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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.
Appearances
So May, Scott's art director, was able to pull up the comic strips because she has this incredible database of Dilbert strips. And lo and behold, there she was. But the exact strips, you'll have to read the book to figure out how Scott characterized Joan Mahoney. But I think he always had a deep affection for her. And I think what was so important about this relationship, other than the moment it happened, this transitional time, was that
She loved Scott. I mean, the letters she sent him are really heartfelt letters. And
think i think that because this person loved scott so much it was very important for me to find her so i did yeah incredible i couldn't believe it was i said i said to the team here i said this kind of thing happens once every five years to me like i i'll find something like this it takes this long and i'll find i mean i found my great grandfather's grave in the middle of a field in lithuania it's kind of on that level like it took that much
She told me she didn't remember that. She didn't say it didn't happen. She just said- So weird. She said that she had no recollection of that. And then I told her that Scott wrote about it. He wrote about it in, I think it's The Way of the Weasel. It's one of the early humor books.
And he writes about how he had to take the BART subway, which he had never taken before. And he emerged in San Francisco surrounded by homeless people. Nothing much has changed in San Francisco in 40 years. He emerged surrounded by homeless people. And then...
know he wrote about how how irritating that was and then and then joan said to me oh well i can imagine he must have been pretty angry so she didn't she didn't admit that she didn't pick him up but she she kind of said well it might have happened that i didn't pick him up oh my god and he still liked her good for him he's just such a forgiving man we love that hold off until you see how he drew her in the comic you have to
Oh, okay. I love that. So, Joel, anything else you want to tell us about? Because I know you're swamped. I don't want to keep you because the book is so important. And I know your time is ticking. We're literally moving things to the scene. Yeah. So this one is done? Okay. So there are some early drawings that Scott published
in his 20th anniversary edition of Dilbert, which is a really great coffee table book. If you don't have one, you can probably get it still. If not on eBay, then, you know, if not on Amazon, then on eBay. But he also has so many incredible early drawings. So you'll see some early drawings you haven't ever seen before. You'll see some photographs you've never seen before. Just incredible stuff. I mean...
It's yeah, it's really been incredible, too. And the other thing is, you know, when someone writes as much about his life as Scott did in so many books. I've had this experience in the previous biography I wrote. I wrote about my mother in law. My mother in law told me a crazy story about how somebody I'm summarizing and simplifying, but basically about how somebody tried to kill her.
and um i didn't i mean i believed her but it sounded almost impossible right it sounded impossible how could this possibly have happened it was maybe embellished a little bit i thought you know and then i
went into her letters, which she gave me to write her biography. And I found a letter from the 1980s, right after this incident had happened, where she wrote to her parents. There was no email, obviously, in those days. She wrote a letter and her account of what happened was exactly what she had told me 30 years later.
And so it was like it was a contemporaneous recollection of an event that had happened the day before or whatever. So I was just blown away like, oh, this, you know, this happened. And then I actually asked other people. I did a little bit of sleuth detective work or whatever. And yes, it happened exactly as she told me. I've had that experience over and over with Scott's.
um, documents, you know, he, he, he told a story in public and then it's, it's confirmed in private. For example, he told a story in how to fail about how he nearly failed out of Hartwick college and that, um, you know, he was drinking too much. He wasn't going to class and then he got mono and he was bedridden and, um,
I have confirmed that, not only the mono part, because Scott's roommate told me that, yeah, he got mono from one of the many girls he was hanging around with. But the other thing that I found was his report cards. And sure enough, there are a couple of semesters that are really bad. AMANDA SCHADE- Like, they dip, and then you see. LARRY HYRBIT- Oh, yeah. It'll be really funny for you to find out which classes he wasn't doing well in.
I won't spoil that surprise, but that was also one of those things that like, you'll have to read the book to find that out. It's also very funny. Oh, we're all reading this book. Believe me. We can't wait. We cannot wait. But the stories he tells in public or that he told in public.
We, you know, this book isn't a tell-all. I mean, this is not like a deep dive into Scott's private life. But it does tell part of the story of how he became who he became. And that does, I think, require some inclusion of some things people didn't know about or maybe didn't talk about much before. You know, it's...
sometimes I would ask Scott about some details of past relationships and things like that. And it wasn't that he didn't want to talk about them. It's just that he, they weren't important enough to him in the present moment. He was focused on who he was with at the moment. So, you know, it was, it was, it was a challenge in that sense. So, you know, as, as a writer, you have to be very careful with that, but yeah.
I think what people will enjoy is learning about how passionate he was about life and how that passion was reciprocated in the people who loved him. And I think that's an important part of the story. I agree. All right. So Joel, should we let you go get to work?
Showing 1041–1060 of 2,500 · page 53 of 125
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