Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special bonus edition of the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

So what's going on here? I do this with a little bit of trepidation. I have to admit.

But what you'll hear if you have the courage or bizarre desire to actually listen to the following four hours worth of audio podcast is an interview of me rather than me interviewing anyone else.

David Zierler of the Americans to the physics is the interviewer and it's an oral history. So this is basically my personal biography going from when I was a kid in school through college through graduate school through being a professor the whole bit. Okay.

This is because the American Institute of Physics, which is a wonderful organization has a wonderful program on oral histories where they interview famous accomplished physicists and then this is raw data for future historians who want to understand what was going on in physics at different points in time.

So we're talking like Richard Viamen, Steven Weinberg, Vera Ruben, Murray Gellmann, this kind of person. And they've also interviewed me. Now I'm not the only person who is not one in Nobel Prize or whatever to be interviewed.

They're trying to cast a wider net and get as much raw data as you can, right? Why not?

But I'm well aware that my own accomplishments in physics do not measure up to those of the big names who have been participating in this project.

And honestly, I'm not quite sure why anyone would want to listen to the following four hours.

With all respect to David who did a fantastic job and is very enthusiastic and very well informed. He's a very good oral historian.

But my life is only so interesting. And there's way more details about my life than I usually talk about in the next four hours.

A lot about not getting tenure at the University of Chicago, a lot about what it was like in high school and college and becoming an atheist and things like that.

So stuff that again, in all honesty, I'm a little bit uncomfortable talking about in public. But there's a, you know, if you're interested in it, there it is.

Okay, my fondest hope would be if we could inspire somebody who was potentially going to become a physicist to realize that you could make a tremendous number of mistakes like I did and still kind of be a semi successful physicist in the end of it.

I should also note that the audio quality isn't quite up to the standard we usually have here on landscape because we weren't planning on releasing this as a podcast.

That's an idea that happened after the fact usually you're just looking for enough audio quality to do a transcript.

And so by the way, so the audio quality here isn't that great, but there are tremendous transcripts. If you go to the AIP site, you can spend many, many fascinating hours reading the audio interviews, the oral history interviews with all sorts of people, big names and less big names and just fascinating stories to be told.

So no need to listen to this if you're a regular mind scape listener, but it's not quite your cup of tea. That's perfectly understandable. If you want to hear it is, there's aerial complaining in the background. She doesn't know why we're doing this, but for the rest of us, let's go.

Okay, David Ziller oral historian for the American Institute of Physics, it is January 4th 2021. I am so happy to be here with Dr Sean and Carol Sean. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Well, thanks very much for having me. Well, this is so exciting for me because you are one of the best interviewers out there. And so it's a unique opportunity for me to interview one of those best interviewers. So I'm really quite excited about this.

It's way easier to be on this side, but answering questions rather than asking them to be honest. So no preparation.

All right, so and so to get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations and I put an S on both of them. And I might add also that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well.

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