Central Air

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.com This week: Jason Furman joins the show this week for an economy-focused discussion. We start by looking at why public views about the economy have gotten so negative, the persistent economic problems people are so mad about, the obvious solution (it's fiscal consolidation — that is, tax increases and spending c...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.com This week: the case for AI regulation and what it would look like, with Dean Ball, who helped to shape AI policy in the Trump White House and is soon to join OpenAI. Is bank regulation a good model for AI regulation, where companies follow rules about making their own rules? We discuss that, and whether we have...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.com This week: Andrew Sullivan joins us from Provincetown to assess the emergent Iran deal. Paying subscribers also get our discussion of racial unrest and immigration politics in the U.K., our debate how much Europe really needs to learn from the United States (a lot, I’d say, and not just about air conditioning),...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.com This week: Matt Yglesias joins us to recap WelcomeFest and discuss “dog-whistle moderation," and why the factional forces seeking to drag the Democratic Party to the center need to advocate specific moderation on specific issues. Then: why Maine Democratic voters are attached to Graham Platner despite his manif...

Listen to two conversations Josh, Ben and Megan had at WelcomeFest, the center-left organizing conference: one with San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins, and the other with Tejano singing legend-turned-congressional candidate Bobby Pulido. More next week, and thanks to those of you who joined us for our happy hour in Washington last week. Sign up for updates about the show and future happy hours at www...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.com This week: Reihan Salam of the conservative Manhattan Institute on the state of the center and the right in cities. Why have we been asked to support politicians like Andrew Cuomo who discredit the center? Is Zohran Mandani really doing such a bad job? Can conservatives and cities be persuaded to take interest...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.com As noted last week, we don’t have a regular episode this week, due to the Memorial Day holiday. We’ll be back with two episodes next week — one with Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute, and one with content from Welcomefest , including an interview with Mark Cuban. We do have some bonus content f...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.com On this week's show: Why is Europe poor? Megan wrote about the issue this week , and Sam Bowman of Works in Progress magazine joins us from London to discuss our differences in work culture, leisure, and how we dry our clothes. Plus, we talk about the ignominious unpopularity of Keir Starmer’s Labour, which has...

On this week's show: Robinson Meyer , executive editor of the excellent Heatmap News, talks with us about why oil has not gotten even more expensive, if there is hope for permitting reform, why Republicans hate windmills so much, and if there ever been a greater environmental advocate than ‘Degrowth Donald.' And where can we put data centers so they won’t bother anyone? Also this week: Josh's desp...

On this week's show: Gary Leff, author of the View From the Wing blog on the airline industry, joins us to discuss who killed Spirit Airlines — the airline made strategic errors, but it could have been profitably acquired by JetBlue years ago if not for a series of Biden-era anti-trust policy failures . The Trump administration tried to commit its own policy error — it wanted to buy the airline, m...

On this week's show: Sean Trende joins us to discuss the continued devolvement of the gerrymandering wars. Sean is an election analyst for Real Clear Politics and lecturer in political science at The Ohio State University. With this week’s Supreme Court decision in Callais , even more opportunities to seek partisan advantage will arise. We talk with Sean about how to define and measure ‘fairness,’...

On this week's show: We joined in the discourse about whether dog owners have gotten too big for their britches . (Dogs are sycophants, I say — at least cats have self-respect.) We discussed the wisdom of New York’s proposed tax on fancy pied-à-terre apartments. Axios reporter Alex Thompson, who caused a bit of consternation at last year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner , joined us to talk abo...

On this week's show: Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini joins to discuss the strength of Trump's multiracial populist coalition amid the Iran war. He offers his take on how the Republican party can avoid a cataclysm in this year’s midterm — it has, in part, to do with the semiquincentennial — and we discuss whether every election is going to be a “change” election from now onward. Also this week,...

On this week's show: Daniel Biss joins to discuss the changing way Democrats are relating to Israel. Daniel is the mayor of Evanston, Ill., and very likely soon to be a member of Congress representing Chicago’s north side and northern suburbs. He just won the Democratic nomination in a hugely expensive primary election — over $10 million was spent, much of it by AIPAC-linked groups dissatisfied wi...

On this week's show: Marc Caputo, White House Correspondent for Axios, joins the podcast to help us understand how Trump and his advisers are deciding what to do with the Iran war, and how they are preparing (or not) for the domestic political blowback from an extended disruption in oil markets. We also get his view from south Florida on the ongoing Republican dominance of that state — what the pa...

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...

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 de...

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 say...

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 fast...

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...

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...

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 Bu...

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 mo...

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 Depar...

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 woma...