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Every episode
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
30 episodes
Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds
Aug 17, 2026 · 1 hr 48 min
SPONSORS: - Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed and wake up feeling at least 50% better — or your money back. For a limited time our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at https://cheershealth.com/TOE - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor at the University of Sydney and author of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Deep…
Jacob Tsimerman: He Won Math's Highest Prize. Then Announced the End
Aug 10, 2026 · 1 hr 31 min
I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Ten days after winning the Fields Medal — math's highest honor — Jacob Tsimerman joins to explain why he's leaving academia temporarily for OpenAI's AI safety team, and why he's grieving even as he does it. The conversation covers why math is one of the first fields being radically reshaped by AI, whether a proof still counts if no one can understand it…
Becca Tarnas: Did Jung and Tolkien Enter the Same World?
Aug 3, 2026 · 1 hr 54 min
SPONSORS: - Nobody likes a call center — ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs fixes that with voice AI that sounds human and works 24/7 in 30+ languages. Try it: elevenlabs.io/TOE - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This podcast explores the uncanny link between two of the twentieth century's great visionary works. Becca Tarnas, assistant professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies,…
Tim Maudlin: Quantum Mechanics Explained FROM SCRATCH
Jul 27, 2026 · 3 hr 3 min
I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a careful lecture that can be followed with zero background knowledge. Einstein thought he'd caught quantum mechanics in an act of spookiness — this podcast asks whether he was even worried about the right thing. Tim Maudlin, professor of philosophy at NYU and a leading philosopher of physics, delivers a rare full lecture tracing Eins…
Emily Adlam & David Wallace: The Quantum Interpretation That Divides Physicists
Jul 20, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt and use the promo code "CURT" to get a Plaud device today - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a podcast all about parallel universes, and whether we have any right to believe in them. David Wallace, professor of philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh and a leading defender of the Many Worlds Interpretation, jo…
Ginestra Bianconi: The Physicist Who (Unexpectedly) Derived Gravity From Entropy
Jul 13, 2026 · 59 min
I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Ginestra Bianconi thinks gravity can be derived from entropy — and that gravity itself is fundamentally anti-reductionistic, since it's about geometry rather than isolated particle interactions. In this episode, the network-topologist-turned-gravity-theorist explains her "Gravity from Entropy" action, which treats matter and geometry symmetri…
Curt Jaimungal: Reality Is Bloody Terrifying
Jul 8, 2026 · 9 min
What does it mean to investigate the "nature of reality"? In this episode, we break down the term across philosophy, physics, mathematics, cognitive science, and theology: exploring questions of metaphysics, fundamentality, reductionism, and grounding. We also touch on a conversation with Slavoj Žižek and why the question of why the universe follows laws at all may be the deepest question of all. Plus: why art belongs in this conversation, and why "fundamental" doesn't mean what most people thin…
Philip Mannheim: The Story of Conformal Gravity
Jul 6, 2026 · 2 hr 36 min
SPONSORS: - Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code TOE at http://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad - Shopify: Accelerate your efficiency. Free trial at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This podcast is about dark matter — and Professor Philip Mannheim thinks it isn't missing at all, just hiding in plain sight as the re…
Curt Jaimungal: What is Existence, Exactly?
Jul 1, 2026 · 23 min
I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Does Batman exist? Not really—but proving he doesn't turns out to be a logical minefield. This episode tackles negative existentials: why saying "X doesn't exist" seems to require referring to X in the first place. We trace the debate from Russell's theory of descriptions, through Kripke's devastating critique in Naming and Necessity, to Mein…
Simon Saunders: The Unsettling Mysteries of Time
Jun 29, 2026 · 1 hr 46 min
SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt and use the promo code "CURT" to get a Plaud device today - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a podcast all about time: depending on how you look at it, that's either unnerving or exhilarating. Professor Simon Saund…
Neil Turok: A Route to Quantum Gravity (Without Strings)
Jun 22, 2026 · 1 hr 55 min
SPONSORS: - Exclusive Plaud Prime Day discount for Curt's viewers: use code CURT for up to 20% OFF at https://www.plaud.ai/curt - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a breaking podcast. We're premiering a new paradigm for quantizing 4D gravity here first, witho…
Roman Yampolskiy: We're Simulated. AI Is Conscious. And We Can't Win.
Jun 1, 2026 · 2 hr 1 min
SPONSORS: - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Roman Yampolskiy has spent two decades being right about things people wished he wasn't — and he's not here to scare you, but to be precise. He argues AI alignment isn't merely unsolved but fundamentally under-defined: no…
Harvey Friedman: The Genius Who Invented Reverse Mathematics
May 18, 2026 · 1 hr 39 min
SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt to get a Plaud device today - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Harvey Friedman — the youngest professor in Stanford's history, founder of reverse mathematics, and the mathematician Kurt Gödel chose to sponsor his final paper — ha…
Janna Levin: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Klein Bottle
May 11, 2026 · 2 hr 5 min
SPONSORS: - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - Go to https://vanman.shop/curt to get 15% off your order - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt to get a Plaud device today - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Janna Levin — Claire Tow Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College, founding Director of Scienc…
Juan Maldacena: Geometry as Entanglement, and the Emergence of Spacetime
May 4, 2026 · 1 hr 48 min
SPONSORS: - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Juan Maldacena wrote the most cited paper in theoretical physics, birthing AdS/CFT and realizing holography — and today, the problem keeping him up at night is wormholes. He suspects space-time isn't fundamental at all, that geo…
Slavoj Zizek: “Buddhism Can’t Explain This”
Apr 27, 2026 · 1 hr 35 min
SPONSORS: - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Slavoj Žižek doesn't answer your question — he dismantles it, rebuilds it, and hands you something stranger and more…
Curt Jaimungal: Consciousness, Irreducibility, and the Local to Global
Apr 22, 2026 · 1 hr
I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Why can't local agreement scale to global truth? At the Mind at Large consciousness conference, hosted by the Center for Process Studies, I make the case using sheaf theory and physics — breaking down consciousness, free will, and the hard problem to show why sincerity beats any polished, totalizing philosophy. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open…
George Ellis: Hawking's Co-Author on Why Reductionism Is Dead
Apr 20, 2026 · 1 hr 35 min
SPONSORS: - Sign up for Claude today at https://Claude.ai/theoriesofeverything and checkout Claude Pro — which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription. - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE George Ellis is one of those guests who makes you rethink…
Aephraim Steinberg: The Physicist Who Measured Negative Time
Apr 13, 2026 · 2 hr 27 min
SPONSORS: - Go to https://expressvpn.com/theoriesofeverythingyt to find out how you can get up to 4 extra months thanks to our sponsor, ExpressVPN - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Professor Aephraim Steinberg, winner of Physics World's Breakthrough of the Year in…
Curt Jaimungal: Why You Are Brighter Than You Think
Apr 10, 2026 · 16 min
SPONSORS: - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE The intellectual world is designed to erode your confidence — through rejection rates, delayed feedback, unfair comparisons, and the silence of everyone you've actually helped. In this video I break down why feeling like a fraud…
Curt Jaimungal: What Is Infinity, Actually?
Apr 7, 2026 · 17 min
For much of history, many mathematicians—following thinkers like Aristotle—viewed infinity as a never-ending process rather than a completed object. In the late 19th century, Georg Cantor revolutionized this view by treating infinite sets as mathematical objects that could be compared and studied. His work showed that not all infinities are equal, and that there are infinitely many different sizes of infinity. While his ideas are foundational in modern mathematics, some philosophical schools, su…
Emily Riehl Makes Infinity Categories Elementary
Apr 6, 2026 · 2 hr 50 min
Emily Riehl, one of the world’s leading category theorists, shares her vision for making infinity category theory something undergrads can actually learn. In this talk, she breaks down how rethinking the foundations of math could change the way it’s taught and understood—and why it might redefine what math even is. I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Join My New Substack (Perso…
Renato Renner: Quantum Mechanics Contains Its Own Contradictions
Mar 30, 2026 · 3 hr 26 min
I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Renato Renner (ETH Zurich) proves quantum mechanics has logical contradictions that undermine its foundations.Quantum theory may be history's most successful theory — yet it can't consistently describe itself. Not a philosophical objection. A theorem. From there it spirals into black holes, reference frames, and why some of his students refus…
Jenny Wagner: What If We've Been Wrong About Dark Matter For Decades?
Mar 26, 2026 · 2 hr 38 min
I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Jenny Wagner examines the inverse problem: how to map dark matter without assuming what it is.What if 85% of the universe's matter isn't missing — it's just that our models were never clean enough to know? Wagner proves mathematically that every dark matter map ever made is extrapolation. The data only tells you something local. Everything el…
Curt Jaimungal: I'm Worried About Us
Mar 19, 2026 · 6 min
I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Curt Jaimungal argues writing reveals something deeper than output—what LLMs expose about human purpose.Curt Jaimungal argues that in an age where LLMs can produce beautiful prose on demand, we've discovered that output was always just a proxy for something deeper — understanding you can't outsource, especially on the questions that actually…
JB Manchak: Time Travel in Physics and What We Still Don't Know
Mar 16, 2026 · 2 hr 18 min
I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Curt Jaimungal examines why physicists still can't resolve whether time travel is possible or forbidden.What if you gathered every possible piece of evidence about the universe — every observation, past, present, and future — and it still wasn't enough? That's not a philosophical parlor trick. It's a theorem. J.B. Manchak proves it using the…
Curt Jaimungal: General Relativity Is NOT Deterministic (Here's the Proof)
Mar 12, 2026 · 22 min
Curt Jaimungal explains why Einstein's general relativity isn't actually deterministic: how Cauchy horizons and closed time-like curves break predictability, and why math and physics don't always guarantee a set future. A solo deep-dive. I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE FOLLOW: - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCur…
John Donoghue: We Have Already Quantized Gravity (And It Works)
Mar 11, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
Professor John Donoghue explains why quantum physics and gravity actually work perfectly together. He tackles quadratic gravity, effective field theory, and random dynamics, arguing that grand unification and naturalness aren't required for a theory of everything. I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE SUPPORT: - Support me on Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe…
Nir Lahav: What If Consciousness Follows the Rules of Relativity?
Mar 5, 2026 · 3 hr 9 min
I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Physicist Nir Lahav proposes a relativistic theory of consciousness: subjective experience as a genuine physical property manifested only from within a cognitive system's own internal simulation. No prior background in physics or philosophy required. SUPPORT: - Support me on Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Crypto: htt…
Curt Jaimungal: Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Gets "Belief" Wrong
Mar 2, 2026 · 17 min
Curt Jaimungal argues that astrophysicists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and spiritual gurus Deepak Chopra and Thomas Campbell can’t logically claim they don’t hold beliefs. This “Theories of Everything” with Curt Jaimungal episode uses analytic philosophy to show why belief’s vital for understanding physics and consciousness, countering what Thomas Campbell and NASA scientist Nathalie Cabrol say. I personally subscribe to The Economist. SUMMER SALE to Aug 17, 2026: 50% off the annual subscription! N…
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