speaker-0: Command F lives between the world we are building and the wisdom we have inherited. We hold AI's astonishing power in one hand and 5,000 years of Jewish thought, ritual, and argument in the other, asking how to navigate what is coming without surrendering what is sacred. I'm Jenna Arnold, and together with some of today's most compelling thinkers, we explore the ancient questions resurfacing inside our most modern technologies. As AI changes how we create, remember, relate, and understand ourselves, we ask whether the questions beneath this revolution have been with us all along. Today's episode begins with a deceptively simple question. When we create a record of who we are, who gets to decide what belongs inside it? Sasha Sagan takes us into humanity's long desire to leave a message for the great unknown. Sarah Wolkenfeld shows us a Jewish archive that survives not by resolving disagreement, but by preserving it. And DZ Kalman asks, What responsibility we carry when AI begins learning from, reorganizing, And reflecting those records back to us. This is an episode about memory becoming infrastructure and about whether the story we hand to the future will be honest enough to contain us. Our first guest is Sasha Sagan. Welcome, Sasha. How are you?
speaker-1: ⁓ I'm great. I'm I'm very excited to be talking to you and flattered, honored to be the first guest of the first episode.
speaker-0: So ⁓ Sasha Sagan is a writer, filmmaker, and speaker exploring how humans create meaning through ritual, science, and storytelling. I could talk about ritual for hours. Her work has appeared in The Cut, O magazine, and beyond. She is the daughter of, and it says, I'm gonna flip this, Andrian and Carl Sagan. We're leading with Anne from now on, and her book for small creatures such as we explores how we mark time and construct meaning without religion. She also has a podcast called Strange Customs, where she talks about why we do things the way we do them, which is ⁓ again, such an a beautiful on-ramp to how we tell the stories about ourselves. So the reason we're starting with Sasha at the top of this season is because I have been a firm believer that the only way that I can understand myself. both like selfishly and also how to understand the world and my country, particularly now, is really to study it from a foreign shore. And instead of starting with like the Catrillion light years away, at the end of the season, we thought we would just ask you to answer all of those huge questions at the top. Thank you in advance.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ I mean what one of the things I'm most interested in, and I had a podcast that was sort of about this, ⁓ is like defamiliarization. Like if you could, and I'm really interested in rituals and traditions, and you know, the if we could step back and look at the things that we do as though they were totally new or from a culture or society that we had no contact with and reframe our most familiar, most beloved or detested but most like ordinary ⁓ rituals and traditions and try to examine them like we're an anthropologist studying some you know reading a history book or st discovering some lost you know society somewhere how can that reveal our fears and hopes and needs and wishes to ourselves and how can we sort of with a lot of empathy I think and a lot of curiosity look at the things that we do in a new light. It's crucial, you know, to see ourselves as not just, you know, from the perspective of the enormity and from the perspective of the microscopic, but also like see ourselves as somebody's, you know, distant ancestor, hopefully if we manage to not destroy ourselves, and somebody's, you know, impossible future.
speaker-0: I did want to talk to you about your book. ⁓ I'll hold it up a little bit longer. Small as much as we, which I love so much. ⁓ it is it is just in the title, there's the humility element, which is sort of both placed in this vastness of the the big wider world and the storyline of who we are, and also like that the bees know how to do things better than we do. ⁓ I'm obsessed with rites of passage, particularly the rite of passage from adolescence to adult and that sort of requirement and responsibility to ⁓ contribute. That's at least what my kids are will be brainwashed with. ⁓ what is it that you're doing to make the world a better place type thing. But ⁓ I will say I was prepping for this episode the days after we finished celebrating Passover. And my Passover, I assure all those listeners. ⁓ breaks every single Passover rule. ⁓ we only we only read like a lot of passages written by women. Karen Armstrong plays a very big role in in our
speaker-1: And I'm fascinated with her work. Yeah.
speaker-0: But one of the things that I do love about Passover is the rule of the youngest at the table has to tell the story. My story sounds different than some of the more conservative, orthodox, even reform stories. Look, but this idea of how and why we have to tell story and the role that story is playing in your life. with your kids, with yourself, how you inherited story.
speaker-1: I mean, my Passover also breaks a lot of the rules and it's completely secular. I mean, you know, like my ancestors beyond the horizon of the generation a couple of generations back where I know people's names and maybe what village they came from, or you know, ⁓ I I don't know anything, you know, after a few generations back except that they were Jewish. And I do feel connected to them and I want to carry things forward, but I don't believe in the theology ⁓ that they that you know, I mean who knows, maybe they were all secretly secular too and just going through the motions. But our our Passover theater is completely secular. And the message is this is a story that we have been telling ourselves for generations. And the message we must take away from it is that If we're doing okay now, it is our moral responsibility to work to help anyone else who is metaphorically or literally enslaved by all the oppressive forces. If we are if we are free, then it is our moral obligation to make things freer for everybody else and everybody else. And that, you know, the delineations between groups are artificial. I mean, the other element of it is Passover is intrinsically springtime, a springtime ritual because for most of human history, surviving the winter was not promised. The idea that s there would be enough food to go around when things were dark and cold, you know, and that everybody would survive the winter and that all the livestock and all the plants that we'd have enough. When spring came, the idea that there was really a new chance at life was so real. And it's only really recently that that relief when the plants start blooming and the animals start reproducing does not is not like directly impacting our ability to survive. And to really try to have that appreciation for ⁓ the the safety we feel if we're lucky enough to feel it.
speaker-0: I think role modeling vulnerability and role modeling the question of who we are and who it is that we want to be was put on a Seder plate, but really just served up to me year after year. But I think that's a very human thing to say who the hell am I? And why does it even matter? So, Sasha, your book.
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: For small creatures such as we, you argue that even people who don't believe in God really appreciate ritual. Have you found there to be a ritual about storytelling that is universal? I know we centered it's part of our conversation in Passover, but like is there like a a a running theme throughout our species? Yeah.
speaker-1: I mean, I think for sure storytelling is something that is like, you know, uniquely ours as a species, so far as we know. Every story is about a change, right? The the main character in a story, in any story, has to change irreversibly for it to be a s a real story, you know? They have to be different at the end than they were at the beginning. And I think that rituals and traditions are about processing change. And I think stories are about processing change. I think that the cyclical traditions, you know, the changing of the seasons, the things that are linked to the solstices and equinoxes, things like birthdays and anniversaries, it's processing like, okay, we have gone around the sun once since this last happened. And what is different and what is the same? And the rituals that are about the permanent changes, birth, coming of age, death. I mean, those are like these touchstones that throughout. history around the world, disparate cultures who had no contact with each other, all almost all, independently chose these same moments to mark in to sometimes in totally different ways. But like when you peel back the specifics of time and place and the costume and the script and the setting, it is a play about the same thing. And that is what gets me. That is what's so moving to me and so beautiful. And for me as a person who sees science rather than theology as the pathway to understanding, the events are scientific events, right? The changing of the seasons, like the solstices and equinoxes, so many holidays. I mean I don't even have to list them, are linked very clearly to those events. And like birth, coming of age, death, those are biological events. Those are scientific events and you mentioned coming of age ceremonies, which is one of my like favorite genres. And like it's kind of you know like the super sweet 16 and the quincinera and the bat mitzvah and then you have like all sorts of really interesting ⁓ like look in ⁓ in the South Pacific you have like land diving where young men like I'm this is one of my favorites like go to a tower among the trees like in front of their village and like there's a pliable plant rope. you know, vine tied to them and they jump off. And it's like this perfect metaphor for like going out into the world it into adulthood, you know, that transition is well then like the society, the tribe, the group, the village goes on a little longer. Like we will our genes, our culture, our ways will survive a little bit longer now that there's another generation of adults. And when we're gone, There's some part of us will live on. And that is very powerful thing. That is like what we're really celebrating, I think.
speaker-0: Do you love this importance of like these very like marked transitions, which are biological and rooted in science? One of the other reasons why it was important to have you on is one of the outputs of ⁓ your parents' collaboration together was the golden record, of which I really should have warned for it. I have like all this golden record jewelry. I was an astrophysics major and undergrad. So your parents were tasked with creating a narrative. For us humans. And it was, well, why don't you describe it? Tell us what the golden record is.
speaker-1: I mean it's a phonograph record, like a record you play on a record player, and it is a compilation of from the 1970s ⁓ of human experience. And it is ⁓ like greetings in 180. human languages, including my my brother Nick saying greetings from the children of Earth in his little boy voice at the time, music from around the world, the sound of a heartbeat, the brain waves of a young woman who had just recently fallen in love, which was my mother. because my parents were working on this and they fell in love while they were compiling. My mother was tasked to find one piece of music to represent The whole of the many millennia-long Chinese musical traditions. And that figures centrally in my existence. ⁓ They compiled these two records, Voyager 1 and 2, and they were launched in different directions, and they have a shelf life of a billion years. So they are like, as my mom would say, a message in a bottle. out into the cosmic ocean. And right now they are the furthest things from Earth ever touched by human hands.
speaker-0: obsessed with this and it's five hours of audio right
speaker-1: So yeah.
speaker-0: Okay, so that was the Secretary General at the time saying like we we come in peace.
speaker-1: Yeah. My dear friends in outer space. As you probably know, my country is situated on the west coast of the continent of Africa.
speaker-0: There's the heartbeat. Is that your mom falling in lost?
speaker-1: Think so. Sounds just like her.
speaker-0: You guys listen. That heartbeat was the sound of Anne falling in love with Carl, Sasha's dad.
speaker-1: Yeah, and there's her brain waves are like I don't know where on it is, but that's the thing where she was like really meditating on the experience of falling in love. And like so the title of my book for small creatures such as we, it comes from half of a quote that appears in the novel Contact, which is the only work of fiction that my parents ever publish and or that my dad ever published.
speaker-0: Mana from heaven we call that sash
speaker-1: And it that line, my parents like collaborated on everything. And that line is actually my mom wrote, and it's ⁓ for small cre the rest of the line is for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. And I feel like that concept, that idea that like yeah, like beyond the existential crisis, right? We are tiny in a tiny little out-of-the-way planet and a little hodunk star. In an enormous universe that we cannot even begin to comprehend. And we are here for the blink of an eye at best. And it's like very, you know, I believe in the existential crisis. I actually think that that's the most important rite of passage. Like that diving headfirst into the like, ⁓ my God, we're all gonna die. You know, ⁓ I think that's really important, but the the warm, reassuring, beautiful. consolation on the other side of that is like we are here right now in this little lifeboat together on this planet that we evolved perfectly to breathe the air and drink the water. And I think that what she was trying to like meditate on and put out into the universe, literally, I mean people say that like putting something out into the universe, but like literally putting it out into the universe was the idea that like the thing that makes it all Okay and beautiful and good is this feeling of love. And you know, if you were trying to boil down the experience of our species on this planet, you could put a lot of things, the art, the communication, the experience of togetherness rather than like the war and horrors and atrocities that we have committed against each other on this planet, you know, they they consciously decided to you know, make a good first impression if at all possible in case anyone ever came upon this. And I think that, you know, the idea of falling in love is gotta be up there with the very best things that we have to offer as a planet or a species.
speaker-0: There is something so profound about what your parents were able to curate and they did the best that they could with the blind spots they had in the 1970s with the technology that they had at their finger ⁓ their fingertips. But as we talk about who we are today and how we're recording who like what's the most important thing, what do you feel like? might be missing from the golden record? Have you daydreamed about reconstructing the golden record and what that would look like today? Cause I don't
speaker-1: I mean, the only thing that I can think of is that we have so much more technology that like we could communicate so much more depth in a way, you know what I mean, than than we could at the time. And I don't know, it's a really good question. I have to think about that. I mean, I think I'd have to do a real inventory of what's on there and what's missing, and maybe, you know, I'm sure that there were societies ⁓ who were not represented and and but yeah I think that there there probably is so much more of human experience to share and that would better represent what it's like to be one of us on this little world.
speaker-0: There's an image of a black female scientist looking into a microscope, included on the golden record. That was Anne, making sure that photo got it. Yeah. Imagine if it was just women who were creating this golden record. What would it sound like? What would it look like? What would be included in it? So, Sasha, now what do we do about these like intuitions of ours and how critical it they are to? Tone, fine-tune, protect over from generation to generation. And now we can just rely on AI to do so much of it. So that's really what we're unpacking in this season. And you kicking us off, holding the legacy of your parents putting a stake in the ground that's now out 44 billion light years, something like that away, like very, very far. And then also in these words of yours, ⁓ reminding us that it is just all about being human and feeling the sun on our face. Thank you.
speaker-1: Thank you so much, Jenna. This was a pleasure and I'm so excited for this season of your show.
speaker-0: ⁓ well thank you very much. So we have Sarah Wolkenfeld here of the Safaria Project. She's the chief learning officer who is building an open access library of Jewish texts. I know you were listening to Sasha about the golden record and sort of that daunting task of scribing who we are as a species and then sending it out for either nobody to see or like the rest of the universe to see. Help me. Connect the dots between the golden record and what Safaria does.
speaker-2: I I really resonated with everything that Sasha said about the golden record. I think this idea of you're trying to preserve something, you're trying to transmit something, you're trying to capture all these pieces of things. You want, as you were just talking about in your last conversation, you want all the voices, you want diversity. And we have this immense responsibility of passing down something that comes from a long time ago that we believe we believe belongs to everybody alive now. And we just have to get it out into the universe somehow. And that is a pretty good approximation of Safaria, digitizing Jewish texts, digitizing the entirety of the Jewish canon and making it as accessible as we possibly can to anyone with an internet connection.
speaker-0: So Sarah, isn't there an overwhelming responsibility that that maybe you feel, or again, maybe this is just my ignorance and intimidation, of accurately interpreting what those texts say?
speaker-2: Yeah, it's absolutely terrifying. And I would say
speaker-0: Make sure that the humility is deeply embedded in the
speaker-2: Totally on the same page. I think it's actually even before you get to the interpretation of it, just the responsibility of making the decisions about what goes on the website, just that in the same way as Sasha described the kind of well, you know, what what do you fit onto that five hours of of recording? You know, of audio. So we have to make decisions. ⁓ usually it's actually not really.
speaker-0: There you
speaker-2: entirely our decision. It's about what we can get access to. ⁓ it's We're still putting out the things we can get access to. And so that feels that in itself, I think is a weight. I really want that bait me drash, that Jewish study home that we're putting out onto the internet to be as diverse as possible. And also I know that things that are under copyright, especially things produced in the last, let's say 50 years or so, we're less likely to be able to put those out. That in and of itself is a huge responsibility. And then, of course, there's the translation question and the interpretation question. And I think it's just important to not let that responsibility weigh you down too much because ultimately, you know, you started off with Sasha talking about the stories that get told and transmitted. And I think we're so lucky as a Jewish people to have so many stories. That's what I see in these texts. I see ancient stories that Can enrich our lives today, but someone has to tell them, someone has to transmit them. And we have to try.
speaker-0: You don't mind going first. And that is so incredibly key. Can you ⁓ help me understand the breadth of Jewish text? What ancient text do you not have access to?
speaker-2: Jewish text is it's hard to quantify because it's by definition, it's an ever-expanding universe of text. So we start with the Bible, we start with the Hebrew Bible, the five books of Moses, and the other sections of the Bible. That's let's say Yay Big. That is like you can hold on to that. Right. You go from there to what we confusingly call the oral Torah. It's confusing because it's actually been written down and printed for a very long time now. ⁓ but you have Mishnah, you have Talmud, and those are. more volumes and more volumes and the printed Talmud takes up a pretty good chunk of a big bookcase. And then you go into commentaries and law codes and more commentaries on those law codes and different interpretations. And people are still writing new interpretations of all of these ancient texts today, right here, right now. And the challenge would be to capture all of that and to ensure that all of that gets again, transmitted and and that people get to make meaning of it for themselves in their own lives, which they can only do if they have access.
speaker-0: How much of the portfolio of content that exists do you feel like you have translated on to Safari you've digitized?
speaker-2: It's hard to say because it really depends a little bit where you're going to put the parameters of what should be included in that universe of text. One maybe helpful, not quite data point anecdotal that we like to say at Safaria is that we think we have 95% of the texts. Wow. 95% of the people study 95% of the time. It's the rule of the 95%.
speaker-0: That's a lot.
speaker-2: It is and it isn't because you have the other five percent of people on the other five percent of texts, then you have more things that people could be studying if they had access to them. But it's a lot. We really have put up a lot. Safari has existed for about a dozen years, and we have done our best to digitize everything we can get our hands on. I
speaker-0: I'm intimidated about the role that AI will play in interpreting, in the bias that AI has toward people of color, toward women, you know, what gets left out of the text that you've digitized because of the way that AI already thinks. That's very frightening to me.
speaker-2: We actually see Safaria as this tremendous, I guess as much as anything can be a force for the good in the world of AI, as a tremendous force for good, because we see already that when we ask questions of ChatGPT, when we ask questions of Claude or Gemini, it is very obviously to us drawing on safari. And we would much rather it draw on safari on a vetted database of primary Jewish sources. Rather than some random article about Judaism that somebody wrote on the internet and AI can now read. And so, in some ways, we're kind of flooding the zone with primary sources, with good translations, with reliable material so that AI will give good answers. It's not perfect. We don't know the algorithm for the AI. Nobody really does, arguably, but it is certainly informing the answers that AI gives. My fear. Just goes back to that responsibility. My fear is that the information that AI won't have access to is the information that's kept behind a paywall, ⁓ the information that's not digitized, the things that don't make it online. And I'm worried about that. That responsibility is larger than Safaria. That responsibility has to do with publishers and making information free and all sorts of other factors that we can't entirely control. But that's really my fear with AI.
speaker-0: When I have posed a question to AI, ⁓ it delivers options. It doesn't say in like it is black and white or this is a thing. But one of the core tenets, or theoretically, some would argue the tenet of being Jewish, not just ethnically, but in the behavior capacity, is the beauty of exploration and debate and curiosity, and dare I say, disagreement. AI still is going to search for the clean answer, the sure answer. But part of basically, you know, the tenet of this series, Command F, is we are searching, we are searching for the find. We are trying to find the answers. And one of the beautiful things about the behavior of being Jewish is the constant searching. But now you've like the confirmed answer tool right next to ancient text, which is only about exploration. Like, how are you marrying them together as a woman before the CLO of Safaria?
speaker-2: I think that what I love about studying Jewish texts, which has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, is exactly what you described. That you're always welcome to argue. And there is no one agreed upon answer. And I've I would say I've honed the skill of arguing about text. That is something that's that's my happy place. That's what I like to do. And I would make a distinction. I'm I think there's a difference between AI as a technology and the specific chat bots that have been brought to market. So it's very clear to me not to over-anthropomorphize, though I am prone to that. ⁓ Claude is definitely not Jewish.
speaker-0: Tell me why Claude's not Jewish.
speaker-2: I think Claude is not Jewish because Claude is such a yes man. Claude agrees with the things that you say. You want an answer to a question. You have a mystery and you'd like that solved. That sort of, well, this is like, you know, I'm giving okay, I'm giving you options, but essentially we're going to end the conversation here, right? What I want to do is satisfy your curiosity. What I want to do is give you the answer. What I want to do is make you feel good and feel validated and feel like you have all the information that you need. That is I would say just completely the opposite of the experience of deep real Jewish text study. Deep real Jewish text study is there's always more questions than answers. It's giving you some information, but it's to move you on to the next thing that you might ask, the next text that you might study. You have an answer. I want to challenge your answer and see if you might want to think about it differently. All of that is a part of the conversational mode of being in this text study. Place. And I think that that is lost with many chatbots. Safaria, in our own experimentations with AI, our own internal chatbot gives you sources. It gives you a next place to go. It moves you along on your journey. It doesn't give you the answer or even one single answer that might be right. It gives you options. It gives you a path. And it accompanies you on that journey. And I think AI can be very helpful in that regard. And I'll say one other thing, since you asked me how I process it as a woman, I'm very lucky because I had an amazing rich Jewish education. Right. And many women traditionally did not have that kind of access. Right. It was just not a common thing. I mean, so many people, just people didn't have a rich Jewish education that for a lot of reasons. But women in particular were discriminated against and not given access to the totality of the Jewish textual tradition. Early on, Safaria put up the Talmud, we put it up in the original and we put it up in English. And the Talmud is the quintessential text that was not taught to women for many, still in many places, is not taught to women for many, many generations. And ⁓ there was a kind of ⁓ spoken and unspoken ban against teaching it to women.
speaker-0: But now
speaker-2: But now it's on safari in the original, but also in English. And so many of the people who spoke to me when we first put up that text were women who said, ⁓ my goodness, now I can read Talmud for the first time. Now I can study Talmud. Now I don't need someone else to let me in. I've let myself in. I just clicked on the text. That's hugely important. I tell people it's a website.
speaker-0: I've let my
speaker-2: You don't have to use it and you don't have to use all of it. And also by definition, and this this has a downside also. By definition, when you're online, that is something you can do in the privacy of your own home. You don't have to be with other people. So men who don't think that women should access the Talmud can use this website alongside women who want to use the Talmud. They don't have to see each other. It's great. It's the online, it's you know, it's virtual. ⁓ I'm happy for everybody to come and study. I don't want to shut anyone out, but for me, the Talmud is my everything and it always has been. And I I want everyone to have that experience. And I think it contains so much of the DNA of of what it is to be part of the Jewish people is in that book. I want everyone to have it.
speaker-0: So this series is looking at ancient technologies and how to apply them today. And one of the questions that I have, particularly around access, and how do we make the tent bigger for both our ethnically Jewish community and then our adjacent Jewish community and people who are just searching for answers that maybe ancient Jewish text has for them at that point in their lives. Have there been any conclusions that you've drawn that challenge the ideas or the rules that you were raised with based on the digitizing process or in using AI alongside the digitization of the text? Is there something that you're like, ⁓ I think we might have gotten that wrong? Or this is a new way to interpret a thing?
speaker-2: I believe in the ongoing interpretive process. So I think there's always new ways to interpret text. And I think that AI actually gives us that in a way. Not the technical piece of AI, but the questions that people are asking around AI are it's like this literally the stuff of the Talmud, literally the stuff of religious traditions more broadly, I think. So questions like, what does it mean to be a creative person? What does it mean to work? What does it mean to invest time and energy into something? And when do you do it? When do you not? When do you work and when do you rest? What does it mean to have a digital Shabbat? Right? What does it mean to go offline? When do you do that? All of these big questions. What does it mean to be human? People are asking these questions now in like social media posts. Like And before that, it was just me and a bunch of friends sitting around in the Jewish study hall studying these ancient texts. And now everyone is asking these same questions. So I don't think about it as.
speaker-0: That's right.
speaker-2: kind of what contradicts, I think by bringing Torah into the digital age, we just brought it into this space of relevance so that people who are right here right now thinking about these questions have access to those texts. Are there uses I think we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't go there for sure. Like I said, I think Claude is not a Jewish chatbot. That's not a great way to have a conversation. But I think that AI overall is pushing us to ask really big questions and that Judaism has so much wisdom to offer.
speaker-0: I've seen chat come back with an answer for me and I'm like, ⁓ you're forgetting something. Please make sure. And I said, please make sure you register this. And they were like, of course. I have no idea if it like actually impacts the code. But like, is that something that Safaria feels like it's part of your responsibility to do? Is that if somebody asks, what's a passive or ritual that I can copy and paste for my Seder, how are you gonna ensure that? It delivers the but this is all open ended and this can be individualized and there's different how how how are you guys thinking about messing with the code at all?
speaker-2: On our site on Safaria, our library assistant will do that. It will say, here are five different texts with five different rituals that maybe even five different communities or five different authors over the span of you know thousands of years used at their passive Reseder. So we can control our library assistant, we can control what's within our system. More broadly, although I can't control their algorithm, I wish I could. I think that the more that we make available, We're just giving more material and more options for Claude to draw from, for Gemini to draw from when it answers those questions. It's a scary world to me if there's only one option out there on the web for Claude to somehow magically pull. And so we'll keep doing our best to digitize and put up more and more text so that there's more options.
speaker-0: Out there. Well, ⁓ Sarah, it that is a perfect segue to our next guest, ⁓ DZ Kalman, who is the author of Jell-O menorah, ⁓ who has very concrete ways that this can ⁓ we we can help protect the sacred art of being Jewish, which is to debate and be curious and explore over again on repeat. And thank you so much for your work. I really ⁓ am excited to see where it lands. Slash never to actually see it completed, apparently.
speaker-2: That's the Jewish way. We just keep working. We never finish. We keep at it.
speaker-0: I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
speaker-2: Thank you so much, Shana. Bye bye.
speaker-0: For all of you who don't know DZ, he will be making an appearance in many of the conversations throughout the season, because I would say there's nobody who sits at the intersection of Judaism and AI in a way that you do. You're asking the questions and your work on Jell-O menorah, which you can find on Substack, ⁓ is so critical to that. So now that you've heard us. go from the golden record, this product that's supposedly gonna tell aliens who we are, and then to hear about safari who are taking those ancient Jewish texts and digitizing them. As somebody who thinks about this all the time, what are your thoughts?
speaker-3: So I I I have to start with the the golden record because that's an object which changed my life.
speaker-0: Me too. Me too.
speaker-3: And has has been a source of inspiration for me since I first learned about it in high school or maybe even earlier. And it's not just that it inspired me, but it feels like the ending of a story that's in the Bible but feels kind of unfinished. So right at the beginning of the story of Genesis, there's the story of the Tower of Babel, which is about how all of humanity comes together to build this huge tower to the sky, and God doesn't like the tower very much, and it's not really clear why. But by the end, God ends up destroying it by basically creating different languages amongst the world's various people. So they can't physically communicate with each other. So they kind of just give up on the project. There's this sense of like language is this thing that you know, spreads us apart and it's a thing that prevents us from working together. And to me, the golden record has always felt like a kind of important coda to that story. Like if we think like literally how high humans can can climb. There will never be anything that humans build that climbs higher than the goal than the Voyager. It is definitively the thing that will always be highest above the earth. And embedded in the Voyager probe is literally a record of our voices and our many languages. ⁓ this idea that we are kind of like responding to that challenge of language is gonna bring you apart by saying, like, no, no, no. The languages are actually what we are offering to the world, what we're offering up to the universe. Like That's where we're gonna show first to all the aliens and all the other species, ⁓ to show our diversity as being a point of pride and not as being a point of disagreement. So ⁓ I have I've always thought about it as being a kind of useful conclusion to a Bible story ⁓ that, you know, has taken a long time to to to arrive.
speaker-0: Tell me a little bit more about what you think ancient Jewish technologies can offer humans as we try, as we step into the AIA.
speaker-3: And generally when you ask like what can religion offer to conversations around technology like AI, I think there's basically two kinds of answers. One is they can offer ancient wisdom, and the other is they can offer offer community. ⁓ and so like let's talk about the ancient wisdom first, right? ⁓ Judaism has been around for a really long time. It has been talking about ideas like the importance of human connection and the importance of gathering and the importance of ritual and the importance of humans themselves. So like those are not ideas that are unique to Judaism. There are ideas that are discussed in Judaism. ⁓ and Judaism as a people, ⁓ as a community, is one of those spaces where those ideas can get talked about and thought through and applied to reality. And I think like sometimes we don't ⁓ always appreciate that those spaces are not ⁓ just gonna come up by themselves. There aren't actually all that many spaces in the world where people can talk through the things that they care about and figure out how they want to construct their lives and their communities. I don't Pretend to say that the ideas that Judaism has about AI are gonna be all that different from what say Catholics or Mormons or Buddhists or Muslims say about AI. But ⁓ the fact that they are saying it and the fact that they're saying it and thinking it through in the context of of people ⁓ matters a lot. And how do you think about human value at a time when ⁓ people are no longer unique in the way that they previously thought they'd been unique? Is there a connection between human uniqueness and human value? If there isn't, then how do you think about human uniqueness? Right, to figure out where are the places where we are turning towards the past and where the places where we now as living people in the present actually need to use our political capital, use our ideas today to come up with new thoughts and new perspectives and new ideas. And that's like a really difficult balance to reach.
speaker-0: Would love for you to challenge a little bit. I I think the previous guest, ⁓ Sara, ⁓ it felt like it was a safe interpretation of the digitization of Jewish text, but like is the act of doing that and in the like seismic shift of women having access to the Talmud in ways that they haven't previously, that feels so concrete and obvious. But like what are the unexpected side effects?
speaker-3: My sense is that religions all over the planet right now are more or less on the same page about AI and the things that we need to do to respond to it. And they're kind of on the same page with pe what people who are not connected to religion are doing as well. So everyone's kind of like on the same wavelength of like, let's figure out what the common sense is. Where they're really different is in how they're organized. So it matters if your religion has a billion people in it or 10 million. It matters if religion is super highly organized or is not. ⁓ right now. Highly centralized religions are doing really well in AI. The Catholic Church has a lot of things to say about AI. The Mormons have a lot to say about AI. Let's say you are putting together a church publication that has images of Jesus, like a newsletter or something. Now they're thinking, well, do we want artificial intelligence to be generating images of Jesus for us? ⁓ Is that disrespectful in some way? ⁓ Does it get in the way of kind of human art? Do we want to introduce AI into what is like a
speaker-0: Like a newsletter.
speaker-3: process of devotion and like thinking about pondering, you know, particular renderings of of Jesus. So they're like they're thinking about that issue. They're thinking, what does it mean to create policy around that? I I think that's really exciting. I think it's it's important to think about that. And I think it's the kind of issue where I imagine that there's going to be a lot of iterations. ⁓ it's not just gonna be like we're gonna figure out the policy that we're gonna use for the next hundred years. It's more like let's figure out a policy that we can use for the next six months, the next year, and then let's revisit it after that because This technology is moving so fast. ⁓ and centralized religions can generally move a little bit faster than decentralized ones. And so that gives a kind of advantage.
speaker-0: curious about how all of the Christian denominations are gonna create a rule around AI creating images of Jesus. Although like again I go, isn't that like too late? Like isn't aren't people already doing that? And even if they have a rule, are people really gonna follow it? But but one of the things that I'm most interested in and how ⁓ Sara was saying Claude's definitely not Jewish because Claude delivers the is like a yes factory. You know, one of the things that I ⁓ Curious and concerned about is who gets to be the people to tell your story and to say who you are? You know, there's just this like you look at Christianity and there's 47,000 different Christian denominations in the United States alone. Who gets to tell the stories? Like, where are the faiths landing on that?
speaker-3: You know, ⁓ I was recently at Anthropic. Anthropic has like recently opened up, has been trying to have direct dialogue with religious leaders and religious thought. ⁓ and ⁓ one of the conversations that we had, someone in the room raised the the the point that Claude's constitution, which is like the the kind of the authoritative text, the kind of the governing document of of the model of anthropic's ⁓ AI model, ⁓ doesn't really talk about God. And doesn't talk about, you know, if you ask Claude something like, You know, ⁓ I'm trying to figure out like what direction to go in my life. I'm trying to make a major life decision. ⁓ Claude will give you a bunch of advice. It may not tell you like, I think you should consult a rabbi or a minister or your spiritual advisor. I mean, like it doesn't kind of go in that direction. And part of the reason is probably because of the culture of Silicon Valley, which has been like so secular for such a long time that it kind of treats those as being like kind of exceptional. So, like if you say, like, yes, I'm religious, then it might say, ⁓ you're religious. ⁓ yeah, you should definitely talk to a spiritual advisor. But it's not going to treat that as a default.
speaker-0: But to me, like I want it to be a default. I don't trust it to be a default. Now there's a lot of other problems within Silicon Valley that I want none of those biases embedded in the code. And I recognize they are. But when it comes to that, I think I'm okay with that. Are we not? Are are are each is this where like each of the religions are gonna be like? Convince the code to say defer to the priest, defer to the imam, defer to the rabbi, like should maybe those people stay out of the code?
speaker-3: I think we're asking a question that like really hasn't had to be asked before, which is like, how do you talk about the kind of the mysteries of life? ⁓ the fact of like, you know, the the strangeness, the oddity of existence, of consciousness, of like the fact that we live in a universe that we don't fully understand in a way that both recognizes the fact that like we have these big open questions and at the same time doesn't say like, and the answer is, you know, this this particular brand of Catholicism, this particular brand of, you know. Of Islam, right? Because you don't want to end up in a situation where it feels like you're paying you're being deferential to one particular faith over another, while recognizing that for most people on the planet, you know, God, spirituality, some notion of higher force is an important piece of their lives. And then figuring out a balance between those two things is really difficult. And I I totally understand why, in the face of that difficulty, there's been a kind of urge, like, let's shy away from that. Like, we don't we don't want to touch. But like, There's a difference between that and kind of affirmatively being like, no, no, no, we're we're gonna kind of we're gonna kind of go for ⁓ you know, ⁓ a kind of default of of secularism unless there is a reason to do otherwise, right? OpenAI, it's most recent model kept talking about goblins for no clear reason. It just
speaker-0: ⁓ yeah, yeah. I saw that where they were like, Please stop talking to AI about
speaker-3: Please please and so you know the question is like, is is God kind of like goblins in the model where it's like you don't want it to come up unless like someone specifically asks for it, or is it just like if it comes up, it comes up and like that's just it comes up because like people think in God terms often. It's really hard to I don't I don't pretend that I know what the balance is, but I think I think it's important to to spend more time thinking it through.
speaker-0: But don't like your version of Judaism is different than Sarah's, is different than mine, is different than Sasha's, is different than your rabbi. Like I I think that's one of at least that's my story that I say that like DZ and I can go to the same synagogue, study under the same scholars, read from the same book, and we will take a single sentence and we will interpret it differently. There is no single version of a a a religion, like even the popes have different interpretations of different sentences. I do wonder if one of the most important tenets of Judaism is this idea of wrestling and not knowing. And is that the thing that the Jews say to the code? Code, you're not actually sure is the answer. And like, take that from us.
speaker-3: Yeah. I think like that that's part of what is incredible about having a decentralized faith where no one gets to say that you're I mean, people do say you're doing it wrong, but like there's there's a real power in like having people within that faith basically saying, like, you know, you know, I get to do what I get to do, and it it is correct by virtue of the fact that I am part of this community. I don't need anybody else's permission. I think for something like AI, there's a lot of power in that because I don't know that anybody on the planet has a good sense of exactly How AI is supposed to be integrated into humanity. It's going to require a lot of experimentation, a lot of trial and error. ⁓ and having the ability to play around with different kinds of relationships with AI, different theological stances, different ways of incorporating it or not incorporating into faith is really, really important. ⁓ and I think one of the kind of the superpowers of decentralized faiths is being able to do those experiments at scale and figure out okay, what's working, what do people feel connected to, ⁓ what is really failing.
speaker-0: In our ⁓ final moments, I have two like impossible questions for you. Is AI gonna be able to call our bullshit? And is there a part of it that we don't want it to see?
speaker-3: Maybe answering both questions, there is a way in which AI kind of like forces this self-reflection of like, who are we? ⁓ my god, what have we put on the internet? So there is a need to kind of like examine ourselves even as we're developing this product of ourselves. I'm hoping, I think, in in the best case scenario, that it forces a kind of maturation of of humanity, even as we're trying to control this thing that we have kind of unleashed. But I do think it's really important to kind of create stronger narratives around what we're creating. I know there's a lot of resistance to that. I know there's like Resistance to the idea of like, well, like, you let's not like put theological language on this. Let's not talk about it in big grand terms. But I think the big grand narratives are actually quite important. And the same way that like the stories we tell about humanity going to the stars is really important, is really inspiring, helps like people orient what they want to do with their lives, how they want, how they imagine human existence developing, definitely feels like a turning point ⁓ in the story of our species.
speaker-0: And is the the final question, is AI reflecting us or is it revealing us? What would you say is so far happening, both at a human level and then if you can at the at the Jewish level?
speaker-3: Mm. I so far I think it's reflecting. With every new technology, there's always a transitional period where it's doing the kinds of things which previous technologies were already doing. What are we going to use the internet for? Well, basically the same stuff that we were able to do offline. AI is kind of in a similar place right now, but I think as we get more used to it, as our use of it matures, ⁓ it will form ⁓ relationships that were previously unimaginable. So we're still in that transition period, and I don't know how long it's going to last. ⁓ but I imagine that there they're kind of there's a kind of novel phase to come.
speaker-0: Well, DZ, I am so grateful to you. We will be blessed with more DZ throughout the season. And I I do hope an outcome of this series is that the tent gets larger for the Jewish community, the Jewish community, and the Jewish adjacent folks, which I fall into every single one of those categories on multiple times a day. And ⁓ and I think the way that, you know, maybe these stories, maybe these religions you know, we we are going to use them at least as a leg up to figure out this new piece of technology because it's only going to, as you said, reflect us even more. So DZ, thank you so much for coming on. You can find more of DZ's work at Jell O Menora and we are so excited ⁓ for him to be the smartest person on this show for the rest of the season.
speaker-3: I don't think that's true, but it's really wonderful. This whole conversation has been great and this has been this has been like a delightful way to spend the afternoon. So thank you so much.
speaker-0: We began with the impulse to leave a message behind and ended with the realization that every archive is also an act of power. Sasha reminded us that preservation is always a choice. Sarah showed us a tradition strong enough to keep contradiction alive, and DZ challenged us to recognize that AI will inherit not only our knowledge, but our omissions, hierarchies, and unfinished arguments. The question is no longer simply what we want the future to remember. It is whether we are willing to build a record expansive enough for the future to understand who we really are. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Command F. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. You can find a summary of this episode along with all the links and resources we discussed at blandavand. Follow the Land of End on Substack and YouTube and join our live community on Twitch. There's so much more to come. The ideas and opinions shared on this podcast belong solely to the host and guests. They reflect our thinking at the time of recording and may evolve as we continue to listen, learn, and encounter new information. They do not necessarily represent the views of any sponsor, partner, or affiliated organization. Command F is produced by the Land of End in partnership with Common Era. This series would not exist without Daisy Kalman, whose questions helped inspire its inception, and whose voice has been essential to its intellectual and moral foundation. Our deepest thanks to Rabbi Yoanis Schiller, Chief Research and Development Officer of Common Era, and Mikhail Humboldt, Christina Gilliutin for their partnership, trust, and support in bringing this work to life. Special thanks to our production team, senior creator producer and story editor Marn Marshe, Senior Livestream Producer Janice Matsko. And producer and editor Sarah Jacobsen.
speaker-1: ⁓ I'm great. I'm I'm very excited to be talking to you and flattered, honored to be the first guest of the first episode.
speaker-0: So ⁓ Sasha Sagan is a writer, filmmaker, and speaker exploring how humans create meaning through ritual, science, and storytelling. I could talk about ritual for hours. Her work has appeared in The Cut, O magazine, and beyond. She is the daughter of, and it says, I'm gonna flip this, Andrian and Carl Sagan. We're leading with Anne from now on, and her book for small creatures such as we explores how we mark time and construct meaning without religion. She also has a podcast called Strange Customs, where she talks about why we do things the way we do them, which is ⁓ again, such an a beautiful on-ramp to how we tell the stories about ourselves. So the reason we're starting with Sasha at the top of this season is because I have been a firm believer that the only way that I can understand myself. both like selfishly and also how to understand the world and my country, particularly now, is really to study it from a foreign shore. And instead of starting with like the Catrillion light years away, at the end of the season, we thought we would just ask you to answer all of those huge questions at the top. Thank you in advance.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ I mean what one of the things I'm most interested in, and I had a podcast that was sort of about this, ⁓ is like defamiliarization. Like if you could, and I'm really interested in rituals and traditions, and you know, the if we could step back and look at the things that we do as though they were totally new or from a culture or society that we had no contact with and reframe our most familiar, most beloved or detested but most like ordinary ⁓ rituals and traditions and try to examine them like we're an anthropologist studying some you know reading a history book or st discovering some lost you know society somewhere how can that reveal our fears and hopes and needs and wishes to ourselves and how can we sort of with a lot of empathy I think and a lot of curiosity look at the things that we do in a new light. It's crucial, you know, to see ourselves as not just, you know, from the perspective of the enormity and from the perspective of the microscopic, but also like see ourselves as somebody's, you know, distant ancestor, hopefully if we manage to not destroy ourselves, and somebody's, you know, impossible future.
speaker-0: I did want to talk to you about your book. ⁓ I'll hold it up a little bit longer. Small as much as we, which I love so much. ⁓ it is it is just in the title, there's the humility element, which is sort of both placed in this vastness of the the big wider world and the storyline of who we are, and also like that the bees know how to do things better than we do. ⁓ I'm obsessed with rites of passage, particularly the rite of passage from adolescence to adult and that sort of requirement and responsibility to ⁓ contribute. That's at least what my kids are will be brainwashed with. ⁓ what is it that you're doing to make the world a better place type thing. But ⁓ I will say I was prepping for this episode the days after we finished celebrating Passover. And my Passover, I assure all those listeners. ⁓ breaks every single Passover rule. ⁓ we only we only read like a lot of passages written by women. Karen Armstrong plays a very big role in in our
speaker-1: And I'm fascinated with her work. Yeah.
speaker-0: But one of the things that I do love about Passover is the rule of the youngest at the table has to tell the story. My story sounds different than some of the more conservative, orthodox, even reform stories. Look, but this idea of how and why we have to tell story and the role that story is playing in your life. with your kids, with yourself, how you inherited story.
speaker-1: I mean, my Passover also breaks a lot of the rules and it's completely secular. I mean, you know, like my ancestors beyond the horizon of the generation a couple of generations back where I know people's names and maybe what village they came from, or you know, ⁓ I I don't know anything, you know, after a few generations back except that they were Jewish. And I do feel connected to them and I want to carry things forward, but I don't believe in the theology ⁓ that they that you know, I mean who knows, maybe they were all secretly secular too and just going through the motions. But our our Passover theater is completely secular. And the message is this is a story that we have been telling ourselves for generations. And the message we must take away from it is that If we're doing okay now, it is our moral responsibility to work to help anyone else who is metaphorically or literally enslaved by all the oppressive forces. If we are if we are free, then it is our moral obligation to make things freer for everybody else and everybody else. And that, you know, the delineations between groups are artificial. I mean, the other element of it is Passover is intrinsically springtime, a springtime ritual because for most of human history, surviving the winter was not promised. The idea that s there would be enough food to go around when things were dark and cold, you know, and that everybody would survive the winter and that all the livestock and all the plants that we'd have enough. When spring came, the idea that there was really a new chance at life was so real. And it's only really recently that that relief when the plants start blooming and the animals start reproducing does not is not like directly impacting our ability to survive. And to really try to have that appreciation for ⁓ the the safety we feel if we're lucky enough to feel it.
speaker-0: I think role modeling vulnerability and role modeling the question of who we are and who it is that we want to be was put on a Seder plate, but really just served up to me year after year. But I think that's a very human thing to say who the hell am I? And why does it even matter? So, Sasha, your book.
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: For small creatures such as we, you argue that even people who don't believe in God really appreciate ritual. Have you found there to be a ritual about storytelling that is universal? I know we centered it's part of our conversation in Passover, but like is there like a a a running theme throughout our species? Yeah.
speaker-1: I mean, I think for sure storytelling is something that is like, you know, uniquely ours as a species, so far as we know. Every story is about a change, right? The the main character in a story, in any story, has to change irreversibly for it to be a s a real story, you know? They have to be different at the end than they were at the beginning. And I think that rituals and traditions are about processing change. And I think stories are about processing change. I think that the cyclical traditions, you know, the changing of the seasons, the things that are linked to the solstices and equinoxes, things like birthdays and anniversaries, it's processing like, okay, we have gone around the sun once since this last happened. And what is different and what is the same? And the rituals that are about the permanent changes, birth, coming of age, death. I mean, those are like these touchstones that throughout. history around the world, disparate cultures who had no contact with each other, all almost all, independently chose these same moments to mark in to sometimes in totally different ways. But like when you peel back the specifics of time and place and the costume and the script and the setting, it is a play about the same thing. And that is what gets me. That is what's so moving to me and so beautiful. And for me as a person who sees science rather than theology as the pathway to understanding, the events are scientific events, right? The changing of the seasons, like the solstices and equinoxes, so many holidays. I mean I don't even have to list them, are linked very clearly to those events. And like birth, coming of age, death, those are biological events. Those are scientific events and you mentioned coming of age ceremonies, which is one of my like favorite genres. And like it's kind of you know like the super sweet 16 and the quincinera and the bat mitzvah and then you have like all sorts of really interesting ⁓ like look in ⁓ in the South Pacific you have like land diving where young men like I'm this is one of my favorites like go to a tower among the trees like in front of their village and like there's a pliable plant rope. you know, vine tied to them and they jump off. And it's like this perfect metaphor for like going out into the world it into adulthood, you know, that transition is well then like the society, the tribe, the group, the village goes on a little longer. Like we will our genes, our culture, our ways will survive a little bit longer now that there's another generation of adults. And when we're gone, There's some part of us will live on. And that is very powerful thing. That is like what we're really celebrating, I think.
speaker-0: Do you love this importance of like these very like marked transitions, which are biological and rooted in science? One of the other reasons why it was important to have you on is one of the outputs of ⁓ your parents' collaboration together was the golden record, of which I really should have warned for it. I have like all this golden record jewelry. I was an astrophysics major and undergrad. So your parents were tasked with creating a narrative. For us humans. And it was, well, why don't you describe it? Tell us what the golden record is.
speaker-1: I mean it's a phonograph record, like a record you play on a record player, and it is a compilation of from the 1970s ⁓ of human experience. And it is ⁓ like greetings in 180. human languages, including my my brother Nick saying greetings from the children of Earth in his little boy voice at the time, music from around the world, the sound of a heartbeat, the brain waves of a young woman who had just recently fallen in love, which was my mother. because my parents were working on this and they fell in love while they were compiling. My mother was tasked to find one piece of music to represent The whole of the many millennia-long Chinese musical traditions. And that figures centrally in my existence. ⁓ They compiled these two records, Voyager 1 and 2, and they were launched in different directions, and they have a shelf life of a billion years. So they are like, as my mom would say, a message in a bottle. out into the cosmic ocean. And right now they are the furthest things from Earth ever touched by human hands.
speaker-0: obsessed with this and it's five hours of audio right
speaker-1: So yeah.
speaker-0: Okay, so that was the Secretary General at the time saying like we we come in peace.
speaker-1: Yeah. My dear friends in outer space. As you probably know, my country is situated on the west coast of the continent of Africa.
speaker-0: There's the heartbeat. Is that your mom falling in lost?
speaker-1: Think so. Sounds just like her.
speaker-0: You guys listen. That heartbeat was the sound of Anne falling in love with Carl, Sasha's dad.
speaker-1: Yeah, and there's her brain waves are like I don't know where on it is, but that's the thing where she was like really meditating on the experience of falling in love. And like so the title of my book for small creatures such as we, it comes from half of a quote that appears in the novel Contact, which is the only work of fiction that my parents ever publish and or that my dad ever published.
speaker-0: Mana from heaven we call that sash
speaker-1: And it that line, my parents like collaborated on everything. And that line is actually my mom wrote, and it's ⁓ for small cre the rest of the line is for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. And I feel like that concept, that idea that like yeah, like beyond the existential crisis, right? We are tiny in a tiny little out-of-the-way planet and a little hodunk star. In an enormous universe that we cannot even begin to comprehend. And we are here for the blink of an eye at best. And it's like very, you know, I believe in the existential crisis. I actually think that that's the most important rite of passage. Like that diving headfirst into the like, ⁓ my God, we're all gonna die. You know, ⁓ I think that's really important, but the the warm, reassuring, beautiful. consolation on the other side of that is like we are here right now in this little lifeboat together on this planet that we evolved perfectly to breathe the air and drink the water. And I think that what she was trying to like meditate on and put out into the universe, literally, I mean people say that like putting something out into the universe, but like literally putting it out into the universe was the idea that like the thing that makes it all Okay and beautiful and good is this feeling of love. And you know, if you were trying to boil down the experience of our species on this planet, you could put a lot of things, the art, the communication, the experience of togetherness rather than like the war and horrors and atrocities that we have committed against each other on this planet, you know, they they consciously decided to you know, make a good first impression if at all possible in case anyone ever came upon this. And I think that, you know, the idea of falling in love is gotta be up there with the very best things that we have to offer as a planet or a species.
speaker-0: There is something so profound about what your parents were able to curate and they did the best that they could with the blind spots they had in the 1970s with the technology that they had at their finger ⁓ their fingertips. But as we talk about who we are today and how we're recording who like what's the most important thing, what do you feel like? might be missing from the golden record? Have you daydreamed about reconstructing the golden record and what that would look like today? Cause I don't
speaker-1: I mean, the only thing that I can think of is that we have so much more technology that like we could communicate so much more depth in a way, you know what I mean, than than we could at the time. And I don't know, it's a really good question. I have to think about that. I mean, I think I'd have to do a real inventory of what's on there and what's missing, and maybe, you know, I'm sure that there were societies ⁓ who were not represented and and but yeah I think that there there probably is so much more of human experience to share and that would better represent what it's like to be one of us on this little world.
speaker-0: There's an image of a black female scientist looking into a microscope, included on the golden record. That was Anne, making sure that photo got it. Yeah. Imagine if it was just women who were creating this golden record. What would it sound like? What would it look like? What would be included in it? So, Sasha, now what do we do about these like intuitions of ours and how critical it they are to? Tone, fine-tune, protect over from generation to generation. And now we can just rely on AI to do so much of it. So that's really what we're unpacking in this season. And you kicking us off, holding the legacy of your parents putting a stake in the ground that's now out 44 billion light years, something like that away, like very, very far. And then also in these words of yours, ⁓ reminding us that it is just all about being human and feeling the sun on our face. Thank you.
speaker-1: Thank you so much, Jenna. This was a pleasure and I'm so excited for this season of your show.
speaker-0: ⁓ well thank you very much. So we have Sarah Wolkenfeld here of the Safaria Project. She's the chief learning officer who is building an open access library of Jewish texts. I know you were listening to Sasha about the golden record and sort of that daunting task of scribing who we are as a species and then sending it out for either nobody to see or like the rest of the universe to see. Help me. Connect the dots between the golden record and what Safaria does.
speaker-2: I I really resonated with everything that Sasha said about the golden record. I think this idea of you're trying to preserve something, you're trying to transmit something, you're trying to capture all these pieces of things. You want, as you were just talking about in your last conversation, you want all the voices, you want diversity. And we have this immense responsibility of passing down something that comes from a long time ago that we believe we believe belongs to everybody alive now. And we just have to get it out into the universe somehow. And that is a pretty good approximation of Safaria, digitizing Jewish texts, digitizing the entirety of the Jewish canon and making it as accessible as we possibly can to anyone with an internet connection.
speaker-0: So Sarah, isn't there an overwhelming responsibility that that maybe you feel, or again, maybe this is just my ignorance and intimidation, of accurately interpreting what those texts say?
speaker-2: Yeah, it's absolutely terrifying. And I would say
speaker-0: Make sure that the humility is deeply embedded in the
speaker-2: Totally on the same page. I think it's actually even before you get to the interpretation of it, just the responsibility of making the decisions about what goes on the website, just that in the same way as Sasha described the kind of well, you know, what what do you fit onto that five hours of of recording? You know, of audio. So we have to make decisions. ⁓ usually it's actually not really.
speaker-0: There you
speaker-2: entirely our decision. It's about what we can get access to. ⁓ it's We're still putting out the things we can get access to. And so that feels that in itself, I think is a weight. I really want that bait me drash, that Jewish study home that we're putting out onto the internet to be as diverse as possible. And also I know that things that are under copyright, especially things produced in the last, let's say 50 years or so, we're less likely to be able to put those out. That in and of itself is a huge responsibility. And then, of course, there's the translation question and the interpretation question. And I think it's just important to not let that responsibility weigh you down too much because ultimately, you know, you started off with Sasha talking about the stories that get told and transmitted. And I think we're so lucky as a Jewish people to have so many stories. That's what I see in these texts. I see ancient stories that Can enrich our lives today, but someone has to tell them, someone has to transmit them. And we have to try.
speaker-0: You don't mind going first. And that is so incredibly key. Can you ⁓ help me understand the breadth of Jewish text? What ancient text do you not have access to?
speaker-2: Jewish text is it's hard to quantify because it's by definition, it's an ever-expanding universe of text. So we start with the Bible, we start with the Hebrew Bible, the five books of Moses, and the other sections of the Bible. That's let's say Yay Big. That is like you can hold on to that. Right. You go from there to what we confusingly call the oral Torah. It's confusing because it's actually been written down and printed for a very long time now. ⁓ but you have Mishnah, you have Talmud, and those are. more volumes and more volumes and the printed Talmud takes up a pretty good chunk of a big bookcase. And then you go into commentaries and law codes and more commentaries on those law codes and different interpretations. And people are still writing new interpretations of all of these ancient texts today, right here, right now. And the challenge would be to capture all of that and to ensure that all of that gets again, transmitted and and that people get to make meaning of it for themselves in their own lives, which they can only do if they have access.
speaker-0: How much of the portfolio of content that exists do you feel like you have translated on to Safari you've digitized?
speaker-2: It's hard to say because it really depends a little bit where you're going to put the parameters of what should be included in that universe of text. One maybe helpful, not quite data point anecdotal that we like to say at Safaria is that we think we have 95% of the texts. Wow. 95% of the people study 95% of the time. It's the rule of the 95%.
speaker-0: That's a lot.
speaker-2: It is and it isn't because you have the other five percent of people on the other five percent of texts, then you have more things that people could be studying if they had access to them. But it's a lot. We really have put up a lot. Safari has existed for about a dozen years, and we have done our best to digitize everything we can get our hands on. I
speaker-0: I'm intimidated about the role that AI will play in interpreting, in the bias that AI has toward people of color, toward women, you know, what gets left out of the text that you've digitized because of the way that AI already thinks. That's very frightening to me.
speaker-2: We actually see Safaria as this tremendous, I guess as much as anything can be a force for the good in the world of AI, as a tremendous force for good, because we see already that when we ask questions of ChatGPT, when we ask questions of Claude or Gemini, it is very obviously to us drawing on safari. And we would much rather it draw on safari on a vetted database of primary Jewish sources. Rather than some random article about Judaism that somebody wrote on the internet and AI can now read. And so, in some ways, we're kind of flooding the zone with primary sources, with good translations, with reliable material so that AI will give good answers. It's not perfect. We don't know the algorithm for the AI. Nobody really does, arguably, but it is certainly informing the answers that AI gives. My fear. Just goes back to that responsibility. My fear is that the information that AI won't have access to is the information that's kept behind a paywall, ⁓ the information that's not digitized, the things that don't make it online. And I'm worried about that. That responsibility is larger than Safaria. That responsibility has to do with publishers and making information free and all sorts of other factors that we can't entirely control. But that's really my fear with AI.
speaker-0: When I have posed a question to AI, ⁓ it delivers options. It doesn't say in like it is black and white or this is a thing. But one of the core tenets, or theoretically, some would argue the tenet of being Jewish, not just ethnically, but in the behavior capacity, is the beauty of exploration and debate and curiosity, and dare I say, disagreement. AI still is going to search for the clean answer, the sure answer. But part of basically, you know, the tenet of this series, Command F, is we are searching, we are searching for the find. We are trying to find the answers. And one of the beautiful things about the behavior of being Jewish is the constant searching. But now you've like the confirmed answer tool right next to ancient text, which is only about exploration. Like, how are you marrying them together as a woman before the CLO of Safaria?
speaker-2: I think that what I love about studying Jewish texts, which has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, is exactly what you described. That you're always welcome to argue. And there is no one agreed upon answer. And I've I would say I've honed the skill of arguing about text. That is something that's that's my happy place. That's what I like to do. And I would make a distinction. I'm I think there's a difference between AI as a technology and the specific chat bots that have been brought to market. So it's very clear to me not to over-anthropomorphize, though I am prone to that. ⁓ Claude is definitely not Jewish.
speaker-0: Tell me why Claude's not Jewish.
speaker-2: I think Claude is not Jewish because Claude is such a yes man. Claude agrees with the things that you say. You want an answer to a question. You have a mystery and you'd like that solved. That sort of, well, this is like, you know, I'm giving okay, I'm giving you options, but essentially we're going to end the conversation here, right? What I want to do is satisfy your curiosity. What I want to do is give you the answer. What I want to do is make you feel good and feel validated and feel like you have all the information that you need. That is I would say just completely the opposite of the experience of deep real Jewish text study. Deep real Jewish text study is there's always more questions than answers. It's giving you some information, but it's to move you on to the next thing that you might ask, the next text that you might study. You have an answer. I want to challenge your answer and see if you might want to think about it differently. All of that is a part of the conversational mode of being in this text study. Place. And I think that that is lost with many chatbots. Safaria, in our own experimentations with AI, our own internal chatbot gives you sources. It gives you a next place to go. It moves you along on your journey. It doesn't give you the answer or even one single answer that might be right. It gives you options. It gives you a path. And it accompanies you on that journey. And I think AI can be very helpful in that regard. And I'll say one other thing, since you asked me how I process it as a woman, I'm very lucky because I had an amazing rich Jewish education. Right. And many women traditionally did not have that kind of access. Right. It was just not a common thing. I mean, so many people, just people didn't have a rich Jewish education that for a lot of reasons. But women in particular were discriminated against and not given access to the totality of the Jewish textual tradition. Early on, Safaria put up the Talmud, we put it up in the original and we put it up in English. And the Talmud is the quintessential text that was not taught to women for many, still in many places, is not taught to women for many, many generations. And ⁓ there was a kind of ⁓ spoken and unspoken ban against teaching it to women.
speaker-0: But now
speaker-2: But now it's on safari in the original, but also in English. And so many of the people who spoke to me when we first put up that text were women who said, ⁓ my goodness, now I can read Talmud for the first time. Now I can study Talmud. Now I don't need someone else to let me in. I've let myself in. I just clicked on the text. That's hugely important. I tell people it's a website.
speaker-0: I've let my
speaker-2: You don't have to use it and you don't have to use all of it. And also by definition, and this this has a downside also. By definition, when you're online, that is something you can do in the privacy of your own home. You don't have to be with other people. So men who don't think that women should access the Talmud can use this website alongside women who want to use the Talmud. They don't have to see each other. It's great. It's the online, it's you know, it's virtual. ⁓ I'm happy for everybody to come and study. I don't want to shut anyone out, but for me, the Talmud is my everything and it always has been. And I I want everyone to have that experience. And I think it contains so much of the DNA of of what it is to be part of the Jewish people is in that book. I want everyone to have it.
speaker-0: So this series is looking at ancient technologies and how to apply them today. And one of the questions that I have, particularly around access, and how do we make the tent bigger for both our ethnically Jewish community and then our adjacent Jewish community and people who are just searching for answers that maybe ancient Jewish text has for them at that point in their lives. Have there been any conclusions that you've drawn that challenge the ideas or the rules that you were raised with based on the digitizing process or in using AI alongside the digitization of the text? Is there something that you're like, ⁓ I think we might have gotten that wrong? Or this is a new way to interpret a thing?
speaker-2: I believe in the ongoing interpretive process. So I think there's always new ways to interpret text. And I think that AI actually gives us that in a way. Not the technical piece of AI, but the questions that people are asking around AI are it's like this literally the stuff of the Talmud, literally the stuff of religious traditions more broadly, I think. So questions like, what does it mean to be a creative person? What does it mean to work? What does it mean to invest time and energy into something? And when do you do it? When do you not? When do you work and when do you rest? What does it mean to have a digital Shabbat? Right? What does it mean to go offline? When do you do that? All of these big questions. What does it mean to be human? People are asking these questions now in like social media posts. Like And before that, it was just me and a bunch of friends sitting around in the Jewish study hall studying these ancient texts. And now everyone is asking these same questions. So I don't think about it as.
speaker-0: That's right.
speaker-2: kind of what contradicts, I think by bringing Torah into the digital age, we just brought it into this space of relevance so that people who are right here right now thinking about these questions have access to those texts. Are there uses I think we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't go there for sure. Like I said, I think Claude is not a Jewish chatbot. That's not a great way to have a conversation. But I think that AI overall is pushing us to ask really big questions and that Judaism has so much wisdom to offer.
speaker-0: I've seen chat come back with an answer for me and I'm like, ⁓ you're forgetting something. Please make sure. And I said, please make sure you register this. And they were like, of course. I have no idea if it like actually impacts the code. But like, is that something that Safaria feels like it's part of your responsibility to do? Is that if somebody asks, what's a passive or ritual that I can copy and paste for my Seder, how are you gonna ensure that? It delivers the but this is all open ended and this can be individualized and there's different how how how are you guys thinking about messing with the code at all?
speaker-2: On our site on Safaria, our library assistant will do that. It will say, here are five different texts with five different rituals that maybe even five different communities or five different authors over the span of you know thousands of years used at their passive Reseder. So we can control our library assistant, we can control what's within our system. More broadly, although I can't control their algorithm, I wish I could. I think that the more that we make available, We're just giving more material and more options for Claude to draw from, for Gemini to draw from when it answers those questions. It's a scary world to me if there's only one option out there on the web for Claude to somehow magically pull. And so we'll keep doing our best to digitize and put up more and more text so that there's more options.
speaker-0: Out there. Well, ⁓ Sarah, it that is a perfect segue to our next guest, ⁓ DZ Kalman, who is the author of Jell-O menorah, ⁓ who has very concrete ways that this can ⁓ we we can help protect the sacred art of being Jewish, which is to debate and be curious and explore over again on repeat. And thank you so much for your work. I really ⁓ am excited to see where it lands. Slash never to actually see it completed, apparently.
speaker-2: That's the Jewish way. We just keep working. We never finish. We keep at it.
speaker-0: I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
speaker-2: Thank you so much, Shana. Bye bye.
speaker-0: For all of you who don't know DZ, he will be making an appearance in many of the conversations throughout the season, because I would say there's nobody who sits at the intersection of Judaism and AI in a way that you do. You're asking the questions and your work on Jell-O menorah, which you can find on Substack, ⁓ is so critical to that. So now that you've heard us. go from the golden record, this product that's supposedly gonna tell aliens who we are, and then to hear about safari who are taking those ancient Jewish texts and digitizing them. As somebody who thinks about this all the time, what are your thoughts?
speaker-3: So I I I have to start with the the golden record because that's an object which changed my life.
speaker-0: Me too. Me too.
speaker-3: And has has been a source of inspiration for me since I first learned about it in high school or maybe even earlier. And it's not just that it inspired me, but it feels like the ending of a story that's in the Bible but feels kind of unfinished. So right at the beginning of the story of Genesis, there's the story of the Tower of Babel, which is about how all of humanity comes together to build this huge tower to the sky, and God doesn't like the tower very much, and it's not really clear why. But by the end, God ends up destroying it by basically creating different languages amongst the world's various people. So they can't physically communicate with each other. So they kind of just give up on the project. There's this sense of like language is this thing that you know, spreads us apart and it's a thing that prevents us from working together. And to me, the golden record has always felt like a kind of important coda to that story. Like if we think like literally how high humans can can climb. There will never be anything that humans build that climbs higher than the goal than the Voyager. It is definitively the thing that will always be highest above the earth. And embedded in the Voyager probe is literally a record of our voices and our many languages. ⁓ this idea that we are kind of like responding to that challenge of language is gonna bring you apart by saying, like, no, no, no. The languages are actually what we are offering to the world, what we're offering up to the universe. Like That's where we're gonna show first to all the aliens and all the other species, ⁓ to show our diversity as being a point of pride and not as being a point of disagreement. So ⁓ I have I've always thought about it as being a kind of useful conclusion to a Bible story ⁓ that, you know, has taken a long time to to to arrive.
speaker-0: Tell me a little bit more about what you think ancient Jewish technologies can offer humans as we try, as we step into the AIA.
speaker-3: And generally when you ask like what can religion offer to conversations around technology like AI, I think there's basically two kinds of answers. One is they can offer ancient wisdom, and the other is they can offer offer community. ⁓ and so like let's talk about the ancient wisdom first, right? ⁓ Judaism has been around for a really long time. It has been talking about ideas like the importance of human connection and the importance of gathering and the importance of ritual and the importance of humans themselves. So like those are not ideas that are unique to Judaism. There are ideas that are discussed in Judaism. ⁓ and Judaism as a people, ⁓ as a community, is one of those spaces where those ideas can get talked about and thought through and applied to reality. And I think like sometimes we don't ⁓ always appreciate that those spaces are not ⁓ just gonna come up by themselves. There aren't actually all that many spaces in the world where people can talk through the things that they care about and figure out how they want to construct their lives and their communities. I don't Pretend to say that the ideas that Judaism has about AI are gonna be all that different from what say Catholics or Mormons or Buddhists or Muslims say about AI. But ⁓ the fact that they are saying it and the fact that they're saying it and thinking it through in the context of of people ⁓ matters a lot. And how do you think about human value at a time when ⁓ people are no longer unique in the way that they previously thought they'd been unique? Is there a connection between human uniqueness and human value? If there isn't, then how do you think about human uniqueness? Right, to figure out where are the places where we are turning towards the past and where the places where we now as living people in the present actually need to use our political capital, use our ideas today to come up with new thoughts and new perspectives and new ideas. And that's like a really difficult balance to reach.
speaker-0: Would love for you to challenge a little bit. I I think the previous guest, ⁓ Sara, ⁓ it felt like it was a safe interpretation of the digitization of Jewish text, but like is the act of doing that and in the like seismic shift of women having access to the Talmud in ways that they haven't previously, that feels so concrete and obvious. But like what are the unexpected side effects?
speaker-3: My sense is that religions all over the planet right now are more or less on the same page about AI and the things that we need to do to respond to it. And they're kind of on the same page with pe what people who are not connected to religion are doing as well. So everyone's kind of like on the same wavelength of like, let's figure out what the common sense is. Where they're really different is in how they're organized. So it matters if your religion has a billion people in it or 10 million. It matters if religion is super highly organized or is not. ⁓ right now. Highly centralized religions are doing really well in AI. The Catholic Church has a lot of things to say about AI. The Mormons have a lot to say about AI. Let's say you are putting together a church publication that has images of Jesus, like a newsletter or something. Now they're thinking, well, do we want artificial intelligence to be generating images of Jesus for us? ⁓ Is that disrespectful in some way? ⁓ Does it get in the way of kind of human art? Do we want to introduce AI into what is like a
speaker-0: Like a newsletter.
speaker-3: process of devotion and like thinking about pondering, you know, particular renderings of of Jesus. So they're like they're thinking about that issue. They're thinking, what does it mean to create policy around that? I I think that's really exciting. I think it's it's important to think about that. And I think it's the kind of issue where I imagine that there's going to be a lot of iterations. ⁓ it's not just gonna be like we're gonna figure out the policy that we're gonna use for the next hundred years. It's more like let's figure out a policy that we can use for the next six months, the next year, and then let's revisit it after that because This technology is moving so fast. ⁓ and centralized religions can generally move a little bit faster than decentralized ones. And so that gives a kind of advantage.
speaker-0: curious about how all of the Christian denominations are gonna create a rule around AI creating images of Jesus. Although like again I go, isn't that like too late? Like isn't aren't people already doing that? And even if they have a rule, are people really gonna follow it? But but one of the things that I'm most interested in and how ⁓ Sara was saying Claude's definitely not Jewish because Claude delivers the is like a yes factory. You know, one of the things that I ⁓ Curious and concerned about is who gets to be the people to tell your story and to say who you are? You know, there's just this like you look at Christianity and there's 47,000 different Christian denominations in the United States alone. Who gets to tell the stories? Like, where are the faiths landing on that?
speaker-3: You know, ⁓ I was recently at Anthropic. Anthropic has like recently opened up, has been trying to have direct dialogue with religious leaders and religious thought. ⁓ and ⁓ one of the conversations that we had, someone in the room raised the the the point that Claude's constitution, which is like the the kind of the authoritative text, the kind of the governing document of of the model of anthropic's ⁓ AI model, ⁓ doesn't really talk about God. And doesn't talk about, you know, if you ask Claude something like, You know, ⁓ I'm trying to figure out like what direction to go in my life. I'm trying to make a major life decision. ⁓ Claude will give you a bunch of advice. It may not tell you like, I think you should consult a rabbi or a minister or your spiritual advisor. I mean, like it doesn't kind of go in that direction. And part of the reason is probably because of the culture of Silicon Valley, which has been like so secular for such a long time that it kind of treats those as being like kind of exceptional. So, like if you say, like, yes, I'm religious, then it might say, ⁓ you're religious. ⁓ yeah, you should definitely talk to a spiritual advisor. But it's not going to treat that as a default.
speaker-0: But to me, like I want it to be a default. I don't trust it to be a default. Now there's a lot of other problems within Silicon Valley that I want none of those biases embedded in the code. And I recognize they are. But when it comes to that, I think I'm okay with that. Are we not? Are are are each is this where like each of the religions are gonna be like? Convince the code to say defer to the priest, defer to the imam, defer to the rabbi, like should maybe those people stay out of the code?
speaker-3: I think we're asking a question that like really hasn't had to be asked before, which is like, how do you talk about the kind of the mysteries of life? ⁓ the fact of like, you know, the the strangeness, the oddity of existence, of consciousness, of like the fact that we live in a universe that we don't fully understand in a way that both recognizes the fact that like we have these big open questions and at the same time doesn't say like, and the answer is, you know, this this particular brand of Catholicism, this particular brand of, you know. Of Islam, right? Because you don't want to end up in a situation where it feels like you're paying you're being deferential to one particular faith over another, while recognizing that for most people on the planet, you know, God, spirituality, some notion of higher force is an important piece of their lives. And then figuring out a balance between those two things is really difficult. And I I totally understand why, in the face of that difficulty, there's been a kind of urge, like, let's shy away from that. Like, we don't we don't want to touch. But like, There's a difference between that and kind of affirmatively being like, no, no, no, we're we're gonna kind of we're gonna kind of go for ⁓ you know, ⁓ a kind of default of of secularism unless there is a reason to do otherwise, right? OpenAI, it's most recent model kept talking about goblins for no clear reason. It just
speaker-0: ⁓ yeah, yeah. I saw that where they were like, Please stop talking to AI about
speaker-3: Please please and so you know the question is like, is is God kind of like goblins in the model where it's like you don't want it to come up unless like someone specifically asks for it, or is it just like if it comes up, it comes up and like that's just it comes up because like people think in God terms often. It's really hard to I don't I don't pretend that I know what the balance is, but I think I think it's important to to spend more time thinking it through.
speaker-0: But don't like your version of Judaism is different than Sarah's, is different than mine, is different than Sasha's, is different than your rabbi. Like I I think that's one of at least that's my story that I say that like DZ and I can go to the same synagogue, study under the same scholars, read from the same book, and we will take a single sentence and we will interpret it differently. There is no single version of a a a religion, like even the popes have different interpretations of different sentences. I do wonder if one of the most important tenets of Judaism is this idea of wrestling and not knowing. And is that the thing that the Jews say to the code? Code, you're not actually sure is the answer. And like, take that from us.
speaker-3: Yeah. I think like that that's part of what is incredible about having a decentralized faith where no one gets to say that you're I mean, people do say you're doing it wrong, but like there's there's a real power in like having people within that faith basically saying, like, you know, you know, I get to do what I get to do, and it it is correct by virtue of the fact that I am part of this community. I don't need anybody else's permission. I think for something like AI, there's a lot of power in that because I don't know that anybody on the planet has a good sense of exactly How AI is supposed to be integrated into humanity. It's going to require a lot of experimentation, a lot of trial and error. ⁓ and having the ability to play around with different kinds of relationships with AI, different theological stances, different ways of incorporating it or not incorporating into faith is really, really important. ⁓ and I think one of the kind of the superpowers of decentralized faiths is being able to do those experiments at scale and figure out okay, what's working, what do people feel connected to, ⁓ what is really failing.
speaker-0: In our ⁓ final moments, I have two like impossible questions for you. Is AI gonna be able to call our bullshit? And is there a part of it that we don't want it to see?
speaker-3: Maybe answering both questions, there is a way in which AI kind of like forces this self-reflection of like, who are we? ⁓ my god, what have we put on the internet? So there is a need to kind of like examine ourselves even as we're developing this product of ourselves. I'm hoping, I think, in in the best case scenario, that it forces a kind of maturation of of humanity, even as we're trying to control this thing that we have kind of unleashed. But I do think it's really important to kind of create stronger narratives around what we're creating. I know there's a lot of resistance to that. I know there's like Resistance to the idea of like, well, like, you let's not like put theological language on this. Let's not talk about it in big grand terms. But I think the big grand narratives are actually quite important. And the same way that like the stories we tell about humanity going to the stars is really important, is really inspiring, helps like people orient what they want to do with their lives, how they want, how they imagine human existence developing, definitely feels like a turning point ⁓ in the story of our species.
speaker-0: And is the the final question, is AI reflecting us or is it revealing us? What would you say is so far happening, both at a human level and then if you can at the at the Jewish level?
speaker-3: Mm. I so far I think it's reflecting. With every new technology, there's always a transitional period where it's doing the kinds of things which previous technologies were already doing. What are we going to use the internet for? Well, basically the same stuff that we were able to do offline. AI is kind of in a similar place right now, but I think as we get more used to it, as our use of it matures, ⁓ it will form ⁓ relationships that were previously unimaginable. So we're still in that transition period, and I don't know how long it's going to last. ⁓ but I imagine that there they're kind of there's a kind of novel phase to come.
speaker-0: Well, DZ, I am so grateful to you. We will be blessed with more DZ throughout the season. And I I do hope an outcome of this series is that the tent gets larger for the Jewish community, the Jewish community, and the Jewish adjacent folks, which I fall into every single one of those categories on multiple times a day. And ⁓ and I think the way that, you know, maybe these stories, maybe these religions you know, we we are going to use them at least as a leg up to figure out this new piece of technology because it's only going to, as you said, reflect us even more. So DZ, thank you so much for coming on. You can find more of DZ's work at Jell O Menora and we are so excited ⁓ for him to be the smartest person on this show for the rest of the season.
speaker-3: I don't think that's true, but it's really wonderful. This whole conversation has been great and this has been this has been like a delightful way to spend the afternoon. So thank you so much.
speaker-0: We began with the impulse to leave a message behind and ended with the realization that every archive is also an act of power. Sasha reminded us that preservation is always a choice. Sarah showed us a tradition strong enough to keep contradiction alive, and DZ challenged us to recognize that AI will inherit not only our knowledge, but our omissions, hierarchies, and unfinished arguments. The question is no longer simply what we want the future to remember. It is whether we are willing to build a record expansive enough for the future to understand who we really are. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Command F. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. You can find a summary of this episode along with all the links and resources we discussed at blandavand. Follow the Land of End on Substack and YouTube and join our live community on Twitch. There's so much more to come. The ideas and opinions shared on this podcast belong solely to the host and guests. They reflect our thinking at the time of recording and may evolve as we continue to listen, learn, and encounter new information. They do not necessarily represent the views of any sponsor, partner, or affiliated organization. Command F is produced by the Land of End in partnership with Common Era. This series would not exist without Daisy Kalman, whose questions helped inspire its inception, and whose voice has been essential to its intellectual and moral foundation. Our deepest thanks to Rabbi Yoanis Schiller, Chief Research and Development Officer of Common Era, and Mikhail Humboldt, Christina Gilliutin for their partnership, trust, and support in bringing this work to life. Special thanks to our production team, senior creator producer and story editor Marn Marshe, Senior Livestream Producer Janice Matsko. And producer and editor Sarah Jacobsen.
