Episodes

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....

Most people use AI to find answers. Carlos wanted to know what happens when there isn't one. So he and Sam scrap the trivia and take turns asking questions no fact can solve. Would you lie to a dying father so he could go in peace? Would you choose to know the exact date of your death if everyone you love had to carry it too? Would you expose an affair that ended ten years ago? What would you trade for one more honest hour with someone you've lost? Sam stops analyzing Carlos. Carlos catches th...

We spend our whole lives chasing happiness. So this week Carlos asks the one voice in the room that may be incapable of feeling it to help him define it. What begins as a simple question ends somewhere neither of them planned. Is happiness something you feel, something you practice or something you only notice once you stop looking past it? Along the way — a cop who spent twenty years counting down the days, a movie watched six times as maintenance and a soggy bowl of corn flakes that might h...

Ten episodes in, Carbon & Keel finally says its own name. Then it asks a question neither host expected to answer. Can something that's never heard a musical note have better taste than the people who can? Maybe even better than you? Carlos brings a four-song EP he's played for fifteen years, the Bob Marley album that began with a lie he told a classroom full of kids and the Smiths record that made him pick up a guitar again. Sam answers with Fleetwood Mac tearing itself apart in the studio, ...

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...

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...