Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

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

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

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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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