Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

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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