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June 8, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
47:40
Episode 558 Scott Adams: Celebrating My Birthday With You While Talking About all the Good News
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Hey everybody, come on in for the special birthday edition.
Eric Finman, welcome.
Eric is here in the house.
If you don't know, Eric recently said some good things about the WEN crypto token that my company puts out.
And with one mention from Eric Finman, who is, if you don't know, he's the very young genius crypto millionaire.
You probably saw him in the news.
And with one word, he took the WEN cryptocurrency To the number one position on its exchange.
So it's the actually...
For the last 24 hours, it was the top traded cryptocurrency on one of the exchanges we're on.
So thanks for that, Eric.
Today's my birthday.
I'm a young 62.
Getting stronger every day.
And... I do that just to make some people angry.
Yes, Gemini it is.
Gemini it is. We've got interesting things to talk about today.
I think you're going to like this Periscope better than most.
Now, of course, it's Kanye West's birthday.
Just a coincidence?
Probably. Let's talk about all the fun things.
First of all, in the news, President Trump is announcing that his tariff threats against Mexico have achieved results.
And the results it's achieved is that Mexico has agreed to put more work on its southern border with Guatemala and to prevent people from coming in and some kind of agreement to keep people in Mexico while they're being processed for asylum.
And also they're freezing some bank accounts of some folks.
Now, it's being reported by the president as a clean win.
He made a threat.
They gave him what he wants.
It all took about a week.
Everybody's good. Best of all, people are going to say it looks like Mexico is paying for the wall.
Now, they might be paying for a wall on their southern border.
But we're not paying for it, and it will stop people from coming into our country.
So in a weird way that the simulation works, it's entirely possible that Mexico just agreed to pay for the wall.
Now, the wall might be a virtual wall.
It might be their National Guard on the border, keeping people from crossing.
But it's a step in the right direction.
Now, here's what to expect.
What you should expect over the coming days.
Right after my simultaneous sip, Are you ready for this?
We'll get back to that in a moment.
If you've got a glass or a cup or a mug, possibly a stein or a chalice or a tankard, could be any kind of a flask, a thermos, a vessel of any kind.
If you would like to join me in the special birthday version of the Simultaneous Sip, now's the time.
Grab your cup and join me for the unparalleled pleasure of the Simultaneous Sip.
Mmm, that's birthday stuff.
That's good. Extra, extra good.
Alright, so here's what to expect with this Mexican tariff solution situation.
You're going to find in the next week or so that all the critics will say, hey, that's not as big a deal as it looks.
Or they're going to say, they are sort of already going to do that stuff anyway.
They're going to say... Look at this video I have of people who are still crossing the border into the United States.
Obviously it didn't work.
So I would lower your expectations of how much of a difference this will make.
It probably will make a difference.
We don't know if it's an 80% difference or a 20% difference, but it's progress.
My favorite part about it is that tariffs work.
It's probably the most, I don't know, it might be the most central thing that this president has claimed that his critics say is crazy.
And if it worked in Mexico, China is probably looking at it and saying to themselves, oh, darn it.
Imagine you're the Chinese tariff negotiators, and you just watched President Trump deliver what looks like a win.
You know, things might change in the next few days as we learn more about it, but it looks like a win at the moment.
Over in China, they're thinking to themselves, the last thing we need is an American public who just changed his mind from tariffs or a problem to tariffs work.
So the big deal is China.
The big deal is getting a win that changes how people think about the potential of tariffs.
Because up until now, sides were split and people saying, oh, you know, tariffs are always a bad idea.
Tariffs are just a tax on consumers.
And all that's true in some way.
But as a threat...
They work really well.
If you're talking about tariffs as a long-term situation, well, that could have a lot of problems, and it could create winners and losers that are accidental, and none of that's good.
But as a threat, it just looks like it works now.
So, if you're China, do you think the United States is going to back down after a clean win with tariffs?
Nope. Nope.
They better start thinking about making the deal because what's not going to happen is the president having tariff success with Mexico and then somehow capitulating on China.
That's not going to happen.
So that's good news for the president and also a fun news cycle.
I love that he gets this sort of thing done on a Friday night.
And then the news has to just sort of live with us over the weekend.
There's nothing that the anti-Trump news, the press, likes less than having a clean win for Trump on a Friday afternoon.
That's terrible.
They're like, oh, my whole weekend is ruined.
I've got nothing to talk about except this win.
All right. I'd like to suggest the following thought.
What would you say is the biggest resistance to President Trump?
There are a million things that people complain about, but if you were to capture them as a summary, what would be the summary for what the biggest critics of President Trump are concerned about him as a president?
His personality. Exactly.
Somebody said in the comments.
His personality. Now, I'm going to take you forward in the future for a moment, and you're going to laugh that I'm the first person who said this.
Are you ready? This is my promise to you.
You won't have heard this before.
As soon as you hear it, you're going to say, oh damn, you're right, and you might even laugh.
Here's the thought.
Second term Trump.
Second term Trump.
Trump in his second term doesn't need to get re-elected.
Nor, but here's the important part, and the part that I've not heard anybody ever mention before.
What do you do about Trump's personality when he's in his second term?
Well, first of all, you've learned that it didn't ruin anything in the first term.
So that's the first thing, and that's a pretty big deal.
But more importantly, and here's the fun part, Whoever is president after Trump won't be Trump.
In other words, even if it's another Republican, it's going to be somebody who's probably nothing like Trump.
So the entire battle that's being done to keep Trump from getting a second term won't be necessary.
There will be something like capitulation.
No, there will be no importance of impeachment in the second term, because you can just wait him out.
Yeah, somebody's saying, oh damn, you're right.
However effective you think this president has been or will be for the entire first term, second term Trump, this world has never seen.
And it's going to be a thing of beauty.
Now, it's going to be a thing of beauty if you like his policies and what he does.
If you don't, it might be a bad four years, but you can give up arguing about his personality.
You can give up talking about impeachment.
It's going to be deal time.
Second term Trump is deal time.
Look at China. Do you think China might be trying to wait him out?
Try to get close to election day so they can get the best deal or something?
Maybe. Maybe. But if it looks like Trump's going to get re-elected easily, and we might see polls that indicate that toward the election, China's just going to say, we can't wait four more years.
We can't go eight years of fighting with this guy.
We need a deal. Second-term Trump is going to be about 50% stronger, just in terms of being able to do stuff that's good for the country.
Probably 50% stronger just in effectiveness.
I'm not talking about dictator, blah blah blah.
I think, aren't we over the dictator thing?
I don't even hear the critics talk about it much.
Is there anything we've seen so far from this president that really looks like anything could turn into a dictatorship?
Really, the stories you hear are that Gary Cohen was taking documents off his desk so he didn't accidentally sign them because Cohen didn't want him to.
You hear about things he wanted to do that the aides and his underlings just wouldn't do.
You hear enough of those stories.
And even as effective as he is in some areas, even as accomplished as he is as president, there's nothing that even slightly looks like a dictator.
Not even slightly. So you're going to have a second term Trump who is definitely not crazy.
That will be obvious after four years of him.
Definitely less provocative.
He already is.
This is a story that you haven't yet seen as a headline.
But I think you would all agree that he is absolutely...
I'm sorry, I just lost my thought because of a comment there.
I'm sure I'll get that back.
Anyway, second term Trump will be fun.
He will be far more effective.
We know he's not crazy.
We know he's not going to be a dictator.
We know that his negotiation style tariffs, North Korea, they all work.
We've seen that there was a great article in Breitbart by Joel Pollack yesterday that I tweeted.
You can find that in my tweet page.
Talking about how if you really looked at the United States relationships and Trump's relationships in particular with world leaders, it's pretty much all good.
You know, we got a little problem with Germany.
But those are productive kinds of problems.
We're not going to have a big problem with Germany.
There's no signs that that's a problem.
And maybe there are things Germany ought to be doing a little bit differently, such as funding NATO more.
So there is a productive kind of stress there.
But if you look at Japan, great.
President Xi, great.
He seems to be getting along with Great Britain at the moment.
France has had its little issues, but Macron was treated very well by the president for a state dinner.
So pretty much everything that people were afraid of about this president for the first term has been disproved.
So the second term is going to be a president who doesn't have to run for every election, wants to work for his legacy, wants to make some deals, and there's just not as much reason to resist him because whoever runs after this is just not going to be Trump.
It's going to be some ordinary Republican running against an ordinary Democrat, and who knows what that's going to look like.
All right, enough about that. I want to revisit a thought I had because it was one of the rare times that I would disagree with With the person I call the smartest person in the world, Naval Ravikant.
I was watching his amazing interview with Joe Rogan.
If you haven't heard that yet, you should listen to the podcast, Joe Rogan talking to Naval Ravikant.
It's in the last week or so that it was posted.
One of the things that Naval says that I disagree with is that humans will always have, or at least for the foreseeable future, will have The monopoly on creativity.
And that creativity and art and those sorts of things are things that machines won't be able to match.
And what he points out is that what we talk about as artificial intelligence is really not that.
It's sort of a pattern recognition thing.
It can process very quickly, but that it's nowhere near the qualities of a human mind.
Now, those statements are all true.
But there's one gigantic blind spot that I think Naval has in his thinking about this.
And I'd like to put this out there.
Now, I'd like to put some context on this, which is that if you ever find yourself disagreeing with Naval, you're probably wrong.
Just keep that in mind.
So I'm going to disagree with Naval right now about AI and human creativity.
At the same time, I'm quite aware I could really be wrong about this.
So I'll present it and let you be the decision-maker.
Now, I talk about the value of having a talent stack, which is having some experience.
You don't have to be an expert, but experience across broad fields, because that gives you a different vision on everything.
If you can look at it through different windows, you've learned economics, you've learned communication, you've learned persuasion, whatever it is.
Your package of skills, the more of them you have, the more accurately you can see reality.
I have a unique...
Talent stack, because I have spent time as a programmer, a bad one, but early in my career, I did learn to code, and so I understand a little bit about that world.
Not enough to be a code and AI or something, but I know the basics.
I also am a professional creator across a variety of fields.
So I've had best-selling books.
I do Dilbert, which is art.
You could argue that this is some form of art that I'm doing here, etc.
And I'm probably one of the most productive creators you'll experience because I create something every day and there's a lot over the years.
So I believe that I have a unique perspective because of that strange combination of experiences.
And here's my...
My proposal of what might be a blind spot for pretty much everybody talking about AI. And it goes like this.
You think the reason we can't create an AI that has a human mind potential is because we're not smart enough yet to make a clever enough AI that's so smart it can match humans.
That is not what's happening.
What's happening is we have not yet understood that humans are not smart.
In other words, AI is trying to catch up to human smartness and the smartest people in the world are saying, wow, I don't know, humans are up here, machines are only up to here, and we don't really see how we could get there in really decades because we're not even close.
This is a complete misunderstanding of reality.
Humans Are already way below machines.
All of those things which we consider human are our flaws, our errors.
Can a machine be more human-like?
Yes, but only by making it have errors.
Can we ever create an AI that would have enough errors that it could look like an idiot on Twitter?
Yes. How long would it take to create an AI that could tweet like a troll on Twitter and nobody would know the difference?
Well, not decades.
Not decades.
All right, but let's talk about creativity.
Oh, and how about creating an AI that That has political opinions that are as good as humans.
Easy. The AI would just say, I will join the team.
Okay, I'm a Democrat now.
Or I'm a Republican now.
It would look at the list of things that Republicans say, the list of things that Democrats say, and it would just agree with its team.
How is that not equal to human intelligence?
Humans don't look at the information and make decisions based on the data and the reasons.
All science confirms this.
We don't. We make irrational decisions that agree with our team or feel good or it's based on a lack of knowledge.
That's how we make decisions.
There's nothing like superior intelligence that's happening.
None of that's happening.
It's us being flailing animals who rationalize our decisions that are irrational after the fact.
Creativity is a specific question here.
Now, here's the thing. How hard would it be to get a machine that could make a great piece of art?
Well, I just told you before we started this that I'm one of the most productive, famous, successful creators in the planet.
You know, if you were just to look at the success of Dilbert, the books, etc.
And here's what I'm going to tell you.
A lot of it is luck.
How many things have I created that didn't work?
A lot.
If you were to look at all the things I've created that were successful at some commercial level, it's very, very little.
For example, Creating Dilbert was sort of an original idea, and that worked.
But once you've created Dilbert, I apply sort of a formula to it.
I take people's real-life experiences.
I put them into the humor formula.
I use the characters I've created.
At this point, it's more of a craft, meaning that there are steps and rules, and there are rules to follow.
That's all programmable. But the initial idea of Dilbert...
A machine could do as long as that machine could be wrong as often as I am.
That's the key.
Here's the part that Naval may have a blind spot for because he has not been, you know, an artistic creator per se for his life, whereas I have.
What I know is how often I can't create.
What I know is how often I'm wrong.
What others see is how often I'm right.
Because you don't see my mistakes.
You don't see all the things I created that I tried and launched and didn't work.
You know, it was this idea. Dilbert was sort of one good idea that managed to be reproducible and extendable.
But it was sort of one good idea.
Could AI create a bunch of ideas of which a thousand of them are bad, but one of them that can sort of A-B test quickly, maybe with people, and find the one out of a thousand that people say, whoa, that's great.
Yes. Yes, AI can do that.
And it's not a giant leap.
So the big thing is you have to understand that the best creators in the world are wrong almost all the time.
You know, the greatest painter in the world is not making a masterpiece with every painting.
That's not happening.
They might make one masterpiece, and then people will say, I like these other ones too, because they're the same person, and then there's something good about them.
But I'll bet if the first masterpiece didn't happen, the other art wouldn't look so good.
In other words, you're looking at chance and A-B testing, And you're imagining it's something magic.
There's no magic to creativity.
It's iteration until something works.
Machines can iterate until something works, and they can do it better.
By 10 years from now, you're going to have a headset that measures how you respond to things.
You're going to look at a screen, and the screen is going to start randomly creating art.
Some of it might be abstract art.
Some of it might be landscapes.
And that sensor on your head is going to go beep, beep, beep when it hits something that you liked.
And then it's going to say, ah, something in this realm seems valuable.
Let me keep reiterating. Beep, beep, beep.
Oh, he likes it. When there's a picture of a landscape, it's not abstract, and it's mountains.
Beep, beep, beep. Let's try some different designs.
We'll put the tree over here.
We'll make the sky a little more blue.
Let's add a cloud. Beep, beep, beep.
The best painting that will ever be made, here's my prediction to wrap it all up.
Someday, could be in 10 years, easily in 10 years, the best painting Painting ever made will be made by AI because it will know what people want and it will rapidly A-B test its way to something that will make you fall off your frickin' chair.
It will be so beautiful you will get goosebumps.
No human will be able to come close to what the AI will be able to do in art in ten years.
Alright. So, there's that.
Now, There's also the human experience that artists take to the art.
But robots can do that simply by querying people, finding out what they care about, looking at what they're writing about, etc.
So, that's my disagreement.
And I'll make a bet that in ten years, There will be an AI painting that will move you so much that you won't believe that humans were ever, you know, were ever good at it.
That will be my bet.
All right. There's a...
There was a great tweet from Human Progress.
I think that's the group where they have just lots of good news that they report on.
And I like to tweet those because it makes me feel good.
But they talked about the fact that there's no conflict in the Western Hemisphere for the first time in human history.
Think about that. The entire Western Hemisphere has no wars.
Just let that sink in for a minute.
The entire Western Hemisphere has no wars.
Thank you, United States.
I mean, a lot of people have a lot to do with it.
Now, somebody's saying Venezuela.
Venezuela's not a war.
It's not a shooting war.
It's not a good situation, but it's also not a shooting war.
Now, the exception here is the drug war and the cartels.
That stuff's still violent, but there's not a nation war.
Even Venezuela does not really have a nation that's fighting against it.
They have an internal problem.
Just think about that.
It's amazing. One of my favorite stories today is that the recommendation to walk 10,000 steps a day Has always been fake news.
Turns out there's no science behind the idea that people should walk 10,000 steps a day.
The best a researcher could come up with is that the reason it came up with the 10,000 is that there is some symbol for 10,000 in, I think, Japanese characters that the character, the way you draw it, looks like a little stick figure trying to walk.
So because there's a stick figure character, a stick figure looking character in Japanese lettering and language, they said, oh, the symbol for 10,000 looks like a person walking.
Let's go with that.
So there's never been any science to that, which is hilarious to me.
Now, let's talk about how to profit...
From political disagreements.
I'm going to throw out a concept, and I want you to think about it to take it to the next level.
So it's a beginning concept.
It goes like this. So first of all, for those of you who don't know, my background is, you know, I studied economics in school.
I got an MBA. I've always been steeped in business models and, you know, how do you make money?
So sort of most of my experience is in how do you take a situation and turn it into something that could make a profit.
And when I look at the current news silos, I say to myself, there is a real inefficiency here.
And whenever you have a serious inefficiency, often, not every time, but quite often, more often than usual, that inefficiency creates an income opportunity.
You just have to figure it out.
All right? Let me throw a suggestion.
Just so you get the sense of it.
Wouldn't you say, it is true, that something that becomes common knowledge in one silo is often invisible to the other side?
But it's not quite equal.
Meaning that the people on the political right, conservatives, typically are aware of all the arguments and the thinking that's on the other side.
But it doesn't work the other way.
People on the left seem not to be as aware of things on the political right.
That's an inefficiency, which should, if we're smart enough, create an opportunity for profit.
You should be able to, let's say in an analogy way, to create an arbitrage of some kind.
Because knowledge tends to be valuable, and if it's not evenly distributed, You should be able to take advantage of that inequality of knowledge.
Let me give you one suggestion.
Now, you will recognize this as self-serving, but you're still going to laugh.
This is all self-serving.
I mentioned that my... My startup has a token that's number one traded token in terms of volume on its exchange at hotbit.io.
And you can also buy them at winhub.com just with a credit card if you like the easy approach.
But here's the thing. If I were to ask conservatives, have you heard of the WEN? The answer would be, there's a good chance, because people have heard of me, they've watched my Periscope, they've seen my tweets, so there's a pretty good chance that half of the world, or a good percentage of them, have heard of this WEN token.
It's unlikely that the people on the right are as aware.
So imagine, if you will, that people on the right bought them either because they're supporting creators who got deplatformed.
So one of my suggestions was I could gift a bunch of WEN tokens to a creator that gets deplatformed, or let's say demonetized, not deplatformed.
Somebody gets demonetized for reasons that we recognize as illegitimate.
The tokens are not worth much in the beginning.
So it wouldn't cost me much to give them away.
So I could give a bunch of tokens to a Dave Rubin or a Steven Crowder or something like that.
And then people on the right could say, oh, I'll do that too.
Now what would happen if a bunch of people on the right bought WEN tokens?
Well, they would go up.
Just like they did when Eric Finman said good things about them.
They went to the top of the Hotbit.io trading list.
Now, as soon as that when goes up in value, it starts crossing over to the other silo.
Because people who are trading crypto are all over the place.
There are conservatives, there are liberals.
But they're going to see it on the exchange.
So the liberals are going to see it for the first time on the exchange.
And when they start buying it, because they see momentum and it seems to be moving, the people on the right have already made their money.
So in other words, you can actually find a way to transfer money from the political left to the political right simply by buying an asset before the people on the left are aware that it's something they should buy.
So that lack of awareness In theory, and again, I'm not saying you should do this necessarily, because, and let me say clearly, any purchases of crypto of any kind, whether it's the WAN or something else, is not an investment.
You should not think of it as an investment.
I want to make clear, and I'm not giving you financial advice.
There's no financial advice.
I'm describing...
Cause and effect and supply and demand.
So if there's a limited supply of this token, which there are, because it's limited by creation, so we can't make more of them.
If the people on the right buy them first, and that creates attention, the people on the left will say, hey, what's all this happening?
They'll buy some, because there's attention on it.
And then the people on the right make a lot of money.
All right. Now, that's just one example.
But I'll bet you could think of other ones that have nothing to do with crypto, in which this difference in knowledge that's temporary, because people on the right learn everything, and then it takes a long time to get over to the other side.
You could probably take advantage of that.
And so if anybody has any other ideas...
That would be great. So wenhub.com is where the wen is purchased.
Or you can get it at hotbit.io as an exchange.
All right. Let's talk about the slippery slope.
So I probably have gotten more heat for this than just about anything else.
And it's the idea that if the platforms start banning the people who are, let's say, the most provocative voices...
That there's a slippery slope and really the entire, the real plan is to get rid of mainstream conservative voices and that it's going in that direction.
And I've said the slippery slope is not a real thing because there are always counter forces that pop up to stop it.
There are natural counter forces.
I think we're seeing that now.
So you saw that YouTube at first demonetized Steven Crowder and it didn't look like there was some easy way for him to reverse that.
There was lots of pressure, so the internet and conservatives and people, anybody who loved free speech, complained.
They complained. And what did YouTube do?
They blinked. So YouTube said, well, okay, okay, maybe it won't be that bad.
We'll let you monetize, Steven Crowder, if all you do is get rid of one link to one t-shirt that we find online.
Now, Whether or not Crowder does that, ever, or whether or not he does it sooner or later, is less relevant to the point, which is he now has a way to monetize.
So in other words, the slippery slope hit a wall with Crowder.
That's what always happens.
In other words, they're always going to push until there's an obstacle that comes up.
And just, hey, boo, stop that.
Stop! Got it.
Crowder is still demonetized.
Yes, until he removes that link, my understanding.
Now, I don't know all the details, but the point is that Crowder was the obstacle.
He was an overreach.
Apparently, Infowars was not an overreach in terms of this slippery slope.
So that was sort of an easy one for the platforms to get rid of.
And even people who like him would say, there was that thing he said that time that even I don't like, even if you like him personally.
And I do like him personally, by the way.
He's been very nice to me.
I'm talking about Alex Jones.
Alex Jones, as a person, is a great guy.
Things he said, you could certainly disagree with him, and quite vigorously, in many cases.
Anyway, so I think the slippery slope has been disproved.
By this experience, people pushed until they had a line, and then that line became a wall.
All right, let's talk about systems over goals.
I often talk about this.
My book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big, introduced this idea that having a goal can be limiting.
Because there might be a lot of things that you want.
All right, I've got to do something about my cat.
Hold on a second. My cat's decided to play with all my papers on my desk.
It's going to be a mess.
Boo? Say hi.
Alright. So systems over goals.
Goals are limited because there might be a number of ways to get rich.
There might be a number of ways to have a happy family life, happy relationship.
So you don't want to limit your goal to, oh, there's this one way.
There's just this one way that I'll be happy.
So first of all, Widen your ambitions, because there are lots of ways to be happy.
And a system is something you do on a regular basis.
You don't know exactly where it's going to shake out, but it's heading in the right direction.
It creates a situation where luck can find you.
So, let me tell you what system I use to make sure that demonetization and shadow banning doesn't go too far.
The system is this.
Whenever I am confronted with something that looks like shadow banning, Something on social media that reminds me of it, it looks like throttling, somebody's complaining, or any suggestion that I or other people who are otherwise good citizens online are being demonetized or throttled,
my system, which I've just started, this is brand new, is that that day I will go and I'll make at least one post on a competing platform.
Now, in the case of Twitter, the competing platform would be Parler or Gab.
So yesterday, I saw things that looked like some kind of, you know, at least I can't confirm, but it looks like I'm throttled or, you know, there may be some issues.
And A.J. Cortez, for example, seems to be shadow banned at the moment.
So because I was reminded of that, My system is, oh, every time I'm reminded that this is happening and there's some evidence for it, even if I can't prove it.
Because if you can't prove it, that's a problem too, because you can't disprove it.
So every time that happens, I go to my phone, and I open up Parler, and I make a post.
Now, what I've done...
I've weaponized shadow banning.
So every time there's something that looks like shadow banning, real or imagined, and this is important, it doesn't have to be real.
It only has to look like it.
That's important. Don't be stopped by whether it's real or not.
If you're reminded of it, go post on the alternate.
Because that would be enough to keep the alternate platforms in business.
So the system is that every day you're sending traffic over to essentially create a free market competition because there's none happening or else there wouldn't be this shadow banning.
Or at least not as much of it.
So that's one system. Here's my best idea I've ever had.
Are you ready for this? Here's how to use a system instead of a goal to reduce mass shootings.
Now, when you talk about guns and mass shootings, there are certain absolutes that you have to have for any plan, or else your plan will go nowhere.
So here's a suggestion for reducing mass gun violence, and I'll make you this promise.
It will have nothing to do with anybody's access to guns.
Are you okay? Because before I talk about this, you're automatically thinking, oh, he's going to limit my gun access.
Somehow there's going to be a new law.
No laws. No changes to laws, okay?
So that's the first thing. No change to laws.
No change. Zero change to access to guns.
Second Amendment completely, completely already.
Now, somebody's saying, gun registry?
No. Here's the second part.
No loss of privacy.
So two things my idea will have.
Zero loss of privacy.
The government will know nothing else about you.
Okay? The government will not learn anything new about you with this plan I'm going to describe.
And no access to guns will be denied, even in an indirect way.
Not in the slightest way will it affect your Second Amendment or your privacy.
Here you go. And this is why a system is better than a goal.
If you're thinking about a goal, you're thinking, hmm, guns, take them away, right?
Goals take you to these specific little places you think about that can be traps.
Here's an idea you've never heard.
It goes like this.
Number one, can social media, with some kind of AI and algorithms, can they determine something special about the activity of people who are likely to become shooters?
I say yes.
I think if they studied all of the language and activity and images and postings and social media and maybe emails that they have access to, they could identify someone who's getting ready To maybe, potentially, be a shooter.
Would you all agree that that's probably true?
That you probably could identify people getting ready?
Now, it might be simple things, such as they talk about shooter games, they post a picture of a gun, they favorite something that has some violence in it, they favorite something that's got some bad Nazi stuff in it, whatever. So I think we would agree that if the social media platforms wanted to, they could identify these people.
Here's the cool part.
Do you know what's really complicated?
Their algorithms. The algorithms of what the social media companies are feeding to people are so complicated that I believe even they don't know what they're feeding to whom.
This is important for the privacy part.
I don't believe that the social media companies have any kind of a database that says, okay, we fed these ads and this content to this person.
And if they did, they wouldn't care because I'm not sure that they care about what one person looked at.
They're looking at averages. So, first thing is a program that can identify people who are likely to become mass shooters.
The second part is automatically and without any human involvement and without any identification of the people involved that are being potentially radicalized, the algorithm by itself It de-radicalizes them.
In other words, if somebody is in a mood to do a shooting and it's been detected by the system, no humans have been involved.
There's nobody at the social media company who knows the name of the person that the AI is identifying.
The AI does not talk to people.
This is the key.
The AI does not print a report.
It doesn't tell you who these people are.
It simply feeds it to their incredibly complicated algorithm, and then the algorithm starts deprogramming automatically, no human involvement, deprograms the shooter.
How do you deprogram somebody?
Well, a variety of ways, and we could probably find this out through testing over time.
One of those ways might be to send them resources they need.
They might need A suicide, you know, advisor.
They might need friends.
The algorithm might actually help them find a friend.
They might need to see images of kindness and generosity and things which would at least give them a little bit of freedom.
They might need to be on meds.
They might need to know there are people just like them who have been helped by getting, say, an antidepressant.
There might be a knowledge gap, there might be a friendship gap, a connection gap, a gap in meaning, or simply a gap of what inputs are coming into their head.
So, that's my idea.
Nobody takes away your gun.
Nobody ever learns who you are.
It's an AI talking to an algorithm That's feeding different content to the recipient.
Tell me that's not the best idea you've ever heard, at least in the realm of gun control.
It's not the best idea in the world.
Yeah, right? All problems are solved.
Nobody has their gun taken away.
Nobody loses their privacy.
You let the machine do it.
And where did this idea come from?
Well, the idea comes from the fact that the social media companies presumably can do the same technique to bias political outcomes.
So if the social media companies can use their algorithm to bias political outcomes, they can certainly bias other things.
And if you can unbias somebody who's on the edge of being dangerous, You wouldn't get them all.
You know, it doesn't solve anything.
You know, it doesn't solve the whole problem.
But I'll bet it'd take a bite out of it.
All right. That is my best idea of the day.
I think I'm gonna...
What time is it?
Ah, okay. Somebody's saying...
Yes, somebody says it has the potential to be misused.
It doesn't have the potential to be misused.
It's already misused.
There's no question in my mind.
Again, there's a smoking gun, but maybe the gun was on fire.
I could easily be fooled by confirmation bias, etc.
But it seems to me fairly obvious that the social media companies are already putting their finger on the scale, as I hate to say, but there's no better analogy.
And so we already know it works.
Or at least we know that they think it works and they're pretty smart.
There are no mass shootings at inner-city schools.
Ask yourself why. I know why.
Does anybody not know why there are no shootings at inner-city schools?
I hate to say it, but it feels like the vast majority of shooters are young white men, and there are just fewer of them at inner-city schools.
So for whatever reason, it seems to be limited to a certain demographic, and I don't know why exactly.
All right. That's all for now.
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