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PODCAST

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

Theories of Everything

Exploring theoretical physics, consciousness, Ai, and God in a technically rigorous manner. If you"d like to support this endeavor, then please visit the Substack https://curtjaimungal.substack.com as you get ad-free extras. Thank you for your charitable and kindhearted support. My name"s Curt Jaimungal, a Torontonian with a degree in mathematical physics from the University of Toronto and I analyze various Theories of Everything from this analytic perspective, though more and more opening up to

science physics

All Episodes

93:02

Adrian Owen: Awake. Aware. Unable to Move.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/08/24

SPONSORS:- Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping with promo code TOE. - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE There are three questions people ask about consciousness: what it is, how to explain it, and how to measure it. This episode is entirely the third one. Adrian Owen, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Western University,

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114:23

Becca Tarnas: Did Jung and Tolkien Enter the Same World?

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/08/03

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,

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121:17

We're Simulated. AI Is Conscious. And We Can't Win.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/06/01

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. TOE listeners get 35% 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 in this conversation, he's not here to scare you, but to be precise. He makes the case that AI alignment isn't merely unsolved but

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107:31

Juan Maldacena: Geometry as Entanglement, and the...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/05/04

SPONSORS:- Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - I subscribe to The Economist for their science and tech coverage. As a TOE listener, get 35% off! 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 geometry

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95:19

Slavoj Zizek: “Buddhism Can’t Explain This”

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/04/27

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 subscribe to The Economist for their science and tech coverage. As a TOE listener, get 35% off! No other podcast has this: https://economist.com/TOESlavoj Žižek doesn't answer your question — he dismantles it, rebuilds it, and hands you something stranger and more useful than

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206:13

Renato Renner: Quantum Mechanics Contradicts Itself...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/03/30

Renato Renner (ETH Zurich) proves quantum mechanics contains logical contradictions that undermine its foundations.Quantum theory may be the most successful theory in history — and Renato Renner has proved it can't consistently describe itself. This is not a philosophical objection. It's a theorem. From there it spirals into black holes, reference frames, and why some of his students refused to continue working on the subject. This one is a quiet storm, blending the foundations of physics with

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6:11

Curt Jaimungal: Why Write?

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/03/19

As a listener of TOE you can get a special 35% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toeCurt 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 matter: death, meaning, identity, morality. Shallowness now wears the robe of eloquence. FOLLOW: - Spotify:

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21:37

Curt Jaimungal: General Relativity Is NOT...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/03/12

Many people think physics / reality is either guided by a probabilistic distribution or is “determined.” Actually, there’s a third, far‐more unsettling option. Curt Jaimungal explains why Einstein’s general relativity isn't actually deterministic. He discusses how Cauchy horizons and closed time-like curves break predictability, showing that math and physics don't always guarantee a set future for our universe. This is a solo deep‑dive. One that he's been meaning to make for a while.As a listener

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118:38

Erik Verlinde: This Physicist (Unexpectedly) Derived...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/02/16

What if gravity is just entropy in disguise? Professor Erik Verlinde joins me to argue that gravity isn't a fundamental force—it's thermodynamic, emerging from quantum information the way gas pressure emerges from molecules bouncing around. We explore why spacetime may be stitched together by entanglement, and how dark energy and dark matter both pop out automatically without extra particles or parameters. Verlinde explains why the cosmological constant problem is a red herring, and why there may be

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123:50

Subir Sarkar: Why Dark Energy is a Local Illusion

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/01/26

Hot off the press, Professor Subir Sarkar makes the case that dark energy doesn’t exist (and he’s not being provocative for its own sake). He’s the former head of Oxford’s particle theory group, serves on the Particle Data Group. Sarkar's group has found that the cosmic acceleration supposedly driving the universe's expansion is directional—not uniform as required by a cosmological constant—appearing only in the direction we're moving through space. He claims the 2011 Nobel Prize-winning discovery

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88:09

Stuart Kauffman: There Is No Theory of Everything

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2026/01/20

This is an interview with Stuart Kauffman, one of the founders of complexity theory. He invented random Boolean networks at only 23 years old and helped establish the Santa Fe Institute. Now 86, he makes a striking claim: there is no theory of everything. Kauffman argues that biological evolution creates genuinely new possibilities that cannot be deduced from prior states—paralleling the ancient Chinese Tao more than Plato's Logos. He also believes he's found something new in quantum gravity (and,

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73:30

ANNOUNCEMENT: Testing the Limits of Gravity w/...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2025/11/25

Sir Roger Penrose and Professor Ivette Fuentes analyze the Ron Folman T-cubed experiment and whether the equivalence principle holds in quantum mechanics. They also detail gravity's role in wave function collapse, the existence of gravitons, and cyclic cosmology.SPONSORS: - Thank you Nolah for sponsoring! Click here https://nolahmattress.com/toe and use CODE: TOE to get an extra $50 off your mattress. - As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has

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18:01

Curt Jaimungal: The Most Terrifying Philosopher I’ve...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2025/11/20

Curt Jaimungal dives into Kierkegaard’s three stages of life—aesthetic, ethical, and religious — showing how each promises freedom yet traps us in its own way. Through the lens of modern anxiety and constant choice, he explores why the “leap of faith” isn’t blind irrationality but a way of living with authenticity when reason hits its limits.Sponsors: - As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My

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50:19

Yakir Aharonov: The Future Propagates Backward in...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2025/10/13

As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toePhysicist Yakir Aharonov argues that the standard story of quantum mechanics is wrong, proposing a time-symmetric “two-state vector” view in which reality is defined by wavefunctions from both past and future. He explains weak measurements (information without collapse), nonlocal dynamics behind interference, and phenomena like the “quantum Cheshire Cat.”

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125:34

Wayne Myrvold: A 2 Hour Deep Dive Into Entropy

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2025/09/29

Wayne Myrvold reinterprets thermodynamics as a resource theory, arguing that the slogan “entropy always increases” follows from the second law rather than defining it. The conversation contrasts Gibbs and Boltzmann entropy, examines Maxwell’s demon, Landauer erasure, statistical bounds on Carnot efficiency, and explores implications for cosmology, ergodicity, and collapse theories, ending with pedagogical reflections and career advice.- 00:00 - Is entropy in the system or in our minds?- 07:12 -

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92:17

The Mathematics That Predicts Your DMT Trip

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2025/09/16

Improve your sleep today! Head to https://evening.ver.so/toe to get 15% off your first order of Verso's Nightcap Elixir.As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Live from MIT Media Lab’s Augmentation Lab Summit, I speak with Andres Gomez-Emilsson of the Qualia Research Institute about modeling consciousness and rendering it. You haven't seen psychedelic visuals /experiences explained like this before

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123:35

Founder of Cellular Automata Unifies Biology,...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2025/09/10

Get 50% off Claude Pro, including access to Claude Code, at http://claude.ai/theoriesofeverythingAs a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe In this episode, I speak with Stephen Wolfram—creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Language—about a “new kind of science” that treats the universe as computation. We explore computational irreducibility, discrete space, multi-way systems, and how the observer shapes

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109:53

Physics Absorbed Artificial Intelligence & (Maybe)...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2025/09/03

As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toeMIT physicist Max Tegmark argues AI now belongs inside physics—and that consciousness will be next. He separates intelligence (goal-achieving behavior) from consciousness (subjective experience), sketches falsifiable experiments using brain-reading tech and rigorous theories (e.g., IIT/φ), and shows how ideas like Hopfield energy landscapes make memory “feel”

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93:35

The Nobel Laureate Who (Also) Says Quantum Theory Is...

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2025/08/12

As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toeIn this episode, I speak with Nobel laureate Gerard ’t Hooft, a theoretical physicist known for his work on the electroweak interaction and his radical ideas about quantum mechanics. To him, the universe is a cosmic pinball machine. Every ball follows a fixed path. No randomness. No mystery. We only invented quantum mechanics to cope with our ignorance. In his

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9:31

Philosophers vs. Physicists

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ·

2025/08/12

Curt discusses how philosophy has directly contributed to physics through Bell's theorem, decoherence theory, the hole argument, and more. Meanwhile, via John Norton, we uncover the hidden philosophical assumptions in physics that most scientists don’t even realize they’re making. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings):

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