00:04:31.240Who wants less police when you have just as much crime?
00:04:34.300But I think that actually there is a smart way to do it.
00:04:38.840And the smart way to do it is to create situations in which getting away with a crime is effectively impossible.
00:04:47.140So, as you drive toward it's impossible to get away with it, in theory, the number of people who try a crime that they know they'll get caught for should go down,
00:04:57.820and therefore the number of police you need should go down.
00:05:00.680So, this is one of – there are probably a dozen technologies in private companies that police do not have direct access to,
00:05:07.720everything from facial recognition to drone things and now DNA technologies.
00:05:13.980But there are a number of technologies that could drive the ability to get away with a crime really close to zero.
00:05:21.580And I don't think you'd have to get all the way to Big Brother.
00:05:25.900And this is relevant because in the news, Ivanka Trump is spearheading a – I guess an effort to try to solve a bunch of cold cases specifically for the Native American community and the Alaskan Natives
00:05:41.900because I guess it's an underserved community and they have all these DNA and cold case samples that they can't solve.
00:05:49.760So, how many of these cold cases in the sense of – if they have some DNA from the case – what percentage of all these cases that Ivanka is targeting to get some resolution to,
00:06:04.680what percentage of those do you think Othram could solve if you were brought into this?
00:06:09.360I think that on the upfront side, you would probably solve, you know, somewhere close to 75 percent and then it will converge very closely on over 90 percent.
00:06:20.640And that's in contrast to what you would see with like a typical system right now where sex assault reveals identity through code as 15 percent of the time.
00:06:29.780Identified remain is like 1 percent of the time.
00:06:31.940All right. Now, put yourself in the head of a criminal and you've got two possibilities.
00:06:37.720The old way is that there was a 15 percent chance of getting caught for, let's say, some violent crime that would leave your DNA.
00:06:45.800But what happens if it goes to 90 or 100 percent?
00:06:49.760Are you exactly as likely to do the crime?
00:06:52.240Well, if it's a crime of passion or you're crazy or it's revenge or something, maybe yes.
00:06:56.060But I got to think that if there were a steady stream of reports of cold cases being solved, what does that do to your mental understanding of risk?
00:07:11.020So, David, would you imagine that there will be lots of stories coming out of the kind you're describing where a really cold case that couldn't be solved suddenly is easy to solve?
00:07:22.660And what's that going to do to the criminal mind? Is something like that coming?
00:07:27.280Yeah. I mean, there's been a steady flow of cases that are that are that are being solved.
00:07:31.120We've got dozens that are that are going to be announced in the next month or two.
00:07:34.400And I think I think what that does is, you know, people have argued, do we have stricter punishment?
00:07:39.320Do we have, you know, what demotivates people to commit crime?
00:07:42.800And I think I think severity of punishment hasn't been very effective.
00:07:46.360But I think knowing that you're going to get caught, you know, I think is a huge deterrent.
00:07:50.420And at this point, if you're going to leave, whether on purpose or by accident, DNA somewhere, there's almost a certainty that you'll be caught.
00:07:58.860If not immediately, very soon, the technology continues to develop.
00:08:02.400And so I think it's going to make people think twice.
00:08:04.740Certainly, it's going to retire the idea of I think I think repeat crime or serial crimes will probably converge on extinction.
00:08:12.440Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Serial crimes will converge on extinction.
00:08:20.700That's that's that's a phrase that you couldn't even imagine before.
00:08:25.200But that sounds entirely practical to me. All right.
00:08:28.320Thanks. I just wanted to get a quick hit on that and try to connect some things I've been trying to connect.
00:08:33.860But just more generally, I think that defunding the police, if you change that into your mind, into how do you make less crime happen in the first place, then you get to defunding the police indirectly.
00:08:47.320Thank you, David. David Middleman from Othram, O-T-H-R-A-M.
00:11:00.740There's a lot of conversation, and I haven't weighed into it much at all, about mail-in votes.
00:11:09.980And the reason that I haven't talked about it is I don't quite understand it, meaning that there's something about the argument about why the – what are the two categories?
00:11:22.560There's the absentee ballots, which we've had forever, and they seem to work fine, but everybody voting by mail is more of a problem.
00:11:33.040And I think that has to do with the fact that if everybody just gets a ballot, whether they want it or not, a lot of people will – it will be mailed to the wrong place.
00:11:44.540Somebody else will pick up the mail and fill it out for you.
00:11:48.060You know, so you can imagine a whole bunch of problems like that.
00:11:50.780And I've got to say, it's a tough one, because I certainly understand why states want to do it, and I completely understand how open to fraud it would be.
00:13:27.960Now, I saw there was a news report of a local correspondent.
00:13:33.120I think he did a local test of mailing some ballots, and he discovered that there were some problems in the post office.
00:13:39.880I think three out of 100 ballots didn't make the whole process, which is way too many.
00:13:46.880Imagine an election in which you were pretty sure 3% of the votes got lost.
00:13:52.400And that wouldn't be much of an election, given how close our elections are.
00:13:56.640So I would say my opinion on all of this is I'm just as concerned as other people.
00:14:05.500But I think we have the weirdest situation in the world here in which I don't know that we have an opportunity to have a credible vote this time.
00:14:18.000Because there's so much going on and so many accusations on both sides of irregularities and voter suppression and mail-in votes and every other thing,
00:14:29.240that I don't even know if we have the option of a fair election.
00:16:21.800So if you were even a little bit objective and you said to yourself, you know, I don't know what's going on here.
00:16:29.060Biden could be a big problem and we wouldn't even know who got elected, really.
00:16:34.000And then the progressive stuff is sufficiently big enough changes.
00:16:39.280Yeah, I'm not going to say radical because that's just politicizing the speech.
00:16:43.220It's a big enough change that any big change introduces a new set of risks.
00:16:48.320So there is a different risk profile, and I would argue that the Biden risk is far bigger because it's an unknown and also a big change.
00:16:58.540Trump is closer to a known if he gets reelected.
00:17:02.820You're going to see some tweets you don't like.
00:17:05.700There are going to be some fact checking that doesn't look good.
00:17:09.500You know, there will be world leaders who say some bad things about Trump.
00:17:14.300You know, it's guaranteed what that looks like 90%, right?
00:17:18.920Always some surprises, but you kind of know what a Trump president's going to look like.
00:17:23.620So if you have this much uncertainty about the result, you have basically one way to get a safe outcome that doesn't drive the country apart.
00:17:36.720And it's a landslide election for Trump.
00:17:39.200Now, that might happen anyway, but the republic is going to be a little bit at risk if we go the other way.
00:17:50.560It's impossible to know exactly risk, but I would say that doing, you know, the, what's the saying?
00:17:57.700The evil that you know is better than the evil you don't know.
00:18:01.440So even if you don't like Trump as president, you kind of know what you're getting.