Not Even Mad: Charles Lehman & Brad Carson

Summary

The Gist: Not Even Mad (Charles Lehman & Brad Carson) – Nov 13, 2025

Overview

In this special "Not Even Mad" crossover episode, host Mike Pesca explores the intersection of American politics, culture, and ethical dilemmas with guests Brad Carson (President, Americans for Responsible Innovation; former congressman and university president) and Charles Fain Lehman (Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Senior Editor at City Journal). The trio debates everything from government shutdown fallout and the tactical value of political issues, to generational malaise and the regulation of vices like gambling, marijuana, and AI—without ever losing their "responsibly provocative" tone.

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Main Topic Breakdown & Key Discussions

1. Media Ethics and Fame in Journalism

• Pesca opens reflecting on the leak of Jeffrey Epstein files, which implicated high-profile journalists like Michael Wolfe in ethically questionable conduct:
  • Success in journalism today is often correlated with unethical behavior, unlike artists or business leaders. "You can't reach the very heights of journalism...without getting quite a bit unethical." (04:45)
• He laments the shift from figures like Woodward and Wallace to the likes of Tucker Carlson, blurring the lines between journalism and performance.

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2. Government Shutdown: Who Won and Why?

[Start: 11:24]

• Pesca tosses out a provocative headline: "After this shutdown, surrender, Chuck Schumer needs to go."
• Lehman and Carson dissect the tactic and political fallout.
  • Lehman: "The whole thing is a Hail Mary on their part...their base is incredibly mad at us for not doing anything and not resisting with all the power that we don't have." (12:15)
  • Carson: "Democrats often lack strategy in all aspects...they could have held out, but when you recognize...you're not going to be able to hold your caucus together...starting the government shutdown is an ineffective strategy." (13:45)
• Both agree the immediate public inconvenience did elevate the issue of healthcare affordability (14:37), but see little long-term political cost.

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3. The Value (or Folly) of Solving Issues in Politics

[15:41]

• Pesca wonders aloud if solving political issues is a disadvantage for politicians: "If you ever solve a political issue as a politician, are you doing yourself a disservice...?"
• Lehman: Sees this dynamic with Trump and border policy: "He did it, he won, he got what he wanted, and as a result, voters don't care anymore." (15:41)
• The panel muses about the possible strategic importance (and hidden risks) of the filibuster.

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4. 2026 Elections, Data Centers, and the Policy-Primary Nexus

[18:50]

• Carson: Predicts that the shutdown will be forgotten by 2026, but spots "data centers" as an emerging Democratic talking point: "There's a lot of concern out there on the ground about electricity prices, about water usage..." (18:55)
• Lehman: The shutdown's real impact might be on party primaries, not the general: "It could have a meaningful impact on primary decision making and how the base...think about who they're going to put up..." (19:51)
• Carson: Brings up the personal political calculus, e.g., New Hampshire's Shaheen family navigating shutdown blowback (21:34).

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5. Centrism, Vibes, and Intergenerational Discord on the Left

[22:11]

• Pesca & guests discuss the difficulty of establishing "sexy centrism" in the Democratic Party, with Lehman arguing that generational, ideological, and insider-outsider divides all "cluster together." (23:30)

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6. Gen Z Malaise and the 'Affordability Crisis'

[25:03]

• Carson supports the view that spiritual/cultural malaise -- "a sense of ennui" -- eclipses purely material concerns: "
  • "There's obviously a real affordability crisis...But the broader kind of malaise...reflects something far deeper than I can't afford a house." (26:11)
• Lehman: Argues that while Americans are materially better off, "the opportunity cost of switching from single to married, of starting a family, is so much higher than it used to be." (27:31)
• The group debates how much life-stage delay is policy-driven vs. cultural.

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7. Culture vs. Policy: Are Political Problems Now Cultural or Solvable?

[32:40]

• Carson: Most societal changes stem from "broader problems of modernity" dating back decades. "Politicians can describe them, but they elude a politician's control." (31:32)
• Lehman: Pushes back—some crises, like housing and energy, are driven by bad policy and could be solved ("We could produce way more housing in the United States...That's largely a regulatory issue." [34:06])

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8. The Persistence and Evolution of Culture Wars

[36:12]

• Carson: "The culture wars have always been with us over the last 50-60 years, and they're just manifesting in slightly different ways today." (36:38)
• Lehman: Suggests that as the US gets richer, "cultural issues raise in their relative salience… effective cudgels because they are sort of the thing that remains on the table." (37:40)
• On issues like same-sex marriage and marijuana, the group probes how "consensus" can hide persistent divides and even reversal in public opinion.

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9. Regulating Vices: Gambling, Drugs, and AI

[44:11]

• Sports gambling scandals have exploded. Lehman: "I do think there's a backlash coming...We need to get rid of these player-specific prop bets. You really shouldn't be able to bet on whether somebody is going to throw a specific ball or strike. That's crazy..." (45:17)
• On AI, Carson: "We don’t have to accept a deterministic future. We can control it… [but] there's a lot more money...propping up the entire American, perhaps global economy." (47:27, 54:51)
• The group connects high friction (difficulty accessing vices) with harm reduction. "There should be some friction. It shouldn't just be that accessible to every single person." - Carson (48:18)

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10. Can We Learn from Experience? Can Regulation Work?

[50:33]

• Lehman: Success and failure in regulating vices follows a cycle of relaxing and rebanning as harms become apparent: "The iron law...is that we do swing back and forth between those two excesses..." (50:33)
• Both doubt our ability to regulate perfectly, but see promise in dumb/simple bans (cigarettes/alcohol models discussed).

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11. Goat Grinders (Pet Peeves Segment)

[60:06]

• Pesca borrows a friend’s peeve: confused use of "EST" for event times.
• Carson: "I consider it immoral to recline your seat in coach class."
• Lehman: Unleashed dogs: "Your dog could eat my child. I'm not happy about that situation…"

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Mike Pesca (on journalism):

  • "You can achieve great levels of success, influence and acclaim and be ethical in most professions except journalism." – [04:34]

• Brad Carson (on Democratic strategy):

  • "You will then have to defect. Right. You should know that probably even starting the government shutdown is an ineffective strategy." – [13:45]

• Charles Fain Lehman (on political incentives):

  • "If you ever solve a political issue as a politician, are you actually doing yourself a disservice in terms of future elections?" – [15:41]
  • "The iron law of the history of vicious substances...is that we do swing back and forth between those two excesses." – [50:33]

• On generational malaise:

  • "The reason people are living in their mom's basement gooning is not because they can't afford a place. There are other options than that." – Carson [26:11]

• On regulating vices:

  • "The virtue of just saying this is banned...is that it's simple and it's dumb, and it's relatively hard to get wrong because it's simple and dumb." – Lehman [53:11]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:04] – Epstein files & media ethics
• [10:34] – Introductions & humor
• [11:24] – Shutdown: who won, who caved & debate on tactics
• [15:41] – Political value of not solving issues
• [18:50] – 2026 impact & emerging topics like data centers
• [22:11] – Discussion on centrism, generational divides
• [25:03] – Generational malaise, affordability crisis
• [32:40] – Policy vs. cultural problems
• [36:12] – Culture wars, social consensus, shifting issues
• [44:11] – Gambling, AI, and regulating vices
• [50:33] – The cyclical nature of regulation, regulatory pessimism
• [60:06] – Goat grinders: pet peeve segment

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Conclusion

Pesca, Lehman, and Carson traverse American politics from legislative tactics to the malaise of modernity and the ethics of regulation with insight and humor. Whether parsing the purpose of the shutdown, warning about the downstream effects of innovation and deregulation, or commiserating about the perils of airline seat reclining, they offer a robust, thought-provoking but never dogmatic discussion—true to the “Not Even Mad” spirit.

Transcript

[Mike Pesca]

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[Charles Fain Lehman]

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee minutes ago literally releasing emails that they say were written by Jeffrey Epstein that explicitly specifically mentioned Donald Trump by name.

[Mike Pesca]

There's almost no verb you could use without getting icky. And the ickiest of all, certainly not, but right in the middle of it. And for my purposes, what I'm going to talk about today is Michael Wolfe, one of the best known journalists working and he's also, I guess, a broker and giving advice to Jeffrey Epstein all over these files. He is one of a few household ish names in the world of journalism. He recently started doing Instagram or social media posts from his house and Emma Gansett and he wears weird sweaters and people love that too. Most people know Michael Wolf is more so than, I don't know, all but two or three other journalists. Who's a better known journalist today who's still working? Bob Woodward is maybe from the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, I don't know. I think maybe more people know Michael Wolf. But what do we say about Michael Wolf who not just in this instance throughout his career has shown himself to be totally unethical? Well, Isaac Saul, my friend Isaac Saul of Tango was tweeting today the latest Epstein emails are bad for Trump, but arguably they are far worse for Michael Wolf, who is literally game planning with Epstein about how defend himself in the media? This is journalism. Well, no. And that's what people always say about Wolf and others of his ilk. Once you get to this level of unethical behavior, you're not doing journalism but that level of unethical behavior is also greatly correlated with success, renown, financial success, attention, who's the most successful journalist or the one with the most attention, who shapes the agenda the most. Sadly, it's Tucker Carlson. Now I know what you're thinking, but he's not a journalist, right? Once you get to that level of success, you can't be a journalist. It's very odd for my profession and it wasn't always as such. Like I said Bob Woodward and Bernstein, they were definitely household name journalists. And the guys at 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace, that meant something. I mean there are journalists now. Ronan Farrow maybe is a person who most people know, but I think it's because he's a pharaoh and possibly a Sinatra. One or two of the CNN or network anchors they know, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, she's an opinion journalist, but she's a journalist. Personally, I think Patrick Rattan Keefe, that guy might be the best and most interesting journalist working today. I also said Maggie Haberman, but they are nowhere near the Michael Wolf, let alone Tucker Carlson levels of success slash unethical behavior. In other professions, professions that aren't in the truth telling business, you can be very successful and still be ethical. All right, people are going to jump down my throat for the next two but in the world of business, Larry Fink of BlackRock and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, those guys are ethical. They're ethical within the ethics of their industry and they're also the most successful. There are successful unethical businessmen, but they don't and aren't as rich as Fink and I think as diamonds. I just randomly was saying to myself, who are the most successful artists? Are they the scammers? Because there are artists who have been put in jail and who scammed, but they're not Jeffrey Coons and Carol Walker and Cindy Sherman or Damien Hurst or David Hockney. They don't seem unethical. You can achieve great levels of success, influence and acclaim and be ethical in most professions except journalism. You can't reach the very heights of journalism, which is a guardian of ethics and a referee of ethics without getting quite a bit unethical. And it wasn't always such and this is why I mentioned Mike Wallace and don't even need to mention Dan Rather or Johnny Apple or any of the other giants back when we had a monoculture. It's just odd. It's just an observation and it comes in the front of other excellent observations because today we have a not even mad episode. My Guests are Brad Carson. He is the president of Americans for Responsible Innovation. I talked to him. And if you're listening to this in the Not Even Mad feed, there's a good, I don't know, 5 minute extra q and A about Brad's time in the House of Representatives and especially running for Senate. And if you have to hate your opponent, he lost to a Republican from Oklahoma who I very much respected. And so I asked Brad about that. That's a bonus only if you listen in the Not Even Mad feed. But if you listen in this feed, you'll hear Brad talk to Charles Fain Lehman, who is a young guy who writes about young guys. He's 31, he writes about vices. He talks pretty quickly rivaling this guy. And both, and this is very important to note are ethical. Not even mad. Up next.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

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[Mike Pesca]

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[Brad Carson]

25%.

[Mike Pesca]

Really? Was it a fun 25%?

[Brad Carson]

Sometimes. It was always interesting. But we have been losing for a few years, so it's been. It's been rough. Yeah.

[Mike Pesca]

The basketball team was good for a while. And, of course, the women's diving team is off the charts. Charles Fain Lehman is also here. He's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a senior editor of City Journal. He focuses on certain antisocial behaviors. So that fits in, I guess, with AI and being in university, if not the president of a university. What's your favorite antisocial behavior, Charles?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Oh, gosh, I have so many. Personally, I like a beer at the end of the day. I work a lot on substance control policy, and people like, you're a teetoter. I'm like, no, you know, I'll have a. I'll have a drink occasionally. I've tried drugs once or twice in my life. Nothing very exciting.

[Mike Pesca]

So, yeah, see, I never have. I should. I should write for the Manhattan Institute about never having tried drugs.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Really? You never smoked pot?

[Mike Pesca]

Oh, does that count?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

It's legal now. Yes.

[Mike Pesca]

So I've never tried a drug that isn't currently legal, is what I'm saying. That is true. All right, so let us talk about the shutdown. And I'm trying to figure out who won, who caved, why it matters. I'll read you a headline. This is from the Nation magazine. After this shutdown, surrender, Chuck Schumer needs to go. The Democratic leaders cave in. Makes it all too clear it's time to clean house in the Senate. But he didn't even want the shutdown to end. I think maybe people just don't like Chuck Schumer. Charles, did you have a theory of this case going in either and take it wherever you want, but who would win? Or if the Democrats were wise or if this was at all a winnable tactic?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

I mean, look, I think the whole thing is a Hail Mary on their part, Right? Their model is we don't have control of either House of Congress or the White House. We don't have any power. And also our base is incredibly mad at us for not doing anything and not resisting with all the power that we don't have. There's a great article in Axios, I think, a month ago about Democratic voters want Representatives talking about Democratic voters want them to literally be, like, violently assaulted in the name of standing up to Donald Trump. And so I think that they felt an imperative to do something, and this was something. And so the best was like, hey, maybe it'll work out. Maybe we'll get something. Maybe this will play well. I did not expect it to go particularly well. And the reason for this is, like, if you're in a standoff negotiating with Donald Trump, you're probably not going to win unless you have leverage because he doesn't care. But in some senses they won in the court of public opinion insofar as they did much better in the polls than I think anyone expected them to. But at the end of the day they weren't going to get anything concrete out of this. And so I'm not surprised when the airport started to have trouble, when the snap cliffs started coming up on the horizon, enough moderates from swing states looked at it and said yeah, I can't play this game anymore, sorry.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, Brad, I guess it's two part question. Do you think they won? And when you were in Congress a little bit of a different period. But do you know where you would have been on this issue?

[Brad Carson]

You know, I think I agree with mostly what Charles said there. Democrats often lack strategy in all aspects of their campaigning. I say that as a former Democratic congressman and what you saw in the shutdown was fundamentally a lack of strategy. Right. They could have held out. And if they thought they could hold that line, then you maybe at some point in time you would have had a concession. But when you recognize, as Charles said, that when the snap benefits start getting cut, when air traffic becomes affected, that you're not going to be able to hold your caucus together and you will then have to defect. Right. You should know that probably even starting the government shutdown is an ineffective strategy. So it's kind of frustrating for me not because the American, not because of the shutdown per se. The American people are really the winner of people coming back into to having the government open up once more. What's frustrating is there's not a sense of strategic play among Democratic leaders.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, I don't know if the Democrats acted strategically or unstrategically, but I think there's a good case to be made that what Wine wound up working out was the best case scenario for them. And also if they had known that yesterday or two days ago would have happened, they should have signed up for it because what happened was certainly inconveniencing many people who are traveling and making the lives of SNAP beneficiaries even more fraught than they are. That's true. That has a cost. But they really did raise the salience of the issue of health care affordability. But they didn't solve the issue. And maybe quite cynically, both of those things are better for the Democrats. I mean, I am beginning to wonder if you ever solve a political issue as a politician, are you actually doing yourself a disservice in terms of future elections. I think that solving issues sometimes just takes them off the table and then the voters can take you for granted and possibly vote for the other guy. What do you think, Charles?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, well, so, so two thoughts on that. I mean, I think that that dynamic is true. Right. The biggest problem that Donald Trump has right now. Okay, Donald Trump has a lot of problems right now. One of the problems Donald Trump has right now is that he has been remarkably successful implementing his desired border policy. Right. Border CR have plummeted to close to zero. Immigration, therefore, is no longer a salient issue. And so his best issue in polling is just like he did it, he won, he got what he wanted, and as a result, voters don't care anymore. So I think that's true.

[Mike Pesca]

You know, and to interrupt and it's not like that should surprise him since his entire tactic during the Biden administration was don't solve the issue. It's better for us.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, well, and you know, now, now, now he's in that bind. You know, the other, the other though possibility of moving the ball forward here that I think would have had an impact is, and that maybe Democrats thought they were going to get is where Democrats and Trump are aligned is they both want to blow up the filibuster, right. They would like to get rid of the 60 vote threshold or at least significantly reduce it. And maybe they were betting on, I have no inside information. Maybe they were betting on the possibility that Trump would finally get to the caucus and say get rid of filibuster for this. I'm done with this. It drives me nuts. Which case they would have gotten more leverage going forward at the cost of very little, it turned out.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. Right. Brad, what do you think?

[Brad Carson]

I'm uncertain that Democrats are that thoughtful, to be honest with you. They had some kind of like stealth operation to allow the Republicans actually in the filibuster because they secretly wanted to use it themselves. In a couple of years when they come back into power, the Democrats could certainly use the filibuster. They're the ones who want to move government in a particular direction and more ambitious government agenda. So the filibuster actually cuts the Democrats far deeper and would certainly be incredibly subtle move to have the Republicans actually take the blame for jettisoning it. I would like to think through that. Thoughtful. I'm skeptical that's whether where they were going.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. And if they just wanted to, as a blunt instrument, ever end the filibuster, they could have and they don't. I mean, it's clear that they don't. It's clear that both parties are disincentivized to do so. And I'm actually ambivalent on it. But what do you think about Brad, what do you think about where this puts or if this changes calculations as to how Democrats Democrats might do in 2026? On the plus side, the argument would go like this. The Democrats show that they can stand up to Trump or the Republicans, and they've also showed that when they do, voters rewarded them. All the caveats of, you know, only a few municipalities and states actually voted on the downside. They had this issue, they had momentum and they threw it away. And they showed that they're able or prone to fold even when they have an advantage. Or then the other side is, I don't think people remember what happened in 2025 when they vot 2026. But what do you think?

[Brad Carson]

I'll go with the latter. I don't think people will really remember the government shutdown next year. Democrats are standing in a pretty good position. The issues seem to be going their way. There's disenchantment with the Trump administration. There's a lot of burgeoning issues like data centers, for example, the Democrats have a crispr message on. So I think Democrats are in a pretty good position for 2026. I doubt that the government shutdown affects many people's votes.

[Mike Pesca]

Yay or nay, you think data centers are going to be a big issue? I haven't thought of that one too much.

[Brad Carson]

Well, they were in Virginia. You know, Abigail Spanberg herself ran gently on the question. Been a much was raised out in Loudoun county, suburban Virginia, very wealthy home, more data centers in the nation than any other area A Democrat flipped a very strongly pro, very strong Trump district running on the issue of data centers. And if you've been in AI, I track the data center issue quite closely. There's a lot of concern out there on the ground about electricity prices, about water, water usage. Some of it is actually misinformation, not well informed, but it is actually quite visceral to people when they see their electricity bill going up. And the easiest explanation is, hey, that's that big data center down the street. And those oligarchs out in San Francisco are bringing this to you. That's a great Democratic message. And yeah, people talk about it.

[Mike Pesca]

Cheryl also won on utility costs and two Georgia commissioners, power commissioners seats were flipped. So, yeah, I should have thought of data centers more. Charles.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, on the, on the, on the 2026 question, you know, on the one hand, I agree with Brad that most people going to the polls aren't going to say how was my life affected by the 35 day or however long was shut down. And it's long now shut down last October slash November. Nobody's going to remember it. We know this from the history of shutdowns. On the other hand, I think that it could have a meaningful impact on primary decision making and how the base of the party, the primary voters of the party, think about who they're going to put up in 2026, which in turn will have an impact. So like, you know, I think about this in Maine where the sort of establishment candidate, Janet Mills is being contested by this outsider with a complicated history, Graham Platner, complicated tattoo choices. Graham Platner. You know, Platner has leaned very hard almost immediately into we need to get rid of Schirmer. We need to have a sort of new leadership. If the base is frustrated with the leadership class Democratic Party, they may be looking for alternatives who are often further left, who are often sort of outside of the Democratic mainstream or the median of the Democratic Party or the median of the leadership of the Democratic Party to, you know, as, as an alternative that can affect who they decide to put up, which can affect the balance of the Senate map, can affect the balance of the House also has, you know, implications over the long term. Chuck Schumer in many senses made this decision because he's worried about a primary challenge from Alessandro Ocasio Cortez. That's not 26, that's in 28, I think. But like that is, that is part of the calculus. I don't think the risk of that primary challenge has gone down as a result of everything that has transpired over the past month and change. So, you know, there can be knock on effects that matter.

[Brad Carson]

An interesting race to watch is up in New Hampshire. We have Gene Shaheen who supported the compromise, a full throated defense of actually making this compromise. Her daughter is actually running for a very purple House seat. And so you wonder about the dynamic that the Shaheen family is thinking. Did this compromise kind of burnish the family's bipartisan credentials? Will it help her daughter to that extent? Will it hurt her daughter by saying like, hey, you know, maybe I'm associating with your mom and your mom caved in. So that's an interesting dynamic that's very interpersonal there that will kind of like reveal what the kind of the complicated politics of the, of the shutdown.

[Mike Pesca]

Charles, you wrote about centrism and The Democratic Party and how Democrats need a robust centrist argument and just constituency as much as they have a leftist. Yeah, it's true. They have no. There's no sexy centrism going on. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder how much of this really does map on to appreciable political ideologies, left center and how much of it is just vibes and generation. Because is it Phil's and pair? It wouldn't be pair if you are a mom, but Phil's and mom, they're obviously of different generations. And I don't know that obviously. Janet Mills is 77, but she's not a capitulator. She is someone who certainly would articulate that she's willing to take the fight to Donald Trump. In fact, she did pretty famously and he went after her in terms of transgender athletes in the state of Maine. So my question is how much of it is Zora Momdani is a socialist, let's say, or Zoran Mamdani is a young guy who doesn't play well with the septuagenarians who are most associated with Demet, the Democratic power structure.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

I mean, I think what I'd say is that, you know, they, there's a reason that they go hand in hand and that you have, you see both among the young people on the left and the young people on the right, although that's, you know, the fewer young people on the right on average, just because how like the age effect works. But on both sides you see a greater openness to sort of being further out on the distribution of ideology. The, you know, Mamdani is a good example of this phenomenon. Yeah. It is the case that he's a 34 year old who has barely had a real job, but it's also the case that he positioned himself as running against the incumbent establishment in New York City. Right. Andrew Cuomo is like the creature of the machine. His campaign was built on essentially the argument, this is my patrimony. I have earned this. I'm Andrew Cuomo. Don't you know who I am? Unfortunately for him, too many New York City voters actually did know who he was, which is why he lost. But Mondani positioned himself as an outsider, understood. He ran the campaign not expecting to win, but hoping to build support for interested and awareness of the dsa, the Democratic Socialists of America. That was his goal. His goal is to build the sort of outsider coalition. So, you know, is it the case? Is it age, is it ideology? Is it sort of outsider versus insider? Look, I think all these things Clustered together. I don't think that people voters are strongly ideological, but they certainly associate more, less median ideologies with those other things in a way that is not totally off base is what I would say.

[Mike Pesca]

Yes, and it would be filet and mirror for. For mother and daughter. Now, Brad, you. I was thinking of something you retweeted and this was Timothy B. Lee wrote, the idea that zoomers are utterly screwed in material terms is total nonsense and I wish people would stop repeating it. Housing is a bit more expensive than previous generations. Many other necessities, food, clothing, most manufactured goods are cheaper. And you agreed. And you said the problem is in the spiritual realm, not necessarily divine, but in the philosophical moral realm. And I think this is true. And yet we have all heard that affordability is the message. D', Zor, you must be laser focused on it. But to what extent is the appeal of the affordability, or maybe the left leaning message genuine and an acknowledgement that the younger generations really, really are behind the eight ball in a way that other generations haven't been? And to what extent is it just the mass bummerism that comes with, I guess, being online and paying attention to other pessimists?

[Brad Carson]

I think it's both. There's obviously a real affordability crisis. You know, the average age for buying your first home today is 40 and 30 years ago it was 28. More and more people are living in cities. More and more of the country lives within 70 miles of an ocean or international border. These are often very expensive locations. So yes, there is a real worry about affordability that is authentic. But the broader kind of malaise, if you will, where you just see the studies. As a college president, I saw this. Fewer students are drinking alcohol, fewer students are having sex, they're getting married later, they're postponing child rearing. There's a sense of ennui. These stories in Harper's Magazine about the gooner culture, where these are all things that I think reflect something far deeper than I can't afford a house. The reason people are living in the mom's basement gooning is not because, right, they can't afford a place. There are other options than that. So I think there is. More broadly.

[Mike Pesca]

There are too many down payments away from a house. Might as well goon.

[Brad Carson]

Exactly. So I think there's like a broad, like, let's call it loosely, spiritual kind of. We've lost the thread in many ways in our culture. And I think young people, you know, obviously are in the most threadbare part of our of our world.

[Mike Pesca]

Who do you blame for that perception in reality, Charles, you write about this all the time.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, I mean, look, I think that the common theme that we are talking there and this comes up with what Brad is saying, right? When you talk about the median age, first home buyers is 40. Or you think of Zaravam donning his campaign, the slogan that was really very effective is afford to live, afford to dream. And it's the second half that is important. Americans are today richer than we ever have been in, in the history of the United States. We have more stuff than we ever have in absolute poverty terms, in absolute wealth terms. We certainly don't have an affordability problem because we can get more stuff. Rather, I think when we talk about affordability, we're talking about, you know, those sort of life course milestones. Are people getting married, are they having kids, are they buying a home? Are they sort of doing the things that are normative for prior generations at the moments when they were supposed to. The mean age at first birth, the mean age at first marriage, mean age at first home buying, all of them are at historic highs. Part of that story is about policy. There's a paper that was going around last week that says something like half of the decline in fertility is attributable to the increase in home prices, which is a real and ultimately policy driven phenomenon. We choose to have high home prices as a general matter in the United States. That's a policy choice that we make. So some of it is absolutely we can make decisions to make those milestones more affordable. Some of it is cultural, Some of it is what we put value on, that we do. Some of that is good. Part of the reason that the mean age at first birth has risen is because we think that women should get educations. Now, I'm in favor of that. I think it's good. But the point is there are positive cultural priority shifts that have happened that have extended that. There are also negative cultural priority shifts that have extended that have happened that. Brad's alluding to people watching, watching pornography. The availability of high, quote unquote, quality substitutes for real life has never been greater. Whether it's porn, whether it's AI, whether it's, you know, entertainment substitutes, it's Netflix rather than going out to the movie, it's talking to friends online rather than going to the bar. Partly because we are so rich, we have much better ways to waste our time than we used to. The opportunity cost of switching from single to married, of starting a family, is so much higher than it used to be. And I think that that really paralyzes people. So, you know, is that a cultural phenomenon? Is it a material phenomenon? It's both. But, you know, there are both factors on the policy side, levers that, you know, people like me on the right side of the spectrum really should be talking about, trying to pull, because we do have to talk about this issue. But then there is also a cultural issue. There is also a way in which our culture has changed. Not merely, you know, the ways our culture has changed for the better that have resulted in this, but also ways that culture. Our culture has changed for the worse. I happen to think that has resulted in this delay in the sense of blaze.

[Mike Pesca]

Few stray thoughts from me on that one. In New York City, where home prices were always very high, this was supposed to lead to a third space phenomenon and going out. And so we should see more of people going out in bars or at least coffee shops than we have. And we don't because it's being interrupted by some of these technological substitutes. I would say that to the extent that people are actually consciously making these choices, like, I will not have a baby because I want to get my advanced degree. That's a good thing. And we should recognize. Recognize that as progress. But in fact, of course, it's that the choices are thrust upon us and no one asked about it. And the last thing I'll say is the genius of a politician should be that he or she can solve these problems. But it is, of course, just that they can describe these problems. And maybe I should say, well, at least they can describe these problems. But sometimes I think actually at most, they can describe these problems. Want to pick up any of that? Since especially. We talked about a couple of areas of your expertise, Brad, Just a couple there.

[Brad Carson]

I mean, I think I agree with everything Charles said about what's happening in today's culture. Many of these trends, though, predate even the rise of social media, right? And they're kind of problems of modernity itself. People losing a sense of meaning, a sense of a lodestar, how to guide their lives, how to organize their families. These are all things that we've really seen accelerate over the last 50 to 75 years. And in some ways, they may have roots 100 of 300 years old. These are like broader problems of modernity that people were writing about in the 60s, 70s, 80s, the early 90s, before we even saw this incredible tech revolution thrust upon us. And I think because of that, you're right, a politician can describe them, but they elude a politician's control. These are matters that are about how you organize society, broader questions about how we see ourselves or kind of self anthropology. It's just a very difficult problem that politicians really can't solve. There's no lever. There's no you make housing more affordable. If we made that, would this make our young men who are suffering so much, would this solve their problem? I doubt it. Maybe it helps, but doesn't solve.

[Mike Pesca]

But I do have to say I started this show as a political discussion show and most of the discussion veers heavily into cultural or sociological discussion. And that that has to be the case. I sometimes wonder if I was doing this in 2001-2004, which is, I think, when you were in Congress or before then or after then, wouldn't I be talking more about should we pass not NAFTA as a policy, what should our terrorism policy be? When should we pull out of Iraq if we should? These are all more policy discussions and there be culture too. But it does strike me that my theory is that the reason we talk so much about culture when we really want to talk about policy, is that a lot of the policy questions have either been solved or have no solution. And I don't know, you guys tell me, I don't know if it's a mark of progress that we're realizing that all of policy is downstream from culture, or it's an acknowledgement that these things are much bigger than a tweak of our trade policy with Canada and Mexico can ever bring. What do you think?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

You know, I feel like I have to be the brief. I'm usually the policy pessimist. Right. It's usually my job to come be like, policy doesn't do anything. There's no impact.

[Mike Pesca]

Well, that's because you're in the Manhattan Institute, right, Which selects for a bunch of wonks who have been talking about trade rates for 20 years.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Well, no, but usually my job is feel like none of this matters. The government can't do anything because I'm concerned. But here I'm going to say actually there are many concrete policy decisions that we have made and continue to make that just make America way more expensive than it needs to be. Right? So I alluded to housing. We could produce way more housing in the United States. We have a dramatic shortage of housing, and that is largely a regulatory issue. This goes back to Ed Glazer's work, right. Fundamentally, it's not that expensive to build a house, and yet there aren't enough houses. And the reason for this is a panoply of state, local, and occasionally federal regulations that impose massive additional costs and make lots of deals, not pencil. There are many decisions. Many states are slowly making these decisions to try to. To fix this problem. Energy is another great example. Like, we could have way more energy in this country if we decided to have more energy in this country. And energy is the input cost to everything. Whether this is like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which exists to not approve nuclear power plants in the United States, I think it's approved, like one nuclear power plant between its initiation 20, 20, something like that figures exact. You know, something like the National Environmental Policy act, which exists to stop people from building things or producing more energy. And the administration, whatever else you may think of, it, has done a lot of work trying to expedite these things. Federal permitting reform. These are all really wonky things, but they determine how much you pay at the grocery store and how much a down payment costs and just sort of the bare material stuff of life. My concern about somebody like Zahra Mohamdani isn't that his diagnosis is wrong. He's right that people are unhappy with how expensive it is to live in New York. My concern is that his solution is just going to be doing things that make New York even more expensive, which I think has been the policy direction for a very long time. So, yes, I agree that there is a big cultural component here, and I want to have that conversation, but I don't want to avoid saying, like, there are lots of things that we could do to make America cheaper, and it would be good if we did some of them.

[Mike Pesca]

I guess Oklahoma's done them right. They're the 47th most affordable state in terms of median home price. Brad?

[Brad Carson]

Well, two things. Yes, you're right. Many of the discussions people have about the affordable crisis this country are about New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. in Wyoming, in Oklahoma, in Kansas. These issues don't quite have the purchase that they do in these media centers where so many of the elites live.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, well, the purchasing power is stronger.

[Brad Carson]

That's why. But I would go back to what you said if you were running for office, as I did in the early 2000s. The culture wars were still front and center. The whole 90s were about culture wars. Right. There are issues that now we have a consensus about, like abortion rights, LGBTQ issues, but gay marriage. When I ran for the US Senate in 2004, gay marriage was on the ballot in more than 30 states, and it was repudiated in most of those states. And these were issues that were really, really powerful. And after I lost the Senate race, I wrote a long article for the New Republic, which was on the back pages of it, which talked about the lessons I learned from running for the US Senate, which were about how important these cultural conflicts really are, are, and you can call it vibes if you want, because most people don't have like an elaborate philosophical justification for their beliefs, but a sense of dissatisfaction with the way the culture was going which led them to vote for those people who hope to reform or repudiate it. And so, yes, the culture wars have always been with us over the last 50 or 60 years, and they're just manifesting themselves in slightly different ways today.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

My LastOther is that one, one, I think, important fact here is that that to, to tie this conversation together, as we get richer, cultural issues raise in their relative salience. Right. Or the ability of parties to persuade people on the basis of culture goes up because the relative value of material appeals goes down. And so, like, you know, I, I do expect, even though I think that there are real material solutions that you could address on a bipartisan basis, I also do expect, you know, to Brad's point, I do accept the culture wars to, if anything, get worse as they become more effective cudgels, because they are sort of the thing that remains on the table as we become better off as a society.

[Mike Pesca]

The fact that we reach consensus on the things that tore us apart when you were running for office, does it give you hope that that will play out again? Or do you think we're in a different kind of culture war? Brad?

[Brad Carson]

I think the issues are still there just, just with a slightly different valence. Even you think, like gay marriage, there is a national consensus supported by the U.S. supreme Court and reaffirmed just this week where they didn't take that case coming out of Kentucky. But if you were to go poll the states would. I do. I think most of them would oppose gay marriage. My guess is probably many of them, if not most of them would. And so these issues are still very resonant. Even when you have kind of an elite consensus or when you might have an institution like the Supreme Court, they can actually enforce some sense of national consensus, but they're still very powerful because they go to fundamental questions. What's the nature of the family? What is our role in society? Even the immigration debate, which might seem very policy oriented, has this deep underlying current about what is a nation? Is a nation even a relevant organizational unit in the 21st century? And that actually is dividing a Lot of people. And then you're answer by immigration is almost derivative of that. So it is these very broad kind of philosophical questions that still are very important.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, I, you know, I also think the same sex marriage is almost so generous. Right. Like there was this sudden profound inversion in public opinion. Almost nothing looks like it. And you know, that was, that is sort of a dispositive win. And in some senses the, you know, the, the activists, the people who sort of work to make that happen. I think part of what happened culturally in the five years after Bergfeld was handed down is they were like, wow, we just completely changed the culture. We could do anything. And it turns out they couldn't do anything. They could make same sex marriage happen. They could convince people that two men or two women could love each other just as much as a man and woman. And that persuaded a majority of Americans and that worked out for them. But it turned out that that was a hard argument to generalize out from. And so I think I would be wary for overgeneralizing from that fairly unique situation to other culture war issues. My favorite one recently is marijuana, which is a topic I spend a lot of time on. I'm the only American under the age. I'm 31, so just over 30, so I can't say I'm under 30 anymore. I'm the only American under the age of 35 who thinks marijuana should be illegal. But actually it turns out that there's been a recent shift in public opinion for about 10, 12 years. Even Republic, a majority of Republicans said it should be legal. Most recent Gallup poll, it's back down to 40%. There has been a real change in that area. So you know, everyone expected that to just sort of be a continuous march of history thing. And now it's less obvious in my opinion.

[Mike Pesca]

I forgot who it was, but I was reading someone about you saying, oh yeah, Charles Fan Lehman, he is the new reefer madness but gussied up with big vocabulary words.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

I think, I think that was it. Cato. I think that's right.

[Mike Pesca]

It was. It was conservative on conservative violence in that case. So we'll be back in a minute. And I do want to tease this by saying two things. One, we will be talking about marijuana and gambling and AI and how they all relate. And also if you care to just listen to the not even mad feed right now, I'm going to ask Brad the very scintillating question about redistricting and the man he lost to in the race for Senate. That'll be all up in a minute. When we're back, I'm not even mad True Work. I'm wearing it right now. Fall weather changes fast, so I'm dressed in layers. I've got this hoodie that's a lovely shade of green, but on top of that I've got a true work zip up jacket. And if I wanted to, I could pivot to a truer coat. A true, true work coat. They're made by trade professionals who are tired of wet, heavy gear weighing them down. And every piece is tested on job sites with trade pros. The trade could be podcaster or it could be, you know, actual construction worker or logger. I wear true work. I don't know, maybe a little too much given how often I'm clearing brush, which is not much, but it's just a testament to the fact that the stuff really and truly does work. And it also looks damn good. Upgrade your day with workwear built like it matters. And get 15% off your first [e-mail] with the code the gist. That's spelling's important on this one. T R U E w e r k.com and use the code the gist.

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[Mike Pesca]

We'Re back with Not Even Mad. I have Charles Fane Lehman with me. I have have Brad Carson with me. And Brad is an expert on AI, and Charles is an expert on a lot of vices. And the vices brought to mind that there were some arrests and indictment this week of two pitchers of the Cleveland Guardians who literally threw their pitches into the ground to win for them. Pretty Small wagers with the next pad, with the next pitch, be a strike or a ball. They were. They now face multiple counts of wire fraud, conspiracy, conspiracy to influence sporting contests by bribery, money laundering, conspiracy and more. 65 years in prison. That's way too much. But the question is, can gambling ever reform itself? Can the sports leagues ever reform itself? Or once the genie's out of the bottle, toothpaste out of the tube? Or as I say, once the toothpaste is out of the genie's bottle, is there ever going back? Do you have to put the guardrails in place beforehand? Which is what the AI industry is thinking about. So let's discuss it. What do you think, Charles?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, I mean, you know, I wasn't even sure when you started asking the question which recent sports gambling scandal. You were right.

[Mike Pesca]

Could have been basketball, could have been a number of them.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Chauncey Billups. It could have been the trailblazers. Was it going to be the time bomb that's been ticking in Ohio? Was it going to be any of a number of NCAA scandals? I think the NCAA just banned like six players for life because they've been implicated in gambling. Just a tremendous issue. And, you know, I think a lot of people are coming around to, we went From 2018, sports gambling was basically just legal in Vegas to 2025. It's legal in 40 states. All of that happened incredibly quickly with basically no regulatory oversight, nobody thinking about what was this going to look like. So, you know, no, I don't think we have to just throw our hands up in the air and say, this is the way that the world is. I already think there's the start of a regulatory consensus emerging. I've talked to lots of people who are saying to me behind the scenes, lawmakers, both state and federal, who are saying, we want to do something about this. What do we do about this? You know, the immediate aftermath of the, of the scan, both, both scandals that I just talked about, both the one in Portland and also in Ohio, there's increasing consensus that says we need to get rid of these players. Specific prop bets. You really shouldn't be able to bet on whether somebody is going to throw a specific ball or strike. That's crazy, obviously, right? For abuse. The. The MLB came out and said you can't bet more than $200 on our sportsbook, which is crazy to me. So, you know, I do think there's a backlash coming. I do think there's consensus it'll be an uphill battle. But look, you know, people talk about we can't ever. We can't ever regulate something once we deregulate it. My response is sports gambling was legal prior to 1992, right? The ban that conservative in 2018 is passed in 1992. That's not like ancient history. That's 33 years ago. It's not that long of a time. And so there was a time when we were able to have a national consensus on we don't want this stuff. Do I think we're going to get back there? I don't know. Do I think we can move in a regulatory direction? Absolutely.

[Mike Pesca]

Do you think AI is a good analogy for this, Brad?

[Brad Carson]

Perhaps. I mean, I do think Charles is completely right. It's something I talk a lot about in AI policy that we don't have to accept a deterministic future. We can control it, right? You can go backwards. You can put things back in the bottle. Those things do happen. And I think I often find myself in opposition to people from Silicon Valley or kind of very facile view of technology that just says, like, hey, it's going to happen. Right? We just have to learn to live with it. That perhaps mitigate some of the damage it might cause. No, we don't. There are examples of technologies that we've chosen as a global society not to pursue. Think of cloning or human germline editing. You know, I think about on the sports thing, what's interesting, what Charles said, right, is he's bringing his concerns about gambling from the integrity of the game itself, which is an important thing. I think more broadly, what it's doing to our society, that you can sit in the stands and bet on, you know, pitches, actually ball or strike. It's pretty extraordinary thing, right? It's not healthy for our society to be kind of having this kind of gambling society, this kind of gambling mentality. You know, you watch ESPN now, you watch a ball game on espn. Not only do they aggressively talk about the lines, they have whole shows devoted to what their best bets are for that. But usually at the end of the game, right, when there's some kind of last second score or a last second stop top, they'll talk about those people in Vegas, right, who are, you know, winning or losing by this as well. And so, you know, my proposal, it probably goes, what Charles thinks about marijuana and other things is like these need to have more friction to them, right? It's a free society. You know, if you want to gamble, if you want to smoke pot, go for it. But there should be some friction. It shouldn't just be that accessible to every single person. You should have to, like, make some effort. And we used to have a lot more friction, and now because of laws, because of technology, it's all become quite fluid, quite lubricated almost. And that's a dangerous thing. These are much more dangerous pastimes than they were when I was 25.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. All of these vices, if you have to work a little to get them versus maybe even working to avoid them, as is the case with gambling inducements, they do work better with a little bit of friction. And I won't talk about too much with friction and lubrication and pornography, but this is the one that does come to mind, right? It used to be if you wanted to seek out pornography, it was legal, but there'd be literal costs and time and you'd have to go to a very seedy part of town. And now that is not true. And we have the goon caves that we discussed. But in general, do you think that we are capable of properly foreseeing the consequences of our actions? Or do we, as a society or as a species need to have the mistakes thrown in our face before we do something? And then the second question is, and when the mistakes are thrown in our face before you talked about nuclear regulation, can we really be trusted to regulate them? You know, Three Mile island was a mistake, and now there's better technology, but can we be trusted to properly regulate them and not just have the pendulum swing wildly the other way? Charles, what? Tell. Tell me as a species, where we stand?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Gosh, I'm trying to get. To answer that succinctly. No, I mean, I think the iron law of the history of vicious substances and gambling, drugs, pornography, anything that is addictive is that we do swing back and forth between those two excesses. But more to the point, we have this dynamic where it's a little bit like Trump's problem at the border. Once you solve the problem, nobody is thinking about how bad the problem used to be, and so there's thinking about how bad the solution is, and vice versa. You think it's something like the marijuana context. You know, prior to legalization, nobody saw the risks associated with marijuana, the risks associated with marijuana addiction, the psychological harms associated with compulsive marijuana use, especially in adolescents, the risk to kids, the risk to driving, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, the long term health risks. Nobody saw any of that. Right. It was hard to get. It was low potency. We didn't think about a lot. And we saw all of the harms that are associated with prohibition. And so we were like, prohibition seems pretty bad. A lot of people get arrested every year. Pot's not that big of a deal. I smoke it all the time. What's the issue? I don't personally, but people smoke it all the time. What's the big issue? And so we switched that ratio, and now we're in a place where people come up to me and they say, I was in favor of legalization of marijuana, but now I smell it everywhere. And maybe that wasn't such a good idea. My response is, you didn't think you were going to smell it everywhere. How did you not see it coming? But people never see it coming.

[Brad Carson]

Coming.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, But I would also say that in 20 years, once the conditioned response of smelling, literally smelling marijuana is no longer associated with nefarious activity, it won't seem so bad. Maybe inherently smart pot smells bad, doesn't smell that bad.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

A lot of people don't like things.

[Libsyn Ads Voice]

I.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Look, I don't find this argument that convincing either, but many people do. No, but, you know, I think.

[Mike Pesca]

I think it's also, you know, the. The Madelines and something about smell and sense memory. I get it. I get it.

[Brad Carson]

The. The.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

The point that I would make, though, is, look, I am skeptical of our ability to get regulation right. I look at cigarettes, which are kind of regulated and still kill 400,000 people a year. People always are like, what about alcohol? Alcohol is legal. People get to it with alcohol. My response is, there are 180,000 alcohol associated deaths every single year. Like, we're not going to ban it. Okay, but do we really want to add to that stack that seems like an example? We're just sort of regulated. It is not a very successful model. I try to be politically realistic. I talk about what will work and what won't work. But I will say at the abstract theory level, the virtue of just saying this is banned. People don't get to do it. Maybe we're not going to throw individual users in prison for it, but we're certainly not going to let companies sell it. The virtue of that approach is that it's simple and it's dumb, and it's relatively hard to get wrong because it's simple and dumb.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. Brad, when you think about what you're trying to do with Americans for Responsible Innovation, are there other substances or other innovations that you take lessons from as having done it right?

[Brad Carson]

You know, yes, of course. I mean, I think there's lots of examples. And I gave two a moment ago of technologies that we actually put back in the bottle in the 1970s. We knew how to do cloning, we knew how to do human germline editing, and we agreed as a global scientific community not to pursue those. And more or less that consensus is held even to this day. And there are outliers in China or what you read in the paper this week that the coinbase billionaire is trying to do. But these things have mostly held right. Like we can do them. There's no margin to do them right. There's lots of you coming from the military world where I spent a decade both on active duty and then later as a civilian at the Department of Defense, there's lots of weapons that the world has decided we're not going to use them. These are usually codified in various agreements, the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions. But dum dum bullets, biological weapons, chemical weapons, mines, these are all things that we have used or have contemplated using and we chose not to pursue that path. So I do think there are many precedents for us to say we can choose which way we want to go on these questions. We don't have to accept like, hey, it exists, it's going to happen, you have to live with it. I don't think we have to do that. And that's a very dangerous attitude that leads you to a lot of quiescence about extraordinarily dangerous things.

[Mike Pesca]

Was there as much money at stake and to be made with some of these weapons or even cloning as is readily apparent there for the grasping with AI?

[Brad Carson]

No, I think that is the big difference. Here you have multitrillion dollar industry that's going to fight you tooth and nail scale. And right now it's propping up the entire American, perhaps global economy. You know, six people who run these major tech companies. If they get cold one day and decide like, hey, we've decided not to pursue this any longer, there's going to be a crash of epic proportions. So yes, there's a lot more money, there's a lot more people advocating for it. There's a lot of things at stake beyond just the idea itself. But that isn't to say that we can't do it if we chose to do so. That just makes makes the politics a lot harder. Maybe the kind of secondary consequence is a bit more worth considering. But we can do it and we have done it.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, and I also think about the attention to detail and how effective the legalization is because there are bad ways to do it and good ways to do it. I Think about three things that were illegal or not allowed just a few years ago that have all become legal on massive online gambling, nil, which is paying college athletes, essentially. And the third is legal pot. And in all of these cases, while I'm speaking as a New Yorker, we rolled it out fairly disastrously. It also seems, you could talk about this as a, as a university president, that the NIL regimen was, it's very wild west and we don't even know who is paid and there it seems to have a lot of victims. And this is also, as we've been discussing with gambling, not very well thought out. So maybe, I mean, it's easy to say if we do this with proper attention to detail and do it effectively rather than ineffectively, it will have gigantic differences. I know it's easy to say, I don't know exactly what effective legalization schemes would mean for NIL or marijuana. I just know what's going on now is not effective. So, I mean, is that part of it, Charles, or am I being naive by saying a hard to nail down word like effect of Maybe you would say there is just such an inherent chaotic chaos to all of these things that it's always going to be ineffective when you implement them.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

I mean, you know, the way that I think about this, and I can talk it less in the context of nil just because it doesn't fit into the following heuristic, but the way I think about this is that in markets, in any vicious product, the thing that you are concerned about is not really the consumption of the product. I don't like, I don't care if people smoke pot or do drugs or whatever it does. I don't care if you gamble on your phone. Doesn't bother me. Not an issue for me at the policy level, the concern is the combination of addiction with the profit motive. The profit motive is great. It's a really effective tool for getting people what they want, right? It's like why there are a thousand different hot sauces that I can go to the supermarket right now and buy, and that's great. I don't buy most of them, but I'm glad they exist. Capitalism is wonderful in that regard. On the other hand, if people feel compelled to consume the thing that is bad for them even as it hurts them, and the profit motive is going to keep giving it to them over and over and over again, that's a really bad combination. Often when you're talking about any of these markets and addictive products, what you're really talking about Is how do you manage the, the behavior of a capitalistic market and can you manage the behavior of capitalism? Right. You're in New York State where you see the real challenges. You talked about the failed rollout. Really what happened in New York is that they hyper regulated the legal weed market. And so you had this huge. Still do. Had this, this huge unlicensed market. And that's just how capitalism, which they.

[Mike Pesca]

Chose, which they chose not to regulate at all and to allow to which they chose.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

They did no enforcement on, on lawlessly.

[Mike Pesca]

Right.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

You know, and, and, and I, my, my answer to the question is you can. There are examples of other countries which have tried to do legalization somewhat successfully. Quebec is an interesting example here. Some of what they've done in Latin America is kind of interesting where you like let people have access to a product but you don't let people sell it. I often think that deals with a lot of the problems. Americans really struggle with that because we like to sell stuff. Stuff. We're a capitalistic country. That's wonderful in many regards.

[Mike Pesca]

But like, and part of the big reasons to allow it from a government perspective is you get the tax revenue that will not be allowed under the regimes you're talking.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

It's not that much tax revenue, but.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, well, and you know, that always does get oversold.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, but, but, and to Brad, you know, in many senses it's a similar dynamic to what Brad is talking about where you are fighting uphill against enormous corporate interests. That's really the thing that you've uncorked with sports gambling, for example. Right. The people who are going to fight regulation tooth and nail are the sports books because they have a lot of money that they would like to keep flowing in. And so the challenge is always not how do you deal with the vicious product so much as how do you deal with the people who want to sell it.

[Brad Carson]

You know, interesting thing also I just add about the politics of sports betting. You know, Democrats right now are spending a lot of time and effort thinking about how do we get young men to come back into the fold. Well, I was talking to a top lobbyist for sports bet betters the other day and he says Democrats are all coming around to appreciate the virtues of unregulated sports betting, because to crack down on it is to exacerbate your problem with young men. And so the party that you would think most likely would be a bit skeptical of unregulated sports betting now sees it as part of a larger political problem and they're refusing to Intervene. So it's an extraordinary thing.

[Mike Pesca]

All right, now comes the time in our show when we talk about the little annoyances that. That maybe we cultivate and think too much about. They're the things that get our goats or that grind our gears. They are the goat grinders. And if you'd like, I could start. And I have a sort of a guest goat grinder. I borrow this one from my friend Barry Nail Buff. As we fell back into standard time, he notes that people, especially a week to six months ago, would always write to him and say, all right, I will meet you at 6pm EST now EST. Maybe they meant Eastern standard time, just the Eastern time zone. But of course, if it's during daylight savings time, EST doesn't mean the actual time that they think it means. So then he had to go back. He had to say, by est, do you mean Eastern daylight Time? And they would say, oh, yes, of course. That's what I mean. And so this is a very good goat grinder. I could see why the extra step to add clarity would detract from clarity and just add to the hassle of your day. Thank you, Barry. And I guess now that maybe your go grinder is having your goat grinder stolen by the host of the show. Brad, do you have a goat grinder?

[Brad Carson]

I do have one, and I think Charles will appreciate it. As a conservative, it's about something you have the right to do should. There should be a strong norm against it. So strong they'll practically call it immoral. And that is reclining your seat in coach class if you happen to be flying. You know, I got into a tussle on social media with people who says, like, one has the right to do it. They're made to do this. I'm like, yes, you have every right to do this, but it's such a strong norm that I consider immoral. To recline your seat in coach class, People do it. As someone who flies a lot, when everyone does it, I immediately think much, much less of them.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Right. See, and this is the difference between me and Brad, because my feeling on people reclining the seats is just once you take somebody who's doing that, you push them at the exit door that nobody would ever do it again.

[Mike Pesca]

Just once, one time on the airline, you know, let's be good moral people. Just start a plausible rumor that it happened. You could fake that with deepfakes and AI.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

That's what I've heard. That's what I've heard.

[Mike Pesca]

That alone. Yeah, it happened. It was a Delta Flight. Maybe it was northwest. Anyway, what's your go grinder there? Cfl?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Oh, gosh. You know, my. I have two small children, a five year old and not quite two year old. And I have actually, I will betray this and make your guests think I'm a terrible person or your listeners think I'm a terrible person if they don't already. But I've never been a huge fan of dogs. But since 2020, the decay in social norms that has most driven me nuts is people walking around with their dogs off leash, which I don't know if you see this everywhere. I see this all the time. In my little like suburb in Maryland outside of D.C. is my neighbors, random people. I know their dogs are sort of like gallivanting around. Often their dogs are much larger than they are so they couldn't really control them if they wanted to. And I'm like, your dog could eat my child. I am not happy about that situation occurring. Could you please control your very large animals? That's my. And you know, I think it speaks to. We have this conversation about disorder, about antisocial behavior so much. It is not sort of the high salience ones that everyone talks about drug use and public camping. So much is just like, can you please leash your dog? Can you please not lean your chair back? People do so much more of that than they used to.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. Whenever I see a dog off leash and a friend said this to me, oh, when they're off leash, it usually means they're very well behaved. And I said, but what about the times? It doesn't mean that. And it's like, yes, then it is extremely dangerous. So you do have these very disparate ways to interpret an off leash dog. So I want to thank my guest, Charles Fain, Lehman fellow at the Manhattan Institute, senior editor of City Journal, and Brad Carson, who's the president of Americans for Responsible Innovation. Thank you guys so much.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Thanks for having us.

[Brad Carson]

Thanks so much.

[Mike Pesca]

And until next time, we are not saying we're right. We're not conceding that you're right, but we are saying that we're not even mad.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Foreign.

[Mike Pesca]

And that's it for today's show. The show is produced by Corey Wara. Kathleen Sykes helps me write the Gist list. Atra Green is working on the web page. Jeff Craig, he's out there. He's doing a lot. He's doing a lot with video, he's doing a lot with audio. He counts as two FTEs. That's how hard he's working in the last FTE but first in my heart. Michelle Pesca OOM Peru G Peru do Peru and thanks for listening.

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