Transcription for Foiled again_ a second attempt on Tr.

mp3

Hello, and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Rosie Bloor.
Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.
Imagine if you could take a virtual replica of yourself to the doctor to test how
different
treatments might help you.
Not science fiction anymore.
Welcome to the world of digital twins.
And his mission was to bring Brazilian music to everyone, and he succeeded.
Our obituaries editor celebrates the life of Sergio Mendez, the king of bossa nova.
But first…
We have somebody in custody right now that is a potential suspect.
We got a little bit more work to do on it.
Former President Donald Trump is safe and unharmed following a protective incident
shortly before 2 p.m. on Sunday at Trump International Golf Club at West Palm
Beach.
The U.S. Secret Service personnel opened fire on a gunman located near the property
line, and this matters under investigation.
Another twist in an extraordinary election campaign.
Yesterday there was a second apparent attempt on Donald Trump's life.
The suspect, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, was soon detained.
Donald Trump reassured his supporters that he was safe and well.
But the incident raises further questions about the protection offered to the
former
president and the level of political violence in America.
Former President Donald Trump was playing a round of golf on Sunday in Florida when
a Secret Service agent spotted a gun barrel sticking out of a fence.
John Priddo is our U.S. editor.
Agents opened fire.
The man who was holding the gun ran from the bushes and fled in a car.
The police tracked him down on an in-state highway and arrested him.
He's now in custody.
Thankfully, no shot was fired and Donald Trump is unharmed.
John, the FBI have said this appears to be an attempted assassination.
How much do we actually know about the shooter and his motives?
Well, his motives are not completely clear.
And in one sense, Rosie, you have to be a lunatic to think it's a good idea
to try and assassinate a presidential candidate.
So there's a limit to how clear they will ever be.
American media outlets have identified him as Ryan Wesley Ralph,
a 58-year-old man from Hawaii.
And I suppose an assassination attempt in which no bullet is fired is an
apparent assassination attempt rather than an assassination attempt.
But we're really splitting hairs here.
I mean, he was lurking in the bushes with a high-powered rifle and a scope
while the former president was playing golf.
It seems fairly clear what his intentions were.
We know a certain amount about him from his social media postings.
Of course, in the aftermath of one of these attempts, very quickly,
people were able to comb through the suspect's social media presence
to see what his political views were.
And that then inevitably plays into the political meaning
of such a shooting or such an attempt.
So we know that he was a pro-Ukrainian activist.
He was keen on America supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia.
The New York Times actually interviewed him last year.
In that interview, he said he wanted to go and fight for Ukraine.
Based on that interview and some social media posts,
it appears that he was frustrated about the difficulty of volunteering in Ukraine.
He had changing partisan views.
And he spoke at times about participating in violence.
It's only two months since there was another attempt on Trump's life,
which the security services was already under investigation for.
How was someone able to get this close?
You're right, Rosie.
There was a huge amount of scrutiny, rightly so of the Secret Service,
in July after an assassination attempt left Donald Trump wounded.
And there, it seemed like the Secret Service had been negligent.
There was a shooter on the roof.
No gunman should have been able to get that close
to a candidate at a political rally.
This one, I think, is slightly different in the sense that the former president
was out there playing golf and this guy was hiding in the bushes.
The Secret Service protects the sitting president of the United States
to an extraordinary degree.
Being president is a bit like being an astronaut.
You're in a highly controlled environment.
You can't wander around and do what you want to do whenever you want to do it.
So no doubt, Donald Trump's security could be increased.
It should be increased after two attempts in the course of a few months.
However, if the Secret Service were to protect Donald Trump
to the level that it's protecting Joe Biden,
then Donald Trump's movement and his freedom to do what he wants,
when he wants, would be severely restricted.
Which presumably is something he wouldn't want.
I would imagine not.
How do you think this will play into the campaign now?
Well, we have some data on this because, extraordinary as it seems,
as you've already said, this is not the first assassination attempt
against this candidate this year.
And what happened after the first one,
in which Donald Trump was very nearly killed in Pennsylvania,
was that his poll numbers didn't move a great deal.
The attempt, of course, dominated the news cycles.
And the effect of this, I think, will be to change the news cycle
from a focus on Donald Trump's debate performance
and stories about pet eating in Ohio.
But I don't imagine this will change polls hugely.
And I suppose if you think about it, Rosie,
campaigns think about persuasion and they think about turnout.
And they are laser-focused on voters in a very small number of swing states.
So were this apparent assassination attempt
to have a big effect on the race,
you'd have to believe one of two things, or maybe both.
One, that it would persuade people
who otherwise wouldn't vote for Donald Trump to vote for him.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to imagine that.
And the other thing is that it would motivate people to turn out,
who would otherwise not turn out and vote.
Now, you can imagine that two assassination attempts
would trigger a sense among Donald Trump's supporters
quite justifiably that he's under threat
and they need to show up to protect him.
But I doubt it will have much effect on swing voters,
the kind of marginal voters who might or might not vote in an election,
who are likely to decide this one.
So based on what happened in July, I think not a big effect politically.
But of course it becomes a big discussion politically
because Republicans will accuse, and indeed already are accusing Democrats,
of deploying heated rhetoric that inspires this kind of violent attempt.
One area where I think it does make an immediate impact is on fundraising.
So almost as soon as it was clear Donald Trump was OK,
fundraising emails went out from the Trump campaign.
Jon, of course you talk about the heated rhetoric.
And one of the things that's astonishing from outside
is just the level of political violence in the US.
What can we expect now?
Well, the US compared with other rich countries is violent, full stop.
The murder rate is coming down,
but it's a lot higher than it is in other Western democracies.
That is, of course, because of the ready availability of guns.
And that's also the most obvious explanation
for the level of political violence in the country.
Actually, I think if you look in the long term,
political violence is down a bit.
If you look back to the 1960s,
there was a successful assassination attempt
against President John F. Kennedy.
That's the last, thankfully, successful one.
In the 60s and the 70s,
there was a campaign of bombings by left-wing radicals.
The last attempt on a president's life that got close
was the assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s.
But you're right, compared with other places,
it does seem that this kind of political violence,
or at least the threat of it, is almost routine in America.
If you look at polls, about 20% of American adults
say that political violence can be justified in some cases.
And in a large, populous, heavily armed country,
you don't need many of those people to really mean it,
to have attempts, or apparent attempts,
like the one we've just seen in Florida.
Thanks, John.
And I'm sure you'll be discussing more of this
on Checks and Balance on Friday.
Great to have you with us.
Thanks, Rosie.
It's one of the most famous phrases in history.
Houston, we've had a problem here.
This is Houston. Say again, please.
Houston, we've had a problem.
A ruptured oxygen tank aboard Apollo 13
threatened not just the mission to the moon,
but the lives of those on board.
When they received that fateful message,
NASA engineers back on the ground in Houston
used the simulators the crew had trained on
to find a solution.
As anyone who's seen the film will know,
they fixed the problem just in time.
Fortunately since then,
virtual replicas have become rather more sophisticated.
A digital twin is a computer model,
but it's more than that.
Paul Marchilli is the Innovation Editor of The Economist.
It's something that actually doesn't just resemble
a physical object, but it's updated in real time
so that it represents what that physical object is
at any point in time.
So if it's going fast, the twin is going fast.
If it's flying, the twin is flying.
It's fed with real time data.
So instead of being static, it's very dynamic.
Give me an example of one.
Well, I've been to a number of Formula One headquarters,
they're very secretive places.
And luckily I was able to go and have a look
at what Red Bull Racing are doing
with their digital twin in Milton Keynes.
They have a control room,
which is a little bit like one NASA would use
for a space launch in which 20 or 30 people
will sit during a Grand Prix,
watching all the data coming back from the race track.
Now each of their racing cars
has something like 250 sensors on board.
So you have the physical car going around the track,
but you also have the virtual.
Each car has a digital twin.
So there's a virtual copy,
which is appearing on the screens
in those control centers.
So anything that happens to the real car
also happens through the virtual car.
Now in between races, you might want to change something,
and they can change thousands of things
during the course of a Grand Prix season.
So they will experiment on what that change will mean
on the digital version of the car.
They'll test drive it in a digital race track.
They can model any of the race tracks they appear on.
And they can do all of this
and then work out whether this tweak to the car
will give them another zillionth of a second
off the lap speed.
And then they'll manufacture the part,
make sure it fits digitally,
and then they can ship it out and do this overnight.
Now our Formula One team
has some of the most advanced manufacturing you can see.
They are streets ahead of most manufacturers.
It sounds to me like a digital twin
is a snazzy new version of a simulation.
It is a simulation.
It's a real-time simulation,
but the reason they're getting more and more important
is we have AI now.
So equipped with that,
the twins can not only begin to analyse
what the real thing is doing,
but can also suggest ways of improving it,
improving performance or changing things.
And in some cases, we will increasingly see
the twin actually fine-tuning the physical thing
that it is monitoring.
So I can see how that might work for a Formula One car.
Give me some other examples
of where you might use this kind of digital twin.
Next time you're on an aeroplane,
look out of the window
and look at the engines under the wing.
Every engine has a digital twin
somewhere on the ground,
being fed with the information from sensors.
And the algorithms and increasingly the AI
is monitoring it.
And they're much better at spotting
emergent trends and changes
or anything that's going on
than probably a human engineer is.
And so it alerts the engine manufacturer
that something may be wrong with this particular engine
or this particular flight.
They'll analyse it, see how serious it is.
They might divert the flight.
That's very unlikely these days.
More likely is that by the time the aeroplane lands,
there's a team of engineers and spare parts
already on hand to fix the engine
so that it can get back to service again.
These are all systems that we expect to operate
in a certain way.
They are designed to operate in a certain way.
What about the use of this sort of technology
beyond machines, beyond logistics?
Well, complex systems,
you can start to model those with the digital twin.
So you could model a bank, for instance,
and indeed Goldman Sachs is doing that
with a digital twin that looks at its financial instruments
and might eventually start automating its trades.
Amazon has huge warehouses
and they're modeled with digital twins now
to the extent they're getting so good
at forecasting future sales.
They can begin to almost look two years out in advance
to see what sales might be.
Again, that's using their twin to experiment with
and to see how things could affect it.
CITES as well, using digital twins
to modulate possible flood responses
and an emerging area,
which will be quite a big area in medicine as well.
So how might you use this in medicine?
Well, for instance,
researchers at Queen Mary University in London,
they model the hearts of their cardiac patients
using a digital twin because this allows them
to try out different possible drugs
and different procedures to sort out heart problems
to see what works best.
Now all hearts are different.
Some procedures work better than others
and some work better on some patients than others.
And that way you should get a better result
for the patient.
It's very difficult to experiment on someone's heart,
say, well, we'll try this.
If that doesn't work, we'll try something else.
You don't really get that chance.
But with a digital twin, you can do that.
And so you should get much better medical results.
Now it's not just hearts that are being modeled,
but lungs are and all sorts of other organs.
And so eventually there is a thought
that we might end up with a digital body.
All of us will have a virtual body.
So we go to the doctors in the future,
the doctor will look at his screen
and he'll be looking at a digital you.
And he'll say, well, maybe I'll try this digital you
and try this on it and see if this works.
And you should get a better diagnosis
and hopefully a better outcome.
It's almost like we could all experience
our own version of sliding doors.
Forgive me for being a Luddite.
Surely this relies on the model being right.
It does indeed.
But that's the risk with all new technologies.
You want it to be programmed correctly.
You also will need all the safeguards.
We're talking about, as with AI at the moment, privacy.
You don't want it to be hacked.
I mean, if somebody could hack into the digital
twin of a city, they could cause all sorts of chaos.
We saw it with the Italian job
when they hacked the traffic control system.
Well, imagine if you could hack the whole city.
So yeah, there are safeguards
and there will have to be some thought
and careful use of how the technology is deployed.
Paul, how big could this go?
Ah, well, there we go.
Could you have a digital world, a digital universe even?
Well, scientists are already using twins
for some far out physics experiments and researching that.
And well, we already have climate modeling,
which is a sort of digital version of our climate.
And if that works well enough,
and I really hope it does,
then we should get some clues
as to how we could avoid a climate disaster.
Paul, thank you so much for talking.
That's a pleasure.
Sergio Mendes knew very well
what people often said about him.
Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor.
His music was the sort you heard on cruise ships
in elevators, but when you were shopping
in a supermarket, easy listening,
that was all no challenge to anybody.
He didn't care what they said about him.
His blend of bossa nova, as in here's that rainy day,
became hugely popular in the mid-1960s.
He never put any label on his music himself,
fundamentally though it was bossa nova,
which he had picked up,
particularly in a bar called Bottles Bar in Copacabana,
where the great founders of the style would come
and sit and people would hang around with them
and they'd do jam sessions and so on.
The people he most admired were a man called Robbim
and another called Gilberto,
who had written The Girl from Ipanema.
They were his two gods.
He decided pretty soon
that he would not be a classical pianist,
instead he would be a bossa nova player.
However, another element soon came into his life.
When he was 13, he was invited to a friend's house
and there they listened to Dave Brubeck's Take Five.
And this took him completely by storm.
He had never heard jazz before.
He marveled at the improvisation of it,
the fact that underneath it there were still harmonies going
and how free that music seemed.
From then on, he paid special attention
to any of the great jazz artists
who happened to visit the Bottles Bar.
He happened to hear a young woman
who had the most beautiful, soft voice
and it suddenly seemed to him
that she would be the ideal lead singer for his band.
Her name was Lani Hall.
He went from strength to strength with that group.
It formed in 1966, so he called it Brazil 66.
He had a huge, huge hit,
which was called Masquenada.
He was always very prepared to follow up
whatever new thing caught his ear.
And he gradually began to experiment more and more
and weave in different kinds of music
as he could find them.
He liked to Brazilianize a lot of the hits of the time.
For example, Day Tripper by the Beatles.
Simon and Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair.
They lent themselves very well to sort of bossanova rhythm,
so it was then bossanova.
Rock and pop all fused in together.
And with this combination,
he was actually twice invited to play at the White House
and became a sensation all over the place.
Even when he became old,
and you would think perhaps his enthusiasm
for mixing up genres might desert him,
he made an album in 2006 called Timeless
on which he recorded his great hit Masquenada.
But this time, it was played as a rap
by the Black Eyed Peas.
He was sometimes accused of making music
and neglecting his Brazilian roots
because he was making his music so popular
that he couldn't be keeping up
with the sheer resourcefulness of Brazil
and the true color and complication of the music there.
But he was always a proud Brazilian.
He lived in America for 60 years in Los Angeles,
but he never became an American citizen.
When he put out his albums and his music videos,
they were strongly Brazilian.
They couldn't really be anything else.
There was one song called The Frog,
which was obviously filmed deep in the rainforest.
He always thought that it was melody that carried a song.
It didn't matter if you couldn't understand
the language it was spoken in.
What mattered was first of all melody, second, rhythm,
and perhaps overall that tremendous air of celebration
and joy which marked carnival in Brazil
and also marked the whole spirit of the people.
When he thought of Brazil, he couldn't help
but think of a boy banging a drum in the street.
And when he spread his songs around the globe
as he did, it was really like inviting the whole world
to have a party.
Anne Rowe on Sergio Mendes, who has died aged 83.
That's all for this episode of The Intelligence.
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You can get in touch at podcasts.economist.com.
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