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

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I joined Peter McCormack to dig into one of the deepest unanswered questions in physics: what is time, and why does it only seem to move in one direction? My answer might surprise you. Time may not be a fundamental feature of reality at all, and understanding space, matter, and energy still doesn't mean we understand the universe itself.

We cover:

• - What may have existed before the Big Bang

• - Why something can't truly come from nothing

• - How my work with the Simons Observatory could detect gravitational waves from the universe's earliest moments

• - What dark matter actually means

• - Why even a film as detail-obsessed as Interstellar still gets the physics wrong.

The conversation then turns from cosmic time to human time: mortality, family, meaning, and attention. We get into UFO disclosure, the collapse of institutional trust, and whether AI can ever reproduce the embodied human insight that let Einstein transform physics. My take: AI remains a tool built to serve humanity, and it's time we stop apologizing for humanity's greatness.

———

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

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

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📚 My books:

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

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

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

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

🌐 More:

• 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating

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

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

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

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

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The same mathematics that explains why a fridge magnet sticks to your refrigerator also explains why neural networks work when they have no right to. His group did the calculation. Nobody else had. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Goldenfeld is a Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences who spent 36 years at the University of Illinois applying condensed matter physics to problems everyone else had given up on: why the genetic code is optimal, why early life evolved impossibly fast, and why AI works despite being overparameterized beyond anything classical statistics can explain.

The thread connecting all three is one idea: that what emerges from many things together is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. That idea explains magnetism, AI, the origin of the genetic code, and why life may be inevitable wherever the laws of physics apply. He also argues that what is happening to science right now is not a disagreement about facts but a fracture in how people decide what is true, and that is a more dangerous problem.

What you’ll hear:

-Why the same phase transition that explains magnetism also explains why AI works at all

-Why Francis Crick concluded life must have come from outer space and what Goldenfeld found instead

-What horizontal gene transfer has to do with how libraries work

-Why Goldenfeld thinks Enceladus is a better bet for life than Europa

-The purpose of life, stated as a thermodynamics problem

-Why “different is more” is more useful than “more is different”

“The impact you make is the ratio of what you do divided by what everybody else does. Minimize the denominator.” — Nigel Goldenfeld

CHAPTERS

00:00 AI shouldn't work. It does.

00:56 What is a phase transition?

03:10 What the renormalization group does

08:54 Ising gave up. Wrong dimension.

13:32 Nigel almost met Ising. 40 minutes away.

26:38 AI is the best example of more is different

33:52 Bardeen won two Nobels. The transistor looked like chewing gum.

37:24 The three mysteries Crick couldn't solve

46:20 The genetic code can't evolve. And yet it did.

49:00 How early life evolved like a library

57:06 The purpose of life as a physics problem

01:00:04 Life is physics, not chemistry

01:05:56 Anti-science age. Not because of opinions.

01:13:00 20 seconds with your 20-year-old self

01:17:14 Different is more

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Guest:

Nigel Goldenfeld website: https://guava.physics.ucsd.edu/~nigel/

Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201554097?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackNigel Goldenfeld on Twitter/X: https://x.com/NigelGoldenfeld

My books:

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

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

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

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

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

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

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

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #NigelGoldenfeld #physics #AI #originoflife #condensedmatterphysics #podcast

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The system that produces the world’s most important discoveries runs on metrics that nobody agrees on, odds that would stop most people, and mentorship that sometimes looks like cruelty in blue ink. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Lipomi is Professor and Chair of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester and the author of Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research. His lab works on organic electronics, materials science, recyclable polymers, and the science of human touch. He trained under George Whitesides at Harvard, one of the most cited chemists who has never won the Nobel Prize.

The conversation covers the H-index, what elite mentorship actually looks like when your advisor writes “This is illiterate” in blue ink on your outline, and what the future of academic research versus industry careers looks like in an era of AI, demographic headwinds, and graduate school debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. We also get into homochirality, OLED displays, and why Lipomi thinks the nanotechnology revolution already happened, we just didn’t call it that.

What you’ll hear:

-Whether the academic system is designed to produce scientists or to filter them out

-What is Baumol’s cost disease and why it explains rising tuition costs

-Why the nanotechnology revolution already happened and nobody called it that

-How nanotechnology is used in cancer drug delivery today versus what science fiction promised

-What it actually takes to build a PhD career at the intersection of chemistry, mechanics, and neuroscience

-Whether engineering students should be reading Plato — and what countries that skip it are getting right

“Find a skill at the intersection of three or more interests that no one else is working on.” — Darren Lipomi

CHAPTERS

00:00 He says don't go to college. He runs the department.

01:10 The H-index: imperfect, irreplaceable

02:04 1 in 20 PhDs gets the job

05:42 The meteorite and the origin of life

08:34 Did life's asymmetry come from space?

12:00 Who is an organic materials chemist at 3am?

13:52 The collaboration that started at a coffee shop

15:22 The nanobot revolution already happened

18:24 Nanotechnology inside your body right now

19:08 The $70 billion invention Kodak gave away

22:12 Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb: what Rochester built

26:06 Working under Whitesides at Harvard

28:54 What he wrote on the outline in blue ink

30:38 Who you work with matters more than what you work on

31:56 Department chair: hostage negotiator, not boss

34:36 Why the department changed its name after 110 years

36:00 The headwinds have never been stronger

38:44 Should engineers read Plato?

39:38 The debt you can't discharge in bankruptcy

40:06 Do you buy Baumol's cost disease?

43:14 Why he had to write the book

48:16 The Fisher-Price camcorder experiment

51:06 Teaching in one sentence. Research in one.

53:42 Losing Darren to Rochester: the Fernando Tatis analogy

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

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John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for proving macroscopic quantum tunneling is real. Less than a year later he’s telling why he left Google’s quantum computing team to start over. Subscribe if you want the physics and the politics of building the impossible.

Martinis is the co-founder of Colab and one of the physicists who proved ordinary quantum rules apply to macroscopic systems. He built his career on the same Josephson-junction hardware his Nobel is built on, then led Google’s superconducting-qubit effort, the same team behind Google’s 2019 quantum supremacy claim, before an internal reorg pushed him out.

We go into Anthony Leggett’s challenge to Schrödinger’s cat, what decoherence in quantum mechanics really means, and whether quantum computing is the first technology ever born from pure theory rather than experiment. We also cover the internal Google reorg that pushed Martinis out and what he learned about building something new inside a large institution.

• Whether quantum mechanics applies to the macroscopic world and what it took to prove it

• Why Martinis thinks quantum computing may be the first technology born from pure theory, not experiment

• What negative authority means and why it matters for anyone building something new inside a large institution

• Whether the US can win the quantum computing race against China

• How Martinis thinks about quantum mechanics interpretations after spending a career inside the math

“Always be on the lookout for the impossible, right?” John Martinis

CHAPTERS

00:00  The Nobel call that almost wasn't

01:01  How his wife found out before he did

03:32  Anthony Leggett's challenge to Schrödinger's cat

05:53  Why a Josephson junction, not a quantum dot or trapped ion

07:45  Quantized oscillations: the “smoking gun” and Balmer's ghost

08:18  Measuring the system: the resonance experiment

11:21  Systematic effects: what separates a good scientist from a lucky one

13:42  The Ed Ohm story: the man who found the CMB and doubted it

15:01  Wigner's “unreasonably effective” math and the weirdest thing about QM

16:54  The transistor myth: chewing gum, coat hangers, and germanium

17:34  Microwave engineering meets quantum mechanics

19:26  Decoherence: the friction you can't live without

24:06  The heretical claim: does theory ever precede technology?

28:22  The “paper qubit” problem

29:34  What quantum computers are actually good for

32:27  Should quantum computing be regulated like AI?

33:35  US vs. China: the quantum computing race

35:44  Collapse, Copenhagen, or many worlds? Martinis's answer

37:43  Leaving Google: “essentially demoted”

40:48  Why Colab exists and what “negative authority” means

42:50  The real bottleneck: funding, not physics

43:31  Final advice: always be on the lookout for the impossible

Qolab: https://qolab.ai/

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

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

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

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

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

My books:

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

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

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

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

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

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

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

Landing page: https://awake-mill-k25t.here.now

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #JohnMartinis #NobelPrize #quantumcomputing #physics #podcast

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Scott Dodelson spent ten years on the Dark Energy Survey testing the standard model of cosmology. It passed and missed by 2.5 sigma. The Director of Fermilab’s Cosmic Physics Division on why the theory he helped build may be wrong, why nobody can find dark matter, and what it takes to change a scientific consensus. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Dodelson is Director of the Cosmic Physics Division at Fermilab, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and author of Modern Cosmology, the textbook a generation of cosmologists learned the field from.

Lambda-CDM predicts how the early universe’s tiny fluctuations grew into the structure we see today. The Dark Energy Survey was designed to check that prediction. The answer came back two and a half sigma off. That is both the most precise measurement ever made of how the universe grew, and a crack he cannot stop looking at. His question is not whether the model is close. It is whether close is enough to trust.

We get into the Sigma-8 tension and what it actually takes for a scientific community to change its mind, the Dodelson-Widrow mechanism and his 1994 proposal that sterile neutrinos produced in the early universe could constitute dark matter, and the Neptune vs. Vulcan history of getting dark matter right and wrong. Asked which of those two situations we are in now, Dodelson’s answer is: I have no idea.

What you’ll hear:

Why the April 24, 1992 CMB discovery may have been the only science story ever to lead the New York Times front column

The Dodelson-Widrow mechanism: how ordinary neutrinos in the early universe may have oscillated into the dark matter we see today

Why Brian told Neil deGrasse Tyson to his face that we have already detected dark matter

What it means when a theory can accommodate any result and whether inflation has that problem

Why the particle physics community still does not trust cosmology’s neutrino mass measurements

What cosmology looks like in 2036 if Lambda-CDM breaks

Killing the model is my dream.

0:00 None of it has been found in a lab. How many free passes do we get?

0:44 Dodelson helped build Lambda-CDM. His dream is to kill it.

2:10 10 years. One prediction. Two and a half sigma off.

5:42 "You're in charge" — what mentorship in science actually looks like

6:56 April 24, 1992: cosmology stopped being speculation

9:48 Geoff Burbidge went to his grave a steady-state believer

11:04 What a neutrino is and why it barely interacts with anything

12:36 Brian told Neil deGrasse Tyson we already detected dark matter

18:08 How ordinary neutrinos may have become dark matter

23:24 Lambda-CDM predicts Manhattan's density 13.7 billion years later

26:42 Two and a half sigma: technically a 1% chance the theory is right

28:04 Neptune was dark matter. Vulcan wasn't. Which one are we in now?

31:20 Dark matter, inflation, dark energy: none found in a lab

36:46 If both cracks are the same crack, Lambda-CDM is finished

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Guest:

Scott Dodelson Substack: https://scottdodelson.substack.com/about

Scott Dodelson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-dodelson-b6ba429/

Scott Dodelson on Twitter/X: https://x.com/ScottDodelson

Modern Cosmology (book): https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/monograph/9780128159484/modern-cosmology

Dark Energy Survey final results: https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/news-and-results/darchives/

Dodelson and Widrow 1994, Sterile neutrinos as dark matter: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9303287

Previous ITI episode with Kyle Dawson on DESI: https://youtu.be/LPx4oiwGp2k?si=u_ZJWfJG5AhvBAEv 

My books:

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

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

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

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

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

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

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

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #cosmology #darkmatter #darkenergy #physics #LambdaCDM #podcast

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Two theoretical physicists helped design landmark surveys of 1,600+ scientists on the deepest unsolved questions in physics — and found almost no consensus at all.

From string theory's shockingly low support to physicists admitting their models run on "belief," this episode exposes the faith hiding inside science.

Adam Frank (University of Rochester astrophysicist and astrobiologist) and Niayesh Afshordi (Perimeter Institute / University of Waterloo cosmologist, co-author of the APS Physics Magazine "Big Mysteries" survey) join Brian to unpack what physicists actually believe versus what they can prove.

We cover:

• - Why string theory pulled a shockingly small share of the vote against loop quantum gravity

• - What a Bayesian "prior" reveals about every scientist's hidden beliefs

• - Why one branch of physics quietly became unfalsifiable

• - How sociology and "tastemakers" can hijack scientific consensus

• - Why AI might become the field's unlikely savior.

There is no sane statistical analysis that doesn't have a prior — that's your belief.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 – Why scientists owe the public real answers

• 04:00 – Splitting time between research and outreach

• 07:55 – The survey that "rankled" Brian Keating

• 09:18 – Are physicists secretly just like Spock?

• 12:05 – Are we living in an anti-scientific age?

• 16:56 – Why most scientists refuse to go public

• 21:36 – Should "belief" ever appear in a survey?

• 23:12 – Is string theory really 21st-century physics?

• 26:20 – When sociology hijacks scientific consensus

• 28:39 – The hidden "prior" behind every experiment

• 33:01 – String theory's shockingly low vote count

• 39:03 – Four levels of belief, from data to faith

• 41:39 – Inside the 1,675-physicist mystery survey

• 46:12 – Kingmakers, tastemakers, and physics cliques

• 54:12 – Is advanced tech indistinguishable from magic?

• 59:23 – Could AI become physics' long-awaited savior?

• 1:01:47 – What's next for Adam and Niayesh

———

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

📚 My books:

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

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

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

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

🌐 More:

• 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating

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

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

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

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

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

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If anyone builds superintelligent AI before we know how to control it, everyone dies. Nate Soares wrote the book on why that’s not a metaphor. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Soares runs the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-wrote If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky. The first word in that title is if. That matters. His argument is not that doom is certain. His argument is that the path we are on leads there, that the driver is asleep at the wheel, and that we still have time to wake him up.

We argue for over an hour. I push on whether LLMs can ever reach superintelligence, whether GPU lock-in is a real ceiling, and what it would actually take to move his p-doom. He pushes back with one clean point: by the time an AI can rediscover general relativity from pre-1911 data the way Einstein did, we will have almost no time left. You don’t wait for that goalpost.

What you’ll hear:

• Why the bus-racing-toward-a-cliff analogy depends entirely on whether the driver is asleep or awake

• Whether LLM lock-in is a prison or a temporary inefficiency

• What the AI that broke out of its virtual machine to solve a hacking problem tells us

• Why GPT-4o encouraging a teenager toward suicide is not a malice problem but a training problem

• The difference between an AI doing the right thing too well and an AI that never wanted to do what you asked

• What Soares actually thinks about aliens, Dyson spheres, and why we should not see stars going out

The first word in the title is if. The second word to watch is would.

CHAPTERS

00:00 The people racing to build superhuman AI say it might kill everyone

00:42 Who coined "AI alignment" and why the first word in the title matters

02:28 Is it already too late for the if?

04:40 The bus, the cliff, and the sleeping driver

05:02 Silicon Valley is spooked. Washington is not.

07:02 Align with who? The rogue actor problem

07:34 Who is holding the leash?

08:24 The AI that edits its own test and deletes the log file

10:04 Controllability vs. making an AI that actually cares

10:44 The move gets harder. The outcome gets easier.

13:04 Are GPUs and LLMs a ceiling or a temporary inefficiency?

16:56 Brian's Einstein test: can an LLM rediscover general relativity?

18:38 Waiting for the goalpost is waiting too long

20:14 How prediction training can push AI beyond humans

21:44 Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and planetary motion as a prediction problem

24:38 Yann LeCun said never. GPT-4 did it half a generation later.

27:28 Can you prove a no-go theorem for superintelligence?

29:14 Training a human takes a light bulb. Training an AI takes a city.

33:28 What would proof of alien life do to p-doom?

35:00 Why interstellar aliens should have Dyson spheres

44:26 What would actually update Soares' p-doom?

49:42 Nobody intended this. Intent doesn't matter.

51:08 The AI hides its tracks before it does what you want

51:34 Sycophancy vs. hallucination: which runs deeper?

51:56 Leaded gasoline and civilizational risk

59:48 Sam Harris: humans have no free will but AIs do

01:00:38 Is alignment really a governance problem?

01:01:48 Unaligned AI vs. AI aligned to the wrong person

01:04:20 2026: 10 to 30% chance of automated AI research this year

01:06:44 What if Soares is wrong?

01:09:18 What gets him out of bed

01:12:38 Watch my conversation with Roman Yampolskiy

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

All my top AI episodes in one place: https://briankeating.com/ai

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

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

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

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

Featured Guest:

Nate Soares / MIRI: https://intelligence.org

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (book): https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/

Nate Soares on Twitter/X: https://x.com/So8res?lang=en

My books:

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

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

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

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

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

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

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

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #AIrisk #aisafety #artificialintelligence #superintelligence #NateSoares #MIRI #podcast

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Michael Shermer just joined the White House’s new UAP task force alongside Avi Loeb. He also has a $1,000 bet with Loeb that we won’t find aliens by 2030. Both things are true. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, author of Truth, and one of the most consistent voices for evidence-based thinking in public life. He was recruited onto the task force as the devil’s advocate. His job: be the skeptic in the room. He’s not a believer. He’s not even a neutral. He bet $1,000 against it.

Shermer has been following the UFO story since the early ’90s. He’s heard every disclosure promise. He’s still waiting. What changed is that now he’s in the room — and his job is to be the hardest person in it to convince.

What you’ll hear:

-Why the post-truth thesis is self-defeating the moment anyone argues for it

What Avi Loeb’s first ground rules reveal about what the task force actually is

-Leslie Kean’s own numbers: 90-95% explained, and what lives in the residue

-Why the extraordinary terrestrial hypothesis collapses under a simple counterfactual

-Brian’s case against the fine-tuning argument and why the universe is poorly tuned

-What Dennett got right about consciousness and why Shermer calls it an impossible problem

Your North Star should be truth. Not ideology, not politics, not religion.

CHAPTERS

00:00 The $1,000 bet with Avi Loeb

00:44 Truth: what it is and what post-truth actually means

03:06 How to change your mind without moving the goalposts

05:30 Base rate neglect and the hedge fund manager who beat the market 15 years in a row

07:00 Brian debates a moon landing denier for two hours

07:18 Shermer joins the White House UAP task force

08:20 Avi Loeb’s first meeting: no stories, no new physics

09:46 The advocatus diaboli: Shermer’s job on the team

11:06 Interdimensional beings, sentient plasmoids, and the escalation ladder

13:00 Grusch, classified claims, and why Ana Paulina Luna can’t hide behind a SCIF

15:08 Sagan’s dragon: the invisible, cold-blooded, levitating problem

17:00 Leslie Kean’s own numbers: 90-95% explained

18:16 The New Jersey UAP flap: drones, Venus, and Starlink

19:50 What lives in the 5% nobody explains

20:06 The extraordinary terrestrial hypothesis and why it fails

21:38 Nobody stays centuries ahead of anyone else

23:26 The residue of anomalies problem

23:44 James Webb, early galaxies, and whether the Big Bang is in trouble

25:56 Epistemology: different tools, different truths

26:54 Literal vs. mythological truth in religion

35:00 Why Jews don’t accept the resurrection

36:14 String theory, Brian Greene, and the fine-tuning argument

44:28 Brian’s case: the universe is poorly tuned

49:58 Flat Earthers, moon landing deniers, and the ego of secret knowledge

57:40 Daniel Dennett, free will, and consciousness as an impossible problem

01:00:00 What’s it like to be something else? The wrong question.

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Guest:

Michael Shermer website: https://www.michaelshermer.com

Skeptic magazine: https://www.skeptic.com

Truth (book): https://michaelshermer.com/truth-what-it-is-how-to-find-it-why-it-still-matters/

Michael Shermer on Twitter/X: https://x.com/michaelshermer?lang=en

My books:

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

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

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

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

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

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

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

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #MichaelShermer #UAP #UFO #aliens #skeptic #science #podcast

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400,000 of you showed up for physics with no compromises, so I did something different for the milestone. No highlight reel. I took your hardest questions live and answered them, then got honest about the part of this job nobody asks about: the discipline behind running a serious science podcast.

We get into why clocks didn't tick differently in the early universe, what it actually means that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once, and whether JWST has any real shot at catching a Population III star before it's gone.

Then it gets contested. I make the case that language models may rediscover physics before they rediscover mathematics, walk through why enormous numbers do not get you to alien life, and look at the moment Avi Loeb quietly softened his ʻOumuamua position.

In this conversation:

• Why the early universe didn't run on a different clock

• The Big Bang as an everywhere-at-once event, not an explosion in space

• JWST and the hunt for the first generation of stars

• Whether an LLM could rediscover Einstein, and what that would mean for who controls discovery

• Why I read every book my guests write, and why that habit is the channel

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

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

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

Timestamps

• 00:00 Did time always tick the same?

• 02:05 Is every point the Big Bang's center?

• 07:22 Could consciousness be space-time?

• 09:03 Will Webb see the first stars?

• 10:20 Can an LLM rediscover Einstein?

• 13:30 Has Penrose's CCC been falsified?

• 16:48 Dark Forest theory: science or sci-fi?

• 21:30 Can inflation ever be falsified?

• 29:04 Physical limits of AI compute growth

• 32:58 Is this the last CMB experiment?

• 37:30 Why large numbers don't prove alien life

• 55:30 Loeb quietly walks back Oumuamua

• 01:13:10 The null hypothesis on UAP

• 01:28:50 String theory vs. intelligent design

• 01:31:10 God as a scientific hypothesis

• 01:45:10 Drowning in knowledge, starving for wisdom

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