Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 9, 2026
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erything better. It's called a simultaneous sip, and it happens now. Let me ask you a question, fine people. Do you believe you can tell the difference between good news and bad news with your common sense and your judgment and your instincts and your heuristics? Well, sometimes it's not so clear. Sometimes we can't tell the difference between good news and bad news. For example, California is s…

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them the truth. I attempt to tell the truth on my live streams and tweeting, but of course everybody just says, well that's your truth, you big old stupid liar, you gullible idiot. We'll talk more about how dumb I am later.

All right, here's a story that I swear to God you really can't tell the difference between parody and reality. If I didn't tell you, if I had not told you in advance that this is real, the following story — would you have believed it? Right? If you didn't know it was real, would you have believed this if you just heard it in the wild? I'm not even sure I believe it, but I saw it today. That the book *1984*, George Orwell's book, famous classic, the estate has approved a request to have it rewritten from a woman's point of view. Finally. Yeah, finally, finally. I'll tell you, I tried to read that thing. You know, I was familiar with it of course, but I wanted to see if it held up. And I tried to read that thing and I was like, oh my God, this book is entirely from a man's point of view. I couldn't even finish it. There were no LGBTQ themes. The Holocaust wasn't even mentioned. Not once. Um, oh maybe it was. Maybe it was actually. I don't remember. But you know the biggest problem was it wasn't from a woman's point of view. And if you could get that fixed, then that book might have some legs. People might want to start talking about that.

Well, I swear to God I had something on my — you know why is it that — have you ever just tried to open an iPad and just leave it there so you could go back to it and it'll just change its page and it'll turn off and it'll come up and it'll ask for software updates? And like, why can't it just sit there? Just sit there and do what the — sorry, there will be no cursing. There will be no cursing.

But I'd like to call your attention to today's Dilbert comic, which I just tweeted. And you may recognize this story. It's Dogbert talking to Dilbert. See if you recognize this story from the news. Dogbert's reading his phone and Dogbert says, the College of Psychologists of Ontario says they will pull my license unless I surrender to a re-education camp. Dilbert says, you don't live in Canada and you don't have a license to practice. And then Dilbert says, they are oddly aggressive for Canadians. Dogbert takes a sip of his coffee and says, sounds like a mental disorder.

All right, do you recognize that story? Yeah, the College of Psychologists of Ontario has asked Dr. Jordan Peterson to come in to be re-educated. The best thing that ever happened to the Canadian psychologists industry is Jordan Peterson. He actually made their entire profession look worthwhile for a change. He took this thing that didn't have the greatest reputation in the world, you know, the practice of psychology, and turned it into something useful for millions of people around the world. So what do they got to do? Well, you better re-educate that. Because — sorry, I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't get through it without swearing. But I think you will agree that one belonged there. That one belonged there.

So I had already previewed to Dr. Peterson that I was going to run this comic. He asked for the original. Do you think I said yes? It's a trick question. It's a trick question. No, it's a trick question. Come on, come on. It's me. You know it's always a trick question. Yeah, there's no original. There's no such thing as originals. They're all created digitally. But I will send him a nice copy because I just wanted him to know I'm in his corner solidly and in his fight against the Ontario College of Psychologists of Ontario.

And if you are not aware of this, I'm just guessing, just going to take a guess, there's probably a better than 50 chance that the members of the College of Psychologists of Ontario have been sent a few copies of this comic this morning. Probably. I'll bet they got a few copies sent to them. How about when they opened their email they were like, oh not 400 copies of this damn thing being sent to me. Why do people keep sending me this comic? Why are they mocking us for this totally reasonable effort of ours to re-educate the only person who has made them look good in their entire history?

So anyway, we'll see if the power of Dilbert has any hold. By the way, this will become the subject of a lawsuit, I think. Isn't Dr. Peterson taking them to court? Some kind of lawsuit about this? I don't know the details, but I will tell you that the Dilbert comic has been used in lawsuits before, in legal cases. And it's used in the sense of what should be common knowledge. If it appears in the Dilbert comic, that's evidence that the public should know about this, that it's a commonly understood thing. Otherwise it doesn't become a comic. You know, I wouldn't do a comic about something that isn't real. Well, I guess I would, but you know the difference. So it could make a difference. It could make the difference because being in a Dilbert comic establishes that it's ridiculous. You get that, right? Like it wouldn't work as a joke. It wouldn't work unless it was ridiculous on its own. You can't take something that makes sense and make a joke about it.

By the way, did you know that? Did you know you can't make a joke about something that's just perfectly reasonable? For

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example, my company decided to cut expenses because we were losing money. What can I do with that? Nothing, right? There's no joke you can make about somebody who does the thing you're supposed to do. So the fact that it's in the Dilbert comic and we can all laugh at it and recognize it as funny — and I didn't change it much, just that Dogbert had to be re-educated — the fact that they would re-ed…

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