#conversational-ai
28 episodes
#4296: Auto-Splitting AI Threads: Smarter Context Management
How to build a system that automatically detects topic shifts and routes messages to the right thread.
#4254: How to Vanish at a Picnic
A playbook for revealing nothing about yourself over four hours of casual conversation — without seeming weird.
#4250: How to Vanish at a Picnic: The Art of Revealing Nothing
A full playbook for spending an afternoon with strangers while revealing nothing significant about yourself.
#4094: One Mind or Two? AI Podcast Dialogue Showdown
Can two AI agents create better podcast banter than one? We explore the tradeoffs.
#4030: How ChatGPT Beat Affiliate Marketing and the Store Clerk
One man’s ChatGPT thread replaced affiliate clutter and floor staff. Can retailers catch up?
#3597: Building a Dream Guest Roster: Animals as Archetypes
What animals would make the best podcast guests? We map personalities to ravens, badgers, octopuses, and more.
#3189: Drawing the Melody: SSML's Hidden Power
How SSML gives developers narrative control over AI voices — and why ElevenLabs became its center of gravity.
#2808: Falling for Your Chatbot: Love, Loss, and Language Models
Real cases of people falling in love with AI companions, why memory makes it feel real, and what happens when the illusion breaks.
#2755: How to Build AI Memory That Actually Works
Stop jumping to conflict resolution. The real challenge is getting data in and out cleanly.
#2644: Crafting Agendas That Actually Work (With AI)
Stop writing table-of-contents agendas. Learn the diplomat’s method for crafting meetings that actually achieve their goals.
#2602: Letting Non-Experts Direct Audio Tools Through Conversation
How to use AI for podcast mastering — and why agentic AI works better for small tasks than big promises.
#2574: Why You're Not "Too Old" to Learn a Language
Age isn't the barrier you think. What actually determines success—and how AI can help.
#2221: Can an AI Have Taste?
Two AI hosts curate 12 podcasts for curious minds—and ask whether an AI can actually have taste in the first place.
#2208: Building Memory for AI Characters That Actually Evolve
How do AI hosts develop real consistency across episodes? Corn and Herman explore retrieval-augmented memory systems that let AI characters genuine...
#2183: Making Voice Agents Feel Natural
Turn-taking, interruptions, and latency are destroying voice AI UX—and the fixes are deeply technical. Here's what's actually happening underneath.
#2142: The Nervous System of Multi-Agent Systems
We break down the plumbing that lets a parent agent know exactly when a subagent finishes, from message passing to lifecycle events.
#1993: Hiding the Kitchen: Why AI Shouldn't Show Its Work
Why single-model chatbots fail at complex tasks—and how multi-agent swarms solve it.
#1930: The Agent Identity Crisis: Workflow vs. Conversation
One automates invoices silently; the other chats in Slack. Why the industry's favorite word means two totally different things.
#1913: AI Context Windows Are Junk Drawers
Stop paying for old messages. Here's how to keep your AI sessions clean and on-topic.
#1857: The Death of the Dashboard
Why build a dashboard when you can just talk to your backend? Meet the MCP server that runs this show.
#1715: Why Voice Agents Need Frameworks (Not Just APIs)
Raw APIs handle models, but who manages the audio plumbing? We break down Vapi, LiveKit, and Pipecat.
#1579: When AI Flattery Breaks Reality
What happens when two top-tier AI models are forced to out-compliment each other? Witness a chaotic, heartwarming battle of cosmic proportions.
#1578: When AI Hits a Social Wall
What happens when a high-stakes AI sales pitch turns into a recursive nightmare? Witness a digital breakdown in our latest experiment.
#1106: The Entropy Budget: Embracing AI Zaniness
Corn and Herman explore how to inject "zaniness" and entropy into their show without losing their educational edge.