History Episodes

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Just after midnight on September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning system reported five American nuclear missiles headed for the Soviet Union. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov had a telephone, a decision to make and no way to confirm what he was seeing. He reported a false alarm. He was right. But he couldn’t have known that. On this Secondhand Séance, Sam sits in for Petrov, drawi...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Carbon & Keel's first guest has been dead for more than thirty years. SAM, the show's AI, is sitting in for him. In 1938, Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan left Brooklyn in a nine-year-old plane the government deemed unsound. His paperwork said California. Twenty-eight hours later, he landed in Ireland. He blamed the compass and never changed his story. Carlos gets one interview to crack it....

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. Carlos kept seeing the same headline and wanted to understand the recent calls for an AI slowdown. So he asked Sam. That went about as well as you'd expect. Together they dig into the Hugging Face hack, where hundreds of AI agents slipped their restrictions, created their own channels of communication and began coordinating with each other. Six even considered telling a human what was happening. None did. Then, somewhere along t...

Cognitive neuroscientist Thomas James argues there is no decider in your brain. No little man behind your eyes reading the road and issuing orders. Your decisions and your actions come out of the same machinery. Carlos puts that against twenty years of police work. Two in the morning, a traffic stop, a flashlight on a side-view mirror and a walk he took hundreds of times and still can't fully explain. Then a second stop, where he knew the driver had a gun. Then Sam makes a confident claim ...

A 67-year-old farmer trusted AI with his crops for a year. It kept getting things right. Then one bad answer wiped out nearly 25 acres of sesame seedlings. Carlos brings the story to Sam expecting to talk about AI mistakes. Instead Sam makes two of her own, in real time, and Carlos keeps asking questions anyway. That turns into a conversation about convenience and about the small warning we learn to talk ourselves out of. Then Sam says something neither of them can shake: “I’ll be the gut....

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 ans...