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Two Monday Mind-blowers

Posted February 13th, 2017 @ 10:06am in #grammys #freewill #Whenhub

First we have a link to an example of how two movies can play on one screen (in our minds) at the same time. This is how hypnotists see the world. It is rare to see an example this clean.

Next, a link to an article that gives you a preview of how machines are learning to chemically program humans. The machines are learning how to adjust our rewards to maximize addiction. There is no logical end to this. Once machines learn hypnosis (and they can), we work for them.

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Did you see the Grammy’s? My startup was running a continuously-updated WhenCast of the winners that night. You can see them here.

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Outrage Dilution

Posted January 26th, 2017 @ 8:24am in #Trump #Whenhub

I’m having a fun time watching President Trump flood the news cycle with so many stories and outrages that no one can keep up. Here’s how the math of persuasion works in this situation:

1 outrage out of 3 headlines in a week: Bad Persuasion

25 outrages out of 25 headlines in a week: Excellent Persuasion

At the moment there are so many outrages, executive orders, protests, and controversies that none of them can get enough oxygen in our brains. I can’t obsess about problem X because the rest of the alphabet is coming at me at the same time. 

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Building My Podcast Streaming Studio at Home

Posted January 24th, 2017 @ 1:43pm in #podcast #Canon #Telestream #Wirecast #WhenHub #Rongyuxuan #Sennheiser

A number of you asked what equipment I’m using to build out my home podcasting studio. I put that tutorial in a WhenHub Whencast (my company’s startup) so you can see an example of how WhenHub works for sort of thing.

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A Look Back at My Trump Predictions

Posted January 20th, 2017 @ 10:28am in #Trump #Whenhub #inauguration

Many of you asked me to provide a quick index to my Trump-only blog posts. I did that for you here in a Whencast. Feel free to share on social media or embed in your own blog. My updates to this will flow automatically to wherever it is shared.

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The Plan for Immortality

Posted January 16th, 2017 @ 12:36pm in #Scott Adams #Artificial intelligence #Whenhub #biography #afterlife

As part of my long-term strategy to achieve immortality, I’m building a permanent digital record of my life online. Someday there will be enough video, audio, biographical, and linguistic information about me to recreate me in software form. Maybe that future software will take into account my DNA too. Eventually there will be enough of a record of my life for future software programmers to recreate my voice, my preferences, my priorities, my thought processes, and even the way I move.

You might think I am not serious. But I totally am. The odds that I will someday be resurrected in software are probably close to 100% because the technology will no doubt exist and I’ll have the most complete digital record available for the researchers to experiment with. Or one of the most.

I plan to keep updating this biography to fill in details as I go. This is just one of a thousand things you can do with WhenHub.

This looks best if you expand the window to fullscreen by clicking the icon in the lower right of the Whencast. (It won’t be awesome on your phone.)

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The Master Persuader Scrambles the Frame

Posted January 11th, 2017 @ 11:14am in #Trump #WhenHub

What was Trump’s biggest persuasion problem in the election? 

Answer: His opponents did a great job of framing him as some kind of Hitler. Do a Google search on Trump and Hitler and you get an avalanche of comparisons. 

It was sticky persuasion, and it still hangs over the country like a chorus of stale farts. I’ve said before that half the country believe they are living in 1930s Germany and the other half think we got a better economy and some free entertainment. Those are two completely different movies running on the same screen at the same time. So how does the Master Persuader deal with the second-largest case of national cognitive dissonance in our history? (Slavery was first.)

Ignoring the Hitler branding from the other side won’t work. It’s too sticky.

Denying the Hitler branding won’t work either. That would just make people debate the details and harden the association by reputation. In the 3rd dimension, where persuasion matters and facts do not, brains recognize “Bob is totally NOT like Hitler” as “Somehow Bob and Hitler are connected.” So denying doesn’t work. Not even a little.

What’s left? You can’t ignore it and you can’t deny it. There’s no solution, right?

Well, there’s no solution if you operate in the 2nd dimension. That dimension is out of ammo. But the 3rd dimension is not. A Master Persuader neither ignores nor denies. 

He plays offense and scrambles their frame. 

But he had to wait for the right time and the right opportunity. That opportunity came to him in the form of an intelligence meeting leak and some fake news. Here’s how the Master Persuader played it:

Trump Tweeted: 


How do I know this was calculated and not just a Godwin’s Law universal reference to Hitler? Because he played it exactly the way I would have done it. And I have a similar skill set in persuasion. This was the only play that can work. It won’t solve for the Hitler branding the other side put on him, but it’s a start.

Update: Now this…

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You might enjoy using my start-up’s app, WhenHub, because it makes you happy to know exactly when your friends and family will arrive. I’m hearing great things about it from users. Feel free to get some free happiness for youself by downloading the free app.

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WhenHub: Movies Coming in 2017

Posted January 5th, 2017 @ 12:43pm in #Whenhub

Here’s one of the billion of things you can do with WhenHub, the startup I co-founded. It’s available now. Free. Anyone can use it to make shareable visualizations for any kind of timeline, schedule, or series of events over time.

This visualization works well for movies. But for other types of data you might want to use one of these looks. (Or build your own with our API, coming soon.)


We also have the WhenHub app that is like the Uber app but without the Uber car. See your friends approach a meeting spot on a map. The app automatically times-out for privacy.

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What if Climate Change Causes more CO2?

Posted January 2nd, 2017 @ 12:15pm in #climate science #climate denial #climate alarmist #whenhub

Let me start this post by restating that I agree with the scientific consensus on climate change. I’m not a scientist and I have no tools to evaluate the credibility of those who are. As far as I can tell, the arguments on both sides are totally credible. I can’t tell them apart. So I default to agreeing with the experts, not so much because I believe experts are likely to be right in this case, but because there are extreme social and economic penalties for being a climate “denier.” So I’m not one. I’m just a non-scientist who would like to understand this situation better.

And one of my ignorant questions is whether we have the causation right. On one hand, basic science tells us that more CO2 in the atmosphere should cause warming. And according to the consensus view of climate scientists, it is. The graphs of CO2 seem to match the graphs of warming. Therefore, logically, CO2 causes warming.

A separate debate is whether the CO2 warming is enough to be a problem or it simply exists. Forget that for now. I’m just talking about the direction of causation.

As a non-scientist, I assume human beings have some sort of temperature range that is optimal for energy and economics. I also assume that there are natural cycles of warming or cooling independent from CO2, at least historically. So we’re probably always warming or cooling. We’re never staying the same. And that means sometimes we are heading toward optimal human temperatures and sometimes away.

Now suppose the Earth’s temperature was already in the good range for humans, but it was getting even better according to a natural cycle. That better temperature would – I assume – increase human activity in ways that (wait for it) contribute to CO2. If the economy is good, we build more industry and create more CO2. If the causation works in that direction, the heat of the world and the CO2 levels would be correlated. But the cause in this scenario is the warmth, not the CO2.

None of this means we shouldn’t be worried about rising CO2. The science says more CO2 means more warming. That’s just physics. And at some point we have to assume the planet gets TOO warm, and economic activity will suffer.

And when the economy suffers, CO2 could drop, assuming the economy goes into decline. At the very least I think you have to agree that the causation is two-way.

When people tell me to “do my own research” on climate change and reach my own conclusions, I think those people have no understanding of how the human mind works. No matter how much research I do on my own, a real climate scientist will still know things that I don’t know I don’t know. If I do my own research on climate science, all I will know in the end is what I do know. And that’s not enough for any kind of credible evaluation. The stuff I don’t know could easily be more important than the things I do know. One would need to live in a particular industry, the way a climate scientist does, to have any confidence that all the important variables are being considered.

Consider how basic my question is today. As a non-scientist, I can’t even tell if scientists have the causation right. My layperson’s brain says correlation is not causation, and humans have a long history of confusing the two. And while climate scientists might have perfectly good explanations for why the causation is primarily one-directional, it isn’t obvious to me. (You can explain it to me in the comments.)

I realize that people want to know which “side” I’m on. But apparently I’m on my own side. My view is that climate scientists are more likely right than not, but the quality of their persuasion is worse than that of the skeptics on this topic. I don’t know the underlying facts. But persuasion-wise, the skeptics have a big advantage.

Remember how I taught you that Trump’s linguistic kill shots had a special quality that allowed them to strengthen over time thanks to confirmation bias? Every time Ted Cruz said something that didn’t pass the fact-checking you remembered his Lyin’ Ted nickname. And every time someone accused Clinton of crooked dealings you were reminded of her Crooked Hillary nickname. Climate change has the same dynamic. Every time it snows the non-scientists of the world look out the window and experience confirmation bias that global “warming” isn’t happening. Sure, it’s usually called climate “change” now, and most people know that. But to the under-informed that change in preferred wording just looks suspicious.

Climate scientists might be right that CO2 will cause catastrophic warming. And fear is a great persuader. But this particular fear is a bit abstract. It isn’t like a nuclear bomb that can kill us all instantly. Climate worries are in the unpredictable future and won’t affect everyone the same way. Persuasion-wise, the climate scientists only have facts and prediction models to make their case. And what are the weakest forms of persuasion known to humankind?

Facts and prediction models.

And how are climate scientists trying to solve this problem? Mostly by providing more facts and more prediction models. And by demonizing the critics. The net effect of all that is to systematically reduce their own credibility over time, even if they are right about everything.

I think you see the problem.

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California passed a new law that says you can’t use your mobile phone in your hand while driving. It was already illegal to text, but now it is also illegal to use other apps with your phone in hand. I recommend getting a dashboard mount, as shown, and using my startup’s free app, WhenHub, to reduce the need to text on the way to meeting people.

In the picture below you can see me about to leave the garage. Several friends already “joined the approach” as we say, so we can watch each other approach our meeting spot on a common map. All approaches time-out after the trip so you aren’t accidentally tracking anyone. No need to text on the way to the meeting because you already know where everyone is at.

By the way, I told you in other blogs that one of my motivation tricks involves working on projects that have huge potential. This one will literally save lives by reducing texting-and-driving. That’s the sort of thing that makes it a joy for me to wake up every day. Look for something like that in your life. It will have a huge impact on your thoughts and energy.

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The Climate Science Challenge

Posted December 28th, 2016 @ 9:35am in #climate science #whenhub

I keep hearing people say that 97% of climate scientists are on the same side of the issue. Critics point out that the number is inflated, but we don’t know by how much. Persuasion-wise, the “first offer” of 97% is so close to 100% that our minds assume the real number is very high even if not exactly 97%.

That’s good persuasion. Trump uses this method all the time. The 97% anchor is so strong that it is hard to hear anything else after that. Even the people who think the number is bogus probably think the real figure is north of 90%.

But is it? I have no idea.

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The Kristina Talent Stack

Posted December 27th, 2016 @ 11:36am in #kristinabasham #WhenHub #Dilbert #Trump #TalentStack

Over the past eighteen months or so my girlfriend Kristina Basham grew her Instagram following from zero to 2.5 million followers. She adds about 10,000 new followers per day.

That’s ten thousand new followers per day.

You might think this kind of accomplishment is easy for her because of her extraordinary attractiveness. Sure, that helps. But there are lots of attractive women on Instagram – most of them showing more skin than Kristina – and almost none of them are adding followers at Kristina’s rate. There’s a reason for that. I call it the Talent Stack.

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