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Previously on Red Pilled America.

So I started working on my career when I was six.

My boss called me to his office.

He said, uh, management just got caught having no diversity in senior management, and until that changes, we can't promote you because you're male and white.

And that's when I started putting some comics together and working my day job.

Scott Wood Doodle the main character on a whiteboard in the office.

And so one of my coworkers said he should be called Dilbert, and I was like, oh, that's it, that's his name, And he said that he was just writing to make sure that I hadn't given up.

And I had given up.

I realized I was talking to the biggest cartoon syndicate in the world.

Who is Scott Adams?

I'm Patrick Carelci and.

I'm Adriana Cortes.

And this is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.

This is not another talk show covering the day's news.

We're all about telling stories.

Stories.

Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.

The media mox stories about everyday Americans at the globalist ignore.

You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries, and we promise only one thing, the truth.

Welcome to Red Pilled America, Brad, part two of our series of episodes entitled The Internet dat We're looking for the answer to the question who is Scott Adams by telling the story of the famed comic strip artist, author, and podcaster.

So to pick up where we left off, in nineteen eighty eight, Scott began developing his Dilbert comic strip with United Media, one of the biggest, most respected comic strip syndication companies in America.

There was no guarantee newspapers we're going to pick it up, but by April nineteen eighty nine, a few dozen newspapers signed on to carry the comic.

Scott was on his way.

After a year of grinding as an artist, he received his first monthly royalty check.

It was for three hundred and sixty eight dollars and sixty two cents.

That was not going to pull him away from his day job at the phone company, but he kept plugging away.

By nineteen ninety the comic strip was in fifty newspapers.

A year later it was up to one hundred.

Dilbert looked like he was about to break out, but by the end of nineteen ninety two it languished in only one hundred and fifty newspapers.

The rate of growth was slowing down because you see, the biggest comic strips of the time were in two thousand papers.

Dilbert was plateauing.

Scott needed to do something and fast.

That's when he came up with a game changer.

With his comic looking like it was going to meet an early demise, Scott's business training kicked in.

He remembered that every successful company figures out how to receive customer feedback, and there was a bleeding edge technology that was just beginning to pop up within the techie crowd.

Well, what about this internet thing and you know anything about Sure, what the hell is that?

Exactly?

Well, it's become a place where people are publishing information.

You can send electronic mail to people.

It is the big new thing.

Scott Adams decided to test the new.

Technology 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.

His audience responded, and what they told him was to set Dilbert in one specific environment.

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 told me the same thing, and nobody told me the opposite, and so I said, well, if you're telling me that's what it is, that's what it's going to be.

And I made that change.

It was the right tweak at just the right time, because corporate America was going through a massive shift that would make Dilbert the champion of the cubicle warriors.

For most of the previous decade, American industry experienced a booming economy.

During that time, companies staffed up and became bloated, not only because of overstaffing, but also because of a new mindset sweeping through corporate America.

The upper levels of our society.

It just continue to be hugely dominated by white men.

Affirmative action really is just a more stiff version of how we have to enforce all of our employment.

Laws by using attributes like skin color and gender and hiring decisions.

Corporate America shifted away from meritocracy.

Productivity naturally nosedivet eating Corporate America vulnerable to economic headwinds.

Government reports today offered analysts more evidence that the nation's economy is headed toward a fourth quarter fall.

It is shocking to have come out of such a boom so quickly into a recession, and I think that that is shocking everybody.

When an economic downturn hit in the early nineteen nineties, corporations began looking for ways to cut costs while increasing productivity.

Micromanaging became a standard in the office, but that wasn't enough.

Companies were looking for ways to drastically cut their labor costs.

That's when a new president made a move to give corporate America the flexibility it needed to change the face of their workforce.

Literally, we'll create more jobs with NAFTA.

Newly elected President Bill Clinton sent out his vice President Al Gore to campaign for the North American Free Trade Act, a treaty between the United States, Canada, and Mexico that purported to create one of the world's largest so called free trade zones.

And this treaty would increase jobs here, Oh, no question about to say those announcement today that it would be minimal either.

There have been twenty three studies of the impact of NAFTA on jobs in the United States.

Twenty two of them have shown that it will cause an increase in jobs in the United States.

But the Clinton administration must have known it was hoodwinking the American worker because practically every business instinct said that a treaty like NAFTA would incentivize American corporations to move their workforce out of the United States and into countries with fewer regulations where they'd only have to pay a fraction of what they were paying in America for labor.

Why deal with the headaches of regulations, unions, and productivity killers like affirmative action.

If you could just hire a foreign workforce with none of that baggage.

While the Clinton administration won the public debate and in nineteen ninety three, the President made NAFTA the law of the land.

In a few moments, I will sign the North American Free Trade Act into law.

NAFTA will tear down trade barriers between our three nations.

It will create the world's largest.

Trade zone and create two hundred thousand jobs in.

This country by nineteen ninety five alone.

But NAFTA, of course, had the opposite effect.

Instead of growing the American job market, operations began moving their businesses into foreign lands and laying off their American workers.

The infamous downsizing of the American workforce was underway, a phenomenon championed by leaders of industry like Warren Buffett and Charles Munger.

Every industry, at all times is interested in downsizing or becoming more efficient.

Name of business that has been ruined because it was over downsized.

I cannot think of a single one.

But if you ask me to name businesses that were half ruined or ruined by bloat, I mean I could just rattle off name after name after name.

This shift to foreign lands devastated the American workforce.

Exxon shed eighty six thousand workers at and T two hundred thousand, General electricallyaid off two hundred and twenty one thousand, and Ford a whopping three hundred and thirty seven thousand.

Instead of investing in their home countries, NAFTA incentivized the these companies to invest in foreign nations.

These American corporations, the large multinationals who are laying off millions of American workers, they have invested this last year seven hundred and fifty billion dollars abroad.

Downsizing impacted every sector of corporate America.

The people that are being downsized, the underemployed, those people that are waiting for the acts to fall on them next.

They're all looking to the future and they're saying, you know, I'd better cut back on my expenditures.

When Scott Adams refocused the setting of Dilbert on the workplace, he naturally incorporated the themes impacting corporate America.

He marcked micromanagement, lampooned corporate bureaucracy, and found ways to weave in the downsizing phenomenon into his art.

Dilbert was the workplace comic strip that white collar America didn't know it.

Was creating, and people needed a face for the workplace, especially the and these were a lot of downsizing, and the employee as a class didn't have a champion, didn't have a face.

Dilbert became that face.

And then the whole media grabbed onto it and said, oh, it's all the Dilberts.

There might be layoffs among the Dilberts, you know, the people in.

Cubicles, the frustrated cubicle warriors had a new champion.

It was Dilbert.

Scott Adams understood the moment.

In nineteen ninety four, he published his first book of comic strips.

He titled it Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies.

The book opened some new doors, and by the end of that year, Dilbert was in four hundred newspapers.

When nineteen ninety five arrived, the dot com era was in full bloom, with the Dilbert main character being an engineer.

Tech workers saw their lives in Dilbert characters as well.

The tech community's embrace of his workplace comic strip sparked another idea.

Scott decided to offer Dilbert on the Internet.

For free, and the Internet was brand new, and it was something that you could easily send on the Internet because it was a relatively small file.

It was before video worked.

Well, and so it just took off like crazy on the Internet.

And that allowed the newspapers to have a little, let's say comfort, and knowing that it.

Had an audience.

Now, with a successful book and his comic strip in four hundred newspapers, you'd think Scott would have quit his day job or perhaps even been fired.

I mean, Dilbert was brutally mocking the entire ecosystem of corporate management.

It was actually very risky to make front of managers and bosses because you couldn't do it at your job because you get fired.

And you know, as my reputation increased, people kept wondering how long before I would get fired.

Scott sensed the acts was going to drop at any moment.

But I did notice that all the projects I got were the bad ones.

I got the things that, Okay, you're on this project, you're definitely getting fired for this, because you know, if you work at any kind of a big organization, you know which of the projects that are going to end your career.

I get all of those after that point.

But what they didn't realize is that the worse it was for me at work, the better my material was, and the richer I was getting in my other job.

So Scott held on to his corporate gig to keep the Dilbert ideas flowing.

I was getting my material from work, so I thought, whoa, I might run out of material, and I can't be a cartoonist unless I also have a job.

You know, you never know what exactly is the secret sauce that makes something work.

But the main thing is that as soon as I knew I could leave any time I wanted financially, work didn't hurt.

If I'm going to miss a deadline, I'd think, huh, I did my best.

But you know, in the old days, you'd still do your best, But then you'd also feel bad, and you'd worry and the consequences and the rest of your life and your career, and none of that mattered.

And I go to a meeting, which normally would be so frustrating because people are just idiots.

Sometimes you just want to get up and start hitting them with a rolled up newspaper.

But you can't.

You can't.

They won't lay you.

So those meetings used to drive me crazy, But once I started seeing them as material for the comic, I'd have my little notepad under the table and I'd just be like, more on that, could you drive down to a little detail on that?

Please?

So it was just the perfect situation for me.

The more evil they were, the better my career went the other way.

But as Dilbert's public profile grew, it became obvious to his colleagues and management that Scott would be making an exit sooner or later.

And my coworkers made a deal with me and with our mutual boss.

They said, we like having you around because I was in an area where customers would come in to see our new technology.

They said, the customers are more likely to come in if you're here, because I was already a sort of a celebrity by that point, and especially among the techies, so their engineers would come in to meet me, but then they get the tour of our technology.

So they said, here's the deal.

We'll do your work.

You don't even have to come in any days you don't feel like it, and we'll work it out with a boss, and we'll just use you as sort of the asset to bring people in and maybe you come in on those days, but you don't even have to do that.

And so I said, all right, I'll take that deal, but I'll also offer, and I offered to my boss.

I said, here's the deal.

The day that doesn't work for you, you don't need to fire me, just ask if you need the budget for someone else.

And sure enough, about a year and a half later, his boss came knocking.

He said, you know I need to add this function.

I don't have a budget.

I can't get the budget.

You're not adding that much.

So I'm going to take you up on your offer.

And he did, and that was my last.

In nineteen ninety five, Scott left the security of the corporate world, but his entrepreneurial efforts were already exploding.

By the end of that year, Dilbert was in eight hundred newspapers, and now he could focus on growing the comic strip full time.

His readers were clamoring for a business book with witty prose on the work themes in Dilbert, so in nineteen ninety six he published The Dilbert principle.

It eventually became a New York Times bestseller.

His comic strip circulation quickly jumped again to one thousand newspapers.

Awards were quick to follow.

In nineteen ninety seven, Scott won both Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year as well as the Best Newspaper Comic Strip Award.

Scott was told since he was a boy that he'd someday become rich and famous.

At forty years old, that someday finally arrived.

But amid his success, Scott was about to get a lesson in social moms.

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So in nineteen ninety seven, Scott Adams was a bona fide celebrity.

He was told since he was a boy he'd someday be rich and famous with a wildly popular comic strip, awards and a New York Times bestseller.

That someday had finally arrived.

But amid this success, Scott was about to get a lesson in social mobs.

I wrote the book The Dilber Future, and I tried to make a bunch of predictions that we could actually you know later test and I intentionally picked what I thought was the most ridiculously impossible prediction.

Well, I said, anybody could predict a flying car.

You know, you could just say, well I missed it by five years.

But I told you flying car.

You know, eventually we're going to have one.

So I wanted to pick something that just nobody smart would be predicting.

So then if you get that one right, you know you really got something to show.

So I picked that the theory of evolution would be debunked in my lifetime.

Gilbert's core fan base were science and tech professionals.

Scott was seemingly striking at the core of their faith evolution.

Now imagine every scientist and biologist hearing that, Oh my god.

I was attacked for years, decades actually from people saying and the dumbest thing anybody ever said is this guy doesn't believe in evolution.

Now they twisted that into I don't believe in evolution, which is not exactly what I was saying.

I was making a prediction.

Scott Adams ignited his first major controversy.

Over two decades later, Red Pilled America would do a deep dive into Scott's prediction in an episode entitled Let There Be Light.

We ultimately argued that his prediction was proven right given the science community's embrace of the simulation theory, the theory that it is almost statistically certain that humans are living in a simulated reality, a condition that makes evolution just a program within that simulation.

We won't go into that story here.

This is all to say that his nineteen ninety seven prediction was one of the earliest indications that Scott had a knack for courting controversy.

As the late nineteen nineties arrived, the icon status of Scott's Gilbert comic strip continued to grow.

It became so popular that it was even referenced in TV sitcoms like News Radio The Love Cartoon.

Can you tell me who drew that?

No, it is so funny.

I don't know.

Do you have an order?

Did you guys?

Which one?

If you drew the cartoon here with the little dog.

Matthew, Matthew, nobody here drew that.

It's a comic strip called Gilbert.

It's in newspapers every day.

No, I assure you, I'm not kidd it is.

Scott himself was even given a cameo.

You know sull of us have jobs to get to save it.

Scott was invited to make other appearances, including the popular TV show Babylon five.

You want to hire me to find your dog?

That's right?

My cat too?

Anything else?

I sho know, Malcolm, They're planning to take over the galaxy.

Dilbert was reaching the pinnacle of its popularity.

Cartoon of Scott Adams is here.

For ten years.

Dilbert, his cartoon creation, has offered a sardonic look at contemporary corporate culture and the plight of the modern day office worker.

It has become the fastest growing comic strip in syndication in the past three years.

A cartoon has spanned a vast empire which includes best selling books, an Internet site, and over seven hundred Gilbert inspired products.

Scott expanded Dilbert into television by working alongside famed Seinfeld writer Larry Charles to develop the Dilbert TV Show.

In January, the animated television series Dilbert debuted on UPN.

In nineteen ninety nine.

The show would go on to win a Primetime Emmy Award, but after two successful seasons, Scott was hit with a familiar obstacle.

Eventually, we lost our time slot because they wanted to turn Monday into an all African American comedy Nights.

But even with this setback, Dilbert continued to grow.

By the turn of the millennium, Scott's comic strip reached its apex in print syndication, appearing in roughly two thousand newspapers.

Gilbert's immense popularity spawned a robust merchandising empire, including calendars, office toys, and even food products.

We're working on the product called the dil burrito.

You may have heard of as a burrito.

It's a food item and it's got your twenty three of your vitamins and minerals, So if you ate it, you'd have one hundred percent of what you needed of those twenty three vitamins and minerals.

And it's kind of branded with Dilbert the dil Burrito, and so I formed a company to create that.

So I've got a virtual company that has one employee but has a worldwide reach.

Right now, Scott and his team got his vitamin enriched burrito into all the bigs like seven to eleven, Walmart, and Costco.

But by two thousand and three, the dil burrito gassed out.

Scott would later reminisce about the failure.

The feedback from the customers.

Apparently, this product made you far more than more than any product of all time.

Somehow this product go all the way through the testing.

You know, we all ate it and tested it, and we all had the same experience, like privately and individually, we all had like the worst fart attack you've ever had in your life.

But I think I think all of us individually didn't talk about it, and we just figured, well, this is my body.

They fight, they find it out there.

He basically, you could eat that thing once and you destroy all your furniture.

That's one of my best failures, of all my failures, I think I like that one the best because it's so ridiculous.

But during this failure, Scott was having success in other new areas.

In two thousand and one, he published God's Debris, a philosophical novella.

Unlike his Office Humor, this fictional work explored the idea that God blew itself up to create reality.

In two thousand and four, he followed it up with the sequel entitled The Religion War, depicting a future conflict driven by religious fanaticism.

Scott suggested a provocative theme that deep down, even fervent believers may subconsciously doubt their religions.

Like his evolution prediction, it underscored Scott's willingness to enter controversial waters.

Up until this moment in his life, Scott's career was in the driver's seat, from managerial training and securing an NBA in the nineteen eighties to developing Dilbert in after hours while working for a phone company, to growing his comic strip, writing books, launching a TV show, and even a vitamin enriched gas inducing burrito company.

Scott's career endeavors were front and center for over two decades.

But then in two thousand and four, Scott met a lady.

Her name was Shelley.

The two would marry on July twenty second, two thousand and six, on a boat in the San Francisco Bay.

Scott's life entered a new phase.

Shelley had two young children from a previous marriage, an eight year old daughter and a six year old son.

His time would be taken up by new activities like watching his stepkids sports on the weekends and Disney movies at night.

At nearly fifty years old, Scott was living the dad life, but that didn't stop him from stepping into more controversy.

Around two thousand and five, Scott picked up a new tech hobby that was gaining momentum.

Blogging or Internet journaling, had been around since the early nineteen nineties, when web designers published internet journals to discuss the development of the World Wide Web.

The practice was adopted slowly, but then exploded into popularity after bloggers broke an enormous story.

On September eighth, two thousand and four, just fifty five days before a very close presidential election, Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mates went on the air on the weekday edition of sixty Minutes with a story that said George W.

Bush back in the sixties, joined the Air National Guard to get out of going to Vietnam, that he got in because his daddy was a big shot, a congressman from Houston, a US congressman from Houston.

That he was a slacker, that he.

Was a draft dodger and a coward.

Rather used what he called never before seen documents to back up his story.

Dan Rather was a reporter.

The two It took over the CBS Evening newsdesk of legendary anchor Walter Cronkite.

The documents rather used in his story were supposedly typed on a nineteen seventy three typewriter that within minutes of the story, commentators in web forms like Free Republic began questioning the authenticity of the documents.

The discussions were quickly elevated by blogs like Powerline and Little Green Footballs.

They insisted that the typography on the memos didn't match the typewriters of the nineteen seventies.

By their analysis, the documents rather was using better matched the two thousand four default settings of Microsoft word.

The bloggers postulated that someone likely created the documents on a modern computer, then ran them through a copy machine many times to age them.

Their theory was picked up by the Drudge Report, then spread to other conservative media outlets.

The arguments were so compelling that they eventually landed in the mainstream media.

CBS News initially attempted to deflect the scandal by asserting that multiple experts had reviewed and authenticated the documents prior to airing the segment.

However, it was only after mounting and irrefutable evidence of forgery emerged that Dan Rather and CBS News issued a formal apology.

Dan Rather said of the Killian Memos story quote, I made a mistake.

I didn't dig hard enough long enough, didn't ask enough of the right questions.

Hetty says he believes his best work is ahead of him as a reporter.

It was a massive scandal that came to be known as Rathergate.

I mean, this was the most respected journalistic institution in America.

Sixty minutes the fake news story was amplified by the most revered journalist in America, Dan Rather, and was used to interfere with a presidential election.

Multiple CBS News executives were fired or forced to resign, and on March ninth, two thousand and five, twenty four years to the day he took over as anchor of CBS Evening News, Dan Rather retired.

We've shared a lot in the twenty four years we've been meeting here each evening, and it deeply felt thanks to all of you who have led us into your homes.

Night after night.

It there's been a privilege and one never taken light light.

It was an extraordinary moment for new media and brought new legitimacy to blogging.

It gave rise to blogging websites like ritbart dot com.

Scott Adams, always looking to get involved in new innovations, began blogging in the wake of Rathergate, and he almost immediately sparked his biggest controversy to date.

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Just log onto Redpilled America dot com and click join in the top menu.

Join today and help us day of America, one story at a time.

Welcome back to Red Pilled America.

So Rathergate was an extraordinary moment for new media.

It brought a new legitimacy to blogging.

It gave rise to blogging websites like Breitbart dot com.

Scott Adams, always looking to get involved in new innovations, began blogging in the wake of Rathergate.

He almost immediately sparked his biggest controversy to date.

In two thousand and six, Scott published a blog post criticizing the media's habit of not providing context.

He wrote, today's topic is not about the Middle East, although it might look like it.

I'll just use the Middle East as an example to illustrate my point.

My point is that the media never gives me the context I want.

Scott's argument was that the media needed to provide context for its busy and or lazy audience that didn't have the time to research their reporting.

Scott went on, without proper context, the news is misleading at best and intentionally biased at words.

He then went on to make his point by citing a story that was in the news.

The media made a big deal, and rightly so, about the President of Iran's comments about wiping Israel off the map and of his questioning the Holocaust.

No reasonable person doubts the Holocaust happened, but wouldn't you like to know how the exact number was calculated?

Just for context?

Without that context, I don't know if I should lump the people who think the Holocaust might have been exaggerated for political purposes with the Holocaust deniers.

If they are equally nuts, I'd like to know that I want context.

The post drew criticism from a media that made a living from taking people out of context.

Some even claimed Scott Adams was a Holocaust denier, but the post was clearly not a denial of the hall.

It was simply a critique about the lack of context provided by the media, and the media's response was to take Scott out of context, proving his point.

The irony was thick.

Scott Adams was no doubt having an awakening about the media.

It was a machine that didn't provide context, seemingly by design, and in just a few short years he would use another new technology to provide context to an unprecedented presidential candidate and in the process put his entire Dilbert Empire in the crosshairs of the media establishment.

Coming up on Red Pilled.

America, I just saw this tool called periscope where you could just hold your phone in front of you and suddenly, if anybody cared, they could be talking to you.

So I've been trying to invite people on the show who could explain how we might defeat Donald Pumpkinhead and tell me your thoughts on that.

I've been studying persuasion for decades, and when I saw Trump last summer displaying the tools of.

I thought, oh, my god, he's not a crazy clown.

Is visceral response to attack people on their appearance short, tall, fat, ugly.

My goodness.

That happened in Junior High.

I never attacked him on his look, and believe me, there's plenty of subject matter.

Right there that I can tell that is the best persuasion you'll ever see.

Newspapers across the country are dropping Dilbert.

Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast.

It's owned and produced by Patrick CARELCI and me Adriana Cortez for Informed Ventures.

Now.

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