Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
303 | AMA | February 2025
Mon, 03 Feb 2025
Welcome to the February 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!Blog post with questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/03/ama-february-2025/Support Mindscape on Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the February 2025 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. This month's AMA is going to be mercifully short on politics. We're mostly talking about science and other fun things. But, you know, politics still goes on and we're aware of it. And I'm a big believer that you kind of
have to be aware of it and respond to it and think about it and take it seriously while also living the rest of your life. So I'm perfectly happy to be talking about non-political stuff for the AMA, but I do want to note what's going on. I always think about the audience hundreds of years in the future who are wondering what we were thinking back now.
And here in February 2025, this is literally a pivotal moment of history. And it would be weird to pretend that it was just a normal moment. We're less than two weeks into Donald Trump's second term as president, and it has been even worse of a fiasco than his biggest enemies might have predicted. The combination of ruthlessness and incompetence is quite shocking, and so it's important to
Remember it. Keep it in mind. Not act like it's business as usual. One of the biggest things that Trump and his allies have going for them is the idea on the part of everyone else that it's just another political squabble. But it's really – Not. It's worse than that.
Just to remind you very quickly, I can't possibly remember everything, but Trump fired a bunch of inspectors general the moment he got into office. These are government employees whose job it is to make sure there is minimal fraud and corruption. So we're getting rid of them because fraud and corruption are going to be kind of an important catchphrase. He fired a bunch of federal prosecutors, U.S.
attorneys, especially ones who have been working on the various felony cases against him at the federal level. He either fired or sent home or convinced to leave a bunch of people at the National Security Council, the director of the federal – Aviation administration, people at the State Department, people in the foreign aid office, there's a 90-day pause on all foreign assistance.
Not all foreign assistance, I shouldn't say that. Israel and Egypt are still getting their assistance, but everywhere else, cut off. Ukraine, elsewhere, heartbreaking stories of people trying to, you know, U.S. workers in Africa and elsewhere working to save people in various ways, just having their funds cut off.
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