Sean Carroll's Mindscape

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins, and Mindscape is his weekly attempt to treat everything as fair game. One week it's quantum mechanics, the next it's the economics of pandemics, then democracy, then the evolution of language, then consciousness. The subtitle promises science, society, philosophy, culture, arts, and ideas, and he actually delivers on all of it. Carroll is a good host partly because he's an unusually good explainer of his own field, but also because he's genuinely interested in things outside it. When he talks to a historian or a novelist, he sounds like a curious grad student, not a physicist slumming it. He pushes back when he disagrees, which happens more than you'd expect, and the disagreements are usually the most interesting parts of the episode. There's also a recurring solo format called Ask Me Anything where he answers listener questions in bulk, and a separate series on the big ideas of physics that functions almost like a free mini-course. Episodes run long, often close to two hours, and the guest list reads like a who's who of people you've been meaning to read: Frans de Waal, Judea Pearl, Kate Crawford, Cal Newport. It's one of the more serious shows in the genre, and it rewards attention.