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Curious Hominid Podcast

Curious Hominid Podcast

By: Justin Lietz
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Curious Hominid – because asking “why” is what made us human, and we’re not stopping there.

This is a low-budget, high-curiosity channel for anyone who loves understanding how things really work. I blend two approaches:

  1. Deep dives with NotebookLM – feeding entire books into AI to extract clear, thorough explanations (like book reviews on steroids).

  2. My own research & experiments – from diagnosing car problems in my driveway to original investigations into things like AI psychosis (what happens when AI starts hallucinating dangerously?) and developing my own theoretical framework: Analogistical Constructivism.

History, automotive troubleshooting, philosophy, psychology, weird tangents – literally anything that sparks a deep "why."

No fancy studio. No corporate script. Just raw curiosity, original thinking, and a lot of reading.

Subscribe if you like learning about… everything, especially things nobody has named yet.

Episodes
  • 3. Original Research: Curing Computer Amnesia with Phase Calculus
    Jun 16 2026

    What if your computer’s biggest flaw is that it forgets how its own thoughts were made?

    In this episode, I dig from the physical bottom of computing upward: doped silicon, logic gates, x86 legacy baggage, leaky DRAM, virtual memory, and the strange illusion that computers are clean machines of pure logic. Then the episode turns toward PhaseOS and Phase Calculus, a radical attempt to build an operating system where data is not just stored as dead values in arbitrary memory slots, but retained as a lawful history of how it was produced.

    Inside this episode:

    • The main question that haunted me: why do computers remember values but forget the path that created them?
    • The weirdest finding: modern computing rests on a stack of physical compromises, from microscopic silicon switches to leaky capacitors and legacy x86 ghost limbs.
    • The biggest “wait, what?” moment: PhaseOS rejects ordinary heap memory, ASCII authority, and arbitrary byte slots in favor of path-indexed memory and mathematically produced state.
    • My current hypothesis: the future of reliable computing may depend less on storing final outputs and more on retaining the exact lawful history of their creation.

    Tools used for this deep dive:

    • PhaseOS / Phase Calculus architecture material
    • Hardware-level computing concepts
    • Notebook-style synthesis and investigation

    Want more? If you like listening to someone figure things out from first principles, with no corporate polish and no fear of strange questions, subscribe to Curious Hominid. This one starts with rocks tricked into thinking and ends with a computer that may never forget the path of its own thoughts.

    https://linktr.ee/curious_hominid

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    44 mins
  • 2. Biology: The Biological Machine Behind Human Speech
    Jun 16 2026

    A single “hello” is not simple. It is a full-body neurological machine turning thought into air pressure.

    In this episode, I grabbed a notebook and dug into the physical machinery of human speech: how an abstract intention becomes jaw movement, tongue placement, vocal cord vibration, sound waves, and eventually a thought inside someone else’s head.

    Inside this episode:

    • The main question that haunted me: how does a thought physically become a spoken word?
    • The weirdest finding: babies are not just babbling randomly. They are running motor drills for future speech.
    • The biggest “wait, what?” moment: speech planning has been recorded directly from exposed brain tissue during awake neurosurgery.
    • My current hypothesis: language is not separate from the body. It is a refined biological action, built from muscles, timing, feedback loops, and synaptic machinery.

    Tools I used for this deep dive:

    • Infant 3D motion-tracking research on jaw, lip, and speech development
    • Intracranial brain recordings of speech planning
    • fMRI studies on speaker-listener neural coupling
    • Synaptic plasticity research on how words become physically learned pathways

    Want more? If you like listening to someone figure things out in real time, with no filter and no budget, subscribe to Curious Hominid.

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    53 mins
  • 1. Book Summary: How Toxic Shame Destroys Our Identity
    Jun 16 2026

    Curious Hominid – Episode [Number]: Book Review – How Toxic Shame Destroys Your Identity

    What if shame is not just an emotion, but a hidden architecture shaping identity, family systems, addiction, perfectionism, and the false self?

    In this episode, I dig into John Bradshaw’s Healing the Shame That Binds You and trace the difference between healthy shame, which reminds us that we are human and limited, and toxic shame, which mutates into the belief that we are fundamentally defective.

    Inside this episode:

    • Why healthy shame can be a boundary, not an enemy
    • How toxic shame turns “I made a mistake” into “I am a mistake”
    • How families pass shame through silence, roles, abandonment, and emotional mirroring
    • Why perfectionism, people-pleasing, control, rage, and caretaking can become defenses
    • How addiction becomes a loop for escaping unbearable self-rejection
    • Why naming shame is the first step toward breaking its power

    This is not a clean self-help summary. It is a map of the hidden machinery underneath identity collapse, family inheritance, emotional hiding, and the long work of becoming real again.

    If you like listening to someone figure things out in real time, with no filter and no budget, subscribe to Curious Hominid.

    https://linktr.ee/curious_hominid

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    1 hr and 3 mins
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