October 17, 2025 • 34 mins
Who is Scott Adams? We tell the story of the famed Dilbert comic strip artist, author, and podcaster. Scott’s commentary often sparks widespread cognitive dissonance. But a deeper look into his life reveals why he has come to be known as America’s Internet Dad.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
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Speaker 1 (00:58):
Who's twenty fifteen and Scott Adams was a hot commodity
on the speaking circuit.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
My toublet for success has three main components, starting with
goals are for losers.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
For decades, Scott provided the comic relief for a generation
of cubicle warriors. His Diilbert comic strip was syndicated by
two thousand newspapers in sixty five countries, with the global
readership of one hundred and fifty million people. He was
a beloved national treasure. But then someone entered the political
scene that would change the course of his life.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I started talking about Trump's talent stack for persuasion in particular.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
And the move would put Scott's entire enterprise in jeopardy,
which raises the question was it worth it. I'm Patrick
Carelci and.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I'm Adriana Cortes, and this.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We're all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
The media mocks stories about everyday Americans at the globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we promise only one thing, the truth. Welcome to
Red Pilled America. Who is Scott Adams. To find the answer,
(02:29):
we tell the story of the famed comic strip artist, author,
and podcaster. Scott's commentary has been known to cause widespread
cognitive dissonance, but a deeper look into his life reveals
why He has come to be known as America's Internet Dad.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Scott grew up in upstate New York in a small
rural area known as the Catskill Mountains.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
We were, let's say, a lower income, as was most
of the town. My father worked at the post office.
My mom had real estate job, and then she worked
at the factory for a while.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
He did not attend to Fanti Prep Academy. Scott matriculated
at a tiny public school, the kind that didn't see
many people leave after graduation.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
There were forty people in my graduating class, and most
of that time. We went to the same building from
kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
But from those humble beginnings, Scott was almost willed into
believing he was going places.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
I had the weirdest experience of being identified very early
as somebody who was going to make it out and
do something that would make a mark in the world.
And adults were telling me that from my earliest memory.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
If you grew up in an environment where.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Adults are just routinely volunteering without being asked, you know that,
I think you're going to be famous someday. You start
incorporating that is just well, I guess that's what's going
to happen. And I have to admit that for most
of my early life I would wake up every morning
surprised that I wasn't already famous.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
And that's not even a joke.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
It was so built into my expectations.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Now, this idea of future greatness may have been implanted
at a young age, but Scott still needed to find
a path to get there. Well. That road would make
its first introduction before he could even read.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
My grandmother used to babysit for the kids, my siblings
and I, and she had in her farmhouse these Peanuts books,
the compilations.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
The comic illustrated by Charles Schultz, featuring Charlie Brown, Woodstocks,
Nubie and others. The problem was Scott was too young
to read.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Four and a half five, and I wanted to because
it was the only thing to do. You know, nothing's
on TV. Before Internet, there was just nothing to do.
And I would look at these and I think, I
like the drawings, but man, wouldn't it be good if
I could read the words.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I got nothing to do, So the Peanuts cartoon motivated
young Scott to pick up reading on his own.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
It's like I got to read these comics. Early, early on,
I found out that there's such a job as a cartoonist.
And there was this guy, Charles Schultz, who was the
most famous one of all time. And so I'm six
years old, and I thought to myself, well, why don't.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
I do that job? That sounds good.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
He's like insanely rich and all he does is draw
comics and I like drawing pictures. So I'll take the
job where I could be insanely rich just drawing pictures.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Why not?
Speaker 3 (05:27):
You know, I'm six, there's nothing wrong with this plan, right,
So I started working on my career when I was six,
And that's not even a joke. It's just that I thought, oh,
you know, how hard could it be to be a cartoonist?
So about age eleven, I applied to the famous artist
school for young people. It was a correspondence thing where
you would draw some things that they told you to draw,
(05:49):
and somebody would judge it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Scott applied but was quickly rejected.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
And the reason I was rejected is they said their
cutoff was twelve years old, and I was eleven, and
so I couldn't be a famous artist yet because that
was only only eleven and around eleven, you start understanding
the odds of life, you know, and you realize, wait
a minute, I can't play in the NBA because I'm
five foot eight.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
You know, that starts to dawn on you.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
And it was about the time I realized, oh, there's
only one Charles Schultz. Wait, tell me how many people
there are on the whole were Oh, that's those are
not good odds. I don't like those odds anymore.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
So Scott started looking for other career options, but he
didn't have much to pull from.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
You know, if you're a little kid in a small town,
you've only seen the jobs your friends have and whatever
the TV dads.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Have on television. That's it. So I'm like a lawyer paperwork.
I could do that.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
But to do that, you need to go to college.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Neither of my parents went to college, and I didn't
even know people who went to college, so I didn't
know how to do it. I was a Valvictorian and
I didn't know how to go to college.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
So seventeen year old Scott started researching how to do the.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
College I was.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Luck would have it, there was a kid from a
larger town or city. I forget where he came from.
He moved into our tiny town, and he had parents
who went to college and they sort of knew how
the world worked, and so they walked him through it.
And then I said, well, Peter, you seem to know
how to go to college. Can you tell me how
to do this? He goes, yeah, yeah, I'm just looking
(07:24):
through these brochures. This is pre Internet, and just find
one that looks good. And I just fill out these
forums and applied to it. And I said, well, okay,
I'll do that too. So I picked some colleges and
applied to.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Him, and in the process Scott thought he'd do a
little experiment on some of the applications. For years, a
family lore had been circulating amongst his kid.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
We were always told we had Native American, you know,
not a majority, but like a good dollop and sort
of cheekily. When I was I guess seventeen and applying
to some schools that with some forum, and said, well,
what would happen if I checked this box that says
I'm Native American?
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Because I didn't know the rules, I said, you know,
who gets to say? Do I get to say? You know? Who?
Is it up to the tribe? Is it up to me.
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
It was just a box, and I had legitimately thought
I had at least a.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Good junk whatever that was.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So I checked the box and suddenly the heavens opened.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
At the time, the United States was going through a
cultural shift. Woke policies were beginning to seep into American academics,
inspired in large part by a moment of activism in Hollywood.
Speaker 5 (08:38):
The Winner is.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
Marlon Brando.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
In the Park in nineteen seventy three, Marlon Brando won
the Oscar for Best Actor. Anticipating a win, he had
someone else speak in his place, and the move would
help start an activist movement in Hollywood and academia.
Speaker 7 (08:57):
Hello, my name is Sasheen Little Feather. I'm APACHE, and
I'm president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee.
I'm representing Marlon Brando this evening. He very regretfully cannot
accept this very generous award, and the reasons for this
(09:18):
being are the treatment of American Indians today by the
film industry excuse me, and on television in movie reruns,
and also with recent happenings at Wounded Me.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
By the mid nineteen seventies, universities were already hubs of
political activity, but American Indian activism was often overlooked. The
OSCARS moment suddenly brought their issues into the mainstream, especially
among younger politically engaged students. Native American student unions began
advocating for curriculum reform, ethnic studies programs, and tribal scholarship support,
(10:01):
and the first to really jump on the opportunity were
the progressive liberal art schools of the Northeast. So when
Scott checked that Native American box, it opened the doors
to a whole new world.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
And all these smaller colleges, mostly the smaller ones, were saying,
we would like to give you free room and board
and a four year scholarship if you will attend our college.
I said to myself, you know this doesn't feel right.
So I didn't need any adult guidance, you know, even
though seventeen, I was like, no, that wouldn't That's that's
not the path I can take, you know, I was
(10:35):
just seeing what would happen. It turns out a later
and later in life, few years ago, I took my
DNA test. I have zero zero Native American anything.
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Speaker 2 (12:06):
Welcome back to Redfield, America. So after experimenting on what
would happen if he checked the Native American box on
his college applications, Scott Adams was offered a full ride
to several universities. His conscience made him turn it down,
but two of the colleges he chose not to experiment
with were Cornell and Hartwick College.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Cornell turned me down, Actually, I think I applied too
late or they put me on a waiting list or something,
I forget what it was. And Heartwick said, will take you,
but I couldn't afford it, so it was way too expensive.
So I actually wrote to them and said I'd like
to go, but I need a scholarship.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
And I actually wrote back and gave it to me.
So between that.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
And my parents saved money and I worked, you know,
several jobs through college and all that, I became an
economics major at Hartwood college.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Now, Scott chose economics because he thought it served as
a good pre law major.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
But at some point I realized that being a lawyer
meant you had to be a battle all the time.
There's a winner and a loser, and neither of those
are fun for me. I don't want to be the loser,
but I don't want to be the winner if I
have to make the other guy lose, like it's just
an uncomfortable permitive position. But I thought, to make money,
I'm going to be a business person or whatever. Decided
(13:20):
to be a banker and take as many classes as
I could to learn the banking stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
By the time graduation came around, he turned to an
economics professor for some advice.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
I said, I think I want to go to California.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
If I was gonna put down roots.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Might as well find someplace with good weather, good economy.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
The professor advised him to try an outfit named Crocker Bank.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Said, there are leaders in the automation, and you know
there's sort of leaders and forward thinking stuff. So I
went out there, stood in line at a Crocker Bank
and asked for a job, and they gave me a job.
Speaker 4 (13:54):
On the spot.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
He started off as a bank teller, but after being
robbed at gunpoint several times, he set his sites higher.
Scott quickly worked his way up the ranks, becoming the
next in line for senior management. That when it came
time for that promotion, Scott was blocked by a new
movement sweeping through corporate America.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
My boss called me in and said, you know, the
company got the bank was getting a lot of heat
because they had no diversity in senior management. And they
said the order came down that sorry, we can't promote you.
So you know, just warning you that you won't be
promoted here because you're white and male, and we just
can't do that until we balance things out.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
What Scott was experiencing was a major shift in corporate culture,
a shift away from meritocracy towards a color and gender
conscious society. It was a long time in the making.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
In nineteen sixty one, President John F. Kennedy first introduced
a firmative action in federal policy, an approach aimed at
increasing representation of so called historical disadvantage groups. I take
it race, gender, or other identity factors into account during
decision making. President Richard Nixon expanded on the policy. In
(15:13):
nineteen sixty nine, he launched the revised Philadelphia Plan, requiring
certain Philadelphia federal construction contractors to meet explicit minority hiring
goals and timetables. Civil rights activists from every nook and
cranny of the nation caught wind, and the policy eventually
swept through the rest of the nation. As the nineteen
seventies progressed, affirmative action policy expanded across every government and
(15:38):
American institution. Federal agencies and contractors were adopting written affirmative
action plans. Many universities and companies voluntarily adopted race conscious programs,
and by the end of the decade, the Supreme Court
weigh in as well, finding that private employers could use
voluntary race aware training programs. A court even found that
(15:59):
race could be used as one factor in college admissions decisions.
When the nineteen eighties arrived, affirmative action became a system
that was used not just to ensure equal opportunity, but
also as a weapon to replace white males with often
underperforming workers. The once laudable policy had grown to a
monstrosity where people were being judged not by the quality
(16:21):
of their performance, but by the color of their skin.
By nineteen eighty one, the new incoming president, Ronald Reagan,
moved to correct the system.
Speaker 8 (16:29):
In the sixties, you opposed all the civil rights legislation,
but more recently you said that you were a part
of the Martin Luther King revolution. If that is the case,
why is your administration so bent on wiping out the
flexible hiring goals for blacks, minorities, and women.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
In administering these programs.
Speaker 6 (16:49):
We've seen that the affirmative action program was becoming a
quota system. Now I've lived long enough to have seen
quotas when they were employedoid long before there was a
civil rights movement, when they were employed in my youth,
to definitely discriminate and use the quota as a means
(17:12):
of discrimination. And therefore we feel that, yes, we want
affirmative action to continue. We want what I think Martin
Luther King asked for. We want a colorblind society.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Minority activist Jesse Jackson saw Reagan's position as a threat
to the affirmative action policies benefiting his coalition, so his
activist group called Push set out to pressure corporate America
into supporting their cause.
Speaker 9 (17:39):
The argument behind PUSH's reciprocity campaign is that because Black
Americans as consumers contribute significantly to the profits of major
companies like Coca Cola, black Americans should hold more positions
of power within those industries.
Speaker 8 (17:54):
Is opposition that we must demand economic reciprocity.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
Social generosity is an addicate.
Speaker 9 (18:02):
After waging a boycott against Cocaine Atlanta, Jackson announced that
company has responded by bringing blacks into management, legal and
sales positions. Operation Pushes expanding its campaign, threatening economic sanctions
against several other bottling companies, including seven Up and Pepsi.
Jackson warns that if these companies don't shape up and
(18:23):
renegotiate with a black community, they may also face an
economic boycott. He argues, blacks must take their fight to
the private sector.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Corporate America, fearing becoming a future target, began voluntarily implementing
affirmative action policies, leading companies like Crocker Bank to inform
high performing white male employees like Scott Adams that their
promotions would be postponed indefinitely again. Scott Adams, so.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
I quit.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
I was a young guy like beginning my career and
if somebody says that we're not going to promote you,
you quit, so I went and worked for the phone company.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Like at Crocker Bank, Scott quickly got on the management track.
He entered UC Berkeley and got an MBA. His career
prospects we're looking promising again. But then he experienced some
deja vu.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
My boss called me in his office and then a
repeat of the earlier story. He said, management just got
caught having no diversity in senior management and until that changes,
we can't promote you because you're.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Male and white.
Speaker 7 (19:24):
And yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
I said, well, how long is this gonna last? And
they're like, well, how long did it take us to
get here? You know, we're not talking about months. You know,
we can't tell you when this will ever end.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
This would have crushed the ambition of most young men.
I mean, Scott had done everything right. He turned down
the Native American scholarship, worked his way through college, then
went through the relentless hours of management training. He even
got his MBA during after hours. You wouldn't have blamed
Scott Adams for becoming bitter, but instead he took the
news and stride.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
I was influenced by the power of positive thinking movement.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
You can actually believe yourself to achievement, you can actually
believe yourself to happiness.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
In nineteen fifty two, clergyman and American author Norman Vincent
Peel published The Power of Positive Thinking, a monumental self
help book that made the case for positive thinking using
a biblical approach.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
Year you really believe, not some vague kind of an
intellectual assnt. But if you with all your heart believe,
if you believe with an intensity of belief, then you
(20:53):
can believe yourself to every good thing.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
My mother was aware of it. She was a reader,
and that was a topic we talked about. I read
about it early, and I got hooked in my teenage years.
I got hooked reading success books.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
After consistently facing setbacks in his career because of his
gender and skin color, Scott was still able to find
a silver lining in his situation.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
And people say, that must have made you feel pretty
pretty bad, And I have to admit it didn't.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
It should have.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
But I remember feeling that I was free, and that
you know the moment that your effort and your rewards
are disconnected, that you don't have to do the effort anymore.
And I realized that I didn't have to come to
my job and work. I could just come in and
just do the minimum it took while doing something on
(21:51):
the side, because I probably wouldn't get fired. I could
work half as hard and still be in the top
twenty percent of the performers without too much trouble. So
that's why I decided to look at other opportunities. And
I thought, well, maybe I'll try to be a cartoonist,
something I'd wanted to do since I was six, and
that's when I started putting some comics together and working
(22:12):
my day job.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
The problem was Scott didn't know where to start.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
So one day, as luck would have it, and luck
is always every good story, I wondered how to be
a cartoonist and turned on the TV and there was
a show telling me how to be a cartoonist, of
all the things that exactly when I needed it. It
was actually a TV show how to do it.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
But Scott turned it on at the tail end of
the program. This was the eighties, there was no way
to rewind the show, so as the closing credit started
running across the screen, Scott needed to act fast.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I grabbed a pen and pencil and I write down
where it was broadcast from and I sent a snail
mail letter to the host, and I said, I missed
your show, but I'd like to be a famous cartoonist.
Can you tell me how to do that? How do
I get started? A few weeks later, I get a
handwritten two page letter from the host in which he
answered all my questions, said, get this book. It'll tell
you where to submit your materials and how to do
(23:09):
it and all that, and use these materials and these
pens in this paper.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
So he went out and bought the book, picked up
the materials, compiled what he thought were his finest comics,
and then sent them off to the magazines that paid
the most for comic strips, publications like The New Yorker
and Playboy.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
And I got my rejections.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
It literally wasn't even a personal rejection, actually a photocopy
of a rejection with my name written in an hand letter,
Dear Scott, thank you for submitting. So I get the rejections,
and I say to myself, well, at least I tried, right,
I put the effort in. I felt good about my effort,
but you know, not everything you try is going to
(23:49):
work out. So I took my materials and I put
them in my art materials, put them in the closet,
and forgot about it. A year goes by and I
get a second letter from His name was Jack cass Day,
the cartoonist and the host of that show gave me
the advice, and he said he was cleaning his office
(24:09):
and he came upon in the bottom of one of
his piles was my original letter and some samples i'd
set him, and he said he was just writing to
make sure that I hadn't given up. And he didn't
ask for anything. He didn't tell me anything else. That
was the only point of his letter, and I had
given up, and I thought, well, maybe he knows something,
(24:31):
like maybe he's just seeing something that's invisible to me
and to the people who rejected me so far.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
So Scott pulled his art materials from out of his closet, and.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
I decided to increase my sights to be a syndicated
cartoonist in newspapers around the world. And I figured, well,
if I fail at that, at least I'll be failing
at a more noble goal. It'll be a higher goal
I'm failing at, and that will feel like progress in
its own weird way. So I put together some comics
that were loosely based on my coworkers, you know, come
(25:03):
them in most cases, and some of me I would
put into the characters.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Scott Wood Doodle the main character on a whiteboard in
the office.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
And so one of my coworkers said he should be
called Dilbert, and I was like, Oh, that's it, that's
his name.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
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(25:45):
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risk of loss. Before making investment decisions, you should carefully
consider and review all risks involved. Welcome back to red
Pilled America. So, after getting some encouragement from a TV
show host, Scott Adams decided to get back to cartooning.
He drew his main character on a whiteboard at work.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
And so one of my coworkers said he should be
called Dilbert, and I was like, Oh, that's it, that's
his name. Soon as I heard it, I was like
seeing the future. I had an experience of a future memory.
In other words, it didn't feel like a dream and
illusion and imagination. It didn't feel like a wish a
hope of visualization, because you know what those feel like.
(27:04):
It felt like a memory. The moment I heard the
word Dilbert, I almost felt myself being drawn down a
tunnel into the future, seeing something clearly, and then being
yanked back out of the tunnel. Back to the present,
and it's an experience I will never be able to
fully explain. But the moment I heard the word, I
could see my future and I knew it, now hoped it,
(27:27):
and not wished it.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
I just saw it.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
So Scott went about making this future memory a reality.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
And so I sent out my samples to the big
cartoon syndicates, and I thought I had all my rejections
from them. You know, a few weeks go by and
they trickle in, one at a time, reject, reject, reject.
One of them suggested that maybe I could find an
actual artist to do the drawing for me.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
So that wasn't my finest moment.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
But one day I get a call from a woman
who said she worked for a company called United Media
that I didn't recognize. Had not sent my samples to
anybody with that name, and she said she'd seen my
samples I didn't even know how, and wanted to offer
me a contract to become a syndicated cartoonist and newspapers
around the world if things went well. And I said, well,
(28:15):
you know, I'm flattered by your offer. But you know,
by this time I was still young, young guy. I
was a little bit seasoned in the ways of the world.
So you know, I'm going to hold my cards a
little close to my vest I'm gonna ask for references.
So I said, you know, I'm flattered by your offer,
but is there any cartoonists you've ever worked with before
(28:36):
who have gone on to be published in any way
in a let's say, a magazine or any kind of
a pamphlet or anything. And there's this long pause and
then she says, yeah, we handle peanuts.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
The same comic strip that drove him to learn how
to read, created by the cartoonists that he wanted to
emulate since he was six years old. But the woman
didn't stop there.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
And Garfield, Marmaduke and Nancy and robot Man. And when
she got to the twelfth name on the list, I
realized I was talking to the biggest cartoon syndicate in
the world, and the most important person on the entire planet,
of all the seven billion people on Earth, I was
on the phone with the most important person for this
(29:25):
entire industry in the biggest place.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Scott Adams was faced with the opportunity of a lifetime.
His pathway to fame had finally revealed itself.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
And she was offering me, without even meeting me in person,
a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist. So once she
said that, I realized that my negotiating position had been compromised.
I was not the clever business person I imagined that
I was, And so I said, well, hell, yes, I'll
take that contract. Now you take the contract, But that
doesn't mean that you're automatically in newspapers. They still have
(29:57):
to sell it to the newspapers. In the first several
years they couldn't do that. The newspapers didn't like it.
It was poorly drawn. They said, nobody cares about a
newspaper where a guy's at work. It's like, you know,
we don't want to see work. This is for fun.
And it sort of languished, and fewer than one hundred
newspapers around the world, which is not enough to make
(30:18):
any kind of a living.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
The royalties were so small it Scott still had to
keep his day job.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
And because it was struggling and starting to head in
the other direction, and failure seemed assured if nothing had
been done in my day job, which I still had.
We were learning about this new thing called email.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
In the early nineteen nineties, very few people actually even
understood what the Internet was, including mainstream news broadcasters.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
What is the Internet?
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Internet is that massive computer network, the one that's becoming
really big.
Speaker 8 (30:51):
Now, what do you mean that's big?
Speaker 4 (30:53):
How does what do you write to it?
Speaker 9 (30:55):
Like mail?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Now a lot of people use it and communicate.
Speaker 8 (30:58):
I guess they can communicate with NBC writers and producers, Alison,
can you explain what internet is?
Speaker 3 (31:03):
And this is how long ago it was that nobody
had email, but we had it because we were the
phone company and we're among the first to have it.
And I thought, hey, I'm going to put my email
address between the borders of the strip and see if
anybody gives me ideas or input. And it was considered
a risky move at the time, which is quaint and
(31:24):
funny from our perspective, because the syndication company said, I
don't know, our clients the newspaper are going to see that,
and it looks like an advertisement for something, and why
would they pay us for something that's going to be
an advertisement? It should be opposite. We should be paying them.
So we think they'll get kicked down. And I said,
you know, but I'm going to fail anyway. Basically, was
(31:46):
my argument, why not. They said, all right, try it,
And I got thousands of emails a day, almost as
soon as it happened, and most of.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
The email went't like this.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Hey, I got email too, but I don't know anybody
else who has email. I saw your email adjusted, so
I'm writing to you because I don't know anybody else
has email.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
But some of the emails gave valuable information it would
change the course of his comic strip.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
At the time, Gilbert was a workplace guy. He was
an engineer, but he didn't spend that much time at work.
That was just one of the things he did. And
people wrote to me and said, you know, we kind
of like your comic when he's at home and playing
with his dog and stuff, but we really like it
when he's at work because that's just like our work,
and then we relate to it. And so many people
(32:42):
told me the same thing, and nobody told me the opposite,
and it was one hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
People said that.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
I said, well, I guess I'm a workplace cartoon now because.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
My background was not art.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
My background was economics and business, and you know business school.
In that realm, you listen to the customer and the
customer tells you what your product is, and that's just
sort of a basic smart business person thing. You can
take a guess what your product is, but as soon
as it's in the market, you're done with that part.
After that, your customer tells you what your product is,
(33:15):
and you better make it that as soon as you can.
So I put this comic out there, and my customer said, no, no,
that's a workplace comic. And so I said, well, if
you're telling me that's what it is, that's what it's
going to be.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
So Scott took the advice of his readers, and when
he did, his comic strip would become a cultural phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Coming up on Red Pilled America, what.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Do you want people to remember you by when all
is said and done?
Speaker 4 (33:41):
Another amazing question.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's owned
and produced by Patrick Carrelci and me Adrianna Cortez for
Informed Ventures. Now you can get ad free access to
our entire catalog of episodes by becoming a backstage subscriber.
To subscribe, just visit Redpilled America dot com and could
join in the top menu. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 7 (34:13):
M
This is Red Pilled America.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Before we start the show, just a reminder to share, like,
and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it,
and please give us a five star rating. It helps
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Red Pilled America, please consider supporting the show. You can
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(00:29):
Or you can become a backstage subscriber. Well you'll have
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Speaker 1 (00:58):
Who's twenty fifteen and Scott Adams was a hot commodity
on the speaking circuit.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
My toublet for success has three main components, starting with
goals are for losers.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
For decades, Scott provided the comic relief for a generation
of cubicle warriors. His Diilbert comic strip was syndicated by
two thousand newspapers in sixty five countries, with the global
readership of one hundred and fifty million people. He was
a beloved national treasure. But then someone entered the political
scene that would change the course of his life.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I started talking about Trump's talent stack for persuasion in particular.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
And the move would put Scott's entire enterprise in jeopardy,
which raises the question was it worth it. I'm Patrick
Carelci and.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I'm Adriana Cortes, and this.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We're all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
The media mocks stories about everyday Americans at the globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we promise only one thing, the truth. Welcome to
Red Pilled America. Who is Scott Adams. To find the answer,
(02:29):
we tell the story of the famed comic strip artist, author,
and podcaster. Scott's commentary has been known to cause widespread
cognitive dissonance, but a deeper look into his life reveals
why He has come to be known as America's Internet Dad.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Scott grew up in upstate New York in a small
rural area known as the Catskill Mountains.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
We were, let's say, a lower income, as was most
of the town. My father worked at the post office.
My mom had real estate job, and then she worked
at the factory for a while.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
He did not attend to Fanti Prep Academy. Scott matriculated
at a tiny public school, the kind that didn't see
many people leave after graduation.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
There were forty people in my graduating class, and most
of that time. We went to the same building from
kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
But from those humble beginnings, Scott was almost willed into
believing he was going places.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
I had the weirdest experience of being identified very early
as somebody who was going to make it out and
do something that would make a mark in the world.
And adults were telling me that from my earliest memory.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
If you grew up in an environment where.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Adults are just routinely volunteering without being asked, you know that,
I think you're going to be famous someday. You start
incorporating that is just well, I guess that's what's going
to happen. And I have to admit that for most
of my early life I would wake up every morning
surprised that I wasn't already famous.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
And that's not even a joke.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
It was so built into my expectations.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Now, this idea of future greatness may have been implanted
at a young age, but Scott still needed to find
a path to get there. Well. That road would make
its first introduction before he could even read.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
My grandmother used to babysit for the kids, my siblings
and I, and she had in her farmhouse these Peanuts books,
the compilations.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
The comic illustrated by Charles Schultz, featuring Charlie Brown, Woodstocks,
Nubie and others. The problem was Scott was too young
to read.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Four and a half five, and I wanted to because
it was the only thing to do. You know, nothing's
on TV. Before Internet, there was just nothing to do.
And I would look at these and I think, I
like the drawings, but man, wouldn't it be good if
I could read the words.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I got nothing to do, So the Peanuts cartoon motivated
young Scott to pick up reading on his own.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
It's like I got to read these comics. Early, early on,
I found out that there's such a job as a cartoonist.
And there was this guy, Charles Schultz, who was the
most famous one of all time. And so I'm six
years old, and I thought to myself, well, why don't.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
I do that job? That sounds good.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
He's like insanely rich and all he does is draw
comics and I like drawing pictures. So I'll take the
job where I could be insanely rich just drawing pictures.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Why not?
Speaker 3 (05:27):
You know, I'm six, there's nothing wrong with this plan, right,
So I started working on my career when I was six,
And that's not even a joke. It's just that I thought, oh,
you know, how hard could it be to be a cartoonist?
So about age eleven, I applied to the famous artist
school for young people. It was a correspondence thing where
you would draw some things that they told you to draw,
(05:49):
and somebody would judge it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Scott applied but was quickly rejected.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
And the reason I was rejected is they said their
cutoff was twelve years old, and I was eleven, and
so I couldn't be a famous artist yet because that
was only only eleven and around eleven, you start understanding
the odds of life, you know, and you realize, wait
a minute, I can't play in the NBA because I'm
five foot eight.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
You know, that starts to dawn on you.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
And it was about the time I realized, oh, there's
only one Charles Schultz. Wait, tell me how many people
there are on the whole were Oh, that's those are
not good odds. I don't like those odds anymore.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
So Scott started looking for other career options, but he
didn't have much to pull from.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
You know, if you're a little kid in a small town,
you've only seen the jobs your friends have and whatever
the TV dads.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Have on television. That's it. So I'm like a lawyer paperwork.
I could do that.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
But to do that, you need to go to college.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Neither of my parents went to college, and I didn't
even know people who went to college, so I didn't
know how to do it. I was a Valvictorian and
I didn't know how to go to college.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
So seventeen year old Scott started researching how to do the.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
College I was.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Luck would have it, there was a kid from a
larger town or city. I forget where he came from.
He moved into our tiny town, and he had parents
who went to college and they sort of knew how
the world worked, and so they walked him through it.
And then I said, well, Peter, you seem to know
how to go to college. Can you tell me how
to do this? He goes, yeah, yeah, I'm just looking
(07:24):
through these brochures. This is pre Internet, and just find
one that looks good. And I just fill out these
forums and applied to it. And I said, well, okay,
I'll do that too. So I picked some colleges and
applied to.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Him, and in the process Scott thought he'd do a
little experiment on some of the applications. For years, a
family lore had been circulating amongst his kid.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
We were always told we had Native American, you know,
not a majority, but like a good dollop and sort
of cheekily. When I was I guess seventeen and applying
to some schools that with some forum, and said, well,
what would happen if I checked this box that says
I'm Native American?
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Because I didn't know the rules, I said, you know,
who gets to say? Do I get to say? You know? Who?
Is it up to the tribe? Is it up to me.
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
It was just a box, and I had legitimately thought
I had at least a.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Good junk whatever that was.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So I checked the box and suddenly the heavens opened.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
At the time, the United States was going through a
cultural shift. Woke policies were beginning to seep into American academics,
inspired in large part by a moment of activism in Hollywood.
Speaker 5 (08:38):
The Winner is.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
Marlon Brando.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
In the Park in nineteen seventy three, Marlon Brando won
the Oscar for Best Actor. Anticipating a win, he had
someone else speak in his place, and the move would
help start an activist movement in Hollywood and academia.
Speaker 7 (08:57):
Hello, my name is Sasheen Little Feather. I'm APACHE, and
I'm president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee.
I'm representing Marlon Brando this evening. He very regretfully cannot
accept this very generous award, and the reasons for this
(09:18):
being are the treatment of American Indians today by the
film industry excuse me, and on television in movie reruns,
and also with recent happenings at Wounded Me.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
By the mid nineteen seventies, universities were already hubs of
political activity, but American Indian activism was often overlooked. The
OSCARS moment suddenly brought their issues into the mainstream, especially
among younger politically engaged students. Native American student unions began
advocating for curriculum reform, ethnic studies programs, and tribal scholarship support,
(10:01):
and the first to really jump on the opportunity were
the progressive liberal art schools of the Northeast. So when
Scott checked that Native American box, it opened the doors
to a whole new world.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
And all these smaller colleges, mostly the smaller ones, were saying,
we would like to give you free room and board
and a four year scholarship if you will attend our college.
I said to myself, you know this doesn't feel right.
So I didn't need any adult guidance, you know, even
though seventeen, I was like, no, that wouldn't That's that's
not the path I can take, you know, I was
(10:35):
just seeing what would happen. It turns out a later
and later in life, few years ago, I took my
DNA test. I have zero zero Native American anything.
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Speaker 2 (12:06):
Welcome back to Redfield, America. So after experimenting on what
would happen if he checked the Native American box on
his college applications, Scott Adams was offered a full ride
to several universities. His conscience made him turn it down,
but two of the colleges he chose not to experiment
with were Cornell and Hartwick College.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Cornell turned me down, Actually, I think I applied too
late or they put me on a waiting list or something,
I forget what it was. And Heartwick said, will take you,
but I couldn't afford it, so it was way too expensive.
So I actually wrote to them and said I'd like
to go, but I need a scholarship.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
And I actually wrote back and gave it to me.
So between that.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
And my parents saved money and I worked, you know,
several jobs through college and all that, I became an
economics major at Hartwood college.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Now, Scott chose economics because he thought it served as
a good pre law major.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
But at some point I realized that being a lawyer
meant you had to be a battle all the time.
There's a winner and a loser, and neither of those
are fun for me. I don't want to be the loser,
but I don't want to be the winner if I
have to make the other guy lose, like it's just
an uncomfortable permitive position. But I thought, to make money,
I'm going to be a business person or whatever. Decided
(13:20):
to be a banker and take as many classes as
I could to learn the banking stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
By the time graduation came around, he turned to an
economics professor for some advice.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
I said, I think I want to go to California.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
If I was gonna put down roots.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Might as well find someplace with good weather, good economy.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
The professor advised him to try an outfit named Crocker Bank.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Said, there are leaders in the automation, and you know
there's sort of leaders and forward thinking stuff. So I
went out there, stood in line at a Crocker Bank
and asked for a job, and they gave me a job.
Speaker 4 (13:54):
On the spot.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
He started off as a bank teller, but after being
robbed at gunpoint several times, he set his sites higher.
Scott quickly worked his way up the ranks, becoming the
next in line for senior management. That when it came
time for that promotion, Scott was blocked by a new
movement sweeping through corporate America.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
My boss called me in and said, you know, the
company got the bank was getting a lot of heat
because they had no diversity in senior management. And they
said the order came down that sorry, we can't promote you.
So you know, just warning you that you won't be
promoted here because you're white and male, and we just
can't do that until we balance things out.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
What Scott was experiencing was a major shift in corporate culture,
a shift away from meritocracy towards a color and gender
conscious society. It was a long time in the making.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
In nineteen sixty one, President John F. Kennedy first introduced
a firmative action in federal policy, an approach aimed at
increasing representation of so called historical disadvantage groups. I take
it race, gender, or other identity factors into account during
decision making. President Richard Nixon expanded on the policy. In
(15:13):
nineteen sixty nine, he launched the revised Philadelphia Plan, requiring
certain Philadelphia federal construction contractors to meet explicit minority hiring
goals and timetables. Civil rights activists from every nook and
cranny of the nation caught wind, and the policy eventually
swept through the rest of the nation. As the nineteen
seventies progressed, affirmative action policy expanded across every government and
(15:38):
American institution. Federal agencies and contractors were adopting written affirmative
action plans. Many universities and companies voluntarily adopted race conscious programs,
and by the end of the decade, the Supreme Court
weigh in as well, finding that private employers could use
voluntary race aware training programs. A court even found that
(15:59):
race could be used as one factor in college admissions decisions.
When the nineteen eighties arrived, affirmative action became a system
that was used not just to ensure equal opportunity, but
also as a weapon to replace white males with often
underperforming workers. The once laudable policy had grown to a
monstrosity where people were being judged not by the quality
(16:21):
of their performance, but by the color of their skin.
By nineteen eighty one, the new incoming president, Ronald Reagan,
moved to correct the system.
Speaker 8 (16:29):
In the sixties, you opposed all the civil rights legislation,
but more recently you said that you were a part
of the Martin Luther King revolution. If that is the case,
why is your administration so bent on wiping out the
flexible hiring goals for blacks, minorities, and women.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
In administering these programs.
Speaker 6 (16:49):
We've seen that the affirmative action program was becoming a
quota system. Now I've lived long enough to have seen
quotas when they were employedoid long before there was a
civil rights movement, when they were employed in my youth,
to definitely discriminate and use the quota as a means
(17:12):
of discrimination. And therefore we feel that, yes, we want
affirmative action to continue. We want what I think Martin
Luther King asked for. We want a colorblind society.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Minority activist Jesse Jackson saw Reagan's position as a threat
to the affirmative action policies benefiting his coalition, so his
activist group called Push set out to pressure corporate America
into supporting their cause.
Speaker 9 (17:39):
The argument behind PUSH's reciprocity campaign is that because Black
Americans as consumers contribute significantly to the profits of major
companies like Coca Cola, black Americans should hold more positions
of power within those industries.
Speaker 8 (17:54):
Is opposition that we must demand economic reciprocity.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
Social generosity is an addicate.
Speaker 9 (18:02):
After waging a boycott against Cocaine Atlanta, Jackson announced that
company has responded by bringing blacks into management, legal and
sales positions. Operation Pushes expanding its campaign, threatening economic sanctions
against several other bottling companies, including seven Up and Pepsi.
Jackson warns that if these companies don't shape up and
(18:23):
renegotiate with a black community, they may also face an
economic boycott. He argues, blacks must take their fight to
the private sector.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Corporate America, fearing becoming a future target, began voluntarily implementing
affirmative action policies, leading companies like Crocker Bank to inform
high performing white male employees like Scott Adams that their
promotions would be postponed indefinitely again. Scott Adams, so.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
I quit.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
I was a young guy like beginning my career and
if somebody says that we're not going to promote you,
you quit, so I went and worked for the phone company.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Like at Crocker Bank, Scott quickly got on the management track.
He entered UC Berkeley and got an MBA. His career
prospects we're looking promising again. But then he experienced some
deja vu.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
My boss called me in his office and then a
repeat of the earlier story. He said, management just got
caught having no diversity in senior management and until that changes,
we can't promote you because you're.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Male and white.
Speaker 7 (19:24):
And yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
I said, well, how long is this gonna last? And
they're like, well, how long did it take us to
get here? You know, we're not talking about months. You know,
we can't tell you when this will ever end.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
This would have crushed the ambition of most young men.
I mean, Scott had done everything right. He turned down
the Native American scholarship, worked his way through college, then
went through the relentless hours of management training. He even
got his MBA during after hours. You wouldn't have blamed
Scott Adams for becoming bitter, but instead he took the
news and stride.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
I was influenced by the power of positive thinking movement.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
You can actually believe yourself to achievement, you can actually
believe yourself to happiness.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
In nineteen fifty two, clergyman and American author Norman Vincent
Peel published The Power of Positive Thinking, a monumental self
help book that made the case for positive thinking using
a biblical approach.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
Year you really believe, not some vague kind of an
intellectual assnt. But if you with all your heart believe,
if you believe with an intensity of belief, then you
(20:53):
can believe yourself to every good thing.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
My mother was aware of it. She was a reader,
and that was a topic we talked about. I read
about it early, and I got hooked in my teenage years.
I got hooked reading success books.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
After consistently facing setbacks in his career because of his
gender and skin color, Scott was still able to find
a silver lining in his situation.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
And people say, that must have made you feel pretty
pretty bad, And I have to admit it didn't.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
It should have.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
But I remember feeling that I was free, and that
you know the moment that your effort and your rewards
are disconnected, that you don't have to do the effort anymore.
And I realized that I didn't have to come to
my job and work. I could just come in and
just do the minimum it took while doing something on
(21:51):
the side, because I probably wouldn't get fired. I could
work half as hard and still be in the top
twenty percent of the performers without too much trouble. So
that's why I decided to look at other opportunities. And
I thought, well, maybe I'll try to be a cartoonist,
something I'd wanted to do since I was six, and
that's when I started putting some comics together and working
(22:12):
my day job.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
The problem was Scott didn't know where to start.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
So one day, as luck would have it, and luck
is always every good story, I wondered how to be
a cartoonist and turned on the TV and there was
a show telling me how to be a cartoonist, of
all the things that exactly when I needed it. It
was actually a TV show how to do it.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
But Scott turned it on at the tail end of
the program. This was the eighties, there was no way
to rewind the show, so as the closing credit started
running across the screen, Scott needed to act fast.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I grabbed a pen and pencil and I write down
where it was broadcast from and I sent a snail
mail letter to the host, and I said, I missed
your show, but I'd like to be a famous cartoonist.
Can you tell me how to do that? How do
I get started? A few weeks later, I get a
handwritten two page letter from the host in which he
answered all my questions, said, get this book. It'll tell
you where to submit your materials and how to do
(23:09):
it and all that, and use these materials and these
pens in this paper.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
So he went out and bought the book, picked up
the materials, compiled what he thought were his finest comics,
and then sent them off to the magazines that paid
the most for comic strips, publications like The New Yorker
and Playboy.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
And I got my rejections.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
It literally wasn't even a personal rejection, actually a photocopy
of a rejection with my name written in an hand letter,
Dear Scott, thank you for submitting. So I get the rejections,
and I say to myself, well, at least I tried, right,
I put the effort in. I felt good about my effort,
but you know, not everything you try is going to
(23:49):
work out. So I took my materials and I put
them in my art materials, put them in the closet,
and forgot about it. A year goes by and I
get a second letter from His name was Jack cass Day,
the cartoonist and the host of that show gave me
the advice, and he said he was cleaning his office
(24:09):
and he came upon in the bottom of one of
his piles was my original letter and some samples i'd
set him, and he said he was just writing to
make sure that I hadn't given up. And he didn't
ask for anything. He didn't tell me anything else. That
was the only point of his letter, and I had
given up, and I thought, well, maybe he knows something,
(24:31):
like maybe he's just seeing something that's invisible to me
and to the people who rejected me so far.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
So Scott pulled his art materials from out of his closet, and.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
I decided to increase my sights to be a syndicated
cartoonist in newspapers around the world. And I figured, well,
if I fail at that, at least I'll be failing
at a more noble goal. It'll be a higher goal
I'm failing at, and that will feel like progress in
its own weird way. So I put together some comics
that were loosely based on my coworkers, you know, come
(25:03):
them in most cases, and some of me I would
put into the characters.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Scott Wood Doodle the main character on a whiteboard in
the office.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
And so one of my coworkers said he should be
called Dilbert, and I was like, Oh, that's it, that's
his name.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
History shows that every market eventually falls, every currency collapses,
and today the US dollar is hanging by a thread.
Trillions in national debt record high markets define gravity, but
stocks can't go up forever. Meanwhile, your groceries, housing, and
transportation costs are all going up, and your dollar it's
buying less every single day. If the system breaks, your
(25:45):
stocks and dollars won't save you, but one thing will. Gold.
Gold has always survived a collapse. That's why banks and
billionaires are stocking up, and Americans are protecting their savings
with physical gold before the next shoe drops. Call their
capital at eight hundred four to eight zero one one
zero zero for your free gold Investment kit and twenty
(26:05):
thousand in bonus gold with a qualified purchase. Lear is
your leading source. Over three billion dollars in transactions, thousands
of reviews. Call now eight hundred four eight zero one
one zero zero. That's eight hundred four eight zero one
one zero zero. Keep in mind that any investment has
a certain amount of risk associated with it, and you
should only invest if you can afford to bear the
(26:27):
risk of loss. Before making investment decisions, you should carefully
consider and review all risks involved. Welcome back to red
Pilled America. So, after getting some encouragement from a TV
show host, Scott Adams decided to get back to cartooning.
He drew his main character on a whiteboard at work.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
And so one of my coworkers said he should be
called Dilbert, and I was like, Oh, that's it, that's
his name. Soon as I heard it, I was like
seeing the future. I had an experience of a future memory.
In other words, it didn't feel like a dream and
illusion and imagination. It didn't feel like a wish a
hope of visualization, because you know what those feel like.
(27:04):
It felt like a memory. The moment I heard the
word Dilbert, I almost felt myself being drawn down a
tunnel into the future, seeing something clearly, and then being
yanked back out of the tunnel. Back to the present,
and it's an experience I will never be able to
fully explain. But the moment I heard the word, I
could see my future and I knew it, now hoped it,
(27:27):
and not wished it.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
I just saw it.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
So Scott went about making this future memory a reality.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
And so I sent out my samples to the big
cartoon syndicates, and I thought I had all my rejections
from them. You know, a few weeks go by and
they trickle in, one at a time, reject, reject, reject.
One of them suggested that maybe I could find an
actual artist to do the drawing for me.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
So that wasn't my finest moment.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
But one day I get a call from a woman
who said she worked for a company called United Media
that I didn't recognize. Had not sent my samples to
anybody with that name, and she said she'd seen my
samples I didn't even know how, and wanted to offer
me a contract to become a syndicated cartoonist and newspapers
around the world if things went well. And I said, well,
(28:15):
you know, I'm flattered by your offer. But you know,
by this time I was still young, young guy. I
was a little bit seasoned in the ways of the world.
So you know, I'm going to hold my cards a
little close to my vest I'm gonna ask for references.
So I said, you know, I'm flattered by your offer,
but is there any cartoonists you've ever worked with before
(28:36):
who have gone on to be published in any way
in a let's say, a magazine or any kind of
a pamphlet or anything. And there's this long pause and
then she says, yeah, we handle peanuts.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
The same comic strip that drove him to learn how
to read, created by the cartoonists that he wanted to
emulate since he was six years old. But the woman
didn't stop there.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
And Garfield, Marmaduke and Nancy and robot Man. And when
she got to the twelfth name on the list, I
realized I was talking to the biggest cartoon syndicate in
the world, and the most important person on the entire planet,
of all the seven billion people on Earth, I was
on the phone with the most important person for this
(29:25):
entire industry in the biggest place.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Scott Adams was faced with the opportunity of a lifetime.
His pathway to fame had finally revealed itself.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
And she was offering me, without even meeting me in person,
a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist. So once she
said that, I realized that my negotiating position had been compromised.
I was not the clever business person I imagined that
I was, And so I said, well, hell, yes, I'll
take that contract. Now you take the contract, But that
doesn't mean that you're automatically in newspapers. They still have
(29:57):
to sell it to the newspapers. In the first several
years they couldn't do that. The newspapers didn't like it.
It was poorly drawn. They said, nobody cares about a
newspaper where a guy's at work. It's like, you know,
we don't want to see work. This is for fun.
And it sort of languished, and fewer than one hundred
newspapers around the world, which is not enough to make
(30:18):
any kind of a living.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
The royalties were so small it Scott still had to
keep his day job.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
And because it was struggling and starting to head in
the other direction, and failure seemed assured if nothing had
been done in my day job, which I still had.
We were learning about this new thing called email.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
In the early nineteen nineties, very few people actually even
understood what the Internet was, including mainstream news broadcasters.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
What is the Internet?
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Internet is that massive computer network, the one that's becoming
really big.
Speaker 8 (30:51):
Now, what do you mean that's big?
Speaker 4 (30:53):
How does what do you write to it?
Speaker 9 (30:55):
Like mail?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Now a lot of people use it and communicate.
Speaker 8 (30:58):
I guess they can communicate with NBC writers and producers, Alison,
can you explain what internet is?
Speaker 3 (31:03):
And this is how long ago it was that nobody
had email, but we had it because we were the
phone company and we're among the first to have it.
And I thought, hey, I'm going to put my email
address between the borders of the strip and see if
anybody gives me ideas or input. And it was considered
a risky move at the time, which is quaint and
(31:24):
funny from our perspective, because the syndication company said, I
don't know, our clients the newspaper are going to see that,
and it looks like an advertisement for something, and why
would they pay us for something that's going to be
an advertisement? It should be opposite. We should be paying them.
So we think they'll get kicked down. And I said,
you know, but I'm going to fail anyway. Basically, was
(31:46):
my argument, why not. They said, all right, try it,
And I got thousands of emails a day, almost as
soon as it happened, and most of.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
The email went't like this.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Hey, I got email too, but I don't know anybody
else who has email. I saw your email adjusted, so
I'm writing to you because I don't know anybody else
has email.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
But some of the emails gave valuable information it would
change the course of his comic strip.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
At the time, Gilbert was a workplace guy. He was
an engineer, but he didn't spend that much time at work.
That was just one of the things he did. And
people wrote to me and said, you know, we kind
of like your comic when he's at home and playing
with his dog and stuff, but we really like it
when he's at work because that's just like our work,
and then we relate to it. And so many people
(32:42):
told me the same thing, and nobody told me the opposite,
and it was one hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
People said that.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
I said, well, I guess I'm a workplace cartoon now because.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
My background was not art.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
My background was economics and business, and you know business school.
In that realm, you listen to the customer and the
customer tells you what your product is, and that's just
sort of a basic smart business person thing. You can
take a guess what your product is, but as soon
as it's in the market, you're done with that part.
After that, your customer tells you what your product is,
(33:15):
and you better make it that as soon as you can.
So I put this comic out there, and my customer said, no, no,
that's a workplace comic. And so I said, well, if
you're telling me that's what it is, that's what it's
going to be.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
So Scott took the advice of his readers, and when
he did, his comic strip would become a cultural phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Coming up on Red Pilled America, what.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Do you want people to remember you by when all
is said and done?
Speaker 4 (33:41):
Another amazing question.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's owned
and produced by Patrick Carrelci and me Adrianna Cortez for
Informed Ventures. Now you can get ad free access to
our entire catalog of episodes by becoming a backstage subscriber.
To subscribe, just visit Redpilled America dot com and could
join in the top menu. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 7 (34:13):
M
Hosts And Creators
Adryana Cortez
Patrick Courrielche
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