Hello, everyone. Welcome to the August 2023, asking anything addition to the Winescape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

This is the week after I released my solo episode on the crisis in physics.

I just wanted to say that I'm quite gratified at the reception that it has gotten.

There are, if you ask what I mean by the reception, there are various places where people can talk about the podcast episodes.

Of course, Patreon supporters, who are the one asking the questions for these Ask Me Anything episodes, can do so on Patreon.

We have a somewhat active group there. There is a Sean Carroll subreddit, SCANCAROLL, where people can talk about podcast episodes,

but also other things that I do and so forth. There's also comments that come up on Twitter and YouTube and what have you.

And people seem to like the solo episode, and they took it in the spirit, I think, that it is offered,

which is it's not primarily polemical, right? It's not primarily there. It wasn't primarily there to persuade you to have a certain point of view.

I have a point of view, and I'm trying to explain to you what my point of view is, but also it's mostly to help you understand why physicists do the things they do.

You're allowed to disagree with how physicists go about their business and what problems they choose to tackle and how they choose to do so.

But you should do so, everyone should do so, from a situation, from a standpoint of understanding why they're doing the things they do.

And that was really the primary point of the episode and why it was so long, because I got to sort of expound on the whole history of 20th century and now 21st century physics.

There are a couple of people, of course, who just snarked about it, but if you look carefully at their snark, it was also completely clear that they didn't listen to the episode.

So the lesson I'm taking from this is that all of my episodes should be four hours long, and then the people who want to snark about them will clearly be not very relevant to the actual discussion.

Probably not going to happen, four hours a lot of time. I don't know if it's clear that it was not a single sitting that I did that episode in, but sometimes you have a lot to say and you got to keep talking about it.

I also wanted to express appreciation because the recent episode with Katie Elliott was also very well received, and you never know, you know, it's a many episodes are slightly different from each other.

Katie was kind enough to come on and rather than just talk about her specific work, help us give a general chat about metaphysics and what it is and what it's for, and people really liked it, which I thought was great.

And so kudos to Katie for that. And also she was very good at asking me questions and having it really be a conversation. That's hard to do for many guests, you know, depending on what their thing is they're doing for a living. Why would they have any questions for me, but hopefully it came through why I think that the physics science, I should say slash philosophy boundary is such an incredibly fertile area to think about things.

Philosophy does have something to offer and physics absolutely has some questions that they have some answers to that will help the philosophers play some questions that they can use philosophical help with.

I should also say that I've been on a couple of other podcasts lately, most notably a couple of episodes of Robinson's podcast Robinson Earhart does a very nice podcast where he gets a lot of philosophers and other thinkers on.

So recently I was on with David Albert talking about quantum mechanics and Boltzman brains and things like that. I was also on an episode of his podcast with Slavoy Zhijek, the famous in certain circles, extremely well-known psychoanalytic philosopher Slovenian and quite a character also. And Slavoy apparently is thinking very hard about quantum mechanics these days.

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