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Episode Date: October 15, 2025

This is the first episode of Central Air, a weekly politics podcast from and for the political center. Every other part of the political spectrum has a podcast — so, why not us?Josh Barro, Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfuss talk about the state of the political center, and the exciting new initiatives that focus on what centrists are for, not just what we think is too extreme. Also this week:The oddly low-key government shutdown, and Democrats’ uphill fight to use the shutdown to get voters to focus on expiring Obamacare subsidies, naked cyclists in Oregon and the political trap of fighting Donald Trump over immigration, the overwrought freakout over Bari Weiss’s installation at CBS, and finally, did it make any sense that the Nakatomi Corporation would have had $640 million worth of bearer bonds in a vault in its new Los Angeles skyscraper?Learn more about Central Air — leave comments, sign up to support the show and receive updates on this new podcast — at www.centralairpodcast.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome everybody to the first episode of Central Air, the show where the temperature is always, just right. I'm Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post. Megan, are you enjoying the cool breeze? Well, the honest answer is that I flew back from India on Thursday, where it was definitely not cool. I actually managed to avoid getting sick in India. The trick is no ice and no brushing your teeth. You didn't brush your teeth for an entire thing? No brushing your teeth with water. That's a much better rule than no brushing.

brushing your teeth. Yeah. It's like gross, Megan. You don't put tap water on your toothbrush. Use bottled water. But then I got home and immediately got the flu. So I would theoretically be enjoying the lovely fall weather that Washington is having. But instead, I am enjoying my raspy voice and many, many episodes of Perry Mason and the Raymond Burr successor series, Ironside. You sound good, Megan, actually. Thank you. I'm working on my, like, Elizabeth Holmes. Also, of course, here with Ben Dreyfus.

Ben, are you comfortable? As comfortable as I have ever been. Which probably isn't as comfortable as most people normally are. Yeah, I have. I've brushed my teeth, too. So I kind of thought we should start this show with a statement of our theory of the show, because I think whenever anyone launches a podcast, they owe the public an explanation of why there should be an additional podcast.

First of all, we did some pilots of this back in the winter, and we got some very positive feedback for that. So thank you for those who listened and enjoyed that. We're looking for more of these. We're back. But our broad thinking here is basically every other part of the political spectrum has its own chat show where people get together every week and talk about what's going on in the news and what that means for like-minded people.

And why should the center be left out of that? We have our own ideas. We have our own camaraderie and we deserve our own show. And I think that partly because there's a broader shift that I think is happening this year in centrist political identity, which is centrist sort of coming out with more pride for themselves, not defining ourselves just by what we're against, but by what we're for. And I've been trying to participate in that myself. You may have seen me get heckled by some kind of like climate, Gaza, LGBTQ protesters back at the Welcome Fest conference for centrist Democrats back in June. I wrote in September about the bipartisan convening at the abundance conference where you have Republicans and Democrats trying to refocus. both parties on growth and efficiency.

And so I think, you know, all three of us have been trying to do our part in some piece of this project and this show may be one additional venue where we can do some of that. Ben, why don't you talk a little bit about what you're hoping to get out of this? I think that in reality, the center in the United States is the dominant faction in terms of like normal people. And that that is obscured because of the internet highlighting voices of radical lunatics. And that anytime you can sort of push against that, it's good. because the internet gives this is where politics now exists.

And it gives this false sense that everyone is on the left or on the right or a braying hyena. And I think that giving people a chance to remind them that actually it's not just that. That actually there are these sort of like normies out there with sort of, you know, okay pick and choose beliefs that are less ideological is a really good thing to do. Megan, what have you been feeling in that, you know, this increasingly bizarre political environment that we've had over the last nine years? you know, I've been nurturing these feelings for a long time, and I decided it's time to out myself as a centrist. I view this podcast as our stonewall.

You're going to throw the first brick. Absolutely. And because we are people of moderate temperament, we're doing a podcast instead of a riot. No, I think the seed of truth to my somewhat puckish remark is that I look at so much that's going on. You know, I was in India and looking at all the problems they have and the challenges they have because it's so poor and because, you know, like their state capacity is low. And I come back here and I look around and I think, you know, America is so great. We have so much. We're so good at doing so many things that if we, everyone could just be normal for five minutes, we could get a lot of stuff done. And no one can be normal for five minutes.

So this is the podcast to come and be normal for an hour, is how I think about it. I also want to do a little bit of self-criticism for the center, which is that, you know, I mean, to Ben's point, there are lots of centrist out there. And there's lots of centrist representation in the media. There's nothing a news organization loves more than a way to, you know, find a way to, you know, present an opinion that's in between both sides. But there's been a couple of problems with the way that the center has been represented in the U.S., you know, maybe going back a couple of decades at this point. One is this idea of the center as like fiscally conservative and socially liberal. And when you look at polling on where the public is, a lot of people who are in the center, it's not typically because they're there. I think that, for example, both parties have really

gotten out of touch with where the public is on immigration. There's been a lot of demand for, you know, more immigration enforcement, more immigration restriction. It's been a problem for Democrats. And that's not the usual kind of centrism that you've seen represented out from Washington. And so I think it's important, you know, if we're, you know, going to speak for the political center or build a political movement that appeals to people in the center to understand where centrism actually is in the United States. And it's not necessarily always in line with what my preferences are. And it's not necessarily in line with what elite preferences are. And then the other is that, you know, when we see, you know, quote unquote, centrist politicians,

at least in the, in the Democratic Party, I particularly interested in Megan's thought on, you know, the extent to which there is, you know, centrist republicanism and how it's succeeding or failing at representing people. But you have, I mean, it's like I live in New York and Andrew Cuomo is supposed to be the candidate of the center. But, you know, first of all, he's awful. And, you know, he has all these personal behavior problems. He's not a good manager. And what counts for being like the center left coalition leader in New York is lining up all the labor unions and all of these other interests that have big expensive demands on the government in New York. And so not actually really focusing on delivering what ordinary people want out of the government and not creating an appealing image,

not going out to say, you know, see, wouldn't you like something from the political center? It's not an appealing offering. And so I think that we do need to stand up for the people who are in the middle, but we also need to, you know, make sure that as that gets, you know, enacted in the political parties, that it's being done in a way that's actually focused on delivering for people. I guess I would also just say that I think Megan brought something up that I is really smart, which is a lot of this has to do with temperament, you know, like all three of us disagreed quite a bit about, you know, actual politics and things like that.

That's the way it's supposed to work in a pluralist society. But what I think that all three of us do have is sort of an understanding that, like, you're not necessarily evil if you have those other beliefs. And I think that just increasingly in this time, it's really hard for a lot of people to just accept that and to just realize that their, you know, policies don't necessarily speak about your soul. And I think that that's just such a huge deal. You know, I come from like a left-wing magazine.

And you guys come from libertarians. background and Josh, you've been in finance and all of these things. But the simple fact is, all three of us have friends who disagree with all of this stuff. And I think that like that, that, just like modeling that in society is basically the best thing you can do. But doesn't policy speak to your soul? I mean, like, I mean, I've written some about this recently, but I think there's a fundamental tension here that has to be navigated, but, but that is actually hard, which is that, you know, I mean, politics is a moral project. It's important what the government does. These things have, you know, large consequences for people's lives and for the world.

And so it's not crazy when people, you know, feel like it's morally important to feel one way or another. We have to find a way to bridge that with also, you know, as you know, we're in a society where people have big important disagreements. We need to be able to live with each other who disagree with us in ways that we feel are important. But that doesn't entail denying that it's very important what the government does. Well, okay. While I agree with that, I think that the only way that it speaks about your soul is if you can assume that people are intentional in their actions and rational in their beliefs, which they're not. You know, people have beliefs because their parents had them. They have beliefs because their parents didn't have them.

They have beliefs because the rain came and the wind came. They have beliefs because of all of these different things. And everyone here in this room, digital room, had beliefs that they have changed about. And since you yourself, no, you were not evil in your earlier life. But you have still changed. Speak for yourself, Ben. Don't erase me. Like, I think there's a couple things.

It's one is like, yes, there are value judgments involved. But there's also people are making, they have limited information, they are making judgments based on their limited information. And also, yes, where they live and who their neighbors are and wanting to be nice to their friends and family members and thinking that their way of life is valuable. And all of those things. And it's not evil. It's often just putting different weights on things. I think this is true with abortion, right? where, like, there are actually two just really important values there.

There is a human life that will not exist if you have an abortion. And then there is a woman whose life will be inalterably changed if she has a baby. And, like, what a lot of people want to do is just kind of erase one of those sides and just talk about the other side of that. And they assume that the thing they care about must be the thing the other side is erasing. So if you are pro-life for a pro-choice or it's because you're, you're not. you hate women and want to control their bodies? Well, you know, the movement's actually driven by women, as a lot of social movements are. And for a pro-lifery, you'll hear them say that, like, these people don't care about babies. Like, many of them have babies. And I will say, I have actually,

I've once in my life met an ardently pro-choice woman who, when she got pregnant, referred to it as a fetus. When she gets pregnant and it's a wanted baby, it's the baby. Right. And I just think it's a complicated value judgment and it's hard. And people can't accept that. They have to demonize the other person. So I think part of it is that it's just temperamentally. I assume that the universe is complicated and large people in every walk of life know things about it that I do not because I have not been in their shoes. And so it is hard for me to judge their judgments and often easiest for me to judge the people who are closest to me because I feel like I understand their lives better. But the other thing is that there is an old blogger who went by the pseudonym Charles Murta. His blog post has now lost

to history, but he had this phrase that I love, which is the universe is not here to please you. I have all sorts of radical ideas about what would be a better world, like many of my fellow libertarians, but unlike many of my fellow libertarians, I tend to work in the kind of functional policy space, which is not libertarian utopia. So I tend to focus on incremental improvements, on thinking about ways that like we can push the boundaries in very small ways. What compromises am I willing to make? What's eighth best instead of first or second best? Because we are the smallest quadrant of American politics. That's actually okay with libertarians. But like I just think that the urge to be angry at people all the time, it's about tribalism. It's about, yes, there's

morality involved. There are people in politics who I just think are genuinely bad people. And then most people are just normal humans who are the normal mix of good and bad. And then there are like an equal handful who are genuine saints. And in between are most of us. And again, I find myself working in the in-between space. And I think of our audience as people who want to work in the in-between space. It's interesting, Megan, you talk there about sort of, you know, operating under constraints and understanding that you're not always going to get what you want, which are characteristics of the political center.

are anti-deranging points of view. If you know that like, you know, every, that everything involves compromise and that, you know, the, nothing can be perfect, it might make you a little bit less inclined to be, you know, super angry about politics all the time. But it also doesn't make for a super inspiring pitch for a political movement most of the time. I mean, socialists love these memes about, you know, like centrist saying better things aren't possible. But, you know, sometimes better things aren't possible. And sometimes we need to talk about, you know, well, you know, under the, you know, the set of limited choices we have and given the tradeoffs that we have to make, this is the way to balance to, you know, sort of, you know, get everybody, you know, something of what they were looking for.

But that's a problem for, you know, running a political campaign and saying, getting people to be inspired and say, I want you to really run my country, my city, et cetera. And I'm watching this from New York right now. And Zoran Mamdani, very likely our next mayor will be a very left-wing mayor, but has run a campaign that is very directly focused on the material concerns of residents of New York with substantive ideas that are aimed at, you know, specific concerns that they have. In particular, New York is a very expensive place to live. And one of his signature proposals is, you know, he's going to make the buses free. He's going to raise taxes on rich people to make the buses free. He's going to eliminate the one thing that he talks about a lot, actually, is he's going to eliminate the cap on permits for halal food carts, the chicken and rice carts. They're all over New York. There's only, you know, however many hundred are allowed to operate.

and the operators have to, you know, pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to rent the license. And that adds, he thinks, $2 to the cost of a chicken and rice plate. And an interesting thing there is that this is actually a deregulatory proposal that he has, saying, I'm going to get rid of that cap, we're going to issue more permits, and that'll make it cheaper to run the whole cart, and that will bring down the price of food. So it's, you know, he understands supply and demand. He understands that sometimes a solution is to get the government out of the way. So that part is great.

But the biggest, you know, signature proposal he has is that he's going to freeze the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, which is about half the rental apartments in New York City, a million of them. And, you know, libertarians and, you know, even most centrists like to say rent control doesn't work. And rent control doesn't work for certain things. It doesn't fix a housing shortage. It doesn't tend to make it cheaper for a new person to move into a city and establish household. But one thing rent control does work for is if the government says that the rent has to go up zero percent this year and you currently rent a stabilized apartment in New York, that means your rent will be lower than it otherwise. would be. And so I watch Momdani out there, both with this, you know, this very appealing persona and

also this set of policy proposals that really is designed to aim at specific concerns that people have. And I, you know, I compare them to Andrew Cuomo, who sucks. But even broadly, like, it's hard to conceive of exactly what the big grand centrist vision is that's supposed to compete with that. And, you know, the abundance book and some of the stuff around that is, is aiming at that and saying, you know, we're going to have a more productive society where people can afford more stuff. But I think that, you know, a lot of of that is fairly abstract. And it's a real political challenge for us to show why this is something that, you know, that you should personally feel is going to make your life better and you should be

excited. I mean, I agree with that in theory. But also, when you look back at, you know, American history, right, centrist are the ones who actually got elected to stuff. And they didn't, you know, Bill Clinton was a very inspiring guy who didn't say he was going to, you know, nationalize the land and redistribute it. I'm not sure I would call, like, Abraham Lincoln exactly a centrist. Right, right. And of Of course, like, there are obviously, there are obviously counter examples, right? But it's just like- Oh, actually, no, I'm claiming Abe for us. He's ours.

Tedric in general, I've won lots of these elections. You know, like, the left in the United States has never won one election, right? And- Well, I mean, I don't know, like, FDR had like a big transformative set of proposals that he ran on in a, you know, a time of economic crisis and really did make big lefty changes to the way the federal government operated and got elected four times. I think that there is a version of success. But there are counter examples if you're in these truly extraordinary. situations where the rest of the world is literally falling into fascism and communism. But like by next to the fascist and communists, FDR is this address, you know?

Like, that's fair. Let's split the middle. Like, on the one hand, we're going to cartelize industry and labor. On the other hand, social security. Yeah, like the Tennessee Valley Authority. You know, like there's, but then you end up, like even Obama, right? Like Obama was my formative person, right? Like I went to those speeches, went to the DNC in 2008,

Wept 21, and did all that, and felt it strongly in my soul, will never feel that emotional connection to a president ever again. But Obama also, aside from some stuff with maybe health care, which now people don't even think was enough, he just wrapped a lot of sort of not radical ideas in the rhetoric of change, and about making politics feel something to your soul, not promising change that will fix society forever, which is what the socialist seems to talk about now,

but saying that, like, things can get better, they just can't get hugely better overnight. They can get iteratively better in a practical sense, and I'll make you feel damn good about it. And, like, that does work. I do not myself, as a libertarian, get very weepy about FDR. Had some issues with Obama. But here is actually a thing that I do think that centrists need,

And this is the old progressive kind of synthesis on, like, deep patriotism. I have been trying to explain to the left for at least 10 years, maybe 20 years. The stuff they want is a nationalist project. And you can see this during the pandemic when 0% of people are like, we need to solve COVID around the world. Everyone retreats in there. Like, when there's an emergency, it's us first still. Borders did not go away. Nation did not go away.

these are kind of fundamental and essential things. They can change borders. There's all sorts of ways in which they can get bigger and smaller. But nationalism for all of its problems, and there were many real problems, was actually an important project. And it paved the way for a lot of the stuff the left wants to do. Deep patriotism is good and it matters. You should not then take that into invading your neighbors or blindly supporting every

stupid foreign policy that your country has. Right? You can criticize them just as you can criticize your mother. But I'll tell you, like, my sister and I could sit around and complain about my mom. Not very much. I had a wonderful mother. But if an outsider came and criticized my mom, I would kill that person. And you should feel that. And the left got away from that. It used to be that you were supposed to be deeply attached to America and that we were going to have lots of immigrants and then we were going to socialize them and turn them into Americans. And it was going to be the melting pot. And then the communists, of course, did not want American patriotism. They wanted the international, which was actually just a cover for Soviet imperialism, but whatever. And that element of it got eroded. And you see this now in how, like, academia treats history. And it's not that I don't want people to be skeptical of America's past or talk about the bad things we did because definitely we did some really bad things. There have been dark moments in American history, like people, not a lot of perfect nations around.

and we are not that one. But we've also done some amazing great things and that we should teach people to deeply love their country, to be proud of it. If you look at our semi-quincennial website, I don't know, it may have changed now, but that's the 250th anniversary. I was ashamed as an American

of this thing. They could not bring themselves to be like, yay, America got founded. Instead, they were like, we're inviting people to explore what America means to them with an essay contest. It was, like, pathetic. It was pathetic.

Get some pride, people. If you can't feel it, instrumentally, you need it. Pretend. Fake it till you make it. It's like that Neil Diamond song, right, about America, where it's like, they're coming to America because we're great. Yes, we are great. It's like a nice dream.

Everyone wants to come here. They want to be here. But I actually feel this really deeply. I mean, I like, we spent our summers in Massachusetts now because we inherited my dad's house there. And in Massachusetts, unlike in D.C. were my house. Birthplace of the American Revolution. Yes. But also in New England, for some reason, putting out flags is not some sort of bizarre political statement that causes, I mean, like in D.C. My house might get firebombed if I was doing this. But in Massachusetts, I festooned this house.

I don't want to just say I. My husband had a big role in this. He found many of these. products. We had like Fourth of July themed wind socks and little flags and a big flag. And I love it. Because I love this country. It is amazing. You should wake up every day and be like, wow, I get to live in the biggest richest country in the world in thus far, the richest period of history with the most freedom for everyone, the nicest superpower that ever existed. And like now we're going back on that. You should be excited about this. And that is one thing that I think centrist could take back, especially for like the center of left Democrats.

Like, lean into it, baby. Wave the flag. Yeah, I think there's something specific to learn from New England there, having grown up there. I mean, you know, at least as of the 1990s, there's tremendous pride in the American revolution history in Massachusetts and in the founding. And in the, you know, what we were standing up for, the ideas that we were fighting the British over. And, you know, obviously it's a liberal place.

But there's a way to connect to these ideas of freedom and to the rich history that America had there. I mean, you get this kind of weird New England-centric view of the revolution in of early American history where like where Plymouth colony is like the super important thing. And, you know, James Town. What the fuck is. Yeah, yeah. But it's, you know, you have all of these historic sites right there and, you know, Lexington and Concord. And you can really feel this connection to the history. And I think that's part of what you're what you're talking about with the flags there and what a flag means to people in New England.

I want to take a quick break. If you're enjoying what you're hearing, I encourage you go to centralairpodcast.com. You can sign up there. You can get updates from us. You can become a subscriber to support this podcast. You can leave comments and feedback. Tell us what you want to hear about on the show. We'd love to have you join us there.

Okay, let's do some centrist takes on the news, what's happening this week. And I want to start with the shutdown. We're day 14 of the government shutdown. Megan and Ben, you're both in Washington. tell me if you're feeling this too. But I've found this to be like a weirdly low-key shutdown. It feels like people are not paying that much attention to the fact that the government has shut down. Two weeks is a long time for this to go. The one in 2013 only went for 17 days. So we're already pushing that. The record was 35 days, the one that was 2018 into 2019. But those felt

like huge news events. I mean, the 2013 shutdown in particular was like important career-wise for me. I was running around on like TV at one in the morning all the time, doing like countdowns with Piers Morgan when, you know, there would, there would be a vote coming up at midnight, and then they would count down and count up about how many hours the government had been shut down. It felt like this saturation news event. And now it feels like nobody cares, and maybe it doesn't even matter if the government is open or not. I think that there was this thing where like, there was this one shutdown that was a huge deal and it had political consequences and it happened 30 years ago in the 1990s. And this was remembered in like the West Wing, you know,

like there's turned into that. And so then there was a long time we were like, wow, anytime there's a shutdown, it's going to change things forever. So they didn't do them until Ted Cruz did it in 2013. And then that didn't change anything. Like the Republican, that time when you were going on Pierce Morgan, I was here too. And like, people were constantly talking about all Republicans. They're not going to, this is screwing them in the 2014 election when they then won the Senate. And after that, it just became that if these things aren't going to have enough of a political

like half-life to actually change the elections, then they're just another news site. where people can't go to the national parks. And sometimes you can go to the national parks. I mean, one thing in Susan Collins has been touting this is that Acadia National Park is open, or at least the roads are open, you can drive through it and, you know, see all the fall foliage that's very important economically for Maine. So, you know, part of why people are not paying that much attention is that the government does a lot of things to try to make it so that the shutdown doesn't have as much direct

impact as people fear it might. Yeah, what Democrats used to do is they would close the national parks. They would make it costly for Republicans to maintain it. And what the Trump administration has done instead is like, say he is going to use this as an excuse to actually do meaningful things that are not symbolic and are just going to really hurt democratic constituencies like government workers. Like maybe we'll just fire a bunch of them. And that's oddly more important and less theatric. And- Well, and Democrats are not really reacting to that.

In part because I think they believe that everything the administration is doing is stuff that it was going to do anyway. There have been a lot of these efforts to cut back the federal workforce and that sort of thing. And they, you know, Russ Vaught, the OMB director, is out there saying that this is in response to that. And I think the sense is basically that there's nothing additional or new here. They're just, they're tying it to the shutdown, but they would have done it sooner or later. If Russ Vaught had his druthers, the federal government would be like three little ladies mailing out social security checks. And that would be it. Would there be social security if Russ Vought had his druthers?

Well, I mean, I'm not enough. But I think he is enough of a political realist to understand that, like, he's, you know, you can't not have the checks going out. I think that one of the problems for, at least from like the Democratic point of view here, is that like because of the way that these, the last 10 months have been going, where they have been, you know,

working on these budget deals and then they've passed them and then the White House has just decided not to spend the money. They've been pounded it. Is that they sort of feel like there's no point in making these deals in Congress at all. So like, what's the point? They'll fight or go 10 rounds about appropriations. And then the OMB will just not spend it.

And so it defeats the entire purpose. And so there's no point in, it's like an existential threat to the entire notion of trust in this. Well, but I mean, the point is that you prefer that the government be open than that it be closed even under the terms of the deal that have been offered to you. And that's sort of the reason I have assumed that the shutdown was going to have to end with Democrats folding sooner or later is they do care that government employees receive their paychecks. I mean, currently they're working without getting their paychecks. And the idea is they'll be back paid when they come back, although Russ Vaugh has been raising. questions about that among the ones that actually have been furloughed off their jobs. But, you know, at some point, some of these things do, I mean, you know, one thing, you know, I was talking with a couple of people who have dealings with Medicare. And Medicare, when COVID happened, they

authorized virtual visits for a lot of Medicare care. But it's not part of the permanent Medicare program. It is periodically reauthorized every time they reopen the government. So right now, there's no authorization for that. So if you're a provider who's doing virtual appointments with people, you have to tell them, you know, well, I don't know whether the government is ultimately going to reimburse us for this or not. And so some people are, you know, missing on missing medical care that they were going to have or they have to go into the office when they wouldn't have before. There's a, there are a bunch of these effects that are real and will become more important the longer that the shutdown goes on. And I think, you know, it's, I understand why it's

very annoying for Democrats that Trump keeps doing these recisions. But at some point, you know, that's a problem that has happened to you that doesn't ultimately mean that you don't prefer that the government ultimately reopen. And those problems will get bigger over time, right? Right. Like, in the short term, there's always stuff you can do to make the shutdown not hit things you desperately need. But the longer it goes on, the bigger problem you have. For example, forload workers who have been working without pay for a month or more, decide to like take some sick leave and not come in because they're sick of working without getting paid. And now there's no one manning the TSA stations, right? Like there's a bunch of ways in which this will eventually start

to hurt. But I guess like, isn't that why that example you gave both of you just gave? But like those are ones that aren't democratic priorities, right? Like if Medicare, people can't get health care or TSA goes down, that's not a just hurting the Democrat thing. That's hurting old people and it's hurting people who fly and it's hurting everything, which is I think why they're somewhat in this game. Even though no one's paying your attention to this right now, they're still trying to like plant the seeds of blame so that when these things do come, it's pre-established who is going to get blamed for grandma not being able to go to Medicare or Joey not being allowed to go to Orlando. with this little flight to go to Disneyland. I don't know what children do. But I think that cuts both ways is like Democrats think they're winning this right now,

but no one's paying attention to it because the government, like for a couple reasons. Number one, the legacy media tends to cover shutdowns less when Democrats are the control Congress and Republicans control the presidency. Well, I don't think we've had a shutdown with, uh, that was instigated by Democrats really in decades. Uh, we did briefly. Oh, so we'd, a brief one in 2018, right? And I forgot about it.

It was like a weekend. Yes. Yeah, it was two days. So that's part of it. Another part of it is actually that just that mainstream media controls less of the mind space than it used to. Right? Like one thing that was driving shutdowns was that in 2013, 2011, 2018 even, right? A lot of people watched cable news.

And they had it on all day, like mostly old people. But lots of people would like drop in and see it. And so like you could get just round the clock shutdown coverage. And that message would get out. a lot of people would be paying attention to it. The viewership of cable news is plummeting, right? And it's at this point kind of exclusively, like people like me and then old people who are kind of not exactly housebound, but in the really declining phases of their life where they just have a lot of time to fill because they're no longer as active as they used to be. Those people do vote, but they're not the determining slice of the electorate.

No one's really actually paying attention to this. So, like, maybe Democrats are going to win this when it really starts to hurt, but maybe they don't. And I think we don't know because most people really just have no idea this is happening. The strategy that Democrats think they have here is that their, you know, their demand about what they would provide votes to reopen the government for is they want reversal of certain cuts to health care spending that Republicans did in the one big beautiful bill and that will happen automatically when temporary increases to the subsidies for Obamacare Exchange plans. that's another thing that it started with COVID and made it a lot cheaper for people to get insurance through the exchanges. It's caused a big spike in enrollment. There's now like 24 million people covered through the Obamacare exchanges. Those enhanced subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year.

And Democrats have been saying we want to extend those because otherwise people are going to have big premium increases if you don't do that. And so the theory from Democrats there is, you know, next month people are going to start getting in the mail those notices about your premium next year is higher by X number of thousands of dollars. trying to focus people on, A, this is happening, and B, it's happening because of something that the government is doing or not doing. Because, you know, if United Healthcare is going to charge you more for insurance, your first view might be, oh, that's, you know, big bad insurance company doing that, trying to tell people this has to do with government policy about how much the government spends on your insurance. And if they don't do that, you're going to have to pay more. So their hope is to raise the salience of that issue. Health care is generally Democrats' best polling issue in terms of, you know, the people both caring about it and preferring Democrats. on it. And they're thinking also is the Trump administration understands this as a political liability. And so maybe they are ultimately going to be willing to cut a deal where the government reopens and you have some extension of some enhanced subsidies. It's because, you know, the number one thing that Democrats are positioning themselves as for right now is that we want the government to continue the various ways in which it spends on people's health care.

Yeah, I mean, the other thing is if you look at it just from like the Democrats themselves have a problem, they need to do something for partisan Democrats to feel like they are fighting against Trump. You have to service your base in some way. And from the most part, I don't think that's actually good politics to do that when it comes to actually winning the general elections because you have to give them a lot of things that make you seem crazy as opposed to just letting Trump wander around doing crazy things. But this is a way of sort of giving them that a fight that is at worst not going to matter in a year. No one's going to remember, but it'll keep tied people over for a while.

And if it does work in a wonderful fantasy world where people do notice, you know, this isn't like other shutdowns. We're associating it with these spike increases to health care. Also, Democrats, as opposed to in 2018, don't actually control anything in Congress, and you have to kind of explain to them what a cloture vote is. And like, it's a little more muddy. And I think that, like, in addition to them being able to sort of leverage this health thing, it's also being able to give my mom who watches MSNBC all the time some way of feeling

like actually they're doing something. Megan, what do you think of the politics of the Obamacare premiums thing? I mean, it's a good issue for Democrats. Healthcare is one of their better issues. It's actually a pretty small number of people who are going to have really big impacts, right? Because the people for whom the impacts are huge are the people who are above the cap, the old cap for the subsidies. Yeah, I guess just to explain how the enhanced subsidies. subsidies work, it was two things. One is that, you know, the way Obamacare works is you have to pay

your premium up to a certain percentage of your income and the percentage goes up as your income goes up. So if you have a low income, maybe you have to pay 2% of your income. If you have a moderately high income, you might have to pay 8%. And so the changes that came in with COVID and have been extended and run for a few years both lowered those percentages. So if you're a, you know, a middle income person, if you're a family that makes $75,000, you're probably saving $2,000 or $3,000 a year because you get a bigger subsidy than you would have before. But there was also, there used to be a rule that if you made more than 400% of the poverty lines. So, you know, if we're talking about a family of four, I forget the exact line, but we're talking about the ballpark of $125,000 a year,

if you make more than that, then you got no subsidy. And it made it so that it was uncapped that basically, you know, nobody had to pay more than eight and a half percent of their income. So those are some of the people who have the really eye-watering thing where it's like suddenly they're going to have to pay $20,000 more. But that's not that many people. There's only a about two and a half million people who are on the exchanges who make more than that threshold. However, you know, two or $3,000 a year to a family making $60,000 a year is significant, even if it's not the same thing as an extra $20,000 a year to someone, you know, making just above that line. No, right. It is significant money. Look, if you're a single person making $35,000 a year,

you might have to pay an extra $100 a month a little over that. For your health insurance, it's a lot of money if you're making $35,000 here. I don't want to say it's nothing. But, you know, like the big healthcare fights, overall the exchanges just don't ensure that many people. And this has been a surprise to everyone, right? Like the architects of Obamacare, the opponents, I was one of them, thought of the exchanges as something that would progressively take over or overtake, I guess,

other markets, right? And that just didn't happen. All of the action is in, like, the big action, I should say, is in Medicaid, it's in Medicare, it's in veterans benefits. So the exchanges, well, I'm not arguing that for the people this will affect that this isn't going to be a problem. It is going to be a problem. I am sympathetic with their problem.

I have been uninsured. It sucks. I'm just saying that like when you look at this vast 340 million person country of ours, it's hard to get a lot of traction with an issue that affects a couple million people. And that sounds crazy, right? Like, unless those people happen to be like congressional staffers. I mean, here's. I mean, it's 24 million people in the exchanges.

I realize we're only talking about a couple million people with the like headline $20,000 increase. But, you know, the universe of people who, you know, that this matters enough to care, you know, the, we're not talking about everyone in the exchanges, but, you know, we might be talking about 15, 20 million people. That's, you know, there aren't that many political issues that genuinely affect everyone. Like, that's part of what's so powerful about inflation. inflation matters to literally everyone. But most, you know, most people are not on Social Security. Most people are, you know, the only government agencies that the, that more than half of Americans even interface within a year, federal agencies, is basically the IRS and the post office. So, you know, I guess maybe it's a mid-size issue. I don't know that I'm disagreeing with you here.

At some point, you know, a million people here, a million people there, you're talking about, you know, a real political constituency. Fair enough. Ben, you were saying? Yeah, I was just going to say that, like, I agree with you about the scale. It actually, like, I mean, I don't know about Megan, you're on at the Washington Post, and I don't know Josh how you guys do it, but like I am, half the last few years been on, you know, these Obama exchange things just because.

Yeah, I'm in the exchange as well. Yeah, so like, and I think that there's a lot of people, especially in an economy that is becoming more and more creator-based and people getting to do jobs like this, where they are outside of it, where you actually like, there are more and more people on it. And I do think that, you know,

24 million people, even just a few million who are going to get hit with these things, spread out of over enough states, that's scaled. of magnitude more than people who are, you know, trans girls swimmers or whatever. Like, how many of those people are there? Like, it's just that those are culture war topics that get pushed on everything and people feel like it speaks to identity, whereas this is just the fact that everyone's life is going to be worse.

Okay. I will accept that, but I'm going to contest the idea that, like, the creator economy is a vote. Okay. We matter, Megan. We matter. We matter. We matter, but we are, We are not normal people, folks. The other thing that's interesting to me about the way this issue is landing, and Marjorie Taylor Green, who's having her, like, round of strange new respect from Democrats in the mainstream media because she's finding a way to criticize Donald Trump from the left or from the center. She's, you know, going around talking about this premium spike thing is a real problem, and Republicans need an answer on it.

And she's rolling it broadly into this issue that's been very big in state politics in a lot of places, hasn't really been a big federal issue yet, which is that you also have had, huge increases in auto insurance and home insurance premiums over the last few years. And that's for a variety of reasons, but a lot of it is, you know, there's been significant inflation, particularly cars costs more, construction work costs more, and therefore, you know, it costs more to pay out claims if you insure a car or a home. So the premiums have to go up. And then you also have certain regional things, you know, much worse wildfires in California, greater hurricane risk in Florida, things that are, again, making it fundamentally more costly to insure a home.

and that's causing premiums to go up. And this is really squeezing a lot of people. The problem with it is a political issue is that in all three cases, health, auto, and home, the fundamental driver of the high premiums is high costs. And so, you know, you can have the government subsidize the things. And, you know, subsidizing health care is a hallmark of advanced countries around the world. So I'm not saying you necessarily shouldn't subsidize them. But it's basically like, you know, you can throw money at the problem, but then you have to tax someone to find the money.

Or you can try to tackle the underlying thing. that is making the thing expensive. But in all of those cases, it's really hard to do. Look, healthcare costs growth did start slowing in the mid-2000s, actually oddly before Obamacare. Obama care tends to get the credit. But it was the slowdown started in 2006. But there's been a lot of upward pressure on that.

There's general inflation, as you say. But there's also, like, we're getting all this awesome new stuff you can do. And when you get awesome new stuff you can do, you spend more on that. And then we're also, we have an aging population. And then, like, as you say, there's all these other weird cost pressures in various markets. Cars are more reliable, all sorts of great features, also more expensive to repair. There's tariffs on them now. Yeah.

Issues with parts from China. Just a lot of, like, all those sensors on your bumpers, very expensive. Old bumpers were just like a piece of plastic or metal. And now they're like, I don't know, they're like robot eyes. and that just adds costs for everything. And it's like it's just a bunch of fiddling stuff like that in every market as well as general inflation. And yeah, costs are rising and people hate it. But, and of course they always want the insurance regulators to make the costs go away.

But that's not a reality. Someone's got to pay those costs. I mean, like some of these have like relatively easy political stories to tell. This is a good way for Democrats to run against Trump's tariffs and say, you know, they're making cars more expensive. They're making your auto insurance more expensive. but that's just one of many drivers. A lot of the other ones, I think, are a lot harder to address than that. It's funny because, like, there's all this stuff going on with Trump and, you know, up and down and yes and no.

But then the real thing is that you see in polling is just that people are increasingly mad about prices, just like they were with Biden. And that is probably the main reason why his poll numbers have been going no good. Because in reality, we all talk about all this other stuff, but it's just the simple answer. It's Occam's Razor. The prices go up. People go mad. It's really interesting that like inflation, the Biden era inflation, which was mostly not Joe Biden's fault, to be clear, a little bit his fault, his stimulus was too big, but a lot of it was just built up by the pandemic and by the fact that we just like funneled money into everyone's account. But you're getting this politics that was really common in the 70s and 80s and disappeared after that, which is the politics of everything ought to be cheap like it used to be.

Right. Like it's like old, old man shouting, shaking fist at sky politics has become a reality for a lot of people who are not actually old man shaking their fists at the sky. Which is driving an interesting political dynamic that we're having right now. Donald Trump would much rather have us talk about immigration than about prices and is, you know, trying to create news events that raise the salience of that. And of course, you know, it's not like, it's not like he invented the immigration issue. Joe Biden screwed this up quite badly. I wrote about that for the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. And there has really, in fact, been a positive change at the border that started under Biden and has continued under Trump. The irregular migration that we were having way too much of has basically slowed to a trickle. But then there's also this stuff where it's like, you know, Trump wants to send the National Guard into various American cities.

And one of the pretext for that is, well, we have to protect our ICE agents who are running around with masks on. And, you know, even as the poll numbers for the president on immigration have gotten worse than they were when he took office. And he's actually a little bit underwater on it. more people tend to say that they disapprove of the way he's handling immigration than that they approve of it. And Democrats are kind of celebratory about that. But first of all, his immigration poll numbers are still a lot better than his poll numbers on the economy and prices. And the other thing is just because voters don't like necessarily exactly what Trump is doing and may think it's too harsh on certain dimensions, that doesn't mean they prefer the Democrats or trust the Democrats. And if Democrats are

drawn in in these news cycles to basically pushing back and saying, you know, how terrible all this enforcement, you can end up in a position where Democrats look worse, where it's, you know, Trump is offering too harsh and Democrats are offering too weak and voters prefer too harsh. So the issue has a real advantage for him. And so one of the political questions for Democrats is as Trump outrages liberals and progressives by going into cities and doing the things that he's doing, how can we have a response to that that expresses the objections that people have without turning attention too much away from prices and also without creating a negative public image for Democrats. And, you know, the number one concern here is, you know, you don't want protesters throwing rocks

at the police and that sort of thing. Maybe sandwich is better than rocks. What we've been having in Portland where, you know, you have these ice efforts, the president is trying to send the National Guard that's tied up in the courts, but my guess is sooner or later, he will be allowed to do a National Guard deployment there. You're seeing these protests that are sort of almost comically nonviolent, you know, people with the protest puppets and that sort of thing. And it's a little annoying when liberals do this, but it also kind of sends the message that, you know, whatever is going on here in Portland, it is not something that requires the involvement of the National Guard. And then the latest version of this is you have people biking naked or biking in clear rain

ponchos because it's Portland and it's rainy all the time. But so, you know, I don't know what to make of the politics of this, Megan, because I think, you know, basically so long as it's not masked Antifa protesters throwing, you know, Molotov cocktails, I tend to think that it's, you know, from a harm reduction perspective, this is kind of what we want politically in these places. I'm actually fascinated by the ponchos because I think of the purpose of the poncho as to protect your clothes from getting wet and disgusting and clinging to you. If you're not wearing any clothes, like, I mean, one of the nice things about being a land-based mammal is that you're waterproof. I do not like the nude bicyclists. Now, I have a general thing about protest, which I think

It's mostly useless. And if you must do it, do it in a way that does not create any negative effects for your side. And this is something where, like, if you turn this into a contest between the masked thugs, taking people off the street and throwing them into vans and behaving with a sort of terrifying impunity, and the nude bicyclists, like, you raise the risk that you will lose on this issue. Also, you're raising the salience of immigration, which is not good for Democrats. Democrats should just, like, I think it is a really tough question, as you say, how do you fight what ICE is doing, which I find genuinely creepy, even though, like, I'm not going to argue

they don't have a right to deport people, but doing it the way that they're doing it, terrorizing people, they don't need to wear masks. They're not bank robbers, nor are they DEA agents who have a genuine fear that, like, the cartel is going to put a hit out on them. the landscapers queuing in the Home Depot parking lot are not going to put a head out in an ice agent. And so I think that the politics of this are tricky, but that there is a contingent of kind of left-wing protesters. And more broadly, like you see this on blue sky all the time, people for whom politics is their identity. It's their life.

They could not, they will reject family who have different politics. They would never have a friend who has different politics. They will judge you as monstrously. evil if you are like five micrometers to their right on any issue. And at the same time, they don't want to do politics. Right? If you're, if you're doing protest of a political issue, you are trying to do something with it. One thing you can do is build organizational solidarity or show that you have numbers. But the nude bicyclists just says like weirdos object to this. People, lots of people don't really like the idea of naked people biking around in a community.

and like I'm not going to, I'm not going to litigate that. Don't make this into a contest between the weirdos and law enforcement because like you are creating problems for your own side. The Antifa people, it's the same thing. Their theory of how anything, it's the people who throw paint on paintings. Well, but it's not the same thing because I don't think Antifa is scary on a grand scale because of the, you know, it barely exists. But like, they're small.

The tactics that they use are in fact violent and, you know, people, you know, have a reason to like be, like afraid if that's happening in their city, whereas the nude bicyclists are merely annoying. Right, but like throwing paint on the glass over a painting. It's not going to harm the painting. No, they shouldn't do that either. But it's antisocial in a way. Do not make it into the forces of antisociality and law enforcement. And that is a lot of people think biking around in the nude, public nudity is antisocial. Don't give those people any reason to be hostile to you. In a perfect world, obviously, I think we all agree that these protesters are. are, shouldn't be doing this.

Like, in a perfect world, politically, you would have just the ICE agents doing these awful things, and then videos of them and people would get mad. But in the real world, it exists, we know that people can't keep their dick in their pants. They need to do something, okay?

And in 2020, they did it in quite bad ways, right? And Donald Trump, who is stuck in the past, has been trying to tease them into doing 2020 again. Like he's been saying, all these terrible things, and then saying, And now I'm going to send in the armed men into your communities. You better be nice to him. And then walking away so that he can, you know, create these situations.

And Democrat, it's so transparent that it's people, right, you're talking about in Portland, have recognized it and I have not given him that so far, which is actually like, I'm so impressed that they haven't done it yet because I was terrified that they would. But I also think that it highlights a vector difference here. Like, when you come and bike naked in Portland, around these ice people. It looks stupid. It's dumb.

But it's also a response to what Trump has raised as a, like, we are doing huge federal military interventions in small cities, which pulls terrible. And it is not a story that people are necessarily seeing as about immigration because Trump has sent in, you know, the tribe and trying to send the military into D.C. He said, trying to do it in Chicago. ICE is the excuse, and people see that. But, like, as long as you can keep that unpopular, like, as long as you can keep it a story about Trump sending the military

and wagging their dick waiting for people to hit them, it's not so much about immigration as it is about federal intervention, which pulls terrible. Let's take another quick break. Again, I encourage you go to centralairpodcast.com. We're going to be doing this every week, and so you should go there, sign up. You'll get all of our updates. You'll get every episode of the show.

You can become a subscriber and support us, make it possible for us to keep making this show, and leave comments for us. Tell us what you're interested in hearing. We would really love if you would join us there at centralairpodcast.com. Okay. Megan mentioned something about people who, you know, politics is their whole identity. And if you get one micron away from them, they freak the hell out about that. And I think this is a good intro for us to talk about Barry Weiss, who is taking over as editor-in-chief at C.B. news and the extent of the freak out about this. And I want to play some audio that John Oliver

played of Barry Weiss expressing some opinions, because Barry Weiss definitely, she has a lot of opinions. And then John Oliver's reaction to the idea that someone who holds those kinds of opinions could lead a major news organization. We need to uproot root and branch the ideology that has supplanted truth at the core of American higher education. And that ideology goes by the name DEI. Some call it wokeness or anti-racism or progressivism or or safetyism or critical social justice or identity Marxism. Whatever term you use, what is clear is that this worldview has gained power in the world in a conceptual instrument called DEI.

Yeah, and that itself is a whole worldview right there. You know this DEI thing that we've been trying where we acknowledge not everyone's been getting equal access to opportunity? Let's just roll. back the clock on that, shall we? Also, let's be anti-anti-racist and not think too much about what that might make us. Dei is actually one of her favorite target. She's also said it's undermining America is about arrogating power and that it demonizes hard work, merit, family and the dignity of the individual. And look, it is not new or indeed interesting that a commentator would say that. There are plenty of them out there and there'll always be an audience for those who want to make that

And the truth is, we wouldn't even have done this story, where it not for the fact that Barry Weiss has just been named editor-in-chief of CBS News. And that feels different. Because there are many opinion-heavy outlets out there from left to right and with low to high editorial standards. This show is, among other things, an opinion outlet. And while our staff works incredibly hard to research stories before we write something and vigorously check our facts afterwards, we're also not the news. And I wouldn't want to work. anyone who led a pure opinion outlet, not even one that I happen to agree with, to suddenly be running CBS News. But it is especially alarming to have someone doing it who has spent years

putting out work that, in my opinion, is at best irresponsible and at worst, deeply misleading. And so what I find so funny here is like the oxygen that people in the media are operating in, not even realizing that they're there. Now, Barry Weiss, obviously, she has a, she has a particular worldview that's been expressed in the free press. and I'm sure it's going to change the way that CBS, you know, makes coverage decisions and that, you know, that they're approaching the news. But this idea from Oliver that basically what the outlets are otherwise doing is a view from nowhere, that, you know, that currently what the media does is unbiased news with no worldview influencing it. And he doesn't claim this about his own show, but it's clearly the way he thinks that, you know, CNN and MSNBC and all the other outlets work. and that Barry Weiss is going to be, like, for the first time, injecting a point of view into these news organizations.

It's like they don't even notice the liberal bias that is very real overall in the media. You know, I can say as someone who has, you know, worked in it for quite some time, this is, it is indeed pervasive. And that, you know, suddenly seeing, you know, one outlet that has been pulled away from this is is very shocking to someone like John Oliver. Yeah, I think, like, watching the reaction to White. and also watching the reaction to what has happened at my editorial page, where there have been some changes. They have been well covered. I'm not going to discuss them. But watching the outside reaction to it, I think, like, I've been in mainstream media my whole career. I've always been the outlier in the rooms I was in, with the very brief exception of like part of the economist.

And I just kind of assumed that people understood that they were really quite a bit more liberal than the rest of the country, that that wasn't affecting how they did coverage, that they were taking sides on things. And I think what's what I've gained clarity on is like, no, they actually don't. They can't see it. Fish can't see. fish don't know what water is. They're just, it's just there. And they can't see all of the ways in which, like,

when any group is the majority in the room, it's very hard for them to consider all of the perspectives that other groups might have and the ways in which their worldview just shapes their opinions. And, like, if it anti-D-EI is ideological, but DEI itself is not ideological. Yeah, I mean, like, and DEI went, let us remember, totally insane.

There was a professor who was fired for saying a Chinese word in class that kind of sounds like the N word. Actually, not even the only instance. There have been other people who were fired for saying things that sounded like it, that had nothing to do, right? Like, this was actually total madness. And that was this the most important issue in the world? No, it was not.

There are like Uyghurs being herded into concentration camps in China. There are many other things happening. But I think a thing that I've, when talking to academics about this, actually, because I wrote a quite, let us say, brisk column when Trump started cracking down on universities. And I don't think that they should be pulling research funding from universities. America's scientific research is not only good for the world. It is really good for our economy. But I said, like, look, you guys kind of picked this fight. You wanted to do politics.

This is what politics looks like. your opposition will absolutely try to kneecap you at every turn if they can. And I got a lot of pushback from people who said, but that's not most of what we do and it doesn't matter that much. And I was like, you know what? It mattered to them. It was happening to them and it mattered a lot. And now they're in power.

And that's like, and there's a lot of people out there like that, right? It mattered to them. And the idea that we can just pretend it didn't happen. and like make fun of people. Okay, John Oliver can with all of his liberal friends. And conservatives, while they're conservative friends, can sit around and like relive the highlights of the Great Awakening at infinitum. I tend to think this is unhealthy on both sides.

But like, understand that that is happening. Do not think you can make fun of it out of existence. You will not. When I listen to that clip, the most absurd part to me is that she, the way she words it is that she's explicitly saying you can call it whatever you want. DEI, cultural moxism. I can call it therapy to big and bad a boo. And then he says, you know, Aunt D,

and he focuses on like she's speaking literally and intentionally about the most wonderful interpretation that he has of DEI, which is people should be nice to each other. No racism. And that is quite clearly not what she is talking about. She is talking about, as she quite clearly says, whatever you want to call this sort of thing that is taken over, that is much more ideological and much further than that.

And he is completely ignoring that interpretation of it and saying, you are saying that we should put people back in chains. Like it is actively, he's making like an interpretive choice that is just absolutely ungenerous and unkind and absurd. You know, it's, and it simply belies the fact that a lot of people take whatever that thing is, whatever we're going to call that cultural Marxism, DEI thing, really is rather unpopular with a lot of people who, in 2018 and 2017, like me, sort of didn't care enough and were kind of like, well, it sounds good, sounds nice, and then saw it kind of blossom into this thing that was worse.

And I honestly think that, like, it's so fascinating as we talk about Barry. You know, David Ellison, her boss, the person who bought Paramount, is a democratic donor, like a centrist, democratic donor. I mean, this is the thing. I mean, Barry also identifies herself as a centrist, and there's, you know, a bit of guffawing about that from people like John Oliver. And I think, you know. Yeah, I mean, the fact that people think it's wild that she calls herself a centrist is, in fact, an example of liberal media bias. If you think that a pro-choice lesbian who's real hawkish on Israel is like, that's crazy. How could anyone say that?

Then you are part of the problem, my friends. Well, I mean, I think the smarter version of that complaint is that basically, you know, Barry has a whole suite of opinions that. I think are genuinely centrist. The topic selection choices that have been made at the free press, I think have been, you know, in practice slanted toward Donald Trump. And again, you know, that's, it's a free country and we should have a diversity of outlets. I'm not saying that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. But I think there is a description of her that's accurate that is, you know, she may be a force

that is pushing to the right even while she herself has a broader set of opinions that are not necessarily more right than left. Yeah, but is it more right-shifted? The mainstream media was left-shifted during the Great Awakening? No, no, I think less so. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, I think less so, right? It's actually more like a centrist publication. There is actually more diversity of views on a bunch of really contentious stuff

than there was on the pages of a lot of mainstream publications. And I think the fact and people are failing, not only failing to grapple with that, they're doubling down on it. Is this a good thing her taking over at CBS? because I have several different thoughts about this. I mean, the first one I would note is that television news is a troubled industry in several ways, and CBS is like the perpetual third place player. And so it was not going to work in the long run for CBS to just do what ABC and NBC do, but not as successfully. And so the idea that this outlet should be different than the others.

I think that is, I think that's a good thing for American media. I think it's a good thing business-wise for CBS. On the other hand, the way that this deal came together, where you have, have Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, putting his thumb on the scale in all sorts of ways and, you know, making these threats that seem to have at least temporarily led to Jimmy Kimmel being taken off ABC's air. And the FCC has to approve these, you know, these sales of companies that own television stations like CBS. So as David Ellison was basically trying to get this approval from Donald Trump's appointee, part of the suite of promises that they made seemed to

involve the idea that they would move CBS News to the right. And even though I have no broad objection to the idea that CBS should not be a liberal outlet in the way that its competitors are, I do have a problem with this situation where the government is weighing in on this, and you have the Trump administration putting its thumb on the scale and causing this outcome to happen. So I don't, you know, the, I mean, other than observing it's bad, I don't know what else to do about that, but I don't like the way this has come about. I totally agree with that. And it definitely like looks bad. And even if, you know, I don't know what sort of like quibro quote was here. But it certainly is not good the way this went down. But also, having said that, Donald Trump

is going to be president for three years more. David Ellison is going to own CBS for much longer than that. Right. Like, I mean, maybe not that. He might sell it at some point. But like, this is going to outlast this administration and being a little too focused, I think, on the immediate thing with the Trump administration, I think like it opens up a situation where you can kind of create more long-term problems if everyone suddenly decides that CBS is forever and always going to now be a MAGA, fascist, newsmax, you know, or whatever.

Like, I think of this a little differently. Look, linear television is a declining business, broadcast television is not entirely dead. There's still like, I don't know, two or four percent of American households get their television through broadcast, but it's like mostly. Like actually over the air.

Actually over the air. But this is a declining business. News is a declining business. News has never been terribly profitable. It's always been, like, you know, they initially pitched it as like a loss leader, give us these valuable television licenses, and we will inform the public, right?

It's been a kind of prestige play, but it's not the major profit center for David Ellison. This is a relatively small part of his business. This is the part the media cares most about, right? But it's not, like, actually the core of this company. And so I think a couple things. Number one, they are number three. When you're number three in a declining business,

you could just keep doing what you've been doing in the hopes that maybe miraculously something will change. Or you can take some radical action. Maybe you'll screw up the business, but the business is going away eventually anyway. So, I don't know, why not go for the gusto? See if you can find an actual new strategy, find a new audience, find something that works. And like the thing that Barry, I mean, on a much smaller scale.

And I think she has a lot of challenges ahead of her. If I were her, the first thing I would do is appoint a deputy who knows how to run an organization of this size. Because it is like who has done that job because scaling to that size is just a completely different thing. And, you know, companies hit these inflection points at, like, 10 employees to 50 employees, 50 to 150, 150 and above, where you just have to develop, like, whole new set of management skills, whole new architecture. And I would get someone who knows how to do that. She's got many challenges ahead. But the thing she has actually done really well, right, is she knows how to kind of surf new media and make things happen. She knows how to get audience.

She sees where things are going. I have enormous respect for the fact that she managed to build this company out of nothing. And all of the people sniping at her, like none of them have done anything like that. I mean, if anyone wants to acquire very serious media for $150 million, I'm happy to entertain offers. You say, is it good? I was like, it's definitely good for people in our business. Right. But like, so I think that's part of it. And also, like, when it is a small part of your business and it is declining, maybe David Ellison is just thinking, like, maybe I'll have a bit of fun with this. I like Barry. I would like my news division to be like this. If it's not going to make me money, it has to make me happy. Right. And so I think like there's all of that stuff in play.

I think like Ben, like I think it could be a problem for them if they get MAGA identified. But honestly, again, this is so inside media. This is a teeny tiny number of highly, highly, highly politically engaged people, which is not most people. And I do not think that the opinions of that very small group of people is going to meaningfully translate into wrecking CBS's business model. I just don't. Well, and it's also, it's hard to turn a big ship. And Barry doesn't have experience doing that. I mean, the free press has been impressive as a business, but obviously they're publishing other people, but you could really see Barry's stamp on almost everything the free press is doing, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in ways I have objections to, but it's very much the Barry Weiss show. You could have a

danger of being too MAGA identified, but you have another danger, which is that CBS just doesn't change as much as she would envision it doing, because She can't be in every editorial meeting. She can't actually have her stamp personally on every story. You have to build a culture. Some of that's about management. Some of that is about new personnel. And so I think, you know, one possibility is that this will actually be less of a story

than people expect just because of the inertia that exists in these sorts of organizations. I think you're most likely to see the imprint on like high profile stuff. I think you're probably going to see the imprint on Israel coverage, although like somewhat fortuitously, we're at a pretty major pause in the Gaza hostilities. But I think, yeah, she's going to have to pick her battles. And it'll be interesting to see which battle she picks. Finally this week, I want to talk about Die Hard. And Ben, you published several thousand word post about the 1988 film Die Hard this week.

And a really interesting post. I want to commend you for it. And it's about the bearer bonds that are central to the plot in that movie. And do they make any sense? And I like the post in part because I think it actually kind of speaks to some policy issues of our time having to do with crypto and sports betting and other things, which I will explain in a moment why any of that would be related. But I guess to start, I was surveying my younger friends trying to figure out, has everyone in fact seen Die Hard?

And there's a little bit of a mix there. So can you give like a thumbnail plot summary of diehard and how the, how bearer bonds matter in it? Well, Die Hard is a 1988 film starring Bruce Willis about John McLean, you know, a New York. York City cop off duty, his wife is moved to Los Angeles to work for a big Japanese corporation in Los Angeles, and on the Christmas Eve party there, he shows up and they're having marital trouble, and then wouldn't you know it? A German terrorist named Hans Gruber shows up to rob this Japanese corporation of the $640 million in bearer bonds that it is holding in a vault on its 30th floor. A bearer bond, or what used to be called a coupon bond,

was, so there's two types of bonds, right? There's registered book bonds, and then there's bearer bonds. Barer bonds, registered book bonds, you know, you don't have a piece of paper for it. They have your name on them. They have numbers. They go to the bank. All of this is all handled. Coupon bonds or bearer bonds are owned by possession.

If you have the paper, you own them. The interest is done through little coupons that you clip off and take to the bank or the Fed. Yeah, I didn't learn this until this week because people will talk about clipping the coupon on a bond just as a metaphorical thing to talk about receiving interest payments. I'd never thought about the reason we call it that. And that's because literally the paper or the bearer bond, it has these like things you tear off that are like, please send me my interest and you provide that to the bondholder and then they pay you periodically. I believe that also used to be true of registered bonds. Oh, really? Yeah. Like one of the reasons bearer bonds exists, right, is that in the old days,

the transaction class of registering these things and transferring them was quite high. Right. It's much easier to have an instrument that you can just like hand over to someone else rather than having to changed the registration every time. Now computers do that, but we didn't have that back in the day. But I think they all had coupons that you literally had to clip off and mail in. Right. And so one of the questions people have about this movie is, why the hell did the Nakatomi corporation have $640 million worth of these bearer instruments in a vault in their brand-new skyscraper, not even at their headquarters in Tokyo in Los Angeles? And there's a sort of broader sport of like discussing die-hard movies, which are super fun. Do they make any sense? And we can talk

other time about Die Hard 2 does not make any sense. But does it make sense that they have these bearer bonds in their Nakatomi Plaza vault? It would have made slightly more sense 10 years earlier. But in 1982, these things had become famous for money laundering and tax evasion. Okay. And so they were actually like the Fed was banned from issuing them in 1982. And corporate bonds were like really disincentivized. And people were really, you know, told to take the ones that already existed and convert them

to registered bonds. But you didn't have to. If you had them from prior to 1982, they were fine. They don't expire. And so in the movie, the bear bonds that you found, I have the prop, they're from 1979. And so you have to wonder, like, their 10-year bear bonds that they bought them. And so you have to figure out why a company would have bought them in 1979 and then still have them in 1988, by which point they'd not converted them.

they're a toxic, toxic political asset to own. You can't insure them, for one thing. Because a German terrorist could break into your building and steal them. Right. They're infamous money laundering tools. They're also like, you're supposed to have them in custody at banks, but you technically don't have to. They're just a real problem to insure them. You would have to have premiums that would out over the course of the plan cost the entire thing.

So why have them? And the initial thought, right? is they're doing something illegal. They want a slush fund of money to do huge value purchases. But in fact, this isn't how bearer bonds really work that well because it's so much money, in fact, that like they can't. This is too much to do a little bribing. This is enough to do arm sales with Libya.

A lot of arms. Yeah. And if you're going to do arm sales with Libya, the worst place to have these bonds is in the United States. When you buy a bearer bond in 1979, you go to a treasury auction. You bid for them, and then you get these bonds, you're $640 million in like treasury bond. And then the registered agent, I mean, the treasury official says, so you want them registered or do you want them, bearer?

And it's an administrative choice. And the person says, well, I want bearer. And he says, okay, they don't care. But you would have them delivered, you could have them delivered anywhere to Geneva anywhere. The second they're in the United States, you have all these huge massive problems, and you cannot convert them without triggering that. And so that's the question is, why do they have these? Are they up to no good? Did they deserve to be robbed?

Or are they just stupid? And the answer has to do with Japanese monetary policy, it turns out? Yes. The answer has, I had to read a book about Japanese monetary policy in post-war monetary policy. And the answer is that in the 1970s, they were dealing with a lot of, like, capital issues where they had these huge, um, primary. problems with they wouldn't let capital controls. Yeah. It was like if you if you were a Japanese company and your money was outside Japan and you let it get into Japan, you couldn't get it out again. Exactly. And you had no place to put it. Everyone had a savings glut. There was nothing to

invest in there. And so all these worldwide companies started to keep their overseas profits, not repatriating them. And so then if you're a Japanese company in 1979 in America that suddenly has $640 million in U.S. revenue, you have a problem. You have you can't send it back to Japan. You have it sitting on your balance sheet. You can't just leave it and you're not going to leave in there. You need to do something with it. And so you put it in a safe security. And then why would you choose bearer? Because the situation you're dealing with back home is that there is micromanagement of every single thing that you do. And that bearer in the United States is freedom. You can have it entirely. You control every bit of it. It is not need to go anywhere. And so someone just in that

moment makes that choice. And then over the next three years, for things that has nothing to do with that, these become hugely toxic and infamous. And by the late 1980s, you know, the United States is in, because of a lot of these monetary policies in Japan, is in a huge panic about Japanese foreign spending in the United States, buying movie studios and things like that. Buying Rockefeller Center. Right. Exactly. And so now you are in 1988, you have a stash, of money that you are terrified of converting or doing anything with because it's going to further that panic. Right. And in fact, one interesting thing that you found in writing this piece is that they talk about it

is $640 million of bearer bonds, but it's in fact over a billion dollars. Right. They say $640 million all the time in it. But when you look at the prop, they've never clipped the coupons. So it's actually the 10 years of eight interest plus that. So it's actually $1.18 billion, which is considerably more and also considerably more suspect. And you can send the coupons in late and get the money. But the problem is, like, the coupon that was, you know, valid in 1981 for interest, that you never sent it in means you have not been earning any interest on that interest in the period since 1981.

And you think that the Nakatomi Corporation lost, like, a couple hundred million dollars or something by not reinvesting its coupons? By not compounding the added things. If you do it about 6%, 6 to 8% of what, you know, they would have made, it's up to around $200 million. It could be a little less depending on what it is. But, like, that's the compounding law. So they go from 1.18, which is what is in that vault, to the 1.3 something. And they've lost a lot of money. Now when they do that, when this eventually has to end up on the books and we talked about to their board in Japan, Japan is going to say, the board is going to say, I want you fired.

Well, are they, though? Because this was the funny thing for me when the whole scandal happened with Carlos Gohn being put in jail in Japan for having secretly paid himself too much. and I was, you know, and then, you know, obviously got shipped out of Japan in a box and ended up back in Lebanon. He was the longtime CEO of Nissan for anyone who didn't follow this and not Japanese himself. And the funny, I remember I was tweeting about this and I was like, but like, how do you, how do you secretly pay yourself? Like, there's a board and there's a compensation committee. Like, they have to know that they entered into a contract with you that, like, and then, and I don't follow Japanese business that closely. But I got a lot of, like, very funny laughs about that about how, like,

like the idea that there's serious corporate governance in Japan, that there actually does seem to be significantly less oversight there in certain ways than there is here. And so you could end up in that situation where the board had no idea how much they've been paying the CEO. So I don't, maybe they wouldn't have fired him for losing $200 million. One of the interesting things that I did find was that it's a little hard to project what they're doing there because they do have a lot of just weird policies that we don't have. I mean, for instance, the corporate tax rate between 1979 in Japan and the last, you know, next 25 years, and I looked into it, fluctuated wildly, you know.

Well, that was true in a lot of countries. Yeah, in that period. Oh, really? I mean, in the U.S., and you look at it and compare it, it goes, you know, there's a cut in the 80s. And then it's pretty, you know, standard. This one goes from 49 to 55 to 38. It's like, these are big changes where you can sort of see people thinking maybe we'll make tax bets about what, what. About when we should bring the bonds out of the vaults.

Right. So it's a tax deferral strategy, which, like, it doesn't. actually offset the losses of the 200, but it's something that you could say, well, I made a risk. Made a bet. So I have a couple of questions about this. And the first one is, you know, as you know, they talk about $640 million in bonds in the movie. They talk about this a lot. Nowhere in the script do they talk about the fact that the coupons haven't been clipped.

You just, you obtained the prop and you see that on the, you know, on the sheet with the bond is all the coupons. And so isn't that just a mistake the prop department made? Like the person who's working in props is not used to handling a physical bond. and probably didn't even realize that like they would have had to be pulling the coupons off of the bond. So maybe it's, you know, maybe they didn't intend for this plot point that you're describing where they're so afraid of the attention that they can't even collect their interests. That may have just been a screw up by someone in props rather than something that was actually intended by John McTurton when he's making this movie. It was almost certainly that. And one of the reasons is because in the coupon bond, their annual bond you take every February.

But in reality, they were normally semi-annual. You would take them every six months for 4%. But yes, if we step outside of the movie for a second, it is just a prop. These prop people just screwed up. Well, I mean, it also sort of suggested to me that maybe the way they decided what the Barabon should look like is to look at one. And that maybe they got it from someone who was doing something very like you described,

which is trying to figure out what to do with the Barabonds they were supposed to have converted. Oh, that's a good point. Oh, that's interesting. You know what was interesting about that is that at that exact moment, And that was where that building was with the actual Naktama Tower is Fox Tower. It's in Century City in L.A. Yeah, and it had just been purchased by an Australian billionaire. Hollywood has always had these, like, interesting problems with moving money around the world.

So, like, spaghetti westerns, right? They were made in Italy in the 50s because Italy had currency controls. It was also very cheap. But you couldn't get your Lira out of Italy. once you had shown your movie in Italy. And so the thing to do was to take all the lira you'd accumulated and use them to make a very cheap movie in an impoverished country that had just been through a war and had lots of bits

that looked kind of like the American West. And so I think, like, maybe there were some people in Hollywood who were, you know, moving a little money around. Or an Australian who'd just come to Hollywood. Yes, and had gotten trapped by the same change as your hypothetical. The real thing is that the rules of the game you have to accept what's in this movie. You know, the fact that the prop department screwed up,

well, that's canon now. We have to justify it. Or else, because you can't say those prop department chewed up. Do you think that this backstory bears any relation to what the screenwriter was thinking? No, I'm quite sure it doesn't. Great. I'm glad we're on the same page, though. I have, I just don't care what the screenwriter thinks.

The actual point is that he's not, he doesn't matter. He was paid for his script and turned into a movie. They're all, screw them all. This movie lives on and I have to make it work. But the funny thing for me about this is, I mean, the reason that screenwriters like bearer bonds as a plot device is that it's a way to have compactly $640 million in a way that you can fit into a briefcase. Like it allows these plots where you have something that is extremely valuable and quite small and can be, you know, obtained and stolen. You can have a fake terror plot that is a ruse that's a cover for stealing all of this money. Whatever happened to diamonds.

Yeah, sometimes that's the way they do it. But then I guess you have to explain why the Nakatomi Corporation, which is not in the diamond mining business, has diamonds in Century City. Fair enough. And this has to do with why the government got rid of these in the 1980s, that basically because this is a compact way to move a lot of wealth in a way that, in theory, cannot be, you know, you can't necessarily trace who got it and how. That that's just an invitation to all sorts of mischief and that we shouldn't have that. It's better that bonds be registered so that you can't steal them and so that you can't use them for various criminal activities and all sorts of things. And I think that was a positive change in the global financial system that we did that. And in the last few years, we've sort of undone that with cryptocurrency, that crypto is like the modern version of a bearer bond and that it's an asset that if you have it, you own it. And it can be moved around very easily.

And it is, again, an invitation to all sorts of both, you know, you can use it for money laundering and the fact that it exists enables other crime. You have these ransomware attacks that happen against corporations and governments. And the reason there's been a spike in that is that there's now a way to demand. a ransom and receive it halfway around the world in a way that is, you know, that you get to keep the money. You know, the North Koreans couldn't demand a bag full of U.S. dollars and have the corporation, you know, somehow bring that to North Korea. Now that we have the cryptocurrency, you can, you can do this ransomware stuff. And I just view that as a really negative

development. And it's annoying to me that we've, you know, we've gone backwards on this and decided actually what we want is, you know, untraceable money in large quantities in a way that can be moved around to facilitate crime. It's like we unlearned a lesson that we had learned. So, look, I am broadly a crypto-sceptic. I think we should distinguish between two different crypto markets, and one is the consumer crypto market, and the other one is crypto as a potential kind of back-end for the financial system. I think there are applications in which things like stable coins are useful. I think there are countries where the currency is so bad, so prone to inflation, so valueless, that, you know, like in prison, there are prisons where people use cans of

mackerel for as currency as currency and the reason they use it is that no one wants to eat the mackerel but it's available at the commissary right like and so like it's not like if you if you use cigarettes like you would you would run out of cigarettes and be like I'm just smoking my money but no one is so desperate or very few people are so desperate they're like I got to crack this can of mackerel right now so there are situations where even on the consumer facing side it makes sense but yes almost all outside of being in a country with strict currency controls and needing to get the money out like China, although I believe that China has now really cracked down on this. Or being in a country where the currency is so bad that you might as well just use it as toilet paper, it would be more cost effective. There aren't a lot of good consumer uses for this.

And the consumer uses people have found are gambling and crime. And I think that that is bad, but I also think, like, people love to gamble. You're not going to take it away from them. One of the other ways that they're similar is that, you know, when you think back to the most famous, the guy who invented Bitcoin, right, who disappeared. They don't know where he is. And they just know that his original stash hasn't moved, right? Because they can look at the, um, they don't even know who he was. The ledger.

Right. It's not that he disappeared. He was an anonymous person. Right. But they know that they know the ones, the coins. they haven't done anything. Another way that they're similar is that bearer bonds, though owned by possession and a name on them, do have serial numbers, right?

So in the movie, Hans Ruber's plan at the end is to fake his own death because, and this is a quote, if you steal $600, no one cares. But if you steal $600 million, they come looking. And this makes no sense because the second those bearer bonds start popping up, they will know, well, those won't blot up. They still exist. And it's just like if the guy who invented Bitcoin suddenly moved that, well, he's not dead. To be clear, he was going to fake his own death in an explosion in Nakatomi Plaza.

And so the idea is Hangsgruber is dead and the bearer bonds have been destroyed. Right. Right. But as Ben notes, people will notice that the bearer bonds start being used. By the way, fun fact about the Lindbergh kidnapping of all things is that the kidnapper got caught because America went off the gold standard. Wait, why? So basically, they changed the notes when we went off the gold standard. If you look at old notes, they actually used to say like gold certificate.

So the treasury took back the old notes and changed them. And so when they were doing the ransom, it was in this like middle period where this hadn't happened yet. And so the guy said, use the old notes. One of the police officers said, use the old notes, like get the money in old notes and give them to the kidnapper. And the problem was that every month he had the ransom, it got harder to. to spend them without anyone noticing. And so as people, so people are on the lookout for these old notes and they start turning up. And that's, that's what led back to Bruno Howman.

The funny thing, though, with this, Ben, with the impossibility of that plan to run off with this tremendous quantity of Berabonds and not have people notice that you still have them, is that you have a theory of the film that Hans Gruber is, in fact, a patsy. And that there is an unseen person behind the attack on Nakatomi Plaza with a completely different set of objectives and a completely different way of using it to become wealthy. Right. I mean, the tale here is how does Honda Gruber know that there's $640 million in marvons there? You know, he didn't divine it.

It's not magic. Someone had to tell him that. And the fact that they told him $640 million, which is just the principal bond, not the interest, the coupons, means that whoever that is doesn't know the state of them and was separated from them in 1979 or something like that. So it's someone who was a Nakatomi Corporation insider but isn't anymore. Right, and who told him and then left on bad terms and hates Nakatomi and because of that has hired the single worst person in the world to actually escape with these bonds, but who is guaranteed to make a spectacle out of it by turning it into a terror attack so that he's hurting the company he hates. And then, presumably, because this is a smart man, he has made put option plays against it and become rich and is now on a beach earning 20% and no one even knows who it is.

And I mean, the usual problem here is that, you know, if you buy a ton of put options, you know, ahead of a terror attack, people will assume the Iran on the terror attack. But your theory is he buys the put options after the terror attack because he knows that the loss of the bonds will eventually be discovered and cause Nakatomi stock to go down more. But he'll be able to say, well, I bought the put options because the terror attack looks so long. Right. That's the real genius. If you buy them, you know, it's famously on 9-11, like people had put options against the airlines. And then the FBI came knocking. And they said, well, they had to explain it. So if you did this with Nakatomi, they would be like, well, this former person must have been the leak of the 640. But he can actually, what he actually knows that no one will know is that when this is investigated, they will discover that these are bearer bonds in huge sums.

And it will lead into the Japanese panic so that he buys them just the next day when the market's open after Christmas. You know, I guess whatever day that was then, that then. Because it's a Christmas movie. Yeah, that then he'll, when people come knocking and say, you bought these but-up, against him then, he'll say, I watched the news. And I just, you know, I had, I had a feeling this was going to go bad for them. So I just have one question, which is how does this former Nakatomi Corporation insider who left the company like eight years ago, how does he know that the bonds are going to be in a vault in their newly constructed tower in Los Angeles? I have an answer to that.

It's not in the post, but here's the real. So the Nakatomi, the Nakatomi Tower in the movie is nearing completion, okay? It has not been finished. It's only, only certain floors are working. This is a huge development. And what he probably knows is that this thing, they are collecting all of the things in the United States and their other assets and moving them to this one place because the bonds themselves are reaching maturity on February 1st, 10 years after they were purchased on February 1st, 1989. So either in five weeks, Nakatomi is going to take these bonds to the Fed and deal with them and convert them, or move them into a secondary market somehow. But they need to be, they're facing a shit or get off the pot moment with these bonds. And he knows that they're

there and figures it out. The other question is, how does he meet Hans Gruber? But I can also answer that if you want to go into it. I mean, I guess my question is, I assume that Nakatomi had like a private jet, a corporate jet, right? So why not just like stick some guys on the jet, some briefcases, some Barabonds? Like, you little at a time. One of a time. One of a one. One It's against the law. It's against the law. But since... It does not seem like that is the primary obstacle to your theory. But the problem for them is that they didn't do that before. So we have to accept the fact that they are in America. They should have taken them to the Kaman's years ago. I don't know why they didn't. But they didn't.

I don't know. I enjoyed the post-bend, but I think it needs a little workshopping to actually make sense as a corporate financial strategy here so that I will want to retain the CFO of the Nakatomi Corporation. No, I mean, Nakatomi is out of business by now. now, I think they're in trouble. This was a real bad event for them. I do really like that you put more thought into the backstory than I would imagine the, of these barabonds than I would imagine the screenwriter did. I think we can leave that there this week, but we're really looking forward to coming back next week and every week to talk to you. Once again, go to Centralairpodcast.com, sign up, get all our update emails. You can become a subscriber to the show and support us in making this. We are really looking forward to getting together with you every

week. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Faye. We are a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swannock mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosier. Thanks for listening and stay cool out.