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On this episode of Advances in Care , host Erin Welsh and Dr. Craig Smith, Chair of the Department of Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia discuss the highlights of Dr. Smith’s 40+ year career as a cardiac surgeon and how the culture of Columbia has been a catalyst for innovation in cardiac care. Dr. Smith describes the excitement of helping to pioneer the institution’s heart transplant program in the 1980s, when it was just one of only three hospitals in the country practicing heart transplantation. Dr. Smith also explains how a unique collaboration with Columbia’s cardiology team led to the first of several groundbreaking trials, called PARTNER (Placement of AoRTic TraNscatheteR Valve), which paved the way for a monumental treatment for aortic stenosis — the most common heart valve disease that is lethal if left untreated. During the trial, Dr. Smith worked closely with Dr. Martin B. Leon, Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Chief Innovation Officer and the Director of the Cardiovascular Data Science Center for the Division of Cardiology. Their findings elevated TAVR, or transcatheter aortic valve replacement, to eventually become the gold-standard for aortic stenosis patients at all levels of illness severity and surgical risk. Today, an experienced team of specialists at Columbia treat TAVR patients with a combination of advancements including advanced replacement valve materials, three-dimensional and ECG imaging, and a personalized approach to cardiac care. Finally, Dr. Smith shares his thoughts on new frontiers of cardiac surgery, like the challenge of repairing the mitral and tricuspid valves, and the promising application of robotic surgery for complex, high-risk operations. He reflects on life after he retires from operating, and shares his observations of how NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia have evolved in the decades since he began his residency. For more information visit nyp.org/Advances…
Content provided by Richard Hanania. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Richard Hanania or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Foreign policy, American politics, and social science
Content provided by Richard Hanania. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Richard Hanania or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Foreign policy, American politics, and social science
I am honored to have New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the podcast to talk about his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious . I’ve always seen atheism as my first intellectual position. Upon learning that many Christian doctrines declare that non-believers go to hell and are tortured for all eternity, I decided I needed to look into whether their claims were true and came to the conclusion that they most certainly weren’t. Yet I don’t completely dismiss the idea that something beyond the natural world might be out there. Bentham’s Bulldog writes pieces on theism and makes arguments that I’m unsure how to think about but don’t strike me as obvious nonsense. A 2020 survey showed that 19% of philosophers leaned towards theism, so it’s not like the position is akin to anti-vaxx or young earth creationism, where none of the trained experts take the claims involved seriously. The fact that people just as smart as me have thought longer and harder about the subject and arrived at the position that God exists is enough to give me perhaps a bit of doubt about my atheism. Debates around theism strike me as similar to those about AI doom. I can develop strong opinions on topics when there is empirical data we can bring to a question. So I have confident views on the best economic system, the role of heredity in determining cognitive and personality outcomes, what causes some voters to support Donald Trump, and whether humans have seen a major increase in living standards over the course of history. When it comes to speculation, trying to follow chains of reasoning, and arguments derived from analogies and thought experiments – which I think is most of what we have in debates over theism and AI doom – I don’t trust myself or other people to be able to do any of this well. Douthat is someone whose political and cultural writings I’ve always found interesting, so I decided to give his new book a try. Believe focuses mostly on attempting to convince the reader that there is something out there beyond material reality, with only the last chapter making the case for Christianity. I found myself dividing the arguments into a few baskets. The best arguments for theism I think rest on fine-tuning and the mystery of consciousness. I found the supposed evidence for the existence of the supernatural – miracles, demons, the power of prayer, near-death experiences, etc. – less compelling. This was much of the focus of his conversation with Tyler , who also sounded very skeptical. I ask Ross to assign probabilities on the supernatural being real, Christianity being true, and Catholicism being true. I then explain my main moral problem with traditional Christian dogma, which is that some portion of humanity will be sentenced to everlasting torture. We tend to think that any punishment should fit the crime one is guilty of. Few would say that an individual who has committed a dastardly act should be held down and tortured for decades, which leads to the question of why an all-knowing, all-loving God would do something similar on a much longer timescale. We talk a good bit about the role of providence in human affairs, which I found quite fun. The conversation swerves into how Ross thinks about someone like Trump playing a preordained role in history. On the surface, this might seem like a somewhat silly part of our discussion, but it actually raises intriguing questions regarding how the mechanics of God intervening in human affairs would actually work. Near the end, we get to the part of Ross’s book I’m most skeptical of, which is the alleged evidence for supernatural experience. If prayer is real, why not conduct a double-blind randomized study? I also bring up the Randi Prize challenge , which offered $1 million to anyone who could demonstrate supernatural abilities but never had to pay out. I have to confess however that I do find the story told by professional skeptic Michael Shermer about how his wife’s old radio started working on their wedding day to be very weird. I do sort of love the idea that God is like a writer for a prestige TV drama, and history has all these A and B list characters that He shuffles around in order to move the plot along. The Roman Empire is maybe its own season. World War II was the finale of the one that began as the Industrial Revolution was taking off. Now we’re in the middle of Season 8, and AI, which started out as a minor character in the background, is about to become the main protagonist. The series finale is of course Judgment Day. People like Trump and Putin are the main characters, the Starks and the Lannisters, while we lesser mortals are akin to the slaughtered hordes left on the numerous battlefields of the War of the Seven Kings. The Hanania subplot is a pretty cool one. Five years ago I was nobody, now I at least have a (very bad) Wikipedia page, and can reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people on a daily basis, leading my fans closer to God or everlasting damnation. I start out as a rightoid, move towards rightist-tinged rationalism, become an influential figure among Elite Human Capital as I disparage the existence of the supernatural. Razib uses the tools of modern science to show I am related to Jesus and his neighbors in ancient Palestine, as the Lord starts speaking to me about how God is actually real, hoping to use (knowing he will use?) my biography and background to bring others into His flock. Ross Douthat convinces me to believe in God, I return to the faith of my ancestors, actually my childhood, and they run a big feature in the New York Times about what happened. All thinking people read it and become convinced God is real, helping us shake free of our cultural decadence and existential anxiety as humanity moves towards a new Golden Age. All thanks to me and this podcast. Oh and you get to live in a state of bliss for all eternity. Very seductive! I can see the appeal of this. But as I tell Ross, short of the Lord or one of his angels appearing directly next to me, I have no way of understanding how one would distinguish Him sending me a sign from my own wishful thinking and intoxication with a very cool narrative that gives me an important role to play in a great cosmic story. I did not become a Christian while talking to Ross, but I enjoyed his book, and perhaps some other souls will be saved among the listeners of this conversation. I think I will take him up on his suggestion to read They Flew and hope to also look into the question of the historical Jesus before long.…
Just did a livestream with the beautiful gorgeous amazing brilliant stunning Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette . You can follow them on Substack here , and also follow Claire directly to keep up with what she is doing. Follow her on X too while you’re at it. We discuss conservatives’ love affair with Andrew Tate, who the Trump administration is now trying to help get out of Romania. We also talk about the topics of some of my articles, including DOGE , conservatism as an oppositional culture , and whether AI will take the jobs of people like us. I was hurt to learn that Claire hated the AI drawing of my article on why we should all die for Ukraine. In addition to her being beautiful gorgeous amazing brilliant stunning, I continue to appreciate Claire as someone who has kept her head and remained reasonable in a time when tribalism and audience capture have ruined so many others. I enjoyed talking to her about our intellectual ecosystem and the influencer market. I ended the conversation feeling like we were going to be ok. Read more…
I just had a discussion with Razib Khan about some of the exciting recent developments in paleogenetics. In 2018, I read David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here and was absolutely captivated by the idea that we could learn about cultures, population movements, and other aspects of our past through the analysis of prehistoric, ancient, and more recent DNA. The field of paleogenetics is a fast-moving one, so there have been a great many discoveries in the five-plus years since the book was published. Reich was on Dwarkesh’s podcast a few months ago discussing some of them. Until another authoritative book comes out on this topic – which I was excited to learn that Razib might soon write – the best you can do is subscribe to his Unsupervised Learning newsletter, where you can find poetic articles on the intersection between genomics, culture, and history. The immediate motivation for this conversation was his recent piece on how the Indo-European explosion of 5,000 years ago actually led to a decline in civilizational complexity in Europe. After some initial chit-chat on the latest on Ukraine and debating stupid people on X, we discuss that essay, along with various other topics, including The race of the Ancient Greeks The fluctuations in Neanderthal admixture in humans throughout prehistory What the Indo-Europeans looked like The identity of the Ancient Persians and their relationship to modern Iranians “Cold winters” theory, and why we see a looks gradient from Northern to Southern Europe The discrediting of white nationalist ideas Theories about group IQ differences What paleogenetics can actually tell us about cultures, the rise and fall of civilizations, and how people lived The irrefutable non-human DNA evidence suggesting there are unlikely to be lost civilizations yet to be discovered Near the end, I tell Razib that he’s basically one of those guys who appears on Rogan and talks about lost civilizations and such, except that what he says is actually grounded in science. In a world with twenty more IQ points, he would be a lot better known than Graham Hancock. While the enthusiasm towards ideas about the human past of Rogan and Hancock fans is understandable, they unfortunately don’t have the judgment to distinguish between science and myth. Every time I learn more about paleogenetics, whether through reading or talking to Razib, I come away invigorated. Aside from perhaps some lessons about human nature, there is little practical knowledge to be gained from such work. Still, some of us are noble enough to want the truth about ourselves, and to be able to stand in awe of the process that has led to us knowing so much about how humans, and our humanoid cousins, lived, worked, loved, and died across tens of thousands of years based on nothing more than the artifacts and genetic material they left behind. Read more…
Just did a livestream on the importance of “race posting” in right-wing culture. Things have gone well beyond being anti-woke. Young right-wingers have created a horrifying inverse of woke culture where race and attitudes towards racial issues, along with attitudes towards those who dislike racism, become the center of one’s worldview. I argue that, setting aside the question of whether one should lose a job for tweets, there is something unhealthy about people forming a community based on whether they can “out racism” each other. I bring up what I call “Red Scare Culture,” in which there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who are racist and cool with racism, and those who will put forth any criticism of racism in any context only because they’re concern trolling or trying to gain acceptance from leftists. See here for context. What annoys me perhaps most of all is that race guys become boring. There are people I know who are passionate about politics, but somehow have no strong opinions on economics or foreign policy. It’s simply race, and to a lesser extent being “based” on sex issues too. Just a pathetic existence. Don’t fall into this trap! You’re a bigger slave to woke than the academic who puts the pronouns in his bio and then goes on with his life. Partway through I’m joined by Jeff Giesea , who has experience in many of the same circles. We discuss how class conflict intersects with racial issues in America, and how we’ve ended up in a paradoxical place where race is the center of our political discourse but matters less and less in our personal lives. We can see this most clearly in the multiracial racists on the right who don’t see any contradiction in their world view. Links and further reading based on references in the conversation: On the DOGE engineer who was fired for racist tweets and subsequently brought back My tweet from today on the topic Recent discussion on Ask a Jew on a wide range of issues including this Me on Nietzschean Chuddery Me, “How to Not Get Cancelled” Me, “America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization” Me, “Ron Unz Confronts the Far Right” Read more…
I did a livestream today with Noah Smith, someone whose writing I have admired for a long time and who I was happy to finally get to meet. We start out by talking about what’s going on with the Trump administration, and all the recent craziness, including the president’s supposed plan for the US to take over Gaza. This blends into discussions about China and Russia, and their memetic relationships with the American left and right respectively. Noah explains why he believes that Putin will not make a deal in the current conflict, and why that means we should keep supporting Ukraine. He also goes into why the current war in Ukraine reminds him of the Russo-Finnish War (1939-1940), and whether Elon Musk is destined to play the role of Franco and eventually take over the Republican Party once Trump is gone. If that’s not enough in the way of historical analogies, Noah presents his theory that Elon Musk sees himself as a Metternich-like figure, perhaps trying to form a global triumvirate with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping against the US foreign policy establishment and the forces of woke. We also talk about American domestic politics, including the GOP as a cult of personality and how quickly the Democrats can reform. In the process, Noah names his ideal Republican presidential candidate and talks about why he is a fan of Texas as a civilization. Near the end, going off his recent article on too many Americans being afraid of the future, I ask Noah what his elevator pitch is for embracing change. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I present a novel theory of “horny posting,” which sees it as a way to defeat both inceldom and racism, the two great evils of the right. Relevant articles Noah Smith, “Too many Americans still fear the future.” Noah Smith, “ The chaos has arrived.” Richard Hanania, “Trump’s executive branch revolution” Betting market I created on Trump’s tariffs…
David Lynch recently passed away, so Rob and I decided to honor the legendary director by watching two of his movies, Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2008), and discussing them. We liked the first film, and debated various interpretations of it, including the standard one and other possible theories. I’m motivated to have a contrarian take here, perhaps because of the overwhelming beauty I found in the reality we were initially introduced to. While Mulholland Drive gave us much to work with, we both absolutely hated Inland Empire . In my view, it’s fine to have surrealist or absurdist elements, but if it gets to the point that the whole thing is a disjointed mess it’s hard to stay interested or care what happens. A character could have died or turned into a rhinoceros at any point after the first hour and I wouldn’t have been moved or surprised, because nothing actually matters once you figure out what the director is trying to do. You need reality to be bounded in some way if you hope to be entertained by or learn from a work of art. We refer to ChatGPT throughout, which performed quite impressively, generating arguments for novel interpretations for the films and clearing up some of the confusion we had about the plots and sequences of events. At the end we decide we’ll give the series Twin Peaks a chance, so look out for that. By the way, the other day I asked people to subscribe to my new YouTube channel, where I posted the conversation with Brian Chau. As it turns out though, I already have a YouTube channel with nearly a thousand subscribers. I just forgot it existed. So ignore the link I posted yesterday and go here if you want to watch my free videos on YouTube. But I prefer you see them here. If people have other interpretations of the films or thoughts on the conversation here, feel free to leave them in the comments.…
The stock market was sent reeling today as a result of the release by the Chinese company DeepSeek of an open source AI model that comes close to or matches the performance of American models, but was created for a fraction of the cost. While traditional models have cost in the range of $100 million to $1 billion to produce, the latest application from DeepSeek was reportedly created for under $6 million. Wanting to know more, I invited Brian Chau on for a livestream to discuss. Some of the questions we cover: What does it mean for a model to be open source? Why would a business release an open source model? Should you sell all your Nvidia stock? How do we know that DeepSeek really cost under $6 million to build? Can its costs be verified? What might the intentions of the Chinese Communist Party be in letting this happen? Will AI take all the jobs? Has Brian’s p(doom) changed at all? When will us writers be replaceable? Has Brian’s vision of a hands off approach to AI regulation won? Did Big Yud go down with the Kamala ship? As a non-expert, I found it very useful to have an hour in which to pick Brian’s brain. I can’t recommend this conversation enough for those who want to make sense of what has happened in AI over the last few days.…
I just did a livestream with Bryan Caplan on Trump’s executive orders on DEI and my role in making them happen. For context, see my post from yesterday. We discuss the history of EO 11246 and Bryan talks about the pressure his dad got from the government to hire more minorities in the airline industry in the 1980s. One point to emphasize is that even people who think a lot about policy have been completely in the dark about the reach of the affirmative action in government contracting regime, on both the right and left. Bryan asks me to give an estimate of the probability I made the marginal difference in us getting Trump’s new executive order. Bryan leaves about halfway through, and I then provide further thoughts on the topic, along with sharing some ideas on the general “vibe shift” everyone is talking about. While this is a victory over DEI, I worry about the pendulum swing involving a backlash to immigration. To me, the fight against DEI and for more open borders is the same struggle: merit, treating people as individuals rather than members of groups, and economic progress. Yet most who are passionate about DEI are motivated by their place on a racist-antiracist axis, so a vibe shift against woke means more restrictive immigration policies. It is important to push back against this. I close by taking a few questions from the audience, including on how to think about the issue of nationalism versus globalism. Read more…
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