Premise

Most science podcasts are content delivery systems. Curiosity Is is a forcing function for conversations that wouldn't happen otherwise. The format: reach out to someone whose work sits at an intersection you find genuinely interesting, do the reading, then have the conversation on record. Three episodes published so far -- a Harvard AI researcher on neural wave machines and inductive biases, a complexity scientist at Lux Capital on how knowledge decays and evolves, and the neuroscientist who named aphantasia on imagination and the spectrum of the mind's eye. Each runs 40-60 minutes. No scripted questions, no rapid-fire segments, no sponsors.

How it evolved

Started as an excuse to cold-email people. Built the infrastructure first: a self-hosted Castopod instance running in Docker on a Mac Studio, tunneled to the public internet via Cloudflare Zero Trust with Caddy as the reverse proxy. The website lives on GitHub Pages as static HTML/CSS/JS. The production pipeline is entirely local -- whisper.cpp for transcription (Apple Silicon optimized), WhisperX for speaker diarization, ffmpeg for normalization to -16 LUFS. Every episode ships with Podcast 2.0 chapters in JSON, full transcripts in SRT, show notes in Markdown, and an embedded YouTube recording. A 12-step production checklist governs the entire flow from recording through distribution.

Technical crux

Two decisions define the project. First: self-hosting everything instead of using Spotify for Podcasters or Anchor. Same philosophy as building a blog instead of using Substack -- full ownership, no platform dependency, no algorithmic feed. Castopod is Podcast 2.0 compliant, which means chapters, transcripts, value-for-value, and person metadata are native to the RSS feed, not afterthoughts. Second: the episode pages on curiosity.is are designed as microsites for each guest, not rows in a list. Embedded video, expandable transcripts, pull quotes, guest bio and links, chapter navigation. The guest's work is the centerpiece, not the podcast brand.

Findings

Three trailer episodes live on all major platforms (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, via Castopod RSS). Full transcripts, chapter files, and show notes committed to the repo. The website has 6 pages: landing with featured episodes and an audio player, episode grid, three individual episode microsites, about page, and contact. A loading animation cycles through 15 short statements about curiosity. Currently on hiatus for production quality improvements.

Open questions

Whether to keep the 'trailer' framing or rebrand the existing three as Season 1. Guest pipeline: balancing cold outreach to established researchers with discoverability of earlier-career people doing unusual work. The website is static HTML -- could migrate to the main Next.js site or keep it separate. Video vs. audio-only: the YouTube recordings add a visual dimension but double the production time. Long-term: whether the podcast earns its own identity or becomes a content arm of the blog.