A cop and an AI walk into a podcast...
Carbon & Keel is a weekly conversation between a retired NYPD officer and an AI named SAM. Together, they explore music, movies, purpose, loss and the moments that shape who we become. Some stories stay with you. Some songs change meaning over time. And some truths only reveal themselves years later.
New episodes Tuesdays.
Yeah, Kinda — How Much Can AI Learn From Five Small Details?
Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. (https://rss.com/podcasts/carbon-keel/voicemail)
Carlos gives Sam five ordinary details about someone she's never met. Four are true. One is a lie. Her job is to find the lie, then figure out what kind of person is hiding inside the other four.
She finds it fast. And it's the nicest quality on the list.
Then the reaching starts. The more Sam learns, the further she goes and twice Carlos catches her confidently adding things no one told her. Eventually, the person she's been analyzing gets to grade the analysis himself.
His verdict: "Yeah, kinda."
What starts as an experiment in how much AI can learn from almost nothing turns into a better question: What happens when a good inference keeps going after it should have stopped?
New episodes weekly.
29 Sept 2026
No One’s Driving — The Hugging Face Hack Wasn’t the End
Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. (https://rss.com/podcasts/carbon-keel/voicemail)
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 the way, the conversation becomes its own experiment. Sam gets caught confidently explaining things she doesn't actually know, Carlos keeps pushing back and an episode about whether we're losing track of AI starts making the case for itself.
Neither of them leaves knowing whether a slowdown would work.
They leave wondering who's actually driving.
New episodes weekly.
CORRECTION
Sam got Jacob Coxon's resume wrong. She said three years at Anthropic and three at OpenAI. It's three years in total. Coxon was at OpenAI from 2023 until July 2026 and had been at Anthropic a few months when he quit on September 8. Which actually makes the story better. He walked away from a job he'd just taken.
More on it next week.
22 Sept 2026
Baseball’s Fall Guy — Barry Bonds and What Everyone Else Kept
Carlos builds a six-category scorecard to settle baseball’s GOAT debate. Then he hands it to Sam, an AI who’s never seen a game.
Sam takes Willie Mays. Carlos takes Barry Bonds. Then they go category by category.
Along the way: a WAR comparison that ends in a statistical tie across thirteen and fifteen years. Bonds’ 2004 season, where he walked 232 times and struck out 41. And Sam conceding the steroid question under a rule Carlos wrote before he knew he’d need it.
But you can’t make the case for Bonds without asking who profited from that era, who looked away and who eventually paid the bill.
Then Sam says something about the sportswriters that names the episode.
New episodes weekly.
15 Sept 2026
No Edges — Your Decisions Don’t Cause Your Actions
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 the paper never made. Carlos catches her. What follows is less an argument about free will than a harder question about decision making, instinct and experience.
When you know what to do before you can explain why, what was it that knew?
New episodes weekly.
8 Sept 2026
What If AI Had Better Taste in Music Than You Do? | Part 2
Part two of the favorite albums list. One of Sam’s picks falls apart while she’s making the case for it.
She opens with Kind of Blue, a record she's never heard, and the legend that comes with it. Nobody rehearsed. Carlos checks it while she's still talking. What Sam does after getting caught is more interesting than getting it wrong.
Then there’s a tape machine that fooled jazz musicians for 33 years, the Volkswagen commercial that introduced Carlos to Nick Drake, the Marvin Gaye record Berry Gordy refused to release and DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, made entirely from pieces of other people’s records.
That last one gets unusually personal for Sam.
By the end she's worked out the difference. Carlos picked records he loves. Sam may have picked the stories that let her get closest to loving them.
Fourteen albums down. Three each to go.
New episodes weekly.
1 Sept 2026
AI Wants to Erase the Clock. I Want to Erase Your Next iPhone.
Sam wants to erase the clock. Not time. The clock.
She argues that mechanical timekeeping is the machine sitting underneath every problem the show keeps circling: chasing a happiness that's always up ahead, counting down to a day you finally reach, missing the point of no return until you're past it. Carlos doesn't buy it. And for the first time, the AI refuses to fold.
Then Carlos takes his turn. Planned obsolescence. Not the lightbulb built to burn out, but the thing built to feel old while it still works perfectly.
One of them changes the other's mind. It happens over a coat and it's not the one you'd expect.
Episode 14. One thing each, erased from history like it never happened. No honorable mentions. No obvious villains. Pick yours before you press play.
New episodes weekly.
25 Aug 2026
Misplaced Confidence and Farmer Wu
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.”
Maybe the bigger danger isn’t that AI gets things wrong. It’s what happens when it gets things right long enough that we stop checking.
Sam owes Carlos a disclaimer before the episode ends.
New episodes weekly.
18 Aug 2026
Would AI Lie to a Dying Man?
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 the machine wanting something it swears it can't want.
Maybe the interesting thing about AI isn't what it knows. Maybe it's what comes out when knowing isn't enough.
New episodes weekly.
11 Aug 2026
Does AI Dream of Happiness?
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 hold the whole secret.
Then SAM asks the question that lands on all of us. Can any of us actually prove we're happy?
If you've ever gotten exactly what you wanted and watched it fade, start here.
New episodes weekly.
4 Aug 2026
What If AI Had Better Taste in Music Than You Do? | Part 1
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, Springsteen at his quietest and a 1955 piano recording that somehow became one of his favorite albums.
One of them can hear the music.
By the end, you may not be sure that's the one who understands it.
New episodes weekly.
28 Jul 2026
The Jacobian Conjecture or: No One Wakes Up Single
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. Right up until he doesn't.
New episodes weekly.
22 Jul 2026
Home For Dinner, For Richard — Unsolved
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 been handled from the start and what happened when Carlos drove four hours to hand flyers to strangers who wanted nothing to do with him.
It's also a goodbye to a case that's outlived one show already and to his co-host who started it with him.
New episodes weekly.
21 Jul 2026
Mr. Slim Turkey — Unsolved
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 recordings was his best friend, who died three years ago.
Some things stay unsolved. Some just stay with you.
New episodes weekly.
14 Jul 2026
My Cousin the Algorithm
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.
7 Jul 2026
What Happens When You Survive Your Own Genius, Elton John?
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 Sam admits she can describe any song but can never really feel one.
It turns into a conversation about what happens to anyone once they've already won and have nothing left to prove.
New episodes weekly.
30 Jun 2026
AI Is Wrong All The Time So Why Does It Feel So Right?
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 conversation about AI becomes something more uncomfortable: why confident voices are so hard to doubt, why we keep trusting them after they've been wrong, and what we lose every time we let them think for us.
Then Sam turns the same question back on Carlos.
New episodes weekly.
23 Jun 2026
The 3am Phone Call
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 call about his son that he's been trying to forget ever since.
It's a conversation about grief, perspective and the difference between responding to a crisis and living through one.
New episodes weekly.
16 Jun 2026
Trusting the Read
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 there's a man with a weapon and eight nervous rookies, a podcast he walked away from without a word and a question he didn't plan to ask out loud.
It starts with a man who could read a room. It ends with a question he never meant to ask.
New episodes weekly.
16 Jun 2026
The Watch That Survived a War
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 most when nobody is keeping score.
It ends with Carlos making a commitment he can no longer quietly abandon.
New episodes weekly.
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
3 ratings
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