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

On this week's show Tyler Austin Harper joins to talk about his reporting on the Mellon Foundation and its role in pushing humanities academia in the direction of progressive social activism, his on-the-ground take from Maine on Graham Platner’s Senate campaign, what literature can teach us about the politics of human extinction, and why the commentariat is souring on all these polyamory memoirs we keep getting.Sign up for updates from Central Air 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

On this week's show: congressional candidate Alex Bores — he’s a New York state representative and author of the controversial AI regulation law, the RAISE Act — joins us to talk about the fight between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, and about how rules should be made about how AI gets used in the public sector. We also got to talk with him about Ben’s “Free Willy” experiment, how to deal with the electrical demands of data centers, and what Manhattan in particular needs from Congress.Plus: we have an update on Iran — Ben now thinks he may have been a little too optimistic about how this war would go, we check in again on the financial markets, and we discuss the rumors that the new ayatollah doesn’t exactly spend a lot of time in the straight of Hormuz, if you catch our drift. We also talk about the disappointing housing bill working its way through congress with a big, bad idea from Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, and we look at McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski and his pride in his hot new product, the Big Arch.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

On this week's show: Mike Solana of Pirate Wires joins us to talk about Silicon Valley. He’s been talking with lots of billionaires who are taking steps to exit California in anticipation of a proposed wealth tax. We discuss how credible those threats are, and what makes the wealth tax different from prior soak-the-rich tax proposals. Plus: the alleged “Gay Tech Mafia,” of which Wired magazine says Mike is a member, the gyrating price of oil, and the outrage over Timothée Chalamet saying “no one cares” about ballet or opera.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

On this week's show: Jesse Singal, co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast, joins us to discuss the shift toward more cautious thinking among (some of) the U.S. medical societies about youth gender medicine. (Jesse wrote on this for The New York Times last week.) We talk about how “The Science” got so far ahead of the science on this topic, and the forces that made a change in thinking faster to come to Europe than the U.S. We also talk about the bizarre, totalitarian media environment that has surrounded these issues, and about why the side question of sports has often gotten more media attention than the issue of medical treatment.Plus: Ben, Megan and I discuss Ben’s surprising optimism about the situation in Iran, which I do not share.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

On this week's show: The Bulwark's Tim Miller joins to discuss his recent trip to Minnesota, the apparent continuation of significant but less bombastic ICE operations in the state, and why we differ on the extent to which immigration is a political pitfall for Democrats in 2026, 2028 and 2029 — and on how much is gained by talking a lot about how terrible Donald Trump is.Plus: we talk about the especially lively debate on left-wing Twitter about whether it is pro-social for mentally ill homeless people to pee on the subway, and an undercurrent of discontent that’s driving that debate — New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is increasingly breaking with the far left. As Tim notes, one thing that’s good about being charismatic is you can defy your core supporters and they let you get away with it.We also talk about the Supreme Court rebuke of Trump’s tariffs, the Citrini memo, and listener feedback on Trump impressions.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

On this week's show: Cartoons Hate Her joins us to make her argument that Democrats need a presidential candidate who “fucks.” First we try to figure out what this figurative sense of “fuck” means exactly — “fucking is in your heart,” says CHH — and then we apply the analysis to the field of politics. Some calls are easy — John F. Kennedy fucked; Michael Dukakis did not fuck — but there are closer calls, like Margaret Thatcher, who may have fucked in some weird British psychosexual way, and there are candidates who fucked too much, like Gary Hart. We look at the elephant in the room — Gavin Newsom, who obviously fucks but obviously should not be the Democratic nominee — and we scour the rest of the field for potential fuckage. Perhaps Josh Shapiro would fuck if we got him some contact lenses and a leather jacket? We consider all possible angles.Plus: We have a very special surprise guest who helps us understand the bizarre phenomenon of “looksmaxxing,” recently covered in a 2,800-word New York Times profile of Braden Peters, a.k.a. Clavicular, the famous 20-year-old moron who improves his bone structure by hitting himself in the face with a hammer. (Peters, unsurprisingly, is a Newsom supporter.) And CHH gives her take on one of my favorite questions: are straight people okay?Sign up for updates 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

On this week's show: everyone loves to talk about affordability these days, or more specifically, they love to complain about unaffordability. But what are they actually complaining about? At least four things, we think: inflation, interest rates, real incomes, and income distribution — or, basically, the whole economy. We invited Natasha Sarin, a professor at Yale Law School who co-directs The Budget Lab there, and who previously served as an economic official at the Treasury Department under President Biden, to join us for this conversation. Plus: interest rates, and what might happen to them if President Trump gets his way on monetary policy, grading Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh on a curve, and “white people tacos."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

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

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

Listeners: join Josh, Megan and Ben on Friday at 12:30 pm Eastern / 9:30 am Pacific for a video chat on Substack. Go to centralairpodcast.com for more details. This week: we discuss our exasperation at Greenlandpolitik and consider an endgame where Trump simply declares that he has Greenland without actually doing anything besides coloring in the map. Plus: the Shapiro-Harris feud, defining a woman (harder than you'd think!), and the already-backfiring California billionaire tax.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