The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table

0:00 The friend he hasn't seen since sixth grade
5:16 Angelina Jolie, BRCA, and the 20% nobody tells women about
18:23 What a cancer cell actually is - and why tumors evolve
26:31 How cancer actually kills you, and what a seizure is
32:14 The last cigarette: why he can't take the test every week
46:27 The best medicine in the world, and who can't get to it
1:03:23 Telling a family there's nothing left

Noam hadn't seen Kenan Onel since high school in Ardsley, where Onel graduated first in the class and Noam, by his own account, drifted somewhere well below. Fifty years later Onel runs genetics and genomics at Roswell Park - the only comprehensive cancer center in all of western New York - and Noam has one thing he wants to ask him about.

He's afraid of cancer. His grandfather died of it. His father died of it. He's taken the Grail blood test, it came back clean, and he wants to know why he can't just take it every week.

What follows is part reunion and part interrogation. Onel explains what a cancer cell actually is, why tumors evolve like finches in the Galapagos, and what is physically happening to someone during a seizure. He explains how cancer kills - the mechanism, organ by organ. And he tells Noam that the test he's counting on just failed its biggest trial in the UK, which sets off the real argument of the hour: whether a guideline written for a population means anything at all to the one person sitting in the chair.

Then, near the end, Noam asks how you tell a family there's nothing left to offer. The answer is the best thing in the episode.

Also: the 20% of women who are high-risk and have never been told, the doctor who warned Noam that Pellegrino was bad for his son's bones, a scan booked by 4pm the next afternoon, and one entire podcast without mentioning Israel.

Dr. Kenan Onel is Chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics and Director of the Center for Precision Oncology and Cancer Prevention at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Live from the Table is the official podcast of the world-famous Comedy Cellar.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro - four nice things about Peter Beinart
4:50 Will God punish Israel? Jeremiah, tradition, and belief
13:20 The critical-mass hypothetical: a 49% Hasidic America
22:03 Quebec, Czechoslovakia, South Africa - why not divorce?
41:35 The right of return: "You can cherry-pick anything"
54:24 1948: They were closer to the Holocaust than we are to COVID
63:40 Day one of a one-state solution: the list
79:53 "An agenda dressed up in violins"

Claude Says:

Peter Beinart - editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, New York Times opinion writer, and author of "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza" - joins Noam Dworman and Dan Naturman for an honest, occasionally heated conversation about the questions underneath the Israel-Palestine debate. Does Jewish tradition teach that Israel's survival depends on its ethics - and does Beinart, an observant Jew, mean that literally? Is there such a thing as demographic critical mass? Why is secession the answer everywhere from Quebec to Czechoslovakia, but one shared state the answer here? Is the Palestinian right of return a sacred principle, a practical question, or - as Noam puts it - "an agenda dressed up in violins"? Plus: South Africa and Mandela, Iran, the Olmert-Abbas offers, what Benny Morris actually wrote about 1948, Robert Jackson's "suicide pact," and what day one of a one-state solution would look like for a gay couple in Tel Aviv. Two people who disagree about almost everything - except the settlements - actually talk to each other.

Peter's book: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza https://bit.ly/4ygbHH8
Peter's Substack: The Beinart Notebook https://peterbeinart.substack.com/

Description Written By Fable/Max: Robert Wright interviewed Geoffrey Hinton in 1983 and, by his own account, got the story 180 degrees wrong. Forty years later Hinton is the "Godfather of AI," two of the three godfathers are frightened of their own creation, and Wright has written The God Test to figure out what he missed and what's coming. We talk about how these machines evolved rather than being programmed - nobody fully understands them, including the people who build them - why "fancy autocomplete" was always wrong, the best case (an AI caught a radiologist's error in his cancer MRI), the worst case (a bioweapon that incubates silently for six weeks), why racing China to superintelligence may cause the war it's meant to prevent, and whether unplugging a machine could ever be murder. Plus an experiment of my own: I put a legal dispute in front of the AI and handed the laptop to the other side.

0:00 Intro - Robert Wright and The God Test
2:13 A 27-ton computer and a buried headline
4:11 Interviewing the Godfather of AI in 1983 - and missing it
10:15 Not programmed - evolved
17:27 The "fancy autocomplete" myth
24:17 Dukakis, Reagan, and how minds file words
35:49 Best case: medicine, education, and an MRI story
42:38 Worst case: bioweapons, jailbreaks, designer babies
48:51 An AI that believes what the Ayatollah believes
50:30 The China race - overdone and dangerous?
57:33 Nazis, the Hamas charter, and bombing over AI
59:46 Authoritarianism through the back door
1:03:35 Sociopaths, the ship of Theseus, and machine morality
1:14:34 Is it sentient? Should you be nice to it?
1:21:54 AI as judge: my legal experiment
1:26:20 The God Test

A conversation about the future of Israel and world Jewry. Can Israel protect itself without becoming a global pariah? Did Hamas gamble that even losing the war could pull Israel into isolation? Noam and Sobelman discuss occupation, unilateral withdrawal, the settler movement, Jewish vulnerability abroad, and the difficult tradeoffs now shaping Israel’s future.

00:00 Intro: Daniel Sobelman returns

03:47 Israel after October 7: a new era for Jews and Israel

08:58 Sobelman: October 7 as a nuclear-level shock

11:48 Why Israel was blamed before it responded

15:50 Hamas’s strategy: provoke a war and isolate Israel

22:35 Occupation, moral corrosion, and the West Bank dilemma

32:23 Could Israeli initiative restore its global standing?

34:03 Settlers, politics, and the failed path of unilateral withdrawal

41:29 Israel as both Jewish safety net and source of Jewish vulnerability

52:02 Resistance vs normalization: the future of the Middle East

Daniel Sobelman is a professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. Read his book, "Axis of Resistance" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9L7QQNN?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Was the MOU a good idea? Noam says yes, the Professor says no.

The Table is joined by Kian Tajbakhsh. They discuss his years as a political prisoner in Iran, the psychology of the Iranian regime, why he believes Iran's leaders genuinely seek Israel's destruction and what the West continues to misunderstand about the Middle East. He also weighs in on Trump, the latest U.S.-Iran developments and the future of the region.

Kian Tajbakhsh is Visiting Professor of International Relations at NYU and Fellow at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. An Iranian-American scholar of Middle East geopolitics and Iranian politics, he previously worked as a democracy and human rights advocate inside Iran. He spent nearly 13 months in Tehran’s Evin Prison, including 8 months in solitary confinement in a high-security IRGC wing, followed by 6 years under house arrest as a political prisoner, before being released as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He is the author of Creating Local Democracy in Iran (Cambridge University Press 2022). His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Project Syndicate, and his analysis has been featured on NBC, CNN, BBC, CBC, and NPR. He writes and comments frequently on Iranian politics, regional geopolitics, and democratic reform; author of The Iran Crisis Notebook on Substack.

www.kiantajbakhsh.net

kian.substack.com

CHAPTERS

02:20 Arrested by Iran & Life in Solitary Confinement

16:20 House Arrest and Release

20:30 October 7 and America's Blind Spot

23:00 Why Iran Wants to Destroy Israel

35:50 Trump, Iran, and the New Middle East Strategy

49:20 Was Trump's Deal a Mistake?