Central Air - Shutdown Fold 'Em, with Nate Silver

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

Josh, Ben, Megan and special guest Nate Silver stress-test alternative ends to the government shutdown. What outcomes were actually available to Democrats? Then: Donald Trump’s poll numbers have materially deteriorated in the last month, and Democrats way outran their polls in elections last week. Are national polls understating Democrats’ national strength?Also in this episode: Nate’s take on the strange debate over whether moderate candidates win more elections, and yet another pro-sports betting scandal. Is gambling undermining sports as a civic institution? And finally: Teen Vogue.Feedback? Questions? Leave a comment at centralairpodcast.com or email us at [e-mail]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. I'm Josh Barrow, and I'm back again with Megan McArdle, columnist for The Washington Post. Megan, you know, I made a mistake yesterday that has led to me having 30 pounds of dried pasta on the way to my house from Amazon today. Well done, Josh. 30 pounds of dried pasta is never a mistake. It's an opportunity. So the Trump administration is moving towards setting very high tariffs on imported Italian pasta on an anti-dumping. rationale saying that basically Italians are selling us too much pasta too cheaply. And I mistakenly assumed that this included De Checo, which is the brand of pasta that I buy because they said it was the largest importers. But it turns out it's, you know, it's 13 companies and DeCcho is not one of them. So now I have all this pasta that's, you know, I'm still going to be able to find it in stores and now I just have to find a way to cook it all. It's good to the DeCecho people

gave money to that ballroom. Seriously. That is Ben Dreyfus. He writes the substack newsletter, Calm down. And I'm very excited. We have a special guest with us this week. We're joined by Nate Silver. You all know Nate. Nate writes the Silver Bullet and newsletter on Substack and he's the author of the book On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything. Nate, thank you for joining us. Thank you.

I'm a big fan of you individually, Josh and Ben and Megan, and a big fan of this new endeavor that you have. Thank you. We very much appreciate that. Do you have enough dried pasta? I don't do a lot of cooking, really. I live in the East Village where you can stumble out in random directions and have literally pristine examples of 26 different types of ethnic food.

The Italians little hit and miss in these fields, if we're going to be honest, right? But, like, I have no need to hoard pasta. Okay, well, you know where to find some if you need any spaghetti. We have Nate this week in part to talk about some of the polling that was way off in last week's elections. But I want to start by talking about the shutdown, which came to an ignominious end with Democrats not getting any of the demands that, they had made about health care policy. They said, you know, if you want us to vote to reopen the government, you have to extend these enhanced subsidies, $23 billion for next year to make it cheaper for people to buy health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act exchanges. And instead,

they got some money for the government accountability office and three months of protections against layoffs for government workers. And there's the usual garment rending among Democrats. And I have a column that came out on Tuesday in the New York Times saying this is the best the Democrats could have hoped for. They were going to have to fold sooner or later. And the reason for that is that Republicans hold the majority, and they always could reopen the government on their own. In fact, Democrats kept saying through the shutdown, this is the Republican shutdown because they're in the majority and they can open the government. And so if Republicans tired of the shutdown and the chaos that it was causing, they always had options available to them to end that chaos without giving Democrats what

they wanted. So I don't think there was anything better available to Democrats here. And the challenge that I put out to people, including to our panelists here today, is if you disagree with that, if you think folding was a mistake, I want to hear what they could have done differently and what different better outcome it would have produced for Democrats. So I want to put that out to the group. If this was a mistake, if Chuck Schumer screwed up, what should they have done instead? I've been kind of a skeptic of Democrat shutdown strategy from the start. I advocated they should make it around tariffs and inflation slash affordability. Instead, you know, other people have the idea that we should just kind of conscientiously

object to providing votes for this government we say is authoritarian, right, which I think is a little bit more of a highbrow kind of college-educated focused message, but like is also maybe a more honest reflection of like what the kind of activist base might think. And so, yeah, look, Josh, I think you basically had a few plausible endings given how Democrats played their hand, right? Number one, that Republicans would eventually nuke the filibuster. Number two, that Democrats would cave more or less as they did. And number three, that they would give Trump a deal that was actually a pretty good deal, right?

That, like, personally, if I were Trump... The Trump would give them a deal, you mean? No, I mean, look, I think if Trump had just said, okay, we'll extend these Obamacare subsidies, right? Then that might actually be a smart thing for Trump to do. The Obamacare subsidies are popular. he is at risk of losing the midterms. Republicans are on inflation and cost of living issues, right? Again, it's a tax break technically.

And so, like, you know, his peak against Democrats probably prevented Trump from considering that offer seriously. But, like, even their winning outcome might have actually helped Republicans in the midterms. And so, like, I, you know, look, whenever you wind up to a situation where you have, like, no good outcome, this happens in poker all the time, right? You're on the river. Someone makes a bet. you're like, their hand probably isn't that good.

My hand isn't that good either. Should I call? Should I fold? Maybe I should raise as a bluff. All these options seem bad. It may be because you made a mistake earlier and earlier stage of the game, so to speak, to get yourself a predicament where you didn't have a lot of good options. And like, yeah.

So what was the mistake earlier? In September, where Democrats kind of decided, they worked backward to say our base feels like we should have a shutdown. And now let's have competing op-eds in New York Times. about what the shutdown should be about and tell everyone about it, by the way, without like a real, A, without a plan for how it would end, given that I think in some ways it played out predictably, B, without Schumer either being an effective public spokesperson or really having command of his caucus. You know, look, the funny thing about it was that public opinion moved in Democrats' favor

late in the shutdown window. Sort of in the second half of October. Yeah. Trump's approval ratings actually improved. or at least were steady early in the shutdown, right? To me, it looks like the SNAP benefits was a big mistake for Trump that affects 40, 45 million Americans. Nobody bought that, like, this is Democrats' fault, that SNAP benefits would be canceled

on November 1st. And so his approval ratings plunged sharply, beginning around October 21st, our numbers. There are other things. There's the White House ballroom stuff that Ben wrote about. Of course, there were the No Kings protest. But to me, if you look at like Google Search Day, there were sustained interest from people in their snapback. benefits being shut off, right? And so, like, yeah, at the very least, you might say, okay,

we never really had a good plan, right? But things are moving in our favor. We had this great Tuesday night in New Jersey, Virginia, et cetera. Let's hold out for two more weeks and have the option value of seeing how it plays out. Okay. So that's basically that they should have folded later is the theory there, more or less. Again, I didn't advocate this shit done at all, right? I guess it's better than doing nothing, but I thought I was kind of, I was indifferent between those. But like,

given how they played their hand, it was actually going kind of well. They, they, you know, it was going better than I would have thought six weeks in. And then they folded. Ben,

what's your theory of how this could, why am I wrong? What should they have done differently? Well, I mean, my main one, I agree with Nate entirely, but like one of this is just timing, right?

Like, they should have either not done it or done it later, you know, or caved later. It reminded me of that. And so would it have actually been less painful to cave next week or the week after. I don't like the, or they would have squeezed more juice out of it in those two weeks. Like I, I, but I don't know what

the juice means here. I do think that like they just had this wonderful week where they won this election and then they rewarded. They like took that, that, you know, the wind at their back and decided to get on their knees and give Trump, you know, they didn't understand like, it reminded me that hero heedel line about, you know, World War II where he's like, this war hasn't necessarily trended in our favor. This was necessarily trending in Democratic paper, you know? Like, things had been going good for them. So either don't immediately take the win and then be like, actually, here you go, so that now all these Republicans are crowing about how the whole thing was stupid, which maybe it was. Like, I don't think I maybe would

have endorsed it in the beginning. But then, like, I just think this was very poorly timed. And just like from a game theory thing, don't give them that right then. And I think that Nate's poker analogy is exactly right. But also, like, what do I think would be a better outcome? Yes. Virtually anything else. But this is the sort of thing people say that as a Dodge. It's like, oh, anything would. Specifically, what is the vision of how this ends in a way that is better? I do think that there's a chance they would have had to eventually have caved on the

subsidies. Okay. You think because they, as I write in the Times, it's like they don't have to nuke the filibuster, which is the shorthand people keep using. They can create another exception, which is effectively what they did to pass the one big beautiful bill a few months ago. They came up with this completely new interpretation of the rules that govern reconciliation to do something you normally couldn't do through without a 60 vote supermajority. So they could have done something like that.

Or the president could have just rescinded the memo from the Carter administration that says the government has to close when appropriations labs. So I think that there's this idea that changing the filibuster is so unpalatable to Republicans that they would have rather folded on the substantive policy measure. And I just think that's incorrect. I think that they didn't have to completely nuke the filibuster, and they would have found a way around the rules rather than hand this really substantial policy win to Democrats. Either of those, I think, would be fine. Like, one, the filibuster is evil and should be killed. And only Republicans have the stones to do it because Democrats are pussies. So the more they weaken them, the better.

But that's also why they might not do it. But rescinding that in 1980 memo, you know what else is evil are shutdowns? The shutdown hostage game that we go through every three years. Like, great, rescind it. Let's take the bullets out of that gun forever. I'm fine with either of those outcomes. So the thing is that I understand there are ideas for Democrats that there wasn't that much to lose from those sorts of things happening, although they do involve handing more power to the president, who is now Donald Trump. But there's also like it doesn't get Democrats any of the stuff that they said they went into this shutdown trying to get.

I don't know, Megan, what do you make of the situation? Is this, you know, everyone hates Chuck Schumer today? Is there something that he could have done that would have been, you know, smarter strategically? I think if you do something stupid, you end up with stupid choices. I am probably the outlier on this. I understand that the base wanted, they wanted to see leadership fight. And so leadership went out and did that. And the problem was that I don't think leadership could get them anything that the base would recognize as a fight.

What was going to happen was that they were going to hold out. They were going to maybe slightly increase the salience of Obamacare subsidies. But honestly, I am skeptical because the people who are paying attention to this, the number of people who follow the news now, it's all like these high engagement voters who already know who they're voting for in 2026 and 28. And so I think that the outcome that was going to happen was that they were going to get almost nothing for it. And now the base is mad. Okay, they were happy for like 20 days watching you fight. And now they're super mad because you didn't get anything for it. And that was where this was

always going. And I think that this whole idea of like doing expressive things because the base's heart beats faster every time you do it. It's just a dead end for both parties. Republicans have worked themselves into an extremely bad place because the minority of voters who love seeing masked men whisk people off the street and hurl them into vans. Those people are extremely excited about what Trump is doing. It's also like, what, 10% of the electorate maybe? And the other 90% is like, oh my God, what the hell are you doing? I wanted to close the border, but not like this. right, or I didn't want to close the border. And I think that we just keep doing all of these stupid performative things.

And then everyone looks around and they're like really surprised that it didn't work. This was never going to work. It was better to take the hit earlier and keep the government open rather than like run up more. God knows how much this cost us. Like being $10 billion, $14, $20, whatever you think it was. And just get the base matter at you. Have they actually, have Democrats now actually come out? out of this with anything?

I think the base would have been matter if they hadn't shut down at all. It's not just the base. It's clear almost all the Democrats in Congress were itching for this. I don't think there was a way around the shutdown. Are you reading this substacks? People are like, we should literally have like John Federman resign mid-session, right? Yeah. And these are people who are like actually not as crazy as some of the other people?

Like, look, first of all, I agree with Megan. I think one might distinguish the kind of traditional base, which the Democrat party is largely kind of middle class, often people of color. I don't know if your show likes that term or not. We're ecumenical. We allow people to say what they like. Okay. You know, it's not the Jennifer Rubens of the world who are millionaires who are writing

substacks who are the base per se. It's like, it's like highly engaged party activists, right? My read just from having been on the internet a long time, write a lot of tweets and substacks and blue sky posts and whatever else is like, I do think this was like a maximally painful way to do it for that crew, right? Because it looked like they were right and their strategy was winning. They didn't have to think about the end game. You can write a zillion substack post about how it's going great. We're rallying the troops, right? You don't have to worry about the end game. But I think the fact that it felt like Democrats were winning. We can debate that to some

extent, but they have this very, very, very, very, very good Tuesday, right? Momentum was in their favor. Even as a skeptic of the strategy, I would say that, right? And then the rug is yanked out from other than other than them. Like, I can understand why they're, why they're really pissed off. Does momentum matter? I mean, because it's like, you know, the next election is in a year. It's not like you add up who wins how many news cycles. And if you win the most news cycles over the course of the of the term, you win the next election. I 100% agree. And that's kind of like the premise of like Ben's newsletter, for example. Look, the consequence is what happens if you have the activist base or for that matter of the regular base, who I think is always a little hard to find a public

opinion apart from elections themselves. They're not as engaged, right? What's this mean, for example, for the Senate race in Maine? You know, what's it mean for this debate about like moderates versus progressives? There's kind of this dimension of moderate versus progressive, this dimension of like risk taking versus risk averse, and then establishment versus anti-establishment. They kind of get like tied and twisted together. But like, you know, let's say that Democrats nominate two or three candidates and competitive Senate races that I think are worse, or maybe not worse, less electable as a result of greater activist anger, right? Like, that has real consequences, maybe.

No, sure, that does. But if they had held out for two more weeks, does that reduce the odds that Graham Platner gets nominated in the main Senate race? I mean, I take the point that activists are disappointed and that in the same way we saw with the Tea Party on the Republican side that might cause voters in the party to act out in unproductive ways. I just don't think that there was a set of options available to Democrats in Congress to have those people be less disgruntled on primary day several months ago than the option

that they took. I don't think it would have mattered if they won nine more news cycles on the way to folding. And I don't think there was a way for them to end this that wouldn't have read to all of those people as a fold. Do you not think, like, I saw people tweeting, like, conservative people talking after, like, a few days ago that they were like, oh, well, now the elections are over. Their Democrats are going to cave because they were only doing the shutdown just to help them

with this last election. And I was like, oh, that's stupid. But honestly, like, the way that they then folded 10 seconds later does lend credence to that argument that, like, they had only ever done it. And there was an Axiost story this week about how Chuck Schumer had headed off an effort to do this fold in October, the subtext of which was at least wait until after the election. I think as a tactical matter, Schumer was right. I think the momentum did matter. going into last week's election because there was an election coming up. But I don't think momentum is important in the month after an election. Yeah, that was the conventional wisdom in Washington was just that they were going to fold as soon as the election was over, that that's

what they were waiting for. Yeah, and it was correct. And like, I think they should not have embarked on the shutdown, but I just don't like shutdowns, and I never have. I think they're dumb. I also think that if they had kept it going, it becomes a higher and higher variance strategy. I can't say that it definitely would have turned on them. It seemed like Trump was getting the blame. Republicans were getting the blame apart because they control all three, right? They control both houses of Congress and the presidency. But part of the reason that Democrats are able to win these news cycles pretty painlessly for the last month was that no one was really feeling it.

You know, like I have sat in the tarmac on several planes waiting to take off because the TSA and the E. ATC are closed. You had some problems at airports, but in general, it was just not visible to people. It was about to get super visible. Snap was getting cut off. But also, if you went into Thanksgiving with air traffic control shutdown and Trump really started messaging this, like, maybe Republicans are still losing. Maybe Democrats start losing and start having to explain why they're shutting down the airports. And I think that that just, it would not have been smart to try to go. for another few weeks and see, even if it's like only a 10% chance that you end up catching some of the blame for a major screw up at Thanksgiving, that's too high for me because most shutdowns don't

matter, right? They don't, and you look at the next election. It's really hard to see that the shutdowns are really affecting what the outcomes are. But like, if people missed Thanksgiving because of the shutdown, I don't think you want to be that incumbent explaining why you voted to make people miss Thanksgiving. I mean, sorry to sound like that crypto Ponzi scheme guy. but like the expected value of like 10% versus 90%. Like I feel like the Democrats, the second this got painful, if the 90% chance is that they're all going to really the pressure he's going to amp up on Republicans, then it opens the entire universe of outcomes that they can win that Josh is talking about.

10%, you know, I don't think that's right. First of all, because Trump is running things and Trump is a chaos Muppet. And Chuck Schumer is not a chaos Muppet. Nate said at the outset of this conversation, it was possible that, Trump might decide that politically it was good for him to extend the ACA subsidies and that he would decide that he wanted that as an off-rent. But I think we had learned by this point that that was not going to happen, that that was not Trump's preference or interest and that he wasn't going to do that. I also think we learned some other interesting things. And I think the thing that Megan's describing

is about to happen, I think it actually already was happening. And Nate, I was wondering if you would talk about that a little bit because you wrote about that this week, that the evidence we started seeing in the polling moving in the second half of October. Some of that looks like it was, you know, people already noticing the impacts of the shutdown being upset about them and pretty clearly blaming Republicans for them more than Democrats. Yeah, look, I think it was SNAP benefits in particular because, you know, Trump is fighting the courts to try to deny people food stamps, right? I mean, so people are able to make that inference correctly, I think. And like, you know, again, a bunch of things that are always happening at once. You never have total determinism.

and looking at approval rating polls. But to me, you see beginning the day that one of the Ag Secretary, her name is, she's like, well. Brooke Rawlins, the Agriculture Secretary. Yeah. These benefits are going to run out on November 1st, and it's Democrats' fault, right? Like, that's times really well with the shift in Trump's numbers and that bill to get up to November 1st.

And again, this is affecting, like, 40, 45 million Americans who are not the most visible Americans, maybe to people like us necessarily, right? Look, I agree with the comment that it was a high. variance approach, again, to make yet another poker analogy, if Ben's going to be the crypto bro, right, I'll make the poker analogy still. But like, you know, sometimes in poker, this is an esoteric poker analogy, right? Some of your value in continuing with a hand in poker is the option to like continue bluffing or play more aggressively later on. If you know you're going to fold later, then you should just fold earlier, right? If you were really ruthless

and cutthroat and maybe thinking about politics some more from a pure strategic lens, a way that I might, frankly, right, then you can say, okay, this is going to be a huge high variance play. And if you get to the point where snap recipients are going weeks without benefits and you have Thanksgiving travel shut down chaos, right? That's going to probably have a lasting effect. It's no longer just something people will forget about a year later. Do we have the dexterity to navigate that situation? Maybe with a weak leader like Schumer, maybe not. Also, the Democrats' message is a little bit inconsistent. It was never really about health care, right? It was about a whole bunch of angst, a lot of which is oriented around democracy and authoritarianism, the stuff

that elites like me think are big problems, frankly, right? You didn't have that consistent messaging. You know, their best message late became about SNAP benefits, I think, actually. And like, so I, you know, if the party had either more risk tolerance or a better messaging apparatus, or maybe that's the wrong way, right? Or like kind of better leadership, so they had more consistent messaging, then that becomes more attractive. They had neither, though. But I mean, also the use of people as instruments like that, where, you know, if you delay SNAP benefits for, you know, tens of millions of low-income Americans

who don't necessarily have good ability to manage the fact that, you know, funds they were expecting to come in don't come in on the date that they're supposed to. That has real human costs. And I can, you know, I can understand from a utilitarian perspective, if you think you're going to get some really important policy concession that's going to do a lot of good for Americans, and you see that as available, why it could be morally correct to do that. But I think at some point where, again, if it's really about that, like, you know,

dragging this out for two more weeks was going to give you the more opportune date of fold, and so you do better in some news cycles, you know, 11 months before an election, I'm sympathetic to the senators who basically said it. It's not worth putting people through that for what is a really, really a marginal political win because the really big political wins that people theoretically thought were on the table were not actually on the table. Okay, but also the House isn't even in session this week, okay? They might as well... They're coming back.

They're going to vote on Wednesday. Well, I mean, they're going to take a train. It could be Thursday. Could be Friday. Who knows? A lot of them are very overweight and slow. But like, I don't know, wait until the House is back. Like, they did...

But the House was waiting for the Senate to vote to come back. The Senate, when the Senate took the vote directly drives when the government's going to open. There's a delay, but the delay compounds the longer you wait. Politicians are just most politicians, not all, Trump is not, but most politicians are fundamentally just like, you know, maximum strategists, right? What do you mean by that? They want to minimize their downside, right? Like, they are, they look to do the thing. Like, if you present them with an option that is, like, very high gain, but also potentially very high loss, most politicians are not into that strategy. And, like, Trump actually. I think is, right? That is his tariff theory. It is a completely incorrect theory economically, but that is his theory. You take a big play for a big potential win. But most politicians just do

not think that way. Most of them want to make sure that they don't have to face a really big problem with angry voters. They don't want to like see people losing their snap benefits and all the rest of it. And like, so any theory of the case that revolved around Democrats being, willing to take potentially big personal losses, the last time that happened in the Democratic Party was Obamacare. And in fact, they lost a ton of seats and a lot of politicians were permanently scarred by seeing that happen. I just don't think there is an appetite for actually doing things that are costly.

Can we zoom out a little bit and talk about what this means for politics over the next year? Nate, I'm wondering what you make of that movement that we've seen in the polls since mid-October, you know, obviously you had the shutdown and you had stuff, you know, knocking down the White House ballroom while people are, you know, preparing to not receive their food stamps. There's also this sense that there has been material worsening in the economy over the last few weeks. Our sense of that is slightly obscured by the fact that the government wasn't releasing a lot of the usual economic data during the shutdown. But do you see the moves that have happened in the president's polls in the last few weeks?

Do we have a sense yet of whether any of that is durable versus something that is just going to bounce back with the shutdown over? Yeah, look, I think the default hypothesis would be that you have some secular downtrend, probably related to anxiety about the economy. Consumer confidence numbers are the worst they've been in years, right? The private hiring, the private payrolls numbers show flat employment growth over many months. Inflations a little bit higher than average. You know, people are being buoyed by the stock market and other things, which is still doing

pretty well. There are anxieties about AI. I don't know when those hit the kind of capital M mainstream or whatever else. You know, Trump also famously has like kind of a high floor low ceiling to his numbers, but in the first term, that high floor was partly because of views that the economy was going pretty well, right? Now it's maybe more because of like cultural grievance or wherever you want to put it. So yeah, look, he went from like a negative seven and a half, like a negative 12 or 13 in our tracking. If I had to guess he'd be at like a negative nine and a half in a couple of weeks. And then you get these more existential questions about like, okay, how low can his numbers

really, really go without acute crises like an actual capital or recession? Well, but I mean, that's, I think that's a key thing there is that, you know, he governed in his last term for three years where the economy was good. And then a final year where the economy faltered for reasons that people did not blame him for. He got a Mulligan. I think actually rationally in some way from voters. Yeah, sure. The high floor, low ceiling thing, I think, you know, we don't know what that looks like under economic stress.

The other thing I'm wondering is, are the polls overrepresenting his position right now? We had these elections where Mikey Sherrill ran nine points better than her polling average in the New Jersey governor election. Abigail Spanberger ran about four points ahead of the polls in Virginia. Are the polls systematically understating Democrats right now, or is the president, in fact, less popular than he looks in the polling? Remember, polls can only fuck up if they underrate Republicans in Trump. Otherwise, no, anyone really cares that much to get mad at it. No, look. There is one difference, which is that if you look at polls of the generic ballot or Trump's approval rating,

they're usually polls of registered voters or sometimes even all American adults, whereas it's quote-to-quote likely voters that show up to vote. And that gap can be substantial. In 2010, for example, you had a very enthusiastic Tea Party-inspired Republican base, and there was about a six-point gap between polls of likely voters and registered voters. So if you see the generic congressional ballot, isn't anything that I look at, it's like, who would you vote for in the race for Congress today, which party? Democrats are up about three points on that poll now, in that polling now, based on registered voters, right? That could easily mean six, seven, or eight points among likely

voters if there's a big enthusiasm gap, which is more consistent with the environment you saw last week. It makes me reject the whole Democrats and disarray frame about the shutdown. I mean, I realize, yes, it's been a rough week. My thesis is you had to have this bad news cycle sometime. So, you know, we're getting it over with. But it seems to me like the fundamental challenge for Democrats next year remains, you know, nominate candidates who can win in states like Alaska and Texas and Iowa, except, you know, I guess if somehow this like makes it more likely that they're going to nominate Jasmine Crockett for the Senate in Texas because they want someone who, quote-unquote fights, then obviously that's that's a problem for Democrat's strategy.

But I just kind of think most of the time that if, you know, if people who would crawl across broken class to vote for Democrats in general election, if they're, you know, belly aching, I just kind of don't think it matters. No, look, I agree. I mean, and the palace intrigue stories are fun to cover. It's fun to write about Democrats fighting. It's fun to write about Republicans fighting too, right? And there are consequences in terms of like what party leadership looks like in the long run.

And, you know, maybe you can be happy. If you think Schumer, if you think Schumer that his clock had passed, it was time for new leadership and that Debra has to be more effective. If they had a younger, less polarizing leader, then maybe you, maybe you should be happy that, like, he kind of fucked up the shutdown. And now I don't think his leadership is sustainable, at least for that much longer. I mean, who else wants a job? I don't know. Well, that's the thing. Does Brian Schatz really want to step into that and have his own brand get damaged over the next year because people are, you know, angry about the same.

same stuff, you might as well, like, you let Chuck Schumer be the senator. Everyone gets to be mad that they can't have what they want because they haven't, they're not in control. And then there's an election and then Democrats take back at least one house. And then people get in a better mood because of that. No reason to taint the next leader with that. Isn't it like Switzerland, you have like a council of presidents or something instead of like just one president? Yeah, maybe like have a council. You got Klobuchar in there some days and and Chris Murphy likes going on TV a lot. He gets to do it some of the time. Oh, he loves going on TV. You hand around the gavel.

Yeah, look, it's an impossible job. However, even relative to other party leaders, Schumer has a net negative favorability rating with Democrats, which I think makes things kind of untenable. But yeah, look, you're right. Like, parties that lose power and Democrats have had a bad series of elections are usually fighting. The longest long-term consulates of that fight are you reorienting the party in constructive ways and having, having, having, big drag-down fights and the, well, figuring that out isn't necessarily so bad. And people care more about, like, you know, Democrats have had a track record of nominating candidates who are mostly good fits for their local states and districts. At the presidential level, when you have to have a

consensus nationally, I'd say a much bigger problem, right? They also have in most Senate races one or more premium recruits, right? They may not be everybody's cup of tea. Not everybody likes Janet Mills in Maine. I'm not even a percent sure how bad Platner would be in the general election. I don't think she's a premium recruit. She's a current governor. He doesn't have a Nazi tattoo. She doesn't, but it's amazing. Susan Collins has been in the Senate for 30 years. And the candidate that the establishment can come up with in Maine to run against her is five years older than her. I just like, it's, it's unbelievable to me. And Democrats do have a bench in Maine. They have a competitive primary shaping up for governor right now. I mean, what it is is, you know,

Susan Collins is actually a very talented political. with a very strong record of winning elections. And it's a more uphill race than Democrats are treating it like they're supposed to win that race because it's main. I think that race is actually quite hard and the best candidates who could run in it don't want to. And that's how we end up with Platinum. And I do think candidates like Plattenor are a strategic mistake.

I just can't get that worked up about this main race specifically because it's like, you know, I need my side to have a, you know, a more clever idea about who we would nominate in order to actually get angry about the prospect that we would instead nominate Grant Platten. But like if they're going to win the Senate, which I still don't think they're going to do. But like then you're looking at like a 2006 type situation where like people did not think, you know, that they were going to win Montana. They weren't going to win all of these very like all of these incredibly hard reach seats. And so in that universe where we're actually talking about seriously them winning Alaska or Texas or Iowa to get over that hump, like then I do think that it made it's important that they have someone who doesn't have a not tattoo. You know, like, you don't want to, you don't want to, who was that guy in North Carolina

a few years ago who, like, had a massive scandal and then lost. Cal Cunningham. Yeah, you don't want that situation. Although the funny thing is, in the end, Cal Cunningham lost by approximately the amount that I think a, you know, generic Democrat would have lost in that race, you know, despite the, like, very cringy text messages related to the affair that he was having. I mean, I think polarization just means that, you know, scandals matter less than they used to. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'll Although, I don't know, like, Jay Jones really underperformed in that Virginia governor's race, like, you know, nine points worse than Spanberger on margin, which, you know, Virginia's democratic enough in a good year that that wasn't enough to tip the balance. But in any case, I want to take a quick break, and then I want to come back and talk about sports and some sports analogies for politics. By the way, I encourage you, go to centralairpodcast.com.

You can sign up there. You'll get an email every time a new show comes out. You'll be part of our community. If you become a paying subscriber, you can join our comments section and get whatever premium offerings we come up with over time to hand out to our paying subscribers. But anyway, we would love to have you over there. Go to centralairpodcast.com. So we've been accepting this premise that Democrats are more likely to win elections or

Democrats or Republicans are more likely to win elections if they nominate more moderate candidates who have a set of positions that is more popular with more of the electorate. And, you know, we talked three weeks ago. on the show about the big deciding to win report that came out from Welcome, sort of condensing all of those recommendations into a package. And the debate about this has been really funny to me, because this idea seems commonsensical enough. And it's in line with the way that actual politics practitioners run elections. If you look at the ads that congressional candidates run in competitive races, they're emphasizing the positions that are popular with the majority of the electorate

and running away from things that are unpopular. But this apparently is actually a topic of debate. among political scientists and then therefore also on Twitter. And so, Nate, I want to get your sense of what you make of this. Laxha Jane from the argument has this methodology called war or wins against replacement. Or basically, you look at how a candidate should have performed in a given election based on characteristics of the district and incumbency and other things. And then how they actually performed. And you find something completely unsurprising, which is the strongest performers are people like Jared Golden and Brian Fitzpatrick, who have a moderate profile and a voting record that differentiates them from their party.

What is the argument against this that we're hearing that says, no, actually, that's not true, and moderation doesn't matter? The argument is that if you run enough regression analyses and have enough motivated reason, you can prove anything with, quote, unquote, political science. Yeah, look, the fact that matters if you do kind of a simple analysis, and usually when it comes to politics, it's not that rich a data set, right? we're talking about a finite number of seats across a finite number of cycles. And you say, here are the candidates who everyone would agree by reasonable criteria,

are moderates, compare their performance against this common baseline. So Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, and they seem to do a few points better. A few points is not decisive in all cases. A few points can be overwhelmed. It's like lower than the margin, for example, the J. Jones scandal, right? That might have been a nine point shift. And people might say the moderation effect is three or four or five points. But yeah, there's a lot of really bad argumentation, including that, oh, these marginal differences don't matter.

No, look, control the house, unless there's a really, really, really big blue wave will probably come down to a half dozen to a dozen, one or two point races. And likewise, control the Senate might come down to, you know, three or four, two or three point races. So every point matters quite a lot. Look, I do think this is diminishing. As things become more polarized, you can explain more and more and more variance in election results just with the POTUS vote. plus remind us some delta about the national environment. But yeah, look, I mean, that's a keep of context here, which is that, you know, 30 years ago you had, you know, Republican senators from Vermont and Democratic senators from Arkansas and generally lots, lots more elections in Congress

that really diverged from the partisanship of the district or state that people were representing. And so, yes, moderation is less powerful than it used to be in part because voters are just are more partisan. But that also, I mean, that just means that everything matters less than it used to, but you still have to try to win the election. And the set of tools that are available to you didn't really change, even though they got less powerful. And this is the thing that's really strange to me from, like, Lee Drupman, for example, one political scientist who had a paper sort of like despairing about the value of moderation. And then he has this idea that you need fusion voting so that voters can vote on more than one ballot line. So, you know, if you have a moderate candidate,

then they, you know, or a candidate who was in some way ideologically, you know, unique from their party. They have another line on the ballot where if you don't want to vote for a Democrat, you vote for them this way. But this is a way of flagging moderation. If voters don't care about that anymore, the fusion ballot line is not going to help you. In fact, we have fusion voting in New York. And it doesn't seem to be counteracting these factors. I'm a fusion voter. I'll have you know. I always, if I'm voting for a candidate who is on the major party lines, I always pick any other party ballot line instead. Really? Why? Because I don't really like the major parties. I mean, this sounds like kind of like a broie. Yeah. Do you like the minor parties,

though, do you want, like, the Working Families Party having more power in New York? Philosophically, sure. Yeah. I don't agree with the Working Families Party as much as I might the Nate Ideal Party, right? Look, the other thing, too, about, like, I'm at least willing to admit that some of my political views probably aren't that popular, right? I probably lean in more kind of a libertarian version of center left, whereas I think kind of a more populous version of the center left probably would poll a little bit better, right? some of the policy initiatives that Zoran has advocated for, for example, I think are probably bad ideas. But I'm happy to acknowledge that they're popular and conceived, I think, of like kind of public opinion in mind, right?

Yeah, no, look, there's always going to be a space for the political scientists or data nerds who tell Democratic partisans exactly what they want to hear. And to your point, Josh, partisans on Twitter or Blue Sky or Substack are not the same thing as actual candidates. the candidates themselves and practitioners seem quite interested in moderation, right? The practitioners seem to think that the stupid they them ad last year was quite harmful to Harris when academics would say, no, you can't prove that. It's like, well, you can't. Wait, sorry, why was the ad stupid? It's stupid in the sense of how much controversy.

In general, I kind of shy away from talking about trans stuff, just because I think it's a very overexposed. issue. But yeah, look, I don't think the Trump people were just randomly showing that ad more often than any other ad. It may be like literally American political history. I'm sure that it did test well. It's interesting that similar attempts to use similar framing in Virginia did not seem to work very much at all, right, which there are a couple of reasons for that. You know, number one, Kamala Harris does have this verbal and written statement on record saying, yes, we want gender transition surgeries for like, illegal immigrants and prisoners. Like, you cannot imagine, like, a more perfect singularity of different things that became positions of people were criticizing in 2024 for Democrats. Number two, like, the novelty of attacks goes a long way. The first time you hear something, it might be quite persuasive, right? The second time, the third time, the fourth time, it seems like old news. You're recycling somebody else's idea. It's been priced in. It doesn't apply to Spanberger in particular who kind of comes across as more moderate, I think intrinsically. I mean,

you know, Harris, I don't know. Have you read her bio? Her book? Her book, yeah. God, no. I most certainly have. It's a very strange book. I mean, she almost has, like, I almost wonder if Carmel Harris is not, like, a little bit spectrumy. This is a hot day. It's so weird. Like, it's like, she has, like, no instinct for public opinion on her own. It can only be revealed. to her by like her strategists and things like that, right? It's just very, very, very weird, right? And she's like, go on these, like, long detours about, like, some pivotal moment about, like, you know, this is the arena that John Bon Jovi sold five million records at in 2004.

It's, like, just, it's just extremely strange. I would like to read you an immortal chapter from Kamala Harris's book. Yes. 37 days to the election. Hair color, manicure, call, and call, and call. 1401 VP rolling fundraiser in

LA rally in Las Vegas 2123 lid that is a chapter it's just like Hemingway that's like a Zen Cohen

well I kind of like the conceit of having of counting down they go through there are 107 chapters right and then you know that Kamal Harris and or her team of ghost writers got to like day fucking 37 right we have fucking 37 more days to go were out of shit to say, right?

And the campaign itself was also out of shit. They also ran out. This is what bugs me about the whole thing. Oh, we only had a hundred seven days. They were polling best at about day 10 or 12 of 107. And they kind of like ran out of things to say. If you went to the issues page on the Kamala Harris website, 13 days before the campaign, it's just like, hey, give us more money.

We don't know why. Just give us more money. It's all we can think to ask you to do. And like the end and they didn't really. I read the book and I got angrier and angrier. that this was who we had to save us from Donald Trump. Because, like, it was everything in it. It was vapid and no theory of anything.

Everything is someone else's fault. Kamala Harris makes no mistakes other than relying too much on other people who let her down. She says in the book that Tim Walsh walked in and was like, I'm not a good debater. And she's like, don't worry about that. And she was like, you're my vice president. You know, when she's vetting VPs.

And then she's after, as he is melting down in the debate with J.D. Vance, she's like, what is he doing? How could he let J.D.? He was going to happen. You knew. And like, it's, right? This is your fault. You are in charge.

The buck stops here, lady. And she has no sense of that. There's no sense of anything she wants to do other than be elected. It was just absolutely, like, it was a catastrophe that mirrored the catastrophe. that mirrored the catastrophe of her campaign. A lot of those people we were talking about online, the progressive data nerds who like to find whatever numbers they want in shadows and bullshit, have spent the last few months arguing that, like, you know, she was the moderate dream.

If she lost, well, that disproves moderation. And it does seem like those people who just are like working backwards from that premise, when in reality the thing that we're talking about right now is that she was a unique, bad candidate, right? But Nate, I hate those people online. And unfortunately, I am not as smart as you are. So I often try out go looking for smarter people to make the cases that I instinctively agree with, but want more evidence of. Will you make some learned attacks on these people so that I can repeat them at cocktail parties? Happily, yeah. So one of the things they do. This is Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing those last

names correctly. They're not household names, but they're maybe the two foremost political scientists who have put out this thesis that moderation is dead, doesn't matter, et cetera, right? They're at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively, I believe. I believe so. So one thing they do is say, well, sure, if you just look at how the modest are performing relative to the baseline, they do better. But if you control for incumbency and fundraising, the difference disappears. Well, What's incumbency? It's winning elections. The argument is that if you control for winning elections, but there's no further effect on winning elections. And fundraising is also, maybe the second best indicator of candidate health, right? And yeah, probably it's true that

moderates have an easier time raising like corporate dollars, maybe progressives though, have an easier time raising money from like the activist based for that matter. So like, it's an overall sign of like professional, competent, healthy campaigns. I mean, the strongest Fundraisers in Democratic universe right now are people like AOC and Jasmine Crockett who are great at raising grassroots dollars from, you know, Democrats who are addicted to watching MSNBC or... And who live in another state. Right. No, but look, I, you know, again, I would challenge these people. I actually make testable predictions about elections and I like to gamble, right?

So, like, put your money where your mouth is. I mean, they are, this, there's a very long, I took like, I was up in Maine, actually hung up with Madaglacius one day, right? but like up in me, social education, I was so bothered by how stupid some of this was. I wrote like a, you know, 50 paragraph posts about it. You can find that on Silver Bulletin. But like it literally has depressed me about the state of academic political science. Like literally, because like there are a lot of parlor tricks, including in this post where they're defending the lack of importance for moderation, which I think is bullshit, at least mostly, right? The first thing they say is we are political scientists, right?

We are doing science. We are scholars, and this is a question that's been studied for a long time, right? It's like not virginal territory. A lot of practitioners, a lot of forecasters, a lot of previous political scientists have all tried to study the effects of moderation. It's not a simple matter. Quantifying moderation is complicated, but there is a, you know, the consensus of the literature is that moderation helps to some degree other things being equal, right? And they're bucking that consensus, having done far less work on that question,

then the consensus has had put into it, right? And there's a lack of humility there among other things. But yeah, let's, you know, Jake, Adam, let's bet. I'll bet. I mean, let's bet real money. You know what I mean? You're at prestige institutions. I know they're being threatened by Trump.

But like, let's actually make some testable predictions about how you think this stuff will play out. Let's see if the replacement for Jared Golden in Maine. Does anywhere near as well as Jared Golden did, who was retiring, of course. Do we need political science at all? No. I mean, broadly, academia is like, you know, we're supposed to be learning things or social science. We're learning things about how society operates, and that allows us to do better at one thing or another.

We learn about, you know, what fosters innovation and then we change patent law or things like that. And, you know, it's not just about, you know, people, they can put their money where their mouth is by betting. There's also, as, as you know, there's a whole industry of running campaigns where people develop views about what leads to winning and losing elections. and they move lots of money around toward the objective of doing that. And then they observe what happens and they learn from that. It's not clear to me that there's any pipeline

where like, you know, political science papers come out and that's changing the way people do politics for the better. It's just like it's not clear to me, you know, what the actual production function is here in society where, you know, you do this academic research and then it's producing some outcome that actually matters. Yeah, look. I think when it comes to election analysis that political science is outmoded, right?

It happens to be a field where you have a lot of practitioners who have been to some degree selected by the market who are producing work at a much higher velocity, right? Part of the issue with academics in general is that like it takes a long time to publish a paper. The things that editors and journal editors are looking for are not things that make the paper better necessarily. there are things that might make the conclusion more, I guess, you know, more politically correct or, you know, there's often in political science academics in general, right, a focus on an overly complicated method that doesn't actually pass the smell test, right? Like this one of these Bonica Grumpback papers are like, we're using machine learning. It's like this is actually a totally inappropriate context for machine learning, right? Machine learning is when you have trillions of parameters or millions of observations with fuzzy relationships. chips, and not when you're looking at a couple of hundred election results over three or four

cycles and trying to see if something has changed, right? And elections, we can, you know, it's not this big bag of numbers. Elections are things like things we can measure and describe. Incumbency and fundraising and moderation, all these things are a little complicated to describe. The presidential baseline, all these things are tangible and legible and are not appropriate for machine learning, but because there's just like biased toward novel techniques that will sound good in an abstract, then, yeah, look, I think political science,

academic political science might be useful for understanding kind of, like, long-term trends for comparative politics for lots of things like that, right? But, like, I think it's pretty inferior for, like, election analysis stuff. I read one of these people's papers, or not papers, but like a sub-deck post a few weeks ago where they were defending protesters, like, going into the streets, you know, and, like, stopping traffic or anything. And they were like, but it does. It does win elections.

And because there's, you know, not many examples of that in the United States. When you look at it, they're like, what about the Baltics in 89? Pretty different situation, though. And then they had their like T-moon Nate Silver to launder these messages into the popular media. It's like the, it's always fucking G. Eliot Morris. I'm like, don't even, don't even get me. I mean, he's just so derivative of, he takes people who did good hard work and makes it

worse and more partisan, right? I don't have a lot of respect for... He doesn't... He doesn't... If his first name is used, it's considered like a slur. What is his first name? Wait, really?

George. Are you afraid to say it? George. Wait, wait. I did not realize that there was like this anti-George bias here. Wait, you're not supposed to say

his first name? This, by the way, I guess we should say this is Nate's successor who ran 538 at ABC. And then most notably, the 538 presidential model in 2024, just kept having Joe Biden ahead, like, had him with his best, like, favored to win on July 14th, 2024.

And then they replaced the candidate because the model was driven so heavily by like this fundamentals analysis, didn't really consider the polls enough. Then when they replaced Biden with Harris, it's clear that the model was going to say that Harris was a worse candidate than Biden because she wasn't the incumbent president. And so they took the model down for weeks in order to recalibrate it and produce a, new one that would say Harris was going to win and then it had 50-50 on election day and then, of course, Harris loses. Yeah, we turned our model off and on in a week, right? We had to wait for some polling to come out on Harris, but it's basically just replacing all the Bidens with Harris's

in the code more or less, right? It's not a complicated technical fix. No, their model, A, it was ill-conceived where it was very reliant on these fundamental factors. It said, incumpancy really matters until late in the race, right? But also their model was literally broken. There were literally, it was chock full of bugs, and they kind of admitted this. However, the combination of like, you're coming for dish on this show, right? The combination of G. Eliot Morris being a really bad writer, and then it being, like, filtered through however many layers of ABC News PR, it successfully obfuscated the fact that this model was totally broken and they radically changed it, right?

Because it's so hard to get through their writing that you can't tell that they totally Yeah, look, that to me is you should probably go manage a nice hot dog stand or something by the side. I don't know. If you fuck up that battle that you cause a PR crisis for your entire news agency, which they did. The AIPC people wouldn't actually speak about this on the record. He caused a crisis for the entire network because his model sucks so much, right? Like maybe just picks a thing else to do. He's a smart kid, you know?

He's a smart kid. He can become the keymaster. But Alan, look, no, I have more respect for Lickman. I will weirdly defend Alan Lickman to some extent. This is, in case anyone's forgotten, this is the American University professor who had the, the, the, four, was it 13 or 14 keys to the presidency? 13, 13 keys. And like, and Lincoln kind of manipulates the keys in ways. But like, but that was actually original work, right?

No, I'm not even kidding, right? He came up with the key. He did a lot of, he did a lot of research. It's kind of a novel technique. I think heuristically, it gets certain things right that it become the conventional wisdom. I mean, I think he kind of like, you know, there's too much subjectivity in the keys and he takes credit for things that, you know, he obscures a popular vote versus electoral college. But like, but Lickman is like work that's actually not purely derivative of better work done by other people. Was part of the problem with these fundamental models?

This is true in economic modeling too. Are we calling the keys a fundamental model? I guess the keys are a fundamentals model. It's a fundamentals model, right? It's something that like. Well, sort of, although several the keys are polling based actually, right? I was wondering about this the other day, and I have you available, Nate, so I'm going to ask you, that all of these models that looked at like, you know, economic factors and so forth, no one had a good model for inflation because the only time we've really had high inflation was a 15-year period before where everything, like Vietnam is happening, Nixon is breaking into the Democratic National headquarters. And so it's actually kind of hard to see what the effect is.

And that what we have now discovered is that, yes, in fact, this is a big problem, but that it just wasn't necessarily visible. to a lot of these fundamentals modelers until we ran through a period of high inflation. Or am I overestimating the impact of that? The economic index that we used in the Silver Bulletin presidential forecast includes inflation as one of the variables and adjust all the other variables like the S&P 500 for inflation. You know, that model showed that Harris was basically like a one-point underdog in the popular vote, which is kind of the exact way it came out, right? So one thing is like the incumbency advantage, A, if you're not actually nominating the actual incumbent, although obviously I think in the circumstance Biden would have been worse, then you don't really have the advantage of knowing the incumbent one last time, right? And also in general, the incumbency advantage is diminishing. You can argue it becomes negative in some circumstance, right? So like, so, you know, incumbency was never so powerful for Biden or Harris as a technically non-incumbent anyway, right? You know, the economy, I mean, ironically, some of that was buoyed by relative.

healthy numbers in the stock market. The so-called hard data was a little bit negative. And in fact, as the data has been revised, we have now found out that the job market was worse than it might have seemed. Yeah, no, look, during the election, I would feud with, like, the Biden defenders and be like, the economy is fantastic. What are you talking about? It's like, well, not really, right? I mean, the inflation numbers have abated. If anything, I think our motto was probably generous because, It assumed that this stuff cycles out over a year or two of voters' mindset, right? By the time you got to November, 2024, you were 18 months beyond the periods of peak inflation. However, the absolute price level was still high relative to how people had calibrated that,

and still is today, to some extent, right? So if anything, I think our model was a little bit generous. I mean, inflation's still running hotter than people have been used to for the last like 25 years, even though it's in the threes, not in the tens, but people are still looking at this and they're like, I went to the grocery store, I did dinner party on Saturday, and I went to the grocery store, and I was shocked. And I follow these numbers. I was like, what, how can it cost this much money to buy meat? And that is, I think, a recurring thing that you're going to be seeing for, in, into, probably into 2026 unless we figure out a way to get

inflation under control. Why don't we take a quick break? And then we'll come back and talk about sports betting and the politics of sports betting. Meanwhile, if you want to get every update about this show and join the discussions that we have that are lively among our listeners, I encourage you, go to centralairpodcast.com. You can sign up and you'll get every episode, and you'll be part of our community. We'd love to have you. Why don't we turn and talk about sports betting? And so Nate, of course, in addition to being a leading election analyst, is also a leading sports analysts, and we have yet another indictment that's come down for fraud in sports betting, where you have two Cleveland Guardians pitchers who have been indicted for intentionally throwing balls

instead of strikes so that their Confederates could win proposition bets on what kind of pitches they were going to throw. You had an indictment a few weeks ago in the NBA that had to do with insider betting, people who knew about injuries that hadn't been publicly reported. In one case, a player appearing to fake an injury in order to push down his own numbers and again allow his associates to win proposition bets on him. And so, Nate, I guess just to open broadly, how much do you worry about this as a threat to the integrity of professional sports, to the popularity of professional sports? Because it seems like this, you know, this huge surge in betting, and in particular, the immense universe of specific things that you can bet on, seems to

be just creating all of these new opportunities for corruption. Look, the analogy I'd use, Josh, is like, it's a little bit like elite public education. It appeals to different demographic, but in the sense of, like, you could see that, like, Harvard and Stanford and the ivies and all these schools were doing things that had the potential to kind of, like, catch up to their reputation in the long term. But they have a lot of momentum. They're very big industries. A lot of powerful people and wealthy people are tied up into them in some ways in the

short run that tends to prevail. But, like, yeah, look. In the NBA, for example, you already have issues with teams having a lot of incentive to tank, because they're trying to get higher draft picks. If you add to that, like, players actually betting on the outcomes, I mean, in baseball, baseball has had its share of scandals before, right? The Black Sox scandal in 1919. And, like, it's also, you know, I understand why sports betting is simply annoying to people,

the ubiquity of it. No, look, I don't think that we're not going to have major league baseball in the NBA. I mean, it might be things that affect their ratings by 2% or 3% or 4%. But I think the leagues have been like about greedy, have been greedy about having too much of this in your face too fast instead of trying to do it in a more sustainable way, right? The original argument, by the way, that, hey, you know, hey, we can detect all these scandals a lot better now because we have much better data from betting partners who have incentives and our requirements to cooperate with federal officials, right? You know, when you're betting, when you have hundreds of thousands of dollars bets, bet on a shitty player like Terry Rozier.

This is the Miami Heat. What is he? He's a point guard. Point guard. I guess he's not shit. He's a league average player, right? Better than any of us at basketball. He's the one who exited a game early appearing to fake an injury.

Right. But like no one would bet hundreds of thousands of dollars on Terry Rozier having fewer than three and a half rebounds in a random regular season game in December. or something unless they have insight info. The degenerate gabbers might bet on LeBron James doing that or Yokic or Jalen Brunson or something like that, right? And likewise, like, these pitchers, I mean, if you read, if you're curious about this, Ben Lindberg is my former colleague at Baseball Perspectus and briefly at 538, he has a good analysis on the ringer showing that these pitchers, at least one of them, were pretty

blatant about what they were doing, right? They were having people bet on the outcome of individual ball strike calls. Will you start with an O-O count in baseball with the first pitch of this pitcher's appearance be a ball or a strike, right? And the data makes it pretty clear that this one pitcher was like throwing, spiking balls in the dirt at a much higher rate when they were being bet on than in other circumstances. Overall, he actually has very good control as a pitcher. Only on these zero-zero counts did he all of a sudden spike a bunch of balls into the dirt in ways that were highly-sistically. implausible unless he had, you know, by the way, some of these people who, I think in general, that professional athletes are pretty smart, right? I think they have all types of intelligence,

and I think, you know, but like some of these people who were allegedly cheating were pretty dumb to think that it wouldn't be detected, right? It creates a pretty clear betting footprint when you know who is betting and on what, right, combined with, at least in the Cleveland Guardians case, a statistical imprint because what you're doing is not very subtle, right? I mean, if, you know, you could say, okay, randomly I'm going to throw some balls and some strikes and I have some mechanism of letting you know, but will, we'll randomize it enough that you'd never actually find a statistical signal for it. They were not doing any of that, right? It was so blatant that, like, I don't know. You have to wonder about their wisdom. This is like selling the stock three hours

before the earnings report comes out. Or buying the options before the terror attack. Right. Yeah. It's like that's the, yes. what the SEC is going to go look for? Do we need an SEC for sports? I mean, prosecutors of all kinds have always had incentives for many years to go after illegal gambling-related activity, right? Because the cases are splashy, and it's like you get lots of media coverage when you indict some professional athletes.

Yeah, and they're kind of theatrical. I mean, you know, they literally kind of call the poker indictment a couple of weeks ago, like Operation Royal Flesh. I mean, the mafia is literally involved. You can imagine, like, these very colorful schemes. they perpwalk some of the defendants, right? So it makes for, you know, look, I think the gambling industry doesn't recognize that, like, there is always an ebb in flow in public tolerance for gambling-related activities.

And the fact that, like, it had been on, I know, an ebb or a flow, have been increasing recently relative to the baseline, does not necessarily mean that it will continue to increase. In fact, you might predict over the long run there would be some backlash, some meaner version that shows up to some degree in the polling, right? And if you were thinking about long-term sustainability, then first of all, you would have more basic kind of bets, right? You bet on team stats. You bet on point spreads, totals, which is how many teams or runs,

except for both teams score combined money lines, which is just who wins at some odds that you're given by the book. You know, the snowshare of like betting on individual player outcomes is newer and creates problems because there's less defense against the outcomes being against cheating or rigging, right? You know, infamously, you had, for example, the Boston College point-shaving scandal in the mid-1970s, right? This is in which sport?

College basketball. You have one player that's trying to tank games for the mob. You have his buddy who was kind of reluctantly doing so. But they're kind of not fantastic players. The rest of the teammates are suspicious of them and were not involved. And like more than half the bets that the mob makes, they actually are. lose those bets, right? Because like one and a half shitty players tanking is not enough in a five-team sport to be all that deterministic. Well, I mean, the Chicago Black Sox even won a couple of those

World Series games that they were trying to lose. It was a nine-game World Series back then and they went three out of the out of the nine games. Correct. This is maybe one of my most like communitarian views. But I think, you know, what we're assessing, you know, is this damaging to sports. I mean, one thing you can look at is, you know, is this harmful to the profits of the franchises. And in general, I think that's actually a fairly good way at looking at how something impacts a business. But I think these are actually sort of shared civic institutions. And that's part of why you get public subsidy for these teams and for stadiums is that the value they create is not just like, you know, restaurants spring up around the MLB stadium and you get

some sort of real estate and economic development. I think that there's real civic pride that forms around these institutions and that's damaged if people see them as being corrupted. And I think that's a relevant thing for policymakers to consider as they're considering, you know, what kind of gambling do we want to allow on these sorts of things, especially at a time when so many institutions have lost so much trust from people. I think it's actually a bad thing for our society if people look at pro sports and are just more inclined to think that it's rigged or fake. Yeah, look, the line I've sometimes used to borrow the old Democratic line about abortion, which is now no longer popular with party activists, right? is that sports gambling should be safe, legal, and rare. Look, there are advantages to having it be legal and above board,

including that it's easier to detect potential cases of fraud and manipulation and cheating, safe, meaning that, you know, if you bet with a bookie, are you really going to get your money if you win, right? A lot of the reason why you have to get the mafia involved in illegal poker games or legal betting rings is because, like, having lots of cash or crypto or digital assets change hands is a non-trivial problem, especially dealing with people who are engaged in kind of these shady activities, right? And rare, look, I will defend poker to the hilt as a game that produced some degree of

social benefit and maybe makes people smarter in different ways, right? For sports gambling, I mean, there are people like me. They're actually trying to, like, build models and provide information that is competitive with Vegas, whether it beats Vegas or not might depend on the sport the week and how good the model is, right. 98% of people aren't trying to do that. I don't think it's terribly harmful when some guy is betting 50 bucks and going to the New York Giants game.

If he has the misfortune of going to the New York Giants game, even how they played recently, right? I don't think there's that much harm there. And if you're going to have betting, you know, one of the thing they do, by the way, is they limit people who are who they perceive as sharp, right? Right. If you're an advantage better, they can kick you out of the sports book. Should that be illegal?

Yeah. I'm limited by most of the major. Yeah, I think they should say, you know, the classic way to do bookmaking is that, yes, you have some sharp betters. So you open your line for an NFL game, say, on Tuesday morning. Now it actually opens two weeks in advance, but ignore that for now, right? Monday morning, Tuesday morning, you open your lines the next week and you say, okay, so for now we'll take bets of up to $5,000, right? some people, they know who's betting, some sharp person bets, and they make a bet that might have like an expected value of, let's say, three to five percent on $5,000, right?

So that costs the sports book a couple of hundred bucks in expected value to use Ben's nerdy EV maximizer term, right? However, if someone who's a really good bet makes a bet, then the bookmaker gets better information. They can say, okay, we just had our initial estimate based on computer model or some intern we hired, right? Or maybe some old guys smoking a cigar whose instances are pretty good, but not fantastic. Now the market has spoken, will move the price and expand the limit for how much we'll take, right? So, you know, NFL games, even if you're limited on other bets, you can bet tens of thousands of dollars on NFL for the most part on Sunday morning before kickoff,

because the markets are so robust. And they only have to, you can beat them by up to 4%. You have to beat the points by four and a half points to make up for the VIG that they take, right? So, like, we have all the information from the entire reveal preferences of the market, right? We dare you to bet a lot of money and beat us by four and a half percent, right? I'm really enjoying Josh's face right now, and I wish that listeners could also enjoy it. I just, I don't see the social usefulness in a more efficient sports betting market. I mean, you know, it seems to be, first of all, we had an old system that seemed to be working fine, where, like, there was a black market and you could bet informally with your friends or you could bet with a bookie, and yes, maybe it was

somewhat harder for you to collect on your winnings, but, you know, this is not an essential part of the economy where it's that bad if there's some friction in it. It's not like the black market and illegal drugs where you had like rampant violence and a tremendous amount of incarceration surrounding the fact that it was illegal. And you could also, you could go to Nevada and bet in person or to sports book if you felt that you desire to do that. And then I think, you know, we've expanded this in a way that, you know, you have some people who develop, you know, really significant problems with this that are, you know, financially, you know, devastating to them and their families. And you have this, you know, pervasive sense that it's undermining the integrity

of the sports leagues. And it's also just kind of gross that you're seeing all of these ads on television all the time and turning sports into a thing that is sort of about betting. It just seems to me that the old status quo was fine. I would like to go back to it. I don't see why we even have to allow this. There's a little nanny statey to me, you know? It is. No, I, look, I'm not a, I'm not a libertarian. But like usually the libertarian arguments around, you know, like why you allow vices have a lot to do with the harms that are created by prohibition. And I just think that prohibition on sports betting was creating very few harms compared to other prohibitions. Look, I'm also a let consenting adults kind of do what you want thing. But the kind of the compromise here is, is to create some

friction, right? It's easier for me to like make sports bets where I, in New York than is I'm literally in a hotel in Las Vegas right now, right? And there are mobile apps because, like, they actually have more friction here. To actually bet on a mobile app in Vegas, you have to visit the casino window for the first time to verify yourself. And then it's just a little bit of friction, right?

Of course, you can actually bet while you're out the window if you want, you don't need the mobile app in the first place, right? In the UK, there are all these, like, little corner shops, the ladbrokes and whatnot. You can go in, get your ticket on the football match, come back later and cash it in. I will say, you know, when I bet I'm mostly doing it online these days, it is physically fun to collect a winning bet at a sports bug, to show them the ticket and they give you $100 bills.

That is kind of fun. That's a tactile. But like, yeah, you know, the frictionlessness of the online sports betting experience, right? Look, I am making bets on the NFL that are in, you know, the low four figures of pop, right? And so, yeah, I mean, you know, you want to deposit $10,000. in this account from PayPal if we're in the morning? No problem. You know what I mean? It's quite frictionless. It doesn't seem good to me. I mean, I think the problem you always have with Vice Industries, I remember the first time I went to a casino. I had just turned 21. My boyfriend took me,

and it turned out his grandfather, who shared his name and was at that point deceased, had been a compulsive gambler who had really, like, wrecked the family fortunes. The nice thing was, we got comped. We got comped everything. So we're in this hotel because they couldn't tell the difference, which is really stupid. Like at 20, I think he was like 22. You know, we show up. He's obviously not the guy who owned a factory and lost it. I like playing blackjack.

I know it's not a net winning proposition, but I like sitting there for an hour, having a drink, doing the math. I like gambling as little as possible. I used to play micro-stakes poker, which was fun. And my husband got really worried until he realized that, like, it was not physically possible for me to lose more. than like $10 a month with the amount of time I had to play. I like calculating the odds. I don't like the thrill of risking stuff. It just does not make me happy at all.

So I'm sitting there in this casino and I'm learning to play blackjack. And actually, most of the people at the table were pretty nice about it, which they're not always when you were playing blackjack if you hit wrong or you do something. That's because they don't understand probability. They think what cards you draw or don't draw affect their likelihood of winning or losing their hand, which is false. So anyway, there was a woman at the end. end of the table who did not look like she was having a good time. She looked exhausted. She was wearing kind of ratty denim overalls. And she played for a long time and we finally left because I was like, well, this was fun, but that was a good hour and a half of my life. I had a couple drinks.

Great. And as we walked away, I had gone to the bathroom. My boyfriend said I was talking to the dealer because at one point someone showed up with more money with more trips for her. He said she had lost like $50,000 and had been re-upped. And she did not look like she had $50,000 to lose. And that's who most of, that's where most of the profits from casinos come from is people who have a problem. It's also true for liquor. It's true for cigarettes. It's true for basically everything. Is that in any vice industry, your profits come from your worst, the people who cannot stop themselves and not people like Nate who do this like, you know, sort of rationally. and in a very calculating way.

And that's, I think, a struggle, a little bit of a struggle for me, even as a libertarian. I would say that the sports betting sites should be smarter because if they aren't, they are going to get regulated in ways they will not like. Like, you should not be able to place bets in the middle of a game in the way that they're doing where you can bet on the next play, the next whatever, because, like, you are basically trying to monetize someone's slot machine-like. behavior, this thing that they call negative flow where you're just like compulsively sitting there and hitting the button. If people are losing their houses doing that, the government is eventually going to come in and crush you. And I'm not saying that I will support the government when it does, but it is going to happen. And so do not design your system to squeeze every last

drop of blood out of people who have compulsive gambling habits. Because if you do that, then you you are going to end up with a government regulator sitting on your neck. And so you should have the good sense to like, and then you saw this, you've seen this with other industries where like in Nevada, right, the casinos actually eventually realized that having the mob there was a problem and worked with the government and to get rid of them because if they didn't, the alternative was worse. and I think that they should be organizing to try to crack down on the practices that are most likely to get people into serious trouble and also to corrupt the sporting games, right? Because it's a lot easier to screw up your next pitch than it is to lose the game for your team without getting taken out. Like, do some internal regulation guys, because if you don't, the external regulation's coming.

During the pandemic, I started going to Atlantic City a bunch to gamble poorly and lose all my money. And a lot of my friends spent that impulse losing all of their money in options on Robin Hood. And like, or on crypto. And I just think that like these people are going to do this. And they're going to lose all their money because life is unfair. Like, I think you can't really, you can't totally fix it. They're going to find another way. They're going to drop it on hookers if they aren't going to drop it on the game.

That's why we need poker, right? Poker is a good way for degenerous to put that toward games that require some degree of mathematical skills or reasoning skills and discipline and social skills, right? But yeah, look, I love Vegas. You see sad shit in Vegas on a routine basis, or not just in Vegas, in casinos that you don't see anywhere, right? I'm not like a big Vegas pool guy. I had like an hour to kill the other day, went to the pool, was trying to order a drink. Of course, the lime was really long, and the margaritas cost 20 bucks, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that, right? And then, like, this woman, like, passes out, like, flat on her back and looks like she's concussed, frankly, right?

They do have security there. They get people there right away. But you see shit like that in Vegas. You know, I remember seeing at the high limit lounge and the area, a guy, like, gambling away hundreds of thousands of dollars because in these kind of comatose, almost proud of how much he's lost. and is saying, well, she was sure pretty. The dealer, wasn't she? I think he was pretty clearly on something. And like, yeah, you just see more and more of that in the casino settings and you would

otherwise, right? Now, look, you also see, like, you go to like the win or something. It's a very high-end, luxurious experience. I think the average customer is actually having a pretty good time in that environment. Half the revenues are more are not made from gaming, quote, unquote, as a you optimistically call it. But yeah, look, I mean, you know, a lot of it comes down to slot machines. So, Megan, if you're playing Blackjack, the house advantage on Blackjack, depending on if you're using basic perfect strategy or not, is 0.3% to 2.0.0% depending on the rule set that's used, right?

Not anymore, because you're not going to find a table where they pay three to two on Blackjack in Las Vegas unless you're paying $100 a half. But yeah, the 0.4s and 0.3s are hard, right? But like, but for slot machines, it's like seven. Lina con, by the way. You had this consolidation in the casino industry, and the blackjack, you're supposed to win three to two when you get a blackjack. And they just change the rule up and down the strips. So instead you just get $6 for every $5 you bet. And as neat notes, it increases the house edge from like half a percent to 2%. The government, you know, it's a heavily regulated industry.

They could just have a rule that blackjack has to pay three to two. Look, no, the equilibrium might be that you have bricks and mortar casinos with table games run by human beings, right? Good union jobs. They have a sportsbook window there where you can physically. go to bet. Maybe they're like little satellite sports books, like, where you can go physically make a bet so they know that you are who you say they are. Everybody gets the same limits when they bet, right? You're not discriminating so that your worst customers can bid a million and your sharp customers can bet zero. There aren't slot machines, right? Because, you know,

maybe that's the equilibrium that would kind of compromise the Puritans and the libertarians. Before we go this week, I want to talk about Teen Vogue because this story is funny. Megan's so happy. So Condé Nass, which owns Vogue and The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, et cetera, closed Teen Vogue in the last few days, which, by the way, Teen Vogue still existed. Some listeners may not have been aware of that. It hadn't been a physical magazine for a number of years, but there was still a website with an editorial staff. And Teen Vogue was kind of funny because like 10 years ago, as Trump was running for president, they shifted from being a fashion magazine to being fashion plus far left politics. And they had some big viral hits in the early days, including a piece by Lauren Duka called Donald Trump is gaslighting America that genuinely did a tremendous number of page views.

But then they've, you know, they've gone along this whole time with stories under headlines like, what is environmental racism, 10 facts about how it works? or Karen is being used by white women. Here's why they need to stop. And so finally, Condé, whose business is deteriorating in the way that every print publisher has a deteriorating business right now, except the New York Times, they decide to close Teen Vogue. The web URL still exist and they'll have some Vogue stories that are put under it, but they fired staff. And employees at Connie Nest were unhappy about this, and several of them went up, marched up to the executive suites to confront the head of HR about the firings and demand, you know, know, did they do this, you know, to protect Donald Trump? What are they going to do to stand up to Donald Trump? And then Conday turned around and fired four of those people because you're not

allowed to do that in the workplace anymore. And this story just feels so 2017 to me. Like this was like, this was the way that like online publishing worked and the culture of it. It was anarchic and you were allowed to just like go and like, you know, like act like your, your company was a democracy and you're going up and saying, you know, the editorial vision has to be different and management actually took that seriously. And management decidedly does not take that seriously anymore these days. I mean, one of my favorite things about, it's so funny, that Lauren Duka, that essay that she wrote that started all of this, she was just the late night blogger. Like, it wasn't a thought out piece. They didn't have an editorial meeting for it. But then it was

so successful that they were like, got to double down on this and chase it. So it began and ended the same sort of anarchy in random nonsense. It's fascinating to me. It's like there's a famous essay by Richard Feynman on cargo cult science where you kind of build a bamboo radio and you put the coconut halves over your ears and you try to make the World War II cargo planes land and they don't. And you are mystified as to why. And this was, look, the reason the Teen Vogue thing happened in the first place was social media algorithms that amplified this stuff. A group of millennial women who were obsessed with youth stuff in the same way they

like the boomers were. Gen X, we're not like this. I'm 52. I don't have a fantasy about being like, I'm still a hip youngster. No, I am a crotchety old person. But so the funny thing about Teen Vogue, right, was that almost no teens were reading it. The audience for it was millennial women in the same way that the audience for YA novels became millennial women. And they somehow liked products that suggested that they were still like super young and hip, while catering to their actual increasingly middle-aged politics. And this was amplified by the social media algorithms that rewarded negativity. It was amplified, obviously, by the Donald Trump bump that everyone in left-wing media got.

And all of those things ended. They're over. The millennials are now way too busy worrying about, like, how to get their kids into Stanford to read Teen Vogue. The algorithms are no longer, first of all, Twitter is no longer, doesn't prioritize links. You can't get big traffic that way. Facebook also, after the resistance, people freaked out on Facebook and blamed them for electing Trump, de-emphasize politics. Instagram doesn't want it. And so there's actually no way to get that kind of virality that they had at the beginning.

And also, companies looked at what the internal disruption did to them and were like, no thanks. And I think the striking thing about that incident was they showed up with people filming it. Yeah, we know what the exchanges were because someone had their iPhone out and recorded it and then it ended up with the New York Post. Yeah, someone in the union was like, it would be a good idea for me

to go on record with someone filming me yelling at the HR guy, who, by the way, has no power to reopen Teen Vogue. He did not make that decision. He probably sent the letters because that's what HR does. But like, Anna Winter, did not call him in and say, you know, I've been thinking, should we still have Teen Vogue or not? No, that is not how that conversation went. And the fact that they thought this would be a good idea, that it would make them look good, that it would in some way end well. I think it speaks to, first of all, the way that the algorithms did just deform the cultures I wrote about this at a time, where everyone was performing for external audiences with internal problems. You do institutional work inside the institution. You don't like take it to Twitter or Twitter.

not a good place to navigate that. You don't take it till, you know, you don't leak it to the press. You talk about that stuff inside because if you don't, your institution cannot function. And indeed, the institutions stopped functioning. Bosses noticed and we're like, okay, we're done with this. And the fact that the people at Teen Vogue didn't notice, actually most of them were not at Teen Vogue. But the fact that they thought that this was still a strategy that was going to accomplish something other than making them feel cool for their friends. Or I guess maybe giving them a way to launch a substack for their brave stand. I think it marks kind of the final end of a really destructive form of politics in media

institutions. And I will say, not a moment too soon. First of all, if I were that guy kind of nasty nasty, right? The HR guy. You know, I would have handled it much less well than he did, right? I mean, literally the phrase, go fuck yourselves would have been repeated many times, right? And again, I'm sympathetic to people. Media is a tough industry. I'm sympathetic to, you know, sympathetic to everybody involved here, believe it or not, right? But like, it's a common parlor trick to use the allure of youth. Maybe Gen X is immune from this, right? But like, there are also like a lot of, I guess you'd call them like twink flueners. No, what is a twink fluencer? It's like these hairy cisson type suit, you know, 20-something Democrats who just so happen to have. Do they have to be gay?

I don't think many of them are gay, actually, right? But they're twinks. They're twinks even if they're straight. But they're twinks, right? They're twinks even if they're straight. They're like 20-something, you know, good-looking, clean-cut, 20-something-year-old Democrats who happen to endorse these fucking boomer politics positions like, Joe Biden. Wow, Joe Biden is really cool, right?

And like, and like invited to the White House and things like that because it's a way to, like, to misrepresent what actual youth opinion is in these avatars that seem, oh, it's a, young, maybe straight, you know, white male, how safe is that, right? And he's a young person, you know, there are different versions of this, you know, a friend of the show, Taylor Lorenz, for example, frequently claims to speak on behalf of the youth of America. When in fact, like, what the youth think is, or, you know, you have like in the, you know, Israel, Palestine and stuff. And again, I'm sympathetic to any protesters, right? But like, you know, but they aren't necessarily a percent of what youth opinion is, like, overall on issue. Actually, that's one where there is a

big age-related split. But overall, young people are not particularly progressive or left-wing across the board on some issues. Yes. On some issues, no. Right. But yeah, it also applies to other disadvantaged groups. We're like, oh, here's this person who claims to be an avatar on behalf of all Hispanic people or Jewish people or gay people or black people or whatever else, right? And, you know, and the way that the internal politics of identity politics works with progressive types, then that can be persuasive, right? You hear somebody who explicitly or implicitly is a member of ex-group, and you think that, like, they speak on behalf of all of that group when, in fact, it's just still one person's opinion that may or may not correlate with overall demographic

splits in the electorate. I mean, Josh, you had that story a few months ago about how, like, blue sky ghettoized themselves, sort of, you know, they're like, yes, it was, what I wrote was that blue sky isn't a bubble, it's a containment dome. Right, not ghetto. I'm Jewish. I'm allowed to say get out. Some of the worst liberal ideas that used to be annoyingly perpetuated through Twitter, now just bounce around on blue sky and I literally don't need to hear them and politicians don't hear them as much. So the Democratic Party isn't distorted by these sorts of things. So yes, this was my pro blue sky take. As I was listening to Megan talk about it, like those people are, they're not on Twitter and they're not doing those algorithms for it, but they're still performing

publicly for blue sky and those people are all just raving mad. Yeah. I mean, I was curious to hear like, Nate, how do you feel about Blue Sky? No. Do tell. It is, like, amazing. So, Nate, you're on Blue Sky, right? No, I'm not. I think I've never actually skeeted there, whatever the fuck it's called, right?

Skeeting is that? I'm not familiar with that, but I know there was a teen vogue article called How to Masturbate if you have a penis. So maybe that was about skeeting? Because I am a crotchety Gen X or is this some slang of which I am unaware, Josh? You know how skeet shooting works? Yeah. So you imagine other things that might be shot out in a...

Yes. As the only non-penus have her on this podcast, I am... I would not have initially thought of that, but now I understand. I apologize. I got to stop track. Nate, what do you think about blue sky? No, look, it is amazing how, like, you know, the way that large language models work, I know that sounds like a detour, right?

They mine all the texts that everyone's written on the internet. and they find like implicit vectors, right? Things that didn't have names before, but which are concepts that are relevant in tying different fragments of English and other languages together, right? And it's like all these fucking characteristics that I fucking hate, the humorlessness

and like the scoldiness and like the constant setting of, you know, expertise in incredibly biased ways and the claim to be kind of bold contrarians when actually you become like very partisan and kind of hackish. Like they're all, concentrated and the personalization of politics, right, that if you disagree with somebody that you

attack their integrity and their character and not debate their ideas, like all the fucking biggest tools in the world all have blue sky accounts, right? It's amazingly well predictive of people that I'll just say, you know, it is personal. I find these people incredibly annoying. I have been arguing with them online for years and, you know, I find them incredibly annoying. sufferable. And the fact that they all are together in this hellscape of their own creation, containment dome, Josh, I find extremely satisfying. I think we can leave it there this week. Nate Silver, thank you so much for joining us for that whole show. This has been great.

Of course. Thank you, guys. And thank you, Ben and Megan. Fun conversation. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We are a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swannock mixed this episode. Our music is by Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening. Stay cool out there.