Central Air - Real Accounts (feat. Jesse Singal)

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

On this week's show: Jesse Singal, co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast, joins us to discuss the shift toward more cautious thinking among (some of) the U.S. medical societies about youth gender medicine. (Jesse wrote on this for The New York Times last week.) We talk about how “The Science” got so far ahead of the science on this topic, and the forces that made a change in thinking faster to come to Europe than the U.S. We also talk about the bizarre, totalitarian media environment that has surrounded these issues, and about why the side question of sports has often gotten more media attention than the issue of medical treatment.Plus: Ben, Megan and I discuss Ben’s surprising optimism about the situation in Iran, which I do not share.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 here with Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down. Ben, I hear you were up late watching some depositions last night. Oh, yes, indeed. The Clinton depositions about Jeffrey Epstein. Spicy, steamy. I just saw Hillary fighting with Lauren Bobert, and Lauren Bobert, they fought over the terms of this deposition. And Hillary Clinton didn't know Jeffrey Epstein, so she had some reasons to be pissed off that they were trying to call her to talk about this.

But so they finally, they agreed on a deposition in chat. Apequa, and the Clintons wanted it to be open to the public, but the Republicans insisted on doing it as closed. And then I guess Lauren Bobert snapped a photo of her and sent it to Benny Johnson, who published it, which was a violation of the ground rules. And you had Hillary righteously objecting to that, even getting some praise from conservatives for that. Did we learn anything besides that? Well, actually, when you watch the full thing, it's even funnier than that because, you know, they're talking and they're having this argument. And then Hillary's lawyer says, you know, interrupts and says, you guys have broken the rules. someone tweeted the photo, and you see the thing that you saw, which is Hillary gets up and says, you know, I'm going to go, we're going to take a break.

And then they come back and James Comer, the chairman says, all right, look, that was a mistake. This is not going to happen again. I have spoken to the members and then they get up to like finish the break. And the first thing that happens when they sit down is she says, all right, so it has happened again. Some other member had sent the Benny Johnson photo or something like that. But no, the Hillary one is funny just because, like, she didn't have anything to say. She never even really met Epstein. But the more just the funny, the other one is Bill, because Bill, you know, did know him

and talks about all these flights they went on to go to Africa and stuff like that. And I just haven't seen Bill in a while. And he is a charming guy, you know, he's got a very, he'd be a great podcaster. He kind of, his lawyers kept saying, like, all right, just yes or no answers. And he then, he makes fun of some people's names. at one point, and there's a lot of, a lot of, he'd be a great guest. We should ask him on. Yeah. Megan, we got to get Bill Clinton in here. Absolutely. I'll call him right up. That's Megan McArdle, of course, columnist for The Washington Post. And did you watch these depositions

at all? I did not. Yeah. Yeah, I had really important things to do. The grout in my bathroom has been looking extremely dingy. I had to catalog my collection of Beatles, many, many important things to do that prevented me, sadly, from indulging. I don't have a collection of Beatles. I'm sorry, I made that up. That was a lie. Yeah. Like everything people say about Jeffrey Epstein. If we do ask him on the show, one thing to keep in mind is that you learn in the deposition that there was a WJC email account pretending to be from him that was actually run by a stamper. And he says in it that he's never, Bill Clinton has only sent two emails.

One was to the space when he was president and one was to a submarine. He's never sent any other emails. So if we email him and he says yes, it's a catch. Bill Clinton doesn't use email. That used to be really common. He said two emails, one in 1993 and in 97. Well, I mean, you know, teletype machines used to be really common. But, you know, the, I mean, John.

McCain used to have his staffers print out all his emails. This has been incredibly... The current president. Doesn't the current... Yeah, very possibly. But at least he... The current president prints out articles and writes on them. At least he, you know, he can, you can always DM him on truth social. Where like, no, a lot of the politicians in the Clinton era, because they had staffs and because they were so tightly scheduled, a lot of them just never really learned to use email. Yeah. Well, I bet Hillary wishes she was one of them. So besides those depositions, we are... going to talk about this new war we appear to have entered this week with Iran. We're going to talk about that later in the show. But first, we have someone with us who people like to get really mad at

on the internet, you know, somewhat in the same way that Bill and Hillary Clinton are people that people like to get mad at on the internet. We have with us this week, Jesse Single, who is co-hosted the Blocking Reported podcast. He writes the single-minded newsletter on Substack. And he had an opet in New York Times last week titled Medical Association's Trusted Belief Over Science on Youth Gender Care. We're going to talk about that this week. Hello, Jesse Single. Hello. In some sense, well, I don't want to call it a victory lap, but it seems, you know, like this is something that you've been reporting on for a long time.

And we've seen around the world, you know, certain retrenchment from medical authorities and associations on these issues. But now here, what you're writing on The New York Times is the American Association of Plastic Surgeons and the American Medical Association significantly walked back their views on exactly what kind of medical interventions. should be done with youth who are experiencing or diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Yeah, I've been reporting on this for a while, and the line you always get as a reason you shouldn't report on it is the science is settled. Glad literally had a truck that they parked outside the New York Times with a billboard that said that back in 2023. Yes, which is usually if I'm curious about a scientific dispute, I'll see what billboards say and what trucks say. So in many senses, I was compelling. Like, yeah, if you report on this, especially from a left-of-center perspective, you'll be told, like, there's nothing to report on here.

This is like climate change denialism. Over the years, the Holocaust denialism or Nazi propaganda analogies have sort of got it more common. But fundamentally, this has always been an area of weak science. I think there are a lot of complex reasons for that. And unfortunately, what's happened is that a lot of medical and mental health organizations, especially since the Republican ban started ramping around 2020, they've put out statements that not only say the bans are a bad idea, which is perfectly reasonable. I mean, that's sort of a values call, but they'll also exaggerate the evidence for youth gender medicine. That allows groups like Glad and ACLU and others to say

the science is settled. But the point in my column was that these are just, these are human organizations, and they're influenced by politics, they're influenced by their desire to sort of be on the right side of history. And you can't really take what they say at face value because they're so political. Before we get into the broader history of how these organizations make decisions about what to recommend, can you just describe for us what the specific change has been in the recommendations here? I mean, obviously, you know, you have a variety of different interventions that are done with people who are, you know, both adults and minors who are experiencing, you know, questions about their own gender. You know, you have talk therapy,

you have hormonal interventions, and then you have certain surgical interventions. This is specifically about surgeries? I mean, one of the claims that I often hear is that there, you know, that there aren't these surgeries done on minors. Yeah. I mean, strangely, I saw Jamal Bowie claim that. The New York Times columnist. I think last week, the New York Times columnist, that basically there's no such thing as a youth gender surgery or language to that effect. You might have, he might have met bottom surgery. But yeah, the three main interventions in dispute here are puberty blockers, which delay puberty. And in theory, give kids time. to, time to think, as it were, if they want to do more permanent interventions.

I don't think these days that serious, critical-minded people still claim that puberty blockers are reversible. For a long time, that was the claim. They're reversible. So there's literally no downside. I think we're not really sure if you can just delay kids puberty and then put them on cross-sex hormones with no ill effects. But yeah, there's blockers, there's hormones, and then there's surgery, which is almost always top surgery or double mastectomies. Bottom surgery on minors is really rare. And so what happened a few weeks ago now is the American Society of Plastic Surgeons put out a nine-page document, not only saying that they thought kids should wait until 19 for surgery, which was itself a pretty big change,

because a lot of the other groups had, if anything, I'd say, been pushing for younger and younger surgery over the years. But they also sort of openly talked about the lack of evidence. And this has been unusual for the American professional organizations because they, in my view, have really skirted around an honest discussion of the evidence base. So a day after the AASPS said that, the American Medical Association basically said, we agree with them about surgery, that surgery should wait. I tried to get in touch with the AMA and other groups. I sort of, in a background off the record call, I'll just say the AMA was trying to create. claim that they actually hadn't changed their stance, that this has sort of been what they said all along, which just I don't think that's true based on their prior documents. But yeah,

the point of my column was this sort of punctures the idea of trusting the science or the science being settled because now even the American groups are saying different things, which is to say nothing of Europe, which is in a really different situation where they've come to more skeptical conclusions. Can you give us a little bit of the history in Europe? I mean, I think that a lot of people have seen news coverage of the Cass report, which is a report that was commissioned by the National Health Service in Britain that led to a move away from various youth gender medicine treatments in that country. Obviously, Britain has a much more government centralized health care system in general. The question of what medical treatment should people get is more of a

public policy question in the UK than it is in the United States. But so there was that major report that caused a significant policy change there and a lot of discussions around the world. And then a lot of pushback in the United States from political groups that have sought to reject what was in that report. But it seems like that's a position that has gotten increasing sway in Europe over the last few years. Yeah. So over the years, I think it was Finland, Sweden, and the UK were the first countries to do so-called systematic reviews of the evidence. And without descending into too much nerdery, a systematic review is a sort of more regimented way of evaluating the medical evidence for a given question. And all the systematic reviews come to the

same conclusion, which is that the studies here are not very good. We don't really know what these treatments do if they're worth it. And I should also shout out Megan. Like she knows she's done work on this. She knows this up to. And I hope you'll chime in. If and when I get something wrong, you want to add something. I mean, honestly, like a lot of my work is just calling you and saying, Jesse, what should I look at? Jesse, how does this work? But yes, I, I've also read a lot of these papers. And I think, Jesse, we have both gone through the same process of, like, I would write something that was sort of supposed to be the conventional wisdom on the topic.

Then I would think, you know, before I published that in The Washington Post, I should just take a quick spin through the literature and make sure that that's backed up. And then I would go and look and it would not be backed up. And I've had this experience over and over again. And I'm sure you've also had this experience where people claim stuff. I mean, the Jamel Bowie case claiming that this doesn't happen was fascinating because literally the big story that kind of broke this on the public consciousness was Jazz Jennings, who had a, I believe, some discovery network show. I'm not sure which one about a kid who's transitioning had bottom surgery. on television at the age of 17, right?

This is probably the most famous case of a kid who is puberty blocked, went on hormones, and then went on to surgery, and definitely happened to a minor. And yet people are just convinced this isn't true because someone has said it, because it gets said over and over again. And I think there's a kind of element of something that in a column, I think last year, maybe two years ago I wrote about what I think on the left is this kind of stealth extremism, right? The right, they put their extremism front and center. You are not confused about what's going on.

And the base is not confused about what's going on. But with the left, I have this fascinating experience of people telling me, and every time I write a column about this topic, it's the same thing. I am inundated with commenters who say, this isn't true, this never happens. and then you come back and say, no, no, this is definitely true, and it definitely happened. And here's when they televised it. And it's not just true of this issue, but I think it is definitely true of this issue. That somehow the medical societies and a bunch of left-leaning establishment institutions came to a view of these things that sounds crazy even to people who are trans-supportive.

like identify with the left or not, you know, right-wing lunatics who think that if a girl calls herself Chris, it's just one step from there to total social chaos. I think the question of how, and I know you're writing a book on this, the question of how that happened, of how they got to such an extreme place without anyone kind of noticing or asking whether this was a good idea, I think is going to be fodder for many interesting history. of science books to come in future years. Jesse, I think that, like, one of the things that I've noticed, you know, you talk about the United Kingdom.

I remember it was in 2017 or 2018, a lefty friend of mine directed a documentary for Channel 4 about trans children in Britain. I think it was called, like, My Trans Child. And he came back after living in London and shooting this very sympathetic documentary. And I asked him about it, you know, and he said, oh, Penn, you know, you think they're getting a little kooky over here. Wait till you go to look at London. He was like, I didn't put it in there.

I left some things out, but he was like the culture in Britain was filled with way wackier sort of extremists than in the United States. And I have seen over the last few years, you know, it seems like that's tilted a bit. And I'm curious to hear you sort of explain maybe that happened. Yeah, I mean, I'm less familiar with that case. I think the centralized health care authority thing makes a big difference. Like, they had, even before the cast review, they have this body called Nice that basically evaluates the evidence for the NHS. So there have already been Nice reviews.

Nice, I think, is most famous in the United States as the death panel that when there was the whole fight over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Nice is the government body in the UK that decides whether a given medical treatment is worth doing. And which disabled groups live or die. Right. Yeah. And there's some dollar amount about, you know, what it's worth to save a life, et cetera. It used to be 20 to 30,000 pounds, but I don't know what it is now. There's no way a British person is worth that much.

I'm sorry. No, so I had a fascinating experience with this during Obamacare where I was invited on, I believe it was the BBC on the radio to talk about Obamacare. And I realized I was going in, because I opposed Obamacare. and I realized I was going into enemy territory, and so I chose the cowardly way out, which was that I was just going to describe the differences between the U.S. and the British health care system. And then I was going to say, well, you know, you make some choices, there are tradeoffs, life's hard. And so I started to describe nice. And I was on the show with the British Health Lord, which was a position I did not know existed until I got on the show.

And I started to describe how nice worked. I said, like, look, you have the system. It is much cheaper than the United States. There's stuff you can do with it that we can't do here. The tradeoff is that in order to control government budgets, you have this agency nice. It looks at treatments and it decides based on, you know, a certain dollar per quality adjusted life year, certain dollar value that it won't cover anything over that. And that's like you can argue whether that's good or. bad, but it's a difference. It means that Britons don't get access to some kinds of care that

could help them. And the health lord interrupts me and says, that's not true. That's not, we don't do that. The thing was, like, health wonks in the United States love nice. They were all jealous of it. And so I thought, I have misdescribed this somehow. And so I just launched into giving basically the description of what they do that is, like, on their website. And now the very angry interviewer interrupts me and says, as the Lord whatever said, that's not true. Britain does not rationed care. And I was like, what? I was totally.

But they do have this thing. It's actually, it is still very much admired by American health wonks. But they have a culture of cost control and evaluation that we do not. Right. But they're also really uncomfortable with it, as I think you've seen with this issue, actually. Right. But so, Jesse, if Britain moved sort of ahead of us in both directions, here. What's the history with that? Yeah, I mean, I basically think in all these European countries,

there's less polarization. I mean, that's not to say they don't have big political disputes, but they're not as far apart. I think a lot of what's happening here is on the left. If you hear someone say that they're not sure about kids transitioning or they're not sure about the evidence base, that is the sort of thing a Republican would say. And whatever else you do in lefty circles, you can't say the sorts of things a Republican will say. And I know I'm oversimplifying a little, but I don't think anyone can deny that in addition to all the other reasons were polarized. Maga does sort of cast a shadow everything. So, look, I first wrote about this in a big outlet in, well, technically 2017, but 2018.

And there was a huge backlash. People were really mad. But since the Republican state laws started getting passed and since, you know, families whose kids are on these treatments feel like their well-being is at risk, in part because they've been told over and over and over, your kids will kill themselves. if they don't go on hormones or in some cases get surgery, that's just ratcheted up the stakes. And I think it's just, yeah, lack of a centralized health care system here and a much more dysfunctional political system. Because the same thing that happened in the UK

happened in other places like Finland and Sweden. I'm not saying there was no backlash to those systems becoming more conservative with regard to youth gender medicine, but nothing like what we're seeing here. I also think there's a thing of like if it's your tax dollars, you think about this in a different way than if it's, you think it's an insurer paying.

Now, actually, like, you pay the premiums, you're also paying for that. But the fact that these things are getting paid for with my tax dollars gives me a much higher investment in whether something that sounds a little crazy to begin with. They don't have recourse to the argument of, like, what business is it of yours? Well, I'm paying for it. It's my business. Can we talk a little bit about some of the non-surgical treatments? Because, I mean, I guess to scope it for people, there's some evidence that there's like at least approximate. a thousand mastectomies per year performed on minors for reasons to do with gender transitions.

Now, that's probably an undercount because it's based on insurance data. And so, for example, doesn't pick up, you know, things that were paid for privately. But so it's, you know, it's not, it's not the most common thing in the world, although it's also not vanishingly rare. But there's a lot more puberty blockers and hormonal treatments being prescribed, right? And, you know, I know that in the UK, in the UK, that's very central to the debate there. Here in the U.S., so far, there's been a similar pullback on that by the medical associations, but is that, you know, similarly vulnerable on an evidence base in terms of, you know, is that really something we should be doing with minors? I mean, I should say, first of all, that there's been cracked in the walls,

I put it in the Times column, but I mean, the American Psychological Association has not, when I reached out to them, they tried to claim they hadn't pulled back. They still have language saying there's a comprehensive body of evidence for these treatments. People can read the column for the details there, they got a little weird. But overall, the evidence base for all these treatments is the same. For blockers, hormones, and surgery, the answers, we don't know, we don't know, we don't know. And that doesn't mean no one's published studies, but people, myself included, because early on, I was part of the problem here. There's this view that if you can point to a handful of studies that appear to show benefits, that's real evidence that treatment works. That's just not how it works.

So you need a very specific level of research quality within a study to be able to make causal claims about something like puberty blockers or hormones. So in my view, there's been more research on blockers and hormones, and I'm curious if Megan disagrees, but we don't really know for any of them. I mean, the studies dating all the way back to the Dutch clinic that started these treatments, the really weak studies. And that's been the conclusion of all the systematic reviews. And in any other area of medicine, or mental health, if we're talking about a depression treatment or an Alzheimer's treatment and someone dropped these studies on your desk and said, is this good research? it wouldn't really be a close call.

Everyone would know it's not good research. I think politics and just totally understandable impulse on the part of parents that they want to help their kids. I think that's why this has become a confusing subject in the States. Yeah. I mean, I think, like, if you think about how this should have gone, is that what should have happened is that the Dutch clinic that pioneered this should have created a control group. And they should have followed the life course of those kids over decades.

And they didn't do that. And if you read their study, their initial study, which is published, I believe, in 2011, and they did a follow-up in 2013, their explanation for this just strikes me as quite unconvincing that it wouldn't have been ethical to do that. Well, okay, so it wouldn't have been ethical to do that, but it's definitely ethical to do something that I don't know if it is actually improving the life course of these kids. The other thing is that, as Jesse has written so many times and explained so well, is that these, you know, they had a pretty careful protocol. Again, I think it should have been a tested protocol, but at least they were pretty careful about how much therapy they were doing, about trying to winnow out kids who might have comorbidities like depression, autism, et cetera. but as it spreads, and especially as it spreads, I think, in the United States because America is such a wild west, because there is, you know, there's no central authority that says don't do stuff, that it spread with, like, kids walking into a clinic and walking out two hours later with puberty blockers and hormones. And after being seen for the first time. And then, of course, all the social pressure. But I think now that as they have seen that the ever, that the ever,

keeps failing to materialize. People keep doing studies and they keep failing to show clear benefit, which if these things worked well, you would expect to see some kind of clear benefit. I would only modify that somewhat just to say that I think in most cases the studies they're running are too underpowered to really show anything. And so what does that, does that mean the samples are too small? Does it mean that they're losing too many people to follow up? What makes the studies underpowered? The most important thing is that these are observational studies where you track a group of

kids over time and you see basically how they do. So the most famous example was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, part of a $10 million NIH grant. And they track the kids over time. If a kid's mental health improves over time, there could be a million reasons for that. It could be the medicine you put them on. It could be that they're being seen by a psychologist. It could be that they're on other pharmaceuticals. A study that doesn't account for that really can't tell you that much. And in addition, the researchers who did this study had said earlier on in the research process, we're interested in these eight variables. We think these will improve. Then they published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, and six of the eight variables are nowhere to be found. They've just disappeared.

That's called outcome switching, and that's a sign that the researchers maybe didn't find what they wanted to find. And one of the co-authors of the study later told the New York Times that they were disappointed in what they found in a different puberty blocker study they were doing. They were disappointed in the results, so they didn't publish them for political reasons. So for all these reasons, it's just very hard to know what to make of these studies. So it's not as though people are conducting good, careful, rigorous studies and not finding what they want to find in my view. It's like, we don't even know what to make of these studies, even if they do supposedly show improvement. Is a lot of medicine just like that, but less politically charged? I mean, I've had certain

frustrating experiences in my life where it's like, you know, you ask four doctors the same question, you get four different answers. And as I've gotten older, I've come to the view that some of this stuff is less scientific than it purports to be. Is this an area where, like, the science is uniquely weak? Or should we be concerned that this is happening all over the place? There's some of this and lots of stuff, but I think like mental health, Jesse, correct me if I'm wrong, has a particular problem. Pain also falls into. to this where we don't have, you know, like for high blood pressure, we have an objective marker. For heart attacks, we have an objective marker. And while absolutely people get stuff wrong about

that stuff all the time, the notorious examples are things like stents for angina, which don't really help in most cases, or things like back surgery, which really do not get back surgery unless you have very narrow indications for back surgery. It goes, like physical therapy tends to work just about as well as back surgery and doesn't cause complications. But with pain and especially with mental health, mental health has what I like to call the moving to Vienna problem, and I'm sure there's actually like a psychological name for this. But look, if I'm really depressed, and I think I would be happy if I could only move to Vienna. And then I decide in a moment of unusual energy that I'm going to move to Vienna. And now I'm making plans to move to

Vienna, and I feel like, okay, finally I'm doing the thing that's going to cure me. I will feel better, right, because I'm being active. I feel like I have hope in this cure. Now, most of, many of us who have done this, the efficacy of this is dubious, right? Often you just find that you're in Vienna and you're the same person, although I should say, I did this, I moved to D.C. after a bad breakup temporarily, and in fact, it was a joyful event, and I'm still living here, and it was great. Oh, God, there were positive outcomes to moving to Washington, that's... Including marrying Peter Suterven, which is like the ultimate great outcome. We should say statistically, if you move to D.C., you're very unlikely to marry Peter Soutrevin.

It's not a common about that. Well, and statistically, if you try, I will murder you, so just... So, like, so measuring mental health outcomes, and this is hard, not just with this stuff. It's hard with SSRIs. It's hard with other stuff because depression often lifts on its own. anxiety often gets better. It varies over time. It varies with life circumstances. And so when you do something for a kid who's feeling really distressed, especially at a time like adolescence where people just generally are extremely distressed, it can look like you're having an effect. And I think that's why when you see clinicians who, when I say we need RCTs, they're like, you wouldn't say that if you

could talk to some of... That's randomized controlled trials. Randomized controlled trials. You wouldn't say that if you could see what I see in that clinic. It's like, no, no, no, actually, this is why we have to do RCTs. Because physicians seeing apparent improvement in their clinics is not a substitute for actually doing large-scale trials. And that's why we do them to approve drugs. And we do not just say, like, ask clinicians, is this thing great? Jesse, what do you think on whether this is indicative of a much broader problem in medicine? I think it is and it isn't. I mean, everything Megan is saying is true. It's hard to measure stuff. No one thinks it's easy.

What some advocates have said, including in court filings, is that it's routine for pediatric medicine to have interventions with evidence of this low quality. I don't think that's true in terms of interventions that have such obvious downside effects. I mean, if you put a kid on blockers at a young age and then cross-sex hormones, they'll be infertile and they probably won't have sexual function. And you're really, you're changing their body permanently. So the examples they pick of interventions that have the same low quality of evidence, usually it's not anything as serious as this. Or it's something where we have a really good model on adults, right? Like where we know this works in adults.

And I mean, and this is the other thing, I guess we should talk about. What's the evidence for efficacy in adults, Jesse? Not. It's not. I mean, I try not to focus on this because I think there's a much stronger libertarian. case, but the evidence base for adults is basically this. But hold on because, I mean, I think, you know, the, the question of, you know, what should public policy be about what adults can do is a question where, you know, you, the, you know, the,

the libertarian questions, you know, let people make decisions about their own bodies that matters a lot. But there are questions here that aren't public policy questions. Sure. I mean, you know, it's, you know, it's important to know how these treatments affect people, including adults. I actually think they intersect because, so W. Pat, the World Professional Association for Transgender their health care. This is a whole other can of worms we might not want to get into, but they, they did a meta-analysis on hormones for adults. So gathering all the studies, accounting for their quality, do hormones help adults? I think it was a study on hormones in general, but overwhelmingly the studies were on adults. Even this W-path meta-analysis, which was in many ways the deck was

stacked, I would argue, in favor of finding positive outcomes, they weren't really able to find that we of good evidence on hormones. And these are for those normal reasons of why medical research is difficult. It's definitely difficult to do an RCT in this area. I don't think there really are any for hormones. I mean, in a randomized controlled trial, you're supposed to put someone on a placebo. Like, people will know whether they receive hormones or not. It doesn't have to be blind to do an RCT. You can do an RCT that's non-blinded. Yeah. To me, where the evidence and public policy questions intersect is, if a trans adult goes into a clinic, what are they told about the evidence base? And I just, I think a lot of people, both adults and adolescents and their families are, I mean, I want to say being lied to. I don't like to accuse people of lying, but at a certain point when like the evidence is all public and we know and we have access to these meta analyses and these systematic reviews, you're sort of doing folks a disservice if you tell them, yeah, the evidence suggests this will make you feel better. I think the only answer is we don't know. I also think like, you know, this is less scientific reasoning, but there are so many trans people who say,

that they've got on these treatments and they've helped immensely and they've stayed on them that I think if I had to guess like there's a significant subset of people for whom these treatments do work. But that doesn't help us know beforehand which ones it'll help. And especially when you're talking about 12 and 13 and 14 year olds, the bioethical issues are so obvious and so fraught that I, the level of glibness about this in liberal spaces gets back to what Megan was talking about. I mean, high brown misinformation is what I think I got that term. from Dan Williams, who everyone should follow on substack, or my friend Helen Lewis called it a liberal misinformation bubble. But we're talking about, like, actual kids and their parents facing major medical decisions. And the glibness has been remarkable. I want to take a quick break, and then I want to come back and ask Jesse about that first article that he wrote on this in 2018 and the career trajectory that set him on. This is Central Air. Jesse, as you mentioned, you wrote a cover story about this issue back in 2018 for the Atlantic. I believe the headline was when kids say they're trans.

And it's sort of, I think the first really major coverage of the controversy around this in the United States, that these treatments had gotten increasingly aggressive in terms of, you know, what ages you would provide them, you know, with what amount of medical assessment before you start putting kids on puberty blockers and hormones, et cetera. And the reaction to this was frankly insane. People were very, very angry with you over this piece and subsequent writing that you did. And I think this was basically, it was a tactic that there was an effort to excommunicate you from the press and anyone else who asked similarly, you know, probing questions about these issues. People constantly accuse you of being obsessed merely for having an area of coverage. I mean, you know, people write about things. Some people write about transportation costs or whatever. You know, there are topics that people cover, which entails asking questions and then writing about them. And this gets framed as some sinister thing.

And I think the effort for a number of years was quite successful in discouraging coverage of the fact that, you know, a lot of these interventions were being done without good evidence behind them. And it really, you know, it took several years to get to a point. And, you know, it was frankly, it was the New York Times that was that basically put its foot down and was willing to start doing coverage and get yelled at over this stuff. But it worked for a long time and continues to work in the sense that a lot of people remain within this information bubble where they basically think that, you know, the things that you know, the things that you. write about are just made up and the cast report from the NHS is quote unquote debunked. And this whole thing is an anti-trans conspiracy by you in the New York Times and whatever. I'm just wondering what that experience has been like for you and, you know, why you chose to put yourself at the center of that, which seems like it has to have been quite unpleasant. Yeah, I mean, I think if you're a journalist, you get interested in certain stories.

And if you're lucky, you stumble upon the right story at the right time. And I think that's sort of what happened. here. The reaction is definitely unpleasant, but there's been this weird thing throughout, which is that for all the social media vitriol, most of the people who actually sit down and write me emails, it's mostly supportive. And like, there's a huge amount of back channel support, like, including from some folks who would probably surprise you. So I think throughout this, I never got the sense, like most people think what you wrote is crazy. because just because like the article itself was so carefully fact-checked. And in many places, in retrospect, I think we sort of pulled punches.

We also deferred. When you say we, you and the outlets you were writing for? Sorry, me and the, me and the, I'm talking about the Atlantic piece in particular. In retrospect, most of the things I would have changed about that article had to do with me deferring too much to activists and to doctors who were touting weak research. But yeah, it was a frustrating experience. my story, there was a lot of right place at the right time. I was not really vulnerable to cancellation in the sense of being pushed out of a job. I, the sort of substack, I hate saying the substack revolution because it's like, you know, French revolution, Algerian revolution, substack revolution, but

substack did make a pretty big difference for those of us who have like a niche and who could build an audience. So it's made things weird in lefty circles like to go to a party and be like, Oh, yeah, that guy was saying that about me on Twitter or whatever, but that's sort of small beings in the grand scheme of things. My podcast and co-host, Katie, Hurtzog, who sort of grew up in radical queer circles, was really excommunicated among her real-life friends about this in a way I wasn't. So for me, it's just been, yeah, some moments of intensity or a few moments of what I'd call actual harassment, but mostly it's just been sort of an interesting window into how online,

That's a word up, I'm going for. It really is a form of bomb on radicalization, I think. I think we make this mistake of thinking radicalization only occurs on the right and on gab. But anyone who spends a few minutes in political corners of blue sky now, they're completely closed off from everything. I mean, they just, it's this thing where your circle of information gets smaller and smaller because you can't read the Atlantic because they're reactionary centrist or whatever bullshit term they made up. That's what Jamel Bowie was calling Alec McGillis. recently. Alec McGillis, the journalist whose main thing is that Amazon is like an evil giant corporation apparently is a reactionary centrist now. And again, like maybe it's because this is that thing where

Jamel is taking one thing that Alec retweeted and then I'm screenshoting what Jamel said about. It's just like it gets a little bit circle jerky or douchey or whatever we want to say. But to call Alec McGillis who has done more like in terms of big name reporters, I'm not sure

anyone has like spent more time sitting down a table with someone who is actually struggling and who actually isn't sure how they'll make ends meet or who, you know, is a person who's at the whims of major public policy disputes that we just discuss abstractly on our substacks. Yeah, if Alec McGillis is a reactionary centrist, but that's a sort of like casual, fuck that guy, fuck that guy, fuck that guy dynamics you see in all ideological communities. And in blue sky, I just, I think it's, I mean, frying brains. I mean, that's what Jamel said about Alec is that his brain got fried by the coronavirus, but I think blue sky itself is frown a lot of brains. Yeah, I mean, I remember when I went through the kind of excommunication from liberal places,

but you're racist. That's different. Yeah, yeah. I'm a racist. I'm every type of, I'm every type. I kill homeless men for fun. But Katie messaged me and was like, you know, it's stuff out there. We're all going to end up by the end of this. all on the island of misfit toys or having to work at Reason. Reason is a great place to work. Then Substant came along, like the next day. I still remember because then Substack happened like right after that.

And then she was right, sort of we all, so many of us did end up gravitating there. I remember when you wrote that Atlantic story and I read it and was like, wow, this is a great story. And then looked at the internet and saw that people were not too happy with you. And you could sort of watch the genesis of what happened.

And as someone who, who, you know, has the same tendency towards arguing with people on social media as you know, although I don't think I do it as well as you do because you're just a better journalist and you're more, you're better arguer. I somewhat have been sad just that this became your big focus because I used to love your writing so much at New York Mag when you were doing the science of us. And obviously you still write about other stuff, but part of me resents the fact that this has become your main feed, just since I don't, I'm not hugely actually interested in trans issues. And I wonder, like, do you ever get that a lot? Look, I'm grateful that I can write a book about this and I hope the book makes an impact. But there's a part of me that's extremely eager to move on because it is such a toxic subject and because there's a lot of other stuff I want to write. I will say that it's not really my place to sort of like tell advocates or activists or the journalists who are actually activists. We know they're activists, but they pretend to be journalists to tell them what to do.

But the tactic of this totally disproportionate level of screaming and shaming, I mean, okay, it was unpleasant for me. Who cares? If I'd actually done something bad, maybe I deserved it. But does anyone look back at the last 10 years of screaming about this subject and say, we've done a good job. We've moved public opinion in our direction. Right. Has it has it? So it's like not only is it individually unpleasant for the people on the receiving end of it,

what does it do? I guess that's what I'm confused about. Well, I'll tell you what it did. It delayed by several years certain policy actions. And it has kept the Democratic Party almost entirely on side on these issues. I mean, you know, you see a little bit of like rhetorical departure on trans participation. in sports, which is frankly a significantly less important issue than a lot of these issues about medical care. But basically, I think there has been success in partisanizing this issue. You talk

about how in Europe, because the issue is not partisanized, and because you can be a, you know, a person in the center left in good standing and skeptical about the wisdom of these medical interventions, there has been more policy movement against those interventions, at least up until this, you know, up until 2025, the U.S. was more permissive on this stuff than Europe. Now that, you know, we have a Republican administration, we're seeing movement against that in red states. But, you know, still blue state policymakers seem, you know, seem unmoved by the, you know, exactly the sort of stuff that you're writing about that, you know, Emily Bazelon has written about in the New York Times, et cetera. But the circle of people who think you can't talk about it has shrunk smaller and smaller.

And I think the key moment here wasn't Trump's second election. It was 2020 when Red State after state passed law banning or restricting these treatments and often doing other stuff. I mean, Kansas is now trying to revoke the, unless I'm, I've been victimized by misinformation. My sense is Kansas is literally trying to revoke and reissue the driver's licenses of folks who had adults who had transitioned there. So that's the kind of like backlash that I think there's a comforting view that on the blue sky set, that that backlash is because of, like, people like me and Megan, I don't think that's true. I think that backlash comes in part from this sense that you're not allowed to talk about this issue and you're not a good person if you do.

Because what are, I mean, what are examples, if there's anything the last 10 years, like post-Trump, post-Brexit life should tell us, it's that if you tell people you're not allowed to talk about this thing that you have strong feelings about. When does that work? When does that not lead to backlash to sort of populist revolt? I think there's a way to tie this into some broader political stories here. And I think, I don't know. I just, I don't think anything, the attempts to suppress conversation have worked. Or if they have worked, they're working less and less and in a more small and concentrated and homogenous population. I think that's right. But I think it looked like it was working. Right. Sure. In 2020.

which is when I, I think Leah Thomas was the point at which everyone just looked around and said, like, no, this is, I'm getting off the bus now. Which just to echo Josh, it's very funny that what mattered the most was not little kids maybe, or young teenagers having their breasts removed, but women's college swimming, which like. Yeah, women's Ivy League college swimming. I think that it's not that it matters more. I mean, like, I, again, I think actually the most important thing aside from are we helping these kids or are we hurting them is prisons, right? And still no one's talking about that. But we, the state is locking people in prison. They are using a self-ID policy that allows people who are like not, I'm just going to say, I think a lot of these people are not trans. They're sex offenders who are opportunistically getting into a woman's prison so they can assault women. So I think for Leah Thomas, that's the point at which when we're arguing about these treatments for kids, for a lot of people, they're like, well, I am not a doctor. How can I assess these competing claims, right? And I have been writing about various kind of technical subjects like this for a long time. And there's just a lot of people who their eyes glaze over and they just pick whoever seems to be on their team. But the thing with Leah Thomas was, it was literally the claim was,

who are you going to believe me or your lying eyes? Right? Sure, Leah Thomas was, depending on who you asked, somewhere between ranked like 68th and ranked 500th in her event when swimming as a man. And then she rockets to number one and wins an NCAA championship. And maybe she just overcame her internalized transphobia and was finally able to be the swimmer. she'd always wanted to be, or maybe she just had retained advantage from having gone through male puberty. And you were telling people that they should not notice something that they were

very obviously able to adjudicate. And I think this was also true, Joe Biden, that like, for years before the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the debate, right, you had, sorry, okay, I just, cut that out. Oh, my God. For years before that catastrophic. Sorry, you meant to say the hall at, like, that. Holocaust of his debate performance. Well, NACPA means catastrophe in Aram. For years before that catastrophic debate performance,

you had all of these gerontologists who would write think pieces for us, for the times, for other people. Expert here. Expert here. Yeah. Age is just a number. You can't tell. And you are trying to tell people who have themselves

dealt with aging parents and grandparents that they are not seeing what they're seeing. And that just doesn't work. So even though sports is, I think, the least important of all of these issues, it's the one where you simply could not get away with BSing people. Let me make, let me, let me like take this, this, this Biden thing a little further and say that like, though I was initially a little skeptical of this connection here, one thing I will say that they are similar is that I didn't particularly, one of the reasons I was wrong about Biden was because I wasn't spending

a lot of time with them. You know, I didn't have any direct interactions with them. And people who were, were saying one thing about it, and I said, okay. And forever through with this trans thing, I don't know many trans people. And I would hear about it. And I don't feel strongly about it. And I am naturally predisposed to let people tell me their own lived reality. And so then you just defer to it. And because of that, then it's not really about someone who pays more attention to it.

You know, the right wing spends so much time, you know, following these issues and then like everyone knew. One of the reasons it's not true that everyone knew is that none of us aren't paying attention to it and are happy to sort of defer to people who act like authorities, which is why I think it sort of comes back to what Jesse was saying of like they acted like they knew what they were saying and they said did it so much to have this authority that then created this false sense of, you know, consensus, which then at some point is punctured and it becomes, you know, I'm more mad at Joe Biden than at any other president in history because I felt lied to. But then there also, I think, was a place where that sort of realization came through with the medical issues. And that actually was with the they, them ad. And Kamala Harris's promise to, of, you know, federally funded transition surgeries for prisoners and all, and immigration detainees, which is that, you know, there's all this discussion over, you know, what treatments are medically necessary. And to a significant extent, that's a, you know, very technical question. And if, you know, treatments don't, you know, produce the outcomes that are promised, then that cuts against them being medically necessary. But then there's also these, you know, these higher level questions of values about what is medicine for and what is it necessary to achieve. And certain things seem are obvious. Like in most cases, we're trying to prolong life, although even there you get, you know, some issues with, you know, extraordinary interventions and assisted suicide, etc.

But I think people looked at that. And, you know, the idea that, you know, the taxpayer is going to pay for someone for an inmate to have a transition surgery, you know, the question of whether that's necessary is to a significant extent. question for lay people. It's not necessary to prolong the life of the inmate. And I think that's something that someone can see from outside. And obviously, you know, people have moral intuitions about what it is that we owe to criminals that are different from the general public. But I think it sort of reflects the fact that, you know, part of what we're arguing about here, what the public is arguing about here, it's not just about the studies and the outcomes. It's about what is medicine for and what are we even trying to achieve. And I think that was a point where people sort of realized that, oh,

this idea of what it's trying to achieve, you know, my concept of what, you know, the good is in terms of medicine doesn't extend to the idea that if someone came into prison as a man, it seems like they can stay a man until they get out of prison. And so I think that's, you know, that's sort of a place where that disconnect really came alive. I think fundamentally what unites all these different subsets of the trans debate is the idea of self-ID, like this idea that it doesn't matter how someone looks, but as both like a normative and descriptive clobet, if they say there's something else, they are something else. And they should be treated as that other thing for all, all intents and purposes, including stuff that might make us feel icky,

like prisons or relatively young kids getting surgery. And I think it was sort of the screaming and the social pressure and the attempts to destroy people's careers that allowed this to spread far and wide in the U.S., even though I think it's a really unpopular idea. in a way, things like opposition to housing discrimination or bathroom stuff, although even there, there's been collateral damage on like these areas that used to be strengths of the trans activist argument. So I do think a lot of this comes down to this higher level idea of self-ID, and like we haven't really debated that in the way they have in the UK, for example. I do think that like there's this thing that I've noticed when people get mad at you,

you know, on blue side the last few weeks, they've been saying, wow, you're just taking a victory lap because you've gotten what you wanted. Trans people are, you know, now the country's turned against us. As though that was like your agenda, which I think anyone who's actually followed your work knows that isn't true. Also, as though the New York Times has you write about something,

like, hey, do you want to take a victory lap? It's just not really. That's what we want to use this space for. Yeah, exactly. But like, I do, I think that the thing that you said about, you know, the way that they, the tone that they use, like the approach that they use,

has obviously backfired so much. And the thing that you said about Kansas is a great example of how it then leaves this space when they silence these sort of like moderate normal concerns about it. Then it's then filled by extremists anti-trans people. And they're the only ones talking about it. And it's just filled that space in such a terribly destructive way that you really like want the left to look at it so that they don't do it in every other issue. Because they fuck this one up already.

And I don't want them to apply it. But to other issues, you don't want them to, like, valorize the tactic. Yeah. During the time that Glad and other groups and journalists they allied with, they spent a huge amount of time and money attacking the New York Times of all the targets in 2023 America with a second Trump presidency on the horizon. That's what they chose to go almost all. I don't want to say all in. I'm sure they're doing other stuff. But those who followed, like, media circle jerks off at the time.

This was in the news. The Times is Transpobia, which was a. a very thin case. And I'm not really seeing any reflection on should we have spent that much time attacking the fucking New York Times of all things in 2023. I think there's just doubling and tripling down. And that's where it's headed. Well, I mean, that that letter they put out attacking the New York Times. They got so many other organizations to sign on to who's, you know, what Glad is done here is wrong and despicable. But at least they are a media pressure group. And it is their job to try to pressure the media in certain directions. They had like the gay and lesbian community center in New York and the Allie Forney Project and all these other groups signing on to this and treating it as part of the, you know, the LGBT Omnicause, you know, going to war with the New York Times, which I think reflects very poorly on a lot of these groups in the NGO space that they both, you know, they can't be tactical. They can't prioritize and they're getting in on the wrong side of an issue that they don't know very much about. But, you know, it would have worked in 2020. We were supposed to talk about why Jamel Bowie is a Nazi collaborator. I don't know if you can give us the 60-second thumbnail of why people are saying that on Blue Sky this week.

Someone said something crazy about him on Blue Sky, Bowie screenshot it. And because you're not allowed to screenshot the things people publicly decide to post, he is now, unfortunately, and always has been, a Nazi collaborator. I think that's it. It only took me like 30 seconds or so. Okay. It's funny. It's like the night of the long knives, even the Nazis come after each other.

Jesse Single, thanks for joining us. Jesse is co-hosted blocked and reported and writes the single-minded substack. And that youth gender medicine book will land with a splash, I think, at some point. We'll be right back with Central Air. Hey, Central Air listeners. On Tuesday, there were primary elections in a few states, and particularly in Texas. There was a solid win for state representative James Tala Rico over Jasmine Crockett in that state's Senate primary. This is a race that I've written about some. And we have a live conversation for you to listen to with Dave Weigel, who covers politics for semaphore, Ben Dreyfus and I. Now, the conversation is live on Wednesday at noon, so depending on when you're listening to this, podcast. Either it's coming up and you can go into the substack app or you can go to centralairpodcast.com.

Join that conversation live, even asked some questions in the chat. And if that's already happened when you're listening, there is a replay available for paying subscribers. You can watch the video or you can just listen to the audio if you want. You can go to centralairpodcast.com for that. This is going to be a key Senate race. Democrats have an unfavorable map trying to take back the U.S. Senate and so they need to win a reach state like Texas. If they want to take back the majority. There were high stakes here. We talk about the political forces, the charges of racism, the leaning into identity politics that did not get Jasmine Crockett over the top there, and some of the opportunities and challenges that may face James Talleyco in that race. We're also

looking at some interesting house races, including down in South Texas. There are some opportunities for Democrats despite the Republican remap in that state. So again, if you want to catch that, go to centralairpodcast.com. It's going to be a very very very important. interesting conversation. So finally this week, as I mentioned at the top of the show, we're going to talk about Iran. Ben, you've been sort of like surprisingly optimistic about this whole thing where, you know, we've started this war. We have killed a lot of the senior Iranian leadership, a lot of, you know, bad people who've been doing a lot of bad things in Iran. Still not clear to me what the hell the administration thinks it's going to achieve here, but you have some hopes.

I was I think that there's a lot of different reasons for concern with about it. And I think that there's two separate questions, right? Is this something that he should have done or I necessarily would have done if I was him? Or whether, you know, there's good arguments for it and it seems like it might be working. Or it might, you know, you can be optimistic about it. One thing I've noticed and you see it in a lot of these different things is that people like to knee jerk, sort of a catastrophism about it because they're also self-shock about Iraq. And I think that that is bad.

And just because you don't like Trump, I try to, I don't like Trump either, but I try to, like, stay away from thinking something is bad just because he's doing it. And I think that honestly, like, if any country has been asking for this for a while, it's the leadership in Iran, right? And I think that it seems to be going pretty well so far. It's early days. But I'm cautiously, cautiously optimistic. I don't know. I mean, obviously we don't have 100,000 troops on the ground yet, so it's not precisely like Iraq. But, you know, I think taking away from the lesson there that, you know, if you destabilize a bad government in the Middle East, that you can you can bring in something worse in the vacuum and get stuck for a very long time at, you know, great cost in blood and treasure stuck there.

Those seem like valid lessons to take away from Iraq, which, I mean, which is why Donald Trump ran for president saying that if you elected warmonger Kamala, she was going to. you were going to end up in a war in Iran. I mean, he was one of the people saying you shouldn't get stuck in this sort of thing. That is a reasonable criticism of Donald Trump. You know, like that is a reasonable hypocrite criticism. The thing about the with Iraq. It's not so much about the hypocrisy is that like it was a reasonable thing to worry about. Right. Okay. But the thing is you're sort of doing it right out to it with Iraq where it's just less than Iraq went wrong. It means intervention bad can't work. And I think that if you actually look at Iraq, the actual mistakes that were made, the biggest ones, weren't just that we did it. You know, so I'm saying was bad. What actually, you know, what happens if we don't disband the Iraqi army and give, you know, a million different armed men, a bunch of time on their hands, take away all of their money and give them a bunch of shame and a reason to fight? Like, there's a lot of things that happened once we were there that went wrong. And I think that the lesson of, oh, oh, we need to be terrified of everything all the time and never intervene anywhere is just an overreating of that situation. Megan, what do you think?

I think that you should not mindlessly extrapolate from the last thing. I mean, military is always prepared to fight the last war, and everyone's scarred by the last war, and overcoming that psychological difficulty in analysis as a columnist, right? Like, I was wrong about the Iraq War. I supported it. That was a bad idea. Lesson learned. Mistakes were made.

And so my temptation now is just to say, this is, This is definitely not going to work. It's going to be a quagmire. And I still kind of think quagmire more likely than not. Because I don't see, we don't have an opposition there. This regime has been around for a long time. And so there's no civil society left that I can see. And again, I'm not an Iran expert. So listeners are free to write in and explain to me where I'm wrong. And I will gratefully accept your criticism. But you've got a regime that's been in place since the 70s that has ruthlessly stamped out rival opposition. And you have also an ethnic problem as you did in Iraq. I mean, in Iraq, it was an ethnic and religious problem. In Iran, my understanding is that it's much more of just an ethnic problem. But you've got a country that has sizable ethnic minorities who would like to break away from main state, and you could end up in a civil war that will be incredibly destabilizing.

The last time we did this in 2003 led to Iran getting much more powerful, right? Because we had removed their primary neighbor rival and plunged it into many years of instability. Now, look, I've actually heard some people who are not crazy arguing the cost was too high in Iraq, but where we are now is better for the Iraqis and better for us. right, that we paid too much for that in terms of Iraqi lives, in terms of American lives, and in terms of American money. But that overall, despite all its problems, Iraq now is a better place than it was in 2003, and probably a better place than would have been if Saddam's crazy sons had taken over. And like maybe the long-term trajectory for Iran. And look, also maybe, I don't know, maybe they'll get a democracy.

Maybe Reza Palavu will go back in a chariot drawn by lion. that people will welcome him with open arms and he will become Shah again. I have no idea because I'm not a neuron expert, but I have a lot of trepidation, let us say. But at all, I also don't see signs that the administration has a clear strategy here. I mean, it seems like what happened is that the Venezuela intervention succeeded on its narrow terms, which is to say that we, in fact, got Maduro and there was a transition to a new leader who at least is in certain ways communicated more, you know, openness in world. working positively with the United States. And Trump is hoping that we will start getting oil

out of the fields there in a greater quantity. And that seems at least the most plausible theory that I hear out of, you know, people in and around the administration is that we're going for another Delsey-Rodriguez situation. That the hope is that rather than a nasty civil war, that there will be not really fully a change of the regime, but a new person will come in who we can better work with. And it just strikes me as, you know, first of, we don't know how well the Delci Rodriguez solution is even working in Venezuela. But then the other thing is this is a regime that was much longer standing and much more ideological than the regime in Venezuela. The regime in Venezuela had been communist, but it actually become less

communist in the last few years and was basically just kleptocratic. And so it sort of makes sense the idea that, you know, we can we can probably buy off somebody else into a more, you know, a more amenable position there. Here you have very sincere, very long regional conflicts that, you know, Iran and a lot of the people in Iran have very deep emotional investment in. And so the idea that we can just prop up someone who we like significantly better strikes me is relatively unlikely to work. And I think, you know, the president did this just because he feels like he's on a role. It's the same thing as, you know, the Greenland gambit was because he felt like, hey, Venezuela worked. Let's try some more shit. And then, you know, you can sable

rattle with Europe for a week and then back off and cancel the tariffs that you threatened. But you can't really back off this after a week if it's not working out the way you want it. I mean, I think that there's also like there's an occupier answer for why this happened, right? Which is maybe like, I'm not going to deny that maybe like the success in Venezuela played something in his brain. But also, they just killed 30,000 of their own citizens in the weekend. You know, that's when on some fundamental human level, that is a bad thing that happened that the United States. I'm okay with them going and killing people who do that.

But not only is it not our not our job to resolve, you know, internal, you know, oppression in other countries. I don't think the Trump administration even claims that that's our job. That's a George W. Bush era thing. The idea that, you know, the measure of the success of the Iraq war is whether Iraq has improved for the Iraqis. I think not only has, was that unwise, I think it's been soundly rejected by the administration. Well, it might be, let me say, let me take two points, though.

One is that whether they rejected for that is irrelevant to me. I don't reject it. I think that we should do it. I'm completely happy with us going and taking that as the, you know, the burden that we do and we go and kill people when they do bad things like that. And also, the other thing I would say is that what their administration's claims about it are are sometimes affected by the fact that the legal authority they're claiming to do has to do self-defense.

And so they're focusing more on the threat they had to the United States. I also do think that the fact that the president trothed help is on the way and then didn't send the help and they massacred a bunch of people may have played some role in the decision to do this, that he wanted to save face over what I think was probably an impulsive, not well-thought-out tweet. But I wouldn't say that it's, I think there's a possibility that it did play some role here, even though not in the way that Ben is analyzing this, but in a very Trumpian way of analyzing that problem. I mean, it sounds like we don't, it sounds like also that they started to move people into the Gulf right around that time. It sounds like that

there's a chance that they just said we need six weeks or whatever it is to actually get this done. And so we're going to, they did decide to do it in early January and then decided to have these little negotiations for a while while they were moving all these fleets there. It is interesting to me the way Trump has raised the stakes here because it's clear, it had been clear previously that his preference around these military interventions was to, you know, aim for smaller scales and things that, you know, could be easily enough turned around. You know, that's, I mean, we, we didn't, you know, go for the, you know, the democratically favored opposition in Venezuela because that would have involved invading and putting, you know, tens of thousands of our troops on the ground in order to prop up the new Venezuelan government. This, you know, we're not on the ground yet, but it seems to me like this is the first time the president has really opened a new military gambit that he can't very easily just back off of if he gets bored of it or decides that it's not working in the proper manner. And I'm, you know, I'm just concerned that they haven't really thought that through in this administration. Because the quality of the people running this is so poor in a way that I have never seen in any prior administration. I mean, Pete fucking Heggseth is the guy who's running this for us.

Like, I feel like there isn't a floor in terms of how stupid I can assume the analysis was. Sure, but also those are the policymakers. And obviously, they can be as stupid as possible. But, like, the U.S. military itself is quite good at its job. And so far, they've done doing, they've conducted this pretty well. You know, they took out almost the entire leadership. in a few hours. And so I think you have to make a distinction

between the morons in the White House and the cabinet and also like the entire United States National Security establishment. Right, but ultimately the morons in the cabinet are going to be the ones who set whatever policy we have for getting out or reconstruction or whatever it is we're doing. So you can't, like, yes, the U.S. military,

I am second to none in my appreciation for their ability to blow stuff up. best blow-upers in the entire world. But after the blowing up, you have to build something that you want to be there. And there's no domestic opposition. You could, I mean, I do understand the administration's reasoning on not supporting the domestic opposition in Venezuela. I disagree with it, but I understand what it was. That they didn't have the infrastructure.

They couldn't go toe to toe with the kind of. areas that are not in full state control and that, you know, they didn't have the militias they would need. They didn't have the control over the military and therefore you go with someone who has those things. But in Iran, there's not even a real domestic opposition in the way that there is in Venezuela. And I just don't see what the game plan is, although I now think it is interesting that Iran's terrible miscalculation was that they wanted to just widen the war to everyone. They wanted to attack the EU and NATO and also all of the Gulf states. And I think that they have ginned up more support for what's going on now and are going to, but are also

widening it to a regional war that we're going to need to care about in a way that we didn't need to care about bombing Fordo. What are our probabilities we're giving this for working? I mean, what does it mean for it to work? All right. Well, in the perfect world, Brittany Spears is doing a residency show at the MGM Grand Tehran. But let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's come to sound of that.

Wow. You're not only going to like get a democratic liberal government in Iran. You're also going to fix the Britney Spears mental health situation, get her performing again. This is very, very ambitious, Ben. But I guess like, for it to work, I think it needs that the person who ends up in charge, if the government that ends up in charge after this, is less extreme and less hardline and is less threatening to its neighbors, less working on nuclear programs, and stops killing their own people.

That's the baseline. For that baseline, I don't know, 30, 35 percent, maybe 25. But I, like, I am not in Philip Tetlock superforecaster territory. I know very little about Iran, and I am therefore just making wild-ass guesses that are meaningless. But that's okay. That's the fun of a – we're on a podcast. That's what we do. Okay, fair.

And then the other thing is that, you know, analogous to the situation that Megan sort of described there with Iraq, I mean, it's, you know, it's easily possible to imagine a situation where you go through a tremendous amount of instability and war in the region and death. And then you come out the other end with a government that is less tyrannical and awful than the old Iranian regime. You know, I mean, that's just sort of there's mean reversion. Like, you know, that government was so bad that if you create chaos and something emerges out of it, it's likely that the new one will be less bad. That doesn't mean it was worth everything that happened on the way to that. I mean, you know, in the case of Iraq, we're talking about a, you know, period of more than a decade that you went through to get to, you know, this Iraqi government that is no great shakes, though it's better than Saddam's government.

Well, let's say over a short time span, over two years or something. Oh, I think the odds of that are very low. 60%, 60%. Let me turn this around, Ben. What are your odds that whatever we end up with in Iran is worse than what we had two weeks ago? I would say that it's like noticeably worse, like in a way that it's clear like Iraq in the beginning when this was just a 15%. And then in between those, it's a hook, you know, you've got pluses and minuses. Since one of my big pet peeves is made up numbers, this is driving me slightly crazy.

So I think we can, I think we can end the segment here. What made up numbers? Didn't you used to work at Wells Fargo? I never opened any fake accounts for anyone. It's funny. You know, when I worked there, this is the, you know, my time there ended in 2009. So it was before the fake account scandal came to light. But we did have all these trainings about cross-cells.

and like how you should try to get your customers to buy more products. And they were so proud. They were like, you know, our competitors, their customers have 2.3 products, but our customers have four products. And I guess we found out what some of that was driven by. But anyway, Ben, Megan. Which is why you should subscribe to The Washington Post, Josh's other podcast, and my subs.com down. Yes.

Real accounts only, please. We have three products. Yeah, like we want our customers with all four products. Central Air is. by me josh barrow and sarah fay were a production of very serious media jennifer spotik makes this episode our theme music is by joshra mosher thanks for listening and stay cool out there