Hello everyone and welcome to the 2025 holiday message for the Mindscape podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Whenever it's a holiday break, I sometimes think about my first year in college.

In fact, going back for holiday vacation and meeting up with all my old friends from high school.

You know, I had a group of friends, mutual friends that we had had for years.

We basically all went to different universities, very different universities,

so didn't keep close touch with each other at the time.

But then, of course, got back together.

And then again, during the summer, after that next semester was

over, I could not help but be struck by how different my friends were. Not in bad ways,

or not always in good ways. They were just different. They were a little bit different people

when they came back from a short exposure to university life.

And they had been, for the years, when I knew them.

You know, of course, they changed.

We all changed during high school, during the four or five years, whatever.

We were hanging out together, but relatively gradually.

And then they went off to the four corners of the earth.

They came back and they were noticeably different.

The thing that obviously occurred to me at the time was, wow, going to college really changes you in some ways.

And I'm sure that it changed me and they noticed that just as well.

But what I eventually realized is that they all changed differently, right?

It wasn't as if there was something that happens to you when you go to college and it all

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