No Agenda Episode 1841 - "Scott Adams Redux"
"Scott Adams Redux"
Executive Producers: Adam Curry & John C Dvorak
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This is your award-winning Get One Nation Media Assassination episode 1841.
This is no agenda.
Almost live, broadcasting from Lake Wells, Florida in FEMA region number 10.
In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
And from Northern Silicon Valley, where I am live, kind of, on tape.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
It's Craig Laudenburg in the morning.
And it's Super Bowl Sunday, everybody.
Super Bowl Sallows.
Yes, that's why.
And Adam's at the game.
Yes.
In Lake Wells, Florida.
That's where the game is.
Yes.
And the most important thing is the prop bets.
The prop best.
Yes, we have, do you get the email from our guy?
We have a guy.
His name is, what's our guy's name here?
Our guy is Josh.
Josh?
Do you not get his emails?
I don't know, maybe.
He sends me the prop bets.
Oh, I get a prop bet from some guy too.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's Josh.
Well, first of all, who's playing?
I forget.
Who's playing the?
Who's in the game, John?
Well, Seattle is representing the NFL, and you have the Boston Patriots back in it again.
And the funny thing is the two teams played each other before.
It was one of the last Super Bowls that Seattle was in.
And Seattle, I said it on the show like two months ago that Seattle always gets into the Super Bowl when there's a new Pope.
Yes, but do they win?
They've won two out of three.
It's tough.
It's tough.
It's tough to know if this is going to be.
Well, the team is a superior team.
Did you say the Boston Patriots?
Isn't that the New England Patriots?
Did I say Boston Patriots?
I hear people who are not going to be able to play.
Well, they were originally the Boston Patriots, but they're the New England Patriots.
Back in 1912, when they were still the Boston Patriots.
And they were the Boston Patriots.
But it's the Patriots, but not with their star quarterback, correct?
Actually, they have a star quarterback.
Am I wrong?
Am I wrong again?
Well, it's like, it's not that you're wrong.
What you're trying to say is without Tom Brady.
That's what I mean.
Without Tom Brady.
Yeah, of course not.
He's been out of the game for a while.
So who's the quarterback now for the guy, Drake May?
He is second-year player.
He's a natural.
He's really good.
And he's taken a team that was just kind of losers and pushed them right into the Super Bowl after the second year in the league.
It might still be a little premature for him to win a Super Bowl, but he's there.
You got him there.
From a political standpoint, which is how we often look at these types of games, we have Seattle and we have New England.
Right.
And New England is new.
New England is kind of liberal now, isn't it?
New England is not New England.
Yeah, they have a communist mayor.
There you go.
Multiculturally.
And the worst part is Seattle has a communist mayor who's actually pretty much a Marxist.
And she's also a woman.
So you got two women.
You got two Marxists, basically.
There's no politics that at least I can extract from the game.
Well, I can only go just because of the name Patriots, you know, because we're Patriots.
I think I have to put it on the Patriots for this year.
I would actually go the opposite direction.
I'll tell you why.
please do is because within recent uh memory in other words in the last couple weeks both bill belichick who had won six superbowls did not get into the hall of fame not did not get Not in the Hall of Fame.
And then shortly thereafter, the owner, Bob Kraft, did not get into the Hall of Fame.
And everyone's going, oh, well, it's because, you know, they've inflategate.
All these scandals that Flamegate was great where they deflated the ball or even deflated the ball a little bit.
But these two minor scandals after six Super Bowls, actually, he won.
He was involved with eight Super Bowls.
He won as an assistant, winning all.
He has eight rings.
I don't think that was it at all.
I think that they stiffed them because Robert Kraft's a big Trump supporter, and I think Belichick is too.
And so they stiffed them in the Hall of Fame because they like Trump and all these left-wing journalists voted, didn't vote for him.
And no one would even suggest that except me.
I just did it.
And that's the reason they're going to do the same thing to the team.
If it's rigged, they're out.
So, well, this poses an interesting conundrum here.
Do you think that do you now?
I would say that all professional sports are rigged.
Do you think it's rigged in favor of Trump for the Patriots or against?
No, no, it'd be a rigged.
No, the NFL is notoriously left.
They put symbols on the back of helmets.
And my wife once asked me, she goes, What is this?
Why does it say be good?
End racism on the back of a helmet.
I remember that.
I forgot all about that.
They're still doing it.
They're still doing something.
Oh, man.
So the NFL is against Trump.
Why don't they put a big Marxist flag on the field?
Just, you know, they should.
They might as well.
So they're against Trump.
So if you go with the basic thesis that we run to predict these games, Seattle has to win.
Okay, so here's the prop bets.
It goes right along with this.
Will there be an ICE protest inside or outside Levi Stadium?
Yes is minus 1,000.
No is plus 550.
Whatever that means.
It means you have to bet.
550 to win.
I think that means you seem stumped.
You seem stumped.
No, the plus-minus thing is always kind of confusing.
They do that on purpose.
Well, how about this is easier.
Will any player wear anti-ICE signage?
Oh, absolutely.
It has to happen.
Plus is 2,000.
The no is minus 10,000.
That means they think it's going to happen.
That would be a bet yes.
Wow.
Wow.
Okay.
Will Trump criticize Bad Bunny or the halftime show in the pregame interview?
I say no.
I say he won't do that.
He's not going to do that.
Oh, see, that's the problem because he might.
That's no is minus 200.
Yes is plus 150.
So they're betting yes that he's going to.
Okay.
I mean, that's the odds makers deciding.
How about this?
Will ICE arrest Bad Bunny on stage?
The likelihood is plus 2,000, no minus 10,000.
Will Bad Bunny say ICE during the halftime show?
I'd say yes.
And yes is plus 200.
No is minus 300.
So they have a lot of interesting prop bets.
Will Bad Bunny take a knee on stage?
Will he give, let's see, will he give Puerto Rico a shot?
Well, if I was Bad Bunny, I'd be looking at these bets and having my family bet heavily.
No kidding.
Will any problem with prop bets?
Will any player kneel in protest during the national anthem?
Is Billy are your boys playing Green Day?
I understand yes.
Yes.
Okay.
Here's a prop bet.
This is your boy.
Will your boy, Billy Joe Armstrong, call Trump fat while on stage?
That.
These are great.
Green Day first song performed.
American Idiot, Basket Case, Know Your Enemy, Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
When I come, I'd say American Idiot.
They got to do American Idiot.
They hate Trump so much.
They'd be American Idiot.
Maybe.
These bets are stupid.
Anyway, did you see the Anthropic ad that everyone's talking about?
Oh, Anthropic.
They're doing an ad.
Have you heard about this?
No.
Yeah, they're doing an ad, which is anti-advertising because they did this big statement.
Oh, Anthropic will never do ads, we believe, and you're just paying for it.
And they did an ad to announce this?
Yeah, so this.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
There's some kid, you know, he's talking to some guy, and the guy is supposed to represent ChatGPT.
And he asks a question, and this guy answers in a kind of robotic voice, monotone voice, like, well, you know, if you use this coupon code, you know, code Bongino.
So everyone's up in arms about that.
Oh, yeah, Anthropic.
Anthropic's going to be the first to go out of business if they don't do ads.
It's the way I see it.
The only AI.
Open AI.
Chat GPU.
Open AI.
Open AI.
If they go out of business, that'll create a cascading effect of doom.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
Anyway, so we will be just, so I say Patriots, you say Seahawks.
We'll see who's right on Thursday.
Well, we'll know on Sunday, but we'll talk about it on Thursday.
For today's special No Agenda show, we are running the interview you did with Scott Adams.
Rest in peace.
Got to say, Rip, rest in peace.
Yes, and I have to say, you know, this is we're doing this because, well, you're going to be at an event, so you can't do the show, but it's beside the point.
We have to, it's a good time to get the retrospective from Scott into the show mix.
So because he, you know, he died unfortunately recently.
Internet Memories00:15:45
And he was a good guy.
I liked him.
I knew, I've known him for over 30 years.
And he feels bad about it.
And went to his house.
How did that, did you, did you just call him up and say, I want to do a show for No Agenda?
I can't remember.
Yeah, it was something like that.
I mean, I knew him.
And so I got a hold of him.
I had his email, and he, which was a screwball email.
He was AOL even.
Really?
Very cool.
That's kind of OG to have an AOL email.
Yeah.
So I sent him a note and saying, told him what I wanted to do.
Yeah, sure.
Come on over.
Because I've had over the years, I've had lunch with him a number of times.
I was, you know, got went and visited when he was hanging out with Stacey, who ran a chain of restaurants that he was financing.
Oh, that was the big financial fiasco.
Well, it was one.
No, he's financed a lot of stuff that was in and out of being a fiasco, but he had plenty of money.
And this was the era when he was married to this woman, the Basham woman.
And she wasn't there.
Is that the violinist?
Yeah, she was supposedly classic.
She might be.
I don't know.
She's in a concert orchestra.
She was a stunt pilot, apparently.
Yeah, she also liked to fly.
She could fly.
And she was supposedly a concert pianist and a concert violinist.
And they had some of her stuff posted and it was, you know, what it was.
Scott was enamored with her and her talents.
And she was also a baker.
She considered herself a famous baker and she didn't have a bakery, but she kind of said she did.
Oh, Scott, Scott, Scott.
Did you not say, hey, bro?
Did you know at any point, bro?
What did you say?
That was one of those things.
And she was basically, I don't know what she's, if she's still on Instagram, but she was an Instagram girl.
She had picture after picture after picture of herself with pretty much nothing in between except pictures of herself.
And nothing with her and Scott, as I can recall.
There was one picture I saw with her and Scott.
There was an event, like a whole bunch of people around.
I remember looking it up.
He bought her a plane.
It was a Cessna.
Oh, it could be.
Yeah, I remember that.
I remember looking it up, like, and looking up her license.
She's not a stunt pilot, but okay.
I digress.
It doesn't matter.
We all do crazy things for women, myself included.
Well, she was an attractive female on the outside.
Wow.
But I never saw her.
I never saw her in person.
So I don't know what level of she must have been really pretty.
She's photogenic, but I never saw her.
And she was somewhat telegenic, but she was photogenic.
I don't know what she looked like in person.
There's a big difference.
And so he was married to her at the time.
She wasn't around the house when I was there.
And a couple of funny things I noted was, you know, there was no art on any of the walls or anything.
It was barren.
Yeah.
And so then I asked him about that.
Did you ask him about it?
I don't remember if it's in the interview either.
I can't remember.
I don't think it was in the interview, but I asked him about it.
He says, oh, you know, Christina didn't, she doesn't like art on the walls.
And I'm thinking, okay, well, that's, I guess.
But then after he divorced her, which was shortly thereafter, and there's still never any art on the wall.
He didn't like to put stuff up.
He just didn't like art on the walls himself.
He had his thing about affirmations.
He was one of those.
He was very into affirmations.
Stuart Smalley.
Get up earlier.
You know, kind of thing.
I don't know what I never saw any of those.
I saw a lot of bongs around the house, and that was about it.
Yeah, back in the day.
I thought I was like, Scott's my man.
He's into the holy herb.
Wonderful.
And that's when I was still smoking lots of weed.
And he had one interesting, I thought, was a tip for everybody.
Here we go.
Because he had built a house from scratch.
Big place, too.
I remember this tip.
Yeah, this is like a good, like a tip of the day.
It'd be a tip of the day for this show.
Yeah, if you're a millionaire.
If you're ever going to build a house, he says the key to success is heated floors.
Oh, man.
I had that in Amsterdam.
I had heated marble floors when I still had money.
Remember those days?
Oh, yeah.
Those days are over.
They ended with the gold bar that left my life, which was worth a mill.
Heated marble floors.
It is something to behold.
It is quite nice.
Yeah.
All right.
So it's about an hour, I think.
I listened to it again a couple of days ago, and it's kind of odd to hear someone who's dead speaking again.
You know, it's just, it's one of those things.
But I think it honors him by playing his.
Yeah, I think that's the idea.
Yeah, especially before, because it was all before COVID.
And this was even, was he doing his show?
It was Morning Coffee with Scott?
Was he doing that by then?
I don't think so.
Was he?
He was doing some scattered stuff.
I remember.
I don't know if it was Morning Coffee when he finally got it.
He may have been doing, I don't know.
I'd have to look it up to be honest about it.
We didn't discuss that.
But once he got into that, he really had a good routine for that show.
And it was one of the more interesting analysis shows, even though it was hard to clip.
So let's listen to it now.
Enjoy this special no-agenda interview, John C. Dvorak, with the legendary Scott Adams.
All right.
I'm here with Scott Adams.
So you've been cartooning, you made your money as a cartoonist.
Correct.
And I met you 25 years ago at Pacific Telephone.
Yeah.
You were an engineer and you were actually the first guy who showed me the internet.
Wow, I didn't realize that.
Well, not the internet, but the web.
The web, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, we had a little lab.
I was working, that was my day job.
And we were showing people this thing called the World Wide Web.
And it was one of the most informative times of my life.
It was in 93, as I recall.
That sounds right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Dilbert was out a little, had been out, but not, hadn't been out enough that I could quit my day job.
Right.
But you were the, anyway, you showed it to me.
You were impressed, but you obviously weren't blown away so much that you went out and bought a bunch of domain names like the Smart Money did.
No, it's worse than that.
It's worse than that.
So we would bring customers in, and we'd show them all our cool phone company stuff that wasn't interesting to anybody, and they would just, their eyes would glaze over.
And then at the end, as just sort of a dessert, we'd say, oh, and there's this new thing coming called, we called it the World Wide Web then, now the Internet.
And there were exactly two websites you could get to.
That's it, the Smithsonian and some other thing.
And we would show them that we could see the website at the Smithsonian and look at a couple of still pictures.
And people would come out of their chairs and they'd say, can I do that?
And we'd say, do what?
You know, touch the mouse and make this.
And they needed to touch it.
They stood up.
Their eyes got big.
And they said, how can we get this?
And there was no application.
And I remember thinking, my goodness, this is going to be huge.
It has that X factor where people want it, even though it's terrible, like early cell phones.
Everybody wanted a cell phone, but they were terrible.
And I cornered our top engineer in the phone company and I said, hey, if I wanted to invest in this coming thing, this World Wide Web Internet thing, what's the one company I should put all my money in?
And he looks at me and he goes, Cisco.
And I go, okay, what are the other companies?
And he goes, Cisco.
He goes, everything's going to be Cisco for the next 15 years or whatever.
It kind of was.
And so I did not buy Cisco, and it's the worst financial decision I've ever made.
Huh.
Well, I didn't buy Cisco either.
But I didn't have some guy telling me to buy it.
It was pretty obvious.
In hindsight, you can see what had happened.
All the points you could have gone, wow, I should have done that.
It could have done that.
It could have done this.
It's the worst.
I mean, just if you had bought Apple when Steve Jobs first showed up and kept the stock, you'd be loaded, especially about $10,000 when you make a few million dollars.
But having kind of been involved in the stock market over the years, the thing is you can't hold the stock that long.
You just won't do it.
You'll just say, oh, it's not going to go any higher than this because you can't do it.
It's impossible.
Unless somebody else buys the stock and puts it into trust and you don't even know you have it.
It's problematic.
So anyway, you did leave eventually.
How long were you there at Pacific Belt?
Well, eight years there, then before that, eight years at a big bank.
And I was doing Dilbert for about six of those years that I was still at the phone company.
So I was doing two jobs and writing a book at the same time and working day and night.
You were getting your inspiration from the phone company.
Yeah, that plus my memories of the bank.
So the big aha was when I moved from a bank to a phone company.
And you'd say to yourself, well, they have nothing in common, two completely different companies.
And then you watch the same management problems, the same way people think, the same way people treat you.
It was just shockingly similar.
And that was really the inspiration behind Dilbert is the realization that these things were universal.
And there were people trapped in jobs all over who probably thought there's nowhere else that this is happening.
This could not be happening anywhere else.
It's impossible.
And it happens everywhere.
That was a genius.
Well, you had, I thought we thought the comic strip was genius because it was the only one that actually addressed kind of day-to-day, workaday, office working issues.
Everything else was, you know, was like a it didn't cowboy stuff or just stupid animals making punchlines that, you know, cracking up to or trying to crack you up with a one-liner.
No, I don't want to claim genius and inspiration totally because I'll take a little bit.
But I also have an MBA.
And one of the main things you learn in business school is listen to the customers, give them what they want.
And that's the sort of thing that artists don't do.
And when Dilbert came out and email was coming out at about the same time or getting popular about the same time, people started emailing me because I put my email address between the panels of the strip.
And they'd say, we love your comic when Dilber's in the office.
We don't care for it that much when he's just at home doing generic things, which is, as you said, what most comic strips were about.
It's just about whatever.
Dagwood.
And so I listened to the customers and completely retooled the strip to make it a workplace strip.
So the reason that Dilber succeeded, and it's very rare that a big comic will break out, is that I applied business techniques to the artistic realm.
Could somebody else do a cartoon and have a breakout nowadays in this market where their syndication is different?
Maybe you'd like one of the last that actually succeeded before the door was closed?
Well, you know, there's only one giant cartoon every 10 years or so.
You know, it's actually very rare.
You know, you can count on one hand the mega cartoons.
And if somebody were to start out today, I'd probably tell them to start on the internet and see if they can get an audience.
And then if they can, try to also get syndicated.
Because for those who don't know what syndication is, you sign a deal with a company that's a syndication company.
And then they sell it to all the newspapers.
So you don't have to do all the selling to the individual newspapers.
So yeah, I would start with the internet first, see if you can get an audience, refine your art, and then try to get syndicated next.
So it is possible, you think?
Totally possible.
But the market is shrinking in terms of the physical newspapers.
But Dilbert's bigger than it's ever been because as long as there's one big newspaper in every market, it runs in that paper.
And of course, the internet market is growing every day.
So it's growing there no matter what.
Where'd you get your drawing skills?
My mother was a landscape artist.
And my father doodled little cartoons that were more like stick figures but very funny in their own little weird way.
So I think I had a little bit of genetic advantage there.
But anybody who's seen Dilbert knows I'm not an artist with any kind of a capital A.
So it was really brute force.
And the first original comics that I submitted, if you saw them, you'd say, there's no way this guy is going to get hired or syndicated.
This looks like an inebriated monkey with a crayon.
What's going on here?
But it was just brute force.
I just practiced until I could do it.
What do you what kind of sense of humor do you think you have?
Well, probably it's a combination of observational plus engineering.
In other words, to make something look clever, sometimes you have to look at it as an engineer, as in, what would be the weird way to accomplish this in the cartoon realm?
If you've got a character who's got a problem and it's a cartoon, so they can kind of do anything, there's no real limits, what is the funny engineering solution?
And it might involve killing somebody.
It might involve aliens.
It could involve anything.
But you have to start, as you said earlier, with something that everybody goes, oh, I've been there.
If you don't get that part right, it's hard to get much else right.
People have to recognize and identify with the situation.
Then you can extend it, but you've got to get them first.
I have a theory that your humor is absurdist.
Explain absurdist.
You spot the absurdities in the office environment, for example.
And most everything, every punchline you deliver is based on something that just is beyond the pale so far as pure absurdity is concerned.
I'm going to agree with that with different words.
I call it a cognitive blind spots.
So I'm looking for places where otherwise smart people are doing something that the observers would say, well, that doesn't look smart.
I know you went to college.
I know you're smart.
Why are you doing that?
And that explains 75% of management.
And the reason for that is that people are paid to manage, but sometimes there's nothing to do or you don't know what to do.
And you end up just saying, well, what's the fad?
Yeah, well, I worked in the government, so I know some of that from another perspective.
Anita's Sales Call Dilemma00:03:54
It's still the same.
You were fired from Pac Pacific Telephone.
I'm going to tell you the story that I was told by one of your old associates.
You remember her?
Anita.
Yeah, Anita.
Anita, who was the real-life model for my character, Alice, in the comic strip?
Yes.
Some bonehead came into the company on some normal kind of, well, let's put this guy in because he's going to reorg this and he's going to do that.
He's going to straighten things out.
And he was naive.
And he said, I guess he went through one.
I've seen this happen on different operations.
Somebody goes in there and they start doing a checklist.
What does this guy do?
Who is this guy, Scott Adams?
What does he do?
And nobody was there.
And I've seen this happen recently in other companies where somebody's actually very important to a company.
You were at the time important the way it was told to me to the sales people.
Because the comic strip was popular enough that they would drag you out on sales calls as a lure, which happens with any company that's got any brains.
Bring a lure in, and oh, you get to meet Scott Adams.
And by the way, you can buy some of the gear or some services.
And this bonehead came in, and he just unceremoniously got rid of you in some sort of a cleanup, very much like you see in the movie The Office.
And you didn't make a fuss or object or anything.
You left and then they found out about it.
They, the people that knew better, they wanted you to come back and you said, you know, I don't need to come back.
I'm going to stay.
I'm going to stay gone.
And that was the end of it.
That's pretty close.
I'll add a little context to it.
My coworkers, once I started getting famous and started to get a little bit of money with Dilbert, it was obvious that I was going to leave.
And it didn't make sense to keep my day job.
But they wanted me to stay.
Like, as you said, I was good for sales.
Customers would come in and they were Dilbert fans, and so I helped.
And they actually made me an offer.
Anita, the one that I just mentioned, the real life Alice from the comic strip, said, How about this deal?
I'll go to our management and I'll say, you don't even have to show up unless you don't want to, except for these sales calls.
And otherwise, we'll do your work.
You know, we'll do the engineering stuff that was your main work.
And my co-workers said, yeah, we're up for that.
We'll do the work.
You just come in for the times you want to, basically.
And I said, So you're like a fellow without being without having the designation.
Right, in a sense.
And so Anita took that to the boss you were talking about and made that deal.
And he said, I'm okay with that.
And he checked with me.
And I said, yeah, I'm okay with it too.
But here's the thing.
I don't want to be a burden.
So the day that you need that budget you're paying me for something else, you just have to ask.
And I'll leave the same day.
And one day he had some other project that he thought was more important.
And he called me in and said, you know, this would be a good day.
And I said, okay, that's the deal.
You just have to ask.
I don't need a reason.
You just have to ask.
And so I left peacefully.
And yes, I did get a call from I believe it was the CEO, CEO or president.
I think it was the CEO at the time, who was surprised to find out that I had been asked to leave.
Ah, well, it's your version is obviously more accurate than mine, but mine's still good.
Yours is good.
Yeah, you were 90% there.
Yeah.
When it happened, since I knew you at the time, I thought, well, this is going to be interesting because how is he going to because I thought the cartoon was derivative from the work experience and you're getting daily material just by going to work, showing up.
And I was wondering how you were going to handle that.
And you've handled it quite nicely.
Hand Problem Revealed00:11:44
I don't see any difference, actually.
Well, I was getting literally thousands of emails a day in the beginning with suggestions.
And it was a huge burden to respond to.
I tried to respond to all of them back in those days.
And there was just material coming in, and it would always remind me of something I had experienced.
So I was always looking for that.
If somebody suggested something I'd never heard of, that usually didn't work for me.
But if I said, oh, yeah, that happened to me, then it was a cartoon.
Where I don't see a lot of stuff from you is convention life.
You know why?
There's a cartooning reason.
You don't see Dilberg go to conventions a lot.
And the reason is I don't like drawing backgrounds.
Okay.
To draw the convention stuff in the back, you either have to be.
I don't want to interrupt you, but since you're now doing everything on the computer, can't you have like a stock couple of backgrounds you just drop in so you don't have to do any of that work?
Well, people would notice the stock backgrounds.
I do do a stock exterior building that I reuse.
But yeah, I'd have to draw it in the first place and I'd have to change it every time.
But you're right, it's a lot easier now with the computer.
When did you switch?
I switched to, let's see, if I can remember the year, it was probably in the 2004-ish range, give or take a year.
And it was because I had a problem with my drawing hand.
I had spasms in my pinky when I tried to draw from overuse.
And it's a weird thing called a focal dystonia.
And went to the doctor and said, what's this?
What's going on with my pinky?
I can't draw anymore.
And by pure luck, the world expert, literally, the world expert on this specific condition lived in my town and was in my HMO at Kaiser.
And, you know, my doctor knew him.
And next thing I know, I'm talking to the world expert on this problem.
And I said, what's the cure?
And he said, we don't have one.
You know, basically changed jobs.
So I agreed to be part of a test group.
They were trying different things to see if they could make some progress.
But in the meantime, I thought, well, I'm done unless I can figure out a solution for drawing.
And so I drew left-handed for a while, which I can do, but it's slower.
I'm slightly ambidextrous, but not terribly ambidextrous.
And then I thought, you know, I'll bet there's by now something you can draw on the computer that maybe my hand would act differently.
Yeah.
Because the weird thing about this hand problem is that it was actually a mental problem that expressed itself in the hand.
So the hand was fine.
And the reason I knew that is that when I drew with my left hand, my right hand would spasm because my brain would say, hey, you're drawing again, spasm, spasm, spasm.
And the expert I mentioned confirmed that.
It's more of a brain problem than a hand problem.
And so when I drew on the computer, even though the drawing looks just like drawing, it's just you're drawing on a screen and you're using a stylus, my brain did not recognize it as drawing.
For whatever reason, it just didn't trigger that very specific response.
And then over time, I learned through hand exercises and gradually building up to using my hand with a regular pencil, just very, very quick tests, you know, hold the pencil down for a quarter of a second and release it before the spasm until I could do a second, then two seconds.
And I did that for months until I believe I'm the first person who's ever remediated or solved that problem, focal dystonia.
I think I'm in the literature, my doctor told me.
Oh, well, that's good and bad, I guess.
It did move you over to the computer, which probably eventually sped up your work.
Talk about, you know, lemonade and lemons.
It probably cut my work load by at least over 50%.
Yeah.
And that's been just a huge advantage in my life, as you can imagine.
Yeah, well, most artists I know personally have all, they all switch over to the computers one way or another, except for one I know that's always been a computer artist.
But they've always benefited from the two-edged sword.
They benefited from the productivity because, you know, especially graphics guys can change the backgrounds really quickly.
They don't have to redo everything.
But then there became so much computer-generated stuff that came out to compete with them.
They're all singing the blues, and many of them had to quit.
So they ended up, it was weird to watch that phenomenon.
Do you have Tourette's?
I do not.
Why do you ask?
Because you have elements of almost identical to Adam Curry, who talks about his Tourette's constantly.
We talk about it on our show quite a bit.
Well, maybe I do.
What are the symptoms?
I thought I should be swearing out loud for.
No, no, no.
I think in my whole life I've run into one person that has that form of Tourette's.
Really?
And he was on an airplane being dragged off.
It was terrible.
I felt bad for the guy.
Well, you dragged me off an airplane.
I can give you some of that.
No, he was cussing before they dragged him off.
But it's mostly Twitches.
Oh, I have lots of Twitches.
Yeah, that's Tourette's.
Well, it's nice to know I got that too.
Well, I don't want to, yeah, well, you've got all these ailments.
I hate to bring it up, but the reason I say that is because there's a commonality with all Tourette's, even the most minor of Tourette's sufferers.
And I know people that have, you know, they have all kinds of Twitches.
Adam fights it because he used to do TV a lot.
So when he was at MTV, he had to fight it.
But everyone who's ever had even a little bit of Tourette's, neat freak.
Really?
I can't say I'm a knee freak.
Adam says the same thing.
But he is.
Yeah, so are you.
I'm here at your house.
That's where we're doing this.
You saw me picking up stuff off the floor when we got here.
Yeah.
True story.
So I wanted to bring it back.
Just mention, you know, you might want to look into it.
You did have some ailment that was disconcerting, though, where you couldn't talk for a month or something like that.
Yeah, so the voice problem was also a spasm of the vocal cords, and I lost my voice for three and a half years.
I couldn't speak.
Oh, it was that long?
Yeah, for three and a half years, I couldn't have a conversation or be understood on the telephone or give a speech or anything.
And it turns out the focal dystonia and the voice problem are actually related because they're both brain problems.
They're not the hand and they're not the vocal cords.
That's just where the spasm is.
But it's well known that they travel in pairs.
So if you have one of those problems, it's not unusual that you might have a second one in some other place on your body.
But Tourette's never came up.
Maybe you don't have Tourette's, but if I just saw you on the street, didn't know who you were.
Now I think I do, so thanks for that.
Maybe.
So what happened?
I just don't want to get into that.
No, wait, hold on, hold on.
Now, if I do, I have an excuse to swear at people for no reason at all.
Adam does that too, but neither you or him have that form of Tourette's.
That is a very specific.
According to you, that's a very specific until I start doing it, and then I've got it.
I don't want to dwell on this, but the three years.
Yeah, three and a half years.
I could make noise, but people couldn't understand it.
What happened?
When was the breakthrough?
What was that like when you came out of it?
Well, the quick version, a lot of people have heard this story, so let me give you the fast version.
So it took a long time to figure out what it was because regular general practitioners have never seen it.
You know, it's very rare.
It's called a spasmodic dysphonia.
How do you explain it to anybody?
Well, so I'm trying to tell people that I've got this problem and they hear it.
The first things that people think are that you have a mental problem.
Because one of the odd characteristics is that you can talk okay when you're alone.
Wow.
So if you imagine that, imagine telling your doctor, oh, I can talk fine as long as nobody's listening.
But if people are listening, it's like this.
That's a bad impression of me trying to talk.
So obviously they're going to say, okay, mental, you're getting too worked up because of people or something like that.
But I was sure that wasn't it because it didn't feel like that, right?
I didn't feel any different talking to people.
And so I rejected volume and I tried some Botox shots.
There was a treatment where they give you a Botox shot through the front of your neck with this needle that you don't even want to hear about it.
It's an ugly process and you have to do it every month or so.
But that didn't work too well for me.
And so I set a Google alert for the spasmodic dysphonia once I'd figured out what it was, which I figured out also from Google because I had the hand problem.
So I said, oh, the hand problem is called a focal dystonia.
I wonder if there's something called a voice dystonia.
So I put in that search, that search keywords, and it popped up with spasmodic dysphonia, because that was close enough.
So Google actually diagnosed me and showed me a video of somebody who had exactly the same problem.
So now I had a name for it.
So I took that name, put it into a Google alert while I was talking to doctors one after another, getting my head scanned and all kinds of things and finding no nothing.
And one day I get an alert that says there's some doctor in Japan who's got a surgery to fix it.
I tracked down the top doctors in Stanford at first.
They said, hey, is this real?
And he said, I don't know if that's real, but we get some exaggerated complaint or exaggerated claims from that particular doctor.
Maybe you should talk to this other guy at USC.
He's doing something.
I talked to him, Dr. Gerald Burke, and he was doing somewhat new/slash experimental surgery in which they would rewire some of the nerves in your neck.
They cut them so that for, I don't know, two months or something, you can't speak because your brain is no longer connected to your vocal cords.
It's the weirdest thing.
You can't.
You can try, but just nothing happens.
And then the re-spliced root kicks in after about eight weeks.
I might have the weeks wrong, but something like that.
And then you can talk or it doesn't work.
Those are the two options.
Great.
Right.
It's either going to work or it just doesn't work.
And then there was a moment almost exactly on the day that they predicted that the nerves could grow back together because they know what rate they grow at, that I could talk very weakly.
Did you have the cutting done?
Yes, so I had the surgery.
And took a couple of weeks to recover from the surgery, and then I could talk just faintly and just for a little while before being sort of exhausted by it.
And then it took a few years to get full fluency back.
Because you also lose fluency.
If you don't speak for three and a half years, you actually can't form sentences.
You know all the words, but you can't do it effortlessly.
So talking is actually difficult for years.
Public Speaking Fluency Lost00:15:07
And only I would say in the last two or three years, maybe, I feel like I'm back to top fluency.
Yeah, I wouldn't know the difference.
I mean, from you 20 years ago or 93, which is, I guess, 20, yeah, 25 years ago.
You sound the same.
Well, that's an ordeal.
We won't continue.
Do you exercise?
I do.
Yeah, I'm quite committed to exercise.
I'm a lifelong exerciser, and I try to do it five times a week and be active on the other two days.
When did you become a Republican?
I am not a Republican.
I'm not either.
So never, I guess.
I went from Democrat to Republican with Reagan to Independent.
And then I didn't realize a better one than that, which is unaffiliated, which is what I am now.
When I was a young man, I thought, I know enough about politics.
I'm going to register and I'm going to vote.
And I cast my vote proudly for Jimmy Carter.
And a few years later, I said to myself, I shouldn't be voting.
I'm not adding to this.
I'm not adding to the intelligence of the vote.
I like that I can vote.
I'm glad that other people do it, but I'm not adding anything to the intelligence of the outcome.
And I don't think that's changed, but I like the topic of politics.
So I talked about it.
I voted for Carter, too.
I felt bad about it later.
I was a McGovern supporter, if you can believe that.
Yeah, so I don't vote, and I am not a member of a party.
Oh, you don't vote at all, but you do like to give your opinions, and you seem to be a I don't know if you want to take this as a descriptor, a Trump apologist.
I hate that phrase.
Yeah, well, I'm called one too, and I don't consider myself to be one.
Yeah, the reason I hate it is that it assumes that you would support him no matter what he did, and that you're just sort of always on the team.
In my case, most of my writing and talking about President Trump started during the campaign, and mostly I talked about his persuasion skills, because that's another area that I have a lot of experience.
I'm a trained hypnotist.
When did that happen?
When did you become a trained hypnotist?
My early 20s.
I thought, hey, is this some kind of superpower that I could just learn?
And so I learned it.
I was influenced by my mother, who had been hypnotized by her family doctor in my small town.
And my mother gave birth to my little sister and reports that she was awake and took no painkillers and didn't feel pain.
Now, that's unusual.
Most people would not have that experience, but about two in five would, or one in five.
And it made me think, what is this thing?
What is this power that you can do that kind of thing?
And so I learned it, and sure enough, it is a superpower like nothing I've ever seen.
It changes your entire worldview.
And that's the biggest change.
It changes how you perceive the world and you stop perceiving people as rational.
Once you can reprogram them so easily, you realize that their rational minds are not really running the show.
And that's just an illusion.
So you've gotten philosophical about it.
Yeah, I guess it's philosophical in the sense that my worldview changed by how easily I could reprogram other people using a set of tools that are pretty well understood.
And that I've been studying persuasion in all of its forms from selling to marketing to design even anywhere I can find anything on it for 30 years probably as part of writing, as part of creating the comic.
It's an important element.
So you saw Trump as some sort of, do you think he is a genius or a savant?
What I saw is that he used the tools of persuasion more effectively than I've ever seen it done.
Now, part of the reason he's so effective is that he seems immune to shame.
He's willing to say or do anything.
And generally, I believe that he's aiming his impulses, at least his public office impulses, at legitimately making the country a better place, in his view of how that looks.
And so he'll cut some corners, he'll do some things people don't like, he'll ignore the facts if it's convenient, but he tends to persuade in the right direction, meaning that if you're someone who likes the borders to be tight, if you like a strong military, and you don't have to, by the way, I'm not telling you you should like those things, but if you do, and lots of people do, he's certainly the right person for that.
You think he's trained like you are, or you think it's just a part of his being a salesman all his life?
Because during sales training, if you were ever a salesman, you end up picking up a lot of persuasion, persuading gimmicks.
Well, keep in mind he wrote the book, or at least he read it, the book, The Art of the Deal.
And so if your brand is negotiating, that's really persuasion or a special form of it.
So we know that he at least has an interest in it, and that would be enough over the years if you're always dealing in that domain, you would pick up a lot of stuff.
Because the thing with persuasion is it's not hard to learn.
You just have to be paying attention to it and absorbing it where you can.
But he also had, this is a weird little tidbit.
His pastor when he was a kid, his family pastor for the church they went to, was Norman Vincent Peel.
Funny, I remember that vaguely, yes.
Yeah.
And Norman Vincent Peale was one of the most famous American authors, and he wrote The Power of Positive Thinking and probably is the person most responsible for popularizing the idea that the way you're thinking about your situation can have a huge influence on your success.
So if you think right, you're going to get better results than if you're thinking wrong.
And we just watched Trump think his way into the presidency, in a sense.
I mean, the optimism, the positive thinking, the inability to be swayed by any problem, it seemed.
Like he was just completely unaffected, at least in public, by things that would have killed most people.
And so there's that influence.
But when you see the technique, you see how often he uses visual imagery.
You see how often when it's available, he'll use fear, persuasion.
The terrorists are coming to get you.
There's crime coming across the border, etc.
And you see him talking past the sale, which is one of his most common tricks.
So if you're talking about how the wall will be built and how it will be funded and those things, you're already talking past the decision of, is there going to be a wall?
So he does this in a lot of topics.
He'll make you engage on the details of the thing before you've decided there will be a thing.
And that's a classic persuasion technique.
And you don't see other people doing it as consistently as he does.
You don't see them use visual stuff.
You don't see him pick emotional topics.
He knows where the emotion is.
And he can read a crowd like nobody.
His presentations are, I don't know how many of the speeches you've watched.
A few, yeah.
I probably watched three complete from the early ones, which were he couldn't carry an hour.
He could do about 35 minutes of material, and then he would start to repeat himself.
Then when he got to the hour, he was really on a roll.
And his speeches, I think, are phenomenal.
He really controls the audience, and he gets a lot of people.
As you know, you were a public speaker.
The bigger audience is the better audience.
The small audience is hard.
You can't speak to six people.
They're not going to laugh.
They're not going to do anything.
But you get 10,000 people or 20 or 30 in his case.
You can have a lot of fun.
Yeah, I think history will record that he's not everybody's cup of tea, so he's sort of a love him or hate him thing.
But in terms of his public speaking, best ever.
Well, it depends on your definition of best ever.
Well, best ever.
I think most effective.
Yeah, so being able to hold the crowd, entertain them, make them want to come back, make them talk about it, make people focus on the topics he wants you to focus on, control the headlines for a week.
It's all there.
He's got some, I've only read this once.
I don't know the exact name of it, but he has a personality disorder of some sort that makes him only need like three to four hours sleep a night.
That's a personality disorder?
Well, apparently it is, by today's standards.
And a lot of people would say it's an advantage.
But he's a very interesting character, I have to agree.
And people, have you found that because you look like you're a Trump ⁇ and I'll use the term again, Trump apologist, that you've lost any business whatsoever?
Oh, sure.
Yeah, probably 40% of my income evaporated and 75% of my social circle.
Yeah, I'm quite an outcast.
And I don't do public speaking anymore because it's too dangerous.
I wouldn't feel comfortable if there was any publicity and you put me in front of a big crowd right now because it only takes one person to say, that guy said something good about the president's persuasion skills.
He must die.
So I don't think it's safe to be in public when people like you are branding me a Trump apologist.
It's not me.
I will say this: that I ran into, you wanted, when I first met you, you did make some assertion that you wanted to become a public speaker because you thought that was just some really cool goal.
I ran into you on the road at the same speaking event.
I was a speaker and you were a speaker at some event.
I don't know if you remember this, but I do, because you were grousing.
Me?
Grousing?
Yes.
It's possible.
It's unbelievable.
And you had run into the same phenomenon that I had run into, which is part of actually what you discussed in the cartoon more or less, which is the boneheads that put together these events and then they hire you to be a speaker.
And then for something, you say something, you do something, and you insulted the CEO somehow by making some offhanded remark.
Did I do that that day?
I think so.
Well, apparently they've never seen Dilbert if they hired me and didn't expect me to insult their CEO indirectly or directly.
I thought it was getting to you to the point where you stopped doing public speaking at that point.
No, I've sort of pulled back from it a few times just because I was busy with other stuff.
But at the moment, you know, and then I had to stop when I lost my voice for a few years.
But at the moment, it's just not safe.
Yeah.
Huh.
I was wondering if that was going to affect you at all.
It affected our podcast by, I think, about 40%, 30 to 40 maybe in terms of falloff.
People just don't want to listen anymore.
They're too happy being kind of hypnotized by mania.
Can you cook?
I can bluff my way through some things.
It's not my favorite thing to do.
What happened to your investments in the restaurants?
Well, I can't tell you the real story because there's actually a variety of legal problems that you end up running into if you own a restaurant and you have deep pockets.
Meaning that unscrupulous people will find reasons to go after you that you've never even heard of.
And I mean literally, you've never even heard of them.
And, you know, I'm pretty worldly.
You know, I've been involved in lots of businesses.
And as I said, I've got an MBA, worked at big companies.
I know a lot of stuff.
I've heard of a lot of stuff.
But the problems that I had legally are things I had never heard of.
And if I were, and I can't tell you because you make settlements and you agree not to talk about them, right?
But I had to settle a few and it looked like there was going to be no end to it.
Like literally, there would just be no end to it, the additional ones that could come.
And I made a business decision to get out.
Now, the first restaurant was wildly popular.
We built the second one at the peak of the market.
Literally, I signed the lease the day that the Twin Towers were coming down.
It was 9-11.
Timing.
Yeah.
Timing.
And when that happened, the economy fell apart.
And the place for the second restaurant was in a place that big companies had agreed to move into.
It was just going to be a gold mine.
It was the greatest location.
And they all pulled out.
They all pulled out because of the economy.
Well, that was a bad era.
I mean, you first had a dot-com crash, and then you had the Y2K fiasco, and then as things were straightening out, boom, you have the Twin Towers.
It was just a one, two, three punch.
So I signed the lease at the literal top of the market.
I got the most expensive leash you could ever possibly get at the same time that the economy went to its lowest point in a long time.
You became a vegan?
No, a vegetarian.
I'm a pescatarian at the moment.
Fish eater.
Yeah, I'll eat a fish if I have to.
I don't love it, but it's good for me.
Have you used a vegan character in your cartoon ever?
I feel like I have.
I know I had a vegetarian character at least once, based on me.
I don't know if I've had a vegan.
I don't remember.
Opportunity.
I'll work that in.
You did a thing.
You were promoting this thing called the Blight Authority.
Yes.
Which is one of your pet projects.
Yeah, so Bill Pulte is the founder and primary mover of this.
And Blight, spelled B-L-I-G-H-T, just refers to generally in this context anyway, an urban area where it's all run down and it's just crime and abandoned buildings and stuff.
Billionaires' Front Page Battle00:13:01
And so what Bill does is he finds funding to go in and just clear it out and just bulldoze it and wreck it and bring it down to dirt so that the crime goes away, but then there's also an opportunity to build something there.
And so where I'm helping the most is helping him try to get the word out that there's this opportunity, there's this land available, there can be more of it because there's lots more blight that can be knocked down.
And I'm helping him just publicize the possibilities.
So the website blightauthority.com has an ideas and forum section where people are suggesting ideas and funding and things that could be done with those areas.
And you'll see more about that.
We're going to do a lot more talking about that.
Did you get your degree in engineering?
No, but I played an engineer at Pacific Belt because they ran out of engineers.
That's a true story.
They literally had a hiring freeze.
They needed engineers for the project I ended up working on, something called ISDN for those people old enough to remember that.
I had a line.
Yeah, and my boss just said, well, you're not an engineer, but can you connect computers to equipment with cables and figure out the software?
And I was like, well, probably if I have help.
So I worked in a technology lab, the most incompetent employee who ever worked in a laboratory.
But I had a lot of help.
So the smart people I worked with covered for me.
Were you funny at school?
Oh, maybe only in my own opinion.
I did doodles of my teachers and my fellow students that were, of course, whatever is the obscene version of the 12-year-old doodle.
Most of them were obscene in some way or another.
Were you a good student, you think?
Did you get high grades, A's, B's, C's?
Did you go to, what college did you go to?
I was a valedictorian.
Oh.
You gave a speech?
I did.
And that sounds more impressive than it really is.
You have to understand there were only 40 people in my graduating class.
Still one out of 40.
Yeah, one out of 40.
Then I went to Hartwick College for my undergraduate degree in economics.
And then later when I was working, I went at night and had my company pay for it.
And I got my MBA at Berkeley.
I'm going to get some opinions from you.
I'm going to go down a list and name somebody.
And then you're just going to say if you have anything to say about them.
People.
Yeah.
All right.
And maybe a couple of things, too.
Can I slander them?
Is that okay?
Yeah, of course.
It's fine.
Good.
It's a podcast.
And why wouldn't I?
Pence.
Pence.
An ideal vice president.
You know, I've said in my book, Winn Bigley, I talk about how Pence was an inspired choice because you want a vice president that is solid.
You know, he's got the resume, so he looks like he could take over if you need it.
But he's the boring version of the number one candidate.
And if you stand Pence next to Trump, Trump is like the full-color multimedia circus, and Pence is like whatever you have left after you take all the interesting things away from Trump.
You know, if you started with Trump and subtracted everything that makes him interesting, you'd have Pence.
So he's a perfect choice as the emergency spare, the backup.
You think he could win if he ran for president and Trump wasn't running?
No.
No, I don't.
But as a, he just doesn't have the personality for it.
But because if you look at what Trump had to do to break through the field, I mean, it was his outrageousness, his willingness to take positions that were further than other people were talking about.
Those are all the things that help him cool.
It also helped him get about $1 to $2 billion worth of media attention.
Which they're still irked about.
But they keep continuing this process of giving him media attention.
He found the weakness in the model, which is if it's interesting, they can't not cover it.
So he just makes sure he's the most interesting story.
I think they could have covered Bernie more.
I mean, because he was kind of interesting.
Okay, another name.
Kellyanne Conway.
Well, I don't know her.
By the way, I didn't meet the president.
He did invite me into the president.
Oh, yes, you did.
He did invite me into the Oval Office a few weeks ago.
What was the point of that?
What was he?
You know, he actually didn't say, except I guess my book, Winn Bigley, was popular among people at the White House.
And I think it was just August and Congress was in recess, and he was just sort of working supporters.
You know, he was just solidifying his base, if you will, especially the people who talk about him, write about him.
But I don't know Kellyanne Conway, except what I watch on television.
But I did feel, I remember when Hillary lost and people were so sad that, you know, hey, we could have had a woman president.
And I was thinking, well, what about, you know, Kellyanne didn't run for president, but she just helped the president get elected.
Like, why are we ignoring that?
So in terms of her skill level, very high.
And she's stuck it out with the president.
So loyalty level looks very high.
So I only know what I see on TV, but I like what I see.
Back to the president meeting.
Do you think he read your book, Bigley?
Did he was any, because usually people, if they read your book, they have some reference they'll make.
He was familiar with the content enough that I knew that he knew what I was writing about.
That's all I know for sure.
Did you have fun?
Did you get a free lunch?
Did you get a lunch?
We didn't have lunch.
It was probably the experience I'll never be able to top in terms of the most interesting thing.
Did you take the matchbooks home?
They had these matchbooks you could take home.
Oh, yeah.
I was just loading my pockets with everything that wasn't.
No, I didn't take anything.
I didn't.
I didn't record it on my secret phone in my pocket or anything.
Actually, I didn't have a phone with me.
And they take your phone away.
If you're a visitor, you don't get to bring a phone into the phone.
If you don't want anything you record competing with what the CIA is recording for all the bugs in the room.
Right.
So, yeah, it was just the most interesting thing I have ever done.
He's very engaging, very charismatic.
And just talking to him for a few minutes was like a life experience.
Well, it sounds like fun.
What do you think is another one, another name, Rachel Madow?
Rachel Maddow is insanely smart and talented and really good at what she does.
Now, if you don't like that political bent, then you want her off the air and her critics will howl.
So I don't agree with her politics or point of view on a lot of things, but you can't deny the talent.
The talent is extraordinary.
Yeah, she was.
She's done the most with anyone over there once that other Oberman left.
What about MSNBC in general?
They seem to me like the version of CNN that went too far.
Like whenever you see something on CNN that seems like, well, they're taking that opinion a little too far.
Well, you know, that feels a little biased.
And then you turn on MSNBC and you go, holy hell, what is this?
What fresh hell is this?
So they just seem like the exaggerated version of CNN.
Jerry Brown.
I really don't follow local or California politics.
He's been the governor most of your life.
Yeah, and I haven't followed it at all.
That's too bad.
So I guess I have, yeah, I can't form a coherent opinion of him.
Here's a generality.
What do you think of Silicon Valley billionaires?
Well, one of the weird aspects of my job, and I think you would say the same, is you end up meeting a lot of billionaires.
I was thinking the other day, how many billionaires do I know personally?
And it was like 20 billionaires.
If I wanted to, I could get a hold of them with an email.
And it's hard to meet a billionaire who isn't interesting.
That's the first thing.
And I don't know if it's because I'm aware they're billionaires or whatever made them a billionaire is what also makes them interesting.
But you talk personally and privately to a billionaire and you walk away thinking, I think I learned something almost every time.
I think you might be right.
I never thought of him as being interesting.
I think, yeah, they are interesting, almost every one of them.
Many of them are very focused, which is the thing that you see with a couple of these guys.
I mean, Bill Gates, for example, is the most focused guy.
He's got supposedly a form of autism that makes him that way.
He must have the good one.
Yes, it's considered the good one.
I'll give you one example.
Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce.
So I did give us, before I lost my voice, I gave a talk there.
And I hung out for maybe half an hour because we were killing time before the event started.
And I got to chat with him at some depth privately.
And I'll tell you, I've never met anybody like him.
Like, he's just not like other people.
And I'm going to explain that I mean that in a good way.
He seems to be operating on this whole other level of, he uses the word intention.
And without getting too woo-woo about it, he seems to have just a superior grasp of how it all works.
And when I say how it all works, I mean how it all works.
He just seems to be operating on a different level.
That's what I took from that.
And I saw this interesting exchange.
I probably shouldn't talk about it, but since it makes him look good, I will anyway.
Where one of his top lieutenants was talking about a slideshow.
He goes, hey, I've got this slideshow we're going to show.
And he looks at it, Mark Benny off, and he looks at the first page and he goes, you know, put something on the first page here about, you know, our philanthropic, you know, that 1% thing where they give away 1% of their profits and try to spend 1% of their time on philanthropic things, charitable things.
He says, put that in the first page.
And his lieutenant pushes back.
He's like, well, you know, I've got that.
It's in the body of the thing.
He goes, no, move it up to the first page.
And then the lieutenant pushes back again and he goes, no, move it to the first page.
And he pushed on it again.
And he just looked at him.
He's like, first page.
It was like, he was so clear on what mattered, right?
And representing the company with that first really mattered.
Those kind of guys which are CEOs like, and there's a lot of them, and a lot of them aren't billionaires.
They still have these characteristics.
They're the guys who are really kind of in meta-quality control.
They're the ones who, you know, I felt this way when they fired John Lasseter from Pixar, who was the creative genius.
And he was fired for hugging too much.
I mean, it was part of the Me Too movement.
And I think that he was the guy who was saying, no, no, no, put it on the front page.
That's the same kind of a guy.
And I think they're into all office environments, you know, and when you lose that guy, whether he's the CEO, usually they are, the company just kind of just falls apart.
Yeah, and just to be clear, it wasn't about the quality of the slide deck.
He wasn't talking about that.
It was reasoning.
It was as much about training this lieutenant what's important and how to put it forward.
Okay, another one.
Why do you think the Silicon Valley billionaires are all Democrats?
Well, they're not all Democrats, but you got your people who are willing to tell you about their politics, and you got your people who may be uncomfortable.
Oh, yeah, there are a few people there that don't like to talk about anything because they know the majority are Democrats.
Right.
Which still begs the question: why do you think there's so many Democrats in a place where there's so much wealth?
It's not supposed to add up that way.
Why I Prefer Fiction00:04:51
Yeah, I don't know.
I think you'd have to get inside their heads to know that.
I don't know what the filtering mechanism is that got us to that point.
Good question.
I don't know.
What's your favorite TV show?
Do you watch much TV?
Favorite TV show?
Really, the only one I record at this point is The Five on Fox News and also the Greg Gottfeld Show, in part because I know Greg, but The Five is probably the best-produced show with the best characters and the most consistently entertaining.
Really?
Because the model that they built of these engaging characters sort of teasing each other and talking about the news is just the best thing on TV.
Huh.
Well, that's a shocker to me.
Didn't see that coming, did you?
No, I sure did not.
I mean, I like my Game of Thrones, but they're not on now.
What about books?
What do you like to read?
Besides persuasion books, I hate to say it, but I don't read a lot of books.
There have been years I've written more books than I've read, and that's literally true.
Part of it is that you can glean the essence of most books pretty quickly, you know, from other sources.
But part of it is also that I don't enjoy fiction.
So pure fiction.
And I can now give you the real reason for that.
So for years, I couldn't tell people the real reason I didn't like fiction.
There's a lot of people that don't like fiction, so let's start with that.
That's good to know.
Basically.
Let alone.
If you hear my dog running around in the background there, spare noise.
The things that I can imagine just by closing my eyes, because I am a professional creative, I believe that every human capability has this big range, you know, where most people are avid and some people are terrible and some people are great.
So in the same way that I'm terrible at music, let's say, I have no musical ear whatsoever, my ability to imagine is probably hard to know for sure, but probably extraordinary just based on the volume of new ideas I create at any moment.
And I'm a very visual imaginer.
And so I can create my own fiction in my head just by closing my eyes, and it's better and more interesting and more tuned to me than a book.
And books are work.
And closing my eyes is not.
And I get exactly what I want anytime I want.
Now, I feel sorry for anybody who can't sort of build an entire story in your head instantly, but I can.
You started with the ISDN crowd, but you were kind of a techie, or do you think that you never were a techie?
I was a programmer at a very low level.
In other words, I did it professionally, but when computers...
What were you programming in?
Usually just, well, basic and doing easy things for the deck, the VAX back in the day.
So programming at BASIC was just for internal financial reports and easy stuff.
And I built a few utility programs that got used.
And I built some video games in my own time, actual graphic video games.
But it took me so long to build one that the entire industry had moved so far in the six months it would take me to build one that it no longer looked like like a game anybody would ever buy.
So I couldn't.
I couldn't keep up with the companies that were doing it.
So I was technical that way, but I I think I'm more.
I'm more about the talent stack which I talk about the, the idea of building lots of different talents and stacking them until you have something that's unique, even if even if you're not great at any of those things.
So I'm certainly not great or even really good at anything in technology, but I'm pretty comfortable around it.
You know, when you came, you saw me working with a bunch of new equipment, put together a new studio set up for myself, and I like that stuff.
Yeah, so you have kept up, but you're a you seem to be a Mac head.
Uh, at the moment I've gone back and forth.
For most of my career I was a double platform guy because you just needed you just always needed the other one.
You know, if you're doing a lot of licensing and working with people around the world, you can't have one platform.
But at the moment, the Mac pretty much gives me everything I need, so I abandoned Windows and you use the IPhone exclusively.
Yeah, I like the whole.
You know I want to stop you there because you you you already credited Google with pretty much saving your life when came to the research on this dysphonia.
Switching Platforms00:04:39
Yeah.
And now you end up turning your back on them and going with an iPhone.
Well, Apple does a real good job of making all my devices work together and somewhat seamlessly.
Google also does, but just a little less user interface love.
So that makes a big difference to me.
What kind of car do you drive?
I've got a 2011 X5 BMW and SUV.
Ah, and that's it?
You don't have a second car little.
Why do I need two cars?
It's just me.
You get bored.
Yeah, I don't like cars.
I'm not a car guy.
Oh.
So if you go out to dinner, what level of restaurant do you go to?
Do you go to a high-end place, low-end place, hamburger place?
What do you like?
What are you a gourmet?
You collect wine.
I don't drink at all.
And when I did, I didn't drink wine.
I'm not an alcoholic.
I know you're thinking that.
You're all thinking that right now, aren't you?
Did he stop because he's an alcoholic?
No, I developed some kind of weird reaction to it.
And then I just stopped and realized, hey, I don't need this.
I feel better if I just never have a drink.
I'm just healthier.
It would save money if you went to high-end restaurants, I can tell you that.
So the answer to your question is, my girlfriend Christina and I have tried a bunch of top restaurants just for the experience of it.
And they weren't really that good.
I got to say.
They weren't better than a mid-level restaurant.
I don't know why people go to these top Michelin star restaurants.
I won't name names.
Why not?
They were not impressive.
But I will tell you that the French laundry was impressive.
That just knocked my socks off.
But other than that, no.
I like a good Italian tablecloth restaurant, and I'm happy.
So I went through a whole couple of sheets here, and I hate to do this, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Because I had this theory about interviewing, and I was working on it.
It was mainly to preclude what I'm going to ask next, which is, what should I have asked you that I didn't ask?
Well, you haven't asked me about my startup, which… Well, let's do that.
So the startup, the name of the company is WenHub.
WenHub, all one word.
And the app we're focusing on right now is called Interface by WenHub.
And if you can imagine, it's like a Tinder for experts, meaning that it's people who are online and available right now for a video call.
And it could be any topic.
So anybody can sign up for an expert.
Anybody can use it to make a connection.
It's a dating app?
No, it's not a dating app.
Oh, it's for experts.
It's for anybody who wants to charge for their time on a video call.
So it could be a consultant.
It could be an expert on some technology.
But it could also be a psychologist.
It could be just somebody who's visiting your grandmother who needs some medical care and maybe the kids want to call in and the professional just takes a call and says, yeah, I'm checking on your grandma that she's taking her pills.
It could be any kind of medical, financial, any realm.
It could be just somebody who wants to spend time with somebody while they're eating because they're lonely.
Somebody might just say, I just need somebody to talk to.
And anybody can set their price, and the experts will be determined by ratings, just like any other service.
You'll get a star rating from the people who use you.
And we think it could change everything from education to healthcare to help people with PTSD if they have somebody to talk to, could reduce suicide because you've got somebody to talk to.
It could be quite transformative.
Who's we?
We is the team.
And whose idea was this to begin with?
Are you just the money guy?
So I'm more than the money guy, and it's the third product that the same team has developed.
So we've done our pivoting.
This specific idea was Nick Cagliani, who's our CTO and co-founder.
And he initially had the idea, and we refined it from there.
But I get pretty involved in the look and the feel and the business end of it.
When did this begin?
I think we're about three years into it.
The new product is only just this.
Is it out?
Crypto Residuals & Interviews00:07:06
Yeah, it's been in stores.
The original version was crypto only.
In other words, you had to pay in our own crypto.
It was an ICO.
Still is an ICO, by the way.
And now we're on an exchange or two, and we can take credit cards now.
What's the crypto called?
It's the WEN, W-H-E-N, and LA Token, the exchange.
You can buy that now.
Are you a fan of crypto?
A fan is probably too strong a word.
I think the blockchain is probably here to stay or whatever it evolves to, but I'm no blockchain expert.
And I think it has its use.
We'll see the battle between government control and people who want to be free of government control.
We'll see who wins.
It'll be interesting.
The government always wins.
It feels like that's how it's going to go.
Yeah.
I don't see any other alternative because otherwise you have chaos.
Not that I'm rooting for the government.
Anyway, I think that'll do it.
I think we got everything covered unless you've got something else you'd want to throw in there because it's free.
Well.
Free airtiming.
We promoted a book, Big Lee, and you got any new books you're working on?
Like a cartoon book maybe, something, a new Dilbert compilation?
So there's always a new Dilbert compilation.
The latest one is Cubicles That Make You Envy the Dead.
It's reprints, and the Dilbert calendar will be coming out in a few months.
And there's always something I got to buy.
What's the Dogbert character's little devil?
Where did that come from?
The Dogbert's.
You have a Devil character.
Oh, well, that looks like Dogbert.
Oh, you're thinking of Catbert.
In the comic, the Catbird is the director of Human Resources.
And I made that character a cat because your human resources director doesn't care if you live or die, just likes playing with you.
Okay.
Well, on that note, we'll end.
I want to thank you for letting me interview you.
Well, thanks for coming all the way out here.
And it was fun.
It was great catching up.
We'll talk again.
Well, you'll never hear an interview like that again with Scott Adams.
That was good.
You should do more of these interviews.
You know, I'm going to, when I do them from now on, I've decided because of the change in the podcast or sphere, the podcast.
What do you think?
Potosphere?
The Potosphere landscape.
Yes.
I'm going to do them all at two hours.
Because I was doing, that was mixed with another interview.
I mean, when we first aired it.
Yeah, why didn't you do two hours?
Did you do that?
Well, you know, we were doing because for some dumb reason, I decided that I was going to do our interviews, and we're going to put two of them together.
And now I'm not going to do that anymore.
And I haven't done an interview for, what, five years since COVID?
It's more than that.
It's been seven.
Well, that was 2018.
So it's been eight years.
Maybe that was the last one I'm not sure.
Eight years.
Yeah, you know, it's just that our show is so good.
It's so good.
We don't need to do that kind of padded stuff, but it was good to have the Scott stuff in the can as a tribute in the one hand, and then also to re listen to some of his earlier thoughts before COVID.
You know, what's kind of wild is that I'm not quite sure who's doing it, but they still have his feed and they're publishing things.
And I think, did I see an AI Scott Adams?
Like that might not have been on his feed, but I think his friends, friends of Scott, are doing sporadic shows that show up on his RSS feed.
Yeah.
And this, and it's the same with Charlie Kirk.
You know, I think when the show's over, the feed should just end.
I mean, it's like if we die, do we want to give it to Darren and Larry?
Do we want to give them the feed?
Well, they keep their show and they can say that they're the inheritors, but you wouldn't change it.
Now, Darren and Larry doing no agenda.
I don't think so.
But who gets the feed?
The feed is apparently valuable because people are using these feeds because they got all these people subscribed.
There's value in that.
Our exit strategy is we sell the feed post-mortem.
Well, one thing you can do.
I'm looking at the way magazines operate is that when you end a magazine folds and they have all the subscribers.
Yeah, you sell the list.
You sell the subscription list.
No, you don't see, well, you sell it with the brand.
Yeah, exactly.
You sell the list to another magazine, and then people can opt out of that and get their money back, maybe if they want it.
But generally speaking, you find some way to drag it out until the subscribers just all stop, stop renewing.
Yeah, well, we also have our newsletter list.
That's another one.
It's money in the bank, man.
Mimi and Tina can fight over that.
That's great.
Well, we have to do some sort of agreement.
But yes, there'd be residuals that drag on.
Residuals.
The residuals dragging on.
I mean, people were going to, you know, it's just the way it is.
Oh.
So I don't know what maybe they're trying to.
I know Scott didn't have the value for value system set up.
No, he didn't have any monetization set up.
Which is fine.
I don't know what the point of it is.
I mean, he still has his cartoons, which are still valuable and they still get redistributed.
He's got a thousand books that he did of cartoons and his writings.
And that still brings him income, whether he's dead or alive.
Yeah.
And so, well, how about this?
How about we live for another four years?
Let's make that a good thing.
Yeah, we can do, we can manage.
We can manage another four years.
And I want to make sure that that was our tribute to Scott Adams, and I hope you enjoyed it.
Yes.
It was good.
And more interviews like that in the future for these special shows.
And a reminder that we still need your support, noagendadonations.com.
This Thursday is your first opportunity to send your Valentine's love through a No Agenda donation.
Of course, we'll do another one on Sunday because Saturday is going to be Valentine's Day.
So I'm sure you will mention something like that in the newsletter.
I hope so.
All right.
We'll be back in the saddle on Thursday for your No Agenda show.
Lots of stuff to deconstruct, as always.
And have yourselves a great Super Bowl Sunday.
Go Patriots, is what I'd say.
No, I'd say go Seahawks, but I don't care that much.
Coming to you from Lake Wales, Florida, which isn't a weird place in Florida.
It is FEMA region number 10.
In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
And from Northern Silicon Valley, where I remain, even though I'm on tape.