Central Air - $140,000 Is Not Poor, $400,000 Is Not Middle Class

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

On this week’s show: is $140,000 a year the new poverty line? Is $400,000 a moderate income? Is the softening in car buying an indication that middle-income Americans have grown more financially pressed in recent months?Plus: we revisit the “you must refuse illegal orders” video in light of news reports about an awfully illegal-sounding “double tap” strike on a suspected drug boat off Venezuela, and we discuss the Trump administration’s crackdown on Afghan migrants. We also talk about casinos in New York City and two environments that bring Americans together: the craps table, and the Benihana table. Finally: Josh angers people on the internet. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow, and I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post. Megan, this is our first post- Thanksgiving show. Was your Thanksgiving a success? It was lovely, although we had 13, and I told my sister to get a large turkey, and she got a 24-pound turkey. Oh, my God. Let me tell you, roasting a 24-pound turkey is not for the faint of heart. But we had lots of stuffing, and I made three kinds of pie, and it was,

It was a very nice time. And we had great guests, too. How about you, Ben, in the cave in Idaho? Did you have a lovely Thanksgiving? I normally do Thanksgiving with my Welsh and Scottish godparents. And I just assumed that they would be here as every year they are. And then I was like, all, see you on Thursday, right? And they said, actually, we're going to Palm Springs. Sorry. And I was like, you immigrants, you don't even care about family, do you? I just had normal food. I didn't do anything special. I had chicken. in fact, because I didn't want to cook an entire turkey. I had a lovely time in New Jersey with my in-laws. I baked pies and brought them out to New Jersey. I did an apple, pumpkin, and a can.

This first time I'd ever made a pumpkin pie, and according to America's Test Kitchen, the secret to a good pumpkin pie is to make it with sweet potatoes. They're like, the problem with pumpkin is it doesn't taste like anything. That's why people don't eat it other than at Thanksgiving, and so they have you blend the pumpkin with sweet potatoes and cook them on the stove top for a long time to reduce the moisture. and concentrate flavor so that it actually has the root vegetable or gourd flavor,

and you don't need to fill it with an absolute ton of spices. But I was happy with how that came out. I must absolutely dissent from this, not taking anything away from your pie. But to me, the secret to a good pumpkin pie is, first of all, I like the spices. I used the recipe. My mother used to wake up every Thanksgiving morning for like two decades and call my grandmother to get the pumpkin pie recipe again because she never managed to write it down and put it where she would remember to

it. And finally, my grandmother actually had like a local artist make the recipe and, you know, put decorations on it. And it's now hanging in my kitchen. So I use the heritage, feral, Taylor, family spice mixture. But then the other secrets are you need to blitz the hell out of the pumpkin and the egg together in order to break down the fibers. Like in a blender? Yeah. Put your mixture in a blender. and then you push it through a strainer. And so you get this beautiful, like, silky consistency. And I think it tastes wonderful.

I don't need any sweet potatoes. It's beautiful just as it is. As we've already discussed last week, I've never had pie or tasted straight pumpkin in my life. I don't understand how it's possible that you've never had pie. It's just, you know, look, it's just some of us are made of different stuff. But when Starbucks started the pumpkin spice latte craze, I assumed that tasted like pumpkin until doing some investigative journalism a few years ago found out pumpkin spice has no relation to pumpkin.

Well, it has relation to pumpkin. They're the spices that you put in a pumpkin pot. Okay, but it's not going to taste like actual. If I went down into the street like a dog and took a pumpkin and just ate it, it wouldn't taste like it. No. No, you also have to cook the pumpkin before you eat it, Ben, don't try to eat it like a dog. Do dogs eat raw pumpkins? Farrell dogs will eat anything.

Speaking of people who might have to resolve. resort to eating raw pumpkin or whatever it is that they can find on the side of the road. Fund manager, Mike Green, has a viral piece for the free press in which he says that the new poverty line for a family of four in the United States is $140,000. He says the poverty line measure that as it was set in the 1950s is out of date because it was based on the assumption that Americans spent a third of their income on food. You take what it costs to feed a family, you multiply it by three. That was your poverty line.

he points out that now we only spend about 6% of our income on groceries. And so he says the poverty line should be 16 times what it costs to buy groceries for a family of four. He does that math and it adds up to $140,000. Now, there's been a lot of howling about this piece from economists and economics journalists. Noah Smith in particular wrote a detailed takedown of it. And what he points out, first of all, is that a lot of Green's numbers are just wrong. For one thing, Green only counted spending on food at home. but the original poverty line estimate was based on food bought at home plus in restaurants.

And if you use that measure, then you find that middle income family spends about an eighth of its budget on food, not a 16th. He also greatly overstates the cost of child care. He basically assumes that if you have, you know, a 15-year-old, the 15-year-old is in full-day daycare at a daycare center. And so it costs over $30,000 a year to care for your two children. And then his measure also, you know, he says like, and this doesn't include, like, nice to haves like Netflix, but in fact, he has a category of other necessities.

that does, in fact, include Netflix, seemingly without realizing it. And so anyway, you know, Green, as Noah points out, this thesis that $140,000 is poor. That means that more than half of American families would be poor. The median income for a family of foreign United States is $126,000. And then if you look at living standards, how they've changed from the 1950s, they're obviously much higher. You know, most of these families have two cars. Their homes are much larger than they used to be.

And so this idea that, you know, more than half of the country is, country is poor. It just doesn't make sense when you look at the math. It doesn't make sense when you look at the way that Americans actually live. And so that's been the backlash. And then there's been backlash to the backlash, which is basically saying that people like Noah are missing the larger truth behind Green's peace, that, you know, middle income people face all sorts of poverty traps. They make more income. And that just means that they lose subsidies they would otherwise get for health care or child care. And it's impossible to climb that ladder. And that it's, you know, it's very hard to live in the United States right now. And that if you were a pointy-deadd economy,

saying, you know, well, really, if you look at the spreadsheet, you're not doing so badly, that that's just insulting to people to talk that way. Megan, what do you make of this? Is $140,000 poor? No, no, it is not poor. You are not poor if you make $140,000 a year. I'm sorry, my child. What if you're of a family of four? So if you have a family of four, you're at the median income. Yeah, a little bit above it, actually. Yeah. Some of this depends on where you live. If you're living in Manhattan, this is a much

a harder row to hoe than if you're living in Boise, Idaho. But you're not poor. And I think that people saying this is the poverty line are people who have no idea what poverty is actually like. It is the most crazy entitled, like, go spend some time with poor people and listen to what they worry about. It is not whether they can access, like, adequate after-school enrichment programs for their children. They're worried about, like, do I have food on the table this week? Will I be able to keep the lights on? How am I going to make my rent?

If you are not worried about those things while living in the cheapest possible housing in your area, then you are not poor. You may feel stretched. You may feel afraid. You may feel precarious. That's all totally valid. But feeling like I really don't like the tradeoffs I have to make, I really don't like that I can't get all of the things I think I should be. able to get for me and my children, that is a totally valid worry. But it's not poverty. Poverty is when you cannot access the basic necessities of life to keep yourself fed, warm, and dry.

Ben, it's funny because the more common version we see of this is pieces that say, you know, $400,000 is middle class now. And it lays out a set of necessities that some, you know, wealthy person in Manhattan might think was necessary, like being able to send your kid to private school, and it adds up, you know, that that costs $400,000. And I guess it would follow that if $400,000 was a middle income for a family of four, that $140,000 would be poor. Right. But $400,000 is obviously not middle income. Well, yes, that is that is the problem here, isn't it? Yeah, it's like, it is middle income for the Upper East side of Manhattan. And if you live there. Yeah, I mean, it's probably not middle of them for Yorkville, though,

you know, like if you just go a little further east. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't think that people who are making middle income should probably be sending their children to Riverdale and Fieldsden. Those schools are too expensive. Unless you've got some sort of scholarship, that seems like a poor investment. Yeah, it just seems a little crazy to me. I completely understand the notion of like, wow, I have things I cannot buy and sometimes have to think of money. But that's true of everyone. It's true of everyone. Like, the richest people on earth have things they, I mean, well, maybe not literally the richest, but everyone else has things that they, they're they have to have to think about it and have to have a little Quicken budget.

That's maybe what everyone just needs is a little, when they used to have Quicken in the 90s, there would be like one of those little things that would pop up and go, you're spending too much money on gas. And now I feel like we just need those little keen insights that say like, hey, actually like, you're spending too much money on Onlyfans. Like this is why you're poor. This is why you can't buy you're feeling like this. No, it sounds ridiculous to me.

And I think that it would be, it's probably insulting to a vast number of Americans. So I think part of this is that people have this idea that you should only have to think about money when it comes to things that are totally trivial, right? Like, it's fine that people can't afford the fanciest cell phone and may have to make do with, like, a few generations ago iPhone. But it's not fine that you cannot get a house in the best possible school district for your child. Now, the fact that those school slots, like the,

best possible school district is a relative measure, which means the definitionally not everyone can do that. But people don't think that way, right? They don't think that they should, for example, just not be able to take any vacations, which was the tradeoff that my parents made in order to pay tuition at Riverdale Country School, as a matter of fact, which used to be a lot lower than it was. It was like even relatively. It was not as fancy as it is when I went there. I went to Fieldsden, so we shared drug dealers. Yeah. Chief, was he still in business when you were there? Chief, for the listeners who do not know, innovated, as far as I know, the pager to delivery model. Wow.

And while I did not do drugs in high school because I didn't have any money, I could buy pizza after school sometimes level of... See, because you were poor. I would not say that I was poor. I would say that my parents made choices about educating me that involved a very expensive education, like no vacations, no fancy clothes, totally adequate clothes. I had, like, nice things. They worked very hard to take care of me.

And I will forever be, like, grateful. But we didn't have the lifestyle that most of my classmates did because the tuition was sucking up an incredible portion of their disposable income. And like, my parents worried about that. My mother later told me she used to lie awake at night wondering how she was going to make the next tuition bill because she sold real estate and it's quite up and down. But they would never, they would have died if you had tried to suggest that they were poor. while they were doing this. The relative thing here, though, where people always have stories, and it's much more often in that frame of, you know, I'm middle class when someone is, you know, well into the 90 plus

percentile in income, is that, you know, they look around and they identify someone who is richer than them who can afford things that they can't afford. And it's like, that's, that's what a rich person is. I was at my beach house this summer because I'm rich. And my neighbor makes this comment about, you know, all these, you know, rich people, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, you are rich. We're standing in your beach house right now. And it's like, but you can always look and, you know, well, there could be a house, there's a house on the ocean front front front front, but I can't afford. Or my ocean front house is less fancy. Right. And well appointed than the other ocean front homes. Yeah. To some extent, this is just like, you know, a little foible in the way people talk. But it has screwed up our fiscal politics in the sense that when you have these ideas about, you know, what it is to be poor that goes up toward middle income or what it is to be middle class that goes up, you know, past 90th percent. incomes is he basically say everyone is off limits to face tax increases. And that also seems to be part of the point that Mike Green is trying to make in this piece. You know, like, you know, you can't

tax these people because look how pressed they are. But so you had this politics during the, you know, the Obama administration where it was you weren't going to raise taxes on anyone making over $250,000. And then by the time we got around to the Biden administration for Democrats, it was instead, you know, you can't raise taxes on anyone who makes more than $400,000. And that ends up, you know, putting almost the entire population off limits at a time when we have this huge fiscal gap. And it also means that you can't talk to people about the idea that the government is providing them valuable services that we may have to tax you more for, that, you know, that you are able to and that you should be willing to pay if you make a case that the government is valuable and

worth paying for, because we've decided that, you know, the rich is only this, this tiny slice of the population. And furthermore, that that's the only slice of the population that we can actually go to for more taxes. So that's, you know, that's, I guess, why I care about this. It's not that it's important the way people talk about themselves in private settings, but it is important the way that this has affected our politics. Well, there's that book that I'm forgetting the name of right now that makes the argument. And like it's somewhat obvious is that like people like to focus on billionaires when we talk about wealth and power in America because they're billionaires. But that like the real wealth and power in America is the middle class. You know, that like once you reach a certain point and it's only $120,000, whatever it is.

But then it's easier for generational wealth to grow. It's easier for people to get, to have networks that lead to better careers for their children. It's easier for all of these things to happen. But there's so many people in that because it's half of America or more than that. It's not politically popular to do that with. Well, is it the middle class or is it the slice of the, you know, affluent people, people making between 90 and 98th percentile incomes? Because that's where I see the tremendous political power here. Yeah.

You're probably right. That's right. Because, you know, you had Barack Obama, for example, one of his budgets, he had this proposal to reform the 529 savings program. This is the program where you, you know, you have a tax advantage to count where you can save money to send your child to college. Like any tax advantage to count, its value is greater to people who face a higher tax rate because, you know, being relieved of paying taxes is worth a lot more if your tax rate is 37 percent than if your tax rate is 10 percent. And so the benefits accrue mostly to high earners. They're also the ones who have the disposable income available to put. into the accounts and they're the ones who are going to be charged tuition by colleges when

their children go to those colleges. And so basically it's this big subsidy for people with fairly high incomes. And it does almost nothing to cause more people to get college degrees because, you know, the kids in these affluent households, they're going to college in any case, regardless of whether or not there's a 529 plan. And so he had this proposal that, you know, instead of this wasteful program, we're going to curtail those subsidies and instead put them into subsidies that aim toward poorer people who otherwise might not go to college if they didn't get the subsidies. And people went absolutely apeshit because the target demo for those 529 accounts is, it's like families where both earners are correspondents at the New York Times. You know, income in the ballpark of 300,000, 400,000, affluent households, households with very high incomes relative to the typical American household, but not so rich that tuition at Harvard is trivial to them.

In fact, affording college is something that is, you know, there's a significant burden for them and they feel that they're deserving of, that tax break, even though there are families who are much more in need of that. And so that proposal went over like a lead balloon. And I wrote a piece, I was a correspondent at the New York Times at this time, making about $150,000 a year plus. So I knew it was typical for people in these positions. And I got in an elevator at the Washington Bureau, and I just got the nastiest comment from some editor because I had said, well, another one of these 400,000 his middle class pieces ran. And it was based on the idea of owning a house in Bethesda, Maryland, which is a fancy suburb of Washington, D.C. And I wrote in the piece, I was like, well, maybe you don't need to live in

Bethesda. And that's where a lot of these people live in the D.C. area. And they don't take kindly to the suggestion that, you know, maybe something that they're engaged in is not a necessity. And maybe they don't need all the tax breaks the government's given them. Yeah, I think what interests me about this piece was not the incredibly bad math. It was that it felt true to so many people. And I think, so I was talking to a very rich person of my acquaintance about this, or DMing on Twitter rather. And I said, you know, I think that what these people actually want is the sense that like it just can never go away, right? Like that no matter what they do, it's always assured that they will have exactly what they have and that their kids will do better.

And that I don't think that's available at any income level. And his response was, yep. Like, and I think about this with myself, right? When we got to. married, we had less than half of the income we have now. We were young. We were whatever. You know, like, and some of that's inflation, but a lot of that's just that we got older and we got, you know, promotions and raises and so forth. And like, we were definitely not poor. And if we had to go back to that level of living, we could definitely do it. Now, it would require us to make a bunch of choices. We would not be able to do fun things that we do now. And undoubtedly, we would quarrel about it because, you know, it's difficult making those choices.

And I do think that one thing that middle class people, upper middle class people buy with their extra money is just freedom from fighting about stuff with their spouse. Right? You don't fight over how clean the house is. You get a cleaning lady. You don't fight over, like, whether to have a nicer car or to put the kids in after-school activities because you don't have to make that trade-off, right?

But it doesn't matter. However much money you get, you will look around, and unless you are literally named Elon Musk, There will be someone richer than you. There will be someone who has more. Someone who has stuff you want. You will have to make difficult choices where you can't do every single thing that comes into your mind. And, you know, that's the tragedy of life.

And you just have to accept it. That, like, you can live, you may be living a very good life, but you are not going to live literally the best possible life you could if there were no choices at all to be made. I grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho, which is like a ski resort for celebrities or whatever. And when the pandemic hit, and I, like, lost my job at Mother Jones. I moved back to Idaho to live with my mom. And I ran into this kid of another movie star who had gone to the private school here with me. And I was like, hey, man, how are you?

Long time to see. And he was like, oh, great. It's been since blah, blah, blah. And he was like, are you still in that house in Gimlet? And I was like, no, she sold it during a fire sale. You know, we had to move back into this shit a lot of us. And then he, I was like, and you are your parents still over in blah, blah, blah. And he said, no, no, they're gone too.

We got priced out by the billionaires. And then I was like, we were both like shaking our heads. And I was like, yeah, it's terrible, you know, gentrification. These billionaires are pricing out the millionaires. The poor little celebrity kids can't even live in ketchup anymore. And I was really thinking like, this is the least sympathetic version of this conversation anyone has ever had. Yeah. Yeah.

And I just wonder. Like how much of this in people's brains has to do with social media? Like when you go on Instagram and see some images that you might know are glassed up so that everyone looks happy all the time and at the beach all the time, that it just makes you feel like everyone is living a life that you're not living. I'm glad you bring that up because I do want to talk about whether we are missing a quote unquote larger truth here that Mike Green's defenders think we're missing. And I think what has happened in the last few years is there's been an increased level of political disqualful. discontent about economic conditions. And that has persisted through several changes in the economy. It's, you know, inflation went really high and then it has come back down somewhat. We had a very tight labor market. Now the labor market appears to be softening a little bit, but there's constant

around the world seems to be that people are much more dissatisfied than they used to be. And one question is why. And I think, you know, you float, you know, social media and envy and, you know, more exposure to what you can't afford. I think a lot of it is just that, you know, we, went through this high inflation that is unfamiliar to people. You see a level of inflation we haven't experienced since the 1970s, so I've never experienced it personally before. And the high prices are just more salient than the fact that incomes went up, that asset values went up, and people have more ability to afford the higher prices than they used to. And so I think that's just still lingering, even though inflation is down in the 3% level, people remember that prices were

a lot lower six years ago, and they are understandably very discontented about that and, you know, feel strongly that, you know, things that used to be affordable aren't affordable anymore. even though one of the funny parts is why the inflation was so persistent was that consumers just kept spending through the price increases. And that was because they had the capacity to spend through the price increases. But that didn't seem to make people happy. But I, you know, inflation is my number one culprit for why people are so much more dissatisfied with the economy than they apparently used to be some years ago. But Megan, do you see candidates other than that and Instagram? Yeah, I think that I have a related theory of what's going on here, which is that

if you compare, like, the, you know, objectively, the economy is not bad. Now, it might be getting bad. Hiring is frozen. There's some real worrying signs. But objectively, like, unemployment's pretty low. GDP growth is okay. Inflation has at least fallen, even though it's not where the Fed, you know, at the Fed's 2% target. But if you think about how people felt after the pandemic, they had these huge wads of cash that they were sitting on because there wasn't anything to buy, Right? Like they, not there wasn't anything to buy, but there were fewer goods and you weren't buying services. So you're just sitting home and accumulating cash. And I think for a lot of people, they looked at that huge nestag and thought about all of the, how different their life could be. Right after the pandemic, you have this rash of articles on quiet quitting and, and, you know, the people who are, you know, like, on strike and they're going to, they're not going to go back. They're going to do something different. better. And, you know, I have to say during the pandemic, I thought there was going to be a lot of inflation because I didn't see how there couldn't be, right? There was all this money in the economy

unless people just sat on it and invested it, which knowing Americans did not seem particularly likely to me, then eventually, then like all it was going to happen was that that amount of money was going to chase the same amount of goods and services or even less goods and services, and then prices would rise. That's not what most people thought. So they had these incredibly, like we came out of the pandemic with these incredibly high expectations, like 1952 level expectations for how much your life could change. Then it turned out that actually, no, you were just going to spend the money you accumulated on like buying the same old stuff at higher prices. And so it's not just that inflation is a problem, which I think it is. It's that there was an

expectations crash that is unparalleled probably since the 70s. Like, even in the financial crisis, it's not so much that, like, we had, it would, the situation was objectively worse, but we had not had the preceding period where everyone thought, like, maybe capitalism would go away. Or maybe, like, I will become a doctor or maybe instead of, like, a medical office administrator or any of these things, people didn't, hadn't had this just abrupt sense that their lives could be totally different. and then they weren't totally different, and in fact, they were a little worse in some ways, and that has made people extremely mad. How did we move past that in the 70s? I mean, it's because I feel like, you know, one of the walls that we hit in the 70s in a somewhat similar way is, you know, you start having real energy constraints.

And, you know, prior to, you know, in the 1960s, it was just like, you know, gasoline was cheap, all kinds of fuel was cheap, and the sky was the limit in terms of, you know, advancements in suburbia, and, you know, homes getting larger and better and that sort of thing. and then you have the energy crisis and you instead have this shift toward conservation and gas lines and you know Jimmy Carter giving the malaise speech

which I think you know that that speech gets a little bit of a bad rap but sort of diagnosing exactly what you're describing there Megan that it like you know feels like the country's horizons have narrowed and people have lost that you know that spirit of hope that they had before if we're in a time like that again I mean it's kind of funny that we if we're in a time like that at the same time that we have this

AI boom where you have of, you know, people in Silicon Valley insisting that life is on the verge of changing forever. And yet Americans feel in this, you know, this place where they feel stuck and they feel that they are not getting what they were promised. One of the key differences, right, between that period in the late 1970s and now is that in the late 1970s, it was worse. You know, like, the economy was bad. You had actual things. And not just in the U.S., obviously, like Britain had the worst time in history in the late 1970s. But that it actually, there was real material constraints that affected everybody.

And so then when things got better, there was a noticeable difference. Here, we're talking about, you know, inflation changing and it will, it, it's obviously better that it's not 9% anymore. And you notice it, but you don't notice it the same way. You're not noticing it like suddenly you don't have to ration gas. Well, I think some people had an idea that prices were actually going to go down. Trump talked about it like the price, which doesn't happen. And when it does happen, it's bad.

It would be terrible. Deflation would be, right, awful. When it does happen, you are. You can have the prices decrease in certain goods, right? Consumer electronic prices have been falling for decades. But if the broad general price level is deflating, you end up in a much worse situation because, of course, your debt does not deflate and now you have lower incomes and less money and the same level of debt and bad, bad things happen.

But people don't understand that. They don't think that way. Sure. If what people are waiting for to feel satisfied again is, you know, a return to 2019 price levels, that's never going to happen. So we have to get out of this. I guess my question is, do people eventually just come to terms with the fact that the inflation happened? I guess that happened in the 70s. Look, like the 80s boom was good, but it wasn't like the 1960s. It was a little bit of a boom. But compared to the 1970s, it was awesome. And wages did not do great in the 80s. That was part of

when Bill Clinton came to power in 1992 was this sense that I think was fairly reasonable that the gains from that economic boom in the 1980s had not been equally shared. and that, you know, we had, you know, lower inflation. People were certainly happy about that. But the economy was not producing the kind of wage growth that people had come to expect. I think if you look at the Morning in America speech, you look at how much Reagan won by. Morning in America was not a speech. It was a commercial.

It's still available online. Really inspiring. Like, I still, I watch it and I want to vote for Ronald Reagan. But, like, if you look at that ad, how successful that Morning in America campaign was, people, it's not just that, like, a handful of investment bankers were feeling that things had gotten better. It is very clear that everyone in America felt that things had gotten way, way better and quite quickly from the 1970s, but what preceded that was basically a decade of stagnation. And so the comparison was great, but expectations are going to have to reset downwards. And then once they have, you know,

there's an old programming joke about a programmer who, walks out into an alley and finds one of his colleagues hitting his head against a brick wall. And he says, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? And the guy says, because it feels so good when you stop. And, you know, we have to, we're going to have to hit our head into the brick wall for a bit more. And when we stop, it'll feel great. I mean, the other thing I was going to say about the 80s is that, like, when you look at all of it, the baby boomers weren't actually a plurality of the economy back then. You know, they did in the late 80s become a plurality. And so, like, The baby boomer era really is the 90s.

But like in the 80s, when things were going on, we're talking about like the house owner generation that owned all of that was also like the silent generation and that they were already a bit older. Right now you're dealing with the millennials entering into that area for like what the boomers were in the 80s where we're growing into this plurality of the thing. And the fact is the millennials had a very weird history with the economy. Like there was this weird thing in the recession, but then also there was the sillier.

Silicon Valley subsidizing that went on for a decade where everything was artificially lower until 2019 when it stopped. And so a lot of the loudest people on social media are talking about, you know, the famous DoorDash burrito bullshit where they're like, oh, DoorDash used to be subsidized. Why won't it just be subsidized anymore? Because that's just not the business models anymore. So there's just an entire lack of price discovery in the millennial ideal because none of it's ever really been happening like that. Another thing I think might be playing into this and the millennial sense that they got screwed. And look, they did have a hard time. Many of them graduated and do a terrible job market. I graduated from business school into the teeth of the 2001 recession and had a

very hard time. And I understand it really like, it changes you. But I also think that late marriage and late childbearing might have something to do with this. Because I think about my own childhood. My parents had me relatively late for their generation. My mother was 26. And so I knew my parents when they had no money. They bought our apartment, which was a co-op, the month before I was born. My mother was eight months pregnant. They had $500 in the bank, and she just quit her job. And she then spent, and this co-op was in horrible shape, which is why I had gone co-op, was the landlord had deferred maintenance for like 40 years and was tired of it and just wanted to get rid of the problem. And so, like, the building's finances were so bad that my father

used to have to go out to the curb and pay the oil guy in cash because they would not extend us even 30 days of credit. The heat used to be off for like a week at a time because the boiler would break and it took them a while to get the money scraped up to fix it. There's just endless stuff. Our apartment leaked. We were on the top floor, not in the penthouse, but the top floor, like the penthouse had a balcony. We were under it. So I remember my mother scraping paint until two in the morning to get like 50 years of paint out of the apartment. And And had I been born 10 years later, I would have seen a very different life. My mother would have worked for 10 years.

They would have had more income to start with. They would have more assets to start with. They would have already finished fixing up the apartment. They would have had higher incomes because my dad was no longer working for the city of New York and was now in the private sector. And on and on and on. And my, therefore, expectation of what the baseline is for being a young person in New York City would have been a lot higher, right?

And I think a lot of millennials are kind of expecting to walk into their parents late 30s or early 40s rather than understanding that like actually, no, it took like 15 years to get there. And those 15 years were not particularly well appointed. And that's normal. And that's one of the problems with these like $140,000 as poor pieces because one of the messages it sends is that, you know, if you and your spouse make $120,000 a year, you can't afford to have children. And, you know, one of the reasons that we're having later marriage and later childbearing is people, you know, wanting to put it all. off until they can reach that certain standard of living. And, you know, some of them are, are never going to reach the specific, you know, heights that they think that they ought to before they have kids. Before we turn from this, we've talked about the sort of the frozen, decent

economy. There isn't a lot of hiring, but there's also not a lot of layoffs yet. Unemployment is still low. Are we starting to see signs that's about to get worse? Because I'm wondering, you know, if this is the level of discontent that we're seeing now, if we move toward a recession, people are going to be really, really unhappy. There's a wall. Street Journal story, for example, about how cars are finally starting to sit longer on dealer lots. You had these various disruptions in the auto market from COVID and from tariffs that have pushed car prices higher. And to a large extent, consumers have just been eating that, even as interest rates have gone up. They're just paying more for the cars. And that's part of why the inflation's

been sustainable. Now we're seeing from dealers that that's fading. And people are, you know, finding ways to put off new car purchase because they've decided they can't afford it. kind of looks like what you would see when you're on your way into a recession. Yeah, you know, the things that you, what are the things that you see people pulling back on first? It's big consumer durables, right? It's furniture, it's houses, its cars. All of which are very tariff-exposed parts of the economy. Yeah.

So with houses, we're not going to see that because the housing market is so messed up from the decade of ultra-low interest rates followed by higher interest rates, which means that people like me who are sitting on sub 2% mortgages, like you will carry me out of this house feet first. I am never moving, at least until we pay the mortgage off. We're not going to see it in the housing market as much. The visibility into the housing market is weird. But like seeing cars slow down and seeing people say, nope, you know what, just going to drive the old minivan for another year,

that is a big warning sign that people are feeling uncertain, that they are worried about their future, that they are sitting on cash rather than going out and taking on especially big new debt expenses, which is how these things are often financed. I think it's so interesting that what you're talking about with housing as well, and when we're talking about millennials,

is that I saw people on Twitter complaining about blaming boomers for all of this a few days ago in response to this article about how boomers are the devil and they shall be dragging to the street and killed because they've ruined the world. Well, it's the idea that basically they're sitting in the large houses that they could afford to buy 30, 40 years ago, and they're not available for sale to,

young families who actually need them. Yeah, but on social media, this is called they're hoarding them. They're hoarding the housing because they won't die, essentially. So I was just out of curiosity, like, looking up all of this. And of course, like when baby boomers do start to knock on wood, hope this never happens, mom and dad, but when they do start to die, that there's going to be the largest wealth transfer in history from them to millennials. there will be like something between $50 trillion or $70 trillion transferred from boomers to millennials.

They will skip Gen X with the forgotten generation, which will then they'll one day give their pennies to their kids, the Zoomers. So the millennials will inherit their parents' houses when they're 55 and too old to have children. Yes, exactly. But also it'll just create this interesting and somewhat unique thing where for the first time in like modern history, because Gen X is going to get jumped so much, the millennials are going to go, from this little whiny area of the economy power to then suddenly being the dominant and wealthy generation. And it's just going to create interesting dynamics where the 60-year-olds won't be the richest. And we haven't really seen that ever. And I don't know, know what it'll look like. It's okay. We're used to it. And Gen X will whine about being overlooked? How novel. Just as they always have. The latchkey kids can take care of ourselves. Thank you very much.

We don't need your stupid inheritance. Let's take a quick break. Do you think $140,000 a year, makes a family poor, why don't you go join our comments section at central airpodcast.com. You can leave feedback on the show, join conversations about it, and get all the updates from us when we put out new episodes. We'll be right back. So we talked last week about that video from those Democrats in Congress saying you can refuse illegal orders, you must refuse illegal orders. And one of the things we talked about was how the video didn't really have very useful guidance for someone in the military in terms of figuring out, you know, what orders are illegal and what should I do if I receive one that I'm concerned about. We then got some news over the last week that gives some

context about what those members of Congress were probably specifically talking about, which is the Washington Post reports about one of those strikes on a boat that our government believes was running drugs off the coast of Venezuela in early September. The report says that defense secretary Pete Higgsith gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. The order was to kill everybody, one of them said. And then it describes how basically There was a strike on the boat. They're monitoring the boat. And then they see that there's two survivors clinging to the boat.

And so, again, according to the Washington Post, the special operations commander overseeing the September 2nd attack, ordered a second strike to comply with Hegset's instructions. Two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water. So this is kind of like a textbook illegal order that, you know, when someone is no longer a threat or a survivor clinging to a shipwreck, you're not allowed to kill them. And, you know, things like this happened in World War II that are used as examples of, you know, when you have an illegal order. You can't say no quarter and we're not going to try to rescue any survivors. The video looks somewhat better in retrospect.

I mean, again, it's, you know, it's still not useful as guidance to the troops. But I can see more exactly what it is that they were trying to raise concern about. Oh, yeah. I mean, I saw what they were trying to raise concern about last week. I'm just not sure this is the most useful way to go about it. I do think that this incident points to a really huge problem with governance, right? It's not just about the specifics of this, which is awful and un-American and unconstitutional and in violation of the world international law and all other bad things.

It's that there's not any realistic check on this, right? We have discovered over the past, you know, few decades, that impeachment is never going to work. that check on presidential power is not real, because it requires basically the other party to have a super majority in Congress, in both houses of Congress, to actually pull it off. No party has been willing to impeach and remove their own president, with the possible exception of Nixon, although we never tested it. So we lack that check. And now, you know, we've got the innovation of, why don't I just pardon everyone in my administration for everything, every federal crime they may have committed before. that. Thank you, Joe Biden. He didn't pardon everyone. Well, I mean, to be fair, he didn't pardon everybody in his administration. He pardoned enough people, including his son. Yes, he should not have pardoned his son, but I think we're going to see a much broader blanket on the way out of the

Trump administration. I agree with that. And look, Trump might have done that anyway, right? It's not like the dude is like, but I couldn't violate norms. No one's done that before. But Biden definitely gave him the idea. And so now I think what we're going to say is he is going issue a blanket pardon of everyone in his administration before he leaves. And so what is, like, and regardless of whose fault you think it is, what check is left on presidential power? Very little. The problem with the Hunter Biden pardon, or one of the big problems with Hunter Biden pardon, was that it deprived Democrats the ability to have the moral high ground when talking about this issue. I'm not sure that I believe that it actually significantly influences Trump's

pardoning behavior and that he would have acted differently. Yeah, but I think actually that the moral high ground matters in the sense that if you want to go out and convince voters that what he has done is a huge problem in an unforgivocal crime, you can't have done the same thing. Right. The last, there are two checks remaining on presidential power. One of them is the Supreme Court and the other is the voters. And Democrats have just completely forfeited the ability to persuade voters on this. And you can tell me about how, no, he really had to do this because Trump is such a bad guy. And otherwise, like, you know, he might have gone after Hunter Biden. and it was just, you know, it wasn't his fault.

But like, sorry, like, no dice. Voters are not going to buy that. Like, that is a satisfying explanation. The partisan Democrats who were already going to vote for the next Democrat, it is not a satisfying explanation that is going to land with normies who don't pay that much attention to politics. I don't think that any of those Democrats are on here. I definitely don't think that Biden should have done that.

But it was one of the many, it was one of the most egregious, terrible things that he did, I think, for all the reasons that we just said. But like also, Hunter Biden, you know, he committed some crimes in his personal life, right? Like, he didn't, he didn't commit murder. He didn't do some of the things that are being thrown here. And I definitely don't think that, like, when they run for the midterms, they should draw these sort of comparisons to the illegal acts like that. But in reality, what we're talking about is, like, why voters will find it offensive. And I think, like, why you see them finding it offensive in his poll numbers dropping continuously. I'm not going to say

that's entirely just because of this. I don't think it's even slightly because of this. I think it's because of the same thing that's keeping those cars on dealer locks. Sure. And also, I mean, I think he's entered into a decline spiral that for Biden started with Afghanistan, right? Once people decide, once they smell blood in the water,

then they keep the numbers go down. But like, the reason, setting all the legality parts here said, because obviously no one's going to jail for this for all the reasons that we've said. But it's just morally disgusting in a way that I don't actually, like, get morally disgusted. by a drop that much. You know, I've got a pretty high

revulsion level for this stuff. But this part of, like, shooting them while they're drowning in the water is maybe, like, the most legally disgusting. And you're like, oh, well, that one is. Even David French, who had said, like, the earlier ones, you know, that probably wasn't illegal.

Because of the OLC MMOs. But, like, this entire notion is absurd. These are fucking boats that are heading towards the United States and can be stopped by the Navy. They're not even heading towards the United States. heading into the vicinity of the United States. They're carrying drugs to Europe. Very often they're, yeah, they're carrying cocaine that is bound for Europe. So, you know, the justification

about fentanyl to the United States is completely bogus. But I mean, it's, you know, the attack on the stranded survivors is morally offensive, but the whole campaign is morally offensive. Because, you know, if you suspect that someone is engaged in a crime like drug trafficking, you're supposed to try to intercept and arrest them, you can't just summarily execute people because you suspect them of a crime. And, you know, I'm sure most of these boats are running drugs, but I don't, not all of them. You know, sometimes the government suspects you incorrectly of being in possession of drugs, which is why we don't just kill people when we think that they're, you know, when we think that they're committing a crime. And I think the reason the administration is doing it is basically just to look tough. I don't think

that they believe this as, you know, as a key foreign policy objective for the United States. I think they wanted to bait Democrats into attacking them for blowing up boats and make the Democrats look soft on crime. They keep absurdly referring to these people as terrorists who are running drugs toward Europe. I think it is somewhat different now that people have seen, you know, the specifically unjustified nature of this specific second attack. And I, you know, I wouldn't encourage Democrats to stay away from the issue. I think that, you know, the administration deserves criticism and I don't think that they will look weak to voters for criticizing the administration here. It's not that I think voters won't hold Trump accountable for his lawlessness. It's that I think they already have.

there were tremendous swings away from the Republicans when they nominated Donald Trump in 2016. And you saw this in, you know, relatively high status voters, places with relatively high incomes and education levels. You saw strong swings away from the Republican Party. And those are the sort of voters who care about things exactly like this. That, you know, they're focused on norms and the rule of law. And, you know, in Greenwich, Connecticut, Donald Trump has put up an absolutely terrible performance three times around. The problem is that those swings were more than offset by swings toward the Republican Party that I don't think are driven by this. I think they're driven by the fact that Trump moderated the party on Social Security and Medicare and that he tapped into broad concerns about immigration. He moderated the party on gay marriage. He did a number of things that shifted the party in a more moderate direction on policy that was more popular. At the same time that he did these lawless things that I think are unpopular. I think it's unpopular that he's, you know, engaged in open, obvious grafts and the people around him are enriching themselves from the government. I just don't think that you win more voters at the margin by pointing that.

that out. I think that the Democrats have won a lot of voters with that. But I don't think that, you know, there are a lot of people for whom this boat strike is going to be the last straw because those people already gave up on Trump 10 years ago. Sure. I guess what I would just also point out before is that one of the arguments that you're seeing from conservatives about this is that Democrats are hypocrites because of the Obama's drone war. You know, that like, and it's just the stupidest thing in the entire world, right? Like the drone program had targets. There was obviously civilians that collateral damage, but they weren't like double-tapping the survivors as they walked away on the satellite. And it was a real military conflict that we were engaged. Right. And I guess like the

the key thing here is, is that Trump, what he is doing essentially is why you see the other people making that comparison to Obama is the far left. Like what Trump is doing is basically the pretend nightmare unfair description of this that the left used to make against George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And like, in so many ways, Trump does that. He, like, he finds these things that were never true and were some of, um, misdescriptions of, of programs that existed in had all these legal backstops and all of the stuff. And then because he's such a Tasmanian devil for carnage and disaster, he actually enlivens those, those cliches and stereotypes in a way that threatens to have really bad, far-reaching bar-frews.

preaching consequences in what it, I hate to say this word, but what it normalizes and that it gives credit to people who will then say forever, we were right, and now I will be right about the government every other time. Are we actually going to invade Venezuela, by the way? I mean, obviously a lot of this stuff, you know, in addition to being away for the administration to look, quote unquote, tough is, you know, the saber rattling and, you know, raising tensions toward Venezuela. It looks to me like the president is trying to bluff Nicolas Maduro into leaving leaving office and the president, you know, made him an offer on terms for which he could, he could abdicate the presidency of Venezuela and, you know, allow a democratically elected

government to take hold. The implicit threat is supposed to be that we're going to somehow remove him by military force, which I just like, that seems very untrump. I think the more classic Trump thing would be to make the threat, try the bluff, and not have a plan B. I have great difficulty seeing us putting boots on the ground in Venezuela, but I guess I don't fully understand what the administration thinks it's up to there. I'm not sure the administration understands what the administration thinks it's up to. And I don't see how this ends in any kind of useful way. I'm not sure they have an end in mind.

I mean, I think they definitely do want Maduro out. But like, what is their theory about what happens next? Not all that clear, right? Like, they don't seem like they have a successor that they would like to see in place. or things that they would like Venezuela to do other than, I don't know, less fentanyl, but they're not the major source of drugs in the United States. It's just, I think there's a vision for Venezuela. I mean, there's, you know, there's a more conservative opposition that, you know,

clearly won the last elections there. I think they envision that opposition taking power and having, you know, a non-socialist economic agenda and, you know, rehabilitating the state oil company in such a way that it can provide. their vision in significant part is the idea that we're going to get more oil out of Venezuela because Venezuela will return to being a capitalist country in good standing and that that will, you know, strengthen the U.S. economic position. Now, I don't know that they have a way to get there, but I think they do have a vision for what they think Venezuela should be like. I'm really not sure it's that clear cut. Honestly, I think it's often just like something,

a diversion for Trump so that he doesn't, I don't know, invade Canada. It's something for him to do, But I like, my understanding, and look, I am definitely not like a State Department reporter. So take this for what it's worth. My understanding is they don't actually really have a particularly clear idea of what the end game is or what to do next. They're just like, it would be good if Maduro was gone, which, you know, cosign. He's really terrible. But, you know, it can always get worse. And that is something always worth keeping in mind.

Yeah, like Maduro is terrible, right? I would love, if he does, if somehow this little, this little bluff works and he leaves, I'll give credit to Trump for that. But Biden wanted him out too. Everyone wants them out. But as somebody who normally is totally pro the CIA just going in and doing coups, never we want. CIA is not any good at that anymore, unfortunately. We're not that good at it.

That's the problem. Were they ever good at it? The good ones we don't know about. That's the problem. But like, you know, it's exactly what Megan said. Like, if somebody could give me a plan for what happens once he's gone, you know, so that we don't have to go and occupy Venezuela. That would be great.

I just think that it's also astounding to me that Trump, aside from just randomly tweeting like a no-fly zone that we're not even actually enforcing, it doesn't seem like he spoke to anyone about it when he tweeted that. He hasn't even bothered trying to make this case at all. You know, like there hasn't been a speech where he said, where he, like, George W. Bush leaned forward and said, like, we'll make the world safe for democracy. He hasn't done anything.

He hasn't had someone say anything at the UN. He's just done some tweets about how he sure doesn't like him. and there's some boats with drugs on them. That's part of why I think he's just bluffing. Yeah. The politics of actually trying to, like, start a war with Venezuela would be very bad. I mean, you know, it's not like Iraq ended up so well. And the public was pretty bought in on that war at the start.

And it took like a year. We spent a year with forced depletion reports and preparing and debates about it and all that stuff. Yeah. So I don't, I don't know. I don't buy it, but we'll see. Meanwhile, we had this, well, I guess we don't officially know the motive yet, but we had this shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., one of whom died, by Ramanula Nakanwal, who was a refugee from Afghanistan in the United States. Over the years that we occupied Afghanistan and that we had allies in the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then finally Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, we've issued a lot of visas. to people who we are admitting to the United States from Afghanistan, in part because they were

helpful to us during the war and that they could come under threat by the Taliban because they were on our side in the war. And this has been controversial, and the Trump administration has, you know, has sought to push back on that. And they've already cut off some of the avenues for that. And now after this shooting, they cut off the last avenues. If you're holding a special immigrant visa from Afghanistan or if you're applying for one, they've stopped processing for it.

they're putting a pause on asylum cases from Afghanistan. And the politics of this to me are just very depressing because I, you know, I think it's basically true that like, you know, refugee admissions are a thing that we do for charitable reasons. I don't think that it, you know, produces, you know, tangible benefits to the population in the United States. You have to convince people to do it, you know, out of an altruistic reason. And then with regard to Afghanistan, specifically, we also have this moral obligation. You know, we break it, we bought it. We caused a lot of trouble in their country. These people, you know, were helpful to us in an armed conflict that we were engaged in. And so we have some moral obligation to admit Afghan refugees, even though

there are various costs associated with that. And one of those costs is that you might, you know, have the occasional refugee who becomes radicalized or otherwise becomes prone toward violent activity in the United States. It's obviously not the typical outcome. But it's a terrible time to go to the American public and basically say, you know, yes, this has real costs. And we've just seen one of the very sad real costs, and we have a moral obligation to do it anyway. Certainly, that's not the way the Trump administration thinks. And it's not a case I'm super politically eager to make to the public, even though I believe it. Yeah, I think that's right. Before you said it, I was thinking, you break it, you bought it. We went in there. Look, we were provoked into going in

there. I don't see any historical alternate history in which we didn't go in there. But we, there were people who put their lives on the line to help us on our mission. And we owe those. people. Without them, we would have lost a lot more Americans. So even at some small risk to ourselves, and like, let's point out, this is one guy out of all of the refugees we've admitted. I do think our country has an obligation to take the very large number of people in who served as translators and so forth and fixers and who enabled Americans to get out of places alive where they otherwise would have died, we have an obligation to take those people in now that the Taliban has put their lives at risk.

But I agree with you, it's just not going to be a politically winnable message. And that makes me sad. But I think that's the reality. I mean, I don't know that it's actually a political loser in reality. I don't think that this is a political thing that people are actually going to vote on in a year. But I let's say that aside, I completely 100% agree with everything you guys should say about the morality of it. But the other like saying the politics to people in elections aside, the United States has a moral, not just a moral incentive, but like a practical incentive to treat these people well because we're going to go and do another war one day and need people to help us.

Like when we're on the ground in Venezuela, you know, we're going to need some translators. I think they speak Spanish, so we might be able to provide that one. I think we can probably come up with some Spanish speakers here in the United States. Yeah. Like we're going to need handlers in other places. and every time the United States breaks its word, you know, to these people, then it becomes harder to do in the future. Yeah, I think that's also very correct and right. This is part of why I'm so frustrated with the Biden administration's record on immigration,

because I think that they made choices that exhausted the public's capacity for altruism here. I mean, you know, you saw these immense expansions in the temporary protected status program under Biden, you know, hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans admitted to the country. And unlike with Afghanistan, you know, the things that have befallen those countries are not our fault and not our responsibility. And so I think that, you know, to the extent that you want a sustainable system for asylum and for refugee processing, you need to convince people that it's limited and it's being used in the most appropriate circumstances. And I think that they sort of, they breached that trust and it's made a lot, made it a lot harder to make the case for it now. When I was coming to Peter's birthday, Megan, like a month ago, I took an Uber from my apartment to your apartment. and the Uber driver was an Afghan refugee who would come here.

And he was telling me that he'd only been here about six months. He liked it. It was expensive, blah, blah, blah. But he had been an interpreter and had not gotten out in 2021 because he had not gone with the rest of his group for some reason. He had then been hidden for a year, had been finally found, had been tortured. And then another and a year and a half later had finally gotten out. And he showed me on his phone, because he was looking for. for a good tip, I think.

Not only, like, photos of him with the Americans' troops who he had worked with, but then also these photos of his body covered in bruises and stuff. And I was like, I am going to tip you, sir. But then I was like, yeah, I'm really sorry of speaking for America. You know, we should have gotten out in 2021. And he said, I don't blame you guys. Most of the people I know did get out. And, you know, the Taliban are just terrible.

This is a nice country. And I was like, that is such a much. more a common reaction, I think. And he was so grateful in this very, like, you know, he had a, he, he was completely realistic about all of it in a way that I don't know that I would be. I might, I might be quite mad if this had happened. Well, I mean, obviously that, you know, if you're from Afghanistan, you've seen a lot of trouble in your life. But, I mean, I think that goes to the point that, you know, we, we do have that moral obligation here. I mean, and something we sort of talk a lot about here is there are

moral commitments that Democrats have signed up for that sort of, exceed the public's willingness to, you know, incur expense for. And you need a budget for that. Now, you need a budget for that. Sometimes you spend that budget. There are things that are important to do when you do them, even though they have political costs associated with them. You just have to be judicious about that. And when you say, you know, we are going to spend that political capital here, then you don't spend it somewhere else. And so, you know, I think that I think we do have an obligation to stand up for Afghan refugees, even though there, even if there's some political costs associated with it, but that again just requires being more mindful about where we're doing

that when we shouldn't be. Let's take another quick break, and then we'll come back and talk about casino licenses in New York City. This is Central Air. So a board in the state of New York has recommended that three casino licenses be issued in New York City, which currently has no full-service casinos. Two of them will be in locations in Queens, one of them in the Bronx. And so the largest city in America is about to go from no casinos to like three full-on Vegas-style casinos. And, you know, as I think listeners know at this point, I'm a killjoy on this stuff. I think there's been too much expansion of legal gambling in the United States. I think it's been harmful to our society. And so, you know, it's not that I think that there should be no legal gambling, but my general view is

to say no to all expansions at this point, just because we've expanded too much. And so I do not think that my city should be permitting any new casinos, but I am on the losing side of this fight. Yeah, I don't think it really matters. that much at this point? You know, look, I'm a libertarian. I quarrel with my non-libertarian friends about vice industries because the problem with vice industries, I think I said this on the podcast with Nate Silver, is that the top like five, 10 percent of consumers do most of the spending. So most people just go into a casino, lose a tiny bit of money and go home, and then you have people who have a serious problem. And that is inherent to like alcohol and drugs and gambling. It makes

them really kind of morally problematic. I once listened to an earnings call with the CEO of a casino company. I was just, I was transcribing it, so I was not allowed to ask questions. But it was both fascinating listening to him talking to him, talk about his strategies for monetizing what he called the avid gambler, which I think means people who are just about to lose their house. I was not that far out of business school, and this guy was a business school professor. It was really interesting, listening to him, talk about all of the strategic stuff and the implementation. And then the question I had that none of the analysts on the call asked because they were asking about like boring stuff like EBITDA. They were, which, sorry, for listeners, is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation,

and amortization. And now you know exactly as much as you did before. But anyway, like, he wasn't, the question I wanted to know was like, how do you get up in the morning? And like, you go to brush your teeth and you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're like, I am pleased with myself. What I do is make people who have gambling problems gamble more. And so, like, I do understand the moral questions about it. I have, we have differences over whether the government should be in charge of, like, resolving those moral issues. But I think at this point, all of that is kind of beside the point.

Because we now have enough gambling available that anyone who wants to develop a gambling problem has the opportunity. And I think that like when there was just Atlantic City in Vegas, you could be worried that opening a casino in your town was going to cause more people to develop gambling problems. But at this point, I doubt there are very many people in the city of New York who do not know where the casinos are or how to get to them. I think it's a little different actually for me with mobile gambling because it's so accessible and it's so frictionless. But when you're talking about like I have to get up, I have to put on clothes, leave by take a shower. I mean, do the shower and then put on the clothes, not the other way around.

Leave my house. Go somewhere. I just don't think that this is meaningfully increasing the amount of problem gambling in the country. When I was reading about this, I was thinking like, I wonder if Atlantic City is upset. Because, you know, I've gone to Atlantic City from New York. It's a few hours of a bus ride. But that's the entire reason it exists, right, is to attract people from New York City. And Atlantic City has had a really rough 20 years because of the,

legalization of gambling literally within the city of Philadelphia and much closer to New York City than Atlantic City. And New York, I should note, we already have a ton of slot machines at Resorts World and Queens. So this will be the first full, you know, table games focused gambling, but slots, which is most of gambling anyway, that already exists in New York. So I mean, to your point, yes, this has been a huge problem for Atlantic City that, you know, if you're looking for somewhere convenient to gamble, there are better options. And Atlantic City never quite had the critical mass of amenities that Las Vegas had to be, you know, attractive as a destination resort. Atlantic City is kind of depressing and doesn't, you know, have great entertainment and the restaurants are only okay.

And so it's really been tough for Atlantic City since, since about 2006. But I do think, like, you know, they have the slots, which is how people mostly lose their money is on slots. So we've already got that problem in New York. And then, but we also have this entire, like, porous thing towards, you know, private poker games. Like, you can, they're, they're clubs, but they're actually just poker rooms. Well, yeah, and then sometimes they get robbed, and sometimes the games are rigged against you. Ried by the mob with NBA players.

Right. There's a lot of things like that going on. And I don't know, what you were saying about how, like, the phone stuff is so frictionless that I think it leads to all those crazy things. But the people who are willing to take a shower and get dressed or get dressed to take a shower to go somewhere to do this, like, at least they're getting out of the house, man. Like, at least those people have a hobby that's doing something and maybe you'll work with stuff. That is so sad.

But Josh, you're just not somebody who likes going to casinos. No, that's not true. I love to play poker and craps. I like craps because it's the only situation which you get to shout at strangers and it's considered socially acceptable. Yeah, I was about to ask why craps? I find craps so unsatisfying. Oh, I think it's so fun. It's like the way craps is structured, right?

It's, you know, one person is throwing the dice, but everyone's in on it. So it's this like this whole, like, team camaraderie thing. And then also... Unless you bet against the guy. Well, yeah. No, you can't bet on the don't pass line because that makes you an asshole. I do that.

Yeah, I bet you do, Ben. Can you explain what pass and don't pass is? So for those who haven't played craps, the main bet that everyone is betting on, it's called there's a line in front of you at the table where you put your chips down. It's called the pass line. And everyone bets on that.

Everyone wins at the same time. Everyone loses at the same time. There's another line behind it called don't pass, which is just the opposite. You win when everyone's losing and vice versa. And so it's for someone like Ben, who just wants to be oppositional all the time and wants to be happy when everyone else is sad,

then you can bet on the don't pass line. It is anti-social behavior, and it is actually quite frowned upon in the casino. And they won't let you roll the dice if you're betting on the don't pass line. You have to be betting on pass to be allowed to throw the dice because you're engaged in a team behavior.

You're trying to throw the right dice for pass. If you're trying to throw for don't pass, then people are going to feel they're going to throw the dice wrong. There are casinos to let you roll as don't pass. They're shitty ones, but they will. And it's very uncomfortable.

But then the other thing is that the way Crap's is structured on most roles, you know, people win a little bit. Some bets are being paid out around the table every time you roll. And then like a handful of the roles, everyone loses everything. And so most of the time you're like building up in a satisfying way and doing this. It does have, so, you know, I made fun of you for, you know, at least people are getting out thing. But like one of the things I like about Crapes that is truly a social endeavor in a way that, you know, other casino games are not. And so that's what I like about craps.

All right. You've convinced me to try craps. And when I develop a serious gambling problem, I will come back and explain that Josh Barrow should have been more tightly regulated. I mean, it's the perfect example because like the don't pass line has better odds. Okay. So like the very slightly better. It's like the house hedge is six one hundredths of a percentage point lower. Whatever it is.

It is better. And the fact that people then always, like I'm always the only person who ever does on a table. It's exactly what you're talking about. This is like how you go. to Benihana by yourself. You just like making people feel uncomfortable. First off, first off, Benny Hana is wonderful with one person or with 10. It doesn't matter. I'm there for the food, God damn it. I have never been to Benny Hana. What is the appeal? It's where the dinner is the show. It's all tables for eight. And so if you're, you know, two people, they seat you at this table with six other people and there's a habachi chef in the center. And so it's, you know, you talk with your friend, you talk with your spouse, who you came there with. But Ben will just go there like solo, which is, you know,

deranged behavior. No one eats alone at Benihana. And then what do you like, you strike up conversations with the people you've been randomly assigned to sit with? The first time they died in it, they sat me next to an eight-year-old on his birthday. I've gone lots of times done this now. And like, I've sat with German tourists who got mad at me for playing with my phone too much. Somewhere in Arizona I went and there was someone else by himself. And I was like, oof. So I guess you're a nut too. But so in any case, I mean, where were we on the policy thing here? Well, I just think, Josh, the next time you're in D.C., we all have to eat at Benihana. And then we have to go down to National Harbor and play craps at the MGM casino down there.

Which is, I think, where the Benihana is. But, I mean, you know, look, as I described here, you know, I enjoy a casino myself. So I'm a little bit of a hypocrite here for, you know, wanting to restrict this. But I, you know, when you mentioned the risks associated with mobile gambling, which I do agree are like especially acute and especially a problem, there's been a lack of organized opposition in a lot of states to these experiences. of gambling. And I think that it would just be good to have a political movement that is inherently skeptical of gambling expansions because, you know, sometimes it'll be they're trying to build a casino near JFK Airport where there's already slot machines and it's like, you know, whatever fine,

that's probably actually not that important. But sometimes it'll be, you know, in New Jersey, you can play blackjack right on your phone anywhere in the state. And it's something they did, basically, to support those Atlantic City casinos that were losing money. They allow them to now offer mobile gambling on phones through the entire state. It makes money for the industry. but New Jerseyans are losing money doing that. That's not currently legal in New York. New York has sports betting, but you can't play casino games on your phone. When there's an effort to legalize that, I want there to be an organized opposition,

says, no, we don't want more gambling in New York State. And I think, you know, if you're going to do that, you maybe shouldn't be so selective about what you're opposing. It's just, you know, saying this has gone too far, too much. Let's stop it. Don't you think that exists somewhat by the fact that the three licenses for this in New York City are not actually in anywhere where anyone lives? Like for a long time, they had talked about doing the Midtime Square or Hudson Yards and

instead these three are out far, far away where people... It's interesting. None of these three casinos are really in any kind of neighborhood. One is next to the Aqueduct Racetrack, basically amid long-term parking lots for JFK Airport. One is adjacent to City Field, the stadium where the Mets play in an area called Willett's Point that does not have residential development. And the third one is up in the Bronx where the former Trump-Link's golf course, now Bally's links is located, and this is literally built on top of a former landfill on the Long Island

Sound, and again, not in the middle of any neighborhood. And so, yes, there was this political contention where proposed casino sites that were in Times Square or at Hudson Yards or otherwise close to where people live and go to their offices, those sites were rejected. But I think that's more about the idea that the casino is a locally undesired use, that, you know, that it's going to bring maybe, you know, crime and undesirable activity, but also just brings crowds. for whatever reason, the theater owners were very opposed to a Times Square casino, I guess maybe because they were concerned that it was just going to be more competition for hotel rooms and space and restaurants and bad for the theater industry. So, yeah, I mean, there was this desire to shunt the casinos away into places that are not in neighborhoods. But I think that just goes to my point that, you know, that this isn't a great thing to have around.

I mean, I will say that to the extent that they're building hotel rooms in New York City, I think that's good. Yes. For those who don't know, New York has cracked down as. at the behest of the hotel workers union and the hotel owners, not only on Airbnb, but on the building of new hotel rooms. And this has caused prices, especially for Manhattan, which were already extraordinarily high. They are now at, like, how much do you need that kidney, Moira?

Levels of pricing. And so I think if nothing else, we should look at the silver lining. More hotel rooms are good for the city. The hotel workers union has been one of the key lobbies, in favor of these casinos. And that's because the casinos will have large unionized hotels associated with them. And, you know, again, I'm in favor of all new hotel rooms in the city. I think, you know, union hotel rooms, great. At least we're getting more, more hotel rooms. You know, there's structural costs in there. But the bigger problem, you know, I would much rather

have more hotel rooms with higher union density in New York and at least have an expansion to capacity than have the current situation where basically you have the ban on new hotel construction and it enriches the hotel owners and the hotel workers unions by increasing the profit margins and giving, you know, more, you know, more money for them to bargain over about what's turning into wages and what's turning into profits. I would much rather see an expansion of hotels, more union jobs, more hotel rooms available. And so that is the, you know, the one silver lining of this, but I'd still rather just have hotels rather than hotel casinos. Finally, this week, I have made people mad on the internet.

Somewhat to everyone's surprise since this had never happened before, but... Yes. I don't really look at what people are saying about me or my tweets on the internet. You know, I don't get notifications when people are complaining about me. I only see notifications from people who I've already chosen to follow. And so occasionally, there'll be situations where, like, someone will mention to me in real life, like, you were a bit the main character today. And sometimes I literally don't know. I have not noticed that people are complaining loudly about me. And now lately, one of the things is sometimes the complaining happens on blue sky, where it's completely cordoned off. And I'm never going to see what it is that

people are saying about me. But I, you know, I engaged in some discourse. So I had it coming a little bit. There was this discussion about, you know, people who put doctor or who put PhD in their display name on Twitter. So, you know, just so that you know that they are doctor because they have a degree in Renaissance literature or whatever it is. And some people were talking about that being pretentious, or at least, you know, Rob Miles suggesting implicitly that it's pretentious saying it's interesting to compare the people who put doctor or Ph.D. in their Twitter username with those who could but choose not to. And this got a response from Dr. Emil P. Torres, who is a philosopher who studies human extinction. And he's explaining why he is Dr. Emil P. Torres in his display name on Twitter. And he says, I do it because I worked unbelievably hard to get that honorific.

I tell my students having a PhD means only one thing that you, statistically speaking, no more than almost anyone else in the world, about one or two narrow topics. I'm extremely proud of having written a big book and also dissertation on the history of thinking about human extinction. And I don't see at all, including doctrine my username is pretentious, because again, I know almost nothing about anything, as for the rest of us. But I know a lot about one or two narrow topics. And I responded to that. And, you know, basically, you know, first of all, I made fun of him for having a podcast with Kate Willett, who's this communist comedian who's spending most for her time lately crying on Twitter about the fact that Zoron Mandani doesn't actually want to, you know, seize the means of production. But, you know, basically saying, no, sorry, everyone who uses, you know,

doctor who's not a medical doctor is insufferable, and none of you individually are the exception. And this drew a lot of response, negative response from people with advanced degrees. And Ben actually had to, like, pull screenshots for me. I got him to, like, do the, the APO research file on me, figure out what people have been saying about me. And I have printed them out here in giant type. So I can look at the, my Twitter haters in analog format. But it's, you know, it's what you'd expect. It's a lot of people pointing out that, you know, the word doctor actually comes from a Latin word for teacher and that, you know, they had it first and the medical doctors took it from them, saying that I'm sexist, you know, how many of these title debates are just men

refusing to refer to women by any signifier beyond their marital status? And then a lot of these people talking about it like they toiled in the salt mines for 30 years. John Ferris says, uneducated fuck shits on anyone using the title doctor when they're not in the medical profession thinks he can imagine what it's like to do the primary work of the university teaching while also doing hundreds of hours of research and writing a dissertation. Hundreds of hours of research. You know, a typical work here is, you know, in the ballpark of 1,800, 2,000 hours. So hundreds of hours of work is, you know, three or four months at work for an ordinary person. These people talk about it like they have, you know, they had to crawl through the deserts, through the, you know,

the task of writing a dissertation about this niche topic that only they could possibly care about and getting paid, even if it's a pittance for the process of doing it, they're very impressed with themselves, and I'm right. It is indeed very annoying. I thought it was very funny that at some point in your thread, you said, like, Jesus Christ, look, it's not like I can't fathom what it would be like to get a doctorate, okay? We all went to school.

We know what it's like, and all these people were like, oh, this fucking idiot, he's got a bachelor's thing, knows what it's like to be a doctor. I do groundbreaking research, groundbreaking into, the field of basket weaving. And like, calm down, man. I also think there is this very odd phenomenon among academics. I agree with you, first of all, that you should not call yourself doctor unless you are a medical doctor. I understand that in like the medieval university, it was normal, but the American standard. And even medical doctors should be judicious about

that, by the way. Yeah. Like, you know, you shouldn't be making restaurant reservations under Dr. Smith. Well, good luck with that one, Josh. But, I mean, the American usage is pretty settled. I also think, you know, like before Dr. Jill Biden, basically, was when this really started. Academics I knew used to sneer at people who used doctor. Because within academia, what it implies is you're not in a job prestigious enough that we can assume that you have a doctorate and, like, you need to tell me that you have a doctorate. And which means you're like a lesser ranked university and so forth. And then. And once Republicans made fun of Dr. Jill Biden, suddenly they were defending this practice, right? I think it's like not great. But I actually think there's a larger thing in the responses to you of academics just have this incredibly bizarre idea about what the world outside of academia is like. Right. If you have a high-level professional job, if you are, for example, Josh Barrow, you have put in many years of doing many long hours. of work. You do not get one of these jobs unless, I don't know, maybe, actually, I can't speak for

you, Josh. Maybe you just phoned it in for 35 hours a week and you're so brilliant. But like, when I was at the Atlantic, for example, I had, like a little lefty kid who was an academic who said, you know, I wish I could just like phone in a couple columns a week. And I was like, when I was at the Atlantic, I was literally working seven days a week at least 12 hours a day. for five years. And before that, I was blogging for free on my own time for five years, right? Like, in fact, all high-level jobs take an enormous investment of time to get them. And their idea that, like, it's only academics who are doing this. Well, everyone else is, you know, going to the office for 35 hours a week, having a few meetings, doing their nails,

and then jetting off to their well-paid vacations is crazy. And it's broader than that, though. Like when I would write about, I don't think that tenure should exist, and it's not because I hate academics. I actually just think it's a really bad system. And I think it's a really abusive system to academics, not the ones who have tenure who love it. But the people, the way it grinds people up for 15 years trying to get that tenure track job and actually get tenure, most labor markets are not that cruel. But when I say this, people will say things to me like, well, how would you like it if your boss could just fire you because he didn't like you? I was like, whoa, welcome to my life. My favorite, my very favorite is in debates about the minimum wage, where I had an academic

who was at a pretty good school and was in a social science field and said to me, well, like, how would you like it if you worked for a fast food and a fast food job? And your boss said to you, you have to sleep with me to keep this job. And I was like, what? If you work at a McDonald's and your boss says you need to sleep with that. me to keep your spot at the friolator, what happens is you walk across the street to the Wendy's. And what they're actually describing is the academic job market, which is incredibly exploitative. And where if your boss said that to you, actually, you would probably have to sleep with him because,

like, there's no other tenure. You just moved to, like, some town in the middle of Missouri. And that's the tenure track job you got offered. And there's no others on offer, and you are stuck. And so they have this very strange idea about the world outside. about their own institutions that bleeds into this insistence that, like, they're,

they should enjoy exactly the same privileges as a medical doctor. You have many privileges as an academic. But the reason we give doctors special privileges is that if they are on a plane and I start to choke to death, the doctor is going to take care of that. And the doctor in sociology is not.

This is the thing, you know, like when medical doctors are self-regarding, it's annoying, but at least, you know, at least they save lives. And so, like, we have a decent amount of toleration for that. Whereas the degree of self-regard that is shown in the responses to my tweets, it's both about, like, how uniquely hard they work to be in this field as compared to anything else that someone might do. The fact that they have done this research, the expertise that it gives them the importance of that to our society, it is just such a contrast to the condition that universities are in right now, where, you know, obviously they are under, you know, political attack. in significant part of an attack that they invited, including through behavior like this.

But you have universities that, you know, rely heavily on government funding that have, you know, chosen to estrange themselves from half of the, you know, of the political spectrum in the United States. And then, you know, Republicans get into power in states and are not super inclined to fund this stuff. It's a really hazardous position for those industries. And then you also have structurally declining enrollment. And so you have an economic model for the universities that is under assault and, you know, however upset they are now about the lack of tenure track jobs and how low the pay is to, you know, be a teaching assistant, that sort of thing, that is only going to get worse because of the fundamentals that are underlying that industry. You could just have a little bit, you know, more humility and practicality here rather than, you know, I think this attitude of we're so important, we're so special, we work so hard, it's part of the reason that academia has not been able to adapt and adjust to the fact that it is, you know, in a weak position and needs to better justify its existence so that it can continue to be funded. If I want to be sympathetic to them, I say that academics used to sneer at people who used

doctor because it's implying that you didn't get a good job. But we've had huge overproduction of PhDs. And while I don't think it is uniquely hard, you want unique hard work, go like talk to the people who are working on Alaskan fishing boats for five months a year and talk about that job or the people who are on oil rigs. Or for that matter, honestly, like investment bankers who routinely put in 100-hour weeks and it really, really sucks. Or first-year law associates.

at big law firms, these people all work extremely hard. But there's been this immense overproduction of PhDs. The departments have not been able to shut it down because it's good for the existing professors. They get research assistants. They get people to take the teaching load from them. And they are producing adjuncts who will take more teaching load from them. But it's terrible for the PhD students themselves. There are way too many people who have gone through this program that is a lot of work,

not uniquely a lot of work, but a lot of work. And they have gotten out into a job market where the job, that just naturally signal that you have a doctorate and no need to mention it are fewer and farther between. And so that PhD or the doctor in their Twitter handle are like the only thing they have left from that experience. They didn't get a great job. They are often toiling for very low wages as adjuncts in a very precarious position. But, you know, they've got the signifier and they want it. They want people to know because what else did they get out of it?

But what does it tell us that people keep going into these. fields despite, you know, people knew, you know, 10 years ago, you know, maybe 30 years ago there was unforeseeable decline in this industry. But 10 years ago, people knew that going and getting a lot of these PhDs was signing up for exactly this, a lot of time working for very low wages and low likelihood of ultimately getting a tenure track job at the end. And it continues to attract people life. What that tells me is that there's a lot of non-economic compensation here, which is to say that, you know, instead of going to work and selling insurance or, you know, writing, you know, unsecured loan agreements for, you know, real estate investors or all the, you know, the other things that professionals do at work that they're not passionate about, these people get to go to work every day and work on their passion project. And that is very attractive to a lot of people, even when the economics in the industry are poor. That means that these people have something to be grateful for, that they are, you know, that they're getting to follow their dreams and their passion, even if it is not leading to a cushy tenure track job at the end. And instead, they talk about it like it's the soul.

And that's what drives me crazy. You know, your baby, your dissertation that you care so deeply about the topic that you're writing about, that is a benefit to you that you get to do the thing that you find so especially interesting. And that's part of why people keep signing up for it. Yeah. When you read that tweet, the original one where the person says, you know, I worked so hard, I don't know a lot about many things, but I know a great deal about one thing. That's everyone on earth, right? Everyone doesn't know things about a lot of stuff, but they know the thing they spend every day thinking about. You know, like, I hate that. book, whatever it's called, where he talks about 10,000 hours. But like, it's a good rubric, right? If you work in any field, you spent more time thinking about anything, not even high-level things. You can work. My first job was writing headlines for CNA, about iPhones and stuff. And you just sit there for three years with one thought. How can I get people to read a review about an iPhone? Then other people will have lots of thoughts about it, you know, once in a while, but you thought about it more. And I think that one of the most fun things about journalism, right, is that every week we find a new story we're going to write about

and we spend hours researching it and we call people who then don't have doctorates by their names, but they happen to work in a fish hatchery and they've just spent 10,000 hours on it and know everything about salmon and how they hatch. You get to see that like at any type of job, the person who actually has this career has learned so much about it that they know about it. The only thing they know more than that is about their own life. They don't know anything about politics or blah, blah, or sports or space, but they know about fish hatcheries. And you just get to see that every day, but those people don't get doctors next to their names because they're there for the simple economic reason that money can provide goods and services.

Well, maybe they should. Maybe the solution to this is that everyone should put a doctor title. We are all doctors of our own experience. We all know a lot about a little bit. That is so deep, Josh, and I hope that 300 years from now, when we are all dead and gone, somewhere, like, that will be the quote that survives of you. And, like, that may be the most profound thing you've ever said. That's going to be my legacy. I'm a doctor, M-Dash, of my own experience. I hope you will put that in your Twitter handle, at the very least.

I don't know, if I change my display name, I'll lose my checkmark. Oh, man, hard choices. I think we can leave that there this week. Megan, Ben. Thank you, as always. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Central Air is created by me, Dr. Josh Barrow, and Dr. Sarah Fay.

We are a production of very serious media, so serious we're doctors. Dr. Jennifer Spodick mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Dr. Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening and stay cool out there.