Episode 156: Scott Adams Talks About Gaslighting, the Dossier, the Cohen Tapes

Come in here, everybody. Come on, gather round, because it's time. It's time again for the highlight of your day. So far, anyway. It features a little thing I call coffee and a little thing I call the simultaneous sip. And you know it's coming. Oh, it's coming. And it's the best sip of the day. Get your day starting off right. Here it comes. Yep, that's some good simultaneous sipping. In response to somebody's comment I just saw going by, this is a V neck, T shirt. V neck, T shirts still. Okay. V neck sweater means your wife dressed you. Big difference. Okay, so the news is getting fun again. Have you noticed that there are cycles there. There are some cycles where the news is no fun, and then it's fun again for a while. And then it's no fun for a while. We're in a fun stage. Let's first talk about Stormy Daniels. Stormy Daniels has announced, apparently, that she is getting divorced. The accusation from her ex, among other things, is that she cheated on him. Now, I've been wondering how Michael Avenatti gets paid. Seems like a lawyer like him would be very expensive. Seems like he's doing a lot of work for his client, putting in a lot of hours, and I don't know how she could possibly afford that much lawyering. And now it's making me wonder if he's working pro boner, if you know what I mean. Let's drink to that. I'm just going to let that one sit there for a while. Yes, I said pro boner. All right, let's move on. I'm noticing that the anti Trumpers are using the word gaslighting a lot. And gaslighting, if you don't know the exact definition, I think it refers to a movie, maybe a Hitchcock movie. But the idea is that you tell lies and then you convince people that they're crazy if they don't believe it. And so the real goal is to drive people crazy. So it's not just that you're telling a lot of lies. It's that you're telling a lot of lies with the intention of making somebody else think they're crazy, because the things they see as truth, they start believing are lies. And I'm thinking to myself, gaslighting would make sense as an explanation, or at least a potential explanation, if the only source of untruth was Trump or at least one side. But in a world where absolutely everybody is lying, what does it mean to say one of them is trying to sell you a story of reality that isn't exactly right. The whole gaslighting thing only works if everybody isn't doing it. If literally everyone. Is dealing in untruth or shading the truth or ignoring important parts and focusing on unimportant parts, if everyone is involved in this, it's hard to pick out any one person and say, well, that one, that one's doing a little gaslighting, these other people are just wrong, or maybe you think they're right. So I've noticed something in the last maybe week or so, and I want to see if you could look for this. And I can't tell if this is the sign of a change, maybe a trend or not, but I have seen CNN be more fair toward President Trump. Has anybody noticed that? Have you seen more fairness about Trump just in the last week or so? Because I mentioned the story of Chris Cuomo, who I thought did a very credible job of explaining both sides of a situation, you don't really see that that often. It was, it was unusual enough that I called it out. It's like, hey, that was actually an accurate description of what the people on the other side are saying. And there are at least two anecdotes recently of Jake Tapper also being completely, in my opinion, objective about something going right for Trump. So he tweeted, for example, the article about the satellite satellites that showed one of the missile places being decommissioned or dismantled in North Korea. Now other people have said, hey, you have to look at it in context. The site might not have been that important, and maybe that's true, but it still is a rocket launching test site and it is being dismantled. Jake retweeted it without any negative comment, just as a positive, that's happening for the president. And then there was a clip I just saw where Jake Tapper opened up a segment. He had some guests and he opened it up by saying that it's actually true that President Trump is tougher on Russia than Obama was. His guests actually laughed out loud, or at least one of them did, about how crazy that is. I guess I can't read minds, but it looked like there was some doubt in that laughter. I thought to myself, well, that is also objectively true because you can point to the specific things that are happening now, the sanctions and giving weapons to the Ukraine, that just wasn't happening before. So Jake, being a historian by training and probably by inclination, wasn't ready to, apparently had no interest in shading the history of it. And so he gave a completely objective take on that, which actually stood out so much that somebody retweeted it. So look, for that, there might be some kind of a shift going on, or it could be a coincidence, I don't know. But we'll see if there's more of that. Now, I know the thing you want me to talk about the most is the Cohen tape. Have you all heard the Michael Cohen tape? Now, I think this tape should seal your belief that we live in a simulation. What are the odds that in the same half of a year that we all dealt with Laurel and Yanni, that we would have a tape that you could hear whatever you want to hear on it? I've listened to that thing a bunch of times. My take on the tape is that you can't tell anything, really. My best guess is, you know, my take on it is that Trump did. Did say something about Cash, but he said it in an attitude that would suggest it was a bad idea and that Cohen agreed by saying no, no, no, no, as in agreeing with Trump that Cash was a bad idea. Now, I haven't heard anybody give that interpretation before. Everybody's seeing exactly what they want to say. So it's sort of this big Rorschach test. Now, would I tell you that my interpretation of that tape is accurate? I would not. I would not. I certainly know enough to know that I could hear this completely wrong. And then, just to make it more interesting, it gets clipped off, so you can't hear the full context, and there are mumbled parts. So it is everything you would want in an ambiguous tape. You can literally hear anything you want on that tape. It's either proving something bad happened or not. Now, frankly, I'm not entirely sure why the cache part mattered. I think the question that was that everybody was wondering is, was the President aware of Michael Cohen's actions? Because he said he wasn't. To which I say, duh. Let me reiterate, for those of you who were born yesterday, if you're an elected official and you get accused of cheating on your wife, denying everything is a pretty good strategy. So I don't think there's anybody on either side who has any mystery whatsoever about exactly what happened here. What happened is exactly. It looks like what was accused, and you just saw somebody handling it the way somebody would normally handle that situation. So there's not a lot there, because it's exactly what it looks like and nobody cares. It can be exactly what it looks like and still not matter. And I think that's where we're at. Now, here's an interesting thing. So everybody's still talking about The FISA warrant for Carter Page. And the big question is, was the dossier the only reason it was granted, or was it the dossier just mentioned as context? And there were other things that were more verified that were also there that made the dossier not necessary for the warrant. It was just kind of background, maybe a little. Little color. And so you're hearing both of those sides being argued, and people are very sure one way or the other. And you're seeing another Laurel and Yanni thing. That's funny. Somebody said Laurel and Yanni, and then you've got Lonnie Davis. And Lonnie is a combination of Laurel and Yanni. And so Lonnie is the lawyer who's arguing this. What are the odds of that? That is weird. Anyway, back to the FISA warrant. So somebody asked me on Twitter, they said, can you name anything that's in the FISA warrant that did not come from the dossier? The simplest, most basic question, right. The most basic thing that we should know by now, all of us watching the story, is what was the evidence in the FISA warrant that you can say did not come from the dossier? And I looked at that tweet and I said, I pretty sure there were things, but why don't I know them? So look how the news industry, both sides have completely failed you. Do you know something that was in there? Oh, let me put it another way. If the story on the right, let's say the pro Trumpers, if their story is there is nothing in there except the dossier information, why don't they say that? Because that would be the whole story. There is absolutely nothing else there except the dossier, and therefore it's illegitimate. But they don't say that, do they? The people who were arguing that the dossier was fake and shouldn't have been in there and all that, they don't exactly say that only the dossier was used. They say something like, well, it was instrumental, it was key, it was critical to it. It wouldn't have happened without it. That's different, isn't it? So I'm pretty sure the right is misleading me. Now, I saw an article by Molly Hemingway, who you're all familiar with Molly Hemingway, one of the better, really very best voices in politics right now. I think she's an attorney by training lawyer. But when she breaks something down, it's always the clearest explanation of things. And I started reading the article and it got long and complicated and I bailed down after a while. But even in that. And maybe it was in the article. Like I said, I kind of bailed out because I just didn't have the patience to deal with the detail. But shouldn't there have been something in the title or the headline, if it were true, that said I'm going to show you there's nothing but the dossier and everything else is just stuff that came from the dossier. Was that in there? I don't know. Because if that was the point of it, it would have been sort of in the title or the first chapter or something, or the first paragraph. So why is it that the most basic thing the public needs to know is were not hearing from either the left or the right. Why is that? Because, you know, the news, the news should be lining up. Does anybody know that having a few days have gone by? Can you think, can anybody give one example of something that wasn't in the dossier? That that was part of the argument? Can anybody do that right now? Because if you can't. Well, you know, if you're counting on the redacted part, Really, I mean, is that the argument that the real information is in the redacted part? I mean, it might be, but. Look at that. I'm not seeing Carter Page being a paid Kremlin advisor. That's not in there. Well, look at this. So how many of you had an opinion about the FISA warrant? And I don't see anybody suggesting anything that was in there except the dossier. And I assume I'm wrong about that, by the way. So just to be completely clear, I believe I'm wrong that there's nothing but the dossier in there. But both sides seem to be suggesting there is more than the dossier. I read Andrew McCarthy's. So here's. So I read Andrew McCarthy's piece and I still don't have an answer. If it's in there, it's sort of woven into a longer narrative and I couldn't pull it out. Does Andrew McCarthy say in clear language there there is zero evidence except for what's in the dossier? Does he say that? I don't think he says that, does he? Yeah. Why don't we know what those other pieces are somebody saying? Exactly. So I make that my challenge to you. See if you can figure out what the anti Trumpers believe is in there that they would call evidence that is not from. From the dossier. And it's not good enough to say that some things in the dossier might be true. That's not the question. The question is, is there anything that didn't come from the dossier. All right, now. All right, I'm just looking at your comments. So we've entered a completely fact free world, which I believe I warned you two years ago was coming. Is there any prediction I've made that was more accurate than that? Some of you have been with me since the beginning. And you remember that I said, it's actually the subtitle of my book, Winn Bigley, Persuasion. In a world where facts don't matter, there was a time when people were saying, hey, we got the facts right, but the other side has them wrong. And in that world, facts still matter. But doesn't it look like, doesn't it look to you like nobody's using facts anymore and we're both listening to this tape and hearing completely different things? If anybody has a fact out of that, it's probably imaginary. Everybody's looking at the Russia situation and has a different interpretation, but none of the interpretations are based on fact. Mueller might have some facts, but we don't know what they are. We are in a completely fact free world in which. Well, let me segue from that because it makes sense. As the next topic, I'm seeing a lot of pundits wringing their hands and crying on tv, figuratively speaking, that the President is criticizing our trusted institutions and in particular he's criticizing the press. And the thought is that he's criticizing the press and the press is an important element of our, you know, democratic republic and that if he degrades the press, it will be bad for the world. Do you know what's wrong with that? It takes as an assumption that the press is doing its job legitimately. Don't you have to, before you can say it's wrong to criticize them, don't you have to start with the assumption that there's nothing to criticize or at least nothing of substance? And I watch all the people who are saying, no, you can't criticize the press. That's bad. He might degrade the institution of the press to the point where even after he's left office and never recovers. And I think to myself, there's a big assumption in that. And the assumption is that there's nothing wrong with the press and that it does not deserve the criticism it's getting. And yet that is the most obvious truth that we can see. It's very clear that both sides are engaged in nothing like truth. You know, it's all spin, it's all opinion now, wrapped in speculation. You know, I've given you this assignment before, but watch CNN and watch how many times they. They make an appeal to mind reading. And it's subtle and it'll be things like, blah, blah, blah. And President Trump believes that if he does this and doesn't matter what follows, because if you're talking about a stranger's internal process, you really don't know that. You can only know what he's doing. Sometimes you can intuit motives if they're really obvious, but most of the time we can't. Right. Because it's a complicated world and people do things for more than one reason. So if you have more than one explanation for a thing, you don't really know how much of the reason is which. Yeah. So I've said two things today. I think they're both true, which is that the press has been completely non credible. And so the President's accusations of fake news are completely on point. And I would argue that the President's criticism of the press is 100% constructive. Now, that doesn't mean, and far from it, it definitely doesn't mean that everything he calls fake news is actually unreal. That's slightly different point. But the general sense that the news is a narrative as opposed to reporting, he's completely right about that. That's clear and obvious on both sides of the aisle. So when he criticizes the news, that feels constructive to me because it might be part of the reason that CNN is suffering in the, in the ratings, and it might be part of what brings them back. They might make a pivot away from the narrative and toward the factual. It's possible. Did I ever talk about James Gunn? Well, I'll just say that I didn't realize that he had gone after me on Twitter at some point in the past and I'd completely missed it. Somebody pointed it out. He had some insulting tweet about me. And so I say, block that Nazi. So my only comment about James Gunn is that he's a Nazi because he acts like one. The other accusations, have at it. You can speculate all you want about what's in his soul and whether his tweets were over the line. I put that all under the Nazi category. So Nazi for sure. I saw, I saw a clip of some folks in Oakland beating up what they call the Nazi. Now, maybe it was a Nazi. I didn't know who it was, but far more likely it was just somebody wearing a red hat. And I thought to myself, wait a minute, I'm pretty sure the Nazis are the crowd that are beating up the people for, for their opinions. So the we're in what I'd call the Nazi transition, where the Nazis are clearly on the left at least as much as on the right, probably a lot more. Probably ten to one at this point. I'm defining a Nazi as someone who's going after people personally as opposed to someone who disagrees on policy. The policy people are fine. The Nazis are the ones who go after you personally in any kind of way. So probably 10 to 1 Nazis on the left at the moment. That will change over time. All right. I think I've covered my topics for today. Is there anything else? Oh, let me talk about Alexandra Cortez. I'm never going to know her name. Can somebody tell me what her name is again? Alexandria or Alexandra Cortez, acl. Let's call her acl. So I've watched Ocasio Cortez, thank you. So I've watched.