Speaker 1: Ah, what's Scott my at? What's Dilbert my guide? Is
Speaker 1: probably the way we should introduce this because if I
Speaker 1: say Scott Adams is the subject of today's episode, like
Speaker 1: sixty percent of people are going to go huh uh.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to say this is an episode about
Speaker 1: the Dilbert Guy. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
Speaker 1: about terrible people. Now listen, folks, I know what you're
Speaker 1: all saying, the Dilbert guy. Didn't he just draw comics?
Speaker 1: How could he be one of the worst people in
Speaker 1: all of history? And the answer to that question is
Speaker 1: because he irritates me, Like yes, let's let's let's clear
Speaker 1: the air here. We're talking about a guy who has
Speaker 1: drawn cartoons. He's not a well, he did kill one
Speaker 1: guy maybe by an action. We'll get to that, but
Speaker 1: we're not talking about like a war criminal or a dictator.
Speaker 1: But he's a really unpleasant man. And the way in
Speaker 1: which he lost his mind and became even more unpleasant
Speaker 1: and eventually had a racist breakdown that got his comic
Speaker 1: strip removed from like a thousand newspapers is super interesting.
Speaker 1: So that's that's who we're talking about today. And in
Speaker 1: order to help me peruse the life of Scott Adams,
Speaker 1: flip through it like a collection of Gilbert comic books
Speaker 1: or comic strips. I have Randy mill Holland. Randy is
Speaker 1: the author and illustrator of the Something Positive web comic
Speaker 1: which I've been reading off and on for like a decade,
Speaker 1: and he is now legally the legal recognized guardian of
Speaker 1: Popeye the Sailor. Randy, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2: I'm fine, Thank you so much. And I feel like
Speaker 2: I should say, to keep being fired that my opinions
Speaker 2: are my own and in no way reflect King Feature
Speaker 2: Syndicate or their parent company Hurst, just to kind of
Speaker 2: save my ass. But yes, I do in fact own Popeye.
Speaker 2: I am destroying him according to everyone who reads Boat part.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, you have been a you have been a
Speaker 1: professional cartoonist for longer than I've been doing just about anything.
Speaker 1: And you also have one of the things because like
Speaker 1: obviously with webcomics, there's a lot of people who have
Speaker 1: been professionally cartooning, but who don't have kind of experience
Speaker 1: with the syndicates or with you know, kind of the
Speaker 1: old traditional any of the old traditional structures of like
Speaker 1: newspaper cartoons, and you've kind of got your foot in
Speaker 1: both of those worlds, which I think will probably be
Speaker 1: helpful for context on this stuff. So I wanted to
Speaker 1: start by asking, what do you think about Scott Adams?
Speaker 1: Where have you been on Scott most of your life?
Speaker 2: Most of my life I've managed to avoid him, Like
Speaker 2: in a friend of mine introduced me to his comic
Speaker 2: in ninety five or so, one of his books, my
Speaker 2: friend Eileen's, because I was We met through computer Bulltromport
Speaker 2: Systems because I am old, and she was like, well,
Speaker 2: you like text shit, so you'll enjoy Dilbert. And I
Speaker 2: read a page of it and said, I do not,
Speaker 2: in fact enjoyed Dilibert, And to read it further, I
Speaker 2: remember it replaced Pogo in the fort Restar Telegram, which
Speaker 2: annoyed me a little bit, And then I remember the
Speaker 2: TVC is. The opening song was Danny Elton's theme from
Speaker 2: Forbidden Zone, a movie his brother made.
Speaker 1: Ah, I know Elkman, I didn't realize that.
Speaker 2: He made public accounts. Yeah, it's a repurposed theme song
Speaker 2: from a movie that Richard Elfman made with the Knights
Speaker 2: of Aungo Bongo in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: I think oh man, so uh yeah.
Speaker 2: That song fuck you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's the musical equivalent of one of those like glass
Speaker 1: soda bottles that's got like a ring around it because
Speaker 1: it's been recycled so many times.
Speaker 2: Just shaking the theme song out like no, no, no, this
Speaker 2: will be fine, this will work for Delberton show. Ye,
Speaker 2: honestly it did. It was better it was. That song
Speaker 2: was probably the best part of that show. Years later,
Speaker 2: I know he made some song accounts to defend himself
Speaker 2: and then he hated black people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he so. Kind of the thing about Scott is
Speaker 1: that he was a successful cartoonist and there was not
Speaker 1: much that you would note about him other than that
Speaker 1: if you weren't super paying it, if you paid attention
Speaker 1: to Scott because I as a kid read not just
Speaker 1: his comics but a bunch of his nonfiction books, if
Speaker 1: you paid a lot of attention to him, there were
Speaker 1: there have always been some weird things that you would notice,
Speaker 1: but it was just kind of like, oh, that's an
Speaker 1: odd thing to believe. Oh, that's an odd thing to believe.
Speaker 1: And then about five years ago he really pretty sharply
Speaker 1: started getting very racist and very bigoted and super right
Speaker 1: wing and kind of at the same time convinced himself
Speaker 1: that like he had discovered the kind of almost supernatural
Speaker 1: secret secrets to persuasion, and it was his job to
Speaker 1: explain how Donald Trump was ushering in like a new
Speaker 1: era for humanity by his magical persuader skills. This is
Speaker 1: all like his kind of heel turn has been fascinating,
Speaker 1: and so I wanted to just kind of like dig
Speaker 1: into what happened with this guy because very few people
Speaker 1: Scott kind of had a lifelong license to print infinite money,
Speaker 1: and he decided to give that up in order to
Speaker 1: get really angry in his like video blog and and
Speaker 1: just like spout bullshit to a fairly small audience of
Speaker 1: like weirdo Trump supporters. And it's it's interesting to me
Speaker 1: how he gets to that point because he's not there's
Speaker 1: not anything kind of he's not always someone for whom
Speaker 1: there's warning signs. So I think I think he's interesting,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about him because I'm interested
Speaker 1: in Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy. So let's start.
Speaker 2: Randy Will if you can't yeah none twenty years ago
Speaker 2: and said, Hey, Scott Adams is going to be like
Speaker 2: this psycho conservative, you know, shit bag like the guy
Speaker 2: who made all the weird vegetarian food for seven to eleven. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that guy like that. No, that was a weird unexpected No.
Speaker 1: Of course, if you were to say one of the
Speaker 1: one of the newspaper cartoonists you read is going to
Speaker 1: turn out to be like a weird fascist, I would
Speaker 1: have been like, oh yeah, high and lowess. Definitely the
Speaker 1: high and lowest guy, right, that's the let's.
Speaker 2: Not go for the Brown family, and they've had a lot.
Speaker 1: Scott Adams was born on June eighth, nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: in Wyndham, New York. His father was a postal worker
Speaker 1: and his mother was a stay at home mom. And
Speaker 1: I always like to point out when guys who grow
Speaker 1: up into like far right, uber capitalist influencers grow up
Speaker 1: in a comfortable, safe, stable environment as a child, because
Speaker 1: they're born in a period of time in which a
Speaker 1: government employee can support a family and own a house
Speaker 1: on one income. And Scott's one of those people, So
Speaker 1: just keep that in your mind when he has his heel. Course,
Speaker 1: we get most of our information on Scott's early life
Speaker 1: through him off and on in some of his books.
Speaker 1: My primary source for his childhood, although I'm not My
Speaker 1: only one is the twenty Years of Dilbert Comic collection,
Speaker 1: which he published in like two thousand and two. If
Speaker 1: you're into comm obviously, which you are, Randy, you know
Speaker 1: how like you had those like the Far Side big collection.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Garry Larson. Yeah, he writes a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff at the beginning, and he kind of like explains
Speaker 1: different comics. There was another one for Calvin and Hobbes.
Speaker 1: Most of like the really big cartoonists get one of
Speaker 1: those at some point in their career. And Scott at
Speaker 1: this is this that like this is what I'm using
Speaker 1: as a big source for his childhood, right so sorry, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this is he was starting to become a
Speaker 1: little bit of a maniac when this came out in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight. He hadn't fully healed turned, but
Speaker 1: he was starting. It's like it's like the pivot document
Speaker 1: of his like turn into a far right like fascist weird.
Speaker 2: As I hate sand moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, where he's not fully broken bad yet,
Speaker 1: but now you can tell he's about to go murder
Speaker 1: the young lynks.
Speaker 2: Oh Jesus Christ, Ratbert and like just have like weird animation.
Speaker 2: M M.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because we're going to talk about like some
Speaker 1: of his early drawings as a kid too, which are
Speaker 1: weirdly enough a lot technically better than Dilbert. So why not,
Speaker 1: I mean, hey, yeah.
Speaker 2: Part of comics is how fast can you draw something? Yeah,
Speaker 2: so that's why you see a lot like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: like there's some old high lowist trips. I remember thinking
Speaker 2: this is some stunning stuff, amazing angles, but it probably
Speaker 2: took for way too damn long for hel muchs are
Speaker 2: being paid.
Speaker 1: Well, Yeah, and this is one of those things where
Speaker 1: like Scott himself pokes a lot of fun at the
Speaker 1: Dilbert art but obviously like it works like it was
Speaker 1: a successful comic for years and years. But anyway, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: We'll get into that in a second. But yeah, this
Speaker 1: collection gets published in two thousand and eight, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of like right at this hinge period where I
Speaker 1: think before this, most people who knew anything about Scott
Speaker 1: would have default kind of assumed, oh, he's probably like
Speaker 1: a vaguely liberal, maybe even kind of like lefty guy,
Speaker 1: because the comics are kind of, at least super officially
Speaker 1: seem like they might be kind of critical about capitalism
Speaker 1: and about like corporate they're not, actually, but most people
Speaker 1: I think probably just sort of assumed that if they
Speaker 1: weren't super up on the Dilbert lore. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: a very interesting period. We'll be talking about that and
Speaker 1: a couple other recollections that have been published about that
Speaker 1: period of his life as sources here. In nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: when Scott's six years old, his family was in the
Speaker 1: habit of taking him on trips to his uncle's farm
Speaker 1: up the road from their house. This uncle had a
Speaker 1: collection of Peanuts comic strip books, and Scott would sit
Speaker 1: down and stare at them eagerly, even before he could read.
Speaker 1: In his book, he describes being fascinated by them because
Speaker 1: they had what he calls the X factor, but which
Speaker 1: I would say is just the result of kids being
Speaker 1: drawn to comics, and Peanuts being a particularly good comic
Speaker 1: at drawing kids in. But you know, I had more
Speaker 1: or less the same experience as a kid, right Like,
Speaker 1: my uncle was the guy and my family who had
Speaker 1: a bunch of published comic book collection collections, and I
Speaker 1: certainly read a shitload of Peanuts. I read all of
Speaker 1: his Calvin Calvin and Hobbess books, I read Bloom County, Farside, Foxtrot,
Speaker 1: even some like deeper cuts like gay Han Wilson's Demented Uvra.
Speaker 1: Who oh yeah, I love Gayhan if you if you,
Speaker 1: if you like Farside, you should check out Gayhan Wilson's stuff.
Speaker 2: My early memory is getting a hands on Pogo books.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah art, which was just astounding because
Speaker 2: my family tends to be a little more on the
Speaker 2: left side, so like Pogo was definitely something my dad
Speaker 2: was a big fan of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting. I I read a little bit of
Speaker 1: Pogo as a kid because we were just talking about
Speaker 1: those like big collections of comics for like Bill Watterson
Speaker 1: and stuff, his big Calvin and Hobbs collection. He writes
Speaker 1: about being a Pogo fan, and so that was like
Speaker 1: one of the comics I looked into because I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: my favorite artist likes Pogo.
Speaker 2: You need to know, like he did a whole storyline
Speaker 2: making fun of the John Bird Society and at their
Speaker 2: height he was taking them when he could have gotten
Speaker 2: in trouble for it.
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: Fucking hated him. It was beautiful.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no, bas Pogo, I love it. So Scott
Speaker 1: kind of goes through this this journey, and it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where like he has this quote in
Speaker 1: the book where he says, my parents always told me
Speaker 1: I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be.
Speaker 1: I decided to grow up to be Charles Schultz. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't don't tell him that.
Speaker 2: It never ends. Well, my parents told me I could
Speaker 2: grow up to work in an office. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 2: I rebelled against it, and I draw comics. But it
Speaker 2: seems like everyone who like their parents told him that.
Speaker 2: I'm going to tell my daughters that I, like, you're
Speaker 2: gonna work in a factory.
Speaker 1: I did have. I mean that's what my more or
Speaker 1: less how my childhood was. Because I also wanted to
Speaker 1: be a cartoonist, and I told my mom and she said,
Speaker 1: do something that has a pension. But the joke was
Speaker 1: on her because those don't exist anymore.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. It's yeah, yeah, like my same things,
Speaker 2: like I'm gonna be a cartoonist of my dad just
Speaker 2: said you don't have to, yeah, just do something else.
Speaker 1: It's this quote from Scott is really funny because it
Speaker 1: gives you an idea of how different things were back then.
Speaker 1: So he's like, this is him talking about like why
Speaker 1: he wanted to be a cartoonist after how hard could
Speaker 1: it be? You draw pictures, you write some words. It
Speaker 1: seemed like easy work to me. And from what I heard,
Speaker 1: the pay was good.
Speaker 2: I will say, in the fifties, if you had a
Speaker 2: good comment, yeah, it was great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the fifties, yes, chastically.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You don't hear a lot of people being like I
Speaker 1: want to get rich. I'm gonna I'm gonna get into comics.
Speaker 2: Not a lot of smart people anyway.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, I mean generally, whether you're taught, like especially
Speaker 1: if you're talking about like you know, it's like superhero comics,
Speaker 1: like the most famous stories are all. He created this
Speaker 1: character that's worth a billion dollars and then he died
Speaker 1: of starvation.
Speaker 2: Oh getting Yeah, except the artist losing his eyesight by
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies, living in a nursing home and like
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers, having to be guilted into paying them thirty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars each ye year for rest Our Lives hated
Speaker 2: doing it.
Speaker 1: But but this this was the fifties and none of
Speaker 1: that was known yet. So no, little Scott falls in
Speaker 1: love with Peanuts and grows up being like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make all those sweet, sweet cartoon dollars, and
Speaker 1: he draws a lot of little cartoons as a kid.
Speaker 1: These are mostly kind of like one panel strips. They're
Speaker 1: sort of similar, and they're not really far side in
Speaker 1: terms of the kind of sense of humor. It's like,
Speaker 1: I mean, he posts some of the drawings he did
Speaker 1: as like a six and seven year old in here.
Speaker 1: They're like, I mean, they're like cartoons a little kid draws,
Speaker 1: but yeah, they're like single panel strips, a lot of them.
Speaker 1: By the time he was eleven years old, he'd moved
Speaker 1: on to Mad Magazine, which makes sense. Mad was super
Speaker 1: big back then. Very there, absolutely absolutely and Mad Magazine,
Speaker 1: for those of you who kind of missed the Mad era,
Speaker 1: had a brilliant artist named Sergio Aragonez, who I learned
Speaker 1: while researching this episode is still alive.
Speaker 2: He's one of the last of the original Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was pleasantly surprised to hear that.
Speaker 2: We just lost I can't remember now the gentleman who
Speaker 2: did the fold In's he just died at over one hundred.
Speaker 2: Oh I didn't know well, but yeah, our Ghones is
Speaker 2: still doing his Combat group. He still does a lot
Speaker 2: of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a he's a He's an amazing guy, an
Speaker 1: incredible cartoonist. He was kind of known as being the
Speaker 1: fastest cartoonist on Earth for a while, and he did
Speaker 1: if you were a Mad reader, he did the marginal cartoons,
Speaker 1: like he did other stuff too, but like those little
Speaker 1: bitty like joke cartoons kind of stuck in between panels
Speaker 1: and on like the side margins of the papers in
Speaker 1: Mad magazine, And it was like, this guy is for
Speaker 1: those of you, like one of my biggest influences as
Speaker 1: a comedy writer, because when I worked at Cracked, one
Speaker 1: of my first jobs was picking images to go in
Speaker 1: between paragraphs of the articles and write little joke captions
Speaker 1: for them. And like, Sergio's work was kind of the
Speaker 1: thing that I figure like that was kind of my
Speaker 1: earliest inspiration for that kind of humor and stuff. I
Speaker 1: always loved him a lot.
Speaker 2: The influence Cracked again.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, this is the only time. That was
Speaker 1: the one influence Mad hat on cra.
Speaker 2: Ford from the head of Zeus one day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no way, I'm the only one who sullied it
Speaker 1: with Mad magazine vibes. Yeah, so Scott Scott and I have,
Speaker 1: like I I identify a lot with elements of his
Speaker 1: early childhood like mine was was not dissimilar other than
Speaker 1: that I had a more comics yeah.
Speaker 2: Like especially comics kids. Yeah, yeah, we were all most
Speaker 2: of us, especially heard an outsider kid. It was a
Speaker 2: little nerdy mad magazine kind of was a siren song,
Speaker 2: like it's here's the weird stuff. You can be a
Speaker 2: little cynical, you can be a little mean, and you
Speaker 2: have fun with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, it was.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: It was really special for a while. You know. Now
Speaker 1: now it's yet another zombie brand, but boy in its day.
Speaker 3: Ye.
Speaker 1: So Scott, his parents do kind of like realize he's
Speaker 1: he's got this love for cartooning and he's drawing consistently
Speaker 1: for years. So they get him like books on cartooning
Speaker 1: and how to draw, and he he becomes pretty dedicated
Speaker 1: to like learning some of the tougher technical things like drawing,
Speaker 1: like proper hands and stuff. So this is a kid
Speaker 1: who's got the ability to kind of like stick with,
Speaker 1: you know, the stuff that he's fascinated and he's more
Speaker 1: disciplined than I think most of us who wind up
Speaker 1: being comics nerds but don't get into cartooning, which makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's he's pretty good as a kid. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, he applies to a serial box contest, which
Speaker 1: was a thing that used to happen for who could
Speaker 1: do the best drawing of Old Faithful. He doesn't win
Speaker 1: the contest, but he gets a camera as a runner
Speaker 1: up prize. And this is in some ways that will
Speaker 1: turn out to be kind of dark a foundational moment
Speaker 1: for him, not because like it con seem it, not
Speaker 1: because it convinces him to be a cartoonist, which is fine,
Speaker 1: but like his his so basically like, as he enters
Speaker 1: this contest, he's super excited that he's going to win,
Speaker 1: and his mom does the generally responsible thing and she's like, look, honey,
Speaker 1: a lot of kids are going to enter. Most of
Speaker 1: them aren't going to get prizes, Like, you're probably not
Speaker 1: going to win anything, don't you know, get your hopes
Speaker 1: up too much. But then Scott gets a prize and
Speaker 1: so this kind of like hits his brain like a sledgehammer. Quote.
Speaker 1: I started to suspect that beating the long odds wasn't
Speaker 1: as hard as it seemed, this became a pattern that
Speaker 1: repeated itself throughout my life. God damn, that doesn't sound sinister,
Speaker 1: but it's going to metastasize into something like oh, okay, good,
Speaker 1: okay good. Yeah, that is a weird way to think
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: That sounds like a super villain. I read too many
Speaker 2: cogbooks to like the long odds. Oh God damn it,
Speaker 2: e'l O'Brien, it's almost.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, like I do think it's odd his
Speaker 1: obsession on like winning this, meaning that he's beaten the
Speaker 1: odds as opposed to like, oh, maybe I'm better at
Speaker 1: cartooning than I'm thought. That's cool, Like I should work
Speaker 1: more on this. It's like, ah, like I managed to
Speaker 1: like hack reality. Like that's really is kind of the
Speaker 1: road he's going to start traveling down.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the next year, his town holds an Easter egg
Speaker 1: hunt and the ground prize is a golden egg with
Speaker 1: like ten bucks in it. Now, obviously this is like
Speaker 1: the fifties or sixties, so ten dollars is roughly equivalent
Speaker 1: to the GDP of Mississippi today. It was it was
Speaker 1: a big incentive, good prize. Ye Scott. Scott found the
Speaker 1: egg and he got his picture in the paper, which
Speaker 1: he says is what gave him a taste for fame.
Speaker 1: It also furthered his.
Speaker 2: Don't again everything. It's just like, uh, he's that shitty
Speaker 2: kid who's like, I'm getting attention?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Can I get more attention?
Speaker 1: Every time I look at like influential culture and like
Speaker 1: the dark side of TikTok, I get more convinced that
Speaker 1: no one should get their picture taken or video taken
Speaker 1: of them until they're like fifty five. And that way,
Speaker 1: when kids are like, hey, do you want to I know,
Speaker 1: do you want to become influencers? People will be like, no,
Speaker 1: those are all like weird looking old people. Let's uh,
Speaker 1: let's let's paint watercolors.
Speaker 2: Partony wants to say, oh, say a lesser being shame,
Speaker 2: But you know what, some people will enjoy that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and unfortunately Scott is one of them. So he
Speaker 1: this is what gives him mistaste for fame. It also
Speaker 1: furthers his understanding that quote beating long odds seemed easier
Speaker 1: than everyone kept saying. Again, this is like says a
Speaker 1: lot about Scott. It's interesting that he's so focused on
Speaker 1: like the odds and that he's special for beating the
Speaker 1: odds as opposed to like, oh, like, you know, this
Speaker 1: was a nice experience in my childhood. It's also like
Speaker 1: weird because none of this seems like to be particularly
Speaker 1: the result of luck. He probably did well in that
Speaker 1: cartooning contest because he worked hard on drawing, and the
Speaker 1: egg contest. Like it's a small town, there's not he says,
Speaker 1: there's like thirty kids in his graduating class. The fact
Speaker 1: that you would have like gotten, you know, won the
Speaker 1: Easter egg hunt one year in your childhood actually seems
Speaker 1: pretty likely. Like when you're talking about like a town
Speaker 1: with maybe thirty kids in it, that's not weird to me.
Speaker 2: It's not like he is trying to solve some weird
Speaker 2: riddle like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: He didn't like stumble upon like an unsolved math equation
Speaker 1: in the on the in like the chalkboard of his
Speaker 1: high school and like fix it or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, I mean, there's thirty kids in your town.
Speaker 1: You probably did ten of these Easter egg uns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not weird that you won one of them. Anyway.
Speaker 1: Scott was now growing convinced that the universe had picked
Speaker 1: him for greatness. So the next thing he does as
Speaker 1: a like, I don't think he's think it's ten or eleven.
Speaker 1: At this point he applies to a correspondence course called
Speaker 1: the Famous Artists Course for Talented Young People. This still
Speaker 1: exists today in some form. It may I mean it
Speaker 1: may have been. That was not like. I don't think
Speaker 1: that was it at the time when he was doing
Speaker 1: it. It was found it was founded in part by Norman Rockwell.
Speaker 1: It's like a long distance course. Oh it's interesting, like
Speaker 1: the ads make it look, and I think this is
Speaker 1: an errant belief. But looking at the ads from back then,
Speaker 1: you get the feeling that it's like a con because
Speaker 1: it's really focused on how cartooning can teach you how
Speaker 1: to make money at home. I don't think it was like.
Speaker 1: People still sell the books online. There's folks who will
Speaker 1: say they're pretty good, like guides to like or like
Speaker 1: drawing and stuff. So I'm not gonna shit on this program.
Speaker 1: It just weird. Anytime anytime something tells me today that
Speaker 1: you can make money at home, I assume that it's
Speaker 1: some sort of a gone But I don't know that
Speaker 1: that was the case.
Speaker 2: Because he gave Scott Adams hope.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I did give him hope, although it's about to
Speaker 1: crush his hope. But before it does that, he files
Speaker 1: an application packet which shows he's got some talent. So
Speaker 1: this is going to show you the drawings he's trying.
Speaker 2: He's actually putting the effort in. I give him that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, like he's got there's an an early like
Speaker 1: he's there's a drawing of a Jaloppi in there. That's
Speaker 1: like pretty good for like a little kid, Like the
Speaker 1: perspective is decent, like cars are heart. When I was
Speaker 1: a little kid drawing cartoons, I was never any good
Speaker 1: at drawing cards. So like he's he's not bad for
Speaker 1: his age. Yeah, yeah, that's quite a good. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You're looking at the drawing of the man really good.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, no, was really well done. That's skill. Like
Speaker 2: I did not realize he had that ability.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, it's like not like Sophie, scroll down, show
Speaker 1: him the geloppee because like the perspective on the car.
Speaker 2: Is also cars are not easy, so.
Speaker 1: That yeah, he's solid. He's like he's these are good cartoons. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that kind of surprised me because they're like
Speaker 1: technically a lot more nuanced like Gilbert is again, as
Speaker 1: we said, effective in terms of it's art style obviously,
Speaker 1: but it's not complicated, right, Whereas like you know, that
Speaker 1: shows that he's got some some more some deep or
Speaker 1: at least had at some point like deeper technical ability.
Speaker 2: It's interesting, like you need to learn the basics before
Speaker 2: you create your style. Yeah, early Schultz versus what Panis was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean even just like a guy like
Speaker 1: everyone knows is a great cartoonist, Bill Watterson. You look
Speaker 1: at kind of a normal strip of Calvin and Hobbes,
Speaker 1: and then you look at the you know, the ones
Speaker 1: like these big Sunday spreads he did where he's he's
Speaker 1: got like Spaceman spiff and shit, and it's a lot
Speaker 1: more kind of like almost uh uh psychedelic fantastic in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: They were also called back to the golden age of
Speaker 2: comics when yeah, like, no, you're going to run this
Speaker 2: comic the way I present it. You're not going to
Speaker 2: butcher up the panels and put different draws. Wagon also
Speaker 2: started off as a political cartoonist, so his training is
Speaker 2: a lot different and he's yeah, very thick heavy line work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and you see Berkeley breadth Breath that is
Speaker 1: a kind of in a similar vein where like he
Speaker 1: would do especially when he did like Outland and stuff
Speaker 1: these like so much more lavish strips that today you
Speaker 1: could know, I mean you could, thankfully. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I love about online cartooning is you you
Speaker 1: do get there's a lot more of that stuff available
Speaker 1: if you know where to look for it, because you
Speaker 1: can publish anything online if you have like the right
Speaker 1: kind of you know, uh platform to put it up on,
Speaker 1: as opposed to you know, when you read that book
Speaker 1: Waterson did, like the collection of his where he writes
Speaker 1: a lot about his background. A lot of it is
Speaker 1: him kind of mourning how much comics pages are shrinking,
Speaker 1: how much less space there is, how much less like
Speaker 1: option for putting in color there is, and how sad
Speaker 1: that makes them is a lover of the art form,
Speaker 1: and I do think like that's one of the things.
Speaker 1: Internetic comics have kind of reversed the slide on to
Speaker 1: an extent, which is yeah, makes me happy.
Speaker 2: It is heartbreaking, but it's also like you're on deadlines too.
Speaker 2: Like I did a storyline Popeye where I got behind
Speaker 2: because like I'm gonna do really hyper detailed art, and
Speaker 2: it's like that's great, but you're getting behind and we
Speaker 2: have a deadline that this these get in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is one of those like.
Speaker 2: Sorry, no, Yeah, it's just like you know you're being
Speaker 2: paid for this, don't You don't have to go beyond it, buddy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean obviously, like when you're doing anything
Speaker 1: five times a week, like a comic or I don't know,
Speaker 1: a news podcast, it will grind you down if you
Speaker 1: let it. It's yeah, it's those production schedules quite brutal,
Speaker 1: but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: Scott does pretty well on this application to a cartooning school,
Speaker 1: but the school rejects him for being too young, which
Speaker 1: temporarily causes him to give up on his dreams of
Speaker 1: being a cartoonist and pick a more attainable life goal.
Speaker 1: God he's got, he's like in his early teens. Maybe
Speaker 1: at this point I think like, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think he was just like the way he describes it,
Speaker 1: he had kind of because of these other incidents of
Speaker 1: like unlikely in his eyes. Yeah, exactly, I found it. Egg,
Speaker 1: Surely I'll get into this cartooning.
Speaker 2: Look, honey, I found ten dollars in it. I think
Speaker 2: I'm ready to replace al Cap.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He always has these like weird leaps in his
Speaker 1: head of like, well, because this happened, this seems possible.
Speaker 1: But anyway, he gets bummed out, so he decides, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to be a cartoonist, and he goes to
Speaker 1: the work of kind of like picking another career for himself. Quote.
Speaker 1: I looked around my town and learned that exactly two
Speaker 1: people had high incomes. One was the only doctor in
Speaker 1: town and the other was the only lawyer. I didn't
Speaker 1: like touching other people's guts and tendons and whatnot, so
Speaker 1: I set my sights on a career in law. He
Speaker 1: has always kind of focused in this point at a
Speaker 1: job that's going to make him a lot of money.
Speaker 1: I do think it's kind of worth noting. And this
Speaker 1: is a thing that like he's open about in his
Speaker 1: early Dilbert career that like, yes, was always about making
Speaker 1: money for me before he kind of gets weirder into
Speaker 1: evangelizing some of his spiritual ideas. Nothing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, always this was a career path he went to.
Speaker 2: The diference is Jim Davis is not trying to incite riots.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jim Davis has never tried to convince anybody of
Speaker 1: his like philosophical conclusions from a career of drawing guard
Speaker 1: he seems to have mostly been happy to get. Jim
Speaker 1: Davis is one of it, like seems to have a
Speaker 1: pretty realistic understanding that like, wow, I've got I made
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions of dollars drawing a cat just kind
Speaker 1: of kind of let that one ride. Not gonna poke
Speaker 1: lady faith too much over this. So in his nearly
Speaker 1: unreadable book win Bigley, Scott claims that during this first
Speaker 1: period of interest in drawing, he was a regular church goer.
Speaker 1: His parents had him attend the Methodist church near their house,
Speaker 1: and he claims he started experiencing doubt in his faith
Speaker 1: when he noticed that prayer didn't seem to influence what
Speaker 1: happened in his life in any way. The tipping point,
Speaker 1: as he describes it, is when he heard the story
Speaker 1: of Jonah and the Whale. The nut of that story,
Speaker 1: if you weren't raised Christian, involves a guy getting stuck
Speaker 1: in a whale's belly for three days before he gets
Speaker 1: spat out, and he's not dead because God's stuff. Scott
Speaker 1: as a little kid is like.
Speaker 2: It's one of those amazing stories in the Old Testament,
Speaker 2: Like don't you feel inspired? God's a socialist?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Why would he do that to somebody? That seems yeah,
Speaker 1: but Scott has the Scott's problem with it is that like, well,
Speaker 1: people couldn't survive being in a whale, so he decides,
Speaker 1: you know, that means that the Bible's not real. I
Speaker 1: called a meeting with my mother and announced I was
Speaker 1: discontinuing my religious education. I explained my new hypothesis that
Speaker 1: she and all other believers were being duped for reasons
Speaker 1: I couldn't understand, but I planned to get to the
Speaker 1: bottom of it. My mother listened to my reasoning, I
Speaker 1: acknowledged that I was making a well informed decision, and
Speaker 1: never asked me to attend church again. And that's, you know,
Speaker 1: fine enough on his mom's behalf. But it's weird to
Speaker 1: me the lesson. He always takes such odd lessons from things,
Speaker 1: because what he writes about this is according to my
Speaker 1: new worldview. I was the only person, as far as
Speaker 1: I knew, who could see religion for the scam that
Speaker 1: it was. Obviously, there were plenty of non believers in
Speaker 1: the world, but they were invisible to me in my
Speaker 1: pre internet small town life. And I find that really peculiar.
Speaker 1: Not the fact that, like, obviously you're in like the
Speaker 1: fifties sixties, you decide you're an atheist, you live in
Speaker 1: a small town, pretty good chance that you you know,
Speaker 1: might not like know anybody right or like that else
Speaker 1: that identifies as an atheist.
Speaker 2: Now we're all going to be honest, Like, if you're
Speaker 2: a small town like that, you're like, yeah, I'm an atheist.
Speaker 2: Oh cool, you're leaving town now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's not weird to me that he didn't know
Speaker 1: anyone else like that. It is weird that he didn't
Speaker 1: know it existed right like that he claimed, because he
Speaker 1: basically claims, I didn't realize there were other people who
Speaker 1: weren't believers. That seems a little peculiar to me. But
Speaker 1: also information was much more difficult to acquire in that era.
Speaker 1: So I'll give that one to Scott. What's odd to
Speaker 1: me is that the kind of beliefs.
Speaker 2: Oh, I just think I also give parents who will
Speaker 2: actively shield their kids from the idea, like you know,
Speaker 2: you and I grew up in Texas, and yeah, Texas,
Speaker 2: which is a you know the taint of the Bible belt.
Speaker 2: You know how it goes parents anything they can to
Speaker 2: shield their kids.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'll give him that one, you know, especially
Speaker 1: given the ara that he comes up in. But what's
Speaker 1: odd to me is that when he decides he doesn't
Speaker 1: believe in God, the schema, the belief schema that he
Speaker 1: develops for himself is something he later describes as the
Speaker 1: alien experiment filter. And it's I don't know, I'm not
Speaker 1: I try not to criticize the beliefs of children on
Speaker 1: this show, but I'm going to read a quote for
Speaker 1: you about Scott deciding what he believes, and you tell
Speaker 1: me what you think about this.
Speaker 2: As a parent, I'm happy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well someone should have done that with Scott. Here
Speaker 1: quote the alien experiment filter imagined that intelligent creatures from
Speaker 1: another world impregnated my mother so they could find out
Speaker 1: what happens when humans and aliens make According to that filter,
Speaker 1: the aliens were watching me at all times. That's an
Speaker 1: odd thing for a child to decide they believe about
Speaker 1: the world. What the fuck the fact that alien impregnation
Speaker 1: is involved. Yeah, that's that is a really weirdly specific belief.
Speaker 1: It's not like I wonder if I'm an alien, but
Speaker 1: like specifically I wonder if the aliens, yeah, like did
Speaker 1: it with my mom so that they can see if
Speaker 1: it worked. That's peculiar. That is peculiar. No judgment, he's
Speaker 1: a kid, but that's weird. That is a little bit
Speaker 1: of a weird belief.
Speaker 2: I mean, look, we were weird kids. Our brains went
Speaker 2: to weird places. I'm sure if I sat down and
Speaker 2: looked at my thoughts like, oh, I can't really judge
Speaker 2: them on this one, but as still looking at him.
Speaker 1: Like really, that's yeah, it's about judgments and being being
Speaker 1: like scarring. Scott consistently draws strange conclusions. Yeah, so, uh,
Speaker 1: you know who doesn't develop strangely elaborate childhood fantasies of
Speaker 1: their mother being impregnated by aliens?
Speaker 2: Would it be the sortied gold cellars that might be providing.
Speaker 1: The gold cellars? Definitely do, but like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: probably does it right? Is that right, Sophie? Can we
Speaker 1: say that or is getting it angry if we say
Speaker 1: that they don't have alien impregnation fantasies?
Speaker 3: I don't know. I believed what you just said.
Speaker 2: Fair enough and prague fan it needs to be a thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, make it happen used chat GPT or whatever
Speaker 1: one of the GPPs. Uh get give us, give us
Speaker 1: some AI drawings of impregnation, Dilbert fetish ark Dilbert.
Speaker 2: Like just birthing a yeah box and.
Speaker 1: Don't don't send it to me, send it to Scott Adams.
Speaker 1: He'll love that. He's got time. Now he's not cartooning anymore.
Speaker 1: He is cartooning still anyway, here's it. Ah, we are
Speaker 1: back and we're talking about the Dilbert guy. So he
Speaker 1: spends several years believing this alien stuff, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: make him happy, so eventually he lands on atheism as
Speaker 1: a teenager. Now he claims it like that he decided
Speaker 1: to be an atheist because it gave him something to
Speaker 1: argue about with people, which does make him ahead of
Speaker 1: the curve that movement. Yeah, no, that was me as
Speaker 1: a teenage atheist for sure.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Now what's odd about that is that it's not odd
Speaker 1: that he's kind of unhappy with that. A lot of
Speaker 1: people like have a period when they're younger of atheism
Speaker 1: and then move, you know to something else that's like
Speaker 1: a thing that happens, Just like people have a period
Speaker 1: where they're super Christian or whatever, and then choose something else.
Speaker 1: Why Scott is unhappy with atheism specifically is that he
Speaker 1: feels like it doesn't let him predict the future. That's
Speaker 1: an odd reason to not like atheism to me, I
Speaker 1: do so weird. Yeah, that's that's not the point of atheism,
Speaker 1: Scott J Yeah. I don't understand why that would be
Speaker 1: a thing that you would ever have expected to get
Speaker 1: out of atheism. I also don't think that's generally a thing.
Speaker 1: There's definitely it's one of the It's one of the
Speaker 1: things that's compelling this to me is that it kind
Speaker 1: of hints at something that Scott never writes about, which
Speaker 1: I've come to suspect, which is that as a kid,
Speaker 1: just the culture the community was into was more sort
Speaker 1: of into apocalyptic evangelical Christian culture than maybe he lets on.
Speaker 1: I don't know this, but it's one of those things
Speaker 1: where like most people I know who are like Christian,
Speaker 1: who are Muslim, who are Jewish, who are Hindu, who
Speaker 1: are you know, zoroastri and whatever, generally like when they
Speaker 1: talk about what they get out of faith, it's not
Speaker 1: it lets me know the future, Like it lets me
Speaker 1: predict the future. But within certain strains of evangelical Christianity prophecy,
Speaker 1: the ability of the Bible to be used as a
Speaker 1: as a prediction instrument to determine what's going to happen
Speaker 1: in the future is a huge deal.
Speaker 2: And that I remember real.
Speaker 1: Things exactly, And that's that's if you're like Catholic, right,
Speaker 1: you don't grow up being like the Bible is a
Speaker 1: tool that lets me predict the future.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: That's not really like a thing for Unitarians or Anglicans
Speaker 1: or Episcopalians, which I was, but it is a thing
Speaker 1: for that chunk of like Pentecostals, Baptists, a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of like chunks of kind of like really kind of
Speaker 1: very American sorts of Christianity. Not exclusively, but yeah, that's
Speaker 1: kind of a hint I think I have maybe about
Speaker 1: like what sort of the surrounding religious culture that Scott
Speaker 1: is raised in is Like maybe he doesn't really notice
Speaker 1: this much, but the fact that he the fact that
Speaker 1: he wants whatever kind of belief system he adopts to
Speaker 1: help him predict the future is interesting to me because
Speaker 1: you don't run into that with most people, nor should
Speaker 1: you yeah, nor should you don't. Yeah, Predicting the futures
Speaker 1: not a not a fun business to be in one
Speaker 1: way or the other. Take that one from me, folks.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen seventy five, s Good graduates high school.
Speaker 1: He's about there's about forty people in his graduating class,
Speaker 1: and as he notes, it's really easy to excel in
Speaker 1: a really small school like that if you work hard
Speaker 1: and you've got you've got like a pretty good chance
Speaker 1: of being the best at like what everything you're into,
Speaker 1: because there's not that many other people. He opted not
Speaker 1: to take chemistry or physics in high school instead of
Speaker 1: in favor of focusing on a class that was un
Speaker 1: common for a man to take in that period, typing.
Speaker 1: Now Scott claims he picked typing because it was easy,
Speaker 1: and the people who took chemistry got bad grades. Because
Speaker 1: typing was so easy, his grades were really good and
Speaker 1: he was able to graduate his valedictorian of the class
Speaker 1: and get several scholarships. As a young adult, he was
Speaker 1: regularly struck by how little use he got out of
Speaker 1: chemistry and physics and how often typing came in handy
Speaker 1: On that one, he's he's not wrong. The lesson he
Speaker 1: takes out of this is like a weird one about
Speaker 1: how they're basically a brain hacking thing where it's like, no,
Speaker 1: if you like stack, you know, these different talents and
Speaker 1: stuff together you can get like we'll get to that
Speaker 1: a little bit later. He doesn't just take like, uh
Speaker 1: yeah again, He's always kind of like makes these odd conclusions.
Speaker 1: Like his conclusion from this is sometimes doing the wrong
Speaker 1: thing works out.
Speaker 2: He used to be one of like Andrew Tate's flunkies
Speaker 2: more and more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's he's got this obsession with like because something
Speaker 1: worked out for me. I have been bestowed secret knowledge
Speaker 1: as opposed to it like I don't know being Like
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, I had this experience of
Speaker 1: like I played a lot of online video games, and
Speaker 1: my mom and dad were worried about it because they
Speaker 1: were like, that's not going to help you, you know,
Speaker 1: get a career or succeed. You should be focusing on school.
Speaker 1: And as it turned out, playing online video games like
Speaker 1: taught me how to touch type, taught me how to
Speaker 1: like organize groups of people online, all of these skills
Speaker 1: that were most useful in my career. I don't translate
Speaker 1: this as like sometimes doing the wrong thing works out.
Speaker 1: I translate this as like, sometimes old people don't understand
Speaker 1: the world as well as young people, right, Yeah, Like sometimes.
Speaker 2: When you just see how trends are changing.
Speaker 1: That's just the world, right, Like I inherently think TikTok
Speaker 1: is silly, but like, obviously it's a huge deal for
Speaker 1: a lot of people, and like the fact that, like
Speaker 1: I don't know, some kid gets really good at making
Speaker 1: TikTok videos and makes a millionaire isn't an example of
Speaker 1: them doing the wrong thing, And it's an example of
Speaker 1: the world having changed in me being an old man. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: good for that little shit. Yeah, good for that little
Speaker 1: piece of shit. Anyway, interesting the way he translates things.
Speaker 1: So Scott goes to Hartwick College in New York State
Speaker 1: and the major's in economics because he heard it was
Speaker 1: good prep for law school and he wanted to understand
Speaker 1: how money worked. He only takes one art class in college,
Speaker 1: and this time he does really badly at it. There's
Speaker 1: more kids in college than he had never been around before,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them had spent you know, when
Speaker 1: Scott kind of stopped drawing, they'd kept honing their art,
Speaker 1: and this is Yeah, it fucked him up. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's an uncommon experience.
Speaker 2: Well, also, you go from being a kid in a
Speaker 2: small school where you're the art kid, to go to
Speaker 2: a place where, oh, this is all the art kids
Speaker 2: from all these in the schools. Oh, and they've been
Speaker 2: working harder than you. Yeah, that's gonna humble your well,
Speaker 2: it should humble you a little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in his case, it seems more like he just
Speaker 1: kind of gives up on art. But he does start
Speaker 1: to smoke a shitload of weed in his college days.
Speaker 1: He was influenced during this period of time when he's
Speaker 1: getting high a lot by the realization that people seemed
Speaker 1: a lot nicer when he was high. This caused him
Speaker 1: to realize that people could experience different realities based on
Speaker 1: their perception. Now that's one of the most basic philosophy
Speaker 1: things in the world, right, the fact that like reception
Speaker 1: alters exactly Like everyone has this realization one way or
Speaker 1: the other. So I don't think Scott is like taking
Speaker 1: a lot of classes on philosophy. I also don't think
Speaker 1: he listens a lot when other people are talking. His
Speaker 1: youth seems to have been a process of a precocious kid,
Speaker 1: avoiding any reading that might have challenged him and opened
Speaker 1: his eyes to thinkers who had had an experimented and
Speaker 1: developed these kind of ideas more than maybe he did.
Speaker 1: He seems to him be convinced that like, all of
Speaker 1: these very normal revelations are him, like inventing the wheel
Speaker 1: for himself basically, as opposed to like, I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: that's like what happens to everybody when they get high,
Speaker 1: Like the fucking billions of people would have experienced Scott,
Speaker 1: it's not really weird.
Speaker 2: He obviously feels he's the main character, and therefore every
Speaker 2: experience he is the main character, Every expec he has
Speaker 2: is him. Yeah, I mean at first it's never oh
Speaker 2: shit to other people feel like it's like, no, it's me.
Speaker 2: I will educate you on me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting he has these perfectly normal experiences and
Speaker 1: then that a lot of people have. And like when I,
Speaker 1: you know, started taking psychedelics and realized how fragile the
Speaker 1: bonds of what we consider reality are and how much
Speaker 1: it can be influenced and changed in very fundamental ways
Speaker 1: by things that simply altered perception, it was very humbling,
Speaker 1: and it caught a lot of things that I had
Speaker 1: held on to from my belief systems as a young
Speaker 1: person who grew up you know, very right wing and conservative.
Speaker 1: Like melted at that point because I realized that all
Speaker 1: of this certainty I had been raised with did not
Speaker 1: adequately describe the world anymore, and that, I think ever since,
Speaker 1: has made me less certain about the things I believe,
Speaker 1: because I know how easy it is to influence my
Speaker 1: own mind.
Speaker 2: See, I knew it with anxiety. Anxiety to it for me,
Speaker 2: I never had to do any drugs. Yes, I just
Speaker 2: have absolute fear, NonStop, all time.
Speaker 1: Very mind altering drug anxiety. Scott I think mean like
Speaker 1: concludes basically, like I I have had a realization that
Speaker 1: other people don't have, and so now I like understand
Speaker 1: the world at a fundamentally different level, which I is odd.
Speaker 1: I wonder how much he spent time like talking to
Speaker 1: people while he was high, because again, this is pretty
Speaker 1: basic stuff people chat about when they're stoned at nineteen
Speaker 1: whatever at them.
Speaker 2: He didn't talk to them, He talked at them if
Speaker 2: they said something. He wasn't paying attention because he wasn't talking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you get that feeling a little bit so age
Speaker 1: twenty one, Scott moves to San Francisco after he what
Speaker 1: he describes as a near death experience. Again. He's he's
Speaker 1: living up in the frigid North. He's driving home one
Speaker 1: night it's snowing and you know, it's in the middle
Speaker 1: of February, so it's probably below freezing outside, and his
Speaker 1: car dies on the highway. He hasn't brought a coat
Speaker 1: with him, you know, because he didn't think he was
Speaker 1: going to be outside much and because young people are dumb,
Speaker 1: and so he winds up being like, I'm gonna freeze
Speaker 1: to death in this car unless I can find someone
Speaker 1: to rescue me. So he gets out of the car
Speaker 1: and he just like sprints down the highway like trying
Speaker 1: to find somebody, and you know, eventually gets picked up
Speaker 1: and he doesn't die, obviously, but this whole thing terrifies him,
Speaker 1: this like brush with death. And he promised himself while
Speaker 1: he was like sprinting down the freezing highway that if
Speaker 1: he survived, he'd sell his car and buy a ticket
Speaker 1: to California, which he does.
Speaker 2: That's a weird fucking leap.
Speaker 1: That is an odd I mean, yeah, I do know.
Speaker 1: I will say a lot of people who wind up
Speaker 1: in California are there because they grew up in like
Speaker 1: Minnesota and were like, never again, never again will I
Speaker 1: go through a winter like that.
Speaker 2: I live for nine years, and the idea of having
Speaker 2: returned to winter does make my butthole pucker. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel the same way about the fucking Texas summer.
Speaker 1: But that's just that's come for all of us now. Yes, so.
Speaker 2: You thought you great gave Robert, No, Robert, we smelled
Speaker 2: where you went, We followed the trail.
Speaker 1: Texas comes for us all. So he moves to San Francisco.
Speaker 1: He's got a brother there, so he crashes with his brother.
Speaker 1: Eventually he gets a job as a bank teller, which
Speaker 1: is you know, it doesn't go great for him. He
Speaker 1: gets robbed at gunpoint twice. So he decides I'm going
Speaker 1: to apply for a management training position. Yeah, no, sounds reasonable, Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: normal reactions here. He rises pretty steadily at the bank,
Speaker 1: and they kind of he flits around a bunch of
Speaker 1: different jobs. He does sometime programming computers, he manages like
Speaker 1: a contract negotiation team, and by his own kind of recollection,
Speaker 1: he's bad at all of these jobs that like, they
Speaker 1: move him to because and he I think this is
Speaker 1: pretty reasonable. He's like, yeah, they never kept me because
Speaker 1: I was good enough at my job. They kept moving
Speaker 1: me to other jobs, but they never give me enough
Speaker 1: time there to get good at them. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's an uncommon experience people have in the corporate world, definitely.
Speaker 1: And he kind of learns as a defensive mechanism during
Speaker 1: this period to deflect from his ignorance by developing a
Speaker 1: sense of humor that he was able to use to
Speaker 1: kind of like please audiences of business executives and make
Speaker 1: them maybe less likely to judge him when he's bad
Speaker 1: at the stuff that he's doing. This is going to
Speaker 1: be an invaluable skill for writing Dilbert quote. Several of
Speaker 1: my jobs at the bank involved making presentations to upper management.
Speaker 1: I seasoned my presentation with presentations with comics to keep
Speaker 1: the audience awake and to have a business reason for
Speaker 1: sitting around drawing comics at work. My comics weren't funny
Speaker 1: in the haha sense, that's certainly true, Scott, but they
Speaker 1: reminded people of their jobs, and that seemed to be enough.
Speaker 1: I believe my first published comic was the Mole that
Speaker 1: I drew on the cover of the company newsletter. So yeah,
Speaker 1: this is kind of how he gets back into cartooning
Speaker 1: over the course of a couple of years. There's two
Speaker 1: characters that he draws more than the other characters he's doing.
Speaker 1: And one of these is like a guy with glasses
Speaker 1: and a weird looking tie who's going to become Dilbert.
Speaker 1: Another's a daw that's based on his old family dog
Speaker 1: that's going to become dog. Those are the I'm be
Speaker 1: sure most people are at least vaguely familiar with the
Speaker 1: fact that those are the two big characters in his
Speaker 1: comic strip. Now, the timing here is a little unclear,
Speaker 1: but while this is all going on, as he's kind
Speaker 1: of like entering the corporate world, Scott starts experimenting with
Speaker 1: hallucinogenic mushrooms. Now, the San Francisco Bay Area is a
Speaker 1: wonderful place to experiment with mushrooms, and Scott has a
Speaker 1: good time. He came his first trip is like right
Speaker 1: after he moves there. He's twenty one years old, and
Speaker 1: he says that it's the best day of his life, like,
Speaker 1: or at least in two thousand and eight, he wrote
Speaker 1: that that was like the best day of his life.
Speaker 1: Well he hadn't killed yet, so yeah, yeah, he hadn't
Speaker 1: killed anybody yet, he hadn't taken a life. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't think that's uncommon. I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: look back at like their first time on mushrooms is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was the best experience of my entire life. Some
Speaker 1: people it's the worst. But generally a lot of people
Speaker 1: have this experience of it. That's not an uncommon thing.
Speaker 2: I will Scott your knowledge as I have never tond
Speaker 2: on any drugs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't like recommended ad hoc to people, but
Speaker 1: I mean there's actually data on this, right like they did.
Speaker 1: There is this famously, the Good Friday Experiments, where they
Speaker 1: give gave mushrooms to a bunch of Divinity students and
Speaker 1: like an overwhelming number of them. Twenty years later, we're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's still one of the most influential spiritual experiences of
Speaker 1: my life.
Speaker 2: Any microdosing shrooms, it is supposed to be pretty good
Speaker 2: for a lot of like mental health.
Speaker 1: It can be, it can be. It's one of those
Speaker 1: things like I'm this is a little off topic of Scott.
Speaker 1: I'm very pro people having the right to and experimenting
Speaker 1: with hallucinogens, there are. I mean, one of the things
Speaker 1: that does increasingly concern me is what we're learning about
Speaker 1: the ways in which people who have a family tendency
Speaker 1: towards schizophrenia can have schizophrenic breaks as a result of
Speaker 1: taking psychedelics or even just marijuana. So whenever I talk
Speaker 1: about I do think many, perhaps even most people can
Speaker 1: benefit from psychedelics. It all pays to be aware of
Speaker 1: your family history and take great care when doing that
Speaker 1: stuff because there are potentially consequences with it too. It's important,
Speaker 1: not no, yeah, but Scott has a great time, right,
Speaker 1: great experience, not an uncommon experience. He benefits from it
Speaker 1: by developing an understanding that his own interpretation of reality
Speaker 1: is just one of many, and not necessarily the truest one.
Speaker 1: That's a good thing to realize about the world. It's
Speaker 1: certainly a thing. I think most people who become healthy
Speaker 1: adults have some version of this realization. Scott writes it
Speaker 1: as a positive realization. But then at the end of
Speaker 1: this section of his book Win Bigley, which is a
Speaker 1: stupid book about winning arguments and how Donald Trump is
Speaker 1: fucking god King, he writes, quote, kids, please don't take drugs.
Speaker 1: Drugs can be dangerous. I don't recommend trying marijuana or psychedelics.
Speaker 1: You'll get a similar perceptual shift by reading this book.
Speaker 1: I designed it to do exactly that. Right now, I
Speaker 1: love him.
Speaker 2: I fucking hate him.
Speaker 1: Oh my fucking I know what I just said about
Speaker 1: being cautious with drugs. But if your choices between reading
Speaker 1: Scott's book and doing drugs choose drugs every time, avoid
Speaker 1: Scott's someone.
Speaker 2: Needed to be bullied more than I were.
Speaker 1: Too much confidence, too much confidence, Scott Christ Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean what's unsettling to this about this to me is that,
Speaker 1: like the lesson Scott gets from mushrooms and the lesson
Speaker 1: a lot of people do, is that, like, Wow, the
Speaker 1: actual meaning of reality and the nature of it is
Speaker 1: actually is extremely open ended and dictated by perception. And
Speaker 1: maybe you shouldn't buy into your own bullshit to such
Speaker 1: a strong extent or believe anything so strongly because so
Speaker 1: much of reality is kind of altered by your brain, chemistry,
Speaker 1: by what's in your stomach, all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: That's a good thing to learn. It's a different thing
Speaker 1: to be, like, don't do drugs, kids. I have developed
Speaker 1: a way to manipulate your mind using my books. That
Speaker 1: works even better.
Speaker 2: That's cult shit.
Speaker 1: That is culty, right, Yeah, that's unsettling as fun.
Speaker 2: That is something I like. I remember a youth minister
Speaker 2: when I was a kid telling us that, you know,
Speaker 2: we didn't need to try drugs because he could help
Speaker 2: us get high on Jesus and be like, I don't
Speaker 2: like this guy at all. Yeah, nothing about this is good.
Speaker 1: No, no, And Scott, he kind of stops experimenting with
Speaker 1: hallucinogens I think pretty early here and gets really into
Speaker 1: something that is not necessarily culty, but it's very cult
Speaker 1: adjacent and it's called he gets into a practice of affirmations. Now,
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong inherently with the idea of affirmations. Affirmations
Speaker 1: are a practice that's birthed by the New Thought movement,
Speaker 1: which in self itself evolved from books like Think and
Speaker 1: Grow Rich and The Science of Getting Rich in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds. Yeah, and they're part of a batch
Speaker 1: of techniques broadly called neuro linguistic programming by some practitioners.
Speaker 1: The basic idea, and I'm flattening a little bit here,
Speaker 1: but the basic idea behind an affirm is that if
Speaker 1: you regularly repeat what you are going, what you want
Speaker 1: to do, what you want to have happen in your life,
Speaker 1: some sort of goal or dream, And if you're extremely
Speaker 1: specific and extremely consistent about the repute the about like
Speaker 1: repeating it, then that will in some way influence the
Speaker 1: future and allow you to achieve that goal. Versions and
Speaker 1: like this is like the secret, so sacret. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: early kind of basic idea is there's nothing inherently like
Speaker 1: if you are if your goal is to write a novel,
Speaker 1: and every single morning you wake up and write down
Speaker 1: on a piece of paper i am going to write
Speaker 1: a novel, and you focus on it, you know, for
Speaker 1: a minute or two while you're having your coffee, and
Speaker 1: that helps you to sit down every day and work
Speaker 1: on that novel. Well, that's great, right, that's a perfectly
Speaker 1: reasonable thing to do, you know. Or if your affirmation
Speaker 1: is I'm gonna you know, get you know this good
Speaker 1: at lifting weights, or I'm gonna get this good at drawing,
Speaker 1: or I'm gonna learn how to I don't know, fix
Speaker 1: engines or whatever, perfectly reasonable. The problem is when people
Speaker 1: start to treat them like the secret does like their magic, like,
Speaker 1: rather than it just being like, well, focusing your mind
Speaker 1: on a task can help you accomplish that task. It's
Speaker 1: by telling, by writing down and in this very specific way,
Speaker 1: this thing that I want to have happened. I am
Speaker 1: altering the universe right in order to like give myself
Speaker 1: a thing. That's There's a lot this problematic. There's a
Speaker 1: lot that's problematic about the secret, especially when you like
Speaker 1: talk to the way people who are into this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff sometimes talk about illness right where they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you can overcome you know, your hereditary illness or your
Speaker 1: your your chronic illness or whatever via these techniques where
Speaker 1: it's like, well, no, no amount of writing affirmations is
Speaker 1: going to stop you from being paralyzed, right, That's just
Speaker 1: not how it works. Science with a label.
Speaker 2: What the hell?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I'm not shitting like I know, I know
Speaker 1: people who are like, yeah, I do this and it's
Speaker 1: just a thing that helps me focus my mind. That's whatever.
Speaker 1: That's fine. But Scott takes it in very much like
Speaker 1: the secrety direction, where like, I have figured out some
Speaker 1: sort of secret way to break the code of the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's you can see the appeal for a guy
Speaker 1: who's whose brain has developed this way because affirmations give
Speaker 1: him something that the philosophies he had adhered to earlier
Speaker 1: in his life had always lacked, which is a way
Speaker 1: of predicting the future and also a way of explaining how,
Speaker 1: in his eyes he was consistently the special boy who
Speaker 1: succeeded at long odds.
Speaker 2: Which is always goes back to he's the main character.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think there's something that's like understandable here
Speaker 1: as both you know, you and I are both people
Speaker 1: who get to do what we love for a living,
Speaker 1: and that's that's that is a tremendous privilege and the
Speaker 1: result in addition to the result of hard work always
Speaker 1: the result of great fortune, because there's always people who
Speaker 1: are skilled and talented who never make it.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: And if you recognize that as as a creative person,
Speaker 1: there's a fear in there, right because it means that,
Speaker 1: among other things, it means that it could stop working
Speaker 1: for you at any point.
Speaker 2: Right, That is very understandable anxiety. I think a lot
Speaker 2: of creative hackens, Yeah, because you it is things change,
Speaker 2: audience changed, might you know, Yeah, what worked for me
Speaker 2: twenty years ago won't work now. I have to constantly
Speaker 2: rework and yeah, pushing.
Speaker 1: And most I think most reasonable people in our position,
Speaker 1: Like you know, there's a variety of things to look
Speaker 1: at it, including well I support a basic income and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, uh, universal health care and shit, so
Speaker 1: that these fears are at least, you know, less involved with.
Speaker 1: Like maybe I will wind up like dying on the
Speaker 1: street if my ability to write shit goes away. Scott,
Speaker 1: I think takes pivots to like, I need to find
Speaker 1: an explanation for how I'm succeed I've succeeded because I've
Speaker 1: hacked reality because then it's something that I can keep
Speaker 1: doing and it won't ever fall apart on me. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like that's I think, what why he winds up kind
Speaker 1: of falling for this stuff? But again, I've gotten ahead
Speaker 1: of myself. But you know who's ahead of everything and everyone?
Speaker 2: I would assume, Well, I can't make the joke your
Speaker 2: knowledge the child Clington Island jokes they wore, are you No?
Speaker 1: No, no, not not after the FBI busted them. U No, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: we'll get in trouble again.
Speaker 2: Okay, sorry. I assume it is the Fine Conveyors of
Speaker 2: Products and Services sponsored this program.
Speaker 1: Yep, that's that's wompst we we have on now, so
Speaker 1: here we go. Oh we are b a K.
Speaker 2: The best product service I have ever been doing.
Speaker 1: I know I I for one, my nipples are hard
Speaker 1: as diamonds right now. So for years Scott put away
Speaker 1: his artistic ambitions and focused on his career. He got
Speaker 1: an NBA at u C Berkeley while he's still working
Speaker 1: for this bank, even though an evening like and it's
Speaker 1: through like his bank actually pays for him to start
Speaker 1: the programs would actually do that for you. Yeah, stuff
Speaker 1: like that happened. He claims he did really well. And
Speaker 1: he claims that, but he also claims that, like, I
Speaker 1: thought that starting this program would give me more opportunities
Speaker 1: for getting promoted, but alas this was not to be.
Speaker 1: And here's what he writes. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: the media had recently discovered that my employer had virtually
Speaker 1: no diversity in management. When an assistant vice principal president
Speaker 1: position opened up and I was an obvious candidate for
Speaker 1: the spot, my boss called me into her office. I
Speaker 1: was the most qualified candidate for the position, she explained,
Speaker 1: but because of pressure to be more diverse, there was
Speaker 1: no hope for another generic white male to get promoted
Speaker 1: anytime soon.
Speaker 2: Oh my fucking god, I was Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's so this is where we obviously, at this point
Speaker 1: in Scott's actual life, he's not saying shit like this, right,
Speaker 1: but this is from two thousand and eight when he
Speaker 1: makes this claim. But this is where we start to
Speaker 1: see like the kind of resentments that are going to
Speaker 1: build in him exploding into a racist tirade come from.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting. This is the first time Scott would
Speaker 1: claim to have been harmed by a diversity program, but
Speaker 1: he's going to claim this happens a bunch more times
Speaker 1: in his life. In fact, from here on, every setback
Speaker 1: in his career, including the failure of the dv of
Speaker 1: the Dilbert TV Show, is eventually blamed on the farious
Speaker 1: individuals wanting to hire non white people instead of him.
Speaker 1: And so it's worth Y's diversity. Yeah, here's a DEI
Speaker 1: program that team. It's worth digging because he keeps doing this.
Speaker 1: It's worth digging into, Like how credible the claim is
Speaker 1: that Scott didn't get a promotion because he was a
Speaker 1: generic white man. So the bank he's employed by at
Speaker 1: this point it was called Crocker National Bank, and it
Speaker 1: was a pretty big institution back in its heyday. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was one of the big four banks behind the
Speaker 1: construction of the first transcontinental railroad in North America. But
Speaker 1: during the time got worked there, it had been outgrown
Speaker 1: by a number of more prominent banks. For a time,
Speaker 1: it managed to do okay because it had you know,
Speaker 1: it was famous for its really good customer service. But
Speaker 1: this starts to fall apart in the early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: along with a lot of stuff. Right, we talk about
Speaker 1: this in our Jack Welch episodes. But the eighties is,
Speaker 1: andition to being the Reagan era, a real transitory period
Speaker 1: for a lot of aspects of the US economy. A
Speaker 1: lot of companies that had been huge in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds fall apart.
Speaker 3: Then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's I'm old enough to remember, like just how
Speaker 2: stressful that was to all adults around me.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And in nineteen eighty one, two years before Scott
Speaker 1: starts his NBA, Crocker had been purchased by the British
Speaker 1: Midland Bank. This was not a great sign, and its
Speaker 1: health as an institution declined throughout the mid nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: Scott claims that he was denied of promotion because of
Speaker 1: diversity in nineteen eighty six. That year is also the
Speaker 1: year that Crocker Bank collapsed. And it's interesting he acknowledges
Speaker 1: it in his book that like a few months after
Speaker 1: he quit because he quits because he doesn't get a
Speaker 1: promotion and moves to another company. A few months later,
Speaker 1: every person in his old group at the bank had
Speaker 1: been downsized. And the way he frames this right after
Speaker 1: saying that, like he'd been denied a promotion for diversity reasons,
Speaker 1: it kind of makes it look that like the firing
Speaker 1: of his coworkers was related that, like they did some
Speaker 1: purge for diversity purposes. The reality is that Crocker Bank
Speaker 1: fell apart, like it collapses the year that he leaves.
Speaker 1: He does not lose out on a promotion because of
Speaker 1: black people. He loses out on a promotion because the
Speaker 1: business falls apart.
Speaker 2: But isn't that how it usually goes? Is like, how
Speaker 2: can I retroactively make this The thought, yes, yes, the.
Speaker 1: Other and that is that is exactly the way it
Speaker 1: that this is like that it actually happens right Like
Speaker 1: the reality at the time is that the bank just
Speaker 1: falls apart. He doesn't get a promotion, because like his job.
Speaker 2: It would mean nothing.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't have a job a month anyway, buddy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and but and and then later he kind of
Speaker 1: retroactively decides to blame it on diversity. He moves to
Speaker 1: Pacific Bell, where he finishes his MBA, and again he
Speaker 1: hopes that because he's got this NBA, he's going to
Speaker 1: get promoted rapidly at Pacific Bell. And it's interesting because
Speaker 1: when he talks about this, he frames it in a
Speaker 1: self deprecating way, saying he did his best to act
Speaker 1: like he deserved a better job, and that this act
Speaker 1: was convincing enough that he gets put on a short
Speaker 1: list for promotion. But then this happens. One day, my
Speaker 1: boss called me into his office and informed me that
Speaker 1: while I was indeed management material, the company had been
Speaker 1: getting a lot of bad press lately about their lack
Speaker 1: of diversity and management.
Speaker 2: It's the exact same story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the exact same story, fucking true, Like this
Speaker 1: happened in that book he writes A two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: These two stories are like a paragraph away from each other,
Speaker 1: Like it's there's no subtlety that Scott is capable of.
Speaker 2: Here if his boss has told him that, like, he
Speaker 2: should be smart to say, oh, you're just making him
Speaker 2: a fucking excuse, and you're trying to blame someone else.
Speaker 2: It's it's like the hole back in the eighties. Hey,
Speaker 2: you know Mexico and Japan are taking her job. No,
Speaker 2: they're not taking our jobs. They're taking jobs are offered
Speaker 2: to them. It's just corporations are sending your jobs away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it took your job. Yeah, but it's interesting. So
Speaker 1: Scott has this habit of like being fake self deprecating,
Speaker 1: like self deprecating but not really meaning it, and it
Speaker 1: kind of undercuts his point here because he's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I hoped I thought I'd tricked him into thinking I
Speaker 1: was the best person for this promotion. You know, they
Speaker 1: didn't know I was really just an idiot. And but
Speaker 1: then also I didn't get the job because of diversity.
Speaker 1: He's like, well, maybe you just weren't qualified for the job, Scott,
Speaker 1: did you ever think of that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: At any rate, his response to not getting this promotion
Speaker 1: that he apparently felt he deserved was to decide to
Speaker 1: stop putting in work at his job beyond the bare minimum. Now, this,
Speaker 1: he says, wound up being key to his future success
Speaker 1: because now that he's got all this free time, he
Speaker 1: starts drawing comics again, and he decides to start publishing them.
Speaker 1: He has no idea how to do this, so he's
Speaker 1: starts writing affirmations again. Now I don't think the affirmations
Speaker 1: do much here, but what does do something is that
Speaker 1: Scott also takes a practical step towards making his cartoon
Speaker 1: dreams of reality. He's watching TV one day and he
Speaker 1: comes across a show on a local channel by a
Speaker 1: cartoonist named Jack Cassidy that's like about how to draw
Speaker 1: cartoons and like how the industry works. Scott sees this
Speaker 1: kind of by chance. He finds Jack's mailing address and
Speaker 1: he writes him a letter being like, Hey, I want
Speaker 1: to be a cartoonist. How do I start? And he
Speaker 1: encloses some of his comics. And I looked into Jack
Speaker 1: Cassidy for this because he's key to Scott's career and
Speaker 1: he's actually a pretty interesting guy. He's still alive, or
Speaker 1: at least according to the Internet, he has been teaching
Speaker 1: cartooning and publishing cartoons for decades and decades at this point,
Speaker 1: and prior to being a cartoonist and a cartoon instructor.
Speaker 1: He spent twenty three years in Army Special Forces, which
Speaker 1: is I think not the most common cartoonist background.
Speaker 2: That is not that is shit. I mean there's a
Speaker 2: lot of cartoonists who have been the military, and there's
Speaker 2: a lot of military cartoonists. That's a good thing.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, twenty three years in special forces is
Speaker 1: a pretty unique background for a cartoon instructor. Guy anyway,
Speaker 1: interesting dude, and he also he's like a really nice
Speaker 1: person because Scott sends him this letter kind of sight unseen,
Speaker 1: and he responds. Casty responds with like this very detailed
Speaker 1: letter being like, here are books that you should buy
Speaker 1: that talk about how the industry works and how to
Speaker 1: submit cartoons and to submit packages to different syndicates, a
Speaker 1: very like the best advice you could basically get.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of cartoons I've met, unfortunately, yeah, will
Speaker 2: not do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You get the feeling that Jack legitimately loves the
Speaker 1: field and wants there to be more people making cartoons.
Speaker 2: I like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great, great, yeah, great guy, as far as I
Speaker 1: can for the person. Now, that's yeah, that is the
Speaker 1: downside of encouraging people as some of them might be
Speaker 1: Scott Adams. But Scott takes his advice. He puts together
Speaker 1: like a packet of cartoons and he submits them for
Speaker 1: publication at various places, and he gets rejected. Nobody takes
Speaker 1: his first packet, and again this convinces him to give
Speaker 1: up and stop drawing for a while.
Speaker 2: That's just so.
Speaker 1: Very normal story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people understand that.
Speaker 2: Like syndicates, even now, as newspapers are receiving get thousands
Speaker 2: upon thousands upon thousands of submissions, and I can't take
Speaker 2: more than a handful.
Speaker 1: No, And what's interesting to me here is that Jack
Speaker 1: Cassidy understands this, and so a year after Scott mails
Speaker 1: him and he sends back this response out of the blue,
Speaker 1: without being prompted. Jackson Scott another letter and he's like, hey, Scott,
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about you the other day. I
Speaker 1: wanted to tell you again. You know, I thought you
Speaker 1: were talented, and I thought your packet was really good.
Speaker 1: And I hope that you're still trying to get published.
Speaker 1: We die, Yes, such a nice thing, decent thing to do.
Speaker 2: He is having the best life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, he seems to still be active and stuff.
Speaker 1: He's written a bunch of like books on cartooning. Awesome,
Speaker 1: a really nice thing to do, and it encourages Scott
Speaker 1: to give it another shot. Yeah yeah, I mean, look,
Speaker 1: we can't. This is again the downside of encouraging people.
Speaker 1: It's like, if you're a if you're a really good
Speaker 1: math teacher, you're going to encourage a lot of kids
Speaker 1: who might otherwise have not liked math to maybe understand
Speaker 1: the world on a deeper level. And that's lovely. You
Speaker 1: might also be responsible for the next Adam Baum. Like
Speaker 1: you can't know, you can't know. You encourage people's speaking. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah tragic. So h Scott takes his advice. He submits
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff and yeah. Quote. During this period,
Speaker 1: I was drawing pre Dilbert and pre Dogbert comics on
Speaker 1: the whiteboard in my cubicle, complete with witty captions about
Speaker 1: workplace happenings. Cartoon naturally draw attention, and soon my coworkers
Speaker 1: were asking the names of my two regular characters. I
Speaker 1: didn't have names for them, so I held a name
Speaker 1: the Nerd Contest on my whiteboard. My coworkers would trickle
Speaker 1: in during the day and write their ideas for names.
Speaker 1: The suggestions were traditional nerd sounding names. None of them
Speaker 1: stood out until one day my ex boss, Mike Goodwin
Speaker 1: walked in, picked up a dry erase marker and wrote, Dilbert.
Speaker 1: This was one of those moments where you feel as
Speaker 1: if you can see the future. I ended the contest immediately.
Speaker 1: It felt as though I was learning the character's name,
Speaker 1: not naming him. The name Dilbert fit him so perfectly.
Speaker 1: I literally got a chill.
Speaker 2: How glory was that fucking office that the Scott's chemical on.
Speaker 1: It does seem like a waking nightmare to have that job, even.
Speaker 2: Like the boss is like, shit, I hate me here too, Yeah, Gilbert.
Speaker 1: Dilbert Now In a Q and A on Reddit some
Speaker 1: years later, Scott would elaborate that the boss who suggested
Speaker 1: Dilbert as a name had learned the name from a
Speaker 1: World War II era comic published by the Navy. Dilbert
Speaker 1: was like the the example bad pilot where they would
Speaker 1: be like, don't do what dil it does. Look he's
Speaker 1: done this bad thing and it caused this problem, and
Speaker 1: it's actually this is still a thing. There exists to
Speaker 1: this day a Navy pilot training device called the Dilbert Dunker,
Speaker 1: which is used. Yeah, it's this weird contraption that they
Speaker 1: used to train jet pilots and helicopter pilots in escaping
Speaker 1: a submerged craft in the space saying, don't be this
Speaker 1: shitty employee. Yeah, yeah, don't you can work. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of it's kind of yeah, don't don't. I think
Speaker 1: it's more of a safety thing for the Navy, where
Speaker 1: it's like, don't do this stuff that will get you
Speaker 1: killed because look at you know, and Dilbert's the example.
Speaker 1: I'm sure his boss just had the name in his
Speaker 1: head from his time in you know, the Navy or
Speaker 1: something like that. But whatever, you know. The important thing
Speaker 1: about this is that the Navy had an opportunity to
Speaker 1: sue Scott Adams and save us all from Dilbert forever,
Speaker 1: and they failed at their duty to protect this country.
Speaker 2: Why we need to defund there. No, no, not.
Speaker 1: People, No, no, no, it's fine.
Speaker 2: They're just it's just a nameeetheart And they've been like
Speaker 2: they get tao by the Navy. Don't mean sho.
Speaker 1: Now I'm I'm I'm going after him for this. This
Speaker 1: is this is the worst Navy failure since Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 2: Oh my fucking gun. Okay, let's look back away from you.
Speaker 2: You take all of that.
Speaker 1: Fuck No, no, no, it's it's fine. Bring it. Bring
Speaker 1: it on, navy. I'm on land. You can't do ship.
Speaker 2: He's just like dragging a rowboat down the highway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sitting in sitting in their aircraft carrier off the
Speaker 1: course coast of Oregon, just screaming, you're not allowed on
Speaker 1: the dirt, motherfucker. Anyway, whatever Scott Adams back to him.
Speaker 1: So Scott's initial comics they're fine, Like I don't know,
Speaker 1: they're like they're not uh great or anything. Early Dilbert
Speaker 1: is not based around office humor, like the character is
Speaker 1: an engineer. But that's kind of like what it is.
Speaker 1: What's interesting to me is that like his art, his
Speaker 1: early art is definitely like a downgrade from the stuff
Speaker 1: he was drawing as a kid, because it's also a
Speaker 1: lot rougher than it's gonna be really though, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's fine, except for his his letterings dog shit, which
Speaker 1: is kind of one of the feedbacks he gets from
Speaker 1: the syndicate Sophi'll show you one of his early comics here.
Speaker 1: What's interesting to me, is that like in this packet,
Speaker 1: because he provides in that book some of his first packet.
Speaker 1: There's some like a couple of political strips and they're
Speaker 1: not conservative, Like the one that we're looking at here
Speaker 1: is kind of an anti Reagan one making fun of
Speaker 1: like the Star Wars missile defense system, like which is
Speaker 1: his Yeah, it's terrible letters.
Speaker 2: That's weekly newspaper comic lettering.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, look, everybody goes through a period here either.
Speaker 2: I can't say too much, but Jesus.
Speaker 1: It is compelling to me that like, yeah, oh, early
Speaker 1: on he's making fun of like Reagan and the waste
Speaker 1: of the Star Wars system. That's interesting. That's that's going
Speaker 1: kind of part there's a there's a surprise reveal coming
Speaker 1: up here, and it's it's that Scott has uh has
Speaker 1: suffered some like kind of sudden shifts in his personality
Speaker 1: that this is evidence of. So Scott's pretty bad at
Speaker 1: naming his characters. To start, his first pick for Dogbrit's
Speaker 1: name is dill Dog. He changes this before submitting his passions.
Speaker 1: That is, if you're if the name of your character
Speaker 1: is just dildo with an extra letter stuck on it,
Speaker 1: that is probably not. I couldn't agree more ry save
Speaker 1: Dill Dog, Jill Dog is.
Speaker 2: Going and something positive because will.
Speaker 1: He can't stop you. He can't stop you.
Speaker 2: Oh no heirst media can stop me from a love.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no no, yeah, I meant for for for something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he has no right.
Speaker 2: God damn it. So, oh my Jesus Christ, how did that?
Speaker 1: Very very funny, very funny? Like what the fuck that is?
Speaker 1: That part's unclear with a with old Scott, But but
Speaker 1: we'll talk. He's going to there's gonna be some weird
Speaker 1: like in cell adjacent stuff.
Speaker 2: Although he gets married a few times remotely.
Speaker 1: So by nineteen eighty eight, he's gotten his his package
Speaker 1: polished enough. That's I didn't mean it that way. That's
Speaker 1: that's that's to send off Gilbert Comics to a syndicate. Now, shockingly,
Speaker 1: this isn't again. You just talked about how many submissions
Speaker 1: these people get. One of these syndicates responds, He gets
Speaker 1: a bunch of rejections, and then somebody responds saying they're interested,
Speaker 1: and it's Scott. When he sees the syndicate that said
Speaker 1: yes to him, has no idea who they are, and
Speaker 1: like when he gets on the phone with the representative
Speaker 1: is like, yeah, who are you guys? Now, I'm telling
Speaker 1: you this basic research due Well, this is particularly galling
Speaker 1: because the syndicate who responds that he has never heard
Speaker 1: of is United Media.
Speaker 4: There was they published Peanuts, Like yeah, like I knew
Speaker 4: who United Media was as a kid in the mid nineties,
Speaker 4: just because like I'd read a bunch of books by cartoonists.
Speaker 2: Like everyone Features at the point, I think they were.
Speaker 1: United Features by that point. It's it's the one that
Speaker 1: does Peanuts and they did Garfield as well, and Garfield. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're massive. So this is like definitely the luckiest break
Speaker 1: this man has ever had in his entire life.
Speaker 2: Literally, he got the top of at the time, the
Speaker 2: number one break. Who the fuck are you? Assholes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I will say to his credit when he
Speaker 1: gets signed on, he does send a thank you letter
Speaker 1: to Jack Cassidy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that is the first thing that it sounds
Speaker 2: like he saw about the person so far.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things. I it's it's
Speaker 1: unfortunate for us all that Scott wound up having the
Speaker 1: career that he had. I do hope Jack cass City
Speaker 1: feels good about what he did. Because that was a
Speaker 1: legitimately very nice thing to do.
Speaker 2: Again, like, yeah, I agree with him. I like the
Speaker 2: idea of more cartoonists. Yeah, but there's that you cannot hear,
Speaker 2: ah won't.
Speaker 1: But what if they become Scott.
Speaker 2: Adams, gmc eines or alcaf those three are always with
Speaker 2: bullets in the chamber waiting to go off.
Speaker 1: That's that's right, Yeah, tragic, So here we go. He
Speaker 1: gets signed, Dilbert starts out. By nineteen ninety, it's in
Speaker 1: fifty papers. By nineteen ninety one, it hits one hundred.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a lot today because there are like
Speaker 1: maybe thirty newspapers left in the country and most of
Speaker 1: them are just SEO aggregators. But back in nineteen ninety, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not like the big comic strips like Fucking Calvin
Speaker 1: and hobbsit chit are in like two thousand papers, right,
Speaker 1: and it's one of those things. Fifty to one hundred newspapers.
Speaker 1: You might make like a couple of grand a year
Speaker 1: doing that. You're not gonna make all that much money, right,
Speaker 1: It's like it's not a bad, like little side income.
Speaker 1: But it is not enough for Scott to quit his
Speaker 1: his day job right.
Speaker 2: At that point, like it's it's only gotten worse. I'm
Speaker 2: sad to say. As the newspapers, it's generally most cartoonists
Speaker 2: I have met, unless they're like doing commics like Blondie
Speaker 2: or something really cute like legacy comics. I've been around
Speaker 2: for a long time. Are Garfield your house? You have
Speaker 2: a second job or this is your second job, but
Speaker 2: this is a main job you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's that's the situation that Scott's in. And
Speaker 1: this is a thing like I'm sure most cartoonists who
Speaker 1: succeed have this period where he's he's doing five comics
Speaker 1: a week, which is a I mean, anyone who's ever
Speaker 1: done that grind, I'm sure as you'll say, that's a
Speaker 1: hell of a gig like that, that is work.
Speaker 2: He's doing five or six? Was he doing the Mondays
Speaker 2: for Saturday?
Speaker 1: I think he's doing just Monday through Saturday, but it
Speaker 1: might actually be.
Speaker 2: Sunday.
Speaker 1: And then he's also he's doing in addition to doing Dilbert,
Speaker 1: he's also working like a full time gig. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: is he is hard, running himself pretty ragged, and he's
Speaker 1: kind of he's getting frustrated because three four years go
Speaker 1: by and Dilbert's not really a big deal and he's
Speaker 1: not making that much money out it's kind of exhausting,
Speaker 1: and he's starting to worry that, like, is this something
Speaker 1: that's never going to turn into anything more than a
Speaker 1: side gig for me? And so it's during this period
Speaker 1: that he makes a decision that's going to probably wind
Speaker 1: up being the actual smartest thing he ever did, which
Speaker 1: is Scott, being kind of a nerd, has gotten interested
Speaker 1: in the Internet before most people, and so, in like
Speaker 1: I think it's something like nineteen ninety two or ninety three,
Speaker 1: he starts sticking his AOL address on his cartoons and
Speaker 1: this lets his readers email him with ideas for the
Speaker 1: strip and requests for more of the stuff that they like,
Speaker 1: and he notices all of the people reaching out to me,
Speaker 1: like the comic strips I do that are like office humor.
Speaker 1: Maybe I should refocus the comic around just sort of
Speaker 1: office jokes, and so he does. In nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: he publishes his first book of cartoons, and it sells
Speaker 1: well enough that Dilbert's now in four hundred newspapers, and
Speaker 1: the comic starts to hit critical mass right as a
Speaker 1: few other things happen that Scott had nothing to do with.
Speaker 1: One of them is that the early nineties are a
Speaker 1: period in which everyone else on Wall Street is following
Speaker 1: in Jack Welch's footsteps. They're firing huge chunks of their
Speaker 1: workforce to pump up the stock price. Layoffs are this
Speaker 1: massive thing, and also the dot com boom is just
Speaker 1: starting to kick off, right, Yeah, And this leads to
Speaker 1: in addition to making a lot of money for some people,
Speaker 1: it leads to a bunch of the dumbest ideas for
Speaker 1: companies that have ever existed, right, a lot of real
Speaker 1: stupid businesses starting the mid now.
Speaker 2: We are definitely a lot of I was becoming an
Speaker 2: adult at this point in time. Yeah, getting on the web.
Speaker 2: It's like, why the fuck do you need that? Who
Speaker 2: is the market?
Speaker 1: And so, because while all this is happening, he's getting
Speaker 1: feedback from workers who like his comics and are dealing
Speaker 1: with these irritations in their jobs, and they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: you should do a comic about you know, the layoffs
Speaker 1: that just hit this coming. You should do a comic
Speaker 1: about this really dumb you know tech idea, Right, And
Speaker 1: so he starts doing all this stuff, and it causes
Speaker 1: him to kind of go a very early equivalent of
Speaker 1: viral with a lot of workers. Right, yeah, I mean no, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: It just was and blonding. Yeah, Dagwood has office, but
Speaker 2: we don't really even know what kind of office Dagwood works,
Speaker 2: and we just.
Speaker 1: I assume some sort of sandwich related job. So early
Speaker 1: Dilbert cartoons mock incompetent managers and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: Scott notes, quote Dilbert became shorthand for bad management, oppressed
Speaker 1: cubicle workers in high tech life. Readers imbued Dilbert with
Speaker 1: their own meaning beyond anything I had intended for it.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of why a lot of people
Speaker 1: early on think that Dilbert is kind of anti capitalist
Speaker 1: or at least anti corporate. Is as Scott notes, it's
Speaker 1: them putting reading into the comics something he had never meant,
Speaker 1: because he just is sort of tapping into the frustrations
Speaker 1: people have, but he doesn't he's not doing he's not
Speaker 1: motivated to do that. His readers tell him he should
Speaker 1: do that, and he's smart enough to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe I should like feed this sort of hunger within
Speaker 1: my audience, But it's not actually based on something that
Speaker 1: he super strongly believes, because again Gilbert initially had not
Speaker 1: been about that at all. That is kind of a
Speaker 1: crucial thing to recognize, and I think it's sort of
Speaker 1: it's part of why some people wind up being kind
Speaker 1: of confused by why Scott goes the way that he does.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety five, Scott gets his biggest break because
Speaker 1: the saddest day of my entire childhood happens and Bill
Speaker 1: Watterson announces that Calvin and Hobbes is coming to an end. Man,
Speaker 1: that is the most I remember crying as a little kid.
Speaker 2: I think five of the year. Also that Gary Larson
Speaker 2: said for the second time he was doing the Far
Speaker 2: Side walked away, Like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's right. The day the comics died
Speaker 1: a rough time for lovers and.
Speaker 2: Then it was not a fun I know. I think
Speaker 2: that was also the year This is probably more for
Speaker 2: me than anyone else, like Floyd Norman stopped doing the
Speaker 2: Mickey Mouse comic. Yeah, that was not a funny year.
Speaker 1: No, It's one of those things, you know, that's a
Speaker 1: lot to take it once as a kid who likes comics.
Speaker 1: The older I've gotten, the more grateful I am that
Speaker 1: Waterson did what he did because it was kind of
Speaker 1: a lesson, especially as as things have gone the way
Speaker 1: they've gone with a lot of the entertainment industry and
Speaker 1: the creative industry. I think the most valuable lesson a
Speaker 1: man in his unparalleled position could have given kids, which
Speaker 1: is like sometimes it's okay to say enough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that is I think a very important lesson
Speaker 2: and on it. Let's be real. Yeah, he and Syndicate
Speaker 2: were at each's throat at that point in time. No. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if he had kept doing the comic like he was
Speaker 2: taking more and more breaks, they were doing more and
Speaker 2: more reruns at that point in time too, it would
Speaker 2: just only gotten worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so I anyway, but at the time, this
Speaker 1: works out incredibly well for Scott because without you know,
Speaker 1: we just talked about how many cancelations there were. Dilbert suddenly,
Speaker 1: like a lot of comic like a lot of newspapers
Speaker 1: are like, well, we've got all these holes suddenly in
Speaker 1: our lineup. Oh and this Dilbert comic just published a
Speaker 1: book and its circulation doubled. Maybe we'll pick it up too, right,
Speaker 1: So suddenly hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of papers start
Speaker 1: adopt like bringing in Dilbert because they don't have anything
Speaker 1: else now. Scott claims in his two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: book that this led to a surge of purchases for
Speaker 1: the strip, which allowed him to quit his day job. Quote.
Speaker 1: People often ask if I quit or was fired. It
Speaker 1: was a little of both. In the final few years
Speaker 1: of my day job, Dilbert had turned me into a
Speaker 1: minor celebrity among technology workers. My coworkers found my fame
Speaker 1: useful in attracting customers to the lab to see Pacific
Speaker 1: Bell's latest offerings. By then, Dilbert was consuming too much
Speaker 1: of my time for me to be effective at my
Speaker 1: day job. It was clear I would soon need to
Speaker 1: quit or be fired. That's when my coworker, Anita Freeman,
Speaker 1: who was the prototype for the Alice character, suggested a
Speaker 1: deal with our bosses consents. She and my other coworkers
Speaker 1: in the lab offered to pick up my slack anytime
Speaker 1: I needed to leave work for Dilbert reasons. In return,
Speaker 1: I agreed to schmooze customers who were Dilbert fans. As
Speaker 1: part of that understanding, I told my boss anytime the
Speaker 1: arrangement didn't work for him and he needed the budget
Speaker 1: for a better purpose. I would be happy to leave,
Speaker 1: and eventually he took me up on the offer. Now,
Speaker 1: if that's true, that's again an example of how lucky
Speaker 1: Scott has been with the people in his life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: contributed massively to all success. Would like, yeah, hey, dude,
Speaker 1: I think because other job is more important to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have worked too, but I'll do your work.
Speaker 2: What the fuck? Wow, that's either the kindest coworker or
Speaker 2: a big crock of shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's one of the two. And it's it's again,
Speaker 1: it's so interesting to me that he becomes so obsessed
Speaker 1: with like the secret like universe hacks that allowed him
Speaker 1: to succeed, when it's like, no, you succeeded because a
Speaker 1: lot of really nice people gave you, which is, by
Speaker 1: the way, why anyone succeeds in a creative profession.
Speaker 2: You know, of us have had at least one person says,
Speaker 2: you know what, I think you should. We should take
Speaker 2: a chance on you. Yeah, let me share your link,
Speaker 2: let me do this, let me do this.
Speaker 1: Absolutely huge part of success and a creator. I mean, honestly,
Speaker 1: just for me, I would never have had a writing
Speaker 1: career if it hadn't have been for like this adult
Speaker 1: who was a friend of mine in World of Warcraft,
Speaker 1: who like, I sent a piece of fiction i'd written,
Speaker 1: and she was like, you know, because every other adult
Speaker 1: in my life was like, yeah, don't rely on writing
Speaker 1: as a career, and she was like, oh, you should
Speaker 1: do this for a living. And you know, sometimes that's
Speaker 1: all it fucking takes, but it's always the result not
Speaker 1: just of hard work, but of like getting fucking lucky.
Speaker 1: Scott clearly got lucky, although I do suspect this specific
Speaker 1: story is a lie and kind of a baffling one,
Speaker 1: because the evidence suggests Scott was in fact laid off
Speaker 1: for cost cutting reasons, per an interview he gave to
Speaker 1: the Sacramento Bee in nineteen ninety five. I don't get
Speaker 1: why he would kind of make up this more elaborate
Speaker 1: story like they were mass lefs at pack Bell and
Speaker 1: he got, you know, canned by them, and the story
Speaker 1: of getting canned in layoffs as the deliberate guy is
Speaker 1: actually kind of more compelling to me than like this
Speaker 1: weird arrangement. But I don't know, maybe parts of it
Speaker 1: are true.
Speaker 2: It's unclear to make him the special boy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, as opposed to like, yeah, it's special.
Speaker 2: Boy Scott, and everyone knows that special boy Scott is
Speaker 2: supposed to save us, yeah, from diversity, so therefore we
Speaker 2: must all make sacrifices for him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's he's He's definitely Again, it's kind of more
Speaker 1: main character syndrome type stuff at this point in Scott's career. Again,
Speaker 1: if you thought it all about his probable politics, you'd
Speaker 1: probably suspect maybe he was kind of a vaguely progressive
Speaker 1: guy because of how critically is of aspects of how
Speaker 1: businesses work. But Adams makes it clear again he never
Speaker 1: meant it as anything but like shallow humor kind of
Speaker 1: often brought to him by his readers, and he was
Speaker 1: surprised that people read more into his work, and this
Speaker 1: attracted some early criticism for Scott. In nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 1: named Norman Solomon, who's a journalist and a media critic,
Speaker 1: wrote a book called The Trouble with Dilbert. Solomon's kind
Speaker 1: of an interesting dude. He got surveilled by the FBI
Speaker 1: when he was fourteen for protesting to desegregate an apartment
Speaker 1: complex in Maryland, which is pretty cool. In nine, Yeah,
Speaker 1: in ninety nine, he won an Orwell Award for a
Speaker 1: collection of columns on deceptive media, and then in ninety
Speaker 1: seven he writes this book. I mean, that's a couple usually,
Speaker 1: but in ninety seven he writes this book about Dilbert.
Speaker 1: And by this point, by ninety seven, Dilbert is like
Speaker 1: one of the biggest comic strips on the planet. Scott
Speaker 1: Adams is a new, very new millionaire at this point,
Speaker 1: and because the strips are so popular, not only is
Speaker 1: he in a bunch of newspapers, but businesses. All these
Speaker 1: corporations that he had been like mocking and making fun
Speaker 1: of have adopted Dilbert. Like people are paying to use
Speaker 1: Dilbert as an advertisement for their company, right, which is
Speaker 1: kind of weird if you think about sort of some
Speaker 1: of the messages that were in the early Delbert comics.
Speaker 1: And Solomon's book criticizes Adams for using Dilbert to improve
Speaker 1: the bottom line of the corporations he purported to mock,
Speaker 1: write and quote, Dilbert Masquerades is the ultimate response to
Speaker 1: our predicament in a corporatized workplace in world. But it's
Speaker 1: a counterfeit kind of rebellion. It marks the supposed outer
Speaker 1: boundary of opposition to corporate machinery. But in fact, what
Speaker 1: Dilbert teaches through example is that the best we can
Speaker 1: hope for is a cynical aside and an acid quip.
Speaker 2: I know he's not wrong.
Speaker 1: I don't think he's wrong. I will say, you know,
Speaker 1: I think Solomon's probably a pretty cool dude based on
Speaker 1: his background. This is a silly choice. I think writing
Speaker 1: an entire book of why Dilbert's not really like a
Speaker 1: leftist master that's a little silly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure thought was procressive, but I don't
Speaker 2: think anyone thought he was going to be the left. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nobody thought Dilbert was there to bring down capitalism.
Speaker 1: It's a little like a horrible.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: I didn't really expect that from from Hagar. It's it's funny,
Speaker 1: but anyway, I think most people, especially most people who
Speaker 1: are now multi millionaires because of their doodles, would be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, a guy had a criticist, what whatever. I'm
Speaker 1: still like rich and successful. This is not has no
Speaker 1: impact on me. Scott in this kind of is the
Speaker 1: first show of the kind of dude he is. Cannot
Speaker 1: get over this. He responds in an interview with the
Speaker 1: La Times, dilvert is just a way to make people
Speaker 1: laugh so they will transfer their money to me. I'm
Speaker 1: in the business of writing funny little things that Phillips
Speaker 1: space in the newspaper, and when I get away with it,
Speaker 1: writing funny little books that people will buy. And again,
Speaker 1: like that response in and of itself is okay, but
Speaker 1: Scott can't let it go. He keeps writing about Norman's
Speaker 1: criticism of him, and eventually he publishes a whole book
Speaker 1: the next year called The Joy of Work that has
Speaker 1: this super long Remember as a kid, I read this
Speaker 1: book is like a ten year old, and you know
Speaker 1: it's a bunch of like funny jokes about like offices,
Speaker 1: and then there's this long diatribe about Norman Solomon and
Speaker 1: how dishonest and evil he is and like how fucked up,
Speaker 1: Like Scott's mocking him for like how badly his book sold.
Speaker 1: It was the guy who who Michael Crichton.
Speaker 2: Made one critics into a choldlustern a book.
Speaker 1: Yeah with a and he's he lengthily describes how small
Speaker 1: the man's penises. Yeah, okay, yeah, what like what very
Speaker 1: why do this?
Speaker 4: Why?
Speaker 2: I write an entire chapter by time YEA about you.
Speaker 1: It's it's interesting because they are both like right wing
Speaker 1: guys who were very convinced of their own brilliance to
Speaker 1: such an extent that they like rejected very basically accurate
Speaker 1: like factual things like climate change. And it is interesting
Speaker 1: to me that, like you've got these two right wing
Speaker 1: guys who get successful beyond their wildest dreams.
Speaker 2: All still such a nerds can't stop masturbating over and you.
Speaker 1: They but they still any criticism makes them lose their mind.
Speaker 1: And it's like, I don't know, Like for like Michael
Speaker 1: Cran's like, man, you wrote Jurassic Park, why do you
Speaker 1: give a ship that somebody gave a book a bad review?
Speaker 1: Like you're literally Michael Crichton, like that's fine.
Speaker 2: Tears on these one hundred dollars bills that stuff my
Speaker 2: pillow at night.
Speaker 1: Like I can fucking log onto Twitter at any point
Speaker 1: and find people saying that like I'm a fucking CIA
Speaker 1: agent and like a piece of shit, My podcast terrible,
Speaker 1: And it's like I don't know whatever, man, Like you know,
Speaker 1: like to quote from a ska musician, I love no
Speaker 1: matter what you do, it's going to piss people off.
Speaker 2: Everyone loves me. Yeah, yeah, I do not have neo conservatives,
Speaker 2: and I'll write people in my emails, yeah, wishing death
Speaker 2: on my child at all because I draw a pop by. Nope,
Speaker 2: it never has.
Speaker 1: You definitely have left wing creatives who kind of can't
Speaker 1: get over criticism too. So I'm not saying yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: top my head, but it does seem to be I
Speaker 1: think it for whatever reason, it happens to a lot
Speaker 1: of these right wing guys who have a lot less
Speaker 1: overall criticism to deal with, Like Scott is not being
Speaker 1: deluged in hate mail. One kind of weird dude writes
Speaker 1: a book about Dilbert that doesn't sell very well, and
Speaker 1: he he never gets over it, like he is obsessed
Speaker 1: with this years later.
Speaker 2: Still is it because the time he wasn't special boy Scott?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's also it's like the first time
Speaker 1: that he had to analyze if like he was what
Speaker 1: he was doing or someone had someone was trying to
Speaker 1: like critically analyze his work, and like when you critically
Speaker 1: analyze somebody's work, you will notice like flaws in it
Speaker 1: and stuff like I've read I've read critical analysis of
Speaker 1: my work that and had to be like Oh you
Speaker 1: know what, I may I may actually alter some things
Speaker 1: about what I've done because or what I'm doing in
Speaker 1: the future, because I think this person has a point,
Speaker 1: you know, you.
Speaker 2: Like, everyone can improve and all criticism is hatred.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that for Scott, the fact that
Speaker 1: criticism exists is again it puts him back in this
Speaker 1: comfortable place of wondering, maybe what I'm doing won't always work,
Speaker 1: maybe I won't always be beloved and famous for my
Speaker 1: creative stuff, and he can't handle that fear. I do
Speaker 1: think it all comes down to that for him. Yea
Speaker 1: and yeah, and that's what this episode comes down to.
Speaker 1: This has been part one of the Scott Adams series, Randy.
Speaker 1: This wound up being more than I had accepts. I
Speaker 1: talk too much and I'm probably no, no, no, no, no, no
Speaker 1: thank you, No, I'm oh, Randy, you got any pluggables
Speaker 1: to plug?
Speaker 2: Yes? I draw an online comic called Something Positive. That's
Speaker 2: Something Positive dot Net. It'st It started off as a
Speaker 2: bunch of dick jokes. Now it's aging in anxiety and
Speaker 2: dick jokes. And I also draw the Sunday Popeicomic at
Speaker 2: comics Kingdom dot com. Slash Popeye. Also on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 2: there's a future called all of Them Popeye. All the
Speaker 2: Tuesday strips are drawn by Shania I'm in amazing cartoonist
Speaker 2: who also work on Spider Ham and I do the
Speaker 2: Thursday strips that focus on Popeye and his family. And
Speaker 2: I guess if you want to scream at me online,
Speaker 2: go to the Twitter account to schuber c h O
Speaker 2: O C h O B A R and uh, just
Speaker 2: tell me how much you wish I would die, because
Speaker 2: why not?
Speaker 1: Yeah? And I think what you should do is instead again,
Speaker 1: either use your own drawing skills, or if you want
Speaker 1: to stick it to those those fat cat artists, use
Speaker 1: an AI generator and create some some unsettling Delbert pornography
Speaker 1: to share with our friend Scott.
Speaker 2: I think this weekend just for you, I'm going to
Speaker 2: draw Dilbert and cragg Art just for you.
Speaker 1: Yes, thank you.
Speaker 2: I thank you right now because I draw on my
Speaker 2: computer and I'm doing this. But I will definitely just
Speaker 2: for you. I will not not for Sophie, so has
Speaker 2: done nothing to deserve this.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: If you can I do. My only request is that
Speaker 1: if you're doing Dilbert alien impregnation, fetish art. I think
Speaker 1: the right alien is wharf Oh.
Speaker 2: God, yeah, you know what Michael Dorn would tap that.
Speaker 1: Michael Dorn would tap Sure, I mean, who wouldn't.
Speaker 2: Michael Dorn can do what he wants. I mean, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: men's voice alone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, gorgeous, Gilbert. Gilbert's a lucky man.
Speaker 3: As what I'm saying, Well, that was a pretty cool episode, Robert.
Speaker 3: But do you know what's cooler? No, it would be
Speaker 3: our Cooler Zone Media, our premium ad free channel, now
Speaker 3: available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 1: Wow, Sophie, that sounds like something that allows you to
Speaker 1: pay money and no longer hear ads. Is that basically
Speaker 1: what we're doing here?
Speaker 3: That is the gist of it. We will also have
Speaker 3: exclusive Q and a's with you Robert Evans and me,
Speaker 3: Sophie Lichterman on this very podcast, and also lots of
Speaker 3: other things add free, our entire our entire catalog of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media shows and ongoing new episodes. Add free.
Speaker 1: Stop bitching about the gold ads. You don't have to
Speaker 1: listen to them anymore, hey us, However many dollars it
Speaker 1: takes I don't know, so more ads?
Speaker 3: So open, so open your Apple Podcasts app search for
Speaker 3: cooler Zone Media and subscribe today.
Speaker 2: I'm going to.
Speaker 3: Thanks Randy, I hate myself Goodbye. Behind the Bastards is
Speaker 3: a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool
Speaker 3: Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check
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