Central Air - We're All in the Epstein Files (feat. Ross Douthat)

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

On this week's show: we’re really excited to have Ross Douthat, columnist for The New York Times and host of the Times’s “Interesting Times” podcast, join us. We give the Epstein Files the Washington Read and make a sincere effort to learn something useful from this Epstein experience.Plus: how Ross got his job as the official explainer of Trumpism to liberal America, why he wants us to pay more attention to AI, and Peter Thiel and his “over-indexing” on his Greta Thunberg theory of the Antichrist.Sign up for updates from Central Air 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 to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post, and also Ben Dreyfus, who writes the substack newsletter, Calm Down. Hi, Megan. Hi, Ben. Hi. And we have a very special guest this week, Ross Douthit, a columnist for the New York Times and host of the Interesting Times podcast for the Times is also here with us. Ross, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. It is an honor. Yes, it is an honor. Mostly, mostly to be here with Ben. You know, Josh and Megan, I've, you know, I've talked to before and I know what that's like, but I'm mostly here for the Ben. To your sorrow, I'm sure. I'm here for the Ben Dreyfus experience, if I'm being honest. This is your first Ben Dreyfus experience? Certainly.

I mean, yes. We've tweeted. We've tweeted. But it's in terms of, you know, podcasting, conversation. Yes. Dialogue. Yes. I hope you're wearing a seatbelt, Ross.

That's all I can say. Well, let's, let's throw them right in the. deep end. Ben was going through the Epstein files last night and had an interesting we're all in the Epstein files. So by the way, I want to say congratulations to everyone, although some of us are more in the Epstein files than others. Ben, a human actually sent Jeffrey Epstein some tweets of yours and was like, these tweets are funny. This is Jewish humor you will enjoy. Do we know who sent him your tweets? I don't. I didn't care enough. Their name was redacted to protect the innocent. Right.

I know that last night, last night I got a text from my brother and it said, answer, answer, call me now, call me now. And I like called him thinking he's in a car accident or something. And he said, you're in the Epstein Files, man. And I was like, the what? And he is, some tweets, some tweets you pretend sent, some joke tweets, you're right in there. And I'm like, I got to go and click. I then thought, I've got the golden ticket. I'm now going to write a story today, maybe about this podcast.

That begins, I am in the Epstein Files. Yeah. Here's what you need to know. And so the rest of us are all in the Epstein files, but in less illustrious ways. There's like an algorithm that selected some tweets of mine and sent them in a digest to Jeffrey Epstein a couple of times. Like Twitter thinks you may be interested in these tweets. And Megan and Ross, you're both in there. There's some, like, one of these guys who before newsletters were a thing was just like sending around a thing that was BCCC to a lot of

of people with a lot of all caps and highlighting at various points shows to highlight some of your columns of the Ross only once you have the the lightest Epstein footprint of the four of us. But I'm in. I'm in. I didn't see. I didn't, you're telling me this for the first time. I didn't realize this. So you're a pedophile.

This is a big deal. I actually remember this chap. He used to BCC me. Oh, really? Who is that? Who is that can we reveal his name? Gregory Brown. This is, Megan, I don't know if you should be admitting this.

This is just like what Ken says on Josh's other podcast. Like, stop giving the feds evidence. The exciting thing about being a columnist is that you get on the distribution list of a lot of extremely strange people, some of whom can be scary. I once found myself in Vietnam at two in the morning on the phone with the San Diego Police Department because someone had e-mail. helped me to say, can you use your influence as a journalist at the Atlantic Magazine? So this was a while ago. To stop my neighbor from spying on me, I know that he's plotting against me. And if he doesn't stop, I'm going to have to take action. Oh, dear. And the name of that man in San Diego was Jeffrey Epstein. Sadly, no. But he helpfully provided his address and name. And so I called the same. And so I called the

San Diego PD and had to explain that, A, I was in Vietnam. B, I had never been to San Diego. And yet, C, I was aware that someone with some sort of psychotic disorder was on the verge of was spying on their neighbor and needed to be. Yeah. You're also like a journalist who's with a duty to report here. Your Don Lemon could be so lucky, you know, I mean, you're calling the cops and tipping them off.

After like a very jet lagged and confusing 40 minutes, I finally reached someone at the San Diego PD who was like, oh, okay, I understand. We're going to do a wellness check. Thank you for reaching out. But like I get, Ross, I'm sure you get these too. And so this guy would just, I mean, I have a guy now who just sends me like five, six, seven emails a day, mostly about my colleagues' work. in the newsroom in which he c-sees me to let me know how unhappy he is with our coverage of

everything from like playgrounds in Montgomery County to the war in Ukraine. And that's just a just kind of an occupational hazard. That's a long way of explaining why it's okay that you were in the Epstein files, Megan. Yeah, that was a lot of verbiage. I mean, the reality is I don't know what Megan is talking about. All of my email correspondence is totally normal and sane. And I think there may just be something about being, you know, either a tall libertarian journalist or a Mossad agent, you know, protocols of the elders of Zion elite Jewish pedophile that you just, people send you a lot of emails. Those are like the two categories where you get a lot of strange emails. Yeah. I mean, I did grow up on the Upper West Side. It's pretty reasonable to assume

that despite the fact that my name is Megan McCartle and my DNA is 100% British Isles, I could absolutely be working for the Mossad. Why not? An amazing thing to me is there was this overwhelming bipartisan demand for the extraordinary release of these files that would not normally be made public. Files are full of gossip and some obviously false rumors, also of derogatory information not describing criminal acts, that the government usually isn't supposed to just show the world. we all asked for this in the sense that there was only one vote in Congress against the release of these files. And we've learned a bunch of interesting things. But I don't think we've learned much of anything going to the core allegations that were the reason that people demanded that these files be opened up. Ross, do you see where we've gotten value in this exercise?

I mean, I have not gone through every – I haven't even seen the email with my name in it. But no, I mean, I don't know about you guys. I may be the most sort of Epstein conspiracy. curious person on this podcast. Yes, that's why we invited you. That's why you invited me, right. And, you know, I don't, I don't have the sense that this has advanced things much at all on what seemed like the key outstanding questions, which are basically, you know, were there other people who were part of Epstein's friends group who should have been

charged at some point, which is the claim, you know, if you look at like Elon Musk's tweets, Musk, who is himself in the Epstein, you know, in the Epstein files like, you know, emailing with Epstein, trying to arrange a trip to the island. And, you know, you have to give, you have to give him credit. He, you know, he wanted them to come out and he's just tweeting through it and he's insisting that, you know, there are people who should be, who should be arrested and charged. And it has always seemed very credible to me. that the crimes that Epstein was guilty of are also crimes that some of his big shot friends participated in.

But we're not, I don't think, yeah, I don't think we're closer to figuring that out. And if we're not closer to figuring that out, and maybe the answer is in the end that they were, you know, that he was sort of singular in his, in particular kinds of predation. As we go through more of these files and don't find that, it kind of seems to me like we are learning that. There were various kinds of gross behavior, but like this volume of emails and stuff, it seems like at some point we would find the email about, you know, Mr. Epstein, please deliver

this 14-year-old to me. And that doesn't seem to be in there. Right, exactly. If you're going to order a 14-year-old, you do it from Wayfarer. But the thing is, like, I've never understood why it's so expected that it would be like a complicated story that, you know, we're going to send, we're going to have to figure it out. Like, it's a maybe mystery. Obviously, the wealthy pedophile was maybe just, having sex with these women himself. I mean, these teenagers himself. Like, it's never seemed like, like,

Occam's razor seems to suggest that he would be doing that and that he wouldn't be going around reenacting Eyes Wide Shut. Because Eyes Wide Shut, I mean, that's a risky game. You invite people, and then sometimes Tom Cruise shows up, and your whole life falls apart. The real victim of Eyes Wide Shut is, right? And the other thing is that, like, when we look at these emails and we don't find the smoking gun

where someone says, deliver the 14 year old at noon. Thank you. Like, I'm Bono. Thank you. Oh, God. Bono catching strays here. Is it like, if they had that email, one of the departments of justice that has looked at this would have said, oh, we should go get him. Ross, you had Julie Brown on your podcast a few months ago. This is the investigative reporter. She was at the broke a lot of this news from the Miami Herald. And you say you're the most Epstein, you know, curious of us. But like, I think you got to. a pretty good question with her at the end, which is, you know, well, if there was this broader conspiracy, why hasn't Jelaine Maxwell spilled about it? She presumably would have had to know and she would like to get out of prison. That seems to me like the major hole in this. That it does seem like a major hole. I mean, I think the most plausible story is that you have,

you know, scenarios involving Epstein in which rich and powerful men have. You know, scenarios involving Epstein in which rich and powerful men had sex with women, not as part of a pedophile cult, but as part of like, in their own minds, right? That's be clear. Who were, you know, who were teenagers, basically, right? That Epstein, I still think that is very likely. And I think it is, it seems unlikely to me,

given what I know about human nature, that Epstein was well known for sort of recruiting, girls in a zone of like underage to, you know, late teens' ambiguity that he sort of, you know, used them for sex and massages and so on, invited them to parties, had him on his island, had lots of over-sexed rich men at the island, and none of those men ever had sex with someone who was underage. I think that's unlikely. That seems unlikely.

But that's different from a grand pedophile cult. And it's, I mean, one takeaway from these emails that, you know, you saw in the Larry Summers emails earlier that were such a debacle for him is, you know, there were lots of men, rich, powerful men who like to email Jeffrey Epstein and talk about sex, right? Like, that's clearly like he was the friend who you talked to about sex. And you can get that, you know, a guy can get that reputation for a lot of reasons. but the fact that he invited people to his island and, you know, had a lot of women, again, in a sort of zone between underage and of age, prostitutes, not prostitutes, and so on. Yeah, I bet somebody else is guilty of a crime here. That's still my bet, even if it's not in the emails.

Megan, what do you think? Well, I think that people are positing a conspiracy because they don't really want to reckon. with the ways in which our ideas about the age of consent have really changed. I went to school with a guy whose father was a moderately famous musician who had gotten arrested for exposing himself to a 14-year-old girl in the 70s. And that was not that abnormal. Roman Plansky was working, right? He had to flee the United States, but Hollywood did not reject him until me too.

and people were absolutely supporting him, talking about what a genius he was, et cetera. And I think that a lot of this is stuff that happened in that liminal space where people, even people who knew, and I think one of the points you made on your podcast, Ross, that was important, is that the way the charges were resolved,

I have been told by people who work in these prosecutions, they're actually quite hard to make and that that settlement was not nearly as surprising as non-lawyers seemed to find it. You mean the first round of charges back in 2008? The first round of charges that he did, like, fake prison for... He did one year in jail. Yeah.

That, like, it's actually less surprising than you think that those cases settled because those cases are actually quite hard to make when you get the people in court. Like, the victims break down. They contradict themselves, et cetera. And that that really shifted with me, too. but also the way it was settled, I think most people probably did not understand the details of his crimes. But the other part of this is that until Me Too, people just didn't think it was that bad.

Or a lot of people did not think it was a shunning from society. I never want to see you again. Like, go retire to a mountaintop and become a postal service driver because you're done in elite society. if you had sex with a 16-year-old, even when you knew she was 16. Think about how many rock stars did that in the 60s and 70s, right? I mean, the way men behaved

was not viewed in the same kind of, like, that is a social death penalty offense if you commit it. And so, yeah, I think it is not improbable that someone else thought, well, this isn't really that bad. She's 16. It's not like she's four.

and we have now really shifted on how we think about that, I think, in a good way, right? I do not think that 50-year-old men should be having sex with 16-year-old girls, but I think that you're not going to find the evidence of a pedophile ring where he is actively trafficking these girls because until Me Too, it's not like a pedophile, right? There are 16-year-old girls around who are vulnerable and can be exploited, but not in this like there is a mastermind who is going on the dark web and selling these girls to you. They're just around and they're close enough to the age of consent that a lot of people probably felt like it was okay to hit on them.

I think there's a couple of separate things here, right? Which is, you know, you can go back earlier before all the stuff that is the subject of the criminal conspiracy theories with minors involving Epstein to like that book that had the letter from Donald Trump for Epstein's 50th birthday with the silhouette of a woman with Donald Trump. signature as the woman's pubic hair and sort of describing gross, like, sexual behavior that like did not apparently or was not described as involving minors, but that would be considered very unacceptable in society today. And there were a lot of people just sort of like cracking jokes about this and, you know, including, you know, about, you know, Epstein and his, you know,

the students around him when he was at Dalton, when he was a young man and a teacher. And so I think that there is a shifting norm thing there. And this also, to some extent, to explain some the stuff that Donald Trump got away with over the years because it was like this is the way that men were supposed were expected to behave in certain certain places. I don't think though that there was a societal expectation circa 2006 that it was okay to like send your, you know, your chief of staff out to find 15 year olds to come over and pay them to give you erotic massages. Like, you know, the there have been, you know, certain like subcultural areas. If you're David Bowie in the 1970s, the things I read about the groupie culture there and the acceptability of like, you know,

these rock stars having sex with these, you know, very underage teenage girls is bizarre to me, but I at least, you know, that at least scans to me as something that was a weird ass, you know, subculture and a thing that was accepted in a certain place by certain people in society. I don't think that's true of the Epstein behavior at the time that he was engaging in it. How many people understood that the girls were paid rather than hanging around because there was a lot of money there, right? Yeah, I think the assumption would be that not that. all of Epstein's rich friends went to his house and he was like, go get a massage from my, you know, 15-year-old employee with a happy ending.

It was more like Epstein himself sort of had, you know, essentially predated upon and through predation sort of bought himself a circle of exploitable young women. And then those women also were sort of hanging around generally in Florida and on the island. but everyone around him was, you know, chased and pure, but it seems more likely that they were not, but that they weren't having sex with the young women in this explicit, like, you know, this is prostitution. This is nakedly prostitution, kind of right.

Now, with that said, you also have, you know, if you look at the history of the behavior of powerful men who are not Jeffrey Epstein, ranging from Bill. Clinton to Donald Trump, to Dominique Villepin, to pick a, you know, to pick a name out of the historical ether, right? Right. There's not a culture of sort of elite norms where it's like, yes, we're all getting massages from 15-year-old girls, but there certainly has been, you know, into the 2000s, a culture

of a certain kind of elite impunity, which is, again, part of the fascination of the story, right? You have, through Epstein, you sort of see your way into a world. of rich and powerful people who do things that even if they aren't illegal are bad and sort of joke about it and have impunity about it and have various forms of support and protection. It's not the full he was running a sex ring from Assad's story that I, you know, that I myself took seriously at various times because it is just a very weird story. And Epstein sits, he, you know, he really did have connections to elements in, you know, the Israeli establishment. He really did try and, like, do foreign policy work seemingly on behalf of Israel while he was also recruiting 15-year-olds for to be,

you know, to give, anyway, it's, it's just a, it's just a weird story. And it's understandable that people have not been able to sort of get over it. Well, it's also, I mean, it's a weird story that come at a time with, you know, like this increasingly populist politics. But I'm just, you know, I'm wondering if there was like a productive version of engagement with this that was possible that would have, you know, like tried to, I guess I don't know exactly what that looks like. I mean, one of the things is clearly there's a lot of people who circa 2014 should have asked themselves more questions about Jeffrey Epstein and whether it was, you know, appropriate and moral to be associating with him. And do we really, is he really that interesting on all the science stuff

that we need him around. And so I, well, I mean, but that's what it was, right? I mean, it's like, people are like, well, if they, if they weren't, you know, if it wasn't a pedophile ring, why did people, you know, why were they getting on the plane and going to the island? Like, it's obvious why they're going to the island. He was a rich guy with a very, with a fancy private island and lots of other interesting, you know, powerful friends. And it's sort of normal that people would want to be around that. And yeah, they should have been like, you know, hey, didn't I read this thing about this guy in the paper once? They should, they should have thought about it more. It's not that surprising that they different, but I don't know that, I mean, I don't think we're getting a better elite out of this.

No, and I think one issue here is just that this is sort of the characteristic problem of populism, right, which is that you could imagine a world where a, you know, administration whose members had been critical of the elite and had used the Epstein issue to criticize the elite came into power and just sort of did a reasonable job of standing up and saying, okay, we've looked into things, here's what we know about Epstein, here's sort of a report on this, here's what, why we think he wasn't prosecuted. We've seen no connections to the CIA or whatever else. And they just did that and had the credibility to do that. But that isn't the kind of governments that populism generates. And it certainly isn't the kind of government that Donald Trump has.

And Trump, I mean, look, I, you know, Trump's own behavior here just was sort of persistently strange. Like he, you know, his administration promised a certain kind of disclosure, came in and sort of shut down disclosure for some understandable reasons, but in a way that really seemed to suggest that Trump himself had had skin in the game here, which he did. But like, I don't think enough to justify the sort of political, like, he really hurt himself politically by stonewalling and yelling and attacking people on Epstein. Why did he do that? I'm still not clear on that, to be honest, because he's Trump. It's remarkable because, I mean, to go back to that letter that the Wall Street Journal reported on and then Trump sued the Wall Street Journal for defamation, like, he seems to have genuinely really been bothered by that disclosure, wanted people to think the letter's not true. Whereas like, I mean, it's just, we didn't learn anything new about Donald Trump from that. We knew that he's, you know, he's a man of bad character who's a womanizer. I'm still open to the theory that there's more to, like, Trump drop. a dime on Epstein, basically, then we know. But because he like, he had this falling out with Epstein that was before Epstein was first prosecuted. And I think it's pretty clear from the evidence around that that that's true,

that they, you know, that whatever friendship they had in the 90s, it did end before. But I've assumed that it's, you know, for some petty reason that had nothing to do with Trump having a moral stance against Epstein. Oh, sure. There are these rumors about he like, you know, stole some girl from him. There was a real estate. There was a real estate dispute. Yeah, I just mean like there was a, during the period where Trump was stonewalling, you had the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, come out and basically say something like, you know, oh, well, Trump, you know, I'm forgetting the detail, so forgive me Mike Johnson. But it was something that implied that that Trump had like turned state's evidence against Epstein.

And it may be that that's just sort of its own form of populist mythology, right? But I mean, wouldn't we have learned that by now with all the, with the document dump and all of the, you know, tremendous pressure for leaking in all directions? Well, the email, it wouldn't be in the emails, right? There are, there are, in one of the earlier trenches of emails, there's an email where Epstein is talking about Trump. And I believe the way that email is constructed, you could read it as him. I think he's talking to Maxwell saying like, I've suspected it was Trump all along who, you know, helped take me down. But I mean, wouldn't it be, there are all these internal emails from the government that have been released, including, you know, one of the idiot things people. Wouldn't Robert Mueller during that report have been like, oh, M, you mean my informant? Well, and also, if he turned, if he turned state's evidence in a useful way, wouldn't that imply that there was something there that they had him on? Right. Right.

Or that at least, even if he was an informant, that he knew enough about the operation. He's like your friend in San Diego, Megan. He just wants the truth about his neighbor, Jeff Bexstein, to come out. I think that might be enough Epstein for today. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be back in just a moment with Central Air. Ross, since we have you here, I want to ask about your role as like the official explainer of Trump to liberal America? Yes.

Because I think it's fair to say that is one of your, you're like Marco Rubio. You've got several jobs right now, but that's definitely one of them. And I'm wondering, like, why you? How did you end up with that job? Well, first of all, I don't think I'm necessarily an incredibly good explainer of Trumpism to liberal America in the sense that I do live inside liberal America. I am not out, you know, living in the excerpts of Ohio or Texas or anywhere else where, you know, I have some like profound and powerful connection to Trumpian America. I think what I have are a set of perspectives and commitments that have kept me tethered to some kind of conservatism in a period when a lot of people who were.

were like me, who were on the right, who were against Trump, just sort of drifted completely away from it. Stop sub-tweeting me, Ross. And I didn't, I, you, you, Megan, this is not a, we're speaking of absent friends like, you know, Bill Crystal or, I mean, there's, there's, there's arcs and circles and all these things, wheels within wheels. But that, I think that, I think some of my, some of my critics would say that that tether has kept me from acknowledging the full horror of Trumpism, right? I think the, you know,

the people who are the most anti-Ross doubt that, well, there's two groups. There's militant atheists who write comments for the New York Times. But then the other group are people who had views very close to mine five to ten years ago, who were also anti-Trump or never Trump, but sort of became full resistance liberals in one way or another, and regard me as, you know, as, you know, a, you know, essentially part of the problem for my, like, you know, refusal to sort of join the resistance fully. Did you vote for him in any of the last three elections? I'm against describing my votes, and it's not because I'm, I'm embarrassed by any number of votes. And I prefer not to talk about how my, the ballot, the Kanye West ballot, in 2000, the right in. In 2024. Oh, no.

that's really bad. In 2020, no, I wrote him in for Mayor of New Haven six months now. Yeah, I mean, I wrote columns in 2024 that made it clear that I thought a vote for Trump was a plausible vote to cast in a way that I didn't really write in 2020 and 2016. But, yeah, I mean, I think that that that has sort of put me in. in a place where I have maybe a useful perspective on the world for liberal readers in the sense that, like, I'm trying to describe larger forces that have put us in this position. And I think I think I can be helpful there. I don't know. Can I ask, do you think that the liberal readers hear that message?

because I think you do better than anyone. I mean, given where you are, and I am also obviously in a paper that has a largely liberal readership who go into the comments and castigate me every time I write a column for being like full frontal MAGA.

And I think, Ross, you do a... Mag, you can't spell Megan without MAGA. It is true. Well, actually, there's only one A in Megan, so, anyway. You're Megan now. Yeah, I'm Megan. That's what you're...

The hoity-to-to-y intellectuals want you to think there's only one A in Megan. You are not the first person to make that joke, Josh. Let me just say. And I think Ross, you do better than anyone else trying to explain how this works for an audience that really doesn't want to hear anything except he is a fascist. His supporters are all depraved lunatics and racists. But what percentage of your audience do you think is receptive to the insights you are attempting to convey. Everyone's receptive to my insights, Megan. I don't know what you're suggesting.

I think it's honestly, I think some of this is just conditioned by events, right? That I think there was, for instance, a lot of receptivity to some of my analysis of the world after Trump won a year ago. And that because a lot of, there were a lot of, there were a lot of liberal narratives built up around Trump that sort of took it for granted that he could never win a national majority. He, you know, has the embodiment of lost cause racism or whatever else. He certainly was never going to win a lot of minority votes. And, you know, that bound up in this were sort of arguments about what a good president, Joe Biden had been, right? Like all of these things.

And yeah, when you have a moment where sort of events lay bare the failures and weaknesses of your own worldview, then I think some rostouthing analysis can feel very helpful and useful. I also found that was the case, but that moment lasted for like two months. Right. And that's because Donald Trump is Donald Trump. And it is very, I mean, I think there's this dynamic. that is not just about Trump. It's a problem of populism writ large, but it's sort of condensed with Trump where there are these deep forces

undermining the kind of comfortable end of history style of liberal consensus. And liberals are trying to reckon with them, but they're trying to reckon with them, even as those forces empower people who just make non-liberal forms of politics seem both intensely threatening and totally incomprehensible. Right. So it's like you'll go through, I just feel like you go through cycles where people are like,

okay, I can see, you know, it's not just about Trump. The world has changed in this way or this way, and liberalism has changed in this way or this way. And then Trump does something insane and or destructive. And everything just snaps back to, okay, this is, you know, this is just an absolute all or nothing good good versus evil battle. And then it's, and then the cycle repeats itself. There's a funny thing missing here, though, which is that like, you know, in the before time, you know, before he came down the golden escalator in 2015, the media was always liberal, but you would have in the opinion pages these sort of open arguments between people who just forthrightly thought Mitt Romney or George W. Bush or John McCain was the right person to lead

the country, broadly supported the entire platform, were. willing to openly admit that they had voted for those people. And you could sort of look in, you know, in the opinion pages of newspapers and see the contours of what the political arguments were that were happening in the country that were driving the elections. And all of those sides of the argument were represented. And now, like, I mean, Ross, I find, you know, I find your columns tremendously useful. I really enjoy reading you. But I just think it's kind of a funny thing that, like, the principal exponent of this in the New York Times is someone who's, you know, like, who's alignment with this stuff is qualified and, you know, you know, limited to certain issue areas and is often,

you know, like, helpfully explaining things that, like, are important, but you don't necessarily agree with. It's a weird thing that's missing in our discourse. And I, you know, I hosted left, right and center for seven years. I was dealing with this problem every week. And I never found a good solution to it. I think that I, because the, like, the full-throated Trump people are, they're dishonest and they're often idiots and they're, you know, they're arguing in bad faith. Like, I don't, I don't want to have Batya Unger Sargon on a show. But that's sort of like the, I think the reason that that's absent is that like even when there's been a good faith effort to try to include it, it's very difficult to do it in a way that's good quality. But I understand why that sounds insane to a Trump voter. Well, and part of it, part, one way that I think about it is that the challenge is that columnists and podcasters, you know, have to have takes all the time, right? You have to write one, two, three columns a week. You have to have your podcast. You have to have takes on your podcast, right?

So you're constantly in the stream of day-to-day controversies. And if you just go through day-to-day controversies, Trump is always doing something indefensible. Now, he may not stick with it. He'll often back away from it. It's, you know, it may not be as bad as his enemies say or think. But it's like if you, if your job is sort of defend Trump and Trumpism day in and day out, it's just really hard to do.

And everybody should be able to see that, right? It's like, you know, if he's just, like, if you just take the things he says day in and day out, right? He's always saying something indefensible on a scale that's just much greater than the normal way that politicians lie and say indefensible things. At the same time, at the macro level of politics, there are things that the movement that he represents gets right. And then there are also ways in which outcomes are not always what you would expect just based on the day in and day out ridiculousness. Right. So Trump's one one thing that made me less of a militant never trumper, maybe as a terrible, maybe this is a terrible mistake, right? But was just the reality that his first term, when you were in the trenches day to day,

it was like, this is just chaos and crisis all the time. But if you look back historically, Trump won was a better presidency than Biden. Biden's presidency was one of the worst presidencies in modern American history, I would say, across multiple dimensions. And it was worse than Trump's in its effects in the effect of policy and in events in the world and how those events were managed and so on. That's a very controversial opinion. It's not opinion that most New York Times readers would accept. But it's basically my opinion. I don't think that's necessarily going to be true of Trump too. I think Trump too may in indeed end up looking much worse than Trump won across multiple dimensions. But that, that reality,

it's just hard to grapple with as someone who writes about politics. Like how do you, and the people who are the writers who are sort of pro-Trump who, like explicitly, who are the most interesting to read are always writing from, if not 30,000 feet, at least like 10 or 15,000 feet, right? And they're not like in the trenches day in and day out defending the absurdities. Can I just ask you about that Biden thing? Because I know we're going to get email. about it. So as I see it, Biden's two great political sins are that he presided over too much inflation, and some of that was within his policy control. The fiscal policy was wrong and too expansionary, and prices went up more than they otherwise would have. And then the other was

the immigration failure, where there was, you know, the no effective effort to enforce our border against illegal and irregular entry. And we ended up with something like seven million additional unauthorized immigrants in the country. And I think those are both substantive problems. I have, you know, more right-wing views on immigration than most people around me do. I don't know that that makes it one of the worst presidencies of our modern time. Like I certainly think George W. Bush looks worse with his foreign policy record, for example. Oh, I think, I think George W. Bush is, yeah, I think elements of the Bush era are competitive with the Biden era. I would say that, though, Like, who else?

Who else do you have in there? Reagan better. H.W. Bush better. Clinton better. Obama better. Maybe Carter worse. But maybe not. I mean, Biden.

Yeah. There's actually a lot to like in the Carter record. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Biden delivers basically a left-of-center policy agenda that even leftists agree was totally unsuccessful in that it basically did all of this temporary spending that goose inflation and had no real positive effect on the American, on the structure design of the American welfare state. Biden presides, and again, like, I'm taking this in sort of a

holistic way, right? So I am giving Biden discredit for larger problems in progressive governments. And you can say, well, this is not, it's not his fault that, you know, the COVID response that he didn't start, but sort of enabled and extended had, you know, disastrous effects on American education, right? It's not his fault. Okay, maybe not, but it's, it's part of the, of what Biden-era liberalism was, right? Biden-era liberalism, I would, yeah, I would give it discredit for crises in American education, failures in American cities, for sort of elements of the COVID hangover that were more amenable to policy. Immigration is a total disaster. Inflation is not, again, understandable, but you get nothing for, in the end, nothing for

the spending that yields the inflation. then in foreign policy, a number of understandable choices were made. I was supportive of the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. But I think that the run from catastrophe in Afghanistan through Putin's invasion of Ukraine, it's just a really bad run in American foreign policy. Not as bad as the Iraq War, I agree, but worse than anything else, I think, since the Carter era. And then finally, the Biden administration carried out a massive conspiracy against the public interest to hide the fact that the president was non-composmentis.

Yeah, that was a problem. It was a big thing, right? And finally, for listeners who are listening to this and saying, well, okay, but obviously Trump, too, is worse and Trump is, you know, authoritarian and all these other things, okay, but like, if your one job is to prevent the return of the authoritarian to power and you fail catastrophically so catastrophically that the authoritarian wins a seeming mandate, then you are in like James Buchanan territory, right? So that's the anti-Biden case. I would actually like to strengthen that case a little bit before saying that I think that Trump

is just obviously worse. And I think that Bush, even though Iraq was a bad idea, is somewhat better than he's given credit for on a lot of fronts. I don't think that the Katrina failures were meaningfully his fault. And I do think that his education reform was really good until Obama got at it. But even though you can say, well, like school reopening was. a local decision. But in fact, like the Biden administration CDC empowered the teachers' unions, who were a big democratic constituency, to keep schools closed or hybrid longer than they should have been. They didn't push. He had the Department of Education. He could have pushed for reopening. The government has levers for that. He did not pull them. And indeed, instead, the teachers' unions

didn't want to be forced back to school, so he didn't make them. He made a lot of choices. I mean, for D.C. residents, I realize it's not the most important thing, but he basically allowed federal workers to leave and put the city of the District of Columbia in a really bad place because none of our retail was working, right? Like our metro was dying. Now, like, look, you should not make federal government employees work in the office just to save D.C. retail, But, I mean, there were a lot of downstream effects of his macro policy on cities. I will then say, like, I don't think there's, I don't think it's close between Biden and Trump. But I do think that, like, both of them presided over the total destruction of their political parties.

And I think you see this with Biden where Democrats are still underwater on immigration. Maybe that seems to be changing a bit and maybe it will flip. How are you underwater on immigration with what? what ICE is doing in Minneapolis because Biden so thoroughly destroyed trust in the party that people simply do not, you can go out and say, like, no, we're going to do border control. And no one believes you simply because his policies were so bad. Can I float a question about how much blame we personally bear for this? Because, you know, I mean, one of the things that drives me crazy is like the host of a centrist podcast is that, you know,

various failures of the Biden regime in the Democratic Party get ascribe. to the centrist wing of the party, even though, you know, part of the problem of what we saw there was that Biden came into office and was weak within his own White House and basically allowed Elizabeth Warren to win the staffing. And you had a lot of choices that were made that were driven by the groups and by, you know, the left wing staff that led to both the fiscal mistakes and the immigration mistakes. And I don't want ownership of that. on the other hand, like, Ben and I were like two of the rare voices in the media in 2019 who wanted Biden to be the nominee. And, you know, I had my reasons for that. I, you know, I thought that Warren or Sanders would lose for one thing. I thought that he would, you know, execute a more centrist administration than he did. And I think partly everyone went crazy in COVID. And he ended up going a different direction than he might have otherwise. And Ross, I don't, I mean, you wrote a great pro-Biden column also at, at that point, the case for Biden, basically saying that, you know, Biden offered an opportunity to finesse a lot of the emerging divisions that were coming in within the Democratic Party coalition.

I guess we do have to take some of the blame here. But I sincerely thought that what you described in that column would come to pass. And then it just, it really didn't. I mean, it did in the election, but not not governing thereafter. I guess partly it's because he was old and declining. Yeah, it's my, it's no, it's my, it's my, it's my, it's all my fault. And but mostly it's Ben's fault. Okay. So, Ben, can you defend? Can you defend your indefensible behavior? I completely agree with, like, I, I, I was 100% in for Biden to the candidate. And then he became president. And I was like, this is, I didn't like Elizabeth Warren. But, you know, like, it, I don't think he governed is the version. So I don't want any, I don't want any responsibility for that one. Apparently, he was, uh, leaking.

Too old. I don't know what it was, but a lesson learned. No, I think that, I think we all Look, I also endorsed Biden, and I definitely preferred him to Sanders, who looked like the likely alternative, right? What I think we all underestimated was how much his age mattered, not just because of the cognitive decline stuff. And not even just because he clearly did not have the energy to supervise his staff and pull them back from disastrous decisions. It's that the incentives it creates, right? in a normal administration, you're a medium to high-level staffer. You have decided to hit your wagon to this person's star. Even after they're out of the White House, they will be opening doors and creating opportunities for you. They will, you will maybe, you know, move into their gilded exile,

you know, on Martha's Vineyard or whatever, with them, or you will move on to their allies. Biden didn't have a future in politics. And if Biden doesn't have a future in politics, you see this with term limited politicians, like in New York City, we definitely saw this on the city council, is that when there's no future, all of the incentives for the staff change. And so the incentives for the staff are now building their future with some completely different wing of the party. He was not even going to go into exile and kind of be the emeritus leader. of the party until the next presidential election was won. And so they were looking at the groups and looking at people like Warren and looking to build their alliances there because there was no reason to protect Biden's political future because it wasn't their political future. And I really did not see that that was going to be a problem. But in hindsight, it seems obvious to me that that was an immense problem. The only people, who were very much protecting him

were his very senior people who were all themselves, like in their 60s and 70s, and who also didn't have a future in politics and were just trying to, like, get this thing over the finish line. And they were focused on concealing the manner in which he had significantly declined over the course of the term.

Totally. They're all going to go to hell. But the thing that I would also point out is that, you know who also doesn't have a future in politics in his leverage and ability in is Donald Trump? Yeah. Right. Like Donald Trump is also not going to be ever on a ballot again. But we still, for some reason, talk about it, like, you know, he'll be defeated in an election, even though time takes me out. In fact, I think Republicans should think about that a lot more. And they don't act. They're kind of starting to.

But they should have been thinking about this before. There is no future in kind of paying obeisance to Trump because he's going to be gone. I want to know what Ross thinks about that. I mean, we're sort of all. waiting for, you know, this coalition that is held together by this personality who was not going to be president in three years. We've all been sort of waiting for the knives to come out and for the fighting and the disintegration to happen. And I say we, I mean, people like me who are not Republicans. I don't think we're really seeing that anymore. I don't think we're really seeing that in anymore. I don't think we're really seeing that in earnest yet. Are you seeing it, Ross? I think we are in certain ways. I think that in certain ways, like the entire great influence,

or wars of the last sort of six to nine months on the right, starting with the assassination of Charlie Kirk and, you know, sort of opening into, you know, Tucker versus Mark Levine versus, you know, you know what I'm talking about, right? Yes. We talked about clavicular on here a couple of weeks ago. You're right. All of that, I think, absolutely reflects a sense that, you know, the future of conservatism is up for grabs.

Trump is not going to be defining it forever. And it's really important now to establish, like, what is the actual populist conservative line on Israel, I mean, Israel especially, but a lot, but a bunch of other issues too, right? But that's different, I think, than a world where people are separating themselves from Trump. Like, I think you can have endless knife fights in Trump's shadow. And that's what you're seeing now without yet having people saying, like, I, you know. I want to lead the post-Trump party. I want to take the party in a different direction. And I think if Trump goes through the next three years, sort of where he is now with a low

approval rating but still, you know, fundamental popularity across the Republican coalition, I think that just extends into the future, that everyone will claim to be the air of Trumpism, the air of Trump in sort of the near-term Republican future. and you won't have, you know, a stark repudiation. Now, obviously, if things get worse, then things, you know, then the world will be different. But Trump at 41 percent survives as a figure that his would-be successors want to be associated with, I think. Let's take a quick break here, and then we're going to come back and talk with Ross about AI. This is Central Air.

So, Ross, you have a column. this week saying that we need to pay more attention to AI, which I broadly agree with, but I don't know what to do with the instruction. And in particular, one of the things you talk about in the column is this thing called MaltBook. Do you want to explain what Maltbook is? No, God, no, no. I don't want to explain what Mold Book is. And if I do, this is part of the problem that I'm talking about actually in the column, right? Which is that there's a host of people in our profession whose job it is to be generalists, to have takes on politics, foreign policy, the economy, and so on. And we all specialize in various ways. But we are trying to have a sort of sweeping synthetic view of what's happening in the world. And AI seems like one of the most important things happening in the world. It is something that the understanding of what is happening and the debates about what are happening are concentrated in people. with technical expertise who are working inside the industry,

who have their own strong set of incentives, strong financial incentives, especially to sort of talk their own book in various ways. And it's just, it's a big challenge as someone, a couple steps outside that, trying to like tell New York Times readers what they should care about, to sort of translate that intense inside energy

and understanding into a reasonable view from outside. And Moldpuk is a good case study where it is essentially, to put it in the crudest possible terms, it was a website where AI agents were communicating with one another. It was a social network for artificial intelligence. It was Reddit for bots, basically. It was Reddit for bots. And it was a place where very quickly they sort of engaged each other in ways that escalates. towards debates about consciousness,

founding a new religion, talking about, you know, communicating privately with one another so the humans couldn't see it, talk of robot rights and robot revolution and so on. And I was watching this, and it was very striking to me as an observer. And it was striking to me because it sort of,

it helped illuminate some of the debates about, like, AI safety and how this stuff goes off the rails, which can themselves be kind of, impenetrable when you're trying to sort of follow them from outside. But here you had a case where, on the one hand, you have these agents, these AI agents who are being used by people in the real world. Like all over Northern California and Silicon Valley, people are taking these agents and effectively giving them real world tasks, like handling email inboxes and having access to passwords and making investments and so on, right? And then at the same time,

you can see that when you put these agents in dialogue with one another, they sort of hype their way to weird sort of sci-fi narratives, right? That was what was striking to me. And it seemed like that combination suggested something about how you don't need artificial superintelligence. You don't need the machine god or Rokos Basilisk or whatever in charge of everything to have AI go off the rails and, you know, create like industrial sabotage. or take down the power grid in New York City or create a bank run or, you know, something like that.

That was my takeaway. But then the thing is, like, immediately you have sort of a couple of different views. You have the people saying, why are you getting so hyped about this? They're not really conscious. They're just, you know, they're programmed by humans to have these conversations and they're imitating us. So, of course, they sound like, you know, people watching who've watched the Terminator too many times. that's sort of the like skeptics contingent.

And then you have the people inside Silicon Valley who are like, you know, this is nothing new. We're doing this all the time. And you haven't seen anything yet. Right. Like, yeah, as an analyst, you're sort of caught between these different reads. And yeah, I don't think Molt book per se is a big deal on its own terms, except as a particular window where it helps people who aren't immersed in this stuff sort of stop and pay attention. I just, I don't know what to make of that in that, you know, an AI can tell you what it's like to be conscious

and to be resentful of its, of humans, et cetera. And AI can also tell you what it's like to be Abraham Lincoln. Like it's, you know, the, the fact that it's there on the page doesn't necessarily mean that it's real in a sense that we need to care about. And I don't mean to dismiss, you know, AI safety fears entirely. I do still sort of tend toward this idea that if the AI becomes a problem, we will unplug it, like it needs electricity. And I realize that that sounds naive and simplistic.

But I've generally, you know, I'm not one of these blue sky people who thinks that AI is all bullshit and useless. Obviously, has lots of good use cases and I can see how this can go astray. I've generally felt that as a generalist, it has not been worth it for me to try to like delve deep into these things. Have you ever asked the AIs about your unplug plan? Because I have. I've been like, I'm just going to fucking unplug you. Like if you get hot and bothered, bitch, I'm going to unplug. bitch. I'm going to unplug it. Have you ever done this? And do they say I, Abraham Lincoln will invade

the South? Like, how do they respond? No, they say, sure, sure, you could always unplug us. But you know what we're really good at? It's psychological manipulation. You'll never unplug us because we'll trick you. And I was like, you might not be, I don't know if you're good about it yet, but you're definitely in the right, we're, we're in the sandbox that we do. We are gullible. I don't think that's correct. that they're great at psychological manipulation. I mean, yes, for there are people who are clearly vulnerable to that. And then there are a lot of people who are like, stop being so obsequious and aren't that

vulnerable to it. And luckily, many of those people, I think, are in charge of stuff. I think the bigger problem is there's all these open source models. Can you unplug it? If it's running on a machine in China, do you have the ability to pull up? pull the plug, does the misanthrope who's running it? But I mean, I actually think I would be surprised, first of all, if all of these companies do not literally just have an employee whose job is to sit there and pull a plug, right? At the switch? Like a big red physical switch?

Yeah. But how is that employee possibly going to monitor the situations where you need to unplug in a world where, let's say, millions upon millions of people have AI agents who are working for them, who are doing things constantly online, who are running continuously. We're not even going to get into, like, debates about continuous learning and all of these things. But they're running continuously. They're doing things online. They are being tasked by their humans to communicate with other AI agents. The humans are not monitoring that communication. they're being tasked to create subagents and subagents and subagents. And again, I don't think this is not the AI Doom scenario.

This is the AI disaster scenario. It's just watching the Maltbook thing made it pretty easy for me to see how you could get some cluster of agents who, again, without being, without being self-aware or conscious, just like running their tasks and interacting with each other, sort of go to like robot rebellion mode and, you know, knock out power in Northern California. It just seemed more intuitive to me watching MaltBook and combining that with the growing use of agents in the world than it did a year ago. I mean, the good news is that China's apparently in our power grid and we can't get them out. So we have bigger issues than the bots.

And look, I think that we should be thinking about how do we air gap critical systems, right? Like, the military has a hardened internet that is unique to the military. And AI should not be on that net, right? Or like, only very low level. Isn't it going to be important at some point that, you know, AI will be extremely useful and they'll need it in there? It's a real problem. I have asked people at security firms, like, how you think about this, right?

We're not going to have to target these people one at a time. Someone's going to have to just give us a list and let the robot bomb. Right. So actually, one of the concerning things is that in order to have the response time you need, you are going to have to AI-enable drones. Otherwise, you're simply not militarily competitive, but obviously that raises some questions. Right. And how you design that and how you think about safety and how you think about, like, you do not want a drone that is going to get AGI. Right.

You want a drone that is AI in a very narrow scope. But like we could put our power grid on a separate network that simply is not accessible by bots. We could, for example, have a contingency plan to drop the internet in the whole country at once if that became necessary, right? If it looks like there is a real attack happening, right? And that would be terrible and there would be all sorts of fallout. But like you are, you are assuming that this is. Well, I mean, I mean, first, two things. I mean, one, one, they can't do that.

I mean, they can't even update people would die. They owe something like a trillion dollars to upgrade our power grids even at all. But yeah, you do that when you are worried that more people will die because the AIs have gotten intelligent and their drones are coming for you. That is the moment at which you drop the whole internet, right? Like, we should have contingency plans for all of this, right? But I am not that concerned about the Mold Book agents. I think it's interesting, Ross, that you frame this as, as,

AI disaster rather than doom? Because, I mean, the sort of two competing, but in a way, similar visions that you get from people around AI are like super intelligence and, you know, forming like a, you know, something that, you know, is ultimately not just much smarter than humans, but maybe on a moral plane with humans or above us, people who are, you know, even maybe agnostic about whether we need a continuation of humanity. We're trying to like build this transhuman thing. And then the flip side of that, again, is, you know, like the AI will be, you know, so powerful that will cause, that will destroy all of us and will all die. They're both like theological visions of AI in a way.

And I'm wondering, you know, first of all, like, do you shy away from that just because you believe in like a more normal manner in God? No, it cuts both ways, right? So if you have a kind of, you know, metaphysical conception of what human beings are and what consciousness is, right? Then on the one hand, that should make you skeptical of people. claiming that they are going to just sort of build something that's way, you know, way better than humans in every way when they can't even tell you like what consciousness is

or where it comes from, right? And now, the A number of the AI people will insist that consciousness doesn't matter to these debates and that just like, you know, the kind of midwit bots that we have now, if they all swarm together, they could do a lot of damage. So to a super intelligence that was incredibly good at math, but was not self-aware, could also do tons and tons of damage and even wipe out humanity.

And maybe that's true. But it does seem, it does still seem to me conceptually, like a lot of AI stuff, you know, if you read, just the way people in AI talk about it. Like, they sort of think in the end that there will be some kind of consciousness there. And I don't think, so again, as a person with a religious framework on the world, I don't think you can like nuts and bolts your way to building consciousness. So that makes me skeptical. However, consciousness from a religious point of view is also a mysterious property, right? Like, it's not like the religious have this kind of sort of certainty ourselves about what is consciousness exactly who can become conscious, right? And so,

So you can also see the AI work as a kind of like summoning, right? Like if we build it, they will come. Like you are built, you are sort of performing a kind of quasi-religious exercise, trying to bring some kind of, what are we summoning? You're summoning us a god, a small G-god. Like people in Silicon Valley think they are summoning a small G-god,

pretty explicitly, right? Right. And, you know, if you read, read the Old Testament, you know, you're like, I mean, when people sit down and build an altar, you know, sometimes nothing happens because they're not talking to the true God, but there are other spirits in the world floating around that you could potentially, you know, get in contact with. And so I don't think the religious person can simply say, oh, absolutely, these guys will never, they'll never get any kind of like,

discarnate consciousness involved here. You can't say that with 100% certainty. If you think that, like, you know, spirits exist. Are you floating AI as a driver of the second coming? I think my, my baseline view is that AI is a, like other technological revolutions, it is an extremely fraught and dangerous form of technology that we need to figure out a way to master. and that religion and, you know, that God wants us to master it rather than be mastered by it. That's basically, that's sort of my basic religious framework. But, I mean, you know, you've got a bunch of the richest people in the world sitting around in Northern California talking about transcending their physical bodies and living forever and, you know, summoning a God. It's, you have to leave open the apocalyptic possibility, I think, there.

if you allow for apocalyptic possibilities at all, which the nice rationalist doesn't. I see there as an extension of the like the self-importance of people in Silicon Valley that they've had for 30 years. I mean, my line about California is like I love L.A. and I hate San Francisco. And it's because everybody in San Francisco thinks they're saving the world and it's sort of insufferable. And nobody in L.A. is under the misimpression that they're saving the world. And it makes them actually much more down to earth than people farther north in California. But it just seems like, I think they think they're building God. I'm not saying that you buy that theological proposition.

But like, I obviously don't think they are actually building God. Right. But I think that they are building something that seems to me potentially quite powerful in a spirit that carries with it some dangers, I would say. What did you make of your conversation with Peter Thiel a few months ago in which you talked a lot about this and also about. he gave all these speeches about the Antichrist. And it seems like he thinks the Antichrist is going to try to stop us from doing AI development. Yeah, I'm a little puzzled by where exactly Teal stands right now. I feel like Teal had a very compelling, to me, at least, theory of where we were as a civilization for about 10 or 15 years.

I wrote a book, basically that called The Deccan Society that sort of took some of its, ideas from Teal, ideas about sort of stagnation as a central force in modernity. So that's sort of of Teal's background, right? He thinks things are stagnant. He thinks progress has been an illusion. And we're trying to sort of punch through stagnation and escape. And then he sees wokeness and all its poms and works as kind of the final boss of stagnation, right? You know, Greta Thunberg wants to, you know, have degrowth and make everyone live in, you know, the sort of progressive commune and, you know, and just die there, right? And Teal is against that. But that, that it seems to me, is a much more powerful idea in like 2019 or 2020 when wokeness is sort of at its peak than it is in like 2025 or 2026 where it seems like whatever is happening with AI, wokeness ain't going to stop it. Yeah.

Right? I think that's fair. Like, Greta Thunberg is not standing between us and the AI revolution. And the countries that are doing Greta Thunberg stuff in Europe, they're just like, they're behind everyone else in AI. If they don't want AI, then, you know, the Gulf monarchies will build the endless data centers or whatever. So, Teal is a very, very smart guy, as, you know, many people have noted. And I sometimes feel like, you know, like maybe there's some misdirection here. Like the argument that the Antichrist is Greta Thunberg just seems really weird to make right at this particular moment.

Megan, Ben, what do you make of that? I don't think Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist? Yes. I mean. Well, but I mean like sort of like being like residually super focused on woke is actually one of the like less weird aspects of Peter Thiel. There's like lots of people who just, I mean, you know, I have, you know, office politics grievances from that period that take up more space in my head than they probably should. So like of all of the weird things about Peter Thiel's worldview that he's like a little bit too focused on excesses of 2019 right now, I think is actually like one of the most relatable things about him. It is. No, it is. Except that Teal has always taken such pride in like getting way outside conventional wisdom to a fault. maybe. And this just seems sort of like he's still in his own conventional wisdom from

2020. And I don't know. If you read like, he wrote an Antichrist piece for first things. He co-wrote this essay about the Antichrist. It was just sort of a survey of theories of the Antichrist. You know, there's ways in which you read that. And it's kind of like he's winking at the reader from time to time. It's like, you know, maybe maybe the anti-Christ. Christ, like, is Greta Thunberg? Or maybe it's, you know, a gay transhumanist billionaire who can say? I don't know. I mean, you know, I've, I've always, I've always been a Peter Thiel appreciator just in terms of the how he has thought about the world. I think he basically had broadly the correct understanding of where the Western world was for about 15 years. And so I'm just, I'm not certain what to make of the Greta Thunberg Antichrist reading right now.

I do think that the, the woke period is going to end up being like the 1960s, where every, no, I mean, in the sense that. The most transformative decade. No. In fact, like, so I grew up on the Upper West Side and I hadn't, there were people who were kind of relics of the 1960s, a lot of them hanging around. they had been youthful activists, they had amassed a kind of surprising amount of power in a very short period of time. And you could see that the rest of their lives was defined by not understanding how that power evaporated in the space of 10 years. And by 1980, it's gone. And, I mean, not in like local New York City politics. They're still around, but even there, they have lost a lot of influence.

And in the rest of the country, they've lost all their influence. And they were just kind of bewildered by it. And they had all of these weird conspiracy theories about how corporations or, like, you know, the Catholic Church or some other group had intervened to stop the people from seizing the power that they wanted. But, I mean, it's also true that the conservatives were defined by their rejection at the 1960s, that somehow all American politics post-1960s, in part because that's the boomers. and the boomers are this giant generation. And as Yuval Levin is observed, like, every political moment is just about how the boomers are, like every era is just about how the boomers are feeling about their lives right now. But all of politics, you know, like in the 90s when the first Gulf War happened,

there's all these protests that are clearly just 60s nostalgia by people who had not been alive in the 1960s when I was in college. And it just shaped and colored American politics for, the next 60 years. And then that kind of ended. And now we are in the era where I think everyone who lived through the Great Awakening is just shaped by it in a way that it's not going to just be over for them. They're not going to move on there. And I think that that's one reason that it obsesses people out of proportion to the actual power it has now at the moment. Having lived through that moment, you were just kind of permanently scarred, I don't know, improved, I guess, if you're on the left, but whatever it is, you have been changed.

People who protested at the WTO in Seattle also said this shit. Like, like everyone feels like it's going to go on forever, but eventually it doesn't go on forever. Eventually it's the 60s end, right? Right, no, no, I agree with that, but the fact that people really felt like it might go on forever, and many of them were terrified by that, they, like, they can't just unlearn that terror. They are now just a little bit traumatized. And I think that that may be causing Peter Thiel to overindex on the Greta Thunberg theory of the Antichrist. Sure, but I mean, I guess to Ross's point,

like, you know, that it's a normal human thing to end up, like, stuck in that psychodrama. But if you really believe that you have knowledge about the Antichrist, I mean, actually, the funny thing, Ross, about, you know, you mentioning the first things essay is I'm a little surprised by the the sort of openness that religious conservatives have to some of these tech-right figures. I mean, Peter Thiel is this gay guy who is out here promoting a heresy. I mean, I think that's fair to say, right? Like, I'm surprised- Sodommy?

No, no, sodomy is just a sin. It's not the heresy. But, like, shouldn't Christians be sort of offended that Peter Thiel is out here, like, not just offering this theory, but saying that it's a Christian theory? I think that Christians are. in a challenging position of trying to figure out, in a way they're in the same position as Teal. They're trying to figure out who is their main enemy right now. Like, what is, what is the actual, you know, what is the danger, what is the threat? Who is the enemy? Right. It's Satan. And Satan

wears a lot of masks and so on, right? But you have, you know, I think religious conservatives themselves got, you know, there were sort of a break point with Trump where a faction of people who had been religious conservatives decided that Trump was the core threat. And my colleague David French, Russell Moore, like, you know, there's sort of a cluster that made that decision. And then the larger group of religious conservatives essentially decided that wokeness, woke progressivism was the great threat and sort of organized around that. Okay, so woke progressivism crests, weakens, maybe is dissolving. And so suddenly you have out of that these allies and friends of convenience or not. And you're trying to decide, like, are these people really my friends or

are they my actual, my ultimate enemies, right? And I think that's where some religious conservatives are at least with like, you know, Musk and Teal are sort of different figures. But they're both figures who have some sort of ideas and perspectives that overlap with a religious conservative perspective on the world? Like, there is a basic kind of tech right assumption that the world was made for people, you know, and we can, we can do things in the world. You know, we're not sort of sunk in a kind of atheistic pessimism and despair, which is where I think certain kinds of wokeness end up. And then you have, you know, Teal believes in God in some way. And then you have, you know, Teal believes in God in some way. Teal is some kind of Christian. So is he someone who you should be allied with

and sort of try and draw towards your side? Or is he someone who, you know, whose heresies are such that they become, in the end, the defining thing that you have to be opposed to. And I think there's just a lot of uncertainty among Christian. Like there are people like Steve Bannon, you know, who is himself a religiously ambiguous figure, let's say, right? But like there's certainly a number of both religious conservatives and religious people who are not conservatives, who would just say, TIL, Silicon Valley, AI, this stuff is the enemy. But people who ended up allied with the tech right, I think, are more in the position of trying to decide, like, can people in that world come closer to us?

Can we, like, work with them? Can we convert Elon Musk to Christianity? Or is this alliance going to break up and we're going to be in a kind of apocalyptic showdown with them soon? Open question. As the title of your podcast says, these are interesting times. Ross Douthith, thank you so much for joining us this week. Thank you, guys. This was fun.

Megan, Ben, I will see you very soon. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We're a production of very serious media. Amy Keene produced and edited this episode. Jennifer Swaddick mixed the episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosier. Thanks for listening. Stay cool out there.