Hello, everyone, and welcome to the February 26.

Ask Me Anything Edition of the Mindscape podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

It's a little bit weird for me, personally, to be recording this AMA right now.

You know, we have the usual spectrum of great questions in the AMA,

but it's a weird time in the United States.

I like to, as you know, pretend that I'm talking potentially to people listening hundreds of years from now. I know that's not true.

Most of the people who listen to the podcast are going to do so within a couple weeks or months

of when it's released. But that pretend scenario lets me say things very clearly that are probably

pretty obvious to everyone. So the thing I'm going to say is, here we are in the second Donald

Trump administration, an administration which is becoming increasingly lawless and authoritarian.

And nobody should be surprised by this. You remember that at the

end of his first administration, Donald Trump incited a riot at the U.S. Capitol in order to cling

to power after losing a fair election. Once that happens, it's completely inexplicable and inexcusable that he is

allowed to run for president again. But as we've seen over the past few years, our elite

institutions, whether it's the government or the media or whatever, are completely unprepared

for the kind of situation that we are finding ourselves in, and they

react very badly.

And here he is president again, with far fewer guardrails, because he didn't probably even

expect to win the first election in 2016.

And he had a certain number of fairly establishment figures in the administration, because, you know,

you got to fill out those job posts somehow. Now there's nobody in the administration,

...