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overcoming learned helplessness

TRANSCRIPT (by speechpad) Hi. This is Jaime Escuder and welcome to another episode of None Sense. I like to drive. I’ve always been kind of fascinated with mechanical things, and engines in particular are really fascinating. I just love the idea of having sort of a powerful thing like an engine under my control. And just the whole sensation of kind of moving through space quickly like that and, again, having that sort of power at one’s command is just a lot of fun. I remember (my mother doesn’t know this), I once went drag racing on the Courtney Campbell Causeway in Tampa just the one time (and I’m a lawyer now, so I think I feel safe talking about this because I know the statute of limitations has passed on this), but I just did it the one time but it was exhilarating and I’m not at all advocating that anyone do this, but the fact of the matter is in my final moments when my life flashes before my eyes I’m just gonna remember the sensation of that. But it’s more than that. There’s a great deal in the U.S. actually that’s just off limits, if you think about it. All these places we can’t go. For example, where I live in Texas it’s a very beautiful place and it’s wide open with huge expanses, but it’s all walled off and it’s inaccessible to me unless I were willing to, you know, climb a fence or trespass or whatever. And, of course, other countries have different rules about this. Other countries have a lot more leniency with regard to people exploring. In fact, I think Finland is famous for having these rules of like this idea that wandering is allowed. And it’s understood that you can kind of walk the country. It’s your county and you can kind of walk it, and so long as you don’t do damage or even allowed to sort of camp out on private property and stuff. Well, you know, not here in the United States. We’re not really allowed a lot of places. But the roads are public. You know, the roads are a place where you’re allowed to be. And so I always kind of…even looking at a map, and I’m kind of obsessed with maps, looking at the roads, to me those lines indicate the zones of freedom that I’m allowed to explore in my car. And, you know, it’s a big country, of course, that we live in, but really, if…and I’ve actually met people who’ve done this, if you wanted to, you could explore the whole country. You could explore, you know, Acadia National Park and the great, you know, coasts and shorelines of both coasts, and then the Rocky Mountains and the deserts. And an engine allows you to do that. And so the point is I like driving. And why am I talking about this? It’s because I’ve talked before about artificial intelligence and all this stuff, but it seems to me that one of the things that we’re really desperate or eager or just so focused on developing is this thing called the self-driving car. In fact, just the other day I read an article about how Google has in fact developed a special kind of computer chip specifically developed to AI called a “tensor processing unit,” which I don’t know anything about other than I’m gathering that it’s a very powerful computer chip. And the express purpose, one of the express purposes of developing these hyper-intelligent computer chips is to allow for driverless cars. So I just want to take a moment to pause and think about…and I think maybe the driverless car thing is a good kind of prism through which to look at this, but to think about what we give up for what we gained. Because I’ve noticed there’s really a balance to everything in this universe and nothing is gained without something else being lost. And sometimes the things that are lost are worth it and maybe the tradeoff is worth it, but I always think it’s a good idea to maybe think about that before we just rush headlong into one thing. So driverless cars, I think the benefits are great. Right? We know that it’ll reduce accidents, maybe even eliminate accidents. And you can read. Right? You could take a nap. You get in the car and you plug in your sister’s address, you know, who live six hours away or something and then you just kind of chill out and watch the scenery, and that’s fine. Except, what do you give up? First of all, you know, you give up information. So nothing happens in computers that someone else doesn’t know about. And I think that’s something that we don’t…we like to pretend isn’t necessarily the case, we just kind of turn that off. But like, for example, Netflix tracks you. Right? Because they want to know what to market to you and stuff like that. So if you watch a show, Netflix knows. And they even track, I read that…or I heard that they even track sort of when you watch and what you watch. So for example, you know, I guess that’s okay. It’s not so bad that…you know, I’m a huge fan of nature shows. So I’ve been watching “Planet Earth II” which is incredible. And I guess it’s okay that people know that I’ve been watching “Planet Earth II”. But, you know, maybe I don’t necessarily want people at Netflix HQ to know that I’ve kind of rewound a few times over the naked sword fight in “Altered Carbon”. Right? If I want to watch it, you know, they’re gonna know. Okay. But what about the information that my car travels carry? Maybe I don’t want anyone to know where I go all the time, and maybe I do. I’m not going anywhere inappropriate but it’s just nice to know that when I get into my car, again, and this ties to the roads, you know? There’s a sense of kind of freedom, there’s a sense of possibility. If I wanted to on a whim, let’s say I’ve got court somewhere. Let’s say I’ve got court in Pecos, Texas and let’s say out of whim I decided I wanted to keep going because I’ve never been to the northern part of the state or something, or I wanted to go see what it’s like in New Mexico. I could just go. And I guess what I’m saying is just thinking all about the information that we’d giving up, where we go, when. There’s this really interesting moment that I’ve never forgotten in the movie, “Minority Report” which is not a great movie, but where the person…they have self-driving cars and the police issue a warrant for the person’s arrest. And so the car just locks itself, the windows go up, the doors lock and it starts driving itself to the police station. Do you really want to live in a world like that? And then there’s just kind of the freedom, the freedom of just being alone in a car and doing things that are not monitored. It’s an unmonitored space. And I want to talk about that kind of in two ways. First of all, there is a joy to driving. There is. Cars are amazing and they’ve gotten less amazing as sort of we’ve gotten more regulated, and as I say they’ve gotten less amazing, it’s also probably true that they’ve gotten more safe. But it’s also true that the safer you make something the more boring it becomes. I remember I kind of fell in love, I was watching the show called, “Victory by Design” which was a series where this guy takes you kind of through the history of different famous automakers like Ferrari and Alfa Romeo and Jaguar. And I just became obsessed and fell in love with Maseratis. And these old Maseratis were just so unsafe. I mean, the early ones didn’t even have like a windshield, they were the old cars that someone had to go in front and crank the engine and the driver had these goggles and it just looked awesome. It just looked awesome. I mean it’s like I would just want to drive one of these cars. And it got me thinking about how much fun it really is to kind of rocket through with the wind and sort of just, you know, it just made me think how driving, it became something that was just really exhilarating and exciting and you have like the 24 Hours of Le Mans and these great races. And, of course, you can go too far, I mean, you know, ask T.E. Lawrence how his addiction to speed panned out. But, you know, there’s a big difference between that and then just making it sort of like the thing that you throw, you know, these big sort of boxed things that we all have now where you just kind go throw in your kids and, you know, the equipment for the beach and it’s just kind of a way to get from A to B. And the actual travel isn’t something to look forward to. Well, I mean that really becomes the case if you have driverless cars where you just don’t get to enjoy the thrill or sensation of driving anymore. And there’s this other thing, we have to be careful about automating things because things that are automated don’t have…there’s no freedom or liberty for you, the person, to explore, I guess to explore, to deviate. I recently read something by a guy named Alan Westin who was a law professor at Columbia and who wrote a book in 1967 called, “Privacy and Freedom” and it has some interesting ideas. One of the reasons to read these people and to read kind of books about something that you think you understand, for example, like privacy. When I say privacy I think we all have kind of a general sense of what that means. But one of the reasons to read other people’s thoughts on something that we already considered to be kind of a fully understood thing is it might help us understand things even more in a more substantive, more nuanced way. And I’m gonna get back to the original idea I was talking about Westin. But for example, I thought I kind of had a good sense of privacy bu

“Novotna produced one of the defining sporting moments of the 1990s when she stumbled in sight of victory against Steffi Graf, and then dampened the Duchess of Kent’s shoulder with her tears.” Related: “I told her we were both just very ill and needed to let other people help us sometimes.”

In this episode, I discuss how I, as a none, contend with grief. MICHIKO DEAD Día de los Muertos a log wind-blown plywood Nevermore.

This episode was inspired by an article I read about the race to develop artificial intelligence. It reminded me of a story that I heard about Jospeh Heller, which got me thinking about the concept of enough. References Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent Vonnegut on Heller on Enough 6,200 Pairs of Shoes A $248,000 Tree House 30,000,000 to 8,000 as peanuts are served today 4,000,000 to 0 by accident 0 to 4,000 600 times more powerful than paper clips to end the world cowboys v. spacemen (Boulding’s original paper here) freedom, books, flowers, and the moon incredibly lucky the great filter Men standing with pile of buffalo skulls, Michigan Carbon Works Transcript Hi, this is Jaime Escuder. And welcome to another episode of None Sense. I read a headline this morning and it reminded me of something, a story that I once heard about Kurt Vonnegut. And so, I’m gonna talk to you about all of that. Here’s the headline, “Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent: Nearly all big tech companies have an artificial intelligence project. And they are willing to pay experts millions of dollars to help get it done.” Okay. And here is the Vonnegut story. This is Vonnegut speaking. “True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer, now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, ‘Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch 22 has earned in its entire history?’ And Joe said, ‘I’ve got something he can never have.’ And I said, ‘What on earth could that be, Joe?’ And Joe said, ‘The knowledge that I’ve got enough.'” This podcast today is going to be about the idea of enough. Enough is something that people really don’t do. We are avaricious and greedy. Most of us are demented, as Walt Whitman said, “with the mania of owning things.” This is why Imelda Marcos had over 1,200 pairs of shoes. This is why a guy named Dan Burnham spent $248,000 on a tree house for his grandkids. “Adorable and worth every penny,” said Mr. Burnham. And we are rapacious. This is a thing that we do: we develop technologies, and then we abuse them. There used to be, think about this, 30 million buffalo in North America. Do you know how many un-hybridized buffalo there are in America right now? There’s a general population of 500,000. So, down from 30 million to 500,000. That’s an astonishing decline. [98.4%] But of those, you know how many are un-hybridized, meaning the actual buffalo that were here originally? 8,000. [0.026%] Here’s another example. Did you know that the United States used to be the largest producing caviar exporter in the world? And that the caviar was of exceptionally high quality? This is from a website I found on the history of caviar. This is the quote, “There was so much American caviar being produced in North America at the time (so around the turn of the 20th century) that bars would serve the salty delicacy to encourage more beer drinking, as peanuts are served today.” At the turn of the 19th century, there was more caviar going to Europe from North America than from Russia. At that time, there were roughly 4 million pounds of sturgeon being harvested from the Great Lakes per year and now, virtually gone. I’m mentioning this because it’s the concept…it’s the idea that we don’t accept the concept of enough, as Joseph Heller did, that causes us to do things like fracking. And it’s also the idea that we don’t accept the fact that we have limitations, that we cannot be trusted with these technologies as we develop them that causes us to create things like nuclear weapons, which we then do things like leave them unguarded. They’ve been flown across the country by accident. [Same incident.] They’ve been overbuilt. We have…there’s something like 4,000 nuclear weapons in the American arsenal. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/811977223326625792 [For the record, that tweet above is sheer madness. It’s also missing a period; can you believe it?] And more than that, not only have we built too many of them, we built far too powerful of them. The bomb that was dropped in Hiroshima killed 80,000 people instantly. And yet there was a bomb in Arkansas, and there’s a show about this, an American experience called “Command and Control” where this nuclear weapon almost detonated in Arkansas. And it was 600 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Just think about the folly of even developing one such weapon, let alone thousands of those weapons, and that’s what we’ve done. And why am I thinking about this in relation to this article I read about tech companies just in a race to develop artificial intelligence? And the reason is, this is another technology, even more so possibly, some people think that nuclear weapons that is completely capable of destroying us. And rather than acting with circumspection and hesitation and restraint, you have one company. Google’s Deep Mind, which is their A.I. arm, paying on average $375,000 per employee to develop this stuff. Now, I know that there are potentially lots of wonderful benefits to A.I. There are medical benefits. There’s the whole self-driving cars thing. And most importantly, and let’s not forget this, there is the fact that it’s going to make some people incredibly rich. But there are also risks. For example, there’s a famous example given by a guy named Nick Bostrom who’s done a lot of thinking about the risks of A.I. It’s called the paperclip maximizer example. And he wrote a paperback in 2003, in which he said this, “It seems perfectly possible to have a superintelligence,” and that’s what we’re talking about with the development of A.I. because we have A.I. now. It’s in our phones. For example, when you take a picture of someone on your phone and there’s that little box that identifies the person’s face, well that’s A.I. at work. We already have A.I. that you can literally hold in the palm of your hand. But what these companies and that’s not enough. I get that’s the point of what I’m saying. We already have A.I. but they have decided that that’s not enough. They want super intelligent A.I. And Bostrom says, “It seems perfectly possible to have a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to manufacture as many paperclips as possible. And who would resist with all its might any attempt to alter this goal with the consequence that it starts transforming first all of earth, and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities.” In this example, let’s say we think we’re doing something innocuous. We just wanna test the A.I., and we decide to give it the task of manufacturing paperclips. And it determines, “Great, I’m gonna make as many as possible.” And I’m not a scientist and I’m not a biologist. I don’t know. I’m just making stuff up here because I’m not super intelligent. But it could easily decide, “You know, the best atmosphere for paperclip manufacture is a carbon-rich atmosphere. There’s too much oxygen in this atmosphere.” So, it acts to cut down all the trees. Destroy all the trees, or it decides, “People are actually in the way of my paperclip production. I need to get rid of them,” or it decides, “We need lots of water to make paperclips.” And so it starts polluting the water. We can’t even predict what it might do. When do we ever stop and acknowledge the fact that we actually cannot be trusted with technology? Because if we could, then maybe, there would still be, some buffalo around. When do we stop and say the average lifespan right now is 80 years and that’s enough? When do we stop and say, “It’s okay for me to drive myself? That’s enough.” Is it not reasonable to say that any technology that has the potential of destroying all civilization? That’s too much. There’s a guy named Kenneth Boulding. He was an economist. He was a lot of things. He was a real polymath. He was an economist, and a poet, and everything. In 1966, he wrote a paper called “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.” He said, “We need to start rethinking about our planet, and we need to re-imagine it from an open system to a closed system.” And he called these the differences between a cowboy economy and a spaceman economy. He said, “The cowboy economy was symbolic of the illimitable plains, and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior. But the closed economy of the future, which we can call the spaceman economy, we have to think about the earth as becoming a single spaceship without unlimited reservoirs of anything. Either for extraction or for pollution and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical, ecological system.” Before we develop certain technologies, let’s say, for example, fracking. It was okay to dig around in the earth and take out as much as we could, because we couldn’t possibly take everything or, for example, before we developed the rifle. It was okay to hunt as many buffalo as possible because it was just not possible to kill 30 million individual buffalo. But when the railroads came, and the rifle came, and all of these things came, it was possible and we did it. As we stand now on the cusp of another thing that we’re frantically developing, A.I., and we’re not even pausing at all to look at how it potentially really could destroy us all. I wish there was more discussion of what enough is. Oscar Wilde said, “With freedom, books, flowers and the moon, who could not be happy?” Unfortunately, it seems like, there’s a lot of people. And I think the reason is they’re not looking at the things that they have already. Because if they did, they would see that really, it is enough. And the other thing is they only look at the possible benefits of the thing, never considering that the negatives are real and also likely. I wanna go back to Nick Bostrom for a minute. He has this other interesting idea called the great filter. He was thinking about why we have not found any signs of extraterrestrial life. And he has a simple idea. And the idea is the reason we haven’t found any is because none of it exists. And the reason it doesn’t exist is because at some point in the development of all intelligent life, it’s possible that they must invent something that leads to their destruction. “It’s not far-fetched,” he says, “to suppose that there might be some possible technology which is such that A, virtually all sufficiently advanced civilizations eventually discover it and B, its discovery leads almost universally to existential disaster.” Now, it’s my belief that most likely the discovery of nuclear weapons is that thing for mankind. I think it’s just incredibly lucky that in the decades since we discovered nuclear weapons, there has not been some catastrophic, cataclysmic thing that’s happened, that’s led to just the destruction of all life. If it’s not nuclear weapons, there is at least the possibility that it is artificial intelligence, a thing that we are rushing headlong into the development of. And maybe, just maybe, the mere possibility that it is that ought to be enough for us to say enough. Thank you as always for listening.

In this episode, I explain why I believe that packing the courts with conservative jurists, as Trump and McConnell plan to do, will cause us to lose our rights. I also talk about John Rawls and Alexander Hamilton. What do they have in common?  They both think that you shouldn’t make rules for other people without expecting them to apply to yourself. Also, they both liked rap. (Actually, I’m not so sure about that rap thing.) References Suicide by Elevator 5th Cir.: Dirty Mexicans Are Suspicious The Right to Remain Silent Does Not Include Remaining Silent An Eye For Not An Eye “Expert“: Black People Are More Violent Than White People The Veil of Ignorance Federalist 78

My solution to the gun violence problem. (It’s not what you think.) CORRECTION: In this episode, I claim that the population density of Cook County, Illinois is 9,000 people per square mile. This is incorrect. It’s about 5,500 per square mile. My claim that Brewster County’s population density is 1.3 people per square mile was closer. It’s actually 1.5. Transcript (by speechpad.com): Hi. This is Jaime Escuder. Welcome to another episode of None Sense. Let’s talk about guns. You know, I don’t really wanna talk about guns, but guns seems to be a particular problem in my country in that we have these endless horrible mass shootings that keep happening over and over again. And I think maybe we ought to talk about why. (I know that the gun debate is not something that’s at all new but I think it’s important. And I haven’t really waited on it and so I’m gonna do that.) I’m gonna do that by starting off with a surprise. And this is the surprise, I’m a very liberal … well, this is not the surprise … I’m a very liberal person. Super liberal. I think that … I mean, if I could wave my magic wand, I would legalize virtually every victimless crime, so prostitution, drug use, whatever. I think we live in a far too criminalized society. America is an over-criminalized, “overruled,” I like to say, country. And I’m very liberal in that way and I think that people should just be allowed to do stuff so long as there’s not a victim. And when I talk like that, people naturally assume that I’m a Democrat, which is true. And, of course, every Democrat is a big proponent of gun control, right? Well, not me. I’m actually not a big gun control guy and this is very surprising to people who, after they get to know me a while when they learn this about me, it’s a shock to them and it’s somewhat disappointing to them. So I wanna explain why, and then maybe because, yes, I’m a Democrat but I’m not a big gun control Democrat, those of you who are skeptical of what I’m about to say might be a little bit more willing to listen. So, I’m not a gun control guy, number one, because I like freedom. I think people should be allowed to do stuff. And I think one of those things is if you wanna be a gun collector or own guns, I can understand why you would wanna do that. Guns are actually pretty amazing machines if you think about it. They don’t require batteries or electricity, they just kind of harness the laws of physics and chemistry to function and that’s a rare thing. And I’m not a gun owner, I’m not a gun nut, but I can see, you know, it’s a rare thing, it’s a rare instrument that sort of functions merely out of alignment with the laws of nature. And a gun does and that’s kind of amazing and so I could see how, for historical reasons and just kind of neat mechanical reasons, why people might wanna own guns. And more importantly, even if couldn’t see that, I just think people should be allowed to be free in a free country and so one of the things you should be allowed to do is have guns. The other thing is I’m not at all blind to the fact that guns have their uses. The police in these types of situations … there was just a mass shooting, like, I think I may have mentioned, in Las Vegas. I think the last count was 58 people dead … in these kinds of situations, so Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech etc., the police always get there too late. Now, that’s not to blame the police, there’s no way they could know it ahead of time but it’s gonna take them some minutes to get there. And if, in that time, the only person with a gun in a room full of people is the guy who’s killing people, that’s how you get to numbers like 58 people or whatever the number was at the Pulse Nightclub, dozens of people killed. So there’s a value I recognize to having guns in places where this is gonna happen. And then the 3rd thing is, gun control is … even the very concept of gun control is completely ignorant of the fact that it absolutely will not work just in terms of the reality of the existence of guns in this country. I think there was an estimate I saw, there’s 300 million guns in this country. That’s actually more guns, there are actually more guns in the United States of America than there are people. Another article that I read was that the killer in Las Vegas used this thing called a “bump stock” which is something I never heard of before, but I guess it’s some sort of attachment or mechanism that you can attach to a gun. And that turns it essentially into a machine gun or a rapid-fire gun. And so, now, there’s all sorts of talk about banning these things. And the article I read was essentially how they’re already selling out in anticipation of them being banned. Would-be owners are already buying them and they are already selling out. So who knows how many thousands or tens of thousands or millions of bump stocks are already out there even if you were to ban them? And so that’s one of the things, one of the mistakes that I think people in general make and that legislators like to pretend: that somehow legislating a fact changes the reality of that fact. And they don’t. Murder is illegal. It’s been illegal in this country ever since the beginning. I think it’s probably been illegal in every country all over earth. Guess what? At this very moment, there’s a murder happening somewhere. The mere outlawing of a thing doesn’t prevent it. The mere banning of a gun isn’t gonna prevent guns from the flow of commerce any more than it prevents the flow of marijuana or any of the other drugs from commerce. So, there’s a dose of reality that has to be attached to the gun debate that I think is often missing in this whole legalize or ban guns debate that we’re having. Having said that, I’m not ignorant at the fact that maybe there are some guns out there, in fact, there are some guns out there that maybe people really shouldn’t have, like these assault weapon type of guns. You know, I don’t want my neighbor, my neighbor shouldn’t be allowed to have a pet hippopotamus. I don’t think they should be allowed to be secretly building and even not so secretly building a nuclear bomb in their garage. Some things are just simply too dangerous. And I think certain types of guns certainly wouldn’t fit that description so I think the idea of having some sort of meaningful debate about what kinds of guns should be normally allowed in society is a good one to have. And I also recognize that that’s not an easy debate or conversation to have and that we could have a whole, I could devote a whole show to that and not have any answers. And so I’m not gonna do that now, I’m gonna save that maybe for later, probably for never, but for today, I’m just gonna say that I’m not an outright ban all guns guy even though I’m probably the most liberal person that you’ve either met or never met. A more important harder thing to do is to ask: why do these things keep happening? And if we accept that it’s not because, and I’m gonna talk more about this in a moment, it’s not just because there are guns in the world because as you know, there’s guns in other countries like Canada and yet they don’t have this problem. Why does the United States have this problem? Let’s start first by analyzing the fact that these things are done by people who not only value the lives of others so little enough to kill them, but they also hate their own lives. Because one thing that always happens to these cases is the person gets killed. This is going happen. Actually, my understanding is that this guy in Las Vegas may have had some sort of escape plan or some sort of delusion that he was gonna escape. He didn’t, he was killed. And clearly, he must have known that that was a possibility. So what is it in these people’s lives or what is it that’s lacking in these people’s lives that makes them decide, “I wanna die. I wanna kill people and then I wanna die.” There’s a guy named Charlie Hoehn, who did a blog post, who suggested some possible reasons why this Las Vegas thing happened. And one is simply that maybe he was lonely. And I think that’s maybe a conversation, an important conversation that we need to have in this country. Former Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, actually said that loneliness is reaching an epidemic proportion in this country. And he wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review in which he said that 40% of adults in America report feeling lonely. Now, actually, especially I think for men and I think I can say this because I am a guy, it’s not okay or acceptable or something that it feels safe to be able to go to anyone and say, “I’m lonely.” And yet we know that it exists and we know that many people have it and there’s many causes of it. And I think one of the causes of it is we take each other for granted. Even people that we have in our lives that we maybe see every day or are close to, we kind of don’t inquire into their feelings as people. I have a little story about this. I live right now in far West Texas in a very sparsely populated part of the country. But I moved here from a place called Oak Park, Illinois, which is in Cook County, Illinois, which is where Chicago is. And it has a population density, Cook County does, of about 9,000 [correction: the actual number is abut 5,000] people per square mile. That’s a lot of people per square mile. And I lived in a building with other people. And I’m not, I’m just as guilty of this as

This is my tribute to Tom Petty, who was great. Transcript: Hi, this is Jaime Escuder and welcome to None Sense. Tom Petty has died. When I heard that, I, of course, was sad because I liked Tom Petty. He seemed like a really, you know, honestly, a really cool guy. Like an original guy who was kind of uncompromising and just was who he was, and put out the music that he wanted to put out, and said what he wanted to say, and just seemed like the sort of guy who would just be a cool friend. And so, when I first heard that news, there was sadness and a sense of loss, and there were really two feelings that I think, two things that I really felt that as I thought about him some more really kind of grow out of my identity as a member of Generation X, which is to say, someone, who is around 40 years old and who is now kind of entering what Jung called the “Afternoon of Life.” The first thing that I thought about, that came to me, was the fact that the old guard that maybe we always thought would be here and that maybe we couldn’t really conceive of not being here, is leaving. Tom Petty is gone, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Douglas Adams, Michael Jackson. I mean, I remember thinking not even be able to imagine a world without Michael Jackson, just thinking Michael Jackson to be around forever. But, guys, Madonna turns 60 next August. So what that really means is the old guard is gone and we are becoming the old guard. We are stepping into the role heretofore played by our parents. Which is to say we are becoming managers of the world. Now, it doesn’t seem like it because baby boomers still very much seem to have the helm of the world, but that’s not going to last much longer. The truth is that one of the aspects of being in the afternoon of life is navigating the surprising and surreal effect of people that you always kind of relied upon or expected to be there disappearing and moving on. And perhaps the biggest example of that is as we enter our afternoon, our parents are entering their evening and even entering their night. In fact, I mean, both of my parents are actually older than Tom Petty was when he died. So that’s the first thing that hearing about this death made me feel. It’s a sort of terrifying sensation of being left to go it alone. I mean, we’re losing our guides, we’re losing our Obi-Wans, our Gandalfs, our Dumbledors. And we have been forced across the line of departure, like it or not, ready or not. Now, there’s nothing unusual or unnatural about that. It’s a process that every single generation has to go through. It’s what our parents went through when their parents entered that phase. But when you are personally going through it, it changes things a little bit. It’s one thing to read about it or just to intellectually know that it’s something that happens or that it’s inevitable that it will happen to you. But when you’re actually doing it and you wake up in the morning and you read the news that Tom Petty is dead, it’s as I said, it’s terrifying and sad, and it’s a little unsettling. And the second thing that struck me when I heard about Tom Petty is just sort of an evaluation of him as a person. You know, you kind of maybe overlook certain people until you hear about that they’re gone and then when you hear about they’re gone you kind of wish you had maybe thought about them more or that it didn’t necessarily take their death to make you evaluate how much they meant to you in your life, but I guess that’s the reality of the way it is. And so as I look at Tom Petty, I mean, we’ve lost an artist, we’ve lost a singer of songs. I mean, I’ve read a couple of obituaries about him and they kind of mention how, like all great artists, he remained true to himself. The Times obituary noted that even though he sold millions of albums and he headlined numerous shows, his songs stayed down to earth, as they said, “Carrying lyrics that spoke for underdogs and ornery outcasts.” I think that’s true and I think maybe that’s one of the reasons why I liked his songs so much. There’s this line in the Rush song, Force Ten, that says, “Tough times demand tough songs,” and I remember hearing that line and thinking it was rather silly, I mean, tough times demand…I don’t know what they demand. But iron fists, or guns, or iron-willed, or just inability to fight or physical strength, or I don’t know, but songs? But when I was a public defender and it was my job to defend poor people in court and to stand up against powerful people like judges and just the police and the whole institution in the whole criminal justice system, I often thought of Tom Petty’s song I Won’t Back Down. And it’s more than I thought about it, I relied upon it. And it actually…it kept me from, well, backing down. I mean, I know what’s right, you’re not gonna push me around, I won’t back down. And that song did make me tough. It made me very tough. And I did count on Tom Petty’s song to be tough and to be what I needed to be in the world and to not back down even if I was stood up against the gates of hell. It was…I felt like I was in it with someone. The Japanese poet, Ishikawa Takuboku, published a series of poems that he called Poems to Eat. And I think about that title a lot, or Poems for Eating. I think about it a lot because, you know, poetry is something that nourishes us. It is something that fortifies us. And that’s true of art, that’s true of songs. It’s like what William Carlos Williams said, “It’s difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” And when I think about Tom Petty, and I have many fond memories of hearing, “I won’t back down” in my head, as I’m actually standing in the courtroom, maybe staring down a witness or a judge in the face and just hearing that and not backing down. It occurs to me that the song remains. That yes, the old guard is stepping away. But that’s not to say that they’re abandoning us. We’re all in a boat out at sea. Tom Petty has sailed on. But he had a heart so big that he left behind some songs to keep us company as we move into the great wide open and take control of this world for a while. And for that, there’s really nothing else to say, but thanks. And thanks for listening.

In this second episode of None Sense, I respond to the following statement by Michelle Goldberg: It’s a source of constant astonishment to me that the country has handed over the means to destroy civilization on this planet to an unhinged lunatic who lost the popular vote and was installed with the aid of a hostile foreign power. It’s such an epic institutional failure that it calls everything we thought we knew about this country’s stability into question. What’s explained at length in the podcast is summarized like this: if we’re expecting institutions like the judiciary to save us from the Trump presidency, we’re doomed. Transcript: Hi, I’m Jaime Escuder and welcome to this second episode of None Sense. Today, I’d like to talk about institutions, or rather the appearance of institutions. And I was led to this topic by something I read again in “The New York Times.” Remember when someone asked Sarah Palin what her news sources were and she clearly had never read any news in her life because she couldn’t name a single, like, news outlet? So, forewarned, my news sources are as follows: “The New York Times,” “The New York Times,” “The New York Times,” “The Guardian,” you’re gonna be seeing a lot. So, if you read my show notes, you’re gonna be seeing lots of links to New York Times articles and The Guardian articles. Also, NPR, although, I gotta tell you, NPR, the website, or the way they do their print journalism, and this may be just because they’re fundamentally an audio outlet, a radio outlet, their print is not so great, but the NPR and the BBC. Also, the “Washington Post.” But my primary sources of news and this is because they’re well-thought out and I really believe they have integrity in the sense of, they don’t, well, there’s no fake news, I mean, they actually fact-check, etc. And I actually personally know this to be true and I’m saying my main ones are “The New York Times” and “The Guardian,” and I know the “Washington Post” does and I’m sure the BBC, I know the BBC does, these are reputable news outlets. I’m not going to be, I’m not much of a “Fox News” reader because I think “Fox News” is terrible news, just junk, terrible, poor quality news. I know that “The New York Times” does fact-checking because I was actually mentioned in an article once that appeared in “The New York Times” and I remember being called by the fact-checker and asked to verify the quotes that had been attributed to me and things like that. So, I was reading “The New York Times” as I want to do and there was an interview with a new columnist there named Michelle Goldberg, here’s a quote from Michelle Goldberg (and I will have a link to this article in my show notes): “It’s a source of constant astonishment to me that the country has handed over the means to destroy civilization on this planet to an unhinged lunatic who lost the popular vote and was installed with the aid of a hostile foreign power. It’s such an epic institutional failure that it calls everything we thought we knew about this country’s stability into question.” And what gave me pause about that, what made me think about that was that this person, Michelle Goldberg, who’s apparently, obviously, very intelligent, highly educated, very thoughtful person, is acting as though she actually, not only believes in institutions and that they exist and that they actually function, but that they have the ability or the will to function when in fact there really is no such thing as an institution. There’s just people and then there’s an edifice that we put in front of those people to inspire awe or fear or reverence in the hope that they’ll obey whatever comes from the institution, but there really is no such thing as an institution, unless the people who populate it have integrity and character and are all of the things that would function well in a society even if they weren’t associated with an institution. So, I want to talk about what I think is probably the most important institution in a democracy and in our government, and one of the most visible and one of the least understood, and one of the best at creating an aura of importance and wisdom and almost, sort of, above the foreignness but is at the same time the worst at actually being that and as an, in actual fact a very manipulable, weak and unreliable institution and I’m talking about the judiciary. When I talk about the judiciary, you know, the judicial branch, out of necessity, has done a marvelous job of creating this veneer that I was speaking about of majesty and, sort of, arising from another place, a place of governance and inhumanity in the sense of almost being, like, a natural force, so let’s, like, look at a courthouse, for example. You know, a federal courthouse can be a very imposing building, you go inside and it’s a very intimidating place, there’s gonna be marble and just the very architecture of the courtroom. The judge comes out and he’s gonna be on an elevated thing, everyone, just by nature of the architecture, or she’s gonna be on an elevated thing, is gonna be required to look up, actually physically look up as though you’re looking up…like many churches are designed, they wear the black robe which creates an air of inscrutability and I think correctly, dignity and then there’s all these, sort of, processes, you know, there’s a big knock on the door before the judge comes in and everyone is supposed to stand and there’s all this pomp and all this stuff. And it’s a very, as I say, it’s a very intimidating imposing cultural, by design, cultural experience walking into a courtroom. When I say cultural, I mean that a courtroom has a certain culture and the entirety of the culture is designed to make you feel minimal so that the person walking in gets the sense that they are entering an alien world which they don’t fully understand, and in which they posses very little power. And the other part of it is, it’s designed to make one believe that the pronouncements that come from the judge and that the judge, the person of the judge, his or herself is almost of another spiritual plane and of a higher order of wisdom. Now, the truth is, all judges are actually people and I’d like to tell a couple of stories to, kind of, illustrate the way I think the reality of the judicial system in opposition to the way it presents itself, and then get back to Miss Goldberg’s’ statement about how it’s, how the election of Donald Trump and his continued debasement of the office of the President of the United States constitutes an institutional failure. And I think she’s just expecting too much of the institution itself and then I want to talk about why the people in the institution of the judiciary, in particular, are failing. All right, the first example comes from, and I hesitate to admit this because I’m not an Ayn Rand fan at all, in my angry youth, stupid youth, I read all her stuff and was highly influenced by it but I don’t subscribe to any of it anymore. But this was a useful story that I believe came out of the beginning of Atlas Shrugged and it’s a story about one of the characters, he grows up and there’s a certain tree in his yard or in his parents’ farm or whatever that was a very big, strong oak tree and he used to play on it and he used to climb it, etc., etc. Well, one day, it was strucked by lightning and the entire tree collapsed and he went over to the tree, shocked, that something that appeared to be so robust and long-lived and vibrant and vigorous would have collapsed so easily. And he saw that, in fact, the tree had been rotten from the inside out and was hollow on the inside, and so the outside appeared to be healthy and strong but in fact the tree was diseased and on the brink of collapse. The second story and I don’t really quite remember where I heard this one, maybe it’s not even true but I think it’s a good analogy, is the story of a guy who got on the New York subway system with one of those long fluorescent lights, like, one of those ones you see in an office building that looks like a pole on a subway pole to keep you from falling over. So, he gets on with one of these lights and then someone else gets on thinking that in fact it is a pole and grabs it and holds on to it. Now, even though in point of fact the thing, the pole wasn’t attached to anything it was completely unsafe, it was just the one guy holding it. And then before the guy knew what was going on, several people had gotten onto the subway and grabbed hold of this thing and finally when he gets to his stop where he’s supposed to throw the light off, he doesn’t know what to do or how to tell the people that in fact they’re not, what they’re holding onto and that what they think is a stabilizing force in their lives is in fact nothing but a light that’s going to collapse, that could collapse at any moment. He simply just lets go of the light and then gets off the train, leaving the unsuspecting unaware people holding the pole which is not actually a poll and which is actually not at all anything that’s safe or can be relied upon. So, I think those two examples the thing that appears to be strong on the outside but is in fact very tenuous and not at all what it appears to be in terms of strength, that’s the judiciary. And I’m going to give you a couple of examples and in order to understand these examples, you actually have to understand the role that the judiciary is supposed

Hi! In this inaugural episode, I introduce myself and explain what I’m doing with this podcast. To summarize, I’m a non-religious liberal who loves America. Or the idea of it, anyway. I explain more in the show, so give it a listen. Welcome! TRANSCRIPT Hi, I’m Jaime Escuder and welcome to this inaugural episode of None Sense. What is a “none”? (I’m actually not that kind of nun that you’re thinking about. Quite the opposite.) None, N-O-N-E, is someone who is secular or unaffiliated with any religious denomination. I’m not only a none I’m also a lawyer, a liberal a father, a husband, other important and meaningful things, but I wanna focus on my none-ness, because I think it’s very important to be open about being that type of person in America at this time. And there’s a couple of reasons [for that]. First, there’s a lot of us. In “The New York Times” I was reading an article that said one third of all millenials actually identify as a none, and as many as 23% [of all Americans], so nearly a quarter of the entire population of the United States is unaffiliated religiously. And when I say that, I’m not talking about that we’re all atheists, or agnostics. [We’re] just people who don’t for whatever reason subscribe to religion. And it’s important for those people to have, I think, people like me out there being open about this, because America, and I really feel like frankly, the world, the way we’re going, needs more people who are willing to be upfront about their lack of belief, because the way we view the world makes us behave, and I know this probably is gonna offend a lot of people who are religious, but I just feel like it makes us behave in a much more responsible way towards the earth and towards each other. And here’s the reason: we don’t believe in heaven. We imagine that there was no heaven, and what that does, is it places incredible importance upon now. Now both in terms of time and here in terms of place. If we don’t believe in heaven that means that if we’re ever going to experience ecstasy or happiness or joy, it’s gotta happen here on this planet, and it also means that we have to be responsible stewards of this planet, because it’s all we have; we’re not going anywhere else. I believe that if you believe in an after-life, you believe that something is gonna get better later on, then it’s okay to abuse the people around you now and the place where you live now because it’s just gonna get better. So it’s okay to pollute, it’s okay…you know, I actually know religious people who are okay with and even in some kind of a warped way, look forward to the apocalypse. They want the world to end because once that happens they’re gonna go to a better place. Well, if you are someone like me, and you don’t think there’s anything after life, other than just nothingness, oblivion, well then you don’t really want the apocalypse to happen because it means it’s all come to an end, and there’s many wonderful things about being alive and being on earth that are not something that I want to end. I have to enjoy it. I enjoy being alive and I’d like to stick around and I wanna enjoy my life and I wanna enjoy the biodiversity of this planet, and I like, you know, I like things like drinking a clean glass of water or breathing in fresh air. Those are good things. And I would like those things to continue and I don’t want to diminish those things or cheapen those things by pretending that there’s something better waiting, when really it’s hard for me to conceive of a more beautiful planet that’s possible of creating more vibrant, wonderful, rich experiences than this one. So I don’t wanna diminish the now and the earth by talk of some future, and that’s part of the reason why I think being a none and practicing a way of life that is kind of an areligious, “there is no god” way of conducting oneself on earth is actually a very responsible and a good way to live. And I have some stories about…a couple of stories I’d like to tell about what it’s like for me, as an atheist born in the United States and raised in the United States, to live in this country that actually makes me feel unwelcome and an alien. (An alien in the sense of…not in the sort of immigration sense that we use as a way to disparage people from other countries who come here because I think that’s a disgusting thing that we do with how we just…many Americans can’t stand immigrants. Alien in the sense of just unfamiliar to the people who would consider themselves the rightful owners of this country. And I hate that because I’m not an alien to this country, I’m as American as anyone else and yet these are the things that happen to me.) So, last November I ran for office as a Democrat in a swing district in Texas. I say it’s a swing district because this district traditionally goes blue. I’m a Democrat and I’m in a district that traditionally goes Democratic, but last November I ran for District Attorney in my district as a Democrat, and the entire district went straight red, not just for District Attorney but literally for everything on the ballot: for President, for County Commissioner. The entire ballot was Republican. Now, I ran for District Attorney on…this was my platform, literally: I’m against the death penalty, and I’m against the war on drugs. And I believed, and I believe still, that this was a sensible, responsible and humane platform, and yet I lost miserably, and why? Because I’m an atheist. That was it. In fact, I’ll tell you a story. I was actually knocking on a door of a potential voter and this was a woman who should have traditionally been a Democratic voter. She was a Mexican-American woman, an older woman who I know has family members in Mexico and the Republican, let’s face it, the Republican policy or slate or leadership is very anti-immigrant and frankly, I think the Republican party is a racist party that’s against Mexicans, and there’s absolutely no way that this woman should have been not a Democratic voter. And yet, I knocked on her door and when I tell you the look of terror on her face when she realized who it was that was knocking on her door … it was like a Tuesday at 3 in the afternoon. And I said “Hey I’m Jaime, I’d like to introduce myself, I’m running for DA,” and she just kind of raises her hands, not like in a way to stop me but almost like in a fearful like trying to cast out demons kind of way. And she says, “I know who you are. I’m not voting for you. In fact, I’m going to church right now,” and then she slammed the door on me. Word had gotten around, clearly, that I was an atheist which has nothing to do with the job of being a District Attorney, but word spread in that community and that was it, that was their one issue. And I know this that was their one issue. It had nothing to do with trial experience or my experience as a lawyer, or about the fact, right, that all these people were religious. And many people in my District are Catholic. It didn’t have nothing to do with the fact that I was opposed on the record to the death penalty, and my opponent was not. And yet they would rather vote for, I guess, a Christian person who’s willing to put poor people to death than an atheist who’s not. I lost the election and the day after I lost the election I went to a nearby town called Fort Stockton to pull out my signs, and it was an exhausting work. I remember that I was in shell shock, not because I lost my election, which is something that I’m actually at peace with, but because Donald Trump won his election which is something that I’m not at peace with and still in shock about and frankly still grieving about. It was a cold day, it was rainy. It was just a miserable day. And I went to a diner and there in the diner was a group of sheriff’s deputies and they were talking about my election. Now, I had my signs all over the District with my face on them saying “Elect Jaime as your District Attorney,” and I was in the very room that these people were talking. And they had no idea who I was, and I could hear them saying, “We’re really glad Sandy Wilson won.” (Sandy Wilson was the lady who ran against me.) “Really glad that she won. I don’t know anything about that other guy but I know that he is an atheist, and what else do you need to know?” Now, I will say there was a lawyer at that table who didn’t know I was in the room but who I know, who actually stood up for me somewhat and said, “Atheism has nothing to do with the job,” but he kind of got some snickers from the sheriff’s deputies like, “come on. Give us a break.” But here’s the remarkable thing about that. The District Attorney’s job is to prosecute cases, which means that whoever the DA is has to work very closely with law enforcement. And here you have these sheriff’s deputies who are going to have to work with whoever the person the DA is, very closely. I mean, their job really kinda depends, and the success of how well they’re able to protect the people in their community, depends upon their relationship with the District Attorney. And so this is a very important election for them, and they had done absolutely no research into the candidates. Into me, other than to determine that I was an atheist. I mean, so little research such that they didn’t know what I looked like, they didn’t know where I had gone to law school, they didn’t know what my background was at all. They had simply heard that I was an atheist and that was it; I was not going to get their vote. It didn’t matter if I was more qualified than my opponent, or if I had been practicing law longer, or if I’d tried more cases, or if I had any experience with, you know, DNA evidence or electronic evidence. None of that mattered. All the stuff that they would actually reasonably need me to do, or types of cases that they might need me to prove in their job. So there is a huge bias against nones in this country, and that’s not okay, and that needs to change. Because the fact is that the United States is a nation in crisis. I’ve never been through a civil war or a cultural war, I don’t think, but I think that’s kind of what’s happening. There’s that great line and I think it’s “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” or “Prisoner of Azkaban” where someone asks Sirius, you know, “is this what it felt like before? Is this the same…is this what revolution feels like?” and he says “well, it feels like it did before” (and by “before” he means like when the Death Eaters came. Well, I don’t know, but this feels like a very bad situation for the United States. The President of the United States, right now, at this very moment as I’m making this podcast is literally picking a fight with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Goldengate Warriors. All right. We are a nation in denial about climate change despite the fact that we seem to be undergoing an epidemic of hurricanes. We have white supremacists. (I guess we’ve always had white supremacists but the difference is, now we have white supremacists who are loud and proud about it, who are parading through our cities about it without any fear of even criticism.) We have travel bans. We have a society that mocks you if you’re educated, that if you say you wanna go to college or you are a college professor, you are met with scorn. We are a country that is going backwards to the dark ages, and it’s a disaster, and in these times, we need strong, clear and sensible voices. And I’m making this podcast because I intend to be one of those voices. As I end this first podcast, I wanna say that there are many people without religion out there: humanists, atheists, agnostics, just people who are maybe are still searching. Nones. We are good people. We care about justice. We care about the environment. We care about other people. I’m not lying to you when I say to you that one of my heroes is Jesus Christ. And I mean that. Now, do I believe that he rose, was resurrected from the dead and lives at the right hand of the Father and, you know, it was a virgin birth and all that? No, no. That’s nonsense. Do I believe, however, that he was an extremely brave person who spoke truth to power, who knew he was gonna be punished for it but felt that he needed to say it anyway for the good of others and did say it? Yes. I think Jesus Christ was a man of great integrity and super brave, and believe me when I tell you that I do hold him as a model for my own conduct. I often ask myself what would Jesus do, which is in fact why I oppose the death penalty, for example. Another one of my heroes, is a guy named Thomas Paine. He is the man who said, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” He is the guy who wrote “Common Sense” which was the major force behind the United States declaring independence from Great Britain. He was a founding father. He was also an atheist. “My religion,” he said, “is to do good.” My religion, and I believe the religion of many nones, is to do good. Some of you may not understand that, some of you may not know what that means. Follow this podcast and you will see.