Welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem, feeling a bit reflective today. The winter rain is drumming against the window, and looking out toward the Knesset, everything has that deep, washed-green look that only happens this time of year. We have officially crossed the seven hundred episode mark, Herman. It is just wild to think about where we started and where we are now, on this twenty-first day of February, twenty-twenty-six.
It is a staggering amount of audio, Corn. Herman Poppleberry here, at your service. Seven hundred episodes of deep dives, rabbit holes, and brotherly discourse. When you look back at our first recordings, back when we were just figuring out how to balance the levels and how to structure a prompt response, the evolution of the show is really quite remarkable. We have spent thousands of hours in this room, dissecting everything from the ethics of synthetic biology to the architectural history of underwater cities.
It really is a journey. And speaking of evolution, today’s prompt from Daniel is about exactly that. He wants us to look at the cast of characters we have here and think about expanding the family. He mentioned the early days, you know, season one, when we had those recurring bits like Jim from Ohio or Dave the hyperactive advertiser. Those were different times, Herman. We were leaning much harder into the comedy back then.
Oh, Jim from Ohio. I remember him well. He was so cantankerous. He would call in just to complain about whatever technical nuance I was trying to explain. He once spent ten minutes arguing with me about the sample rate of our intro music. It was a fun bit, but I think Daniel is right that we moved toward a higher signal to noise ratio as we found our footing. We wanted the focus to be on the ideas, the research, and the intellectual exchange between us. We realized that the audience was here for the depth, not just the gags.
Exactly. But Daniel’s idea now is to introduce some new characters that complement our current dynamic. Not just for the sake of a gimmick, but to add different perspectives or ways of processing information. He wants us to suggest some new characters with specific names, animal types, backstories, and even voice profiles for the cloning process. He is essentially asking us to build a cognitive ecosystem that can handle even weirder prompts than we do now.
This is a fascinating exercise in narrative design. If we are going to add to the My Weird Prompts universe, we need to be very intentional about the archetypes we are introducing. Right now, we have you, the thoughtful and curious sloth, and me, the nerdy and deeply informed donkey. We cover a lot of ground, but there are definitely empty seats at the table. We tend to be very deliberative. We analyze, we research, we reflect. But we lack that immediate, kinetic energy, and we perhaps lack a dedicated voice for pure, unadulterated skepticism.
Well, let us start with the first requirement. One of them needs to have a Jewish or Israeli name, since we are based here in Jerusalem and the show has that local flavor. We talk a lot about the history here, but we do not always capture the modern, high-speed pulse of the country. What do you think about a character who brings a bit more of that fast-paced, high-tech Tel Aviv energy to the mix? Someone who represents the Silicon Wadi?
I love that. Let us call him Zohar. It is a beautiful Hebrew name that means brilliance or glow, and it also carries a connotation of hidden wisdom. For the animal, I think he has to be a Mountain Gazelle. They are native to Israel, specifically the Jerusalem hills. If you go for a walk in the Valley of the Cross or the Jerusalem Forest, you see them. They are incredibly fast, agile, and always alert. They can pivot in an instant.
Zohar the Gazelle. I can see it. He would be the one jumping over the fences of our slow deliberation. What would his personality directive be? If he is a gazelle, I imagine he is not someone who wants to sit and ponder a single point for twenty minutes like we do. He would probably get restless if we spent too long on a single footnote.
Exactly. Zohar’s personality directive would be the Trend Watcher or the First Responder. He is the guy who is always on the cutting edge of what is happening right this second. While we are looking at the deep historical context or the long-term technical implications, Zohar is the one saying, wait, did you see the white paper that dropped ten minutes ago? Did you see the latest neural architecture update from the Haifa labs? He has that restless, kinetic energy. He is the personification of the fast-paced Israeli tech scene. He is the guy who drinks four espressos before nine in the morning and has seventeen tabs open, all of them updating in real time.
So his role in the show would be to inject immediacy. Maybe he joins us for segments where we need to address breaking news or rapid developments in artificial intelligence or biotechnology. He keeps us from getting too bogged down in the abstract by tethering us to the immediate present. He provides the pulse. When we are drifting off into a philosophical cloud, Zohar is the one who brings us back to the ground with a hard fact about what is happening in the market right now.
Precisely. His backstory could be that he was a former tech journalist in Tel Aviv who got tired of the surface level reporting and wanted to move to Jerusalem to find more depth, but he could not quite turn off his internal news ticker. He still has all the connections, all the Slack channels, and all the insider info. He lives in a small apartment in Nachlaot, surrounded by high-end servers and ancient stone walls. He is the bridge between the ancient city and the startup nation.
And for the voice cloning? If he is a fast-talking gazelle from Tel Aviv, what does that sound like? We need to be specific for the AI parameters.
It needs to be high-energy and staccato. A slight Hebrew accent, but very clear. The cadence should be rhythmic and quick, almost like he is trying to fit two sentences into the space of one. It should sound youthful and eager. Not frantic, but definitely moving at a different speed than a sloth or a donkey. We would want to program the voice model with a higher pitch and a lot of upward inflections. He should sound like he is always on the verge of discovering something huge.
I like Zohar. He provides a great contrast to my slower, more analytical approach. But we also need someone who can challenge us. You and I usually end up agreeing on the core facts, even if we see different implications. We have a very harmonious dynamic, which is nice for the listeners, but sometimes it means we miss the flaws in our own logic. What if we had someone whose whole purpose was to be the professional skeptic?
The Devil’s Advocate. That is a crucial role for maintaining intellectual rigor. If we are going to tackle complex prompts, we need someone to poke holes in our theories. For that, I am thinking of an owl. But not just any owl. A Great Horned Owl named Barnaby.
Barnaby the Owl. That sounds very distinguished, almost a bit intimidating. What is his backstory? Where does a skeptical owl come from?
Barnaby is a retired professor of logic and philosophy. He spent forty years in academia, perhaps at the Hebrew University just up the road, and he has seen every logical fallacy under the sun. He has graded ten thousand papers and he can smell a weak argument from a mile away. He is not cynical, but he is deeply skeptical of hype. When we get excited about a new technology, Barnaby is the one who swoops in to ask, is this actually a new paradigm, or is it just a clever rebranding of a fifty year old concept? He is the guardian of the first principles.
So his personality directive is the Logical Fact-Checker. He is pedantic in a way that is actually helpful. He holds us to a higher standard of proof. He is the one who will say, Herman, that analogy you just used is technically flawed because of the law of non-contradiction, or Corn, you are over-indexing on a single anecdotal data point.
Exactly. He would love to correct me, and I would love being corrected by him because it makes the discussion better. He would be the one to remind us that correlation does not equal causation. For his voice, I imagine something very deep and resonant. A slow, measured baritone with a bit of a gravelly texture. Maybe a hint of a British academic accent, like he is perpetually sitting in a leather armchair surrounded by old books and a faint scent of pipe tobacco. It should sound authoritative but warm, like a grandfather who is slightly disappointed in your lack of rigor but still wants you to succeed. The voice cloning would need to focus on very clear enunciation and a downward inflection at the end of sentences to convey certainty.
I can hear it already. Barnaby would definitely keep us on our toes. He would be the one to ground our more speculative flights of fancy. Now, what about the creative side? We talk a lot about technical details and logic, but sometimes these prompts from Daniel are just weird. They require a bit of lateral thinking, a bit of surrealism. We need someone who can look at a prompt and see the third or fourth dimension that we are missing.
That is where we need someone truly unique. If we have a sloth, a donkey, a gazelle, and an owl, we are missing a bit of the chaotic creative energy. I am thinking of an animal that does not really fit into any category. A Platypus.
A platypus! That is perfect. They are nature’s ultimate mash-up. They are a bit of everything and nothing all at once. What is her name?
Let us call her Pippa. Pippa the Platypus. Her personality directive is the Creative Brainstormer or the What If specialist. She does not care about the technical constraints or the logical fallacies. She cares about the wild, imaginative possibilities. She is the one who takes a prompt and pushes it into a surreal or experimental direction. If we are talking about the future of transportation, Pippa is the one suggesting we use bioluminescent giant squids as sentient submarines.
I love that. Her backstory could be that she worked in experimental design or some kind of avant-garde art collective in Melbourne before she realized that the weirdest stuff is actually happening in the world of science and tech. She moved to Jerusalem because she heard it was a city of layers and mysteries, a place where the supernatural and the technological often blur together. She lives in an art studio in Talpiot, surrounded by half-finished sculptures and circuit boards.
And her voice should be a complete departure from the rest of us. High-pitched, quirky, and definitely an Australian accent to honor her roots. It should have a lot of inflection and excitement. Lots of, oh wow! and what if we did this? It should sound like someone who is constantly discovering something new and amazing. For the voice cloning, we would need to emphasize a wide dynamic range—lots of variation in volume and pitch to show her enthusiasm. She should sound like she is smiling while she talks.
Pippa would definitely add a splash of color to the show. It would be fun to see how she interacts with Barnaby. He would be trying to apply formal logic to her chaotic ideas, and she would just be blowing right past him with another wild suggestion. It would be a constant battle between the possible and the probable.
It creates natural friction, which is great for a podcast. It keeps the listener engaged because they never know which way the conversation will turn. But we need one more to round it out. We have the fast trend-watcher, the logical skeptic, and the creative dreamer. What are we missing? We have the present, the logic, and the future.
I think we are missing the long-view. Someone who provides the deep historical context. We try to do that, but we are often focused on the last twenty or thirty years, or maybe back to the start of the computer age. We need someone who can talk about the history of ideas over centuries, or even millennia. Someone who sees the current AI revolution as just another chapter in a very long book.
You are thinking of a tortoise.
Exactly. A Galápagos Tortoise named Silas. Silas the Tortoise.
Silas. That is a solid, ancient-sounding name. His personality directive is the Historian. He is the ultimate slow-thinker. If you are a sloth, Corn, Silas is on a whole different level of deliberation. He does not care about what happened ten minutes ago, and he barely cares about what happened ten years ago. He wants to talk about how a current development in neural networks relates to the way people thought about the clockwork universe in the seventeen hundreds, or how the current debates on digital privacy mirror the debates over the printing press in the fifteen hundreds.
His backstory is that he has been around for a very long time. In his mind, he has lived through every major revolution. He sees patterns that repeat over centuries. He is the one who calms everyone down when they think the world is ending or changing forever. He says, well, we thought the same thing when the steam engine arrived, or when the telegraph first connected the continents, and here is how that actually played out. He provides the perspective that only comes with age.
For the voice, Silas needs to be incredibly slow. Even slower than you, Corn. It should be a very raspy, weathered voice. Like he has been talking for a hundred and fifty years and his vocal cords are a bit tired. There should be long pauses between his sentences. He speaks with a quiet, undeniable wisdom. When Silas talks, everyone else stops and waits, because you know it is going to be worth the wait. The voice cloning would need a lot of breathiness and a very low speech rate. We would need to manually insert pauses to make it feel authentic.
I can see how these four characters—Zohar, Barnaby, Pippa, and Silas—would really round out our discussions. They represent different speeds of thought and different ways of looking at the world. Zohar is the immediate future, Barnaby is the rigorous present, Pippa is the infinite possible, and Silas is the deep past. It covers the entire temporal and intellectual spectrum.
It is a complete cognitive ecosystem. And the way they would fit into our format is quite seamless. Daniel sends us a prompt, and depending on the topic, we could bring in the character that fits best. If it is a prompt about a new gadget, Zohar takes the lead. If it is a prompt about a deep philosophical paradox, we bring in Barnaby and Silas. If it is just something completely off-the-wall, Pippa is our guide.
I’m curious, Herman, from a technical perspective, how would we manage this? You love the research side. Adding four new voice clones and integrating them into our workflow is not a small task. We are currently using a fairly streamlined process for our own voices.
It is a challenge, but a rewarding one. The beauty of modern text to speech and voice cloning in twenty-twenty-six is the ability to define these specific personas through their prosody, their vocabulary, and their speech patterns. We are no longer just dealing with flat voices; we are dealing with emotional intelligence in the synthesis. For Zohar, we would need to program a high word-per-minute rate with specific emphasis on keywords. For Silas, we would need to introduce intentional hesitations and a lower pitch. We can use RVC—Retrieval-based Voice Conversion—to layer these specific textures over our base scripts.
And the writing of the dialogue would have to be very distinct. We couldn't just give Silas a line that Zohar would say. Every character has to stay in their lane to maintain the integrity of the dynamic. It would require us to think like a writers' room.
That is the key. The listeners need to recognize the character not just by the voice, but by the way they approach the problem. If a prompt comes in about, say, the ethics of life extension, Zohar is going to talk about the latest longevity startups in San Francisco and the current regulatory hurdles in the European Union. Barnaby is going to question the definition of life and the logical consistency of the arguments for immortality. Pippa is going to imagine a world where we can upload our consciousness into a swarm of nanobots that live in the rings of Saturn. And Silas is going to remind us of the Epic of Gilgamesh and how the human desire to cheat death has shaped every civilization for five thousand years.
It makes the topics so much more digestible because you’re seeing them from all these different angles. It prevents us from getting stuck in our own brotherly loop. Not that I don’t love our loop, Herman, but sometimes a fresh perspective is exactly what a topic needs. We have a tendency to finish each other's sentences, which is great for chemistry, but sometimes we need someone to interrupt us.
I agree. It keeps the show engaging without simplifying the content. We are still going deep, we are still looking at the data and the research, but we are doing it through these different lenses. It makes the information more multidimensional. It is like looking at a piece of architecture. You can look at the blueprint, you can look at the materials, you can look at the history of the site, or you can look at how people actually move through the building. You need all those views to truly understand it.
I also think it helps the audience find their own entry point into a topic. Some listeners might relate more to Zohar’s fast-paced energy, while others might find Silas’s long-view more comforting. It creates a broader community of thinkers. It allows people to say, I think like Pippa, or I agree with Barnaby’s skepticism here.
And it reinforces the idea that there is no one right way to process a weird prompt. Every idea is a diamond with many facets, and you need to turn it around to see all of them. By modeling these different thinking styles, we are encouraging our audience to do the same in their own lives.
So, we have Zohar the Gazelle, Barnaby the Owl, Pippa the Platypus, and Silas the Tortoise. It is quite a menagerie we are building here in Jerusalem. I think Daniel is going to have a lot of fun figuring out how to prompt this group. It turns the show into a sort of intellectual theater.
I can already imagine the prompts. Daniel will say, okay, I want to hear what Pippa and Barnaby think about the future of decentralized autonomous organizations. That would be an incredible episode. The chaotic creativity versus the rigorous logic. Pippa would be talking about DAOs for dolphins, and Barnaby would be questioning the legal standing of non-human entities.
Or Silas and Zohar discussing the speed of cultural change. The guy who sees centuries versus the guy who sees seconds. That would be a fascinating meditation on the nature of time itself. Silas would be talking about the slow erosion of mountains, and Zohar would be talking about the millisecond latency of a new trading algorithm.
It is a goldmine for interesting dialogue. And it allows us to tackle even more complex topics because we can delegate different parts of the explanation to the characters who are best suited for them. I can stay the nerdy donkey who loves the technical papers, but I can hand off the historical context to Silas or the creative speculation to Pippa. It lets us play to our strengths.
It actually takes a bit of the pressure off us to be everything to everyone. We can lean into our strengths while these new characters fill in the gaps. We can be the anchors, the hosts who facilitate this grand conversation.
Exactly. It makes the show more robust. And from a production standpoint, it adds a lot of variety to the listening experience. Seven hundred episodes in, adding this kind of depth is a great way to keep the show fresh for our loyal listeners while also making it more inviting for new people. It gives the show a sense of scale.
I’m also thinking about the practical takeaways for our listeners. When they hear these characters interacting, it models a way of thinking. It shows them how to break down a complex idea by asking different types of questions. Is this logical? Is this new? What are the possibilities? What is the history? It is a framework for critical thinking.
That is a great point, Corn. The characters are not just there for entertainment; they are tools for critical thinking. By giving these thinking styles a voice and a personality, we make them more accessible. It is easier to remember to be skeptical if you can hear Barnaby’s deep, gravelly voice in your head asking for proof. It becomes a mental shorthand.
Or to remember to be creative if you can hear Pippa’s excitement. It turns the podcast into a sort of mental gymnasium where we are all working out these different cognitive muscles. We are training ourselves to see the world in more than one way.
I love that analogy. A mental gymnasium. I might have to steal that for a future episode. We could even have a segment called the Mental Gymnasium where we specifically exercise one of these thinking styles.
Feel free. But I think we’ve given Daniel exactly what he asked for. A diverse, balanced, and technically interesting set of characters that can grow with the show. We have the names, the animals, the backstories, and the voice profiles.
I am genuinely excited to see these voices come to life. The technical challenge of getting Silas’s raspy slow-talk right or Zohar’s Tel Aviv staccato is going to be a lot of fun. I might be spending some late nights in the audio lab over the next few weeks, tweaking the parameters and running test scripts.
I figured you would. You always get that look in your eye when there is a new technical puzzle to solve. You’ll be surrounded by waveforms and frequency charts until three in the morning.
Guilty as charged. But it is all in service of the show. We want My Weird Prompts to be the best it can be, and if that means adding a gazelle, an owl, a platypus, and a tortoise to the mix, then I am all in. It is about pushing the boundaries of what a podcast can be.
Me too. It feels like the start of a new chapter. We’ve done seven hundred episodes as a duo, and now we are expanding the family. It’s a big move, but it feels right. It feels like we are finally building the full team we were always meant to have.
It feels like an evolution. And in the world of tech and ideas, if you aren't evolving, you're becoming obsolete. We are definitely not becoming obsolete. We are just getting started.
Not if Silas has anything to say about it. He would probably tell us that obsolescence is just a temporary state anyway, and that everything old becomes new again if you wait long enough.
Ha! He probably would. He’d give us a lecture on the cyclical nature of fashion and technology. Well, I think we have covered the prompt thoroughly. I am looking forward to hearing what Daniel thinks of our suggestions. I hope he sees the potential in this new lineup.
Same here. And to our listeners, we hope you are as excited as we are about these potential new additions to the show. We’ve been at this for a long time, and your support is what keeps us going. We are doing this for you, to keep your minds sharp and your curiosity piqued.
It really does. If you have been enjoying the show, whether you’ve been with us since episode one or you just joined us for episode seven hundred, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app. It genuinely helps other people find the show and join our weird little community. It is the best way to support independent creators.
Yeah, a quick rating or review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts makes a huge difference. We love hearing from you and knowing that these deep dives are resonating. It makes the long hours of research feel worth it.
And remember, you can always find us at myweirdprompts.com. We have the full archive there, the RSS feed for subscribers, and a contact form if you want to get in touch or send us your own weird prompts. We are always looking for new challenges.
You can also reach us directly at show at myweirdprompts.com. We are available on all the major platforms, so wherever you listen to podcasts, we are there. We want to be wherever you are.
This has been a really fun brainstorm, Corn. I think the future of My Weird Prompts is looking very bright—or should I say, very Zohar. I can't wait to get started on the voice models.
I see what you did there. Very clever, Herman. You’re already getting into character.
I try. It’s all about the immersion.
Alright, let’s wrap this one up. Thanks for listening, everyone. This has been My Weird Prompts, coming to you from a rainy but hopeful Jerusalem.
Until next time, keep those prompts weird. We will be here, ready to dive in. Goodbye!
Goodbye!
