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Jan. 25, 2026 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:47:39
Scott Adams Celebration of Life 01/25/26

Scott Adams Celebration of Life 01/25/26 Hosted By Greg Gutfeld.Guest speakers: Shelly Adams, President Trump, Greg Gutfeld, Joel Pollak, John Shoemate, Quin Harker, Stephan Pastis, Dr. Drew, Mike Cernovich, Zuby, Jack Posobiec, Joshua Lisec, Michael Malice, Naval Ravikant, Walter Kirn 

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Scott's Impact 00:14:40
Afternoon, I'm Greg Gutfeld.
I'm lucky to be a friend of Scott Adams.
We're here to celebrate the life of Scott Adams, which is incredibly easy to do.
Anybody who knows him has been touched by his life, and your life has been made better by Scott Adams.
Although this is the first day I found out his middle name was Raymond.
I don't know how to feel about that.
I'm more upset that he never told me his middle name was Raymond.
I have so much to talk about Scott, but I'm speaking later, and I don't want to just shoot my load right here.
Probably not a good adjective to use, but it is amazing how prepared I am to talk about Scott because Scott gave me the tools to talk about life and people and friendship that I wouldn't have been able to do before.
I am extremely grateful to be here and to see all of you.
I'm incredibly grateful for the life that I have and my family and my job.
I'm grateful for those things.
And a lot of those things came because of my friendship with Scott.
So ultimately, beneath my gratitude for my life is my eternal gratitude for knowing Scott.
But I'll get into that later.
Right now, I want to introduce the legendary, just an amazing person, Shelly Adams, who will do her welcome remarks.
Thanks.
I want to thank everyone for being here and joining us in live stream.
In Scott's last few months, he would say to me, I really didn't know until now how many lives I've impacted.
I am so grateful that I got the opportunity to see it.
I wish I had a little bit more time, but I've done my job.
I'm ready.
And now my wish is to keep my legacy alive by those I impacted, passing my lessons along to others.
I do believe Scott is watching over us right now and continuing to see how his presence shaped many of our lives and the impact he made on this world.
With that, I have a special video that I'd like to share with you.
The world lost a great one this month when we lost Scott Adams.
There was nobody like him.
But heaven gained a good heart, a brilliant mind, and a very brave soul.
That's the big gain for heaven.
Scott was one of a kind among the most interesting and original people and thinkers of our time.
His wit, humor, talent, kindness, and insights on life endeared him to millions and millions of people and taught his many fans, readers, and listeners how to look at the world in a very different way.
He was a very different guy, but brilliant.
I will never forget that Scott was with me from the very beginning, right at the very beginning.
He knew what was happening.
He got it.
And he was a loyal and true friend to all of us until the very end.
After I heard Scott was sick, I called him up and asked him if there was anything at all I could do to help.
And as I was reminded then, Scott was a courageous and relentlessly positive guy.
Over these past few months, he endured pain and faced death with extraordinary spirit and grace and talent because he was in there pitching.
His talent would always come through no matter how sick he was.
Scott, we love you.
We miss you.
And we will never ever forget you.
Thank you for everything and everything you've done for me.
And God bless the United States of America, which loves you so much.
Thank you very much, Scott.
That was so Trump.
All right, our next speaker is one of Scott's friends and a great writer, Joel Pollack.
Today we mourn our beloved Scott Adams, yet we also celebrate his extraordinary life.
In a few moments, I'm going to share some of the best news some of us have ever heard.
But first, my name is Joel Pollack, and I'm a journalist.
I became close with Scott Adams over the last 10 years, and he asked me to write his biography.
Scott was the creator of Dilbert and the author of books like How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big and the host of Coffee with Scott Adams.
He introduced an awareness of persuasion in politics.
He was also a husband, a stepfather, and a brother.
And many of us felt he was also our best friend.
So many of us traveled across the country despite the snowstorm to be here.
And so many thousands more are watching online and millions will watch in the days that follow.
With us today in spirit are Dilbert, Wally, Alice, and so many more characters.
The pointy-haired boss sent flowers, and the Republic of Albonia declared a National Day of Mourning.
Dogbert sends regrets.
He couldn't get back in time from the Davos summit in Switzerland.
Scott was born on June 8th, 1957, the second child of Virginia and Paul Adams.
From an early age, Scott had a vision of what his life would become.
His mother used to say Scott would be president.
He replied that he preferred to be the power behind the president.
Looking back at the past decade, it's clear he achieved that.
President Donald Trump called Scott the great influencer, and he should know.
Scott predicted Trump would win way back in 2015, and he helped many people understand Trump.
Scott debunked hoaxes about Trump, and he offered ideas about how Trump could govern.
And the White House was listening.
In 2017, when North Korea's Kim Jong-un threatened America with ballistic missiles, Scott had a suggestion.
Why not reach out to him?
The idea made its way to the White House, and Trump gave it a try.
The result was calm on the Korean Peninsula and peace over the Pacific.
You can see from the president's heartfelt tribute just how deeply he respected and loved Scott.
That message, by the way, was delivered thanks to a special effort by Greg Guttfeld and Jared Kushner and Dan Scavino.
Their generosity reflects Scott's own.
I was one of the many fans who reached out to Scott for advice and whom he helped.
In 2016, I interviewed him and we became friends.
over the years i confided in scott and he and me on the day he was canceled by the media i came over and i told him we would always be with him We would always be on his side.
And, you know, we didn't agree on everything.
That was the point.
Scott would admire the skill with which someone presented their view, even if he disagreed with it.
That gave him intellectual freedom and moral clarity.
Scott was generous long before he had the means to help other people.
Scott's sister, Cindy, told me that when her first husband left her alone and pregnant in Boston, she found herself in a financial bind.
Scott called her from San Francisco, where he had just started working at a bank.
He had no money, but he offered to help anyway.
Together, they brainstormed possible solutions, including Scott's idea of helping her start her own daycare.
Though she ended up taking a different path, that moral support and offer of financial support meant everything to her.
Scott was also a fighter.
He stood up for free speech and for truth.
Scott often defended Trump, but he was an independent thinker, and he often had a contrary view.
For example, you may remember Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who turned against Trump.
When she was arrested in Ohio for public indecency, many Trump supporters were happy.
But Scott said Stormy Daniels was probably innocent.
Police reported that Stormy had battered a patron at a strip club with her bare breasts.
Scott said that sounded like a good time.
Scott used humor to diffuse our anxieties about politics when many of us felt hounded or yes, hunted because of our views.
He created a character called Dale with a tissue paper goatee as the symbol of elitism and snark.
We laughed at Dale and we set our fears aside.
We also cried with Scott as he endured the death of his stepson.
That loss motivated Scott to push our political leaders to fight the threat of fentanyl.
It's not a coincidence that fentanyl deaths are way down today.
That's great news, but the best news is still coming.
Over the years, Scott shared dozens of lessons through his books and live streams, using systems instead of goals, building a talent stack.
These were lessons he had absorbed across his lifetime.
Take the talent stack, for example, the idea of collecting skills that add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Growing up in Wyndham in upstate New York, Scott, Cindy, and their older brother Dave had watched their father teach himself many different skills, including how to build his own swimming pool and how to invest in the stock market.
I asked Scott whether he had drawn some of his ideas from the Bible, even if he himself wasn't yet religious.
He said no, that principles like turn the other cheek had universal relevance.
But when Scott began to embrace Christianity, even though I'm Jewish, I shared a passage from the New Testament with him from Matthew 25, verses 14 to 30, the parable of the talents.
A talent is a coin, but the word has many meanings.
In the story, Jesus rebukes a servant who buries his talent to keep it safe and rewards the servants who multiply their talents by taking them into the market and investing them.
That lesson resonates with Scott's own.
Scott wrote that the story of Jonah and the whale had turned him into a skeptic of religion as a child.
How could a man survive inside a whale for three days?
I wonder if what really bothered Scott wasn't the whale, but that Jonah ran away from his mission.
He didn't want to use his talents to help others.
Jonah was the critic who wanted to sit on the sidelines, to see everything destroyed so he could be proven right.
Scott's message was the opposite.
Make the most of your talents.
Don't be afraid to be embarrassed or to be wrong.
Be useful.
And be happy when your enemies do the right thing.
One of my favorite lessons was what Scott called the 48-hour rule.
When someone said something crazy or offensive, social media would explode.
But Scott would give them 48 hours to walk it back or to explain.
It was a way of restoring decency, of healing.
Maybe we should all commit to keeping the 48-hour rule alive.
Scott was also relentlessly positive.
He told us that as tough as the news might be on any given morning, we have to remember we are living in a golden age.
That was good news, but the best news is still coming.
Scott taught us how to reframe difficult situations.
He reframed cancellation as liberation, and he found a way to thrive outside the mainstream media.
He went through two divorces, but in his last days, as he looked back, he told me he had enjoyed what he called two complete marriages.
They had not failed.
They had been fulfilled.
What a reframe.
And of course, Shelley remained his best friend, his assistant, and his caregiver through the hardest times.
Thank you for everything, Shelley.
Scott spent his last months helping everyone he could.
He helped his stepdaughter celebrate her wedding.
He offered to help me and others when we were displaced by the Palisades fire.
When Scott asked me to speak at his funeral, I told him that I would offer another reframe, from grief to gratitude.
We miss Scott, but we are so thankful for the life that he lived.
We will remember him every day at 10 a.m. Eastern, 7 Pacific.
He gave us the simultaneous sip.
During the pandemic, he gave us the simultaneous swaddle.
He kept his live stream going to his last day.
Scott became successful through Dilbert, but he believed his legacy would be what he taught people about how to understand the world and improve their lives.
Let me try to summarize his philosophy.
Scott believed we could never know what was real.
We all see the world through a filter.
That doesn't mean everything is relative.
Some filters help us achieve more than others.
The crucial thing is that we can choose our filters and become authors of our own reality.
For example, Scott applied what he called the Dilbert filter to understand the chaos of large organizations.
He used the persuasion filter to understand politics and to shape events.
Some say that without Scott, the last election would have been very different.
Many of us would still be censored today.
Scott gave us our voices back.
He changed that reality.
Of course, the physical world still exists.
You might say, what good is a filter against something like cancer?
But look around us.
Have you ever seen anyone leave this world surrounded by so much love?
By facing death in the public way he did, Scott became even closer to the people who loved him.
Scott reframed death as not just a physical separation, but also an opportunity for connection.
Scott's Public Impact 00:15:42
He told me after he could no longer walk that in some ways it was the worst time of his life, but in many ways it was also the best.
Two days before he died, I sent Scott a photo of the first page of his biography.
His last words to me were, and so it begins.
Good luck, my friend.
Even in the end, Scott saw a beginning.
Scott embraced Christianity in his last days.
He promised his followers he would do it.
In fact, he had done it already, privately.
It was the one thing he had kept to himself.
He reasoned that if he was wrong, no loss.
If he reached heaven, he would know he had been right.
Now, finally, for the best news some of us have ever heard.
Are you ready?
The morning after he died, one of his friends, who is not religious, sent me a note.
Joel, he wrote, I woke up this morning with a three-word phrase in my head.
Incredibly good news.
Just the phrase.
And no linkage to Scott until I asked myself, incredible good news about what?
And then I tried to dismiss it, but I couldn't.
I didn't really ask for any messages, but this one arrived.
Incredibly good news.
What does that mean?
As Scott said, we each understand news through our own filters.
But if you have a certain filter, call it the salvation filter.
What I just told you may be the best news you have ever heard.
Is it real?
Was it Scott?
I can't tell you.
What I can tell you is how beautiful it is that millions of people who love Scott can look forward to having coffee with him again.
For now, we can pass along Scott's lessons to the people we will one day leave behind to keep him alive in this world as well.
So it begins.
Good luck, my friend.
Thanks, Joel.
That was amazing.
Up next, the great Shelly Adams.
Before I begin, I want to call out my husband, Pat, who has known from the beginning of our 11-year relationship that I'm a package deal.
Not only did I come with two children, but I also came with an ex-husband who would be forever in my life.
Not your typical blended family, but I appreciate Pat's understanding, love, and support through the years, as well as giving up our time while taking care of Scott until the end.
Pat, I know you've heard a lot.
You've had to endear a lot about Scott, especially in the last past year, but here I go again.
You might want to pull out those earplugs that I slipped in your pocket earlier today.
I'm so unbelievably grateful to have Scott in my life for the last 24 years.
Scott was not, Scott was public about almost everything, but when it came to his family, he was a protector.
I'll try to do my best to give you the short story of how Scott came into my life and save the long, juicy version for Scott's biography.
You're welcome, Joel.
I met Scott in 2022 at a local gym when I was working part-time, taking care, taking a break from my career to raise two young children.
As you all know, Scott always had a routine.
He had a regular standing tennis date with his friend, John, which happened to be during the time I worked.
Scott was so easy to talk to, instantly became friends, but embarrassingly, for several months, I didn't know what he did for a living, nor did I know much about the Dilberg cartoon until he decided to share that with me.
All I knew is that he was funny, smart, kind, uplifting, positive, and very fit.
One year later, in 2023, 2003, it was time for me to go back to full-time work.
And Scott happened to mention he was looking to hire an administrative assistant.
With the ability to work from home, it was a perfect opportunity for me.
With my children only being three and five years old at the time, my main job was just collecting some great comic strip ideas from people's real work stories along with other projects he had me do.
In 2024, Scott asked me out for dinner with his tennis buddy John and his wife Lorraine.
I didn't think much of it as I considered John my friend.
And why would Scott, a very successful man, have any interest in a single divorced mom with two young children?
Who was his employee?
Well, little did I know, he didn't see things that way.
He saw qualities in me that he didn't see in myself.
And to him, I was the family he always wanted.
Our relationship grew, and the big test was when it was time to meet the kids, who were only four and six at the time.
What I didn't know then is that Scott merely Scott didn't merely want, he decided that we were going to be his family.
We all know when Scott decides something, he'll do whatever it takes to make it happen.
It wasn't going to be easy trying to win over two shy, stubborn kids who didn't understand why Scott was coming into their lives.
Scott, not having been around children much, this was definitely going to be one of his biggest challenges.
My daughter Savannah recalls her first introduction to Scott.
When we were invited over, Scott pulled out some off-brand soda, some really awful version of like Sprite or Canada Dry.
She can't really remember what it was.
But she wasn't too happy or impressed.
For my son, Justin, he was younger and a little more impressed by Scott's jokes and of course his magic tricks.
Scott quickly learned how difficult it was to entertain kids as well as how hard it was going to be for them to adapt to the new situation.
Scott was not going to give up because remember, he decided that we were going to be his family.
Of course, Scott succeeded as he did with almost everything he decided to do.
He researched, he learned, he used his persuasion techniques to win the kids over.
We married in 2006 and became a family, and that forever changed our lives.
He was the Scott you all know and love, accepted us for who we were while making us better versions of ourselves.
He was a devoted husband and stepdad who showed up in so many ways.
He surprised us one day with having our family picture painted in a mural he had at one of his restaurants.
He was committed to the family.
He always encouraged us to build our talent stack.
Designing and building our Dilbert home gave me a big stack.
Scott's talent stack grew by being a huge father figure, role model, supporter, coach, teacher, entertainer, jokester, and much more.
He was very present in all the kids' interests and activities.
When the kids got older and the kids' activity slowed down, Scott felt he was not needed as much.
Wanting to find a new purpose, something bigger than Dilbert.
He would work in his office trying to find more meaning.
He knew he had the capability to help the world in some way, but that would take all of his time, dedication to do it.
That would not be the recipe for a happy marriage.
I couldn't ask Scott, who meant so much to me, to not find a way to use all his ideas and wisdom for the greater good.
It was something he felt so strongly about.
And really, I knew he had already decided.
He was going to make an impact on others, as he did for us.
We separated, later divorced, but he was always my best friend, still employer, and the best stepdad to my kids.
His decision was one of his best.
His dedication and presence made an impact on so many lives.
After Scott found his path and got settled into his new purpose, he was lucky enough to marry again.
And although it ended, it brought him happiness.
He gained two more stepchildren, Marin and Hazel, who had the same opportunity to learn and grow from Scott as we did.
I'm so grateful for my life with Scott.
And now I have a purpose to keep Scott's legacy alive, and that will continue to help me move forward.
You're all already stepping up and making my job easier, spreading Scott's lessons and wisdom to the people who might benefit from it.
I know we will continue to work together to keep Scott's legacy alive.
Kelly, up next we have a message from one of Scott's friends who couldn't be here, John Shoemate.
My name is John Schumate, and I just want to say that Scott and I play weekly tennis for over a decade in Pleasant in California.
And coincidentally, that's where we both met Shelly about the same time.
And, you know, Scott never was cheated on line calls like a lot of people do in tennis.
And in fact, he did just the opposite.
He would give away any points that were like questionable.
He would always give them away.
And that was him.
You know, it's just how good he was.
And I appreciate the free points.
I wish I could say that to him now.
But, you know, my wife, Lorraine, and I, we really miss Scott dearly.
And we're very happy that Shelly was able to jump in at Scott's request and to help and get everything in order here at the end.
And Scott was always so good to us and everybody else.
And we're going to miss him a lot.
So that's all I could say for now.
Up next, one of Scott's friends, Quinn Harker.
There you are.
Sorry.
part of my system is uh not being the smartest guy in the room this and and thank you guys for coming We had the good fortune of meeting Scott 20 years ago out on a soccer field, Savannah's team, our daughter, a couple of families, daughters in this room.
Closer.
Okay, sorry about that.
To meet Scott.
Very unassuming.
White hat or his hat on, pale skin, like he never went outside, but sitting in his lawn chair, but didn't know who he was.
I was familiar with Dilbert, but we didn't know who he was.
We just knew that Shelly introduced us to him and fortunately became part of, he became part of her life, but also became a huge part of my life for 20 years.
I benefited greatly from that friendship.
So as the time we met, Scott was dealing with his vocal issues.
Hadn't gone through the procedure yet.
So he didn't talk much.
So you're all, he's a comic, but there's nothing there.
He must write funny, but he doesn't, there's no jokes coming out.
And so he made up for lost time following that procedure.
And obviously we benefited from a lot of great wisdom as that came through.
Like you guys, I knew Scott from the public side.
I got to know the comic, the publishers, the podcaster, the blogger, all those kind of things.
But one thing I want to share with you guys and make sure, especially Hazel and Marin and Justin and Jacob, as you joined the family, there was nothing more important than you guys to him.
He was a husband.
He was an ex-husband.
He was a father, very good friend.
And you guys were extremely motivating behind the scenes to what he wanted to achieve.
How to fail.
Written as much for Justin as anybody in the world.
We all benefited.
But I sat with him and when he was prepping that book together, it was about how do I help those with me.
Shelly, you nailed it.
You gave him such a place of belonging.
And he protected that with everything.
Behind the scenes, it was a vulnerable guy.
He was competitive, but very vulnerable.
And he loved you guys dearly.
He wanted to make you proud.
That was the thing.
And he held on no matter what.
Marriages ended.
You were part of his life and he loved you.
And despite all that public attention, obviously he was there for you guys.
So that was, he had an amazing, successful career, influenced us a lot.
And to Shelly, your loyalty to that guy, biggest engine.
I mean, it was incredible.
Your steadiness, Pat, the family, you guys gave him that place of belonging.
He loved you.
That's the most important thing.
He lived for you guys.
Scott's Arc of Life 00:04:53
Many of you will know that Scott shared the arc of life.
Selfish at the beginning as a kid, and then you go.
He put so much focus on that last part of his arc that we all benefited from.
He dedicated himself to giving away his wisdom, his lessons, successes and failures.
How can I pass something along?
Anything that might help somebody else.
Way a point.
Joel, you spoke well.
It was wonderful to hear that summary of his life because he lived it behind the scenes.
He poured himself into his ideas, gave tools, micro lessons.
He was an amazing thinker.
I've never hung out with anybody that's a Mensa guy before.
So it was really amazing.
And he would be as creative as ever.
I still remember when he created the double-sided whiteboard.
The first, you guys didn't see the first version.
The first version had some clips on it, wasn't bolted together.
But his creativity level was amazing.
He was an amazing mentor to me as much as a friend.
We shared a lot behind the scenes, tennis matches.
I was reminded about losing the ping pong to a 68-year-old man who's on cancer medication and painkillers and can't feel his lower body.
But I won some, but not much.
So when we talk about his legacy, it isn't only what he produced, it's what he hoped would happen and what would awaken within people that he shared those with and took it to heart.
Well, all the sippers, the influencers, followers, and the internet dads, you brought him joy and inspiration.
You gave him community, friendship, and meaning all the way to his last day.
Reciprocity in action.
I know he loved you guys for that.
Thank you.
To close, I want to share a personal note.
Scott's view of the world and my faith in Jesus Christ was no secret throughout our friendship and never a point of contention.
There was no judgment in that man when I talked to him.
I have no more loyal relationship than with that man.
We talked often, especially following the diagnosis, when Scott being Scott told me we're in his garage, man cave, whatever you want to call it.
Looks at me and says, this is going to be harder on you than it is on me.
Shared the news with me.
We talked often, especially again after his diagnosis, about who's running the simulation.
For those of you who shared your faith with him, thank you.
God fought to the end, and the decision he made to accept Jesus Christ brings peace.
Believe God's love and grace pursues us relentlessly into the edge of eternity and offers us life after death.
I pray that for each of you as well.
Scott was uniquely and wonderfully made.
I am so very grateful for all that he gave me.
Thank you for listening.
God bless.
That was pretty smart, if you ask me.
You reminded me of when Scott was on my show, I introdu him as Scott so smart that Mensa joined him.
So next up, we have Dave Adams visiting us with a message.
What I treasure most about my brother Scott is the laughter we shared.
When we talked in the phone, my wife always knew I was talking to Scott because of all the laughter and our ability to get each other going.
It didn't matter what happened in our lives, good or bad.
We shared our stories that were sometimes embarrassing.
The kind of things that perhaps you should keep to yourself.
It didn't matter.
If it was funny or amusing, share we did.
Scott brought that quality to his podcast.
If it was funny or amusing, he shared it with us.
His lack of embarrassment was a humanizing superpower.
Laughter That Humanizes 00:14:41
He could find the nugget of gold in everything.
An insight, life lesson, absurdity, and especially laughter.
Scott's legacy, his gift to us all, is his massive life's work.
Cartoonist, author, avatar.
The world is a better place because you were here, bro.
next up stefan pestis tomorrow uh i will get up and i will drive to a cafe and i will write a comic strip called pearls before swine
And I will try to make people laugh, as I have done every day for almost 25 years now.
And that is all due to Scott.
Because 25 years ago, I was a litigation attorney in San Francisco who hated his job.
So I would draw at night and on weekends in the hopes of quitting the law and becoming a syndicated cartoonist.
But as with every cartoonist, everything I submitted was rejected by everyone.
So on my lunch breaks at my law firm, I went to a bookstore in the Embarcadero and I sat there on the floor in my suit and tie.
And I studied the best and most popular strip around, and that was Dilbert.
And I learned everything I possibly could about how you write a three-panel comic strip, how to remove every unnecessary word, how to remove every unnecessary line, and how to bring to the comic that same blunt, inappropriate tone that you would use in a note you pass in high school.
And I tried with the syndicates again after that.
And after years of getting only rejections, I got signed by United Media, the same company that syndicated Dilbert.
But then in the same, in the kind of goofy corporate twist that Scott would write about in Dilbert, a salesman at United said there was no way any newspaper would ever buy Pearls.
It had no demographic.
It was about a stick figure, rat and pig, who never moved and mostly talked about death.
So the same syndicate that signed me canceled me.
My career ended before it started.
And suddenly I was back to being a lawyer for life.
Enter Scott, the very cartoonist whose work I had studied but did not yet know personally, saw the strip online and told all of his fans that he loved it and to go read it.
I remember running upstairs and saying to my wife, I don't know if I'll ever make it in this field, but if I do, this was my big break.
And it was.
The hits for my comic strip went from 2,000 on a Tuesday to 155,000 on a Wednesday.
That was the power of Scott.
And 25 years later, Pearls Before Swine is in almost 1,000 newspapers.
Now, let me tell you something you might not know, which is how generous what Scott did is in my particular field.
Because syndicated cartooning is not like publishing, say, fiction books, where you'll happily give a blurb to a fellow writer because many books can be successful all at once.
In newspaper comics, a cartoonist can only succeed by knocking someone else's comic out of the newspaper.
So when you endorse someone, particularly who's in the same genre of comics as you, you are building a competitor who could one day knock you out of newspapers.
Scott did it anyways.
But that wasn't the end of his help because in 2003, in just the second year of my strip, Scott offered me the biggest opportunity he possibly could have, asking me if I wanted to draw Dilbert for a day.
Something that would give me way more exposure than I had ever had before.
So, of course, I said yes.
And I asked him, Are there any limitations?
And Scott said no.
So I proceeded to draw a strip where Dilbert ran with scissors and died.
Theoretically, ending Scott's comic, You Can't Have Dilbert Without Dilbert, thereby opening all 2,300 of Scott's newspaper slots to Pearls Before Swine.
That's how I chose to repay my mentor.
As the years passed, Scott and I became friends.
And when I went to his house, I was still trying to learn everything I could, peppering him with one question after another.
Like when I asked him one time, How do you manage to be so funny in your books?
And Scott said, I try to make my brother laugh.
So simple, but so brilliant.
Because when you write comedy for a living, you often find yourself trying to please this amorphous mass of people.
And when you do, you end up pleasing no one.
So instead, make one person you know laugh.
And I have followed that advice in every book I have published since.
And that was the thing about Scott's advice.
It did not consist of the usual platitudes that other successful people might give you.
He was willing, as I often told him, to give away the keys to the kingdom.
But you had to listen.
And I listened, as he told me when I saw him a few weeks ago, and he reminded me of the time I met him at his restaurant and asked him questions for two hours.
He said, You wrote down every single thing I said for two hours.
I don't think anyone else ever took it that far.
And then there was the more specific advice he gave me about writing a comic strip, like the time he told me: if you have a really dirty strip, you want to get past the syndicate and into newspapers, create a second, even dirtier strip.
You have no intention of running and send them in together.
The syndicate will fight you like crazy on the really dirty one, and the one you want to run will slip by unnoticed.
That's the kind of guru Scott could be.
In fact, Scott would rarely email me to tell me a particular strip was good.
But if it was dirty and I got it published, Scott was like a proud father.
Like the time I had my main character rat tell someone in a restaurant to eat shit talky mushrooms.
Scott thought that was awe-inspiring.
But if you knew Scott, you also knew he was very competitive, which meant he had to top it.
The student could not eclipse the teacher.
So Scott emailed me.
February 7th, 2014.
No greeting, no, how are you?
quote, if you look at the top of Alice's hair, the very top, you'll see it's a penis and balls.
We were like two adolescents passing inappropriate notes in class, except we were doing it in newspapers in front of 50 million people.
November 20th, 2009, email from Scott.
Once again, no greeting, no, how are you?
Just, I said poop in today's comic.
Next stop, Alice blows Wally.
Or this one from July 7th, 2014, when Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson came out of retirement to draw my strip on the condition that I keep Bill's involvement a secret until the strips were published, which I did.
So Scott wrote to me, once again, no greeting, no, how are you?
Just, quote, clearly you can keep a secret.
So I might as well tell you, I stabbed a hobo.
By the way, when Scott wrote something like that, he never added the ha ha ha that normal people add, which always left you to wonder, did he stab a hobo?
And in person, Scott could say some equally wild stuff.
Like the time we were in his kitchen, he was talking about how much smarter he was than his parents.
So much so that he sometimes wondered if he wasn't born the usual way, but instead had been given to his parents by aliens.
I laughed.
Then I looked up.
Guess who wasn't laughing?
Which brings me to one last thing.
When I post publicly about how much Scott has meant to me, I hear from a lot of people who are familiar from Scott, familiar with Scott, primarily from his more political stuff.
And because of all that, as you might expect in this era, some of them have less than kind things to say.
And then they have a lot of questions for me, wondering if I share his politics and some of his viewpoints.
I don't respond to that stuff.
But if I did, this is what I would have said.
I could count on one hand the number of political topics Scott and I would have agreed upon.
And I disagreed with a lot of the stuff he said.
But it's okay to have people in your life you don't agree with.
I need more of those relationships in my life, not less.
How are we going to get anywhere if we don't talk?
And besides, sometimes all we need is a friend to stand with us in our kitchen and tell us we were probably not put here by aliens.
But also, you should know this about Scott.
Every year I would email him or text him and thank him for giving me a career, offering to pay him back in any way I could, including mowing his lawn or washing his windows.
And do you know what Scott said every time in response?
Pay it forward.
Go out and help somebody else.
Anybody else?
That was Scott too.
More importantly, there was so much Scott and I did share.
We were both geeky kids with glasses from small towns who each headed to San Francisco, worked for corporations, did not like working for those corporations, and weren't particularly good at drawing, leading us both to the same logical conclusion.
We should make a living drawing.
And it worked.
Scott led, I followed.
Know him, know me.
Which is why a few weeks ago, when I heard he didn't have much time left, I asked him if I could come by the house and say goodbye.
And he said yes.
So I drove here to Pleasanton and saw him there in his bed in his living room.
And we joked about all the stuff I just told you.
And we talked about one more thing.
I told him one last time how much I owed him and once again offered to clean his windows.
But instead of his usual response, he replied that he did have something to ask of me, which he had never said.
So surprised, I said, whatever you want, man, you know, I owe you everything.
And he said there was a writer doing his biography and asked, would you write the introduction?
The human part of me started to cry.
The cartoonist in me replied, sorry, dude, I got no time for you.
Scott laughed.
I loved making him laugh.
And then I said, of course, man, it would be an honor.
So then I held his hand and I said, thank you.
I wanted to hug him, but he had those hospital beds on either side of him.
So I couldn't get to him.
Looking back on it, I think he put them there on purpose.
But he looked back at me and with what looked like tears welling up in the bottom of his eyes, he said, you're welcome.
Then just days later, I heard from Shelly, as we all did, that Scott was no longer with us.
But because he once was, tomorrow, I will get up, I will drive to a cafe, and I will write a comic strip.
Thank you. Next up is me.
So, yeah, I'm not going to lie.
I do, I talk for a living, but stuff like this makes me pretty nervous.
I don't know why it's so easy for me to do, to talk to millions of people, but this is always harder.
And when people say that they're nervous about doing this stuff, you're so am I.
But what's interesting for me is how Scott Adams prepared me to speak at his own funeral.
You know, I think about, I've known him for 10 years.
10 years ago, my mom passed and I was thinking about her funeral and whether or not I was truly there for her.
You know, maybe I was, maybe I wasn't.
I had a lot of anxiety, a lot of ego, a lot of self-doubt, and definitely a lot of drinking.
And here I am 10 years later, I'm at Scott's funeral and I'm completely 100% here for him.
He prepared me.
He made me a better person over 10 years.
And I thought of the things that got me to the point where I could talk at somebody's funeral without getting drunk.
The basket case theory, which is one of Scott's great theories, is that whenever you enter a room or you have to do something and you're surrounded by unfamiliar people, maybe you're going into a bar, just remember that everyone in there is a basket case, just like you.
And no one thinks about you more than you.
Everybody's got problems.
So when you go in and I'm speaking here, I realize, you know what?
Even if I do a terrible job, you guys are happy.
It's not you.
Replacing Effort with Reward 00:08:55
He had a really simple framing that sounds so simple that it seems stupid, but replacing effort with reward.
It was a way to get over laziness or laziness or procrastination or just anxiety about doing something.
So let's say I didn't want to do this.
I could have come up with a lot of excuses because I didn't want to do the effort.
You know, it's like I have to write something.
I have to fly here.
And I can fill what Scott would call the mental shelf space with so much negative information that I wouldn't do something that I would end up really, really happy and grateful and honored to do.
And we do that a lot.
I do that a lot.
So I focus on the reward.
What would happen if I did this?
I'm doing this for Scott.
He would be happy.
He would be thrilled to know that I came here and I did this and I would feel good.
And I think about those things and those things shove the anxiety and the negativity out.
That was the replacing the effort.
Everybody thinks about effort, doing the dishes.
You don't want to get off from out of the sofa to do the dishes.
Well, you think about the clean dishes in the cupboard.
So stupid, but so simple and so effective.
He often would talk about replacing anxiety with adventure.
You know, and somebody who has anxiety will often worry about what's going to happen, what's going to happen.
And he would frame it more like, what's going to happen?
It's going to be great.
Aren't you dying to find out what's going to happen?
And that would, you know, I would often use that framework when I would go on trips because I had this tremendous fear of flying.
which oddly enough went away over the last 10 years, perhaps because I flipped it from terror to curiosity.
And what could it be like if I die in a plane crash?
It actually worked.
If you think like that, you can actually think like, hey, this, this will be interesting.
One of my favorite frames he does is about the ego.
And I never really thought about the ego and how much it played a role in my life and our lives.
And when listening to Scott was, you know, how much all of your relationships are based on whether your ego is going to be injured or not.
And basically, anxiety is just your ego sweating.
And to somehow, he brought up this concept of basically being able to dial up and dial down your ego as though it's something that is a flexible variable in which you could just dial it down to nothing.
And my favorite frame, and I quoted it in books and in articles, is that imagine somebody asking you to carry a Picasso across the street.
So you're, oh, God, I got to, you know, I got to wrap it up.
I got to wait for the weather to be nice.
I got to walk really slow, watch for traffic.
I can't let anything happen to this Picasso.
But then think about somebody asking you to carry a potato and you're like, that's fine.
Put it in your pocket.
If you lose the potato, you get another one.
And he says, right now, your ego is a Picasso and you need to turn it into a potato.
And I often thought about, I would just like, if I was like nervous about something, I go, it's a Picasso.
Got to turn it into a potato.
And it, and it worked.
What are the other, there's some other simple things that when he just says, if you have bad thoughts, just shout no.
He would do that every once in a while.
And he goes, just say no.
Nope.
Nope.
And it does, I mean, it does work.
And also, if something goes bad, I love this framing because, you know, I've been fired three times.
I've had bad relationships.
I wish I'd heard this before.
I probably would have been in more bad relationships if I'd heard this before.
But his, it was just a bad fit.
And I thought about that.
It's like, it's such a great piece of advice to give to somebody who just got fired or just went, it's just a bad fit.
It takes, again, it takes everything off your ego.
And it's just such, I think part of the genius of Scott was the simplicity of this information, so simple that we overlooked it.
And I learned all of this stuff the way many of you did every morning.
It was 10 a.m. my time on the East Coast.
I love trying to explain it to people who aren't familiar with it.
I'm sure you've done that.
Oh, there's this guy you should watch on YouTube.
His name's Scott Adams.
Oh, that Dilbert guy.
Yeah, but this is amazing because I was not, I wasn't a cartoon guy.
I just got into him because somebody recommended that I had a pretty severe case of Trump derangement.
And I started reading Scott and he got me out of it literally, like boom.
And but trying to explain a coffee with Scott Adams to somebody that's unfamiliar with it is pretty, it's pretty rich because that's how the podcast worked.
It wasn't sophisticated.
It didn't feel like a show.
He wasn't interested in trying to dispense this intellectual wisdom to feel superior.
He was just trying to be your friend.
And he understood that if you were there, he was going to show up anyway, because if you were there, you needed a friend.
And he understood that.
His voice, just his manners, it was all this incredible gratitude from service.
Those two things I learned from Scott go hand in hand.
The more service you do, the more grateful you are.
Nobody told me that growing up, but I learned that from him.
And I would quote him on the five.
One of the great things that I really appreciate is that he loved the five and he would watch it every day.
And he would know, and I would quote him.
I would, if I quoted him on everything, I would have to quote him on everything.
And he would just say, Hey, Greg, thanks for mentioning me, but you don't have to.
So he was never chasing any kind of recognition.
He was just glad that he helped.
So he didn't care whether I mentioned him or not, even though I would feel guilty if, let's say, I said something that I heard that morning and didn't attribute it to him.
I felt dirty.
He was like, it doesn't matter.
And it was part of his, I guess, his philosophy that you're helping somebody else and that's good enough for him.
He doesn't need any of the accolades.
And I think, you know, a lot of people don't realize the impact he's had on this world because of that, his impact on the White House and certain policies that we deal with now in terms of health, you know, came a lot from him.
And a lot of people listen to him that you would be surprised.
But I'm really happy.
I'm really happy for Scott because I think he accomplished his goal because he had a great system.
Remember, everybody's going to reach the goal.
We're all going to die.
But his system got him off what you would call, I guess he called it Prisoner's Island.
Do you guys remember that when he would be trapped on an island?
But he would be the last one standing.
And I feel like he got off Prisoner's Island.
And we're all like, he's still with us.
He's managed to do something that very few people do: he left everybody who knew him in a better place, and he's in a better place.
And I'm just incredibly grateful to be here and to have known him.
I can't imagine my life not knowing him, which is weird considering I'm not related to him.
It was just some guy I read.
But I'll stop there.
But up next, we have a friend of, this is a buddy of mine who we both kind of bonded over Scott Adams.
We were like in a green room and he goes, Hey, do you listen to Scott Adams?
I go, Are you kidding me?
This is Dr. Drew who couldn't get here, but he sent a message.
My feelings are vast, but my comment will be brief.
I feel that we have lost our comrade and our trusted professor, and I have lost a buddy.
I shall forever be grateful for the relationship we had and for the wisdom imparted.
But like in every great battle, our job is to carry on, but never forget.
Never forget the inspiration and never forget the wisdom.
We have a job to do for which Scott has trained us.
We must carry his message forward, but I still shall miss my friend.
up next uh one of the early adopters of scott adams mike cernovich you know i've sort of been going to too many funerals but one of the things that i find interesting about him is and i had this epiphany at my grandfather's is everybody's just kind of like an avatar to a person You know, I'm like, I, you know, Greg knows Scott this way, Shelly knows it this way.
Scott Adams' Legacy 00:04:41
And when you go to a funeral, it's a kaleidoscope and you're sort of turning it.
And you think, oh, yeah, I mean, Scott had a real life.
I remember when I saw him at my grandpa's funeral, I go, wait, this guy was, he was just my grandpa as a kid.
And you're like, no, this was a human being.
He had dreams.
He lived, you know, and he died.
So coming here and hearing Shelly and everybody's stuff has helped me like keep my shit together because I'm not, I'm, I've become sentimental in my old age.
But so, so I knew Scott and I thought was funny is I was at, I read his book and I go, man, this is a great book.
It put together a lot of thoughts that I'd had, but it was more systematic where there's a lot of swirl or blur in your life.
And you go, that's, yeah, if you, every skill you learn and you add, it compounds it.
And then as you got to know Scott better, he would just say, oh, I made up that rule, but it sounds better to just say it doubled, right?
It's more like a 10 or 20% thing.
And I didn't go, well, I want to meet the guy.
I want to meet the guy.
So I just did what occurred naturally to me, which was you write a book review.
I always tell people they're always in people's notifications.
How do I meet this person?
I go, hey, have you ever written about the person or written a book?
No, no, it doesn't even doesn't even occur to anybody.
I wrote a book review on it because I thought it was a great book.
And then I remember he followed me on Twitter, what it was called then.
I was at the gym.
I was at Equinox with my wife.
And I was like, yeah, I got the Scott Adams, Scott Adams follow.
But the reason that comes to mind is his header image was a, it was a cutting board of vegetables, something ridiculous.
And the reason I bring that up is there's a bigger point is back then, nobody knew what social media was or what you were doing on it.
Now, right, it's a whole industry, it's a cottage industry.
Now you have your glam gloss pic and your header image has to look a certain way and you have all these fancy links you can do.
And he's just like, I don't know, it's just cutting board image.
And I was sort of the same.
Like, I don't know what to post.
iPhones didn't even have selfie mode at the time.
So no, nobody really knew what they were doing, including him, including me.
And how do you tie it to Scott?
You go, well, nobody knows what they're doing, but that's way too Reddit coded.
That's one of those dumb things losers say.
But you figure it out, right?
You figure it out.
And, but you're going to, you're going to take some hits.
And that, that was Scott.
Nobody knew how to use Twitter.
You get on Twitter.
Back then, there's no industry.
So all it does is ruin your life, by the way.
Anybody, it's great now to be like, wow, Mike sort of like, no, it was a bad 10 years.
And Scott and I lived those 10 years together in a lot of ways because he's somebody who was writing Han Dilbert.
I didn't really know much about Dilbert either, other than existed.
I just liked his book and I thought he was a smart guy.
Next thing you know, he's persona non grada 2015, 2016.
And he hadn't even really said anything shocking by then.
That was, I was more of the bomb thrower.
And then you, you see him take chunks and then you see him live his life.
And that's, I think that's why people fuck.
That's why a lot of people, myself included, are so sentimental about it because we like, we live life together.
The overdose, the challenges that he had, the watching a good man be smeared.
But I had this weird closure, though, actually, when surprisingly from, it was either New York Times or one of these outlets.
And we knew it was coming.
We knew it was coming.
The obituaries.
We knew they were coming.
Right.
And it says something like, former great cartoonist turns scumbag, dies.
And I laughed.
I swear to God, I laughed.
Because if you read the obituaries about terrorists, there was one guy who was called a beloved Islamic scholar.
He was ISIS.
And I thought to myself, this is, this is funny.
Whereas I think a year ago or six months ago, I'd have been so angry about it.
And I thought, this is just perfect.
This is, this is comical.
It is comical at this point that you're doing to it.
And that was, again, I think a wink from him in the universe.
And it's funny that Greg said he quit drinking because the opposite, I'm not drinking, but I remember after ayahuasca, I DM Scott and I go, I finally understand God's debris.
So I guess I'm the druggie now.
One guy quits it and another guy finds something else, finds something else in Peru.
But I go, I get it.
I get what you were trying to say about the connection or the ego.
And the ego is separating from everyone else.
Comical Quitting Jokes 00:04:20
And the connection was everybody feels closer together.
And in many ways, the meaning of life is trying to get away from the egotistical separation and the boundaries.
And I'm so great.
Or like, I'm not afraid to cry anymore.
I'm like, I don't want it to ruin, ruin my talk because I want to look cool or whatever.
But I was like, I'm probably going to start crying.
And I go, I don't care.
What am I going to do?
Start crying?
What are people going to laugh at me?
Do I care if people laugh at me?
Because I'm weeping, you know, weeping over a beloved figure.
And that was Scott.
That was Scott to the very end, a very complicated person, a beloved person, and someone that we all saw a certain part of.
And I'm just so grateful I got to be here with everybody and to hear everybody's story.
So thank you so much and God bless.
That was great.
Up next, beaming in Zuby.
Hey, this is Zuby here, and this is a tough message to record.
So how shall I begin?
Let me begin by saying, rest in peace to a legend, to you, Scott Adams.
God bless you.
We love you.
We appreciate you.
And I'm grateful to be able to call you a friend.
Thank you for your kindness.
Thank you for your wisdom, your hospitality, and all of the love that you have shown over the years.
Thank you for the laughs and the knowledge that you've provided for decades to me and to millions and millions of people all around the globe.
You're truly, truly appreciated.
I know as part of Scott's legacy, he wanted to have as many people as possible at his funeral.
And I think that we are witnessing that right now.
I wish I could be there in person, but this message is going to have to do for now.
I know that you're up there simultaneously sipping with the angels right now and cracking jokes.
And I know that one day I'm going to see you on the other side, brother.
So to all of Scott's friends, family, fans, people who are grieving, please keep your heads up.
I know that's what he would want.
And Scott, thank you so much for everything, man.
God bless you.
We appreciate you.
It's great.
I'm sure that was Scott texting him.
Could have done it over without the texting, but that's what I like him.
All right.
Up next, Jack Pasabiak.
Hope I did that right.
I always screw it up.
Totally wrong, but that's okay.
You know, actually, funny enough, Scott in his lifetime would always, it would always say Jack Pasabic, Jack Pasabic.
And I remember there a few times we'd talk on the phone and I would say, you know, actually, Scott, it's Pasobic.
Just wanted to make sure it's Poseobic.
He's like, oh, great.
Then the very next day he'd be out there.
Jack Pasabic out there.
And so it's just, it's just funny.
Scott was kind of like that.
But, you know, we're out here and we're thinking about this.
We're thinking about Scott and how much he meant to us.
And we've had such great speakers.
We have so many great speakers to come.
But I was kind of wondering, I think I know what everyone's thinking out there.
I think I know what everybody's waiting for.
And I was thinking that maybe you guys wanted to take it up a notch.
Did anybody want to maybe take it up a notch?
because I know a few people may have them here.
We've got a couple of mugs and I know there's a lot of people who have the mugs at home.
And so I wanted to make sure that at least somebody did the simultaneous sip while we were all here together.
So I figured it might as well go for it.
And it's really simple because all you need is a cup, a mug or glass, a tankard, chalice or stein, a canteen, jug, or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Scott like coffee.
And join us now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, even when your good friend and a good man advances to the next level of the simulation.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go for Scott.
Why We Left Scott 00:06:11
And you know, I would say the first time I ever met Scott in a sense was probably like a lot of people in the newspaper, right?
When you're reading the cartoons and I was a kid and I would, you know, I loved, you know, Snoopy and I love, you know, Charles Schultz and Charlie Brown and Peanuts and then Garfield and of course the rest of them.
And then there was this other cartoon, this comic strip that I would see and I love the newspapers and I would get them every day.
And it was this guy who worked in an office and it was called Dilbert.
And I didn't understand it at all.
It didn't make any sense to me as a kid reading this and then going through grade school.
It didn't make any sense.
And I'd get to high school and I'd still read the comic strips and it didn't make any sense.
Then I got my first internship and working in media in Philadelphia area.
And you're making copies, you're working in office.
And suddenly, oh, gosh, you start to get it.
It starts to make sense.
And then when I was in the military and gosh, people think, oh, wow, the intelligence community and oh, wow, that's like Super Spy, James Bond stuff.
No, no, it's all Dilbert, but it really is.
It really is.
And anyone who tells you otherwise is a Fed.
And when I would go through Scott and we would eventually get the, you know, the calendars and we would get them come in and you'd see the Dilbert cartoons up on different cubicles in different places.
You think, this guy just gets it.
And this guy just totally gets it.
But he also understood, he also understood that there's so much more to life than the cubicle farm, that that is not where you find your meaning in life.
And in many cases, and as I'm a Catholic, I say, that's your purgatory, right?
When you're living in those cubicles, life is what happens outside of there.
Life is what happens when you're meeting other people, when you're having those impacts on other people, when you're raising children, when you're having those meaningful relationships, and when you're being useful to others.
And I think Scott really taught us all that so much.
And of course, he lived that life.
It was this observation, this shrewd observation.
He was one of the wisest people.
And of course, courageously early on to see what the Trump movement was doing, what Trump was doing as a president, to come forward.
And he sacrificed so much coming out and saying what he did when he did it, deals, contracts, publishers, income, even his social circle.
And he did it anyway.
And I think people misunderstand that they think, oh, well, Scott was just some big Trump supporter.
And I don't think it was like that.
I think Scott was a human supporter and Scott was a social supporter and he wanted the best things for everyone.
And he deeply, deeply loved other people, and he deeply, deeply loved his country.
He was a true American patriot.
And in that spirit, we knew that in those last days, those last weeks, when he made that announcement about accepting Christ, and I know there were some people, they had questions.
They said, oh, was you know, is this a cost-benefit analysis?
Is it Pascal's wager?
And I think you guys who knew Scott even more personally than I did, you would say he didn't do things without sincerity.
He always did things with true sincerity.
And so I believe it's true.
It's either an unbelievable generosity in his last moments, or it was his acceptance and humility.
And just from my own personal perspective, see, people remember, of course, I think it was back last May when he made his diagnosis public.
And of course, in typical Scott Adams fashion, he actually obeyed his own 48-hour rule because he got the news, but then didn't make it public for 48 hours.
So even imposes his rules on himself.
And he had thought originally that he may only make it one more month and he wanted to make it past the wedding.
And he said that he did that.
But then some doors opened and some phone calls were made.
And we know that we were given another six, six, seven months with him.
And he saw the outpouring of love that came along with that.
And I think it was those last few months that he was given by God in order to bring him to Jesus and make that final conversion.
And that's what I'll always believe.
And I know, and I know that our Lord brought him up, of course, a little bit early because I'm sure that God and Jesus and everyone else were as cheesed as we were that Dilbert was canceled in 2023.
And he said, well, we're going to have to call him up here, disappearing from the local paper.
And like many of us, Jesus doesn't always have time to watch the full live stream.
You have to maybe go back or like me, go back.
I would always, I'm a 2X guy.
But now it's Scott's turn to forever rest and to watch and enjoy as he settles into eternity with our Father after a lifetime of being useful to others, spent making all of our lives richer and funnier and in sharper focus and more true.
And I know he certainly did that for me, my entire family.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.
May his soul and all the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.
Scott, I hope you and Charlie are having a good time up there.
Up next, Joshua Lysak.
Yes, hello.
My name is Joshua Lysak.
Scott Adams' Legacy 00:02:41
I am Scott Adams' editor and publisher for his library of literary works.
In the wake of his cancellation that particular morning, I received a number of notifications that people were shouting out my name in Scott's mentions and his replies and notifications and on the live stream that he should talk to me.
And it was shortly thereafter I got a text message from him to the effect of, what do you know about setting up an independent publishing company, Joshua?
Effectively was the conversation.
And the rest is history.
And part of the history, of course, is the book we see here, Reframe Your Brain.
In Reframe Your Brain, Scott taught us the usual frame versus reframe formula.
It's a way to go from impoverished thinking around an area of your life to something closer to happiness and success.
We will repurpose the great influencer's formula now.
Usual frame.
Scott Adams has passed away.
Reframe.
Scott Adams now lives forever.
What is a man but what he does for others?
Considered the greatest men with the noblest feats in Western history of art and science, politics, and public service.
Names we all know, like Michelangelo, Da Vinci, the Wright brothers, favorite U.S. presidents past, Washington, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt.
Into the pantheon of greatness enters now the most influential personal development writer of all time and space, Scott Raymond Adams.
Scott Adams belongs to the ages now.
His steadfast, ever-present spirit, the kindness and wit, clarity and skepticism he taught us when he came into our homes and hearts every single day for more than 10 years, starting with a simultaneous sip.
Scott left a lasting impression on civilization because he left his mark on each of us.
Some of us knew him as a friend and client.
For many of us, he was our internet dad.
Me, he taught me how to grieve the loss of my twins with dignity.
He gave me personally reframes to integrate their little lives into my own and press on honoring theirs.
And when the happier times came, and they do come, Scott was able to meet all three of my living children.
Scott's Internet Dad 00:06:06
Each of them knew Scott's voice from their mother's womb before they were born.
Fatherhood changed my worldview, but so did Scott Adams.
And around the same time, there was a period of my life where I like to joke I was CIA, which in fact stands for cringe internet atheist.
And one of my boys at that time was a man named Sam Harris, and I regularly listened to his waking up podcast.
And during the days of my more, I call it the Libby phase of life, Scott Adams came on and did the debate with Sam.
And as Scott would say, he triggered Sam Harris into cognitive dissonance.
And Sam attempted to obliterate Scott and the debate, and it totally backfired.
And then I asked myself, as the meme says, are we the baddies?
Shortly thereafterwards, I became patient zero for Scott personally.
And I became a success story of someone who he publicly cured of TDS or Trump derangement syndrome.
He then had me on his podcast a number of times, shouted me out in my work, and he, as the book, the famous book from Dale Carnegie, being hearty in your approbation and lavish in your appraise, right?
How to win friends and influence people.
That's what Scott was for me.
And in terms of inquiries, I went from, like an earlier guest said, from about 2,000 to about 155,000.
And in many ways, Scott created and kind of launched my career.
It was through Scott that I later connected with the man who would become my brother in metaphorical arms, Jack Posabic, and doing a number of books together.
But the words that perhaps meant the most to me now, Beyond the recommendations and praise that he shared publicly about me as his editor, I mean, how do you fix Scott Adams?
How do you do that?
That was my task.
And he was a living demonstration of the dialing down your ego.
And so I would say, Scott, I think you should restructure it this way, rephrase it this way, rephrase it this way.
And then many times he'd say, Okay, sure.
And then it was my turn.
You know, I was trying to impress important people, as I like to say.
But then it was my turn.
I would suggest something, and Scott would reply, as Greg would say, with the reframe.
Scott would tell me, No.
And so I had to dial my ego down.
Many words we exchanged over the years, but his last words to me personally were, I love you.
Scott was my internet dad, and he was my children's internet grandpa.
On the national stage, however, Scott Adams was the stepfather and godfather of MAGA.
Before our favorite president, Donald J. Trump began to make America great again.
It was Scott who made candidate Trump great first.
Politically speaking, Scott gave millions of us permission to vote our conscience to save America and to so bring about an imminent golden age that Scott, like Moses in the Bible, knew he would lead the people to, but not himself get to see.
As a person, it felt like Scott spoke one-to-one to each of us, an omnipresent on-demand mentor.
He was every single day the sense maker we could trust in a world gone mad.
Every day on coffee with Scott Adams and on every page of his books, Scott taught us not what to think, but how to think, and with Dilbert, how to laugh about every single bit of it.
Scott Adams was a rich man, and he reinvested his wealth of fatherly wisdom in all of us who knew him, liked him, and trusted him.
To repurpose the title of Scott's fiction trilogy, God's Debris, we are all Scott's debris now.
From his Dilbert cartoons to his political critiques, from best-selling books to brave predictions that proved right but costly so, and it was worth it.
Learn the price of success, then pay it, Scott would say.
Scott taught us the most valuable micro lesson of all.
Be useful.
He was, he is, and I believe he will forever be.
2,000 years from now, on January 25th, AD 4026, it's going to be a Thursday.
I hope there's coffee.
Two millennia from now, on Earth, the moon, Mars, or somewhere out past all three.
Thanks in advance, Elon.
Somewhere at this very moment, 2,000 years from now, someone will discover Scott Adams for the very first time and their life will change for the better forever.
They will laugh bigly, they will love harder and live better with a reframe here, a comic there, and a quote they won't ever forget from anywhere.
Scott Adams is the Mark Twain of King Solomon's.
The American author from Wyndham, New York, whose words will live on for so long as there are human beings or whatever comes after us.
But now it's our turn to quote our mutual Stephen K. Bannon, next man up.
What book will you write?
What comic will you draw?
What micro lesson will you teach on video with a double-sided whiteboard?
What prediction will you make, outlandish as it may seem at the time?
But the very act of you speaking what you believe to be the truth with courage, the very act of you making that bold prediction is what makes it come to pass.
Next man up, The great influencer who influenced the influencers of the influencers.
His mug is empty.
Our hearts are full.
Pay him forwards.
Making Bold Predictions 00:15:41
I received this email a few minutes ago, and I wanted to share it with you in closing.
Scott, on Coffee with Scott Adams, number 1619, from January 10th, 2022.
In response to the outpouring of reverence and adoration from people who knew the late funny man, Bob Sagett, Scott said, quote, I've said that my strategy for my life is to live for the best funeral, meaning the most people who care if you die.
One way to measure whether you lived a good life is how many people care when you die.
So I've always thought that that would be my standard, to have the maximum number of people willingly go to my funeral, as opposed to just have to because they're related or something.
The eternal Scott Adams.
The immortal, Scott Adams.
Scott Adams, forever.
Thank you.
Up next, Michael Malice.
Impossible to breathe in this thing.
I had a whole bit with this where I was going to show up and say, if you just dress like Dilbert, you get past security and then tell people horrible things like, do you want to see my knife?
But we're going to put this aside.
Thank you so much for letting me have a chance to honor Scott.
He is just an amazing person.
It's hard to find the words, especially for someone whose job it was to find words that so many others of us had difficulty finding for ourselves.
I remember when Scott was on my show and I was the hundredth person to ask him what Garfield was like in real life.
And rather than getting annoyed, he just kind of rolled his eyes and went with it.
And a clip just recently surfaced this week because I'd forgotten, and this part is true, when I had him another time on my show, I said, the worst thing, in my opinion, by getting older is people start dying.
And I asked him about that.
And he talked about how he was expecting, you know, he's going to outlive a lot of other people.
Times when Scott was wrong.
And the sad thing about getting older and people dying, it's never the ones you want.
I mean, I'm not saying I have a list.
But I am saying I could make a list.
And I think everyone else in this audience could as well.
One of the most frustrating things about working on the internet and in media is how negative and nasty it has been and how much worse it's getting.
And that's never gotten to Scott.
You always had this air of happiness and being a beat.
And as a result of this, you kind of have to get hardened because if you let in the compliments, you have to let in the nasty stuff.
And there's always going to be much more nasty stuff than nice stuff.
But let me tell you all, when Scott Adams publicly said, oh, that I'm funny, or people should look at my Twitter, like that level of validation is something that doesn't happen very often.
And Scott's legacy is still with us.
Something I like to do is often post the dumbest thing I could think of.
So just this week, I had Chad GPT make a drawing of Renee Goode, who was the woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis, and Scott in a van together driving to heaven.
And no one said too soon.
No one said this is disrespectful.
They just said Scott would have liked this because Scott liked making people laugh.
But besides his humor, there was also that mind.
And it's really kind of funny when you talk to people who didn't know who Scott was and they think it's the Dilbert guy.
It's like, no, Yeah, Gilbert's fine.
But those books and where he changed his career in later days to reorient how people think.
I'll give you one example.
I get slightly political.
I talked to a lot of people about the Epstein stuff and I couldn't reconcile two things.
I thought, okay, if Trump's in the Epstein files, Biden would have leaked it.
But if he's not in the Epstein stuff, why is he fighting so hard to keep it from being released?
No one I talked to had even a slight theory as to how it could be done, except for Scott.
Scott's idea is, what if Trump is using the stuff that's in there to blackmail people?
And he doesn't want that to be made public because they lose his power.
Is that theory true?
I don't know, but he's the only person I knew who could make sense of different pieces and make them more coherent.
Now, as some of you might know, I used to co-author books for celebrities.
So I wrote a little piece and tried my best to get it in Scott's voice.
And that was extremely easy and extremely impossible, which is a contradiction in terms.
It's easy because Scott had a very specific cadence in how he spoke.
We all know it when we hear it.
But it's impossible because you cannot get into the head of Scott Adams.
His brain worked in ways that no other brain worked.
So I tried my best.
Let's see if I did a good job with it.
So here we go.
So the framework is we're having a memorial service for Scott.
The reframe is we're having a party and Scott is running really late.
What if instead of thinking about this as a sad event, we think about it as a get-together?
Is it really true that Scott is running really late?
No, of course not.
Does that matter for the reframe?
Not really.
We all have friends we haven't talked to in a long time.
If you stop, you could probably think of a bunch of people that if you ran to them right now, it would really make your day.
You have their phone number, their email address.
You could reach out to them this very instant if you wanted to, but you won't for whatever reason.
It doesn't mean you don't like them.
It just means they're not in your life at this moment, and that's fine.
It's possible you'll never communicate with them again.
That doesn't change your opinion of them one bit.
Scott tried to do two things in his content.
He tried to make people laugh and he tried to make people think.
Was every Dilbert hilarious?
No.
So what?
Some were really good and memorable and some you forgot about them the second you finished reading them.
I'm sure Scott forgot a lot about them too, that if he went back to read some of them, he'd think, well, that wasn't very clever.
But the good ones he'd remember well and have a story to tell about how he wrote them.
Some of the good ones probably came to him in a flash, while the others he had to work on the exact wording for weeks or months.
The other thing Scott tried to do was to make people think and to make people think about how they thought.
Again, not everything he said was on the money, but how would that even be possible?
No one can say smart things all the time.
But when you're dealing with a smart person like Scott, you remember those smart things they said for the rest of your life.
You might also remember those dumb things because surprising when a smart person says something dumb.
It's not a surprise when a dumb person says something dumb.
You just go on thinking, yep, there they go, being dumb.
But when a smart person says something dumb, you think, huh, that's odd that this smart person said a dumb thing.
And if you really want to get into it, you wonder, hey, maybe I'm the one being dumb here.
Maybe he sees something I don't, or maybe I'm just misunderstanding what he means.
I've seen both situations happen more times than I can count.
But Scott never tried to make people sad or depressed.
Not once.
It wasn't part of his vocabulary.
And since he never tried at it, we also know he never failed at it.
So why would he want us to feel that way?
He was a great communicator, both in his words and his actions, and both his words and his actions showed that he wanted us to laugh and he wanted us to think, but not be sad.
How would that help him?
It wouldn't, of course.
In fact, if he were sad, he'd probably want to go for the reframe to get us out of that sadness as quickly as possible.
So let's think of this as a party, like we've politely waited long enough for Scott to arrive.
It's time to begin.
You're yawning because where is he already?
Come on.
It's taking so long.
Maybe we can even get a little annoyed that he's not here because he's missing out.
He'd find that funny.
We could still have a good time without him.
And I think that's what he would have wanted.
Thank you so much to have done that in the mask, though.
Up next, Nival Ravikant from, I don't know where he is.
I think Asia.
Shelly, thank you for the love and the care that you showed and continue to show for Scott and for gathering us here.
I'm sorry I couldn't be here in person, but Scott had a huge influence on my life and my writing.
And so I wrote a few words about the Scott that I remember, and I'd like to share them.
A man finds to his astonishment that he exists.
After the elation of childhood wears off, he asks, who am I?
Why am I here?
How does this all work?
These are hard questions, so after a brief struggle, he selects a ready-made answer and goes about the motions of life.
Scott Adams was not such a man.
He was a live player, ever curious, intent on figuring out this simulation that he found himself in.
From first principles, Scott unraveled, understood, and ultimately controlled his own reality.
He hacked himself with affirmations, others with persuasions.
The world was simultaneous sips.
He explained people as moist robots, two movies happening on one screen.
His world is God's debris.
He carved a personal mission to be useful and made us all better writers, public speakers, and persuaders.
He preached the footwear theory of motivation, the Adams law of slow-moving disasters, the skill stack, systems over goals, and of course, the Dilbert principle.
Besides cartooning, philosophizing, and teaching, Scott rose to the occasion and displayed the one virtue that cannot be faked, courage.
Scott had the courage to speak honestly as he saw it about Trump, about his nation, and about his time, even though it cost him friends, audience, money, and his ticket into polite society.
Scott had true courage, the kind that makes you unpopular, the kind that is always and everywhere in short supply.
At the end, as any hacker of reality, Scott covered all of his basis.
He left as a Buddhist, a Christian, and a player in the simulation.
Scott, I and we did not get enough time with you, but you were a mentor and a marvel.
You were useful and you were courageous.
You were incompressible and indivisible.
One of a kind and generous with your drawing, your writing, and your speaking.
Unlike your squealing critics in the chattering classes, you will be red generations from now.
On this earth, there are many long-lived hells, but no lasting heavens.
Each heaven must be created and nurtured, ex nehilo, from mind and from mud.
Scott, you created a small heaven for us all, and to a larger heaven you go.
A man finds to his astonishment that he no longer exists.
He asks why?
What was it for?
How will this new reality work?
When the rest of us get there, we'll find Scott every useful, ready to explain, having figured it all out.
Thank you, Scott.
God bless you.
Up next, Walter Kern.
I've been looking at that photo as everybody's spoken, and I thought, Now we're surprised he became a Christian, a man who most uniform and cherished ritual was having everybody take a drink from a holy cup together every day.
He was a stealth Christian.
Somebody just had to come to him and finally say, Scott, you already are.
You just have to admit it.
You take the sacrament, you give the sacrament.
You've taught America not to fear.
You've taught America to not to pity itself, to look at every day as a miracle, to look at death as, you know, and the approach of death as the most glorious part of life.
I'm glad that someone reminded him to come out formally as a Christian because he was probably the best one even before he named himself that I've known.
I try to think about how I got to know Scott Adams because I did not know him personally.
Like the people who knew him best, I never met him.
But in around 2016, I became aware that there was a person who wore glasses, was very intelligent, was a hypnotist.
And that impressed me as another small town kid.
Hypnotism is one of the skills that we most value.
Public school kids from small towns realize that hypnotism is the road to getting good jobs and beautiful women and so on.
And that he was a hypnotist made me think that we were kindred souls.
I found out that there was a guy who wore glasses who was a hypnotist, who was intelligent, and he kind of liked Donald Trump.
And there were two of us, it meant.
And I felt less lonely immediately.
It was a strange, I knew nothing of his work.
I knew nothing of his comics.
I only knew that it was possible to be a thinking, independent person and have a positive impression of Donald Trump.
I wasn't alone.
I was a journalist writing for Harper's Magazine and all these kind of very liberal, thoughtful magazines, and I had not yet met anyone else to whom I could confess my secret.
So there he was.
You know, the way I really got into Scott's world was by starting to listen to his show after my father died of ALS.
My father had a long, well, not that long, decline, but a shocking decline from an ALS addiction in early 2020 to a death from the disease just a few months later.
And I spent my time at his bedside and I came away depleted, depressed, upset.
And I started listening to Scott's show as a self-help strategy.
I mean, to me, he was the only self-help author who ever helped me.
And that was because I didn't get the feeling he wanted to touch me.
I didn't get the feeling that he was creepy in any way.
He was happy and he was so damn happy, he wanted other people to have some.
And as I started to listen to him, I got an idea that His politics really flowed from a desire for others to be happy in their own way.
Why He Wasn't Dead 00:05:52
He was one of those people who was an avatar of freedom because freedom is the only way that we get to think for ourselves, feel for ourselves, see for ourselves.
We can only be happy in our own way, and we can only do that if we're free.
It was a very natural set of political beliefs that flowed from a desire for others to be fulfilled.
It was the politics of self-help, really.
You can only help yourself if you're free.
And so the person who's going to help you be that is the person who's going to help you become more yourself.
It never seemed adversarial.
It never seemed ideological.
It seemed natural.
It seemed to come from a great American tradition.
And now that he's gone, because I'm a writer, I want to place him in a tradition.
I want to say, who is he?
Mark Twain?
Well, Mark Twain was a very pessimistic, bitter person who believed that the human race had just as about effed everything up that it could and may have been better off never having been born.
Scott was like Twain in that he could surprise you and he could turn a phrase, but he was a lot more positive.
Was he Will Rogers?
You know, never met a man he didn't like.
Well, I kind of get the feeling that he didn't.
You know, he maybe disliked them on second meeting, but I on first meeting, he probably liked them quite a bit.
What he really never met that he didn't like was a problem or a difficulty that he couldn't see as an opportunity.
And the people who used to say things to that, like that to me when I was young used to irritate me.
You know, oh, every, you know, every difficulty is a challenge.
Every, you know, every failure is a new chance to win in a new way or something.
I found those people endlessly annoying.
Why didn't he annoy me when he said those things?
What was it about Scott?
Because I could see he was living them and I could see it was working.
It wasn't like my school counselors who I knew had problems.
I mean, I knew, and as he and his life, as his life went on and as I followed him more intensely on the rowing machine, because he made me want to do things like row, I found myself getting stronger and stronger in these years after my dad died.
And then about last spring, I saw that he was perhaps dying.
And on the, I think it was the 26th and 20th, 22nd of May, I made a tweet.
I said, I'm a little uncomfortable with people who are acting like Scott Adams says is gone already.
While we're here, we're here, and he's here.
None of us know what tomorrow will bring for ourselves or for anyone else.
Life is now.
That was last May.
And there was a feeling right then that those were his last days.
He got back to me on June 30th, Schrödinger's cartoonist.
By that, he meant something that I think we should keep in mind today.
In the Schrödinger's cat experiment, it is possible that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time, depending on the observer.
There may be a sense in which he's not dead.
There may be a sense in which, depending on the observer and our point of view, Scott is in one universe, just as alive as he ever was, and that we can maybe switch perspectives sometimes to make sure that we understand that.
He was a complex thinker.
He was the guy who, when I felt stupid and wanted to rip off an idea, I went and listened to him.
And then I waited a few days for everybody else to forget it.
And then I rephrased it.
You know, he gave it all away.
He gave everything away.
And I remember watching his show for clues to who he was.
I said, okay, why doesn't he make a real studio?
Because he doesn't have to.
That's not his mission to make things fancy.
Okay, why does he wear glasses like that?
He could get contacts because it's easier.
Why does he use his kitchen?
His kitchen is nice, but it's not the nicest kitchen I've ever seen.
I'm aware for some reason that he has means, but he hasn't made his kitchen that fancy.
Those are 80s cabinets.
And I just thought, this guy is, he is, he's Will Rogers.
He's Dale Carnegie.
He's Norman Vincent Peale.
He's Art Link Letter.
He's all those people who all are versions of the same person in America who isn't pretentious, who isn't showing us what they have that we don't have, who's absolutely speaking straight across the table.
But the last person he reminded me of is someone you guys might not know.
A few might know him well.
His name was Bill Wilson.
He started Alcoholics Anonymous.
And he was a guy who sort of met everybody where they were, welcomed them in.
And the only at an AA meeting, they say the only reason you can be here or the only thing that allows you to be here is a desire to stop drinking.
Never Felt Late 00:03:06
Going to a Scott Adams podcast, you never felt late.
You never felt like you'd missed, you know, come in too late, like you missed the first part of the semester.
You always felt welcome.
You always felt like the only qualification to be there was a desire to lose your self-pity and a desire to think.
And till the very last moment, that's what he allowed for me.
The people who knew him, I feel a little sorry for because they got to know the real Scott Adams.
And I got to know that Scott Adams.
And he was perfect.
And he, I never saw him, you know, in a weak moment.
I never saw anything but his 80s kitchen, his smile, his glasses, his positive attitude.
He will forever be a saint for me, as he will be for all his listeners.
I think.
I do think, in a sense, in a just slightly tilted universe, he's still with us.
Thanks.
Thanks, Walter.
And now the closing remarks from Shelly Adams.
Thank you so much.
And on live stream, celebrate Scott.
It's everything he would have wanted and more.
I mean, I want to give a special thank you to Greg for hosting this ceremony today and everybody who shared stories and memories today.
Hearing them reminded me just how loved Scott was and how many lives he has touched.
I also wanted to thank my husband, Pat, my daughter Savannah, my sister Shauna, and my cousin Bree, and all the family and friends who've helped me get here today and have supported me through everything.
I couldn't have done it without you.
A heartful thank you as well to Jay Plemmings for putting together the beautiful slideshow.
It captured Scott's spirit so well.
And to the locals team, Owen, Erica, Marcella, and Sergio, thank you for being patient with me and for stepping in to keep Scott's live stream going.
We will figure it out the plan for long term, but it means so much to me to know that his work is still being cared for.
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