This TED Talk is from author and host of the After On podcast Rob Reid.

He actually first gave it at TED 2019, but he made a lot of visual references on stage,

which doesn't really translate well in audio.

So we asked Rob to come into our studio and redeliver his talk just for TED Talks daily.

We'd love to know what you think. Leave a review

on Apple Podcasts or send us an email at Podcasts at TED.com. There's about 7.5 billion people on

earth. The World Health Organization says that 300 million of us are depressed and that about 800,000

people take their lives every year.

A tiny subset of them choose a profoundly nihilistic route, which is they die in the act of

murdering as many people as possible. One of them recently killed 58 people in Las Vegas,

as you probably know. Another murdered 49 people in Orlando. You may not have heard of the guy

who killed five people in the town of Aurora, Illinois, in February. Not because it wasn't a tragedy,

because, of course, it was, but because there's so much of this going on. Just last year, Wikipedia

counted 323 mass shootings in the United States alone.

Not all those shooters were suicidal, and not all were maximizing their death tolls, but many, many were.

An important question becomes, what limits do these people have?

Take the Vegas shooter.

He slaughtered 58 people. Did he stop there because he'd had enough? No. And we know this because he shot and injured another 422 people who he surely would

have preferred to kill. And we have no reason to think he'd have stopped at

four thousand and twenty-two victims. In fact, someone that nihilistic might have gladly

killed us all. We don't know. What we do know is this. When suicidal mass murderers really go all

in, technology is the force multiplier. Here's an example. Several years back,

...