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Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. Expect the worst Some drink champagne Some die of thirst No way of knowing Which way it's going Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Friday, May 30th, 2025. I am John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. With me, as always, Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
Hi, John. And our social commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John. Okay, I'm just going to read to you one of my favorite weekly moments, particularly on a Friday, is the release of Nellie Bowles' newsletter at the Free Press. one of the more delightful forms of political commentary in America, TGIF. And I'm just going to read you the opening paragraph because I think it gets to...
The difficulty one has in reconciling oneself, at least if the one in this case is me or I, depending on how you want to phrase it grammatically, with the ongoing. day-to-day business of the trump administration even when it is doing things that i admire or have been hoping somebody would do for a long time um In a section called I Can't Afford a Pardon, Nellie writes, the White House vending machine is giving out pardons this week.
Scott Jenkins, a Virginia sheriff convicted of conspiracy fraud and bribery for accepting piles of cash in exchange for letting rich folks have fake sheriff's badges, got a Trump pardon. So did reality show stars and fraudsters, Todd and Julie Chrisley, who'd initially been sentenced to 12 and seven years respectively. for conspiring to commit bank fraud and obviously conspiracy to commit tax evasion. And a random tax criminal has also been pardoned right after his mother gave Trumpo.
$1 million at a fundraising dinner. That gentleman had been ordered to pay the state $4 million restitution alongside his prison sentence. So the $1 million payment to the president is a better deal in some ways. At this point, paying your taxes directly to the Trump family is a better deal and probably safer than using the IRS. Trump wanted to slash red tape and slash red tape he has. Now he just puts a briefcase on the table and nods.
I pay my cleaning lady in cash, and that's how I will probably pay my taxes now, too. Every April, I will throw wads of dirty bills in a brown paper bag, scroll my Social Security number on it, and leave it at Tiffany Trump's door. How do I calculate what's owed? Well, it's based on my income, of course, plus extra in my case for being a blue state libtard and for not losing the baby weight.
deductions offered for pictures of a local ballot showing Trump written in for every option, especially library board, being a guy with beer cozies and acceptably strong biceps because we need more of you fellows, and being a woman with anything other above a B cup, I get two or three. deductions this year. So yeah, I was handing out pardons day, and this comes at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, last night.
Angry at the fact that a trade court had ruled that his tariffs were unconstitutional before an appeal court stayed that decision or sort of frozen in place. Trump decided to go on to True Social. and say that Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society, hates this country. The person that he leaned on to pick, to help him pick the three Supreme Court justices whom he did pick and who are there on the Supreme Court.
rendering important decisions, though maybe he feels that they're not going to render the decisions that he wants in any given case or have not yet rendered them the way that he would want them. So, oh, Abe Greenwald has joined us. So here he is, A. Greenwald. All right. So as I say, my experience is that every time I want to say, look, this is what you get. It's good. Everything's good.
And then terrible things happen that are unprecedented, that are sickening, or that put an extraordinarily bad taste in your mouth. You forgot to add that he appointed Paul Ingrassia, a right-wing, Andrew Tate-supporting... Calling him right-wing is an injustice to us. Paul Ingrassia is a psychotic white supremacist. On-premises monster. One of the more evil people in the sort of larger universe of the social media horror shows that have emerged. And he is now running...
ethics, an ethics panel at the White House. He's 30 years old. He's a supporter of Andrew Tate, like you said. His Twitter feed is repulsive. He is repulsive. This is... I don't even know what to compare this to. This would be like putting the head of OnlyFans in charge of the blue laws or... You know, the guy from Boogie Nights in charge of the Motion Picture Association of America or something like that. To your point about like, you know...
When you think, well, this is okay and that's okay, and then something awful happens. I think if you truly, fully abandon any idea... that Trump is anything resembling conservative, it all falls into place, and nothing is that shocking anymore. It turns out... There's more than one way to be against liberals and progressives. It's not only you don't have to be conservative. You could be many other things. Trump found this other thing to be.
that is anti-liberal, anti-woke, sometimes, that fits in, that sort of ends up being somewhere near the right. Not conservative at all. And if you just think of it in those terms, nothing shocks anymore. Because as long as it's about Trump having enemies. It makes sense. He has certain enemies, and that's what this is about.
And he has no sense of history, which is why he can go after Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, which is basically going after his own first term in office. So many presidential immunity decisions, a lot of the decisions that he relied upon even to be back in the White House.
are the result of this project on behalf of the Federalist Society to get conservative justices appointed, conservative judges in the pipeline. So that to me shows it's maybe it's because it's nearing the end of the week. It's sort of the temperamental toddler. Trump that emerges occasionally on truth social. And this is, again, it speaks to the issue of his temperament, which is that.
If someone else had sat him down for 10 minutes and talked to him about what Leonard Leo and the Federal Society have done for conservative principles in the judiciary, maybe he wouldn't have put that up there. But again, he's impulsive, like a toddler. But maybe he would have anyway.
He has no, the past matters not at all. It's only the moment in the moment where it's like, you know, you watch the cabinet meetings where they go around one by one and each cabinet member opens by saying a. terrible disease that donald trump cured recently in an infant or something by touching their forehead like and and then you see even when people like they were just swearing in the other day people were People are doing it when they get sworn in by Trump. He just wants nothing but love.
He just wants to be loved. He's a big teddy bear. He doesn't just want to be loved. He wants money. We're all psychologizing him here. He's selling pardons. He is... shaking down news organizations he wants cbs has gone to him paramount has gone to him with a bribe a 15 million dollar bribe to make this lawsuit against 60 minutes go away and to make nice because
Paramount is trying to sell itself to Skydance for Shari Redstone, the owner of Paramount, to get herself out of the media business and settle all of her past accounts. It's nakedly the case that just as ABC paid Trump $15 million, although then that money is going to be used for something or other, he wants them to pay him off.
Right, but that's not why he's mad at Leonard Leo. No, it's not. But what I'm saying here is that we can say, well, you know, he does things that are conservative or not conservative and all this. Something else is going on here.
By which I mean that he finds himself in the fortunate position of having a completely servile Republican Party terrified of him because... if he gets mad at you he will you know make a primary against you and throw you out of office and then thereby get somebody who was even more who is more who is totally servile as your replacement if that person can can win. And he is like going to town. He's got his kids going around the world raising billions of dollars. I mean, this is...
This really genuinely, I mean, my joke is like, we just spent years having litigating the question of whether or not Hunter Biden got five or $10 million out of. China and the Middle East in a really repulsive form of back scratching and influence peddling and influence selling. And it looks to me like the Trump family is looked at. the biden family and said what a bunch of losers if you're going to be going out and selling influence at this level that the word that
It ends with the letters I-L-L-I-O-N should have a B in front of it instead of an M. You don't sell real estate this cheap. What's the matter with you? Talk about a sign that Hunter Biden is... contemptible like if you're going to be a crook be a good crook if you're going to if you're going to if you're going to influence pedal like use the power of the united states the way it deserves to be used like who sells this way this is another example that we're often
I think, correctly harsh about the Democratic Party right now being in disarray and not really under, not... being able to determine whether it should move back towards the center or further to the left. The truth is we don't have a legitimate conservative opposition to Trump either because of what you just said about the Republican Party. And to Abe's earlier point, he's not a conservative. He is a weird amalgam of populism.
old school Democrat, you know, kind of big city politicking and, you know, whatever characterological problems he brings to the table. But this idea that he should be able to be seen as the carrier of conservatism, I would like to see. Name one politician right now who we would think embodies traditional Republican conservatism of the old sort. Anyone? I mean, DeSantis has gone pretty anti- Mitch McConnell. Yeah, Mitch McConnell, who's leaving and is old.
So I mean, that's, that's the other problem is that we don't have, I mean, plenty of intellectuals are making the argument about conservatism, but we don't have a lot of political leadership doing it. So in that sense, there are no breaks on what he's trying to do. There is no, there's nothing to stop him. And so when he does these. the grifting deals and whatnot. I mean, that's not conservatism either. I personally get enraged when people...
think that I am anything like Trump in terms of my values and principles. He has very different motivations, but they are not conservative and we need a healthy conservatism in this country. I frankly don't really understand it. I mean, maybe if we're going to get back to the psychological, it's that this is the way we keep score. This is the way he keeps score.
We would ordinarily keep score by saying, you're the president of the United States. You have climbed to the top of the greasiest pole the world has ever seen. You are one of only 46 people. to have held this most important job in almost 250 years, 240 years, you have nothing to prove. You don't need... to make CBS bend the knee to you. You don't need to have your sons go out and raise money.
you know, from Abu Dhabi and various Emirates to show that you are the big cheese. You're already the big cheese, but that's how I would look at it. And I'm not sure that's the way he looks at it. He looks at it. it as it's not enough unless the cabinet bends the knee the republican party bends the knee cbs bends the the bending of the knee is what he is president for He's not comparing himself to previous presidents. This is why the...
He's doing exactly what he criticized Biden and Republicans have been criticizing the Biden administration doing. We should, by the way, besides an age limit on presidents, we need to reform the presidential pardon power that is long overdue. It's abuses in this.
administrationally the most recent. But he's comparing himself to other leaders across the globe, people who do not exist within liberal democracies, people who do not have to answer to the voters every four years or every two years. He's looking at people who actually, like Putin, and others, not because I think he wants to model their system and our system on theirs, but just in terms of the kind of how caprice is how they govern because they can.
I think he admires that in the sense that he doesn't want to have to answer things. This is why he's calling... I predicted, I just want to say, I predicted Carolyn Levitt's press conference yesterday where she went on and on about unelected judges. I mean, that to him is, why do I have to answer for my decisions? I think something's right. The country's behind me because I won. I shouldn't have to deal with any of these details.
And Musk is leaving today, which is interesting. That's something we should talk about in terms of that's one bookend to the beginning of this second term. Well, that's maybe why he's so grumpy, because, you know. As you said, it's very difficult. for men of a certain age to make friends. We're always hearing about once we reach middle age, we stop making friends, and his friend is leaving. It's very hard for him to make new friends. He made a friend, and his friend is now leaving.
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We'll hear stories that are heartbreaking and stories that are inspiring every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever fine podcasts can be found. Leonard Leo, so the Federalist Society, is the single most successful public policy influence experiment of my lifetime. A conservative experiment. A conservative experiment. Well...
I would say experiment because I'll explain why for a second. So, I mean, I saw it a morning. Part of it was born at Yale. Part of it was born at the university of Chicago when I was an undergraduate. And.
It really started out as a group of scholarly law students who were interested in constitutional law had come to believe that liberal jurisprudence was... revising the Constitution by, you know, opinion and was not hewing to its original standards, was finding in the Constitution rights that did not exist and was not... obeying the rights that did exist and just sort of got together to have meetings and discuss this as law students and over time they started
having chapters at other schools. And this effort grew organically along with the installation of the Reagan administration and the idea that one of the reasons that...
The turn to the right in the United States that happened was that liberal and leftist judges had gone so soft on crime that they had made America somewhat uninhabitable and that they were, again, finding things in the Constitution like... the right to racial quotas that did not exist and the right to uh forced busing in schools that did not exist and all kinds of things like that and over the past four decades being first it was bad to be in the
Federalist Society because it meant that judges who had clerkships to hand out didn't want you because you were too controversial, and then it became a way for conservative judges to locate people as there were more conservative judges to locate people. that they could have as clerks who would hew to their views and follow their precepts. Until such time as, over time, tens of thousands of people are members of the Federalist Society.
All lawyers right of center joined the Federalist Society practically. And then it became a vehicle for administrations concerned to find and states and to locate people who would serve.
in these lifetime appointments who would hew to conservative principle. And Leonard Leo is therefore an unbelievably successful figure, but he's a successful figure because he is... ideologically consistent from the time he was a kid until now and he and others who were there and what it is is judicial restraint original intent uh finding in Finding in the Constitution the grounds to make decisions that will have effects on American policy. And...
So the main thing that the judiciary represents is a check on untrammeled executive and legislative power. That is what the judiciary in its fundamental role here. in part exists to do either to settle controversies between the executive Supreme Supreme Court controversies between the executive and legislative branches, or as I say, to sort of risk. be a voice for restraint in the sense that what they go back to is the original understanding of the United States and not to everything else.
to say that leonard leo hates america i've never by the way i've never met leonard leo so this is not he's not an old friend of mine i don't know you know all of that i know a lot of people who are involved in the federal society but him i don't know but Trump hates America in that sense. That is, as you say, what he does not like about America is what makes America America, which is to say that the president can't wave his hand.
and impose tariffs. The Constitution is our supreme ruler, not the president. That's right. The people are the supreme ruler in the United States. The president is their employee, and he is governed by a set of restraints called the Constitution. And Trump doesn't...
like it. And when he doesn't like it and fights it and says, I don't know if I'm going to obey this and I'm going to obey that. If you're going to accuse anybody of hating America, Trump is the one who deserves that accusation under these circumstances. and not Leonard Leo, who has spent his career trying to preserve an understanding of the United States against an onslaught, that attempt that we have been fighting also.
to say, oh, sure, you can just suspend student debt. Of course it's okay to discriminate against Asian Americans at Harvard. Sure, because we have other goals in mind. And no, we're going to stop you. We're going to stop that. We're going to stop it when it comes to us and we can find a harm being done to the plaintiff who is making this.
Although we should note that so far in all of these battles with the judiciary, Trump has erred more on the side of rhetorical bluster than actually defiance, sheer defiance. So despite a lot of the overheated rhetoric.
coming from his Truth Social account and some of the members of his administration, he hasn't yet defied, I mean, they're appealing certain rulings, but his talk doesn't exactly match his walk here, thank goodness, because he needs to defer to what the Supreme Court tells him to do. And also, you have to remember that the reason Trump liked the judges that adhere to the Constitution and, you know, an ideology of originalism and all that had nothing to do with...
their belief systems or their ideology. You know, it's not like Trump was for originalism, and now he's against it. It's not even like the filibuster arguments that we have where the two sides just keep switching sides. He liked the judges because they got him essentially elected president. The Supreme Court seat was open. The conservative majority was...
in danger, was up for grabs. And he came out with a list of the type of judges that he would appoint in the Federalist Society and all those who influenced that. Did him a very big favor by mobilizing a very smart list of judges and helping him. And the reason that it was somebody needs to do that for him is because. He did not he did not then and does not now care what judges believe. What was good about those judges is that conservatives who may have been wary of him otherwise or.
before the death of a Supreme Court justice, may have felt that not enough was at stake in the election to pull the lever for Trump. That these judges... pushed some people over the line. That's literally it. The judges helped him. And now he wants a judge and conservatives don't. And it doesn't matter to him. Whether the ideology is the same or different than the other guys, but he didn't like, you know, Amy Coney Barrett is a brilliant justice, but he doesn't think so. He doesn't care.
He doesn't find her intellectually stimulating. He doesn't get what makes her a superstar to the conservative and originalist right. He doesn't. None of that is even going through his mind. What he sees is a transaction. It's baggage to the extent that it goes through his mind. It's like, you know, for him, as far as he's concerned. His appeal is that he doesn't have to sell conservative ideas. It's too heavy a lift. It's too complicated. He doesn't want to be bogged down with all that.
You know, he can sell a much simpler product day after day, which is him, which is deals, which is entertainment, which is, you know. He's unfortunately, as he sees it, attached to this other thing, to this conservative stuff.
It also, it strikes me, I'm sorry, I'm so jet lagged, but it also strikes me that in this second term, you know, the worry is that, oh, he's going to become a fascist authoritarian, you know, now he has unlimited power, and he doesn't care because he's only got this one term left. But in fact, what it reminds me of is more like when someone from like a backwater little town becomes super celebrity famous very quickly.
And then they surround themselves with all the people from their little town, you know, like the two-bit meth dealer, the guy who used to work with them at the fast food place. Maybe decent people, but they get but they bring he brings in right now completely unvetted people this second term. So the first term, he obviously learned the lesson that he shouldn't listen to the experts because he ended up firing a lot of those people. But the people now they're not even vetting.
I was thinking about Matt Gaetz, this anti-Semitic woman who's been appointed a spokesperson that is a DOD. I mean, he's just throwing people at the wall who, you know, everyone on social media then vets these people for him, like we're doing with Ingrassia and saying.
These are not acceptable terms for us. You cannot put these, you know, white supremacists or anti-Semites or obvious, you know, federal government hating lunatics in power, but he does it anyway. So in that sense, it's like he's just he's got his inner circle. And yes, we've talked about the loyalty, but it does strike me that...
The lack of vetting this time is very undisciplined. It's not lack of vetting. See, that's also where I have to... You think it's his true self coming out in these appointments. Well, first of all, it's not just him. So in 2016, he came in. He was a party of one. was this unlikely person. He got these votes. He got in. And he didn't have a Trump movement. There was no MAGA movement in that sense. It was built over the course of the first term.
the loyalists, and then over the course of the four years of the interregnum. And so, you know, there were people who got jobs in the Trump first term who had been loyal to him or early adopters of... trumpism or magaism or something like that i don't know you know like sebastian gorka obviously michael flynn who was fired very early uh and probably for unjust reasons although he's not i think an emotionally or mentally stable person so it's
that he was a national security advisor, various other things. Over the course of the eight years, there are now thousands of people who are sort of... plug-inable in some generalized policy sense who comment on things on twitter and they have some kind of a podcast or they they're on a radio show or they're on one of those mini networks you know one
in america or whatever and he's now installing them all over the place including the case of this woman's name i can't remember who says Leo Frank, the victim of the lynching in Atlanta in 1913 or 1915 that led to the creation.
of the anti-defamation league uh what was guilty of of raping this teenage girl which we know he was not and he was in fact you know uh i mean it's it's it's it's and so there's a sort of the the leo frank truther is now uh has a high ranking job and this guy paul and gracia who literally said the day after uh october 7th that um this that october 7th was a psyop by israel
Just as Ukraine was performing a PSYOP against Russia, the war with Ukraine and Russia was a Ukrainian PSYOP to get Western, and COVID and the vaccine was a PSYOP. This guy now has a major job. So he's not putting them in because he's the president, but it's also all the people around him. who are doing personnel, and they're installing loyalists, and they don't care. And in fact, maybe the more extreme a person is the better, in part because there will be no protection.
for them. They're there to help him get whatever it is that he wants. And so, and they have no loyalty to anything. They don't have a loyalty to the constitution. They don't have a loyalty to truth. They don't have a loyalty to good conduct, good behavior. They in fact are, you know, demonstrably bad. I don't know if they're bad people. I expect they are bad people. I don't think you can say that.
I really think if you spend five minutes that you can say that Leo Frank was justly lynched. First of all, can anyone be justly lynched? Second of all, that Leo Frank was guilty of rape. You only say that because you are up to something bad.
morally spiritually bad and notably anti-semitic that is the problem is that trumpism now is a real thing and the reward the people that trumpism rewards are like not good for the country they're bad they're there it's not bad to be loyal to the person that you work for it's good it's good political organizations need that i'm not
I'm not saying that that is not the case. And Trump does have a reason to think that there are people... in the ambit of the right whom he would hire who would be bad for him who would leak against him or whatever i'm sure everybody thought that sasha vindman was like a good solid neocon you know military man you know freedom lover whatever and then you know he basically engineers the first impeachment from his perch at the national security council ginning up a false charge that trump
had betrayed the country on that famous perfect phone call so he's got reason to say i can't pick people from the general pool of republican normies Because I can't trust them. But the people he can trust, a lot of them are really bad. i don't mean bad because i don't like their policies i mean they're bad people well this was the challenge remember in the first term where the
The attempt to construct an intellectual scaffolding around MAGA was interesting to watch. It was funny to see all these intellectuals say, oh, these are the principles. It's very different from the old conservative principles, which we know don't work in liberal principles. which of course also don't work. But they never quite constructed the full building, right? They had this kind of teetering scaffolding made out of bamboo. He gets booted out of office.
The intellectual scaffolding then became justifying that the 2020 election was stolen. And then when he wins again... They're busily, the people now busily constructing the building are the same ones who are on the outskirts, the podcasters, the entertainers. He has a lot of entertainers in this administration, people who spend their days in the sort of murkiest corners of.
the internet and talking about the worst sort of conspiracy theories. And this is far beyond just the people who are suspicious of the so-called deep state. There is some reason for healthy skepticism about the way some of our administrative agencies have worked over the past few years.
decades. That's more than this. So I think this goes to Seth's point about the judiciary and the federal society. If you don't have principles, you can do anything. And so that's why these people are very comfortable in the... Second Trump administration. If you if you have no principle except loyalty.
You can bring in anti-Semites. You can bring in misogynists who support Andrew Tate. It doesn't matter as long as they're doing the thing that they were hired to do, which in Ingrassia's case is now to vet. He's vetting the people who will be appointed to important positions at the DOJ. You know, I think in some...
really important way, we have to consider the fact that the left facilitated this in the sense that they ended up occupying Such a weird, small, indefensible corner, ideologically, that no one could get with, that represented and spoke for no one, that...
To oppose them, you no longer had to be conservative. You could be somewhere, anywhere else in the 90% of the... ideological world that wasn't where they were that wasn't saying trans people we see you today and you know uh uh whatever other crazy thing they were pushing And also the wrongdoings of the Biden administration. You didn't have to be conservative to oppose to say this has to stop. This is craziness. It broadened.
The opposition, they broaden their own opposition to the point where all you have to do is say, I'm against that. I don't want to replace it with this good principled thing necessarily. I don't know why I'm against it, but I just know I'm against that. I want to crush that. To be clear. you're not talking about sort of like the you know an intellectual art you're talking about just an ordinary voter saying
I'm looking at this and whatever Biden is, I don't want any part of it. I know what a man and a woman are, for example. That's the idea. And then it's, of course, also like I don't these people. There's a senile guy running for president. And somebody is saying that's okay and that is not okay with me. And you know what else?
when his vice president takes over in the big switcheroo, I'm like, there's something fishy going on here. This is not the way things are supposed to go. Maybe Trump is crazy, but he's not that. So you're right, there's some kind of this weird gaslighting, which is a combination of ideological gaslighting, like Obama saying, if you want your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
Or, you know, that's my all-time favorite. Or the JCPOA keeps Iran from developing a nuclear bomb when it actually enshrined Iran's right to build a nuclear bomb.
various other things like that where you go no no that that's not true what he is saying and what he is doing is not true and he knows it's not true and he's saying it literally in our faces that it's not true and And then, of course, you then add on Biden's infirmity and saying that it's okay for calling a bill that costs $2 trillion, the Inflation Reduction Act.
All that stuff, saying if anybody says that COVID came from a lab in China instead of from somebody eating a bat, that they deserve to have their free speech rights revoked. At some point, you're just like, okay, I'm going to take a flyer on this guy again, because why not? But here's the why not. I'm not saying that a vote for Harris would have, you know, if we were, if we...
played a counterfactual and Harris won in November. And we were sitting here at the beginning, you know, almost at the beginning of June. five months into her presidency that we wouldn't be pulling our hair out and smashing our heads against the wall at the horrible things that she was doing because i'm sure that would be the case but this is a just a different set of circumstances and intellectual honesty and simple
Like, good taste and an understanding of how America has functioned should say that it's not that I don't think he's Hitler. He's something else. He's more like Perón or he's more like Noriega. You know, if you're going to, like, compare, he is. looking to enrich himself and his family and have the world pay obeisance to him. And in some ways, he's going to do good things with the power that he holds.
And in many ways, he's doing bad things with the power he holds. But see, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that is a good way to put it. I like that. He kind of behaves like a small state. potentate or mild dictator-ish, but mainly corrupt, a corrupt leader of a very small place. But he happens to be running the most powerful country on earth. And that's where the disconnect is. He's wheeling and dealing like he's a Noriega.
but you know with the with the drug cartels but he's the president of the united states and this having i just spent some time in europe and everybody keeps asking and i will say it is not a good thing our natural allies in the free world no longer trust us. And they apply that to all of us. I mean, unfortunately...
That is where the leadership is lacking for Trump. And Trump can be quite happy making his deals and enriching his own children. But the respect for our country has declined significantly among the very people who should be most. I mean, yes, cynical and a little bit snobby towards us, but still our natural allies. I mean, and also, like, let's look at, see, I think yesterday's...
news on the Make America Healthy Again, the Maha report. Yeah, this to me was a really big, this to me was exactly what I was afraid of with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. getting to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, as opposed to, you know, put in charge of some...
agency or one specific project or something like that. People said, well, he's just going to focus on what he's going to focus on. But you can't limit the focus when somebody is the cabinet secretary of the entire agency. And this Baja report... They put out, you know, seven or so of the studies that were cited didn't actually exist. Others were misinterpreted. And the White House's response was that there were formatting errors.
In the document, two different what Caroline Levitt said that at the podium, but also the HHS spokesman. also said that, that this was the answer that they had settled on. There were formatting problems. And so there's also this sense of like, well, it doesn't really matter. It's not just that you get your chance.
With Trump, like if you're somebody who wants to give a shot because you're the opposite of the type of health officials who were in power in the Biden administration and therefore let's see what you can do, it's that they'll stand behind. The stuff that comes out of this, you know, and they'll say, you know, here's what HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said. Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected.
OK, but not like the made up science. Now, the story also goes on to say that the Trump White House has requested five hundred million dollars from Congress for to put the Maha report. into action in some sense, and that they intend for this stuff to result in policy. So it's not just like... wow, this guy is a crazy person on Twitter and thinks like, you know, not that I'm minimizing that, but it's like, on the one hand, there is this...
America starts to look ridiculous. And as Christine said, people stop trusting and don't know who they can talk to and don't know who they can work with and all that stuff. And the other side is that we spend half a billion dollars.
on fake science because we were angry about the other guy spending half a billion dollars on a different kind of fake science four years ago. And what seems to be happening is... there's no way to get like there's no way apparently there's no way to spend 500 million dollars on good science there's just competing bad sciences you know and not not that not that everybody's the same in this regard but that when you talk about
you know, the legacy of this, you're going to see laws and regulations and policies that stick or are going to have to be undone, otherwise they'll stick, that are based on literal AI hallucinations. I think I told this story a couple years ago that I have a friend who has decided to test various AIs. you know, as they come online, uh, by asking them to write an essay, biographical essay about me. I don't, I actually have not really used AI or chat GPT or these things at all.
because i'm unnerved by them but for some reason this is he's amused by this so he asked them to write these you know like tell me about john pod horitz or something like that And one of the most interesting aspects of this is that every time one or another or another one of these different programs...
uh, or they're not programs, whatever you would call them, writes an essay and it's, you know, a thousand words long or 750 words long. And they note my long career as a movie critic. And then they say, he said this about X movie. and they quote me saying something and i never said it it sounds like a line from movie review sounds like something it doesn't really sound like something i would have written to be honest but
It's like a line from a movie review. The AI understands what movie criticism looks like or sounds like and what a movie is and how maybe a conservative person would react. to a liberal movie or something like that. But the quotes are not real. So when I read this story about the Baha non-existent studies, I was like, well, obviously somebody said, write me a report. Now, I assume that AI will get better. But remember, AI does not have access. unless it is sold to it, to copyrighted material.
Okay. That's unfortunately not true because I plugged in the title. Someone just sold. Right. Okay. They have actually, um, meta, meta's AI has without copyright, uh, total and total violation of copyright. If you're an author, you can go type your. name. I think the Atlantic had the link in a story a few months ago. You can type your name or titles of your books.
into the into the search engine and it'll show you and every single thing i have published which i hold the copyright to has been used to train ai without my express permission that's true of millions of writers they are they are They're doing this because it's like ask for forgiveness, not permission. So they are training on this stuff. And to the issue of a government document, think about the historical record. So even if they correct it or withdraw the hallucinations, if this is how...
these people are producing documents. And I don't think this is a partisan problem. This is going to be true on the left as well as the right, no matter who's in charge. How do we determine which footnote is real? I have spent, if you spend time in the archives and you do scholarly work, you check every footnote in a monument. just to make sure that the person because you're reading the same manuscript I have many times
disputed an interpretation that a fellow historian made about a letter we were both reading. That's part of the work. It's painstaking. It's effective if you're doing it honestly. And it's exactly what everyone wants to skip over and use AI to do.
do. And AI can't do that yet. Maybe it will. But I think it's, first of all, it's training on the work of scholars and others without permission. And it's these hallucinations, they have not solved that problem. I think that's going to remain a problem for a while. Well, you know, Matt should be here for this, but Christine is a speculative fiction fan. You know that one of the features of Dune, which is probably the best read.
one of the best read science fiction novels ever written, is that Dune exists in a world after essentially like a Terminator-like event where the computers gained... consciousness and went to war and tried to destroy humanity and so in this world that follows that we are in no one can use machines And so people have to be trained to become human computers using genetic, they do genetic engineering, but you cannot use essentially AI.
And so Frank Herbert, 60 years ago, saw this coming, that there would be a way in which if intelligence achieves... you know if sort of intelligence as some kind of abstract principle achieves consciousness in some fashion or an ability to do make these calculations 10 000 times faster than a human
can ever make them just as people like our kids christine's and my kids and cess kids eventually like are in college and are starting to get the prep professor saying you have to write a paper in the classroom or do an exam in a blue book or something like that, because I can no longer trust that you are not having a machine write this paper. That's why it's the danger with AI isn't sentience. It's the slop.
There's so much slop. And that's now getting into government documents and policy. The sentience will hasten the slop. So they go together. In other words, human cognition will decline as... People increasingly rely on machines to teach them how to think. In other words, we used to have to learn how to think. Part of the scholarship that you're talking about is not just... for the purposes of establishing a proper historical record.
It is also a way of teaching you as you're doing it how to think about the subject that you were using and that the thing, maybe a motivating idea you had to write your PhD dissertation was incorrect. Because you find a document that disproves the thing that you are trying to prove. And then suddenly you have to recalculate because the complication gets so... Anyway, the fact that only a few years into this AI era of the writing aspect of it, that...
The largest department in the federal government... The Department of Health and Human Services, run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wants to stop Moderna from making a new mRNA vaccine for bird flu and have everybody eat whole grains and do it. whatever they do and swim in filthy rivers in rock creek park or whatever it is is in fact the largest single department in the federal government
It has the most money. It administers the most money because it is where Medicare and Medicaid come from. And it's no joke. Like, you know, if you found out that some ancillary... department, the Office of Economic Opportunity or something like that, produced a report that was written by AI. You'd have a big laugh and it would be funny and you would say you're an idiot and the guy who ran it would get fired for being so sloppy.
This is the baby. This is like the dream baby of the secretary of HHS in his mission to change America. Yeah, it's... It's perfect. It's perfect that AI came along with the slop when it did. If you think back, it was 2017 that... Kellyanne Conway went on Meet the Press and defended something someone in the administration said that was false by saying they were offering alternative facts.
And that became a sort of conceptual meme, this alternative facts, fake news. And we're also in an age where if you want. If you have an argument and you need a study for the argument, you can find the study. There's no study that disproves. There are studies that disprove what you want and prove what you want. You could pick any one. So it's all out there. So then along comes this technology that just spits out alternative.
And it is, of course, it's going to be used. It's going to be seized on. It is like it is it is it is the perfect complement to the sort of. era of argumentation and debate that we are in um and it's always wrong like my own my only real exposure to ai is that It's built into Google now. So when you Google anything, you first get this. This essay at the top of the page.
And yeah, summary, you can get that. You can get rid of that if you don't like to see it. But what I do instead of getting rid of it is ignore it the way I would ignore ads that come up because. It's dead wrong. It has nothing to do with anything every time. It's an alternative fact.
And the other thing is that this is a self-perpetuating cycle, right? Because AI slop comes up with something that didn't exist. Robert F. Kennedy's... report, Maha report, that's going to get a half a billion dollars of funding behind it to make policy, cites this and uses it and explains in the text why this is a...
why this proves such and such. And then in the future, when AI goes trawling... for info to answer your questions it's going to come across the maha report and it's going which is authored by so and so in the white house and it's going to pull it and it's going to include it in its
And that is going to become not AI slop, but it's just going to become like, well, here's a source. It's a literal source. You can follow the citation. The source takes you to an actual government report authored by an actual. supposedly authored by an actual human we know probably not actually authored by by you know a human but the point is that it is uh laundering its own slop it has bought a a car wash
This is like Breaking Bad. AI has bought a car wash to clean its own slop and put the AI slop back into circulation as non-slop. as non-traceable legal tender. So, um... Everything is terrible is what we're saying. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. I want to make a recommendation. I'm going to warn people to begin with that the book that I'm about to recommend. is sexual it's a memoir it's sexually very explicit and so uh if you if you if that is unbearable to you which i mean parts of this book
There are a couple of pages here and there that I had to skip over fast because I found them very discomforting. But there's a remarkable American memoir that's just been published. It's called Theater Kit. It's by a guy named Jeffrey Seller. And it is his life story. Jeffrey Seller is the most inventive Broadway producer of the last 30 years.
And at the end of the book, he tells the story of how he climbed up some stairs somewhere to listen to a guy playing some songs about turning 30 and being unsatisfied. And that was Jonathan Larson, and that was the genesis of the show Rent. And he was at the time himself working as a lowly booker. for traveling shows that went to summer theaters and theaters around the country.
25 26 years old himself no producing experience no money no nothing and over the course of five years he and larson and you know basically created this show called rent that changed broadway forever rock opera larson died on the verge of its being produced at the age of 35 which is one of those
great horrible you know like melodramatic theater stories but he didn't just stop there then he goes climbs up the stairs to another thing and he hears this show where they have puppets singing songs about being adults, and he helps shape that into Avenue Q. which has run for 20 years, various places, one at Tony, Justice Brent, one at Tony. And then at the same time, he climbs some stairs and he hears these kids from Wesleyan.
performing songs about washington heights and that was lin-manuel miranda and that was his first show in the heights and then he produces hamilton so this guy produced rent avenue q In the Heights and Hamilton in a 30-year career, as well as some other shows that didn't do so well. Where did he come from? How did this happen? And his life story is that he grew up as a lower middle class.
Jewish kid adopted in the outskirts of Detroit with a father, a reckless, weird, crazy father who had had a terrible motorcycle accident. when he was very little and ended up sort of with short-term memory loss and a complete inability to self-regulate.
uh his spending or what he wanted to do or anything like that a very bitter mother and a very bitter sister and theater finding theater as a little kid saved him But as a description of this, of how you climb out of a sort of torturous personal situation by finding a calling and an avocation and a subject.
And this country, again, allowing you to kind of work your will if you have a will and you have a way and you have real talent. It is like one of these great American... pull yourself up by your bootstraps memoirs as i say it gets very sexually explicit he's gay and he describes a lot of gay sex in the book and even if the sex were were not gay
i didn't need that like i don't care about a sex life it's of no consequence to me and so you know that's discomforting and somebody should have edited it out but uh it's a it's an extraordinary book as i say it's called Theater Kid, the author is Jeffrey Seller, S-E-L-L-E-R. And it's not just for people who are interested in theater. It's... Also, he's not a creative. He's not a writer. He tried to write. He realized that he was somebody who could help other people.
make their work into something that a lot of people would want to see. That's itself an extraordinary and unusual talent, not unlike being an editor, but also being able to raise money to help. make this stuff happen and it's it's really a remarkable book theater kid by jeffrey seller so uh everything is terrible but theater kid is good
even though it has terrible parts to it, which is like America now. We'll be back on Monday. For Abe, Seth, and Christine, I'm John Putthor. It's Keep the Candle Burning.