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.
Podcasting since 2024 • 1702 episodes
Intellectually Curious
Latest Episodes
The El Farol Bar Paradox: How Crowds Self-Organize Around a Threshold
Why does trying not to crowd a bar on a busy night end up crowded anyway? W. Brian Arthur’s El Farol Bar problem shows how bounded rationality, evolving heuristics, and adaptive decision rules drive a decentralized crowd to self-organize around...
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4:44
Veronica the Tool-Using Cow
A 13-year-old Swiss brown cow in Austria named Veronica wields a long-handled deck brush with precision, flipping it to use bristles or the smooth handle to scratch different body parts. This episode explores how her multipurpose tool use revea...
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4:42
Qhapaq Ñan: The Royal Inca Road and the Art of Connecting an Empire
An engineering marvel built without iron tools or wheels, the Qhapaq Ñan spanned 40,000 kilometers from Colombia to Chile and Argentina. We explore how the Incas carved stairs into mountains, engineered drainage, and relied on runners and llama...
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5:12
Klein-Gordon: The Relativistic Misfit That Became a Particle Physics Prophet
In 1926 Klein, Gordon, and Fock crafted a perfectly symmetric relativistic wave equation that failed to describe the electron’s hydrogen spectrum because electrons have spin. Yet decades later it found its moment in scalar fields and antipartic...
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5:03
The Medulla Nebula: Inside a Brain-Shaped Supernova Remnant
We peel back the pareidolia to reveal the physics of CTB 1 (G116.9+0.1): a 49-light-year remnant in Cassiopeia where radio and X-ray views tell opposite halves, shaped by an asymmetric explosion. The gas is rich in oxygen and neon, pointing to ...
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4:25