The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 561. Scott Adams and Jordan Peterson

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

In this deeply personal interview, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with Scott Adams, cartoonist and creator of Dilbert, to explore the unlikely paths that shape a life—from illustrating a nationally syndicated hit comic to fatal illness and facing the metaphysical. Adams shares stories of coincidence and perseverance, including how affirmations, setbacks, and sheer optimism propelled him from obscurity to national fame. The conversation dives into themes of malicious envy, systems versus goals, American culture, simulation theory, and the power of narrative perception. Both reflect on trauma, purpose, and survival—making this episode a profound meditation on how we author meaning in a truly absurd world. This episode was filmed on July 7th, 2025  | Links | For Scott Adams: On X https://x.com/scottadamssays?lang=en On Youtube, watch or listen to the “Real Coffee With Scott Adams” podcast https://www.youtube.com/@RealCoffeewithScottAdams/videos Website https://dilbert.com/ 

Some of your viewers know that I have terminal cancer, prostate cancer that's metastasized. And once it metastasized, you don't have the options of curing it like you would if it was localized. So part of my system is to be open to all the possibilities, but the other is the belief that nothing's impossible. The spirit of your aim answers your prayers. This is literally the case because once you set up an aim your imagination and your cognitive systems orient themselves to serve that aim. It wouldn't be the first time I had an incurable disease that I cured. I'm a

really cocky bastard. I kind of enter a lot of situations thinking I could do this. You know, as an adult I started thinking that, you know, I must be living in some kind of a simulation. And that somehow the way I steer the simulation is by imagining what it is that I want to go toward, and then things fall in line. We're navigators and we navigate towards a destination. Like we set our sights by the stars.

All of this is true. Most of us know Scott Adams as the creator of the world famous Dilbert cartoon, wherein for decades he offered a satirical critique of corporate culture and office life. But Adams is also a sage and a suffering sage. In mid-May he announced that he had received a prostate cancer diagnosis, which is most likely terminal. We spoke at length about his career, about his strange life, about the role of faith and affirmation in his movement forward, about technology, about optimism and service, and much more. Join us. It's a great conversation. Join us. It's a great conversation.

First, I'd like to thank you for two things, for Dilbert, and also on behalf of my son for Dilbert, because he was an immense Dilbert's fan when he was younger than he is now, and I spent a lot of enjoyable time reading Dilbert, and so it's great to, to what? It's a little bit of satirical lightness in a world that's often, often lacks humor. So thank you for that. And also thank you more personally. You wrote a cartoon about me when I was in the midst of my, I'm still in the midst of my interminable war with the College of Psychologists in Ontario.

And I don't think they were very happy about that. I certainly hope not. Apparently I'm to be re-educated this month. So I'm dead serious. They've reduced my penalty to one two hour session by Zoom, which I'm supposed to keep private, but certainly will not. So yeah, well, I think they're part of their problem is that everything I said turned out to be correct. And so that's kind of annoying three or four years later.

So thank you anyways. Much appreciated for Dilbert and for the personal touch as well. Glad to help. You know, I should add that I owe you an apology for something you might not be aware of. Okay. When you first burst onto the scene and became

sort of the biggest thing everywhere, I had not yet been exposed to your content. But when I was doing my podcasts, the chat would turn into just a non-stop, what do you think of Jordan Peterson? And I had to start blocking people because it just completely took over my podcast. And then finally after, oh, it must have been months and

months of that, I thought, all right, I'm going to go look at your content. And I thought, oh, I get it now. I completely understand why everybody was pestering me. Because when I watched your content, I had this weird sensation that I was like the less educated form of you, meaning that I largely agreed with everything you were saying, but I didn't have the science, you know, behind it. So, that was like a big

awakening for me. And then I got hooked on your content and absorbed a lot of it. Well, so apparently we're approximately equally reprehensible. Is that the moral of the story? Well, whatever you were saying was certainly hitting with a lot of people, including me. So, I guess we're all reprehensible. Yes. Well, we've certainly moved to the point where many of us are reprehensible. So although maybe things are shifting back

to something approximating whatever kind of sanity we might be able to accomplish, I see that you pen-stripped Will Thomas of his medals two days ago. And so I'm always thrilled when a six foot five man no longer gets to have medals in a female swimming competition. And to me, that's a sign of sanity,

but that's, I suppose, part of being reprehensible. And I don't know, how are you feeling about the current, what, zeitgeist, let's say? Well, it's incredible. The fact that Trump is doing so many things he said he would do, and he's doing it as fast as possible, maybe because the midterms could disrupt things. But now I'm mostly worried about how long it will last, because all it takes is one election and everything goes back to where it was.

And that would be pretty intolerable to me. But at the moment, it just feels like nonstop goodness. I saw people were trending, the Golden Age has begun this morning. So at least half of the country thinks things are great. And then I see the other half, I like to call it two movies on one screen. The other half of the country thinks they're living in some kind of nightmare hellscape.

And I wake up every day and I think, oh, where's the hellscape part? It looks pretty good to me. So I'm enjoying it. Yeah, well, as far as I can tell, the hellscape is the remnants of what had happened over the last 10 years. I mean, things really seem to go sideways in a serious manner in about 2015. And maybe that was a consequence of us all becoming hyperconnected, eh? Because it's certainly possible that stupid, impulsive ideas spread faster than wise and sagacious ideas, right? I mean, we've never...

Well, yeah, one of the things I write about in Dilber all the time is that things start as good ideas when they're small. Yeah. is that things start as good ideas when they're small. Do you remember when there was a big fad of re-engineering? And, you know, there was a book on it and everything. And so, re-engineering was a great idea. It was the idea that instead of just tweaking something that wasn't working, you should think about how to rebuild it from scratch and, you know, really make it exactly what you wanted.

Now, who can argue with that? Except by the time it hit the corporate world, it turned into every manager has to re-engineer everything or else they're not with the new thing. And then it just became absurd. Everybody was just looking for money to re-engineer something. And that seems like what happened with all the wokeness stuff. It probably started as, well, let's, you know, let's treat people

respectfully and sort of acknowledge that people are different. And then it just turned into a whole different thing. Yeah, I wonder, you know, I read a couple of, there's three now, I think, psychological studies about, for example, about motivation for income redistribution. So imagine that you can generate a set of questions that reliably assess someone's attitude

towards the more socialist idea of income redistribution, so that you can place them on a continuum in relationship to their support for that idea. And you can do that relatively carefully, so it's a stable measurement. And then you could look at what predicts that belief. And these particular psychologists looked at three factors. They looked at compassion, which would be the factor that you just described, genuine compassion, let's say. And that seems to reflect trait agreeableness, which is one of the big five personality traits. And so, and they looked at fairness, like actual moral concern

with fairness, and they looked at malicious envy. And the biggest predictor was malicious envy. And the second biggest predictor was compassion. And fairness didn't enter the prediction at all. And so one of the things... Well, yeah, I was saying that fairness was invented so children and idiots would have something to talk about. Because, you know, there's no standard for fairness.

Yeah, well, I suppose the entire political discussion in some ways is about what constitutes fair. But it's interesting that the, you that it's compassion and concern with fairness, let's say, that drives concern with, well, equitable wealth distribution. But if you do a careful analysis, it's malicious envy that's doing a lot of the work. And so I've become more and more skeptical of those, of, you know, you said things start out good and then deteriorate. And I wonder to what degree that's the case, because that malicious envy, two things, and I'd like your comments on them. That malicious envy certainly plays a role.

I mean, that's a story as old as time, because that's the story of Cain and Abel. And then there's also this proclivity for people to use God's name in vain, so to speak, which I did a very careful analysis of that commandment, trying to understand what it meant. And what it means is, don't claim moral virtue when you're feathering your own bed, right? And so you could imagine that the most egregious error you can make is to do something corrupt and then to sanctify it, right? And there's a tremendous amount of that that characterizes our culture now, I think much

more than that was the case, let's say, when I was half my age. Because I just don't remember that being that prevalent, you know, that people would thump their chest and proclaim that they were on the side of the angels with quite the amount of force that seems to be the common tactic. Now maybe that also has something to do with being hyperconnected, you know? Because you can trumpet your moral virtues so easily into so many people that it's easy for it to be gamed. Yeah, when I was young, I grew up in a family where we were very much not rich, but we had

a house that was directly across the ski slope in town. So that's where the rich people went to ski. And I'm pretty sure that I was full of malicious envy at the time. Because the way we talked about the rich people was as if they were enemies who had, you know, somehow gotten there, you know, in some criminal way or some unethical way. And those are just sort of assumptions that they didn't deserve their money. And you can imagine that if things hadn't gone well for me, if I didn't do well in school so I had a path out, that I could have become a criminal and just said, well, you know, you didn't deserve

your money, I'll steal it from you. Right, right. So, I feel I've gone from the malicious envy mode, just because my circumstance and, you know, hearing other people talk, to all the way to, you know, now that I have things I want to protect, I find myself suspiciously in favor of things that protect my assets. And I talk as though those are the godly things and those are the systems that protect us all.

And I mean it because the arguments for it are all good, but I always ask myself, is it a total coincidence that all these things that I think are morally smart and good and systems that work better than other systems? Is it my imagination that these are all good for me? You know, I'm watching the big beautiful bill get passed, and you know, I could have spent time looking at all the ways it would affect everybody, but I found myself just looking at how it would affect my taxes and I thought, hmm, there I go again.

Well, you know, okay, some thoughts on that. I've been to a lot of different places in the world now, mostly and broadly in the West, let's say, but some other places as well. And there is one thing I've noticed that characterizes the United States more particularly and thoroughly than any other place I've been by a lot, which is that that sentiment of malicious envy

is radically attenuated here. And there is a major streak of American culture that's predicated on the opposite assumption, which is that it's possible to make good by doing well, and that people who earn their living deserve to keep it and that much of what constitutes true wealth is honestly gotten. And I do believe that that's a wellspring of wealth for the US. And I've had a lot of dealings, well, you have too, and we can talk about this, you've had a lot of dealings with the corporate world. I tend to go speak at corporate events.

It's so funny, eh? Because the evil corporate events. So if I go speak at a corporate event, this is my experience. So they pay me a lot. They're thrilled to see me. I can talk about anything I want. The audience is extremely receptive.

Everyone's very hospitable. It's hyper efficient and all things considered, it's very hospitable, it's hyper efficient, and all things considered, it's a great pleasure. Okay, so that's the evil corporate world. Then if I go to a university, so they don't pay me anything, the administration and the students do everything they can to interfere with the experience

and make it as miserable as possible, both directly in terms of challenge and also behind the scenes. It's very inhospitable, it's very badly produced, and mostly it's a royal pain in the neck. And so, and that's, that's, I don't think that's merely a matter of my self-interest making itself manifest, you know, like, I don't think that's merely a matter of my self-interest making itself manifest, you know? And I do think that the US continues to lead the world economically because that sentiment of malicious envy is more attenuated here by a lot than it is anywhere else in the world. So for what that's worth.

Well, wait, but what would be driving it in America over the other countries? You mean the lack of it? No, the malicious envy. Well, I think it's probably... You're saying the malicious envy is worse here. No, no, it's not worse. It's much less here. It's much less in the US. Oh, okay. Oh, no, it's much less. Well, there's a genuine sentiment of, and maybe that's part of the depth of the American

dream. There's a genuine sentiment here that you can make good by doing well, and that if you do manage that, then you deserve the fruits of your labor and you could be admired for your hard work and your success. I mean, in your situation, we could analyze your situation. You were worried about your self-interest overwhelming your ethics. Although I'll tell you, I'd rather deal with someone honestly self-interested than hypocritically altruistic any day.

You can deal with a greedy man because you know what motivates him. And if you can make a deal with him that also benefits him, man, you're both playing the same game. And that's pretty simple compared to someone who, in whose mouth butter wouldn't melt and who's always working for the betterment of the human race, you have no bloody idea

what they're up to or what motivates them. And so now you, I mean, you've come by your success by bringing joy, ironic joy to hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people and for a long time. And so that seems like a good deal for everyone. And if it provided you with a certain degree of material security and comfort and opportunity, then how in the world is that

not a good thing for everyone? I mean, I think the world's a better place because it had Dilbert cartoons in it by quite a substantial margin. Yeah. My first ambition as a child was to become a lawyer. Well, my first ambition as a child was to become a lawyer. Well, my first ambition was to become a famous cartoonist when I was about six years old. But I soon found out that it's very hard to become a famous cartoonist and the odds were very much against me. So I went through this age of reason from about age 11 where I was like, I better do something that will work. But the more I thought about being a lawyer, I was sort of pre-law in my mind in college,

the more I thought, wait a minute, the only way I can win as a lawyer is by making somebody else lose. I mean, there might be some exceptions to that. But generally, it's an adversarial system. And I thought, if I lose, I'm going to feel bad. And if I only win because I made somebody else lose, I'm going to feel a little bit bad about that too. You know, depending on how badly I won. And so I thought, what about entertainment? You know, who loses when you get entertained? Nobody.

You know, they win, I win. So I thought, well, I'll go into some place where everybody wins. So that was both for my mental health, but also there was a moral dimension to that, which is I just couldn't build a life around winning. I also thought, what if I'm really good at it? If you're really good at being a lawyer,

in some ways that's the worst case, because you're getting off guilty people, you're prevailing where maybe the facts were not really completely on your side. So being a great lawyer would feel a little bit sketchy to me, but being a great cartoonist, if you could ever get there, would just be all plus. So, I chose wisely in the end. So, when you were six, you already had an inkling of your ambition. And what were you, who were your idols? Who were your cartooning idols? I saw an article about Charles Shultz in a big magazine display.

And I saw him standing there in his sweater and looking a lot like I look now with the glasses and everything. And I thought to myself, wouldn't that be the best job in the world? You know, he draws one comic a day, and he's world famous, and he's got airplanes and stuff. And I thought, yeah, I'll just do that. But, you know, that's when you're a kid and you think you can be an astronaut or an NBA player if you just try really hard. But eventually, I became smart enough to know it was impossible. And then I gave up that dream for years, as I mentioned. It wasn't until I was well into the corporate world, and I learned that doing a good job in the

corporate world doesn't exactly perfectly correlate with success, that there are just so many other factors that can take you down. That's why I started doing things that didn't make sense. They were sort of irrational. So I thought, well, I'll just try to become a cartoonist, even though I don't know how to do it. And there was a weird sequence of events that allowed me to get into it. It was so weird, it made me doubt the nature of the universe, to be honest.

You said you weren't very sensible and you were dreaming of impossible fame like Charles Schultz had. I mean, he had Rockets named after his characters. I mean, that man was at the top of the world for a good while. And then you got sensible and you studied pre-law and then you took a nosedive, let's say, into the corporate world. And then you stopped beinglaw and then you took a nosedive, let's say, into the corporate world and then you stopped being sensible and then something impossible happened.

So, and then you made an illusion to that. You said you had experiences that were so off-kilter, let's say, that it made you doubt the structure of the world. So, hey man, elaborate on that. So, I took a class in hypnosis when I was in my 20s, because my mother had given birth to my little sister while being hypnotized, because my family doctor was a hypnotist. And she reported having no pain and being alert and essentially awake but still under hypnosis while she delivered a baby without, she said, without

painkillers. Now, once I got older, I started to doubt this story, whether it was true. But in the meantime, in my 20s, I signed up for a hypnosis course. And one of the students was into something called affirmations. Now, most people have heard of it, but the way it was described to me was, oh, there's this book where if you just write down 15 times a day what you want, this magical coincidence stuff will happen. And I thought, you know, I'm not really a believer in anything magical.

But she kept saying, well, you know, it doesn't cost anything, it's easy to try, you know, it worked for me, you know, some lover from my past just appeared magically when I affirmed it. And I thought, all right, well, I'll give it a shot. And long story short, I picked some things which, according to her instructions, I picked some things which I thought were highly unlikely to happen on their own, such as a relationship that was, you know,

with somebody who was way out of my league at that time. And it happened. And then some financial stuff that just seemed wildly unlikely happened. And they were both subjects of my affirmations. But I had been warned that if I didn't pick something that was wild enough, I wouldn't keep going with affirmations. I would just tell myself, well, I guess I'm a lot more attractive than I gave myself credit for. Or maybe my financial instincts are just wildly good. And sure enough, I did those things. So I said, hmm, I really got to give this the real test.

And so I decided the other part of the story is the reason that my corporate career failed is that my boss called me into her office one day when I was working at a bank and said, I don't know how to tell you this, but we've been told by management we can't promote white men anymore. And I said, what? You can't, like how long is this going to last? And my boss was a woman, said, well, we don't know, but you know, so I thought to myself, all right, well, I quit.

So I resigned soon after, went to work for the phone company, got on the fast path to management, and then one day my boss called me in and said, I don't know how to tell you this, but the word has come down from management, and you know where this is going, that we can't promote white men. And so that's when I decided, all right,

I'm going to use an affirmation to become a famous cartoonist. So I started writing down, you know, I, Scott Adams, will become a famous cartoonist. Not just a cartoonist, but a famous cartoonist. And how do you do that before the Internet? Like, how in the world, if you had no connection to anything, it's not like there was a cartoonist college I could get into. I didn't know a cartoonist. So one day I come home, one day I come home and here's the magic part.

I turn on the TV and I'm just flipping through the channels and it's before TiVo, you know, before I think of technology. And I see the end of a TV show on one of the PBS stations about how to become a cartoonist. But I turned in too late. I only caught the end of it, so just enough to know what it must have been about. So I quickly ran and grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper, and as the closing credits were going by,

I wrote down where they were broadcasting it from and the name of the host. And I wrote him a snail mail letter. And I said, I missed your show, but I would like to become a cartoonist. Can you give me some tips? You know, where do I start? And sure enough, Jack Cassidy was his name. He was a working cartoonist. He wrote back a two-page handwritten letter in which he said, answered all my questions. He said, you know, buy this book, it'll tell you where to submit things that people would buy. Use this kind of paper because you can erase it a lot of

times, use these kind of pens. So, I thought, oh, my goodness, now I know what to do. So, I bought the book, I got the paper, I made a bunch of comics that I thought were pretty good. Sent them off to Playboy and the New Yorker and just some magazines, because that was my ambition at the time. And they came back with rejections. But they weren't even personal rejections. They were literally photocopies of generic declines.

We were not interested in your cartoons. So I thought at the time, well, I tried. I did my best because I really did try hard. I put lots of time into it. Put my stuff away, forgot about it. A year later, I walk out to my mailbox, and I get a second letter from Jack Cassidy, the original advice I've gotten.

I thought, oh, I didn't even thank him for his advice, because I suck. I just sort of used it, and a year later he's writing me a second letter. And I thought, what is this about? And I opened his letter and it said he was cleaning his office, and it came upon my samples

I'd sent him a year before. And he said, and this was the same advice he gave me on the first set of advice. He said, I just wanted to make sure that you hadn't given up. And that was the only reason he wrote. There was no other agenda, didn't ask for anything. He just said, I want to make sure you didn't give up.

And I thought to myself, well, what is he seeing that these other editors are not seeing? So I thought to myself, I'll raise my standard instead of trying to get published in a magazine, which might give you a few hundred dollars a month. I thought I'll try to become a syndicated worldwide cartoonist like Peanuts and, you know, do the hardest thing you can do as a cartoonist, which is break into that market. So I put together some samples

that were now Dilbert, because I'd been doodling him at work and a co-worker gave him a name, Dilbert, and sent them off to the half-a-dozen cartoon syndicates. Now, they're the ones that give you the big break. There were only half-a-dozen of them at the time. There were fewer of them now. And if they said yes, they would work with you to sell your comics to all the newspapers in the world. So, if you got that break, that's like the break. So, I sent off my samples because I had that book that had been recommended to me, so I knew where to send them. And the rejections started trickling in. and one of them suggested that maybe I should

find an actual artist to do the drawing for me. Yeah. So, that's the kind of feedback I was getting. So, once I was pretty sure I had all the responses that I was going to get, I said, well, now I've tried as hard as I can twice. But, you know, I'm no fool. I'm not going to just keep chipping away for nothing. So, I put all of my art materials away in the closet and I worked on my tennis game and a few months went by and one day the phone rang. And it was a woman who said that she was an editor for some

company I'd never heard of. Some company called United Media. And I checked my notes quickly and I hadn't sent my samples to anybody by that name. But she said, we saw your samples, I didn't know how. And she wanted to offer me a syndicated cartoonist contract. And I thought, okay, I mean, that would be the big break. But since I hadn't heard of this outfit, I said, well, I'm very flattered, but I've never heard of your outfit, this United Media Company. Is there any cartoonist that you work with that's been published? Have you worked on anything like, I don't know, cartoons and magazines or a pamphlet or anything?"

And there's this long pause. And she says, yeah, we handle peanuts. And Garfield and Marmaduke, and when she got to about the 12th name on the list, I realized that my negotiating position had been compromised. And I said, hell yes, got a lawyer, got a contract, and I went from there. So, let's take apart the affirmation issue, okay, and delve into that a little bit. So, I have a program online called Future Authoring and it's at a site called selfauthoring.com and what it asks you to do is to write for 15 minutes

about what your life could be like in five years, if you were treating yourself well, and you got what you wanted and needed. So you wanna put yourself in a state of mind where you're treating yourself like you're worth taking care of, and then to imagine, play, pretend, that things worked out for you.

And we kind of define that. It worked out would mean, well, you know, it's worth getting out of bed in the morning. You know, you feel like you're, you're, you don't feel like. Your life has a purpose that justifies its difficulty. You have enough opportunity and enough security, enough challenge, enough adventure, all of that. Just hypothetically, what would it take to satisfy a creature like you?

And then just pretend, write for 15 minutes. So that's the first part. And then the second part is, okay, now do the reverse. Imagine that you let your stupidity get completely out of hand and auger you into the ground and your life is about maximally miserable and you've contributed to it. What would that look like? Okay, now you've got poles, you've got a little hell and you've got a little heaven. And so your narrative world is arrayed.

And then it walks you through a sequence of questions and answers about how you would operationalize your vision. Right now, people are visionary, right? We can manipulate our visual cortex with our prefrontal cortex so we can imagine various futures. But even more importantly than that, this is the affirmation issue. And maybe there's something more to it than this, but this is something. Everything we perceive in the world, we perceive around a goal. Like that's how perception

works. You know, if you're looking down the road, you look at where you're going, and everything relevant to that destination is what shows up in your visual landscape. We live inside a story. Like a story is literally a description of the structure of our perception, and that frames our emotion and our attention. And so, the affirmation story is actually true. It's like as soon as you set a goal, your perceptions orient themselves around that goal. And part of the reason that religious systems require you to aim up as diligently and religiously, let's say, as you can is because

diligently and religiously, let's say as you can, is because if you structure your perceptions around the highest imaginable goal, then the world lays itself out as the pathway to that goal. That's literally how perception works. There's a great book by a man named J.J. Gibson called An Ec ecological approach to visual perception, and he was one of the early investigators into the structure of perception psychologically. And I've elaborated on his ideas to some degree. We see pathways, we see tools and obstacles, we see friends and foes, and we see agents of magical transformation. And agents of magical transformation change your goal. And that's literally how the world...

But I'm curious about something deeper here too, because I don't know how the world cooperates with this, you know? Like, the fact that you caught the end of that PBS special makes sense to me because you had set your ambition. And so that show became relevant and popped out for you. And so that pop out, that's what happens to Moses, by the way, when he encounters the burning bush, that's something pops out that changes him into a leader.

He goes off the beaten path to investigate something. So anyways, it popped out for you and you pursued it, but then you had these interesting, well, are they coincidences? Like, how do you make sense of this? Because this character, Jack, what was his name? Jack Cassidy. Jack Cassidy. You know, that name rings a bell. Was he a relatively famous cartoonist? Was he an illustrator?

No. He did the kind of work that you probably haven't seen, because it wouldn't be a syndicated cartoonist. But he worked at that job for his whole life. Now the question is, what motivated him, what elemental goodness of heart motivated him to not only reach out to you once, but twice, right? Because that's a weird concordance, the fact that it happened at all, and thank God for that, and bless his heart, you know, seriously. There's a man who went out of his way for reasons. Do you have any sense of what was motivating him? And then he did it again, right? So that's...

Right. But it's not even the end of the coincidences, because getting a big contract to be a syndicated cartoonist still gives you only a one in 20 chance of succeeding, something like that. But here's what happened to me. First of all, the editor who liked me, the only one who liked me and said yes, she was married to somebody who had the same job as Dilbert. He was literally an engineer who wore a short-sleeve shirt with pens in his pocket. So, what she saw was her husband.

So, when she was saying, yeah, this could work, she was basically not in her personal experience. So, what were the odds with only, let's say, six editors in the world who could have offered me that opportunity, one of them was married to Dilbert. First of all, what were the odds? Next, that was enough to get published, but it failed on launch. So, it only got, I don't know, maybe a dozen newspapers, and sometimes they buy it

just in case it becomes big to keep it away from the competition. So, they didn't even run it. So we sold it to only a few newspapers. Maybe one of them ran it, I'm not even sure. So nothing was happening, but you know, it got a little bit of purchase. Then the next coincidence happens. If you don't sell into one of the big newspapers, everybody ignores you. But if you can get into one of the big ones, then you can usually capitalize on that.

So, one day the woman whose job it was to recommend comics for the Boston Globe, which was the big anchor paper for the Northeast, she looked at the Dilbert samples from our salesperson and wasn't impressed. But one day she and her husband were driving to some holiday destination. She was driving and he was bored. This was before cell phones and, you know, he didn't have anything to do in the car. He looks in the back seat and there are a bunch of samples from failed cartoonists, including me. So he reaches in the backseat, pulls out the Dilber sample case,

starts reading them, and starts laughing like crazy. And the wife is like, what, really? And he can't stop laughing and reading them to her. Now, what do you think he did for a living? Engineer. She was married to an engineer. She didn't get it when she saw it, but she trusted his reaction enough to recommend it.

The bosses said, we don't see it. We don't see what you see in this comic. But it's your job to get this right. So, we're going to trust you. And then it got in the Boston Globe. It was huge. All the newspapers in the East Coast bought it. But then it gets wilder. The entire middle of the country and the West, no sales.

I mean, almost nothing. And I found out years later that the salesperson for the entire West Coast simply thought my cartoon was bad. And so when he went in to sell things, he just didn't show it to people. He showed the other comics he had to sell. So here's where the lucky bar happened. He died.

He dropped dead in a hotel room on a sales trip. And, you know, of course, I have a good alibi. But he was replaced by a guy who, as they tell the story, they brought him in and said, could you sell these comics? He was already in that business. And they laid down all the comics they had to sell, including Dilber. And I was told later that he went down the line and said, shit, this is shit, this is shit, this is shit, I can sell this one. He was the best salesman in the world. And I had a map with tax whenever it sold into a market, and I could watch him travel

like an ant, you know, like I knew exactly where he was, because the sales reports would come in and say, he sold another one, sold another one, sold another one. He took the whole West Coast because somebody died younger than they should have died, completely out of my control. And without those things, it just wouldn't have happened. And so, during that time, I was doing my affirmations that I would become a famous cartoonist, and sure enough. And then one day, the Wall Street Journal asked me to write an article to

be in the Wall Street Journal because they liked my comic. And I wrote an article for that and then a publisher said, well, we like the article, could you turn that into a book? And I'd never even taken a writing class except business writing, which is specialized. And of course, I had learned to just say yes to everything. So I was like, oh yeah, oh, I could totally write a book.

Yeah, how hard could that be? So while I was doing my day job, I'm doing my day job full time, I'm doing Dilbert full time, and now I'm writing a book. And it almost killed me, but I was doing my affirmations that I'd be a number one bestselling author. You know, one of the things I really noticed as a clinician, and as a university professor, was that people closed doors to their movement forward constantly without noticing it. And it was partly because they didn't have their affirmations, let's say, so they actually couldn't spot

an opportunity, right, because they had no goal-directed vision. But often something would pop up that was unlikely. You know, it's hard to know how many unlikely things happen to you in your life. Like, unlikely things are happening all the time. Your heart is beating, which seems rather unlikely if you think about it.

I mean, unlikely things happen a lot. And some of those are gonna be oriented towards in principle, the pathway forward that you want. But if you say no, I mean, how many unlikely things that go in the right direction do you think you're gonna get? It's not that many, right? But if you say yes, I mean, how many unlikely things that go in the right direction do you think you're going to get? It's not that many, right? But if you say yes, then they multiply.

So I'm curious about how you learned or decided to say yes and how that was related, if at all, to this affirmation issue. Well, you have to start with the fact that I'm a really cocky bastard. So I kind of enter a lot of situations thinking, I can do this, I can do that. You know, I had a childhood experience that probably set me on that way. When I was 11, we would have these Easter egg hunts in our little town where you try to find the golden egg that was hidden among all the other eggs that were worth less. And for years I had thought I will be the

winner and find the golden egg. So, this is maybe a one in 200 situation because there are lots of people there. And year after year somebody else found it. And then my last year I'm like, I'm going to get that freaking golden egg golden egg. And, you know, I try and try and try and then the bell rings and the event is over. So, now I'm basically retired forever because I've aged down of the Easter egg hunt. And I'm like, wow. I really thought I was going to find the golden egg one of these times.

And then somebody announces, nobody found the golden egg. So, we're going to narrow the field to, you know, where it is, and you're going to hunt again for another, I don't know, 10 minutes or something. And I walked directly to the golden egg. And next thing I know, I'm in a newspaper holding up this little golden egg on the front page of my hometown newspaper. And that was one of the times there were others in which I

said to myself, did this happen by coincidence? Like, do I have magic eyes that I can see golden eggs better than other people? How do you explain this? And so by the time I became a famous cartoonist and I was working on having a number one book. I just thought anything was possible. And you want to hear the weirdest one? Say yes. Yes, definitely.

Okay. Here's the weirdest one. I also had a habit of when I was trying to go to sleep or just daydreaming, I would think of little stories of largely impossibly unlikely things that somehow I had succeeded at. One of them, because it made me happy and that I would go off to sleep thinking of positivity. One of them was that someday, and I didn't know the specifics of it, the President of the United States would summon me

to the Oval Office and ask my opinion on something. And the idea was that I had become credible enough in whatever domain that a president would want to hear what I had to say. And then in 2018, I got a message that Trump wanted to talk to me. And I ended up in the Oval Office chatting with him, and he actually asked my opinion on something. And I thought, really, what were the odds of this?

What are the odds of any of this being true? But my life has been consistently strange. By the way, you must be having the same experience because, you know, you experienced the going from I have a really good job to something that's almost impossible to explain, the phenomenon, which is you. Didn't you have the same wild, like, is there anything I can't do? Did you have that experience? I think it's just a continual state of ongoing trauma. You know what I mean?

It's so preposterous. I mean, my life is so preposterous all the time that, you know, actually one of the clinical markers for post-traumatic stress disorder is derealization. So, derealization is when something's happening, but it doesn't seem real. Like I don't have episodes of derealization. That's my life.

It's a hundred percent preposterous things nonstop. And I have no idea. I mean, I kind of learned, learned, I guess, you know, back in 2017 or so, because this all blew up around me in 2016. 2017, I had this sense that I was on a hundred foot wave, you know, and that it would roll over me or it would flatten out. Those were the most likely outcomes, but neither of those happened. It just kept rolling on and I don't know, I'm along for the ride, I suppose. Luckily, I have a lot of help.

Thank God for that. A lot of people looking out for me. But, and the world is, you know, I really liked your story. It's so cool because that Golden Egg story, it's a perfect imaginative or mythological summary of everything that you just described that happened in your life, you know? And so, and I don't know what to make of that. I do understand, as I said, like perception is not what people generally think. You don't see the objective world. You literally see pathways, tools, obstacles, friends and foes, and agents of magical transformation. That's the world. Now, here's the weird thing, Scott, is like, you could think about that as a narrative

overlay on the real objective world. But then if you're a scientist, you think, well, wait a second, we've been selected by an evolutionary process, let's say, to perceive the world in a manner that most contributes to the continuation of our life and our reproductive success. And so we see the world in a manner we describe as a story. Well, how are we to decide that that's not what the world is then? I mean, this is literally how we see. So...

Yeah, I've got a couple of hypotheses I've worked on to try to explain this whole thing so I can understand what's happening to me. You may have heard the term reticular activation. Yes. Where if you think about a certain outcome or a certain situation long enough, you essentially rewire your brain, because, you know, your brain changes with every experience and everything you learn, until you notice things that you wouldn't have noticed.

And if you do it right and you're thinking about something positive for you, then you're going to notice that thing. So back to your example of why did I notice the end of a TV show about how to be a cartoonist? And would I have noticed that if I had not been doing affirmations? And my answer is, I don't know.

It seems difficult to account for all of the unlikely coincidences that moved you towards your goal merely as a consequence of a shift in perception, right? I mean, I think that's the best way to account for it to begin with. The story about the PBS special in particular exemplifies that because it popped out for you, but then you also played your part because you paid very careful attention to the credits and you took the next step, right? So you had a magical doorway appear,

but you also walked through it and looked for other doors. And then that set off this cascade of events. And I don't know, there are coincidental things happening all the time. I guess the question is, what would your life be like if you set yourself up so that you were maximally inclined to capitalize on those unlikely occurrences, right? You were alert and awake and attentive and, well, that's why I was so curious about your decision to say yes. Now, you tied that to that Easter egg story. Can you concretize that a bit? I mean, was that the first time you

had an inkling that your determination, your vision and your determination could shape things around you in a desirable way? Yeah. Yeah. That was exactly when I thought, I don't know, maybe life is wired in a way that's not obvious. And if you could figure out how that wiring works, you could control reality itself. You know, so at least I was sort of open to the possibility. But you know, this was also the age where I was watching, you know, reading comic books and you know, magic seemed more accessible.

But you know, as an adult, I started thinking that, you know, magic seemed more accessible. But, you know, as an adult, I started thinking that, you know, I must be living in some kind of a simulation. And that somehow the way I steer the simulation is by imagining what it is that I want to go toward and then things fall in line. And you used the word authoring before, and that's my favorite word for controlling the simulation. Because you author a story, and then you find yourself in the story later, and it's just like you wrote the book,

and then you became the character in the book. And how do I explain that? That goes way beyond anything I can put together with cause and effect. So, I'm not 100% sure that we live in a simulation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the day I die I wake up in a gamer chair and they say only five minutes has gone by, but you live this entire other life in the game. So, I always wonder, you know live this entire other life in the game. So I always wonder, you know, maybe there's more to find out. You never know.

Well, the fact that we represent the world with stories primarily and that we're instinctively oriented to find stories attractive, even stories of magic, like it was only this year that I figured out what an agent of magical transformation was because they pop up in stories all the time. Cause I think concretely, I think biologically, it's like, why are we predisposed to believe in agents of magical transformation? And then I thought, oh, I see,

an agent of magical transformation is someone who comes along and changes the game, changes the aim. And that's what Gandalf does for the hobbit, you know, he elevates him into a new game. And so that kind of magic happens all the time. And it's definitely the case that we perceive in relationship to a goal. There's absolutely no doubt about that. I don't think there are few facts as well established in physiological psychology as the fact that we perceive in relationship to a goal.

We are visionary. We do use our prefrontal cortex to manage the world using our visual system. We navigate, we're navigators and we navigate towards a destination. Like we set our sights by the stars. All of this is true. What it means is like the thing that's so peculiar about it as far as I can consider

is that I don't know what it means that the world is a story. That's not the same idea that the world is a set of objective facts, which is also obviously true in some way. Question is which facts, right? The question is relevance. And so now, did your parents, I often ask my guests about their parents, especially if they, well, most of the people I interview have been successful in one way or another. You said you're a cocky, I think you said you were a cocky bastard, although maybe you didn't use exactly that phrase, but that was the gist of it.

Um, What what kind of relationship did you have or do you have did you have with your parents? Like did they Were they were they responsible for your confidence in some part, or was that something you think that was more a manifestation of your essential character? Like, what was your relationship with your parents like? All right, so here's where it gets even weirder. My parents are part of this story, but others as well. When I was very young, people would, adults, would tell me

that I was going to be rich and famous someday. And they would even use the same term. I once got stopped on the street by an older woman who, you know, was a small town, so she wondered who my parents were and stuff. And she's just chatting with me for a minute, and before she leaves, she goes, you're going to be rich and famous someday. My mother told me that she expected me to get rich someday so I could take care of her in the manner which she would like to become accustomed to. That was her standard joke. But I literally became rich and then helped them, you

know, live in a life that was closer to the standard they wanted to live. And so, she always had her own confidence. She was also an artist, by the way. So, she was a portrait artist. And I picked up, you know, the drawing fever from either her jeans or her example, I don't know. My father was a wannabe comedian, meaning that he'd say funny things or all of his letters were funny. So I got kind of the dry humor from him. I got the confidence from, I think, my mother and from other people as well.

People spotted me early. Now there's one thing I wanted to add to what you were saying about goals. I don't know if you've heard me talk about this, but I famously write about systems being better than goals. Meaning that having a goal, but having no system that would help you being prepared for it isn't enough.

You gotta have the system. Right, right, right. So even if you take the simplest one, like when I saw the TV show about how to become a cartoonist and I quickly wrote it down, part of my system has always been to make sure that you've got a pencil and a piece of paper really close all the time. That was my actual system, and that's never changed. Now, how many times have I gotten an idea and I've got exactly 15 seconds to write it down?

Yeah, right, yeah. Before something changes. You know, somebody walks in and I forget it. So that's the smallest example. Well, that's very astute, I think. One of the things I've learned as I've spent decades writing is that if I'm laying in bed and I have an idea, I go write it down.

Because I know I'll forget it. I'll forget it. It's like, who knows what huge that idea is? So here's another thing that's extremely cool. So you set your goal, and then the world arranges itself as a pathway to that goal, and then everything relevant to that. But that's also, this is so uncanny, that's also how your imagination works, your thoughts. So your aim, your thoughts. So your aim calls forth revelation. That's literally, well, it makes sense if you think about it for a minute. Imagine that you decide you're going to go somewhere. Well, then obviously what your

thoughts should do is circulate around that trip, because what the hell good are they otherwise? around that trip, because what the hell good are they otherwise? So that, but here's the crazy part. The spirit of your aim answers your prayers. This is literally the case, because once you set up an aim, your imagination and your cognitive systems orient themselves to serve that aim. And so again, part of the religious insistence is, serve the highest aim.

Well, what is that? Well, that's up to you to figure out to some degree. It's like most of us can tell the difference between an aim that's somewhat better than the one we have and somewhat worse. Like, we've got a pretty good sense of comparative aim. But if you understand that your perceptions and your imagination and revelation itself is structured by your aim, then, well, that makes the world an entirely different place. It's also rather terrifying, you know, because if you have a pathological aim, then that will structure your imagination, right? That's very close to demonic. That's very close analogy. Let me give you a little story that plays perfectly into that. When I was younger,

I got married for the first time, and I had stepkids. The marriage didn't work out after several years. And because they're stepkids, you don't get, you know, joint custody or anything like that. So, the loss is huge. Like, you lose everything, your family, all at the same time. And I realized that that was my sort of main goal in life was making this little unit happy and healthy and safe. And when that went away, I realized, man, I'm going to need some kind of motivation. And I actually said out loud, I was alone, but I said out loud that I was going to donate myself to the world. And that from that point on, I would only work on things that had

some larger multiplying effect on the world. And that's why I started writing my books like How to Fail, and Almost Everything, and Still Wouldn't Big, which has had a big impact on people's success. It's why I talk about politics, because I think it's useful. It's why I do everything. So, everything I do now has to have some connection to a larger body of people who would benefit if I do it well. And that revived my sense of meaning at a higher level so that I haven't had

an unhappy day in, I don't know, 20 years? Because even if it's a bad day, I know I'm working toward this larger benefit. Right, right. Okay, so a couple of things related to that. In the story of Abraham, like Abraham is a sequence of upward transforming goals, right? So the father of nations is a man who reorients his goals in an increasingly upward direction as he moves through life, right? And you know, he ends up charged with the responsibility to try to save the doomed city, that Sodom

and Gomorrah. He fails at that, but he's still charged with that responsibility. And there are prophets in the Old Testament who succeed at such things. Jonah succeeds, for example. And so, Abraham is late, the story of Abraham is structured as a set of transformations, upward transformations of goal. And that story that you just told is, you know, you can see there that you moved from the proximal, not that your family wasn't important and transcendent in a sense, because it clearly was, but you broadened that. And then the meaning that you described, like we actually experience positive emotion

in relationship to a goal. And so if you set a high goal, then any indication of movement towards that goal floods you with dopamine essentially. That's, it produces new neural circuits and it's it's the essence of of positive emotion that's motivating. So now one other thing that's also the meaning of the vision of Jacob's ladder. You know Jacob decides he's going to stop being an utter reprobate and he turns his eyes towards the heavens let's say because he decides he's going to improve.

Then he has a vision of a structure that connects heaven to earth with the ultimate goal at the top, basically defined as God. In the Jacob's Ladder vision, you can't see God because he's at the pinnacle, and the pinnacle recedes as you move towards it. But that's the definition. And then the voyage of life becomes that climbing up that ladder, making the goals deeper or higher, depending on how you look at it.

That also, all that seems to be correct psychologically, as far as I can tell. Like, it's not in the realm of superstition and myth. It's, that's just how things work. So how did you see that so interesting too, Scott? Because you see, you could have despaired when you lost your family. You could have shook your fist at the sky and cursed God, you know. That's what Job's wife tells him to do when he's suffering.

She says, there's nothing left for you except to shake your fist at God and die. But you decided to replace a goal that was already positive with one that was broader and more positive. How do you think you overcame your resentment, your bitterness, your sense of loss? And I'm also curious about how that's playing out now, because we haven't talked about this, but I know that you're quite ill, and so that's also germane. So, why did you decide to stay? Go ahead. Well, I think the answer is that I was born with some kind of innate optimism that never turns off. So, I could have horrible situations and it barely affects my optimism. I just think,

well, today was bad, but look at tomorrow. To your point, some of your viewers know that I have terminal cancer. So, I've got prostate cancer that's metastasized and once it metastasized, you don't have the options of curing it like you would if it was localized. And five months ago or so, the pain started, you know, because the tumors are all over my body. And I was unable to walk. I was using a walker and a wheelchair, and I was just racked in pain every single day. Every day was a nightmare. And in California, you get to choose your end date if you want to, meaning you can take your own life with a very civilized process that's legal in California. So, I had planned that I, you know, wouldn't want to live

in excruciating pain forever because, you know, my productivity was not going to be that good anyway. And I'd picked a time for that. And the time was this week. But what happened was I had also been looking at some other alternatives, another drug that was kind of new. And one of the requirements for the new drug is that first I have to take these castration drugs, they call them, which I've been putting off because no guy wants to sign up for castration, but they literally turn off your testosterone, which is why

they call it that, and the cancer needs the testosterone to grow. What I didn't realize is that the moment I started taking the testosterone blockers, which was just about three weeks ago, I think, it removed all of my pain. And now I can walk again unaided. My day is largely just completely normal. Now, it probably bought me maybe something like months to a few years, nobody knows, because eventually the testosterone blockers, your body

acclimates to them and, you know, does eventually the testosterone blockers, your body acclimates to them and, you know, does a workaround. So, it won't last forever, but we've hit the age of AI and there's probably something in the lab somewhere that can fix me. And I've got this little window where the pace of scientific discovery, especially in healthcare, will probably be wilder than it's ever been

before. And I might have, just by luck, I might have just enough time to use that little window to find a way out. Because there's no way out. But it wouldn't be the first time I had an incurable disease that I cured. You probably know the story or some of the listeners do. That some years ago I lost my ability to speak to a rare condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which RFK Jr. has a version of it, a little different version.

In my version, if I ordered a Diet Coke, some of the letters would get swallowed, and it would sound like, Coke, Coke, Coke. And so, I couldn't have any kind of a normal life. This was, it may have also been one of the reasons that my first marriage ended, because you couldn't have normal conversations or, you know, have friends over. And it was incurable. So you basically lived with it or you took painful botox shots through the neck into your vocal cords and you had to keep doing it and it would ebb and flow in effectiveness and it would sound like you had just done helium.

You talk a little bit like this. So, I made the difficult decision to give up on the thing that would let me talk at least a little bit, which was the Botox, just in case I could find something that worked better for what was considered by the experts incurable. So, I set my Google alerts to tell me if there's any new science about this condition. And every time something beeped, I'd look into it as much as I could. One day,

there's a little beep on my alerts that says a Japanese doctor had come up with a surgery to put in some kind of a shunt or something, and that it was having a great effect. So I went to my doctor and I said, is this real? And he said, well, that particular doctor, we know of him and he's an over-claimer. So probably not real. But I happened to know of a guy who seems to have some different kind of surgery, Dr. Gerald Burke down at UCLA's head, neck, whatever it is.

And you should talk to him. So, I look into it, I talk to him, he says he's developed a newish surgery in which he would sever the nerves between my brain and my vocal cords, which are in the front of the neck, and that he would redirect them, essentially take some nerves out of the neck and create a new path just in this little area, and that it worked on most of the people he tried it on, but not everybody. So he said if you try it, there's maybe an 85% chance that you'll be pretty happy with it. It'll be at least better if not a complete cure. And a 15% chance that it will ruin any chance you'd ever have of getting better because it would be a permanent change.

And I signed up. And now I get to talk to you. And as you can tell, my voice is completely serviceable and that was an incurable disease. Incurable. Likewise, when you have one of those problems, it's a muscle spasm thing, in that case it was vocal cords, they often come in pairs.

Nobody knows why. But the spasm is actually caused by your brain. It's not actually the muscle. You know, that's why cutting the connection somehow worked. But I lost the ability to draw because my pinky would spasm and I couldn't control it. But getting back to systems versus goals, for years I had practiced drawing left-handed, just in case something ever happened to my right hand. It was part of my system. And so, it got to the point recently where I've been drawing all of my comics left-handed for, I don't know, a few

years now. And no difference because I practiced it so long that I can pull it off now. Engineered redundancy. Yeah. So part of my system is to be open to all the possibilities, you know, the reticular activation. But the other is the belief that nothing's impossible. So, if it were someone else with any of those problems as an observer, I probably would have said, well, you know, you're done. But when it's me, I never think I'm done. I always think, well,

not only am I going to fix this problem, I'll do what I did with the spasmodic dysphonia, I'll make sure other people know it exists. So, I did a lot of outreach and People Magazine did a spread on it so that other people can know that they can get the cure. Right. So, I always think as big as I possibly can, you know, outside of myself, because again, that's the more motivational frame.

Right. Well, Scott, I'm going to bring this particular part of our discussion to a halt. I think that was an excellent place to close. That was quite the lateral and sideways conversation. I didn't expect that. It was quite magical. I really liked the tie-in with the Golden Easter egg hunt. That was a real nice narrative touch.

For everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Scott more about Dilbert. I want to know how his life changed when he became an extraordinarily well-established cartoonist. What effect his cartoons had on corporate and engineering culture. And then I want to talk to him as well about cancellation and his new life. And so obviously we could talk for several hours, but we have another half an hour on The Daily Wire. And so you guys could all join us for that. Anyways, thank you very much, sir.

Thank you. Thank you very much. And yeah, and to everybody, thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Thank you very much. And yeah, and to everybody watching and listening as well for your time and attention.