Joel Pollak
speaker
2,500 appearances
9 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Joel Pollak’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.
Appearances
So for example, I'll save it for the book, but right now, what I'm giving me to scan in, and we've gone over and selected all these things, there's an early version of dog births before Dilbert existed. Oh. Like the first Bugs Bunny? Yeah, there's an early version. Scott used to do Christmas presentations for his company and he would draw caricatures. And there's an early version of a dog
helps santa and it's basically dog birth but it's not his name isn't dog birth in this cartoon his name is dildog oh g it's like a kind of early dilbert d-i-l eric you can see why you had to rename it yeah right away oh
But it was close to the Dilbert part mixed with Dogbert. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, that one may have been a little bit later by the time, because he had already developed Dilbert by then. I'm seeing Dilbert in little illustrations here, but he did a lot of early caricatures of things at work. And yeah, it's part of what we're going to see. Excellent. Okay. And so, all right, what else do we need to know, Joel? I mean...
Hamster? Was it your hamster or a guinea pig, Joel? Yeah, hamster. It was my hamster. That was an important hamster. Yes. That hamster belonged to my kids when we were in our house in Pacific Palisades. And then there was the fire and we evacuated with the hamster. And the hamster went everywhere. We were in five or six different homes with that hamster. And the hamster passed away a few months ago. But in a way, it was our...
kids comfort as they, it was the one thing that stayed the same as they moved from house to house after the fire. So it was important.
Um, I was posting on X for several weeks that I was looking for a woman named Joan Mahoney and.
Joan Mahoney, as some people guessed, might've known Scott because the clues I had and which I shared publicly was that she had gone to Hartwick College and she lived in San Francisco. And Scott actually wrote about her in several books that she was the girlfriend that he went to San Francisco, not to be with, but I guess she's the reason he ended up in San Francisco. She invited him to come to San Francisco.
When he moved to California, he stayed with his brother Dave in Southern California. Dave is still in Southern California. And then she went up to San Francisco. I'm sorry, Scott went to San Francisco because the girlfriend was there. He never said what her name was. And he wrote about her in different ways. There's one book where he writes that she was supposed to pick him up at the airport and she decided she didn't want to. And anyway, they obviously didn't end up
together in the long run. But I thought this is really someone very important to interview because she knew Scott during this incredible transition when he left upstate New York and came to California and started working at Crocker Bank and started this new life that led him to become what he eventually became. And I could not find her. I couldn't find her. Her name is Joan Mahoney and
There was nothing about her anywhere. I even went to Hartwick College, not just to look for her, but to look for more information about Scott and to check out the college. And I asked the administration at Hartwick if they had any information about her and all they could tell me was that she hadn't graduated. So they didn't have any address on file, no way of contacting her.
The internet did not yield anything. Try looking up Joan Mahoney in a nation of 350 million people with, you know, a large Irish American population. I mean, you just, you can't, you know, thousands, thousands of Joan Mahoney's in America.
And what was incredible was I had a couple of other clues in the form of letters that she sent to Scott that he kept. He kept these letters his entire life. And I had addresses on them, so they helped a little bit, but I looked up any information about her from the addresses, couldn't find anything.
Finally, there was one address that was sent from her parents' house, one letter from her parents' house. And so I looked that up and I discovered her yearbook on ancestry.com. I actually got a membership in ancestry.com to find Joni Mahoney. Joni Mahoney was also known as Joni Mahoney. I interviewed some of Scott's other classmates or friends from school and they knew who she was, but they couldn't, they hadn't stayed in touch with her. Just excuse me one second before I finish this story. Go ahead. Can you do that one?
But anyway, it had a picture of her. And that's the one photograph I had of her from the Hartwick yearbook when she was, I guess, a freshman or a sophomore. And then it also seems to be the same woman who was in a couple of photographs that Scott had kept. So I thought, okay, this is probably the same person. And the key there was her middle name. So I had her middle name now. Now I could narrow down those thousand Joan Mahoney's to very few Joan Mahoney's.
And I called people and I called the woman in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was not her. She had never been to college. I started to wonder if she was alive because there was no information. Someone told me that they think that I should check the obituaries, not just the other records. Anyway, I called the number all day yesterday that I found
Called a bunch of different numbers, left some messages, got no response. And finally, I decided to try one more time in the evening. And I called this woman up and I said, hi, I'm writing a biography of Scott Adams. I'm a friend of his. And I'm just wondering if you might be the Joni Mahoney or the Joan Mahoney that he knew in college. And she said, yes, it was me.
And we had this conversation. Everyone here sitting at the table heard me interview her. And if you knew how hard I'd been looking for Joan Mahoney, I asked so many people. I searched every database I could. I was kicking myself for not asking Scott while he was still alive if he had contact with her.
Nobody seemed to know anything about her. She seemed to fly below the radar, the internet radar, just kind of lived off the grid and below the radar. And eventually I found her. So, so it's absolutely, it was, it was absolutely incredible. So I have to rewrite a section of the, of the book in which I explained why I hadn't found her. Now I'm going to talk about finding her and also what she told me. So that was, and, and, um,
Someone took a picture of me while I was talking to her for the first time and my mouth was hanging open like I'm actually talking to Joanie. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We're going to send it to you so you can see the picture. Yeah. So you mean she knew he had died? Yes. And she told me she had tried to get in touch with him before he died with the email. She had she had the wrong email address for him or it bounced or whatever. So she was not able to talk to him.
but there's a really amusing end to the story that I'll save for the book. Yes, yes. But let me put it this way. You can tell us now. I'll give you a clue. Scott, she told me, I didn't know this before, she told me that Scott had drawn her into a couple of comic strips.
Showing 1021–1040 of 2,500 · page 52 of 125
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