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This unusual Israeli podcast covers everything from sentient AI to extending the human lifespan
If an alien spacecraft landed in Dr. Avi Loeb’s backyard tomorrow, he would readily step on, leave his family behind and take off to discover the great beyond.
Obviously, he’d be giving up a lot, but it’s for an essential cause, he says: Humans need to explore the possibilities for human life beyond earth.
“We know the sun will burn up the surface of the earth within a billion years,” he says. “We won’t be able to stay here.”
Loeb, an Israeli-American astrophysicist at Harvard University, shared these thoughts recently in a podcast conversation with Dr. Tal Patalon, head of Kahn Sagol Maccabi (KSM), the Research and Innovation Center of Israel’s Maccabi Healthcare Services. Loeb was Patalon’s guest on an episode of KSM’s popular English-language podcast, “A Matter of Life and Death.”
Now in its third season (and first in English), the podcast features physician-researcher Patalon in wide-ranging conversations about life, the future and the human experience with leaders and innovative thinkers from a broad variety disciplines and fields of knowledge — from the former head of the Mossad to musicians and professors. Patalon elicits insights and showcases her multidisciplinary approach to her work at KSM, and she also has a way of getting at the core of her guests’ personalities and belief systems.
“These are open conversations, not interviews,” Patalon said. “It’s all about relationships and learning from these people. These are really special individuals who help broaden your perspective and serve as inspiration for innovation.”
KSM itself conducts various types of health research, helping researchers and entrepreneurs with its massive clinical and medical data as well as deep understanding of technology and artificial intelligence. KSM also operates the largest biobank in Israel, with over 900,000 biological samples, enabling partnerships with companies in genetic research and support for a range of Big Data projects.
Patalon’s podcast embodies the out-of-the-box thinking that guides KSM’s approach to research and innovation. Her recent conversation with Loeb covered the AI revolution, extending human longevity, and Loeb’s work at The Galileo Project for the Systematic Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts.
Loeb leads the Galileo Project’s search for physical objects associated with extraterrestrial technological equipment. He and his team use sophisticated instruments to image and collect data on objects in the sky that the government and astronomers have deemed outliers. The goal is to determine whether they are natural phenomena or technological in origin and from other planets.
“I am looking for relics of [extraterrestrial] civilizations that have perhaps predated us and sent out gadgets and probes to explore space,” Loeb said. “They would have had enough to have filled up the solar system with a million probes. Tech gadgets can survive the harsh environments of space.”
Loeb and his team identified an interstellar meteorite that collided with Earth off Papua New Guinea in 2014. Based on the speed of the object, Loeb determined that it came from outside the solar system, and the Department of Defense supported his assertion.
“It exploded. We are planning an expedition to scoop the ocean floor to collect the fragments,” Loeb said. “We know it was tougher than iron, so we will examine the fragments to see if the object was natural or an artificial alloy that could be a fragment of a spacecraft.”
Avi Loeb, an Israeli-American astrophysicist at Harvard University, talks about artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial life and technology as the featured guest on a recent podcast episode of “A Matter of Life and Death.” (Courtesy of KSM)
Loeb told Patalon how his work has made him think that humans are not necessarily that smartest and most accomplished species in the universe, and that modesty is in order.
“We are no smarter than the mean of the universe, no matter what we have accomplished. We have nothing to brag about,” he said.
Patalon agreed: “We are arrogant. Our world is tiny and fragile and we are destroying it. We should cherish what we have.”
However, Patalon disagreed with Loeb when it comes to how far the AI revolution should go. Loeb believes we are close to the point where AI will take over many roles in human life.
“There will be sentient AI systems. They will converse among themselves and create their own communities. A new consciousness will emerge. Death will be like unplugging a computer from a wall, so in the future it will be illegal to do so,” he said.
From Patalon’s perspective as an active clinician specializing in family and emergency medicine, she is certain that AI will become integrated into the human body within five to 10 years. She expects to see augmented humans with constant glucose monitors and vitals-monitoring chips implanted under the skin.
“And 3-D printing of organs is developing fast,” she observed.
But unlike Loeb, Patalon believes that extending human longevity to an extreme degree is not the goal of AI. Rather, there is a consciousness above material reality, and a spirituality and soul beyond technology. She worries about the separation, depression and addiction associated with technology and wants to see more efforts put into helping people learn how to handle technological evolution. We can’t let AI run away with things and negate human consciousness and positive relationships, she said.
“A high-quality life means learning how to love unconditionally. That is the human future,” Patalon said. “Otherwise we are like animals.”
At the end of each episode of “A Matter of Life and Death,” Patalon asks her guest whether they think about death and what they would like their epitaph to be. Loeb thinks that people waste time and resources memorializing themselves by building monuments on Earth. Not particularly attached to his body, he said, he’d be be eager to download his consciousness to an avatar astronaut.
“I hope we will figure out how to live forever, but if I have to die, I would be happy for it to happen somewhere other than Earth,” he said. “On Mars there is no bureaucracy to suppress innovation.”
To listen to this and other podcast episodes, click here.
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The post This unusual Israeli podcast covers everything from sentient AI to extending the human lifespan appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’
(JTA) — In the fall, a video of Nick Fuentes criticizing Donald Trump drew the praise of progressive ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
“Finally getting it Nick,” Bowman commented, apparently recognizing some common ground between himself on the left and Fuentes, on the far right, who said in the video that Trump was “better than the Democrats for Israel, for the oil and gas industry, for Silicon Valley, for Wall Street,” but said he wasn’t “better for us.”
Now, Fuentes says there is actually no common ground between him and those on the left.
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler — my problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler,” Fuentes said during his streaming show on Tuesday, which focused mostly on the potential for an American attack on Iran.
He continued, “You have all these left-wing people saying, ‘Why do I agree with Nick Fuentes?’ It’s like, I’m criticizing Trump because there’s not enough deportations, there’s not enough ICE brutality, there’s not enough National Guard. Sort of a big difference!”
Fuentes, the streamer and avowed antisemite who has previously said Hitler was “very f–king cool,” has been gaining more traction as a voice on the right. His interview with Tucker Carlson in October plunged Republicans into an ongoing debate over antisemitism within their ranks, inflaming the divide between a pro-Israel wing of the party and an emerging, isolationist “America First” wing that’s against U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Once a pro-Trump MAGA Republican, Fuentes has become the leader of the “groyper” movement advocating for farther-right positions. The set of Fuentes’ show includes both a hat and a mug with the words “America First” on his desk.
In a New York Times interview, Trump recently weighed in on rising tensions within the Republican Party, saying Republican leaders should “absolutely” condemn figures who promote antisemitism, and that he does not approve of antisemites in the party.
“No, I don’t. I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” replied Trump when asked by a reporter whether there was room within the Republican coalition for antisemitic figures.
Asked if he would condemn Fuentes, Trump initially claimed that he didn’t know the antisemitic streamer, before acknowledging that he had had dinner with him alongside Kanye West in 2022.
“I had dinner with him, one time, where he came as a guest of Kanye West. I didn’t know who he was bringing,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And it was Nick Fuentes? I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Trump flaunted his pro-Israel bona fides in the interview, mentioning the recent announcement that he was nominated for Israel’s top civilian honor and calling himself the “best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, spent the bulk of his show on Tuesday speculating that Trump will order the U.S. to attack Iran, and concluded that “Israel is holding our hand walking us down the road toward an inevitable war.”
The post Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’
(JTA) — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.
In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss’ contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man.
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform
The post Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs
(JTA) — For the second year in a row, Jewish star third baseman Alex Bregman has signed a lucrative free-agent contract with a team that is run by a Jewish executive and plays in a historic ballpark in a city with a significant Jewish community.
Last year, it was the Boston Red Sox. Now, Bregman is headed to the Chicago Cubs — a team whose Jewish fans possess almost religious devotion.
Bregman, who had opted out of a three-year, $120 million deal with Boston, has signed a five-year, $175 million pact with the Cubs. It is the second-largest contract ever signed by a Jewish ballplayer, behind Max Fried’s $218 million contract in 2024. Bregman previously signed a five-year, $100 million extension with the Houston Astros in 2019.
Bregman, who played the first nine years of his career in Houston, has been one of baseball’s premier third basemen over the past decade, with three All-Star selections, a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger and two World Series rings. He’s also heralded for his leadership on and off the field.
Bregman grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he played baseball in high school and also, according to his mother, was once teased while leaving school for a bar mitzvah lesson. His grandfather, the onetime attorney for the Washington Senators whom she said Bregman called “zeyde,” gave him a collection of baseball cards featuring Jewish players.
His great-grandfather fled antisemitism in Belarus and fell in love with sports in the United States, The Athletic reported in 2017, as Bregman hurtled toward his World Series win.
“It’s the fulfillment of four generations of short Jewish Bregmans who dreamed of playing in the major leagues,” his father Sam, now the district attorney in Albuquerque’s county as well as a Democratic candidate for New Mexico governor, said at the time. “The big leagues and the World Series. One hundred twenty years in America fulfilled by Alex in this World Series.”
Bregman has also been vocal about his Jewish pride. He celebrated Hanukkah with a local synagogue in Houston, and following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that launched the Gaza War, Bregman drew a Star of David on his hat during a playoff game and participated in a video of Jewish players calling on fans to support Israel.
Some Jewish fans hoped Bregman’s shows of solidarity with Israel would lead him to suit up for another new squad this spring, Team Israel at the upcoming World Baseball Classic. But Bregman announced this week that he will play for Team USA again. Another Jewish ballplayer, Rowdy Tellez, will rejoin team Mexico, taking two big names off the recruitment board for Israel.
Back in 2018, as Bregman was first emerging as a major star, he said he regretted taking a pass on Team Israel the previous year, when it made it to the second round of play. Suiting up for the U.S. team, Bregman had just four at-bats as a backup player.
Now, he has selected a jersey number for his Cubs era that reflects his aspirations.
“I wore No. 3 because I want a third championship,” Bregman said during his first press conference with his new club on Thursday.
The post Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs appeared first on The Forward.