AMA | Feb 2026
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
Hello everyone and welcome to the February 2026 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. It's a little bit weird for me personally to be recording this AMA right now. You know, we have the usual spectrum of great questions in the AMA, but it's a weird time in the United States. I like to, as you know, pretend that I'm talking potentially to people listening hundreds of years from now.
I know that's not true. Most of the people who listen to The podcast are going to do so in within a couple weeks or months of when it's released, but that uh pretend scenario lets me say things very clearly that it's probably are probably pretty obvious to everyone. So the thing I'm gonna say is here we are in the second Donald Trump administration, an administration which is becoming increasingly lawless and authoritarian. And nobody should be surprised by this.
You remember that at the end of his first administration, Donald Trump incited a riot at the US Capitol in order to cling to power after losing a fair election. Once that happens, it's completely inexplicable and inexcusable that he is allowed to run for president again. But as we've seen over the past few years, uh our elite institutions, whether it's the government or the media or whatever, are completely unprepared for the kind of situation that we are finding ourselves in, and they react very badly, and here he is president again, with far fewer guardrails, because he didn't probably even expect to win the first election in 2016, and he had a certain number of fairly establishment figures in the administration, because you know, you gotta fill out those job posts somehow.
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