Andrew ❤️ Mindscape

In this episode of Pod, Actually, Andrew talks about his favorite podcast: Mindscape with Sean Carroll.

Andrew discovered Mindscape while trying to improve his own teaching. A deep dive into Richard Feynman’s lectures led him into quantum mechanics, Bayesian logic, and eventually to Carroll’s long-form, curiosity-driven interviews.

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Transcript

2026 02.19 Andrew Mill

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hello, I'm Catherine and welcome to Pod Actually, a podcast about people's favorite podcasts. On today's program, I'm speaking with Andrew from Melbourne, Australia. Andrew is a bridge teacher, the card game, and he also plays bridge competitively. Let's jump in. Andrew, what is your favorite podcast?

SPEAKER_00 0:28

My favorite podcast is Mindscape.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Mindscape. Can you tell me about Mindscape?

SPEAKER_00 0:45

It's a podcast by a guy called Sean Carroll, who's a physicist and a philosopher, but he's also a science communicator. And he is he has a podcast where he interviews a diverse number of people from lots of different walks of life. So some of the guests are physicists, some uh biologists, so it's whatever area he's interested in that he doesn't know very much about and he wants to learn more. He gets what he considers to be the world one of the world's leading experts in that area, puts them on, he reads a bit of the stuff they've done beforehand so that he can ask appropriate questions and they go from there. And they it goes for a couple of hours per podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

So it's quite an in-depth look at whatever they do. But it could be a a wine somelia or uh an art expert. It's whatever he's interested in that pops up. He never has the same guest on twice so far. That's his rules, not anyone else's. Now he does two podcasts each month. One of them is where he talks to a new guest, and then he has a another one called Ask Me Anything, where his patrons give him questions and he answers them live. Well, when I say live, he answers them within the podcast. I don't know. It's not live because he could do as many takes as he likes, but he professes not to do that. If he mucks up an answer, he just mucks up the answer and he's happy to live with that.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Is it just an audio podcast or is it video as well?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Yes, just audio. I listen to it on YouTube, but there's just a background screen on all the time. He does lots of other things on YouTube. So I have seen him and I've seen him debate people on YouTube live, but but the podcast he does is not um Yeah, audio only. Yeah, audio only.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

So is it on YouTube because he's got a YouTube channel and that's just where he does it, or is it available in other places as well?

SPEAKER_00 3:13

You're asking me things that I have no knowledge of. As a confirmed Luddite, I can't answer that question.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Okay. How did you discover this podcast?

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Well, the short uh story. I was interested in improving my teaching. Someone told me that Richard Feynman's lectures were the best lectures ever been delivered by anyone at any stage. I found them on YouTube and watched them to see what I could learn. But they were postgraduate physics lectures about quantum mechanics. I hadn't done any physics at school whatsoever past year 10, so it was all gobbledygook. So I taught myself a bit about quantum mechanics so I could listen to the lectures. Sean Carroll was part of that learning, and I found him a very good communicator. And then I found he wasn't interviewing physicists half the time anyway, but interesting people. The discussion is pretty much always pseudo-intellectual, if not intellectual. Sean Carroll is a big believer in Bayesian logic, another area that I delved into. So he resonates with me as being a for an sort of genuine sort of character. And he was interviewing who I found to be interesting people. The ask me anything stuff is miles over my head because they are mainly physicists or people interested in physics asking questions. But again, as long as you ignore the maths and just accept that what they say is correct, that it's over your head, all the conceptual stuff is appropriately challenging to make you think, and you're you're allowed to have an opinion without being able to actually do the equations.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Have you ever thought about asking him a question?

SPEAKER_00 5:14

I well, I'm not, I'm a I subscribe, I'm not a patron.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Sure, but have you ever thought about asking a question?

SPEAKER_00 5:21

No, not really, because I don't have any questions I that I think he's going to help me with that I can't work out myself. But I couldn't think of a question as good as the questions that get asked anyway. So I'm interested to hear the replies, but there's nothing that I need to ask him that I'm that he's going to know the answer to that I can't find out. That I'm interested in enough to ask the question.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

Just going back to how you discovered the podcast, so you were exploring certain topics online, doing a bit of a deep dive into them. That led you to find him.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

So that led to physics communicators. That like teach yourself physics in three easy lessons or quantum mechanics explained.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

But you found that his way of communicating this stuff resonated with you and was interesting to you. And because you then were on his YouTube channel finding that stuff, you were then interested, you sort of stumbled onto the podcast, thought it was something else, but you were into it, you liked him and you felt he had a credibility that you were prepared to go along for the ride.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Yeah. I may or may not have been on his YouTube channel. I don't quite understand what that means. But what happens when you look for something on the internet on YouTube? Unbeknownst to you, it suggests a whole lot of related people.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Yes, it's called the algorithm. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

So the fact that I was dipping into quantum mechanics, specifically that area of physics rather than you know a little bit of cosmology because that's unavoidable. So I looked at podcasts from lots of different people, some of whom were pushing a barrow that didn't interest me in the slightest, some of whom probably knew about as much physics as I did, despite their claims. And he was a person who came across as genuine, who quite clearly knew what he was talking about. But it's interesting in in quantum mechanics that there are different schools of thought. So, like philosophy, you can come from different branches where you can vehemently oppose what someone else says, whilst agreeing about 90% of it. So he certainly comes from a position that I don't know if I agree with it or not, but he puts up plausible arguments for his position. But he also interviews and talks to people from completely opposite perspectives. In fact, he's probably more interested in talking to people who don't agree with him than from the clique of people who do agree with him, which I I think is I find that more entertaining anyway.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

But it sounds like you respect his mind, and so you're happy to go with that, follow his through line.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

I respect the fact that he's he does his stuff full-time. He's written about 25 books on the subject while doing this podcast twice a month and all the rest of it. So the guy clearly doesn't sleep. So he's driven, but he's also in I find him interesting to listen to. For the most part. Not not always, but for the most part, I do.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

I'd have to review the shows to understand what various episodes. But I find it interesting that if I said to you, Oh, would you like to listen to a podcast about X, you might say, Oh, not really. But if this person comes up as a guest on his show, because you have a relationship, parasocial relationship with him, you're happy to go there.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

That's absolutely true. That's absolutely true. Yeah. Although there are a couple of times where the guest was in an area that I was not remotely interested in, and I either didn't listen to those or listened for the first 15 minutes just to verify that I wasn't going to be interested in it, and then stopped listening.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

And did you feel irritated or was it just like, oh, this is no, no.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

I I I try not to do irritation over things. Yeah, that's a different area altogether. But we we can leave leave that area for another time.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

So you said the podcast is often two hours.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Yeah, it might even be three hours.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Wow. Do you listen to it from start to finish?

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Pretty much, but again, the question and answer stuff where I'm not going to understand two-thirds of the questions, let alone the answers to them. I would tend to listen to that basically while I'm in bed and on the way to going to sleep. So I would miss some.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

What about the main show, the one that the interview show? When do you listen to that?

SPEAKER_00 10:12

Just downtime, I guess. So it could easily also be in the evening before sleeping.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

What day of the week does this podcast drop?

SPEAKER_00 10:22

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if it's at the same time each month. It's it's monthly. I don't know if it's the same day or the I think it's I think it's always the same week each month.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

But do you look you look out for it a little bit?

Here

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yeah. It just pops up. I don't think I've ever had to go searching for it. It just appeared at some stage and it says, you know, it dropped 11 hours ago or six hours ago or something, so I know it's the current one.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

Do you listen to it at home in front of the computer, or do you go for a walk and have it on your phone? Where do where and how do you?

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Okay, I listen to it on the computer. My my phone may as well be a baker-like phone with a round dial on it. I use it for phone calls. My phone is not a camera. It has the capability of being a camera in someone else's hands, uh, but not in mine.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Okay. So here you are at home, you see the podcast, you want to listen to it. Are you treating your computer a bit like a radio where you just put the volume up and you walk around the house and you're doing whatever you're doing? Or are you sitting down with headphones on?

SPEAKER_00 11:31

No, I well, I don't do it with headphones on normally. I just do it through the computer. If I go out of the room, I don't do it in the same room that my wife is in because she has no interest in the podcast whatsoever. So I I have my own the study that I would listen to it in, which is also the spare bedroom. So I can lie on the bed and listen to it, or sit in the chair and listen to it. I could do other things, but I tend not to. I tend to just listen to it. And it occurs at a time I might have half an hour before a lesson or before I have to do something. So I might listen to the first half hour of it and then just come back to it later the next the same day or the next day to finish it off. It might be that I never get back to it at all if it wasn't a particularly interesting episode to me, but that's not the the tendency is I do listen to them if I've lasted through the first 15 minutes, then there's probably something interesting someone's going to say that I'm I I'm certainly not taking notes, although I have done that before too. But I my tendency would not be to use it as a study session. It's it's just a a general interest thing. The the voices are in the background, they're they're conversational. I'm listening in on the conversation with some degree of interest that varies from guest to guest. And if I fall asleep during it and I was interested in it, I'll tend to go back and replay it. And if I fall asleep and think, well, that seems appropriate, then I won't go back and listen to the rest of it.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

It sounds very relaxing, though, to imagine you in your study just chilling out, lying down for a while, listening to this show.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Yeah, well, I'm uh I guess I would describe myself as semi-retired, so I have plenty of spare time. I'm also inherently lazy, so I don't actively go out and try and fill my time with things to do. So I do have a lot of time that I can find to do things like that. It used to be that I spent that time reading. I found that my reading intake has dropped off the face of the earth. There was a time when I read seven books a week. I now read five books a year.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

Does that worry you?

SPEAKER_00 13:52

There would have been a time when it would have worried me. The reason I read five books a year, partially, is because that doesn't worry me anymore.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Also, it sounds like you've read all the others. Thinking again about the variety of guests on Mindscape, which episode have you been most surprised to enjoy?

SPEAKER_00 14:13

There's no one episode that stands out, but there are I I have zero interest in politics. So anyone who's talking about the political landscape, um it'd be a person who was a political scientist, if you like, would be the person he would and so there's a couple of those that had some interesting things to say about society. So I guess they were slightly more philosophical than political, but there'd be stuff that I would never have actively thought that I would be interested in. So, yes, social sciences, political sciences, a little bit of the biology. I didn't think I was interested in biology, and I'm really not, but when he does it, he draws the parallels between physics and biology and stuff like that. So he's coming from his own perspective. So a lot of his questions are quite pointedly to do with his interest areas in the in the subject. But also he then manages to ask questions that he has no know he has no knowledge of the subject, but he can, when when he's given an answer, he'll restate the question in terms that a physicist would state the question in to see if he's on the right wavelength of the person he's interviewing. And that restatement of the question often was helpful to me, who also wasn't the wasn't a biologist or anything else like that. So it's his interaction with these um interviewees, he is clearly listening to what they're saying and responding. And if he needs to follow up a question for his own interpretation benefit, he will craft that question in such a way that he lets the rest or he lets me into the conversation as well. Which I think is a skill that not everyone who communicates on in well, my interest is in teaching, but the people who are doing science communication, and I've listened to quite a few of them. He's not the only person I listen to, but I I think he's the best of them. Not always the most entertaining, but the best.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Final question. Do you think liking this podcast says something about you? And if so, what is that?

SPEAKER_00 16:47

That would have been the subject of one of his mindscape podcasts, I suspect. Well, what does it say about it? It shows where my area of interest are, but not because it's specifically physics, because it could have been specifically any other area. But I think that I like thinking. So anything that is discussing thinking, logic, Bayesian or otherwise, but the process of how we acquire knowledge is the interest to me, not the subject that that's being dispensed through. So I think that's what it says about me that I'm that I'm interested in not in the knowledge itself, but in the acquisition of knowledge, or even the methods of acquisition of knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Andrew, thank you so much for talking with me today.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

Pleasure. Anytime.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

And that's the show. Podactually is produced and hosted by me, Katherine Harris. If you like the program, please tell a friend. And you can also support us over at Patreon at Pod Actually or on Substat. Thanks for listening. See you soon.