Listened to Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books by Sean Carroll from preposterousuniverse.com

Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and what’s on my mind. Since the big event for me in 2019 was the publication of Something Deeply Hidden, I thought it would be fun to talk about the process of writing and selling a popular book. Might be of interest to some of you out there!

Cover art for Sean Carroll's Mindscape

Sean, an intriguing episode. It’s great to hear the interesting directions you’d like to move and the sorts of non-physics topics you’re planning on covering. Given some of the areas relating to communication and democracy that you’d like to cover, I might recommend taking a look at a few of the following potential guests:

George Lakoff, a retired Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, has some solid ideas about how we communicate as well as how Donald J. Trump’s speech is  influencing our current politics and changing the way that journalism operates in our democracy.

Alan Alda, a science communicator and podcast host of Clear+Vivid and, yes, the well known actor from stage and screen (including M.A.S.H.), who has a long running podcast on the topic of communication and how we communicate. If you’re not listening to it already, it has many of the communication related ideas around who we are, how democracy works through communication, how our tribal tendencies effect the world, etc. (You’ll likely appreciate his podcast in general and may want to mine some of it for guests for your own show.) If you’re able, perhaps do it as a pair of crossover episodes in which you interview him and another in which he interviews you? I think both of your audiences will appreciate such a set of interviews, and you’ll have a chance to do a more extended exploration of both your separate as well as common areas of interests. (There’s also an odd similarity to the theme music for both of your shows…) 

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

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