Best Sarah Alberts Podcasts (2025)

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11. Scotland’s Most Notorious Serial Killers (Ep 1) 57:14

1h ago57:14

57:14

How did Burke and Hare get into the lucrative business of murder? Why was there such a demand for fresh corpses in 1820s Edinburgh? What gruesome methods did the pair use to kill their victims? Join David Olusoga and Sarah Churchwell as they delve into the gothic story of Burke and Hare, the mass murderers who scandalised the nation. To find out mo…

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RAG Risks: Why Retrieval-Augmented LLMs are Not Safer with Sebastian Gehrmann - #732 57:09

1d ago57:09

57:09

Today, we're joined by Sebastian Gehrmann, head of responsible AI in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg, to discuss AI safety in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and generative AI in high-stakes domains like financial services. We explore how RAG, contrary to some expectations, can inadvertently degrade model safety. We cover examples o…

1
Richard Merritt Part 2 53:23

16h ago53:23

53:23

Richard Merritt was a well-known, successful attorney in Smyrna, Georgia, until he was caught stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his clients. Richard pleaded guilty to the financial crimes and was given two weeks to get his affairs in order before he had to report to prison. Richard was willing to kill to avoid going to jail. Join Mike …

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A Talk at the National Bloc with Lama Wazzan, Lina Jarrous, Kristy Asseily & George Kyriakos 1:16:17

4d ago1:16:17

1:16:17

A discussion on Beirut's municipal elections and Beirut Madinati 2025's platform.With Lama Wazzan, Lina Jarrous, Kristy Asseily & George Kyriakos.Co-hosted with Charbel Al Khoury.The podcast is only made possible through listener and viewer donations.Please help support The Beirut Banyan by contributing via PayPal:https://www.paypal.me/walkbeirutOr…

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10. 1983: The World On The Brink (Ep 2) 53:32

5d ago53:32

53:32

Why did a military training exercise seem like an imminent threat of nuclear attack? Despite being minutes away from launching Nuclear missiles, what made the Soviets back down? Why does no one know how close we came to total annihilation? Join Sarah Churchwell and David Olusoga on Journey Through Time as they discuss the days where we narrowly esc…

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From Prompts to Policies: How RL Builds Better AI Agents with Mahesh Sathiamoorthy - #731 1:01:25

9d ago1:01:25

1:01:25

Today, we're joined by Mahesh Sathiamoorthy, co-founder and CEO of Bespoke Labs, to discuss how reinforcement learning (RL) is reshaping the way we build custom agents on top of foundation models. Mahesh highlights the crucial role of data curation, evaluation, and error analysis in model performance, and explains why RL offers a more robust altern…

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Municipal Elections & Beirut Madinati 2025 with Kristy Asseily (Ep.417) 1:10:29

6d ago1:10:29

1:10:29

Kristy Asseily joins The Beirut Banyan to discuss her candidacy for Beirut's 2025 municipal elections.Our discussion covers her recent return to Lebanon and passion for grassroots politics, Beirut Madinati's efforts in retrospect, and the short and long-term platform the list is advocating.We also talk about voter engagement, communal concerns, mun…

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Richard Merritt Part 1 59:00

8d ago59:00

59:00

Richard Merritt was a well-known, successful attorney in Smyrna, Georgia, until he was caught stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his clients. Richard pleaded guilty to the financial crimes and was given two weeks to get his affairs in order before he had to report to prison. Richard was willing to kill to avoid going to prison Join Mike…

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9. Able Archer: The Closest We Ever Came To Nuclear War (Ep 1) 1:05:12

12d ago1:05:12

1:05:12

Why was the world so close to the brink of nuclear war in November 1983? What tactics were the Americans employing to play high stakes mind games with the Soviets? And, what made the Soviets so exceptionally paranoid? Join David Olusoga and Sarah Churchwell on Journey Through Time as they discuss how a routine military training exercise in November…

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How OpenAI Builds AI Agents That Think and Act with Josh Tobin - #730 1:07:27

17d ago1:07:27

1:07:27

Today, we're joined by Josh Tobin, member of technical staff at OpenAI, to discuss the company’s approach to building AI agents. We cover OpenAI's three agentic offerings—Deep Research for comprehensive web research, Operator for website navigation, and Codex CLI for local code execution. We explore OpenAI’s shift from simple LLM workflows to reaso…

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Aldo Pacheco 1:04:05

18d ago1:04:05

1:04:05

To outsiders, Aldo and Barbara Pacheco seemed like a happy family. When Barbara filed for divorce after a decade of marriage, Aldo became obsessed with winning custody of his kids and vowed that if he couldn’t have Barbara, no one else would. Join Mike and Gibby as they talk about Aldo Pacheco. What appeared to be an earlier attempt at killing Barb…

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8. The Myth of Tokyo Rose: Truman and the FBI Witch Hunt (Ep 2) 1:00:30

19d ago1:00:30

1:00:30

Why did Iva Toguri get branded America’s first female traitor, despite there being no evidence to convict her? How did her case become important to President Harry Truman’s re-election campaign? And, after decades, how did Iva and her supporters finally clear her name? Join Sarah Churchwell and David Olusoga on Journey Through Time as they delve in…

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CTIBench: Evaluating LLMs in Cyber Threat Intelligence with Nidhi Rastogi - #729 56:18

23d ago56:18

56:18

Today, we're joined by Nidhi Rastogi, assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology to discuss Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), focusing on her recent project CTIBench—a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on real-world CTI tasks. Nidhi explains the evolution of AI in cybersecurity, from rule-based systems to LLMs that accelerate analysis by p…

1
Timothy John Cook 1:05:08

26d ago1:05:08

1:05:08

Omar Medina was a young music producer who went missing in September 2017. Days later, his body was found in a barrel in the San Diego Bay. Investigators traced the evidence back to Omar’s former landlord, Timothy John Cook. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss Timothy John Cook and the murder of Omar Medina. Cook denied all involvement in Omar's mu…

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7. The Myth of Tokyo Rose: The Woman Accused of Betraying America (Ep 1) 52:39

26d ago52:39

52:39

How did Tokyo Rose, a woman who never existed, become one of WWII’s most well known Japanese figures? Who was Iva Toguri, the American citizen caught up in the myth? How did sensationalist journalists weaponise the story of Tokyo Rose to create a vicious narrative about post war Japan? To find out more about Find My Past visit: https://www.findmypa…

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Generative Benchmarking with Kelly Hong - #728 54:17

30d ago54:17

54:17

In this episode, Kelly Hong, a researcher at Chroma, joins us to discuss "Generative Benchmarking," a novel approach to evaluating retrieval systems, like RAG applications, using synthetic data. Kelly explains how traditional benchmarks like MTEB fail to represent real-world query patterns and how embedding models that perform well on public benchm…

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Kate Webster 1:00:19

29d ago1:00:19

1:00:19

The murder of Julia Martha Thomas, also known as the Barnes Mystery or the Richmond Murder, was one of the most infamous crimes of 19th-century Britain. Julia was murdered by her servant Kate Webster, who dismembered her remains and impersonated her for two weeks before fleeing the country. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss Kate Webster. Kate was…

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6. Darwin, Dickens, and a Giant Diamond: Inside The Great Exhibition (Ep 2) 57:09

1M ago57:09

57:09

Paranoid predictions of crime fill the newspapers - so how will the well-to-do react to the incoming crowds of the working-class? From Harrods to the Eiffel Tower, what iconic attractions do we have The Great Exhibition to thank for? Did this 'Peace Festival' unite a nation or expose the deep-seated class divisions of Victorian society? Join Sarah …

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Exploring the Biology of LLMs with Circuit Tracing with Emmanuel Ameisen - #727 1:34:06

1M ago1:34:06

1:34:06

In this episode, Emmanuel Ameisen, a research engineer at Anthropic, returns to discuss two recent papers: "Circuit Tracing: Revealing Language Model Computational Graphs" and "On the Biology of a Large Language Model." Emmanuel explains how his team developed mechanistic interpretability methods to understand the internal workings of Claude by rep…

1
The Swanson Motel Murders 59:11

1M ago59:11

59:11

On November 16th, 1981, 53-year-old Priscilla Dinkel and her 7-year-old granddaughter Danelle Lietz were murdered at The Swanson Motel in Dickinson, North Dakota. The case went cold until 1991, when local law enforcement utilized an FBI profile to identify the killer. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss the Swanson motel murders. The police followe…

1
The Time Line with Ali Hamed - April 13, 1975 - 2025 (Ep.416) 49:12

1M ago49:12

49:12

Please make sure to check out the video version: https://youtu.be/rKUnhF4hXU4On displacement and refuge on both sides of the Green Line, the diversity we retain and a tribute to the city we call home fifty years after April 13, 1975.With special thanks to Ali Hamed.Videography by Alexy Chidiac. Soundtrack by Marc Codsi.The podcast is made possible …

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5. The Great Exhibition: Prince Albert, Revolutionaries, and the Duke of Wellington (Ep 1) 49:55

1M ago49:55

49:55

The Great Exhibition is to open in May 1851 and millions of people will descend on the capital to marvel at exhibitions of culture and industry. Victorian engineering and determination will transform one million square feet of glass into the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park in just five months, ready to house the wares of the world. However, th…

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Teaching LLMs to Self-Reflect with Reinforcement Learning with Maohao Shen - #726 51:45

2M ago51:45

51:45

Today, we're joined by Maohao Shen, PhD student at MIT to discuss his paper, “Satori: Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Action-Thought Enhances LLM Reasoning via Autoregressive Search.” We dig into how Satori leverages reinforcement learning to improve language model reasoning—enabling model self-reflection, self-correction, and exploration of a…

1
Jonathan Scott Graham 1:03:02

2M ago1:03:02

1:03:02

In the early morning hours of August 16th, 1986 an intruder entered the home of 27-year-old Gary Larson and stabbed him to death before raping Gary’s fiancee. The case was unsolved for almost twenty years, until a peeping tom was arrested in 2004, when authorities noticed similarities to the suspect in the cold case. Join Mike and Gibby as they dis…

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4. The First Woman to Run for President: Sex, Scandal, and Suffragists (Ep 2) 1:07:34

2M ago1:07:34

1:07:34

From the trading floor of Wall Street to the campaign trail, Victoria Woodhull was a force to be reckoned with. Sadly, her scandalous presidential campaign ends in disaster, and she spends election night in a cell. She’s been arrested for trying to expose the hypocrisy of one of America's most revered figures, the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, and h…

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Waymo's Foundation Model for Autonomous Driving with Drago Anguelov - #725 1:09:07

2M ago1:09:07

1:09:07

Today, we're joined by Drago Anguelov, head of AI foundations at Waymo, for a deep dive into the role of foundation models in autonomous driving. Drago shares how Waymo is leveraging large-scale machine learning, including vision-language models and generative AI techniques to improve perception, planning, and simulation for its self-driving vehicl…

1
Johnny Lewis 1:04:41

2M ago1:04:41

1:04:41

Johnny Lewis was an actor on many different shows. He was best known for his roles on The OC and Sons of Anarchy. He was a teen heartthrob who once dated Katy Perry. A motorcycle accident sent his life spiraling downward, culminating in an unbelievable tragedy. There was no doubt he suffered some head trauma during the accident, and it is difficult…

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3. The First Woman to Run for President: Rags to Riches (Ep 1) 1:02:13

2M ago1:02:13

1:02:13

The American public is outraged by the announcement of a woman running for president. The year is 1872 and the candidate is Victoria Woodhull. Victoria Woodhull’s fascinating life started in a rural frontier town in Ohio. By age twelve she had become her family’s main breadwinner, working as a travelling spiritual medium and faith healer. Her eccen…

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Dynamic Token Merging for Efficient Byte-level Language Models with Julie Kallini - #724 50:32

2M ago50:32

50:32

Today, we're joined by Julie Kallini, PhD student at Stanford University to discuss her recent papers, “MrT5: Dynamic Token Merging for Efficient Byte-level Language Models” and “Mission: Impossible Language Models.” For the MrT5 paper, we explore the importance and failings of tokenization in large language models—including inefficient compression…

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Richard Glossip 1:22:34

2M ago1:22:34

1:22:34

Richard Glossip spent years on Oklahoma’s death row for a murder he says he did not commit. He has come within hours of execution and has been served his last meal three times. Richard has filed numerous appeals and professed his innocence for over 20 years. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss Richard Glossip. He was convicted of murdering his boss…

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2. The Attack that Shook America: Black Tom Explodes (Ep 2) 48:31

2M ago48:31

48:31

New York harbour erupts with an explosion as Black Tom island is ripped apart. The shock waves ripple out around Manhattan and New Jersey, shattering windows miles away and even registering on the Richter scale. However, despite the widespread destruction, the attack was downplayed as an accident by the US authorities and it was only years later th…

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GEORGE WARDINI - Measure of Success (Ep.415) 57:57

2M ago57:57

57:57

George Wardini returns to The Beirut Banyan.We look back to 1983 and discuss similarities in the relative calm Lebanon experienced following Israel's siege of Beirut and expulsion of Arafat from Lebanon.We also examine post-2024 war developments and security risks related to attempts at disarmament, what the potential of a wider Arab-Israeli peace …

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1. The Attack That Shook America: German Spies in New York (Ep 1) 49:37

2M ago49:37

49:37

New York, 1916. America is supposedly neutral in the war but they are shipping huge quantities of supplies to the allies. However, it being a nation of immigrants means loyalties across the United States are divided and members of the German-American community are causing trouble. Led by Franz von Papen and funded from Berlin, a ring of spies and s…

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البير كوستانيان 4:45

2M ago4:45

4:45

البير كوستانيان: وحدها المحاسبة وإعادة الهيكلة تسترجع الودائع، لا بيع الأوهامBy Ronnie Chatah

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Scaling Up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning with Jonas Geiping - #723 58:38

2M ago58:38

58:38

Today, we're joined by Jonas Geiping, research group leader at Ellis Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems to discuss his recent paper, “Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach.” This paper proposes a novel language model architecture which uses recurrent depth to enable “thinking in l…

1
William Leslie Arnold 1:15:22

2M ago1:15:22

1:15:22

In 1958, 16-year-old William Leslie Arnold shot his parents over a dispute involving the family car. Less than a decade into his life sentence, he escaped prison and was on the run for over forty years. In 2022, a genealogy database finally revealed his whereabouts. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss William Leslie Arnold. The crimes he committed …

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Journey Through Time Trailer 1:22

2M ago1:22

1:22

Join historians Sarah Churchwell and David Olusoga on Journey Through Time, as they expose forgotten history, and bring to light extraordinary events you should have heard of. Journey through Time, a new show from Goalhanger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesBy Goalhanger

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NADIM SHEHADI - The Real Question (Ep.414) 55:23

2M ago55:23

55:23

Nadim Shehadi returns to The Beirut Banyan.In this episode we discuss the 2020 Eurobond default and the controversy surrounding that decision. We also look at fault lines formed between the banking sector and restructuring-advocacy groups and the wider story of the economic direction of the country.Nadim Shehadi is an economist and regular contribu…

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Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought with Chengzu Li - #722 42:11

2M ago42:11

42:11

Today, we're joined by Chengzu Li, PhD student at the University of Cambridge to discuss his recent paper, “Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought.” We explore the motivations behind MVoT, its connection to prior work like TopViewRS, and its relation to cognitive science principles such as dual coding theory. We dig i…

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Mark Latunski 1:17:27

2M ago1:17:27

1:17:27

Kevin Bacon left home on Christmas Eve 2019 to see a man he met on a dating app that evening. After his parents reported him missing the following day, the police received a tip that led them to the home of Mark Latunski, who was already known to police because of two disturbing incidents earlier that year. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss Mark …

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Inside s1: An o1-Style Reasoning Model That Cost Under $50 to Train with Niklas Muennighoff - #721 49:29

3M ago49:29

49:29

Today, we're joined by Niklas Muennighoff, a PhD student at Stanford University, to discuss his paper, “S1: Simple Test-Time Scaling.” We explore the motivations behind S1, as well as how it compares to OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek's R1 models. We dig into the different approaches to test-time scaling, including parallel and sequential scaling, as well…

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James VanCallis 1:04:18

3M ago1:04:18

1:04:18

April Millsap was murdered while walking her dog on a popular Michigan trail. Prosecutors used data from her digital footprint to help secure a conviction in her 2014 murder case. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss James VanCallis. Some eyewitnesses saw a man on a motorcycle interacting with a young girl on the trail, and they were able to provide…

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Accelerating AI Training and Inference with AWS Trainium2 with Ron Diamant - #720 1:07:05

3M ago1:07:05

1:07:05

Today, we're joined by Ron Diamant, chief architect for Trainium at Amazon Web Services, to discuss hardware acceleration for generative AI and the design and role of the recently released Trainium2 chip. We explore the architectural differences between Trainium and GPUs, highlighting its systolic array-based compute design, and how it balances per…

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Bernard Finch and Carole Tregoff 1:10:40

3M ago1:10:40

1:10:40

Bernard Finch was a wealthy doctor who worked in the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California. In 1958, he began having an affair with his married receptionist Carole Tregoff. When Dr. Finch’s wife was found dead, the two became the prime suspects. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss Bernard Finch and Carole Tregoff. Finch was the type of man used…

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ALBERT KOSTANIAN - A Final Word (Ep.413) 12:26

3M ago12:26

12:26

Albert Kostanian returns to The Beirut Banyan.In this short episode he candidly discusses a campaign to discredit his economic views and media reputation, debunks accusations of shadow funding and behind-the-scenes government orchestration regarding Kulluna Irada, dispels smear tactics increasingly used to sideline reform-minded advocates in govern…

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π0: A Foundation Model for Robotics with Sergey Levine - #719 52:30

3M ago52:30

52:30

Today, we're joined by Sergey Levine, associate professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, to discuss π0 (pi-zero), a general-purpose robotic foundation model. We dig into the model architecture, which pairs a vision language model (VLM) with a diffusion-based action expert, and the model training "recipe," emphasizing the ro…

1
Scott Watson 1:07:49

3M ago1:07:49

1:07:49

The disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope is one of New Zealand’s most high-profile and controversial true crime cases. Scott Watson was convicted of the murders, but Watson has spent years appealing the verdict and has many supporters who believe in his innocence. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss Scott Watson and the murders of Ben Smart a…

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AI Trends 2025: AI Agents and Multi-Agent Systems with Victor Dibia - #718 1:44:59

3M ago1:44:59

1:44:59

Today we’re joined by Victor Dibia, principal research software engineer at Microsoft Research, to explore the key trends and advancements in AI agents and multi-agent systems shaping 2025 and beyond. In this episode, we discuss the unique abilities that set AI agents apart from traditional software systems–reasoning, acting, communicating, and ada…

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Stephen Reitz 1:09:11

3M ago1:09:11

1:09:11

Stephen Reitz invoked a sleepwalking defense after he was charged with killing a woman during a weekend getaway. He claimed he woke up from a dream that he was fighting off an intruder and discovered her body. Investigators doubted his story, especially when they uncovered evidence about his tumultuous relationship with the victim. Join Mike and Gi…

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A Wedding, a Commemoration & a Funeral 2:59

3M ago2:59

2:59

On a wedding, a commemoration & a funeral.And holding Nawaf Salam’s incoming government to a higher standard.By Ronnie Chatah

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Sarah Alberts Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen