Loading summary
Transcript158 lines
- [00:00]
John Podhoretz
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary.
- [02:18]
Seth Mandel
Hope.
- [02:19]
John Podhoretz
For the.
- [02:23]
Christine Rosen
Expect the wor Some preach.
- [02:25]
John Podhoretz
And pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing this way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, October. Hold on. 24th, 2025 hi, I'm Jon Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. I want to commend to you our 80th anniversary issue which will be in your mailboxes next week or the week after, but which is available online to all subscribers and everybody who would wish to subscribe. We have some really wonderful stuff in there, including our own Christine Rosen on the danger of trans I have a colloquy with Dan Senor on what it's been like to provide regular commentary through podcasting for supporters of Israel after October 7th and what that experience was like. We have a great piece by Jonathan Shands around the challenges facing Israel in the wake of the conclusion of the, I don't know, two year hostilities between Israel and Hamas. And a really brilliant review of Ben Shapiro's new book by Irina Velitskaya. All kinds of wonderful stuff that right now I can't bring to mind. I don't have it right in front of me. But that's their commentary 80th anniversary issue. Please check it out. And the person who is responsible for helping me put that issue out is, of course, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe. Hi, John does that while Seth Mandel, our senior editor, is laboring daily on the website. Hi Seth.
- [04:24]
Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
- [04:25]
John Podhoretz
And then of course, Christine Rosen, author of her monthly social commentary column that I just mentioned. Hi Christine.
- [04:31]
Abe Greenwald
Hi John. And can I give a shout out to Seth's piece from I Believe Yesterday about genocide, which is on the website? It's fantastic and everyone should read it. It's really great piece.
- [04:42]
Christine Rosen
Thank you.
- [04:42]
Abe Greenwald
I sent it all around since social media. I like old school, send it around on email.
- [04:47]
John Podhoretz
So that's old school, sending around on email. If you're really old school, you will be printing it out, clipping it, folding it, stapling it, putting it in an envelope and sending it to your sons at college.
- [04:59]
Abe Greenwald
Yes, there we go.
- [05:02]
John Podhoretz
That's what old school is. Or putting it on your refrigerator with a magnet. Nobody, nobody, nobody is doing anything like that anymore. So, you know, it's interesting. Trump Blots out the Sun There is no news in America outside of Trump news. I mean, there is news. There's like this gambling scandal which indicates that all of professional sports is about to be destroyed by the fact that there is now open and legalized betting everywhere in America. Because how athletes, how we're ever going to be able to trust that any game that is being played is being played, played fairly and that the players on the field aren't themselves taking advantage of, of DraftKings or whatever or some system to play DraftKings. I, I don't know how that genie is ever going to be put back in the bottle and that this scandal is, is so it's like a tip of the iceberg or, you know, I mean, you can't, it's hard to believe that it's just the Portland Trailblazers and this one guy in the Miami Heat who were involved in, in this kind of activity, just too rich. It's too easy, it's too controlled. And so enjoy your sports while you can because basically the only way to handle this is going to be to have AI players playing with AI, you know, referees, and you'll be able to sort of have avatar players that you pick in your fantasy football leagues. And there will be no live sports. There will only be, you know, it'll look live. Sora makes everything look live, but it's not going to be live. And you think I'm kidding. Let's see where we are in 2033. Once. Once.
- [06:48]
Christine Rosen
All this reminder of the, the Tim Donaghy scandal, right? The last NBA betting. NBA doesn't have a lot of famous betting scandals, but the last famous NBA betting scandal was a ref who was caught up in all this. And he was the bait. The, the crux of the scam was that he was helping people cover the spread. And that was what. So he was, he was orchestrate, you know, in other words, he was orchestrating games in from front to back in such a way that he was, he had the spread in mind that not just, you know, who would win or who would foul out or something like that.
- [07:26]
John Podhoretz
This is exactly why there, this genie is out of the bottle and can never be put back in. Because betting is theoretically infinite. You know, it's like a craps table. If you've ever played craps, there are 50 different kinds of bets. You can bet on any given card. It's not, do you get, you know, it's not roulette. It's like, does your number come up or does it not come up? There are side bets. You can bet, you can hedge a bet. You can bet against the line. You can bet, you know, you can bet on the come, you can bet on whatever. There's, you know, all these. You can bet on the coin flip.
- [07:56]
Seth Mandel
You can bet on anything.
- [07:57]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, but, but so that, so that there are infinite numbers of ways in which you can affect the result or outcome of something that will satisfy a bet. And if, and if you have some system where you have a computerized purchase of DraftKings bets on some line or other and you, and you know, just not making the spread is one thing. You could sort of bet on whether or not there's, I don't know, like three foul balls in a row or, you know, two balls in a row. Like you bet on anything as, as Guys and Dolls would have it Nathan Detroit tries to get Sky Masters. Sky Master says he. Somebody once tried to bet him that a raindrop would, you know, like that a raindrop would drop, roll down the window and, you know, bet on that or something like that. So you could bet on anything. And so if you can have a thousand different kinds of bets, you can have a thousand different kinds of scams.
- [08:56]
Abe Greenwald
But this is why the digitization of the online form of it is so dangerous. And actually a lot of kids have gotten into big trouble. That's a huge problem in junior high and high schools with kids doing online sports betting. Gambling is a vice, or we used to see it as a vice for a reason. And it was a vice that did still require you to go someplace and place a bet. You actually had to leave home, go place a bet and do it and that or go to the track or go to the. I had a really kind of wastrel uncle who almost ruined the family business with betting on the greyhounds in Florida. So this, it's pernicious even when you don't have the ability to do it on demand in a moment in your pocket at any single moment of your day. But I think it is utterly destructive. And I mean, I've had some of our listeners have written me saying, why are you guys advertising online for? I guess people get served up some online sports gambling ads, even of our podcast. But it is an incredibly pernicious thing it's doing to a vice that used to be limited to a certain number of people. What porn did to sort of sex, which is just completely transform how many people consume this former pleasure. Because a little gambling in small measure can be a pleasurable experience. But what we've done to gambling thanks to the Internet and smartphones is pretty bad.
- [10:10]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, I mean, you can go to a bingo parlor in a small town and, you know, buy 12 boards and then, you know, and you can win 40 bucks or, you know, and it costs you 12 bucks to buy the boards.
- [10:21]
Abe Greenwald
And I play poker for quarters and pennies with my neighbors. It's fun.
- [10:25]
Christine Rosen
But yeah, yeah, all you have to do is go. And when you, when you gamble live, there's something else that you see, right, which is the effect that it has on people and the communities and who it attracts and all that other stuff. In other words, it can be a sort of, in its own way, scared straight moment. You know, we had, you know, my friends and I had. I'm from south, south ish, Jersey. I always say Lakewood. And so, you know, we would go down to Atlantic City. And when, if you went to Atlantic City, you wouldn't say, boy, I'd love for this to be my town. You know, I'd love for my town to look like this. I'd love for, you know, it, it feels like a meeting, it feels like a destination for vice, which is what it is. And then you leave and you want to feel like you're leaving it behind, even though you're not necessarily doing anything, you know, illegal or, or, or, you know, know, slimy. I mean, you could be just playing poker at a table. There is a feeling when you went to Atlantic City and experienced, you know, a night in Atlantic City and you came home, you wanted to sort of wash that off of you. And I think that that's the, that's also the fact that you could take out your phone and do it. Is this. There's no feeling of like, I, something feels kind of wrong about this, or there's a reason that I'm going to this one place to do it and then coming home and that I wouldn't want this around, you know, where I live and all that other stuff.
- [11:54]
Seth Mandel
There's also now this. Millions and millions of this crypto obsessed cohort, especially young people, but not exclusively them, that they sort of live in a virtual casino at all times. And that is obviously unhealthy, but is also another sort of mainstreaming route to gambling that gets in the culture.
- [12:28]
John Podhoretz
Well, look, I mean, there's crypto, crypto. Before crypto, there was the world of the 35 year or 25 year bull market from 1983 to 2008, when. So that is 25 years right now, 35 years. Back to math corner here at the Commentary podcast.
- [12:53]
Abe Greenwald
Definitely come with a warning.
- [12:55]
John Podhoretz
So, of course, you had this, you know, massive acceleration in stock valuations in the 90s and the 2000s, and you had tens of millions of people doing day trading every day, which is essentially like being in a virtual casino. In some ways, though, your, your odds were better just because a rising market is a rising market. And then, of course, people lost, were wiped out. Like, again, tens of millions of people had their savings or whatever they were counting on wiped out. I'm not even talking about people who were, you know, had their 401ks and stocks and all that. I mean, people who were spending a good deal of their time daily trying to play the market. And so we know of the destructive impact of something like that, which isn't even gambling per se, because it's not betting sheerly on luck. You Know it's not or you know, playing some in sports. You're like trying to calculate whether a team is going to win or lose. But I think here in the, in the. What I'm saying is that there are interesting knockoff consequences to these kinds of things. And of course, betting, gambling, the, the, the universalization of gambling, it, it is like a free speech quit.
- [14:19]
Seth Mandel
Like.
- [14:21]
John Podhoretz
It'S a kind of, we're a self governing society. Adults should be allowed to do what it is that they want to do. It's a, it's a victimless crime and it's not like prostitution where you have lots of people on all sides of the transaction. Very hard to make the case that adults shouldn't be allowed to gamble if they want to gamble. And we sort of had this compact that. Right. You would only go to a couple of places in America to gamble. Right. There was, there was Vegas and then there was Atlantic City. Everywhere else was kind of illegal or you had off track betting in some places and racetracks and then that was kind of it. And then the Native American, the reservations started opening up with gambling and then the boats, you know, where you could gamble and stuff like that. And now obviously you can sort of gamble, gamble anyway. But the, but the, but the, and.
- [15:19]
Seth Mandel
All digital casinos too opened up.
- [15:21]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah.
- [15:22]
Abe Greenwald
And so the machine gambling is insanely addictive.
- [15:25]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah.
- [15:26]
Abe Greenwald
I mean I actually, because, because another gamble that paid off for someone is linked to, because a brought up crypto that President Trump just pardoned the guy who was convicted and served time for running one of the biggest crypto exchanges. And this we can, we don't have to get into the details of that. Although these, that particular crypto exchange was linked to, you know, moving, moving funds for groups like Hamas and other terrorist organizations. You know, it's that once again, my other hobby horse besides the public sector unions is the reforming the presidential pardon power. And I think this is another example where Trump was lobbied. He has financed his family, his extended family has financial interest in, in obviously in crypto. And as do many of his advisers. And this guy heavily lobbied to have himself pardoned and succeeded. So here's another example where. And I would put the January six pardons under this, I'd put all the blanket pardons that Biden did on his way out the door of his family and of many felons. I would love Congress to take this up because I think the American people, every time one of these stories comes out, sort of shakes their head and go, how is this possible? So that this was just another data point that I, that I noticed in today's headlines.
- [16:36]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's one of the reasons I wanted to, when I said Trump blots out the sun, it's like the amount of news that is made by this president on an hourly basis is beyond anything that we've ever, ever seen before. So like one hour he's pardoning the head of Binance, or, you know, one day is pardoning George Santos, the next day is pardoning the head of Binance. The, the East Wing is being, you know, is being torn down and a ballroom is replacing it. He announces that he is suspending trade talks with Canada because he's angry that the government, provincial government of Ontario made an anti tariff commercial using, it's interesting, using a radio address by, by Ronald Reagan in which it, it looks like AI took a picture of Reagan in a kind of lumberjack shirt reading a radio address script. But the mouth, it's, it's not really that script. And they edited the speech and somebody at the Reagan foundation says that it's a misrepresentation of the speech doing some favor for the Trump people because it was clearly a reflection of how Reagan felt about tariffs. Not that Reagan himself didn't use tariffs. Every, every president will of necessity make political use of tariffs to help his party. It happens. No one's pure and Reagan wasn't pure. And nobody, nobody, nobody's hands are clean. But that Trump would announce that he was suspending this effort to negotiate with Canada on tariff policy because he was offended by a commercial that wasn't even made by the central government. That's where, you know, like, I'm, I'm awash in admiration for what he did, you know, with Hamas and Gaza and the, and the things that are going on there. And then he turns around and he acts like a psychopath. I mean, I, or, you know, like a, like a mad king. Not that I'm saying that he. No kings.
- [18:46]
Abe Greenwald
But he also withdrew. He also said he's not going to send troops into San Francisco after all because someone he likes gave him a call and said it's not needed.
- [18:56]
John Podhoretz
Well, there's that. And then, and then there's the good part. That's why it's so, so then also he's decided that he's mad at Putin. He keeps having phone calls with Putin and Putin says what he wants him to hear on the phone call and then they finish the phone call and then Putin, you know, attack civilian sites in Ukraine. So then this week, while he's Behaving like a psychopath on the pardon power. He then adjusts American policy toward Ukraine in a direction that I think is helpful and proper and right and not far enough, but loosens the restrictions on how far the Ukrainians can fire into Russian territory and is now sanctioning the two largest Russian oil companies. To put the squeeze on. This is a proper use in some ways of executive power or executive authority, because what, you know, he is trying to harmonize it or align it with American foreign policy. And American foreign policy should not welcome the destabilization of the world in the form of Russia's effort to swallow up, you know, portions of a country, sovereign country, right next to it. The. The ramifications of that, should Russia's Ukraine behavior stand and not be opposed, you know, for the rest of the century, will be catastrophic. So I. It's like you can't even. It's like you go up and you go down. You go up and you go. It's like everything is. It's only an emotional roller coaster. It's a policy roller coaster. It's a. It's a behavioral roller coaster. And, you know, like no other politician American can get any purchase. Not that they're trying to, but, you know, like 40 years ago, there were combatants in American politics. Like right now, JB Pritzker is trying to be the combatant against Trump or, you know, Mamdani's like, I'm going to face down Trump or whatever. But, you know, like Robert Byrd, the Senate majority was a. Was a serious irritant to the White House. Knew everything there was to know about Senator, about sort of process on Capitol Hill and how the, and how, how you could gum up the works as a. As a senator. Master of the Senate, terrible person, Ku Klux Klansman, like, not an admirable person at all, but jealous of senatorial prerogatives and was like a worthy opponent of the executive branch, wanting to do anything and everything. There were senators and congressmen who ran committees. You knew people, knew their names, knew they. They involved themselves in policy matters. They did oversight. Nobody is anybody. Like, there is nobody. Unless you're. Unless you're making lunatic statements about crazy things like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Nobody, nobody counts. Nobody is like, in any kind of a position to do battle. Now, maybe if Democrats were in. Weren't in the minority in both the House and the Senate, the Senate Majority Leader and the House, you know, the House speaker of the House would be like worthy opponents or have the stature to fight. So maybe it's a condition of the moment. But I just, I don't remember this kind of imbalance in American politics before in which everything focuses on one person. Maybe the first six months of the Obama administration, maybe, baby, or maybe the first six months after 9, 11, when, you know, Bush, you know, restructured when with, with, with the Senate and the House and so involvement, you know, restructured.
- [22:45]
Abe Greenwald
The American government, it wasn't dominated by Bush's personality. And I think that's where like Trump's true. I mean, it's a feature, not a bug, that he's the disruptor in chief. And sometimes that shakes out for the good of the country. I think, as you say, certainly in dealing in the Middle east and hopefully in Russia, if he remains consistent. But we've seen him go back and forth, depending on mood and discussions. He's about to go to Asia and he might or might not meet with Xi. And Xi seems to have figured out this fact about Trump and is working that angle very heavily. So the fear is always with Trump that he doesn't see the bigger long term picture. He's kind of in the moment. And that skill can be extremely useful in negotiating deals and dealing with difficult leaders and certainly disciplining his own party. But it is, it's why it's so frustrating. I was reading, actually Seth Dillon had a great piece in the Free Press the other day about why people, if you're a conservative, you actually do need to continue to have point out enemies on the right. You know, this idea that we all have to be cohesive. He contrasts that in particular with MAGA World, where anything Trump does is fine, even if the week before he did the opposite. And Seth was like, no, I'm not, I'm not on board with that. And I completely agreed with his piece. But the thing is, we do also point out when Trump is successful, and that drives the other side crazy too. So I do feel like sometimes there's like four or five of us on a little island just trying to point out the things that are principled and good and the things that are bad and, you know, let it all shake out.
- [24:17]
John Podhoretz
Okay, guys, I'm excited because it is fall and it is time for me to talk again about my favorite clothing, quince sweaters. Quince has the kind of fall staples you'll actually want to wear on repeat, like 100% Mongolian cashmere from just 60 bucks. Classic fit, dude. Denim and real leather and wool outerwear that looks sharp and holds up. You know, I wear a lot of quince sweaters. If you Watch us on YouTube. You're going to see Quince sweaters all winter. But I got my eye on their suede trucker jacket. It's perfect for layering and just looks really casual. But put together by partnering directly with ethical factories and top artisans, Quince cuts out the middlemen to deliver premium quality at half the quality cost of similar brands. So layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they Look. Go to quint.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U I N C E.com commentary free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com/complyment.
- [25:34]
Abe Greenwald
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com.
- [26:01]
John Podhoretz
You know, it's the Larry Tate Ification of the Republican Party. Larry Tate, a character on the, you know, on the TV show Bewitched, Darren's boss and one of the great TV sort of supporting characters because the point about him was that he was entirely situational and all he wanted to do was please the client of the advertising agency. So, you know, something would happen and Darren would have to come up with a slogan to cover his wife's witchcraft and he would come up with some slogan and then the, the client would say, well, I'm, I'm just astonished. And Larry Tate would say, darren, what you have done is just absolutely terrible. And the client would say, I think that's brilliant. And then dare. And then Larry Tate would say, terribly brilliant. That was a terribly brilliant move you just made. That is the sort of practically the not just maga, but like the entirety of the slavish Republican conservative press or whatever. Yeah, it's like just, I just want to please him and let me please him. And obviously you can see why it's a mistake not to please him because he could, you know, come up with ways to try to get you arrested, which is really horrifying. And I'm not, again, I'm not going with the no Kings theory, but, you know, he is somebody who does not respect standard practice behavior on how you're supposed to conduct yourself as president and not misuse your powers and authorities and you know, if, if the House.
- [27:54]
Abe Greenwald
If.
- [27:54]
John Podhoretz
The results of the 2024 election had been that, you know, Democrats had prevailed by 2, 2 seats in the House instead of Republicans prevailing by 5 seats in the House, a lot of the stuff that's going on here wouldn't be happening.
- [28:09]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I will say the Senate Republicans are stirring themselves on certain things. The strikes on the supposed drug boats that's roused them enough to think about whether there should be some piece of legislation that says you cannot do this without a declaration of war, approval of the Senate. You know, so they are on a few things, kind of slowly awakening to the idea that they do have this oversight role over the executive that they should be exercising. But I mean, with the government shutdown as it is, will that stopped a lot of this action?
- [28:39]
John Podhoretz
But, and even there, I mean, that's, that's part of the, there's a, there's a, a pygmy quality to the Democratic resistance to Trump expressing itself in this government shutdown. Because now we're getting stories, I had the news on this morning and there's, you know, the woman whose kid has cancer who works for the, you know, AG department and now she's not getting a paycheck. And she said, you know, I don't have a village, so I don't know how I'm going to make ends meet. And you know, I'm not quite sure what the kids cancer has to do with this since I assume that she has health insurance, which, which wasn't, isn't suspended by, by the government shutdown. But, but she's crying and it's terrible. And the horror stories and the Republicans didn't do it. Like Republicans aren't responsible for the shutdown and Democrats are continuing with the shutdown because they're desperately trying to convince the public that Trump shut the government down. And he didn't and Republicans didn't. And so you have this cognitive dissonance problem going on here. It's, I don't know how it's helping them. I guess it only helps them because they're worried about getting primaried if they look cooperative with the Republicans in any way, shape or form. And they don't want to give, you know, primary challengers from the further left of their party any reason to step up because things are so unstable. But it's not a good fight. Like, it's not, it's not a worthy fight. It doesn't make sense that the government is shut down over them wanting to institute a policy that was likely to get instituted in some fashion or in serious negotiations two months from now. So, you know, I mean, he's, he bestrides an hour were like a colossus, but they're making it very easy for him to do that by being pygmies in response to him. I mean, it's like the problem with the no Kings rally, which is what was it about? It's five days later. Does anybody know what that was about? Except we hate. We hate Trump. I don't know what it was about. What, what, what?
- [31:03]
Seth Mandel
There were also a lot of keffiyehs. It was a little bit about that, too.
- [31:06]
John Podhoretz
I mean, there were 7 million people.
- [31:08]
Christine Rosen
So there was, it wasn't the no Mears protest.
- [31:11]
John Podhoretz
Okay, yes. Right. I'm just saying, like, what, what was that? What were the action items? Like what, what are the deliverables? What met by what metric do you say that, that no Kings was a success. And meanwhile, he's just, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. I'm doing the other thing. I'll do this, I'm have this, I'm that. You know, and he just like, he's like a hyperactive.
- [31:32]
Abe Greenwald
Well, pretty. The shutdown is going to, going to end because pretty soon air traffic controllers are not going to get paid and they're not going to show up to work, and that's going to grind a lot of things to a halt. And then people are going to have to start dealing with each other on the Hill. I mean, that's, that's happening soon. And there have already been some slowdowns at airports, which make news every time it happens. So I, I think that is going to force everyone's hand. But the no Kings takeaway, I don't know. No one's even talking about it anymore. I've heard more stories about the AI slop video Trump issued on the day of the no Kings protest, as I have about what was accomplished at the no Kings protest. I guess turning up and saying we don't like this administration is, is, you know, that's, that's fine. That's actually what this country allows to happen. And it was generally peaceful. So, I mean, there were some hateful things said, but it was a generally peaceful demonstration.
- [32:22]
John Podhoretz
Speaking of AI slop, something that's not a slop, but, like, it's going to be very interesting to see what a possible effect it has or doesn't have. I imagine it doesn't have an effect because I do think that there is very little possibility that Zoram Hamdani will not win the mayoralty of New York. But a couple of days ago, out of nowhere emerges, one presumes, from the Cuomo camp, though it's not entirely clear. This kind of astounding AI commercial in which they have AI generated people.
- [33:00]
Christine Rosen
Saying.
- [33:01]
John Podhoretz
You know, I love Zara Momdani because he's not gonna, you know, he's, he's not gonna enforce misdemeanor crime, so now I can steal at the drugstore. And then the guy putting stuff into a bag some, it's like he won't, he won't enforce domestic violence. And then you see this like 250 pound guy in a wife beater shirt and his wife sitting on her bed, clearly just having been beaten up.
- [33:29]
Abe Greenwald
The granny drinking and driving was also.
- [33:31]
John Podhoretz
The granny. Yes, granny drinking and driving. I mean, so on the one hand it's AI slop and it looks terrible. And on the other hand, it's like you couldn't actually pull this off with real people because it would be too, I don't know. So maybe it's an earworm, maybe it gets into people's heads and it's kind of memorable and it just reinforces their concerns or something like that.
- [33:57]
Christine Rosen
Well, I think also the, the trouble with AI a lot of times is the uncanny valley.
- [34:03]
Abe Greenwald
Right?
- [34:04]
Christine Rosen
The. We get uncomfortable when something is. When it's too close, but we're perfect.
- [34:10]
John Podhoretz
But it's not close enough. Right. It's.
- [34:12]
Christine Rosen
Right, it's.
- [34:12]
John Podhoretz
You can, you're. Yeah, right.
- [34:15]
Christine Rosen
That's what, that's what sort of makes us uncomfortable. It's kind of like the Tilly, what's her name, the actress that. The AI the fake actress. Yeah, fake actress who's something and she's, you know, and she's got, you know, the unions, you know, the entertainment unions up in arms because she theoretically would take work away from a real living person. Whatever. That's a whole new dimension to it. But there is something about the uncanny valley that is the place you don't want to fall into. And so I think that people are going to find that the, a better use of AI are going to be something kind of like what Cuomo was getting at with that stupid video, which is make something ridiculous and don't try to convince people that it's real. That's going to be a better use of AI And I wonder if that's actually going to be an improvement in general, because I would love for. It would be good if people would stop trying to make the point of AI be to fool the public. The, you know, if they start making the uses of AI more geared toward, you know, like a cartoon, like I can't make, I can't drop a piano on someone's head in a, you know, in a sitcom, but I can do it in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. That sort of thing that AI is, you know, if we just accept the, the gap between AI and reality, you can have a lot of fun with it. And I think people are recoiling a bit from anything that you have to look at twice to see whether it really is. And I'm hoping that that instinct that we're seeing now, that sort of that like, brief recoil when something falls into uncanny valley, I'm hoping that that is a societal instinct. Maybe that is, that is, you know, sort of the white blood cells that might prevent this like, AI slop drowning of culture.
- [36:13]
Seth Mandel
I wish I saw people recoiling at the uncanny valley. I feel as if they actually enjoy it, that they, they, the, the weirdness itself is a kind of aesthetic that, that they're getting into. And I, you know, look, I'm sort of my bigger problem. And one problem here is that it's going to advance and they're not going, the creators and programs are not going to stop trying to make it more and more lifelike and real world.
- [36:52]
John Podhoretz
The progress is astounding. I'm sorry. I mean, they are close to eliminating the uncanny valley. There was a very big uncanny Valley moment in the Cuomo commercial, which is the woman behind the wheel drinking from like a bottle of bourbon. That really does look like a cartoon. It does, does not look like a real person though. When she starts and you see her in the car at the very beginning, she kind of looks like a real person. But, but my, my sort of deeper.
- [37:23]
Seth Mandel
Problem with it is that no matter what, what it's used for, even if it's used for more fantastical purposes and, and, and crazier, more obviously fake scenarios, is the cheapness of the effort. Still, someone had to draw a cartoon painstakingly. You know, there was a human hand at work. So to me, the cheapness of getting it done, the cheapness of effort is like, it shows. To me, that's the sickening part that reveals itself no matter what.
- [38:04]
John Podhoretz
Although in political advertising, sometimes cheapness has always worked like a down and dirty negative political ad. Well, in the heyday of when negative ads were really biting, which all had.
- [38:16]
Abe Greenwald
That same scary dude's voice, the guy's.
- [38:19]
John Podhoretz
Like, you're a liberal.
- [38:20]
Christine Rosen
It's 2:00 in the morning.
- [38:22]
John Podhoretz
Buddy McKay, you're a liberal like that. But Arthur Finkelstein, who was the master of the negative ad, did not think that it needed to look polished. He thought actually it being unpolished and rough as it was, was a help because made it edgy and jagged and it might therefore stick in your head a little bit more because.
- [38:43]
Abe Greenwald
But it required creativity on the part of human beings to think about what would look scary, what would in what. I think a. Abe's point of. You're preaching to the choir here, obviously, Abe, but. But the point is that there. It doesn't take any effort. It's a prompt that you can write in a split second and then the AI does the rest for you. And there isn't that. I mean, there's a huge debate ongoing among anyone in any sort of creative space, whether they're actors, you know, musicians, artists, about making a distinction between AI slop and human made art. And this, this effort to make AI art, whatever that might be. There have been a few exhibits launch. I watch those very closely. But there is something intrinsically human and I think that's why I'm annoyed. I roll my eyes every time the White House issues one of these stupid Trump AI things. But there's something corrosive about that as well. Because it's one thing for, you know, silly people online to do whatever they want, making crazy videos, but for it to come out of the White House with the imprimatur of the White House and it just to be this silly slop is people say it's embarrassing. It's not embarrassing, it's just demoralizing.
- [39:49]
John Podhoretz
I mean, you can edit a parent.
- [39:51]
Christine Rosen
Of, you know, young kids. Like, I, I see this, you know, the, the that quality difference that you're talking about with the difference that effort makes. Right? And one thing that really struck me was I finally showed my kids the first time several years ago when we watched the Prince of Egypt. I remember seeing the Prince. I mean, the Prince of Egypt was released when I was, I think probably in, in high school or whatever. Like I was young. Ish. When the Prince of Egypt came out. The Disney movie.
- [40:24]
John Podhoretz
Disney movie. But the first DreamWorks movie.
- [40:27]
Christine Rosen
I'm sorry, excuse me.
- [40:28]
John Podhoretz
It's a.
- [40:29]
Christine Rosen
It's a car.
- [40:30]
John Podhoretz
It's the, it's a cartoon version of the exodus of the Mo. The story of Moses, right?
- [40:35]
Mark Halpern
Made in like 1994.
- [40:37]
Christine Rosen
It is like. It's also like, you know, everybody has a. Every, every. Every great actor or every like big actor at the moment has like a part in, in whatever goldblum is Aaron and you know, all this other stuff. MICHELLE PFEIFFER SINGS but, but the other thing about it that I noticed was that when I showed it to my kids, I had not, I don't think when I was younger I had realized how incredibly moving it is as a. How great a movie the Prince of Egypt really is. And it was one of the last like real hand drawn projects. It was, it was the one. It was not completely hand drawn, but it was one where, you know, the. All the CGI that was added to it, if I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure this is correct, was basically to enhance the hand drawn world that they had created. And so the Prince of Egypt in a way really marked a line after which CGI became the big thing. And you really moved away from it. So. So you can look at the Prince of Egypt and see kind of the, you know, the Last of the Mohicans in a way of a certain kind of animation. And it really does feel. And look, there is something different about it. The other thing is that I was having this conversation with a friend of mine. We were talking about the shows our kids watch and we realized that. So there's like Spidey and his amazing friends, right? All these cartoons on Disney that are kid versions of superheroes. And I mean the superheroes are kids. Spidey is a kid, you know, all the others in the group are a kid. The villains are kids. And you know, and my kids right now are very into. And his kids also this thing called PJ Masks, which is a group of six year olds who at night become heroes and fight the villains, right? And the villains are also kids. And it's like 6 year olds versus 6 year olds at night. And apparently the parents are not wondering where everybody is. But. But it's funny because we realize that it's the exact same show as Spidey and his friends with the CGI changing like the color and pattern of the costumes. It's literally like there's a boy hero, a girl hero and a. And a boy hero of indeterminate ethnic origin. And those three, you know, go about. And it's the same thing. Spider man has that. A boy Spider Man, a girl Spider man, and I think there's a black Spider man is the third kid PJ Masks something, you know, similar. And it's like you take this formula and in a world where you can do this with computers, you literally could make endless, endless versions and have everything be the same. Pretty much the same exact thing. And so what's crazy is that the, the improvement in technology is supposed to open up the horizons, supposed to make you be able to do anything and expand your world. And what's happening seems to be find a formula that works and literally copy and paste that formula over and over and over again. And so it's not even expanding what we see and hear and feel when we watch TV or go to the movies. It's having the opposite.
- [43:58]
Abe Greenwald
The Internet power of homogenization has been underappreciated since the Internet kind of hit the scene. The promise and the, and the.
- [44:07]
John Podhoretz
The issue with, the issue with AI is not how it's going to be used at the, you know, at the highest creative level and therefore destroy, you know, like great writing or though, I mean that's obviously something that I care about or great filmmaking or something like that. It's the total massification of it, right? It's, it's the fact that, you know, GROK is available whatever, you know, these things, you can subscribe to proximity with these programs anthropic and 200 million people can make Prince of Egypt. And the net cost of that is it's probably not going to look great, but maybe 10 years from now it'll look great, but it will not be anything special because it, it will be the ultimate form of homogenization because it's all bits and pieces of creative properties that have been stitched together in infinite variations, but none of it is original.
- [45:19]
Abe Greenwald
Right? It's a parasite host problem, right? We the, the host, we the host is human creativity in all of its vast forms. And AI has a parasitic relationship to that. And no right now, no requirement to actually pay people for what they're doing. Although there was this recent lawsuit about that writers should all go to the lookup that anthropic owes you money because they pirated your words without permission and they should now pay you. But it is. But, but that parasite host dynamic nobody wants to talk about because there is an end point to what they. And this is why the model collapse of a lot of the sort of ChatGPT style LLMs is concerning because they're just feeding off of what's already online and at a certain point it's going to just be churning over the same thing. And it is all the. It's not so much about the built in prejudices and biases, it's about the fact that there is a finite amount of information and a lot of human creativity remains buried in books that have never been scanned in archives and other places in the human mind, which we're also being trained to outsource a lot of our skills to these tools. So all of that stuff, I mean, it does sound pretty dystopian when you start putting it all together. And I do think artists are always at the cutting edge, creative people at the cutting edge of saying, you know what, what we do is unique and special and should be either protected or you should have to pay us for our work. That's an important argument that's going on right now with a lot of this AI stuff.
- [46:42]
John Podhoretz
So when you look at the Cuomo ad or you look at that, you know, the Trump AI stuff or all of that, the cheapness is part of the point. I mean, I actually do think in that sense, if the Trump in the plane dropping feces on the no Kings demonstrators looked more realistic, it would be very, very disturbed like that. You can say, well, it's just a joke. It's like an editorial cartoon. It's sophomoric, you know, or it's childish. But imagine that it actually looked like feces. Imagine that. You know, like there are ways in which it being better would make it infinitely worse. Right? That's the point where the uncanny valley thing gets scary, which is the progress is insane. You, you're, you mentioned, you know, Prince of Egypt. So 20 years ago, this movie, the Polar Express came out and it was this new form of technology in which you had actors sort of acting and then they were sort of animated over.
- [48:03]
Abe Greenwald
Creepy as hell.
- [48:05]
John Podhoretz
And it was unbelievably disturbing because of the uncanny Valley problem and stuff like that. When they made Toy Story, for example, everything with the toys was fantastic. But when you see the kid Sid, you see a. You see a couple of kids, real, and they're supposed to look like children. And it was like it made you a little nauseous. That's. There's something off and it made you nauseous. And today, not only would that not be the case, that Sid would look like a real person, but it took them six months to make Sid look bad in 1995, and it will take them six minutes to make Sid look like an actual person now. And the only real cost, and this is an interesting social distance. We've gone off on this wild tangent. You know, the problem is that the energy demands that are created by these large learning models and the, the kind of use that their mass use, we are going to be stressed in terms of our energy as never before. And, you know, if you're a supporter of nuclear power, you may be getting your wish. Finally, after 45 years of attempting to shut down nuclear power in the United States, because there's going to be no choice but the. But. But for the building of like Meta.
- [49:49]
Abe Greenwald
Is building a nuclear power plant. Meta funding the. Yes. Just for this purpose. Yeah.
- [49:54]
John Podhoretz
They're going to have to be mini nuclear power plants all over the place simply to power AI. If people get used to needing AI to do things for them, which they apparently are at a rapid clip. My daughter sent me a story from from her college newspaper. She doesn't like AI, doesn't use it, but according to the survey of this college newspaper, 80% of kids use some form of AI every day in some fashion or other to study, to do this, do that. I can see how it's useful in small bore like if you can say, make me a, you know, make me a list of books about, about 18th century Constantinople, you know, and then maybe order them for me through Amazon or something like that. And then it does that. You do it in one sentence.
- [50:53]
Abe Greenwald
It's often I have to say, because I test it out all the time just both to test my own prejudices and to see how it works. It is. If you know something about a subject and you ask most of the models, it's really dodgy as to whether they're A, giving you factually correct information and B, if they're giving you if all those lists of books from Constantinople are actually the best scholarly works on the subject or if they're just, you know, what was highest ranked in a, in a search or mentioned most on Wikipedia. So it's, it really is not a trustworthy source of information and everyone's treating it as such.
- [51:29]
Christine Rosen
I'm Oliver Darcy.
- [51:30]
John Podhoretz
And I'm John Passantino.
- [51:32]
Christine Rosen
We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now through our nightly newsletter, status.
- [51:40]
John Podhoretz
And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Powerlines.
- [51:46]
Christine Rosen
Every Friday, we're breaking down the biggest stories shaping the industry, explaining why they matter and saying the things most people are thinking but too timid to say out loud.
- [51:54]
John Podhoretz
No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis that isn't afraid to call it like it is. We also pull back the curtain via our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes.
- [52:04]
Christine Rosen
My understanding, having reported this, is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.
- [52:20]
John Podhoretz
Oh, My God, that's Power Lines presented by Status. Follow Power Lines and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast.
- [52:34]
Mark Halpern
I'm Mark Halpern, and I want to let you know that two Way Tonight, the destination for the best political news and analysis anywhere, is now available as an audio podcast. Each weekday, I'll be joined by special guests from the worlds of news, politics, and the media, along with members of the two Way community for conversations like no other. It's the best way to stay informed at the end of your day or first thing in the morning every weekday. It's a show like no other because we involve the community. We hear from people from around the country, around the world. They're part of a conversation. There is no other platform like this, and I hope you will find it to be not only different than everything else, but more meaningful as you become part of a special community around the program. So listen and follow two Way tonight with Mark Alperin on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other major streaming platform.
- [53:22]
John Podhoretz
I'm not. Okay. I mean, also, there are ways in which you can use them to help you make lists, to do scheduling, to do, like, very prosaic. Yes, to do very prosaic things that they take out of your hand, make life immensely, you know, easier, and help you organize things or something like that. There's that AI stuff that I note, by the way, when we produce this podcast, we do it on a program called Riverside. We're done. And Riverside has two major AI functions that happen that you don't. No one will ever see. One of them is that it instantly makes a transcript or almost instantly makes a transcript of us talking. And five years ago, those transcripts were illiterate and impossible, and now they are pretty close to being letter perfect. Second is that it generates a precis of the conversation that we have just had that is eerily accurate. And how long does it take, Abe? 30 seconds? Maybe 45 seconds?
- [54:31]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, if it takes longer. It's not. It's not because it's. It's not because it's figuring out. It's because there's some other way.
- [54:37]
John Podhoretz
I could literally cut and paste it and use it as the thing that we put on our summary of the podcast on Apple, you know, for. For people to read, although it's. It, you know, leaves nothing to the imagination. It basically. It's like there's no secretary recording minutes. It's like. Or like a stenographer kind of summarizing it. Yeah, it.
- [55:02]
Seth Mandel
Riverside also has other AI functions that I don't use They're. Because they're bad. I mean there's one like, instead of going through it and creating the final product myself, you can hit a button that says like, you know, AI edit or whatever and they'll do the whole thing. And it's, it's bad, you know, it's not good.
- [55:29]
John Podhoretz
Right?
- [55:29]
Seth Mandel
They, they can, they can turn us, it could turn us into cartoons too.
- [55:34]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, well, they, they. I mean, you know, that's, there's also. Yeah, maybe we should do that on, you know, Perham or something. But, but they, there's, there's a program, you know, the app Google has its own AI notebook of Google Notebook lm. And it is an AI program that initially was to do those things. Right. To help you. I mean you could get a transcript, you could also get a summary of whatever you read. This app now, which you could have on your phone can take an article and turn it into a two person podcast that you can listen to. It will actually have two different voices produce a podcast that you can listen to a podcast version of some academic article or something like that. And there is another feature that I don't know if they've added it yet, but they've talked extensively about adding it where you can make it a call in show and you can interact with the AI podcast hosts that have just AI produced a podcast about the article that you fed in. You can ask a question and say, well, what. But it says here. And so at that point, I mean it's like, it's kind of crazy. But you could, you know, you could toss, you could toss a commentary article theoretically into this app and ask it to make the Commentary magazine podcast. I'd be interested to see what it sound like. But one, but this is where things are going in a way that is like overwhelmingly, you know, like it goes from really useful, which is transcript. Transcripts are a massively useful tool. Fast transcripts to, for, you know, the way the, the speed at which news moves, you know, at coverage fast transcripts are like, this was, you know, an incredible invention and then it like jumped forward into the future.
- [57:40]
Abe Greenwald
They're already, I will add to that that they're already have a friend who does sort of teaching company lectures and they will now have, they have the option of using an AI version of his voice for the record, you know, they do a streaming version. And he said it to me and he's like, someone I've known, you know, 30 years, like, does this sound like me? And it does. But if he but there was something off about it, because I know his voice. We've had many conversations over the years, but I don't think anyone who doesn't know him would notice the difference. And so that's also where all of our voices can be harvested and made to say just about anything. Which, you know, John, you don't have to do ad reads anymore. You can just AI you sort of export it to AI. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff that. Again, that. That uncanny valley. If I know him, I know that wasn't quite his voice, even though it was a version of his voice.
- [58:31]
John Podhoretz
I mean, you know, it's. Look, you know, Arthur C. Clarke famously said that advanced science is.
- [58:40]
Abe Greenwald
Indistinguishable from magic.
- [58:42]
John Podhoretz
Indistinguishable from magic in the human brain. You know, science achieves levels where its capacities are indistinguishable from magic. So that, you know, 100, 100 years ago, if there was a machine, if you knew that there was a machine that could take water and help make it into ice, that was magic. Like, you know, you know, every. Every. Every step of the way, you know, how. How on earth did people figure out how to send sound waves through the air to be received by something that you could then hear? Something said miles away? And it's still the case. I don't know how that. I don't understand how that works, how television works, how radio works, how you're listening to me podcast.
- [59:31]
Abe Greenwald
Physics Corner is coming your way after.
- [59:33]
John Podhoretz
No, but it is. It is. It is.
- [59:36]
Mark Halpern
We.
- [59:37]
John Podhoretz
We don't expect that we are to understand it. We accept that it is, that it is. And now, basic facts of reality, like your voice not really being your voice, is gonna have some very significant impact on everything. We just don't have the foggiest idea how to game it out, which is why you get this Luddite sensibility. And, you know, I'm against bloodism. I. You know, I think it's a. History has shown that it's a fool's errand, number one. And number two, it, you know, retards things and retards progress, but it's very hard not to look at this and say, it must all be stopped. You know, just stop it now before. You know. And people do say this, like, people are saying things like, if the computers get too smart, it is going to be like the Terminator. They're going to go to war with us or take control of our. Of our systems or whatever. You know, this is not.
- [60:44]
Abe Greenwald
But the concern isn't that they. Because they don't have human motivation, but they've been created by humans, so they have enough of our vices and maybe hopefully some of our virtues. That's the alignment problem. But I think the fear is that we don't know how it does what it does. And that is new. That's really, really new. Because even algorithmically based life, which we've all been living in for a while, since the Internet, you could go back. An algorithm is a form of formula. Go back and rework it and change it to change things. If things were going wrong, even the creators of these powerful tools can't explain how they work. So we're on the plane and they're building it while it's flying. And that is the part, I think, where some, some guardrails are necessary in advance. And that's not ludism, that's human protectionism, if you will. It's like the tariff industry. Like we do need to protect certain things until we understand them better because our minds don't work in the same way that these powerful tools do.
- [61:36]
John Podhoretz
The problem is that l is.
- [61:40]
Christine Rosen
Say what will save us is the. From what you're describing, Christine, when you say they have, you know, their. The input is all human, it sounds like what will save us is the machines will all develop gambling addictions.
- [61:52]
Abe Greenwald
Gambling and porn addictions.
- [61:54]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [61:54]
Christine Rosen
And it will sideline their entire, you know, any other ambitions they could possibly have.
- [62:00]
John Podhoretz
Well, look, technological optimists like Isaac Asimov, right, who sort of came up with this, these, a lot of these ideas, you know, in fictional form 70, 80 years ago, you know, when he was talking about what would happen if there were robots that were sort of in daily use in life, said, well, the robots would all have to be programmed with these three laws that were, you know, they can't attack you. They can't do something that's not in your service and they can't. I can't remember the third law. Right. But I mean, there's no reason those. That was his conceit in a weird way, to sell the idea that there was nothing to fear from a robot. Though, of course, then his stories were all about how robots get turned against you. But that there was that, you know, that this would just have to happen if robots were going to be part of our daily lives. But it hasn't happened. I mean, it's not like we know that the AI, that the large language models are being programmed not to attack us.
- [63:08]
Abe Greenwald
No, but we do know that they've become exceptionally Adept at dissembling, lying, strategizing around the human goals that were given to it to, or problems to solve in ways that are probably harmless in a lot of fields, but in say, autonomous warfare or, you know, nuclear weapons launch or areas where actually civilizational collapse might occur from a, from a stupid error, the ability to scheme, there's this fascinating literature, if you want to dive deep into some of the AI stuff. Fascinating literature about how all the schemes, from how they cheat at chess to how they go around the human interlocutor in any sort of combat situation. It's, it's fascinating. And they're trying to figure out how it learns to do that. And they still don't know. But even reading those papers, which I do fairly regularly, occasionally keeps me up at night because we don't know how they figured out how to out scheme us. We're good schemers. Human nature, boy, that we're kind of hardwired to do that. And it's figuring that out and they don't know how. Exactly.
- [64:12]
John Podhoretz
Just think that. The interesting thing about contemporary science, which as you know, is not my, my field, you know, my, my strong suit, is that the things that we expected would be the case versus the things that have actually proven to be the case. So if you would ask me where we would be in 1995 after they began mapping or completed the first version of mapping the human genome, everybody would have said, well, you map the human genome and then they're going to like find cures to most diseases. And it turns out that was not what happened with the human genome. What happened was that the unbelievable complexity of the human body became even more clear. It was not a simplification process.
- [64:58]
Abe Greenwald
It was a CRISPR out of that though. CRISPR technology.
- [65:01]
John Podhoretz
Right. So it's not that it can't happen or that there won't be iterations of this, but there was this idea like we're going to find out what every gene is in the body and then, you know, that'll. That's it. Like, that's, that's the end of like medicine will have been solved. We'll know. And then the idea that it turns out that these things interact with each other in ways that we cannot begin to understand. And if, you know, it's like if you turn off this gene because it may have the prospect of giving you ovarian cancer when you're 45 and then you turn it off, well, maybe turning it off means that you're going to get hodgkin's when you're 12. Like we don't know how this works. And it was humbling to everybody who was convinced that the, that the mapping of the human genome was itself going to be a solution. Right. So that's. And you know, all this research into quantum mechanics and all that, all of which suggests not only that there is a. There are ways in which people are going to be able to learn and understand and do things in the future that we can't even really comprehend because it works according to principles and rules. Sort of like what you're saying with AI that we cannot, that are beyond our ability to analyze. They also reveal that the universe may be a vastly more mysterious place than we even thought. And that the religious impulse that says, you know, like in the book of Job, where were you when I created the whirlwind? There are things that happen in this earth and in your life and everything that surpass, surpasses your understanding and you will never be able to understand. Quantum mechanics is the same thing. Maybe there are alternate universes, maybe there are pocket universes, maybe there are alternate realities. All that stuff that sounds like science fiction, but that the people who do this, it has the quality of the mystical, the supernatural, the, the beyond our ability to reckon or understand it. And it's weird to be feeling like we're standing on the precipice of this simultaneous leap in the capacity of things to happen somehow. And the revelation of how little we know. They're both like they're, they're interwoven.
- [67:47]
Abe Greenwald
But the word you use that I think with the mapping of the human genome and what came after that, it was humbling. That's not a tone I see much of in our current AI moment. I don't see a lot of humility. I see it. There are actually Geoffrey Hinton, a few others who have, who have said, who've said this is this hopefully will be used for the good of humanity. But here are my concerns and let's go slowly. There are a few of those voices, but not in the industry and not in the policy making world right now. And I think that's actually something that I would like to see a little more of in the future.
- [68:21]
Seth Mandel
But you know, the genetic science and like the dominance of the gene, you know, and like the Dawkins school, the idea that we are nothing but sort.
- [68:35]
John Podhoretz
Of control of our genes. Yeah.
- [68:39]
Seth Mandel
Which I think has been, you know, very countered like very strongly by further developments. We use our genes. They're more at our service than we are at theirs. But before that was revealed. There was the same arrogance about this, about the certainty of what it would mean to map out the genome and to pursue these avenues of inquiry. So they're like at that phase where that's a phase in a movement.
- [69:22]
Christine Rosen
There's also the Silicon Valley habit of creating something. And then 10 years down the line, they're all at, you know, some conference and they're going, I don't let my kid use what I created. You know, like a Facebook engineer saying, like, my kids don't have access to Facebook. That stuff is poison. You know, and it's like the AI stuff and I don't know, you know, a genome mapping, all the, all this stuff going into the future makes me wonder how much of that we're going to see, which is like the people who create it being like, well, you won't see that in my house. Just your house, you know, my house, my 25 billion square foot house that was built, you know, by selling you this technology that I don't let my children use. But there's like this sort of Dr. Frankenstein's regret virtually every time there's some major leap, right? I mean, there's. There. It's like, it's like the guy who created the Labradoodle or whatever, you know, his, his, like his lament, his deathbed lament with, was that he had created the Labradoodle because they're wonderful. But he said, he said that he had, what he had done was he had created this dog for a friend who had allergies and, you know, whatever. Like he had bred this dog, whatever. He had this idea and he bred the dog for a friend. It was supposed to be like one, you know, and then it became a thing. And then people were like, oh, well, you know, they have all sorts of congenital issues because they're this, you know, and he's. And he was racked with guilt for creating an animal that, I don't know, maybe had, I don't know, whatever it was.
- [71:01]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [71:02]
Abe Greenwald
Pugs were meant to sit on the laps of rich people.
- [71:06]
John Podhoretz
Dog breeding is the original was genetics. Before anybody understood genetics, they were breeding rats and they didn't know what they were doing was just genetic manipulation. You know, the, the problem here with.
- [71:20]
Seth Mandel
AI is that the people who are, who are making these leaps happen, they don't have the conscience that, that this, that the creator of the Labradoodle does. Right? So, you know, you're talking about someone like Elon Musk, who was a very strange, complicated figure, but he announces, you know, in advance what the next amazing thing Grok is going to be able to do with a certainty that that's always a great. That's great. That's a. That that's good. You know, he. And he will always be like that. You know, he is not going to ever think that there's something bad that, that, that, that can be. Because if it were up to him, he'd be fine interacting with.
- [72:07]
John Podhoretz
But I mean, look, there's a human nature, human nature streak. Like what you're talking about in terms of Geoffrey Hinton or people who said, never let my kid use Facebook or something like that. Alfred Nobel created the Nobel Prize because he invented dynamite. And then he was ashamed of him. He didn't. He didn't realize that in create. You know, Robert Oppenheimer, you know, like, spends years developing the atomic bomb. And then he's racked with guilt, you know, because, you know, he thought he was going to get to pick how. How. How this power was used. And it's like, no, we're in a war. We develop, we spend it. We spent $2 billion on this. You know, we spent the equivalent of $500 billion doing this so we could win a war. It wasn't about anything else. You know, Harry Truman saying, get that crybaby out of my office. Like, I don't need his nonsense. So there is that human impulse which is like, I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. I just thought I was expanding the limits of human knowledge. Oh, my God. What. You know, it's the right. The modern Prometheus. That's. That's the Frankenstein theme. What have I done? You know, I did something and it's made everything worse. You know, the person who came up with ways to preserve food, you know, on grocery shelves for, you know, for weeks in the ultra processing thing. Now everybody thinks that this has produced obesity and, and. And had. Has had terrible health consequences 50 years later. But that wasn't. He didn't think that. He was just trying to figure out how you could keep a donut on a grocery shelf for. For seven days without it going stale. You know, and so there is that thing which is, we can do this. And then ultimately what? It's self indulgent, it seems to me, that sort of thing. The Facebook guys saying, regretting what they did because we can't know. And if he hadn't done it, if the guy who would come up with ultra processed foods hadn't done it, another guy would have done it.
- [74:14]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, but here's the difference between now and back then, the Silicon Valley types, when they look into the future, are actually quite, quite clear about what they think society will look like. And they are the winners. And then there's everybody else with VR goggles slapped on, living their real lives online because there are no jobs, there's no, like, the environment's gone to hell. Like, it's just, well, we'll just, we'll satisfy them with a version of soma and we will continue to live our lives and call the shots. And you know, and in this room also, what we do, which is analyze political questions, that's also something that I think they are happy to outsource to other tools. They're very impatient with political process. They're very impatient with democracy in particular. So I think they're much clearer and more. The hubris involved in their vision of the future is basically like, well, if you don't want innovation, you don't want everybody to be happy all the time. Our version of happiness involves building our own private city outside of San Francisco where we don't have to deal with the homeless with all of our wealthy friends. And you sit in your trailer with VR goggles on. And that is their vision. And they are perfectly happy to outline that as a positive future for humanity. And I think that's, I disagree with that vision, let's just put it that way. So we should recommend everyone go back and reread Ready Player one, because that is actually your future.
- [75:35]
John Podhoretz
Oh no, no, I'm just kidding. Oh, that book is so depressing.
- [75:39]
Christine Rosen
Watch Prince of Egypt. That's, There you go.
- [75:42]
John Podhoretz
Watch the Prince of Egypt. Ready Clare one. Right. But yeah, no, I, I, I think you're being a little, I, I'm not gonna defend Silicon Valley tripe, but I think you're, I think you're being a little unfair.
- [76:01]
Abe Greenwald
Manifesto from a few years ago. It's online. I encourage everyone to read it and tell me I'm being hyperbolic, but I'm not being dishonest about what people, right.
- [76:10]
John Podhoretz
Who are in this, right. Who exist in this realm. But I'll give you an example of this which. So my mind has been changed by something. Don't claim that very often. So like I'm very freaked out by the self driving car. I was, I saw, you know, was in, I was in la, saw them all over the place. Very recognizable because they have all these spinny wheels on them, like pinwheels on the top and they have a little like flashing light on the top and it's little Weird, you know, these cabs, these way mos. But the, the data are pretty clear that they're vastly safer than, than, than the industry.
- [76:56]
Abe Greenwald
The industry did those studies. Just, just, just saying, industry funded.
- [77:01]
John Podhoretz
The numbers are, the numbers are so dramatic. They're really dramatic. It's not like they're 20% safer, it's like they're 90% safer. It's like if every car were self driving based on some of these algorithms. Again, we don't have enough data on it, but it appears that they really will not crash into each other. If they don't, you would like have a world in which you could conceivably have a world in which the auto accident as we understand it is a thing of the past and it is the thing that kills more people in the United States than any other thing. And so I am, there are ways in which you can see how this stuff that is so unnerving because it's like I don't want my autonomy taken away in which I want to get in my car and drive wherever I want to go or whatever and not have this car controlling me. Although you know, you get a taxi and somebody else is controlling it though you give it a destination. But maybe that's a, maybe that's a misunderstanding of or miscalculation or a failure to be able to see how this stuff can work for your benefit in the future.
- [78:14]
Christine Rosen
Well, I think people will get used to it in a way that they don't imagine. And I'm, I'm like you, I, I, I am, I don't know that I would get into a self driving car. But then I think, you know, 20 years ago I got into a monorail at Disney World, you know, and whatever at the World of Tomorrow and stuff like that. And you start thinking like, well how often have I actually gotten into, you know, this, you ride roller coasters, you do this and that there's the amount of times that you trust machines to, to take you safely through a journey that would otherwise be incredibly dangerous is something that I think you probably get used to. Just like, you know, you get used to each new advance of it. But I think that the, the, the thing with the self driving cars is also that it's not just the autonomy but it's like there, people think of, people think about could they be hacked, right? Am I driving in a car and could some like 12 year old take the car that, that's driving me right there? All sorts of like, and I'm not saying that's realistic. What I'm saying is the imagination when we think about, you know, these sorts of things, the imagination can really run wild and the statistics can turn it into a kind of like the debate over nuclear energy, which is like, it's clean, it's obviously safer by leaps and bounds than what we have. But everybody's kind of afraid of a nuclear spill or, you know, whatever. And that's drummed into you. That's the same kind of thing with self driving cars, which is that like the data makes sense that they're safer. But also it's like, what if the kid next door gets control of my car?
- [79:54]
Abe Greenwald
That honestly, you know, to the adaptability point. The first time I got in an Uber Uber, I remember thinking it's just a strange dude in, in his. And I'm in getting in his car and trust him that he's going to just take me to my destination. We very quickly adapted to that. But I will say I did. My sister takes the Waymo all in San Francisco all the time and she said the most annoying thing about it is that unlike if you're in an Uber or I mean ideally in a taxi, but not always, the driver tends to keep the vehicle clean because the rankings, you know, will reflect if they don't. And nobody. There's a tragedy. The commons in every single way.
- [80:27]
John Podhoretz
No one's cleaning their trash. No one's cleaning the Waymo. Right. Well, listen, no, I know people in LA with teenage daughters who will now only let them ride in Waymos. Why? Because Uber is a very unregulated business in la. And how do you know that a guy, your daughter isn't going to get picked up by a guy and you're driving in Benedict Canyon and he'll pull off on the side of the road and do something to her. Now it's not like that happens every day. And you therefore, it's not like the subway platform problem in New York City where there was this point where people were being pushed off subway platforms every day. But that's again where you, Seth, what you're saying, like where the mind goes is something like that. So it's like, well, the one thing that unnerves me about my daughter going out at night in, in an Uber is that she's with some driver. I don't know, eliminate the driver. Eliminate the driver and the threat to her physical safety or her, you know, from is is eliminated. And I hadn't even thought of that. I didn't, you know, this was a conversation I had a couple months ago when I was in Los Angeles and I had not. This had not occurred to me. And I have teenage daughters, so obviously everybody in LA has sort of thought this through. New York, the Uber drivers are actually regulated, so they are licensed like other taxi drivers. So. But even so, like, you know, I don't know. I just.
- [81:56]
Christine Rosen
There's a. There's a great Simpsons episode where they let the. The nerds take over the management of the town of Springfield. And so they make. One of the changes they make is the. The traffic lights are. They get rid of green. The green light, because everybody's driving faster when it's yellow. And so everybody in Springfield is shaving all this time off of their commute because they've gotten rid of the green light and just have yellow and red. So sometimes it's like a too clever by half, you know, thing like that. But it does. It does have that ring to it.
- [82:33]
John Podhoretz
Okay, look, just to bring this back to the empyrean or the vaguely political. So I brought this. All this entire conversation started because I brought up this Cuomo Mamdani commercial in which they used AI to sort of show people living in Mamdani's New York and all the horrible things that they could get up to if Mamdani's policies were put into place. And I. Maybe this is the only real way that you can frighten people into not voting for Mamdani, to be honest. Like, you know, because he's not gonna make anything for it. He's not gonna do this. They're not gonna do that. But you know what? Every light quality of life is gonna go to hell. Here's a. Here's. Here's a vision of it. Here's a way of looking at it, you know, where we could write that. We could write columns that are just. We could write a dystopian novel about life in New York under Mamdani, but it. You know, it would be published two years into his mayoralty, and it would either then be overtaken by events or not, you know, I don't know. So I'm. Obviously, we've gone on way too long. I'm so sorry for. To everybody. I did want to make a quick recommendation based on a piece of advice given me by. By a dear friend. A book that I've never. I. I have never read the historian Barbara Tuckman's work. She was an enormously.
- [84:10]
Abe Greenwald
She's great. Oh, yeah.
- [84:11]
John Podhoretz
She was an enor. Popular, popular historian. She was like the great popular historian of the 1960s and 1970s. And I confess, I'd never like what David McCullough became. And I had never read her work before. And my friend recommended to me her book, the Proud Tower, which is about the decades before World War I and the things and historical events that led to World War I. Because he. He said to me, isn't this very reminiscent what's going on with Luigi Mangione and the assassinations and everything of chapter two of the Proud Tower? And I said, well, I haven't ever read the Proud Tower, I'm ashamed to say so. So I downloaded the Proud Tower and I read chapter two, which is called. I'm sorry, it's called the Idea and the Something One Second. It's called the Idea and the Deed. And it's about. It's about the rise of anarchism and how the anarchists manifested themselves, these guys who had these ideas in the mid 19th century, how there was this explosion of anarchism and the number of assassinations that were committed that you've never even heard of. Two different Spanish prime ministers, a princess of Hungary, various people assassinated, including the biggest one, which is Tsar Alexander II in 1881. And how. From the Idea to the Deed. Right. So it's how ideas then actually manifest themselves in people taking up the idea and then putting it and making it flesh. And it's an amazingly haunting description of our present moment. But it's largely 130, 140 years ago, and the sorts of people, the kind of underground men or the sort of the. The shiftless young men. Although in her case, she's really describing poor people. A lot of people who, you know, are, like, hopeless because of poverty, which is not obviously the case with the people. Like, it's not Luigi Mangioni's story, certainly, but how ideas can manifest themselves in monstrous behavior taken up not by leading political figures, but by anonymous nobodies who enter into history and change it with one giant act. And it's a breathtaking historical description. And it's the only part of this book that I have read so far. And it's the only thing I've ever read by Barbara Tuchman thus far. But it was pretty staggering. And so I want to recommend at least chapter two of the Proud Tower.
- [87:07]
Abe Greenwald
Then read, then read the Guns of August, which follows is the next, next era beginning World War I, which is also great.
- [87:13]
John Podhoretz
Right, okay. So sorry to haunt you and make you worried about AI, but, you know, if you weren't worried about AI before, I don't know what. What you've been. What you've been smoking to avoid being horrified by AI. Anyway, we'll be back on Monday. So for Seth, Abe and Christina, I'm John Pot. Horace keep the camel burning.
- [87:46]
Seth Mandel
And Doug.
- [87:47]
Christine Rosen
Here we have the Limu Emu in.
- [87:49]
John Podhoretz
Its natural habitat, helping people customize their.
- [87:52]
Christine Rosen
Car insurance and save hundreds of With Liberty Mutual.
- [87:57]
John Podhoretz
Fascinating.
- [87:58]
Christine Rosen
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
- [88:04]
John Podhoretz
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [88:06]
Seth Mandel
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty.
- [88:10]
John Podhoretz
Liberty Savings Ferry Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.