Hello everyone, welcome to the May 2023 ask me anything addition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll

Those of you who are regular listeners will remember that last month, you know, we do the AMA episodes every month

We do episodes every week, but once a month once yeah once a month

It's an AMA episode and so the April 2023 episode

We began with a story about the March 2023 episode the March 2023 episode

I started off by talking about the fact that it had been really hot in Baltimore

Over the summer and I sort of jokingly or at least not very seriously connected that to climate change and how it affects people's

visceral reaction to these scientific findings and

People didn't like that so that that particular podcast episode was

Much higher audience numbers on YouTube of all places regular podcasters listeners didn't care

But on YouTube somehow people were funneled to listen to that

I guess it was because of me mentioning climate change because it got terrible reviews that episode

You know got more

Dislikes than the typical episode and also there's a bunch of weird people in the comments complaining about climate change and scientists

So to do the experiment last month

I also talked about climate change in the intro

Wondering whether YouTube's algorithms would somehow find it once again

Mostly for fun like I'm not actually gonna be doing this as a regular thing to try to get more engagement

Anyway, the experiment was a complete failure. Actually, that's not true. The experiment wasn't a failure

Experiments are only a failure when you don't get an answer when you don't learn what is going on

But the high hypothesis that by talking about climate change in the intro I would drive engagement

That was falsified by the experiment no more than the average number of viewers slash listeners, etc

...