Holiday Message 2022: Thinking Really Slowly

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to that beloved Mindscape annual tradition, the Holiday Message. An opportunity for a quicker and less-well-thought-out solo episode to round off another year. Ironically, this year the theme is the importance of slowing down and thinking things out really well! Illustrated by two things that have been on my mind: a couple of internet/tech kerfuffles (Elon Musk buying Twitter, Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX), and the distinction between foundations of physics and “regular” physics. See if you can dimly perceive the thread that ties them together.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Blindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.3	And this is our annual holiday message for 2022. It's a rainy day here in Baltimore.
0:11.2	My first December here in Baltimore. So if you hear little pitter-patterer brain drops on
0:16.7	the window right next to me, that's why something we didn't get too much of in LA.
0:21.7	You know, the idea behind the holiday message that I started doing in the first year of the
0:25.7	podcast would be a solo episode, but something shorter, you know, not structured, not deep,
0:31.5	not careful. More like a little reflective, self-indulgent perhaps, more personal set of opinions about,
0:38.7	I don't know, something that was inspired by the year that had just passed, whether it was with
0:43.6	the podcast or the outside world or whatever is going on in my life. And I've not been great
0:49.6	about picking topics. I mean, I think the actual holiday message has been pretty good, but I really
0:53.6	need to sit down and think every single year about what to talk about. So this year, I did think
0:59.6	of a couple things, you know, obviously my life has been completely uprooted, moving from LA and
1:04.4	Caltech to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins. Still haven't yet moved into the house that we will
1:09.5	eventually move into, but that's coming later this week. So apologies if this is a quick and
1:14.8	dirty kind of episode. But there were two things I kept thinking about that certainly did not rise
1:20.2	to the level of a whole episode. And I realized there was a through line through them that I could
1:26.3	combine together. And the two things were on the one hand, things going on online and in the tech
1:33.4	world and subset of that. Number one, Twitter, obviously being bought by Elon Musk, changing in
1:41.2	various ways. I'm very active on Twitter. So that is affecting me. And the other one was the
1:46.5	FTX crypto collapse featuring Sam Bankman-Freeze about which I'm certainly no expert, but nevertheless
1:53.7	have some opinions about. So that's something that I wanted to say something about in a very
1:58.4	narrow specific way. I have no way of commenting on the bigger picture there. The other idea was
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