Hello, everyone. Welcome to the November 2020 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Let me explain what's going on here. As some of you know, we have a Patreon

for people who want to support Mindscape financially. You can go to patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll.

And there's two benefits for actually contributing to the Patreon. One is you get ad-free versions of the podcast.

And the other is every month we do one of these AMA episodes. Ask me anything episodes.

So near the end of the month, I put up a post on Patreon and anyone who is a Patreon supporter can ask a question.

And I try, don't always succeed, but I try my best to answer every question that is asked.

And this episode represents that. So these episodes, these AMA recordings are published on Patreon near the end of the month.

In fact, this one that you're about to listen to, if you're going to listen to it, came out at the beginning of the November 2020.

At the beginning of the November just before the presidential election, which seems like years ago.

Now, but what happened is a lot of the Patreon supporters by their own initiatives said it would be better if we could share the results of the AMA widely, not just to Patreon supporters.

So Patreon supporters will continue to get the benefit of being able to ask questions on the AMA.

And then forward anyone will be able to listen to the answers. So we're going to make it just a regular part of the Mindscape feed.

It won't replace the regular episodes. So it won't get a number.

We're going to release these episodes in the middle of the month. So the Patreon supporters get a week or two after the AMA came out to listen to it and know in their hearts that only they have been able to hear it.

And then we're going to send it out to everybody.

So as I always say here, no pressure to join on Patreon or anything like that, where the happy community, whether or not money is exchanging hands.

But I would like to convey my thanks to the Patreon community for suggesting that we share these AMA episodes more widely.

So these words I'm saying right now are replacing the intro I did for the actual AMA that the Patreon supporters heard.

Because I was only talking about the election that was going to come up in a day or two, not really relevant anymore.

Going forward, this is going to be the same intro that you get for the wide thing and for the Patreon supporters.

Usually I babble on for a couple of minutes about something that has been going on in the last week and then we dive into the questions.

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