Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. What you're hearing right now is a last-minute blurb

I am appending to the beginning of the podcast to make an announcement that some of you have may have seen on either

Twitter or my blog the other day namely that I am moving from Caltech to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. My new title will be

Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy. How cool is that? I got to say

The Homewood professorships are special kind of positions that in principle float freely above specific departmental lines

But for practical purposes, this is a joint appointment between the physics department and the philosophy department

I will have offices in both departments. I'll take students in both departments teach courses the whole bit

So it's extremely exciting for me because rather than doing philosophy type things or even doing

public facing outreach-y type things or doing a podcast and kind of having that be in addition to my job

All that stuff is now part of my job. I am a philosopher as well as a physicist, card carrying right now

And all of the podcast writing books giving talks kind of stuff they want me to do that

This is the first time in my academic life when this is actually encouraged rather than tolerated

So very very exciting for me. We're moving over this summer nothing bad to say about Caltech

It's been a great place, but this particular position with a lot of people who I already know is just exactly right for me

There's several people who we've had here on the podcast on Mindscape already at Johns Hopkins Henry Farrell

The political scientist Adam Reese of course the astronomer Emily Reale the mathematician

So it's a very very exciting time

You can read more if you go to the blog and I explain what it's all about. The other thing I wanted to very quickly note is that this podcast was recorded

About existential threats to humanity and the political response to them over a month ago

Before we were in the current crisis that actually makes us think about existential risks and the political response to them

So it was not recognition. It's just that some topics never go away. Okay now return to our regularly scheduled podcast

You know when I think about guests for the podcast I have rules

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