Part One: How The Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Ah, what's Scott my at? What's Dilbert my guide? Is
probably the way we should introduce this because if I
say Scott Adams is the subject of today's episode, like
sixty percent of people are going to go huh uh.
So I'm going to say this is an episode about
the Dilbert Guy. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about terrible people. Now listen, folks, I know what you're

(00:24):
all saying, the Dilbert guy. Didn't he just draw comics?
How could he be one of the worst people in
all of history? And the answer to that question is
because he irritates me, Like yes, let's let's let's clear
the air here. We're talking about a guy who has
drawn cartoons. He's not a well, he did kill one
guy maybe by an action. We'll get to that, but
we're not talking about like a war criminal or a dictator.

(00:46):
But he's a really unpleasant man. And the way in
which he lost his mind and became even more unpleasant
and eventually had a racist breakdown that got his comic
strip removed from like a thousand newspapers is super interesting.
So that's that's who we're talking about today. And in
order to help me peruse the life of Scott Adams,
flip through it like a collection of Gilbert comic books

(01:08):
or comic strips. I have Randy mill Holland. Randy is
the author and illustrator of the Something Positive web comic
which I've been reading off and on for like a decade,
and he is now legally the legal recognized guardian of
Popeye the Sailor. Randy, how are you doing today?

Speaker 2 (01:27):
I'm fine, Thank you so much. And I feel like
I should say, to keep being fired that my opinions
are my own and in no way reflect King Feature
Syndicate or their parent company Hurst, just to kind of
save my ass. But yes, I do in fact own Popeye.
I am destroying him according to everyone who reads Boat part.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
So, yeah, you have been a you have been a
professional cartoonist for longer than I've been doing just about anything.
And you also have one of the things because like
obviously with webcomics, there's a lot of people who have
been professionally cartooning, but who don't have kind of experience
with the syndicates or with you know, kind of the

(02:09):
old traditional any of the old traditional structures of like
newspaper cartoons, and you've kind of got your foot in
both of those worlds, which I think will probably be
helpful for context on this stuff. So I wanted to
start by asking, what do you think about Scott Adams?
Where have you been on Scott most of your life?

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Most of my life I've managed to avoid him, Like
in a friend of mine introduced me to his comic
in ninety five or so, one of his books, my
friend Eileen's, because I was We met through computer Bulltromport
Systems because I am old, and she was like, well,
you like text shit, so you'll enjoy Dilbert. And I
read a page of it and said, I do not,

(02:48):
in fact enjoyed Dilibert, And to read it further, I
remember it replaced Pogo in the fort Restar Telegram, which
annoyed me a little bit, And then I remember the
TVC is. The opening song was Danny Elton's theme from
Forbidden Zone, a movie his brother made.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Ah, I know Elkman, I didn't realize that.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
He made public accounts. Yeah, it's a repurposed theme song
from a movie that Richard Elfman made with the Knights
of Aungo Bongo in nineteen eighty.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
I think oh man, so uh yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
That song fuck you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
It's the musical equivalent of one of those like glass
soda bottles that's got like a ring around it because
it's been recycled so many times.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Just shaking the theme song out like no, no, no, this
will be fine, this will work for Delberton show. Ye,
honestly it did. It was better it was. That song
was probably the best part of that show. Years later,
I know he made some song accounts to defend himself
and then he hated black people.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
Yeah, he so. Kind of the thing about Scott is
that he was a successful cartoonist and there was not
much that you would note about him other than that
if you weren't super paying it, if you paid attention
to Scott because I as a kid read not just
his comics but a bunch of his nonfiction books, if
you paid a lot of attention to him, there were
there have always been some weird things that you would notice,

(04:17):
but it was just kind of like, oh, that's an
odd thing to believe. Oh, that's an odd thing to believe.
And then about five years ago he really pretty sharply
started getting very racist and very bigoted and super right
wing and kind of at the same time convinced himself
that like he had discovered the kind of almost supernatural

(04:38):
secret secrets to persuasion, and it was his job to
explain how Donald Trump was ushering in like a new
era for humanity by his magical persuader skills. This is
all like his kind of heel turn has been fascinating,
and so I wanted to just kind of like dig
into what happened with this guy because very few people

(05:00):
Scott kind of had a lifelong license to print infinite money,
and he decided to give that up in order to
get really angry in his like video blog and and
just like spout bullshit to a fairly small audience of
like weirdo Trump supporters. And it's it's interesting to me

(05:20):
how he gets to that point because he's not there's
not anything kind of he's not always someone for whom
there's warning signs. So I think I think he's interesting,
and we're going to talk about him because I'm interested
in Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy. So let's start.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Randy Will if you can't yeah none twenty years ago
and said, Hey, Scott Adams is going to be like
this psycho conservative, you know, shit bag like the guy
who made all the weird vegetarian food for seven to eleven. Yeah, yeah,
that guy like that. No, that was a weird unexpected No.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
Of course, if you were to say one of the
one of the newspaper cartoonists you read is going to
turn out to be like a weird fascist, I would
have been like, oh yeah, high and lowess. Definitely the
high and lowest guy, right, that's the let's.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Not go for the Brown family, and they've had a lot.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
Scott Adams was born on June eighth, nineteen fifty seven,
in Wyndham, New York. His father was a postal worker
and his mother was a stay at home mom. And
I always like to point out when guys who grow
up into like far right, uber capitalist influencers grow up
in a comfortable, safe, stable environment as a child, because
they're born in a period of time in which a

(06:32):
government employee can support a family and own a house
on one income. And Scott's one of those people, So
just keep that in your mind when he has his heel. Course,
we get most of our information on Scott's early life
through him off and on in some of his books.
My primary source for his childhood, although I'm not My
only one is the twenty Years of Dilbert Comic collection,

(06:54):
which he published in like two thousand and two. If
you're into comm obviously, which you are, Randy, you know
how like you had those like the Far Side big collection.
Oh yeah, Garry Larson. Yeah, he writes a bunch of
stuff at the beginning, and he kind of like explains
different comics. There was another one for Calvin and Hobbes.
Most of like the really big cartoonists get one of
those at some point in their career. And Scott at

(07:16):
this is this that like this is what I'm using
as a big source for his childhood, right so sorry, yeah,
I mean this is he was starting to become a
little bit of a maniac when this came out in
two thousand and eight. He hadn't fully healed turned, but
he was starting. It's like it's like the pivot document
of his like turn into a far right like fascist weird.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
As I hate sand moment.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yeah yeah, yeah, where he's not fully broken bad yet,
but now you can tell he's about to go murder
the young lynks.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Oh Jesus Christ, Ratbert and like just have like weird animation.
M M.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
It's interesting because we're going to talk about like some
of his early drawings as a kid too, which are
weirdly enough a lot technically better than Dilbert. So why not,
I mean, hey, yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Part of comics is how fast can you draw something? Yeah,
so that's why you see a lot like yeah, yeah,
like there's some old high lowist trips. I remember thinking
this is some stunning stuff, amazing angles, but it probably
took for way too damn long for hel muchs are
being paid.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
Well, Yeah, and this is one of those things where
like Scott himself pokes a lot of fun at the
Dilbert art but obviously like it works like it was
a successful comic for years and years. But anyway, it's interesting.
We'll get into that in a second. But yeah, this
collection gets published in two thousand and eight, and it's
kind of like right at this hinge period where I
think before this, most people who knew anything about Scott

(08:39):
would have default kind of assumed, oh, he's probably like
a vaguely liberal, maybe even kind of like lefty guy,
because the comics are kind of, at least super officially
seem like they might be kind of critical about capitalism
and about like corporate they're not, actually, but most people
I think probably just sort of assumed that if they
weren't super up on the Dilbert lore. Yeah, so it's

(09:01):
a very interesting period. We'll be talking about that and
a couple other recollections that have been published about that
period of his life as sources here. In nineteen sixty three,
when Scott's six years old, his family was in the
habit of taking him on trips to his uncle's farm
up the road from their house. This uncle had a
collection of Peanuts comic strip books, and Scott would sit

(09:22):
down and stare at them eagerly, even before he could read.
In his book, he describes being fascinated by them because
they had what he calls the X factor, but which
I would say is just the result of kids being
drawn to comics, and Peanuts being a particularly good comic
at drawing kids in. But you know, I had more
or less the same experience as a kid, right Like,

(09:43):
my uncle was the guy and my family who had
a bunch of published comic book collection collections, and I
certainly read a shitload of Peanuts. I read all of
his Calvin Calvin and Hobbess books, I read Bloom County, Farside, Foxtrot,
even some like deeper cuts like gay Han Wilson's Demented Uvra.
Who oh yeah, I love Gayhan if you if you,

(10:04):
if you like Farside, you should check out Gayhan Wilson's stuff.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
My early memory is getting a hands on Pogo books.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah art, which was just astounding because
my family tends to be a little more on the
left side, so like Pogo was definitely something my dad
was a big fan of.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, it's interesting. I I read a little bit of
Pogo as a kid because we were just talking about
those like big collections of comics for like Bill Watterson
and stuff, his big Calvin and Hobbs collection. He writes
about being a Pogo fan, and so that was like
one of the comics I looked into because I was like, oh,
my favorite artist likes Pogo.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
You need to know, like he did a whole storyline
making fun of the John Bird Society and at their
height he was taking them when he could have gotten
in trouble for it.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
Fucking hated him. It was beautiful.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
But yeah, no, bas Pogo, I love it. So Scott
kind of goes through this this journey, and it's one
of those things where like he has this quote in
the book where he says, my parents always told me
I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be.
I decided to grow up to be Charles Schultz. Yeah,
don't don't tell him that.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
It never ends. Well, my parents told me I could
grow up to work in an office. Yeah, and uh,
I rebelled against it, and I draw comics. But it
seems like everyone who like their parents told him that.
I'm going to tell my daughters that I, like, you're
gonna work in a factory.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
I did have. I mean that's what my more or
less how my childhood was. Because I also wanted to
be a cartoonist, and I told my mom and she said,
do something that has a pension. But the joke was
on her because those don't exist anymore.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
Oh my god. It's yeah, yeah, like my same things,
like I'm gonna be a cartoonist of my dad just
said you don't have to, yeah, just do something else.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
It's this quote from Scott is really funny because it
gives you an idea of how different things were back then.
So he's like, this is him talking about like why
he wanted to be a cartoonist after how hard could
it be? You draw pictures, you write some words. It
seemed like easy work to me. And from what I heard,
the pay was good.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
I will say, in the fifties, if you had a
good comment, yeah, it was great.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, in the fifties, yes, chastically.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:17):
You don't hear a lot of people being like I
want to get rich. I'm gonna I'm gonna get into comics.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Not a lot of smart people anyway.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
No, yeah, I mean generally, whether you're taught, like especially
if you're talking about like you know, it's like superhero comics,
like the most famous stories are all. He created this
character that's worth a billion dollars and then he died
of starvation.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Oh getting Yeah, except the artist losing his eyesight by
the nineteen seventies, living in a nursing home and like
Warner Brothers, having to be guilted into paying them thirty
thousand dollars each ye year for rest Our Lives hated
doing it.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
But but this this was the fifties and none of
that was known yet. So no, little Scott falls in
love with Peanuts and grows up being like, I'm gonna
I'm gonna make all those sweet, sweet cartoon dollars, and
he draws a lot of little cartoons as a kid.
These are mostly kind of like one panel strips. They're
sort of similar, and they're not really far side in

(13:11):
terms of the kind of sense of humor. It's like,
I mean, he posts some of the drawings he did
as like a six and seven year old in here.
They're like, I mean, they're like cartoons a little kid draws,
but yeah, they're like single panel strips, a lot of them.
By the time he was eleven years old, he'd moved
on to Mad Magazine, which makes sense. Mad was super
big back then. Very there, absolutely absolutely and Mad Magazine,

(13:35):
for those of you who kind of missed the Mad era,
had a brilliant artist named Sergio Aragonez, who I learned
while researching this episode is still alive.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
He's one of the last of the original Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
I was pleasantly surprised to hear that.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
We just lost I can't remember now the gentleman who
did the fold In's he just died at over one hundred.
Oh I didn't know well, but yeah, our Ghones is
still doing his Combat group. He still does a lot
of stuff.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah, he's a he's a He's an amazing guy, an
incredible cartoonist. He was kind of known as being the
fastest cartoonist on Earth for a while, and he did
if you were a Mad reader, he did the marginal cartoons,
like he did other stuff too, but like those little
bitty like joke cartoons kind of stuck in between panels
and on like the side margins of the papers in
Mad magazine, And it was like, this guy is for

(14:27):
those of you, like one of my biggest influences as
a comedy writer, because when I worked at Cracked, one
of my first jobs was picking images to go in
between paragraphs of the articles and write little joke captions
for them. And like, Sergio's work was kind of the
thing that I figure like that was kind of my
earliest inspiration for that kind of humor and stuff. I

(14:50):
always loved him a lot.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
The influence Cracked again.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah yeah, yeah, this is the only time. That was
the one influence Mad hat on cra.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Ford from the head of Zeus one day.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, no way, I'm the only one who sullied it
with Mad magazine vibes. Yeah, so Scott Scott and I have,
like I I identify a lot with elements of his
early childhood like mine was was not dissimilar other than
that I had a more comics yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Like especially comics kids. Yeah, yeah, we were all most
of us, especially heard an outsider kid. It was a
little nerdy mad magazine kind of was a siren song,
like it's here's the weird stuff. You can be a
little cynical, you can be a little mean, and you
have fun with it.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah, exactly, it was.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
It was.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
It was really special for a while. You know. Now
now it's yet another zombie brand, but boy in its day.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
Ye.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
So Scott, his parents do kind of like realize he's
he's got this love for cartooning and he's drawing consistently
for years. So they get him like books on cartooning
and how to draw, and he he becomes pretty dedicated
to like learning some of the tougher technical things like drawing,
like proper hands and stuff. So this is a kid
who's got the ability to kind of like stick with,

(16:06):
you know, the stuff that he's fascinated and he's more
disciplined than I think most of us who wind up
being comics nerds but don't get into cartooning, which makes sense. Yeah,
and he's he's pretty good as a kid. In nineteen
sixty seven, he applies to a serial box contest, which
was a thing that used to happen for who could
do the best drawing of Old Faithful. He doesn't win

(16:27):
the contest, but he gets a camera as a runner
up prize. And this is in some ways that will
turn out to be kind of dark a foundational moment
for him, not because like it con seem it, not
because it convinces him to be a cartoonist, which is fine,
but like his his so basically like, as he enters
this contest, he's super excited that he's going to win,
and his mom does the generally responsible thing and she's like, look, honey,

(16:50):
a lot of kids are going to enter. Most of
them aren't going to get prizes, Like, you're probably not
going to win anything, don't you know, get your hopes
up too much. But then Scott gets a prize and
so this kind of like hits his brain like a sledgehammer. Quote.
I started to suspect that beating the long odds wasn't
as hard as it seemed, this became a pattern that
repeated itself throughout my life. God damn, that doesn't sound sinister,

(17:13):
but it's going to metastasize into something like oh, okay, good,
okay good. Yeah, that is a weird way to think
about it.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
That sounds like a super villain. I read too many
cogbooks to like the long odds. Oh God damn it,
e'l O'Brien, it's almost.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yeah, it is, like I do think it's odd his
obsession on like winning this, meaning that he's beaten the
odds as opposed to like, oh, maybe I'm better at
cartooning than I'm thought. That's cool, Like I should work
more on this. It's like, ah, like I managed to
like hack reality. Like that's really is kind of the
road he's going to start traveling down.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
So the next year, his town holds an Easter egg
hunt and the ground prize is a golden egg with
like ten bucks in it. Now, obviously this is like
the fifties or sixties, so ten dollars is roughly equivalent
to the GDP of Mississippi today. It was it was
a big incentive, good prize. Ye Scott. Scott found the
egg and he got his picture in the paper, which

(18:06):
he says is what gave him a taste for fame.
It also furthered his.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Don't again everything. It's just like, uh, he's that shitty
kid who's like, I'm getting attention?

Speaker 3 (18:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (18:20):
Can I get more attention?

Speaker 1 (18:23):
Every time I look at like influential culture and like
the dark side of TikTok, I get more convinced that
no one should get their picture taken or video taken
of them until they're like fifty five. And that way,
when kids are like, hey, do you want to I know,
do you want to become influencers? People will be like, no,
those are all like weird looking old people. Let's uh,
let's let's paint watercolors.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
Partony wants to say, oh, say a lesser being shame,
But you know what, some people will enjoy that.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, and unfortunately Scott is one of them. So he
this is what gives him mistaste for fame. It also
furthers his understanding that quote beating long odds seemed easier
than everyone kept saying. Again, this is like says a
lot about Scott. It's interesting that he's so focused on
like the odds and that he's special for beating the
odds as opposed to like, oh, like, you know, this

(19:10):
was a nice experience in my childhood. It's also like
weird because none of this seems like to be particularly
the result of luck. He probably did well in that
cartooning contest because he worked hard on drawing, and the
egg contest. Like it's a small town, there's not he says,
there's like thirty kids in his graduating class. The fact
that you would have like gotten, you know, won the

(19:32):
Easter egg hunt one year in your childhood actually seems
pretty likely. Like when you're talking about like a town
with maybe thirty kids in it, that's not weird to me.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
It's not like he is trying to solve some weird
riddle like yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
He didn't like stumble upon like an unsolved math equation
in the on the in like the chalkboard of his
high school and like fix it or anything like that.
It's like, yeah, I mean, there's thirty kids in your town.
You probably did ten of these Easter egg uns. Yeah,
it's not weird that you won one of them. Anyway.
Scott was now growing convinced that the universe had picked

(20:06):
him for greatness. So the next thing he does as
a like, I don't think he's think it's ten or eleven.
At this point he applies to a correspondence course called
the Famous Artists Course for Talented Young People. This still
exists today in some form. It may I mean it
may have been. That was not like. I don't think
that was it at the time when he was doing

(20:28):
it. It was found it was founded in part by Norman Rockwell.
It's like a long distance course. Oh it's interesting, like
the ads make it look, and I think this is
an errant belief. But looking at the ads from back then,
you get the feeling that it's like a con because
it's really focused on how cartooning can teach you how
to make money at home. I don't think it was like.

(20:50):
People still sell the books online. There's folks who will
say they're pretty good, like guides to like or like
drawing and stuff. So I'm not gonna shit on this program.
It just weird. Anytime anytime something tells me today that
you can make money at home, I assume that it's
some sort of a gone But I don't know that
that was the case.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Because he gave Scott Adams hope.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah, I did give him hope, although it's about to
crush his hope. But before it does that, he files
an application packet which shows he's got some talent. So
this is going to show you the drawings he's trying.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
He's actually putting the effort in. I give him that.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
Yeah. Yeah, like he's got there's an an early like
he's there's a drawing of a Jaloppi in there. That's
like pretty good for like a little kid, Like the
perspective is decent, like cars are heart. When I was
a little kid drawing cartoons, I was never any good
at drawing cards. So like he's he's not bad for
his age. Yeah, yeah, that's quite a good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
You're looking at the drawing of the man really good.
Yeah yeah, no, was really well done. That's skill. Like
I did not realize he had that ability.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
No, yeah, it's like not like Sophie, scroll down, show
him the geloppee because like the perspective on the car.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Is also cars are not easy, so.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
That yeah, he's solid. He's like he's these are good cartoons. Yeah.
I think that kind of surprised me because they're like
technically a lot more nuanced like Gilbert is again, as
we said, effective in terms of it's art style obviously,
but it's not complicated, right, Whereas like you know, that

(22:25):
shows that he's got some some more some deep or
at least had at some point like deeper technical ability.

Speaker 2 (22:31):
It's interesting, like you need to learn the basics before
you create your style. Yeah, early Schultz versus what Panis was.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Yeah, yeah, I mean even just like a guy like
everyone knows is a great cartoonist, Bill Watterson. You look
at kind of a normal strip of Calvin and Hobbes,
and then you look at the you know, the ones
like these big Sunday spreads he did where he's he's
got like Spaceman spiff and shit, and it's a lot
more kind of like almost uh uh psychedelic fantastic in

(23:02):
a lot of ways.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
They were also called back to the golden age of
comics when yeah, like, no, you're going to run this
comic the way I present it. You're not going to
butcher up the panels and put different draws. Wagon also
started off as a political cartoonist, so his training is
a lot different and he's yeah, very thick heavy line work.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
Yeah, yeah, and you see Berkeley breadth Breath that is
a kind of in a similar vein where like he
would do especially when he did like Outland and stuff
these like so much more lavish strips that today you
could know, I mean you could, thankfully. One of the
things that I love about online cartooning is you you
do get there's a lot more of that stuff available

(23:40):
if you know where to look for it, because you
can publish anything online if you have like the right
kind of you know, uh platform to put it up on,
as opposed to you know, when you read that book
Waterson did, like the collection of his where he writes
a lot about his background. A lot of it is
him kind of mourning how much comics pages are shrinking,

(24:02):
how much less space there is, how much less like
option for putting in color there is, and how sad
that makes them is a lover of the art form,
and I do think like that's one of the things.
Internetic comics have kind of reversed the slide on to
an extent, which is yeah, makes me happy.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
It is heartbreaking, but it's also like you're on deadlines too.
Like I did a storyline Popeye where I got behind
because like I'm gonna do really hyper detailed art, and
it's like that's great, but you're getting behind and we
have a deadline that this these get in.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, it is one of those like.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
Sorry, no, Yeah, it's just like you know you're being
paid for this, don't You don't have to go beyond it, buddy.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, And I mean obviously, like when you're doing anything
five times a week, like a comic or I don't know,
a news podcast, it will grind you down if you
let it. It's yeah, it's those production schedules quite brutal,
but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Scott does pretty well on this application to a cartooning school,
but the school rejects him for being too young, which
temporarily causes him to give up on his dreams of
being a cartoonist and pick a more attainable life goal.
God he's got, he's like in his early teens. Maybe
at this point I think like, yeah, I don't know.

(25:22):
I think he was just like the way he describes it,
he had kind of because of these other incidents of
like unlikely in his eyes. Yeah, exactly, I found it. Egg,
Surely I'll get into this cartooning.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Look, honey, I found ten dollars in it. I think
I'm ready to replace al Cap.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
Yeah. He always has these like weird leaps in his
head of like, well, because this happened, this seems possible.
But anyway, he gets bummed out, so he decides, I'm
not going to be a cartoonist, and he goes to
the work of kind of like picking another career for himself. Quote.
I looked around my town and learned that exactly two
people had high incomes. One was the only doctor in

(26:02):
town and the other was the only lawyer. I didn't
like touching other people's guts and tendons and whatnot, so
I set my sights on a career in law. He
has always kind of focused in this point at a
job that's going to make him a lot of money.
I do think it's kind of worth noting. And this
is a thing that like he's open about in his
early Dilbert career that like, yes, was always about making

(26:23):
money for me before he kind of gets weirder into
evangelizing some of his spiritual ideas. Nothing.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, always this was a career path he went to.
The diference is Jim Davis is not trying to incite riots.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, Jim Davis has never tried to convince anybody of
his like philosophical conclusions from a career of drawing guard
he seems to have mostly been happy to get. Jim
Davis is one of it, like seems to have a
pretty realistic understanding that like, wow, I've got I made
hundreds of millions of dollars drawing a cat just kind

(27:02):
of kind of let that one ride. Not gonna poke
lady faith too much over this. So in his nearly
unreadable book win Bigley, Scott claims that during this first
period of interest in drawing, he was a regular church goer.
His parents had him attend the Methodist church near their house,

(27:22):
and he claims he started experiencing doubt in his faith
when he noticed that prayer didn't seem to influence what
happened in his life in any way. The tipping point,
as he describes it, is when he heard the story
of Jonah and the Whale. The nut of that story,
if you weren't raised Christian, involves a guy getting stuck
in a whale's belly for three days before he gets
spat out, and he's not dead because God's stuff. Scott

(27:44):
as a little kid is like.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
It's one of those amazing stories in the Old Testament,
Like don't you feel inspired? God's a socialist?

Speaker 1 (27:51):
Yeah? Why would he do that to somebody? That seems yeah,
but Scott has the Scott's problem with it is that like, well,
people couldn't survive being in a whale, so he decides,
you know, that means that the Bible's not real. I
called a meeting with my mother and announced I was
discontinuing my religious education. I explained my new hypothesis that
she and all other believers were being duped for reasons

(28:11):
I couldn't understand, but I planned to get to the
bottom of it. My mother listened to my reasoning, I
acknowledged that I was making a well informed decision, and
never asked me to attend church again. And that's, you know,
fine enough on his mom's behalf. But it's weird to
me the lesson. He always takes such odd lessons from things,
because what he writes about this is according to my
new worldview. I was the only person, as far as

(28:34):
I knew, who could see religion for the scam that
it was. Obviously, there were plenty of non believers in
the world, but they were invisible to me in my
pre internet small town life. And I find that really peculiar.
Not the fact that, like, obviously you're in like the
fifties sixties, you decide you're an atheist, you live in
a small town, pretty good chance that you you know,
might not like know anybody right or like that else

(28:57):
that identifies as an atheist.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Now we're all going to be honest, Like, if you're
a small town like that, you're like, yeah, I'm an atheist.
Oh cool, you're leaving town now.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
Yeah. It's not weird to me that he didn't know
anyone else like that. It is weird that he didn't
know it existed right like that he claimed, because he
basically claims, I didn't realize there were other people who
weren't believers. That seems a little peculiar to me. But
also information was much more difficult to acquire in that era.
So I'll give that one to Scott. What's odd to
me is that the kind of beliefs.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
Oh, I just think I also give parents who will
actively shield their kids from the idea, like you know,
you and I grew up in Texas, and yeah, Texas,
which is a you know the taint of the Bible belt.
You know how it goes parents anything they can to
shield their kids.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, so I'll give him that one, you know, especially
given the ara that he comes up in. But what's
odd to me is that when he decides he doesn't
believe in God, the schema, the belief schema that he
develops for himself is something he later describes as the
alien experiment filter. And it's I don't know, I'm not
I try not to criticize the beliefs of children on

(30:05):
this show, but I'm going to read a quote for
you about Scott deciding what he believes, and you tell
me what you think about this.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
As a parent, I'm happy.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
Yeah, well someone should have done that with Scott. Here
quote the alien experiment filter imagined that intelligent creatures from
another world impregnated my mother so they could find out
what happens when humans and aliens make According to that filter,
the aliens were watching me at all times. That's an
odd thing for a child to decide they believe about

(30:35):
the world. What the fuck the fact that alien impregnation
is involved. Yeah, that's that is a really weirdly specific belief.
It's not like I wonder if I'm an alien, but
like specifically I wonder if the aliens, yeah, like did

(30:56):
it with my mom so that they can see if
it worked. That's peculiar. That is peculiar. No judgment, he's
a kid, but that's weird. That is a little bit
of a weird belief.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
I mean, look, we were weird kids. Our brains went
to weird places. I'm sure if I sat down and
looked at my thoughts like, oh, I can't really judge
them on this one, but as still looking at him.

Speaker 1 (31:18):
Like really, that's yeah, it's about judgments and being being
like scarring. Scott consistently draws strange conclusions. Yeah, so, uh,
you know who doesn't develop strangely elaborate childhood fantasies of
their mother being impregnated by aliens?

Speaker 2 (31:39):
Would it be the sortied gold cellars that might be providing.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
The gold cellars? Definitely do, but like, I don't know,
probably does it right? Is that right, Sophie? Can we
say that or is getting it angry if we say
that they don't have alien impregnation fantasies?

Speaker 3 (31:57):
I don't know. I believed what you just said.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
Fair enough and prague fan it needs to be a thing.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah, yeah, make it happen used chat GPT or whatever
one of the GPPs. Uh get give us, give us
some AI drawings of impregnation, Dilbert fetish ark Dilbert.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Like just birthing a yeah box and.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Don't don't send it to me, send it to Scott Adams.
He'll love that. He's got time. Now he's not cartooning anymore.
He is cartooning still anyway, here's it. Ah, we are

(32:39):
back and we're talking about the Dilbert guy. So he
spends several years believing this alien stuff, but it doesn't
make him happy, so eventually he lands on atheism as
a teenager. Now he claims it like that he decided
to be an atheist because it gave him something to
argue about with people, which does make him ahead of
the curve that movement. Yeah, no, that was me as

(33:03):
a teenage atheist for sure.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Now what's odd about that is that it's not odd
that he's kind of unhappy with that. A lot of
people like have a period when they're younger of atheism
and then move, you know to something else that's like
a thing that happens, Just like people have a period
where they're super Christian or whatever, and then choose something else.
Why Scott is unhappy with atheism specifically is that he
feels like it doesn't let him predict the future. That's

(33:30):
an odd reason to not like atheism to me, I
do so weird. Yeah, that's that's not the point of atheism,
Scott J Yeah. I don't understand why that would be
a thing that you would ever have expected to get
out of atheism. I also don't think that's generally a thing.

(33:53):
There's definitely it's one of the It's one of the
things that's compelling this to me is that it kind
of hints at something that Scott never writes about, which
I've come to suspect, which is that as a kid,
just the culture the community was into was more sort
of into apocalyptic evangelical Christian culture than maybe he lets on.
I don't know this, but it's one of those things

(34:14):
where like most people I know who are like Christian,
who are Muslim, who are Jewish, who are Hindu, who
are you know, zoroastri and whatever, generally like when they
talk about what they get out of faith, it's not
it lets me know the future, Like it lets me
predict the future. But within certain strains of evangelical Christianity prophecy,
the ability of the Bible to be used as a

(34:35):
as a prediction instrument to determine what's going to happen
in the future is a huge deal.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
And that I remember real.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
Things exactly, And that's that's if you're like Catholic, right,
you don't grow up being like the Bible is a
tool that lets me predict the future.

Speaker 4 (34:49):
You know.

Speaker 1 (34:50):
That's not really like a thing for Unitarians or Anglicans
or Episcopalians, which I was, but it is a thing
for that chunk of like Pentecostals, Baptists, a whole bunch
of like chunks of kind of like really kind of
very American sorts of Christianity. Not exclusively, but yeah, that's
kind of a hint I think I have maybe about

(35:10):
like what sort of the surrounding religious culture that Scott
is raised in is Like maybe he doesn't really notice
this much, but the fact that he the fact that
he wants whatever kind of belief system he adopts to
help him predict the future is interesting to me because
you don't run into that with most people, nor should
you yeah, nor should you don't. Yeah, Predicting the futures

(35:30):
not a not a fun business to be in one
way or the other. Take that one from me, folks.
So in nineteen seventy five, s Good graduates high school.
He's about there's about forty people in his graduating class,
and as he notes, it's really easy to excel in
a really small school like that if you work hard
and you've got you've got like a pretty good chance
of being the best at like what everything you're into,

(35:51):
because there's not that many other people. He opted not
to take chemistry or physics in high school instead of
in favor of focusing on a class that was un
common for a man to take in that period, typing.
Now Scott claims he picked typing because it was easy,
and the people who took chemistry got bad grades. Because
typing was so easy, his grades were really good and
he was able to graduate his valedictorian of the class

(36:13):
and get several scholarships. As a young adult, he was
regularly struck by how little use he got out of
chemistry and physics and how often typing came in handy
On that one, he's he's not wrong. The lesson he
takes out of this is like a weird one about
how they're basically a brain hacking thing where it's like, no,
if you like stack, you know, these different talents and

(36:35):
stuff together you can get like we'll get to that
a little bit later. He doesn't just take like, uh
yeah again, He's always kind of like makes these odd conclusions.
Like his conclusion from this is sometimes doing the wrong
thing works out.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
He used to be one of like Andrew Tate's flunkies
more and more.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
Yeah, he's he's got this obsession with like because something
worked out for me. I have been bestowed secret knowledge
as opposed to it like I don't know being Like
when I was a kid, I had this experience of
like I played a lot of online video games, and
my mom and dad were worried about it because they
were like, that's not going to help you, you know,
get a career or succeed. You should be focusing on school.

(37:14):
And as it turned out, playing online video games like
taught me how to touch type, taught me how to
like organize groups of people online, all of these skills
that were most useful in my career. I don't translate
this as like sometimes doing the wrong thing works out.
I translate this as like, sometimes old people don't understand
the world as well as young people, right, Yeah, Like sometimes.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
When you just see how trends are changing.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
That's just the world, right, Like I inherently think TikTok
is silly, but like, obviously it's a huge deal for
a lot of people, and like the fact that, like
I don't know, some kid gets really good at making
TikTok videos and makes a millionaire isn't an example of
them doing the wrong thing, And it's an example of
the world having changed in me being an old man. Now, yeah,

(38:00):
good for that little shit. Yeah, good for that little
piece of shit. Anyway, interesting the way he translates things.
So Scott goes to Hartwick College in New York State
and the major's in economics because he heard it was
good prep for law school and he wanted to understand
how money worked. He only takes one art class in college,
and this time he does really badly at it. There's

(38:22):
more kids in college than he had never been around before,
and a lot of them had spent you know, when
Scott kind of stopped drawing, they'd kept honing their art,
and this is Yeah, it fucked him up. I don't
think that's an uncommon experience.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
Well, also, you go from being a kid in a
small school where you're the art kid, to go to
a place where, oh, this is all the art kids
from all these in the schools. Oh, and they've been
working harder than you. Yeah, that's gonna humble your well,
it should humble you a little bit.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
Yeah, in his case, it seems more like he just
kind of gives up on art. But he does start
to smoke a shitload of weed in his college days.
He was influenced during this period of time when he's
getting high a lot by the realization that people seemed
a lot nicer when he was high. This caused him
to realize that people could experience different realities based on

(39:09):
their perception. Now that's one of the most basic philosophy
things in the world, right, the fact that like reception
alters exactly Like everyone has this realization one way or
the other. So I don't think Scott is like taking
a lot of classes on philosophy. I also don't think
he listens a lot when other people are talking. His

(39:31):
youth seems to have been a process of a precocious kid,
avoiding any reading that might have challenged him and opened
his eyes to thinkers who had had an experimented and
developed these kind of ideas more than maybe he did.
He seems to him be convinced that like, all of
these very normal revelations are him, like inventing the wheel
for himself basically, as opposed to like, I don't know, man,

(39:53):
that's like what happens to everybody when they get high,
Like the fucking billions of people would have experienced Scott,
it's not really weird.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
He obviously feels he's the main character, and therefore every
experience he is the main character, Every expec he has
is him. Yeah, I mean at first it's never oh
shit to other people feel like it's like, no, it's me.
I will educate you on me.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
Yeah, it's interesting he has these perfectly normal experiences and
then that a lot of people have. And like when I,
you know, started taking psychedelics and realized how fragile the
bonds of what we consider reality are and how much
it can be influenced and changed in very fundamental ways
by things that simply altered perception, it was very humbling,

(40:37):
and it caught a lot of things that I had
held on to from my belief systems as a young
person who grew up you know, very right wing and conservative.
Like melted at that point because I realized that all
of this certainty I had been raised with did not
adequately describe the world anymore, and that, I think ever since,
has made me less certain about the things I believe,

(41:00):
because I know how easy it is to influence my
own mind.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
See, I knew it with anxiety. Anxiety to it for me,
I never had to do any drugs. Yes, I just
have absolute fear, NonStop, all time.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Very mind altering drug anxiety. Scott I think mean like
concludes basically, like I I have had a realization that
other people don't have, and so now I like understand
the world at a fundamentally different level, which I is odd.
I wonder how much he spent time like talking to
people while he was high, because again, this is pretty

(41:34):
basic stuff people chat about when they're stoned at nineteen
whatever at them.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
He didn't talk to them, He talked at them if
they said something. He wasn't paying attention because he wasn't talking.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
Yeah, you get that feeling a little bit so age
twenty one, Scott moves to San Francisco after he what
he describes as a near death experience. Again. He's he's
living up in the frigid North. He's driving home one
night it's snowing and you know, it's in the middle
of February, so it's probably below freezing outside, and his
car dies on the highway. He hasn't brought a coat

(42:05):
with him, you know, because he didn't think he was
going to be outside much and because young people are dumb,
and so he winds up being like, I'm gonna freeze
to death in this car unless I can find someone
to rescue me. So he gets out of the car
and he just like sprints down the highway like trying
to find somebody, and you know, eventually gets picked up
and he doesn't die, obviously, but this whole thing terrifies him,
this like brush with death. And he promised himself while

(42:27):
he was like sprinting down the freezing highway that if
he survived, he'd sell his car and buy a ticket
to California, which he does.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
That's a weird fucking leap.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
That is an odd I mean, yeah, I do know.
I will say a lot of people who wind up
in California are there because they grew up in like
Minnesota and were like, never again, never again will I
go through a winter like that.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
I live for nine years, and the idea of having
returned to winter does make my butthole pucker. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:53):
I feel the same way about the fucking Texas summer.
But that's just that's come for all of us now. Yes, so.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
You thought you great gave Robert, No, Robert, we smelled
where you went, We followed the trail.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
Texas comes for us all. So he moves to San Francisco.
He's got a brother there, so he crashes with his brother.
Eventually he gets a job as a bank teller, which
is you know, it doesn't go great for him. He
gets robbed at gunpoint twice. So he decides I'm going
to apply for a management training position. Yeah, no, sounds reasonable, Yeah, no,

(43:27):
normal reactions here. He rises pretty steadily at the bank,
and they kind of he flits around a bunch of
different jobs. He does sometime programming computers, he manages like
a contract negotiation team, and by his own kind of recollection,
he's bad at all of these jobs that like, they
move him to because and he I think this is
pretty reasonable. He's like, yeah, they never kept me because

(43:49):
I was good enough at my job. They kept moving
me to other jobs, but they never give me enough
time there to get good at them. I don't think
that's an uncommon experience people have in the corporate world, definitely.
And he kind of learns as a defensive mechanism during
this period to deflect from his ignorance by developing a
sense of humor that he was able to use to
kind of like please audiences of business executives and make

(44:13):
them maybe less likely to judge him when he's bad
at the stuff that he's doing. This is going to
be an invaluable skill for writing Dilbert quote. Several of
my jobs at the bank involved making presentations to upper management.
I seasoned my presentation with presentations with comics to keep
the audience awake and to have a business reason for
sitting around drawing comics at work. My comics weren't funny

(44:33):
in the haha sense, that's certainly true, Scott, but they
reminded people of their jobs, and that seemed to be enough.
I believe my first published comic was the Mole that
I drew on the cover of the company newsletter. So yeah,
this is kind of how he gets back into cartooning
over the course of a couple of years. There's two
characters that he draws more than the other characters he's doing.

(44:54):
And one of these is like a guy with glasses
and a weird looking tie who's going to become Dilbert.
Another's a daw that's based on his old family dog
that's going to become dog. Those are the I'm be
sure most people are at least vaguely familiar with the
fact that those are the two big characters in his
comic strip. Now, the timing here is a little unclear,
but while this is all going on, as he's kind
of like entering the corporate world, Scott starts experimenting with

(45:18):
hallucinogenic mushrooms. Now, the San Francisco Bay Area is a
wonderful place to experiment with mushrooms, and Scott has a
good time. He came his first trip is like right
after he moves there. He's twenty one years old, and
he says that it's the best day of his life, like,
or at least in two thousand and eight, he wrote
that that was like the best day of his life.
Well he hadn't killed yet, so yeah, yeah, he hadn't

(45:39):
killed anybody yet, he hadn't taken a life. Now, I
don't think that's uncommon. I think a lot of people
look back at like their first time on mushrooms is like, yeah,
it was the best experience of my entire life. Some
people it's the worst. But generally a lot of people
have this experience of it. That's not an uncommon thing.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
I will Scott your knowledge as I have never tond
on any drugs.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
Yeah, I don't like recommended ad hoc to people, but
I mean there's actually data on this, right like they did.
There is this famously, the Good Friday Experiments, where they
give gave mushrooms to a bunch of Divinity students and
like an overwhelming number of them. Twenty years later, we're like, yeah,
it's still one of the most influential spiritual experiences of
my life.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
Any microdosing shrooms, it is supposed to be pretty good
for a lot of like mental health.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
It can be, it can be. It's one of those
things like I'm this is a little off topic of Scott.
I'm very pro people having the right to and experimenting
with hallucinogens, there are. I mean, one of the things
that does increasingly concern me is what we're learning about
the ways in which people who have a family tendency
towards schizophrenia can have schizophrenic breaks as a result of

(46:49):
taking psychedelics or even just marijuana. So whenever I talk
about I do think many, perhaps even most people can
benefit from psychedelics. It all pays to be aware of
your family history and take great care when doing that
stuff because there are potentially consequences with it too. It's important,
not no, yeah, but Scott has a great time, right,

(47:12):
great experience, not an uncommon experience. He benefits from it
by developing an understanding that his own interpretation of reality
is just one of many, and not necessarily the truest one.
That's a good thing to realize about the world. It's
certainly a thing. I think most people who become healthy
adults have some version of this realization. Scott writes it

(47:34):
as a positive realization. But then at the end of
this section of his book Win Bigley, which is a
stupid book about winning arguments and how Donald Trump is
fucking god King, he writes, quote, kids, please don't take drugs.
Drugs can be dangerous. I don't recommend trying marijuana or psychedelics.
You'll get a similar perceptual shift by reading this book.
I designed it to do exactly that. Right now, I

(47:56):
love him.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
I fucking hate him.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
Oh my fucking I know what I just said about
being cautious with drugs. But if your choices between reading
Scott's book and doing drugs choose drugs every time, avoid
Scott's someone.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Needed to be bullied more than I were.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
Too much confidence, too much confidence, Scott Christ Yeah, I
mean what's unsettling to this about this to me is that,
like the lesson Scott gets from mushrooms and the lesson
a lot of people do, is that, like, Wow, the
actual meaning of reality and the nature of it is
actually is extremely open ended and dictated by perception. And

(48:37):
maybe you shouldn't buy into your own bullshit to such
a strong extent or believe anything so strongly because so
much of reality is kind of altered by your brain, chemistry,
by what's in your stomach, all this kind of stuff.
That's a good thing to learn. It's a different thing
to be, like, don't do drugs, kids. I have developed
a way to manipulate your mind using my books. That

(48:58):
works even better.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
That's cult shit.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
That is culty, right, Yeah, that's unsettling as fun.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
That is something I like. I remember a youth minister
when I was a kid telling us that, you know,
we didn't need to try drugs because he could help
us get high on Jesus and be like, I don't
like this guy at all. Yeah, nothing about this is good.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
No, no, And Scott, he kind of stops experimenting with
hallucinogens I think pretty early here and gets really into
something that is not necessarily culty, but it's very cult
adjacent and it's called he gets into a practice of affirmations. Now,
there's nothing wrong inherently with the idea of affirmations. Affirmations

(49:39):
are a practice that's birthed by the New Thought movement,
which in self itself evolved from books like Think and
Grow Rich and The Science of Getting Rich in the
early nineteen hundreds. Yeah, and they're part of a batch
of techniques broadly called neuro linguistic programming by some practitioners.
The basic idea, and I'm flattening a little bit here,
but the basic idea behind an affirm is that if

(50:00):
you regularly repeat what you are going, what you want
to do, what you want to have happen in your life,
some sort of goal or dream, And if you're extremely
specific and extremely consistent about the repute the about like
repeating it, then that will in some way influence the
future and allow you to achieve that goal. Versions and
like this is like the secret, so sacret. Yeah. The

(50:25):
early kind of basic idea is there's nothing inherently like
if you are if your goal is to write a novel,
and every single morning you wake up and write down
on a piece of paper i am going to write
a novel, and you focus on it, you know, for
a minute or two while you're having your coffee, and
that helps you to sit down every day and work
on that novel. Well, that's great, right, that's a perfectly

(50:46):
reasonable thing to do, you know. Or if your affirmation
is I'm gonna you know, get you know this good
at lifting weights, or I'm gonna get this good at drawing,
or I'm gonna learn how to I don't know, fix
engines or whatever, perfectly reasonable. The problem is when people
start to treat them like the secret does like their magic, like,
rather than it just being like, well, focusing your mind
on a task can help you accomplish that task. It's

(51:08):
by telling, by writing down and in this very specific way,
this thing that I want to have happened. I am
altering the universe right in order to like give myself
a thing. That's There's a lot this problematic. There's a
lot that's problematic about the secret, especially when you like
talk to the way people who are into this kind
of stuff sometimes talk about illness right where they're like, oh,

(51:31):
you can overcome you know, your hereditary illness or your
your your chronic illness or whatever via these techniques where
it's like, well, no, no amount of writing affirmations is
going to stop you from being paralyzed, right, That's just
not how it works. Science with a label.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
What the hell?

Speaker 1 (51:49):
Yeah, So I'm not shitting like I know, I know
people who are like, yeah, I do this and it's
just a thing that helps me focus my mind. That's whatever.
That's fine. But Scott takes it in very much like
the secrety direction, where like, I have figured out some
sort of secret way to break the code of the universe. Yeah,
And it's you can see the appeal for a guy

(52:10):
who's whose brain has developed this way because affirmations give
him something that the philosophies he had adhered to earlier
in his life had always lacked, which is a way
of predicting the future and also a way of explaining how,
in his eyes he was consistently the special boy who
succeeded at long odds.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
Which is always goes back to he's the main character.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
Yeah, And I think there's something that's like understandable here
as both you know, you and I are both people
who get to do what we love for a living,
and that's that's that is a tremendous privilege and the
result in addition to the result of hard work always
the result of great fortune, because there's always people who
are skilled and talented who never make it.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
Absolutely, Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
And if you recognize that as as a creative person,
there's a fear in there, right because it means that,
among other things, it means that it could stop working
for you at any point.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
Right, That is very understandable anxiety. I think a lot
of creative hackens, Yeah, because you it is things change,
audience changed, might you know, Yeah, what worked for me
twenty years ago won't work now. I have to constantly
rework and yeah, pushing.

Speaker 1 (53:20):
And most I think most reasonable people in our position,
Like you know, there's a variety of things to look
at it, including well I support a basic income and
stuff like that, uh, universal health care and shit, so
that these fears are at least, you know, less involved with.
Like maybe I will wind up like dying on the
street if my ability to write shit goes away. Scott,

(53:43):
I think takes pivots to like, I need to find
an explanation for how I'm succeed I've succeeded because I've
hacked reality because then it's something that I can keep
doing and it won't ever fall apart on me. Right, Yeah,
Like that's I think, what why he winds up kind
of falling for this stuff? But again, I've gotten ahead

(54:03):
of myself. But you know who's ahead of everything and everyone?

Speaker 2 (54:08):
I would assume, Well, I can't make the joke your
knowledge the child Clington Island jokes they wore, are you No?

Speaker 1 (54:14):
No, no, not not after the FBI busted them. U No, yeah, no,
we'll get in trouble again.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
Okay, sorry. I assume it is the Fine Conveyors of
Products and Services sponsored this program.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
Yep, that's that's wompst we we have on now, so
here we go. Oh we are b a K.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
The best product service I have ever been doing.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
I know I I for one, my nipples are hard
as diamonds right now. So for years Scott put away
his artistic ambitions and focused on his career. He got
an NBA at u C Berkeley while he's still working
for this bank, even though an evening like and it's
through like his bank actually pays for him to start
the programs would actually do that for you. Yeah, stuff

(55:09):
like that happened. He claims he did really well. And
he claims that, but he also claims that, like, I
thought that starting this program would give me more opportunities
for getting promoted, but alas this was not to be.
And here's what he writes. In two thousand and eight,
the media had recently discovered that my employer had virtually
no diversity in management. When an assistant vice principal president

(55:31):
position opened up and I was an obvious candidate for
the spot, my boss called me into her office. I
was the most qualified candidate for the position, she explained,
but because of pressure to be more diverse, there was
no hope for another generic white male to get promoted
anytime soon.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Oh my fucking god, I was Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:48):
It's so this is where we obviously, at this point
in Scott's actual life, he's not saying shit like this, right,
but this is from two thousand and eight when he
makes this claim. But this is where we start to
see like the kind of resentments that are going to
build in him exploding into a racist tirade come from.

(56:09):
And it's interesting. This is the first time Scott would
claim to have been harmed by a diversity program, but
he's going to claim this happens a bunch more times
in his life. In fact, from here on, every setback
in his career, including the failure of the dv of
the Dilbert TV Show, is eventually blamed on the farious
individuals wanting to hire non white people instead of him.

(56:30):
And so it's worth Y's diversity. Yeah, here's a DEI
program that team. It's worth digging because he keeps doing this.
It's worth digging into, Like how credible the claim is
that Scott didn't get a promotion because he was a
generic white man. So the bank he's employed by at
this point it was called Crocker National Bank, and it
was a pretty big institution back in its heyday. In fact,

(56:53):
it was one of the big four banks behind the
construction of the first transcontinental railroad in North America. But
during the time got worked there, it had been outgrown
by a number of more prominent banks. For a time,
it managed to do okay because it had you know,
it was famous for its really good customer service. But
this starts to fall apart in the early nineteen eighties,
along with a lot of stuff. Right, we talk about

(57:14):
this in our Jack Welch episodes. But the eighties is,
andition to being the Reagan era, a real transitory period
for a lot of aspects of the US economy. A
lot of companies that had been huge in the early
nineteen hundreds fall apart.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
Then.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
Yeah, that's I'm old enough to remember, like just how
stressful that was to all adults around me.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
Yeah. And in nineteen eighty one, two years before Scott
starts his NBA, Crocker had been purchased by the British
Midland Bank. This was not a great sign, and its
health as an institution declined throughout the mid nineteen eighties.
Scott claims that he was denied of promotion because of
diversity in nineteen eighty six. That year is also the

(57:55):
year that Crocker Bank collapsed. And it's interesting he acknowledges
it in his book that like a few months after
he quit because he quits because he doesn't get a
promotion and moves to another company. A few months later,
every person in his old group at the bank had
been downsized. And the way he frames this right after
saying that, like he'd been denied a promotion for diversity reasons,
it kind of makes it look that like the firing

(58:17):
of his coworkers was related that, like they did some
purge for diversity purposes. The reality is that Crocker Bank
fell apart, like it collapses the year that he leaves.
He does not lose out on a promotion because of
black people. He loses out on a promotion because the
business falls apart.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
But isn't that how it usually goes? Is like, how
can I retroactively make this The thought, yes, yes, the.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
Other and that is that is exactly the way it
that this is like that it actually happens right Like
the reality at the time is that the bank just
falls apart. He doesn't get a promotion, because like his job.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
It would mean nothing.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
You wouldn't have a job a month anyway, buddy, Yeah,
and and but and and then later he kind of
retroactively decides to blame it on diversity. He moves to
Pacific Bell, where he finishes his MBA, and again he
hopes that because he's got this NBA, he's going to
get promoted rapidly at Pacific Bell. And it's interesting because
when he talks about this, he frames it in a

(59:11):
self deprecating way, saying he did his best to act
like he deserved a better job, and that this act
was convincing enough that he gets put on a short
list for promotion. But then this happens. One day, my
boss called me into his office and informed me that
while I was indeed management material, the company had been
getting a lot of bad press lately about their lack
of diversity and management.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
It's the exact same story.

Speaker 1 (59:33):
Yeah, it's the exact same story, fucking true, Like this
happened in that book he writes A two thousand and eight.
These two stories are like a paragraph away from each other,
Like it's there's no subtlety that Scott is capable of.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
Here if his boss has told him that, like, he
should be smart to say, oh, you're just making him
a fucking excuse, and you're trying to blame someone else.
It's it's like the hole back in the eighties. Hey,
you know Mexico and Japan are taking her job. No,
they're not taking our jobs. They're taking jobs are offered
to them. It's just corporations are sending your jobs away.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
Yeah, it took your job. Yeah, but it's interesting. So
Scott has this habit of like being fake self deprecating,
like self deprecating but not really meaning it, and it
kind of undercuts his point here because he's like, oh,
I hoped I thought I'd tricked him into thinking I
was the best person for this promotion. You know, they

(01:00:26):
didn't know I was really just an idiot. And but
then also I didn't get the job because of diversity.
He's like, well, maybe you just weren't qualified for the job, Scott,
did you ever think of that?

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
At any rate, his response to not getting this promotion
that he apparently felt he deserved was to decide to
stop putting in work at his job beyond the bare minimum. Now, this,
he says, wound up being key to his future success
because now that he's got all this free time, he
starts drawing comics again, and he decides to start publishing them.

(01:00:58):
He has no idea how to do this, so he's
starts writing affirmations again. Now I don't think the affirmations
do much here, but what does do something is that
Scott also takes a practical step towards making his cartoon
dreams of reality. He's watching TV one day and he
comes across a show on a local channel by a
cartoonist named Jack Cassidy that's like about how to draw

(01:01:18):
cartoons and like how the industry works. Scott sees this
kind of by chance. He finds Jack's mailing address and
he writes him a letter being like, Hey, I want
to be a cartoonist. How do I start? And he
encloses some of his comics. And I looked into Jack
Cassidy for this because he's key to Scott's career and
he's actually a pretty interesting guy. He's still alive, or

(01:01:39):
at least according to the Internet, he has been teaching
cartooning and publishing cartoons for decades and decades at this point,
and prior to being a cartoonist and a cartoon instructor.
He spent twenty three years in Army Special Forces, which
is I think not the most common cartoonist background.

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
That is not that is shit. I mean there's a
lot of cartoonists who have been the military, and there's
a lot of military cartoonists. That's a good thing.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
But yeah, yeah, twenty three years in special forces is
a pretty unique background for a cartoon instructor. Guy anyway,
interesting dude, and he also he's like a really nice
person because Scott sends him this letter kind of sight unseen,
and he responds. Casty responds with like this very detailed
letter being like, here are books that you should buy

(01:02:26):
that talk about how the industry works and how to
submit cartoons and to submit packages to different syndicates, a
very like the best advice you could basically get.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
Yeah, a lot of cartoons I've met, unfortunately, yeah, will
not do that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
Yeah. You get the feeling that Jack legitimately loves the
field and wants there to be more people making cartoons.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
I like that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Yeah, great, great, yeah, great guy, as far as I
can for the person. Now, that's yeah, that is the
downside of encouraging people as some of them might be
Scott Adams. But Scott takes his advice. He puts together
like a packet of cartoons and he submits them for
publication at various places, and he gets rejected. Nobody takes

(01:03:10):
his first packet, and again this convinces him to give
up and stop drawing for a while.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
That's just so.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Very normal story.

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people understand that.
Like syndicates, even now, as newspapers are receiving get thousands
upon thousands upon thousands of submissions, and I can't take
more than a handful.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
No, And what's interesting to me here is that Jack
Cassidy understands this, and so a year after Scott mails
him and he sends back this response out of the blue,
without being prompted. Jackson Scott another letter and he's like, hey, Scott,
I was just thinking about you the other day. I
wanted to tell you again. You know, I thought you
were talented, and I thought your packet was really good.

(01:03:52):
And I hope that you're still trying to get published.
We die, Yes, such a nice thing, decent thing to do.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
He is having the best life.

Speaker 1 (01:04:01):
Yeah, I mean, he seems to still be active and stuff.
He's written a bunch of like books on cartooning. Awesome,
a really nice thing to do, and it encourages Scott
to give it another shot. Yeah yeah, I mean, look,
we can't. This is again the downside of encouraging people.
It's like, if you're a if you're a really good
math teacher, you're going to encourage a lot of kids

(01:04:25):
who might otherwise have not liked math to maybe understand
the world on a deeper level. And that's lovely. You
might also be responsible for the next Adam Baum. Like
you can't know, you can't know. You encourage people's speaking. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah tragic. So h Scott takes his advice. He submits

(01:04:49):
a bunch of stuff and yeah. Quote. During this period,
I was drawing pre Dilbert and pre Dogbert comics on
the whiteboard in my cubicle, complete with witty captions about
workplace happenings. Cartoon naturally draw attention, and soon my coworkers
were asking the names of my two regular characters. I
didn't have names for them, so I held a name
the Nerd Contest on my whiteboard. My coworkers would trickle

(01:05:09):
in during the day and write their ideas for names.
The suggestions were traditional nerd sounding names. None of them
stood out until one day my ex boss, Mike Goodwin
walked in, picked up a dry erase marker and wrote, Dilbert.
This was one of those moments where you feel as
if you can see the future. I ended the contest immediately.
It felt as though I was learning the character's name,
not naming him. The name Dilbert fit him so perfectly.

(01:05:30):
I literally got a chill.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
How glory was that fucking office that the Scott's chemical on.

Speaker 1 (01:05:37):
It does seem like a waking nightmare to have that job, even.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
Like the boss is like, shit, I hate me here too, Yeah, Gilbert.

Speaker 1 (01:05:44):
Dilbert Now In a Q and A on Reddit some
years later, Scott would elaborate that the boss who suggested
Dilbert as a name had learned the name from a
World War II era comic published by the Navy. Dilbert
was like the the example bad pilot where they would
be like, don't do what dil it does. Look he's
done this bad thing and it caused this problem, and
it's actually this is still a thing. There exists to

(01:06:06):
this day a Navy pilot training device called the Dilbert Dunker,
which is used. Yeah, it's this weird contraption that they
used to train jet pilots and helicopter pilots in escaping
a submerged craft in the space saying, don't be this
shitty employee. Yeah, yeah, don't you can work. Yeah, it's
kind of it's kind of yeah, don't don't. I think
it's more of a safety thing for the Navy, where

(01:06:27):
it's like, don't do this stuff that will get you
killed because look at you know, and Dilbert's the example.
I'm sure his boss just had the name in his
head from his time in you know, the Navy or
something like that. But whatever, you know. The important thing
about this is that the Navy had an opportunity to
sue Scott Adams and save us all from Dilbert forever,

(01:06:48):
and they failed at their duty to protect this country.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
Why we need to defund there. No, no, not.

Speaker 1 (01:06:55):
People, No, no, no, it's fine.

Speaker 2 (01:06:57):
They're just it's just a nameeetheart And they've been like
they get tao by the Navy. Don't mean sho.

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
Now I'm I'm I'm going after him for this. This
is this is the worst Navy failure since Pearl Harbor.

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
Oh my fucking gun. Okay, let's look back away from you.
You take all of that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:18):
Fuck No, no, no, it's it's fine. Bring it. Bring
it on, navy. I'm on land. You can't do ship.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
He's just like dragging a rowboat down the highway.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
Yeah, sitting in sitting in their aircraft carrier off the
course coast of Oregon, just screaming, you're not allowed on
the dirt, motherfucker. Anyway, whatever Scott Adams back to him.
So Scott's initial comics they're fine, Like I don't know,
they're like they're not uh great or anything. Early Dilbert
is not based around office humor, like the character is

(01:07:55):
an engineer. But that's kind of like what it is.
What's interesting to me is that like his art, his
early art is definitely like a downgrade from the stuff
he was drawing as a kid, because it's also a
lot rougher than it's gonna be really though, it's it's
it's fine, except for his his letterings dog shit, which
is kind of one of the feedbacks he gets from
the syndicate Sophi'll show you one of his early comics here.

(01:08:18):
What's interesting to me, is that like in this packet,
because he provides in that book some of his first packet.
There's some like a couple of political strips and they're
not conservative, Like the one that we're looking at here
is kind of an anti Reagan one making fun of
like the Star Wars missile defense system, like which is
his Yeah, it's terrible letters.

Speaker 2 (01:08:39):
That's weekly newspaper comic lettering.

Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
Yeah, you know, look, everybody goes through a period here either.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
I can't say too much, but Jesus.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
It is compelling to me that like, yeah, oh, early
on he's making fun of like Reagan and the waste
of the Star Wars system. That's interesting. That's that's going
kind of part there's a there's a surprise reveal coming
up here, and it's it's that Scott has uh has
suffered some like kind of sudden shifts in his personality
that this is evidence of. So Scott's pretty bad at

(01:09:13):
naming his characters. To start, his first pick for Dogbrit's
name is dill Dog. He changes this before submitting his passions.
That is, if you're if the name of your character
is just dildo with an extra letter stuck on it,
that is probably not. I couldn't agree more ry save

(01:09:36):
Dill Dog, Jill Dog is.

Speaker 2 (01:09:37):
Going and something positive because will.

Speaker 1 (01:09:42):
He can't stop you. He can't stop you.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
Oh no heirst media can stop me from a love.

Speaker 1 (01:09:49):
Oh no, no no, yeah, I meant for for for something. Yeah,
he has no right.

Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
God damn it. So, oh my Jesus Christ, how did that?

Speaker 1 (01:09:59):
Very very funny, very funny? Like what the fuck that is?
That part's unclear with a with old Scott, But but
we'll talk. He's going to there's gonna be some weird
like in cell adjacent stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:10:11):
Although he gets married a few times remotely.

Speaker 1 (01:10:14):
So by nineteen eighty eight, he's gotten his his package
polished enough. That's I didn't mean it that way. That's
that's that's to send off Gilbert Comics to a syndicate. Now, shockingly,
this isn't again. You just talked about how many submissions
these people get. One of these syndicates responds, He gets

(01:10:35):
a bunch of rejections, and then somebody responds saying they're interested,
and it's Scott. When he sees the syndicate that said
yes to him, has no idea who they are, and
like when he gets on the phone with the representative
is like, yeah, who are you guys? Now, I'm telling
you this basic research due Well, this is particularly galling
because the syndicate who responds that he has never heard

(01:10:58):
of is United Media.

Speaker 4 (01:11:00):
There was they published Peanuts, Like yeah, like I knew
who United Media was as a kid in the mid nineties,
just because like I'd read a bunch of books by cartoonists.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
Like everyone Features at the point, I think they were.

Speaker 1 (01:11:14):
United Features by that point. It's it's the one that
does Peanuts and they did Garfield as well, and Garfield. Yeah,
they're massive. So this is like definitely the luckiest break
this man has ever had in his entire life.

Speaker 2 (01:11:28):
Literally, he got the top of at the time, the
number one break. Who the fuck are you? Assholes?

Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
Yeah, And I will say to his credit when he
gets signed on, he does send a thank you letter
to Jack Cassidy.

Speaker 2 (01:11:42):
Yeah, yeah, that is the first thing that it sounds
like he saw about the person so far.

Speaker 1 (01:11:50):
Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things. I it's it's
unfortunate for us all that Scott wound up having the
career that he had. I do hope Jack cass City
feels good about what he did. Because that was a
legitimately very nice thing to do.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
Again, like, yeah, I agree with him. I like the
idea of more cartoonists. Yeah, but there's that you cannot hear,
ah won't.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
But what if they become Scott.

Speaker 2 (01:12:15):
Adams, gmc eines or alcaf those three are always with
bullets in the chamber waiting to go off.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
That's that's right, Yeah, tragic, So here we go. He
gets signed, Dilbert starts out. By nineteen ninety, it's in
fifty papers. By nineteen ninety one, it hits one hundred.
That sounds like a lot today because there are like
maybe thirty newspapers left in the country and most of
them are just SEO aggregators. But back in nineteen ninety, yeah,

(01:12:46):
that's not like the big comic strips like Fucking Calvin
and hobbsit chit are in like two thousand papers, right,
and it's one of those things. Fifty to one hundred newspapers.
You might make like a couple of grand a year
doing that. You're not gonna make all that much money, right,
It's like it's not a bad, like little side income.
But it is not enough for Scott to quit his
his day job right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
At that point, like it's it's only gotten worse. I'm
sad to say. As the newspapers, it's generally most cartoonists
I have met, unless they're like doing commics like Blondie
or something really cute like legacy comics. I've been around
for a long time. Are Garfield your house? You have
a second job or this is your second job, but

(01:13:27):
this is a main job you do.

Speaker 1 (01:13:30):
Yeah, And that's that's the situation that Scott's in. And
this is a thing like I'm sure most cartoonists who
succeed have this period where he's he's doing five comics
a week, which is a I mean, anyone who's ever
done that grind, I'm sure as you'll say, that's a
hell of a gig like that, that is work.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
He's doing five or six? Was he doing the Mondays
for Saturday?

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
I think he's doing just Monday through Saturday, but it
might actually be.

Speaker 2 (01:13:55):
Sunday.

Speaker 1 (01:13:57):
And then he's also he's doing in addition to doing Dilbert,
he's also working like a full time gig. Yeah, that
is he is hard, running himself pretty ragged, and he's
kind of he's getting frustrated because three four years go
by and Dilbert's not really a big deal and he's
not making that much money out it's kind of exhausting,

(01:14:18):
and he's starting to worry that, like, is this something
that's never going to turn into anything more than a
side gig for me? And so it's during this period
that he makes a decision that's going to probably wind
up being the actual smartest thing he ever did, which
is Scott, being kind of a nerd, has gotten interested
in the Internet before most people, and so, in like
I think it's something like nineteen ninety two or ninety three,

(01:14:41):
he starts sticking his AOL address on his cartoons and
this lets his readers email him with ideas for the
strip and requests for more of the stuff that they like,
and he notices all of the people reaching out to me,
like the comic strips I do that are like office humor.
Maybe I should refocus the comic around just sort of

(01:15:02):
office jokes, and so he does. In nineteen ninety four,
he publishes his first book of cartoons, and it sells
well enough that Dilbert's now in four hundred newspapers, and
the comic starts to hit critical mass right as a
few other things happen that Scott had nothing to do with.
One of them is that the early nineties are a
period in which everyone else on Wall Street is following

(01:15:22):
in Jack Welch's footsteps. They're firing huge chunks of their
workforce to pump up the stock price. Layoffs are this
massive thing, and also the dot com boom is just
starting to kick off, right, Yeah, And this leads to
in addition to making a lot of money for some people,
it leads to a bunch of the dumbest ideas for
companies that have ever existed, right, a lot of real

(01:15:45):
stupid businesses starting the mid now.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
We are definitely a lot of I was becoming an
adult at this point in time. Yeah, getting on the web.
It's like, why the fuck do you need that? Who
is the market?

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
And so, because while all this is happening, he's getting
feedback from workers who like his comics and are dealing
with these irritations in their jobs, and they're like, hey,
you should do a comic about you know, the layoffs
that just hit this coming. You should do a comic
about this really dumb you know tech idea, Right, And
so he starts doing all this stuff, and it causes
him to kind of go a very early equivalent of

(01:16:18):
viral with a lot of workers. Right, yeah, I mean no, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:16:25):
It just was and blonding. Yeah, Dagwood has office, but
we don't really even know what kind of office Dagwood works,
and we just.

Speaker 1 (01:16:32):
I assume some sort of sandwich related job. So early
Dilbert cartoons mock incompetent managers and all that kind of stuff.
Scott notes, quote Dilbert became shorthand for bad management, oppressed
cubicle workers in high tech life. Readers imbued Dilbert with
their own meaning beyond anything I had intended for it.
And this is kind of why a lot of people

(01:16:53):
early on think that Dilbert is kind of anti capitalist
or at least anti corporate. Is as Scott notes, it's
them putting reading into the comics something he had never meant,
because he just is sort of tapping into the frustrations
people have, but he doesn't he's not doing he's not
motivated to do that. His readers tell him he should
do that, and he's smart enough to be like, oh,

(01:17:13):
maybe I should like feed this sort of hunger within
my audience, But it's not actually based on something that
he super strongly believes, because again Gilbert initially had not
been about that at all. That is kind of a
crucial thing to recognize, and I think it's sort of
it's part of why some people wind up being kind
of confused by why Scott goes the way that he does.

(01:17:34):
In nineteen ninety five, Scott gets his biggest break because
the saddest day of my entire childhood happens and Bill
Watterson announces that Calvin and Hobbes is coming to an end. Man,
that is the most I remember crying as a little kid.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
I think five of the year. Also that Gary Larson
said for the second time he was doing the Far
Side walked away, Like.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
Yeah, I think it's right. The day the comics died
a rough time for lovers and.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
Then it was not a fun I know. I think
that was also the year This is probably more for
me than anyone else, like Floyd Norman stopped doing the
Mickey Mouse comic. Yeah, that was not a funny year.

Speaker 1 (01:18:13):
No, It's one of those things, you know, that's a
lot to take it once as a kid who likes comics.
The older I've gotten, the more grateful I am that
Waterson did what he did because it was kind of
a lesson, especially as as things have gone the way
they've gone with a lot of the entertainment industry and
the creative industry. I think the most valuable lesson a

(01:18:34):
man in his unparalleled position could have given kids, which
is like sometimes it's okay to say enough.

Speaker 2 (01:18:41):
Yeah, yeah, that is I think a very important lesson
and on it. Let's be real. Yeah, he and Syndicate
were at each's throat at that point in time. No. Yeah,
if he had kept doing the comic like he was
taking more and more breaks, they were doing more and
more reruns at that point in time too, it would
just only gotten worse.

Speaker 1 (01:18:59):
Yeah, yeah, so I anyway, but at the time, this
works out incredibly well for Scott because without you know,
we just talked about how many cancelations there were. Dilbert suddenly,
like a lot of comic like a lot of newspapers
are like, well, we've got all these holes suddenly in
our lineup. Oh and this Dilbert comic just published a

(01:19:22):
book and its circulation doubled. Maybe we'll pick it up too, right,
So suddenly hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of papers start
adopt like bringing in Dilbert because they don't have anything
else now. Scott claims in his two thousand and eight
book that this led to a surge of purchases for
the strip, which allowed him to quit his day job. Quote.
People often ask if I quit or was fired. It

(01:19:43):
was a little of both. In the final few years
of my day job, Dilbert had turned me into a
minor celebrity among technology workers. My coworkers found my fame
useful in attracting customers to the lab to see Pacific
Bell's latest offerings. By then, Dilbert was consuming too much
of my time for me to be effective at my
day job. It was clear I would soon need to
quit or be fired. That's when my coworker, Anita Freeman,
who was the prototype for the Alice character, suggested a

(01:20:05):
deal with our bosses consents. She and my other coworkers
in the lab offered to pick up my slack anytime
I needed to leave work for Dilbert reasons. In return,
I agreed to schmooze customers who were Dilbert fans. As
part of that understanding, I told my boss anytime the
arrangement didn't work for him and he needed the budget
for a better purpose. I would be happy to leave,
and eventually he took me up on the offer. Now,

(01:20:26):
if that's true, that's again an example of how lucky
Scott has been with the people in his life. Yeah,
contributed massively to all success. Would like, yeah, hey, dude,
I think because other job is more important to you. Yeah,
I have worked too, but I'll do your work.

Speaker 2 (01:20:39):
What the fuck? Wow, that's either the kindest coworker or
a big crock of shit.

Speaker 1 (01:20:46):
Yeah, it's one of the two. And it's it's again,
it's so interesting to me that he becomes so obsessed
with like the secret like universe hacks that allowed him
to succeed, when it's like, no, you succeeded because a
lot of really nice people gave you, which is, by
the way, why anyone succeeds in a creative profession.

Speaker 2 (01:21:03):
You know, of us have had at least one person says,
you know what, I think you should. We should take
a chance on you. Yeah, let me share your link,
let me do this, let me do this.

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
Absolutely huge part of success and a creator. I mean, honestly,
just for me, I would never have had a writing
career if it hadn't have been for like this adult
who was a friend of mine in World of Warcraft,
who like, I sent a piece of fiction i'd written,
and she was like, you know, because every other adult
in my life was like, yeah, don't rely on writing
as a career, and she was like, oh, you should

(01:21:32):
do this for a living. And you know, sometimes that's
all it fucking takes, but it's always the result not
just of hard work, but of like getting fucking lucky.
Scott clearly got lucky, although I do suspect this specific
story is a lie and kind of a baffling one,
because the evidence suggests Scott was in fact laid off
for cost cutting reasons, per an interview he gave to

(01:21:52):
the Sacramento Bee in nineteen ninety five. I don't get
why he would kind of make up this more elaborate
story like they were mass lefs at pack Bell and
he got, you know, canned by them, and the story
of getting canned in layoffs as the deliberate guy is
actually kind of more compelling to me than like this
weird arrangement. But I don't know, maybe parts of it

(01:22:12):
are true.

Speaker 2 (01:22:13):
It's unclear to make him the special boy.

Speaker 1 (01:22:16):
Yeah, yeah, as opposed to like, yeah, it's special.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
Boy Scott, and everyone knows that special boy Scott is
supposed to save us, yeah, from diversity, so therefore we
must all make sacrifices for him.

Speaker 1 (01:22:28):
Yeah, it's he's He's definitely Again, it's kind of more
main character syndrome type stuff at this point in Scott's career. Again,
if you thought it all about his probable politics, you'd
probably suspect maybe he was kind of a vaguely progressive
guy because of how critically is of aspects of how
businesses work. But Adams makes it clear again he never
meant it as anything but like shallow humor kind of

(01:22:50):
often brought to him by his readers, and he was
surprised that people read more into his work, and this
attracted some early criticism for Scott. In nineteen ninety seven
named Norman Solomon, who's a journalist and a media critic,
wrote a book called The Trouble with Dilbert. Solomon's kind
of an interesting dude. He got surveilled by the FBI
when he was fourteen for protesting to desegregate an apartment

(01:23:12):
complex in Maryland, which is pretty cool. In nine, Yeah,
in ninety nine, he won an Orwell Award for a
collection of columns on deceptive media, and then in ninety
seven he writes this book. I mean, that's a couple usually,
but in ninety seven he writes this book about Dilbert.
And by this point, by ninety seven, Dilbert is like
one of the biggest comic strips on the planet. Scott
Adams is a new, very new millionaire at this point,

(01:23:35):
and because the strips are so popular, not only is
he in a bunch of newspapers, but businesses. All these
corporations that he had been like mocking and making fun
of have adopted Dilbert. Like people are paying to use
Dilbert as an advertisement for their company, right, which is
kind of weird if you think about sort of some
of the messages that were in the early Delbert comics.

(01:23:56):
And Solomon's book criticizes Adams for using Dilbert to improve
the bottom line of the corporations he purported to mock,
write and quote, Dilbert Masquerades is the ultimate response to
our predicament in a corporatized workplace in world. But it's
a counterfeit kind of rebellion. It marks the supposed outer
boundary of opposition to corporate machinery. But in fact, what
Dilbert teaches through example is that the best we can

(01:24:17):
hope for is a cynical aside and an acid quip.

Speaker 2 (01:24:21):
I know he's not wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:24:23):
I don't think he's wrong. I will say, you know,
I think Solomon's probably a pretty cool dude based on
his background. This is a silly choice. I think writing
an entire book of why Dilbert's not really like a
leftist master that's a little silly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
I mean, I'm sure thought was procressive, but I don't
think anyone thought he was going to be the left. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:46):
Yeah, nobody thought Dilbert was there to bring down capitalism.
It's a little like a horrible.

Speaker 2 (01:24:57):
Man.

Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
I didn't really expect that from from Hagar. It's it's funny,
but anyway, I think most people, especially most people who
are now multi millionaires because of their doodles, would be like, oh,
you know, a guy had a criticist, what whatever. I'm
still like rich and successful. This is not has no
impact on me. Scott in this kind of is the

(01:25:18):
first show of the kind of dude he is. Cannot
get over this. He responds in an interview with the
La Times, dilvert is just a way to make people
laugh so they will transfer their money to me. I'm
in the business of writing funny little things that Phillips
space in the newspaper, and when I get away with it,
writing funny little books that people will buy. And again,
like that response in and of itself is okay, but

(01:25:40):
Scott can't let it go. He keeps writing about Norman's
criticism of him, and eventually he publishes a whole book
the next year called The Joy of Work that has
this super long Remember as a kid, I read this
book is like a ten year old, and you know
it's a bunch of like funny jokes about like offices,
and then there's this long diatribe about Norman Solomon and

(01:26:02):
how dishonest and evil he is and like how fucked up,
Like Scott's mocking him for like how badly his book sold.
It was the guy who who Michael Crichton.

Speaker 2 (01:26:15):
Made one critics into a choldlustern a book.

Speaker 1 (01:26:19):
Yeah with a and he's he lengthily describes how small
the man's penises. Yeah, okay, yeah, what like what very
why do this?

Speaker 4 (01:26:28):
Why?

Speaker 2 (01:26:28):
I write an entire chapter by time YEA about you.

Speaker 1 (01:26:31):
It's it's interesting because they are both like right wing
guys who were very convinced of their own brilliance to
such an extent that they like rejected very basically accurate
like factual things like climate change. And it is interesting
to me that, like you've got these two right wing
guys who get successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Speaker 2 (01:26:52):
All still such a nerds can't stop masturbating over and you.

Speaker 1 (01:26:56):
They but they still any criticism makes them lose their mind.
And it's like, I don't know, Like for like Michael
Cran's like, man, you wrote Jurassic Park, why do you
give a ship that somebody gave a book a bad review?
Like you're literally Michael Crichton, like that's fine.

Speaker 2 (01:27:11):
Tears on these one hundred dollars bills that stuff my
pillow at night.

Speaker 1 (01:27:15):
Like I can fucking log onto Twitter at any point
and find people saying that like I'm a fucking CIA
agent and like a piece of shit, My podcast terrible,
And it's like I don't know whatever, man, Like you know,
like to quote from a ska musician, I love no
matter what you do, it's going to piss people off.

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
Everyone loves me. Yeah, yeah, I do not have neo conservatives,
and I'll write people in my emails, yeah, wishing death
on my child at all because I draw a pop by. Nope,
it never has.

Speaker 1 (01:27:46):
You definitely have left wing creatives who kind of can't
get over criticism too. So I'm not saying yeah, yeah, yeah,
top my head, but it does seem to be I
think it for whatever reason, it happens to a lot
of these right wing guys who have a lot less
overall criticism to deal with, Like Scott is not being
deluged in hate mail. One kind of weird dude writes

(01:28:09):
a book about Dilbert that doesn't sell very well, and
he he never gets over it, like he is obsessed
with this years later.

Speaker 2 (01:28:17):
Still is it because the time he wasn't special boy Scott?

Speaker 1 (01:28:21):
Yeah, I think it's also it's like the first time
that he had to analyze if like he was what
he was doing or someone had someone was trying to
like critically analyze his work, and like when you critically
analyze somebody's work, you will notice like flaws in it
and stuff like I've read I've read critical analysis of
my work that and had to be like Oh you

(01:28:42):
know what, I may I may actually alter some things
about what I've done because or what I'm doing in
the future, because I think this person has a point,
you know, you.

Speaker 2 (01:28:51):
Like, everyone can improve and all criticism is hatred.

Speaker 1 (01:28:56):
Yeah, and I think that for Scott, the fact that
criticism exists is again it puts him back in this
comfortable place of wondering, maybe what I'm doing won't always work,
maybe I won't always be beloved and famous for my
creative stuff, and he can't handle that fear. I do
think it all comes down to that for him. Yea

(01:29:17):
and yeah, and that's what this episode comes down to.
This has been part one of the Scott Adams series, Randy.
This wound up being more than I had accepts. I
talk too much and I'm probably no, no, no, no, no, no
thank you, No, I'm oh, Randy, you got any pluggables
to plug?

Speaker 2 (01:29:34):
Yes? I draw an online comic called Something Positive. That's
Something Positive dot Net. It'st It started off as a
bunch of dick jokes. Now it's aging in anxiety and
dick jokes. And I also draw the Sunday Popeicomic at
comics Kingdom dot com. Slash Popeye. Also on Tuesdays and Thursdays,

(01:29:55):
there's a future called all of Them Popeye. All the
Tuesday strips are drawn by Shania I'm in amazing cartoonist
who also work on Spider Ham and I do the
Thursday strips that focus on Popeye and his family. And
I guess if you want to scream at me online,
go to the Twitter account to schuber c h O
O C h O B A R and uh, just

(01:30:17):
tell me how much you wish I would die, because
why not?

Speaker 1 (01:30:21):
Yeah? And I think what you should do is instead again,
either use your own drawing skills, or if you want
to stick it to those those fat cat artists, use
an AI generator and create some some unsettling Delbert pornography
to share with our friend Scott.

Speaker 2 (01:30:40):
I think this weekend just for you, I'm going to
draw Dilbert and cragg Art just for you.

Speaker 1 (01:30:46):
Yes, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:30:47):
I thank you right now because I draw on my
computer and I'm doing this. But I will definitely just
for you. I will not not for Sophie, so has
done nothing to deserve this.

Speaker 3 (01:30:57):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:30:58):
If you can I do. My only request is that
if you're doing Dilbert alien impregnation, fetish art. I think
the right alien is wharf Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:31:07):
God, yeah, you know what Michael Dorn would tap that.

Speaker 1 (01:31:11):
Michael Dorn would tap Sure, I mean, who wouldn't.

Speaker 2 (01:31:15):
Michael Dorn can do what he wants. I mean, yeah, exactly,
men's voice alone.

Speaker 1 (01:31:19):
Yeah, gorgeous, Gilbert. Gilbert's a lucky man.

Speaker 3 (01:31:22):
As what I'm saying, Well, that was a pretty cool episode, Robert.
But do you know what's cooler? No, it would be
our Cooler Zone Media, our premium ad free channel, now
available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 (01:31:40):
Wow, Sophie, that sounds like something that allows you to
pay money and no longer hear ads. Is that basically
what we're doing here?

Speaker 3 (01:31:48):
That is the gist of it. We will also have
exclusive Q and a's with you Robert Evans and me,
Sophie Lichterman on this very podcast, and also lots of
other things add free, our entire our entire catalog of
cool Zone Media shows and ongoing new episodes. Add free.

Speaker 1 (01:32:12):
Stop bitching about the gold ads. You don't have to
listen to them anymore, hey us, However many dollars it
takes I don't know, so more ads?

Speaker 3 (01:32:21):
So open, so open your Apple Podcasts app search for
cooler Zone Media and subscribe today.

Speaker 2 (01:32:30):
I'm going to.

Speaker 3 (01:32:31):
Thanks Randy, I hate myself Goodbye. Behind the Bastards is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool
Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: How The Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind