Central Air - The 'Woke' Odyssey (feat. Sonny Bunch)

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

This week: Sonny Bunch joins us to talk about “The Odyssey,” what we thought of the film, whether the controversy about some casting decisions materialized, and more. Also this week: we consider the likely effects of the WBD-Paramount merger (if it is allowed to go through) and why the studios are spending so much money to produce films they dump on streaming. We discuss why Netflix’s stock is in so much trouble. During cocktail hour (free to all listeners this week) we discuss the stupid plan to adopt year-round daylight saving time, propose ideas to make soccer more interesting, and discuss how Josh has become an EV-driving lefty cuck.Sign up for updates from us at centralairpodcast.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack Newsletter, Calm Down, and Megan McArdle, columnist for The Washington Post. Megan, you know, Friday was my birthday. Happy birthday, Josh. Thank you. I'm 42 years old now, and I celebrated by going by myself to the movies. I went to a 7.30 a.m. showing of The Odyssey at the Regal Union Square in Manhattan. I saw it in 70mm, not IMAX.

regular 70 millimeter. There were like 20 people in the theater with me at 730 a.m. I got popcorn. It was very serene. I like, you know, the part of why I don't go to the movies as much as I should is that I find, especially in New York, it's just a little bit of a cluster fuck. It's always so crowded and whatever. And so like, the 7.30 a.m. weekday movie may actually be a life hack here. The morning, the morning movie is one of life's great pleasures. This is like, Don Draper had this 100% sorted in Mad Men. You know, you would like go to the midday New York showings that are kind of empty, and that is absolutely the way to go. It's the only way I go to the theater now unless I'm at a press screening. Sunny Bunch has elbowed his way in here.

Sunny Bunch, film critic for The Bullwork. He hosts the Across the Movie Isle podcast with Alyssa Rosenberg and Peter Sutterman, a friend of the show, husband of Megan McArdle. So this movie, in the lead up to it coming out, there had been a certain amount of controversy, Elon Musk in particular, complaining about the casting of Lupita Nyango as Helen of Troy. Apparently, a lot of people are under the impression that Helen of Troy is a historical figure and that there's a fact of the matter about what color Helen

of Troy's skin was. And also that she's the heroine of the movie. Yeah. Right. Which she really, she's not the heroine in any of these stories. But I just, you know, I think it's been, you get cultural backlash to things and sometimes it matters. Like certainly there are, there were Disney films that I think like the storytelling got

too woke in certain ways and they made things that were not really desired in the market. They didn't do that well. Here, whatever Elon Musk was on about clearly is. not in touch with the broader movie going public, which has been very eager for this movie. Well, so to kind of back the card up just a little bit, you know, for years now, we've had these fights over particularly family movies. So, you know, you go back to Lightyear. Remember Lightyear, the movie that was based on the film that Andy, the boy from Toy Story Watch that made him want to buy. I'm explaining this plot to you. It's insane. It's an insane idea for

for a movie. This movie, I would argue, was always destined to bomb because you could not explain it to people in a sentence that made sense, as I was just trying to do. But because there was a two lesbian moms kissed for like 10 seconds, you know, in the movie, then that's why the movie failed is because, you know, tired of woke, tired of woke. There was an argument that more recently you had the Snow White remake, the live action Snow White remake with Rachel Zegler. Rachel Zegler's out there and she's saying, like, I don't even like the original Snow White. The heroine isn't, you know, active enough in the story, but whatever, whatever she was saying. And people were like, we're going to boycott this movie because she doesn't respect the story that she's acting in.

And then that movie bombs. I would argue that that movie was probably always destined to bomb because the way these movies work, when you have, when you have one of these huge live action movies hit, it's something like Beauty and the Beast or the Lion King, Aladdin, etc. it's movies that like when I was a kid those movies came out now I have kids and I'm going to take them to see the live action film snow white came out when your great grandmother was a kid you know like there's no generational tie there and so I think you had enough of these in a row where movies that were probably not going to do great anyway were also piled on by some of these Elon musk adjacent folks and they thought we can destroy these films it's like when you're in prison you've got to take down the biggest guy. And so they look at Nolan and they're like, we're going to take down Christopher Nolan. And Christopher Nolan fucked them all up. Like he just, he just, he put a hurting on all of them.

He's the shot collar in the prison. You're going to need more than a chair. There are so many Oz jokes I can make here. I'm going to avoid it. Speaking of formative childhood media, I really enjoyed watching Oz as a teenager. Formative childhood traumas. Oz was right up there.

So I think that that, That is, that's at least part of what was going on here. They saw this thing. They were like, oh, we've got, we've got a black woman playing Helen of Troy. Don't they know she should be half swan and another half three god? And then they're, they're like, oh, we've got this, we've got this trans man who's playing Achilles. This was a whole part of this that has just been kind of memory hold. Remember, they, for like, three weeks, Elon Musk and his his crew of idiots was like,

Elliot Page is playing Achilles, the Great Warrior, and we remember, we remember when Brad Pitt was doing it. And he looks like a maze. He's a man's man. And this is not, Elliot Page wasn't playing Achilles. Elliot Page was never playing Achilles. Nobody ever had confirmed that. Nobody had ever, they got all wound around their axles about a nonsense story that just was never true. And again, so they saw this.

They thought, okay, we can, we can take this down. We can really take the culture. back. We can make Hollywood do whatever we want. And that theory was proven incorrect this weekend, turns out. I would also like to shout out to the people who rebutted that by providing stills of the film with Brad Pitt as Achilles, the Troy, not The Odyssey, with Brad Pitt as Achilles wearing what appears to be some very nice, high-end luxury women's resort wear. Yes. And man's man with his little fringed crop linen top over his linen silk blend maxi skirt.

That's what men's men are wearing this year, I guess. I can't wait to see a Bronze Age pervert sporting the new Achilles look. As they all were. One of the things that when you saw this idiotic thing that they were doing was, do these people actually believe this? Because one, it's so stupid, but also, we've long since passed the point where I don't believe people can be stupid. But, like, it was also just a doomed fight.

They were never going to take this movie down the way that they could have some marginal negative effect on, you know, the dwarf movie. And use them to be suggesting that they did think they could take it down. I think they did. Well, so your question, how much of this did, they actually believe is an interesting one that I want to come at kind of from a slightly different direction, right? And I think you tweeted something like this, man. You were like, I don't believe any of these people are offended that no Greeks are in this movie. None of these, none of these,

there was another line that was like, oh, this is cultural appropriation. They haven't put, they haven't put my big fat Greek wedding cast into this movie. Where is, where are all the Greek stars? Why is it Neavartalus in this movie? And so there's, there's that element to it, which I think was always fake. That was just like pure naked outrage monks. that I don't think, I don't think had any resemblance to reality, right? I do think they saw some of these wins, you know, air quotes, on these other movies, and they got kind of an inflated sense of self and how much they could drive the conversation and how real the penetration of Twitter is into to the real world.

Because, like, look, there are ways in which Twitter can impact and infect real life. and Twitter is a good way of driving certain narratives because a journalist remain addicted to Twitter. You know, we stay, we've stayed here, you know, we are always on here. We see all of this stuff. Frankly, it probably influenced some of my own predictions on boxups. I figured this would probably do $85 to $95 million. I was always relatively bullish on... Domestic or global?

Domestic. Okay. So the actual domestic is tracking for something like $1.25. domestic's 125. So I like, I mean, the real reason I was discounting it is for the IMAX reason. Like, there's a limited amount of IMAX inventory. There are a lot of people who are going to wait to see this on IMAX. So what ends up happening is this movie, I thought it would have a smaller opening longer legs. It had an enormous open. Like, it, this, there's no, you cannot describe this opening any other way than enormous. It's his biggest non-Batman domestic opening. right. The Dark Night and the Dark Night Rise is both did bigger. It's this biggest international opening of all time, not adjusted for inflation. We can, you know, we can argue about how much that matters. But it's an enormous, enormous hit. And it's still going to have legs because there are, as you said, all of these IMAX screens are sold out all over the country. We have one of the IMAX 70 millimeters here in Dallas. And I didn't buy tickets ahead of time. I always, I always fucked this up. I always think, I'll just, I'll figure it a day that I can go. And sure enough, the show is basically. sold out through the end of the run. I mean, there are, there are tickets in the front couple rows. You know, there's, there are some, you know, 3 a.m. showings that have a few decent seats. But, like, the thing is sold out. They're grossing, you know, I did the math on this once.

And it's an enormous amount of money that each of these individual theaters go to because they charge a ton for the tickets. It's 30 bucks for a ticket for the IMAX 70 millimeter. Maybe more in New York. I don't know what the... Yeah, I paid 30 for my regular 70 millimeter ticket on Friday. Well, you're paying New York prices. That's, you know. And that didn't include the popcorn. That nice 7 a.m. popcorn. Yes.

I sat in the sixth row and I started to feel ill about an hour into the movie. And I was like, is it because I ate popcorn so early? And I eventually realized I was actually too close even though I was in the sixth row. And so I moved back to like row nine. I had read all the things that Tonya you're mentioning about how, you know, when the trackers, the few weeks before there was all the stuff about how like this movie had a bigger, you know, margin. They weren't sure because there were so many IMAXs.

And there was so little, you know, pre-sales for normal theaters. And they were like, it could be a lot of walk-ups and it could be not. Who knows? And then we went to see it on Friday at 3 o'clock in a movie theater that is made in 1972, you know, that doesn't have anything. And it was completely sold out. And I was like, oh, all right, I guess. And I guess the walk-ups over the whole weekend kept growing and growing and growing. So that's how it then, for the normal theaters, that it just led to this.

this much bigger number than expected. Yeah, we went to see it in a normal Dolby theater, and Peter had already seen it on Thursday, and invited himself along to see it again, which tells you how much he liked it. So what did we think of the movie? Sonny, give me your review. I'll give my very quick review,

but I'm more curious to hear what you guys make of it, because I find that critics are not super useful on this sort of thing a lot of the time. But look, I think it's a great movie. It's a big epic movie, and I mean that in like every sense of the word, right? which is that it's not just the best cast that you've seen in a major motion picture since Oppenheimer, frankly. You know, it's got A-listers in pretty minor parts, relatively supporting roles, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland.

I mean, Lupita Nyango is a legitimate starring actress in her own right, and she has like five minutes of screen time in this. Zendaya is arguably the most popular actress in the world amongst the under 30 set, and she's in this movie, for again about 10 minutes. And then Matt Damon, of course. Matt Damon is the star. He stars is Odysseus. He is great. He is a little more dower than usual. This is closer to his like kind of born mode, which I don't, which I don't love him in. And frankly, that's not, it's not my preferred Matt Damon. But, you know, so it's a big epic movie. And it's a big epic movie just in terms of scope and scale, right? This is the first movie that was ever shot entirely with IMAX cameras, which means that we don't have the kind of shifting aspect ratios, which is kind of a

hallmark of Nolan's previous four or five films where he would shoot certain scenes in IMAX and certain scenes were in the kind of more letterboxed format, which I've never loved. I've always thought it's a weakness of his that, you know, it takes you out of the film. This, you're immersed totally in it the whole time. So I really like that. the film itself as a piece of storytelling, if I have a complaint about it, is that it hues too closely to the epic poem itself. So if you, you know, we, I'm sure everybody's rereading the Odyssey now because, because of this. I mean, translations of the Odyssey are actually

selling very well on Amazon right now. Some people are. I'm only being like slightly sarcastic. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big thing. But in, in the poem itself, Odysseus doesn't show up till book six. He's on one of the islands. He's just kind of hanging out there. And before you get all that, there's like the bickering amongst the gods. There's Telemachus, who is in the movies played by Tom Holland. He's Odysseus's a son, but he's never met his father. And he is trying to, he's trying to determine if he's going to come back because otherwise he needs to take the throne to kick out all of the suitors who are eating him out of house and home, like literally eating him out of house and home. So there's like, there's like six books of this where it's just like, okay, where are we going to go on this odyssey that I've been promised?

And then we get to Odysseus, and then his story is kind of told through flashback, through a series of flashbacks, which again, this is what they do in the movie. And the problem with this from a storytelling, from a cinematic storytelling perspective is that it is very fractured and herky jerky. You don't have the smooth kind of riding on rail sensation that you do in something like an Oppenheimer or an inception or, you know, or some of these other movies. one of his great films inception. Shut up, Sonny. And as a result, it's slightly lesser than some of his other films. That said, it's great. It builds to this intensely cathartic last hour where people in my theater were literally clapping and cheering.

And, you know, this happened sometimes at previous screenings, but not that often. The last time it happened was with sinners. the Ryan Cougler vampire movie. It's an unusual experience. It clearly clicked with, like, general audiences. You know, one of the things that the jokers on Twitter were saying were like, well, of course the critics like it. The critics are, you know, paid shills for Universal.

They're going to like whatever the studio tells them to like. We'll see what the audience says. The verified audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is higher than the critics score. It got an A from Cinema Score audiences, which is a, a polling firm that polls Friday night viewers. So everyone loves this movie. It is going to have enormous legs. I'm in a weird position of like a long time and notorious Nolan lover of like being probably

slightly cooler on this film than some than than most everybody else, which is which is odd for me. Let me attack you. Yes, please. As you mentioned, you have been a Nolan fanboy forever. Okay. And we've had a long-running joke because, like, I'm not a huge, a long fanboy. And Inception, I think, is the most overrated film in history. One of the things I really hated about it when I went to see it was I said, I don't like it.

And people said, you just don't understand it. As though it's, like, impossible to understand a dream within a dream. You've never refuted this. You've never refuted this. It's something that five-year-olds think that, what if I had a dream within a dream? But then also, you know, you love Tenet, which is indefensible. And, but like, when I saw Oppenheimer, I walked out and I was like, well, got to hand it to a man. Best picture, best director, he did it.

And the thing that's always annoyed me about him historically is that ever since Memento, you know, because Memento made him who he is, right, he tries to blow your mind a lot. So even in a movie like Dunkirk, which is incredibly straightforward in some ways, it's like probably as shortest film, there is some element of playing with time nonsense, right? like he takes these different nonlinear threads and then goes, surprise, guess what? This one's actually this time. And it just feels like he's trying to blow your mind. But I don't want my mind blown.

My mind is my best friend. And I don't want to hurt my mind. And so whenever he does these things, like Tannard is the rare example, it really just annoys me. And this one, though, in the Odyssey, the exact thing that you're talking about, how it's told through, you know, a series of flashbacks, his way of playing with time, serves the story. You know, I did think it was, he wasn't trying to blow my mind when he jumps back and forth

from these islands. It's just that it is a story told through memory. And so it makes sense. It didn't feel like a, like completely artificial like he was just trying to jerk me around, which is what he does when he's annoying me in sometimes.

I just thought that they built up so well to the moment where suddenly it did get linear. You know, like suddenly the flashbacks are over. He's on Ithaca. and the music starts and you know like you have promised us that now you are going to kill all these people and we are going to have a straightforward third act and he just nails it.

Yeah, I really, when I was going to see it, I mean, Ben makes fun of me for not really being a movie guy. This is only the second movie I've seen in a theater this year. He's never seen the bodyguard. I've never seen the bodyguard. I don't know why the bodyguard in particular is what Ben is obsessed with that I need to see. Well, he can understand it.

It's not like inception. It's very straightforward. Yeah. And has the history's most annoying song is its theme song. Oh, Megan. Don't come for Whitney Houston. Basically, I was like, oh, my God, two hours and 52 minutes. That seems like it's going to be really long,

which is probably not helped by the fact that I was doing it at 7.30 in the morning. But, I mean, it's interesting to me how many idioms we get out of the Odyssey. And, you know, Silla and Caribdis and the Siren song, these are things that have a cultural footprint that last. 3,000 years and most people don't really think about exactly what it's in reference to. And it's like, oh, yeah, it's a tour through all of those things. And that's like, that's fun. But it's like, it's not exactly a war movie.

It's him, you know, like monsters and like, and witchcraft and all of this stuff. And then you get that third act, which feels like a much more straightforward war movie. And so I enjoyed all the components of it. I didn't even, I, and it's not that I hated the first act, but I really, it felt to me like it could have been 20 minutes shorter. But the, but by the end, I was really into it and really sort of, you know, I, I, I, I shared the audience's enthusiasm for the film and really enjoyed it by the end. What did you think of The Odyssey, Megan?

Overall, I thought there were just so much great stuff, right? And that, like, in many ways, it's, I think, one of his best films. There were a couple things. I had some notes. So it's going to be slight digression, but I will land this plan, I promise. I love the movie Saving Private Ryan, like, really, really, really a lot. I have watched it many times. And the problem is there is one flaw in that movie and only one, and it is the stupid speech over the grave in the cemetery at the end.

That speech could have been condensed to tell me I lived a good life. And instead, there's like 10 minutes of like, hey, I'm not sure if you picked up on the themes of the movie. So we're just going to take a quick break. And I'm going to explain everything you just saw to you. Nolan was doing a little too much of that for my taste. It is the end of our age of bronze. The age of bronze thing was so, that line. And then the line that was like, yeah, well, they'll have to sing them in stories

because they'll forget that people like us could write. And I was like, oh, shut up. They didn't say that. Yeah, his monologued Penelope a little too much. Like for anyone in the audience who has missed the last two and hours and 15 minutes of the film, let's just check in. We're going to do a quick review and then there will be a short quiz. And my husband has convinced me that mine is a minority taste in this,

that like many people cite that very speech in saving private Ryan that I hate Load and Abominate. That's like their favorite part of the movie. And so I understand that you have to do some of this in the same way that I understand. that from now until I die or leave my job as a columnist, I will be forced to tell readers exactly what I'm going to tell them by no later than the first sentence of the second paragraph.

I do not love it. Apparently audiences do. I think we just need to clarify here that audiences are stupid. Like, audiences are made of people. But I will say, I love the... I like a good summation speech in a movie. And Christopher Nolan does these all the time.

He did it at the end of the dark night. Yeah, but he does like five of them in this. There are like five moments where he just stops the action to tell you that war is hell. And it's like, yeah, you know, I think we knew that. But he's not saying war is hell. He's saying we have broken civilizational covenants that will lead to decline. And then we will forget we have done it and we will do it again.

He's right. I am not disagreeing with the theme. I am disagreeing with the extent to which my mouth was forced open and the theme was pounded into my throat with a ball-pene hammer. But my larger issue, I would have liked Odysseus a little closer to the original poem. And I'm not talking about like it has to be some faithful, like, it's, you know, it's, we're doing Lord of the Rings and we need like 17 endings

because otherwise the super fans will slay us in our sleep. But like the Odysseus of the Odyssey, he is a charismatic scoundrel who is not particularly good at leading his idiot men. More of a Han Solo character, as Peter put it to me as we walked out of the movie. And then I would have liked to see Penelope actually updated a little modernized, not as, like, feminist Penelope who's angry about the patriarchy. I would have liked to see Penelope updated as Wiley Trickster Penelope, who is like the smartest person in the room and is in a bad position and is, like, actually, like, manipulating things

and there's a little bit of that. I would have liked to see more of it. I would have liked to see them, instead of him regretfully going off to the war, him kind of going off like the idiot he is. Penelope trying to stop him. And Penelope telling us everything, like, no, this isn't about some dumb glory. It's not about Helen. This is about trade routes.

Like, I would have actually liked to see her given a little more of, like put more of that into Penelope and less of it into Odysseus. I would have just liked to see it a little more complicated because, what Nolan is really good at is complexity. And so I would have liked to see him boost the complexity by like 15%. And maybe that's unrealistic, but that's what I wanted. And I'm entitled to my wants. My wants are valid.

I think maybe one thing that you guys are kind of touching on is that this movie does not treat Odysseus as the wily cunning trickster. It treats him as kind of dirtbag asshole trick. which is, which is, you know, like, there's, there's like the trickster who, like, does clever things and you applaud him for it. And then there's the trickster who cheats at cards and you dislike. And he is the trickster who cheats at cards in this movie, right? I mean, he's not even that much of a trickster. He's really much more of a very stock action hero figure that we have seen before in the war-weary vet who realizes that it was a mistake. His speeches towards the

the end or more interesting on that front. But like Odysseus is like Han Solo or like he is a timeless character because he is trickster because he is simultaneously kind of amoral and they can that can evolve. But at the beginning at least he's amoral and yet he charms you. And yet like you like him and you want to be on his side. And that does not come through in this movie. Well, let me, Let me just one specific example from the film. The section where they're all in the ship, they're going towards Silla and Caribdis. And he says, oh, let's go to the whirlpool and we'll kind of shoot out the other side. And then his men are like, no, fuck you.

We're going through this. There's a passage right here, asshole. We're going to go this way. He's like, no, no, we got to do the whirlpool thing. We're going to just shoot out the side. But he doesn't say, we can't go this way because six of you are going to die because of a monster. He lets them think they're making the choice. He knows what they'll do.

He tricks them into killing themselves. I agree with that, but it's actually like how many moments like that are there? There's fewer of them, certainly. Losing the Cyclops bit, you know, I am nobody, that definitely reduces his trickiness quotient. I'm sorry. Can you explain what that is? In the book of the Odyssey where they are trapped by the Cyclops, he tricks the Cyclops

into basically calling him nobody as he is fleeing. So it sounds like the Cyclops is saying. nobody is fleeing from me. Yeah, the cyclops is like, yo, yo, what's your name? And he says, my name is nobody. And then once he does all of it, all these other cyclopses,

because there's many of us. Yeah, there's many cyclopses. Yes. In the movie, they all come, they go, hey, what's happening? Cyclops, what's going on? What's going on? What happens to you? And he says, nobody heard me.

And they go, oh, this cyclops is just drunk. And they don't help it. They don't run after. Right. Yeah. And it's a pun on Odysseus's name. Yeah. But in English, it is not a pun on Odysseus's name.

Right. Right. Thinking about, you know, the, the bet that Elon Musk and that crew made about that, you know, they could take this movie down or even if it was a bet just like that the movie was going to go down and they could take credit for it. I think part of that is just, you know, we've gone through several really rough years for Hollywood. And a lot of movies, you know, they've spent a lot of money making and flopped. And this year has just been a much better year all around, including this. What's a, do you have a sense of what's, what's changing some of? Why are, you know, why is box office finally back above pre-pandemic levels? Well, I think, I think it's a combination of things. I mean, one, you've had some really interesting original films come out, right? So the two examples everybody points to here are obsession and backrooms. And there's always, there's always money in the horror stand, right? Like, there's always, like Hollywood is always finding cheap horror movies that do decent box office.

And you could look at this as that. But I think, I think what really happened here is you have, two films that come out from really three films. We could go back to Iron Lung. I don't know how much we want to talk about that. But Obsession and Backrooms are films that are made by these kind of YouTube native filmmakers. Backrooms. Backrooms is actually like IP.

It's just IP none of us know about because we're old. What is Backrooms? It's this Reddit copy pasta thread that this Kane Parsons guy made a whole little universe out of on YouTube, you know, kind of these endless fractal videos of, like going through weird liminal spaces, the long and the short of it is, that audience was very excited for this. But it was also, it also appealed to just general, broader, older audiences. Obsession is a movie that like hits at very specific Gen Z anxieties about sex and hookup

culture and consent and all that sort of thing. So you have these movies that are hitting at a younger audience that are doing very well. you also have a lot of kind of older IP related stuff not hitting that I think I think people are a little bit surprised by I don't think anybody expected Supergirl to flop as hard as it did. I don't think anybody expected the live action Moana that came out to flop as hard as it did. So you've got you've got some things that aren't hitting. But like generally speaking, and this is before we even get to the biggest film of the year. Well, I guess one of one of the biggest films of the year before the Odyssey, which was Project Hail Mary, right? So Project Hail Mary, enormous hit.

People love that movie. It's huge crowd-pleasing hit that plays great in theaters that has, you know, I think a guy that we've, that we in the film writing business have liked for a long time, who, like, audiences are, like, kind of hit and miss on Ryan Gosling. He gets his big star opportunity. So you've got, you've just got good movies out right now. Who doesn't like Ryan Gosling? Ryan Gosling has had some bombs in the last few years.

He's so pretty. The fall guy. The fall guy. The fall guy. I loved that movie, by the way. It was too self-reverential. I think probably mostly for audiences, living with a movie critic,

did help me enjoy it. But it was a great movie, and I was sad. It didn't do better. But yes, it did not do better. Again, it's just been a good year because the movies have been, for the most part,

pretty good and pretty entertaining. And even the ones that are kind of hit and miss, like, for instance, Michael. I didn't like Michael. I didn't like the Michael Jackson biopic that was just like, we're not going to talk about the unpleasantness. That movie grossed a billion dollars worldwide because you know what people wanted? They wanted to go to a movie theater and sing along to Michael Jackson songs. And like, that's fine.

I don't think anybody expected, like, for instance, the Devil Wears Prada 2 to hit quite as strong as it did. I think Disney knew what they had in their back pocket because they spent a ton of money on that movie. It's very expensive movie. But it did huge, huge numbers. It's like $600 something million worldwide. That's the other movie I saw in the theaters this year. I do tease Josh about how he doesn't go to the movies a lot. But then one thing that he said to me after seeing this was that he liked out to see and it made him think he wanted to go to the movies more, right?

Yes, I did say that. And so this is what movie studios and movie theaters count on. The same exact thing happened when Elvis came out. You remember Elvis, the Austin Butler Elvis movie? Love it. That movie came out and it was a surprise hit. People were very into it. and they saw trailers for Top Gun Maverick.

And they saw the trailer for Top Gun Maverick. They're like, oh, a new Top Gun movie with Tom Cruise. That could be fun. Top Gun Maverick comes out. It's an enormous hit. It's like an industry saving hit. And what happens? Lots of people see the trailers that are with that movie.

They're like, oh, I want to go see this, this, this, and this. The problem is over the last few years, the flow of product has not been as good because of the strikes, because of COVID. You know, there have been a lot of, there have been a lot of structural issues. with getting good movies to theaters. And so you've kind of had people fall out of that habit of like, I'm going to go see a movie. What's the new movie this week?

I'm going to go see that. That's what the hope with The Odyssey is, that people will go and they'll be reminded of the magic of the movies. Let's take a quick break. We're going to come back with Sunny Bunch, and we're going to talk about the Paramount Warner Brothers merger. This is Central Air. So, Sunny, I want to ask you about this merger.

The state of California and some other states are now suing, trying to block this acquisition. of Warner Brothers Discovery by Paramount. And the central issue in the lawsuit the state of California has filed is basically they're alleging this is going to reduce the production of movies. And people in the industry appear to hate the idea of this merger. I mean, people especially hate it because they're Democrats and they don't like the Ellison's getting their hands on CNN, but they also hate the consolidation and

the feeling that this is going to further reduce employment and production. Is that true, first of all? Are we going to see fewer movies because of this merger? All right. I'll tell you what Paramount Skydances said. Paramount Skydances said, we will continue to make 15 movies a year for Paramount and 15 movies a year for Warner Brothers.

We will make 30 movies per year, our movie studio will, and we shall put them in multiple thousands of screens. This is a lie. It's a lie. Like, that's not a thing that's going to happen. Paramount's not making 15 movies a year now, right? No, they're not. And it's not going to happen.

Now, they could make 15 movies a year and put half of them on Paramount. Plus and HBO Max, but that's not a thing that's going to happen. I feel very confident saying that right now. They may do it for a year or two, and then they'll have some flops, and then they'll say, oh, we got to retrench. We can't afford to put in 15 movies per studio per year. We know this from history.

Like, 20th Century Fox and Disney get away with the fool me once part of this equation, right? Disney buys 20th Century Fox at the end of the 2010s. They pay $80 billion or whatever for it. Huge amount of money. and what do they do? They say, we will continue to make the same number of movies. 20th century studios will be a distributor, and Disney will be a distributor.

And we'll have our little adult sub-brands for Disney, whatever their Touchstone equivalent is now. We'll have Searchlight Studios. It used to be Fox Searchlight. It's just going to be Searchlight Studios. We'll do the indie films, and we'll do... But we're going to put out the same number of movies. And if you look at the chart,

entertainment strategy guy. Great, great follow here on Substack. The chart looks like it's just a downward plateauing arc. Well, but they did that right into COVID, right? That certainly played a part, but there's no, like, I like some of the stuff that 20th century studios is putting out now. I like send help. Their new Sam Ramey movie, right? They put that out. They are a great repository for 20th century Fox IP, right? They put out the Avatar movies. They put out the predator movies, the alien movies that they've been doing. Like, they still do some interesting stuff, but it puts out, it just puts out fewer films. Like, it just objectively puts out fewer films.

But the reason for that, right, it's not that people woke up at Disney and said, ha ha ha ha ha, ha, you fools. You fools. We're going to, we're going to stop because we hate movies and we love hurting people. It's because, you know, it stopped making financial sense. And to do that. And if Fox had stayed independent, they also would have. stop putting out as many, like all these other studios have stopped it out. And I guess one of the

things that I wonder when I hear about, you know, what's going to happen with Paramount and Warner Brothers is that the alternative, right? The other road is not Warner Brothers independent and happy like it was in 1997. You know, like there's, well, it wasn't even independent than it was time, but like the idea, they seem to be arguing against perfect, but perfect is just not a thing that's really in the cards. Right? Yeah, it feels kind of like the, the, You know, like, Lena Kahn blocked the Biden administration blocked two moves in the airline industry. They blocked a partnership between JetBlue and American, and then they blocked JetBlue and Spirit for merging. And the idea was that would be bad.

It would reduce competition. And then Spirit just went bankrupt. Right. And JetBlue is now in trouble. Like, when the market shifts, there's no way by trying to keep hold the number of companies. companies constant to keep what is fundamentally a demand-led problem from changing the output, right? And in fact, often you make it worse because, you know, now there's going to be all these dislocations and so forth.

And as with movies a little bit, there's so many theater slots, right? Those theater slots will be filled for the foreseeable future. And similarly, there's so many airline gates and someone is going to take those landing slots. But I just think that, you know, the people who are saying this is going to be bad, it will reduce the number of films being made. We're not necessarily wrong. There's no world in which we keep six studios buying at the rate they have. The reason that that's not working, the reason that there's all this merger pressure is precisely that the old model is not working as well. Look, if the option is between Warner Brothers being purchased and Warner Brothers ceasing to exist, probably slightly better for,

Warner Brothers to be purchased. I remain unconvinced that that is the actual... But it's not necessarily ceasing to exist, right? Like, that's not how it always happens, right? What can happen is that everyone's margins degrade, and then the quality of the product has to go down because the margins are lower. And you have more, you have, like, you get all sorts of weird dynamics, but the just dynamic that creators often seem to be envisioning where, like, it just stays 2015 or 2019 or any year that was before the pandemic. It just doesn't seem like that's ever going to be on the table. There are all sorts of margins on which you can adjust quality in order to deal with the fact that

demand is declining. But at some point, something is going to get adjusted. And like that's, I think, sadly, the reality of it, I love theatrical releases. I loved going to see The Odyssey. I love every time Peter isn't like, hey, I'm going to see this screening at like 2 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon when I come. I like going to the movies when I actually go. But that's the best time to go.

It is. But my job doesn't think that's the best time for me to be in a movie. It's impossible to have this conversation where it's just looking at it as theatrical releases, right? Like you mentioned entertainment strategy guy who has a wonderful thing that he constantly reiterates, which is that when these studios make movies only for streaming, they should still release them in theater. most of the time. You know, like, it helps the streaming end of it to have done that. It's like an Apple store, but for movies.

If you just talk about movies now... Can you guys actually explain something to me that I have found very confusing about all of these movies that get made with the intention of doing a theatrical release and then they shunt them to streaming? I guess this is a general problem with a streaming service. You have all of the subscription revenue. And you know about what people watch, but you don't necessarily know what the things are that they're watching that cause

them to pay versus the things that they, you know, they're just filling time and they're going and watching something. So if you have spent $30 million or $50 million to make a movie and you release it to streaming, how can you ever possibly tell if you made money on that? Well, I mean, there's, Josh, you don't understand the data and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, re-up rates and the re and the thumbs ups and the-they do have ways of like tracing this a bit, but a lot of it also, you know, they'll see, like, one of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, for the Netflix's videos, aside from like the initial funnel of stuff that gets people to subscribe, is stuff that gets people to reactivate, you know, and like they've let their subscription

lapse. And then other ones, yeah, what's the first thing they watch after they reactivate their subscription is often a good metric for like. But like to your broader point, and I think is that a lot of it is art. There's data and you can look at it and you can, but there's lots of data, you know, you can find lots of things. And so you end up with these situations where everyone has a theory and some of those are right and some of them are. wrong. And a lot of, but also a lot of the ones that, you know, the studios where they end up doing it, where they, as opposed to Netflix, the ones that really do have theatrical releases normally, but they decide to put it on Hulu instead. It's just that they think it's going to lose

money. They don't want to put more money in the brand. That it's like, there's no, it's a money, but they don't want to throw more money after bad ones. So there's two, there's two separate questions here, right? Why does Netflix do what Netflix does? Netflix does what they do, because they have more money than Creeces. Like that, that's the long and the short of it. You know, they're, they're generating $12 billion a quarter or whatever. Like, they're generating some insane amount of revenue every corner. And they use that money. I would argue, there's an argument to be made that Netflix makes films in a predatory manner

designed to deprive the theaters and theatrical first companies of product. I don't really want to get into all that right now. But the long and short of it, they have a ton of money. So they can spend $250 million on a red notice. that they're never going to put in theaters or that they put in theaters for a token run for a one week run. I actually saw Red Notice in theaters

that looked like shit. Didn't look much better on the screen at home. But wait, hold on. That's not a theory of a business I would find convincing in another industry that just because a company has a lot of money, it goes out and does a bunch of money losing things. Like, that's like, they still want to make money.

I tend to agree with you that them spending that amount of money on a two-hour movie is a much worse business model than them spending the same amount of money on a 10-hour TV show, right? Because if your whole metric, because Netflix and you are just worried about hours of engagement, spending that money on something that lasts for five or six times the amount of time makes more sense. I totally agree with you.

I actually, I'm with you 100%. Nothing that Netflix does in the film space, as opposed to the TV space, but nothing they do in the film space outside of like chasing Oscars makes any sense to me. I understand why they spend the money to chase Oscars. Studios do that all the time. but when they spend, again, $250 million on a Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot movie, they have, they are making, in my opinion, they are making a mistake, and I don't care how many hours of viewing that they show for it. Like, it doesn't make any sense to me. I agree with you, but have it, my impression is they've all pulled back from that.

Well, they have. Netflix very specifically has because, because I was right. But the, the... It seems to me that one way you can think of that is just, like, to harm you. terminize Sonny's point, right, is that they had a ton of money and they were, and this is a shifting landscape and they don't quite know what's going to work out. So they make a ton of big bets on big movies hoping that this is going to, because I suspect what Netflix knows from looking at its catalog is that they have an interesting issue, right? The original theory of Netflix is that

you're going to have this library of IP and you'll have it forever and it's going to be super valuable. And what they found is that their old IP isn't very valuable. People don't rewatch it. There are exceptions to that. And again, Sunny knows this much better than me. But this is my understanding of what's happening is that, like, yeah, whereas, like, Amazon is making bank on, like, being the distributor, not the owner. So they're much more of just a pass-through at this point. But, like, they're getting all of this long-tail stuff where they get distributors who will find some movie from 40 years ago that's only on Amazon. I started watching Ironside, the successor series with Raymond Burr to Perry Mason on Amazon.

You do all that stuff, and it's not a ton of money, but you're also not spending a lot. But that that back catalog is the other people's back catalogs that are more famous or more valuable precisely because they have theatrical exposure. And I think that and because people know what they are. And unlike the old days where what's playing this week, I will go see whatever it is. The problem that streaming has now is like how do people filter out exactly what they want, especially if they're not like sunny with extremely strong preferences about what to view? and the idea was, okay, we're going to make our own back catalog of really, like, well-known, valuable stuff.

And they took a bunch of the money they had and they blew it on doing that. And then it just didn't work. And they've kind of really pulled back. That is my telling of what happened. But Sonny, is that right? Ben, is that right? All right. Let me just say that it's an interesting thing that you're discussing because there's actually a better test case for it.

And it's Apple. Apple literally launched without a back catalog. You know, like, Netflix never had no. like when House of Cards came out, they still had things already, you know, like they had the licenses out there still license. Yeah, but they were licensing content from Stars when they launched. That was the big.

No, no, yeah. I mean, but like Apple didn't. Apple didn't. Apple didn't. Apple TV signed up for and they said, you have nothing. We will give you one show and then they did it. And then,

and it took quite a while for like Ted Lassard and blah blah. And now they're building them stuff like that. But all of it, you're right that like, you know, Netflix again, if you now go into Netflix, you'll see lots of HBO shows. HBO Warner Brothers sells licenses their shows. to Netflix again. They all are back in the business of using them as distribution models like that

because they're just a current amount of cash flow. Right. Sunny, I mean, you can, is that? Yeah, I mean, if you go back and there was a great book about the kind of early history of Netflix's move to streaming. And the long story short is a bunch of studio heads wound up licensing their content, like MCU movies were on Netflix for a long time before Disney Plus was a thing, because they could hit their, you know, they hit their revenue projections.

They got big bonuses. Netflix got their content. But that was ultimately self-defeating because it turned Netflix into this monster, you know, site that everybody subscribed to because it was $8 a month or $10 a month or whatever for, oh, I can stream all the Marvel movies. It's $10 a month. And I can stream all these other things. And this was before any of the original content, right?

Like, I can stream the whole season of Breaking Bad. Oh, cool. This is neat. to jump back to your point about Amazon, Megan. Amazon's a really interesting business because they're kind of like Roku in that they have a simultaneous pass-through model where they have the Amazon channels where you can subscribe to HBO Max or whatever. I don't think you can subscribe to Netflix on Amazon, but like you can subscribe to virtually all of the streaming, all of the other streaming networks through Amazon. And you just do it through the Amazon homepage. I subscribed the Fox One for football season with that.

that's how I did it. And they take a cut of that revenue, but they also get all the data. They get the data of what people are watching, which is as valuable in some sense. Josh, to jump back to your earlier point about why do some of these streamers make a movie and then they're going to put it in theaters and then they put it on their own server, that has to do with advertising costs, right? Like, it costs $30 million to advertise your low end release. if you're not going to make at least $60 million more by putting it in theaters, it doesn't make any sense to release it in theaters. Like that's just kind of the bottom line.

Now, some of these movies cost a lot. You know, the horror movies cost less. Horror movies also don't do very well on streaming, which is another kind of interesting thing. But to kind of square all these circles, the dark matter of this whole conversation is the cost of advertising, which for a movie like The Odyssey is probably 100, 20 to $150 million is what Universal probably spent on just on advertising this movie in addition

to the $250 million budget. If you are not going to make that money back, and remember, you have to make twice that money back because theaters keep half of it, it doesn't make sense to put a movie in theaters. These are movies that would have gone direct to VHS back in the day, but they do this more than they used to send things direct to video. Well, I have joked for a while now that Netflix has rediscovered the direct to VHS business. They've taken that model and they have put it on streaming and they're spending like 10 times more than they should be on all of these movies. I guess what I would like to ask for you, Sunny, is I was reading this post that you have about how Paramount buying Warner Brothers would be bad.

And, you know, I'm somewhat sympathetic to this idea. But I just want to know what, like, we know what happens if they don't buy it, right? Like, Warner Brothers already had a plan to break itself up to spin off its talk. discovery assets and to have this somewhat slimmer down thing. When I hear people talk about, like, in the industry, complain about, you know, theatrical will go down and it'll be job loss and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The simple fact is that that might be true that theatrical releases go down, but the actual spend that studios are making on original productions has never been really higher, except

for maybe 20, 23 when it was like sort of peaking. But it's just, it's television, it's TV series streaming stuff. It's been in decline for the last two or three years, though. I mean, we hit peak streaming in 2023 or 2024, and it's been down ever since then. Right, but I just mean like, if you're a writer in L.A., there are more people making a living doing this now than in 2017. Yeah, I think that was true three years ago, but it seems pretty dire right now. They're not as in many as in 2023 or whatever. Well, then it's also geographically, especially dire in L.A.

Because a lot of the productions have moved away from there to markets that subsidize it more heavily. But I guess my main point is just that, like, it's not like these companies. are are going to stop making these movies and then put that money into barabonds. They're moving it into content spends in other ways. And I think that when we just look at it as theatrical, the demand thing is that people do like watching these streaming shows. And so, look, it makes sense that the investment follows that because that's what people want.

And in the end of the day, people are still being paid huge amounts of money. I mean, not a huge amount of money less, but like there's a huge amount of money going towards acting and creation and writing and all of these things happening in this industry that is unparalleled. It's vastly more than it used to be. Unfortunately, it's all Taylor Sheridan. He's just writing all of the scripts now. The question I have then about that, Sonny, is, you know, that streaming boom happened, but we've seen this precipitous fall in Netflix's stock price in just the last few weeks. And then also Netflix getting cagey about data that they're going to share with us about what

people are watching, which makes me wonder if, you know, maybe people aren't loving watching that stuff so much in the way that they did even. in recent years. I think it's safe to say, well, look, their stock declined a lot because they made this bit for Warner Brothers. Their stockholders didn't like that. It has stayed down. And now they are not only, so a few years back, they said they're not going to release

our subscriber numbers anymore. Now they're going to only do these data dumps once a year. I think people are rightly concerned that their engagement numbers are down. That said, I don't see any. real evidence that their subscriber numbers are cratering. They don't release those anymore. We'll see. I mean, as we were discussing all this, the New York Times reported that a federal judge has put a temporary restraining order on the Paramount Warner Brothers merger. So we'll have 14 days to 14 more days to discuss this.

But so what do you five years in the future think would be a good, like, healthy Hollywood situation here? I think an independent Warner Brothers, that is running an HBO Max. I actually don't have a problem with the discovery assets. The problem with Warner Brothers Discovery is it's got all these cable assets that they either need to do something with or figure out how to write them off. I don't know if they want to spin it off like a Versant situation where NBC Universal spun off all their cable,

a lot of their cable assets into this kind of separate company called Versant. I don't know if they could do that. I don't know if Warner Brothers could do that. but I like an independent Warner Brothers with a successful streaming service HBO Macs pretty successful in terms of you know it's making money now they're paying down their debt which is another key thing like Warner Brothers Discovery has like greatly reduced the amount of debt that they took on over the over in in the course of that merger and David Zazlov took a lot of shit for that he was he was you know getting harangued for spending money on that instead of production

it seems to be working. You know, I don't know. Like, I am not convinced that a Paramount Skydance Warner Brothers with, you know, $90 billion more debt is necessarily the best way to go. I don't know. But see, here's the problem. We're getting into a lot of financial things that I am sketchy on it back. Like, you guys are the finance debt people.

Can I offer my industry reformation take that everyone will hate, especially in Los Angeles, which is that, you know, one of the upsides of having mergers here is that Los Angeles has a housing crisis. And the Paramount lot is 65 acres, right? Turn it into condos? Yes. Build 20,000 homes on the Paramount lot. And you can make movies in the Valley. Like, as there has been this decline in film production in L.A., and I realize this is a big, you know, economy-wide problem in California. You've had film subsidies that are enormous in Ireland and Georgia and Canada and various other places and it's drawing the productions away. And that's sad. But it's a fact on the ground. And I just see this piece of real estate that's, you know, it's close to where the subway runs. It's one of the densest parts of Hollywood.

I just, you know, I think we could have a tremendous number of homes built on that lot. And everyone in L.A. will hate me for saying that that's what you should do with the Paramount lot. So what you're calling for is the who framed Roger Rabbit of housing plans. Yes. You want to bulldoze Tune Town and put in Yuppie condos with mixed use development. I want to gentrify Tune Town. All right, fair enough. It's a plan.

It's a plan. It's a much better business plan than spend $250 million on some movie that you're going to release on Netflix. Like, I don't think I need to defer to these people and their business judgment about what should be done with their real estate. I think that's probably fair. I think that's probably fair. I think we can leave that there. Sonny, thank you so much for coming on to talk with us about the movies. Absolutely.

This is a lot of fun. I love talking to people who are smart about things that aren't movies. It's fun. Let us know when you meet some. I'll see you later. Thanks, honey. Okay, let's pause the tape. We can come back and do Cocktail Hour with World Cup and Daylight Sanding.

I'm going to get a cocktail. All right, I'll get a cocktail. So we're back for cocktail hour. I have a canned cut water espresso martini here. We're taping a little earlier than usual today. It's 154 p.m. So I figured a brunch-type beverage was appropriate. These are really good, by the way.

I don't know. They also make these canned Bloody Marys. And that makes sense because everything that's in a Bloody Mary is canned ordinarily except for the liquor. But these are good products if you're out on a boat or otherwise in a pinch where you don't have Peter Souterman with you to make a cocktail for you. I think it's better, honestly, to have Peter Souterman with you. I'm just saying. Yes, that's plan A. But I don't know.

I mean, Megan, you're in a hotel room right now. Where's your canned cocktail? There is nothing in this hotel room. I got in last night. My flight was insanely delayed. So I left my house at 9 a.m. to catch an 11 a.m. flight through LaGuardia to Asheville, North Carolina, where I am at a conference. I left the house at 9 a.m.

sat at LaGuardia as any, and it was the worst possible way, which is the app was inaccurate. And then when it would update, it would be like it's 15 minutes later. And so it increased. It was like a sorriedies paradox. I actually tweeted out a... I'm sorry, it's a what? A sorried paradox. At what point does a...

When you pile grains of sand, at which point do they... Does it become a heap? At which point, like, do we admit that this is a delay? And at one point, the app said my plane was in the air and it wasn't even at the gate yet. Megan, I have to say,

that is my favorite paradox. And no one has ever mentioned it with me. And I'm just thrilled to that. I was like, there's a lot of... A lot of things on this podcast that you guys talk about that I don't immediately recognize. And this one, the second she said, I was like, brain activated. Yeah. So I couldn't concentrate to get work done because it's like updating every 10 or 15 minutes.

I am standing in line because at some point it becomes clear. I'm not going to make my connection. I have to take a later flight. I could have driven to Asheville, North Carolina, in approximately the amount of time it took me to fly there. And you were on what airline? American Airlines. American doesn't even have a hub in LaGuardia. There were a lot of questionable decisions made.

I mean, you shouldn't fly American ever, but like you should especially not fly them through LaGuardia. Because like, how many times a day do they fly to Asheville from LaGuardia? Well, at least twice, because I missed one flight and got the next one. Huh. So anyway, I finally, finally get to my hotel at 9.30 last night, whereupon I am too tired to go to the bar and get something to eat. I'm too tired to get a drink. I bought two Pepsi Zero's or Pepsi Zero Sugar or whatever the hell it's called and like some animal crackers. and Doritos at the airport.

And that is not only what I dined on friends, it is what I breakfasted on. I then had to write a podcast script, do another podcast, do a meeting for this podcast, and then do this podcast. So the answer is, Josh, this very long-winded answer,

is that I have nothing. I am drunk my Pepsi Zero Sugars. And I am taking this straight and unfiltered. This brings out the great thing of, which is, you know, the decline of mini bars. when we were when we were all in dc a month ago i landed it uh got to my hotel in bethesta which is in maryland and one in the morning and was like hi you got any alcohol i need to drink and we don't got none many mores and i said do you have have one downstairs going to buy him this is here in maryland sir

we don't sell anything to sleep we don't sell alcohol asleep and so i ended up taking a uber just over the line into dc just to go to a bar and and it was one it means i'm an alcoholic But two, it also means they should have mini bars just for this exact situation where you get in late. You know, look, you're going to need a nightcap. You know, like toothpaste buying the thing. They don't sell it. It's just an amenity. You get one good canned cocktail to tide you over.

Yeah. Like the Royal Navy where they would just give you a little bit of rum, you know, just with the ration. I have a Jack Daniels and ice. Wow. It's a bit early for that, but that's all I had. 11.59 a.m. Almost noon. In Idaho.

That's when it's okay. I want to talk about Daily Saving Time and I want to talk about the World Cup. But first, I want to give you guys an update on something because we talked a few weeks ago about my car's check engine light. And Ben gave us that tip about you can order the thing on Amazon and it will tell you what's wrong with your car. That information came too late for me. I'd already taken it to the dealer. And we got the diagnosis. The car's, the temperature sensor in the engine was broken.

So it can't tell if it's overheating or not. And the estimate comes back and it's like the new sensor is about $270. And the labor to replace the sensor is $2,700. And by the way, you also need new battery. And we decided this was too large a percentage of the value of our 2017 Mercedes E-300 for it to be worth doing this repair. So we sold that and we bought a new car, a new used car, which is a, it's another Mercedes sedan, but it's an EV. So I am now a like left-wing cuck who drives an electric vehicle. It's also funny that your Mercedes from nine years ago you had to sell because it's electronics,

broke, so then you upgraded it to a Mercedes that is only electronic? Well, I mean, the EVs are less complicated machines than internal combustion engine cars. They have fewer parts. Well, but I feel like they probably still have temperature sensors. We had to replace the turbocharger on our prior car, which was a very expensive repair, which we did earlier when the car was worth more. And so there's definitely no turbocharger in the EV. But this is the first car that I've owned that has advanced adaptive cruise control.

And it's like you get on the highway in this car and it drives itself. You just set it and you tell it like, don't go any faster than 60 or whatever the number is you're putting in. And it just follows the car in front of you. It stops. If you hit the turn signal, it changes lanes for you. And I gather, I haven't driven it at night yet, but I gather it has this night lighting package where if you're about to change, lanes at night, it will project onto the road, an arrow showing where the car is going to go. And if it sees a pedestrian, it will, like, flash a light to show you where they are,

which seems like it might freak the pedestrian out, although that's like, so. Although less than getting hit by you as you changed lanes. Yes. Does it do that thing where it'll carry a little part for you? Yes, it also does that. And so the part of the reason we bought the EV is first we looked at, well, can we get a more, a later model, e-series gasoline, powered sedan. And they've gotten way more expensive than they were when we bought the prior one in

2020. And then we figured out the EVs are significantly less expensive, even though they had a much higher MSRP when they were sold new. And that just reflects like EVs hold their value terribly. It's also partly like at the time that it was sold, it was, you know, the lefty Biden administration, there was a tax credit if you were buying the car. But in any case, it was just a much better value to buy the electric sedan. We paid almost $10,000 less than we would have for a similar, less featured car that ran on gasoline. And we never really drive it more than about 60 miles. So we can just, I figure I take it to the garage that we park at in Manhattan for 20 bucks. They charge the car to full. And I never have to think about buying gasoline again.

I'm curious, why do EVs hold their value less? Well, because there's more innovation in it quicker. I think it's more that they've just, they were overbuilt for a while. And there was a that they were going to become a bigger and bigger share of the American market, and then it's sort of more quickly than expected to reach the fraction of people who actually wanted to own an EV. I mean, Megan, we've talked with you about this before, that, like, your view is you don't have anywhere to charge the EV. Yeah.

And so even though you would otherwise be a good customer for it, it doesn't make sense for you. I think a lot of people just don't think it's convenient. Yeah, we'd be a great customer. I mean, I, so I owned a mini that I bought in 2008. And when I bought it, it had 8,000 miles. and when I finally gave it to my cousin's kid, we needed to get a new car because we went from being a one bull mastiff family to a two-bowmastiff family. And while one ball-mastiff and two six-foot adults in a mini is amusing, two-bill mastiffs and two-six-foot-two adults in a mini is insupportable.

This was in 2023. It had like 26,000 miles on it. We had driven it 18,000 miles in 15 years. And so, like, and we had to have a car because if you have a dog, you have to be able to get the car and the dog has an accident or, like, eats poison as our dog, one of our dogs was a frequent flyer at poison control. You have to be able to get the dog in the car immediately and get them to the emergency vet, which in D.C. is like half an hour away, 45 minutes away. I'm sorry, isn't the approach to, like, keep the dog from eating poison rather than, like, having a chariot to deal with when the dog eats the poison? Sort of like having Peter Souterman to prepare your cocktails. It is always the first choice.

But dogs are wily about getting food and stupid about what they will eat. So anyway, like we had this card. We did not. We are the perfect candidate, but we can't figure out the charging because we park our car on the street. And so we are still slaves to the internal combustion engine. I want to talk a little bit about daylight saving time because the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, you know, like basically 300 to 100. to adopt permanent daylight saving time in the United States.

We'd say we would keep our clocks rolled forward. Solar noon would be approximately 1 o'clock, or actually in most of the country, later than 1 o'clock, because the time zones are sort of farther west than they really ought to be. But so we'd be on permanent summertime, and everyone loves this because they love daylight, and it's called the Sunshine Protection Act, and it's going to protect the sun,

and we'll get sunsets after 5 o'clock in New York all year. The problem, of course, as I have tried to explain to people ad nauseum, writing on this over and over. My first piece on this was in 2018. I've had to keep writing about, don't change the daylight saving law. It's good as we have it now. You'll hate it if you make this change.

Is that, you know, you get sunrise under the new proposed law at like 8.20 a.m. in the depths of winter in New York, 9 a.m. in Seattle, 9 a.m. in Detroit, 8.30 in Dallas. You're like forcing people to wake up, commute in the dark, send their kids to school in the dark. And they're going to be mad. We know they're going to be mad because we did this in 1974. And people got really mad. and they said, we're going to do a two-year experiment with permanent daylight saving time. There was so much outrage.

My kid had to wait for the bus in the dark. And then they repealed it within a year by a vote of 383 to 16, so even more overwhelming in the House of Representatives. But, you know, people, they don't know their history. They don't consider tradeoffs. And, you know, we see this in everywhere in public policy. It's endemic and fiscal policy. But I just, you know, this is such a clear example of it because the government cannot create any more sunshine. It can only allocate it between the morning and the afternoon and people

are only thinking about the afternoon. They're not thinking about the morning. And then the third thing, the third horseman of our current political apocalypse is the whining. The way that people talk about the experience of the time changing twice a year. Senator Ed Markey issued a statement calling it a head spinning experience. Do your head spin when the clock change? Because especially now, like when we were kids, you at least had to like physically change the clock. And and maybe you looked at a clock and it got confused. Now they all change for you. Do your head spin when you go through that experience?

So, I mean, I don't think that's what the problem people have with daylight savings. What is the problem? Are you an early riser or a late riser, Josh? I'm a pretty late riser, generally. That's interesting because daylight savings does not bother me at all because I wake up most of the year between five and six in the morning. And so when the clock goes forward, I just wake up at six instead of a lot. five and it's fine. And when the clock goes back, it doesn't matter. I wake up. Like, none of this bothers me because I have at a typical sleeping habits. But for people who have to get out of bed at a

specific time to be at their office job, and that time is already a push for them for their natural circadian rhythm, when they have to wake up an hour earlier, it is genuinely miserable. Genuine lie miserable. I just love to that you pronounce genuinely. Genuinely. I'm so miserable. I had to wake up early today. They're exhausted. They get into more car accidents. And, like, they are correct that this is really unpleasant for them and they would like to stop. And the problem is that, as you say, there are tradeoffs. And because voters don't think this through, politicians will just do random stuff that sounds like it fixes, some problem they're actually mad about. But which has much worse tradeoffs that they would hate even more.

And I think this is the metaphor for all politics right now is voters having a legitimate kind of gripe with the world. being imperfect. And then politicians going out and being like, I'm going to pass a law to make that not be so. And it's like, no, they can't make the world not be imperfect. They can just do something even worse. And I wish this dynamic would stop, but I don't, it looks like it's not going to. So. All right. Let me let me acknowledge that though my head does not spin when the clocks change, I do find daylight savings time a little baffling for my small brain. I, I, I, it's not the actual change when it happens. I can handle it. It's when I'm thinking about. It's when I'm thinking about, it when it's about to happen and I have to think about like what direction is the clock going to go.

But don't think about it. Just like your phone tell you what happened. Well, that's what I do. And it's fine. I don't, I don't have a problem with it. But to Megan, to your point, I do think that like whether or not this is a good policy, I don't know that this is um, politicians hearing something and saying, we're going to do something about it. This is actually like something that people believe. And so they're actually responding. to their voters bleeding, wanting this. Whether that's a good want or not, is it another question. And I just sort of feel like they should pass it just because we can unpass it.

We did it in the 70s, so what? But it's so interesting, Josh, that you have been one of the lone voices who's basically been saying, don't feel nothing, don't pass that thing. There are dozens of us. There's other discourse. The more common discourse one is the bloggers say we need never daylight savings time. And then they pass. this one that's permanent daylight taking time.

And then you say that we should never have it. And then bloggers for years have been saying, no, no, no, never daylight take time. And even as talking about this, my head has been. It's the sleep experts, which I put scare quotes around, like permanent standard time. And they say it's better for most people's circadian rhythms. But like, you know, there are certain ways in which I've had enough of the experts in recent years. And this is sort of one of those things where it's like the the question of, you know, how should the clock work is not a question for sleep experts anymore than like, what should I have for dinner as a question for. nutritionists. Like, they have information they can bring to bear that's useful, but ultimately,

we, as lay people, we have a bunch of preferences about how the day should go. And what is the best circadian rhythm or, you know, what's going to, you know, what do we think is going to decrease all-cause mortality by 24 deaths a year nationally? I don't know that there is a particular economist's view on that. I mean, the main one is that, like, the various claims about how this affects energy consumption and such things are wrong. And it doesn't really matter that much from that. So I think economists would probably say that doesn't really matter for the economy, but that doesn't mean that they can tell you like it doesn't matter what you do because it matters for non-economic reasons. I wonder about industrial accidents and mismeetings. But I mean,

this is all pretty trivial, right? I mean, this is the thing where like when people are like, oh, it was genuinely miserable that like don't people have like balls thrown at their sleep schedule all the time for all sorts of reasons? Like, haven't these people ever gone on a business trip and there was a time change or their kid was screaming at night and they were kept up or they stayed up late to watch something or they had to get up early. Like, it happens all the time that I have to sleep for a different block of time than I ideally would. And I'm a, you know, I'm a big boy with my big boy pants and I deal with that. And it's not that, it's not that hard. And this is just another one of those things.

And this one always happens on a Sunday. So it's not even on a business day. I'm just saying there's a reason people hate it, and that reason is valid. I also do not like getting up before my body wants to get up. It's just you can't fix it. And we used to have mechanisms in this country by which politicians would acknowledge that voters genuinely would like the world to be a better place than it is. And that it would be nice if we could do something. And then sometimes they would be like, yeah, we'll study that.

And then they would go and tell the study people make a study showing. what we already know, which is that this is not going to work. And that would be the end of it. And we are losing those mechanisms. But we're not doing a constitutional amendment. They can undo it. They can undo it. And they will. When I say there are dozens of us. Senator Tom Cotton has been the strongest soldier for the preservation of the existing status quo here, which is good. Wait, you're going to talk about Tom Cotton. You have to talk about the way he worded it. Because he was like, look, I want to apologize on this for the last time we voted on this. The last time we voted on this, I said it was okay. And I just, you're going to talk about it.

I hadn't read about it. No, no, that's not what it was. He's always been opposed to this. There was a, Marco Rubio when he was a senator, and he was the big proponent to this dumb idea that we should have daylight saving time all the time. He brought up a unanimous consent request, which people do for, like, theatrical reasons in the Senate all the time.

And what they do is they send it around an email that's basically like, these are the unanimous consent requests that are going to come up tomorrow. Let us know if your senator wants to object to this. And there was a fuck up in Tom Cotton's office, and nobody flagged for him as this was coming up, and they didn't know that he carried. about this. So he was supposed to object and he didn't. And then it passed the Senate to everybody's

surprise. And then that time, Nancy Pelosi did us a solid and bottled it up in the house. So it, so it never got to Joe Biden's desk. But Arkansas would have very late sunrises in the winter and he understands that that would be stupid. In kind of semi-Marco Rubio defense, right, this matters less, the closer you get to the equator. So for the state of Florida, it actually might be better to abolish daylight savings time, but it's not. really, or to abolish changing. That's why they don't do Daily Saving in Hawaii. It's some Idahoans, I know, they were like, we should like it.

You know how in Sun Valley, like, it gets, it's dark here. This is also a funny, like, the economy thing. Like, the golf course industry lobbies for this because they think people will play more golf if the sunsets later in the winter, but the ski industry is opposed because the ski resorts are going to have to open too late in the day in the winter if they do this. So it's like, I'm sure that, like anything, there's winners and losers, but I don't think there's an overall economic story here. Megan, you had a funny thing when we were talking about this before, but...

Yeah, I want you to share your dumb policy idea here. Tell us your even worse proposal for how time should work. The idea was that you just moved the clock ahead so many seconds, like, every few days. Like, you just move it by one second. Like, I don't know. This actually strikes me as... But so it's going to take, like, two months to do one minute a minute a time. I don't know.

I'm not doing the math in my head. Why is this better? Just because it's grass. And it doesn't mean that there's a jarring, like, sleep shift, which is what people are really mad about. I just don't buy the jarring is a real objection. I just don't buy the jarring objection at all. Yes, Ben, you don't have to get up for a day job every day. But there are many people who, like, have to be at work at 8 a.m.

But do you think that someone wakes up on Monday and goes, what? It's true. Ben did petition us to move the tape time of this podcast to 2 p.m. mountain time because 9 a.m. was too early. What is true? If your shift started at 7 a.m. as there are lots of people in this country whose shifts start at 7 a.m., you might feel rather differently about suddenly having to wake up an hour earlier. Sure.

I mean, having said that, I am of the people on this podcast, the one who's most accommodating would people want to change the times. I'm like, yeah, sure, I can make it work. 3 a.m. sure. Fair enough. Finally this week, let's talk about the World Cup. Oh, yeah. Because I've really been appreciating your Twitter content about soccer, Ben, because it is so contemptuous.

And it was so perfect because the World Cup final was so boring. So boring. They didn't score, and they didn't score, and they didn't score. And then finally the refs had to intervene and throw somebody out of the game so that there was a power play. And then the power play enabled Spain to score. And then we were like put out of our misery in the match ended. Like most Americans, I don't like soccer because it's so boring. They don't score ever.

But I like the World Cup because of the fun of the nationalism. You know, it's fun to be patriotic and to argue with people. But the game itself is the low point for me. It's incredibly boring. And then the bronze medal game. The Constellation Prize match. The Consolation Prize. Finally, soccer popped the cherry.

They had a fun game. And it took 150 years or whatever. But they did it. They scored 10 goals. And it was thrilling and fun and, like, you know, I was at a party watching it. And, like, people who were outside barbecueing came in to watch it. They, like, they hadn't been expected to. And it was great.

And then all these other people from across the world kept saying, oh, I know that the Americans who are stupid must have liked this. But actually, this is the worst soccer game in the world, the football game in the world. There's no defense. They're not playing the right things. And it was like, I don't, I don't care. If there's things that we can do to have it be like this, this all watch, this is fun. And then the next game, of course, was what they wanted, which was some sort of pure defensive thing where nothing happened.

And then eventually the reps essentially decided who won by throwing out the one guy from Argentina. Well, I guess this is Spain's bit is that they play this style where they just pass the ball back and forth to each other and hold on to it all the time, but don't play aggressively with it. and try to keep the score as low as possible. And it works. I mean, they won the World Cup. But this is, you know, the, when, you know, when heated rivalry came out and all of the gays had to learn about hockey, I bought a hockey book called Take Your Eye Off the Puck and it was describing this like the modern history of hockey.

And one thing I learned is that hockey was like this for a while. The New Jersey Devils invented this thing called the neutral zone trap, where it was basically a strategy of hockey play that kept the score really low and just tied everything up. in the middle of the rank, and it was really boring. And they changed the rules of hockey to make this strategy less effective. They made it so you could pass the puck farther down the ice and set out to increase scoring. And so it seems like maybe some Americans, maybe even like maybe we can send some people from the NHL to figure out how you can boost the scoring in soccer. I don't know whether we need to make the goal bigger or something.

So I think lots of sports tend over time to become a solved problem. You figure out what video gamers call the meta, the strategy that works best right now, and then they get boring to watch because they, and maybe all sports is too strong, but a lot of sports have this tendency. And while I am by no means an expert on sports, my theory is that when that happens, Americans being shallow and entertainment focused, they change the rules so that that solution no longer works. and Europeans and other countries are much more reluctant to do this. I think in part that's because soccer is more decentralized than any of the other American sports, right?

Don't be so sympathetic. They are generally less dynamic societies that are hidebound and refuse to change. Right. And so like when I talk to Europeans about this, they'll be like, no, that's what's brilliant about it. So they have valorized that the game is solved. And I think that as an American, I believe we should not valorize that. We should change the rules. fundamentally sports are about entertainment right like there's a lot of things about sports that are great that i love but they shouldn't be stuck in amber you should be changing them NBA has done it over lots of times they have didn't used to have a three point line they didn't used to allow dunks they they had zone defense which for a long time you know was outlawed and then they let it in and then they had people did it too much and then they figured out that threes had better performances blah blah blah but they change it because they want them to be exciting because these are businesses and they want to people to care and to love it. And the idea that soccer just can't change at all because it was

handed down from the mountain by born out of Zeus's head in Midlands of England or something in 1870 or whatever is absurd. They should change. They should make it good. And they should have halftime shows. The halftime, they were all crying yesterday about how like, oh, their halftime, the halftime is too long. These Americans have to have salied out beautiful game with the halftime. And it was like, oh, oh, I'm so sorry. We have to take a while. break from the scoreless game where no one was doing anything. To see Madonna. Every minute I can't see them not scoring.

Oh, it's a bad. I have lots of notes on this. Americans should just propose a better version. Maybe the ball could be oblong and then we could put like big heavy pads on them and they could run into each other. Megan, do you have any last word before we go here? I do not. I do not.

See you next week. Bye, Megan. Bye, by Ben. Right. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We're a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swatic mixed this episode. Our music is by Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening and stay cool out there.