Tyler Austin Harper is back with us, just in time to consider the ignominious end of Graham Platner’s campaign for U.S. Senate. We (including Tyler) all discussed back in March how this might be coming. But Tyler warrants that Platner is a “normie Democrat” — not in his personal behavior, but in who he trusts and what he’s angry about. An…

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Jason Furman joins the show this week for an economy-focused discussion. We start by looking at why public views about the economy have gotten so negative — consumer sentiment looked surprisingly poor compared to quantitive economic measures under President Biden and that phenomenon has continued under President Trump (even if not quite t…

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This week’s show is about AI and we’re joined by Dean Ball, who helped to shape AI policy in the Trump White House and is soon to join OpenAI. (See his latest newsletter on the new role he’ll be taking that focuses on AI policy, both external and internal.) Dean makes a case for an AI regulation model that looks like bank regulation: making rules about how companies should make their own rules, much like banks make their own credit policies in accordance with government rules about credit risk.

There’s a plausible theory here about complex systems, but also some worrisome implications. Banks, after all, fail from time to time. It’s taken us hundreds of years of trial and error to get to the still-imperfect regulatory system we have today. And banks are full of experts who want to get repaid on loans and avoid insolvency, but who also have incentives to take risks that can be socialized to taxpayers. Applying that model to an industry whose visionaries talk openly about how their products might kill everyone feels more than a little unsettling.

But then, do we have other choices? Dean suggests we don’t, really.

For paying subscribers, this week’s episode ends with the very first (but not the last) Central Air cocktail hour, where Ben, Megan and I pour ourselves some drinks, unpack what we’ve heard from our guest, and try to get comfortable with what the future holds for us. I even feel a little bit driven toward the church by the end. Maybe you will too? To hear the whole episode:

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We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

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We have a lively conversation for you this week with Andrew Sullivan, the first blogger and the prime intellectual mover behind marriage equality. Andrew joins us from Provincetown to assess the emergent Iran deal. Paying subscribers also get our discussion of racial unrest and immigration politics in the U.K., our debate how much Europe really needs to learn from the United States (a lot, I’d say, and not just about air conditioning), and our consideration of the joys of Europeans discovering exurban America (including Buc-ee’s!) as they attend the World Cup.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

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Matt Yglesias is back with us this week. We discuss his admonition against “dog-whistle moderation”: Matt says the factional forces seeking to drag the Democratic Party to the center need to advocate specific moderation on specific issues rather than fighting over whether to talk about “oligarchy.” The Pledge to America is a step in that …

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We want to thank the several dozen of you who joined us in Washington for our first listener happy hour. One of you even brought baked goods — delicious salted chocolate chip cookies — thus setting a new standard for Central Air fandom. Thank you! We look forward to doing more of these in other cities and hope to meet more of you in person.

Besides meeting listeners and taking Megan to MGM National Harbor to play craps — more about that on next week’s show — we had an interesting day at WelcomeFest, the center-left organizing conference. We talked with San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who declares that “all crime is illegal” in SF, describes how the city is using drones to fight car burglary, and tells us how she’s fighting to make her city a political asset for national Democrats instead of a liability. And we talked with Bobby Pulido, a Tejano singing legend who’s now entering politics, trying to win back an ancestrally Democratic congressional district in heavily Hispanic south Texas, which has swung hard toward Republicans in the Trump era.

We hope you enjoy these conversations. If you want more, please also check out the conversation I had with Mark Cuban on the conference main stage. You can watch that here.

We’ll be back early next week with Matt Yglesias.

Stay cool out there,

Josh

Are you in Washington D.C. today, June 2? Come join Ben, Megan and me for a Central Air happy hour near Logan Circle from 5:30-8pm. Or say hello to us tomorrow at the WelcomeFest conference!

This week, we’re joined by Reihan Salam, president of the conservative Manhattan Institute, to talk about the state of the center and the right in cities. Why have we been asked to support politicians like Andrew Cuomo who discredit the center? Is Zohran Mandani really doing such a bad job? What should we make of Spencer Pratt? Can conservatives and cities be persuaded to take interest in each other again? All subscribers hear that conversation.

Paying subscribers hear the rest of our conversation with Reihan about why people can’t leave Israel out of municipal politics, and what it’s like to run a conservative think tank in the age of Trump. Also on the premium version of the show this week, Ben, Megan and I discuss the “Save our Bacon Act” and the ethical obligations we have toward livestock, and finally, the implosion of the “Freedom 250” festival and whether a Kamala Harris administration would have planned something better.

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We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

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As I noted last week, we don’t have a regular episode this week, due to the Memorial Day holiday. We’ll be back with two episodes next week — one with Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute, and one with content from our on-scene interviews at Welcomefest, including a conversation I’ll be having with Mark Cuban.

However, we do have some bonus content for you: a Substack Live chat we did with Nate Silver of Silver Bulletin on Wednesday, reacting to Tuesday’s primary election in Texas and assessing Democrats’ odds of retaking the Senate. There’s also a free preview of that for free subscribers.

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Also, we want to thank all of you who have become paying subscribers to the show — nearly 1,500 of you. Your support makes this show possible, and we’re thrilled to have all of you here. Welcome!

Finally, if you’re in Washington next Tuesday, June 2, we hope to see you at our happy hour.

Enjoy the show,

Josh

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Dear listeners,

Why is Europe poor? Megan wrote about the issue this week, and Sam Bowman of Works in Progress magazine joins us from London to discuss. Americans work more and our economy is more dynamic, Sam says, though he does note there’s real value in Europe’s emphasis on leisure and he even defends not using a clothes dryer. (Sam thinks dryers will ruin your clothes and possibly burn down your house. Maybe we need a public education campaign that teaches Europeans how to choose appropriate dryer settings and clean their lint filters?)

We also talk with Sam about the ignominious unpopularity of Keir Starmer’s Labour and the post-Boris Johnson Conservatives. Labour has not delivered on its promise to build instead of block, even though Britain’s central government has all the authority over planning and zoning that Abundance advocates here dream about. Sam says Britain needs to rework its fiscal system so local people reap the benefits of local building — but the American experience suggests this probably won’t work, either.

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That’s for all free listeners. Yes, the paywall is here — for paying subscribers, we also chat with Sam about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film ‘The Odyssey,’ which Elon Musk and other conservatives are very mad about because Helen of Troy is black. Ben writes that the irate critics who haven’t even seen the movie “all have brain damage,” and we discuss why this isn’t exactly another live-action ‘Snow White.’

Ben, Megan and I also discuss the Long Island Rail Road strike, a topic about which New York Republicans have managed to get to Governor Kathy Hochul’s left, defending the god-given right of commuter rail engineers to be paid for two days’ work if they have to drive two different kinds of engines in the same day. (How conservative!)

And we discuss central New Jersey’s missing congressman, Tom Kean Jr., who hasn’t been seen since early March. His staff keeps saying the representative is dealing with an unspecified “medical issue” in a place where “there are no cameras,” and as they continue to insist he’ll be back at work real soon, they stubbornly won’t say exactly what’s wrong with him. Two and a half months seems like kind of a long time to be incommunicado at rehab. Is he in a mental institution? We discuss that possibility with Ben, who is an alumnus of America’s most prestigious mental institution, McLean Hospital. Megan thinks the congressman might be recovering from a botched Turkish hair transplant. But who knows? If he wants us to stop speculating, he can tell us what’s going on.

We hope you enjoy the episode — and if you want to hear the whole thing (and no more paywalls in the future), subscribe now.

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There’s been a lot of energy news lately, so we invited Robinson Meyer, executive editor of the excellent Heatmap News, to discuss what’s going on. Topics include: how has oil not gotten even more expensive? Is there hope for permitting reform? Why do Republicans hate windmills so much? Has there ever been a greater environmental advocate than ‘Degrowth Donald’? And where can we put data centers so they won’t bother anyone?

Also this week, we discuss my despair at the continued unwinding of the social contract, manifesting everywhere from the demand for hyper-specific tax exemptions to plane passengers disregarding admonitions to leave behind their luggage during an emergency evacuation. Plus, we look at Democrats’ despair over the Virginia Supreme Court.

Plus, exciting news: As mentioned during the show, we’ll be having a listener gathering in Washington, D.C., the evening of Tuesday, June 2. We will have more details to follow, but mark your calendars. The reason we’ll be in Washington is that Megan, Ben and I will all be attending the WelcomeFest conference on June 3, where we’ll even be doing a live taping of the show. If you’re interested in tickets to WelcomeFest, please email the team at Welcome and they’ll help you out.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

As reported in the most recent New York cover story, Central Air is officially a “major podcast”! And we have another major episode of the show for you this week. Gary Leff, author of the View From the Wing blog on the airline industry, joins us to discuss who killed Spirit Airlines — the airline made strategic errors, but it could have been profitably acquired by JetBlue years ago if not for a series of Biden-era anti-trust policy failures. The Trump administration tried to commit its own policy error — it wanted to buy the airline, making Spirit’s troubles into taxpayers’ problem — but fortunately, Spirit’s existing creditors refused to be crammed down, and there was no deal to be had.

We have a wide-ranging conversation for you with Gary on the relationship between the government and the airlines — whether United could really be allowed to buy American, what’s going to become of the financially-troubled JetBlue, why Europe has a more robustly competitive low-cost airline industry than the U.S. does, and much more.

Also this week: We discuss hopeful federal news on housing policy and a grim housing policy outlook in our nation’s capital.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Assuming Virginia’s new congressional map survives legal challenges, it will replace a map co-drawn in 2021 by Sean Trende, election analyst for Real Clear Politics and lecturer in political science at The Ohio State University. Sean joined us this week to talk about the genesis of his map, the gerrymander that will likely replace it, and the national arms-race to redraw maps to favor the parties that control various states. With this week’s Supreme Court decision in Callais, even more opportunities to seek partisan advantage will arise — obviously in southern red states that can now draw out black-majority districts; and less obviously in northern blue states that can now draw more efficient Democratic gerrymanders, if coalitional politics allow. We talk with Sean about how to define and measure ‘fairness,’ and about the ways the gerrymandering debate remains stuck in the 2010s.

Also this week, we talk about food inflation. Sean had a viral tweet in 2023 bemoaning how a family-size DoorDash order from Outback Steakhouse had climbed to $125. Well, today that same order would be $190, in part due to the spiraling cost of lobster tails. This sounds trivial, but it gets at a key fact about politics — inflation bothers everyone, from those scraping by to those who simply notice that the things they like to buy cost more than they used to.

Plus, Ben, Megan and I talk about the assassination attempt on President Trump, and the low-intensity public response to it — why is it no longer even that interesting when someone tries to kill the president? We discuss.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

When you record a podcast, you start with a sound check. In the days before COVID, producers would induce guests to test their microphones with prompts like “tell me how you got to the studio.” But now that everything has gone virtual, the dominant question is “what did you have for breakfast today?” This often leads to an absurd situation where the guest pauses and says nothing, trying to remember what he or she ate for breakfast, even though it doesn’t matter — the response doesn’t need to be accurate, it just needs to be audible. Go ahead and tell us you had 72 eggs; so long as you speak into the microphone and it sounds good, we can proceed to the interview.

That said, I thought you might be interested to know what I had for breakfast before Central Air this week. We roll tape at 11am and talk for nearly two hours, so a hearty breakfast is important, and I find there’s no better way to get myself in the podcasting mindset than eating like I’m a guest at some fancy French hotel.

This week, I made a wonderfully savory omelette. I sautéed one large chopped shiitake mushroom cap in a 10” nonstick pan with salt and really good olive oil, then added half a chopped shallot, chopped marjoram, coriander1, and more salt. Meanwhile, I beat three eggs with a quarter teaspoon of Kosher salt, a tablespoon of Pecorino Romano cheese, and a teaspoon of Calabrian chili paste.

The key to a good omelette is not letting it cook too hot. Add the eggs to the pan over medium heat and let them set for about a minute. Once they’re solid enough to slide a spatula under, lift the omelette at its edge and tilt the pan to let the liquid eggs run under and make contact with the hot pan surface. Repeat this action, proceeding around the pan, until very little liquid egg is left. Then reduce the heat to medium-low and cover the pan for 90 seconds. When you lift the lid, the whole omelette should be solid and brilliant yellow, and you can roll it out of the pan onto your plate.

Breakfast should have vegetables, and I had some leftover balsamic vinaigrette from the prior night’s dinner, so I made a simple salad with spring mix and those “flavor bomb” tomatoes that are good all year. I also cooked two slices of bacon in the microwave, and I toasted a bit of bread, but not too much, since Whole Foods has raised the price of a Pain d’Avignon baguette to $4.79 from $4.50 in recent weeks (thanks, Trump!). Add two or three cups of coffee with lots of half and half, and you’re ready to make a podcast.

This week’s episode is fun. We joined in the discourse about whether dog owners have gotten too big for their britches. (Dogs are sycophants, I say — at least cats have self-respect.) We discussed the wisdom of New York’s proposed tax on fancy pied-à-terre apartments. Axios reporter Alex Thompson, who caused a bit of consternation at last year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, joined us to talk about whether there should even be a White House Correspondents’ Dinner. And we even discussed a controversy that’s literally about air conditioning.

We hope you enjoy the episode. If you have any comments about how I’m absolutely right about dogs, please leave them in the comments section below.

Best,

Josh

Donald Trump didn’t just win the 2024 election, he did it by building the most racially and ethnically diverse electoral coalition of any Republican presidential candidate ever. Partly, he did that by drawing in minority voters who, prior to Trump’s rise, had voted Democratic despite holding conservative views. And partly he did it by winning over disaffected, not-especially-ideological voters of all races who believed he could deliver a stronger economy and lower inflation.

“In order to have a majority coalition in this country, the coalition has to not entirely make sense,” says our guest this week, Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, whose 2023 book Party of the People lays out how and why Donald Trump, of all people, was building a more diverse Republican voter base. And indeed, as the Iran war pushes up gasoline prices and the price level more broadly fails to fall, we’re seeing a lot of strain on Trump’s coalition, with the members who joined in hopes of getting low prices especially likely to fall away.

Patrick offers us his theory of how Republicans can avoid a cataclysm in this year’s midterm — it has, in part, to do with the semiquincentennial — and we discuss whether every election is going to be a “change” election from now onward.

Also this week, Ben, Megan and I discuss what “everybody knew” about Eric Swalwell, and whether we’d be better off with more insider gossip thrown out into the open — remember, that’s what Gawker did, and people got pretty tired of Gawker by the end. And we look at the prospect of a United Airlines-American Airlines merger, which United CEO Scott Kirby reportedly floated to the president himself.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Thanks to all of you who tuned into my live video with and ! I thought our conversation about Trump’s polling and about Democrats Senate prospects in 2026 was really interesting and informative, and I hope you enjoyed it as well.

Here’s a playback for those of you who weren’t able to join us live. We’d love your feedback in the comments, …

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I first met Daniel Biss more than a decade ago when he was an Illinois state senator working to rein in that state’s unsustainable debts related to public employee pensions. Now, he’s the mayor of Evanston and very likely soon to be a member of Congress representing Chicago’s north side and northern suburbs. He just won the Democratic nomination in a hugely expensive primary election — over $10 million was spent, much of it by AIPAC-linked groups dissatisfied with his positioning as a “progressive Zionist.” We had an interesting conversation with Daniel about the changing way Democrats are relating to Israel, and the extent to which debates about the country are coming to dominate intraparty contests, even while voters tell pollsters the issue isn’t that important to them.

We also talk about Medicare for All — Daniel, like most of his opponents in the primary, says he supports it, but where’s the appetite for the sorts of broad-based tax increases that would be required to finance it? How would progressives go about convincing the public that it’s worth paying more taxes to receive more government services? Daniel sits well to my left, but he’s one of the smartest people I’ve met in elected office, and I think the conversation we had with him on these topics was really interesting.

We also check in on the Iran war — Jamie Kirchick sat in for Ben who’s off this week, and took up the thankless job of being the panelist who thinks some good could actually come from all of this.

We talk about Gavin Newsom’s emergent strategy when fighting Republicans on the internet: calling them gay. Barney Frank says this is homophobic, but Newsom’s office tells The New York Times something I fully believe: the staffers writing the “you’re gay” tweets are themselves gay. But what might make sense as an in-joke among the gays sounds weird when put in the mouth of a straight politician, and it’s part of a broader issue with gay Democratic communicators amusing themselves by putting gay words in their straight bosses’ mouths. Are we really supposed to believe that 83-year-old House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro is making jokes about Rita Ora and the Khia Asylum? Let’s let straight Democrats be straight again.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Thanks to all of you who tuned in for my and Megan’s Substack live chat with Phil Chan, who accompanied me to La Traviata at the New York Metropolitan Opera this week, and who has fascinating ideas about how to save opera — updating it to make it more relevant to modern audiences, drawing in younger attendees, and ultimately making it more financially sustainable at a time when opera organizations like the Met are under severe financial stress.

If you weren’t able to join us live for the conversation, a replay is available here for paying subscribers. And here are some relevant links:

• The New York Times on financial difficulties at the Met, which spent down more than 20% of its endowment last year to finance ongoing operations.

• And the Times on similar financial difficulties for for-profit Broadway producers, who keep losing money on musicals and are increasingly turning to less-expensive plays.

• WGBH on Phil’s 2023 reimagining of Madama Butterfly for the Boston Lyric Opera.

Get more from Josh Barro in the Substack app

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We hope you enjoyed the conversation and we look forward to being back in your ears next week.

Best,

Josh

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The Trump administration has been very clear: they have four key objectives in the Iran war, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz is not one of them. That’s England’s job! We could end the war without doing it. Also, we won’t end the war until the strait is open. Who knows? It’s almost like they’re making the whole thing up as they go along.

Marc Caputo, White House Correspondent for Axios, joins the podcast this week to help us understand how Trump and his advisers are deciding what to do, and how they are preparing (or not) for the domestic political blowback from an extended disruption in oil markets. We also get his view from south Florida on the ongoing Republican dominance of that state — what the party did right to win solid majorities of Florida voters, and whether they face any danger from Trump’s national unpopularity and a cost of living crisis that, in Florida, takes the particular form of high housing prices and skyrocketing homeowner’s insurance costs.

Plus, Megan came in for a two-minutes hate this week for describing how she uses AI in her writing process — primarily, in the way one would use a human research assistant. We talk about the right way to use AI as a journalist, and the roots of the anti-AI fervor among journalists: one obvious reason is that many people are badly misusing AI — see the New York Times book reviewer who used an AI engine to plagiarize the Guardian — but another is that slop is a product category that long predates the rise of AI, and it used to be labor intensive in a way that it will not need to be going forward.

We hope you enjoy the show. Also, we hope you join us on Thursday at 1pm eastern for my conversation with opera director Phil Chan, who stood up to Timothée Chalamet by taking me to see the Metropolitan Opera’s production of La Traviata this week. We’re going to talk about why people should care about the opera, and what opera institutions can do, other than complain about remarks like Chalamet’s, to convince younger generations that they should “give a shit” about the art form. To catch that live chat, go to centralairpodcast.com or join us in the Substack app.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

This is a fun one! Tyler Austin Harper joins the show this week to talk about his reporting on the Mellon Foundation and its role in pushing humanities academia in the direction of progressive social activism, his on-the-ground take from Maine on Graham Platner’s Senate campaign, what literature can teach us about the politics of human extinction, and why the commentariat is souring on all these polyamory memoirs we keep getting.

We hope you enjoy the show! If you have responses, please share them in the comments below.

Best,

Josh

Since you likely know how I feel about the Kennedys, you can probably guess how I feel about Jack Schlossberg, the useless fuckboy grandson of John F. Kennedy who is running to be my congressman. Schlossberg doesn’t have a career or accomplishments — or labor income, for that matter — but he does have a large inheritance, and people on the internet say he’s sexually attractive, though personally I can’t see it. As Jonathan Chait wrote last month, you can’t even accuse him of having failed upward, because “failing requires having been entrusted with some responsibility in the first place.” This heterosexual twink is completely void of distinction, and I will be extremely annoyed if he ends up representing me in Congress.

But probably, he won’t win. It’s a big field, and one of his opponents, Assemblyman Alex Bores, joined us on Central Air this week. Unlike Schlossberg, Bores is a serious person with real accomplishments — he’s the author of New York’s controversial AI regulation law, the RAISE Act, so we asked him to join us to talk about the fight between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, and about how rules should be made about how AI gets used in the public sector. We also got to talk with him about Ben’s “Free Willy” experiment, how to deal with the electrical demands of data centers, and what Manhattan in particular needs from Congress.

We also have an update on Iran — Ben now thinks he may have been a little too optimistic about how this war would go, we check in again on the financial markets, and we discuss the rumors that the new ayatollah doesn’t exactly spend a lot of time in the straight of Hormuz, if you catch our drift.

Plus, we talk about the disappointing housing bill working its way through congress with a big, bad idea from Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, and we look at McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski and his pride in his hot new product, the Big Arch.

We hope you enjoy the show,

Josh