Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, John Carroll.

And as you know, if you've been listening to this podcast, I'd like to mention books that I have written or am in the process of writing.

My most recent book that has actually appeared is of course called The Big Picture,

and it was an attempt to put together the laws of the physical world with the human side of things.

And this is an element of a genre, right?

There's a kind of book where you try to synthesize some gigantic picture of things.

And it's, you know, that there's successes and less successful books in this genre.

Our guest today is Nicholas Christakis, who is the author of one of the most recent attempts in this genre.

It is called Blueprint. Now Nicholas, unlike me, is not a physicist.

He's a, well, it's hard to say what he is. I almost said he's a social scientist,

but one of the things he brings to the table as an author of an incredibly sprawling book like this

is that he seems to be a professor of everything. He was originally a medical doctor,

and now I have to read this from the back of his book. He is at Yale University,

the sterling professor of social and natural science,

and particularly he's appointed in the departments of sociology, medicine, ecology,

evolutionary biology, statistics and data science, and biomedical engineering,

as well as being the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.

So he's a sociologist, a medical doctor, he studies ecology, and networks,

applied math, a whole bunch of things. So in Blueprint, he's trying to put this all together, right?

He's trying to write a book about humanity and what makes us special,

not just culturally, but how that relates to our biology, our genetics,

how we came to be different than other animals in different ways.

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