Podcasts · Science

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

Sean Carroll

300 episodes

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.

Episodes page 1 of 6

  1. 372 | Erik Winfree on DNA Computers and Robots

    · 1 h 18 min · Episode 372

    When we think of computers, we think of machines running on some kind of silicon chips. But the idea is more general: at heart, a computer is any object that takes in input, processes information, and produces output.…

  2. 371 | Kyle Harper on How Humans Have Shaped Life on Earth

    · 1 h 25 min · Episode 371

    Humanity is merely one species out of millions living on Earth, but we have a disproportionate impact on the rest of the biosphere. Recent transformations have accelerated that impact, but in fact it stretches back to…

  3. Ask Me Anything | October 2026

    · 3 h 32 min

    Welcome to the October 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…

  4. 370 | Daniel Akerib on a Faint Hint of Dark Matter

    · 1 h 16 min · Episode 370

    One reason it's been so hard to directly detect the dark matter is that we're not sure what it is. But for a long time, a leading candidate has been "Weakly Interacting Massive Particles" (WIMPs), so an impressive…

  5. 369 | Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will

    · 1 h 24 min · Episode 369

    The worry about debates over free will is that they degenerate into semantics -- what do you mean by "free will," really? But there are important substantive issues that shouldn't be ignored. Do people deserve blame…

  6. 368 | Elizabeth Alexander on Why Democracy Needs Imagination

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 368

    In all sorts of ways, the modern world makes it difficult to nurture our individual humanity and connect with the humanity of others. The disciplines that try to do so are, naturally enough, the humanities. Poet…

  7. Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | September 2026

    · 3 h 52 min

    Welcome to the September 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…

  8. 367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of leaders

    · 1 h 17 min · Episode 367

    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.…

  9. 366 | Jim Al-Khalili on Time, Quantum, Biology, and Cosmology

    · 1 h 15 min · Episode 366

    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…

  10. 365 | Vitor Cardoso on Why Black Holes Are Special

    · 1 h 06 min · Episode 365

    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…

  11. 364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure

    · 1 h 16 min · Episode 364

    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…

  12. 363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins

    · 1 h 52 min · Episode 363

    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…

  13. Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026

    · 3 h 58 min

    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…

  14. 362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

    · 1 h 20 min · Episode 362

    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…

  15. 361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together

    · 1 h 16 min · Episode 361

    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…

  16. Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026

    · 4 h 03 min

    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…

  17. 360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass

    · 1 h 30 min · Episode 360

    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…

  18. 359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy

    · 1 h 56 min · Episode 359

    The cosmological constant, as discussed last episode, provides a perfectly good (thus far) explanation for why we observe the universe to be accelerating. But it might not be the right explanation, and demonstrating…

  19. 358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant

    · 2 h 00 min · Episode 358

    The most surprising discovery in fundamental physics during my career as a scientist was undoubtedly the acceleration of the universe, announced in 1998. The most straightforward explanation for these observations is a…

  20. 357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics

    · 1 h 20 min · Episode 357

    Messenger RNA (mRNA) plays a literally central role in the functioning of life as we know it, shuttling information back and forth between the DNA where it is stored to the ribosome where it is used to produce…

  21. 356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity

    · 1 h 17 min · Episode 356

    All ideas have a history, no matter how inevitable and well-entrenched they may seem to us today. The later Enlightenment was a heady time when people were exploring new conceptions of nature, humanity, and the self.…

  22. AMA | June 2026

    · 3 h 57 min · Bonus

    Welcome to the June 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…

  23. 355 | Solo: Looking Quantum Mechanics in the Eyeball

    · 1 h 44 min · Episode 355

    One of the major obstacles to understanding quantum mechanics is the difficulty we have in simply accepting what the theory itself is telling us. The problem is that we know what the everyday world looks like -- stuff,…

  24. 354 | Christian List on Free Will and Levels of Reality

    · 1 h 27 min · Episode 354

    Did I have any freedom in choosing this particular podcast guest? At the level of particles, fields, and the fundamental laws of physics; no. At the level of human agents navigating the world, yes. Today's guest,…

  25. 353 | Alvin Roth on the Economics of Morally Contested Markets

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 353

    Economic markets are efficient ways of deciding fair prices, at least in ideal circumstances of perfect competition, information, and choice. But there is more to life than fair prices. Two people might decide on a…

  26. AMA | May 2026

    · 4 h 06 min · Bonus

    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…

  27. 352 | Bing Brunton on Connecting the Connectome to the Body

    · 1 h 14 min · Episode 352

    The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an important step to understanding how brains work, but a long way from the final…

  28. 351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All Sentient Creatures

    · 1 h 16 min · Episode 351

    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…

  29. 350 | J. Eric Oliver on the Self and How to Know It

    · 1 h 21 min · Episode 350

    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…

  30. AMA | April 2026

    · 3 h 47 min · Bonus

    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…

  31. 349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches Us About Quantum Mechanics

    · 1 h 26 min · Episode 349

    There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's theory of general relativity with the framework of quantum mechanics. But a…

  32. 348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency

    · 1 h 15 min · Episode 348

    "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…

  33. 347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You

    · 1 h 09 min · Episode 347

    In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a single prison guard. Although his original idea was never built, the…

  34. 346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play

    · 1 h 28 min · Episode 346

    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.…

  35. AMA | March 2026

    · 3 h 53 min · Bonus

    Welcome to the March 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…

  36. 345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe

    · 1 h 35 min · Episode 345

    Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncertain about the way the world is, but we can also be uncertain about our…

  37. 344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It

    · 1 h 21 min · Episode 344

    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…

  38. 343 | Tom Griffiths on The Laws of Thought

    · 1 h 19 min · Episode 343

    For all that human beings spend a lot of their time thinking, it's far from obvious what that process actually entails. Part of it amounts to classical logical reasoning. But an even bigger part involves reasoning with…

  39. AMA | Feb 2026

    · 3 h 10 min · Bonus

    Welcome to the February 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…

  40. 342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind

    · 1 h 37 min · Episode 342

    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…

  41. 341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle

    · 1 h 13 min · Episode 341

    "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…

  42. 340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters

    · 1 h 18 min · Episode 340

    At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for us to matter -- to…

  43. 339 | Ned Block on Whether Consciousness Requires Biology

    · 1 h 11 min · Episode 339

    It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to think about…

  44. Holiday Message 2025 | The Romance of the University

    · 43 min · Bonus

    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…

  45. AMA | December 2025

    · 3 h 37 min · Bonus

    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…

  46. 338 | Ryan Patterson on the Physics of Neutrinos

    · 1 h 26 min · Episode 338

    The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hypothesize new particles that could not be detected. Modern…

  47. 337 | Kevin Zollman on Game Theory, Signals, and Meaning

    · 1 h 18 min · Episode 337

    Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potential rewards. That's a pretty broad class of interesting events, so…

  48. 336 | Anil Ananthaswamy on the Mathematics of Neural Nets and AI

    · 1 h 14 min · Episode 336

    Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications have been discussed at great length. To understand the origin and…

  49. AMA | November 2025

    · 3 h 34 min · Bonus

    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…

  50. 335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe

    · 1 h 18 min · Episode 335

    Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It can be tempting to think of scientific discoveries as being carefully…

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