Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBells Before Steam: How Clocks Won the Industrial Revolution
Season 1 Episode 341
Mechanical clocks were invented by monks in the 7th century to pray on time — not to measure labor. But Lewis Mumford argued that the clock, not the …
1 week, 1 day ago
The Ninety Percent That Wasn't
Season 1 Episode 340
We got fact-checked on our own lean transformation statistics—and discovered we'd contradicted ourselves on camera. Hosts walk through Mark Graban's …
1 week, 2 days ago
Words That Walk: Why Food Outlasts Music as Language Teacher
Season 1 Episode 339
In episode 223, we crowned music humanity's most powerful involuntary language teacher. But what if we got it wrong? Today we explore Wanderwörter—th…
1 week, 2 days ago
The Enclosure Playbook: How Shared Resources Get Stolen
Season 1 Episode 338
Episode 338 explores the systematic erasure of commons — shared knowledge and resources that have been enclosed into private property systems through…
1 week, 3 days ago
Both Doors Have Pink Slips: The Double Bind of AI Adoption
Season 1 Episode 337
Workers in 2026 face an impossible choice: automate your job and become obsolete, or refuse and get fired. This is the double bind—and the data prove…
1 week, 4 days ago
Graft Rejection: Why Management Philosophies Can't Travel
Season 1 Episode 336
When Toyota reopened a failed GM factory with the same workforce, they achieved remarkable results within months—results GM couldn't replicate anywhe…
1 week, 4 days ago
The Linkshell Problem: How Group Chats Changed Friendship
Season 1 Episode 335
Every group chat on your phone has a secret history dating back to 1973—but the real question is: why does being in one feel like a job you never app…
1 week, 4 days ago
The Golden Rules: What This Show Keeps Rediscovering
Season 1 Episode 334
After three hundred and thirty-three episodes, the hosts mine the archive to extract the recurring structural claims this show keeps making across un…
1 week, 5 days ago
Hanging Up the Jersey: When Metaphors Become Defaults
Season 1 Episode 333
After 319 episodes and 94 hours of audio, Clown Cast retires three core metaphors—kintsugi, the Balinese water temples, and the immune system—that ha…
1 week, 5 days ago
The Confident Shrug: Why AI Can't Explain Itself
Season 1 Episode 332
Modern AI can diagnose skin cancer with 95% accuracy—but ask why, and you get a confident shrug. We explore interpretability and explainability: why …
1 week, 5 days ago