My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Voice of America...is pro-China? Pneumonia deaths graph update Viewer questions --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Hey everybody, come on in here. | |
| Hey Donnie Diamonds, good to see you. | |
| What a day! Well, most of you are probably in church or headed to church or wish you were in church or doing a virtual Zoom to church. | |
| I suppose nobody's actually going to church today, right? | |
| Is there any place in the country you could actually go and be in the same room with each other? | |
| I don't know. Maybe we'll find out. | |
| Hey, Omar. Good morning, good morning. | |
| Well, there's not much going on today, which isn't just a continuation of what was going on yesterday, but we'll talk about that, but not until we get the day started just right. | |
| I'll be taking some questions, so if anybody wants to queue up to be a question asker, this will be the time to do it. | |
| But first, If you would like to enjoy the Simultaneous Sip, and of course you would. | |
| Of course you would. Yeah, you would. | |
| All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass or take your chalice or a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine to the end of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the pandemic, better. | |
| It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now. | |
| Go! Well, let's see what's going on. | |
| The South is open for church services. | |
| What do you all think of that? Do you think that your right to assemble in church should take priority over the health of the public? | |
| Well, here's the way I look at it. | |
| How could you go to church and have those good churchy feelings But also be willing to kill grandma to do it. | |
| So, I'll give you my opinion. | |
| Here's my opinion. Freedom's good, but if the way you worship your god risks killing your grandmother, for no good reason, I would say you've made the wrong choice. | |
| I wasn't expecting to take a strong stand against going to church today. | |
| Just kind of came out. | |
| As most of you know, I'm not a believer, but I'm very pro-religion, because I think religion is, if properly used, and it's more often properly used than not, religion is a tremendous benefit to most people. | |
| So I hope you're enjoying your day today. | |
| But I have to question why anybody would get in any kind of a group when the health risks are so high. | |
| And especially, why would you do it on a religious day? | |
| It seems like that should be the day that you're worshipping Satan. | |
| If you were worshipping Satan, wouldn't it make sense to get together with a big group so you could get everybody infected and kill everybody in the nursing home? | |
| Feels a little more like Satan-ish, but that's up to you. | |
| All right. You're all familiar with Voice of America. | |
| That's our US-funded entity that broadcasts radio into other countries so that we can propagandize them and tell them that we're pretty darn awesome here. | |
| Pretty darn awesome. | |
| And apparently Voice of America is not as objective as we'd like it to be, and it's been accused by our government of We spend $200 million a year on the Voice of America, and apparently it's starting to spout Chinese propaganda. | |
| That's right. We're spending however many millions of dollars on the World Health Organization to not give us good health information. | |
| We spend all this money on the World Trade Organization to not give us fair trials. | |
| And apparently we're spending a lot of money on the Voice of America to create propaganda against us. | |
| And I think that's probably an overstatement. | |
| There have been some specific examples in which they seemed a little bit pro-China, which is weird. | |
| I don't know how that could happen, given that we're the ones who fund it. | |
| I don't know. Honestly, I don't know how it happens. | |
| But there it is. So anyway, that's a big story today. | |
| I continue to wait for this sign before I decide to get afraid of the coronavirus. | |
| As of today, I am not personally afraid. | |
| I mean, I'm certainly afraid for the impact it might have on the country and other people, but for me personally, I'm pretty well isolated here, not too afraid, but I've proposed this standard for myself, which is there are a lot of famous people in the world, right? If you count all the famous athletes, celebrities, politicians, etc., tons of famous people in the world. | |
| Until the first famous person who's under the age of 70 dies from the coronavirus, and of all those possible people whose names you know and you would call them a celebrity under the age of 70, if not a single one of them in America dies, what are the odds I would be the first one? | |
| Because if you think about it, at this point, I don't want to jinx myself. | |
| But if I were to die, me personally, to die from coronavirus tomorrow, I would be the most famous person who died of coronavirus in the United States. | |
| Is that wrong, by the way? | |
| Has anybody famous in the United States, under 70, died? | |
| I don't think so. So what would the odds that I would be out of all the famous people in the country, really the world, I haven't heard of any famous dying yet, out of all those famous people, what are the odds that I would be the one who dies? | |
| Seems pretty low. So I realize it's irrational and not based on math or anything, but until there's at least one famous person dying, what are the odds is me? | |
| Speaking of that, Babyface, the Singer, producer, entertainer. | |
| He is 61 years old, which is weird because he has the most perfect nickname. | |
| So he's a singer named Babyface. | |
| He's 61 years old, and when I read that, I thought, well, that can't be right. | |
| He's not 61. | |
| I'm looking at his picture. He looks 35 tops. | |
| He looks like he's in his 20s. | |
| I'm looking at this guy, and I'm thinking, he actually has a babyface. | |
| That's the most perfect nickname anybody ever had. | |
| Anyway, he and his family, unfortunately, they have the coronavirus. | |
| There's no reason to believe that they have any especially bad problems with it, but he's the most famous person who's not Tom Hanks or Pink or that basketball player, Gobert. | |
| I guess they're the famous ones so far, but we hope he'll be okay. | |
| So Tom Hanks recovered enough to host Saturday Night Live, but they did it All remotely. | |
| You know, Tom Hanks was in his kitchen and all the rest of the staff. | |
| They did their own little skits like they're YouTubers from their own homes. | |
| Now, I didn't see it, but I've been watching a lot of news TV where the anchors and stuff are in their own homes. | |
| If you watch The Five, you see they're all in five different locations and stuff. | |
| And if you watch Bill Maher, you saw he did it from his backyard or something. | |
| And here's the question. | |
| Are there shows? Somebody's saying Joe Diffie, but he was over 70. | |
| And I didn't know who he was anyway. | |
| I didn't know who John Prine was, but they're over 70. | |
| So, here's my question. | |
| Are the shows that we're watching that are being cheaply produced from people's kitchens, are they worse? | |
| Think about it. Somebody says Joe Diffie was 61. | |
| Alright, well, I don't count that one. | |
| Because I didn't know who he was. | |
| So if I've never heard of him, he's not famous enough to count. | |
| I'm sure some of you have heard of him, but I've never heard of him. | |
| He's a famous drummer, and John Prine was over 70 with underlying health conditions. | |
| Boris Johnson, they say, nearly died. | |
| They said 50-50, but he came through. | |
| So anyway, my point is, if you're watching the news, all these people doing these low production jobs from home, honestly, they look just as good to me. | |
| Have you noticed? The only thing that I noticed that's obviously sort of missing is there are some people who do live shows with live audiences, or at least other people in the room, and they wait for the laugh, and the laugh doesn't happen. | |
| So the way Bill Maher did his show, I thought was clever, and also... | |
| Also fairly self-aware. | |
| Because when Bill Maher does his stand-up, a lot of the show, if you will, has to do with the audience reaction. | |
| So he's not just telling jokes and standing there. | |
| He's sort of moving with the audience and, you know, if they laugh, he responds and stuff. | |
| And I'm seeing other people saying it's worse. | |
| I don't know. I think it's different. | |
| And I think it's interesting. | |
| Um... So in the long run, yeah, I suppose you could say it'd be worse. | |
| Production is worse and stuff. | |
| But there's a little bit of adjustment they need to make. | |
| So the way Bill Maher did his was he had them dub in, you know, fake audiences laughing at his jokes. | |
| It would be a different audience, you know, and obviously from historical black and white footage and stuff. | |
| So it was actually pretty good. | |
| The Hubris of Scott. | |
| Would be the last thing that somebody said in their comments before they got blocked. | |
| Anyway, enough of that. | |
| So I would like to update my permanent prediction record. | |
| All right, you all remember that there was that graph that showed that the number of diagnosed pneumonia deaths for this year seemed to drop off a cliff. | |
| Coincidentally, at about the same time that the coronavirus was picking up. | |
| And so people passed that graph all around the internet, and people said, look, it's obvious that there's nothing happening but ordinary pneumonia. | |
| It's being miscategorized as coronavirus, and you can tell by looking at the graph, because pneumonias stop at the same time that corona goes up, so it's obviously just misdiagnosis. | |
| I looked at that graph, And with no factual evidence whatsoever, said, that looks like a fake graph to me. | |
| Was I the first person on the internet that you saw? | |
| Might have been others. But the first one that you saw, call out this graph that everybody was passing this around. | |
| It was very, very well trafficked. | |
| How many people saw that and believed it? | |
| And then I was maybe the first person In the world to tell you that doesn't look real, that's fake. | |
| Well, it didn't take long for a data scientist by the name of, so there's an update to this story, you've heard the first part, Tyler Morgan, who put together this amazing visualization in which he showed that the only reason that that one line seemed to drop off this year It was because there's a lag in the data reporting and it happens every year and every other year looked exactly like this year if measured at the same time. | |
| But there's an update. | |
| So people said, are you sure, Tyler Morgan? | |
| Are you sure it's going to happen this year? | |
| Just because the other years they had that drop too and then it got corrected, does that necessarily mean it's going to happen this year? | |
| And we didn't know. But now we do. | |
| So now the data has been reported, and data scientist Tyler Morgan put in the actual data, so nothing was changed. | |
| He just took the data the way it's reported, and the scary drop in pneumonia just went away. | |
| It went away exactly as Tyler Morgan told you it would, because it went away all the other years at the same time. | |
| And so he just waited for the same time, told you it was going to happen, Then he redid his graph, and there it was. | |
| There's still people here saying it's not fake. | |
| Okay, here's what you need to do. | |
| It's amazing how there's no amount of information that will change people's minds. | |
| Even though I wrote a book on that topic, So even though I'm most famous for saying that the information and facts don't change anybody's opinion, even though they should, and I'm watching it happen right in front of me, here's what you need to do. | |
| The source for the data is written right on the graphs, so you could go to my Twitter feed and you could find the graph, look at the source, look at the data, and see if you put the right data into the graph. | |
| It's all You can find out for yourself because you can look at the actual source. | |
| It's a government source. So just look at it. | |
| Look at the data and see if it's the same data he looked in the chart. | |
| And then come back to me and tell me he did it wrong. | |
| I don't think anybody's going to come back to me. | |
| Now, I haven't done that, by the way. | |
| I have not checked that myself. | |
| But do you think this data scientist who's gotten quite a bit of attention because I tweeted him and he deserves it, he's really good, Do you think that he just made that up? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Who's more famous than me? | |
| You know, you can check that. | |
| There's a website called Twitter Fight. | |
| Is that what it's called? | |
| No, Google Fight, right? | |
| Let's do that. | |
| Google Fight. | |
| Because every now and then I like to... | |
| No, not flights. | |
| Fight. I guess that went away. | |
| They don't show it anymore. | |
| Huh. Oh, fugal fight, that's why. | |
| Oh, God. I've got this weird situation with my phone. | |
| I don't know if this has happened to any of you, but the way I hold my phone all day long is this thumb is on this corner of the phone right here. | |
| So when I'm holding it, this thumb is always right on this edge. | |
| And for a long time afterwards, it'll have a dent in it. | |
| Can you see that? I spend so much time with the phone on the corner of my phone that there's actually like a U-shaped. | |
| It takes a while for it to come back. | |
| But I've so deformed the end of my thumb by holding the same part of my phone that when I try to type, the end of my thumb has two points. | |
| Instead of having one point in the middle of the thumb, it's like a little camel hump with two humps. | |
| And I'm like... I'm mistyping like crazy. | |
| So, let's try it again. This is the worst periscope of all time, but there's not much other entertainment happening, so... | |
| Let's see. | |
| My goodness. There it is. | |
| Make a fight. All right. | |
| So, what was that guy's name? | |
| Diffie? Joe Diffie? | |
| So, we'll check him. | |
| Joe, D-I-F-F-I-E, I think. | |
| And then, there's me. | |
| How interesting watching other people type on their phones in purpose. | |
| All right. So we're going to see this fight, and I'll show it to you as it's happening, if I can. | |
| It's thinking. | |
| It's thinking. So what this is, is Google will... | |
| Test the number of search results. | |
| Well, it looks like it's not going to work. | |
| That's just... | |
| Well, that was the least interesting thing that happened today. | |
| All right. Do you have any questions? | |
| We'll take your questions now. | |
| Let's see who has good questions for me. | |
| Let's try... | |
| If I'm pronouncing your name right. | |
| Andreas? Andreas? | |
| Andreas? Andreas, are you there? | |
| Do you have a question? Hi. | |
| I was thinking about the mental framework for this crisis and I've been thinking maybe we should change like collectively to the thinking of like really resilient Animal or insect like an ant colony that basically when it's under attack just unites forces and really doesn't worry too much about the particular feelings of every individual ant or just holds together, follows orders and pulls through. | |
| Yeah, I'm not sure that thinking about it differently would get us to a better result because we have pretty amazing cooperation and innovations and everything. | |
| You know, it's like everything else in the world. | |
| You know, five or ten percent of the world just isn't going to go along with anything. | |
| But 90% of the world are doing pretty well. | |
| You probably can't get much better than that unless you threaten to kill people. | |
| But in terms of how things are going, I like that the president is reinforcing How much he thinks the economy is going to bounce back and how quickly. | |
| What I like about that is he's basically setting our expectations. | |
| He's picked a future point. | |
| He said the end of the year might be record-setting numbers. | |
| I don't know if they'll be record-setting, but if everybody thinks it's going to be good at the end of the year, We'll all prepare for it. | |
| So businesses will make more products and people will save their money to spend. | |
| And people will act as though we all agree that things are going to be good at the end of the year. | |
| And if we act as though it is, then it becomes good because the economy is just the result of all the intentions and actions of the people. | |
| So that's my best answer. | |
| I don't know if that was any good, but thank you, Andres. | |
| All right. | |
| Next question. Let's see what Bill has to say. | |
| Bill went away. | |
| Bill, let's try John. | |
| I don't know why people go away as soon as I select them. | |
| I don't know if that's a technology thing or a me thing. | |
| Bill, do you have a question? | |
| Bill, do you have a question? | |
| Bill is not listening to his phone. | |
| Later, he's going to say, darn it, I almost had a phone call. | |
| Let's try Nancy. Nancy looks prepared. | |
| Nancy, do you have a question for me? | |
| Yes. You know what today is? | |
| Is it Easter Sunday? | |
| It is. And I am wondering... | |
| What you think about something in the world of persuasion that has lasted over 2,000 years and what actually occurred in those days by a very small group of people that were able to influence The world down through the generations. | |
| It has continued. So how could that have happened? | |
| Well, I hate to rock your world. | |
| Yeah, I know. I want you to. | |
| I want you to. I'm curious what you think. | |
| I feel bad answering this question on Easter Sunday. | |
| You asked, and people don't come here to hear me lie to them, so I'll give you my honest answer. | |
| I'm not a religious historian. | |
| I'm not. But I'll make a statement which I believe to be true, things I've heard from religious historians. | |
| Which is that there were lots of traditions and there were lots of other religions that did not survive that had similar characteristics of somebody who was killed and then they were reborn as something bigger. | |
| So apparently that's just a normal thing that happens with lots of religions. | |
| So if you go back in time, there were lots of different religions and they competed against each other in different ways and something won. | |
| You know, a few of them emerged. | |
| So Islam emerged and And Christianity emerged and lots of different forms of Christianity. | |
| So I would look at it as just evolution with some kind of survival of the fittest, which in some cases has to do with the quality of the story, if you will. | |
| Does it have a holy book? | |
| Is it put together well? | |
| Is it promoted by a leader? | |
| Because there were a number of leaders who We sort of took up Christianity as their thing. | |
| Now, if a few leaders had changed their mind, you know, if the King of England or, you know, I don't know, Charlemagne or I don't know my history well at all, but if some of the great leaders, just a few of them, had simply said, no, I'm going to pick this other religion, probably would have gone a different way. | |
| So there are a bunch of factors about why one religion does well and one does not, but I would pick one thing in particular that Maybe two things about Christianity that make it work really well, persuasion-wise, to get to your question. | |
| Yes. One is the thought that you can always be saved no matter what bad you did. | |
| So we'd like to think that we can be good people even if we've done bad things. | |
| And Christianity directly says, yeah, you could do terrible things, but as long as you're willing to, you know, at this moment, I think that is such a seductive and appealing thought because people are wracked by guilt and to have some authority say, | |
| you know, all that guilt you had We all got problems, too. | |
| All you got to do is do these steps, say these things, you know, believe in these things, and your history is wiped clean, and your guilt is gone. | |
| So in terms of getting rid of your guilt is great. | |
| It also has the advantage that if your life is bad, you can always tell yourself, you know, my life is bad. | |
| But I'll do these following things to be a good person and then eternity, my afterlife, will be awesome because I worked hard even though my life was bad. | |
| So between the fact that it has a payoff of infinity literally forever in heaven, that's the best payoff you could possibly have. | |
| So you would expect that people would work the hardest and be the most obedient to whatever promised them the most reward. | |
| So, you see, Islam promises a big reward. | |
| Christianity promises a big reward if you do the right stuff. | |
| So, persuasion-wise, it's fairly straightforward. | |
| People will do a lot to get a gigantic potential reward, even like a lottery. | |
| You'll buy a lottery ticket even if you have a 1 in 100 million chance of winning, because if you did win, it would be so great. | |
| You'd be happy. So, did that answer your question at all? | |
| Well, I think that's a good shot at it. | |
| I don't know if it is. | |
| I'm not sure. | |
| Maybe perhaps if it is a big old fairy tale, what a good fairy tale it is for so many people down through the generations. | |
| Well, keep in mind, I didn't say that. | |
| No, you didn't. | |
| So I try to be more, at least lately. | |
| Well, I think the thing that you mention so often is we can't even remember who was in the news last week and who was being persuasive. | |
| And it just strikes me every year, at Christmas and Easter particularly, That this man had the most incredible effect on human history out of all people that have ever lived. | |
| So it just amazes me, because he didn't have any of the tools that we have today, and yet his influence still exists. | |
| Or you could say that whoever wrote the Bible were the influential ones, because the Bible was written after Jesus' life, so if it had not been written in a way that people found influential and persuasive for centuries, I don't know that what he did would be so, had the impact. | |
| It had more to do with With the people who collected it on paper, right? | |
| Would you agree? Well, I don't know about that. | |
| When you think about Paul, who was influenced the most, he didn't have the Bible. | |
| He didn't have, you know, he was speaking to people about the influence of this man, Jesus Christ. | |
| So it was amazing that Paul didn't have anything to go on except his experience. | |
| Well, he did have the message. | |
| You know, I read... That turn the other trick didn't really mean what we think it to mean today. | |
| Have you ever heard that? I have. | |
| Yeah, I don't know the details, but I think turn the other trick was a little bit more aggressive. | |
| I think in those days it wasn't so much, you know, hey, hit me again and I won't hit you back with the way we interpret it today. | |
| I think it was more of a subtly psychologically aggressive thing. | |
| I don't know the details, but It changed. | |
| But let me just say this. | |
| My larger theory of reality is that none of us have brains which are designed to understand reality, meaning that a clam doesn't know it's a clam, but it also doesn't need to. | |
| You know, my dog doesn't really understand much about this complicated human world that it lives in, doesn't need to. | |
| So as long as the creature can survive and procreate, that's all it needs. | |
| So there's no reason to believe that humans have this extra ability We're good to go. | |
| And so, we can see that even in the simplest situations, people will look at the same facts with, you know, eyes and ears and stuff, and come to completely wildly different conclusions about their own reality right at that moment. | |
| Like, in the moment, people are redefining reality wildly differently. | |
| So, when somebody says, is this religion or that religion true, I have the same answer for all of them. | |
| Nothing's true. You know, not the thing in your hand, not the thing you heard on news, not what you think of your life, your purpose in the world. | |
| None of it's true. Because we don't have the equipment, meaning our brain. | |
| Our brain is not designed to tell us what's true. | |
| It's just designed to keep us alive. | |
| And for that, telling us little stories does fine. | |
| So is it true that any of us have the right little story? | |
| So might it be that the Hindus, for example, are the only people who are getting the right story and everybody else is interpreting it wildly different, you know, the Muslims and the Christians? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| I don't think so. That seems possible. | |
| I mean, you can't rule it out. | |
| But it seems far more likely that all the evidence suggests that none of us have an accurate view of reality. | |
| And we've all created these stories that exist in our heads, which are internally consistent to us, but sound like nonsense often when we explain it to someone who has a different movie in their head. | |
| So I don't say that Jesus is real or not real, that Islam is real or not really real, or anything else. | |
| I say that we don't have the capacity to know what's real. | |
| So whether there is a real version of religion or not, There isn't any chance we'd find it, except by luck. | |
| There are so many religions that if one of them is right, it doesn't matter which one, if one of them is like bang on, it does mean all the rest of them are wrong. | |
| And you don't know which group you're in. | |
| That's the problem. All right. | |
| I hope I didn't reprogram anything. | |
| Can I say just one last thing? | |
| Sure. I am a believer, but I have loved for the first time years ago when you first introduced the idea of the simulation. | |
| It has just been fascinating to me. | |
| And I see evidence of it over and over and over. | |
| And yet, the flip side of that is that in this world, the Christian belief world, we call those Easter blessings. | |
| And for me, you are today's Easter blessing. | |
| Happy Easter, Scott. Oh, you're so nice. | |
| I love you. Thanks. Have a great day. | |
| Bye-bye. I like when people are in a good mood just because it's Easter. | |
| Maybe she's in a good mood all the time. | |
| I don't know. Let's see what Omar has to say. | |
| Omar? Omar, may the gods of technology connect us. | |
| But it looks like they may not. | |
| So Omar's got some technical difficulty. | |
| Come back, Omar. Come back. | |
| Let's try Jan. Jan? | |
| Jan? Do you have a question, Jan? | |
| Happy Easter. What's your question? | |
| I've got an idea and I wanted to see what you thought about it. | |
| So this is a really rough idea. | |
| I was talking about it with my husband yesterday. | |
| With the restaurants being, I think the restaurants are going to have a hard time coming back. | |
| They're going to have to get really creative. | |
| So what do you think about a handheld mouth shield that you could have, the restaurants could provide? | |
| And now this is a rough idea. | |
| And they would, they could brand it. | |
| They could make them look kind of Fancy or funky down the road, but the idea is you can see people's mouths and they would have this little handheld shield and they could take it with them. | |
| A handheld shield, so the kind that the medical professionals attach to their head, is that what you're talking about? | |
| Well, no, I'm talking about like, you know how the old fans, many years, decades, maybe centuries ago, women would hold those little fans and they would sort of wave it at themselves. | |
| But instead, it would be like a fixed, it wouldn't open up like a fan and be solid or opaque. | |
| cake, it would be a clear, translucent piece, if you will, held on a stick, and you would hold it up to your face while you were talking at a restaurant. | |
| Well, I will use the same argument I use for face masks, which is, it seems to me that anything that is a barrier to the force of the air coming out of your mouth should make some difference. | |
| you know, the obvious thing is that if you have a mask on, It's going to keep the air closer to your face. | |
| If you have a flat object in front of you, it seems like your air would still sort of escape around it, but it would stop a little bit of it. | |
| My thought is that it would be hard to make that widespread and it would be hard to convince people it made enough of a difference for them to take the effort to use them and have something in one hand. | |
| It's good thinking. I like where you're going with this. | |
| Because I like the general thinking of is there some other thing you can do with your face-mouth area to get us past that. | |
| So I like the thinking. I'm not enough of a scientist to know how much of a difference that would be, but as somebody says in the comments, maybe some. | |
| I mean, if coughing into your elbow makes a difference, it makes some difference if you can get people to do it. | |
| Anyway, interesting idea. | |
| Thank you for that. | |
| Thanks. | |
| Bye. | |
| Any ideas that require and then everybody will do X is always a problem because getting everybody to do X is pretty darn hard. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Alright, I'm going to add a studio. | |
| Hello, caller. Do you have a question for me? | |
| Caller, I'm talking to you but you don't know it. | |
| Yes, hi. DJLC Studio? | |
| Yeah, when you're writing the Dilbert comics, do you think that you're kind of going through the process of having conversations with yourself? | |
| The internal process, I don't know if anybody's ever asked me this question, which is actually a really good question. | |
| The internal process I have when I'm writing it is that I usually start with some concept. | |
| So it's something that bothers people, something that happens a lot in the office. | |
| And then I say, well, which characters would make sense to be interacting around this concept? | |
| And it's usually pretty obvious. | |
| If it's sort of a nerdy thing, it's Dilbert. | |
| If it's a boss thing, it's the boss, et cetera. | |
| So then I've got the concept, I've got the characters. | |
| And then I say, all right, where are they? | |
| And it's usually in the office. | |
| And then I say, all right, who would start the conversation? | |
| Now, as a writer, here's a little writing trick. | |
| People have said they really like this writing trick, so I'll repeat it. | |
| If you want a dialogue to look sort of realistic, even though it's in comic form, but enough realism that people say, oh, that happened to me, you avoid asking questions. | |
| Because it's really easy as a writer to say, okay, it's two people talking. | |
| The first one asks a question. | |
| The second one answers. That becomes boring right away. | |
| Now, you can't avoid it, because in the real world, people do ask questions and stuff. | |
| So I, of course, include questions in the comic. | |
| But the first thing I tell myself is, can I rewrite it without a question? | |
| So I always have that thought in my head. | |
| So I start writing the comic, and I reflexively, because everybody does, the first line is a question. | |
| I go, okay. My rule is, if I can avoid it, The first line of dialogue should not be a question. | |
| It should be a statement. Because in the real world, people don't care what you think. | |
| 99% of the time, nobody cares what you think. | |
| They simply tell you what they think. | |
| They try to get what they want. | |
| They try to move their agenda. | |
| They try to be selfish. | |
| So if you write dialogue, write it for people who are being selfish, self-absorbed, and don't care a bit about the other people. | |
| Unless... It happens to be a character that is their very characteristic that they care about people, but that'd be the exception. | |
| But the ordinary people, to make them look like real people in real situations, make them super selfish. | |
| And then the audience will say, oh yeah, I've had that feeling before. | |
| Because you're trying to get to people's internal thoughts, not the ones that they let other people see. | |
| So our internal thoughts tend to be far more selfish and dark than the ones we let the rest of the world see. | |
| So if you're writing dialogue and you're trying to entertain people, it's often good to have your characters make statements that match people's dark, selfish thoughts. | |
| That always works. | |
| If there's one trick of writing, Use that one. | |
| All right, so then the question is, does it become kind of a dialogue in my head? | |
| I think that's where you were heading with that. | |
| Like, do I hear the dialogue? | |
| Is that what you're asking? Kind of. | |
| So it reminds me a lot, if you're familiar with what Jordan Peterson talks about with archetypes, it kind of seems that a lot of your characters are kind of archetypes. | |
| Yeah, they very much are. | |
| One of the things that reinforces that is, If you were to try to map the Dilbert characters, the way they exist, into an existing chess set, you could do it more easily than you imagined. | |
| That is to say, you would quite easily know who the king was, which would be the boss. | |
| You would know who the queen is, because the queen is the most powerful character and female. | |
| That's Alice. So they map the one that looks like a castle, with a little square castle he had. | |
| Sort of even looks like Dilbert. | |
| And Dilbert goes in straight lines. | |
| You know, he's an engineer. I can only go in a straight line. | |
| So, you know, and Ashok, the intern, he's a pawn. | |
| He's literally smaller and, you know, expendable in the world of Dilbert because he's just an intern. | |
| And if you look at... | |
| And, of course, Dogbert would be the knight, the little horse, because you don't see it coming. | |
| It's like, oh, two over and one over? | |
| I didn't see that coming. So it's quite common... | |
| That you can take any popular TV show and you can map it right into a chess set. | |
| Because to your point, we have these universal feelings of categories of people and we sort of automatically, our brains put people into categories, these archetypes as you say. | |
| So there's that. | |
| But anyway, to answer your question, once I have the characters set up and I've got the situation... | |
| And the first try I ask a question and they say, no, no, no, don't make it a question. | |
| Make it a statement. Make it selfish. | |
| Make it stupid. That looks like a person. | |
| And then I just iterate. | |
| So I can actually hear them talking to me as if they're the ones talking. | |
| And I don't know if I can always do that or if that's just practice or if everybody can do that easily. | |
| I don't know. But in my mind, I can actually just see them. | |
| And then they start talking. | |
| And so Dilbert will say, you know, my project is heading toward a wall or something. | |
| And they'll look at it and they'll say, no, he wouldn't say it that way. | |
| And then he says it a different way. | |
| No, that's not the way Dilbert would talk either. | |
| And then Dilbert says something else. | |
| I go, that's Dilbert. Okay. | |
| That's what Dilbert would say. | |
| And that's my first sentence. | |
| And then I go from there and just iterate. | |
| When I get to the end, if there's something about the timing or the setup that didn't work, I can go back and tweak things so that the pace and the timing end at the right place. | |
| But it's very iterative. | |
| And it is more like listening than creating. | |
| And that's the part that... | |
| People who are not naturally creative probably find to be the magic part. | |
| I don't know, because you only know your own brain, so you don't know what anybody else's internal process is like. | |
| Well, that reminds me of a poem that I wrote, which is, I can't stop writing poetry when I rewrite I wrote and judge myself. | |
| Yeah, so judging yourself and rewriting is really the process of writing. | |
| So hating what you just wrote is the most dominant part of writing. | |
| And also something else you said, and then this will be the last thing because you got plenty of other important callers to get to, which is in Greek mythology, like they kind of represent different architects. | |
| So like there's like the god of love and the god of war and all that stuff. | |
| And people were basically compelled by those different gods and they were like consumed or one could say possessed by those gods in something you were saying. | |
| It also reminded me of a different poem I wrote a long time ago about chess, but yeah, so those are some thoughts. | |
| All right, thanks for the thoughts. | |
| All right, take care. All right, let's take another caller. | |
| Let's see if Larry has something to say. | |
| Larry? Larry? | |
| Larry, are you there? Do you have a question? | |
| Yes, I can hear you. Go ahead. | |
| So I had a couple of different thoughts. | |
| One is about Bill Gates and the other is about Joe Biden. | |
| Which would you prefer? Bill Gates or Joe Biden? | |
| You mean for president? No, no. | |
| Questions about topics. | |
| Oh, give me Bill Gates. | |
| Alright, so Gates is apparently setting up vaccine factories for seven different promising vaccines, which seems like an incredibly generous and proactive thing to do. | |
| The Gates Foundation is going to produce them just in case they're viable so that we don't have to wait. | |
| But then all these conspiracy theories pop up. | |
| Bill Gates is going to put microcontrollers in us. | |
| It seems idiotic. | |
| Why does that happen and how can the Gates Foundation stop it from happening? | |
| Well, some of it has to do with Bill Gates' legacy reputation because when he was making his money as a young man, he was pretty much a shark. | |
| So he would, at least he was famous for, I wasn't there, so I can't judge it personally, but he was famous for, let's say, bending the ethical limits, at least within what's a monopoly, what is fair competition, and that sort of thing. | |
| So he has that, which will always dog him, but I think those were also the I've said this before, and I'll probably say it a million times. | |
| I'm almost positive that Bill Gates is exactly what you see, meaning that there's just nothing... | |
| There's just no pretense, largely because he doesn't need to. | |
| He doesn't need your money. | |
| He's literally trying to give his money away. | |
| So the thought that he would have something to gain, either politically or monetarily, flies in the face of everything you know about him. | |
| I remember you saying a couple of years ago, you don't care, you have a few money. | |
| And he's got a thousand times the money that you have. | |
| Think about all the rumors and complaints that go around about George Soros. | |
| Soros is a rich guy, but he's just a fraction as rich as Bill Gates. | |
| If Bill Gates wanted power, He would be buying it directly. | |
| He would be doing what George Soros does. | |
| Have you ever heard of Bill Gates buying power anywhere? | |
| I haven't. Have you ever seen Bill Gates express that clever interest like, oh, I'd never run for president. | |
| Gosh, I'm certainly honored that everybody's asking me, but no, I'm focused on that thing where he really wants to be president. | |
| He's never done that. | |
| No, he's just eradicating malaria and polio. | |
| Right, right. So I think Bill Gates thinks that an elected job would be a move back, which I would think. | |
| If you ask me what is more honorable and important, President of the United States or Bill Gates doing what he's doing now, I don't know. | |
| We could get somebody else to be President. | |
| Like, you could fill that job with other capable people, but how do you get another Bill Gates Foundation Like, trying to cure malaria and stuff. | |
| I mean, that's a one-off. | |
| So, I think that Bill Gates, he can't be trying to get a promotion, because he already has the most honorable, important job on the planet. | |
| He doesn't need money, so he doesn't have a motivation. | |
| And here's another factor, which maybe I have a little special feeling for. | |
| If you've seen some documentaries about him, he's not normal. | |
| Meaning that he looks like maybe it's Asperger's, I don't know what it is, but he has the ability to focus incredibly. | |
| Now, one of the things that comes with that, and this is me speculating a little bit, so I'm a little further than where I should be, But just for fun. | |
| Part of the double, the other side of the coin for that intense focus and whatever being on the spectrum gives you, which is like a superpower in his case, it also makes you fairly honest and blunt. | |
| So he's not the kind of guy who could hide it. | |
| I feel like even when he was being a capitalist evil guy during his Microsoft days, I don't know if anything was hidden. | |
| It was just raw power, right? | |
| I mean, mostly, I don't think anybody ever said, you know, Bill Gates told me something and I thought he was lying. | |
| You've never heard that, have you? | |
| Have you ever heard one accusation in the entire history of Bill Gates? | |
| Has anybody ever, even one time, accused him of lying? | |
| Think about it. Think about how famous he is and how long he's been in the public eye. | |
| Can you think of one example where somebody credibly said that Bill Gates himself, as opposed to somebody else in Microsoft, ever? | |
| One time? Has he even been accused of lying? | |
| Think about it. Almost everybody's been accused of lying. | |
| I don't know that he ever has been. | |
| Anyway, somebody will think of an example, perhaps. | |
| But no, I am... | |
| I'm 100% confident that Bill Gates is the real thing. | |
| Because all of the incentive would be for him to be the real thing. | |
| All of his incentives. | |
| There's no incentive for him to be anything except exactly what he's showing you. | |
| He doesn't have anything to gain. | |
| You've got lots and lots of conspiracy theorists here in the comments. | |
| They're among us. I don't believe them. | |
| Thanks for the question. Let's take another. | |
| Maybe we can do one more. | |
| Let's see what TLC is up to. | |
| TLC, can you hear me? | |
| Morning, do you have a question? | |
| I actually have an idea that I wanted to run by you to see what you think. | |
| Okay, good. So, trying to problem solve how we get the economy back open and do that in a way that keeps everybody safe. | |
| Right. I started thinking, the least vulnerable group seems to be teenagers. | |
| Okay. So what's preventing teenagers from taking on what Mike Rao would call the dirty jobs that are keeping the country moving? | |
| Well, yeah, I think that's effectively what's going to happen, but maybe without the under 18 people. | |
| Because if you're under 30, you're also pretty safe, relatively speaking. | |
| Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. | |
| If you see that the people who have jobs that are under, I don't know, 50, let's say, do go back to their own jobs, but you might see, to your point, young people filling in for the people who can't go back to their job. | |
| So I can see that. | |
| That would make sense. It's a temporary situation, maybe. | |
| Yeah, and I'm thinking, I'm from a manufacturing background, and there's this dearth of kids that are going into these trade schools. | |
| So now that they're all not in regular school, We can send them into these jobs, keep them away from adults if you want to. | |
| We've got empty hotels all over the place, empty dorm rooms. | |
| Yeah, I think you hint toward a bigger point, which is everybody is going to be really creative and flexible about how to get this done. | |
| So I don't think there's even one element of society that isn't under review right now. | |
| We've never seen this before, which is part of the reason that I'm confident about the future, the future being 2021 and beyond. | |
| Because the amount of innovation that this is going to sort of accidentally trigger, because we've critically re-examined everything we do from the bottom up as if it didn't exist. | |
| We have to start from scratch and say, okay, what if... | |
| I always had to give food in a world in which I couldn't be around other people. | |
| How would I do it? Then you think about delivery and stuff. | |
| Systems are being modified just all over the place like crazy. | |
| Just a ton of creativity and A-B testing going on. | |
| A lot of good stuff happening. | |
| I'm positive about that. | |
| Yeah, me too. I'm with you on that. | |
| I have one more thing that I'd like to see what your thoughts are. | |
| I'm not sure if... There was an article, I believe, two, three days ago in the Wall Street Journal about farmers dumping milk and throwing out cheese, and this is an issue with packaging, right? | |
| So there's HRI food, which is hotels, restaurants, industrial food packaging and production, and then there's regular stuff we get in the supermarket. | |
| And now more food is consumed outside of the home traditionally. | |
| So now... | |
| They can't shift those lines over to package it in a way that it can go into supermarkets. | |
| But then we're seeing these long lines at food kitchens and other things. | |
| I'm reading this morning, you know, India's starving. | |
| Why are we throwing out food? | |
| What can be done to stop that? | |
| Well, my guess is that all of these are temporary things. | |
| So temporarily, you could easily see somebody say, ah, if I had two weeks, I could solve this, but my milk will be bad in one week. | |
| So I think if you check back in a year, a lot of that stuff would be worked out. | |
| They'd have new systems, just like you said. | |
| I think it's only a timing thing. | |
| I think that it just takes a little while. | |
| To work things out. | |
| But I think we'll get there. Thanks for the question. | |
| Thank you. Let's do one more because it's Easter Sunday. | |
| Can't think of a better reason. | |
| All right. I'm going to pick this one because of your title. | |
| Based and running toward what? | |
| Hello, BASTE. Do you have a question? | |
| Our technology is not going to add you, it looks like. | |
| Alright. So BASTE will not be with us. | |
| Let's try. Blake. | |
| Blake, do you have a question for me? | |
| Morning. Yes. | |
| I can, yes. So thinking about simulation theory and all this persuasion, it's all like Once you grasp it and wrap your head around it, how do you make more practical applications of it? | |
| For instance, in stressful situations where you need to be calm and think about how to be more persuasive, like if you're in a court on the stand or you're in a business negotiation or something like that. | |
| Good question. | |
| I did something like this with a relaxation kind of exercise, but there's more of an everyday Part of this. | |
| I find myself on a regular basis saying, alright, what if my reality is not the classic one where I'm a real person who's born and live and die and stuff, but rather, what if I'm a character in a video game? | |
| And this video game is designed for me to solve certain obstacles to get to the next level. | |
| And I say to myself, does it seem like I keep running into the same problem everywhere? | |
| And it feels like that's what defines the level you're on. | |
| Have you had this experience? | |
| Other people have all kinds of different problems in different realms. | |
| But you, for some reason, keep having the same flavor of the same problem in different clothes, one time after another, and you say to yourself, was this my challenge for this level? | |
| I guess this problem just keeps coming up and up, and I could go to another state, move to another house, change jobs, and I would still have this problem, because it would follow me. | |
| So sometimes it's fun, To think of yourself in a video game. | |
| So instead of saying, oh, why am I plagued by this problem? | |
| Nobody has this problem but me. | |
| Why does it keep following me? | |
| Instead of saying that, say, oh, I get it now. | |
| That's my objective for the level. | |
| I can't go up a level until I solve this. | |
| So then it makes it sort of fun. | |
| You say, all right, instead of this big annoying thing that I'm a victim of, what do I do about this? | |
| How can I get past this? | |
| How do I get to the next level? | |
| So I'm not sure that any of this is real, but it's fun to think of it. | |
| The other thing is that when you take yourself out of your, let's say, human frame and you just suddenly look down on yourself like you're a video game, it can take you out of your stress because you can actually just imagine, all right, imagine that I'm the game creator now and I'm just looking down on the game and I'm looking at my characters. | |
| What are the odds that those characters are going to be You know, let's say dead in a week. | |
| Not very high, right? | |
| But if you are the character and you're looking at this, you know, 1% chance of getting the coronavirus or something, you're pretty worried. | |
| But then you take yourself up to the game player level and you go, 1% chance? | |
| Well, I'm not going to worry about that. | |
| Let's go to the next level. | |
| So it does help sometimes to just imagine you're a different person in a different context. | |
| And then you can imagine that the same situation starts looking differently because you have a different point of view. | |
| It's just a little trick I use to take me out of my preferred frame. | |
| So my preferred frame is, I am me. | |
| I'm in this real world. | |
| I have these problems. | |
| And that can really weigh on you. | |
| So even though the problems don't necessarily change, you can think about them differently by taking yourself up to game creator level and looking down and saying, that doesn't look like one that's going to stop him for more than a few days. | |
| He solved that problem a hundred times. | |
| Yeah, he's not very happy, but I give him 48 hours. | |
| He'll have that over with. | |
| And then it just lets you see it more objectively. | |
| Anyway, that's the best I got for you. | |
| Hope that helped. So you give us all the tips and we read the books and stuff but when you're actually in the situation you're like well do I use this technique or do I use this technique? | |
| How do you frame yourself when you're in the moment or about to go into it? | |
| Like I get the relaxation thing you just said about taking yourself out of that space and being above it but when you're actually in it when the questions are flying at you or you know Yeah, so it doesn't work. | |
| I don't find that this works when there are other people in the room. | |
| So if there are other people in the room, you're pretty much... | |
| You know, tied to interacting with them. | |
| You can't just disappear into your head. | |
| So I'm talking about in your quiet times. | |
| You know, you're drifting off to sleep. | |
| You're sitting at your desk by yourself. | |
| So it's more of a private process. | |
| There's nothing you can do if other people are around. | |
| If other people are around you, you will be drawn into their world. | |
| So just save your other thinking for when you're alone would be my advice. | |
| All right. That's the best I can do. | |
| I don't think that helped too much, but thank you so much for the question, Blake. | |
| Thank you. Alright, I think I can add to here. | |
| And tomorrow, and this coming week, we're going to have a lot of news. | |
| It's going to get really newsy. | |
| There are some things coming in the coming weeks that I know about that you don't. | |
| At least one of those things It's really, really good. | |
| Meaning that if you're wondering, you know, are we going to be having this problem forever? | |
| The answer is no. | |
| And I can't tell you what I know that you don't know, but let me tell you that when you're looking at the toolbox of tools for dealing with this coronavirus situation, there's a new tool that's better than the other tools. | |
| And you don't know about it yet because it needs a little development. | |
| We're talking only about a few weeks, maybe three or four weeks. | |
| You're going to see something that you will say to yourself, well, if we had that before, we'd be in a lot better shape now. | |
| So, and that's just one of the things I know about. | |
| So I'm talking about something with the coronavirus. | |
| There's good news about Probably. | |
| Yeah, nothing's 100%. | |
| But there are things I know about that you don't yet know about that would suggest there's a new tool coming that's better than all the other tools. | |
| We might only be three weeks away. | |
| So, my prediction is that if you're worried we'll be locked down forever through the summer or something like that, very small chance. | |
| Very small chance that we will be locked down all summer. | |
| Might we be locked down until, let's say, June 1st? | |
| Pretty good chance. | |
| Pretty good chance. | |
| I think maybe some stuff will open May 1st, but maybe not much. | |
| I think May 15th is going to be the first time that anybody gets serious about opening stuff up, just a guess. | |
| And I think June 1st, if you had to bet on it, It would be when more things will open up than before June 1st. | |
| So, if I had to bet on it, it's going to be June 1st. | |
| And part of this is dependent upon these new tools that are on the way. | |
| One that I know about, others that also look promising, but they're not really going to be online until around June 1st. | |
| That's when we can get serious. | |
| So, somebody says, am I bluffing? | |
| No, I'm not bluffing. I could be wrong. | |
| Meaning that maybe my optimism will be misplaced, but I know the tool works, and it's just a question of ramping it up. | |
| So basically, we don't have to wonder if it works. | |
| That part's answered. It's a manufacturing production distribution question, which I think... | |
| So he says, June 1st is too long. | |
| Well, maybe. | |
| Here's what I think. | |
| I've been thinking about my neighborhood. | |
| I've got this app called The Neighborhood, so if I send out a message, it's sort of geo-fenced to only go to the people in my zone that live there, or at least people who signed up to live there. | |
| I'm pretty sure that I'm going to make sure nobody starves in my neighborhood. | |
| I was going to send out an email or something or a message on the Nextdoor app just to tell people in my neighborhood that there isn't any chance that they're going to starve unless we all starve. | |
| If somebody needs a sandwich in my neighborhood, I'll buy them a sandwich. | |
| It's a pretty upscale neighborhood so people aren't going to be too much starving here. | |
| But the point is, I can personally make sure, as long as the supermarkets still have food and I still have money, I can make sure that nobody starves in my neighborhood. | |
| Like, I can guarantee it. | |
| I'll just put out a message that says, hey, if you have some reason you can't give food, email me. | |
| I'll take care of it right away. | |
| So, nobody in my neighborhood is going to starve. | |
| Likewise, nobody's going to be kicked out of their homes because nobody's going to get evicted in this environment. | |
| So if you don't get kicked out of your home and they're not going to turn off the power, they probably won't even turn off your cable because everybody knows people are having trouble paying bills. | |
| So at least for the next few months, I think everybody can stay where they are. | |
| I mean, they have the option. It won't be fun. | |
| But you can stay where you are. | |
| And I don't think there's any chance... | |
| That people won't be willing to help feed you should you need it. | |
| And I know that, you know, part of the problem is that there are people who just had normal good jobs and lives who suddenly literally can't buy food. | |
| And I think that for many of them, just asking for help is going to be the hard part. | |
| Asking for help is going to be the hard part, right? | |
| Which is why in my neighborhood I'll probably just send out an email so people can contact me personally because nobody wants to admit they need help. | |
| So, you say June 1st is too long, but let me suggest this. | |
| Zero people will starve to death. | |
| In the United States. | |
| So I'm predicting that zero people will starve to death because of the coronavirus. | |
| I don't know if there's anybody starving for other reasons, but not because of the coronavirus. | |
| We're not going to run out of food and we're not going to run out of generosity. | |
| We've got plenty of that. All right. | |
| I'm seeing in the comments that Mark Cuban would crush Biden. | |
| I think you're right. All right. | |
| That's enough for now. I will see you tonight. |