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The Pope has weighed in on artificial intelligence. Where are the Jews? With DZ Kalman, we explore why the Vatican's attempt to establish moral guardrails for AI is such a consequential moment, what Jewish history teaches us about the concentration of power, and why the unlikely story of Heinz ketchup might offer a surprisingly useful model for turning values into enforceable standards.Full transcript and show notes available at thelandofand.live

AI can tutor, entertain, and answer almost any question. But if it removes the struggle, what does a child lose the chance to learn? Jenna Arnold speaks with Brooklyn Children’s Museum president and CEO Atiba Edwards, child-development psychologist Tovah Klein, and Jewish scholar David Zvi Kalman about play, resilience, and the responsibilities adults cannot outsource. Edwards asks whether time saved by technology actually becomes time to play—or simply more time to work. Klein challenges the parental impulse to fix everything: children need adults who know them and can help them through disappointment, rather than making disappointment disappear. Kalman asks who should carry the burden of proof before AI enters children’s learning, and what happens when an instant answer replaces the work of deciphering a question together. Through chinuch, the Jewish language of education and formation, the episode asks what we are preparing children for: a world that responds to every demand, or a life that requires patience, judgment, and relationships with other people? What should adults protect when convenience begins to crowd out the experiences that help a child become a person?Full transcript and show notes available at thelandofand.live

What happens when technology promises to keep a conversation going after death? Jenna Arnold speaks with grief educator CJ Infantino, death doula and Buddhist chaplain Alex Sarkissian, and Jewish scholar David Zvi Kalman about grief bots, digital memory, and what it means to be witnessed. Drawing on the death of his wife and his experience raising three children, Infantino challenges the idea that grief is a problem someone else can fix. Sarkissian brings us to the bedside: a good death depends on the individual, and compassionate support begins with their needs, choices, and fears. He asks what happens when an AI companion built for engagement turns comfort into dependence—and whether it knows when to stop. Kalman brings Jewish mourning practices into the conversation: shiva, comforting mourners, and kavod ha-met, the dignity owed to the dead. A simulation might feel comforting, unsettling, or both. Whose needs does it serve, whose consent does it assume, and does it help us face the reality of loss? This episode asks what we owe the living who carry an absence—and the people whose memories we are turning into something that speaks back.Full transcript and show notes available at thelandofand.live

In an age of synthetic creation, what makes art more than an image? Jenna Arnold speaks with artist, journalist, and NYTimes Best Selling author, Molly Crabapple, artist and producer Stephanie Lepp, and Temple of the Moon lead artist James Gwertzman about memory, disagreement, and the communities we build by making things together. Crabapple traces her family’s artistic inheritance into the history of the Jewish Bund and recovers a secular, socialist, defiantly anti-Zionist movement that fought for Jewish dignity and belonging where its members already lived, arguing that a home lives within us. Lepp explores how Faces of X and the Anti-Debate can make difficult perspectives visible without collapsing them into a meaningless middle. Gwertzman describes a Burning Man temple built by volunteers to hold grief, memory, and release—and why the process can matter more than the finished object. Through the lens of lishmah, the Jewish idea of doing something for its own sake, the conversation asks what gets lost when creative work becomes only an output to optimize. AI can generate endless images. What responsibility do we retain for the human lives, constraints, and histories that give them meaning?Full transcripts and show notes available at: thelandofand.live

Long before dating apps, humans built systems for helping people find one another: families, communities, matchmakers, rituals, intuition, and a good amount of unsolicited advice. Jenna Arnold speaks with Greta Tufvesson and Nikki Lewis of The Bevy, Molly Tolsky of Hey Alma, Phillipa James of Fate, and Rabbi Yonah Schiller of Common Era about what happens when one of humanity’s oldest social technologies meets one of its newest. Jewish culture carries the idea of bashert—באַשערט, destined or “meant to be”—alongside traditions that insist love still requires discernment, responsibility, community, and work. As AI promises better matching and fewer wrong turns, this episode asks whether technology can help us find connection without teaching us to optimize the mystery out of it. If algorithms become better at choosing for us, what responsibility do we retain for cultivating intuition, tolerating uncertainty, and becoming people capable of recognizing another human being rather than merely evaluating them?Full episode transcripts and more information available at thelandofand.live