“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams revealed Monday morning that he has prostate cancer that has spread to the bone and doesn’t expect to live past the summer.
Looking gaunt and speaking haltingly, Adams said that with President Joe Biden having disclosed a similar diagnosis, he thought the time was appropriate to share with his followers.
“My life expectancy is maybe this summer. I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer,” Adams said, adding that he lives in California, where assisted dying is legal for terminal patients who find the suffering intolerable.
“The disease is already intolerable. I can tell you that I don’t have good days. So if you’re wondering, ‘Hey, Scott, do you have any good days?’ Nope. Nope. Every day is a nightmare, and evening is even worse,” he said.
Adams said that he is never without pain and has been using a walker to get around for months. He added that “it’s kind of civilized” to be able to put your affairs in order.
“If you had to pick a way to die, this one’s really painful. Like, really, really painful, but it’s also kind of good that it gives you enough time while your brain is still working to wrap things up,” he said.
Adams had told his followers previously that he was having mobility problems because of pain from arthritis and trouble with discs in his back. He said he didn’t add that there was also a tumor in his back, because “everyone would start treating me as the cancer guy.”
“Once you go public, you’re the dying cancer guy, and I didn’t want you to have to think about it, and I didn’t want to have to think about it,” he said, adding, “I wanted as many normal months as I could get.”
Adams also said he expected there would be a lot of ugly comments made about him online and he wanted to reduce the number of weeks he had to deal with it.
“All my enemies — people who are Democrats mostly — are going to come after me pretty hard. So I have to put up with that," he said.
He said he would keep on doing the podcast as long as he can tolerate it.
The Deseret News was among publications that dropped Adams’ popular comic strip in 2023 after the cartoonist came under fire for saying that Black people are a “hate group.” His syndicator also stopped distributing the cartoon.
The comment came while Adams was talking about a survey that asked whether people agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white,” and Adams was responding to respondents who either disagreed or said they weren’t sure. Twenty-six percent of Black respondents in the poll had said they disagreed with the statement.
Adams said the remark was hyperbole intended to make a point and accused the media of taking it out of context. He never regained the reach he had prior to the incendiary remarks, and his loyal fans considered him a victim of cancel culture. But because his fan base was so large, he was able to still command a large audience on social media, through his podcast and by self-publishing books.
Despite Adams’ expectation of internet hate upon revealing the diagnosis, most of the early responses to his announcement were sorrow and gratitude.
Jennica Pounds, the Utah data analyst who goes by “Data Republican” on X, wrote that she was “gutted” by the news and shared a story with Adams about a vision that she had related to her Christian faith and professional journey.
She said that she was grateful for Adams’ work, which had helped provide clarity about her own path, and concluded “I’m praying that soon, you’ll believe in Jesus too. So that after all this, when the storms have passed, when this earthly life gives away to the eternal kingdom, we can meet again: healed, whole, and without barriers.”
Adams, who is skeptical of religion but has said that he is not an atheist because “they operate from certainty,” replied with a heart emoji.