Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes Episode #2629 Segments
MainContent Cognitive Reframing

Back to episode — Episode 2629 CWSA 10/15/24

Context —

audio and no visual when I am so visual. Speaking of which, if you need to find merchandise for Coffee with Scott Adams that features, yes, my bald head on shirts and hoodies and mugs, just go to one of your favorite search engines and search for CWSA for Coffee with Scott Adams merchandise to buy. It'll pop right up. Here are some security tips for men, courtesy of Joshua Steinman. You should fo…

← Previous segment →

l women if they work in some kind of secure military or intelligence job. Turns out that there will be a very nice Chinese woman who would be very happy to be your girlfriend, and maybe you could have long conversations about what you do at work. So here's how you know you're dating a spy: your spy is twice as good-looking as you. Now it gets complicated if you're also rich, because then you can't tell.

All right, this is the funniest story of the day, and I laughed until I cried this morning. I was sitting at my desk just crying with laughter. Now I hope this is as funny to you as it is to me. Now it's funny because it's real.

Here's the background. You might know that Jordan Peterson was in some trouble with something called the Ontario College of Psychologists. Now he's a Canadian, and this is a Canadian entity that has some kind of control over the licensing of Canadian psychologists. And if you want to remain in good standing in your profession, you've got to be good with this organization. And this organization ruled that Dr. Jordan Peterson needed to be re-educated because his social media posts were so inappropriate for someone in their profession that they needed to either take away his very license to practice or have him re-educated by a social media psychologist expert. There are a lot of those. I don't know. But he had to be re-educated.

So the first thing that Dr. Jordan Peterson did was he tried to, I believe he tried to fight the process. You know, he challenged the process, and that didn't work. So now he's a victim of the process. And he eventually decided that he would in fact accept the re-education process.

Now let me just set this up for you. It's Dr. Jordan Peterson, the most famous and possibly most capable person who's ever existed in this plane of existence for this domain of knowledge and whatnot. And now Canada's task is to find somebody who's smarter or more knowledgeable on the topics of how to communicate in the context of being a psychologist and a social media person. That's right. They're going to find somebody who's better than Jordan Peterson in his chosen field, in which he's literally the most famous and capable person you've ever seen in your life in any field, and at the same time better at social media and communicating. There's nobody better at social media and communicating.

So what do you think happened? Well, turns out in the entire nation of Canada there were zero volunteers for this job. There's nobody in Canada who takes the job. Nobody in Canada wants to be so stupid that you would embarrass yourself and have your entire professional life destroyed by teaching Jordan Peterson how to be Jordan Peterson. Like, how in the world do you even do that?

But it gets better. It gets better. I'm going to read to you what Jordan Peterson wrote when he had some clarifying questions about the process. All right, this is so deliciously fun I can't even stand it. All right, hold on. I can't read. I'm tearing up.

All right, so this is from Dr. Jordan Peterson. Let's see. He said he has some questions for the college about how the qualifications of the quote social media expert would be determined. So he asked this: "By what standards do you accredit your social media experts? Is that a regulated profession? Are these experts also versed in the complexities of clinical psychology? How else can they improve the professional activities of a psychological practitioner? Is there any concrete, published, and peer-reviewed evidence that the tender lessons they purport to provide actually produce an improvement in the behavior of those they educate? By what objective criteria are you going to measure my improvement in that regard? Are there standardized tests for such progression? How are those standards established, if they exist?"

Oh my God. Nobody in the entire country of Canada was willing to take the bait. I would like to know, I would like to now give you my impression of every person in Canada who may have once thought they were qualified for the job of educating Dr. Jordan Peterson. I now give you my impression. This is me doing an impression. You can't tell if you're listening on audio, but it's really hilarious. It's getting better. It's funnier every minute. It's getting a little bit funnier. And see, oh my goodness.

So I sure hope that Canada saves us by educating Dr. Jordan Peterson, because what if he just keeps going out there doing what he's doing? Just think of all the harm he's causing to the world, if not your own family. Oh God, please educate him.

Okay, if you could have written a script of a movie about that situation and you didn't kn

Context —

ow how the movie would end and you couldn't come up with a good ending, there could be no better ending than having nobody in the entire country of Canada willing to take the job. There's no, you can't get better than that. I'm sorry, there's nothing. If he had like won his appeals and had it overturned, ah, boring. If he'd taken a class and somebody gave it to him, icky, boring. But having nobody…

Next segment → →