Cave of Mirrors: The 234th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 234th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, and the security and media landscape in which this happened. Are we all in a modern Plato’s Cave that has become a hall of mirrors, such that we can be sitting right next to someone, seeing a totally different reality? How can we evaluate diffe...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
It's the 134th, which I knew without any... Wrong again.
Wrong again.
200.
Oh, right, right, right, right.
I keep, I keep subtracting a hundred and I'm doing that just, it's a safety factor thing.
You don't want to overflow the container.
And so if you subtract a hundred and then you just, all right, I screwed up again.
Um, but.
It is the 234th Dark Horse Podcast Livestream.
I am Dr. Rhett Weinstein.
I didn't screw that up.
You are Dr. Heather Hying, also not an error.
And we are not in Kansas anymore.
That is my feeling.
It's been a long time since we've been in Kansas.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
Literally been a long time.
A long time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
When would that have been?
I recall the event, but I couldn't tell you what year that was.
I think the last time that we were in Kansas was for our friend's wedding.
Yeah.
When we were in grad school.
So that would have been like 2000 something.
Yeah.
This is our friend Karen.
Yes.
Who was a Karen before that was cool.
She's awesome.
She remains awesome.
Anyway, yes, that was in Kansas.
We then left Kansas.
We then left Kansas because we didn't live there.
Indeed.
But we are still no longer in Kansas.
That was my point, I think.
All right.
I had some great times in Kansas as a child.
Some of my extended family on my dad's side, my cousins, one of his brother, one of my father's brothers, my uncle, and all his kids lived in Kansas.
And I remember water skiing.
That's kind of it.
That implies that there's water in Kansas, which I do not recall, but I guess there would have to be.
Yes, a bit.
There are people living there, after all.
Right.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, it is a crazy moment.
It is.
It is.
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Right.
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All right, three fruit juice.
Three fruit juices.
So, we have to stretch a little bit to get that last one in there because it doesn't seem... Dewey.
Yeah, Brett actually, not Dewey.
I've been calling you the wrong name all of these years.
Yes, you have.
Often, quite awkward.
Could you finally mention it?
Well, I thought it was about time.
Dr. Dewey Weinstein, I thought it was.
No, it's a fruit juice in the metaphorical sense because, as many of our listeners and viewers will already know, gold and silver only comes from one place.
The explosion of stars.
That's the only place you get enough force to drive the atomic components together to create these heavy elements.
Sure, with you so far.
It's the fruit of stars.
It's metaphorical and it's weak as hell, but nonetheless.
The fruit of stars.
Well, the fruit juice of stars.
Funny bee.
Whoa.
Well played.
I like that.
It's kind of a failure of an analogy, but you know, I think it was worth the attempt.
I think so too.
Alright, so some things happened this week.
Holy moly, a number of things happened this week.
Among them would be the assassination attempt on President Trump, which we will talk about.
The announcement of the vice presidential pick for the Trump ticket, J.D.
Vance, at the Republican convention.
and there is a Something I don't even know how to describe it, but there is There was briefly excitement apparently in many different places about the possibility of a Trump Bobby Kennedy ticket, which of course is not going to happen in light of the the naming of JD Vance, but nonetheless the fact that
This is an idea that apparently was on the minds of a number of people, including the primaries involved in such decisions.
Tells us something about the mood of the country, and I think that is tremendously positive.
The country is sick and tired of this nonsense, and I wish that that ticket had happened.
Yep.
We had a great video requesting it.
Not only did I put out a video, but that video in the space of less than 24 hours got more than 2 million views on Twitter alone.
So, again, I think what we are looking at is an electorate that is actually ready to think outside the box, and that is nothing but positive.
Yeah, by some of those two men's views they would seem to be utterly incompatible, but that of course is the idea behind unity.
That is the idea behind Unity.
Now, I will just add one other little detail.
A video emerged, was leaked, from the Kennedy, I don't know that it's the Kennedy camp, but from very close to Kennedy, that Bobby found tremendously embarrassing and apologized for this morning.
It was a video somebody had taken, I think there was a documentary being filmed, and So there was a camera on in the room when President Trump apparently called Bobby Kennedy and they talked.
And I totally get why Bobby is mortified.
The apology I know is genuine.
I do actually think the leak is probably good for the world.
What is said in it?
Uh, the two of them speak, uh, candidly about shared concerns, um, shared hopes, that sort of thing.
But anyway, I just think the fact of a congenial conversation having, um, been observed by now, you know, who knows how many million people saw it.
Tens of millions of people have presumably already seen this.
That, hopefully, will turn down the political heat between these two camps in the upcoming campaign.
And my hope is that, alright, Bobby's not going to be the running mate on the ticket, but my hope is that Patriots will leave room to come together to do the job that needs to be done when whoever it is ascends to the office.
So anyway, I get that it would be better in one sense if that tape hadn't emerged, but it was nice to see people talking across those lines about what's in the interest of the Republic and of Americans.
One of my overwhelming senses after the attempted assassination on Donald Trump was that he very much looks like a patriot at this point, and it sounds like that conversation, the lead conversation, which I have not seen,
It sounds like it reveals a conversation between patriots, which we expect that patriots will disagree about things, that there is no single slate by which you can identify yourself as a patriot, but that if you are running for office in any country, you have to believe in that country.
Unless you are trying to overthrow it, that should be a precondition.
And many on—I don't even know if I should keep on calling it the so-called Left—but many on the so-called Left seem to find it a badge of honor to find the country itself reprehensible.
And that inversion of patriotism is itself the reprehensible thing.
if what you are doing at the same time.
It's one thing to believe that, but if you are then trying to push that view into not just the public sphere, but into the political sphere, then you are, in fact, inciting revolution at some level.
Yeah, actually, why don't I add a little flesh to those bones?
The agreement on the well-being of the nation ought to be at the core of anyone who wishes to lead it.
and And what that means, of course, is that when the nation is in jeopardy, ideology ought to be absolutely secondary.
Yeah.
All of those who believe in the nation ought to rally around protecting it.
And the nation is in deep jeopardy.
And unfortunately, we've got there are some people on both sides, but we very definitely have people on the blue team claiming that the jeopardy to the nation is the opposing candidate, which, of course, has everything to say about whatever it is that happened in this attempt on President Trump's life.
But I would, I would add one other thing.
The term patriotism is one of those terms that I think is vitally important, but it's also got a couple of places where people trip over having kind of an intuitive sense of what they think it means, but it's really worth defining precisely.
And I would argue that patriotism Is the willingness to make profound sacrifice for something, right?
The fact that it often is a nation that one makes a profound sacrifice for is important.
But the real point is if patriotism is an endogenous characteristic.
Then that endogenous characteristic is about sacrificing for something and it doesn't have to be a nation and I would point out so I always Hear people just the same way you hear people Conflate empathy and sympathy and I I've argued that you have to define these things precisely they have a relationship to each other that patriotism and nationalism are two things that you hear treated as synonyms, and I regard them as antonyms.
Yes.
And I believe that the distinction actually is perfectly encapsulated.
I have no idea if this was anywhere on the man's mind, but when John F. Kennedy says, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, it strikes me that he has defined both words.
Right nationalism is what your country can do for you.
It's your your your nation as weapon effectively and patriotism is your willingness to sacrifice for that nation and In any case, I I do think I see I mean clearly You've got two people One of whom lost a father and an uncle in the process of attempting to do the nation's bidding.
And the other one is the target of vicious slanders about his personal nature.
The Hitlerian rhetoric that's been directed at President Trump.
Both of these people are clearly putting their life in jeopardy for a reason.
And... Go ahead.
I mean, I think my thoughts are just iterating what I and you have already said, but I have never had any doubt that Bobby Kennedy Jr.
was a patriot.
He has embodied patriotism in everything that he has done, and of course the lineage from which he comes does as well.
And so he does not break the tradition of the Kennedys in being a true patriot.
I did not think that Trump was a patriot.
I saw no evidence of it, nor was I particularly looking for it, if I'm honest, eight years ago.
I assumed it wasn't there, and I didn't see it.
He appears, you know, first in the debate, first to my explicit consciousness in the debate, where everyone was talking about Biden's poor performance, which, as we've talked about, was no surprise to those of us who've been seeing what he has become, you know, what a shell of a conscious being Biden has become.
What was surprising to me in the debate was Trump's performance, who came across statesman-like.
And I don't know patriotic in particular, but he came across as a man of leadership qualities.
And then in this moment on Saturday evening, when he was almost gunned down, there was a whole slew of things, both in his explicit behavior and just in the moment that felt
Like, he was embodying a patriotism, and it wasn't just that his base, his long-term base, the people who have been with him from the beginning, were now living, were seeing the man that they always said he was, but that he seems now to be energized by protecting the country.
I didn't see evidence of that before.
Yeah, I want to get to a broader pattern here.
And I think it's obvious to me in retrospect, but it took a while to get there.
My grandfather used to say something about the Kennedys, and it wasn't terribly generous.
He had lots of concerns about their motivations.
But he acknowledged that they matured into their roles.
He didn't trust them at first, but they won him over.
Maybe not completely.
Your grandfather, who was born in 1908?
No, he was born in 1913.
1913.
So just in terms of placing him in the... Yep.
- 1913, so just in terms of placing him in the-- - Yep.
But anyway, I have noticed a pattern amongst the people, We know a lot of extraordinary people at this point.
The last eight years have put us in contact with a tremendous number of people.
And I do think a pattern I have seen amongst many of them is that the, I don't know, the crucible of the present, of the public eye, of the contentious moment that we live in, Causes it either causes you to falter or it causes you to mature.
And I have to say, I feel it in myself.
I feel it in you and I see it in many of the people that we now count as friends and that this is something.
You know, the Constitution has to define when you're an adult is for practical reasons.
When are you eligible for the office?
That kind of thing, which creates an obviously arbitrary boundary.
You know, there are people who are, you know, lives beyond their years and 35 is longer than you would have to wait.
But nonetheless, there are others who will never be ready.
Right.
There were others.
In fact, most people will never be ready.
But but the point is, I think One of the many ways in which human beings break the normal rules for critters is that the maturation process, the physical maturation process, is a little interesting with humans, but it's not very interesting, right?
It's fascinating, but it's no more fascinating than, you know... It's not highly unusual.
Right, a dog or a bird.
It goes on for longer than most others, but...
Yeah, it's got this weird delay in it.
And in fact, it is that weird delay that points to the really special thing, which is the cognitive apparatus, which does not abide.
In one way, it abides by the normal biological rules where you reach your maximum capacity at reproductive maturity, and then it declines, and then it declines more precipitously, right?
That's true of the, like, the conduction velocity of information in the brain.
It is not true of the capacity of the mind to think, the maturity of the soul, these sorts of things.
Those things follow a different trajectory.
And conduction capacity is one measure that is quantitatively true.
But it doesn't say anything about connectivity, nor about how much there is to connect.
Right.
And so let's just say the brain, you know, if we take the definition, which I've always liked, the mind is what the brain does, right?
The brain is a physical object, right?
If you die, your brain is still there.
We can measure it, weigh it, all that stuff.
Your mind is gone, right?
The mind is the consequences of brain activity.
Some people will argue it's more.
I don't see any reason to believe it is, but it is miraculous.
But nonetheless, the mind is not the same sort of stuff as the brain.
The conduction velocity drops because it has to for evolutionary reasons we won't go into at the moment, but the mind can grow wiser even as the neurons grow slower.
And it can in fact grow wiser at a rate that much more than compensates for the decline in the rate at which neurons fire messages.
For what?
Yeah, for a while.
And then, yeah, I mean, it all fails, ultimately.
But it is not terribly surprising to see that there is a maturation process amongst people who are faced with profound challenges and difficult questions that you actually continue to get better over your entire life.
If you have the right stuff, you continue to get better over your entire life at figuring out how to look at those things.
And so we do expect wisdom to grow.
And then maybe as, you know, at the very end of your life, you get less good at doing anything cognitive, including wisdom, but that, you know, you would expect an old person if they had seen relevant stuff to be wiser about it.
So anyway, this general pattern is there, and I guess it's not terribly, you know, clearly Bobby Kennedy has matured, right?
He went through some really bad stuff, which he's fully ready to acknowledge.
And he's become this marvelous human being.
It wouldn't be terribly surprising if all the things that Trump has been put through are causing him to mature also.
Yeah.
No, that's good.
Yeah.
All right.
So I wanted to just cover a number of things.
Interestingly, you and I had a discussion last night that covered some of the ground that I'm hoping to get to today.
And I think you kind of nailed the thing I was searching for.
So we will get there.
Okay.
I don't know what the thing is in this case.
Interesting.
I don't remember what it is that you're referring to particularly.
Yep.
It's a permanent upgrade of the toolkit.
You know, something I just didn't know how to say and you, you got it.
But anyway, first thing I wanted to do is just say, look, we are stuck in a realm.
Where there are all kinds of expectations and rules about what we should discuss, what we shouldn't discuss, what the appropriate tools are to have these discussions.
Somebody appears to have tried to end President Trump's life.
Yeah.
That raises all kinds of questions.
There's obviously a shooter on a roof who is the presumptive gunman, right?
And there's a lot of evidence.
Of course, we live in 2024.
There are cameras everywhere.
So we have a tremendous amount, you know, it's not, it's not 1963 where, you know, There is a Zapruder film and its actual film and, you know, the access to it involved it being released to the world.
We live in totally different circumstances.
But the question of how we're going to deal with What appears to have happened, what it might mean beyond the obvious, is not straightforward.
And what I think our audience expects from us, and what we can do, is we can model the very difficult question of how you responsibly engage in evaluating circumstances like this, where Very few of us were present.
Uh, the information that we have is filtered both intentionally, uh, and accidentally by algorithms and things like that.
How are we to reason through what, you know, what are the, what are the bounds of what we are allowed to consider here?
And what are the, what is the, uh, the appropriate toolkit to bring to bear?
Does that sound fair enough?
What are you asking me?
Does that seem like a reasonable way to approach this?
Sure.
Okay.
So, first question I wanted to address.
I saw a lot of unavoidable theorizing.
That is, the advancing of hypotheses is theorizing.
You don't advance theories, you advance hypotheses.
So an awful lot of theorizing about possible conspiracies that might go beyond the obvious in the case of the attempt on President Trump's life.
I was surprised by The sloppiness of some of it, and it's not that I don't expect a lot of sloppiness in such discussions, but there appeared to me to be one gigantic elephant in the room when it came to sloppiness that I just think we need to address.
As far as I'm concerned, the stakes are so high in an American election, and the stakes are even higher in this election by effectively everybody's analysis.
It doesn't matter what side of this you're on.
Everybody regards the stakes as very, very high.
And so the idea that we have to entertain all of the actual possibilities in order to narrow down to what did happen and what its meaning might be, Seems to me reasonable.
That said, you've got all of these people hypothesizing, theorizing about possible conspiracies, and much of it appeared to be just simply responsive to what team you view yourself on without any constraints that come from what I consider to be obvious logic.
So for example... So is that the elephant?
The elephant is, um...
I saw a lot of theorizing about whether, let's agree that at least the conventional wisdom says that given what ended up happening, that Trump came out ahead in part because there's sympathy for him, which is understandable, but also because he demonstrated courage in the moment and that changed people's view of him.
And again, the way that he demonstrated courage looked like patriotism.
It looked like patriotism and it looked like leadership to a lot of us for reasons that are a little hard to put your finger on.
I mean this is somebody who was presumably reacting from their amygdala and yet here he is he stands up having just been wounded and demonstrates that he's okay which you could interpret that multiple ways but one of the ways is that
People needed to know he was okay And he had enough presence of mind to to do that rather than to scurry off and make you know put his his safety first But People because Trump appears to have come out ahead many people argued that E might be Or his team might have in some way orchestrated this.
Is that the elephant?
That's the elephant.
Right.
The sloppy thinking elephant.
Well, the point is, look, I don't put anything off the table, but my feeling is you should be able to falsify that idea.
Not with 100% certainty.
Who knows what is within the realm of the possible, but that doesn't make any sense.
It makes no sense.
He was a front runner.
If we're talking about a fake in which an actual bullet is fired and an actual bullet appears to have been fired, somebody was killed, right?
The idea, A, that anybody thinks they have enough control in such a circumstance to fake such a thing without risking accidentally killing President Trump, no way.
But B, Let's suppose that there was some more elaborate fake in mind where the idea was to create the impression that there had been an attempt on his life with no risk.
The frontrunner doing that when it would immediately bring you know the full weight of the FBI into an investigation in which the hint that the thing didn't wasn't what it looked like might be you know he could go from frontrunner to uh
You know laughing stock if you were to do such a thing so the point is if you look at the the classic series of Characteristics that law enforcement looks to to figure out who is actually a suspect in a crime means motive and opportunity right means Not so good Right?
The ability to control such an event is pretty low, but motive?
It just doesn't add up.
The fact is he had everything to lose in attempting to get a boost in popularity when he was already the frontrunner, so I consider that the elephant in the room.
If you're arguing that just because he came out ahead from the event, given what did happen, that therefore he might have Participated in it.
I don't think he would have participated in it anyway, but it's a preposterous hypothesis.
You need something vastly more robust than that.
It's an irresponsible suggestion in light of the ridiculousness of it.
Okay, I'm not sure exactly why that's an elephant here, but if I can just rephrase what you're saying is there are a lot of things that people are asking, and you would expect that all of the things get asked, and that some of the things quickly get dropped off the table because they are so improbable that while still theoretically possible, they are not worth focusing attention on.
And one of the ones that is not getting dropped off the table, even though It is theoretically possible, but it is so improbable for all of the reasons of motive and means that you've just described, is that this was a setup by the Trump camp itself.
Right.
I regard that.
I don't fault anybody for running the idea past themselves, but the idea that it has enough legs to advance it, you know, okay, you know, did space aliens create the whole thing?
You know, you got to eliminate possibilities as just too absurd to be worth exploring, and I think that one
Immediately trips the two absurd to consider Limit okay, so anyway, that's That's a minor point the larger point actually I was spurred to think about this in part because of a piece it's unfortunately a two-part piece and only the first part is available, but Michael Shermer
Put out a piece in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, and it's clear from the piece, especially from his subtitle, what his argument is.
Broad brush.
Do we want to put that up on the screen?
I think Zach has it, or I have it on my screen as well.
Okay.
So this is Michael Shermer's piece in The Skeptic, his magazine.
The title is Lone Assassins, and the subtitle is The Attempt to Assassinate President Trump is Just the Latest in a Long Line of Mostly Mentally Deranged Solo Actors, Part One.
Okay.
Now.
Let me first say a few things about Michael Shermer.
Michael Shermer is a friend.
I greatly appreciate Michael Shermer.
He and I differ on many issues.
Most of them stem from a different view of the way one should regard conspiracy in one's thinking.
Hypotheses of conspiracy have a different status for Michael than they do for me, and I assume for you.
But, that said, every hypothesis benefits from the application of intelligent skepticism.
And Michael is very intelligent and... Intelligent and honorable and not personal.
These are all things that Schirmer does brilliantly and almost no one else does.
He never makes it personal.
He never makes it personal.
And that is really, it's a testament to his character, which I appreciate.
And it is also a service.
Even if you believe that Michael has it wrong and that he's actually doing something, his algorithm is making the same error again and again, as I do believe it is.
He is doing those of us who have a different algorithm a service by forcing us to refine our arguments, to understand where they are weak and in what way they are weak.
So in any case, although I disagree with Michael on many things, I have an argument.
We have made an argument in the course of the COVID debacle that everybody, irrespective of which side of the argument they are on, deserves credit for contributing to the solution as long as it's an honest The point you start saying, well, you know, your enemy is responsible for your, your, your detractor is responsible for somebody's death because they misunderstood the biology.
No, the answer is we're having an argument about the biology and even those who are on the wrong side of that argument, as long as they are doing it honorably and the hallmark of that would be that they update when they discover they're doing it wrong.
Um, they are entitled to credit for participating in getting to the solution.
And I see, I see Michael this way.
Very much.
I feel like he's a force for good even if I disagree with him.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, so the thing I wanted to start with though is I understand the argument that he is making in this part one of a two-part piece.
The argument is, if we look at the history of assassinations, especially assassinations of American presidents and presidential candidates, that there is a pattern that is evident, which is most assassinations are the work of lone gun nuts.
And therefore, we should be very reluctant to look beyond that unless there's reason to, unless there's evidence to.
And on the one hand, logically speaking, that makes sense, but it runs afoul of a higher logic, which I want to make evident.
So the higher logic is this, and forgive the academic detour, but there are two kinds of error that we discuss in science.
One is called random error, that's just noise, and the other is called systematic error.
And while it sounds like in some ways systematic error would be better because it's organized, in fact it is way worse.
Random error is error that goes in an arbitrary direction.
So sometimes a data point will push you towards a hypothesis you're trying to test when your hypothesis isn't even true.
And sometimes it will go against.
And the solution to the noise problem, if it's truly noise, is more data.
More data swamps out noise.
It allows you to see signal and to stop paying attention to noise.
And so it has.
Random data is subject to that aphorism from Toxicology, if you will.
Dilution is the solution to pollution.
Yeah.
With regard to random data, you just need more data because, I'm sorry, with regard to random error, you need more data which will swamp out the error.
100%.
And with systematic error, it doesn't work this way.
It does not work.
Systematic error points in a particular direction.
If you collect more data, It will have the same bias and you will be misled.
And so systematic error is a wicked problem where it exists.
And there is a kind of systematic error built into an analysis like the one that Shermer is partway through here, which is Well, there are really two errors, but the primary one I want to call attention to is the nature of conspiracy breaks our first-order logical tools.
Because the very nature of conspiracy is to create the impression that something other than the actual thing has happened.
In other words, conspiracy always comes with a cloak.
And the problem is that that cloak will be built in order to trigger Occam's Razor so that it falsely closes the question too early.
So, in the discussion of the conspiracies that may or may not have happened, there is much talk about Patsy's.
Lee Harvey Oswald, amongst those of us who believe that he was not the lone assassin of JFK, he appears to be a patsy.
That is, somebody who is holding a gun at the site of an assassination in a way that appears to make the story of the assassination clear, and then his assassination two days after his arrest
Makes it impossible to ask certain questions of him and in fact he alleges on camera that he is a patsy He believes he's been set up or at least he makes that argument so Conspiracy creates a Deliberately creates the impression that something else has happened that is not the actual explanation in order to hide itself so the problem with doing historical analysis of the sort of
That Michael is doing is that it imagines that we have the actual tally of Conspiracies versus lone gunmen and maybe we do but we can't know that because really what we're doing is we're looking at exposed conspiracies versus lone gun nuts and Lone gun nuts expose themselves by their very actions, and conspiracies work hard to not expose themselves.
And so you would expect that we would have some conspiracies erroneously in the lone gun nut problem and never the other way around.
Therefore, we expect an overcount of lone gun nuts in the lone gun nut versus conspiracy tally.
Yep.
Now, I have to say, in looking at the stories, and Schirmer is very good at providing the historical evidence of all of these stories, I learned things from his description in this piece that I... He goes through all of the presidential assassinations, and much more briefly the assassination attempts, and then also the assassination of RFK.
Yeah, so he's got the full data set of people Headed towards or in the presidency who have been assassinated or nearly assassinated and Anyway, it's very interesting now.
I don't know that he's got anything in a wrong category there although there are several I suspect but in effect he's got a circularity where what he's doing is he is extrapolating from the fact that That he has concluded that Oswald acted alone, that we count that in the lone gun nut category.
Likewise, Sirhan Sirhan.
Likewise, Hinkley.
I didn't read it that way.
I think, actually, with regard to Lee Harvey Oswald, he refers not just to the Warren Commission, but to 8, 9, 10 other analyses that are done that come to the same conclusion.
Now, what I don't know is what is the complete solution set of analyses that have been done, and how many of them came to the opposite conclusion.
Right.
So, you know, we have at least the possibility for a confirmation bias here, where there is being, there is a reporting of the original conclusion was this, and all of these later conclusions were this as well, therefore this.
And that's not actually conclusive evidence, especially if we don't know how many other analyses have pointed in the other direction.
Right.
And many analyses have pointed in the other direction.
Right.
And then there's much we just simply don't know.
So I will argue you have to sideline a good fraction of these because they are contentious for evidentiary reasons.
Now, Michael, I'm sure will argue that actually that's a bad reading of the evidence.
But anyway, that is a question for another time.
But I also want to point out that the likelihood of a conspiratorial assassination and our inability to detect it have changed over time.
So I don't know quite what to do with this philosophically.
It's not a consistent environment, but let us just point to some of the things that have been altered.
One thing that has been altered is the significance of high office in the United States.
The United States became a much more powerful country and a wealthier country in the aftermath of World War II.
So the stakes, the amount of power and the wealth generating potential of the presidency has gone through the roof.
And that means that the motive to prevent one person from taking that office, to increase the likelihood that a different person takes that office, has also gone through the roof.
So that has changed.
What's more, The environment in which we are able to look at the correct set of evidence and not be misled has changed and it's not obvious to me that we know the net impact but you know you had people limited to analog means until very recently and what we now have is a spectrum of
Tools and weapons and the ability to gather information that changes the entire landscape of how a powerful actor will be involved.
Presumably the only thing that has changed for, or not the only thing, but the most important thing that has changed for an actual lone gun nut is the weaponry itself, which has become higher powered and more accurate so it can be accomplished at a greater distance, which It complicates the job of preventing an assassination.
I think the run-up to and the likelihood of being caught are vastly changed by the social media landscape.
Well, I agree the... Just the technological landscape.
The technological landscape.
Rather than just say social media.
To the degree that a lone gun nut was also occasionally sharing his lone gun nuttery interests to friends before.
He is more likely to be doing that in a way that's traceable now.
And, of course, one of the things that started being talked about right away after the assassination attempt on Trump on Saturday was There seem to be maybe, you know, at least two eyewitness accounts of this guy climbing and being there.
But wait, why isn't there video of that?
Because everyone's got their phones all the time.
Right.
So that, you know, we now have different kinds of evidence for claims that didn't exist before and different ways of getting caught as well.
Yes.
We also have We have to enlarge the range of possibilities that we consider as well.
One thing that is true is there is a very conspicuous pattern of delivering too little, or in Bobby Kennedy's case, no secret service protection at all.
What is the meaning of that?
One has to speculate, but there is an obvious meaning.
You've got an executive branch that has demonized its opponent, has portrayed the importance of defeating that opponent who is now ahead in the polls.
It has portrayed this in the starkest, most dire terms, and that Even a lone gun nut could effectively be given more access than they would otherwise be given.
So, you know...
A conspiratorial explanation could be anything from, you know, something completely scripted to lapse.
You know, if Bobby Kennedy were assassinated by a lone gun nut, I would want to know why he hadn't been given Secret Service protection.
What did those discussions look like?
Was somebody hoping for that?
So we have to entertain those intermediate possibilities.
Um, but lone gun nuts certainly do exist.
In light of the, um, permissive gun laws that we have in the United States, it is certainly impossible to provide perfect protection for a targeted individual.
However, the attempt on President Trump's life is not something that happened in some chaotic situation that would be impossible to control.
What we know is that this was a planned event.
The location from which the president was going to be speaking or the former president was going to be speaking was perfectly well understood.
Of course, an advanced team had looked at the landscape and they would have known every vulnerability and the place from which he was apparently shot.
Was an obvious vulnerability.
So that does raise questions about how an obvious vulnerability could have been overlooked.
And if it was not overlooked, why was it not properly covered?
Those are absolutely legitimate questions.
A friend who is very knowledgeable in some of the relevant spaces here, especially in firearms, posed the following three broad possibilities.
This was This was someone individual in combination with the generalized incompetence of Secret Service at this point.
This was someone individual in combination with the Secret Service that was underrepresented there because they kept on refusing to give additional support to Trump, even though he had been asking.
And this was not, in fact, an individual.
And within that space lives all sorts of possibilities, the three-letter agencies and such, conspiring, potentially.
And I do feel like those don't exactly exist at the same level as one another, but that begins to frame what the possibility landscape is.
Well, one thing I find, I find conspicuous about it.
Uh, first of all, I will say, um, I think I've forwarded it to you, Zach.
Maybe you have it.
Um, as of this morning, the head of the secret service, who is obviously, um, uh, under metaphorical fire for this failure, rather shockingly claimed that the, that the pitch of the roof prevented them from putting somebody on it.
No.
Do you have that?
I don't.
You didn't send it to me and I don't know who the head of the Secret Service is.
I've forgotten her name.
Try to find it.
The head of the Secret Service is also a woman?
Yes.
I didn't know that.
Simply doesn't add up, right?
You could imagine, first of all, the roof was not... Yeah, that's a good turn of phrase here, because this is actually a math problem.
Like, is the pitch of the roof too steep?
Well, the shooter managed to manage it, so not so much.
Yeah, it's like a butterfly roof, I think.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
So this was like, oh, there was an OSHA problem?
You didn't want to put a sniper up there because the roof was too steep?
Like, okay, first of all, let's agree that there are roofs that are too steep.
Yes.
That does not mean you don't have to cover them in some way, right?
Maybe you can't put somebody on it, but you can have somebody- That sounds like something the CDC would say.
Right.
It's so dumb.
Yeah.
Right.
So, okay.
By some dumb analysis, this roof was not too steep for the gunman, but was too steep for the Secret Service.
I don't believe it, but let's say... The gunman, which apparently had no particular training or skills.
Right.
Yeah.
Right, exactly.
But, if you had such a conclusion, then there would be lots of things that you would do.
Among them would be, somebody's job would be to keep permanent watch of this... Yeah, you'd cover the roof.
Whether or not you actually had someone on the roof, you'd... Right.
And then, so that raises questions... Well, unless you really thought it was just too steep for any normal human being to get up there.
It's laughable, but...
It's preposterous, is the problem.
So, okay, you've got a question that results in a nonsense answer.
Does that not make you think, actually, I am now more eager to go and look at all of the possibilities?
Because to the extent that nonsense comes back, something isn't right.
No, I mean, it does feel like Walensky in the CDC and, you know, during COVID.
It's like, wait, you said what now?
Wait, you learned about things from watching CNN when you were supposed to be making policy?
Okay, we're not listening to you anymore.
Like, anyone who is still listening to you should stop.
Right.
And so this sounds like that.
It does sound like that.
And I will say one of the conspicuous patterns in the aftermath of this, I have talked to a couple of people who have relevant expertise.
And nobody is comfortable with the explanation.
The best.
The roof explanation?
Nobody is comfortable with the overall explanation for the shooting.
There appears to be a absolutely jaw dropping failure at multiple levels.
So not only do you have an obvious vulnerability in the form of this uncovered roof with line of sight on the speaking location of President Trump.
But you also have the fact that members of the public spotted what was apparently the gunman going up to the roof and attempted to call law enforcement's attention to it.
And so we can talk about a lot of stuff.
The best explanation I've heard for why that did not result In that threat being neutralized was that there is a kind of confusion that comes from the fact that you have multiple agencies.
You have local law enforcement and you have Secret Service and possibly other forces involved in protecting, in this case, former President Trump.
And there is concern, obviously understandable, that if you see somebody with a rifle on a roof, that you don't necessarily know that this is a threat rather than part of the security apparatus.
Apparently there are issues with radios not being of the same type, so somebody is charged with making sure communications are handed off, and you can imagine that somebody... It's like an imperial versus metric problem.
For fuck's sake!
Right, but here's what I would point out.
Okay, you could imagine a scenario in which a sniper who had eyes on the gunman did not know for certain whether he was looking at a law enforcement person with a gun or an assassin, right?
You could imagine that causing an order not to shoot.
You can imagine that causing hesitancy for the sniper.
However, What one cannot easily imagine is that you don't immediately pull Trump off the stage until you know.
Well, I don't I don't know the timing.
You know, the picture of the sniper kind of pulling his eye away from the site and looking, you know, seems like an incredibly long time.
But, you know, it's actually it's no, no, no, no, no.
The members of the public were trying to call attention of law enforcement to this guy on the roof.
So there was plenty of time to detect something isn't right.
Maybe it's going to be a case of mistaken identity and it's going to be a law enforcement officer dressed in a way Yeah, but I thought where you were going here was there are all of these different sort of both, you know, representatives of various security forces who also exist at different levels of both sort of impact in the world and training.
And as I understand it from one of the people that I think we both heard from, you've got the Secret Service, which is supposed to be the highest level of training and we would hope the highest level of being informed of what is going on at both the most immediate level in terms of hands-on defense, like they are going to be the ones who
You know, go on top of him and shepherd him away if there's an attack, and also who do the, you know, 30,000 foot level analysis of like setting up the space, but that the guys on the ground who are doing like crowd control and assessment are more often going to be local law enforcement, who may well be awesome, But they may also not be fully informed by the Secret Service, nor have direct line to them.
And so I don't think it's defensible.
But the idea that, well, you know, security was told, well, it's not the same security as the forces who were up on stage with him.
And that's a problem.
But it does mean that there's plenty of room for communication to fail to happen.
There shouldn't be any room for communication to fail to happen, but that is one of the manifestations, the ramifications, of having multiple kinds of security at any such event.
I don't think so.
What about that, don't you think?
I don't think I said anything extraordinary just now.
It's inconsistent with the number of minutes over which members of the public, multiple members of the public, are trying to get attention on the gunman.
So if this had been a matter of 10 seconds, okay.
Lapses in communication.
I get it.
Many minutes.
And in fact, there's a video circulating, I don't know if you've seen it, in which I believe it's Milk Bar TV has put together all of the various clips of both Trump speaking, of members of the public who have cameras and they're looking at the gunman on the roof.
The amount of time in which somebody should have detected that there was a problem was so great.
That it is implausible that a failure of communication, there's got to be a, uh, the equivalent of the cord on a train, right?
That you pull the train stops, right?
There has to be a something isn't right.
Okay.
Protect the target.
And that didn't happen over so many minutes that I, you know, it requires an expert.
Obviously there's a failure.
There's, I think there's many failures or it's not a failure at all is, is the point you're making to play devil's advocate here and say, okay.
And I don't know how many people were in that crowd.
I haven't heard the number.
Was it a couple thousand?
Was it not that big?
It looked like hundreds, but I don't know.
I don't know.
But in a, in a, in a rally, you know, for, for president, um, there are likely to be a lot of people trying to get vantage points, trying to get a better view, doing things that security don't want them doing.
So there will likely also be a lot of people who are staying within the bounds of what security wants, being like, you see that guy over there?
He's gone around the fence.
You see that guy over there?
So So there is going to be, you know, a fog of security, if you will, that will happen in any such event.
Right.
But the job of the Secret Service in this case... But I think what we heard is that it's not the Secret Service who are actually on the ground interacting with the crowd.
Doesn't matter.
At some level, you've got a target.
Their job is to keep them alive.
One of the tools that they use is local law enforcement.
To the extent that that is not a good arrangement because there's communication barrier, there has to be a rapid protect this person and risk the embarrassment of doing so when there was no actual threat, which the public will understand, versus the massive failure that almost resulted in the assassination versus the massive failure that almost resulted in the assassination of the leading candidate for president.
So, and I will say that it's just as an easy point to make from this perspective.
On the ground, there may be, you know, 25 classes of things that people were doing.
And from here, like, oh, the worst thing possible happened, except he missed.
And it's really clear that that shouldn't have been allowed to happen.
But like, where, where is the cutoff?
Well, okay, so I've watched many interviews with snipers, with people who have been charged with doing the advanced sight scouting, identifying targets.
They all say effectively the same thing, all the ones that I have seen.
Which is what?
Which is, this was a completely standard threat that should have been absolutely neutralized by the advanced team.
This roof, that distance away.
Line of sight.
Okay.
Right.
So the point is, their point is, look.
But that's about in advance.
No, it interacts because the advanced team shows up.
They see, oh.
That roof isn't, you know.
Right.
That's that's the advanced plan.
But yeah, hold on.
So the point is, OK, that roof that gets a red X. OK, that's a danger point.
OK, what is the plan for that danger point?
OK, OSHA regulations prevent you from putting a sniper on that roof.
I mean, it's insane.
Okay.
It's absolutely insane, but let's just say.
Okay.
Okay.
Then the point is, oh, okay.
Plan A does not cover that roof.
Plan B involves somebody on some other structure keeping an eye on that roof.
You have one job.
That roof is your job.
I did not.
Okay.
So again, that's the advanced planning.
I agree with you.
Right.
But the point is, again, there's only one objective here.
It's protect the target.
Protect the target to the extent that there is some general problem, which is, do you have any idea how complex it would be to protect somebody in a world where you have second amendment rights and lots of people have guns?
Yeah, that's a tough problem.
And you know, if, This had been out on the street somewhere.
It's a different question.
But in this case, the advanced planning and then the failure to do the right thing about it should have resulted in hyper-awareness of any unusual stuff there.
And we also have... Well, no.
If this was all organic, Then, presumably, they're not hyper-aware of the fact that they have failed to cover an obvious place where someone could be taking a shot at the president from.
So, they're not already on high alert about, like, oh, we got to be really—like, if that's where they'd been, they would have covered it.
Well, but that's exactly the point, is that how they would not have been aware that they had a vulnerability that was uncovered, especially in light of later... I feel like we're talking about cross-purposes.
You keep on referring to, like, why didn't the advanced planning work like it needed to?
I agree with you.
I am saying that once you're in the moment and you're interacting with not the same people, not the same security who are actually doing the defense and did the overall planning, that the decisions that are being made are not as obvious then.
Okay.
Then this results in the second layer.
Okay.
Let's say for the sake of argument that this is a very difficult job.
It's especially difficult in light of the coordination between agencies and all of that and effectively it is unavoidable that there will be gaps that are big enough for an assassin to find his way into.
Well presumably You would have an awful lot of foiled attempts for every one in which the assassin found the gap.
Mm-hmm.
This 20-year-old... We don't have, we don't, we don't record...
By your logic, you know, less than 10 attempted assassination or no, like four or five attempted assassinations on residents is not a lot.
No, there would be many more than that.
Well, that have been diffused and maybe they wouldn't.
But in this case, the improbability of a 20-year-old kid with a apparently high-powered rifle finding his way onto a roof that somehow the advance team either failed to identify or somebody overrode their identification of it
Raises a question that is a incredible coincidence that somebody who was looking for the ability to Take a shot at President Trump found the place where all of these professionals Somehow all dropped the ball I would also like to say very quickly that I remember the first time I thought about the JFK assassination.
I was shocked at the level of foresight in, you know, a city like Dallas, right?
The level of every window has to be scrutinized.
There has to be someone in every building.
No civilian guns could be within eyesight of the President, basically.
We're talking about a small town with, like, one roof that was relevant.
With, you could, everyone could see everything.
This is such a tiny level of coordination.
It's still a huge project, but compared to, like, protecting presidents in major American cities.
Especially in motorcade when they're moving through.
And the presidents, you know, presidents are allowed to, like, walk around and interact with people at events.
They do all sorts of stuff that is incredibly hard to protect from skyscrapers being what they are.
This is nothing.
It's like a roof.
A few hundred feet in a big grassy plain.
Right.
Google Earth allows you... It's a nothing project.
They should have, I mean, who knows how many millions of dollars it costs, but it's like, it's nothing for them.
Right.
It is a trivial level of analysis.
Now, you know, you could imagine a novel attack, but this wasn't one.
This was...
uh yeah an unremarkable weapon an unremarkable person an unremarkable uh place that he shoots from that is accessed in an unremarkable way um you know apparently uh there was even uh security in the building underneath him right so okay he was being very quiet Well, I do wonder how nobody heard a guy scurrying on the roof.
Maybe there's an explanation for that, depending upon what's under that roof.
Mice.
Okay.
But the overarching point that I was hoping to get to, the one that I believe you nailed in our discussion last night,
is what are the reasonable bounds of uh discussion in the aftermath of an event like this and um right right so here's what i think go ahead i mean i can i can say what i remember us talking about last night or you or you can Well, I think we need to get there.
OK.
So the point is, I believe that in our modern environment, not just with respect to assassinations and attempts and things like that, but over a wide range of topics, the burden of proof and the threshold of proof are being used to shut down exactly the explorations that we need to be making.
And we are being told it is irresponsible To have any discussion at all about whether or not there could have been a conspiracy here, which is preposterous.
And so it is easy to see that it is preposterous, at least from my perspective.
Why it is preposterous is really the thing I want to get to.
The principle of parsimony would seem to suggest that lone gun nut is always the preferred hypothesis to conspiracy.
Would seem to, right?
Don't jump here.
We've got to get there.
We've got to get there.
We will, but... I don't think you know what I was going to say, but go on.
Well, I want to get to your point, but I want to get there after we've laid some more groundwork.
So, There's a question about the burden of proof.
Lone Gunnet is preferred because it is simpler than a conspiracy and so we who wonder if there was something more to this are having to overcome that burden and This is not sensible, but there's a question about why is it not sensible.
The burden of proof, the threshold of proof, the idea of parsimony, these are all things that exist in a legal context.
And we are not in a legal context.
We in the public are looking at an event that very nearly changed Who we would have the ability to vote for in November.
So we have a Democratic Republic in which we are entitled to vote for people to represent us.
It is obvious that many people would like to shape who we may vote for so that we are forced to vote for somebody that they find preferable rather than somebody that we find preferable.
So the incentive to shape an election by eliminating a popular candidate exists there.
And to the extent that somebody is trying to interfere, and somebody was, whether it was a lone gun nut or whether it was something more than that, somebody is trying to interfere with the ability to elect Donald Trump in November.
Presumably that's the obvious interpretation of anybody who is attempting to shoot at President Trump.
But why are we not?
Obligated to Wait for evidence to accumulate that is sufficient to place Conspiracy in a position that is more likely than lone gun that why?
The question for us is why should we be discussing the question of conspiracy at this moment and My point from which yours then follows is that the rules of engagement here are not the legal rules.
That the principle of parsimony is violated itself by conspiracy.
The conspiracy creates a frame for some set of events that did not happen.
In order to find it, therefore, we have to look at all of the possibilities and eliminate possibilities that don't make any sense.
I would say means, motive, and opportunity ought to at least Loom large in our toolkit that that's the set of things that suggests that somebody is worth considering and that anomalies suggest a Suggest that there is more here than meets the eye and more here than meets the eye is the reason to pursue a
to pursue a wider set of evidence, right?
We could look for evidence and not find it.
But when we do look for evidence, we find absurdity, right?
We find the claim that the roof is too steep to have put anybody on it.
And so, there's a principle that gets used that is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, right?
The principle is called Hanlon's razor, and Hanlon's razor can be phrased in various ways, but the basic way is never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
And my argument is that has a implication.
What can be explained by incompetence is limited by plausibility.
In other words, what we do not have a good toolkit for is when a level of failure is so great that incompetence itself is incapable of doing the heavy lifting.
So that's the question.
Are we over?
Is this a place where the incompetence that is claimed is sufficient to do the explaining?
Or does it simply leave us without a sufficient explanation?
For example, what do you mean the roof was too steep?
Right?
That would seem to be a level of incompetence that is beyond plausible.
And as we were talking about last night, and you raised it today, the CDC, their failures during COVID do not look like an incompetent response to an infectious disease.
It looks like the inverse of the correct response.
Incompetence does not create an excellent response and then do exactly the inverse.
That is an implausible pattern to be explained by incompetence.
In Hanlon's Razor, the word can is where a lot of the heavy lifting, if you will, is being done.
Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence.
Even I, as I'm trying to enunciate the word specifically, swallow the can, and it's critical.
Not everything can be attributed to incompetence, and even if individually things can be attributed to incompetence, once you have things adding up and adding up and adding up, you've got incompetence over here and over here and over here.
Like, oh, the entire agency is incompetent.
Well, maybe.
But at some point, you get to so much incompetence, or so many observations of failures, that it strains credulity.
And this seems like this, oh, you just switched into, I just don't believe it, I can't believe it, I can't imagine it land.
But that can is exactly the place in Hanlon's Razor, in all of our assessments of really plausibility, that brings the human into it.
Like, no, actually, That doesn't feel plausible to me.
That doesn't feel like it could be attributed to incompetence because there were so many things going on.
And so, if I may, I think Hanlon's Razor Hanlon's razor, and the law of parsimony, and therefore Occam's razor, and Michael Shermer in his piece that you showed briefly, arguing that lone gun nuts are the expected.
All lead to this supposition that most moderns are walking around with, which is that the null hypothesis is it was one guy.
The null is that it was one guy.
Imagining anything else, that takes special evidence, and you're going to have to prove it.
If the null hypothesis, if the default hypothesis is it was one guy because of Hanlon's razor, because of Occam's razor, because of Parsimony, because of all of these things, then in order to credibly propose that it was anything more than one guy, the burden is on you.
And I think part of where we have gotten in thinking about this is, actually, under conditions as complex as this, there is no null.
And so it will sound, if you start down this road, like, nope, I don't think the null should be lone gun nut.
Oh, you're a freaking conspiracy theorist, conspiracy hypothesist.
And so you think the null should be conspiracy?
No.
I think there shouldn't be a null here.
Yeah.
I think I think that what we need to go in with is we don't know we are open and there are so many observations here of maybe incompetence across every domain across every every possibility and maybe not but the null is not one therefore I have to work harder to prove conspiracy the null is we don't know.
So I think actually the We who have studied how to think about such things are actually in error and we have fallen into an error where null hypothesis is actually very close to an object in the neighborhood of such explorations but it's not an appropriate analogy.
So a null hypothesis exists in a scientific context where you're trying to falsify a hypothesis and so you have a default.
But that actually is a much later stage in the process than we are at, where we are trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
This is possibility space.
Yeah.
This is possibility space.
And actually the right toolkit is, let's put every hypothesis on the table now.
Even the crazy ones.
We'll take off the ones that don't add up for one reason or another.
That person didn't have motive.
That person didn't have opportunity.
That person didn't have means.
Those kinds of things, right?
And then we get left with a set of hypotheses in which most of them will be wrong, right?
The remaining hypotheses.
But a proper toolkit is not one in which some hypothesis enjoys the position of presumptive truth, especially when conspiracy is in play.
Because if there were conspirators, they would want you to think that a lone gunman had done it.
And all the better that it would be a lone gunman who didn't survive the thing so that they couldn't tell you what they were involved in.
Yeah.
So it is perfectly natural at a logical level to not treat anything as the default hypothesis.
I would point out we've been here before, right?
The idea that natural origins for COVID was the obvious explanation and that, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology required some incredible level of evidence that we couldn't possibly have, right?
The answer is there was no evidence that it was a natural origins, and there was an institute studying these very viruses in that very location, so nothing has priority, right?
And in fact, you know, to the extent that the natural origins people Believe that actually the case is closed in their direction.
You haven't brought forth any evidence.
You're depending entirely on presumption.
Presumption which you are not logically entitled to.
So I and one exercise I thought we might what we have effectively said here is that The idea that never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
A, that is not a formal rule of logic.
That is a appealing and sometimes useful rule of thumb.
Right?
It's not like Occam's Razor where actually we have, you know, centuries of people thinking about its implications, spotting its flaws, right?
Hanlon's Razor is a cheeky something or other.
But even so, if we all agree that there's something to it, that there's lots of stuff that you might imagine as the result of malice that is actually just incompetence, that certainly happens a lot.
But the point is you would need To wield that principle, if it even rises to the level of a principle, you would have to wield it with care around things, as you point out, like, well, what does the word can?
Are there limits to the word can?
Can we, you know, can we, you know, dismiss, you know, Extermination camps as some kind of extreme incompetence?
No, right?
Can't do certain things.
So I just wanted to point out that this is actually true of many of the things that we treat as principles.
There's an art to applying them and part of what we are stuck with in modern times Is that we know the aphorisms and people are allowed to apply them in ways that are absurd.
And so I just wanted to go through a list of some that can be misapplied and see how that happens so that we get better at it.
First one I wanted to do was the, um, the Hippocratic Oath.
First do no harm.
This is a principle that they, you swear to it as, as you become a doctor.
Okay.
Do surgeons have to swear to it?
Isn't the first thing they do harm you?
I mean, they cut you open, they cut the thing out of you, and then they sew you back up.
Do a lot of harm.
Right?
They do more good than harm, hopefully.
But there's a lot of harm involved.
And some of it comes first.
So, first do no harm is obviously an appeal to a net impact.
And what's more, doctors have to be in a position to kill you in order to save you.
So it's not even that in each individual case the doctor has made a terrible error if you die.
Maybe the doctor did their best for you and bad luck meant that the repair didn't work.
Right?
But maybe nothing better could have been done and you would have been much worse off for them not trying.
So, first do no harm sounds like, hey, we need doctors not to do any harm.
But doctors do harm in the process of doing net good.
And that's what that means.
Okay, the second one we've talked about in prior discussions is correlation does not imply causation.
This is a widely abused principle.
What it means is that correlation alone Does not imply causation.
It's an observation.
It creates the hypothesis of causation.
But if you have a hypothesis that one thing causes another and you find a correlation that is predicted, it does imply causation.
So doesn't prove causation, but it implies causation.
Strongly implies causation.
And in fact, let's let's take an absurd example here.
As a biologist, do you believe that babies are caused by sex?
I do.
You do?
Even though I have this chart in which I can demonstrate that there is often a period of months where sex seems to drop off right before a baby is produced.
So I think, I think it's abstinence that causes babies.
Oh, yeah.
I see.
You see?
Yeah.
Right.
So anyway, the point is, one needs to be careful.
Correlation does not Prove causation, but you need to apply a logical toolkit in the neighborhood of correlations and causations and pre-existing causal hypotheses that make predictions allow a correlation to imply causation.
So anyway, careful application.
The principle, Jefferson's principle, the government that governs best governs least.
Well, that is an argument that in the wrong hands results in an argument for no government.
It's obviously not what Jefferson meant.
He was obviously involved in an effort to create good governance.
And obviously the principle means that you don't want unnecessary governance.
You want only governance that does good for the governed.
And therefore there ought to be pressure not to add bells and whistles to it without a good reason to believe that they are actually positive.
By the way, you just jump in if you think I'm abusing principles or... No, we're good.
Okay.
The perfect, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
That can become an excuse for really cruddy work.
Right?
You can do better.
There's lots of times when you should let the, um, you should let a drive to make something better.
I mean, just the simple process of prototyping things.
You come up with a lot of garbage-y stuff before you get to the thing that's actually worth having.
And, you know, if you bailed out... The prototyping would seem to follow.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
You don't prototype a lot if you're a perfectionist at every stage of the process.
Well, no, in all of these cases, I believe that the principles wielded by somebody who has a light hand and knows what the limits of their application is, they're all positive.
Right, but what is the counter example for don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
That you will arrest your prototyping process with a junky output.
So the way prototyping obviously works is you create something that proves that you can solve the problem in question, but in, you know, your first prototype tends to be If you're prototyping something that's going to save effort or increase capacity, your first effort takes you a huge amount of effort and eats up a lot of your capacity to produce something that barely works.
And then you go through some process where at some point you create the first in the iterated set that solves, that takes less work to um, to wield it's, it's actually net, it's a net savings.
And there may be a good deal farther than you can go, uh, in that process.
But then there's a point at which you're shooting for perfection, which you can't have you're, you're dealing with trade-offs.
And so, um, the perfect being the, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The failure mode is you accept something that you had a lot more improving that could have been done for a relatively cheap expense.
Um, and instead you accepted some garbagey intermediate that, uh, isn't, isn't very worthwhile.
I guess.
again on the ground it's going to be reasonable people may not agree where that point is of course right and actually that's that's a principle in and of itself is that the line you know when have you done more harm than a doctor should reasonably do in the process of their work well that's a discussion that you would want to have some
Highly intelligent informed people with experience in doctoring try to navigate and you would also want every one of them to have the wisdom to know that you're not going to nail that line, but Today there is risk involved.
There is risk.
Some people will be harmed.
Yep, and there's a question about over what timescale?
All there are all kinds of questions, but the point is look We can agree that many of these lines are going to be extremely difficult to draw, maybe even impossible to draw.
But the idea is, okay, there's the line itself, which is a difficult problem.
And then there are things that are so far from it that we don't have to worry about the fact that the line is difficult to draw.
Right?
When the head of the Secret Service tells you that a shallow roof is too steep to put a sniper on, That's a shocking level of misunderstanding about the job that this person is employed to do.
Right?
It's not like a judgment call.
So... Did they actually invoke OSHA?
Or is it you?
No, that's me invoking OSHA.
I'm trying to make sense of what's being said.
In what way was this roof too steep?
About the only way you could imagine is that... It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.
But I don't, it can't, it can't be OSHA.
No, it can't be OSHA.
But, you know, at least that would be something, right?
You could imagine OSHA.
I mean, I feel like OSHA would step in if your job is to literally make your body the defense of the incoming bullets.
Like, they've got bigger concerns than the pitch of a roof.
I agree.
I mean, it was a very strange thing for her to say.
Okay, another principle that needs to be wielded with care.
Everybody thinks they're the good guy.
That's true for almost everybody, but it ain't true for everybody.
There are people who actually delight in not being the good guy.
They're very rare, but you don't, you know, You can say to somebody, everybody thinks they're the good guy when somebody has imagined dark motives of an opponent who's just simply behaving like a normal human being.
But you don't want to apply that to a psychopath who may delight in doing harm.
So just again, this list is aphorisms, if you will, in which you find general truth, but it's the universal application of these things to all situations to which they could possibly be applied that creates errors, because none of these should be applied universally.
Absolutely.
These things have to be applied by somebody with nuance.
If you just apply them as an absolute rule and you assume the universe always abides by it, you'll trip yourself up.
Here's a fun one.
Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Yep, there's definitely something to that.
On the other hand, there's nuclear transfer cloning.
Is there?
Yeah, you remember nuclear transfer cloning when it was first discovered?
Nuclear transfer cloning was the technology that allowed the cloning of Dolly.
Oh, nuclear transfer.
Nuclear transfer cloning.
And the thing about it was it ended up being not complicated.
What needed to be done was actually pretty straightforward.
You just needed to take the genes from a cell and you needed to.
So just where I even hiccuped as a biologist, like nuclear is the adjectival form here of nucleus.
You're just moving the nucleus of one cell to another.
Yeah, exactly.
Now the, uh, the thing is it, it's very prone to failure, right?
So of course they had to do thousands of attempts before one worked.
Same thing over and over expecting different result.
Well, they did the same thing over and over and they got a different result and it ended up being, you know, a transcendent discovery.
There are worthy things that have an incredibly low rate of success.
Right, exactly.
So, in general, should you keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result?
No, in general, no, but there are cases... But also, I mean, not just that, but also just in In the sphere that everyone has, it's practice.
You know, you start learning to play tennis or play the guitar or bake.
And early on, probably your attempts are not brilliant.
And if you keep with it, if you have any skill at all, and you have tenacity, you are likely to improve.
You are likely to improve.
But it may be a while before you feel any improvement at all, where you are effectively plateaued.
And is the plateau telling you you need to stop now?
You need to give up?
Sometimes, but not inherently.
Right.
So in some sense, the question is, do you know when to deliver this thing and when not to?
When does it apply?
And that's an art.
Knowing when it applies is an art, right?
At some point, you keep trying the same nuclear transfer cloning technique and it doesn't work.
And you've got to say, well, I don't know what blocks this, but it's not a functional technique.
But the amazing thing about it was the incredibly high number of attempts that they had to make before they got one that worked.
But one is all it took.
Okay.
When you hear hoof beats, assume horses and not zebras.
Not a good rule in the Serengeti.
I mean, right?
I imagine.
Um, so I actually think in the Serengeti, um, there's a lot of other things you should assume probably before zebras.
That's a fair point.
Yeah.
Wildebeest, for example.
Sure.
Um, I mean, so the equines are parasitactles.
You got lots of other things that sound like, probably sound like them out there.
Yeah, I am going to defer to experts in equids and other hoofed creatures.
But nonetheless, at least in that case, you're much more likely to encounter striped horses than any other kind.
I guess you could also add the rule for distinguishing a coral snake from a mimic.
Red, then black, poison, lack, red, then yellow, kill a fellow, which is a great rule unless you're in the tropics, at which point the rule fails.
So anyway, I admit when you first started talking about it, I'm like, I hope he doesn't ask me for it because I, as a herpetologist, yeah, I've long ago recognized this was not actually useful.
So I didn't, I didn't bother.
Yeah.
When you spend most of your time in the truck, I mean, I'm sure you don't find a lot of, if I'm going to be running into coral snakes, that's not a useful thing to have in my head.
Right.
And in the Serengeti, you don't find the Maasai saying, well, if you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.
Right.
Right.
I mean, in fact, they would look at you rather quizzically if you made such an assertion.
What is this horse you speak of?
Right.
Okay.
So anyway, that's just, it's just a list and we could go on and on and on finding other things.
But the basic point is, look, you need nuance in this case.
What we really need is, oh, I did want to make one other point, which fits here.
One of the things that is conspicuously absent at this moment from the discussion about the assassination attempt on President Trump is the proper reaction to it amongst the governmental structures and frankly, the news.
Yeah, I've got a little media stuff to share, but go to governmental structures first.
So in both cases, in both the case of the government itself and the news, you would imagine that a failure this jaw-dropping would result in all kinds of questions that need to be answered just to take them off the table.
How does anybody know that this is not a conspiracy from outside?
This level of failure?
Did somebody get into the Secret Service?
Do they have a story to tell that would explain, you know, was there a stand down order?
If so, can we figure out who it came from and figure out whether they were responding to something rational or... So the basic point is, look, people are Using the fact that an allegation that there was a conspiracy points in certain directions.
Who benefits?
But the list of people who potentially benefits is huge.
And you would think that everybody would be interested in, you know, President Biden is under secret service protection.
You would think the Biden administration would be obsessed with figuring out whether there was a problem with that mechanism at this moment.
Right.
They've seen a failure.
Oh, my God.
Does that put the president in danger?
Yeah.
Right.
You would think they would be obsessed with that.
And yes, it's the apparatus that they're hoping to be reliant on for another four and a half years.
Right.
So the absence of that discussion.
Right.
Why is, you know, Secretary Mayorkas not trying desperately to get to the bottom of this and assuring the public that he Well, I mean, maybe he is, and I haven't seen it, but there is a lack of the correct reaction, and that is in and of itself conspicuous.
Yeah, I mean, there's so little shared among us anymore.
In terms of our understanding of what is happening in the world.
And it's far more than two camps.
By and large, we each have our own tiny little spheres that we pay attention to, and anything happening outside of that, or that would appear to contravene the world that we live in, we're unaware of.
Largely, we just never even run into it because of the algorithms and such.
We don't have to make choices anymore.
We used to have to make conscious choices.
I listen to that channel, not that one.
I read this paper, not that paper.
I stand next to the water cooler by that guy, not that guy.
And now, of course, we don't even know when the choices are being made for us.
And so we become reaffirmed and confirmed and, you know, less nuanced over time through the fault of algorithms because the activation energy required to escape from our own little spheres is ever higher.
We are becoming ever more complacent, ever more lazy, ever less likely to seek other things out.
We are actually more polarized, but it's also also becoming more difficult to do so.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the right tool is to discuss where our failures are.
And we should be we should be absolutely united in this.
People on Red, Blue, and Otherwise ought to be obsessed with figuring this out, because our democratic republic depends on the ability to protect people seeking office.
So not to the point with regard to the failures of the security apparatus, but to that larger point.
Zach, would you show that little like 40 second clip of Joy Reid on MSNBC, which I saw because Scott Adams quote tweeted this clip.
Yeah.
And people are concerned and expressing concern that we won't be the guardians of memory.
Hmm.
And that we will allow Donald Trump, as he is, you know, bathed in the glory and grandeur of his party, to rewrite himself as both a hero and a victim.
That people who are the most vulnerable to not just the things he's done, but the things he's promising to do, And that that will then happen without a guardian saying, wait, stop.
And then the media will acquiesce to this rewrite.
And the people that I've been talking to don't accept the rewrite.
That's just an extraordinarily different world that she and the people on the stage there with her are living in.
I don't recognize it.
I can't even tell what is being referred to.
And, you know, there are a few places that are in there, you know, that's what, 30 seconds or so, that are obviously flawed.
she She doesn't want Trump to rewrite himself as a victim.
There was an assassination attempt on the man that missed his head only because he turned it at the last minute.
So this makes—this is This makes no sense at all.
But then there's sort of an ethos of, it's our job as people who you used to call journalists to be the guardians of memory.
But I don't recognize the supposed history that she's talking about.
And I don't know what it is that she claims that Trump did that was so egregious or that he's promising to do.
What are the promises that the people who are so terrified of another Trump presidency think he has made that will destroy?
And I just went back for my natural selections that posted today.
The Atlantic Monthly, their January-February issue of this year, was devoted to—the theme of the issue was If Trump Wins, and they had, I don't know, a couple dozen pieces in which, among other things—I kid you not, and I'll just pull up my own description here.
You don't have to show my screen though.
They say—oh, sorry, it's in my footnote.
I only went snarky in the footnote here.
Some of the answers in the Atlantic Monthly—and this is, you know, before the debate, before the assassination attempt—for what will happen if we get another Trump presidency are that that will destroy journalism.
And science, and quote, instill a culture of fear in classrooms.
Furthermore, that Americans can't handle the chronic stress of another Trump presidency.
Wow.
So, you know, to be fair, this is from six months ago.
That's from six months ago.
I don't know how many of those people writing The Atlantic for the January-February 2024 issue would say those things now.
I suspect a lot of them would, because that clip from Joy Reid is from, you know, today or yesterday.
What are they seeing?
Well, in my opinion, as a non-member of their tribe who Only occasionally runs across the content that they're digesting.
Yeah.
There is a narrative and the narrative involves things like, you know, President Trump said that he would be a dictator on day one.
You know that he said that?
Because he didn't say.
What he said was he joked something like, make me a dictator for one day, right?
Now that is a joke I could make.
I don't believe in dictators, but the idea of, you know, there are some things that you just want to do in order to make the place work that you can't do because the bureaucratic this, that, or the other.
Yeah.
Right.
I tend to use the word king in that place, but fine.
Right.
But the point is it's a joke, right?
Likewise, um, I mean, if we're going to take literally all of the jokes and even possibly linguistic wobbles that people make, I feel like I am both for correct reasons and for these ill-formed reasons much more terrified of what Biden will do because of the absurd claims that he makes because he's not fully conscious anymore.
Absolutely.
Um, but the idea that you've got a person who's itching to be dictator, um, that, you know, uh.
But, but does that, does it hinge on like a couple of these like tropes?
Cause they, they pulled out things that he said and he's scary and mean and bad.
And, and is it a couple of these things or like?
Well, look, Remember what a human being is, right?
We need Plato's allegory of the cave.
And yes, we keep rewriting it in the matrix and the Truman Show and all of these things revive that metaphor for a reason.
You've got a cave wall.
It's high def and it feeds a series of beliefs that are then repeated and discussed as if they make sense and
If you're not looking away, if you're not looking for reason, if you're not looking at that thing and going up to it and scratching it and discovering it's a cave wall, if that's reality, then you don't understand that a game has been played with January 6th.
You don't understand that there's something about the idea, you know, that President Trump being asked what I believe was a trick question
About his willingness to commit to a peaceful transfer of power has been transmuted into he refused to peacefully transfer power Right, so in that world, but I guess I think I'm coming at it from a somewhat different place, which is When I've traveled when we've traveled to places that don't look like home And generally always our language skills in the place where we are are not
They're never fluent in any other languages, although we try.
Yes, we seek wild nature, but we also seek interactions with human beings, and cultural interactions, and, you know, also, you know, food and music and all this.
But, like, interactions with human beings, in part because the fact is that we all have a lot more in common than separates us, and it is our differences that make us interesting to one another.
Um, cross-culturally and just inter-individually.
But, um, if, if you walk into an interaction with someone else and you find them so baffling that you are wondering if they're even human, the reaction should be, what am I, like, what am I missing?
What, what are we failing to do here that I can't recognize that that is, like, what, what is going on in your head?
And so I have, I think I instinctively have that reaction when I see someone Clearly, having received a bunch of information that I can't fathom.
Yes, OK, it's the cave wall.
I want to know who put what on the cave wall, because knowing that will enable me more successfully to interact with those people.
And I can end up, you know, interacting with Joy Reid, but When I interact with the people in day-to-day life, if I can have a better sense of what's actually in their head that makes them seem so inscrutable to me right now, then I have a better chance of actually engaging and potentially Revealing some of the drawings that aren't reality as they think they are.
So I want to know what the things are that are making this so inconceivable.
Okay, I want to try to connect a few dots.
Something very interesting happened yesterday, I guess.
Did you see this thing with Jack Black?
No.
Okay, so for the audience's benefit, Jack Black is a high school classmate of ours.
Jack Black, who is a very funny guy.
I think we all like Jack Black.
And he was funny at 17.
He was funny at 17.
He's hard to dislike.
Yeah.
He also rather famously is a rock musician.
The band Tenacious D is his project.
And Tenacious D was on tour in Australia.
And at the end of a concert yesterday, I guess, um, Jack Black says, Australia, it might've been tomorrow.
We were having a friend.
I was having a conversation with a friend of ours, uh, who is in Australia.
And, um, he said something about it being July.
And I said that here it's still June.
He was like, you know, I had to think about it for a second.
Anyway, Tenacious D, Jack Black was finishing his set and he said something to his bandmate who apparently was having a birthday, that he should make a birthday wish, and the bandmate said something absolutely shocking about next time, don't miss.
Right.
That was... This is public?
Yes.
Well, somebody took video of it.
It was public to the audience, and it got out into the world.
The world went, huh?
And the tour is canceled.
Jack Black has said that he was broadsided by what his bandmates said.
All plans for Tenacious D are off.
My guess is this is the end of the band.
But the point is, I think it is exactly what you were describing, that somebody who is used to circulating in a milieu in which the received wisdom is that, you know, President Trump is a threat to democracy itself, that that is terrifying fact, that were he to take office, you know, everyone's anxiety would go through the roof.
We wouldn't know what danger we're in, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.
When your social circle is all watching the same cave wall.
Yeah.
And then you step out and you don't even realize you've done it because these people are like Americans except that they have a funny accent.
And you don't realize that the things that you've been saying to your friends and they've been laughing are absolutely beyond the pale.
Yeah.
No, and Libs of TikTok did a good job of collecting a bunch of these These people online who were saying exactly that.
Next time don't miss.
I wish he hadn't missed.
And a lot of them are like government employees, faculty members.
Who says this?
Well, who thinks that?
Right.
Who thinks that?
Who who thinks that says it to anyone?
Right.
Who who thinks that and says that to anyone puts it on Twitter?
Like, not only are these people Really deeply embedded in a farcical cave wall that is dangerous to humanity, but they're also dim.
So maybe that's not right.
It's just like, so maybe that's not right.
Maybe they're not.
Maybe the point that you're making about the cave wall is like, no, you really, I don't know how you can think that if you put it on Twitter, only the people who agree with you will see it.
Like, I don't, I don't understand that.
They don't understand that there are other people who believe things, people who think other things.
Right.
But I feel on Twitter of all places, everyone notes that there are, that there are people who believe the opposite thing, regardless of what it is.
No, no, no.
We are, okay.
We are living in a cave of mirrors.
Okay?
Okay.
The problem is there are many cave walls of various different kinds and I want to connect a couple things that we've seen and that we know from elsewhere.
One thing is that Michaela Peterson and Jordan Peterson have recently tripped over something that you and I were discussing months ago.
Okay, we were discussing Nazi Twitter.
And Nazi Twitter, whether that's the right name for it or not, is something that I tripped over.
I tripped an algorithm by speaking about Nazi stuff And that algorithm, I think, misunderstood what I would want to see.
And so it started feeding me stuff from a part of Twitter that doesn't show up on my screen, right?
And so the discovery that it exists, that these people are talking to each other, you know, that they have a culture and that, you know, there are factions and all of that was shocking to me when I saw it.
And then to watch somebody else trip over it, it's like, oh, The barrier between the various cave walls is such that you can easily not know that you're sitting right next to somebody who's watching a whole different movie.
And so, A, that's just something we have to be aware of.
You know, Jack Black and his bandmate tripped over something because they didn't realize... Jack Black didn't say it.
He didn't.
I do.
First of all, let me just say, Jack, if you want to talk about this, I would be happy to talk to you about it.
It's not a gotcha thing, but I do think there is something for all of us to learn in the experience you've just had.
And I would be interested in that discussion.
So please reach out if you're willing to have it.
And continue that conversation from Ojai so many years ago.
Yeah, we can pick up our conversation from Ojai so many years ago in which you told me that you were going to be a huge Hollywood star with no arrogance in your voice.
You just were telling me matter of factly that was your plan and you were sure you were going to pull it off and you did.
So congratulations.
But, um.
But anyway, it's such a weird aside.
But okay, so it's a, it's a, a, um, a cave.
What did I say?
Oh, a cave of mirrors.
A cave of mirrors.
It's a cave of mirrors.
Yeah.
It's a cave of mirrors.
Hall of mirrors though.
Also wall of mirrors.
It's a cave wall of mirrors.
But anyway, so you can be watching one movie and because you're sitting next to somebody, you assume they're seeing the same movie and they may be seeing a very different movie, or they may be seeing a variation on the movie that you're seeing, which is even more confusing.
But, okay, I want to make an argument about the blue team.
I make a point, although I am a registered Democrat, I don't vote for these people anymore, I don't trust them, and I retain my status as a Democrat so that when I complain about them it actually causes people to think.
But I don't.
Well, maybe it only takes one of us.
But yeah, no, I just I couldn't I didn't register as a Democrat.
We moved back to Washington.
Yeah, a couple years ago.
I mean, you know, the party has become something else.
And the question is, what has it become?
Yeah.
I wanted to point to a couple of things.
One, I don't even remember if I showed it on a past stream, but Van Jones had an interaction On camera with a bunch of other people in which he after the debate before the assassination attempt and after the Biden debate He said to his colleagues, you know, we're having one discussion on TV and then behind the scenes We're having a very different discussion.
I think that was a window into what's going on the people who make the movie on the cave wall and Are also watching a cave wall, but it's a different cave wall and their job even though their job is supposed to be to elucidate what's going on in the world, they're actually producing a fiction for their audience and subject to a fiction on their own cave wall.
I wanted to point out as well that among the reasons to be concerned about things like this assassination attempt potentially meaning more than lone gunmen exploited an embarrassing lapse of security.
is that we know President Trump talks about the Deep State.
The Deep State is a fraught topic.
When I was in Las Vegas at Freedom Fest, I was on a panel with Angela McArdle, the head of the Libertarian Party, and we were discussing the Deep State and I knew that this was going to happen.
There were four of us panelists and there was a Uh, distinction, what the four panelists meant by deep state was different.
I knew it was going to be.
There's this belief that deep state is, um, the vast bureaucratic apparatus that does not turn over with every administration.
That is indeed a very important phenomenon.
It wields real power.
It's not what somebody like Trump means when he talks about the deep state.
He's talking about something that is involves the intelligence community.
The military-industrial complex it obviously has international connections through things like the five eyes We can debate whether it exists, but the point is it's it's a different thing now to the extent that there is a deep state that involves the intelligence apparatus We know from history because it has been exposed that the intelligence apparatus has investigated
Mind control using things like hallucinogenic drugs.
The MKUltra project was about mind control.
So when you have a lone gun nut, is that all you've got?
Well, that rather depends.
Are they downstream of somebody's project to control minds?
Did somebody steer them this way or not?
And, you know, steering them that way wouldn't... They wouldn't necessarily know that they were even working for somebody, right?
If there was such a project.
Project Mockingbird.
That was a project to control the press, right?
Now these things were officially disbanded, but what does that even mean?
You're talking about clandestine organizations that disbanded programs that embarrassed them.
Did they rename them?
Are the programs really gone?
Do those programs have descendants that we don't know the names of?
We don't know.
And so anyway, the sum total of all of that is we have a We have a failure for events to add up.
Those events have profound consequences for how we are governed.
Governed that affect who will be winners and who will be losers and under what principles we will live.
And therefore the stakes are so high that we have to assume there are many people who would alter the landscape of available candidates if they had the power.
Most people don't have the power because presumably the security is good enough to prevent it, but then we have conspicuous failures.
Why did Secretary Mayorkas deny Bobby Kennedy Secret Service protection until after the near assassination of President Trump?
That was conspicuous.
Many of us noticed it.
That's an absurd thing to do.
In fact, the Secret Service protection was extended to presidential candidates in the aftermath of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy Sr.
in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
That's where that principle came from.
The presidential candidates need to be covered by the Secret Service because of precisely this vulnerability.
For Mayorkas to deny that coverage to Bobby Kennedy, There's an obvious question about why someone would do such a thing.
I don't know the answer.
Presumably, well, I don't want to presume anything.
I don't think we have to presume anything.
I think we have to be entitled to investigate all possibilities.
It would certainly be natural if Secretary Mayorkas Was as concerned as the rest of us about what happened on Saturday and motivated to get to the bottom of it rather than motivated to cover the failure of people who are under him and his organization.
But I don't know.
I guess we'll see.
I think we have reached the end of what I was hoping to cover.
All right.
We're going to skip some of the other stuff until next week, but I had, well, actually, I was going to read two poems.
I want to just read one, but I want to share.
So I have some poems in Natural Selections today.
If you're interested in poetry at the moment, go there.
One of them is from this beautiful book, Sustenance and Desire.
I'll try to read it off the screen here.
I just blocked my face.
Sustenance and Desire, a food lover's anthology of sensuality and humor.
Edited with paintings by Bess Goves.
A really beautiful book by this wonderful publisher, Godin.
But I'm not going to read that one today.
I've just got a poem from, and this is just a collection from Garrison Keillor from when he was doing the Writer's Almanac.
Pre-cancellation, I guess.
It's called The Iceberg Theory.
And you're not gonna, it doesn't have, I don't think it has a rhyming meter, so it's not one of the poems that you're gonna love, but I think you'll still appreciate it.
I set a pretty high bar for a free verse, but you know.
The Iceberg Theory by Gerald Laughlin All the food critics hate iceberg lettuce.
You'd think romaine was descended from Orpheus' laurel wreath.
You'd think raw spinach had all the nutritional benefits attributed to it by Popeye, not to mention aesthetic subtleties worthy of Verlaine and WC.
They'll even salivate over chopped red cabbage, just to disparage poor old Mr. Iceberg Lettuce.
I guess the problem is it's just too common for them.
It doesn't matter that it tastes good, has a satisfying crunchy texture, holds its freshness, and has crevices for the dressing, whereas the darker, leafier varieties are often bitter, gritty, and flat.
It just isn't different enough, and it's too goddamn American.
Of course, a critic has to criticize, a critic has to have something to say.
Perhaps that's why literary critics purport to find interesting so much contemporary poetry that just bores the shit out of me.
At any rate, I really enjoy a salad with plenty of chunky iceberg lettuce, the more the merrier, drenched in an Italian or Roquefort dressing, and the poems I enjoy are those I don't have to pretend that I'm enjoying.
This feels like, um, that poem and this moment feels like it could be a wake-up call to all the over-educated elites who are certain that the cave wall they've been looking at is reality.
And maybe, maybe leave the cave just for a little bit.
Take a look at some of the other things that are around you.
Yeah, well, I mean, you pointed to a... by the way, I did like that poem.
It's tough for free verse to cross the threshold, but that one works.
The key, really, as you and I have been doing for quite some time, is dare to be honest with people that you like that you know disagree with you.
And expect the same from them.
And then, when you discover that your disagreements are utterly profound, hash out why.
What is how could two people living on the same planet come to such different conclusions?
You will be shocked at what you discover absolutely shocked.
It's It's not as hard as you think and it's actually frankly one of the great privileges That you can experience as a human being is when somebody else lets you look through their eyes.
It really is a tremendous privilege.
And, um, if you can, uh, engage in a reciprocal agreement, I let you look through my eyes.
If you let me look through yours, then you will, you will come to discover that you're sitting next to somebody who's watching a different movie and then you can get to discussing, well, why would that be?
Right?
What kind of world is it that two people sitting next to each other are watching a different movie?
Right?
Yeah.
It raises questions.
It does.
Walking a mile in someone else's eyes.
It's good.
All right.
I think that's it for this week.
No Q&A this week.
We'll be back next week on Wednesday rather than Tuesday.
Go to the darkhorsepodcast.org website to get updates and links to all of our stuff.
I don't know if you have any store stuff to show.
Nope.
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