I think that the evidence is that the more society, the more culture has media to provide us the ability to share experience and understanding, then the more sophisticated, secure and non-violent that culture becomes. If we think about a mind that has no understanding and experience, let’s think about a newborn infant, and just to cheat for the purposes of this hypothetical, let’s give the newborn infant a little more control over its motor skills than, than a, a freshly born newborn infant has and let’s put a gun in the lap of this infant. This infant has no understanding of the way the world works and no experience yet. It’s newly born. And the infant might use its just instinct of grasping to fondle this thing and it might accidentally touch the trigger. Might not and it might actually pull the trigger and the weapon will go off and then fire a bullet in a random direction. We can imagine where this bullet might strike. We can imagine the scenario where the bullet strikes the child itself, kills the child. Or the bullet strikes a parent or it ricochets harmlessly into the wall. Let’s pick one of the scenarios where it doesn’t kill the child ‘cause we want to understand what the child’s experience is like after this moment occurred. I think the child has no difference in its understanding of what goes on whether the bullet hits the wall or hits the parent. I think the, the, that infant mind, that mind that has no experience and knowledge, no understanding, uh, is startled by the loud noise, but feels no different whether the bullet hits the wall or kill, or kills his own parent or her own parent. Contrast that with a mature adult mind. The mature adult mind will feel something if another human being is struck. And the difference between the infant mind and the adult mind is experience and understanding. Now, if we live in a world where the only experience and understanding we have is that which we can obtain ourselves through our own interactions with the world, there’s no other people in it, it’s going to take us a long time to understand things. But fortunately, we live in a world where we can pass information to one another. When we develop the ability co-, communicate our parents can tell us, “No, that’s dangerous.” And we can learn how to understand what our parents mean. And it allows us to parse things faster. When we develop some media and the first artist drew on the cave walls the giant wholly mammoth, the man with the spear, he was able to communicate to the young boys that hadn’t yet gone into the hunt, this thing is huge and will stomp on you. See the scale by my drawing on the wall? Stay away from its feet. And they, they have an evolutionary advantage from having that ability to use media to communicate, uh, experience and understanding, transfer, experience and understanding. And the better and more capable our media is, the better that simulation of that hunt, the more equipped the people that that information if being communicated to are to parse it and understand it and get value from it. And we are very fortunate ‘cause now we figured out how to create interactive media. We cannot merely use are prefor-, frontal cortex to simulate and imagine what it would be like to font, to fight that wholly mammoth; we can actually use a computer to simulate it and get a sense of what it’s like. This is really useful. Now, there are broken people in this world. And broken people don’t necessarily follow the same rules that the rest of us do. Broken people instead of seeing the benefits of a collaborative society and feeling gratification when we give joy and happiness to others and we benefit the people around us, broken people sometimes because they are broken feel they must harm themselves or others. They’re broken. Fortunately, there’s not many broken people. Also, we’ve learned that consuming experience and understanding does not cause us to become broken. In fact, the more experience and understanding we get that we can transfer from one of us to the other the, more quickly we are to have better decisions and, and be less broken. Be more likely to be optimal in decision making. So, therefore the society that embraces the transfer of information, the transfer of experience and understanding is going to be a better society than the one that does not. And for that reason, we must embrace, uh, in a, and amplify and accelerate our use of tools and technology to communicate in a form. And video games are leading the charge. Now, not all people that use video games as a form of expression have the intent of, um, education. But as human beings who generally all non-broken human beings have this feeling of wanting to be better with each other, um, to improve our own experience and experience of those around us, any simulation will better us because we’ll get a sense of, of, eh, eh, like, eh -- Even playing Grand Theft Auto a gamer knows that, that playing Grand Theft Auto as sane mind is actually better equipped to make better decisions that are good for the world be, after playing the game than before it. And this is one of the reasons why people that really understand video games for the b-, that play them or create them want, uh, uh, we’re almost, uh, uh, insulted by the suggestion that there’s a negative to this because we feel, we understand these benefits. It’s only the broken mind. So, the problem isn’t the media. The media -- the more media we have the better we are as a society. The problem is the broken mind. And I’ve not heard any proposals whether it’s, you know, those that hate guns saying, “Make the magazines smaller.” Or those that hate media, “Ban content.” None of these proposals will actually help us overcome the, the, the pain we feel when things like Sandy Hook happened. We need to figure out the way our minds work. And we need to anticipate and help those that might find themselves with broken minds.
