It Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Podcast

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

Website ↗ Last published 1 November 2026 643 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

“People cherry pick. They say, if the universe was one proton heavier per kilogram in the early universe, we wouldn't have existed. Okay, that's true. If it was one proton now, it wouldn't have any effect whatsoever. So it could be completely the same quantity, just at two different times. And one or two percent is not finely tuned at all. That's actually extremely coarse. The Wi-Fi in this room is tuned to something like a part in 10 to the 9th.” — Brian Keating, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Brian Keating · 1 Nov 2026 Listen →
“I had this idea about four years ago to take a large language model, but cut off its knowledge base in 1911. Anything that happened after 1911, just erase it. Anything that happened before, keep it. So lobotomize it. Tell it nothing beyond that point and see, can it rederive what Einstein did four years later? And no, it doesn't seem that it can. It'll keep forcing a solution until it gets an answer, and it can get arbitrarily close numerically, but it can't come up with the insight that actually gravity is not a force. It's a manifestation of the curvature of space and time.” — Brian Keating, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Brian Keating · 1 Nov 2026 Listen →
“However smart LLMs are, and despite the likes of my good friend Richard Dawkins saying that he believes that Claude is truly conscious, I think he's very, very wrong. I don't think that means that AI wouldn't one day become sentient and self-aware.” — Jim al-Khalili, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Jim al-Khalili · 27 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Suppose you're playing against a really strong player and you're up a queen, and then you have three hours left on the chess clock. The one way you can still lose this one game is if you start rushing your moves. You somehow act like you have only one minute left on the clock and then you blunder this piece, you blunder that piece, and suddenly you're lost. I feel that this is exactly what humanity is doing right now.” — Max Tegmark, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Max Tegmark · 23 Oct 2026 Listen →
“I will always do AI as a second pass, never as a first pass. It's actually interesting. I study innovation and brainstorming was invented in 1955. And by 1957, we knew it was a terrible idea because the problem is as soon as you do any group process, your ideas fit the group. So you always want to start working on your own before anything else. … If the AI writes, it will write a seductive, wonderful section that I will not be able to get out of my head and will influence my writing.” — Ethan Mollick, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Ethan Mollick · 20 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The AIs are trained to use English in this kind of case because it lets us have some observability into what they're thinking rather than non-English. It's not a lucky thing. It is an actual design decision that the AI labs are under pressure to relax, because the AIs will be much more efficient if they didn't use English.” — Ethan Mollick, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Ethan Mollick · 20 Oct 2026 Listen →
“I grew up thinking in the 1980s that we are just a hairsbreadth away from assured destruction and that the risk of nuclear armaments is way too high for humanity. Now I think the adults had been correct. And a generation of students who took to the streets and were very upset about this turned out to be wrong. Nukes have prevented several world wars that would have been happening between World War II and now.” — Joscha Bach, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Joscha Bach · 9 Oct 2026 Listen →
“You are asking for a perpetual safety device, a system which will never fail once. New models, new data sets, interaction with any agent, malevolent agents, recursive self-improvement, it will never fail once. It's always one step ahead of something smarter than you. I think it's impossible.” — Roman Yampolskiy, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Roman Yampolskiy · 9 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Everything I know I've learned by doing research. You get interested in a problem, you have to solve it, you learn everything you need to solve that problem. … Trying to get a background of all of physics before you start doing research is an illusion.” — Francis Halzen, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Francis Halzen · 7 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Being a physicist, from all objective points of view, is a miserable career. … The only reason it's worth doing is you just enjoy this. You're obsessed by it. You love what you're doing. And so if you do it as a job, it's going to be very, very disappointing.” — Francis Halzen, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Francis Halzen · 7 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Heresy is actually rewarded in academia as long as it's not completely outrageous. So you get a lot more points for saying something that goes against the consensus. … Go to Google or Microsoft, arguably very open-minded organizations, and try to be heretical there. I think it's much, much, much harder.” — Daron Acemoglu, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Daron Acemoglu · 5 Oct 2026 Listen →
“One simple one that I float is getting rid of all algorithmic feeds. So we go back to the early days of social media. We let everybody speak whatever they want. … Social media companies are not then allowed to take your speech and amplify it algorithmically. If you have 20 friends in social media or 20 followers, they see your crazy speech. That's it.” — Daron Acemoglu, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Daron Acemoglu · 5 Oct 2026 Listen →

Hosts

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating is hosted by Brian Keating , Mat Kaplan , Micah Hanks , Danny Jones , Rick Walker , Aryaan Arora , Dan Hollaway , Dave Asprey , Mark Randall , Amira Arora , Ross Patterson and Peter McCormack .

Recent Episodes

  1. 1 Nov 2026

    Are We in a SIMULATION? | Brian Keating on the Arora Podcast

  2. 27 Oct 2026

    Jim Al-Khalili: Physicists Are Being Sloppy About Time

    With Jim al-Khalili

  3. 23 Oct 2026

    Max Tegmark: We’re Building A Replacement Species

    With Max Tegmark

  4. 20 Oct 2026

    Wharton AI Researcher: If AI Froze Today, It Would Still Rewrite Work

    With Ethan Mollick

  5. 14 Oct 2026

    Are UFOs Alien Tech? Avi Loeb vs Michael Shermer

    With Avi Loeb and Michael Shermer

  6. 13 Oct 2026

    Adam Grant: Don't Trust Your Gut. Test It.

    With Adam Grant

  7. 9 Oct 2026

    Roman Yampolskiy vs Joscha Bach: Can Anyone Control Superintelligence?

    With Roman Yampolskiy and Joscha Bach

  8. 7 Oct 2026

    "I Thought It Would Fail!" Francis Halzen: Winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize In Physics [Reupload from 2022]

    With Francis Halzen

  9. 5 Oct 2026

    Nobel Economist Daron Acemoglu WARNING: AI's Payoff Is NOT What You Think

    With Daron Acemoglu

  10. 3 Oct 2026

    AI Is the New Tower of Babel (And Its Builders Know It)

    With Mike Slater

  11. 30 Sep 2026

    Robert Wright: AI Alignment Is a Moral Problem, Not a Technical One

    With Robert Wright

  12. 27 Sep 2026

    Former NASA Physicist: The UAP Maneuver That Should Have Exploded

    With Kevin Knuth

Guests

Eric Weinstein (37 episodes), Avi Loeb (22 episodes), James Altucher (12 episodes), Max Tegmark (10 episodes), Sabine Hossenfelder (8 episodes), Michael Shermer (8 episodes), Lawrence Krauss (7 episodes), Roger Penrose (6 episodes), Stephen Wolfram (6 episodes), David Brin (5 episodes), Carlo Rovelli (5 episodes), Adam Riess (5 episodes), and 366 more.