Scott Adams joins The Paul Leslie Hour!
Are you here? Let’s give a simultaneous “Yes!” Hello fans of the spoken word and welcome to The Paul Leslie Hour, episode #1,047 with Scott Adams.
Yes, you heard it right. Joining us is Scott Adams — author, cartoonist and host of the Multi-platform daily show Real Coffee with Scott Adams, famous for creating the iconic Dilbert comic strip.
Please follow Paul Leslie on X at ThePaulLeslie and be sure to say hey to Paul, yes, and simultaneously follow Scott Adams on X at ScottAdamSays
Everyday isn’t just about being a “T-Shirt Icon” for Scott Adams. Simultaneously, he’s got the 2025 Dilbert Calendar as seen on dilbert.com Let’s just say that if you think that the interview with Scott Adams is starting right now, you’d be absolutely correct. You are right about that.
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Introduction to Scott Adams
Scott Adams: Hello, Paul.
Hey, Scott Adams. How are you?
Scott Adams: I’m good. How are you?
I’m doing great. What a pleasure to talk to you.
The pleasure is mine.
I’m hiding in my garage because I’ve got a remodel going on inside the house. It’s pretty loud.
Okay. Well, it’s a nice change of scenery here for those of us who watch every single day, which I know that no doubt there are plenty of those. It’s my great pleasure to be talking with a man that I listen to every single AM, no matter what, as I like to say on Twitter. Scott Adams! Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me, and thanks for watching every day.
Surprises in life
Well, it’s a great pleasure. And it’s occurred to me a few times that Coffee with Scott Adams is a lot like coffee itself. You get to enjoy it every day. It adds immeasurably to your life.
True.
It can be a source of physical and mental stimulation.It awakens you in those ways.
And it’s just so good to talk to you. So I’m curious, you’ve had quite an experience doing a lot of different things. What has surprised you most about your life?
Oh, surprised me about my life. Yeah, I have to give a sort of the jerk answer to that because there’s no way to do it without, I can’t do it honestly without looking bad. So here’s the version which is true, but it doesn’t make me look humble enough. It makes me look crazy. I always thought things would work out just the way they did.
From the age of six, I remember reading a story. I think it was an old magazine called Life. It was a big, big deal at the time. And it had this big feature story about this cartoonist, Charles Schultz, who had this comic strip called Peanuts, and it was sweeping, you know, everybody off their feet, and it was changing the world. And I looked at it, and I thought, That looks like a way better job than what my father’s doing, working at the post office. Why don’t I do that? And so at the age of six, I decided to be a famous cartoonist. Now, so what surprised me was when it didn’t work out right away.
So the embarrassing part about the story is that I have, and I’ve always had, completely unrealistic expectations about my own path. But the number of times that I’ve somehow thwarted the odds, I mean, just obscenely thwarted the odds on a number of occasions, it just feels like we’re in some kind of a simulation. And I picked an adventure. It almost seems like, all right, here’s the deal. You’re going to pick the adventure where you’re born in a small town, but somehow you figure out to be a famous cartoonist and you move to California.
And then you guess who’s going to be the next President, and next thing you know, you’re a political pundit. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do when I was about six years old. I wanted to someday be a person that knew enough about the world that if I talked about it every day, people would say, “hey, why don’t we listen to that once in a while?” So almost nothing has surprised me. The surprising thing is that it’s not surprising.
Yeah, I don’t think that makes you seem crazy at all. There have been times where something has happened to me where I’ve thought, wow, that’s really exceptional. And people say, “wow, how about that?” And I’ve thought, no, I kind of thought that was going to happen.
But I’ve seen it happen. I tell this story a lot. I’ve seen it happen even when it wasn’t because of my hard work. For example, my little town in Windham every year, we’d have an Easter egg hunt. And there was one, the golden egg was the one that had the big dollar amount. I think it was like $25, which in those days was, you know, to a little kid would be maybe like a few hundred. And every year I’d go to it and I didn’t find it. And it was the last year. And I said, “damn it, I’m going to find the golden egg.” Now if you imagine this field just full of kids and, you know, it’s just a bunch of nature in the field, and we get to the end of it, and they do the whistle, and like, I didn’t find it. I’m like, god, and I was so sure. I was so sure I was going to find it. It was my last year. I’d be aging out of it after that, and I was like, ah, you know, why was I so sure that it didn’t happen? And then the announcer goes: “nobody found the golden egg.” We’re going to open it back up for, I don’t know, five minutes or something. And they narrowed down the area a little bit.
And all these little kids descend on it. I bend over and I pick up the golden egg. And I don’t think my life has ever been the same. Because my belief about what was possible based on the odds, just, it wasn’t making sense because I would look around and say, “all of these people had exactly the same skill for finding an egg on the ground.”
How, how did I win this? And then, you know, there were a number of, I won’t bore you with the whole story, but the number of times that ordinary things defied the odds in almost just extraordinary ways, it just doesn’t feel like any of this could be real. It just feels like I bought an adventure where I get to beat the odds every now and then.
Do you feel lucky?
You know, oddly, no. It feels more like fate. It almost feels like it was programmed or something. When I talk about luck, I wrote about this in my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Luck is something you can manage, but you can’t directly have more or less luck.
There’s no such thing as a lucky person. But you can certainly go where there’s a lot more action. If I had stayed in my little town, would I have done as well? I doubt it. So instead, I went to the most dynamic place in the world, the Bay Area of California. And if cartooning hadn’t worked out, I had probably 25 other things I could have done in that same area without having to commute too far.
Daily habits and routines
So much of your life seems to be about daily habits. You’ve got the Coffee with Scott Adams every single day. Now you have this page-a-day calendar. How can somebody out there greet each new day fully well?
Speaking of the page-a-day calendar, the Dilbert 2025 calendar is now available. The only place you can get it is at the link that’s at Dilbert.com. And if you get it now, you can get it for Christmas.
I’m a real big believer in routine and systems. So, routine would be one kind of a system. Systems is a bigger statement.
So, I like knowing that when I wake up, I know exactly what I’m going to do. And I would say that the first four hours of my day, maybe longer, maybe up until, oh, actually up until maybe 12:30, from 4:30 to 12:30, I pretty much know exactly what I’ll be doing. Now I’m doing the livestream in the morning, but you know, even though the content is different, I prepare the same way, and I’m looking at the same sources and having the same thought process. So it’s new and the same at the same time. But if you turn it on any given day, I’m going to be wearing a shirt that looks exactly like the one I have on now. And that’s because I don’t put any thought into the shirt because it just doesn’t pay off. There’s not an upside. So I simply remove decisions until I’m down to the minimum, keep them the same every day.
In 30 years or maybe my whole life, I don’t remember having a bad morning. Isn’t that weird? Like, I’ve never had a bad morning. The first four hours of my day are extraordinary every single time. It’s my favorite part of the day. So if you start the first four hours with something that you personally find extraordinary, it’s hard to ruin the day after that. You know, I used to do the cartoon the first thing in the morning. And if you complete something that’s going to be published in national publications by 9 a.m., and you know you’ve done a thing and it will get published, that’s a great feeling. Just launch the rest of the day. So if you’re not a cartoonist, I would do something like get my exercise done or study that class that you need to advance at your job, do something. I like to make sure that I’m improving my life in the first few hours of waking up because then it’s hard to take something away from me the rest of the day.
That’s so actionable and good advice. You know, on the note of the t-shirt thing, I have a number of friends who watch you every single day, and we call you “t-shirt icon Scott Adams.“
You know, I certainly didn’t invent the idea of dressing the same every day. Maybe Steve Jobs did. Maybe he borrowed it from somebody else. But you see Zuckerberg do it. You’ve seen a number of other people copy it. And there’s two parts to it. One is that I’ve just, by trial and error, figured out that this color works for me better than other colors. So what would be the point of having a different color every day if there’s just one that works better than all the others? So, yeah, I just simplify my life, and it works out.
Well, on that note, it’s a perfect time for a friend and viewer question. This one comes from Robert McCready. He is at Evening Magic on Twitter, or X, I should say. And let’s pull up Mr. McCready’s question here.
Robert McCready: “Hi. How do you feel about being a father figure to potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans?”
Yeah. I love it. When I wrote my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, it was explicitly everything that I thought was important that I put together for my young stepson at the time. Now, he passed away from a fentanyl overdose, tragically, a few years later. But the book went on to become almost a foundational book in the realm of self-improvement. And it’s very much written like a dad. Like, it’s not a dad tone, but it’s the things you would wish somebody had told you when you were 14, just make everything easier and better.
And then I kind of took that to the Internet and have somewhat casually made connections with, I don’t know, maybe 20 other people that I would call dads. You know, they’re not all male. You know, some are female, but let’s say parents.
And I think it started to form this insanely powerful force that’s almost separate from party. Because if you look at Elon Musk, he’s a Democrat, but he’s helping Trump at the moment. He’s not really about party. He’s full-on dad mode. And if you look at the other people who are in, let’s say, the Trump pirate ship, I like to call it, you know, the odd characters, many of them were Democrats, but they just want to get some work done. They all have that sort of parental dad energy, you know, again, try not to make it sexist so we can throw the moms in there too. But there’s an energy that just says, this is going too far. If the government’s not going to fix it, I guess I have to step in.
So it’s so much that’s kind of why i sexistly call it the dad energy because dad doesn’t care until he really cares that’s sort of like the dad stereotype is like that’s fine that’s fine now we’re done but when you’re done: you’re done. That that’s sort of the dad energy and i see that happening right now all over the country well.
The role of father figures
It kind of makes me think of the day after the election, to go further with this “dad thing,” you do have that energy. There’s no doubt about it. And it’s a special moment when you see a father figure and he’s brought to tears.
And I have to say, I went to bed the night before, and it almost seemed like it wasn’t real seeing the election results.
Yeah.
And then the next day I was watching you, as I do, and I felt this cathartic relief. And I can say I was crying with you. I’m hoping you can tell us about that moment.
What was the moment that I lost it? Was I saying something in particular?
Yes, indeed. You were reading the tweet from Scott Presler where he was saying, “Mr. President.“
Right. So part of that was reacting to the good writing. So I was reacting professionally. Professionally, just if somebody can say the best thing in the fewest words, it just blows me away. So part of it was that. But I could just feel the country had dragged Trump across the finish line.
And that feeling, see, I’m even feeling a little bit now, that feeling is extraordinary. Because there was a connection across millions of people that I don’t know if everybody felt it, but if you were anywhere in the pro-Trump world, you did feel connected to all the other people. And we could feel that we were guiding him, keeping him alive, keeping his energy up, and effectively very much partnering in the campaign.
Now I’ve never felt that before. You know, I mean I was, I tried to be active in his first race and the second, but I didn’t feel like everybody was in on it like it felt like there were just a few of us, you know, weirdos who like politics who are loud, but this time was different. The because of this, the dad energy, it was basically, it was just pure dad energy entered, and it was unbeatable, it turned out. It was this gigantic force that just sits there waiting until you need it. But when you need it, there it is.
So I think it was the larger force that got me. It wasn’t Trump winning. It was the larger force of it.
The power of being useful
Absolutely. Yeah.
Well, so much of your advice is practical. There have been times where I wasn’t sure what to do, and then I’ve been reminded of something that I’ve heard, and I’ve just sat there and I’ve thought, maybe there’s a different way to think about this or to approach it.
You made a comment today about, you know, how at the very least be useful, and that’s good advice at any time, but it’s also especially when all else fails. I’m hoping you can talk about how you came to that realization.
Well, first of all, I did some Googling the other day because I wondered if I was one of the first people to use that phrase as a sort of a motivating phrase. And as soon as I’m not, I don’t know if I’d ever heard it from somebody, but somebody famous whose name escapes me had said it once before. Elon Musk says it fairly often. And I think some other people have said it recently. And here’s what works about it. It works every time. And it does, and it’s not hard to figure out how to be it. You know how to be useful, and where I first discovered it was getting myself out of a bad mood or a funk. If you’re in, if you’re having a bad day that’s just unfixable, there’s nothing you can do about your own situation at least today. You know, tomorrow maybe it’s a new day, but right now you’re just, you’re just in a funk, I’ll just sit there and say, all right, who can I delight?
Like who doesn’t have any idea that I’m going to go fix some problem for him? But it has to be useful. It’s not just, you know, hey, how you doing? It has to be some problem I know I can fix. Now, I have resources, so sometimes it’s easier if you have resources. But, it works every time. If you make somebody’s day and you’re useful and they just simply appreciate you, you’re good all day. It’ll turn any day around. And that’s being selfish. That’s just fixing your own mood being useful. Now, you take that to work and you say, what’s my job description? Well, that’s not going to get you very far. But if you say, what’s the most useful thing I can do for my boss, my coworkers, my customers? Well, then you’re going to be the star employee. People are going to look at you and say, oh, this one knows what to do, how to jump right in, how to fix something. And so Be Useful just works in every realm, top to bottom. People will respect you. They’ll promote you. They’ll want to mate with you. It’ll help your own mind. There’s nothing it doesn’t do. It’s almost like magic.
Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. And also, if more people would embrace that idea, think about the cultural or the societal impact.
Yes. I mean, it’s such a simple reframe, and it’s available to everybody. The other one that’s sort of in that sort of a cousin domain to that is the idea of building a talent stack that I write about, which is if you have a certain set of skills, you should ask yourself, what would be best to add to that to make me more special and more unique so I can get more money and be more useful? So the more talent you have in your talent stack, especially if it’s well-designed and stuff that works well together, the more useful you can become. So even if you say to yourself, I can’t think of a single way to be useful, go build your talent stack and fix that. There’s something you can add to your current talents that will make you useful the next time you have that question. So build your talent stack.
Misconceptions about public perception
Do you think there is a biggest misconception about you?
Huh? Well, you know, as a public figure, you soon, or very quickly, you discover that Gelman amnesia effect. I talk about it a lot, where if you read a story in the press about yourself, you know all the errors. And you think, my God, they think a lot wrong there. You know, even basic stuff sometimes, like, you know, what my jobs used to be, where I used to work. You know, really basic stuff. And so you get used to the fact that nobody knows who you are. So you know, I think I started out thinking that I am this certain kind of person, and I would like everybody to know who that certain person is, and then eventually you realize that’s not how anything works. Everybody’s going to have their own idea. So my best play, for happiness and to be useful, is to make sure everybody can get something out of me that they like without being too bothered by the other stuff. So if you like a good joke but you don’t like politics, well, I got a comic for you. If you like politics but you’re not much into comics, listen to my livestream, you’ll love it. So you know, I try to be as much as possible without being ridiculous about it. I try to be enough for different people that everybody can find something useful about me. You know, how I would be with my friends, my family would be different than I’d be with the public, for example.
Finding job satisfaction
What advice would you give to somebody who is trying to find that place where they enjoy their work and maybe they’re not exactly satisfied right now, but they’re trying to get to that place?
Well, I would say that the way of life is that most people don’t like their first job or their second job or third or fourth job. It’s the way of life that you know when you’re young and you’re just getting started, you would be fantastically lucky to find a job that you wanted to do all your life, and it was just like a killer job. So the way you hack the system is you just keep building skills until you get to pick your job. So you know, this is sort of advice I’ve given a million times. I don’t know if it’s still valid actually because everything’s changing so fast with AI and remote work and stuff.
But I used to tell people that you could somewhat ignore what your boss said was your job, if you had a better take. So if your boss hires you to do x and you walk in and say I got x under control, but you know what, you really need somebody to work on y. But y is the thing that gets you promoted, gets you attention. Y is the thing you enjoy, it excites you. So don’t assume that your job description is what your job is. That’s just the first draft. And, you know, of course, there’ll be some things on there you have to do, but you should think of your job as your next job. You know, you’re dressing for your promotion, you’re preparing for your next job, you’re learning skills for the next job, et cetera. So you can always make a bad situation tolerable if you’re really aware it’s working towards something. So for example, in college, you know, you might have not the best living situation and a lot of work, but you know that’s going to be useful if you can finish it very good.
On the note of advice, if you could go back to the year 1975, when you were turning 18, you could put your hands on your shoulder and say, this is what you need to know. What would you say?
That’s exactly what my book was, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It was that voice with the hands on my shoulder at even a few years younger than that. The lucky thing is that I even have a written diary from the time where I wrote my actual strategy for life, and one of the things I said was two ways to make it big. You either had to sell expensive things for a commission, or you had to make small things that you could make an infinite amount of them, even though you did the work once, you know, easy to reproduce. And so my strategy was to keep trying things that if it worked, it could go big. And if it didn’t work, it just made me tired and maybe a little frustrated, but it didn’t kill me. So I tried writing software. I tried other writing things. I tried a number of things. I tried to get in a patent.
Things that would be, if you could just make this one thing work, there’s no limit to how big it could be. So that was a strategy. So somehow I came with that automatic, I guess I was just born with it or something, but I would give anybody that age the idea that you need to figure out what makes a person rich. If that’s what you want, you don’t all want that. And then you’ve got to make sure you’re doing something like that. If you’re selling your time, you’re probably never going to get there. So I always saw my day job as my education.
So when I took a job at a bank, I did not say, I will be a banker forever. I said, if I could learn what bankers know, oh my God, you could take that everywhere. And it’s so useful just knowing how the whole credit and banking world works. Then I went to the phone company, and the phone company would reimburse you for any class. It didn’t have to be a degree. I mean, they were really, really, you know, they’ve tightened up since then, but so you could take non-degree classes, and I would take all kinds of things like communication, negotiating, strategy. And by the time you’ve accumulated a hundred different skills, which you could literally do, you could put together a hundred skills over just say seven years or something. You could take it almost anywhere. You can walk into any job interview and be pretty sure you’re at the top three.
Predictions for 2025
Well, we’ve got just a few days left until we roll into another year. So as far as the century goes, we’ll be going into the second quarter. We were talking about calendars before. Any predictions for 2025?
Wow. Well, given that Trump is the president, we should expect lots of energy, meaning against him as well as what he’s doing. He seems to be just doing so many things that it’s hard for his critics to even get a grip on it because there’s a new thing every 10 minutes. So he might continue that because it’s a winning strategy. If he can piece together a few wins, every win after that looks easier. Because what Trump has done is something that I’ve never seen done, you know, but I haven’t seen every president. In my opinion, he’s gone from a, you know, a politician to a legend by winning the second election. And the way I explain it is if you’re negotiating, let’s say to end a war or do a trade deal or something, and you’re the head of your country and the head of the other country comes in, you kind of pierce, and you’re thinking, I’ll get the best job for, you know, the best deal for my country. And sometimes you can’t even make a deal because you’re just, it’s just too hard. But if the person on the other side of the table is a legend.
You almost can’t let yourself leave without a deal. Like, it changes everything because you’re not losing to a legend. You’re having an experience with a legend. That’s completely different. It’s almost not even a competition. It’s almost like you’re working together because the legend is not against you. It’s a legend. So I’m not sure if I can completely explain that, but I’ll tell you this. If Trump ends one war, whichever one it is, it could be Middle East, could be, you know, Ukraine, they both sound like it’d be almost impossible, but I think you’ll get at least one, at least Ukraine. And after he said he would do it in a day, now let’s not take him too literally about a day, but if he gets it done in a month.
He’s a legend, he’s a legend legend, like whatever, whatever’s a legend squared. And at that point, even the Middle East is going to say, all right, what do you got for us? Right? If you could do that, what else can you do? And it’s just going to be a whole different dynamic than just fighting them all the time. It’ll be more like, can you solve this too? So I think in 2025, you might see the weirdest thing, which is some of his biggest critics saying, okay, okay, I kind of hate you, but can you give me a hand on this? And then he’ll say yes. And it’ll be the most amazing thing that ever happened in America because he will treat people like individuals and like Americans, and that’s what we need. By the way, the biggest change I’m seeing, even coming from Democrats who are trying to figure out why they didn’t do well, is their understanding that the identity politics is just a road to destruction. And that if we focus on every individual as an individual, you can get really good results.
So if you just say, what does this person need? And then you’re not so worried about whether they’re LGBTQ or religion or race or whatever. You say, what does this person need? And then there might be another person who could be any other identity who just needs the same stuff. They might need a mentor. They might need somebody watching the kids. They might need something. But if we treat the individuals as individuals, there’s almost unlimited upside for what the country can do.
So going back to the calendar, I understand that there’s one side of the page that’s for maybe the people who donate to NPR or something, they wouldn’t be offended. And then on the other page, for the cool people in the office, you can show them the other page.
Let me show you. I just got my own version in the mail. So this is the first time it’s made in America because it’s the first time I’m in total control of it. So I just said whatever it takes, it’s going to be made in America. So always there had been a calendar on each page, but what we did is also put a comic on the back. The ones in the front are from the classic Dilbert library that had been published before. That’s the way the calendars always have been. But the other ones are the ones that only the paid subscribers have seen, and they’re naughtier. I like to say spicier. They’re spicier than what you could see in the newspaper or the old Dilbert, but they’re no more than PG-13 at most. So I say leave the nice ones face up, and then privately when you’re all alone, you can look at the other one.
The best part of being yourself
So what is the best thing about being you?
Yeah. I don’t know if anybody’s ever asked me that question. The best thing about being me, the honest answer is I don’t know, because maybe if I were somebody else, I’d say, wow, that’s pretty good. I just didn’t realize how good it was to be you. So I’m going to answer it in terms of what makes me different. Maybe that’s the best answer.
I’m pretty sure that whatever’s happening in my head on a regular basis is quite different from whatever’s happening in other people’s heads. Now, Elon Musk has said that almost as a negative, like he can’t turn his head off. It’s a torture as much as a gift. I feel that too. But I also know that if I go into any situation in which creativity is a valuable asset, that I will be one of the more useful people in the room. So when it comes to being useful, creativity is one of those things that kind of works everywhere. And if you get a reputation for being a creative person, then people will listen. So I could go at this point, I could go into, you know, a room full of people on a topic I don’t know anything about, and as long as they know that I’m the creative person, if I talk, they’ll listen. I mean, it might not be the best idea, but it sure is nice to be me and know that if I have a creative idea, I can guarantee that people will listen to it because I have a track record. So that’s, that is very nice. I love that.
Well, in our last couple minutes here, I always like to end the show. I just give the guests the stage. So it’s an ocean of a question in that you can go anywhere. We just never know who’s watching. We never know who’s listening, which that’s every morning for you. But what would you say to anybody out there who’s joining us?
Final thoughts and advice
Wow. So the most useful advice to the general person. Well, you know, not to be a broken record, I always tell people to use systems as opposed to goals and to use talent stacks.
And I tell them to, you know, that pursuing passion might be a wrong turn. Rather, just be really good at something that pays well, and you can have a lot of options. I tell people to know that luck isn’t real, but you can go where there’s more of it. So go where there’s more energy, more people, more jobs, more everything. So those are the big ones, and then, of course, as we said, be useful.
So those are the things I would tell everybody, and I would tell them if they want to be happy in the morning to go to Dilbert.com and see the only place they can find the link to the Dilbert calendar. And beyond that, those are the things that I usually rely on. The things I mentioned, if you get that stuff right, you’re going to be in good shape. And I hear back from a lot of people who are doing just those things, and they’ve quit drinking, they’ve lost 80 pounds, they’ve got promotions, just incredible results. So I’d say if you do the right things, you get the right answers. And it’s hard for me to think of anybody in life who made all the right choices, unless they had like some cataclysmic health problem, they’re doing fine. They’re doing fine. There’s not a lot of homeless people who made all the right decisions and don’t have a mental problem or an addiction. We do live in a world where just doing the things that we should all know we need to do, such as building skills, et cetera, is enough. Even in our coming robot world, I think it’ll be enough.
So everybody out there, it’s Dilbert.com. I’m going to get two calendars because it kind of helps with the shipping and handling costs. And also follow you on X. Scott Adams Says is the Twitter handle. X handle, sorry. And check out the show. It’ll really add tremendous value to your life as it has mine. And thank you so much. I usually don’t have coffee this late in the day, but today I made an exception.
Well, I’m having water, but as far as you know, it’s coffee.
That’s coffee.
Simultaneous sip. Oh, that’s good coffee. It’s pretend coffee, but it’s good.
All right. Well, if I can ever be useful at any time, please don’t hesitate and have a wonderful rest of the day.
Thanks. And by the way, you ask great questions. You’re very good at this. So if you’re wondering, am I good at this? The answer is yes. I do this all the time, and you’re very good at this. So take that with you. And thanks for having me.
Thank you.
All right.
Until next time.
All right. So I will say bye for now.
