#feb1 the public is done

Feed to catch up. And then we're going to do a special purpose double whiteboard. Yeah, it's better than one double whiteboard. And I'm going to run an idea past you. In a way, you have just become part of the first digital constitutional Congress in which I will be proposing a non binding amendment to the Constitution, a system, if you will, a new process. I'm going to run it by all of you for opinion so you're going to see it for the first time. All right. So as you know, there are some situations for which our government is ill equipped. One of those would be getting a budget approved, am I right? They'll throw everything together into a big bill until nobody likes any of it and they just can't get past it. So is there any kind of process that would help them get past that? It's almost like you need a hostage negotiator, somebody independent who just goes in and says, all right, all right, let's try to make a deal here and get something done. Likewise with the pandemic, we've got this situation where the government is really the worst tool for the job. If you're in a war like a real war, the government's the best tool for the job. Absolutely. You want somebody to organize and organize quickly and have that kind of power. But as we're deciding to get back to something like normal life, the government is the worst tool for that job because the government can't make a wrong decision and expect to keep their jobs. And anything that requires more people to die, even if there's a trade off of freedom, if it's not in the context of a regular shooting war, it's going to be bad for a politician. So they really can't make the cost benefit analysis that the public requires. So what do you do? And that's where a hostage negotiator comes in. And I'm going to lay out a process for getting past logjams with a. Something I'm going to call a hostage negotiator, borrowing that term from Greg Gutfeld. And the idea is that if you had a certain situation, somebody could, number one, self appoint themselves with a three replacement option. Here's the part that I want to run past you because there would be no process for, let's say, electing or appointing a hostage negotiator, something that would have to arise by some kind of person just wanting to do it. In this case, I will act as that person just to see if the process works. And the process is that the first Person who goes into this process has to make a little bit of an impact. In other words, maybe get a hashtag trending or get some agreement somewhere, just a little bit of impact. But in order to be credible as a hostage negotiator, they should have three people named as replacements. In other words, three people who would just have to say, you know, I could do that better than you. I'll take your job. And they automatically get it. For example, I would name. I'll give you one example. I'll name Sam Harris as somebody who said. If he said, hypothetically, if he were to say, you know, I like this idea of a hostage negotiator, but you're bad at it or you're not credible, or it's just not going over with the public for some reason, as soon as he said that, if you wanted to legitimately take over, I would say, perfect. That's exactly how the system works. If you want to do it, go ahead. But I would ask him to do the same thing. List three credible people that if they just said, you know, you're a mess, I'm going to take over, that they could do it. So what would be Sam Harris? Maybe come up with a couple more. Now, just think about that for a moment and, you know, roll it around in your head. What could go wrong? How many ways could it go wrong? Now, if the first thing. If the first thing that you're thinking is, I don't like Sam Harris, you have to wait for the other two names because nobody's going to like any one of the names. Just like every other form of government, nobody's going to like all of it, Right? So remember, you have to accept that this is a process in which all of us will find something we don't like. That's not disqualifying. That's a symbol of a good system, actually, if negotiating is involved. So let me say this. The hostage negotiator would be there to assist the government, not replace. Would not be a battle. It would be helping the government fill in a capability that it simply doesn't have and can't have in this special circumstance. That ability is to tell us, you know, some of you are going to die, but let's get back to work. Government just can't say that. So it would be greatly aided by somebody else saying it and then simply agreeing with it or going the way that the majority goes. But I don't think it's a case of just asking something from the government. The public should be willing to offer Something as well. So as a negotiator, I would make some specific offers I'll tell you about in a minute. The idea would be to negotiate creatively. Offers that are not a standard Republican offer or a standard Democrat offer. Just be creative. Just throw some extra things in there, maybe take some things out of there. Just see what you can do. That the public would get behind. But here's the key trigger. The hostage negotiator would not approve of any deal without getting 75% of the public on board. So in other words, the hostage negotiator would have zero power, as it should be. Only the public would have the power. But the public would have to get up to speed, be well informed, and then by a 75% majority, then the government is safe. Why is the government safe? Because if you can get a majority that big for anything, your politicians are completely safe. They can just say, look, there was a 75% majority for this. Nobody went against it. In fact, at that point, you'd probably get something like 100% congressional approval of stuff with a few holdouts. So here's what a opening offer would look like. Look like this. And again, this is just a model for how something like this could work. So don't get too caught up on the specifics. The reason I'm showing it to you is to get your opinions, okay? Nothing happens until you have a target. Least nothing good. Unfortunately, things happen, but they're not good. Anybody who knows anything about management will agree with the following statement. If you're not measuring something and have some specific looking direction, nothing good is going to happen. You can't just go to work every day and try to be good at your job. That's not anything. You have to have a direction, and you've got to be able to measure if the things you're doing are working or not working. If you're not doing that, it's unmanaged. And the pandemic feels unmanaged to the public. It's not really unmanaged, but it feels that way to us because there's no specific thing being measured toward a specific end goal. Now, suppose somebody said, all right, we'll measure statistics of infections or deaths or hospitalizations. What do all of you say? I don't trust those numbers. Right? I don't trust those numbers. So instead of trusting those numbers, I would propose the following. That we would manage it by saying February 1st is our target. Can we get the government to say yes, The Biden administration may be the governors, because remember, this is State and federal negotiation. Can you get everybody to say, yes, but we would hold them not responsible if we have to change that target. You have to have a target, but it's crazy if you don't change it. If the data changes or the situation changes, you have to have some kind of a target. We'll talk about systems over goals, but in this specific case, since it's obvious that we all want to get back to freedom, there's no ambiguity about what the end state is. Right? There's no ambiguity. If there were, then a system would be better than a goal. But in this specific case, where everybody knows exactly what they want, which is get back to normal life safely enough, then that's a little less of an issue. All right, so we would hold our politicians not to blame for any excess deaths that came as a result of this negotiation. And we would say that we would not hold them to the decision of February 1st unless by that date a credible polling company of people who are well informed. Of course, that might be hard to define, but of people who are well informed, 75% of them agree that February still works. What do you think? Now, of course, the government. Government would not be bound to any of this. It would simply give them an extra path that's not available to them now. And the extra path is to follow the lead of the public. Right now, that's not an option. Right, because the public's a little bit too split and we don't have. We wouldn't all agree on the end date. Now, for this to work, it would require. Not that 75% agreed. Here's an important point. This would be a little bit like a jury trial. It's not that you get 75% on the same page, it's that you get 75% to say it's time to make a decision, which is a little bit different. It's the people who say, all right, all right, I get it. You just need a few more votes. We need to get past this. I wouldn't have picked February 1st. I might have picked March 1st, but I'm not going to be the one to stop it for those 30 days. So you need a lot of people who are sort of, you know, in the middle to be convinced that we just need decisions. All right? You're forgetting there's a lot of psychos out there that love this stuff. Okay, I don't know exactly how that would. How exactly that would work. Now, I'm seeing some stuff on locals that I won't call out, but I Want to emphasize that if you make it a combative process with the government instead of an additive process, you're not going to get very far, because everybody's first reaction is to bristle and try to maintain power, et cetera. So it has to be an assistance period. And the first person who starts something going needs to be willing to George Washington. It. Does everybody know what that means to George Washington? Whoever goes first has to be willing to get out of there really fast, because otherwise the system has no credibility. It requires a flow of credible people through it, some better than others. Right. But at this point, the way our system is designed, it just doesn't have the ability to get past log jams the way the public would like it to. So we could give it that cover with a different hostage negotiator for each topic. You wouldn't want the same one for more than one topic. I would. I would say so. Even to get the ball rolling. I don't even know if you'd want one to get the ball rolling more than once, even if they were quickly replaced. All right, yeah. Trump. Trump is too polarizing. So you want people who. You can't find anybody who has no connection to politics because the Trump era ended the days when anybody didn't have an opinion. We're done with that. So you need people who at least have some record of appreciating arguments on both sides, at the very least, and they should have some level of rational, established ability that is obvious to everybody. So I heard somebody suggest Naval Ravikant. He would be on my list. All right, so you beat me to that one. I doubt he'd do it. Which is exactly the kind of person you want. Somebody who would be the last person in the world who would agree to something like that. That's who you want. All right, well, here's the thing. You want people who are not just popular. I'm seeing Joe Rogan being suggested. The trouble with Joe Rogan is that he is great at what he does, but I don't know that the left in particular would recognize him as having the, let's say, intellectual independence or depth. I hate to say that because he's one of the smartest guys around, but you're looking for somebody who's got that sort of statistical. I guess that's the best way to say it. Somebody who has a statistical appreciation of the arguments. I think you need that. At least. Shellenberger is good. Yeah, I like. Van Jones would be good, especially because he's shown appreciation for both sides of arguments. Tom Brady. That's funny. Sting. All right, now we're just doing funny names. All right. I'm seeing Dr. Drew's name go by, and he was actually one of the first people I thought of. But on second thought, should we include medical professionals at all? Here's why I believe that politicians and the entire medical community has the same problem, which is the risk of being wrong at this level is a career ending problem. Would it be a career ending for. For me if I were to negotiate something that was suboptimal? Well, I mean, I'd take shift for a long time, but I could put up with that. Like, for me, I don't really see the downside. But if you actually are a medical professional, I think it's too dangerous and I wouldn't recommend it because I'm not sure I would trust a medical professional to be free of the constraint of their own professional risk. It would be way out of line with what would be asked of them. Now, would I expect to get lots of doctors to weigh in and to agree and to publicly say yes or no, let's say on February 1st? Yes, yes. So you'd want to really pay attention to the medical professional opinion above others, I think, but you don't want them to be the ones whose name is attached to it. I think that's just more than you want to ask a medical professional in these polarized times, in this polarized question. So I would say nobody who's directly associated with politics. So, you know, Trump's great negotiator, but for this exactly the wrong person, you'd want somebody, said Mike Rowe. That was one of the first ones I thought of, too, but primarily because of his sort of common sense likability. But I still think you need somebody you feel more comfortable, could go a little bit lower into the. Or deeper into the science of it. I'd want somebody who's got a proven ability to go deeper than I can go. That would be, you know, something I'd be looking for. All right, Neil degrasse Tyson. Oh, there you go. There you go. I mean, the perfect trio would be white, black and female, right? Yeah. If you had to have. If you're going to name three people in today's polarized world, because, remember, you're trying to get credibility and you're trying to get everybody on board. So while I could make an argument, there are lots of times you don't want to go all woke up. This wouldn't be one of them. This is one of those times. Where extra wokeness just has utility. It just has utility because it's not like there's only three people in the world that would qualify as good for this position. Elon Musk would have been my top choice. I'm seeing that suggested over in the locals network. Elon Musk would be able to look at the science, has the popularity on enough of the world, but he's a little bit polarizing and maybe the left has a little bit of a problem with him. Jordan Peterson, not American. Not American. I feel like you need an American on this one. Although I don't know, do you? I guess I'd be open to that. I guess I made an assumption without thinking about it too hard. Yeah, Jordan Peterson would have the. All of the capabilities plus the communication ability that literally no one has. By the way. I've never seen a better communicator than Jordan Peterson. I've never seen anything like it. All right, that's all I had to say for today. I was expecting more pushback. Can I get just a final opinion of what looked good or not in this idea? Worth a try. Because we could a b test it. I mean we could just. We're testing it right now. If it doesn't work, nobody will care. The hashtag will die tomorrow. You know, we'll give it a try. Remember, everything's non binding, everything's negotiable and everything's public and you know, no. No negotiating behind closed doors. So I'm mostly getting good responses, which I wasn't actually expecting. I shouldn't be so surprised. Yeah, I wasn't expecting a good response, frankly, but. All right, so we're off and running then, Based on your response. We are. We're live. So this is the opening offer? Opening offer to the Biden administration and all governors that this is applicable to. I realize many of you live in a state where you already have all the freedom you want, but for the rest of us, we would appreciate some backup. And again, I'll tell you, in fact, maybe I'll just say if anybody wants to step forward and take over for me, if they've got basic capabilities, which is you're sure that they could see things on both sides of the political aisle and they have some depth, more depth than I have and I don't have enough. So I'd like to get it replaced as soon as possible. If you could do that for me. Just replace me as soon as possible. Anyway, that's the opening offer February 1st, but it doesn't count unless 75% of the well informed people also agree that it's time. That's the opening offer. And I would hold blameless the government for changing the date if they need to if the situation changes and hold them not responsible for any extra deaths that they could have avoided by being more stringent. But 75%. Let's see if we can get there. All right. Now keep in mind, if we get surprised in January, all bets are off. Everybody understand that? Right? You all understand if we get some big surprise, all bets are off. You have to have to rethink it from the start but without any big surprises. February 1st, public is done. By the way, did anybody notice that? Rhymes. February 1st, the public is done. It's hard not to say, isn't it? I'll bet the first time you hear it you want to roll it around your head. Feb1, the public is done. Yeah, that's not an accident. All right, that's it for today. I'll talk to you later.