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April 3, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
48:35
Episode 888 Scott Adams: Swaddle Away Your Cares and Ease Into a Great Night of Sleep
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm drinking coffee late at night.
That's how I roll.
I was up this morning and started work at, I think, 2am.
It's weird having complete control over your schedule.
If you'd like to simultaneously sip, I know this is swaddle time, but breaking the rules a little bit, this would be the time.
Grab your cup, grab your mug, go.
Well, tell me, dear audience, how many of you had an extra good night's sleep with my how many of you had an extra good night's sleep with
So after I hypnotized those of you who stayed around to the end and were willing, how many of you actually experienced an extra good night of sleep?
Tell me in the comments and we'll see them.
It'll take a moment to catch up.
Swaddled me gently.
That should be the name of a movie.
He swaddled me.
He swaddled me gently.
Alright, let's do a little breakdown of the events since last I talked to you.
So we had another meeting of the task force press conference.
And let me tell you how it went.
First of all, Mnuchin, Secretary Mnuchin was really good.
Did you catch Mnuchin's presentation?
So he was talking about the financial side of it.
And I gotta say, he was really good.
So here's what was good about it.
He had a confident Sort of in command way about him, which is exactly what you want to hear.
You don't want to hear any dithering.
You don't want to hear him say, I'll have to ask somebody about that.
You don't want to hear him say, I'll look into it.
You know, you want him to just tell you what's a good idea and tell you what he's doing and what the priorities are.
And I would say he nailed it.
So very strong from Mnuchin.
The other thing I liked about it in particular Is that he was specific where he could be.
So everywhere that he could give you a time estimate, he would say, you know, we're going to try to do this in two weeks.
Normally it would take X months, but we're going to really try to do it in two weeks.
Now in a few cases I believe he didn't have as much certainty, but he still bounded it.
Which is exactly what you want.
Because that tells you that he knows what he's doing.
It's not that we have to manage him exactly.
And it's not that we're directly going to do something if it's one answer or another.
But the fact that he knows, and he can say, well, this is about two weeks, this one, you know, we don't have a handle on it, but we've tried to do it in a month, or whatever he said.
But he basically, he bounded everything.
He put an estimate on everything, and he put a boundary on everything, and then he told you what he would do if the boundary was exceeded.
So in the case of, I forget which part of the plan he was talking about, he said, if we need more, then we'll go back in phase four and get it.
And I thought, okay, I now have a really good understanding Of the situation sufficient for my purposes as a citizen.
Because remember, we're all in this.
This is not a spectator sport.
The messages that our leaders are telling us, our experts and our leaders...
are making us act differently in profound ways.
Everything from closing down the economy to don't wear masks, do wear masks, don't hoard this, do hoard that.
You know, start-up factories, don't start-up factories.
But mostly, I guess, start-up factories.
So, the information we give for our leaders is absolutely making lots of us act differently so it matters that they're saying it right.
Now, I do not have as high a grade For the rest of the presentation.
I'm not going to single anybody out, but I don't know how many times I have to say this, and I guess, based on a lot of comments that I got on Twitter, there are a number of you who don't understand why I'm so worked up about the fact that the task force is not clearly telling us this is how much we need of everything, this is how much we think we have, And this is how much we're producing to fill in any gaps.
Now some people have said to me, quite reasonably, and here's a perfect example of how if your skill stack does not include, let's say, business and economics or finance or anything, it's a perfectly reasonable question, what's the difference?
Because it's going to be what it's going to be, right?
If it's bad, it's bad. If it's good, it's good.
They're trying as hard as they can.
It's not like anybody's dragging their feet, right?
They're trying as hard as they can.
It's going to be what it's going to be.
What's the difference if you and I know how close they are?
There's a big difference. And it's not obvious.
I don't think it would be obvious to everybody.
So let me explain it to you.
I think everybody who's got any kind of background in business or economics will agree with what I'm going to say, which is that expectations are really important, and we are acting differently depending on what they tell us.
For example, would Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, would he convert his factories to I think he's making masks.
Would he do that if he knew that we were 95% there?
Yeah, we're within striking distance.
Would he have changed his whole factory over to make masks if he knew we were almost there anyway?
Probably not, right?
I mean, that's a big, big, big investment by him and his employees and everything else.
And so if we were 10% of the way there, and it really is an enormous national emergency as opposed to an average emergency or kind of one we almost have under control, it's a gigantic difference.
How much pressure would we, the citizens, put on our government if you knew that we were only 10% of the way there?
You'd put a lot of pressure on.
In fact, you would say, you need to stop everything else you're doing and make sure that the healthcare professionals get the right protective equipment.
You wouldn't even let them finish the press conference if the number was 10%, right?
But if the number is, let's say, 60%, Will you act differently?
Well, you might. You might.
You might not try to hoard, because you know it's really going to kill somebody in actuality.
Somebody actually could die if you hoard some stuff.
So it might change how you act.
It might change whether you get involved in trying to make some masks yourself.
It might change your behavior in lots of different ways.
But here's the thing. The most important thing you would do Is if we know how close we are to meeting our needs for those basics, the healthcare professional frontline basics, especially ventilators, if we knew how close we were, that would also give us a lot more visibility on when we get back to work.
Right? Because if we have enough ventilators, not as many people will die.
And so as the number of people who die goes down, that's going to be the metric.
It's not going to be the number of people who get it.
It's going to be more than the number of people who die.
So as we build up our hydroxychloroquine, our masks, our ventilators, the number of people who will die should be predicted to go down in a predictable fashion.
And that should also give you much better visibility of when the economy gets back on its feet.
Now why is that important?
Let me explain something about the economy.
That you probably have never heard, except maybe from me if I've said it before.
Which is the economy is best understood as a set of ideas and thoughts.
The economy exists in our minds, our collective minds.
And here's what I mean. If I don't trust you to pay me, we can't make a deal.
Or it'd be so hard that you wouldn't have much of an economy.
So one of the things that is the collective idea is that you don't cheat the other person.
And part of the collective idea is if the more visibility that you have, the less likely somebody is going to try it anyway.
So the best economies are, and this is no coincidence, the ones where there's the most built-in trust.
For the most part, let's say you're in the United States, for the most part, if you're just buying a good or a service, you think most of the time you're going to get what you paid for.
Every now and then, something bad will happen.
But the fact that there's a general understanding that there's a trust...
And everybody's watching is what builds an economy.
But also, as somebody said in the comments, the expectations.
If you expect things to be good tomorrow, and that's just a mental state, it's just your expectation, then you'll invest today.
And it's that investing today that makes it possible for things to be good tomorrow.
So the entire economy is the outgrowth of a set of mental expectations.
And here's where I'm going with this.
This set of mental expectations, which have been intricately designed over time to hold together, require that the real world is also part of the action.
Because you don't think about the mental part too much if you're actually going to work and making money and buying things and making profits and stuff.
You think that's the stuff.
You think it's the goods and the things you're moving and the money that's going back and forth.
But that's just the outcome.
That's just the result of having a well-designed mental model, which is the strength of the United States.
So I would say that if you combine the mental models of our patriotism and national preferences, if you will, with the mental models of capitalism and fairness and And, you know, just who we are as a people.
Those are the structures that have to be solid for everything else to work.
Because there would be nobody buying and selling anything, and there would be no economy, physically, except for those mental models that we all share.
Now, here's the important part.
We're not all equally contributing to the existence of the mental model.
Meaning that most of you don't need to know anything I'm talking about.
You just need to know that there is an economy and you could go to work.
But there has to be some critical mass of people Who thinks substantially the way I'm thinking, which is that the economy is the way you act and the set of thoughts.
And those have to be solid.
They have to be well-designed thoughts that are engineered to work well together, just like capitalism, just like democracy, the republic.
Those are well-engineered thoughts.
Another challenge, I believe, between where we are now and getting back to solid economic footing is that we don't lose our mental model while we have paused the physical world.
The physical world can actually take a pause if your mental model stays intact.
Because most of the things that will need to be primed again and pumped up, we know how to do that.
It's all part of our mental model.
So unless the mental model breaks, and one of the ways it could break, for example, just to give you a concrete example, it could be that half of the country says, I think we need socialism.
And then half of the country would be supporting a different model in their head, and it would start to conflict with the common model, and then the physical world would start to reflect that conflict, and that might not be good.
It could be good. It could be just a transition to something better.
But at the very least, it would introduce some risk.
So here's the point.
People who understand the economy and understand business, if you look at their comments to this, you'll often see that they're tending toward the optimistic or tell you, well, we'll lose this much, which might be scary, but it's not necessarily the end of the world.
The people who are telling you it's going to be the end of the world are the people who don't understand economics.
And it's not because they don't understand it.
In other words, they're not describing it wrong because of a lack of understanding.
That might also be happening.
But rather, if you're an artist, a writer, a journalist, but not an economist, a business person, a finance person...
Then you say to yourself, what does my job require?
And your job requires interest.
You want your reader to be interested.
And so you'll tell a story that's really scary about the next big depression.
It's the worst things will ever be.
And you think, well, I'm just telling a story.
It's interesting. It might be true.
I'm just saying it might be true.
Worst case scenario. That's fair, right?
But those stories...
are deeply degrading and damaging to the set of ideas that are well designed and are just sort of floating in space held together by the people who understand this stuff.
And you need the people who don't understand it to take a vacation and not try to break the set of ideas which are the strongest set of ideas In the history of humanity.
The things that give us equality, the things that give us competition, free market stuff.
The set of ideas, which is us, is the strongest set of ideas ever engineered.
Not perfect. Maybe we can do better.
But up to this point in history, it's the strongest set of engineered ideas of all time.
And we've got to keep that together.
And what I'm suggesting is that a big part of keeping that together is confidence, and a big part of confidence is when your leaders can give you numbers and estimates.
So, for example, if my leader said, I guarantee you that we'll be back to work on, I'll just pick a day, June 1st, then the economy would say, ah, the idea of the economy is solid now.
Because we just got an expectation, and we need that.
That's our fuel, the expectation.
So now you're solid, and now you can make it to June 1st.
Now what happens if June 1st comes, and the leaders say, ugh, too soon.
It's going to be July.
Still okay. Still okay.
Because you went from a sense of some idea where you're going, gave you some confidence, didn't work out.
But that's how capitalism works.
Lots of things don't work out.
Companies fail. Capitalism is a big failure engine that only works on average.
And so we could basically reach a point where our expectation of things could decide what the future is.
It's the power of positive thinking.
When it comes to economics, it's real.
The power of positive thinking is sort of the magical version that you can wish yourself into a reality.
I'm not going to claim that any of that's provable in any kind of a scientific way, or even true in any way that you would think of things to be true.
I do know it seems like it's true.
Those of us who practice it become presidents and famous cartoonists and stuff.
And it doesn't seem like a coincidence that the people who have that mindset tend to be more successful.
And I'm suggesting that the people who have that mindset Your president is one of them.
Very optimistic.
I'm trying to be one of them.
And thousands of other people who are like-minded, who understand that the economy is a psychology engine.
And if we don't keep that 100%, it doesn't matter what's happening with our physical assets.
We won't be ready when the time comes.
So, we need our task force to give us Their best estimates of how close they'll be to averting a gigantic hospital debacle because of lack of equipment.
If they say that we're nowhere near it, then you and I need to work harder.
Literally, you and I need to work harder.
Because if we're sending our first-line hospital people into battle without weapons, you and I need to work harder.
There's something we need to do.
Donate money, find a friend, make a connection, build a mask.
I don't know. Must be something we could do, push our politicians.
So yeah, we need to know, are we 10% of the way there, 30% of the way there, with a good chance of closing the gap?
Are we 90% there and full confidence we'll close it, and we're going to keep making stuff so we can help people in other countries?
Wouldn't that be great? And by the way, all you'd have to do is tell me that we're going to make enough for us, but we're going to go gangbusters to make enough for the rest of the world.
If my government just told me that, I would have a much better sense of how we're going to get to the end of this.
That would give me some confidence and visibility about the future, and that would allow me to be one of the people who can support this idea machine that is the economy.
So I'm trying to do the very best I can, and I realize that if you did not have a background in Some of this stuff, economics and business, it would not be obvious whatsoever that getting the way we think about it is actually important to the outcome.
It is the outcome.
The outcome is nothing but, in terms of the economics, the way this turns out is almost entirely a function of how we collectively expect it to turn out.
And we could literally Will the economy into a stronger place?
Now, I don't mean in magic ways.
You know, nothing like, you know, new-agey or anything.
I'm saying that our expectations is what causes us to act in certain ways, and we can simply tune our expectation to a positive outcome, and the odds of that translating into an actual positive outcome are about 100%, because that's what it is.
The economy is nothing but those expectations.
Played out in the physical world.
I've probably said enough about that.
I was looking at the death counts.
So I go to worldometer, worldometer.com, worldometer.
And it's got some good statistics, well they're all bad I suppose, about coronavirus.
And I've got a question.
Because it looked like the total number of deaths in the United States is flattening.
Can anybody confirm that?
So I think the deaths in the United States are over 6,000.
But I need a confirmation of this.
I think that yesterday the total number of deaths in the United States from coronavirus was 1,049.
Just before I signed on, and of course today is not over, but let's say today is 90% over, because most of the cases are on the East Coast, and the East Coast just has a couple hours left before it's tomorrow.
So the number is 968 today, as of a few minutes ago.
So that's under 968.
Yesterday's count. So yesterday was 1,049.
The day's not over, but it's almost over.
And we're under that number.
Does that...
She has only...
I'm looking at your comments to see if anybody has some comments.
Because it looks like it started to go flat.
Is that...
Can anybody confirm that?
Now, it should be said...
That, you know, one day's number doesn't mean much.
So, you know, you'd have to wait for several days to know if there's anything like a trend.
They changed on...
The daily count stops at midnight GMT. Huh.
So, is today the day?
Is today the day?
Maybe. Let me remind you of my prediction, because I think I have the most contrarian prediction.
Because the predictions tend to be, it's going to be hundreds of thousands of people, it's going to be terrible, and some people say, ah, it's no worse than the flu, and it's going to be nothing, we should have gone back to work.
My take is that it's probably exactly as dangerous as experts are saying, I mean, they may be off by a factor of five, but it's still in the super dangerous category.
So I think that's true.
But I think that we will be so good at combating it that we'll surprise ourselves and that the total net number of deaths will be under 5,000.
Now you say to yourself, but Scott, it's already 6,000.
And it's not done.
It's not even close to done.
So why would you say it's going to be 5,000 if it's already 6,000?
And the answer is, I'm talking about net.
Meaning that you have to count the number of people that we saved by keeping people off the streets, which turns out to be a pretty big number.
And it's bigger than the coronavirus death number at the moment.
Now, in theory...
If the experts are right, the coronavirus deaths will pass the number that we're saving by keeping people off the roads and away from hiking accidents and stuff like that.
At some point it'll cross, but I'm predicting that we'll have enough days before that's going to happen to actually get on top of it.
Meaning that the hydroxychloroquine might work.
There might be something else that works.
Maybe the testing will become more ubiquitous.
Maybe we figure something else out.
But that's where I'm at on that.
All right. What about suicides?
Well, I wonder.
I'm not entirely sure that there will be more of them.
I think we can guarantee that whenever there's a change of any kind, people will react to it.
So here's what I would expect.
I can't guarantee this, but here's what I expect.
I'll bet you the number of suicides goes down, while at the same time I will acknowledge that there might be people who will kill themselves who might not have.
But I think that the net will be positive.
Now some of it might be just that we're forced to be in the same quarters.
So I would think you need a little bit of privacy to do something like that.
So one of the effects is that people just won't have privacy for a while.
One of the effects might be that people feel connected to other people in a way that they didn't feel before.
Maybe people are just more afraid of the world than they are of their own little problems for a while.
So if I had to guess, I think we'll be better on that metric as well.
If it's up, will you lump that in your net?
Well, it all has to be lumped, right?
If it's something we could measure or even estimate with some reasonable estimate, net is net.
So you don't have to ask me other questions about is this in the number or is it not?
If we can measure it as part of did people die or did they not, then yeah, of course.
It doesn't matter if I've thought of it yet.
If you think of something else that could be in that number, yeah, that counts too, whichever way it goes.
That's how it works.
All right. We need a gross prediction because net is impossible to calculate.
No, it isn't. No, we'll be able to calculate that.
Now, of course, not with the certainty of precision like a rocket.
A rocket needs to be precise.
But we know, for example, on any given week of the year, how many people are likely to die in drunk driving accidents.
So all you'd have to do is say, well, let's say this year isn't going to be that much different than the last three years.
How do we do? And you say, oh, we're down on that by 10,000 people.
Coronavirus deaths are up by 15,000 or whatever.
Net is not valid.
Net is the only thing that's valid.
Because if you make a decision which affects all of those other things, you can't not count all the other things that got affected.
It's got to be lumped in there.
I've asked 100 times how you're going to measure metrics.
Well, I just told you.
You would just estimate based on prior years and then count up the coronavirus deaths and bada bang, you got it.
I like when stocks are up.
So the thing you should...
Here's one of these little predictive things that will drive you crazy.
On any day when the stocks are sharply up, there's more chance that tomorrow is going to be sharply down.
It's probably like 2 to 1, and vice versa.
You know, when it's down, there's probably a 2 to 1 chance that it'll at least be up a little bit the next day.
So just, you know, you could still have a run of, you know, five days in a row that's down, so that's not ruled out.
I'm just saying it's one of those general patterns that you see a lot.
Net is 100% valid.
Thank you. Can we talk about Jared Kushner?
Let's talk about Jared Kushner.
Personally, I feel more comfortable whenever he's on the case.
He... I don't remember him talking at the task forces before, so I'm generally confident that things are going to be done rationally and, let's say, with kindness when he's on the case, because he seems good at that.
So that's good.
But he needs to do the same thing that the rest of the task force needs to do, which is tell us where we're at in terms of meeting our needs for equipment for the front line people.
Talk about the admiral.
Was it the Admiral who's in charge of procurement and logistics?
See, I think that's the guy who needs to be telling everybody else the numbers.
So, it's not Jared Kushner's fault if he can't tell you the numbers, if the guy who's in charge of getting the numbers also can't tell you the numbers.
So, it's probably the admiral.
Now, he had some BS about tapping into the hospital's procurement systems and writing some software and blah, blah, blah.
And what did he say? He was going to get a Procurement tower or something, some buzzword.
I didn't even know what it meant.
So a lot of that was just jargon and nonsense, and I'm sure he's very good at his job, maybe the best in the world, according to Trump, and I have no reason to doubt it.
But in terms of his communicating with the public, which I don't believe he's ever had to do before, Maybe that's the first time he's ever had to talk to a non-military audience about something that's important to his job in this way.
So I don't think he hit the mark, but I would expect him to quickly adapt because at that level...
At that level, they don't make the same mistake twice.
You know what I mean? Like by the time you're an admiral or a general, you're going to look at your performance, you're going to fix it.
It's not going to be the same the second day.
So I would expect that he will start giving us some useful numbers.
He has not done that yet. In fact, I'll make a prediction.
You want a prediction? Tomorrow's press conference, the admiral will tell you Something closer to, this is what we need, this is what we have.
And it could be a wild estimate, but if it's the best he knows, then I want to know that, even if he's wrong, and even if he has to revise it later.
Alright. Is there anything else you guys want?
Otherwise... Where is Schiff?
Will we learn from our mistakes with China?
I'll tell you, the United States has never had this feeling about China before all at the same time.
You know, China can be divisive.
You know, if the Democrats like China, then the Republicans have to not like them and vice versa.
But at the moment, the United States, I think we see what we're dealing with here.
So... You know, I'm being asked in the comments about 3M. Apparently the president had to put the boot on 3M, or maybe they were helping 3M get rid of some kind of obstacle.
So I don't want to assume that whatever the order was that the president signed, I don't want to assume...
The 3M was doing anything wrong, but they may have had some obstacle that they also needed the president to get out of the way.
So that's a wait and see.
I wouldn't want to make a judgment based on what we know about that, which is not much.
Where is Joe? Yes, where is Joe Biden?
Do you think Gavin Newsom will push for martial law?
You know, I'm not entirely sure.
What martial law buys you that we don't already have?
I mean, I could probably make a list of what you can do with it that you can't do without it, but do we need it?
I don't see the need for it.
If that develops, anything's possible, I suppose.
I'm far less concerned than all of you are about turning into a dictatorship.
And part of that is You know, my little monologue earlier, talking about, you know, these ideas that hold us together as a country.
And the strongest ideas we have is that we're not going to put up with a dictator.
There's probably nothing that is more basic to the American character.
And I'm talking about everybody who is, you know, ten generations here, plus everybody who came over yesterday.
Because even the people who came here yesterday, They're not into dictators.
Not at all.
So the risk that this country could turn into a dictatorship Maybe I'm too optimistic, but to me it's zero times zero times zero because the public, we just have too strong a mental model that we would die to change that.
I mean, so many Americans would just say, oh, that's the deal?
We're going to be a dictatorship?
All right, where do I have to sign up to die to change that?
And you'd have so many volunteers that...
It would change instantly.
So I think we're very safe as long as our mental models are good, and they are.
We're very safe from that.
Now, you want to hear something controversial?
You won't like it.
For years I've been saying that we see privacy and our loss of privacy as a bad thing.
That we believe privacy is good and loss of privacy is bad.
I've been saying that our filters are backwards.
And that the illusion here is that what we're really comparing is one person having privacy, but you don't.
Because that's bad. You don't want to live in the world where other people have privacy, but you don't.
Like, no, no thank you.
That'd be the worst world, right?
So when you say, do you want privacy, or do you think it'd be okay if we had less privacy, we reflexively think in terms of, I don't want to be the one who doesn't have it.
But consider this world.
How about a world where nobody had it?
Now, I'm not talking about your bedroom and bathroom activities.
You still have that as private as you want.
But imagine this pandemic came and we'd already, all of us, given away our privacy.
And just think about this as an idea, not a suggestion.
There's nothing about what I'm going to say that's actually going to happen in the real world.
It's just a thought experiment.
So you don't have to get mad at me.
I'm not promoting it.
It wouldn't matter if I did.
It's not going to happen. So just think about it for the intellectual thought about it.
If we had given away all of our privacy, let's say we had let the government know at all times where our phones are so that it could tell who was near anybody else, then their contact tracing would be instant.
So you wouldn't have to worry about, uh-oh, this person just was found to have the virus.
The moment you find it out, you would just put that person's phone over into your system, and everybody who had contact with them in the last two weeks would get a text.
I think they're doing that somewhere, South Korea maybe.
But in order to do that, we would have already had to agree to give up our privacy.
Now the downside is that they abuse it.
But would they? Here's the thing.
They could abuse it if they had privacy and you didn't.
But remember, that's the situation that we all agree is the worst one.
So I don't favor a situation where somebody in the government could still have their own privacy and then abuse yours.
You'd have to be in the same boat.
Whereas if they started to abuse your privacy, you could know they were doing it because they wouldn't have any privacy.
You would know what they were doing.
So you'd say, hey, don't abuse my privacy.
Or there would be nothing to abuse because everybody had given it up.
Now, you'd have to have exceptions, you know, maybe not your health care, etc.
But you could easily imagine a world where giving away all of your privacy allows you to solve gigantic problems.
Gigantic problems, like a pandemic.
Right? If we had given away all of our privacy, The pandemic would be over.
But, you know, it has its own costs, and you're well aware of them.
So I'm not selling it. I'm not saying you should give away your privacy.
I'm just saying, if we had, we'd be working right now.
Somebody says, naive.
Somebody says, very naive.
Well, I block all those people.
So you're welcome to give reasons.
But if you say naive, or very naive, or even just wrong, then indeed, you will be blocked.
They would abuse this.
Alright, can we agree that you don't have to tell me that people would try to abuse it?
Can you agree that I know that, so you don't have to keep telling me?
Because that would be sort of in the obvious category.
But everything's got a risk and a trade-off.
So there you are. What were the odds that we would all be dressing like Antifa?
If we're living in a simulation...
I always say this jokingly, so don't take this too seriously.
But I always say that one piece of evidence, not proof, but compatible evidence, that you're living in a simulation is code reuse.
That you'd see things that, you know, you'd just see patterns over and over again.
So don't you think we're seeing some code reuse?
You know, one of the biggest stories is people wearing masks that are just like scarves around their face.
Mostly. I guess they had all kinds of masks.
But they had all kinds of masks and they were wearing the masks in public.
And that was like a big story for the last several years to be a whole bunch of masked people in public.
And then there's a pandemic and what does it cause?
People to wear masks in public.
I don't know. Did both of those things have to happen in the same few years?
Completely different stories, and they both required somebody to wear a mask in public?
Code reuse.
That is how you know that this is a simulation.
How is Mexico doing?
I do not know how Mexico is doing.
You know, you want to hear a theory?
Say yes. Yes, you do.
You want to hear a wild theory?
Alright, here's the caveat.
I'm not going to go full conspiracy theory.
I'm just going to say that if you were going to predict the future, maybe this would be So, if you believe that the cartels in Mexico have too much control over the government, including the federal government, that we could never really work with the federal government of Mexico to do something about the cartels, Because they are the cartels.
Or at least they're working with them, we're afraid of them, we're taking money from them, or something.
So there's some kind of too much of a closeness there.
Now, that's the first assumption.
So if you don't think that's the case, then nothing else I say makes sense.
But for those of you who say, yeah, I'll go with you so far that the government of Mexico is probably a little friendly with the cartels.
Now let's say that you're President Trump and you want to figure out how to fix this cartel situation.
And you're looking at all your options.
And you look at your assets and what you got going.
And you say, you know, what asset we have is this El Chapo is in jail.
So you've got El Chapo and he's probably flexible right now.
Right? He's probably flexible.
So El Chapo's in our jail, probably getting flexible.
Doesn't look like he's ever going to go back to his life of being a, you know, narco crime boss.
I would think he's really flexible.
Now, just hold that thought.
Separately in the news, did you see the weird story about the president of Mexico visited the town where El Chapo's mother lived?
And in what looked like it was planned, and there were cameras rolling and everything, he stopped and went over and greeted the woman and talked to her in her car, the 95-year-old mom.
And she said something about, you know, she had sent him a letter, I think he said he got it, probably something about her son.
And so people said, all right, is this a coincidence?
Is it a coincidence that the president of Mexico happens to just run into El Chapo's mom in an intersection and decides to stop and go talk to her?
Does that sound like a coincidence?
Well, maybe it was.
So one possibility is that's all it was.
He's just a politician.
He just, you know, he had no beef with the mother.
Maybe she's kind of famous, so I just stopped and talked to her.
So maybe it was just that possible.
Here's another possibility.
And I'm not saying this is true.
This is just for fun, okay?
Not a prediction.
I don't know anything.
I don't have any inside information.
Just for fun. If you were Trump, how would you get rid of the cartels And still get the government of Mexico involved.
Well, here's the way I'd do it.
I would get the cartel whose leader you have under your control to protect the president and the high officials in the government.
So if the president of Mexico needed protection from his own country, who would he turn to?
His military? Well, could he trust them?
Maybe not. But he might be able to turn to El Chapo's cartel.
And El Chapo could.
And again, I'm not saying this is happening.
This is just for fun. El Chapo could agree with the government of the United States.
Here's the deal. I'll go straight and get out of the drug business.
And in return, you know, you'll give me some leniency and you'll let my people live and stuff.
But we'll get out of the drug business.
But between now and the time we do, we'll protect the government of Mexico so that you can work with them to get rid of the other cartels.
And suddenly, the president of Mexico is talking to the mother of El Chapo, and it all makes sense.
So could it be that the president of Mexico may be under the protection of El Chapo's people because the United States and El Chapo Find that to be a good understanding.
Maybe that's the best way to protect the president of Mexico.
Maybe that's why we'll see more military action against the cartels.
Now, should you bet on this?
No. No.
No. If this ever became like a betting market unpredicted, don't bet on that.
I'm just saying it fits the evidence.
That doesn't mean it's true.
Because it only fits the evidence we know, which is not very much.
Somebody says the Mexican army ran from El Chapo's son.
Right. So you do know that, at least in some places, the cartel is more powerful than the army.
So it does kind of make sense, doesn't it?
Kind of makes sense. And if he were El Chapo, would you make that deal?
I would. Because what else has he got?
El Chapo might want a good life for whoever's not in jail, his family and stuff.
Maybe he could make a deal.
Get him out of the drug business.
They have some chance of living.
But he might need to protect the president while business is being taken care of.
All right. Is Zoom safe?
You mean Zoom as in Z-O-O-M, the software?
So first of all, Zoom is an amazingly good product.
It's a really good product, I gotta say.
It's just well designed.
But it's not the only thing that does that.
There are other...
I used something the other day that could do something similar.
But Zoom sends at least some of its traffic through servers in China, and most of their engineers, I think most of them are in China, and that's a security issue.
So if you're just talking to your friends, It's great, but if you have any kind of proprietary information or anything you wouldn't want China to know about, I wouldn't use that.
Zoom sends all your passwords to China, says somebody.
That's probably literally true in the sense that the traffic might be going through servers there.
I'm not saying it's literally true and that they're emailing your password to the government.
All right.
I think I've said everything I need to say.
And I will see you in the morning.
But before that, I want to tell you that you're going to have a really good night of sleep tonight again.
If you didn't have one last night, well, even more reason to have a good one tonight.
But you're going to get better and better at sleeping.
Until you can just lay down and drift away.
So think of my voice counting you to 20 and feel yourself just drifting away.
And I won't do it tonight.
You can just replay it in your mind.
And then tell me, tell me how well you slept tomorrow morning.
I will see you in the morning, 10 a.m.
Eastern, 7 a.m.
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