logoalt Hacker News

alexpotatotoday at 2:39 PM2 repliesview on HN

I've seen this with both famous and regular people.

e.g. a friend of mine once met William Shatner and then ran into him again a few months later. When asked "How are you doing?" Shatner answered exactly the same way at both the first and second meeting. I imagine some of this is efficiency since famous people tend to get the same questions over and over again. Tom Wilson even has a business card that answers a lot of these questions [0]

What was more surprising was seeing this in high school. I did a summer program with kids from all over the US. A few months later, I saw one of them at a sports event and, similar to Shatner, he had a canned response. He was from a well to do family and was probably on some kind of "track" to the right college etc. Was still surprising to hear.

If you are curious to see someone busting the cache, there are video compilations of Sean Evans from hot ones asking questions of guests based on deep research and them being incredibly impressed. [1]

Charisma on Command also has a great video on how to ask better question [2]

0 - https://www.upworthy.com/back-to-the-future-actor-has-a-hila...

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Endmr-93KOY

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHyYlFCaXPM


Replies

tryauuumtoday at 5:08 PM

I don't think people actually care about a sincere answer to "how are you doing", so replying with the prebaked line makes sense

netsharctoday at 2:54 PM

There's a long story about Boris Johnson (dickhead chancer who was prime minister in the UK) doing the same routine in 2 different occasions: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/c1korj/jeremy_v...

... and people loving it.