https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilberito
(Image removed from quote.)
The product failed to catch on in the market, leading Adams "several years and several million dollars later" to sell off his intellectual property and exit the business. Adams himself noted "[t]he mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail."[4] The New York Times noted the burrito "could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste."
I don't know if it's in the Wiki but Adams basically thought the Dilberito would become the
blue jeans of food and that was in 1999.
https://www.bizjournals.com/eastbay/stories/1999/03/22/story8.html"I was horrified to find that most things have almost no nutrition," said Adams, a practicing vegetarian for the last eight years.
"I know that diet is the number one cause of health-related problems in the world," Adams said. "I figured I could put a dent in that problem and make some money at the same time."
The market research behind the concept was simple: "There's six billion people in the world, and they all eat," said Adams.
Adams is also big on "affirmations" which is basically "positive thinking magic"
http://mindhacks.org/scott-adams-affirmations/135The idea behind affirmations is that you simply write down your goals 15 times a day and somehow, as if by magic, coincidences start to build until you achieve your objective against all odds.
Prior to my Dilbert success, I used affirmations on a string of hugely unlikely goals that all materialized in ways that seemed miraculous. (...)
But some of my goals involved neither hard work nor skill of any kind. I succeeded with those too, against all odds. Those are harder to explain, at least for me, since the most common explanation is that they are a delusion. I found my experience with affirmations fascinating and puzzling, and so I wrote about it.
It would seem fair to point out that the rest of the text is Adams walking back to more rational explanations... But he's equivocating a lot on the matter. It's not in here, probably in another book, but he said he used affirmations to beat a nasty medical test he was undergoing (cancer or somesuch).
It's not about being demeaning to those sort of beliefs specifically (Superstition in all forms is pretty widely shared), but more about how it's not just an absurd contrarian bit he's playing, even if he is peppering a lot of self disparaging sarcasm into it.
