Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
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Princeton Mathematician: Wormholes Can’t Survive Einstein’s Math
3 november 2026 · 56 min
A Princeton mathematician says wormholes cannot survive Einstein's equations, and the AI apocalypse is absurd. A solution that vanishes under a small nudge is a ghost, not physics. Lees meer
Sergiu Klainerman is a mathematician at Princeton University. With Demetrios Christodoulou, he proved that empty spacetime is stable.
We cover: What makes a solution of Einstein's equations physical, why slowly rotating black holes pass the stability test and wormholes fail it, why shocks form no matter how small the perturbation, whether AI can reproduce a landmark proof, and why he calls the AI singularity absurd.
Mathematics is discovered, not invented.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Are wormholes real?
08:38 What happens at an event horizon
12:06 God does not know about coordinates
17:32 What Maldacena would say about wormholes
21:48 Why extremal black holes matter
28:56 Einstein and the 1919 eclipse
33:52 Terry Tao and Fermat's Last Theorem
43:04 Can universities be reformed?
48:16 What to tell a 19-year-old
50:48 Kip Thorne and the movies
Support the show and get the full transcript, bonus content and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt
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Are We in a SIMULATION? | Brian Keating on the Arora Podcast
1 november 2026 · 1 uur 55 min
The Arora Show with Brian Keating Lees meer
What happens when science reaches the edge of what it can explain?
In this episode of The Arora Show, Amira & Aryaan sit down with renowned cosmologist and physicist Professor Brian Keating for a fascinating conversation about the universe, consciousness, God, the Big Bang, and some of the biggest questions humans can ask.
We explore the origins of the universe, whether there was truly a “beginning,” what existed before the Big Bang, the mysteries science still cannot solve, and where physics, philosophy, and spirituality collide.
Brian also shares his perspective on the search for extraterrestrial life, the limits of human knowledge, Nobel Prizes, modern cosmology, and what decades of studying the universe have taught him about our place within it.
In this conversation:
What happened before the Big Bang?
Did the universe come from nothing?
Does physics leave room for God?
Can science explain consciousness?
Are we likely alone in the universe?
What are the biggest unanswered questions in cosmology?
Where does scientific knowledge reach its limits?
What does the future of physics look like?
Professor Brian Keating is an experimental cosmologist and professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. His work focuses on understanding the origin and evolution of the universe, and he is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.
Subscribe to The Arora Show for long-form conversations exploring consciousness, science, spirituality, psychology, philosophy, and the nature of reality.
Hosted by Amira Arora & Aryaan Arora
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Introduction: The Big Bang, God & Simulation Theory
02:25 - Dr. Brian Keating's $200 Million Experiment to Understand the Big Bang
06:20 - Why Are Humans Obsessed With the Origin of the Universe?
09:20 - How Telescopes Reveal the Beginning of the Universe
16:04 - Is Interstellar Scientifically Accurate? Black Holes & Time Travel
20:45 - Are There Qu…
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Jim Al-Khalili: Physicists Are Being Sloppy About Time
27 oktober 2026 · 45 min
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. Lees meer
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 equa…
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Max Tegmark: We’re Building A Replacement Species
24 oktober 2026 · 57 min
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. Lees meer
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
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⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of ev…
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Wharton AI Researcher: If AI Froze Today, It Would Still Rewrite Work
20 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
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. Lees meer
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 m…
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Are UFOs Alien Tech? Avi Loeb vs Michael Shermer
14 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 23 min
Is there alien technology in our skies, or just birds, balloons and bad video? Lees meer
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
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Adam Grant: Don't Trust Your Gut. Test It.
13 oktober 2026 · 44 min
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. Lees meer
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 yo…
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Roman Yampolskiy vs Joscha Bach: Can Anyone Control Superintelligence?
9 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 14 min
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. Lees meer
📬 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
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"I Thought It Would Fail!" Francis Halzen: Winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize In Physics [Reupload from 2022]
7 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 28 min
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. Lees meer
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… -
Nobel Economist Daron Acemoglu WARNING: AI's Payoff Is NOT What You Think
5 oktober 2026 · 35 min
Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu says AI's real productivity gain is an order of magnitude smaller than the industry claims. Lees meer
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
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🎯 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
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AI Is the New Tower of Babel (And Its Builders Know It)
3 oktober 2026 · 13 min
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. Lees meer
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): htt…
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Robert Wright: AI Alignment Is a Moral Problem, Not a Technical One
30 september 2026 · 1 uur
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. Lees meer
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 passi…
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Former NASA Physicist: The UAP Maneuver That Should Have Exploded
27 september 2026 · 1 uur 3 min
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. Lees meer
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
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Carlo Rovelli: Free Will Is Real. Physics Can Prove It.
22 september 2026 · 1 uur 6 min
This episode is sponsored by Abacus AI agent: agent.abacus.ai/keating Lees meer
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 ch…
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They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark Matter
17 september 2026 · 2 uur 5 min
They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark Matter Lees meer
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: htt…
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Dark Matter Has a Problem. So Does MOND.
15 september 2026 · 16 min
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. Lees meer
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 bot…
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OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes Claim: Is This What AGI Looks Like? with Emad Mostaque
9 september 2026 · 1 uur 19 min
Did OpenAI just solve Navier–Stokes—and what would that actually mean for AGI? Lees meer
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…
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Roman Yampolskiy vs Emad Mostaque: I Was The Only Optimist - #569
1 september 2026 · 58 min
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. Lees meer
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 we… -
The Universe Didn’t Come From Nothing | The Peter McCormack Show
28 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 46 min
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. Lees meer
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.
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📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt
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The Physics Reason AI Works When It Shouldn’t - #568
25 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 18 min
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. Lees meer
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 m…
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Engineering Chair: Most People Should Not Go To College - #567
18 augustus 2026 · 1 uur
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. Lees meer
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…
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John Martinis: The Nobel Physicist Behind Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling - #566
11 augustus 2026 · 49 min
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. Lees meer
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 CM…
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Fermilab’s Scott Dodelson on Cosmology’s Crisis - #565
4 augustus 2026 · 41 min
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. Lees meer
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 cosmol…
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Faith & the Physicist: Aliens, Astrobiology, String Theory, and the Search for Meaning
31 juli 2026 · 1 uur 12 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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Annie Jacobsen: How One Lab Leak Ends the World in 6 Days - #564
28 juli 2026 · 1 uur 49 min
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. Lees meer
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… -
We Built Something We Can’t Control | A Warning from Top AI Safety Expert - #563
21 juli 2026 · 1 uur 20 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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Michael Shermer: The Only Skeptic on the Alien Task Force - #562
15 juli 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
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. Lees meer
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 Lu…
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400K Subscribers Asked Me Anything. The Answers Got Weird.
11 juli 2026 · 2 uur 4 min
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. Lees meer
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/ytHave 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 theo…
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Top Astronomer: UFOs Are STILL Here - #561
7 juli 2026 · 1 uur 6 min
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. Lees meer
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
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Nobel Economist: The Market That Lets People Die - #560
30 juni 2026 · 1 uur 22 min
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. Lees meer
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 decrimina…
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Dead Cows, Aliens, & Ghosts: How Kevin Knuth Connects Them All
26 juni 2026 · 26 min
NASA physicist's UAP math survives. His conclusion doesn't. Lees meer
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:
🏄♂️ Twitte…
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Intelligent Design Theorist: AI Just Proved It Can’t Think Without Us - #559
22 juni 2026 · 1 uur 5 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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Is the White House's New UAP Council a Game Changer for Disclosure?
17 juni 2026 · 2 uur 16 min
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. Lees meer
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 witnessesGUEST:
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.orgHOST:
Brian Keating — experimental cosmolog…
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Roman Yampolskiy: AI Can’t Be Controlled — and We’re Building It Anyway - #558
15 juni 2026 · 1 uur 28 min
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. Lees meer
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. …
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Michio Kaku Went Viral On Diary of a CEO; I Had To Fact-Check
14 juni 2026 · 45 min
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? Lees meer
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 …
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Physicist: Why I Believe in Near-Death Experiences
9 juni 2026 · 23 min
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. Lees meer
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 Mo…
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Godlike AI Is Here! Peter Diamandis Debates Brian Keating - #557
1 juni 2026 · 1 uur 4 min
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. Lees meer
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 eyesPeter 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 a… -
Two Scientists, One Question: Does Alien Life Need a Soul? - #556
30 mei 2026 · 1 uur 34 min
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. Lees meer
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 possibleCan 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://ww…
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FLAT Universe: Why Scientists Keep Getting This Wrong
27 mei 2026 · 24 min
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. Lees meerDr. 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 pu… -
Joscha Bach: The Self Is a Story Your Brain Tells Itself - #555
15 mei 2026 · 1 uur 32 min
The AI theorist who thinks consciousness is a software agent — and that God, AGI, and the apocalypse are all pointing at the same thing. Lees meer
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 Equation That Changed How Physicists Think About Reality | Juan Maldacena - #554
7 mei 2026 · 41 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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Princeton Scientist: We Don't Understand AI - Tom Griffiths - #553
29 april 2026 · 52 min
A Princeton cognitive scientist says AI can't think like a child — and giving it more data won't fix that. Lees meer
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 Wha… -
The Universe Is Trying to Destroy All Matter. Hakeem Oluseyi - #552
21 april 2026 · 50 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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Quantum Computers Aren't Useless. You Just Don't Know How to Use Them.
20 april 2026 · 13 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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This AI Broke Every Benchmark — Then It Did Something Worse. Vivienne Ming - #551
16 april 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
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. Lees meer
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
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AI Insider CEO: The Models Too Dangerous for You to See. Emad Mostaque - #550
13 april 2026 · 1 uur 34 min
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. Lees meer
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
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Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
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Genius Philosopher: The Law of Physics That Explains Why Your Life Falls Apart. Rebecca Goldstein - #549
7 april 2026 · 42 min
Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Lees meer
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 m…
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You're full of SHIT! Piers Morgan & Brian Keating take down Moon Landing Denier
4 april 2026 · 50 min
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. Lees meer
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
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Dark Energy Is Dying: The Cosmological Crisis Nobody's Telling You About. Marcos Palerjo - #548
3 april 2026 · 22 min
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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.
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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:
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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
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🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast#universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #darkenergy #Galaxysurveys #RoyalObservatoryEdinburgh #hubbletension …
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Are the Van Allen Belts Deadly? Debunking the Biggest Moon Landing Hoax!
31 maart 2026 · 34 min
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. Lees meer
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 HarderReferences:
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:
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📚 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
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