Central Air - Bring Your Husband to Work Day

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

In the spirit of Thanksgiving gatherings, Megan brought her husband to visit with us this week. Peter Suderman joins us to discuss holiday cocktails, an overly sympathetic story about an illegal immigrant who stole a man’s identity so he could work, the controversy over the “illegal orders” video from Democratic members of Congress (with reference to a useful op-ed by David French), and your dad/Sean Duffy’s campaign to get air travelers to behave themselves. About those holiday cocktails: go to centralairpodcast.com for a special Christmas-y mai tai recipe Peter helped Josh develop, and other links to holiday libations (and you can sign up for our newsletter there too). 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 back to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down. Ben, you're joining us from some sort of cave this week. Oh, yes. It's a very lovely cave. I'm in Idaho, and that's where we all live, is in caves. It's great here. Lovely. And Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post. Megan, you've brought a friend with you this week. I have. I brought my husband.

Wow. Take your husband to workday. Yeah. Well, you know, um, Like as a trad wife, I don't like to go anywhere without him. I'm just the token trophy husband, and I know. Megan McArdle, the world's tallest trad wife. Probably. Megan has with all of us here, Peter Souterman. Peter, remind me what your title is.

You're at Reason Magazine. Yeah, so my title is Features Editor. I'm the host of the Reason Roundtable, which is our Monday, Tuesday, or podcast involving all of the top editors in which we talk about the news of the day every week. And then I also work on a lot of our kind of big features in the feature well in the magazine. Yes. And Peter also writes an excellent cocktail substack called Cocktails with Sutterman. And later on today's show, we're going to be talking about some cocktails for the holidays, which is one of the reasons that we've brought Peter here this week.

But Peter's joining us for the show and has lots of interesting ideas for us. I want to start this week by talking about a story that was on the cover of the Sunday New York Times. The headline says, two men, one identity. It's about an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, Romeo Perez Bravo, who's been a story. living in the United States for decades, finding work by using stolen identities. It's about him, and it's about Dan Kluver, one of the men whose identity he assumed. This identity theft has caused a number of problems for the real Dan Kluver. The IRS keeps coming after him for taxes related to Perez Bravo's work, and he's been unable to get that cleaned up. He's had to send thousands of

dollars to the IRS for taxes that he really should not have owed. He also got pulled over and was informed that his license was suspended in Missouri, a state he's barely ever been to. Of course, that suspension was actually earned by Perez Bravo. Perez Bravo has been deported three times, but each time he's returned to the U.S., he also got a D.Y and what the Times characterizes as other minor offenses related to alcohol, although not within the last 15 years. In any case, as the real Dan Kluver went through those troubles with the IRS, and as a tough on immigration administration came to power in Washington, he finally interested the local police in trying to find the guy who had stolen his identity. And earlier this year, through various law enforcement operations, Perez Bravo was arrested. He stands charged with identity theft and is likely to face imprisonment and then ultimate deportation to Guatemala. And the weird thing about the frame of this time story to me is that it's pitched as this story about two men both put in difficult situations by circumstance.

But in fact, unlike the real Dan Cluver, Perez Bravo has committed a long series of crimes, or at least, you know, if what's described in the story is accurate, he has. He entered the country illegally repeatedly. He drove drunk. He stole another man's identity in a way that caused real trouble. This was not victimless. And I think this framing gets it the way the media can't talk about immigration as an area of law actually requiring enforcement. Even the language here is deficient. The subhead of the story says that Mr. Perez Bravo is undocumented.

But actually, he had too many documents, which he used illegally. And I don't think we're going to get to a sustainable place on immigration unless we can re-centered the idea that our immigration laws need to be. enforced, and that means returning people like Mr. Perez Bravo to Guatemala. It doesn't mean finding a way to accommodate his desire to live and work in the U.S. in contravention of our public policy. I just find it to be a, you know, a framing that is very reflective of the way the media thinks about these issues. Like, the framing of that story was so weird because they clearly wanted you to be, as you say, equally sympathetic to both parties. And like, one guy was just working a factory job in the

town where he grew up, and the other guy stole his identity. these two people are not the same. And I am very sympathetic to someone in Guatemala who is poor and wants to make a better life. I mean, we should say this guy, like, he risked his life to come here. And that makes me inherently sympathetic to someone who wants to be here that badly. He made mistakes in his youth, as many Americans do. But he got his life together. He had five kids.

And he was working pretty hard. One of the most enraging elements of this story is that the guy whose identity was stolen ended up having to go a payment plan with the IRS, which could not figure out that he was apparently working two jobs in completely different states and was probably not the same person. And so he has, it seemed like, had paid thousands of dollars to the IRS to get out of his tax debt, which he did know in the first place. But one of the reasons that our immigration debate and our immigration policy has gotten so bad is that liberals do want to see these, these as like victimless crimes. Identity theft is inherently not a victimless crime. And the idea that we shouldn't control our border because

it's sad. And like it is sad, right? I would like to give more people the opportunity to come here work and become Americans. But America cannot open its borders to every single person who wants to come here. And the fact that progressives were unable to kind of frame these things as like, we should do a lot of this. We can't do all of it. And we do have to enforce the laws we have and instead wanted to kind of look the other way as people broke law after law after law. That was both, I think, wrong, but also politically disastrous. Peter, are you the bleeding heart here? Should, you know, basically anyone in Guatemala who sees a good job opportunity in the United States be allowed to come here and work it? Yeah, I mean, to some extent, look, you know, I'm very sympathetic to what Megan says,

as I always am here, right? As a trot wife, I would never disagree with my husband, obviously. I've pre-clear these opinions with him. Yeah. But I'm a, you know, I'm a, you know, I'm a, I'm a, libertarian. And to me, when I read this story, I read it as a story fundamentally of government and policy failure. So like Megan, part of what jumped out at me was just the total inability of the IRS to make this guy whole, to make the guy whose identity was stolen whole on money that he didn't, in fact, owe to the government. It started out, I think, by paying $6,000 or something like that, like an amount of money that was quite a bit to him. And the next year, he just got another bill. for $20-something,000, right? And he was talks about how on the, you know, he was on the phone with the IRS

trying to get through to these authorities. And this is money he didn't owe. It was money that he had committed no crime. And the IRS couldn't get their act together to say, you don't owe us this money. And that is a huge problem, a huge failure on the part of the IRS. I think we would all agree. Identity theft is bad. It's a crime. It should be punished. You don't want a world in which identity theft is happening in which there are incentives for it, in which it's common. But if this person, if the immigrant in this story had been allowed to come here to work in the first place, then that wouldn't have happened. If you had had a system in which this person could find a way into the United States and then get a job at, I think it was a turkey processing

plant was his first job and a series of other places after that. This story does not sort of scream this person shouldn't be allowed to work. The story screams that this person did some stuff that he shouldn't have done after he got here because he wanted to work in the United States so badly. We should have a system that makes it legal and straightforward for people who want to work and come do those jobs that are difficult, demanding, ugly, unpleasant jobs. If they want to come here and work for $7 an hour in a turkey processing plant, we should have a system that allows them to do so legally so that we don't end up with these identity theft situations. And that brings me in my third thing here, just real quick, is if your solution

here is deportation. I agree. He should be punished for these crimes. That is straightforwardly, not something that you want to tolerate. But this is someone who's already been deported at least once, maybe twice, if I, uh, multiple times and didn't keep this person out of the country. And so deportation as a strategy isn't working either to prevent this. I guess my first question then would be, you know, if you, it's had a system where simply you could get a work permit here, if anyone, if someone is willing to hire you for a job, you know, wherever you are in the world. Perhaps you of some sort of screen about criminal activity or whatever, but it's a screen that most people will pass. How many people do you think would come to the United States under that regime?

Wouldn't it be hundreds of millions? It would be a large number. Hundreds of millions of jobs? Well, I mean, the economy would grow because, you know, there would be more people here. And that is, you know, the math that people don't always do right here. It's, you know, the immigrants come here, they work. They also consume. That grows the economy.

It creates more jobs. The job doesn't need to be that attractive to be more attractive than living in a lot of these places where people are. So you could be a truly enormous number that you would have that I think goes back to Megan's points. Matt Iglesias wrote a book titled One Billion Americans largely about this. And I don't know if the number is actually a billion that we get to under this system, but it's a large number.

And it's a big change for America. Right. But Matt's vision also doesn't contemplate that you can simply get a work permit on demand. He wants to be significantly more selective about, you know, there are certain classes of people that he wants to grant work permits to and visas to en masse. but generally for, you know, higher paying, higher skilled jobs that involve higher levels of education, in part because immigrants would come under that regime, they're better fiscal contributors in the United States. They pay more in taxes. They consume less in government services. They're also easier to assimilate.

The key of the one billion Americans' vision, which has its own difficulties, is that you are intentional about who is coming to the United States so that you are building a kind of immigration that is more politically acceptable, more economically manageable, and more culturally manageable. that's very different from just saying that anyone who wants to come from Guatemala to work in a turkey processing plant is allowed to do so. I think you would ultimately hit a number of practical and political barriers that would make that regime unworkable. I certainly think that there are political issues with this. I mean, it's pretty clear that the public doesn't love mass immigration in a lot of cases. On the other hand, they do like the effects of mass immigration. One of the reasons that the economy is struggling in a bunch of ways right now, and just specifically that like meat prices are up, is because it is hard to hire labor, because a lot of that labor is immigrants who are maybe

dubiously legal in status for whatever reason. And that has made it just much more difficult to have a whole bunch of grocery staples at the prices that we used to be familiar with. I don't think we should throw open the border and hire, let anyone come here just because there's a job. But I do think that you can very reasonably raise the number of people who are allowed to legally come here before you hit any of these problems that you're discussing. Well, haven't we hit the political carrying capacity already?

It seems like we've had, you know, the Trump presidency and movements that we're seeing all around the world are reactions to the dissatisfaction with the volume and the nature of immigration that is being seen into wealthy countries. I think that there's a difference between the people that are coming here that are causing problems at the border and then being sent to New York and Martha's Vineyard and all of this stuff and people coming here with jobs. You know, I don't think that people are having an objection. to the fact that there's immigrants who are coming here and have jobs and are not like ending up.

I don't think that's right. I don't think that's right, Ben. I have talked to people who definitely object to people coming here. Of course, there are lots of people on the right. You think that there's always been those people in America. But what makes the current situation with immigration so much different than past times in immigration is that there's a group in the middle that's upset about it, like who aren't people who have normally got mad about this. And those people are responding to a crisis of this, of a surge going on. They're not, responding to just the structural change that there's suddenly too many brown people here. The people who are upset about that are a constant part of America, but they're a smaller part. Right, but the thing is,

if you're not going to go to a system where basically you can, you know, you can come here on demand if someone is willing to hire you, then you still need a regime in which we prohibit people from working if they lack authorization to be here. You still need to deport people. You still need the whole border security. There's a whole apparatus that Peter describes, you know, all the second order effects that this causes. It's the reason that people steal identities and things like that. But unless you're going to have a practically open border, then that is a core function of government that you do need it to perform with regard to certain people, even if you are changing at the margin, exactly who you're going to admit. And, you know, while the country, obviously, you know, we're not going to experience

what it would be like nearly double the population. We have seen that in certain local areas in a way that has become politically prominent. I mean, Springfield, Ohio, which was at the center of the last presidential campaign with, you know, the people making up the stories about Haitian immigrants eating the cats and dogs in town. But this was a town that, like, had become a third Haitian over a period of less than a decade with massive migration to that area. And largely, Haitians were coming there to work. Largely, they were coming authorized by the Biden administration under the temporary protected status system. And so you didn't have, you know, some of the, some of the attendant problems that you have with illegal immigration to do with, for

example, identity theft. But you still had this, you know, tremendous draw on local resources, public schools that suddenly had to deal with both a huge surge in enrollment and needing to do, you know, interpretation from Haitian Creole and all of these things. And I think what you were seeing there was the, you know, the reaction to the fact that, hey, this is not only greatly changing the character of the community that I'm in, it's putting a tremendous strain on various government resources, even though people are coming here to work and largely for sympathetic reasons. And I think what you saw was that that was politically unacceptable. And then the response that Democrats had to that was basically to say they're not eating the dogs and the cats, which is true. But it doesn't,

you know, you can say that it doesn't get at the concern that people are expressing about immigration, even within a system where you are doing it through channels that are legalized and regularized. And so I think that, you know, I think we've seen what it's like to hit that ceiling. So I'm moderated a debate between National Review and Reason or Reason and Cato. It's an interesting and spicy debate. And the point that the National Review side made that I thought was strongest and most effective was simply there isn't political will for the kind of near open borders or sort of unrestricted immigration so long, you know, with minimal checks. Oh, you don't have a communicable disease. You don't have a criminal record. You're allowed in.

That's it. Like, they're correct. There isn't the political will for that. At the same time, I think part of what you're seeing here in the, you know, nine, ten months into the. Trump administration is that the public doesn't actually like a highly restrictionist regime. And I don't know that they dislike the restrictionist actions necessarily specifically. But what they don't like is those second order sort of ripple effects that come from restriction.

They don't like the way that that affects the economy. And frankly, when you look at like polls, surveys, public opinion about the workplace raids, which are different from the we're going after the gangs, we're going after criminals, which was the advertisement, you know, sort of what the Trump administration said. When the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, started sending ICE into workplaces in Los Angeles and other places, the public sentiment on that turned against them. They were not, they didn't actually want to see people who had committed no crime other than, than immigrating illegally, and who were here working, contributing to the economy. They didn't want to see mass deportation, you know, from

by masked, barely labeled, you know, federal enforcers. This is a Cendrish podcast. I think it might be helpful to remember that there actually was a perfect solution to some of, not a perfect solution to some of this, but the comprehensive immigration reform idea of raising legal immigration and also raising enforcement that was pushed for decades and kept getting stopped by psychotics is actually what you want, right? Like, I think that you break a crime as undocumented. You never been here.

You should be able to be deported. and we should do all of those things and enforce all of our laws. But you should also then make it so that there's more evidence for people to come here. And since that broke down, you've just ended up with these two psychotic different versions, one of which is we're going to send mass people in to drag people out of Tyson's chicken. And the other one is, I'm a communist, open the borders and let them all in. So I think that that's right, but there's also a time consistency problem, which is that when you do these deals, one reason, not the only reason,

But one reason that conservatives were not up for doing comprehensive immigration reform is that previous rounds of comprehensive immigration reform, some version of this, we're going to give amnesty and a path to citizenship to the people who are here, we're going to tighten up enforcement, we're going to do all this stuff, is that the path to citizenship happened right away, the liberalization happened right away, and then the enforcement just didn't happen, right? And part of the problem here is that, like, one is a problem. performance thing. You have to continually do enforcement, right? It's not just enough to fund it.

You have to have someone at the top who is setting priorities, who cares about doing enforcement, who's making the agency work, et cetera, et cetera. On the other side, the other stuff is much less like dependent on implementation. And so there was a real credibility problem from the Democrats who wanted to do this, especially because, like, their de facto position really by the early 2010s, whatever they said, their de facto position was we shouldn't have enforcement. We shouldn't be doing this, right? They wanted, they were willing to get, like, pay lip service to it. I think that, like, when we talk about how, you know, everyone knew that the Democrats really weren't in for enforcement, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all true. And we've

watched Democrats move further left on this over those years in the 20 years since 2005. And you've also watched Republicans go, get more extreme on this in the last 20 years. And I think it's just a natural reaction to these things failing before and everything getting worse. So if we can actually stop it from getting more radical, which is what's going to keep happening if you don't do it, then that's not going to be good. And in 10 years, we're going to be saying, oh, yeah, remember the salad days of 2025? Let's take a quick break. I want to remind everyone, go to centralairpodcast.com and sign up on substack to listen to us. You'll get updates every time a new episode comes out. You'll be able to join our lively comments section. we'd love to have you there.

There's been this sort of unhinged story. Last week, several Democrats in Congress released this video on Facebook, a 90-second video, aimed at members of the military and intelligence agencies and such, reminding them that they are not supposed to follow illegal orders. And the Democratic lawmakers who appear in this video are themselves veterans of either the military or the CIA or similar entities. And they say in this video, you can refuse illegal orders. you must refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders.

You must refuse illegal orders. The White House has gone absolutely apeshit about this, saying that it's basically encouraging an insurrection, encouraging, you know, members of the military to refuse orders that they are given by the president or the representatives of the president. You actually have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatening that they're going to recall Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, back onto active duty so that they can potentially court-martial him. And the first thing that's crazy to me about this story is that, like, if the White House hadn't freaked out about it, I don't know

how many people would have even seen this video, which was this like kind of like poorly produced Facebook video. But it seems, you know, obviously, you know, it's almost a truism to say you must refuse illegal orders. There's nothing in here that says, you know, if the president gives you a lawful order, go ahead and refuse it. The White House, you know, seemingly looking for this confrontation, actually, you know, maybe even potentially trying to put a member of Congress on trial over it. is somewhat crazy to me. Everyone here is behaving badly. Now, I think that, as usual, the White House is behaving more badly than the other people.

But I, too, am very disturbed that we are blowing up random boats in the ocean. Yeah, that's what this seems to be about, even though they don't explicitly mention the Venezuela boat strikes. Yeah. So I, too, am extremely concerned about this. I would like it to stop. I am frustrated that I do not, in fact, have much power to make it stop. I mean, the power of a Washington Post columnist is considerable, but not actually, you know, omnipotent. And I think it might be appropriate for me to write a column saying, you know, you can refuse illegal orders.

But what Congress is doing here is kind of trying to run the executive branch in a weird way by getting the lower level employees to ignore the boss. And while it is true that you are supposed to refuse illegal orders, it's not quite as clear cut as. as this suggests on the boats, right? If an officer orders you to gun down a village, you are definitely not allowed to do that, and you cannot say I was following orders. But where it is unclear, as David French pointed out on the advisory opinions podcast,

if these guys refuse the orders, they're going to get court-martialed. And this is not the right way to deal with this problem. I do understand that, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a right way to deal with this problem because the administration is behaving

in an insane fashion. and blowing up random boats in the Atlantic, as I say. But nonetheless, like, getting Democratic members of Congress to do this, you are setting up more and more points of opposition in a way that's not even productive, right? If this was going to work, then that would be one thing. But it is not going to work. These guys are not going to get court-martialed in order to stop the Trump administration from doing this. All you are doing is setting up an ugly confrontation, a constitutional problem between the branches,

that I think is neither wise nor good for the country, then of course you have the administration, which has lost its mind, but then it lost its mind months ago. To just give the thumbnail of what the law is there, it's basically that you know, like you have rules of engagement, and if your commanding officer tells you to violate them, and it's what it tells you to do is manifestly illegal,

then you're supposed to refuse the order, and that's like Mili massacre kind of stuff. But when it's this sort of question about, you know, is this operation authorized by law, that, you know, the fact that there's a, a legal opinion in the defense department saying that it's authorized by law. It's not up to, you know, the commander on, you know, on whatever, wherever they're firing the weapons from. It's not up to that person to decide, you know, should Congress have had to a vote to authorize this war? And so the,

both the memo not only protects them, but actually obligates them to follow the orders there. That's the situation here is described by David French. That is my understanding, but I am not a lawyer. So, yeah, I would say that I agree basically everything that Megan just said. I think like it's not good that this is happening. But I would say that the Democrats did not intend for the benefit that I'm about to mention when they made this idiot little video for Facebook. But having the White House freak out in this extremely nutty way towards Mark Kelly of all people, the most electable. He's he's an astronaut, he's a Navy like top gun pilot. He's a moderate from Arizona. And this one problem is that he's too short to be president, probably.

But he's... Many such cases. He's the type of Democrat that I want, you know, to be the future of the party. And by making him enemy number one is just going to elevate him in a way that if the White House was going to pick who run against and, like, have a fight with, he's basically the worst person imaginable. I guess my first question is for all three of you, or maybe just for you, Josh, but for all three of you, like, I was surprised by how much you guys accepted the idea that Slotkin was meaningfully

trying to influence actions by military servicemen in the Venezuela boat strikes. I mean, I think that's what this was about. But I don't think she actually thought, well, if I put out this video, then somebody who's running one of those drones or, you know, flying one of those planes is going to decide at the moment to not press the button. I think that this was basically progress. virtue signaling on a message that is going around, which is like, don't do illegal stuff. You don't have to under the Constitution. I see graffiti signage about this all over in my neighborhood, because when you live in Washington, D.C., you get like occasionally you get posters for the new nine-inch nails tour and Hennessy.

But like a lot of what you get is posters that are put up that are like very specific about the Congress and administration policy. There is Stephen Miller specific, like anti-Steven Miller. specific graffiti and posters all over the Union Market District of D.C., which is near where I live. And this is this is the same sort of thing. This just sort of seemed to me like she wasn't thinking about this as something that would have a real consequence in the real world. She was thinking about this as something where she could say something and be part of the group that liberals would like to be part of, right, and sort of make them happy in the way that liberals often like to do conservatives in their own way, too.

I didn't even take it as a meaningful attempt to interfere with actual military actions. And that is why the response is even more disturbing to me and even crazier. And then there's this sort of like this reverse of that, which is Trump is saying some really crazy stuff about this, right? This isn't just sort of going off the rails, right? This is seditious behavior, punishable by death. Those are quotes. He apparently retweeted somebody. on truth social. This is a retweet, not something Trump said himself, but apparently retweeted

somebody saying, hang them George Washington would. This is aggressive, death-minded threat rhetoric coming from the president of the United States in the Oval Office. And nobody thinks that he's actually going to try to hang Alyssa Slotkin, but it's crazy. Like, I mean, it's better that he's saying this stuff in some ways and not meaning it, but it's also crazy. that we are now into Trump's second term, and we've all just decided to shrug our shoulders and say, well, you know, sometimes the president issues death threats to a Democratic senator. He doesn't mean it. Who cares?

Like, that's not a good situation to be in. No. Yeah. I like the exhaustion of Trump's outrages is a problem for journalists. It's so exhaust. Like, what do you say? You have said 90 million times that this man is unfit. should not be in the office. And you get tired repeating it for the hundred millionth time.

And so you say it less often because you can't keep up the level of response that at some level his craziness deserves. And also, it's not just that you can't keep up the level of response yourself. It's that the audience is tired of it. And it clearly isn't making an impact with people. So you have to be judicious at the same time. This is crazy, folks. To your point, Peter, I don't think that the intent of the Democrats here in this video was to create some sort of, you know, chain of command crisis in the military where someone sees this on Facebook and decides to decline to fire a weapon from a Navy ship. I think that the underlying message of the video is that the Trump administration's actions with the military have been

illegal. And so, you know, to the extent that it's about the boat stuff in Venezuela, that's what I mean that it's about that. They have been illegal. I mean, Rand Paul makes a pretty strong case on this. And I think it's true that they are illegal. So I don't, I don't think that the video was irresponsible as such, although I do agree with David French that the video doesn't provide useful guidance to people in the military because it doesn't tell people about how to figure out when an order is illegal. And the reason doesn't provide that guidance is that, you know, that's actually not probably very useful for this specific situation. The problem of the administration conducting this illegal action is not one that can be fixed by rank and file people in the military.

As for, you know, how outraged and freaked out we should be about the president, you know, suggesting that Democrats in Congress should be hanged. It's obviously, outrageous. I just, you know, I, like, we've been through 10 years of Donald Trump saying outrageous things that people, you know, allowed it to slide by. And, you know, the idea that you just need to grab people by the shoulders and tell them louder that they need to be outraged by it, I think is totally agree. It doesn't work. It's not an effective message. Right. And not only is it not effective. I mean, the reason that it's not effective is that that stuff, you know, it doesn't actually affect most people's day-to-day lives the way the president talks about

Alyssa Slokham. I mean, in part because he's not going to do it. But, you know, I think that it behooves, you know, Democrats and, frankly, it also behooves commentators to focus on the ways that the government actually affects ordinary people's daily lives because that's what drives elections and that's what people vote on. And people have certain expectations about prices and crime and immigration and energy and various things that are, you know, that have driven the outcomes in elections. And that's part of why, you know, why I try to keep myself focused there to a significant extent. you have to meet the electorate where it is. And it's not driven by the same things that high engagement voters are in part because I think, you know, the overarching thing is that, you know, people feel like people who are highly, you know, plugged into politics and people who feel like they really have a strong stake in the way that our institutions run and we're running before 2015, feel like Donald Trump has undermined all of that and tried to take away, you know, the institutions that are supposed to ensure the democratic responsiveness of our system. But I think most people feel like the system was already not democratically responsive to them. It's not like they are,

you know, losing out on the stake that they were already holding in our politics. And, you know, I think you have to meet people where they are on that. I'm in total agreement on the messaging. I both agree and disagree. I disagree because I do actually think that the institutions are super important and that Trump is doing an enormous amount of damage to institutions that matter. And while I agree with the electorate that they were not as democratically responsive as they should have been, and the kind of left-leaning cognitive elite made a lot of errors. Republican elites made a different set of errors, but that elites kind of ignored legitimate value questions,

like what should the level of immigration be, in favor of the elite consensus, and also that the institutions themselves often were dysfunctional. And so when I look at what Trump is doing, I actually do think it's extraordinarily important to preserve the institutions that he has been destroying. Where I agree is that I think that failed, and that we are now well past that point.

And that, you know, I don't want to say there is no point in keeping, pointing, you know, continuing to point out that these institutions were good and they mattered. But I think that partly because Democrats reacted often by saying, like, we can't let them destroy these institutions. We got to destroy them first. And also, like, the media, academia and so forth, but had this response where they were often violating their own norms in an effort to, like, get Trump and that that made everything worse. But also because, as you say, I think ultimately the way you have to fight Trump is at the ballot box. You are not, like, we are not going to, like, go into the streets and defeat him by doing the carebear stare and just showing how much we care about democracy. We are going to defeat him by winning elections. And that, therefore, ultimately, I do think

you're right, Josh, which is that we have to meet the voters where they are because that's the only hope. It's also an interesting week for this because it's the same time that Marjorie Taylor Green finally decided that she had enough and announced that she's going to resign from Congress effective in January. And we've gone through this weird cycle of strange new respect for Marjorie Taylor Green on the left, as, you know, she has objected to the Trump administration, both on the price stuff, but then also on certain foreign policy things, the idea that Trump has now gone too far, even for Marjorie Taylor Green, it's been a little bit surprising to me the extent to which Democrat, well, not Democrats generally, although some of them like, you know, the Jewish

space lasers lady or sorry excuse me she she wants us to know that she never said the space lasers were Jewish she just said that they were funded by the Rothschilds just turning against Trump a little bit can sort of lead to not quite forgiveness of all of that but like hey you know it looks like Marjorie Taylor Green had a point on a couple of things it's funny because I'm in Idaho visiting my mom and my mom is like an MSNBC liberal you know she watches MSNBC for 24 hours a day that's really bad for you like have you said have you thought about having an intervention Really quite bad. No, it's colored many of my my outlooks about how the media, how Kivel News is terrible. But yesterday, after we had talked about what we were going to talk about on the show, she mentioned to me, Marjorie Hela Green, and I was like, hey, well, you know, she's still a crazy woman.

And she said, oh, well, she, you know, I don't know. I've been thinking about it now. And she stood up. It was brave. She's been fighting the fight and started to do all of the things that you're describing. I was like, what about the fact that she thinks, like the Jews are behind it all. And my mom was like, oh, I don't, I'm, I'm not sure about that. But we do, my mom was short at that. My mom was like one of those people who absolutely would like want her to be a keynote speaker at the 2008 Democratic Convention. Simply because she fought with Trump over one one thing. Stop clock, but don't have the stop clock as a keynote at the 2008 DNC. Yeah.

She's crazy. But she, her resignation note, is a sign of the battles to come for the Republican Party in the post-Trump post-Maga era. And there are also a sign that a lot of those battles will be pretty familiar because part of what she said in that note was stuff that like Justin Amash has been saying for 15 years or so now. This is the former congressman from Michigan who. Right. Libertarian-leaning former Republican congressman who was, you know, a thorn. and John Boehner's side for many years, in part because his argument was Congress has simply made itself a sort of tool of the executive branch and backbenchers, sort of mid-level congressmen

and particular representatives, just like are expected to just show up, vote yes or vote no, as leadership tells them. They barely get a chance to read these thousand-page bills that are released at 10 p.m. and voted on at 1 a.m. and this is a terrible, terrible way to do government to legislate. It's a terrible job also, if you are an elected official, but it's also it's not what the Constitution intended. And so while Marjorie Taylor Green is sort of discovering this, in my view, way too late, what this signals is that those battles are going to come back because the Republican Party has basically solved all of those battles for the past 10 years by just defaulting to doing whatever it is that Donald Trump wants. And it's kind of interesting

that before she decided to resign, one of her big arguments was about health care, about how she kept going to the speaker and saying, look, give us a health care plan, tell us what it is that we are in favor of, and they couldn't get it. Mike Johnson just couldn't deliver anything for her. And you have these reports out this week that the Trump administration was going to release a plan for how to deal with the expanded ACA, the Obamacare subsidies that were at the heart of the shutdown last month. And they sort of talked through this plan with a bunch of Republicans. Republicans were like, no, we don't like that plan. And so now it's on infinite delay again. Well, that's been 30 years. This is 30 years, absolutely. That's a problem that predates Donald Trump. But a lot of that

disappeared under Donald Trump and even through the Biden era, because the party was simply what Trump says. And there wasn't anything else to it. And when Trump is no longer in the picture, it's going to have to be something else. It might not be something smart, might not be something principled, it might not be something that makes any kind of sense. They won't be able to simply default to. Well, Donald Trump says this.

That's what we are. I think that you're totally right. And one of my reasons for optimism about the state of this country is that Donald Trump has had this effect on the Republicans and on the Democrats for now 10 years, where everything is about him. And once he's gone, we kind of have no idea what's going to happen. Because both parties will have to find new definitions of themselves.

and new things to care about and fight about. It's like when Kevin Costner left Yellowstone. Exactly. And, well, I'll tell you what, that last season wasn't great. It was, that's not an optimistic, weed. Yeah, it might not go better is what I'm saying. I want to take another quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about holiday air travel and holiday cocktails.

This is Central Air. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, alumnus of the real world and I believe real world road rules challenge, thinks that air travelers need to stop getting real and start being polite again. He has this video that he put out with some instructions on what to do when you're traveling. Let's bring civility and manners back. Ask yourself, are you helping a pregnant woman put her bag in the overhead bin?

Are you dressing with respect? Are you keeping control of your children? Are you saying thank you to your flight of time? and your pilots? Are you saying please and thank you in general? Okay, so there's your father, Sean Duffy, with some scolding about how you are behaving on the plane. And this video, and we'll include a link to it in the email that goes out with this episode, and you can see that by going to Centralairpodcast.com, contrast these viral videos of people getting into brawls on airplanes and people using their bare feet to operate the touchscreens. But so anyway, contrasts that with like golden age of air travel, 1950s, 1960s, you know, posh, civilized airplane culture. And of course, the reason

that it was so posh back then was that only rich people could afford to fly. And now it has been democratized. And the whole of our society, positive and negative, it's all visible in the airport and on the airplane. And so, and, you know, tremendous numbers of people fly. So the occasional brawl, someone's going to pick it up on their phone. I don't know. It's just very strange to me, this idea of this top government official trying to do mismanors. and telling people, you know, you stop wearing your pajamas on the plane and that's going to improve our culture of travel in this country. Well, isn't the argument that there is an elevated number of incidents of some sort post-COVID, right? And so we know that this was happening when masking was required.

It was pretty clear that masking was at least part of the reason why that was happening. But what they're saying is there's still an elevated number of kind of hostile incidents in air travel. And I guess if you don't wear sweatpants, you'll be nice. So that is in the data, although I think it's unclear the extent to which they're just, you know, a given incident is more likely to be to report it to the government now than it was before. Because you had this surge that with, you know, the flight attendants having to enforce masking rules and people not wanting to follow them, there were clearly a lot of conflicts about that. But there's also perhaps been some sort of, you know, like basically bureaucratic change in terms of, you know, if something goes wrong on the plane, does the government get informed to the fact that that happens? So it's not entirely clear the extent to which it remains elevated versus that we're just, you know, we're counting things that we didn't count before. But I do think it's definitely true that there was a problem, you know, in the 2021, 2021, 2022 range that had to do with the fact that the pandemic itself and regulations related to the pandemic created a new set of conflicts.

People are absolutely total pricks to flight attendants in a way that is shocking. But I will also say that since people are so routinely terrible to flight attendants, if you are just nice, they are so grateful. And that's how you get free drinks, my friend. Like, just smile and say thanks and be nice to them. And they will not charge you for that Jack Daniels. That's a nice thing about it. Yeah, I have a theory that I cannot in any way validate,

that it is elevated because, although I think it is, this is nature is slowly healing, but I think that road rage and air rage are related. And they're related to the fact that for a year, a little, like a year and a half, we took the most rule-abiding, obsessively procedural people out of the airports and off the roads. And what was left was you got a culture shift. When you pull like all the front row kids out of the class, it's not just that they're not there. It's that the whole classroom culture shifts. And I think that that's part of it. I do also think the frustration

of having to wear masks. I mean, the rules on planes were ridiculous, right? I remember flying and wearing a mask, but everyone's pulling them down to eat and drink. I was like, what are we doing here? And I think that the rules so clearly made no sense, made bread a kind of contempt for the rules, which does not explain why people are like being mean to flight attendants, but does explain, I think, why you're seeing more altercations over everything, right? The number of people who are trying to sneak on that I watch trying to sneak on

with like nine bags, you know, sort of tucked under their jacket, and so forth, who are trying to take the compartments that are meant for main cabin extra because they're more convenient for them to leave their back at the front of the plane. All of these things, like, they breed fights on the planes and everything gets nastier. I do think actually it's nice that he's telling people to be nicer. It can't hurt, right? I mean, sure, he's not wrong. I don't know whether I care if people wear their pajamas on the plane.

You know, my mother actually had to dress up to pick people up at the airport in the 50s. because flying was such an event. But the thing is we forget, as you say, how expensive that was. I actually just recently wrote a column on this. You know, the early 1950s, TWA would sell you a one-way ticket to Los Angeles for $110, which works out to $1,400 in today's dollars. That's one way, 11-hour trip. You have to change in Chicago or St. Louis. You can do that whole trip, round trip now for less than $400. Of course, the people on the planes are fancier, not just that they themselves are more affluent. But even for those affluent people, this is a big deal. People were not more polite because they were dressed up. They were more polite because there were fewer of them. They were having a very exciting experience that they were thrilled about and were, you know, this was a big trip that they might make once in a lifetime or once a year. Most people did not fly ever.

and those who did did not fly very often, unless they were a really rare sort of business traveler. I have no problem with people dressing in a way that makes the trip a little bit more comfortable because the whole process of flying unless you are flying first or business or something like that, but even then in some cases, has just become incredibly uncomfortable. And a lot of that starts with the TSA and all of the pat-downs and the mess there, but then even the flights themselves. I'm somebody, I'm tall and I just find flying to be kind of a miserable experience. And so if you can at the margins, make yourself slightly more comfortable without inconveniencing

or completely grossing out other people. Like you shouldn't be operating the touchscreen with your bare feet. But right by like sweatpants and a neck pillow are just not a problem here. I do think Megan's right very much about the sort of the culture shift. And in some ways it actually just to maybe undercut some of my own points a little bit, but like goes back to the immigration thing because the rule of law in airplanes and in the flying experience in that sort of that liminal zone between where you're traveling proved to be kind of ridiculous, kind of a joke and run by people who were at best like either cynical or idiots

or Lord knows what. Everyone could see it. And that has had a negative effect on how people behave in those spaces because they see the authorities as being not trustworthy. I have something rude to say about this, which is that people have this idea that air travel has gotten less comfortable and less pleasant within their lifetimes. But like, I mean, you can look back in the New York Times in 1990, where they're talking about how seat pitch in economy is now 31 inches. Seat pitch is still typically 30, 31 inches in economy. What has happened is that people have gotten older.

they are fatter than they were than they were younger. They're less flexible than they were when they were younger. And so it is less comfortable on the airplane, but that is because they have changed, not because the airplane has changed. Well, the TSA experience has changed in the last 30 years. That is very different than it was before 9-11. Right, but you can get pre-checked for $14 a year, and then the TSA experience is substantially the same as it was before 9-11. Like Walter Isaacson is on the free press podcast this week saying that, you know, stratification in airports is a driver of loss of social cohesion, which I don't think I really buy. Yeah, I think that is false. That is just not correct. I think partly the TSA doesn't do a good job of

explaining how inexpensive pre-check is, but like even if a lot of credit cards will pay for it for you, but even if they don't, again, it's now $70 for five years. That's $14 a year to get out of, you know, the hassle of taking your laptop out of your bag and whatever, which people should, you know, if they don't like it, they should just go up and sign up at that very low price. Josh, everything you just said, A plus, you should be president. People like to talk about how air travel is so terrible. And the simple fact is it's not. Okay, it is wonderful.

The fact we get to fly in the sky. You can zoom through on TSA. The people who just like to whine about bullshit. That is all that this is. Peter, I'm sorry. But like, it's magical, but it's physically unpleasant. Yeah, I think there might, I think part of the disconnect here might be the fact that Peter and I are six foot two. Is it hard to be called?

Is it hard? Seriously, that extra inch? So there's finally one time in your life that being tall isn't good? There's one very limited instance. For women that I have to tell you, being tall, I get no income advantage. I do get the more likely cancer death. And it's basically just all suckage. I like that she's tall, but.

Yes. I do. I got the tall husband. That was the, that was the consolation and it is a big consolation. But if you're quite tall, and like for a man, I'm not that tall. For a woman, I'm pretty tall. But that extra inch makes a huge difference. When I sit in normal economy, not the like, you know, premium economy, I am wedged into that seat and I cannot move.

And it is extremely uncomfortable. If you're quite tall, it will be bad. If you're quite anything, it'll be bad. If you have no legs, it'll be complicated, you know? And all of these specific physical. ailments that people have are going to make it worse, but we can't build society around what the six five person feels like. Sure. I like how you've just portrayed being tall as a physical ailment. I think it was the two of you who portrayed it as a physical ailment. Yeah.

Look, there is a reason I got into an abusive monogamous relationship with one airline so that I never. Glad you said airline. And I was like, oh, he's listening. Yeah. I wondered where that one was going. So that I never have to fly. in normal economy. Other than in extreme circumstances, because, like, I have status. I get the automatic. I can pick a premium economy seat.

And yes, when you are taller, you adapt. You find ways. I'm not suggesting that we should make the seats. I think the idea that we should make the seat pitch bigger to accommodate me. I am for a woman, like a four sigma event for a man. I'm still, like, two standard deviations above the mean. And we should not be trying to design something that's optimized for me. that would be ridiculous.

I am just arguing the empirical question of whether it's awesome. In fact, I think flying's not that bad. And especially, we've gotten all of these adaptations. We have TSA Pre. You can get a statement credit for Clear. I got one from my American Express card. So I go through even a little...

Clear is not useful anymore. By the way, clear is the biggest scam. Because basically, I mean, I think most people know this from the airport. You go, there's a regular line. There's a TSA pre line. And then there's the Clear line. And with Clear, you go and you stand in front of this machine

and it scans your retina and determines who you are. And the idea is it's supposed to be this high-tech thing that, you know, avoids the labor-intensive TSA process of verifying someone's identity. But in fact, there's like eight employees running around at every clear station. The machine reads your identity. And then a person who is receiving a wage

has to then walk you up to a TSA employee and vouch for the fact that you looked at the machine and the machine verified your identity. And then half the time the TSA employee has to look at your driver's license anyway. And so it's actually, it's a less efficient system that costs more to operate. And the whole reason is it's a way of laundering the fees. You or your credit card company pays money to clear, clear pays money to the airport. The airport pays money out to the airlines. They're all in on it,

basically charge, it's a way to charge for a priority line and get revenues back to the airports and the airlines in exchange for that. But then also, they sold it to too many people, and it doesn't even work anymore. It's very often slower than going through the TSA preline. It varies by airport, but at Reagan, usually it is faster than the TSA preline by, like, a lot. When I flew out of Reagan just a week ago, when there was, you know, the shutdown was still going on and everyone was blowing their brains out over the air travel. I zoomed right through. No line at all. Just a lovely experience. Why did we ever even reopen the government? Yeah, exactly. Anyway, where were we? I understand that, like, it's, you know, it's uncomfortable being in an economy seat if you're, if you're six foot two. But that was also true in 1990. Yeah. So, like, I still don't buy this as a thing that has gotten worse. And people, you know, they bemoan the fact. And people, you know, they bemoan the that they don't serve you a meal on the plane anymore. Whereas what did people talk about 30 years ago? How awful the meals were. Yeah, that's one I really never got.

It's like the food was horrifying. I want my like dog meat patty drowning in mystery sauce. There's that meme that constantly goes around where they share this photo of first class on TWA in 1989 to Paris where they're all, you know, happy and smiling and dressed like idiots. And there's, you know, a big spread of turkey and food out on the table. And like at that moment, that's like a complete Thanksgiving dinner. It's insane. But like at that moment, you know, only the richest kings could fly on TWA first class, right?

But that first class is now dog shit next to what we have in current airplanes. And for the price of that ticket then in coach, it still costs something like, I think, $600 in like if you do inflation, in real dollars. and which is about the same cost it would be to fly to Paris now in Coach. But what is different is that for the amount of money that you were paying then for first class, you can not only be, you can be in business class, which is heaven. It's live flat and you can do all of these wonderful things. And if you're so rich that you really want to make an experience out of it, like in the 50s, you can have these private suites in first class that costs $10,000 and only take eight people and have private chefs.

and those people, you can have all three of them. Every choice in the world is there. I mean, at a certain point, this is also competing with private travel, right? And for the rich. Yeah, that's like the La Prémyre on Air France, which I have not had the privilege of flying. But my understanding of the way that's marketed is that, you know, even if you are a very rich person with a private jet, it costs a fortune to fly your private jet to another continent. And so they are, you know, competing for that market, people who would otherwise fly private if they were flying domestically. Megan, you did this once on Etihad, right? Peter and I both did this. We did not get the actual super premium private seat.

We got the little rooms. It was merely absurdly extravagant rather than the most obscene thing I've ever imagined. And to be clear, we did not pay cash for this because we don't have tens of thousands of dollars. The wonderful travel blogger Gary Leff, who runs the view from the wing, talked us into mile running.

In one way, we went on Edahad First Class, and it was amazing. the chef comes out and he's like, this is the menu, but I don't want you to think of this as a menu. Think of it as a suggestion. You tell me what you want and I will make it. Wait, there is a chef? There is a chef on board who makes all the first class food. It was extravagant and wonderful. It was even more wonderful because we didn't pay for it. And you did this with Peter's lifetime income advantage from being tall? Yes, yes. That did help.

It was really cool to have done once. I don't think I would ever pay for it unless, I mean, we would have to have so much money for me to be willing to pay for that level. Because, again, I mean, Ben, you're right. Nice business class, which I do occasionally fly, also paid for by other people who I'm speaking to or some or is that worth. Nice business class international is great. You get a live flat seat.

They give the little pajamas. The amenity kits are nice. When we got onto that flight, they explained to us that, that, they explained to us that there was some sort of extremely specific leather that our seats were made out of. And like, great. Like, it was very comfortable seats. But you would have to have so much money that it's just totally irrelevant for that to be the kind of premium that you're paying for relative to business class, which gives you the thing

that is actually worth paying for if you're six foot tall, which is a lie flat seat. A lot of the plane attack crybabies who whine about it all the time then love to be like, oh, well, you know, on a train. Train is, trains are wonderful. trains are great. And those fucking people have never done what I've done, which is take an Amtrak train across this country on Thanksgiving so that I had Thanksgiving dinner in an Amtrak train. Yes, because those people are sane, man. My father and I were the only people in the dining car that day because the whole train was empty. But let me tell you, the Amtrak Thanksgiving dinner is not good. I would rather buy the thing for $9 from Delta in coach. Okay. I would rather bring a can of SpaghettiOs, I think. Yeah.

I mean, that's been the thing, though, about charging for the food on the planes is that if they want you to pay $9 for, it has to be something that is worth paying $9 for. It's actually been a good thing for consumers to unbundle the food so that they have to offer you something that's worth paying for. And sometimes that works. Sometimes it's, you know, some awful sandwich that you regret. Well, that's why they sell a lot of drinks and they don't sell a lot of food. Yeah. As Ben mentions, you know, a reason that people are going to be traveling this week is the upcoming holiday. And part of why we wanted Peter here this week was to talk about some of that holiday planning.

I actually reached out to Peter the other day because I'm throwing a Christmas party in a couple of weeks. And I wanted a holiday Mai Tai for the Christmas party, you know, take this tropical warm weather drink and figure out how to make it appropriate for Christmas. And Peter actually had some really good suggestions for me about how to do that. Yeah. So your first idea was you just wanted something that sort of felt Christmassy but also was a Mai Tai. And your first idea was to use spiced rum as the base, right? A Mai Tai for people who don't know is this classic Tiki drink that dates back. It's the 1940s or a little before.

There's a little bit of dispute about the exact origin. There's basically two guys who spent one of whom who spent a bunch of time in the tropics and then brought tropical drink culture back to the United States. And that was Don the Beachcomber, who's sort of the godfather of Tiki. And then there's Trader Vick who had the chain of Tiki drinks that kind of expanded all of this nationally. But the Mai Tai is the kind of foundational Tiki drink in so many. ways, right, is the drink that kind of defines the category. And what it basically is, is it's rum, it's lime juice, it's orange liqueur, like a grand marnier, or sometimes a quantro, but like typically a

grand marnier, or jat, which is an ingredient that listeners may not know about, but it's basically a nut syrup, right? So if you've made simple syrup or you've made sugar syrup ever, right, imagine that, but with a nut infusion, typically almonds, but although there's a bunch of different ways you can make it. And then sometimes there's a little bit more just additional syrup added into that. mix. But it's those ingredients. It's that combination of nutty syrup, oranges, lime, and rum. An important thing that Peter did not say there. What is not in a Mai Tai? 151 rum, which everybody thinks is like there's a float. Cherries. And what else? There's lots of things. There is no pineapple juice in a Mai Tai. Yes, there's also no pineapple juice.

That's correct. Sorry, I forget all the things that people want to put in a Mai Tai that are, that you shouldn't. And pineapple juice cocktails can be good, but they're not Mai Tai's. And part of the joy of the Mai Tai was that it was originally made as a sort of showcase for one of the best and most interesting rums that was available when the drink was invented, which was Ray and Nephew 17. It was a 17-year-old rum that is no longer in production. There's actually only a handful of bottles left in the world. If you can find one, they go for something like $50,000 at auction. I mean, they're basically impossible to get. And so in the decades since, Tiki people have sort of tried to reconstruct, well, what is the ideal thing, way to make this drink without that Ray and Nephew

17? And they've settled on typically a combination of rum with an H, R-H-U-M, which is French rum agricultural, and Jamaican rum. And if you use the right combination of rums, this drink becomes really beautiful, rich, intense, complex. It was always a showcase for rum, and it should be a showcase for rum still, which is why you don't want to use Captain Morgan. And so this was the, this was sort of the thing that I sort of tried to nudge Josh away from doing was, yeah, I gravely offended Peter with my suggestion. Don't make, like it's a good idea. Welcome to my world, Josh. It's a good idea in some ways because it's rum with some spices and you're trying to bring that spice element into a Mai Tai. But Captain Morgan spiced rum is just not a great rum. I'm sure you can

use it in some fun drinks, but it's not the right thing. Instead, you want to find some other way to integrate those holiday spices. What I basically said was think about something, maybe like Benedictine, which is this herbal liqueur that actually kind of ends up as a surprisingly good teaky ingredient that's not used all that often, or even more commonly, allspice dram. Allspice dram is found very commonly in teaky drinks, most notably in a drink called Three Dots and a Dash, which is really wonderful teaky cocktail, if you can ever make one. But all spices. dram. If you know what all-spice berries are, this is a liqueur that tastes like all-spice berries. And it is sometimes called pimento liqueur. There's a whole bunch of brands on the market,

but the most common one, the one you can find at most liquor stores, called St. Elizabeth, all-spice dram. And so what I sort of suggested here was make this with a good combination of rums. You don't have to use rum agricultural in Jamaican rum. There's actually some people who will now say that an even more historically accurate version can be made by using Guyanese rum like El Dorado instead of the rum agri-col, because that's actually made the way that some of those older rums were made. Can you explain why did these rums taste different? I mean, I know some of them are aged more than others, but what else, you know, like it's made from a sugar base, right? Like what causes rum to have different flavors?

So they're using different types of sugar bases. They're using different types of stills, which makes a big difference. So a pot still versus a column still. It makes a very big difference. the climate and temperature of the aging makes a big difference. The amount of aging makes a big difference. And so, I mean, one of the things that people have tried to replicate that old Ray and Nephew by just buying today's relatively unaged or unaged Ray and Nephew,

and we're going to age it in our little barrels at home, right? And in fact, barrel aging goes much faster and a much smaller barrel, right? Because the surface area. And so they'd be like, oh, I've made Ray and Nephew 17. No, you haven't. Even if you've got something that's sort of maybe in the vicinity of it, what you don't have is the tropical climate that that stuff was aged in. Like, you can't in the 1940s, right?

Like, you're not replicating it because people can go overboard about talking about the terrar of spirits, right? The terrar. I will never pronounce that word right. It's all of these, well, I can spell it and I can't pronounce it. But like whiskey that is aged in Kentucky has a particular character because Kentucky has these very intense seasons, super hot in the summer and super cold in the winter. And while there are now some whiskey-aged rick houses like, yes, there are places where they'll do climate control.

Historically, like in the 1800s, that wasn't even possible. There was no way that, you know, there was no air conditioning. There was no possibility of doing climate control back when these spirits were being developed. And so the climate makes a big difference. There's like even the spot in the barrel aging warehouse makes a huge difference. Time in barrel makes a big difference. And the type of barrel makes a big difference. So, for example, most scotch is aged in old bourbon barrels. Those have been used already. Because they've been used already, there's less stuff to get out of the wood. The sugars from the wood have already been removed. So scotch you want to age for a lot longer, but it's a gentler process. Also, scotch is aged in Scotland,

which has a very different climate than Kentucky. So all of these things end up mattering. This is interesting, though, to me, in the context of the Mai Tai, because, like, you know, people think about, you know, they have a scotch on the rocks and they get all of these flavor notes out of it. When you're mixing it with lime juice and syrup, that's more for the flavor of the liquor to punch syrup. And that's also, that's one of the reasons not to put the pineapple juice in the Mai Tai, because the pineapple is really going to trample on it in a way that the lime and the syrup won't. It is true that you do get these flavors of the different rums through the Mai Tai, but it's more subtle than it would be, you know, just up on the rocks or in the context of a drink like a Manhattan where you don't have. have the strong citrus flavors. But it is interesting. Change out the rums in these. It really does

taste different. I am by no means a cocktail expert. I have outsourced that aspect of my life to my husband, along with my opinions. But it's always surprising to me when he will make the same drink with two different rums. And even when there's quite a lot of like fruit juice or other stuff in it, that using two different liquors, even if they're closely related, right, using two different kinds of rum. Rum's probably got, I think, kind of the strongest variation, but whiskeys, too. I mean, whiskeys, bourbons rise, right? So, like, within category are going to vary quite a bit. But rum is the spirit that has the widest variation because there are unaged rums that are super high-proof and very fiery and intense. And then there are these, you know, beautiful old rums

that are, you know, 10, 12 years old. You can buy an El Dorado 12 or El Dorado 15 if you want to try something that's quite a bit older, drinks a little bit more like bourbon, really rich, kind of molasses-y thick, but also that oaky vanilla, sort of aged flavor to it. Those are actually pretty inexpensive for older spirits. You can get an El Dorado 15 for like 40 or 50 bucks in some places, maybe a little bit more if you live in New York or Massachusetts. But yeah, this is like the Mai Tai was built as a showcase for our great rum. And so when you are making your my tie, whether it is just a normal summer my tie, or whether it is a Christmas inflected version, you should try to use at least one, if not two, great rums. And you will find that the cup,

not just the selection, but the combination of those rums. Don the Beachcomer, who kind of invented Tiki as we know it, called his drinks Rum Rhapsodies. And so they are supposed to be kind of poems to the greatness of good rum. And these drinks are, yes, you have all these sort of layers of flavor that go on top with the brightness and acidity that comes from the lime juice and then these complementary sweet flavors as well. But what you are ultimately trying to do is bring out the complexity and the beauty of these really nice rums. And rum, unlike whiskey, has not, or tequila, has not inflated in price in the same way. You can pay $100 or $200 for a bottle of rum if you want, but there are a lot of really, really great delicious rums out there, widely available for $30 or $40 a

model, sometimes even less. To close the loop on that holiday Mai Tai recipe, for Peter's guidance, I made it with that Eldorado 8, the Guyanese rum, and an Appleton 8, which is an aged Jamaican rum, the addition of the all-spice dram for some of that all-spice flavor. I like to use Pierre Ferran, Orange Curacao, which I think is a little bit stronger in flavor than Grand Mangan gets a little bit more of an orange note in there. And then a cinnamon stick, some grated nutmeg. And I actually found a rosemary sprig was also quite nice in this. getting these more robust holiday flavors that I think play nicely with the lime and the

ramen give you a sour drink that is appropriate for winter. Can we publish the recipe in the show notes? Yes. If you go to centralairpodcast.com, you'll find the episode notes and that will include that recipe there. Peter, did you see the thing a few years ago about how Jack Daniels, the most famous sort of American whiskey? They're from Wales originally.

And that Wales found the recipe in Wales and said, actually, look, we invented Jack Daniels whiskey. And I just thought it was interesting. as you were talking about the differences in climate, about how that recipe would have tasted if it had been made in Wales, as opposed to Tennessee. I had not seen that there are a whole bunch of origin stories for various brands and for even whiskey itself that are in dispute. There's a great new book out by a guy named Noah Rothbaum, who for a long time, he was the

editor of Liquor.com. He was a co-editor of the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, and he has a new book called the Whiskey Bible. It's a sort of follow-up to the Wine Bible. And it is this incredibly comprehensive look at the world's whiskeys, but starts with a kind of origin story in which he's like, well, Scotland claims to be the origin for whiskey, but also Ireland. Which is correct, by the way. It says McArdle. Yes. But also, I may have, he writes, I may have found some evidence that maybe it just came from England. I don't know. Boo's history is always in. dispute and a lot of the historical material is it doesn't fully pin things down.

Is there English whiskey? Yeah. I mean, it exists. Is it good? I wouldn't say I'd drink very much of it. There's whiskey from everywhere now. I mean, this is the thing. You can get great whiskey from India.

I was in Paris a couple years ago and found this great whiskey shop and they had all these French whiskeys, which was also, I'd seen there's one on the U.S. market called Bren. Yep, very light. Kind of honey-ish. Yeah. And so one of them was like aged in Armagnac barrels. and had this sort of sweet note to it.

It was very cool. But yeah, to your point, you can make whiskey anywhere, and sometimes they even do. Japanese whiskey is one of the most popular. And Japanese whiskey is very, very similar to scotch in a bunch of ways, in particular to kind of Highlands Bayside lighter scotches that don't have that super peaty, super intense flavor that you get from the Aylase that Megan and I like, you know,

like Ardbeg or Lefroid, which are, you know, when people think of like, oh, that's the gross scotch. That's the one that I don't like that. No, those are the ones that, that Megan and I really like. And in fact, funny, since we're both on here, Megan was the person who taught me to drink scotch when she brought home a bottle of art bag. I do not care for this. For those of us whose liquor preferences do not run toward, like, licking the inside of a fireplace. Are there any Thanksgiving cocktails on tap in the

McCartle's Sutterman House as we go into Thanksgiving? So one of my most popular cocktails that I've written about in the newsletter was one of the very earliest ones and is just called a Thanksgiving sour, and it is an infusion of actually very inexpensive American brandy. I mean, stuff you can get for like $12 or $14 a bottle and then turned into a sour, and you infuse that brandy with apple, cinnamon, and some other spices. And then you make a basic, I mean, almost think of like a whiskey sour or a daquiry-style drink with it with simple syrup and lemon juice. And it's... It's very delicious. But it's pretty delicious. It takes a little bit. bit of time to make because the infusion takes a couple of days. So you can't make this on Thursday

morning. However, it tastes just like the thing you want at Thanksgiving. And it is both a good cocktail that will satisfy cocktail nerds who have strong opinions about this stuff. But it's also very approachable. So unless you're talking about somebody who really, really just doesn't like liquor at all ever, if you are serving drinks to people who maybe don't want to try, something really intense with Scotch and Chinar, which is like my happy spot. This is a drink that will appeal to all palettes, you know, sort of people of, like, and that's what you want for Thanksgiving. You don't want to make people try too hard. I've also done a bunch of other sort of silly stunt drinks. Last year, we did a green bean drink that we won't speak of again, a green bean

martini, sort of a take on a green bean casserole martini. Yeah. We had a truffle element. So is it like a Gibson then? Yeah, basically making. a Gibson but with green bean instead of onion and try to figure out a way to make it good. But I'm not sure that one came out as well as I wanted it to, but it was a fun experiment. But I did a pumpkin spice old-fashioned. Which was fantastic. It was actually quite delicious. I did a pecan pie old-fashioned.

I try to replicate some of the flavors that you get on the table at Thanksgiving. A cranberry sauce to basically Thanksgiving cranberry sauce and put it into a sidecar format. and gave it that sort of cranberry tang, right? These are fun things that you can do. Sometimes they take a little bit of work. Do you do anything with stuffing? I always thought, like, is this project going to lead to a stuffing cocktail? It hasn't yet.

But every year I'm like, how could I do that? How could I do that? I think we'll leave it there this week. Peter has a roundup a few days ago that he ran that has those various Thanksgiving drinks, including the ill-advised green bean martini. We'll include a link to that in the show notes, so you can inflict that on your guests if you want or make something delicious like that cranberry maple sidecar.

Megan, thank you for bringing your husband this week. Thank you next week for show and tell and bringing my dogs. Oh, nice, nice. And Ben, thank you for, well, thank you for being you. Bringing my personality. And thanks to all of our listeners for being here. And may you all have a very happy Thanksgiving. Yes, and we'll be back in a week.

Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We are a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddick mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosier. Thanks for listening and stay cool out there.