Central Air - Revolt of the Billionaires

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

On this week's show: Mike Solana of Pirate Wires joins us to talk about Silicon Valley. He’s been talking with lots of billionaires who are taking steps to exit California in anticipation of a proposed wealth tax. We discuss how credible those threats are, and what makes the wealth tax different from prior soak-the-rich tax proposals. Plus: the alleged “Gay Tech Mafia,” of which Wired magazine says Mike is a member, the gyrating price of oil, and the outrage over Timothée Chalamet saying “no one cares” about ballet or opera.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. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post. Hey, Megan? Hello, Josh. And Ben Dreyfus, as always is here. He writes the substack newsletter, Calm Down. And he promised me he had a little bit to open the show this week.

That is such a lie. It is such like you just to say, I explicitly decided him a bit. You said, put me on the spot. I said, put me on the spot. And here I am doing that. Tell me about your brother riding the turtle. God. There was all these, I saw this thing of this 187-year-old turtle that exists, apparently. But it's, um, it's from somewhere, it's from the Seychelles, the Seychelles. I don't know how to pronounce it.

Seychelles. Okay. But I once went to the Galapagos. Yes. And it was in the 90s before the woke took over. And they didn't really pay any attention to us. And so I have this video of my brother, being five, riding a hundred and fifty-year-old turtle. Because they were like, Yeah, sure. They'll let the Americans do whatever they want. How do you know if a turtle is 150 years old? It doesn't have rings like a tree, right? Like, and it doesn't have a birth certificate. You know what?

You know, I'll be honest with you, Josh. I have no idea how they know how old that fucking turtle is. You know what? Like when there's like, oh, this person is 120 years old. It's always just false. Like either they screwed up the records or like there was the famous French woman who was supposed to be 120, but really it was a pension fraud thing. She was stealing her mother's pension.

I think it is very unclear whether the calm all thing was a pension fraud, actually. I mean, there are, like, people who do get into the 110s. They're extraordinarily rare. But you get these jurisdictions where it's like there's a year when they started issuing reliable birth certificates and suddenly, like, the number of super centenarians coming out of that population just drastically drops because nearly all the people who are supposed to be that old. Most of these things of, like, people in Yugoslavia live forever. it's all bad record keeping.

And in fact, like most of Japan's incredible population of superagers, etc., it's records fraud. But my understanding is that there are some people who are attested

to live to 110 or older. They're just like one in like $5 billion. It's not a... But that still doesn't explain the turtles. Wait, so your brother rode, like, rode one of these, like, incredibly old turtles. That doesn't seem very nice.

Yeah, my brother rode once because a turtle that was committing pension fraud. When you're a movie star's five-year-old son, they let you do whatever you want. With complicated psychological after-effects, I'm sure. Yeah. Speaking of impunity for the wealthy and whether that exists or whether the, you know,

the backlash is coming around for that, we're going to talk this week about the California billionaire tax proposal, which is a ballot measure that may be on California ballots this November that would create what purports to be a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires to create a fund that the state is then supposed to use over time for health care. And there's been a lot of reaction to that. And we have with us this week, Mike Salana, who is the founder of the tech publication Pirate Wires. He's also the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund, which is a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Mike, thank you for joining us this week. And I know you've been talking with a lot of billionaires. I'm interested to hear what they've been saying to you about this wealth tax proposal. Yeah, hello. Thank you for, thank you for having me. Glad to be here. So do they, do they like it? Do the billionaires want the wealth tax?

They love it. I mean, they're just all about it. They're asking for more. You know, it's definitely bad. I think the question was never whether they were going to be okay with it or not. It was like, are they going to leave or not? Are they going to do anything about it or not? And in fact, this is like a big part of the wealth tax architects and the union's argument was that wealth flights a myth. And they actually, actually cite research to this effect. But I think as my colleague Blake Dodge at Pirate Wires wrote, this is like misattributed. It's like misunderstood the research that they're citing, I think purposely. Well, flight is real when you are talking about wealth taxes. And it is real in the state of California already from what I hear. And I've spoken with a lot of these people. I think I've actually spoken to more billionaires. I think I've cited, I've sourced my piece with more billionaires. I truly believe than any other person in history. You said 21 billionaires for this piece.

There were 21. I've spoken to more since, but for that piece, there were 21 that I spoke with. So I've been surprised that, you know, the first round of reaction to this, you know, not just in your piece, but most of the coverage has been on, you know, are billionaires going to leave under the threat of this tax? It feels like the first question is, you know, are they going to defeat the proposal? Is the proposal even going to get on the ballot? And then if it gets on the ballot, is it going to pass? Because, I mean, California voters are sort of less left wing than you might expect in their handling of ballot measures. They defeat a lot of tax increase proposals, even tax increases aim just the wealthy.

They voted down rent control three times in the last decade. And so I sort of expected the first round of response from not just billionaires in California, but business interests generally that view this as a threat to the ability to do business in California would organize and spend a ton of money to defeat this. Well, I think the prudent course of action was to both leave and spend money on defeating this. So it's just if you are here, it's such an extraordinary. I mean, we've never seen an asset seizure like this before. I guess one key piece of context we should give people is that the way the measure is written, in theory is based on billionaires who are in the state as of January 1 of 2026. Yeah. Originally, it was 2025 and they had to amend it because it was like super illegal.

So now it's 2026. And so December was when you had this mad rush. And everyone was like, what are you doing? Are you? staying? Are you leaving? This is like pretty scary. So they left and fought. And I agree with you. I think from my read, you're correct about Californians being a little bit less left wing than people think, especially when it comes to these ballot props. The most recent one was the DEI ballot. There was like a, it was the state asked, can we discriminate based on race, basically? Obviously they were doing it for purposes of DEI, not to be like, yay, white supremacy. But the voters roundly were like, get the fuck out of here. So it's more complicated than people think. However, polling indicates billionaires super unpopular and this ballot proposition popular. I think that it really

comes down to whether or not the union's responsible for the ballot proposition want to win. And if they do, they have the money to get the signatures, to run the ads and to get it passed, I believe. So I don't think it's really a matter of like whether or not it will fail on its own. There's maybe a chance that counter ballot propositions could have some success. In California, since, since, like, Newsom is against this, does that matter at all? Like, does it, is it just that it passes? Even Katie Porter is against it. Does it just have to pass the ballot measure or does it have to then be, like, approved by? No, it doesn't, he can't do anything about it. He can negotiate, and he has been negotiating with the unions behind the scenes, or at least that's what all of the

rumors are saying. This is especially problematic, this specific ballot prop, because not even all of unions are, most of the unions are on board. The teachers union hates it because it circumvents a special funding carve out that they have themselves. They're supposed to get a cut of like every single funding increase that happens in the state per another psychotic ballot proposition, 98, I believe. There are always these crazy ballot props. So they're mad. Newsom is negotiating with them. That means that the healthcare workers union has a lot of leverage. Like it could maybe that's how it could possibly matter is, but no, if once it passes, it passes. It passes. is unless, last thing, because there is a way that I don't understand that this could just fall apart,

Californians, and I think like 1993 or so, passed a ballot proposition that said no state funding could go to any illegal immigrants. So not for education, not for housing, not for health care. It was 1994. That passed overwhelmingly. The California electorate said yes to that. And then it just gets caught up in this crazy court process that eventually isn't pursued to the fullest extent and finally dropped by the state. And somehow this law that passed is not the law. So there is stuff that could happen, I guess. I want to go back for a second to the

question of, you know, like actually just straight up defeating the measure of the ballot box. Because there's a Politico poll that came out this week that does find the ballot measure leading by a substantial margin by 50 to 28. But that number isn't as impressive as it sounds because of the history of the way California ballot measures poll, which is they tend to have their strongest polling right when they come out, and then the no vote just goes up and up and up. There was a study from the Public Policy Institute of California that they put out a few years ago finding that a ballot measure had to be ahead by 21 points on average, four months ahead of the election, in order to just barely tie in the end, and that the decay was actually even

worse for tax-increased ballot measures, that the combination of the more voters here about a tax-increased proposal, the less they like it. Those proposals also tend to draw a lot of spending on a no campaign that is often, you know, effective. And the messaging that the billionaires have here, I think, is effective. And we can talk in a second about it. It's supposed to be a 5% one-time tax, but then there's this strange calculation based on, well, as is the case with many of the big tech companies, if you're a founder and you have controlling shares that exceed your theoretical economic stake in the firm, they can end up taxing you at a rate that's substantially higher than 5%. I think they have a good argument that this is going to undermine the tax base and the economy and the

state. And that's why liberals like Gavin Newsom are on the no side of this. I'm wondering if, you know, if your view, which seems to be if this gets on the ballot, is it going to pass, is that the prevailing view among the people who'd be affected by this? Because it seems to me like they're, you know, they do have a strong ability to defeat this if they organize well. And I'm wondering if they're focused on that. Tax increases, they pass all the time if they're narrow. If they're narrow and they target like corporate companies, payroll tax, that CEO tax, the millionaire tax, anything that's not a broad tax, tends to do well in San Francisco and Los Angeles. And this is a different class of ballot proposition, obviously. And then in terms of Gavin Newsom, I mean, the reason that he's opposing this is not because it's like bad for the economy. He needs billionaires as well. You have this huge conflict in the Democratic Party between the hard left and the like machine left, the Gavin Newsom left. Those guys get as much funding from billionaires as anybody more in California. I mean, in California, there is no Republican Party that's relevant.

So the billionaires are funding people like Newsom. Yeah, I would say, you know, California in the depths of the financial crisis, passes a temporary income tax on higher earners and hike in the sales tax, if I recall correctly. Yes. And that temporary thing passed easily, was extended and made permanent easily. Or I guess I think maybe it goes to 2030. I should have brushed up before the show. Is it a millionaire's tax?

It was Prop 30 and then Prop 55, if I am recalling correctly, right? Yeah. I mean, the state had a fiscal crisis then and had Governor Jerry Brown out there, you know, really pushing for that. It's a different situation than this. Yeah, but I don't think it had a fiscal crisis in 2016, right? Then they were just like, yeah, I love this. It goes on higher earners.

Most people are not going to pay this tax. Everyone loves taxes. Most people don't pay. And so I, the billionaire's tax is the ultimate. in taxes that most people don't pay. So I would not be as sanguine as you are that this is going to decline in popularity. The arguments against passing it are real,

but as I discovered when I wrote about wealth taxes last Friday, they are complicated, and many people struggle with them. And they just don't, they just immediately are like, oh, so you love billionaires, your billionaire owner. Put you up to this, didn't you? It was like, yeah, sure, Jeff Bezos absolutely calls me. and suggest column topics that are, funnily enough, columns I have been writing for 20 years

about why wealth taxes don't work. I won't say it's like 50% likely to pass. I have no idea. I'm not an expert on California politics, but I would not be like, well, probably it won't. And I also find it odd that they're claiming that, or that anyone at any point thought that this would not cause capital flight. I mean, Norway raised its billionaire. It has a wealth tax of 1%.

It raised it to 1.1 percent and like 30 billionaires and multi-millionaires left the country in a single year. It's just obvious that people at that level are going to try to structure around it, especially when the signal you're sending is stay here and we will come after you again and again. And I think Scott Alexander actually had a really good post on the ways that the SCIU just uses terrible ballot initiatives to extort people. And do you want to stick around and find out what they're going to. going to extort from you or do you want to just go? The California dialysis industry does not have that choice, which was one of the examples he uses, where they just keep trying to pass these measures. Although I would note those ballot measures, which, you know, have a nice sounding effect where it's like we want minimum staffing ratios at dialysis centers, the voters keep voting them down.

Sure. And the liberal newspapers keep endorsing a no vote on those. There's a lack of patience with what the SEIU has done by a lot of people on the left, as Mike notes, the teachers union is not on board with this. Look, I don't think I'm sanguine about this. I think that if you're opposed to this, you need to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a no campaign for it. I'm just saying that I think that that can work. And I think that that's sort of the, that seems to me like the first line of defense. And it's been interesting because sometimes the tech billionaire money that gets into politics looks kind of dilettanteish, like Elon Musk in Wisconsin wearing a cheese hat. But sometimes it's been very hardheaded and effective, like all the crypto money that has been spent.

nationally. And so I'm wondering, you know, is that happening behind the scenes right now? Is there that well-funded, well, you know, well-organized effort to defeat this? So it's unclear who they are still. I've heard rumors. But all of the Oneado propositions are really interesting to me. I'm sorry, the what propositions? Five new ballot propositions were named by the Attorney General. Those were run by the Kurtonado group, him and like whoever he's representing. And there are these very interesting ballot propositions that target various aspects of taxation law and the wealth tax, I think almost all of which includes some kind of like inside of them, like a counterspell for the wealth tax basically. If these ballot props get enough signatures and then get enough votes,

more votes than the other ballot proposition, it just counterspells the other ballot proposition. Right. So I'm curious, and maybe no one in this podcast knows the answer, but, you know, The SEAU has this tactic of going and trying to extort money from various people that negotiates with by passing ballot propositions that will hurt them. Why has no one funded a ballot proposition that sounds nice but would completely wreck the SCIU? Yes, a great question. Surely there must be one. I think I've been asking this question myself, and it's not just in writing, but two billionaires.

And I think that they just are, they are super tech is what I really understand. there's one billionaire's book with who was not in the tech community. And among tech billionaires, they just have not been super engaged, aware, like involved. The ballot prop system itself was confusing to a lot. They were like shocked that this was even possible. So I think they're just kind of waking up to this. But I completely agree with you that that is what has to happen. It's interesting because there was a successful similar effort to that in 2024 because the AIDS Health Care Foundation, which is a huge healthcare nonprofit that provides a lot of health care services, is run by this guy Michael Weinstein,

who then uses the AHF money on unrelated political initiatives, especially around, like, he's been one of the big rent control backers. He also hates it whenever anyone tries to build tall buildings near him in Hollywood. But so they've put these rent control measures up several times back with AHF money. And so the real estate interests in 2024 went up with this ballot measure requiring health care nonprofits to spend like 98% of their budget on health care to basically stop AHF from doing that. And that ballot measure passed. So, you know, the unions are a different matter. I don't know what that would look like exactly, but that is a tactic that's been used

before. Well, one of them is one of the ballot propositions that would require like a crazy level of transparency into every single organization that takes money from a special tax. That's That's one of my favorite ones. It would require audits and things like this, annual audits. You would have to hire people third parties to come in and analyze your mission strategy and how likely it is for you to achieve your goals and everything else. And I think these are interesting ways about it. But this like new space of everyone saying wants to end the ballot prop system, it's crazy in California. It should not exist. Like legislation should be left to our legislators. Otherwise, things like this happen. But I think that you're

starting to see a realization among people with a lot of money that it's like, well, these people want to kill us and this system exists. And so your options are either to leave or to fight. And in some of them at least, not enough of them, but a few of them with a lot of money are now aware of all this. I want to ask about the concept that a bunch of the billionaires have left already. What does it mean to leave? Because it seems to me there's three, it's one thing to, you know, create a corporate entity in Florida or to buy a piece of real estate in Florida and say, you know, this is where I live now. It's another thing to substantially move your personal life and your business operations to a third place. And it's a third thing to convince the state of California that you have left.

And so there were these news articles about, you know, various, I forget was it Larry Page or various people like, you know, that did things that caused them to be domiciled elsewhere. To what extent have they really substantially moved out of the state of California? Yeah. First of all, there's no rules that are set in stone here on purpose in California. It's a lot of all left somewhat ambiguous. Like even the idea that you have to be gone 180 days or something is like, that's not enough. They can prove that it, that it's not enough. They go into all sorts of weird things where your doctors, you know, how often does your wife travel back to California to see your hairdresser like crazy shit? So, you know, it's a giant question mark. They say it. And then

they do a bunch of things to help make a case when they're attacked by the state. So it's like, I bought a building and I have people staffed there and my name's on the building. And, you know, all my doctors are there and all of this. But they're all just building cases. Yeah, I feel like for 5% of my wealth, I would find a new hairdresser. Well, sure, but I love Garland. Garland, if you're listening to this, it's not you, but for 5%. Even before this wealth tax proposal, I mean, I feel like for years we were seeing a lot of these news stories about, you know, the general hostility of the California policy climate for business and how people are fed up and they're moving to Miami, they're moving to Austin.

And a lot of them go there for 18 months and then they come back. And they seem to discover that, you know, the summer is miserable in South Florida, and that there were real agglomeration effects in California that were valuable for doing their business, combination of it's a nice place to live, and it is, you know, a place where you can actually make more money before taxes. And so, I mean, aren't you one of those people, Mike? Didn't you move to Miami and move back? Yeah, so I moved to Miami for love. We have to be very clear about this. I did not move to Miami. I was never a, Miami is the future of tech person. I wrote very clearly about it. I followed San Francisco politics is what I followed and wrote about because I was

rooting for the city and I love the city and all my friends were there and things like this. You're right. I don't think anybody didn't appreciate the network effects, especially in tech, of the Bay Area and how just essential they were to all of the success that was happening. It was an open question about whether or not you could build things elsewhere. And for some people, it was like, well, this is just out. Remember, this was COVID when a lot of this is happening. San Francisco is a disaster zone in 2020, 2021. It's like really, things are really crazy there.

So people are leaving, and I was very like, this is a clown show. Miami Tech is not a thing. It's never going to happen. This tax is crazy. And the fact that, so when you look at things like the way it targets private startups control rather than ownership, it is designed to really fuck these people out of the state. Like, I don't know how you read this thing and not interpreted as this is designed to make me leave. So previously it was like, California's crazy.

It's too crazy for me to be here. After this. Wealth tax, people are saying, I don't know that it's possible for me to be here. I'm talking to people who were hardcore California maximalists, making fun of Keith Rabeau, like, friends of mine who were like, you got to get back here, Salana, and like the city's back. Like, we're going to fix it. Keith Rabeoy, for those who don't know, is a prominent VC who moved to Miami. He is the guy who's like, he's like the Miami guy on Twitter who's constantly like, Miami's perfect. It's beautiful. It's the future of the world. And people will just roast him for it.

Does he tweet this in August? I feel like some of these. people who moved to South Florida had never been there in the summer. He'll, he'll defend it. Listen, he, he's his own, I'm out here to do this is, Keith's not someone that I defend. You know, he speaks for himself. But the people, what just what freaked me, honestly, made me nervous in a way that I wasn't, was going to the people who previously were like the most hardcore SF forever people making fun of Keith and whatnot. And they were like, not even, oh, I'm scared, I'm nervous. They were just doing the math. And they said, you know, if this happens, I probably cannot be here. Those people were already, by the way, making moves to not be here.

One, one of the more famous ones said, I'll take the tax once and then I'll leave. I'll take everything with me, my company, like everything, because he's just, he's here already. And he was the most pro-tax person there, the most sort of famous of the lives. So it just feels super, super different. I'm not here to say that Miami's the future. I just think that this is a hugely dangerous thing for San Francisco. What's the point of taking it once and then leaving? Isn't it only a one-time tax?

I don't, I'm a Democrat, man. Like, who knows? Who can get into their head? You're going to pay it once. I feel like then you're set. Then you're like, well, I might as well enjoy living here. Well, no, no, because no one thinks it's just one time is a thing. So it's like, if it happens once, it's like, if it happens even one time, it's even set up.

So the legislator can it. There's a moral hazard. re-up it once it's past. No one believes it's a one-time thing. They think like once you normalize a wealth tax, which again is crazy. And the average American just has never thought of this before, but it's such a different kind of thing that it just changes your relationship with the state in such a way as like you're going to be getting wealth taxes all the time. That's what they want. Yeah. I think if I were, I think if I were looking at the history of tax initiatives in California, I would assume that there would be another Prop 55 style attempt to extend this to a yearly thing.

And so maybe it's not convenient to leave this year. I suspect, I don't know. But looking at some of this, it's like people with kids in school seem like they are more likely to stay put than people who do not have kids in school. Just like reading the Twitter tea leaves. But eventually, right, your kids graduate, you leave. Let's take a quick break. And then we'll come back with Mike Solana. And we're going to talk about the gay tech mafia.

This is Central Air. So, Mike, one of the key reasons that we wanted to bring you on was to talk about. a feature story that ran in Wired magazine a few weeks ago called Inside the Gay Tech Mafia. Getting into these allegations that Silicon Valley is secretly run by the gays, and it's like, well, who better to bring than like a gay guy who works at Peter Thiel's Fund? And is bound by the ironclad vow of emerita. I mean, what information are we getting out of hand? Well, I don't know.

The gays like to talk. So, I don't know. So that's really how this piece happens, right? That's like how it happens. is these shatty homosexuals. All of them have made up information that they're spinning around. One person goes to a clueless straight female journalist who doesn't know this about gay men. And she's just like, oh, my God.

Like, this is crazy. I've uncovered the craziest story of all time. And it's like, no, you just like talked to a gay man. Anyway, I'm here always. Well, she talked to 31 gay men. So like beating out your 21 billionaires. She, you know, she did her research. in the community. But so, I mean, the piece is sort of amusingly thin in that, like, you know,

like one of the pieces of information she finds out is that a lot of the gays like to go work out at Barry's boot camp in the Castro, and a lot of them are in really good shape. But so, like, there's an aspect of this that sounds like it must be trivially true, right? Which is that, like, you know, there are gay men and they know each other and they sort of look out for each other. Like, this is every industry that has not just gay men, but sort of like any sort of like affinity group like that. It's like, yes, like people, they go to parties and they know each other. Gay men are spending time together.

Yes, you're wired. Correct. That does tend to happen. The gay men are sometimes friends with other gay men. They talk to other gay men. They sometimes go to bars where there are only other gay men. These things are all correct. Are there people, are there straight guys pretending to be gay because they think that will

help them raise capital? That's one of the allegations in here. No, no, no. So this is like, I do, this actually, and I'm not a big, like, let me be upset and a grieved kind of person about these sorts of things. I talked to this writer off the record. The topic bothers me. And I think that it's inherently extremely homophobic.

There's this idea that to be successful and young and gay is to have received something that you have for sex, basically, is what is being said. That is what is like, that's what the subtext of this piece was. That's what she's saying. That's something that gay men sometimes. say about each other. And that's clearly what she picked up. It's not true. And it's a hard thing to deal with as someone who is successful. It is like, is to have these people saying nasty shit about you all the time. And then here she is putting a giant megaphone on it. But the truth is,

like, all of the successful gay men, you just, oh, there's all these successful gay men in Silicon Valley. You can, you can name them. At one point, she actually does name the three of them. She's like Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Keitherboy, and others. Well, that's for. And on and on. And it's like, no, don't go on and on. Don't say on and on. Who are they?

Because I'm pretty sure you just listed literally all of them. And if you look at every single successful billionaire founder or whatever in Silicon Valley, they are over like more than population. They are straight. They are almost all straight. There is no like scary, like way too many gay people disproportionate. number of them successful. If anything, it's, it's less than proportionate. And it's just like a salacious, sort of inherently exciting story, because when you talk about gay men, you're talking about sex.

Like, that's what makes a gay man is sexuality. And so it's like a sex plus money power story. And I think she knew that it was thin. And she tried to have her cake and eat it too. She tried to say, like, well, isn't it just, I'm going to like lay out the case. And then like the reader can conclude that it's thin or something. And it's like, no, what you're doing is you're legitimizing this. And in fact, it still is happening. I mean, plenty of people make fun of that story, but plenty of believe it. I think there's always a problem when you pitch a feature like this. I am going to think about and sub-tweet in my mind a lot of other pieces that I think were thinner than they should have been. You get to a point where you realize you've overpitched. And you can make a decision then to have a very

hard conversation with your editor where you either step the thesis down a notch or you pull it. But you've usually by that point, put a lot of time into working at it. And because most people are not good at processing the sunk cost fallacy, you get these pieces that run, even though there's not really a story there, because no one can figure out how to stop it, right? It had a slot in the magazine. It has all of this stuff. There is a train going down the tracks, and pulling that at the last minute is challenging.

Well, I mean, and in some measure of fairness to Zoe Bernard, who wrote this piece, I mean, there are aspects of it that basically seem to admit like this thing is oversold, where there's some, I believe a gay man actually speaking to her and saying, you know, well, that guy, how did he raise all that money? He must be gay. And she's like, well, no, actually, he's married to a woman. So I think there's some acknowledgement in the piece that this is an oversold concept within Silicon Valley. Do you think there's truth to that, that like, this is a conversation that people were having

before the wired piece came along? This is such a hard conversation to have because you have. to provide context into like an entire subculture. Okay. And the average person just doesn't know how gay men are. I would say there are a lot of nasty, jealous bitches who make a lot of complete shit up. Like I've heard the craziest made up shit about myself. When I started dating my now boyfriend of five years, that was the first time I experienced

this degree of just like crazy like complete fabrications and I wasn't even like there are way people who get way worse than I do. I don't know who your boyfriend is. Oh no. He's someone famous. He's just he's he's just hot. And so and so he's he's loathed by people and then I was loathed by people because I got to date a hot person.

Oh, how difficult for you. You don't understand how petty. Don't think me because my boyfriend is beautiful. It's been really hard. It's been hard. It's been hard. But I think that people don't understand how petty and awful things can become in like a very insular subculture like this. You have people who are sitting around looking at other people in the funding category now who are getting money and they're like, what do they have that I don't have?

And they say nasty shit. And it becomes a rumor and it gets around. Now, are there other rumors floating around that are based in something more legitimate? Like, probably. Like, yes. I mean, bad things happen everywhere. But like the meat of this story, which is that like gay men, you, you are getting things for being gay is just like by the numbers not true. But like by like my own experience not true.

I remember when I was young, gur, like very young. I mean, I was in my, when I'm 40 now, so when I was in my 20s, I remember for years people would say they would ask. They were like, okay, so you have this because I mean, you did something, right? like just straight up like like like like if that's a normal question to ask these are gay men asking you this this straight men gay men would always ask this question and i would be like no and horrified because i was approved and like shocked at like that kind of a thing uh and then i became self-conscious about it and like nervous about it like wherever this would happen a lot and people would say this and suspect this and and then finally this like light switch went off one day and i was nasty to

someone about it. Someone asked me and I was like, no, I just, you know what, I'm not going to, I was nasty about it. Okay. My, my disposition changed. And it was like, no, no, no. The problem here is not anything with me. The problem is you. You don't, you don't have the talent. You don't have the intelligence. You don't have the role that I have because you are not as good as me. And I think I needed that chip on my shoulder to manage that kind of like disgusting shit that you get as like a younger gay man. So that's what is true about being gay in Silicon Valley. And then they were like, meow. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. Through a drink in my face. It got like nasty in the gay bar. But I think that is true. It's like people say that and they think that. And I think people have to

create these really complicated alternate worlds in which they don't have something they want because some secret conspiracy exists. And clearly that's something that straight people are saying as well in the piece. I mean, she talked to straight men who said like, oh, if I were gay, I would have funding. And it's like, no, you don't have funding because you're a fucking idiot. That's why you don't have, do you know how easy it is to get funding right now in Silicon Valley? The money is raining from the heavens. Like, there's so much money. But meat-flavored ice cream is the future. I'd like. Right. I mean, they're just like throwing it out there. Like, if you're not getting funding, it's not because you're not sucking dick. It's because you're not good.

And like, that's just what you have to accept. There's one story in the wired piece that, Mike, I'm wondering your opinion about whether it's true or not, where there's a claim that there's some straight founder who was trying to get money out of a gay VC and that he put his hand on somebody's leg in a meeting, like as though he was pretending to be gay. And the reaction to this

as described in the piece from gays who witnessed it or knew about it was basically like, this fucking guy, can you believe this? Like, when you read that story, did that ring true to you or do you think that's made up? This is that the straight guy did it to signal that he was gay. I don't know.

Like, I guess it could be, I don't think it would help him. No, I mean. And the piece doesn't make it sound like it did help him. But it just sounds ridiculous because, okay, it's separate from gay stuff now. Separate from gay world, I've been in a venture setting for 14 years now. And not a random place. I'm not like one of these, like I'm the marketing guy. I'm not even saying I'm one of these investors, but I'm not at one of these like fake VC firms. I've worked with Peter. And I've seen real investing environments. And it is overwhelmingly dominated by straight men. Like it's like it's even we're a Peter, obviously this is like a gay friendly environment, but it's still like mostly.

It would be very funny if it wasn't. Right. Maybe it was actually a homo. But it's like most people are straight. Most people who get funding are straight. Most people asking for funding are straight. Not just like a little bit most. Like overwhelming. So it just doesn't make sense to go into an environment like that to me. Now maybe there are other men who are sleeves bags who respond to that sort of thing. the way that straight men do with women, and we've heard millions of stories like that. And I don't deny that that is possible and probable even. Like probably someone has done something disgusting like that.

But that is not the norm. And it's certainly not the norm to the extent that someone would be like, oh, man, I better peacock that I'm a homosexual so I can get this money. Like, that's just not based in reality. Also, imagine, imagine being this guy, this, this apparent guy who, like, felt this other guy up in this meeting. who is straight and he was like, all right. I know this pitch isn't going to work.

It's not great. I'm going to need to casting couch it. You know, I'm going to need to put myself out there. And then he gets in there and just says, well, in the least subtle way possible, starts to feel someone else in the meeting. Oh, buddy, buddy, that's not it. You got to. But like the casting couch was real, right?

I mean, yeah. That was a thing that happened. And so I read this as the token heterosexual woman on this podcast. You know, I read this through the lens of Me Too in the media. And one of the things that I thought as we were going through this, first of all, there were a lot of real abuses that I'm very glad we're rectified. There's another category that was, you know, you're a woman in your 20s. Older men will pay attention to you. And they will mentor you. in exchange for either just getting to look at you and getting to feel like there is a 25-year-old woman taking an interest in them, or they get the option to make a pass. You don't have to accept the pass.

They just get the option to make it. That's bad. Like, you can argue that's bad, but also, like, I think a lot of the women who went through me to thought that that attention would continue if you ruled that off the table, and I think what actually happened was that a lot of the heterosexual,

males I know said, absolutely never, will I ever be alone with a woman? I will not book travel to the same destination as a woman. I am not, right? But the other thing about that was that in general, and by the way, I wasn't in media in my 20s. I was in a different industry, so I'm not like speaking to anything specific that I did or stories that I know about. But that's, that is a pattern in, that was a pattern, certainly in the 90s and the early 2000s. But the thing was, it didn't get you that far. Right? And it's a little bit like a lobbyist donating to a politician. You get the option to make your case to the politician that you can get him votes. And if you want something really trivial that no one will ever learn about, like some weird tweak to the tax code, maybe you can get that. But in

general, you cannot get very much out of it. And similarly, like, even if you thought that this was a thing that was going on, number one, you look at all the Hollywood actresses. I think it seems actually pretty clear from the way some of them reacted to me to, that they had been forced to, or felt forced, or, I don't know, for all I know, willingly, gone through the casting process. And also that none of those women have the position they did because of that. Because in fact, like, there are a large number of desperate hopefuls who will sell their bodies to get something they want.

Only fans proves this. But there are very few people who are, like, exceptionally talented and beautiful and look great on screen and all the rest of it. And then you complicate it further. There are not that many gay men, right? Like you, this strategy cannot, like, it doesn't work with heterosexual women who have 50% of the population to choose from, although most of them may not be offensive, abusive jerks. But, like, it is definitely not working with, like, I don't remember what the percentage of the population of gay men is, but it's quite small. They think it's about three and a half percent of men or something. Yeah, it's, this is not, this cannot be a career strategy. But they're loud.

Yeah, they won't shut up. Especially if you're going to like berries. I mean, it buries. Well, you know, 99%. The part of this that I'm wondering that I suspect it is true and actually I still suspect is true. And because it's what I see in other industries is gay men like to hire other gay men and especially like to hire, hire like, attractive younger gay men.

They're usually not sleeping with each other. This is what I'm talking about. It's just the option to look at someone who's very attractive. They like having that around. So what I would say is like gay men are definitely like hanging out in groups of friend, like friend groups. The way that a friend is like, oh, let me introduce you to so-and-so if you're looking for a job. Like that kind of thing is happening in gay circles, but that's not unique to gay men.

That's unique to friend. That's a thing that happens in friend groups. And what you see with gay men are there tend to be friend groups that are predominantly gay men in the friend group. And so you could look at that and be like, all those gay men are helping each other. But it's like those are just friends helping each other. and there's nothing sexual about it. And that's absolutely a thing that happens in the way that all, yeah, groups of people, everything in life is about who you know.

Most of us have what we have because we were helped by someone that we know at some point. And it's no different with gay people, sure, but that was taken, that like very mundane aspect of being a human being was taken and turned, a hint. There was like a hint of like, but is this kind of fucked up actually? And it's like, no, it's like a superhuman thing that happens. So there's nothing fucked up about it. So there's not like orgy's happening in Gary Tan's sauna. Right, he's straight.

That was crazy. I'm like, how can you even include that? Gary Tan who runs Y Combinator. So that one especially bother me because it's like you're not just saying something awful about Gary, implies something awful about Gary Tan. And she's like, well, I'm not. I'm just like, it's a rumor. It's like, yeah, that you just printed and wired.

Are you crazy? So like not only is it bad because of Gary, you have these young men who didn't do anything wrong, who we're just hanging out and are now involved in the story that is hinting at the fact that they slept with, I guess, a married Christian. Oh, Peter Thiel's a married Christian, too. Like, you know, the... True. That is true. There are a lot of us out here. I really did enjoy, though, imagining the phone call that was implied by this.

Can we borrow, you know, I just... You got a sauna. Like, I've got some friends. We're going to turn the music up real loud. You won't really notice a thing. Like, what? How was this supposed to work? So the story comes from the fact that there was a hot tub.

Oh, yeah, but they really were in Gary Tan's sauna. People were hanging out together, but there was nothing like nefarious about it. People hang out in hot tubs. Yes. Calling someone to borrow their sauna or their hot tub, that is a very normal conversation for those who have friends with sanas and hot tubs, which sadly does not include me. But like, you can't go to someone's sauna and do that without enforcement. forming them. You don't have any friends who own a hot tub? No. Do you do what, do you live in a trailer

park? You ever, hot tubs, hot tubs, do you buy them to Costco? I want to introduce one more thing about this, which I tried to explain to her. You're trying to paint a picture of basically, you know, gay men, especially young gay men. This was not like, we invoked me to a second ago, Megan, a moment ago. It's sort of like the inversion of Me Too, because the focus of this was not these like bad older men, you know, manipulating young people. The focus was like, the question was like, are young, hot gay men like manipulating the world with their hot gayness and like getting things they don't belong. They don't deserve. Like that was the weird framing of it. And are they doing this through these networks of like other gay men talking to each other? And I was like,

you would never say this about Jews. You would never say this about Indian men in Silicon Valley. These are two groups of people that are disproportionately successful for sure in Silicon Valley. But is there anything nefarious happening? Fucking no, absolutely not. And you would discard it immediately because it sounds so crazy and so obviously bigoted that you'd be like, oh, damn, I better not write that crazy fucked up thing I just thought. And it's like, you're not doing that for game then. Why? It's like, why?

And I think that you could, if you really wanted to go down this very bad, dark path and you were to look at like groups of Jewish. people in Silicon Valley and their rate of success, you started counting all of the successful Jews in Silicon Valley. And how many of them went to summer camp together? Right. You'd have all sorts of like, did you meet at the, I don't know, what is it, is it birthright or like, where did you meet them? And what did you talk about? And like, oh my God, like, let's look at the emails. To drag this back to me to a little bit is that I actually think that there is this kind of mode of liberal discourse, which assumes that there is some, like, platonic ideal in which all of the automata get slotted into the proper box without ever having anything to do with any sort of

relationship they have with another human being. And that's not how human social groups work, right? It just is the fact that, yes, like, sometimes people hire their friends. They know their friends. They know what their friends are like. There are downsides to hiring your friends, to be clear, because like now you've now got like a personal relationship entangled with your professional relationship. But like this is just normal human behavior. And I think that me too was in a way like the apotheosis of the idea that somehow it could be like severance and we would all walk into work. And nothing about our backgrounds or our personal lives would ever intrude and we could totally separate it. And that that was not realistic.

And to be clear, again, there are lines that you should not cross. and Harvey Weinstein was clearly on one side of that line, and then some people like Aziz Ansari were not on the other side of that line. But in between, these negotiations are difficult, and someone's always going to be kind of pissed that, like, they didn't, you know, get that marginal 0.1% boost

from having some social connection. But that's just the, like, we're dealing with messy human beings and not, like, this perfect, idealized, like, robot society that I think some people thought we could somehow have. But I think also, and part of why I can't get too angry at Wired about this is that, you know, I think, yes, there are like, there are well-formed social norms against juke counting that we have for good reasons. And I don't think there are a lot of— But juke counting is crazy.

Yeah, no, like, don't do it. It's like it ends in bad places. But I think part of why you can run a piece like this about gay men is that people are jealous of us. That they look at us and they think that we have more fun lives. And, you know, this is something we've talked about on the show a fair amount is like the increasingly toxic gender politics between straight men and straight women that is that is miserable for everybody around. We are exempted from that. And I think that this vision that they have painted of like the gays in Silicon Valley and are they having these fabulous secret orgies that we don't know about, they wish they could be us. They think we're having more fun and we're getting ahead at the same time. And so, you know, partly it's, you know, and I think that.

But it is fabulous to be gay. And the networks that, you know, that they describe, they're not working in exactly the way they describe them working. But those networks are very real and are nice. And it's, you know, it's nice to have this community. And so I, you know, partly I just, I feel fortunate. And so I can't get too mad when straight people are jealous of us. Yeah. The thing about gay people now, and I mean, as a Jew, I say this, like, you're white now.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, you don't count as minority. You get to, you can play, you can play Augusta. They let you, they let you, they let you in the Masters now. You're allowed to, you're allowed to do all this stuff. And you don't get, Jews don't get any credit. Neither do the gays and the rest of the people like to make up lies about you. There was law in California that you had to have a diverse board.

It was struck down recently. And now they're kind of reintroducing a version of this by forcing VCs to, Josh, you tweeted about this today. The VCs now have to survey the founders that they fund and ask them a bunch of demographic questions. including whether they're gay. They're allowed to refuse to answer the questions, but you have to ask. Yeah. So there was a version of this previously that forced boards to be diverse in this way, and Jews specifically were not included.

They had like weird credentials. Like, Persians were not included. They were not considered brown. They were considered white. Well, that's the way the census works, too. If you're from the mid-east, you're white. Gay men were included. I would like to plug David Bernstein's amazing book, classified,

which just goes into how weird and arbitrales. all of these categories are. Like, if you are Afghan, you are European and you are white, but if you were born like five miles away across the Pakistani border, you're Asian. It's a very mountainy border. Yeah. All of these classifications are weird and historically contingent on which groups manage to get themselves organized in the 1960s and often the internal politics of that group.

My recollection is that, in fact, within the Jewish community. there was both a desire to be recognized as a protected class and also some understandable concern about recognizing themselves as a separate class. But all of it is very strange. And I think that has become totally incoherent in our new and more diverse society where it's not like 90% white, 10% black, or like 88% white and 2% everything else. It's a beautiful melting pot. That's why it's good that there's still like a behavioral delineation of who's gay.

That, you know, anyone can claim to be queer, but you have to suck Dick to be gay. Oh, yeah. We have to let Mike go. Mike, I assume you're late for one of those secret Silicon Valley orgies. Yep. Yeah, yeah. I've got my supplies in my bag. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. This is Central Air. So it's been a wild few days in the financial markets, particularly in the market for oil, obviously because of the war that Ben Dreyfus has been so eager about. Thank you, Ben, for causing this global turmoil.

My car has good gas mileage. Yes, you're Mazda Miata. Yeah, it's a manual, all right? It performs better than an automatic. You're really committed to the bit about like pretending to be gay, even driving the Miata in the snow in Idaho is, oh, I know.

Also, because it's a cherry red meada. So, like, it looks, it's a real, it's really, it's quite funny in Idaho and sometimes where I go places and people are nicer to the gays in Idaho than you'd expect now. People talk about the miata as a gay car, but I don't, I don't know any gay men who have a Mazda Miata. I used to. The only people I've known who had one were like girls in high school. It's famously a hairdresser car, right?

That used to be called in the 80s. But when I started to consider getting it, I did get a DM from a famous woke gay who immediately, a famous woke gay journalist who you guys probably hate, who I'm not going to name. And I'd never spoken to them before. And he messaged me and said, oh my God, it's, you know, I'll be honest with you.

You should definitely get it. It's the only car I drive. And I was like, well, all right, you know, maybe it works. Has it gotten you any of that GavC funding or not yet? It was the dick-sucking that got me that funding. So anyway, we start this war, and it doesn't seem like the White House was really prepared for the idea that it would cause oil prices to spike. And gasoline prices are up almost 50 cents a gallon in the United States. Oil went all the way to $110 a barrel at the end of last week.

But then it's come sharply down in significant part because the president has been out there trying to send signals that the war isn't actually going to go. on that long. And this is the way the markets have been treating Trump for years, this, you know, quote unquote taco idea. Trump always chickens out. That you can't trade on big economic moves from big shocking things that Trump does because if the market moves in a shocking, unfavorable way, Trump will just unwind whatever it is that he wound up. I've been skeptical that you can do that with an Iran war and the way that you can do it with some other things like, you know, threatening EU tariffs over Greenland. But it's been interesting to me, Megan, you know, the oil is now back down to like $86 a barrel as of Tuesday morning when we're taping this. That's up from

80 before the attacks, but it's a lot lower than 110. It looks like a lot of people are pretty sanguine about the idea that this will just be a short excursion, I believe, is the word that the president or someone around him used the other day, rather than a lasting conflict that undermines the oil trade in the Mideast. I mean, that's one way you could see it. You could also see it as believing that the United States is going to open the Straits of Hormuz one way or another, and that Iran is going to pretty quickly run out of ordinance, which will obviously still leave a problem in the region, but not the same problem, right? You don't then have to worry about pipelines being bombed, the, you know, the Aramco refinery that was hurt. You can

rebuild that stuff and assume that as long as the U.S. has air superiority, you're going to have a lot of difficulty rebuilding the ordinance. Is that right? How long would it take around to run out of bombs? My understanding is that the assumption is that they will run out pretty quickly and that they will, and that it's in some ways a race to see who runs out first. Do we run out of interceptors and ordinance before they run out of drones and missiles? And my understanding from people who know about this, which I do not, is that it's more likely

that they run out than that we run out. I mean, I would hope. Yeah. Some dumb country in the Middle East. We don't have enough interceptors to beat Iran. How are we going to handle China? Again, I am now going to, I am now channeling smarter and more knowledgeable people than me. So listeners who have corrections, I will gratefully accept them.

But my understanding is actually, like, the way they're shooting down drones is, like, with machine guns. And we do, in fact, have a lot of, like, bullets for machine guns. And so the things were low on. are things like these Tomahawk missiles and interceptors and so forth. And so theoretically, you could just put a lot of ships in the Straits of Hormuz with machine gunners whose job is to shoot down the drones as like ships pass through. Is that an ideal solution? Would it be better to have not started this war in the first place? Probably. But so that may be part of it, too. I honestly don't know. I have no idea what the markets are thinking. I mean, it does sound like

Like you guys are talking about us winning. Like, right, which is what I said last week. We'll win. We're going to win. We have more. It's not even winning, right? If it's a stalemate and we've still got a problem and we haven't secured regime change and everything's kind of ugly and there's no settlement, it still does not necessarily follow that they can continue hitting Gulf states and closing the Straits of Hormuz in the way that they have. I mean, those like the pesky, hootie rebels have been able to basically shut down shipping through the Red Sea for you.

for years. It's been surprising to me how little we've been able to, you know, force much weaker powers than us to open up these shipping lanes. Like, I realize the Houthis are, you know, they're supplied by the Iranians. But it's been, you know, if they've been able to effectively, you know, close red sea shipping for years, I'm just, you know, I'm skeptical that we can really open up the Straits of Hormuz in a week. It's always a question of what cost, right? Like, so if you can't, it's not that we could not have stopped the. Houthis is that we couldn't do without invading Yemen. Right. Like, so might we put troops on the ground close enough to the Straits of Hormuz to reopen it? I don't know. Maybe. That's starting to sound a lot more involved. I am not recommending this, to be clear, but like, I don't know what exactly markets are pricing. At the end of last week, Charlie Gasperino, this markets reporter at Fox Business, who's pretty, you know, closely tied to people around Trump, was tweeting about, you know, the oil going to to one-tend a barrel. And it's basically saying, you have to understand commodities traders are

idiots. And they overreact to the news. And they don't understand that Trump is going to get the Strait of Hormuz reopened in a week. And I don't think Gasparino's analysis of the like, the military action was quite right there. But, you know, oil prices did in fact fall sharply. And he and Nate Silver got into a big back and forth over this, where Nate Silver was like, well, if you're so smart, why aren't you a commodities trader instead of, you know, talking about this on Twitter? But I think that there was some truth to the fact that we have seen sharp swings in a lot of markets that were overreactions to things that Trump announced, whether it was the tariffs or something else. And if you followed the market there, you lost your shirt because in fact they determined that things were not going to be as bad, in part because it's a two-way, you know, like thing where Trump reacts to the market and then the market reacts to Trump, which undermines the effectiveness of the market as a thing that can actually control Trump. But I think that one of the ways out of this is that Trump can basically declare victory, which is not the same as being able to defeat Iran in a week, but it is something that can then reopen oil trade.

But I think it remains very unclear when you have the president out there saying, well, this war is going to be very short, but then you have Pete Hegson saying it's just beginning. And you have the president threatening that we're going to kill more Iranian leaders. My assumption is that a $110 barrel oil is too painful in one way or another. we find a way to back off of that, and that's what the markets are pricing in now. But I'm just skeptical that what that means is that we can force whatever outcome we want on Iran. I think that we probably have to back off in order to achieve that. So one thing that I think a lot of people struggle with, and indeed I struggled with as an MBA student, is the fact that, like, very small shifts in supply and demand can produce very large shifts in market prices.

Especially for oil. Especially for oil, but also for stocks. So, like, one that, you know, with this, if people remember Citrini Research and this AI report, and all of these stocks crashed basically with this scenario, this memo that this research firm had written about how AI was going to take everyone's jobs. And I had reasons to disagree with the memo, but, I mean, one thing that may happen is just that, like, a few people read this in panic. And everyone else is like, I'm going to process this. I'm not going to trade right now. I want to think about this a little bit.

And so because there's a lot of people who are panic selling, it's not that like the entire market has moved. It's that the people who are left in the market only want to buy it a low price and the people who are panic selling want to sell. But that can get very, like, you can get very large moves from actually relatively small shifts in who is moving. And like I remember a business school classmate who is. interviewing for trading got an answer where he was like, you know, he went through like the

case with the guy who was interviewing. I mean, he was finally like, was it just more buyers than sellers? And the guy was like, yep. That day, we just had more buyers than sellers. It caused a big spike. But it wasn't, there were more buyers than sellers because of anything in particular. It was just like, people are rebalancing their portfolio. It's not, you know, so I think that is like, also something to keep in mind is that the people who are panicking are extremely motivated, but the people who are not buying at that moment might not be in total agreement with them. They're just maybe biting their time and deciding what price they want to buy. But the upside of that with oil is that, you know, if there is a real substantive supply shock that, like, you know,

we actually go a long period that they, you know, they're shutting down production in a bunch of these Gulf countries because they can't get the oil out of the straight, is that you need the oil price to move a lot to change people's behavior, that there are certain things that they get expensive and people just cut back on them immediately. But people have basically fixed needs in terms of how they consume gasoline and other petroleum products. They have to commute to work. They can't go to tomorrow and buy a Miata like Ben is driving and get the big miles per gallon improvement from that. And so you need big moves in the price in order to change behavior. And that's, I think, cuts in favor of the panickers. Because basically, if this is actually a condition that can't be

unwound in a week, and maybe it can. But if it can't, then the price is actually going to have to change a lot in order to bring supply and demand back in line again. Oh, right. So I actually think this more applies to other markets where you're seeing these extremely wild swings. You know, there was one example was after this a treaty research report, IBM stock dropped because Claude Code turned out to be okay at like rewriting some old legacy code that IBM. makes a fair amount of money consult a gun. But first of all, like, consulting on Legacy Code is not all of IBM's business. And second of all, did you really not foresee that Claude Code was going to be pretty good at working with Legacy Code?

This was a big surprise to you that just hit you, and now you need to, like, make the stock drop some incredible percentage point. You know, and so I think that's, like, that dynamic describes that at least as much as it describes what's happening in the oil market right now. But it does feel like markets in general are just oddly prone to panicking. And I think that's it's because there's so much uncertainty. It's that Trump is a chaos Muppet. It's that AI is very hard to game out. And things just feel really unsettled. And traders are also behaving in an unsettled way.

I mean, I think that there's attention here, right? I get that if he backs out and he winds this down, It'll help with all these gas price issues you guys are talking about. But as the lone pro-Iran attacker on this podcast, I will just say that I don't want him to stop. That's the problem. The problem would be if he backs off right now. You know, no, he does need to keep killing those leaders until they have a good one. If he just did this and he tacos it out, he just backs off, then it's not going to make life better for the Iranian people, which I understand is not his goal, but it is my goal.

And I want them to make a better life for the people of Iran. I don't think it's as simple as that. I don't think that Delsey Rodriguez is like waiting in the wings in Iran. Well, of course, that's why he's going to have to keep killing the leaders until they find one, you know. Going to keep having to bomb the president's house. There was some guy, some general yesterday who was like, we have 10 years. We're going to fight him for 10 years. And I was like, you should definitely kill that guy today.

Find him. Finally this week, speaking of disasters, I want to talk about Timothy Shalameh. who is up for an Oscar for Marty Supreme, but has caused himself a little bit of a PR problem with some comments that he made about ballet. You know, here's what he had to say in an interview with Matthew McConaughey a few weeks ago, but it's just been going viral on Twitter in the last few days.

I admire people when I've done it myself to go on a talk show, go, hey, we've got to keep movie theaters alive. You know, we've got to keep this genre alive. And another part of me feels like, if people want to see it like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, or they're going to go see it and go out of their way and be loud and proud about it.

And I don't want to be working in ballet or opera or, you know, things where it's like, hey, keep this thing alive even though it's like, no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.

But damn, I just took shots for no reason. And so a lot of the ballet and opera people are really mad at Chalemate. But more broadly, it seems like a lot of people in entertainment generally, including people who probably never go to the ballet in the opera, but want to sound like.

they care about the ballet and the opera are deeply offended by these comments. Deeply, deeply, deeply, performatively offensive. I mean, it is, it is, his statement, which is just, it's just about the business, right? He's not saying the ballet is bad. They shouldn't be doing it. He's just saying that, like, you know, these are, these are art forms that cannot support themselves and so have to be funded by charities, right, essentially, just so that they can survive, which is true.

people caring about them. And, I mean, the idea that any of the people mad about this on the internet have been to any operas, or, I mean, maybe they went to Swan Lake once or something, but, like, that's the only ballet they've been to. And the operas, I mean, the opera, they have definitely not been to the fucking opera. They might have seen pretty woman and seen that one scene there. But, like, the operas aren't even in English. I have been to the opera, Ben. I'm not mad about the Tim of the... Oh, yeah, which one? Paliachi?

I've been to a bunch of operas. I've never been to the opera. Really? No, I've never seen an opera. They look like they're very long and not in English. They have, the Met has super titles, so it's, like, it's on the back of your seed. It's actually... I went to the ballet once at the Met.

I saw the Nutcracker. Why would I want to go to something where I have to read the titles and not paying attention to the actual show? I don't understand. It's insane. Unless I'm trying to impress someone, which is fine. People do lots of things. People do lots of things to impress people. but the people on the internet who are mad about it

are just being, it's just proof that people will act offended about something. They actually are not mad about in real life. You know, like they would never actually be upset about it. But the funny thing about it is, is that like this thing, it happens every year with the Oscars where like the person who's supposed to win says something and then it starts like a film Twitter obsession right towards the end and they go, oh, it's all the knives come out for them. And this is just a, you know,

is the funniest one. Because it's so stupid. He was defending movies. But this sort of, this reminds me of the way a lot of journalists talk about journalism. And I think you get this phenomenon in industries that are economically challenged. And movies are, you know, maybe not in as bad shape as ballet, but their model is also under threat. And there's a certain extent to which people, they get emotional about it for reasons that are understandable. But then they sort of act like it's beneath them to care about the economics of the industry. Yeah. Right. And that, you know, and that they just, they just get really offended whenever anyone talks about, you know, which things are economically viable and which things aren't. And so the attitude that we have to figure out, you know, what do we do that

actually gets people to care about going into the movies is correct. It's interesting to me that the examples he goes to our Barbie and Oppenheimer, because that was three years ago. And, you know, those were, you know, two big, very different summer blockbuster movies. And that was sort of coming out of COVID, a couple of the thing. Barbie was, in fact, the first movie I had seen in the theater since COVID. You went to see Barbie on that day? Like on Barbenheimer Day? No, I didn't go on Barbenheimer Day, but I did, you know, I went, it was in the middle of the day on a weekday. So I was like on Long Island in a theater with like 12 other people in it seeing Barbie.

Oh, I love that day because like, you know, there was all these like little like teenagers going to see Barbie. And then there was like old World War II veterans and me going to see Oppenheimer. And you could really like tell, you know, but every, it was something for everyone, let a hundred flowers bloom. It seems a little bit grim to me that he had to reach to an example three years ago. to talk about, you know, what it looks like for there to be success drawing people back into the theater. I mean, it would have been, it would have been funny if he had just mentioned, like, some Pixar random movie than out of us remember that made it. Inside Out 2. Yeah.

Which did make over a billion dollars. Yeah. A Minecraft movie was last year's number one release. Right. If he was like, people just love, we just kind of keep Minecrafts coming out. But the other thing is that, like, he's been in lots of big, you know, he was in that awful Wonka movie that made a zillion. and these awful Dune movies for losers that makes billions of dollars. Dune was a great movie, Ben.

Are we going to fight? I hated it. I didn't watch the second one because I hated the first. I'm sad for you. It's so stupid. Stupid worms on the worm plant. Who gives a shit about the planet? But let me ask you guys an honest question.

Let me be on the spot here. Can you name one ballet person who was not in sex in the city? I don't think I understand that question Well because it was like What's his name? Barishnikov was the love in? Yeah, Barishnikov played with the insects in the city And he's the one we all

Oh, can I name like dead ballet people? Yes. Well, no, no, not dead. If they're dead, that doesn't count. No, no, no, well, it depends when they're. Can you name like a famous ballerina? The answer to, for me, is no. Misty, what's her name?

Misty? Yeah, no. He's a stripper. She might be a dancer, but it's not a... All right, I'm going to Google this, and if I'm wrong, I will be embarrassed. Misty Copeland is an American ballet dancer and author who made history as the first African-American principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater. Okay, I mean, it is the American... So, Megan sort of got that, although Misty, what's her name?

I think we can only give, like, half credit for. I'm old. I can't remember anyone's name. And, I mean, the opera, the opera. I mean, when I think of the opera, it's the end of the godfather part three, where the... they all get killed. You know, like, it's, I've been to the ballet lots of times, actually, because I quite like it and I'm learned, but I don't go every day. But I would not go to the opera.

I have no intention of going to the opera. I'm the English. I mean, actually, I have been to both the opera and the ballet in my lifetime. I've never weirdly been to see the Nutcracker, despite the fact that I grew up in New York City, and that's a really common thing to do with your kids in New York City. but nope. But I mean, while I have done these things, I'm actually in broad agreement with Timothy Chalameh.

These are art forms that are now dependent on a, like, give me money or the puppy gets it, kind of fundraising. It's like, either you pay for this or ballet will cease to exist or opera will cease to exist. And like one of the saddest quotes that I actually texted this to you guys was, you know, someone who was like in a Wall Street Journal article who was like obviously he wasn't in the audience for our recent performance. And it's like obviously he wasn't. Point 7% of Americans went to the opera last year. And that is way down for pre-pendemic. Everything's been hit. I mean, movies are also down just nominally. They're down by about $3 billion average box office since 2019. But obviously that's nominal. That's so when you just of her inflation, the fall is even more dramatic. Everyone's gotten hit, but the art forms that were already kind of on donor life support have gotten hit harder.

Is that a real staff that you said the 0.7 thing or did you... No, that's real. It's from the Wall Street Journal article that I texted you that you could have read, but... I am aghast that it is even that much. 0.007 would have been my guess. You know? Wait, I'm sorry. 0.7% of what?

Of Americans have been to the opera. That's like two. million people. I think there's a liars. I mean, if that's a poll, I'm just, those people are lying. Like, there's, I want, I want validated exit polls of the opera to know who's going to. Ben, please don't tap on the table. Oh, sorry. Because I mean, look, I, I'm in Idaho right now. I think if you wanted to go to the opera right now in Idaho, you'd have to, you'd have to, you'd have to go to Seattle or something. I don't need, it's not even near. You live in a fancy ski town. Isn't there some like, like, lavishly funded performance house there that has traveling stuff that comes through? Yes, but not for opera.

not for opera, there's musicals. Maybe these people have just been to spam a lot and think that's an opera. But like that doesn't count. Point seven is, I don't mean to be Trump in 2020 and be like these are these guys, but like people are busting them in.

They're busting them in for going to escape to go to these. Since the dawn of time, the visual arts have been dependent on, you know, patronage from very wealthy people. It's, I, you couldn't run the movie industry on that, but it's not clear to me that that's like a failed flawed model for something like ballet.

I mean, you can have arts that are just funded by charity from rich people. But that's why movies are so special. Yeah, it is, it is in 2017, 2.2% of American adults said they caught an opera during the year, according to a study from the National Endowment for Arts, five years later, that number dipped to 0.7. Ballet went from 3 to 2. So before the pandemic, there were 7 million Americans going to the opera every year? I'm not sure I buy that. No way. I'm going to unsue that poll the second we get off this. I'm going to find it and go through that methodology. I think it doesn't matter. Either the number is extremely low or it is even more low than that. And either way.

100,000. That's how many went, maybe. There's only about 10 million active skiers in the country. Like, you can have a niche industry that works around, you know, a small percentage of population because that's still millions of people because we're a huge country. Right. I mean, there's only 13 million Jews on Earth. But one thing I'm wondering about this Chalemay controversy is the way this has been covered is sort of like, oh, no, he's not going to get his Oscar because people are so mad about this. Now, first of all, the Oscar balloting deadline, I understand, was last Thursday. And I realize he made these comments before that. But like, the controversy didn't hit the mass public until after that deadline it ended. It's not clear to me how many people in the Oscar voting base were aware of and exercised about this thing that he said in time for it matter to the voting. So I don't know, Ben, is that is that made up? up or? It took a while to like reach the mass breakout moment of the weekend where we were all seeing it. But what I've seen is that it started to go big in the communities in the last 48 hours of voting. And there's all these hilarious like sites and like people who track Golden Derby who like do odds on who's going to win. And they're not not like the dumb betting markets, but like they're people who actually like somewhat know what they're talking about. And

And THR and variety always find ballots. You know, they get people to do their ballots. And there were a few of them where someone was like, oh, I was thinking about it. I was going to give it to Chalameh. I thought he was great until he pissed all over the opera. Well, the Oscars are on Sunday, so we'll be able to pick this up next week and see who was right about that. But I think we can leave it there this week. Ben, Megan, this has been fun, as always.

Thank you. Thank you, Josh. 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 Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening and stay cool out there.