You know, I genuinely did meet it when I said that this is not a politics podcast and that remains true

But man, what can you say sometimes? Politics comes for you.

Okay, so specifically what I said is that this podcast, Young Heretics, is not a

podcast about politics. And that remains true. We are not here to just do a round up on whatever happens to be happening this week.

In fact, rather the opposite.

We're here to take a longer view of history.

We're here to get a little bit of break, a little bit of a distance on the

news cycle. But the other thing I said is that this is a podcast about reality.

It's about as much of the whole of reality as we can take in and it's about what the wisdom of the Western canon can help us to

understand about reality as it unfolds.

And politics is a major part of most people's daily reality,

and I would say that it has been a really big part of the reality of the last 72 hours or so.

I don't know where you were when you heard about the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. I was driving from

Losa Leavos to Lompoke. I was in California for a dear friend's wedding and doing a

little wine tasting beforehand and the news just

sort of dropped feels these days like it drops out of the sky into your phone like a

kind of homing pigeon just nose diving into the car or into your home or wherever you are.

And there it was, like somebody tried to kill Donald Trump at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania.

And I gotta say, I don't wanna make too much out of any one news story.

I always want to be careful before diving into the hysteria and the panic that always accompanies any major

development these days in politics because we're also up to the minute and we're all constantly

acting like this is the first time anything has ever happened before and we're shocked and we're appalled and whatever

...