Humor, Laughter and The Matrix - Talk 17 of 25
Topic: Humor, Laughter and The Matrix
Theme: Humor
Author: Barry Sweet
Date: January 7, 2018
Video Production by Tim & Karen Morse. Morsephotography.com
So You know that I love laughter and depth. If you have forced me to choose two things in life… those would be the two. And I started an idea years ago that I called The Matrix.
I stumbled into it, again, because I read a book called Megatrends in the 1970s and if you think about the title of the book, It's Just “Mega” a prefix with “Trends” (suffix) which is a concept… And the compound relating of those two words together, made a word that was bigger than the two individual parts.
Megatrends was a New York Times bestseller. And so I thought what I would do is take all the power words of history and put them together. I learned that that word is called “concatenation”. When you put two parts together and make a new whole… and I started learning that you could really make some great concepts like “linear logic” and then “fuzzy logic” (because Fuzzy Logic is a category… it doesn't follow a line but it is nevertheless logic... and it adds a new hook to hang your hat on).
I learned about the concept of a “floating baseline”. A baseline doesn't float. It's a baseline. Everything is based off the baseline. But let me show you the concept of a floating baseline…
Mark Magnuson, was the Chief Ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park. His Grandfather was a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park and he would go up and say “Man, there's a lot of people at Bear Lake”. And then Mark's father was a ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park and he'd go up and say “Man, there's a lot of people at Bear Lake”. And then Mark Magnuson was a Chief Ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park and Mark would go up and say “Man, there's a lot of people at Bear Lake”. Well, they all use the same words, but it had a completely different meaning for his grandfather than it did for his father, And it did for him. And therefore, I stumbled onto the concept of the “floating baseline”.
So I started thinking “Wow, if you could concatenate all these words together and get the best power prefixes and put them with the best power words you could probably develop new concepts in culture. So my friend Sam Flournoy said “Barry, you should put that in an Excel worksheet. And just put all the prefixes down the Y column and all the power words across the X row and they’ll auto-concatenate… like the back of a road atlas and you'll invent new concepts!”
Well I did it. I mean it's crazy. And you'll laugh but I have eleven thousand words in the Y-axis and 11,000 words in the X-axis… and I've discovered wonderful new concepts by doing that. But today's topic is about laughter and I just couldn't help to put the funny stuff in there too. And I started realizing that you could invent humor. Let me give you an example… It's always darkest just before dawn. And the show's not over till the fat lady sings. But when you use The Matrix and auto-concatenate, you end up learning that “It's always darkest… just before the fat lady sings”. And so I started realizing I could invent humor! And I've used that for a lifetime. Now I have invented a thing called Clever 101 where I've got the funniest phrases all hooked together and you just concatenate phrases like “This is not the french toast you are looking for… move along move along”.
So and we owe it to the community pool to be funny. We owe it to the community pool to be funny and to throw laughter units into the community pool. As many a day as we can throw in there… because it makes the community pool a wonderful place swim.
It's math.
It all boils down to math. The more good, the more clean water, the better the swim for everybody. And the more people that know how to do it, the better the swim for everybody. It's simple to me. It's such simple logic to me.
I would have to dig out the humor grid because I've got another Humor grid and maybe, in the end, I'll publish all this stuff on wisdompool so that everybody can have it.
But for tonight that's it.