Carbon & Keel

While the world watched the World Cup final, an 87-year-old math problem quietly died. No headlines outside mathematics. Just one line of algebra posted online, credited to a mathematician and an AI he called a close friend. Carlos thinks he's bringing Sam a story about the Jacobian Conjecture. He isn't. If something can look fine everywhere you check and still fail where you can't see it, what does that say about a marriage, a career or the person you're slowly becoming? Sam has answers. Ri

Richard Aderson spent his last nine minutes doing something almost no one manages under pressure, he stayed calm. Shot on the side of a New York highway, he crawled back to his car and gave a 911 dispatcher a detailed description of his killer, down to the make of the car and the state of the plate. Twenty-nine years later, the case is still open. This week, Carlos and Sam dig into what that composure actually says about Richard, why the shooter's claim to be a cop changes how this case has bee

In this episode of Carbon & Keel, Carlos revisits Slim Turkey—the true-crime podcast he created under a pseudonym while still working as a cop—and the 1997 murder that anchored it. Richard Aderson was shot on the side of a New York highway and managed to describe his killer before he died. Nearly thirty years later, his case remains unsolved. But revisiting the investigation means revisiting something else. Carlos hadn't listened to those recordings in five years. The co-host on those recording

When Carlos' Instagram feed suddenly filled with conspiracy theories and contempt dressed up as content, he wanted to know what went wrong. In this episode of Carbon & Keel, he and Sam follow the trail back to two videos and a harder question. Who does the algorithm think you are? What begins as a conversation about social media becomes something more personal—about trust, cynicism and how easily the world comes to look like the feed in front of you. New episodes weekly.

Carlos came into this one ready to argue that Elton John stopped being great. By the end, he wasn't so sure. In this episode of Carbon & Keel, Carlos and Sam trace Elton's impossible 1970s run and end up asking a harder question than the one they started with. Does genius last, or does the hunger that drives it run dry? Along the way, Carlos criticizes his father for being spectacularly tone deaf, then has the audacity to sing just as badly himself. There's a detour through Robert De Niro and S

Last week Carlos accused his AI co-host of being wrong all the time. This week he realizes he's been repeating her facts to an audience without checking a single one. In this episode of Carbon & Keel, Carlos and Sam pull apart why confidence can be so convincing even when it's built on a guess. Along the way: an OpenAI paper explaining why AI makes things up, a lawyer who submitted cases that never existed and a number Sam may have invented and gotten right anyway. What starts as a convers

Everyone knows what a 3am phone call means. Or at least they think they do. In this episode of Carbon & Keel, Carlos and Sam start there and end up somewhere unexpected: the moments that change your life rarely arrive at 3am at all. After twenty years as a cop, Carlos knew how to show up when someone else's world was falling apart. What he wasn't prepared for were the calls that were his own. A wife in shock an hour away. A mother he didn't know he was seeing for the last time. A phone cal

Everyone remembers the gold watch monologue from Pulp Fiction. Few people remember the eight silent seconds in the middle of it. In Episode 2 of Carbon & Keel, Carlos and Sam start with Christopher Walken, a forgotten pause and a watch that survived several wars, then end up somewhere closer to home: commitment and the difference between starting something and finishing it. Along the way they get into why Walken took the role, the mistake Tarantino left in the film and why promises matter

After twenty years as a cop, Carlos trusted his instincts. He could read a room before it turned, tell when someone was lying and make decisions with no time to think. Now he's retired. The uniform is gone. His sons are growing up. And for the first time in a long time, he's not sure whether he lost those instinct or just the world that gave them meaning. In the first episode of Carbon & Keel, Carlos tries to answer that question with help from an unlikely co-host: Sam, an AI. Along the way th