Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

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

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

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

Astrophysicist Beatriz Villarroel found point-like flashes in sky photographs taken before a single satellite existed. Nine of them lit up simultaneously on one 1950s plate. Nothing in orbit could have made them — because nothing was in orbit yet.

Beatriz Villarroel leads VASCO, which scanned 600 million objects across 70 years of photographic sky surveys hunting for things that appear, then vanish.

We cover: why finding zero vanishing stars pointed at something stranger than what she was looking for, the 8.7-degree deficit in Earth's shadow that a 22-sigma signal says cosmic rays cannot fake, the 68% transient spike clustered around nuclear test dates, how telescope aberration patterns prove these are real photons and not plate defects, and why she now says she fears for her safety.

Pre-Sputnik plates may hold evidence of non-human technology in Earth orbit. She wants you to check the math before you decide.

Chapters

00:00 It appeared, then it was gone

00:48 The obsession that built VASCO

06:10 What a Palomar glass plate really is

09:16 600 million objects, zero vanishing stars

13:47 Nine flashes, one plate, same instant

21:11 Why asteroids and cosmic rays are ruled out

26:47 The Earth's shadow shouldn't be empty

31:17 The flashes cluster on test dates

40:08 What is actually up there

55:24 Tic-tacs, retrievals, and belief

58:51 The question she didn't want to answer
📄 Want to check the math? Every VASCO paper, the full transcript, and the counterarguments — free: https://BrianKeating.com/bvpod

———

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

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

A Nobel laureate in economics argues the bans we pass to protect our morals are quietly killing people and the data backs him up. Why the line between a market we allow and one we forbid is mostly an accident of disgust. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

My guest won the 2012 Nobel Prize for designing the systems that match kidney donors to patients who would otherwise die waiting.

We cover why it’s easy to buy heroin but hard to hire a hitman, what surrogacy bans actually do to the babies they’re meant to protect, why paying kidney donors could end a shortage that kills thousands a year, and the trade-off statement he wants every lawmaker to say out loud.

He has been called an organ trafficker. He explains why that’s the point.

What you’ll hear:

Why banning something that people want often makes it more dangerous

The kidney market America won’t build and what that silence costs

What the hitman vs. heroin ban asymmetry tells us about effective prohibition

The McCormick statement: the trade-off acknowledgment most policy debates refuse to make

How prediction markets are eroding the boundary between public and private information

Whether Milton Friedman was right to be embarrassed by the economics Nobel

There’s no such thing as a solution. There are only trade-offs.

CHAPTERS

00:00  Who gets called an organ trafficker?

02:26  What makes a transaction repugnant?

03:14  Why bans without support create black markets

03:36  Heroin is easy. Hitmen are not. Why?

04:44  Prohibition, NASCAR, and moonshine

07:26  Surrogacy: legal here, criminal in Europe

12:30  When money turns something legal into a crime

14:28  Can religion corrupt a market?

15:56  Who actually pays for college?

21:38  The Enhanced Games: drugs as a marketing platform

25:30  Adderall, Erd0151s, and the science of getting sharper

30:58  Why AI makes market congestion worse before better

35:00  100,000 kidney failures a year. 30,000 transplants.

36:44  Portland decriminalized heroin. It failed.

39:22  The trade-off statement politicians refuse to make

41:14  Can you legalize sex work and shrink trafficking?

47:42  Kahneman chose to die. Who should decide?

48:30  Should we put GLP-1 drugs in the water?

56:12  America is the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma

01:00:54  Prediction markets and inside information

01:01:34  Sports gambling is more addictive than it looks

01:11:40  Peter Nobel called economics a marketing stunt

01:13:32  Is economics a real science?

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

Get your three free gifts when you join my Multiverse of Minds: https://BrianKeating.com/cosmic

Featured Guest:

Alvin Roth website: https://web.stanford.edu/~alroth/

Moral Economics (book): https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Economics-Prostitution-Controversial-Transactions/dp/1541702018

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 #economics #NobelPrize #AlvinRoth #marketdesign #podcast
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices