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. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua. I'm your host. And today we need to dig again into the topic of what is now called COVID-19, the coronavirus that is increasingly making its presence known throughout the world. It's almost a month ago that I first recorded the topic on January 27 where I recorded a show, episode 694, How to Prepare for a Flu and Coronavirus Quarantine.

And I was hoping that by now this would be, that show would have been overreaction and there's no reason to even bother. But unfortunately, things are going the opposite way. And so I want to begin by just giving you a thesis statement of this show, then tell you what's going to be in the outline of it.

And then we're going to dig into the topics. Don't know how long this is going to be. It's going to be difficult. I've tried recording this multiple times and I've given up on trying to get the right tone. I'm just going to, I just got to get it out.

So basically here's the thesis of what I want to communicate to you. The COVID-19 outbreak of flu around the world is an increasing economic threat to you and possibly an increasing physical threat. It does bear the risk of potentially causing sickness for you and your family, which can be devastating.

And that sickness could also be life ending, which could be devastating. I'm less concerned about the specific sickness than I am about the potential economic effects of this sickness. Yes, the sickness could be significant, but there's a good chance that in the societies that you and I live in, which are more advanced medically, that the sickness itself is not going to be the biggest risk.

It is a risk, but it's not going to be the biggest risk. Whereas the big risk is potentially economic. And we're going to, I'm going to do my best to unpack that for you. So at this point in time, I have moved my own personal DEF CON threat level up substantially.

And specifically, I expect that there's a very good chance that this COVID-19 will be a triggering event for what we will later call a significant recession and/or potentially longer term. Maybe we'll reach the economic academic term for depression or something like that, but a significant financial crisis. And unfortunately, based upon the way that this is emerging, if it does reach that, it could have very long range effects.

So I'm going to do my best towards the back half of this show to give you some things to prepare. But the simplest thing that I would do is just say, think about how you need to think about some of the medical stuff, but think also then about how you would prepare for a significant recession.

And here I will commend to you and probably re-release the episode that I recorded back in September of 2019, episode, ironically enough, 666, How to Prepare for the Coming Recession. I had a listener that emailed me a couple of days ago and said, "Do you know that there is a show, the season 666 at the top of your iTunes chart on how to prepare for the coming recession?" And I had not known it and I went and fixed the problem.

But episode 666 called How to Prepare for the Coming Recession of September of 2019 has a fairly comprehensive discussion of what to do financially speaking if you are concerned about a recession. And I am increasingly concerned about a recession. So that's my thesis statement. My thesis statement is there are significant storm clouds economically on the horizon.

It will take a little time to see if those storms actually do bring, come to your local area. There are significant physical concerns on the horizon of sickness, etc. And there are a few things that you can do, but you should have your alert level very high and you should be preparing for these events at this point in time.

That's the thesis. Now, let's back up and I will talk you through my thinking and my reasoning. I find this topic very hard because we are dealing with a lot of things that are unknown. And we are dealing with things that are potentially very significant or potentially less significant.

And so I need to give you some background ideas that you can then filter through your own rational brain to figure out the right thing for you to do. There will be some physical preparation that you can do and some economic preparation. But you're going to have to filter that through.

And so to do that effectively, I need to give you some background thinking in my brain, the things that I'm considering when I'm making the suggestions that I'm making. Let's begin with the physical threat. I have long considered a global flu pandemic to be the most likely and the most devastating threat in terms of big, large-scale emergency disaster scenarios.

I've been interested in emergency disaster preparedness since I was, you know, prior -- before I was even a teenager. Some of the first books I ever remember buying when I was 12 years old, I remember I took a trip to England with my parents. And I came across the SAS survival manuals in some bookstores in England.

And I used my money and I came home with three SAS survival manuals. And I loved those things. And I would go out in my backyard and practice making a shelter, an emergency shelter with a pocket knife and string of branches and things. Just practice all of the wood survival techniques.

And then I got involved in emergency preparedness at an early age, doing emergency communications with some organizations and hurricane preparedness. And I was -- one hurricane that came through Florida, I was at the Emergency Operations Center in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida, through the hurricane, sleeping in the barracks and watching everything.

That went on during the emergency operations systems there in the hurricanes. And so I've been interested in the subject for a long time. And as a financial planner by trade and training, I've always seen the clear and obvious corollaries from technical financial planning to emergency preparedness, as I've discussed extensively here on the show.

They're just different approaches for the same problems. In the same way that you have worst-case scenarios that can affect a family financially, such as the loss of an income earner or the loss of anybody. And you prepare for that with some combination of financial tools and other tools, right?

A financial tool is a life insurance policy. Another tool is to make sure that you tell your family how much you love them or that you've built a strong family culture so that your family won't be torn apart in your absence. It's a combination of financial tools and other tools.

I've always seen the same obvious parallel to emergency preparedness. If you're going to be prepared for an earthquake or for a forest fire, there's some financial planning, such as having homeowner's insurance that can hopefully help you to rebuild your house after it's burned down or tumbled down. Then you also have to have some immediate preparation, such as a safe place to be during the earthquake or a safe evacuation route to get out of the forest fire threat or some ways to mitigate it, perhaps a shelter.

You can have an underground shelter from fire. And so these are the kinds of things that could save your life. And you can't – if you're dead, your family can collect on your homeowner's insurance policy, but you can't. And so there's a perfect integration between prepping, between physical preparedness and economic preparedness, financial tools.

And they're both important. And they both have to be considered. And so I've long tried to intertwine these topics here on Radical Personal Finance. But being a student of the topic myself, I've often thought about what are the worst-case scenarios. And my personal list, as I think about all the different worst-case scenarios, my personal list has always been three things.

Number one, global flu pandemic. Number two, wide-scale EMP or electric magnetic pulse attack. And number three, a hot nuclear war, a widespread nuclear war. And all three of those scenarios are very plausible, very possible. I don't know what the difference is between plausible and possible. They're plausible and possible.

They can happen, possible. And they're plausible. And we can easily imagine them happening. They all have historic analogs that can be pointed to that these things have happened in the past, with the exception of the use of electric magnetic pulse as a widespread tool of warfare. Although we certainly know that there are coronal mass ejections that have happened in the past that could have a similar effect as an electromagnetic pulse.

I'll expand that in a moment. And so they're worth considering. They're all really, really bad, really bad. But in my opinion, the worst of those is the flu pandemic. And one of the reasons why the flu pandemic is potentially the worst of those is because of its slowness of onset, its slowness of happening, and its widespread global effects.

Let me unpack that for you. Let's start with something like nuclear war and EMP. So by way of review, if you're not familiar with the concept of EMP, the basic idea is if you can detonate a powerful nuclear weapon at a high altitude above the earth, you generate what's called an electromagnetic pulse, which is simply a surge of electricity that has the potential to fry the circuits of almost any electronic equipment.

The actual nuclear weapon will not have any effect with regard to radiation or would have very minimal effect to radiation or physical explosion. But the electrical pulse can destroy almost anything that is electrical that is not properly shielded against an electrical pulse. Now, it's unknown because it's never happened.

It's unknown how widespread the effects of it would be. You can read various novels that have been written about it. Your two best to start with if you're interested in that particular scenario would be William Forshen's book One Second After, probably the best written and really fascinating novel, One Second After.

I would commend that one to you. And then also David Crawford wrote a book called Lights Out, which is a little bit less elegantly written but still very well written. And they approach the problem, the same problem, but from two different novelists' perspectives. In those books, what you would find is that the destruction of electronic devices is total.

Anything that has microcircuits in it, from the cell phone on your hip to the computer on your desk to the car in your garage to the power plant, everything electrical is destroyed in that particular circumstance. Now, that's probably not what actually would happen. There's been minimal testing that's been done on electromagnetic pulse, and that minimal testing has produced fairly uncertain results.

And a lot of it would just depend on how well shielded certain things are. So, you know, modern cars have a lot of electronics, but they're also pretty well shielded. And so that shielding can make the difference. So we just don't know. But even if 50% of the cars were broken or 80% of the cars were broken, it would be really, really bad.

And even if there were still some devices that worked, if you've suffered a widespread destruction in the power grid, that would be really, really bad. And so this is a big risk. And millions, tens of millions of people would die if power grids were knocked out. But the benefit of that kind of attack is you would know something acute has happened.

For example, if you went out and all of a sudden you're sitting at your desk, as some of these novels posit, you're sitting at your desk and your computer blanks out, the lights go out, you pull out your cell phone and your cell phone goes off, you know, wait, something's happened here.

You go out and try to start your car. It doesn't start. You know something has happened. And although that would be really bad, you would at least know that something significant has happened. And thus, you would be well advised to quickly start taking preparation for whatever it is that you need to do next.

To quickly go to your car and put on a comfortable pair of hiking boots and get to your house and collect your children from school and make your way home. Or to, you know, start storing water or whatever you would do in that circumstance. You would know something has happened.

You would know your action is warranted because there was a clear indication that something has happened. There's no secret about it. If you think back to the big blackout in New York City a decade or so ago, you know, you know that there's a problem. Everybody's walking home. It's obviously a major problem.

You could say a similar benefit would be the case if there were a nuclear war, a widespread nuclear attack. If you look to the east and there's a blinding flash of light and you see a mushroom cloud, you know that there's something to do. If you ever see a blinding flash of light, you immediately duck and cover.

You get down, cover your head, get under a table, do whatever you can, duck and cover. That has the potential to save your life. And the reason is because it has a potential to minimize injury that comes from the blast wave that blows out windows and things like that and sprays glass across.

So if you ever see a bright light, immediately duck and cover no matter where you are. Get down as low as you can and get under anything solid that you can. Or let's say that you were far other away from the blast cloud. You're not a particular blast energy is not going to affect you.

But you look to the east and you see a large mushroom cloud. Well, you can very quickly know that's bad and I need to make steps to improvise, to go to my radiation shelter, my fallout shelter, or I need to quickly improvise a fallout shelter. And so you run to the basement, you stack a table in the corner of the basement, you start stacking up books or you start stocking up, you get cardboard boxes or tote bins and you start filling them with earth.

Or if you don't have earth, you start filling with water and you improvise a fallout shelter. And then you go into the fallout shelter and if you don't have equipment, hopefully you have some kind of radiation detection equipment. But of course, that's not generally standard issue these days. Most of us don't go around with a Geiger counter on our hip, although you can, that device is available in a couple hundred bucks.

Most of us don't do that. And so you go into your fallout shelter and you stay put for a couple of days. And that action of improvising a fallout shelter and going into it, it won't be fun, but at least that could save your life. And that would give time for the background radiation to subside to smaller areas.

But no one would say that you're overreacting. If you look to the east and you see a mushroom cloud, no one would come by your house and say you're overreacting by going into this fallout shelter. That's the benefit of those things is there are cute, cute things that are really bad, but you know something has happened.

But I'm convinced that a flu pandemic could be worse. And the reason is you're never quite sure if something is happening or not. The ironic thing about my recording the show this morning, as I record this show, the stock market is down massively. All kinds of interesting news stories about the COVID-19 are emerging all around the world, spreading in Italy, cities on lockdown in Italy, South Korea, potentially spreading farther.

We don't know. But I've just returned from three days in the mountains, the wilderness. I didn't have a cell phone that worked, but no cell phone connection. I was out of range of cell phone range. I was out. No Wi-Fi, no Internet connection. I was entirely cut off for the last three days and life looked great, relaxed.

No word of news, didn't follow the news. Everything looked totally normal. But then all of a sudden I come back and say, well, let's go. What's going on in the news and find out that everything looks not normal. But if I look out the window, it's still the sun is shining.

There's a little mushroom cloud in the east. And so you wonder, am I crazy? Am I freaking out about something? So that's the problem with flu pandemic, that it's very slow to come on. Other problems with the flu pandemic is that it is very slow to happen until it's not.

A flu pandemic is something that emerges over the course of months and months, potentially years. And in the early year, early days of it, it doesn't look significant. Even now, if you look at the total number of people reportedly infected, something like 100,000, a little bit less, depends on what number we use and when you're listening to this.

But in the scale of a global population, that's a tiny number. It's an absolutely tiny number. And then if you look and say, well, what are the actual symptoms of the disease? Most of us have had the flu. And you can acknowledge intellectually the flu kills tens of thousands of people, but I don't get scared of dying generally when I get the flu.

You think, okay, what's the big deal? So we get sick. And unless you really understand how diseases transmit and how quickly they can become huge, you've got major trouble because everything is slow until it's not. Because of the multiplying compound effect of the way that viral infections can spread, everything is slow, the numbers are small until they're not.

And then all of a sudden, they're huge. But even when they're huge, you don't -- even if you're in Wuhan, China, there are lots of people who are perfectly fine. Stuck in your house, but you're perfectly fine. And so you sometimes wonder, and you're like, is this really what's happening?

Is this really going on? And so you doubt everything. You doubt your ability to make good decisions. That's what's so frustrating about it. That's what's so frustrating about someone like me who's going on the record with opinions because I don't like to be wrong, and I don't like to be wrong on the record.

It's a lot easier to be wrong to a family of friends who -- you just probably forget what you were wrong about than it is to be wrong in public where there's basically a permanent record of what you've said and you're wrong in the memory of tens of thousands of people.

It's easier to be wrong quietly in a whisper than it is to be wrong at the top of your voice. And so you don't want to be wrong. You also don't want to do anything foolish, but you know there's a threat. And so point number one about the flu pandemic is that the threat is very slow in emerging until it's not.

But somewhere along the way, you kind of got to say, well, I see the threat, and I'm either going to prepare or I'm not. Now, the next thing that makes it bad is the psychological profile of populations because there's usually plenty of time to prepare until that one moment when panic strikes and all of a sudden it's like a raging forest fire when everybody has the same thing all at once.

You go to the store one day, everything's fine. You go the next day, and it's wiped out, and people are having fistfights in the parking lot. It's that human panic that all of a sudden when you see everyone else reacting, you think I've got to react. And then there's a contagion, a genuine contagion, when you see other people reacting more, and you think I've got to go get more, and they're getting more, and then they see you getting more, and then they've got to get more, and all of a sudden everything freaks out.

And so you go from everything's slow to all of a sudden, boom, everything bad. Big, big problem in a flu pandemic. The best analogy I know of is if you think about how something, let's say something's being cultured in a Petri dish, and you'll go day one, and you go from one cell to two cells, then day two from two cells to four cells, then day three, four to eight, but on the ninth day, you go from 40% coverage of the Petri dish to 100% coverage.

And that's basically how these things happen. Everything's slow until everything's too fast. And so if you're going to be ahead of time, you've got to be ahead when you're scared about being stupid, when no one else is doing what you're doing. Some random guy speaking into a microphone you're listening to on a podcast, like, well, that guy's talking about it, but no one else really is.

And so you've got to move early, otherwise you're too late. The next big reason why a global flu pandemic is potentially one of the worst case scenarios that I can imagine is because it's truly global in scope. That's different than electromagnetic pulse attack. Yes, a state actor could set off, you know, the United States could set off multiple nuclear weapons in space above Russia and knock out the power in the whole country.

Or Russia could do it in the United States, or China could do it in the United States, right? The big three, they're always going to be fighting with each other right now. That could happen. But even if the entire power grid in all of the United States was wiped out, that doesn't mean that there's no power in Mexico.

That doesn't mean there's no power in Brazil. It doesn't mean there's no power in Europe. So bad, but still somewhat localized. Although, of course, it's hard to say a national event in a country as huge as Russia or the United States is localized, but still on a global scale can be somewhat localized.

Or even nuclear war. Let's say that all of a sudden you get into a three-way nuclear war, a genuine hot nuclear war. Russia, China, and the United States all lobbing missiles at one another. That's really bad. But it's not civilization ending bad. Nuclear weapons are fearsome, but they don't actually kill that many people in the nearby area.

And the fallout can be easily avoided and somewhat quickly dissipates. So that's why nuclear war is very survivable. I used to think nuclear war was completely unsurvivable. Then I started studying it. No, nuclear war is very survivable. And if you're living in Brazil or if you're living in Italy or if you're living in Australia, there's a good chance that your life can go on.

But a global flu pandemic is not a respecter of national borders. And probably the biggest risk that you face in today's world is the increased mobility of people. One of the reasons why the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 that killed 50 million people, maybe 100 million people, one of the reasons why it was so bad was because of the massive mobilization of people around the world due to the World War, World War II at the time.

And so you had these huge flows of people from continent to continent, many tens of thousands of soldiers going from the United States to Europe or from the United States to Asia and then back from Asia to the United States and then back all across the world. That's one of the things that previously was not really, didn't really exist in human history.

And even in World War II, although there were airplanes, most of that massive movement of people was occurring at the speed of a train or the speed of a ship. Whereas today, that global circulation of people is almost a constant presence in our life. And so you can very quickly have a flu outbreak that starts in China, spreads to Korea, spreads to Japan, spreads to the Philippines.

But there's no reason why one day later it can't be in Kansas City, Kansas, or in Sao Paulo, Brazil, or Toronto, Canada, or Mexico City, Mexico, because we're all basically one day from physically being on the exact opposite side of the world. That's a profoundly massive risk. Profoundly massive.

Now, think back to an emergency scenario. It's one thing if your country is struggling. There have been lots of national emergencies in a country. It's another thing if the entire world is struggling. It's another thing if the entire global supply chains are disrupted in the world, which is a major threat of this particular disease.

It's starting to happen. As I've talked about, one of the things when you think about emergency preparedness has to do with how long do I need to go until I can be resupplied. And so if you have small disasters, you can be resupplied very quickly. You can today lose your job and have no food, and you can go to your neighbors, and you have neighbors on all sides of you have plenty of food, and if you tell them, "Listen, I don't have any food.

Would you be willing to give me some food so we can have dinner?" Every one of your neighbors would say yes, and they'd give you food. And so your disaster can be relieved almost instantly by going to your neighbors. If there's a tornado that comes through your town and wipes out your town, there are still dozens and dozens of towns all around that aren't affected by that tornado.

And so within a couple of hours, there can be relief supplies and relief personnel in your town. If you go up to a larger scale event, such as a hurricane, a regional event, now all of a sudden it starts to take a little bit longer. You can have a regional event, a hurricane in South Florida or a hurricane in New Orleans, and that'll disrupt several towns, slower moving, broader path of destruction.

But once the storm itself moves out, the surrounding regions can quickly resupply. So if a hurricane happens in South Florida, Costco immediately starts staging supplies, and they have all the supplies ready to rush in from Georgia, ready to rush in from Alabama. If a hurricane happens in Texas, all the surrounding areas immediately change, and they start sending resupply there.

And so you're a couple days away, really at most, from having resupply. But if you move up from a regional event to a national event, you start to have bigger problems. Now it's hard to find a national event that doesn't become international in today's world, especially for larger countries where many of us live.

An event that affects the whole of the United States is often difficult to see. Usually it would be some kind of political event and/or some kind of large scale national war. But pretend that there was some national event that just affected Americans. Well, you've still got Mexico, you've still got Canada, you've still got many other nations that can access and send relief and send supply to help the United States of America.

But what if everybody is facing the same problem? What if all the countries around the world are facing the same problem? What if all the countries around the world are facing a major outbreak of flu, and yet oxygen concentrators around the world, you just can't get them? Because they're going everywhere and they're gone.

Where's the resupply going to come from? Well, the resupply is going to come from China. But the problem is, China is not open for business because everyone is locked in their house, so the factories aren't working. And that's the problem, the unique problem of the global flu pandemic, which makes it potentially horrific in its global impact.

Because if it goes global, there's no place for relief. The Martians aren't going to send a relief ship to the United States that's filled with aid the way that the United States does if Haiti is affected. There just ain't no one to help. That's why the global flu pandemic is such a huge potential risk.

So, it's slow to come on, slow to happen, and the results are slow. It has global potential impact. All of these things are bad. Now, what else? Well, one of the major problems with the flu pandemic is, although it can be acutely dangerous for somebody who's infected, it can be the cause of many other associated problems.

So, what is the disaster that's unfolding in China right now? Is it a disaster that some thousands of people are dying and have died? Yeah, that's a disaster for a few thousands of people and their families. But the disaster for hundreds of millions, nay, billions around the world, that disaster is the economic disaster.

And we're right at the beginning of the economic disaster that can flow from this particular event. Let me ask you a question. If I give you $5,000 right now, are you likely to go and take that $5,000 and book a nice big fancy cruise vacation for you and your family?

Nobody would. And so, you have, when you have a cruise ship docked in Japan where everyone's freaking out with quarantine, and rightly so, right? I'm not saying it was wrong. But you have a quarantine cruise ship, the cruise industry is going to die. Or it's going to be severely sick.

Nobody's booking cruises right now. Think about the economic impact of that. You have this very large industry. You have that very large industry that's affected globally. All over the world, cruises are drying up. Then think about the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who make their direct living from the cruise ships.

Think about the dock workers who have a job to get the ship tied up. Think about the immigration people who check people's passports when they're coming on and off. Think about the guy on the street who's hawking wares to the cruise ship. Think about all the people working on the cruise ships.

Think about all the food that is bought by the cruise ships. Think about all the alcohol that's consumed by a cruise ship. Think about all of that stuff drying up. And the cruise companies immediately going to lower staffing, less fuel being purchased, less food, less alcohol, laying off people because they don't need people to clean the ship.

And think about all those little communities that are impacted in the local area. So now you got the guy that does the tours to the waterfall for the people on the cruise ship. Well, now he doesn't have any business. And now because he doesn't have any business, his family starts to suffer.

He can buy fewer things in his local area. It just has a very, in some ways quick, but significant ripple effect. Now, if that happens for a couple of weeks, it's bad. Most people can't go weeks or months or a month or two without income. Most majority of people don't have that kind of savings.

But what if that happens for months? Now all of a sudden you have long-term, serious long-term problems. And that's just one industry. The travel industry in and of itself is a huge, huge industry. And nobody who's paying attention to the world is going out right now and voluntarily booking non-necessary vacation travel.

I'm scheduled to take a trip in two weeks. It's something important. But I'm sitting there looking at it and saying, "Is this really worth exposing potentially me, my family, my community, to the increased risk that comes from contact to other people?" Significant. Cruises are one thing, but think about how this particular right now you see all over the world, especially in Italy now, all of a sudden, boom, government says, "We're ending the public gatherings." So this carnival is canceled.

These religious masses are canceled. These public events are canceled. Think about the economic impact in those communities. Now stretch that out. We don't know how long things will continue in China. There's really no reason to think that it's going to end this week. Now start stretching it out. You've got President Xi in China saying people could go back to work, but there's -- what's fundamentally changed about the risk from two weeks ago versus today?

And so the economic effects and all of the associated disasters that can come are just much, much worse. And that's not even getting to workforce not being there. There are many industries that need a certain number of workers to be present for those industries to work to do safely, whether it's people to work on airplanes and to service airplanes appropriately so that they fly safely, or whether it's people to man a factory so that it can put out safe products, or whether it's the number of people necessary to, I don't know, drive around in a car with flashing lights on its roof, whatever the particular industry is, there's a certain level of staffing in electrical agencies.

And so if you get a very widespread flu pandemic, when many people are sick, that can cause acute problems. And it just goes on and on. We could talk about the breakdown in social dynamics. One of the things that I find fascinating about a flu pandemic is it erodes social trust very quickly.

I was yesterday talking with a friend of mine, an Asian businessman, not even from China, but he was telling me that his business has dropped off by more than half because people look at him and say, "Oh, he's Asian." And I think he's Filipino. And it has nothing to do with -- he's not -- I mean, Philippines, yes, certainly there's coronavirus in Philippines right now, but he's not Chinese is the point.

But yet, very quickly, people say, "Okay, Asians, I'm not going to do business with Asians. I'm not going to go to the Asian grocery store. I'm not going to go to the Asian, you know, store over here. I'm not going to hire the Asian person to work on my house." And so this social trust starts to erode.

And you can't go to somebody and say that's not a rational response. We're not dealing with some kind of irrational xenophobia. You're dealing with a very specific rational response to saying, "I'm concerned about this particular section of the world." Just so happens that that section of the world has a certain ethnic characteristic that can be reflected on the face.

And so that hurts the Asian merchants, hurts the Asian community. Now, what does that do when all of a sudden you have a whole ethnic community that's starting to lose income? That has a ripple over effect. And I don't even know where those things end. But there are these downrange economic effects that are potentially horrific, potentially terrible.

Now, let's go back to the flu pandemic itself. What makes this particular one so dangerous? There are two basic things that you want. If you're going to create a worst-case scenario, an absolute worst-case scenario, and you're sitting down and you're going to write a novel. And that novel is going to be built on what do we do, how do we create a flu pandemic that's the worst?

Well, you want two things. The first thing that you want is you want a very long incubation period. And ideally, it's asymptomatic. You want a long incubation time. So if there's a three-day incubation time where the flu is and you're sick on the second day, well, you're going to stay home.

You're going to know, "I'm sick, and I'm going to stay home." But if you have a two-week or potentially longer, three-week incubation time, and that incubation period is asymptomatic, but you can transfer the disease. It's very transmissible during that time. Now you've got a problem. Because you're carrying the disease, and you go out, and for three weeks, you're at the grocery store, you're with your coworkers, your children are in their school, et cetera.

And you're transmitting the virus for three weeks? That is a nightmare worst-case scenario. What is COVID-19? What feature does it seem to have medically? It seems to have a very long incubation period that's asymptomatic. So you can be spreading a virus all around without knowing about it. And it seems to be highly transmissible.

That's point number one. The second thing that you need for a really good novel laying this problem out is you need a sickness that is significant, but it can't be so significant that everyone dies in the first few days. Because what happens is the disease just kills everyone who's transmitting it.

So what you need is you need some significant sickness with real danger for death in order to make your plot really attractive. That, yeah, people are really scared of dying. But not so deadly that everyone who gets it just dies quickly, and then they're gone, and we can go on with life.

Well, what feature does COVID-19 seem to have? Seems to have a significant degree of sickness and a not insignificant degree of mortality, but not so deadly that there aren't lots of people recovering, and not so deadly that it's killing everyone who has it. If you made it up in a lab or you made it up in your mind to write a novel, it's hard to see how you would write something different than the COVID-19.

I've not yet heard any characteristics that make me say, "Wow, this isn't what I would write if I were writing a novel about the widespread bad effects of the flu." Except, I guess I might say maybe a little slightly higher mortality, but who knows? I don't know. So it's potentially really bad for those reasons.

Now, you say, "I want to make a rational, thoughtful decision. I want to be a good consumer of information. Then I want to consider it, and I want to take the right course of action." Well, here's your next problem. The fog of war. The unreliability of information. See, I would like to have the ability to make a rational analysis and good predictions here to you.

That would make me feel really good as somebody who feels a responsibility to serve you, my listener. It would make me feel good to be able to make a good decision and say, "Here's what's going to happen, and here's all the reasons why." But we're stuck in a place of bad information.

Good information is almost impossible to come by. Let me explain the factors that go into it. First, we're dealing with something that is outside of most of our area of expertise. There are virologists and people who specialize in this that is their area of expertise, but that's probably not you or me.

If you're like me, you're probably saying, "Well, I'm kind of ignorant about this, but let me quickly bone up on my knowledge." You're studying what "are not" means, and you're thinking about this, and you're trying to become quickly an expert, but you don't know enough to know what you don't know.

You don't know the key things to look for any more than I do. Then you look and say, "Where did this start?" It started in China, Wuhan, China, allegedly. And the problem there is you're dealing with a totalitarian communist government that is particularly prickly with regard to giving out information, especially information that reflects poorly on it.

In a totalitarian communist society, politics are everything, and everything is politics. And so nobody wants to lose face. Nobody wants to take the political repercussions of letting the information out. And so you find the whistleblowers from back in November and December, and you see, "Wow, these people were really put upon." And you think, "Well, that makes sense." And so you don't really trust the information that's coming out of China.

What's worse is you know you shouldn't trust it if you're going to go by past experience. You go back to SARS, and you see how horrifically the Chinese government distorted the information, how horrifically the -- actually, it just flat-out lied and didn't reveal the data. And so you have these ideas, as I do, about, "Well, I think this is what's happening, and I'm trying to listen to the doctors who are saying what's happening." But you don't know whether you can even trust the data.

You don't know if you can trust the data on the number of people sick, the number of people who've recovered, the number of people who've died. And this is especially bad in the modern world of user-generated content, because you see a video on Twitter, and you say, "Well, this is really bad." But then you don't know, "Is that video from now, or is that video from a year ago?

Is that video from here, or is that video from there?" And you can't really trust it. You've got to go and try to look and see who's corroborating something, who's denying something, but there's so much data that you can't really trust it. So the source of the data is really troublesome, really problematic.

Then if you understand a little bit about flu or virology, then you understand that even if you could trust the source of the data, you can't really trust that they accurately are collecting the data. For example, what is the actual test for this COVID virus? And is it at all plausible that you could go from not knowing of this virus to developing a test kit, to producing the test kit in such a way that you can test billions of people accurately?

Well, of course not. And so who's being tested? Well, the people who are being tested are those who are in the hospital, or who are experiencing symptoms, or who have reason to believe that they're exposed. But what about all the other hundreds of millions of people who can't plausibly be tested, because the kits don't exist?

And so what happens to asymptomatic transfer in a long incubation period? So even if the numbers weren't coming from China, even if the numbers were coming from the most honest, forthright, open, transparent government in the world, I don't know what that would be, but let's just pretend that it was coming from that, you would recognize practically you still can't trust the numbers.

Well, what do you do if you can't trust the numbers and can't trust the information? You start to think. You start to be a little paranoid. You start to wonder what else are they not telling you? So you say, "Well, I can't trust what they're saying to me, so let me go and look at what they're doing." This is a line of reasoning that I often go down.

I don't trust what you're saying, because either you're lying to me, or I don't understand it or something, but I can see what you're doing. Actions speak louder than words. So let me ignore what you're saying, and let me look at what you're doing. And so you go to China, as we did a month ago.

And at that time, there were tens of millions of people under quarantine. Now, far more. And you say, "Well, what are they doing?" Well, what they're doing is basically committing economic suicide and telling everybody, "Stay home." Everybody, "Quarantine," et cetera. Then you go and you look at what they're doing, such as welding doors of apartment buildings shut, and you say, "Man, this is really bad." But now you want to make a good decision on it.

So you look at this data. You say, "I can clearly see what they're doing. I can clearly see that tens of millions of people are being quarantined." So there are a couple ways and directions that you could go. The first way you could go would be the more believing, trusting method of analysis.

You could say, "Wow, they're really engaging in this massive quarantine effort." And you know what? That's exactly the kind of thing that would need to be done in order to stem the flow, stem the transmission of this particular disease. And what's so interesting is China is probably the only nation in the world that has the resources to do this kind of heavy, hardcore, far-reaching quarantine.

So this is going to be pretty cool because they're reacting appropriately to what seems to be a significant threat, and because of their appropriate hardcore reaction, they're probably going to be successful, and they're going to stomp this thing out. And then you would go and you would read what the World Health Organization says, and you would listen to the president of the World Health Organization who praises China, profusely for their excellent reaction, and you'd say, "Yeah, they're doing what they need to be doing." And so yes, the fact that tens of millions of people are being affected, well, that's what they need to be doing.

So good on them, right? Or you might go in the other direction. You might say, "Are you kidding me? They're saying that there's," you know, I'm going back a month ago, "Oh, a few thousand people sick, but they're putting cities, tens of millions of people under quarantine? They're destroying economic output for the nation?

They're destroying the biggest, most important festivals over something that's just a basic flu that's affecting a few thousand people? They're saying there's 7,000," okay, a month ago, "7,892 people infected and 132 deaths, and yet they've got tens of millions of people locked down and billions and billions of dollars of money lost for this?

And they'll leave it for an instant. This must be far worse than they're saying officially." So you can have the same apparent data, and both of those conclusions are pretty plausible, pretty rational analysis of the data. You can say, "Well, they're taking this action, but it's what they should do," or "They're taking this action and they're flat out lying to me." So we don't make much progress there with trying to figure out what the truth is.

So let's go on with our analysis. What other kinds of bits of information could we look at? Well, we could listen to what those in the know are saying. We could say, "We've got the World Health Organization for a reason, and these big international agencies are really important, help the world communicate on big, important things like this," or "We've got the president of so-and-so that's talking about it." And so you say, "I'm going to listen to what they say, and I'm a trusting, trustworthy person." I'm going to say, "Well, they're saying that we're making progress and containing the threat." But then you recognize that the biggest risk of something like flu pandemic is probably not the flu itself.

Could you get sick? Of course you could get sick. And could you die? Yes, but people die all day long, every day, from all kinds of things, far more mundane than COVID-19. And so you think, "If I were the mayor of a city, if I were the governor of a province, if I were the president of a country, if I were the president of an organization, what I'd be really concerned about is panic.

I'd be really concerned about panic, because I've seen what people do when they panic. And so I want to make sure that we avoid panic, because panic comes with its own horrific set of problems." So you also want to be truthful, so you kind of got to give information, but you never want to cause panic.

And so there's a natural bias to downplay the severity, because you don't want to cause panic. And in a way, that's right. I put myself and I say, "What if I were the mayor of a city? Would I lie to people to cause panic?" And as much as I have to say that I wouldn't want to lie, it's hard to see what other option there is.

I would justify it to myself by saying, "Well, I'm only lying for a time while we work on a solution, and I'll tell them two days from now, once we've developed a cure or a vaccine or a potential plan, then I'll tell them the truth of it." But that just goes on and on and on.

And I can't imagine a political leader anywhere in the world who would say, "I'm just going to tell you, you guys should panic. This is really bad. Even if I knew with absolute certainty that you should panic, it's really bad." And so you can't really trust the government officials.

You can't really trust them, because you know they have to lie, because of their real need, not just a perceived need, their real need to maintain peace, to maintain calm, to maintain order. They have to lie. And if there were a worst-case scenario, they would not tell me, because they couldn't, because they're concerned about maintaining the peace.

So, well, how can I get the truth? Well, there's probably someone in the government that would be a whistleblower. There's probably someone in the government that would say, "This is the real truth." And so I'll look for that whistleblower. The problem is, in the world of 2020, you can find those people everywhere.

But you don't know them. They're not friends of yours. You don't know whether to trust them. You don't know whether to trust the information that they have to say. And you don't have the ability or the time to vet it properly. And so, probably like me, you just come down and say, "Well, at least if I believe the official sources, I'll be safe." So I'll wait for the official sources to change their tune, because I don't know whether to trust some random chat on Reddit, some random guy who reports such and such a thing.

And I don't know enough about this to vet that. I don't have the expertise or the skill. And thus far, I haven't even talked about the more hardcore conspiracy theories. A little while ago, I said that it's almost hard to imagine how you would design a virus more perfectly in a novel versus COVID-19 as far as what it's doing.

A long incubation period of asymptomatic transmissibility of the disease, a significant sickness and a not insignificant death rate, but not such a high death rate as to wipe that out really quickly. That's the stuff of a novel. But then you've got people like, say, Senator Tom Cotton, an official US senator, starts a couple of weeks ago, says that a study reported in The Lancet, evidently true, says that there is strains of the HIV virus in COVID-19 and its genetic structure.

That's strange. Now, I don't know anything about virology, but I don't know what that means, but it sounds bad. And here's this guy saying it publicly, saying it loudly. Now, I don't know who Senator Tom Cotton is. Maybe he's a kook, but maybe he's not, but he's saying it out loud.

But then you start digging into the facts and you say, "Huh." They're saying that this virus officially is supposed to be emerged in a wet market in Wuhan, China. But the strange thing is that there's a Level 3 bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China that just happens to be a few blocks from this wet market.

That seems like a really strange coincidence, really strange coincidence. But, well, it's probably just a coincidence. I'm not going to be a crazy conspiracy theorist, but I'll just go on and say that it probably did emerge in the seafood market. And after all, I don't want to be a wacko.

So here's the New York Times headline. "Senator Tom Cotton repeats fringe theory of coronavirus origins. Scientists have dismissed suggestions that the Chinese government was behind the outbreak, but it's the kind of tale that gains traction among those who see China as a threat." By Alexandra Stevenson, back from February 17, 2020, so 10 days ago.

Sorry, a week ago. "The rumor appeared shortly after the new coronavirus struck China and spread almost as quickly that the outbreak now afflicting people around the world had been manufactured by the Chinese government. The conspiracy theory lacks evidence and has been dismissed by scientists, but it has gained an audience with the help of well-connected critics of the Chinese government, such as Stephen K.

Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, and on Sunday it got its biggest public boost yet. Speaking on Fox News, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, raised the possibility that the virus had originated in a high-security biochemical lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak. 'We don't have evidence that this disease originated there,' the senator said, 'but because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving that evidence on that question at all.' Mr.

Cotton later walked back with the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon run amok, but it is the sort of tale that resonates with an expanding chorus of voices in Washington who see China as a growing Soviet-level threat to the United States, echoing the anti-communist thinking of the Cold War era." Anyway, that's enough.

So, of course, now I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, and if Tom Cotton is a Republican from Arkansas, he's probably an ignorant redneck hillbillies of some kind, and if it's Stephen K. Bannon, who's a critic of the Chinese government, well, he's not acceptable, and he's bad and banned and whatnot, so that's probably a conspiracy theory.

But now here we are, a week later. Story from the Washington Examiner, February 22, 2020. Now, of course, we're very concerned because the Washington Examiner is not the Washington Post, and we're supposed to trust the Washington Post but not the Examiner, but whatever, let's just read the headline. "Tom Cotton demands answers after China's state newspaper says coronavirus originated outside wildlife market.

A Republican senator says it's time for the Chinese Communist Party to reveal what it knows about the new coronavirus after the country's state-run newspaper reported that the mystery illness may not have originated from a seafood market in Wuhan." Wait a second. I thought we had proof that it was bat DNA and that it came from eating bats.

"On Saturday, Senator Tom Cotton demanded answers while sharing a report from the Global Times, a Chinese daily newspaper operated by the CCP, Chinese Communist Party, citing new research that claims the virus is transmitted from human to human and didn't originate from animals at the seafood market. Although early reports claimed the illness was spread through food such as bat soup, snakes, or pangolins, researchers now believe patient zero, the original person with the infection, brought the disease to the Wuhan market from 'another location.'" "The English-language Global Times confirmed the data show the infection was 'introduced' to the market, adding fuel to skeptics who believe the CCP is failing to explain the full scope of the epidemic.

The study was done by ChinaXiv, an 'open repository for scientific researchers' who believe one infected person accelerated the virus's spread during a visit to the market." "Cotton has repeatedly challenged the prevailing narrative surrounding the coronavirus outbreak as it has infected and killed patients in countries as widespread as Iran, Italy, and Japan." "In January, the Washington Times reported that Wuhan is home to China's most advanced virus research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The New York Post reported Saturday that Chinese Major General Shen Wei, the country's top expert in biological warfare, was sent to Wuhan last month to deal with the crisis." "More than 2,000 people have died and over 75,000 have been infected since the outbreak began earlier this year. However, it is difficult to ascertain the full size and scope of the illness." So, what do you do?

What do you believe? How on earth do you make sense of this? My answer is simply this. I have no idea. All I know to do is to say, 'Let me look at the information, consider the different sides, and then try to figure out what I can do that would seem prudent to protect myself and my family.' Now, I have not understood why the stock market was not reflecting the major concerns.

When China is virtually shut down, and you have the world basically, we, the United States, are running on this, you wonder, 'What on earth? How is this not reflected in stock prices?' And so finally today, you start to have stock prices hammered. As I record this, down over 3%, almost 4% on some of the major indices.

Now, could it bounce back by tomorrow? Of course it could. I don't know. But it's interesting to finally see that happen. I don't know how to tell you what's going to happen. All I know is the risk is real. The risk of a global flu pandemic is real. This particular flu pandemic hopefully is restrained.

But if you were writing a novel based upon a knowledge of flu pandemics, about how a flu pandemic would develop, including the numbers, the spread, the responses, etc., it would look like what you're seeing in the newspapers. It would look like what you're seeing in the newspapers or wherever you get your news.

Everything is proceeding on the timeline that you would basically expect. Which means that the numbers are still small. But they might not be a month from now. Remember, think about the multiplying bacteria on a petri dish. 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 4, 4 becomes 8, 8 becomes 16, 16 becomes 32, 32 becomes 64, 64 becomes 128, 128 becomes 256, 256 becomes 512, 512 becomes 1024, 1024 becomes 2048, 2048 becomes 4096, 4096 becomes 8192.

And we could go on, on, on, on, on. Now we're at 262,144, which becomes 524,000, becomes 1,048,000, becomes 2,097,000, becomes 4,194,000, becomes 8,388,000. It's a compound effect. Now that was doubling. But with a viral infection, it can be far worse. This is where we go back to the number of people that each person transmits it to.

If one person transmits it to two people, you have a major effect. But what if one person is non-symptomatic for two weeks, and they transmit it to six people? You would say, "Well, what is it?" I don't know. The data is unreliable. I don't know. And so now that it's starting to get spread outside of China, now hopefully we'll start to get better data on the transmissibility, etc.

But the point is, even all that data comes after the fact. It comes after you need it. Because one person can still be infecting multiple people. And so it goes slow, slow, slow, until it goes fast, fast, fast. So let's talk about what you can do to prepare. For the last hour, I've tried to be thoughtful, and I've tried to be thoughtful.

I've tried to show you my line of thinking so that you can judge whether you believe it's rational or not rational. I've tried to talk about the unknowns of which there are legion. But at the end of the day, once you come to a perspective, you've got to say, "Well, what can I do to prepare?" And so what I often come to on these questions is the simple reality that I don't know what the future can hold.

And so I often judge what I should do based upon the cost of preparing versus the cost of not preparing. And what I've often found when I've done that analysis is the cost of not preparing is unacceptable, whereas the cost of preparing and being wrong is acceptable. I noticed, I was browsing around and I noticed Nicholas Nassim Taleb posted this morning, where he wrote a tweet and he was talking about this concept about basically freaking out.

His argument is you should be freaking out if you understand how infections work. The answer, what other people will call an overreaction, just simply indicates ignorance on their behalf. And he wrote this, he wrote this tweet, he said, "When paranoid, you can be wrong 1,000 times and you will survive.

If non-paranoid, wrong once and you, your genes, and the rest of your group are done." It's a huge mystery that academics who deal with risk, rationality, sub-forecasting, and super-forecasting fail to get it. There's obviously some blanking on the words, some sarcasm there. So, "When paranoid, you can be wrong 1,000 times and you will survive.

If non-paranoid, wrong once and you, your genes, and the rest of the group are done." So, a month ago when I talked to you about preparing for flu pandemic, I said to you, I said, "Listen, you can prepare to be quarantined. Quarantine is the most likely outcome. And if you will prepare to be quarantined, there's very little cost to it." I said, "Purchase some extra food, buy some shelf-stable food so that you don't have to go out to the supermarket and just prepare to basically be sitting in your house for a few weeks, something like that." That is the basic action step.

Now, if you think about something as simple as that, what is the cost of not preparing? What is the cost of not buying extra food? Well, potentially it's deadly. If you don't have food, you're not going to sit in your apartment and starve to death. So, you're going to go out to a market or you're going to go to a neighbor, you're going to go somewhere and try to find some food.

That's what you will wind up doing. Well, if that potentially could expose you to the virus, thus potentially infecting you, potentially infecting your whole family, potentially leading to death in some of your family members. Now, let's contrast that outcome with your being paranoid. You're saying, "I'm going to go and I'm going to stock up on food." So, you do what I recommended.

You go to the grocery store, you go to a big box store, wherever you shop, and you stock up on extra food to put in your house. You buy a couple thousand dollars worth of food. Now, you have two months, three months of food in your house. Well, let's assume that in a worst case scenario, the virus comes, you can now stay at home and keep your family protected, stay safe, and potentially avoiding any loss of life in your family.

Now, the problem is you'll never know if you were right because in that situation, you'll never know if that action was the thing that protected you, which is really annoying. Back to the contrast of a flu pandemic with an EMP or a nuclear disaster. If you put a fallout shelter in your basement, well, you know if a nuclear bomb goes off that you probably saved your family's life because you know that the radiation levels, the fallout levels, fallout radiation were life-threatening and sickness-inducing for your neighbors, but you know that your family is safe because you had the foresight to put in a radiation shelter when everyone would have laughed at you if you told them you were doing it.

Or what about the fact that you kept all, you know, you kept a backup set of electronics for your vehicle, maybe you kept an old car in the garage that didn't even have electronics, and then you kept some backup radios and backup power sources in a Faraday cage, you know, down in your basement, and maybe you put a, you know, a metal cloth over your generator and you protected it with some shielding.

And so after the EMP event, your generator still works, you still have functional radios and electronic equipment and functional computer, and so while your neighbors have no knowledge of what's going on, you have radios, while your neighbors have no cars that work, you have a car that works, etc.

You're vindicated in your preparation, in your foresight. But with the flu, you will never be vindicated. You won't know if you saved your family's life by staying at home. Now what about the flip side? What if you're completely wrong? Well, you have some extra food, and then you know, the next few months after the danger flows past, then you simply eat that food, if it's food that you would normally buy.

Or if you have some extra food and it's food that you don't eat, then maybe you cook it up for a party, right? You bought a bunch of flour and you use it up in a big bread baking bash. Or you give it away to somebody who doesn't have food.

Somebody who's homeless or somebody who's in need. Or you give it to a food pantry and you take a tax deduction for it. I mean, there's no there's just no downside. And much of preparation is like that. When you do the risks of "What if I'm paranoid and I'm wrong?" Well, okay, these are minor risks.

So I give away $2,000 worth of food to a charity and I take a deduction for it. Minor risk. Not going to be a big deal. Versus "Death of my child?" Big deal. Very big deal. So, let's reiterate where we've come so far. I've explained to you the problem with analysis.

That it's very hard to analyze this rightly. The risk is very real. It's proven to happen before in human history. And it's very feasible and conceivable that COVID-19 could continue to expand on a global basis. And it could have devastating civilization altering effects. If COVID-19 were to kill people with the same severity as the Spanish flu did, it would probably be 200-300 million people around the world that would be dead.

Now, that would be bad. But the bigger effect is economic. Okay? So, just what I've talked about. We don't know. We're in the fog of war. We don't know what can happen. So all we can do is say, "This could happen. It's reasonable. It's plausible. The evidence is uncertain.

We don't know who to believe. Don't know what to trust. But we could do it. But these things could happen." Then I've talked about how it's worth preparing. The final thing that you have to know is you have to remember two final things. First, you have to remember that the time to prepare is before everyone else wants to prepare because you've got to be early.

Better to be a month early than a minute late in this kind of stuff. Right now, there are really not any significant shortages of anything that you need, other than possibly some shortages in some places of things like face masks. So you can be early today and you can go out and you can prepare, whatever that means to you.

But if you're a minute late and the shortages are there, there's not going to be resupply coming from China for a very long time. So in some ways, you should start thinking about full shelves as "This is it." Now, it's obviously not the case for some things. Some things are produced locally, etc.

But if there's something that you've been wanting to buy that comes from China, I'd recommend you buy it. If you have an Amazon shopping cart that's got things that you've been sitting on and you recognize that those things come from China or have components that are sourced in China, I would hit the buy button and have that stuff shipped out.

If I were in the stores and I noticed something that I'd like to have that, if this flu pandemic became worse, I'd like to have that, whatever that is, I would get it. Because there's a very plausible argument that would say there's not resupply coming for a very long time.

I've elsewhere talked about the problem with just-in-time inventory. In fact, let me reference that podcast number for you so you can listen to it. That would be episode 581 published September 7, 2018 called "Understanding Why Money Doesn't Work Sometimes" or "Understanding Just-in-Time Inventory Management". That was an audio explanation that I pulled from another show and shared on my show that I thought was one of the best explanations of just-in-time inventory systems.

Just-in-time inventory systems are wonderful. Let me give you the two-minute synopsis. The concept is with a just-in-time inventory system, you don't need to keep massive stockpiles of stuff in the back of your store, in the warehouse in the back of your store, because that's financially independent. Sorry, inefficient. Financially inefficient.

So you can trust that if you do all that, you have money tied up in that stuff that could be put at other uses. You have to, the cost of storing it, etc. Rather, what you can do is you can just simply have a sophisticated inventory management system run by a computer program that organizes a shipment right when you need it.

And so those shipments will come in in today's world 24 hours a day. And that's why if you run a Walmart store, you run a local store, you'll have shipments all the time. And there's a very sophisticated inventory control system that brings those shipments in. Now, there'll be a regional warehouse that will have some inventory in it.

But that regional warehouse will, the business managers will do their best to keep that regional warehouse as thin as possible so that there aren't shortages, but you don't have tons of stuff in the warehouse. The inventory manager, the store manager, doesn't want shortages because if he has shortages, he might lose a customer.

But he also doesn't want to have tons of money stored up in that warehouse. And so he'll try to arrange it in such a way that there is just enough inventory to make sure that he'll never have a shortage, but only a very tiny margin of safety. Because he knows that he can depend on his other suppliers.

And as the world has become more and more reliable with regard to transportation systems, communication systems, etc., the smooth and very light inventory has proceeded all the way through the chain. So just-in-time inventory systems are the rule in the local store. They're the rule in the regional warehouse. You have the distributors that are sending in trucks 24 hours a day right to that regional warehouse.

And the regional warehouse is distributing that out to the stores. But then it goes back to those manufacturers. The manufacturers themselves use a just-in-time inventory system in the manufacture of product where they bring raw components in, either raw materials or components made by other companies. And you go and you look at some large manufacturers and you'll find that they have a very precise shipping schedule for the parts that they need for that day's production.

They come in at 1.30 in the morning, they're on the assembly line, the next truck comes in at 10.30 in the morning, etc. They don't want to keep the inventory. And so this goes all the way back to the raw materials. And about the only people that would have stockpiles are the producers of raw materials.

Now normally this leads to a very efficient economic system with very high profit margins. This has profoundly transformed the profitability of companies and dramatically dropped prices. It's not just about profits for the producers, it's also about the benefit of low prices for you, the end consumer. As the end consumer, you benefit from these very efficient manufacturing and store stocking systems.

So you get lower prices. But if there's a hiccup, the system has only a small amount of resilience. Think back to my examples about local, then city-wide, then regional, etc. There's a little bit of resilience for those kinds of events, but there's really no resilience for a global just-in-time inventory system.

If a Japanese product producer can't get raw components shipped out of China because the Chinese factory is shuttered, because the factory boss doesn't have the requisite number of face masks, because he can't get them because they're being hoarded by the population, and the factories that produce the face masks are shut down, what happens is that Japanese manufacturer cannot create the products.

So once those products have been sold off of the store shelves at Walmart, and once the Walmart distribution warehouse has distributed what they have, there aren't any more products that come until the Chinese raw materials or raw component manufacturer can get back in business. Then that can be shipped from China to Japan with the appropriate health checks to make sure it's not infected with COVID-19.

Then that product has to get made in Japan and then shipped over to your local Walmart distribution center, then to the local Walmart, etc. That's a long process. And so as we go forward, shortages on products are increasingly likely. And that's the normal expected result of this. So we're still too early to say it's certain, but it's increasingly likely.

So what's happening is the inventory is being pulled out of the system. The warehouses are going to start drying up. And if this continues, and there's no current indication that it's not going to continue, you'll start to see those things. So what do you do? Hard for me to say, because it's all going to depend upon where you're at and what you're doing.

But I'll just tell you what I think is prudent and you go from there. The first thing is you should certainly be prepared to quarantine yourself and your family to hopefully help you to keep from getting sick. So that's the basics. Things like having food, things like having water.

Those things are simple. So go to the store, stock up on shelf-stable food. Listen to the episode I did a month ago on how to prepare for quarantine. I'm not going to repeat that. But stock up on things that you would need to prepare for quarantine. And make sure it's for a significant amount of time.

With this particular profile of this virus, it seems more prudent to prepare for a significant amount of time than for a less significant amount of time. If you have a place that you could go, if you had to, that would get you away from people, make sure it's stocked up.

If you've got a little vacation cabin and whatnot, make sure your vacation cabin has food. So you could go and spend the summer in your vacation cabin, largely isolated from people. That would be prudent. You certainly at this point in time should be starting to be wary of crowds.

Seems a little bit like an overreaction to say don't go anywhere within public, but you should be thinking about it. You should be conscious of when you're going places in public. You should be doing all of the things, and by the way, there's a difference between if you are in, you know, I'm not aware of any reported cases in South America, right?

So if you're living in a little town in southern Argentina, well, not going out in public seems excessive. If you're living in a large city, if you're living in Hong Kong, well, not going out in public seems much more appropriate, and so you have to watch the reported cases and consider your personal risk.

The thing that will be maddening is you'll never know if you made the right decision or not, because there's no acute event. You can't know if you just missed that person by not going to the store or not. So be prudent, but be thoughtful in exposing yourself to large numbers of other people.

I hate the results of that. I hate the sense of social isolation. I hate the lack of social trust. I hate the economic events of that starting to slow economics in your local area, but it seems like the prudent response. You should brush up and make sure that you are aware of the recommendations for physically protecting yourself.

So how many times have you heard, "Wash your hands"? Well, that is certainly true. Wash your hands properly. I've gone from just simply washing my hands perfunctorily to more of the medical thing, but going to the point where you wash your hands with soap very carefully for a longer period of time to make sure that you're starting to control those kinds of things.

Using hand sanitizer more frequently is important. One thing that I think is prudent is just practicing not touching your face as I rub my nose, because I said touching your face, especially when out in public. So you may have touched something where there may be virus and then you touch your face and you transmit the virus to yourself.

So practicing the skill of not touching your face when out in public, pretending that your hands are contaminated and then when you get home and you wash with soap and you've disinfected it, then you can go ahead and touch your face. But that would be a good, important thing to consider.

If you take things like prescription medications, there's a very good chance that supply lines for prescription medications will be disrupted. If this continues, they will be disrupted. And so this is the time to, if possible, get ahead on your prescriptions. Now, the better time would have been six months ago, but there may still be enough inventory that you can get ahead today.

I fear that if you wait much longer, then the inventories will slow down and the pharmacist and whatnot will recognize that and they won't give them. But this is the time to go ahead and get backed up on your prescription medications. If you have things that you would like to have, again, whatever those items are, this is the time to get it when they're still available.

You can't always trust that the things that you'd like to have will always be available. So just look at the things that you'd like to have and consider what you would need. It seems premature to me to say, "Run to your cabin in the woods and don't come out." But it does seem appropriate for me to say, "Stock your cabin in the woods and make sure that you've got a plan if you had to." Now, most of the concerns that I have on this particular virus are, and there's possibly some other medical things you could do.

You could stock up on some supplies, do a little research. You could stock up on some supplies for treating it. Basically, you're treating an ammonia-like sickness at this point in time. So maybe buying an oxygen concentrator machine. I've got one sitting in an Amazon cart. Probably since I'm publicly announcing it on the show, I'll go ahead and click "Buy" while they're still available.

Things like that, in case somebody gets sick, someone in my family or a neighbor gets sick. That's the kind of thing that could save someone's life. We didn't even go into all the disaster of a virus. The problem is that if medical systems get completely overwhelmed, which happens in a widespread pandemic, because, again, the medical system is designed for condition normal.

You can't have 15 doctors and nurses and an entire hospital building sitting there empty for normal considerations. It's just not economically feasible. So when you have something like a flu pandemic, now all of a sudden, very quickly, the medical system itself gets overrun. So if someone's sick, although possibly they might get good care in a hospital, if it's just no room, you're going to be caring for them at home.

So increasing your medical preparedness, increasing your family's immune system is important. I've been taking a careful look at our family and saying, "Is there anything that we've been lazy on? Are we eating sugar? Are we not making sure that we're increasing our immune system? Taking multivitamin supplements and taking some vitamin D supplements and things like that.

Do we need it? I don't know. Probably not. Is it helpful? I don't know. But does it hurt anything? No. So why not?" Those are the kinds of things to consider. My most significant concerns, however, are economic. And that's where, at this point in radical personal finance, I feel more confident in why you should be careful and think about what to do in recession.

Go back, and I will link to it in today's show notes, go back and listen to the show that I did on how to prepare for recession. Episode 666 in September of 2019. I'm not going to clutter up the feed by putting it there again, but flip back to 666 September 2019 and listen to that episode.

I followed that up with a replay of episodes 192, 193, and 194, which was about recession, just calming down not to get laid off in the next recession. In those shows, although I've tried to not make specific predictions, you'll notice that in those shows I was talking about recession, and there was no recession.

In September of 2019, the yield curve on US debt inverted. And my note said in September 2019, "It's official. The yield curve on US debt is inverted. That's a pretty good indicator that recession is in our future." Well, it didn't happen from September to February. But if you'll go and listen to that show, I haven't listened to it since I recorded it, but if you'll go and listen to that show, you will find nothing in there that would have harmed you if you had done what I recommended in that show.

Nothing in there would have harmed you if I was wrong. Back to 192, 193, and 194, obviously that was a number of years ago, and I said "Make a plan in case you get laid off in the coming recession." Well, there has been no recession from episode 192 or 193, 194, until today, episode 700 and something.

No recession. But none of the things that I talked about in that show would have hurt you. And so I hope that nothing bad happens as a result of COVID-19. I don't want to live in a world with shortages. I don't want to live in a world where I have to go get on an airplane, etc.

But almost nothing that I'm recommending is going to hurt you if I'm wrong, and I hope I'm wrong. So the biggest, most important thing you can do is prepare for recession. Prepare for a significant economic crisis. And the most important strategy for you to use right now is a strategy of staying in place.

I believe that many economic crises can be solved by moving, by relocating from the place of the crisis to the place where there is no crisis. But this is not one of those. This is one of those unique ones where moving is the exact wrong thing to do. Rather, you need to be prepared to stay put.

And so this is not the time to go out and start incurring new expenses. This is not the time to, this is the time to be cautious. I hate the fact that all this stuff becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I say to you, "Well, don't go out and buy a new car because this is not the time to have a car payment." There's no time to have a car payment, but you get the point.

I hate the fact that that results in an economic slowdown. That it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there's no other way to plan. So, be cautious, be prudent, be conservative. I can't tell you what to do with your investments, with your stock market investments, etc. I'm not competent to pontificate in those things.

But I can tell you, prepare. And so, listen to 666, "How to Prepare for the Coming Recession Financially" and consider your actions. I'm not going out and getting into debt. I'm not going out and increasing living expenses. This is the time to be conservative and to wait and watch and see.

Economic preparedness is kind of an interesting thing. And I should simply point out. Let's say that you do what I recommend, which is, don't commit to big new expenses. Just be cautious, be prudent. Control your outflows. If everything goes bad, you're protected. If everything goes bad, you may be able to capitalize on the opportunity.

Get deals on things. Expand your business. Take advantage of great employees that are available because you moved early. But if everything goes great, all you've done is lose basically, perhaps a couple of months or a few months of moves. So you can predict those costs. Now, if you have opportunities to make money, certainly pursue them.

But predict the costs of just waiting. And oftentimes waiting doesn't have that big of a cost. And if it does have a cost, you can often know and predict what that cost is. That's it. I feel like if I say anything more, I'll be repeating myself unnecessarily. I hope that I have conveyed to you a few basic ideas.

Here's what I wish you to have understood at this point in time. Number one, viral flu outbreaks or global pandemics are a serious risk. A very, very significant risk to your physical health, to the health of your family. They are perhaps more importantly a very significant economic risk. And it's a risk profile that has the potential to be truly devastating if it goes to a global basis.

Truly devastating. The risk is real. It's happened before. Everybody I've ever read on the subject believes, experts I mean, people involved in contagious disease outbreaks, etc. believes it will happen in time. Again, it's just a matter of time. It's a very significant risk. That's point number one. Point number two, we don't know if this particular flu outbreak is that very significant risk.

But at present, it's charting like the kind of thing that could become that significant risk. Proceeding apace. It is possible that it's slowed down by the strong reactions, and that's about the best that you can hope. With the flu outbreak, probably the best, most honest thing that a government agent could say is, we're imposing these massive quarantines and massive reactions in an effort to slow down the spread so that you could have time to prepare.

So this risk, this disease, although it's still early, has the potential, it matches the profile potentially, of the kind of thing that could be that significant risk. More data will be coming out in the coming weeks as people recover, as people die, as more and more people are sick in a more western context.

It'll give those of us who view things more from a western lens more insight and so you get a better idea of what to expect. Number three, the biggest risk is probably not physical, although that is a risk, and you should prepare accordingly. The biggest risk is probably economic, due to the world that we live in, with a just-in-time inventory system, and due to the fact that a global flu virus attacks potentially on a global basis without targeting a specific community.

This means that things like supply line disruptions can come into play, and there can be massive overreaction by the people which leads to other economic problems, recessions, etc., and significant crises. This has all of the hallmarks to have that potential, and it is already having that potential in localized areas.

If you make your living in Nassau, Bahamas, based upon cruise ships, your income is down. If you're a Chinese businessman running a local store, write to me and tell me if your business is down. I heard that from one friend, but write to me and tell me if your business is down.

If it's not down, it's probably going down. So, different industries are going to be affected differently. If you're in China, obviously your business is affected. The closer you are to China, your business is affected. Many of us live in places where we're not that affected, but it could have that potential.

So, prepare for economic disruptions. That's the biggest thing. And then think about what you would do if you did have to quarantine for an extended period of time. What would you do with your children? At what point in time would you pull your children out of bed? At what point in time would you cancel travel plans?

I don't know the answers to that, but I know that it's good for you to be thinking about them right now. As I'm looking at my calendar for a trip that I have scheduled in a couple of weeks, I'm sitting here saying, "Well, what's the risk like?" Well, I don't know.

But all I know is I'll be watching it over the next couple of weeks. Do you pull your children out of school at some point? Well, certainly you do at some point, but do you do it early or do you do it later? Do you go to your second remote house and work from home more?

What do you do? Hard to know. What I would say also is I will link to in the show notes for today, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States has published here in February 2020 a document called "Interim Guidance for Businesses and Employers to Plan and Respond to Coronavirus Disease 2019" COVID-19.

This is worth your reading. They give a little bit of background on the coronavirus. Then here are some of the recommended strategies that they recommend for employers to use now. Number one, actively encourage sick employees to stay home. Separate sick employees. Emphasize staying home when sick. Respiratory etiquette and hand hygiene by all employees.

Perform routine environmental cleaning. Advise employees before traveling to take certain steps. And then additional measures. Now there's a bunch of sub points under those, but those are the strategies that they recommend. And then they have a part of that document called "Planning for a Possible COVID-19 Outbreak in the United States" and they give a number of planning considerations.

Consider the disease severity, the impact on employees. Prepare for possible increased numbers of employee absences due to illnesses in employees and their family members. Dismissals of early childhood programs in K-12 schools due to high levels of absenteeism or illnesses. And they go on to talk about other recommendations. So be careful.

Be considerate. And this is a point where if it's not time for taking action, it's time for making plans. That's where I think we are. It's at least the time to have plans made of what I will do or would do if these certain things happen. And I think it's time for stocking up.

If there are supplies or things that you would need in that kind of circumstance, get them now. I had two letters from listeners in Asia. One letter I read on the show where the listener said, "Josh, well because of what you've done, we're well prepared." Then I received a letter from another listener who said, "I'm sitting on an airplane heading back to China.

I wish I had done it. I got so used to having fresh food all around in a market, I just thought it was silly to stock up." No, it's not silly. Stock up. There's no downside to it. That's it for today's show. In closing, I would tell you that I am tonight, Monday, February 24, I'm teaching a class to students of my Radical Preparedness course on food preparations.

How to stock up on food so that you have abundant amounts of food. This is a prepping class that I've wanted to do for a long time because a lot of prepping stuff out there is, in my opinion, not quite practical and I've always wanted to have something that was super practical but well thought out as an entry level gateway to prepping.

I probably have a few ideas and techniques that could help advanced preppers, but most of what I want to focus on is just basic stuff. This is stuff where I think I have unique insight because I'm knowledgeable, but I've also gone through the exercise of changing countries and starting from scratch outside the United States, which is different than the US-centric mindset.

That class is still available. If you go to RadicalPreparedness.com, you can sign up for that class. RadicalPreparedness.com If you are listening to this after Monday, February 25, as most of you are, that's totally fine. I am recording the classes, transcribing them, and they're available for you afterwards. Then I'm continuing the series so you can join for more live classes in the future.

Go to RadicalPreparedness.com and sign up there and take that extensive course that will be available tomorrow on all the details of how to stock up on food preparedness. RadicalPreparedness.com 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.

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