Pod Insights Summation with Auren Hoffman Rabbi David Wolpe - AI, faith, and the future of human connection About this episode Rabbi David Wolpe is the emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, one of the largest synagogues in the United States. He is a bestselling author of eight books on faith and spirituality and has been named one of the most influential rabbis in America. In this episode of World of DaaS, David and Auren discuss: AI rabbis and digital therapyLab grown meat and kosher lawsConsciousness uploading and digital soulsFertility rates and collective meaning Looking for more tech, data and venture ...
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Auren Hoffman? Hello fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdas.com. That's world of das, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Rabbi David Wolpe. Rabbi Wolpe is the Emeritus Rabbi of the Sinai Temple of Los Angeles, one of the largest synagogues in the United States. He's written extensively about ethics, beliefs, and the role of tradition in a rational, data-driven world. And he's also a longtime friend. So Rabbi Wolpe, welcome to World of DAS.
0:46 Speaker 01 I'm happy to be in the world.
0:48 Auren Hoffman? I'm happy to be here as well. Now, what is the role of religion in AI development?
0:56 Speaker 01 Well, I could go way back and say that actually, I really do believe that the whole idea that the world operates rationally is, in its origin, a religious idea. Because if a God made the world according to certain rules and standards, then it makes sense, both that the world has rules and standards, and even that human beings are designed to be able to discover that. So you could make that argument. This is, obviously, might take us for a feel. But the other part of it is that religion is well-placed to pinpoint those things that AI does well and
1:37 Speaker 01 does not do well. Because religion is not essentially an information-based enterprise, it's an encounter and experience-based enterprise, at least as I understand it. Other religious figures may feel differently.
1:54 Auren Hoffman? Because part of the religion is the community and how you feel and being there when someone goes through hardship, or goes through a death, or et cetera.
2:03 Speaker 01 And even the idea of God is obviously less informational than experiential. That is, ultimately, you can't prove or disprove God. People have been arguing it for thousands of years, but at least according to my tradition, you can encounter God, which is a very different sort of claim. So I think that AI might actually do some very good things for religion. First of all, a lot more information immediately and even difficult questions that people ask rabbis, you can get at your fingertips. But I don't think that it actually encroaches on the central message of religion,
2:47 Speaker 01 which is that human beings occupy a unique niche in the universe and are both part of nature and also out of nature. Now, when AI becomes AGI, if that ever happens, we may have a different challenge on our hands.
3:04 Auren Hoffman? Even in the short term, just like today, people have AI therapists. You could have an AI religious leader or an AI rabbi or an AI priest or an AI minister or something like that, where you could ask questions. You could have a talk to maybe not as good as the real thing, but maybe more accessible to people. Or maybe for some people, when you go to confession with the priest, maybe you want to be a little bit more anonymous. You want to have this conversation without them necessarily knowing who you are, et cetera.
3:34 Speaker 01 So that's an interesting question. If AI absolves you, does that have the same psychological and spiritual impact as if a priest absolves you? I don't know. Also, in my experience, and this again, it's the same question. A lot of what people come to a rabbi for are questions they already know the answer to, but they don't trust their own instincts without some kind of, yes, that makes sense, that is all right. So someone will come and say, my father is abusive to me, really abusive, and I want to cut off contact with him because... When I'm in his presence, he can be physically abusive.
4:19 Speaker 01 When I talk to him, he's emotionally abusive. And if he were different, I would be in contact with him. But right now, every time I speak to him, he's abusive. And I know the 10 commandments say you should honor your father and mother. Is that okay? And when the rabbi says, yes, actually, you don't have to be in contact with a truly abusive parent. It makes it feel easier for the child to be able to say, this is really ethically okay.
4:46 Auren Hoffman? Okay, got it. Interesting. These L M's and A I, they can already mimic creativity, empathy, sometimes even wisdom. How should we think differently about this idea of A I and personhood?
5:00 Speaker 01 If we believe that there's an internal experience to the other, it's very different than if we believe the other has this almost uncanny ability to muster words that are helpful. I think that people will want to believe that the other actually feels what they feel or understands what they feel. And absent that, I'm not sure it'll have the same impact on the seeker. Because you will ultimately be alone in your search, even though A I might be able to respond to you.
5:38 Auren Hoffman? Going back to that therapist thing, how do you feel when you may have people in your congregation using it as some sort of therapist, some sort of tool? How do you think about that?
5:49 Speaker 01 It worries me a little. First of all, just on a very practical level, as you and I both know very well, A Is are still subject to some wild hallucinations. In my experience, you can't always talk them out of it. No, this quote does not exist in the Bible. Can you give me the one that does? And they'll give you the same quote. So there isn't a good system of checks for that. That's one worrisome thing. But I've read recently, and you know more about this than I do certainly, that the stronger AI gets, the more it seems to hallucinate, which is really bizarre and interesting, but also dangerous. So the other piece of this is that I think for some things,
6:33 Speaker 01 AI can be a really helpful therapeutic presence because I don't know how to say this in a way that is tender, but a lot of what people ask, you'd be really surprised that they ask. And you recognize these are people who probably did not grow up with even decent parenting. Cause if they did, they would know that, for example, when your 14 year old daughter says, I hate you, that that's what 14 year old daughters often do, and it should not destroy your world. For things like that, I think AI could probably be very helpful because it's crowdsourced in the most gigantic way
7:14 Speaker 01 and say, this is a common experience of parents of teenage daughters, for example.
7:19 Auren Hoffman? My guess is so many human therapists are pretty subpar as well.
7:23 Speaker 01 That's another issue. I think that that's true, that a lot of therapists are, like a lot of almost every profession that requires a really high degree of understanding and empathy and insight, such people are harder to get. And also I think there's another reason why therapists aren't as good as they might be. I'm going to be honest about this is because a lot of people of real skill and insight and wisdom, who would have gone into the humanities in one way or another, are now going into fields like finance and software, fields that are more remunerative. So I'm actually worried that the next generation, they might be even less skilled.
8:07 Auren Hoffman? One thing, if you think of like a marital listening, let's say I come home from a hard days of work, my wife comes home from a hard day of work and I just want my spouse to listen to me, or she just wants me to listen to her. And it's actually really hard to listen, especially if you're listening for like 30 minutes. It's a tough thing to go do that, but you know, okay, as a spouse, I'm supposed to listen. That's what I'm supposed to do. So I'm gonna try to do my best. An AI husband would be so much better than being in so many ways.
8:37 Speaker 01 They wouldn't forget your complaints and it wouldn't do what I just did to you, which is interrupt.
8:41 Auren Hoffman? Well, a little interruptions may be good, yeah.
8:45 Speaker 01 But it's true. Well, remember, didn't you say about that person at work three weeks ago that they did this to you then? And you go, oh my God, yes. And your spouse might not remember that, but the AI would. Used as a smart tool, it could be great. The problem that human beings tend to have with tools is they expect too much of them, especially if the tools are omni competent as AI seems to be.
9:12 Auren Hoffman? When I was getting involved in AI 15 years ago, I'd say almost 100% of people I met in AI were like extreme atheists. Now, most of the people I know, they're extreme creationists. They believe they're in a simulation. So it was essentially, they believe there's a God that created the world. How do you think that happened?
9:34 Speaker 01 I have a very off the cuff theory. Don't take this to the bank, but here goes. Do you know the quote by the biologist JBS Haldane? He was not a believer. One of his famous quotes is someone asked him what he's learned about God by being a biologist and he said, "The Creator has an inordinate fondness for beetles." But he once said, "The world is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose." And I think the more you actually get down to the foundations of anything that is baffling, the more it induces a certain intellectual humility where you feel like there is intelligence beyond us.
10:15 Speaker 01 It may not be that I come to the God of the Bible. I don't necessarily think that that intelligence said to Abraham, go. But it's really hard to see these marvels and think it's totally blind chance. So I understand the simulation idea, the attraction of the imagination that there are worlds that we can't begin to really understand.
10:41 Auren Hoffman? Now, in the Jewish religion, you're supposed to keep kosher. You're not supposed to eat pork. Maybe this is already resolved by the rabbis that be or something, but what about lab grown bacon? Can you eat that?
10:55 Speaker 01 This is actually a really fascinating question. And yes, I would say it's been resolved, but it hasn't been resolved. That is, rabbis have opined on it, but I don't think there's any perfect consensus. There are a lot of different ways of approaching this legally, but I think in the end, there's going to be for most religious Jews, a sort of visceral, this doesn't feel right to me. So I'm not going to partake in the same way that I've been a vegetarian for decades. I think lab grown meat would be hard for me to eat just because I have been so conditioned not to eat meat, even though now there would be no ethical objection.
11:36 Speaker 01 So I think that that's probably where the majority of the religious world will come down. But it's so new and so different that I can't say for sure. I'll give you an analogy. According to the Jewish tradition, the mother classically decides whether the child is Jewish. And the reason is because you always know who the mother is. Not only that, but even if you implant a Jewish embryo in a non-Jewish woman, and the non-Jewish woman gives birth, according to Jewish law, the child has to be converted because the birth mother is not Jewish, because the surrogate is not Jewish. But that's according to Jewish law. It's whoever gives birth to the baby.
12:18 Speaker 01 If the egg is a donor who isn't Jewish and a Jewish surrogate gives birth, the baby's Jewish because the birth mother, which is the only kind of mother that traditional Judaism knew, is Jewish.
12:30 Auren Hoffman? Some Christians could have a Jewish baby without even knowing it.
12:34 Speaker 01 Absolutely. So now, as you all saw from Orange's reaction, this is completely counterintuitive in the modern world. But whether that law will change over time is a real question because when you have a law for thousands of years that makes sense, and then for 20 years, or 30 years, or 50 years, it doesn't make sense the same way. The conservative force of a religious tradition really fights against it.
13:03 Auren Hoffman? Now, what about relationship with an AI girlfriend or something? And it's a real relationship. Are you cheating on your spouse? Intuitively, I think you would be.
13:14 Speaker 01 Here's an easy test. Does your spouse know?
13:17 Auren Hoffman? Right. So if you didn't tell your spouse, if it was a secret, then probably is wrong.
13:21 Speaker 01 Then it's some kind of betrayal, even if not an explicit betrayal. But if your spouse has a robot on the side, and you have a robot on the side, I wonder what that would be.
13:33 Auren Hoffman? Polyamory with AIs or something.
13:35 Speaker 01 The circuitry gets very complicated. These questions are just the beginning. You know, my brother Paul, who's an ethicist, he always says that people think ethical questions are a choice between right and wrong, but they never are. The really hard ones are choices between two rights, and you have to decide which one takes precedence. And so here, for example, none of these questions will be easy because we're introducing a new component, and we don't know yet how it will play out. But I would say that having a relationship like that, even with a non-human entity, the possibilities for the disruption of the relationship with your partner
14:19 Speaker 01 are really immense. So it's a dangerous enterprise.
14:23 Auren Hoffman? Now, when you're talking about prolonging lifespan, and that's obviously very trendy thing right now, some that, you know, maybe you're prolonging for decades, maybe even in the future, hundreds of years. How does that make you think?
14:37 Speaker 01 It raises certain practical questions like, does that mean that we stop procreating? Because what's the world going to do with babies that keep coming and adults that don't die? And also, it's funny because you and I both know people who can't figure out how to spend a Saturday night, but they want to live forever. I don't know how they're going to do with that. But I would say if that ever happens, it's going to require a huge adjustment in a thousand cultural forms and adaptations and ways of living. And it's death that gives the values that we treasure in life. For example, if you say, I had a fight with my friend, but I'll make up with him in a hundred years.
15:19 Speaker 01 Or it's actually the knowledge that we have a certain limited time that gives urgency and priority to the way we live. So I don't know how that would be if we had a virtually unlimited time.
15:31 Auren Hoffman? What about things like uploading our consciousness? Is that a way of dodging spirituality?
15:38 Speaker 01 It depends what the essence of you is. If the essence of you is your, what you're calling your consciousness and I'll call your soul, if that's actually transferable to another creature, all I would say is that the idea of reincarnation was basically that. Reincarnation was my soul now goes into another creature. And that wasn't considered outside the realm of religion. Now, in Judaism, people may not know that reincarnation does exist in Judaism. It's not a mainstream belief, but it is certainly in especially mystical Judaism and the Kabbalah.
16:16 Speaker 01 So if that idea can exist inside religious traditions, maybe we get reincarnated into silicon.
16:25 Auren Hoffman? Interesting. There's this idea that we're created in the image of God. If we create something in our own image, like AI, what obligations do we have as creators?
16:39 Speaker 01 Is it a knockoff image? Is it a second order image of God? It comes down to internal experience, which is consciousness, which is the nub of so much of this discussion. And whether consciousness is real or primary, or the panpsychics thinks that think that consciousness is like a constituent, a basic constituent of the world. And maybe it is. But I think that the obligation that you owe to another creature has to do with the degree of that creature's ability to have internal experience and to in some way participate in the same kind of being that you do.
17:21 Speaker 01 That's why we have obligations to animals, which have some kind of internal, it may not be our internal experience, but still is real. And we don't feel the same kind of obligation, for example, to an ant or a stone, because we see that as a much lower order or no order at all. So it depends how we're going to evaluate these AI creatures. And as you know, people are all over the place on this right now. And we just don't know. And I don't even know how we could know. I mean, if you have any theories about that, I'd love to hear it. How will you know if an AI has consciousness when it responds, when it can pass the Turing test with no problem?
18:05 Speaker 01 And it responds to us just like a person?
18:07 Auren Hoffman? It's very interesting. When I take a Waymo, when I close the door, I always wave to it. I don't know why. It's just kind of intuitive and I feel there's some, and I write like please and thank you to the AIs.
18:22 Speaker 01 Forcing me to admit something embarrassing, which is most mornings I take the same walk around my neighborhood. And there's a Waymo that's always in the same place. And I unconsciously say good morning to it as though it's waiting for, because it's always got that spinning thing. It's the only car that's actually in motion. And I feel like it's, ah, there's David on his morning walk. And I know it's insane. It's insane, but that's how it feels. So that's the question is, at what point does a simulation become the thing? And is there always an unbridgeable gap between the two? And my instinct is there is. I don't think that AI could be conscious the way we are, but that's just my intuition.
19:06 Speaker 01 I have no idea if I'm correct.
19:08 Auren Hoffman? Now, it seems like regular church or regular synagogue attendance has been on the decline in the US for decades. What do you think the future is like?
19:19 Speaker 01 This is one of those things that I think it's really over-determined. There are a lot of reasons for it. Among them is that we live in a very anti-institutional age. And even people who feel religious don't necessarily like religious institutions. So the optimistic part of me, because I like religious institutions, things wax and wane and that might change. But the other part of me says it might be that we are in the process at this point in human history of discovering and expressing a different way of worship and of relation. My concern with that is that religion gives guidelines for behavior, not just for feeling. And that actually really does matter.
20:05 Speaker 01 I worry that the decline of one is also part of the decline of the other, that there was more civility in the world when people felt religiously obligated and more sense of communal duty towards one another when people felt religiously obligated. In any synagogue or mosque or church in this country, you will find people who regularly feed each other, take care of each other and so on, because that's what they're supposed to do.
20:33 Auren Hoffman? People do have a longing for community. Every human, or almost every human, has that longing. And for many humans, it's not being met right now. Maybe the churches and synagogues and mosques weren't meeting it. So maybe they weren't good enough, they weren't inclusive enough, or it was just long and boring or something. They went out of obligation rather than getting more out of it.
20:57 Speaker 01 I think they were good at the community part, but they were not as good at doing things that would make people want to join in the community. Here's a problem that exists. I'm sure this exists in companies, but here it exists in synagogues. You have a certain kind of service or program. All the people who support your synagogue and are older like that program. All the people who don't give you a penny and are younger, but are your future, don't like that program. So you have a choice. You can change the way you do the service. Maybe you'll attract some younger people, but you'll drive away the people who support the synagogue and keep it going.
21:39 Speaker 01 We have single services for younger people and then older services, but it's very resource intensive and it's just hard to do. And also sometimes even the architecture of the building that you're in, you know, there are a lot of variables, but the last real difficulty is traditional forms of religion, orthodoxy and Judaism, fundamentalism and other traditions, which are not exactly identical. But the further you go towards literalism in every religion, the better the religions are doing. And I think that a lot of that is because if you have a literal belief that this is what God wants you to do, so you do it. But anything less than God wants you to do it, then you have to sell it.
22:24 Speaker 01 It's good for you. It's good for the community. It's part of history. It's on and on and on. And all those reasons are intrinsically less powerful than the creator of the universe told you to do it.
22:38 Auren Hoffman? Is this why you think there are so many Protestant men that are converting to Catholicism? It's just more prescriptive and easier to follow?
22:46 Speaker 01 I think a belief that it is ultimately rooted in transcendence and not in helping you lead a better life is actually more powerful. We think what's important is the pursuit of happiness, but actually if you want to get people to do something, believing that God wants you to do it is, I think, the best motivator, if you really believe it. Let me give you an example that a friend of mine, Rabbi Joseph Delushkin, once gave me, which I think is a beautiful example. He said, I know people severely overweight and they have clogged arteries and their doctor tells them, do not eat this or that because it really could kill you and they still eat it. But if you had said to those same people, it actually isn't kosher, they would never touch it.
23:32 Speaker 01 And that's amazing. It's like certain motivations override everything.
23:37 Auren Hoffman? Certain things you may have been doing all your life, so maybe easier also. If all of a sudden you told someone you can't eat lobster, they might be a little bit miffed or something.
23:47 Speaker 01 That's probably true. As somebody who's never had a lobster in his life, it wouldn't be hard for me.
23:51 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, exactly. When you think of, there are a lot of people bemoaning the fact that fertility rate is down in most countries, in pretty much every country in the world. I'm not even sure if it is correlated to religiosity or not. Even in the most religious countries, often the birth rate is down.
24:13 Speaker 01 You go on YouTube and you end up watching stuff that you didn't know you had any interest in. There was a thing about the fertility rate in Japan, and they said, when all these developed countries, Japan happens to be the model for what happens because it's been happening for 30 years. But all these developed countries, the one country that's a developed country where that isn't true is Israel. In Israel, it's not only that the birth rate of the ultra-orthodox is high, we would expect that. But even of the secular, the Tel Aviv Israeli, who's as secular as any European, the birth rate is higher. And there, I think it's because there's a sense of collective meaning and future that's important. If you think you're having a child for yourself, one is okay, two is fine.
24:56 Speaker 01 But if you think you're having a child for the collective future, then you're more likely to have a bigger family.
25:02 Auren Hoffman? If you think of the upwardly mobile person in Israel, they live in Tel Aviv. And so wherever they are, they live somewhere near their family, within a couple hours' drive of their family. The upwardly mobile person in Europe or in the US could be thousands of miles away from their family, and it just may be more difficult to do that.
25:25 Speaker 01 That is true, because if you have family around or community around that raises kids communally, it's obviously takes a huge burden off the parents.
25:35 Auren Hoffman? One of the things about Japan I think a lot of people know about is 30 years ago, they were the lowest birth rate in the world. Right now, they're approaching the middle. So they're actually been flat on birth rate for last 20 something years. So they're about 1.3 TFR. South Korea is now 0.7 TFR. So they're almost twice as good. Well, good is relative, but if you believe having kids is good. They're almost twice as good as South Korea. They're better than Italy, Spain. So their birth rate is actually like above many, many European countries now.
26:10 Speaker 01 But it's not replacement rate and they live a long time, which faces a huge economic burden on the generation above you.
26:17 Auren Hoffman? One of the things you're best known for is having these public debates with prominent atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. What's your goal of engaging with them?
26:27 Speaker 01 I haven't done it in a while. My goal, especially when the new atheist movement was at its height, my goal was, this sounds ridiculous, I wanted to show people who assumed that you had to be stupid or foolish and have no good arguments to be a believer, that in fact, you could marshal some very sound arguments and that faith throughout its history has engaged in these kinds of questions and has something to say to these questions. I was not doing it with the intention of persuading people to believe. I was doing it with the intention of giving them more respect for the intellectual respectability of belief. Most of the people who came to the debates were people who were atheists and wanted
27:11 Speaker 01 to see the believer get trounced. So if you look, for example, most of the comments on the debate will be exactly that. But I've had many letters over the years and emails from people who will say something like, "I'm not a believer, but I thought that you made good points and I appreciated the fact that you did it." And so I think in the end, it was more productive than not. And with Christopher and with Sam, I mean, I became friends with them and really I gained a lot out of it. And I certainly think it was an interesting experience for me. So I'm glad I did it and I think it was a good thing to do. I hope it was good for the people who watched.
27:51 Auren Hoffman? It's interesting because when that new atheist movement, which was 2003 to 2006, it was a very brief time when it was super popular. And then it just faded. No one really talks about it anymore. You never see a bestselling book talking about that today. And even people who are, they may not believe, they're almost say they're agnostic. They don't say they're atheists anymore.
28:15 Speaker 01 So much of it was a reaction to nine 11 and to the idea that extreme fundamentalism was a danger to Western society. And Hitchens too, felt like he was defending the West. And so I think that was a big part of it. And I don't, why faded so fast though? I don't know. I'm not sure.
28:39 Auren Hoffman? Really, it was very much of a fad. Now, would you ever, in your own kind of course, pray that technology will fail?
28:48 Speaker 01 I admit, there's a big piece of me that hopes that AGI is never achieved, that non-human things never actually get consciousness. For all the reasons that run from the Elias or Yudkowsky, they're going to destroy us to the religion. This really is a tremendous challenge to a religious worldview. So in that sense, yes. But I also do know that if we can work out the ability to retain our humanness and increase technology, you look at every indices of human longevity and so on and so on. It all starts with a hockey stick with the beginning of the industrial revolution.
29:30 Speaker 01 I've had both a brain tumor and lymphoma, and my life was saved both times by advanced medical technology. So I'm not going to be the Luddite who says, I wish technology would fail when I know that I wouldn't be here if it did.
29:43 Auren Hoffman? Now, very soon, and really already, I can train a model on your sermons, your books, your teachings. It could answer questions in video that looks like you, your voice. We're basically there already. I mean, someone could have a meeting with you and almost very soon, like, I could just do this podcast with AI and get the same thing. Maybe not like quite as good, but it's getting there. The same anecdotes you probably have given some time and some of the same kind of jokes. How do you think about that? How do you process that as a religious leader?
30:16 Speaker 01 Is this time for me to tell you that actually it's not me who's answering these questions?
30:22 Auren Hoffman? That would be so awesome if you're like, take off the mask, like, oh yeah, this is actually an AI the whole time.
30:27 Speaker 01 That would be hilarious. But I have a lot of faith in the human ability to recreate our mission. I think we'll find new things to do that mean something to us. I really hope that that's so, even though I do see dangers, obviously, in AI, like everybody does, because the incentives for safety are not nearly as strong as the incentives for development, and that worries me. But I think maybe it'll be like, yes, it's possible. I have in my pocket a machine that could beat Magnus Carlsen at chess, but I still would rather watch Magnus Carlsen. I flew all the way to Dubai to see him in the World Chess
31:08 Speaker 01 Championship years ago against Nepo. It was very cool, because I thought he is arguably the greatest player ever, maybe the greatest player ever, he or Kasparov or Fischer, I think. And here it was, I have a chance to actually watch him. I want to see him before that's not possible. So I went there and it was great to do, even though I knew that, as I said, I had something in my pocket that could probably beat him and now could certainly beat him.
31:33 Auren Hoffman? I can drive faster than the fastest marathon runner. And, you know, it's like, you know, anyone can.
31:40 Speaker 01 Exactly. I hope that human endeavor will still have its special magic for humans.
31:45 Auren Hoffman? Now, you're also opine a lot and think a lot about antisemitism on campus, Harvard, Columbia, all this stuff. What are your thoughts about it?
31:55 Speaker 01 I have a lot of thoughts about it, but I will restrict myself to this. First of all, antisemitism is an ancient and protean hatred. By protean, I just mean people can hate Jews for anything. They can hate them for being capitalists, or communists, or weak and stateless, or strong and stateful. It doesn't matter. I hope that people will realize, though, that it is always a prelude to other kinds of destruction. It starts with the Jews. It never ends with the Jews. Never, never, never, never. It didn't in the Spanish Inquisition. It didn't with Nazi Germany. It's always bad for a society. And we see it now on the right, on the left, and jihadism. There are sort of three strands of antisemitism.
32:38 Speaker 01 And I think it cannot be cured by Jews. There are many, many, many more non-Jews than Jews. We're 2% of the American population and 0.2% of the world. If non-Jews don't stand up against antisemitism, we're in terrible trouble. So I hope that we will get more of a recognition among the non-Jewish community that this is a real threat.
33:01 Auren Hoffman? Okay, a couple of closing questions. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?
33:06 Speaker 01 Boy, I'm really not very conspiratorial minded, but I would say, I think a lot of people who have common interests in undermining the values of the West conspire with one another despite the fact that they have disagreements in their basic values, which is how you get queers for Hamas. That's a conspiracy that wants to undermine the West, and it's a dangerous one.
33:33 Auren Hoffman? Okay, that's a good one. Last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?
33:42 Speaker 01 I am not the only person to say this, but I think that it's important telling young people to just follow their dream. I think you should tell them to follow their gifts. And if they follow their gifts, that is what they're good at, they will discover, in fact, that that opens the door to their dreams, that their dream is very abstract, but their gifts are very concrete. And you might think what you want is to be X or Y or Z, but you discover in the process of actually working out your gifts, that it gives you tremendous joy and satisfaction.
34:15 Auren Hoffman? You think people have a good sense of what their gifts are?
34:19 Speaker 01 Some do and some don't. I think it varies. Like, I knew, I was very lopsided as a student. I was always words. I was books and letters and speeches and words. And I always loved that more than anything else, even more than music, more than anything. Other students have to try a variety of things to discover what they're good at. And by the way, sometimes they're lucky enough to have mentors or friends who will say to them, you're good at this. Like, when I was in high school, there was a kid who kept beating me at chess. That was how I became a chess player. But then, when I met really good chess players, I said to myself, you are not gifted at this game. You will be a fine tournament chess player. And I was a fine tournament chess player, but not even close. But that was
35:04 Speaker 01 a good experience.
35:06 Auren Hoffman? It's very hard to know, should you lean into your strengths, or should you work on your weaknesses?
35:12 Speaker 01 I'm of the lean into your strengths. I would rather see somebody who is outstanding at X than okay at X and mediocre at Y. Now, obviously, like any general rule, there are always exceptions. But as a rule, leaning into your strengths is a really good thing. And the one other thing that I would say is that the most important quality to lead a good life is courage. Without courage, you're a slave. And it's also a muscle. It's a muscle you can work on. Do things you're afraid of.
35:45 Auren Hoffman? And how does one develop courage? You could be courageous in one area and not courageous in another. Certain social situations, you might be okay being disliked. In other ones, you might really need to follow the herd.
35:58 Speaker 01 It's true, but the great thing about it is when you do something courageous and you realize you survive, it helps you the next time. Nobody's courageous in everything, but when you do some things that take some courage, it really does help for you to know that the next time you'll be okay. As I once told my daughter, when there was a big blow up at the sin, it doesn't matter what it was. And I said to her, but you see, I'm okay. And I told her that Churchill said after the Boer War, it's exhilarating to be shot at without result.
36:28 Auren Hoffman? There are many things that people think they need courage for because they're afraid of, but often the consequences in any scenario are quite low. So you actually really don't need that much courage if you're rational about it. You can give a speech that bombs, tell a joke that bombs, or you ask a girl out and she says no or something. You think you need a lot of courage, but you actually don't. But then there are other cases where you really do need courage because there could be speaking out or something in an institution or some other type of thing where you could lose your job, you could be ostracized from your community.
37:02 Speaker 01 Or you hurt people that care about you, which is also true.
37:06 Auren Hoffman? Which is often courage, telling people the truth about things. Well, this has been amazing. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you, David Wollby, for joining us, World of DAS. Well, I follow you at RabbiWollby on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to get with you there. This has been a ton of fun.
37:23 Speaker 01 Thank you so much.
37:27 Auren Hoffman? Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review and check out worldofdas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren. That's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.
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