The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table

0:00 "You picked the wrong guy" – the audiobook story
3:12 "You own [Comedy Cellar], one of New York's treasures"
7:28 The customer who will never tip again
15:41 Motivating a team after you've won: finite vs. infinite games
23:23 Noam doesn't like fine dining
39:55 Handling Google reviews & hunting down critics

Noam sits down with Will Guidara — author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park (named the best restaurant in the world under his leadership), and co-producer of The Bear — for a conversation between two obsessives who refuse to run their businesses as businesses. They compare notes on why the money has to be a byproduct, how to answer a customer who swears he'll never tip again, keeping a team motivated after you've won, why fine dining lost its way, tracking down anonymous Google reviewers, and why Will walked away from the top restaurant on earth to be a better dad.

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