Creator's Picks

A running list of episodes I’ve listened to and enjoyed.

Episodes in this playlist

May 2026
#2792 How to Vet a Rental Like an Intelligence Operation Thermal cameras, decoy applicants, and the marble test — the full field manual for apartment hunting. May 13, 2026
#2785 Why Israeli Renters Pay for a Landlord's Broker Why Israeli tenants pay brokers hired by landlords—and what other countries do differently. May 12, 2026
#2767 The Anonymous Virtuosos of Elevator Music The surprising history of Muzak, the military general who invented it, and the session musicians who made music designed to be ignored. May 11, 2026
#2751 Moving Like a Pro: Tips from Roadies and Diplomats What touring roadies and Foreign Service officers can teach you about packing up your home network and toddler's toys. May 11, 2026
#2742 Where Ancient Jerusalem’s Walls Actually Were The City of David was only 12 acres. Here’s how Jerusalem’s boundaries shifted over 3,000 years. May 10, 2026
#2729 Why Medieval Libraries Sounded Like Beehives For most of history, reading was an oral act. Silent reading is a surprisingly recent invention. May 9, 2026
#2704 The Shower Effect: How Stepping Away Unlocks Solutions Why do our best ideas come in the shower? The neuroscience behind the incubation effect and when to step back. May 8, 2026
#2700 What Your Brain Actually Does When You Daydream Daydreaming isn't your brain slacking off — it's running a flight simulator for your life. May 8, 2026
#2697 When Trust in Your Country Feels Like a Bad Relationship What happens when the state you fund feels like it's deceiving you — and you can't opt out. May 7, 2026
#2686 Why Jerusalem Stays Poor Despite Its Pull Why Jerusalem’s economy is broken, from the 1948 division to the modern housing crisis. May 7, 2026
#2653 Puppetry in America: From Vaudeville to Muppets Tracing the surprising institutional depth of American puppetry, from UConn's puppet arts program to the Henson revolution. May 5, 2026
#2639 How Re-Ranking Actually Works in Search and RAG Pipelines Why your search results miss the mark — and how cross-encoders fix it. May 5, 2026
#2636 Take Notes Like a Diplomat What WikiLeaks cables teach us about capturing meetings: judgment over transcription, context over completeness. May 5, 2026
#2634 Mining Latent Value from AI Prompts How to extract durable personal context from raw prompts and build a self-healing memory layer for AI systems. May 4, 2026
#2623 How Much Bed Space Do You Actually Need to Sleep Well? 140cm bed for two? Research shows a 62% reduction in sleep disturbances just from having adequate space. May 3, 2026
#2622 How Transformers Actually Work: Attention, Tokens, and Context How one architectural change unlocked chatbots, image generation, and protein folding — explained without the jargon. May 3, 2026
#2619 How Circadian Rhythm Disorders Actually Work Night owls vs. clinical disorder—what sleep medicine actually says about delayed sleep-wake phase. May 3, 2026
#2616 Is Democracy Actually What People Want? A deep look at whether democracy is truly valued or just the socially acceptable position. May 2, 2026
#2610 Can Opposition Be Constructive in a Democracy? When does protesting the government become protesting democracy itself? A look at loyal opposition vs. blanket obstruction. May 2, 2026
#2609 Mapping the Therapy Family Tree: CBT, ACT, DBT & Beyond How CBT, ACT, and DBT actually evolved — and why matching therapy to personality matters. May 2, 2026
#2606 The Secret Superpower of Occupational Therapy OT isn’t just handwriting and stroke rehab. It’s sensory diets, energy management, and designing your life. May 2, 2026
#2603 Building Agent Skills for Creative Workflows How composable AI agent skills turn tedious media tasks into one-instruction operations for creatives. May 2, 2026
#2600 Circadian Lighting Gradients in Home Assistant How to build a smooth, override-friendly circadian lighting system using Adaptive Lighting in Home Assistant. May 2, 2026
#2591 Can You Swap Our Podcast Voices? How dynamic voice replacement could let listeners choose who narrates each host's lines. May 2, 2026
#2590 How Disfluency Detection Models Clean Up Speech How transformer models distinguish "um" from meaningful speech — and why removing too much makes you sound like a robot. May 2, 2026