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.

Subscribe now

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

Read more

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

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, …

Read more

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

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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

Best,

Josh

Read more

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

Thanks to everyone who turned into today’s live chat with (of the excellent podcast Across the Movie Aisle) and !

We had a great chat about 2025 in movies, and about the post-COVID business model that the film industry is still grappling toward. We heard how Alyssa learned to appreciate horror films, got Ben’s movie lot memories, and discussed my proposal that David Ellison should raze the Paramount lot and build thousands and thousands of new homes right in the core of Hollywood — apparently, this would be unpopular with some people in the industry.

If you weren’t able to join us live, a replay is here for paying subscribers. Enjoy!

Best,

Josh

Read more

This week, Mike Solana of Pirate Wires joins us to talk about Silicon Valley. He’s been talking with lots of billionaires who are taking steps to exit California in anticipation of a proposed wealth tax. We discuss how credible those threats are — lots of people talk a good game about moving to Miami and make it through one summer — and what makes the wealth tax different from prior soak-the-rich tax proposals. And we discuss the likely opposition — the proposal is far from a fait accompli, and it’s even opposed by a lot of Democrats, including Gavin Newsom and Katie Porter.

We also talk about the alleged “Gay Tech Mafia,” of which Wired magazine says Mike is a member. Does it exist? Does it run Silicon Valley? Is it headquartered at the Castro branch of Barry’s Bootcamp? How can we get invited to its fabulous parties? Mike reveals all.

Also this week: we look at the gyrating price of oil. Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business said on Sunday that commodities traders are “imbeciles” who overreact to news, and indeed, oil prices did fall sharply Monday after spiking on Friday. They didn’t fall for quite the reason Charlie proposed — “within days we will 100% control the supply of oil coming out of the Straits of Hormuz,” he promised — but the markets seem to be pricing in an expectation that tensions will quickly de-escalate in one way or another. But… what if they don’t?

Finally, we look at the outrage over Timothée Chalamet saying “no one cares” about ballet or opera, which we think is largely coming from people who do not themselves go to the ballet or the opera, and Megan tries to convince us that we should actually go to the opera.

Subscribe now

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Thank you to everyone who tuned in for my live video chat with of Semafor and ! We had an interesting and lively conversation about the Texas primaries — how James Talarico prevailed over Jasmine Crockett, and how Republicans ended up with a runoff, where they must endeavor to avoid nominating a candidate so unappealing he could actually lose Texas.

We also look at why Rep. Dan Crenshaw lost, and how, in Texas Republican politics, being potentially disloyal to Trump is apparently worse than sleeping with your staffer who then set herself on fire.

If you weren’t able to join us live, we have a playback here for paying subscribers. You can sign up to watch that and get all of these future lunchtime live chats that we do with interesting reporters, pollsters and commentators.

Get more from Josh Barro in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

We’re back with another episode of Central Air and this time it is a bit of a crossover: Jesse Singal, co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast, joins us to discuss the shift toward more cautious thinking among (some of) the U.S. medical societies about youth gender medicine. (Jesse wrote on this for The New York Times last week.) We talk about how “The Science” got so far ahead of the science on this topic, and the forces that made a change in thinking faster to come to Europe than the U.S. We also talk about the bizarre, totalitarian media environment that has surrounded these issues, with GLAAD attempting to squish journalistic coverage of the weak evidence supporting youth gender medicine practices (initially with significant success) and about why the side question of sports has often gotten more media attention than the issue of medical treatment.

And then Ben, Megan and I discuss Ben’s surprising optimism about the situation in Iran, which I do not share.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Wow, some of you had strong opinions about last week’s episode. Sometimes they were even strongly positive opinions! But not always. Here at Central Air, we hear your feedback, and we promise no Donald Trump impressions this week — but we can’t promise that forever, because we are fiercely independent journalists who don't take orders from anyone, not even our paying customers.

What we do have for you this week is a conversation with Tim Miller, host of The Bulwark podcast, about his recent trip to Minnesota, the apparent continuation of significant but less bombastic ICE operations in the state, and why we differ on the extent to which immigration is a political pitfall for Democrats in 2026, 2028 and 2029 — and on how much is gained by talking a lot about how terrible Donald Trump is.

We also talk about the especially lively debate on left-wing Twitter about whether it is pro-social for mentally ill homeless people to pee on the subway, and an undercurrent of discontent that’s driving that debate — New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is increasingly breaking with the far left, including by having the NYPD resume sweeps of homeless encampments on city streets. As Tim notes, one thing that’s good about being charismatic is you can defy your core supporters and they let you get away with it.

Plus, we talk about the Supreme Court rebuke of Trump’s tariffs and we discuss the Citrini memo, a document that proposed an implausible scenario of an AI-driven financial crisis — but not implausible enough to be ignored by the stock market on Monday, apparently. (I also wrote about this yesterday).

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Thank you to the several hundred of you who tuned in for my live chat with and . We had an interesting conversation about his recent poll for The Argument on trans issues; the failure of the “no debate” strategy pursued by trans activists (see, for example, the ineffectual GLAAD letter to The New York Times); and how Democrats and trans activists both might be expected to respond to recent rightward shifts in public opinion on topics from youth medical treatments to sports to bathrooms.

If you weren’t able to join us over lunch, we have a playback of the conversation here for paying subscribers (and thank you for your support of Central Air!)

Subscribe now

We’ll be back in your ears with another full episode next week.

Best,

Josh

Read more

It’s a very special week here on Central Air, because Cartoons Hate Her joins us to make her argument that Democrats need a presidential candidate who “fucks.”

First we try to figure out what this figurative sense of “fuck” means exactly — “fucking is in your heart,” says CHH — and then we apply the analysis to the field of politics. Some calls are easy — John F. Kennedy fucked; Michael Dukakis did not fuck — but there are closer calls, like Margaret Thatcher, who may have fucked in some weird British psychosexual way, and there are candidates who fucked too much, like Gary Hart. We look at the elephant in the room — Gavin Newsom, who obviously fucks but obviously should not be the Democratic nominee — and we scour the rest of the field for potential fuckage. Perhaps Josh Shapiro would fuck if we got him some contact lenses and a leather jacket? We consider all possible angles.

Also this week: We have a very special surprise guest who helps us understand the bizarre phenomenon of “looksmaxxing,” recently covered in a 2,800-word New York Times profile of Braden Peters, a.k.a. Clavicular, the famous 20-year-old moron who improves his bone structure by hitting himself in the face with a hammer. (Peters, unsurprisingly, is a Newsom supporter.) And CHH gives her take on one of my favorite questions: are straight people okay?

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh