 Okay, we're back, we're live, I'm Jay Fidel, this is Think Tech Hawaii, and more specifically this is Global Connections with Carlos Juarez, joins us from Texas I think today, and Carlos, welcome to the show. Aloha Jay, always a pleasure to connect and obviously give you some additional perspective there as we call this global global connections. I always have one leg and one arm in Mexico and another part in Texas, so I kind of straddle the border and unlike some people, I build bridges, I basically connect these two parts of North America and well, you know, a great opportunity for us to continue our dialogue as we've had. That's why we appreciate you so much Carlos. By the way, the name of the show is America is Burning and it is, and how does that, I suppose the unspoken part is how does that look to the rest of the world? How does it compare to the rest of the world? And by the way, I just saw in the news that the governor of Texas has required masks now, that's outside as of today. Yeah, yeah. So again, in Texas like Florida, like California and a few other spots, you know, right now facing rather well, unexpected peaks and you know, it happened a few weeks back, we had this or a month or two ago, we begin this opening process and now we're seeing what has happened, especially in places like bars and places where people are gathering in close surroundings. But beyond that, we'll unravel some of this. I mean, a lot of it is, I think it continues to be the mixed signals we get from the national leadership. President Trump has not yet, you know, come out and said, hey, I think what a day or two he said something that sounded more positive towards masks. But you know, at the end of the day, we have a handful of Republicans still too few too small and very late. If you don't have, I think proper leadership, leading by example and making clear, you know, you're going to have a lot of people, well, and part of it too is this independent culture of the US. It's remarkable when you compare with other nations. I mean, look at many of the East Asian countries, whether it's Taiwan or even South Korea. These are places that, well, you know, there are different factors. But the people basically, you know, I guess, you know, they see it as part of their own civic duty. And I think what strikes me is that so many people have this sense of very selfishness, not realizing that those actions are affecting you and me and my father and, you know, my, you know, friends. This is a public good and the pandemic doesn't like just, it doesn't stop at borders and it doesn't just somehow affect only certain people. It's everywhere. Well, I mean, let me sort of ask you if this works for the model of spreader that we hear about. The model of spreader we hear about wants to go to Fort Lauderdale for the spring festivities. He wants to go to the beach or she, he or she wants to, you know, socially engage. And he's in his late teens or early twenties. Is he thinking about community versus individualism or is he just badly educated? Well, it's a little bit of everything and obviously a little bit of selfishness too and not understanding again, because we hear it again and again from the experts and unfortunately when we don't heed their warnings, we have this. So I go back to this. I mean, the proper role of a political leader is to set the tone, lead by example, repeat, you know, share information, let the experts, let the science guide, you know, our policies. And, you know, from the get go, we've seen again way back in the beginning of the year in the early part of this crisis, President Trump kind of dismissing it. And then, you know, after what, maybe two months of daily meeting suddenly it just all stopped and now there's no information. And I think that becomes a problem too. You just don't have it because I've been watching and monitoring, you know, both what's happening in Mexico very carefully and other parts of the world. You really need to have the leadership telling you and reminding you and reminding you again and again and giving you and yet at the same time giving you hope saying, look, if we do this, this will happen. Here's what we have to do and here's why it's got to be a full package in the absence of that we're going to just have this very hodgepodge and I think in the end, without a clear strategy or policy from the U.S. what you have is individual states and communities and cities kind of having to take it up on their own and that's not the most effective way at all. Yeah. Yeah, and we've been talking about that. I mean, if he was speaking to the nation, then that would avoid the differentiation between states and cities and counties. But what he has done is not only has he not spoken to the nation, he has said it's not my problem. It's their problem. They got to fix it. They got to find a way. And then he doesn't help them as a matter of fact. He stands in the way, for example, of setting up competitive markets, competitive bidding on ventilators, which is very destructive stuff and masks and then lying on top of all of that. So what you get is a thousand voices, a thousand policies. They don't agree with each other. They take different positions at different times and you have no collaboration at all. If you want to deal with a pandemic, you have to collaborate. Yeah, and it's the mixed signals that just send more confusion. And it's interesting because, of course, we're facing now in barely four months now this presidential election, of course, and at least today, today in early July, we've got polls telling us that obviously Biden is doing better and Trump is not doing so well, except when asked how one of these candidates handles the economy, there's still a significant amount of support for Trump in handling the economy. But the irony is that that's a double-edged sword because it then gives him a reason to somehow not look at the pandemic, not look at these other issues and try to focus on starting up the economy. And unfortunately, what we've begun to see already now very clearly this past month is moving too soon to open and not doing it somehow carefully, it's going to backfire. And so now we have states like Texas and Florida that are suddenly having to put the brakes and cancel the opening or reverse, I guess, opening beaches and whatnot or any of that. I totally agree with you. I mean, one of his big platform points is looking at all that I've done for the economy. And it was, I wouldn't call it great beforehand. I think it was sort of flimsy running to the end of 2019. There's such disparity in wealth, such disparity in control and all that. And he was feeding money to the wealthy with the tax reform act. But I think what strikes me most is he gets up up on the stage and he says, we're back, we've licked it. Now we have to reopen. And he was he was a leader in that. And he created a followership who all agreed, let's reopen, we got to reopen. We have to get back our old economy and all that, all the Trump economy. He was thinking that it was, you know, a great political move for the election. But in fact, I don't know how you felt. When I saw him say that, I said, wait a minute, have we fixed the problem yet? Have we have we provided masks, ventilators, policy? Have we have we been helpful on social distancing? Have we been helpful on therapeutics and vaccines? No, we hadn't done anything. And he stands up there and says, you got to rebuild my economy. I said, this is going to be a disaster. How did you feel? Well, I mean, some of that, too. And I think the other thing that we have to understand, the US is a very large country, you know, and what's happening in Wyoming is not the same as Virginia, Florida, even Hawaii relative to other places has been much more modest. And, you know, but again, you're in an island economy. It's much more easy to seal it off. What I'm getting out there is that you can't expect the same outcome in every place and some places are going to simply have. So you need a little bit of wiggle room and flexibility. But I think at the end, you really need to have a continual message that is consistent and clear. And and so while you reopen, you have to do it smart. You can't just do it and everything we're going back to normal. And that's why you need good communication that explains it. We're going to do it, but we have to do it carefully. We still have to social distance. We have to and we have to be driven by the data. We have to see, OK, as we now see things have gone bad. And you mentioned the governor of Texas. Well, he's looking at the numbers. And by any objective measure, you're seeing a massive spike. And and that's a result of poor again, poor, you know, the decisions and people just kind of going loose and thinking it's all over. Even after what in the past week I saw here, they've begun closing the bars and you've got a group of bar owners that are suing the state because, you know, somehow they're being discriminated. And to me, that's just astonishing. I go back to this in the end. I think people have to understand this is a first of all, it's a health crisis. Yes, the economy, yes, so we need that and it's going to come back. But frankly, if we don't address the health crisis, the economy is going to continue to lag and then it's going to be longer. We're going to have more, you know, lockdowns in the future. So it's a health crisis first. And more than that, it's also a public issue, a public good. Or, you know, somehow something that we all have to come together to understand and that my actions affect you, your actions affect me. But we're not doing that. The people are not together. And as usual, Trump has been divisive. He's made divisive statements. This thing about the mask is it's divisive. He has people fighting with each other about whether they should wear a mask when they come into the store, actually fighting. And there was one case where somebody shot somebody who tried to get him to wear a mask coming into a store. Well, let's talk about Europe for a moment. And I saw a thing in the paper a couple of days ago about the total population of the EU is 446 million. OK, that's a half again as big as the US or at least substantially. The US is 330 and they and they have these days. They have 35, 35, 100 new cases, new COVID cases a day, 35, 100. The state of the state of Arizona has a population of 7.2 million, which is a small fraction of the EU. And they have a new cases of 4,800 per day. That's more than all of the EU. We are so far out of control. Fauci says we are so far out of control. And really the question is, can we ever come back? Can we ever get control? Well, again, we are at a very clear, vast difference there. And today what we see, again, I don't have the beautiful charts, but you can just see Europe did this and now it has bent that curve down and it's down here. And we've done this and now we just seem to be going again, spiking up so it's a very uneven situation. And again, I would just say in Europe, while there is some variation, there are no doubt in actually the UK, pretty problematic still. Nevertheless, on the whole, the EU has managed to more effectively coordinate and cooperate it. And look at you can imagine the sting. It must have been for Trump, but the EU has just announced they are going to restrict travel from the United States together with Russia and Brazil. And so we're suddenly not going to be able to get to Europe with a very few minor exceptions. That's got a sting, you know, and my first thought when that was announced, like, well, I'm sure he's going to be angry enough to like impose more tariffs or more, you know, some kind of reaction that will be more rash and impulsive. But, you know, again, I think we're seeing the unevenness and the other bigger question, of course, is the yes, it is. I've mentioned a health crisis, no doubt. But the impact on the economy, I mean, the global economy on the whole is, you know, never experienced this in our lifetime. The U.S. economy, of course, is going to be plunging even lower. I was reading or no, we're looking at some recent reports from the International Monetary Fund, where they have now just back in April, they had projected a decline of 3% for the global economy. Now it's going up to 4.9. The U.S. even more, more closer to 6%, but these numbers are kind of hard to really know because everything is in flux, you know, a lot of uncertainty. Bottom line is we're going to be facing a very slow recovery. And, you know, will we confront, you know, a second way? Because actually what we're seeing in the U.S. is not a second way. We're still in that first one that hasn't quite been effectively managed. But as we're being told by many, we might anticipate in the fall or in the winter, you know, a return of a different, you know, even in places like Europe, they have to be monitoring it carefully. But at the end of the day, the other point, and I want to maybe address this quickly, is that the pandemic is now no longer centered primarily in Europe. It is in the U.S., absolutely, but it's also now spreading in the developing world and in particular Latin America. And we see Brazil has been, of course, in the headlines for some time and they are facing deep crisis. Mexico as well now is at the peak at the moment. And one of the challenges we have about all these places is that often the information is really hard to nail down and get accurate. They're not doing as much testing. So they don't actually have real numbers and information. But there are differences in these emerging markets, developing countries that are going to play out in different ways. In the wealthier advanced industrial economies of Europe and the U.S., obviously you have a safety net that's greater. You have a central bank that can sort of stimulate the economy in different ways. You have many people, a pretty good percentage who have the capacity. Like you and I here, we continue our work, it goes on, we have to modify it. But when you look at a place like Brazil or Mexico or Peru, a very high percentage of the population is in the informal economy. They don't have regular jobs. They depend on day to day, you know, selling goods on the street or doing more informal bartering. And there is simply no safety net there. Set aside, you also have health care systems that are going to be weaker and, you know, strained. You've also got a lower per capita income. And so, again, people are going to be harder hit. And again, limited role for the government. There's also no social distancing when you have massive, you know, crowded urbanized centers, which is the reality for most of Latin America. People don't have the luxury of staying at home in a nice home where they can just, you know, cubby away. They have to go out into the street, into the public transport. And and so without social distancing, without the economic wherewithal, without even the testing to really give us accurate information, the numbers simply may look better than the reality. And so I think, you know, we spoke a couple of months ago, we spoke about this, how it's going to play out in the developing world. But interestingly, I would tell you the case of Africa is rather curious because in many ways, it's a very young population in many of the countries, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. But we're not likely to see as grave of a situation. And it's not entirely clear why some of it is a function of, you know, maybe less mobility of societies. You know, even Latin America today, they're very globalized and, you know, there's a lot of a lot more interaction with the other parts of the world. But Sub-Saharan Africa curiously may come out better than places like Latin America or certainly Europe, younger populations that can also expect to do better. Yeah, that is, that is curious. And I have the same sense of it, although I have no data. But, you know, I want to talk about what happens when you take that analysis further. So India, for example, very highly populated. A lot of people working on that, you know, the informal economy you mentioned, the government really doesn't do much for them and they get hungry. And there are food, food banks available. But you have to go miles or, you know, a walk or take a train even to get food. So the government is really not dropping it on their doorstep and, you know, what is happening is that it's unraveling country. This is my information. They're unraveling. And I think this is a phenomenon you're going to see in a variety of these developing countries where it really unravels. They have nothing to lose by going out of the street. They have nothing to lose by seizing on those on the other side of the tracks and saying, we have to march on them. They have goods. They have what we want and we're going to go and take it. And I really worry about an unraveling of the social order in countries like that because they will be starving otherwise. And what else they got to do? Furthermore, I would say that maybe to a limited degree or a lesser degree, we're going to see that sort of thing in the U.S. People now don't have jobs. They don't have a prostitute jobs. They were unemployment insurances running out. They're health insurances, you know, in question. They don't have resources. They haven't been saving. This country has terrible numbers on saving. So they're going to be on the street too. And they're going to be hungry. What will happen to the social order? So here, there and everywhere. And look at the U.S. I mean, aside from the pandemic, aside from the economic, you know, punch, suddenly we have this, you know, racial injustice protest kind of weaved into there and then add to that an election that somehow in the midst of that, there's pressure and the president's wanting to do rallies and he's going to have, I think, for the July 4th over in Mount Rushmore and they've made clear, you know, no mask. So we got compounded on to what is essentially this pandemic, the other factors. But yeah, I think the potential is there. Typically, we would talk about like the developing world, the sort of third world as places of social conflict and tension, but we see it right here in our, you know, U.S. of A, a lot of divide and even something like the mask, how we've seen so much discussion about how that's become like a political statement. And you have many, particularly males who are sort of pushing a very, you know, sort of almost a hyper nationalist agenda that, you know, wearing a mask is kind of a wimpiness or weakness. And if the president is not, you know, obviously, you know, modeling that, they're going to be following his lead. So I see also the tensions here in the U.S. again, the protest movement this past month, you know, in other parts of the world, again, we're going to see that as well. And then, but I go back to this, one of the challenges I think is getting good information in a lot of places. And particularly, again, Mexico, my case in point that I know quite well, I struggle myself as a, you know, as an academic expert to really know what is the true information. Now, there are places you can see it. The news does provide some of it, but the government is often criticized at kind of trying to put a spin on it or maybe not being as blunt or as open as it could be. And President López Alvarado in Mexico, a populist leader, a leftist leader, took a lot of criticism also for downplaying it and sort of, you know, wishful thinking. Now, Brazil, the other big power in South America with a different variation of populism, a right-wing leader who also, perhaps in a more extreme way, has sort of been in denial and has taken a lot of heat for that. Again, I just can't go back to that. The power of leadership, the importance of political leadership. If you don't have it, if it's not a consistent message with good, you know, data and a mixture of the seriousness, but also providing some hope. If we do this, if we stick it together, if we kind of cooperate, it will get better. You need to have that. So it's not just gloom and doom, but it's also seriousness. Here's what we need to do. And here's why we do it. And at the end of the tunnel, it will be better. Otherwise... Termination and perseverance. The guy in Brazil, like Trump, is a denier. Yes. And he's sending, you know, really negative messages to people about taking care of themselves and their fellow men and women. And the problem there is, look what happened. Look what happened in Brazil. It's got an enormous spike going on. Yeah. And these things are, you know, the one thing that Fauci said that sticks with me is that when you lose control, this is a big price to pay. This is very hard to regain control. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it sort of unravels. It kind of becomes like one of these, I don't know, it takes on a life of its own and you can't just put the brakes on it. And then the fact is, you know, the political leadership, if you've had a leader, whether it's Trump or Bolsonaro in Brazil, who has been in denial, and then suddenly they decide to change their tune, they don't have credibility. People are not gonna accept it as real legitimate. So, you know, you just can't, you can't change it on a dime. And that's a real problem. Yeah, well, that's certainly that exists here. That Trump has been lying, you know, for his entire administration and he continues to do that and misleading us. If all of a sudden he was to get straight, if all of a sudden he was to tell the truth, nobody would believe him anyway. He has zero credibility with, you know, at least 50, 60% of the country. And the other ones follow him blindly, which without critical thinking. So, you know, I feel that the phenomenon you describe in the developing countries, in terms of leadership and credibility, is the same here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Ash, I think it's frustrating. And then with the US political system, we've got the Republican, particularly in the Senate, the Republicans who are simply kind of looking the other way and, you know, looking to cover their own asses, let's say. And we've had a very small number. Even, you know, in the House, I think Liz Cheney, this one of the House leaders has begun to push back and increasingly what we're starting to see now for the presidential campaign is a small number, but a perhaps growing number of Republicans who are now anti-Trump Republicans. And until you see enough of those to kind of make a critical, will we see it? And again, in terms of the political analysis, yes, if the election was held today, maybe we could anticipate an outcome, but guess what? The president has tremendous powers of incumbency and a track record of using dirty tricks and who's to say that come September, October, there might be some disinformation that comes out. And, you know, remember the Ukraine saga, we might see some, you know, whether it's even true information or not. It's just, you know, throwing mud on the wall and I can think we can anticipate it's gonna get pretty ugly and pretty nasty. Yeah. And a lot of people will be misled. You can assume that he'll try to, you know, he'll try to bury Biden with some kind of phony distraction. That's very serious. But going back to Congress for a minute, Congress is dysfunctional. So what I was alluding to before is this whole thing about the social fabric breaking down economically, socially, it's not just black lives matter. It's people in the street looking for food. And I think we have the risk of that happening because the benefits that have been out there are, you know, they're ending. And there may not be so much benefit anymore by the states or the federal government and they gotta eat. So what do you do? Well, the government has to act, it has to provide food. And our jobs even, you know, somebody referred earlier today to show to the CCC, the Conservation Corps, during FDR and the WPA during FDR, the government hasn't even touched that one. So we, you know, I'm not sure the government can prevent people from going out of the streets because it's dysfunctional. Yeah. And you know, some time ago, a month or two ago, I heard a fascinating interview about somebody from the sort of restaurant business because they've been hit hardest, of course. They've been closed for months, some of them will not survive. But what he was describing was a fascinating, like why didn't we figure this out? And he was saying how rather than give everybody these stimulus checks and just, you know, put money in the economy, which is obviously the easy strategy, why not turn to the restaurants and say, turn them into almost like a community, you know. And now this has happened at the micro level in many places. Some restaurant tours say, hey, what do I do? I know how to make food. And so let me begin this. But it would have been probably almost better to sort of have the government. So, okay, work with the restaurants, say, look, we will provide you with this, you know, stimulus, you've got the facilities, the capacity, you're in the neighborhood. And then those people, instead of going to these food banks, which has also been, you know, dramatic to see them, the massive outpouring, but it would also keep alive these restaurants in a way to do what they know how to do best. Instead, we've got restaurants that are clearly not going, not going to survive a fair number of them. Well, they're already folding up. Absolutely. They're folding up in Hawaii. They're not coming back. And as you suggested a minute ago, the stimulus that we've seen and maybe the ability of the national government, the federal government to provide that, at some point it's going to be running out. It can't just simply, you know, even the unemployment benefits. There's a limited capacity, but it goes back to this. Do we manage the health crisis so that we can get to the economic crisis? Or do we rush to get the economy running without having the health crisis solved? And that's where we are now. What's your answer to that, Carlos? Well, again, we're already seeing now the need to reverse a lot of this opening. Again, I just go back to this, you know, you've got some leaders, again, even this president, this governor of Texas suddenly having to eat some grow and have to decide, hey, guess what? You know, maybe we did move a little too quickly. By contrast, Texas has a controversial Lieutenant governor, very, very outspoken. And a few days ago in Fox News, it was very critical of Fauci saying that he's going to stop listening to him. And Fauci doesn't know anything. And it's like, again, those kind of signals from political leaders, they don't help. They make it worse, because some people, especially maybe those that aren't terribly informed, that's all they hear. And when they hear that, then they're not going to wear masks. They're not going to care. They're going to blame, you know, the whatever, you know, the left wing media, when what we really need is good information and effective leadership. And it's not a partisan issue. Any leader needs to be doing this. So, boy, you know, we've just, we've brought out like the worst and everything. And we're paying for that now by the aggressive push to perhaps essentially open too quickly and without careful management of all the pieces of the puzzle. So it's- The problem, the problem is we open too quickly. It's hard to go back to lockdown. People resist that. They don't want to do that. And so they get confused. They get angry. And remember, they're stuck. It's not like they can get out of this. They're locked into it, even if they're not in lockdown. So I really worry about the average person feeling very badly and looking for a way out, if you will, looking for some relief from the pressure, you know, because we all live our lives. We all know that we have a certain amount of time on the planet. And right now, this is lost time. This is like Rip and Winkle, you know? Maybe you wake up later and find it's better. But right now, I can't be optimistic. So what do you think is gonna happen here? Give me a two week expectation, Carlos. Gosh, I mean, again, I think right now we're still seeing this peak and it's not gonna go away right away in some of these places, whether it's Texas or, you know, Florida, that will continue. I'm curious to see, you know, because we've got pushback already from the reversal now to have to close back down. That's not gonna be well received by many people. And yet, you know, I go back to this, you know, we need good information and we need people to accept it and understand it. And I think, you know, we've had this polarization of our body politic now for years. It's not something that arrived now. But given that that was already there, this has only exacerbated it. So now you have even more divide. I don't have a lot of optimism for the near term. You know, there are others who will say, wow, this is a great opportunity once we come out of it and we'll redefine, you know, the workplace and the home place. And for some that will work. Clearly there's a further divide. Those of us who have, who work more in the knowledge and service sector, who can somehow continue what we're doing versus those who are maybe, you know, working more with manual, you know, manufacturing or the, you know, the hotel and restaurant businesses, they are not gonna be able to come back to where they were. They have to reinvent themselves or simply close out and go into something else. So we're gonna see a lot of shaking up of that. Again, you know, for some maybe optimistic, trying to say, well, look, let's come out of this and rethink everything, you know? So it's a tremendous window of opportunity. It may be that some places will seize it better than others, you know, everything from, hey, now we need better, you know, bike lanes or walking places. People need to, you know, be able to enjoy going out more or even a sense of community spirit. I think we've seen examples of that in different places where people have suddenly gotten to know their neighbors. They've lived next to forever and now for the first time, maybe start talking to them. But, you know, we've got so much uncertainty still ahead. I think we're not quite out of it for some time and, you know, we're gonna have to roll with it and see how it plays out. And what listening to you, what comes to my mind is this, is that we already know that we're gonna suffer a certain number of casualties and it's unpredictable how many, only a lot. We already know that a lot of businesses are likewise casualties, okay? So when you look at it, of course, we wanna renew, we wanna reinvent, reimagine our whole society. And the positive point is that at the end of the day, like it or not, we will have to do that. But in the process, there will be many, many casualties. People aren't really used to that idea. No, and even those who are facing, you know, people who are dying, it's not a death like in the past. You suddenly, you can't even see the people at the end of their life and you can't have a funeral in a proper way. And so that, I can't help but imagine for psychologists and mental health professionals, what that is doing to people. And, you know, just the whole, you know, stay at home crisis, what it has done to, you know, to create, you know, again, trauma, again, I don't know what it would be called, but just dealing with the anxiety that this has caused surely has an impact on our lives that we have yet to figure out what that will mean. So it is remarkable. Again, I'm the eternal optimist, so I wanna think that, yes, we'll get through this and surely we will. And yet, boy, I think we're still gonna be in for a lot of, as you said, a lot of suffering, a lot of pain and the continued muddling of, again, the mixed signals from political leaders to me, that's a real problem. And, boy, you would like to think, just get those rascals out. I mean, if people can't just think of themselves, you have to think of the public interest. Get those rascals out. Well, thank you, Carlos, I must say this doesn't make me feel like I'm happier than a few minutes ago, but I feel like we've had a good conversation and I'm looking forward to our next one on whatever subject is current at the time, probably more around COVID, but thank you so much, Carlos. And likewise, and raising public awareness as we do here on Think Tech. So thank you, Kay, for your, and look forward to our next chat. Aloha. Aloha.