Libby Barnes, like essentially no one else on Forecast, wanted to be a professor from age 12. Specifically, a physics professor. And indeed, climate science almost lost Libby to neutrinos. But an instrumentation disaster, and the associated personal mayhem in the research group, made Libby realize that she was geared more for solving a great many problems, not any one particular decade-long quest. Now, Libby is exploring a dizzying array of topics in climate dynamics, and we bore down into the long-running debate on arctic impacts on the mid-latitudes and subseasonal to seasonal prediction. Along the way, Libby tells Mike about her amazingly sensible — and highly intentional — approach to academia and the tenure process.