st an experience. I'll give you an example. In my early youth I saw myself as a famous cartoonist. Now I became one. What are the odds of becoming a famous cartoonist? Well the odds of being a successful cartoonist are pretty low. The odds of being a famous one are really low. How many famous cartoonists can you name? Right, maybe 20. And the other 19 of them probably started way before I did. They're already sort of just famous people from the past in many cases. So to become a famous current cartoonist, what are the odds?

Now if that were the only part of my story I would say okay Scott, that's easy to explain. It's the thing you wanted. You had the capability. You worked for it. You got it. And if you had not succeeded we wouldn't be listening to you. So there's also a survivor bias thing built into there. But it's not the only part of my story.

I also had a vision of a house I would live in years in the future and that I did. I lived in the house. There was for all practical purposes the exact house I imagined for years. And like most of my dreams I don't remember. I can't tell you I remember much in terms of any dream I've ever had. I don't think I have. But these visions, I call them, were not dreams. They were a solid, almost like a memory of the future. That's how I experienced them. And of course I always thought to myself that doesn't mean they're real. I might have this thing that feels like a memory but of the future. That doesn't mean it's real. And I wouldn't expect 80% of you to even, most of you are probably checking out before I get to the good part. There's a good part coming.

In college, in my freshman year, was it freshman? I don't know what year it was but in college one day I was sound asleep and I woke up in bed, sat up in bed wide awake and I saw myself living in San Francisco. Now I had no connection to San Francisco. I was in college on the East Coast, had never traveled here, never been to California and didn't even know any people. I didn't know a person who lived in San Francisco. And I saw again like it was a future memory, a vivid picture of me in San Francisco. A few years later I landed in San Francisco having sold my car for a one-way ticket to San Francisco and actually to California and then I drove up to San Francisco and I lived there for years and built my life here.

I had another vision at around the same time. Again it was a future memory meaning not like a dream because I don't really remember my dreams and I don't put any importance in them. But the vision was me standing in front of a large audience, a physical audience, and talking to them and somehow I was a celebrity. Now this was weird because at the time I was having that vision slash hallucination, whatever you want to call it, it was my experience. I'm not saying it's true or false. I'm not putting any meaning on it. I'm just describing it. I saw myself standing in front of large crowds and they were listening just to me and I didn't know what I was saying or why I was there.

Years later when the Dilbert thing happened I embarked on a speaking career and I would finally find myself quite frequently standing on stage alone doing essentially stand-up comedy to a group of a thousand or five thousand. I think 5,000 was the biggest. Now there was nothing, absolutely nothing in my early life that would suggest that my personality and my ambitions, anything would put me on stage as a celebrity in front of a giant crowd of people. And it happened. It happened.

I have one other premonition that I've had since I was very young. It's my strongest one. Now these other ones were all good news. All right, good news. I have become a famous cartoonist. That's great news. Good news that I would be able to live in this cool house that I imagined and then I did, but not the house I'm in. I built this one. And it was cool news that I would stand in front of big groups and entertain them or something. And it was good news that I'd moved to San Francisco because it's a nice place where I used to be.

But there was one premonition, really really strong, and it has weighed on me like one of the worst parts of my life. It was my hardest premonition, my worst one, and it has weighed on me for decades. And it went like this. In my early 60s, which is now, there would be a national disaster that people didn't see coming. I never in the vision knew the nature of it. And in that world I would become important in a different way, different than cartooning, different than that. And that I would know my role when it happened.

And I think it's this. Because as much as this is a health problem it's a psychological problem. And somehow by complete accident, meaning I didn't plan it, I have studied my whole life for this moment. All of my skills, all of my talent, all of my celebrity capital coming together at this moment exactly as I have expected for decades. It's my clearest, cleanest, scariest vision of the future and it's this.

But here's the good news. It works out. Because in this vision we get through it and we get through it by sticking together and we get through it because we can, because we're Americans, because we're humans. Ninety-nine percent of the species on earth have gone extinct. Not us. Not us. Ninety-nine percent of the species of the planet Earth have already gone extinct. Not us. That virus doesn't know what's coming for it. Human ingenuity is starting to kick in.

Hold on two weeks. Two weeks in two weeks you're gonna see news coming from your fellow citizens, the best among us, that is better than anything you've ever seen in your life. It's going to be breathtaking. It's going to be hard. This next year is gonna be hard. It's gonna be very hard. But for the 20% of you who live in a world where cause and effect isn't everything, maybe we're not a mechanical world. Maybe there's something mysterious, something spiritual, something extra. Maybe we're a simulation. Maybe God has a plan. Any of those things. But if it helps you, if it helps you even