Overtime – Episode #743: Andrew Huberman, Jonathan Swan, James Kirchick

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Mom. All right, he's the host of the Heberman Lab podcast, and also the new book Protocols, Andrew Heberman. He's the New York Times White House star. Spongebob, the best-selling book, Regime James. Jonathan Swirl, and he's a contributing writer for The Atlantic. And now for a secret city, Jamie Kirchick. All right. Here are the questions from the people first, as for you, Andrew. A new study found that people who drink more coffee had less body fat and more lean muscle. Wow, coffee, okay. With the biggest benefits at five or more cups a day, coffee has a great publicist. I gotta say. I like it, but I mean, that seems like a lot. Is coffee actually that good for us? Yeah, what is your thing on coffee? Yeah, the data say it's really good for longevity as well. So, providing you're not drinking so much that you have anxiety or can't sleep at night. So, you're drinking it for most people in the early part of the day for you starting at noon. Right. It can appear to offset some of the effects of dementia. But that doesn't mean you should drink caffeine if you don't like it or doesn't agree with you. But five cups a day is a lot. I think for most people, 400 milligrams or two to three strong cups of coffee, a couple cups of tea that's good. I imagine they lost weight because they were moving around a lot more. I mean, it is. Right? No, really. One of the major ways that this is interesting, actually. We burn a lot of calories with spontaneous movement. It's called meat. Non-exercise induced thermogenesis. It can burn up to like 1,500 calories a day. The knee bouncers, they're generally pretty thin. You mean they're so jittery that they're burning. Well, that can't be the way to do that. This is a real thing. Okay, I'm sure it's a real thing. I think it's a good thing. But I mean, it is a bean. Coffee, right? I mean, a bean. It's like something that grows in nature. There's no reason why we would think it is bad for us. Right. In nature of cocaine, no? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You must all medicines come from plants. Plant alcohol. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm not. I had one bad year on cocaine for long time. I'm not a. I don't. It's the worst drug I've ever been on. But I wasn't on cocaine. I was on some shit. It was caught up with stuff. Of course. If you actually. This is what I've heard. I've never been to Peru or Colombia or Bolivia. I've heard. If you actually just do what the natives did for thousands of years, you know, you're just chewing on the leaf. It's not a. It's not a, like, this kind of highway. Hey, hey, John Hector. Yeah. It's not that. It's just. It's kind of a cool up buzz. But it's. I don't. I don't know if pure cocaine, just chewing on the leaf, is really that terrible. Do you know, Jamie? Well, I was going to say. I think the people. Come on, Jamie. You're okay. You must know. I'm talking about my history. I do think that the ladies in Massachusetts, with their queer bar, it might be a little more exciting if they were to introduce that into the. You know, they actually said, you know, with the mask. How would you do it with my. I suppose I can say it. They said. They told you. It was right on the website. You lower the mask sip and then put it back up, of course. Right. The disease doesn't come in. No, never. I mean, didn't we learn this during COVID? What stupid theater this was? I remember eating and parking lots. Nice restaurants. And now we're in the parking lot at Craigs. Really? And, you know, this whole thing where you. You could keep the mask off while you're eating at the table. Yeah, back. Because the germs would never come to the table. And certainly they never bought their celebrities. But when you got up to go to the bathroom, you had to put the mask on. And then we keep doing it again. Okay. John, you said that Trump losing the 2020 election was the best thing that happened to him. Mm-hmm. What do you mean by that? I don't even think it's disputable. I mean, if he had won, if he'd eaked out of narrow victory in the 2020 election, he would have been hobbled by COVID. He would have every major economy around the world had inflation. There were supply shocks. He would have had to manage that. I mean, he says it wouldn't have happened under his leadership. Impossible to disprove, but, you know, hard to believe as well. And he also wouldn't have had the time to assemble the team that he wanted. So, for all those reasons, it would have been a pretty reactive term. Whereas he lost. He was out of office. He was built up as a almost mythological figure through the indictments. I mean, we wrote a story in the Times. After that first indictment, his fundraising was like Mount Everest. Every aspect, attention on him, media coverage, it all went up. The assassination attempts, he was enlarged through that period. And his team had time to really prepare for the second term. So, I mean, to me, it's not even a question. I would agree with that. I mean, I brought this up kind of with him when I talked to him. Because we were kind of having a friendly argument about how we, whether he lost 2020, I said, you know, it's actually better. Because if you've ever seen a superhero franchise, you always have to have, you know, it's a trilogy. Yeah. Even a movie itself is, you know, act one, act two, act three. The hero has to go down and act two so he can, a hero rises and act three. What did he say when you said that? I don't know why he was drunk. No, I wasn't drunk. You were nervous, right? I was nervous. I was pounding them all night long. No, no, no. No, I mean, he was friendly. I mean, I told the people, you know, he just never got mad at anything. He took it in. You know, I don't know if he is a big fan of superhero franchises. I'm not either, but I know that about them. Yeah. You have to have, like any movie, you have to have that middle act where you go down or else the third act is. Or it's really when you think the villain is dead. Right. And then he's not dead. He comes back alive. Okay. That's more apt. NVIDIA CEO Jason Huang says, "AI may make us worse at basic skills like math, but it won't matter because we'll learn new skills." Do you agree? I think he was saying that kids don't know how to do long division anymore. They don't know, right. But, like, doesn't matter. They don't know how to do long division. If we have calculators and all, you know, AI technologies, I'm not sure. Right. I think I forgot how to do long division. So, I don't know how important it is. How do I have with this? I don't know if you've had this experience. When I learned to drive, for example, I could find my way around because I had to use a paper map. Now, because of GPS, that part of my brain just doesn't work. And I worry about the more things we offload, the more cognitive tasks we offload, we just become blobs in capable of logical thinking, reasoning, deep thinking. I mean, it worries me, especially writing. Writing to me is the one where writing is the purest form of thinking. I can't think without writing. It helps me clarify my thoughts on paper. And the notion that you would outsource that. What's left? I mean, what do we have left? I agree. I mean, the latest. [Applause] The latest good news, I read about AI, is that maybe we'll just be like pets. Yeah, right. You read that? It will be the pets? It will be the pets. That's the most beautiful thing. The AI is definitely not the pet. Right. We're not in charge. Right. The good news. It won't kill us all. That's the best scenario. But we will just be pets. But, you know, if you want to be the pet, I mean, that's what. What? I mean, wolves chose to be. What about our former homeless security secretary, the cabinet official? Christie, what was her name? Christie No. Yeah, killed her dog. I mean, don't want. No. We don't want Christie No, I'm in charge. Yeah. I mean, dogs come from wolves, and they have a much better life than wolves. They're, you know, they're thugging it out there. That was wolves. I mean, it's not cool out there in nature. It's a doggy dog. And, you know, my dog is a thousand years old. And he's still alive, you know. For his a great life. Yeah. I have to feed him his medicine with, like, the most expensive ham in the world, because he wouldn't even eat hot dogs anymore. That's what that wolf's got for becoming a pet. So maybe it is a good thing. In fairness to AI, I acknowledge that there are a lot of huge potential risks. In terms of science and medicine, the power is immense. I mean, I can give an example, David Faganbaum at University of Pennsylvania. He cured his own Castleman's disease, figuring out what it's a cancer-like disease. He was basically on his deathbed. He's a physician, figured out using AI that you could mine for all the existing already approved drugs that don't make companies money anymore. They found the right combination of drugs, and he's alive 11 years later. And he started a not-for-profit. I have no relationship to it. It's called every cure where people who are dying essentially do this using AI to take novel combinations of already existing approved safety-tested drugs. And many of them are living. Without AI, that's not happening. Because you can't do it this all the time. But you said it was 11 years ago. Did we have AI? So 11 years ago, he used a system that he's now with every cure is implemented into AI. Wow. But kids are surviving. Yeah. So your dermatologist now can look, you can get 25 dermatologists to look at your skin scan. Right? And get all those opinions. The notion of a second opinion with AI, you can get 1,000 opinions. You can say what your risk tolerance is in terms of treatments. So AI is going to do a ton there, and for self-testing in kids. So to learn, it's not great, but to self-test. Like, generate a test, test my level of ability at so-and-so. Calculus, algebra, history in a certain era. It can tweak it so that you're just getting the right amount corrected and incorrect so that you're actually learning. So there are a lot of ways in which you can be used for good as well as bad. But do you really want to crowdsource your diagnoses with a thousand people or do you know? No, but I want to show up to my doctor who's recommending certain things and be able to hand him or her a panel that says, you know Somebody at a completely different institution thinks that there's an alternative method and it's been backed by You know a number of different physicians in a different country where this is approved. Should I travel there and get this treatment? You know are we behind the times like you know, so I think and it's free I mean in some sense it's free, right? So I think as long as people are good filters on the information I think AI has tremendous medical There's no doubt about that. There's no doubt. No one is saying that. No one is saying there isn't this awesome good side to it Well, our obsolescence wouldn't be a thing if it wasn't good Right if it wasn't amazing at all these tasks we wouldn't even be having a conversation about human obsolescence Right, that's true. I mean, I might trust an AI doctor more than a human doctor in a lot of instances Well, they talk about radiology. I mean, you know, it's already performing astonishingly well. Yeah, yeah Well, my doctor is Dr. Conrad Murray, and I trust everything he tells You know you remember who that was Hospital Michael Jackson. Oh Okay, they knew I love it Final question I've you heard about the palestinian Rachel Dollazal. Yes, what do you make of this? This is a you haven't okay. There's this woman her name is Hannah Gan and she's pretending to be palestinian She came for it. She's a white Jewish lady And she has admitted that she was darkening her skin and basically cosplaying as a palestinian I mean this is to your point your point also about gossiping the issue that a white Jewish lady Wants to be a palestinian. Well, there are these radical left-wing Jews who see it as their role to condemn Israel and say that it's committing genocide And it's as bad as the Nazis and you know Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon all is Sean all these people and This girl seems to have taken it for the next level, right, which is at now actually Pretending to be a palestinian. I think it's actually really insulting two palestinians I mean, they should be able to speak for themselves. Not have some left-wing Jewish lady It just shows as always with these kind of people. It's so much more about them than the cause Yes, the cause is them. Yeah, the cause is just a vehicle for them to be Showing you what good people they are. Their number one agenda is to let everyone know I am a better person than you. I am morally superior to you and I will do whatever I have to but but this is I thought that was pretty funny for a Jewish lady. It's now a palestinian and she's chanting from the river to blooming damn Catch all new episodes of real-time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO on demand for more information log on to HBO dot com