At eighteen, David Hume thought so hard that his body broke down, developing scurvy-like spots and emotional numbness that a doctor diagnosed as the disease of the learned. This episode follows the Edinburgh prodigy who entered university at twelve or younger, secretly abandoned law for philosophy, recovered on a prescription of daily claret and exercise, and wrote A Treatise of Human Nature at a Jesuit college in France, only to watch it fall dead-born from the press.

The hosts walk through the ideas that terrified the religious and academic establishment: empiricism, the problem of induction and constant conjunction, reason as the slave of the passions, the bundle theory of the self, and the is-ought problem. They also cover the bizarre jobs he took to survive, the six-volume History of England that finally made him rich and famous, his celebrity in Paris and bitter falling out with Rousseau, the 2014 discovery of a letter tied to a Grenada slave plantation that led Edinburgh to rename the David Hume Tower, and his influence on Adam Smith, Kant, and modern cognitive science.

• Why Hume compared human reasoning to a superstitious fan who thinks a lucky jersey wins games
• How the sports-car example shows emotions setting the destination while logic merely draws the map
• Why you cannot logically derive what ought to be from what is without a human desire bridging the gap
• How a man who doubted causation justified fifteen years writing history as his empirical laboratory
• The closing question: are large language models, and humans, just predictive engines built on habit?