AMA | June 2026

Hello everyone, welcome to the June 2026 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. So I don't know whether this is perkling into other parts of the world. Probably it is, but here in the United States, one of the many, many news stories going on, it's a news-rich environment these days. You have to at least say that.

One of the many stories is that senior officials, senior elite members of our governing classes, uh, both literally in government and in industry, have been picking fights with the Pope, with our new Pope, Pope Leo XIV. Uh he's an American pope from Chicago, first ever American pope, um, but he's liberal in various of his inclinations. Not a hundred percent so, like, you know, there's um always going to be the case that the Pope is Catholic, right? The Pope is going to agree with a lot of parts of doctrine that the Catholic Church likes to promulgate, and some of those will not quite count as liberal, some will. It's all very confusing, and it's all constructed by human beings, not actually given by God, but

So be it. The Pope has been pushing back on various aspects of modern technology and governance. You know, he has noticed that you should be nice to immigrants is part of what Jesus preaches in the New Testament in the Gospels. And yet there are people who claim to be following Jesus's teachings who are not really very kind to immigrants. So he says those things and that riles people up.

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