Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Is there alien technology in our skies, or just birds, balloons and bad video?

Two members of the White House UAP Science Advisory Council face off LIVE. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who chairs the council, makes the case for searching. Michael Shermer, the council skeptic Loeb picked himself, says show me the evidence. They have $1,000 riding on whether non-human technology is confirmed by 2030.

Get all my best ET content: https://big-bang.kit.com/bvyt

We'll cover the redacted Pentagon videos, Loeb's new papers on tracking objects over Nevada, the claims from David Grusch, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and Eric Weinstein, and what evidence would change each of their minds.

Avi Loeb: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/

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When two people are vibing, their brainwaves synchronize and so do their heartbeats. That is not a metaphor. It is a measurable physiological event, and organizational psychologist Adam Grant has spent his career figuring out how to make it happen on purpose. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Grant’s new book Vibe is his seventh. It argues that the science of human connection has been hiding in plain sight for a century, and that most of what people do to build relationships is either backwards or unnecessary.

The episode covers why the highest sign of chemistry between people is enjoying your disagreements rather than avoiding them, why remote work produces boreout rather than burnout, and why your first impression of someone is a snapshot of one situation that may not represent the whole person. It also covers burstiness, confident humility, and why universities have survived COVID, AI, and every other disruption that was supposed to end them.

What you’ll hear:

“The highest sign of chemistry between people is not agreeing with them. It’s enjoying your disagreements.” — Adam Grant

CHAPTERS

00:00 Vibing is real. Your brainwaves prove it.

05:30 Task conflict vs. relationship conflict

07:40 Who is actually in charge: parents or infants?

10:14 Burstiness: the remote work pattern that works

14:24 Don’t trust your gut. Test it.

19:34 Confident humility: the essence of a good scientist

21:32 Desirability bias is worse than confirmation bias

29:00 Zoom fatigue is boreout, not burnout

30:02 The A/B test that killed “relationships”

34:14 Don’t disbelieve what can’t be falsified

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Enter the debate: https://briankeating.com/ai

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Featured Guest:

Adam Grant website: https://adamgrant.net/

Vibe (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GPHPNZ14

Adam Grant on Twitter/X: https://x.com/adammgrant

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/TLANPW

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#AdamGrant #loneliness #remotework #psychology #briankeating #intotheimpossible #Vibe

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Roman Yampolskiy says keeping a superintelligence safe forever is as impossible as building a perpetual motion machine. Joscha Bach says today's AI is more controllable than anyone expected, and that shutting it down would doom us anyway.

📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/ai

Roman Yampolskiy is a computer scientist at the University of Louisville who has spent more than a decade on the AI control problem. Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist who studies how minds, biological and artificial, build a model of reality.

We cover: why a perpetual safety device may be as impossible as perpetual motion, what happens when AI research automates itself (Roman puts it at 28 percent today), whether nuclear deterrence is the right analogy, who really benefits when AI labs ask to be regulated, and why consciousness may have nothing to do with whether AI is safe.

Being conscious does not make you kind.

🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon: get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: patreon.com/drbriankeating

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#intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe

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The physicist who turned a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into a telescope says the most exciting moment of his career was not the discovery. It was the first atmospheric neutrino. Before that, he was deep in debt to NSF and his own university with no neutrino to show for it.

Francis Halzen is principal investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole and Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

We cover: why ice under the South Pole is clearer than anything a lab can make, the 2,600 TeV event that dwarfs the LHC, why IceCube sees more energy in cosmic neutrinos than in gamma rays, how neutrinos crossing the universe test quantum gravity, and the quark he refused to believe in.

Physics is a miserable career unless you are obsessed by it.

Recorded in 2022, before IceCube detected neutrinos from our own galaxy.

Learn from Nobel Prize winners, and you could win a meteorite: Please join my mailing list here 👉 briankeating.com/x

Chapters

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A production of imagination.ucsd.edu

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Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu says AI's real productivity gain is an order of magnitude smaller than the industry claims.

The bigger danger is not the machine. It is that a handful of people are deciding how it gets built.

Daron Acemoglu is an MIT economist who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

We cover: why a Nobel chemist left Berkeley for China, the optimal amount of heresy science should tolerate, the one rule that would end algorithmic outrage without censoring anyone, the accounting trick behind billionaire wealth, and why AI's path is a design decision, not destiny.

We are still a democracy. Perhaps not for long.

Chapters:

0:00 Can science survive without democracy?t

2:08 Why a Nobel laureate left Berkeley for Chinat

3:58 What Galileo knew that Kepler didn'tt

5:12 Is peer review undemocratic?t

7:41 The optimal amount of scientific heresyt

10:06 Science isn't slowing. So what broke?t

12:06 The design choice behind echo chamberst

14:49 One rule that would fix social mediat

19:26 Should Elon Musk have this much wealth?t

23:49 AI is a design choice, not destinyt

———

📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating

🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: / drbriankeating

⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: / @drbriankeating

📚 My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpAt

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFut

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9Ut

Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Unt

🌐 More:

🏄‍♂️ Twitter: / briankeating

📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss

✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe

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The new Tower of Babel, and its builders are becoming like gods to us. The bigger threat isn't killer robots; it's how much of your own mind you've already handed over.

I joined Mike Slater on Politics By Faith (The First) to talk about AI, faith, and the people building it.

We cover: why Babel is always the city AND the tower, how the same AI that discovers drugs can build super viruses, what I'm seeing in my own classroom as term begins, why cognitive offloading scares me more than Terminators, and the one thing AI still can't do without us.

AI belongs in your hands as a thinking partner, never the primary creator.

Chapters:

00:00 Mike Slater introduces Brian Keating (cosmologist, not cosmetologist)

00:37 Why AI is the Tower of Babel — the city and the tower

02:05 The double-edged sword: new drugs vs. super viruses

02:57 Altman, Amodei, Musk — "they become like gods to us"

03:42 "Regulate us, take us over" — who really wants that

04:23 A scientist weighs progress: "I'm an accelerationist"

05:19 AI as a curiosity amplifier, not a shortcut

06:04 First day of class at UC San Diego — the war over AI

07:22 Thinking partner, not primary creator — and the nuclear analogy

08:20 Cognitive offloading — how many phone numbers do you remember?

09:17 The worldview of the people running AI

10:35 Why I'm not a doomer — and what to actually do (local models)

———

📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeatin...

🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: / drbriankeating

⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode:

📚 My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

🌐 More:

🏄‍♂️ Twitter: /briankeating

📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss

✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe

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The real AI alignment problem is not technical. It is moral. You cannot align a superintelligence to human values if humans cannot agree on what those values are, and you cannot get that agreement without a level of global cooperation we have never managed before. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

The Tower of Babel is the AI parable nobody is reading. Technology that outpaces wisdom fragments the people building it. The Fermi paradox offers the grimmer version: civilizations that reach the capacity to blow themselves up typically do. Robert Wright has been watching this longer than almost anyone, he was reporting on neural networks in 1983, and his conclusion is not that the machines will fail the test. It is that we will.

Wright’s book argues that superintelligence is not the danger and AI alignment is not the solution unless it comes with a moral advance. Passing the God test requires something no lab can ship.

What you’ll hear:

-Why Wright thinks p(doom) fails as a scientific concept

-What the binding of Isaac and the Tower of Babel have in common as moral tests

-Why global cooperation is the only thing that can actually slow AI down

-What Lee Smolin’s cosmological natural selection has to do with the Fermi paradox

-What Wright thinks Eastern and Western enlightenment have in common and why it matters now

-Whether there is a role for humanity inside the global brain or only for the machines

“We face the kind of test that God would give.” — Robert Wright

CHAPTERS

00:00 The man who interviewed Hinton in 1983

05:04 The God test and its two meanings

08:36 Religious faith in technological progress

14:10 Hinton then versus Hinton now

19:38 Why slowing AI down requires international cooperation

26:02 How LLMs reverse-engineer the meaning of words

32:08 Brian's Einstein test: can Claude have a happy thought?

40:06 AGI is impossible. Here is why Brian thinks that.

47:04 The Fermi paradox as a moral filter

51:10 What passing the God test actually looks like

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Enter the debate: briankeating.com/ai

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Featured Guest:

The God Test (book): https://thegodtest.net

Robert Wright on Twitter/X: https://x.com/RWrighter

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#RobertWright #AIalignment #superintelligence #FermiParadox #briankeating #intotheimpossible #AI

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A physics professor ran the energy budget on the Nimitz tic-tac. The maneuver needs about a thousand gigawatts, more than ten times every nuclear plant in the United States combined.

Nothing we build survives its own waste heat at that scale. So what was flying?

Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics at the University at Albany and a former NASA scientist who now applies Bayesian statistics to UAP sensor data.

We cover: why a 5,400 g maneuver would turn a pilot into soup, where the energy went when the object stopped and no explosion followed, the 1954 radar measurements nobody wants to talk about, the New Zealand frigate that went dark and adrift in three seconds, and why the records from that deployment stay classified until 2062.

Knuth says the power numbers alone rule out human technology. I push back on whether the sensors agree.

Newsletter, full transcript, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: briankeating.com/aliens

CHAPTERS

00:00 Why this field needs gatekeepers

03:50 How anomalous is anomalous?

06:40 The UFO photo that was a seagull

10:40 Radar clocked them at 19 km/s in 1954

15:00 5,400 g and a body weighing 227 tonnes

19:00 The radar return problem he had not considered

21:45 A gigawatt of waste heat and nowhere to put it

24:30 The 747 chased by something carrier sized

29:00 Why a number without an error bar is worthless

34:30 The NASA job he was not qualified for

37:00 Proxima Centauri in a day and a half

41:00 The warship that lost all power in 3 seconds

46:30 Pushing a column of water that cannot compress

48:45 The light that burned bark off the trees

53:00 What the power numbers rule out

56:00 The 95 percent problem

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This episode is sponsored by Abacus AI agent: agent.abacus.ai/keating

I fed it Carlo's recent papers and asked for the argument, the counterargument, and the evidence that would support or refute each side. Some of the questions and animations in this interview came out of that. It runs the top frontier models in one place, turns a dense PDF into a research report or a presentation with charts, builds interactive dashboards off a spreadsheet, and takes API access if you want it wired into your own tools.

Plans start at $10 a month. My link gets you the first month for $7: agent.abacus.ai/keating

The physicist who built loop quantum gravity says the second law does not say what you were taught it says, and that freedom does not require breaking a single law of nature. Order builds itself. Your head is older than your feet. And neither one is the strangest thing here.

Carlo Rovelli founded the loop quantum gravity program and wrote the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics.

We cover: why oil separating from water is not a violation of entropy, what Galileo got wrong about the one discovery he is most famous for, the paper Einstein published denying gravitational waves, why a chess program that deliberates tells you what your own freedom actually is, and what Rovelli would build with ten years and unlimited money.

“To imagine that to be free you have to violate the laws of nature is stupid.” — Carlo Rovelli

CHAPTERS

00:00 Your head is older than your feet

00:48 Things left alone get ordered. Who ordered them?

07:00 Low entropy might be about you, not the universe

08:38 You can be in two cities at once, just not to you

11:02 Why start with Galileo when Einstein knew more?

19:34 Galileo misunderstood his own discovery

22:32 Einstein published a paper denying gravitational waves

25:08 The definition of time that explains nothing

26:50 Two clocks, two metres apart, two answers

31:06 Nothing gets recorded without something being lost

33:12 The chess program deliberates. So do you.

37:06 Can a machine have Einstein’s happiest thought?

39:52 Thirty minutes versus a month

44:10 Dark matter made of black holes the size of a hair

51:10 Ten years, unlimited money, a room full of junctions

Rovelli told me the second law does not say what I was taught it says. Order builds itself.

Three moments worth the rewatch:

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Featured Guest:

The Relational Universe (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735216118

Carlo Rovelli on Twitter/X: https://x.com/carlorovelli

My books:

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

#CarloRovelli #freewill #entropy #physics #quantumgravity #briankeating #intotheimpossible

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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.

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #RickGaitskell #darkmatter #physics #AI #emergence #podcast

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