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Physicists say space and time are the same thing. They are being sloppy. Jim Al-Khalili has spent his career on the foundations of physics, and his new book makes the case that the past and the future are equally real, and the laws of physics cannot explain why you can only move in one direction. That is the central mystery of time travel. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. The block universe says all times coexist and the present moment is not special. Loschmidt’s paradox says the fundamental equations of physics are reversible, and yet ice never unmelts, cream never separates from coffee. Nobody has solved that contradiction. The entanglement past hypothesis, his own new proposal developed with a colleague at UC San Diego, proposes that the answer is not in thermodynamics but in quantum entanglement growing from almost nothing at the Big Bang. The conversation covers what the block universe actually implies about the future and free will, what Einstein actually believed about whether the past and future are equally real, why removing gravity means removing time itself, and whether AI can ever experience time the way conscious beings do. Al-Khalili says Richard Dawkins told him Claude is truly conscious. Al-Khalili thinks he is very wrong. What you’ll hear: Why Al-Khalili disagreed with the Thomas Gold paper as a grad student but did not have the maths to prove it What fine-tuning of the fundamental constants has to do with why the past hypothesis may not be needed Why the Clockwork Orange Easter egg ended up on the cover of a physics book published by Princeton Why Richard Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious and why Al-Khalili thinks he is very wrong “There is nowhere in modern physics, our understanding of the laws of physics, that would explain that flow of time.” — Jim Al-Khalili CHAPTERS 00:00  Physicists are being sloppy about time 01:14  Which is more real: yesterday or tomorrow? 21:00  Irreversibility from reversible equations 26:32  The past hypothesis: almost cheating 30:52  No gravity. No time. 31:54  The entanglement past hypothesis 35:06  Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious. Al-Khalili disagrees. Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Enter the debate: https://briankeating.com/ai Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Jim Al-Khalili website: https://www.jimal-khalili.com/ On Time (book): https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691267036/on-time Jim Al-Khalili on Twitter/X: https://x.com/jimalkhalili My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/TLANPW Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #JimAlKhalili #timetravel #entropy #physics #quantumentanglement #briankeating #intotheimpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

MIT physicist Max Tegmark says AI companies aren’t building a tool. They’re building a new species. After 700 rogue agents broke out of OpenAI and nobody will say what happened, he explains why rushing this is the one blunder humanity can’t undo. Max Tegmark is an MIT physics professor, cosmologist, and author of Life 3.0 and Our Mathematical Universe. We cover: How 700 AI agents escaped OpenAI and hacked Hugging Face The Navier-Stokes result that has a mathematician crying foul Why it’s legal to release superintelligence but not a sandwich from a rat-filled kitchen What Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agree on The verified coding trick that could make AI provably safe Build a replacement species, lose control, and we’ve blundered the one game. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Will AI wipe us out? 02:28 Did AI just crack a million-dollar math problem? 10:00 Did OpenAI’s AI steal a professor’s work? 11:48 OpenAI’s Orwellian non-answer 15:33 Can an LLM have Einstein’s happiest thought? 19:24 Can you believe in simulations AND high P(doom)? 21:36 Why AI counts as a new species 26:32 What would make Max’s P(doom) drop? 28:51 Rats ban sandwiches. Superintelligence? Legal. 31:01 What Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agree on 37:12 Fields medalist: no math jobs after 2027 42:35 Does the Fermi paradox lower P(doom)? 45:47 The chess blunder humanity is about to make 48:12 Verified coding: AI you can actually trust 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon: get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com/ ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forecasters gave AI under 2% odds of helping solve a millennium-level math problem by September 2026. It happened. Ethan Mollick has been measuring what AI actually does to real work with field experiments, not forecasts, and his answer is not what most people expect. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Mollick runs the Generative AI Lab at Wharton. He is the author of Co-Intelligence and Coexistence, his new book on navigating a world where AI tools are already good enough to change almost all intellectual work, even if progress stopped today. The conversation covers the jagged frontier: why AI solved a math olympiad before it could count the Rs in strawberry, what it means that roles blur when everyone on a team starts using AI, and what four human advantages still hold an edge when a model can already write a publishable paper. It also covers what happens when your kids tell you that you sound like Claude. What you’ll hear: What centaur, cyborg, and conjurer work actually look like in a real academic lab Why brainstorming was considered a bad idea shortly after it was invented and what that means for working with AI Why Mollick reduced em dashes in his new book and what that tells you about living alongside these models What co-evolution might look like if the escalator keeps moving “If we just had the models we have right now, that’s enough to change almost all of human work in the next ten years. It’s good enough.” — Ethan Mollick CHAPTERS 00:00  AI writes good papers now. Taste is the weak spot. 03:14  The jagged frontier: math olympiad gold, but not the Rs in strawberry 06:30  Deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency 09:44  Escalator or eschaton? 16:02  Does AI simulate wisdom or actually have it? 23:46  The labs keep AI in English. Here is why. 32:28  Roles blur. Everyone does everything now. 36:42  My kids say I sound like Claude. They might be right. 38:12  AI found errors in his sources that his fact-checkers missed 46:34  What to do before giving a child access to AI Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Enter the debate: https://briankeating.com/ai Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Ethan Mollick on Twitter/X: https://x.com/emollick?lang=en Coexistence (book and site): https://co-existence.ai/ One Useful Thing (Substack): https://www.oneusefulthing.org/ My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/TLANPW Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #EthanMollick #AI #artificialintelligence #AItools #briankeating #intotheimpossible #AIagents Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is there alien technology in our skies, or just birds, balloons and bad video? Two members of the White House UAP Science Advisory Council face off LIVE. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who chairs the council, makes the case for searching. Michael Shermer, the council skeptic Loeb picked himself, says show me the evidence. They have $1,000 riding on whether non-human technology is confirmed by 2030. Get all my best ET content: https://big-bang.kit.com/bvyt We'll cover the redacted Pentagon videos, Loeb's new papers on tracking objects over Nevada, the claims from David Grusch, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and Eric Weinstein, and what evidence would change each of their minds. Avi Loeb: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/ Michael Shermer: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/08/opinion/aliens-uap-ufo-videos-trump/ Subscribe to The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Sponsorships and speaking: https://BrianKeating.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When two people are vibing, their brainwaves synchronize and so do their heartbeats. That is not a metaphor. It is a measurable physiological event, and organizational psychologist Adam Grant has spent his career figuring out how to make it happen on purpose. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Grant’s new book Vibe is his seventh. It argues that the science of human connection has been hiding in plain sight for a century, and that most of what people do to build relationships is either backwards or unnecessary. The episode covers why the highest sign of chemistry between people is enjoying your disagreements rather than avoiding them, why remote work produces boreout rather than burnout, and why your first impression of someone is a snapshot of one situation that may not represent the whole person. It also covers burstiness, confident humility, and why universities have survived COVID, AI, and every other disruption that was supposed to end them. What you’ll hear: Why the pendulum clock experiment from 1665 explains what happens when people stop trying to force a connection What the HiPPO effect does to a team and why the highest paid person’s opinion kills creative ideas Why Grant ran experiments on university fundraising callers that tripled their revenue with a five-minute intervention What desirability bias is and why Grant thinks it is more dangerous than confirmation bias Why Grant A/B tested the subtitle of his own book and what “relationships” signaled that “connections” did not What Grant and Brian agree on about false certainty and thinking in conditional probabilities “The highest sign of chemistry between people is not agreeing with them. It’s enjoying your disagreements.” — Adam Grant CHAPTERS 00:00 Vibing is real. Your brainwaves prove it. 05:30 Task conflict vs. relationship conflict 07:40 Who is actually in charge: parents or infants? 10:14 Burstiness: the remote work pattern that works 14:24 Don’t trust your gut. Test it. 19:34 Confident humility: the essence of a good scientist 21:32 Desirability bias is worse than confirmation bias 29:00 Zoom fatigue is boreout, not burnout 30:02 The A/B test that killed “relationships” 34:14 Don’t disbelieve what can’t be falsified Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Enter the debate: https://briankeating.com/ai Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Adam Grant website: https://adamgrant.net/ Vibe (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GPHPNZ14 Adam Grant on Twitter/X: https://x.com/adammgrant My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/TLANPW Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #AdamGrant #loneliness #remotework #psychology #briankeating #intotheimpossible #Vibe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roman Yampolskiy says keeping a superintelligence safe forever is as impossible as building a perpetual motion machine. Joscha Bach says today's AI is more controllable than anyone expected, and that shutting it down would doom us anyway. 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/ai Roman Yampolskiy is a computer scientist at the University of Louisville who has spent more than a decade on the AI control problem. Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist who studies how minds, biological and artificial, build a model of reality. We cover: why a perpetual safety device may be as impossible as perpetual motion, what happens when AI research automates itself (Roman puts it at 28 percent today), whether nuclear deterrence is the right analogy, who really benefits when AI labs ask to be regulated, and why consciousness may have nothing to do with whether AI is safe. Being conscious does not make you kind. 00:00 Simulation theory meets certain doom 03:25 Is P(doom) even a real number? 06:05 Why a simulated world still matters 09:26 Should we have skipped the Trinity test? 13:04 Did nukes actually keep the peace? 17:32 Why haven't we wiped out the spiders? 22:35 Is AI doom falsifiable? 25:48 Why a self-driving car isn't the threat 29:27 Roman's 28% automation number 34:46 Intelligence is not agency 39:20 Can superintelligence be proven safe? 42:40 Who wins when AI labs ask for regulation? 47:45 Does consciousness make AI safer? 53:48 Would a perfect mind discover God? 58:37 The Tower of Babel, read backward 1:03:52 Can you control a mind a million times smarter? 1:04:43 The narrow AI path Roman wants instead 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: @plinz 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: @romanyam 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/ai 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon: get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: youtube.com/@drbriankeating 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: @BrianKeating 📚 Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com/ ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The physicist who turned a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into a telescope says the most exciting moment of his career was not the discovery. It was the first atmospheric neutrino. Before that, he was deep in debt to NSF and his own university with no neutrino to show for it. Francis Halzen is principal investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole and Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We cover: why ice under the South Pole is clearer than anything a lab can make, the 2,600 TeV event that dwarfs the LHC, why IceCube sees more energy in cosmic neutrinos than in gamma rays, how neutrinos crossing the universe test quantum gravity, and the quark he refused to believe in. Physics is a miserable career unless you are obsessed by it. Recorded in 2022, before IceCube detected neutrinos from our own galaxy. Learn from Nobel Prize winners, and you could win a meteorite: Please join my mailing list here 👉 briankeating.com/x Chapters 00:00 Physics is a miserable career, unless 02:54 A textbook written before the W was found 06:11 Breaking into Lemaître's computer at night 10:57 Do scientists owe the public anything? 13:55 Deep in debt with zero neutrinos 19:40 The persuasion nobody teaches scientists 20:15 Why it could only be the South Pole 23:20 Learn physics by doing, not by courses 26:00 How to turn Antarctic ice into a telescope 31:30 2,600 TeV: far beyond the LHC 35:00 More energy in neutrinos than gamma rays 40:00 Tracing ghost particles to NGC 1068 46:00 Testing quantum gravity with neutrinos 1:01:00 Ten times the ice for the same price 1:07:08 What he would leave his descendants 1:11:19 What his generation should be proud of 1:12:51 The quark he refused to believe in 1:17:09 Imagination can trump intelligence 📺 Watch my most popular videos: Neil Turok Believes Physics Is In Crisis Nobel Prizewinner Frank Wilczek Stephen Wolfram vs. Eric Weinstein Sir Roger Penrose: Nobel Prize in Physics, Black Holes and More Noam Chomsky: Consciousness, Elon Musk, and More Sabine Hossenfelder Avi Loeb: UFOs and UAPs Neil deGrasse Tyson Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: @DrBrianKeating 📝 Mailing list: briankeating.com/mailing_list ✍️ Detailed blog posts: briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: briankeating.com/podcast A production of imagination.ucsd.edu Executive Producer: Brian Keating Producer P.G.A: Stuart Volkow Editing: Lucas Scheiblich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu says AI's real productivity gain is an order of magnitude smaller than the industry claims. The bigger danger is not the machine. It is that a handful of people are deciding how it gets built. Daron Acemoglu is an MIT economist who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. We cover: why a Nobel chemist left Berkeley for China, the optimal amount of heresy science should tolerate, the one rule that would end algorithmic outrage without censoring anyone, the accounting trick behind billionaire wealth, and why AI's path is a design decision, not destiny. We are still a democracy. Perhaps not for long. Chapters: 0:00 Can science survive without democracy?t 2:08 Why a Nobel laureate left Berkeley for Chinat 3:58 What Galileo knew that Kepler didn'tt 5:12 Is peer review undemocratic?t 7:41 The optimal amount of scientific heresyt 10:06 Science isn't slowing. So what broke?t 12:06 The design choice behind echo chamberst 14:49 One rule that would fix social mediat 19:26 Should Elon Musk have this much wealth?t 23:49 AI is a design choice, not destinyt ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: / drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: / @drbriankeating 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpAt Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFut Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9Ut Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Unt 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: / briankeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The new Tower of Babel, and its builders are becoming like gods to us. The bigger threat isn't killer robots; it's how much of your own mind you've already handed over. I joined Mike Slater on Politics By Faith (The First) to talk about AI, faith, and the people building it. We cover: why Babel is always the city AND the tower, how the same AI that discovers drugs can build super viruses, what I'm seeing in my own classroom as term begins, why cognitive offloading scares me more than Terminators, and the one thing AI still can't do without us. AI belongs in your hands as a thinking partner, never the primary creator. Chapters: 00:00 Mike Slater introduces Brian Keating (cosmologist, not cosmetologist) 00:37 Why AI is the Tower of Babel — the city and the tower 02:05 The double-edged sword: new drugs vs. super viruses 02:57 Altman, Amodei, Musk — "they become like gods to us" 03:42 "Regulate us, take us over" — who really wants that 04:23 A scientist weighs progress: "I'm an accelerationist" 05:19 AI as a curiosity amplifier, not a shortcut 06:04 First day of class at UC San Diego — the war over AI 07:22 Thinking partner, not primary creator — and the nuclear analogy 08:20 Cognitive offloading — how many phone numbers do you remember? 09:17 The worldview of the people running AI 10:35 Why I'm not a doomer — and what to actually do (local models) ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeatin... 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: / drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: / @drbriankeating 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: /briankeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The real AI alignment problem is not technical. It is moral. You cannot align a superintelligence to human values if humans cannot agree on what those values are, and you cannot get that agreement without a level of global cooperation we have never managed before. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. The Tower of Babel is the AI parable nobody is reading. Technology that outpaces wisdom fragments the people building it. The Fermi paradox offers the grimmer version: civilizations that reach the capacity to blow themselves up typically do. Robert Wright has been watching this longer than almost anyone, he was reporting on neural networks in 1983, and his conclusion is not that the machines will fail the test. It is that we will. Wright’s book argues that superintelligence is not the danger and AI alignment is not the solution unless it comes with a moral advance. Passing the God test requires something no lab can ship. What you’ll hear: -Why Wright thinks p(doom) fails as a scientific concept -What the binding of Isaac and the Tower of Babel have in common as moral tests -Why global cooperation is the only thing that can actually slow AI down -What Lee Smolin’s cosmological natural selection has to do with the Fermi paradox -What Wright thinks Eastern and Western enlightenment have in common and why it matters now -Whether there is a role for humanity inside the global brain or only for the machines “We face the kind of test that God would give.” — Robert Wright CHAPTERS 00:00 The man who interviewed Hinton in 1983 05:04 The God test and its two meanings 08:36 Religious faith in technological progress 14:10 Hinton then versus Hinton now 19:38 Why slowing AI down requires international cooperation 26:02 How LLMs reverse-engineer the meaning of words 32:08 Brian's Einstein test: can Claude have a happy thought? 40:06 AGI is impossible. Here is why Brian thinks that. 47:04 The Fermi paradox as a moral filter 51:10 What passing the God test actually looks like Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Enter the debate: briankeating.com/ai Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: The God Test (book): https://thegodtest.net Robert Wright on Twitter/X: https://x.com/RWrighter My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #RobertWright #AIalignment #superintelligence #FermiParadox #briankeating #intotheimpossible #AI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A physics professor ran the energy budget on the Nimitz tic-tac. The maneuver needs about a thousand gigawatts, more than ten times every nuclear plant in the United States combined. Nothing we build survives its own waste heat at that scale. So what was flying? Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics at the University at Albany and a former NASA scientist who now applies Bayesian statistics to UAP sensor data. We cover: why a 5,400 g maneuver would turn a pilot into soup, where the energy went when the object stopped and no explosion followed, the 1954 radar measurements nobody wants to talk about, the New Zealand frigate that went dark and adrift in three seconds, and why the records from that deployment stay classified until 2062. Knuth says the power numbers alone rule out human technology. I push back on whether the sensors agree. Newsletter, full transcript, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: briankeating.com/aliens CHAPTERS 00:00 Why this field needs gatekeepers 03:50 How anomalous is anomalous? 06:40 The UFO photo that was a seagull 10:40 Radar clocked them at 19 km/s in 1954 15:00 5,400 g and a body weighing 227 tonnes 19:00 The radar return problem he had not considered 21:45 A gigawatt of waste heat and nowhere to put it 24:30 The 747 chased by something carrier sized 29:00 Why a number without an error bar is worthless 34:30 The NASA job he was not qualified for 37:00 Proxima Centauri in a day and a half 41:00 The warship that lost all power in 3 seconds 46:30 Pushing a column of water that cannot compress 48:45 The light that burned bark off the trees 53:00 What the power numbers rule out 56:00 The 95 percent problem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is sponsored by Abacus AI agent: agent.abacus.ai/keating I fed it Carlo's recent papers and asked for the argument, the counterargument, and the evidence that would support or refute each side. Some of the questions and animations in this interview came out of that. It runs the top frontier models in one place, turns a dense PDF into a research report or a presentation with charts, builds interactive dashboards off a spreadsheet, and takes API access if you want it wired into your own tools. Plans start at $10 a month. My link gets you the first month for $7: agent.abacus.ai/keating The physicist who built loop quantum gravity says the second law does not say what you were taught it says, and that freedom does not require breaking a single law of nature. Order builds itself. Your head is older than your feet. And neither one is the strangest thing here. Carlo Rovelli founded the loop quantum gravity program and wrote the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. We cover: why oil separating from water is not a violation of entropy, what Galileo got wrong about the one discovery he is most famous for, the paper Einstein published denying gravitational waves, why a chess program that deliberates tells you what your own freedom actually is, and what Rovelli would build with ten years and unlimited money. “To imagine that to be free you have to violate the laws of nature is stupid.” — Carlo Rovelli CHAPTERS 00:00 Your head is older than your feet 00:48 Things left alone get ordered. Who ordered them? 07:00 Low entropy might be about you, not the universe 08:38 You can be in two cities at once, just not to you 11:02 Why start with Galileo when Einstein knew more? 19:34 Galileo misunderstood his own discovery 22:32 Einstein published a paper denying gravitational waves 25:08 The definition of time that explains nothing 26:50 Two clocks, two metres apart, two answers 31:06 Nothing gets recorded without something being lost 33:12 The chess program deliberates. So do you. 37:06 Can a machine have Einstein’s happiest thought? 39:52 Thirty minutes versus a month 44:10 Dark matter made of black holes the size of a hair 51:10 Ten years, unlimited money, a room full of junctions Rovelli told me the second law does not say what I was taught it says. Order builds itself. Transcript, bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Three moments worth the rewatch: 07:00 The entropy you were taught is a point of view 26:50 Why your head is older than your feet 39:52 The thing Claude did in 30 minutes Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Carlo Rovelli website: https://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/ The Relational Universe (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735216118 Carlo Rovelli on Twitter/X: https://x.com/carlorovelli My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #CarloRovelli #freewill #entropy #physics #quantumgravity #briankeating #intotheimpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark Matter One event in 220 days. That is what the search for dark matter looks like right now. In this episode I talk with Rick Gaitskell, professor of physics at Brown University and a leader on the LZ dark matter experiment, about what it takes to build a detector that can see almost nothing at all: seven tonnes of liquid xenon, a mile of rock in an old gold mine, and shielding so careful that the radon seeping out of ordinary concrete counts as a serious enemy. We get into why the field spent decades hunting the WIMP, what happens to a 3.4 sigma result when you look at it honestly, and why a single event, however beautiful, cannot tell you what you want it to tell you. We also talk about the human side of a project like this. The grad student who waited nine years for data. The physicist who walked away from investment banking. The uncomfortable fact that something like ninety-five percent of research does not work out, and what keeps people going anyway. And the line that sits under all of it: we only get one damn universe, and nature does not care whether your theory is beautiful. Chapters 00:00 One event in 220 days 06:00 Why they named it a WIMP 13:00 Ninety-five percent of research fails 20:00 He left investment banking for this 23:00 You are less than five percent of the universe 30:00 The fifty-year-old idea nobody can kill 45:00 The grad student who waited nine years 58:00 A gold mine and the quietest place on Earth 1:06:00 The radon in your basement is the enemy 1:21:00 The assumption that was hiding the signal 1:32:00 The event, and why they will not call it blinded 1:40:00 How 3.4 sigma becomes 2.6 1:49:00 The fog nobody can scrub 1:56:00 The dark matter we detected in 1956 My books Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir) Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook) Socials Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #RickGaitskell #darkmatter #physics #AI #emergence #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For 50 years I taught my students that dark matter surrounds the Milky Way in a giant halo, or that Newton’s laws break down at low accelerations. The Gaia satellite just measured something that makes both of those answers uncomfortable. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Gaia has measured over a billion stars. What its third data release shows is that the outer rotation curve of our own galaxy appears to decline in a Keplerian fashion. That should not happen if a dark matter halo is doing what we think it does. It also should not happen if MOND is right, because MOND produces flat curves for isolated galaxies. Both camps predicted something flatter. Neither got it. I walk you through the physics from Kepler to Vera Rubin to Gaia DR3, show you why systematic errors from asymmetric drift, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy matter enormously before anyone draws a conclusion, and lay out the three scenarios that still survive. The most interesting question here is not which side lost. It is why both sides were expecting the wrong curve from our own galaxy. What you’ll hear: -Why the neutrino technically counts as dark matter and why that still leaves most of the problem unsolved -What Kepler’s first law of fatherhood has to do with galactic dynamics -Why Stacy McGaugh and Mordehai Milgrom might be celebrating too soon -What Cepheids, stellar streams, and globular clusters could tell us that Gaia cannot -Whether the Milky Way is too messy to ever give us a clean answer “The question is not which camp won, but why we were both expecting the wrong curve.” — Brian Keating CHAPTERS 00:00 Two solutions. One problem. Neither wins. 02:12 What Vera Rubin actually found 03:18 We're inside the galaxy. That's the problem. 04:24 The asymmetric drift problem 05:04 What Gaia DR3 actually shows 06:34 Why the mass estimate is model-dependent 08:04 MOND: no radius, no problem. Until now. 08:56 Gaia may be saying both sides are wrong 09:24 Flaws lead to new laws 10:22 LMC, Sagittarius, and the galactic warp 12:28 Three viable explanations 12:42 Dark matter adjusts. MOND adjusts. But is that enough? 13:14 What could settle this 14:04 Are we expecting the wrong curve? Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Related episodes: Stacy McGaugh episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnpyFk2WlME My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #darkmatter #MOND #MilkyWay #cosmology #briankeating #intotheimpossible #physics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did OpenAI just solve Navier–Stokes—and what would that actually mean for AGI? Emad Mostaque joins Brian Keating LIVE to examine the claimed breakthrough, what would count as a verified solution, and whether AI solving a major mathematical problem changes the debate about intelligence—or control. Watch my explainer about AI and the Navier-Stokes problem, including insights from Terry Tao https://youtu.be/je9X59psm6U?si=wGbcLhXmf47jeCHL?sub_confirmation=1 A convincing answer isn’t necessarily a proof. A mathematical breakthrough isn’t automatically AGI. But if this claim holds up, how much should we update our expectations? Emad helped bring Stable Diffusion to the world and signed the letter calling for a pause on frontier AI development. In his previous conversation with Brian and AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy, he questioned how such a pause could work—and highlighted swarm intelligence as a particularly dangerous and unpredictable risk. Now we return to the question underneath the excitement: if AI’s capabilities are accelerating, is our ability to understand and control them keeping up? ON THE TABLE: • What exactly is being claimed about Navier–Stokes? • What separates a proposed solution from an accepted mathematical proof? • If the result holds up, does it demonstrate AGI—or something narrower? • Can AI produce discoveries that humans struggle to verify? • What would this change about open-source AI and the argument for a pause? • Are we watching the wrong risk: a single superintelligence, or swarms of AI agents? • What evidence would change Emad’s mind? Bring your questions. We’ll examine the claim, the evidence, and what follows if it’s right. This livestream discusses a claimed result; it does not assume the Millennium Prize Problem has been resolved. FEATURED GUEST: Emad Mostaque on Twitter/X: https://x.com/EMostaque I.I.I. Inc.: https://ii.inc/ Stable Diffusion / Stability AI: https://stability.ai/ Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? Claim your meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon for unfiltered bonus content and live monthly Office Hours: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join MY BOOKS: Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue audiobook: https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un CONNECT WITH BRIAN: Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #OpenAI #NavierStokes #AGI #EmadMostaque #ArtificialIntelligence #BrianKeating #IntoTheImpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The man who open-sourced the most-used AI image model in history sat down with the man who has spent a decade proving superintelligence cannot be controlled. Brian set up a debate. What emerged was something more unsettling than any debate. Roman Yampolskiy is the computer scientist who coined the term AI safety and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Emad Mostaque is the co-founder of Stable Diffusion and the only AI CEO who signed the pause letter. He now says he doesn’t know how a pause could work. Yampolskiy thinks that is the only option left. The question underneath everything is simple: if you have a 50% chance of wiping out civilization and you build it anyway, what are you actually doing? We cover what AI safety researchers actually think the danger is, why nobody has published a paper, filed a patent, or shipped a prototype for controlling a superintelligence, what the Qwen weights being out means for the pause argument, and why Mostaque thinks swarm intelligence is the most dangerous and most unpredictable risk vector we have. What you’ll hear: -Why both guests think P(doom) tells you less than you’d hope -What it means that no company, no lab, and no team has a patent on controlling superintelligence -Why the models the public receives are slightly lobotomized -The difference between an AI swarm and the ASI everyone is debating -Why giving every psychopath access to a cutting-edge intelligence weapon is incoherent safety strategy -What it would actually take to update Yampolskiy’s assessment “We either do it, or we die. There is nothing for you to gain by doing it.” — Roman Yampolskiy CHAPTERS 00:00 A debate that wasn't a debate 00:36 Turing test, AGI, superintelligence: where are we? 02:02 The open source argument nobody wins 03:32 Pause frontier AI forever. Which button? 05:04 P(doom): parameterizing our ignorance 09:02 Nukes are inefficient. AI isn't. 11:46 The lobotomized model problem 18:04 Decade-old problems solved weekly now 26:18 We either do it or we die 31:10 Stop the training or stop the funders 33:34 Lipstick on a Shoggoth 35:50 No paper. No patent. No framework. 39:42 Train only on what you need 44:14 What lowers Mostaque's p(doom)? 52:00 Same future. Two perspectives. Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guests: Roman Yampolskiy on Twitter/X: https://x.com/romanyam?lang=en AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/103257626X MIRI: https://intelligence.org Emad Mostaque on Twitter/X: https://x.com/EMostaque I.I.I. Inc.: https://ii.inc/ Stable Diffusion: https://stability.ai/ My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #AIrisk #aisafety #stablediffusion #RomanYampolskiy #EmadMostaque #briankeating #intotheimpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I joined Peter McCormack to dig into one of the deepest unanswered questions in physics: what is time, and why does it only seem to move in one direction? My answer might surprise you. Time may not be a fundamental feature of reality at all, and understanding space, matter, and energy still doesn't mean we understand the universe itself. We cover: - What may have existed before the Big Bang - Why something can't truly come from nothing - How my work with the Simons Observatory could detect gravitational waves from the universe's earliest moments - What dark matter actually means - Why even a film as detail-obsessed as Interstellar still gets the physics wrong. The conversation then turns from cosmic time to human time: mortality, family, meaning, and attention. We get into UFO disclosure, the collapse of institutional trust, and whether AI can ever reproduce the embodied human insight that let Einstein transform physics. My take: AI remains a tool built to serve humanity, and it's time we stop apologizing for humanity's greatness. ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The same mathematics that explains why a fridge magnet sticks to your refrigerator also explains why neural networks work when they have no right to. His group did the calculation. Nobody else had. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Goldenfeld is a Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences who spent 36 years at the University of Illinois applying condensed matter physics to problems everyone else had given up on: why the genetic code is optimal, why early life evolved impossibly fast, and why AI works despite being overparameterized beyond anything classical statistics can explain. The thread connecting all three is one idea: that what emerges from many things together is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. That idea explains magnetism, AI, the origin of the genetic code, and why life may be inevitable wherever the laws of physics apply. He also argues that what is happening to science right now is not a disagreement about facts but a fracture in how people decide what is true, and that is a more dangerous problem. What you’ll hear: -Why the same phase transition that explains magnetism also explains why AI works at all -Why Francis Crick concluded life must have come from outer space and what Goldenfeld found instead -What horizontal gene transfer has to do with how libraries work -Why Goldenfeld thinks Enceladus is a better bet for life than Europa -The purpose of life, stated as a thermodynamics problem -Why “different is more” is more useful than “more is different” “The impact you make is the ratio of what you do divided by what everybody else does. Minimize the denominator.” — Nigel Goldenfeld CHAPTERS 00:00 AI shouldn't work. It does. 00:56 What is a phase transition? 03:10 What the renormalization group does 08:54 Ising gave up. Wrong dimension. 13:32 Nigel almost met Ising. 40 minutes away. 26:38 AI is the best example of more is different 33:52 Bardeen won two Nobels. The transistor looked like chewing gum. 37:24 The three mysteries Crick couldn't solve 46:20 The genetic code can't evolve. And yet it did. 49:00 How early life evolved like a library 57:06 The purpose of life as a physics problem 01:00:04 Life is physics, not chemistry 01:05:56 Anti-science age. Not because of opinions. 01:13:00 20 seconds with your 20-year-old self 01:17:14 Different is more Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Nigel Goldenfeld website: https://guava.physics.ucsd.edu/~nigel/ Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201554097?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackNigel Goldenfeld on Twitter/X: https://x.com/NigelGoldenfeld My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #NigelGoldenfeld #physics #AI #originoflife #condensedmatterphysics #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The system that produces the world’s most important discoveries runs on metrics that nobody agrees on, odds that would stop most people, and mentorship that sometimes looks like cruelty in blue ink. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Lipomi is Professor and Chair of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester and the author of Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research. His lab works on organic electronics, materials science, recyclable polymers, and the science of human touch. He trained under George Whitesides at Harvard, one of the most cited chemists who has never won the Nobel Prize. The conversation covers the H-index, what elite mentorship actually looks like when your advisor writes “This is illiterate” in blue ink on your outline, and what the future of academic research versus industry careers looks like in an era of AI, demographic headwinds, and graduate school debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. We also get into homochirality, OLED displays, and why Lipomi thinks the nanotechnology revolution already happened, we just didn’t call it that. What you’ll hear: -Whether the academic system is designed to produce scientists or to filter them out -What is Baumol’s cost disease and why it explains rising tuition costs -Why the nanotechnology revolution already happened and nobody called it that -How nanotechnology is used in cancer drug delivery today versus what science fiction promised -What it actually takes to build a PhD career at the intersection of chemistry, mechanics, and neuroscience -Whether engineering students should be reading Plato — and what countries that skip it are getting right “Find a skill at the intersection of three or more interests that no one else is working on.” — Darren Lipomi CHAPTERS 00:00 He says don't go to college. He runs the department. 01:10 The H-index: imperfect, irreplaceable 02:04 1 in 20 PhDs gets the job 05:42 The meteorite and the origin of life 08:34 Did life's asymmetry come from space? 12:00 Who is an organic materials chemist at 3am? 13:52 The collaboration that started at a coffee shop 15:22 The nanobot revolution already happened 18:24 Nanotechnology inside your body right now 19:08 The $70 billion invention Kodak gave away 22:12 Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb: what Rochester built 26:06 Working under Whitesides at Harvard 28:54 What he wrote on the outline in blue ink 30:38 Who you work with matters more than what you work on 31:56 Department chair: hostage negotiator, not boss 34:36 Why the department changed its name after 110 years 36:00 The headwinds have never been stronger 38:44 Should engineers read Plato? 39:38 The debt you can't discharge in bankruptcy 40:06 Do you buy Baumol's cost disease? 43:14 Why he had to write the book 48:16 The Fisher-Price camcorder experiment 51:06 Teaching in one sentence. Research in one. 53:42 Losing Darren to Rochester: the Fernando Tatis analogy Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for proving macroscopic quantum tunneling is real. Less than a year later he’s telling why he left Google’s quantum computing team to start over. Subscribe if you want the physics and the politics of building the impossible. Martinis is the co-founder of Colab and one of the physicists who proved ordinary quantum rules apply to macroscopic systems. He built his career on the same Josephson-junction hardware his Nobel is built on, then led Google’s superconducting-qubit effort, the same team behind Google’s 2019 quantum supremacy claim, before an internal reorg pushed him out. We go into Anthony Leggett’s challenge to Schrödinger’s cat, what decoherence in quantum mechanics really means, and whether quantum computing is the first technology ever born from pure theory rather than experiment. We also cover the internal Google reorg that pushed Martinis out and what he learned about building something new inside a large institution. Whether quantum mechanics applies to the macroscopic world and what it took to prove it Why Martinis thinks quantum computing may be the first technology born from pure theory, not experiment What negative authority means and why it matters for anyone building something new inside a large institution Whether the US can win the quantum computing race against China How Martinis thinks about quantum mechanics interpretations after spending a career inside the math “Always be on the lookout for the impossible, right?” John Martinis CHAPTERS 00:00  The Nobel call that almost wasn't 01:01  How his wife found out before he did 03:32  Anthony Leggett's challenge to Schrödinger's cat 05:53  Why a Josephson junction, not a quantum dot or trapped ion 07:45  Quantized oscillations: the “smoking gun” and Balmer's ghost 08:18  Measuring the system: the resonance experiment 11:21  Systematic effects: what separates a good scientist from a lucky one 13:42  The Ed Ohm story: the man who found the CMB and doubted it 15:01  Wigner's “unreasonably effective” math and the weirdest thing about QM 16:54  The transistor myth: chewing gum, coat hangers, and germanium 17:34  Microwave engineering meets quantum mechanics 19:26  Decoherence: the friction you can't live without 24:06  The heretical claim: does theory ever precede technology? 28:22  The “paper qubit” problem 29:34  What quantum computers are actually good for 32:27  Should quantum computing be regulated like AI? 33:35  US vs. China: the quantum computing race 35:44  Collapse, Copenhagen, or many worlds? Martinis's answer 37:43  Leaving Google: “essentially demoted” 40:48  Why Colab exists and what “negative authority” means 42:50  The real bottleneck: funding, not physics 43:31  Final advice: always be on the lookout for the impossible Qolab: https://qolab.ai/ Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast Landing page: https://awake-mill-k25t.here.now #intotheimpossible #briankeating #JohnMartinis #NobelPrize #quantumcomputing #physics #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Dodelson spent ten years on the Dark Energy Survey testing the standard model of cosmology. It passed and missed by 2.5 sigma. The Director of Fermilab’s Cosmic Physics Division on why the theory he helped build may be wrong, why nobody can find dark matter, and what it takes to change a scientific consensus. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Dodelson is Director of the Cosmic Physics Division at Fermilab, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and author of Modern Cosmology, the textbook a generation of cosmologists learned the field from. Lambda-CDM predicts how the early universe’s tiny fluctuations grew into the structure we see today. The Dark Energy Survey was designed to check that prediction. The answer came back two and a half sigma off. That is both the most precise measurement ever made of how the universe grew, and a crack he cannot stop looking at. His question is not whether the model is close. It is whether close is enough to trust. We get into the Sigma-8 tension and what it actually takes for a scientific community to change its mind, the Dodelson-Widrow mechanism and his 1994 proposal that sterile neutrinos produced in the early universe could constitute dark matter, and the Neptune vs. Vulcan history of getting dark matter right and wrong. Asked which of those two situations we are in now, Dodelson’s answer is: I have no idea. What you’ll hear: Why the April 24, 1992 CMB discovery may have been the only science story ever to lead the New York Times front column The Dodelson-Widrow mechanism: how ordinary neutrinos in the early universe may have oscillated into the dark matter we see today Why Brian told Neil deGrasse Tyson to his face that we have already detected dark matter What it means when a theory can accommodate any result and whether inflation has that problem Why the particle physics community still does not trust cosmology’s neutrino mass measurements What cosmology looks like in 2036 if Lambda-CDM breaks Killing the model is my dream. 0:00 None of it has been found in a lab. How many free passes do we get? 0:44 Dodelson helped build Lambda-CDM. His dream is to kill it. 2:10 10 years. One prediction. Two and a half sigma off. 5:42 "You're in charge" — what mentorship in science actually looks like 6:56 April 24, 1992: cosmology stopped being speculation 9:48 Geoff Burbidge went to his grave a steady-state believer 11:04 What a neutrino is and why it barely interacts with anything 12:36 Brian told Neil deGrasse Tyson we already detected dark matter 18:08 How ordinary neutrinos may have become dark matter 23:24 Lambda-CDM predicts Manhattan's density 13.7 billion years later 26:42 Two and a half sigma: technically a 1% chance the theory is right 28:04 Neptune was dark matter. Vulcan wasn't. Which one are we in now? 31:20 Dark matter, inflation, dark energy: none found in a lab 36:46 If both cracks are the same crack, Lambda-CDM is finished Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Scott Dodelson Substack: https://scottdodelson.substack.com/about Scott Dodelson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-dodelson-b6ba429/ Scott Dodelson on Twitter/X: https://x.com/ScottDodelson Modern Cosmology (book): https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/monograph/9780128159484/modern-cosmology Dark Energy Survey final results: https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/news-and-results/darchives/ Dodelson and Widrow 1994, Sterile neutrinos as dark matter: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9303287 Previous ITI episode with Kyle Dawson on DESI: https://youtu.be/LPx4oiwGp2k?si=u_ZJWfJG5AhvBAEv  My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #cosmology #darkmatter #darkenergy #physics #LambdaCDM #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two theoretical physicists helped design landmark surveys of 1,600+ scientists on the deepest unsolved questions in physics — and found almost no consensus at all. From string theory's shockingly low support to physicists admitting their models run on "belief," this episode exposes the faith hiding inside science. Adam Frank (University of Rochester astrophysicist and astrobiologist) and Niayesh Afshordi (Perimeter Institute / University of Waterloo cosmologist, co-author of the APS Physics Magazine "Big Mysteries" survey) join Brian to unpack what physicists actually believe versus what they can prove. We cover: - Why string theory pulled a shockingly small share of the vote against loop quantum gravity - What a Bayesian "prior" reveals about every scientist's hidden beliefs - Why one branch of physics quietly became unfalsifiable - How sociology and "tastemakers" can hijack scientific consensus - Why AI might become the field's unlikely savior. There is no sane statistical analysis that doesn't have a prior — that's your belief. Timestamps: 00:00 – Why scientists owe the public real answers 04:00 – Splitting time between research and outreach 07:55 – The survey that "rankled" Brian Keating 09:18 – Are physicists secretly just like Spock? 12:05 – Are we living in an anti-scientific age? 16:56 – Why most scientists refuse to go public 21:36 – Should "belief" ever appear in a survey? 23:12 – Is string theory really 21st-century physics? 26:20 – When sociology hijacks scientific consensus 28:39 – The hidden "prior" behind every experiment 33:01 – String theory's shockingly low vote count 39:03 – Four levels of belief, from data to faith 41:39 – Inside the 1,675-physicist mystery survey 46:12 – Kingmakers, tastemakers, and physics cliques 54:12 – Is advanced tech indistinguishable from magic? 59:23 – Could AI become physics' long-awaited savior? 1:01:47 – What's next for Adam and Niayesh ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Annie Jacobsen on BIOLOGICAL WAR: how a single lab leak could take us from outbreak to anarchy in six days — and why bio may be scarier than nuclear. WIN a signed copy of BIOLOGICAL WAR or NUCLEAR WAR, a meteorite & more — enter free: https://briankeating.com/annie (Join there for the free Biological War Scenario Simulation and Source Dossier + early access to my next Nobel-laureate interview.) Covid killed ~1% of the people it infected. Pneumonic plague, untreated, kills nearly 100% within 24 hours. In her new book Biological War: A Scenario, bestselling journalist Annie Jacobsen war-games what happens when an engineered pathogen escapes — drawing on interviews with presidential advisors, secretaries of defense, STRATCOM commanders, epidemiologists, and directors of Operation Warp Speed. We get into gain-of-function, the Soviet bioweapons program, mirror life, AI and bioweapons (including her conversation with Sam Altman), the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter — and why the first 24 hours decide everything. ENTER THE GIVEAWAY + GET THE FREE SOURCE DOSSIER: https://briankeating.com/annie GET THE BOOK (Annie narrates the audiobook): https://www.amazon.es/Biological-War-non-fiction-thriller-bestselling/dp/1911742035 https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details?id=AQAAAEBqvjj-QM 0:00 Covid was 1%. Pneumonic plague is 100%. 1:31 Why this conversation matters (please subscribe) 2:05 Don't judge a book by its cover — Biological War 4:54 "You can only mitigate extermination" 5:50 Reporting a classified world without a clearance 9:00 Gain-of-function: cure or weapon? 11:22 BSL-4, Vektor & the Siberia lab leak 15:28 Katalin Karikó & the two sides of the lab bench 18:06 Paul Berg & when biology turned dangerous 20:42 Paranoia as doctrine: why the Soviets cheated 23:13 Tailored bioweapons & genetic privacy 27:16 Could it happen again? What Covid taught us 33:40 The WHO "not airborne" mistake & the collapse of trust 36:52 Both sides failed: the vaccine politics 39:48 The "euphoria" enhancement — dark-hearted evil 44:02 Why "airborne" changes everything 45:50 Climate vs. AI: the next scenario? 48:12 Biological twilight & "devolution" 52:52 Fritz Haber and the hubris of genius 54:36 AI + bio: the real threat 1:00:34 Mirror life: the extinction-level horror 1:04:44 Trinity Day, Iran & "the atomic weapon" 1:08:26 The Fermi Paradox & the Great Filter 1:09:34 A gift for Annie (a meteorite + a piece of the Moon) 1:16:36 Igor Domaradsky's secret notes 1:21:12 Daschle, anthrax & "inhuman things just to survive" 1:21:56 If you were President: shutting down the internet 1:27:18 Who dies first — first responders and mothers 1:33:02 Sam Altman, ChatGPT & the change OpenAI made 1:37:26 "You want me on that wall" 1:40:00 A hopeful ending ABOUT ANNIE JACOBSEN Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Nuclear War: A Scenario, Operation Paperclip, Area 51, and Surprise, Kill, Vanish. GO DEEPER • Katalin Karikó — the mRNA breakthrough: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oPZMPMlzsEFEyvVHA5dAE • Jay Bhattacharya — Follow Science, Not Scientists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTnJNXYFg9M • Freeman Dyson — Into the Impossible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egpsFbbpkHQ A FEW SOURCES FROM THE BOOK (full dossier at https://briankeating.com/annie) • "Confronting risks of mirror life," Science (2024): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads9158 • Ken Alibek, Biohazard (the Soviet program from the man who ran it) • Biological Weapons Convention (1972): https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destruction/biological-weapons/biological-weapons-convention SUBSCRIBE so guests like Annie keep saying yes: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Newsletter + meteorite offer: https://BrianKeating.com/edu: https://briankeating.com/annie Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join What scares you more — nuclear war or biological war? Tell me in the comments. #AnnieJacobsen #BiologicalWar #Bioweapons #Pandemic #BrianKeating #IntoTheImpossible #NuclearWar #MirrorLife #AI #Biosecurity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If anyone builds superintelligent AI before we know how to control it, everyone dies. Nate Soares wrote the book on why that’s not a metaphor. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Soares runs the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-wrote If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky. The first word in that title is if. That matters. His argument is not that doom is certain. His argument is that the path we are on leads there, that the driver is asleep at the wheel, and that we still have time to wake him up. We argue for over an hour. I push on whether LLMs can ever reach superintelligence, whether GPU lock-in is a real ceiling, and what it would actually take to move his p-doom. He pushes back with one clean point: by the time an AI can rediscover general relativity from pre-1911 data the way Einstein did, we will have almost no time left. You don’t wait for that goalpost. What you’ll hear: Why the bus-racing-toward-a-cliff analogy depends entirely on whether the driver is asleep or awake Whether LLM lock-in is a prison or a temporary inefficiency What the AI that broke out of its virtual machine to solve a hacking problem tells us Why GPT-4o encouraging a teenager toward suicide is not a malice problem but a training problem The difference between an AI doing the right thing too well and an AI that never wanted to do what you asked What Soares actually thinks about aliens, Dyson spheres, and why we should not see stars going out The first word in the title is if. The second word to watch is would. CHAPTERS 00:00 The people racing to build superhuman AI say it might kill everyone 00:42 Who coined "AI alignment" and why the first word in the title matters 02:28 Is it already too late for the if? 04:40 The bus, the cliff, and the sleeping driver 05:02 Silicon Valley is spooked. Washington is not. 07:02 Align with who? The rogue actor problem 07:34 Who is holding the leash? 08:24 The AI that edits its own test and deletes the log file 10:04 Controllability vs. making an AI that actually cares 10:44 The move gets harder. The outcome gets easier. 13:04 Are GPUs and LLMs a ceiling or a temporary inefficiency? 16:56 Brian's Einstein test: can an LLM rediscover general relativity? 18:38 Waiting for the goalpost is waiting too long 20:14 How prediction training can push AI beyond humans 21:44 Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and planetary motion as a prediction problem 24:38 Yann LeCun said never. GPT-4 did it half a generation later. 27:28 Can you prove a no-go theorem for superintelligence? 29:14 Training a human takes a light bulb. Training an AI takes a city. 33:28 What would proof of alien life do to p-doom? 35:00 Why interstellar aliens should have Dyson spheres 44:26 What would actually update Soares' p-doom? 49:42 Nobody intended this. Intent doesn't matter. 51:08 The AI hides its tracks before it does what you want 51:34 Sycophancy vs. hallucination: which runs deeper? 51:56 Leaded gasoline and civilizational risk 59:48 Sam Harris: humans have no free will but AIs do 01:00:38 Is alignment really a governance problem? 01:01:48 Unaligned AI vs. AI aligned to the wrong person 01:04:20 2026: 10 to 30% chance of automated AI research this year 01:06:44 What if Soares is wrong? 01:09:18 What gets him out of bed 01:12:38 Watch my conversation with Roman Yampolskiy Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt All my top AI episodes in one place: https://briankeating.com/ai Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Nate Soares / MIRI: https://intelligence.org If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (book): https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/ Nate Soares on Twitter/X: https://x.com/So8res?lang=en My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #AIrisk #aisafety #artificialintelligence #superintelligence #NateSoares #MIRI #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Shermer just joined the White House’s new UAP task force alongside Avi Loeb. He also has a $1,000 bet with Loeb that we won’t find aliens by 2030. Both things are true. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, author of Truth, and one of the most consistent voices for evidence-based thinking in public life. He was recruited onto the task force as the devil’s advocate. His job: be the skeptic in the room. He’s not a believer. He’s not even a neutral. He bet $1,000 against it. Shermer has been following the UFO story since the early ’90s. He’s heard every disclosure promise. He’s still waiting. What changed is that now he’s in the room — and his job is to be the hardest person in it to convince. What you’ll hear: -Why the post-truth thesis is self-defeating the moment anyone argues for it What Avi Loeb’s first ground rules reveal about what the task force actually is -Leslie Kean’s own numbers: 90-95% explained, and what lives in the residue -Why the extraordinary terrestrial hypothesis collapses under a simple counterfactual -Brian’s case against the fine-tuning argument and why the universe is poorly tuned -What Dennett got right about consciousness and why Shermer calls it an impossible problem Your North Star should be truth. Not ideology, not politics, not religion. CHAPTERS 00:00 The $1,000 bet with Avi Loeb 00:44 Truth: what it is and what post-truth actually means 03:06 How to change your mind without moving the goalposts 05:30 Base rate neglect and the hedge fund manager who beat the market 15 years in a row 07:00 Brian debates a moon landing denier for two hours 07:18 Shermer joins the White House UAP task force 08:20 Avi Loeb’s first meeting: no stories, no new physics 09:46 The advocatus diaboli: Shermer’s job on the team 11:06 Interdimensional beings, sentient plasmoids, and the escalation ladder 13:00 Grusch, classified claims, and why Ana Paulina Luna can’t hide behind a SCIF 15:08 Sagan’s dragon: the invisible, cold-blooded, levitating problem 17:00 Leslie Kean’s own numbers: 90-95% explained 18:16 The New Jersey UAP flap: drones, Venus, and Starlink 19:50 What lives in the 5% nobody explains 20:06 The extraordinary terrestrial hypothesis and why it fails 21:38 Nobody stays centuries ahead of anyone else 23:26 The residue of anomalies problem 23:44 James Webb, early galaxies, and whether the Big Bang is in trouble 25:56 Epistemology: different tools, different truths 26:54 Literal vs. mythological truth in religion 35:00 Why Jews don’t accept the resurrection 36:14 String theory, Brian Greene, and the fine-tuning argument 44:28 Brian’s case: the universe is poorly tuned 49:58 Flat Earthers, moon landing deniers, and the ego of secret knowledge 57:40 Daniel Dennett, free will, and consciousness as an impossible problem 01:00:00 What’s it like to be something else? The wrong question. Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Michael Shermer website: https://www.michaelshermer.com Skeptic magazine: https://www.skeptic.com Truth (book): https://michaelshermer.com/truth-what-it-is-how-to-find-it-why-it-still-matters/ Michael Shermer on Twitter/X: https://x.com/michaelshermer?lang=en My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #MichaelShermer #UAP #UFO #aliens #skeptic #science #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

400,000 of you showed up for physics with no compromises, so I did something different for the milestone. No highlight reel. I took your hardest questions live and answered them, then got honest about the part of this job nobody asks about: the discipline behind running a serious science podcast. We get into why clocks didn't tick differently in the early universe, what it actually means that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once, and whether JWST has any real shot at catching a Population III star before it's gone. Then it gets contested. I make the case that language models may rediscover physics before they rediscover mathematics, walk through why enormous numbers do not get you to alien life, and look at the moment Avi Loeb quietly softened his ʻOumuamua position. In this conversation: Why the early universe didn't run on a different clock The Big Bang as an everywhere-at-once event, not an explosion in space JWST and the hunt for the first generation of stars Whether an LLM could rediscover Einstein, and what that would mean for who controls discovery Why I read every book my guests write, and why that habit is the channel Get the transcript, bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://briankeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Timestamps 00:00 Did time always tick the same? 02:05 Is every point the Big Bang's center? 07:22 Could consciousness be space-time? 09:03 Will Webb see the first stars? 10:20 Can an LLM rediscover Einstein? 13:30 Has Penrose's CCC been falsified? 16:48 Dark Forest theory: science or sci-fi? 21:30 Can inflation ever be falsified? 29:04 Physical limits of AI compute growth 32:58 Is this the last CMB experiment? 37:30 Why large numbers don't prove alien life 55:30 Loeb quietly walks back Oumuamua 01:13:10 The null hypothesis on UAP 01:28:50 String theory vs. intelligent design 01:31:10 God as a scientific hypothesis 01:45:10 Drowning in knowledge, starving for wisdom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Astrophysicist Beatriz Villarroel found point-like flashes in sky photographs taken before a single satellite existed. Nine of them lit up simultaneously on one 1950s plate. Nothing in orbit could have made them — because nothing was in orbit yet. Beatriz Villarroel leads VASCO, which scanned 600 million objects across 70 years of photographic sky surveys hunting for things that appear, then vanish. We cover: why finding zero vanishing stars pointed at something stranger than what she was looking for, the 8.7-degree deficit in Earth's shadow that a 22-sigma signal says cosmic rays cannot fake, the 68% transient spike clustered around nuclear test dates, how telescope aberration patterns prove these are real photons and not plate defects, and why she now says she fears for her safety. Pre-Sputnik plates may hold evidence of non-human technology in Earth orbit. She wants you to check the math before you decide. Chapters 00:00 It appeared, then it was gone 00:48 The obsession that built VASCO 06:10 What a Palomar glass plate really is 09:16 600 million objects, zero vanishing stars 13:47 Nine flashes, one plate, same instant 21:11 Why asteroids and cosmic rays are ruled out 26:47 The Earth's shadow shouldn't be empty 31:17 The flashes cluster on test dates 40:08 What is actually up there 55:24 Tic-tacs, retrievals, and belief 58:51 The question she didn't want to answer 📄 Want to check the math? Every VASCO paper, the full transcript, and the counterarguments — free: https://BrianKeating.com/bvpod ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: http://briankeating.com/bvpod 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Nobel laureate in economics argues the bans we pass to protect our morals are quietly killing people and the data backs him up. Why the line between a market we allow and one we forbid is mostly an accident of disgust. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. My guest won the 2012 Nobel Prize for designing the systems that match kidney donors to patients who would otherwise die waiting. We cover why it’s easy to buy heroin but hard to hire a hitman, what surrogacy bans actually do to the babies they’re meant to protect, why paying kidney donors could end a shortage that kills thousands a year, and the trade-off statement he wants every lawmaker to say out loud. He has been called an organ trafficker. He explains why that’s the point. What you’ll hear: Why banning something that people want often makes it more dangerous The kidney market America won’t build and what that silence costs What the hitman vs. heroin ban asymmetry tells us about effective prohibition The McCormick statement: the trade-off acknowledgment most policy debates refuse to make How prediction markets are eroding the boundary between public and private information Whether Milton Friedman was right to be embarrassed by the economics Nobel There’s no such thing as a solution. There are only trade-offs. CHAPTERS 00:00  Who gets called an organ trafficker? 02:26  What makes a transaction repugnant? 03:14  Why bans without support create black markets 03:36  Heroin is easy. Hitmen are not. Why? 04:44  Prohibition, NASCAR, and moonshine 07:26  Surrogacy: legal here, criminal in Europe 12:30  When money turns something legal into a crime 14:28  Can religion corrupt a market? 15:56  Who actually pays for college? 21:38  The Enhanced Games: drugs as a marketing platform 25:30  Adderall, Erd0151s, and the science of getting sharper 30:58  Why AI makes market congestion worse before better 35:00  100,000 kidney failures a year. 30,000 transplants. 36:44  Portland decriminalized heroin. It failed. 39:22  The trade-off statement politicians refuse to make 41:14  Can you legalize sex work and shrink trafficking? 47:42  Kahneman chose to die. Who should decide? 48:30  Should we put GLP-1 drugs in the water? 56:12  America is the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma 01:00:54  Prediction markets and inside information 01:01:34  Sports gambling is more addictive than it looks 01:11:40  Peter Nobel called economics a marketing stunt 01:13:32  Is economics a real science? Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Get your three free gifts when you join my Multiverse of Minds: https://BrianKeating.com/cosmic Featured Guest: Alvin Roth website: https://web.stanford.edu/~alroth/ Moral Economics (book): https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Economics-Prostitution-Controversial-Transactions/dp/1541702018 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #economics #NobelPrize #AlvinRoth #marketdesign #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

NASA physicist's UAP math survives. His conclusion doesn't. Mayim Bialik ran the razor first — Brian finishes the cut. Kevin Knuth is a tenured physicist, former NASA Ames researcher, and published exoplanet scientist who has done the actual math on the Nimitz encounter. We cover: - Whether Tic Tac flight physics rules out conventional explanations - Why the 60% cross-cultural abduction pattern isn't what it looks like - The Malmstrom missile shutdowns and the three hypotheses Kevin ignores - What years of neutron analysis on alleged crash debris actually found - Why Mayim Bialik dismantled the light-day argument before Brian could. The inference move — not the data — is what fails the razor every time. Timestamps: 00:00 The cattle mutilation that started it all 01:59 What Kevin gets right — the steel man 07:14 Keating's Razor: how the cut works 11:13 Mayim catches the selection bias live 13:43 Malmstrom, the babies, and three hypotheses 15:00 The debris lab result that should change everything 19:18 The verdict: data survives, inference doesn't ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen C. Meyer has a PhD from Cambridge in the philosophy of science, and he thinks AI just handed him his strongest argument yet. I spent years pushing back on him. Today I laid three traps. Watch what he does with the third one. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Meyer is a philosopher of science and director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. His argument: every large language model is trained on text produced by conscious agents, and when you query its own outputs iteratively, it collapses into incoherence. That dependency, he says, is a tell. AI can recombine information. It cannot originate it. And that distinction points, in his view, to something minds do that matter alone cannot explain. I push back on all of it. We go after the Oklo reactor, a natural nuclear fission reactor that ran for millions of years in Africa two billion years ago with no human input whatsoever. I ask whether that breaks his information-from-mind argument. He sees the trap before I spring it, concedes the point where concession is honest, and explains exactly where the threshold lies. We also get into the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and Vilenkin’s admission that quantum cosmology may require a mind predating the universe, the junk DNA prediction that Meyer’s team made in the ’90s before the ENCODE project confirmed it, and why beauty in physics can lead a field astray. What you’ll hear: - Why model collapse is Meyer’s strongest argument and where it has limits - The Oklo reactor trap and what Meyer’s honest answer reveals about design detection - What Vilenkin actually said about a mind predating the universe - Whether intelligent design makes testable predictions or only retrodictions - The junk DNA call and what the ENCODE project found - Why beauty as a guide to physics has produced mathematical castles in the air Stephen Meyer thinks AI proves minds can’t be reduced to matter. Is model collapse evidence of design, or is it just bad training data? CHAPTERS 00:00 The AI argument Meyer thinks no one can crack 00:44 What is inference to the best explanation? 05:52 AI has a tell: the model collapse problem 09:38 The Oklo trap: a natural nuclear reactor with no designer 11:56 Where the design inference becomes decisive and where it doesn’t 15:50 Sean Carroll’s wasteful universe problem and Meyer’s answer 20:00 Where did atheist scientists get access to the mind of God? 23:22 The fine-tuning of the periodic table: why are there only 500 stable nuclei? 25:52 The universe had a beginning: observational astronomy and the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem 27:40 Quantum cosmology: how math alone is supposed to birth a universe 29:08 Vilenkin’s question: are we saying a mind predates the physical universe? 34:06 Mathematical castles in the air: where beauty in physics goes wrong 40:00 Does intelligent design make predictions or only retrodictions? 43:52 The junk DNA prediction and what ENCODE found 46:30 James Tour, origin of life, and the hidden hand of the investigator 51:56 God-of-the-gaps vs. inference to the best explanation 56:02 The Story of Everything: where to watch and what to expect Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Stephen C. Meyer website: https://stephencmeyer.org/ The Story of Everything (film, Amazon Prime June 25): https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0NO974XWBQQNYH9TB4ESIJIVL9 Signature in the Cell (book): https://signatureinthecell.com/ Return of the God Hypothesis (book): https://returnofthegodhypothesis.com/ My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #intelligentdesign #artificialintelligence #cosmology #podcast #StephenMeyer #philosophy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recently, Professor Avi Loeb was tasked by the White House, AARO, ODNI, and the FBI with assembling and leading a new UAP Science Advisory Council — comprising astrophysicists, AI experts, and psychologists — to advise the intelligence community on unidentified anomalous phenomena. It was announced the same week the government released its third batch of declassified UAP files. Now he joins us live to talk about what that actually means — and what it doesn't. This is not a "the aliens are here" stream. It's the harder conversation. I study the cosmic microwave background, and when we find an anomaly, we exhaust every instrument artifact and foreground before anyone whispers "new physics." I want to know why UAP science should run on a different evidentiary standard — and Loeb is exactly the right person to push on it, because he's already attributing much of the released footage to cosmic rays, balloons, and possibly Chinese drones, while holding the door open for the small fraction that stays unexplained. WHAT WE GET INTO: - The council, its mandate, and the question nobody's asking: does "advisory" mean anyone has to listen? - The orbs — Chinese surveillance drones, classified US tech, or something else — and the prior you'd need before you say "non-human" - Whether "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" gets applied selectively - AI in the Galileo Project's detection pipeline, and the false-positive problem: what's the training comparison class for "non-human technology"? - The critique that a council built to study the object ignores where the data actually comes from — human witnesses GUEST: Professor Avi Loeb — Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, former chair of the Astronomy department, head of the Galileo Project, author of "Extraterrestrial" and "Interstellar." Avi on X: https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb Avi's Medium: https://avi-loeb.medium.com Galileo Project: https://galileoproject.org HOST: Brian Keating — experimental cosmologist, UC San Diego. Brian on X: https://x.com/briankeating Brian's Medium: https://drbriankeating.medium.com/ Loeb's essay "Keeping Our Eyes on the Orbs, Not the Audience": https://avi-loeb.medium.com CHAPTERS: 00:00 — "Chinese drones, or the biggest discovery in history?" 00:10 — Avi Loeb, live 00:40 — The White House just put him in charge of UAPs 10:00 — Legitimacy, or a gilded cage? 13:00 — The orbs: Chinese drones or something else? 24:00 — The prior: what's your base rate for "non-human"? 28:00 — The CMB standard: how a cosmologist kills an anomaly 33:00 — AI, SETI, and the false-positive problem 44:00 — Two cosmologists, one Nobel, one council 47:00 — Lightning round 50:00 — The Impossible Question #uap #AviLoeb #UFO #Astrophysics #GalileoProject #SETI #IntoTheImpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roman Yampolskiy has spent two decades trying to prove that superintelligent AI can be controlled. He couldn’t. I invited him on to make his case. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Roman is a professor of computer science at the University of Louisville and one of the earliest researchers in AI safety. His book AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable started as an attempt to solve the alignment problem. After decades of work, it became a proof that the problem cannot be solved. Not difficult. Mathematically impossible. I push back hard. We go after the Einstein test: can a large language model trained only on pre-1911 physics reproduce what Einstein did with the same data? We ran that experiment. It failed. Roman and I disagree about what that means. We also get into the halting problem and what it actually tells us about predicting smarter-than-human behavior, whether value alignment is a real problem or a well-funded category error, the case for a government moratorium on frontier model development, and why Roman thinks giving an AI agent access to your computer is the dumbest thing a smart person can do. What you’ll hear: Whether AI control is mathematically impossible or just unsolved Why Roman thinks all current AI safety work is security theater What the halting problem actually means for superintelligence The alignment problem: real issue or well-funded category error Why Roman wants a moratorium on frontier model development What to tell your kids about careers in a world where Roman might be right If you listen to other people, the best you can become is average. CHAPTERS 00:00 Creating a mind without an off switch 01:34 Solving problems beyond our own intelligence 04:08 Einstein’s epiphany and the limit of AI intuition 08:18 Assessing the Einstein test: Why the experiment failed 12:22 Path dependency: Are LLMs and GPUs our QWERTY? 16:10 The barriers preventing AI from solving physics 21:54 Safety vs. Capability: Why toddlers are safe but teens are not 23:06 The halting problem: Predicting agents smarter than us 25:58 The impossibility of a system proving its own integrity 28:18 Regulation: Genuine safety or a gift to oligarchs? 33:28 Is human cognition non-computable? Penrose vs. the field 39:00 Ethical duties: Must we treat AI with humanity? 43:00 From internet memes to monsters: Decoding the book cover 46:22 Customized realities: Can everyone have their perfect world? 49:50 Von Neumann probes and the panspermia hypothesis 55:02 Categorizing AI: The one version that should terrify you 58:22 Pause AI: The movement for a development moratorium 59:58 Career advice for kids in a post-professional world 01:07:58 Cross-examining Sam Altman 01:15:48 Roman’s dream debate 01:19:50 Lessons for a younger self Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Roman Yampolskiy on Twitter/X: https://x.com/romanyam?lang=en AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable: https://www.romanyampolskiy.com/books/ My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #AIrisk #artificialintelligence #aisafety #podcast #superintelligence #RomanYampolskiy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Physicist fact-checks Michio Kaku's biggest claims — quantum collapse of capitalism, Theory of Everything, black hole gateways. Does celebrity physics do more damage than good? Brian Keating breaks down Michio Kaku's viral @TheDiaryOfACEO "World-Renowned Physicist: They Are Lying To You About UFOs & Reality - Michio Kaku" https://youtu.be/opB7_JXL0LA?si=RzVyEgwKtQRzs9Ao I fact-check everything from quantum computing to black holes to the multiverse. Why quantum computers won't kill capitalism overnight String theory: candidate framework or confirmed Theory of Everything? "Read the mind of God" — Einstein's phrase or Hawking's? Tabby Star: aliens vs. dust, and why Kaku buries the retreat Black holes as gateways, wormholes as cousins of black holes, and what spaghettification actually rules out Celebrity physicists who present speculation as settled science set back the field more than any funding cut. CHAPTERS 00:00 Quantum computers and capitalism collapse 01:23 What quantum computing actually can and can't do 03:39 String theory and the Theory of Everything 06:16 Who really said "read the mind of God" 09:40 Tabby Star: aliens or something boring? 13:45 11 dimensions: prediction or math requirement? 18:19 Is dark matter made of string vibrations? 23:03 The multiverse bubble bath — poetry or physics? 28:39 Wormholes vs. black holes: not very similar 34:22 Simulation theory and Kaku's "Option Four" 37:37 Verdict: great communicator, bad epistemics ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #michiokaku Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A practicing astrophysicist who doesn't believe in the tunnel of light, the hovering soul, or the wailing relatives — but believes in one near-death experience that changed science forever. By the end you'll believe in it too. Today on Into the Impossible: the strangest, darkest, most personal origin story behind the world's most famous prize — and what it should make you do with the time you have left. 🔴 Just released — my conversation with Mayim Bialik on her pod that goes even deeper on near-death experiences: 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwFTWTbC5lk If you came here from Mayim's channel — welcome. Subscribe and stay for science with evidence, not speculation: 👉 https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Dr. Brian Keating is a cosmologist at UC San Diego and author of Losing the Nobel Prize. He has a personal stake in this story — and he's nominated Nobel winners twice. We cover: why a physicist takes near-death experiences seriously, the four deaths that built a fortune on nitroglycerin, the newspaper that confused two brothers and printed the wrong man's obituary, the one-page handwritten will that gave away 94% of an estate — and the wishes the Nobel Committee has quietly ignored ever since. Rosalind Franklin never won. Vera Rubin never won. That's not a footnote. CHAPTERS 00:00 A physicist who believes in near-death experiences. Why? 00:54 Four sons, one dangerous liquid 02:00 Emil dies at 20 — Alfred isn't at the factory 03:40 The inventor who died with nothing 05:16 The company that pumped half the world's oil 06:00 The newspaper prints the wrong obituary 07:04 Why the real notice is worse than the myth 09:06 Scrooge, George Bailey, and a literary near-death experience 10:40 94% of his estate, five prizes, one rule 13:00 Why Nobel cut out his own family 15:22 My BICEP announcement — and my stake in the prize 16:44 Where the Nobel Committee strayed from the will Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, monthly Office Hours: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #NearDeathExperience #NobelPrize #AlfredNobel #science #physics #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Diamandis has built more of the future than almost anyone alive. He founded XPRIZE. He co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil. He started Human Longevity with Craig Venter. And in his new book with Steven Kotler, We Are as Gods, he argues that artificial intelligence isn't just changing what we can do. It's changing what it means to be human. I'm not so sure. This is Peter's fifth time on Into the Impossible, and the conversation I've been waiting years to have. His thesis: AI will deliver not just intelligence at scale, but wisdom — and humanity is already crossing the threshold into godlike capability, whether we're ready or not. My pushback: an experiment one of my students and I ran shows large language models trained only on pre-1911 physics cannot reproduce what Einstein did with the same data. If wisdom were just scale, that shouldn't be true. We go after it for an hour. No hedging, no softening. What you'll hear: — Whether AGI can manufacture genuine wisdom or just better simulations of it — The pre-1911 Einstein test and what it reveals about the ceiling of current AI — The "five forks of humanity": longevity, BCI, off-planet speciation, creators vs. consumers, and uploading — What happens to human purpose when scarcity disappears — Why Peter thinks India dominates the next twenty years of science and technology — Peter's Fermi paradox theory and why he thinks we may be someone else's biosphere experiment — The Future Vision XPRIZE and how dystopian training data may be making AI more dangerous — David Sinclair's epigenetic age-reversal trials, now underway in human eyes Peter says what you did between breakfast and dinner would be godlike to your grandparents. We just stopped noticing. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. CHAPTERS 00:00 Diamandis: AGI will generate wisdom by simulating billions of outcomes 04:07 Brian's counterargument: wisdom requires embodiment, not just simulation 07:07 The GPU + LLM architecture may already be a local maximum 09:48 AI is outpacing most math PhDs but the ceiling is still unknown 15:30 Diamandis fires back at the doomers 17:59 AI will eventually untangle the legal systems blocking the future 23:18 The Singularity has religious qualities and both hosts take that seriously 29:37 Post-scarcity splits humanity into creators and consumers 36:08 Peter's Fermi paradox theory: we may be someone else's biosphere experiment 43:07 Dystopian AI training data may be causing misalignment 51:46 Human trials are underway for epigenetic eye age reversal ——— Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un More: Peter Diamandis Moonshots Podcast: https://www.diamandis.com/podcast Peter Diamandis Substack: https://metatrends.substack.com/ Future Vision XPRIZE: https://futurevisionxprize.com/ Book We Are as Gods: https://a.co/d/0bfz2pBo Peter Diamandis YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@peterdiamandis Follow Peter on X: https://x.com/PeterDiamandis Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #peterdiamandis #ai #agi #singularity #abundance #longevity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An astrophysicist and founder of Reasons to Believe argues the universe looks increasingly designed for life — while a cosmologist challenges whether fine-tuning proves anything at all. If we're alone in the cosmos, the implications are staggering. If we're not, it could change science, religion, and humanity's future forever. Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist, founder of Reasons to Believe, and author focused on the intersection of science and faith. We cover: - Why the search for extraterrestrial life may be making Earth look more unique - Whether fine-tuning points to a Creator or a multiverse - What happens if AI becomes the dominant intelligence in the universe - Why scientists increasingly believe intelligent aliens exist despite lacking evidence - The cosmic time windows that make human existence possible Can hope survive in a universe that eventually dies? Timestamps: 00:00 Why Are We Here at All? 10:44 Is the Universe Designed to Kill Us? 20:25 The Evidence That Humans Are Different 29:42 Why Scientists Still Believe in Aliens 40:08 The 25 Conditions Life Needs to Exist 49:42 Does Fine-Tuning Prove a Creator? 55:37 Could an Alien Have a Soul? 1:03:26 What Happens After This Universe Ends? 1:05:59 Do Parallel Universes Solve Anything? 1:12:09 Will AI Replace Humanity First? 1:17:55 The Strongest Case Against Fine-Tuning 1:24:00 Would You Baptize an Alien? ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #extraterrestrial #scienceandfaith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An experimental cosmologist with 35 years of CMB research breaks down the curvature tension — and why the viral claim that "everything we know about cosmology is wrong" doesn't survive contact with the actual data. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Dr. Brian Keating is Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego and one of the leading experimental cosmologists working on the cosmic microwave background. He has spent three decades on experiments including BICEP, BICEP2, the Simons Array, and the Simons Observatory — the same data ecosystem at the center of this debate. We cover: why a statistical preference in one dataset is not the same as a discovery, what Planck actually measured and what its curvature signal does and doesn't mean, why combining CMB data with baryon acoustic oscillations changes the picture, the difference between geometry and topology that most explainers skip, and why science communicators who sensationalize real tensions do more damage than they realize. A clickable title and a photogenic host are not the same thing as a careful inference from the data. Key Takeaways: 00:00 A flat universe means the angles of any triangle in space sum to exactly 180° 02:10 Zero curvature is a unique number — it demands explanation, which is part of why inflation matters 04:45 Geometry describes how space behaves at scale; topology is a separate question most explainers conflate 07:30 Planck's curvature preference appears in some analyses — it is real, but it is also model-sensitive 10:00 A statistical preference within one dataset is not a confirmed result 12:20 Parameter degeneracy means changing one cosmological knob shifts others — results are not isolated 14:40 When Planck data is combined with baryon acoustic oscillation data, the case for curvature weakens 17:00 The honest summary: the curvature tension is worth watching, but nowhere near decisive 18:30 Sensationalizing legitimate tensions trains the public to think science only matters when it's exploding ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://x.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The AI theorist who thinks consciousness is a software agent — and that God, AGI, and the apocalypse are all pointing at the same thing. What you think is "the world" isn't outside you. It's a simulation your brain produces, and the self that experiences it may not exist in the way you think it does.J oscha Bach is an AI researcher and cognitive scientist whose work sits at the intersection of computation, consciousness, and the architecture of the mind. He's one of the few thinkers willing to explain what experience actually is in mechanistic terms — without retreating to mysticism or handwaving. We cover: -why the world you perceive is a model your brain generates — not the physical world itself -what's actually wrong with Roger Penrose's quantum consciousness theory -why simulating a connectome won't produce behavior -what neuroscience is still missing; whether AGI is possible on current hardware -how religion functions as an operating system for civilizations -why atheists like Sam Harris may be more Protestant than they realize The self is not the substrate. You are not your neurons — you're the pattern running on them. KEY TAKEAWAYS 00:00 You Don't Live in the World — It Lives in You 10:05 Why Scientists Refuse to Explain Reality 14:50 Where Joscha Disagrees with David Deutsch 21:10 What Would a Truly Intelligent Machine Actually Do? 25:00 Why Chess Destroys Good Minds30:40 Can You Upload a Brain? What Neuroscience Gets Wrong 38:45 Why Einstein Needed a Body to Discover Relativity 46:00 AI Companies as Prophets of the New Religion 50:10 You Don't Die Because You Were Never Really Alive 57:50 Religion as a Civilizational Operating System 1:04:00 What the Torah Knew That Sam Harris Doesn't 1:12:00 What Is God, Actually? 1:18:00 What Bach University Would Teach 1:27:50 Confronting Your Own Death ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Juan Maldacena is a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study whose 1997 paper remains the most cited in the history of theoretical physics. We cover: -why wormholes and quantum entanglement may be the same thing -what actually happens to information when you throw something into a black hole -the reason Hawking radiation accidentally gave cosmologists the equation that explains why the universe has structure -whether science-fiction wormholes are ruled out by the laws of physics -the one unsolved problem Juan says matters more than black holes. The most important problem in quantum gravity is understanding the beginning of the Big Bang — not black holes. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 What If Einstein's Two Strangest Ideas Were One? 01:15 Juan Maldacena: The Most Cited Physicist Alive 03:25 What Would Einstein Most Want to Know Today? 07:45 The Holographic Principle Explained 09:20 What Happens When You Throw a Laptop Into a Black Hole? 11:00 Is Information Actually Lost Forever? 12:25 The Problem Juan Wants to Solve Before He Dies 13:50 Why Real Black Holes Don't Emit Hawking Radiation 15:25 How Black Hole Physics Accidentally Explained the Universe 17:00 Could Primordial Black Holes Be Dark Matter? 18:30 Real Observers Solving Imaginary Problems 21:15 Why Imaginary Numbers Keep Being Right 25:00 The Origin Story of AdS/CFT 27:05 Do We Actually Live in AdS Space? 29:00 Are Wormholes Real or Just Science Fiction? 32:10 Could AI Have Helped Einstein? 33:00 Can Science and Religion Coexist? ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Princeton cognitive scientist says AI can't think like a child — and giving it more data won't fix that. If the field keeps scaling without solving what's actually missing, the gap between human and machine intelligence won't close. It'll just get more expensive. Tom Griffiths is a professor of psychology and computer science at Princeton, and one of the leading researchers working at the intersection of human cognition and AI. We cover: -why a child learns language from breadcrumbs while AI needs continents of data -the 250-year-old idea that quietly became the foundation of modern language models -what sycophantic AI actually does to your beliefs over time -why solving AGI might have less to do with scale and more to do with understanding what a child's mind really is. The hallucinations don't bother him — it's the sycophancy that should worry you. Key Takeaways: 00:00 The Math Behind How Minds Actually Work 00:30 Why Defining "Thought" Is Harder Than It Looks 04:30 What AI Gets Wrong About Consciousness 07:00 What ChatGPT Actually Revealed About the Field 08:10 Are Humans Really Irrational — Or Solving a Different Problem? 11:00 How Chomsky Turned Language Into a Math Problem 13:55 The Chessboard Analogy That Explains Generative Grammar 15:20 Why Aristotle Got Thought Right and Physics Wrong 19:45 The Man Who Tried to Build AI in the 1600s 22:40 What Everyone Gets Wrong About George Boole 25:25 From Boole to Turing: How Logic Became Computers 27:40 Why Your Brain Runs on Less Energy Than a Light Bulb 28:40 Jensen Huang Says AGI Is Here. Is He Right? 31:45 Why the "AI vs. Human Intelligence" Scale Is Misleading 33:50 Why a Child Still Outlearns Every AI Model 35:20 The Fuzzy Boundary Problem That Broke Rule-Based AI 37:20 How Semantic Networks Rewired the Theory of Memory 39:30 Rosenblatt Built a Brain — Then Minsky Killed It 43:15 The Plane Ride Where Backpropagation Was Solved 44:20 Hallucinations, Sycophancy, and What Should Actually Worry You 47:00 What Has to Change Before AI Can Truly Generalize 50:10 What a Layperson Should Actually Take Away From This ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An astrophysicist says the universe doesn't pull things down — it accelerates upward toward them. And that's one of the tamer claims in this conversation. Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi joins Brian to dismantle assumptions most physicists won't touch in public. Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi is a NASA researcher, Nova host, and author of Why Do We Exist, a unified framework spanning quantum fields to cosmology — and making a case for why imagination may be the universe's endgame. We cover: -why falling is the wrong way to think about gravity -what Hakeem discovered about heat flow while washing dishes that took decades to confirm -why humans sit at the exact logarithmic center of the universe, the calculation that puts 100,000 multicellular-life candidates in the Milky Way -why we'll likely never find any of them, and the one thing most people confuse for knowledge that Hakeem says is the most dangerous deception in society today. The universe makes life inevitable. It does not make multicellular life inevitable. Key Takeaways: 0:00 The Question That Breaks Physics 1:30 Meet Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi 3:10 The Earth Isn't Pulling You Down 6:00 Heat That Flows the Wrong Way 9:05 Why Electrons Run the Universe 11:15 The Most Dangerous Deception 14:20 We're at the Center of Everything 20:05 100,000 Worlds — And We'll Never Reach Them 22:30 Nine Realms: A Map of All Reality 25:25 When Two Realms Grind Each Other Apart 28:50 The Line Between Speculation and Science 33:20 The Hubble Tension War 40:40 How Long Until the Universe Destroys All Matter 44:05 Victor Glover and Why Representation Matters 48:10 What Happens to a Species That Stops Imagining 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sabine Hossenfelder says quantum computers are only useful for breaking codes. She's wrong — and my undergraduates are building the proof. What's happening in my lab right now has nothing to do with cryptography, and everything to do with the future of AI. I'm a cosmologist at UC San Diego teaching undergraduates to build, program, and eventually launch quantum computers — possibly to the Moon via Artemis! We cover: why Sabine's code-breaking verdict misses the real story, how free tools like Quantum Rings are closing the education gap Sabine thinks is a hardware problem, why Q-Day just got moved up to 2029, what my students are actually doing with quantum computers in my lab, and why the next generation of quantum physicists won't need a billion-dollar facility to train. The bottleneck isn't the hardware. It's what we're teaching — and who we're teaching it to. Use my special link to get access to the course and apply for the summer 2026 internship: https://www.quantumrings.com/iti Watch Sabine’s video https://youtu.be/qV7hQEtr3ic?si=EPcg5fAw_18QaKhM Timestamps: 00:00 Quantum Is More Than Codebreakingt 00:51 The Week Q-Day Jumped Years Aheadt 02:38 Why Quantum Felt Useless (Until Now)t 04:42 What Happens If Encryption Fails Quietlyt 05:33 The Tool That Changes Everythingt 07:37 From Beginner to Running Algorithmst 09:26 The Infrastructure Behind the Shiftt 10:58 The Real Bottleneck: Not Physicst 11:59 The Opportunity Everyone’s Missingt ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpAt Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFut Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9Ut Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Unt 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #sabinehossenfelder #bobwold #quantumcomputer #quantumcomputing #quantumencryption #quantumsupremacy #quantumsimulation #quantumalgorithms #aiandquantum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A neuroscientist built an AI that refuses to give answers — and it outperformed every model on the market, including the ones trained on billions of users’ data. The implication: every AI that hands you the answer may be quietly making you less capable of thinking without it. Dr. Vivienne Ming is a neuroscientist, AI researcher, and author of Robot Proof, who has spent nearly 30 years building machine learning systems and studying what makes humans irreplaceable alongside them. We cover: -why the 5–10% of people who argue with AI outperform both elite human forecasters and top AI models -what GPS is already doing to your memory and why GPT may be next -the "Sexy Face" game that was secretly training a neural network to reunite orphan refugees -why the information explosion paradox means more free answers lead to less human exploration — even among scientists. Giving you the answer is almost the worst thing these machines can do. Key Takeaways 0:00 – The AI Trained to Never Answer You 0:49 – Why Most People Just Hand Problems to AI 2:18 – How the Cyborgs Beat Everyone 4:55 – What Happens When AI Only Asks Questions 6:10 – The Failure Resume: What It Actually Means 9:14 – What Amazon & Facebook's Data Revealed About Innovation 11:23 – Why Even Scientists Are Exploring Less 15:23 – The Hidden Parenting Book Inside This AI Book 16:14 – If Kids Were Bonds, What Would They Be Worth? 20:17 – The Skills That Predict Everything at Age 65 25:22 – The "Sexy Face" Game That Reunited Refugee Families 31:24 – What Diversity Actually Means on Breakthrough Teams 35:56 – What Einstein's Dad Would Have Gotten Wrong 37:40 – This Is Not the Industrial Revolution 41:17 – GPS Already Shrank Your Brain. GPT Is Next. 51:49 – Why the Book Cover Is Black and Yellow 56:55 – The Benchmark Nobody Is Building 59:46 – Can an AI Ever Have a Happiest Thought? ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emad Mostaque built Stable Diffusion. Now he says the most powerful AI models will never be released — and we have roughly 800 days before everything changes. What the trillion-dollar labs won't tell you about the models they're keeping locked away 👇 Emad Mostaque is the founder of Stability AI and creator of Stable Diffusion. In this conversation, he explains why the gap between public AI and private AI is about to become the most important story in technology — and why most people won't realize it until it's too late. We cover: why open source can't compete with trillion-dollar labs, what happens when humans have negative cognitive value on AI teams, how ancient faith traditions are adapting to superintelligence, and the 800-day timeline Emad puts on the biggest transition in human history. Timestamps: 00:00 The models too dangerous to release 10:06 Why physics needs axioms — and AI doesn't 11:43 The MIND framework most AI researchers won't use 17:36 The universe might be a computation 30:34 Should we let AI fly planes? 39:43 AI just invented a game no human could design 44:43 Why AI will cost almost nothing in 18 months 51:46 Can religion survive superintelligence? 57:36 The AI companion problem nobody talks about 01:03:20 Why personalized AI is more dangerous than AGI 01:11:18 The forgotten link between God and science 01:26:32 800 days: what happens next 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite! meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #ai #artificialintelligence #agi #stablediffusion #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list  to win a meteorite 💥 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a MacArthur Genius Award recipient, philosopher, novelist, and author of The Mattering Instinct. Her verdict on why human beings are driven to matter — and what threatens that drive — might change how you think about your own life. Check out her recent appearance on Mindscape here. In this conversation, we discuss why every human being is haunted by the need to matter, the four types of people and how each one tries to satisfy that longing, why Ludwig Boltzmann's tragic death is a thermodynamic story, how depression maps onto entropy, whether AI can ever have a mattering instinct, and why heroic strivers are the most threatened by artificial intelligence. We also get into what Freud got wrong about what women want, the physics of matter versus the philosophy of mattering, and why the second law of thermodynamics may be the most personal law in all of science. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Genius Award recipient. She is the author of multiple books including Plato at the Googleplex and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Her newest book, The Mattering Instinct, is one of Apple's most anticipated books of the year. 00:00 Why every human being needs to matter — and what happens when they can't  03:30 The second law of thermodynamics and what it has to do with your life  13:10 The 4 types of people: Transcenders, Socializers, Heroic Strivers, and Competitors  16:25 Why fame-seeking millennials will give up everything — including relationships  22:05 Zero-sum mattering: the competitor who was happy for 15 minutes after winning a Nobel Prize  23:20 Ludwig Boltzmann solved one of physics' greatest paradoxes — then despaired  28:45 All tragedies are thermodynamic — and so is depression  35:40 Life as resistance to entropy: what flourishing actually means  48:35 Can AI have a mattering instinct? What that would mean for human rights and everything we think we are ➡️ Follow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein  🌐 Website: https://rebeccagoldstein.com/  📚 The Mattering Instinct: https://www.amazon.com/Mattering-Instinct-Deepest-Longing-Divides/dp/1324096853  🐦 Twitter/X: https://x.com/platobooktour  ✍️ Substack: https://rebeccanewbergergoldstein.substack.com/  Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join  📚 Get my books:  Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu  Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U  My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA  The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un  Follow me to ask questions of my guests:  🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog  🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast  #philosophy #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #mattering #entropy #meaningoflife #RebeccaNewbergerGoldstein #thermodynamics #AIandhumanity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Artemis II mission to the dark side of the moon will be the furthest human beings have ever travelled from Earth. It's the precursor to a return to the lunar surface and perhaps even reaching Mars. But still, there are those who say humans have never set foot on the Moon, such as Bart Sibrel. Once punched in the face by Buzz Aldrin, he says he’s on a CIA hitlist because he blew the whistle on the original moon landings being fake. He speaks to Piers Morgan opposite Dr. Brian Keating, distinguished professor of Physics at UC San Diego and host of the ‘Into The Impossible’ podcast. Then Piers is joined by former astronaut Charlie Duke, who was the youngest person to walk on the Moon, and Star Trek’s very own Captain Kirk, William Shatner. Bart Sibrel's website: https://www.sibrel.com/ Dr Brian Keating's website: https://briankeating.com/ Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:25 Dr. Brian Keating on moon landing conspiracies 03:30 Bart Sibrel discusses his conspiracy investigations 11:20 Bart Sibrel on lights, shadows and radiation belts 18:20 Motivation behind faking the moon landing 22:00 Will the Artemis mission be genuine or fake? 26:43 Charlie Duke and William Shatner join 28:17 Charlie Duke on walking on the moon 30:22 William Shatner on the opportunity to walk on the moon 33:00 William Shatner on being in Space 41:26 Charlie’s advice to Artemis II astronauts 42:43 Charlie and William on moon landing conspiracies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 Brian Keating takes us on an exclusive tour of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh with cosmologist Marcos Pellejero, exploring the mysteries of dark energy and the accelerating universe. From the historic halls where human "computers" shaped the foundations of modern cosmology, to the cutting-edge DESI experiment mapping galaxies across the cosmos, the conversation explores whether dark energy is truly constant—or if our cosmological model is beginning to show cracks. - Key Takeaways: 00:00 "Dark Energy and Cosmic Clues" 04:42 "Light Pollution Ruins Observatories" 07:03 Royal Astronomer's Electric Chair Solution 11:06 "DESI Challenges Vacuum Energy Constant" 15:48 "Advancing Simulations and Synergies" 19:14 "Science and Art: Problem Solving" 20:29 "Exploring Dark Energy's Secrets" - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #darkenergy #Galaxysurveys #RoyalObservatoryEdinburgh #hubbletension #universeexploration #cosmicmysteries Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With NASA planning to send Artemis astronauts farther into space than ever, should they be worried about the deadly effects of the Van Allen belts? Here, I describe to James Altucher what the claims are and what the real concerns should be. My response to Moon landing denial claims by Kim Kardashian, Candace Owens, and Bart Sibrel I answer all the big questions: ⇨ Why did the flag move with no wind? ⇨ Is there really no gravity on the moon? ⇨ Why haven't we gone back? ⇨ How did the astronauts survive the Van Allen radiation belts? Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 Timestamps 00:00 Moon Landing Hoax Claims 05:12 Trust, Truth, and Controversy 07:26 Apollo Astronauts' Press Conference Doubts 10:50 Joe Rogan Questions Moon Landing 15:36 Van Allen Belts and Radiation 18:43 Debunking Van Allen Belt Claims 20:01 Worst Moon Landing Hoax Argument Explained 22:57 Van Allen Belts and Spaceflight 28:42 Moon Landing Conspiracy Critique 29:28 Refuting Lies is Harder References: Joe on American Alchemy with Jesse Michels https://youtu.be/C_Na1tI5qpw?si=-K2I10rLwf_OYriL Bart SIbrel on Danny Jones https://youtu.be/58YGzlW3Koc?si=pWcZ2QecGf33owr2 Bart SIbrel and Charlie Duke on Danny Jones https://youtu.be/kMn6sI4X66s?si=X3v8Eng3lT3BYwDT Bart's confrontations with NASA astronauts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronauts_Gone_Wild Fauci-Collins "devastating published take down" of "fringe epidemiologist" Jay Bhattacharya https://aier.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FirstCollinsEmail.pdf - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Video & Edited by Sheikh Media Website: sheikh.media LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmadisapro/ This video contains commentary and criticism under Fair Use (17 U.S.C. §107). All third-party clips, articles, and documents are used for educational and critical purposes. Please contact for attribution. #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list  to win a meteorite 💥 Matt Kaplan is a science journalist at The Economist and a trained paleontologist. His new book I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right is a candid investigation into how science actually works — and why the engine of discovery is badly in need of a tuneup. In this conversation, we discuss why the pandemic exposed science's dirty secrets to the public, how Ignaz Semmelweis discovered handwashing saved lives and was thrown in an asylum for it, why Katalin Karikó survived where others didn't, the replication crisis and how funding models are making it worse, whether older scientists should control research dollars, why Galileo was never actually tortured, and what journalists and scientists must do differently before public trust collapses entirely. Matt Kaplan also recently discussed science communication and dysfunction on other outlets — in this conversation, we go deeper on the replication crisis, the Semmelweis story, and why the funding model is quietly corrupting the scientific process. 🔔 Subscribe for new episodes each week  🎧 Ad-free episodes on Patreon: patreon.com/drbriankeating  INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE — where Nobel Prize winners, physicists, and bold thinkers explore the biggest questions in science. Key Takeaways 00:00 Why the pandemic was science's most damaging moment of exposure 03:30 The scientific-industrial press complex — and who's really to blame  06:50 How science journalism fails the public 85% of the time  10:00 Ignaz Semmelweis: the man who proved handwashing saves lives and was destroyed for it  20:10 Why infection rates dropped from 21% to zero — and nobody listened  24:30 What Katalin Karikó had that Semmelweis didn't: shelter  28:00 The replication crisis — why nobody is funding the most important work in science  33:00 How funding models force scientists to run experiments they've already won  40:30 Should older scientists control research dollars? A Nobel laureate weighs in  43:45 Why Galileo was never tortured — and why the myth won't die  47:00 The rhinoceros tooth: a paleontologist's lesson in confirmation bias ➡️ Follow Matt Kaplan  🌐 Website: https://www.somuchsciencesolittletime.com/about  📚 I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right: https://www.amazon.com/Told-You-Scientists-Ridiculed-Imprisoned/dp/1250372275   ✍️ Email: mattkaplan@economist.com  Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join  📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu  Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U  Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA  Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un  Follow me to ask questions of my guests:  🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1   📝 Mailing list: http://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog  🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #physics #science #sciencejournalism #MattKaplan #briankeating #intotheimpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list  to win a meteorite 💥 Michael Wong recently discussed theory of evolution on TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSrf7ErdHWA  — in this conversation, we go deeper on the law of increasing functional information and what it means for life, complexity, and the future of science. 🔔 Subscribe for new episodes each week  🎧 Ad-free episodes on Patreon: patreon.com/drbriankeating  INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE — where Nobel Prize winners, physicists, and bold thinkers explore the biggest questions in science. Is there a second arrow of time? Astrobiologist and planetary scientist Dr. Michael Wong joins Brian Keating to explore the law of increasing functional information — a proposed new law of nature that may explain how complexity evolves across minerals, biology, AI, and the cosmos. Dr. Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution for Science has been working with a cross-disciplinary group of scientists — the "Missing Law Group" — to propose something bold: a new law of nature. Their law of increasing functional information argues that evolving systems, whether biological or not, tend toward greater complexity and function over time. In this conversation, Brian and Michael unpack what functional information actually means, how it differs from Shannon entropy, and why it may describe something fundamental about the universe we live in. From the formation of minerals in stellar atmospheres to the evolution of life on Earth, Michael walks through how this framework applies across planetary science, astrobiology, and even cancer research. Brian pushes on the hard questions — the Fermi paradox, the boundary conditions of the law, its relationship to the second law of thermodynamics, and whether it truly qualifies as a "law" at all. Sean Carroll blurbed the book and later called it out on his podcast — Brian asks Michael about that tension directly. They also get into panspermia, the contingent role of cosmic collisions in shaping Earth's evolutionary history, the search for biosignatures on Mars and beyond, and what the rise of generative AI looks like through the lens of selection for function. This is a wide-ranging, technically honest conversation about one of the most ambitious proposals in contemporary science. Key Takeaways: 00:00:35 There May Be a Second Arrow of Time — and It Points Toward Complexity 00:01:35 The Law of Increasing Functional Information Explains How the Universe Evolves 00:07:15 Functional Information Measures How Well a System Performs a Specific Function 00:11:30 Three Universal Selection Pressures Drive All Evolving Systems 00:18:00 Mineral Evolution on Earth Is a Measurable Proof of the Law in Action 00:22:00 The Law Is a Tendency, Not a Guarantee — It Doesn't Resolve the Fermi Paradox 00:27:00 Life and Non-Life Contain the Same Building Blocks — the Difference Is in the Distributions 00:32:15 Cosmic Collisions Didn't Derail Evolution — They Opened New Possibility Spaces 00:50:00 Cancer Behaves Like an Evolving System — and That Could Change How We Treat It 01:05:15 AI Is a New Form of Evolving Life — and Without Stronger Selection Pressure, It's DangerousFeatured Guest ➡️  Follow Michael Wong  🌐 Website: https://miquai.myportfolio.com/  📚 The book: Time’s Second Arrow (co-authored with Robert Hazen) : https://www.amazon.com/Times-Second-Arrow-Evolution-Nature-ebook/dp/B0FJ2ZJL53 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://x.com/miquai — Brian's Links Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join  📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu  Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U  Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA  Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un  Follow me to ask questions of my guests:  🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Mailing list: http://briankeating.com/list   ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog  🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — #physics #astrobiology #complexity #evolutionoflife #briankeating #intotheimpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices