PODCAST · science
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
by 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.
Episodes
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Ask Me Anything | October 2026
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 them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have…
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370 | Daniel Akerib on a Faint Hint of Dark Matter
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 amount of experimental effort has been put into trying to detect them. Recently, a...
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369 | Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will
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 for doing wrong things? Can we make choices that create meaning for our lives?...
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368 | Elizabeth Alexander on Why Democracy Needs Imagination
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 Elizabeth Alexander's new book, Signals Across Vast Distances, grapples with the...
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Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | September 2026
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 them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have...
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367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of leaders
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…
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366 | Jim Al-Khalili on Time, Quantum, Biology, and Cosmology
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...
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365 | Vitor Cardoso on Why Black Holes Are Special
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...
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364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure
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...
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363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins
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...
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Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026
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...
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362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities
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...
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361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together
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...
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Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026
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...
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360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass
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...
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359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy
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 that would be yet another foundational discovery. In this episode I discuss what…
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358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant
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 positive cosmological constant, or vacuum energy. I talk about the origin of…
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357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics
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 proteins. RNA may even have been the first molecule to kick-start the origin of life....
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356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity
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. Andrea Wulf is a writer of narrative histories, examining the origins of ideas...
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AMA | June 2026
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 down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything...
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355 | Solo: Looking Quantum Mechanics in the Eyeball
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, arranged in space, evolving through time. So we can't resist the temptation to...
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354 | Christian List on Free Will and Levels of Reality
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, Christian List, is a philosopher and political scientist who has arguably done the...
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353 | Alvin Roth on the Economics of Morally Contested Markets
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 fair price to carry out a contract killing, but society generally frowns on the...
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AMA | May 2026
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...
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352 | Bing Brunton on Connecting the Connectome to the Body
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 answer. A big next step is understanding how neuronal circuits connect to and...
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351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All Sentient Creatures
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...
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350 | J. Eric Oliver on the Self and How to Know It
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…
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AMA | April 2026
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...
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349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches Us About Quantum Mechanics
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 number of intriguing ideas have arisen along the way, including black hole…
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348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency
"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...
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347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You
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 word has come to indicate any system of social control through constant...
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346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play
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.…
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AMA | March 2026
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 down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything...
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345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe
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 place within the world. This kind of situation arises in cosmology (where the...
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344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It
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…
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343 | Tom Griffiths on The Laws of Thought
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 probability and uncertainty. And some of it is governed by unavoidable...
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AMA | Feb 2026
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 them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
Sean Carroll
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas have?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas currently has 447 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas about?
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...
How often does Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas release new episodes?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas publishes regularly with 447 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas?
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Who hosts Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas is created and hosted by Sean Carroll.
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