Well, Bill, we've certainly got a lot of mileage out of your exchange with Sean Carroll at the 2014 Greer Heard Forum.

And we've done numerous podcasts on the topics that came out of that debate.

And, you know, it's still frequently discussed today.

In fact, I've noticed that Sean Carroll's popularity seems to have grown, at least on social media.

And we'll look at several of the video shorts that he has on YouTube.

You know, first, since I brought up popularity, I'm curious. I wanted to ask you,

do scholars in the academy, such as yourself, and Sean Carroll, often have to walk the fine line

between scholarship and becoming a popularizer? Can you do both? Both Sean Carroll and I have tried to supplement our scholarly

academic publications with popular-level works. So Carol publishes popular-level books on science

for the layperson. I publish popular-level treatments of philosophy

and theology. And so both of us are engaged in trying to produce both scholarly and popular

literature. The risk in this, Kevin, is that scholars sometimes look down, rather condescendingly, on colleagues who do

popularization. And this risk is really augmented when the only thing that the scholars know of your work is the popular level material.

Then they're apt to think that this person isn't really producing substantive scholarly material.

So there is a real delicate balance and risk here in trying to do both good scholarship and write for a general

lay audience. But I think it's important to try to do so, and so both Sean Carroll and I are

engaged in this project. Seems to me that you can do both, but, you know, other scholars, it's very disparaging.

They say, he's a popularizer. And that's not a compliment.

No. Yes, you can do both, for example. One of the great scientific popularizers was Sir Arthur

Eddington, who wrote masterful books for laypeople

on relativity theory and cosmology and so forth. Still worth reading today. By contrast,

Stephen Hawking's attempts at popularization, such as a brief history of time, were really huge failures. They sold very

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