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PODCAST

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape

Mindscape provides a bridge to the biggest ideas in the universe, as shared by the most creative and intelligent thinkers.Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, and author of numerous books. Every week he talks to a guest who is a world expert in some fascinating subject, and they talk about it in a way that is both informal and deeply informative.Learn about the complex dynamics of social systems, the mystery of quantum superposition, the origin of

science physics

All Episodes

250:10

AMA | May 2026

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/05/04

Welcome to the May 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with AMA questions and full transcript:

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76:18

351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/04/20

Peter Singer has been an influential philosopher for a number of decades. He was a significant early voice in animal rights, has been a leading thinker of utilitarianism, and helped inspire the effective altruism movement. In this podcast episode, we try our best to talk about all of those things -- working from metaethical questions of consequentialism vs. other approaches, to specific flavors of utilitarianism, the practical demands that ethics places on people, the rights of animals, and the

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86:14

350 | J. Eric Oliver on the Self and How to Know It

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/04/13

We are more familiar with ourselves than with anything else in the universe, but we generally don't come very close to really understanding what our "self" is. That's not too surprising, as selves are very complicated and we are burdened by all sorts of biases. Today's guest is J. Eric Oliver, who has been teaching a popular course at the University of Chicago called "The Intelligible Self." His academic specialty is political science, but he brings together ideas from psychology, neuroscience, and

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228:14

AMA | April 2026

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/04/05

Welcome to the April 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Henson Shaving is offering 100 blades free with the

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76:51

348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/03/23

"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristics (e.g., becoming stronger through exercise) that would then be inherited by its descendants. This is a different story than the one ultimately told by the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, according to which inheritance passes through our genome (which doesn't know that we've been working out). In her book The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and

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71:29

347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/03/14

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95:29

346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/03/09

Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical tasks, but less good at understanding what numbers actually mean. One window on the ways that species differ is how they play amongst themselves. I talk with anthropologist and cognitive scientist Erica Cartmill about modes of play and other social behaviors among various species, and what they reveal about the ways we all think. Upgrade your denim

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83:47

344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/02/16

It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and individual rights -- "liberalism," in the political-philosophy sense of the term. But such movement isn't inevitable or irreversible, and in very recent times there have been both intellectual arguments explicitly pushing back against the liberal consensus, and political movements that are more openly nativist and authoritarian. I talk with Adam Gurri, the

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97:15

342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence,...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/01/26

Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There is tremendous divergence of species over time, but also repeated convergence to forms and mechanisms that are unmistakably useful. We see this clearly in eyes and fins, but the basic pattern also holds for brains and forms of social organization. I talk with philosopher Rachell Powell about what these

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72:41

341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2026/01/19

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty universal, ultimately due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Anyone living in a society or involved with technology must therefore be interested in the concept of maintenance -- keeping systems working. In his book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Stewart Brand looks at the challenges and rewards of this concept.Blog post with transcript:

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42:51

Holiday Message 2025 | The Romance of the University

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2025/12/22

Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full solo podcast. And hopefully something uplifting.This year, I offer a short apologia for higher education in the liberal arts and sciences, focusing not on the down-to-earth economic/occupational benefits of a college degree, but on the very real ways in which such an education opens up possibilities for personal growth. I think all of us in academia

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216:44

AMA | December 2025

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2025/12/15

Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic.Blog post with transcript:

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214:19

AMA | November 2025

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2025/11/17

Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!Blog post with AMA questions and transcript:

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74:22

334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2025/11/03

The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human thought. But the process by which we learn about the universe, and the language with which we talk about it, is extremely human-dependent. Does that mean that aliens would do science differently, and even think differently about physics, even if we all live in the same universe? Physicist Daniel Whiteson has teamed with cartoonist Andy Warner to investigate these

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70:22

333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness,...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2025/10/27

Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated reasoning to convince ourselves of something that isn't quite accurate? Or is it something different -- unmotivated reasoning, or "unthinkingness," an unwillingness to do the cognitive work that most of us are actually up to if we try? Gordon Pennycook wants to argue for the latter, and this simple shift has important consequences, including for strategies for

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81:12

332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2025/10/20

Music is math that you can dance to. The fact that certain notes sound good when played together, or in succession, is related to the mathematical properties of the frequencies to which they correspond, an idea that goes back as far as Pythagoras himself. These days we have a much more intricate understanding of these relationships and how to manipulate them. I talk to composer and music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko about how different musical scales are constructed and the math underlying what sounds

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217:19

AMA | October 2025

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2025/10/13

Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!Blog post with AMA questions and transcript:

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114:46

331 | Solo: Fine-Tuning, God, and the Multiverse

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2025/10/06

Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as features of the initial conditions like the curvature of space and the initial entropy. But they can't truly be "unnatural" -- they are literally features of Nature itself. Some have turned to the anthropic principle and the multiverse, while others look to theism for an explanation. I talk here about my views on the various

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76:34

329 | Steven Pinker on Rationality and Common Knowledge

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape ·

2025/09/22

Getting along in society requires that we mostly adhere to certainly shared norms and customs. Often it's not enough that we all know what the rules are, but also that everyone else knows the rules, and that they know that we know the rules, and so on. Philosophers and game theorists refer to this as common knowledge. In Steven Pinker's new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., he explores how common knowledge (or its absence) explains money, power, and a wide variety of subtextual human

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