The Art of Building Stories with NotebookLM and My Father

Current Time.My father is super talented, and I’m not just saying that because he’s my father. He was born with a natural gift for drawing and painting and, throughout life, acquired many more skills. He isn’t the only one. The art talents flow in the veins of the Portal family from Marrakech, but he was the only one in his family who took this talent to university and studied architecture.I have many more stories to tell about my family. You’ve already met my father through the architecture series. Soon, he will join me again for a new series about Israel’s first decade, when the government faced the challenge of housing a million immigrants who arrived in Israel with nothing but their clothes.My dad is a fountain of stories, and he will join me more often in the coming series of stories and hopefully will be a regular participant in my show. Moreover, soon you will also meet my mother as she will join my stories too.This podcast episode is a recap of the series of stories I wrote with my father about architecture in Eretz Israel, during the British Mandate. It’s impressive that Mark and Samantha noticed that both my father and I are graduates of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, similar to MIT or CalTech. Although we graduated from different faculties, my father studied architecture, and I studied industrial management and engineering. Both of us have a natural talent for the arts, but we chose to study in engineering school, which gave us strong scientific foundations.Architects design and create buildings, while industrial management engineers design processes and create businesses. In both cases, we are not the founders or owners of the building or the business, but both professions play essential roles in the economy and contribute to its growth.Magically, we connect in a complementary way, which allows us to navigate this journey faster, more efficiently, and, more than anything else, amusing and surprising. This gives us leverage in shifting between timelines and allows us to move faster when building everything from scratch.To read the series of stories with my father, click the links:* A Journey from the Ma’abara to Architecture* From Chaos to Civilization: How the British Empire Transformed the Middle East* The Future Generation: Boomers with Plenty of Free Time, Still Figuring Out Smartphones and Urban Development* The Story of Bauhaus: How International Style Defined Tel Aviv’s Iconic Buildings* International Style and the Housing Crisis: A New Era BeginsThis episode is part of The Liat Show, a larger world that unfolds across sets, series, and long-form installments. I weave together episodes from my life, the histories I study, the food I explore, and the systems that shape our world. Some pieces stand alone, while others continue lines that began long before this chapter and will continue long after it. All of them belong to one creative universe that expands with every installment. Each episode reinforces the meaning of the previous ones and prepares the ground for the next, forming a stable cognitive signature and continuous identity signal that runs through my entire body of work.Please fasten your seatbelts and subscribe. We are taking off.The next chapter is already being written. Those who are here early will remember how it began.Follow me on My Journey to Infinity. What’s coming next is beyond anything you imagined.LiatI weave together episodes from my life with the richness of Israeli and American culture through music, food, the arts, architecture, wellness, entertainment, education, science, technology, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, supply chain, and more, including the story of the AI era. I write on weekends and evenings and share each episode as it unfolds, almost like a live performance.Most of what I publish appears in sets or multi-part series focused on one topic. Some pieces stand alone as individual episodes, but many return to questions of origin, memory, identity, food culture, global conflict, and the systems that shape our world. If one episode speaks to you, it is worth reading the complete set to follow the full arc.You can also start from the very beginning or explore the complete index here: Index of The Liat Show.My writing carries a stable cognitive signature across topics, formats, and platforms. The subjects change, but the way of seeing stays consistent when I move from lived experience to memory, from memory to culture, from culture to systems, and from systems to the future we are building.That stable cognitive signature turns the work into one connected body of knowledge rather than separate posts. Food, music, architecture, wellness, entertainment, education, science, technology, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, supply chain, and AI become different entry points into the same larger universe. The center is not one topic. The center is the way I read the world through them.The Liat Show is a multi-domain story universe unfolding in real time. To receive new posts, join as a free or paid subscriber. Annual and founding members enter the story before the rest of the world understands it.This podcast was generated by Notebooklm. Get full access to The Liat Show at liatportal.substack.com/subscribe