Back to episode — Episode 1297 Scott Adams - Bombing Syria, The Obesity-Virus Pandemic, How Not to "Log Off" on Zoom
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you. All right, now let me take that story into this next news item. There was a man, I guess his last name was Raja Gopal. I think it was India. Was it India? Might have been Pakistan. I forget. But he's from the Karnataka Hassan district, so somebody can tell me where that is. But anyway, he was riding his motorcycle and a cheetah or a leopard, it's not clear, attacked his family. Just like cam…
← Previous segment →right? Well, I don't feel like I'm giving away a state secret because it's kind of obvious. Don't you think that our government and probably other ones are putting together deepfakes of other leaders and deepfakes of terrorists? Don't you think if we had a good deepfake of Osama bin Laden we could have made some videos and put them into the system and caused people to act differently because they thought bin Laden was giving them guidance? And I'm not sure we didn't. How would we know, right? We wouldn't know if we'd done that. Nobody would tell you.
So the opportunity for weaponizing these deepfakes is really scary. Because imagine you get into a shooting war and we take a deepfake of the leader of the other side, put him on a video, and he says, hey everybody, lay down your weapons, we're surrendering. His own military would probably think it was true, right? Because everybody, even in the military, they have the phones, right? Or do they? If you're on operation maybe not because you could track the phone. But when they got back to base, people would have phones and stuff, right? So even if you're a terrorist you would see the video. It wouldn't have to be on TV. It would just be circulating. And there would be your leader, your terrorist leader, saying lay down your weapons, you know, we got everything we wanted or whatever.
So that's common. Twitter is talking about having some kind of pay model where you could optionally charge people for extra content, maybe even newsletters. So the world is moving toward this subscription base. But Twitter has a really big obstacle to overcome, a psychological obstacle. And the psychological obstacle is you're used to Twitter being free. Once you get used to it being free, people are going to complain if there's anything that looks like it's extra and it's on Twitter but you have to pay for it. It's really going to make people angry.
Let me tell you how you're going to feel. Well, this is how I feel. Now I'll read a story on let's say Twitter or CNN or whatever, and I'll click to see the original story and it's behind a paywall or you have to go and figure out
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how to turn off your ads and your ad blocker, which isn't too much of a bother. I would say I skip almost everything that's asking me for money or a password or my email address or to turn off ad blockers. And every time I go to one of those links I get angry. Now Twitter users are gonna have that experience. They could be like, hey that looks interesting, click. Oh I'd have to pay for that. I'm…
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