Dr. Jack Goldstone

To me, that distinction is very hard won because the world is full of ideas and opinions and smart people have them all the time.

But to try and figure out what questions can you ask for which you can get pretty firm, defensible answers gleaned from history, from narratives, from data.

You have to work hard for that.

Scientists all over the world, whatever their field, whether it's physics, chemistry, biology, revolutionology...

We're not in it for the money, as you say.

We're in it because we're excited about finding true narratives, being able to tell true stories, being able to say, I've struggled to the top of this mountain, but now that I'm here, I see where the facts are and I see where the misunderstandings and misapprehensions lay scattered around me.

As a society, and maybe as a world, we're losing the value of truth.

It just no longer matters to people, for the most part, because the lies now are told with such conviction and with such compelling emotional stories behind them.

Again, just to pluck a current example from this week, Donald Trump happened to say, as he often does, blustering, since I put the National Guard in Washington, we've had no murders for a week.

Never happened before.

Never had such a peaceful time in this city.

And it's because of what we did and people are complaining.

Well, according to a news story from the Washington Post in March, or in April rather, there was 16 days in late March and early April when there were no murders in Washington, D.C.

Murders are statistical, and sometimes we'll have a string of seven days without a murder, sometimes a string of 10 or 15 days.

It's happened several times in the last five years that you have a string like that, just kind of occurs at random.

It wasn't the first time.

But Speaker Johnson came and echoed the lie and said, this was a great accomplishment of our president.

We had seven days in Washington without a murder.

No one's ever seen that.

And at the cabinet meeting the other day, one of the cabinet secretaries said, you know, you should get a Nobel Prize for creating peace in Washington, D.C.