Dear listeners,
We’re so excited to bring you the first episode of Central Air, a weekly politics podcast from and for the political center. Megan, Ben and I figure every other part of the political spectrum has a podcast — so, why not us?
Let me formally introduce Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfuss, my co-hosts for this podcast. Megan is a columnist for the Washington Post and Ben writes the Substack newsletter Calm Down. Some of you listened to the pilot episodes we put out on the Very Serious podcast feed this past winter, and we were happy with the feedback we got from you — not just that you liked the shows, but what you liked about them. And we’re calling the new show “Central Air” not just because of our outlook from the center of the political spectrum (and not just because it’s a refreshing blast Europeans can’t afford), but also because of our intention to produce a show with an even temperament. There’s going to be plenty of disagreement, but we always expect cool heads to prevail.
On this week’s show, we talk about the state of the political center, and the exciting new initiatives that focus on what centrists are for, not just what we think is too extreme. (I also mention my experience being protested by climate-Gaza-LGBTQ protesters at a conference for centrist Democrats this June.) We look at the oddly low-key government shutdown, and Democrats’ uphill fight to use the shutdown to get voters to focus on expiring Obamacare subsidies — and to get voters to blame Republicans when they see their premiums from private insurers go up.
We discuss the naked cyclists in Oregon, and the political trap of fighting Donald Trump over immigration. We talk about the overwrought freakout over Bari Weiss’s installation at CBS, why liberals in the media can’t see that the media is liberal, and the challenging prospects for any plan to make a third-place broadcast news division more relevant.
And we talk about bearer bonds. Ben has a fun post for his newsletter Calm Down about the Bruce Willis action classic Die Hard, asking a vital question about its plot: Does it make any sense that the Nakatomi Corporation would have had $640 million worth of bearer bonds in a vault in its new Los Angeles skyscraper? Ben says yes — and his explanation includes a dive into 1970s Japanese monetary policy and 1980s U.S. actions to fight money laundering. And we discuss how bearer bonds were a forerunner to cryptocurrency, offering many of the same invitations to criminal mischief.
We hope you enjoy the show! Have comments for us? Suggestions for topics or guests on future shows? Please write them in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you. And make sure to subscribe here so you know when we release new episodes, and follow the show on your podcast app of choice.
Stay cool out there,
Josh
