Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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Episodes Episode #157 Segments
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Back to episode — Episode 157 Scott Adams - Cohen, EU Trade, Shadow Banning

Context —

Now if you've been watching CNN lately, as I have been, you'll note that there's a mystery that they're reporting about, mostly Anderson Cooper. And here's the mystery. Anderson Cooper, after hearing the Michael Cohen tapes, is trying to figure out why the president might have lied about an extramarital affair. I was specifically lying about some payments involved. But Anderson Cooper and CNN, the…

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All right. So in our Yanny versus Laurel world, in our world in which there are two movies on one screen, sometimes sometimes there are three. So the two movies that everybody's watching about the Michael Cohen tapes are did the president say use cash or did the president say don't use cash?

Now the way it's being reported is it's hilarious, frankly. The fact that, who's the president's lawyer? New York mayor, whose name I'm forgetting at the moment, ex-New York mayor Giuliani. So he's saying the tape very clearly says don't use cash. Do any of you hear that? Do any of you hear him say don't use cash? Is there anybody out here that actually hears that, anything like that on that recording?

So what's funny about it is this. It's such a bold, ridiculous thing to say. But I've been watching this situation and I'm trying to figure out what really is happening here, because the snippets of the conversation don't quite make sense, do they? So no matter what your interpretation is of what was said or what was not said, it still doesn't quite make sense. There's something that doesn't all fit.

I wanted to offer you a third interpretation. So the two interpretations we have is that Trump said, should we use cash? Now Lanny, what's his name, the lawyer for Cohen, says that he's talking about like in actual physical dollar bills. If you can imagine $150,000 worth of just cash, you know, big pile of cash. So Lanny Davis says, well, you know, that's what he means. He means cash like a big bundle of money. And of course Giuliani, you say no, he's saying don't use cash, which is clearly, well, I'll leave it to your judgment, but I don't hear that when I listen to the tape.

So I'm going to give you a third interpretation. And by the way, here's my challenge to you. When I give you the third interpretation, I want you to see if you can even think the other two are possible anymore. All right? So I'm going to erase from your mind, maybe not all of you, but for many of you, when you hear the third interpretation, you're just going to say, oh, why did it take so long for somebody to explain that?

Context —

Okay, and here it is. So we're going to the whiteboard. So here are some words we heard on the tape. We heard Cohen say, we need to finance this company. The company that would be used for the payments, the payments to the ex-Playboy model. And you heard Trump say, finance what? Right? So when Cohen says finance, we would all agree that Trump had a question about the word finance. Finance what? A…

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