Central Air - The von Trapps Were Not Jewish

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

On this week's show: we’re joined by Jerusalem Demsas, Editor-in-Chief of avowedly liberal publication The Argument. Jerusalem makes the case for immigration advocates to ride the thermostatic shift toward support for immigration without avoiding the political traps that befell Democrats under Joe Biden.Plus: we talk about what sort of bargain Democrats should try to drive about funding the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the abuses they’ve perpetrated in Minneapolis, and we look at one aspect of The Argument’s project: getting liberals to stop acting like they’re “temporarily-embarrassed communists” and take pride in their own coherent worldview. We consider Moderna’s announcement that the US policy environment has turned too anti-vaccine to support expensive research into certain mRNA applications for fighting infectious disease. And Ben makes a case for one of the ugliest vegetables around. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. I'm Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post, and Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down. Ben, we've had a lot of feedback about your mustache ever since Friday's live chat. Oh, yes, your ethereal mustache. You know, the hills are alive with music of the mustache. Yeah. I mean, I don't know why I mentioned that's an odd reference to me. It's not a Nazi mustache for people just listening. No.

It's just to be clear, this is a normal mustache. I was thinking of it just as a happy singing song. Normal goes a little farther, Ben. Wouldn't that make it an anti-Nazi mustache or one of the Von Traps? The Von Traps, that is right. That is what I'm going to say about this mustache. You know, until I was like 35, I was under the impression that the reason that the von traps needed to leave Austria was that they were Jewish.

I was like, that's why they were fleeing the Nazis. They were Jewish. And then it was like, oh, I guess I need to go watch the movie again. Why are, I thought they were Jewish? Why are they leaving? She's a nun. She's a nun. Sorry, I haven't even introduced yet.

Julie Andrews is a nun in it? Wait, I was not the only one who had this idiot impression of how the movie works. That's the whole movie. They're definitely Catholic. The whole movie is that she's a nun. But she's married to, she's married to God then. How is she supposed to get together with Christopher? She's a novice and she leaves the convent before she takes her final vow.

She is sent out to be a nanny to the Von Trapp family. Because she's Jewish and she can't be a nun. I mean, if she's not a nun anymore, she can convert. We'll take her. That was, by the way, that's Jerusalem Dempsis correcting us about the plot of the sound of music. I'm so sorry. Editor-in-chief of the argument joining us for the show this week. Thank you, Jerusalem.

I'm so happy to be here. I literally could not keep silent through that. I couldn't. We're like two minutes into the show and you've already added value. So speaking of oppressive governments, let's start this week in Minnesota. There seems to have been finally a climb down by the Trump administration here. We had a second fatal shooting of an anti-ice protester, an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed by a customs and border patrol officer who was assisting ICE on this so-called Operation Metro surge

with thousands of officers and agents running around the Twin Cities causing all sorts of chaos. And the initial reaction to the administration was to accuse him of having been a domestic terrorist, saying he showed up with a plan to kill as many law enforcement officers as possible. This did not square with the video. It didn't even seem to be flying on Fox News. And by Monday of this week, you had the president taking these actions. It appears that so-called commander at large Greg Bovino has been pulled out of Minnesota. He may be retiring, according to some news reports. Tom Homan has been sent in there.

There's been this ongoing power struggle apparently for months with, Christy Noem, the DHS secretary and her sidekick slash lover, Corey Lewandowski, who have been trying with some success to sideline figures like the so-called Bordersar Tom Homan and Rodney Scott, who runs Costumes and Border Patrol, basically the professionals there who are like, okay, we want to deport as many people as possible. Let's go like find criminals and find, you know, jurisdictions that will cooperate with us and send us, you know, criminals on detainers and we'll deport as many of them as possible. That was one camp. The other camp was the Noam Lewandowski camp, which is let's go into northern cities where the government is hostile to us and cause as much chaos and do as much stuff publicly on the streets as possible to create all this video.

And we've now seen the tragic end result on that. The president's poll numbers on immigration have gotten a lot worse. The Republican pollster Eschlon Insights has him now at minus 12 on immigration. He was at plus 10 in April last year. Notably, that's still not as bad as his numbers on the economy, which they have at minus 19. But Jerusalem, you've sort of had this project of trying to rehabilitate the popularity of immigration. To what extent is the administration accomplishing that task right now for the pro-immigration forces? Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, we expect kind of a thermostatic reaction whenever someone's in office, right?

No matter what Biden had done, no matter what the economic situation had been, the highs of pro-immigration sentiment that we saw during the first Trump administration, were never going to remain through the Biden administration. And similarly with Trump, no matter what he would have done, you would have expected some kind of thermostatic reaction. As you just said, he and his administration have gone way farther than I think most people expected. Even the language they were using during the campaign of kind of going after criminals and rapists and talking about Lake and Riley created a real expectation that this was going to be, the language, the worst of the worst is a phrase that was used by this administration

to determine how they were going to go after. immigrants. And, you know, many people on my side of kind of the immigration question have long understood that, like, the politics of this are not good from like any side, right? Like, it's very, very difficult to deport people out of this country without creating massive amounts of backlash, whether it's from businesses who are now suffering because their workforces are being decimated by a deportation strategy or it's regular people, like, who, you know, their service workers are no longer able to help them in, and because they're not willing to come into work. And, and because they're not when they need to come into work. Like, there are a lot of people who are contractors, who are

nannies, who are housekeepers who were afraid for many times, for many, for many, uh, weeks during the National Guard, the presence here in D.C. to come into the office to go to their jobs. And that creates real economic problems. But then also just like at a, what we're seeing in Minneapolis, which is like a much bigger escalation than what we're usually seeing during interior enforcement, which is that we're seeing literal, like, military Harry style operations happening in a major American city, and people are being picked out of lines because of their accent, because of their appearance. I mean, these are things that are really disturbing to people who are anti-immigration as well. So that level of backlash that we're seeing

now is above and beyond what I think many people would have even expected going into Trump's second term. But then there's this broader question getting back to what you originally asked me, like how do you rehabilitate the kind of more pro-immigration view? And, you know, this constant bouncing back and forth between, you know, horror at an interior enforcement regime and frustration at the inability of administration to actually manage inflows is like not actually building a sustainable pro-immigration majority. Like the goal is to create an alternative where people don't feel that people are being letting to this country without appropriate vetting, that people are being resettled in places that can manage those inflows, that the places that are receiving them are not

being forced to spend local dollars, making it locally fiscally problematic for those places to take them. Like these kinds of things have, you know, an outsized impact on even pro-immigration people's views on the question. And so to me, like a pro-immigration majority is going to happen when you can actually balance that in a way that is sustainable. Megan, I've been a little bit unclear on who this performance has been for exactly in Minnesota. I mean, one of the one of the administrations, obviously, goals was to stop people from showing up at the border. And they succeeded at that. And it's clear that there's, you know, there's real feedback between, if, you know, people are seeing things on social media around the world that suggests that you can get into United States. If you show up here, they will come. They fixed that. And a lot of that really was a PR thing that they did. It's not clear to me that this interior enforcement stuff is important for that. I mean, first of all, they've already achieved it. The arrivals at the border have plummeted to an extremely low level. I think partly they think this will induce people to, quote, unquote, sell. deport, although it's not clear to me that it's useful for that. The data, unfortunately, is not

very good on how many illegal immigrants leave the country of their own volition at any given time, and particularly there's a reason to think that in some of the census data that looks at this, we're seeing fewer people reporting that they are foreign-born, but that's probably people just answering differently because they're concerned about admitting that they're foreign-born, rather than, in fact, it being that millions of them have left. But so, you know, it seems like this has effectively terrorized the population in Minnesota. I don't think that. think it, you know, specifically induced people to leave the country. I think conservatives have been a little bit surprised how poorly this stuff has landed, but it's, you know, it's not clear to me,

you know, what message they thought they were sending to whom that was going to work to do what. Well, in the case of Minnesota, I think what they were hoping to do was capitalize on the Somali fraud story. To be clear, Somalism not the only people who committed welfare fraud in Minnesota. It seems to have been an extremely widespread problem. But there were a very small. We're not. We're not a lot of were a lot of Somalis involved. This played well for immigration forces, and they thought, we'll go in there, we're going to provoke confrontations, we're going to raise the salience of this issue. And they don't seem to have planned for the possibility that by provoking confrontations, they would have not very well-trained ICE officers. And even though the people involved in the

shooting actually have often been with Border Patrol for years, the thing is, border patrol is not an urban police force. Right? Those are fundamentally. different jobs, and that those agents would then create bad optics for themselves. And I think that's where we are. Part of it is they just enjoy the theater, right? Part of it is that they were hoping to get a kind of George Floyd-like response that would create a backlash to the protests to pro-immigration sentiment. And part of it is they just wanted to keep Minnesota on people's minds. They have certainly succeeded in that last goal, but not in the way that I'm. I think they imagined it.

It's so stupid, though. Oh, my gosh. This administration did something stupid. Who could have predicted? Yeah. But, I mean, like, first of all, like, something like 90% of the people of Somali descent in the, in the Minneapolis area are U.S. citizens. So it's not like it's not like you can send ICE there to do anything about, you know, quote unquote Somali fraud. And in fact, it looks like they were tending to be going around looking for people of either Latin American or Southeast Asian descent as they went around the Minneapolis area.

they induced the lead prosecutor on the Somali fraud cases to resign because he was so offended by what they asked him to do in terms of looking into doing an investigation of Renee Goods' widow. So the welfare fraud stories in Minnesota are very real, are a real problem for the Minnesota Democratic Party. And not only did they not capitalize on that, they've in fact bigfooted that story in a way that they have insulated Minnesota Democrats from consequence on that. So it's just, we occasionally talk about like Democrats have a human capital deficit on immigration enforcement policy and how did the Biden administration screw up so much. It was partly that they basically, they didn't understand what was going to happen at the border when they did the things they did because the people who were expert on this were Republican-leaning. But then Trump came in and instead of listening to people who were experts on that, he had, you know, his Corey Lewandowski running point on this, who is not only a hot-headed moron, but has no particular expertise related to immigration. I mean, I guess, yeah, to your point, like, it's not, it's not. It's not. It's not. surprising they did something moronic, but it is, it is moronic. The most moronic thing that they did was, Lathendor, these masks, right? Like, I've never seen a bigger self-owned than this mask situation.

Because when you look at, at these videos, any video, even with them just milling about or acting like thugs, there's just a human response to go, that motherfucker in the mask is up to no good. Like, it is a human response to do that. And it makes me not want to give these people the benefit of the doubt after I've seen all of these different things. You know, and it's the same thing that happened in 2020 when the Antifa people were wearing masks.

I looked at it and went, you're after something. But like to Drew Foam's point, which I thought was really good, the iron hue of all of this sort of like looking at the larger mistake that they've made is that for 20 years or 30 years, every discussion or every grand bargain that they always talked about included sort of an understanding that whether you wanted to welcome people into this country or not. or whether you were like ideologically for amnesty or not. Like the McCain and Lindsay Graham and that whole crew just had to recognize the fact that practically you can't get rid of 13 million people here. That there's no way of doing that without doing things that the American public isn't comfortable with.

And traditionally that was money. They were like, we just don't want to pay $100 trillion, $100 billion to do this. But then you get to like the 78% of those people who are here who like are just not criminals and they're just your. friend and you don't think of them as the bad immigrants, then inevitably you get mad at. But, like, what this has shown, what the Trump administration has shown is that that conventional wisdom, anything undersold it, you know, like even when he's gotten money from Congress, from these, like, supplicant Republicans, we'll just throw money whatever he wants. And even when he has favorable conditions with scandals and all this nonsense, they still can't

get people out of a place in Minnesota. in the dead of winter without accidentally killing a fucking nurse from the VA. Like, they're that bad at this. But I think, though, to your point, I mean, given how, like, as we've discussed, how idiotic what it is that they've done here, there is a less idiotic set of things that they could have done. Now, it might still not have been effective in terms of, you know, exactly how much of the unauthorized immigrant population you cause to leave the U.S., but, like, the options

aren't this or, you know, amnesty, everyone who's in the country. Go ahead, Jerusalem. Yeah, I mean, the thing I'll just, I mean, there's two many comments here. One is that I think that in conversations about immigration enforcement, there's like two sorts of things that end up confusing people and the discourse at large. One is that no one ever talks about how like the most important question of how many people try to come into this country is economic. Like, is even under the Biden administration, no matter what the Biden administration had done short of like randomly shooting people who are approaching the U.S. border, there would have. have been a lot of people trying to come in post-COVID recession, labor market is doing fantastic. It is related that the labor market is not doing super hot right now, that we're seeing

fewer flows. But wait, no, sorry, doesn't that run the other direction? I mean, you know, you had this huge reversal in the flow pattern that started in 2014 under Biden and intensified under Trump in 2015, while the economy remains strong. And hiring went down because fewer people were arriving in the country. But it seems to me like the lesson from that is that is that arrivals are highly responsive to policy, that if you make it much more difficult to enter the U.S., you get a lot fewer people showing up even when the labor market is good. I mean, you know, 2009, 2010, it was a weak labor market. Sorry, my point is not that that policy has no impact on immigration flows. My point is that the large determination of immigration flows is the economy. We know this because under

Trump, right, in 2019, as the labor market starts running really, really hot, even on under the really intense draconian family separation policies, even when we're seeing like all of these stories about how Trump hates these people, all this stuff is happening. I don't think it's as bad as right now in terms of interior enforcement, but I'm saying like it was very, very negative. It was unprecedented. They were getting a lot of press. You saw the highest levels of immigration arrivals at the U.S. border in all of U.S. history. And that's because like even when you're doing all those sorts of things, they do have some impact. But the labor market is just like a massive pull. Like even if you have a 70% chance of not making it, like 30% chance of earning U.S. wages is like a massive incentive to come to the United States of America.

But the second point that I wanted to make is about like this question of like, how do you do like can you do border enforcement or sorry, can you do interior enforcement in a way that is like less draconian? And like, yes, you can. But like this raises the question of like what is your actual goal here? If the goal is to get rid of criminals, like people who have been caught by local elected officials and have been. served with whatever kinds of arrest warrant, whether it's that they've been arrested for murder or they've been arrested for a parking ticket, whatever it is. Like, the question then is, like, how do you develop good relationships and good systems

with those local law enforcement to get those people out of the country? If the goal, though, is this much more radical goal that, like, I think Stephen Miller and other people in this administration have, which is that, like, genuinely people with this ethnic makeup, with these genetic makeups,

are, like, bad for the country and are polluting the country. It's not really about, it doesn't even matter. You're just trying to get, like, any of these people out of there. And that's just going to, that goal is the problem. Like, I think people are like, confusing. Why are they using these tactics? Well, it's because, like, there are people in the administration who genuinely just want to get anyone who's like this out of the country. Well, but what if you have a third goal? So, I mean, you know, the usual so-called comprehensive immigration

reform framework was built at a time when you had a large number of long settled and authorized immigrants in the United States. And the idea was basically these people have been here for a long time. They're part of a community. A lot of them are, you know, they're in mixed status families. They're often Mexican, they have Mexican-American relatives, et cetera. That reality changed a lot, starting in 2018, 2019 because of the huge flows that we had, where you have, call it, six, seven million illegal immigrants in the United States now who have only been here for short time, on top of, you know, a slightly larger population of people who are genuinely very long-settled. And if you want a policy outcome where basically, you know, maybe eventually we're going to do an amnesty for certain

long-settled people, we want to get criminals out of the country. But we also want several million of these recently arrived people to leave. It was a different time, but when Mitt Romney, who has always been pretty far to the right on immigration, even as he's been moderate on other issues in the Republican Party, he's the one who first coined this term self-deport. And the idea was basically that you throw up economic barriers that make it much more difficult for employers to employ people who are here illegally. And you throw up barriers that make it more difficult to obtain government services if you're here illegally. And that those things will induce people to leave. And I think that there's basically because of the unprecedented rate of unauthorized migration

during the Biden administration, I think there's been some expectation that that needs to be part of the solution now in a way that it didn't need to be 10 years ago. I mean, is that something that's feasible, Jerusalem? I always say this. I mean, obviously anything is feasible. Like if the United States government decided they were going to just kick people out, you could just do that. I just don't actually think it's true that you could do that without the kinds of disruption we're talking about here. Like, millions of people, even if they've only been here for a few years, are now. And I'm a embedded in the American economy in a way that would be painful for key interest groups if that were to change. Like, we're talking about people who are currently doing jobs, meeting people.

Like, yes, they haven't been here for a decade or whatever, but like it is actually quite hard to do that. And it's also quite hard to do that in a way that, you know, I think most people would find acceptable. For instance, everyone, when we're talking about these like millions of, you know, illegal immigrants, we're often talking about people who came here with making an asylum claim. Now, we can say that like there's some number of those that we don't think are valid asylum claims and it's ridiculous that it's taking it too long for it to work through the system and again yeah i would say most yeah it's like yeah there's like a lot likely a majority it's like very difficult to know but like that is very plausible to me that it's a majority of people i don't i don't know i think it's very hard to

know but i think that the question then is okay so like let's say there's even 30 percent of them that have a legitimate asylum claim we could say we don't give a shit as a country that we don't care about asylum claims at all like anyone who came in the last five years were going to deport you But like, that means you're going to have all of those same stories of we sent a family back to El Salvador and they got murdered or whatever. And like that creates problems politically too. So I think there's a question here of like, yes, you could do things, but it would create massive political backlash and economic backlash because you would both hurt the labor market and create stories that are really negative for the administration. Megan, what do you think? I think the problem is that like I actually am not sure the asylum system can survive.

people have figured out that you can game immigration by coming and making a bogus asylum claim. We have, I mean, to be clear, we have fixed a lot of the problem by doing Remain in Mexico and so forth. But if it is possible to get into the United States and work for a few years by making a fake asylum claim, not only are you going to undermine the legitimacy of the asylum system, you're going to break the asylum system for people who actually need asylum because they can't get their case adjudicated. And so I think it's right that to do what Stephen Miller wants to do, you would need to do a lot of unpopular stuff. But like, we could probably actually reduce immigration, illegal immigration, quite a bit by doing much tougher employer side verification, which is how Europe does it, right? And that would create other issues. You would have to revamp, right?

You need some sort of a better centralized ID system for the United States. There's all sorts of like side issues on this. But Republicans don't want to do that, right? They don't want to hassle small businesses and they don't want to do a major like IT upgrade and put money into that. They don't want to increase the bureaucracy for dealing with E-Verify, but that is something that you could do. They don't want to hire thousands of additional immigration judges. Exactly. Which is one of the things that seems to be a key part of these reforms.

Yeah. I mean, there are there are things you could do that would be much less both morally and optically. bad than what they've chosen. But in part, like, I think that they just enjoy it. They enjoy the theater of it in the same way that there are protesters who really enjoy, like, you know, it would be nice if we stopped deportations, but like what I actually enjoy is me being out there confronting the powers of darkness in the form of the government. And like, those people, the differences that are slightly uncharitable, right? I mean, you don't think they're sincere? There have always been protesters who loved the drama, right?

And the cause, it wasn't that they didn't care at all, but the cause was secondary to their own personal drama that was playing out on the streets. And you would see them just go from cause to cause to cause. The difference is, though, that those people are like a fringe in protests, right? They're occasionally a really annoying fringe, but they're a fringe. Those people on the Republican side are now running government policy. And that is a huge issue. I think that they genuinely, any kind of impact, even winning elections, is in some sense secondary to Stephen Miller to playing out his Goddardamorong fantasies on a national scale. I want to turn back to the more immediate future, which, you know, by the end of this week, the Senate needs to pass government funding bills if we're going to avoid a partial government shutdown.

It looked like there was going to be a group of Democrats in the Senate who were going to avert the shutdown and vote for this package of funding bills. The latest fatal shooting blew that up. And basically, you've had Democrats in the Senate saying we're not going to advance this package that includes funding for the Department of Homeland Security until you have various reforms and changes in this immigration enforcement apparatus. I guess, Ben, I always been very skeptical of government shutdowns as a strategy. I keep seeing people advocate this without explaining how the shutdown is going to produce the outside. outcome that they're looking for. You're one of those people, right? What is...

Right. What's supposed to be done by shutting down the government this week? I mean, I've never been... I've never supported a shutdown in my entire life. You know, like, as close was... Until today. Yeah, I mean, now, honestly, like, I was more over the weekend when it looked like Taco Trump was still going to have these thugged, hooded assholes in Minneapolis,

but now they're going to retreat back. Well, I mean, maybe. We'll see what the scope of the retreat is, but it's looking like that. But yeah, but so, like, my enthusiasm is a little like, if they've... they pull it back a bit, then I'm less morally, like, chatty about it. But I still think that they should do it because the general choice between whether you should do a shutdown or whether you should have some doomed thing in Congress where liberals fight just to fight is that you're going to show that your base that you're fighting, but you risk moderates. You know, like there's a tradeoff. And that in almost all situations, there's just no point in risking those moderates, especially on a lot of these issues.

But in this case, it's so, so, so awful and so disgusting and so profoundly unpopular that I don't see that downside risk. And once you don't see the downside risk, it sort of changes the thing of it. But I take your challenge. Yes. Which is that you always say. You know what my question is. How will the shutdown end? Whenever someone proposes a government shutdown, they should have a theory of how the shutdown is going to end.

Taco Trump fails. Okay. But more specifically? Yeah. The Democrats should ask for a decoupling of the bills so that they can say we'll pass all this nonsense for the government. And then we'll have ice as a separate thing since we hate ice. And we'll talk about ice longer. And Republicans will say, no, no, no, no, no.

We know we see your plan here. Everyone hates ice. So we're going to say, TSA, if you want to fly, you must let us have ice. Wait, so let me just explain what the package looks like for what better. There are six funding bills that haven't passed yet. their defense, labor, HHS education, transportation, housing urban development, state treasury, and then the sixth one is Department of Homeland Security. So one thing that you could do is you could pull the five bills out of there that are not

homeland security and pass them, and that will fund air traffic controllers and it will fund, you know, grants to school districts and that sort of thing and the Department of Defense. And then you have DHS left over. It sounds like you're proposing even more surgery than that, which is that you want to pull out FEMA and the Transportation Security Administration and fund all of those things. things and leave over just ice. Although I think it's important to note that most of ICE's funding now actually comes out of the one big beautiful bill.

They're not even reliant on this funding. So like you would hold aside, I forget what the number is, 10 billion of ICE funding. 75 billion is what they got in the big master's bill. It's like 18 billion a year. And it's just a little slush fund for them to use to their advantage of what they want. But they still, they still ask for 10 billion is the appropriations this year for the thing. So they clearly do understand that money can be exchanged for goods and services. And they like money.

But my point is actually not that they is about the money. You're right. They have the money to do whatever they want. It's not about we're going to starve the beast. It's that you are using this moment to secure concessions from them. And what are the concessions? The initial demand is to have them separated, which they won't go for, because they know that that's a trap. And so the next thing is to put guardrails on it.

It's like in the House bill, there's these various things about how these ICE enforcement officers need to, you know, maybe try to wear body cams more, which already they should be doing. But this would be like, you could demand that it be done. Actually, they have to codify it. You can say, like, we should give money to an IG report. They'll actually investigate it. Maybe they'll have to, like, give a report to Congress after 90 days to make sure they aren't just killing people. Maybe we'll have to get some handshake agreements that they're going to at least investigate. investigate these random killings or anything like that.

The really important point is that you're not actually asking for anything special about immigration. Like, I don't think it would be good for them to go in and have a shutdown for concessions on immigration. What I think that Democrats should do is go in and ask for and fight for concessions on, stop sending thugged men into the streets to beat and kill people. Well, so hold on. I mean, one thing is that what you described there doesn't amount to stop sending thugs into the streets to beat and kill people. Means that when they kill them, they were going to have body cams of it. Well, okay, but that's quite different.

My understanding is that the people who shot Alex Pretti, in fact, did have body cams. And that footage is now being allegedly reviewed by DHS. So I am all four. Like, strap these guys with, like, sensors all over the place. and, you know, turn them into a 24-7 live stream, but it's not a magic bullet. I agree it's not a magic bullet. I don't think any of this is actually going to stop anything

because, like, obviously, there's quite a few videos of everything they're doing, you know? They like to film themselves, and people like to film them, and there's ETS security camera footage, and only cam models getting killed, whatever. But, like, the... What? I made that last one up, okay?

Only fans on the mind. Okay. My point is that, Josh, as you often like to say, the real guardrail at the end of the end of the... of this will be the election, right? Yes. So what matters is the politics. And the point is, is that in this case, the politics will help for them to show that they are fighting so that streets aren't filled with mass thugged bullies who beat up people and shoot nurses.

Do we think this is actually going to be a major issue in the midterms? I mean, I would, like, I am not downplaying this. I am completely outraged by what happened. Our editorial board issued a very strong editorial on this, of which I endorse every word. and I have been tweeting about my outrage. But I think we often overestimate how much things that feel incredibly outrageous and terrible in the moment. And I think this is really nationally politically significant. Again, not downplaying it as a problem that is happening in our country actually turn into issues at the polls.

I think maybe what's going to determine the midterms is mostly going to be the economy, which I also think is bad for terms. I don't know. I'm actually, though, I'm not asserting this as a fact. I am raising the question, in 11 months, is this still going to be top of mind for many voters who weren't already going to vote? Go ahead, Jerusalem. Yeah, I mean, I think it just really depends. Like, if they deescalate, right? And, like, you don't have these images anymore. Like, yeah, voters have short-term memories and, like, their vote is not going to be determined by what happened, unfortunately, this month. I mean, this is true also of January 6th, right? The voters were, in. incredibly frustrated and upset in the moment there was serious political blowback, but it just was too far from an election to be that meaningful. But I do think that like, you know, we do a lot of polling at the argument. We're polling right now where we did a press stamp poll into the field trying to figure out people's views as like, you know, we want to figure out the percentage of people who saw the video. How did they feel about different things, et cetera? So we'll have that out on Thursday. But like, I've been shocked if you look at most important issue polling, not just ours, but also the Times-Cyna poll. Like democracy as an issue is surprising. amazingly popping in ways that, like, I would not have expected to be so durable. Like, the fact that when people are asked to name their top two most important issues, they name democracy is not something that I think is, like, permeated into, like, the issue space. And so, like, that is something where I'm like, okay, even if someone does not make their vote on this,

like, they're going to vote more on, you know, their economic pocket issues, I think people do care. They are, like, concerned. I think I have a certain amount of PTSD from, like, 11 years of Trump outrages that are, like, the primary driver of why liberals find him so upsetting being useless for Democrats. Like I just think this is not true. Like he's like so like he's almost lost both elections. I think like Democrats his own failures really that drove that. Sure.

But but I useless at the margin is what I mean. You know, like you can just you can go to Greenwich, Connecticut and you can see the enormous number of people who have been permanently estranged from the Republican Party in upscale suburbs by Trump's, you know, like abandonment to the rule of law. I think it's partly like the people who felt like they had the most statured, in the system to begin with, who really felt like the system was responsive to them, that the rules, like, work for them. Those are the people who have been most outraged by, like, the, like, the rules don't apply any more kind of stuff. I don't think we've seen any of these elections

where it has worked for Democrats to harp on that, where it's basically you go out and you talk about those issues and you raise the salience of those issues, and it wins over voters who are persuadable. I think that, you know, we've seen that the persuadable voters care about how much eggs cost. It makes me very wary of situations like this, where Democrats, have come around to the view that, aha, the key political weakness for the president is the fact that he is a lawless thug who behaves in ways that that trample on the rights of Americans. Like, I just, I feel like we have seen that that is like that is never the right way to run the campaign. And I realize that, you know, a new thing can be different. And I think that the, you know, the mass outrage out there is very real.

But I also think that the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's killing, like, it felt like there was, you know, a certain way that things had changed in politics and the way that, you know, the way that the, the way. that that was activating voters. And that was completely wrong in a way that ended up actually being quite damaging for the Democratic Party. Well, first Joe Biden did win. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. But I think he won on competence. Biden won by saying we're returning to Norville. It was a literal reaction to Trump's insanity and lawlessness. But I think I'll point out to. Was it? And to COVID. Yeah. People overrate like how much George Floyd stuff didn't change things. Like even like A, like there were actually quite a few state policy changes that nobody pays attention to. Like it's actually very difficult not to have body cameras, their oversight boards that exist in many states across the country that otherwise

wouldn't have. No one really cares about these, like, technical policy things, but they did actually happen. But also on top of that, like, attitudes about racial profiling shifted left dramatically. The reason we don't talk about it anymore is because most people think it's bad when cops shoot black men now in a way that they didn't before. But like, that was a massive attitudinal shift. And so it's not like super relevant to what you're saying. I just like, I hear a conversation like all the time that are like, that didn't change anything. I'm like, I don't know. Like, lots of people who didn't otherwise have these opinions now hold like pretty left-wing opinions on race. Well, but I mean, it induced a bunch of Democrats to endorse a bunch of policies in the aftermath that they paid a significant political price for in the ensuing years.

They were in a reality distortion field as to what was going to be popular on certain things. I also think you have to remember now that like it's not enough to motivate voters because turnout's much higher than it used to be in presidential elections anyway. And because of that, like if you actually actually. want to defeat Trump permanently by rejecting whoever his handpicked successor is, you have to win a presidential election pretty decisively, not by like 0.01%. I mean, I think we have seen that the old progressive theory of we just need to mobilize the base has been decisively falsified. But I think more generally, right, because turnout's higher, in part because of voting by mail and other things that have made it easier to vote,

you get less juice from issues that are going to mobilize people who are lightly sympathetic to your side. And so you actually need to move voters from one column to another. And I think democracy is a harder sell on that because I think a thing that I did not realize in 2016 and now believe to my great sadness is that all of these institutional issues, all of this kind of democratic norm stuff, it's all intra-elite stuff. most of the public does not believe in that stuff. They just don't. And like, it varies which group they don't care about. Just to like to argue the other side of this for a second. The broad public doesn't care about that in an abstract way.

But the sort of things that have happened in the last couple of weeks make it a little bit more concrete in terms of like, can a federal agent just like shoot you in your back on the street? Which I think that's, you know, that in some ways that's like, you know, rule of law and democratic norms. But it's made into a concrete thing rather than an abstract. Right. And on the concrete issue, I think you can win. Like, this is bad execution. This is bad policy. Like, they're doing this wrong. Well, and it's a violation of people's rights. Like, on the kind of more high flooding, we need to restore our civic institutions. I think we do need to do these things. But that's going to be an intra-elite deal because no one's ever going to win an election on that. Right. But I mean, I guess like that's the difference, right? Like, I agree with the 100 percent that talking about democracy is the super-st thing the Democrats have ever done, right? branding sounds silly. It doesn't, I don't even know what it means when they talk about it, to be honest with you.

Because, like, he did win that last election, you know. But what you're talking about, Josh, is exactly the difference is that, like, democracy might be what we have to call it in polling because it's just a, it's a catch-all term for this kind of various thing. But in reality, the problem is that I have seen videos of thugged men beat people up just because they said mean things to them. And, like, this is America, okay? in America, it is your right to call a cop a fat pig. Like, you might not be the smartest thing to do, but everyone in this country who isn't a liar

understands intuitively that if you call a cop a fat pig and then he beats you for it or shoots you for it, that pig should lose his badge. Like, like, that is not a good pig. It is an American right to do that. And I just think that, like, the reason why this is different, it is like, you know, as the Jew on the podcast, I will say, you know, why is tonight different than all other nights?

Is that all other times that we've talked about this and has been ethereal democracy stuff that is a little hard to understand. There's nothing hard about watching these videos of these masked bullies doing this stuff. It's disgusting. And it's hit people on a visceral level that I don't think other things do. And I just think that that's, we can all get a little too busy fighting the last war to then like deny what our own eyes are showing us. I'm not, I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing that much.

I am just arguing for campaigning on this at a lower level of like they're doing this badly. And then having modest expectations for how much that's going to matter in November, I'm not arguing that this is not, in fact, a grotesque violation of like everything America stands for, nor am I arguing that like you can't move voters at all. I just think you're probably going to move them at a lower level of like this could happen to you, not at like, here's my 250 page white paper on democratic institutions. Right. And I just think that's like the sad political reality.

Yeah, two quick points here. One is that like, so our polling but also the New York Times-Syenne polling has recently shown that like Trump's coalition is breaking down. It's like the Latino and young male voters that were like really powered some of the new voters entering the Trump coalition, like, or like genuinely fleeing the fucking party. And you see this, like, also just in the discord- recursive space, too. Like, Joe Rogan is literally like, what the fuck are these guys do? Like, he's, like, in shock over it. And he sounds like totally lived out on his podcast. And, like, that stuff, I think is, like, clearly influencing the ability of this coalition to, um, to continue under the Republican banner.

But the second thing I'll say, too is, like, I think we often have too much, um, uh, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we're up to show up to politicians over, like, what they, the campaign ends up being, the campaign ends up being. over. Like, yes, there are things they can say or do. But, like, if you look at paid comms from Democrats basically the last 10 years, like, they're often, like, doing the smart thing in all of their paid communications. Like, it's just kind of hard if, like, you're constantly on TV and you're trying to go on there and talk about your bill about, like, health care premium reform or whatever. And they're like, okay, did you see that there was, like, a murder in Minneapolis? And you're like, well, I'm here to talk to you about, like, Medicare for all who wanted. Like, what the fuck is that? Like, you just sound like a moron. You know, like, this is one of the,

the things Zoran Mamdani managed in the, it's like his amazing ability to be on message and find a way to like give an answer about affordability to virtually every question he was asked was like genuinely impressive. And a lot of a lot of politicians at any place along the political spectrum should, because he did it without sounding like a crazy person. I also think he wasn't a national political figure and he neutralized the left because they were all on his side. Like I think if a moderate Democrat had done that, they would have been like, you're a fucking chill. How dare you not talk about these issues? And they just like, there's no way they would have let it. get away with that if he wasn't a DSA er. I mean, and I guess to that point, he wasn't perfect. He did at one point muse about having the NYPD arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when he would come here for the UN General Assembly. Well, thank God you said Netanyahu. Who among us?

Have not. First I was like, Benjamin, what he said what about me? Yeah, he's going to arrest you, Ben. Let's take a quick break. We'll be back shortly with more of Central Air. So Jerusalem, how many months now into the argument, your new liberal publication? We just hit six months. Congratulations.

But thank you. Thank you. Mazel tov. Thanks. It's fun, but it's also technically been like almost a year of me working on this project, so it feels longer. One of the things I like that you said like right around when you were launching and basically talking about how the argument is going to put out an affirmative argument for liberalism as opposed to, you know, other left of center ideologies. And you say, we are not temporarily embarrassed communists. And I feel like especially, I mean, I guess the worst of it was the 2020.

Democratic presidential primary. But it was a lot of like, you know, very left-wing people in the party with their, you know, their big binder full of plans. And then people not as far to their left, basically issuing a whole bunch of apologies about why they weren't going to do the things that Bernie said he was going to do. How is that project going? What does it look like to be making that affirmative argument for something that is more on the center left? Yeah, I mean, I just find it so frustrating. I don't have a problem. If you, like, genuinely believe that communism, is like the way forward to make human life better and that people's lives, we better, like,

go ahead, make your arguments, like, let's have that debate. I think that you're wrong. I think that that's a worst way to live. And I think you're going to make the country worse if we implement these policies. But the people who fucking piss me off the most are the people who, like, in private are just like, obviously if we do this rent freeze,

it will, like, destroy the housing market and many people will be homeless. But we need to be nice to these, like, constituents. Like, do you actually believe these policies are going to make people homeless? Because if so, this is the most, like, brain dead shit I've ever seen in my life. I cannot believe that you think this is okay.

And I realize a big part of it is that, like, a lot of people are not, they're more interested in coalition management, whether they're actual politicians or they're people who are just like, they have a lot of friends or people in their, you know, workspaces, whether they're journalists or their think tankers or whatever. And they don't want to make those people mad at them. And so they're more interested in that kind of coalition management than they are, like, the literal issues we're talking about. Because if you're, if whatever you implement, it's going to increase a chance of even a single

person becoming homeless. And you do that knowingly because you don't want someone to be mad at you. I actually think that's like near evil kind of behavior. Just get out of politics. Like, don't do this. I get it. A lot of people don't want to be yelled at online. That's fine.

Like, that's actually very healthy and normal. And we commend you for your, your mental health and, and acuity. But then just don't do this job because this job is actually like has really high stakes. And I mean, when we came out, I think we were like pretty open about the fact that like, you know, it's a very big tent. Like being, you can be a left liberal. You can be a right liberal. there are libertarians. There are people who are much more conservative than me, much more to the left of me that we've published.

even people who consider themselves socialists, but also liberals we've published. There's a very big tent of people who consider themselves liberals and figuring that out as a big part of it. But every single person we published, like, at the very beginning, I was like, if we're putting it out there, it means we're not going to just go like, oh, sorry. I'm so sorry that you all got mad about this thing we published, like distancing ourselves from this thing. And I think that having that posture has actually decreased the level of backlash you get. I think a lot of backlash comes when people know they can get you to feel bad and apologize for having different views than them. But like, I don't feel bad about my views.

I think that they're right. They might be wrong. And then I'll change my mind if someone shows me that they're wrong. But like, I don't feel bad for thinking that I'm making the world a better place by advocating for certain things. I'm just to tell you, you were talking about coalition management and how like when people talk about it, it's so insane. And it reminds me this is about the right. But when I was 18 years old, I went to a cocktail party with Grover Norquist. And we were all very upset about the war in Iraq. Grover Norquist. the longtime head of Americans for Tax Reform, the right-wing anti-tax group. Yeah, and it was like, the election's about to happen.

Everyone's very, you know, a rock on the mind. Right, right. And I'm like a teenager who cares a lot about Iraq. And I was like, what about sworn a rock grove? And he says, my, it's terrible. I don't support him. And I was like, yes, you do? And he said, oh, well, sure.

I mean, it's a team sport. Publicly, I have to sport it. It's idiotic, though. And I was like, very shocked. like it was, you know, thrown into the deep end of the pool. And now as someone who's been in politics and seen like how, and not just politics, but journalism as well in real life and social media, how common that is, that exact coalition, this is a team sport thing.

How did you end up at a cocktail party with Grover Norquist when you were like 18? Was this at David Frum's house or something? It was at the Oxford Union Debating Society. And it was some people who were. were debating things, one of whom happened to be my father. So this is sort of a star-fucking connection, situation, as you could say. So I think I broadly agree with this that the no enemies to the left or the right has become an enormous problem in American politics. But I do think there's a trade-off, right?

And I remember this. Larry Summers came to speak to when he was Al Gore's economic advisor when Al Gore was running for president. And I, as a young MBA student, got to see him talk at the University of Chicago. And he was defending a bunch of policies that were kind of economically somewhat indefensible. And not even that the policies were, but the claims about the policies and their marvelous effects were economically indefensible. And I saw a professor get up, my macro professor, in fact, got up and laced into him in a very University of Chicago way. And Larry Summers just kind of shrugged and looked out and everyone understood. He's not in the job.

He's working for Al Gore. His job is not to go out and tell you why Al Gore's policies that have been decided on for political reasons are not going to work. And, like, people, Brad DeLung used to do this to Greg Mankue when he was working for the Bush administration. And, like, yes, yes, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors is not going to go out and tell you that his boss is full of it. But internally, you want those people there because they can push policy broadly in a better direction. And I think that's also true in politics. You do have to do some horse trading. But I think the question you ultimately have to ask yourself, and the question that a lot of people on the right and the left have stopped asking themselves, is at the end of the day,

why am I on this team? What is the team doing? And if you have stopped caring about that question at all. There's a big difference between making small compromises to get yourself to 50 plus one. And just deciding that the only thing that matters is your teeny tiny issue and or the fact that like

the main thing about being on my team is that I hate everyone on the other team, where it really is just literal fandom and the actual, you know, any of the procedural or policy stuff is now irrelevant. It's interesting though that it's Summers who was, Larry Summers, was your example there. Because in more recent years,

Larry Summers has been willing to be somewhat of a skunk at the Garden Party in some of these internal Democratic Party debates, particularly about, you know, the stimulus during the Biden administration. Yeah. But I think this is actually a perfect example, Josh, because the question is actually, what role are you doing? Right. It's fine if you are literally the Council of Economic Advise. I mean, they're specifically there in part to push back. But like, if you're like on NEC and National Economic Council and like you can't like go and like shit on the president all the time, sure. But like just to explain to people, there's two different economic policy. bodies in the White House. The Council of Economic Advisors is supposed to, in theory, be a little bit more academic and elevated and offering the president-dependent advice. The National Economic Council is sort of the president's, you know, in West Wing, like, economic policy cheerleader. And that's, and Larry had that job at one point. Yeah. And it's like, what kind of role are you playing? Like, if you're in politics, sure, like, I'm not going to tell you how to do your

coalition management, like, whatever. But like, if you're a journalist, if you're a writer, if you're like, I'm just sort of here, like, what are we all doing? Right. I mean, like, that's the thing is, like, I'm even willing to, like, give. Grover Norquist in retrospect. Of course, he's a lobbyist. He has, here's one, one thing getting these taxes lowered. He has to say what you have to say.

But then you see so many people who, like you said, are journalists. Like, all of us here are writers. My job isn't, I'm a Democrat, but like, my job isn't to help nominate get Democrats elected. It's to be honest with my readers. And if I'm not doing that, then I'm bad. Yeah.

Yeah. I, 100% agree. But I'm actually, I'm interested in whether, Jerusalem with the argument and some of these specific, like policy arguments over stimulus that because I mean Larry Summers you know Larry Summers also unfortunately asked Jeffrey Epstein for relationship advice about an affair that he was pursuing which was gross and he got in trouble for that but like you know part of why people had it out for Larry Summers was exactly this stuff that he was you know breaking from the line that the groups

wanted that the people aligned with Elizabeth Warren and the party wanted and then there was an opportunity to take him out and they they jumped on it you know for reasons that were a mix of actual revulsion at certain personal behavior versus like desire to win a policy fight. But like that side, and it's obviously it wasn't just Larry. There was Jason Furman who was, who never asked Jeffrey Epstein for any relationship advice and, you know, remains in good standing. That side, though, which I take to be the side that is more probably aligned with where your publication is editorially, just got their asses handed to them in that fight in the Democratic Party. So what's the plan next time for getting that message out in a way that like stands up for itself? Well, politics is a blood support, right? People are going to be unfair and, like, use personal failures to discredit your ideas. And that's always been true. And so, like, I mean, just in general, outside of politics, you should try to be a good person who doesn't consort with, like, pedophiles.

That is good advice. in politics, too. I have never been in a room with Jeffrey Epstein or asked him for relationship advice. But, you know, I think that that's definitely just true. I mean, I think that there's a, there's a problem when we often talk about the influence that I think bad ideas have had on, whether it's the left coalition, the right coalition, to underrate how persuasive those ideas were at the time. Like, people weren't just doing this coalition management thing. They just weren't thinking through ideas on first principles, or they were and decided they agreed with them. Like, when people were talking about how, I don't know, like Title IX and like whether or not college men

deserve due process rights in Title IX investigations, like, it wasn't like people didn't understand, hey, like, usually you give due process to criminals because, you know, we have these principles that lead us to believe that innocent people can sometimes be caught up in processes and like they deserve these, like, you know, lawyers or whatever it is. Like, it wasn't like, they weren't confronted with these ideas. They were often like lawyers who were much smarter than like me, and, like, they had access to them. But, like, it's that they were convinced of the opposing argument, which was that actually this is such an epidemic, sexual assault is such an epidemic on campuses,

that, like, even if some guilty people get swept up, that's okay because we need to believe women in general and there's been a big problem of not believing women when they're sexual assault. Like, it was actually a persuasive argument that worked. And so the question is, like, how do we shore up arguments persuasively that I think lead us in better directions? Like, to me, as someone who was in-class, college when like me too was happening, I was very persuaded by arguments that were like, hey, like, you know, fuck this. There are a lot of men who are getting away with like, you know, sexual assault and we need to like make it harder and harder than to get away from it. And I don't

think there were voices who are like, hey, like, let's look at like history, like how this is played out that were made more prominent on the left. And so my role, I think in, in the discourse is to be a liberal person who has a lot of the same kind of equity commitments that like people on the progressive left have, but also like that much deeper commitments to like these liberal ideas, because I've seen them play out badly in both sides. Like even when you're on top, it doesn't actually work out. Like we didn't actually solve like sexual assault epidemic on campuses through these policies. Like it didn't actually work. And so the thing that we're trying to do is like you try to learn. I think that movements get better when people, you know, are able to to see

the mistakes they've made in the past and and implement them differently. But I also think this, like we've seen a lot of learning happen. Right. Like the reason why there was so much stimulus in the post-COVID moment is because people were overreeding the problems of the Great Recession. Like the Great Recession, we actually did stimulate too little. And then there was a massive effort by like tons of wonks to say like next time we need to recover quicker and get to full employment as fast as possible. And so now there's another lesson. Just like, yeah, you can actually overdo that. And then it's a huge political problem. Yeah. I think we can leave that there, Jerusalem. Thank you so much for joining us. And where can people go to get the argument? It's been so fun. Can't wait to come back.

Theargumentmag.com. You can get all of our hot takes across the liberal political spectrum. Thanks, Jerusalem. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody. We've been trying something new here at Central Air. We've been doing these occasional live shows on Substack, where the three of us get together on video.

We take questions from listeners who follow along live. We had several hundred of you join us for the last one that we did last Friday. Here's a little bit of sound from that, and I want you to know you can go to centralair podcast.com. If you sign up there, you'll be able to see those shows, even if you miss them live. You can watch them back. You can also get it delivered to you as audio in your podcast feed. Just another feature that we want to share, especially with our paying subscribers here at Central Air. Tell me about this mustache, Ben.

I don't want to talk about the mustache. What happens somebody's from the lifestyle? Josh, I don't want to talk about the mustache. Everyone with a mustache loves talking about their mustache. What do you do you want to talk about this? My mustache is I've been working on it, you know. Yeah, that mustache really is something. It's kind of ethereal, and you can see it.

If you go to central airpodcast.com, you can watch the video. You can get Ben's explanation of why he's so bashful about his very handsome mustache. And then also, you know, of course, we had substantive conversation here as well. We used this past week's episode to review the Greenland episode and figure out did we learn anything through this nonsense. We talked about the arrest of Ryan Wedding. the Canadian snowboarding cocaine baron down in Mexico. Turns out if you're a 6'5 white guy with a lot of tattoos, it's pretty hard to hide out in Mexico and blend in.

And we also have a look at some online idiocy, this guy clavicular, who somehow became an influencer, who says you should hit yourself in the face with a hammer to improve your bone structure. I don't know where he came up with that. That's a bad idea. But anyway, if you want to hear us discuss all of those things and take some questions from listeners,

you can go to Centralairpodcast.com, see that episode and we'll be doing more of these live shows for you going forward. We hope that you will join us. So last week, Moderna, the MRNA pharmaceutical research company, announced that it's pulling back on investments in phase three trials for certain infectious disease vaccines because of a change in the policy environment in the United States, that basically the government has, you know, become quite hostile toward certain kinds of vaccines and especially toward MRNA vaccines. And so they just don't see the market as being ready to support the investment that they were going to make in this, which I personally find to be a rather depressing development. Megan, I know you have thoughts on this?

I do. Look, I think this is a folia d'a here. What is a folia d'a? It's a kind of, it's when two people make each other crazier. Okay. Like reinforce each other's delusions. Okay. Like a marriage. Something like that. Yes, Ben. That is what marriage is like. You should get married. as quickly as possible so that you can enjoy the delusion that you'll live happily ever after, which then turns out to be true. Ben, the marriage expert on this podcast. Yes. So, look. Sometimes you have to stand outside of the institution to judge it fairly.

The proximate cause of this is the bad marriage between the Republican Party and anti-vaccine skeptic activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is not in any other way, really much of a Republican. but who is now running the Department of Health and Human Services, and is, despite his patently insincere promises to Congress that he would not do this, is meddling with vaccine policy in all sorts of ways that have made it much riskier to develop new vaccines. And that is bad, and that is America's fault that this happened, especially the Trump administration's fault, but we elected them. But then the other part of this is why is the important? American market so vital? Why can't you develop vaccines unless you can get into the American market? And the answer is that everywhere else decided that it would be a great budget savings if they

just rewrote on the United States to pay for all new drug development. So it costs somewhere around $2 billion to bring a new drug to market. You get somewhere between now, somewhere between 9 and 12 years usually to recover those costs while the drug is still on patent, and then it goes off patent, and you have a lot of generic competition, and then you don't make very much money on your drug. And so that means that in that window you have to charge as much as you can to recover those R&D costs. And the problem with this is that because the marginal cost of producing an additional pill, after you've made the first one that cost you $2 billion, the next one might cost you a few cents or a dollar. And the temptation for countries is to say, no, I just want to pay the dollar.

And so what Europe has done in a variety of ways is they have, the left likes to call this negotiating, the right likes to call it price controls somewhere. The reality is a little bit in between those two poles. Call them soft price controls. In a variety of ways, they have pushed the cost down much closer to the marginal costs than America has. This sounds great to a lot of Americans. They want to emulate it. And in fact, we've moved in that direction already. The Inflation Reduction Act contained a provision to control Medicare prices for the biggest blockbuster drugs. And the Trump administration has extended that in a variety of ways with this most favored nation idea where we're not going to pay any more than comparable countries do. And so the result is that the profits that pay for the development come

from the U.S. market. So while you can make your marginal cost back in Europe or in Canada, you can't make that $2 billion. And so if you can't make the $2 billion, you're going to invest in some area that you're not looking at so many problems. So when you combine that with the fact that there's going to be more regulatory delays, there's, you know, you might not end up on the vaccine recommendation schedule, all of that stuff. There are also concerns that there might be more liability in the future. And all of that is making it not attractive to be in the U.S. And it's already really unattractive to be anywhere else. And that means that Europe, by free writing, it's not the only area. There's also true in defense. They have depended on us to be,

have dependable good policy. We should have dependable good policy. When we don't have dependable good policy, that's our fault. But it is their fault that they have made themselves so dependent on the United States that when, like when we sneeze, they catch cold. Can I ask some dumb questions for a second? Yes, go ahead, Ben. Ask the dumb questions. My understanding, right? I know that I know this basic thing you're describing that American pharmaceutical companies do the developing.

You know, we like to make. Well, I should know actually, the companies are not necessarily American. They depend on the American market, but a lot of the companies are European. Well, that was a, okay, so I guess you're getting to my question, which is one of the most famous things that happened in with vaccines in the last decade was when we did all these COVID things. And one of the famous one was Astorzeneca that is based in the UK, right? Well, yeah, but their shitty little vaccine, so cute at Oxford, they came up with the, like, Oh, was it not good?

I don't, I guess I didn't, I didn't, I, maybe I got COVID and got brain fog and don't remember. But I just remember there being, being some Europeans doing something. It was not as good as the MRNA vaccines. But didn't, didn't also they, they invent these GLP1 drones? Yeah, no, like, Nova Nordisk is Danish. And the Pfizer vaccine was a joint venture with, how do you pronounce that it's buy on tech? But anyway, as a German company was like central in the development of the Pfizer vaccine. But so anyway, to your point, often, you know, the companies can be in Europe, the research can be done in Europe.

But to Megan's point, they are heavily dependent on the returns that they will make selling the drugs into the U.S. market. It's essential to their economic model. Yeah. Also, I mean, LeMond just actually recently, a few months ago, had a big piece on the European Pharmacy. industry. It's actually available in English. You can read it. That said that these low reimbursements are slowly killing the domestic industry and that not only is the U.S. surpassing them both because of industrial policy here and because this is, you know, often people like to be closer to their biggest market, but also now China is coming up rapidly behind and that Europe really needs

to get its act together. So, I mean, one question I have for Megan is a lot of this stuff feels on some level arbitrary in terms of, you know, you mentioned the nine to 12 years of, it's a, it's a 20-year patent, as I understand it, but like it includes the time from when you invent the compound. So you have several years that you're in trial, you can't sell it. And so you're typically left with maybe nine to 12 years. But that policy could change. The patent could be shorter. The patent could be longer. And even in the U.S. where it's like in theory, we have market setting of prices. In fact, these are markets that are influenced in all sorts of ways by government policy that influence willingness to pay.

And that also has to do with, you know, which drugs do the, do the pharmaceutical companies even need to cover? Sure. And then in Europe, I mean, I think you overstated a little bit. It's not like they're regulating it down all the way to the marginal cost, but you're getting much less return. But so how do we, you know, if those things shift in one way or another that make the pharmaceutical development less lucrative than it used to be, how do we know that we previously had the right equilibrium and now the prices are too low? I mean, well, I think that. that the vaccine thing tells you that Europe's prices are too low. Europe has a much bigger population than North America.

If you cannot get vaccines developed for that market alone, then the price is too low. Right. If the United States changing its policy is the end of you getting new vaccines, you are not pricing correctly. Is the United States at the platonic ideal of a price? I have no idea. The way you will find out is we could be too long. low for all I know. I mean, unlikely, right? They're often pricing what the market will bear. So it probably couldn't go that much higher. Well, I mean, I guess you could have, in theory, even longer

patent terms. Yeah, but I don't think that's, is that a good trade-off? But why are the vaccines even being affected by the patent terms? I mean, shouldn't they, they have to reformulate them every year with every new disease? So isn't that, doesn't it reset the clock? It depends on the disease. That's true for flu. So then, so then what are they developing these vaccines for that that they haven't gotten to yet. But they're like, all right, next year I'm going to. Well, next year I'm going to get it. I don't know.

He didn't specify. But there are a lot of diseases that are out there that we don't have vaccines. So I mean, and then I guess the other question I have is, you know, circa late 2020, early 2021, I was like really psyched about the MRI vaccines. It was like so awesome. We developed these so quickly. They were 99% effective. It looked like, you know, we just, you know, sock this thing right in the,

the face. And, you know, maybe that was a lot of people, including me sort of overreating the early results, and we should have been prepared for the fact that the performance was going to deteriorate. But, like, it really deteriorated a lot. And I still, you know, I'm, I'm still pro vaccine and I still think that, like, the annual COVID vaccine is, you know, particularly a good idea for seniors and a, and a good enough idea for adults in general. Like, I don't think that, like, the, I go and get one every year. But it's not as good as I thought it was going to be. And so I assume that's some of what has undermined this market, that the things looked even better circa early 2021 than they do now. Look, that is certainly undermined Moderna's share price.

But like, coronaviruses are especially hard to make vaccines for. There's a reason we had exactly one vaccine for a coronavirus before the pandemic. They're unstable. They shift quickly, right? It's a little bit like flu, whereas there are other things that might be rarer, not as big a market, but where you could do a lot of good with these things, we're not going to find out because it's at this point probably functionally impossible to get a new broad vaccine introduced to the U.S. market at least until 2028. It's interesting that thing that you described, Josh, about, you know, when I also was very excited to get the vaccine. and I was one of those people who had a bad reaction to it. Not like a, I'm going to get autism reaction. But, you know, the three-day... You're already autistic.

Yeah, the three-day hangover that people got, you know, where you just feel like shit a few days. And the next year, I still got it. I got it over a year's. But then I knew it was going to be bad. And I've stopped getting them now because, you know, I'm in that adult category where I'm probably going to be fine. But you see an abandonment rate just from these things because the drugs are not for perfect

unless they continually innovate. And I'm reminding. data as we are talking of GLP1s, that when I went on it, I also became one of the weird people who gets incredibly nauseous and dehydrated and my kidneys failed last year, which I wrote about. And it was just because, like, it's a rare thing. Sometimes they make people incredibly nauseous. And the doctor said to me, that's just the first generation.

These make so much money, they're going to fix that. And the second generation will do it. But if you don't have that economic thing like you're talking about, vegan, then, I don't know. maybe you don't get past the people who just have that bad reaction and have spiking abandonment rates. Megan, is there awareness around this in Europe? I mean, because in certain ways, it's analogous, as I think you noted, to the NATO issue

where, you know, Europe slacked for decades in spending on a national defense and relied on the U.S. and has now seen that the U.S. is less reliable. And one of the things, one of the better aspects of that is that it has pushed Europe toward spending more on defense, they could presumably allow higher domestic prices. and that would encourage more drug development. We were trying to do like a back of the envelope before the show, and we think it's something like half a percent of GDP or something, you know. Yeah.

So it's material the amount that, you know, Europe would have to spend more to be, you know, sort of creating the kinds of incentives that the U.S. creates in these markets. But it's not something they couldn't do if they chose to do it. It's not. But I think they, the problem they have is that they made a lot of choices. that are now deeply embedded in their societies, that assumed that America would be paying for your drugs, paying for your defense,

doing most of the innovative frontier stuff that would then generate a lot of spillover benefits for your economy. And I think that piece is still happening, right? Our tech sector is still booming away, creating spillover effects for Europe. So undoing those choices will be a lot harder than not having made them in the first place, right? So you see this in the healthcare system in the United States and the other direction. Lefties really want to copy European single-payer systems, and they say, well, these systems are much cheaper.

Actually, the delta is shrinking. It's now about a 50% difference between us and the next highest spender, which is Switzerland. But the problem is that those systems held down costs from the get-go. They never paid their doctors a lot. They never built all of these extremely fancy hospitals with tons of cutting-edge machines, right? And undoing that in the U.S., telling doctors to take a pay cut, I guess closing those hospitals or selling the machines, that would be much harder than just never having expanded in the first place. And for Europe, they have these huge social spending budgets that depends.

on not having to pay for defense. That depend on, like, Europe is, England, the UK, is out of borrowing capacity. They cannot borrow in an affordable price, which means, and they're kind of out of taxing capacity. So, at least on their high earners and really, like, getting towards their low earners as well. So what do you do now if you've got to boost your defense spending and you need to spend half a percentage of GDP on drugs, but also you've got a lot of people retiring and you've got to be Got to get rid of the triple lock. Yeah, like you do, but that's politically totally impossible.

There's a very stupid social security type policy in Britain that we'll get into on another show, but they made a set of promises that sound really promising, but basically amount to saying that the benefit will grow faster than the economy every year. Yeah. Oops. Yeah. Sorry, you were saying. I think elites understand they're in a bad place,

but I have not seen any of them offer a politically, feasible program for getting to a better place. It's going to be colonialism. They'll have to go back into Africa. But so I guess the simpler fix is that we need a new administration here in the U.S. One hopes. Before we go this week, we have a conversation that we need to have about vegetables. And Ben had some news for us about a really sort of horrifying-looking vegetable that you

discovered that he thinks is absolutely delicious. What is the most underrated vegetable out there, Ben? It's called a celery root, and apparently it's also called a celiac maybe. Is that right? Celeriac. Celiac is a fashionable disease that people have in Hollywood. Well, they won't be able to curate what with this pharma news. But celery root is what they call it in the country bumpkin supermarket here in Idaho.

The Sun Valley organic market for the country bumpkins? It only has, only half of it is organic, okay? You can pay. Is there an Arawan in Sun Valley? No, it's called Atkinson, actually. But I read this thing in this, you know, recipe book, by which I mean the Internet, recipe Internet. And it said, have you tried these celery roots?

You should take them and dice them and use them with turnips and potatoes. And it said in the thing, just so, you know, if you've never done this before, this is a hideous vegetable. I've only ever seen celery root presented to me as a puree on a plate in a restaurant. I had actually not seen one until you caused me to Google a picture of it. And it was the second most horrifying thing that we've caused people to Google on this show this year. Yeah, that that root... I guarantee you that there is at least one low-budget 1950s sci-fi movie in which the alien is played by a celery root.

It is genuinely terrifying. But it's funny because that's also what the recipe thing said. It just pitched it the exact way you did. It said, you know, Salary Root is often the secret of high-end restaurants. And so you go, ooh, I would love this. And then it warned me that it would look terrible. And I went and was looking. He was like at the scene in Indiana Jones when he's like, what is the cup?

And they're going for the pretty one. But you know, he's like, it must be the ugliest cup. Jesus was a poor man. He would drink from the ugly cup. And I'm going through this accent since I finally find this hideous, hideous mongrel of a vegetable. And pick it up. And as I was checking out, because it's a small town, the person is looking at me a little, like, suspicious and says,

So what are you going to do with this? And I looked at her and I was like, well, apparently, like, shave the skin off it or something. Then you dice it. It's like hairy and like it looks like there's something wrong with it. Yeah. And she went, hmm. And then she said, and then she said, she kept looking and she went,

and shook her head. And I said, well, what do you think I should do with it? And she said, and she whispered and leaned forward and said, I hear some people grill it. And I was like, well. So I think there's actually a useful rule here. Tyler Cowen has a rule about restaurants where if you go in and there is something super weird on the menu, you should order it because it's there for a reason, right? They're not selling a super weird thing that is also disgusting. Yeah, you can't make any money doing that.

Yeah. And the same thing is true of ugly vegetables. If it's really hideous, then there is probably a good reason to try it. This is the like you're ugly enough that you're funny thing, you know? Yeah, good personality. But wait, big personality. The thing you do with the celery root is you combine it with with turnips and potatoes. Is there any flavor in this dish?

I was making a hatch. I was making a, you know, like a root hash. And so I was experimenting with bringing them all together. I found also that then I put some leaks in it and a nice, you know, all that stuff. But apparently, as I was tweeting about it, I learned that the Polacks, as they used to call them. The Poles? Yeah, that's what the woke people call them now. But the Poles.

Is Polack, is that offensive or just archaic? I don't care. I don't know. I mean, it was definitely offensive by the time I was in primaries. school. Okay. Dreyfus is Polish. I'm allowed to say it.

I'm allowed to say it. But anyways, it was a joke. We can call the Poles if you want, Mr. Woke. But with the Poles, the Poles apparently make Polish soup. And I'm told that celery root soup, it's celery root soup. It's celery root is the key of the Polish soups. And so that in Poland, they love celery root. And if you even, if they heard this, they might hear it, they're going to get pissed off.

We're disrespecting their national fruit. Or not fruit. Or their name. Root. Their national name. Well, they have a great sense of humor about that, I bet. Megan McArdle also had certain advice about, like, root vegetables on root vegetables being super delicious. What was the—what do you propose to do with a celery root?

I bet it would be good, as with turnips mashed into your potatoes. Do not make the disgusting Irish dish where you, like, mash kale into your mashed potatoes. That is— No, that would have too much fun. Also, too many potatoes for the Irish. Possibly also too much flavor. But, no, you know, my people were in desperate straits for centuries as the oppressive hand of the English battered us into poverty. And we, not to mention our short growing season and the fact that it's a relatively small island, we did some inadvisable things to survive.

But that said, a nice, like, very lately caramelized turnip mashed into your mashed potatoes is just like elevates the mashed potato game to a whole new level. And if you have not tried it, high recommend. I mean, this is an excuse to tell the funniest story that's ever happened in the last 20 years in global affairs, which is two years ago when Britain was having some problems with their economy because they're a poor rainy island with nice track. but there was like some problem and they couldn't get they don't have their own tomatoes they have to get their tomatoes from Spain and so this in Spain

told them to go fuck themselves for whatever reason and the woman who was in charge of the agriculture secretary I think this was a Brexit thing right there was like there there were the trucks full of tomatoes

were lined up at the border and they were having trouble processing them yeah and Spain was like we just don't we we the tomatoes we do have spoken for it for our European friends you can't have any and I look

I love that everyone has this like, this like northeastern city accent. Like the guy, the guy from Seville, the tomato farmer is like, hey, hey, hey, I got your tomatoes. I just defaulted the exact same one every single time. Look, that's the guy driving the truck. But he told him to go, you know, you can't have any tomatoes. You got to get him yourself. And Britain has no tomatoes because they're out. And people were riding in the streets.

The woman, I believe you mean Liz Truss. She might have been. She might have been. Yeah, it was the agriculture secretary. And then she became the most unpopular and briefest turn. She was prime minister for five seconds. She killed the queen was the only thing she accomplished during her time as prime minister. Well, and like the best political meme of, I think any in the last few years, maybe except for the Marco Rubio, like, dressed doing all jobs.

Yeah. Was that there was a head of lettuce. Yes. Which is going to last longer. Truss or the head of lettuce. And the head of lettuce beat her. But also like she goes on, before she's prime minister, when she's just the farming minister or whatever,

she goes to calm down the rabid chartist movement of tomato hungry, thieving Britons. And she says, look, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You can't have any tomatoes. But we do have turnips. You can have as many turnips. you want. And like, they were, they were like, we'll kill you. You know, outrage. Because of course. And I was just always imagining like, what would happen if someone said that in America now? It's like if Trump or Biden or anyone sent out their agriculture secretary to say you can't have tomatoes, but you can have some turnips. I mean, the Secret Service would do a coup. People, people would, there would be instance of a war. Americans don't even know that turnips exist practically, right? Right. But we're a wealthy. country. We have so many tomatoes. We have so many tomatoes. We can be picky about them. I buy tomatoes all

time and throw half of them out because they're not even good, I guess. I go, I didn't took it in time. I throw it in the trash. You know, you know what the right way is to buy tomatoes in a can? Well, for some things. I mean, like, in, like, in August, there's some, like, local heirloom tomatoes that smell great. That's great. Buy those make a capraise salad. But like those tomatoes that were being trucked in from Spain were probably not any good anyway. Like, you get these completely flavorless off-season tomatoes. American tomatoes are particularly bad

because just the way our supply chains work. I actually agree with you for sauces, but I will say that the grape tomatoes are great. And you can use... You can get good small tomatoes all year now. Yes, and you can, instead of making

like a capraise with your giant tomatoes and the giant mozzarella, you can get little pearl mozzarella and make a grape tomato cabraise salad, which is equally delicious. Well, but I put them in, you know, a salad with some spring mix or whatever, but I don't know. I just like, I feel like there's one of the good things in life is the anticipation of good things to come.

And knowing that summer will come back and we can have the capraise salad again in the summer, it's more special when you don't try to have it in January. I don't know. I mean, this is the same type of shit that you once said to me about how I shouldn't have an iced coffee with a shrimp salad or whatever. whatever, because I can have an iced coffee another time and it's not the right man. Well, no, that's a different reason. The reason is that you have delicate flavors and you have strong flavors.

And when you have the strong flavors, they trample on the delicate flavors and you can't taste them. So when Ben ordered the warm shrimp salad at La Diplomat, which has a tarragon dressing that is very delicate, and then you drink coffee with it, you're not going to taste the tarragon. That's why you shouldn't have the iced coffee. I've explained this to you repeatedly. I don't know. I don't know. It sounds like wacky wellness bullshit. Okay? It sounds like the type of stuff people say at RFK camp. I know that I like that ice coffee hits the spot.

Well, yeah, you're a heathen. Let's leave it there for this week. If you go to central airpodcast.com, you'll get the show's episode notes. And we're going to include there some shock images of celery roots that you can look at and be horrified. Make sure there are no children in the room, though, before you go back. Yes, make sure. Ben, Megan, thank you so much for joining me as always. Thank you.

Thank you. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Faye. We are a production of very serious media. Amy Keen produced and edited this episode. Jennifer Swaddick mixed the episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening and stay cool out.