ABOUT & SUPPORT
Conversations and writing about how people become who they are. A growing body of work, and an ambition to help worthwhile questions become shared inquiry.
WHERE I HOPE THIS LEADS
I want people to leave a conversation understanding something more clearly, with a useful connection or a question they want to pursue.
The episodes and writing are where I begin. Over time, I want Might Ramble to help ideas travel between people who could do something with them.
THE WORK TODAY
Carefully prepared conversations and essays that connect lived experience with scientific insight. Work that helps someone understand, feel less alone, or ask a better question.
Explore the workWHAT I WANT TO EXPLORE
People in different disciplines can be asking related questions without knowing the other exists. I want to recognize connections worth making and help people explore them together.
Sometimes I can contribute to the science. Sometimes the useful thing is an introduction.
THE LONGER AMBITION
I want Might Ramble to become part of how the science happens. The aim is to help relationships and careful inquiry grow into research when the question, expertise, and resources fit.
The form is still taking shape. The next step should follow from a worthwhile question.
PUTTING THE MIDDLE STEPS TO WORK
I want to get good at understanding what people are working on, making thoughtful introductions, and helping a promising conversation lead somewhere.
TOOLS & ATTENTION
AI is expanding what we can search, compare, explain, and work through. I want to use that capacity to read more widely, test my understanding, and arrive with questions worth someone’s time.
A promising connection still asks something of the people involved. They have to see why it matters, trust the invitation, and decide to give it their attention. Someone has to understand their different priorities, translate without flattening the science, and help a disagreement become something they can work on.
That is a craft I want to develop. Learn enough of each person’s language to recognize a useful connection. Give an uncertain idea room to be said aloud. Encourage someone when the work stalls, ask the difficult follow-up, and help everyone leave knowing what they have chosen to do next.
Research on teams links psychological safety with learning. Research on social networks suggests that people connected across groups can encounter ideas their own circles miss. These findings give me reasons to take the work of bringing people together seriously. The practical value has to be earned in each relationship.
AI can already persuade people in some settings. I want to become someone others know, question, and hold responsible. That takes understanding the stakes, staying with the work, and helping people turn curiosity into something they choose to do together.
Amy Edmondson’s study of 51 manufacturing teams found an association between psychological safety and learning behavior. It gives a useful reason to make room for questions, uncertainty, and speaking up.
Ronald Burt’s study of managers and their networks linked connections across groups with ideas evaluated as valuable. It supports looking beyond one familiar circle. It does not establish that any particular introduction will succeed.
Salvi and colleagues’ 2025 experiment found that GPT-4 could be persuasive in structured online debates. Persuasion in that setting and sustaining a research collaboration are different questions. The approach above is my intended practice, informed by these studies.
CURIOSITY ACROSS BOUNDARIES
An addiction researcher, an athlete, and an artist bring different forms of expertise. Each has learned to notice things that can be difficult to see from outside their work. I want to understand those ways of seeing well enough to recognize where they might become useful to someone else.
Someone can care deeply about a question without knowing its technical vocabulary or having access to the journal where it is being discussed. A conversation can offer a way in through an example, a story, a careful explanation, or simply the chance to ask what something means.
A person may arrive for a guest they recognize and find themselves curious about addiction, identity, or the brain. A scientist may encounter a lived experience that changes the question they want to ask. Those are possibilities I want the range of the show to open. Scientific claims still need scientific evidence. Experience helps us notice what deserves a closer look.
THE PERSON BEHIND THE PROJECT
Scientist, writer, and host.
Building a place for people to think together.
MA in Chemistry
B.S. Chemistry
Based inI’m 29. My formal training is in chemistry. My work and study now reach into biology and neuroscience. Addiction, recovery, PTSD, and mental illness in the lives of people I love have given those subjects a very personal weight.
I began Might Ramble in 2025 after leaving my PhD program and getting sober. My sober date is June 13, 2025. I research, schedule, and host the conversations, write the essays, and produce the episodes, animations, and artwork. I’m learning the craft as I go.
There’s a little Roy Firestone in the ambition. In The Art of the Interview, Lawrence Grobel describes the sports interviewer researching, writing, arranging access, editing, and replaying interviews to learn from them. That seriousness about the whole craft appeals to me. When the production department is largely one person, you become quite well acquainted with everyone responsible for your mistakes. I want to know each part well enough to make the next conversation better.
I want the work to help someone recognize an experience, encounter an idea they would otherwise have missed, or find a person worth thinking with. Over time, I hope some of those conversations become relationships and research.
A PERSONAL REASON
My twin was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the fall of 2023, just as I was beginning my PhD at Brown University. It changed what I wanted my work to be for.
I began moving from chemical biology toward neurobiology, with no neuroscience background to fall back on. That has meant learning new foundations, asking for help, and spending a great deal of time finding out what I don’t know. I’m still doing that.
I want him to have the best care we can make possible, and a life with room for joy, connection, and things to look forward to. We have a long history together. I want us to make the most of the life still ahead of us.
Might Ramble is part of how I’m working toward that future. Support here helps sustain the preparation, writing, and conversations as I build the skills and relationships to contribute more.
This began partly as a way to rebuild my own life. It has become a place to learn, make useful work, and take a larger aim seriously. These six threads keep bringing me back.
Choose a thread to follow.
I started writing because I needed to sort through what I had lived and work out what I thought. A page gave me something I could return to. Writing helped me find connections I could not see while everything was circling in my head. It also gave me a place to question my own explanations and imagine what might come next. I kept writing.
My curiosity has never been especially tidy. I was already reading papers, chasing references, and wondering how people became who they were. The show gives me a reason to ask people who know things I don’t, find out what I’ve misunderstood, and follow a question further. Writing makes me slow down and turn that curiosity into something another person can use.
For a long time I treated feeling ready as a prerequisite. A convenient arrangement, really. In 2025, I had to build a different life anyway, so I began sharing the writing and starting conversations. I want to become a better interviewer, writer, and scientist. Preparing, making the work public, and listening back give me something concrete to improve. I would like to find out what I can do by doing it.
There are people I love whom I cannot make well. My twin’s schizophrenia is a particular reason I care about the science and the everyday reality of living with these conditions. He did not choose this illness. I want to help make that reality better understood and contribute, where I can, to work that might improve care. Sometimes that contribution may be scientific. Sometimes it may be helping the right people find one another.
I need to be sober to give this work my full attention, day after day. The work also helps me protect that sobriety. I talk openly about recovery, prepare for conversations that matter to me, and build relationships with people who know what I’m trying to do. That gives my days structure and leaves me fewer places to hide from myself. It is one part of a life I want to keep showing up for, alongside the care and support my recovery needs.
I want a working life that depends on more than one employer, one boss, or one set of circumstances. A catalogue of my own gives people something they can judge for themselves, without waiting for a job title or institutional introduction. The craft travels with me, and relationships across different fields can open more ways forward. Universities, labs, companies, and independent collaborators can all be part of that life. I want fewer decisions about my future resting with any one person.
THE DRAWING
I wanted the logo to hold the people, places, struggles, and questions that have shaped my life. You wouldn’t know most of them by looking at me. This is one way I gave them a form.
Explore the drawing. Hover to find a detail, then click to read its story. On a touch screen, tap a detail or choose its name below. Choose “The education timeline” from the index to see the three universities together.
Open the original drawing
THE REVERSED QUESTION MARK
My mom was always telling us to ask people questions. She was also unapologetically quirky, which gave me some permission to be myself. The backwards question mark carries both of those things. I’m left-handed, and the mirror image that won’t quite fit over the original carries a chemistry reference, too. Mostly, it is an invitation to stay curious and ask in a way that feels like my own.
THE BRAIN AND THE CIRCUITRY
The brain’s branching structure becomes a circuit board. I was building a show about people and their minds while artificial intelligence was becoming part of everyday life. I wanted both in the picture. What can each help us understand? What changes when they meet? Those are questions I expect to keep returning to.
THE BEAM
The beam cuts across the maze. It connects places without following the routes drawn between them. Through Might Ramble, I hope to notice when people or ideas belong in the same conversation and help that connection happen. The line also divides the family figures into two groups. A shared history can still contain very different experiences.
Tools, attention, and human connectionTHE SHRUG
The little person in the middle is smiling with his hands open. Life has rarely followed the route I expected. I still get to ask questions, try things, and make something of the time I have.
It’s also an ode to my friend Jacob Smith. Back in rural Iowa, Jacob introduced me to Reddit and the shrug emoticon. That small piece of our friendship found its way into the center of this drawing.
THE IOWA HAWKEYE
The Hawkeye forms the dot of the question mark. I began college at the University of Iowa in 2015. It was a time when my questions about myself and the world were opening up, and when addiction made my life much harder to navigate. The maze becomes more complicated around that point. It records the feeling of being curious, lost, and unsure how to find my way through.
MY TWIN AND ME
The two joined balloons are my twin and me. We share a birthday and a great deal of history. Our lives have also taken different courses. The joined lines hold both the closeness and the fact that his experience is his own.
MY 3 OLDER SIBLINGS
The six figures are my siblings and me. The three above the beam had already left home when addiction changed life in our family. My twin, youngest brother, and I were still living there. All six of us were affected, in ways that belong to each of us to describe. We were different ages, with different responsibilities and different degrees of dependence on home. The line records that difference in timing and position. It leaves room for the fact that a shared family history can feel different from one life to another.
Childhood and adolescence are periods of ongoing brain development. Research on adverse childhood experiences asks how the kind, duration, and timing of adversity relate to that development. Living at home also shapes the everyday exposure and support available to a child. These are useful questions to bring to a family history. They cannot tell us exactly what happened inside any one person, or whose experience counted more.
Read the review on childhood adversity and neural development
THE MINNESOTA BEAKERS
The red outlines of the beakers form the University of Minnesota’s M. Minnesota is where I changed direction from business to chemistry and began doing scientific research. The university takes the shape of the tools I began learning to use there.
BROWN, SIDEWAYS
After Minnesota, I went to Brown for a PhD. In the drawing, Brown is on its side. Things went somewhat sideways there, too. I left without the doctorate. It remains a place where I learned, changed direction, and had to reconsider what I wanted my life to become.
THE HOOK INTO TEXAS
The hook pulls the route into Texas. I wanted a small visual way to show being drawn toward the place where I began making a different life. By then I had left the path I expected to follow. Texas became the place where I started putting the next pieces together.
THE EDUCATION TIMELINE
Read the education across the drawing from the Iowa Hawkeye to the Minnesota M made from beakers, then Brown. That is the order I attended them. The symbols let the chronology sit inside the maze, alongside the parts of a life that never appear on a transcript.
ADDERALL
The orange pill is Adderall. It sits above the white-and-blue Vyvanse because I tried Adderall later. Both pills are part of how I represent my stimulant addiction in the drawing. Their positions follow the order in my own life, giving that part of my history a form I can point to.
VYVANSE
The white-and-blue capsule is Vyvanse. March 2014 was my first experience with a stimulant. It belongs below Adderall because it came first. The capsule also represents my stimulant addiction. A small object holds a moment in a much larger story.
LOVE, TIME, AND RECOVERY
Above the substances are a heart, a clock, and a curving line. For me, the heart means learning to meet myself with love. The clock is time. The line bends because recovery, and life more broadly, have rarely moved in a straight direction. Together they trace a way out of the container holding active addiction. They sit above the substances because, in my own story, recovery comes after addiction. I wanted the drawing to leave room for a way out, even when I couldn’t yet see one.
THE LEARNING CURVE
One project asks for a lot of different crafts. Some I practice every week. Others I’m deliberately learning from the beginning.
Choose a skill to see what I’m working on.
01 / INTERVIEWING
Interviewing well reminds me of good work at the bench. The more carefully I understand the material before I begin, the more room I have to think when something unexpected happens. Preparation helps me recognize a surprising answer, follow its implications, and change direction without losing the question.
I want to be a partner in someone’s own understanding of themselves. That takes enough preparation to follow their thinking, enough attention to notice when it changes, and enough openness to let them correct my picture of who they are. The hope is that we can think together and arrive somewhere neither of us had entirely mapped out.
What I’m practicing Deeper preparation, more patient follow-ups, and leaving room for silence.
Hear the conversations02 / SCIENCE WRITING
I want to give people words for something they have experienced and a way into ideas they might otherwise never encounter. That means understanding a piece of science well enough to explain what it shows, how the researchers reached it, and what remains uncertain.
Much of the work is deciding which detail makes the mechanism understandable, which analogy helps, where a qualification belongs, and how to bring the reader back to a human question. I want the writing to reward curiosity without requiring a specialist’s vocabulary.
What I’m practicing Tracing references, explaining mechanisms, writing for the ear, and revising until the thread is clear.
Read the essays03 / INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
If I want this work to improve understanding of mental health and care, I need to be able to follow questions through the institutions, incentives, decisions, and everyday experiences that shape them. Investigative skills can help me find records, reconstruct a timeline, ask whose perspective is missing, and test an explanation against evidence.
That would make me more useful as an interviewer and a potential research collaborator. A question that survives careful checking is a stronger place to begin. So is a clear account of what the available evidence cannot yet answer.
The learning path Start with reporting methods and ethics, learn to use public records and verify claims, then practice the whole process in a small investigation.
On the agenda Story-Based Inquiry, GIJN’s introductory training, the SPJ Code of Ethics, The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook, and The Art of Access. These readings and exercises are still part of the plan I’m working toward.
04 / PRODUCTION
Scheduling, recording, sound, editing, mixing, artwork, and publication all stand between a conversation and a finished episode. I currently do that work myself. Each choice affects whether someone can settle into the conversation and stay with it.
I’m learning to make the process more reliable while keeping the life in the recording. Better systems should leave more time for the research, writing, and attention that made the episode worth producing.
What I’m practicing Clearer sound, deliberate edits, dependable recording habits, and a production process I can sustain.
Explore the episodes05 / ANIMATION & VISUAL EXPLANATION
I make the episode artwork, diagrams, and animations around Might Ramble. I want someone to be able to see a connection, a mechanism, or a change unfolding over time, and hold the idea in mind.
I’m learning when a still image is enough, when motion explains something, and how to keep labels, timing, and visual emphasis aligned with the science. The visual work should invite a closer look and reward it with understanding.
What I’m practicing Visual storytelling, diagram design, motion, and checking what an image might accidentally imply.
Explore the drawing06 / SCIENTIFIC DEPTH
Chemistry is my formal foundation. Moving toward biology, neuroscience, and mental health has meant reading, working through unfamiliar methods, following references, asking for help, and learning from people doing the research.
I want enough depth to recognize a useful connection and enough judgment to know when I need another person’s expertise. Understanding a result also means understanding the model, population, and assumptions that limit what it can tell us.
What I’m practicing Sustained study, critical reading, research relationships, and questions precise enough for a specialist to do something with.
Follow a question
Might Ramble is a long-form podcast that works in two layers.
The first is what you’re known for. Your field, your craft, your story. Expect me to have done the reading, probably more of it than was strictly necessary. I want to go as deep into your work as you’ll take me.
The second is the person underneath it. What led you to devote yourself to this, of all things? What drives you? What makes you tick? Why do you do what you do?
Every guest is here because of the why-them question. Some overcame something that breaks most people. Some are world-class at something singular. Some live in a way most people wouldn’t dare, or couldn’t fathom. And some are known for the worst thing they ever did — because the question doesn’t stop applying when the answer gets dark. Understanding how a person became what they became is not the same as excusing it. Refusing to look explains nothing. In every case, thousands started from the same circumstances, and yet there’s only one of you. I want to understand the interior architecture that made the difference.
I don’t come to these conversations as a detached observer. My training is in chemistry. My research wandered through chemical biology, microbiology, and neurobiology. My ongoing inquiry is the neuroscience and psychology of human behavior. I have lived experience with addiction and PTSD. I’m a participant in the questions I ask, and my aim is to be a partner in your own understanding of yourself.
The name, Might Ramble, is part confession, part standing permission. Conversations here run long and follow live threads wherever they lead. This is a conversation, not an examination: you can pause, restate, or strike anything, and you have final say over what is published. The best moments of this show have been things a guest didn’t plan to say.
A FEW CONVERSATIONS TO START WITH
SCIENCE & ADDICTION
Clinical Director and Deputy Scientific Director, Intramural Research Program
National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health
IDENTITY & PUBLIC LIFE
PERSONALITY & PSYCHOLOGY
Borderline Personality Disorder & Personality Pathology
NEUROSCIENCE & PSYCHIATRY
The Dish on SchizophreniaFROM ACROSS THE TABLE
A place for guests’ reflections on the conversation. Their words will appear here with their permission.
SUPPORT MIGHT RAMBLE
If an essay helped something click, or a conversation gave you a new question, consider supporting the next one.
Might Ramble is independently produced. Contributions help cover the practical costs of making careful, thoughtful work and the time it takes to keep doing it.
Support Might RambleSharing a piece, introducing a thoughtful guest, or subscribing to the newsletter helps the work reach its next person, too.
WHAT SUPPORT MAKES POSSIBLE
KEEP MIGHT RAMBLE GOING
Thank you for helping me keep researching, asking questions, and making the work.
GET IN TOUCH
For guest introductions, research or creative collaborations, and conversations about supporting the project, I’d be glad to hear from you.
mitchellpenningroth@gmail.com