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
Stablecoins and the Global Economy: A DECO Deep Dive
We unpack an NBER paper arguing that stablecoins do more than money — they reshape global finance through a borderless digital economy called DECO. We explore reserve-backed vs crypto-backed designs,…
00:06:56 |
Wed 30 Jul 2025
Fortunate Triangles: The One-to-Two Secret in Geometry and Number Theory
We explore the intriguing class of integral‑sided triangles whose orthocenter and circumcenter stand in a precise one‑to‑two relationship at a vertex, using the 6‑7‑8 example as our anchor. We’ll def…
00:11:58 |
Wed 30 Jul 2025
OEIS A00291: Bipartite partitions
In this episode of The Deep Dive we explore A00291, the bipartite partitions sequence. We unpack its multiple lives: counting bipartitions of N white objects with two black ones; counting factorizati…
00:04:46 |
Tue 29 Jul 2025
OEIS A000290: Perfect Squares
Dive into the classic sequence of perfect squares, A000290. We’ll trace how n^2 shows up in elegant ways—like being the sum of consecutive odd numbers and the sum of two consecutive triangular number…
00:04:22 |
Tue 29 Jul 2025
OEIS A000289: Explosive nonlinear recurrence, infinite coprime property, and connections to Sylvester and Fermat sequences
Welcome, curious minds. In this episode we dive into A000289, the nonlinear recurrence that rockets from simple beginnings to monstrous numbers, while keeping every pair of terms coprime. We unpack t…
00:05:25 |
Tue 29 Jul 2025
OEIS A000288: The all-ones tetranacci sequence
We explore A000288, the tetranacci-type sequence with starting values 1,1,1,1. Its simple recurrence a(n)=a(n−1)+a(n−2)+a(n−3)+a(n−4) leads to surprising structure: a combinatorial interpretation cou…
00:05:29 |
Tue 29 Jul 2025
The Bitter Lesson: Why Computation Trumps Hand-Coded Intelligence
In this Deep Dive, we unpack Rich Sutton's 2019 Bitter Lesson: over decades, AI breakthroughs favor general methods and scaled computation over hand-crafted knowledge. We trace examples from chess to…
00:04:56 |
Tue 29 Jul 2025
Garbage Cans & Bitter Lessons: AI in Messy Organizations
We explore the messy, real-world 'garbage can' view of work and the bitter lesson from AI research: brute computation often outpaces carefully encoded knowledge. From process maps to autonomous AI ag…
00:08:21 |
Tue 29 Jul 2025
OEIS A000287: Rooted polyhedral graphs with n edges
We explore A000287, the number of rooted polyhedral graphs with n edges. Rooted means a distinguished edge on the polyhedral skeleton, so counting distinguishes shapes that would be equivalent withou…
00:06:44 |
Fri 25 Jul 2025
Helly’s Theorem Demystified: From Local Overlaps to Global Intersection
Join us for an accessible tour of Helly’s theorem in discrete geometry. We’ll define convex sets, state the finite d-dimensional version, and show why every collection of d+1-wise intersections impli…
00:05:12 |
Thu 24 Jul 2025
Bridger at the Edge: The Real Jim Bridger and the Making of the American West
A deep dive into Jim Bridger’s life—from an illiterate blacksmith’s apprentice to a legendary mountain man, explorer, and mapmaker. We separate myth from history, explore his daring journeys to the G…
00:15:27 |
Thu 24 Jul 2025
The Deep Dive: Scaling Human Ingenuity—The ChatGPT Productivity Revolution
In this episode, we cut through the hype to quantify what ChatGPT is doing to productivity. Drawing on OpenAI data and research, we map rapid adoption, real-world workplace use, and early productivit…
00:17:31 |
Thu 24 Jul 2025
Aeneas Unlocked: AI, Inscriptions, and the Epigraphic Revolution
In The Deep Dive, we explore Google DeepMind's Aeneas—an AI that can restore fragmented Latin and Greek inscriptions, predict their origin, and date them within a historical window from 800 BCE to 80…
00:17:56 |
Thu 24 Jul 2025
OEIS A000286: Representations of integers as 2x^2 + 5y^2 up to 2^n
We explore A000286, the count of positive integers ≤ 2^n that can be expressed in the quadratic form 2x^2 + 5y^2. Trace its history (formerly known as n3251 and n312), its appearances in Sloan’s Hand…
00:04:41 |
Thu 24 Jul 2025
The Deep Dive: Subliminal Learning in AI — How Traits Travel Between Models
In this episode, we explore how advanced AI, especially large language models, can pick up non-semantic traits from data produced by other models. We cover the mechanism, the crucial role of shared i…
00:07:06 |
Thu 24 Jul 2025
OEIS A000285: Pseudofibonacci numbers
Explore A000285, the Fibonacci-like sequence with seeds 1 and 4: A0=1, A1=4, An=An-1+An-2. We'll show how it relates directly to Fibonacci and Lucas numbers (A_n = F_n + L_n + 1, or A_n = 2F_n + F_{n…
00:04:06 |
Thu 24 Jul 2025
All Models Are Wrong, But Some Are Useful: A Practical Dive into Modeling
A concise exploration of the idea that underpins modern data thinking: models are approximations, not perfect representations. We trace the line from Korzybski and Box to Cox, Gelman, and beyond, unp…
00:05:17 |
Thu 24 Jul 2025
OEIS A000284: Cubed Recurrence Sequence
We dive into A000284, the Cubed Recurrence Sequence, defined by a_n = a_{n-1}^3 + a_{n-2} with a_0 = 0 and a_1 = 1. See how a tiny nonlinear operation—cubing the previous term—can drive terms from si…
00:05:17 |
Tue 22 Jul 2025
Camille de Gast: Trailblazer of Speed, Service, and Suffrage
A riveting dive into the life of Camille de Gast, France’s fearless pioneer who leaped from the racing track to philanthropic leadership and feminist reform. From breaking barriers in early motorspor…
00:05:44 |
Tue 22 Jul 2025
The Hidden Hand Behind the Beagle Birds: Elizabeth Gould
Today on The Deep Dive we uncover Elizabeth Gould, the 19th‑century artist whose hand shaped natural history illustration yet remains largely unsung. We trace her collaboration with John Gould, her l…
00:04:49 |
Tue 22 Jul 2025
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