Intellectually Curious
Intellectually Curious is a podcast by Mike Breault featuring over 1,600 AI-powered explorations across science, mathematics, philosophy, and personal growth. Each short-form episode is generated, refined, and published with the help of large language models—turning curiosity into an ongoing audio encyclopedia. Designed for anyone who loves learning, it offers quick dives into everything from combinatorics and cryptography to systems thinking and psychology.
Inspiration for this podcast:
"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson."
― Frank Herbert, Dune
Note: These podcasts were made with NotebookLM. AI can make mistakes. Please double-check any critical information.
Episodes
1751 episodes
Sieve of Eratosthenes: From Ancient Papyrus to Modern Prime Power
Two thousand years after Eratosthenes measured the Earth, his sieve for finding primes still benchmarks modern hardware. We break down the elegant filtering method—why you start at the square of a prime, how memory and segmentation unlock huge ...
•
4:32
The Mastaba Machine: How Egypt Built an Immortal Architecture
Step into the desert 4,500 years ago to meet the mastaba—an architectural 'bench' that was really a self-contained machine for immortality. We explore its two lives: the public chapel for offerings, and the sealed substructure with a backup sta...
•
12:39
The Halting Problem: Spinning Wheels and the Limits of Computation
Spinning wheels aren’t just frustrated users—they hint at a fundamental limit of computation. In this episode we unpack Turing's halting problem, walk through the Saboteur paradox that defeats a universal predictor, and see how Rice's theorem e...
•
5:26
OpenAI Frontier and the AI Co-Worker
We break down OpenAI's Frontier—an AI 'co-worker' designed as real infrastructure—and its three pillars: shared business context, persistent identity, and governance. See how a manufacturer shortened a six‑week production optimization cycle to ...
•
4:41
Systema Teleion: The Hidden Grid of Ancient Greek Music
We tour the ancient Greek musical system—from the tetrachord and the proslambanomenos to Systema Teleion and the three scale families (diatonic, chromatic, enharmonic). We explore the Pythagorean quest for perfect ratios versus Aristoxenus’s ea...
•
4:52
Lunar Infrastructure: LISTER, CELINE, and the Blueprint for a Moon City
We break down NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, with robots LISTER and CELINE mapping subsurface heat and cosmic-ray radiation to reveal the Moon’s true hazards. From a small pneumatic 'shoot-and-clear' system to a site-agnostic lander,...
•
4:45
Newgrange: The 17-Minute Sunbeam and the Dawn of Civilization
We descend into County Meath to explore Newgrange, a 5,000-year-old monument whose roof box funnels a single winter solstice beam that travels 19 meters and lights the chamber for 17 minutes. We'll unravel the engineering genius of the corbelle...
•
5:17
Claude Opus 4.6: Adaptive Thinking, Agent Teams, and the AI Orchestrator
We unpack Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 and its adaptive thinking: a metacognitive approach that decides when to think deeply or sprint and the move from a single tool to collaborative agent teams that coordinate across code, docs, and compliance...
•
5:31
Towards Self-Driving Code Bases: Orchestrating Thousands of AI Agents to Build a Browser
An in-depth look at Cursor’s ambitious system that turned thousands of AI agents into a coordinated software factory. From the single-genius Opus 4.5 to a recursive, isolated hierarchy, we explore how isolation, slack, and precise prompting sol...
•
6:01
Le Plasker: From Mesolithic Hut to Neolithic Tomb on Brittany's Ridge
In Brittany near Carnac, Le Plasker reveals a time-spanning story: a Mesolithic hut dating to about 5700 BC was abandoned for 300 years, then a Neolithic tomb was built atop the old ditch. Rather than a quiet cemetery, the site becomes a living...
•
4:22
Heavy Waves: Quantum Superpositions in Sodium Nanoparticles
We explore a Nature study that pushes quantum interference to masses of 170,000 daltons—sodium clusters of 5–10,000 atoms delocalized across 133 nm in a Talbot-Lau interferometer. The result challenges macrorealism and confirms the Schrödinger ...
•
4:22
The Skeleton of a Song: Roman Numerals and the Universal Grammar of Harmony
We dive into Roman numeral analysis—the universal translator for harmony. From I–IV–V and inversions to borrowed chords and modal interchange, learn how the same structural skeleton underpins Bach, the Beatles, and modern pop. Discover why V re...
•
5:15
Meltwater, Micro-Engineering, and the Curling Stone: The Physics of Sweeping
We unpack how thermodynamics and tribology turn vigorous sweeping into real-time ice engineering. Learn how a nanometer-thick meltwater film lowers friction, why the curling stone curls in the direction of its spin, and how the 'running band' c...
•
5:22
IceCube: A Deep Ice Window into the Neutrino Universe
IceCube tunes into the cosmos by catching the faint blue Cherenkov light when a high-energy neutrino interacts in the ice. We explore the engineering marvel of hot-water drilling, thousands of sensors, and the science of ghost particles that tr...
•
5:18
Ancient Zapotec Engineering
A tour of Monte Alban's audacious engineering: how a rugged mountaintop was leveled into a 15,000-person plaza with cut-and-fill, how earthquake-resistant teplera walls and multifunctional terraces stabilized slopes, farmed land, and captured r...
•
4:53
Ancient Automata: Hephaestus, Talos, and the Birth of Embodied Intelligence
We trace humanity’s oldest dreams of intelligent machines—from Hephaestus’s golden tripods and living handmaidens to Talos the programmable sentinel. Explore how these myths encode early engineering logic—open‑loop control, single‑point failure...
•
4:48
Doggerland: The Lost Mesolithic World Beneath the North Sea
A journey back to the Mesolithic shoreline that once connected Britain to mainland Europe. We explore Doggerland’s lush coastlines, lagoons, and reed beds, meet the Maglemosian hunter-gatherers, and trace how modern seismic mapping is reviving ...
•
4:31
Stygiomedusa Gigantica: The Giant Phantom Jelly of the Midnight Zone
Dive into the bathypelagic dark to meet the 33-foot Stygiomedusa Gigantica, a stinger-less giant that drifts like a cloak and swallows prey as its bell expands. Its four long oral arms act as a living net, while a small fish, Thalassobathia pel...
•
4:55
Apples Turn Brown To Defend Themselves
Why do apples brown so fast? We dive into enzymatic browning: how broken cells unleash PPO on phenolics, forming ortho-quinones and melanin in a blink. Learn why lemon juice stops it, why some varieties stay white longer, and how this tiny plan...
•
4:10
Bioengineered Fire: Could Nature Build a Dragon?
We explore a provocative science thought-experiment: could biology assemble a fire-breathing creature? By unpacking three constraints—fuel, ignition, and thermodynamics—we survey high-level, plausible mechanisms: energy-dense terpenoid oils as ...
•
5:10
PaperBanana: A Multi-Agent Studio for Faithful Scientific Visualizations
We explore PaperBanana, a multi-agent framework from Peking University and Google Cloud AI that turns research prose into accurate, publication-ready diagrams. Retrievers scout for structural bones, planners map concepts to that skeleton, styli...
•
5:26
Engineering Breakfast: The Pancake as a Fluid Dynamics Problem
We turn breakfast into physics: optimizing pancake thickness, batter viscosity, and pan heat to maximize Maillard flavor while keeping the center fluffy. From the 190°C target to the Leidenfrost signal and the single-flip rule, learn how to des...
•
6:01
Tensegrity: Floating Compression and the Shape of Strength
We unpack tensegrity—the architecture of floating compression. Tracing its history from artists like Snelson and Fuller to modern bridges like Brisbane’s Kurilpa Bridge, we see how isolated compression elements are held in a continuous tension ...
•
5:08
Rolling Giants: The Olmec Colossal Heads and the Logistics of Scale
We explore how the Olmec heartland moved 50-ton basalt heads from Sierra de los Tuxtlas to centers like San Lorenzo and La Venta. Without metal tools, they used natural pre-shaping and log-raft river transport during the rainy season, and prepa...
•
4:34
Propinquity: How Proximity Designs Our Relationships
We dive into the science of nearness—propinquity—showing how where we sit, walk, and scroll can predict who we befriend or fall in love with. From MIT’s Westgate stairwell study to today’s digital feeds, explore functional distance, the mere ex...
•
5:05
