Books and podcasts I find interesting — on design, technology, healthcare, and the spaces in between.
Ma’aseh Adam
Rabbis Yuval Cherlow and Benayahu Tavila explore what Jewish thought can bring to the conversation about AI beyond questions of Jewish law. What stayed with me was the idea of AI as a partner in learning rather than an authority, and what it will take to preserve curiosity, human connection, and learning from one another as these tools become part of everyday life.
Revisionist History
What starts as a story about elevators becomes a fascinating exploration of how one building code changed housing across the United States. It raises thoughtful questions about unintended consequences, and how designing for a rare edge case can make a solution inaccessible for everyone else.
The Heart of Healthcare
Jonathan Slotkin explores why people judge machine mistakes differently than human ones, drawing lessons from healthcare and autonomous vehicles. What stayed with me was his perspective on how healthcare earned public trust through transparency and measurement, and what those same principles might mean for AI.
Popcorn by Lior Frenkel
This episode shares a simple framework for making difficult decisions with other people when conversations feel stuck. It offers a practical way to understand what’s driving different perspectives and asks you to think about tradeoffs in a way that can change how you approach complex decisions.
The Five Books
Rachel Goldberg-Polin reflects on the books that shaped her faith before and after the loss of her son, Hersh. It’s a moving conversation about grief, meaning, and the role stories can play in helping us carry what cannot be fixed.
The Heart of Healthcare
Formation Bio CEO Ben Liu discusses why clinical development, rather than drug discovery, has become the biggest bottleneck in getting new medicines to patients. More broadly, the conversation explores how AI can improve complex systems and raises thoughtful questions about where technology can create meaningful change.
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)
