Well, ladies and gentlemen, exciting times to be alive. It's getting real. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to helping you live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less, although lately it's kind of turned into COVID central around here.

Hope you'll just stick with me. I've actually tried three times in the last couple of days to record a couple of the shows and for a variety of reasons I have not been able to get it done. I've been traveling this week. I'm in Louisville, Kentucky. Had a great meetup with a bunch of listeners last night and anyway, I sat down and did a couple of shows and I got several times into it.

I just couldn't get it done. But this evening I felt like I got to turn the mic on. So it's late at night here on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 and it's been a momentous day and a momentous evening in the news of the day. And so I wanted to just to get on the microphone, share with you a few ideas specifically about the flu pandemic, the emerging COVID-19 pandemic.

It's going to get worse before it gets better, but I'm going to try to give you some positive things to think about. And then I'll try to give you just a few ideas on economics, but I will continue to talk about some other things. Certainly things are being affected left, right and center all over the place.

So let's begin. The news is coming fast at the moment. This evening, President Trump announced that the United States is, in addition to banning travel from, let's see, what is it? South Korea and China, the United States is banning travelers from Europe, except the United Kingdom for the next 30 days.

That's a significant development. Evidently, Tom Hanks and his wife have been diagnosed with COVID-19. Just this evening, the NBA canceled the season. I pulled up a little clip on YouTube of there was a game with the Jazz and some of the team getting ready to start and all of a sudden right at the beginning, all the officials are talking to one another and they canceled the game right before tip off.

Harvard University canceling all classes. All classes are now going online. The stock market down again majorly today. Stocks are, I think, officially in bear territory now, in a bear market. And so that's a significant development. And it seems like, I'll just tell you, just getting started, but it seems like the pace of change is just coming in constantly.

New headlines frequently. I've got, I sit in a hotel room, I've got Bloomberg Business on right now watching the headlines come in minute after minute from all around the world. And certainly, these are, it's one of those crisis periods where things are happening. People's browsing around the social networks a little bit and it seems like there's a great toilet paper shortage.

So that's a very significant need for a lot of people. So it is remarkable just to see how fast things are changing. Even I was thinking about politically. I don't know if there has been ever any, I don't know if there's ever been political conditions that have been changing so quickly as they are, at least in presidential politics.

Senator Joe Biden was running for president a few weeks ago. It looked like his campaign was completely on life support. And I was feeling pretty confident that Senator Sanders would be the Democratic nominee for president and all of a sudden, two weeks, just bam, bam, bam, and everything changes.

So there's a lot of things happening very, very quickly. And so I think we can expect that trend to continue. But let's talk briefly. I'll just give you my insight on the disease. I've been talking about it for a while. So I released last week an optimistic, fairly optimistic sounding show.

I continue to maintain that optimism just simply because of what I think the data is demonstrating that this particular virus is probably not going to have quite the death toll that I was worried that it would have. And I'm also increasingly optimistic to see, although late, too late, I'm increasingly optimistic to see many people responding to the threat.

One of the things that's been so interesting to watch in China as the original, as COVID-19 started to develop in China, it's been so fascinating to watch how they've been able to successfully contain the virus through drastic measures. Now those measures were certainly very costly to China, but they were also effective and they stopped the spread of it.

And I think you see right now, Italy can totally shut down except for I think pharmacies and grocery stores. And I hope that that would stop the spread there. The reality is we know how to stop the spread of a flu virus. You stop basically all person to person contact.

That is effective and that slows the spread and stops the spread sufficient to get ahead of it and to give time for the hospital system to absorb the people who need help. And so that's a really important component of it. And so I'm optimistic about that. I'm also very grateful that young people, children especially, seem to be shared.

I guess that's probably, I think we all share a love for children and a desire to see children protected. But as a father of four young children, I'm grateful for that. Now of course the virus continues to be very harmful for older people and for people with underlying health conditions.

So we need to be cautious. But I think that I continue to be optimistic that the physical condition is not as bad as I previously feared. It's not to say that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people around the world may not die, but it's not going to be as bad as I previously feared.

Now there are a couple bits of data that are kind of against that thesis. The thing that I have found most concerning was a piece that I read yesterday and shared, I sent it to all my consulting clients. And the headline here comes from the South China Morning Post.

The headline is, "Coronavirus can travel twice as far as the official safe distance and stay in the air for 30 minutes, Chinese study finds." What happened was some Chinese epidemiologists were studying a couple of cases in China and they were able to isolate some people who had contracted the disease on a bus from another person.

And they found, it was a long distance coach bus where one person who was infected got onto a bus and sat down in the second row from the back. Now in China all of the long distance buses have CCTV cameras on them and so the researchers were able to see exactly where the person sat and they were able to see exactly how the interaction played out between that person and other members.

And what they found was the infected person passed the infection on the bus to somebody who was four and a half meters away. That was the closest they got, four and a half meters away. That's to me pretty stunning and that's very concerning. What they also found is 30 minutes later somebody came onto the bus and after the original infected person left, 30 minutes later a passenger came on and was infected.

And this just shows how infectious the disease is, just passing through small particles in the air from one person to another. That's very, very concerning. That's a really concerning piece. Then a listener, as I was talking about that online, a listener shared with me an article about a lawyer in New York City who infected about 50 people and I was reading, started to read more and was reading about somebody in Korea, a super spreader as they're known, who actually succeeded in passing the virus to thousands of people.

It's a person, individual known as patient 31. So it's very, very infectious. Now it's still, it can be defeated and so the strategy is social distancing, staying away from people, staying home and stopping and slowing the spread. And that strategy is important because it may protect you from getting infected and in addition to that important goal it has the benefit of slowing down the spread of the disease so that you can have fewer people sick at one time which gives the medical system more of an opportunity to stay up to date, to stay current with people who are sick.

So in a moment I'll talk about kind of what you can do and I think one of the key things is as far as I'm concerned it is definitely time to be distancing yourself from people, from crowds and bringing your movements and contact with people to the bare minimum.

Easier for some people than others but certainly possible. Now let's talk about the economics of the situation. I continue to think that this very clearly is going to cause major and long-term economic disruptions. The very best case I can see for the economic effects of this virus is simply devastating.

I consider devastating to be the bare minimum and we'll see where we're going to go from there. But I want you to think about and to understand a little bit about why I consider this to be fairly certain at this point. Why are stock markets down? Are stock markets down just because people are scared?

No, stock markets are down for of course millions of reasons for all the individuals in it but because companies are going to be making a lot less money in days to come and that's big due to the only workable way to control this crisis which is to shut everything down.

But think about how widespread this is. Again this is why the reason a virus is so horrific and so bad is the changes needed happen everywhere all at once. If you have a local tornado, it happens in your town but in the virus you can see it is absolutely global.

So everything, everywhere is getting shut down all at once. Yes, there are some countries that have been ahead of the curve in Asia and now in Europe ahead of the curve and the Americas are now starting to catch up but still practically speaking over a period of weeks where everything is shut down together over this period of weeks.

So everything gets shut down. Everyone stays home and this happens simultaneously in every country, every state, every county, every family and this has a tremendous ripple effect. I want you just to imagine the businesses that are hurt by this and the revenues that are lost by this. I think the NBA is a good example since it was just tonight announced that the NBA is suspending the season.

First think about the lost ticket revenue that was previously scheduled to be coming in to all of those franchises based upon their games. Think about the lost TV revenue that all of the TV stations previously had committed. What are the NBA, there's probably an NBA network on cable TV, what are they going to do now that the season is canceled?

What about all of the NBA games that were previously scheduled to be booked on TV? What are the TV channels going to fill that time with? Think about all of the ad revenue that's lost by those TV channels for not having those games. Think about all the revenue that's lost for the franchises by not being able to sell the TV rights to those games.

Think about then all of the probably the advertisers themselves who are going to have less money because they can't buy the advertising. Think about the vendors and the concessions revenue that won't be gained by all the people working at the NBA games. Think about all of the hotel revenue that'll be lost by all the travelers that were previously part of the NBA system.

Now that's not a big hotel driver, I'm thinking of other events, conventions, etc. But think about all of the Uber revenue and the taxi revenue that's going to be lost because those games aren't going to happen. Think about all of the restaurant tabs and the bar tabs that are not going to be generated because of those NBA games and how that's going to hurt all of the bartenders and the servers and the restaurants and the restaurateurs.

It just goes on and on and on and that's just one example of a huge example but that's just one industry, the NBA. Now take that out to March Madness, take that out to the rodeo in the Houston rodeo or the Texas rodeo just canceled. It's going to go to other things, NASCAR games and everything.

Think about the just the widespread disruption for months going forward and how across the board you have this domino effect where these cancellations just ripple outward, less money to spend and the money starts to freeze up. And it's not that the money disappears, it's just that it starts to freeze up and that has a devastating effect to people who are in those affected industries.

So at the bare minimum this is going to be devastating and then could it be worse than devastating? Time will tell, right? It'll depend on how long these measures take place, it'll depend on what happens in the psychology of the people, etc. Pay also attention to what we're experiencing.

We're starting to experience the kind of the contagion of panic so to speak. The news that I thought was really interesting here this evening was the news about Tom Hanks because when you have a widely loved person who has a great degree of notoriety, you wind up with a situation and they get sick, you wind up with a situation where people start to pay attention.

And I think you start to see that with the runs on toilet paper, the runs on soap, the runs on all this stuff. So you're starting to see the kind of the contagion spread, the contagion of panic where nobody wants to be the last one shopping for toilet paper.

And you're starting to see the emotions come in where the system is breaking down where previously – let's use toilet paper as the example today because it's a really good example – maybe most people would go and buy toilet paper and they would say, "I'll just go ahead and get one thing of toilet paper because that's the normal amount that they shop, one big package." But then all of a sudden they find out that toilet paper is in short supply and so they go to the store and they figure, "I'll get two instead of one." And so the supplies start to get low and then that news starts to spread and today it spreads faster than ever before because any individual can produce that news among their community.

And so more and more people run out to the store to go and get more toilet paper. And then the stores start rationing toilet paper to try to maintain it and so they say, "Maximum one per customer, maximum five per customer." Costco has been rationing products for the last few days, many different products.

And so then people – that just spreads further and then people say, "Well, I've got to get around the rationing." And so they start going to multiple stores so they can get past and it just gets worse and worse and worse. And so the supply chain just totally breaks down because of the just-in-time inventory systems under which the supply chain is run.

It works fine and it has a little bit of flexibility but not a lot. And so it can be disrupted very easily by unforeseen circumstances. Similar example would be the mask crisis where healthcare providers are having a hard time getting a hold of masks and they're just not out there.

And so you see how the supply chain works fine during normal times but unless you stockpile the stuff and unless it was stockpiled by organizations, by governments, etc., by hospitals, then the things fall apart and because of the excess demand all of a sudden. Now that's not a permanent condition.

Eventually people say, "All right, I've got enough toilet paper for okay. I'm not going to die if I don't have 10 packs of toilet paper. Three or four is fine." So they stop buying and then that gives time for the system to be replenished, etc. And then there winds up being a toilet paper oversupply because everyone has enough to last them for months and most people aren't going to stock it and keep it stocked up in their house because they just don't want to have the stuff sitting around.

And so the store shelves get full again and then the revenues go way down. So you can just watch it breaking down right now, right in front of your face. And you can see how years ago I did a study on why price gouging laws are so destructive and I believe immoral.

They're not a moral use of the law. Now I'm not going to get all bent out of shape about that and jump up and down on my soap box but they're at least destructive. You can see how stupid they are because what they do is you wind up, if you don't allow the pricing system to react, then the stores wind up regulating demand by rationing.

You can either ration based on price or you can ration based on person. And since it's generally not, it's considered a bad business, which I support, it is bad business to do, but it's also considered to be illegal in many places to raise prices to respond to demand. What happens is the demand quickly outstrips the supply and strips the supply from the shelves and then you wind up with shortages.

And if you're frustrated right now that you can't find toilet paper and you're not sure what you're going to do in the coming days when you don't have any toilet paper, well, consider that next time you start proposing for price gouging laws that result in you're not having toilet paper.

You'd probably rather have gone and paid a $20 for a little four pack of toilet paper, which would be an extremely high price, but at least you'd have a little bit instead of not having any available simply because all the store shelves were stripped bare. And if you were willing to pay $20 for some toilet paper, all of a sudden some of those people who bought three big cases of it might be willing to spread it out.

You know, if I bought three big cases at the standard price of $10 for a case, I'd be happy to sell some of mine for $20. And so maybe there'll be a black market in toilet paper. Let me know if you're seeing that. But that's just how economic systems work.

So notice, please, I don't like to say I told you so. I really would like to be wrong on some of this stuff because it really stinks and I don't like to gloat. But notice, how can you protect yourself? How should you have protected yourself from this? The answer is simply by stockpiling the things that you would need.

Throughout the entire history of radical personal finance, I've emphasized this to you. You don't have a need to be efficient with the things that your family needs. You don't have the need to be efficient. You don't have the need to run everything at the razor thin line. It's easy enough for you to keep half a dozen packs of toilet paper in the garage and that's your buffer.

Well half a dozen big things of toilet paper from Costco will last you for a long time. And so you just put that on a shelf out in the garage, take one down, replace it. And that way you've always got a half of a, you know, six, half a dozen cases of toilet paper as your personal buffer.

Doesn't cost you much, takes a little bit of storage space, but it protects you when there's a toilet paper crisis of 2020. So you protect yourself by stocking up. Same thing with food, same thing with medicine. You put the buffer in there because you don't need to be efficient.

The needs of your family with most of these things are very, very small. I think the mask situation is another good example. You can just simply see that people who are in those situations, imagine the pressure that's on a hospital administrator. The hospital administrator knows that we need to stockpile personal protective equipment for our workers.

But that stockpile comes with a cost. And you know that it's possible that someday there could be a flu pandemic or someday there could be a contagious disease outbreak and we need to have lots of extra masks to protect the patients and protect ourselves, et cetera. And so they can stockpile large amounts of it, but the stuff expires, it goes bad.

And so are you really going to feel good as a hospital administrator putting this stuff on year after year after year in very large amounts that have to be stored, that have to be cared for, that have to be rotated and then just seeing the stuff expire year after year after year?

And so eventually you say, "Oh, let's get by with a little bit less, a little bit less, a little bit less." And then the supply chain narrows down to one region of the world. There was a book that was written by the guy that was on Joe Rogan's show having a talk about this and he talked about how 80% of the blood, was it the blood?

The IV bags were produced in Puerto Rico. And when the hurricane came through Puerto Rico, it devastated those factories and led to a real global shortage of IV bags. But a hospital administrator has to worry about that and there's a pressure to press towards efficiency, got to be efficient, can't stockpile too much stuff because it's just a huge amount of money.

But that's not you. You can stockpile the stuff and it not be a big deal. You can stockpile masks. You can stockpile personal protective equipment. You can stockpile hazmat suits. You can stockpile all of that stuff. And in the grand scheme of your finances, it's not a big financial cost.

It's an annoyance to store. It is a cost of storage but it's not a big financial cost. And storage, as long as you've got a way to do it in an organized way, it's not that big. So what can you do right now? Right now, I think it's early to start talking about big opportunities.

I think it's very, very early to start talking about economic opportunities. And so I'll try in the future to just talk about some ways to profit from an event. I do want you just to keep your head up and to stay focused on being positive. And I don't mean that in some kind of woo-woo ignore reality.

But what I do mean is be realistic. If you go back and you study times of great panic, times of great crisis, there are always opportunities. And many people make their fortunes during a time of crisis. So we shouldn't be scared about crisis. It happens. But if you'll keep a level head on your shoulders, look for opportunities, there will be opportunities.

We don't know yet what those are. We're just getting started. It's going to be, in my opinion, it's going to be a long and slow crisis. And you are going to get so annoyed. And I'm not going to turn radical personal finance into COVID central. I already feel like I've done it too much.

We're not going to sit around here and talk about it all the time. Talk about it on occasion. But this is going to be a long and slow crisis. It's going to grind on for months and months and months before it stabilizes. And we'll see what's on the other side.

I'm not going to make too many predictions beyond that, just that it's going to be very slow. You're going to be so tired of it. I'm going to be so tired of it. But what can you do right now? Well, the most useful, valuable thing you can do right now is isolate yourself and your family.

I think it's time to do that. Isolate yourself and your family. Now that's going to be hard to figure out how to do it and what exactly that means, to what extent you can do. And all of us have different circumstances. I'm traveling right now. I'm just hoping I can get home.

And if I can get home, then I'll hunker down with my family and hopefully I don't get sick in the airport. I did my best to take precautions, but who knows. But isolate yourself and your family, and especially older family members. Isolate yourself and your family so that you can protect older family members, especially for the coming weeks.

As things start to, we're right at the start, as I, in my opinion, we're right at the start of the compound growth curve in the United States. And what's been happening is the virus has been percolating out across the community, spreading from thousands and thousands of people to thousands and thousands of more people.

But now those symptoms are going to start to be seen. And you have a complete and total debacle of undiagnosed cases, lack of testing. It's almost impossible for people to get testing, and this is just enhancing the spread. And the United States reacted far too slowly of closing things, shutting things down, too little too late.

And so there are thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people right now who are infected all across the United States. And so I would say that what's needed right now is simply take the action early to isolate yourself. Isolate, especially if you're elderly, especially if you have underlying health conditions that weaken your immune system.

Take the action now to isolate yourself as much as you can, as much as you're willing to do. And give it a few more weeks to start to stabilize, to see what happens, and to start to get a better idea of the risks, a better idea of the numbers, and see if we can get ahead of it.

I think that's important. That's the most reliable thing that you can do. Now you may not be able to go all the way. Right now, companies that can, you know, there was just a moment ago, Twitter is now ordering all of their workers to work from home. If you can work from home, you should.

If you can minimize that stuff, you should. And remember, in order for isolation to work, you got to do it early before it really seems like it has to be done. Maybe I shouldn't have traveled. I don't know. We'll find out. Maybe I'll be sick in a week. But you got to do it early.

So it's going to feel stupid. I was talking with my wife. What are we going to do? It's going to feel stupid because you're going to look around and say, "There's not really any need for it." But that's the right time to do it. Cancel community events. I think at this point it's a good idea to cancel travel, etc., and just simply focus on isolating yourself.

Now, there are opportunities, though, to make that a positive thing, to make plans. You probably had a long list of goals and things that you've been wanting to accomplish that you haven't had a chance to accomplish because you've been so busy. Maybe you wanted to work out more. YouTube is your friend.

There are thousands and thousands of people who've made workout videos that don't require any equipment. You can do them right at home. Pop a video on and start getting fit right at home. You probably wanted to read more. Well, Amazon still ships. You can buy books or you can get the digital book and then you don't even have to interact with the paper book and you can start reading.

You probably wanted to, I don't know, start a podcast, start a YouTube channel. Guess what? You got a cell phone. Watch Cell Phone Start It and get started. You probably wanted to go to school. One of the greatest things that's going to happen is a boon in distance learning.

Right now you could sign up at about any university and take online classes and that's going to be a big opportunity right now. So think about ways that you can do some things you wanted to do. You probably wanted to hang out with your children. You probably wanted to, you're thinking about a family vacation.

Well take the family vacation but go to a national park instead of going to a theme park. Go camping instead of going to a theme park or going to the places that are full. Take everyone to the beach and go play in the water instead of going to downtown and find something you can do.

You can do that kind of stuff without interacting with a lot of other people. So buy some board games and invest in time with your children. I've always thought, what if I went to prison? What would I do? I thought, okay, pretend Joshua, you get sent to prison for 10 years.

What would you do? And I've often thought, well, I'd get a PhD. Here's all these things. I'd get super fit. I'd be jacked and playing basketball all day. I mean, so just think about that. What if you went to prison? In this case, the prison is your home. You got a chance to hang out there.

Maybe you write. Write a book. Write a novel. Do something. There are ways to do from it. We'll talk in the days to come about the economic effects, about ways to profit from it as those things start to emerge. I'm not confident at this point. I think we're just at the very beginning and it's going to be a long, slow road.

Those are my thoughts. I hope it helps you in some way. Pay attention to the news. Pay attention to the risks. Keep your head on straight. Don't freak out, but don't stick your head under the rock either. At the very least, pay attention to the human psychology because that's what you're seeing right now is in some ways the very predictable human psychology of panic and groupthink.

It's making a difference. Talk to you soon. Your tough Tacoma is here. Your powerful 4Runner. Your stylish Camry. Your versatile RAV4. Even your fully electric VZ4X. Your new Toyota car, truck or SUV is available now. So see your Toyota dealer today. We make it easy. Toyota. Let's go places.

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