that says, look at what I look and say in the words I use and don't look at what I do or don't do to measure me. I also think what Amanda is saying is very true for me too that it's like, I don't care about your personal life. They agreed to swear an oath to this country, to their constituents, that they would make the best decisions for their people. And the problem that I have with all of this is that it's just so dishonorable. The only oath they make has nothing to do with their constituents. It has to do with the Constitution. That is the oath that they take. So like in this situation, it couldn't be more obvious. It would actually be more understandable for people to be making the weird decisions that they're making, the weird votes they're making, if it was to the constituents because constituents could agree that we should throw immigrants into concentration camps without due process. The constituents could agree that Trump should be able to federalize and nationalize the elections. It's actually even more simple than that. The Constitution says that Congress has the exclusive power to declare war, that Congress has the exclusive power over the purse, that Congress has like, it is black and white and literally written on a piece of paper. So when we're talking about how people are voting and more specifically how leaders are giving cover to those people by not calling votes so that they are on record for either voting or not voting a certain way, then that is a direct dereliction of their duty. And in this case, in this constitutional crisis world we're living in, it's a direct violation of the highest duty, which is to uphold the checks and balances that undergird and stabilize our entire nation. So it is the ultimate treason in my view to place your own political aspirations to keep your job secure while you jeopardize the future of the Republic. I think what you just said is actually really important because I didn't ever think about it this way or know about that. I didn't realize that their oath is to the Constitution and to the nation. And what I am now just realizing is that when they are trying to appease the constituents, that's all about getting reelected. And it's triple worse than that because it's often not even the constituents, it's the people who are funding their reelections. They're trying to make it seem that this is what their constituents want or if it's not what their constituents want, they're explaining that actually constituents, you do want it this way. And let me explain it seven ways to Sunday that don't make any sense. So you convinced yourselves you wanted this thing that is really in the special interest of the Super PAC that is funding my reelection. So it's actually not even cowering to constituencies in most cases, it's to their funders. No, that's how you get a Cory Booker who's constantly just coming on Instagram and saying, Trump, we hate Trump, you hate Trump, I hate Trump, we all hate Trump. Using Trump as a galvanizing thing to make people feel good about him while consistently voting with APEC. That is an appeasement of the constituent while actually acting on behalf of the donor again and again and again and again. And that's Jeffrey's issue. The reason that Rep Connick can be so overt about Schumer needing to go is because Schumer is the minority leader of the Senate. And Rep Connick is in the house and the minority leader of the house is Hakim Jeffries. But if you look at the APEC record, Schumer has taken over 1.7 million of APEC money. And Hakim Jeffries has also taken 1.7 million in Israeli lobby money and 850,000 from APEC itself. So he is compromised for the same reasons. And this is where politics gets dirty, right? This is where it gets confusing because Rep Connick wants to be part of a progressive leadership that can get things done in the house. He wants to be able to push his billionaire tax forward, which I fully support. He wants to be able to do a lot of really important things, which if he gets sidelined by Jeffries for calling Jeffries out, he will be less likely to be able to get done. So it's a very confusing situation, but that's how we ended up with all of this just wishy-washy, don't feel good about anything issue. And it all comes down to money. It all comes down to the Supreme Court, Citizen United ruling, which said that any amount of money from any corporation can come into elections. And I just want to say one thing about APEC because it's really interesting the way that things have changed over time. So APEC, as if everyone doesn't know, is the Zionist Netanyahu-aligned regime lobby effort. They have given, I think, $217 million to politicians in the last few decades. It's interesting to watch Democrats kind of step a little bit back from that when they've always been all in. And I just want to say something about that because there is this perception from some groups that to say that APEC money needs to get the hell out of politics is somehow anti-Semitic. And I just want to address that head-on because, first of all, foreign interference in any regime, like if there was a pro-Russia lobby group that was the highest funder of half of our Congress, we should be very worried about that. Any foreign influence. It's literally in the Constitution that we're not supposed to have foreign influence over our politicians. Secondly, there is a huge distinction between anti-Zionist Israelis and the Zionist regime of Netanyahu. The same way there's a distinction between anti-Trump Americans and the MAGA regime of Trump. And it's an active generosity when the people around the world can look at us and say, I know that you, American, is not synonymous with Trump and MAGA. I feel grateful. I feel safer. I feel as it is an active generosity toward me. I also know that I am imperiled and the future generations are imperiled by what he is doing. And what I would say is I too know that Jewish people are not represented by Netanyahu. Absolutely. And I will continue to rail as aggressively against Netanyahu and the right-wing dangerous Zionist regime as I will against Trump. Yes. And I would welcome others to do so. That's right. And it also has to do with religion, the separation between discussing religions or discussing nations. I would never say to a group of people, stop criticizing Trump because that's anti-Christian. I'm a Christian. I can see that what Trump is doing is not Christian just because he says it is, just because he's rallying the Christian nationalists like all of these land, hungry, power, hungry men do. They know that the only way that their missions will be sanctioned is if they call it God's will. And so they rally their religious troops around their thing. And those of us who also share the name, because I am a Christian, I must loudly denounce what Trump is doing as not Christian but anti-Christian. And I will never turn to anyone who is resisting what Trump is doing and saying, don't you do that, that is anti-Christian. Because the most Christian thing that anyone in this nation can do is all they can do to stop fascism. We can do hard things. We'll see you next time. We are proud to say that we can do hard things is an independent production brought to you by us. Treat media. Treat media makes art for humans who want to stay human. And you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram.