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 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.
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
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?
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.
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 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?
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, 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.
Ah, I know Elkman, I didn't realize that.
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.
I think oh man, so uh yeah.
That song fuck you. Yeah.
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.
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.
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, 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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
Not go for the Brown family, and they've had a lot.
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 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, 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 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.
As I hate sand moment.
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.
Oh Jesus Christ, Ratbert and like just have like weird animation. M M.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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, 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, if you like Farside, you should check out Gayhan Wilson's stuff.
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.
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.
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.
That's awesome.
Fucking hated him. It was beautiful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I will say, in the fifties, if you had a good comment, yeah, it was great.
Yeah, in the fifties, yes, chastically.
Yeah.
You don't hear a lot of people being like I want to get rich. I'm gonna I'm gonna get into comics.
Not a lot of smart people anyway.
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.
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.
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 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, 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.
He's one of the last of the original Yeah.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear that.
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.
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 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 always loved him a lot.
The influence Cracked again.
Yeah yeah, yeah, this is the only time. That was the one influence Mad hat on cra.
Ford from the head of Zeus one day.
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.
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.
Yeah, exactly, it was.
It was.
It was really special for a while. You know. Now now it's yet another zombie brand, but boy in its day.
Ye.
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, 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 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,
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, but it's going to metastasize into something like oh, okay, good, okay good. Yeah, that is a weird way to think about it.
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.
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.
Yeah.
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 he says is what gave him a taste for fame. It also furthered his.
Don't again everything. It's just like, uh, he's that shitty kid who's like, I'm getting attention?
Yeah?
Can I get more attention?
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.
Partony wants to say, oh, say a lesser being shame, But you know what, some people will enjoy that.
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 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 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.
It's not like he is trying to solve some weird riddle like yeah, yeah.
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 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 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. 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.
Because he gave Scott Adams hope.
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.
He's actually putting the effort in. I give him that.
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.
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.
No, yeah, it's like not like Sophie, scroll down, show him the geloppee because like the perspective on the car.
Is also cars are not easy, so.
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 shows that he's got some some more some deep or at least had at some point like deeper technical ability.
It's interesting, like you need to learn the basics before you create your style. Yeah, early Schultz versus what Panis was.
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 a lot of ways.
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.
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 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, 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.
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.
Yeah, it is one of those like.
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.
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.
Oh.
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. 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.
Look, honey, I found ten dollars in it. I think I'm ready to replace al Cap.
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 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 money for me before he kind of gets weirder into evangelizing some of his spiritual ideas. Nothing.
Yeah, always this was a career path he went to. The diference is Jim Davis is not trying to incite riots.
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 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, 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 as a little kid is like.
It's one of those amazing stories in the Old Testament, Like don't you feel inspired? God's a socialist?
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 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 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 that identifies as an atheist.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
As a parent, I'm happy.
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 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 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.
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.
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?
Would it be the sortied gold cellars that might be providing.
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?
I don't know. I believed what you just said.
Fair enough and prague fan it needs to be a thing.
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.
Like just birthing a yeah box and.
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 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 a teenage atheist for sure.
Yes.
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 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.
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 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 as a prediction instrument to determine what's going to happen in the future is a huge deal.
And that I remember real.
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.
You know.
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 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 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,
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
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 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.
He used to be one of like Andrew Tate's flunkies more and more.
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.
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.
When you just see how trends are changing.
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, 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 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.
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.
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
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 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, 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.
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.
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, 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, because I know how easy it is to influence my own mind.
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.
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 basic stuff people chat about when they're stoned at nineteen whatever at them.
He didn't talk to them, He talked at them if they said something. He wasn't paying attention because he wasn't talking.
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 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 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.
That's a weird fucking leap.
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.
I live for nine years, and the idea of having returned to winter does make my butthole pucker. Yeah.
I feel the same way about the fucking Texas summer. But that's just that's come for all of us now. Yes, so.
You thought you great gave Robert, No, Robert, we smelled where you went, We followed the trail.
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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.
I will Scott your knowledge as I have never tond on any drugs.
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.
Any microdosing shrooms, it is supposed to be pretty good for a lot of like mental health.
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
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,
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
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 love him.
I fucking hate him.
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.
Needed to be bullied more than I were.
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 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 works even better.
That's cult shit.
That is culty, right, Yeah, that's unsettling as fun.
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.
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 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 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 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
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 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, 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.
What the hell?
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 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.
Which is always goes back to he's the main character.
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.
Absolutely, Yeah, absolutely.
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.
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.
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, 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 of myself. But you know who's ahead of everything and everyone?
I would assume, Well, I can't make the joke your knowledge the child Clington Island jokes they wore, are you No?
No, no, not not after the FBI busted them. U No, yeah, no, we'll get in trouble again.
Okay, sorry. I assume it is the Fine Conveyors of Products and Services sponsored this program.
Yep, that's that's wompst we we have on now, so here we go. Oh we are b a K.
The best product service I have ever been doing.
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
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 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.
Oh my fucking god, I was Yeah.
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. 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. 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, 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 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.
Then.
Yeah, that's I'm old enough to remember, like just how stressful that was to all adults around me.
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
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 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.
But isn't that how it usually goes? Is like, how can I retroactively make this The thought, yes, yes, the.
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.
It would mean nothing.
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 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.
It's the exact same story.
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.
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.
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 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?
Yeah?
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. 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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, a lot of cartoons I've met, unfortunately, yeah, will not do that.
Yeah. You get the feeling that Jack legitimately loves the field and wants there to be more people making cartoons.
I like that.
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 his first packet, and again this convinces him to give up and stop drawing for a while.
That's just so.
Very normal story.
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.
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. And I hope that you're still trying to get published.
We die, Yes, such a nice thing, decent thing to do.
He is having the best life.
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 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 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 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. I literally got a chill.
How glory was that fucking office that the Scott's chemical on.
It does seem like a waking nightmare to have that job, even.
Like the boss is like, shit, I hate me here too, Yeah, Gilbert.
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 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 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, and they failed at their duty to protect this country.
Why we need to defund there. No, no, not.
People, No, no, no, it's fine.
They're just it's just a nameeetheart And they've been like they get tao by the Navy. Don't mean sho.
Now I'm I'm I'm going after him for this. This is this is the worst Navy failure since Pearl Harbor.
Oh my fucking gun. Okay, let's look back away from you. You take all of that.
Fuck No, no, no, it's it's fine. Bring it. Bring it on, navy. I'm on land. You can't do ship.
He's just like dragging a rowboat down the highway.
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 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. 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.
That's weekly newspaper comic lettering.
Yeah, you know, look, everybody goes through a period here either.
I can't say too much, but Jesus.
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 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 Dill Dog, Jill Dog is.
Going and something positive because will.
He can't stop you. He can't stop you.
Oh no heirst media can stop me from a love.
Oh no, no no, yeah, I meant for for for something. Yeah, he has no right.
God damn it. So, oh my Jesus Christ, how did that?
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.
Although he gets married a few times remotely.
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 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 of is United Media.
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.
Like everyone Features at the point, I think they were.
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.
Literally, he got the top of at the time, the number one break. Who the fuck are you? Assholes?
Yeah, And I will say to his credit when he gets signed on, he does send a thank you letter to Jack Cassidy.
Yeah, yeah, that is the first thing that it sounds like he saw about the person so far.
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.
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.
But what if they become Scott.
Adams, gmc eines or alcaf those three are always with bullets in the chamber waiting to go off.
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, 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.
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 this is a main job you do.
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.
He's doing five or six? Was he doing the Mondays for Saturday?
I think he's doing just Monday through Saturday, but it might actually be.
Sunday.
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, 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, 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 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 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 stupid businesses starting the mid now.
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?
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 viral with a lot of workers. Right, yeah, I mean no, yeah, exactly.
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.
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 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, 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.
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.
I think five of the year. Also that Gary Larson said for the second time he was doing the Far Side walked away, Like.
Yeah, I think it's right. The day the comics died a rough time for lovers and.
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.
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 man in his unparalleled position could have given kids, which is like sometimes it's okay to say enough.
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.
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
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 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 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, 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.
What the fuck? Wow, that's either the kindest coworker or a big crock of shit.
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.
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.
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
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
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 are true.
It's unclear to make him the special boy.
Yeah, yeah, as opposed to like, yeah, it's special.
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.
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 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 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, 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.
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 hope for is a cynical aside and an acid quip.
I know he's not wrong.
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.
I mean, I'm sure thought was procressive, but I don't think anyone thought he was going to be the left. Yeah.
Yeah, nobody thought Dilbert was there to bring down capitalism. It's a little like a horrible.
Man.
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 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
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 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.
Made one critics into a choldlustern a book.
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?
Why?
I write an entire chapter by time YEA about you.
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.
All still such a nerds can't stop masturbating over and you.
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.
Tears on these one hundred dollars bills that stuff my pillow at night.
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.
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.
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 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.
Still is it because the time he wasn't special boy Scott?
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 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.
Like, everyone can improve and all criticism is hatred.
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 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?
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, 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 tell me how much you wish I would die, because why not?
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.
I think this weekend just for you, I'm going to draw Dilbert and cragg Art just for you.
Yes, thank you.
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.
Thank you.
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.
God, yeah, you know what Michael Dorn would tap that.
Michael Dorn would tap Sure, I mean, who wouldn't.
Michael Dorn can do what he wants. I mean, yeah, exactly, men's voice alone.
Yeah, gorgeous, Gilbert. Gilbert's a lucky man.
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.
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?
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.
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I'm going to.
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.