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
- 1388
- Years Active
- 2024 - 2025
Nash at the Table: Equilibria in Everyday Life
A friendly tour of Nash equilibrium—the point where everyone's choice is best given what others do. We translate the math into everyday stories—from traffic and pricing to coordination games and the …
00:11:59 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Magnesium: Fire, Food, and the Fuel for a Greener World
Explore magnesium’s extraordinary journey—from Epsom salts and battlefield flames to chlorophyll, enzymes, and lightweight metals powering today’s green tech. A curious tour of history, biology, and …
00:07:42 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Mars Deep Dive: Oceans, Canyons, and the Red Planet Unveiled
Join the Deep Divers as we journey billions of years back to Mars—imagining oceans, raging volcanoes, and a landscape shaped by cataclysmic events. We’ll untangle the Martian dichotomy, explore Valle…
00:11:27 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Manganese: From Cave Paintings to Modern Batteries
A curious tour of manganese, the life-sustaining element that linked ancient art, steel, and today’s batteries. We explore its long history, the science of its multiple oxidation states, how it got i…
00:12:49 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Moon Dust Decoded: A Deep Dive into Lunar Regolith
We peel back the layers of lunar regolith—the Moon’s ancient, glass-studded dust—to reveal how grain size records its history and why ISRU matters for life support, fuel, and construction. Explore mi…
00:13:57 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Cosmic Collision: Inside the LHC and the Quest to Understand Reality
A deep dive into the Large Hadron Collider: how proton beams, superconducting magnets, and the search for the Higgs boson connect to dark matter and the origins of the universe. We explore the data-s…
00:08:59 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Salt Deep: A Deep Dive into the Great Salt Lake
Join us for a science-and-story plunge into Utah’s Great Salt Lake—from its origins as Lake Bonneville to today’s hypersaline north arm, brine shrimp and flamingos, and the legends that surround it. …
00:08:28 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Karpathy Let s Reproduce GPT-2
Learn about Karpathy Let s Reproduce GPT-2
00:12:42 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
From Mob to Match: The Rough Roots of Medieval Football
Step back to medieval England, where hundreds chased a ball through crowded town squares with few rules. This episode untangles how Shrovetide games served as a social safety valve, how kings, poets,…
00:07:17 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Maxwell's Demon Revisited: Gatekeepers of Entropy and the Information Paradox
A deep dive into the 150-year-old Maxwell’s demon thought experiment: how a tiny gatekeeper at a microscopic door seemed to beat the second law of thermodynamics, why information has physical meaning…
00:11:35 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Gitchigami: A Deep Dive into Lake Superior
Take a multi-layered look at Lake Superior—from the Midcontinent Rift origins and its vast, time‑laden waters to shipwreck time capsules and today’s nitrate challenges. We connect ancient geology, Oj…
00:07:52 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Cosmic Visions: The Kardashev Scale and the Fermi Paradox
A mind‑bending dive into Nikolai Kardashev’s energy‑based ladder—from Type I planetary civilizations to Type III galactic mastery (and beyond to speculative Type IV). We’ll trace the ideas, explore m…
00:14:15 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Iron: From Meteorites to Molecules
Take a planetary tour of iron—from its extraterrestrial origins delivered by meteorites to its central role in the Iron Age, technology, and biology. We'll explore iron's different forms (allotropes)…
00:17:21 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
The Great Firewall: China’s Digital Fortress and the Global Web
We explore how China’s Great Firewall works—from the Golden Shield to the Great Cannon—and why it matters for science, business, and free expression in a tightly controlled yet increasingly connected…
00:09:16 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Gömböcs: The Self-Writing Shape That Always Lands Upright
Dive into the math and mystery of the gomboc—a convex, homogeneous 3D shape with a single stable and a single unstable equilibrium that 'writes' itself back upright. We trace its origins from Arnold’…
00:11:27 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Arrow to the Knee: The Tiny Line That Owned the Internet
A deep dive into Skyrim's famed guard dialogue and the I used to be an adventurer... line, exploring how a procedurally delivered quip became a global meme. We unpack open-world design, the quirks of…
00:05:27 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Lyceum Unleashed: Aristotle, the Walking School, and the World’s First Library
Take a stroll through ancient Athens’ Lyceum, a bustling crossroads of sport, religion, philosophy, and science—long before Aristotle’s footsteps, and even as a cradle for the first European library.…
00:11:16 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Beyond the Apple: The Hidden Life of Isaac Newton
Dive into the complex life of a scientific giant. From precocious sundials and plague-time breakthroughs to calculus, optics, alchemy, and the Principia, we unravel how Newton’s curiosity, ambition, …
00:11:32 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
Inside the Bit Room: How Computers Really Store Integers
A bite-sized tour of how computers represent integers: how bit width and byte size cap values, the difference between signed and unsigned numbers, and why overflow matters. We’ll also peek at big-num…
00:10:25 |
Sun 13 Oct 2024
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