Scott Adams, a retrospective
It’s 1997. I’m in an airport. Very early teenage years. I had just started to become exposed to business and “the workforce” by going into work with my dad during the summer and sometimes working (when I wasn’t using AOL). I’m heading back home to Iowa from California. I stop at the bookstore looking for a snack. The books begin to catch my eye. At my age, I was heavily into Garfield at the time. So naturally I go towards the comics. Back then there were books that had like 300+ pages of comics in them (not to be confused with comic books).
Something catches my eye. In between the comic books and the books with comics was something else. It was a small 5x7 book in blue with a cartoon dog on the front titled “Conversations with Dogbert”. Dogbert was a recurring character in the Dilbert universe. I was familiar with Dilbert a little bit from seeing comic strips here and there. But I had never really read them though. Given my love for animals (as I just started becoming vegetarian), I picked up the book. After reading a couple of pages and chuckling I purchased the book and read it on the plane ride home.
At that point in my life I was a Dilbert fan. I loved his quips, gravity defying necktie, crazy coworkers, boss with pointy hair, and fight corporate work structure approach. I started buying more Dilbert comic books. I would read them in school. As a teenager trying to find my identity in a small town, Dilbert resonated with me. I would spend my spare time in school either reading bass guitar magazines or Dilbert.
The local library had a copy of the “The Dilbert Principle”. Which was a book that posed the theory that “Companies systematically promote incompetent employees to management to minimize the damage they can do.” It was a book that I frequently checked out. At the time it was wasn’t a revolutionary book, but it was a great workplace topic. The book contained very little cartoons and was very text heavy. It was here that I began learning more about Scott Adams and his views. It was like seeing the cartoonist behind the cartoon, while still sticking to the subject matter of the workplace.
Eventually, the public library had a book sale and I purchased The Dilbert Principle. One day while on AOL, I looked up info on Scott and saw he was vegetarian. I felt kind of vindicated. Being from a small midwest town where not eating meat was basically akin to hating puppies, it was nice to see I wasn’t alone and that the person whose work I was reading had something very in common with me.
Dilbert-mania raged throughout the late 90s and early 2000s. After signing a licensing deal with office depot, Dilbert merch exploded to the main stream in the form of merch and commercials. For Christmas one year, my parents gifted me a Dogbert mug that had the text “Let me drop everything and work on YOUR problem.” It was my hot chocolate mug for years until it got chipped then becoming my dedicated pen holder.
In the early 2010’s Scott was fairly active on twitter. I made a quote from one of his books into a graphic and tagged him in it. I let him know it resonated with me. He liked the tweet and replied “thank you.” I think it was him and not a bot. It felt kind of cool that he enjoyed what I made from his work.
Around the mid-2010s I started reading “God’s Debris” or rather listening to the audiobook about it. I was having a faith crisis at the time and was open to different religious literature. The book focuses around several surface level philosophies, where a an old guide tells a young delivery boy these ideas. The main idea was that God somehow blew himself up and we are all that’s left of him. I wasn’t big into that, nor the other ideas in that book. But this didn’t turn me away from being a Scott Adam’s fan.
During the 2016 election, Scott was one of the more outspoken voices claiming donald trump would win the election in a landslide. He went on talkshows and would present evidence around his point. He then wrote a book about this called “Win Bigly”. Which I also read. I gave a copy of ‘How to fail at almost everything and still win big. Kind of the story of my life” to one of my assistants. After reading a bit of the book she pointed out that Scott was just bragging about a lot of things and seemed very insensitive. I told her that these were just jokes. But then I reflecting more deeply on Scott’s writings. Were they jokes?
He had a few writings that seemed very misogynistic. It wasn’t standard “locker room talk”. I usually glazed over those paragraphs. But something didn’t sit right with me. It was likeI couldn’t unsee something but I didn’t know what.
February 2023, Scott Adam’s made remarks calling Black American’s a “hate group”. Along with other racist context, it seemed Scott had fallen off the deep end. Following the remarks many newspapers stopped publishing his comic immediately. Lots of people stopped reading Dilbert, myself included. There were groups that tried to separate the art from the artist, but it was difficult.
I was talking with a friend about what was happening. He recommended me a “Behind the bastards” podcast episode about Scott Adams.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000620748620
I heard more well researched information about him behind the scenes. I try to take most things with a “grain of salt”, but a lot of this info tracked pretty well. More racist comments were dug up. When Dilbert TV show (with it’s two season run) was cancelled Scott tweeted in 2020 "I lost my TV show for being white when UPN decided it would focus on an African-American audience." He then followed up with "That was the third job I lost for being white. The other two in corporate America."
It was insanely clear to me that Scott’s writings were no longer (or perhaps never were) jokes. It was how he viewed the world. I wasn’t so much crushed as disappointed. Around this time I made a more conscious effort to declutter my Dilbert collection. In 2025, I took my last Dilbert book, the Dilbert Principle (that I bought at the library book sale) to a used book store and exchanged it in for store credit. I still had the coffee mug holding my pens. Earlier that year, Scott had annouced he was diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer which spread to his bones. Treatments were also not working for him. He asked trump on social media to help him obtain access to a drug for treatment. RFK replied back “How do I reach you? The President wants to help.”
While undergoing radiation therapy, Scott became paralyzed from the waist down. While still going through all this pain, he was still hosting his daily podcast show Real Coffee with Scott Adams. On January 13th, 2026 Scott Adam’s passed away at 68 years old. The news reached me via a couple of friends who we all felt saddened by the huge shift in Scott’s behavior of the years. Given all the personal history I have with Dilbert and Scott outlined here, I felt this was the time to close this chapter in my life. My Dogbert mug had seen better days and I wanted to move on. I discarded the mug and built a new pen holder out of floppy disks, zip ties, glue, thoughts and prayers.
Scott’s legacy is sadly tarnished by his later years of jumping on the trump, being racist, and being exposed. He could have led a quiet peaceful life during 2016, but this was not what he chose. I never saw Jim Davis (the creator of Garfield) speak out politically. There was a lot of other unflattering things Scott did that I didn’t mention here. Dilbert now has a damaged legacy as well. For me, I have moved onto other office subject matter. But am saddened that this was the legacy that Scott Adams chose for himself and Dilbert.
