Scott Adams, a cartoonist, author, an independent-minded pundit and podcaster, has died at the age of 68 after a rather public battle against prostate cancer. The host of Real Coffee with Scott Adams, the creator of the legendary comic strip Dilbert, and the author of numerous books, had continued with his livestreaming routine, seven days a week throughout his treatments for the disease up until yesterday. In the process, he treated his audience like close family during his cancer journey.
Adams first entered the American consciousness through the clever and relatable satire of Dilbert, which vividly captured the frustrations, absurdities, and the humor of modern office life. His success with Dilbert enabled him to branch out into self-help books on persuasion, and eventually to carve out a very influential niche as an intelligent observer of American politics, culture and media.
Adams was born in 1957 in rural Windham, New York. While he often recounted that he showed early aptitude for drawing, he initially pursued a more conventional path, earning an MBA and working in banking and telecommunications firms. Years in a corporate setting informed his later work on Dilbert, which debuted in 1989. The strip’s central insight, that organizations often reward the wrong behaviors and promote the least capable people, felt both funny and true.
For generations of white-collar workers, Dilbert was not merely a comic strip; it was a form of recognition of the often unspoken reality of cubicles, corporate-speak, pointless meetings, and managers who were never in on the joke.
Dilbert’s success was swift and enormous, running in thousands of newspapers worldwide, and it was translated into dozens of languages.
After that, Adams became a bestselling author, publishing books such as The Dilbert Principle, which argued that companies systematically promote incompetent employees into management in order to minimize the damage they can do. This opened the door to Adams as a public speaker on topics related to culture, work, power, psychology, and persuasion. He often credited his training as a hypnotist for his deep understanding of persuasion.
In the 2000s and 2010s, he began to comment on politics as well, because of the critical importance of persuasion to all of politics. He developed and promoted what he called a “persuasion filter,” arguing that public debates were less about facts, and more about narratives, framing, and emotional resonance.
In more recent years, he became a prolific presence through his books, on social media, through his livestreamed podcasts seven days a week, offering real-time commentary on news and media narratives.
In 2023, newspapers across the United States and abroad dropped Dilbert from syndication, ending a run that had lasted more than three decades, after comments Adams made on his podcast were taken out of context to allege that he was racist. He would later describe this encounter with cancel culture as one of the more liberating moments of his life.
While he lost access to longtime readers of his comic strip in newspapers, he gained a huge following among conservatives, who saw the mercilessness of cancel culture at play with him. Still, he continued to publish Dilbert online.
As a podcaster, he started every livestream with his patented “Simultaneous sip,” where he would invite everyone watching and listening to join him in “sipping your favorite beverage. I like coffee.” From there he would do a one-man monologue, usually for an hour, on the topics of the day, scientific and technology news, and anything else that interested him. He rarely interviewed guests, and did not play audio or video from other media. He typically would just describe it in low-tech fashion.
But because it was a livestream, he would continually interact directly with his audience in real time, monitoring and reading listener comments. So even though his was the only voice you heard, it felt as if he was having a conversation with his audience.
While Adams resisted calling himself a conservative, his point of view most often reflected the Donald Trump base, though at times, he would challenge that base on some issues.
In late 2025, Adams disclosed that he had earlier been diagnosed with advanced metastatic prostate cancer, and while he continued to undergo a multitude of aggressive treatments under his doctors’ supervision, he continued to appear on his podcast seven days a week, for the most part, right up until yesterday.
In his final days, Adams announced that while he had not considered himself a believer in God in the traditional sense, he would convert to Christianity.
Survivors include ex-wives Shelly Miles and Kristina Basham, and a stepdaughter. A stepson preceded Adams in death, a victim of the fentanyl plague. This was an issue on which Adams was very outspoken.
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