Intellectually Curious
Intellectually Curious is a podcast by Mike Breault featuring over 1,200 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.
- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 12 minutes
- Episodes
- 1390
- Years Active
- 2024 - 2025
Lighthouse of Alexandria: Reassembling a Legend from the Sea
A French-led team has recovered 22 colossal blocks from the Mediterranean—the actual stones of the Pharos—plus a newly discovered gateway monument. This episode follows how archaeologists, engineers,…
00:09:01 |
Sat 12 Jul 2025
Gravity, Entropy, and the Emergent Cosmos
The Deep Dive explores the provocative idea that gravity might not be fundamental but emergent from information and thermodynamics. Tracing the arc from Bekenstein and Hawking to Verlinde’s entropic …
00:15:16 |
Fri 11 Jul 2025
OEIS A000273: Unlabeled Simple Digraphs
We explore unlabeled simple directed graphs with n vertices: what "simple" means (no loops, no multiple arrows in the same direction) and what "unlabeled" means (counting up to isomorphism). We discu…
00:07:53 |
Fri 11 Jul 2025
FLOPS Unleashed: From ENIAC to Exascale and Beyond
In this deep dive, we demystify FLOPS—the metric that quantifies a computer’s ability to crunch floating point math for science and AI. We’ll unpack why floating point arithmetic matters, compare FP6…
00:11:24 |
Fri 11 Jul 2025
The Demise of American Social Gatherings
Learn about The Demise of American Social Gatherings
Note: These podcasts are AI-generated, and sometimes AI can make mistakes. Please double-check any critical information.
Sponsored by Embersilk LLC
00:24:36 |
Fri 11 Jul 2025
OEIS A000271: Sums of Ménage Numbers
From the classic round-table ménage problem, we tour the world of integer sequences that sums of ménage numbers unlock. We explain how the circular counts tie to linear seatings, Chevelev’s insight t…
00:09:01 |
Thu 10 Jul 2025
SOL: The Atlantic Data Superhighway Powering Cloud and AI
The Deep Dive unpacks Google's SOL transatlantic subsea cable — its Florida landing, Santander landing, and connections through Bermuda and the Azores to Madrid — and explains how this 16-fiber-pair …
00:10:16 |
Thu 10 Jul 2025
OEIS A000072: Number of labeled trees with n nodes
We explore Cayley’s formula a(n) = n^(n-2) and the surprising ubiquity of this count—from spanning trees of the complete graph K_n to parking functions, chip-firing configurations, cycle factorizatio…
00:07:22 |
Thu 10 Jul 2025
OEIS A000270: Discordant permutations
We dive into OEIS A000270, the “Discordant permutations” sequence. We’ll unpack what it counts—permutations of {1, …, n+1} that are discordant with two reference permutations (the identity and a fixe…
00:10:18 |
Tue 08 Jul 2025
Mercury Unleashed: Diffusion-Powered Speed for Coding AI
In this episode of The Deep Dive, we explore Inception Labs' Mercury—the diffusion-based LLMs promising turbocharged speed without sacrificing quality. We unpack how MercuryCoder uses parallel refine…
00:05:23 |
Mon 07 Jul 2025
OEIS A000269: Three Labeled Vertices in Trees
In this episode we unpack A000269—the count of trees on n nodes with three distinct vertices labeled. The first terms are 3 for n=3 and 16 for n=4, with numbers growing rapidly as n increases. The en…
00:05:20 |
Mon 07 Jul 2025
OEIS A000268: Iterated Exponentials
A000268, the Iterated Exponentials sequence, explodes in size and beauty. Defined via its exponential generating function, it begins 1, 3, 15, 105, 947, 10,472, ... and reflects repeatedly applying e…
00:04:33 |
Sun 06 Jul 2025
Bacterial Code: Small Modules, Big Open Source Communities
Explore Andrei Karpathy’s Bacterial Code—how small, modular, self-contained bits can accelerate open source communities. We unpack the three pillars (energy-efficient microunits, modular operants, an…
00:05:04 |
Sun 06 Jul 2025
Birdsong at the Edge: Lightweight AI for Field Conservation
Join us as we explore how researchers turned EfficientNet B0 into a compact, field-ready birdsong recognizer. We unpack four key innovations—Efficient Channel Attention (ECA), targeted kernel-size re…
00:15:56 |
Sat 05 Jul 2025
Data Commons Unpacked: Making Public Data Accessible and Usable
A deep dive into Google's Data Commons, the open knowledge graph that unifies hundreds of public data sources into one searchable ecosystem. We explore how a single schema and API tame data fragmenta…
00:18:57 |
Sat 05 Jul 2025
Stein's Paradox: Shrinking to Improve All Estimates
We explore the counterintuitive James–Stein estimator: why pooling multiple normal means and shrinking toward a common center lowers total risk in three or more dimensions. We'll unpack geometric int…
00:15:23 |
Sat 05 Jul 2025
Shrink to See: Alvar Alloy 30 and the Race for 10-Picometer Space Stability
In this episode we explore Alvar Alloy 30, a titanium-based material that contracts when heated, and how NASA’s hunt for ultra-stable exoplanet observations is driving a leap in materials science. We…
00:17:07 |
Sat 05 Jul 2025
Caesar Unraveled: Prohibition, Tijuana, and the Salad That Conquered the World
Trace the real origin of the Caesar salad from Cesar Cardini’s improvised 1924 dish in Prohibition‑era Tijuana to today’s global staple. We separate myth from fact—anchovies or not?—and follow its jo…
00:04:20 |
Sat 05 Jul 2025
Noether's Master Key: Symmetry, Conservation, and the Universe
Join us on The Deep Dive as we unravel Emmy Noether's theorem: how continuous symmetries in nature imply conserved quantities like momentum, energy, and angular momentum. We’ll explore concrete examp…
00:14:03 |
Sat 05 Jul 2025
OEIS A000267: Floor of sqrt(4n+1)
We explore A000267, the deceptively simple a(n) = floor(sqrt(4n+1)). Beyond the bare rule lies a repeating pattern where each integer k occurs floor(2k+3) times, a connection to odd squares, and a we…
00:13:48 |
Fri 04 Jul 2025
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are the property of Mike Breault. This content is not affiliated with or endorsed by eachpod.com.