Central Air - No Audience Capture at Central Air (feat. Tim Miller)

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

On this week's show: The Bulwark's Tim Miller joins to discuss his recent trip to Minnesota, the apparent continuation of significant but less bombastic ICE operations in the state, and why we differ on the extent to which immigration is a political pitfall for Democrats in 2026, 2028 and 2029 — and on how much is gained by talking a lot about how terrible Donald Trump is.Plus: we talk about the especially lively debate on left-wing Twitter about whether it is pro-social for mentally ill homeless people to pee on the subway, and an undercurrent of discontent that’s driving that debate — New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is increasingly breaking with the far left. As Tim notes, one thing that’s good about being charismatic is you can defy your core supporters and they let you get away with it.We also talk about the Supreme Court rebuke of Trump’s tariffs, the Citrini memo, and listener feedback on Trump impressions.Sign up for updates from Central Air at 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 at the Washington Post, in your new office. In my new office. Very exciting. It's been eight years. And finally, finally, I have achieved an office, although mostly because I now have outside podcasts and they don't really want me doing them like at my desk. Well, we appreciate you having your little chamber to do this. An echo chamber, as it were. And echo chase. Yes, we're going to get you some soft wall coverings for in there eventually. And Ben, you're like in somewhat less ethereal setting than usual this week. No, no. I'm in, yeah, I'm in a hallway in Idaho.

But usually it's like you have a halo effect of lighting behind you. I know. I've been trying to make it so that it doesn't make me look angelic because I know that I already look so angelic. That adding the halo is just. rubbing it in your face. Yeah, you're an angel. And that's what a lot of our listeners thought about last week's episode. I assume you've all been getting feedback, direct, not always wanted feedback, like I got about last week's show. I mean, it's the, when I say that it was controversial and reaction was mixed, I mean that truly. That's not a euphemism. There are a number of you who hated

last week's episode, and I want to apologize to you directly. We are not going to do a Trump impression at the top of the show every week, I promise. But there were also some of you who loved last week's episode, including one piece of feedback I got from a listener was, this is the best episode of Central Air yet. I am making a fool of myself, defaing at my desk. And so given that mixed reaction, I felt, you know, I have to be, you know, data dependent. And so we went and we looked at the data from Apple Podcasts, which gives, among other things, data on completion rate. If you listen to the show, what percentage of the show do you listen to? And indeed, a point for the complainers here, the completion rate was lower than usual last week.

It's at 75% that'll probably tick up to 76, 77, as some people, it sits in their podcast player and they will listen to more of it. But more typical for a show of that length would be about 84%. So some of you did stop listening. I'm sorry. I'm sorry you didn't like it. I hope that this week you will find that the show is back to normal. And for those of you who did love it, we're going to keep trying new experiments with things that will hopefully delight some of you without annoying too many others of you. But I don't know.

Hard to please everyone. I would say that to the listeners, one, I love listeners. Obviously, you guys are wonderful people. But also, you're the best. You're the best, especially the ones subscribing. But one of my favorite things about Josh is actually that he's willing to have on niche internet humorists on podcasts like this. Because, you know, that's how I ended up here. And I just think that, you know, we have to experiment and try new things.

And a lot of people today are too audience captured. They're too afraid. They just redo the same thing over and over and over and over again. And no, not that, not here. Not here at Central Air, where we are just, you know, disrupting, trying to see what works. It's pilot season, you know? And I think that it's good. And I think we should all support it.

And I think that if people didn't like it, well, they might want to look in the mirror. I told my producer at my Washington Post show that our motto for the show is Fafo. And I feel strongly that that should also be the motto for Central Air. What does Fafo stand for? It's an acronym, the last three words of which are, and find out. Oh, oh, I see. Yes, Fafo. It's fuck around and find out.

Some people felt we said fuck too much last week, and maybe we did. So we'll try not to do that all through this episode. But it's always Megan McArdle with the swearing, forcing that into the show. And her disgusting sex dreams. Yeah, it was actually was Megan's idea to do the Trump impression. the top of the show last week. I mean, yeah. Look, like I said, our motto is fatho.

Next week, I'm going to make Josh dress up as a banana and deliver to beard not to be a soliloquy from Hamlet. It's going to go viral on YouTube. Always love a video gag in an audio medium. We're also going to talk about the movie, our favorite movie, the bodyguard next week. The banana is, first of all, for the YouTube clips. obviously YouTube is where it's happening these days. But second of all, it's to inspire you, Josh, to reach deep inside and grasp the fundamental absurdity of life as you deliver the monologue. Yeah.

Speaking of bananas and absurdity, President Trump's tariff policy, which has suffered a significant blow this week. One of the, you know, one of my favorite anti-tariff memes over the last year has been why tariff banana, pointing out that some of the tariffs have gone on goods that they're, could not possibly be a substantial domestic industry for bananas, coffee, et cetera. And actually, that's one thing the Trump administration climbed down from a few months ago. It's clear the president said in some meeting, hey, people are mad about affordability. What can we do to address affordability? And someone finally convinced him that we were not going to develop a domestic banana industry and maybe he could lift those tariffs. But now the Supreme Court went and lifted a lot more of those tariffs, striking down a majority of the tariffs the president has imposed over the last year plus.

All of the tariffs be imposed under a law called AEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This is a Nixon-era law granting the president authority to regulate trade. The court said that power to regulate does not imply power to tax. I sort of expected that the court would eventually reach this decision. It's surprising they took so long. I think in part they took so long because Neil Gorsuch had to write a. quite enjoyable, but very long, very detailed concurrence in which he, like, picks his bones with each individual member of the court who disagrees with him on any small aspect of it. But so anyway, this got struck down. You could have thought of it as a political gift to the president, because this is another good thing for affordability. Like, hey, this consumer tax that you've imposed, maybe don't impose it so much.

But the president seems intent on doing what he can to reconstruct his tariff policy out of other legal authorities that he still retains, even after this has been struck down, which, Megan, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by that, given his overall stubbornness. Yeah, you know, I think of Chief Justice Roberts as saying to the president in his decision, Sir, it's like, speaking of favorite movies, Jerry McGuire, help me help you. In fact, the tariffs are not great for the economy. Trump's approval ratings are low in part because the economy is in some ways not very good. and all he has to do is pull a Biden. Let the Supreme Court strike down his stupid unconstitutional policy that no one likes.

And then for the segment of the base that wants it, which is pretty narrow yet committed, you just whinge about the Supreme Court. Mean old justices wouldn't let me do my tariff policy. Right? And then just like let it go. Let the economy rebound. let your popularity rebound to the extent it can and move on with your life, sir. I guess one of the problems, right, is that when Biden, Biden did that with the student loan thing, Biden was probably never like into it.

You know, he never supported it that much. He was kind of bullied and harangued into it. Like, he didn't like it in the primary, but then he did do it. And because he, which he got struck down, obviously. But I think that in this case, the problem is is that Trump loves tariffs. Like, Trump loves tariffs more than anything else. And so he's the part of the base that is mad. That's why he's taking away the Supreme Court's capital letters.

Yeah. I know, but doesn't it have any crypto scams to run? Or couldn't he be reconstructing other parts of the White House? That's true. Unfrolling more, like, totalitarian banners across federal buildings, anything other than not, like, I'm in favor of these things, but on relative damage. I think he could concentrate on other parts. And there are actually things he could be doing that people would like. For example, the D.C. federal government has all of these old, often from the 1960s, hideous federal buildings, Launfant Plaza.

I am looking at you. And, you know, he could grasp his inner real estate developer in the same way that Josh is going to grasp his inner banana next week. And that sounded dirtier. That sounded dirtier than I meant it. apologies to those. That was inadvertent. I will refrain from grasping my banana on this show. Thank you very much. But you could reach into his inner real estate developer, and he could actually put a major mark on the capital city by facilitating the sale and redevelopment of those buildings. And that would be a good thing that even Washingtonians who hate him with the white hot passion of a thousand sons would actually like. So I do feel that there are. more productive ways that he could do things he loves and genuinely believes in. It's funny because, you know, he actually has done an unusual amount of fixating on the real estate of the capital for a president.

I mean, first of all, he did tear down the East Wing with, you know, very dubious legal authority. And there's currently litigation around that. So I think it's, you know, it's possible that's going to get stymied in the courts sort of awkwardly after they've already torn it down. So then, you know, we'll be stuck with maybe a, you know, construction site for a number of years with nothing going on. He's trying to build that absurd 200-foot arch in Memorial Circle right across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, which someone pointed something out to me the other day that in addition to being an eyesore that would be way taller than all of the other monuments. That's also like right in the approach path to National Airport, very close to the, you know, to the start of the runway. So I don't know how tall a thing can you really build right there. That approach path has been in the news a lot in the last couple of years.

Indeed. Indeed. Actually, I should say this is a different approach pass than the approach path that the accident happened on, but even so. We definitely don't want any helicopters flying low enough that they are likely to hit the arch. I mean, look, I actually don't have strong feelings about the arch. I don't know. Probably it'll be dumb. But on the scale of dumb things, this is like when I tried to convince my resistance Libon that actually we wanted him to tear down the East Wing and we wanted him to spend all of his time doing real estate stuff. and redecorating and picking out new White House China. I don't think I sold her.

But if the arch is going to distract him from worse ideas, I will come out full square in favor of the arch. Well, but so, I mean, but the arch being unsightly is unimportant in the same way that Launfant Plaza being unsightly is unimportant. Lafant Plaza, by the way, for people who don't spend much time in the sadder parts of Washington, D.C., is a, is an office, a brutalist office complex just south of the National Mall that is like especially ugly. But so, I mean, I guess you're saying here that you just want him focusing on real estate in the DC area and whether the things he's doing are slightly good or slightly bad. It doesn't matter that much. And I guess that could make sense, but better that he would do

slightly good things like redeveloped L'Enfant Plaza. I mean, yes, if I have to choose, but if we could do a package where he gets an arch of some height safe enough for planes to fly over it and also redevelopes L'Enfantz Plaza and is so wrapped up in these projects that he forgets about tariffs, I've like 100% take that deal. Isn't an arch itself just a little European? I mean, the only arch I can even think of in the U.S. is the one in Washington Square Park, which is, you know. Well, St. Louis. Okay, but that's not that type of arch. That's a, that's a, that's a goofy arch. That one, that one doesn't even, the other, the one in Washington Square Park looks like

the one in Paris. Yes. The one that he wants to build in the circle in one. Washington, D.C. What do you have against arches? It's a very nice shape, structurally sound? I don't know. I just think I just get a little, I get a little touchy when we get all this Europe, the Frenchies start showing up. And we're just going to start having French stuff in America too much. Okay.

Hold on. If we're going to give more political advice to Donald Trump, I want to bring in our special guest this week, which is Tim Miller from the bulwark, host of the bulwark podcast. Tim, thank you for coming and doing a little cross-pollination with a know. other centrist media project here. I am so thrilled to do it. I was excited to be invited. I don't know if I'm good at being very serious, but I'll do my best.

Ben Dreyfus is on the show. It's okay. No, this show is not very serious. But, you know, it's in the very serious brand, you know. You know, we were discussing. We had cartoons hate her on the show last week doing her Trump impression, which a lot of listeners found to be extremely unsurious. And we've been sifting through the feedback on that.

That Trump impressions aren't really for me. You know, I support all types of art, and I honor everybody that's trying to do themselves. But I'm not really into the Trump impression space. Yeah. You get enough of the real thing? Yeah, well, too much. So you were recently in Minnesota with some of your colleagues from the bulwark. Obviously, Minnesota in the news more than it would like over the last couple of months.

Can you describe for us a little bit like, you know, you're there, you know, the, obviously the peak of the attention was a few weeks ago with the show. shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretty. What did things look like on the ground now with, you know, the government announcing a wind down of so-called Operation Metro Surge? What is the level of intensity today? Look, there are a lot of motions being there, obviously, but my big takeaway from a political standpoint is I was kind of shamed by the crowd. Night one, we had two events, and I got out there immediately, and I said, look, when we planned this event, we planned it because Mayor Frye was on my show, and I was asking what people should do, and he's like, Well, for starters, people shouldn't cancel shows here because John Mullaney and others were canceling shows. I was hurting the economy.

He's like, people should come to Minneapolis. It's safe. Please come. And so I was like, okay, we should go. And, you know, we planned it thinking that we are going to go in the middle of this occupation or whatever and, you know, be there to be the, yeah, I don't know. What was it called when the guys just to go to visit the soldiers in the military? U.S.O shows. I couldn't come up with that.

U.S.O shows. Yeah, it was kind of going to be a U.S.O show for the, for the protest. and volunteers. And then, you know, Trump announced the backdown and Greg Bevino had to go home to his Hobbit House in California. And so I started the first show by saying basically this has gone from, you know, like supporting the troops at battle to kind of a valedictory, like congratulations. It's a victory. We won. And I was booed, basically. People were like, no, not true. And I spent the next day going around talking to volunteers and activists. And obviously people have, you know, of their own perspectives and organizational interests here.

But I was talking about just random people that show up to the Whipple Building. The Whipple Building, for those who don't know, is where the main ICE detention facility in the Minneapolis area has been. Yeah. And my main takeaway from those conversations was that, you know, one woman I talked to is the best example. She's like, I go here three hours every day. I live 45 minutes outside of town in Wisconsin.

There's been a decrease in the number of protesters out here and the number of media out here, but the number of cars going out in and out of the building is the same. She's like, I can't speak to exactly what they're doing, but, you know, it's not like they've left. Like the number of ICE vehicles, you know, coming to their headquarters, the number of people who have been detained and are being dropped off outside the Whipple building. You know, usually people who are immigrants that have some kind of complicated status. And so instead of, you know, being sent to Texas, they end up getting detained and released. Like the number of those folks haven't really changed. It's down a little bit since the peak, but not much.

And then, again, she said this is anecdotal. but like in my community in Wisconsin, 45 minutes away, we've seen a huge search in ICE agents and CBP agents, you know, in our community. And so I think the assessment of most people on the ground of Minnesota, we also talked to Tim Walls, and Tina Smith, and others, was that like the, you know, kind of intense operations in the city center in Minneapolis have started to dissipate, right? And like the efforts of Bovino to, like really instigate violence

and, like, go up to protest. and shit-talked them and, you know, throw smoke bombs at them and all that. Like, that has calmed down a little bit. Like, the actions that started the protests, which is, you know, amassed agents nabbing people off the streets without much due process, like, that is basically continuing a pace. And I think that this is something that Trump has been good at over the years. Like, he's a tabloid guy from the 80s and 90s in New York, and he knows how to move on to

the next story. And I think that a lot of the kind of fundamentals of the Stephen Miller operation is ongoing if some of the, you know, kind of WWE elements of it have dissipated. And so that's good that they're not menacing protesters as much, but I think it's still pretty troubling the extent of the actions that are continuing. And I felt I felt chastened by the people of Minneapolis having those conversations a little bit. Do you think that the aspect of it where they did appear to be masked bullies going around and beating people up for saying mean things to them and blowing whistles.

Has that actually stopped? Or is it that we're just not seeing those videos anymore? Yeah, I think that that part of it has dissipated somewhat, in part because there are fewer protesters out right. Like, look, any of these cases, the conflagrations are going to happen when there is like a locusts, like a place where people are going and a place where there are a lot of agents. You know, you're obviously going to have, you know, more blowups.

But, again, and I can only, this is all anecdotal, and I can only tell you what the politicians and what the activists are saying. But, like, there are still examples of these guys, you know, acting outside the base, not examples. Like, they still are acting outside with the basic rules of policing and law enforcement in other city. You know, like the nature of the work that they're doing, federal agents, masked, going up to people, tricking them sometimes. Like, one, they were telling me the one things they're doing is they're putting, like, you know, gay pride stickers on the back of the cars and, you know, no king stickers on the back of the cars and things like that. There was an anecdote of they went outside a mechanic shop where they, you know, had some reason to believe that there were undocumented immigrants in there. And they pretended like their car was broken down. People came out of the shop.

They, you know, grabbed them. You know, the types of stuff that, like, regular normal police, you know, normal law enforcement wouldn't do. and doesn't do. Like, that part is still ongoing. And I do think that they're more disperse. And so there's less video in part because they're more dispersed, if that makes sense. What you described there, Tim, I mean, the polling nationally on immigration has always been very complicated because people have all sorts of complicated and often internally conflicted views about what exactly it is that they want out of immigration policy. And so, you know, there are certain things that are obviously broadly popular, you know, like, you know, taking someone who is a convicted felon upon their release from

prison and deporting them. And while there's been all this controversy between the federal government in Minnesota about cooperation between jails, which are releasing people who haven't necessarily been convicted of a crime, I mean, that's one of the areas where there's always been ongoing cooperation is that sort of thing. But then when you get to some of the stuff that you're describing there about, you know, like, you know, actions outside workplaces where there's suspicion that people, you know, are here without legal authorization, but who probably haven't been out in the community committing any crimes. That's something where you get, you know, a lot more controversy about exactly what kind of enforcement you want there. It's been interesting to

me that, you know, even as the reaction to the Trump administration has turned increasingly negative, as there's been, you know, more of this, you know, extremely high profile, extremely disruptive in some cases leading to the deaths of protesters, you know, actions that have been taken by ICE, you still have a situation where poll respondents tend to say they prefer Republicans over Democrats on the immigration issue. There was an AP NORC poll that came out earlier this month, and it has the gap narrowing. It has a four-point preference for Republicans over Democrats on immigration. That's down from 13 points a few months ago. But if you look back at 2019, the last Trump administration, voters actually thought Democrats were more trustworthy

than Republicans on immigration. And so I'm wondering what you make of it as you have a party that's, you know, trying to defeat Trump and trying to see to it that we don't have policy like this next time, that even in spite of all of this that we've seen, you still have respondents saying, you know, they are more inclined to trust Republicans than Democrats on this stuff. I guess I'd say, I think we can get to the 2019 numbers yet. Look, this is one area where I find myself in conflict with our friend Matt Iglesias in the centrist content space, a rare area of strong disagreement with him. He argues, and a lot of folks that have that position basically say that Democrats, this is not a winning issue for Democrats. Democrats are out of step with the country

on this. It's not worth talking about. They should focus on other things. I just, I really don't think that's right. I mean, I think that the Democrats obviously have an issue with their party brand, what comes to management of the border. And I think that's going to be a big challenge for 28 candidates, figuring out how to talk about this. But for 2026, I think the overreach of the Trump administration in the interior immigration enforcement, is broadly unpopular. I think it's unpopular among some key groups that they gained with, particularly Hispanics, but also, you know,

this broader, whatever you want to call it, Manosphere, like younger men-type audience, the folks that have don't tread on me type ethos, who had been for Obama and went along with Trump over basically woke and COVID and the border. I think that some of those folks don't like to see what we've seen from the interior, in Interior enforcement. We've seen that from, you know, kind of the man, comedian space.

And also it's just fundamentally un-American and wrong and allows the Democrats to kind of recapture a case for patriotism where Democrats can kind of sound like Ronald Reagan in the 1980s when it comes to immigration and put themselves more in the center of the electorate and push the MAGA policies out to the edges. So I think they should talk about it. We've seen a pretty dramatic drop in the popularity of ice, like basically one and every five Americans has gone from a positive view on ice to a negative view on ice during the, what year and change that Trump's been in office? Yeah, that's also in the APNORC poll.

It has ice 60% unfavorable, 32% favorable, which is remarkably poor. So people are persuadable. I mean, like, on what other topic has there been a 20, 30 point shift in the last year or any of recent years? I, like, you just don't see that that often in our polarized time. So, look, I think that the policy is wrong. I think it's un-American. It's disgusting.

And I also think it's unpopular. And to me, that's a combination that should leave the Democrats to be able to talk about it. Like, I think that then the questions, you know, some challenging questions arise for Democrats. Then when you get to having a debate where people are like, should we decriminalize the border or raise your hand yes or no? Like, I think that they're challenging immigration questions for them opposing the ICBP actions. I don't think it's that challenging. I basically have the exact same opinion as you about all of the. everything you just said, except that I guess I'm, I worry that because we saw this happen a few years

ago, is that people saw these situations in Minneapolis and saw this overreach, which are so disgusting, and had this straightforward dislike of it, you know, like a natural revulsion to seeing these mass people doing this Gestapo nonsense. And that I think that that leads to these ice numbers dropping so much. And that there's then just a fear that people will overinterpret that as an embrace of the left's view of immigration, as opposed to a view that state bullies going around acting like fascists is unpopular. Yeah. You know?

How much of this is a backlash to interior enforcement versus a backlash to the most extreme ICE tactics and the fact that they killed two American citizens? You know, if ICE took it down like 10%, would those numbers still help Democrats in the midterm that much, especially since I think in general, other stuff is likely to dominate, like, the economy and so forth. Obviously, the fact that they murdered two American citizens didn't help. So I think that we can agree that made it much worse for them politically. But look, there were signs that this was back firing on some before that.

I mean, if you look, for example, at the Mikey Cheryl election in New Jersey, where she really overperforms. Now, obviously, it's New Jersey, but like you look at Passaic County, which was the heavily Hispanic county in North Jersey that Trump, I believe he flipped. I'm going from memory now. But I believe he flipped it. Yeah. He did. And, you know, there's this whole outrage in the last week of the 24 election about, you know, the kill Tony joke about whatever, you know, Puerto Rico being a garbage can. And Democrats were like, see, the Puerto Ricans will come to our side because of this.

And no, they didn't. They voted for Trump. But then a year later, with Mikey Sherrill, they had reversed. Now, some of that's economy, of course. So it's not all immigration. But I do think that the immigration tactics were hurting there. I was talking to Bobby Polito, who's kind of a centrist Democratic candidate running in South Texas. He feels like there's back that it's hurting them, and he's not like one of these radical anti-border control Democrats.

And he was saying that there's been overreach. So I think that they are being hurt beyond just these murders. I don't think that cutting it down 10% would help. And I also think they've been funded to such a degree. I don't know if they can dial up back more than 10%. And they have so much money. Like, what are these guys going to do? Just sit around and eat donuts.

and put their thumb up their ass. And they have this huge math. They're going to be random ICE agents and CBB agents acting inappropriately all over the country for the rest of his term because there are so many of them. I mean, they're more people than there are U.S. Marines, like, at this point. What they can do is make exactly the change that you described from what you saw in Minnesota, which is that they can do these operations in a way that, you know, some people may still have significant objections to basically saying it's the wrong priorities, it's the wrong tactics,

but that are not causing, you know, sort of like, scenes that look like war zones on the on the on the streets of major american cities i just you know if if that's if that's what it had been all along i wonder if this would have turned into any kind of similar political fiasco for the administration i turned to the wisdom of our vice president jd vans who in 2016 or 2015 or 14 wrote a blog post where he said basically i don't understand why republicans who are so skeptical of governments able to do anything efficiently on any other area think that the government can officially do mass deportations That was his position back when he was an ever-trumper, and I think that he was correct then and he's correct now.

I don't think that there's a clean and nice way to do this. I mean, sure. I think that they could not have the war zones and they could not have the murders. And I think that would minimize the backlash somewhat, but I think that the policy is unpopular. I think that funding these guys to the degree they have is unpopular. You can't control. Someone says out of their control now, right? It's just like you've hired all these guys that are running around all over the country.

Like you can't micromanage all of them. Tom Homan can't. So you can give them different orders. I mean, again, you can produce what you have in Minnesota today rather than what you had in Minnesota six weeks ago. But are the order going to lead to deportations? Are they going after? Are they going to go after nonviolent criminals? Is that the different order? We're going to stop going after nonviolent criminals?

Because that's okay, but I don't know what they would do. Look, I am not in favor of all of this interior enforcement, but I'm not sure that's what people are reacting to. It feels to me like what they're reacting to is the videos of these mass men, not just shooting people, but, you know, pushing women down to the floor for mouthing. off to them and all of those. And it does seem to me, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this all happened even though Christy Noemann didn't want it to, but it feels like that was deliberate, right, that they were doing that in order to send a message, both to kind of the public and to people and other countries don't come here. This is what this looks like. But that if you just stepped that part back, if you just stepped back the part where people are just acting with impunity,

and I grant that that's probably hard in part because, right, their experience. expanding this force so rapidly, they're not doing good training. But if you took those orders back, it's not even that I think people would necessarily support the interior deportations. It's more that it's kind of like gun control, right? You see this every time there's a mass shooting, the polling for gun control is really good. But people don't vote on it unless they happen to be gun owners, right? And that's the, I guess, the question I'm asking is, is this actually a politically salient issue minus the extreme tactics. I'm not one of those people that is like Hispanic voters only voter immigration.

I don't think that. But I think all you have to do is just who are the two groups where Trump has lost the most ground with since he's been in there, Hispanic voters and young voters? I don't think that young voters are really for this and I don't think that Hispanic voters are even a nicer version of it. And I think that a lot of Hispanic voters at this point, there's like a, what was the game we played in our kids? Six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

I think that there's like a six degrees of Kevin Bacon thing. a lot of Hispanic communities where somebody's been roughed up or treated inappropriately or wrongfully detained or and and like you know I just think that there's to be a backlash against it. I will say I do think there's one lesson just going back to Ben's point. There's one area where I do agree, which is I saw this guy Justin Pearson, but who I do like. He's a congressman. He's one of the Tennessee three. He's running, I think, in the Memphis district, Steve Cohen's district for Congress.

And he's on CNN. And like he wouldn't answer like should anybody be deported. Right. I do think that there's a way to overinterpret this stuff for sure. And I think that it's important that the Democrats actually go overboard, kind of, and talk more than they would wish to about, like, how much they want to deport criminals and, like, how excited they are about deporting criminals. And it makes them very, you know, it gets them really jazzed when they see a sex offender get deported.

Like, I would recommend that they do that. And I certainly worry that you get into a situation where basically you just go back to 2019, where you said, I forget it was Ben or Josh said it, that that was like the low watermark for Republicans on immigration. And then the next thing, you know, Democrats are on stage, you know, talking, like basically giving the John Lennon, we should have no borders position on immigration. And like, that changed very fast. So I do think that there are lessons. I just, I just don't think that, I think the campaigning on the ice stuff is, at least in the next year, as an anti, as an oppositional thing, rather than as we have this alternative policy. As an

oppositional thing. I think that's right in the next year. I broadly agree that I'm not terribly worried that this is going to cause a lot of problems for Democrats in 26, even if they do overinterpret this. I worry, actually more than 2028, I worry about 29, which is that, you know, once the next Democratic administration comes into office, if there is a global perception that the policy is knock on wood, yeah. But I mean, Democrats are going to govern again? Okay. Yeah, that could be some problems. then we get a long way until that. No, but I mean like abject mishandling of this destroyed the Biden presidency. Like it's the one of the two most important mistakes of the Biden presidency, which is why I'm, you know, fairly focused on not repeating it.

And it's, you know, and you don't have direct control over it as a policymaker. It's partly, you know, global perception. If people think that if they get to the U.S. border, they will be able to enter and they'll be able to stay, you will have another migration search. And so you have to have an effective policy that stops them from getting in and you have to communicate that. policy in an effective way that causes people not to try to come. And it's to be better than sending Kamala Harris to give a speech that says, that says, do not come. And so one of the things that I worry about in terms of being credible on that is that it sort of, Tim, seems like you're sketching out a framework here where, you know, you're going to do border enforcement. But border enforcement

is not perfect. And also sometimes people come in on a valid visa and then overstay the visa. and that's one of the significant drivers of illegal migration to the United States. If you have a regime where we try to stop you from getting across the border, but once you're here, if you've been here, we can only remove you if you're convicted of a crime or maybe even more restrictively if you're convicted of a serious crime, then that's basically a policy that says if you can find a way to get here, then you can stay. And so both that's a big hole in immigration policy, and it's also a big poll factor that encourages people to try to come here.

So it seems like in 2020, Democrats are going to have to be comfortable with some sort of interior enforcement regime that is not just about criminals, even if you are not, you know, doing something close to the intensity that Trump is doing in terms of the volumes that you're trying to do. Part of the picture has to be the idea that if you are here and you're not allowed to be here, that can be a valid reason for the U.S. to remove you. You don't want one billion Americans, Josh? I'm happy to change legal immigration policy in a wide variety of ways. I hear you. Look, I grant immigration policy is super complicated. And I think that there are a lot of tough questions for a Democrat who comes in next time. And I think that they'll be pushed and pulled both ways, right? Like, I think that there are legitimate reasons to just tear ice down to the studs. Like, who could you trust? I mean, everyone there executed this policy that is totally lawless

and, you know, closer to East Germany than it is to the American policy. So I understand an argument. It's like, bring back INS. Like, let's put this in the state. Department, but then you fall into the, you know, a trap that you talk about, right? Where there's, you know, you basically send a magnet signal all over the world. I think that it's super complicated. If a Democrat gets in, they're going to have huge challenges. I think we should not have, as a country, had an 82-year-old president that didn't enforce the border or elect Donald Trump to have him totally corrupt all of our institutions. I think that somebody fixing this mess is going to have a major challenge across a million.

different verticals. This is one of them. I think in the meantime, though, focusing on the terrible things that Donald Trump is doing and not getting bogged down on a white paper about what, you know, INS is going to look like in 2029 is probably the right political move. It's funny. I'm not sure if this is true,

but as looking at the screen right now, am I the only person here who voted for Obama? No. I really thought, I really almost, this was a sign of my cuckish never-trumpedness. Like, the last second I don't, almost flipped in 2008 because I hated Sarah Palin so much. And I was voting at a

school that was like, I was full of black kids that were running around outside who were so excited shouting Obama Obama. And I was so fucking pissed at McCain for picking Palin. Like, I had a one minute internal check. And I was just like, I like John McCain too much. I voted for John McCain.

I voted for Obama in 2012 for the record. I voted for Obama in both 2008 and in 2012. But I have to say, I regret not voting for. for Mitt Romney because I feel like that was the best timeline. Is if Mitt Romney had won in 2012, no Donald Trump in 2016. The funny thing is that the timeline in which Romney won is way better on a lot of dimensions.

And nobody in that timeline who prefers it over the actual timeline has any idea that they prefer it over the other available timeline. It would be so best. Everybody bitches. Everybody bitches the whole way through the Romney timeline, not knowing what was averted. Also, I just feel like I underrated him as a person. His decency under Trump. I'm sorry, Mitt Romney. This is my official apology to you for not voting for you in 2012. Mitt Romney has consistently had quite right-wing views on immigration. And part of the way that he keeps the timeline staved off is that there's, you know, that there's the robust immigration enforcement by someone who's not into the like Christie-Ome style displays. But anyway. reason I was asking it was just because Obama during that interview he gave where he mentioned aliens that got all the ink also was going around talking about how, you know, he said we need to have, we can't say open borders. You know, he came through and it essentially just made the argument that Tim, you're making, which is like we need to make clear to all these people. Like, we need to have, we can't, we need to have some deportation regiment just so that people don't think that we're what we were in the Biden administration. And I was just wondering if you guys saw that interview. Are we all on board here with the Obama version of this?

This is why I'm for like, like, let's just let the Republicans change the Constitution and run Obama against Trump. Because I think that's our best way out of this timeline. Not my favorite president ever, but, you know, he talks about this stuff in a normal way. Yeah. Because he wasn't, he wasn't brain poisoned by peak woke because he was already out of the White House, spending his time on yachts and doing whatever Netflix specials by then. Do you think Obama would want to run again? I sort of wonder about that. I mean, on the one hand, he liked, I think, getting to be president. But who would want to go back, especially, like, with everything that's happened in politics in the last 10 years? If I were Obama, I'd be like...

I think he found the job exhausted. Yeah. I think he feels he did his time. Only Donald Trump is stupid enough to want a third term. Tim, to go back to your rejection of white papers. Yeah. Because I actually, I think this in a way gets at, like, sort of the key. divide among a lot of us in the political center about how to think about the politics of the

Trump era, which is that when I watch Donald Trump do awful things and be an awful president and, you know, like the, and I look at him and I can't imagine how we possibly got in the position where this is the guy who's leading our country. The question I'm just fixated on is why did voters prefer this over what we had to offer and how can we change what we had to offer so that they don't choose that again? I just think that there's a lot more room to maneuver in terms of changing what the Democrats are and changing what the Democrats propose versus changing the way people feel about what the Republicans are and what they propose. I think that people have heard all the messages about how awful Donald Trump is for 10 years now.

And some of those messages were very effective, but they've had their effect. People who were interested in those messages have heard them and have digested them. And so I, you know, that's why when I watch what happens on immigration here, the thing I fixate on is Democrats and immigration and how we can not fuck the issue up the next time. And I just agree with that premise. I think people approach that very differently. Yeah. Well, I disagree the premise in part because Donald Trump got a lot of new voters last time.

Like, a lot of people watched him stormed cap. We actually fucked up new things during the Biden administration. Okay. Yeah, sure. But like a lot of those voters you're starting to hear, you know, they're still hearing that anti-Trump stuff new because they're not big consumers of news. Kamala crushed it with people that consume a lot of news. There's a lot of people that just had a vague.

pre-COVID memory that was nice and pleasant and that, you know, things didn't feel as expensive. And they're like, I'm going to go back to that guy. The other person is old. The lady that they replaced him with, I don't like that much. I think a lot of it was pretty vasa. So look, I understand. I think, I do think that the Democrats could benefit from having a couple of like very clear policy pivots that people understand. It's like, hey, we're not like the old Democrats on topic A and B. I think that would help the Democrats for sure. But I also, think that, you know, running Donald Trump's, like, brand into the, like, below-earth dirt, you know, getting them down to, like, Bush post-Katrina, post-Araq, post-Theriot Myers territory, or even

people that liked Bush were complaining about Bush. I think that's an important objective of the Democrats over the next year. Let's take a quick break, and then we're going to come back and talk about pissing on the subway. Love that. This is Central Air. You know, here at Central Air, we put out an episode for you every week, but we also do some live chats on Substack. We've been doing these on Friday afternoons where we'll get together on video, sometimes with someone interesting that we can talk with. We actually did one last week with Lakshah Jane, who runs data and polling for the argument. They had an interesting poll on trans issues and the shifts in public opinion that have happened on those over the last few years. Here's a little sample of that.

people who voted for Kamala Harris split basically like 3841 in terms of are trans women allowed to compete in women's sports, right? So male to female, can you compete in women's sports? But here's the surprising part. When you filtered it to just parents that voted for Kamala Harris, it was 45 to 34 saying, no, they should not compete in women's sports. they should compete with the gender matching their biological sex, we would support a national law that enforced that. And that's like, that is a horrific level of support for the progressive movement because being underwater by 11 among parents who voted for Kamala Harris, there's no constituency

for that then. And that was a big takeaway. Now, if you want to hear that full live chat, you can go at centralairpodcast.com. It's available to our paying subscribers. And if you sign up there, you'll also get notifications when we do these in the future. We're going to be doing a lot more of these, and we'd love to have you join the conversations. If you join live, you can even ask questions in the chat and influence what we talk about in the conversation. So again, if you want to hear Lakshajan, and if you want to hear more of those conversations, go to Centralairpodcast.com and sign up.

So there's a bit of extremely online discourse that has happened this week that actually does have an access to an important political fight that is happening in the U.S. right now. But the way that it's being experienced on Twitter is that someone named Daniela posted on Twitter that her husband was on a crowded subway train in New York and a homeless woman got on, pulled down her pants and peed all over the train in front of everyone. Nice. But her husband hasn't stopped talking about it in 24 hours, and it's the single most traumatizing thing that's happened to him in New York City. And this led to a parade of, like, you know, medium-sized leftists, the sort of people who, you know, have written a couple articles for the nation and have 20,000, 15,000 followers on Twitter. medium-sized in their following, not like five, eight. I mean, I don't know how tall they are. If they're left-wing, they're probably short, right?

They have to be bitter for some reason. But so, Danielle says this, and then you get all these people basically calling her soft, and, you know, like, this is just how life is in the city, and, you know, if that's the worst thing that happened to you, nothing that bad happened. And then you had someone saying that when people piss on the subway, it's pro-social because it's a cry for help and that they're showing that they're showing that they're showing that they're in crisis and they need support that they are not receiving. One writer named Beatrice Adler Bolton saying that it is carceral sanism to complain in this way about people, you know,

peeing and pooping on the subway, that it's mental health stigma and saying that, you know, we want to deny access to public spaces to the sort of people who behave like this. And so this is, you know, this is a very real strain of thought on the far left. And the far left is relevant in the politics of New York City. But it's just, it's interesting. interesting to me that it's happening in the context of the left-wing mayor that we've adopted, basically not doing what they wanted on this stuff, including they're annoyed. He's, he announced that he was going to stop clearing homeless encampments when he took office. That policy lasted all of six weeks, proved unworkable, a bunch of people died in the cold. Now the city is going back

and saying, you know, actually, no, you're not allowed to camp on 6th Avenue. It's first of all, just funny to watch people saying this because they have to know on some level how deeply, politically unpopular this sort of thing is to say you have to accept the city being like a sewer because that's the thing that's inclusive of everyone and really in practice what that leads to is people want to privatize as many spaces as possible so that they can not be peed on a couple thoughts i have a single item of agreement with our leftist friends the two of them the person to this podcast that husband seems kind of like a bust i'm sorry like the single most traumatizing thing you've ever seen as a lady peen

in front of you? Like, I didn't, you know, okay, I had to potty train my daughter. I didn't love it. Well, it's possible that she's engaged in hyperbole. Yeah, sure. Okay. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. Also, it's the most traumatizing thing that has happened to him in New York City and we don't know how long they've lived if they just moved, like, three months ago. Okay. I'm just saying. There's a lot of trauma in life. And people should stop talking about trauma altogether. I'm backlashing against the overfocus on trauma. So the Zoroam part of it that's interesting is that he does seem to have learned the lessons, at least a little bit, of some of the failed lefty mayors.

And when I interviewed him a year ago when he's running, one of the things I asked him was just about this. And it was my biggest concern about him was I asked him, and I was like, how do you think you're different from the Chicago mayor or from Chesa Buda? What have you learned from that? And his answer was pretty unsatisfying, I think, in part, because he didn't want to anger those folks.

And I was like, oh, I don't know. But then, over the campaign, you know, beginning with keeping Jessica Tisch. That's the police commissioner who he held over from the Eric Adams administration. Yeah, the police commissioner, yeah. And continuing to some of the things you just laid out, he has demonstrated at least some level of practicality and pragmatism that a lot of his fans online don't share. And I don't know why, whether it's because his charm or because he's the great hope of the tribe,

or because he has some kind of Teflon, similar to Trump. Like, a lot of them don't seem that mad about it so far. We'll see. And it's just, we're just starting. But I think that there's a lot to learn from that. I don't, like, he has seemed to not be as scary as his, you know, right-wing critics have tried to make him. And I think that pragmatism goes a long way. Actually, making the city run well goes a long way.

And so, I don't know. I mean, we'll kind of see. But I've been noticing it, like, for a while now. And I get some of my, you know, more staunch anti-Zoron friends, like, get mad at me for, like, handing it to him from time to time. But, like, I just think that objectively is done that. I will say on the other side of that I did see just yesterday. I did some Googling because you told me we were to talk about Zoran. And I saw that he's reinstituting the fines for not composting.

And that's bad Zoron. So I'm going to give you bad Zoran for that. No one, the government has no role in deciding what I do with my fucking. you know, Apple Corps. All right, I'll do whatever I damn well pleased with my Apple course, okay? We've had on this podcast since the campaign, it's sort of like running thing about waiting for the leftist tears when Zoran does anything that is not lefty. And there's been a steady stream of it from online leftist cranks who had been upset since before he took office, you know, the nimbie comedian. Kate Willett. Kate Willett, yeah. She's constantly

mad about it. But in general, you know, Most of his fan base has been okay with everything. And Matt Iglesias wrote that column about how, you know, one of the benefits of being so likable is that you can disappoint your base. As on someone who's definitely not part of his base, I definitely do recognize how likable he is. And even during the campaign, when he would say things that a lot of other people, you know, the left, I mean, the right would accuse him of all these terrible things.

And I watch him on these videos and he seems like a nice guy. I fundamentally do not believe what they were saying about him. And I just, I do think that that goes so far and just of just how much you want to give the person the benefit of the doubt. Megan? I think that that's correct. But I also think he hasn't really been tested. So I have also been looking to see if he has learned the lesson of other lefty mayors. But the lefty mayor I'm looking at is John Lindsay, the famous progressive,

mayor of New York City who started with Zoran Lake approval ratings and left as one of the most failed mayors in New York City history. He is fresh and everyone else is tired. Wasn't that his, wasn't that his slogan? That was a really good one, yeah. He was a Republican, by the way, which just goes to show how much the parties have sorted over the past 70 years. But the thing is that Lindsay did okay. Well, Lindsay actually came in and immediately had a transit strike, which was not great, But he came out of it with pretty good approval ratings. And it was as things got harder and harder and he had to make choices that was when he really was challenged. And I don't think Zeran is at that point.

But I think with the budget, he is getting to that point. He is going to have to make some choices. And those choices are going to be really unpleasant. And similarly, like, I think that actually the composting fee, as dumb as I think it is, of all of the destructive stuff that he could do in New York City, like bring back the composting fee. Right? Like, leave. Do not go and try to like wreck the housing stock. Just, yeah, make everyone compost. They're not going to do it. And they will absolutely not pay the fines either. But it will make all the lefties feel like you have really done something. And you, and it's like the carriage

horses under de Blasio. I think that compost stuff is actually like the lifestyle stuff that people really hate. Yeah. Is there a constituency for the mandatory composting? I mean, the stuff about the carriage horses under de Blasio was actually like a real estate play by someone who had an interest in the fact that, you know, the stables would become available if the carriage horses weren't allowed in Central Park anymore. The like, I mean, in my building in Chelsea, we've, you know, we've gotten all these notices from the building about, oh, you have to compost now. The city's going to send inspectors and they're going to cut the bags open and look for organic waste. And if there's organic waste, they're going to find the building. That's the other weird, the weird collectivist aspect

of this, that they, you know, they don't know, unless you live. Unless you live, in a single family home, they don't know whether it's your garbage or your neighbor's garbage. They have to find collectively your whole building if someone is not composting, which I think is another thing that makes that just unworkable in the long run. Oh, right. No, I think the thing with composting is that you reinstate the fee and then you do not have any budget for inspectors. And that, like, you have satisfied the people who want people to compost and then you just ignore it. Oh, I see. So yet another law. that we won't enforce.

Can I give one lesson to all of this for centrists since we're on Central Air because I think there's something to be learned here about as you look ahead to primaries that if you gain enough credibility with your main base, there's no penalty actually for moving to the center. Whereas if you start as a contrarian centrist, like it's all penalty with the people on your side every time that you say something to the center. And like an example of this, we've seen this with Trump on a million things, but an example on this for Zoron, I saw a meme going around from some right person yesterday, and it was like a picture of Zoron wearing a mask saying cutting library budget is violence or something for like three years ago. And then it was on the right, it was Mayor Zoran cut $6 million from the library budget or whatever it was. And this was supposed to be like a gotcha.

And I looked at that meme and I was like, yes, great. Everyone, like, everyone, this is amazing. Like, everyone loves this. Nobody's mad about this. Like, the people like us see that and we're like, good on you, Zoron, for being practical. Welcome to the cause. The lefty types that, like, 2% of people that believe the cutting library funding is violence.

You know, look out of the gut, still my guy. And this is some right-wing troll trying to get me mad. I'm not going to let them do it. Like, there, you have a lot of room to run. And I think that he has demonstrated that. Again, I agree with you, Meg. I'm like, we'll see. It's a short period.

to time, like, will, you know, can he survive the coalition politics and will he be able to do this sort of stuff for a lot? I don't know. But, like, there's some signs that there's some lessons to be learned about, I guess. And the harder thing is he also cut new police hires, right? And that, now, if crime keeps falling in New York, he's great. And like, but if it doesn't, he is going to pay for that over and over. That is consistent with what he was saying on the, on the campaign trail, at least, that he was going to keep the NYPD at its approximately 34,000 officer level, which I would. note is a higher ratio of police to population than in most major cities, although not as high as it was 20 years ago. We used to have even, even, we used to have like four police per thousand residents. But it's been interesting to me watching him start to start a little bit to address those harder questions because he's, you know, the, as we discussed, he kept on Eric Adams as police commissioner and has made, you know, a lot of moves toward the center on on policing. He's now having to make his first budget. And he wants this big tax increase from Albany that he's not going to get. He then.

put out this proposal for a 9% property tax increase, which I think the idea of the politics there was people will hate that, and that will build support for the income tax increase he wants the state to give him. Instead, people got mad about the proposed property tax increase. It's clearly not going to pass the city council. He's not going to get either of those tax increases. He's going to have to figure out how to cut the budget in certain ways. And I think we've seen a couple of early signs that he might actually make some good choices about how to do that prioritization. One of the first promises that he did renege on was is that New York has this rental assistance program that's kind of similar to the federal Section 8 rental assistance program.

It's very expensive. And then the other problem is that, you know, if you have a fixed number of apartments in the city and you hand out more vouchers to pay for them, that just pushes rents upward. And so one of the first promises he went back on is that, actually, we're not going to put another billion dollars toward that. We can't afford it. So I think that was a positive step. There's also this interesting question of, you know, he wants to get all this new building done. And he has, you know, he's going to rezone and do things that make the private sector more inclined to build. and he wants to increase the amount of money that the government spends on getting subsidized income-restricted housing built.

He also said he would use union labor for that. Andy said he would do it for $500,000 a home. Probably costs something closer to $800,000 a home if you want to build all union projects in New York to build those affordable housing complexes. And his deputy mayor for housing was speaking to one of the local publications here the city and said, well, you know, there's all sorts of different ways to work with labor. And that doesn't necessarily mean we have to meet. the prevailing wage requirements on every project. So we'll see exactly where they land there, but I think there are starting to be some signs that they realize, you know, they operate under

a fiscal constraint. The good news is that New York spends a tremendous amount of money. So to stay within the fiscal constraint here, if there's all sorts of room to get more efficient and provide more services without raising taxes. You do end up having to get into fights with some of, you know, some powerful political lobbies. But it's interesting. It's sort of a sign that they eventually realize that they at least are going to have to do. take on the building trades. Now, the good thing for Zoron about the building trades is the building trades are full of people who vote Republican. Like the amount of political distance and social distance that's opened up between the Democratic Party and those unions has become very large. You know,

the teachers union, the SEIU, the healthcare, you know, there's other places where that's going to be harder. But I think we're starting to see some signs that they might even make some smart decisions about that, which I am certainly rooting for. I'm trusting you, Barrow. That's your view. If you say it, I believe it. Fingers crossed, let me know when I should not, when I should start to be worried about that. Just, you know, throw up a flare. We'll see.

There's some state law stuff that needs to be done. I think they'll probably wait for a lot of it until after the 2026 election, but I'm hopeful that he'll make some good choices there. Well, to bring it back a little to the national thing, in that interview Obama gave about aliens and how the other stuff we were talking about, he again addresses pissing on the subway and is like, you know, we can't get mad at people for not wanting to be pissed on the subway. and you have to deal with it so you can stop the Republicans.

Unless you want to. He says like we need to deal with it in a good way so that the Republicans don't deal with it in a bad way. And I do think that like what you were saying to him about how if you start as a progressive and then move to the center a bit, it gives you a little bit of insulation is that a lot of that did happen with Obama. You know, I mean, he was he was the liberal candidate versus Clinton originally. And you see even in those interviews, Republicans going, oh, even Obama says we're going, we're going to do this stuff. And it's, you know, I'm happy for Republicans to be saying

that about him as much. We want Republicans saying, look at these Democrats making same decisions as much as humanly possible. One question I have about that is how much of this is path dependent, right? That you could kind of keep a lid on things in New York 10 years ago before the pandemic, but we really let things explode out of control between 2018 and 2024. And can you get back to the old path without some pretty extreme measures. I don't know the answer to this. This is not like my prediction that you can't, but I'm not sure that Zerun Mammani,

it would take a kind of ferocious will to crack down. The old path on what? On public disorder. It would take a pretty ferocious will to do that that Zerun Mundani is just not going to have. Right. He does, even if he is like, okay, on the margin, We have to clear people who are troubled off the subways and so forth.

Like, in sort of the same way that it took Giuliani to really crack down on New York crime, no Democratic mayor was going to be that interested in doing it. I'm not endorsing everything that happened under the Giuliani administration. I'm just saying that, like, once, kind of like with immigration, right, once you've gotten on the bad path, the thing that you have to do to get off that path is much more extreme than what you could have done if you just stayed on the good path. And I sort of wonder if he will not have some of those issues in New York with the public order stuff, which is really important. I would note, by the way, that disorder in my neighborhood got noticeably worse in the last two months in terms of both the homeless encampments and associated, you know, trash on the streets. It's like, and it was especially surprisingly because it has been cold as hell.

And so you would ordinarily expect a decline in that sort of activity. And, you know, it got noticeably worse, which I think is, you know, one of the reasons for the U-turn on. it. But, you know, it's the, the stuff can happen fairly quickly. I have no insight into the trash collection pickup in New York. So I'll take it just for more of the general, like, political lesson is, I don't know. Like, maybe those, Zorong, you know, can have a mandate for it via, via resources and do it in a way that the lefty would do it and do public order. I mean, they manage this in lefty cities and other parts of the world where they do, where the subways are a lot cleaner.

And public transportation is a lot cleaner, and it isn't necessarily because they have four cops per 1,000 people. It's because there are other investments in it. But they actually have more cops than we do per 1,000 people in Europe. They're much. And the thing is, like, yes, the social welfare states are much more generous than in the U.S., although not necessarily than in New York City. But their public order, they do not let you sleep on the street. They do not let you piss on the subway. That's not an option in Denmark.

They will come and take you to a very nice. well-appointed, place hospital where you will be forcibly treated, but you are not going to do that in public spaces. And that's the thing that... They don't even have guns. If you tried to stop me... If the Danes try to stop me from sleeping and pissing on the subway, I'd be like, show me your gun. Where's your gun? You don't even have one. Yeah, nice club, buddy. Yeah, nice club, idiot. I think that, like, yes, you can do a lot with the social services side. But if you don't do the public order enforcement side, it will descend into cash. That's just there are some people, it's not because there isn't funding available, it's because they are so ill or so addicted that they prefer being on the street. Now, they would obviously prefer just being in an apartment where they could be sheltered.

But like there are, when you were living in an apartment, there are other people there, and there are rules that are required to keep people, the other people happy. Like, these are really hard problems. They're not, it's not just like we don't spend enough money. New York City spends a phenomenal amount of money on the homeless. And it's not enough to control the disorder because you have to do the other piece where like we will take care of you if you were this ill. We will provide you treatment. I'm all for all of that. Megan, that's carceral saneism. Yeah, I'm doing carceral saneism. But also you do not have an option where you are creating a problem in public spaces. That's not one of your life options there. Tim, I'm going to give you the last word here and then let you go. That is fair.

Yeah, I just wanted to just kind of close to make one political point on this was Zoron, and one lesson is that we sat here on Central Air with a bunch of people that the Zoron's biggest fans, like range from actively dislike to find to be useful idiots to don't care about, right? Like this way, and here we are like basically complimenting him, you know, with caveats. And here's a lesson, I think. And it's what I call the Kamala paradox. Kamala ended up finding herself in a situation where corporate centrists, you know, thought that she was a California socialist and that progressives and populists thought that she was a corporate centrist in league with Netanyahu and her, you know, brother-in-law that works for Uber, her brother that works for Uber, whatever, right? People were so obsessed with her brother-in-law.

I don't know. It was unhinged. I'm just telling you what people thought. And so you end up in the sour spot. Yeah, you end up in the sour spot. Whereas the other people that have been mentioned in the show Obama and Zoron, maybe there's some misogy here, maybe not, like find themselves in a little bit of a sweet spot, like where right-wing people don't like either of them. But like getable centrist, middle of the road, college-educated type folks look at them and are like, well, you know, they're trying. You know, Obama tried to meet us on the middle in the red states, blue state.

Zoron's at least, you know, doing the list of things Josh laid out, you know, and maybe going after the trade. unionists and there's an effort there. And on the margins, like, that matters politically. And, and, like, being able to be, you know, malleable in a way that is appealing to people, you know, who have differing views is, like, a key part of political success. Trump has figured this out. And so I just think that, like, that to me is the big political lesson for Democrats from Zoron that can be learned that, like, wraps up our whole conversation, whether it be about immigration or public disorder or whatever. It's like, how can you signal to people that have differing priorities and interests that, like, you care about them? And, you know, then the challenging

part of actually governing the Ewan Megator talking about, well, that's hard. But, like, the first part is a pretty good step to getting in. And Democrats have been pretty bad at that for the last decade. Tim Miller, host of the Bullwark podcast. Thank you for joining us on Central Air this week. We hope you enjoyed the breeze. Thanks, guys. It's been fun. We'll be right back with more Central Air. So finally this week, I want to talk about this Wall Street research memo. I wrote a piece on it. I know Megan has been doing some thinking about it as well. This memo from a group called Satrini Research came out on Sunday and basically posited this scenario where it's 2028 and AI is really useful. It has lots of use cases and lots of businesses. And that's great for some people. However, it causes a bunch of businesses to go out of business, basically things that do things that use. don't need anymore because the AI can do it for you. They say, you know, like, you won't need a buyer's agent anymore if you buy a house. Firms that sell software as a service, a lot of people will just be able to vibe code their own software for their internal corporate uses. And so either

they'll stop using those companies or they'll demand huge price cuts from those companies, and a bunch of them will go bankrupt. They describe a specific way where DoorDash would no longer be in business, because you'd be able to come up with your own, like, delivery app on your computer, and they'd all compete the prices down to basically zero for the fees that they'd, the, the fees that they'd the company takes to arrange the delivery. And they say that, you know, when this happens, you have a bunch of white-collar people who lose their jobs and they stop consuming. And that causes home prices to fall. It causes failures in the mortgage markets, failures in the private credit markets and basically causes a financial crisis. Productivity goes up too much. And that causes

there to be less demand for human labor. And that causes an economic crisis. And this memo seems to have been taken fairly seriously in that, you know, the memo came out on Sunday and on Monday, Some of the stocks that were specifically mentioned in the memo is exposed, Blackstone, because the private credit stuff, DoorDash, Service Now, those stocks fell especially sharply. People, it seems that investors picked up the memo. It actually changed their view on the fundamental value of these companies as impacted by AI and they went and they sold the stocks. And I find this especially funny because I just think the memo is deeply unconvincing. This sort of thesis that, you know, well, this good thing's going to happen. People are going to be more productive and that's going to cause the economy to crash. is very counterintuitive.

And it just doesn't make sense because it doesn't account for all the positive, you know, like, so, you know, maybe you lost your job. What if you didn't lose your job? And you know, you're a nurse. You're still needed in the hospital. And furthermore, your real income has gone up because of all these things that you used to pay more for. You don't pay any more for because of the AI. You're going to go out.

You're going to buy other things. You'll go on an additional vacation. You'll renovate your house. You'll send your kids to summer camp, all these things that, you know, both improve your quality of life and create jobs because you're doing new consumption. it seems like that should offset it. So I don't like, you know, maybe the AIs, maybe they'll kill us all. Maybe they, you know, they'll become sentient and, you know, reconfigure the world for their purposes. I don't really buy that either.

But that seems like, you know, at least that's a novel mechanism that seems plausible, whereas just this idea that it's going to be too useful and improve productivity too much and that will cause the economy to crash. I find it very strange that people were sold on this. Yeah, it's bizarre on so many levels. Starting with, as you observed, like, so I wrote a column about this. a couple weeks ago, the number of professions that was fully remote, which is I'm going to take as a proxy for things that you can do that can be automated by AI, even though I don't even think that all jobs done. Wait, we're fully remote, Megan.

Yeah, no, this is my point, actually. Like, if we take the extremist case that all jobs that were done fully remotely, that's like 18% of the economy. The other 82% of the, is stuff that people had to be in person for. So number one, the idea that this is going to cause this mass unemployment, second of all, the idea of the speed at which this is going to happen is crazy to me. Right. I mean, isn't there regulatory problems? I mean, there's everything. There's institutional problems. People do not adapt this fast. All of these, it's all of the bros in Silicon Valley

are extrapolating from their own business, which is full of tech people who, like to adopt new technology. And that is not what most of the world is like. I used to be in IT. And let me tell you, I could roll out something to the IT people. And I could be like, this thing only works in command line on like a sun workstation. And also it's written in high church Slavonic. And if it helped them, they would adopt it. They would learn high church Slavonic in order to use it. On the other hand, you'd go to a normal user and you'd be like, okay, you just have to push this button, and then it's going to make you 30% more productive. And they'd be like, push a button.

Are you crazy? And so they're extrapolating the pace wrong. They are not thinking through what happens to relative prices, right? Is that if, yes, if demand for something falls, the price of that thing also falls, which is bad for the person selling that thing, but also then changes consumer uptake. And all of these things. And it's good for the buyers. Yeah.

who then have more money to go spend on other things. Exactly. But also, like, Netflix introduced streaming in 2007. It is 18 years later. Why do people have cable? Why is that still a business? Now, fewer and fewer people do. But think about how long it took to roll out for this streaming revolution

and how long it is still taking for people to shift from cable to streaming. Right? Things take a long time. And also, as you say, there's going to be. be offsetting gains. People are going to have, like, no one has any idea what the relative price is going to settle out for, like, what should be done by a token, what should by compute, and what should be done by a human. What I do think is true is that this is going to be bad for some white-collar workers. And sadly, I think journalists may be one of those groups,

but those people, their panic infects everything when they contemplate the possibility, not that they are going to be impoverished and, you know, die in a gutter, but that they might lose relative status and the relative enjoyability of their job and their relative financial preeminence, those people lose their minds. And then they, they sort of impute that to the entire rest of the economy. And that is incorrect. It would, I would be very sad if journalism became, it went away, right? I would be, there were a number of, number of reasons, like, you know, from democracy to my personal benefit. But that doesn't mean that the rest of the economy would lie in ruins and unemployment would go up to 10%. It means it would be

bad for journalists, and there are a lot of bad knock-on effects from that, but for the rest of society, but not that kind of like we should sell off every stock. I was also shocked. IBM sold off, apparently, when someone, when Claude released a tool that said it could update COBOL code, which is this very old programming language, used to run on mainframes, became a big issue in Y2K, and people remember what that was when we'd update all the dates

because there were two-digit dates when we rolled over to the year 2000. And was anyone surprised that Claude Code was going to be good at updating old mainframe code? Which IBM gets paid a lot of money in consulting fees to update for you, which is why their stock fell.

But like, why was the money, market both surprised by something obvious and inevitable, and then freaking out over basically a science fiction scenario. Can I ask you guys a question, which is, have you, maybe it sounds like you know a little bit more about technology than perhaps I do, and maybe I don't want to speak for Josh, but I don't know much about these things and recently got Claude Code and decided to learn what these people were talking about so that I could see it and pop my cherry. And I did make some VAT apps immediately.

And it is fucking amazing. Do tell. I made a game of Hangman that is impossible to win, essentially. It's the devil's hangman. And I started it in the terminal, and then I built it the graphical interface. And now I have it. They're doing it for the iPhone. Wait, how do you make Hangman impossible to win?

Aren't you just guessing the letters in the worst? Well, I'm not going to reveal my secrets here, Josh. Does it only pick, like, words like pygmy that only have rare letters? No, no. It's, it's only four-letter words. And it's constantly things like a blank ITS. So you go, oh, it's bits. Oh, it's mitts.

Oh, it's fits. And then you have to go through and you'll never get it because it's just a consonant that's different in the beginning. Anyways, my point is... You're going to sell that to the New York Times for a million dollars. Well, my point is, is that I did discover, like, you can, you can do. this 5-pointing thing that they're talking about, which is shocking. It doesn't mean that I'm going to be changing the economy or that that's going to be happening. But I do think that, like, you can see how in a few years the one person at the company who does

know how to do this stuff, we'll be able to spin up these things. I mean, when I was in Mother Jones, we used to have one data editor, right, whose main job was to go around everyone working on a feature story and to help them go through an Excel sheet and make graphs and stuff. that is essentially like what that data editor did. And that person now, you know, in the 2030 version of it, is going to have so many more fancy tools that it'll be amazing. I don't understand the two-year thing the guy's talking about.

That sounds crazy. But like, yeah, I think it's going to be exciting and disruptive. And there may be local demand depressions where, you know, industries are disrupted. And we like the biggest thing I worry about, honestly, is private credit that has been doing a lot of lending. to build these data centers. And if there's a pullback on that, I worry about the leverage cascading through the economy and somewhat the way that leverage from the housing market cascaded in 2008.

But the broader, like, everyone's going to be unemployed all at once. This is, this adjustment is going to take longer than you think. It's going to take longer than the AI companies think, which might be bad for their investors, but not my problem. There was a scenario a while back that had robots, like, coming, like propagating through the world by 2027. And it's like, no, no, the physical things have to move on boats. I have one that vacuums my floor. Yeah. Well, and now China knows, it has, knows everything about where everything is in your house, Josh. Yeah. It's funny. You know, people always point that out.

It's like, what are the Chinese going to do with a floor plan on my house? No, this is exactly. We also have a robot back, which is, I love it. It mops too. And, like, if they are, they're going to find out where I have hardwood floors and where I have rugs. Okay, guys. Honestly, that's what I felt about the Snowden thing, too. It was like, what? So the NSA knows about my practice. What do they can't use it in court?

What are they going to do? Okay. Actually, although there was a fun story this week that's like vibe coding and robot vacuums, which is that some guy wanted to be able to control his robot vac with his Xbox remote, and he coded a thing that let him do that. And then he discovered that it not a lot of, allowed him to control his own robot vac, but 7,000 other robot vacs in 24 countries around the world because it was like the same access token for every device. And so he was a nice guy.

So we called the company and The Verge and told them about this without actually using it. And they fixed the bug. But I guess, you know, maybe some scamp somewhere will like vacuum my apartment when I don't want a vacuum. And that'll make me extra clean. I think we can leave that there this week. Megan, Ben, thank you as always. Thank you. Thank you. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We're a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddock mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Josh Momosher. Thanks for listening and stay cool out there.