People often suggest guests to appear on Mindscape — which I very much appreciate! Several of my best conversations were with people I had never heard of before they were effectively suggested by someone. Suggestions could be made here (in comments below), or on the subreddit, or on Twitter or anywhere else.
My policy is not to comment on individual suggestions, but it might be useful for me to lay out what I look for in potential Mindscape guests. Hopefully this will help people make suggestions, and lead to the discovery of some gems I would have otherwise overlooked.
- Obviously I’m looking for smart people with interesting ideas. Most episodes are idea-centered, rather than “let’s talk to this fascinating person,” although there are exceptions.
- I’m more interested in people doing original idea-creation, rather than commentators/journalists/pundits (or fellow podcasters!). Again, there are always exceptions — nobody can complain when I talk to Carl Zimmer about inheritance — but that’s the tendency.
- Hot-button topical/political issues are an interesting case. I’m not averse to them, but I want to focus on the eternal big-picture concerns at the bottom of them, rather than on momentary ephemera. Relatedly, I’m mostly interested in talking with intellectuals and analysts, not advocates or salespeople or working politicians.
- I’m happy to talk with big names everyone has heard of, but am equally interested in lesser-known folks who have something really interesting to say.
- Sometimes it should be clear that I’m already quite aware of the existence of a person, so suggesting them doesn’t add much value. Nobody needed to tell me to ask Roger Penrose or Dan Dennett on the show.
- I like to keep things diverse along many different axes, most especially area of intellectual inquiry. Obviously there is more physics than on most people’s podcasts, but there will rarely if ever be two physics episodes in a row, or even two in the same month. Likewise, if I do one episode on a less-frequent topic, I’m unlikely to do another one on the same topic right away. (“That episode on the semiotics of opera was fine, but you need to invite the real expert on the semiotics of opera…”) More generally, podcast episodes should be of standalone interest, not responses to previous podcast episodes.
- I am very happy to talk with people I disagree with, but only if I think there is something to be learned from their perspective. I want to engage with the best arguments against my positions, not just with any old arguments. Zero interest in debating or debunking on the podcast. If I invite someone on, I will challenge them where I think necessary, but my main goal is to let them put forward their case as clearly as possible.
- Corollary: someone is not worth engaging with merely because they make claims that would be extremely important if they were true. There has to be some reason to believe, in the minds of some number of reasonable people, that they could actually be true. My goal is not to clean up all the bad ideas on the internet.
- Obvious but often-overlooked consideration: the person should be good on podcasts! This is a tricky thing. Clearly they should be articulate and engaging in an audio-only format. But also there’s an art to giving answers that are long enough to be substantive, short enough to allow for give-and-take. Conversation is a skill. (Though Fyodor Urnov barely let me get a word in edgewise, and he was great and everyone loved him, so maybe I should take the hint.)
- This is a long list, but the most useful guest suggestions include not just a person’s name, but some indication that they satisfy the above criteria. A brief mention of the ideas they have and evidence that they’d be a good guest is extremely helpful.
- None of these rules is absolute! I’m always happy to deviate a little if I think there is a worthwhile special case.
Thanks again for listening, and for all the suggestions. I am continually amazed at the high quality of guests who have joined me, and at the wonderful support from the Mindscape audience.
Hi Sean,
I would like to recommend Dr. John Vervaeke, who studies the science and philosophy of wisdom and meaning.
He has formulated very fascinating ideas about how historical understanding of wisdom has changed over time and what it means to be wise today. He’s a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and has debated Jordan Peterson before Peterson became (in)famous.
Hello Sean,
I would like to put forward one of the leading German researchers in gravitational wave physics:
Prof. Dr. Karsten Danzmann
Direktor am Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut) in Hannover, Direktor des Instituts für Gravitationsphysik an der Leibniz Universität Hannover
Thanks for your excellent work!
Hubert
My suggestion is Chris Lintott, host of BBC’s Sky at Night. Known also for citizen science – Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse. He speaks eloquently and passionately about the breakthroughs made by ordinary people eagerly sorting and cataloguing big data.
From exoplanet data to wildlife on the serengeti – ordinary folk are still better at these sorting tasks than AI. He has a strong voice on getting everyone involved in big data science.
Professor Carroll, I highly recommend Shinzen Young as a person you may want to be on your Mindscape Podcast. Shinzen is a meditation teacher who has written a book, “The Science of Enlightenment”. He has trained in Asia in the three major Buddhist traditions, and is the leader of Vipassana Support International. He is also involved in scientific research regarding how mediation affects the brain. Thank you, kingsley hines
I’d love to hear you talk with Tim Palmer of Oxford UK about his Invariant Set Theory formulation of QM. You touched on superdeterminism in one of the Q&As for Greatest Ideas, but I think there’s lots of more for you to unpack with him about this interesting variant.
Very briefly, the idea is that a Hilbert space that is constrained to rational values (“p-adic”, or fractal geometry) instead of real values looks “from the inside” like one that has nonlocal hidden variables, while not satisfying the statistical independence assumption of Bell’s Theorem.
He wrote an FXQi paper this year that’s a good launching point.
Thanks!
I would appreciate if you would considered Graham Hancock on the podcast. He’s work on the impact theory and lost ancient civilizations has the potential to change our view of our whole species’ history and even if his theory doesn’t turn out to be true, there’s a lot of evidence he puts up that would allow for a lot of discussion
George Monbiot talking about rewilding!
The work that people do working towards this, the problems faced due to ignorance and protective interests, the benefits when it happens and the fascinating understanding of what it’s all about.
https://youtu.be/8rZzHkpyPkc
Book: ‘Feral’, George Monbiot
Sir, I would like to suggest Brian Eno, british musician and artist, as a candidate. Eno has devolped artistic and musical works based on the work of Stafford Beer’s ideas on cybernetics and systems management.
Eno is an engaging speaker on aspects of the human condition, society and science.
Dear prof. Carroll,
I do not know if your fifth point applies to David Deutsch. Nevertheless, I dare to say that he satisfies the other criteria for inviting him. This really doesn’t help the not-inviting-physicists case, but I can’t help it. And since you clearly love the word “idea”—you live by the word—I think that makes your second point the most important one. It just so happens that David Deutsch has many original ideas, which I think are really not obvious in standard literature or standard research. I would love to hear your dialogue. Hoping that you don’t have any prejudice against him, I shall leave the bullet points for the discussion to you, without adding any of his work here. If you happen to have not heard him very much, please check some Youtube videos, even short ones will do—quicker than reading books.
I’m humbled to be able to write in a place where you read what I have to say. I hope this comment reaches you.
Sincerely, Guri.
I second David Deutsch.
Hello Sean,
I am writing to suggest J Jaye Gold (Justin) as a guest on Mindscape. Following is a link to a video, listing each of your criteria, followed by a one or two minute excerpt evidencing Justin’s suitability. https://youtu.be/0hgaq3JQtRg
His expertise is in the subtleties of human behavior, and the subject matter I’m recommending is “Exploring the underlying obstacles to flexible thinking and the reception of new ideas.” He speaks without cliché and listens without interrupting. I have added several of his quotes that seem relevant in addition to some unique biographical information.
Biographical Information
A product of the NYC school system, Gold, a violin prodigy with an extremely high IQ, skipped two grades before attending Stuyvesant High School for the intellectually gifted. Most of the rest of the education he claims to value took place on the streets of Greenwich Village while attending NYU, where he used his math skills to achieve considerable financial success as a loan-shark and bookmaker. In his early 20s, bored with repetition and starved intellectually, he accepted an invitation from a family friend who lived on the shores of Lake Titicaca in Peru. While living with this man, who eventually sent him to study in Afghanistan, Gold became interested, then fascinated with human behavior. He made it his lifelong scientific study to the point of claiming, “Speaking as an impartial observer, I may be the world’s foremost expert on the subject of human interaction.”
Although he has more recently made public his writings in the form of several books, he has been able to maintain anonymity for 40 years by working with small numbers of people, in private laboratory and field circumstances, researching and developing unique methods that have often proved effective in facilitating positive change.
He neither asks for nor receives any financial compensation, nor does he proselytize or solicit students … and he does his own laundry. He can spontaneously and often humorously discuss his discoveries of facets of human behavior as it is manifest in sports, finance, cooking, meteorology . . . anything, while injecting points of view I have heard nowhere else. His students, past and present, have credited their application of his scientific research with understandings and life-changing experience they had not previously found available. I am one of those students, and in my 54 years of life, have never met an intellect to match this man’s.
P.S. I asked Justin if my reaching out to you was okay and he said yes.
Cheers,
Corinne Boyle, PhD
Managing Director, Center for Cultural and Naturalist Studies
ccns-inc.org
530-559-3237
Some Quotes of
J JAYE GOLD
reprinted with his permission
The arrogance of our time: If we don’t “get it,” we conclude that there is nothing to get.
We have a language for explaining human behavior, but do we have a language for exploring it?
We are perpetuating the illusion that life is not a sequence of moments, ignoring that the next hand is always in the process of being dealt and a new adventure is beckoning.
If we could find the glorious and natural experience of a graceful stroke in whatever endeavor we choose, whether it be sports, science, or even commerce, we might find that the priority of winning, that we so often assume is essential, is much further back than we might suspect.
Actual creativity begins with, ‘If I were to build it right now, if I were to set it up right now, with everything I know, everything I understand, everything I’ve seen, how would I set it up? Not, “How did they set it up?” but, “How would I set it up? There is no way it has to be done; there’s only a way it used to be done.”
You’re on the Ferris wheel, there’s a loud noise, and it stops. The ride was pleasant till then-but now you feel super alive. Feeling alive comes in the moments between being surprised and successfully eliminating that surprise. That’s it; that’s life. Almost all the rest is repetition.
Putting “I” aside for even a moment challenges all the effort we’ve put into building “I” up. It’s like our lives have been a process of cooking up a casserole of “I”s & all we know is to look for opportunities to serve it up. Is it time to explore being as awareness, not just I?
Some of us believe that comfort is an essential asset, and that we can get our fix of challenge by watching somebody else’s life in the movies. Others feel dissatisfaction with numbness, safety, comfort, and the lack of challenge in their lives. Both are understandable, but only the latter opens doors.
We should be aware of the obstacles that are unwittingly thrown in our path by others to be able to try to avoid them. But ones we throw in our own path are the ones that should get our keenest attention—those are the ones we have the best chance of which to rid ourselves.
Regarding Justin Gold’s podcast eligibility: I don’t get it. But, in all fairness, maybe someone else, other than his advocate, does…
David Eagleman would be a wonderful guest! He even has a new book that came out “Livewired” and he had a wonderful docuseries “The Brain” on PBS.
Read the criteria and I think you should have David Deutsch on your podcast. I’m sure your familiar with him as he is a fellow advocate of MWs. I’m sure you’ve read older book the Fabric Of Reality, but his second book The Beginning of Infinity is genuinely one of the best books I’ve read and I’m sure you’d enjoy. I think you guys would have some healthy disagreement as well with his Popperian Epistemology and his views on moral values, aesthetics, and the nature of mathematics.
I vote for Robert Sapolsky… That would be an amazing big picture episode from the prospective of evolutionary biology and society. The problem you’re going to have is to stick to the canonical 1.5 hours.
Hey Sean big fan of the podcast! I would like to suggest that you get Daniel Schmachtenberger (Civilization Emerging, War on Sensemaking etc) on Mindscape. Would love to hear the two of you converse!!
Bonney Bassler- chair of molecular biology at Princeton
I have been waiting for you to have Bonney Badass on your show so that you could ask her for the truth?
Coupling Bontastic Bassler’s quorum sensing with Coleen “quick smoke” Murphy’s mitokines I’m certain you will, mid-Bonalicious podcast, illuminate the question without back reference:
Did mitochondria win?
Or rather, are they winning?
If we can say that the universal goal is to be the best in the fight against genetic determinism, to creat more space to fill, to battle with entropy…
Couldn’t that irritant, the fight against genetic determinism, create the environmental press for the ability to imagine?
The press for a frontal cortex?
For consciousness?
Couldn’t our consciousness be a byproduct of the mitochondrion’s battle against genetic determinism?
And if so,
do you think that if you were to just consider how many extant mitochondrion there are & how conserved their DNA is…
Are they winning?
Are mitochondria tectonic & humanity seasonal?
Maniacal minds want to know
Thank-you Sean
John
I have read your book, From Infinity to Here, and found it good reading. Don’t know anything about the infinity book mentioned or its’ author. Infinity is a tough subject to theorize about, unless you are a mathematician, or, a physiscst. Those who believe in God (I.e., theologians and others, blindly faithful), have vague dreams of everlasting life and such metaphysical pipe dreams. I have written one short essay on the subject. My assessment included the following: the idea of infinity is useful, primarily to mathematicians and physicists. Those of us tackling electricity or small engine repair/maintenance need not apply. Infinity is neither a destination nor a goal: you can’t get there from here—there is no ‘there’ to get to., and even if there were, you would never know it, vague dreams, notwithstanding…can’t get something from nothingness.
Doug Hofstedter’s book, I Am a Strange Loop, came to mind when I wrote the essay I’m re-visiting, leading me to this final notion about infinity. It has NO loop. Not supposed to have one. Unlike Dennett’s trilogy, physical; design: and, intentional stances, infinity has none, zero, zilch, nada..
Because, we are the author of infinity. It would not exist, unless some sentience, such as ourselves, were extant to either recognize or define it. Birds don’t do it. Bees, uh, no.
Case in point, for any doubters: would there have been an atom bomb, without us, or some species very like us? It all depends—on us.
George Whitesides specifically his research on the origins of life from a chemists perspective
Anil Seth – Neuroscientist, great TED talk.
Robin Carhatt Harris – Leading researcher for the therapeutic use of psychedelics.
Paul Stamets – Mycologist, guest of most-watched Joe Rogan podcast.
Dr Eric Smith, pioneer origins-of-life researcher. He was mentioned in passing in your interview with Sara Walker. One of those SFI polymath people. Highly articulate speaker. Applies physics thinking to biology. Has extensive knowledge of the history of origins of life research.
Regardless, thank you for your terrific podcast.
C
David Benatar
Anti-natalist philosopher
I would suggest talking with Jean-François Gariépy about his novel ideas of “The Revolutionary Phenotype”. It is both extremely interesting and convincing as well as having potentially huge implications for the future of our lifeform.
He is a controversial character and I suggest you do some first hand research before you dismiss him after skimming through Wikipedia(which is not much more than a hug smear against him).
Don Hoffman ticks all the boxes on that list.
I am amazed you have not had him on already.
David A. Sinclair about aging and extending lifespan.
“discovered that Sirtuin 1 (called sir2 in yeast) slows aging in yeast by reducing the accumulation of extrachromosomal rDNA circles”
Sinclair, David (2019). Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1501191978.