AMA | August 2021
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2021
⏱️ 191 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the August 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast, the August 2021 Ask Me Anything |
| 0:05.2 | Episode. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You know how this works probably by now? It's an |
| 0:10.4 | Ask Me Anything, so people write questions, and I do my best to answer them. The people who get |
| 0:16.3 | to answer the questions are Patreon supporters. So if you want to be part of the question asking |
| 0:21.9 | brigade, just join up at patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll. Not that expensive, and you get not |
| 0:28.7 | only the right to ask questions every month for the AMAs, but also you get ad free versions of |
| 0:33.2 | the podcast and a feeling of well-being for supporting something good and being a member of a community. |
| 0:38.9 | Now, as we've said before, the number of questions has grown fairly large, so we cannot answer all of |
| 0:45.9 | them, but I go through and I try to figure out which ones I have interesting things to say about. |
| 0:50.9 | So again, if you don't get your question answered not necessarily because your question wasn't good, |
| 0:55.2 | it just didn't vibe or resonate with what I had to say in this particular day. So I hope everyone's |
| 1:00.9 | doing well. We're in the middle of the summer post 2020, so the first summer that should be post |
| 1:06.9 | pandemic, but we're not post pandemic because many people have not gotten vaccinated yet, and therefore |
| 1:12.3 | we're still in the middle of a pandemic. And I hope that it doesn't get worse, but as long as we |
| 1:18.0 | haven't vaccinated the whole world, there's still plenty of opportunities for the virus to mutate. |
| 1:23.0 | We already have the Delta variant and other things, and rather than just getting rid of this virus, |
| 1:27.4 | we're sort of letting it flip from person to person because we don't want to, as a society, |
| 1:32.5 | take the necessary steps to fix it. This makes me very sad. But nevertheless, |
| 1:37.6 | several months ago I decided I was just going to be optimistic about this, and therefore I've made |
| 1:41.5 | travel plans. So tomorrow, as I record this AMA episode, it will be the first time I go to the |
| 1:48.7 | airport to step on an airplane in roughly a year and a half. So we'll see how that goes. I'm going |
| 1:53.8 | to Santa Fe to go to the Santa Fe Institute where I am now officially a fractal faculty member. |
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