Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a 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. I might have to change that.

It's a tough time. Who knows? Actually, you know what? Let's keep a good attitude. Let's talk about how to build financial freedom in 10 years or less, even in the midst of where we are right now. Live Q&A show today. A bunch of callers on the line. It's going to be interesting.

If you're new to Radical Personal Finance, welcome, welcome, welcome. Every Friday that I can arrange the technology where I can arrange to be on a stable internet connection and host a live Q&A call. Every Friday that I can do that, I host a live Q&A call. These calls are open to patrons of the show, those who support the show on Patreon.

If you would like to do that, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance and sign up to support the show there. Patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. I don't want to waste any time today, so we're going to begin with Justin in Chicago. Justin, welcome. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, Joshua. Sorry about that. No problem.

You're live. I had two questions for you. The first one is I have a family member who is currently in Costa Rica, trying to come back, I think tomorrow, and that's been canceled. So now trying to get flights out later this week. I was just going to see if you had any thoughts on should she have tried to come home early amidst the news?

Do you think she should stay put and try to make accommodations there? Is she living in Costa Rica or is she just simply traveling in Costa Rica on a short term? She went for a one-week trip, kind of in the middle of all this. And why was the flight canceled?

Why couldn't she get out? I'm not sure why the first flight was canceled. It may have been like an availability thing. I'm not exactly sure, but the flight she was supposed to come back on was canceled. Has the airline rebooked her? Yeah, she's been rescheduled to another flight. So what's the problem then?

Why shouldn't she just take the flight? So I guess mainly I was curious because she's recovering from illness and is in her 60s. So I was thinking about just trying to avoid contact with folks. Well, there's not really an option for her. If she was living in Costa Rica or she had friends in Costa Rica, then of course she could stay in Costa Rica.

But Central America, just like almost anywhere, is shut down. So she has three ways to get from Costa Rica to the United States. She can fly, she can drive, or she can take a boat. She ain't going to drive. All the borders are closed. Mexico-US border is now closed.

Of course, if she's a US citizen, she could get in that one. But I don't know if the Mexican border is closed right now, but Honduras is closed. El Salvador is closed. Guatemala is closed. Costa Rica is closed. Costa Rica would let her out, but Costa Rica is closed.

Panama is closed. Panama is canceling all flights, all international flights on Sunday. So she's not – generally, of course, she could drive up, but too late for that. And so her only options are to fly or to take a boat. There's no practical boat scenario, and so I think she has no choice but to fly.

So if she's been sick, if she has coronavirus or has the symptoms of it, then obviously she owes it to her fellow passengers to not fly to get treatment until she recovers, and she can do that in Costa Rica. But if she just has a cold or something like that, then have her wear and acquire a mask to protect her fellow passengers, to maintain distance, but I don't see any option that she has but to get home.

I don't see any other choice for her at this point. All right, awesome. Thanks so much. Any other questions before you go? I know I've got a date for you. Okay, great. All right, we move on to – looks like Pennsylvania. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

Hey there, Joshua. This is a guy in Pennsylvania. Good to talk to you, sir. You too, sir. Go ahead. I have a simple tax return question, and the question is where you would best suggest that I would put these funds. My wife and I have been talking about it for a few weeks now.

We were talking about this before everything has happened with coronavirus, and now I think this probably changes the conversation a little bit. So essentially, just to kind of outline where we're at, we're in ministry, so I'm employed at a church, and she is a freelance writer, very minimal. She makes about $500 a month.

And so I look at our income as, especially in times like these, as fairly high risk, because if the community stops making income, the church stops making income, I stop making income. So I have a tax return coming. We are, as a family, we are debt-free except for our mortgage.

We have an $86,000 mortgage. And with this $7,000 tax return coming, we're married with three small children, four, two, and one. And where we've been discussing is whether or not those funds should go into our emergency cash savings to beef that up, or if they should go towards paying off our mortgage faster or towards what we consider our Kids' Future Fund, which is where we're saving for things like college or whatever else may come up, but it's not in a 529 or anything like that.

So I just kind of wanted a little bit of your guidance on what you would suggest. At the moment, our income is going to continue to come in. You know, I'm still working. Our church is moving online, things like that. We have $4,500 in our emergency preparedness fund right now.

$3,000 of that is in a money market account, and $1,000, $1,500 of that is in $50 bills in the gun safe. So we have that cash on hand. So I just kind of wanted to feel you out for what your thoughts and what your suggestions were on where we should launch that money.

If I were in your shoes, I would go to the ATM and I would withdraw the $3,500 from the money market account. I would add that and $50 and $20 bills to the money that's in my gun safe, and when I receive the $7,000 tax refund, I would take that to the bank and I would turn it into physical currency.

I hope that that's overreacting. I hope that that is unnecessary, but at this point in time, my concern grows day by day, and I don't see, except unless we have some miracle treatment that proves to be effective. For example, in the last couple of days, there's a lot of excitement about chloroquine and other treatments, and I think that's great.

If some miracle treatment comes out in the next few days, I will be thrilled with that, but barring that, I see no reason not to do what I've just said. That's what I would do. >>Trevor: So your recommendation is to up my cash on hand to around $10,000, and had we not been in this scenario, would you suggest any differently?

I've listened to a lot of your episodes where you're suggesting more cash on hand than I have. >>Dave: Had we not been in this scenario, would I have suggested differently? Probably, a little bit, but I would have thought about the other options. I would have worked it through. I would have considered the benefits and the drawbacks, et cetera, and I probably would have arrived at a similar conclusion.

If you had a total emergency savings of $12,000, I'd be nervous about all of that $12,000 under normal situations, no global pandemic. I'd be a little nervous about all of that $12,000 being in physical cash because that puts you at risk of a security risk if your safe is broken into, if you have a home fire.

It's too risky to have all your money in cash in that scenario if that represents all of your savings. In addition, it's a risk for just simply the administrative complexity of paying bills. It's very valuable to have digital emergency funds that can be quickly put in a checking account that you can make an electronic transfer, et cetera.

I would have probably still steered you towards saving it just in emergency funds, not a college account, not paying extra on your mortgage because I'd rather you have $12,000 being the father of three children than $5,000. I probably still would have steered you in that direction. Of course, in normal times, I would have said, "Spend some of the money.

There's no reason. Perhaps, there's something that you've been waiting for and maybe an extra $2,000 is spent. That's reasonable." But in the current scenario, I would do it as I said. While you're waiting on that tax refund check, I would go to the bank. I would make some ATM distributions and I would take out the money that was in my money market account and turn it into physical currency.

Then when I received the tax refund check, I would also turn that into physical currency. There's no downside risk to that other than the risk of loss. So I would diversify it. Put some in your gun safe and bury some in the backyard or put some at your mom's house or something like that so that it's not all exposed to the risk of loss, not all exposed to a house fire, et cetera.

But I think that's where we are and I think that that move at this point in time is clearly justified. Okay, I appreciate that. And then kind of the same thing, if we get that, which it looks like they're going to pass cash to every American household, kind of handle that in the same way.

You'd suggest or maybe do a little bit of digital beyond that. I don't mind. You need some digital money just to pay bills, right? So if you still have income and whatnot, that's fine. And I don't want to – I'm trying to figure out how to clearly convey my concern, which grows day by day.

I have just – prior to this call, I've just spent an hour sitting and talking to my wife, talking through all the reasons why I'm wrong, all the reasons why I'm overreacting and the conclusion was that I can't find it. And when I conclude this Q&A call, I have a significant amount of cash and I'm going to the bank to withdraw more.

So I hate that. I hate that we're there, but I'm concerned that within the next few days, those kinds of things will start to be more apparent and you need to be early. So if I'm overreacting, I don't see much of a cost to you if I'm overreacting. I don't have any cost to me if I'm overreacting.

And so that's as clearly as I can say. Yeah, I appreciate it because they're trying to prevent a run on the bank. Of course, of course they are. But the reason they're trying to prevent it is because there's more significant danger right now than there has ever been. And again, I'm giving all these disclaimers because I'm uncomfortable publicly acknowledging that these are my current concerns.

It makes me seem very weird and I don't like that, but these are my concerns. And so if you go to the bank early and you arrange distribution of physical currency, you can possibly get your hands on physical currency. But if you wait until things are more difficult, then there's a good chance they don't.

And so what I have heard from many listeners is first of all, it's just flat out difficult to get your hands on physical currency in today's world. There's been an incredible war on cash over the last number of years. And although I've never done a standalone episode on that, I have all the material, I've tested myself to see if that's actually true.

Because I used to think that was a conspiracy theory and oh, there's not a war on cash and I used to take it lightly. At this point, I'm convinced that it's real, it's true and I've proved it for myself. And then so it's hard under normal circumstances to get cash out of the bank.

And what I am hearing increasingly is that banks are just like you go through when you face an emergency, right? There are a number of different phases to it. And you can see this with regard to the toilet paper crisis and whatnot right now. So the first phase is that there's a reason for concern.

If you move before there's a reason for concern, you can stockpile as much of anything as you want. And so the secret is always to move before there's a reason for concern. Six months ago, if you were stockpiling the necessary goods and you wanted to stockpile toilet paper, you could go to Costco, you could get two or three carts and you could get as much toilet paper as you wanted.

It was cheap, it was easy and nobody would look at you other than like I wonder why that guy's getting so much toilet paper but nobody would take a picture of you and post it online for public excoriation. That was what you could do six months ago. Now if you went back in December and January when we first started hearing news of a potential viral outbreak, it was early, we were seeing news, it had a whistleblower that started to bring it, people were paying attention.

If you understood the potential contagion of a global viral pandemic, you could go in January and you could buy toilet paper and you could get three carts worth and there was no big deal. You didn't harm anybody else, everything was entirely fine, there was no downside to that whatsoever.

In February it started to get questionable but if you waited until March and then you went and did it, now as far as I'm concerned you're engaging in something that is hurting other people and this is like the difference between the word stockpiling versus hoarding. I don't like the use of the word hoarding the way that it's usually used.

I don't like it at all because what happens is that I'm not a hoarder if I went six months ago and purchased a year's supply of toilet paper, I'm simply stockpiling. No one else is hurt, there's plenty of slack in the supply line, that's just a simple choice, I'm stockpiling.

Now then they start using the word hoarding and they say well you're hoarding because now you're taking things and that's making it unavailable to other people and I believe that you're entirely justified in doing that but that that's not a good expression of love for your neighbor. I don't want to take valuable resources in a difficult time away from people who need them more than I do and so I would not go, if I was going to make an order for masks six months ago, I could order a thousand masks and just simply have that available for me and I didn't hurt anybody.

In fact now I would be in a position to give charity because now I could take, if I bought a thousand masks, obviously I'm being a little bit hyperbolic with these numbers but if I bought a thousand masks now I could easily take three or four or five hundred of them and I could take them to my local hospital, I could take them and donate them and really be helpful and my stockpiling allowed me to be charitable during a time when that charity is really needed and so that's just good sense.

Now I don't believe that it's a good practice or an ethical moral practice to hoard during times of shortages, that's not love for neighbor. And so this is not a time to go out and to hoard those resources but there's a major difference between stockpiling and hoarding. So where are we financially?

Why am I concerned about physical currency? Well if we continue on the current path then next week and the week after we're going to start to see public concern about banks. We're going to start to see public concerns about a lot of stuff in the financial supply and this is the most complex supply chain in the world where you've got the biggest people involved.

You've got the supply chain of the Federal Reserve controlling the actual supply of money in the economy. You've got the big consumers of money, of individuals, of corporations, of governments, etc. and on a global basis this supply chain is now being tested. And so what are the stages that people go through?

Well in physical products like toilet paper normally what would happen is as demand rises then the price would rise and that price would start to adjust the supply. But of course in the United States and in most countries around the world there are what are known as price gouging laws which are supposed to keep the prices from changing in a situation like that.

So instead of the price changing to reflect the increase in demand what happens is the stores sell the product out very quickly and then they start to have shortages. Then in order to deal with those shortages in a way that doesn't alienate their customers which is the first thing that stores should not change prices massively because it alienates their customers and also in a way that follows the anti-price gouging laws they impose rationing and that's the next step.

So when you start to see rationing you're a little bit late but when you see rationing there's probably still time for you to go out and to get your supplies because the supply is starting to be filled in. The warehouses are shipping out more toilet paper. You can go to multiple different stores.

You can get a couple things. Again we've got an ethical problem there that I think we should be cautious of. There's no reason to cause unnecessary shortages but practically speaking if you need more toilet paper you can go and get it when you're in that period of rationing. So that period of rationing is a very important sign that hey something's going on.

Now that period of rationing can be short term. It can change and so you want to say why is this being rationed and what's actually going to happen. So with cash what I am seeing is first of all cash has been a tightly controlled market for a long time.

It's a very tightly controlled market and there's a lot of rationing involved. You cannot generally go on just about any day to your bank and ask for large amounts of cash. You have to put an order in and they have to need a day or two to satisfy it.

The amount of physical currency that's available is absolutely tiny compared to the amount of currency that's in circulation. So now what you're seeing is you're seeing more and more stress and more and more strain go onto the banks and so banks are starting to ration their services. I've received multiple reports from listeners who've shared with me directly that banks are limiting withdrawals to $3,000.

That's a frequent number that I've heard from multiple listeners that they're limited in cash withdrawals to $3,000. That's not a lot of money. That's really not a lot of money and so that's concerning because that's in addition to other rationing mechanisms such as just as you think about mechanisms like ATM distribution limits at $400 and $300, etc.

Now even if you go in and you have $10,000 in your account, the banks are limiting you. In addition, banks are rationing access to their services. Many banks are closing down their lobbies and they're leading to you have to do business with them in the drive-thru, which makes all the sense in the world given a viral outbreak.

Makes all the sense in the world, but I'm also concerned now about even just the access to money, physical money. That rationing is a major warning sign to say what's going to happen in the future. Now the supply chains are still pumping in money. Every single night the banks are trying to refill their vaults.

The Federal Reserve is getting digital money out. There's currency that's flowing around to try to meet the demand, but it's possible that that gets worse. As the news continues to—as more and more people start to understand where we are and as more and more people start to understand the financial concern, as these things start to hit publicly, pit the public awareness, then it could affect it.

What happens is you're not dealing with—when you're dealing with markets, you're dealing with people and their individual behaviors. The thing that causes the panic is not necessarily the actual results. It's not necessarily the actual outcome. This is why you've seen people arguing about, "Well, the coronavirus is just a flu." Well, in my mind it's rather obvious that it's not just a flu.

I don't understand how people can still believe that. It was one thing to say that when you had data out of China that you couldn't be sure of, but at the moment I don't see how you say that. But the problem is not that it's just a flu. There is the medical problem, and then there's the perception of the medical problem.

There's the actual issue, and then there's the human psychology and the panic that ensues. And so financially you have exactly the same thing. So what are people who are managing the finances trying to do? They're trying to solve the actual problem, and then they're trying to manage perception because the danger is that there is mass panic.

And when there's mass panic, then all of a sudden everything gets out of whack. And so there's the problem, which people can argue about the problem, but then there's the reaction to the problem, which is in and of itself a problem. That's why people are always – medical advisors, even me, I'm trying to balance, okay?

Let me speak into the subject, but also manage the human psychology. Now thankfully in my case I can speak without – I'm not a government agent. I don't have responsibility to that. I just have responsibility to my listeners to give them the best ideas that I have. But at the moment, financially speaking, over the coming weeks we're in very, very tricky waters.

And what's going to happen is they're flooding the market with money, and that money is going to be digital money. That money is going to be physical money. But in a contagion of panic, that human psychology can lead to shortages, can lead to major problems. And that's the kind of thing that can lead to bank collapse.

That's the kind of thing that can lead to freezes. That's the kind of thing that can lead to all kinds of awful price control laws, currency control laws, all the stuff that just makes a financial panic awful. And so that is the fear that is being discussed right now in – that's the fear that's being discussed right now in every corner of the financial universe.

How do we avoid this? Now, I'm hopeful that it'll be able to be avoided, and so I don't want to be the cause of panic. But I also don't want my family to be without toilet paper. And so when you see something, I think you have to say something, and that's what I'm doing here.

So that's the background to that, is that as I watch this develop, this is the next – one of the next big potential events that is going to make things more and more difficult. >>Steve: Yeah, absolutely. So based on – so you'd recommend I need to kind of step that cash out.

They're only going to give me so much anyway, so I kind of have to step it out. >>Steve: Right, right. >>Adam: Yeah, what I would do – thankfully, $3,000 is a very doable amount. You can go to your bank, you can get a distribution, you can call them and ask them.

If you haven't, one of the things I always recommend and have for years is that you should always have high ATM limits on your cards. This has become more difficult in recent years. For example, with my bank for many years – and this is back to the war on cash – with my bank for many years, I was able to institute a standing order for all of my debit cards that I could – where my ATM – my daily ATM distribution limit was I think $5,500.

I had to do it in writing. I would give them a written request, but I had on all of my debit cards $5,500 daily ATM distribution limits. So I could go to an ATM and I could sit there and the ATM has a limit and then your bank has a limit for ATM distributions.

But I could go to the ATM, I could sit there and put in my PIN number – let's say it's $400 – I could put in my PIN number 13 times and get out $5,000 from the ATM without my bank shutting me down. Then with multiple accounts, I could do that with multiple cards and multiple accounts and then I could do that on multiple days.

And so I always had it set up so that if I needed – all of a sudden I look around and I need cash, whether it's to go and buy an RV because somebody's selling one or buy a boat or whether it's I need cash because I'm worried about getting access to cash.

I always had it set up so that I could go and I could just from an ATM at 10 o'clock at night, I could go and I could get $20,000 out because if I have multiple debit cards with high limits set on those, then I could go to multiple ATMs and I could go get $20,000 out of the bank.

Well, what happened is I think a year or two ago, I lost my debit card and I got a new debit card. And then I tried one time to go get money out of the bank and I couldn't get a lot of money out of the bank and that was really frustrating.

And so I called them and I said, "What's going on?" I knew from previous experience when I had lost previous debit cards that whenever I got a new debit card, I had to reinstitute that same policy. I had a written authorization with the bank but I had to call them and say, "Will you please go ahead and reference my written authorization that's on file and give me the permanent high ATM limit on this card?" So then what I found out with the new card is that they would no longer honor that and the bank had made a policy change that now I was limited to whatever the stupid $500 or $600 standard thing but I could still contact them on occasion to request a higher ATM distribution limit.

And so that was just a sign and I said, "This is one of the most valuable things in the world to me. What are you doing?" And they just wouldn't listen to me. And so I said, "Ah, this is getting worse and worse." Now every bank is different, right?

There's a big difference between the big monster mega banks and modest size banks and local credit unions, etc. But I have watched, you know, year after year I've watched this get even harder. And so I lost the question I was answering when I was responding to you. But just, oh, the point was simply that $3,000, you should be able to get that out of the ATM.

That's doable. Go to a few ATMs, request a temporary ATM distribution limit if you do that or just go to the bank and see if they give you the cash. You don't have a problem. The person who has the problem is the guy who's got a couple hundred thousand dollars and he wants to say, "You know, I'd like to pull out $30,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 and put it aside just in case." That's where things are starting to get tricky.

So I don't think we're right there, but that's going to be the next thing. And so I'm watching that very carefully over the next couple of weeks and looking for information, but that's my advice. >>Trevor: My wife and I have been, since right around October, we've been slowly prepping, slowly getting fruit stores and things like that in the basement.

We've always been working on emergency funds and we've been debt free for our entire marriage since 2012. And we take all this very seriously. And my wife, I'm taking your radical preparedness course and my wife, she thinks that's all a good thing. But it's been kind of neat to see this kind of go on because I think it's almost, God's timing is amazing.

It's almost prophetic that you're doing this right now, that you have been doing this because all of this has been theory in our household as we've discussed a lot of what you're talking about. And now here we are. I said, "I wish this happened six months later. We'd have been so much more prepared for this." And so my wife actually just this morning, she just, in a stockpiling mentality, not a hoarding mentality, she just got back from the store and she got extra of everything so that we can not have to leave for a few weeks if we don't have to.

And she said, "I'm so glad you're taking that." She's totally on board now. And you go to the grocery store. It's a little bit eerie. I was walking through Alpi and it's quiet, it's empty, the shelves are empty, and somebody's cell phone started playing the Titanic. I said, "Oh no, what's happening here?" I couldn't believe it.

Well, thank you for taking that course. And even, oh, I cut you off. Forgive me. Go ahead. No, I was just going to say I really appreciate the help. And I just had just a follow-up thought of, if I do all this cash stuff, then I can, as long as my income continues, I can just continue my regular plan of saving for kids' futures, saving to pay off mortgage and all that.

I can stay the course. Exactly. Don't have to alter those goals. Okay? Exactly. Yeah, I think, and thank you for taking the course. I'm glad that it is helpful. I will tell you this, I am teaching that course, right? I have paid attention to this for a long time.

I have pages of notes of things that I feel exposed on because I can hardly believe every day. I get my normalcy bias every single day. And I just say, I thought this through, but I always thought, I knew historically that a global flu pandemic, or global viral pandemic, this is the thing that throughout history has changed again and again and again, entire civilizations.

The plague changed history. You can see cholera outbreaks, the Spanish flu, again and again and again, you can see that this changed civilizations. Entire civilizations disappear because of infectious disease outbreaks. You have smallpox outbreaks in the Americas and entire cultures and civilizations disappear. And so I've always thought that this was a serious threat.

And because of the model of the threat, as I've stated publicly, I've always thought that this was the hardest thing because it's all the globe all at once. And especially that's the risk that has always risen, that in the past, it wasn't always all the globe all at once because people traveled around at a fairly moderate speed, the rate of that their own feet would take them, the rate that a horse would take them, the rate that a sailboat would take them.

But now as the speed of travel has increased and we went from horses to trains and trains to automobiles and then to airplanes, and now people travel around at 24 hours a day, that has always been the major risk factor for the outbreak of infectious disease because that speed of movement makes it possible for something to go from one area to the rest of the world all at once.

Well, that's been compounded and had offsetting benefits to it. The information also travels and so information travels fast, which leads to a bigger risk of panic, a bigger risk of the human psychology. During the Spanish flu, very rarely people knew what they knew from their neighbors and they knew what they knew from the newspapers, but now I'm tuned into the world flow of information and so is everybody else.

And so this increases the risk of human reaction and overreaction, human panic, et cetera, and it makes it even more acute. Now thankfully there are offsetting factors. We have massively improved healthcare systems. We have massively improved treatment systems, massively improved understanding of germs and viruses, et cetera, and so there are offsetting factors that make things better, but you see it playing out.

So the point is just simply to say, "Yes, I understand the situation you're in," and every day I look at it and I think, "Well, I always knew that this was a scenario, but I didn't know it was going to be quite this difficult." During your course. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly, and so it's one of those things where I keep hoping every day that there'll be some cure, but I'm like, "Next time it comes, I'm going to be 10 times better prepared than I am now," because I don't like the impact of it day by day. I don't like it and I'm in a better situation than most people.

So all right, man. Guy, thanks for calling in. I'm going to boogie on. I've got a bunch of other callers to work with, so thank you very much. All right, we go now to, looks like Mohamed. Is that you? Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

Hi, Josh. Thank you. Yes, I've been to the Joshua Sheets University, so I've taken all your courses and I so appreciate everything you've done. I'm in a situation where I'm doing telemedicine, so I have my online business right now doing telemedicine as a physician. I have a few other online businesses, so I'm in a good financial situation as far as income.

I have a good amount of cash saved up. I also have real estate in the US and I have a piece of property in Spain, so I could live in either one. Currently, I'm in California working in a clinic and I'm debating in the long run, but also in the short term, is it better for me to be in Spain or is it better for me to be here?

I can do my business in either place. And a follow-up question, if you do have time, if not, that's fine, is whether there's an opportunity right now to invest in anything that comes to your mind. Thank you. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Before I answer those, could you give any comments with your experience and what you're seeing on the ground of things that you think I've gotten wrong or things that I've gotten right in terms of just for my audience?

Because, of course, we always appreciate when we can hear directly from somebody who's part of the community who has the medical knowledge. Can you give any comment on what you're seeing and where you think we go from here? Yeah, I mean, it would always be more comfortable speaking to you directly without your audience, but, I mean, I'm happy to say what I've experienced.

So I'm a family medicine physician, so I'm in a community health center working in Compton, Los Angeles. So we have a little bit of a lower education status with patients and a little bit less access. So we are seeing a lot of people who are coming in with cold and flu symptoms because they're certainly afraid.

They've been turned away at the ERs or they're trying to go to the hospitals. We don't have any testing. And even if we did have testing, we can't rely on the results of the tests right now. We don't know what the specificity and sensitivity is. We don't have enough personal protective equipment to collect those specimens, which can put us physicians at risk.

We also have a lot of fear as far as me as a physician. Everybody said that there is this waiver, there's that law waiver, we can do telemedicine, we can do this. Everybody said that me as a physician, I'm off the hook for a lawsuit. So unfortunately, that hasn't come down the pipeline yet.

So a lot of us physicians are afraid to diagnose a certain potential disease like this. If we see somebody with certain symptoms, I'm not saying that people do this, but I'm saying that physicians have, you know, we're careful about how we document it in the chart, because if I do miss a heart attack versus a pneumonia versus a COVID infection, then I'm on the hook.

And if I do send the patient over to the ER, I'm on the hook. I get chewed out by the ER doctor, I get chewed out by the hospital, I get chewed out by the CEO, the CFO has given us talks at the clinic, the medical director has given us talks.

So there's a lot of chaos and we're not getting enough information as physicians to know what to do, how to manage these patients, how to screen the patient, and what can I say to a patient? Should I keep him at home? Should I send him to the hospital? So there's a lot of chaos for us.

We're protecting ourselves, we're protecting our ass, because I'm trying to protect my income. So that's what's happening there. But yeah. I think that's enough. I've got private messages from other physicians that I can share anonymously as well. So thank you. To answer your questions, I would say specifically Spain versus California.

It seems to me that between the two, I'd probably rather be in California right now, especially for your opportunities to generate income off of this. I think that if you're going to work hard during this period, as you certainly are, that there's no reason for you not to get paid.

And so there's probably a better opportunity for you to be able to generate income in the private market in the United States and through the telemedicine options versus the nationalized systems in Spain. Now if that's wrong based upon your experience, then just discount that. But to me that seems like an option.

You can use your geographic flexibility to go where you can help people and be well compensated for that work. That would be helpful. In addition, it seems to me that if you are a US citizen, you are going to have a little bit more security there than you are in Spain, being perhaps a resident.

But are you a citizen, an EU citizen or a Spanish citizen? I'm a permanent resident of Spain, so I have a visa and I'm a citizen of the US. Okay, so that's good. So anyway, that's one consideration. Beyond that though, I would look at just on the ground and say where do you feel more comfortable and where do you feel like you can serve more effectively.

It might be possible if you're going to work at a clinic in Spain and also do telemedicine, perhaps that would be the most effective place for you to serve. I know you're not at this time just trying to figure out what's all in it for you, you're seeking to serve.

But I would look at the medical options and see. You're probably, hopefully it's okay in either place. I don't know that, you know, the United States is probably a week or so behind Europe in terms of the proliferation of the infection, or at least the acknowledgement of the proliferation of the infection.

And where we go from here, I don't know. I'd be slow to get on an airplane right now, so the fact that you're in California right now to me would be pretty persuasive. I don't have any more insight than that. You could probably be useful in both places and may you know God's wisdom and strength as you seek to serve in this time.

As far as investment options, I see that as a question of now versus later. And these are very, very different scenarios. At the moment, answering investment options is hard because we don't know the extent of the, we don't know the extent of anything. We're still in the situation of just simply not having good, reliable information and thus good data analysis is very, very difficult because there's so many unknowns.

Now I think we can be certain that regardless of what happens with the infection, with the virus, with the actual pandemic, it has already caused incalculable economic damage. At this point in time, I am mentally preparing myself for that economic damage to continue for minimum months and months and probably more like a year to 18 months.

As best I can understand, it seems to me that there are two basic things that can solve the, that can potentially solve the medical problem and only one of them is short term. The first thing that will dramatically change the medical problem is the discovery of a very effective treatment protocol for people with coronavirus, with COVID.

And so I see people talking about that. I see physicians trying things. Again, all the excitement in the last few days over chloroquine, I hope I'm saying that right, but there's excitement over it. But I haven't seen lots of people say, "Yes, let's trumpet this. We've got this thing licked." If some kind of extremely effective therapeutic treatment is found that's effective for young people and old people alike, that could bring this whole thing, that could bring the infection to a stop and that treatment could be preventive.

It could be a way of inoculating people against the impacts of the infection. And then there are enough people I think who would be happy if they knew there were a treatment and say, "Okay, fine, I'll just go ahead and I'll get sick, I'll get infected and they've got a good treatment for me and we'll get herd immunity quickly in that situation." And so that's the best short term case for stopping the actual infection.

Now the best long term case is a vaccine, but I don't see how a vaccine could be developed and or developed, tested properly, created and distributed in anything less than a year and probably that's even too optimistic. Something more like 18 months would be a time frame. There are companies who right now are trialing vaccines, but there's such a huge difference between here versus there that to me it just seems like only someone who's ignorant of that process would think that that's a short term solution.

And so I'm looking for those two things, but the vaccine is long term. Now unless a treatment is found, what we know right now is that this is a deadly disease that's incredibly infectious and is killing many. And the modeling indicates that if this disease is not contained, then the death toll, what was it from the Olympia College this last week, you know, the estimated death toll in their modeling was something like four point, you know, over four million Americans, something like 45 million people globally in the worst case scenario.

Then they modeled different scenarios. Now those things have of course have a huge margin of error. We don't know that for sure, but the only thing we know for sure absolutely works is quarantine, is social distancing. We know that if you sit in your house and you don't go anywhere and you're not sick now and you don't contact any sick people, you're not going to get sick.

And so quarantining and/or like vaccination and/or treatment is the only solution, but that comes with an incalculable economic cost. And so at this point, I'm hoping that there's a therapy developed that's very effective within the next weeks and months. And of course there are millions of doctors all around the world trying to find that, but until that's found, I don't see how this doesn't continue for a minimum of a year to 18 months.

Maybe they'll figure out how to do rolling lockdowns to say, "Okay, we're going to lock down for three weeks. That minimizes the spread of infection. Then we're going to go back to business as normal for a few weeks and then we're going to lock down again." But the cost of human lives is simply of an uncontrolled viral outbreak is simply too high for I think any politician to say, "Yes, we're going to do that," and for any intelligent rational person to be willing to engage with.

And so at the moment, I see this economic effect as getting deeper and longer and being on a period of again minimum months and months and months and months while hoping that a treatment is developed. So if that analysis is right, if it's wrong, tell me why it's wrong, but if that analysis is right, I don't see a short-term investment opportunity that makes any sense.

And you can kind of go through almost all of the different asset classes, and by the way, except possibly the short-term solution would be cash, but that's not an investment, or possibly gold because of the perceived stability of gold in terms of crisis. But if we look at investment opportunities, I think generally we look at business.

I always talk about it in terms of business. I look at it in terms of real property, usually real estate and/or other tangible property, and then paper assets. Well paper assets are in turmoil. Stocks are obviously in turmoil for good reason, and I don't see any reason to expect that to end any time soon.

The market is going to continue to react to massive inflows of money. The market's going to continue to react to bad news, good news, etc. But if you conceive of what a global lockdown, what you're seeing all around the world, a global lockdown is right now, and especially the potential cost as this virus continues to spread in areas where there's, you know, the testing in the United States is awful, but what about the testing in Nigeria, right?

What about the testing in the Congo? What about the testing in greater India? Some of these, of course, Nigeria and India being very populated, the Congo not, but I mean the testing in these areas, it's just, it's incalculable, the cost here. And if you look at the best-case scenario in the United States being catastrophic, the best-case scenario in Nigeria or the best-case scenario in Darfur or the best-case scenario in Mombasa is just awful.

It's worse than catastrophic. So man, that's it. How encouraging Joshua is today. So paper assets on a global basis, where's the obvious play, right? Maybe there's a trade involved that you could do. Maybe there's a trade in healthcare or something like that, and that's possible. But in terms of generally speaking, I expect massive continuing levels of volatility as the market generally continues to come to terms with where we are and where we're going from here.

I don't see how it gets better in the short term. So I don't see an obvious paper play that I'm willing to say or I'm willing to advise on. What about real property? So the obvious solution here, well, let's go to business first. So business is incredibly uncertain because with the exception of a business that you can create, right, I think that if you had the opportunity to say, "I'm going to build a telemedicine business," or, "I'm going to build something in the private market maybe with unlicensed people who aren't physicians and figure out something there," there are opportunities in business that can serve this need.

But for most businesses, most businesses right now are just utterly paralyzed because it's almost impossible for the vast majority of businesses to function in this environment. There are a few that can function but most cannot. And so the business thing is highly specific. So what about property? Real property as in real estate, land, and/or physical property?

Well, I think the power is of course with some kinds of tangibles. If you were sitting on a mountain of – we can't use masks because of course you donate all those. But if you were sitting on something that were in high demand right now with the exception of the laws against it, you could make money off of it.

There was that story of the guy with 17,000 hand sanitizer bottles. He could just go out and – well, when traffic was flowing, he could go stand in the road like they do outside of the United States and sell them one off to people on the road. But there aren't real obvious plays there, especially there aren't real obvious plays that are not taken.

Ammunitions sold out, ammunition sold out. So the only obvious play with any kind of real property would be something like gold and/or silver. And I think that there's an interesting argument there. I'm buying more gold. I think that that's probably something that could work out. The gold market has not – the price of gold has not gone through the roof based upon current events which is really interesting.

But of course, most people don't own gold. There are arguments against it. The single thing that I never expected, the thing that has been the most shocking to me and I'm using those words accurately and carefully. That's not hyperbole. But I have been legitimately shocked is I have never, ever imagined a scenario in which you would see governments doing things like in California where you are forbidding evictions.

I never would have imagined that and I thought I'd imagine some bad things and that was past my imagination. And I don't know anything of what to do with that. But generally I would have said if this were a week ago before those laws started getting passed, a week ago I would have said, "Well, the obvious play here is going to be buying real estate." And so my plan has been for years to stockpile cash, wait for recession.

I've seen it as inevitable that recession comes. I would stockpile cash, wait for recession and then on the backside of recession when people start losing their houses, you start having increases in foreclosure, then I would go ahead and I would start buying real estate and I would establish a large and broad rental real estate portfolio.

That's been my plan since 2015. I thought it would happen sooner. I didn't expect it to take till 2020 but that's been my plan since 2015. I was wrong on the timing. But now with some of these changes in legislation, now I don't even know what to do with that because the entire real estate market is being turned upside down where if landlords can't evict tenants, then why would any tenant in their rational mind pay their rent?

And if lenders can't foreclose on properties, then why does any borrower pay their mortgage? And so right now I don't know what to do with that. I've looked at it, I've thought about it and as far as I know, that's unprecedented. Maybe I just have – I have been so busy, I haven't had the time to go and try to do some research and see if there's something I didn't know about that, that maybe it's happened before and I just didn't know about it.

But I consider that unprecedented, absolutely unprecedented and I have no idea what to do with that from an investment perspective. I've been on the phone with clients who are large real estate, own large amounts of real estate and we're just trying to figure out, "Okay, what do you do in this?" My answer is I don't know.

And so the only thing that I see that's safe is to revert back to income, generating an income and trying to figure out how to serve people in a way that generates income. Cash, US dollar has strengthened over the last week, but cash, I go back to foreign currency diversification because I think the US dollar is the strongest currency in the world, probably will remain that way, but I'm nervous about having everything in US dollars and then we go back to precious metals.

And so that's what I'm doing and at the moment it's not, the way forward is not clear to me because of these unknowns. I don't see the path because the path absent a treatment, absent an effective treatment protocol is utterly depressing. With an effective treatment protocol, then perhaps we could get to some kind of solution, but how do I predict what that effective treatment protocol is?

And so there what I would say is what you should do as an investor is you should rely on your deeper level of biology and how to read kind of the medical literature and then as you see solutions or non-solutions, then think about the impact of those and then try to trade based on your inside knowledge.

That would be my best advice at this point in time. >>Joshua Foer: Thank you, Josh. >>Joshua Cohen: My pleasure. Thank you for the work that you're doing. I appreciate your service. All right, we go to Indiana. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? >>Indiana Jones: Hi, Joshua.

Thanks for taking my call. This is not the question that I called about, but when you were discussing getting cash earlier, I thought you gave a good explanation of why it might become hard to get cash in the near future, but you didn't really say why you think that having thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of currency on hand would be especially valuable in this time period.

>>Joshua Cohen: I'm concerned about banks being closed down. I'm concerned about bank holidays. I'm concerned about runs on the bank. Every single time that there is economic panic and financial panic, what happens is there starts to be a run on the bank. People start to go to the bank and get physical currency.

Now, in today's world, it's hard to imagine because all of us are used to doing work digitally. It's a little hard to imagine it compared to the past. The world of 2020, where the vast majority of us function on digital currency, it's hard to imagine, compared to 1950 when digital currency didn't exist.

But I still think that people are accustomed to this idea that in a bad scenario, cash is what is needed and physical currency is what they mean. It would not surprise me to wake up on Sunday morning or Monday morning or Tuesday morning and see lines of people lined up at ATMs if this continues at the current pace.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm three weeks wrong. It wouldn't surprise me to see that on Monday, and it wouldn't surprise me not to see that on Monday. It wouldn't surprise me not to see that a month from now. But if that starts to happen, that creates a general contagion and a general panic.

What do government bureaucrats do? What do they do in that situation? The answer is they close down the banks. They shut down the banks. They do that because they have to stop the flow of money and they have to stop the panic. They understand that it's going to be the panic, and so they declare a bank holiday.

Now that bank holiday can vary depending on what country you're in and depending on how severe the crisis is. But the bank holiday is declared and the government says, "Listen, you have FDIC insurance. There's no need for you to panic. You're insured at $250,000 per account. We promise that these banks are going to be fine." The bankers all say, "We promise that you're going to be completely fine," but they stop the ability of people to get access to money, get access to physical currency.

So does that work? Well, a lot of people believe that it does, and there's arguments in favor of it doing it. But it certainly is not comforting when all of a sudden you see a bank holiday in your state. In fact, more people, more and more want to go and get cash.

And so what else does the government do in times of panic? Well, they start to bring in price controls, which just make everything worse. Anti-price gouging laws are a form of price controls, and so they bring in price controls, and that makes everything harder. Sometimes they make currency transactions illegal, whether it's certain currencies or certain larger amounts of currency.

And I think that the generalized population has become relatively immune to this at this point in time. Americans, for example, have put up with and have not cried out about all the currency controls that have been in place for decades now. Americans have not been concerned about the fact that you can't do transactions bigger than $10,000 in physical currency without a currency transaction report.

In Europe, many parts of Europe, it's illegal to do large transactions of currency. You can't go and do something simple like buy a car from a guy with money. Thankfully, it's not illegal yet in the United States, but it is certainly illegal in several parts of Europe. In other countries, they've banned currency.

And so the question always comes down to navigating this, and it becomes brutal because it changes day by day. In China, they have taken, in the wake of the virus, they took all the currency in and said they were going to reissue it, but they've moved everyone to a digital payment system.

India, what was the thing? Let me get my facts straight here. Just off the top of my head, India last year canceled currency transactions, et cetera. So the point is that I think that there's still, with the US dollar being strong, I think that the vast majority of people generally believe that the US dollar is going to be fine and that the vast majority of people still are happy to have cash.

And especially in a system of government money where you say, "Hey, I'll sell you this thing here for cash and it doesn't show up so I can still get my free money from the government or I can avoid this tax," et cetera, I think that when you have cash, you have the ability to move in the middle of a bank close down.

So if there's a bank holiday or if there's issues on digital money or you're required to track everything, et cetera, then I think currency still gives you value. And so when you have currency, you have the ability to provide the needs of your family. You can go to your neighbor who went to Costco a few weeks ago and bought 10 cases of toilet paper and say, "Listen, man, would you sell me a case of toilet paper and I'm happy to pay you triple what you paid for it?" And the neighbor says, "Yeah, sure.

I'll do that." You can buy services that you need. You can purchase, have people do things for you with currency. And so it's just the most useful tool in your toolbox and it's one of the few things that you can do in a scenario where there's uncertainty. You can often go and use currency to get access to things that are simply not available.

So I've said for years, "Why have I talked about stockpiling? Why have I talked about preparedness?" Well, what I've said for years is money is always your most effective tool. It's always your number one tool except in the situations where money doesn't work. So why do we save money first?

Well, because saving money is your best solution to problems in your life except when money doesn't work. And so what did you see happen in the toilet paper market as just a best example? Money stopped working. You couldn't get toilet paper really at any price. Now that's not actually true.

You could have gotten it at some price but you couldn't get it in the store because money stopped working for toilet paper and because the supply went out. And so what's the next big thing that happens in a bad scenario? Again, I know this sounds nuts and I feel like a crazy man doing it but this is what you see throughout history which is why you've got to be prepared in advance.

Well, money still works in a situation where—so money is your best tool to buy stuff as long as money works. We've talked about that. We've talked about stockpiling. That's why we started talking in January about stockpiling, about preparedness, etc. So now there are shortages. There are shortages and there are probably going to be increased shortages, increased rationing.

Money is still your best tool to be able to surpass those shortages. If you don't have toilet paper but you know your neighbor has a bunch of toilet paper then you can just simply go to your neighbor and you can say, "Listen, neighbor, could I buy toilet paper?" And you can pay a high price.

But you can only do that if you have physical currency. Some people accept digital currency and you've got Venmo, you've got PayPal, you've got ways to convey money but physical cash is still far more powerful. So physical cash gives you the opportunity to get the stuff that your family needs in a difficult situation.

So that's the phase we're at now. Now what's the next kind of final phase if you wind up with a really bad economic crisis? Well, in a really bad economic crisis you wind up with some combination of deflation and/or mass inflation and/or hyperinflation. And so there are people who argue about these things.

Now, hear me clearly, at the moment I do not think that that is going to happen in the United States. I do think that'll probably happen in some other countries in the world but I do not think that that's going to happen in the United States yet. But I think that it is increasingly possible and I'm concerned about it because I see no end in sight for the reasons previously stated medically.

And so the biggest problem I have is not rational analysis of, "Hey, this could happen." The biggest problem I have is simply my own inability to believe that I'm even saying that out loud. And that's a normalcy bias which is a flaw, it's a logical error, it's a logical fallacy.

And so I can't make my analysis based upon logical fallacies. So let's talk about what happens if you go into a deflationary environment or a hyperinflationary environment. Mass inflation is the least objectionable of those and probably the most likely. But in a deflationary environment, you want to have money so that you can buy stuff.

And in a hyperinflationary environment, you want to have money so you can buy stuff. And so if all of a sudden you got into one of those situations where you had to very quickly make large purchases, you want to have the ability to do that with actual money that you can access, not money where they say it's transaction decline.

That's the value of cash. And so whether that's just simply to buy food, if there are food shortages, whether that's simply by having cash so that when capital controls or price controls or more rationing or anti-hoarding laws or just any other kind of financial control or financial repression laws enacted, then you have the ability to work around that system.

If I've got $30,000 in my pocket, I can get on an airplane, I can go to another country and I can turn that $30,000 into local currency and I can start again. And so that's the argument for cash. It's the thing that solves problems when everybody else is locked down, when everybody else's accounts are frozen, when everybody else has their credit cards are frozen, and we're in such a crazy scenario that it's increasingly possible to see those things happening.

And so I still think there's time. I still think there's plenty of time. I still hope that that's premature, but this is the time to be prepared for that next step. And so what's the cost of having cash? Well, the cost of having cash is foregone interest, right? You're not getting interest on cash anyway.

And so the only costs of having cash that I see is number one, you have a security risk, risk of theft, risk of loss, risk of fire, but you can mitigate those risks pretty well and you have a convenience risk that you're not going to go up in today's world in the United States.

You're not going to go and buy, generally speaking, you're not going to go and buy a house for $100,000 of cash. I guess it's in theory possible, but it's not going to happen. So in that situation, if all of a sudden we say, "Yeah, it's time to go ahead and invest in real estate and I want to qualify for a mortgage in a kind of a more normal world where we're trying to take advantage of normal level recessions," then you need that money in the bank.

So you can prove its provenance. You can prove its legal creation. You have the bank trail of it. So that's where you need the money in the bank. And so if I, you know, I'm not taking all my money out of the bank and going in cash, but I am concerned about not having significant amounts of cash and I'm concerned about not having foreign currencies, et cetera.

So did that make sense? Was that a good explanation or did I totally muddy the water? Yeah, I think so. I don't disagree. I actually, I'm in my car and I literally just went to the bank and took some extra cash out because I was listening to you. I guess it seems to me like I'm in probably a similar situation to the caller you were talking to earlier about that.

And you know, I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars set aside where, you know, I can put $30,000 in cash and that's, and I understand it's not a big deal to have all my money in cash for a short period of time, but you know, I have some stockpiles of food and toilet paper and stuff like that.

You're a rich man. Everything crashes. Yes. If everything crashes and people aren't paying their mortgages and the banks are shut down and I'm not allowed to use my debit card or my credit card to pay my electric bill, you know, a few thousand dollars would supply my family with food and toilet paper and such like beyond what we need for quite a long time.

So I guess I'm not really disagreeing with anything you said. I just, it seems like as a listener, I can start to feel a little bit panicked listening to you. And for those of us in the middle, middle area where we're not going to say, oh yes, I have lots of cash stockpiles and hey, here's a great deal on a $40,000 RV.

If I can hand over a hundred dollar bills and that's, you know, no big deal to me to do that. I mean, I could manage, but we could have $20,000 in cash sitting at home. I just want to encourage you to maybe say like, is there some reason that a person who has the net worth of 40 or $50,000 liquid assets, I don't think we should be feeling panicked and racing out to try to get all of that hundred dollar bills.

I wanted to give you the chance to clarify that. It's a fair point and it's very difficult to me knowing that my words are listened to by other people. I don't wish to be the person who spreads panic. There is a time to panic. The best time to panic is before it's needed so that you're prepared for it.

And so, you know, let's say that you are using a chainsaw and your chainsaw slips and cuts your thigh open and you're looking down at your thigh gushing blood and you know your femoral artery is right there. You're going to die in a few minutes unless a solution is found.

And so that is the time not to, you know, obviously this word panic because panic is truly counterproductive where your heart starts racing, your mind shuts down, your body is flooded with adrenaline. Panic is never a good idea. So I don't know the word to use to say this is serious and you have exactly 60 seconds to stop the problem.

So in that situation, what do you do? The only hope of your living in that situation is that a tourniquet is applied to your thigh in seconds, in tens of seconds, and a tourniquet is applied to your thigh in tens of seconds and that you have qualified medical professionals there in as absolutely fast as they can be there, 60 seconds would be great.

So when you look at a situation like that, you look down and you see how serious this is. You would be an idiot who should panic if you went out to use a chainsaw wearing a pair of board shorts and flip-flops without a tourniquet, right? You're stupid. You're absolutely stupid to do that.

So if you're going to use a chainsaw, you think ahead and you say, number one, I'm going to make sure that I wear proper safety equipment. I'm going to wear chainsaw chaps to protect me in case my chainsaw slips. I'm going to wear steel-toed chainsaw boots. I'm going to be prepared with proper protective equipment.

Well, people don't do that because it costs, people don't do that because it costs, you know, hundreds of dollars to go and buy the stuff, but you're an idiot if you don't do that. Number two, you make sure that you have a tourniquet on your person ready to go so that you can quickly reach down and if you have an accident, you can put a tourniquet on your leg and you learn how to use it.

And so the time to panic is before you ever turn on the chainsaw. Now that panic is just simply preparation. And so I don't know how to properly with my own voice other than explain the difference between these things. I'm not panicked. I'm not panicking. I am, I'm rested.

I'm relaxed. I'm trying to think rationally and clearly, but I'm trying to observe the situations at hand, study the dangers, make appropriate preparations to care for my family and make appropriate preparations to help my listeners who've put their confidence in me without saying do something stupid. So that's the only way I know how to do it is to explain here's the situation and here's the solution.

The solution to chainsaw safety is number one, hire somebody else to do it and let them be the ones to die for it. Number two, the solution is wear proper protective equipment, use proper techniques for safety and then number three to have a tourniquet. But if you look down and you don't have that stuff in place, then somebody should say this is unwise, this is foolish.

So I don't know if that muddies the water, but basically here's the reality we're in. Okay, the risk of a viral pandemic has always been there. It's always been there throughout history. Viral infectious pandemic has changed the course of history time and time again as previously discussed with previous examples.

It is a massive risk. When we start to go into one, what you're hoping for is you're hoping to see competent reaction to that viral pandemic. That's why there is a World Health Organization. That's why every country has some kind of Centers for Disease Control and why every country and many cities hire infectious disease specialists and why there are teams of people.

That's why hospitals stockpile personal protective equipment. That's why they're prepared for that and you hope for competence in those situations. And with competence, what you can see is that any viral infectious disease outbreak can be properly managed. You can see that in Singapore right now. You can see that in South Korea.

You can see that there have been competent reactions and responses to this viral outbreak. And so you can even see it in China. It was incompetent at first, but at the moment it seems like they have competently responded. Now all of us have the opportunity to respond competently to that risk.

The United States government has the opportunity to respond competently to that risk. The Panamanian government has the responsibility. Every government in the world has the opportunity to respond competently. Sometimes competent response happens and sometimes competent response doesn't happen. Now let's go over to financial risks, market risks, fiscal risks, monetary risks.

Every government in the world has the ability to manage its finances competently with regard to its fiscal situations. There's no requirement that a government borrow money. There's no requirement that government builds massive welfare states destined to support millions of people. There's no requirement that governments build these huge bloated infrastructures based on borrowed money.

There's no requirement by that. There are many governments in the world that run their finances very well. You could go to Singapore and you can see a model government, right? You can go to many countries and you can say, "Hey, this country doesn't borrow a lot of money. This country doesn't create bloated welfare systems.

This country is actually profitable. They're competent." But you can also look around and say that there are countries that are completely incompetent. So on a fiscal level, what you have in the United States is you have complete and gross incompetence on a fiscal level. You have utter incompetence fiscally.

So fiscally can go on for a while, right? That can happen. Now what about monetarily? You could, in theory, if you are committed to the theories of Keynesianism and the way that modern policies are managed, you could say, "We could have a competent federal reserve." And I think for the most part, you can have good evidence to believe that there's a fairly competent federal reserve.

Of all of the people associated that I've just mentioned with regard to the bureaucrats handling Centers for Disease Control or pandemic infections teams in the United States, they've proven thus far to be generally incompetent with sparks of brightness. Fiscally, the US government is fiscally incompetent with no sparks of brightness whatsoever.

The Federal Reserve, monetarily, mostly competent right now. But I get concerned about how long that competence lasts. So I think that they're competent. I don't generally believe in the underlying theory of Keynesianism. I think that the way that it's done is a very modern experiment that the vast majority of countries in the world have decided to engage in.

And I don't think it lasts. I don't think it lasts. But I'm hoping it lasts a little bit longer. So I'm ranting, but that's the best I got for you. I'm sorry. You got another question? Thanks. Yeah. I will say, I think what you're saying about panic, I don't think panic is a good word.

But we should always react at an appropriate speed for the urgency of the situation. And the key is to always do that in everything, every day. And then being able to recognize when the situation changes, and realize that I was chainsawing, and I didn't need to act urgently. I should be slow and careful.

Now I'm bleeding to death, and I need to act a different action much more urgently. 100% agree, and I'm sorry for using the word panic because you're exactly right. There's never a good time to panic. If by panic we mean that adrenaline pumping, got to do something, freak out, no.

The time if you cut your leg with a chainsaw and your femoral artery is bleeding, don't panic. Call for help as fast as you can. Look around for something that can be used for bleeding control, even as an improvised method. Don't put pressure on it, and ask God to forgive your sins.

You don't panic, you respond quickly. Right. And that's always, even in non-emergencies, doing the best thing directly and immediately is an important life skill I'm seeking to gain. Exactly. So if you have time to pivot to a completely non-emergency and coronavirus related question, I have one. I think that I have a, for lack of a better term, I'll call it a working class mindset.

I've heard the term poverty consciousness, that I think, I'm not sure I totally have that, but to some extent, what are your thoughts on helping to overcome that? I make pretty good money by American averages, probably as much or more than anybody in my family or my in-laws has made, makes, or ever made, but not, you know, it's about $80,000 a year.

And so I think that I am sort of mentally, I guess stuck would be the right word in moving beyond that and thinking like a non-working class wealthier person, if that makes sense. It does. I love the question. I've got one more caller on the line, since we spent so much time on your first one, and it's just hard for me to pivot from kind of these serious topics, so these urgent topics to that, which is very important.

Do me a favor, call in next week and I'll try to remember to put you first in the queue. And let's start with that because I'd love to start next week's Q&A show with that question. Fair enough? Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you very much, Joshua. All right. Final call of the day.

We go to Illinois. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi, Joshua. This is Sean. Can you hear me? Yes, sir. Go ahead, Sean. Hi, Joshua. Thanks for all of your work on this topic. A few weeks back, you said like now is the time to do things before panic sets in and act appropriately, so I appreciate your thoughts there.

One of the things I'm thinking about moving forward with regards to paper assets, and I apologize if this question is going to ask, this is the first few minutes of the call. You know, I don't totally ascribe to the Dave Ramsey mindset, but I do think, I always hear him talking about growth funds and income, international, all that jazz.

I wondered if you had any resources as to the best way to identify good growth funds, whether it be books or articles. Obviously, specifically growth stocks are just those that don't really pay dividends. I wondered if you could just shed some light on a more aggressive investing approach as we, I think, you know, those opportunities are going to be there.

Sure. So, the thing that's always been weird. So, does Dave Ramsey, to your knowledge, does he still recommend when he talks about mutual fund investing, he used to say his recommended portfolio is that you put together a portfolio of growth, growth in income, aggressive growth, and international, and basically that you divide it 25% between each of those or something like that.

Is that still the language that he uses currently to your knowledge? That's correct, and I'm not, it's definitely still current. I'm not necessarily looking to follow that exactly, but I definitely think there's some efficacy to growth stocks. Okay. So, this has always been something that I've never understood why he uses those words, because if you go to any non, you know, Dave Ramsey ELP, and you say, "I want to buy some growth.

I want to buy some growth in income. I want to buy some aggressive growth, and I want to buy some international," with the exception of international, those just simply aren't really categories that are used, generally speaking, in the mutual fund industry. It's not that, they do make sense to some degree, but they're not the way that mutual fund portfolios are usually constructed.

Usually the way that mutual fund portfolios are constructed, the much more common classification of mutual funds is, you know, large cap, mid cap, which stands for capitalization, the size of the fund, small cap, etc. And so, it's kind of weird. You know, when I was a financial advisor, I used to think, "How would I create a portfolio that matched this model fund?" Because it's just not, it's not language that's really used in the market out there, abroad.

Now, if you start reading mutual fund prospectuses, you do find that the mutual fund prospectus is very clear about the investment objectives of the fund. So you'll see prospectus language that says, "This fund pursues investments in companies that have a significant potential for growth." Or you'll see, "This fund invests in mutual funds that have a mutual funds that," my legal prospectus language is failing me, "that pursue stability of value with good dividend payouts." These are the kinds of things that are used.

And so, back to kind of his four categories, the thing that is the most useful is difference between growth versus income. And what that basically comes down to is, are you trying to find companies that are pursuing the growth of their company and you're hoping to make your investment largely through something like capital gains, versus are you trying to find companies that will pay you a stable income?

And so, a balance here would be, on the one hand, you would have a company like Apple Computer that is seeking to dominate the computer marketplace, and they're not trying to pay out dividends, they're trying to grow their market share. And so, somebody who invests in shares of Apple Computer is going for the growth of those shares.

It's a capital gain investment goal. And so, that's a growth-oriented investment. That's different than investing in your local utility company that has a 70% market share in that local value. It's hard to conceive of how that company grows a whole lot, but they pay a nice dividend. And so, that's an income-oriented investment, where what you're looking for is that dividend or that other blue chip company that pays dividends.

Those are the kinds of... That's kind of what he's going for. Now, when you get to it and you say, "Okay, what's the difference between a growth and an aggressive growth?" Well, that's a really hard difference to articulate. Basically, usually, if you are going to try to put that into more normal language, an aggressive growth fund would be the kind of fund that is pursuing smaller companies that have the potential to grow a whole lot more.

At least, it's usually considered that way. So, you might look and say... I mean, Coca-Cola is not considered a necessarily growth company. I'm just trying to think of a brand where you would say, "This is a mature company in a mature market." And so, we want to grow, but that's different than saying, "We're going to make more of a speculative investment on a promising drug manufacturer." We want aggressive growth because we want this drug manufacturer to develop the cure for COVID-19 and sell it all around the world or something like that.

The key thing is just simply these are weird. His categories are really weird. That's why it's hard to go to the marketplace and say, "I'm going to figure out how to buy these funds." You can't really do it. Now, you could sit down with, I'm sure, one of his endorsed local providers and his referral system that he maintains, and they would sit down and they would show you a portfolio of mutual funds and they would say, "This is an aggressive growth fund," or, "This is a growth fund." And it's not wrong.

It's just weird. And so, here would be what I would say. Go to a big mutual fund company that does active investing because Dave is usually, as far as I'm aware, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but Dave is usually either at least okay with or a proponent of active mutual fund investing, last I heard.

And so, go to a company like American Funds, big name in the mutual fund space, in the active space, and start downloading their prospectuses for their funds. What you'll see is that they will have their funds listed in this category. Download the prospectus for the investment company of America, one of their most famous and oldest funds, and just read the prospectus.

Start with the sales literature, but then read the prospectus, and you'll start to see how the prospectus lays out very carefully what the investment aims of this fund are. And then grab one of their international funds and get an idea of what they're doing, and that will start to give you the education that you need to think about what your personal goals are.

Now, when you go back into talking with a financial advisor, you're going to get, and you ask for a portfolio recommendation, you're going to get a portfolio recommendation that says, "We think that you should have 32% of your investment in large cap mutual funds. We think that you should have 15% in mid cap, and we think you should have 10% in small cap, 5% in micro cap, 10% in real estate, 5% in precious metals, whatever." I lost track of the numbers, but they'll give you that based, and then X number of percent in bonds based upon this risk profile questionnaire.

And then within that portfolio, we're going to take this large cap, and we're going to diversify it into growth funds versus incomes, etc., and they'll give you basically a standard boilerplate portfolio. But after you've read some prospectuses and sales literature, I think you'll understand those terms a little better.

That's where I would start. >>James: Great. That's very helpful. Thank you. >>Steve: My pleasure. That's it for the callers on today's show. Let's see. I had a couple people hang up, and it looks like they didn't come back. All right. So, thank you to the callers on today's show.

Man, I hope I've done a good job with my tone. I hope that I've been clear. Forgive me if I didn't. I think that the conversation we had there about panic is appropriate. We use the word panic and try to use it in different phrases, but if you actually mean genuine panic, no.

Genuine panic is—I can't think of a scenario when genuine panic is actually useful. You just want to act when you see a risk. I still wrestle—I said this publicly before—I still wrestle with how hard it is to say some of these things in public, knowing that if history is any indication, at least in the United States, I'm probably overreacting.

There's this generalized idea that, A, things are going to be okay, and generally they often have been—often, not always. If we go to a global perspective, then it hasn't always been okay. And so, I really hope I'm overreacting, and I'm acutely conscious of saying these things out loud in public, because what happens if I am overreacting, I've overreacted on the record, and when we go back to business as usual, I've established myself as an overreactor and the sky is falling, right?

I hate that. But when I started this show, I promised myself that I would—I knew that I can't hope to not offend people. I can't hope to be right in everything. I'm sure that I'm wrong, and I try to acknowledge when I'm wrong, but for me, when I gave myself the permission to speak publicly, I made the commitment that I would be honest, and that if I was wrong, I would simply correct it.

And so, what I'm seeking to do is to be honest, and if I can find—if I'm proven to be wrong, and/or if I can—somebody can show me where I'm wrong, I'll correct it without problem. I think it's stupid to ever expect yourself to get everything perfect. Nobody—nobody does that.

And so, I'm seeking to be honest. But I think I've done a pretty clear job of laying out the specific risk. The specific risk is the viral infection. I think I've laid out pretty clearly and rationally shared with you why that risk is so significant and where the off-ramp is, right?

The off-ramp to this viral outbreak is a miracle—an effective treatment protocol, which thus far is unproven. We're hoping that it's developed quickly, but thus far, it is unproven. There's no very effective treatment protocol that specifically attacks this particular virus, right, other than standard treatment protocols, try to give the body the support that it needs, ventilator support, etc., to fight through it.

I am receiving daily very serious personal messages from people in the medical community, people with insight. And by the way, I would solicit those. I try to listen carefully and then just simply open to things, but I see risk happening. And so the medical stuff is the easiest to see, because if you see a treatment being developed, become more optimistic.

To the extent that you don't see a treatment developed, expect this policy of social distancing at the easiest answer, long-term social isolation, etc., these lockdowns, expect this to be the tool of choice, because government officials have no other tool. That's the key. Imagine yourself as the director of public policy for your country of residence.

What other tool do you have when you know that if you have a large population, millions of people are going to die from this infection? This infection is deadly. It is not just the flu. And if it gets out of hand, it becomes even more deadly, because it completely overwhelms the hospital system and all of the medical resources.

It is not the flu. It is deadly. So now imagine you're looking at that, and you know that if you don't take action, I'm going to use millions because of the population of the United States, if you know that you don't take action, it's very likely that millions of people will die.

You know that if you do take action, millions of people will be hurt economically, deeply hurt economically. Those are your two choices. You're on the horns of a dilemma. If you do nothing, millions of people will die. If you take action that you know is effective, it buys you time to find a solution.

It buys you time to find a therapeutic cure. It buys you time to develop a vaccine. It buys you time to not have millions of people dying within a period of months. That's how fast this infection would spread. It buys you time, but it comes with an economic cost.

So why would you not buy time? I would. Now what other choice is there? That's the only morally right choice is to say we have to do this because it buys time. Now you know that it comes with a huge economic cost, but the economic cost is an easier price to have on your conscience than the moral cost.

If you were the emperor of your country and you looked down and you said, "I'm the emperor and I know that if I take this action, I'll lose millions and millions of people, but we'll all -- we won't all be rich, but we'll all have sort of kind of have some money and we'll keep economic activity going.

But if I take this other action and I shut everything down, we'll save millions of lives, but we might be headed for utter financial ruin." Which of those choices would you make? Which of those choices do you want on your conscience when you stand before your maker and say, "This was the choice that I made"?

Which of those -- when you're grilled for the rest of your life, you were emperor of the country, you were emperor of the world, and what choice did you make? Do you want to say, "I tried to save lives and it came with an economic catastrophe and I overreacted, but at least we're all still alive because the data indicated that it was going to be really bad"?

Or do you want to say, "Yeah, well, we don't really care that much about lives. We just wanted everyone to stay rich"? There is no other choice. So now put yourself back in that -- you're still emperor of the world or emperor of your country. You've got to make this choice.

What do you do? Well, you know that the single biggest risk is the virus, okay? You know that the other big risk is the human panic, that if humans start panicking, everything falls apart. And then you know that the financial risks are very high, but you hope that with time you can deal with those.

You can give money away. You can change laws. You can make it illegal to evict people. You can adjust bankruptcy laws. You can capitalize -- you can nationalize all the debt away, right? If we could just forgive all the student loans, then why can't we just forgive all the debt, right?

Why not? And you have prominent politicians who are making their entire political campaign saying, "We're just going to forgive student loans." Well, my question is, if we can forgive student loans, then why can't we forgive credit card debt? And why can't we forgive mortgage debt? And why can't we forgive business debt?

Why not? If it's good to forgive student loans, to free up students to be able to make it in America instead of being overburdened by their student loans, then why isn't it a good thing to go ahead and free up all the homeowners? After all, just think of how the economy would boom if you didn't have to pay a mortgage right now.

And if that's a good idea, then why not free up the businesses? Because if the businesses are servicing their debt, then that just is really hard for them. So let's just forgive everything, right? This is the economic system that you're in. So back to your emperor of the world.

You're desperately hoping to buy time. You're desperately hoping that if you bring down quarantines, if you say, "That's it. We're shutting things down," at least you have some time to possibly deal with the economic outfall of that, right? At least you have some time for a new therapy to be proven, a new drug to be tried, a new machine to be developed.

Somehow you have the time to turn all Tesla manufacturers into ventilator manufacturers and save millions of lives because now we have enough ventilators. You're trying to buy time. So you're killing the economy to try to buy time to save human lives, which is the right decision. That's the morally correct decision in that situation.

And it's going to be incredibly politically costly because if it works, as it can, as it will, I hope, as it will, what will happen is that you will have a few thousands or tens of thousands of deaths instead of millions. And everybody will tell you that you were an idiot because you killed the economy to save millions of lives, but millions of people didn't die and it was a complete overreaction.

But at least you'll go to your grave as emperor of the country. You'll go to your grave knowing that you did the right thing with the information that you had. But what's the economic risk? Well, the economic risk is unknown. Now is it possible there's a perfect dance? Is it possible that the government can magically do all these things?

Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. There were a lot of people that predicted the end of the world in 2008. If we give away trillions of dollars in bailouts, it's all going to fall apart. Well, it didn't. So there's a good chance it doesn't now. And man, I hope that's right.

But on the other hand, you should see that there are some fundamental rules in the world. There are some fundamental laws. But those laws depend on human psychology. If you were to go back to 1950 and you were to go to an economist and you were going to say, "Listen, you know what we could do?

We could just end the gold standard and we could just get rid of the connection of the dollar to gold and it'll be great. And you know what? It'll never fall apart." You would have had everyone say, "Are you crazy? No, of course we can't do that." Except some people said you could.

So then it happened, right? You end the connection to gold, right? Now you have complete and total ability with the government, completely unconstrained by any connection to a physical substance, which allows politicians to say, "Well, you know what? We can give you money. We can forgive this. We can nationalize this.

We can give that away here. We can take this industry over. We can spend more." And those politicians come to power. And other people look around and say, "You know what? The way to come to power is to say, 'Vote for me. I'll forgive all your student loans.'" And it works.

And you go through an entire generation. And you had all the doomsdayers, all the doomsayers and doomsdayers saying, "Well, the government might one day owe a trillion dollars of debt, and that'll be a catastrophe." Then you get past a trillion dollars of debt, and it's not a catastrophe. "Well, maybe it'd be ten trillion." And it's not a catastrophe, and nothing falls apart.

And so what happens is this feeds this idea. There's no limit. There's no limit. Well, I ask you the question, what do you believe? Do you believe there's a limit or there's no limit? The answer to that question is probably going to make it your next course of action obvious.

I don't know what the limit is. And man, I hope that limit isn't reached this year. I have told my wife, and I can't get any more honest than what I said. I've told my wife, I said, "Listen, I think that within our lifetime, I think within our lifetime we're going to see massive change." And my best estimates have always been at some point in the coming decades, notice all the room I give myself, at some point in all the coming decades, this financial and economic system, it has to come apart.

Now what I'm hoping is that it comes apart very slowly, and that it comes apart with room to unravel. And so you can have some bankruptcies here, you can have some changes there. Just like when you solve government finances, how do you do it? Well, you do it in bankruptcy, right?

But that bankruptcy ideally is a whole lot of little bankruptcies. Okay, we're going to means test Social Security. So if you have more than $300,000 you're no longer getting, or a million dollars, you're no longer getting Social Security. And then three years later, well, that was too much. So if you have more than $500,000 you're no longer getting Social Security.

Or if you have this amount of income coming in, now you have to pay more money for Medicare, or we're going to tighten this. And when you do things little by little, incrementally, then you can soften the pain. If you elected Joshua, Emperor of the World, and you know that Joshua would like to end all that stuff, theoretically, right?

But Joshua as Emperor of the World would never come in and say, "Let's cut it. Let's just cut it all right now." That is awful. That is terrible. Any parent in the world knows you don't do that to your children. The worst thing in the world that you do as a parent is if you ever go in and your children are playing happily at the park, and you walk in and you say, "Children, stop right now and go get in the car." Your children melt down, right?

And so you learn as a parent, one of the first lessons you learn, you don't do that. You set expectations for your children. You set expectations and you say, "Listen, at this time we're going to go." And then I always give a five-minute warning, right? And I want them to respond properly no matter what.

If I say, "Stop playing, get in the car," I'd like to hear a chorus of "Yes, sir, daddies," and my perfect, obedient little children trot happily with good attitudes to the car. I'd like that. We're not there. Maybe someday we will. Who knows? That's the goal, but of course we never get that.

So what do I do? So I give warnings and I say, "Okay, five minutes." And I set expectations in advance of here's what's going to happen. That's effective leadership, is you do your best to set expectations. Now if it's an emergency and the children are going to get mowed down by an incoming asteroid, I'm going to say, "Go to the car," and when they start crying, I'm going to yell, "Go now," and probably the fact that I'm yelling is going to spur them to action.

I don't yell. And they're going to be so scared that they're going to just run, but that's what's required. And so what you look for and you hope for is incremental change over time. And so what I have hoped for as long as incremental bankruptcy, incremental adjustments. That's been the idea.

But that doesn't account for a genuinely serious global viral infection. That doesn't account for the possibility of going from 3% unemployment one week to three weeks later, 20% unemployment. That's a shock that is insane, insane. That is unprecedented in human history. And so when something like that is unprecedented, it has unprecedented results.

Now we all hope that you can soften the landing. Maybe the government can soften the landing and give $2,000 away to everybody. Maybe the government can bail out all these people and whatnot. I sure hope so, because I want to live in that world. I do not want to live in doomsday world.

I don't like it. It stinks. I hope it's that way. But at the end of the day, I still have a responsibility to my family, my wife, my children, my extended family. I still have a responsibility to my neighbors. I still have a responsibility to you to try to find your best path through it.

And you don't get to choose whether you live in the roaring nineties or whether you live in the plague-ridden twenties. What you have to do is you have to respond to the evidence that you see. That's all I got. I will be thrilled if I'm wrong, but that's what I see.

Watch the news carefully. Take prudent precautions in your own life. Consider what you can do day by day. Do not panic, but respond to the things that you see. In the worst, if you're wrong and you've responded, you've thought it through in your head, if you've taken certain actions, if you're wrong, there might be a small price to pay for that.

I think I've done it in the examples that I've given. I think I've tried to give fairly prudent examples. If you bought food, okay, worst case is you eat it or you give it away to somebody who needs food. Worst case is you feed it to your chickens. I'm about to go, when I close this show down, I'm about to go buy more food.

Worst case scenario is I feed it to the chickens and it gets used up. It's not a big financial cost to me in terms of my overall financial picture, but it helps me sleep better and it's insurance. So I go here, I'm going to go get more money out of the bank.

What's the cost? It's just insurance. The biggest cost is maybe I've sparked a financial panic here. I sure hope not. But with the pace of change right now, the things that I never would have imagined, that's not true, I would never have believed three weeks ago that I would record the show that I just have because of the risk to me.

Professionally I would never have believed it. I could imagine it because I've imagined the scenarios and I've done courses on this stuff for a long time. I've thought about this stuff for a long time. I never would have believed it. Well, you just heard it. Thank you. May you have a good weekend.

Try to take all the good that you can out of this stuff. If you respond to circumstances early, then you can get good growth out of it. You can get good benefits out of it. I know that this is a sober show. I know this is a sober tone.

I remain generally optimistic. One of the things that you see is in human ingenuity is you see opportunities. Even in a worst case scenario, let's say that everybody goes bankrupt. One of the things that happens is in the same way that when a fire sweeps through a forest, it leads to new and fresh growth, when you have massive times of financial panic, there's a cost to it.

People die. Genuinely, I'm not being hyperbolic. People die. But there also is in the wake of it new opportunities. If you've ever worked with somebody who has gone through bankruptcy, bankruptcy gives relief to people in a way that is powerful. Bankruptcy can also give relief to governments. Bankruptcy can give relief to all kinds of things.

Now those things can be painful, but bankruptcy can give new relief. So just the metaphor of a forest fire is an appropriate thing to think about. The forest fire looks like an awful thing. If you're standing in it and it's coming up the hill and you're about to die, it is an awful thing.

But the forest fire also gets rid of all the old dead wood, gets rid of all the old dead wood. It sparks new life. It opens up the canopy. It allows the forest to regenerate itself. And that's what even happens with governments. When you study all the governments that have gone bankrupt and have defaulted on their debt, it gives new ability.

It gives new life. And so if that's the United States, again, I still think it's premature. I don't think we're there. I do not believe that. I don't think that. But trying to stay ahead of at least a few weeks ahead of the curve, if that's the United States, okay.

If you're prepared to feed your family, if you're prepared to unite with your neighbors, you're prepared to do that, it can be the kind of thing that leads to opportunities on all sides. There's no reason to be... There's reason to be optimistic. It's interesting, this morning Carl Richards, who I really like, he's been on the show, he wrote the One Page Financial Plan.

He's a financial advisor. He's most famous at this point for being the New York Times sketch guy where he writes all these sketches about... He's so good at just taking a concept. And Carl is committed, deeply committed, which I appreciate as I am as well, to being a voice of positivity in a difficult time.

And so this morning Carl wrote a tweet. He said, "I have no idea how, I have no idea when, but listen to me my friends, things will get better." Now that's very true, right? Wouldn't you agree? If you're older than eight, you know that life gets better. It gets worse, it gets better.

Life is filled with cycles. And so Carl says, "I have no idea how, I have no idea when, but listen to me my friend, things will get better." I love that. I responded and I said, "Sure, but they can also get far, far worse for a very long time before they get better." Now that's not quite as fun and as happy, but it also happens to be true.

Because if you're over the age of eight, you've probably also noticed that in your life things can get far, far worse for a very long time before they get better. And I don't want to be an optimist who just simply always believes that, "Hey, everything is going to be great." That's stupid.

I also don't want to be a pessimist who just believes everything is going to be bad. That's stupid. I want to be a realist who looks at the situations at hand, who looks at the opportunities and says, "Facing these opportunities, facing these realities, I'm going to behave in the appropriate way given the risk." The optimist, the forest fire is coming up the California Canyon during fire season.

You've gotten a notice on the news and an emergency alert on your smartphone. The optimist looks at that fire and says, "That fire is not going to come through my house. I'm just going to stay here and believe the best. I'm going to think positive thoughts in the face of that forest fire." The pessimist looks at the fire and says, "I've just got to sit here because that fire is coming so fast I can't get away.

So I'm just going to sit here and die." The realist looks at the fire, looks at their car and says, "I don't know if I can make it or not, but I am getting out of here if I possibly can," and goes as fast as they can to the car and runs.

And then the realist adjusts along the way. If they realize they can't outrun it, they look desperately to figure out, "Is there a way that I can survive this thing? Is there a body of water that I can throw myself into and is there a way that I can survive the deprivation of oxygen or is there a way, what can I do along the way?" That's realism.

So optimism and pessimism are both intellectually stupid. Forgive the hyperbole. I just don't know a better word. They're intellectually stupid. Take the realistic path. Take a firm look at the world. Take a firm grasp on reality as best you can. Listen to multiple voices. Ask people to defend their arguments.

Give you the reasons why. And then look at your life and take whatever actions you believe are appropriate in light of that. That's the best I got for you. Have a good weekend. I look forward to speaking to you next week.