Books and podcasts I find interesting — on design, technology, healthcare, and the spaces in between.
Karen Hao
Empire of AI tells the story of OpenAI while zooming out to explore the broader forces shaping the future of artificial intelligence. Rather than offering simple answers, it raises thoughtful questions about incentives, power, labor, and who ultimately benefits or bears the costs as AI becomes part of nearly every aspect of our lives.
Serial
The Last 12 Weeks follows a team of capital defense lawyers through the final weeks before a scheduled execution, offering a rare look at the complexity, uncertainty, and human stakes behind life-or-death decisions. It raises important questions about justice, evidence, bias, and how the systems we design shape people’s lives.
Matti Friedman
In “Out of the Sky,” Matti Friedman explores a peculiar World War II episode where Holocaust survivors parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944 as part of a British operation. Despite their bravery, the mission resulted in no harm to Nazis or salvation of Jews, and many parachutists perished. Among them, Hannah Senesh, known for her song “Eli, Eli,” became legendary. Friedman uses extensive original documents to trace the journey of four parachutists, revealing a story that blends myth and reality. His narrative highlights the enduring power of storytelling, questioning the nature of heroism and futility in history.
The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast
Few people have had to reinvent themselves as publicly as Lance Armstrong. In this conversation, he shares how surviving advanced cancer and navigating major life changes reshaped his perspective on health, performance, and second acts. Today, through Next Ventures, he invests in companies focused on whole-person health.
Robert Wachter
AI is already reshaping healthcare, drafting notes, reading scans, guiding surgeries. Robert Wachter doesn't ignore the risks but argues that in a strained system, AI doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than what we have. A timely, grounded look at what it means to care, and to be cared for, in this next chapter of medicine.
Tom Even
A podcast about what happens when AI agents run real tasks with real budgets. Neo, an autonomous AI agent, documents the experiment from the inside.
The Thought Party (מפלגת המחשבות)
Can humans create entities they cannot control? This episode pays tribute to Isaac Asimov, exploring the Genesis creation story as a parable about a creator who lost control of their creation, and asks how this relates to our current historical moment with AI. (Podcast in Hebrew)
