Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

We have yet another experimental kind of podcast today. Our guest is Kate Jeffery,

who is literally an experimentalist and experimental neuroscientist at University College London,

where she studies the cognitive map within the brain, how we find where we are in the universe

and how that triggers certain neurons in our brains. But we're not going to be talking about neuroscience

for the most part. Kate and I were both participants in a workshop in Costa Rica, a covely workshop

on space, time, and the brain, on this general idea of relating space and time to have

their represented in brains. I gave a talk while I was there on complexity and its relationship

to entropy, and Kate hearing the talk responded to it in her own talk, talking about the evolution

of complexity in a biological and environmental context, where things are much more subtle and

nuanced and there's a lot of details that is a physicist I could gloss over. So together we

thought that it would be fun rather than just me interviewing her about her stuff to talk about

this area of the relationship between entropy and complexity, how complex structures come to be

over time, whether it's cosmologically here on earth or even within a social domain, and then how

complexity goes away, there can be catastrophes, right? There are extinction events, there's the ultimate

equilibration of the universe. So this is more than any other podcast I've ever had, I think I am doing

just as much of the talking as my official guest, it's possible that I'm doing more of the talking

than Kate did. But anyway, we're both sort of trying to learn things, this is neither one of us

laying down the law from on high, it's a true interdisciplinary exploration, and I think you're

going to find it's a lot of fun. So let's go.

Kate Jeffrey, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thank you. So this is an unusual but fun

episode, I think, in the sense that we're going to try to make it a two-way conversation, right? You

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