Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network. Alright. Well, Scott Adams, welcome again to the James Altester show. Thanks for having me again. Creator of Dilbert. But, you know, Scott, everybody says creator of Dilbert, but, you know, I think, your your your true inner passions are coming out as a as a blogger. You know, maybe. I I think if I could choose either drawing comics or blogging, I would actually choose blogging. I like it better. Well, okay. Which brings up an interesting question. After you do something for a long period of time, and as we talked about last time, you have almost an infrastructure underneath you, you almost feel obligated to continue, but your marginal happiness doesn't, you know, keep going up. So Yeah. Success is a is a trap. It's obviously a trap everybody would prefer over the alternative. But, yeah, it does lock you in a little bit. So so, Scott, I think your your your particular talent in blogging is you like you like to outrage peep not outrage people. You wanna make them I feel like you wanna confuse them. Like, you know That's that's actually just the outcome. I'll tell you what I'm actually trying to do. Alright. I'm trying to present topics which people are already familiar with in an objective fashion. And what happens is if you are actually objective, you piss off both sides because they don't they don't recognize your opinion as their opinion. Therefore, you must be on the other camp because you know the world only has two sides. There there are no rational people in the middle, so if you try to be 1, you know, people are gonna say, well, you gotta be the other side, and you're not on my side. So so so keep in mind that to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever pulled that off. And the reason is what you see when I write is that every basically, both sides just hate you. And but I I feel that just in the last few months, especially, there's some kind of recognition that maybe there's something in the middle that that's worth looking at. I I know my traffic seems to be, up a bit and, getting lots of positive comments. So I so I think there's some people who needed that middle ground and are starting to recognize that maybe it exists. Well, okay. So we'll we'll talk about that, but I do wanna get to one of your, controversial ones, because it's it it it struck me as interesting. You had a blog where you asked people, would you rather have average intelligence, and average beauty or oh, wait. Wait. No. Average intelligence, but good beauty, high beauty, or high intelligence and average looks? So, obviously, average intelligence and high beauty, but you know? Yeah. We can't we can't open to you. Right. Exactly. But, what do you think reasonably is the answer? And and how do how do you feel people responded? I mean, I saw the comments, but how do you feel people responded to just the question itself? Well, I think people weighed in because they had an emotional connection to it. So as soon as you start talking about how people look versus brains, you know, these are deeply personal things, and everybody's connecting with it and wants to to fight their point. So I I got a big pretty big reaction. And, I mean I mean, it seems like it's also an evolutionary question too because we all humans, you can argue, only really had intelligence for say, 70,000 years. But, kind of outward beauty and outward characteristics created the alpha male and alpha female for 3000000 years. So there's some kinda gen DNA thing happening here too. So here's what I found interesting about the topic, is that pretty much every individual agrees with the fact that looks tend to trump brains in lots of individual situations, not every situation, of course, but that is terribly important how you look at it. Every individual knows that. But, also, every individual is part of society, and as part of society, society kind of collectively is another brain. Right? If you added up all the people in society, it's like, you know, conceptually, it's another brain. And that larger brain says, if you start treating people by their looks instead of their contribution, their brains, their, you know, their integrity, these other qualities, the society is worse off. Right? So most people are their small brain says, yes, in the daily life, how do you look seems to be terribly, terribly important. Every every experience I have confirms that. But as part of society, you don't wanna tell your kid that. Right? So if if my blog was not, read almost exclusively by adults, I wouldn't have been I would not have done that topic because it's a dangerous thought for society to adopt because then people would act in all the wrong ways. You know, it would be all that matters is how you look, and then you lose the good stuff about character and brains and all that. But on an individual level, we all kind of understand that that looks are, kind of primary in terms of first impressions. Do you get the job? Do you wanna work with this person? Do you wanna marry them? It kinda rules rules that other stuff. I mean, you know, you know, this person. Although you point out that, you know, part of looks could be personality. For instance, you know, women like, guys who make them laugh. So there is, some things that could be tweaked. Yeah. I think everybody's got, you know, maybe a a 20% delta that they can play with there. I would say the the primary thing you can do is fitness. You look you look at me, I've got the short bald old guy with glasses thing going on, but I'm very, very fit. So if you take that away, on a, you know, scale of 1 to 10, I'm a 3. If you add that in on a 7, it's gonna make my Scott, you're, like, ripped. What what happened? I mean, I know if you're reading your blog, but explain. You've got, like, a 6 pack. Yeah. So well, I didn't come to that very quickly. So part of my process which I read about in in the book, how to fail and almost everything, and still win big, is, first of all, experimenting because every person is different. So that my first advice is that, whatever diet is working for someone else, there's no reason to believe that's gonna work for you. So there's there's should be some kind of ongoing experimentation of what works for you individually from the things that make sense. So it's taken me years years to figure out what worked for me, and a big problem with that was that the science or at least, how the media presented the science was so misleading that if you took all of the diet and exercise tips from, you know, 1970 and just tried to live them, you would do what I did, which is gain a few pounds every year until you're over late. Alright? So then science sort of caught up and the media started getting a little bit improved message about the reality of the science. Now if you follow science, you actually can do well. So you wouldn't have a much better idea what foods to stay away from. And there are tons of these little tips. For example, there's science that says if you eat peanuts, just as one example of a fatty type of food, that you'll probably lose weight over time on average because it's such a satisfying type of fat that isn't terribly bad for you. Probably not bad for you at all. So so once you've accumulated sort of a, a toolkit of all these little things like, for example, the knowledge that tiredness and hunger feel the same, you you have that day when you wake up and you're eating all day and you're like, I don't know what's happening. I keep eating and my stomach is full, but I'm still hungry. That's almost always because you're tiny. Right? And now we know that. That's, you know, settled science and stuff. So if I'm tired hungry, I'll do different things, like take a nap. Right? So so I don't have to eat, I could take a nap, but I could also eat some peanuts because they're gonna kill my hunger faster, probably. I'm not sure if it works exactly for, for, a tired hunger, but it's the first thing I would try. But the point is you accumulate all these pieces of information and you replace slowly the need for willpower, which is, don't eat the cookie. I want the cookie. You don't eat the cookie with, hey, if I have this stuff in my house that is healthy and tastes good and it's equally available, then I don't need willpower. I'll just eat this. It's sitting right there. It's right in front of me, and I don't have any cookies in the house. It's just a simple trick. But once you accumulate enough of these simple tricks, the weight just falls off and and you start getting fitter and stronger. So that's that's kinda what happened with me. Well, you you, you go on to say in this post, the attractive, spousery people have insanely interesting lives because they get amazing offers on a regular basis. And you said when I when I was married, I never heard any of their stories. Now I am one of them. The spouse freeze opened up to me. If you think attractive single people in 2015 are living the same lives as the rest of us, you are very, very, very wrong. Now I was single in 2009, not not 2015, but you say that's all I can tell you. Just just tell us a little of the secrets. Well, I will tell you that among attractive women under a certain age, let's say, 35, the percentage of them who have been in threesomes or have had affairs with other women is close to a 100% among the attractive, kind of suburban, under 35 women. So, you know, married couples started doing that. I mean, not as much, obviously. I I hear stories about people being offered amazing trips. Usually, it's attractive women who get the better offers, but the guy is oh my god. The stories you hear from guys were unusually attractive about the, let's say, the the intimate offers they they get with very little preparation. Now, on the different post, you you you kind of seem interested lately in what makes something go viral. So you did an experiment, you you saw on slide share that you did a slide share of your latest book, and, it seemed to do very well. It had, like, 240,000 views, and you sort of were wondering, like, what was it what what made this viral as opposed to, I'm assuming, your your book? Did you see a noticeable difference between, I guess, sales on the book and views on the slide share? Yeah. So so this whole virality thing has so many levels to it that I I didn't think it was gonna be so interesting, really. So it turns out that what's viral for me individually as an author that people understand something about my work is different from what would be viral for someone else. So in other words, it's the context, not not just the, you know, the message, it's it's who says it. So a year ago or maybe 9 months ago, that very that very slide share you were talking about, was also published. And it it did well, but it was, you know, maybe a 5th of what it did the second time out. And what's changed? I mean, I don't know what's changed except the way it was introduced in by Business Insider when they said, you know, here's the slide share. Possibly the wording they used, maybe it was a slow slow news day. But I think also since the book came out a year ago, you hear a lot more people talking about passion is bulls**t. You know, you can hear it from a number of other people now. I wasn't wasn't the first person to say it. And also that systems work better than goals. So when I first said those things, they didn't catch any hooks. Right? It was kinda like, I hear I hear it, it's it's going live. Now one of the, things you need for virality is familiarity, which is weird, because you think something new and interesting would be the viral thing. But for what I do, it turns out that how familiar the topic is seems to be terribly important. Everybody seems you you want people to know the topic and understand it basically, and then what you do with it is something they weren't expecting. It's gonna be familiar topic, unexpected. In my specific case, I need to stick to kind of workplace safe stuff. I find that if I put a, you know, naughty word in something that people can't afford it. And so it's a complete killer for me. But if I were a 19 year old YouTube star, the profanity might be exactly what makes people forward a thing. That might be the point of it. So viral isn't viral. Viral is what would be viral for me specifically. And and in, lots of cases, people forward my stuff because they think I'm gonna get killed. Right? So it's, you know, it's part of the lynch mob. It's like, you you gotta see what this idiot said, you know, why don't you leave a bad comment like I did. So it's it's very interesting watching this stuff. Right now, for example, that, Reddit is is blowing up. I'm not sure when when the podcast will run, but the day of the recording, Reddit is blowing up with, my latest blog post, so the traffic is is just getting crushed over there. Now what's interesting is that the topic I picked is one that I have written on and blogged on in the same place probably 4 separate times over the years. Not once did I get more than a peep of interest. What did I do differently this time? And you're gonna laugh, I tell you. I changed the title of it, kinda just the introduction, to something that, indicated that living in the future would be essentially free. Right? So so that's kind of a bigger claim that I actually, supported in the in the blog. In the blog, I said, well, maybe 20% of the cost now, would remain, but you could get rid of 80% if you did everything right in the future and built your own city from scratch with that in mind. Now, that probably reminded you the, you know, living for free of the a title you're familiar with, the, you know, the 4 hour work week. Right. You know, and that title, as I understand it, went through testing and and testing that well. Right. Like, I think his initial title I forget it. I had something like how to be a drug dealer or something like that. Right. And that there's a perfect example of something that can't be viral in the business world. Right. So, you know, you think, oh, this it's got a shocking word in it, that makes it better, but it it kills it in the business realm. But you know what? In your article on on viral how to make an article viral, I think you downplay the significance of title, And Business Insider, they're masters of creating viral titles. And I think titles are, like, 50% of what makes something viral. Yeah. I I didn't downplay it so much as I didn't realize it until I saw it happen with my own work, especially today. I mean, when I saw, you know, how much a title difference, that made, it kinda changed me. But also your your post on, the the biggest failure of science or science biggest failure, that's first off, you got you got all you hit every button in that one, right, and you know it. You you have all the sides of every big issue, and and and you leave it with a question. Well, everybody wants to click on this. What is science biggest failure? And I I think that was your one of your biggest commented posts. Yeah. Probably that may be my biggest of all time. And and and if you look at the the technique there, so that was crafted with getting lots of readers to look at it. I mean, it was written with that in mind. So it was kind of a natural and then it had, you know, I had a climate change hook that was just naturally in there. Did people hate you with the did did you have a lot I mean, I saw on the comments people were going both ways, but people weren't really hating on you. They were arguing with each other. Yeah. They were kind of picking their own side arguments. You'll one of the things you'll notice about my writing when people get mad is that they're either mad as something that they themselves made up after they read it, like they reinterpreted something and said, well, if you say this, you must, of course, also believe in this. Let me argue about this other thing, which and there's no logic between the 2. So now it's like I've been assigned a a ridiculous opinion that somebody's debating. So so I see that a lot. Do you ever do you ever, feel angry or, like, you know, like, you you you you refer to what I call outrage porn, you refer to outrageous. Like, do you ever feel like, oh, I gotta respond. This is outrage porn on board, and outrageous is on my blog. I, you know, I used to, respond to every bad comment with, yeah, I tried everything. I've tried being reasonable, which never works. I've tried being, you know, extra angry. I've tried ignoring them. And I've decided that just for me, that, being very aggressive on it and just going at people as hard as I can, works. Because first of all, it's a it's a permanent record. So this I want the I want my side to be there permanently forever. Right? Secondly, if if the attack is unfair, there's some part of karma in me that feels like there are there are obviously pushback. Right? So you don't feel the need to, like, delete totally rude, way out there comments? I don't think I ever have. I've deleted things for other reasons, you know, being off topic or whatever. But, no, not just if they're insulting me. That's I find that interesting in its own way. I guess when you when you respond and get into the argument, that makes it, of course, more viral. People come back, and they wanna respond to you. Yeah. Probably a little bit, at least in the comments. Yeah. It probably doesn't make people forward the article more, but maybe they'll come back to the comment a little bit. And if you look at the article about science's biggest fail, if you go back to the viral question, if you put science and fail on the same topic, everyone wants to look at it because there are 2 sides. Right? So one side says science never fails. It's just something that's imperfect, but the system the system fixes itself and improves over time. And then there's the other people who say, man, you science guys are getting climate change wrong. And so what I wrote was a what I thought was a balanced middle piece that, you know, acknowledged both sides and said, there's a reason that these people disagree, and here's the reason. And that if you could deal with that reason, maybe they would not disagree. So that would seem like a perfectly balanced approach, but people so wanted to be mad at me because the topic, you know, charges you up. You're like, you must be saying something I'm gonna disagree with, but I was very careful to not say much that anybody would disagree with in that post. I'm gonna have to try I'm gonna steal that technique. I'm gonna I'm gonna write a post with science and failings in the title. I'll even, totally attribute it to you. Scott Adams suggests this is the way to go viral. Live for free. Live for free. Thanks to science's many failures. That will get you a 1000000000 hits lately. Live for free due to science's many failures. Okay. I'm on it. Now you must have realized, also that your post on orgasms would not go viral. That must have been an experiment also. They're all experiments in the sense that, I'm looking to learn something specific. Alright? So in that case, I had this hypothesis that these topics can never go viral. So I wrote what I thought was an amazingly interesting piece with just an adult theme, you know, not not a dirty thing. It's not x rated or anything. We're talking about bodily functions. And and sure enough, people just get uncomfortable with that, and it doesn't go anywhere. You mentioned, though, in there something curious. You said, you know, you learned this in a hypnosis class that you could tell by having a conversation with someone what their sexual fantasies are. So, like, what's a what's an example of that? Well, an example of that, and this is one that my, instructor uses. So this is made not the fantasy so much, but revealing things in common conversation. When people are hungry, they say, oh, I'm famished. When someone is hungry and you're the opposite sex or whatever sex they they prefer and they're into you, more often than you would expect, instead of saying I'm famished, they will say, I'm ravished. I'm ravished. And, you know, it's a Freudian slip kind of thing. But when you start looking for it, it's really everywhere. And so if somebody, for example, is, into 50 shades of gray, they often their language will be peppered with things like, man, I really I really got spanked in that, dart tournament. Man, you kicked my butt. I'm not I'm tied up all day, you know, it's so so your language, because your, sexual identity, your sexual preferences are just always right bubbling in your background. They're never gone. Right? It's just always kinda with you, especially if you're a guy. You know, you got the every 10 second thing going on. So the the language of your sexual nature is just bleeding through. You know, you're you're just saying, oh, you know, somebody tells you they need market penetration. Maybe, you know, maybe it's a business conversation, but if it seems like an odd choice of words, pay attention because there might be some more odd words coming that seem a little little unusual in the context, and that's what you're looking for, something that's unusual in the context. So so, you know, I'm curious again about the viral thing because I wonder I wonder if it's more of a society thing now that people are consuming content in bite sized chunks, and so those are more likely to go viral. Like, take take a book. It's hard it's and you mentioned the 4 hour workweek. So the 4 hour workweek sold millions of copies. I think it's hard now for a nonfiction, essentially, business book to sell millions of copies, but, like, a Dilbert cartoon might be read by millions of people. I I I'm wondering now if just the nature of content has changed so much even just in the past 6 or 7 years that we're done with not done with, but, like, it's much it's a different world now for for the million sales bestseller or or, like, the last episode of Seinfeld will never happen again, will never have 60,000,000 viewers on a TV show. So Yeah. So, yeah, people are all over the map, so you've got the long tail happening and, I don't know. Do do you see that with Dilbert? Does Dilbert change? You mean the the viewership you're talking about? Yeah. Dilbert has remained relatively constant for years. It doesn't it doesn't have a high arc or a low arc. It's just kind of slow growth. It's actually bigger now than it's ever been. You know, it's sold in more newspaper even even now it's in more newspapers than it's ever been even though there are fewer newspapers. So so Dilbert has consistently grown, but, Dilbert is perfectly viral. Now I did that accidentally, you know, when it was created, but it's it's business and why often mention specific business items. And if you're in that area, and I mentioned some very specific thing like Google Analytics or AB testing or or something like that, the people in that industry are every one of them is gonna see that copy because either they forward it or somebody forwards it to them, but you can get, like, a 100%, I'll call it microvirality. So when I was when I was trying to build up Gilbert in the early days, I would target, specific micro areas and say, here's a joke about ham ham radio operators. Right? Because they're not as a well served community. So what I knew is that the ham radio newsletters would all say, can we reprint that cartoon? And they did. There were just wasn't much content for them. So now within this small area, who knows how many ham radio operators there are, maybe few tens of thousands, I got them all. I got every one of them. And then I say something about accountants, I get the accountants. So that that's always been my strategy from from day 1 with the well, not day 1. Once I realized that that worked, it became my strategy. That's a very powerful strategy. I think that I think also that works with blogging. Like, if you because take as an example your your 2 groups there, Chances are the ham radio operators and the accountants don't have a huge overlap. So you could even reuse the same content and have it reprinted everywhere, because they don't know each other. They're not gonna say, oh, he used that before. Yeah. There there's some of that. And, there's also a a magic sort of a formula in cartooning. I don't think it applies to anything else. But roughly speaking, if somebody reads 5 Dilbert comics in the week and they laugh once at just one of the 5, they will remember it as if all 5 were funny. Where did you how did you how do you know that? Where did you come up with that statistic? Because because, if you read a comic, your favorite comic, let let's say you pick up an old Farside collection, let's say he was your favorite cartoonist, he probably was, and you look through, you remember every one is when when you look through, you're like, every 5th one was was like a home run. The others are good, the other, but the 5th was a home run. So with Dilbert, I noticed that because people would say, you're funny every day. But I know that's not true. Right? Because my content is all over the place. There's no way it's appealing to people every day. And then when people, talk to me, they're usually talking about a very small subset that that apply to them, and then I know that they're they have, they have extended the glow to these other comics that they didn't like as much. So that's interesting because, again, for you know, I write a lot of blogs. I do feel like I need all 5 to be great. But it's mhmm. But I think that's true for, for a blog. Because blog is probably a little less of a habit than a comic strip. So the so the the 1 in 5 rule works because you are gonna come back 20 times even if all 20 are bad. Right. Number's just there. Right. Number 21, you're gonna start thinking maybe a change in half. Right? But if I but if I've got 4 good ones in that series of 20, you're not going anywhere. So so interesting. So okay. So you know if you kind of pepper humor throughout, and, obviously, it's not something you can plan, but the 1 in 5 rule. We have the the appeal to different groups, so, ultimately, you get every group. We have kind of this extra trick, have science and fail in the title. What are some other you've been quite a bit about virality lately. Like, what are what are some other tricks you consciously use now? You you do some Twitter testing, I noticed. Yeah. You know, I was just reading a study somebody did. I wish I could, refer to it, that the exact length of your tweet makes a big difference, and it turns out that middle something in the, like, 3 quarters as many characters as you can use as your sweet spot. If it's too small, people think it's maybe not important. If it's too long, it seems like too much work. 144 characters, who can do that? Okay. Right. So that that's the type of result that you would never predict. There's no way you could and apparently, it matters if your hashtags, show up early in the first sentence versus saving them for the end. That matters too. I'm not sure why. I don't I don't really get that. What's better, to have the hashtags first or last? Well, early in the sentence, like the, you know, the like the 4th word or so, I think, was the the study. So so you got that. So, yeah, what I'm doing is I'm using Twitter as this instant, laboratory. So I'm just spraying all kinds of ideas on variety of topics. And what I discovered, for example, on Twitter, and this may be a function that at least my Twitter users are 98% male, is that when I mock the intelligence or logic or reasoning of any other group, hugely popular. Because because the beauty is everybody's pretty sure that I'm talking about someone else. I mean, that that always works. It's like, yeah, those other people are pretty dumb. So and it's not it's not even terribly clever stuff, you know, it's, I try to try to do the the poor man's version of Mark Twain, you know, where he said man is the only animal that blushes or needs to, so some some version of that type of witticism for people's intelligence tend to be my top hats. Could you could you use those to guide topics for Dilbert? Yes. So I don't know that I have yet, but that is that is part of the intent. More for guiding it for the the blob than than for Dilbert, but yes. So Dilbert's just like an automatic for you. You, like, have a a an arc that could last for years, and you just get to it every morning, pop it out, and then now you're thinking about your block. So people always ask me, are you thinking about ideas for Gilbert all day long and stuff? And in the early days, I did because I was panicked that if I didn't have one in advance, I'd be sitting in front of a blank piece of paper, and then then what do you do? Right. So so I always had lots of notes in pipeline, ideas. Now I sit down. I usually draw my do my blog first, and then I look at a blank thing and maybe I read a little bit on the Internet and some business sites that just kinda get your mind thinking in a certain mode, and then something happens. And so for, whatever, 26 years, it's worked every time. But I've never had to get up and say, today, there is no cartoon. Like, that's happened 0 times in 26 years. So now I have a confidence that I don't need the idea before I sit down, and often the what's floating in the environment at the moment you write it tends to be more emotionally connected. Right? Because because if you thought of it, so probably other people are thinking of it too. But that's amazing, though. Not once in 26 years you've had kind of a writer's block on Dilbert. Do do you think that's common among cartoonists? Interestingly, I've never asked that question. As many cartoonists as I know, I've literally never asked that question. I have no idea. I don't know. I mean, I get I certainly get writer's block on writing. Like, I'll have days where I just stare at the blank screen, have no idea what to do. Yeah. I've I've literally never had that. Now some of it is technique, you know, and, I'm sure you'll, be familiar with this. It's the old writer's trick that if you have no ideas, write it anyway. Right. You just start writing. So it's the act of writing that, you know, if your body does it, your your brain will will follow. Kinda like if you force yourself to smile, your brain will get happy. Science says that. I think the act of typing and trying to write with no idea where it's going, I find organizes my thoughts. Yeah. So, and I also also find it with the comic that there have been a number of times where I have no idea in mind just kind of a general sense of where things are going. And if I start drawing it, the act of starting kicks me into, the mode where I can finish. Have you ever thought about split testing a a Dilbert strip? So for instance, make a a Facebook ad with 2 different strips and just put a $5 budget on it so almost nobody will see it, and then just see which one got more clicks, and you know that one will be more popular among fans. That that that's an interesting idea. However, the micro, micro marketing, micro virality argues against that. So the the comic that got the big hit maybe appealed to a bigger audience, but the one that got the smaller hit probably was viral. Because, you know, the smaller group might be the the plumbers or whatever and then then they all forward it around. So, and plus you would only have a Facebook representative group, which Facebook is mostly older women. My readers are mostly guys. You could target though. You could you could target like I want men in the United States who Oh, yeah. It's true. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I could do that. I've never thought of doing that, but I will think about that. Yeah. It sounds like it would double my work, so my initial Right. Right. Initial reaction is is how to do that. But in a sense, I've done that, indirectly and non scientifically because there have been a number of comics that were unsuitable to be printed in newspapers. I didn't know it until I submitted them, but, sometimes I have to create an alternate. So I've got the the safe version that runs in the newspaper, the adult version that runs on my website, and lots of people see both. So they see it in the paper and then see it in the website. I don't know why anybody would see both. And typically, there's a type of person who likes the more profane adult edgy comic. There's another group who only likes it not that way, like that's just a, you know, a total killjoy. So so I know there's at least 2 distinct groups for the type of stuff I wrote. If I if I could split myself in half and become 2 writers, you know, 1 edgy and and one sort of safe business, they would both have a job, I think. You know, it's funny. In terms of viral, I find that certain topics other than science would increase the virulence of a post. So, for instance, if you tell people never to buy a home, for instance, that people go crazy because either pea you know, this is such a huge cognitive bias. Either they've already spent the money on a home, so you can't possibly argue against that, or they haven't. So now they're gonna fight. So that's that's another one. And, also, you you don't really hit political issues as much. Like so you do climate change, some stuff there, but, like, you're not gonna fight. You don't do much fighting about war, for instance, which is a huge viral. Like, everybody hates you then. Well, actually, I did write a a post about, putting a wall around the ISIS held Yes. You know, territory. And, my brother who's visiting this week had an interesting idea that apparently, maybe you've heard of this. Is it true that the drones have to have a chip in them, that if they get near the White House, it disables the drone? Oh, I didn't know that. Well, maybe that's not true. But, anyway, it inspired this idea. So imagine if you said that all makers of advanced weaponry, even let's say high end rifles have to have a chip in them, and the chip is geo deactivated. It just doesn't work in, you know, the Middle East. Eventually, nobody would have modern weapons because all the old weapons would, you know, rust or go away, and the new ones simply wouldn't work. So so unless somebody in ISIS held territory could invent a chip manufacturing company, which seems unlikely, they wouldn't be able to fire the guns. So that, like most of my blog ideas, is half baked and full of holes, but it's really interesting because I thought about it and I thought, that could kind of almost work. Right? All you have to do is make sure that your weaponry has enough advanced technology in it that just won't work in places you don't want it to work. That'd be one of those situations though where everybody would just load up on old technology there. They just Well well, you know, once you've got a wall around it, nothing's coming in or out, so they've just got what they've got. Right. So walls and only only let the gun switch ups into the wall. Well, you gotta cut off all communication. That's key. If they can communicate with the outside world, that's terrible. Right. Yeah. But you don't you haven't done anything like, you know, Vietnam shouldn't have happened or Iraq, Afghanistan shouldn't have happened. You know, you don't get into kinda, like, the Democrat, Republican, battles. Well, yeah. I don't because, usually, that stuff is so well covered Yeah. That I I find it boring by the time by the time it by the time I hear about it, it's already overdone. So what other stuff what other stuff do you recommend or you think of as viral, you know, as easier to go viral in your posts? Well, I think there's you need a minimum in a lot of things. Right? So it has to be something that people have heard of. It's got a minimum quality to it. And as we've talked about, it has to be the length. Right? And apparently, depending on where you're releasing it, that makes a difference too. I was just reading, the other day that apparently, video just kills regular photographs on Facebook, and text, I think it's Facebook. Anybody who's watching this, don't quote me on any of this. I'm just, you know, working off memory, but something like this. I think they were saying that text actually outperforms a photograph, which is completely, you know, non intuitive, whereas over at, Twitter, adding a photograph seems to, be better than text alone. So you've got all of these intricacies, depends on the platform, depends who's sending it. And Part of it's the text too. Part of it is the technology also because sometimes on Facebook, if you share a photo, it only shares the photo and not the text. So you might have text with your photo, and they go together, and then now you can't really share as well. So so that's why I try to keep I stick to just text. I do my full blog now on Facebook, not even on my blog. Really? Yeah. Because then I get much more engagement on Facebook, and then I can accurately really see all the shares and all the comments and much better engagement on Facebook just blogging on Facebook. Wow. Interesting. So, as I'm just kinda wading into this social media viral environment here, and I think I'm about half knowledgeable, you know, kind of compared to what I need to know to do my job properly. I know about half of it now. And already, it feels like I'm in the mind of God. You know, it once you start understanding how all the the social networks and the people connected to them, how they all relate, and how things become viral, and, you know, how pathways are formed, you you almost have to understand it like a whole. Like, you can't understand it in a in a part of it That doesn't tell you anything. You have to understand them altogether, and I don't have that yet. I'm, like, halfway there, and already I can see it. It literally feels like you're in the brain. You're you're in a giant mind because the people are connected in such a specific way. It's true. You know, sometimes I write things that I like, but I know nobody's ever going to share. And other times I'll write, here's the top ten ways to do something, and everyone's gonna share that. And you don't really do the listicle thing, you know, but the brain reads in an f structure. I I I love the listicle thing, as a reader. I'm always drawn in by it. It works every time. Yes. But but but this goes back to your previous comment that, it has to do with how much time I think I've been invested. If I see a list, I say to myself, you know, somewhat automatically, 30 seconds, I'll probably remember 3 things on this list that I didn't know before, that's that's worth 30 seconds. But, you know, if it's a link to an article, I'm like, let me see the headline and I'm I'm good. You know what you should do? You should do an Instagram video, like 15 second video, you drawing a Dilbert, you drawing today's Dilbert strip. Just do that every day and post a video on Instagram and share on Facebook. You know, I've actually thought of doing that very thing except I can't show the comic by contract. I can't show it until the publication day. So but I probably could get away with that if I stopped before the 3rd panel. Or just do it on publication day. Do it on publication day. Yeah. Good thing I'm talking to you. I'm solving a lot of my problems. I would go I would go watch that every day because that's that's your process. Everybody wants to know process. Right? Everybody thinks, oh, Scott Adams has been doing this for 26 years, but I'm gonna start doing it tomorrow and be a success. So everyone thinks that automatically. And if they could see your process, then, you get questions all the time about your process, I'm sure, like, even on your blog. Yeah. I would say that's the, question that people ask the most is, you know, how how many days in advance do you work, and do you do it all in one day, and then take the rest of the day off. Those questions I always get the most. That's a good idea. I might do that because I was, I was just saying yesterday that with my half knowledge about social media, only yesterday I realized that if I did something on Instagram, it's already on Facebook. I'm like, really? Why did it take me till yesterday to figure that out, you know, because there's a lot of stuff to know and I'm getting up to speed. Yeah. And you know, Vine videos for Twitter, do a 6 second Vine video on storytelling. Here's how you you know, 20 videos, Scott Adams on how to tell a Dilbert story, 6 seconds each one. Yeah. I think I think that would, that would work. I've just started playing with the Vines a little bit in videos. I've spent yesterday trying to, understand Imovie so I can use it. I was making some videos yesterday. So I'm gonna go kinda hard into the whole video world. That's great. I'm building on my building on my skills to do that now. So, what you suggested the the, kind of sped up version of of drawing, I I did one of those just last week. It was for a girl who has cancer, and people are doing stuff for it. But it looked great, so I I like that idea. I wonder if you could do that on a T shirt. Like, have a T shirt have a video of you doing a fast Filbert drawing. I've never heard of that done, but that would be a fun idea. I'd wear that T shirt. Wait. How would that how would that Just some kinda, like, really flat l you know, screen on a t shirt just showing a video of you drawing a Dilbert. You know, because it's simple enough video that it's not that it shouldn't be that hard to make. But who knows? Nobody's done it. Would you wanna see the video that shows my hand or would you be happy with the screen capture that was every 30 seconds? Either one. The hand that shows the process, so I don't know. Maybe I need the hand. Probably the hand. Yeah. Give it that human human touch. So that's the same thing for my validating is, human faces. So I remember when new Newsweek years ago asked me to design the cover with Dilbert, but it was only one that they were considering. They were also considering putting an attractive young woman on the cover. And when they they said, here's what I'm competing against, a beautiful woman's face on the cover of Newsweek, I said, okay. How about every study in the history of time on covers shows that a human's face is gonna beat everything? And, of course, they picked the human's face because why wouldn't they? It's the only thing that makes sense. You know, I used to do a project for HBO where I interviewed, 5 people a week at 3 in the morning on a Tuesday night. Because if you if you were out at 3 in the morning on a Tuesday night, there's a reason for it, and it's usually not a good reason. And then I would I would get the transcripts that have all these photos and then allow people to click on the the 4 or 5 people I chose that week, and there was this a definite hierarchy. Like, if you were, I I hate to put it this way, but if you were a slutty looking blonde woman, you would get clicked on. And, by the way, it didn't matter if you were a male or a female. If you if you were a slutty looking blonde transvestite, you would get clicked on first, And then you can imagine just the hierarchy on down from there, but that works. Now Yeah. I I I have a friend who, is just civilian who is very attractive, and she puts her pictures on Facebook and, you know, and Instagram and has, you know, tens of thousands of followers Yeah. For and she there's no skin showing. It's all it's all g rated stuff. She's just attractive. Man, that's if to be reborn again as, like, a beautiful looking woman, that's the way to go, really. Haven't you heard it's a man's world? You would you would be in terrible shape if that happened. So irate. I don't know. Now let me ask you. What's going on with Calendar Tree? Like, all your studies on, getting things viral, let's let's apply that to calendar tree. So that calendar tree, just to summarize again, is your your calendar app. It ties into all the different email applications. It's great. So so, we're not a calendar app so much as a way to feed information to the calendar you already have. Alright? So we're not replacing your calendar, but if you had a long schedule that you tried to wanted to be in your calendar without retyping it, we send it as a link so you can put it in. So that's the core product, but we're, right now in the middle of, getting ready to launch an app that will have a whole bunch of new features, and then we're gonna do a name change and a lot of exciting things. So we're we're being a little quiet this month, in anticipation of making a lot of noise in a few weeks. What name one new feature. Gosh. One new feature is, if you send me a text or an email and I want that information on my calendar, I'm just gonna text it to my calendar and or email it to my calendar. And it's gonna put all of the information in the calendar, you know, including including the trail of email messages. I wish I could text to my calendar. That would be a good one. Well, you'll be able to do that in a week. I'll give you a a review copy. Alright. Excellent. And, you know, I also really think and we we exchange this in in emails. I really think you should have do some sort of contest and giveaway to get people on the signed up for Calendar Tree. Yeah. I think I will do something like that. I when when you mentioned that, I I thought that was a good idea. We just need to get the product out there and get it in people's hands, and then I'll we'll start doing that stuff. Well, Scott, thanks again once again for being on my show again. It's been a really pleasure. I'm gonna keep bothering you every time I see a bunch of blog posts that, that intrigued me. So, you know, I'm keeping my eye out. So and and on that topic, I'm adding some new content, some new creators to dilbert.com. Maybe as early as tomorrow if I can get things working. So there'll be some new voices there. That'll be interesting, and I'll That's interesting. So so you I I noticed you mentioned that. So you wanna be a destination site for things other than your content. Like Well, you know, the way I'm thinking of it is a little bit like, Johnny Carson, giving a chance to new comedians. Yeah. I like that. So so since dilbert.com already has traffic, people are already coming to it, but they're coming to it really for just one reason at this point, plus plus my blog. I thought, well, if I put other content on there that makes sense for the people who are already coming, that makes sense. It's like it was like shelf space that was empty. So I thought, why not put something on the shelf space and see if they can find an audience? So we're gonna do that. Yeah. And I think that's an interesting experiment. I've been, reluctant to share the space on my blog, but, I usually spread out by going on other trusted sites like LinkedIn or Medium.com or Huffington Post, but that's interesting. Alright. I'm gonna, I'm gonna see what your submission guidelines are. I'm gonna try to submit something. Well, you have to be a regular. You have to be a regular provider, but, the submission guideline is, if you ask to do it, the answer is yes. Alright. Alright. Good. I I'm gonna I'm still gonna pitch some ideas to you and see if you say if you say yes. Alright. I love that. Alright. Thanks a lot, Scott. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Take care. For more from James, check out the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network at stansburyradio.com, and get yourself on the free insider's list today.
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