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
1702 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
The Theory of a Superionic Core at the Center of the Earth
What if Earth’s inner core isn’t a simple solid ball of iron at all? In this episode we explore the idea that the core could be in a superionic state—iron lattices that stay solid while carbon atoms flow through them like dancers in a square—ma...
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5:05
The Rise of the Virtual Procurement Officer
Explore the shift from automation to autonomy in procurement. A virtual procurement officer perceives messy data, reasons toward goals, and drafts sourcing packs. All under guardrails that require human sign-off. Learn about real‑world sa...
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4:35
Head Activator: Hydra's Regeneration Tool Rebooted for the Human Brain
We trace the head activator signal from hydra’s regenerative biology to its life-preserving role in the human brain. Learn how HA binds to the GPR37 receptor, sparks calcium signaling, and activates cell-survival pathways, offering a new angle ...
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5:09
Goliath of the Seas: The Seawise Giant and the Quest for the Largest Ship
We dive into the Seawise Giant—the largest self-propelled ship ever built—and unpack how its unprecedented size challenged physics, engineering, and economics. From a doomed first life to a salvaged giant that spent years as a floating storage ...
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5:39
Artemis II: Humans Return to the Moon
We decode Artemis II—the first crewed lunar mission since 1972. Over 10 days, Orion Integrity launches on a towering SLS, performs a lunar flyby via the European Service Module, and validates life support, heat shielding, and a crucial manual d...
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5:22
The Great Enclosure of Saqqara: Egypt's Stone-Walled Prototype for the Pyramids
In Saqqara's landscape near the Step Pyramid, the Great Enclosure is a colossal, empty rectangle. This episode traces Gizar el-Mudir’s double limestone walls and solid-fill interior, dating it to the late 2nd/early 3rd dynasty, and argues it wa...
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5:01
The Bellman Equation: Turning Big Problems into Bite-Sized Plans
A tour through the Bellman equation and dynamic programming: how to turn a sprawling, multi-step problem into a sequence of manageable steps using backward induction. We unpack the principle of optimality, the role of the discount factor in bal...
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5:03
History of Celestial Mechanics
A tour through celestial mechanics—from Newton's gravitation and Kepler's laws to the intricate three-body problem, perturbation theory, and Lagrange points. We explore inertial frames and heliocentric coordinates, how precise predictions drive...
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4:43
The Step Pyramid of Djoser
We journey back to Saqqara around 2670 BC to witness the birth of monumental stone architecture. Imhotep transforms a square mud-brick mastaba into a six-step pyramid, while a vast subterranean labyrinth, thousands of faience tiles, and clever ...
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4:49
Saturn's Moon Empire: Titan, Enceladus, Iapetus, and the 274-Moon Frontier
A rapid tour of Saturn's astonishing moon family. Titan's thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere hosts vast methane lakes; Enceladus vents cryovolcanic plumes from a subsurface ocean, feeding Saturn's E ring; and Iapetus greets you with a dramatic two...
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4:48
The Geometry Behind Egypt's Obelisks
We explore how ancient Egyptians carved, moved, and erected colossal obelisks without cranes. From the unfinished Aswan obelisk to the sand ramp technique, lubricated sleds, and lever systems, we reveal the practical geometry and project-manage...
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5:01
The EMI Whisper: Listening for Hidden Faults in High-Voltage Equipment
Join us as we dive into electromagnetic interference monitoring, a non-intrusive way to detect partial discharge long before heat or vibration give it away. We'll explain how nanosecond RF emissions from tiny voids in insulation create repeatab...
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5:15
Mirror Neurons: The Brain's Instant Replay of Others’ Actions
We trace the accidental discovery of mirror neurons by Rizzolatti and Gallese, explain how these cells fire both when you act and when you observe the same action, and explore how this “neural rehearsal” supports understanding intention and emp...
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5:11
The Snail That Rebuilt Its Eye: Secrets of Regeneration
We dive into groundbreaking findings from the Stowers Institute showing Pomacea canaliculata, the golden apple snail, can regrow a complete camera-type eye in about four weeks. Learn how blastema formation, Pax6, and a vertebrate-like genetic t...
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5:00
Meteotsunami: When Weather Makes Waves
On a perfect coastal day, a sudden drop in water level can be followed by a towering, tsunami-like surge—with no earthquake. This episode explains meteorological tsunamis: how rapid atmospheric pressure changes from squall lines and severe stor...
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4:39
Almost Everywhere: The Strange World of Null Sets
We unravel how sets with zero length can be everywhere, from the density of the rational numbers to the Cantor set, through Lebesgue measure, density, and almost-everywhere thinking. Explore measure theory’s counterintuitive miracles, the idea ...
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5:17
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): The Open Standard for Instant, Agentic Shopping
An in-depth look at the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)—an open standard that lets AI assistants shop directly within chat by talking to retailer backends. We break down agentic commerce, merchant-of-record retention, and the modular capabili...
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5:08
The Moving Sofa Problem: How a Hallway Corner Was Finally Solved
A legendary geometry puzzle asks for the largest 2D sofa that can round a right-angle hallway corner. We trace the journey from Moser and Hammersley’s early bounds to Gerver’s iconic handset-shaped sofa, and finally Jin-Hyun Baek’s 2024 proof u...
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4:52
The Noperthedron Breaks Rupert's Law
A journey from Prince Rupert’s late‑17th‑century bet to a 2025 breakthrough that ends the Rupert conjecture. We explore how Jakob Steininger and Sergey Yurkevich designed the Noperthedron—an ornate 152‑faced shape engineered to fail the Rupert ...
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4:43
Winged Endurance: Navigating the World’s Longest Migrations
From the Arctic Tern’s 90,000 km yearly chase of endless summer to the bar-tailed godwit’s 11,000 km nonstop Pacific crossing, and the northern weeder’s 18,000-mile transcontinental hop, plus the shearwaters’ vast 40,000-mile circuits, this epi...
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4:02
