Adam Kucharski

Oscar Morgenson went along as witnesses for him.

And it's always told as kind of a lighthearted story as, you know, this logical mind, this academic, just saying something silly in front of the judge.

And actually, to my own admission, I've in the past given talks and mentioned it in this slightly kind of lighthearted way.

But for the book, I got talking to a few people who had taken it more seriously.

I realized he has this extremely logically focused mind at the time.

And maybe there should have been something more to it.

And people who've kind of dug more into possibilities were saying, well, what could he have spotted differently?

that bothered him.

And a lot of his work that he did about consistency in maths was around particularly self-referential statements.

So if I say this sentence is false, it's kind of self-referential.

And if it is false, then it's true.

But if it's true, then it's false.

And you get these kind of weird self-referential contradictions.

And so one of the theories about Goodell was that

And in the constitution, it wasn't that there was a kind of rule for someone can become a dictator, but rather people can use the mechanisms within the constitution to make it easier to make further amendments.

And he kind of called it a downward cycle amendment that he had seen happening in Europe in the run up to the war.

And again, because this is never fully documented exactly what he thought, but it's one of the theories that it wouldn't just be outright, that it would just be this cyclic process of weakening and weakening and weakening and making it easier to add.

And actually, when I wrote that, it was one of the earlier bits of the book that I drafted.

i did i did sort of debate whether including it i thought you know is this actually just a bit in the weeds of kind of american history and here we are yeah it's it's remarkable yeah yeah no it's i mean i i found it uh you know quite it struck me when i was reading this because here back in 1947 there was somebody

Yeah, I think that encapsulates a lot of what the book is about, is that search for certainty.