okay so hello every everyone welcome to uh our third and last session of comics More Than Words um so our uh topic for this quarter was computer science and um today we're going to have a very beautiful conversation on Comics computer science and more I will say um so we have a conversation with Zack Winer Smith um creator of snbc and among many many other books that that we will talk about H and we have also Chris who's a lecturer at the computer science department um like the first computer sc
ience class that I took I I took it with Chris cig yeah so it was not long time ago it was like three years ago but it was an next so I will let Chris to introduce and and and let it go great thank you Christian uh well it is my pleasure to introduce Zach weer Smith the creator of the incredible web comic SMBC the instigator of of the Festival of bad ad hoc hypotheses otherwise known as ba Fest and hopefully we'll be able to ask him a little bit about that and author and co-author of a number of
wonderful books including uh a book I love called sunish which is uh about emerging technologies that are at once both amazing and terrifying uh he has also written some fun children's science books and uh he's just about to release a book and then as I understand it another book uh but he's just about to release a book called Bea wolf two words as in as it turns out uh which is uh a retelling of Beowolf and uh we hopefully we'll hear a little bit about that from Zach as well uh Zach has an Eng
lish degree from Pitzer college and also studied just down the road at San Jose State where he delved into some biochemistry and then physics and you know his Comics often provide uh I would say biting commentary and also very humorous biting commentary on popular science technology Computing mathematics uh and and he has uh very humorously lamb based academics more than a few times uh Zach has also worked in the film industry uh he is married and his wife is actually a co-author we may hear a l
ittle bit about that as well and they have a couple of kids so I look forward to uh to today's chat um Zach has a few remarks um and Zach take as much time as you want I might jump in with some questions here and there and then we should have plenty of time for questions from uh other attendees as well so Zach over to you yeah thank you that was that was a lovely introduction um uh I also to do a lot of stupid jokes in addition all the the smart sounding stuff um uh so I I guess um for your clas
s I wanted to talk about a little about sort of how my career got started and uh how it's gone and and the weird directions it's taking now um so I uh as you said I I used to work in the film business right right out of college I decided to foro a graduate degree in English literature and go to Hollywood and um I ended up uh sort of climbing the ladder there and I got to where I was an assistant to Talent agents which is kind of the job you want but it was so utterly utterly am miserating um tha
t I I fled the city to never return and um that's when I went I went back to University for a degree in um at first biochemistry and then I got interested in pure physics and um and essentially uh I was doing comics on the side to help support uh that the physics lifestyle I want to do indulge in and uh at some point they got popular enough that I kind of couldn't do both and so I figured I would do comics and and just teach myself stuff on the side and not worry about taking tests so um so and
and then my career basically Blossom since then um the comics have gotten generally more popular over time although the the internet has made it very hard to measure that uh so I don't actually know anymore but people seem to still read and and buy books and things um and then in the last I guess five years I've gotten more into book writing I released like comic collections but not um you know books that I'd written just to be books on their own and so as you mentioned I wrote a book with my wi
fe Kelly who's an ecologist uh about emerging technology just because it was fun uh and then um I uh uh slightly more controversially I I illustrate a Kong book advocating for an open immigration policy for the United States um and then uh which which was uh surprisingly popular that was hard to get media coverage for it um but and then uh covid happened oh and you mentioned I do a thing called the Festival of bad ad hoc hypothesis which um covid destroyed because it involved putting a thousand
people in a room for a fun show together which was like the worst thing possible can I by the way our last show the keynote speaker did a joke presentation predicting an incoming pandemic uh which was just uh kind of astonishing um and so if we ever come back that's the first thing that's gonna be brought up is was our fault um and uh then uh after that i' I've kind of been branching out more uh so as you mentioned I have a kidsbook coming out literally in um oh I think on the 21st so uh the lik
e two weeks that's crazy wow um so yeah I have a kids book which is a retelling of bailable for kids which I just thought nobody would want to read uh but I was I was very happy to have made it and are we so far I mean it's not out yet so maybe everyone will hate it when it comes out but the reviews have been sort of extravagant and our sales have been much better than expected so there's a hidden audience for Old English literature for children um and then I have one more book and I can't say m
uch about it other than that it's about space settlement I'm sort of embargoed from saying much more about that but I have strong opinions on Space settlement uh so may maybe uh some some other time I could come back to discuss that but um but uh I guess that's that's where I am I don't know um yeah I I it's I I uh I actually looked at your book on Space settlement um it's always been my my thought that that one of the best jobs for an urban designer would be go to Mars and design like from a Bl
ank Slate because you can't do that on Earth very much anymore um so I'm sorry that sorry to hear you can't talk too much more about that but uh we will have to to look forward to yeah yeah I could say I could say the one one thing I think I could say without ruining anything is that I think you want to be real careful with the idea there are any blank slates available in space because even uhh I'm sorry don't let me go on a tangent because then I'll start saying stuff I don't want to say fair e
nough fair enough all right well well I have I have a couple questions for you that that may uh steer the conversation a little bit um you know a lot of your I do want to hear more about Beowolf first of all why don't I ask that for what can you what can you tell us about bolf give us your pitch about about uh the book how how did you end up making this like going back and making this story now you know newly told yeah so so the first thing about um I I say be wolf but about half people say bayw
olf and I'm just rolling with it because it's it's I think if you knew someone whose name was beatric and you had whatever her nickname was is what you say so either way it's cool enough we'll go with so so it's a little weird what people should know the weirdest thing about this book is it's actually written in verse and not like modern verse that is recognizable it's like so so old English verse is written uh in a literation with a certain sort of style and it's I'm not exactly copying that be
cause it's hard to do in Modern English you know Old English is is like you it's not a language you can read because you know English um and uh so it's fairly different it has different grammatical rules anyway it's a really weird book uh and what happened was is as you say I'm I'm an English literature major uh I've actually read many of these these old books and so bolf is part of my working knowledge and I have a daughter who's very smart but doesn't usually listen to me and I was in the car
I would drive her to school every morning and I just I swear she would ask me a question and I'd start to answer and she'd ignore me I could not get through to her and then for as a joke I started telling her beay wolf like for kids uh which you know ended up being so you don't know bolf the the the basic opening plot is that there's this really nice place everyone gets together and then there's a monster who sort of ruins it by coming by and killing everyone or most of the people not everyone u
h and turns out that's a very appealing premise for children as long as you remove the um the murder part and like the the sort of like we had a good thing going and somebody ruined it is a very deep thing for children and um and she was just totally enthralled which was like the first time that had ever happened me with her so I just kind of kept going day after day until the story built up and then so I had this poem and it's like 600 lines of UNM verse so I was like nobody will buy this uh so
I approached a friend of mine who goes by Boule he's a French artist he's one of the best cartoonist in France and France has probably the deepest comic book tradition which is something we could talk about we wanted to but but um you know and and he was into it and so we we pitched it and by crazy dumb luck because it was a very hard book to pitch my last editor the editor for that book about immigration had done her senior thesis on making baywolf into a comic book and so we ended up working
with her it was just this series of coincidences and uh you know for people who I I don't know how much your your your your your classroom cares about like the ins and outs of publishing but like just getting an Editor to like it doesn't mean you get to make a book they have to go back to like a sales department and argue with them and I think I think I don't know the inside story but I think she took some risks on our behalf and it's it's ended up quite good that's great well well good luck wit
h the good luck with it coming out in a couple weeks um I think you have a pretty good track record so far so that's uh that might be why the editors are are able to pitch it so well so and two two two different cartoonists as well so that uh that sounds yeah yeah yeah I didn't illustrate this one so it looks really good right yeah that's that's that's great um that uh uh so my my next question is is more about your uh it's more about your Comics your Comics often feature you actually a lot of y
our Comics I go oh there's Zach again like as part as one of the characters in your comics and your wife I might add um and you know indeed the you know the featuring both of you uh in fact today's today's panel I think Fe both of you as it turns out uh but how how does I I guess i' I'd like to know a little bit more about working with your wife and and how that like how has that panned out um number one number two how does she feel about being in all your Comics your Comics um and and number th
ree uh just you know can you tell us a little bit about how you work together and what kind of brainstorming you do together and that sort of thing sure sure sure yeah that that's um you know it's funny I got asked that a lot with sunish and I never had a good response but I feel like a better response now since we worked on this latest book so like for you know I mean so like we get along well and communicate reasonably well so there's no like throwing a chair through a window I I don't have an
y drama to report um but like um so for sunish which was a fairly easy research project was we kind of just divided and conquered um you know it was like we had 10 different topics and so you know one of us would would read the relevant literature we we had a little bit of division of blavor she did more interviews and stuff um but but it was mostly divide and conquer and by the way you know what was cute is that we would go do talks and I everybody assumed that she had done all the hard stuff b
ecause she has a PHD and I don't which it was it was like like we we we we got like reverse sexism uh and uh and it was kind of charming I don't know I was like oh this is this is what it feels like to have someone assume you didn't do any work um and uh but um for this latest book the one I can't talk much about was it was a much bigger research project it's a book about space settlement and we're covering just a huge amount of angles on on it um and so it was so extravagant like the re our bib
liography is like a brick it's just like endless reading and so uh what what emerged is it turns out when you have that much work to do you you have to get a little more tactical and it it turned out that so we joke like I can read a lot faster than her with 90% comprehension but she reads slower with 100% comprehension which is actually a pretty good combo uh it turns out with a research group because I could I was able to like kind of read ahead and figure out possible directions but then like
there's a part where you have to make sure you're not full of it and that's where you need someone like Kelly to to to be like well well what is the what is the strongest version of the argument we're disagreeing with you know that kind of stuff and are we really representing this position properly and and uh do you have a citation she also because she's a scientist she would go through and like anytime I said anything where that sounded like an always statement she was like we're gonna change
this to most of the time to the best of our knowledge you know um we we had a very good research relationship um for the comics actually you know what's funny is I don't know I don't even know she's in knows if she's in today's comic because she reads my scripts she's my like script reader and she like approves my jokes so she never actually reads my Comics um so I I'll have to break the news to her there you go I mean I assume it's her the the the you know I assume it's her um that's uh yeah th
at that's I didn't realize she she was integral to helping uh you know proofread Etc your Comics that's that's great oh yeah she helps out that absolutely I I I'm I'm very into feedback a lot of artists are like anti- feedback but I feel like it's it's very dangerous to get no feedback you end up getting really really weird uh and a little I I was just reading an interview with PG W house uh from the 70s and he was talking about how he loves reading critics of his books and I was like I've never
heard that out of any writer he was like well yeah there's this guy who said my last book was really bad and I stereotyped the characters too much so I'll just fix that thanks that guy I was like this is the most even killed human being who ever lived there you go yeah oh that's great that's great so so Zack one of the things one of the things I love about your Comics uh is certainly the pop Science and Mathematics and Computing and uh of course I also love the Batman Superman rivalry ones Etc
but but uh you know the you you went back to school to to get you know to to kind of feed an urge to learn more science and you must have walked in and said wow you know th this is where a lot of my ideas are going to come from now because things in science are weird and things in science are are you know PE people have different opinions and so forth um you know I think the you know that's what's endearing about a lot of your work is the you know some of it people don't you know some of it I as
sume people might be seeing for the first time as well some of these Concepts and they go look it up and go oh wow uh you know do you have any examples of sometimes where you say uh this is almost a little too esoteric but I'm going with it anyway yeah I I I definitely do I my my view has become like I update seven days a week so I feel like I have a decent amount of latitude to just get go weird and if it just if it just dies and nobody likes it like I could just move on but I don't know as soo
n as you get surprised I did a comic this wasn't even that long ago this was maybe like six months ago I uh came this idea for a game called incomplete information tic-tac-toe uh and it was just this um without getting really boring it was just like you randomize uh whether each player is trying to win lose your tie and each player doesn't know what the other player is trying to do and it was just kind of a joke and it turned out to be like surprisingly mathematically Rich uh in ways where I lik
e I I there was a guy who did a bunch of work on it that it was definitely I didn't have the math to understand what he was arguing for other than like there were certain like weirdly you'd think there would be a dominant strategy that would be obvious because it's it's it's just a variant on Tic Tac Toe but it turns out the the lack of information you know requires you to assume certain things and I think ultimately they just had to simulate and kind of see what happens um and so I don't know t
he the thing is like uh you know you there's some areas that have been really plumbed like if you really if you want to say something that nobody's heard about cosmology I think that's probably pretty tough because like you know there have been 83 TV shows and every physicist whoever lived has written a book about it um but like computer science is actually I I feel like an underappreciated area um like I don't know why why are there like eight trillion books about like Einstein and there's like
four about Allan Turing that's kind of changing but not that much you're like you know you want to talk about significance to Modern Life you know I think you there's a pretty good argument that we should be talking more about like uh you know I don't know like you know the all those early well we talked about BR russle but like I'm blanking on a couple of the other guys who were involved early on but um there's definitely another there's definitely a few out there you know I think yeah unfortu
nately not every scientist and famous famous mathematician is Richard fean in the sense of being able to you know the story tells itself or they tell their own story I think that's that might be might be part of it um back to your comment about uh about that that that game idea well number one have you thought about creating a board game that might that's next um you you have done some Kickstarter things before correct is that yeah we we we actually have a board game that's finally almost going
to deliver it ended up being a much harder project than than we thought this actually interesting from a research perspective because like we decided to do a trivia game and um you know uh usually when you're a guy who entertains you just license stuff and but we we decide to be very Hands-On we're like we have to write the trivia ourselves because we don't want like unsourced unsighted you know like we have we have a problem with like you know being nerds you know you just want it to be accurat
e and it just turns out it was it really strange experience because we we um like you started saying well I'll just write a bunch of trivia like can I pull from list and actually turns out a lot of like trivia that gets passed around is just wrong or it's like there's a whole bad lecture you could do on this about how like a lot of trivia is not only wrong like it couldn't even be right like you there's a lot of trivia that's like did you know that this animal does this and it's like you don't h
ear like enough specifics to to even know like how you would look up whether that's true or not and um so this thing we thought would be easy ended up like being really hard um and U partially because we made it hard but also just because like it's actually hard to find out things that are sort of true and interesting and which can be sort of like stated in a single sentence uh so yeah that was that was a weird Direction U I have like a long rant about how like all listicles are wrong um we actu
ally like we tried to look up like in in desperation like give me a listicle of interesting science and I would say something like 70% of facts that you see analystical are either either like straight wrong are misrepresented or couldn't even be right because they don't contain enough enough specificity to uh to be right or wrong yeah that uh that that does sound sound like a challenge I imagine uh I imagine the creators of Jeopardy face the same sorts of things every day where they they go is t
his real or not I don't know if these are yeah very interesting it's hard I remember um there's this quote unquote fact see it all over the internet and it must there must be a year at which it bursts onto the internet because after a certain point it's just everywhere and the fact is the claim fact is something like ostrich eyes are bigger than ostrich brains and you're just like as a like you know you just hear that you're like oh neat and then when you're like well I need to find a source for
that then it gets weird because you're like well wait a minute I like there are multiple species of ostrich and like what's your source and I I actually found a paper and it's actually more like they're about the same size I've had like a paper where they were like we dissected 10 ostrich heads and and so the problem is like if you're if you're being honest the actual trivia question would have to be something like according to this paper from 2015 on on the on these particular 10 ostrich heads
you know um I mean this is like a nerd problem normal people could answer that trivia question and just be happy but when you're a nerd it has to be right but at the same time wouldn't you love it if you were at some some uh some convention and somebody came up and was so pedantic about it and was like when not triv your question it could be you know that I think that there there's probably something about that that that that uh would be fun as well I have to say yeah well see is the problem wi
th the entertaining nerds I was I was well I won't say who I was talking to about this I was talking to a a popular science author about what it's tough because like um like you I mean I'm guilty of this so I can't complain about people doing it to me but like where people will like you know one you know nerds want everything to be right so if you were slightly wrong they will correct you and not always politely but also they will be mad if you didn't mention their particular thing so if you tal
k about nuclear re actors and you don't talk about their favorite thorium reactor design you it's like as if you completely whiffed uh so like you feel this extra pressure to not be wrong yeah I can tell you I can tell you uh professors and instructors F face that just about every day as well yeah the same yeah it's tough yeah and then especially when like when you commit it to a book then it's like it's you you're permanently wrong if you get anything wrong and right right yeah the I the this i
s this kind kind of goes back to your your comment about the the the challenging nature of that of that mathematics you came up with um you know the the creators of Futurama and The Simpsons put all sorts of jokes and mathematical and sciency kind of jokes very much hidden for people who weren't paying attention but those who were paying attention it's a gold mine and of course there's lot there's books written about that as well um and and I think your Comics are a little different in the the p
unch you know the punchline very much is the that but uh but I can I can see that sort of saying in fact I think they actually had a proof that came out of Futurama at some point I I think I remember that yeah literal math proof but um yeah so uh so yeah I look forward to seeing more as much more pop science as you can in the comics I think that's a lot of people would be would be yeah I I'm I'm trying to sort of read like so for for years I've been working on the space settlement book and I lik
e I think I did some space settlement jokes but there's just only so much you can say and a lot of it had to go to book and I'm now re-engage I actually like you know the thing I wanted to do is dig into computer science more for a while um because like I said I feel like it's just an untapped wine of jokes there's just like there's not enough jokes about fra you know it's it's time could be very much very much could be um uh you know one of the things you had mentioned you might want to might w
ant to talk about was uh uh growing your core business so you have a you have your fingers in a lot of pots right now right or at least you you have over the years um how did that you know was it was it just a matter of you had an idea and you tried to go find somewhere yeah or what yeah yeah yeah so so like um my view is and this is probably always true but like basically if you're trying to make a career on the internet the internet dra changes drastically like every five years and I had actua
lly thought what's been interesting lately is like I remember I used to be like okay you have to learn a new platform every two years that's just the deal and then maybe starting 10 years ago it kind of solidified a little it was like well no now it's going to be like Facebook and like Reddit and Twitter for a while and that it seems to have fragmented more um so now what's interesting you see I'm trying to figure out how to adapt to this or to what extent I want to adapt to this is like you if
you talk to an artist who's starting out who's like 20 they will tell you okay you can follow me at the following places and they'll literally have like 12 different platforms they're on that and not just that they're on that they've had to learn like like everything from what what do people on this platform want what does the algorithm want how often to post like you know even stuff like well if your posting on Instagram you have to cut up your Comics a certain way and use a certain font size w
hich like I I I I I go back and forth on because on the one hand I find it like kind of distressing because it's like oh God I wish all this time could just be going into craft and not into kind of you know guessing what the algorithm once this week you know um I I find it I find it frankly really really distressing that there research papers written on Facebook's algorithm like like somebody actually you spend all this time analyzing something where like there is an algorithm known somewhere uh
and then we're just trying to spy on it like like this just this time a human being could have spent doing something else on the other it's like you know know just the internet changes and you have you have to roll with it uh and and it's it's it's it's good and bad uh I mean I guess I would say I have broadly negative feelings about um about the way like like um a lot of these big platforms have become run where where it it it's um like like like the way you know every cartoonist over a certai
n age just wishes it never changed from RSS right like RSS was was was perfect for for and and like so obviously perfect as an artist but I think it was also fairly good for consumers because it was just like you sign up to get something and you get the something and you don't have to uh get it based on whether other people like it too um and so lately and this is maybe the next thing oddly enough is you start seeing everybody's got a newsletter now everyone's got like a substack or media newsle
tter which is which is a kind of we like I I think of it as like bad RSS it's just like you know it's like it's RSS but you have to sign up at 83 different places um and so um I'm sorry this ended up being a rant about the modern internet so like in terms of my business my view of it is the like you know the safe thing you do with a stock portfolio is you try to have diversity um so one thing's going bad something else can be going good and hopefully overall things over time go well and so I I h
ave tried to you know I do my daily comic which is still my main source of Revenue but but over time I've shifted more and more to um to books being a big part of right my uh Revenue stream and for a while actually you know doing doing B Fest was was was okay it was never a big money maker but it was like you know if you can get a thousand people together to do something fun uh I don't know maybe that's good for business it was also just really fun um I'm we're kind of eyeing what to do now that
I don't want to say Co is over but like now that you don't you wouldn't feel like a murderer if you got a thousand people in a room together um so we're kind of figuring that out now uh I don't know and but but yeah I mean my view is like kind of unfortunate it's a little bit dangerous to put all of your um effort into one type of thing because just the the you know it's not just that the internet changes quickly anymore too it's like we've seen this I know a lot of cartoonists are upset that l
ike Instagram wants you to post videos now because you know like cartoonists are awkward antisocial loners and and now it's like no you got to post reals with your opinions on things and so I don't know it's tough so the more you can be doing different stuff the more hope you have that like one thing can be your life raft if something else doesn't that's a good that's a good point I have to say I I it wouldn't surprise me if some of our our guests here have never heard of RSS it's that far back
in the in the past at this point um I know yeah it was so nice that was like I mean I mean and I I don't use either but it's I I think a lot of people after Google stopped supporting it uh it just kind of went away and I I you know I don't want to get too conspiratorial but I assume part of what's going on is you know RSS is hard to like pull data out of people you know whereas if it's you know well we have an assignment for one of our one of our classes that's three or four classes into the com
puter science where for a long time there was an RSS assignment and students were asking about it going what is this stuff and there you go but yeah yeah the internet is changing that's true have you have you uh I mean this may not be in the budget but have you thought do you work with anybody to try to get your stuff out or are you doing it all on your own like to different platforms uh oh well uh I have worked with other people I it's you asked that so like I had worked with third parties and
lately I've switched back to doing it myself um basically because uh it's two things one one just there's a kind of like God it kind of sucks that you would have to so corporate with your own content posting it on the internet you know what I mean like that's just kind of a bummer like the whole not the whole point but a big thing about the internet was there was supposed to be a kind of like intimacy to it um uh you know that you would just post something and someone else would read it and You'
have that connection so the idea that you're hiring someone because they have to trip the algorithm on your behalf is just kind of like a bummer uh but also um it's been my experience and it you know it probably just depends on what you're doing that for my work I actually I and I can I can the the the analytics is very clear on this like I I I like I just for Facebook for when when Co hit I just didn't have a lot of time because uh because I lost child care you know I was I was some School uh
I became a math teacher very quickly and uh so I was I was I was having to teach my kids all the time which was cute and all but like it was tough for business and um so I turned it over to a third party and I could see in the analytics I took it back over like a month ago and like stats it's like literally a 10x increase in like across the board wow which I yeah which is like frustrating because it's like I would like to I mean again like I said I you what I worry about is like all this differe
nt Social Media stuff all artists are required to do it like I mean basically what's happened with me is a certain amount of time which I might have spent reading a book or uh or making more content uh is is now like figuring out what would what would get me through to my own audience on Facebook but but like you know like it's a very Stark difference to have me running it versus someone else um so that's where I'm at now is I I basically just run it myself and um and try to keep it personal and
kind of small I would say also you know it's one of these things where I I I've had points in my career where there's like a Crossroads where you say to yourself like I could I could become a guy who hires three people and we make more money and the money goes too paying for them to be here and slowly I move from being a cartoonist to being a person who manages this little business and like so like Jim Davis who runs or I shouldn't say I guess I should say run runs like Garfield Enterprises or
whatever it's called I think he's a billionaire um but like I you know I wouldn't mind being a billionaire but like he doesn't make comics he's he's a guy who runs a business Based On A A Garfield you know franchise or selling Garfield licenses and like you know that's fine and whatever but it's not for me uh and so like you say to yourself like I have this path I could take and I'd rather take the one that leads to me kind of just getting to control everything and even if it's less lucrative I
have to say that's that's heartening uh Zach in in a lot of ways to to know that you're you really are in it for I want to do what I want to do you know and and I agree I agree the the billionaire aspect is probably tempting but from the standpoint of doing daily things that you enjoy that's that's great um yeah for sure I mean you don't you don't you you don't do B like be wolf unless you're uh I mean you know in general I would say pretty much anyone drawing G graphic novels is not there for M
because there just isn't a lot of money I mean I'm I'm one of the lucky ones I do pretty well from Comics but like graphic novels are extremely labor intensive and may maybe AI is going to change that we'll all find out in the next 10 years but um but they're extremely labor intensive and so um you know I don't know anyone who's like cynically gets into graphic novel right right well cool well listen Zach we have a we have a whole bunch of people here who I'm guaranteed want to ask some questio
ns um Christian did you have any particular way you wanted to ask questions I was was planning on just having people raise their hands and then I'll call on them does that sound good that sounds great all right all right what kind of qu and I I also see at least one or two other aspiring Comics out there comic uh uh writers out here too um who who has a question for for Zach just ra do the little raise your hand or put your video on or or what have you yes eseno go ahead Stefania yeah hi um I'm
not sure if you can hear me because I'm in EGR and the by is a little bit spotty perfect um but I saw that you worked on the open borders Comics sort of the science and ethics of and I was wondering if you could talk about sort of the role that humor and Comics play in educating people about issues like immigration from both scient sure yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um so uh let's see how to F so so let me separate comics from humor because those are kind of two different things um so like Comics I t
hink are a really underappreciated medium uh for this sort of thing I mean it's a little tough because in the US and this is my experience in the US you get a lot of people who will be like Comics are for children um but I think that's not true for people under the age of maybe like 25 or 30 anymore Comics are like so so like if you go to France or if you go to Japan or you go to Italy or Belgium and a lot of other places uh Comics are just like one more way to do things in the US they they for
for historical reasons that I could get into but but maybe they're not of Interest they're they're a kind of children's medium and so the one downside is like we would get articles that would like be like you know you disagreeing with us and would would cite that it was a cartoon so you see it's a childish stupid people Viewpoint which just wouldn't fly in France you know and um but what I the way I think about it is I'll tell you this like so I uh I wrote a book called sunish It's a 100,000 wor
d Popular Science book I'm fairly convinced that a per of all buyers did not read it cover to cover because few very few people do with Pros books I think that's just the state of the universe with comic books I think they do they pick them up and they read them I I think partially that's because it's a shorter format so I think of a typical graphic novel is 200 to 300 Pages which is about the equivalent of a two-hour lecture and most people have the attention span for a two-hour lecture and the
n when you add that they're like pictures and faces and emotions um for whatever reason it's just easier for people to to to to consume it's it's a nice consumable format they I I will say there is a downside to like you know in a two-hour lecture you cannot give as much information as you would in eight hours but I think maybe more information gets through to the reader that they'll retain so you know it's complicated and then but of course you can always be like look if you want more informati
on there there's Google Scholar uh most people don't don't do that but the people who want to can get it um in terms of humor uh as as a vehicle I I really think I mean I don't know for sure but but like humor is a really good way to to disarm people a little bit and uh I think probably that's just because we're all just social apes and if you can make someone laugh they feel a little good and they don't think of you as like you know some sort of like crazy alien brain to them you're you know an
d so I think it can it can help to to do that because it's just sort of like you know so my view is with most people part of why people end up really being mad at each other is they don't have to work together like if people meet in person it's very hard to hate each other you can do it but it makes life very uncomfortable um and but you know you know can't I can't do that with 50,000 people uh like you can't reach with with a comic book but humor is kind of maybe the closest art form you can ge
t to to just sort of spending a minute with a person um and so I do think there's some value there also just kind of like as a pragmatic matter I think it helps people keep turning Pages um but uh but yeah so I I I I do think it's an underappreciated media we actually repeatedly with that book by by American Writers were credited with like inventing the idea of non-fiction graphic novels which is like hilarious like there was there was a in the early 60s there was a non-fiction graphic novel abo
ut Martin Luther King that was used by the um Civil Rights Movement um so you know uh you know you might get made fun of by uh certain elements of the intelligencia but you'll reach a lot of people um so yeah I think it's it's a really good direction to go yeah I think You' you're going to reach a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise read a book let's say yeah uh estan is that Dan your question right great all right who else has a question who else has a question for uh for Zach AC go ahead and
before AC talks uh AC was one of the people I I noticed uh AC has an incredible uh uh graphical book out about computer science that uh hopefully we're we're hopefully she'll get uh get out to the masses soon but go ahead AC not to steal your thunder Acy but thanks Kristen hey everybody and hi Zach Christian Hector so um I was just curious what does kind of a daytoday like work day look like and what keeps you inspired and like the source of inspiration flowing when you do have to make a com tha
t's like on a regular basis so I will tell you I I think I quit doing Comics like six times before I got locked in and I'll tell you what helped and what I do now which which works reasonably well um so I what really helped I was needing to do Comics to make a living like there's a point in my 20s where I was like I can I can quote unquote make a living which meant like you know eating noodles every day but it was you know whatever like make comics and plus when you're 20 and you eat noodles eve
ry day your body still functions uh which is which is less true now for me um but so uh it does help to kind of need to do it I know that's a like I wor that sounds kind of H Marky but like like you know if you have an off-ramp that can be a little dangerous uh because because it is really hard my experience is most people I mean you don't you know I don't I don't know what your Ambitions are but like so like I do daily comic strips which is fairly intensive and most people when they try to do t
hat will stop around six weeks or so if they make it that far and I think what's going on is if you start writing you know you you basically start using up every joke you've ever had every anecdote in your life everything you've ever learned and it turns out for most of us including myself that's not as much as you might guess uh and so you you just kind of hit a wall and so what I do now which is a little zany I actually have a kind of Life schedule and so um there are different ways to do that
and I I think it probably pays to experiment because what you're essentially doing is optimizing your brain's output um and so I I tried for example like doing like a Ben Franklin schedule every 15 minutes of your life and then just did not work well for me because it was like like you're really productive on schedule but then if you get a phone call for an hour like at least for me I was like oh my God I'm off schedule and I'm going crazy and so what I do is I have a list um in in just like Go
ogle spreadsheet which is like here are the 30 tasks today and it's like very very specific down to like brush your teeth and U you know feed the dog U but then it's also like read this match um and so that that I I know for some people I think that would be kind of soul ing um to be like you have to read 50 pages a day or or whatever it is but for me it's like it's really important because I found if I don't meet my like reading quota that I just it's like the well runs dry and then I I'm in a
really bad position so what what I would do um if I were like uh early in my career and this is what I did do is just like experiment with ways to organize yourself and you'll find how your own brain works uh and and I like you know and and I I you know I worried like young artists that sounds kind of like brutal but it's just kind of like you know part of that is being happy you know so so like like if you're if you're completely miserable all the time you also won't be productive and creative
and all that nice stuff um the one other tip I have is that that again just works for me it might not work for somebody else um like in general if you're entertaining the public and if if you're already doing computer science you're h of the game but like you have to bring something to the that a random person doesn't uh and that can be you know like if you're somebody who went to Antarctica uh and got lost or something you have a great story you know are you fly Mount Everest I don't know I don
't like to leave the house so what I do is I read more than other people and that's that's what I have going for me and so to that point what I do try to do is read stuff that maybe sounds boring to me or maybe sounds outside my wheelhouse or or just stuff that's challenging um and I find that's very helpful it's almost like if you do like math that you're bad at being creative is like a relief so that that is my collection of tips I've I've built up over 20 years um uh in in terms of what my da
y looks like usually what my day looks like is I get up and and this goes back to like the make sure you're watching after your happiness but in addition to reading like I I have chickens I go feed and I uh I I make sure I'm exercising every day uh and then I I have time set aside to make sure I'm reading a lot so most of my time is is is reading um and there's some Min maxing you can do there too which is like am I better off reading for 45 minutes and writing for 15 a lot of artists will tell
you you know you've got to stare at to blank page and I have found that's almost always a mistake it's just kind of like horrible uh like I like you you get good at like I'm obviously not creative right now so instead I'm going to go read a book or I'm going to take a walk or I'm going to do something and when I come back I'll feel better but but the key is just learning how your brain works and and trying to make it do the things you want it to do hopefully that was helpful not too rambling yea
h thanks very much is Z is that that good AC follow-ups great okay um yeah Zach uh it's it's probably pretty clear to everyone you're pretty organized when it comes down to or and and maybe that's maybe that's you're pulling the wool over our eyes but organization is probably key to a lot of a lot of this yeah unfortunately I would say I'm not a naturally organized person I'd be very clear about that I'm not like my wife is a like she she she wants her life organized down to the like millisecond
and that that makes her happy it does not make me happy to schedule my life but but like when I don't I get very a drift um so so I I I learned to do it as a sort of survival thing or or at least a career survival thing there you go yeah absolutely so like uh I have this I have this idea for a really horrible bad think piece that I probably don't even agree with which is like there's there's a lot of focus now on sort of seeking mindfulness and uh and all this like you know finding your your in
ner peace and all that stuff and being an artist is kind of like the opposite path it's like I'm I'm going to like utterly just am miserate and Destroy myself but I'm going to because I have to make the this thing um so like I I've actually I've been you know I don't want to get too musy about it but like like the fact that be wolf which is like I mean it's kind of stupid but it's it's a 600 line in a form nobody does anymore and it's just gotten this extraordinarily positive response and I've l
ike talked to families that play games with their kids about it and and wanted to read more epic verse I was told one child was crying because there was no sequel yet and that for me is very moving um and but but but to be clear the actual process of writing it was very difficult uh and it was you know it's very timec consuming and extremely stressful and involved saying no to a lot of fun stuff I would have rather been doing I mean I don't act like it was complete Misery all the time and there
they genuine moments of like enjoyment and I I I I ended up meeting really cool people uh like like weird medievalists uh and and stuff um but the path is D the path was I'm want to make the perfect thing and I'm I'm willing to sacrifice some level of well-being in pursuit of it um and uh I got I feel like this is like bad advice to give to young people but there is something to be said for like giving yourself like forgetting about like like there forget forget about this personal Transcendence
business and just focus on making the great thing um I don't know I I I really I find this feels very oldfashioned now but I really I am more jealous of like a perfect turn of phrase by you know Keats than I am of like Elon musk's entire career uh because and I'm I'm madly jealous all the time I should say uh that's the proper posture of an artist is is constant jealousy and anger um but but I don't know there something I I'm not like a theological person about it but like there's just somethin
g very special about putting something like putting a perfect sentence or paragraph into the Universe um and and now and then you get someone who can do it repeatedly and it's like the other I was reading um Forge Lis bess's um collected essays and and you it's not all good when you do the complete set it's not all gon to be good but there's so much that's just astonishing um and to have made such a thing like I would take a high l life to have that have have been the one to have made that book
um so my my like not quite uplifting giving yourself enough credit either I mean you know you talk about how much how prolific some of these other people are how many Comics are you up to now daily strip oh God it's thousands and thousands correct yeah I guess I I I know a lot people obsess over this I think it's probably somewhere between four and 5,000 but I don't know um how many but but I would even then you that's very nice of you to say but I would say the Stu what I'm proud of is maybe ab
out a hundred of them like there's about a hundred where I'm like I think this was really good and I don't know if someone else could have done it um those I feel really good about um the the quantity uh is is nice as a career thing but it's the the occasional good ones that make you feel really nice I don't know 100's pretty good that's uh that's that's pretty good I wouldn't wouldn't be complaining about that Jenny good to see you Jenny Jenny what what uh what's on your mind hi Zach hi Christ
hi Christian Um Zack I think briefly touched on this earlier but what are your thoughts on generative Ai and how it might affect a creative process for Better or For Worse yeah that's that's the big question right now um I can tell you uh anecdotally the feeling in the field meaning like cartoonists the people I know and interact with uh is there is a lot of anger and I had thought there would just be a lot of fear and maybe the you know it is fear expressing itself as anger but there's there's
a there's a high level of resentment I think a lot of it centers on the idea that there are people who are going to be able to do you know the thing that's a little scary is is that you could take somebody's style and just duplicate it and take it and it's not clear what IP protection they'd have that that seems very legit to me the the the the surprising thing to me is there a lot of people who are angry angry about the idea that um there will be people who didn't go through the like time it ta
kes to become good at your craft who can just kind of Leap Frog um so on on the second question I think that's just silly that's like I'm this is just this is just the way things are and I think it's whatever it does to my career it's a better world if if if people can jump straight to making really good art without having to go through as much craft and it's like kind of a bogus complaint too because there was a very similar complaint when digital stuff came out in general that people weren't h
aving to learn to like you know use I I mean I I started my career doing pencil and ink and like scanners and stuff that's how it used to be and and that was even you that was a digital scanner that was an evolution on the old system so like I I I don't think that's a legitimate complaint or it's it's a legitimate complaint about your own life but it's not a legitimate complaint about the sort of Economics of it but I think the question of Ip is the hard one so like um what I think is scary is s
o like I'm an okay artist but I'm more known for writing so I think I I have a little bit of protection like by the time people are like a computer can do the the high level work I do we're all we're all just losing um but like I know a lot of people who are like they're fine writers but they're known for just Exquisite artwork and I worry I obviously worry about them but I also worry that the economics is going to be bad which is to say you know you know it'll be very easy to to create a whole
life's Corpus but then why are you going to get people doing new stuff um that that takes 10 years to get to I don't know um but my my suspicion you know this came up I was talking to my daughter who's eight and she is very she you know like maybe this is just every eight-year-old but she was like oh I want to be an artist and I I did kind of notice I was hesitating I was like kind of like I don't know kid you know by the time you're you know an artist you know like where you artist maybe you're
a professional by like if you work hard by like 20 or 22 or 25 I don't know what that career is going to look like I don't know if that's even a career anymore as such um so I mean the big answer to your question is I don't know and I think there's a lot of fear there's a big this kind of inside baseball but like a very Comm piece of software is clip Studio they introduced AI features and there was so much rage that they actually took it out they removed a feature just to not anger people um bu
t my suspicion is what's going to happen is that there are going to be people who adapt to Ai and they'll be able to produce two to three times maybe more as much content and they'll just win like just economically and so everyone's going to have to adapt a vaguely similar thing happened with the move to digital um because like like so in my case I'm positive going to digital made me draw two to three times faster AI might be you know five to 10 times faster and so I think you know regardless of
what's good or right the I think the economics is going to lead to people who are willing to embrace AI winning and I I don't know what that means for the art form though I I I I feel very ambivalent about it does does that answer your question I'm happy to do a followup is it strange yeah definitely yeah I think it's really refreshing to hear from an artist instead of all the computer scientists on Twitter talking about it so thank you for sharing that yeah and I I I feel like I'm I'm a weird
person here because like I know a lot of artists who are just like no we hate these people and like I don't know I have a lot of friends who like computer science feel like I with people who work at Nvidia on this exact sort of stuff and I don't know it's I think if you went back 20 years and you said to someone hey imagine you could just imagine a movie and make it you didn't have to hire all these people and have all these money I think most people see that as positive but it it is so disrupti
ve right now um uh and I I think part of what's scary and I think this is probably an omnipresent issue in AI is is it's like what worries me is I think people and maybe maybe I'm just flattering myself and I'm going to get messed over too but like people like me who work at a fairly high level uh are maybe okay but like there are a lot of people who are just kind of like laborers I mean that's a weird way to put it but they're like like who draw like manga like that's not high level creative wo
rk uh compared to what some other people do it's it's it's like you know there's definitely creative work that goes into it but there's a lot of stuff there's just like a director of the comic tells you draw this angle draw this person draw this stuff that's very easy for an AI to do now and so I think that's that's the people who I don't know what's going to happen with that so so that is scary so I'm I'm I'm torn between like the the sort of like fascinating open Vista and the the you know pot
ential Devastation to a lot of very interesting people um yeah thanks for the Insight on that Zach could you give us 30 seconds on what your current tools are as far as as far as drawing yeah I mean I'm I'm fairly boring I I use a cintique waycom tablet it's actually about like a 10y old one at this point um I work exclusively digital now and have for 10 years um and I to be honest my work is so simple I really don't use a lot of like stuff I mean I download like brushes and that sort of thing I
for for for bwolf it this is kind of fascinating if you look at it would swear it's drawn in like charcoal but it's all digital it was done in procreate um but but G Boule the the artist um he's like a master of this stuff and so like uh digital has just completely wanted that and that kind of gets into this AI stuff real quick which is like you it used to be if you wanted to do cross-hatching you had to do this all day and now there's a brush for it and I think that's basically good but it is
it is a little strange yeah that's a good that's a good point well listen uh Zach we are we are at the end of our our amazing talk with you thank you so much for joining us yeah and uh we uh I I'm telling you I am more jealous about a turn of phrase in Keats than entire career is going on my wall I think with your thing right next to it um but uh thank thank you so much um I if if everyone can can applaud etc for for Zach thank you for joining us um Christian is there anything else you need uh f
rom from us or uh we uh good uh no I I I would also like to thank you Zach uh like PR for like um doing this conversation and everyone who came here like thank you so much for joining us today in this meeting and for joining us in general likeing our um computer science Edition in this group so thank you so much yeah thank you so much Zach and and please keep keep doing uh keep doing the things you love because we all love you and if if anybody has any questions my public email is actual me so I
'm always happy to talk to a young is trying to figure out what to do great great cool thank you very much Zach and thanks everybody for for joining us today uh this was this was a lot of fun
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