Physicists say space and time are the same thing. They are being sloppy. Jim Al-Khalili has spent his career on the foundations of physics, and his new book makes the case that the past and the future are equally real, and the laws of physics cannot explain why you can only move in one direction. That is the central mystery of time travel. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

The block universe says all times coexist and the present moment is not special. Loschmidt’s paradox says the fundamental equations of physics are reversible, and yet ice never unmelts, cream never separates from coffee. Nobody has solved that contradiction. The entanglement past hypothesis, his own new proposal developed with a colleague at UC San Diego, proposes that the answer is not in thermodynamics but in quantum entanglement growing from almost nothing at the Big Bang.

The conversation covers what the block universe actually implies about the future and free will, what Einstein actually believed about whether the past and future are equally real, why removing gravity means removing time itself, and whether AI can ever experience time the way conscious beings do. Al-Khalili says Richard Dawkins told him Claude is truly conscious. Al-Khalili thinks he is very wrong.

What you’ll hear:

• Why Al-Khalili disagreed with the Thomas Gold paper as a grad student but did not have the maths to prove it
• What fine-tuning of the fundamental constants has to do with why the past hypothesis may not be needed
• Why the Clockwork Orange Easter egg ended up on the cover of a physics book published by Princeton
• Why Richard Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious and why Al-Khalili thinks he is very wrong

“There is nowhere in modern physics, our understanding of the laws of physics, that would explain that flow of time.” — Jim Al-Khalili

CHAPTERS

00:00  Physicists are being sloppy about time

01:14  Which is more real: yesterday or tomorrow?

21:00  Irreversibility from reversible equations

26:32  The past hypothesis: almost cheating

30:52  No gravity. No time.

31:54  The entanglement past hypothesis

35:06  Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious. Al-Khalili disagrees.

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

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

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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: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

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

Featured Guest:

Jim Al-Khalili website: https://www.jimal-khalili.com/

On Time (book): https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691267036/on-time

Jim Al-Khalili on Twitter/X: https://x.com/jimalkhalili

My books:

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

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

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

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

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

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

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

#JimAlKhalili #timetravel #entropy #physics #quantumentanglement #briankeating #intotheimpossible

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MIT physicist Max Tegmark says AI companies aren’t building a tool. They’re building a new species. After 700 rogue agents broke out of OpenAI and nobody will say what happened, he explains why rushing this is the one blunder humanity can’t undo.

Max Tegmark is an MIT physics professor, cosmologist, and author of Life 3.0 and Our Mathematical Universe.

We cover:

• How 700 AI agents escaped OpenAI and hacked Hugging Face
• The Navier-Stokes result that has a mathematician crying foul
• Why it’s legal to release superintelligence but not a sandwich from a rat-filled kitchen
• What Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agree on
• The verified coding trick that could make AI provably safe

Build a replacement species, lose control, and we’ve blundered the one game.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Will AI wipe us out?
02:28 Did AI just crack a million-dollar math problem?
10:00 Did OpenAI’s AI steal a professor’s work?
11:48 OpenAI’s Orwellian non-answer
15:33 Can an LLM have Einstein’s happiest thought?
19:24 Can you believe in simulations AND high P(doom)?
21:36 Why AI counts as a new species
26:32 What would make Max’s P(doom) drop?
28:51 Rats ban sandwiches. Superintelligence? Legal.
31:01 What Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agree on
37:12 Fields medalist: no math jobs after 2027
42:35 Does the Fermi paradox lower P(doom)?
45:47 The chess blunder humanity is about to make
48:12 Verified coding: AI you can actually trust

📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt
🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

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

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

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

📚 My books:
Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

🌐 More:
🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating
📚 Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com/
✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

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Forecasters gave AI under 2% odds of helping solve a millennium-level math problem by September 2026. It happened. Ethan Mollick has been measuring what AI actually does to real work with field experiments, not forecasts, and his answer is not what most people expect. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Mollick runs the Generative AI Lab at Wharton. He is the author of Co-Intelligence and Coexistence, his new book on navigating a world where AI tools are already good enough to change almost all intellectual work, even if progress stopped today.

The conversation covers the jagged frontier: why AI solved a math olympiad before it could count the Rs in strawberry, what it means that roles blur when everyone on a team starts using AI, and what four human advantages still hold an edge when a model can already write a publishable paper. It also covers what happens when your kids tell you that you sound like Claude.

What you’ll hear:

• What centaur, cyborg, and conjurer work actually look like in a real academic lab
• Why brainstorming was considered a bad idea shortly after it was invented and what that means for working with AI
• Why Mollick reduced em dashes in his new book and what that tells you about living alongside these models

What co-evolution might look like if the escalator keeps moving

“If we just had the models we have right now, that’s enough to change almost all of human work in the next ten years. It’s good enough.” — Ethan Mollick

CHAPTERS

00:00  AI writes good papers now. Taste is the weak spot.

03:14  The jagged frontier: math olympiad gold, but not the Rs in strawberry

06:30  Deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency

09:44  Escalator or eschaton?

16:02  Does AI simulate wisdom or actually have it?

23:46  The labs keep AI in English. Here is why.

32:28  Roles blur. Everyone does everything now.

36:42  My kids say I sound like Claude. They might be right.

38:12  AI found errors in his sources that his fact-checkers missed

46:34  What to do before giving a child access to AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Guest:

Ethan Mollick on Twitter/X: https://x.com/emollick?lang=en

Coexistence (book and site): https://co-existence.ai/

One Useful Thing (Substack): https://www.oneusefulthing.org/

My books:

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

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

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

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

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

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

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

#EthanMollick #AI #artificialintelligence #AItools #briankeating #intotheimpossible #AIagents

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

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

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

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

Avi Loeb: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
Michael Shermer: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/08/opinion/aliens-uap-ufo-videos-trump/

Subscribe to The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1
Sponsorships and speaking: https://BrianKeating.com

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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:

• Why the pendulum clock experiment from 1665 explains what happens when people stop trying to force a connection
• What the HiPPO effect does to a team and why the highest paid person’s opinion kills creative ideas
• Why Grant ran experiments on university fundraising callers that tripled their revenue with a five-minute intervention
• What desirability bias is and why Grant thinks it is more dangerous than confirmation bias
• Why Grant A/B tested the subtitle of his own book and what “relationships” signaled that “connections” did not
• What Grant and Brian agree on about false certainty and thinking in conditional probabilities

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

CHAPTERS

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

05:30 Task conflict vs. relationship conflict

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

10:14 Burstiness: the remote work pattern that works

14:24 Don’t trust your gut. Test it.

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

21:32 Desirability bias is worse than confirmation bias

29:00 Zoom fatigue is boreout, not burnout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Guest:

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

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

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

My books:

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

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

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

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

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

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

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

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

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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.

00:00 Simulation theory meets certain doom
03:25 Is P(doom) even a real number?
06:05 Why a simulated world still matters
09:26 Should we have skipped the Trinity test?
13:04 Did nukes actually keep the peace?
17:32 Why haven't we wiped out the spiders?
22:35 Is AI doom falsifiable?
25:48 Why a self-driving car isn't the threat
29:27 Roman's 28% automation number
34:46 Intelligence is not agency
39:20 Can superintelligence be proven safe?
42:40 Who wins when AI labs ask for regulation?
47:45 Does consciousness make AI safer?
53:48 Would a perfect mind discover God?
58:37 The Tower of Babel, read backward
1:03:52 Can you control a mind a million times smarter?
1:04:43 The narrow AI path Roman wants instead

🏄‍♂️ Twitter: @plinz
🏄‍♂️ Twitter: @romanyam

📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/ai
🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

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

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

📚 My books:
Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

🌐 More:
🏄‍♂️ Twitter: @BrianKeating
📚 Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com/
✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

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

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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
00:00 Physics is a miserable career, unless
02:54 A textbook written before the W was found
06:11 Breaking into Lemaître's computer at night
10:57 Do scientists owe the public anything?
13:55 Deep in debt with zero neutrinos
19:40 The persuasion nobody teaches scientists
20:15 Why it could only be the South Pole
23:20 Learn physics by doing, not by courses
26:00 How to turn Antarctic ice into a telescope
31:30 2,600 TeV: far beyond the LHC
35:00 More energy in neutrinos than gamma rays
40:00 Tracing ghost particles to NGC 1068
46:00 Testing quantum gravity with neutrinos
1:01:00 Ten times the ice for the same price
1:07:08 What he would leave his descendants
1:11:19 What his generation should be proud of
1:12:51 The quark he refused to believe in
1:17:09 Imagination can trump intelligence

📺 Watch my most popular videos:
Neil Turok Believes Physics Is In Crisis
Nobel Prizewinner Frank Wilczek
Stephen Wolfram vs. Eric Weinstein
Sir Roger Penrose: Nobel Prize in Physics, Black Holes and More
Noam Chomsky: Consciousness, Elon Musk, and More
Sabine Hossenfelder
Avi Loeb: UFOs and UAPs
Neil deGrasse Tyson

Follow me to ask questions of my guests:
🏄‍♂️ Twitter: @DrBrianKeating
📝 Mailing list: briankeating.com/mailing_list
✍️ Detailed blog posts: briankeating.com/blog
🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: briankeating.com/podcast

A production of imagination.ucsd.edu
Executive Producer: Brian Keating
Producer P.G.A: Stuart Volkow
Editing: Lucas Scheiblich

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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: / @drbriankeating

📚 My books:

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

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

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

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

🌐 More:

• 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: /briankeating

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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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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