John Kegg (2:51)

So I'm a philosopher by training. I teach at UMass Lowell and have for about 15 years. When I got tenured, I decided that I don't want to necessarily write just for academic audiences, but start writing trade books. And so about 10 years, I began in. 10 years ago, I began to write Philomemoir, which is this crossover between memoir and creative Nonfiction. I'm a 19th century philosopher by training, which means I'm interested in Friedrich Nietzsche, William James Raff, Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, philosophers who really think about the relationship between the love of wisdom and how to live a good life. And so I started by writing American philosophy, a love story, and then hiking with Nietzsche, both of which are very personal and sort of try to show how the reading of philosophy can change a life, and in this case, my life.

Caleb Zakrin (3:52)

I think. I think that makes you, in many ways, the perfect person to try and launch one of these tools. I feel like there has been a lot of different attempts recently to create something like what Rebind is trying to do, which is basically how do we use the tools that AI gives us to actually read more deeply. And I think that there's. There's just an infinite amount of articles coming out about how AI is essentially ruining writing, ruining reading, making it so that students, you know, don't actually engage with texts. And I think that Rebind really is an attempt to, you know, attempt to kind of flip that on its head, flip that narrative on its head, and show how AI tools, when implemented properly, can be used to give people a deeper engagement. So could you tell the story of how Rebind Mind actually started? How you transitioned from being a tenured philosopher to, you know, is creating a startup?

John Kegg (4:48)

Yeah, I can. So three years ago, John Dubuque, who's a entrepreneur out of Santa Barbara, reached out to me, and he had just sold his family's company, and he wanted to make a transition into thinking about great literature, great books, but also artificial intelligence. And he said, wouldn't it be something and something really useful if we could scale one on one tutorials with experts like you about their favorite books? And he said, would you be willing to do an experiment with me. And I said, well, it depends. And he said, I would like to give you, or I'd like to ask you to give me 40 hours of audio commentary about Walden. And it needs to be your commentary, kind of the sort of commentary you would give to students as you take them through the book step by step. And then what we're going to do is we're going to use AI only to distribute that original commentary. So Rebind is based on AI distributed original human commentary. It's not training LLMs, it's using AI to distribute a wealth of commentary about a large number of books. And what we found is that when users come in and start asking questions about Walden and Mike in this case, or John Banville's commentary on James Joyce's Dubliners, when they ask questions, what is coming back to them is not some sort of generic LLM response that you might get from ChatGPT, but you're getting attributable verbatim commentary back from an author that that's given his, her or them their genuine responses to the text. And so that's really what Rebind is about.

Caleb Zakrin (6:50)

Right. So it's basically using the AI as like a search function where you can interact with it. And then instead of, you know, being some sort of just like a simple search section, it's kind of going and finding a transcript of that section or something that's been tagged to that particular part of the book that you might be curious about. Right. And then it's prompting it that way.

John Kegg (7:11)

That's right. And some reading platforms already have this in the sense that Logos, for example, which is a Bible software platform, has this function where if you ask a question, it sources your library and brings those sources indirectly to answer your question. Rebind goes one step further where the conversations that you have in the Rebind Study Bible or in the classics offering are actually tri voice commentaries. What I mean by that is you have your voice as the questioner or the reader. You have the commentators voice like Salman Rushdie or Margaret Atwood. Then you have this third voice which is the Rebind AI assistant, which is straight AI is, is a generic AI AI assistant, but the AI assistant has been instructed only to stitch your questions to the commentator's responses. So it's a sort of three way, it's kind of a conversation between a generic AI, the commentate the, the commentary and then your questions. Does that make sense?

Caleb Zakrin (8:20)

Right, yeah, so, so it's a way of still making it, you know, Kind of seamless, but without it halluc, you know, having the problems of hallucinations that you might have where, you know, it's, you ask it a question and it's, you have no idea where it's sourcing it from. Probably Reddit or something. And you don't know who this anonymous person that said it was, whether or not it's accurate or not. This is like actually, you know, from, from the scholar's mouth, so to speak. And a lot of the, the books that you've done so far, you know, they're classic books. And then you, you've engaged with, with mostly writers, but, you know, pretty esteemed writers on their interpretations with it. What has been that process like, of getting, you know, obviously you did it, but getting these other writers and scholars to engage with texts. How did you, for example, like went over Margaret Atwood or Salman Rushdie and convince them that this is something that they should, you know, try their hand at?

John Kegg (9:19)

Yeah. So there are two questions there. How, how does it work? Or how do you get all of this commentary? There are two, there are three basic ways, but the primary way, through a series of well structured interviews, either with myself or my colleague Clancy Martin, who's a philosopher at UMKC. And we would interview these commentators for between 10 and 30 hours about the books and ask them all the questions that get them to sort of work through things exegetically in a careful way. And they do a great deal of preparation beforehand. And then these would be recorded kind of the way that we are now, and then transcribed, edited, and then passed back to the commentator to approve. Then the second question is the other two ways are some commentators, like Philip Kitcher, who's doing Ulysses for us, is writing out his responses. It's 300,000 words of, you know, textual response. And then the third way is just to do a sort of monologue, which Sadie Stein from the New York Times did for her for the most part. So how did we get, how did we get these esteemed writers to come on board? It was really a matter of showing them that we were not training. An LLM like OpenAI is getting into so much trouble for, and to show them the platform and to show them the very narrow use case that it is being used for. So most, most commentators are comfortable having their words distributed verbatim or almost verbatim in these chats. So there we've got not gotten a huge amount of criticism with the exception of those individuals who haven't allowed us to show them the platform. But once Once you see the platform, you say, you think to yourself, oh, this is basically a new way to distribute authentic commentary. And AI can do it instantaneously, obviously. How else did we get them to agree to it? We paid them to do it. Which is one of the reasons why we've turned to the more scalable Rebind Study Bible. So one of the sort of limitations that we had with Commentary is that we only had 11 people on the Rebind team and only two people doing interviews. And we thought to ourselves that it's going to take a long time for us to get as much commentary as we need. And so what we've done with the Rebind Study Bible is we've begun to get commentaries that can be used in exactly the same way. We take a 15,000 page commentary and we use it to source hundreds of thousands of different types of conversations.

Caleb Zakrin (12:22)

Right? And it makes a lot of sense. I mean, I, I haven't fact checked this, but I'm certain that the Bible probably has the, at least in the English language, the most commentary of any single book. And there's obviously, you know, millions of people that daily are reading the Bible and you know, this is offering what the Rebound Study Bible offers a kind of an, an interesting look, interesting way to interact with the Bible, not just, you know, sort of passively, though some people might disagree that their reading is passive, but this is a quite an active form, interactive form of getting to engage with the Bible. So how did the, how does the Rebind Study Bible work? What is it like for a person that is, is using it on a, you know, a daily or weekly basis.

John Kegg (13:12)

So you can search for it on the iOS it's an iOS app, whereas the other classics were on a desktop application. So you can go into iOS and look up Rebind Study Bible and check it out for free for a week. But the way that it works is you can read the American Standard version of the Bible. You can listen to an interleave podcast at the beginning of every single chapter of the Bible. That's 1189 chapters. And at the beginning of each chapter, when I say an interleaved podcast, you can listen to the verses, some verses from the Bible and then immediately the conversation from the rebind AI assistant comes in and interweaves the commentary that applies to those verses and then returns you back to the next set of verses that you're going to listen to. So it's this back and forth between, we call these recasts or podcast recasts, which is basically you can listen to the Bible or part of the Bible in audio form, then you listen to Commentary, and then you're back to listening to the Bible and that. And so you can work your way all the way through in podcast form. That's one way that you can experience the study Bible. It's sort of a audio first, more passive experience. But then at any point, you can ask questions from the text and be prompted to give reflections from the text. When you ask questions, the answers are gleaned from the 42 scholars who wrote the new International Commentary, which is sort of the gold standard or a gold standard in biblical commentary. It's 15,000 pages. It was assembled over the last 75, 60 years or so, and it's put out by Eerdmans, which is the. One of the largest Christian public publishers. And the answers that you get in conversation are then sourced and attributed directly from the Commentary.

Caleb Zakrin (15:19)

Right. And this app, you know, I've seen other Bible apps, and sometimes they'll, they'll be tied to a particular denomination and, you know, maybe even be pushing for a particular interpretation. That way there's, there's. It's not tied to a particular denomination. Right. And it's also not necessarily like, you don't need to be a Christian or be religious at all. You can be an atheist who's just interested in the Bible because it's extremely relevant when, you know, for any sort of reference. Like, I, I mean, when people. You can be an atheist and, and learn so much from, from reading the Bible because it's just the references are everywhere and in and constant. You know, secular philosophers are constantly responding to arguments made about the Bible. So it's not tied to a particular sect, right?

John Kegg (16:05)

No, it's not. It's a, It's a Protestant. We're using a Protestant commentary. The NIC is a Protestant sort of mainstream Protestant commentary. And it has three sort of pillars which are it needs to be scholarly, it needs to be, in some ways, it needs to be evangelical, and then it needs to be sort of personal and lived. So sort of practice for life. But me being a philosopher, I can listen to the NIC and be perfectly happy with the interpretation and learn things that I've taught the history of Christianity, I've taught the history of world religions. And when I interact with the app, I learn a ton from both the podcasts, but also from the interactive components. The Rebein Study Bible is sort of growing in the sense that we can scale the number of commentaries on the site, so this won't be the only commentary being used we could have. In the next few months we'll have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of books that are being drawn on to enrich the study Bible. And what we have on the horizon is basically, if you can think about the way that Memory works on ChatGPT, on 5.1, and if you've used it extensively, you know that the memory function is pretty impressive and it remembers what you've worked on, who you are. And we're hoping that rebind becomes the place where people deposit their, you know, sort of store their, you know, thoughts about religion or thoughts about, you know, personal thoughts about the Bible and then rely on it to give them a sort of personal approach to Scripture. Moving forward, whether it's academic, scholarly or devotional, it's. I think it's one of the upshots of AI and education is the personalization of education and being able to remember and listen to a user and to serve as a certain mirror for yourself about what you've been interested in or what you might be interested in in the future. One of the sort of features that we have on the rebound study Bible is this feature where you can take a picture of your bookshelf and then in the future it will bring that knowledge about your bookshelf, about your literary interests, about what sort of intellectual interests you have into conversation with the questions that you have about the Bible. Because one, every teacher knows that like one of the best things to do with students is to start where they are. Basically ask, what do you already know? What are you interested in? And then how can you extend it? And I think that this application sort of, it definitely has possibilities in that direction.

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Caleb Zakrin (20:49)

Limu Cable and Doug. Here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com liberty liberty liberty savings very unwritten by liberty mutual insurance company affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Yeah, that is really interesting and I think oftentimes too like making, you know, there is a sense in which people, when you're reading books, you know, you're putting them in conversation with past books you've read and this is a way of, you know, really storing it and having something that's going to maybe remind you of the various connections that you could potentially make. And obviously there's, there's lots of different connections you can make between all different types of books. I'm wondering, you know, what you have seen because you, you were talking about like your use of it. I've used it a bit. I probably not nearly as much as, as you have. And you know, what, what, how you sort of compare it to, you know, a kind of, you know, philosophical engagement with text that you might have been doing before this, you know, how does it, how does it compare? How is it different? Do you know, do you find yourself, you know, wanting to engage with books, you know, using these sorts of AI tools more and more or, you know, do you, is this, is it for very particular usage that you find yourself wanting to use these sorts of tools for?

John Kegg (22:25)

I mean, I think that the Bible is a certain, is like a extremely interesting use case because it begs for interpretation and has gotten interpretation in so Many different ways for centuries upon centuries. So this use case is particularly good for books that demand exegetical interpretation, that is to say, line by line, passage by passage, paragraph by paragraph. And that people will want to. This is why Ulysses is also so good, is because I could not read Ulysses by myself. In fact, I've never read Ulysses by myself. But with Philip Kitcher by my side, who's taught Ulysses at Columbia for 30 years, I can probably make my way through. Similarly, I've never read the Bible from beginning to end or in its entirety. But with the Rebind study Bible, I'm going to do it pretty easily, I think, and have made some real progress. So I'm thinking it really works for books that are daunting, but that people know that there's something incredibly meaningful if they just have a little bit of guidance.

Caleb Zakrin (23:41)

Right. I mean, I've seen, you know, I've never read Ulysses, but I've seen friends, you know, reading Ulysses and then alongside their copy of Ulysses, they also have the, you know, the guide, you know, the Ulysses guide guide that's even twice as long as Ulysses. And that's often the case that the commentary on these big and daunting books can run much longer than the actual books themselves, which just shows the absolute wealth of an experience they can be. When you think about your own role as philosophy professor, you know, do you, do, do you worry that, that, you know, philosophers like you are going to be put out of business by this sort of, this, this sort of, you know, what, you know, in two years, three years time when, when, when these, these tools get really, really good because they're already pretty good, but when they get amazing, you know, does that, does that keep you up at night at all?

John Kegg (24:40)

Philosophy has done a good job over the last 120 years of jeopardizing its own relevance. So it's not like it's, it's not as if AI is going to come in and do something that it hadn't already done to itself. So I'm, I think that the answer to the question is I, I think that face to face interaction is still incredibly important. We should think about these tools as tools, not as replacements for one on one engagement. That being said, a lot of students don't have the opportunity to have a one on one Oxford style tutorial with someone about a great book. And this provides some sort of close proxy to what at least the commentary that is passed back and forth might give you. So I don't, I think that the cost of education, I Think that our economic, current economic structure, these are factors that might lead to the humanities.

Caleb Zakrin (25:53)

The.

John Kegg (25:54)

Death of the humanities more than AI, for example. Especially if we take seriously the massive difference between AI distributed original commentary and generic responses that you get from ChatGPT or Gemini. I worry, this is a situation that I worry about, which is I know a lot of professors have begun to write quizzes and to give study, study guides written by ChatGPT or by Gemini and they get 15 really good questions for their students and they give that study guide to their students. And then the students take that study guide and they put it into ChatGPT and get really good answers and then they come and they regurgitate these answers on a quiz. That's, that's a concern that I have. It's kind of like chameleons in a fun house. So I, I think that's a concern that I, that I have. But I think that this, this type of tool based around close reading is help more helpful than harmful.

Caleb Zakrin (27:06)

Yeah, I think, you know, I'm sure you in your field, but not just in your field, but also in academia in general, like I do feel, and I think things are changing. You know, even the way that people talk about AI now in terms of their usage of it compared to two years ago is pretty radically different, I find. I don't know what your experience is, but I imagine you probably would, you know, get pushback from certain academics that are maybe skeptical. Do you have a sort of a thing that you tell them, obviously you've kind of already given, I think some pretty good arguments for why this type of AI tool usage is actually pretty good and useful. You know, you can simulate that Oxford style tutorial for way less, you know, and it's, it's really, especially for someone who doesn't have someone else to talk to about these books, which, you know, I think is an experience that a lot of people, especially like precocious high school students have. You know, they're interested in some topic or book, they don't have anyone to talk to about it. This would be a great tool for them. You know, do you have a kind of a line that you sort of give or arguments that you find yourself giving to, to people that are skeptics?

John Kegg (28:12)

Yeah, I do. I, I, I basically make the argument that, that we are in a moment as pivotal as the Gutenberg Press in terms of the written word and writing and either we can look away and let other people take the reins and then be surprised about the outcome. When big tech, when big Tech takes over AI reading practices, or we can be involved in the transformation. So that's my first push. The second push is just like the Gutenberg Bible. This is about access or AI. My position is that AI facilitates access and personalization in a way that has never been possible before at scale for a large number of users and readers. And what I mean by access is there is such a glut of information out there, like there is such a, you know, critically complex amount of commentary on the Bible that a single reader would never be able to find the, you know, the, the gem or the, the pearl of wisdom that really suits their need without spending a lot of time, a lot of time in a library like Widener at Harvard or. And what AI allows you to do is to search a very, very wide array of texts. And we're talking about edging into billions of words on the Bible, like in terms of the commentary, and allows you to find nuggets of wisdom that you would never have, you know, come across before from, from a host of thinkers who you might never have encountered. The nic, the commentary that we used on the Revine study Bible is $2,500 in terms of, it's, you know, the volume, the number of volumes is $2,500. And you get access to that for 13 bucks a month, you know, through rebind. And that's kind of the accessibility approach that I think convinces a number of, you know, academic compatriots.

Caleb Zakrin (30:39)

Right. And I'm sure too, you know, it's better. You know, the, the reality is, is that most people, and this is what we encounter all the time with New Books Network is like most people aren't reading these academic texts, but if there was a tool that could help, you know, discover, help people discover the, the nugget of wisdom or the pearl of wisdom that is valuable to them, then then that can make it, makes it very valuable. So they might not actually be able to access or even read this particular, you know, particular book or particular commentary, but, you know, through their queries, might have, might, might, you know, surface something that they wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. I'm, you know, I find it just really interesting this, this, this whole project and the way in which you're developing it. Part of the reason why I find it interesting too is because, you know, it seems like, you know, you're, you're going up against, you know, these, like you said, like these tech giants in a way. You're, you're obviously focusing on a pretty narrow slice of the, you know, the AI market. But, you know, has it been challenging, has it been difficult to, to try and, you know, launch this, this product both in the, in the AI world and the Bible world too, the Bible commentary world, which is its own behemoth unto itself?

John Kegg (32:00)

Yeah, I think that's a very good question. So I think that the tech giants currently are more concerned, they have bigger fish to fry than to create a responsible study Bible using original commentary and rag, which is retrieval, augmented generation, which is the type of AI that we're using. Maybe at some point they'll turn their attention to the publishers, but I think the publishers know exactly what they have in terms of IP intellectual property. And I think they're going to be very reticent to team up with companies that are not handling the IP very respectfully. And we, you know, you see this in the OpenAI case or the anthropic case. So I, it has been challenging, at least in part because the tech technology is evolving so very quickly. So you can do things on ChatGPT 5.1 that were basically unimaginable six, six months ago. And that's going to change, you know, consumer facing reading platforms like this one pretty dramatically. So that's been challenging. But in terms of facing big tech and the publishers, the publishers have been fairly open to it once they've seen the use case.

Caleb Zakrin (33:31)

Right. I also think too like when it's very specifically about reading a text, when it's book forward instead of it being, you know, sort of information forward, where it obscures the, the actual sources. That's, that's really my big issue with it. And part of the reason why I avoid using AI all the time for certain things. Like I, I find it useful for, for some things, you know, I, you know, weirdly enough, like every, it's not often that I'm using Excel, but it's really useful, I find, for like manipulating data. You know, I'm not a coder myself so, you know, it can do, it could do things that, that I, I just are beyond my, my capabilities. But I do find sometimes that when I'm asking IT questions, you know, that I might, you know, be better suited for, for searching in a book that I'm typically unsatisfied with the answers because I just have no idea where it's coming from. And even if it gives sources, there's no guarantee that the sources are actually, you know, not only that the sources are accurate, but also that the source that it's pointing to or saying that is where they got the information from is even the. Even. Even where they got the information from. And what I really like about this is that it just, it's, it's centering the books, it's centering the text and it's centering the, the scholars, them, themselves.

John Kegg (34:50)

I thought, I mean, I thought a lot about why it's. Why it's very so dissatisfying to ask chatgpt existential questions. And it's because they have no state. I mean, an LLM has no stake in the game. Zero. Right. There are no stakes, there's no embodiment, there's no position. And when you're asking an existential question like why do I suffer? Or why are we here? Or you know, any great philosophical or religious question, you want answers from other human beings who have the same embodiment and the same experience as you. So I, I mean there's never going to be. I mean, I've thought a lot about whether an AI could be developed that would replace or you know, replace a philosophical teacher. And I don't think so because philosophical teachers have bodies and histories and an experience that AI doesn't. I mean, we can think about the brain and the vat and we're never going to. It might be the case that someday robots have the type of embodiment that allows them to develop metaphoric language the way that we have, or to sort of negotiate existential questions. But their embodiment will be different than ours and so their answers will be different. So too will their language. So I think that we're a long way off.

Caleb Zakrin (36:28)

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I'm wondering, you've mentioned some of the plans to further develop the Study Bible app, which is its own sort of unique offering. In addition, and you mentioned too that you first became, you know, sort of working with Rebind by doing your own reading, your own guide. Are there other books that you would like to do in the future that you hope to be able to do another rebind for?

John Kegg (37:05)

Yeah, I did a joint book with Bessel Van Der Kolk on William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, which was just amazing. So I would love to take up where Clancy Martin left off. He did a lot of Nietzsche for rebind and I think Nietzsche is one of those writers that can be read and re read in all sorts of different ways and really benefits from this exegetical close reading approach. Other books that I would like to see done. We're beginning to make our way through spiritual classics generally. So we had Eric Zimmerman work on Taoism. And we had Elaine Pagels, the historian of religion from Princeton. She did our Gospels, the Hidden Gospels, so the Gnostic Gospels. I'm more interested currently because I've been so enmeshed in the rebind study Bible, is that I'm interested in the spiritual texts and getting commentary that opens them up. I think that the more books and more original commentaries you have on these types of canonical sources, the better. And so I'm looking forward to sort of broadening that offering out.

Caleb Zakrin (38:36)

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense to start there, you know, starting with, I think, books that, that people, I mean, you know, people have demand for, but also, you know, books where there's just been so much written written about that you can really flesh out all the, the, the, the commentary in like, a really, really productive way. I'm wondering too, you know, I don't know your entire personal backstory, but just, you know, I'm always interested in, in, you know, when I speak with academics that, you know, have decided to kind of go a different, more entrepreneurial route. Not like you've given up on your, your academic pursuits as well, but, you know, how did you, how do you kind of conceptualize that, you know, for your, for yourself in terms of like, you know, why, why take this kind of entrepreneurial path in addition to just, you know, you could just sail off into the sunset, you know, doing, you know, teaching philosophy to students, which, which a lot of academics do. You know, why this path?

John Kegg (39:43)

You asked the good questions for the end, huh? So. So I'm 46 now. When I was 40, I had a cardiac arrest and had open heart surgery and, and then sort of came back to work eventually. But what happened in that process was pretty jarring, and it actually jarred me out of my writing in a particular way. When I was younger, I always. I could write in my head, which means, I don't know, I guess everybody writes in their head in a certain way. But when I wrote in my head before, I could actually write, you know, paragraphs and pages in my head and then get to a typewriter, get to a keyboard and then write them out. And that's how I wrote. And when I had my heart event, I, I was out for about a little less than two minutes. And when I came back, I, I couldn't do that anymore, which was pretty upsetting to me. And I began to think, if I can't do trade writing in the way that I wanted to, what. What could I do that would be public facing? And so I Worked for Outlier, which is a offshoot of the co founder of Masterclass, started it. I worked for them for a time. I worked with Imprint, which was another app, which is consumer facing, which is basically a learning application. And then when John said to me, hey, do you want to do this project? I thought, yeah, this is the type of, you know, outward facing project where I can make big ideas incredibly accessible. So we have about 3,000 people on the Rebind platform and we started the Rebind Study Bible maybe seven weeks ago. And it's going very that that product is going very well. There's a really big market and I think that being able to touch and speak to a wider audience is something I've always really wanted to do and this is just an avenue to do it.

Caleb Zakrin (41:53)

That's a great answer. And you know, I feel like, yeah, life is short and I think it's worth doing things that we can only really do in the present. I mean, I love reading books and I love engaging with old texts. There's something very timeless about it, but I feel like bringing it into something that feels very cutting edge of the moment. It's exciting and I'm excited to see how Rebind develops. And I really do recommend that listeners go and check out the Rebind Study Bible app because it's kind of the most fleshed out version of the Rebinds, but also other texts too. There's quite a few guides and tours. I mentioned some of them at the beginning. You can do Huck Finn with Marlon James and Candide with Salman Rushdie. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing how it further develops. I think that it's a really interesting product and, you know, it wouldn't be surprised if this is the way that, you know, my kids in the future will be, will be learning when they're in school. They'll have their Rebind AI device that helps them go through, you know, learn American history. So John, it was really just such a pleasure to get the chance to speak with you on the New Books Network and really looking forward to seeing what happens with Rebind and with your work moving forward.

John Kegg (43:21)

Caleb, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.