Calm News with Jessica Yellin: Stay Sane AND Informed

Since November, Abby, Amanda, and I have been planning, dreaming up ways for this community to show up for each other, take care of each other, and continue building community. But you know that several months ago, I quit social media.
And the effects of that quitting on my nervous system, mind, and heart have been as dramatic as when I quit drinking. It's been wild and it's been extremely important for me to experience.
Since that quitting, I have felt calmer, braver, and clearer, actually. And in the midst of that, we have come up with some honestly terrifyingly realer and more embodied ways to connect with you and as a community than on social media.
I want to keep showing up for each other and I want to keep building community now more than ever, but I don't want to do it on social media anymore. So here's what I'm telling you today.
Soon I'm going to be inviting you into something special and the invitation is first going to go to you through my new newsletter.

Okay? soon I'm going to be inviting you into something special and the invitation is first going to go to you through my new newsletter okay I have a new newsletter and all of my invitations and Abby and Amanda's invitations to new projects new events all the beautiful offerings we're planning are going to come to you first on this newsletter all right now listen if history proves to be an indicator, what will happen is the newsletter will go out, everyone who receives the newsletter will sign up for these offerings and then they will be sold out. That's what happens and then everyone gets sad and mad who didn't get the invitation in time.
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It might be the only place that I'm doing that.

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Jessica Yellen, our dear friend, is the founder of News Not Noise, a pioneering Webby Award-winning independent news brand. Over 1 million subscribers and followers across IG and other digital media rely on Jessica and News Not Noise to understand what matters, which experts to trust, and to manage their information overload.
She is the former chief White House correspondent for CNN and an Emmy and Gracie award-winning political correspondent for ABC, MSNBC, and CNN.

Hello, PodSquad.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Today, we are starting and trying a new thing.

The new thing we are trying today is calm news. Calm news.
I'm going to share with you the origin of this experiment. Last November, I started to slowly and then all at once lose my mind.
I hit a point in my life where I realized that paying attention each day to the news as it was presented to me in a way that made every moment feel terrifying and urgent and insane was making me ineffective, was hijacking my nervous system in a way that made me not able to be the human being, the mother, the activist, the writer, the thinker that I want to be. And I started to understand deeply that it was designed that way, that I wasn't alone,

that the news as it was presented was not just to inform me, it was to scare me, to keep me addicted to the television, to keep me addicted to the phone. And not only did I realize that it was ruining my life and my days, but it was stealing my humanity.
I was slowly starting to feel a real us in them. I was slowly starting to be unable to see the humanity in people who thought different than me.
I was in a silo. And the whole thing, as we say in recovery, just became unmanageable.

I decided at that time that I was going to stop, just turn off the televisions and stop and try to reclaim my sanity. Fast forward a few months later, I started to feel better, calmer, and also deeply irresponsible because I do not want to pretend that there are only two ways that I either, one, stay addicted to the news as it stands, or two, put my head in the sand and not know how to lead, how to react, how to prepare my children for the world that they are entering.

And I realized there had to be a third way.

During that time, the LA fires happened.

My dear friend, Jessica Yellen, came to stay with me during that time because her house was in the line of danger.

She sat and stayed at my house for four days with her little dog, Bruno.

Oh my God, I miss him. And what happened was that Jessica, as many of you know, she's the founder of News Not Noise.
She's a Webby Award winning news reporter, but she's been in this realm for a very, very long time. She's not only a master reporter, but her entire life has been dedicated to figuring out how to do the news differently for people so that they can ingest what's going on in the world in a way that makes them more effective, more thoughtful, and more helpful in healing that world.
For four days, she sat with me and I felt the effects of that kind of news reporting. She explained to me what was going on in ways that allowed my nervous system to stay calm and my mind to activate.
She explained things in such a way that my children, I watched them, their very fearful bodies, calm. There was no bypassing.
There was no pretending. There was no fake positivity.
There was real delivery of what was going on in the world in a way that was honoring of truth and also of humanity. And at that moment, I realized, oh my God, this is the way.

This is the way. We must create this third way for people who want to be informed, want to be educated, but also want to be healthy and effective.
Enter calm news.

Today, we are experimenting. Our dear friend, Jessica Yellen, is here to begin to discuss this third way, how we can do the news in a new way, and perhaps maybe that we can do it together.
Jessica, welcome. Thank you, Glennon.
That was the most beautiful description and introduction. Thank you.
Oh my gosh. Can you talk to us a little bit about this new third way? Because often my experience in life is that I lose my mind, like what I explained earlier.
I believe this is my personal problem, right? I take it to therapy. I take it to all the places.
I try to figure out what is wrong with me. And then when I start to talk about it, I realize, oh no, this is a universal problem.
And based on the mass exodus from news that has happened over the past year, it strikes me that perhaps a lot of people were feeling the way that I was feeling.

Can you explain to me your take on that and how you think it needs to be done differently and how

it can be done differently? Yes. And I'll tell you, my favorite compliment comes from therapists

to take a look at the your take on that and how you think it needs to be done differently and how it can be done differently. Yes.
And I'll tell you, my favorite compliment comes from therapists who tell me, I prescribe your news to patients who can't take it but want to stay engaged. So you are not alone.
There are a lot of folks out there who are feeling that way. My general view is the news exists to inform citizens in a democracy.
The news is the only private business explicitly protected in the U.S. Constitution, the free press, because the founders of America believed a free press is essential to have a well-functioning democracy because you need your citizens to be informed.
But if the news is panicking people or the news is giving people so much trauma fatigue that they're operating out of fight or flight or not informing them or all the other things, it's not doing its job and our democracy is not stable, right? So I spent so long in the news noticing how my own nervous system was responding. I spent basically 20 years, 17, as a TV news journalist or writer.
And I would talk to regular voters. And by the end of the time I was in TV news, they would scream at me.
I was always interviewing undecided women voters. And they would scream at me saying, you know, the news, you give me a heart attack, you panic me, and then you go to commercial break.
I have no idea what's going on. It's like walking into a dinner party halfway through.
You use this lingo, you have these names, you talk about terms, and then all of a sudden I'm watching a commercial. And they say, I leave with more questions than answers.
And people would say to me, I'd rather watch the crime channel. And I'd say, why? And they'd say, because at least at the end, there's a resolution.
And so I started to realize there's a fundamental problem here that we need to re-engineer. The language we use in the news, the way we frame things is designed, as you said, to panic people.
Not because people in the news are cruel or they want to be mean. I have a whole presentation on it, but the bottom line is the industry learned that's how they can drive engagement, drive up ratings and profits, right? And so it became industry standard to panic folks or build on your outrage or rage, just negativity.
And I started to think about, are there other ways to drive interest and engagement that aren't those negative qualities? Because those negative qualities drive rage, fear, disengagement, polarization, depression. Depressed people are more likely to engage with disinformation.
It goes on and on.

And I'm from LA. And in LA, I grew up around Hollywood.
And Hollywood drives interest and engagement, sometimes through fear, but largely through compassion and empathy. And I thought, how can we use compassion and empathy to engage people in the news? wow so So before this recording pod squad, Jessica called me and basically said, because not only is she a beautiful reporter, but she also knows her friends well.
And she basically said in a nutshell, how are you going to stay calm? Like, don't forget, calm news has to be calm. So talk to us a little bit about witnessing mind and what you're going to bring to us some news.
What can we bring? This is a mutual, the pod squad will need to bring something specific as you bring something specific. What is the listener need to bring to this sort of news to make the outcome what we want it to be, which is

clarity, calm, and efficiency in what to do next? So I think of it, as you said, as witnessing

mindset, which means recognizing that what's happening in the world is real and it's not your

Thank you. witnessing mindset, which means recognizing that what's happening in the world is real and it's not your experience in this moment in most cases, right? Like if you're in a wildfire, yes.
But in most cases, what we're going to talk about today is something that is happening out there, but what's in here for you is still safe and stable and calm. And constantly reconnecting with that knowledge is what helps me keep myself calm and helps me get through the difficult things.
But the other piece of it is asking yourself what story or what conclusions am I drawing about what I'm hearing that might not necessarily be the truth.

So the first piece of that is anybody who's done yoga or done meditation or done mindfulness work

knows the experience of being connected with self, with the calm self within. There's so many different terms used for that experience.
But when you're feeling like you're not in your fight or flight body and you're in your vagus nerve is activated and you're chill and you're good, if you can kind of take a minute and moment and breathe into that. Right.
And I start there.

So one way I do that is, you know, inhale, hold, and then you exhale much longer than

you've inhaled.

Should we do it for a second?

Yes, we should.

Okay.

I'm going to inhale for four, hold for five, and then exhale for eight.

Okay.

Okay.

Hold.

Two.

One.

Exhale as long as you can.

It's the longer exhale that activates the vagus nerve. That's what I've learned.
Through your mouth or through your nose? Does it matter? The exhale? I think you're supposed to inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. But for this, I don't know that it's essential.
It's length of time. I've also learned people have different ways.
So the audience can tell us. So when you get into that calm place, that's your landing pad.
Like that's where you're living. And so when you feel that you're outside of that and activated, that's when you know you've been triggered and it's time to like put the thing down and remind yourself, I'm here, my body's safe, I'm good.
And then come back into it. Because what we do with the news, importantly, because we care, is we go on the ride.
And then all of a sudden you're inside, you know, the treasury department with Elon Musk and you're going down the rabbit hole and you can't stop him. And you're like, no, come on, we're not in the movie.
Back out, where's my calm self? Can I stop you right there? Because I wanna to just give an example of that, because that feels so important to me. And what I want the pod squad to hear is not, what you're telling yourself is all these problems might be happening to other people, but it's not happening to you.
So you're fine. That is not what we're saying.
What we're saying is, and I'll give you an example, when I, as a queer woman in a same-sex marriage who is raising queer children, hear news about rights being taken away, about the future of this country that might be threatened for my children and me and my family. I have to remind myself when I read and when I listen what Jessica is saying.
Right now, in my home, in my body, I am okay. Right now, I'm looking at my child.
They are okay. Not because I'm bypassing, but because the next moment is going to come.
And then the next moment is going to come. And what the world and those children are going to need is a clear, calm, prepared mother who is thinking clearly and thinking creatively.
There is no moment where my clear Overheadedness and calm does not make me a more effective leader. If I am panicked constantly, I will not be the leader and the mother that they need when the moment comes for me to activate.
So that just in terms of it is not bypassing, it is good leadership. It feels to me what you're describing is exactly what my therapist talks to me about, about my own personal work.
Like the idea that something could be deeply, deeply wrong in your life, like you are committed to change it. But the only way you can really change those patterns is to have this kind of detached observation of yourself while that thing is happening.
So you can say, oh, look, that's me doing that thing I really want to change. Like by taking the step back and actually not being on the ride with yourself while you're doing the thing is the only path to change it.
And it feels like that's the same thing. Like looking and being like, oh, I can see with clarity, Elon Musk is raiding the Treasury Department.
What does that mean? And what can I do about that? I have a clarity, whereas if I'm spinning in the hustle and I'm down the rabbit hole, I'm just as whacked out as Elon is and I

can't do anything about Elon. That's right.
In that moment. That's right.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. If you're the pilot of a plane, which we all are metaphorically, we are all leading our own lives.
Some of us are leading other people who are passengers on the plane. We are all leading.
It is the wrong idea to think that the pilot who is screaming and panicked and fired up and losing their mind is the strong pilot. Okay? That is not the pilot you want, even when there are problems on the plane, even when it feels like the plane's going down, then more than ever, you need a clear-minded, calm, strong pilot.
So that's what we're doing here. Right, Jessica? Yes.
It's just the moment. You get it.
The reason I think this is such a revolutionary way to approach our reality is I spend so much time in social media and one half of my feed is all this like tools and tricks to, you know, be calm on the mat and how to work on your mindset. And it's all the therapy stuff, right? And then the other half of my feed is the world is ending, explosions, panic, blah, blah, blah.
And often the very same mindfulness meditation people that I look to for guidance on how to practice on the mat or how to be still in myself are then posting these wild, panicked, hysterical things about the world and politics. And I'm like, how are you not applying the wisdom you've gained in this comfortable, safe meditation world into the world of action and change and stress out there? Isn't the whole point of having those tools that you can use them in the world and not just in your own personal life.
Like Amanda, what you said is 100%. Yes, we use them in our own personal relationships.
They also apply to how we interact with the world of information, ideas, and political change. And I think people do that so well-intentioned.
Like we think an indicia of my commitment and belief that this is wrong is the extent to which I am enraged by this happening. And as the truism goes, you should be outraged about outrageous things.
Everyone should be outraged

about outrageous things. It is the posture towards that outrage that is channeling it in the most effective way.
Like we have to be wiser and more grounded than we have a right to be in this moment if we are actually committed to surviving and resisting it. Yes.
100%. And if we want to have our wild and precious lives.
Hey, everybody. It's Hoda Kotb, and I would love for you to join me for new episodes of my podcast, Making Space.
Each week, I'm having conversations with authors, actors, speakers, and dear friends of mine, folks who are seeking the truth, compassion, and self-discovery. I promise you will leave these talks stronger and inspired to make space in your own life for growth and change.

To start listening, just search Making Space wherever you get your podcasts and follow for new episodes every Wednesday. It is about being effective for the next steps for the world, but it is also because we have a birthright to joy, to calm, to peace, to creative lives where we are waking up and figuring out what do we want to do with our time, energy, money, day, love, that we are not constantly in reaction, that we have agency and access to the lives that we want.
100%. One of the key tools in that is asking yourself when you feel like you're on the ride, to use language, is what have I decided is true about this that might not be true? If you've written the script and you're already moving because you've decided an outcome, you're ahead of the story.
Ahead of the story. That's good.
Also on the ride, pod squad, listen, even that language is helpful. When you say that, Jessica, I know what that means in my body.
I know when I'm on the ride. It happens so fast.
It's like a hijacking of me. I feel it, an intensity building on the inside.
What does it feel like for you to be on the ride? Even identifying it is helpful, right? Mm-hmm. And I can feel my nervous system calm down when you're saying that, when we say I'm not on the ride, like I can see it.
And one of the things that's valuable about having this conversation and hearing this conversation is you might not get it the first time. Like your body might not respond.
But those ideas are in your head. So the next time you hear this or the next time you suddenly feel so anxious with the news, there's a part of your brain that will go, wait, I know something about this.
And you might have just a moment of being able to distance yourself like, oh, I remember they talked about how I'm on the ride.

Your intellectual mind might not understand what that means,

but in that moment you're triggered,

it gives you almost like an air gap,

a moment to step out.

Yes.

And the more you can lean into that air gap to notice that you're too caught up

and triggered in that way

and that there is a way to relax out of it, that's your key. And the more you practice that, the more your muscle memory grows and you're able to do it in the moment.
There's also like a kind of righteous, beautiful indignation you can have about it because it's like what we're so fired up about and so outraged about is that they're trying to take control of all of us. But the irony is that when we submit to the ride, they're literally controlling us.
The nature of a ride is someone else is operating it and someone else is deciding where you're going, how fast

you're going, when you're going to drop, when you're going to go up. The saying like, I am in charge of how I feel and where I go and the energy leakage that happens for me and the specific and strategic use of my energy is an incredible act of resistance to that control.
And may I add a corollary to that, which I hadn't thought about until this conversation, which is one of the reasons Elon Musk and all those people we'll talk about are able to do as much as they do in the world and they're doing right now is because by all accounts, they're not very emotional about their work. They don't go on a ride.
They stay at that witnessing space and they can make calculated decisions about what to do. And that gives them a measure of power over people who get emotionally reactive.
And so I'm not advocating to not care. That's the whole point of doing the news is to care so that you can know and take action, but to step out of the reactivity so that you have that powerful driver's seat, sort of wise mind as you're doing it, which they have.
Yeah. It's to care enough.
It's not that you don't care. It's to care enough to do the work in order to be effective, even though it feels different.
It feels different than constant outrage. Because it's interesting when you say that, I think, okay, the example I gave earlier about learning about queer rights being taken away and my ultimate fear being that that reaches my home.
If I'm really honest, that's what I'm thinking in that moment. When I'm losing my mind in my home, it has already reached my home.
Yes. It is very interesting to be terrified that bodily autonomy will be taken from us.

Let's practice now. Let's be in charge of our own bodies and our own nervous systems.
If we don't want our bodies to be controlled by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, how about we start today? right okay let's practice And I think that as long as we're experimenting with this, we'll start with a mini discussion like this to reground us in why we're doing what we're doing. But now let's do some what, Jessica.
When we talked about this episode, we thought, let's start with three things that you think the pod squad needs to know and why.

I'm going to have us do one breath.

Okay.

Before we actually do that, can we do one more grounding breath?

Yes.

Jessica tells us four in, five hold, eight out.

Okay.

Let's do it before we go into the news.

Hold. Exhale.
hold exhale Glennon's showing off she did it for like five seconds longer than I did great exhale ladies thank you Jessica thank you now let's get started by talking about what these motherfuckers are up to now, she said so calmly. Calm news.
Okay, story number one is about Doge, which is Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Please know it is not an actual department.

So the headline of this is Elon Musk and his boys are inside the pipes of government, and insiders and lawyers are warning that they're behaving with cruelty to federal workers and compromising the privacy of millions of Americans and the credibility of America's financial system. That sounds scary.
What it means and what's going on is Musk said that he wants to find waste, fraud, and abuse inside the different agencies in government. The way he decided to do that is by plugging a bunch of computers into the different agencies, and he's going one by one, and then examining the guts of the agencies.
We don't have information on exactly what they're doing, what they're using, what they're really looking at, but we do know that he's working with a team of people he brought in that were either 20-somethings, there's even a 19-year-old who he's worked

with before who are engineers.

Others were sourced and hired by Peter Thiel, who is a venture capitalist, worked with him

at PayPal and is involved in a lot of surveillance technology, drone technology.

And they've sort of plugged these young men into workstations going into the guts of these agencies around government. They've been taking down websites, demanding access to highly sensitive systems, grilling staff, and also recommending things to be frozen, presumably people to be fired, We don't know.
Sending emails to all of the federal workforce. And it's very unclear what criteria they're using for any of this, what level of vetting they've had.
The questions go on. Okay.
I have a beginner's mind question about that. Yes.
How is Elon Musk getting access to all of this? How has that power been given to him? And is this, is what we're seeing the move from democracy to oligarchy? Meaning, is this where a government just starts to be run by some business leaders who are very rich and get access because of that? What are we looking at here? Great questions. And I'm going to start with your second question first, which is, if you wanted to move into oligarchy, this is one way to lay the groundwork to do that.
It could be a predecessor step to that kind of thing. We are not there yet.
There are people who argue we are because they see what's coming, but I would argue they've written the script. And going back to the script writing idea, I'm staying on the facts that are true today, and we can talk about where it could go and how it could go that way.
Right now today, what we know is that these people are gaining a level of centralized access to systems that no one's ever had before.

And it gives them a measure of power and eyes and ears onto the system and control.

That's a potential consolidation of power, could lead a lot of scary things, but we don't know that it's gone there or what they're doing.

I'll pause on that, ask if you have a question, and then before answering your first one. I just want to ask also, because I know the big one was the treasury payment system, where it's literally every payment that goes out anywhere in the world, including like America's social security payments and every international one that they had access to, all the sensitive data of every American.
Is anyone talking about the fact that Elon Musk runs data companies and is he extracting that data for his own personal use? And is there any check on that? I mean, all of his competitors' payments are in there. Is it about the government or is it about his personal for-profit? There seems a lot of conflicts there.
There's a lot of conflict and we don't know. Okay.
We don't know. So that's part of the, we can write multiple scripts about where it goes from here.
Peter Thiel, the man I referred to before who has worked in a venture capitalist who was Elon Musk's partner, helped hire some of these guys. He's the mentor, supporter of J.D.
Vance. He gave J.D.
Vance his entree to politics and to venture capital and more. He is very big in the data surveillance world.
And, you know, Elon Musk has access to all manner of tools and Peter Thiel's built systems around data surveillance. And there's endless number of worrying scenarios that could emerge from giving them access to so much.
But again, they've been so cloak and dagger. One of the things that happened when Trump came into office is he mandated that none of the agencies communicate anymore with the public.
So every agency used to have a communications office where as press you could call and ask what's this and what's that. And they were pretty withholding.
They didn't tell you much, but you could at least talk to them. And they'd post things on their website and updates.
That's gone. Did you just say that every federal agency is not allowed to talk to the public? Brief.
Yeah. They're not sharing knowledge in that way that they used to.
Wow. I don't know how temporary that is.
And if that's just for this like blitzkrieg, first hundred days, massive attack approach they're using to making change. But that's where we are right now.
And so we don't know a lot about what they're doing. I don't believe that if they were talking to us, they'd tell us anyway, but we just can't know.
So let me answer Glennon's question first and then we'll go to Treasury. You'd asked, I think, a version of under what authority, by what permission is he doing this? Trump made Musk what's called a special government employee.
That's a real thing. And they say that his team of people has been vetted.
We don't know that they have proper classic security clearance, but the White House says they've been, quote, vetted. And they've been made some form of employees and tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.
And there are Republicans and supporters of Trump who say, y'all who were worried about this are out of your minds. We have one of their view, one of the world's most talented engineers and CEOs who's volunteering his time in the best minds to go in and make our government more efficient.
And we should be thanking them. So that's the alt view and how they would present it.
What we don't know is what tools they're using once inside the system to look around what they're doing with that and how they're making decisions. So I hear from federal employees that they're feeling like they're being surveilled.
People are telling one another that they think that their computer, work computers, are listening to them. So they're saying to turn it off at night if it's at home.
People are telling stories. Those are stories I've heard.
Other people are reporting that some of these doge kids are grilling federal employees, like on video conferences, in a rather rude manner, like justify your work. If you had to fire one person in your workspace, who would it be? And that even sometimes they're doing it on a two-way video conference where the doge kid who's questioning the federal worker has their video turned off.
It's very eerie. Big brother.
Yeah. So that's the human level.
The larger scale is, you know, people who work in cyber tell me they're concerned because the Musk, Silicon Valley way to do things is move fast and break things and ask questions later. And in government, if you break things, that's someone's social security check.
That's the payment that goes to the cancer research. That's on and on and on.
And if they take the approach that we're just going to split people and just fire anybody who's

ratted out by a friend or by a colleague or any other sort of arbitrary category where they're

not being careful, you might rip out one of the key cords that you need to make the system work. Right.
Can I just speak to, as a person who lives in DC, it's a very personally difficult time for a lot of people. I couldn't tell you the number of people that I know that could have been making much more money somewhere else, but deeply believe what they're doing.
And they have countless friends who have been dismissed. They are getting emails that say, if you hear of anyone within the agency that is against Trump's policies, you have to report them to this email address.
It's a very scary time around DC in terms of people not knowing what's happening and feeling very much like the idea is if you don't pledge allegiance, you will be rooted out. And that's super un-American.
And one of the fears is once these folks are in the system and have a measure of power, can this be unraveled? I will say before we go into the rest to give people some perspective, I think every case, like one case after another, these things have now been challenged that they've taken to courts. The courts have said no.
They have paused a lot of what Doge is doing that's most concerning. Some of what they've done, it's going back to court, but paused.
The Trump administration tried to halt federal funds for a lot of places. The court

said you can't do that. At every step, the courts have said, no, no, no.
We don't know if they will try to defy the courts. We're going to learn.
But I also think it helps to understand that one of the theories about the Trump administration in this term is that Trump insiders believe they have very few days to actually force their will into the system because at some point soon, Congress is going to start to, their factions will start to fall apart. They don't have a big majority.
Their own teams are very, like they have a coalition that has a lot of factions that aren't well aligned that could start fighting soon. And so they feel like this is like part of the reason it's massive

attack is yes to confuse us, yes to distract the press. Also because they're like, let's see how much we can get done while we can before things start to fall apart.
So there's a future version of this where it starts to fall apart of its own weight in a way.

Okay. Can I say back to you what I think I've heard you say in a way that is a new person to all of this way, just so I can see if I'm understanding it in general.
So is this a bit correct. We know that during the Trump campaign this time, Elon and Donald became tight and Elon was contributing huge amounts of money to the Trump campaign with the plan and hope that as soon as Trump was elected, Elon would then become Trump's special guy.
What's the name? He's called a special government employee. Okay.
He's sort of acting like the CEO. Of the country.
Okay, great. What could go wrong? Okay.
So, ooh, just went on the ride, coming back. Sorry.
No, no, no. That was me.
I'm catching myself. Okay.
Good. So now that plan worked.
So now Elon is Donald's special guy. And so he gets to create a department almost.
He gets to create his own team. and that team of Elons is sort of infiltrating all the different branches of government with what they are saying is their express goal of cutting the fat, making it more efficient.
And he has what is unprecedented levels of access without any typical or measurable vetting or clear understanding of what the goal is. Or oversight.
Or oversight. Okay.
So in terms of witnessing, that is helpful. I understand in general what is going on with Elon.
Thank you, Jessica. You're still allowed to go OMFG.
Yes. Witnessing mindset allows you to have feelings about the thing.
Okay. I'll just say in general, it feels like it could be problematic.
I mean, we are on the wildest timeline. Okay.
Let me ask you, I would like to do one more because I think usually we will give people three things, but since we did such a beautiful introduction, let's choose one more and then call it a day. It's enough practice for the day.
Okay, one of the big concerns right now is, will Doge behave in ways that are constitutional or not? And in a larger sense, is the Trump administration going to trigger a constitutional crisis? I'll tell you that J.D. Vance and Elon Musk have actually challenged the legitimacy of courts to do their constitutional checks and balances, and that's triggering concerns that we might be at the start of a constitutional crisis.
And I can explain that a bit more. Amanda had mentioned earlier that DOGE, which is not a department, it's just calling itself one.
Okay. Because an actual department would have to have confirmations and people would have to say, yes, we agree that person should have access to highly sensitive information.
Yes. And you raise such an important point, which is all of this should be stood up by Congress.
Yes. So if they want some sort of new department that does this, that would have to be voted on by Congress.
It's the executive's job to execute how that department does its work, but Congress has to have a say, and Congress has not had its say. Now, Congress is not stepping in to check anything Musk is doing, so that's worth noting, but that could change in time.
So this Doge entity, one of the first things they did is go into some of the key departments and including Treasury, and they went into this payment system Amanda mentioned to start looking around. We don't know what they did.
This raised, as you might imagine, some significant alarms all over the place. And they were taken to court.
A bunch of states' attorneys generals said this is a violation of Americans' privacy because, right, our pay stubs or tax stubs are in there. And we don't actually know what they're looking at.
Like, is it all Americans' IRS payments? Is it just federal employees' payments? We don't know. But they have the risk

of violating privacy laws. They're putting payments to states at risk.
And it's risking the credibility of our financial system. In fact, five former Treasury secretaries wrote an op-ed this week saying that this is almost constitutional crisis.
It's threatening America's financial stability. And a judge said, it's true.
The first, get out. They said the kids who were in there have to get out of the system, unplug your laptop, you know, and erase everything that you downloaded.
That upset the administration and J.D. Vance, I still say tweet it.
He posted on X. It's so hard to get used to that.
A message that said, essentially the last sentence of his message is, judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. He's saying, back off courts, you can't tell us what to do.
And then the administration filed a lawsuit challenging the judge saying, your ruling that we need to get out of treasury, that Doge needs to get out of treasury is unconstitutionally telling us how we can do our job. It is our job to run treasury, true.
It is the treasury secretary's job to decide how the payment system functions, true. And the Treasury Secretary said it was okay for Doge to go in.
So you are overstepping. They're going back to court on Friday, and we'll see what the judge decides.
This is a potential constitutional crisis because if the judge says, no, you have to stay out, and they violate it and go back in, they are saying, we don't listen to the courts. They haven't done that yet.
To our knowledge, we don't know that they've gone in overriding a judge's will. So we're not in the crisis now.
We are looking at the possibility of that. I'll pause there.
Constitutional crisis means basically like our constitution, our form of government was set up for the purpose of, if you go back to our origins, preventing a tyrannical leader from taking over the government, because that's what we fought against to establish America, right? So the idea of checks and balances, you have Congress, you have the court system, and you have the president. So when you say constitutional crisis, are you meaning that like, will these checks and balances hold? That's what we mean by constitutional.
Is the constitution going to work the way it was intended to work, where one can't take more power than it is supposed to have. Yes, exactly.
And what the Constitution says is these three branches do different things. Congress writes the laws, sets the policy.
The executive, the president's branch, puts it into action, takes those and interprets what they mean and puts them into action. And then when there's a dispute about that, the judiciary, the judges weigh in and decide this is what it really means.
And you have to do this and you have to do that. Now, it is precedent history in America that the judges have the final word.
There is a court case called Marbury versus Madison. And in that case, the Supreme Court said when there's a dispute and the Congress and White House disagree, we, the Supreme Court, have the final say.
And ever since then, we have followed that pattern. Interestingly, not the Constitution that says that.
It's Marbury v. Madison, and we follow that tradition to this day.
What could happen is they could say, for example, no, we're not getting out of the Treasury Department. And then that would be challenging that history-making precedent in Marbury v.
Madison that the courts have the final say if it went to the Supreme Court. And if Congress doesn't want to act because they've been passive to date and the courts ruled and the executive decides I'm not listening to the courts, then the question is who has the controlling authority and how do you enact that will? If it's the courts that should be driving what the executive does, how do you force that on the executive? That would be the crisis.
That's wild because then there could be a crisis where the branches are fighting each other, but then there could be a crisis by abstaining from a fight. In other words, like if Congress doesn't stand up and do its job or the courts don't and they just passively let this happen, then that's like a different kind of crisis.
Like it's not working the way it was supposed to, but it's because the others aren't stepping up to enforce the balance. And there's terms for that, like constitutional coup and people are throwing that term around.
And I don't feel comfortable with that word at this point. I don't think that's where we are.
Others do. I don't.
But, you know, we are in this weird position where because Congress isn't saying, hey, no, stop, the executive isn't overriding their will. They're not expressing their will.
Right. Exactly.
Or maybe they're fine with this. Maybe they're in a wait and see mode.
Yeah. I know we have to wait till Friday for this kind of standoff to happen, but there were like five more injunctions by courts saying like, you can't do these things you're doing, Trump administration.
Have they complied with any of those? Is there any clues as to if they're going to? In my analysis, they have found clever legalistic ways to try to end run the courts in some cases without explicitly defying the court. So I think they've adjusted.
I'm going to give you a quick example. The White House, I can't even remember how long ago now, said there's going to be a freeze on all federal grants and funds.
That went to court. That was in a memo.
It went to court. The judge said, you can't do that.
So they rescinded the memo. Then they said, now that the memo is rescinded, we're going to freeze federal grants and loans because the judge's ruling was about the memo.
And without the memo, we're just going to do it in a different way. But you see that they were recognizing the court's authority, I think, by saying no memo.
And so it went back to court and the court just said, memo or no, you can't do this. And you're in defiance if you do.
And so now we're waiting to see if the payments go out. But I think by doing that, they recognize the court's authority in a sneaky trying to test boundaries way.
So two things. First of all, can you, Amanda, do what I did with the first one with that? Can you say back to Jessica what you heard her saying, what you would report to someone who wasn't listening to this in a clear, concise way, what she just said? Yes.
What I heard Jessica saying is that there is a lot of dramatic, even unprecedented actions being taken in the early days of the Trump administration that many of which have been challenged in the court system. So that is something that would suggest that the checks and balances are working to some extent to avoid a constitutional crisis where one branch is taking too much.

So that is happening right now where there's an overreach by one branch and another branch saying, y'all can't do that. And that we are in a situation where it is still to be determined whether the acceptance of the authority of the other branch to say you can't do that will be respected by the executive branch, which is the presidency.
Does that sound right, Jessica? A plus. Okay, great.
Can I tell you just before we end what my nervous system story is about this? I just think there should be like a nervous system story because there is a point at which you're talking where I start hearing wah, wah, because no, no, no. And this is, I want to train.
I'm going to train myself throughout this process because my nervous system story is there's a home invasion. We had a system and now there's been a home invasion and there's no one to call because the people who are supposed to come fix it don't have the power or organization to hold the line and hold these home invaders accountable.
And I'm scared about that because I just saw the ineffectiveness of the people who are supposed to hold the home invaders to account because of all that went down in the last election and the inability to hold a line and hold leadership and hold precedent. That is my nervous system story, that now no one is in charge except for people that I don't trust.
So is that a story that is untrue? What is your reaction to that? I would say true, untrue. It's a fair feeling, right? It's a fair experience out of what we've discussed.
But what I see is our systems haven't been working. And I think that's pretty clear now.
And something's changing. Things have to change.
And this is an invitation for moving into reform. And it's true that the people who are at the driver's seat right now have one vision of reform, and we don't know what it is.
But maybe we are being called to awaken in a different way. And we weren't awakening and nothing before was awakening.
And we needed a much louder knock at the door. We also needed a vision for reform.
We also needed that and we didn't have it. And I'll tell you what, they're clear with their vision.
They're clear with their vision. And they have a new language for what they do.
And that's honestly part of the reason I'm so excited to talk to the two of you is you're so good with language.

And we need new language around what is healthy and good and right to have a better world.

Right.

And to act in the political space and act in our own lives in ways that are not just, you know, good and kind, but powerful

and effective and strong and new. And new.
Beautiful. Let's take one more deep breath

and end with that. All right.
Ready, everybody? All right, podad. Thank you for that.
We'll see you back here next week when we'll try this again. Calm news the third way.
Thanks, PodSquad. Bye.
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