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
1783 episodes
Why AI Is Obsessed With Em Dashes
We pull back the curtain on the AI obsession with Em dashes, exploring how prestige bias in training data and safety constraints shape model output. Learn why the next-word predictor treats a dash as a cheap, universal connector—costing no keys...
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4:29
Costly Signals: Education, Warranties, and the Trust Economy
We unpack signaling theory (Michael Spence) and why a diploma acts as an endurance test rather than a memory cache. From the sheepskin effect to warranties, IPOs, and charitable giving, this episode shows how costly signals separate the real de...
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5:06
The Ripening Brain: Memory, Sleep, and the Art of Rewriting the Past
A deep dive into how memory consolidates—from fast synaptic changes in the hippocampus to cortex-wide reorganization—sleep-driven replay that strengthens traces, and the surprising idea of reconsolidation that re-edits memories when we recall t...
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5:08
Antarctic Ring of Fire: The 2026 Annular Eclipse Guide
On February 17, 2026, a spectacular annular solar eclipse graces Antarctica as the Moon’s apogee yields a bright ring around the Sun. We unpack the geometry—why up to 96% coverage lasts about 140 seconds, how to watch safely with ISO 12312-2 gl...
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4:52
The Ghosts of Tannins: A Chemistry Tour of Wine
We dive into the chemistry behind a glass of wine—how flavonoids color, tannins texture, and aging polymerization shape flavor, mouthfeel, and aging. From maceration and skin contact to sediment as the ‘ghosts’ of tannins, we connect sunlight, ...
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5:04
Satisficing: The Smart Shortcut for Busy Minds
We explore Herbert A. Simon’s idea of bounded rationality and the art of satisficing—the practice of choosing the first option that meets your criteria rather than chasing the optimal solution. Learn how aspiration thresholds, stopping rules, a...
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4:05
Autonomous Neighbors: How Generative Agents Bring Smallville to Life
We dive into the Stanford–Google Generative Agents study, explaining how memory streams, smart retrieval, and a reflection loop let AI residents in a sandbox town autonomously plan parties, spread news, and even spark romantic subplots—without ...
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6:19
Deglazing Demystified: The Science of Fond and Sauce Mastery
We reveal why the brown fond in a hot pan is culinary gold and unpack the physics and chemistry of deglazing—from Maillard reactions and the formation of fond to thermal shock, steam jacking, and the polar chemistry that makes wine outperform o...
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4:50
Gemini DeepThink: The AI that Proves, Refutes, and Bridges Science
A deep dive into Google's Gemini DeepThink and its Aletheia workflow, where AI generates proofs, then verifies them with a self-checking verifier—and even admits when it can’t solve something. We explore how this advisor-style model bridges mat...
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5:30
LHS 1903: The Inside-Out System That Rewrites Planet Formation
A nearby red-dwarf system defies the classic order of planets: a dense inner rocky world, two gas-rich mini-Neptunes, and an outer rocky planet. We unpack the TESS and CHEOPS data, explore the gas-depleted sequential formation idea (the contagi...
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5:16
Mars Organic Molecules Discovery
We break down Pavlov and team’s Cumberland rock study from the Curiosity rover. Long-chain alkanes—decane, undecane, and dodecane—survived 80 million years of Martian radiation, and a decay-model suggests the original organics were orders of ma...
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5:07
Stigmergy: How Simple Signals Build Complex Cathedrals
Dive into Pierre-Paul Grasse’s 1959 idea of stigmergy—the environment as a collaborator. From termites laying mud balls that become arches to Wikipedia edits and open‑source collaboration, we explore how simple local signals guide massive, robu...
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4:36
Zero, Half-Collinear, and the AI Breakthrough in Gluon Scattering
We explore how a decades-old assumption that a single-gluon tree amplitude must vanish breaks down in a very specific half-collinear setup. A Harvard–Cambridge–OpenAI collaboration, aided by an AI that inferred a clean, piecewise-constant formu...
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5:17
The Box that Built the World: The Intermodal Container’s Global Revolution
A concise voyage from early box ideas to ISO standardization, tracking how a simple steel crate and a clever twist‑lock transformed shipping into an hours‑not weeks affair. Meet the designers and engineers—Tantlinger, McLean, and the corner cas...
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4:44
The Gittins Index: When to Exploit, When to Explore
A concise, math-forward tour of the Gittins index—the rule that turns uncertainty into a value and tells you which 'arm' to pull in the multi-armed bandit problem. We'll trace the idea from slot machines to real-world decisions in energy and me...
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5:27
Miranda’s Hidden Ocean: Forensic Geology on Uranus’s Chaotic Moon
We decode a Voyager 2 flyby to show Miranda might be more than a frozen relic: a thin ice crust floating above a deep subsurface ocean, sculpted by tidal forces with Umbriel. Through forensic-style mapping of cracks, ridges, and cliffs, researc...
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4:47
Storming to Performing: The Real Path Through Bruce Tuckman’s Team Phases
We dive into Bruce Tuckman’s classic Forming–Storming–Norming–Performing model, exploring why conflict isn’t a side effect but a necessary filter in real teams. Learn how leadership style must shift from informing and coordinating to coaching a...
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3:57
From Finger Flicks to the Vortex Genie: The Tiny Revolution in Lab Mixing
We trace the leap from bulky orbital shakers to compact vortex mixers, revealing the miniaturization and high-speed logic that power a tiny, furious vortex in a test tube. This deep dive covers the Kraft brothers’ 1962 patent for the Vortex Gen...
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5:18
Automated Backpack Microscope Diagnoses Malaria
Octopi 2.0 is a Stanford-led, open-source backpack-sized automated microscope aimed at democratizing diagnostics. It costs under $2,000, scans about 1 million red blood cells per minute—roughly 100x faster than a human—and uses a novel DAPI-RNA...
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5:17
Good Enough: The Case for Aspiration-Based AI
Aspiration-based reinforcement learning, a specialized approach to AI that prioritizes satisficing over the traditional goal of maximization. Rather than ruthlessly seeking the highest possible reward, these agents operate based on internal ben...
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4:46
Atomic GPT: Building a Transformer from Scratch in 200 Lines
A deep dive into Karpathy's Atomic GPT—a fully functional transformer implemented in roughly 200 lines of pure Python, with no libraries. We trace how a value class records computation history, how backpropagation unfolds from receipts, and how...
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4:46
Egg Nebula: A Cosmic Blink From Red Giant to Planetary Nebula
Step inside the Egg Nebula—a fleeting moment in stellar life as a red giant sheds its skin and begins a new phase as a pre-planetary nebula. We unpack its striking bipolar geometry shaped by a hidden companion, the concentric shells carved by t...
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4:55
The Thermodynamics of the Perfect Cookie: Expansion, Extinction, and the Ring
We break down the heat-and-moisture physics behind a great cookie, turning baking into a two-act physics show. Act one: expansion as butter melts and CO2 forms bubbles; act two: controlled shrinkage that seals the structure and yields the covet...
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4:59
Hidden Price Tags: Hedonic Regression and the Value of Everyday Things
We demystify hedonic regression, the method that teases out the price of a single feature from bundles like cars, homes, and laptops. Learn how implicit prices reveal the true value of non-market goods—clean air, park access, and public infrast...
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5:24
Carmack's Light-Speed Memory: The 200-KM Fiber Loop and the AI Hardware Revolution
We explore John Carmack's daring idea to store AI weights not in RAM but in a 200-kilometer loop of fiber, turning data latency into a form of storage. We trace the history of delay-line memories, explain how light-speed data flow could slash e...
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