Central Air - Don't Tear Up Your Lawn

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Listeners: join Josh, Megan and Ben on Friday at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific for a video chat on Substack. Go to centralairpodcast.com for more details.This week: we discuss President Trump’s gross and remarkably self-centered response to the murder of Rob and Michele Reiner, and the strangely candid interview that Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles granted to Vanity Fair. We look at reporting from The New York Times on how Jeffrey Epstein rose to prominence and success on Wall Street, despite very early signs that he shouldn’t be trusted, and we consider an essay in Compact arguing that diversity mandates at academic, arts and media institutions have been designed by older generations to fall solely on the backs of white men who are millennial and younger, producing institutions staffed by old white guys and very few young white guys. Plus: bad ideas about backyard gardening, and our predictions for 2026. 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

This is Josh Barrow here with a new episode of Central Air. I want to let you know, Megan, Ben, and I are going to be doing a live video chat this Friday, December 19th on Substack. That's going to be at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific on Friday. We're going to offer some holiday gift recommendations. We're going to talk about baking strategies for Christmas. We'll also be taking questions from listeners. We'd love to have you there.

If you want to join that, go to Centralairpodcast.com and sign up. You'll get a notification when the chat is happening. It's going to be open to everyone. but paying subscribers will also be able to watch the playback later in the event that you are not available to join us at 1 o'clock on Friday. But we do hope to see you there live Friday at 1. We're looking forward to connecting with you. We hope you'll be there. Now here's the show. Welcome back to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right.

I'm Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post. Megan, I was happy to see that your husband, Peter Sutterman, put out a newsletter issue with the cocktail that he helped me develop a couple of weeks. weeks ago for Christmas. Did you get to sample any of those while he was... I did not. Oh, no. I was deprived. You should get Peter to make one of those for you. We're also here, Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Subzac newsletter, calm down. Ben, what's your Mai Tai situation been lately? I don't know that I've ever even had a Mai Tai in my entire life. I did enjoy listening to Peter sell it. And I was, it's on the list now.

Come over and have a Mai Tai, Ben. This can be arranged. Every week, it's a new thing that Ben has never had. I mean, I guess, you know, a Mai Tai is a less strange thing to have never had than pie. I mean, in fairness, Ben has been living in a yurt for most of his life, subsisting on dirt and sticks. I have had savory pies, just to be clear. Yes, yes, yes, yes. You've told us about the savory pies. The savory pies I've had, all right?

I'm not some freak. Not some freak. The president's kind of a freak. We're going to start this week with the weird thing he said, which, I mean, you know, if you're going to focus on weird things Trump says, obviously you could you could open your show with that every week. But this week, Rob Reiner died. I mean, this horrible story. Rob Reiner murdered, along with his wife, apparently, by his very troubled son. And so this news came out and lots of people were very sad about it and had a lot of, you know, remembrances to do of Rob Reiner and the great films that he made. And the president's reaction was to declare that he must have been murdered because of his Trump derangement syndrome. That his Trump derangement syndrome really upset a lot of people and that someone killed him over it, which is a weird thing to say on several dimensions. And one thing that's been weird to me, to me, about this is that, you know, like, of all of the things that Trump has said, this is the one that seems to be like cleaving him from a lot of his own base and people saying you really

shouldn't say that. And he really shouldn't say that. But it's just interesting to me that for this to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It feels like the wheels are coming off the Trump administration. Now that prediction has been made many times before. So I offer it with trepidation. But it just does feel like they are floundering. Like there's no direction, like no one's really in charge. No one is reining in the stuff that is damaging them. And that was something that you saw in the first Trump administration for all of his many flaws as a president, was that when people embarrassed him, they would be gone. And that has not happened. I mean, the ice raids are really bad for the Republican Party politically. And I don't know whether that's

because this is sort of the YOLO presidency, right? He is never running for office again. He doesn't have to care. He certainly doesn't care about the future of his party, which constrains normal lame ducks. But I also wonder if it isn't like he's almost 80. And this is what you saw with Biden was just an increasing lack of control over his own administration. And because the staffers who are running the Trump administration have been selected first hand, first of all, for their personal loyalty to Donald Trump. And second of all, for their kind of ideological extremity in some direction. or another, that this is the result is they're doing stuff that's politically incredibly counterproductive. The tariffs are a good example. I do think Trump has been meddling, but not in a

productive way where I do think he had instincts on things like Social Security, Medicare, and so forth, of reining in the Republican Party's unpopular positions and just saying, no, we're not going to do that because it turns out people really don't like that. He's not doing that on tariffs. He's not doing that on immigration. And so this feels to me like, a piece of that that it's no longer strategic in some way. It's just pure id. I have a slightly different take on it there. I do think that part of what's happening here is that the president is becoming less popular and has less of a political grip on the country and on the party. And that gives permission for Republicans to break with him both on, you know,

things like this, which is basically a tonal thing. But then also, you know, you have Republicans who are, you know, agitating because they want to vote on extending Obama. Medicare subsidies and that sort of thing trying to get political distance from the administration on issues. But I think it's just because the economy is slowing down. And to some extent that's the president's own fault. The tariff policy has been bad for the economy and is one of the reasons that inflation is stubbornly high and that the economy and that growth is slowing down. Aside from that, I think you continue to see places where the administration is picking its shots politically. And most notably, they've done essentially nothing to try to restrict abortion access at the federal level, much

to the irritation of certain pro-life groups and interests in the Republican Party. You've just seen this week, Mike Pence, demanding the resignation of RFK Jr. at HHS saying that RFK is a closet progressive, someone who was a Democrat not very long ago, who's not interested in using the government to restrict abortion. But it's clear that that's because the president correctly identifies that as a political loser for Republicans. I think the ice raids, I don't think the ice raids are popular. But I haven't seen a poll that has Democrats prefer. over Republicans on immigration, even, you know, in the aftermath of months and months of this, you know, extremely aggressive immigration enforcement policy that is sometimes sweeping up U.S.

citizens and doing things that people don't approve of on the streets of their cities. So I'm not, you know, I'm not sure that it's a wholesale political failure of this presidency so much as it's a repeat of what happened with Joe Biden, where the economy went sideways in a way that the administration wasn't prepared for, didn't have a plan to fix and didn't really have a message about. And you're even seeing some of the same messaging stuff coming around that happened during Biden. Oh, yeah. About, you know, the basically, you know, you just need to give us some time. The inflation's going to come down. Actually, the economy is better than you think. And I think that's the whole. They've even revived one of my favorite dumb memes from the Biden administration,

which is blaming the meat packers for rising meat prices. Yes. They are not the reason that meat prices are going up. The reason meat prices are going up is, A, inflation and B, things like tariffs are affecting their inputs. There's a bunch of factors here, approximately zero of which is consolidation in the meatpacking industry. Ben, what did you make of the Rob Reiner truth? I mean, I agree with basically everything

that you guys have said about all of this. I was just, even after all of these years of Donald Trump being the biggest prick in history, I was still just shocked at the grossest of this tweet. Not because it's the worst thing he's ever done, maybe. Although I'm having a hard time immediately thinking of something as tone deaf?

I think your right to hone in on that, though, is a thing where, like, something, you know, terrible happens to someone. They're the victim of a violent crime or they're even murdered. And there's this, on the right, there is this reach both to bizarre conspiracy theories of what happened and finding it funny that someone who was politically opposed to you suffered this great misfortune. Yeah, the other thing that was just so shocking about watching it happen in that moment is just because everyone else, you know, was doing the thing that you're supposed to do. one, I mean, as a human, of just being shocked and appalled by it.

But then even people who didn't like Ron Briner, you know, all of the people, all the conservatives were saying, oh, you know, I disagree to them, but this is obviously terrible. And then some of them were doing, going a step further and saying, you know, unlike when the left is celebrating all of the murders that happened when Charlie Kirk was killed, you won't see any of that here. No, no one on the right is celebrating it. And then Trump just like jumped in and celebrated the hell out of it. And I just think that that's one of the reasons why even now he's getting pushed back from a lot of those conservatives is that they were, they had come up with their own little talking point here to own lives in comparison. And then he couldn't keep his dick in his pants.

And so made individually all of those people feel a little bit like a whore, which they are. Wait, I'm sorry. He made them feel like whores? Well, I mean, all of those Republicans who were going like, well, you know, you'll, You'll never see Republicans celebrate the death of someone. To say they feel like cores would be to suggest that they can feel shame. I mean, Jack Fasobiac, that like Pizza Gate conspiracy theorist weirdo, was one of the people who was like, you know, people on the right won't say this about Rob Reiner. And then Trump says it.

And then he's just explaining why the president was absolutely right to say this about Rob Reiner. I mean, they can't even remember what they said five minutes ago. But I think that, you know, that that's some of the like, you know, influencer, MAGA universe defend whatever the president's. says, but it's been really remarkable to me how in Congress, this is something that a lot of members have chosen is, you know, this is where I can, you know, stake the fact that I'm different than him. And I guess they're going into a difficult midterm and they'd like to find some way to get that separation they won't necessarily be punished for by the White House. I don't know. It's just a weird, like, very little, very late thing for me. Megan, you mentioned that he doesn't fire people around him this

time around and that that's causing some of these, these problems where he becomes so insular. And that's been, it's an explicit strategy on the part of the White House. They're saying no scalps this time. And I think their feeling was, you know, you fire Tom Price for overusing the private jet at HHS. And that just encourages the media. It encourages Democrats. They whip up more controversies and then you end up having to fire more people. And there's some amount of that that happens where if there's blood in the water, then, you know, then people, you know, campaign around things that they wouldn't otherwise.

But the flip side of it is if you don't fire anyone, sometimes someone is doing, you know, a really bad job that is under mining you politically and you're stuck with whatever nonsense it is that they are doing. Indeed. As the Biden administration shows. Over and over and over again, yes. Yeah. The no scalps rule in this White House, I think, has prevented them from making the turns that they need in any of these policy areas. But I don't know what the turns would look like if they did.

I mean, part of the problem, you know, if what's dragging down your presidency is that the economy is worsening, in general, you're kind of screwed. Like, the president doesn't have a dial that he can just turn that's like good economy, bad economy. Is it different in this administration because they've made so many unforced errors you could go and just lift all the tariffs tomorrow? Yeah, I think you could adjust the levels on the tariffs and that would be good. It wouldn't maybe like rescue the economy, but it would be better. Just be like, I have decided today we have a 5% tariff. Right. Like my preferred level is zero.

But, you know, it's 5 or 10%. It's across the board. It's on everything. That's what it's going to be. No more changes. And that's it. And that would be a great announcement. It would bring relief and gladness to the heart of many manufacturers who at the moment do not know how to organize their supply chains because the tariffs, like some obscure physics particle, exist only in the mind of Donald Trump at any moment that could change into a completely different form of matter.

And I think you could do that. I think you could dial back the ice raids and just because I agree with you, Josh, if you give it. people at choice between utterly brutal internal removals and border, what border, then people are going to choose the former. But they really don't like, as far as I can see from the polling. And I mean, I will say my own personal opinion on this might be shaping how I read those polls. But they really don't like watching little ladies be shoved around by ice for no reason, right? It's not like the two-foot-tall woman who's yelling at the ICE agent represents a mortal threat that must be contained by kicking her to the floor and zip-tying

her immediately. And I think most people just don't like seeing that in the same way they didn't like seeing kids in cages in the first Trump administration. And the first Trump administration rapidly figured that out, dialed it back, and then it was a non-issue. And they could do the same thing now, but somehow they aren't. Just stop being unpopular now. Like, Donald Trump has been unpopular for his entire, this entire era, except for this one

brief period when people were really, really upset with Joe Biden, you know, and some stuff going on on the left. And then they've all been remembering that they don't like this guy. Much people don't like him. And when he then adds all of these other things that he's screwing up, that the economy, he's gone out of his way to own with these tariffs and all of these things in a way that are like just incredibly stupid. And then all of these other random little chaoses that he does all the time, like, randomly telling Jeffrey Goldberg about war plans and bullshit. And he's been unpopular. Yeah, but he's been like this all along.

And he's, you know, he's won two out of three elections. He has been popular enough up until a few months ago. Like, and I think that, you know, I don't know, I just, I really don't want Democrats to get excessively complacent about some of this stuff. If they, if they, because there's, there's this temptation to basically say, look how unpopular is on everything. Even his immigration agenda, people don't like it anymore. And that ends up justifying, you know, whatever it is that Democrats want to do in their own deepest heart of hearts, even if that's quite unpopular and saying, well, you know, the counterfactual is Trump so we can go back and throw open the border again and all these sorts of things. I just, you know, I think he is subject to the same laws of gravity as every other political leader around the world, which is to say that, you know, the rumbling discontent about the economy that goes around globally is coming for him too. But I think that's that's the fundamental problem. And as with other leaders, leaders around the world. If he did a little better on that, then he might actually, you know, be able to get one over on the Democrats. No, no. I mean, I think I agree with you that the central problem here for Democrats is that Trump's weakness actually is like a long-term liability for Democrats because it allows them to not make important structural changes and reforms to their own policies. And you saw that. I mean, we're living in the era of that, right, because Trump was such a fuck up in the first one that it allowed Democrats to go buck wild and do all this insane nonsense that then was so.

toxicly unpopular that it destroyed the entire party and reelected him. Do you think it would have been different, though? This is a question I asked myself. I'm not challenging you. I'm asking. Would what have been different? If Donald Trump had been less crazy, would the Democratic Party in 2020 have been less crazy?

Or was that mostly about social media and not about Donald Trump? I think it was social media, but I do think that Trump created a condition where Democrats were like, this is fucking five alarm. fire and we are going to take leave of our senses a little bit for this one because this is, you know, fascism is here or whatever, whatever terms you want to call it. And then it just added a bit of fucking, you know, fairy dust to everything that happened. And so everyone was a little bit, a little bit more flying off to Never Neverland, right, that I don't think would have happened. I mean, maybe I'm wrong about that. I don't know. I also think Democrats told themselves stories that

Donald Trump proves that people can go for anything. Right. And which is wrong. That if that can win, then obviously whatever I like can win to. Sometimes people are just searching for the story to tell them that they can do the thing that they wanted to do all along. And if that story wasn't available, maybe it would have just been a different story. I do think that the, you know, the runaway nature of the 2020 primary where it was just, you know, like we're going to eat all the candy that we want, I think was justified by that. I don't disagree with what you're saying at all. I guess what I think is just that it doesn't mean that Trump, that Trump right now, as he exists in 2025 and who we know him to be. could suddenly turn the plane around, you know,

and pull out of this decline of popularity that is just him reverting back to what he's basically been forever. But that is a huge problem for Democrats who can use it to avoid all of these important, difficult discussions that they need to make. And that that's a huge problem that Democrats need to be, like, aware of and not allow this to happen again.

The other funny thing with this, you know, Trump unleashed second term is that the counterweight to the fact that, you know, he has these, you know, more extreme officials in the cabinet that are not as cognizant of public outrage or of public opinion as some who were in the first administration is that his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is much more powerful than the first term chiefs of staff and is supposed to be this sort of stabilizing influence, that she's the one who keeps, you know, keeps all the trains on track. She has been an impressive political operative in a lot of ways. I think the way that she ran the 2024 campaign was quite. impressive for Donald Trump. But this week, she's in the news having given this series of very long, unguarded interviews to Chris Whipple, this guy who has written books on the histories of White House Chiefs of Staff, sat down with her 11 times. And she just, you know, badmouthed the

whole bunch of the other officials in the administration. She said the president has an alcoholic's personality. And, you know, clarify that, you know, the president doesn't drink, but that his sort of, you know, the self-regard and belief that he can do anything is sort of similar to dealing with an alcoholic. She talks about that Russ Vaught, who runs OMB, is an absolute right-wing zealot. She accused Elon Musk of using ketamine and then claimed to the New York Times that she never said that, even though Chris Whipple produced a tape of Susie Wiles talking about how Elon Musk uses ketamine, which is the thing that's also been in the press a fair amount. Yeah, I feel like that's pretty widely known at this point.

And then she talks about how, you know, Marco Rubio has a lot of, all of these, you know, like, core views that he really had to be brought around. He's not going to just, you know, abandon his principles to get behind Trump. Whereas for J.D. Vance, it was like more of a political decision. I mean, first of all, the, the question that comes up with all these sorts of things is, like, why did this person talk to the press? And I think the usual answer and something that I sometimes have trouble convincing people who are outside the media, they always think that, you know, whenever something comes out that's a leak, it's, you know, some grand plan or scheme or conspiracy. And in fact, like, you know, a lot of,

When people talk to reporters in ways that they shouldn't, it's just because they enjoy talking about themselves. Everyone likes talking about themselves. And, you know, reporters are good listeners. And it can be fun to talk to them about yourself. But do not use a reporter as a therapist. But I thought Susie Wiles was smarter than that. I mean, especially people love talking to Vanity Fair. That's everyone's dream person to chat with.

Her Twitter rebuttal is, I would say, a sort of classic non-denial denial. Wait, what did she say on Twitter? The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit. piece on me and the finest president, White House staff, and cabinet in history. Significant context was disregarded, and much of what I and others said about the team and the president was left out of the piece. Oh, yes. My quotes are out of context. That's always a... Yeah, yeah. When I said that Trump had an alcoholic's personality, I meant that in a completely different way. It didn't mean he had an alcoholic's personality. So, yeah, this is remarkable to me.

that she did this because she is usually more disciplined. It's not that she talked. She said those things on the record. Like, what are you thinking? Why? Why? I just, I don't know.

It's delicious and puzzling. It's a bit like the mango in that regard. The mango. Yeah, you know, I mean, it's got this giant stone in the middle of it. You can't really figure out why it's there.

It makes it hard. It's the seed. Yeah, no, I know. But, like, why is it so giant? And why is it fibrous and connected to the flesh? I don't like it. I'm not sure I understand the analogy, Megan. But I get that you're calling her strange.

It's just I don't understand why it happened. I am relishing every bite. But I really don't understand why it happened. Let's take a quick break. By the way, have you gone to centralarpodcast.com? We have a lively comments section and also on the substack app, a chat channel that has been quite fun for discussing this show. So I encourage you to go to centralairpodcast.com. Sign up there. You'll get

access to all of that. We would love to have you. We'll be right back. The New York Times has a feature this week about the rise of Jeffrey Epstein trying to unravel this mystery of how the hell did Jeffrey Epstein make so much money. And this has been the weird thing. You know, we know that Leslie Wexner, the billionaire who founded the limited had Jeffrey Epstein manage his money and paid him sort of absurdly handsomely for doing that. For a long time, he was Jeffrey Epstein's only. He was publicly identified client. But there's still been the, it's so unclear how this guy who was like a math teacher at Dalton, the highly selective private school in New York City, rose up through the ranks of Wall Street and became this very rich person not apparently serving that many

people. It's also the reason there's a lot of conspiracy theories about, you know, other possible ways with blackmail or involvement with foreign intelligence services, how the hell Jeffrey Epstein made so much money. So anyway, the Times tries to solve this mystery, and they sort of shed light on it, in that they describe deals that he engaged in that made him money. What they don't explain is, and I don't know that anyone can't explain it, is why the counterparties agreed to engage in these deals with him. And it basically describes him, you know, starting in the early 1980s, being a very charming and convincing young man who basically elbows his way into Wall Street sideways

and keeps talking wealthy and important people into investing money in things. And then sometimes he loses that money in ways that are very shady and seems to face no apparent consequence for that and basically just keeps doing this upward until he gets introduced to Wexner and basically convinces Leslie Wexner that his incumbent money manager is stealing from him. And so to instead bring in Jeffrey Epstein to handle it. To steal from him. To steal from him.

And so the times they've laid out the what. They haven't laid out the why. But I think the why. And it's something that will, I think also helps inform certain later things that happen with Jeffrey Epstein during his, you know, sex crime day. he just clearly has had this remarkable personality that allowed him to convince people that they wanted to be around him, they wanted to trust him, they wanted to trust him with their money, way against their better judgment. And it just kept working and working and working. And, you know, I guess we, you know, we've all sort of seen people like this, maybe not to that level.

But it just, you know, reinforces for me the idea that it's this force of personality thing that catapulted him into this, you know, bizarre and malevolent life he ended up leading. Yeah, and I think we're handicapped in this regard, or we have been handicapped in this regard, really still are after this time story. But the fact that no one wants to be like, let me tell you how charming the pedophile was. Right. So, like, people will say he was charming. But there are, I have not seen, to be clear, I have not exhaustively cataloged all of Epsteinania. But I haven't seen what you often get in these stories, which is the anecdotes about how. he charmed me. Right. The funny, charming moments that show you how this sociopath managed to get people to like him and trust him. But because of what he did in specific, no one wants to be like, well, you know, there we were chatting. And he was hilarious. And let me tell you about this darling thing he did for my 40th birthday or whatever it is. You're not getting any of it. But I assume that that stuff must have happened. Right. He didn't just like, like stand around like a mannequin and look, I don't know, give people piercing gazes with his dark eyes and somehow they were hypnotized. I assume that there was some sort of interpersonal reaction

that is never going to make it into any of these stories precisely because it feels so gross to, I suspect it also feels gross to journalists who are given things like that. It feels so gross to describe this guy being in any way likable even for two minutes. But that's clearly what it is. Yeah, no, no, it's clearly what it is. But what I'm saying is, you know, like the show don't tell thing is that in these kinds of deep dives, normally you get a lot of showing. You get a lot of like, here is the moment where he just charmed her, won her heart, et cetera, right? And there is zero of that. There's just like a description that people were charmed by him.

Yes, how? How did this happen? Was he like, you know, like one of those guys with the snakes, the cobra in a basket? and he started playing a little flute. And then I have no idea. Because in none of the stories about Epstein, do you ever get any of that? I don't know, Ben, what did you make of this?

I have a friend who went over to his house like 10 years ago or something after he was already a sex criminal, you know. And she was like a scientist and went over in a... Did she know he was a sex criminal when she went? Yeah. Well, she knew he already gotten in trouble in the past. He was in, like, she in a group of science. or whatever from Harvard had, like, gone to something.

And she told me this. And I was like, so did he, did he, do you? And she said, no, honestly, he was pretty nice. Had a great night. He was lovely to all of us. We all sat around talking about physics. And did she feel like it was, like, weird and wrong to go do that? I don't think that she knew the details of it at the time.

Like, she knew that he had, like, a prostitia. charge or something. It was before like the Miami Herald stories and all of that stuff, you know. There was a really good podcast that Ross Douthit did with the Miami Herald reporter. Julie Brown. Who, yeah, who kind of uncovered all this. And one thing she said was that you have to understand that the way the charges were done, he pled to like a single count or maybe it was two counts of, but I think it was a single count of an underage girl, right? And that because of that, like, you could, I think people may have imagined, like, well, I thought she was 19, turned out she was 17, not what it actually was. Yeah. That friend of mine, like, definitely did not know what we all then found out, the details of all of it.

And I think in that case, she and her little physics club from Harvard or whatever wouldn't have gone to that house and been like, oh, yeah, we were just playing boggle or whatever. But she did say that she, you know, there was a interesting. like brought a bunch of interesting scientists together. They had a fun conversation about science, no rate. And in the stories about that period, you know, so 2009, the conviction happens and sort of in the 20 teens, he's continuing to have these dealings. There's people like your friend who, you know, presumably get brought along as big characters. But then there's a few other people, and Larry Summers obviously is in this category, sort of like core contacts for him who are validators in elites, academic and political and policy spaces. and who are bringing these people around.

And Bill Gates and all of these people made what were terrible decisions on several dimensions, both that, you know, was not a great moral thing to be involved with him. There was tremendous reputational risk associated with it that has, you know, really come down to be a problem for a lot of those people. And it seems like the sort of thing that should have been obvious because I assume those people who knew him better probably had a little bit more of an accurate read on exactly what the criminal charge had been. I mean, I guess maybe, maybe. Maybe not, but like, I don't know. He, like, my understanding from that interview, and again, I am not an Epstein fanatic, is that he just kind of settled into court, pled guilty to a couple of counts. And that the way it was done with everything sealed, it might well have been possible to think, okay, well, maybe he paid like a 17-year-old prostitute and he thought she was 19, maybe, you know, like, wasn't there some amount of contemporaneous news coverage in 0809 when he was being.

being investigated? I don't know the answer to that, but I mean, I had never heard of this guy before he became a thing in the 2010s. I don't remember it being a big story. Obviously, I do not spend a lot of time in Palm Beach, so perhaps it was better known there. But I suspect that, like, while people understood he had a skeevy interest in very young women, they may not have understood the extent of what was happening or even understood the possibility of that, right? They might have just thought, well, he had a bunch of very young mistresses

and then one of them turned out to be even younger than he thought, which was obviously, to be clear, not what actually happened, but that I think that the way that the court case was done might have given people that impression. I also, I just find these stories with people describe, well, you know, he took me in and then he took my money and that I was never able to get my money back. Or in one instance, his boss at Bear Stearns learns that he has lied and claimed to hold college degrees that he didn't hold, but then didn't fire him for it and actually was kind of like, well, I asked him why he did that and he said he couldn't, thought he couldn't get into Wall Street otherwise, and I kind of related to that. I feel like I am on guard against being taken in by this sort of person. I'm aware of this personality archetype, or at least I think that I am.

dealed against it, and I don't know, maybe that's just a story that I tell myself. I also think that, but then, like, in a different way, is just like, I'm inherently, in some ways, a very trusting person, but in terms of giving other people my money and not trusting at all. But I think that the thing that holds me back is that all of the, the way you take a mark, right, is to think that he's taking you. And so, I don't know, maybe this actually makes me more vulnerable. The belief that I am impervious to this. I did love in the New York Times story that that anecdote you just described where the barrister and guys like, so I go up to him and I says, these colleges, they never heard of you. And he says, all right, I'll admit it. I didn't go to those two

colleges. I didn't graduate college. And he says, so why'd you do it? Why'd you lie? And he says, I didn't think you'd hire me if I didn't. And then the guy relates to this as he goes, oh, and that was a really good answer. I mean, of course that's why he did it. What else? Why else would he'd done it. I'll see you lie on your resume. Like, what, what, what answer could you give in where the guy would have said, actually, this isn't a good one. You're gone.

This isn't a good enough excuse. In a strange way, when I was reading this story, actually, it had me thinking some about the like American Canto, Olivia Nutsi, R.FK Jr., Ryan Lizza situation in that it's this whole story of a lot of people making terrible decisions at the influence of each other that seemed like it should have been. foreseeable how terrible all the decisions were at the time. And they went ahead and did it anyway. And I don't know. It's like, I guess like similarly strong interpersonal forces running in several directions there, causing people to do things that once you see it on the page, you're like,

why the fuck did you do any of that? I mean, look, Josh, in 2003, I decided to take my MBA, which cost me a $100,000 worth of student loans that I had to pay every month. There was no income-based repayment. And I got a job offer from the economist that paid $40,000 a year, which was two-thirds of what I had made before I went to business school. My mother just panicked. My father controlled his panic better and was like, how would you analyze this as a business school problem? And I was like, well, I guess I would project the future cash flows and then I would discount them for something to represent the fact that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. He was like, please do that. And so I did it and it had like the same expected

value is becoming addicted to crack. And yet I did it anyway, which is how so many great stories start. And sometimes, you know, it works out. So sometimes you should go to Epstein's Island, is what you're saying. No, no, in that case, I'm just saying that that mentality is maybe how you get to be a rich person in the first place. You're like, this seems like a bad idea, but I don't know. Let's try it.

Or that's how you get to be Washington Post journalist. Kids don't try this one at home. Right. I have a certain fondness for people who do things that seem unwise. Speaking of unwise choices to enter journalism, there's an essay in Compact Magazine by Jacob Savage, who is a formerly struggling screenwriter who writes about his struggle trying to get into screenwriting and basically argues that because he was a white man coming up in the millennial generation, that the diversity efforts in Hollywood made it impossible for him to do that. And his argument about this is more sympathetic than it sounds when I put it that way. And he describes, this process that happened in a number of industries that happened in creative industries, that happened in journalism, that happened in academia, where basically you get a shift at some point in the last 10 years. And one thing we'll talk about is exactly when the shift happened, because I think he has the

year wrong by a little bit. But you have this shift toward these organizations deciding that they need to have a much different demographic makeup than they have, that they have been too male and too white for too long, and they need to change that. And the manner in which they change that is entirely through the new cohort. That basically you have an existing crop of old white guys who are there, who continue to be there, who continue to have the high profile jobs.

And the way that you change your numbers is that everyone you hire into a junior position has to be in one of the target demographics for hiring. Or maybe not literally everyone, but a large majority. And it creates this cohort effect where, you know, if you were a white guy who was 50, then it was a great time to go into screenwriting.

And if you were a white guy who was now 40, then you were screwed because you were, in the wrong cohort. And whenever anyone makes arguments like this, one of the problems is it's hard to tell, you know, when that's what happened versus when it's just, you know, you weren't that good, and you maybe you wouldn't have made it anyway, and, you know, how can you possibly know for sure? And so the first thing that struck out at me reading this essay is that he says, you know, 2014 was the pivot point, the hinge, the year the DEI became institutionalized across American life. And it's why people who are, who are millennials who are about 40 right now, why those white guys were

especially screwed. But, you know, I'm a white guy who's 41. And I, you know, my first full-time journalism job was in 2012 when I was in 28. But in 2014, that's the year I got hired as a correspondent at the New York Times. And it was, you know, very much the sort of like the beginning of the, of the shooting off of my journalism career. And we're fine for me. And I think that there's, you know, there's a few different things happening here. But one is that, you know, something that he describes as happening in 2014, I think really didn't start happening in earnest a lot of these organizations until 2018, 2019, where you actually start seeing people overtly saying things like, well, you know, we can't hire a white guy for this

role because of the diversity needs. And so I think that, you know, some of the stuff he describes happened and happened later. But the other thing is that I think, you know, it happened with differing intensity in different places. And in fact, there were a number of avenues that remained, you know, widely open to, you know, people of any race or gender in these industries, even if there were certain places where it became a lot harder to come up as a white man. Yeah, I think he is broadly correct. In fact, I wrote a column about this. I can't remember when. probably 2021, 2022. Something I noticed in my own industry was people were saying, like, journalism should

represent the population in general, and they would throw out these statistics that, like, journalism is 73% white or something, and the population is only X percent white. And so I actually ended up. I was like, you are making mathematical errors left and right. Number one is that because of immigration and because immigrants had higher birth rates than Americans, Native-born Americans, until 2008 when they actually started to converge. But people were thinking disproportionately like non-white Americans were young, like under the age of 18. They were not going to be working in media organizations.

The older immigrants did not speak English well enough to be working as journalists, right? also many of them were unskilled. They did not have the education to work as a journalist, certainly without a long training period at, say, like a farm workers newsletter or something, right? And so if you actually looked at the cohort of adults, which was the relevant number, it was much smaller than that. If you started looking at adults who spoke English as their first language, which is not always a prerequisite, certainly, for being a journalist. but if you came, if you learned English as an adult, you were very unlikely to ever become a journalist in English. It is extremely difficult for most people to learn a new language as an adult well enough to be a writer in that language. So that when you looked at what the actual relevant population that could be journalists, we were actually not nearly as far from it as people thought.

And so they were first of all trying to rebalance towards the wrong numbers. And then second of all, what they were trying to do is do all the balance with new hire. because you can't just fire people and be like, well, we've decided we have too many white dudes, so we're firing these nine white dudes. Because those dudes, especially if they're like in their 50s and are probably going to have a hard time getting a job elsewhere, they're disproportionately likely to sue on age discrimination as well as on racial discrimination. You don't want to do that. And so they tried to balance it all in the incoming cohorts, which meant it got harder and harder for white men to get promotions or to get entry-level jobs. simply because it wasn't that you couldn't, but it was difficult because if you were trying to make your newsroom

demographically representative, and your only avenue is the people you're hiring and promoting, well, the channel for a white dude is going to get narrower and narrower, and the younger they were, the narrower it was. Ben, what did you make of this? And in particular, he talks a lot about Hollywood in here, and I think that Hollywood is a little bit challenging to look at compared to some of these other industries,

because there's both, you know, most people fail who try to get into it. And it's more opaque than some others in terms of figuring out who's really the best, who would have succeeded, you know, in some, you know, quote unquote, fair system. How can we even evaluate the Hollywood claims? Yeah, I mean, he talks about it in specifically, you know, entering writer rooms, which is as close to, like, the clear, like, latter job career that you can actually sort of like have in this version, as opposed to screenwriters, really. because you can start out as a writer's assistant on the rules of engagement on CBS, you know,

and then do that for a few seasons, and then they'll get moved and given some things, and eventually you'll get to write a story and blah, blah, blah, and with Gronstaff, and 20 years later, you'll make an NSI-S spinoff. And, like, I know friends who did that in 2008, and, you know, we're doing those exact jobs then. And I also know that those are the jobs that are really difficult to get, But also they're incredibly low paying at the beginning, right? Like a writer's assistant in those rooms makes nothing. And so you have to be able to take that job.

You have to be able to do what's essentially, you know. It's for trust fund kids, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think that you see that, that part of it is sort of like he doesn't really discuss as much. Because you also saw that, you know, in journalism, right? Like he talks a lot about and the thing about, you know, fellowships now in journalism are much less white and white and male than they. were 10 years ago. And that's because of like intentional choices, but one of them is because

they're also paid better. You know, your opening job in journalism now isn't what it was. You know, when I started, I once had to offer someone a job at Mother Jones for like $22,000 a year or something, you know, and that's like doubled now. Yeah, my first job at the economist paid $40,000 a year. And that was a special concession to my MBA. They went back and wrung an extra $5,000 out of the office in order to give me an MBA bonus. Right. And I do think that that's also playing a role with all of this in just like the, in a lot of these like industries, the pay for a lot of these lower rings has gotten better.

So they're there then not just for trust fund kids anymore, which is good in general, obviously. But it plays a role since their trust fund kids happen to also be like male more. I thought that this was an interesting story just because I completely. really can see exactly what he's talking about. He's got some interesting numbers about all of this. Yeah, there's some striking numbers in here where basically you have certain, like, new hire cohorts and then also winners of prizes and fellowships and certain things in

writing. Yeah, and I don't think that you can explain that just by, like, well, the fellowships paid better and now, that was not a change in the application pool. That was a change in the hiring decisions. Right. I do think it's like, it's a confluence of all of these different things. But what felt most sort of like interesting to me about this story was that you do end up, if you're just going to be hiring entirely to solve these larger diversity quotas, then you end up with lots of male senior editors and only a bunch of junior reporters and entry level people who are overwhelmingly not white men, right? Because that's the only way you're going to be able to do it.

And then you just end up with this sort of ridiculous structure that then this guy or people like him. his feeling is actually like taking a specific price on his generation specifically. I mean, I also think that creates a dynamic that I think contributed to the Great Awakening, right, which is that the old white dude does not want to tell the young women and people of color how it's going to be on social justice issues. And that, I mean, I have heard old white dudes say that. And that that may have been one reason that the Great Awakening proceeded. in the way that it did.

Yeah, one thing that's interesting with that is that you definitely saw that dynamic happen in newsrooms, circa 2020, 2021. It was basically like the junior staff was in charge and the management was terrified of them. They've gotten a grip on that at many of the organizations since then. Like there was a big culture shift in New York Times. There was a big culture reshift at the New York Times in the last couple of years. Yes. You know, the Washington Post, through a very different trajectory, I think, has also experienced that.

I don't know where you're talking about, Josh. We have always been the same committed to high-quality journalism without fear or favor. But one thing that shows is that this isn't inevitable with those new demographics. I mean, these organizations are still very female at the lower levels in these newsrooms. So I just, I think you're describing a real thing that happened there. But when managers basically act like the employees made them do things, it's like it is clearly true that if you want to manage from the top, you can, whatever, the demographic profile. Oh, yeah, no, any of these rebellions could have been put down, the jobs are so scarce in my industry. Any of these rebellions could have been put down in three seconds by saying, I'm very sorry you feel that way.

I wish you the best of luck in your new endeavor. And that would have been the end because no one is giving up a job at the New York Times. I shouldn't say no one. Almost no one is giving up a job at the New York Times to make a point. And, like, in fact, what Joe Kahn eventually did when he took over was he said, if you do this, you will not write for the New York Times. We are done with this, and then people stop doing it. And I do also think that there is something about Boomer specifically,

because, like, the age structure at the top of a lot of institutions, right? It's people who are a few years away from retirement. Do they want to have a fight about this stuff, or do they just want to give the insurgents what they want and retire gracefully? And I think the answer is they just want to retire gracefully. They don't want to have a fight about it. I mean, like, Dean McKay was not a white dude. He was, right?

He was at the top of the New York Times, but what he was was a couple of years away from retirement. And I think that that may have played some role in his decision not to crack down on the newsroom, that he did not want to have a fight be the last couple years of his tenure there. But so I have a couple of questions about the phenomenon that Savage is describing here, where he's alleging that there was this mass shift toward strong racial and gender preferences and hiring in these fields that, by the way, are illegal when carried out in the manner that he described. And we're illegal before students for fair admissions, et cetera.

It has never at any point in American history except in very narrow circumstances where your organization has been directly discriminating and you are trying to rectify something you recently did, not like 200 years ago, but like, you know, last week, it has never been legal to say we're not considering white guys for this job. So where are the legal consequences for this? Because, I mean, both, you know, individuals can sue. And one thing that Savage describes in this piece is that at many organizations, this stuff was put in writing where, you know, going around in writers rooms in Hollywood, there are spreadsheets that make clear that they're looking specifically for diverse candidates for positions. You see in universities and law firms where, you know, people are just sloppily saying that, you know, we're looking to, we're just hiring minorities for this position kind of thing. People could sue. And if there's that kind of paper trail, they can win those lawsuits. And then also the government can take action here. And we have an administration that both now and in its first, you know, in the first Trump term, was eager to take on these sorts of cases, to use civil rights law to say, hey, now they're discriminating against white people.

Now they're discriminating against men. There's been no apparent consequence for this. And that makes me wonder if maybe these cases are weaker than Savage makes them out to be here. Actually, I have an answer to this because I've written about this. So why don't people sue? A few reasons. Number one, I mean, the mystery is why Hollywood wrote this down. These people make the insider traders who think they can get out of charges by inventing cute code names for their illegal trades look like geniuses. They were literally just like, I am doing a crime. Here's the memo on my crime. But why did they do that? I think because they thought it was legal. Now, Hollywood does in fact have a partial exemption from the Civil Rights Act for actors and models that you can specify race is actually. kind of a gray area, but it's never, the courts have just kind of agreed to leave it alone.

But for things like ethnicity, gender, et cetera, height, whatever, you can specify that. And I think they might just have assumed that, like, you can do that in every creative industry. So I think probably also a lot of the people who were told, well, it's because you're a white guy, also thought that. And I think the second thing is that if you do sue, that's the end of, that's the end of your career. And it's true of all sorts of things. It's true of sexual harassment too. You sue for sexual harassment. You are understanding that you are not going to work in that industry again if the case gets out. Because people have a difficult time from outside, seeing what is legit discrimination, harassment, et cetera, and what is someone who's just litigious,

and people don't like to hire litigious people. And then the third thing is that the, so you don't get plaintiffs, even when they have a legit case. So I have heard a story that I absolutely believe. I've heard more than one story like this, but a grotesque story, in which a philosophy department, the hiring committee, has recommended someone who is a pro-life Catholic. And a woman just stands up and says in the department, we're not hiring this guy. I'm not having like a pro-life white man in my department.

I'm actually not even sure he was pro-life. He was Catholic, which is a good proxy, but not a perfect one. And that's totally illegal. And the whole department is just like, okay. And now, like, he knew he could sue, but if he sued, that would be it for his academic career. So instead, he took a job at a lower-ranked school and kept quiet about it. And there's a lot of things like that where, like, people know that they could sue, but they have incentives not to.

Sure, but to your point, lots of things work like this, including sexual harassment. And yet, you know, sometimes people do sue over sexual harassment. And the fact that we have that system. Right, but it's actually much rarer than the sexual harassment. Right, but also the fact that there is the litigation risk acts as a check and prevents a certain amount of. We're getting there. Yes, yes. We're getting there.

So also there was a higher bar for white plaintiffs. that the Supreme Court just overturned. It was not a total bar, but it was effectively going to be harder to get a lawsuit if you're a member of a majority group. And so all of those things come together. Now, the government can get around this with what's called a pattern or practice investigation. You don't need a plaintiff. The government is looking for multiple instances of some behavior to get around that barrier to lawsuit. The civil rights people were never going to initiate that.

That's not why they went into civil rights law. That is all changing now, but that's really recent. And part of it is that the Trump administration is actually not that competent and just didn't have their arms around this. And also DeVos was Betsy DeVos, the education secretary. A lot of this, for whatever reason, has gone through education, even though there are broader implications for employment law. And Betsy DeVos was focused on Title IX stuff and on the really egregious due process

violations that were forced upon boys who were accused of sexual assault as a result of a 2011 dear colleague guidance letter from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. So to that point, the Civil Rights Division and the Department of Justice is now run by a woman named Harmeet Dillon, who had been a Republican political activist. And if you listen to my other podcast, Serious Trouble, you've heard about Harmeet Dillon because she and her team put out a memo regarding Texas redistricting, urging Texas to redraw its congressional map, what ultimately became the new Republican-leaning map there. And that memo completely misdescribed the law around racial gerrymandering and basically instructed Texas that they needed to create certain new Hispanic majority districts to comply with the law. And the memo was wrong. And Texas Attorney General Kent Paxton knew the memo was wrong.

And as they were having this internal Republican discussion about how to do the remap, there was this memo that came out of the Texas A.G's off. office that was like, yes, draw a new map, but not for those reasons. The memo from the Department of Justice is wrong. And this became a key point in the litigation over that map. Now, ultimately, the Supreme Court is going to save the Republicans there and their map's going to get enacted. But when there was a trial court decision throwing out the new map, it basically was built around the fact that this memo from the Department of Justice was wrong and told them to do something illegal. And that certain Texas politicians made public statements to the effect that they were doing this in order to comply with this federal memo, all of which is to see.

say, Harmeet Dillon's not very good at her job. And so they, you know, if this is a new priority for the Trump administration, they may not really have the A team working on it. It also strikes me that, you know, one of the first things they did coming into office was bring in all the big white shoe law firms and bring them to heal and make them sign these settlements. There was real legal exposure for a lot of those firms around junior hiring where there were engaged in explicit racial, you know, quotas, essentially. Not just hiring. Their clients were saying, we want diverse teams and you have to staff diverse teams also illegal. Yeah. Like you can, and they all did it. And one of the things that, you know, when those law firms, they signed those settlements and a lot of

people were really angry about it, but one of the things the firms got was that the administration agreed to close EEOC investigations into those firms that they had opened in some cases. So, you know, the firms didn't agree to much in those settlements. They said they would do some pro bono work, very often recharacterizing work that they're already doing. They said they would comply with the law, which you already have to do. And they managed to. And they managed to. shut off what should have been a significant area of legal risk for them, which is they could have been investigated over this stuff. So again, you know, the sort of to respond to my own question of, you know, where's the action here? I think, you know, now that you do have an administration

that actually cares about this stuff, they're not actually that good at addressing it. Yeah, they're a cheap date. One other reason that it's interesting about in the Hollywood context is, you know, he talks about 2014 being that that key year, right, when all the started for them. it's interesting that that's also the year that the streaming era basically starts in earnest. And though the numbers of people being, you know, white men being hired in these writer's rooms or whatever, has declined relative to, you know, every other demographic. The actual, what actually happened in Hollywood overall was that it became much easier for everyone to get jobs because of this massive streaming boom that happened right from 2014 up until, you know, 2023.

So that, like, one of the reasons there probably wasn't as many lawsuits was because though they might not have been getting into the Disney Fellowship program and they might not have been getting the highest paying best, you know, best plum spots on network television and everything like that, people were actually working. In fact, there was more television writers than ever before every year. Wait, so is his thesis then just wrong as it regards writers in Hollywood? Because, again, what he's suggesting is that it became harder for a white man to get a job in 2014 that had been in 2004. So if the absolute number of white men employed went up, even if it went down as a percentage, then his thesis is incorrect. I mean, we could run through the numbers, and I will do that after we do this. Look at the WGA numbers of productions and then take his percentages and see if it went up, like absolute if it was enough to overcome it. But like, it's definitely there were massively more numbers of writers being hired.

So it would have to be a quite huge change. I mean, but the difference is that it doesn't feel the same, right? Although my understanding is that the size of the writer's rooms went down as the number of the writer's rooms went up. So, like, the WGA employment has changed shockingly little. No, but that's totally true. It has the size of the rooms has changed. And also, the amount of episode orders are different. You know, I have a friend who, like, sold a show to Hulu.

And then that show aired the 10 episodes or whatever. And then it was canceled because it was only watched by a few people. And that person's life materially did not change. You know, they did not become fabulously wealthy. But if that had happened in another era, then they would have bought a house in the hills. You know, like they would have at least netted a million or two. You know, and like, so it doesn't feel as great as when a lot of these things, when you have something on the Flicks Channel or whatever, or you're the seventh joke writer

in this Sundance Channel's comedy sitcom that no one's watched. But like in reality, those people are getting health insurance and they are employed television writers. It's just that they aren't the ones who are having middle class lives off of their. But this sort of brings me to my other question here about this. Because like one is, you know, if you describe a widespread illegal employment discrimination situation, one is, you know, shouldn't there be lawsuits, shouldn't there be government actions? The other is if you have widespread illegal employment discrimination or any situation where you have firms making hiring decisions based on things other than who is actually good at this job, then you should see the firms performing more poorly and you should see firms that opt out of the

discrimination, being able to do a moneyball sort of thing, and performing better. And it's not clear to me that we see either of those. I mean, I guess I don't know how we would measure exactly, you know, whether, you know, whether these firms are underperforming. What he describes in the article is the outlets for these white men is, you know, they go into crypto or they go into, they go to substack. But the substack thing is not actually on point because, you know, white guys going to substack was like me and Matt Iglesias and Noah Smith. These are people. people who had high-profile jobs in traditional media that they were leaving. It's not people who were shut out of those jobs. Yeah, I'm trying to think who the counter example is of someone who just came up entirely natively on substack. It's very hard because, you know, for people to be interested in reading your substack, it's ordinarily because they've heard of you because you were published in some newspaper before that. Yeah, I don't know of any, who are the... I mean, I'm sure... cartoons hate her is actually the one that immediately comes to me. Yes. Right. And... Yeah, that's a great newsletter, by the way. Not a white dude. Yeah, she is.

I like it as a window into straight culture because the like the folkways of the heterosexual. They're sick, sick, perverted. Like the main window I get into that often is stuff like, you know, the cut from New York Magazine or like, you know, the New York Times style section. And when you read those, you're getting a particularly crazy subset of straight people and particularly straight women that like is not representative and it's not good for that to be taken as representative. So it's like this is an unusual like, you know, like normal. straight person, who I'm hearing about... Now I, like, want to invite you to Christmas dinner, Josh. I'll introduce you to all my straight friends.

Right. You can see what we're like. Wow. I have plans that day. We're really not that bad. We celebrate Christmas just like you do. I'm just kidding. That sounds delightful.

I would love to come do that another year. I'm making dinner for my mother and my in-laws this year. Oh. The thing I liked actually, though, most about this essay was at the end where he's just like, it's not that you couldn't do it. it's that it was only the most extraordinary white dudes who could do it. And I was just an ordinary guy. And maybe 20 years ago, that would have been enough.

And now it's not. But that's what makes me doubt the thesis of the piece. The piece is not completely wrong. I've seen some of this myself. But like, yeah, it's definitely not completely wrong. A lot of these fields are just fields that are genuinely hard to get into all the time. Right. And some of what you're seeing is presumably just that.

But I think that's always been the case, right? I have seen women sue or make file HR complaints or whatever over being. this was a while ago. This is, I think, really, you don't see this much anymore, but over, you know, failure to get a promotion or whatever and saying it was sexism. And in some cases, I thought it was sexism. And in some cases, I thought it was like,

actually, no, you're just not that good. And that's always the hard, you know, the thing about discrimination is that it's always hard to tell, unless it's so blatant that it's like, we don't hire Jewish people here. It's so hard to tell in your case what it was, right? because some of the people that are discriminated against would never have gotten jobs regardless

and some of them would have. And you don't know who is who in that counterfactual universe where discrimination isn't happening. What's just remarkable to me is that they're literally writing down. Like, no, we don't want any white men for these staff roles.

So I think you have to acknowledge it happened because, I mean, assuming that he is correct that those documents exist and he has seen them and he didn't just make them up. But also, I've had conversations like this. I would be at a conference talking to some academics, and they were like, yeah, we're doing a new bunch of cluster hires. And I would be like, well, you should talk to this person. They would be like, no, this role is for a woman of color.

And I was like, why are you telling me about your crime? I just met you like 10 minutes ago, right? Speak clear, it's a civil offense, right? Yeah. There is a criminal version, I believe, but almost never. But yes, don't do this. And if you do do it, don't write it down. Before we go this week, I want to talk about gardens because Ben wrote a fun piece this week about a meme that he doesn't.

like. And this meme is part of a broader set of like, you know, pastoral back to the land, wasn't life simpler back in the 1950s or the 1850s type stuff. And it's about lawns. And it says, if everybody had yards like this and showing a vegetable garden instead of a lovely green and grassy lawn, then no one would be starving. And Ben has a number of logistical objections to this idea that we should rip up all of our lawns and plant kale. I hate this meme. And I hate this a And I hate everything about it. I mean, one, the first main problem is is that no one is starving in America. I mean, if you're like, that just isn't people, there's food insecurity.

People are having too much food, in fact. Yeah. And the United States, we have plentiful food. There's not like a problem. The food insecurity issue is not like, because we don't have enough food. It's, you know, access and affordability and all of those things like that. But if you take this meme literally and you actually like look at the 45 million acres of lawns that exist in the United States, which is the size of Washington State. And what it would entail to actually

like turn them into vegetable gardens, we're basically creating hell. You know, this is, this is the worst situation. We're taking the most amazing economy in history and, and turning it into a nightmare that would cost a hundred billion more labor hours than we even spend today doing everything, doctors and lawyers. Yeah, that was the most amazing statistic to me in that piece of yours. It's what, it would be, it would take like 400 billion hours a year to work all of these fields, which is more hours than Americans work. Yeah, it would take 405 billion. In fairness, I think a lot of that might be like giant lawns at like rich people's houses or golf clubs or something where you're essentially running a farm. Yeah, we'll reason it so much because amateurs are really bad at shit.

Like if you're just somebody doing this in your lawn, it's, it takes, oh, it takes four hours, according to the stats that I found. It takes something like 200 hours a year to, do a thousand square foot little vegetable garden. But if you're a professional and you're an agricultural worker, you can do way better than that. Well, it's not just skill. It's capital, right? Totally. They have a lot of equipment.

I was actually weirdly just talking to the Washington State Fruit Growers Association annual meeting, which was sponsored by a, among other things, like by this company that makes AI-enabled cameras that can go around and you just drive it through your orchard and then it tells you what's budding, what, you know, phase it's at and all this stuff, right? And those capital requirements have basically been going up for the last

250 years. And so they have all of this stuff that allows them to be way more efficient than you. It's not just that they know more. It's that they, like, you are not going to buy the AI camera for your little 400 square foot plot in the backyard. Totally. But basically

with the meme and the entire ideology behind it suggests is that like specialization is bad, right? Specialization in where we actually have people to know what they're doing making the food. And you are a doctor or you work at like Amazon or whatever and you know how to do that better than you could make zucchini in your yard. It's like you are doing more for the American economy so that you can then provide that and then it'll go around and through the miracle of miracle of money and markets. Everything will come around to itself. And what these things are all about is that you should get rid of specialization and everyone should have to be subsistence farmers because then they will all visibly struggle in this way

that would maybe feel like it would be so hard that it would make you have some sort of semblance in life, some happiness. Ben, you were right that the meme is literally wrong and that if everybody ripped up their yards and planted vegetables, that that's not a... Well, I mean, I guess it's not what would end starvation because Americans are not actually starving, and this is not a good way to, you know, feed the country, et cetera, et cetera. And we haven't even gotten in here, you know, like, are you going to grow soybeans and where are you going to raise cattle and all that sort of stuff? But when people post this meme, and I normally don't like talking about the larger truth, but I think that's actually the right way to look at this meme. It's not a literal demand that we rip up every inch of grass in the country to plant leafy green vegetables and have everyone eat that. Isn't the claim here that if people felt more connection to the land through some amount of cultivation on their own property? And these people also probably want people to buy local produce, not necessarily grown by them, but grown by some farmer in the community, that there are certain civic benefits associated with that? Sure, but I don't think that's true.

I mean, that comes back to the fact, what civic benefits are there? People aren't starving. We've solved this problem. I think this is done by people who have very little connection to the land. I don't know. Maybe they have a little garden. You think the person who made this meme hasn't in fact ripped up their lawn and planted broccoli in its place? Even if they have. Let me tell you about what scale gardening looks like because my grandparents both grew up on farms. My grandmother's people were in chickens. My grandfather's people were in produce. My grandfather left the farm during the Great Depression, as many farmers did because they couldn't sell their produce to nearby Rochester and Syracuse, and he had to clean eight tons of rotted cabbage out of a silo. And he said that was the worst job he ever had. He went into town, got a job as a grocery boy.

Eventually came to own the gas station that he worked for, and the rest was history for the feral family's fortunes. I quit Animal Crossing when I forgot about the, like, cabbages in my cellar and ended up with a cellar full of rotten virtual cabbage. That was a daunting enough thing that I stopped playing the video games. Just imagine eight tons of it that you have to like literally crawl on. Literal real cabbage. To get it out. Yeah. And so he, but when he was in his 40s, he decided he needed a garden.

And by garden, I mean a little farm. It was like two acres. He had everything. He had corn and berries and trees and all sorts of stuff. It was great. But also, it required phenomenal amount of labor. We used to go out and pick, and then we would come back and we would can at all because, like, you know, you don't get, like, just one dainty little cucumber to put in your salad. You get more cucumbers than you could possibly eat right now, and so you got to make pickles.

And ditto, the green beans and the peaches and the berries, and every single thing. Every single thing has to be preserved if you do anything at that scale. Now, not everyone's yard is that big. But, like, if you are actually thinking of that doing this is some way to solve hunger problems, or to create community, I will note that, like, while my grandfather did give a lot of produce away, this was mostly a family enterprise, not some sort of, like, joyous coming together of the entire town of Newark, New York, New York, that you had better be prepared for canning and then prepared to figure out how you're going to prevent your vegetables from getting botulis, uh, botulin. There, I forget the name of the bacteria, but the stuff that, like, goes into your forehead as well as sometimes into your vegetables,

that produces this as a side effect of anaerobically processing your canned goods. It's semi-dangerous, fruit, not so dangerous because there's acid and it kills the bacteria. But also, it happens in the middle of summer. It involves huge pots of boiling water on the hottest days of the year. And then you've got to eat canned green beans. I happen to like can't green beans. Many people do not. And no one is thinking any of this through.

It is so ridiculous. It's entirely the fantasy of people who live in a suburban plot. and go to the farmer's market, like, three times a year, and we're like, oh, man, if only I were more connected to the land. Is this a right wing or a left wing thing now? I've lost track. I think it's both. I mean, you just see it in different. Like, that meme is, I think, framed in the left wing version where it's about starvation, you know?

Rather than about feeding your 11 children. Right. Like, but it's the exact same horseshoe thing of it. I just think that the idea that it provides some sort of civic value to be closer to the land in some decentralized farming situation is just the stupidest thing. ever heard in my entire life. This is how millions of people died in Chinese famines and shit. Sure, but I think there's a version of this that's like, you know, people going out and saying that we would have a better society if everyone else took up the hobbies that they have.

And I actually think there's a fair amount of truth to that, regardless of what hobby. I mean, there's a version of this is just like a put-down-your-phone thing. Like, you don't have to garden. Americans could do to have more hobbies these days. You know, the additional labor hours that you're spending, you know, like picking the cucumbers or whatever, if that's time you'd otherwise be spending staring at TikTok, that is probably a positive change, even if it's an inefficient way to get cucumbers. I mean, I definitely grant that, like, it's good to get out of your house and do something.

But the problem with this whole thing specifically is that, like, the fact that we have lawns that we do not have to grow things on, that we can have these beautiful lawns everywhere, is a testament to how wonderful America is, that we have conquered history, and that we don't have to make every little bit of land productive. This is our last show of 2025. I want to thank everyone who's joined us for the first 10 episodes of Central Air. I really hope you're enjoying this podcast. We've been really enjoying making it.

And we'll be back in the first week of January. Before we leave you, I want to offer some predictions. As we look forward to the end of 2025 and we're peering into the beginning of 26, what do you see out there on the horizon? Yeah, I think social media anger is kind of over. And I don't mean that it is stopped. I just mean it's no longer cool. I think people are exhausted by it.

I hear from more and more people who used to be like good resistance libs are just like, I don't watch the news anymore. I don't do news. It makes me too upset and anxious. So I have just decided to not do that anymore. And instead I'm getting really into like my crafting or whatever it is. And I'm just hearing that from more people that they're swearing off it because it's too alienating. And I think the endless hunt for status and engagement by making people mad is not going to be a good strategy for the coming year, which is one reason that I have called my new podcast, compliment to Central Air, reasonably optimistic.

I feel like that is where the market is going. Also, like, where I would like to go personally. Reasonably optimistic, you can find that wherever you list of podcasts. At the Washington Post. And at the Washington Post. Ben Reiface, what do you look forward to? Yeah, I mean, I think that things are going to be fine. Wow.

I think it's all going to sort of work itself out. I've been pretty copacetic about things in general for most of the last, most of my life. And I'm going to be proven right. Everything is going to be fine. Not for everybody. Things might be bad a little bit on the margins. You know, the economy might get bad. But everything in general, America's best days are ahead of it.

Such an optimistic end to this. I have an optimistic prediction, too. I think in 2026 we're going to see the revenge of the neurotypical. I think it starts like 12 years ago with all the fucking listicles about being an introvert and how amazing it is, you know, 37 amazing signs that you're an introvert and, like, talking to people is so exhausting. And isn't it great to just, like, sit at home and, like, cancel plans and not have to talk to anyone? And then you had this period over the following years where, first of all, that got medicalized.

And instead of saying you're an introvert, you say you're a nerd. neurodivergent or you self-diagnose with ADHD or autism or whatever. And then the pandemic hits and causes people to spend a lot more time at home. And some people discover that they really enjoy this and they love covering their face and not having to interact with other people. There was a New York magazine issue a couple of years ago, like the new rules of etiquette, more than half of which seemed to be focused on accommodating this sort of thing, like new rules to make sure that I don't have to have small talk or make conversation with people or go to

events that I don't feel like going to. And I just think that people are finally getting really tired of this. And I'm seeing this trend on social media. You know, there was someone who had a viral tweet saying, if I meet you at a party and you instantly start asking about my job, you're subhuman to me. This person with a real job, by the way, who works at the verge, says this. And, you know, if you're in journalism, especially, you should be able to talk to other people. Like, that's, you know, a key component of the job. But there's a response. from tomorrow winter who runs strike press saying small talk is actually good and being unable to engage in it as the real social deficiency. And I agree with this. And I think in 2026 we're going to

see a surge in neurotypical pride. What does the flag look like? I'm trying to imagine. We're going to have to work on that one. Although my friends make fun of me when I describe myself as being neurotypical, which I mean, you know, like, it is a weird thing to say out loud and I'm not actually going to put it in my Twitter bio. But like being blunt doesn't make you autistic. I am in fact capable of having orthodox interactions with people and perceiving their emotions and knowing when they are speaking sarcastically. I don't think you're autistic at all. I'm not. Tell my friends that.

Next time you're at my house, I want you to tell my friends that I'm not autistic. But so anyway, like, you know, being able to like, you know, go out and meet people and talk with them and ask them about what they do for a living and hold a conversation and answer questions and ask them. These are good things. And I think in 2026, we're really going to value that as a society. We're getting back out there. Anyway, I will see both of you, Ben and Megan, in 2026 for more of these outgoing, engaging, neurotypical conversations. Thank you both. Thank you.

Happy holidays. Thank you, Josh. Happy New Year and happy holidays to all who celebrate. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We are a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swatic mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosier. Thanks for listening and stay cool up.