Central Air - Immigration, with Matt Yglesias

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Matt Yglesias joins Josh, Megan and Ben to discuss immigration: why (and how) the Biden administration bungled the issue so badly and how the Democratic party could start to regain voters' trust on the issue.Also in this episode: the problem of “the algorithm” and how it's really a problem of the audience with its bias toward negativity; Helen Andrews’ essay for Compact, which alleges that key institutions are suffering from an epidemic of “feminization”; the efficacy of the “No Kings” protests; and ...does Italy have too many restaurants?Sign up for updates from Central Air here. 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 everybody to the second episode of Central Air. It's the refreshing blast. Europe can't afford. I'm Josh Barrow. I'm here again with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post. Megan, how was your weekend? Were you out at the No Kings protest?

I was not. I was getting ready for my husband's birthday party, I'm afraid. Oh, how was that? It was lovely. Ben was there. Actually, you should ask him. I really enjoyed it, but I'm a bit biased. Ben, what do you give Peter Sutterman's birthday party on a 10-scale?

An 11. 11. Wow. All right, all right. And eight. Let's let's calm down. I've dug your pardon, Ben. Look, I just realized I can't be, you know, I got to give them a realistic grade here.

There was punch and pimento cheese sandwiches. Wow. I bet, you know, Peter, of course, famously the cocktail guy. I assume this was some kind of really good punch. What was it? Yeah, it was fish house punch is what we normally make for. you would have to ask my husband, it's good. Okay.

It tastes good. I think it involves tea, but then also other things. So Megan and Ben were not at the No King's protests this weekend, but seven million Americans were, according to the organizers of these protests, Indivisible was the main liberal political organization behind it. 2700 rallies across the country. And I'm always interested in the news cycles around these because there's this sort of whining from Republicans where it's basically like.

well, they just want the president to be a Democrat. That's their objection. It's kind of like, well, yeah, sure. That's kind of what politics is. But I also found it interesting, you know, the No Kings naming is interesting because, you know, there's a bunch of different reasons to complain about Donald Trump. And I think Democrats are electorally find, you know, health care is their number one issue right now. And the health care cuts in the one big beautiful bill are the issue that Democrats want to focus on and trying to reverse those with the government shutdown. But No Kings is really kind of a message about abuses of executive. power, the president going and doing things that, you know, aren't within his legal authority

that Congress is supposed to have control of that were widely not understood to be a thing that presidents would just do unilaterally, like, you know, put us back to 1930s tariff levels, even if there are laws allowing them to do that. And so it's an interesting divide to me, because these are issues that matter a lot to partisan Democrats. And I'm wondering, you know, maybe this is an effective way to frame that to try to get people to focus on those issues that are not as attention-grabbing inherently as health care is. Megan, what did you think about the protests? I think that the rule of protesting is first do no harm.

They did no harm. Great job, guys, stay the course. I tend to think that protests are not a particularly effective form of political action, unless you can meet some pretty narrow conditions. I think if we look at the, historically, the great protest achievements of in the United States were first the Suffragette movement and then the civil rights movement. What are those two things have in common? They have in common people breaking laws and causing an official reaction that will polarize the public against them. People do not like to see women being manhandled. Northerners did not like to see police using fire hoses and dogs to keep people from peacefully marching or sitting at a lunch counter where people in the north did not think they should have been barred. By the way, I agree with that. I don't want to make this sound like I'm both sidesing Jim Crow. And that is actually very effective.

Short of that, a lot of the protests you see today, for example, the people who are blocking traffic, like, yes, you're doing civil disobedience. The problem is that very few people think that the laws against blocking a highway are unjust. And I think just turning out in large numbers tends not to have much political effect. But people like it. It makes them feel like they're doing something. to the extent that that's substituting for actually doing something, I think that can be bad, but it does build solidarity. It can help mobilize, you know, like be a sort of get-out-the-vote effort ahead of local elections. And so, look, they did the protests. They did not cause any

trouble. They did not produce bad soundbites for their own side as left-wing protests have often done in the past. So I think, you know, maybe there's a modest uptops. side. There was no downside. Grading that like a a a for effort Democrats. Yeah. I mean, I agree with everything Megan just said. I'm I'm not a big believer that protests under outside of you know, incredibly rare situations actually help much. But, uh, you know, they didn't they didn't, they didn't burn any cars. There was nothing, no problems like that. I hate the name no kings. Really why? Because I don't even under I didn't even, I didn't even, it had to be explained to me, which is so stupid because obviously once they explain it, I guess I see what you're like right.

But I mean, isn't it like getting back to the American founding here that, you know, the president is being abusive of his powers in the way that, well, I mean, I guess you'd say King George the third, although a lot of people have been pointing out that it was really the elected English parliament that was misbehaving in a lot of ways. But it's the getting back to our, you know, the principles of our founding that were not supposed to be ordered around in certain ways by officials, I think that's. Sure, sure. But also what you, when you first initially hear in Kings, you think, well, he's the president and he was elected. King George wasn't, wasn't elected. Well, I guess that's maybe that's why, maybe, I don't know, no parliaments would not be a good message.

But isn't that telling is like overseas, right? They're not called no kings protest. They're called no tyrant protests. Right. I saw that note from Democrats abroad. They're having some of these protests in countries that do have kings. And the kings are even sometimes well liked in those countries. But I don't know. I don't think no kings is that confusing a message. I think it's that, you know, that the president is wielding power that he's not supposed to have like a king, I think is a fairly simple message. I don't know. I didn't feel confused by it. Yeah.

I mean, I guess so. I thought it was, I almost wanted to go and be like act dumb and be like, no kings. Yeah, get out, King George. And then have someone have to explain it to me that it was about Trump. And then I would go, what? He used a president. But I wasn't committed enough to the bit. No.

Yeah, I also think, Josh, you are not the median voter. Sure. And so the fact that you don't find that confusing doesn't mean that the median voter doesn't. I also think that, you know, it's going to be a challenge for the left to reclaim the American founding branding. No, but I'm glad that they're trying. That's not something that they are historically known for loving and in recent periods. Their reverence for the founding, including toppling all the statues of the founders. Look, I mean, again, A for effort, how successful is that going to be? Not so clear. I think that's part of the point of protests like

this is that, you know, when you're drawing out, I don't know if it's really seven million people, you know, your organizers say, but it's clearly a very large number of people, you're getting the sort of people who are not coming out to the like protest puppet, naked bicycle protest type things in Portland, people who have more normy engagement with American politics and probably aren't the sort of people who are going out and, you know, toppling statues of Thomas Jefferson and Parks. And so I think it's, you know, it's to the good for Democrats to have that voice, you know, out there more as, you know, instead of being represented by more extreme protesters. And then, you know, The thing you raise about, you know, if this is a substitute for actual political action, that's a problem.

But I think there's also an argument that it's a compliment. And we've seen that, you know, from like Laura Putnam, the historian at the University of Pittsburgh, who's looked at some of these movements, you know, in recent years, you know, both the Women's March and the Tea Party before it. And finding that, you know, you build this infrastructure to do these protests. And then that same infrastructure is useful for organizing for local elections and trying to elect officials from your side and turn people out. You know, turnout is an overrated thing, I think, in presidential elections, but in, you know, in elections that have lower turnout, that sort of organizing can be important for getting people together and winning. And so to the extent that you're getting people today together to wave signs and then in a few weeks, you're getting them together to get people to get people out and, you know, vote for the House of Delegates in Virginia or whatever it is. I think that can that that can be an important muscle memory thing for political movement. You need people to get used to getting together.

And sometimes they do one thing and sometimes they do another thing. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the second episode of Central Air. If you like what you're hearing, I encourage you. Go to Centralairpodcast.com and subscribe. You'll be notified about every new episode, every week, and you'll be able to pop into the comments section, respond to our conversation, and let us know what you think. Of course, you can also add Central Air on your favorite podcast platform,

so you'll get all our latest episodes there. Either way, please, come inside and join us. It's nice and cool in here. We have a special guest this week for the first time on our Central Air. Central Air show. We're bringing in Matt Iglesias, who I'm sure substantially everyone who listens to us is familiar with. Matt, thank you for joining us here on Central Air. Are you enjoying the cool breeze? I am loving it. I listen to the first episode. I thought it was like a great mission statement. I'm really excited. And I am an air conditioning aficionado as well. So I love the name.

It's the best thing. It's, you know, it's always exactly the right temperature. I don't understand why people, you know, they have this mythology in Europe that like being hit by a wall of cold air is bad for your health. It's like, you know, it's like the ill humors or something. I believe that's just the French. I heard it was Germans. Yeah, the Germans and the Italians. I mean, Europeans are insane, but like I'm hardcore on this. I mean, I had an infamous slate take about how I don't like to eat lunch outside and people will be like, oh, but the weather's so good today. But inside, the weather is always good if you have air conditioning. If you have central air. Speaking as someone who tried to survive a summer in Massachusetts without air conditioning and

ended up sleeping in the car with her dogs because there was a during the heat dome. Oh, yeah. When it hit 95 degrees. I've got a no AC house in Maine. It is borderline tolerable, but we are getting some mini splits put in. So Matt is here. We're going to talk about immigration, which is something that Matt and I have both been writing about in recent weeks, specifically what the hell went wrong in the Biden administration

on immigration that, you know, led to out of control irregular migration and a huge political liability for the president. And the genesis of this conversation is I wrote a piece of the New York Times a few weeks ago, basically saying that Biden had destroyed trust and Democratic Party on immigration, that his administration did not appear to have been really trying very hard to enforce the law, allowed, you know, millions of people sometimes illegally, sometimes with, you know, this process where the asylum system was overwhelmed. And so they would issue people a ticket and say, you know, come back in four years for your court. And meanwhile, you can work in the United States.

And even if your claim is probably going to be rejected, you get to stay here for a really long time. And then in some cases through this program called temporary protected status, where the executive has a fair amount of discretion to give out legal status in the United States. And about a million Haitians and Venezuelans were admitted that way. And so basically, as this was happening in the Biden administration, as there was increasing public discontent with chaos at the border and huge numbers of migrants showing up in New York City and elsewhere, the line from the Biden administration was basically, well, you know,

we can't fix this under current law. The law is a problem in various ways. People have rights to come here and seek asylum. We need Congress to pass a law that will spend more money and give us more power and then we'll be able to fix the crisis at the border. They weren't able to get that deal through Congress. And then suddenly in 2024, they sort of looked in their toolbox and they were like, oh, wait, we do have a bunch of things that we can do to clamp down on asylum, which they did. And almost immediately, there was a huge drop in this flow of regular migration across the southern border. And sort of, I think a lot of Americans looked at that and were like, well, why the fuck did you wait three and a half years in order to do that? And it's a not only was a big liability for Kamala Harris, who didn't find a way to distance herself from Biden on this. It also means that, you know, as Trump comes in and does his crackdown, Democrats are not in a good position to message that they would handle this issue better. So anyway, I wrote about that and I wrote about that and I wrote about how Democrats need to recommit to enforcement so that they can talk credibly about this. And there were two top Biden officials who shared the piece on Twitter and praised it near a tan.

who ran the Domestic Policy Council in the later part of his administration. That's the organ in the White House that handles immigration policy. And Stephanie Feldman, who had also been top official at the Domestic Policy Council and served as staff secretary. Matt, you then wrote about this and I wrote about this. It's this funny thing. It's like, you know, I wrote like, gee, Biden really sucked on this. And these two officials who were partly responsible for are like, yeah, Biden really sucked on this. It's like, okay. So whose fault was that? What the hell happened in the White House that caused this to go so wrong? So we know who not to hire next time and what to do differently next time. And they don't want to talk about that. And Stephanie

Feldman specifically basically said, well, you know, like there's no need to name names. You know, in the transition next time, I'm sure people will know about that and then that will be discussed and sort of like that it can be handled quietly. And it's just really weird, like partly because, I mean, this is very important, it's substantively important, it's politically important. It's also weird because usually when there's a big problem inside administration, there's leaks about it, and there's pretty good press reporting about how the big mistake that everyone's angry about happened. And here we haven't really gotten that. One of the things the Biden team was good at was not leaking.

And so, Matt, I'm just wondering, you know, you've been trying to get to the bottom of this. What is your theory of what the fuck went wrong in the Biden administration on immigration? It's challenging to know exactly because, as you say, like, the Biden administration, I think this is a little under remarked upon because, you know, journalists write the stories that they have. and they don't write the stories that they don't have. Even after, in some ways, especially after the Jake Tapper book and all that stuff, we have gotten less insight into the internal policy disagreements of the Biden administration than of any administration that we have ever had.

Right. Like neither that book nor any of the subsequent reporting or anything that came out previously like really clearly indicates like who disagreed with whom and about, what and when. And you just know, nobody runs the government, right, in which like every issue comes up, right? Like, there's all these Haitians. And then someone's like, what should we do about it? And just everyone is unanimous, right? Like, nothing goes that way. What I have been told, though, is that at the beginning of the administration, essentially nobody is in charge of immigration in a comprehensive way, that different people have different pieces of the puzzle, that they are all

responding to, you know, a few different kinds of advocacy group pressures to try to show that they're different from Trump and they're doing something. They are also all, I mean, a striking thing about the Biden administration is that from the beginning, senior officials are expressing anxiety about the high level of illegal immigration. You know, like the first conversation I had with the Biden administration about this was in March 2021. And they are not saying to me, Matt, it is good that we have all these people at the southern border, asylum claims. That is our new policy working as intended. Like, we wanted to reverse the cruelty of Trump's anti-asylum, anti-refugee policies. That's why a lot of people are here. We're going to, like, make it a little bit more orderly and it's going to be fine. They are saying to me, it is not true that our policies are the reason why all these people are here. They are saying to me, we still have

the CDC Title 42 expulsion order in place. And so, therefore, logically, none of these other executive orders that we issued in January can be responsible for this. You have to understand the pull factors from the labor market, et cetera, et cetera, et to just step back and explain to people what that policy framework was. There were a number of things that the Trump administration had done that made it more difficult for people to come to the U.S. and claim asylum. There was a policy called Remain in Mexico that basically was requiring people to wait in Mexico, sometimes in quite difficult circumstances, while the U.S. was waiting for, possibly a very long time to look at their asylum claims. There were these agreements with countries

in Central America that basically said if you passed through those countries, you had to try to claim asylum there, that you know you were obligated to seek asylum in Guatemala. You were not allowed to seek asylum in the U.S. And then when COVID had come in in 2020, there was this thing Title 42 that basically said there's a public health emergency. And if people show up at the border, we can just turn them around because of the COVID pandemic. So the Biden administration's first policy idea was to reverse Romania, New Mexico, reverse the safe third country agreements, which, as they point out, had not actually been implemented in a real way, but to keep Title 42 as kind of a backstop, right? And if you think about

like not caring at all about the substance of the policy and just doing intersgroup triangulation, and it's like, I want to give some wins to the immigration advocates, but I also want to like try to hold the line. Sticking with this COVID thing, because Biden was doing a lot of COVID-hawkery, Right. But it didn't make sense. I mean, what I wrote at the time was like, you've got to step back and think to yourself, like, what is the outcome that we want on immigration? And then what are the policies that we think are going to deliver the outcome? And like, they clearly just didn't do that.

Like, because you would ask them, well, if you're saying Title 42 prevents people from coming, then like, why did you make these other changes? Like, what would the possible point to be of getting rid of the same? third country agreements unless you wanted people to transit through the Darying Gap and be able to make asylum claims. Well, but it seems to me like the Biden administration's messaging goal, circa 2021, was that they wanted to be seen in the United States to be being nicer to migrants, that there were, you know, there was a lot of outrage on the left about, you know, Donald Trump talking about shithole countries and the various things that he was doing that were hostile to

immigration. And they wanted an audience in the United States, particularly within the Democratic Party to see that they were the kindler, gentler administration. But they didn't want that message to be heard globally. They did not want migrants to, in fact, you know, to receive that information and come here and infer that, hey, this is a good time to try to seek admission to the United States. And, you know, this, honestly, this is the thing that I miss most about being a Republican, is that I think Republicans have like a basically sound view of human nature and how people will respond to messages and incentives. And I think Democrats live in a fucking fantasy land about how how people, you know, respond to incentives and process information.

And that the Biden people thought that, you know, you could reverse all these policies in a way that would send this message into the, in the U.S., that, you know, we're nice to migrants now, and that that message wouldn't, wouldn't get to Central America and that you could send Kamala Harris down there to say, do not come, and that that would work and you would, you would split the information and that, you know, the very strong pull factor of the fact that gaining admission and permission to work in the United States is extremely valuable, that people are not going to pay close attention to change you. in their likelihood of obtaining that and act accordingly.

Like, they just, it seemed to me like they didn't understand that, you know, that this thing was going to have global effects. Yeah, I mean, you know, conservatives in their sort of typical failure mode are assholes. And liberals in their typical failure mode are naive, softies. And, you know, and I think the recurrent problem, I mean, I've got a piece coming out later this week about the Obama administration. in its second term, where the number of people involved was dramatically lower, and so it just wasn't as big of a deal. But they wound up facing this same dilemma, which is that when essentially teenagers, people figured out that because of rules had been adopted back in 2008, if you came to the

southern border as an unaccompanied minor, you were going to receive kinder treatment than an adult would. And so teenagers were being sent without their parents to the northern border to make asylum claims and avail themselves to these opportunities. The Obama administration, again, they absolutely did not say when this was happening, like, this is good. This is our kindness to minors making asylum claims, working as intended. We think the American people are going to feel that this is fantastic. But they got into this rigmarole of, well, the system is overburdened. We need Congress to take action. We need more resources to handle this better, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because the idea of being cruel to basically sympathetic cases, right? Like if Trump was right, if all of these people were like terrorists and mass murderers, I don't think the Obama administration would have any problem getting rid of them. The problem is that they didn't want to be. jerks to people who are fleeing a legitimately bad situation. But if you don't do that, right, like the immigration system requires harshness toward people

who, on a human level, like, they're not bad people, right? Like, this is a classic like, Malapuribita kind of thing. Malaprohibita? What is that? Like, some things are like illegal because they're morally wrong, theft and murder, etc. Other things are just rules. We drive on the right, not on the left. There's nothing wrong with driving on the left. But like, we need people to pick a side of the road and we need to enforce the rule.

Wanting to move to the United States and do DoorDash deliveries for money is not like some insane, like, how dare you kind of thing. But like if we don't want. Those psychos. Right. But it's like the country can't function without quantitative limits on how many people come and without time, place, and manner restrictions on how they do it. And so if you are going to have those rules, you need to enforce the rules. It means that some people who are not like in a cosmic sense bad people, like need to be put in prison and set back home. And it's just like Diane Feinstein back when she was

with it mentally and thus had not been taken over by her left-wing staff, she was saying back in 2015. Look, under Section 212F of the Immigration Naturalization Act, the president can basically unilaterally cancel asylum programs and get this under control, which like 10 years later is what the Biden administration eventually does. So it's like this same debate has been ricocheting in the Democratic Party forever running sort of hot and cold on different levels. And I think the important, I mean, I think it's important going forward for Democrats to acknowledge this, that, like, there's the outcome that they keep agreeing they don't want. But it's like, this Kant, I think, says, like, if you will the end, you have to will the means. And it's like, it kind of sucks that you have to deal out harsh treatment to basically sympathetic people to maintain an orderly immigration system.

But, like, you just do. and spending years dicking around and trying to come up with some alternative to it is not helpful. So, Megan, I mean, I assume that you as a libertarian are also broadly sympathetic to the idea that, you know, when people want to migrate across borders, they ought to be allowed to do that. But it doesn't seem to me like, you know, the, I mean, and I don't think it's just because libertarians are a junior partner in the coalition on the right. There seems to be a little bit more practicality about what Matt is describing there than you sometimes see in the Democratic Party coalition. I mean, among the libertarians, I think. No? No, I would not call the libertarians practical on this.

And look, I say this as someone who is at the edges of the libertarian movement, shading over into a kind of whiggish sensibility, constantly being ejected by people for my insufficient ideological purity. And there are a lot of open borders people who just literally think there should be no controls on immigration. And I will talk to them and they will say that the control is when the job market saturates, people will stop coming. I think this is wildly impractical on a number of levels. Like, number one, you live in a democracy. And many of those libertarians who are open borders people are now extremely exercised, justifiably, at Trump's offenses against democracy. Well,

one feature of democracies is that they do not vote to admit huge numbers of people from outside. The United States probably comes closer to that than any other place, except, you know, like Canada actually has a really high percentage of foreign born, but now it's looking like maybe that didn't have a ton of actual political support. You are also seeing this in Europe. It's very hard to maintain political support for having more than, say, 10% of your population be foreign born. my personal view is that even aside from that, there is some limit at which you can assimilate new people into your culture. And I am not like making an argument about small cultural differences, but there are big cultural differences that are really important about things like rule of law, about things like corruption, right?

And I say this as a descendant of the people who famously came here and introduced their rather corrupt political culture to the United States. those things you getting people to adopt those norms it happens this is not like some racial essentialism this is just like different kinds of societies are organized for different things from everything from queuing to how you expect your legislators to behave on the one end you have like low level hunter gatherers and then on the other end you have like Norway where everything you know it's a very high social trust culture very optimized for running a large society in a pretty consensus-based way. And in between, you know, the United States has a mix of these things.

So I think, like, I don't know what the limit of how fast we can assimilate people into modern society is. I think it's higher than the political limit, so it's a little irrelevant. You know, I think we could certainly have 20 to 25 percent of our population foreign-born. But the electorate disagrees with me, and we're never going to get there. The other interesting thing there is, you know, something you occasionally hear from the libertarian part of the right is, well, you know, we should let people in here, but like, don't let them have any government services. You know, we'll say, you know, if you want to come here and work, that's okay. But, you know, we will, you know, we'll make that work fiscally by saying that, you know,

the government's not going to spend any money on you. And occasionally, I even hear libertarians say things like, well, immigration reduces social trust, and that's good because then there'll be less support for a welfare state and the government will be smaller. But you have this additional problem where it's like, it's actually even more important for liberals to have, you know, a coherent approach to immigration than it might be for conservatives because liberals also want this generous welfare state and, you know, a big active government doing a lot of things for us communally together. And that's one of the things that we saw where I live in New York, which is that you have, you know, a judicial ruling that creates a right to shelter, anyone, you know,

shows up in the city regardless of immigration status and says, I don't have somewhere to sleep. The city has to put them in a hotel room. The city rented something like 14,000 hotel rooms that was using for, you know, well over a year to house these migrants who came during the Biden administration. And so that's, you know, that's another thing that liberals haven't really wanted to reckon with is that they, you know, they want these big generous government programs, which, you know, both have, you know, that they have cost constraints and the more people you make eligible, the more they cost. And then also you have this political constraint where people have to feel that this is a communal project for some sort of society and the support for it wanes if they see that it's illegal immigrants who are taking up all those hotel rooms using billions of dollars out of the city's budget. And I just, you know, I don't think there's been a willingness to think, in a practical manner about that on the Democratic side. It's just sort of wanting to pretend that that tradeoff is not there. A thing I spend a lot of time trying to convince the left of is that a welfare state is a fundamentally nationalist project. You go to Denmark and they've got the flag just slathered on everything.

Why? Because that is how you actually justify getting people to pay incredibly high taxes to provide services for people they've never met. and the idea that government is just kind of like a hotel and like you check in when you feel like it and you check out when you don't like it anymore, that's a very cosmopolitan idea that just does not work at the level of actually organizing society to do anything other than provide hotel-like services. And yeah, you actually have to make a commitment to the idea of America as a group of people who has some control over the people who join our little club. And I think when you do that, you can actually make an argument for making it a big club and for creating room for our one billion Americans, as Matt has so provocatively and correctly argued for.

But you have to argue about that from the perspective of like, we also get to make demands on people. And they can't just come in and access welfare benefits. But Democrats don't want to do that. And Republicans at this point just don't want to do anything. So I guess I remember talking to you, Matt, when you wrote that book and a key part of it, right? right, is you have to increase humans lots of ways, but one of them is immigration. And I think that like it gets to all of these benefits that come from having, you know, increased workforce and all these people who come here, prime working age and all of that stuff.

But then you get to the simple like political reality that Americans generally have never really been supportive of increased immigration at any point, though they often look back and say it was okay before, but let's not let's not do any more of it. and except for like, you know, the polls are always so funny, because you look at like the first Trump term where suddenly things all go way up for immigration just out of like knee-jerk reactions to him. And but then when you look at like, you know, the first law that the U.S. had really about this, right, in like the 20s when they started to restrict it, people sometimes like,

oh, well, before that, we used to love all the mix and Irish coming. And it's just like, in reality, that law was just because like there was finally a state with enough structure to even try to enforce immigration. And like, there was no power to do that before. So I think it's just a complicated thing where you can look at this broad, long horizon, where it, like, does make so much economic sense and all these wonderful things to increase immigration. But then just the political reality and the day-to-day thing that people are just not,

not fond of it. Matt, I mean, when you write about immigration, I see a lot of people throw at you like, hey, you're the one billion Americans guy. Like, that sentiment seems a little bit ill-timed. for the way that immigration politics has gone in the last few years. And, you know, the, can you lay out, you know, is this, you know, if you have a vision where the Democratic Party reestablishes credibility and enforces immigration law and sets rules about who can come here and who can, who can not come here, do you still think that's compatible with a substantial increase in the

total volume of legal migration? I mean, you know, in some sense, yes. I mean, I think that what Biden did, like, has fundamentally salted the earth around this for some, you know, period of time, you know, that like, who knows? I mean, if J.D. Vance becomes Donald Trump's successor and then J.D. Vance is unpopular for whatever reason and he loses in 2032, you know, it's like you may just have a different situation then and different kinds of changes. I think that the situation of Australia is instructive about immigration, because Australia has some of the highest levels of immigration relative to its population. size of any country, and they have the absolute harshest asylum protocols. You know what I mean?

Like their government- They stick people on Nauru or whatever you pronounce that. They bring you to offshore extraterritorial prison islands so that it is like mechanically impossible to make an asylum claim in Australia if you attempt to get there by sea. And the point of that is that successive Australian governments from both the center right and the center left, are trying to say that the government of Australia is in charge of who immigrates to Australia. What you have with asylum is this very legalistic concept that, like, who comes to the United States should be based on who does and does not meet some objective threat criteria in their home country, which is like a nice idea.

If you were just assuming that, like, at max 1,000 people, you know, will do it or something, right? If you were to say, look, we will grant asylum to 1,000 people a year and it's going to be the 1,000 most objectively deserving hardship cases, like, fine. But 1,000 is a really low number, right? If you're trying to say, look, we should have a large number of people coming in, it has to be that we are selecting people not because it's of the greatest benefit. to them to move here, but because it's the greatest benefit to us to move here, right? The politics are like not trivial either way once you get past a certain point. And you've seen this. I mean, Canada had for a long time a well-supported and well-controlled immigration system.

The Trudeau government made some sweeping changes to how that function. There was a lot of backlash. They're kind of turning back on that, but trying to still maintain a fairly large number of people overall. Canada is not a country that by objective standards has a lot of people living in it, relative to its land area. And so it makes sense. But like, there's the 100 million Canadians guy. Ah, yes, Maximum Canada. Yeah, I mean, I just stole his book. You know, he makes the point that Canada actually suffered during the era of immigration restriction to the United States. There was no restriction on Canadians moving here. And there was still a lot of labor market demand for immigration.

So there was like incredibly large volumes of Canadians moving south of the border to where the weather is better. And he argues, I think, persuasively, this was bad for Canada to have, you know, this much out migration. You know, I will say like the kind of dark matter in this that I would love to have more people on the record about is that like Mark Zuckerberg personally for a lot of the late Obama, Trump won and very early Biden. years was putting like a ton of money into soft on crime, soft on immigration, political advocacy. Then Zuckerberg seems to have like sharply polarized against the left had like remade himself, went on Joe Rogan with his gold chain and was like, we need masculine energy now. And I don't know like 100% what he's thinking. But like the forward.us was like behind, I would say probably like the most.

politically toxic ideas that got into Democratic Party politics. And it is quite good for the world that he has, like, chosen to ratchet down their funding. And, like, I don't think that that particular Constellation of advocacy groups is holding the same kind of influence going forward. Like, as you noted, right, like, Center for American Progress, which is, like, the ultimate mainstream lib institution, they, like, actually put out. a different immigration policy in their document, which, like, they haven't done in other things. A quite harsh asylum policy. And I mean, you know, there's a number of aspects of the immigration policy. And I think they're trying to square the circle that you are, Matt, where it's like we want,

you know, we want more legal immigration that is designed to benefit the U.S. And we also want to enforce the law better. But it's, you know, it's Center for American Progress. It's really near a Tandon personally. Like, her name is on that paper as the president of the organization and as a former top Biden official. But that's part of what makes. me so confused about the black box of how these decisions were made in the Biden administration, because Nira was there those whole four years. And I think we can see from her comments and, you know, that she, you know, she was one of the people who saw this as a bigger problem and, you know, was presumably trying to do something about it. But we don't know, like, you know,

who was standing in her way. And the, you know, the, so I still don't know how we can then, you know, we have the new Democratic president come in in 23. and they're holding the white paper from the Center for American Progress, it says this is how to fix asylum so that same thing doesn't happen next time. But presumably we have the same workplace dynamics that we had circa 2021. And we don't know who not to hire. And we also don't know, like, if it was really just that basically, like, they were cowering and it was like, please don't hit me, that they just didn't want news stories.

They didn't want people on the left to see them being tough. Whereas the Trump administration seems to understand that the performance of toughness is actually part of the policy. It's the majority of the policy, I think, actually, because, like, it's, you're trying to deter people. And so, you know, the objective odds of getting caught obviously matter. But, like, people aren't statisticians, right? And it's like, do you convey? I mean, it's, I would also love to know.

I mean, I also understand why Nira and Steph Feldman don't want to just, like, do our jobs for us and tell us. I wish that they would, though, because it's important to understand. Well, actually, hold on. I don't fully understand that. Because normally these people, they want to win these internal political battles. Like, it's pitched. And part of that is leaking to the press or speaking openly to the press and trying to shape public perception of what happened to have people think that you had good ideas and other people

had bad ideas and you should have more power next time. I'm actually confused that they're not doing our jobs for us. And I think maybe the answer is that nobody really was doing that good a job circa 2021. that you know that some people saw this as more of a problem than others, but nobody was, maybe nobody was really pounding the table in the way that they should have been trying to get this right. I mean, it's the same thing with why Kamala Harris couldn't incredibly break with Joe Biden on migration is that she probably, you know, she probably didn't have any good ideas at the time. And if she claimed to-

But she should have just lied. Right. But then someone would have leaked against her and said, actually, you know, yeah, I mean, but so in any case, it's slightly grim to me because it suggests to me that, you know, maybe there's no set of staffing in the Democratic Party that would have gotten this right because they were all subject to like just their primary focus was, oh, no, there was another news cycle where these border patrol employees appeared to be striking their whips in the general direction of migrants. And that's, you know, that's the number one concern is that progressives think that's mean. But I mean, part of it is, and Matt and Josh, you can both say this better than me, say what this is true. But it just seems to me that no one

within the Democratic Party wants to formulate an actual immigration policy that would work. Because you have to deport people. because that would require at some point stating we plan to be mean. They're comfortable with closing the border. I mean, again, like part of what's, it's both frustrating about this, but also encouraging, is that, like, this is the issue where the Biden administration did change course. Like, they changed course too late. But, like, they did change course.

It's annoying that Harris didn't criticize them for it because the decision was already made. Right. And like Nira and Feldman are out there now being like, Joe Biden did this wrong. Senate for American Progress is like, we need to have a much harsher assignment policy. Democrats, again, like the issue where congressional Democrats within like 10 feet of the front line were like, we're going to throw in the towel and cave was the Lake and Riley Act. Like this is the topic on which there has been the most sort of like intra-party shifting, I think, like substantively, it's like it's very different from like the transgender sports issue where it's like pulling teeth to get somebody to agree with 80% of the public. Like this is one where like

Democrats do see that there's a problem. My main concern is that they are underrating the fact that the Biden administration faced a genuine dilemma that like you, Josh may think it's dumb, that like liberals are so tied up about this, but that like it was. It was. It was a it's easy to believe that, like, Republicans were right all along. Joe Biden just, like, for no reason, pressed the open the border button. And so next time we're going to come in and we're not going to do that. We're just going to sand the edges off the worst of Trump's abuses, but, like, we won't press the open the border button. And what you need to take seriously is that, like, there are very real abuses that are happening. But whatever, however you characterize them, when you take office and

start rolling back immigration enforcement, people are going to test you. And they're going to say, oh, does this mean it's really easy to get in now? And governments that Trump has leaned on to externalize enforcement are going to say, we can ease off on cooperating with the United States and maybe strike a better deal for ourselves. They're like, who knows what's going to happen. There will be an increase in arrivals at the southern border just as there was when Biden was there in February. I don't think there's anything you can do probably to stop an initial increase because, like, people try to get away with shit when there's, you know, I'm parent. It's like, if my wife tells our son, he can't do something, like he'll ask me. But you can't,

you can't stop somebody from trying, right? But you need to, like, square your shoulders and be like, when we are put to the test, the answer is going to be no. That, like, there is going to be somebody who like got hurt by a border patrol agent because they were running away. There's going to be somebody who was stuck in dingy conditions in Tijuana because they couldn't get an appointment. And it's like we're going to go through with it, right? That it's not just that like moron leftist Joe Biden was like, let's open the borders now, guys, because they spent that whole year being like, we're not opening the border. Like, we definitely didn't do that. And people were leaking at Susan Rice that like she wasn't being nice enough, et cetera, and they let it spiral out of control because the more people who get in,

the more people will come. And the more out of control it becomes, the harsher you need to be to reestablish deterrence, right? And just to like keep in mind that like you've got to be firm and consistent before it's out of control. Is there someone we can bring in from the Australian Labor Party to look? I'm not kidding here. To talk about like, I assume there must be some intra-coitutional politics in Australia, not everyone. has to be happy about sending the asylum seekers to Nauru. Like, there must be someone who has, like, literal experience with managing this and figuring out how to win that inter-party fight. I would be very interested to hear what that's like. Yeah, I mean, it's a good, it's a good idea.

You know, like, I think, you know, maybe we should make Anthony Albanyes be, you know, Secretary of Homeland Security or something. Like, you know, like bring, because this, another question that Democrats are going to face is a technical expertise gap, right, where most of the people who are Democrat. Because like we're all here talking and like yak, yak, yak. But like, I'm not a specialist in immigration law, et cetera. Most of the people who both are Democrats and also are deeply knowledgeable about how the immigration system works are like migrant side immigration lawyers. Right. Like that's what the body of knowledge is. Whereas Donald Trump has access to a lot of people who are experts in immigration enforcement, who have spent a lot of time

I'm stewing and being like, what is some bank shot way we can, like, coerce the city of Chicago into cooperating more with our interior enforcement stuff? You don't need to do 100% of the things that Stephen Miller wants to do. But I do think you need to have a Miller-level understanding of, like, what are the things you could do, right? That, like, the toolkit is available to do what you want, so you don't reiterate this Obama era, like, exchange of letters where the White House counsel's office is saying, like, to cramp down, we need new statutory authority, which means, because like what unlocked this ultimately for Biden was like, Republicans started saying, we will only give aid to Ukraine if you do a border crackdown.

Joe Biden really wanted aid for Ukraine, right? So that induced Biden to say to his coalition partners, we can do immigration restriction in exchange for Ukraine aid rather than in exchange for immigration concessions. That ultimately changed the whole psychology. But it's just to say, like, it got the issue out of the progressive immigration policy box and just into any other box where it's just like Chris Murphy and people are doing negotiations. And like, you can solve the problem, but like you've got to try. Let's take a quick break. We'll be back with Matt Iglesias on Central Air. Do you have a bone to pick with us?

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the site where the temperature is always just right. So, Matt, another thing we want to discuss with you this week is streaming. You have a piece, you know, I mean, it's funny you complained about Zuckerberg earlier. I feel like you think, like, Mark Zuckerberg is basically the root of all evil in our society in one way or another. Some evils. Yeah. And so you have a piece about the algorithm, but it's not really about the algorithm. And, you know, when I say the algorithm is obviously it's not just meta, it's YouTube.

It's these, you know, streaming video products that give you a really optimized version of television that suck you into some loop. that you're watching media that is not, in fact, social. But that basically this is, you know, it's built around the negativity bias that people have where, you know, the more negative something is, the more engaging it is, the more that they will, you know, continue to watch it. And that it's basically, you know, screwing with our psychology, the fact that you have people drawn to all this negative information and that it's, you know, making our, you know, our politics more polarized and also more polarized to the right. Why would that necessarily be the case? Why is that what algorithms do. Well, I mean, it just, it seems to be the case that highly negative content is more

engaging. And I think that this negativity, I mean, I think about like the conversation you guys were having at the start of last week's episode, right? And it's like, why is it so hard to have like community, right? Like a community of ideas and people and talkers who represents the center. as opposed to just like people who you know, who you're like aware privately have like sane opinions. And some of it is that like the content just doesn't do as well as like extreme content and like everything is a disaster. And like you have to be a communist or a Nazi. And it just like happens to be the case that like if you force people to choose between like fascists and communists, the fascists will win. that's like that's that's the math there's just more right wing people than left wing people exactly exactly

and so like driving everything to hyper extremes um is like especially i think like bad for progressive causes but like it's most first order just bad for people who are like uh like america all things considered is like a really good country it's a really good place to live you should be pretty risk averse about like wild ideas that dramatically destabilize it. And like it's incredibly hard to get traction for anything like that. Probably the closest you can come is like dunking on Europeans. Because like that's that's like a form of negativity, right? Like we can make fun of their lack of air conditioning and they're like damp clothes and

other stuff like that. And all I'll have a good laugh amongst ourselves. But it's like it's hard, I think, to maintain a like, rational center of politics if people don't want to acknowledge kind of how good we have. So I feel like all of us are kind of in the business of trying to push back on that. I mean, Ben, your substack is literally called Calm Down. And I, you know, I read about these phenomena and I understand that they're happening around me. Partly, I have trouble, like, getting my head around it because I just don't relate at all.

I mean, this is not what my algorithmic feed looks like. My algorithmic feed is full of, like, cooking videos and, like, how airports work and these sorts of things. And like the last thing that appeals to me is like is Dumer content. So maybe I, I just don't know how to reach this public? But I mean, Ben, you know, how have you been thinking about that as you're trying to market your, you know, non-Dumer media content? Right. I mean, I think that you're getting at like a truth about these algorithms, right? Like there's anyone at Facebook or any of these places saying, dumer, good. It's just, it's reinforcing what, what your tastes are. And so if you engage with certain types of content, you're going to start

seeing more of it. So you have engaged with cooking videos. And so you'll see more cooking videos. And people who think that the world is falling every day and that we should go back to living in traditional and colonial era times, we'll see more of that. And I think that like, since everyone on earth has had one moment when they were upset about something and wanted to like dwell on their own pain and and feel terrible about everything, they then do that a little and then you see more of it. You see more of it. You see more of it. And suddenly your TikTok feed isn't just filled with Australians making silly videos where they jump off a roof into a pool, that now it's filled with people talking about how Osama bin Laden's letter was so brilliant.

You know, he had a great rationale. And I think that's one of the problems that I've always had with a lot of the anti-Facebook commentary in the first Trump administration was that they all sort of blamed them for, one, electing Trump, but also for sort of creating the conditions of the war. and making people terrible or making people sad. And while true, they sort of gave an intentionality to it that I think just wasn't there. And that in reality, it's just that people have these cognitive biases that then come out when the algorithms sort of jump at them.

You know, there's that line about how Jews are like other people but more. And like algorithms are like people, but more. Wait, I sorry, I'm not, maybe I'm watching the wrong algorithmic videos. I was not familiar with that line about Jews, Ben. I agree that like narrowly there's a kind of cope in like algorithm blaming because like the algorithm's just just us. But it is also true. I mean, those of what I've been like, Megan, you, I'm sure can also speak to it's like those

those who've been in the media for a long time that like increasing levels of knowledge about the audience change the outputs. You know, like it's not it's not like analytics caused X. you know, like it is the audience ultimately and then also the content creators, but like also we're, you know, we're living in a market economy and these technological advances in identifying what people want. And also that change in the advertising, that it used to be that like brands would want to be adjacent to high tone content because they couldn't actually identify what was going on. Right. So it's like, you know, you wouldn't have put like a BMW ad in the

weekly world news. But now, you know, you can target the customer anywhere they are. And so like, just like appealing to people's lizard brains has become objectively more lucrative thanks to, you know, technology shocks. I think that's right. But I also think like, as with any development, it's always easy to look around and be like, this is a, a part of, this is the human condition rather than a piece of the human condition. And I think like the people, there are, are, it is very clear that there's a large number of people who really enjoy being mad about politics. And they look like addicts. And they literally, they just, I realized at some point, and I have tried to correct this in my own writing, not always successfully, but that there were

just people who just wanted reasons to be mad. They didn't even care what they were. They went out looking. And I experienced a little bit of this when my parents were dying. And when I was like, I was really sad. And you would think that like, I would be. engaging with deep content the opposite. I wanted the dumbest culture war fights. You could imagine because they distracted me from the fact that there was this tragic thing happening that I couldn't fix. But I also think that that's actually not most people. It's a kind of narrow group of political hobbyists. I'm not even sure it's constant over time. It is what politics looks like right now. And I think in part that's because people are despairing of doing anything.

Right? If you look at the politics of mid-century, it's about doing stuff. It's about possibility. There's also like a bunch of yelling about how the communists are trying to overthrow America, which, I mean, fair they were. They weren't very good at it. And the Red Scare was not the correct response. But the communists were, in fact, attempting to undermine America. There's just all of this writing about stuff you could do. And people now don't even feel like there's anything you could do. So there's a kind of hunt for conspiracy theories of like, who is preventing things from happening. And the answer is you. You are preventing things from happening. And this is like how I am now trying to reframe my approach to politics going forward. Again, not always successfully. I just wrote a pretty toasty piece on academia and viewpoint diversity is to say like, well, what about things we could do rather than that aren't just like, I have found the bad person. Now the only, your job as a political consumer is to yell at the bad person until they stop being bad or until others stop paying attention to the bad person. And like, this is not, that's not how politics works. So is this why Ezra and Derek's abundance project is like timed now?

It's taking this, you know, relatively dry regulatory reform stuff and packaging it into an approach to national greatness and, you know, making this into doing big things again. Is that the antidote to this? I think it's part of the antidote, and I think that there has to be a parallel politics on the right that is not about identifying the insidious foreigners or the internal fifth column

who are destroying America, but like, what would you like to do, guys? Not what would you like the world to look like, in 1950, but what would you actually like to do to accomplish that, have some plans that are not Like, they're, I don't want to say good job.

They're being very effective at getting what they want done on immigration. Because they know what they want done. They have a goal. There is a means to that goal. I do not approve the way they're executing on that. I very much do not approve of it. But they are effective. And they need to apply that to some positive goals.

And I think that's also true on the left. Is there a solution here that has directly to do with the algorithms? I mean, you know, one of the things about, you know, this is human names. nature and also, you know, we live in a free country. Like, I think their circuit 2017 had been this big hope among liberals that basically we'd fix the algorithm and we would moderate out the right content and we would get people to have the right ideas again. And, you know, in addition to the question of whether that's even desirable, I think it, you know, it just doesn't work for for a number of reasons. But I have been interested in the shifts in the last year and a half or so

toward restrictions specifically on smartphone use for children. I mean, like the one big bipartisan project that really seems to be working right now is banning smart phones. in schools. And I think, you know, that there is something to that, you know, children have plastic brains and, you know, there are things that we don't expose children to that we allow adults to have. And, you know, that's a reason to do this. But I think another reason, I think some of the same things about how, you know, smartphones are melting children's brains, they're probably also doing to adults' brains. And it's just easier because children, you know, don't vote and we're already supposed to be in charge of them. It's easier to impose the rules on the

children. But I think it partly reflects, you know, a latent desire among adults. to turn back the clock on some of these things in a way that we can't actually bring ourselves to do ourselves? Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I mean, I think there's a kind of a censorship impulse that arose after 2016 that is not a good idea and that didn't work. But that there's just a general, like, you could call it a tax policy question, right? It's like what are like sources of revenue?

Like, what are modes of consumption that we want to encourage versus? discourage. And for a long time, dating back to the late 90s, there was this view that internet consumption was like a social good, that to the extent that the government was involved in this, we needed to be encouraging higher levels of broadband internet consumption than a pure market equilibrium would deliver to people. And in retrospect, like, that seems misguided to me. Like, there's very robust market demand for broadband internet usage. Very, very robust. People really like it.

But people also have very mixed feelings about the actual impact, not just on society, but like on themselves, right? Like, if you ask somebody like, how'd your weekend go? I've never heard somebody say, like, it was great. I spent hours on TikTok and I saw the funniest shit. You know what I mean? Like, no, do people like watching funny shit on TikTok? Yes, obviously.

Like, I think if it was made illegal, they would really not like it. But, like, people don't like paying taxes. People also don't like big cuts in public services. I think there might be something to, like, you know, like let people keep more of what they earn by working and tax people more who are using, like, super high levels of bandwidth. You want, like a literal TikTok tax. Like a bandwidth tax. Like how we tax alcohol at a higher rate than, you know, like bottled water or something.

I mean, I don't know, but I mean, I just think like a mindset shift that's like we're not we're not going to censor the internet. We're not going to like force all the content to be good. But like as we make public policy decisions that are within like the normal bounds of policy analysis, like we should be trying to encourage people to be less online. I think we can leave it there. We've been online for quite a bit. I mean, people should listen to good podcasts, obviously. More podcasting, less streaming. Yes, listen to Central Air.

Matt, thank you for joining us here. Thank you. Thank you. Megan, you mentioned dumb culture war content that had been engaging you. So let's talk about Helen Andrews' new essay on feminization of institutions. We'll discuss whether the essay itself is dumb culture war content, but it has certainly produced a lot of dumb culture war content. Helen Andrews is a provocative, very conservative writer. We actually, we had her on, I think it was left, right and center years ago to talk about her

her book about how the baby boomers ruined everything, which was a fun piece of Helen Andrews content that sort of appealed to people across the political spectrum, but generally Helen Andrews is right wing. And she has this new essay for Compact, which is the sort of Trumpy-right ideas journal, saying that institutions have become feminized. And that this is a big problem, she says, as a woman. And what she's talking about is that, you know, it's not just about, you know, you know, you know, women arguing before the Supreme Court, you know, women going to law school.

It's that as institutions become majority female, it leads to changes in their culture in ways that change what you value and what you don't value. And that, you know, she, you know, she sort of says, she's like, you know, well, it's not that there's something inherently wrong with the way women think. However, she then goes on to argue that, like, it's basically screwing up a whole bunch of these institutions. And you were the, you were the one who wanted to talk about it this this week. So is Helen Andrews? Do you think she has a point about something here? I do think she has a point, which is that women and men, on average, have different styles, have different interests. This is obviously a broad generalization, but you in politics kind of have to make broad generalizations at some point.

I don't agree with the way she frames it, which is like, this is a disaster, this guy is falling, you know, women are ruining things, civil rights law has ruined things. I do in fact agree that women and men are different in a lot of really key ways from the fact that women are more risk averse than men. They are more averse to open conflict than men. And obviously there are a lot of women who don't fit into that, including me. I am a quite disputatious person for a woman. But that that matters. If you have an organizational culture that's set up to handle one style and to tamp down the things that men do that are quite destructive to the organization, such as like internally competing, like open competition for status between two guys that can kind of wreck your company as everyone is beating their chests.

Bob Iger versus anybody else at Disney. Indeed. We didn't acknowledge that women have their own forms of competition that they can be equally destructive. That toxic femininity is a thing, just like toxic masculinity is. They're both real. And that, I think, let things get out of hand during the Great Awakening. where what you had was a very female style of aggression, which is indirect, which is using gossip to bring people down that is proliferating madly because that kind of aggression scales in a way

that male one-on-one aggression does not. And no one can name what's happening and say, hey, wait a minute, this is not a good idea. So the funny thing for me about this, and part of the argument here is that basically like cancel culture is a feminine thing, fundamentally. Yeah, it's lady drama. And I'm just confused about it because it's like, you know, her argument is that women are less comfortable with open conflict than men are. It feels to me like cancel culture involves a great deal of open conflict. But it's a very specific kind of open conflict. So think about like what a cancellation looks like.

Number one, there is a bizarre level of deniability. I thought about this one, Mark Joseph Stern, not himself a woman, but I think using the rules, of cancel culture that evolved before this. I want to put a pin in that, by the way. We're going to come back to the men as examples of femininity here. And this happens in, you know, in Andrews' essay, like, people will have these examples of things that are, you know, toxic femininity and it's a man doing it. It feels like we're just, at some point, you're just like drawing circles around the target

and saying you hit the target. I actually disagree with this, but we'll come back to it. Okay, okay. So what does this look like, classic? So he cancels Ilya Shapiro. Mark Joseph Stern, by the way, is a liberal journalist on the law and the court. writer at Slate. But Nicole Hannah-Jones has also done this at the New York Times, where she will tweet something, which during the Great Awakening, the height of the cancellation wars, you know where

this is going. You know that you are basically inviting people to hurt this person by messing with their employment, by shunning them from decent society. And then when the inevitable happens, they're like, oh, but I never said that should happen. Right? Like, no, you're an adult. are you're not 12 you understand what happens when you do this thing but they maintain this level of plausible deniability whereas the kind of historical um more open way that is valorized among men is you take them on one on one which is not to say that no one ever went behind someone's back leaked to the papers etc but it's also that you are almost always invoking for someone else right no one ever says this person hurts me fly monkeys like go hurt him. What they say is, I am so wounded. I feel, I feel sad. Someone has made me feel

sad. Even better. Someone has made this other person feel sad. I have appointed myself as the protector of that person. So now everyone go attack them. But the most important thing is that it's many on one, right, is that what you're doing is activating a group to destroy someone. And attempting at the same time as you do it to maintain deniability that that is what you're doing. You were pretending even though you cannot possibly think when Mark Joseph Stern highlighted something that Ilya Shapiro had said about Katanji Brown Jackson versus Shri Shrinivasa. Katanji Brown Jackson, when she was up for the nomination, Ilya Shapiro said she's not the most qualified person. They should have nominated Shri Shrinivasa. This led ultimately to Ilya Shapiro's defenestration from a position at Georgetown Law School.

Yeah, he had just accepted a new job. He'd left his old job and he ended up with no job. He did eventually land somewhere, to be clear. It's not that he's now sort of driving a bus somewhere. But that thing of, like, picking out someone and then denying that you want them fired, if you look at, like, old episodes of conservative cancel culture, which were definitely a thing, someone like Ward Churchill, people are, like, very clear about what they want to happen. I want this person fired.

I am going after this person in an attempt that that level of indirectness, that level of, like, oh, I'm not really, I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to be mean. I just like, I'm sad about this terrible thing this person did. That is somewhat new. And I think of that as a feminized culture. And I think anyone who's been in all female environments recognizes that as the way that female group dynamics work. I don't know, Ben. Is Mother Jones an example of this?

I mean, Mother Jones was a heavy, heavy female slant. I mean, sorry, which I bring up because you have some, you know, direct personal experience with cancellation attempts. Right. I was internet canceled for years and they always stood by me at Mother Jones. And then eventually 2020 happened in, boof. You know, you finally, they finally get you. And like, the thing that I think what Megan was saying that struck me is wrong, very true to me, was about how cancel culture was based around gossip, essentially, and that gossip scales.

And one of the ways that that happens, like we used to spend all this time at Mother Jones, you know, everyone, like every media place on Slack. and you would see the public chats with lots of people in them where there would maybe be some tit-tat-tat. But then, as the admin, I could see like the number of messages posted. And for every one message posted in those public chats, there would be six posted in a private chat. So essentially just like structurally, people were seeing these public chat messages and then immediately going into the back private rooms. and talking shit about them. And it creates this entire, you know, staging rooms for people to then come out and

build up the nerve and then do classical culture and do gossip at scale. And I think that that's just like inherent to not just Slack, but also the Internet entirely in like this conversation we were just having about social media dynamics. I don't know. I hadn't really thought about it specifically in a feminization place until I'd read this piece. But I do think that there's something to be said just for this being a technological thing like that. That gossip scales better because of the internet? Yeah.

Yeah. Female style aggression. And again, this is a generalization, not like every single person is this way. It scales better, right? If you think about, like, having a big fight with someone, it doesn't get better because there are more people who can get involved, right? It's you and them. But when it is trying to get a group to hurt.

someone, that scales a lot better over the internet. And I should, I also think that there is definitely that women are less, are just generally less comfortable with open conflict. And you see this, you had someone like Eric Lander, the White House Science Advisor, who appears to have been fired not because he was sexually harassing anyone or because he had his hand in the tail, or because he was discriminating. He seems to have been fired just because he was kind of maybe a jerk. And that like the women, the young women in his office didn't like it. And when I think about the conversations I have with my friends, but their conflicts with their husbands, often it is that you're having a conflict because your husband's treating you like a guy and you're like,

no, but I don't want to be treated like that. Right. I don't want you to, when I'm upset, I don't want you to like jolly me out of it by making fun of me for being upset. Right? That's not a way that I want to interact. That is a way that men really do interact with each other often. Is like you're in high school and you're sad about something and you're saying you're sad and your friends start kind of teasing you and making fun of you and that's a way, right? That's a male style of interaction. Very uncommon among women. But I mean, is it is it is it a bad thing to have a norm in the workplace that people are supposed to be, you know, nice to each other and not, you know, I mean, I can understand that there are there are benefits to, you know, freewheeling cultures

where people can, you know, like, say, you know, your idea is stupid and that kind of thing. But there are also costs to having workplaces where people make fun of each other. Like, it's not obvious to me up front that that's a problem. I think this is the right way to think about it, which is that there are benefits to the female style. Look, I've been to these all-female policy dinners, and there is a warmth there. It's really enjoyable. Like, for example, when you ask a question in a mixed policy dinner, the purpose is to prove that you're smarter than the person you're asking the question. question of. When you ask it at a female policy dinner, the purpose is to get information and have a

discussion which might lead someone to change their mind, right? It's a very different dynamic, but the female policy dinners also have failure modes that the mixed ones don't. And vice versa. I just think, like, thinking of this is, oh, well, the male system was good, and now women are wrecking it, which is kind of the way Helen presents the piece, I think, is wrong. What I think is think is the right way to think about it is we should acknowledge that there are differences. We should not treat men as defective women or women as defective men for having, on average, different preferences. And we should think about what are the strengths and weaknesses of each? And is there a way to maximize the strengths of both rather than maximizing the weaknesses of both?

As I think we have done, actually, over the past 10 years, is the way our politics is working. one way to look at it is that we have jointly maximized toxic masculinity and toxic femininity, and now they are fighting out for dominance, and it's bad, and I wanted to stop. It's funny because one of the things that Andrews is saying is that basically cancel culture is a fundamentally feminine type activity. We're seeing, you know, the refinement of conservative versions of cancel culture that are definitely not coming out of feminized institutions. I mean, we saw this with Charlie Kirk, and, you know, like people, you know, some people, you know, sort of like celebrating his death, but other people just like complaining that they

thought he sucked right after he died and then this like organized effort to get these people fired. And I guess I take your point, Megan, that there's an overtness about that where people are saying, I want these people fired. I'm just, I'm not sure that that's the really important distinction there. Like it's annoying when people are not honest about their motives and intentions and it's like, you know, just admit what you're up to. But like it's, you know, I think the cancel culture is still roughly a similarly sized problem, even if people admit exactly what it is that they're doing. So I think that's right, but I also think that if you talk to conservatives, many of them will frame this as an explicit, like, no, we're just doing tit for tat now. If I can't say that, those people can't say this.

That feels like excuse making. I'm not sure it is. I think it's wrong as a theory of how you fix cancel culture. To be clear, I don't think tit for tat works. It can work, but we are far past the point at which it will work. We're now just in the tit for Ted death spiral, which is the failure mode of that game theory strategy. But I think that they do believe it, that their job now is to show liberals where this ends. All right. That tit for that thing is such bullshit, okay?

I'll admit that they might have talked themselves into it, but a lot of people believe in the Loch Ness monster. Like, it is such horseshit. And they are just trying to rationalize their own. little evil devil inside of them that made liberals do it. It's the same guy. It's just that they're telling themselves a different virtuous story. Liberals have a virtuous story for their version of cancel culture too. And they believe it. But we here friends can admit both of these groups are so full of shit and that they are just wanting to, you know, get back to people they don't like. And it's scaling better because of the internet. Yeah, that's my theory. Before we go this week,

I want to talk quickly about Italy. There's an article in the New York Times this week saying that there are now too many restaurants in Italy. And this is a problem. Palermo is the main city they focus on the largest city on Sicily. And that, you know, there are these streets that used to have, you know, the green grocer and all the places that the locals would go to shop. And now they're just full of restaurants for tourists having apparel spritzes, even though the apparel spritz is from northern Italy and has nothing to do with Sicily. And you're having policy responses where cities in Italy are imposing zoning rules, saying no more restaurants in these highly touristed areas because they are becoming less authentic because too many people are here trying to have

Cacui Pepe. I was amused by this in part because sometimes it feels like with all the problems that exist in the world, people are out there trying to invent new problems and saying, you know, now the new problem is Italy has too many restaurants. And then there's also a nod in the article to this, you know, that, you know, well, maybe this has to do with the fact that Italians don't want to go buy their vegetables at the greengrocer anymore. That it's, you know, it's 2025 and even Italy has supermarkets and that, you know, some of the things that we're going by the wayside, we're just going to go by the wayside and something new has to go in. And it's a good thing that it's restaurants rather than blight. But I just, you know, the, I don't know, I just was

really amused by this piece because it seemed like, you know, such a fake problem when Europe has so many real problems that could be focused on instead. Are there too many restaurants in Italy? No. No. If anything, they probably should have more. That's one of the things that people quite like about Italy is their food. And I mean, in, in northern Italy, they have some manufacturing, they have some stuff going on. But in southern Italy, they don't have that stuff. They have tourism, some agricultural stuff and crime. And like, it makes perfect sense for them to appeal to tourists who are visiting. And I mean, I'm quite sure that Italians also probably eat at their restaurants. Yeah, I mean, the article says 13% of the Italian economy is tourism, but I assume like every country,

a lot of that is internal tourism. And it's probably annoying Italians coming and having Italian food on the streets of Palermo that is not from that region of Italy to a significant extent. Right, exactly. I really like the idea of having, you know, like having to have a specific of need to open a new restaurant like you do with the hospital, like having to do an elaborate study showing that there are not enough restaurants. The main problem is just that retail is failing. This is true in all cities. Like I walk around D.C. and I'm like, we have too many restaurants and I want more other stores. But you in fact want to shop on Amazon and have things delivered to your house. Right. My revealed preference is that I do not, in fact, wish to have to like trek down,

especially with everything locked up right now because of the shoplifting problem we have in D.C. I do not, in fact, actually, wish to trek to the drugstore every time I need something. I wish to have it conveniently delivered. But I would like other people to do that so that I can have a nice store to look at as I walk by. And the fact is that that's just not how retail works anymore. in many ways, like, I mean, speaking from the point of view of a tall woman, the internet revolution in retail has been life-changing, because when I was growing up, it was literally not possible to buy pants that fit me. I was at a high school reunion, and so it was like, you pioneered low-rise and cropped, and I was like, no, that was not pioneering. That's what normal height

pants looked like on me. And the only way it became possible other than like a handful of specialty catalogs and retailers, which had horrible bedazzled jeans and awful things that were embarrassing for a young girl to even contemplate. But through the magic of the internet, because you now don't have to worry about stocking unusual sizes, such as the size 8, the 34-inch inseam pants that I wish to buy, those were never going to be stocked at like every retailer, because that's not a very usual size. I am a Six Sigma event as height and frame goes. But now they can have a few of them and send them all over the country. And it's been great. But the fact is, you're just not going to have, you're not going to have the stores that you used to have. And it's sad in many ways.

But, you know, you just kind of got to embrace reality. You can't make that problem go away by banning restaurants. You're just going to end up with empty storefronts instead. I can't relate it all to the idea of one of bemoaning how that there are too many restaurants like it's a we've been talking this whole time right about how people are don't have community and they're all on the internet watching tic-tok videos that are insane and one of the few places that humans do like going and actually having community is a restaurant right like it's it's one of the the things people love to actually get out and do with their friends and we should have restaurants as far as the eye can see we should be Kevin.

Restaurant abundance. Restaurant abundance. One billion restaurants. I just think, I mean, that makes more sense than Matt's idea of taxing bandwidth. Like, you want a subsidy for in-person activity. You know how there's like so many Thai restaurants everywhere because like Thailand, the government will give you like these low, these financing subsidies for. Is that why? Yeah.

I did know that Pod Thai was a centrally planned project invented by the government in Thailand because they needed a national dish. Wait, what? Yes. Yeah, pot Thai is a public sector initiative. That is why you listen to this podcast, folks. It's these high quality learning. But like in Idaho, in my small town in Idaho, right? Like there's like no, not many Thai people, but the Thai people that there are, each have restaurants.

It's like seven restaurants for a town of 3,000 or something. And the reason why they do it is because in 2000, the government Thailand set up this program where if you are a Thai expat, any, they'll give you these like, they'll train you to be a chef, they'll give you a menu, they'll then give you. you these incredibly, like, low interest loans to set it up as a form of, you know, culinary diplomacy. And, oh my God, this is here in the Wikipedia entry. The Thai government created the global Thai restaurant company limited in an effort to establish

at least 3,000 Thai restaurants worldwide. That's crazy. And I think now it's higher than that. Where is the Trump administration's plan to counter this unconscionable act of culinary imperialism? Well, it's fascinating, actually, if you go down this hole, because I think it's It's one of the most, it's such a successful program, right? Because then it leads to people buying Thai ingredients and markets,

and it leads to increases in tourism and all this stuff. But a couple of other countries have tried to emulate it because it was such a success, and they have sort of like failed spectacularly. And so they've all gotten. Which other countries? I'd have to check because it's been a while as I look, but they had to like, they abruptly ended them. What they ended was the part that what Thailand does is that it does help with the financing.

And they actually will give you the menu, which is why all the Thai restaurants here are all literally the exact same. menu. Well, and they safe central planning never works. I think we can leave it there this week. Ben, Megan, thank you for joining me again for this cool conversation. Thank you. Thank you.

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