It's revealing that the author thinks that a podcast is the ideal venue to reason through complex technical issues.

The "like" phenomenon is less of a verbal fluency issue and more of a cultural one. You can listen to someone smart like Donald Knuth speak and he will definitely stammer and stutter a lot, but he doesn't use filler words. "Like" is more of a West Coast or California thing and I also find it annoying and distracting.