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Sean Carroll

Ever wanted to know how music affects your brain, what quantum mechanics really is, or how black holes work? Do you wonder why you get emotional each time you see a certain movie, or how on earth video games are designed? Then you've come to the right place. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more.

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

The course of history is affected by many things, including the political and social situations of large groups of people, their biological and physical abilities, and their geographical and environmental contexts. Sometimes, it would seem, history -- or corporations, or religions, or sports teams -- can be affected by the actions of just a few influential persons. In his new book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, Jared Diamond asks what effect leaders can have, and what it is that makes them successful (or not).
 
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Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/09/07/367-jared-diamond-on-the-course-of-history-and-the-role-of-leaders/
 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
 
Jared Diamond received a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his awards are the U.S. National Medal of Science, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize. His international bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel has sold over seven million copies.
 
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367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of leaders

Everyone lives through time, but we continue to struggle to fully understand it. We remain unsure whether time is fundamental or emergent, why it has an arrow pointing from past to future, and how that arrow connects to our experience of time's passage. Jim Al-Khalili's new book is On Time: The Physics that Makes the Universe Tick. We discuss what time is at the most basic level, and how it connects to open questions in biology, cosmology, and quantum mechanics.
 
Mindscape listeners can try StatsKey Pro free for one month with code MINDSCAPE. After that, it's $4.99 per month unless canceled. #ad
 Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/31/366-jim-al-khalili-on-time-quantum-biology-and-cosmology/ 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
 
Jim Al-Khalili received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Surrey. He is currently Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Physics at Surrey. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and has served as past president of the British Science Association. He has been awarded the Michael Faraday Prize by the Royal Society, and has been appointed an appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
 
 Web site University of Surrey web page Google Scholar publications Amazon author page Wikipedia YouTube

366 | Jim Al-Khalili on Time, Quantum, Biology, and Cosmology

Black holes, as Stephen Hawking discovered, do grow old: they emit radiation, lose mass, and eventually evaporate away. But our fascination with black holes never grows old. This is especially true today, as we are seeing a flood of new data and intriguing theoretical ideas, which both tests the limits of Einstein's general relativity and teach us new things about the astrophysical universe. At the Center of Gravity at the University of Copenhagen, they are currently celebrating Black Hole Week, which provides an excellent opportunity to talk with Center director Vitor Cardoso about what we've been learning about these singular cosmic objects.
 
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Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/24/365-vitor-cardoso-on-why-black-holes-are-special/
 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
 
Vitor Cardoso received his Ph.D. in physics from the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal. He is currently a Villum Investigator and Director of the Center of Gravity at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and a Distinguished Professor at Técnico.
 
 Web site University of Copenhagen web page Simons Collaboration page Google Scholar publications

365 | Vitor Cardoso on Why Black Holes Are Special

One of the paradoxes of science is that it seeks objectively true understanding of the world, but its methodology is driven by ignorance, failure, and uncertainty. Some phenomena we understand pretty well, but interesting research happens at the boundary of what we do and don't know. And there is no foolproof algorithm for moving in the right direction; we need to make conjectures and test them against the world. Biologist Stuart Firestein has been advocating for a better public understanding of the true methods of science, most recently in his new book It Could Be Otherwise: Science In the Age of Uncertainty.
 
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Mindscape listeners can try StatsKey Pro free for one month with code MINDSCAPE. After that, it's $4.99 per month unless canceled. #ad
 
Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/17/364-stuart-firestein-on-how-science-relies-on-ignorance-and-failure/
 
Support Mindscape on Patreon(opens in new tab).
 
Stuart Firestein received his Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently Professor of Neuroscience at in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Sloan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His research studies cellular mechanisms of signal transduction and olfaction. His previous books include Ignorance: How It Drives Science and Failure: Why Science Is So Successful.
 
 Columbia web page Google Scholar publications Amazon author page Wikipedia

364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure

Large Language Models display an uncanny ability to construct human-sounding speech, and can synthesize concepts in novel ways. Is this because they are truly thinking like human beings in some way, or have they found a way to be human-like without reproducing the internal mechanisms of human thought? Chandra Sripada argues that LLM cognition is more human-like than we suppose, and offers evidence from the ways that cognitive scientists study actual humans.
 
Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/10/363-chandra-sripada-on-how-llms-and-humans-are-cognitive-cousins/
 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
 
Chandra Sripada received an M.D. from the University of Texas and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Rutgers University. He is currently a professor of philosophy and psychiatry at the University of Michigan, where he holds the Theophile Raphael Research Professorship and directs the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. He writes Cognition, Decoded, a Substack newsletter about AI, cognitive science, and philosophy.
 
 Web site Google Scholar publications PhilPeople profile 
Babbel is offering listeners up to 60% off. Go to https://babbel.com/MINDSCAPE. #ad
 
Get 60% off an annual plan from Incogni using code MINDSCAPE at https://incogni.com/mindscape. #ad

363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins

Welcome to the August 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 questions and full transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/03/ama-august-2026/ 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026

People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, and use less infrastructure per person. Indeed, the relationships between these quantities and city population obey power laws with apparently universal exponents, reminiscent of scaling laws is biological organisms? Luis Bettencourt argues that they can be explained in similar ways, using ideas from complex systems and network theory.
 
Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/07/27/362-luis-bettencourt-on-the-universal-properties-of-self-organizing-cities/
 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
 
Luis Bettencourt received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Imperial College London. He is currently the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Professor Department of Ecology and Evolution & Data Sciences Institute, as well as Associate Faculty and Special Friend in the Department of Sociology, at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems.
 
 Web site University of Chicago web page Google Scholar publications Wikipedia

362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

One of the characteristics of life is that living organisms gather information and put it to use. Even one of the simplest lifeforms, bacteria, are able to sense features of their surroundings and alter their behavior accordingly. Most impressively, they are able to sense the presence of similar bacteria by a process called quorum sensing. Today's guest, Bonnie Bassler, is a leader in this field, and explains how quorum sensing allows groups of bacteria to do things (including in our bodies) that wouldn't be possible for individual bacteria.
 Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/07/20/361-bonnie-bassler-on-how-bacteria-talk-and-work-together/ 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
 
Bonnie Bassler received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University. She is currently Andrew K. Golden University Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, the Gruber Prize in Genetics, and the National Medal of Science.
 
 Lab web site Princeton web page Google Scholar publications Wikipedia

361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together

Welcome to the July 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 transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/07/13/ama-july-2026/ 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026

Modern life has, in many ways, removed us from the environments in which our ancestors lived and adapted. Not only do we spend time looking at screens, but we spend time indoors, or outdoors but in urban spaces. How does this affect how we think and feel? Psychologist Marc Berman is a pioneer of "environmental neuroscience." In his recent book, Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being, he presents evidence that spending time in nature not only puts us in a better mood, it makes us better thinkers.
 Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/07/06/360-marc-berman-on-the-science-of-touching-grass/ 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
 
Marc Berman received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan. He is currently Professor of Psychology and Faculty Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago. Among his awards is the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions.
 
 Environmental Neuroscience Lab U. Chicago web page Google Scholar publications Amazon author page

360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass

Technology is changing the world, in good and bad ways. Artificial intelligence, internet connectivity, biological engineering, and climate change are dramatically altering the parameters of human life. What can we say about how this will extend into the future? Will the pace of change level off, or smoothly continue, or hit a singularity in a finite time? In this informal solo episode, I think through what I believe will be some of the major forces shaping how human life will change over the decades to come, exploring the very real possibility that we will experience a dramatic phase transition into a new kind of equilibrium.
 
Blog post with transcript and links to additional resources: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/03/25/270-solo-the-coming-transition-in-how-humanity-lives/
 
Support Mindscape on Patreon.

270 | Solo: The Coming Transition in How Humanity Lives

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