Hello, everybody. Welcome to the July 2021 Ask Me Anything Edition of the Mindscape Podcast,

where we take questions from Patreon supporters of Mindscape. So if you're not a Patreon supporter,

that's okay. You're permitted to not be Patreon supporter, but it's way more fun

and fulfilling in your life. If you are, you can go to patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll

to sign up $1 per week or whatever it is to support the podcast and you get to ask AMA

questions. And then I answer them and eventually everyone gets to listen. Sadly, not so sadly

for me, but sadly for the AMA, there are so many people and so many good questions that I can't

answer all of them. So it's asked me anything, but I don't necessarily answer everything. Sorry

about that. I do try to get a representative sample, right? So if there are themes that keep

appearing, I'm going to try to at least answer someone's question in that theme. And I think we've

hit the point now where there's so many questions that I'm probably answering less than half.

So really don't feel bad if your question is not being answered. It's not you, it's me, as I said

before. I try to pick out the questions where it's not only a good question, but something where I,

in particular, have something interesting to say about it. I will say, you know, I like to give

advice to people who want to know how to get their questions answered. You know, we say in the

instructions, shorter questions are preferred. I know that some people seem to find that a

difficult piece of advice to take seriously, but really, if you want to get your question answered,

shorter questions definitely do help you have that happen. It's not enough. You can ask a

short question that doesn't get answered, but it definitely helps me say, oh yes, I could answer

this in a very brief period. Also, shout out to the Patreon supporters who suggested that we finally

get a merch store here at Minescape selling t-shirts and mugs and things like that. So you set up one

on t-public. You can find a link to it on the Minescape webpage, which is preposterousuniverse.com

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