Central Air - Deciding to Win, with Liam Kerr

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

This week, we’re Deciding to Win, or at least talking about a new manifesto about how to improve and moderate the Democratic Party’s image. Liam Kerr, one of the report’s authors joins us to talk about it.Also this week: the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and those who are very offended by it (not us), Karine Jean-Pierre’s very weird interview with The New Yorker, some lessons from an election in Argentina, and signs that the president’s trade war is starting to do significant economic damage in at least some parts of the country.Feedback? Questions? Leave a comment at centralairpodcast.com or email us at [e-mail]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to the third episode of Central Air, a cool breeze directly into your ears. Actually, that sounds less pleasant than I intended it to. A cool breeze in your general direction and some nice sound in your ears. I'm Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist at the Washington Post. Did you have a nice weekend, Megan? I had a lovely weekend. I am reading a lot of Neil Stevenson books right now in preparation for a project. Excellent science fiction writer. Heralded for having predicted many things among them. the Metaverse. He is the person who coined that name. Ben, did you spend any time in the Metaverse this weekend? No, my God. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you. The story I want to open with this is one that, like, people are real angry about, and I just cannot relate to the level of anger over

this. And this is the very rapid demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make way for President Trump's signature ballroom. And, you know, the thing Trump points out that it's reasonable is The east room of the White House can fit about 200 people for a dinner, and the president hosts these state dinners. And so they literally have to build a tent on the lawn of the White House, like it's a backyard wedding in order to host these state dinners. And Trump is like, that's silly, we should have a ballroom. And so, you know, rather than go through a year's long consultation process with the National Capital Planning Commission and get, you know, appropriations and arguing with Congress over what color everything should be painted, he just tore the thing down. and he has raised money privately, including by, you know, shaking down companies for these, for these various settlements instead of directing all the money toward his presidential library. Some of it is going

toward this entity that will build the ballroom. And in theory, they're going to start building this ballroom that people keep saying it's 90,000 square feet. Now, the president also has a history of saying that his 10,000 square foot apartment in Trump Tower is 30,000 square feet. Numbers are hard, Josh. Yeah. We were doing this math before the show. There's a 90,000 square foot ballroom could seat about 4,000 people for a seated dinner, which is probably larger than necessary even for the White House. And I think the ballroom is not, in fact, that large. But they're building it, and people are real mad. I actually, Jonathan Last from the bulwark has been writing about that Democrats need to promise that on day one, on day one in the next administration, they will,

they will tear down the ballroom and restore the east wing to its former glory. Here's a little bit of Jonathan talking about that on the bulwark's next level podcast. with Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller last week. Who does the White House belong to? Does the, is the White House a piece of the American government that belongs to all of the people who comprise America, the citizenry? Or does it belong to the king who resides there? Because the Trump version of this seems to be, well, it's mine. And so I can do whatever I want with it.

And that's why I think it has to be knocked down. Because you have to show people that, no, no, no, no, we don't tolerate this. ship. They don't, they didn't leave the statues of Saddam up. Josh Shapiro is going to give a Barnburner speech. He says, I will tear down this ballroom. I'm not saying this should be the centerpiece of the campaign, but in the same way that Trump would say, yeah, and we're gonna do like, I don't know, we're gonna put Jim Comey in jail or whatever, you know, one of his applause lines. Like, this ought to be a staple of every person

who's running for president as a Democrat in 2028. So, you know, later on today's show, we're going to be talking about a new report on how Democrats can show that they're more in touch with the American people and more focused on the issues that they care about. And tear down this ballroom strikes me as a step in the wrong direction there in terms of laser focus on the needs of the American people. I mean, it's insanity. It's the stupidest thing.

Look, I like Jonathan last, nice guy. But like, this is just crazy. I mean, it's also just not going to happen, right? Like, there's no chance this ballroom is getting torn down just because that's not like... Because it's going to be useful. It's going to be useful. There's too much capital going to be involved. To be quite honest with you, like, it looks fine in the renderings.

It looks nice. And the notion of just doing it just for funsies, I mean, the next president, one thing I can guarantee about them is that they're not going to want to wake up every morning to jackhammers that quite literally remind them of the previous precedent. You know, like they're... Everyone needs to take a pill about this bar. It's just a ballroom, and it's a ballroom that's needed. And they keep spending all of this time about how this is some statues of Saddam.

I mean, what are we talking about? The key thing about statues of Saddam is Saddam in them, right? They're statues of him. This is a ballroom. Trump is going to be president for three years. This ballroom's going to be around for decades. It doesn't have his head anywhere. Look, I will authorize the next president to take out any statues of Donald Trump, say,

suspended from the ceiling by two screaming bald eagles. The next president can reduce the amount of gold leaf that will surely be festooned around this ballroom. Indeed. I think a redecoration might be in order. Yeah, like the renderings look fine. They're not the most lovely thing I've ever seen. But I've really been enjoying the people posting their fond memories of the East Wing, which is to say the hallway they walked down on their way to the West Wing when they were

like going to the White House Christmas party. And like, it was a hallway. How many fun memories do you guys have of hallways where, like, that is the, you don't think about where you went or what you did. You're just like, man, the hallway. The hallway was fantastic. Wish I could have to spend more time in that hallway. People need to get a sense of proportion and also to let things go.

I am also a big fan of Jonathan last. But we do not need to go into the next administration clinging to every petty resentment of the Trump term. we need to focus on the important resentments and deal with those, not like, and then there was the time that he said that, like, my mother was ugly. It's just like, no, you just got to zen it out. There was something I was realizing about my own reaction to this, because part of it was like, as I saw people get agitated about this, it was like, what normal person could possibly care? And in fact, there's a West Wing episode about the idea that, like, no normal person could possibly care about changes to the White House complex, where they want to try to move the press room into the

Eisenhower building, and they run a poll about it so Josh Lyman can prove that nobody would care. And then one member of the White House press corps receives a call from the pollster asking about it. And they figure out that the DNC has run this poll. And the press corps, of course, goes a shit about it. And I thought it was like that. Like, you know, like, this is a Washington issue that only someone like deeply, deeply in Washington could care about. But there was a tweet that changed my mind about this from R.J. Lehman, who's from the center right think tank, the R Street Institute, where he said, you know, how could it?

anyone care about this? Like, have you seen the reactions that people have to, like, minor changes to ordinary homes somewhere vaguely in their neighborhood? How upset they get? Like, how do you think people might feel about a building that they see on the back of the $20 bill every day? And so, like, I do get this idea that, like, people don't like change. And there's also a little bit of my own visceral reaction here, which is that I'm, like, such a yimby that I basically can't see a bulldozer without being happy. It's like, yay, like, finally someone is building something in this country. Finally, someone's tearing down that orphanage to build a high-rise apartment. Yeah, no, it's like the crying about, you know, what about the National Capital Planning Commission?

They didn't, we didn't like the, fuck the National Capital Planning Commission. Like, you know, we've had this whole big fight about the Federal Reserve and, you know, the Trump says they should fire Jay Powell because the Fed renovation has been too expensive. And, you know, some of the reasons the Fed renovation has been crazy expensive are, you know, they weren't allowed to put as much glass in as they wanted. They instead did to use more marble because of, you know, like to, to, informed to the other buildings around it. They can't substantially increase the above ground envelope of the building. So they're building all this very expensive basement space out.

It's like the things that these people make you do. Like I like I there's a part of me that which is the next Democratic president will be able to, you know, take whatever the priority there is and like sweep away all the petty bureaucrats who would stand in the way and just get something built. And so I look at this with like a little bit of envy when Trump does this rather than with outrage. Yeah. I mean, totally. Absolutely. There's like this fetishism. this procedural fetishism that the Democrats love. That's the other reason it won't get knocked down. It would take Democrats a decade to do it.

You know, like they're not just going to jump on the fact that they can demolish it because of a legal loophole. They would have to go and have an environmental report and do all of this nimbie stuff. The historic preservation people will be like, tear down the historic Trump East Wing. Are you mad? Yeah. I wrote this thing this week where they were like, the people from that commission are just a few months ago quoted bragging about how, you know, they, they can drag out expanding a sidewalk for two

years. And like, they are bragging about this. Those people should be in jail. You know, like, like, I'm happy that Trump just took his garrulous Tasmanian devil personality to this one particular issue. And I also like to speak to what, what R.J. Lehman was saying. Like, I agree with that at some level, but also this is not, in fact, the building that is on the dollar Bill? Yes. The East Wing is literally out of frame. Yes. And if you gave people a picture of the East Wing and then like five other random vaguely classical buildings from the mid-40s, how, what percentage of people do you think could pick out the East Wing? Would it be higher than the 20% you would get from people guessing randomly? No. No one knows what the East Wing

looks like. This is all, look, it might be out of scale to the White House, and then maybe I will be mildly miffed. But it's not like the West Wing is lovely either. Well, we can fix the scale problem by tearing down the West Wing and building an appropriate office building there, because that building is decrepit for like the nerve center of the most important government in the world. Like, yes, it's going to like look asymmetrical, but we can fix that by tearing down the West Wing and building a four-story office building with appropriate modern offices. And then we can rebuild a replica of the Oval Office in there. We're going to take a quick break and turn and talk about something else, which is reorienting the Democratic Party and deciding to win.

Meanwhile, if you want to get every episode of this show, you can go to centralairpodcast.com, sign up there, become a member. We'd love to have you. There's a new report out this week called Deciding to Win. The report is from Welcome, the Democratic group that puts on Welcome Fest, which is that organizing conference for a new centrist faction in the Democratic Party. Ben and I both had a good time at that conference in June of this year. And we have a link to the report on our show page at Central. podcast.com. I encourage you to go take a look because there's a lot of good ideas for how to reorient the Democratic Party in there. But briefly, what it says is that Democrats need to focus

on popular economic messages like raising the minimum wage, protecting old age entitlements and making the rich pay their fair share in taxes, that they need to fight the perception that they are obsessed with issues like climate and identity politics, you know, be prepared to face the next they, them add, that Democrats need to moderate their unpopular positions on issues like immigration and public safety. These prescriptions, are controversial in the party, although they're probably not that controversial among our listenership. In fact, there's even a counter movement called Persuasion, which says Democrats just need to get the public to change their, quote, unacceptable, unquote, preferences. So good luck with that. But even among

those of us who accept these prescriptions, I don't think there's been a lot of clarity yet about what it would mean to implement them. So to talk about that, we've brought in Liam Kerr, who is one of the co-founders of Welcome. And so I guess to start the big picture, like, what does it mean the report is called deciding to win. So when we say deciding to win, it comes from a Nancy Pelosi quota, first you decide to win, and then every decision you make flows from that. But our approach is really operationalizing in a way that what Elizabeth Lauren said about the left, organizing is a muscle, not a battery.

The more you use it, the stronger it gets. Incentres typically have viewed conflict and fights as drawing down a battery, as losing power, whether they spend money or endorsing candidates or taking risky policy positions, that it's a cost that they're paying. But actually what we see on the left and the right is that when there's conflict, when there's a chance to do something together, you're building a muscle. And so we focus our packwork entirely on Trump won U.S. House districts. And that's really a way of building a muscle.

And we hope the report can also inform building up that muscle of a community of taking action together. And so when you talk about having those fights, who do the fights need to be with? Because Matt Iglesias writes a lot about this, about, you know, like, if you get centrist Democrats in a room, they just love to complain about AOC and the squad. But like every party has a fringe. And, you know, the big problem for these candidates in exactly the sort of House districts you're operating in, you know, places that Trump may have won by four points or something like that. It's not just that there are some, you know, members of Congress from New York who are very left wing. It's a broad perception that the party is very left wing and has got. very left wing. And you get into some of that specifically in the report, pieces of controversial legislation that are sponsored by way more Democrats in the House than was the case 12 years ago, changes in what's in the Democratic Party platform that have changed perceptions of what the party

is for. So how do you, if you're a centrist and you're trying to both win one of those elections and move the perception of the party toward the center, what fights do you have and with whom? Yeah. So the dating back to the politics of evasion report from 1989, kind of a foundational document for the DLC. Conflict is essential for people to pay attention. That's the Democratic Council, which was the sort of the centrist-democratic group that gave rise to Bill Clinton. And a comfort with conflict is important, but we can't only be about conflict and we cannot only be about opposition. And so I think a big thing that we've seen from the response of this report is people across the Democratic Party say, okay, if anything, the leftists are blaming

the centrist for fighting Bernie on identity issues. And there is this some common understanding of a need to move. And so to go forward, you know, the left is often an obstacle, not the main opponent. And so when we seek to operationalize this, we look at these Trump 1 districts where often there is not a very well-funded Democratic candidate. And if we want to go against, you know, the piece we put out today about the words that are used far less frequently in the 2024 Democratic Party platform, we need candidates that are out in districts Trump 1 by 6 points saying,

nation, America, responsibility, deficit, fathers, right? The best way to do this is not just to fight the left. It's to go win in red districts. And when the left attacks you for it, you have the high ground. And you want to be fighting from up high, not from down low complaining that AOC has a lot of Twitter followers and why can't we get any, you know, compelling, exciting people on our end? Something I hear from a lot of different corners in the party is that Kamla Harris tried this. The messaging of her brief presidential campaign was very focused.

on economic issues, very often economic issues that test well, and that, you know, she sought to, you know, reorient the image of the party toward, you know, pocketbook issues and it just didn't work. What do you say to that? Yeah, I think if you tried to rebrand Chipotle in four months and say that this is, you know, fine dining international fusion, you could, you could try that and maybe you'd move people a little bit and it's better than doubling down on, yeah, we, you know, had E. coli for some people at one point, right? But, But you can't rebrand someone who is in the 90s of name ID, has pretty set favorability, and is taking these really not only positions that are at a step, but did so in a way to differentiate

within the Democratic primary. And so a lot of these positions were used as a wedge intentionally to try to distance herself to the left of the party in the primary. And so you have this successful years-long branding effort. She was in the United States Senate. She was the second most left-point member of the United States Senate. And so just doing this rapid 107 days move wasn't going to be enough. And I think the ad, the discourse around the they, them ad, really does show that it's about, you know, much more than any one particular issue.

I think you make a really good point about the branding trouble that she faced, you know, in that short period of time. And when you look at the larger problem for the party, like the democratic brand problem that exists in red states and in certain purple states, how much do you guys think that you can sort of like make, make, progress on that in individualized races, where you don't have the benefit yet of having a new party leader that can actually rebrand the entire party and, you know, change the perception of it. How do you think like this looks in a Trump won race in the next few years? And I think that's one of the central tensions within the political center right now and something that I think you'll all be discussing over the next, you know, 850 days till we have these presidential primaries. You know, we have this urgent need to.

in the short term to have people's names be bigger than the D in parentheses. Jared Golden has to be bigger than D. Marie Glucent-Camp-Perez has to be bigger than D. And so we have this short-term need to go build individual candidate brands that can overcome that. And people often bring up, well, if they're all doing it in different ways, how are we ever going to change the overall party brand? And that is a very clear strategic tension for centrist to be working on. And I think one of the really important reasons, you know, our first of all confess,

the keynote was Jared Golden talking about progressive conservatism, this concept of being culturally conservative, economically more populist, and having an actual identity around what that means and about who can affiliate with that. Rebecca Cook and some other candidates have used that pretty effectively. This year, you know, as Josh mentioned, you know, he was talking to Richie Torres about abundance, Jake Hockencloss and one of the abundance authors, you know, also spoke about that other kind of different style of centrist vision for the party. And so we think that these individual subbrands need to bubble up. And they could be as small as, you know, Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Quay are in South Texas.

They have a third candidate who's really dynamic, Bobby Polito, running in an adjacent district that was also Trump Plus 10. And you could have somewhat of a micro faction there that could aggregate into something where people say, okay, there's enough of these microfactions that I see this broad center as tolerant and pragmatic and non-insane, even if they're all not lockstep on individual issues. But we can't have 72 people with 72 different things. How do you get those people out of a primary for the presidency? And I was texting last night with a political reporter of my acquaintance. And we were both saying, you know, we really like Josh Shapiro. And then we said, how does that guy get out of a primary.

Like, arguably, you know, Republicans consolidate on JD Vance and he does well in New Hampshire, but it looks pretty ugly after that. I mean, this is the problem that the Democrats have had, is that it's really hard to get people who can speak to a heterodox group out of a primary. Trump has managed to overcome that with a really weird confluence of events. High name recognition brings new people into. to the primary system, we weren't voting before. And then because he becomes so IDed with the party, he gets those people back. But how do Democrats get someone who is more of a centrist, more

heterodox, not friendly with the groups, up to the point where Democrats are competitive at the presidential level? Yeah. I mean, I think the intersectional purity test left will go bankrupt like everybody else does very slowly and then all at once in the presidential primary process. It's going to need to be helped along. We're not in the best position for that to happen right now. But luckily, the presidential primary is in stages. And we have this odd challenge this time where people have woken up to reality. They've gone back and touched grass. And we're not all going to race to the left in the primary and leaving one dottering legacy man who everyone remembers from the 90s crime bill standing being like, wait a minute, what are the fancy words

I'm supposed to use? And in a weird way, the race to the left made. it easier for voters and for other mainstream Democrats to consolidate behind one person. In a weird way, moderation and centrist, a return to common sense is going to lead more competition to that lane, and the way that it collapses behind one person will probably look different. It's a staged, it's a multi-stage process. But we need community to foster it and we need to make it okay for people to not just be heterodox on one random issue here or there, but to really lean into these kind of popular policies and then communicate them very persuasively. Are there more specific lessons to be drawn from 1992 here? I mean, you talk about this report as a

successor to that 1989 Politics of Evasion Report, which was basically, you know, talking about how Democrats had gotten out of touch at the time. Welfare was really high on this list, but you also had immigration and crime. And you had three successive elections in which Democrats had just gotten their asses handed to them with candidates who were perceived as too liberal. And, you know, I was, I was eight years old in 1992. So I, you know, I was, I was actually following the election more closely than your average eight-year-old. But the, my sense was that basically the party was really beaten down by losing over and over and over again. And there was an openness to trying something new just because people had, you know, it had gotten through the heads of liberal activists

that you were never going to get Walter Mondale elected president. Is there a way to do that process without, because I mean, you know, Harris didn't lose by that much. I think that a lot of Democrats have the sense that, you know, we only need to do a little bit better in order to win, and therefore we only need to adjust a little bit. Now, I think, you know, partly there's some real oddity of running against Donald Trump who has some big strengths and big weaknesses compared to a normal Republican candidate. And, you know, maybe some of those strengths are going to go away when they finally have to run someone else. But it's also possible that Republicans will keep those strengths and lose some of the weaknesses and, you know, have a really strong 2028.

But I don't know how, you know, other than, you know, losing and only getting 50 electoral votes, I don't know what can be done to like shake the party and say, no, you really need big change. You know, tweaking isn't going to cut it. Yeah, important to learn these lessons from history in part so kind of people in our community have a tangible way to say, yes, we could do something really special together in this broader community of people alienated from the extremes. And so there's somewhat of a similar reckoning now, but there are some really key structural differences that when we're actually operational. a community within the Democratic Party that can make this shift, that we have to pay attention to what things are very different. One big one is about just convincing other people to take this medium term to longer term course.

So the DLC started in 1985, right? And their breakthrough comes in 1992. There were a lot of lunches and policy papers and beers and going to New Orleans and having fun and building a sense of community and a real narrative along those seven, eight years. The stakes are perceived to be so much higher now. It's not like, oh, no, Reagan, right? It's existential. And so getting people to throw in on that, there is a some challenge there,

although I think people are starting to pick their heads up and look longer term. There's a much smaller pool right now. So when Reagan won in 85, there were more than 200 Democratic members of Congress from Reagan districts. And so one part about getting crushed so badly is you just have tons of tons of people whose voters voted for Reagan, right? Now we've got 13 in the House. And those 13 are like pretty awesome for the both part. And they're exciting and they are leading the way. Same in the Senate, right? You have people that are speaking out. Some of these governors like over Shapiro and Megamention. But when you look at like who signed the DLC's big manifesto, right, these are

all from people from states that Reagan won handily. And so the pool that we're jarring from of pointing to and saying these are elected leaders is just, is just small. And our intra-party enemies are much more effective because they're leveraging technology and intersectionality to be able to attack right away. So a thought experiment of like, if Paul Songas was up in Newburyport or wherever saying something at a conference like Seth Moulton said after the election about trans girls and sports, maybe like somebody would get a letter to the editor of the Newburyport Daily News or something.

Seth Moulton has like his full staff getting harassed via text and signal and DIA and everything. And has a staff member quit within 12 hours, has a local Democratic town committee come out and endorse a challenge to him within days. And so there is this nervousness and lack of confidence and anxiety that persists in the Blue District Democrats in particular. And Seth Moulton didn't even vote for the Republican legislation on girls' sports. There are only two Democrats in the House who voted for it. They're both Hispanic Democrats from South Texas.

And so this is, I mean, this is one of the remarkable things to me about operationalizing moderation is that, you know, when you have an issue that 80% of the public is against you on it, you can't just say, you know, we need to make room for those people in the party. Those people need to be represented in the party by people who agree with them and vote along with them. And I think we've seen some of that on immigration. We talked about that last week on the show that, you know, that's the issue where Democrats have really actually recalibrated some of their positions. A lot of them voted for the Lake and Riley Act. But aside from, you know, these occasional rhetorical things from Moulton, from Gavin Newsom about, you know, gee, like this doesn't feel fair in girls sports, there hasn't been any really substantive move on that or really on climate to get the Democratic Party. And this makes me a little bit despairing that like, you know, there's this idea that climate is a cultural issue, which it's, you know, climate is an important economic issue and really gets in the way of Democrats saying that we're for a populist agenda of lower costs. and people on the left and party never like to talk about this because it's an inherent contradiction in their positioning. But you had this vote to basically prevent California from mandating that everyone shifts to electric vehicles in about a decade from now. And Chuck Schumer whipped the vote against that. The only one Democrat in the Senate voted to abrogate the California rule, Alyssa Slotkin, one of the two senators from Michigan, the heart of our auto manufacturing industry. And so it just seems to me, you know, people talk about, you know, they argue about,

about whether we should moderate or not, but even the so-called moderates don't do a lot of moderating. I'm very frustrated about it. Yeah, it's Democrats who say we need to moderate. It's kind of like St. Augustine saying, you know, dear Lord, make me chased, but not yet. We want to be moderate, just not yet and just not on that issue. And, you know, so there's this vague moderation.

And Stephanopoulos has a great line 92. He said specificity is a character trait. And that was a big deal-se thing, where they would have specific issues that brought those values and differentiation to life. And we've all recognized, we've got these white leftist elites that have kind of been running us into the ditch, but not really saying, okay, everyone's realized this, but they still all have those jobs.

Like the foundation grants were for three years. They still have to hit the grant metrics. Like all of the mechanisms that are in place to punish moderation are still in place. There is a specificity, and this is part of the operationalizing response to this is it doesn't have to be overly antagonistic. It doesn't have to be attacking everything all the time. But we do have to have our eyes open to the fact that those dynamics are still fully in play.

I was watching Abigail Spanberger dodge around on this issue. This is the trans issue? Yeah, the trans women and sports issue. Abigail Spanberger, she's the Democratic nominee for governor in Virginia. The election there is next week. And the debate moderator is saying, like, should trans women be allowed to play in sports? and she says, well, this should be made by schools or this or that. And it's like, first of all, no one is fooled by this.

Almost no one thinks this is complicated, right? I actually think this is complicated, but I am really in a minority, as becomes clear every time I write about this. And I'm a weirdo. I'm a weirdo nerd who likes to have, like, you know, philosophical debates over what a woman is. But she's dodging around it. I'm watching her thinking, what would happen to you if you were just like, yeah, no, like,

obviously trans women should not play in sports. I am with the 70% to 80% of the population that believes that. What would the lobbying group be able to knock her out? No. Would voters punish her? No. What is the negative thing that she is flinching away from when she is asked a straightforward question that to me, regardless of your personal opinions on this, has a pretty

straightforward political answer? I think this particularly affects straight white guys. maybe CIA officers also. The most oppressed group in America. If you're still sticking around this Democratic Party after the last, it's like everybody needs three beers, kind of. Like, everyone gets really tight when anything comes up about any of this stuff. Because you've had to retrain your brain so often over the last 10 years

to think about all the different kind of psychological warfare tactics that could be used against you based on any word. And I'll admit, I just, I've had zero beers. And when you just said, start to bring up that question, even though I feel very comfortable, grounded in where we are and in the complexities of it, I start to get like a little tense, you know, and I think there's just something in almost every Democratic politician that's not on the far left today of awkwardness. And, you know, people can sniff that up and it's still there.

Spanberger's going to win in a walk, though. I mean, maybe this is an issue that you can evade. Sure, but why, I guess is the question. Like, if you just want to go full, like, yes, let trans women into sports and you think you can still win that way, great. But why are you trying to dodge it when everyone transparently understands what the dodges? You can dodge on complicated policy questions. You can say something that sounds vaguely plausible, but everyone knows what a man in a woman. women are and how sports work.

Right. No. Shouldn't you as a libertarian be open to the idea that there should be no state-level policy on how to organize a sports league? Like, I don't think it's inherently a crazy position. To be like, that answer of like, don't let the schools, let them do it, is my answer. Like, the schools and the sports should decide themselves. The government should just stay at it.

Well, I think there's a reason baseball has an antitrust exemption, which is that when you, when you have a team, it's not just a matter of you having a team. If you are a public school and you have a sports team and you decide that you are admitting trans women, you then get into a situation we have seen this with colleges where a bunch of other women's teams don't want to play you. It creates all sorts of side issues that I think. They're more than welcome to make that decision. Keep those things in mind when they decide what to do. Or like let the sports leagues do it. Sorry, sorry.

I know we're getting off track. Like everyone else in America, this comes up and everyone's like, all right, let's fight about it. Right. But I just think it is stupid to say that you don't have an opinion on this. Everyone has, I am like one of five people in the United States who actually does not have an opinion. I didn't like playing women's sports. I don't care. But like almost everyone actually has an opinion.

Almost everyone knows that everyone has an opinion. And why are you lying about it? You're not fooling anyone. He's not lying. I think if you're a politician whose view is I don't want my specific government entity to make a rule on this, I think you should still venture an opinion. on the issue so that you sound like a normal person. But I mean, to some extent, that's what Seth Moulton and Gavin Newsom have done is they've said, they've talked about their personal feeling about

the sports league, but they don't want to use their specific lever of government to set it. And I, you know, look, I think this issue is unimportant enough that public opinion should be a major guide in how to proceed on it. I don't think that there's any first principles reason that you have to organize a sports league around gender identity. And if the public demands it, you know, so be it. But I, you know, I don't think it's crazy. to take the view that, you know, this is not an issue that needs to rise to the level of the state government or the federal government. But you can articulate that view and you can still talk about it in like a normal human way that indicates that you too have an opinion on this thing that everyone really has an opinion about even if they don't want to admit it. Yeah, I think it gets to confident centrism.

Like Ben just stated his point very confidently. Josh, you just said to your point very confidently. Abigail Spanberger was more conservative than 97% of House Democrats and voters are going to give her the benefit of the debt. You know, Kamala Harris not only had, it was only 11. words and the big punch line. And then at Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens. That's taxes, crime, and immigration. Gender is just the hook.

But I think the most damning line is her on tape saying, the power that I had, I used it in a way that was about pushing for the movement, frankly, and the agenda. Nobody thinks Spanberger is saying that stuff, right? She's not for the movement. She's not for the agenda. She's a spook who wants business to come back and stuff. And so if she gets awkward about that, people may have opinions on it, but they're awkward about it too. And so confidence is good, but she had the credibility to override that.

Liam Kerr from welcome. Thank you for joining us. And we'll include a link to the report in the email version of this show so people can go take a look at it themselves. Thanks, Liam. Thanks, Liam. Great to be here. Acknowledge voters, not land. Yes. Bye, guys. That was fun. Thank you. Let's take a quick break. And if you want to see that report, if you want to see notifications when every episode of our show comes out, go to centralairpodcast.com. There's a show page for this episode of the show that has links to things that we talked about. You can also sign up there and become a part of our community. We'd love to have you.

One thing Liam said at the end there is acknowledge voters not land. Well, I mean, there's lots of context. But one funny thing as, you know, the Democratic National Committee, one of the things, in addition to, you know, paying off the immense debts that were left at the end of Kamala Harris's presidential campaign that they're focused on is, you know, trying to figure out what the party can do to not lose next time. And every time they have a meeting, it opens with a land acknowledgement. And actually, as the folks from Welcome pointed out, the opening of the 2012 Democratic Party platform is about jobs and manufacturing and how Obama brought us out of the Great Recession. And defeated Al-Qaeda. Yes. General Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead.

Not in the preamble, but the great Obama line from that campaign. The opening of the 2024 Democratic Party platform is a four-pand-a-party platform is a four-pans. paragraph land acknowledgement. And if I ever talk about this on Twitter, I get liberals saying to me, well, who reads the party platform anyway? You know, voters aren't watching the DNC meetings. What does it matter? Why are you complaining about this? And it's, you know, like, I don't, I don't think taking the land acknowledgment out of the platform is the thing that will make the difference and cause Democrats to win the election, but it is, it is reflective of a mindset. We're like, the literal point of land acknowledgments as a practice is before we can talk about

anything else, we have to talk about indigenity. And, you know, know, what our ancestors did wrong to the Native Americans. That issue has to be number one on the agenda in every meeting. And it goes directly against the task before Democrats, which is that when you poll voters about what issues they care about and what issues they think Democrats care about, they care about inflation and, you know, to a lesser extent, immigration and crime, health care, and they think Democrats care about identity and abortion and health care, the one area of overlap and climate change. And so like literally having a practice where it says the most important thing is this identity issue. Like, of course that's pushing the wrong direction on that. I just want to

see someone ask Ken Martin about this because I realize that any given time the DNC chair is doing a press conference. This isn't the most pressing issue. But like, I want to know what the fucking justification is for doing this thing that like goes in exactly the wrong direction on shaping the image of the party. I mean, I think that like what you just described, like that question that you have when you hear this is why these specifically are so destructive. Like these land acknowledgments are the thing that basically broke me during the peak woke era. That was what broke you, Ben. You were lying huddled on the floor of your apartment, fetal position.

Right. Well, that's the thing. I understand they're not as serious as some of the other things. But when you, every day, every time you log into a Zoom, I have to start with this completely inane thing. Did they do this in the Mother Jones editorial meetings? Oh, totally. I mean, they think them everywhere at that time.

You couldn't go, well, not every editorial meeting, but there were random meetings where they could. And, you know, it just happens enough and enough. where then you start to wonder, like, what the fuck is wrong with these people? And why are they making me do this? And then you then start to pull at it the way you just did. Like, what is the rationale? And then in reality, you end up your one Google away from going down some red pill thing

where Chris Rufo comes on and tells you, like, the way the world works. And, like, I think that these daily annoyances that liberals just love to do and then say, it's no big deal and deny the thing about it, what they aren't, what they're, what's so dangerous about them is that it misses like the second order effects that what happens when you spend all of your time having to sit in rooms where people first all say their pronouns and their pronouns are all the normal ones. They're just making you sit and listen and drag it out. It's a problem because it's indicative of a couple of mindsets, actually, I would say.

And the first one is obviously just thinking of politics as entirely a series of transactions between microgroups within your coalition. And of course, like those microgroups, groups, in order to keep appeasing them, you just have to pile up more and more like micro initiatives because each of them wants a little piece and the groups keep getting smaller. And this is not a good way to do politics. You do some of this. Microinitiatives, everyone does it, right?

We're going to develop the greater Trenton area with my $5,000 tax cut for new small business owners or whatever. But they're really limited returns to it precisely because, like, you only have so much attention. and the more micro initiatives that you're doing, the less you are appealing to a broad base of voters. And the second and I think related phenomenon is actually that Democrats got so comfy with the idea that the media, which, let's be honest, it leans left. It's not that like there was some big conspiracy conservatives, but it was true that if Republicans did something that looked ridiculous to liberals, that was going to end up on the evening news. And if liberals did something that was going to look ridiculous to conservatives, that was much less likely to end up on the evening news. And when the evening news was super important at setting the agenda and giving people information, that was kind of a superpower.

It was like a little boost that Democrats went into every issue on. And they got so used to it. My favorite of this was, I can't remember it was 2016 or 2020, the Democratic National Convention, up to 6 p.m. before the evening broadcast started. it would be endless numbers of illegal immigrants talking about their experience and how hard it was. And then like that all got shut off for 6 p.m. And the assumption was the media is not going to rebroadcast all of these people talking about their lives.

And it wasn't endless. I don't want to exaggerate. But there were like a lot of them. And I was like, why are you fronting these stories? These seem like not stories that are going to help you. And of course they cut it off for the evening broadcast. And this was 16. I remember this.

It was like the programming of the primetime convention have been done by a completely different team than the program. And it's clearly, and we're going to talk about Corrine Jean-Pierre, which is closely related to this in a little bit, but there's definitely this like, it's this office politics where all of these people have these, you know, expectations that, you know, you get this thing and you get this thing. And that's what they were using the convention for. But the funny thing is then you're not using it as a public relations tool.

Yes. But the assumption was that they could do both, that you could have the front that was going to make the major media. And then you could do all this horse trading inside the country. coalition and no one would notice because in part because the media was not going to be like super eager to talk about why is the DNC putting all of these illegal immigrants and somewhat unpopular activist groups on. And the problem is I'm not going to debate this as a moral issue. It is no longer tactically effective and Democrats have been very slow to get that message,

that they can't work the refs, that it's not a viable strategy and that you can't do all of this targeted insider politics with 97 million groups. You have to have an overarching strategy that obviously there's going to be, you're going to have wings, you're going to have different groups, but you have to actually have a brand that is one brand that's going to speak broadly to the American people and that is not going to go through a mainstream media where everyone leans left. It's going to have to flow through a zillion channels of social media and podcasts and all the rest of it. And that's just the reality. And I feel like they have not yet woken up to that reality.

And it worries me. I totally agree with your critique of like Democrats not recognizing the fractured state of the media and having these things that can travel. like that. But also, when you go back to even this era right before this, so like 2016 and around this time, I think that like when the Democrats don't do these things thinking no one's ever going to see them. A lot of it is that they think that you're right, it won't end up on the CBS evening news, but it is going to end up on Fox News. And the thing is, is that like there is a backlash aspect to it where like the second they do this dumb bullshit that someone can say, ah, well, I don't know, at least I didn't see it, it's not a big deal. And then it ends up on

Fox for two weeks, that then Democrats have a natural, like, backlash effect where they go, actually, I love it. It's my favorite thing in the world, which is so stupid, obviously. But, like, the Republicans do that, too, right? They did it with the ballroom. They went, you know, in the polls, they were like, we don't like the, we don't like the ballroom. And then after a few days, it went, actually, now I love the ballroom.

And, like, it's, everyone has that. And Democrats had it then. And it just, it's dangerous. We're living in a world where, like, the backlash effect has pushed people into increasingly unpopular position. Yes, and I will say one more thing about my fear for Democrats, which is that they're going to pull a John Kerry, Tim Walts. They're going to nominate someone who is like a progressives idea of a good normie. Who is that?

I don't know yet. I will find out. These were, you know, I never dreamed until they did it. But they're going to find someone. They're like, hey, this dude is a veteran. You love veterans. Maybe not veterans who threw their medals over a wall to protest the Vietnam War, but we didn't think about that because we have never met a normie. And like my fear is that they will do that again at a time

when they need someone closer to an actual Normie to win. I think they're going to nominate Gavin Newsom, which is something that I, you know, a year ago I could not have imagined myself saying. But I think that, you know, the thing that Democrats are most desperate for is someone who will fight back. And the problem is that like Democrats are in the minority in Washington. There aren't good ways to fight back on most things. And it's a recipe for frustration. However, for Newsom found a genuinely effective way to fight back. He is apparently going to succeed in redrawing the congressional map in California and reclaiming several seats or claiming several seats for Democrats, helping the party win a House majority. And he more broadly has found this

way to adopt this combative posture without actually running to the left on a lot of policy issues. And these sort of childish, you know, taunts he does toward the president, I don't love them. But on the other hand, I don't think they create general election liabilities. in the way that the candidates circa 2019 were doing trying to differentiate themselves on who could be, you know, the most left wing in comparison to Trump. And I think Newsom has significant electoral liabilities to do with, you know, policies that he has enacted in California and, you know, health insurance for illegal immigrants and things like that. I can't wait to hear him explain his dinner at the French laundry during the pandemic when he had locked down his entire state.

Well, yes. And there's also like he looks like an 80s movie villain. Yeah, I'm going to depend him on that French laundry thing. But I do not like it. Wait, hold on. Wait, give us your French laundry defense. So what? It didn't matter at all. So they went to this stupid thing and like, it was fine.

No one who was hurt. He had told Californians that they weren't allowed to do all sorts of things. You know what? Life is different when you're powerful. They let you grab you buy the laundry. It's like Boris Johnson. The problem is not actually that he did it. If Boris Johnson had been in the opposition, it wouldn't have been that big a deal.

The problem was that. that he made everyone else get into their houses and not go anywhere. And I'm sorry. I actually think there is still enough of a hangover of resentment, especially from people who had to go out and work for a living. And we're not working from home and like hanging out on Clubhouse and listening to podcasts all day. He's a California liberal. What are you thinking, Democrats? Please don't. Yes, but he's not a liberal's idea of what a conservative would like. Whatever else is wrong with Gavin Newsom. Fair enough. Okay. I take it back. Nominate the fake normie. Pick someone who feels like a normie at least. A month ago when we were planning this,

I was talking to my very left-wing friend, Taylor Lorenz, and I was telling her about this show. And she was like, oh, Central Air, what is it like about centrism? And I was like, yeah, yeah, that is her. What is it about? And she said, so what do you guys love? Who do you guys want to win? You just want Gavin Newsom to win? And I was like, no, I'm pretty sure we all fucking hate Gavin Newsom. And she was like, but centrist love Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom is your guy. And I was like, Oh, Jesus, we're going to end. We can't help on it. I think that there is a risk of this, right?

It's people looking at him. Look at his beautiful family. He has wonderful hair. He's a centrist because he has vetoed some of California. He slept with a Trump. His family looks like a meme for one of those right-wing return accounts. Like I said, actually, maybe he is what a progressive thinks a Normie likes. And this is a terrifying thought.

Well, I mean, to push him, back on it, the people who have been leading in the polls at this point never end up winning, right? Like Hillary Clinton was leading in the polls this time? Except for Donald Trump, you mean? Well, and the Republicans are mentally ill. I don't talk. I'm talking about Democrats who are mentally ill in a different way. Democrats, the person who's winning in this time with the Democrats, who knows? I mean, sometimes they, I mean, Al Gore was ahead the whole way and just got the nomination. I mean, sometimes. What's different when you're in, when you are the vice president? I don't know. I just like, and the other thing is like, I'm kind of afraid that if we don't nominate Newsom, we're going to do

something even worse. I mean, look, I want Josh Shapiro to be the nominee, but I think that as candidates try to differentiate themselves from Newsom, they will be running to his left. And, you know, maybe AOC will run, and that nominating her would be a mistake. Look, I mean, you know, I think probably we're just going to lose the 2028 election. But I worry that there are even bigger mistakes than nominating Governor French Laundry to be president that might be available to the party. And this is why you listen to this podcast for the cheering, optimistic message. that helps to carry you forward through your week, knowing that we're facing a better future. I'm happy to say that Josh and I mostly agree about lots of political stuff, but I'm pretty

confident that Democrats will get it together and win. Really? Yeah. So we'll find out in a few years. Like, this is one of the first times I remember is having just a very, like, a directional disagreement about what's going to happen. Ben, you were talking earlier about the difficulty of rebranding the Democratic Party without a, without a figurehead.

And so if you, you know, if you see like, you know, we're going to get it together and we're to win. Can you sketch out what that looks like and who drives those changes that need to be made? I think that once you get past the midterms and you finally get the field set for what is going to be like a two-year-long primary fight, you're going to have all, it's going to serve as a proxy for these battles between the far left and the central left and every other faction of the Democratic Party. And, you know, in reality, the Far Left never wins these things. And my part of the party constantly wins them. So like, there's a good reason to be confident about that. Then you're going to, but you're going to have an years, you know, about 18 months of this,

at which point these people are going to be introducing themselves to America. And if none of them do terribly well, then nothing's going to happen. But if a star goes up into the sky that is bright enough, it will then have this gravity that pulls everything towards it and it will help rebrand the party in its own image the same way that happens every time, you know, there is actually a leader of a party. It happened when Obama was president. for the Democrats. It happened when George W. Bush was president.

Happened with Trump. Twice now has happened with Republicans. And I just think that that's, you really can't game that out until you get past the midterms and start to see what this looks like. And that bright, shining star is Josh Shapiro? I think that Josh Shapiro has a very good chance of it being.

I love Josh Shapiro, but I don't, you know, he's not like an inspirational leader of a movement in the way that Barack Obama was. Twinkled, twinkle, little Josh. What rhymes with, Josh. I should know that, but I haven't really thought about it. I don't know. Speaking of depressing stories, I wanted to take a quick break and then come back and talk about Corrine John Pierre's book tour. This is Central Air. Again, go to centralairpodcast.com. Get all the

links related to today's episode. Sign up to follow us and join us here every week. So there's this new book, Independent. It is number 1,633 in books on Amazon right now. So, you know, it's really it's really a barn burner, you know, no one can stop talking about it. The book is by Corrine Jean-Pierre, the former press secretary in the Biden administration, who has declared herself a political independent now because Democrats were too mean to Joe Biden. She was very upset about that. So now she has left the party because basically the party wasn't partisan enough. The book tour has been this like kind of hilarious face plan. She did an interview with Isaac Chotner, which like, it's funny. Occasionally I will like tweet like no one should

ever do an Isaac Chotner interview. And then I'd forget I actually was interviewed by him, like 10 or 11 years ago, and I lived to tell the tale. So maybe, you know, most of the time, it's fine. People only read the interview if it's a disaster. My husband was saying that he wants to start a consulting firm. It's called Isaac Chotner Associates Limited. And the entire thing is, if Isaac Chotner invites you on his to be interviewed, you will pay him a million dollars, and he will tell you not to take the interview, and you will both be better off. There's several reasons why the tour has been funny. But one is like she keeps going out there and insisting that she never saw anything wrong with Joe Biden and that, you know, he was really

sharp all the time. She was dealing with him in the White House. Yes, he was getting older, but he was doing a totally good job. And then, you know, when the debate happened, you know, she was in the back of the plane on Air Force One that day and she didn't see him the way she normally does and he was sick. And his performance in the debate was very surprising to her, but very anomalous. And mostly Joe Biden was, you know, like sharp as attack, et cetera, which is not convincing to anyone. But then she also, like, talks about how it was so unfurricular. fair the way that people in the party threw him under the bus and that he was such a decent man and that's just not the way that you treat people. And the crazy making thing to me about this is that

like none of that is about winning. And there's a tremendous amount of the culture of this in, you know, the like the top operative levels in the Democratic Party where basically it's like they're a club and they're operating in their own interests around the people in the club. And winning the election is sort of secondary. It's Joe Biden's a nice man. You have to be nice to him and you can't tell him he should leave the race because that's not nice, which is just so discordant from the idea that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy and that we have to defeat him at all costs. But it seems to be a cognitive dissonance that some of these top operatives are capable of holding in their heads.

I mean, it reminds me of the report we were just talking about, right, deciding to win. You have to make that decision and decide to put it above other stuff, that you're going to like make that the priority as opposed to either feeling good about the person, and whether you're going to be nice to this with the president and everything, or if you're going to feel good about your own purity test. You know, it reminds me of like the line and the David Mamet line, like,

good father, fuck you, go home and play with your kids. You know, like, if you're not good, if you're not selling, you're not, this is a place that we're trying to sell land and not be nice to our kids. And I did find that the way she just keeps bringing it back to these personal characters, it's not healthy.

And it's also interesting that I think that it's one of the, one of the problems of politics in the internet is that people turn them into little fandums, you know, where everyone is like, oh, I love this person. So I need to everyone has to be, I love Liz Warren. So even though I don't think she'll win, I have to support her and do all of this. And that's sort of similar to what's going on here. It's just deeply unhealthy. Yeah.

But like Barack Obama had this fandom and almost always resisted the sort of self-indulgent bullshit that it allows you to engage in in a way that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were not disciplined about. And so it just feels like that, you know, it can be done correctly because we saw not that long ago someone do it right. I was reading the interview and cringing, occasionally pulling a pillow over my eyes to sort of give myself time to recover. And I was becoming really worried that whatever caused Joe Biden's cognitive decline might have been infectious. But then I thought, no, actually, she was always like this. She was always bad at giving answers. She was a very bad press secretary.

And why did she stay? Because Joe Biden never fired anyone. The fact that his administration was unpopular, that things weren't happening. No. They just, he'd hired someone and it was Joe's team. And they were supposed to display that same kind of loyalty. And in some ways, it's really impressive how little his White House leaked. And in another way, it's really not because it was like a little club of people who was

wrecking the Democratic Party and Joe Biden's reputation, by the way. while they were all being nice to each other. Yeah. I mean, one of the crazy Korean Jean-Pierre stories and the is that there were people in the White House who wanted her gone. And it was funny. People would ask me questions about this at the time

as she was, you know, doing this job very badly. Like, you know, what do you think about this? And it's like, on the one hand, she was really bad at this job. But on the other hand, like, if I was to make a list of, like, political problems plaguing the Biden White House, like the press secretary was bad at briefing would not have cracked the top 50. Oh, yeah. Like, and so.

And so part of why she was able to keep the job was that it actually wasn't that it wasn't that important that she was so bad at it. It was just sort of it was embarrassing. And the other thing is like when it's like, you know, well, why didn't she get fired? A lot of people like conservative especially are like, oh, it's because she was a black lesbian. But like, to your point, Megan, Biden didn't fire anyone. He didn't fire white guys either. And so I think, you know, the, but there was this apparent effort to get her out of the West Wing without firing her, which is that she was offered the job running Emily's list toward the, you know, sometime in early 2024. And no one has successfully reported this out, but a lot of people think that like Anita Dunn, who was one of the president's top advisors, sort of engineered this, like, hey, we can get her a soft landing. We can move her out. We can make John Kirby, the press secretary. And then Jean-Pierre turned the job down and it got into press and people sort of assume that it's John Pierre, who was behind the leak of, you know, the fact that she was offered this Emily's list job clearly trying to usher her out of the White House. And the funny thing with that is if she'd taken the job, she'd be running Emily's list right now.

Yeah. It is indicative of this broader personnel dysfunction that, again, you know, it would be better if it only applied to black lesbians because then at least you'd be able to fire everybody else. But it was like the, you just, you couldn't fire people even if they were bad at their jobs. And it's part of the reason that the White House was, was so ineffective. Yeah, I mean, Trump also had a history of not firing people who deserved to be fired because he just valued loyalty. Oh, oh, no, no, no, I'm talking about Trump. Oh, but Trump also did it. Well, we fired a lot of people in the first term. Right. But that was because they, they'd eventually go on television or something, say like, ah, this guy's no good.

And he's like, you're out. But, like, he also put up with a lot of it. He would fire people who embarrassed him. Right. And now his definition of what is embarrassing, not the same as mine. Right. I mean, like, even so far in this, in this, in this one, he didn't fire the fuck up who texted Jeffrey Goldberg about the war plans, right?

Like, well, they kicked him upstairs. They, uh, they made him ambassador to the UN to get him out of the, out of the national security council. So I guess it is similar to the, it's, that's the Emily's list for Mike Walts. Yeah. But he actually took the exit. Can we talk a little bit about trade?

There's been some funny trade news in a couple of directions this week. One is the administration has been, you know, clearly trying to prop up the Malay administration in Argentina. And apparently with some success, I mean, I don't know how much it affected the elections, but there were these midterm elections down in Argentina, this libertarian president who has been, you know, pushing market reforms in Argentina and is, you know, widely liked by the right around the world, has been having difficulty propping up the Argentinian peso. And so the Treasury has intervened in the market and billions and billions of dollars of

investment through these credit various facilities at the Treasury to try to benefit Argentina, and maybe it worked. But then another thing the president did is he announced we're going to buy more Argentinian beef. There's a quota that limits how much Argentinian beef can be imported to the United States. The president wants to relax it. And farm state Republicans are apoplectic about this and saying, you know, this is not America first and this is so damaging to America's ranchers or whatever. And it's just, it drives me a little bit crazy that the thing that can finally activate Republicans in Congress on the president's agenda of trade policy by Fiat is the one time when Donald Trump is the free trader and wants to allow freer trade in beef. And then they're like, no,

no, cheaper beef for Americans. That's awful. You can't allow that. It is extremely disappointing. My understanding is that Argentinian beef is extremely good. I've never had it because, of course. They do love their beef. They like, the national cuisine of Argentina is very American. It's just like, let's like grill it in a tremendous amount of meat. You know, America used to be a beef country too. And there were a lot of beef countries.

And then when you look at the charts, they were all replaced, like from the 1960s until now, chicken replaced all of them. And so now there's virtually no majority like beef countries except for Argentina and the one right next to it, Paraguay. Huh. It's the one of like the last, you know, they're living. living in the old life. Yes, we got much more efficient at farming chicken.

And so, like, there's, it is actually fascinating to read old cookbooks. I have an old cookbook from 1950 that has a recipe for making mock chicken drumsticks to stretch your budget out of veal. And, like, the relative prices completely flipped. Yeah. Starting in, I think, the 60s, maybe the 70s. Right. One of the reasons it flipped is the story of the Buffalo Wing.

Buffalo Wing shot to fame in the mid-1960s, and chickens only have so many wings, and so it led to them having to make more of them, and so it led to an oversupply of thigh and the other one. Yeah. How many buffalo wings were people eating? I have some skepticism about this story. Ben, what source did you read this in? Don't worry. I have an article waiting to publish about it, and the fact is that it began an Anchor's Bar in Buffalo, New York,

in 1964 and then within a few years they were selling hundreds of millions of them and it turned this trash cut of the chicken that was usually thrown out or used in soup broth yeah into this thing that then was costing more which led to an overproduction of it that then fit in with the 70s and 80s diet culture that led to the chicken growing and also the various ways that it was cheaper to do The great turkey breast boom of the 80s led to a mass export of frozen turkey legs. Because, of course, they were only using the breast meat, and you couldn't really sell turkey leg meat in the United States. I mean, you could, but not in large amounts. So they would export them to, like, the Philippines and Fiji and all of these places where they were cheap and people ate a lot of them.

Huh. Sorry, we were talking about Argentina. Yes. Megan, do you have any other thoughts on this election result? I mean, it's interesting to me how deeply invested American conservatives have gotten in, you know, what's happening in Argentina. Did we get our monies worth here with the Malay holding on? I mean, I have skepticism that he can maintain his dollar peg long term. Dollar pegs are very hard to maintain. And Argentina has gone off them before.

They've got a slightly less rigid one now, which helps but doesn't really solve the problem that if your currency is overvalued, a lot of people who have money will think about what they could do with that money. And one thing they could do with that money is bet that you're going to have to go off your currency peg. And that often usually means that eventually you have to go off your currency peg. To give people a little bit of context, Malay has gotten inflation down from like 1,000 to something like 30%, which is a big victory.

And that's part of what he's being rewarded for politically. but 30% is still a lot of inflation, a lot of inflation relative to the dollar. And so structurally, the Argentine peso should be weakening. And they're trying to stop it from weakening as much as the market would have it. And that's, as Megan notes, a difficult, dangerous game. Yeah, I am actually heartened that he managed to pull out this election, which people did not expect. Because, you know, he came into a really bad situation. Huge budget deficits being monetized, really high rates of inflation, also poor growth, like a huge number of

different problems at once. And when you're in that situation, the temptation is always to finesse it, or you can do something called shock therapy. And he opted for shock therapy. And the problem with shock therapy is that it's really unpopular. I will say also, for example, in Russia, it could have been done better. But the thing about shock therapy is that when you're in a democracy, what usually happens is that the person doing the shock therapy loses the next election and then you just go back into the cycle. And there are ways to try to mitigate that problem, for example, getting large IMF loans, but Argentina has a kind of history of defaulting to the IMF and to everyone else. They have a just large collection of problems, and it's going to take a long time to reestablish

to get inflation expectations. The thing about inflation expectations, right, is that if I think prices are going to go up and I'm writing a contract, I am going to write provisions in that contract for like on the assumption that prices in the future are going to be higher than prices now, my money will be worth less. And that means that once inflation expectations are high, it's very hard to get them down. I was talking to a policymaker in India a few weeks ago, who was saying they had gotten inflation down about 600 basis points, which is about six percentage points. But they'd only seen expectations fall by about 200 basis points because inflation in India had been very high for a very long time. And it just takes.

people a long time to adjust back to the expectation that, like, no, inflation is going to be low. And this is also true of Argentina's credibility at running, not running budget deficits, at their credibility at repaying their international loans. All of those things are going to take them at least a decade to really get into a spot where people are willing to trust them with credit, trust them with their money, and so forth. And so my expectation for Malay, even though I wished him well, he is a libertarian-ish, Austrian anyway, was that he was going to come in, do this stuff, and then voters were going to be like, okay, but why isn't everything better? You're gone. And that hasn't happened. And so I think all in all, it's exciting that Argentina actually has

a better future than it would have if they had, you know, sort of checked him in and tried to bring the Peronis back. But it's still a really long road ahead. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., as the president is trying to liberalize trade in Argentinian beef, he's also restricting trade in certain other areas. He announced a new 10% tariff on Canada because he's mad about an ad that Ontario premier Doug Ford took out on American television during the World Series in which the Blue Jays are playing, using audio of Ronald Reagan talking about how free trade is good and Trump is furious and thinks this misstates Ronald Reagan's legacy, which, you know, the president likes to say Reagan did tariffs and Reagan did do tariffs. and Reagan did do tariffs, but on a tiny scale compared to the tariffs that President Trump has imposed. But so he, you know, is reigniting that trade war with Canada. Maybe he's about to reach a deal with China.

But there's an interesting story this week in the New York Times about the economy in Iowa and also in Nebraska, which is sort of the region of the country that's been hit the hardest by the combination of trade and immigration policies that this administration has pursued. The trade war with China has impaired U.S. soybean exports to China. Farm equipment has gotten more expensive because of, you know, the import tariffs. There's also, you know, in eastern Iowa, there's a fair amount of manufacturing that relies on aluminum and steel and other things that have been tariffed. And then also you have industries that have been heavily reliant on immigrant labor, including illegal immigrant labor. And they are having more difficulty finding employees to work. And so there's been a significant contraction in the economy in this part of the country.

Governor Kim Reynolds, the Republican governor is not seeking re-election. She's one of the least popular governors in the country. I've sort of, you know, been sitting here in New York waiting for the shoes to drop on the economy because the president has imposed these enormous tariffs. They don't really seem to face the stock market that much. You know, the, the monkeying with the Federal Reserve also doesn't move the financial markets as much as I might have expected it to. You know, economic growth has been sort of, you know, middling but remains positive. But I guess, you know, at least regionally, we're starting to see that these policies have real effects that, you know, for which there might be real political penalties in the sort of place that is particularly, exposed to trade policy because of all of these physical goods that are central to the economy

and where, you know, it's not like there's going to be a big AI startup in Des Moines that attracts all the capital and makes everything work there. So I don't know, maybe the thing that we've been watching for, anyone who's been critical of the president's economic policy, maybe we're starting to see it show up here. Yeah, I mean, it was always going to take longer than people were expecting than most people were expecting. And I said this kind of privately at the time was guys don't make people think that next month, the price of everything is going to go up. That's not how inventories work. Right. And also don't make people think that the, you know, the economy is going to crash by 15%. We're about 25% of our economy is exposed to trade.

If you raise tariffs, this is going to have a meaningful impact and it's bad. But it's not going to destroy the U.S. economy. It's going to be a one-time growth shock. And, I mean, at least provided that the tariffs are somewhat fixed and do not. keep changing wildly until everyone just gives up and goes back to carving rocks for a living. Yeah, indeed. But people who didn't kind of work through the math of it or understand how supply chains work were expecting these huge and immediate impacts. And what you were going to get was a very significant impact, right?

A 2% decline in economic growth is major. That is a recession. It's not minor. But it's also not like the Great Depression. it is just a 2% decline in economic growth, something like what we saw during the first second Bush administration, if that makes sense. The first W administration. And I think people overpromised.

And then there was this lull where it was like, oh, look, the sky hasn't fallen. Yay. Well, look, first of all, the tariffs are working their way through the supply chain now. People have been buying a lot of stuff that was untariffed, stuffing their retail channels in anticipation of Christmas. but eventually it's going to show up and prices are going to start to rise and people are going to get super upset. If we're lucky, we'll get past Christmas. But eventually it is going to be there and it is going to be bad. But I think that everyone, including somewhat mysteriously, the markets, has just not

kind of thought about what the actual likely size and time frame were going to be. And so they were initially too pessimistic. Now they're too optimistic. And then we're going to head back to too pessimistic when reality actually starts to bite. Ben, I just saw you taking a big swig of your luxury imported Topochico water. Yeah, it did. Bottled fresh in Monterey. You better start to like tap, buddy. Actually, that's probably USMCA compliant. And so it's probably one of the things that's been exempt from the president's trade war. So you're, you're lucky there, Ben. I mean, if it wasn't, it already is quite expensive. You know, I can't. I can't. Like, I can handle it. But somebody was telling me recently about a very nice bottled bubbly water from Europe. And I was like, the tariffs make it impossible, sir.

I can't be ordering these on Amazon. Yes, but think of our domestic water industry and all the jobs that will be created. That's true. I was thinking as I was reading that story about Iowa, you know, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about farm equipment in Iowa. And I was wondering what other regional industries have such high exposure to this that I haven't thought about until the New York Times writes about them, where they come up.

Well, I mean, obviously autos is a big one, but the thing is that there's a bunch of countervailing effects that, you know, that some, you know, it's imported steel and steel makes it more expensive to build the car. But on the other hand, you know, you are seeing some announcements from Mercedes and others that they're moving production here to avoid tariffs on, you know, on final completed cars. So the sign there, I think, is less clear than on some of this Iowa stuff. And also hard to tease out from the fact, I don't know if anyone's been following the Nexperia drama in the Netherlands.

No. Yes, it's very amusing. So basically the Chinese bought a maker of low-level. They're not like, this is not the high-end NVIDIA chips that use for AI. They're just basic chips. But, you know, China is trying to move up the value chain and semiconductors. And so they bought a Dutch company. The U.S. put pressure on them allegedly. We don't really know why this happened. But the Dutch said, no, you're transferring technology to your Chinese parent and you're not supposed to do that. And now we're taking your company from you. And then it got even more fun because the Chinese branch. of this company was like, no, but we are declaring independence. And it was very, it was really hilarious. But the upshot is that this has cut off the supply of chips. And now like Volkswagen shutting down a couple lines, including the car. I own the Tiguan, a very fine, small to medium SUV for those of you who are looking for a car.

Looking for a car that you can't get anymore. Yeah. Sorry. Anyway, like that stuff, all the supply chain stuff with decoupling with China isn't always about tariffs. There's a lot more drama about export controls, about these rare earthbans that China's doing, and all of those things are also going to be feeding into the prices of a lot of products and going to make it hard to actually tell what's the tariffs and what's other things that have been happening all over the world as we try to get. I think fairly, look, I am in general

opposed to tariffs. I do think that there are certain critical supply chains you want China out of. They should not control strategic, you know, supplies of things. that we need in order to, say, be in a war with a country that shall be named later. Like Grindr. Yeah. We made them sell Grindr. We don't want them to control our strategic supply of gay dates. I mean, imagine what would happen in a...

That's a good terminology for what one finds on Grindr. Is hookups better? Yeah, that's better. Imagine what would happen in wartime if our brave gay fighters could not get access to the tale they needed to keep morale up. Did you guys see the thing that they said? Or he was like, yeah, we'll let him have TikTok. It's just the opium of the brain.

Oh, yeah. Or whatever. Or spiritual opium. Yeah, this is apparently how Xi talks about TikTok. It's such a smart way of like describing it back to like the 19th century with like, they're just going to let us get hooked on our little brain cookie craziness. I hate it. That's how they win.

I hate it so much. I think we can leave it there this week. Ben, Megan, this is another fun conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Josh. Thank you. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Faye. We are a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddock mixed this episode. Our music is by Joshua Mosier. Thanks for listening.

Stay cool out there.