All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 26, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
25:53
Episode 391 Scott Adams: Who Won the Border Security Negotiations
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.
Sorry, I didn't mean to actually be broadcasting already, but my finger slipped.
And when my finger slipped, we went live.
So here I am. All right.
Let's see if I can make that message go away.
So, I've been watching, watching the coverage.
I'm sort of in my spare time.
I'm doing something else today.
But I've noticed that the way people are treating the news about the end of the government shutdown is all wrong.
And so I thought, I'd better get on here and correct everything.
Sorry, I'm a little disheveled.
All right, so here's what we know.
Months ago, months ago, I predicted that this wouldn't end, meaning the government shut down as well as the wall negotiations, until somebody said, let's kick it over to the engineers or the experts.
Now, some people are saying that, no, it's the border security people, it's not the engineers, so you got it wrong.
To which I say it's always going to be the engineers and the border security experts.
It can never be just one of them.
The border security experts are kind of like the users in this case.
They're not the ones writing the check, but they're the users.
They're the ones who say, okay, our specifications are this place needs, you know, more security, this place needs less.
And then the engineers decide what to build.
So now that's happened.
Alright, so both sides have apparently agreed to kick it over to the experts, who are really a combination of the engineers plus the border security people.
So, so far, in the entire world, I'm the only person who told you that was going to happen.
It had to happen. There wasn't anything else that could happen.
So the one thing that could happen, happened.
But now the fun part.
Who won? So who won?
Let's see your opinions.
I'm watching the breathless proclamations.
So here's my take.
I'll be watching for your comments as I say this.
This is like a baseball game in the fifth inning.
And the spectators are calling the winner.
How do you call the winner in the fifth inning?
It's not over. So the question you have to ask yourself, okay, is it, maybe it's not technically over, because we don't know what this committee will come up with, and if they come up with something, we don't know if anybody's going to implement it.
Because, you know, you could always ignore the committee.
But I don't think either side wants to ignore the committee at this point.
Because if either side ignores the committee, They will now be, wait for it, here's the big turn.
If they ignore the recommendations that come out of the experts, they will be ignoring the experts.
And that's new.
Now, you could say they've been ignoring the experts up to now, but the way it's been framed is as a competition between Pelosi representing the Democrats and Trump representing his base, mostly.
So that frame is now lost.
So both sides have given up the frame that it's Pelosi versus Trump.
They kicked it to the experts.
Now what happens if the experts come up with a totally reasonable sounding plan?
There's a little bit of barrier here, a little bit of fence here, a little electronic stuff here.
What happens? What happens if Trump says, I don't want to do what the experts say?
Well, that would look pretty bad, wouldn't it?
How do you defend that?
What happens if Pelosi says, yeah, I hear what the experts say, but I don't want to do it?
It's going to look really bad, because now you're not disagreeing with the president, you're disagreeing with the experts.
Once we reach the situation where both sides, Trump and Pelosi, let's say, Got to the point where they both were saying we need border security, and whether it's a wall, per se, is not the important part.
Once we reached that point, the endgame became clear, although for some reason I'm the only person who told you what it was, which is they'd have to kick it to the experts.
The experts would come back and say it's going to look like this or look like that, and then they're sort of trapped.
So here's what's different.
A lot of people are going to say, wait a minute, you know, this setup wouldn't have worked before.
And it probably wouldn't have.
If they had done this earlier, it may not have been successful.
Still might not be, but the odds are much better now.
And here's why. The country and the politicians have border fatigue.
They're really tired about this.
They don't want to do this again.
The last thing they want is another government shutdown.
And so Trump, who has looked entirely reasonable, which his critics will say means he capitulated, he caved.
CNN is hilarious.
If you look at the front page of CNN, they've used every word you can use for him losing.
He is losing, he's caving, he's backing down, etc.
But he's also being reasonable.
For every person who says that the president is backing down, what you have to answer is what's wrong with letting the experts tell us what to do there.
Because somebody said the cartel one, and that will be true if we don't get better at border security.
Now, let me take you to the future, all right?
Now, there's a good chance that whatever the group comes up with, the president will turn down on the first pass.
You should all be ready for this.
Whatever the group comes up with, the working group, whatever it is, you should expect the president to turn it down on the first pass.
Now forget about any other times before.
This is a new day.
Because you might get a little extra, so it would be sort of a good thing to do to turn it down on the first pass.
And then maybe get a little extra and say yes.
So that would be perfectly typical.
So don't be surprised or panic when that happens.
So Trump has been slowly guiding us away from it's got to be a big concrete wall to it needs to be a variety of solutions.
What are the two things that could happen as a result of the working group and the experts?
Number one, they could decide to improve security at the border in a variety of ways.
If President Trump gets more border security than we had before, will that look like a loss?
And what's the other alternative?
The working group will get together and say, Dammit, we don't need any fences or walls at all.
Let's tear down the stuff we have and never put any more in there.
Can they do that?
Do you think there's any chance?
This is a question you have to ask yourself if you're going to predict what's going to happen.
Is there any chance that whatever the outcome is, maybe after some more stops and starts, which would be predictable, but whatever that outcome is, is it going to be more border security or less Or maybe exactly the same.
You tell me, are we going to have more border security, exactly the same, or less at the end of this process?
Because if it's more, It doesn't matter what it looks like.
It's not going to matter at all.
Now, it seems like it matters now.
People are going crazy and Trump let them down and he caved.
He capitulated. Damn it.
He capitulated. But just think ahead a few weeks.
Is there any chance that the experts are going to look into it and decide to give us less border security?
No. Is there any chance that we'll end up with a, let's say, just a normal incremental improvement that would have been exactly the same under any other president?
Maybe. But probably not.
Yeah, everybody's saying more.
No matter what happens, the smart money says we're going to get something that most objective observers will say, okay, that's probably a little more than another president could have gotten us.
And people will look back and say, he made a, you know, a big ask.
Wall that thing up, concrete, the whole way.
And then eventually, as the negotiations were ongoing in the public, it was sort of a public negotiation, I would say, they got closer and closer to the middle.
But that middle is going to look like it's leaning his direction, which is not the worst thing in the world, is it?
Now, if you've been following me for a while, I don't think you've ever seen me say he needs a wall.
So if you're wondering what my personal bias is or my personal preference, from the beginning, I've always said the same thing.
How the heck do I know how much of it should be a wall?
Let's have the experts tell me.
Once the experts tell me, then I'll maybe agree with them.
But I'm certainly not going to come up with my own idea of how to do border security.
So there's nothing in this that is number one, not what I predicted or anything I have a problem with.
Do you have a problem with it?
Is there anybody who has a problem with it that's not political?
Does anybody have a problem with a working group of experts coming up with a good solution for border security that we put a few billion dollars into, whatever that number is?
I don't know. I don't see any of this as being a problem.
Now, let me take you back a couple years ago.
When the president was first saying, wall, wall, wall, wall, wall, how much did we, the public, actually know about the situation?
Did you know that putting a wall the entire length was impossible, you know, at least in terms of getting the rights to the land and the terrain and everything?
Did you know it was just impossible?
Well, now you're probably far more educated.
For example, do you remember when people were saying, walls are no good because, and whether it's a wall or a tall steel structure, whatever you want to call it, all the smart people were saying, that's no good because the cartels will just tunnel under it.
And then we saw at the trial for El Chapo that one of the experts who was a cartel member said, no, we stopped using tunnels.
Do you know why they stopped using tunnels?
Kept getting caught. And it was easier to do it another way.
Building a tunnel is a real expensive, takes a long time.
Now, if you happen to have a background in economics, Did you think that the tunnels would be used for letting illegal immigrants into the country?
If you studied economics and you thought that those tunnels built by the cartel were going to be used for just individuals who wanted to cross illegally, then you don't understand economics.
Or at least you're not a good criminal.
If you're a criminal, rule number one, you want the fewest number of witnesses that you can have.
If you're using a tunnel to cross thousands of people through your tunnel, you've created thousands of witnesses.
Thousands of witnesses!
There was no reasonable world in which a tunnel would be used for anything except contraband.
Because if you're only using for contraband, then Maybe five people in the cartel who have sworn their life to the cartel.
Well, they know where the tunnel is, but nobody else knows.
That's a good tunnel.
So, and then if you add on top of that that the government got better at apparently detecting tunnels, you suddenly start using fishing boats.
So apparently fishing boats are the, you know, the popular method and aircraft and just crossing at the border.
Forget about the tunnels in particular.
Think about how much you learned about building border structures.
You've learned about how other countries are doing it.
You've learned approximately what the budget is.
You've learned what's been done in the past.
You've learned what the experts are suggesting.
You've learned that in urban areas you want more of a structure.
You've learned that in remote areas we have a number of electronic, digital kinds of ways to sense and maybe there's some drones and stuff.
Think of how much you learned as a citizen about border stuff.
That was all Trump.
All Trump. Had Trump not been hammering on this topic for three straight years, we would not be more educated on this topic.
And now that we're all educated, we all came to the same opinion, didn't we?
If you don't count the crazy open borders people who are, you know, trivial, they're kind of like the flat earthers of the conversation.
If you don't count the extremists, wouldn't you say that we've all learned so much about border security?
And I would include the president.
Don't you think that the president knows a lot more about border security than when he was a candidate?
Of course he does. We all do.
And now that we've learned enough, we see that kicking it over to the experts and letting them come up with a variety of solutions that make sense for every area is clearly the best thing to do.
So, follow this.
The president raised the priority of the border question higher than it's ever been.
By raising the question to the highest priority, even though we were fighting the whole time, the entire country, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, we all became educated.
To a far greater degree than I ever expected would happen, for myself or for anybody else.
Now that we're all educated, and it's our highest priority at the moment, right?
What's a higher priority?
It seems like the highest priority.
So Trump made it the highest priority.
He educated the public by hammering on this forever until we all understood it.
And then, here's the fun part.
Once we were educated, he did the very thing that you should do.
Kicked it to the experts.
He's going to shine a light on it.
And now the politicians and the experts are trapped.
They're trapped. They can't say no to fundamentally what the experts come up with.
You know, they can change some things on the margin.
As I said, Trump is likely to turn down the first thing they come up with just because he might get a little more.
You know, they might be sick of doing stuff and say, all right, we'll give you a little bit more.
But he's created a situation where we will get some kind of better border security in the most intelligent and cost-effective way it could be done.
Do you know what CNN calls that?
Losing. Did I say anything that isn't true?
Did I just say anything that isn't observably true?
The president raised it as a priority.
In so doing, he educated the entire country, including himself, including Pelosi, including you, including me.
We're all smarter.
And now that we're smart enough, He put it into the only system that ever made sense.
Kick it over to the experts, make sure the whole country is watching so that whatever those experts come up with, we can't just, you know, put that paper under a pile and ignore it.
We can no longer ignore whatever those experts came up with.
Now, suppose he started on day one and said, okay, I set a wall, but I'm going to kick it over to some experts.
Total debacle.
It would have been a total debacle if Trump had done now, which is turning it over to the experts, if he had done that on day one when he got elected.
That would have looked like losing because we wouldn't be educated and we would ignore whatever they came back with because it wouldn't be that much of a priority.
By making it the world's biggest priority, or at least our biggest priority, in our minds anyway, maybe not in reality, but in our minds our biggest priority, he's guaranteed that we can't ignore what the experts come up with.
He's also made every Democrat who matters say in public, we want good border security.
He made every Democrat, every critic of his, he made say in public, except for, you know, the crazy RPOs and some of the fringe people, but all the ones who matter, he made them say in public that security matters and we should do it a smart way.
That's the trap.
The trap is that he made the Democrats say for a month, we have to do it the smart way.
And then he educated the entire country.
And then he turned it over to the experts and the engineers.
And do you know what they're going to come up with?
The smartest way.
Yeah. The smartest way is coming.
Maybe we haven't seen it yet.
Maybe they already had it. Maybe they're 95% done with it.
It was always the plan, but we just didn't know what it is.
Somebody says you're an idiot.
They said that years ago.
I'm saying the same thing.
For years they have said, give it to the experts, and for years the experts have had a plan.
But it was never the right time because the public had not been educated and the public was not as engaged as they are now.
You had to get the public educated, you had to get us engaged, and you had to make sure that whatever the hell comes out of that committee, let's call it the committee, but the working group, whatever comes out of that, we care now.
We didn't really care that much before.
So, In losing, if you'd like to say that Trump lost politically, you can make that case because he asked for a wall and he probably won't get something that looks like a 2,000 mile wall.
So you could certainly say that he did not get what he wanted.
And you could also say that some of his most ardent supporters will give him a hard time.
But here's what they're going to have to criticize.
They're going to have to criticize the smartest people, meaning the experts, coming up with the wisest plan that the engineers and the border security people with the most experience are backing.
That's what you have to be against now.
Before you got to be against a dumb idea, which is a big concrete wall for 2,000 miles.
How hard is it to be against a big, dumb concrete wall that's 2,000 miles?
Easy, right? Everybody can be against that.
Even people who are on Trump's side were against that.
But how do you be against the working committee of engineers and experts who say, for this amount of money, we can make a big difference and it would look like this?
Including, you know, censors at the crossings and, you know, maybe they'll throw in some other immigration stuff.
All right. I'm watching my Twitter feed and people are piling in.
It feels exactly like it felt the day before Election Day.
For those of you who don't remember, 2016.
So about a week before election, people were piling into my Twitter feed and they were They were still sore about all the things I'd said about the campaign and things I'd said that were positive about Trump.
And they came in to say, I'm going to come back here tomorrow after the election to, you know, to drink your tears.
Because you're going to be so humiliated.
I can't wait to see.
I can't wait to see you eat crap tomorrow.
I can't wait for your humiliation the day after the election.
My life is complete.
I get to see the Dilber guy completely humiliated.
Didn't go their way.
Sorry. Didn't go their way.
In this case, everything that's happened up to this point I told you it happened.
Not only did I tell you what happened, it's what I wanted to happen.
What I wanted to happen was for the situation, the dumbness to subside.
What is the dumbness?
Here's the dumbness. A concrete wall for 2000 miles.
That's dumb, right?
I don't care who you are.
That's dumb. What else is dumb?
Let's do nothing. Let's not fund any better border security.
Well, that's dumb, right?
So we had to leave the dumb place.
It was two different dumb places, but they were both dumb, right?
I have never occupied either dumb place.
I've always been waiting.
Right here.
I've been waiting for both dumb sides to say, yes, yes, border security matters.
Let's give it to the experts.
Let's get educated. Let's figure out how to do this right.
And then take that decision away from the politicians.
Let the politicians say we want better security.
Both sides say that now and let's see how far we can get.
Now, Ann Coulter apparently is not too happy about this.
Somebody says, please address Ann Coulter.
I'll give you a general answer.
It's hard for me, since I'm a professional writer, it's hard for me not to love Ann Coulter.
Right? And some of you don't want to hear that, right?
But my God, she's a great writer.
Whatever else you want to say about her, her just pure writing skill, her ability to form a sentence, to put an idea together, to make a book out of it, is crazy.
I mean, she's like the best, you know, one of the best writers you've ever seen.
But she also has a unique niche in politics.
I don't begrudge her success within that niche.
But I don't think it's also necessary that I have an opinion on her.
Because she's doing what she does really, really, really well.
Which is different from me having to agree with everything she says.
So I think I'll defer.
I don't need to have an opinion about her.
Her capability is through the roof, but that doesn't mean I agree with all of her points.
All right. I haven't heard what Mike Sertovich said yet, but But give him a week.
Give Mike a week and see if anything changes.
I'll just leave that there.
▲
Export Selection