Hello, everyone. Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll. A little bit later in the month than usual with the AMA,

but there's a whole bunch of things that happened in the scheduling of a podcast.

As many of you know, it's just me here. There's no team. There's no social media apparatus. There's no editor. It's just me doing all the podcasts, which I like it that way. I can control everything. But sometimes you set to juggle things and the AMAs came out a little bit late. As long-time listeners know, at the end of the year, next week you'll get a little holiday message from me, kind of a mini solo episode, and then we go dark for the one week that is sort of right after Christmas, I guess, this year I forget exactly what it is. But other than the holiday message next week, the next you'll hear from me is regular episodes coming in January. And there's no AMA in January for that reason, because we're taking off the holidays. So the next AMA will be in January. And there's no AMA in January for that reason because we're taking off

the holidays. So the next AMA will be in February. So there's this one. And I don't have a lot to

say to get into it. I just have two quick things to say. Both involve asking for money. Sorry about

that. It is the season, though, isn't it? The holiday season is closely associated with asking for money.

The first is a more highbrow thing asking for money, which is I got an email from Joshua Green.

You remember Joshua Green was a guest on the podcast.

He's a Harvard professor in both philosophy and psychology, who does these wonderful

neuroscience experiments to see what is happening in your brain when you are reasoning

morally, right?

Are you, is the brain doing something different when it's doing deontology versus

utilitarianism?

If you have different answers to the trolley problem, do different parts of your brain

light up.

Yes is the answer, which is fascinating.

If you haven't heard that episode, I would recommend checking that out.

But also, as he mentioned on the episode, he is one of the driving forces behind a charity

called Give Directly.

And it's one of those things that I'm unabashedly a fan of. Give Directly is kind of a version of effective altruism where you give them money and they just

give it to people. Like not a lot of thought involved. They give the money to poor people.

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