Central Air - Conceal the Epstein Files!

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

We finally have word that the Epstein files will be made public, but is that a mistake? Ben and Megan offer their arguments for keeping the secrets secret, and Josh isn't sure about that — what is in there? And doesn't President Trump, who campaigned on releasing the files, deserve whatever happens once that happens?Also this week: the effort to rehabilitate the reputation of price controls (ew), a celebration of the end of the penny, and the TikTok proposition that “the new American dream is to leave.”Sign up for updates from us (and support the show) and www.centralairpodcast.com 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 Megan McArdle, columnist of The Washington Post. Megan, are you already getting ready for Thanksgiving? Started making my Thanksgiving pies, you know, get your crust done early. You can bake pies more than a week out? No, no, you don't bake them. Okay. You make the crust. You can actually make up your fruit pies and freeze them.

But then you just pop them in and bake them normally. Do not do this with a pumpkin pie. It will not turn out well. You don't want to freeze custard pies. You definitely do not. Ben, did you make any fruit pies this weekend? No, not yet, at least. I say that for midweek normally. Okay.

What's your favorite kind of fruit pie? Well, you're putting me on the spot, and the truth is I've never had a fruit pie. You've never had like an apple pie? No, I don't, it looks disgusting to me. I've had savory pies. All right, Ben, we will fix this. You will come to my house and I will feed you my... I don't know about that.

How is it possibly you've gotten your entire life without eating like the regular normal kind of pie? I'm a cake man. If we're going to do dessert, I'd prefer a cake. All right. I mean, I have preferences, but I've eaten a lot of things in my life. This will be rectified. Yes. You will report back to our listeners about the joy that is a good fruit by.

Speaking of long overdue things being rectified, we are one step closer toward the release of more of the Epstein files, or maybe we are. There was this effort in the House of Representatives to force a vote on Representative Thomas Massey's bill to require the release of the of the Epstein files. And there was discharge petition. Normally, if the Speaker of the House doesn't want something to come to the floor, it doesn't come to the floor. And there's an expectation that members of the majority won't undermine the speaker on that. But four Republicans signed this discharge petition with all the Democrats in the House. And that was enough to force the Epstein files to the floor. We're recording on Tuesday.

The vote is going to come later in the day on Tuesday and expected to pass overwhelmingly. even though it's going to pass, the Speaker of the House has been out there saying, you know, there are problems with this bill and it needs to be amended before it can become law to impose more restrictions on what can be released. And it's sort of the usual set of things that are the reasons why you wouldn't just release all of the material from some investigation. You know, the government collects lots of information. Some of it gets introduced at trial and is therefore seen in open court. But they're not just supposed to like splay open the file and tell you everything interesting that they learned in the process for various reasons to protect. to protect victims, also protect people who were never charged with a crime. And there wasn't a particular reason for the government to expose all of their secrets. But anyway, that seems to be going

by the wayside here. And I've been interested that aside from Mike Johnson, almost nobody seems interested in speaking up for that ordinary process aspect of this about, you know, are we really entitled to all of the information that the government learned over the years about, you know, anyone who had any dealings with Jeffrey Epstein. Obviously, people don't feel very sympathetic around that. But I know, I know, Ben, at least you've been waging this lonely fight that the Epstein file should not be released. Yeah, I mean, I understand the political reason why Democrats are doing it. And I think that Trump, you know, spent years sort of playing footsie with these conspiracy theories. And so I have, you know, I enjoy, there's probably a German word for how I

feel watching him suffer. Yeah, the word is schadenfreude. Yeah. Exactly. One of the better known German words. Oh, oh, well, after the Holocaust, me and my kind didn't learn any more words from them. But anyways, the point is that in reality, though, there have been people who have sort of like stood up for the, we shouldn't just release all of these names to the mob that is going to go online and just guilt by association all of them. And it was the federal judge who they like went before a few months ago who said, I've looked at it. there isn't anything to release here that I think would, you know, have value, like, disproportionate value. And so, you know, I understand that this isn't a popular political opinion, but I don't actually understand why this case of a very bad man who did sex crimes and had friends and who's wealthy, but had all of this looked at by two different justice departments for two different parties should necessarily just be released because people have conspiracy theories or because people are interested in it.

Megan, do you want to see the files? No. No, I mean, look, if there is something in them that the government should prosecute, they should prosecute it. But Democrats have looked at this. Republicans have looked at this. I tend to think that there's not a lot in there that is going to be prosecutable. And you've seen this with Larry Summers, who is now being pressured to step back from public life over what were certainly questionable personal judgments. about how he interacted with Epstein, but which are not legally actionable.

And it is not the business of the government to amass files that they couldn't get any other way, right? I'm in general in favor of transparency, but like we don't actually want a world in which the government can go poking around in an investigation. And then every single unsavory thing they learn gets flooded into the public. And also, if you think about it, look, like, I'm sure Epstein will have exaggerated his connection to people, will have said, will have pretended that he has more access than he does to various famous people. And so an email from him comes out and says, like, you know, I've got the ear of whatever. That person can come out and say, I met him at a cocktail party once. He texted me. I did not return his texts because I am not interested in, you know, dealing with Jeffrey Epstein.

But no one's going to believe them. There's no recourse. And, you know, there's a famous line from a corruption investigation that ultimately turned up nothing at enormous expense of a guy who said, like, okay, great, where do I go to get my reputation back? And the government should care about those things. So I understand why there's so much conspiracizing about Epstein. It does look crazy, suspicious that he died. The video wasn't recording, et cetera. but I don't think that investigating these tawdry, you know, people who stayed around him when they should not have is a matter of public interest.

Was he just incredibly charming or something? I, like, I kind of baffled and amazed by the extent to which people felt compelled or chose to continue associating with him in the way that he did. So many prominent people, I mean, the Larry Summers revelations that you refer to there was that these emails, exchanges going all the way up until into the late 20 teens when Epstein was just about to be arrested with Summers basically seeking relationship advice from Jeffrey Epstein. In particular, Summers is describing this sort of unpleasant thing where Summers was trying to romantically pursue this woman who sort of was also a professional mentee of his, an economics professor at the London School of Economics. And, you know, Summers was and is married. And so it's certainly an embarrassing thing for Larry Summers, and because of the professional nature of the relationship,

I can even understand why people see it as reflecting in an important and negative way upon his work. But on the other hand, you know, it's not criminal activity. Because the woman was not an affiliate of Harvard University, it doesn't even look to me like necessarily actionable professional misconduct. But, you know, people, because there's been this dump of these emails, Larry Summers' private communications are now public and people are entitled to form opinions about them and, you know, and understandably those are negative opinions given given that information. But it again goes back to, you know, it's not the government's job to, you know, go find and surface every embarrassing thing that somebody said or did that wasn't a crime. But people are very

interested in learning this and are, you know, you have Elizabeth Warren jumping on it and saying that Harvard should cut ties with him, as the president has also been saying. And that looks to me like, you know, finding a way to fight a political and policy fight for Larry someone. was on the opposite side from Elizabeth Warren on a lot of intra-party fights over economics in the Democratic Party. But it's just interesting to me that there's very little interest in that sort of, you know, principled idea about, you know, what things we shouldn't necessarily know, even when those things are derogatory information about important people, that they have relevant privacy interests. It's hard to think of Larry as being sympathetic. I mean, I guess that, like,

you know, they all come off terrible in those emails. But, like, one thing also about these e-bails is those are from the lawsuit. You know, those are, those are, those weren't. even obtained by the state. Those were obtained in the course of these legal proceedings. What we're going to find out when the DOJ releases them is all this possibly much, you know, more interested up that the government did go out and collect. We haven't even like... Well, I should note that those emails were released by a congressional committee, not by the DOJ. They weren't public until now. Right. But I mean, there's also a reason that discovery in lawsuits, you are generally not allowed to release what you got once that, like...

you can, you can, the stuff that goes into court can be public, but you can't just dump everything that you got and like you were doing a search of emails and you discover that a law partner is having an affair. Like, you can't dump that. And there are good reasons for that. None of us really wants to have anyone have the kind of power to put our private stuff in public without like our consent, without, I just think it's so dangerous. to go down this road. But I mean, when you say nobody wants that, there's an NPR Marist poll finding 77% of people want the Epstein files released in their entirety, except for the redaction of the names of victims. Oh, yeah, sure. People want other people's stuff to be in

public. Yes, they would love the ability to troll through the private lives of other people who are more famous and powerful than they are. But they don't want it turned around. And I think you see this, like, somewhat hilariously in the cancel culture debates. where both sides will be, you know, like, lives of TikTok is a good example of this. This is this account on Twitter that just goes and finds random small follower accounts of, like, teachers saying that they're going to teach your kids that their stupid values about sexuality or wrong or something like that. And then lives of TikTok would blow it up and then those people's lives would suffer. And on the one hand, these people put this out publicly, right? but they also thought, like, I have 100 followers.

This is not going anywhere. And people on the left were outraged by this and would say that this is a norm violation. This is terrible. And then they would go and do exactly the same thing to some small follower conservative account. And, like, in my reporting, I have a no randos policy, which is that if I'm at a rally for either side and someone tells me something that they really should not be telling a reporter, like, if you're a politician, that's fair game. I'm sorry.

But I don't need to expose that, you know, some random guy at a rally at a Trump rally has unlovely opinions about immigrants. I might quote him anonymously, but I'm not going to put his name out there to see if people can wreck his life. Because he doesn't understand the rules of the game. This is not actually a matter of public interest. Like, the fact that your auto mechanic has terrible opinions is not really relevant to anyone except the auto mechanic's friends. and family. And so I don't publish that stuff because I think that it is more destructive than not to open people up to those kinds of attacks. But is that different in this Epstein case and that his friends were the rich and powerful? I mean, these are not randos that we're learning about.

Sure, but the rich and powerful, look, again, if they have done something wrong, they should be prosecuted. I mean, not if they have done something wrong. There's lots of morally wrong stuff that is not illegal. It is morally wrong to be a crappy abusive spouse. I don't think the state should get involved in adjudicating that problem. I'm not talking about obviously domestic violence where the state absolutely should get, but just to be like a person who's mean to your wife and cheats on or whatever. Like those are bad things. You were a bad person if you do them.

And also the state, it's not the government's business. And I think that about a broad swath of human behavior that we don't want to go down our road. We don't want to end up like China where like everything's a social credit score and the government and the public are constantly sitting. in judgment of every private thing you have done. We all, and we all know that in our own lives, right? We can think about right now what I want the government going through all of my emails and publishing anything that I've said that was unwise.

No. No, you would not. It's funny because I agree with all of that in the abstract, and yet there is no way that I could bring myself to tell a member of Congress that they should vote against this release. Partly, I mean, it's, you know, I understand the political imperative there, but it's partly I just feel like other people who weren't on my team went out and created all of these wild conspiracy theories about this that are now boobberanging back upon them and they sort of deserve that. But also it just, you know, it feels to me like this demand among the public to see this stuff was created by other people in an irresponsible way.

And I should not expect anyone who I'm aligned with to expend any kind of political capital standing in the way of giving those people what they asked for good and heart. I actually, I don't think that the Republicans or conservatives or created this. This is in fact the most conspiracy-looking thing that has happened in my lifetime. Right? You've got this guy who is abusing underage girls who knows all of these rich and powerful people. The source of his income is still somewhat mysterious, plausibly could be blackmail-related. and then he goes to jail and he commits suicide, even though he's supposed to be on suicide watch,

and then the video disappears, right? That is, like, conspiracy theories are going to happen about that. That is not something where, like, you know, conservatives gin this up for political advantage. But it is really the job of elites to tamp that stuff down in the same way that it was the job of Donald Trump to tamp down the Q&on election conspiracy theories rather than feeding them.

It just, at some point, you do have to say that it is the, that you have to do the thing that's right for the country, not right for your immediate political fortunes. And we expect that of Donald Trump. It worked for him to deny the election, right? It worked out better than probably the alternative when he would have gone away looking like a loser and gone into ignommy. Instead, he got to be president again. And still, it was totally irresponsible and wrong. And I am not going to say to, like, I can bring. myself to say to Donald Trump, don't do that. You should not have done that. So I guess I can say that Democrats too. I feel obligated to point out that Donald Trump didn't just like feed in to these things. Okay. He didn't just like like Q&I people said it. And he said, oh yeah, I'll retweet you. You know. No, no, no. He was the originator of it. And then, but also I also also, I also, I was what to say that. Like he didn't just like like maybe conservatives, nice conservatives,

all the smart, nice conservatives who sit and are smart and nice did not push. this Epstein stuff, but it did rise to a part where not only was the president doing it, it was himself the president of the GP, but also like all of his little minions that dominate the GOP did it to a point where it was no longer just roving bands of lunatics on the internet, which exists in the Democratic Party as well. It was roving bands of lunatics in Congress as well. No, I agree with all that. But the fact remains that sometimes you have to ask our leadership to do things that are the

right thing and not the thing that works out to their immediate short. short-term political benefit. And I think this is one of those cases, just as I think that the case was, I don't care Donald Trump if this is better for you personally. You don't get to do that because it's bad for the country. Well, but I mean, he promised he was going to release the Epstein files when he was running for president. He told Lex Friedman on his podcast that he would release the files. Yes, Donald Trump is full of terrible ideas that are bad for the country. He says things he should not say. He does things he should not do. I will yell at him about that. I will also yell at Democrats to do the same thing. I don't think that turnabout is fair place. It's not the same thing. It's not

turnabout. It's holding him to his campaign pledge. He promised to do this. And now he owes it to us to follow through. Yes, but it was a wrong campaign pledge. Right, but we're not allowed to expect politicians to keep their promises even when they're bad promises. No. Dear God, if he could have, if he had defaulted on his promised imposed tariffs, I would cheer. I would not be like Democrats. You should make him impose tariffs. No. No, no. But it would be totally reasonable in Ohio for a congressperson running to say, look, he didn't even do it. Taco Trump didn't even vote, didn't even.

Look, and if it was really safe and did not seem like, in fact, Donald Trump, I would probably not bother yelling at that person. But if that person was like making headway and looked like they were going to successfully shivied Donald Trump into imposing tariffs, I would say, stop. Stop, this is bad. I don't know what to tell you. I may be perhaps naive, perhaps optimistic, perhaps someone who has a vision of a better world, but I am just like, I'm not going to sign on to this. Megan, you say this is the most conspiracy-looking situation that you have seen. Do you think Epstein in fact killed himself? I would say I'm agnostic on that point, in part because I actually, like, on point in principle,

I refuse to spend hours diving down the Epstein rabbit hole and come. up with a reasoned opinion. I am not going to watch the video to like see the gap. I am not going to do any of this. But I will say like if you told me that there was one conspiracy in the world that was true, this would be my nomination. But then shouldn't you want to see the files? Because I mean, weren't you saying that, oh, sorry, it was Ben who said that, you know, two different administrations looked into this and didn't find stuff to prosecute. I mean, if, you know, if it's possibly a conspiracy, then presumably that conspiracy would involve not prosecuting powerful people who had engaged in wrongdoing here.

That's also why you would kill Epstein to stop them from incriminating people. Yeah. So I am not running a true crime podcast. I have a very low estimate of my own ability to slueth out who killed Jeffrey Epstein. I don't think anyone else is going to salute it out either. We're still arguing about the Kennedy assassination 60 years later. Well, let me just, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Let's stick to Epstein. Okay. There is no conspiracy. Who killed him? He obviously killed himself. Let me explain why he killed himself. Because he was about to go to jail for the rest of his life as a pedophile. And he had been famous and now he wasn't and shame did it. And why didn't the camera work? Because in American prisons, cameras sometimes don't work. The stupid cards are for you. As on Josh's other podcast, they often talk. The American justice system has a lot of holes in it. And I mean, the other thing is, there is not, I'm actually not going to have seen a bit of a truth. Obviously, he's a bad. guy, he was guilty. I see no evidence that anyone other than he and just lane did it seems like he was sleeping with these young women himself. I think it's possible that he paid the guards to not be paying attention when he killed himself, right? There's a lot of different ways in which this could be vaguely conspiratorial and also not that like the pedophile powerful men, pedophile ring,

you know, intervened with their incredible power of the federal prison system to, to kill him, right? Bribing prison guards is a pretty, like, longstanding practice that has... Yeah, but then how do they keep that secret? And the idea is that who did this? It's, is it Trump? Is it Hillary Clinton? Like, who...

Because, I mean, the thing is, as Ben describes, the official story of how Epstein died, I think is very plausible. That he did not want to live anymore. And that the Bureau of Prisons is incompetent and does not exercise sufficient care over the well-being of the people. people in its custody, that all makes perfect sense to me. And then the alternative theory where there's some conspiracy, you have to have someone in a position of power who is at risk of being exposed by Epstein. But somehow Epstein has not, you know, not yet gotten any of this information out,

even though it would have already been useful to him to have done so. And they are able to extend their reach down into the low ranks of the Bureau of Prisons and figure out, you know, who's who's guarding this facility and pay them off and keep it secret, despite the intense level of public interest in this story. I just find that much less plausible than that Epstein was despondent and the Bureau of Prisons was incompetent. Again, A, I have not spent a lot of time on Epstein minutiaa and B, like, I'm just saying if you told me that this had happened, like, if it came out that this had happened 20 years from now, right?

I would not be like, I can't believe this. That's ridiculous. How could, right? I mean, this is the most plausible conspiracy out there, even though I agree with you that the official account, quite plausible. But so if it's possible that there's a conspiracy here, isn't it also likely that some of the stuff in the files would shed light on that? Again, the signal to noise ratio is very low from a public that itself lacks subpoena power.

I just don't think this is well. Also, I mean, I just think it would be funny if they released these files and someone said, oh my God, it is a conspiracy. Both DOJs were in on it. And then, guess what? You don't have arrest power? What are you going to do? Send some tweets? The top people in the country. Well, that is the one missing piece for me here, actually, is why Donald Trump is so intent on not releasing the files. I don't think that Donald Trump was receiving, quote-unquote, massages from 15-year-olds. For one thing, in these emails that the House Committee released in the last couple of weeks. Epstein in his own emails says that Trump, quote, knew about the women,

but that Trump never received a massage. And then also broadly, you have this tremendous amount of email traffic from Epstein and lots of embarrassing stuff. And no apparent coordination of a pedophile ring. Like, you know, if he was in fact, you know, pimping out these girls to his rich and powerful friends, presumably there needed to be some communication about that, some logistics involved in that. And there's, you know, there's no apparent sign of that. And so, So, you know, I think that the, I think that the likely thing is that, you know, Epstein committed various crimes, was assisted by Jolene. And then he just, you know, had lots of friends who liked being around him because he had other powerful friends and a private jet. And, and, and, you know, there's got to be something in there that Trump thinks it would be really bad if it came out. And, you know, I'm honestly very curious to know what. Yeah, I'm curious to. But to Megan's point, curiosity is not reason enough to demand the release of confidential information, even though, you know, everyone else is so fucking irresponsible these days.

I don't know why I have to be responsible all the time. Welcome to the Democratic Party. Because we're the centrist, Josh. That's our job. Responsibility. Yes. Let's take a quick break, and we'll be back shortly with more central air. By the way, if you want to get every episode of this show, if you want to get all the emails that come out when we have the show,

if you want to be able to make comments on our episodes, go to centralairpodcast.com. You can sign up for updates from us. You can become a subscriber. You can even support this show and make it possible for us to continue making it. So again, that's centralairpodcast.com. So there was an op-ed in the New York Times this week by Barat Ramamurdy, who had been a top economic official in the Biden White House and Neil Mahoney, who's an economist from Stanford. And they're arguing in favor of price controls. And what they say basically is, you know, affordability has rocketed to the top.

of voter concerns. And it's really hard in the short term for the government to actually make things more affordable. You can have policies that promote abundance with a capital or a lowercase A, the production of more goods and services, but they often take a lot of time to be effective. You can hand out subsidies to people, but if you're subsidizing the purchase of something that's fixed in quantity, as housing sort of is in the short term, that often just bids up prices and doesn't actually make things more affordable. And so they say, in a targeted way, we should have price controls. And they say, you know, economists hate price controls, but there's a way to do it that minimizes the downsides where the price controls have to be temporary.

They have to be paired with long run measures that increase supply. And that, you know, gets you from the short term into the long term. Megan, they say economists hate this. Do you hate this, too? I hate it with the white hot fire of a thousand sons. I am. I am boggled. I am gobsmacked.

I am like drunk on this triple distilled balderdash. I mean, this is basically, there are so many policies in the world that if you could implement them in some completely ideal fashion might actually be effective. And the problem is that you can never implement them in a completely ideal fashion. Let me tell you how your temporary price controls are actually going to go. which is that they will not be temporary. There is nothing more enduring

that a temporary price control, rent control in New York, started during World War II in order to temporarily deal with the inflation induced by taking 50% of our GDP and shipping it abroad for the purposes of killing people.

And they had, New York was then a manufacturing center, they had a housing shortage, and they said, just for now, we're going to control rents. Well, that was not just for now. Because, of course, after the war, there's still a housing shortage. You cannot take this price control off.

People would march on City Hall with pitchworks. And so they let it go until they look around and notice that no one has built any new apartment buildings. And so they say, okay, well, but we're not going to do it again. This is only for, you know, we only did this for the old apartments. Until 19th, there's a spate of building in the 50s and 60s. and then in the 1970s, inflation's happening. And they look around and they're like, wow, this is really hard. We need some more price controls.

So they slap another round of price controls on. And New York is still 80 years later dealing with, this is not the only reason that there's not enough housing in New York. It's one of the many reasons there's not enough housing in New York and that landlords underestimate, underinvest in buildings, in their maintenance. This is a terrible policy. It has been a terrible policy for 80 years.

it is probably going to be a terrible policy until the sun burns out, or I guess actually what the sun's going to do is expand into a fiery cloud of gas that will eventually consume the earth. And that, my friends, is when New York City's rent control regime is probably going to end. The idea that you could do something targeted, carefully positioned price controls that are only until we get the supply side working is lunatic. I cannot believe that two intelligent adults, decided to write those words in a row. And that's how I feel about it.

It's funny because, I mean, one of the things they say in the piece is they do say they worry about what you're describing there, Megan, that these purportedly temporary policies will become permanent. And one thing they suggest is sunset clauses, which is, you know, that the price control should say that in the law, that it's only going to last for a certain number of years. And New York's rent controls used to have sunset clauses. They started temporarily for World War II, and they were supposed to expire after a few years. And what would happen is the legislature would repeatedly and repeatedly renew them. And then in 2019, once progressives finally got control of the state legislature in New York after

decades of split control between the parties, they removed the sunset clause from New York's rent control law and made it officially permanent. Andrew Cuomo signed that before then, you know, running for mayor and saying he was going to stop the left-wing insanity of various sorts. And so, you know, I think we have seen. the exact opposite in the political economy of what they're describing here, that in fact, there is a tendency to make these policies more permanent. On the other hand, I want to stick up for the idea that rent control has not actually been

the primary problem for the lack of housing production in New York. New rent controls were slapped on in the 70s, and there haven't been significant new ones on newer construction yet. There are some exceptions to that. You can voluntarily opt into the rent control program in exchange for a property tax abatement. there is a so-called good cause eviction law that imposes certain restrictions on rent changes, but they are much looser than what exists under the rent control law. And so generally, you know, you did have a lot of appetite to build new rental apartments in New York

over the last several decades because it had been credible that there had not been new rent controls imposed on new construction for several decades. And when you're building a real estate project, you know, most of the value in it is in the return from the first 20 years. And so, you know, the fact that if you build a rental apartment building now, if you're worried that the city will impose rent controls 30 years from now, that doesn't actually impair the value of the construction by very much. And so you do see, you know, some places like Montgomery County, Maryland have designed really terrible rent control regimes that impose rent controls much too early on new construction. And it really does damage that. But I think the main culprit here in New York is the downzoning that we did in 1961 that made it much harder to build tall buildings in New York City. And if we hadn't done that, we'd probably. actually be in a pretty okay place in spite of the rent controls. And I think the other thing that

we are seeing in cities is that often the lawmakers who are the most flexible on zoning and most interested in allowing new construction are the most left-wing ones. We're seeing this in places like Los Angeles where like the socialist Nithia Raman on the council is very good on zoning and the so-called moderates are terrible. They just don't want tall buildings built near them. And so I actually do somewhat buy this idea that we're getting these coalitions in cities that are demanding, you know, certain strengtheninges of rent controls, but that have genuine commitments to upzoning, and that that may actually be a positive trade on creating new housing. So let me, I don't think, I think I disagree on the political economy, and I am somewhat biased

on this by having grown up on the Upper West Side. And the thing is, like, the moderates, right, what are the moderates responding to? They're responding to homeowners who don't want the value of their property impaired or, and in New York, that impairment, it's significant, right? grew up across the street from a very low-rise building that had what's called a taxpayer on it, which is you just throw up this very short building to pay the taxes while you wait to develop the land. And then eventually they went and developed it. And the homeowners in my building on lower floors freaked out because they had enjoyed a lot of light, which then went away when the building was put up. And that's a real impairment. And the thing is that rent control turns renters

into property owners. They can't sell the property, and they can't pass it under their kids under most of the New York City rent control slash rent stabilization regime. The number of apartments that are still controlled is quite where you can actually just pass that onto your errors is quite small.

But it gives people property-like rights in their apartments, and my observation is that they then act like NIMBY homeowners. because why should they care? You know, rents can go up on the other apartment. It's not their problem because their rent's not going to rise. And in the meantime, they are fixed in place in a way that is abnormal for renters.

You know, they have much longer ten years. And what they want is for nothing to change. They like the neighborhood just the way it is, and exactly the way the homeowners do. And they vote like that. And they go to community board meetings and shut stuff down and protest against changes in the zoning or zoning exemptions. or even like buildings that are actually within the zoning code.

They find reasons that they're not. And you see this in New York. And so I think it actually mitigates one of the great benefits of having renters, which is that they are transient. They tend not to be as interested in shutting down housing. And so, well, I think that in theory, right, like people are, you have this progressive, like, yeah, let's control the rent, but then let's make it easier to build.

In practice, it doesn't work out so well. Right? in practice, you get these one step forward, two steps back often, or at best two steps forward, one step back, where they pass these NIMBY things and they look around, they're like, oh, wait, no, but people are going to build housing. Stop. So I don't think that that's a real political coalition. I think it's like a fun thing to write white papers about. But I don't think it's actually shown up in the cities in terms of getting a lot more housing built. Ben, do you want price control? I don't. I'm not an economist, so I'm not as smart as you guys, but they sound like, I'm convinced by the argument that they're hard. to get rid of. And that then creates problems. But there's a very funny law in L.A. in the housing thing that I only was just reading about. And, you know, they did the whole rent control of World War II, and then in the 70s kind of rejiggering it so that it's only for existing units. But so if you have a,

you know, a triplex in L.A., and it's pre-73, I think, and so it's been rent controlled all these years, or I'm rent-stabilized all these years, if you buy that property and knock it down and build a six-story 26-unit apartment building, every single unit in that is suddenly rent-stabilized. It turns out via the property, not the development itself. So there's just not as much remote incentive to develop those pieces of land to knock down these completely useless triplexes and duplexes from 1964 and then build a modern apartment building in it, which just sounds crazy.

Yeah. No, I mean, we've also been seeing this in California where there are these state-level efforts to force cities to relax zoning. And then the city's trying to come up with ways to get around that. And one is, you know, they're fighting in San Francisco over whether you should be able to build anything taller on any parcel that already has an existing residential use, which, of course, knocks out like half the parcels in the city that might be appropriate for developments. That's not great. At least it's not France.

Did you guys hear about Macron's, like, plan in France to make it to the... Oh, yes. No net new development of land in France, in theory. It sounds so crazy that I thought it had to be fake. In addition to housing, the other, you know, one of the other big topics for price controls is energy. And we talked about this some a couple of weeks ago, Mikey Cheryl, running for governor of New Jersey, winning big. One of her big promises is to freeze electric bills. And Ramamerti and Mahoney similarly argue here that you want price controls in the short term and policies to create new supply in the long term.

I see a couple of problems with that. One is that, you know, when they talk about new supply, they only talk about renewables. They don't talk about, you know, natural gas. They don't talk about nuclear. And I think this reflects a problem in the political coalitions that if you know, if you want electricity prices to be held down in the short term, you basically need to pursue energy from every source. And we're seeing some Democrats do this in practice.

Governor Kathy Hokel here in New York just approved a new natural gas pipeline to Long Island over the objections from a lot of progressives in her party. Democrats in Illinois relaxed that state's climate law to allow fossil fuel plants to stay open longer than they were supposed to. So I think, you know, the political pressure around electricity prices. is actually making some elected officials more flexible and more pragmatic in practice. But one of the problems with freezing the utility bills in the meantime is that you lose the price signal. Utility bills go up. People use less electricity. And if you don't have that signal,

you can end up in the situation that you had under Gray Davis in California where people, you know, they don't turn down the AC because they don't have to for price reasons and there's not enough electricity in the grid. And you end up with blackouts. And that's, in addition to being a huge practical problem is an enormous political crisis for whoever. presides over it. And so, you know, I understand people are mad about rising electric bills, but I worry about, you know, putting the demand for price controls ahead of the demand to produce more energy. Again, I just think, like, you're going to say, we're only going to do this for a little while. In fact, that was the, that was kind of what the Nixon people thought.

Right. We tried this in the 70s. Yeah, they turned out to be correct in that it became totally untenable and they had to stop. But in fact, it had a lot of downstream effect. I am old enough to remember as a very small child being in the car, well, we waited in the gas lines. And you had, there was a regime where it was by your license plate number, where alternate days, you could only get gas on half of the days of the week. Because, and it was done by, you know, like odd numbers was, if the last digit on your license plate was an odd number, you had some days and even number other days. was the point of that? I mean, you don't buy gas every day. Did that actually reduce gas consumption or make the stations less crowded? I don't... I have no idea. But this is, I mean, I think that this actually speaks to the total lunacy of trying to, oh, we're only going to do this a little bit

and only for a short period of time. It doesn't work out that way. You end up, like, the stories of the Nixon people just sitting around and being like, I don't know, is processed cheese spread the same thing as sliced cheese, how does the price vary on those things? Like, now, obviously, they're not proposing anything that sweeping. But at a small level, that's what you end up with, where it's energy, where it's housing, that you create huge problems. You don't do anything about, like markets, supply and demand are brought into alignment through the magic of prices.

And if you change the price, you were going to induce demand. without inducing supply, and in fact, you're suppressing supply, and you can do all sorts of, oh, well, but then we're going to do this abundance agenda. It's not, the abundance agenda is not going to look like what it does when you're sitting down and drawing it out. It's going to get modified for coalitional reasons, and you're going to get more demand subsidy than you really want, and less supply freedom than you really want, and it's just going to be a mess. Let me play liberal devil's advocate here, which is, for, for energy,

Specifically, since we already have these state agencies regulating these prices already, it's not like these are free markets existing in this section already. I mean, I'm completely sympathetic to the fact that that doesn't mean it couldn't get worse. But am I wrong in that? It's like insurance markets, right? I mean, every state regulates their insurance market as they should because you need to ensure that these insurance companies have enough capital to pay out claims and are not like investing it in forbearing trout farms or, whatever the, whatever stupid idea they've come up with in the hopes of making, like, fabulous sums and not having to be so conservative with their. So it is good that we have people overseeing their portfolios.

But in a lot of states, there's enormous pressure to keep rates down. Understandably, I don't love paying my insurance bill. At the end of the year, usually I haven't used it. I've just paid a lot of money for what feels like nothing, right? And the problem with that, as you've seen in California, where they are now having to raise rates a lot because the homeowners insurance people are just like, yeah, you know what? I don't want to offer homeowners insurance here anymore. And you can go along like that for a few years. But if you don't fix the underlying problems, such as in California's case, the tendency to build in wildfire zones without adequately fireproofing your house, then you are ultimately going to end up in a situation where the insurers leave.

And, you know, in fairness, a power plant cannot just not just be like, I am no longer, I'm taking my power plant elsewhere, right? But you can shut down marginally unprofitable power plants. And you can, the regulators can job on them and they can say. And you can end up discouraging utilities from building new power plants. Right. But also often that, you know, if they are going to keep offering these cheap rates, they have to do something else that's bad, like not trimming back the trees near their power lines and thus sparking forest fires, right? At the end of the day, you cannot repeal the laws of supply and demand. These companies need to make enough money to make it worth their while to provide power.

You can allied that for a few years and force them to suck it up, but ultimately you're going to end up in a worse place because you have not allowed the price signals to do their job, which is to tell us what people want and how much they're willing to pay for it. So what can be said to voters who are understandably very upset about, you know, electricity prices in some places, you know, going up by double digits a year, homeowners insurance drastically more expensive than it was, rents rising faster than inflation? What do you say to people who say, you know, that this is not working for me in my life, I need to change here if this is the wrong answer? We have announced a radical deregulation program and we're excited to find that there are like a zillion new homes. homes under development in the next year. I mean, that's, it's true. That's not very satisfying. Because first of all, it doesn't lower rents in the immediate term. And as we were just talking about,

you know, even though they, you know, people want lower prices, their focus is often going to be on, well, that's, you know, that's a lot more traffic and it's going to be harder for me to park and it's changing the neighborhood character. I mean, I understand, you know, people want things that are, you know, mutually exclusive. Voters are not always reasonable. But, you know, if this is their top issue, something needs to be said to them on it because if, you know, if you don't have something convincing to offer them, they're going to vote for the price controls. I mean, I guess the answer is if voters want, like, democracy is the idea that the American public knows what it wants and deserves to get it good and hard, right?

If you, yes, if you want to do bad policy, there is a lot of bad policy out there. We can do a lot of bad policy that will make things worse for everyone. But like, I am not going to say, well, I understand why you're doing this terrible policy. If it's a small policy, that's one thing. But price controls are a large and extremely bad policy. They're not a little bit bad. They are a lot bad. I mean, one area where I think there is opportunity here is in places where the government

is doing especially stupid things, there is a lot of running room to be had by just stopping that. And we're seeing a couple of examples of that. I mean, at the federal level, Donald Trump seems to have decided that affordability is a big political weakness for him. And so one thing that he did this week is lift some of the tariffs that he imposed, deciding that agricultural products that are not produced in any significant quantity in the United States, maybe we don't need to tariff those because we're not protecting any domestic industry.

So he's taking tariffs off coffee and bananas and other tropical fruits. And so, you know, I guess, you know, that makes coffee a little bit cheaper, but it's not that big a part of the, you know, the consumer's overall basket in the United States. Similarly, in New York, you know, we have the, this, a bunch of these crazy regulations, including my favorite one to talk about is all the scaffolding. It has to go up around buildings in the city for facade inspections that they don't do in any other city around the world. There's actually a calculation out of the, from Guy at the Naskannon Center, estimating that Zeramandani could finance a year of his rent-free's proposal simply by repealing that law requiring all that scaffolding. So in some cases, there are things that you could do in the short term that really would pull off some meaningful amount of expense and provide relief that comes right away rather than years in the future.

So, you know, why tariff banana, I think is the right question to ask. Let's take a quick break again. Go to centralairpodcast.com. Become a member of our community. We'd love to have you. The penny has gone away. The Trump administration announced this week that they have struck their last pennies, and there will no longer be one-cent coins made for circulation.

There was a great Katie Weaver feature last year in the New York Times. magazine urging that this be done. And there were a couple of things that I loved in this piece. One is the government has to produce a tremendous number of pennies because they are not used. That basically, you know, you mint quarters and people get quarters as change and they go back and they spend them in the quarters circulate. You mint pennies. They go out to banks and then to retailers and they're given out as change. And then they, you know, end up in sock drawers and, you know, in the garbage and other places. They never get back into circulation. And so you have to make more pennies, so you have them available for the retailers to give out as change that then turn into

trash. So you need more of the coins because they are so useless. And the other thing in this piece was her discovery that the president or the secretary of the treasury could just stop making pennies. There'd been this longstanding popular conception, including on an episode of the West Wing, that if you were going to get rid of the penny, you had to convince Congress to get rid of the penny. And Katie Weaver says, hey, section 5,111 of Section 31 of the U.S. Code says the Secretary of the Treasury shall mint an issue coins in the amounts the secretary decides are necessary. And so the secretary can decide zero. And in fact, you know, a year later, the Trump administration with this ethos of you can just do things, picks that up, says, hey, this law says we can stop

making the penny. And they stop making the penny. So, you know, credit where due, worthwhile Trump administration initiative getting rid of the penny. One of the things that I loved about that article was that when she stumbles on to this thing and says, you know, I've been going through the code. Janet Yellen won't even talk to me. And I've found this one line. I was thing that I was like, that line, have I heard of that line in the legal code before? And is it the line that actually would have justified minting the coin all those years ago, the platinum coin to pay the debt? I don't know if it's the same section. It is a similar provision. I mean, the other thing with the platinum coin is that, you know, there are certain restrictions on how the government can, you know,

take the currency that it produces and just put it out. The, the treasury is not allowed to just, like, print a bunch of $100 bills and use them to pay the government's bills instead of, you know, know, levying taxes or putting out debt. And they didn't put that in on the platinum coins because the platinum coins were supposed to be commemorative and were not anticipated to be made in significant quantity. So that's a separate loophole there. But yes, there is this amount of discretion given to the Treasury about what kind of coinage to me. Katie has a wonderful follow-up in the Atlantic about like, you know, her dream had come true. But then she'd realize that the Trump administration, though doing this wonderful thing of getting rid of this useless penny that costs, you know,

of $60 million a year or something like that in pennies that are just going into people's stock stores. For every penny that we made, it costs four cents to make. Yeah. But she points out that, like, apparently the Trump administration hasn't given any guidance to businesses about rounding, you know, and they have no plan for what to do with the existing pennies, which she had originally written in this thing from last year, that the government was terrified that people might actually take the pennies out of their drawers and do something

with them because there's not enough vault space in America to handle them, and they're completely useless. I didn't understand this idea that we need a plan for the penny. I mean, people throw away the pennies. That's the plan. Right, that's the plan. Or they sit in drawers in people's houses, and that's the plan. I mean, you know, the problem with the penny in the first place was that they are,

even for the poorest Americans, they are not worth dealing with. And no one was gathering them up and using them for transactions. So I don't know why that would change just because the penny's been discontinued. I mean, you know, what's going to happen to all the pennies? Nothing is going to happen to all the pennies. That was the problem with the penny in the first place. But I don't think the government needs, like, an initiative for the, you know, destruction and reuse. Well, in Canada, I think that the thing that she had looked at was that they had a recycling program for them.

And they had, like, recycled in the last 10 years, something like 700 zillion tons of old Canadian penny. But that it had made them the number one zinc recycler in the world or something like that. And we don't have that plan. I actually have friends who used pennies to decorate their house because it was cheaper than, like, buying copper tile. So they glued pennies to the wall in various patterns. They had in their shower was a map of DC that they had done with, you know, like the green pennies versus the shiny copper pennies. Did that look good? Or did it look janky and terrible?

It looked great. No, it looked really good. They're very crafty people. and, you know, for those listeners who are prone to doing home improvement projects, you know, a lot of pennies out there that you could. So see, Ben, here we go. We have a plan for the pennies. They're all going on the wall. I mean, what do you guys do when you get a penny. I mean, I know that what I do, what I've done my entire life is that if you give me a penny, I will instantly throw it on the street. Because it says that it's supposed to be good luck for someone. And you get to tell yourself, I don't need this. Maybe it'll give someone good luck. That's also probably littering, you know. I basically haven't used cash since about 2013.

Yeah, that's the thing. I don't get pennies. I don't even get quarters. I never handle change anymore. It used to, you know, it used to be that there would be a big jar of change that would sit on my desk. And then once a year, I would go to the CoinStar machine and turn it into an Amazon gift card because then you didn't have to pay the fee for the CoinStar counting.

But lately, there's no significant inflow of coinage in my house, which I think is why it was politically possible finally to get rid of the penny. There weren't even really users of it anymore. Now, I don't know that West Wing episode that I referenced, the idea was there were all these people who came to the White House with the big block of cheese day where you have to listen to like random people who come in with policy demands and one person wants to get rid of the penny and they can't come up with a reason not to get rid of it. And then what they come up with is that the Speaker of the House is from Illinois and Abraham Lincoln is on the penny and it would be unacceptable to an Illinois politician to get rid of the penny for that reason. And it's true,

by the way, that the toll roads in Illinois used to be able to use pennies to pay in the exact change lanes, which other states did not allow. So I guess there was some sentimentality around that. But I'm skeptical about, you know, we probably could have done this 25 years ago. And the political resistance to this may have been totally imagined. But I think now it's like, I can't even imagine myself as a penny user. And then finally this week, I want to talk about TikTok trend. which is the American dream is to leave, says the New York Times, the new American dream. And they're writing about how, you know, Europeans and Americans post on TikTok, making fun of each other's, you know, national like foibles and customs. But that lately Europeans are making fun of Americans

and Americans are being like, yeah, you're right. We should move over there. And I just, you know, one thing I love about this ludicrous trend piece is that they, you know, say it's building on a, you know, an increase, a new. trend of Americans moving abroad, and they link literally to a press release from a company that provides services to American expats about how so many people need their services now, because lots of people are moving abroad. But I think basically just what we're seeing here, these posts about how life is better in Europe. It's because you're American, you go on vacation in Europe. So, like, of course it seems great because you're on vacation. And also, you have your

American salary, which is higher than the salaries that people make in Europe. And you can see all the purchasing power that you get with that in Europe. It just feels. feels like a lot of idle complaining to me. Yeah, it's totally bizarre. It's like going to the Grand Canyon and saying like, the American dream is to live in a canyon. Like actually, if we all lived in a canyon, you can go see what that looks like at Niagara Falls, right? Where the Canadian side is all developed and it looks terrible. I don't think I get that analogy, Megan. Do people pine to live at the Grand Canyon? Okay. You're on holiday and you're like, I want to live here forever. Like, no, you don't want to live in Grand Canyon forever. I've never heard anyone say they want to move to the Grand Canyon.

It's fine. Okay. I'm just stopping with the analogy, starting over. Look, yeah, the fact that Americans go on vacation and they're taken with the beauty of, look, and I will say, the average kind of small European town is nicer looking than the average, like, random American suburb. On the other hand, there are also a lot of random European suburbs that are not that nice looking, and you didn't go visit the. them because there's nothing in those suburbs except people doing the stuff you do in your suburb at home, like taking the kids to school and like making like chicken tenders for the toddlers and so forth. Some of the suburbs are quite nice, but they're not, they're like nice in the way

American suburbs are. They're not, you know, glamorous and filled with these ancient buildings that you can walk through and picture history happening. It's worth taking a trip on Google Street View in France, pick some random place. And you can find, like, it looks more like America than you might expect in a lot of these places. And you're on some strode in the suburbs and there's a giant parking lot in front of the Carafort. So like, you know, not, of course, when you go on vacation, you choose the spots that are good for vacation because you are a sensible tourist going to see things that are pleasant. And that's not necessarily a, you know, a representative sample of life over there. So here is where my analogy comes in. It's like a European thinking that like New York City and the

Grand Canyon are America. And, saying, like, I want to live in New York City and the Grand Canyon. Everyone wants to move to the Grand Canyon. Honestly, I totally know hikers and backpackers who would absolutely say, I want to live in the Grand Canyon, but they're not allowed to. I mean, even people who acknowledge that Europe is poor and terrible, as, you know, we do, I mean, the show is named after a thing they can't afford to go. And there are so many things.

But, you know, people, even when they talk about this, they say, well, but it is beautiful. It is more beautiful. We have to give them the beauty. And you know what? This is such horseshit. There are, of course, some beautiful parts of Europe, as there are anywhere in the world. I'm sure there's beautiful parts of fucking Syria. But, like, the simple fact is the United States is a stunningly beautiful country.

It has everything. It's got Alaska. We got that. That's pretty pretty. We have Hawaii ever been there. We got Southern California. But then you can go way further down the line. And, like, drive through Nebraska.

Nebraska is way fucking prettier than most of the shitholes in poor Europe, okay? It might not be nicer than Khan, but, like, it is way nicer than the middle of England, okay? It's just people just don't give America credit. America is arguably the most beautiful country in the world, except for possibly New Zealand. I also think that a lot of what people are reacting to is that I think Western, architecture took a bad turn sometime in the 1930s. And because America had relatively little restriction on planning in the post-war era, and because we're just a newer country and there was less stuff in it, there are like a lot of pretty ugly American subdivisions. They're fine.

They're lovely places to raise your kids. Not everything is having a nice facade, right? but the facades in many places in Europe are nicer. And also, you know, the lifestyle is often pretty nice. They've got a lot more vacation than we do. They do have lots of villages that are not car-centric and are more centered on walking around. And I think the thing that people don't think about is that a lot of that is subsidized by the U.S., right?

The fact that we don't restrict our economy and regulate our economy as much meant that it was more productive, that it has been providing the technology from, of the world economy for the last, basically since World War II, and that Europe then doesn't have to develop its own innovation. It's not that to say that Europe never innovates. There's lots of innovative European companies. But you know what? A lot of the innovations and things like pharmaceuticals all develop for the U.S. market. They would not be developing those things with the European price-controlled market in mind. It is developed for our free market. We provide

there are a lot of, like basically their military, there are, you know, there's only really two countries in Western Europe that can project any force larger than a Weeblow scout beyond their borders. Britain and France. France and Britain. And even then they often need American logistical support, especially Britain. All of that, it's nice to not have to pay for those things. You can use that money for other stuff.

But someone's got to be out there doing the innovation so that your standard of living does not fall as your birth rate and your population decline and everyone is on vacation and retiring at 55 instead of working later. Someone's paying for that and someone is making sure that you have the economic wear with all to do it. In a lot of cases, the United States has been boosting. The European dollar goes a lot farther because the United States exists. If the United States did not exist, then they would be much poorer and it would look a lot less nice. France. I mean, what's the last thing that France fucking invented, right? Be real.

What? Be real. Remember the social media app where you post like a picture of yourself at a fine time once a day? That was like the French advancement in social media. No, I've never even heard of it. It means nothing. I haven't any idea. Okay.

I mean, you can go through. Like, what has France done? They love to brag about the past. But since World War II, what have they done? And there's one thing. They maybe sequenced the AIDS virus first over America by about a week. But that's the only thing in the last eight years. Everything else has just been riots and complaining.

Didn't they also build the TGV? Yeah, nuclear power plants. Did they invent nuclear power? They build better public works projects than we do. Those are inventions. They didn't. Those are just things that they did. Anyone could do that.

I could probably do that if you gave me enough time. But we haven't. I mean, their electrical grid is something like 70% nuclear. They found a way to do this rollout. You know, no one will, like, outstrip me on like Europe is poor type. but I think that we owe credit where it's due. I believe they also invented postmodernism. Even the elevator music.

But like, that's not, have they been to the moon? Have they invented the iPhone? What about... There's nothing on the moon. There's an American flag, Josh. I don't understand what the thing is that people have about the moon. It's a big rock in outer space. This is my crankiest view that the scandal is not that the moon landing is fake,

but that it was real. Like, what a waste of money. Oh, Josh. Oh, Josh. No. Humanity going to be. to space is like the most important thing that will happen in our lifetime. Every single time that a French person looks up from their glass of wine at night and looks at the moon, they have to think, who, America owns that.

I'll never be able to go there. But if I was an American, maybe I work hard. I could. No. America. I, uh, they're rubbing it in my face with that light. That's worth 10 times the cost of the Apollo program. I just think there's this, this funny disconnect between like the Americans who romanticize

Europe and have these fantasies about moving there and how, you know, life is, you know, so much like fairer because, you know, the people don't worry about medical bills and they don't, you know, work as many hours and all this sort of stuff. And you contrast that with like the rollicking political discontent that actually exists in Europe, where it is clear that Europeans are dissatisfied with their living standards and with the way things are going in their countries. Now, maybe, you know, some of this is similar to the unreasonableness that we were talking about earlier in the show in the United States, you know, expecting solutions to problems that the government cannot actually be expected to provide. But it's, you know, there's this sort of this notion

of Europe as this like copacetic place when that does not appear to be the way that Europeans actually feel about Europe right now. I've heard things like people are now talking about outsourcing their code development to Britain rather than India because it's so cheap. The gap in living standards between Europe and America, which was converging for most of the post-word period, is widening again. And look, you can argue about whether the marginal utility of having a bigger house or air conditioning or other things is really worth the trade-off in working hours. But I think the answer, air conditioning, I triple dog dare Americans to go and try to live through a Paris summer without air conditioning. That argument is getting harder for the pro-European side to

make as the divergence gets bigger. Right. It's one thing to say, like, do I really need five pairs of shoes versus one? But, you know, when I was in Britain after the, I think of 2022, when the Russian Ukrainian war started, the Brits were competing with each other as to who could turn their heat on last because the price of heating gas had doubled. This is no shade on my hosts who were lovely. It was very nice of them to turn the heat on, but they only turned it on when I went to bed. And so I lay there in like an incredibly icy room for 45 minutes until it warmed up. And like that was actually the reality of like when you were that income constrained. Like these were successful professionals, not people who were like, you know, their first job out of college. And Americans don't think

about it because we are so rich. We're so used to being rich that we don't think about what it is like to live in a place where you just have a lot less money for a lot less stuff. They also don't think about the fact that things like the health care is free. Well, actually, Americans pay a lower percentage of their costs out of pocket than a lot of Europeans do, but also Americans have a lot more ability to jawbone insurance companies into giving them some treatment they want than you have to jawbone your national insurer into changing its bureaucratic policy set by a committee in the government. There is a zero percent chance you're going to get something out of that system that it has not decided to provide. And there are hassles of dealing with

US health care system that you don't have there, but partly that's because, like, you don't have any ability to lawyer or anything. You're going to get what they decided you're going to get, and that's that. I also think that you can just test this, right? If people who want to leave the United States, I think that we should make citizenship movable. Like, it's an asset, and if you want to go, you should be allowed to sell your citizenship to someone who passes security tests, checks, you know, we're in like vet them first, but then you should be able to get a website up and people can bid, and it'll be, you know, a seller's market. People will offer you a lot of money because for a lot of people, it's not a lazy, stupid fucking Americans who were saying this stuff,

their American citizenship is the strongest asset they have, you know, and just let them go, let them move to wherever the fuck they want to move it, as they do a swappy swap, and we'll see if they try to come back, because I think they're going to be crossing the Rio brand trying to get back here pretty quick. I do want to say, because I started this segment by complaining about, you know, misrepresentations on social media that only look at the positive side of things. There is an influencer I follow who's an American expat in France named Roya Fox. And she does these videos about, you know, that often touch on how work-life balance is better in France. But then at the end, it'll be like, oh, and by the way, the salary for the job in France is half what it would be in the

United States. And like, that is the real trade-off. And again, you know, there are perfectly good reasons to decide, you know, I want to make less money and I'm going to consume less and I'm going to work less and I'll have a better work-life balance. But one trend that you're seeing now in France is French people emigrating to Quebec because Quebec, you know, basically has a more American style economy and culture and you can get higher salaries there. And so, you know, those choices go both ways. There's a lot of people who look at it and say, you know, well, gosh, you know, in theory I'd really like to, you know, take a siesta and get five weeks of vacation and that sort of thing.

But there's also a lot of people who, you know, say, you know, what I would really like is the opportunity to make more money. And that's, you know, why the U.S. sees such, you know, positive net migration. over history. Yeah, look, I took my MBA to become a journalist, right? You make tradeoffs with salary and other stuff you want all the time, but you, but that was my choice, right? It wasn't like the government came in and said, you can't be an investment banker, you can only be a journalist in order to make it easier for me to make that decision. And that's functionally what European governments do with a lot of these things, is they take the choice out of the

individual's hands, and then you got a work-life balance, great, but if you didn't, want that. You don't have any option to not have that much vacation. You don't have any option to have different things from your health insurer. And I think that people, Americans way underweight the value of options because we're so used to having them that it doesn't even occur to us that we wouldn't. I think we can leave it there this week. Ben, Megan, another great conversation. Thank you. Thank you. 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. Stay cool out there.