How Scott Adams built his empire of influence

One day in the late winter of 2018, Scott Adams broadcast a video of himself as he wept tears of joy.In his hand was a smartphone playing another video.On the screen, a senior official from South Korea was announcing the first-ever talks between a sitting president of the United States and the leader of North Korea.The talks would not bring peace, nor would they lead to the removal of nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula.

But they would end a period of tension that had lasted for years and threatened to erupt into war.The reason Scott wept was not just because he was happy to learn that there was hope for diplomacy.The reason he wept was because he had helped bring it about.He was a man who drew a comic strip for a living.

He also wrote books and hosted a daily livestream during which he drank coffee with thousands of fans.Through the strength of his ideas, he became, for a moment in history, one of the most powerful voices in American politics.He had planted the idea that the crisis with North Korea — in which each side had traded threats of war — could be resolved without violence.

That it was a conflict of psychology, not militaries.So it was.And North Korea — however briefly — came out of the shadows.That was why President Trump called Scott the “Great Influencer.” He knew firsthand how powerful Scott really was — he followed Scott’s ideas from the Oval Office.In fact, the idea of a “Great Influencer” is very close to the “Prime Influencer,” a character that Scott had invented in a futuristic novel he wrote decades before.The Prime Influencer, in Scott’s story, was an ordinary person who could change the world through the simple act of sharing seemingly ordinary ideas that ripple outward to move civilizations.

Scott’s fictional Prime Influencer could even stop wars and bring about peace.But Scott hinted that the Prime Influencer might really exist and that we could find him, or her, if we looked hard enough.Perhaps artificia...