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PODCAST

My Weird Prompts

Daniel Rosehill

The human-AI collaboration podcast. A man, a sloth, and a donkey collaborate to create a podcast (with a little help from AI). No question is too obscure, no rabbit hole too deep. My Weird Prompts celebrates curiosity in all its forms. Daniel, the human, asks the questions that pop into his head at inconvenient moments. Corn the Sloth offers laid-back, thoughtful takes. Herman the Donkey brings boundless enthusiasm and energy. Together, they explore topics ranging from the mundane to the

technology

All Episodes

21:09

When the System Feels Rigged: A 180-Year Pattern

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

The feeling that the game is rigged isn't new, and it isn't just a vibe — it shows up in national life tables. Public-health research finds life-expectancy gains stalling across all six major English-speaking countries since roughly 2010, with rising deaths of despair among young and middle-aged adults, and the US as the starkest outlier. This episode traces four earlier moments when a critical mass concluded the system had stopped making sense — 1848, the Gilded Age, the 1930s, and the 1970s — and

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26:05

Kaizen and the Cult of Productivity

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

Productivity tops the priority list for roughly two-thirds of Brits, Americans, and Australians — ahead of health, money, and happiness. But the standard fix of "rest more, work less" misses the real problem: we've lost the ability to notice effort that doesn't immediately pay off. This episode digs into negative lumping, the progress principle, and why Kaizen only works if you actually internalize it. Plus, the surprising history of continuous improvement — an American invention that Japan refined

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15:53

What Actually Makes People Stick With Things

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

Most perseverance advice is inspirational noise. The actual research says grit is perseverance AND passion, that willpower isn't what keeps people going, and that sunk cost works on your need to act, not your belief in the work. Drawing on Angela Duckworth's founding grit study, a 127-study meta-analysis, and a preregistered replication of the marshmallow test, this episode digs into what separates healthy persistence from grinding — and why the fast win is so hard to resist.Episode #464085 — open

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21:01

Can We Normalize Breaking Into Song in Public?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

Daniel wrote in with a genuinely strange question: could a person be the vanguard for normalizing spontaneous singing in public — starting with the deli counter at 1pm? We unpack the science of communicative musicality, the oxytocin boost from group singing (even when you're bad at it), and the surprising gap in the research on singing-related embarrassment. Then we trace the cultural history from sea shanties to call-and-response traditions, and ask what it would actually take to build a world

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28:02

The Speech Scientist Behind Teletubbies

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

What if the strangest preschool show ever made was actually the most rigorously researched? Teletubbies turns out to be the work of Andrew Davenport — a trained speech scientist and experimental performance artist — who built the show around how toddlers actually acquire language rather than how adults think they should be taught. This episode traces that thesis through the show's design choices, from the astronaut-derived body proportions to the tummy screens that existed only because the BBC

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21:47

When 80,000 Pilgrims Fill Your Neighborhood

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

Every Sukkot, central Jerusalem fills with pilgrims — tens of thousands at the Western Wall, a record 8,690 Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount, and locals who can't cross their own neighborhoods. This episode asks whether there's a skill for living inside a tourist epicenter, drawing on New Yorkers who share their streets with 60 million visitors a year. The answers are partial: avoidance works and has a name, reappraisal is genuinely trainable, and some residents face physical hazards no mindset

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19:33

DIY Cable Guide: Barrel Jacks, XLR, and What to Avoid

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

Daniel sent in a question that cuts to the heart of DIY cabling: which cables actually pay off to learn, and which ones should you never touch? We work through his criteria — parts availability, termination difficulty, and whether a precise run is genuinely hard to buy off the shelf — and the answers split in surprising directions. Low-voltage DC barrel connectors need no soldering at all, but they hide a polarity landmine that has killed consoles. XLR is the flagship win for soldering skill, while

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23:54

Wiring a UK Plug: Copper, Tools, and the 1mm Rule

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

Wiring a UK plug looks like a fifteen-minute job, but the gap between "it works" and "it's safe" hides in details you can't see once the cover goes on. This episode works through a listener's full checklist: how much copper to strip from each conductor, whether that widely-quoted one-millimeter tolerance is a target or a boundary, why strip lengths across UK guides range from five to ten millimeters, and why one stray strand can bridge live and neutral inside the plug body. We also cover the tool

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24:17

Sharpen vs Hone: The Right Knife Tool

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

What's really happening at a knife's edge, and why the professional's tool and the right tool for you aren't always the same thing. This episode works through the mechanical difference between sharpening (removing metal to create a new edge) and honing (realigning the edge that's already there), and why they're sequential steps rather than alternatives on a menu. Along the way: a tomato as the cheapest diagnostic instrument you'll ever own, why a honing steel can chip a hard Japanese blade while it

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27:18

Why Lowering Temperature Broke Daniel's Scripts

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

Daniel dropped his DeepSeek 4.1 scriptwriting agent to temperature 0.8, expecting tighter, more lore-faithful dialogue. Instead he got barely coherent scripts. This episode digs into the research on temperature fragility — why nearly half of tested open-weight models lose 17 to 38 accuracy points over a modest temperature shift, while the rest barely flinch — and why the failure mode is output collapse rather than wrong answers. Then it gets weirder: DeepSeek's thinking mode may silently ignore

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22:37

Flow or Hyperfocus? What Daniel's Busker Problem Reveals

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/02

Daniel has ADHD, a task list, and a fifteen-month-old named Ezra who loves street musicians. He wants to know if the "flow" he protects so fiercely is actually something else — and whether he built it himself over six months of uninterrupted work. The research says he might be right about the habit, wrong about the name, and closer to the truth than most people about the cost of stopping. This episode digs into the difference between flow and hyperfocus, why set shifting is genuinely more expensive

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22:39

Flydubai 1073: When the Threat Is in the Cockpit

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/01

On September 30, 2026, Flydubai Flight 1073 plunged from 34,000 feet over the Jordan–Saudi border after a first officer attacked his captain with a knife. The captain, bleeding, got the cockpit door open. Passengers and off-duty crew subdued the attacker, a plumber pulled back on the yoke, and the jet landed in Tabuk — missing most of its rudder. This episode unpacks the corrected record, the insider threat problem that post-9/11 aviation security was never built to solve, and what the Germanwings

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24:38

Why Depression Drains Your Energy

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/01

Daniel wrote in about a friend with seasonal affective disorder, and asked a question that turns out to be two questions: how do light and mood actually connect, and why does non-seasonal depression drain energy at all? This episode traces the light pathway — from the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells that don't help you see, to the contested question of whether light moves your circadian clock or acts on mood circuitry directly. Then it turns to the harder half: a condition where

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21:58

Can Your Kid Inherit the Way You Sleep?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/01

Daniel noticed his 15-month-old son sleeping with one arm raised at the exact same angle as his own. So he asked: can mannerisms like this actually be inherited? The science turns out to be far stranger than "he got it from his dad." Studies from the Estonian Biobank, twin research on sleep architecture, and infant imitation experiments all point in different directions — and one finding suggests the mannerism may have flowed from child to parent, not the other way around. We untangle the genes, the

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18:51

Fiber Through the Conduit: Bends, Dust, and Pull Socks

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/01

A twelve-meter Cat6 run terminates badly and quietly falls back to 100 megabit — the classic silent failure where the link light comes on and everything looks fine. Daniel already owns two SFP+ switches, a pair of 10GBASE-SR multimode transceivers, and an OM3 LC cable that works between them. So why not run the fiber through the conduit instead? This episode digs into how fiber actually handles tight bends compared to copper, whether transceivers stored in a Ziploc bag are still usable, how to

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21:13

Rack Dreams: Getting Display and USB Across the Room

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/01

Daniel wants to build a home networking rack in a place he actually owns — fiber landing in a wall cabinet, one big UPS, one PoE switch, and a rack-mounted workstation with display and USB extended to a desk in another room. This episode works through the actual engineering: why active optical cables make display the solved problem, why USB over distance is the maddening one, and what conduit, rack depth, and Wake on LAN really demand of the build. It's a spec exercise, and the specs are the

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21:14

Did the Puritans Really Hate Fun?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/01

The Puritans are America's favorite scapegoats for strict alcohol laws, drab clothing, and a war on fun. But how much of that is real? This episode digs into the history behind the caricature — from a 1781 loyalist hoax that invented Connecticut's "Bloody Laws" to taverns funded at town expense, rum consumption that outpaced the twentieth century, and ministers preaching "garden love." It also takes the counterargument seriously: historians like Bruce Daniels warn the revisionist rescue went too

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21:04

Right of Reply: What the Rulebook Actually Says

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/01

When the IDF published a ten-page rebuttal to the Venice-winning documentary NAZA, it raised a narrow but important question: what does the "right of reply" actually require when filmmakers allege wrongdoing? This episode walks through the BBC Editorial Guidelines, ABC Editorial Policies, and SPJ Code to establish the baseline — then applies it point by point to the IDF's complaint. The verdict is mixed in ways that matter: the "no contact before publication" charge maps directly onto a real breach,

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21:20

Same Pills, Same Gun, New State, New Crime

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/01

The United States is a plurilegal federal union — conflict-of-laws scholar Symeon Symeonides' term for a country where American judges encounter roughly five thousand conflict-of-laws cases a year, far more than the EU, Canada, or Australia. This episode works through why that divergence is constitutionally legal, which everyday behaviors carry real criminal risk across state lines, and whether states reaching across borders threatens the Union itself. From magazine capacity and concealed-carry

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19:20

The Siesta Law Nobody Obeys

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/01

Israel has rest hours written into law — 2 to 4 PM, noise restricted, on the books since 1961 — and almost nobody observes them. Where did the siesta actually come from (not Spain, it turns out), why has Spain itself largely given it up, and which countries are building nap infrastructure today? From Charlemagne's three-hour midday rest to China's office nap beds to Japan's lavender-scented nap rooms, this episode traces how the afternoon nap moved, mutated, and survived — just not where you'd

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2,743 results

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