Central Air - Snow NIMBYs

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

Listeners: join Josh, Megan and Ben on Friday at 12:30 pm Eastern / 9:30 am Pacific for a video chat on Substack. Go to centralairpodcast.com for more details. This week: we discuss our exasperation at Greenlandpolitik and consider an endgame where Trump simply declares that he has Greenland without actually doing anything besides coloring in the map. Plus: the Shapiro-Harris feud, defining a woman (harder than you'd think!), and the already-backfiring California billionaire tax.Sign up for updates from Central Air at www.centralairpodcast.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Ben Dreyfus, who writes the substack newsletter, Calm Down. Ben, you're joining us from like Sun Valley, Idaho this week, right? The town where you grew up next door to Bruce Willis? Yes. Yes, I am. I haven't seen him. Apparently is not doing terribly well. No, no, yes. Sorry. But it's a lovely town. They, they haven't closed it down yet. I was just in Aspen last week. It was Gay Ski Week there. And like my strong Yimbi tendencies, that are brought out when I'm in New York, get only stronger when I'm in one of these rich ski towns, which actually have the worst, most absurd nimbie politics in the United States.

Like literally in Aspen now, it's like $15 million for a 3,000 square foot house in town. And you walk through town, it's all these very attractive, low-rise buildings, you know, old mining town, whatever. And I just, you know, I just walked through there and I just want to put up skyscrapers. It's like there is so much demand. And, you know, in France, in the Alps, that's like what you actually have is like brutalist towers. at the bottom of the ski resorts because the French at least sometimes understand

that grand national projects are a good thing and we want many people near our beautiful mountains. I think they'd probably like string me up and kill me in Aspen if I tried to do the actually appropriate kind of real estate planning

that they ought to have there. But I have opinions. I mean, Ketcham is much worse than Aspen. I mean, there's a hard, a hard three floor limit. Ketchum and Sun Valley are the adjacent towns

right by the fancy ski resort there. Yeah, and there's literally like you can't build anything at all. They don't have, you know, we have one hotel that got some sort of magic power thing about two decades ago to be four stories. And it's still like, it's the point of great contention, you know. People are like, how do they, they ruined it? We'll never pick that mistake again. We also have Megan McArdle, as always, columnist for the Washington Post.

Megan, I imagine you've been out to Aspen for some Aspen Institute type stuff. I have. Yes, Nantucket Ower Mountain, as I like to call it. I remember being there about a decade ago for, I've never gotten to go. for, I've never gotten to go for ideas. I went for the retirement security policy conference, which is like the, the most boring of the Aspen Institute things. But it was still an opportunity to go to Aspen in July, which is beautiful. And I remember walking through one of these lovely residential neighborhoods with some people from AARP and whatnot and being like, you know, I wonder what these houses cost. Is this a $3 million house I'm looking at? And we fired up Zillow and it was like a $7 million house. And this was a decade ago. Now they've doubled since then. So, you know, if the, if you had the opportunity to buy you. real estate in Aspen 30, 40 years ago. That would have been a really good opportunity not to pass up. Sadly, I did not have that opportunity because I was 12. Right. Well, you know, some people get the entrepreneurial bug early. You know, you start with the lemonade stand and sooner or later you have

real estate in one of America's premier resort towns. If only. I'm not even sure I got the entrepreneurial bug late. So speaking of implausible real estate deals, I suppose, we should start this week with Greenland. I think something has gone wrong with the president. And like, you know, he's always been, you know, a bizarre, insane person. But the last few weeks have been especially bad. And I think what happened is that the Venezuela operation was a tremendous success on narrow terms. Like we actually, we were able to go in and snatch Maduro and install new leadership that appears to be more pliant on certain specific areas that the president cares about. We haven't restored democracy to Venezuela or anything. And it's not clear that we've done anything in the long

run that makes it a great place for U.S. oil companies to invest or anything like that. But Trump, you know, went in to do a thing that it wasn't clear we could do and it was a smashing success. And it seems to have reinforced for him this idea that at least in the Western Hemisphere, can have anything he wants. And now he's going around demanding Greenland. Yeah, we have entered the Mad King phase of his presidency. And I don't like it. No. I didn't like the prior phase to be. quite clear, but the new phase seems worse on every dimension. And look, I really do not know what is going on with this. It's crazy. Like, it seems like he's just determined to have a legacy of

having increased the territorial size of the United States so I guess we can surpass Canada. Greenland big on map. Yeah. That's what it is. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, look, it is strategic. I don't want to downplay that, but we have all the access we need for our military. Right, but that makes it not strategic, right? Like, you know, access to Greenland is strategic. We already have it. Like, this effort to, like, change its power on the map. It's not strategic at all.

Yeah. The place is strategically valuable, but we don't need to conquer it to get those benefits. We can just ask Denmark nicely to let us put more troops there. And they will comply because they don't like Russia either. Yeah. I'm just at a loss, Ben. Yeah. I mean, I guess I just have a hard time understanding what his endgame is here.

It's not going to be that we actually voluntarily conquer Kremlin. Okay. Like, there's just, that just isn't going to be it. NATO, too many NATO issues here. So then you would like, what is the point of this? Is he just like trying to bully them into Denmark eventually saying, fine, you can have it. But here's the cost. You'll have to write us a check.

Because then you see, you know, numbers bandied about where they're like, all right, what if we run them a check? you know, I don't know, maybe we'd give them a $500 bill. And like, that seems like not a good deal for us. That's quite a lot of money. And then you're like, what if they lower it? Maybe, I don't know, we'd do a hundred bill. And I'm not sure if that's a good deal either.

Because, like, again, we can just build whatever we want there with the military. We don't need to do any of this. So, like, what is the point? Where is this going? If not just him wanting to kind of go out and have a couple of months thing to talk about. You know what I think he's going to do is I think just, you know, one day in the coming weeks, he's going to announce that Greenland is ours. Like, we already have a military presence there by invitation by the Danes. And so they can just like, he'll be like, okay, like he'll put out a new map on truth social and be like Greenland is ours.

It doesn't necessarily mean doing anything. Like, I don't think we want to be like responsible for, you know, civic utilities in nuke or anything like that. And so what happens if the president is just out there and says, you know, well, now we have Greenland and we don't really do anything different? And then presumably the Danes say, no, you don't have Greenland. But I don't expect anyone to fire a gun at each other. He prosecutes basically any news outlet that mentions that we do not, in fact, own Greenland. I mean, like the Chinese, where, like, Marriott International has to do these groveling apologies for a map for a map on their website that makes it look like Taiwan as a country. I mean, like, but that kind of. kind of is the president's objective here, right? He just wants people to say that that Greenland is part of the United States. And so on some level, I mean, it's, you know, it's obviously it's doing huge damage to our relationships in Europe. And we'll talk a little bit about the, you know,

the tariff and trade implications and Ukraine and everything else we have to do with the Europeans. But in terms of, you know, if all he wants is a map that colors Greenland and the same color as the United States, that's actually a very easy thing to achieve. It's easier than getting Maduro. But like, if he does this, if he does just release this map on Truth Social and then. people in this administration, you start calling Greenland one of the United States. Right. What happens when someone from Greenland tries to fly to the United States without a passport? Well, I mean, I guess, I mean, first of all, they're Danes so they can already-

Are we going to issue passports to everyone in Greenland, just like optional American citizenship? Maybe, I don't know. Like, that sort of seems like the sort of troll. Only like 60,000 people live in Greenland. It would not be, you know, that challenging a thing to do even if they were doing it purely as a troll. We go and have one-on-one interviews with every single one of them. Right. Well, that's also, I mean, one of the associated things that's been driving me crazy here has been the effort on the part of fans of the president to come up with justifications for why this is anything other than idiotic.

And the first thing you'll see is, you know, like, well, art of the deal. Like, you know, you go out and you ask for some big thing and redefine the terms of the negotiation. It's like when he owned that USFL affiliate, the alternative league to the NFL in the 1980s. And he hired Herschel Walker. before he hired Herschel Walker as a losing Senate candidate, he hired Herschel Walker to play football for him. And he was like, you know, this is so good for the league. Herschel Walker is so great for branding for everyone.

Really, the other team should pay part of his salary because it's such a good thing. And, you know, they didn't do it. But he writes in the art of the deal about how proud he was for making this ridiculous ask because, you know, you can't get something if you don't ask for it. And so you have people out there saying, well, see, he's not, we're not going to invade Greenland.

He's just trying to get good terms on a price from Denmark. And so first of all, like, you know, that these are our allies. You're not supposed to like, like you're some sort of mob boss go in and say, you know, nice island, shame if anything happened to it. And then try to, you know, and say, well, but I didn't actually break its kneecaps. And therefore what I did was okay. And then, I don't know, I'm just like there are certain things that are just so manifestly stupid that it feels like there should be a certain amount of dignity associated with not trying to defend them. And this is just one of those where it just makes my head hurt whenever I see anyone on Twitter acting like, this is not stupid. Even mob buses understand that they need allies. And the thing is, like, I've heard all of these Trump supporters say, well, yeah, this is just how he comes out of New York real estate. This is how it works. And I'm sorry. That is not how New York real estate works. No, my father was a lobbyist for the heavy construction industry in New York, which does not do residential real estate. It does like tunnels and bridges and so forth. But like there's two trade associations, the one my dad ran, and then the Building Trades Association.

They're all members of it. It's actually an incredibly small world. And you cannot actually do this to your contractors because then people won't work for you if they see you doing this to their friends. And that is the crazy part is this idea that, like, America should just be this schoolyard bully. Like, what happens with schoolyard bullies is that eventually everyone else on the schoolyard teams up against them and beats the snot out of them. And that's what we're shaping up for. Yeah, I mean, straight out of college, my first four years out of college before I went into journalism, I was a real estate banker. I worked at Wells Fargo in their New York commercial real estate office doing, among other things, large construction financing. I worked on a team that, you know, finance really big buildings. And when they were teaching us like Wells Fargo's philosophy of credit, the slogan they use is people credit real estate, which is you're supposed to think about those things in that order when you're thinking about whether something is, you know, whether a project is good to make a loan against. And the thing about that order is that, even if the real estate and the credit are in good shape, if the person is not someone who's good to do business with, you don't lend. And the example they always gave us on like who fails the people test was Donald Trump. This is before Donald Trump entered politics. This was when he was just, you know, real estate slash television celebrity business guy. And his whole reputation was as someone who, you know, did not keep his word and would try to get out of paying people amounts that he was supposed to pay them. And the idea was that's who you don't bank. And he had all.

of these, you know, very unconventional financial arrangements in significant part because he alienated the lenders who do the normal lending for normal real estate in New York. There is a way that things are done there. And a key part of it is that your reputation matters. And your, you know, your reputation is someone who keeps their end of a bargain and pays amounts that they're supposed to pay is important for being able to do business on an ongoing basis. So it always drives me slightly nuts when people are like, this is how New York real estate works. No, like, there's a reason that Donald Trump ultimately made his money through a combination of licensing his name to other people's real estate projects and being a television celebrity who did a performance of what it is to be a business person. And look, those were both good businesses and he made a lot of money in those businesses, but he did not actually have an extensive history as a real estate developer. He built a handful of buildings in New York. Yeah, there's a reason, and there's a reason he left for Atlantic City. Yeah. And then went bankrupt there too.

There's like a trope that I don't know if you guys watched the television show Landman on Paramount Plus. I do not. Oh, yes. It just had its season finale on Sunday. Don't spoil it. I haven't watched it yet. All right, but it's about just for the uninitiated. It's about oil. It's not an oil company. Okay. So there is a thing that happens in that episode. And it's a common Hollywood trope, okay? Which is businessman needs money for business. And it's legitimate business.

In this case, an oil business. And instead of going to a bank, they go to the cartel. And the cartel gives them awful terms, but then gives them the thing and sets up the new season. And so in this version of it, this guy has a, a bunch of producing wells. There's a lot of, like, assets here. They're sure, you know, this is, I just need some $40 million. And then I'm going to be able to get this $1.5 billion out of the ground.

So he turns to the cartel. They give him the money and he says, all right, and then you get, you know, 50% equity for eternity. So essentially, this is the worst deal in history. And instead, he never goes just to like the first bank of Midland or Bank of America and says, like, it's like a normal loan, sir. They would say, pay him out. Instead, he goes for equity over debt. Stupidest thing in the world. Is there an explanation of why?

Is it like Donald Trump where he, like, all the bankers think he's a shady bitch? No, but that's my point is, is that, like, there is no explanation for why in these shows. Instead, these shows always just go straight to the cartel. They don't ever call up normal banks. They skip the thing. But, like, Trump, Trump is like, he, you understand why he can't go to the banks anymore.

He burned all these bridges. Wells Fargo keeps telling him no. So eventually he has to go to the Germans than the cartel. And it's getting, giving them worse and worse deals. But, like, in Hollywood, a lot of this seems like the people who say, this is just how it works in New York real estate. It's because they've watched landmen and shit. They're just like someone intends of having to go to the cartel. Yeah.

Yeah, the idea that you succeed in business by just being, like, totally unscrupulous, it's not correct, right? No. And especially it's not correct when you're dealing with people who also have power. Right? You can argue about whether, say, VCs rapaciously price the capital, they offer new startups and so forth. But you can't really argue that you're going to get away with this with your, like, international allies. This is not how any of this works. But I mean, part of the problem here, the political problem here, going all the way back to 2015, is that, you know, the huge, you know, kitchen sink full of arguments that have gotten thrown at Donald Trump over the years, the one that, like, fell the flattest with voters, and you would see this in focus groups and such, is arguments

that Trump was, in fact, a bad businessman. And, you know, you try to tell people this and you give them the history of his specific businesses and the bankruptcies in Atlantic City. He couldn't even make money running casino, et cetera, et cetera. And you tell voters this, normal people. And they're basically like, well, if he's such a bad businessman, how does he have the plane? And it's actually, it's actually not a crazy take. It's like, you know, the, you know, if he's so bad at business, why is he so rich? And I understand like he inherited money from his father, but he actually, you know, he ended up with more money than he should have had just from inheriting money from his father. And the real answer is that he was good at the entertainment business and that he was good at this licensing business.

He was good at a different business than the one that he holds himself out as being an expert in. But it's sort of, you know, the having to argue that point with people was just impossible. And eventually all the campaigns stopped bothering because they realized that this was just a dead end. But then part of the problem is that when he tries to take his purported success in business as a real estate developer, as this bizarre real estate developer with all these bizarre approaches to it, and then say, well, now I'm going to apply that in world politics. You know, you can argue about, you know, well, world politics is different. But the real answer is that didn't even work in real estate. And that's just something that we all gave up 10 years ago trying to convince anyone of because they were never going to believe it in what even was the point. But, you know, now here he is trying to apply his purported business lessons when really he's in the business of selling business lessons.

Anyway, I hate it. And, like, I mean, isn't that true, though, here? It's true? Like, you know, he's never even had, you know, he's been good at the entertainment side of politics. But, like, he's been trying to renegotiate deals for the United States since 2016. And is there one I'm forgetting where he actually did it? I mean, I guess NAFTA, NAFTA sort of got a little different. He changed, like, three commas.

in the agreement and was like, I've gotten that's an amazing deal. Yeah. I mean, I think he has had like genuinely a more productive Middle East policy than Biden or other traditional presidents have had. I think that's like the one. And maybe that's because it's an area of the world where nobody is scrupulous. And so his, you know, his approach to what international relations might should look like is a little bit of a better fit there than it is for, for example, of Europe where, you know, what he's just doing is, you know, people have, you know, senses of personal honor and pride and there's domestic politics in these countries. This is the other thing that drives me crazy with the pro-Trump response.

Like, you know, even there's like this law professor Rob Anderson, people who want to know better. But it's basically like, well, you know, the Danes shouldn't be so belligerent about this. Like, you know, this is a negotiation and they're the ones who're escalating. It's like there's domestic politics in all of these countries. And when the president comes and takes a dump on your country and says that, you know, your sovereignty doesn't matter. and the fact that you have territory who gives a shit.

Like, these political leaders, they're responsible to their own voters who are, for very good reason, offended by this behavior. It's not like dealing with some kleptocracy in the Middle East where there is literally no democratic accountability. It also sets something off in my brain, right? Like, I would have no problem with us taking Greenland. If people in Greenland, like the 60,000 people who lived there, wanted it. You know, like, if those people said, I don't like Denmark. You know, Denmark, they aren't us. They haven't been nice to us.

And we'd actually rather live in the United States, I'd be like, okay, that's the people of this place saying it. If we want to go bully this tiny little Denmark and take it, that's one thing. But the people in Greenland don't want it. So, no one seems to want it. No, I mean, two things. One, as you know, they don't want it. But also, you know, we have certain obligations country to country to, especially to a country like Denmark that is a NATO ally. I mean, and you see this a lot within Europe.

Like, it's considered very poor form to go around fomenting separatist movements in other countries, even when those separatist movements reflect very real domestic sentiment in certain places. Like, you know, if the Catalans decided that they wanted to leave Spain and join the U.S., we still can't go take Catalonia because of our obligations to Spain, even if that reflected genuine sentiment in Catalonia. And similarly, you know, like, I mean, there's a lot of municipalities and states in the United States where if France came to them right now and said, you know, gee, would you rather be part of France? like, you know, maybe, you know, Massachusetts might say yes to that,

but that still doesn't make it okay for the French to come and, you know, try to, like, you know, get them to have a referendum and, you know, get states to secede. I don't think that's, I don't think even Massachusetts will say yes to that. The real tragedy of this is that, is that we're missing our opportunity to turn Alberta the diverse state. Yeah, more of that dirty oil, heavy sour oil. There is actually, like, an Alberta. There is an Alberta separatist movement.

And I think we're looking like a less attractive partner for them. Well, I mean, there's also been some interesting shifts in Canadian politics in response to our ridiculous behavior where, you know, the prime minister there, Mark Carney, for one thing, made news this week opening up to Chinese made vehicles. We had previously had a policy in concert trying to keep out the cheap Chinese EVs for a mix of economic protectionist and national security reasons. but now we no longer have a shared policy on the auto industry because the president keeps, you know, threatening and imposing tariffs on autos and auto parts. And so the Canadians have gone and made a deal where they're going to let in the Chinese cars. And then also the prime minister, you know, his liberal party had generally been somewhat hostile to fossil fuel development. But he cut a deal with the premier of Alberta where they're planning toward building a pipeline to take Albertan crude oil to the Pacific Ocean so it can be exported to Asia.

So, you know, Alberta has gotten better terms from its national government in part because of the, you know, the U.S. hostility there. Also worth noting that Mark Carney is only prime minister because Trump had to go and attack the Canadians and put these ridiculous tariffs on. The Liberal Party would have lost. Trump single-handedly turned around their fortunes. Well, I mean, it was a Trump and then also like the ridiculous Justin Trudeau resigning and being replaced by a more serious. person who then also abandoned the very unpopular carbon tax policy of the liberals. I mean, it's an important lesson for Democrats in the United States that if you ditch your unpopular leader and his unpopular policies, the polls will actually shift around you. Who would have thought?

Maybe, but so, you know, like the, we have a lovely central banker here and Jay Powell. It would be nice if we could just install him like the Canadians did with their central banker. But alas, we, you know, wouldn't that be so funny? Direct democratic elections. Imagine just how the, how, how like the internet hordes on the right and left would react to. Some twist debate and Jay Powell is now the president. Well, they do this in other countries. In Italy, Mario Draghi was like made the prime minister by like a cabal of like centrist elites. I look on with like longing at the fact that this can just be done in other places, but

not not in the United States. The other thing, the compounding stupidity of this that I want to discuss, is the communications that the president has been sending out. He's been publishing text messages that he's been getting, including like a, you know, kind of ass-kissing one from Mark Ruza, former Dutch prime minister who runs NATO, sort of praising the president for how great he is on, you know, cooperation with Europe, et cetera. And then a more reasonable one from Emmanuel Macron, basically being like, you know, we're in line on Syria. I don't understand what you're doing on Greenland. Maybe we can all get dinner while we're in Davos, which, you know,

the president published as though it was embarrassing. I think that's a perfectly reasonable request from from the French president. But so anyway, he wrote to the prime minister of Norway and then carbon copied all these other European leaders saying, well, since you didn't give me the Nobel Peace Prize, I no longer have to be primarily interested in peace. And he says, you know, I should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize because I ended eight wars. But it really, you know, this is what makes me think it's just about the color of Greenland on the map. It's he wants recognition. He, you know, the last thing that he doesn't have that he wants is respect from elites around the world. And so he wants, he wants the peace prize and he wants to, you know, expand American

territory and, like, stamp his legacy on something and the Trump Kennedy Center and all that. And so, but he's literally, like, demanding the Nobel Peace Prize. It's not good enough that he received Maria Machado's Peace Prize. He wants one that actually has his name in spite. I mean, it's just such a cook. Him accepting that Peace Prize from her. Like, you understand why she offered it. Sure. She, she's using a transactional. She's being strategic. Yeah. I mean, but him accepting it is such a bitch move. It's the most embarrassing thing I've ever heard. in my entire life. He didn't even have like the stones to say, oh, thank you very much.

You know, you keep that for yourself. I don't really need. He actually said like, thank you. This is mine now. This is like somebody accepting it for like an Oscar they didn't win. I love the memes around this with like him receiving like the Wimbledon women's singles championship. A trophy from Serena Williams and then him like being like Playboy Playmate of the year. I think the most hopeful thing about this is that it shows that he's obsessed with his legacy in the way that second-term presidents are, which means maybe he's not going to try to stay in office after 2028.

Well, look, he's quite old. Maybe. He can't stay in office forever. I don't even think that that's really a concession. And the other thing is, like, there was a version of this. Jonathan Shate wrote something like this couple of months ago that, like, like, his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize is like the one pro-social urge that Donald Trump has, that like maybe he would try to create some peace so he could win the Peace Prize. But it's clear that now his view is that he can just like demand his way into the Peace Prize. And it's about like, first of all, he's under the impression that the government of Norway can even decide who gets the prize. But it's like it's like he's going to invade Norway and take the Nobel Peace Prize. Right. But I think that he is now, he's come to the view that, like, he still wants the peace prize, but it's not necessarily linked to his actual creation of peace. I mean, even though he, you know, he's been going around saying, you know, I ended eight wars. A friend of mine was asking me while we were in Aspen, like, you know, can someone ask the president which eight eight wars? He says he ended. I was like, oh, no, no, there's a list. Like, this is not, it's not, I mean, it's a made up number, but there are eight supposed conflicts tied to it. There are two of which I think that he actually played a significant role in, in ending.

which is this like Azerbaijan, Armenia, 30-year-old conflict where there is now an armistice. And the other is between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, where there was a peace deal of sorts. There's others like where he says he ended the Pakistan-India conflict, which I think would be news to the Pakistanis and the Indians. And similarly, there was this like skirmish between Thailand and Cambodia, which there was an agreement. But anyway, they're back fighting again. So that one doesn't count. And then there's also two that are not, that were not real conflicts. was supposedly that Egypt and Ethiopia and Kosovo and Serbia were at war with each other.

And no one could quite figure out what that was. There's a dispute between the Ethiopians and the Egyptians over a dam, but they were not fighting a war. And it's, you know, he's, it's basically like, it's like when they, in New York, when they're like, you know, affordable housing units saved or created, he's scoring himself for wars ended or, like, caused not to start. He's saying that, you know, I prevented them from even going to war. And that should be counted. Well, it's also not just the list because, like, some of them, some of those, I'll grant him that, like, they did specific, you know, they sent an envoy to do a help negotiate a deal. Right. But some of these other ones, they just, like, the White House released or press release saying, we hope for peace.

And then, like, when the warden breakout, they said, that was us. See, we did it. We got it. We'll score that one for us as well. So the, in terms of, like, getting him out of this Mad King mode, that, you know, there's always this hope that, like, some external force is going to stop him. And so one is, you know, maybe the, you know, maybe the. the tariffs he's been throwing around. Maybe the Supreme Court will throw those out. And there's been, it feels like every week someone says to me, like, oh, the tariff decision, it's coming down tomorrow from the court, including today was one of those days, where I know, I know, Megan, you were getting people saying this to you, too. Yeah, but they've said it, like, four times now. And this is just, it's all speculation and no one knows. Right. Someday they will rule. But, like, people keep saying it's going to be a specific date and then it's not. So, like,

some of the president's tools may be taken away there. You've also had market reaction. And that's something that the president has responded to in previous months. They, you know, when he rolled out the quote unquote liberation day tariffs last April, there was a hugely negative market reaction and he walked some of it back. And so the markets, Monday was a holiday. They opened on Tuesday. They're down, but they're not like crashing. Like the Dow opened down 700 points. Last I looked as we were taping, it was down about 450 points. Bond yields have moved. The 10-year yield is up to 4.271, which is the highest level since September. So maybe that's enough to chasten him. But the problem is that this stuff has been self-limiting because when the market does do big moves, then the president

chickens out and undoes things and the market moves back. And that discourages the market from moving in the first place. So I don't, you know, I don't know that the market's going to save us here. Yeah, I don't think it is. I don't understand how the markets think about him. The other thing is that when there have been these sell-offs, like there were in April, and then the president unwinds whatever he did, the people who sold off lost a bunch of money. Yeah. You know, it's, it's costly to overreact to what the president does if he's going to unwind it. And so I think that, that itself chasens the market.

I have been pretty good about not being a, uh-oh person, you know, I'm not like a big investor, but I just like invest. And I've always been like, you know, who cares? It'll all be a little survive it. And then about a week ago, I finally did have a, uh-oh, Ben. This is now getting a little. It was the Jay Powell stuff where I was like, all right, let's, let's stop. Did you move out of equities a week ago? I moved out. I moved out. I moved everything. I cleared it all out.

Really? And how much does the market need to fall before you go back in? I don't know. I'm going to need to see some, I'm not that good of it. I'm going to need to like get a whole, get a whole new pH balance and put it in the water thing because it just scared me so much with the, with the Powell prosecution stuff that I was like, I don't want to just be sitting on these positions at the moment. So when you just said, like, the market was down today, I was like, oh, few, Ben, few. At least you got out. Well, so, I mean, the flip side of, you know, on the one hand, like, this fallen stock

prices, you know, a little over 1% feels modest in certain ways. The flip side of it is that, like, I feel like Scott Bessent wakes up in the morning and, like, focuses on, can I get the 10-year yield under 4%. And now he is failing at that. And the 10-year yield is, you know, up, you know, as I say, you know, 4.27-ish. And so if he wants to get the yield down, I mean, they've tried threatening the Fed. It doesn't really work because it's ambiguous which direction it should push interest rates if you undermine Fed independence. If you cause the Fed to inflate a bunch and then the Fed is going to need to raise rates later to deal with that, then maybe rates should go up because you undermine Fed independence.

And then similarly, you know, this global turmoil they create with the Greenland thing, that also tends to push rates up. So, like, if they're really focused on a 10-year yield under 4%, what they should do is stop doing. all the dumbass things they've been doing for the last month. If only. If, well, if only, I guess, I guess we shall see. I don't think they can stop him. I think his advisors have completely lost control in a way that is different from the first term. Like, yes, he was not entirely constrained in his first term.

But, like, now it's really, I cannot imagine there is anyone within the administration who has supported the Greenland. nonsense, right? He's just doing this. He's just doing... They're implementing it. What is the... I honestly don't know what support means because, like, is it, did there someone in the Pentagon who has been like has to, you know, make sure that war plan for Greenland is up, up to date? Like, make sure we've, like, get, like, make some, some, like, troop numbers. Well, I would, I would assume we do have a war plan for Greenland in the event that the Soviets. It was probably made in 1943, though. And then Russia, right? Well, but I mean, one thing I saw people pointing out is that, you know, the everyone talks about, you know, like the strategic importance of Greenland and the Arctic, blah, blah, blah, but like the whatever national security global, like, threat assessment, the administration published just a couple of months ago makes no mention of the Arctic.

And so, like, you know, to the extent that, you know, that this is not just something that matters strategically, but it's like supposed to be a top priority. It does not appear to have rated. But then the president was like, you know, a big on map. Like, you know, jokingly, I think a few weeks ago, Megan, you were like, we need to get him one of those map projections that squeezes the north and south regions to create accurate sizes. Because Greenland is, in fact, you know, a tiny size, the size of Africa, even though it looks nearly as big on a map. Like, but he'll, you know, they'll be like, oh, woke map. Like, you know, making the white country smaller. I mean, it is quite big.

It's like a quarter of the size of the continental U.S. It's not tiny. But it's not nearly as big as big as it looks on the map. Let's leave that there on this Greenland stupidity. I have a headache already. But listeners, I encourage you, go to Centralartpodcast.com. We're going to do a live chat this Friday at 12.30 p.m. Eastern, where you'll be able to ask us questions about Greenland or about the wealth tax in California, which we're going to talk about later on this show, the proposal for that. You can ask us about 2028 election stuff.

Any questions you have for us, go to centralairpodcast.com. You'll get an email that we'll let you know when we're doing that live chat this Friday. We would love to have you join us. Let's talk about Josh Shapiro, because this is like sort of like amusing office politics stuff. Josh Shapiro has a memoir coming out, why we keep the light. And what his office, when they ask him about stuff with Kamala Harris, they keep giving these statements like, Governor Shapiro wrote a broad-ranging book about his, you know, his life and philosophy. and this is just one element in it. But obviously what everyone is interested in is the VP vetting

process in which he says that he was asked by aides to Kamala Harris whether he'd ever been an agent of the Israeli government. And then subsequently was asked had he ever interacted with an undercover Israeli agent. His answer to that question being, how should I know? Clearly, the VP vetting process between the two of them went very badly. And he didn't want to be vice president and she didn't want to pick him to be vice president. They had to fumble their way toward not being a ticket together. And so there were these questions about Israel. We've all been in those relationships where you're just waiting for the other person to break up with you because that will be less drama. And they're waiting for you to break up with them.

And so it drags on for another six months. But on the other hand, like, when I got out of those relationships, I would be grateful. Yeah. I have never seen two kind of active politicians in the same party shiving each other with quite such enthusiasm in brieo. as Kamala Harris and Josh Shapiro. I don't understand what's happening here. Well, I mean, so she started it with her own book. Yes.

And yes. The most incredible section of her book is the VP vetting. Not only because she shives Josh Shapiro for no apparent reason, but then also because she describes Tim Walts telling her, like, I'm bad in debates. And she's like, no, no, it's fine. And then later in the book, as he is flubbing his debate with J.D. Vance, she's like, how could this happen? How could you give those? And she's like, he told you this was going to happen. What do you mean how? I know you love that passage because this is the third episode of the podcast on which you have recounted that passage. It is a great passage. No, but I mean, like, just absolutely mystifying how she decided, first of all, to pick Tim Walts. But then second of all, how she decided having slighted John

Shapiro, that she should make him look bad in her book. Why would you do that? That's not how politics works. Well, I mean, I guess maybe they're going to run against each other for the 2028 nomination. I mean, I think that the easy answer might just be that they didn't like each other. They felt pressure because to both be on the ticket together because he was such an obvious choice. But at the same time, there was this entire issue with him being Jewish because of the left. So, like, she was looking for a way out of it.

she didn't want to make people on the left. She didn't want the world to say she's turning down the Jew. So she was looking for a way out of it besides that. He didn't want to be on it because he thought she was going to lose. So the way besides that was to ask him, gee, do you really want to be vice president? It's quite expensive. Well, see, then you get to the thing.

Because, like, the thing about asking him if he's a secret Jewish agent is that it does sound terrible. But I also understand, you know, they asked Waltz if he was a secret Chinese agent. And, like, maybe there's someone just with a list saying, let's just make sure all these people aren't agents. But, like, the more shocking. calling thing to me in this passage of days ago is that then after he says, no, I'm not a fucking Jewish agent, what are you talking

about? Is that then this same aid calls him back up and goes, hey, so I just wanted to say, thank you so much for meeting with Kamala. She had a really great time. She's going to be doing, she's going to be working through it, expect to hear back in a few days. I did just want to point out, though, that there's not a lot of money in being VP, and since you're pretty

poor, it might cost a lot. Like, will you even be able to afford nice clothes for your wife? Yeah, you know, the food isn't free when you're vice president. Anyways, just something to think about and he was like, are you trying to convince me

to drop out by saying I'm too poor to be vice president? I just don't know. I just want you'd be able to make whatever calculations you need to make just so that you can be aware how your family is just going to throw out there. Harris also told him

that the VP's office doesn't have a private bathroom. I mean, this is how, just let them down easy, guys. But you just say to him, he's an adult. Just say, look, I don't think it's going to work. We're going to someone else. Well, one of the funniest things to me about this, and this is from Kamala's own accounts of this negotiation with Josh Shapiro, is that, you know, famously,

Kamala Harris was this, like, mistreated put upon vice president who, like, had no real role in policymaking and was given all the worst portfolios and had to, like, claim to be, like, the immigration czar and find a way to fix root causes of migration in, like, good. luck, go fix Guatemala, Vice President Harris. So, you know, she actually had like a pretty good point about ways that she was treated badly by the Biden team. Like, you know, they never thought she was any good, which is true. And like, that's why they shouldn't have put her on the ticket. But then once you did put her on the ticket, like maybe commit to the bit that you actually think Kamala Harris is any good at this, which they never did. And she sort of describes to Josh Shapiro how being vice president sucked. And, you know, all these things that like the way the job was not any good for her. And Shapiro wants a.

real partnership and a role where, you know, he gets to, like, have input and be an important policymaker in the White House. And she basically says to him, no, like, the job is going to suck for you, too. Like, we're going to recreate the abusive relationship. It's like, it's like one of those chain of abuse things. That's always the case with the VPs. It was really, the cheney and the Biden relationships were quite unusual. And they existed precisely because these people were ambitious, were not ambitious, we're not expected to run for the presidency, misjudged that one, but, and therefore they were taken on to do trusted. But like, Tom Ler in the 60s is writing about this with Hubert Humphrey and LBJ.

This is actually the normal, and was also true of LBJ and JFK. That's the normal relationship with your vice president, is that they squat in the Naval Observatory for four years, wishing they had something better to do with their time. It's normal on a grand historical time scale, but like the last, last vice president with a vice presidency as small as Kamala Harris's was Dan Quail. Like, there were several of these VPs, including Al Gore, who had real policy portfolios and, you know, real involvement in policymaking. So it's not unreasonable to think that you might ask for that now, even though, you know, in the long sweep of things, you can be like, yes,

you're John Nance Garner. She's right, exactly. Like, it's just that like, she specifically was a vice president to a president who had been a powerful vice president. You know, like, like Biden had had a relationship like Cheney with push. And then she's like, I hate this. I hate being abused. No one listens to me. I eat dog shit every day. And so will you, sir.

Would you send Kamala Harris out to do anything? No, I wouldn't put her on the ticket. No, no, sure. But having done that. But once you put her on the ticket, yes, it's about how the whole thing was cynical and identity politics driven. And they decided it had to be a black woman.

And the only black woman who was as governor or senator at the time was Kamala Harris. So when you decide that, you've settled on a set. of one. And so they pick Harris, even though they don't think she's any good. And then they, you know, they're like, well, she's not any good. We can't let her do. No, I mean, the whole thing was ridiculous. Like, they shouldn't have picked her. But if they, once they picked her, you know, there at least would have been some honor in, like, acting like it had not been ridiculous to pick her.

I think you have to, you have to think of this as sunk costs, right? You can't get that back. Having done it, what are you going to do? And the answer is not send Kamala Harris out on, like, mission critical. But then why isn't her one then? Let's say she's the sunk cost in this story, right? She's like, come, I got brought into this. Then we hated it. I spent four years one.

There's no fucking bathroom about how I have to pay for my own food. And then she's talking to this other guy. And instead of realizing that like the mistake was Biden choosing her and choosing the wrong person and then spending four years not together, she's saying there's like, no vice president should ever expect to have any influence. Instead of realizing like, this is the moment where you can do what Biden didn't and like choose the right person who you'll actually care to hear from and allow to have a real partnership with.

Yeah, no, she did not do that. The other thing that's operating here, and this is, you know, Tim Alberta wrote a very interesting profile of Josh Shapiro a couple of months ago. Josh Shapiro is an extremely ambitious guy, maybe even uncommonly so for someone who is like such a poor man. But like, it describes how like, you know, Shapiro has like a 60% approval. and Shapiro has pretty good relationships across the aisle with Republicans in a way that's unusual these days. But there are a lot of Democrats who kind of hate his guts in Pennsylvania. And it's clear that he is like, you know, sort of aggressively clawed his way to the top. And I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that. But it, you know, it probably does mean that he was.

Well, I think even more, the point of the profile was like even more so that these are, you know, these are not unusual traits, but he sort of dialed them up to 11. And it probably meant that like he was going to be quite unhappy. be being vice president, which I think is part of why he wanted to find a way to get to know in this negotiation. If you're going to decide that like, look, I don't like this fucking bespectacled poor Jew out of Pennsylvania who's too eager to, who's like a knifing people in the back. And I want some, I want someone who will speak to the, to my idiot white base. You know, like, why is the identity politics choice? If you're going to go the identity politics version, why isn't it the astronaut?

Why is it the coach who went to China and can't debate? Josh Shapiro has a 60% approval rating in Pennsylvania. If you want someone who's good at appealing to non-college educated white voters who've fallen away from the party, Shapiro was already in. Totally. I mean, I think they picked Shapiro. I am Jewish. I love Jews. That isn't me. Are you an agent of Israel, then? Maybe. But I think what people around Harris would say is, you know, she's married to a Jewish guy. Like how could she have any problem with Jews? And I think, you know, part of it is that, you know, there is an emergent part of the Democratic Party that has a problem with Jews. But I think the other thing is that, like, Josh Shapiro is religiously observant. He keeps the Sabbath.

He has four kids. There are these markers of the way that he lives his life that I think a lot of liberals are skeptical of, in a way that they are not skeptical of, like, truly secular Jews. That there's, you know, there's a certain cultural distance that they feel. And the flip side of that is that those are actually things that I think bring a certain amount of cultural commonality for certain Americans who are not Jewish, but who, you know, are serious about their own religion. And I think that in a way, he's like, he's too Jewish for certain parts of the Democratic Party in a way that Doug Emhoff would not be and a lot of other Jewish politicians

would not be. And so I think partly it's a, it's a reflection of a kind of prejudice that applies not to all Jews, but to a specific and, you know, meaningful subset of Jews that he's part of. The unfortunate, one of the unfortunate things for the party is that, you know, the, you know, in addition to that being bigoted, it also, you know, that Josh Shapiro in a certain way is like kind of the right amount of Jewish to be the first Jewish president. Like, you know, if he was, you know, if he was an orthodox Jew wearing a weird hat, that would be like too much cultural distance. But the fact that he is like, you know, seriously religious is actually, I think, an asset in certain way.

Now, I feel like Lucille Bluth being like, yeah, who doesn't love the Jews? But I think that, you know, if he was a hazy and he's having sex through a sheet, everyone would have problems with that. But I think, you know, there's, anyway, I think that there was, among other things like cultural distance created that by that from like the certain staffer class that is active in the party right now. I guess I still just, I guess like fundamentally that I think you win a national election. Why once you take Shapiro off the table and for all these reasons that they, you know, maybe describe it, they don't like Shapiro and he's too poor and, you know, all the stuff. Why do you end up with waltz over the astronaut?

Like, it seems like what they're saying is the astronaut is still a better appeal to these people than because because they have this condescending view of non-college educated whites in the Midwest who have all away from them. And it's like, oh, what, you, like, the football coach guy. Like, and, and particularly they want someone who has, like, the right cultural markers who also has, like, zero policy distance from the progressive left in the party. And Walls is, like, key characteristic of Minnesota, as governor of Minnesota, was that he let the groups write the agenda that they moved through the legislature and got, like, no, like, didn't have any heresies in the way that Josh Shapiro did trying to get school vouchers done in Pennsylvania.

They want someone who has the right cultural markers and no, and they want James Tallerreke. They want one of these like, oh, like these robs who care about religion. I know what we can show them. Like a nice young religious man who will explain that religion actually makes you left wing. Yeah. Like, and that's what they thought Tim Walls was like showed that if you're a rural like veteran football coach guy, that actually you should, you know, let anyone play girls sports who wants to kind of thing. I also think, and I know I've said this before too, but like what shines through in her book is A's higher A's and B's higher C's that she was really uncomfortable. with people who were more charismatic and competent than she was.

And Tim Walts was the least charismatic. And as it turns out, the least competent person she interviewed. I hate it so much. Let's take a quick break. And then we'll come back and talk about Megan's recent column on the Supreme Court arguments over trans participation in sports. This is Central Air. We mentioned briefly the trans sports thing,

one of the, you know, several policy issues where Democrats had a little bit of distance from the median voter in 2024. And the Supreme Court just heard an oral argument in a couple of cases that will consider state rules that prohibit or that restrict participation in sports to based on biological sex. Megan, you had a column he wrote about this in which you said there was a gaping hole in the argument that transport advocate made. Gaping hole right there in the headline. Did you write that headline yourself? No. No. No. I'm not a good headline writer. No. Well, neither is the person who wrote that headline. But what's the gaping hole? Alito asked one of the lawyers. There are actually several versions of this question, but asked like, what's the definition of sex? And she was like, oh, we don't have a definition for the court. And I should know that's important because the various federal non-discrimination laws say that you can't discriminate based on sex.

Yeah. And look, the argument was very slightly better than that sound. She did kind of go on and say, we're not contesting their definition and so forth. But like, the core problem is that the argument for trans rights, they never really developed a coherent framework in the way that the fight for gay marriage did, where there was a strategy. And that there was a kind of three part, like, this is in it. It's not a choice. We're not going to are getting married. doesn't hurt anyone else, and it's not fair to keep us from marrying, right? This is an argument that, like, ultimately won because it's compelling. The argument for trans inclusion was kind of like maybe men and women aren't different, and if they are, maybe, you know, going through treatment causes you to lose those advantages, and also you're a bigot if you question any of those things, and that didn't work. And so they ended up at the court, in part because these cases were filed when the politics looked different. And then, like, one of the cases, they actually tried to withdraw.

And the state was like, no, you had to keep going. Because it was clear they were going to lose and they didn't want to make new law. I guess, just to give very brief background, there are two different cases here that got consolidated. One of them involves a young person who had certain hormonal treatment and another, which doesn't. Yeah, one of them involves a student in West Virginia who has been on puberty blockers. One of them involves a college student in Idaho. And that latter one, they actually tried to withdraw when it became clear that they were going to a six-three court that was not going to be friendly to their claims.

But it was too late at that point. They'd gotten favorable lower court decisions. But so like at the policymaking level, sometimes when people argue about, you know, who should play in what league, sometimes it's a relevant question of, you know, what is this, what is this person's testosterone level, what sort of medical treatments have they received? And there are two cases that present, you know, somewhat different policy questions, even though they may end up consolidated into the same legal question. And so you ended up in front of the court without a really coherent argument that these differences don't matter.

You ended up in front of the public similarly, right? The reason these bans exist is that this issue pushed incredibly far ahead of public opinion. and now it is looking like they're just going to lose it all and, in fact, backslide on stuff like bathrooms where there wasn't the same level of public pushback. So the gaping hole is this definition of, well, the definitions of both sex and gender, because if the question is what is a woman

that can be, you know, a question about sex or it can be a question about gender. But so, like, I mean, do you have an answer to that question, Megan? What is a woman? Someone capable of producing the small gamete. Or sorry, the large gamete, the large gamete. Well, someone who, too late, someone who genetically would be, like, you know, like if you, you know, if you had ovarian cancer and your ovaries were removed, you'd still be a woman. Someone whose body is designed to produce large gametes.

So, Caitlin Jenner is not a woman? I would say she's a trans woman, but I would not. But is it a trans woman a kind of woman? I suppose. Like, I don't, like, I don't have an answer to the question either. At least I've given a definition, which is more than anyone at this case has done. But I think for the purposes of sport and for the purposes of sex-segregated spaces that exist for a reason, I think the answer is the large gamete answer. For prisons, for sports, for domestic violence shelters, which doesn't mean, look, I know that trans prisoners, for example, can really be at risk for endanger in the general population.

Create a transsection of the men's prison. I'm not trying to, like, hurt trans people. I think at work. and in housing, they should have equal rights. They should be protected from discrimination. But in context where it matters, I think the large gamete definition should prevail. And that's areas where biology is the relevant question. I think we're getting, though, at why Democrats get tongue-tied about this question, which is that, I mean, you know, you ask a Republican, what is a woman. And, you know, very often what they say is, you know, an adult human female, which is closely related to that, you know, the large gamete answer. Because when you get into defining what's a female, it ends up being about the large gaming. But a lot of those Republicans who say that, you know, will treat Caitlin Jenner as a woman. The president has talked about Caitlin Jenner as a woman in the past. And I think what that gets at is that, you know, that there is this longstanding concept that there can be such a thing as a sex change and that someone who was born female might undergo changes that we as a society would treat as, you know, as causing them to be as though they had a different sex. And that used to be under a very limited.

set of circumstances and now there's been, you know, a huge increase in trans identification and new concepts and that sort of thing. But, you know, even when it was, you know, transsexuals as a, you know, something that was being poked fun at on the Jerry Springer show, that was still a recognition that trans people existed and there was such a thing as, you know, as a sex change. And so I think, you know, that's part of why coming up with a comprehensive definition is, is more difficult than it seems like it ought to be. And that's very unsatisfying politically and also, you know, you probably need to come up with the complex answer. I think in a very unsatisfying way, it's kind of like corporate personhood, which is, you know, when you say, what is a woman, it's what we as a society

deem and for whatever purposes we deem. Sure. And like the turfs and the gendercrits will ask me, like, why do you use pronouns? Because I've written about transports, pediatric medical transition. I'm like, well, first of all, because I'm not a jerk. And second of all, because like, I don't think that these, that the pronouns are somehow speaking to a deep biological reality. And I think this is actually where both the turfs and the trans, the kind of radical trans activists, which, by the way, is not most of the trans community, got confused. It was like, if you use the pronoun she, therefore you also have to be in a locker room with a penis. And I don't think that flows. And so I said to one of them who was yelling at me

about this, it was like, look, when I call a ship her, I don't think it can like, nerds. a baby, right? I don't need to think that in order to respect someone's desire to socially assume the role of being a ship or being female, right? Like, I use people's pronouns because that's what they want. And I use people's names because that's what they want. I don't actually need to have like a deep argument about whether they are like in some essential way, a woman. I don't know what a woman, like what the definition that both the turfs and the radical activists are using of this essential nature of gender identity, what I do think is that there are some biological distinctions that are made in law that exist for a reason and that should be preserved. I actually

don't care that much about women's sports. I was a high school athlete because I went to a school with mandatory athletics. I hated it. You can just nuke the whole category as far as I am personally concerned. I understand that most people do not feel this way. But I just think that, like, there are real reasons we don't have biological males and women's prisons, and we should, we should honor those reasons. There are real reasons that we don't let people self-ID without any attempt to take hormones, have surgery, whatever, and then waltz into naked spas with women, not because trans people are sex offenders, but because sex offenders will pretend to be trans, right? And that these all seem like quite common sense, like 80, 20 positions, but no one seems to be able to adopt them.

So I agree that this is that I do think like a lot of these you describe in 80, 20 ways, right? Like, but then you see what I think Josh was sort of getting at with this with this little question about what's a woman. Where just a few days ago, you know, they asked, I think it was Axios, asked all these Democrats who might run for president, what's a woman? And then the headline was most of them refused to say. Right. And like three of them gave an answer and the other 36 or something said, you know, declined to comment. And I follow a lot of fairly sane conservatives on social media.

And they were all saying, oh, as long as the Democrats are like this, they'll never solve the problems of peak trans of this era when all this stuff was going on. And like, as somebody who didn't like the peak trans era when Democrats were going around and saying, we need to have girls. and sports, trans women on the swim teams and all of those on the wrong side of these 80-20 issues. I actually have no problem with them not answering the question. Like, not answering the question

seems to be the same thing to do, right? Like, it is a hard question to answer. You just struggle to answer it. It is a complicated thing. It's not actually that easy to say. What I don't want them to do is to proactively try to change the conversation and take a 20% issue and say, let's send trans women onto the swim team.

As long as they're, like, just not proactively trying to change it. I think the problem with that is, is that it's paired with taking the wrong side of the 80-20 issues, right? They also declined to answer questions about sports. It wasn't just that they refused to define women. I agree. This is a stupid gotcha question in a lot of ways. Well, I actually don't think it's stupid.

But the reason they ask it is that watching these people kind of squirm and dodge and try different ways not to it. Like, because it's not just like, you know, like can men get pregnant, whatever. watching those people equivocate and like try to wiggle out of it is really good politics, in part because I think Democrats let activists take this so far without pushing back. But do you think that in 2008, whatever the nominees are, that any of them are going to be saying we should have women, trans women in sports, like the main ones? They're going to have to answer the question. And they don't want to.

I mean, they're going to, they're going to, and my explanation is that they're going to, They're going to try to dance around it and say leave it up to the associations or the stance or whatever. Yeah. Do they, I mean. They're going to do their best. They're not going to proactively do what they did in 2020, which is say, you're a bigot if you say no. I think, you know, like Abigail Spanberger didn't really have a tremendously satisfactory answer to this question or campaign for Governor Virginia. It didn't matter. She won a landslide. Right. In a blue state, absolutely correct. Well, I mean, she, she ran ahead of how a Democrat would typically run in a blue state. She, you know, their opponent was. Yes, right. But her opponent, like, used this as a leading issue, all of which is to say, like, you know, I think, you know, if Republicans think, well, this is, Democrats' position on this issue is crazy and only a small minority if people hold it. I think it doesn't actually necessarily produce that big a political advantage for them if people don't care that much about the issue, which I think is sort of the natural state of things is for the organization of high school sports leagues not to be a leading issue in American. I'm a lot more worried about where Democrats are on energy and immigration than I am about what. they are on this issue. But I also, I don't think it's a dumb gotcha question. I actually think it's a question that people should probably think harder about. Because, I mean, Megan, I don't think you gave a satisfactory answer to the question. Because I, you know, the, you said the gammy thing, but then you seemed reluctant to say that Caitlin Jenner was not a woman, which would be an implication. I think part of why this is a hard question for liberals to answer is that there's this false idea that either gender is a matter of biology. And like, you know, if you are female, that makes you a woman, or gender is a matter of self-indexamined.

and that anyone who perceives themselves as a woman is a woman, when really, if we're talking about gender as a social construct that's separate from sex, then it needs to be socially constructed, that a woman would be someone who meets certain societal expectations of what it is to be a woman, which is probably usually driven by biology, but could be driven, for example, in the case of Caitlin Jenner, by, you know, a sincere and obvious commitment to a gender identity that diverges from sex. You know, longstanding way of living in that manner, perhaps, you know, certain medical or surgical treatments that align to that, that it divorces it from sex without making it purely a matter of self-ide. It's a matter of meeting certain societal expectations.

I think the problem with that is that biology is real in a bunch of contexts. Of course it's real, but and not mitigated by hormone treatment. No, but there's all sorts of societal constructs that are, you know, not necessarily directly. This is why I say it's like corporate personhood. I mean, any societal construct, like, you know, we could define woman in any way that we chose to. The problem is that to the extent you need to make policy around this stuff, you actually need to be able to make rules and to, and create definitions. And if it's not going to be a simple blanket, a woman is someone who is, you know, has the genetics to produce the large gametes. And if it's, and I, and I think it's not even in your view, a bright line view like that, because you're talking about certain circumstances in which

Caitlin Jenner is treated as a woman. If you want to operationalize that as policy, you have to be able to describe the circumstances where someone is or is not a woman. And so you need to grasp towards something that looks like a rule. So I guess I would say this. I think the legal definition of women should be based on biological sex. But I also think that the Bostock ruling can stand within that framework, right? Because the ruling was ultimately not that like this person is a woman and therefore has a right to dress this way. It was that you can't say that people of one sex can do something or must do something, but people of another sex cannot.

And we have exceptions to that that have been well defined in law for like, you know, decades at this point. And all of that's pretty coherent. Okay. I mean, I think that's right as a legal matter. I think that the Bostock reasoning is very separate and can stand alone, even in spite of what rulings were like. to see from the Supreme Court, and that has implications for a lot of context, but does not,

doesn't really tell you what to do with, with, with sports. But we will see what the, what the court does there. Let's take a quick break. And again, I encourage you to go to centralairpodcast.com. We're going to do a live chat this Friday at 1230 Eastern. We'd love to have all of you join that. You can ask us whatever questions you like. You can try to suggest sweet pies that Ben Dreyfus might eat and lose his, you know, his designation as someone who's never had pie or any other, you know, maybe even a policy-related question. Go to centralairpodcast.com, sign up there. We'd love to have you join us.

Before we go this week, I want to talk a little bit about this billionaire tax proposal in California. People may have seen some national news coverage of this. The SEIU, the health care focused union in California, is working with Robert Reich and Emmanuel Syez, the left-wing economist, to put out this ballot proposal that purports to levy a one-time wealth tax on billionaire. in the state, 5% of their wealth, and we'll get into the difficulty of calculating that in a second. And it creates this sort of fund that the state is supposed to use an endowment to pay for health care stuff in the future. And furthermore, when you do something like this, there's concern about capital flight, that people will leave the state to avoid being taxed. And so they think they

designed cleverly around this, where the ballot measure would be voted on this coming November, but it's based on the wealth of billionaires who were in California as of the start of this year. And so you saw a number of prominent billionaires take steps right before the start of 2026 to establish residency somewhere else to say, I know live in Florida or wherever. So already fleeing a tax that hasn't become law, and I would note may not become law. Governor Gavin Newsom is opposed to this proposal. There have been a number of prior SCIU ballot measure efforts in California that have gone down despite the liberal orientation of the state. So I would not assume that this tax is going to become law, but it could. And also, you know, you're already seeing the negative.

economic consequence of the tax, which is that you have capital fleeing the threat that the tax could be imposed in the future before it's even been imposed. Yeah, it's possibly the most remarkable own goal ever, right? Even if this thing loses, California loses, because people have already looked for ways to establish residency elsewhere. And I think even at this point, even, you know, they may come back as Dave Tepper came back to New Jersey after he flamboyantly left. in 2016, cost the state of New Jersey, a bunch of money, and then kind of slithered back in 2020.

There is a thing here, by the way, where people announce that they're moving to South Florida, who have never been to Miami in August before. They've been to Miami in February. It's lovely. They like being on the beach. They move there. They discover that Florida is fucking disgusting in the summer. And they make it about 18 months, and then they give up.

And now I would note, you know, if California has this wealth tax, people could leave Florida and move to some third state. So that doesn't necessarily help. California here. But this does happen with the Florida tax refugees specifically where they're like, oh my God, I am way too rich to be spending August in a hurricane zone in the tropics. I mean, in one, I guess by what legal mechanism would California have to tax wealth after the person was no longer a resident there? Like, let's say you moved away in November when they passed this thing. How were they allowed to go back and retroactively charge you for something from January? Yeah, they've got two problems. One is the retroactivity and the other is like at best they'd probably get it prorated and you're creating

conflicts with other states which moves it to the federal level. Normally when you're subject to the income tax of a state, it's for when you're there. Like if you go to Texas for 10 of the months and you're in California for too much, it's like the revenue, the realized gains that happened when you were there. I don't really know how you'd even do this, what they're describing. With rich people, there's also all these complications, right? they're often not in their home all that often. Of course.

They're jetting around the world doing stuff. And so determining residency for those people is somewhat complicated, which actually, I think, gave people confidence that it would be harder for them to establish residency elsewhere. And I think they were like, no, you've given me a real incentive. I'm going to do it. Although, I mean, that would have to be litigated here as it often is. It means that they can't, you can't go and. be like, I bought this beautiful house in Florida.

I was there for two months out of the year and the other, like, ten months I was traveling. It actually means that wherever you go, you have to stay there and really stay there and be there for eight or nine months. Because otherwise, they're going to be California, like, reason to say that this was just pretextual. But so if you're someone who thinks that this is a horrible mistake for California, what does one do about it exactly? I mean, like, you know, California has an open ballot measure process. You can't stop a union from proposing something like this, and you won't be able to stop them from proposing it again. Which is one reason to move even if you think this is going to fail this time, right? And that's a problem.

I mean, I would note, again, I think a lot of people have decided this tax is going to become law. And, you know, like, they've tried three times to impose minimum staffing levels on dialysis centers in the state through the same process. And the voters keep voting that down, even though that sounds nice. shouldn't enough people work at the dialysis center. California's have repeatedly voted down statewide rent control proposals. So like the electorate is not as left wing in California as you might think from the, you know, the candidate elections that they do. So I think it's plausible that this will go down and then go down again. And, you know, Gavin Newsom, who is not a moderate guy, has been out there talking about what a what a misadventure and a mistake this is. But I guess,

you know, if you are someone in California who like thinks this is just really bad for the state's economy, what do you even do about that? Yeah, there's not much. It's unfortunately. You can't stop them from proposing it again and again. And then one other weird thing about the ballot measure process there is in California, a law that's passed by ballot measure can only be amended by ballot measure. So another problem with these sorts of wealth taxes, that they are ungodly complicated. And there's all these provisions about, you know, how you value a privately held entity and how you value shares that have supervoting rights. That's one of the things that the billionaires have really been freaking out about is that there's an unfavorable treatment of supervoting shares that could raise this tax rate far above 5%. Right. And then there's a that's supposed to be like a catch-all that says, well, the state will do a fair market calculation, blah, blah, blah, but then you're both relying on the bureaucrats to do that and then years of litigation about what the correct valuation was. If that stuff ends up being structured wrong, the legislature can't do a technical correction bill and fix it. They would have to try to come back to the voters to amend it again, which is another reason not to make complicated tax policy like this by ballot measure.

But it's sort of, you know, like it's just a thing that's out there in the air that they've proposed this and it can be proposed again and again. And even if you think that's really unwelcome. I see no particular way to stop. I mean, you can defeat the ballot measures, but you can't stop people from, you can't take the question off the table. Yeah, which is itself kind of a reason to think about, think hard about whether you want to be in California, right? It's got a beautiful tech cluster. It's got beautiful weather, et cetera, et cetera, beautiful scenery.

But at the end of the day, you just have to worry that you're going to end up with some incredibly inefficient tax that you can't fix. But people have also said this about California forever. I mean, California already has an extremely high state income tax. You've had billionaires move away from the state and come back. And then you've also, you'd have had billionaires leave, but there continues to be tremendous business investment related to AI that's happening in Silicon Valley where there's been a judgment that, you know, whatever is unfavorable at the fiscal environment there, there's just more money to be made in California. You can do better business there. Now, obviously, there's some theoretical point at which the taxes would be too high. But whether this particular tax takes us over that point, I think is ambiguous, right? And partly it depends on, you know, how the tax would even be implemented once it was passed and what the true effective rate would turn out to be. But there's some amount of this kind of taxation that investors would tolerate. Yeah. And the risk is that, right, it's easier now to move than it was 10 years ago. Austin is kind of turning into a little mini tech hub. And I was just there,

actually, this weekend. And it feels like it's booming. And it also just feels like you can do stuff, right? You can try, you can just try things and build things in a way. way that is extremely difficult in California. But aren't people doing a lot of that in California? Like, I mean, you know, I go out to California and there's all these driverless cars going around in San Francisco and Los Angeles. It's even more of them in Austin. But every third, like the Waymo's were everywhere.

They're everywhere in SF too. But, but I mean, and, you know, the office market is picking up again in downtown San Francisco and it's all AI companies, you know, taking all this new office space. There is, you know, the, the techs, I mean, California, don't get me wrong, has tremendous tremendous problems and, you know, spent, you know, tens of billions of dollars on this high-speed braille thing that doesn't have any tracks and, you know, 24 billion on homelessness that doesn't, like, the state is fucked up in all sorts of various ways. But it can, it remains a very attractive environment for people to, to invest in technology because something has gone right there. Yeah, sure. New York was, New York City was a manufacturing capital until the 60s, right? It had a big manufacturing base. My dad was a budget analyst as they lost it. And one of the things the budget analysts were telling them was like, your policy is driving people away. But it had started before.

It had started with other places developing as alternatives. And New York was like, how could you leave New York? Everything's here. The ports here. All of these complimentary, well, it turned out that if you got the policies got bad enough, you could leave. Yeah, and then you're going to turn out fine. But I guess like, I feel like we're all maybe skipping a little bit. ahead to taking this wealth tax whatever actually happened. It just seems like there's a huge

stops. There's one that has to be voted on. They have to do that. But also there's these idiotic implication things. There's no, there's going to be a lot of lawsuits over this. It seems like the, the people assuming that this will ever actually happen are just going way too far. Well, this is part of why I wonder about how seriously these various billionaires have established residency elsewhere. I mean, to the point Megan raised earlier, I mean, you can, You can establish corporate entities in Florida and take certain steps that make it look like, you know, you're established. And a lot of these people already have multiple homes. But New York, when they're auditing you to figure out, are you a resident in New York?

It's all this very invasive stuff about, you know, where's your dentist and where do you keep your dog? And there's this sort of touchy-feely domicile test on top of where do you spend more days where, like, if you do things that cause it to appear that New York is where you have an intent to return, which is literally that stuff about the dentist. It's like your health care providers are where your home is. And so I wonder, I mean, we won't know until they're actually litigating it if and when this tax is passed. Yeah, I feel like they're a billionaire, though. You can find another dentist. You can. But to that point, these people do not want to reside in Miami as their primary residence.

A lot of them. I mean, some of them do. But we've seen people who've made these choices. You know, and a few years ago was, you know, they were upset about COVID stuff and but also broadly about the high taxes and, you know, all the various problems in California. A lot of them reversed their decision when it came to actually having to live in Miami. Right. But they only have to be out of the state for a couple years, right? Like, that's the huge. But you already do that. You could already move to Wyoming. You already make, you already save quite a lot of money to just move to Jackson Hole, right? But it's not just for a couple of years because they can try again and they can try again and they can try again.

I think that's part of the reason for the capital flight in the first place, right? Is that there's a broader threat about exactly what kind of wealth taxishing this is. I don't think these guys are necessarily thinking they're going to be gone forever, but they're thinking they're going to be gone for the period in which this tax will be assessed. Well, but I mean, or they're thinking that they will take certain easy steps that will allow them to argue later that they left that might or might not work. But they might be reluctant to take the full suite of steps that would involve a lot of actual change their day-to-day lives to physically and directly uncouple from California. And we won't know whether they've done that until it's litigated. I think Brennan Page have moved because they're at risk of losing control.

of Google. Right? Because of the weird way it calculates voting shares, they would have these enormous tax bills that they would have to, like, liquidate half their holdings to pay, is my understanding. Maybe. You'd have to have this whole fight over what the, you know, the sort of subjective, yes. Sure. Similarly, I think it is telling that most of the billionaires you've heard about moving do not have children. Right. They don't have to pull their kids out of school. And if you don't have to pull your kids out of school, and again, you're a billionaire. If you are, like, you have, you are Peter Thiel and you're like, but I will really miss the amazing breakfast tacos at the place near me, you can put the breakfast tacos on your private plane and have them waiting for you when you wake up, right? There is, and I think for the purposes of avoiding like a $5 billion tax bill or whatever, that sounds like a pretty good tradeoff.

And so I think for the people who can move, they have probably moved. Are they intending to be there forever? No. But I bet they have new dentists because they have good tax lawyers who told them to get new dentists. Sure, sure. But if your excuse for not moving is the breakfast tacos or the schools or anything like that, it sounds like you actually don't think this is going to happen. Because, like, of course, if you actually thought you were going to get a bill like that,

then breakfast tacos or sending your kids to the school. They have really nice schools. Anyway, send them to the school and switch. Who gives a shit? But like... Because people... Because the children get very upset when taken away from their friends. Some people actually like to live with their children and do not want to send them on a boarding school on another continent.

Some people. Oh, my God. But I also thought it was interesting because, you know, you've seen all, you know, some billionaires who have taken steps to establish residency elsewhere and who've complained about this. Jensen Wong, who runs Navidia, basically said, I don't care, go ahead, tax me. And I thought that was interesting as a PR thing, in part because, I mean, Navidia is one of these companies that has really gotten in bed with the government and has made all of these direct, you know, deals where the Trump administration has made what I think is quite unwise policy with regard to selling microchips to China that was clearly driven by Navidia's desire to get into those markets. But they, you know, Navidia's in business with the

government now. And I think it sort of makes sense for Jensen Wong to be like, you know, easy come, easy go. They're going to tax me more fine. I found my way to get mine out of the government. He, you know, there are other more libertarian-minded billionaires who I think have a different view. You know, of course, part of it depends on, do you think this is really a 5% tax or because of the complicated way it's written? Do you think it's, in your case, much higher than 5%. You obviously may have different reactions. But I think there's also, sometimes you will have these people who basically say, you know, California's been good to me. I've made a lot of money here.

Some of my money I've made in concert with the government. If the government is going to tax me, I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over that. You're so rich that you really care about the breakfast taco. And if they're going to take 5% of your wealth, that's just another cost of doing business. but obviously, you know, different ideologies and different circumstances will lead to different calculations on that. So it's more than 5% because they're still going to have to pay capital gains on whatever they sell to. Right. So it's like, I don't know, what is that? Six, seven percent. I would be very upset if someone took six or seven percent of my personal wealth. No, I'd be very upset too.

I would move. I'm going to be honest. If you came and we're like, I am taking seven percent of your 401k, I would live. leave your state. I'm sorry, guys. Imagine that you have $50 billion, and this won't affect your day-to-day lifestyle if it happens to you. And furthermore, you've already made a choice to stay in California, even though there's a 13% income tax. Like, if you were highly tax sensitive, maybe you already would have left. I guess that's what I mean. Megan, you do. You do pay higher 7% of your thing, just live in a state that you could go move to a low tax date right now and save much more than that. I think income taxes and wealth taxes are,

a little different, in part because, like, right, there's no provision for, let's say that this passes on November in November. It's valued, I believe, as of January 1st, and then the market goes down. And then you have to sell. Right. And it's way more than 5% of your actual net worth now. And unlike capital gains taxes, where there's an offset for that, because next year, when you lose money, you can, you know, you can deduct some of those losses. This is just you lose it and you don't get it back. No, look, I think one of the economic problems with this is the uncertainty that it creates, that people don't know exactly how it's going to work, what the exact rate is going to be. That said, you know, we've gone through all of this time of a Trump administration that creates

sort of frivolous economic uncertainty for no good reason. Nobody knows what a tariff rate is going to be. You know, there's all sorts of like direct personal intervention by the president that undermines business models and instructs companies on what to do. And to a large extent, the markets have shrugged that stuff off. And so that makes me, you know, like, I mean, for decades, I would hear and sometimes I would say these arguments about, you know, uncertainty. You know, that's really going to be bad for business investment. People don't know what the returns are going to be. I have been a little bit blackpilled by watching the markets react to uncertainty with a shrug.

And, you know, especially in the most impacted sector here, which is, you know, these, there's, this frothiness around AI where people think, you know, it's just going to throw off so much money, it's going to be on a giant money fountain. And that makes me wonder about whether, you know, even though I can, you know, give all the textbook reasons why this is creating uncertainty and uncertainty is bad for investment. I just don't know that the relevant actors are going to care that much. Well, so markets, yes, but like I hear from manufacturing people all the time that the uncertainty is causing problems for them. And I, is making them not invest in, like, factories because they can't figure out what their

raw material cost is going to be. So maybe we're just looking in the wrong place. I mean, in terms of financial markets, the United States remains kind of the prettiest ugly girl on the block. And that distorts a lot of market activity where, like, where else are going to put your money? When I ask people in the markets, is what they say, where else I'm going to put my money. Greenland. Europe. Bonds.

Greenland. Yeah. Yeah. But for real stuff, for factories, they can just not build or put it elsewhere. So I do think the uncertainty matters already. Yeah. Well, I think for this week, why don't we leave that there? Sort of where we started on, you know, this like increasingly cloudy environment.

I think that if people have money, they want to move because they don't trust equity, bonds, Greenland, anything, they should become subscribers to centralair podcast.com. Yes. And we will take all of the money. and put it great use. Yes, Ben is absolutely right there. Go to Centralairpodcast.com. Give us your money so it doesn't have to sit the market.

Ben, Megan, thank you for speaking with me as always. Thank you. Thank you. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We are a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swannock mixed the episode. Our music is by Joshua Mosier. Thanks for listening.

And stay cool out there.