YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Adams

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2015-09-22
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2015-09-22
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  1. “Think of your life as a system. Think of yourself as the most important part of the system. Be useful and make yourself more valuable as you go.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I would like people to go to Dilbert.com and check out my blog if they like my non-humor thoughts. Pretty soon my startup, which is now called CalendarTree.com, will have a little pivot and have a new name. And we'll make lots of noise about that. But you'll want to watch for that.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “limited canvas with which to paint. I've always made it a top priority since I was a teenager and had tons of stress-related medical problems to make that job one, to learn how to not have stress. I would consider myself a world champion. So I'm not going to worry about losing one friend if I have 100, but if I have two friends, I'm really going to be worried. I'm not going to worry about losing my job because my one boss is going to fire me because I have thousands of bosses at newspapers everywhere and lots of them can like me one day and it doesn't make any difference to my life. So one of the ways to not worry about stress is to eliminate it. I don't worry about my stock picks because I have a diversified portfolio. So diversification works in almost every area of your life to reduce your stress.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, 30-year-old self. That was a time of great transition. I would say probably patience because, you know, I've been playing the system game and not the goal game since I got into college and literally have a diary in which I wrote my master plan. If you take 10 years following a process and it's not giving you results, that's hard to remain patient. So in retrospect, that was the only thing I needed to maybe alleviate some of my pain. But on the other hand, impatience probably drove me harder, so maybe I wouldn't tell myself that either.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And poor people can't do. He's taking not only the place that has the greatest leverage because he can go in with his brains and money and his scientific ways and the energy that he can attract to himself and pick off these things. His contribution to Africa by the time he takes the dirt nap or transfers his life force it to software, which I think is far more likely in his case, they may rename the nation after him. It might be the continent of Bill Gates when he's done. And I'm not sure if everybody sees this coming. I mean, he's working on stuff like fixing water. How would everybody like to have water? Wouldn't that be good? I mean, he's going after the biggest targets with some guns that have all the ammunition that you need to go after those targets and nobody else can do it.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “First of all, he amassed a huge amount of money, but did so in a way that made the world forever better. And I'm sure that now that you see how the second half of his life is going, I think that he always needed something that didn't just make money. I think the putting the computer on every desk or whatever was a real thing. I believe he invested that money largely so he could do the second part of his life. And now you take the smartest, most rational human the world has ever produced and find out, well, surprise. Everything you thought about him wasn't exactly what you thought. And years ago, when he said his plan was to give it away, and nobody really took that seriously, guess what? He's doing that too. And the way he's doing it is he's picking the thing that governments can't do.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Well, Donald Trump, but only because he's in the news. So I think the test was completely polluted, what I think is successful. I would say if I think of it for two seconds, Bill Gates and there's nobody in second place.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “People want to hire you. You're useful. Everything comes together if you just do that one thing. And that dovetails back to the product is you. The project is semi-relevant, whether it succeeds. What really matters is that you become a more valuable and therefore more useful person at the end of it.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Waste is death. So you didn't lean. You always pitched in. You didn't wait for somebody to ask. You just be useful. And so having now made the money that I need to make, I'm far more focused on the being useful to the rest of the world part of the equation for the second half of my life and far more enjoyable. So if somebody says, how do I be happy? The biggest question in the world, I'd say be useful. It works every time. It doesn't sometimes work. It works every time. Be useful. Because what, guess what? People like you. They want to be with you. You're useful.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “It would say be useful, it would be everywhere. So I realized one day that I could boil down my entire philosophy of how to live into those two words. Just be useful. Yeah, that comes from my farming upbringing. My mother grew up in a farm. I grew up next to the farm. She grew up on, so I worked on it with my grandparents and stuff. And there, you know, there's no wasted energy, right?”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “And then I go print the form, print the form. After I printed it, I still had to, then I learned I really needed to do something online instead. And so I had to find that again. So I'm now like, find the email, find the email. So without that, I don't have a hope”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Before you call, this is a true story. So as part of your process, your assistant. Totally worth the time not complaining about the process completely necessary. But in that two minutes, I only had one hope to be able to complete that two-minute task within the hour so that I'd have it in on time for this. And the only hope was chanting it continually to keep the other thoughts out of my head. So for five minutes, I simply chanted, print the form, print the form, print the form. I would pick up my phone just by reflex and start to hit Twitter while I'm chanting. And I was saying, no, I actually have to yell at myself. I yell at my hand. No, no, no. And I yell at it all the way back to the table.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Your smartphone, all of that depends on them taking you off your task and making you look at an advertisement or buy their new song or buy their new thing or look at a new app or something. So they're literally in the business of making you distracted and doing the job that the smartest people in the world using the best science and A-B testing can provide. While in the normal world, you had it was a fair fight, right? Like, hey, I'm going to ignore your billboard on the highway because I can. It wasn't that hard. Ha ha. Those guys with the billboards, they weren't using a ton of science. But now it's me against all the scientists in Google.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Let me emphasize that point because I realized I sounded like Old Man get off of my lawn this new technology stuff. But I think most people have heard of me know that I'm very profuture in technology. So I'm not saying we should back up. But keep in mind the names of these biggest companies in your world, like Google, Apple, their business model is distraction.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Well, that needs an update because I have a theory that there's a something like called a digital disease, meaning that if you take the average person and put them in the average simple environment of the past, they were not overwhelmed by its complexity. But I believe that today, the average person is overwhelmed by the complexity of life because it got more complicated, and that I barely know an adult who isn't on some kind of drug either prescribed or otherwise to deal with anxiety. And I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case when I was a kid. Maybe we have more options now, I guess. I think there's like a real legitimate mental illness plague.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “But if you talk to the general public, it's still not well known. And then I would add to that I haven't read these books, but I took the Dale Carnegie course. And if the books say anything that is as useful as the course, that's probably a good thing. I hear good things about”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Yeah, that's the part I was choking on. I didn't know how to pronounce the first part, but it's C-I-A-L-D-I-N-I. 100% of effective people seem to have read that book. Yeah. In fact, that's one of those things that when I meet somebody and they're operating at a pretty high level, if you mentioned that book, they've all read it. That's true.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “I retired from the gift-giving business a while ago, which takes a long time to train everybody. No, I replaced that in favor of being a nice person on a general basis. Maybe I want to buy you something today. It doesn't need to be a reason. So no, I don't do gifts in particular, but I'd say if you're looking for a book that I think everybody should read. It would be a book called Influence by, I don't know how to pronounce that name.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Five chance of being. But listen to this. It gets more interesting because this is more validation for why this might work. This doctor could get no credibility because when he would report his cures, which he was shouting at the top of his voice, he was making videos showing the people, showing the actual people talking before and after. It was as convincing as it possibly could be. And when he would take it to the medical community, they would say, oh, it looks like all that happened here is that these people were misdiagnosed in the first place. So you didn't cure spasmodic dysphonia. These are people who just had strained voice boxes or strained whatever vocs and you let them rest them for a while and now they're better. I say maybe that's everybody.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “And again, I have to emphasize it's totally a long shot, but there's somebody who listened to this who's going to try it, and we'll find out.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yes, I should say that whispering is still perfectly allowed because that doesn't use your vocal cords. So you can communicate with anybody you want to in a quiet room during this quiet period.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “So the humming in the key of F uses different equipment, like it uses just a, you know, or maybe it just has less of a pressure on the same equipment. I don't know. And by the way, I'm talking at what I can best approximate as the key of F. I'm tone def, so I'm not sure I'm getting there. My normal speaking voice is actually much lower, and I do that to preserve my speaking mechanism. That's one of the things you learn. So put those two things together. The only two things these two things that are the only things that work to solve the spasmodic dysphonia is people didn't talk not even a little bit using their normal voice for an extended period, three and a half months in one case, maybe as few as a week or two weeks in the other case. But if you have this or you know somebody who does and you're listening to this, somebody out there, I want you to see if you're in a special situation.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “So there is a non-zero chance, and I actually saw my surgeon like a couple months ago just at an event, and I said, is it possible that the only reason your surgery works is that you prevented me from re-injuring the muscles of my vocal cords for long enough for them to heal for the first time ever. Because when you have this problem, you end up straining it every single day because you're trying really hard to talk. It's just not working. So imagine if you had a sprained ankle and you ran a marathon every day.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “hum at the key of f for weeks and try to never talk at your natural deeper tone instead just hum. Now I think it might have worked for 10 or 20 percent of the people, but keep in mind this is an incurable problem. 10 to 20 percent of the people walked out with perfect voices. I spoke to one of them, actually several of them. I spoke to live, so I verified, and one of them crossed over my week, so I know it's a real person, not a shill or something. Now, what do these two things, the surgery, which nobody knows why it works, and the humming and the key of F, which nobody knows why it works, what do they have in common? In both of those cases, it's the only time the subject takes an extended period without re-injuring the muscles in the vocal cords”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “I'm going to take it. All right, the surgery fixed me and what that involved was cutting some nerves in my neck that disconnected my brain from my vocal cords for three and a half months. They spliced in a new network that takes three and a half months to regrow and once it regrows then I could talk but very weakly and it took years to get my voice back to where it is. What's interesting about that is nobody knows why that works because the problem has been well identified to be a little brain hiccup. So you don't fix your brain by rewiring the nerves in your neck. Now hold that thought. Nobody knows why the surgery works. Now the only other thing that works for this that I've personally verified because I've talked to the individuals who've done this and I actually went through this training myself was a doctor who some thought was a not because science was not quite supporting his method. But he would go in and he would say everybody”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “This is literally true. I might actually be able to, with your help, solve the entire problem for 50,000 people in this country. Maybe. It's a long shot, right?”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “By the way, I'm going to do an audio impression of it because there are people listening to this guaranteed who have it and don't know they have it because they've never heard anyone else who spoke that way and they're trying to figure out what it is. So I'm going to do an impression and I'm going to send like three dozen people to their doctor with a solution. Here's my impression. If I were to order a diet coke since my vocal cords would clench, especially on some problem syllables, it would come out like a clipped cell phone. So instead of a diet coke or can I have a diet coke, it would come out as coke like that. So it sounded like you're just dropping syllables. So everybody at home who said, holy shit, I know somebody like that, the name for it is spasmodic dysphonia. But I got something much cooler. You want to hear it?”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Right. So I'm not going to give a big scary medical thing on your show. It'd be terrible. And people can Google it. If you Googled spasmodic dysphonia, you would learn that I and tens of thousands of other people had this problem where you lose your voice, meaning that it clips your vocal cord spaz at times when you don't want them to. So you can't get out words that make sense. It was so unknown that it took me a long time to figure out what it was and I had to figure out using Google and hunting down a doctor and doctor to doctor and my path went through Japan down to USC and finally Dr. Gerald Burke who had invented a surgery that was not well publicized that worked for me. So since then I've been active trying to tell people who have spasmodic dysphonia which”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “I would say a comic called F minus F being like you're a failure F you can Google that it's it's syndicated and that's the one that makes BLAF the most of the ones you haven't heard of Of the ones you may have heard of that also makes me laugh the most, pearls before swine. And that would be no accident because he literally studied the two of six rule. And I had conversations with him when he was coming up. And you can see that he's one of the few cartoonists who's approached it the way I have, which is as a business, not just an art. And so he's the most methodical operator out there now in terms of doing what is the smartest thing to do for your art.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Shoot by the end of this interview, I will have come up with that six one and I'm going to scream it in the middle of whatever other unrelated questions.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Clearly, there's more to it than that. Again, that's just the, you have to have at least that two dimensions. Take a look at the best comic strip of all time that I think nearly everyone in the world would say, Calvin and Hobbes. There's a talking tiger that is both bizarre and cute. So he took the far side one dimension further as a starting point. The moment you start reading Calvin and Hobbes, you already have Q because his drawing is amazing. Both of the child and the, you know, he's got a double cute. He's got a child and an animal. And it's a cool animal, right? So he starts that before he even writes a joke. So then if he has the kid doing something naughty or also anything bad happening to anybody is, of course, one of the dimensions. So cruelty, did I mention cruelty? Am I up to five yet?”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “You have to Google the rest. But let me give you an example. So Qt is usually kids and dogs, right? And bizarre is just anything that's out of place. So if you know your cartoon history, you will know that the far side use primarily the dimension of putting something at a place. So you'd have an animal talking. So as soon as the animal's talking, he's got one dimension. So he's basically starting a race and he's already ahead of you if you're the cartoonist who's sitting there saying, I think I'll do a comic about anything. The world is my canvas. But he started ahead of you already. So he's got the bazaar and then he'll have the animal say something often in the framing or the type of mood that a human would say, right? So that's the recognizable part. So if you could put yourself in the picture and say, oh, God, I recognize that situation, but it's an animal talking.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “But you asked me for two, because you know I could come up with two. All right, so I'm going to go for six because you've now made it safe for me to do it.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Oh, I know you're good at this. Because you know what you just did that was just so smart? If you had asked me for the six, I would have changed the subject because I know I'm not going to remember.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “I did. I've written about it a number of times. I think if anybody Googles my name, Scott Adams and Six Dimensions of Humor, you'll see it. Yeah, you'll see a few references to it”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “So for example, I know because I've learned over time that there are six elements of humor, six dimensions of humor, and if I use at least two of them, I've got a joke. If I use three of them, it's probably going to be a really good joke. But that's not enough. There's something about it, that X factor, that thing you can't put your foot on, that just makes your body move. It just moves your body. And if you can't get that, no craft in the world can survive. It can't resuscitate it.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “I'll tell you, if I'm thinking of, let's say, a particular setup for a joke, I'll think of the joke, and then quite often I'll audibly go. And it wasn't planned, right? It just went. And it was sort of a half laugh that you do when you're by yourself and you say, think of something funny, but you don't want to do a full laugh. There are other times when, so for example, I told you the story about being in the shower and thinking of the entire plot for God's debris in one moment, my entire body lit up. When I had the idea for the blog that I wrote recently that just sort of lit up the internet, I felt it as a full body experience long before I wrote it. And so that's largely true. Now with Dilbert, if you do this long enough, a lot of the things that used to be technique just get baked into your personality after a while. And so there's stuff you do a second nature that you're kind of moving art into the domain of craft.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Yeah, so the model is your brain can't find good content, not directly in an intellectual sense. Obviously, the brain's involved. But what I mean is that as I'm thinking of these ideas and they're flowing through my head, I'm monitoring my body. I'm not monitoring my mind. And when my body changes, I have something that other people are going to care about too.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Failing that, I usually open business insider because I just like reading it. Or usually while I'm waiting for my coffee, I've looked at my Facebook feed and just played around. Basically, I'm just trying to wake up, get my mind working. And there's a process where once you clear your mind, you have to flood it. And you may use different words for this, but I know you do it. So you empty it, and then you flood it with new input that's not the old input. So I'm looking at the news. I'm looking at stuff I haven't seen. I'm not looking at yesterday's problem for the fifth time. I'm looking at a new problem. I'm thinking of a new idea. So I'm flooding in all the new stuff. But then you got to find out where in that flood is the little piece that's worth working with. And that's where I use the body model. I kind of cycle through all this study.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “At that point, I usually get on and start looking, I guess I check, you know, Twitter first and check my webpage to see if anything blew up that I don't know about Did I say anything yesterday that caused the world to melt down? Because I'll need to know about that.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “I eat a builder's 20 gram protein bar chocolate peanut butter, and I'm so smart that I actually picked it up and had the label in front of me because I expected that question.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “So depending on when I went to sleep either five or six, but let's say five, I get up and I walk directly downstairs and get my coffee. So push one button and wait for it. Have my one protein bar, which is always the same because the coffee is always the same. The protein is always the same and the time's always the same. Give or take that hour because I'm removing decisions.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Well, actually, the analogy I use is it has more to do with flow rate. That is to say, if I'm busy, I'm thinking about lots of things, I might have one good idea in an hour. But if I clear my mind, I can't stop them coming. They're like bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. Now, that's the part, unfortunately everybody wants to know, what's the secret to being a creative person and having a new idea every day? And unfortunately, there's just some of this that either is a bad childhood experience or DNA. You can do a lot to make yourself better at whatever you have, but the flow rate of ideas that I have, I think probably is unnatural.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Gives me some kind of an idea or I jump off of what was the last thing I wrote the day before because sometimes they lend themselves to a serial treatment. But I don't have much of a process beyond being in the right frame of mind physically and mentally, like getting rid of all the other distractions, which is in part why I do it in the morning, not just because my energy and my mind are better, but because distractions are far less. So for me, creativity is a process of removing barriers. It's not so much a process of pulling something in that was outside me.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Well, I use my Wacum Sintique for the drawing. So what that is is a special monitor. In my case, it's a really big one. I think it's a 27 inches across. And I can draw on it directly with the stylus, much like you would draw on paper, although you have to learn new techniques and use Photoshop and a lot of different stuff. So it's just Photoshop at a Syntique Welcome. And after that, I just usually peruse the news, drink coffee, eat my protein bar in the morning, and something jumps in my head. And if it doesn't, maybe I'll read a few email messages that I think will have messages or suggestions. Sometimes I'll check the suggestions coming in from various places, usually I've got an email address just for that that runs in the strip every day. So some combination of that.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Versus the goal. I mean, I certainly didn't start out to have a cat cartoon. I started out to do a bunch of things. I introduced a lot of characters. I watched to figure out which ones worked. And I just put water on the stuff that worked.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Right. So Capert now comes out of nothing and certainly had no plans to have a Garfield competitor and now I'm stuck. I'm like, oh, they all want it, but what am I going to do with it? So now I've moved Dilbert into the office by that time. And I'm like, ah, how do I get a cat in the office? It's already too much that I've got a dog there. And then I realized that a cat's personality fits perfectly with human resources. So I made him the director of human resources. Because, you know, like a human resources person, a cat doesn't really care if you live or die. He just likes playing with you before it happens. And recently I started working with a company called ThinkHR who does subscriptions of HR advice, I guess my simple description. And I'm working with them with Catbird as a potential way to get their message out there. So this is a good example of the system.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Don't ask Well, I'll tell you the biggest change that there were actually more emails than a few, but it's one that jumps to mind. When Capert was originally introduced, he was just a cat. He wasn't meant to be a regular character. But thousands of people, I'm not going to say thousands. I'll say probably hundreds of people emailed and said, we love cat bird. And what's interesting is he didn't have that name.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Yeah, and let me say that about me as well. I mean, I'm a voracious reader of all my feedback on social media as well as email and everything else. And I've changed substantial things in the way I approach Dilbert or other jobs based on one or two emails.”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “email messages saying this is the greatest thing why don't you put it in my newspaper the and then they name the actual newspaper I printed them all out I collected them by what newspaper they mentioned sent them off you know physically like printouts to the salespeople and then they walked into the office of the editor and put the printout on their desk and the editor said okay you know for a newspaper if five people ask for something that they've never heard of you know and it's something that they usually you know for $20 a month they can put it in the newspaper or whatever it is they're going to do that”

    2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT