Central Air - Every Centrist's Favorite Socialist (feat. Tyler Austin Harper)

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

On this week's show Tyler Austin Harper joins to talk about his reporting on the Mellon Foundation and its role in pushing humanities academia in the direction of progressive social activism, his on-the-ground take from Maine on Graham Platner’s Senate campaign, what literature can teach us about the politics of human extinction, and why the commentariat is souring on all these polyamory memoirs we keep getting.Sign up for updates from Central Air www.centralairpodcast.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome 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, and Ben Dreyfus, who writes the substack newsletter, Calm Down. Megan, Ben, did you see this New York Times piece about jacket potatoes and what people in Britain are eating these days? Unfortunately, I did, and now I can't unsee it. I saw this photo that you sent and was so shocked and that I did a quick Google and was like, what's having been happening here? Apparently, as far as I can tell quickly, is that these disgusting knife criminals have been putting tuna with beans on baked potatoes sort of and are lining up for days. Yeah. So the Times article is about there's a trend right now for jacket potatoes, which is British for baked potato, which are a longstanding traditional food in Britain.

And they say that the traditional combination, which I was not aware of, was, as been described, a baked potato with those canned baked potato. beans they love in Britain and tuna salad on the same potato. And so the innovation with these food trucks is that they put some other things on the potatoes, maybe things that are less disgusting than that. But people still love to go and get their baked potato with baked beans and tuna salad. In their defense, rationing during World War II was really very bad. And, you know, you develop... I mean, they've been using that for so long. They've been using it for so long to explain it. Yeah, but you know, like, so I grew up. My mom was actually an extremely good cook.

I mean, she, like, made her own croissant, and they were good. You can tell they were good because they're pronounced like that. They're croissant. Yeah, croissant. Also, where's this going? She also stuffed them with beans and tuna? I mean, she grew up in a small town in western New York State. And so I also grew up on a number of family favorites like orange jello with shredded carrots and crushed pineapple,

which, by the way, I will still defend. and delicious. And apples, bananas and raisins and miracle whip was a salad in my house. I frequently got that as a vegetable. Well, I mean, sometimes you just wish that the V2 bomb would come. I mean, they might have been rationate, but at least the Blitz didn't have that. I would still eat that. The things you grew up on as a kid, you don't know they're weird.

No one's told you yet. And they're fine. But, like, if someone offered me their own disgusting childhood down concoctions, I would recoil like any other red-blooded American. It's just what you're used to. I think this is cultural relativism at its worst. You should be allowed to say this is disgusting and that you're a sicko. I am, as we speak, in Idaho, right?

The place of potatoes. Oh, yeah. This must be especially offensive to you. If somebody here put beans and tuna on them and also spoke with an English accent, even just the accent maybe, we'd string them up. Well, anyway, I do appreciate Megan bringing the proof that the western most part of New York is in the Midwest, which is true and people don't always realize it. Why don't we bring in our guest for this week? We have joining us Tyler Austin Harper, who's a staff writer at the Atlantic. Previously,

he was a professor of environmental science at Bates College in Maine. Tyler, thank you for joining us. Yeah, happy to be here. Were you aware of those potatoes? Yeah, I was. I was not offended by the beans, which I think is, I mean, I wouldn't want those gross canned beans on them, but like beans and potato doesn't ipso facto discuss me. But the tuna slop on top of it is just a bridge, you know, a bridge too far. I feel like you could. do tuna and potato or beans and potato, but the combination thereof is just defensive, you know. Yeah. I mean, I guess like a Niswas salad is a tuna and potato combination, and that's normal. But so, I believe you're the first socialist we have joining us here on Central Air. So, so welcome.

Thank you very much. I'm glad to have the honor. And it's kind of funny, in part because of the topics that you write about, I feel like you're sort of like a lot of like moderates and conservatives favorite socialist these days. I've been told that. How do you like that? How does that feel? It doesn't bother me. I mean, it's not as surprising as that might sound on the service. I mean, I think one of the enduring legacies of Marxism is a kind of acute awareness of the way in which capitalism is a kind of revolutionary force that also upends traditional values in the family and in the name of progress and so on and so forth. And so I think I approach a lot of those issues with that particular lens, but I'm often, you know, talking about problems that conservatives

also care about with a different skew on them, certainly, than they have. But I do think there's a kind of strange affinity. That's perhaps too strong a word, but kind of strange affinity between how Marx approaches the question of culture and then how conservatives often tend to think about culture. And I think this article that you wrote about the Mellon Foundation is sort of an interesting example here, because you're complaining about what is effectively a political takeover of academia, or an effort to put academia toward a progressive political project, which is definitely not a conservative project and is also not a Marxist project. And so it makes sense that you and conservatives would both object to this, even if for, you know, with different visions.

Yeah. I mean, I think what animates a great deal of my writing is the conviction that comes from Marx that the ideas that dominate in a given time in place tend to be the ideas of the ruling class, right? So whenever I look at a oligarchic philanthropy, like the Mellon Foundation, that is very progressive, but is worth $8 billion, and its board of trustees is stuffed with hedge fund managers. And they are funding projects that we are told are revolutionary, right? Things with titles like Trans-Liberation and the Age of Fascism and all sorts of other, you know, allegedly radical ideas coming out of the elite academy. I think I look at that, and you can conclude one of two things.

You can conclude that by some kind of miracle, a genuinely revolutionary project that is antithetical to elite class interests has somehow bubbled out of the inner sanctum of the elite. Or you can conclude that somehow all of this revolutionary gobbly gook is in fact, at minimum, not hostile to and perhaps even conducive to a lot of the interests at these sorts of elite institutions. And being someone who doesn't especially believe in the frequency of miracles, I tend to assume that all of this revolutionary patter is actually not threatening at all to the status quo, which is precisely why Mellon with its Board of Trustees stuffed with hedge fund managers is all the more happy to fund it. Megan, what do you make of that of capital being the force behind?

We'll go into a little more detail about exactly what Mellon is doing, but sort of the, you know, I guess you could, for lack of a better word, call it the woke turn in humanities academia. Look, I think that the fundamental diagnosis that this is not that threatening to sort of existing capital structures is correct. I think that explains some of what's happened in the Democratic Party. But I would also say that I think the causal chain is somewhat complicated. It's not that, like, Capital wanted this to happen, and therefore it did as a way of diverting the workers from their true solidarity. I'm skeptical that the workers have all that much solidarity with each other.

So am I. But I think rather what it is is that, like, and I think this is generally true in politics, is that people often can think that something is a deliberate seeking of a goal rather than seeking the path of least pain. That these things get purchase in institutions because there are genuine radicals who want to do radical things. And if that is like existentially financially threatening for the institution, those things are less likely, not totally unlikely to happen.

We have in fact seen institutions during the Great Awakening. that were functionally destroyed by this kind of politics. But it is less likely to happen. You'll get more pushback. And just in general, people push back on stuff that is against their financial interest much more strongly than they push back on stuff that intellectually they think is bad. And so what you're going to get in a party like the Democratic Party that is increasingly catering to kind of highly educated professionals is that

the tax, the acceptable tax base will be redefined upwards to include only people who have a million dollars a year in income, not even a million dollars in wealth, but literally earn a million dollars a year. There's like a tiny handful of these taxpayers in the United States and they are apparently supposed to pay for everything because the professional middle class is absolutely not going to give up the resources that allow them to not just live comfortably, but to try to provide that future for their kids, right? And so I do think that, like, that is one reason that this got purchase in the university and things that would have involved telling donors to go screw themselves, got less purchased. But I will say, quite a lot of stuff that involved wealthy donors to get lost

and, you know, sacrifice all their wealth. That stuff has quite a lot of purchase, too. If you look at, like, the sort of the social sciences outside of economics, the humanities, there is a lot of radical economic politics as well as radical racial politics. Tyler, the thing that I liked most about you, not most, but one of the things I really liked about your article in this entire thing is that, you know, we spent the last few years sort of having this discussion about the groups, right? Specifically like politics, like the groups in politics. But in my experience, coming at Mother Jones was knowing these groups at journalism, right? specifically like non-profit left-wing journalism.

And you could see it in a few different ways. Like they would come and the activists are the easiest people to report with. So they're all just your sources, right? That's the easiest one. But then also you have the Ford Foundation, which like gives you money specifically to put a certain, like cover certain beats and cover certain topics and stuff like that. And I will admit that like when I used to interact with these people

and help them write grants and structure all the stuff for them with those departments, I always kind of thought like, well, you're just keeping them at arms bay. And I would spend all of my time sort of complaining when the stories turned out wrong with that first type, with the fact that the reporters kept going to the activists. I didn't think about the money element that they were actually like structurally designing it. And I thought it was so interesting to then look at it at this layer that's more upstream, right? That's actually like where even the activists are going to school, where everyone is going to school and how it's all happening like before they even enter into the area where I was seeing them. And I just kind of wanted to hear more about like how you think all of this sort of flows together and creates this kind of, well, whatever, wherever the economy that we're all in.

Yeah. And in conjunction with that, I think it might be good if you could describe exactly what the Mellon Foundation does that made it the subject of your article. Because I think it'll be a good object lesson for that. Yeah. So the Mellon Foundation is a liberal nonprofit that with the mission of funding American Arts and Letters. That was started in the late 1960s by the children of Andrew W. Mellon, the famous robber baron. And for a while, their mission was pretty straightforward. They donated money to the Folger Shakespeare Library. They funded professorships at universities. They gave money to research, et cetera, et cetera.

And then in 2018, they hired a woman named Elizabeth Alexander, who was a well-known poet from Yale, sort of out of the Obama universe. She read one of her poems at his inauguration, which is one I think. she first sort of entered into broader public consciousness. And shortly after her arrival at Mellon, she basically pledges, and in fact said this allegedly in her Mellon interviews, that she would focus the organization's entire philanthropic output in the direction of social justice grantmaking. And so over the course of the last seven years, really since she started, but especially since 2020, when this pledged only fund social justice grantmaking became formalized,

Mellon has really narrowed their funding scope, which might be fine. It's a private foundation. They can do what they want. They are allowed to spend their money as is in accordance with their mission. The problem is that almost every other funding source for American Arts and Letters, particularly the academic humanities, has essentially collapsed, right? There is the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is a federal agency that funds American Arts and Letters.

But their budget is literally a fraction of what the Mellon Foundation's budget is. In 2024, I believe the NEH grant-making budget was $78 million. Mellon's grant-making budget is over half a billion dollars annually. And so we're talking an extraordinary amount of money being pumped into universities with the string attached that that money will only go to projects that the Mellon Foundation understands is being in keeping with social justice. And so one of the the theses of my article is that as we've discussed the quote-unquote great awokening in American higher education.

The general assumption has been this is kind of a grassroots thing, right? It is those woke, blue-haired students and professors who have crazy left-wing ideas. And I'm not denying those people exist or that they are often annoying. I agree. But too much of the blame has been placed on the people at the bottom of the food chain when really a lot of the social justice prattle has been dictated top down by the senior administrators at universities, but also by nonprofits like the Mellon Foundation, which can spend money to exert their political will.

But then, to answer your question about sort of how all this works, and also to speak to something you said, Megan, I don't think there is some grand conspiracy, you know, that capital is undertaking to install this particular kind of, what gobbly gook or at least was doing so in the 2020s. But I think what you have seen over the last, say, 15 years since roughly 2010 is that universities have responded to growing economic discontent and populist backlash by trying to find the moral high ground.

back to the 2008 Great Recession. In the wake of that, a lot of public ire was directed at American colleges and universities, which were increasingly becoming debt machines that were saddling students across the country with loans that couldn't pay back. The anti-debt movement, specifically focused on universities, is one of the pillars of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Then you have the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015, 2016, which basically champions free college and then again puts a laser beam on this question of student debt. And I really don't think it's a coincidence that if you think about the sort of start of the really intensive vocification in the universities, that begins to happen around 2013,

2014, 2015, right? At this moment of populist backlash against basically financial exploitation from these academic institutions. Well, what can the academic institutions do to regain their moral high ground? They can't lower tuition, or at least they're not going to. They're not going to fundamentally change their business model, right? And that doesn't leave a lot of options. So what they decide to do is to lean into social justice, right? Because that is one thing that doesn't cost them any money, or at least doesn't cost them nearly as much money as changing their basic financial model, but allows them to sort of reestablish their moral authority and their sort of ethical legitimacy in the eye of a public that have really come to see them as kind of debt lords. And I think that's a really important part of the story here. I'm not suggesting there was some grand motivation where all the college presidents got into a room and said, well, we're really taking it on the

chin with all this debt stuff, I really think we should emphasize wokeness. But I think there was a similar process of elimination you saw across a lot of elite institutions that, you know, this is something they could lean into that would seem to be meeting the moment while not changing anything about their business fundamentals. Right. I'm just suggesting, I don't think it was even conscious, right? Yeah, I agree with that. You look for the thing that doesn't make you, or at least doesn't require you to do anything. It did often make you feel bad about your white privilege, but since you weren't actually going to do anything about your white privilege, you could just like feel bad and that was enough. But I would also say, like, this succeeded in part because of the lower level people,

right? It succeeded because they were pushing on an open door. When the coax go on to campus, they do succeed in getting often some civic center or something established, but it doesn't matter because the rest of the university is so actively hostile to it that it's very hard for those ideas to spread. Whereas these ideas from the Mellon Foundation absolutely spread far and wide throughout the university because they were primed for that. And that was happening at the lower levels.

When you talk to people in the social sciences, even relatively left social sciences like sociology, they will say it was the grad students who were pushing most of what happened. It was not that the professors were all these lefty indoctrinators. It was that we then got a bunch of grad students who functionally terrorized the people older than them into signing statements they didn't want to sign and doing things they didn't want to do, changing curriculum, et cetera. So, like, well, I take the point. I think it's obviously correct.

I do think you have to put some responsibility on the grassroots because the grassroots was what enabled this to become the force it did. Yeah, totally. I agree. That would be my argument, Tyler, and I'm interested in your response. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, I think it's undeniable that faculty have been left leaning for a long time. I think the self-conception of a lot of faculty is that they are something like the Zapatista territories, particularly in the humanities, right? Which they are this like state within a state that is this pocket of radical resistance within the machine work of the neoliberal university.

And, you know, they are radical and they have nothing to do with the broader structure of the university, et cetera. And I think that is fundamentally delusional. One of the things I hoped my article will did, and I don't know that it succeeded, because I'm not sure how willing the people who need to hear this are willing to hear it. But it's just to point out, the ideas that you champion as supposedly revolutionary and progressive are also championed by the people who are ensconced in and prop up an economic model that you think is loathsome. And why is that? Like, does it not discomfort you at all that hedge fund managers who run Mellon are so comfortable pushing the same kind of ideas that you think are so pathbreaking? And so, yeah, I totally agree with you. I think, look, if the Mellon Foundation had done in 2020 a pivot to focusing on conservative issues and pro-life, this and that, and whatever, do I think they would have exercised sweeping power for American universities?

Absolutely not. I think you're totally correct there. maybe some and maybe some public universities and red states. But I think that's totally, totally correct. But I do think the point of the spear has generally been top down rather than bottom up. And just having been a faculty member, faculty are often on the front lines actually pushing against the wokeification of their disciplines, which is one of the reasons not to get off track here. But faculty hiring has really moved increasingly to what's called a cluster hiring model over the last five years. What that basically means is traditionally power to determine what feelings. you want to hire in is housed in the individual department. So the English department says, our Shakespearean just died. We need a new Shakespearean. We want to hire a Shakespearean. You go to the Dean and say, hey, we need, our Shakespearean's dead. Can we get a new one? The Dean says yes. And you can attend your life. It's like when your truck, your plastic truck breaks, except like when you're a kid,

except like mom goes to the Shakespearean store and picks one up for you. Exactly. In recent years, there's been a move to what's called cluster hires, which is basically where the Dean's office or the provost office says, we have this university-wide initiative where we are going to fund lines in black studies. If you would like a tenure line, and keep in mind, a tenure line means an extra warm body in your department to make your life easier because they can advise more students, so there's a lot of leverage there. If you would like a tenure line, just pitch us something in black studies and you can have one, right? And that is, the dean's had to do that because the English department doesn't want to hire in anti-racist Shakespeare. They just want a Shakespearean.

But the dean correctly understands that these quote unquote woke areas are good ways to diversify very quickly. And that's their priority. And so they voiced that on the department. So I think you're right. I think, look, there's a lot of lunatics in higher education, Megan. I'm going to be the last one to disagree with you there. But I do think there's, I guess, the balance of attention between the grassroots bottom of the pyramid and the top of the pyramid. I don't think people have been tentative to how those dynamics work together. And it's not just the blue hair gender studies people. I guess like that was when I was mentioning by the jurors versus like the activist groups and then the people, the Ford Foundation types, the ones funding it. That I hadn't really thought about that connection until you made it there. Like, like, I guess what you're saying is that people aren't paying enough attention to the capital elements of it as opposed to the grassroots version of it is exactly sort of like what I feel, feel like I noticed happening in the journalism side of this. Right. Like I was constantly looking at the equivalent of the activists, or like the grassroots types, true believers who were just there and doing all. of it. But then actually, like, when you then step back, I think that we're somewhat missing

the broader points that you're making, which is that there's just funding structures going on here that are doing it, which is much harder for people to get excited about or feel strongly about. You know, it's a little less juicy. Also, just harder work reporting that out. You know, a lot of conservative media have been the critics of higher education and they just want to point out like, oh, look at these wackos doing this wacko thing and they don't want to, you know, follow the money and do all that kind of work, you know. What was your experience with that because I mean, when you were at Bates, your field was basically ideas about human extinction and literature. Am I describing that correctly? Yep, yep. The history of the idea of human extinction is what my

academic works on. Right, which obviously is not a black studies topic. Did you face significant pressure to try to sort of make your work more black at all or like on the job market? Yeah. Actually, the first major thing I wrote for sort of national public audience was called I'm the wrong kind of black professor. It was basically about the many, many years worth, going back to being an undergrad of pressure I faced as a minority to study black stuff, basically. You know, going from my senior thesis where I wanted to write about James Joyce and did, I had faculty that were like, oh, wouldn't you rather write about the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes? And that's nothing wrong with, I don't actually like Langston Hughes, but I do like the Harlem

Renaissance. This is like the most controversial thing you've said so far. You don't like Lexington Hughes? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really, I don't actually at all. But then in grad school, same kind of thing. And honestly, a lot of it was couched as help where it was like, I remember I had one conversation when I was getting ready to go on the job market with the faculty member was like, you know, you're going on the job market next year. You might want to think about publishing something on, say, black 20th century American literature because I studied the history of the idea of human extinction. So the history of science and literature, but I particularly focused on the British 19th century in the early 20th century. And I remember being told by a sort of faculty

member mentor that was like, on the job market and English department is not going to know what to do with a black Victorianist. And you need to do something to make yourself legible to them because they're going to be like, why would I get a black guy? Almost like it's inefficient, right? Like you can get a two for one, you know? Like, why would I get a black guy to do Victorian literature when I could get a black guy to do black stuff? And that kills two birds with one kind of stone. And one of the reasons I'm really sensitive about the Mellon Foundation's narrowing of the kind of work they will fund is because I've experienced so much pressure to work on race stuff throughout my academic career. And I've been very fortunate that it was not a barrier to me.

I was really lucky that I had fully funded grad school for the six years I was in grad school. I went straight into a tenure track professor job. I am deeply grateful for all of that. So I've managed to find institutions that weren't going to force me to do black stuff. But yeah, it's a really acute pressure. And whenever I've touched on that or written about that, I cannot tell you the volume of emails I get from someone who says, I'm a medievalist.

And when I was 35, an associate professor at X university, I finally came out to my colleagues. And immediately my dean began pressuring me to do like queer medievalism. I don't even know what that means. Like, I don't, I'm a medievalist. I don't work on. And so it is really pervasive. And yeah, it's definitely been a, been a,

been a thing I've dealt with. I remember taking a class in extinction literature at NYU, and a lot of it was, you know, the last man or like, you know, on the beach, all these sort of classic things. And then I do you remember getting to the point where we were studying Last of the Mohicans. Oh, interesting. Which is like, you know, it's like it's a different sort of extinction is, but it's also about like a cultural race being.

And I do sort of like remember noticing sort of like, oh, okay, all right, now we're sort of bringing in this other element I hadn't expected here. And I don't, the person, they made an interesting points about it. But it did sort of have the feeling of someone who had said, okay, well, you are also a person of color. Could you maybe bring this into your extinction literature? That's how it works. That's how it works.

It's interesting to me, though, because this idea of, you know, harnessing the humanities for, you know, progressive social change, which seems to be what is animating Melon now is in many ways a very different idea from like, the humanities are going to be. good for developing good generalists who can write well and think well and analyze ideas, and that will, you know, make them better on the job market. But they're both instrumental ideas about what the humanities are for. Either the humanities are for a political project or the humanities or for job training. I've seen you a number of times push back on both of these ideas and basically say that, you know, the humanities need to defend themselves in their own right

as something that is simply valuable for what it is. And I'm wondering if, you know, if you are taking that approach and you're a college or you're the chair of a humanities department at a college, and you're just saying, well, this is inherently valuable. How do you then analyze what is good work, who should study the humanities, what is the right amount of funding for the government to put toward this? I mean, obviously, that is a part of why arts funding happens in general. I think that people do accept that precept, but then it's very difficult to then say how high a priority should this be, you know, and what sort of resources should we put to it. The first thing I would say is, yes, I've been very critical of all forms of utilitarianism when it comes to justifying the humanism. humanities, in the sense that I'm generally pretty hostile to the idea that we should justify

humanistic study by saying it will develop XYZ skill set or allow us to find ABC jobs. However, the fundamental problem here is that tuition is simply too expensive to make, in good faith, the intrinsic value of the humanities argument, right? A thing I like to point out, especially to students, is that the phrase, pay your way through college comes from the fact that you used to be able to pay your way through college, wading tables or tending bar. In that idea, it's totally gone. But in an era in which you can pay your way through college, it's one thing to say to students,

these texts have intrinsic value, you were being immersed in the grand traditions of human thought and Western civilization. It is part of continuing to keep the lamplight of intellectualism as a tradition lit. It's one thing to say that when you can graduate from your local state college without debt. It's an entirely another thing to say that to make that case when tuition costs $95,000 a year, as it did at Bates when I was leaving, right, which is just an astronomical sum. So I think it is really impossible to disentangle how do we make an intrinsic value argument about the humanities from the basic problem of the financial crisis of the university.

And by financial crisis, I mean an affordability crisis. So I would just say it's simply difficult. It's one of the reasons I'm not especially optimistic about either the humanities or higher education. I end the melon piece by sort of suggesting the bargain the humanities have made, which is politically contorting themselves in exchange for money to remain financially solvent. That juice might not have been worth the squeeze. That Faustian bargain might not actually have worked out. And the humanities have been housed outside of universities for almost their entire existence. The idea that the home of the humanities is the university is really a 150 or 200-year-old idea. And I think we might just need to begin getting comfortable with the notion that the humanities need to migrate back out of the university again and that those of us who want to defend them and cherish them or whatever, the university might not be a hospital home for them precisely because all of those problems are unfixable.

So I realize I'm dodging your question slightly, Josh, but the reason I am is because I actually don't think there's very much to be done here, unless we get a government that wants to massively fund higher education, drastically bring down tuition, do something like nationalize the Ivy League or whatever, and I don't see that happening. I just think we're on the decline. Well, and you would still need to make the same case then.

I mean, it's, you know, rather than individual student resources, then you're talking about government resources. You know, why should we pay for this rather than, you know, universal child care or, you know, any other number of things that are, you know, sort of in line for the same money. Yeah. Well, just to give you an example, I think, and I will make a utilitarian case, even as I hate making utilitarian cases. But if you look at something like artificial intelligence, right,

I think a lot of the problems we are having right now and a lot of the arguments we are having with artificial intelligence right now is precisely questions about what is intelligence, what is a mind, how do we know when something is thinking or not, right? These are all deeply humanistic questions that philosophers have argued over for many, many, many years. And even if you look at the arguments over whether or not AI is hitting some kind of plateau, Right. If there's going to reach a point where you can't scale up anymore, they've already been fed on all the data that's available, they might get marginally more efficient, but at a certain point, we might peek out, right?

there have been a number of people, Gary Marcus is one of them, one of the sort of leading lights of AI, who has argued for years that large language models are the wrong path, partly because they are not embodied, right? Intelligence isn't just algorithms and whirring numbers. Intelligence is a process of a mind interacting with the world, right? And large language models don't have that. There's a really long tradition of philosophical literature and other literature precisely about the relationship between minds and worlds. And I think there's a lot that humanities have to offer our present moment. And I think many of the problems we have right now, most acutely in Silicon Valley,

are because our leading lights of industry are basically illiterate. They don't know anything about the Western philosophical tradition. They don't know anything about literature or any of the other great cultural resources we have at our disposal, even as they are creating machines that are fed on essentially the entire corpus of Western art and letters. And so, yeah, I think there's a way in which the crisis of the humanities is also fed into the technological crisis we're currently dealing with and our inability to even understand what's happening to us. Well, I think you mentioned the West three times there. That's quite out of fashion. Now you're going to get me in trouble with the leftists.

No, but I well, I mean, you know, if you have this crisis of the humanities where it's, you know, like how can we justify the, you know, someone has to come up with the money for all of this expense for us to continue doing our work, they're sort of tying one hand behind their back because the Western canon in which so many of the professors have expertise and the the case that you make is the longstanding case, that's now like an imperialist idea that is vaunting Europe over other equally valid traditions around the world. They've lost the ability to make that argument. Yeah, I think they have. I hope they can get it back because I think it is desperately important. It is a uniquely American kind of anxiety, which is partly

a reflective of our ideas of being a melting pot or whatever. But you see much less hand-wringing in France about the teaching of French literature. You see much less hand-wringing in Germany about teaching German literature, right? There's an understanding that this is part of our national cultural output, that we have this kind of Western tradition that we helped make, and we're going to inculcate our students in that tradition. And I think Americans, particularly since the 1990s, when the so-called cannon wars happened, right?

These fights over the dead white men of Western and American letters, I really think there were sort of two paths available. One was to say, actually our sense of the canon has been too narrow. There are these great figures, black writers, Native American writers, lost women writers of the 17th century, that actually deserve a place in the canon because they were overlooked for reasons of sexism or racism or whatever in their own day. That is one path, right, canon expansion. And the other is to say, the very idea of a canon is this kind of imperial structure that is national, and the most vulgar of senses and is the root of all of our problems within sort of Western

intellectualism. And I find that both frustrating and also part and parcel of a broader rejection of just normativity, which you see across the left, where there is a deep discomfort with just championing norms, right? That there are basic moral, ethical, political, cultural norms and upholding them is part of what it is to be an intellectual. That doesn't mean in a kind of dogmatic way, But at least admitting that there are norms and part of what politics is is a fight over which norms we should have, but not whether there should be norms at all. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. This is Central Air. So, Tyler, how long have you lived in Maine now? Six years.

You've left baits, but as far as I can tell you, intend to stick around in Maine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I fish very seriously. And the fish I fish I fish for are in Maine. And so I am not leaving. That's correct. So I want to know about your take on this Senate race, because it's been getting a lot of national political coverage, Susan. Susan Collins, the moderate Republican running for her sixth term in the U.S. Senate. And then there's a contested Democratic primary between Janet Mills, the sitting Democratic governor, who would seem like a fairly typical Senate candidate, except that she is five years older than Susan Collins, who again has been in the Senate for almost 30 years. And then Graham Platner, this guy is like this 41-year-old oyster farmer, former Marine. And is one of these sort of darling of the left candidates, literally a lot of the same consultants who were around John Federer. and Zoran Mamdani.

And the balance of the polling that I've seen suggests that he's actually likely to win this Democratic Senate primary that's coming up in a few months. Despite a lot of controversy about lots of things that he was saying on the Internet over a number of years. And then also this tattoo that he had that is apparently some sort of Nazi imagery that he had for almost 20 years. And I'm wondering what you make of the grand platinum phenomenon from on the ground there. Because I know you wrote something about, you know, people don't seem to care as much as you might accept. about some of the things that he's said in the past. Yeah, I think that's correct. I think by and large, people don't care.

However, I think a question I've gotten a lot from other journalists outside of the state or just other friends trying to figure out what's going on in Maine is how are Maineers overlooking this Nazi with this racist, sexist, Reddit history, et cetera, et cetera, and I really think the fundamental thing here is very, very few people in the state of Maine think Grant Platner as a Nazi. I think they mostly buy his story that he was a guy who got a tattoo while drunk on shore in Croatia, which it should be noted is one of the more interesting things when the Reddit story came out is that there were a lot of ex-Marines and ex-Great War and Terror vets who came to Platner's defense, not all of whom were liberal or a lot of whom

were conservative, but said, look, these tattoos were very popular in the Marine Corps during the Great War on Terror. People did not see them as Nazi skulls. They just saw them with skulls, whatever. So I think a lot of people up here just basically by the story. And then in terms of his problematic internet history, one, I just don't think a lot of people care about that. Just to give people a sense of what the posts were. I mean, it was a wide variety of things. But, you know, he called himself a communist, like anti-cop stuff. Why don't black people tip? Like, you know, all sorts of things. Yep. Why don't black people tip? But also rural people are like backwards troglodytes. It was really like a heterogeneous bag of different insults,

in a variety of directions. There was also some stuff that was, you know, anti-gay. But, you know, I read the entire Reddit archive. And on balance, this is a guy who was going to Westboro, anti-Westboro Baptist protest in like 2011 and 2012, before Obama was even in support of gay marriage, long history of pretty boilerplate liberal commentary on Reddit. Yes, said some offensive things,

but of the variety that I think is not a tip. typical of a Marine infantryman. And so people just don't seem to care about that. But one of the reasons they don't care is because we have a very small state. Maine has about a million people that explodes in the summer when all the out-of-staters come into vacation. But we are a small state. Most of our population is concentrated in the South.

And Graham Platner has been doing essentially a non-ending rally fest going all over the state, talking to voters directly. And even if you have not been to one of these yourself, and I've been to a number of them covering them for work, you know people who have. And if you see him speak in person, he just does not seem like a bigot. And I think a lot of voters are like, I don't know what was going on in those Reddit posts. And I don't know what the real story is at the tattoo. But here and now, this does not seem like a guy who's a racist. He's a charismatic speaker. Seems very intelligent. He's talking about the things I'm angry about. And I think that's one of the reasons he's doing so. well in the polls. You see these various things about him come out. And he, grand platters way to my left. But, um, you know, I don't, he clearly isn't a Nazi to me. Like, it seems very obvious. Like, I can buy that the tattoo explanation. You're drunk in Croatia. What else are you going to do? Would get that. And I mean, I've, I've, I've say terrible things on the internet. I don't even know my own internet history. It would be the worst possible things in the world. Um, but one of the

things that's particularly annoyed me about the way this has gone on is that a lot of people who have been like pushing this stuff have been saying, I don't think he's a Nazi, but in the general election, someone will. And so he'll lose. So we need to nominate someone else. And like, I, I sometimes do that in my own head where you try to like, uh, game it out too much the way you then say, I'm not making a value judgment, but we can never nominate a gay person or whatever or a not or a person with a Nazi tattoo. But I guess maybe I, I, I, I, I, I guess maybe, I, I, I, I'm yet to really see anyone who actually thinks he's a Nazi. Like, they haven't really found anybody who's actually saying, I take it all.

That's the subtext. Nobody does. Yeah, but okay. Uh-oh, we found one. He found out that it was a Nazi tattoo. And then he had it for another 10 years. I'll give you a year. Right? But, like, at some point, I am also disorganized.

It takes a while. You got a clear calendar. You can't go swimming after you get the laser, whatever. But 10 years seems a bit much. And I don't think he's a Nazi, but I actually think it's kind of like Trump, where I don't think, like, Trump is a super virulent racist. But I think he doesn't care. And he's perfectly happy to pander to those people. It's like, you went on this podcast that I guess, I don't know, at least Tablitt says is dabbles in anti-Semitism. And he was like, I love you guys, because he doesn't care. In the same way that Trump doesn't care. Like, is Trump a David Duke racist? No. Is Trump very happy to court those people's votes? Also, Like, yes, he is. And, like, I think people don't care about that. I think that's what Trump revealed. And I think that that is what Graham Platner is revealing. But I'm not sure I like that revelation. Right. I am not absolving Graham Platner from having a Nazi tattoo for 10 years after he found out that he had one. Like, I'm sorry. That's just like you have crossed the line and like telling people about it like it's funny. Right. Well, and Tyler, my sense from, from, from the piece that you wrote for The Atlantic about him back in the fall was that you don't really believe his claim that he never knew about the Nazi nature of the tattoo. You believe that he didn't know it at the time he got. But he claims that he learned like last year about this being Nazi imagery. There was a Jewish insider story that had some anonymous source suggesting that he knew about this years ago. And it seemed like you sort of think he probably found out about it some time ago. Yeah, I, and first of all, I'd say I basically agree with your point of view, Megan.

And on top of that, I've talked to him a number of times for reporting that story. I believe he did not know at the time. I've talked to a lot of veterans who say, yes, that completely scans. There was some reporting that someone else from his unit who got the tattoo with him also said, yeah, but we didn't know. It was just a skull on the wall. Do I buy that he didn't find out at some point? No.

If I had to guess, I, I'd have to guess. I think the most charitable explanation is this, and this would be, this is one that makes sense to me, although I still agree with you, Megan, that I don't think this excuses it. From what I was told, he gets this tattoo on shore leave in Croatia with people he had just served in Ramadi with to commemorate a number of friends who were killed in Ramadi, which is one of the most brutal battles of the Great War on Terror. Does it seem possible to me that at some point he finds out what this tattoo means, and yet it was a tattoo that he got to commemorate these men he served with, and he thinks it's a covered part of my body, and I'm just not going to take it off.

Do I think that's plausible? Yes. And I think that's the best possible explanation. Do I think he still should have got it removed? Absolutely. Do I buy that he didn't find out until the year of our Lord 2025? No. I think that's pretty implausible.

But this kind of brings me to my fundamental view on this race, I think Graham Platner is a risky candidate. My job is not to champion Grand Platner. I think he comes with a lot of risks. I think he's a man who has said he had a really dark period with PTSD and drinking in the 2000s, I think it is entirely possible at any moment. And I have no knowledge of anything to be painfully clear. But it's entirely possible at any moment.

We could learn something about him that would end his candidacy tomorrow. That makes him a really risky bet, given that he is on track to win this primary and something could come out at any point that basically hands Susan Collins a victory. I don't think that should be glossed over. To me, that is, if I were somebody attacking Graham Platner, that would be the attack line. No one thinks he's a Nazi, but this is somebody who might not have good judgment, who is very inexperienced. And he hasn't been vetted.

He comes out of nowhere, and there could be a black swan event, politically speaking, any moment here. And then Susan Collins is a senator again. I think that should be taken seriously. My frustration, though, with the national coverage of this race is there's a complete blindness to how overwhelmingly risky Janet Mills is a candidate. She is one of the oldest governors in America. She's one of the least popular governors in America. I believe she's the least popular Democratic governor, if not the least, very close. She's been very controversial for a number of reasons in Maine,

ranging from issues around Wabanaki sovereignty, which is a more bipartisan issue than you would imagine. Going to the mat for trans sports has not been popular, including among, you know, liberal folks. very poor state, and she essentially risked federal funding going to the mat over that issue with the Trump administration. And her age is a unique vulnerability at a moment when the Democratic Party is still very much going through PTSD with Biden. And so I think we need to be clear-eyed, and I think sometimes folks on the left are not as clear-eyed about the risks platinum might pose where I do think there's a chance things can implode at any moment. But there's been a real unwillingness to see the extraordinary vulnerabilities of Janet Mills.

who is also an establishment candidate at a moment when that is also a vulnerability. She's essentially handpicked by Chuck Schumer, endorsed by the DSCC. A lot of people up here feel like she was foisted onto us as the candidate who was just installed, and now we're all supposed to just take it. And so this is a race without ideal options. And I think to me that is the correct take is that there's two very risky bets, and which risk is one you're willing to stomach, I think is the question for main voters. That's been why I've been kind of sanguine about this primary because I, you know, I share much of your view about Janet Mills' weaknesses as a candidate. I have a take on Platner, though, that I think is a little different from what we've generally been seeing, which is the whole defense of every, you know, not of, you know, having this tattoo for so long and all of the various things that he said on Reddit is that basically this is that basically this stuff. And I think that's true. I think that's completely plausible. And there's an interesting quote in your story from a lot.

October from Ro Khanna, who is basically saying, you know, like, well, politics is full of people like my classmates at Yale Law School who have been trying to be president since they were 12, and don't we want some more real people? And the thing, though, like, those strivers from Yale are very annoying on a lot of dimensions. But one thing that's good about them is that they generally have a very clear ideological vision that they've been working on for a long time that is stable, and you know what you're getting with them. You know what they're, you know, why they want to be in government, why they want power. And I think the thing that we saw with John Fetterman is that, you know, when you when you valorize this kind of aesthetic of someone who's, you know, not a typical politician

and doesn't meet these usual norms is that often you're getting someone who just hasn't thought that deeply about politics and is fairly likely to change once they get an office. And, you know, partly part of why I'm saying what about this is I'm a moderate and for all I know, Graham Platner will break my direction if he wins. So, you know, it's more the left's problem than my problem that you don't know exactly what you're getting. But I think it's a little weird that they ran this playbook with John Fetterman. It blew up in their faces. And they're very mad at John Fetterman, but they don't seem to have internalized the lesson that you actually kind of want someone with a record of commitment to an ideology. Because just a few years ago,

he was, you know, sounding like a fairly different person on Reddit. He could be a fairly different person a few years from now. I think it's weird that there hasn't been a reckoning with that. The thing I want to know about Fetterman and Graham Platner is what is the deal with these like, working-class coded candidates who have rich parents. Like, Plottenor, he's an oyster farmer. Yeah, he went to Hotchkiss. His grandfather was a modernist architect. His father was a lawyer, right?

This is not the proletariat finally rising up to take its rightful place in our politics. And why is that? Right, but it's also not like he's going to the Vanity Fair Oscar party. Yeah. It seems like he's a little middle class somewhere. Yeah, I mean, remember AOC at the Met Gala? Yeah. I would say a couple things. I mean, first, I'm from the part of Pennsylvania. Federman is from. And, yeah, I mean, he's a rich kid who lived on his daddy's money for most of his adult life. I think the difference with Graham Platner, and Josh, your basic critique of how are we sure this is a serious person? He seemed to have a number of different ideas. I think that is actually fair. Just the thing I find annoying about the main Senate discourse is it's focused on completely unrued. reasonable fantasies, like is not, is Platner a secret Nazi, rather than this guy seems to have a lot

of ideas and sometimes maybe has had some poor judgment. Is this really the person we want in this vitally important Senate race and Senate seat? But to the sort of like working class coded sort of cosplay thing, Megan, which I think is very fair. I mean, I have two observations. The first is you were not going to pull some oisterman from Northern Maine without at least some kind of fluency in the ways of the professional class out of nowhere and have him run a slick Senate race where, look, Plattner quotes Thomas Payne from memory. Paragraphs at a time in his speech is,

it's very impressive. And I just think the reality is that, look, if you want working class adjacent candidates, this is a guy who has worked working class jobs. I am not aware that he's living on family money. He was a Marine infantryman. I think part of why that line of attack,

I don't think it's bad faith. I think it's perfectly reasonable. It points to something real, which is that, like, there's an element of cosplay here. But at the same time, this is a guy who did the thing, the liberals are always telling people to do,

which is use your privilege, give back. He joins the Marines as a non-commissioned officer, right? He's very much seemingly a kind of regular person lives as a regular dude. And it's a very different story than Federman. But as to the flip-floppiness, and whether Platner is another Federman, I do not know if Plattener will be a good senator.

I do not know if his campaign will end tomorrow. But I do know that John Federman had a stroke. And like part of the, like that can't be obscured from like his broader ideological changes, I think. Like that is an important part of the conversation, you know. I think people oversell that. I mean, the reason that John Federman had a stroke, he had a fib, atrial fibrillation. He went to the doctor. He was diagnosed with this.

And then he just never went back to the doctor. I mean, and I don't even particularly mean, I mean, you know, obviously there are lifestyle things you can do. But, like, he should have been on blood thinners. Yeah. You know, there are procedures that cardiologists do that, like, you know, this is a disease that has, you know. Well, he wore those dicky shorts that aren't too tight. Probably pretty good for his circulation. But so, I mean, it was his own, like, disregard for the medical advice that he received was the reason that he had the stroke in the first place.

He also, like, you know, on the Israel stuff, I think he correctly points out that he'd always had this, like, fairly pro-Israeli position, people just weren't paying very much attention to it. Oh, yeah, the left just ignored that part. I mean, he was pretty consistent. Yeah, I'm not actually criticizing either of them for cosplay. Like, all politics is cosplay, right? I mean, but I am curious that apparently what reads as the great white working class hope is that you are a professional class child with very poor impulse control, right? And like that is actually the commonality of both of these people is that they have. That's good. And look, I don't, I have it my life sometimes not had great impulse control either.

I'm not judging. Sure. But it really is that that is what is what the democratic idea to get in with the working class is like you make weird decisions, many of them unwise, like developing a serious drinking problem and posting on racist things on Reddit and or like not. you know, treating your, your AFib. And like, why is that? Why is that that, why is that who Democrats have? Though I completely understand sort of what you're saying, I think it's, it's wrong to point this on the left or just on the Democrats. We're, we live in the era of Donald Trump, right? Great white savior. The young, young, young, poor whites love him. And, you know, that, that is a man within poor and post control who's wealthy and lives in a golden, golden fucking

nugget or whatever. Yes. Yes. Why? No, but what I mean, I agree with you. I'm just saying it's not that Democrats uniquely are doing it. It's just that maybe, you know, this is a thing that's happening beyond party. If I could should take one point very briefly. I mean, I think something that is getting lost in the national media coverage of this is that Planner actually is campaigning and his campaign is predicated on ideas. And part of the problem with Jan Mills is that she's, one, not really campaigning. She's just doing events with donors on the coast.

And two, she doesn't really have a policy platform. Like, if you look at her website, it's basically a merch store and a donation button. I mean, it is not really clear what she's running on. And I think you're right that there are people, especially in the national media landscape, who are reacting to Platner's style and they like his style. He's a Marine and he wears, you know, Carhart and whatever. But I think a lot of the people here, like if you go to events, they just like the stuff he talks about. They like that he is critical of American foreign policy.

They like that he talks about reshoring manufacturing. They like that he talks about health care. You're definitely right that he fits the mold. And I actually think Trump is a kind of good comparison in a way. But I also think there's, well, if you talk to people who like him, there's, there are policy positions he has that they're attracted to, not just the style, which is why if you go to one of his events, you will see. I mean, I was at one and there was a guy, I believe he was a construction worker. He literally was in the middle of winter, was in December. and he had a toe sticking through a boot, right?

He was very down on his luck. And then there was the Chardonnay drinking set from Cape Elizabeth that was also there, one of the pretty main coastal towns. And so I think there's a policy center of gravity to him as much as an aesthetic one, but that doesn't mitigate any of the risks, which I think are really real and not to be underplayed. I want to take another quick break. We'll be back shortly with Central Air.

Tyler, one thing you remark on a fair amount is the sort of the re-rise of obsessions with extinction in American politics in the last few years. And obviously, this goes directly to what you study academically. I guess AI and climate being two of the main ones where people express, you know, visions about how the human race is going to be destroyed or extinguished. And I'm wondering, what does literature teach us about how to think about this when people are saying things like, I can't bring children into the world because the world is on fire, or either hyping or, you know, warning about AI and saying that it's going to kill us all? How does having a grounding in the literature influence the way you think about that stuff?

Yeah. So the first thing I would say is the idea of human extinction is actually a relatively novel idea. I think we think of it as an idea that's been around forever in the form of apocalypticism. But before really the 18th century, almost all end of the world narratives were religious in nature. There was some kind of divine or mystical element, right, that causes the end of the world. But it's not to the end of the 18th century that species loss is actually definitively proven that species had gone extinct. For many years, there was a lot of resistance to that notion because it implied that God made something only to kill it off. And why would God do that? Because God is perfect and why would a perfect God make an imperfect thing? But anyway, from the time species loss is discovered, quote unquote, the end of the 18th century, which is also when human beings begin to think, well, if the Mastodon could go extinct, what is preventing the human race from going extinct? Then to about 1945, most reflection on the problem of human extinction occurs within literature. It is only when we drop the bomb in 1945 that extinction becomes a policy concern and a political concern, right, where we need to think about the nuclear arms race and how to diminish it. And we need to think about AI now and how do we regulate it or climate change.

But before 1945, the domain of taking human extinction seriously was really in science fiction and in kind of fringe science where people took the question seriously, what does it mean if we were to go extinct? But I think the thing I get from the study of literature and the broader study of the history of the idea of human extinction is that every generation has worried that their generation will be the last generation. You can point your finger on almost any century or decade of human history, but particularly since the 1800s, and you can find people convinced that we are approaching the end of the world. If you look in the 1820s and 30s, there were acute comet panics where people see these meteorites in the sky and They worry it's going to be the end of the world. In the early 1920s, you had similar sorts of extinction panics,

partly stemming from concerns about the creation of potential nuclear technology, which there were already premonitions of in the 20s and 30s, to even worries about automation and killer robots. That also isn't new. And so, ironically, a question I get asked a lot is you or somebody who spent many, many years thinking about the problem of human extinction. Is that not so depressing? And there's a way in which it's actually quite the opposite.

Because if you look at history, we are not a special generation. Yes, we have new, very real threats like AI and nuclear war and climate change that we're not real in the 1800s, and I don't want to diminish that. But at the same time, this feeling that we're at the end is endemic across human history, and yet we have somehow survived. If you look at the moment we dropped the bomb in 1945, and the days and weeks that follow, there are all these newspaper articles and think pieces about essentially, the world will probably end soon because once other countries get nuclear weapons, we will inevitably use them and the world will be consumed in thermonuclear fire. And crossing fingers and knocking on wood, it's 80 years later and there's never been another nuclear weapon used in combat. And I think that is a miracle. It's actually something amazing and that should give us,

even as our world is hurtling towards some kind of brinket feels like, a profound degree of optimism. I think if you would have told many political scientists, folks in the nuclear industry in the 1950s, that we would make it to the year of our Lord 2026 without another nuclear detonation, I don't think they would have believed you. And yet somehow we've done it. And so I think literature has a lot to teach us. I think history has a lot to teach us in terms of contextualizing our moment and calibrating our degree of panic. Because I think we should have some panic. But I think it should be calibrated to human history, you know. They talk about apocalyptic narcissism, right? It's great phrase. Where everyone is going, like, it makes us all feel so great to do it. That we're so special that we get to be the last generation. Is that the idea? Yeah, exactly.

That we're living in such extraordinary times that it's the end times. Unprecedented. Yeah, unprecedented. And that it's always, it's always happening like that. And then, I mean, when I mentioned before on the beach, right, which comes up in that era right after the, they're all like, oh, fuck, we're all going to go. This is it. It's over. And when you, on the beach where, you know, there's been a nuclear war.

the northern atmosphere is done and it's just Australia and like New Zealand the left and they're waiting for the fallout to come and kill them and the thing that happens with them isn't that they run around ripping their hair out it's just that they recommit to daily life and like just go about it in this very

sort of bizarre but then completely understandable way and then when you see people nowadays who are like oh it's the end it's the end it's over and so I now am going to rip my hair out I constantly think about like on the beach it's like that's not what happens when you actually think that the end is inevitable Yeah. Yeah. You know, with the end is inevitable, maybe you just look for solace in the moment. Totally.

I'm wondering how this influences the way you think about climate politics, because a lot of the dumerism that we hear is about climate. And, you know, if you really think that, like, we're all going to die, that could counsel against action. But then the flip side, I think is that, you know, part of the reason that we've had this, you know, it's climate change, then it has to be the climate crisis and then it has to be the climate emergency is trying to dial up that alarm because the idea is that will increase voters willingness to increase. occur costs to fight this if they think that, you know, if they don't think of this in terms of, you know, in 2080, there's going to be a lot more flooding in Bangladesh and it's going to cause real, you know, significant hardship, hardship all around the world. But the costs are, in fact, disproportionately far in the future in lower income countries. And there's the challenge of getting voters to say, you know, I'm willing to pay 75 cents more a gallon for gas so that there can be less extreme weather in Bangladesh long after I'm dead. It's in fact, you know, when you prioritize that, it seems to me like that causes Democrats to end.

alienate a lot of the same voters who get alienated by some of the cultural shifts that have happened in the Democratic Party. And Senator Ruben Gallego likes to talk about people want their big-ass truck. You know, an effective anti-climate change agenda makes it more expensive to have the big-ass truck. So how do you think about selling that to people, especially if you're trying to sell it in a way that is not, we're all going to die? Yeah. So I think a couple of things. The first starting point I would have is that there is no choice but figuring this out. I think something I hear people say a lot as well, climate politics just don't work and we can't get elected, et cetera, et cetera, et et cetera.

And that there's obviously an element of truth to that that I don't want to diminish and I very much recognize. But at the same time, there is really not a choice because, I mean, increasing swaths of the country are basically uninsurable. We have more and more climate associated disasters by the year. The bill is going to come do at some point. And so I think partly just being frank and honest with voters about that reality is important. But part of the problem here, I think, yes, there's a problem here.

I think, yes, there's an element of buck passing, which is that, like, I'm probably going to be dead by the time this is a big issue. And I don't even live in Bangladesh. So what do I care? Like, there's, I don't want to diminish that kind of cynicism. I think that it's totally true. But I also think there's just, when you talk about why should I pay 70 cents more per gallon of gas to fight the climate crisis, part of that is, yeah, people don't want to give money to the government. But that is also in part because they don't trust the government to actually do things well or fix things, right? I think it's really hard to disentangle. both selfishness, I don't want to pay more from the feeling that even if I do pay more, these incompetent fools probably aren't going to fix the problem anyway, and all this money is going to go to projects that never actually get built and don't really solve much of a problem. And so I think that's kind of a fundamental issue. And those two things are mutually accelerating and sort of working in tandem. People don't want to spend more money. And they also don't trust the government to spend the money to give them wisely. And I think part of that trust is very

reasonable when you look at public schools in states like Massachusetts that are money gets dumped into them and seemingly not a lot of great education always comes out of them. I mean, Massachusetts has some of the best educational outcomes in the country. Although their schools are not as expensive as New Jersey and New York, which pay more to get less. Sure, sure. But when you look at, yes, their schools are very good, but when you look at the amount of money compared to states like Mississippi or southern states that are also getting increasingly very good outcomes for much, much less, I think there is a reasonable degree of cynicism about how dollars get spent. But at the same time, I just, I don't think we have a choice. And so we are accelerating to a point where once more of the country is uninsurable, once homes

are being destroyed and they can't be rebuilt, once this doesn't just impact people living on the West Coast dealing with wildfires or in Florida dealing with hurricanes, but greater swaths of the country, I think it's going to reach a boiling point politically. And so I don't know, I really think it's one of those things that's just non-negotiable, and you have to figure out how to package much more popular politics so that people are willing to go along for the ride and maybe swallow the bitter climate pill. I mean, the interesting thing with that is, I mean, that's an empirical claim that people are going to, you know, the homes are going to become uninsurable or that the costs are going to rise so high. And it's been interesting

because, you know, I own a house on a sandbar on Fire Island in New York. And no, you know, regular admitted insurer in New York State will write homeowners insurance policies out there. But you can get insurance. It's expensive and it's gotten a lot more expensive over the last few years. But it is possible. And similarly down in Florida, I mean, they're having an insurance crisis and that people, they find it increasingly unaffordable. It's pushing down the value of homes in Florida. But it's not literally impossible. It's just, it's a significant expense that then has to be weighed against what the expenses would be if, you know, for whatever you would do to reduce carbon emissions. But the thing is that if you take action in Florida to reduce global carbon

emissions, the benefits that produces accrue all around the world and from now into well in the future. Whereas if you incur expense in just like paying more for insurance in Florida, all of the benefits of that expense occur locally in Florida. And so I think it becomes hard for it to pencil where those costs become so high that the most cost effective thing is a global climate solution rather than a local patch to deal with the fact that climate change has made things more expensive there. It's also been interesting to be watching what's happening in California, because a lot of people are literally having difficulty finding insurance because of wildfires out there. But partly, you know, as someone with one of these, literally we used to have insurance from Lloyd's London on the house in the pines.

There's this market that exists in like my little weird pocket of New York that seems like it could be effective in California. And instead, the state has this weird insurer of last resort, which is part of why that hasn't happened. But there are ways to, you know, insure around the fact that it's becoming a lot more likely that your property is going to get flooded or burned down or that sort of thing. Yeah, I would also say that, look, most of the action on climate change we know is not going to be getting U.S. consumers to use less. It's going to be getting China and India to use less, right? And that just dictates a whole different set of policies from most of what the Democrats are pursuing, which is subsidies and, like, mandating fuel efficiency. And the actual way you have to do this is find technologies that are so cheap and attractive that China and India will use them rather than fossil fuels to industrialize, right? and, like, not just China and India.

I feel like it is at least feasible, conceivable, that you would get more support for that. You know, we're funding, like, research, we're funding translational stuff, especially, which is kind of that chasm that's the hardest to fund often in innovation. And that's largely not the approach the Democrats have taken. Largely the approach they have taken

is subsidized the hell out of our favorite technologies, and then penalize people who buy dishwashers that don't protect the Puget Sound from phosphate poisoning. Republicans are just stupid on this, right? They're deliberately mad about solar and wind, even when it's better. But Democrats also have this coalitional politics that just, I have to say I am much more pessimistic than you

that we will get effective solutions. I'm not saying we won't get something that isn't called a climate change solution. But something that actually just makes India say, you know what? Solar wind, nuclear, we're doing that. We're not doing this lame fossil fuel stuff. I have a lot of pessimism. Well, I mean, it's complicated for China and India, right?

Because it's not, you have two countries that have the worst air pollution right in the entire world. So they actually, like, sort of need to frack just to get coal out of their air. So, like, you can't ask them entirely to go to wind because there's actually people, like, choking on putrid air in China who, like, you first need to make it so the kids can breathe. Then we can move them from fracking to wind. Like, like, look, I believe that China is serious about getting rid of its air pollution, right? Because the air pollution is terrible. It kills a bunch of people. It's really unattractive.

It makes people not want to come to your cities. Like, U.S. Greens keep convincing themselves that China, because it's building a ton of solar panels, while also building a ton of coal factories, that they convince themselves that China is super committed to greenhouse gas emissions. and I find that completely not in evidence. China is very committed to building a ton of electric capacity and to reducing air pollution, both of which are great things.

I approve. But how do you envision America doing a policy that is going to get China and India to cooperate? Well, I mean, you know, the grand multilateral dreams of the Paris Accord and that sort of thing just, I don't know, feel like a little bit of a joke right now after two non-consecutive Trump administrations.

I would just say I share Megan's pessimism, but I would always always. also want to emphasize something else, which isn't related to the many intractable global problems that you're pointing out, but also just the basic trust in science that I think is foundational to this issue to begin with. And I think there's a real crisis of the expert class that is not unreasonable. I mean, people do not trust our academic experts. And if you talk to people in my field in environmental studies or whatever, there's a real sense as to why don't they trust our science that we're putting out and why don't they believe us and why do they think,

blah, blah, blah, and these conservatives say all these things about us. It's like, well, if you look at the history of the 20th century, academic experts and experts have been wrong about a lot of areas of profound consequence, whether it was the opioid crisis and medical experts who told a lot of people that these were miracle pills that came without consequences to COVID, which had a great deal of problems of mismanagement that we are still lingering with in the public school systems. And then on top of that, gender issues where a lot of the country just feels like academic institutions are just like wildly out of state. step with actual science and even seem disinterested in it. And so I think part of the problem, too, is like, how do you rebuild trust, especially when the Democratic Party is so insolulably tethered to higher education? And in many ways, I think a lot of the public not incorrectly sees American colleges and universities as shadow organs of the Democratic Party. And I don't mean that in a conspiratorial way that they're like coordinating, but just in the sense that the primary

function of a lot of these institutions is basically one to reproduce their own donor class and two, to reproduce Democratic voters. And so I just think there's a real crisis of kind of epistemic trust that has to be fixed somehow and that the public has lost faith for reasons that are partly, yes, right-wing fear-mongering, but they're also partly based in the actual experience of expert-class failure. And so in some sense, why would you expect them to trust the stuff about climate science coming out of American universities, you know, even as I do happen to trust it? Okay, before we get into this next topic, our final topic, this one's a little spicy. We're talking about a polyamory memoir, and there's a lot of sex talk related to that.

So if you're listening to this in the car with your kids, I mean, I don't know, maybe you want them to hear it, but just fair warning. I want to talk about this Lindy West memoir, Adult Braces, which you recently wrote about for the Atlantic. We had our production meeting the day before the shows we do, and one thing we were trying to figure out is like exactly how online is our listenership and in which way. Lindy West was a writer for Jezebel for a number of years. She wrote a memoir called Shrill that sold very well and that got made into a television show. And she's sort of this millennial feminism figure who was an obsession for a lot of people. And that's part of why this memoir that she wrote that was controversial has kind of burned up the internet. But I'm not sure about the extent to which our listenership was reading Lindy West back in the heyday of Jezabel.

And so I don't like, you know, fun internet drama is fun. but I didn't want to have to read people in too deep into the lore. But I think what's interesting for everyone, including people who don't necessarily have an opinion about Lindy West to begin with, is this is another one of these straight polyamory pieces, her memoir. And there's been a lot of, you know, like, she even sort of suggests in the memoir that's becoming de rigour in certain circles to, you know, that politically you ought to be polyamorous because that is the progressive thing to do.

Ahabooule Oluo is her husband, who's a musician. And a few years into their marriage, she basically gives an ultimatum. wants to open up the marriage, wants to take in another girlfriend. And she ends up doing this long road trip in part to come to terms with this. And she characterizes herself as in the end being very happy in this, you know, polycule that she's in now with her husband and their mutual girlfriend, Roya. But people read the book, including you, Tyler, and came away unconvinced that she was happy about this.

And it seemed like part of a theme of women in particular, straight women talking themselves into the idea that they ought to be polyamorous even when they don't really want to be. Yeah, I think the reason this book exerted so much cultural power and generated so much discussion, is it just arrived kind of right on time when people are beginning to get frustrated with this kind of version of identity, progressivism, therapeutic kind of self-healing mumbo-jumbo. What is most interesting to me, you will be shocked to learn that I am not usually on the Lindy West Polyamory beat. However, I happened to write a couple years ago. I reviewed this book called Moore by this lady named Molly Rodin Winter,

which is very similar story, this kind of journey of self-discovery. She has an absolutely awful husband who basically tricks her into polyamory. This guy in a bar hits on her and her husband's like, you should sleep with him. And she basically pushes her into it. She's like, I don't really want to. And then she does. And he's like, sweet. Now we have an open marriage.

By the way, I'm going to go start sleeping with my ex-girlfriend. And so the whole book is basically Molly Roden Winter crying. saying she wants to reclose the marriage. You eventually learn that she's literally a cult survivor, like her mom and her had been in a cult when she was younger. But the reason I bring this up is Moore was almost uniformly praised by the media as this sexy fun girl boss romp of empowerment. And I was reading all these reviews.

And it's like, did you read the book? It's one of the most disturbing things I've read in a really long time. This woman is clearly in a kind of hostage situation. And so I bring that book up because two years later, Adult Bracus comes out, a very similar structure where there is a woman who is pushed into polyamory ends up giving it a go and then convincing herself she's having a grant on time. Adult Bracis is in many ways a much less disturbing book than more, and yet the response has been uniformly negative.

And I think that says something about the sort of, to use the phrase, everyone uses, just the vibe shift we've undergone in recent years. But, you know, I think it has something for everyone's frustrations. It has kind of banal, self-help, therapeutic, eat, pray, love, kind of. of nonsense. It has real disdain for rural people and places. I mean, most of the book is her just traveling through the middle of the country complaining about like all the hicks she meets. Like she buys honey from this guy at a roadside stand and notices he has a Second Amendment hat and then has this internal panic that he might use her money that she gave him for the honey

in order to fund like anti-abortion activism or something. And so like it has like out of touch coastal progressivism. It has like a disdain for rural people. It has wokeness, use. used as blackmail where her husband basically coerces her into this by comparing sort of monogamy to slavery and then he's black, which is relevant. And then she feels this white guilt that, you know, she's somehow colonizing the word she uses and maybe enslaving her husband by expecting him not to sleep around. So, yeah, I just think, I feel bad for her because she does not seem like a bad person. She's, I think, a talented person. A lot of the problems she has in the book are motivated by kindness. Like, she sort of falls into this consenting.

to allowing this girlfriend thing to continue because the girlfriend's best friend dies and she's having an emotional crisis and her husband's like, I really need to go be with my girlfriend because her best friend died. And Lindy West basically doesn't want to deprive this other woman of emotional support

in a time of crisis. And so Lindy West is not a bad person, but she is somebody who is through a confluence of like various forms of social justice mumbo-jumbo. It is funny. Like, Josh and I once used to do episodes There's a previous versions of podcast where we would do a advice column reviews. And just the way that you just described that made me think of the advice column that I would read at Slate or something if someone did it, which is like, do I need to let my husband fuck his mistress because her friend died.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Exactly. No, you don't need to let him do it. But what if he's black then? Have you considered that? Black and non-binary. Well, that's the other thing. I don't want to suggest that he becomes non-binary. In a footnote on page, I believe, 185 of the book, she mentions in passing that he's a non-binary, but uses he-him pronouns the whole time. But suddenly when the internet is like, this guy seems like he kind of sucks,

she immediately begins switching to they-them pronouns, seemingly in a cynical bid to, like, portray him as a demographic group that people will be less inclined to be mean to, you know. Well, and also, like, his apparent gender expression is not particularly unconventional. Right. I mean, this is the, you know, like when the only indication that someone is non-binary is that they tell you that they will also use they, they as a pronoun in addition to he. It's like, you know, it seems like, you know, this is sufficiently internal to him that it's not clear to me why it needs to be any of the rest of our concerns. But I thought one thing that was interesting you wrote about this was how a lot of the things that, like, led her to talk herself apparently into this relationship were basically political commitments. It's, you know, the anti-racism, sort of a broader sense that it is progressive to be open to polyamory, and that in a way that's just overthinking your romantic interests, that people need to allow themselves to make decisions about what kind of relationships they want in life without focusing too much on what that means about political commitments because it will lead you to silly places.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, and that is partly why this book and the discourse around, I think, is of interest to people beyond just folks who are interested in polyamory or sort of salacious memoir. is that it does sort of speak to the way in which in certain circles, social justice has been used as a cudgel, often to manipulate people who just want to be good people, but who also want to be told what to do. The psychoanalyst Jackalcon defines people who are neurotic as people who just want someone to come along and tell them, this is how you should live. For neurotics, they want to just, they're constantly asking, who am I? What should I do? How should I behave? And I think one of the things that quote unquote

wokeness did was provide a rubric for living for people where it's like use these words, do these things, give the land acknowledgement, don't do this, do do that. And there's something really comforting to that. And I think when you have somebody who is neurotic in that particular way and then someone comes along and sort of exploits and weaponizes that neurosis

by saying, actually, the thing I want to bang my girlfriend is actually the social justice thing. If you're resistant to it, it's because of you're deeply entrenched racism. That is something, yeah, we're seeing in this particular relationship dynamic and it's one of the perils of like the politicalization of romance. I mean, one of the things I said is this is just the other side of the coin of tradwifery. But also you see this in academia, right, where it's like, look, 80% of faculty are just pretty normal people of normal preoccupations. And yes, or left of the average person, but are not wackos. you have 10% of faculty who are like stridently quote unquote anti-woke and then you have another 10% who are very, very, very progressive.

And those people just tend to be really good at coercing and brow beating everyone else. And so I think it sounds silly on the one hand that many people have spent 10 days talking about this polyamory memoir. But I do think it's because it's a window into all of this dynamic that you can see across different kinds of institutions and social structures, et cetera, where a certain version of liberal. is just used by people in power, whether it's somebody in a relationship or an institution, to like browbeat people into doing what they want. Can I ask you as a panel of three straight people? You know, there's been this increased number of these memoirs and think pieces about straight people, you know, opening up their marriages and getting into polyamory.

How common is this really? Because, I mean, obviously, like, sleeping around is a great gay tradition. That's actually kind of cultural appropriation, what the straits are doing here. But I don't know, like one of my more conservative views is I think men and women are fundamentally different and have different, you know, different desires about the structure of sexual relationships and that you're unlikely to find women who want these sorts of arrangements, which might be why you would have to talk yourself. Speaking for wives everywhere, I agree.

Well, I mean, I understand Dan Savage once tried to talk you at opening up your marriage? Yes, yes. So this was... How did that pitch go? It's even funnier. So Dan Savage runs an amateur porn film festival. I made the mistake of mentioning this time. my editor at Newsweek.

Next thing I know, my husband and I were on a plane to the amateur porn film festival to cover it. Which I believe is called hump? Yes, it's called Humfest. So, do you usually bring your husband on these reporting trips? I don't know. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was freshly married.

Was he like, oh, you're going where? I can't. Yeah, this one I'll come to you. Actually, he disliked it more than I did. I was just like, well, this is anthropologically interesting. He disliked what? He did not like the amateur porn. Anyway.

Enough said about that. Anyway, so I want to talk to Dan Savage for the piece, which eventually got killed because I made it too high concept. And what they wanted was more graphic descriptions of porn. Oh, yeah. This is when Tina Brown was running news. Yeah. And I was not really emotionally prepared to deliver what they wanted. So anyway, there we are at the amateur porn film festival, and I am trying to interview Dan Savage, and he finally agrees we'll have dinner before the second night, I think.

Anyway, so we have dinner, and Dan Savage, we're chatting, who is lovely, I really enjoyed the dinner. So, Dan, if you ever hear this, just letting you know, thank you. And, no, so we're chatting, and he's talking about how, like, monogamy is too hard and, you know, and he's like, you guys should open up your marriage. And I was, we'd been married, I think, for a couple years at this point. I think this was 2012. It might have been early 2013. And I was like, you know, honestly, if we were going to make that decision, probably not going to make it here at this nice but nondescript Thai restaurant. And, yes, it was a funny time.

I will say, like, looking at the reaction to Lindy West, there is a gendered element that I was talking to a guy about the other day, which is that I feel terrible empathy for her, even though our politics are very far apart. And I really loathe the kind of mean girl feminism that she was associated with. I really hate it. Not just because I was occasionally its target. I just find it deeply, deeply off-putting. It is like being back at all-girls summer camp, and I had quite enough of that when I was 11. Thank you very much.

But I felt so sorry for her just reading about it. I haven't read the memoir, and I sort of can't bring myself to do it. It feels like giving someone money to continue their fentanyl addiction. Fentanyl's really cheap. You don't, they can get it. You don't have to give them much. Yeah.

There is a particular thing of, and you're so right about it being the inverse of the travolts. right? There have been all these stories of these trad wives who have talked themselves into believing that they are really enjoying being with guys who are abusive. And that's actually like, I know plenty of tradwives who are with guys who are not abusive and who are wonderful husbands and they haven't talked themselves into anything, but I also know women who have trapped themselves with a series of ideological commitments that got out of control. And that is what the this feels like, and I actually, as someone who has stayed in an abusive relationship

long after it ceased to be somewhere I should be, as someone who stayed in non-abusive relationships long after it has ceased to be somewhere I should be because human beings are complicated. And especially, I think, when you're a woman in your 30s, right? It just is true that women's value on the dating market declines faster than men in their 30s, They start higher in their teens, and then it gets a lot harder for women. I think gay men, my understanding is, Josh, and apologies if I'm slandering your people, I think they experience some version of the age penalty that is much harsher than what heterosexual men get.

Oh, no, my generation actually is very fortunate. Got to ride the wave. Like, Daddy came into fashion just as we were hitting middle age. Oh, well. It's like, it's perfect. There's some other generation that completely mismatched it. I've heard some, like, complaining about the cruelty of aging as a gay man. But I did this in my early 30s.

You just feel like, well, I'll never get anyone else, right? This will be the end and I will just die alone with my cats. And so it becomes easier to double down on a relationship that's not working. And just reading these accounts, it feels like that, that she has trapped herself, not just because she let her brain be eaten by ideal. biological worms. And this can happen to anyone on any dimension. It's not like a slam on leftism in particular, but also is now in a position where she has put a lot of investment in this relationship, and it's not clear whether she is likely to find someone else if she leaves it. And so I just felt

deeply sad. But of course, like, the ultimate thing is don't commit the sunk cost fallacy. You know, the best time to get out was four years ago. The second best time is now. But that's a really hard message to hear when you're in it and you're afraid. Josh, I know we're getting late here, but I wanted to give you a very direct anecdote to your question about whether this polly stuff. I was dating a girl once and she didn't live in New York. I lived in New York. She came to New York to visit me as she did every few months. And she said, Ben, an ex-boyfriend of mine is in town and I want you to meet him.

We're just friends now. Don't be worried. But we're going to go see him. He is in charge of a swingers group. And so we're going to go to the swinging party where, you know, they're going to be swinging. There's no fucking in the bar band, but it's where they're going to match out. They might be some making out with people and then they're going to go off and swing. And I was like, you sick in me, slut?

I didn't say slut. But I was like, okay, I'll go. And I wanted to be cool and smart and hip. And I went into this bar on the Lower East Side with her. and she saw her. All these people looked a little scummy, a little, a little, you know, layered black suits with black jackets and black, black ties.

And I met her devilish ex-boyfriend who had three Eastern European women with him. And none of whom were terribly attractive. Is this how you tell us here in the Epstein files, Ben? Quantity has a quality all its own. Ben is in the Epstein files, but not for this. Yeah, they were all a little too old for this, actually, because all these people were actually a little, like,

Bridget Tunnel 40s, you know? They were all, like, trying to capture something that they had lost. And the guy says hello to my girlfriend, and we're just having a nice time chatting, chatting. But then we get a little drunk, and I get a little paranoid and was like, oh, they're all trying to fuck you. Every guy here is trying to fuck you. And she was like, man, it's okay. They might be trying to fuck me, but there's no emotion behind it.

That's the whole point of this, you know? And a lot of them were probably trying to fuck you too. Look, that woman, that 47-year-old wife from New Pulse, she might be interested in structuring you. And I had a very not good reaction to it and was like, can we please go? Can we just go and just have a have a, have a, have a, I just need you. If I, you're the only thing I need. If I had six sticks, I put them all in you. And we did end up leaving.

And I'll never forget, like, in the Uber back to my apartment, but she was like, oh my god so pathetic so square and i felt so judged and emasculated by and also like telling the story now what a baby i was but also what what a normie i was this is i am i am the normal person i think that in reality people read these things and it's it's actually sort of outside of the experience a lot of people are like me at the bar they expect that they'll be like like lydie west's boyfriend or something uh-huh but in reality they're just uncomfortable people like me. I was talking to someone else about this. I don't think I know any polyamorous people. Maybe not that they would tell me now that I've written two like not so nice articles about straight people

doing polyamory. So who knows, maybe they're all around me. They just wouldn't let me know. But no, I don't know anyone who has. But it is, yeah, I don't know. It is just interesting the way in which it seems to fit into just a broader umbrella of like part of people's frustration is like I heard a lot of people say like you're just dressing up cheating. And I don't know. This feels like one of those vices. We are trying to normalize, and that is like weed and gambling or whatever, and everyone is sort of realizing this was better when you went up to the guy reading the sports page at the bar, or you went to the bridge and tunnel bar that Ben is describing. And it wasn't on the cover of New York Magazine, you know? And so I kind of think this is, like, part of a broader cultural

moment. Everyone's like, some of the things that have, like, gone to the forefront should just, like, go back to the shadows and they shouldn't be penalized in any kind of way, but like there should be some more friction and yeah, I don't know. You know, I don't doubt that Dan Savage has writers who are happily in, you know, non-monogamous relationships because the universe is large and the people who write Dan Savage are not a representative sample of America, right? They are in fact a quite unrepresentative sample in a lot of ways. My experience with people who opened up their marriages or relationships, and I don't know that many of them. It's kind of like one of my friends in college joked that our freshman year, she was a lesbian, and she said, yeah, like a lot of,

like a lot of freshmen, I was on the by now, gay later plan. And the opening up your relationship seems to generally be a waste station on the road to divorce. It's something that you do when one party either really just cannot keep it in their pants. And eventually that is going to overwhelm your relationship. But before you do that, you're going to see if you can just live with it in a very open and consensual way that isn't all that consensual. But then the other thing is that both parties are kind of looking to get out. And both of them aren't really feeling it. But I don't know, like we've been together for so long.

What if we like spice things up by opening it up? And then eventually what you realize is no, actually, you just don't like being together anymore. I'm not saying that there aren't people who have had different experiences, but those are the examples I personally know about. I don't know very many of them. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't tell me, right? Like, maybe all my friends are happily, like, going to bars and meeting 47-year-old people from the suburbs, and they're just not telling me about it. I think the other thing there is, like, anything that you're doing as an effort to troubleshoot a relationship is an indicator that there's an underlying problem in the relationship. That's why you're troubleshooting in the first place.

You know, and I think with the gays, it's not typically like, you know, a couple that was together for like seven years and something wasn't working and then they need to change something. It's sort of something that, you know, both parties were bought in on from very early on. And so you're less likely to end up in the sort of Lindy West type situation where it seems like one person is really doing this under duress. I think since we all love Dan so much, maybe this amateur porn festival thing is where we should be doing a live Central Air one day. I don't think anybody wants to see that, Ben. But we don't have to shoot... It's okay. There are no bad ideas.

There are no bad ideas. Just bad people. We're just trying to come up with an event idea. I think we can leave that there this week. Tyler, thank you for joining us. This has been a really fun conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, guys.

And thank you, Ben and Megan. I will talk with you next week. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We're a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddick mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening. and stay cool out there.