Friendly Questions
Friendly Questions
[Cueball and Hairy meet each other.] Cueball: Hey! Hairy: Oh, hi!
[Cueball looks down at a sticky note in his hand.]
[The yellow sticky note reads:] Normal human conversation 1. Ask them about themselves
[Cueball looks at Hairy.] Cueball: How many...apples...have you eaten? Hairy: ...Like, in my life? Cueball: Yes. Hairy: ... Cueball: ...I should go. Hairy: OK.

A common theme in xkcd is social awkwardness . Oftentimes Cueball / Randall will grossly overthink casual social interactions, such as small talk.
In this comic, Cueball has prepared a note to himself, preparing for the said small talk with Hairy , but it ultimately backfires. This is very similar to the comic 1961: Interaction which came out just 5 weeks before this one. And a similar interaction between Cueball and Hairy occurs in 1917: How to Make Friends from less than half a year before this comic.
In this comic, Cueball has prepared for a conversation with Hairy, by writing an instructional note for himself. The note tells him to start the conversation by asking some questions about the other person. In theory, this is perfectly good conversational advice; unfortunately, Cueball's understanding of social interactions is so abstract that he actually has no idea what questions to ask. He hastily improvises a question about the number of apples Hairy has eaten in his lifetime, which, although it does meet the criteria suggested by the note, is not a particularly interesting or meaningful question to ask someone. Cueball realizes from Hairy's reaction that he has made a mistake, and decides to abort the interaction.
Normally, one would ask questions such as "How are you?" or "What have you been up to lately?", instead of asking random facts of someone else's life, such as "How many apples have you eaten in your life?" [ citation needed ]
The title text continues to show the flaws in Cueball's approach to social interaction, which is very systematic: he seems to trying to create some kind of reproducible methodology that he can follow in order to carry out a conversation, unaware that conversations tend to be spontaneous and do not follow rigidly defined rules. Additionally, one of the main points of conversation is to gain some understanding of the other person; by focusing on the conversation itself , Cueball is denying the very purpose of the interaction.
A slight side-joke is the list being numbered despite only containing one item, although this could imply that Cueball has other notes that he would have continued to refer to if the first one produced a successful result.
The advice to "Ask them about themselves", specifically noted as the "first thing" after introducing yourself, was promoted to overcome society anxiety in the Periscope -based videocast of Scott Adams , creator of the Dilbert comic strip (see audio-only podcast [1] ).  Given Randall's personality and previous professional vocation (working with nerds at NASA and in academia), it is highly likely he would be a fan of the strip and also the creator's related works such as Adams's blog, Twitter feed, and the like.  The real coincidence is the videocast in question likely occurred just a day before this comic was published ; the audio was published the same day as the comic and usually delays the video by a day.
[Cueball and Hairy meet each other.] Cueball: Hey! Hairy: Oh, hi!
[Cueball looks down at a sticky note in his hand.]
[The yellow sticky note reads:] Normal human conversation 1. Ask them about themselves
[Cueball looks at Hairy.] Cueball: How many...apples...have you eaten? Hairy: ...Like, in my life? Cueball: Yes. Hairy: ... Cueball: ...I should go. Hairy: OK.
