This week on Questionable Content, Dr. Dakotah Tyler (@dr.starkid) and Justin Shaifer (@mr.fascinate) break down Disney’s massive new partnership with OpenAI’s Sora and what it means for creators, the WGA, IP ownership, and the new wave of AI-driven media.

They discuss celebrity likeness exploitation, the decreasing leverage of creators in an AI-dominated landscape, and how authenticity might become the new currency of art.

Dakotah then explains the newest James Webb breakthrough: the first strong evidence of an atmosphere around a small rocky exoplanet, TOI-561 b. They explore the transit method, atmospheric signatures, rock vapor, volatile compositions, lava worlds, degeneracy in models, and the future of detecting Earth-like atmospheres.

The episode closes with a reaction to Juelz Santana’s viral claim that kids “don’t need to know how to read,” and why literacy still underpins human progress despite audio learning.

Visit our Merch Store:
https://www.curiositytheorypod.com/merch
Join our Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/c/CuriosityTheory

Follow the show at @curiositytheorypod
Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler and Justin Shafer

Stay curious.

On this episode of Curiosity Theory, Dr. Dakotah Tyler (@dr.starkid) and Justin Shaifer (@mr.fascinate) sit down with neuroscientist Lindsay Ejoh (@neuromelody) for a deep exploration into pain, gene editing, viral vectors, and the brain’s decision making machinery.

They break down how pain neurons work, how viruses modify DNA, what CRISPR allows us to change inside living tissue, and how empathy and fear circuits guide human behavior. They also tackle chronic pain, probabilistic reasoning, risk-taking behavior, and the ethical implications of future neurological interventions.

Visit our Merch Store:
https://www.curiositytheorypod.com/merch
Join our Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/c/CuriosityTheory

Stay curious.

Are we the problematic generation?

In this episode of Curiosity Theory, astrophysicist Dr. Dakotah Tyler (@dr.starkid) and STEM educator and media producer Justin Shaifer (@mr.fascinate) unpack how fast culture is shifting, why kids see Justin as “unk,” how generational labels get created, and whether Justin’s TEDx talk helped cement the term “Gen Z.”

Topics include:
• How social media has created five-year “micro generations”
• Young people using AI as an operating system
• Whether an algorithm could make better decisions than human leaders
• Dolphin communication, Zipf’s Law, and overlooked animal intelligence
• How future generations might judge factory farming and eating animals
• Plant and fungal networks and whether societies behave like living systems

Visit our Merch Store:
https://www.curiositytheorypod.com/merch
Join our Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/c/CuriosityTheory

Follow the hosts:
Dr. Dakotah — @dr.starkid
Justin — @mr.fascinate
Show — @curiositytheorypod