Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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
Mentioned books
32 snips
May 11, 2026 • 1h 12min
353 | Alvin Roth on the Economics of Morally Contested Markets
Alvin Roth, Nobel Prize–winning economist and market designer at Stanford, explores morally contested markets. He discusses how markets differ from other institutions and how design, law, and social norms shape transactions. Short segments cover kidney exchanges, paid plasma, surrogacy, drug policy, and why some trades become politically fraught.
96 snips
May 4, 2026 • 4h 6min
AMA | May 2026
Wide-ranging Q&A covers whether antimatter regions could be distinguished and how CP violation might reveal differences. Topics jump to Boltzmann brains and when anthropic reasoning goes wrong. Conversations probe determinism, death, psychedelics, decoherence versus measurement, and the limits of many-worlds. Practical threads include AI in education, collider limits, AGI caution, and ethics around accountability and science communication.
83 snips
Apr 27, 2026 • 1h 14min
352 | Bing Brunton on Connecting the Connectome to the Body
Bing Brunton, neuroscientist and UW professor who maps connectomes, discusses linking wiring diagrams to body movement. She explains how fruit-fly connectomes reveal circuits for walking, how tiny rhythm-generating networks can drive limbs, and why embedding neural maps in simulated bodies and real flies helps test predictions. The conversation touches on limits, validation experiments, and implications for embodiment and rehabilitation.
133 snips
Apr 20, 2026 • 1h 16min
351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All Sentient Creatures
Peter Singer, a philosopher known for utilitarianism, animal ethics, and effective altruism, discusses objective ethics and consequentialist reasoning. He explores measuring utility, weighing extreme suffering versus many small pleasures, and why distant lives and animals matter morally. He also covers effective altruism’s aims, practical giving guidance, factory farming’s scale, and support for assisted dying under safeguards.
157 snips
Apr 13, 2026 • 1h 21min
350 | J. Eric Oliver on the Self and How to Know It
J. Eric Oliver, a University of Chicago political scientist who teaches The Intelligible Self and wrote How to Know Yourself, joins to explore the self as a process rather than a thing. He discusses neuroscience and psychology of ingrained routines, meditation and psychedelics for unlearning, language and narrative shaping identity, AI and cultural change, and practical steps for noticing and adjusting self-processes.
137 snips
Apr 5, 2026 • 3h 47min
AMA | April 2026
A wide-ranging Q&A jumps from many-worlds puzzles, decoherence, black holes, and warp drives to UFO skepticism, AI safety, and the future of democracy. It also detours through Dan Brown, martinis, college as self-improvement, authoritarianism, and what makes a fresh nonfiction book idea.
102 snips
Mar 30, 2026 • 1h 26min
349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches Us About Quantum Mechanics
Daniel Harlow, MIT physicist known for work on quantum gravity and black hole information. He explores why gravity is special, lessons from black holes and holography, subtle nonlocality that rescues unitarity, and surprising implications for cosmology and observer-centered quantum mechanics. Short, dense, and provocative discussion of how fundamental physics might emerge from information limits.
42 snips
Mar 23, 2026 • 1h 15min
348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency
Jessica Riskin, Stanford historian of science known for The Restless Clock, traces Jean‑Baptiste Lamarck’s vision of organisms as creatively active agents. The conversation explores machine metaphors versus self-making life, Lamarck’s life and reception, links between his ideas and modern concepts like epigenetics and niche construction, and the cultural forces that shaped evolutionary thought.
72 snips
Mar 16, 2026 • 1h 9min
347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor and author who studies privacy and policing in the digital age, joins to unpack how everyday tech creates constant self-surveillance. He discusses why law lags behind fast-changing data collection, how devices and data brokers feed policing, the rise of AI-powered real-time monitoring, and proposed legal reforms and corporate design choices to limit abuse.
136 snips
Mar 9, 2026 • 1h 28min
346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play
Erica Cartmill, cognitive scientist and anthropologist who studies comparative cognition and play, joins to explore how minds differ across species. She discusses how intelligence is a constellation of traits, surprising numerical strengths in chimps, and the roles of play, teasing, and laughter in social bonds. She also links animal cognition methods to evaluating AI and invites public observation of animal behavior.
