Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

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
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NASA physicist's UAP math survives. His conclusion doesn't.

Mayim Bialik ran the razor first — Brian finishes the cut.

Kevin Knuth is a tenured physicist, former NASA Ames researcher, and published exoplanet scientist who has done the actual math on the Nimitz encounter.

We cover:

- Whether Tic Tac flight physics rules out conventional explanations
- Why the 60% cross-cultural abduction pattern isn't what it looks like
- The Malmstrom missile shutdowns and the three hypotheses Kevin ignores
- What years of neutron analysis on alleged crash debris actually found
- Why Mayim Bialik dismantled the light-day argument before Brian could.

The inference move — not the data — is what fails the razor every time.

Timestamps:

00:00 The cattle mutilation that started it all
01:59 What Kevin gets right — the steel man
07:14 Keating's Razor: how the cut works
11:13 Mayim catches the selection bias live
13:43 Malmstrom, the babies, and three hypotheses
15:00 The debris lab result that should change everything
19:18 The verdict: data survives, inference doesn't

———

📬 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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Stephen C. Meyer has a PhD from Cambridge in the philosophy of science, and he thinks AI just handed him his strongest argument yet. I spent years pushing back on him. Today I laid three traps. Watch what he does with the third one. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Meyer is a philosopher of science and director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. His argument: every large language model is trained on text produced by conscious agents, and when you query its own outputs iteratively, it collapses into incoherence. That dependency, he says, is a tell. AI can recombine information. It cannot originate it. And that distinction points, in his view, to something minds do that matter alone cannot explain.

I push back on all of it. We go after the Oklo reactor, a natural nuclear fission reactor that ran for millions of years in Africa two billion years ago with no human input whatsoever. I ask whether that breaks his information-from-mind argument. He sees the trap before I spring it, concedes the point where concession is honest, and explains exactly where the threshold lies.

We also get into the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and Vilenkin’s admission that quantum cosmology may require a mind predating the universe, the junk DNA prediction that Meyer’s team made in the ’90s before the ENCODE project confirmed it, and why beauty in physics can lead a field astray.

What you’ll hear:

- Why model collapse is Meyer’s strongest argument and where it has limits

- The Oklo reactor trap and what Meyer’s honest answer reveals about design detection

- What Vilenkin actually said about a mind predating the universe

- Whether intelligent design makes testable predictions or only retrodictions

- The junk DNA call and what the ENCODE project found

- Why beauty as a guide to physics has produced mathematical castles in the air

Stephen Meyer thinks AI proves minds can’t be reduced to matter. Is model collapse evidence of design, or is it just bad training data?

CHAPTERS

00:00 The AI argument Meyer thinks no one can crack

00:44 What is inference to the best explanation?

05:52 AI has a tell: the model collapse problem

09:38 The Oklo trap: a natural nuclear reactor with no designer

11:56 Where the design inference becomes decisive and where it doesn’t

15:50 Sean Carroll’s wasteful universe problem and Meyer’s answer

20:00 Where did atheist scientists get access to the mind of God?

23:22 The fine-tuning of the periodic table: why are there only 500 stable nuclei?

25:52 The universe had a beginning: observational astronomy and the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem

27:40 Quantum cosmology: how math alone is supposed to birth a universe

29:08 Vilenkin’s question: are we saying a mind predates the physical universe?

34:06 Mathematical castles in the air: where beauty in physics goes wrong

40:00 Does intelligent design make predictions or only retrodictions?

43:52 The junk DNA prediction and what ENCODE found

46:30 James Tour, origin of life, and the hidden hand of the investigator

51:56 God-of-the-gaps vs. inference to the best explanation

56:02 The Story of Everything: where to watch and what to expect

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:

Stephen C. Meyer website: https://stephencmeyer.org/

The Story of Everything (film, Amazon Prime June 25): https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0NO974XWBQQNYH9TB4ESIJIVL9

Signature in the Cell (book): https://signatureinthecell.com/

Return of the God Hypothesis (book): https://returnofthegodhypothesis.com/

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 #intelligentdesign #artificialintelligence #cosmology #podcast #StephenMeyer #philosophy
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Recently, Professor Avi Loeb was tasked by the White House, AARO, ODNI, and the FBI with assembling and leading a new UAP Science Advisory Council — comprising astrophysicists, AI experts, and psychologists — to advise the intelligence community on unidentified anomalous phenomena. It was announced the same week the government released its third batch of declassified UAP files. Now he joins us live to talk about what that actually means — and what it doesn't.

This is not a "the aliens are here" stream. It's the harder conversation. I study the cosmic microwave background, and when we find an anomaly, we exhaust every instrument artifact and foreground before anyone whispers "new physics." I want to know why UAP science should run on a different evidentiary standard — and Loeb is exactly the right person to push on it, because he's already attributing much of the released footage to cosmic rays, balloons, and possibly Chinese drones, while holding the door open for the small fraction that stays unexplained.

WHAT WE GET INTO:

- The council, its mandate, and the question nobody's asking: does "advisory" mean anyone has to listen?
- The orbs — Chinese surveillance drones, classified US tech, or something else — and the prior you'd need before you say "non-human"
- Whether "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" gets applied selectively
- AI in the Galileo Project's detection pipeline, and the false-positive problem: what's the training comparison class for "non-human technology"?
- The critique that a council built to study the object ignores where the data actually comes from — human witnesses

GUEST:

Professor Avi Loeb — Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, former chair of the Astronomy department, head of the Galileo Project, author of "Extraterrestrial" and "Interstellar."
Avi on X: https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
Avi's Medium: https://avi-loeb.medium.com
Galileo Project: https://galileoproject.org

HOST:

Brian Keating — experimental cosmologist, UC San Diego.
Brian on X: https://x.com/briankeating
Brian's Medium: https://drbriankeating.medium.com/

Loeb's essay "Keeping Our Eyes on the Orbs, Not the Audience": https://avi-loeb.medium.com

CHAPTERS:

00:00 — "Chinese drones, or the biggest discovery in history?"
00:10 — Avi Loeb, live
00:40 — The White House just put him in charge of UAPs
10:00 — Legitimacy, or a gilded cage?
13:00 — The orbs: Chinese drones or something else?
24:00 — The prior: what's your base rate for "non-human"?
28:00 — The CMB standard: how a cosmologist kills an anomaly
33:00 — AI, SETI, and the false-positive problem
44:00 — Two cosmologists, one Nobel, one council
47:00 — Lightning round
50:00 — The Impossible Question

#uap #AviLoeb #UFO #Astrophysics #GalileoProject #SETI #IntoTheImpossible
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Roman Yampolskiy has spent two decades trying to prove that superintelligent AI can be controlled. He couldn’t. I invited him on to make his case. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Roman is a professor of computer science at the University of Louisville and one of the earliest researchers in AI safety. His book AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable started as an attempt to solve the alignment problem. After decades of work, it became a proof that the problem cannot be solved. Not difficult. Mathematically impossible.

I push back hard. We go after the Einstein test: can a large language model trained only on pre-1911 physics reproduce what Einstein did with the same data? We ran that experiment. It failed. Roman and I disagree about what that means. We also get into the halting problem and what it actually tells us about predicting smarter-than-human behavior, whether value alignment is a real problem or a well-funded category error, the case for a government moratorium on frontier model development, and why Roman thinks giving an AI agent access to your computer is the dumbest thing a smart person can do.

What you’ll hear:

Whether AI control is mathematically impossible or just unsolved

Why Roman thinks all current AI safety work is security theater

What the halting problem actually means for superintelligence

The alignment problem: real issue or well-funded category error

Why Roman wants a moratorium on frontier model development

What to tell your kids about careers in a world where Roman might be right

If you listen to other people, the best you can become is average.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Creating a mind without an off switch

01:34 Solving problems beyond our own intelligence

04:08 Einstein’s epiphany and the limit of AI intuition

08:18 Assessing the Einstein test: Why the experiment failed

12:22 Path dependency: Are LLMs and GPUs our QWERTY?

16:10 The barriers preventing AI from solving physics

21:54 Safety vs. Capability: Why toddlers are safe but teens are not

23:06 The halting problem: Predicting agents smarter than us

25:58 The impossibility of a system proving its own integrity

28:18 Regulation: Genuine safety or a gift to oligarchs?

33:28 Is human cognition non-computable? Penrose vs. the field

39:00 Ethical duties: Must we treat AI with humanity?

43:00 From internet memes to monsters: Decoding the book cover

46:22 Customized realities: Can everyone have their perfect world?

49:50 Von Neumann probes and the panspermia hypothesis

55:02 Categorizing AI: The one version that should terrify you

58:22 Pause AI: The movement for a development moratorium

59:58 Career advice for kids in a post-professional world

01:07:58 Cross-examining Sam Altman

01:15:48 Roman’s dream debate

01:19:50 Lessons for a younger self

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

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:

Roman Yampolskiy on Twitter/X: https://x.com/romanyam?lang=en

AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable: https://www.romanyampolskiy.com/books/

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 #artificialintelligence #aisafety #podcast #superintelligence #RomanYampolskiy
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