Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

And this is the 2021 edition of the Holiday Message here at Mindscape.

The original idea of the Holiday Message was I wanted to take a couple of weeks off

near the holiday times to just, you know, clear the mind of podcast-oriented questions.

And so I took one week off where in between Christmas and New Year's, that makes sense.

And just before Christmas, I didn't quite have the energy to do it, but I thought I should

reward all the wonderful people who are listening here every week with at least some message

to express my appreciation.

That's the real job of the Holiday Message is to say thank you to all the many people

who've tuned into Mindscape couldn't do it without you.

Well, that's not true.

I could do it without the audience.

It might be harder to get guests, but I could do something.

It wouldn't be nearly as much fun and I probably wouldn't do it if no one were listening.

So you play a very important role here by listening.

And the original idea also with the Holiday Message was to maybe do a state of the podcast

address, right, to talk about what we did over the last year, the different guests we

had.

I found that that was number one work, which I didn't want to do.

And number two was hard to do because I talked to a lot of different people, a lot of different

things.

...