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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
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- [00:33]
Abe Greenwald
ABC Sunday, American Idol returns.
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John Podhoretz
Give it your all. Good luck. Come out with a golden ticket. Let's hear it. This is immense world.
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Christine Rosen
I've never seen anything like it.
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Seth Mandel
And a new chapter begins.
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Christine Rosen
You're going to Hollywood.
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Abe Greenwald
Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryant and Ryan Seacrest on American idol. Season premieres Sunday, 8, 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu.
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John Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way.
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Christine Rosen
It'S going Hope for the best Expect.
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Abe Greenwald
The worst for the best.
- [01:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, March 7, 2025. I am John Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
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Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
- [01:39]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
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Seth Mandel
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
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Christine Rosen
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
So I don't know what to talk about.
- [01:52]
Christine Rosen
It's Friday.
- [01:53]
John Podhoretz
It's Friday. So maybe I'm going to start with the most terrifying thing I read today, which I texted you guys from our friend John Ellis's News items newsletter. Earlier this week, Elon Musk tweeted something out about how the singularity is coming and maybe he knew about this. This is sourced to newatlas.com I don't know what that is. The world's first biological computer that fuses human brain cells with silicon hardware to form fluid neural networks has been commercially launched, ushering in a new age of AI technology. The CL1 from Australian company Cortical Labs, at least not a Chinese company, offers a whole new kind of computing intelligence. One that's more dynamic, sustainable and energy efficient than any AI that currently exists. And we will start to see its potential when it's in users hands in the coming months. Known as a synthetic biological intelligence, SBI, Cortical's CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025 and is expected to be a game changer for science and medical research. The human cell neural networks that form on the silicon chip Unquote. I don't know why that's a quote. Are essentially an ever evolving organic computer. And the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon based AI chips used to train existing large language models like Chat GPT. Christine, as our resident Luddite, how did reading this make you feel?
- [03:38]
Christine Rosen
Oh, well. So I have been following a little bit what Cortical Labs has been doing. They famously a few years ago used mouse mice brain cells and computer chips and taught this thing how to play Pong. Remember Pong? And everyone thought that was nifty and neat. But in just a few years this technology has advanced significantly. A couple of things to note. When they describe human cells, they call it wetware as opposed to software or hardware. That concerns me because we should, I think begin immediately to be and should already have been making distinctions about what is human and what is synthetic or created or engineered. And so the fact that they just give human cells a version of a mechanical name like hardware software is concerning. Look, this is, this, this is a creation of something that is neither fully a machine nor fully human. It's a new thing. It's a genuinely new thing. And if it advances as it does, there's lots of opportunities for, for example, personalized drug, you know, development. There's all kinds of things you could do medically and scientifically to advance human flourishing. But there's also a lot of stu. Do in terms of using this to advance robotics, which is already quite getting to a point where, for example, we have new technology to allow robotic hands to be much more sensitive to touch and to grasp and do more fine motor skills. You start seeing all this stuff coming together in the next few years and you have a lot of opportunity and a lot of risk. So I think it's very important to define and distinguish between what is human and and what is not, what has rights and what does not. And legally how we have to start to assess these new things because they are like this example is just one of many. These are new things, new technologies that fuse human qualities, human things like cells with a machine. Yeah, you should be a little freaked out.
- [05:34]
Seth Mandel
We had, I mean the takeaway, we had. How many, how many arguments did we have over the rights of apes? And then, you know, moved on down the line. And then there were, we had arguments over trees, right? Trees are living and have certain rights and that had, you know, that was, that was made in court arguments about clearing rainforest area and stuff like that. So I think that it Sounds like you're describing Westworld come to life.
- [06:05]
Christine Rosen
Because work presents huge ethical and legal challenges down the line. If, if it's developed along lines that would allow the personalization of, you know, synthetic biological machines for each human. And, you know, some of the stuff they're, they're predicting will not come to pass. But much of it does upend some of our notions, legally and morally, about what is human and what is not.
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John Podhoretz
Can I ask.
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Abe Greenwald
Well, I'm, I'm sort of, I'm still trying to grasp what, what is this first thing, what is the application? Do we have any sense of how it would be used and for what?
- [06:42]
Christine Rosen
So mainly, I mean, they call it, this is, again, this kind of, is jarring to hear, but they call it a body in a box. It's a way to test using human cells and the power of computer technology, a way to do rapid testing of new drugs, for example, personalized medicine. There are all kinds of ways, particularly in the healthcare field, where this could be extremely useful if you have a rare disease, for example, and getting, and getting a big pharma to do some research on this tiny disease, very costly and time consuming. So the idea is that it actually opened up all these pathways to more personalized ways of dealing with things that arise problems in the human body. But there are also other applications, particularly for robotics, that could fuse, you know, a very human like robot with a kind of human intelligence that's been, you know, built in this box.
- [07:34]
John Podhoretz
So there is this concept I'm trying to remember, is it Feynman who came up with, who, who came up with the notion of the singularity?
- [07:44]
Christine Rosen
Kurzweil.
- [07:45]
John Podhoretz
Ray Kurzweil. Right. So the singularity is this theory that at some point in the not too distant future, I think he, he dated it at 2045, if I remember correctly, that the sorts of things that are being done that sort of.
- [08:08]
Christine Rosen
Let's start.
- [08:08]
John Podhoretz
It started, we start say with the artificial hip, right? Really back in the before times like that, you can insert a piece of fiber, plastic or something. Pacemaker, Right. Artificial hip. Now we have cochlear implants, we have chips in people's heads that seem to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's, some other things like this. And his idea was that the singularity would be the moment at which the technological machine derived enhancements of human life would kind of fuse with humanity itself. And that there would start to be no real difference between man and machine, or that rather man would become part machine, or at least the machinery that we use to do things like pick crops that were all done by human hands until 60 years ago or whatever that they will. These will be inside our bodies. You know, we'll have chips that make us see better, we hear better. We can replace everything in our body that is wearing out with something else. We can. And so that's the singularity that we will basically be. We're on the cusp of a fundamental revision of what it means to be human. That we are born body, that the body.
- [09:47]
Christine Rosen
Well, and ultimately that the brain. The reason this is exciting for people who want to see the singularity happen and this, this technology is very far from being able to do this because the brain is very complicated and has many kinds of cells. But the idea is you could upload your own. Your brain, the contents of your brain can be uploaded to some sort of box and then live. You, you will, your consciousness, whatever that is in your brain will live forever in this encoded way, this digital form. So you never, your physical body might decay and die, but. But you will continue to exist in this new state.
- [10:16]
John Podhoretz
Right? Or so that's one version of the thing. The other version of the singularity is that the body is a car. And you can replace, you know, it's the ship of Theseus, right. That there is no part of your body that cannot be as it degrades, as life degrades us, that cannot be replaced and re engineered and made to be. I mean, there are things that can't. Right. Or that we don't really understand the interplay of. Right. I mean, you can get a heart transplant, but people who have had heart transplants and there is this interesting consciousness question about what it's like for people who get heart transplants or even who get bypasses or quadruple bypasses. The bypass operation in that case literally means that your heart is removed from your body. The blood is pumped through an artificial machine. They do whatever they have to do to clear out the arteries which are occluded and they put the heart back in. And that people who after they've had this surgery often plunge into horrible, horrible depressions, like nightmarishly bad depressions because their body, there is some kind of. There's really. It's not just metaphorical that the heart is at the center of our existence. Their heart has been removed from their body. It's put back in. And the body knows that something unbelievably traumatic has happened here, that it lost its beating source and that people have to kind of get through this period. That does suggest that you know, we look at ourselves like machines too easily. The interplay between the heart and the brain and our systems and all of that. But that's the promise of the singularity in one sense is your shoulder hurts, you get rid of your knee hurt, you get, get a new knee if you're. Yeah.
- [12:18]
Christine Rosen
Although the Kurzweilian vision is singularity is very simple. It's when artificial intelligence is smarter than humans. Right. That that's the point we've reached the singularity. And so some people welcome that, like Kurzweil and a lot of people in Silicon Valley. Others fear that, like all the doomery AI folks, I'm somewhere in the middle, which I think is a, I think healthy skepticism towards even wanting that as a goal is something that as humans we should embrace. But the replacement part stuff is, is sort of adjacent to this larger idea that we want to create an intelligence that is both foreign to us because it doesn't think and reason the way we do. The other recent paper that came out this week that was fascinating to me was how quickly the new models of AI that have been trained on more data learned how to cheat, learned how to fix rig chess games, for example, which they couldn't do very recently. So they're getting better at doing things that humans have done, but they do it in a way that humans can't understand. So the, the promise of the singularity is also its great risk, which is that once we create something this powerful, if we don't understand how it reasons or if it does reason, or what it's, what it's doing and how it's doing it, we are helpless to stop it when it gets into areas that maybe we thought were safe from its power.
- [13:27]
Abe Greenwald
I think what I always, I mean, where I always find myself unimpressed with. Well, I mean, Kurzweil is a, isn't. I don't know if he's not a likable figure to me in, in general.
- [13:40]
Christine Rosen
But he's very odd.
- [13:41]
Abe Greenwald
But even with the, with, with this kind of thinking, where I find the arguments or the, the predictions and dreams kind of fall apart is on the consciousness question when they start talking about uploading consciousness and when they start talking about conscious, because it's sort of like when the people talk about aliens. It's the same fundamental missing piece at the heart of it. We have no idea what creates consciousness. There hasn't been a conscious machine ever. And so the idea that, well, if you just keep putting things together and making them more complicated, consciousness will arise or something Seems fanciful. Or the idea that. That our consciousness is simply a function of these neural networks.
- [14:39]
John Podhoretz
Right, well. Or that there is no such thing as consciousness, which is the. Which is the most radical but also the most rational version of this idea, which is that we don't have free. Not only don't we have consciousness, consciousness would, you know, suggests that there is this kind of. We are independent of our. Of our body in some weird sense, though of course, we can only have consciousness within a body and within a.
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Christine Rosen
For now.
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John Podhoretz
For now. Well, that. That's the Kurzweil idea. But that. But that. But that consciousness exists independent of our machine existences because animals, all animals have machine existences just like we do, or not machine, but whatever, just sort of like life patterns and that we are the one animal or, you know, or that that achieves this higher level of abstraction thinking that we know that we are or that we know that we are and others are not. That we are and that we have distinguishing qualities and that we have.
- [15:44]
Abe Greenwald
It feels like something to be us as.
- [15:47]
John Podhoretz
Right, yeah. And so this is a very hard thing to describe. So what the hyper rationalists who started dominating conversations about this in the, like, late 1990s and early 2000s started saying as there is no such thing as consciousness, we are, in fact, consciousness is a myth that is created to keep us running and moving. Like free will is a myth, which of course is an offshoot of consciousness, that we are not making decisions. We are the sum of. We fit what we do, and then we try to make sense out of it by saying that it was something that we chose, but in fact, we chose nothing.
- [16:30]
Christine Rosen
Well, and this is what leeches from. And the people who subscribe most vigorously to this worldview are often deeply unhappy because it leeches any sense of flourishing or meaning or purpose, or dare I say the word soul. The idea of any of these things being unique and integral to being a human being, it. It makes them go away. And it did. I think you're right to say that in the late 1990s in particular, it coincided with the rise of the new atheism. And a real way of saying we are done with superstition. Science and technology really have given us the power to understand ourselves in a way that we couldn't before. And we are better and smarter at this than previous eras. And I think what we see now, 20 years later is, well, maybe in some ways we are more powerful with our tools, but we still have this stubborn inability as human beings to figure out why we're on this planet, what we're meant to do, et cetera, et cetera.
- [17:19]
John Podhoretz
Well, so, I mean, this is a. This is. This is such an unbelievably complex and abstract and difficult thing to talk about that we're all sort of stumbling around in the dark. But a lot of the ideas that the sort of techno optimistic ideas or optimistic ideas about what we're going to do with all of our advanced computing power have not yet come to proper fruition, as we would have expected, because we are just vastly more complicated that. One of the things that we've learned over the last 40 years is that the human whole is infinitely more complicated than anything anybody really understands. Right. The idea was if we could map the human genome and we succeeded in doing that pretty much 30 years ago, that we would see there were all these on off switches. We could turn off cancer, we could turn on intelligence, we could turn on that. And then it turns out the human genome maps the genes, but it can't reveal the interplay that. The interplay. You know, it's this classic thing like if you do something, you see that you have a way of preventing a Jewish person who is lactose intolerant, as many Jews are, from being lactose intolerant. And so you turn this switch off, you do crispr.
- [18:45]
Christine Rosen
CRISPR technology does actually allow us to go in and snip little bits of.
- [18:48]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, so you snip a thing off. So, like, that means it's okay. You'll be able to have dairy for the rest of your life. And then 40 years from now, we'll discover that that increases colon cancer by tenfold. We don't know. One of the great disappointments of our time is the idea that. That the. The mapping of the human body and the genome and all that we know is actually proven to us that we know less than we thought we would.
- [19:18]
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- [21:16]
John Podhoretz
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- [22:53]
Christine Rosen
But in each of these cases, whether you're talking about human genome mapping, CRISPR technology, there was this period of great hubris when these technologies were discovered. Although I would say the woman who discovered CRISPR has, is a model of scientific discovery and that she has long been very cautious about how we should use this technology and what it means. So I will exempt her. But that's then followed by what I think is most valuable about being a human being, which is a recognition of humility and limits with some of this stuff. So that's actually where the techno optimist project, particularly the Singularity types are, are the exception and also a sort of dangerous one in that they don't think that humility. Humility is something they'd like to fix and overcome in terms of what kind of world they would see for us in the future.
- [23:38]
Seth Mandel
This is, this is why I find cancer so fascinating because that is. Cancer is essentially, you know, something goes wrong with the cell and we don't know why. We, you know, we. It's like the most studied thing and we don't know why that is. And so the, the, the battle to the, the battle to cure cancer, the cancer moonshot feels a lot like this kind of AI singularity consciousness stuff because it, there's like a, it feels like there's a root to something, an answer at the root of this. That is the reason that all things happen. And it's kind of a reflection of that. And also I, I think that, you know, to me, I worry more about the transition period with AI. I worry about the period where we go from, you know, somebody studying medicine and being able to use AI to write a paper and pass a test and you know, whatever, all this other stuff. But who still has to be the surgeon physically in the room and actually operate on the patient, right? These are the things that I, that I worry about, about the people take cutting, about whether it'll allow people to cut corners when the end. There's no corners to cut right where you actually have to. It's like, you know, you can't. You, you can't. You can put LeBron James's games entire career through an AI machine filter, right? You can't be LeBron James when you go out there, no matter what the AI says, no matter how it breaks it down. So that the way that we have this, you know, we sort of think that we, we are gods in this way, but we don't actually hold the information.
- [25:39]
John Podhoretz
No. Or you have the ultimate conundrum that is proposed by this, which is you can make everybody LeBron James, then it doesn't matter if you're LeBron James. I mean, what LeBron James can do is do something on this, you know, this square inside an arena that nobody else has ever been able to do with their body and stuff like that. But if anybody can do that, then the people will stop playing the game.
- [26:11]
Christine Rosen
But here's the thing. History teaches us that not everybody will have access to that sort of enhancement. And so we will start to actually have a far two, two and three tier society where those who can do that will, because they can afford it or have access to it, and everyone else will become a permanent underclass to that sort of skill set. Right, well, LeBron James, problem in philosophy. We all know this.
- [26:35]
John Podhoretz
No, but if that is a. But if that is a skill set issue you have, then it's Amazing to be LeBron James. Let's see how he feels when he's 70. Do you know what I mean? Like now, maybe then, because you can replace your knees and your shoulders and your elbows and every part of your body, you can be LeBron James, and then you won't spend the last 15 years of your life in crippling pain. The way I gather, a lot of professional athletes, not only talking about the.
- [27:03]
Christine Rosen
Contestant, it starts earlier than 70. It starts in your 40s and 50s.
- [27:07]
John Podhoretz
For some of these guys, or in your teens if you're, if you're, if you're a teenage pitcher and you have to have very serious surgery on your shoulder in order to keep pitching. You know, it's not like you're supposed to go into surgery when you're 14 years old. You know, you get Tommy John surgery so that you can continue to pitch. Used to be you did everything you possibly could not to have to go into surgery. You know, like, surgery has risks and there's dangers, and you can get an iatrogenic disease in the hospital and stuff like that. Better, better to not do things that cause you to have surgery. And now, in fact, some of the.
- [27:42]
Seth Mandel
Sports surgeries that they've come out with have been controversial in recent years because they had, you know, for a while they were doing this, this micro knee surgery, and it turned and it turned out that, you know, the players who were getting this right, they could come back to play sooner. That was this was. It was a less surgery. They didn't have to, you know, pop the kneecap off, whatever it is. And so the recovery was much less. And the stiffness was much, but it wasn't. There was something started happening and all these guys who had this particular knee surgery got hurt again like three, four months later. There was like rash of this, like it didn't last. Something about the surgery itself that they.
- [28:29]
John Podhoretz
Hadn'T bet on because we're unbelievably complex thing on earth. We may be the most complex thing on earth. And these efforts to kind of solve for what it means to be human and then, and then improve on what it means to be human is of course, you know, that's the myth. I mean this has gone bad. This goes back to the myth of Prometheus. I mean that the, the human desire to achieve aims and standing and a position outside what we know to be normally human has been seen as a very dangerous element of our hubris and a danger to humanity. Right. That's Prometheus, that's the Tower of Babel. I mean, I'm sure there are foundational myths and other religions that are, that are parallel to those.
- [29:23]
Christine Rosen
Well, that's. But, but. Sorry to interrupt, but the, but the reason that we, we value those reminders of hubris taken to an extreme is that we also wouldn't want the opposite, which is a, which is a culture that took no risk. Right. You do want, you want some risk takers, but you want them bounded by some understanding of what it means to be human. And that's actually the real departure for a lot of the techno utopian and techno enthusiastic philosophy, which is that being human is the problem they want to overcome versus saying how can we push humanity's limits? And that's a real, that's a distinction with a difference I think when it comes to applying this stuff to, to our fellow human beings.
- [29:58]
John Podhoretz
And it is very important because you mentioned the new atheists and you mentioned this kind of, this ultra materialist response again beginning really in the 90s by people who said that we don't have, that we are computers and that we just don't understand ourselves in the right way as computers because we have these, we believe in these myths like that we have free will and that sort of thing that we. When you believe in nothing transcendent, one of the virtues of belief, if you're a religious person or whatever, is that it radically increases the timeline even though you don't understand it. I mean, inside people's souls, it increases your understanding of the timeline and what it means to be human. If there's no heaven, if there's no afterlife, if you don't see yourself as being reborn after you die, in the generations that follow you, or however you want to look at it, then all you have is now. All you have is this. All you have is this life. And you better get cracking on living as long as you possibly can because there were worlds in which that was not anything that anybody could really conceive of. Right. Really. Until 100 years. A lot of people, like, knew, well, if you ate more healthfully, you wouldn't get diabetes or something like that. That's something that people came to understand better over the last hundred years. And that's a. You know. Or you shouldn't smoke if you might have a propensity for lung cancer. There are things you could do to improve your life and extend your life, in theory.
- [31:43]
Abe Greenwald
So.
- [31:43]
John Podhoretz
But that if you look at life as though when you die, the world dies, which is, you know, because you. You shut off and you're off. And so there's a kind of desperation to this, which is we should. We need to do whatever we can to let ourselves live longer. That's that guy whose name I can't remember. Who is Brian. What's his name? The guy who's doing the.
- [32:08]
Abe Greenwald
You have it. Brian Something Johnson.
- [32:11]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Trying to. Who is making himself a human experiment and how long he can make himself live. And Peter Thiel and others are paying a lot of money.
- [32:24]
Abe Greenwald
Kurzweil, too. I mean, he wants to live forever.
- [32:27]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. Right. Okay. So you only. I mean, I don't mean to. I don't mean to say that it's okay to die, but there is a world in which you only feel the desperate need to live forever. If you don't think that you're. That there is something like soul, that your soul may be eternal, that humankind is a trope that you live on in your children and your grandchildren and whatever. Or that you may be. I don't know if you're hit. You may be reincarnated, you may be. That you don't. All your chips are not in this one pot. And you're either going to win it or lose it. I know this sounds like a very strange way to look at it because, of course, we're also talking about the good stuff, which is the alleviation of suffering. The fact that people. Because of a lot of the. You know, that. That maybe what this can all do is figure out ways to release people from the torment of daily pains involved in the degradation of the human body. To. To find ways to, you know, improve on palliatives. And things like that, so that the life that is lived by people who aren't going to die is really vastly improved without having to live to 150, like, you know.
- [33:43]
Christine Rosen
And this, this actually the experiment we started talking about has the most promise for people with epilepsy and Alzheimer's because these are conditions that are quite mysterious, often originating in the brain. And it will help hopefully bring some significant advance in understanding those kinds of conditions and also treating them.
- [34:02]
John Podhoretz
Obviously, I mean, the brain is of course, the. So the, as you say, the root. The root for. For. For this is this question of whether or not you can somehow take your consciousness or take your brain and. And put it into a computer and then it will, you know, and then it will. Will live forever. And of course, the brain is the most fiendishly difficult thing to study because much of what we know about the brain comes from accidental. Comes from what happens to the brain when it's injured. You know, it's sort of like the.
- [34:33]
Christine Rosen
Oliver Sack with the railroad. The famous.
- [34:36]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, the guy, the guy with the. With the bar through his head. Right. Is the, is the U story. But I mean, it's what Oliver Sacks wrote about what neurological anomalies that then show us if this is an anomaly, what is the normal. So you take you, you. You are able to study somebody who can respond to you, talk to you. We also have this with the Parkinson's patients, for example, with the. The alleviate alleviating measures where you sort of press a button and somebody who is shaking, stop shaking, right? And then it's like, what did that feel like? What just happened at that moment when we pushed that button? What are you feeling now that you felt? If we turn it off, what are you going to feel then? You know, and it could be very hard to describe. I mean, I once had a conversation with Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh, if you remember, went deaf, apparently went deaf from drug use, which. From extreme painkiller drug use. And he got a cochlear implant. And so I ran into him at a Christmas party. It's somebody I'd known for a long time, though very slightingly. And I said, I'm so fascinated by what you've gone through. So when I speak, do you hear my. And you're having this. You have this machine in your head that converts my voice into a digital file and then plays it back to you. Do I sound like I sounded when you talked to me before you had this operation and before you went deaf? And he said, I don't Know, I mean, you sound. You don't sound like Stephen Hawking, you know, you don't sound like the voice box that Steve. Or, you know, a voice out of a computer. But they don't know. It may be that my brain converts what that file is into something approximating the human voice as I remember it.
- [36:50]
Christine Rosen
Right. Because memory is implicated.
- [36:52]
John Podhoretz
Because memory is very much implicated. But whether or not I'm hearing you, we don't know. As I say, you don't sound like this kind of machine. Like that. You don't sound like that. But I don't know what you sounded like before, and I don't really know what you sound like now. And so that's.
- [37:15]
Seth Mandel
You might not sound the same technically to him as you did before, but he thinks you do. Well, he was brain. His brain. No, it's like when it fills in the blanks, right? When you see, like, lighter or something behind, you know, covered in a billboard or something, your brain fills in the blanks. His brain has made your voice.
- [37:36]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so they figured out how to do the cochlear implant so that, you know those amazing videos of babies who suddenly start. Can hear and hear their mother's voice and grin and cry and everybody cries. They know they're hearing. They don't know what they're hearing. And then it turns out the brain is so incredibly complicated that, yeah, it may be filling in a voice and also differentiating between voices so that it's not like everybody sounds exactly the same. Like that condition in that amazing, very punishing animated movie Anomalisa, which is about a person who. People who see people can't recognize faces because every face looks the same to them. So it's not like every voice sounds the same as every other voice. This co. Implant can even make sure that voices are unique and original somehow. But it's not the implant. It's your brain. So screw around with your brain at immense cost. If you want to try to find out what's happening there, that's where you may start to get into horrifying. You know, things that happen that will be. That will. Will be horrifying. Well, that's.
- [38:59]
Seth Mandel
I mean, that's. That's like you, You. You know, you posted Scott Stossel's essay last night, right, about psychopharmacology. And a lot of that sounds like this. That, that. That sounds like what we're getting, which is like, we don't know why this chemical compound medication works on some people and not on other people. All we seem to know is that lots of these medications work for different people. Right.
- [39:34]
Christine Rosen
And.
- [39:34]
Seth Mandel
But you, because you can't have somebody, you can't have a computer print out what it feels like, you can't actually get at the core of like, what does this feel like to diagnose it?
- [39:50]
John Podhoretz
Right. Well, so it's interesting you mentioned that. So Scott Stossel, who is an editor at the Atlantic, published a book review in the American Scholar of a book by someone named Laura Drummond, I believe is her name, about her freeing herself from 20 years. Excuse me, not Drummond. Maybe you could look it up. Anyway, it's a book, an account of how she sort of fell into the world of psychiatry and psychopharmacology at the age of 13, and then I think at the age of 30, said, I am going off all of my meds because she had cycled through dozens of them and had been through dozens of programs with many different psychologists like psychoanalysts, psychopharmacologists. And she said, and he. And Scott Stosselin is in his roots. Scott Stossel, having battled with clinical depression and hospitalization and anxiety himself, said, it's like 19th century medicine. Like they don't know. They. We had this moment of techno optimism in the, in the early 90s when Prozac started being used to deal with depression. And the serotonin re reuptake inhibitors of which Prozac was the first major model, seemed after two weeks of taking it to have this remarkably positive effect on people who had low grade or even not, but I mean, very persistent depression. The depression that is, I wake up in the morning and I feel like, you know, there are the. Everything is cloudy. And that. The thing that was said about Prozac was you took it and after two weeks you woke up and suddenly it was like the sun was shining. And this was the great moment of great hope that depression had been solved, that it was this problem of how serotonin was processed in the brain and that there were ways to manipulate that. And it's been both incredibly useful and incredible and an incredible disappointment because these drugs lose their utility after a while. People like get used to them and they don't have the effect anymore. They don't know how it works. They don't know why it works. They don't know why Prozac works on this one, but Lexapro works on that one. They don't know why. You know why Effexor is good, it's not an ssri. But this one is bad. They, they don't. All they can do is give it to you and then have you report how you feel. And Stossel and this book review, this woman, this woman says, I'm done. I, I, you know, this has poisoned me and poisoned my life, and I'm going to live without it because I no longer trust the ex. The people who are doing this to me, they're not experts. They're just flailing around in the dark like I am trying to help me, but half the time they're hurting me and they're not helping me. And Stossel says in his piece, this is an incredibly valuable and important book. And on the other hand, if it convinces people that they shouldn't take pharmacological medications, it may ruin many people's lives who would otherwise be helped by the medications. It's very hard to find that middle ground.
- [43:25]
Christine Rosen
Well, part, part of the problem when these things first came to market was this idea that they were a magic, they were a silver bullet, right? It was all of these years of trying to talk, do talk therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy and all these other things hadn't worked for people with really severe cases of depression. Here, finally, you can pop a pill. Everything will be good again. And Americans love that as a marketing style. But in fact, it turns out both with, both with SSRIs, but also more recently with some of the drugs, psychopharmacological drugs used to treat ptsd. I have a couple of friends who've been transformed by using those things in very moderated doses, but under the care of someone who does it in conjunction with regular, traditional therapy techniques. Understanding your problem, where does it emerge here? So for them, all the talk therapy had not worked for decades from their post traumatic stress. This was the one little missing piece. But it would not have fit had they not also had the human who understands, you know, all the stuff with psychiatry there by their side. And so I do think this magic pill solution, which again, technologists love, it's like, here, use this app, take this pill, everything will be better. It doesn't work that way because as you say, we're quite complex.
- [44:36]
John Podhoretz
Right? And then, and then the, the author of the book whose name we again.
- [44:40]
Abe Greenwald
Delano.
- [44:42]
John Podhoretz
Laura Delano.
- [44:42]
Christine Rosen
Delano. Yes.
- [44:43]
John Podhoretz
Okay. The idea that you can cure yourself through the application of will is also a very American idea. Right. It's a kind of the ultimate or the deepest in self help is we can choose. We can alter our perceptions using our strengths as people to overcome whatever obstacle is in our. We can retrain our brains through the application of will. And that is, I think, often very true. And yet of course, there are versions of it that are terrible, that are absolutely nightmarishly terrible, particularly if they start getting applied to people who aren't of the age of consent.
- [45:39]
Christine Rosen
You know, those used to be arguments made with the within the boundedness of character formation and virtue in the old days. Right. So habit training was actually useful because it was, it was seen as part of this larger world of virtue inculcation and character building. Now we have, it's entirely divorced from that. No one even talks about virtue anymore. So you have like Charles Duhigg's book on the power of habits. Really good. It has lots of great sort of cognitive behavioral therapy style ways of getting your brain, you know, focusing your attention, getting things done. It's all very practically helpful, but it's entirely removed from the other human part of this, which is, why am I doing this? What is this for?
- [46:15]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, but you know, I think also, oddly enough, not to get too poppy, but of the, the, the actor, former rapper, former gang member, Mark Wahlberg. So Mark Wahlberg, you forgot underwear model. Underwear model, right. Marky Mark. And then he has. And he was a bad guy. He was a bad juvenile delinquent kid who went around Boston beating people up, beating up gay men, was a drug addict, did all this stuff. And something happened to him. His ambition, they got very successful, obviously, but his life was going off the rails and something happened. And he had two things happen at once, one of which is that he was, he, he became a postulant at the Catholic church. He became a very serious Catholic daily communicant at mass. Very serious. And then he undertook this life regimen. And if you read about it, it's like insane. He wakes up at 3 o'clock in the morning, he does a three hour workout, he gets up, he makes breakfast for his children, he takes them to school, he goes to mass, he comes home, he does another two hour workout, he takes a nap, he has a smoothie, then he does another workout, Then he has a meditation session. Maybe he goes to church again, the kids come home, they have a day, ba da da. And then he is in bed at 8 to get up again at 2:30, right? And you read that and you're like, oh my God, sounds horrible, right? It's like, it's like he's like on this. And on the other hand he saved his life and is living a life that he believes to be of meaning and purpose that is not solely about him. It's about serving others. It's about serving his family. It's about being a good Catholic. It's about, you know, he apparently gives enormous amount of money away from his extraordinarily lucrative career. And that. That's another virtue. That's a kind of weird combination of Calvinism and Catholicism. You know, that you, that that industry is one of the ways to save yourself from. From despair. Human, human industry. And that this isn't anything that you can apply to yourself or like take as a pill. Like it's a, it's an ongoing exercise in being human.
- [48:38]
Christine Rosen
His is more quasi monastic, I would say, than Calvinistic. It's actually far more Catholic. You know, the regimen, the sort of, the very ordered, ordered daily life.
- [48:46]
John Podhoretz
Well, philosophically so I said Calvinist because of course it is through. It is through your, the application of your acts and works that you can come to an understanding of whether or not God believes that you are one of the elect. And that this is according to Weber, I'm not really a Calvinist theologian, but that according to Weber that, you know, people have a. Can learn of themselves that they, that they are among God's chosen by seeing how things go in life, that life will reveal whether or not you are blessed or not blessed. And that success is one of the, is one of the ways to determine. That's the Protestant ethic in some sense, that not, not just success in the monetary sense, but sort of like leading a life that you and other people believe to be a successful life is the way to understand yourself in the universe. And that this is the problem with all of the materialist stuff and the idea that maybe we can take human cells and put them together with a chip and do all this is that we are absented from it. I mean, it's just like philosophy. It's very disturbing to read. I find it incredibly disturbing to read this stuff because you're, you're saying, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to live another four. I mean, maybe if I'm really lucky or unlucky, I'll live another 40 years, right? I'm going to be about to be 64 if I'm insanely like, you know, my parents. My father's still alive in 95, my mother died in 94. So maybe my genes suggest that I will have a. I have hopes of leading a longish life, but I don't know what I'm going to see by the time that I pass from this mortal coil. And indeed the very fact that people are working feverishly to ensure that they won't pass from this mortal coil or that there is an escape from the ultimate truth of being human. Right, which is. Is that what did what a Catholic say on Wednesday, right? From dust you come, and to dust you will return. That is what it means to be human, and that you can escape the dust through transcendence. And that's what is not offered by the ship.
- [51:18]
Abe Greenwald
It takes me a while to sort of like, think through the opening gambit of this podcast. You know, just, just. You're reading about that, about this technology, and I have two simultaneous thoughts that. That dominate when I hear something like this. One is that, yes, of course, I'm. I am deeply uncomfortable with them playing around with human cells as if they were just inorganic material. And then at the same time, I always think they're going to be made foolish. I always feel like these profound claims about leaps, especially when they are so reductive, when they think they've got it all figured out, when they think they've got the brain figured out, when they think they've got how the source of life comes together figured out, it's always wrong. And it's always dominated by whatever the latest technology is. It's like, you know, consciousness. And the human brain throughout history was always. People were always saying, oh, well, it's like the steam engine, you know. Oh, it's just like. It's like electricity. It's like whatever the latest technology is, people then say, oh, now we got. Now, now we know how the brain works. And so now they're going, oh, it's like a computer. Oh, it's like. It's a neural network. It's. And then. So what are they. They're going to be saying something else entirely different 50 years from now.
- [52:59]
Christine Rosen
It's kind of how. It's kind of like all of us every day trying to figure out the Trump administration. Like, it doesn't.
- [53:06]
John Podhoretz
Yes. It resists. Like, it resists a synthetic. A theory that synthesizes things into a whole. Like when I watch.
- [53:14]
Abe Greenwald
I just want. This relates to it. I watched this documentary on that guy, Brian Johnson, who. This is a guy who's trying to de age, Right?
- [53:23]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [53:23]
Abe Greenwald
It's not. He's trying to take years biologically off his body with. With 9 billion different crazy treatments and poisons and everything. And I'm looking at him and I think, your hair plugs look fake. We can't get hair plugs. Right? Hair plugs. Billionaires can't get hair plugs that look real.
- [53:47]
Christine Rosen
And I gotta say, Elon musk. Yeah, that dewy complexion is creeping me out. It is not attractive. He's becoming kind of asexual looking in a weird so if we can't get.
- [53:57]
Abe Greenwald
Hair plugs right, slow down. I don't think we're going to start de aging anytime soon.
- [54:03]
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- [56:00]
John Podhoretz
Still getting around to that fix on your car?
- [56:02]
Seth Mandel
You got this on ebay. You'll find millions of parts guaranteed to fit. Doesn't matter if it's a major engine repair or your first time swapping your windshield wipers.
- [56:12]
John Podhoretz
Ebay has that part you need ready.
- [56:13]
Seth Mandel
To click perfectly into place for changes big and small, loud or quiet. Find all the parts you need at prices you'll love. Guaranteed to fit every time.
- [56:23]
John Podhoretz
But you already know that ebay things people love.
- [56:27]
Seth Mandel
Eligible items only Exclusion Supply thing that, the thing that gets me about the Dagers and the live forever people is that what are they spending every minute of every waking hour doing? De. Aging. For what purpose? Right? I mean, your day, you're trying to live forever, but the 12 hours of your day or whatever that you're awake consist of specific acts and actions, right? And if you're that Deger guy, what are you doing all day? You are swallowing pills, you are taking blood samples, you are running tests, right? You are, you are treating yourself as a sort of lab rat. But what is the point? Well, in this, what are we doing any of this? Like, it's a great thing to discover, I guess if you can, you know, for some people it might just be the great mystery I'm going to solve. You know, aging and there's, there's a chasing the mystery. But, but for everybody else, it's like you want all that extra time to continue taking 12 vitamins in the morning and you know, taking your blood and pulse at noon and whatever. Like it's all consuming toward nothing.
- [57:45]
Christine Rosen
But this is why he became so quickly instrumental about even his own offspring and started harvesting fluids from his own child in order to continue this project. So I think that's a really important point. It's that mindset starts to become its own means and end.
- [58:03]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's what I mean when I get. Keep returning to this, you know, and I don't want to make an totally sort of religious point of it, but when you don't believe in the transcendent, what else is there to do? You know, you are the, you know, instead of building Chartres, which takes 250 years years, and you're like one of the workers on Chartres, and, you know, you spend 40 years carving stuff on the outside of the building and you die without it being completed. And then it's completed 100 years later, right? And, and if you're, if you believe the soul is eternal down some down from heaven, you can look down and see your handiwork is still being gawked at in wonderment by people, by millions of people every day. But if you don't believe that that's a thing, you are your own cathedral. There's nothing, there's no reason to do anything that will outlive you because you don't believe that anything outlives you, right? Or it doesn't mean anything that anything outlives you. So you might as well spend six hours a day trying to live another six hours at the tail end of your Life. Because there's nothing else there for you now in the form of scientific inquiry. I'm just pointing. Like Neal Stephenson, whom I allude to, I think I mentioned him earlier this week, wrote this just extraordinarily brilliant novel called Quicksilver, which is about the scientific revolution in London in the 17th century. And Newton and Hooker, various other people, are characters of the Royal Philosophical Society, which was basically the first scientific body of people who are sharing insights and things. And of course, there were all these restrictions. What could they do? You know, the only way they could ever understand how the human body worked was to body snatch, was to steal corpses, which was considered a grave, monstrous evil, and dissect them. Or they could experiment on themselves. And the book features these amazing portraits of Newton trying to figure out how the eye works by sticking objects into his eye. You know, like trying to see how. How you make a let. How how lenses work and how the eye functions. And these guys had to use themselves as part of their experimentation because experimentation was largely forbidden to them by the religious standards of their time. So this is. So what, what, what Johnson is doing is a real. Is it. Weirdly, in a. In an old tradition, but it's solipsism. Newton wasn't doing this so he could fix his own eye. He was doing this so that humankind could understand how the eye worked. Yeah.
- [60:59]
Christine Rosen
This guy is going to be the most annoying person at the retirement community. Right. He's going to be going over in his mind everything he should have done.
- [61:06]
John Podhoretz
I don't know.
- [61:07]
Christine Rosen
Because he won't win. This is not. This is not a. This is not a race you can win. Is the.
- [61:11]
Seth Mandel
And also. And also, like, not to be like, totally dark, but the more successful he is, the more of his life will be watching everything around him die.
- [61:23]
John Podhoretz
Well, right. Well, that is.
- [61:24]
Seth Mandel
He's not doing.
- [61:25]
Abe Greenwald
He.
- [61:26]
Seth Mandel
The human race is not doing this process along with him.
- [61:31]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, no, I mean, that is, of course. Right. That. Isn't that the. Isn't that the horror, right, of the. The person who is, you know, cursed to live forever? The horror of the person who was cursed to live forever is that he sees his parents die and then he sees his wife die and then he sees his children die and then he sees his grandchildren die and maybe he marries it. Whatever it's. That is. That is not the way it is to be. You know, the level of human loneliness that is created by that image of a life lived too long is.
- [62:09]
Christine Rosen
Immortality is a curse. Right. That's why vampires are considered cursed creatures.
- [62:14]
John Podhoretz
Right. Well, they used to be. Now they're not.
- [62:16]
Christine Rosen
And other sexy tweens, you know, in love with werewolves.
- [62:19]
John Podhoretz
I don't know, by the way, which is why the new movie version of Nosferatu is so interesting and worth. Worth people's time, because it restores the idea that there is something unspeakably evil about this demon that is living forever by drinking the blood of others and is a. Is. Is. Is a literal human plague who, left to his own devices, will kill off all of humanity. And it's been like 20 years since we had nice vampires, you know, that glowed and. And healed people in the Civil War.
- [62:52]
Christine Rosen
Sorry. They sparkled, John. They sparkled. Thank you.
- [62:55]
John Podhoretz
Fair enough. Okay. Anyway, we went in this very.
- [62:59]
Seth Mandel
This is talk everlasting also, right? There's what. That's, like, the one children's book that does this, that. That presents this. That. That's like. That's why that book makes such an impact when you're young and you read it. There is no other book that presents you with this scenario until you're at least in your teens or young adult phase. And this is, like, the one thing where you're like, am I old enough to really grasp what this means?
- [63:27]
John Podhoretz
And the unjustly forgotten and really quite remarkable emotional blockbuster, powerhouse movie of the 1980s. Cocoon, which. I know people. So if you remember the cocoon, which is a metaphor for all of this, is.
- [63:42]
Christine Rosen
And stolen down the street from my childhood home.
- [63:46]
John Podhoretz
These people that are at a retirement home who are sneaking off to a pool in the neighborhood to go swimming because there's no pool at their retirement home. It turns out that in the pool are these pods. They are. They are aliens that have been sort of languishing immortals that have been languishing under the sea in these kind of cocoon.
- [64:08]
Christine Rosen
Not surprising if you grew up in Florida, that that would happen.
- [64:11]
John Podhoretz
And when they swim in the pool, they de age like Brian Johnson, and two things happen, one of which is they de age, and they're having a wonderful time of it. And one of them, played by Jack Ilford, refuses to do this and refuses to do it with his wife, who has Alzheimer's. And he's like, this is wrong. We are supposed to be old. We are supposed to die. You are violating the order of things. And then in the course of the movie, the idea is that these old people are vampires, vampiristically taking the life away from these creatures who are in the cocoons who are themselves going to die off because their life force is being sucked away by People who already had a light, who. Who actually lived full lives and that. And that this is not right. That what. What it is that they are doing. It's a very potent, as I say, metaphor for this question of whether or not our society should be designed to make sure that everybody lives forever or not. I'm not going to be like the famously tasteless governor of Colorado, Richard lamb, in the 1980s, who said, we all have a duty to die because he didn't want to spend money on the Social Security system. I'm not kidding. Like, this was something he said. Social Security is costing us too much money. We all have a duty to die. We're, like, helping keep people alive with all this money and for health care and Social Security. And it's her. It's harming earlier generations. I mean, that's a horribly grotesque thing to say. So I'm not.
- [65:51]
Seth Mandel
But it's also Zeke Emanuel. We've had these fights during.
- [65:55]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's right.
- [65:55]
Seth Mandel
He says Emanuel was one of the advisors. And he also believed that, like, at age 75, whatever, you should stop getting stuff done and whatever.
- [66:06]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [66:06]
Seth Mandel
Treat certain.
- [66:07]
Abe Greenwald
Didn't. Didn't he take it back now?
- [66:10]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, he's an Emanuel.
- [66:12]
Seth Mandel
I'm not sure if that was because it was so politically toxic that he, like, was destroying his. His career as an advisor. Like, he was one of those guys. Was like, it was going to become, like, hiring the population bomb guy as your advice.
- [66:25]
John Podhoretz
Well, that entire. That entire family is a family of people of very strange moral framing. Remarkable family. Bizarre family. Anyway, the Emanuels. But to move on from the Emanuels, I do want to say one thing before we go, because Christine mentioned that the Trump administration resists some kind of a comprehensive analysis of anything he's doing. But yesterday, I think we can't leave without talking about what happened yesterday with the tariffs, because. And it's really like Tweedledee and Trump is like Tweedledee and Tweedledum in the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland or something. He's proposing tariffs, and then he's. And then he's withholding them. Is there a move on the planet? Are people in America, like, are there demonstrations in the streets saying, put on tariffs on Mexicoans. Can't do it. Do it. And he's like, okay, I'll do it. I'll do it. Maybe it's gonna be. He's the one who puts on tariffs. And then, like, a day later, he says, I'm suspending the tariff for a month. Who's he arguing with? He's the only person who want, he and Peter Navarro who should be in a mental institution. They're the only people who seem to want tariffs in the United States. So impose the Merdona. Like this is, this is the craziest thing that he's done thus far is create market uncertainty, crash the Dow and the S and P and stuff like that by 5%, panic at people in markets all over the world and then say, nah, it's all right, we're not going to do it for a month. We'll see how we feel in a month. Is there any defense for this? Because again, if this were the front edge of a very important argument in America about our economic policies, I would understand why he felt the need to proceed in this fashion where he goes and kind of suspends things and says we're going to wait for three weeks to see what comes out. But this is all him. Am I wrong? Is there a single politician or economist of any note in the United States or on the planet who thinks these tariffs are a good idea?
- [68:52]
Christine Rosen
No, they're all, in fact, like the Heritage foundation recently disappeared and then had, after people notice, put back up all of their decades long arguments against tariffs and why they're bad for the economy and suddenly they're like, no, tariffs are great because Trump says they're great and they tried to disappear. Their history of pro, of anti tariff stuff. No, people are scrambling to justify something that doesn't have an economic justification.
- [69:15]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [69:16]
Abe Greenwald
And you know what's interesting is he makes fools of the people who have to support everything he does. So if on Monday you're on TV talking about why it's important to impose tariffs on Canada because of fentanyl or whatever, on Tuesday, you have to explain why we don't need tariffs imposed on Canada.
- [69:46]
Seth Mandel
You know, and also, but I also think it's a, it's a, it's what happens when someone has real, no real opposition. I feel like you, he's, he, his, he's shadow boxing himself because he doesn't have somebody else to fight with. So he's like looking in a mirror, right? And he's like boxing the reflection in the mirror because he doesn't have anybody to spar with. It's like, you know, Natan Sharansky playing chess with himself. If there were somebody else that could play with Sharansky, he would be much happier probably playing against another person. But there's nobody sitting on the other end. So he plays white and then he plays black. And that I feel like that's A bit of what happens with Trump where it's like, let's do tariffs, and then, you know, let's see what happens when we do this. And then it's just, you know, it's. It's like a. He's racing against himself. There's nobody else running next to him.
- [70:39]
John Podhoretz
Well, it's fun, which is just so great. Like, you know, not for my responsibility in our economy is instability and uncertainty are just two very important qualities for future investment and possible growth and all of that. There's nothing like uncertainty to just help an economy stabilize and grow. So I want to thank our president for his contributions to our uncertainty because, you know, that's. That's. That's what I call a firm hand on the tiller.
- [71:16]
Seth Mandel
And to tie it all back to the beginning, it's. It's exposure therapy. That's what you're thanking him for. It's exposure therapy. We will be immune to the anxiety that comes with the chaos because he is giving us exposure.
- [71:31]
John Podhoretz
Well, we'll be immune to the anxiety from the chaos, but we will not be immune from the real world consequences of the policies that we cease being anxious about. We'll stop being anxious, and then the economy will grow half as fast as it might otherwise because of the uncertainties introduced. But we'll just be like, oh, whatever, you know, pass my son's, you know, plasm so that I can try to live forever. I'm just gonna inject some plasma from my son now and see how it works.
- [72:04]
Christine Rosen
Don't worry. They're working on the SOMA so none of us have to worry.
- [72:07]
John Podhoretz
Oh, thanks. Thanks for going there.
- [72:10]
Christine Rosen
Sorry.
- [72:10]
John Podhoretz
There we go. That is the now. Now we're into the dystopias. Okay. We'll be back on Monday for Abe, Seth, and Christina and John Pod Horat's Keep the candle bur.