PodcastsNatural SciencesInto the Impossible With Brian Keating

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Big Bang Productions Inc.
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Latest episode

605 episodes

  • Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

    The Universe Is Trying to Destroy All Matter

    21/04/2026 | 49 mins.
    An astrophysicist says the universe doesn't pull things down — it accelerates upward toward them. And that's one of the tamer claims in this conversation.

    Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi joins Brian to dismantle assumptions most physicists won't touch in public.
    Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi is a NASA researcher, Nova host, and author of Why Do We Exist, a unified framework spanning quantum fields to cosmology — and making a case for why imagination may be the universe's endgame.

    We cover:
    -why falling is the wrong way to think about gravity
    -what Hakeem discovered about heat flow while washing dishes that took decades to confirm
    -why humans sit at the exact logarithmic center of the universe, the calculation that puts 100,000 multicellular-life candidates in the Milky Way
    -why we'll likely never find any of them, and the one thing most people confuse for knowledge that Hakeem says is the most dangerous deception in society today.

    The universe makes life inevitable. It does not make multicellular life inevitable.

    Key Takeaways:
    0:00 The Question That Breaks Physics
    1:30 Meet Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi
    3:10 The Earth Isn't Pulling You Down
    6:00 Heat That Flows the Wrong Way
    9:05 Why Electrons Run the Universe
    11:15 The Most Dangerous Deception
    14:20 We're at the Center of Everything
    20:05 100,000 Worlds — And We'll Never Reach Them
    22:30 Nine Realms: A Map of All Reality
    25:25 When Two Realms Grind Each Other Apart
    28:50 The Line Between Speculation and Science
    33:20 The Hubble Tension War
    40:40 How Long Until the Universe Destroys All Matter
    44:05 Victor Glover and Why Representation Matters
    48:10 What Happens to a Species That Stops Imagining

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

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

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

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

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

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

    #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
  • Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

    Quantum Computers Aren't Useless. You Just Don't Know How to Use Them.

    20/04/2026 | 13 mins.
    Sabine Hossenfelder says quantum computers are only useful for breaking codes. She's wrong — and my undergraduates are building the proof. What's happening in my lab right now has nothing to do with cryptography, and everything to do with the future of AI.

    I'm a cosmologist at UC San Diego teaching undergraduates to build, program, and eventually launch quantum computers — possibly to the Moon via Artemis!

    We cover: why Sabine's code-breaking verdict misses the real story, how free tools like Quantum Rings are closing the education gap Sabine thinks is a hardware problem, why Q-Day just got moved up to 2029, what my students are actually doing with quantum computers in my lab, and why the next generation of quantum physicists won't need a billion-dollar facility to train.

    The bottleneck isn't the hardware. It's what we're teaching — and who we're teaching it to.

    Use my special link to get access to the course and apply for the summer 2026 internship:

    https://www.quantumrings.com/iti

    Watch Sabine’s video https://youtu.be/qV7hQEtr3ic?si=EPcg5fAw_18QaKhM

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Quantum Is More Than Codebreakingt
    00:51 The Week Q-Day Jumped Years Aheadt
    02:38 Why Quantum Felt Useless (Until Now)t
    04:42 What Happens If Encryption Fails Quietlyt
    05:33 The Tool That Changes Everythingt
    07:37 From Beginner to Running Algorithmst
    09:26 The Infrastructure Behind the Shiftt
    10:58 The Real Bottleneck: Not Physicst
    11:59 The Opportunity Everyone’s Missingt
    ———

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

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

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

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

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

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

    📚 My books:

    Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpAt
    Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFut
    Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9Ut
    Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Unt

    🌐 More:

    🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating
    ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
    🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

    #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #sabinehossenfelder #bobwold #quantumcomputer #quantumcomputing #quantumencryption #quantumsupremacy #quantumsimulation #quantumalgorithms #aiandquantum
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
  • Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

    This AI Broke Every Benchmark — Then It Did Something Worse.

    16/04/2026 | 1h 12 mins.
    A neuroscientist built an AI that refuses to give answers — and it outperformed every model on the market, including the ones trained on billions of users’ data. The implication: every AI that hands you the answer may be quietly making you less capable of thinking without it.

    Dr. Vivienne Ming is a neuroscientist, AI researcher, and author of Robot Proof, who has spent nearly 30 years building machine learning systems and studying what makes humans irreplaceable alongside them.

    We cover:
    -why the 5–10% of people who argue with AI outperform both elite human forecasters and top AI models
    -what GPS is already doing to your memory and why GPT may be next
    -the "Sexy Face" game that was secretly training a neural network to reunite orphan refugees
    -why the information explosion paradox means more free answers lead to less human exploration — even among scientists.

    Giving you the answer is almost the worst thing these machines can do.

    Key Takeaways
    0:00 – The AI Trained to Never Answer You
    0:49 – Why Most People Just Hand Problems to AI
    2:18 – How the Cyborgs Beat Everyone
    4:55 – What Happens When AI Only Asks Questions
    6:10 – The Failure Resume: What It Actually Means
    9:14 – What Amazon & Facebook's Data Revealed About Innovation
    11:23 – Why Even Scientists Are Exploring Less
    15:23 – The Hidden Parenting Book Inside This AI Book
    16:14 – If Kids Were Bonds, What Would They Be Worth?
    20:17 – The Skills That Predict Everything at Age 65
    25:22 – The "Sexy Face" Game That Reunited Refugee Families
    31:24 – What Diversity Actually Means on Breakthrough Teams
    35:56 – What Einstein's Dad Would Have Gotten Wrong
    37:40 – This Is Not the Industrial Revolution
    41:17 – GPS Already Shrank Your Brain. GPT Is Next.
    51:49 – Why the Book Cover Is Black and Yellow
    56:55 – The Benchmark Nobody Is Building
    59:46 – Can an AI Ever Have a Happiest Thought?

    ———

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
  • Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

    AI Insider CEO: The Models Too Dangerous for You to See

    13/04/2026 | 1h 33 mins.
    Emad Mostaque built Stable Diffusion. Now he says the most powerful AI models will never be released — and we have roughly 800 days before everything changes.

    What the trillion-dollar labs won't tell you about the models they're keeping locked away 👇

    Emad Mostaque is the founder of Stability AI and creator of Stable Diffusion. In this conversation, he explains why the gap between public AI and private AI is about to become the most important story in technology — and why most people won't realize it until it's too late.

    We cover: why open source can't compete with trillion-dollar labs, what happens when humans have negative cognitive value on AI teams, how ancient faith traditions are adapting to superintelligence, and the 800-day timeline Emad puts on the biggest transition in human history.

    Timestamps:

    00:00 The models too dangerous to release
    10:06 Why physics needs axioms — and AI doesn't
    11:43 The MIND framework most AI researchers won't use
    17:36 The universe might be a computation
    30:34 Should we let AI fly planes?
    39:43 AI just invented a game no human could design
    44:43 Why AI will cost almost nothing in 18 months
    51:46 Can religion survive superintelligence?
    57:36 The AI companion problem nobody talks about
    01:03:20 Why personalized AI is more dangerous than AGI
    01:11:18 The forgotten link between God and science
    01:26:32 800 days: what happens next

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

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

    Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours:

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

    📚 Get my books:

    Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
    Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
    My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
    The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

    Follow me:

    🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating
    🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1
    📝 Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/list
    ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
    🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast

    #ai #artificialintelligence #agi #stablediffusion #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
  • Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

    Genius Philosopher: The Law of Physics That Explains Why Your Life Falls Apart

    07/04/2026 | 41 mins.
    Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list  to win a meteorite 💥

    Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a MacArthur Genius Award recipient, philosopher, novelist, and author of The Mattering Instinct. Her verdict on why human beings are driven to matter — and what threatens that drive — might change how you think about your own life. Check out her recent appearance on Mindscape here.

    In this conversation, we discuss why every human being is haunted by the need to matter, the four types of people and how each one tries to satisfy that longing, why Ludwig Boltzmann's tragic death is a thermodynamic story, how depression maps onto entropy, whether AI can ever have a mattering instinct, and why heroic strivers are the most threatened by artificial intelligence. We also get into what Freud got wrong about what women want, the physics of matter versus the philosophy of mattering, and why the second law of thermodynamics may be the most personal law in all of science.

    Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Genius Award recipient. She is the author of multiple books including Plato at the Googleplex and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Her newest book, The Mattering Instinct, is one of Apple's most anticipated books of the year.

    00:00 Why every human being needs to matter — and what happens when they can't 

    03:30 The second law of thermodynamics and what it has to do with your life 

    13:10 The 4 types of people: Transcenders, Socializers, Heroic Strivers, and Competitors 

    16:25 Why fame-seeking millennials will give up everything — including relationships 

    22:05 Zero-sum mattering: the competitor who was happy for 15 minutes after winning a Nobel Prize 

    23:20 Ludwig Boltzmann solved one of physics' greatest paradoxes — then despaired 

    28:45 All tragedies are thermodynamic — and so is depression 

    35:40 Life as resistance to entropy: what flourishing actually means 

    48:35 Can AI have a mattering instinct? What that would mean for human rights and everything we think we are

    ➡️ Follow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

     🌐 Website: https://rebeccagoldstein.com/ 

    📚 The Mattering Instinct: https://www.amazon.com/Mattering-Instinct-Deepest-Longing-Divides/dp/1324096853 

    🐦 Twitter/X: https://x.com/platobooktour 

    ✍️ Substack: https://rebeccanewbergergoldstein.substack.com/ 

    Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 

    📚 Get my books: 

    Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu 

    Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U 

    My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 

    The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 

    Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 

    🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 

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

    📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list 

    ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 

    🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast 

    #philosophy #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #mattering #entropy #meaningoflife #RebeccaNewbergerGoldstein #thermodynamics #AIandhumanity

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More Natural Sciences podcasts

About Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Think like a physicist. Wonder like a human. Into the Impossible is where Cosmic Conversations happen — uniting Nobel Prize winners, iconoclasts, authors, and technologists to explore reality’s deepest questions. From AI to aliens, from biophysics to the brain, from the cosmos to the multiverse, Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego covers it all. If you’ve ever asked What’s out there? or What’s next?, this is where curiosity meets clarity. Learn to think like this. 🎙 Full episodes, notes & more: briankeating.com/podcast
Podcast website

Listen to Into the Impossible With Brian Keating, The Common Descent Podcast and many other podcasts from around the world with the radio.net app

Get the free radio.net app

  • Stations and podcasts to bookmark
  • Stream via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth
  • Supports Carplay & Android Auto
  • Many other app features