's a process. It doesn't have to be an app. It could be something that gets the same thing done. And it goes like this. Number one, how much do you dislike commercials on your television? I think you don't like them at all. Wouldn't you wish that if you were watching live TV where you can't fast forward that you could have something entertain you during the commercials? And yet, here's the key, and yet have the thing that entertains you during the commercials be on the same topic or within the same field as the show you were just watching.

And so I submit to you what I call News Buddies. What it is, it's a live stream. Could be on an app, but it could be just a live stream that is at the same time as the live network broadcast or cable broadcast of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC. And so if you're watching any of those shows you can have, call up on your other device. So let's say you're watching the news on your television because you're a certain age, you watch a television, and you call up your phone. A little person, a real person who at exactly the same time for you and other people watching the same show will be your little news buddy. It'll be like a little avatar that just sits there on your phone and is completely silent mostly during the actual broadcast. The moment the broadcast moves to a commercial you can silence your TV and then have the little news buddy say, you know that story you just watched? That's kind of fake news because it's a little bit out of context. Here's what they left out.

And what would you rather do? Would you rather listen to the commercial or would you rather listen to somebody tell you what was wrong with what you just watched? Which is more entertaining? Because that's all that matters, right? Now let's say it's free. Could easily be free because if you put it on, let's say on YouTube, you could have the commercials run. I don't know if you could do this, make the commercials run on your buddy app at a different time as the ones on the TV so that you never get commercials at the same time. I think you can do that. But you can do it on an app if you build it yourself. And so therefore you wouldn't have to listen to the commercial. Maybe it's just running in video. It doesn't even have any sound while the news buddy is talking.

And now let's say that you don't like one of the news buddies because it looks like that's another propaganda. You pick another one. And other people can judge the other news buddies and pick one you like. So there should be somebody who, and by the way there wouldn't be any copyright problem because the news buddy would not be showing the stream. You would have to have your own separate stream for CNN or whatever it is you're watching. Now you have the news buddy doing a little fact checking while the live news is on. And then the news buddy could even, hold on that gets better, send you links to the fact checks. Huh? In real time. In real time.

So your little news buddy, you know as soon as it goes to commercial it says, you know what they said about climate change? Well some people say that that's not true. Here's a link. You'd be like, seriously? I totally believe that there's a link that says the opposite. Now how many senior citizens, how many senior citizens could handle having a news buddy on the phone plus the TV? Okay, over a certain age I'll give you that it would decline in usability. But it's also over a certain age that they're not as active in anything. So you tell me that people in their 50s and 60s can't handle opening an app on the phone? I say no, of course they can. So the people that you're really trying to reach, even the older segment, can absolutely turn on a simultaneous app. That's not even hard.

So here's something that I would like to give you as a general concept. If I had told you before you'd ever heard of something called a jury trial that I was going to design this justice system where 12 of your peers would be selected and then vetted by lawyers and we'd have all these checks and balances and a judge, but ultimately there'd be 12 people who would decide if you go to jail or not, how many of you would have thought that would work? Seriously. Yeah, be honest with yourself. If the jury system had never existed and somebody described it to you and said I got this great idea, would you think that was going to work? Really? I don't know. Some of you maybe. Maybe better than the alternatives.

What about the Supreme Court? Think of all your problems with the Supreme Court, all the complaints you have. If somebody had described the Supreme Court before anybody knew it ever existed, it was just a whole new idea, would you have heard that and said yeah, I think that's going to last at least 200 years? People will find that very credible? I don't know. Maybe you would have thought it was better than the other ideas. So you know that'd be good enough. But I'm not sure that we're so smart that we know that we can't engineer systems to at least make us satisfied that we've done the best job we can.

So when I was talking the other day about could you have a Supreme Court of fact checking, how many of you said ugh, you can't do that because then the fact checkers would just be bought off by somebody? And then you think of all the reasons why it doesn't work. I get that. Every one of the reasons why you offer that it wouldn't work if you designed it incorrectly. Yeah, you're right, it wouldn't work. But don't underestimate the ingenuity of the public to design something that does work. Even if we get it wrong 19 to 20 times, if you just keep chugging along you're gonna get something that works.

So when I talk about this news buddy app, the only thing I'm trying to transmit is that you'd be surprised how many thorny, impossible-seeming problems could be solved if you just chug along and try enough things. Doesn't mean this will be the solution to have a little news buddy because you know the obvious thing is they become corrupted, blah blah. But we do have a history of solving problems that I would say are like this-ish in the sense that you can't imagine how you could get the bias and the criminality out of it. But we seem to largely be able to fix those things. It just takes a while. So I don't know if the news buddy is the way, but something cool could probably fix the fake news. I don't think what's going to fix it is competing platforms. That's my best guess.

Do you think that the fake news will ever be fixed by somebody coming up with a competing platform that's oh, that's all the good news so we'll watch that one instead? It doesn't feel like it, right? And so since we've tried that in effect, should we not try something else? Right? So somebody cleverly is saying, so when did you create this news buddy app? It would have been smarter to develop the app before giving you the idea. But I feel like it's more about the concept of designing systems that work. It's not even about the app. And I don't have that much interest in that kind of an app. But it was a good question. Yes, it was a good question.

All right. What are the coolest things about being me? If I could be all about me for a moment, and why wouldn't I be, is that every now and then I'll wake up and just something cool will happen that's just so cool you can barely contain yourself. And you didn't know it was coming. It's just, hey, it's cool.

I was curious about something related to a story I'm going to talk about later. And in order to talk about that other story about an author being canceled I wanted to Google myself and see if what's the highest rated thing about me, to see if it was negative or positive, and to compare it to this other story. And I discovered that something like three days ago there was a story that the Dilbert comic is going to be featured in, or already is in, a Rick and Morty episode. And I guess they go to an alternative universe or something and they go into an alternative universe where there's a Dilbert world and their desks are eating the people or something.

And here's what's weird. So this was four days