Central Air - Speaking of Getting Screwed (feat. Andrew Sullivan)

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.comThis week: Andrew Sullivan joins us from Provincetown to assess the emergent Iran deal. Paying subscribers also get our discussion of racial unrest and immigration politics in the U.K., our debate how much Europe really needs to learn from the United States (a lot, I’d say, and not just about air conditioning), and our consideration of the joys of Europeans discovering exurban America (including Buc-ee’s!) as they attend the World Cup.Upgrade your subscription now at www.centralairpodcast.com to hear the whole episode.

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. I'm here with Megan McArdle columnist for the Washington Post and Ben Dreyfus, who writes the substack newsletter, Calm Down. Ben, have you been practicing listening to other people and processing the information they say to you and learning facts about them? I have been doing that low these many years on this earth. Have you? Without many results. I think that it's mostly, you know, it's everyone's fault.

It takes two to tango. Other people should be more interesting. but I am certainly doing my best. We have Andrew Sullivan here with us this week. He writes the weekly dish newsletter on Substack. Andrew, what I'm referencing there, Ben, Megan and I had a listener meetup a couple of weeks ago down in Washington, D.C. And Megan, like the good journalist, that she has learned a lot of information about our

listeners, and Ben just talked about himself for hours on end, which... It's my fault for not being interesting. I'm honored to meet Ben Dreyfus, I have to say, because I've seen his Twitter handle for many years. Is this your first Ben Dreyfus experience? You were in for a real tree. Well, I'm notorious at forgetting people I've met. So it might not be. I once said to Condi Rice, Madam Secretary, it's so nice to meet you. And she said, well, we've actually met twice before. So if I can forget Condi Rice. No, no, you are 100% right. And this is our first time meeting properly. And I've been reading you since, you know, before anyone had any, was paying any attention to

me online. And I was just a lunatic responding to those view from your window competition posts that you used to do. Awesome. A good old dishhead. So it's a pleasure. It's very nice to meet you. He still does the view from the window. They're still every week. I was just puzzling over this week's. Well, I don't. Chris Bowdenner does it. He's the genius behind that. So I don't want to take any credit. But it was my idea, but he's done it. I've tried to do those a few times and they are impossible. Like, I don't understand how anybody else ever solves them. They are, these people are fucking cracked in the head. First of all, I shouldn't say that.

For anyone who's not familiar with what this is, this is a weekly contest that they do in Andrews newsletter where it's literally a view from somebody's window. And you have to figure out where in the world it is. But you're not like looking at the Eiffel Tower out the window. It's actually quite obscure and quite difficult. We're not, we on, are we broadcasting right now? Yes. Oh, for fuck sake.

Okay. I mean, it's taped. But, you know. No, I know, but I thought we hadn't started. Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to say, oh, my gosh. What did you say that was so bad? I didn't mean to say that all the people that do the window contest are crazy.

It's just that their intelligence far surpasses my ability to grapple with it. And they are incredible. I mean, incredible. And, you know, you'd be amazed. Andrew is in awe of you and is so proud of all of you for the work that you do. I've always thought when we were talking about AI once on weeks of back, Somebody was talking about how good they are at identifying things like that. And I immediately thought of that contest and was like, oh, these AIs must be cheating.

They must be so good for these cheaters to identify where someone's in, you know, a sweat lodge in Mongolia. Google Earth was a big threat, you know, to the contest. But somehow Chris has managed to keep it going through all these technological changes. These added has correspondence all over the way. It's become this massive community. It really is. Do you have a strategy for detecting and preventing AI cheating? No.

I don't, but you should ask Chris because he does it. I don't have it. I really, he runs that page himself. And because like you, I have, I'm just completely flummoxed by it. I would just like to say, Ben, that was me talking about the column I wrote on how AI can detect unpublished text. And I'm glad that you've paid so much attention. to me. I'm sorry I wasn't more interesting. I was like, yeah, somebody, somebody somewhere.

I don't know. Yeah, it was me on this podcast. Ben, by the way, I want to introduce you. This is Megan McArdle. She's a very good columnist for The Washington Post. You may have met her before. Oh, oh my God. Yes. Of course. She's taller than all three of us. I just wanted to point out. Even combined, we could all be standing on each other. Not quite, but yes, I am the tallest person on this podcast. You're always the tallest person everywhere, Megan. I mean, every every, you were the tallest person at the Atlantic, I think. Megan was telling us that she was the tallest person at her high school until her senior year. I think it says a lot about you, Megan.

I like, just drop that there. I think it says a lot about you. What does it say, Andrew? That this would otherwise be a complex for some people, but Megan carries on as if it's of no import and has been charming and brilliant from the minute I met her. Oh, Andrew. You think that other people wouldn't have bothered to, developing sense of humor or intelligence, they would have been like, well, I'll just get by on the height alone. That's men. Does not work for women. Right. It's the question for women. And because men are so weird about it, you know.

Andrew Sullivan, famed expert on women. So can I ask a question as the lone straight woman on this pot, the lone woman? Yes. With gay men, is height a thing? I mean, I understand people have preferences, but for women, it's a real thing. It's not, weirdly, it's not for tall women. We're ecumenical. My dating philosophy was always climb every mountain. I was, my husband for 15 years was 6'5. Is 6'5. He remained 6'5.

He remained 6'5. Well, probably little. As we get older, we do shrink a little bit. But he's, he was a very tall glass of water. And it worked. It meant that I had to get king-sized bed. and stuff and we couldn't we were going to get a cottage here we couldn't because the ceilings were too low for him and when he went back to England to visit my family and my brother

bought this like Elizabethan cottage and it was like Gandalf at Bilbo's it really was by the time he climbed he climbed into my brother's house in the in the shire in the sausage countryside but um I I've always liked all guys it's weird I don't really I'm not attracted to guys shorter than me. I'm just not. Five, seven, I'm like, okay, no. I think gay men know that, like, there has to be one person who is taller than the other person

in any relationship between two men. So, like, men can, you know, sort of expect that they will necessarily find a woman who is shorter than them and that more or less works statistically. Oh, can they, Josh? Tell me more. I mean, well, actually, are, is Peter taller than you? I know that you are both, like, officially six, too.

But he is, like, very slightly shorter than me. I mean, like a quarter inch or something. Does he have a complex about that? No. But I did once ask him if he would have asked me out or if he would have dated me asking out as a complicated question in our relationship. But if I were like, if he were a lot shorter.

And he said probably not. But it's hard for him to imagine because he's six foot two. So he's never had any of these complexes that shorter men sometimes get about. It is weird to me, though, the number of women who are like, five foot six and are fixated on dating a guy who's six feet tall. It's like, do you just like having the crick in your neck? Is that what it is? You really enjoy that muscle getting super tense as you like. I feel like as somebody who is the same, roughly the same height as Josh and Andrew, I think, as well. I feel like there's a margin of error. Like, I'm not noticing

exactly if someone is an inch or two taller. I feel like we're all around the national average. It's only when a freak comes in like you, Megan, or a dwarf, you know, that I'm like, oh, my God, you're quite short, aren't you? The one thing I will say is, you know, I don't think gay men are generally that focused on this, but there is something undignified about a very tall bottom. Like, there's just something where it's like you're looking at like a Chihuahua mounting a German Shepherd and it feels silly. It's a, like, to me, it was more, it's more a practical problem of what do you do with the

legs. Like, where do they go? They are so huge. So huge. Okay. I think on that note, maybe we should turn and actually talk about some news this week. Why don't we talk about Iran? That feels like a good turn from this. They love bottoms there and they never know what to do with legs. Speaking of getting screwed. Yes. There's a deal of sorts to end the Iran war announced on Sunday by the Pakistani negotiators who have led this process. The two central provisions are supposed to be an end to the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and the opening of the Strait of Hormuz to toll-free travel. The U.S. and Iran are then supposed to negotiate sanctions relief and constraints on Iran's nuclear program over the next 60 days of ceasefire. So we'll see where we are in 60 days.

And we'll see, I mean, there is a memorandum of understanding that we've not yet seen as we tape this show on Monday afternoon. It's supposed to come out at some point soon. But one of the frustrations for me, following all of this news for months, is like using Donald Trump as a news source as to what sorts of agreements have been reached when he lies all the time about what the status is of agreements and what's in them. The Iranians, of course, are not a reliable source on this either. So, you know, it's sort of going to be a discovery process for us all as to what everybody here actually believes that they have agreed to and what they're actually going to perform on over the next coming months. But I guess my first question is to Ben, which is, are you happy now?

because when this war started, you were the one who was like, hey, this seems like it might be a good thing. Like, you know, worked in Venezuela. Let's try it again. Maybe the Iranians can get some freedom here. Maybe Delciel Rodriguez will do a good job running the country. Are you satisfied with the result that we've, they were grasping toward here? All right. I confess and have already apologized on this podcast to originally being too optimistic about this.

Okay. But I did not think it was going to be like Venezuela. Venezuela was a quick get in, get in, capture this bitch, and let's get out. You know, that was an easy run of thing. I thought that, you know, if we were really going to do this, we should go in and really do it. You know, let's do some real proper regime change. Let's get rid of these bums and bring freedom to the nice Iranian people who love, who I've heard about quarter million troops on the ground. I was hoping that a lot of them could be robots. That would have been ideal. Or drones in the sky that would kill from the clouds. But no, it turns out that. that, you know, Trump didn't share my beliefs about spreading democracy. And so I do think that now that it turned into a bit of a cluster fuck, right? And I was wrong. And say la vie. But I, so now I think it's best to end this. That's the best thing we can do is we need to end this.

But I also do think that originally, you know, the problem was that Trump didn't have a theory. He didn't have the liberal interventionalism or neoconservative thing, which a lot of people disagree with it. Maybe it's stupid. But like, I do believe that in going and using guns for goodness. And he didn't because he doesn't have, he doesn't think about things very much. He just thought he was going to get a benefit. And it led to bad outcomes. And I would just say that it didn't reflect poorly on me or my beliefs because he doesn't reflect them.

Andrew, what do you make of this? Because it feels like we're moving toward an outcome that makes it. made approximately nobody happy here. Because, I mean, certainly the people who opposed this war all along were not happy. It's not looking to me like the Iran Hawks are happy with this outcome either. I mean, obviously, some people who are huge sycophants for the president are saying that he, you know, greatly improved our position in the Mideast. But I'm not really seeing anyone other than the administration really trying to make the case

that we came out of this better off than we came in. Am I missing anything? No, I mean, you will hear it from them. I mean, for me, the most poignant response was someone that I had gotten to know when we covered the 09 Green Revolution in Iran, and I kept in touch with, who was a big, you know, domestic Iranian dissident and young man, and just wrote to me to say that everything I ever hoped for has been destroyed. He said that on the first day of the war, then. the delusions that led to people even beginning to believe this was a possible scenario the bullshit that Netanyahu laid out which the CIA told Trump in advance was quote unquote farcical is just it's as if we have a government in the United States that will do wars for regime

change in the Middle East whichever party whoever is president whatever the position of the American people. And I think the one silver lining that I take from this is that this is by any measure, I think. Now, they will say otherwise, but this is a massive humiliation for the United States and for Donald Trump, mainly for us, to have been exposed as a superpower with absent mad leadership that cannot be negotiated with, with whom you cannot even talk to because you have no idea what it's going to do from one hour to the next. It's shown that all of our vast military strength means nothing if we can't achieve even a small objective on the ground. It also showed, I think, by the way that it started, that the relationship the United States has with Israel is incredibly toxic and damning for both sides. It's

It should not be the case in any conceivable circumstance that a small ally would suddenly declare to the superpower. We have the capacity to take out the entire cabinet in Iran because we believe in war crimes and we believe in mass assassination of other people's leadership teams. Something we haven't even discussed is a huge precedent that they've said. So we're going to do that. They're going to attack you in response. Are you, so we just want to let you know, are you in or out?

And Rubio and Trump both except, we had no choice but to go in. Now, that with no debate, not even debate within the administration, apart from a tiny group of people, Congress in the dark, the public unaware there was ever going to be any war. And this thing starting the way that did is another sign that the United States, not only is its military power, essentially massively overrated, it is a banana republic. It's operating as a failed state. Megan, what have you made in the announcement?

Look, as I think I've mentioned on this podcast before, I supported the Iraq War. And that was a bad idea. And that was the moment at which I realized I should not have opinions on things I don't understand. And I also realized that the amount of effort required to develop opinions on foreign policy was probably better used to hone my skills at things I already understood reasonably well. So, look, I think the, I got nothing. I mean, like, he's an idiot.

He got us into this thing. And now he's flailing to get out and trying to save face. And it's all dumb. And we are in the dumbest timeline, except we're probably not. There is some timeline where we did something even dumber. And I am glad I don't live there. That's what I got. I mean, look, I'm an idiot too, right?

I run all the time about everything. But I'm also, I have the confidence of a straight man. And I am not going to sit on the sidelines the way Megan just did with this thing. I will talk confidently about these subjects I am constantly wrong about. Thank you, Ben. I will just say that, like, though I completely agree, this was a disaster, awful. And Trump, not a good fellow. And everything that Andrew just said is right.

And the fact that we were bullied by fucking Israel is absurd. And we should have had the CIA get rid of Netanyahu as well. But, but I also do believe that when you watch the leader of some country mowed down 30,000 of their own people, that I think that the United States as the best country in the history of the world should try to find ways that are successful to stop that. And maybe that means that we couldn't do it this time. And maybe it means that it was stupid and the wrong person and Trump was never going to do it. And maybe we can never do it. But I feel like there's always a lesson overlearned,

which is we all need to keep our dick in our pants because like fucking Mogadishu went poorly. And the fact is that I don't believe that. Like I'll never believe that. What's your example of a war like this that went well? Kosovo. It worked once. We bombed the shit out of Serbia and liberated Kosovo.

I don't know why it worked that one time. It did work once. It also did work, obviously, importantly, in World War II. Yes, but you remember the D-Day thing? We, like, we massively invaded the European continent. Also, you may remember that the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, thus launching us into the war. Yes, as the only British, I'd like to remind you

that the Americas did not join World War II to defend democracy, despite being begged to do so for many, many months by people being bombed from on high. So I'm not going to grant the United States a little that gift. We did save democracy, though. I mean, I'm not saying that's why we did it. Yes, no, I agree. It was a great and wonderful thing. And not only we did a great and wonderful thing,

the even greater wonderful thing was how you responded to victory, which was with generosity and magnanimity and support. But after you've defeated countries, you can rebuild them. But not while you're still trying to fight them. Well, and the other thing is we saved democracy in Western Europe, but we teamed up with the Soviets to fight the war, and then we cut agreements with them after the war that created a huge sphere of influence for them in Eastern Europe, and then spent decades in the Cold War with the Soviet. Reflecting, you know, there's a lot of trouble in the world,

and there are some problems that we can fix, and some problems that we can fix only at tremendous cost that is only sometimes worth laying out. But, you know, we are, you know, we are a sovereign country with a lot of influence, but if you, you know, places where with human rights violations as severe as Iran, there are a lot of those places in the world, including China, obviously. And one also has to remember that part of the process that led to the Iranian revolution was a completely unnecessary CIA deposition of a government in Iran and the imposition of the Shah. It is that we started a lot of this stuff as well. And so really what we were, doing is not responding. So we are responding, obviously, the regime. We're responding to our own

actions in that region many, many years ago that have gone extremely wrong. Well, and also, I mean, my ongoing frustration about the enormous footprint of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in U.S. politics, part of what I want there is a recognition that people can behave badly halfway around the world. And there can be, you know, a lot of, there can be wrongdoing on both sides of a conflict. and ideally we should find a way to make that less our problem rather than more our problem. The country that emerges from this the worst is Israel. Yeah, I mean, isn't that remarkable? People talk about like, you know, Israel is the hidden hand behind everything.

And obviously, you know, the Israelis played a role, a significant role in talking Donald Trump into this conflict. But they didn't get what they wanted out of this either. No, they have a disaster on their hands. They have, in fact, conceded the idea that Iran can directly leverage. arms against them if they attack Hezbollah. So that connection has been done, which had didn't exist before. They know Iran now has the Strait of Hormuz leverage. They now know that Iran's ballistic missiles and indeed their non-nuclear stuff, depending if they get to nuclear stuff, it's not going to have money restraints on it, which is what they were concerned

about in the JCPOA. And they have lost the support of the American people in a quite dramatic way, obviously not just the Iran war, but I think the Gaza plus the Iran war means the end of the bipartisan routine support for Israel in the United States. So when you look at what Netanyahu is actually done, he has dramatically weakened Israel's status within diplomatically and strategically within the Middle East. He's lost his most important ally. and he has ended with a deal that is going to give the Iranians hundreds of billions of dollars to invest exactly in an economy that is going to strengthen their own military and their own regime.

And the new leadership there is more radical than the leadership before. This is an absolute catastrophe for Israel. And those of us that try to say don't do this should not be the ones being called to account. It's the people who said, go for it, Israel. They need to be called to account for the consequences of their rashness. There's one knock-on consequence of this that I've been toying with as possibly a silver lining, and I want to get takes on this, which is it looks like the Trump administration is sort of rebuilding the JCPOA without calling at that and trying to insist that they came up with a much better deal even if they did not.

One of the key weaknesses of the JCPOA, the Iran deal from the Obama administration, was that it wasn't a treaty. It never had buy-in from Republicans. There was significant risk that it was going to be reversed when a Republican administration came in. And in fact, that was exactly what happened. If now we have, you know, JCPOA v2 and it is owned by Donald Trump as a theoretical grand accomplishment of his, I wonder if that creates more domestic political durability for it in the U.S. No, obviously you have all of these attendant problems that have been created. The Iranians know more about power that they have than they did before.

They know that they can gain leverage by closing the straight of four moves. So perhaps what we've ended up with is much worse than the first version of the JCPOA in terms of its durability there on top of all of the damage that was brought by the war itself. But I do wonder whether we are grasping toward a bipartisan agreement around the idea that we are going to stabilize our relations with Iran around limitations on their nuclear program, setting aside the issues that Republicans were so mad got set aside in the JCPOA version. one to do with, you know, regional proxies and missiles and that sort of thing. Maybe now this is what it took for Republicans to realize this was the best we were going to do with Iran. Is that possible? I think it's possible, but I think you underestimate the tenacity and passion of the pro-Israel elements. And I think you're also underestimating how this deal, if it comes through, is going to have on that Republican coalition. Because there are two very, very, very,

difficult strains here. You could say it's, you know, it's Vance and Rubio if you want, or it's Vance and the others. And it's the Tucker Carlson Wing, the Edwards Colby Wing, and the old school neocons, the Mark Levins, the people that have been running the show. Now, they hate each other. They despise each other. Now, if the neocons, which looks very likely, decide that this is an absolute catastrophe, a betrayal of massive proportions, fermented by antiseption, Mets, blah, blah, blah, people who, they're going to go off their rocker at the consequences of this. And that could reignite this civil war within the GOP, make it make it even more bitter and make the anti-Semitism stuff even more toxic in the place.

That's what I think could well happen domestically as a result. Megan, do you have any sense of where that is within the Republican coalition these days? I think that's right. the Reagan coalition, right, is the classic three-legged stool. You have the defense hawks, you have the social conservatives, and you have the market conservatives. And those folks basically just agree that they're going to coalition together and they're going to broadly adopt each other's issues or at least not care that much. The evangelicals get abortion. The market conservatives get taxes and the defense hawks get to.

spent a lot of money on guns and occasionally go shoot them at people. And that kind of broke during George Bush, not just because of Iraq being somewhat debacletacular, but also because the old, what held that coalition together was ultimately opposition to godless communism, right? There was something for everyone to love. The communists were atheists. We could hate them for that. They were socialist. We could hate them for that. And they were our geostrategic rivals. And we could hate them for that. And so that's what held those people together. And after the Berlin Wall fell, that was no longer such an animating proposition for a coalition. And I think you've seen the long decline. And Donald Trump, partly because, you know, like, as people age out,

people tend to stick with the commitments they had as young people. And so the people who came up in the Reagan coalition were still going strong, right? But they're now aging out. They're dying. And so what's left is a much more fractured coalition that doesn't feel that stuff as viscerally. You've seen this on the left, too, right? I mean, I think one of the reasons that the Biden administration did not take inflation seriously was because so many of the staffers had never lived through it as adults.

And those of us, I only lived through it as a child, right? I remember when subway tokens kept getting more expensive and when my mom would be in the grocery store and would just not have enough cash and forgot her checkbook and we had to put stuff back. If you've not lived through it, it's hard to understand how much that, like what that does politically, what it's like personally. And so as those people leave the coalition and a younger group comes up who have never lived in the world of Red Dawn. and all of the like Wolverines and America and the evil empire, they just don't feel it. And like supporting Israel was part of that, in part because, right, Israel was part of the network of proxies that we had, just as the Soviet Union had their proxies like Cuba. And as that has fallen apart, right, support for Israel was this reflexive support for Israel,

was this kind of vestigial feature in the Republican coalition that was bolstered a lot by the fact that evangelicals had their own religious reasons to support Israel. And it's just fractured. But the problem is there's no like animating theory of anything to replace it. And that is given Donald Trump quite a lot of latitude to do whatever strikes his fancy at the moment. I think there's something quite obvious to replace it, which is what used to be called. Republicanism. I mean, the notion the Republican Party or the right of center party in America was interventionist abroad is a very weird post-war phenomenon. It really is. What I find, what I found fascinating about the Sam Tannenhouse book on Buckley. And you think of Buckley as the classic Reaganite

fusionist person. But when you actually look at what Buckley was before Pearl Harbor, you will see America first was Bill Buckley's most important belief before Pearl Harbor. The Republican Party is naturally, any conservative party that is controlling or aiming to control a country that is an entire continent surrounded by two vast oceans is not going to be an interventionist party. And it's just going to say, hold on a minute, why? Communism gave them a reason, and it was bound up exactly, as the American said, with a whole bunch of religious and ideological commitments on a whole variety of its atheism and its communism made it a tufer.

Nothing like that has replaced communism. And the generation that never remembers communism is like, well, why are we doing this? When you ask them, I mean, Israel is at least a bit, why would Americans in the middle of the country who were born after Cold War think we should risk world war to defend Taiwan? 9,000 miles away when China is like a few hundred yards away and they speak the same language, the whole thing makes no sense whatsoever.

So we're a de-leveraging thing. And what I think, what I hope this does is kill off for good, the interventionist instincts in the Republican Party so we can get to the natural 19th century position once again. Yeah, I'm not saying whether it's natural or unnatural. they just have not settled on it yet. Sorry, just to be clear, you just mentioned Taiwan. Like, like, one of the fears that I would have with what you're talking about with, like, with all of these things going poorly, is that, in fact, we wouldn't defend Taiwan because

so many people don't seem to identify how it's an American self-interest to do that. Are you saying that you think that that would be good? Like, who would be absurd for that, like, bipartisan consensus of how we should be willing to go to war to defend Taiwan? I think it's absurd that we have that bipartisan consensus and know that no one in America agrees with it. All right. All right. So wait, let me see something else. In other words, this is a policy that's in the middle. It's like, it's like Wiley Coyote off the cliff.

It's just a matter of when it collapses. And my view is you have to try and do that as responsibly and as carefully as you can. And obviously, we haven't done it that way. We're spas. We're going spasms in intervention and withdrawal, spasm another crazy thing. But this may cure the Republican Party of it because it has been such. a catastrophe. But like, well, let me, let me just speak of Taiwan. Like, when we think about Taiwan, we think about this all this office situation where, you know, we're having to be in war, the, the fleet is sent to the, you know, the Taiwanese straight. And we think about it in the terms of forced depletion. But also, the United States valuing that has reduced tensions in lots of times. In the 1980s, there was famously a moment where the head of the Taiwanese secret nuclear program came to the

CIA and said, just so you know, your ally has been secretly developing nuclear bombs and has not told you. And the CIA said, oh, Jesus Christ, they're going to start a war with China. Like, they're going to, they're going to test it and China's going to have to go to war. And so the CIA went and said, you have to stop and took them apart. And that guy lives in Idaho now. He had to leave Taiwan. And he was, he's a teacher in Idaho. Now tell us the GDP and military strength of China in the mid-1980s and look at it now. I mean, that's the point. What's the limiting principle here, Andrew? I mean, you know, I think part of the idea with the defense of Taiwan is that we don't want China to be able to threaten South Korea and Japan.

I mean, we worry about Russian threats against Western Europe. What draws the lines around which alliances are worth investing those, you know, serious defense commitments in and which ones aren't? You're right. If we're retrenching, we need to have a new line, right? I do think the immediate line is you guys have got to rearm yourselves, which is actually now happening finally. That's this week's free episode of serious trouble. If you want to hear the rest of our conversation with Andrew Sullivan, we talk about race riots that have been happening in the United Kingdom in response to a couple of high-profile violent crimes and more broadly the immigration politics that has roiled the United Kingdom for the last

10 plus years without a satisfactory resolution for the electorate there. And if you also want to hear our conversation about the World Cup, Europeans, traveling the expanses of the United States and discovering wonderful things far from where tourists normally go and maybe even some lessons for Europe there. Andrew's a little resistant to that. My idea is about paving the green belt around London, even though I happen to be right. But so anyway, if you want to hear all of that, go to centralairpodcast.com, and you can upgrade, become a paying subscriber.

You'll get every full episode of the show. It'll also be making it possible for us to make this show. We would love to have you in our community. So go there. Upgrade. Listen. Thank you.