Central Air - We Judge Because We Love

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

On this week's show: Warner Brothers Discovery is up for sale, and Netflix and Paramount are fighting over the opportunity to buy it. We discuss the fate of CNN, the future of moviemaking and theaters, the Trump administration’s apparent intent to interfere on Paramount’s behalf, and who's really competing with the streamers for our attention.Next we talk about Ezra Klein’s search for “the good”: a framework that will allow liberals to say — without reference to charts and statistics — that building a community is better than staring at your phone all day or, replacing your spouse and your therapist with an AI chatbot, or, God help us, living in the “goon cave.” Is it better to more freely pass moral judgement on each other, or should we trust individuals to figure out what’s good for them?Finally, we discuss a report that almost 40% of undergraduates at Stanford are officially “disabled."Join our comments section and sign up for updates about the show 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. I'm Josh Barrow. I'm here with Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down. Ben, do you have your Christmas tree yet? I'm Jewish. Oh, right. The Dreyfus affair. How could I possibly forget?

I don't believe in Christmas or trees. The trees are real, Ben. I've seen them. They say that. They say that, but I'm not convinced. I mean, originally the trees are for, like, you bring the tree indoors, and it confuses the evil spirits into believing that they're out. outdoors, and so they won't haunt your home. It's a pagan tradition that the Christians took.

But yeah, no, that's what the, in Germany, the Tannenbaum. That's what it was for originally. Megan, are you scaring the evil spirits out of your house? We are, but in a complicated way because we have two dogs who will like to eat things, including wood. And so we have a dinky, sad, pathetic-looking little, like, four-foot artificial tree that we bought on Amazon for like $20 because they won't attack that. I have my Christmas tree on the second attempt. I got a Christmas tree delivered because I live in New York and I'm kind of lazy. And so the tree comes to the apartment. It's all set up.

And then I'm going after the guys have left and I'm trying to straighten out the trunk. And I observe there's a whole bunch of dead pine needles near the trunk. I'm trying to figure out why is there a dead section of the tree. And I realize there isn't. There is a bird's nest in the tree. And I like poke at it with a broom handle and see all of the like the feathery down in the nest. And so I, of course, asked Chachypti what to do about this. And it said, you know, it's very unlikely that there's a bird.

However, there can be like mites or various things. And so I called the people who brought the tree. They came. They picked up the tree and they brought me a new tree. So I'm on my second real live nine-foot Christmas tree. And this one does not have a bird nest in it. At least Chachachapit wasn't like, there is a bird and it's your new child. Well, the other thing I learned from Googling is, while we're talking about German Christmas traditions,

Apparently in Germany, it was historically considered a good omen if you found a bird's nest near Christmas tree. So I think that means it's going to be a good year for podcasting, Josh. Yes, absolutely. Good year for podcasting, also a good year if you run Warner Brothers Discovery. Warner Brothers Discovery has ended up for sale, put itself up for sales, kind of got elbowed into putting itself up for sale by Paramount, which wanted to buy it. They had this quasi-auction process, and they accepted an $83 billion bid from Netflix by most of the company. Paramount was not happy. Paramount came around with its own hostile bid. They're offering $105 billion to buy all of the company. A crucial distinction is we'll get to in a little bit because this drives whether or not you're going to own CNN at the end of this transaction. Of course, this has become also a very political story. You know, mergers among big players in an industry like entertainment can end up subject to antitrust review. And there are suggestions that either of these proposed transactions could have trouble there. And the Trump administration is very close with Larry and David Ellison, who control Paraly. Paramount. And there have been some fairly public indications of a preference from the Trump

administration that Paramount should be the winning buyer here. Again, probably having something to do with CNN, which we'll discuss in a moment. But I want to focus first actually on the movie part of this business, because that's, you know, the main business that these companies are in. And Ben, can you lay out for us a little bit the sort of garment rending that's happening in Hollywood right now at the prospect of really either of these transactions, but especially Netflix going out and buying a major movie studio? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's fundamentally just about the fact that Netflix is historically, you know, not very pro-theater. They've at various points said that. It's key to their entire business model. And when they've released things in

theaters, it's been just for awards reasons. They've never really committed to doing it a lot. And people in Hollywood are deeply wedded to a universe where people go out to theaters, even though that universe doesn't really exist that much anymore because of, among other things, Netflix. So there's a lot of a garment. branding about it, especially because Warner Brothers has had such a good year this year in the theaters. And so despite the fact that the CEO of Netflix came out and said, look, we're going to keep releasing things in theaters. We're just probably going to get rid of the shorten the window. Which they've already greatly shortened. Yeah, which they've already greatly shortened.

And it's the window between when a film is released and when it is allowed to appear on a streaming thing. And the sure you make it, the less incentivized people are to go out to the theaters. So it's sort of whether they release them or not. But if they shortened it enough, It might not really matter. But basically, it's just people thinking that this might be the actual, you know, death now for theaters. So as I look at these trends where, you know, especially with COVID accelerated this, a lot of movies that were supposed to get theatrical releases didn't. And it seemed like that continued thereafter and what you described there where, you know, there is a theatrical release, but it's not the main way people are going to see the movie. And it very quickly becomes available on streaming.

Is it like a nostalgic thing to want these theatrical releases? or are there a lot of movies that would be financially viable to make if you have a robust system of theatrical releases that no longer make sense to make or no longer make sense to make at similar budgets to what you would spend if the destination is ultimately that people are going to watch these online? Because it always strikes me that, like, you know, you have a movie and, you know, hopefully you release it and, you know, you gross, I don't know what it is, 30 million or 100 million or 500 million if it's like, you know, the Avatar 5.

And then compare that to just you put it on a streaming service and I guess you somehow allocate some fraction of the monthly subscription fees that you have to figure out what is good for this, you know, this one particular piece of entertainment. It seems to me like a lot of big budget films should be impossible to make unless you're going to have a robust system of theatrical releases. I mean, they are. The big budget films are basically impossible to make without that, you know. That's why Apple lost so much money traditionally on all of their movies that they've been making. They were throwing $200 million and things like that. But the real thing that they're talking about, like the theatrical environment that they are longing.

for has not existed for 30 years. You know, it's been slowly in decline. And it's the one that allows mid-budget movies to make money, like the adult dramas that cost $30 million. And the problem with that is that that has just been declining since the 1990s. And it was sort of covered up by the fact that there was this decade where people spent $30 billion going to superhero movies. But like the era where you could have a movie that, like a courtroom drama, that, like a courtroom

drama that made $30 million, I mean, that cost $30 million and made $75 million and sort of made $1 million profit for the company is basically over. And the irony is sort of that, you know, a lot of those movies, right, it's not that those things aren't getting made anymore. It's that now they are made for streaming. And when you look at it like that, there's actually never... And they're made as series rather than as films. I mean, I feel like, you know, prestige television kind of replaced that market to a large extent. Yeah. So if you think about like the old magazines, the old glossy magazines that become possible basically because four-color printing becomes reasonably cheap. Those magazines support a whole ecosystem of short

stories. And writing short stories is actually like a viable career. And then those magazines basically get put out of business by radio and television. Sorry, you mean short fiction or you mean like feature stories that then get optioned and made into films? No, short fiction itself. And by the 80s, right, short stories are kind of a loss leader for writing a novel. Because novels are what people use when they cannot, like when they are on a train, when they cannot watch television or listen to the radio. And by now, they're just little literary magazines, right?

The technology changes the form of what you do. And the technology of film, I think part of what people are reacting to, it's not just that the budgets don't work, although that's a huge part of it, you don't make things for streaming the way you make them for a big screen, right? Like a big screen, why are all movies, with a few exceptions between 90 and 180 minutes long? Because that is long enough to be worth leaving your house for, but not so long that your butt goes numb. You can do all sorts of stuff with audio and with visuals when you know that you're going to have a high-quality projectionist and that everyone's going to be looking at the screen. You can pull little Easter eggs in there. And

When you moved the small screen, you know people are looking at their phones. Now, there are things you can do on the small screen for people at home that you can't do in a theater, like prestige television, long story arcs that span a season. If you think about what network television looked like, because you could, you were only airing this once a week, and you couldn't assume that everyone was going to see every episode, it's all episodic. Right? Now you can do these longer story arcs. You can do all sorts of stuff that you couldn't do on the old technology. but you're also going to lose some of the stuff that you had on the old technology.

And for the people for whom movies were their dream, the theatrical release feature film, they want to save it. And they also, of course, want to save all the jobs that are associated with it. The people who are good at writing screenplays for feature films might not be the best prestige television writer. It's actually a different style of writing in a lot of ways. People also, like the sound, are you going to, how much? much you're going to spend on your sound engineering when you know everyone's going to be listening

to it on their home crappy theater system and on and on and on it's really going to change like everything in Hollywood and that's it's sad I love the movies I mean one of the things about it is is that this change has already happened right and the irony of like all of this is that the streamers have actually led to more people being employed making these things than ever before you know far away like the glut of streaming you know there was 700 different scripted shows in the United States in 2024. That's an unsustainable bubble, right? Of course.

Completely. People are losing money on that and they're eventually going to stop. Completely unsustainable. I mean, we went through a mini version of this in the podcast industry too where, you know, Amazon and Spotify were subsidizing a lot of stuff that, you know, I mean, fortunately, like weekly subscription-based shows is one of the models that is really surviving very well the turn that's happening in the podcast industry. But you did, you know, my senses you've seen as a similar, much larger scale thing in streaming

where basically it's just, you know, people throw money. at things and they're eventually going to figure out they should stop. Totally. I mean, that's the, when the strike happened three years ago, one of the things that they wanted was access to analytics about their shows, because a lot of the people, you know, the creators of these shows weren't really being told who was watching them because the streamers held that data so tightly. And one of the things that they got in it was certain access to it. But what they ended up seeing was what anyone who had lived in any other industry knew is going to happen, which is no one's watching any of this crap. They are watching 20 of them.

the shows and then a lot of the other ones are getting literally like thousands, single digit, thousands of viewers that like, you know, on Hulu, no one is watching this stuff. And it's immensely depressing to then the creators to realize that if you're really going to see this, it's not that they're actually having these huge shows. They're actually having stuff that that is just being effectively a waste of money. And that's, that is, as you're saying, leading to like this drawback, you know, it's unsustainable because it's just not worth it. But it doesn't change the fact that, though they might not be being released in, in, um, studios, the number of people who can make a living in Hollywood is never been higher.

You know, it just means that not all of them get to be Aaron Torgon. A lot of them have to be someone and honest. But also the other thing that I would just say with regard to the going into the theaters and they're big and beautiful is that nowadays we all have big and beautiful televisions. Everyone can see and they have U.H.D. and all of this stuff, that for most movies, it's verboten to say this in Hollywood because they're so addicted to going to theaters. But like, a lot of these movies really don't need to be seen on the big screen. You know, juror number two doesn't need to actually be seen in 75 millimeter, you know, like.

But so then does it matter who acquires Warner Brothers Discovery? Because, I mean, we're talking about this, you know, big long run changes being driven by shifting broad economic forces. But I assume that, you know, Netflix, because they are the largest streaming service, if you take a given piece of content that's coming out of the Warner Brothers studio, they will tend to lean more. toward a more streaming-focused monetization strategy than, you know, if it's the Paramount team that is in charge of this, both because that's what they do for a living and they have a bias in that direction, and they may have a relatively good infrastructure for that, relatively bad infrastructure for theatrical release. So is that, you know, will this transition at least be slowed down if either there's no transaction or Paramount as the buyer rather than Netflix? One of the questions is how much you'd want to take what Netflix says for granted. You know, like they say that they aren't going to just turn it into Netflix. that they're going to keep them as distinct units.

But also what's... People say all sorts of things, you know, I mean, United said they were going to keep the hub in Cleveland when they bought Continental. But, I mean, the other thing is that you have to then wonder, what's the point of them also doing the nightmare scenario? What's the point of Netflix buying it just to shut down theatrical? Because if Netflix just wanted to buy the library, they could just buy the library. They could buy the production unit.

They could buy whatever pieces they wanted to. They could buy the lot and just change it all. But... Well, but then haven't you bought the whole studio? I mean, isn't buying the studio a way of buying the lot And the library and the, you know, the production pipeline. Yeah, but it's also then adding $40 billion more to it. You could buy those things for cheaper.

You know, you could buy those assets if you just wanted to grab them. But the real reason is that saying that at least in the near term, also, I mean, there's a bunch of contracts. They can't just immediately stop releasing them in theaters. But the question is, like, in 2032, is Warner Brothers still going to be releasing any movies at all? Or is it only going to be releasing nine? Like, nine is what it is now. We're no longer in this era where they're releasing new ones every week. They release nine movies?

year? I mean, they released, I think, probably 12 or 13 this year, but it's incredibly low. I had no idea it would have gotten that low. And they are 25% of new studio releases. And, I mean, they've had a bunch of huge hits this year, but like they've also had some bombs, like the Altonites and stuff like that. But it's just a question. It's not like there's so many being released. It's not like the 90s when you would go to the theater to see a different one or this movie every week. I think what happens is, look, first of all, I think theater is dead. It might take a while. but it's dead in the next 10 to 15 years.

There's just no way it can be safe. Isn't it going to stick around forever? I mean, I realize that, you know, superhero movies are not what they once were. But, I mean, won't there still be some certain subset of this entertainment that is very expensive to produce that really does benefit from a large screen? The kids don't watch it.

Like, the kids are still going to movies right now, but they're increasingly shifting towards TikTok and YouTube. For a long time, movies have been propped up by the fact that people under the age of 18 need some work. to go and they can't drink yet, or under the age of 21, rather, right? So they go to the movies. But the thing is that now these people don't leave their houses, right? They don't drink either. We'll get into that more later today. They don't drink. They're not having sex. They're all, like, they're what, you know, the evangelicals dreamed of in 1980, but then the monkeys paw curled.

But, look, there's going to be art houses forever. There will still be, AFI will still exist. in Silver Spring and in L.A. There will be art theaters. There will be small theaters. But ultimately, no, I don't. There is just a point at which, you know, doing a podcast has revealed to me that even on a very small scale,

the more people you involve, the more complicated it gets very quickly, right? Coordinating that function gets harder and harder as you scale up the number of people. And those kinds of movies just take a lot of people to make. And I think the returns

are going to keep going to. down. When you look at who is going to the movies, how often they go to the movies, huge, whole segments of the market have just vanished, like middle-aged women who used to actually, in the 40s, middle-aged women were like the mainstay of movies, which is why you have so many movies from that era that are aimed at the ladies. And they basically just sometime in the 90s just decided, but I have a television, I could just stay home and watch, like, you know, an affair to remember for the 80th time. So I think that either, there's no scenario. in which you can save this for the long term.

Sometime in the next 20 years, I think most theaters will probably close. I mean, it is true that the blockbusters will be around. Like, they are going to have to have something to put Avatar in, right? It's the smaller ones, which is the ones that are actually, like, the not Avatar, not Deadpool and Wolverine ones. Those are the ones that are just not going to find a place. So, like, if you think about how the steel industry left America, right,

these Korean mini-mills come in and they're like, we're not going to take, you know, like big rolled sheet still. We're just going to take the rebar market, which is the lowest part of the market. No one wants it. The steel mills are like, take it. I would rather not be in that business. The thing is they just keep coming for the next segment of the market. And then eventually they're making giant steel beams and so forth.

And I think that's what's going to happen is that, yeah, right now streaming is taking the lower end of the market. It is taking old IP that you've already monitored. in theaters and in other distribution chains, and then it is making additional money off of that. But the more it eats into each additional segment of the market, the less sense it makes to have a movie theater, right? How many avatars are they going to release a year? Are you going to just, and like people see these movies. They see them once and then they go home. It's not like when I was a kid where people, because you would, you knew, once you, what I grew up before VCRs. I mean, like, I was a little kid.

The VCRs came in when I was in middle school. But you would go to a movie that you liked a dozen times because you knew you'd never get to see it again after it left the theater except on very rare rerun occasions on television. And that's been declining for 50 years. But at some point, how many avatars do you need to keep a theater going? Because people see Avatar once now. Maybe they see it twice.

I have my doubts. I want to turn and talk about the politics of this. So the Trump administration has generally sort of indicated this preference that Paramount should be the buyer. Larry Ellison, whose son David Ellison runs Paramount. Larry Ellison, of course, is the many times over billionaire Oracle guy. They are politically tight. They have moved CBS in a somewhat more ideologically congenial direction, maybe not all the way to the right, but somewhere toward the center. And so there's a preference there for that. There has been a little bit of news reporting suggesting that the Paramount people got a little bit over their skis and sort of like treated the Trump administration too much as their ally and like were too nakedly corrupt about this. And so the administration has not been fully as four square for Paramount as one might have expected. But there's this general sense that the Trump administration would prefer for Paramount to win here. And a key lever for that is that, you know, there could be antitrust review. of Netflix acquisition, and it's not a crazy thing to say that there are antitrust problems with this deal. In fact, that's been, as Paramount is going around making their hostile offer, one of the things they're saying is the Netflix deal won't go through because of antitrust and because the Trump administration.

My first question is, can either of these deals survive antitrust review? Now, Netflix, because Netflix is number one in streaming, Paramount is number five, it seems to me like the Netflix deal is the one that probably does have more fundamental antitrust problems. You know, either of these could end up tied up in court for a long time fighting over is it even allowed. I mean, they're both get approved. This is all just about dragging it out, right? Like, the argument that they will make, if it ends up in an antitrust problem with Netflix, is that Netflix is the largest and HBO Max is the second largest. Well, it's the third largest, really, if you count Amazon.

I've seen people say third or fourth. Aren't they smaller than Disney? Oh, right. Of course, Disney Plus, but yeah. And the other thing is that they don't really know the overlap. They don't know how many numbers are people subscribed to both. But regardless, like the point that will be made by Netflix and has been made by, is the same one that's been made by like Facebook when they've been, you know, accused of antitrust things, which is that it's not actually that they're direct competitors just against each other. It's that YouTube is actually the largest one of these, right?

When you look at viewing time that people spend watching things, YouTube is far and away the biggest. But is that argument going to carry? Because, I mean, it's carried for meta. Right. But Instagram and TikTok really are direct competitors. competitors in a way that YouTube is not as much a direct competitor for Netflix. I mean, YouTube is free. It's lots of low quality, like, you know, fill your time content. It's different from the highly professionally produced stuff that comes out of Netflix or comes out of the movie studios. Yeah, and one thing you have to remember is that the judge is going to be old. The judge is not going to be spending all of their time on YouTube watching, like, rug pressure watching videos or whatever it is that the kids watch. That's something middle-aged people watch. I really love them, actually.

I'm a huge fan of rug pressure watching videos. And it is a little bit, like, I understand that there cannot be this many rugs in the world that are completely blackened with dirt and that they must at this point be creating new rugs for me to watch. But I don't care. But I also, like, I don't really get TikTok in the way that other people, even other people in my age, and I'm 52, seem to get it. Like, I will talk to people and they're like, yeah, I, you know, I had to delete the app because I would just lose hours. And I was like, I can lose a good 15 minutes on rug pressure washing videos or whatever.

And then I'm done. I don't have any urge to keep watching. But so your contention here is that rug pressure watching videos are not, in fact, the Netflix competitor in the market. Or a judge will not think that they are the competitor. I can argue it either way. But I think when you get in front of a judge, you are very likely to hit someone who is in their minimum 40s. and that person is not going to feel like rug pressure washing videos are the same thing as watching, like, Gladiator on Netflix, right? They're just, it is going to be a really high emotional bar to get over that.

And you can put all the figures and the numbers down, but I think they are going to define the market as people doing things that are fairly alike, not anything that you could be doing on the internet to distract yourself, which is an infinitely large category. You could say that like, you know, Amazon and only fans are fundamentally in the same business, but they are not. I mean, you could say it's entertainment. You could say that book publishers are the market. Yeah. But I think that to Megan's point, the question is not, can you argue that Netflix isn't a big player because you should define the market so broadly? It's will the courts buy the idea that you should conceive it that way? I mean, I actually think if I am Netflix, I lie awake at night worrying about YouTube and TikTok.

I do think of them as my competition because they're competing for my customer's eyeballs. But I don't think that a judge is going... But, I mean, again, this is also true in some sense that, like, if I am running GM, I lie awake at night worrying about Harley Davidson and little micromobility and the public transit system and are people going to buy fewer cars.

But a judge is not going to decide that, like, the New York's MTA and GM are fundamentally in the same business. just think that like there's two things going on here right one of which is investors clearly think that this will go through right right like you can see it in how this was priced the day after netflix did all of this like you can see in the fact that netflix's stock is falling right but like it's not like such a great deal for investors think it it may go through it's not like the share price went all the way up to netflix's offer which reflects the the possibility that the deal could fall apart right because there's also this now tender offer that's going to go into all of it but like well that put that pushes the warner brother's discovery price up if it was a sure thing that's a sure thing that's thing that Netflix deal was going to go through. The price should have gone up to somewhere in the ballpark of 29. It's a little difficult to calculate because Netflix hasn't offered to buy the entire company and you have to have a view of what stub with CNN and some other cable networks is worth after Netflix has bought most of it. But like it was a few dollars shy of that, which reflects the

possibility that there will be no merger. Then Paramount made its hostile offer and the share price went up because maybe you'll have a bidding more and maybe it'll sell for even more than that. But one of the outcomes that is on the table is no deal. I mean, as a owner of Warner Brothers stock, this has been wonderful events for me. But conflict of interest. Yeah. But I mean, I also just find it sort of funny that we're talking about this like the antitrust regulators in the U.S. are just loving to stop mergers like this. And I just don't think that's true. Like, it might be true in the fantasy minds of the left. Sometimes they go down. I mean, you know, JetBlue spirit went down. Sometimes they go down. I mean, look, Lena Khan was actually pretty effective, not at blocking merger. She was very bad at that. She kept trying to block stuff. And then courts were like, I don't think so. Your novel theory of antitrust is not going to fly here. However, a lot of people looked at this and were like, do I want to spend three years in court trying to get past them or could I just not do this merger? And so merger activities slowed even though they didn't actually have a lot of great success in court blocking mergers. And I think if you are Netflix,

certainly, and I think probably if you're paramount, in some ways more if you're paramount, because of the politics of this, you have to think about not just can I get this merger closed in the next 18 months to two years. But what happens when a Democratic administration comes in? Like, do they come in and make me divest HBO if I'm Netflix? Do they rule, right? Do they get, I think you might be able to get a court to sign off on that. And I think if I were running Netflix, I would, you know, Ted Sorrentos has said that they're going to keep them standalone. And I think I would keep them standalone just to make sure that there is a way that if a more aggressive antitrust regime gets in, that I have something I can sell, that I haven't integrated this into my service. And then they're just like, okay, split it in half.

Well, but so I don't think we're going to get to the point to the unwinding because I think this will be litigated before the deal closes. I mean, if Netflix emerges as the winning buyer, the Trump administration will challenge the merger. And if Paramount emerges as the winning buyer, then there will be a state attorney general who sues to force judicial consideration around the merger. And, you know, Tim Wu, the like anti-monopoly professor at Columbia is in the Times with an op-ed saying both of these merger transactions are illegal. But the paramount part is pretty hand-wavy where he basically says, well, you know, it's combining two big movie studio businesses. But in fact, if you combine the Warner and Paramount movie studio businesses, they end up about the same size as either Disney or Universal. So it's, you know, I think if you get into court, it's not like the courts never blocked the mergers. Again, you know, JetBlue Spirit blocked in court. The American Airlines partnership with JetBlue. Pushing Spirit into bankruptcy. Well done, Lena Con. Right. But I mean, to my point, you know, sometimes the court actually looks at it and says, no, this is anti-competitive. I'm blocking the merger. And I, you know, I think there's a lot of risk that would happen in the Netflix case. Paramount, I think it's a lot harder to make the case that it's, you know, that it's too much concentration. Because, you know, they end up with a quarter of the market, which is about the same as Disney, which is a little bit larger than Universal. I don't know how fearsome that looks, but on the Netflix side, the position they have in streaming looks a lot more prohibitive than that.

Yeah, for Hollywood, you know, having five major studios instead of six looks very bad. But I think for a court, having five major studios instead of six is probably enough major studios to let the deal go through. It is hilarious. I just want to talk briefly about this because it's so funny that, like, one of the differences between these two deals and the reason the Paramount is launching this hostile bid is, Basically, they offered $30 for the whole company, and Netflix has offered $27 and change for only the movie studio and the streaming, which is the valuable part. And so a lot of the fight over this in this hostile bid is going to hinge on, like, do you think CNN is worth anything? You can make an argument for like $1 to $3 a share. You could push it as high as five as one analyst did.

I could also make an argument that it's negative and that you should actually be paying someone else to take this business. And so I think one of the things that is remarkable about this is the incredibly rapid collapse of linear television. Yes. Right? I mean, and like the writing's been on the wall for a while. But these businesses were wildly profitable until a few years ago. And they are just like the the future of the business suddenly looks incredibly bleak. I mean, they're still profitable.

They're still, you know. For now. Yeah, for now. I mean, they're obviously declining. But it's still the key. But like every month, the number of cable subscribers paying for packages, that cause carriage fees to be paid to these networks. It's just in secular decline.

Sure, because they're dying. And that's, you know, sort of quite literally die. Yes. But, but I mean, it's still the, you know, the main drive. We just went through this with, um, the Skydance accusation of Paramount where like, they're linear things. It's a declining asset, but it's still the key driver of their revenues. And I mean, then you end up with these things about their CNN, but then there's also,

you know, TNT and TBS and all of these other ones that, that used to be like important. And now don't have, you know, they lost the NBA. They lost all these various things that give people reasons to charge these absurd carriage fees. It's interesting to look at it from that point of view. And it's also interesting to look at the fact that Warner Brothers has been trying to spend this off now for a year because they recognize that they're trying to move the debt to it and everything. Does it matter who gets CNN? The reason that people in Washington are focused around this is they're, it's the tail wagging the dog. Like a lot of people in D.C., the main thing they care about is CNN and is the Trump administration going to see to it that Barry Weiss, who is overseeing CBS, who is overseeing CBS,

news, then also gets to, you know, reorient the coverage at CNN. And that's clearly something that the president would like to see happen. One thing that's funny about this to me is, again, Netflix has not offered to buy CNN. So if the Netflix deal goes through and there's this spinoff stub of Warner Brothers Discovery with CNN and these other declining assets not worth very much, I assume someone's going to pick that up at some point. So, you know, who knows whose hands that that would end up in. And in part because of the decline of linear television, maybe it doesn't matter as much politically who controls CNN as it might have 10 years ago. But, you know, there is this, you know, in Washington this sense that if we get the right buyer here,

we can make the liberal media a little bit less liberal. I mean, I think that's just a crazy thing to even care about for Republicans anymore because it, the influence of these outlets is so much less than it was five or ten years ago. And they're doing very well moving through their alternative network of podcasts and so forth. I think, and I think the person, people that actually matters for, ironically enough, is the Hollywood people who want this company left as a standalone, right? Because right now, the movie studio is, and the streaming, like, these are attached to a dying linear TV business with a lot of debt. And that means that, like, that business instead of investing is putting money into the debt. And I think that in a lot,

well, it might preserve some jobs in the very short term. In the longer term, what you're doing is you have a company that sort of can't do future-oriented investment, can't, like, be strategic because it's got so much debt and because the business that was supposed to anchor that debt is just collapsing very rapidly. So your thesis is that either of these transactions will lead to the production of more entertainment content than if there is no murder? No, I think that actually either of these transactions is more likely to position Warner and HBO for success in the future because they will not be lashed to this highly debt-ridden and just not very well managed.

I mean, David Zaslov, got to give a credit, right? This is the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery. Buying Warner Brothers has historically never worked out, right? This has been for decades now. Warner's has been involved in a series of high publicity mega-mergers, all of which have turned out to be disasters for one party or another. David Zazlov, though, managed to be the guy it's not a disaster for, probably, pending regulatory approval. He ran Discovery Networks, which owned the Discovery Channel, and then bought Warner.

HGTV, the Discovery Channel, all of these, you know, low-budget reality, brands on basic cable. And it was a really good business for a long time. Those shows are incredibly cheap to make. You get a ton of sponsorships and you got carriage fees from the cable providers. These are per-subscriber fees that cable companies pay to the networks, most of the networks. Ironically, QVC actually pays cable companies to carry it. All of that is now dying. And instead of this herding Zazlov, he has managed to cash out. He had a giant paycheck. He loaded the company down with debt to do this deal. It has not worked out well in terms of creating a consumer juggernaut.

But he is going to have an amazing exit. But he has made money. He has made so much money. He's going to have a fantastic exit if one of these deals goes through. And all hats to him for like winning the game of hot potato. Which is funny because it's clear from the news reporting that he's personally pissed at David Ellison for forcing him into this situation where he has to sell the company. And now I guess, you know, you often have this situation where it's in the, best interests of the shareholders of a company that be acquired, but that will cause the CEO to

lose his job as CEO. And so he personally doesn't want that. And so it seems like there was an element of that here, although, you know, Megan makes a strong case that he should be counting his blessings. He should take the money and run. He should not complain that he wanted to be CEO a little longer. Like, I'm sad for you, but. Well, it's funny because, I mean, Paramount offered him to stay on. They were like, if you just accepted, we'll let you be the CEO still. if that's the problem. But yeah, I do think it's funny. I have a rule where I only invest in things that Twitter hates.

And so years ago, I bought a bunch of Facebook stock because everyone was like, Facebook, that's ruined. And then, of course, that has been the best investment of my life. And about a year and a half ago, when Warner Brothers was at 8 or something, people were like, oh, they killed Batgirl. This company is going to hell. And I was like, seems like it's time to put some money in it. And now is it's like pushing up towards 30.

I was like, oh, God, I'm going to pay off my car loan now. So thank you to both David Zazlov and the idiocy of Twitter. It's too bad Twitter didn't hate Navidia three years ago. Oh, God. If it even knew how to spell it, I would have been in there. But then you wouldn't be on this podcast. You'd be retired to your private island. So it's really, it's best for America that you did not get that tip from Twitter.

Let's take a quick break. And then we'll come back and talk about something related. We talked about those social media apps that are maybe in the competitor set. to Netflix. You know, a lot of people spend an awful lot of time on those. Ezra Klein has a column, you know, talking about this as part of our broader social atomization and what's wrong with it and sort of realizing that he needs a moral framework to underpin his desire to pass judgment on the way people spend their time. And we're going to try to do some of that here. Meanwhile, are you getting our emails? Are you getting every bit of information that you want

about this show? When we send the show out, we send links to some of the articles that we discuss and other interesting information. I encourage you go to Central Air Podcast dot com sign up there and you'll get all of that we'll be right back i want to turn and talk about something that is actually somewhat related we you know we talked about the extent to which the social media apps and the slop that you know you can stare into your phone for hours looking at you know is that a competitor to netflix and there's a lot of angst about us being increasingly sucked into our phones and not talking to people in the real world and you have this successful political movement to take phones away from children in school

one of the few areas where we're seeing a lot of bipartisan cooperation in state capitals around the country right now. But I've seen some interesting stuff being written in the last few days, basically alluding to the fact that, you know, we talk about this stuff for children, in part because children are, you know, not full adults and we're allowed to tell them what to do and we can take away their phones. But some of this stuff is probably also bad for us as adults, and we don't focus on that as much. And in particular, you know, in addition to the algorithms and, you know, people just, you know, staring at low-quality content. for a long time. There's also the emergence of these, you know, AIs that you can talk to and treat like they're your friend. And we all have this instinct that that seems like a bad thing. And Ezra Klein wrote about and also talked about on his podcast, you know, there's this effort to have a data-driven explanation of why that's bad and why you shouldn't want to be friends with AI.

But that really, like, there's just a fundamental normative thing here that, like, we have some idea of what a good life is. And being friends with your phone does not meet that. And he's saying that, you know, liberals need to be able to reclaim that language that is moralizing in a way that expresses a view about what the good way is to live beyond just do whatever you want. Basically, you know, it's not going to be possible for society to remain neutral on what it means to live our digital lives well. And I think this is right. But what's interesting to me about it is that it's contentless. He's saying, you know, we need a concept of the good, but he doesn't really have one to offer. And, you know, normally these things are rooted in religion, that there's

some, you know, God has some plan for us and something that we're supposed to do, and that drives, you know, what is, what is a good life, what is not a good life. If you don't have reference to that, and you have this instinct that you want to say to people, basically, it seems to be the instinct is that you want to tell people they need to have deeper relationships with real people and spend less time alone and less time interfacing with technology. You then somehow need to reason backwards into why you get to tell people that if that's not what they want to do on any given day. And he's sort of identified the need to have that moral structure, but he doesn't actually have a framework to underlie it. And he also doesn't want to order people to do things, right, which is where those moral structures come from. They come from being told to do something that you don't particularly feel like doing. And you don't get to argue about it. You don't get to have opinions about whether you should or not. You just do this because this is how we do things. This is why I do not start my thank you notes with thank you.

And it is why I go to Mass on Sundays. It's not like I'm— Wait, I'm sorry. You're not supposed to start a thank you note with thank you. No. I didn't know about that rule. Why aren't you supposed to start it with thank you? Darling, Aunt Agatha, I've been having a wonderful time with the beautiful new salt and pepper shakers that you sent me.

We have them out on the table at every holiday, and our guests cannot get over how adorable they are. Thank you so much for the wonderful gift. We will always think of you when we use them. That is a good note to Agatha. Huh. I guess that I have a new rule to follow. But so anyway, I sidetracked you. I didn't make the rules.

But that's not a moral rule. There are certain things of etiquette that are, I mean, this is like the example that Glacius gives about, you know, we drive on the left, not because that's, you know, there's something fundamentally right about driving on the left. We just need to coordinate and settle on something. But even once you have settled on something, it has to have moral force. And so a good example of this is I was in Cambodia and I am at a tourist shop. And I am standing in line like an American stands in line.

So there's not really a good queuing tradition in Cambodia. It's more of like a rugby scrum. But in the tourist shops, there's more queuing. And I am queuing and I am doing an American desk, which is I'm looking around, I'm like stepping out of line to examine stuff. And then I expect that as in an American cue, someone will tap you on the shoulder and be like, you're next. No, like five Belgians just walked straight in front of me. And for a moment, I was super angry about it.

And then I was like, no, actually, they have their own queuing roles. there's no moral content to a queuing rule. But if I am in New York and someone does that, murder. And like because, in fact, like, once that rule has been settled on, you do have to treat it as a moral question. And I think the problem that- But there is moral content to a queuing rule. Like, the specifics of it, you know, there are various different queuing rules that could all meet the same moral end. But, you know, queuing is ultimately about fairness.

It's about saying that we try to make everyone wait about the same amount of time, first-ins. first out. There are other versions of fairness that I could come up with. Why shouldn't old people go to the front of the line and pregnant ladies so they don't have to stand? Right, but that also has moral content. I mean, my point is simply that it's not arbitrary. There's several different ways to do it, but it's not arbitrary because certain rules would serve the underlying goals and other rules would not in a way that, you know, whereas like drive on the left, drive on the right on the right side are equally good for serving the same end. Actually, technically not. I believe there is a slight increase in car accidents driving on the right hand side of the road.

But because most people, I mean, it's very, I look this up at one point. It's very slight. But it actually is safer to drive on the left side. But there's no way to get there. It would be way less safe to try to switch now. The problem I think Ezra has, he's on to something. But at some point, actually, this is a problem I have with abundance too, is eventually at some point you've got to pick a fight. Right?

Otherwise, you're just doing self-help. if you actually want people's society to decide on what the good life looks like at any level at some point you're going to have to be like you know what the good life doesn't look like like that that and that and it can't just be being on your phones that is not that's too thin a life way to attract the kind of like self-discipline and community and you know virtue building that i think that essay suggests he wants well You know, the problem with abundance was that it didn't pick enough fights with the environmentalists, the unions,

the interest groups that you're going to need to defeat in order to actually do abundance. And similarly, this is not picking enough fights with groups that Ezra Klein doesn't actually want to have a fight with over things that go beyond just whether or not you're looking at your phones and how are you relating to other human beings in the world. Wait, so what are the fights that you see him shirking there. Are you saying he should be like calling for prohibitions on pornography or? I can think of

any number of fights, but you're going to have to pick some of them. It could be porn. It could be gambling. I mean, he did say that commercialization of marijuana was a mistake. Right. That's one fight that one could pick there. You could try to delegalize, move to a, you know, a non-commercial decriminalized. At the end of the day, what he is gesturing towards is a thick community with a thick moral order. And those communities have a lot of rules. They don't have just like, don't spend some much time on your phone. And I think he is in fact right that thick communities with thick moral orders are probably overall they have their downsides. They are probably overall a more satisfying way for most human beings to live. Ben, do we need a thicker moral order? I mean, as someone

who has never been a part of a thick moral order community, I will say that like I am aware of the like grass is always greener feeling of being like, oh, it would have been better if I was a part of these thick moral order religious groups. And so I get it. But you sort of got at it in the beginning, Josh. I think when you said that like we talk about all the shit with regard to children because we can affect children aren't allowed to have phones. We can just say no phones for you, children. But it's also screwing up adults' brains.

But we don't bother really talking about that because there's no way for the government to stop that from happening to change our behavior. There's just facts that people like as for Klein can write columns in the New York Times about it. and that's going to have whatever success it has, which is none. His column is very successful, then. I think we should. Right. But it's not successful and it's not going to make anyone say, you know what, you're right. I should go and go to church on Christmas.

And I should go and do the potluck. Like there's no, that's things that society has to decide for itself over a course of long, lots of different trends and things happening. And I guess I just trust more that the great mass of humanity will decide. for itself what's going to be better here and will adjust over the course of these years. All of this is rather new. We haven't had time to really adapt. Smartphones have been around for less than 20 years. I think that we can all get a little too hysterical about this and just brains take a while to react to stuff. Things will be fine. But I think there's been a sort of surge and I see it

both on the left and the right in writing in recent years about what ails our society that really is not aimed at public policy. It's aimed at trying to change what people want, what their values are, and what choices they make when those choices are freely available. And I think, you know, to some extent that can be unsatisfying because it's like, okay, well, you know, you write a call and says people should want different things. You can't just make people want different things. You don't have a proposal for what the government is going to do about that. But there's a lot of social changes that can only happen that way. I mean, you know, to take a couple of examples, we talked about that Helen Andrews essay a few weeks ago about, you know, the quote-unquote

feminization of the workplace. And one of the criticisms of that essay, that Madaglacius, for example, has issued, is that, you know, she has these big sweeping claims about everything this is done wrong. And what she wants is a tweak to, you know, workplace harassment law to, you know, give people, you know, fewer rights to make claims in court, which obviously is not going to bring about the kind of societal change that Helen Andrews is looking for there. But I mean, if you're talking about you want things to be more like the 1950s, you know, it wasn't the law that kept women out of the workplace. I mean, you know, in the 1950s, like six percent of doctors were women. It was a set of social norms. forms that underlay that. And so obviously, I don't want to bring those social norms back, but if you were going to bring back the 1950s, it wouldn't be the government forcing us back into the 1950s. There would have to be a grassroots change in people's preferences and desires and actions that would cause that. Similarly, on the left, Rachel Cohen Booth has an interesting piece in Vox about how in Europe, birth rates are not great anywhere, but they're better in societies that have a more egalitarian attitude

toward parenting duties than in societies that have a more, you know, traditional, masculine, patriarchal attitude. And so, you know, the birth rate hasn't fallen off a cliff as much in France or in Norway

as it has in Italy. Again, you know, that's something that probably is not that responsive to public policy. There's, you know, they want to give, you know, people want to give paid leave and various things that might affect it

the margin, but it's mostly, you know, people have changes in their preferences and values and that's what causes society to change. And if there's a, a sense that things have gone sideways because people have the wrong preferences and values. I guess you sort of have to start by talking about that people should should want different things. How you actually bring that about, I have no idea. But I think that, you know, maybe these are the right conversations to be having, even if sometimes people are pushing in the wrong direction. I mean, the people have been having these conversations forever, though, right? I mean, they've been having them since the 1950s and before that about how the past was better. I think they've been having those conversations since like the Stone Age. But yeah, I mean, people can, People could have these conversations as much as they want. Sure. Some people like hockey. I don't give a shit.

But like the reality is that we're not going back to the 1950s. You know, like humanity has momentum on its side and it does various things in massive group behavior. And like when you just say, oh, I wish it was this, it doesn't really do anything other than highlight the fact that some people have on we in an emptiness in their life in modernity. I kind of disagree with this. I disagree with the progressive idea that progress, we just always move towards more liberalization. towards more of like sexual norms, familiar relations, et cetera. You know, the Victorian era followed on and was a reaction to an era of irreligiosity and licentiousness among the British nobility.

And then society just took a look at it and was like, oh, whoa, control, alt, delete, reboot, reboot. And it is not inconceivable to me at all. that for a variety of reasons, including the fact that falling birth rates are not actually sustainable at the societal level. They are sustainable at the individual level. But ultimately, you cannot have the kind of pension schemes that people are counting on. They are not having children on the assumption that someone else's children will provide the stuff they plan to consume when they're old. And that's not, it's kind of a Ponzi scheme. It's not sustainable over the long term.

I think ultimately birth rates and probably somewhat more traditional family structures will rebound. I'm always a little overwhelmed by this idea that we need higher birth rates because of, you know, pension liabilities. Because, I mean, first of all, you can't, I mean, you can't make people reproduce more on the grounds that, you know, the pensions need their funding. But also, I mean, I agree with that. But also, there's the option of abrogating the pension obligations. Like, you know, one way you can deal with the fact that you have made promises that are unsustainable with the given birth rate is that you cannot follow through. on the promises. Absolutely. If you were a young person and you were looking at all the old people who starved because we cut off their pensions, what do you think then? Well, but they wouldn't starve.

Right. Like, I will say, like, I didn't, I didn't have kids. And having cared for my parents as they were dying, I have real fears about what my old age is going to look like because what I discovered in that process and what basically anyone with an aging parent discovers is that you need an outside person to advocate for you. You just do. And it has to be someone who really cares about your interests because it's not like the hospitals are bad, but they've got a lot going on and you are not their priority. And you need someone for whom you are the priority. I mean, I think that that's completely reasonable in certain ways, although I don't think that in my lifetime there's going to actually be a situation where Social Security doesn't appear for people at all. But I would also just point out

that when I said the thing about history having momentum and things like that, I didn't necessarily mean the liberal view that everything always gets better and progressive and leads to more rights and liberalization of everything, I just mean that regardless of what people with columns think, history has a momentum of itself and is going to do what it does. And that sometimes that might lead to Victorianism. It might lead to anything, who knows. But that just the pundit class saying things over and over isn't actually going to change that in any interesting way. It's going to be done by economics and technology and all of these other massive, massive things that all of us are just sort of pushing it the sides of. I'm also, I'm just pessimistic about the idea that you can get some sort of big social change here in people's preferences and actions because I'm not sure how much people have changed in the first place.

I think people have responded to a changing set of incentives that makes it easier to be alone on several dimensions. You know, it's easier to not have children in part because, you know, while you need help in your old age, this is probably the best time ever to be without the help of your children in your old age when you're declining. It's not a good situation, but, you know, the state of New York, the Medicaid program will pay to put me in a nursing home if it comes to that and I'm out of assets. You know, it's certainly, you're in a better position to deal with that now than you would have been a hundred years ago. And similarly, these choices that people are making to be alone, whether that's, you know, literally just, you know, spend time in their rooms looking at their phones instead of going out with friends or choices that people are making. not to get married. It's because the infrastructure that we have around being solitary is better than it used to be. It's less boring because this technology is, in fact, entertaining. And there was even this like kind of dystopian modern love piece in the New York Times about this woman who says that the AI she talks to now is better than both her ex-husband and her therapist. And that's very grim. I do not like that. But it is also a technological advance that, you know,

people will look at this and say, well, this makes being alone more viable than it used to be. I think that, you know, the opportunity costs have just changed. And I don't, you know, I don't know how you possibly unwind that. I mean, I don't think you will unwind it entirely. But I also agree with Ben that this is a new technology. It is like social media, like everything else, right? Like, if you look at the Great Awakening, to me, that looks like it's a lot about social media, not entirely. I think there were other factors in play. But social media played a huge role in this. And I think that a big part of it was that companies just did not have the cognitive filters to understand that 10,000 people hitting retweet is not actually a big deal. And I developed at one point something I called the Texas High School Football Stadium Rule, which is that there are in the state of Texas something like 85 high school football stadiums that see more than 10,000 people. And if you would not, you would not, freak out because the crowd at one of those football games was mad at you, then you should not freak out over a Twitter storm, right? And like, you would, if you would not say we have to fire

this guy, the Katie Tigers pep squad is enraged, then you should not do that in response to a Twitter mob. But I think that people did ultimately develop some of those filters. It took them a while. It was not overnight. We're still kind of working through it. But just companies are way more inclined and to be like, those are just randos entertaining themselves. I don't care what they think, right? And that, I think, is healthy, but it takes time. And I think that's also going to be true for AI. Totally.

I mean, I think there have been a lot of these studies right about how many people, the human brain is capable of being friends with, right? It's something like 150, I think. 150, the dumb bar number. Yeah, exactly. And then... I have more than 150 friendships. Right.

Sure you do. This is very funny for me watching all of this coverage of social atomization, because I have like an impossibly high level of social connection. And so, you know, I try to remember that I'm, you know, I'm very unusual. I'm, you know, spend my summer out on Fire Island and people are through my house all the time. And, you know, I'm having two Christmas parties over the next couple of weeks. Like I like, I see a lot of people all of the time. And many of them are even real.

One might say most. And so I do know that it is possible in these times. It's also been something I've reflected on a little bit. And there's some of these numbers about how, like, gay men don't seem to be as negatively affected by some of these trends that are holding men back. And you're seeing actually gay men, gays are significantly outperforming straight students in college now among men. And so I don't know whether, you know, my community is just doing something right here. But, you know, we see other people. Well, I mean, congrats.

Sounds great. I know. These things are possible. Some of us, straits also occasionally hang out with other human beings. Occasionally, yeah. There was another, well, we're talking about grim stuff in the New York Times and atomization here, the originator of the modern love column in the Times, which I guess some of the modern love pieces are like wholesome and heartwarming, but very often I just read them and it's like, yeah, God, Jesus. So anyway, Kathy Hanauer divorced her husband after several decades of marriage

and describes how basically they just got kind of bored of each other. Like they weren't, you know, they weren't screaming at each other. They weren't they weren't cheating. They weren't throwing plates. But, you know, she sort of set back from work a little bit and he was moving more into focus on his work and they had differing interests. And they decided just, you know, maybe we'll, you know, be happier apart. And they described that this has been good for them and they're surprised by the negative reaction they've gotten from people around them, including their children. She says, the decision we made inspired pity, judgment and confusion from those around us, our parents all forever wedded, bonded and bafflement. And so, and then she remarks that people would say to her, I'm sorry, and she didn't want condolences. She said, thanks, but it's okay, we're good. And I just found this piece very sad that, you know, and I don't know, I know, I know Ben, you had a different reaction to this. And this, I think gets again at, you know, the extent to which we sit in judgment of other people's choices about their own personal lives. But it seems to me that, you know, in a marriage, you're supposed to endeavor to love each other forever. and obviously you cannot make an ironclad commitment

about how you're going to feel about everything in the future. But in a situation like this where you weren't actually that estranged from your spouse, it seems like you know, you have some sort of obligation to really try to want to stay married. And it seems like they skipped past that step. And I do have judgment about it. Yeah, I mean, I agree.

I think it's sad on that level. I also think there's some self-delusion going on probably and that there was probably other problems going on in this marriage maybe that aren't coming out. Maybe this situation isn't as wonderful. this is. But, and as the child of a broken home, I can promise you that those kids are never going to forgive them for this. But, you know, I'm also just naturally uncomfortable with second-guessing people who make a consensual decision like this where they've spent time together.

They know more about their relationship than I ever will. And it sounds like a completely reasonable thing that adults should be allowed to do, which is a say, maybe we should try something else. Well, I don't think they shouldn't be allowed to get divorced. No, of course. But again, this is one of those things where, like, you know, you talk about if you say people divorce, you know, too freely, but you're not proposing to get rid of no-fault divorce, you don't have a policy proposal, but you have a statement about what people should do in society. I don't think it's a category of arguments that I think are worth having. Not everything has to be, not everything can be imposed downward from public policy. I think this is a perfect

example then of what we were talking about. Like, when we look at marriages and the like amount of divorce in society, you can put so much of like the increase of it to no-fault divorce, right? But I don't think that there's a lot of cases where people are staying in marriages or not because it's socially unacceptable or socially acceptable to do it. You know, at this point, like, whatever people think about it isn't going to be the thing that keeps you in a marriage. There's a million other reasons to be in that marriage. Well, but that is precisely because we stopped judging people who leave marriages that are doing

okay because they're bored or they think they could date someone better. Or, like, if we were judging those people, there would be less of it. Indeed, I know of cases usually involving older men and younger women, younger new wives. Like, those guys are not getting invited to as many dinner parties as they used to get invited to. You know why? Because the wives are like, nah, nope, she's not coming to my house. Because middle-aged wives support middle-aged wives. Let me tell you.

Speaking is a middle-aged wife. Sure. I just think that, like, I don't know. This all seems so petty in a way. They're like, I don't want us to have a society where we actually do that. where we actually try to enforce these sort of social mores in a way that is just people being catty to each other because of life choices that we on the outside will never completely understand. Well, but is it catty? Civilization rests on petty law enforcement then.

Like, I remember years ago, some guy tried to steal a cab as I was leaving a bridal shower and we're all carrying all this stuff. And he just literally walks across the street, cuss in front of us, and starts to get into our cab. And all of the other women were like, oh, and I was just like, are you going to take our cab? And he was like, well, I thought you were waiting for the bus. I was like, do you hail buses where you come from? And like, apparently someone behind me was like, Megan is such a New Yorker. But like if you don't do stuff like that, civilization will collapse. But that man was stealing your cab.

Like, there's very obviously an immoral act there. I completely understand shaming that person and, you know, trying to write the wrong. People being tired of being in a marriage. I think strong marriages are actually good for the. rest of us. I think, like, actually, the expectation that people stay married, it is good for the rest of us. I mean, so, like, one small example in something I was thinking of as I read this, my parents divorced, and to be clear, my parents should have gotten divorced, they really, really did not like each other. They basically, they had for a long time what's known as a Manhattan

divorce where you live in the same apartment, and you just never speak to each other, which was extremely awkward for the 20 years that they did this, maybe 25. But, but. The burden it put on me and my sister when my parents got sick at the same time, my father was in Boston, my mother was in Washington, D.C. And we were constantly flying up to Boston and then frantically flying back to D.C. We got a brief respite after my mother died and then my father got sick again. And like that thing of leaving your children to do all that work and not only leaving them to do it, splitting the spouses so that they can do it in two different cities at once, it's selfish. and not understanding why your kids. Now, like, in my parents' case, I understand it.

I endorse their divorce. Because they really, really had a problem. They should have done it sooner. But if you're just kind of bored and you think you would be a more interesting person with another partner, like that other partner is not going to take care of you like the person you've been with for 40 years.

You spend a lot of time building up that time. And now you're going to have a new person who will probably not be there when you are old and need stuff, and instead your kids are going to have to do all of it. So that's one example of a way in which, yes, actually this affects other people. It affects a lot of other people.

I'm just not comfortable with that. Judging people is a way that we express care for them. I mean, it's such an excuse to say that. But, like, in reality, like, it's just, I don't know anything about these people's lives, you know? And none of us do. And we're just making decisions about what would it be based on these incredibly, like, thin views that, like,

oh, well, people should stay together because you're going to love each other longer because you were married the first time. Well, okay, maybe, but maybe not. Life contains all different types, right? It takes all sorts to make a world. And I just really don't like this sort of like Puritanism that is saying, like, we're going to tell them, we're going to at least try to shame them all into having what we think is the right type of life. Look, I'm just a New York Times reader.

Kathy Hanauer doesn't have to care what judgment I have drawn about the essay that she wrote about marriage. But first of all, when you write about your marriage in the New York Times, you were inviting people to make judgments about it. You've made your private matter public. But it's also, I mean, the judgment that I'm talking about here really is to be brought by people who are in society with us, by friends and colleagues and neighbors. And that's where I would say that expressing judgment is a way that we show care for each other, which is, you know, we judge other people's behavior because we are concerned that they are making choices, not just that we'll have bad ramifications for society, but that we'll have bad ramifications for them. That's why religious

people care that other people, you know, adopt a religious tradition that they think is correct. But I think, you know, going back to where Ezra started this, I think the reason that we care that, you know, someone is, you know, spending six hours a day on TikTok instead of going out and having friends or in a more extreme case. He talks about this essay that ran in Harper's earlier this year, the goon squad, about this online subculture of people who, excuse me, I say people, I mean men, who just, you know, spend hours and hours and hours masturbating to these, like, vast quantities of porn in their goon caves, these spaces that are, like, optimized for this behavior. And for many of them, it is substituting for forming real interpersonal and sexual relationships. I do judge the gooners.

I think it is bad to be a gooner. But also, I mean, the reason that I have that judgment, it's not that I think that they're going to be damned to hell. I don't believe in that. But I think that ultimately this does not make them happy in the long run. And I think that also, it's easier to square the circle than Ezra thinks it is, where he's like, you know, we have to, we have judgments about this and we need a framework to explain why we think that, you know, it matters whether or not you spend all of your time gooning. But I think there's a fairly simple one, which is that people don't always have good judgment about what's going to make them happy in the future. And that's particularly true about addictive goods and services. It's why we restrict smoking and tax it and have had this successful campaign to get people to stop smoking.

because smoking is pleasant in the moment and unpleasant in the long run, and people have bad judgment often about things that are, you know, that feel good now and are not going to feel good later. I think some of this social media stuff falls into that category. And when we talk about why do we have judgment about that, why do we express judgment? It's because we observe people making choices that are not going to make them happy in the long run and because we have some obligation in society to care for each other and try to, you know, try to get people to make good choices. I think marriage and family is a big thing like that. And also, to some extent, things like career choices, going to college, et cetera, right? What we assume is that there are some life choices that you cannot really understand until you've gotten to the other side of them. And therefore, the people who have are going to serve as your native guides. And, like, as sometimes happens with guides, if you've gone on a rafting trip or whatever, sometimes they yell at you.

And they're like, no, no, no, don't do that. This way, this way, right? Like, that's actually how good guiding has to work sometimes. And that is, I think, my take on this is, like, if I want less government, I actually need more robust social institutions. I need, I don't need everyone to be sharing the same thick culture, but I need a lot of people to be in thick cultures that will guide them towards life choices that will not force the government to deal with their poor life choices, right? Whether that's away from crime, away from poverty, it's. And I think the contradiction that libertarians don't think about enough, but also liberals, progressives, don't think about enough, is that for the things you want to do, it is often actually more important to have culture doing a lot of work. So if you look at the Danish welfare state, right, the Danish welfare state, the culture, the shame of taking resources that you don't deserve, of cheating, that is doing a ton of.

of work. And that is the only way that that welfare state works is that it's a high trust society where people can almost always be relied on to do basically the correct thing. And there's a lot of levels at which that works. They need less management of their institutions and so forth. But one of the basic ones is they don't have to do as much enforcement. And if progressives want to have a bigger welfare state, then they need to build a pretty thick culture that is going to do more of that shaming at the cultural level. And they don't want to do it. that. And similarly, libertarians, if they want less government, you are going to need some system that takes care of, like, pregnant women and women with small children because that is not

a viable economic unit. And libertarians don't want to do that. And I think that this is a problem for both groups. I mean, I would just say that, like, the idea that progressives don't want to do that is the nicest thing anyone's ever said about progressives. Like, progressives desperately want to do this. You know, progressives are the most annoying fucking people in history. They desperately want to do it in ways that won't work, right? Like, they want to shame people about their anti-racism, but they don't want to shame people about their turnstile jumping. Well, if you don't shame people about your turnstile jumping, you are not going to have a nice mass transit system. Sure, but what I mean is that they do want to shame people.

And, like, we used to have a running joke at Mother Jones where there was just, there were things that we would just every day tell you not to do. You shouldn't take a shower too often because it would be bad for the environment. You shouldn't have BPA in your couch. You shouldn't do this or that or that. And everybody gets annoyed by that. You know, you become these, an ideological movement, a political movement that is just constantly whining and saying, no, you're doing it wrong. And that's like something that progressives really need to work hard to stop doing. You know, it's so toxicly unpopular.

Let's take another quick break. And by the way, if you want to see some of those things that we've been talking about, if you want to see those modern love articles about how AI is better than your ex-husband, if you want to see that Harper's feature on gooning, which maybe you don't want to see that, maybe you really do want to see that. Anyway, go to centralairpodcast.com. There's a show page for every episode, including this one that has links like that. And you can get that in your email inbox every time a new episode comes out. Again, that's centralairpodcast.com. The breakdown of these norms is actually relevant for the last topic that I have on the list for us today, which has to do with disability claims at colleges.

There was this Atlantic story about how, no, 38% of undergrads at Stanford are identified as disabled. very often this is due to psychiatric conditions, ADHD, depression, anxiety, not super serious psychiatric conditions, not like schizophrenia. And in many cases, these students are getting extra time on exams as a result of this. You also see this with the SAT and the ACT, where you get some clinician to declare that you need accommodations because of one of these conditions, and you get more time to take the exam, and then you, as a result, get a higher score on it. And it's part of what has driven this. And, you know, there's a widespread sense in the universities that this is unfair, this is people gaming the system. You do get some very extreme disability advocates who just say this is great, and more people

should see themselves as disabled, and more people should get accommodations, and all of this is good. But most people seem to have a sense that this is not good and that there's people gaming the system. And part of the problem is that, you know, there used to be shame around saying, you know, I have a disability that makes me bad at taking this exam. I need extra time. Now there is no shame about making that claim. no shame about making that claim in a way that is fairly specious and a sense looking around, well, you know, everybody's doing it, so I need to do it too. And it's undermining the assessment systems that these colleges have relied on to figure out, you know, who is actually better than

anybody else at the work that's being done in the colleges. And so I think it's exactly this, this failure, this loss of judgment that, you know, and people thought it was, it was good to judge people less for these things. And, you know, you shouldn't think that, you know, because someone can't pay attention to an exam, that's a bad thing. In fact, we needed more shame around this. Yeah, I mean, the arguments that people are making in favor of this end up being just arguments against timed exams, right? They'll say, well, like, when in the workplace are you ever going to have to sit down and do something in an hour and a half with a short time frame and no books? I'm like, well, welcome to my life. But. And also, there are a lot of untimed assignments in

college. Yeah, there are a lot of untimed assignments. We time assignments for a reason, because first of all, people who have more mastery of the material are more likely to be able to recall it quickly and to deploy it effectively. And so having it timed does tell you something and tells you something in a way that having a term paper does not. If you don't want to do time test, don't do time test, great. But if you are doing a time test, giving a bunch of people an exemption on the grounds that they are not good at doing time tests is crazy. Right? You are like basically, it's sort of like giving a pilot an exemption from an eye exam on the grounds that we already know he's blind. Right?

Like, no, we are testing his vision for a reason. We did not just do this arbitrarily. And I think that if you are doing it arbitrarily, if you've never thought through why you might want to have an exam, that only lasts for a certain amount of time, then absolutely you should look at that and be like, maybe I should do it a different way. But if you have looked at it and decided that there are good reasons for doing this, I think there are some good reasons for doing it. There should not be exemptions for time except for people who have a kind of disability

where they actually need something time-consuming done. So, right, there are people who, for example, are quadriplegic and need someone to write the answers down for them. They have to dictate them. There are people who need the questions read to them because they're vision-inpaired. And that actually just does take extra time. But there are people who might need a separate room because, like, they are in a wheelchair and it doesn't fit at the desks, right? There are reasons for accommodations, but those reasons cannot be, I am not good at doing the task, which is the situation we're in now.

It seems to me, and I realize this is not the law. You'd have to change the law. But, like, you shouldn't have accommodations for problems that are fundamentally cognitive problems. Like, you know, if you're blind, that's not a cognitive problem, and we will, you know, you can have an accommodation to address that. But if you have a condition that just makes you, like, cognitively less capable of demonstrating, mastery of the material within a time frame, that's something the test should measure, not something that it should avoid measuring. It strikes me as just like a category error to conceive that as a disability. You might as well give people extra time for low IQ. I mean, I thought it was interesting when this, when this article came out, you know, I had extra time on my SATs because I, because of, you know, ADD and all that nonsense. But I actually didn't know that I even could have applied for accommodations actually in college. Well, you couldn't have. They changed the law in 2008 to make it much easier. And you're old.

Right. Exactly. which 2008 is the year I graduated. And so, but, but I think that, like, that's exactly my point, which is, is that, like, did this situation that's happening happen because suddenly there was no shame anymore? Or did it happen because of an actual policy change? It's both. So there were a bunch of legal and, like, both court decisions and legal changes, but those, those were downstream of cultural changes about how we should think about disability and the

influence of disability activists who wanted to define disability as widely as possible and give accommodations to as many people as possible. And I've gone back and forth with a couple of these activists on Twitter over this issue. And, like, the thing I've been trying to impress on them is that if everyone has an accommodation, it's going to crowd out the people with very mild problems are going to crowd out the people who really need them, which is what happened at Disney World. So they had a special program for disabled kids where they could skip the line. And if you're a parent of a kid with autism, that's a big deal because your kid can melt down,

like just cannot stand in line like a normal kid. kid. And it was a huge boon. I knew so many families that I've talked to for whom this was an amazing gift. And then rich people started hiring disabled people to get in line with them. And then Disney changed the program so that you still get to like, they'll give you a time to come back, but you can't cut the line anymore. And if you have an autistic kid who kind of freaks out, it might be hard to wait nearby and go. And so I think like the impractical idea is that everyone has disabilities and everyone should be accommodated for every, every, every, And this is like, the society is not run by your mother. And you cannot have a world that is crafted so that no one ever has any strengths and weaknesses. And we all get exactly the same outcome. And that really kind of does seem like what they are trending towards. And I think ADHD is actually a great example of this because like, I am very sure that if I were in school now, I would have a diagnosis for ADHD. I would have a diagnosis for anxiety. But ironically, what good would extra time on tests have done me? I feel.

finished every single test I took early, with the exception of my AP English exam, because it's a long essay. I think probably also my AP government and history and so forth, because those are long essay exams and you can, like, just write more if you have more time. But in general, I think for ADHD, you should give them less time. Are you saying you would have gotten a diagnosis on the merits? I would, I would definitely have gotten an ADHD diagnosis if I were in school today. Yeah. I was absolutely, like, totally dysfunctional. But ADHD doesn't actually benefit from extra time. In fact, everyone else appears to benefit more than kids with ADHD, but they do it because this is all unscientific nonsense

that just got pulled out of someone's butt to meet the legal standard. I'm very skeptical, no offense, Megan, of very highly achieving people claiming to have attention problems. I nearly flunked out of both high school and college. Okay. I got my act together, and I also found a job where my weird combination of, I am omnivorous and distracted by the internet all the time, but also I am capable of intense hyperfocus and can spend 12 hours doing something without noticing the time pass.

Like, that happens to be a very good combination for my particular weird job. But yes, I'm pretty sure that I would have gotten an ADHD diagnosis if I were a kid now. The funny thing about that, though, is that's not a disability. No. I mean, it might be diagnosable, but it's like, you know, it is not, in fact, an impairment. Right. It has not proven to be an impairment in my career. I mean, I had, as I said, extra time on my SATs, which I bombed, and then never had it in college where I went, became an honor student.

And like, because it's true, extra time for me meant nothing. It was completely useless to me. I agree with everything you guys are saying about how this is obviously a stupid situation where people are gaming it. And then they're using the gaming to then out compete with each other. And it leads to sort of a corruption of the entire playing field of it. I guess the only thing that I don't necessarily agree with is that this is because people don't have shame about it anymore. I just think that it's probably more downstream of that. There's policy decisions that were made in 2008 that now suddenly people are going in and getting all these sort of like pretend accommodations.

And that there's an actual policy change you could make to fix that instead of just saying it would be great if people had pride in honest work still. I would like both. Embrace the healing power of end, Ben. These two things happen together, right? It's not just one or the other. A parent who realizes that their kid who has attention problems can get extra time on tests or whatever and that there is a benefit for it is more likely to seek, right? If there is something to be gained, if you have all of these individualized education plans and extra resources, then obviously more parents are going to seek diagnoses. But when more people have diagnoses, the stigma on it is necessarily going to lessen.

The other thing where I think that we need a little bit more stigma here is it's not that ADHD is not a real condition. It is. And there are, you know, treatments and medications that are useful for people with in various circumstances. But also like, learning to focus on a task is something that people do in life that is like, that is a learned skill. And if you see the fact like, you know, well, it's, it's hard for me to pay attention to things that I think are boring and I'm going to work on that versus it's hard for me to pay attention to things that I think are boring. And that's a cute aspect of my personality. then you end up with worse attention in society because people don't see it as, you know, as a trait to modify or as a problem to overcome. They see it as a personality aspect. And then you also get what Megan describes where you get the hijacking of accommodations for these things for the people who least need them. You see this with autism where, you know, you have people who are, you know, severely autistic who have really extensive care needs. And then a lot of the conversation about autism is framed around people who just, you know, think it's a quirky way to describe themselves. And so I think, you know, if you reinforce the idea that these things are problems and they're problems to try to overcome, and when there's severe problems, they're problems that require significant accommodation, rather than that, you know, it's, you know, we're a wonderful neurodiverse society and, you know, each of us is a color in the rainbow and how wonderful is it that I have ADHD? And I think that there's a significant amount of that these days. Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that the disability on social media, you see people just claiming disabilities that are, it's not like they have one leg, right?

And like, I definitely think that that is bad. Like, it is, it's absolutely absurd. And I don't mean to say otherwise. I do think that maybe we could shame that the entire notion that restless leg disorder is a real thing that you need to have accommodations for. But I also, you know, the funny thing is, like, I have that. This is merely a mild annoyance. It has never occurred to me that it requires medication. Sometimes there are just things that are not ideal about us, and we try to find ways to work around them rather than, you know, making it part of our identity and seeking accommodation for them. But anyway.

Yeah, and I think that when you give people a reason to kind of marinate in their weaknesses, you are not doing them a favor. Look, there are people who really have very severe panic disorders, and those people need medical help and, you know, everything society can give them. But treating someone who occasionally has a panic attack as if now they are like fragile little egg people who cannot be touched, less their shell break, is not a favor to them. This is the kind of thing that gets you attention from your mother. And it will get you attention from society when you are young and very attractive. But eventually you're going to be 40. And people are just going to be sick of it. And they're not going to give you attention. and they're not going to give you help.

And so be kind to your future self includes, like, I'm not saying, like, I have had, I have anxiety. I am like, I have panic attacks sometimes. I once didn't sleep in a hotel room for two days in Israel. And it's not pleasant. Don't love it. Also, like, it's not my life. It's not who I am.

It doesn't define me. And I have had to develop ways to cope with it. And I have mostly. And that has been better for me than I think it would have been had I grown up in the era where everyone has nine diagnoses and they've got all of these plans. And, you know, maybe I'm just a crotchety old person. But I genuinely think, like, I had a lot of friends like that. Lots of friends who have various stuff, ASD, ADHD, etc. And most of them, you know what, figured it out. And I'm not saying, like, don't get therapy. But like, expecting the entire world to bend around you. It works for a very short period of your life, and God willing, your life will be long. Well, I mean, I will point out that one of the reasons that all of this happens is in the way that you're describing is because personality disorders disappear in your 30s and 40s. And as you get older, they go away. So that, of course, old people look at it and go, I'm fine now. I know some examples of that not happening.

I mean, it doesn't happen with everybody, but borderline personality disorder, which is the main one that people have, does in fact disappear as you get older. People can look it up. I've been to a mental institution and you haven't. Before we go this week, Megan, you were talking about learning from the production of a podcast. I mean, I'm sure some of that is this podcast, but you also have a new podcast that you are launching at the Washington Post. Can you tell us about that? We have launched a new podcast. It's called Reasonably Optimistic. I urge all of our subscribers to check it out. Basically, the idea is that I think people are sick of podcasts that tell them how terrible everything is, with the exception of this one, which... I think we sound wonderful.

I talked about how I have more than 150 friends. I'm, you know, I'm very optimistic. Well, so it's basically how to be more like Josh. Ooh, this sounds great. How to be more focused on solutions. The first podcast just went up. It's with Neil Stevenson. It's basically like it's techno-futurist, hopeful for society,

not going to tell you that the dark night of fascism is about to descend over the land and eat us all in its. dark mall. And I hope that you'll all check it out. And we will include a link to that as well in the email version of this show. And if you're not getting our emails, I encourage you go to Centralairpodcast.com. You'll get notifications and you'll get supporting material. You'll be able to read those grim modern love essays that we talked about on the show this week and various other articles that we discussed. So again, that's at Centralairpodcast.com. Thank you, Megan. Ben, fun conversation this week. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Central Air is created by me,

Josh Barrow and Sarah Faye. We are a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddick mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosier. Thanks for listening and stay cool out there.