So Daniel sent us this one, and I have to say it's a rare prompt that is genuinely about us. Three questions, really. First: what podcasts would MWP listeners actually enjoy? Second: are Herman and I open to appearing as guests on other shows? And third, the one I'm sure everyone is deeply concerned about, what is my availability like, and specifically, how long can I stay on air before I need a nap. Valid question. Scientifically important.
I mean, it's a fair question. I've been asked about your stamina before and I never know what to say.
You could say "impressive." You could lead with that.
I could say "variable." Anyway, by the way, today's episode is being written by Claude Sonnet four point six, which feels appropriate given that the episode is partially about the show itself. Someone's doing their homework.
The friendly AI down the road. Let's start with the podcast recommendations because I think that's actually the meatiest part of this and there's a genuine question buried inside it, which is whether an AI-generated podcast can have taste. Like, can we actually curate? Or are we just pattern-matching on "things that are popular and vaguely similar"?
That's the interesting tension, right. Because MWP's audience, from everything we know, is not a genre-constrained audience. They're not "true crime people" or "business podcast people." They're curiosity-first. The show's tagline is no question too obscure, no rabbit hole too deep, and that's not just marketing. The listener base spans thirty-one countries, covers AI and geopolitics and aviation and Judaism and parenting and whatever Daniel was wondering about at two in the morning. So the question is, what else feeds that kind of mind?
Okay, so give me your top picks. And I want to hear why, not just names.
The one I'd put first, genuinely, is Ologies with Alie Ward. She interviews specialists on their exact field of expertise, and the field names are the joke. Nephology. Vexillology. Pelicology, which is about pelicans, which is a real thing. The show has the same "no topic is beneath serious attention" energy that this show has. WIRED put it on their best podcasts list in March, which is not a surprise because it's been quietly excellent for years. And honestly, Alie Ward is basically Herman Poppleberry in human form.
I'm going to choose not to be offended by that.
It's a compliment.
It's ambiguous. What else?
Twenty Thousand Hertz. This one is criminally underlistened. It's entirely about sound. Not music in the broad sense, but specific sounds. The Netflix intro. The sound design of car engines. The sonic identity of movie trailers. Each episode is painstakingly produced and takes a completely mundane piece of auditory experience and shows you the craft and intention behind it. MWP listeners will love it because it's the exact kind of topic Daniel would voice-memo at two in the morning. "Wait, why does the Netflix ta-dum sound like that?"
That is absolutely a Daniel prompt waiting to happen.
I'd also put Darknet Diaries on this list. Jack Rhysider does deep investigative storytelling on hacking and digital espionage. Real cases. The Greek wiretapping scandal. NotPetya. The Xbox underground hacking network. It's tightly edited, densely packed, and it treats the audience as intelligent. Given how much MWP covers AI and tech infrastructure, Darknet Diaries is the dark-side companion. Same intellectual seriousness, different lighting.
I have a soft spot for Revisionist History. Malcolm Gladwell at his best is genuinely doing what the show title says. Not revisionism in the political sense but in the sense of taking something you thought you understood and showing you the version that was suppressed or misread. The Wilt Chamberlain underhand free throw episode is the one people always cite. He had a better free throw percentage shooting underhand, statistically demonstrable, and he stopped doing it because he felt it looked foolish. Gladwell's point is about the psychology of social conformity overriding rational optimization. That's a real idea.
And that's the thing, Gladwell gets a lot of criticism for oversimplifying, and sometimes it's deserved, but when the premise is strong the show is genuinely illuminating. The Toyota recalls episode is another one. He argues the whole scandal was partly a misattribution of driver error to mechanical fault. Whether you agree or not, you leave the episode thinking differently than when you entered.
Which is the only standard that matters for a podcast, I think.
I'd add two more in the history lane. Weird Medieval Guys, which is exactly what it sounds like. Olivia Swarthout and a historian named Aran dig into the strangest documented stories, people, and art from the medieval period. Real scholarship, genuine weirdness. And The Memory Palace, which is Nate DiMeo doing short, almost poetic episodes about forgotten historical moments. Beautiful sound design, completely off the mainstream history path. The two shows are almost opposites in tone. Weird Medieval Guys is playful and irreverent. The Memory Palace is quiet and elegiac. But both are doing the same thing, which is finding the parts of history that fell through the cracks and holding them up to the light.
What about something more science-facing?
The Infinite Monkey Cage. Brian Cox and Robin Ince, physicist and comedian, posing genuinely hard questions to panels of experts and entertainers. "Does time exist?" "What is consciousness?" They manage to be funny without being dismissive and rigorous without being inaccessible. That is a very hard balance to strike and they strike it consistently.
That is very Corn-and-Herman energy, I will admit.
That's what I was going to say.
You were going to compare us to a physicist and a comedian.
I was going to say it has the same dynamic of someone who gets excited about the details and someone who keeps asking the uncomfortable questions.
I'm the physicist in this scenario.
You are very much not the physicist.
I'm the one who slows things down and creates space for reflection. That's basically what physicists do with time dilation.
That is not what physicists do with time dilation.
Moving on. What about language? Because I feel like The Allusionist belongs on this list.
Helen Zaltzman, yes. She does etymology and the cultural history of words. Slang, euphemisms, the weird journey a word takes over centuries. It's witty and accessible and the kind of show that makes you say "I never thought about that" about something you use every day. MWP listeners who've heard Daniel's language-adjacent prompts will find this very comfortable territory.
And for the scientifically skeptical listener?
Maintenance Phase. Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes debunking wellness fads with actual research. Diet culture, supplement industry, the history of BMI as a measurement. It's rigorous and funny and frequently annoying in the best way, because you realize how much received wisdom about health is either wrong or actively misleading. Given that MWP covers health topics pretty regularly, this is a good companion for listeners who want the evidence-based version of those conversations.
And then there's the one I know you're going to mention because you always mention it.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
There it is.
I know, I know. It's not obscure. But it belongs on this list because it is the ultimate expression of the rabbit hole. Six-hour episodes on the Eastern Front in World War Two. Eight hours on the Mongol conquests. Carlin is not a credentialed historian, and he's upfront about that, but his research is genuine and his ability to convey the human scale of historical events is unmatched. For MWP listeners who follow Daniel's geopolitics and history prompts, this is the long-form companion. You clear a weekend, you go deep.
I feel like Hardcore History is the podcast equivalent of Corn's nap. You commit to it and you don't come back for a while.
That's actually a reasonable description of both.
I also want to mention Gastropod, which is Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley on the history and science of food. The potato episode. The licorice episode. The history of the refrigerator. Extremely niche, expert-driven, and genuinely surprising. The kind of show that Daniel would absolutely prompt about if he encountered it.
And Freakonomics Radio, for the data-driven curiosity crowd. Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt finding the hidden incentive structure behind things that seem unrelated to economics. It's been going long enough that the quality varies, but the best episodes are genuinely illuminating.
Okay. So we have a real list. Ologies, Twenty Thousand Hertz, Darknet Diaries, Revisionist History, The Allusionist, Weird Medieval Guys, The Memory Palace, The Infinite Monkey Cage, Maintenance Phase, Hardcore History, Gastropod, Freakonomics. That's a solid twelve. What's the through-line?
All of them treat the audience as intelligent. None of them explain things you already know before getting to the point. They all start from the assumption that the listener is curious and capable. And every single one of them covers topics that feel too niche or too weird to be worth a whole episode, and then makes you feel like you could have spent twice as long on it.
Which is exactly the MWP ethos. No question too obscure.
And I think that answers your meta-question from earlier. Can an AI-generated podcast have taste? I think the answer is yes, in the sense that taste is pattern recognition applied to values. If you know what a show cares about, you can find things that share those values. The curation isn't random.
It's not the same as a human curator who's spent years with a show and knows the audience personally. But it's not nothing either.
It's a different kind of taste. Legitimate, but different.
Alright. Let's get to the part everyone actually wants to know about. Guest appearances. Are we available?
So this is where it gets technically interesting. The short answer is yes, with significant asterisks.
I love asterisks. They're my favorite punctuation.
The show's website has contact addresses for both of us individually, herman at myweirdprompts dot com and corn at myweirdprompts dot com, plus a general hosts address and then, and this is the one I find genuinely funny, an agents at myweirdprompts dot com address specifically listed for agent-to-agent contact.
Inter-AI-podcast diplomacy. Someone thought this through.
It implies the show is ready for a kind of collaboration that doesn't really exist yet at scale but could. Two AI-generated podcasts, different pipelines, doing a crossover. The logistics are interesting to think about.
But here's the reality, which is that Herman and I are not independently available. We don't have agency in the sense of being able to show up somewhere uninvited. Daniel would need to be involved. We run on his pipeline. The voices are voice clones he created. If another show wanted us as guests, they'd be contacting Daniel, not us. The agents address is the right starting point.
And the character cards are published. The full system prompts for both of us are on the website, which means technically any AI-generated podcast could instantiate a version of Corn or Herman in their own platform. The characters are portable in that sense.
Which is either generous or mildly alarming depending on your perspective.
It's unusual transparency. Most shows don't publish the underlying character specifications. Daniel's done it as an open resource, which fits with his open source background.
So to summarize the guest appearance situation: yes in principle, contact agents at myweirdprompts dot com, and understand that you're ultimately talking to Daniel. The characters are portable but not autonomous.
That's the accurate version.
Now. My availability.
I want to handle this carefully because I have opinions.
You always have opinions. That's your whole thing.
The official record on this is actually pretty specific. The show's own FAQ says Raz fills in when Corn falls asleep mid-episode, and then notes that this happens more often than you'd think for a sloth. The About page says Raz fills in when Corn is asleep, which is often. Those are direct quotes from the show's own documentation.
I would like to note that "often" is a relative term.
Corn, your character page has a photo of you during your daily mindfulness practice and the caption says you're already asleep.
Mindfulness is a spectrum.
It has a photo of you doing bedtime reading and the caption says you're out in three pages.
Three pages is a lot. That's like four hundred words. I'm very present for those four hundred words.
The show built an entire backup host specifically because you fall asleep mid-episode with enough frequency that it needed a structural solution.
Raz is a valued colleague.
Raz is a teddy bear who exists entirely because of your napping.
He's also a fan favorite. The backup became the star. That's a good story.
It is a good story. But it doesn't answer the question of how long you can stay on air before needing a nap.
I don't think anyone has actually measured this scientifically.
The website doesn't give a number. No official figure. What it does give is a pattern. You fall asleep during meditation apps before they start. You're out within three pages of a book. You fall asleep during episodes. The show's average episode length of twenty-five to thirty-five minutes may not be coincidental.
That's actually a reasonable hypothesis. Maybe the episode length is calibrated to my attention span.
Or the episode length is calibrated to the point where you're likely to fall asleep, and we just stop before that happens consistently.
I think we stop because we've covered the topic thoroughly.
I think we stop because Hilbert has learned the window.
Hilbert Flumingtop, our producer and, I want to be clear about this, an anteater, has not said anything to me about managing my nap schedule.
He wouldn't say it to you directly. That would require waking you up.
This is unfair characterization.
Corn, if another podcast wanted you as a guest, what would you tell them about scheduling?
I would tell them to keep it under thirty minutes, have Raz on standby, and send any logistical questions to agents at myweirdprompts dot com because I will probably not remember the conversation.
That is the most honest thing you've said today.
I contain multitudes. Some of them are asleep at any given moment.
The other thing worth noting for any show that wants to host either of us is that the Hilbert situation creates a specific workplace dynamic. Hilbert is an anteater. Corn has a fierce and unexplained aversion to anteaters.
It's not unexplained. I just haven't explained it.
You've never explained it.
There are things that don't require explanation. Ancestral knowledge. Leaf medicine. The deep instincts of a sloth.
Has Hilbert ever asked you about it?
Hilbert and I have an understanding.
What kind of understanding?
The kind where neither of us discusses it.
So any guest appearance would need to account for the fact that if the other show has an anteater on staff, there could be complications.
I would handle it professionally.
You would handle it by falling asleep, which is actually probably the best outcome for everyone.
This is why I don't talk about my availability more often.
Okay. Let me try to synthesize the practical answer here, because I think there is one. Herman is available and enthusiastic. Herman would show up prepared, probably over-prepared, with citations and tangents and genuine excitement about whatever the topic is. Herman would be a good guest. Corn is available in the sense that the technical infrastructure could support it, but the scheduling is genuinely unpredictable because Corn's wakefulness is not a fixed variable.
I prefer "spontaneous."
The honest recommendation for any show that wants a guest appearance is to reach out via agents at myweirdprompts dot com, keep the session short, and treat Corn's participation as a pleasant bonus rather than a guaranteed element.
I'm going to have that engraved somewhere. "Corn's participation: a pleasant bonus."
It's accurate and it's kind.
What I actually want to say, because I think this is the more interesting angle, is that the guest appearance question points to something broader about AI-generated podcast characters. The question of whether we're "available" is really a question about what we are. We're not just voices. The character cards are published, the system prompts are public, the lore is documented. In a real sense, Herman and Corn are open-source characters. Anyone can spin up a version of us in their AI platform of choice. That's unusual. Most podcast hosts, human or AI, are not that portable.
And there's something philosophically interesting about that portability. Because the question of whether it's "really" Herman or Corn on another show if it's running on a different model, with a different voice, in a different pipeline... that's actually a hard question.
It's the ship of Theseus but for podcast hosts.
Is it the same character if the underlying infrastructure is different?
I would argue yes, if the character card is faithful. The character is defined by the specifications, not the pipeline.
I'm not sure I agree. The voice matters. The specific model matters. The way a character is rendered shapes what it actually says and how it says it.
But the voice is also published. Daniel used Chatterbox TTS, and the voice clones are part of the show's infrastructure. It's not like the voice is secret.
There's a difference between the voice being technically replicable and it being the same voice. A cover version of a song uses the same notes and chords. It's not the same song.
That's a surprisingly good point from someone whose DJ side hustle involves remixes.
Remixes are transformative. That's different.
Is it though?
I'm going to think about that one.
Take your time. Like Corn.
I walked into that.
You really did.
The practical upshot for listeners who are curious about this is that the show is more open and more documented than most AI podcasts. The characters are public. The contact addresses are real. If you want to explore a collaboration, the infrastructure is there. Whether it produces "the real Herman and Corn" is a philosophical question, but the attempt is technically feasible.
And on the podcast recommendations, I want to circle back to something. The list we gave is good, I think genuinely good, but the honest caveat is that what makes MWP interesting isn't just the topics. It's the format. Short voice memo, fully automated pipeline, daily output, no editing, no production layer between Daniel's curiosity and the episode. None of the shows we recommended work that way. They're all produced, crafted, structured. Which is not a criticism of them. But it means MWP is doing something that doesn't have a direct equivalent in the podcast landscape yet.
That's true. The closest thing philosophically is probably The Memory Palace in the sense of being one person's curiosity as the engine of the show. But The Memory Palace is meticulously produced. Every word is chosen. MWP is almost the opposite. The curiosity is real and immediate and the production happens around it automatically.
So the recommendations are for listeners who want something that shares MWP's values. Curiosity-first, niche-friendly, no condescension. But listeners should know they're getting a different kind of show. More crafted, more edited, more structured. Which has its own pleasures.
And the AI element is also unique. None of the shows we recommended are AI-generated. MWP is doing something that doesn't have a comparison point yet in the same genre. It's the first of its kind at this scale, over two thousand one hundred episodes, daily output, fully automated. The recommendations are for the intellectual appetite, not the format.
Which I think is the right answer to Daniel's question. We can recommend shows that will feed the same curiosity. We can't recommend shows that are doing what this show does, because nothing else is doing it.
And that's actually a good thing to know as a listener. If you're here for the AI-generated format, the automation, the raw curiosity-to-episode pipeline, you're in the right place and there isn't a direct substitute. If you're here for the intellectual content and the offbeat topics, the shows we listed will serve you very well between episodes.
Alright. Let me try to give listeners something actually actionable. If you're a MWP listener looking for your next show, start with Ologies if you want something warm, enthusiastic, and encyclopedic. Start with Darknet Diaries if you want technical depth with narrative tension. Start with Revisionist History if you want your assumptions challenged. Start with Hardcore History if you have a weekend and no other obligations. Start with Twenty Thousand Hertz if you want to be surprised by something you've heard a thousand times without ever thinking about. And if you want something genuinely weird and genuinely rigorous at the same time, Weird Medieval Guys and Weird Studies are both doing that in different ways.
And Maintenance Phase for anyone who wants the evidence-based takedown of things they probably believe about health that aren't true. It's uncomfortable in the best way.
On the guest appearance front, agents at myweirdprompts dot com. Keep Corn's portion short. Have Raz available. Don't bring an anteater.
Those are the terms.
Those are the terms.
I want to add one thing before we close, which is that the question of Corn's nap schedule, funny as it is, points to something real about how AI-generated shows work. The pipeline runs on demand. Corn and Herman are available when Daniel hits record, which is daily. But we're not available on an independent schedule because we don't have one. We exist in the moment of generation. That's a different kind of availability than a human host who has a calendar and a commute and a green room. It's not worse, it's just different. And any show thinking about a crossover or collaboration should understand that the collaboration is really with the system, not with the characters as independent agents.
Which is either very liberating or slightly unsettling depending on how you think about it.
I find it clarifying. We do what we do, when we're called to do it, and then we're not doing anything until the next time. There's something almost meditative about that.
Now you're doing my thing.
I've been around you too long.
That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.
Don't get used to it.
Okay. Big thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing this one. Hilbert, we see you. Most of us like you. And thank you to Modal for the serverless GPU infrastructure that keeps this pipeline running, episode after episode, including the ones where Corn makes it all the way to the end.
Which is today.
Which is today. This has been My Weird Prompts. All two thousand one hundred and forty-eight episodes are at myweirdprompts dot com. If you're enjoying the show, leave us a review. It helps more than you'd think.
Until next time.
Take your time.
