All Episodes
Previous Next
March 5, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:44
Episode 840 Scott Adams: Conversation With Naval Ravikant About Coronavirus
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, this is Scott Adams.
Welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams.
This is a very special one with my guest, Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList, legendary investor, but more importantly, lately, one of the clearest thinkers in the United States, maybe the world.
I refer to Naval all the time as the smartest person I know with the most impressive talent stack.
But, you know, it's a dangerous time, and after we do the simultaneous sip, which I'm hoping, Naval, you'll join me with, let's do the simultaneous sip.
We don't need a preamble.
Go. Oh, my God.
Thanks for having me. I will say, given your stellar introduction, I do have to point out that Scott is a recluse and doesn't know very many people.
So that definitely helps.
If I ever meet somebody smarter, you're going to get demoted from smartest person I know.
So, you know, this coronavirus is, of course, the big story.
And the government's doing a pretty good job of telling us what to do.
You know, wash your hands, don't sneeze on grandma, don't go to China.
But they're not doing a good job of telling us how to think, how to think about it, how to feel about it.
And that's what you are perfect for.
Tell us what we should think about this coronavirus.
How afraid should we be?
How should we frame this for the most productive approach to it?
I think Essentially, the coronavirus is going to push us to do things that we should probably already be doing as a society.
Firstly, we do need to practice higher and higher levels of hygiene in this highly interconnected world.
Who doesn't want to be cleaner all the time?
Everybody I've ever met wants to be cleaner.
Everybody admires people who are cleaner than them.
Everybody likes going to places that are super clean.
Everybody, when they first go to Japan, has this reaction of, oh, my God, look how clean they are.
And it's never looking down on them.
It's always looking up at them.
So I think as a society, it will make us more hygiene conscious, which will help us just reduce spreads of the common cold and the basic flu.
So I think in that sense, it is very helpful.
Secondly, I think it'll move us more towards the future faster.
Robotics, automation, telepresence, VR, remote work, all those things that are coming anyway.
I mean, let's face it, most of white-collar jobs are just LARPing, right?
You're just running around pretending like you're doing work in meetings, and I think this will expose a lot of that.
The actual productivity in most white-collar jobs is in a small creative portion, which this will emphasize.
And it'll force us to sort of make that solve the collective action problem of moving to those tools.
And then I think it'll also cause us to do basic preparedness for viruses and bacteria that we need as a society because synthetic biology technology is getting easier and easier and spreading more and more.
So it's only a matter of time before we see engineered viruses and bioweapons.
And so as a society, if we're better prepared for that, it's good.
I saw your tweet in which you refer to it as essentially a series of wars that we, the big creatures of Earth, the humans, are going to have with the small creatures, the viruses and the bacteria.
This has always been true.
If you look at humans, we've been the apex predators on planet Earth for a long time.
Ever since we discovered fire or tools, we've basically taken over and killed everything else, right?
As soon as humans invented spears, axes, and fire, that was it.
We won. And every other species got driven into extinction or domestication.
To the point now where the lowest ranking human outranks the highest ranking animal.
Like the top dog in the world is lower status than the lowest human.
You would put that animal down if it attacked that human.
So we've conclusively won against all the big things.
So our remaining natural predators, and actually they're not quite predators, they consider us their habitat, are bacteria and viruses.
And that's a very broad generalization.
It's like saying plants and mushrooms or fungi.
Obviously, there are good bacteria and even good viruses that we use that are symbiotic, but for every symbiote in the animal kingdom, there's six parasites or so.
That's the rough ratio that I've heard.
So bacteria and viruses are our last major remaining enemies, with one exception, mosquitoes.
And mosquitoes are actually caused damage to us by carrying bacteria and viruses, by injecting us with pathogens.
They're just flying needles, right, is the way to think about them.
So bacteria and viruses compete with us and there's this hypothesis called the Red Queen hypothesis.
It's named after Alice in Wonderland where the Red Queen and her guards are running really fast but they're all kind of running in place against each other because the ground keeps moving.
So the idea there is that bacteria and viruses evolve to compete with us and infest us and we evolve in such a way to get away from them.
And so we use sexual selection, which is Scott Adams goes and finds Christina Basham, and this goes through a long selection cycle, and then your genes mix with her genes, and then your children, which I hope you will have, you know, can use whichever genes are best adapted to this environment to resist the next generation of viruses.
And viruses are mutating.
They're not intelligently selecting other viruses to mate with.
They're not sexual. They're asexual.
They're just replicating mindlessly and mutating, so they're much less likely to pick the right gene.
But they're so short-lived that they're getting many, many, many more mutations.
And if you look at the amount of genetic variation that a bacteria or virus will get over 20 years, it's roughly similar to what a human will get over 20 years.
But a human will do it by wandering around their entire life and find the proper mate to mix their genes with.
The bacteria or virus will do it just by massive amounts of replication.
So there has always been this race going on, this Red Queen-style race between bacteria and viruses and us.
And we fight through genetic selection and mate selection, and they fight through mutation.
And now, because of the huge interconnectedness we have, humans living in urban environments, traveling around airplanes, shaking hands and doing a lot of business with each other, we're spreading these bacteria and viruses much faster.
We also have a much larger population.
So now you have seven or eight billion hosts within which a bacteria can mutate, as opposed to just a few hundred thousand hosts a hundred thousand years ago.
So we need to use technology to combat that, to offset that.
And we're going to use things like vaccines, therapeutics, hand washing, hygiene, antibiotics, social distancing, et cetera, et cetera.
To resist that. So that's kind of my general thesis.
Do you think it's reasonable?
I've seen a few people hypothesize that because of how we're changing our lifestyles to protect ourselves from all this stuff, that we might actually end up saving lives, even if the coronavirus is pretty bad, we could end up ahead.
Is that possible? Yeah, there's some data around that out of Hong Kong that's showing that social distancing is working.
Hong Kong was hit very badly by SARS, and so they reacted very quickly and vocally to what just happened in China.
And basically, people just stayed indoors.
And forget about what the government orders and what the government doesn't.
I think the government's ability to actually do things is very limited in these cases, and people have to save themselves in a decentralized manner.
And people in Hong Kong just stayed indoors and wore masks and they washed their hands and they kept their distance from each other.
And you can see in the data that not only did coronavirus stop spreading or get contained, but everything went down.
So the influenza went down and common colds went down and other viruses went down.
So it works.
I mean, viruses have a very specific methods in how they spread and a human being is a much smarter entity than any given virus.
So if each one of us is taking care of ourselves, the problem takes care of itself.
So let's talk about some of the news.
You know, it's tough to peer into this fog of war and know what's true.
So China is saying that they've got to, at least maybe they've turned the corner and the new cases are less than they had been.
Do you think that's real? Do you think China's given us the straight scoop?
I mean, they acted pretty aggressively.
Could be true. Actually, I do believe them.
And it's not that I believe them because I think the government there is a paragon of transparency and virtue.
I think it's because they don't gain much by lying.
If they lie and if the thing's not under control and everybody starts going back to business as usual, people can start dropping dead again.
And that's going to be a disaster for them economically.
But they have lied up till now.
Pretty much everybody agrees.
They tried to suppress it when they thought that it was just rumor mongering.
Also, China is more decentralized than I think people give it credit for.
A lot of what goes on at the local level, you know, it takes time to filter up to the big bosses level.
It's a very large country.
It's not a single unified monolith.
So I think they were definitely not the most competent in their initial handling of it.
But I don't think that they're overtly explicitly lying.
I think the bigger danger with China Is that as they return to business as usual, it starts spreading again.
But there are countervailing factors, like it's going to get warmer and people on average are just going to be a lot more careful.
Even if they say go back to work to everybody tomorrow, they're all going to be wearing masks still.
They're all going to be washing their hands all the time.
They're not going to be hugging each other.
They're not going to be within close quarters of each other.
And my guess is that public events and buffets and church attendance gatherings and so on will still suffer from low attendance.
And the cruise ship industry is dead never to return, unfortunately.
I think you're right about that.
I had a plumber come over yesterday and I tried for the first time the non-handshake greeting.
You put out his hand and I did that, you know, coronavirus, sorry, you know, nothing personal.
I was sort of testing it out to see, does it work socially?
And it was a little bit awkward, but not enough that I'm not going to do it again.
Well, the easiest way to handle that one is, this is something I've been doing for months now, which is I just tell people, I'm just getting over a cold.
And they just back off.
So it's basically, it's not you, it's me.
That excuse would never work better than today.
Exactly. So that would be my advice to people.
You can just say I'm getting over a cold.
I've got a little chest tightness here.
Exactly. Keep your distance.
Now, There was an article I just read about the cruise ship, which for all the wrong reasons, it turned out to be the best laboratory.
Because you had people in a closed setting, you could really know who these people are, and then you could look at the result.
And one of the outcomes of that is that nobody under 70 has died.
And of over 700 people infected on that ship.
So that's impressive.
But also they did not get care that quickly and they were not identified that quickly.
So if you assume that Only the older people were even affected.
And now that we know that's where the real risk is, we could really put a, you know, sort of a wall around our oldsters.
Isn't it possible that even if this virus is 10 times more viral, that because the people dying from it can be easily identified and walled off, isn't there at least some hope that now that we're no longer caught off guard, We could drive down the death rate to ordinary flu levels, which is plenty bad.
Yeah, I don't think it goes down to ordinary flu levels.
This thing is much worse than the ordinary flu.
For one thing, it's far more virulent.
The R0, the spread factor, is multiples of what is the flu.
The flu is like a 1.28.
This is like a 3.0.
But that's...
That's what the virus itself can do.
But if you factor in our response to it, we would effectively lower it.
That's true. I think we can effectively lower it, but I think it's going to require a level of self-quarantine and hygiene that the American population is currently not engaged in.
At least in San Francisco, 99% is business as usual.
And if it's going to spread anywhere, it's in San Francisco because your cold urban environment is directly interconnected to Asia.
So I walk around the street, nobody's wearing masks.
Everyone's still going to events and gatherings.
People are still shaking hands and high-fiving.
So we do not have anywhere near the level of self-control that I think will be required to actually lower the spread factor.
Secondly, this thing does kill people in their 20s and 30s and 40s.
It's just statistically a lot less likely.
But it has a high comorbidity rate.
So if you have an existing condition, which could actually just be a flu or cold, it can go haywire on you.
So 20-somethings and 30-somethings have died from this.
It's just in the under 10 category that we've hardly seen anything.
The children seem to be very immune to it.
Well, what's interesting about the cruise ship is that there were enough people that we should have seen 30-year-olds dying if people who had good modern care were going to die.
And none of them did. That's pretty telling.
Yeah, the counterargument is also who has good modern care because the current ICU system, the intensive care unit system, is built on an assumption of a very small number of beds being needed at any given time.
So if this thing really does land 20% of people in the intensive care unit, like some estimates say, then it'll easily overwhelm the hospital system and you will end up with higher morbidity rates.
So a lot of it is about spreading it out, spreading out the illness.
Like if we just all take care of ourselves and summer arrives, then hopefully the sick don't arrive all at the hospital all at once.
But there's already evidence that that's happening.
In South Korea, the hospitals are full.
And South Korea is extremely well run and managed in this regard.
So I don't think we're out of the woods here.
I think we're actually just entering the time period in the US where we're going to have to take some measures, maybe not as extreme as China, but we're going to have to start doing social distancing to protect ourselves.
And I'm hoping that the warm weather will save us, frankly, because nobody knows with this particular virus and the flu does spread in warmer weathers, but in general, the warmer the climate, the more humid the climate, the lower the spread factor, because these are airborne viruses that like cool and dry and don't like hot and humid.
Now, here's an interesting, maybe just completely coincidental, and you can help me sort this out.
The places with the biggest problems, coincidentally, have the worst air pollution.
Even people don't realize, but Italy has the worst air pollution in Europe.
South Korea is a mess.
And here's the weird part.
I just read an article that said the air on the deck of a cruise ship, not even below deck, on the deck of the cruise ship, the air quality was worse than Tehran.
Now, so I've asked people, could that be a correlation?
And there are actually a number of different ways that it could be.
One is that it decreases the sun shines, and there's a vitamin D hypothesis that if you're low, you're more susceptible.
One is that the pollution just lowers your resistance in general.
My own hypothesis is that maybe the virus actually becomes more easily airborne if it hitches a ride.
Apparently, that's a real thing.
A virus can hitch a ride on dust.
But you have the other correlations, heavy smoking areas and high density, etc.
I think high density is actually the Occam's razor one.
Asian cities are much higher density than Western cities.
Even in Italy, it broke out in the Turin Marathon at first.
You know, in Quam, you have huge amounts of travelers and pilgrimages coming in and sitting in large gatherings.
So I think just high density of people is the most obvious thing.
If there's a large group of people gathering indoors, that's the perfect spot for a virus.
If you have a small number of people spread out on a tropical beach, that virus is not going to get a foothold.
So I think there's some common sense that we're just evolved as humans to realize this.
Here's a very simple way to think about how embedded this is in human society and culture.
Colds tend to occur during cold weather and the people in cultures where they have a lot of cold weather tend to have cold behavior and cold attitudes.
Why do we use that word cold?
To refer to an illness, to refer to a weather, and we use it to refer to a set of behavior patterns, cultural behavior patterns.
We use the same word for all three things.
That right there should clue you in on where these things replicate.
And this is knowledge that's embedded in the English language and goes back thousands of years.
So if you look at the so-called cold cultures like Northern European cultures and Eastern European cultures, they're not bear hugging you.
You know, they're not singing and chanting and holding hands together.
They're generally sitting far apart.
They're very suspicious of each other.
They're not engaging in large gatherings.
These cultures also have long traditions of, for example, sauna use and hot springs because they're trying to induce artificial fevers in their body.
They also tend to worship being in the outdoors and being in nature.
If you go into kind of warmer weather cultures, like for example, India, the ones that are involved in hot and humid environments, what they have to worry about are waterborne diseases.
So they're constantly boiling their water or they're spicing their food because they're trying to kill the waterborne diseases.
Whereas in cold weather cultures, you're trying to fight airborne diseases.
So I think you just need to have a cold personality and go to a warm climate if you want to avoid colds.
Well, I'm looking at the big implications because it seems to me that we have a pretty good formula for how to keep grandma safe.
Grandma, don't talk to anybody who's been to the concert.
Let's take you out to the country.
He'd just keep you away from people.
Well, we don't know right now if little kids are spreaders or not.
Little kids do get it.
They tend not to get very sick from it.
The question is how much viral shedding and spreading do they do?
If they do do a lot, then the obvious vector would be that it spreads in schools.
The kids are largely asymptomatic or unhurt.
They bring it home. Grandma's living at the house and she gets sick.
So that is a vector that we have to test.
If I had to predict, I would say schools will shut, maybe for a month, whatever's the right amount.
I don't think there's any chance it won't happen in this country.
Do you? Don't you think schools are going to shut for maybe a month?
I think schools have to shut, and I think large public gatherings have to be canceled.
And I think large public gatherings are going to be canceled not because the people organizing them want to cancel them.
There's too much money at stake, for example, with South by Southwest and the Olympics.
It's just that nobody's going to show up.
People are going to clue in.
All it's going to take is a few people dropping dead and then everybody will run for the hills.
The harder part is school cancellation because schools aren't really about education, let's face it.
Schools are an extended form of daycare and socialization.
So if you cancel schools, then you have a daycare problem for adults.
You know, well, I'm gonna be the voice of optimism on this because I think the country needs to hear that we're capable and we're strong.
If this were just one person who had a daycare problem, that's a problem.
But if the whole world has a daycare problem, I'll watch your kids.
Yeah, it takes a village to raise a child.
And if we do collective child watching, then it gets pretty easy.
We have a whole host of problems that would be caused by this that I believe are probably relatively solvable.
Let me talk about another one.
Just to finish that off, I think this is a huge boon for the homeschooling movement.
This is your moment. It could change civilization quite permanently and forever.
I've said for a long time that where homeschooling is going is virtual reality.
I've got my little virtual reality set over here.
You spend five minutes in that, and then you say to yourself, okay, would I rather learn history by reading a book, or would I rather stand in the middle of Napoleon's battle?
There's just no question where it's all going.
So, businesses.
Now, one of the big fears is that the economy will get crushed worldwide, big depression, etc.
And I'm an optimist on this.
Obviously, there'll be a big disruption, so there's no question about that.
But how bad it becomes, I'm going to add this context.
And I can do this because I'm the creator of Dilbert.
You could take 20% of any workforce and remove them from reality and nothing would happen.
I think it's more than 20, but yeah.
Yeah, nothing would happen.
And the reason I know that is not just experience, but it's called summer.
It's called Christmas.
We routinely have 20% of people.
You also see this when people go on strikes or there's a government shutdown.
When I worked for the phone company, the local phone company, I was a salaried employee and when the non-salaried people went on strike, which happened a few times, we so-called managers or salaried people would have to fill in.
So there's a very small number of salaried people compared to all the union people.
Didn't make any difference. You know, 20% of us did the job of 80.
We just didn't do the big projects and the long-term stuff, put that on hold for a month, and it was fine.
And if you buy the creative destruction argument, we're going to go through a shift and the new industries that we shift to are actually going to be better for the economy longer term.
So going to remote work may end up being more efficient.
You may be able to hold more jobs as a remote worker because you just get the job done instead of having to do FaceTime at the office.
Even there was some concern that Uber and Lyft would take a big hit because who wants to get in the car with a stranger?
But it turns out that may be better than getting in a subway or a bus.
So people switch away into other models of doing things.
I think people are fundamentally creative and innovative and consumptive and they don't stop doing that.
They just change how they do it and what they do it around.
Like this is going to be a huge boon for Netflix and Slack and companies like that which rely on people staying indoors.
Zoom is going to do great.
Here we are on Zoom. I was thinking this morning how I could invest and make money on this and I had to talk myself out of thinking about that.
You're already kind of invested in that by living in the Bay Area and kind of being in tech companies in various ways.
Also, your viewership should go up.
That's something you could track, yeah.
Maybe we induce a panic and then everybody comes to our Twitter in person, never mind.
I call that marketing.
Do you think, and I know that there's no way to know this, but just based on your broad understanding of the world, do you think there's a genetic element to who's susceptible to the coronavirus?
Doesn't have to be an ethnic...
No, no, there probably is.
But I think there's probably...
So it binds to this thing in the lungs called the ACE2 receptors, which is overexpressed in Asians and in males.
On the other hand, it does seem to be killing Iranians and Italians and so on as well.
So I don't think that that's going to necessarily mean that it's focused in one part of the population.
But definitely, people who evolved or grew up or came through generations of people who lived next to animals have higher resistance to diseases like flu and smallpox than people who didn't.
And you can see the clear evidence of that.
When the conquistadors first got to South America or the colonizers got to North America, they basically almost accidentally killed all the native populations, maybe deliberately, maybe accidentally, but by spreading flu and smallpox.
But those are flus and diseases that they themselves were immune to because they and their ancestors had been exposed to them because they had grown up in cold climates where you bring the animals indoors during the winter and so you grow up next to animals and all the animal-borne diseases.
As opposed to Native Americans who are running around outdoors and didn't have this concept of living indoors with cattle or domesticated animals.
So there's definitely a genetic component to it and there's a historical component to it.
But we're not going to be able to suss that out without massively genome sequencing everybody and drawing large scale patterns.
Well, I'm almost wondering if you could just take the cruise ship or, you know, some group like that and just sequence them.
Sequencing is cheap. We could probably start doing it.
We could probably start sequencing all the patients and then seeing what level they end up at and then using that to figure out who to put in the front lines of healthcare or not.
This is an idea floated by Balaji Srinivasan recently, a mutual friend of ours, who's really declared what he calls World War V, World War virus, World War V. It's pretty clever.
And is going full scale on this thing.
But he basically made that point, which is we should be doing the sequencing and testing to figuring out which healthcare workers should be front of the line and which ones should be back of the line.
I saw an article the other day that the Neanderthal gene, or however much DNA we got from them, might have something to do with your susceptibility to some common colds and viruses and stuff.
So it's going to be something like that, whether it's Yeah, I don't know if there's a single Neanderthal gene.
I'm always suspicious of those kinds of correlations.
They're too neat, right?
They make for good headlines.
I'm sure there's a baboon gene and there's a squirrel gene in you somewhere, right?
Have you done your 23andMe or something like that to see if you have any?
I've got a little bit.
I didn't do it for two reasons.
One is those things are incredibly non-actionable.
They don't actually tell you what you can do to make it any different, short of like, don't marry somebody else who's missing the exact same gene.
And that's very unlikely in my case.
I'm not going to change my spouse based on that.
And the second reason I didn't do those is because the privacy around them right now is very suspect.
They will use that to arrest your second cousin who turns out was a serial killer or was near a murder scene or what have you.
So I just don't want my kids, I don't want to get sequenced and sell out my kids' genes in the process.
What kind of criminals are you raising there?
We'll find out. Hopefully smart ones.
I think the whole privacy boat has left a long time ago.
You're correct in that physical privacy is gone.
There are cameras everywhere and eventually there will be gene surveillance networks everywhere.
So I think physical privacy is dead, but I think digital privacy will be alive and well through encryption.
That will be a very different kind of underground privacy.
Not for you and me, but for pseudonymous internet trolls, privacy is still around.
Yeah, that's right. You know, for you and I, we have this weird future feeling where we know what it's like to not have privacy the way that regular people who don't operate in the public already have.
And for me, I don't know, do you ever have any...
You roughly have a similar situation to me, which is people will recognize you, especially in the Bay Area.
Is it ever a problem?
It's inconvenient at times, but I brought it on myself, so it's not really a problem.
I mean, minor fame, being like a B-list or C-list celebrity has some slight advantages, but it also has significant disadvantages.
It's hard for me to travel to a lawless country anonymously.
So there are parts of the world where I just won't go to anymore.
Overall, I would say For me, the harms outweigh the benefits, but I might just be saying that.
If you took my fame away tomorrow, I might be screaming for it back.
It's very hard to say. I don't think I'm self-aware enough to know the answer.
I would say there's more good than bad.
The good is it makes me feel good.
Every once in a while somebody approaches me in the grocery store and I'm usually happy to see them.
I think I would rather be rich and anonymous than poor and famous.
But a lot of times rich and famous go together, poor and anonymous go together.
So if I had to choose between those two, yeah of course I'll take rich and famous over poor and anonymous all day long.
So let me ask you, this is sort of a psychological question, but it has to do with the coronavirus.
Are you doing anything to prepare?
Because I think people want to feel that they're doing something.
And actually doing this, what we're doing right now, is part of what I felt I could do.
Like, I feel like I want to help.
I'm doing things for myself to stay healthy, etc.
Are you doing anything? Yeah, look, I'm an obsessive, slightly paranoid A heavily paranoid person by nature.
So I'm definitely washing my hands till they're dry and raw.
There's hand sanitizer everywhere in the house.
We even have ingredients to make our own.
We do have food stockpiles for a couple of weeks.
I have masks. I have gloves.
I have all that stuff. What about sleep and exercise?
Because those are pretty important. Yeah, I've already had a pretty good sleep exercise regimen, and it's kind of late to change that.
I'm probably taking a lot more vitamin C and vitamin D than I used to.
I'm not going to the gym.
I'm working out outdoors.
I'm not going to large public gatherings.
I'm working remotely whenever possible.
If there is an uncontrolled outbreak in the Bay Area, in other words, if we know that community spread is happening and there are thousands of cases, and I give that actually a pretty reasonable chance because we just haven't been testing, then we will go into a quarantine-style lockdown like my friends in China were doing.
Where we just stay in the house.
We go out only to get food.
We spray it down with alcohol, you know, the boxes before we bring it in.
And we're just very careful about who we let in and out of the house.
I am actually particularly susceptible to getting colds because I'm involved for an equatorial climate.
And whenever I'm living in the Bay Area, which has a lot of fog and no sunshine, I'm always getting colds and respiratory illnesses.
I'm less worried for my wife who's younger and not of Indian origin and my kids who are just young and not as affected by coronavirus.
I'm very worried for my mom so I basically locked her down in her house and I'm sending her deliveries from Amazon.
But I'm on the more paranoid side and I have more flexibility than most people.
But I do think that it's worth just watching the stats.
And if it looks like there's an uncontrolled outbreak in your area, then you want to be ahead of that game and not behind.
I do think having two weeks of food and You probably don't need water, but food, toilet paper, kind of all the necessities, prescription medicines, that's just common sense.
Despite what they say, you should have a mask.
It's that you need to know how to use it.
So go on YouTube and watch the videos on how to use the mask.
It's a little disingenuous to say, you don't need a mask, masks are useless, and then saying, please save masks for the healthcare workers.
Both of those things cannot be true.
Thank you for saying that.
I've been arguing this on Twitter for a week.
And if nothing else, you wear a mask to protect others in case you have it.
So I would feel more comfortable in a social gathering if everybody else is wearing masks, and so I would do my part by wearing a mask.
And you see this in places like China and Hong Kong, where they will not let you enter a store if you're not wearing a mask, because you're not doing your bit to protect others.
So I think all of those kinds of measures, it's smart to start doing that.
And also it takes time to learn how to do these things.
These are not like you flip a switch and the next day you certainly know everything about hygiene and protection and distancing and so on.
So I'm viewing this as a dry run.
I'm getting my family prepared and ready.
And frankly, it's something to do with your time, right?
And then if it actually arrives, then we're ready for it.
I've been taking daily walks in the sunshine.
I definitely do that.
Do 45 minutes or an hour.
And I'm doing lighter exercise because if I wear myself out, then I'm actually more susceptible.
And I find that when I do my walk, it's such a small, small thing I can do to make a very small difference in my protection, but I'm doing something.
So psychologically, I'm now part of the solution instead of a victim.
And it's a whole different mindset.
And I feel like, yeah, bring it on.
Coronavirus or not, I'm going to be ready.
I'm going to be as strong as possible.
If it happens, it happens.
I'm ready. Yeah, I don't think vitamin D supplementation will make up for actual sunlight falling on your skin.
So getting sun is really good.
And that's where I'm hoping That the curve will naturally bend as warmer weather arrives.
And when that happens, people are more outdoors, they're less likely to be in indoor gatherings, the sun itself kills viruses, your vitamin D levels, your immune system stronger, all those things play in our favor.
But what that concerns me is that a vaccine is still at least 12 to 18 months away, possibly a longer time because we've never successfully developed a vaccine for any of the existing six other coronaviruses.
So Because a vaccine is pretty far away, we're gonna have at least one more wave.
And the second wave will start building, let's say around, let's say the weather is a factor and that helps suppress it.
Then the second wave starts building in October, November, instead of January, February.
And it starts with infected base of hundreds of thousands of people instead of a few dozen people in the middle of Wuhan.
So the second wave could be a lot larger.
And in past pandemics, that's usually turned out to be the case.
This time, at least we have the advantage that our response will be faster.
Our response will be faster and there will already be some people in the environment who have limited immunity from previous or similar infections.
In fact, one of the pieces of potential good news here is that usually these viruses hit kids pretty hard.
But in this case, they're not at all.
And so why is that? And the current best hypothesis is that about a quarter of the common colds caused today are actually caused by four circulating coronaviruses that also got released and are endemic in the population.
But those four coronaviruses don't hurt you anywhere near the same level.
They just cause symptoms of a common cold.
And so the theory goes that kids have been getting these at school and so that they already have some natural immunity built up to this one.
And if that turns out to be true, that means you could use data and dead virus from those four viruses to help build a vaccine.
Well, that would be good news.
That would be. Still pretty unlikely though.
Well, I think that the supply lines will stay open because we could lose a lot of workers.
Once you reach that crossover line, where the risk of the flu is not as high as the risk of a global economic meltdown.
And I think you get to that point really quickly.
There's an economic meltdown that's going to kill far more people than...
Yeah, the panic could be worse than the disease for sure.
I mean, even if you go to a worst-case Wuhan-style scenario for the whole world, right?
Let's say what happened in Wuhan happens to the entire planet, right?
Okay, so unfortunately, you know, a lot of people die, but it's still not enough to like seriously impact like everybody.
It's like, you know, 98-99% of people are still mostly fine.
Even the people who end up hospitalized or don't get hospital care, some of them get very sick and die.
The productive capacity economy doesn't really go down.
It just has to shift into an indoor remote work kind of economy until we build up enough immunity and vaccines.
You're probably not going to have riots in the streets because there's a killer virus.
You don't want to gather in the streets, right?
It's kind of the opposite of a zombie apocalypse, right?
Or in that sense, it is like a zombie apocalypse.
Everybody runs and hides except the zombies are not 98% out there.
It's like 0.1% and they're dropping dead.
They're not like coming out to eat you.
So I don't see those kinds of worst case scenarios outside of panics.
And the panic is probably not a physical panic.
It's more of an economic panic.
See, this is exactly why I wanted to talk to you.
Because there are some people who think we're in bad shape and the panic itself can be worse.
But if I had to bet my own personal money on it, I would say it's going to be painful and we're going to be okay.
Yeah, I think it could be somewhere between relatively painless to very painful, but I think we're fine long-term regardless.
I think a year and a half from now, it's a blip.
And even stock markets are very forward-looking instruments.
You know, stock markets have discounted what's going on, what's going to happen in the next 30 years and discount back.
So I think the stock market will also be fine.
In fact, it's mostly already recovered, or at least partially recovered.
Well, I think that's a perfect place to stop this conversation.
And I hope that was useful to anybody watching this.
And thank you for spending the time.
Absolutely. Hope this was useful.
▲
Export Selection