The Problem With Coronavirus | My First Million Podcast

Okay, you want to get into some stuff? You want to talk about coronavirus? Or you want to—

Yeah, coronavirus. Okay, so I'm terrified of coronavirus. Um, and you know, generically I'm terrified, you know, I was terrified without information, and then I started looking into a little bit more.

So I don't even know about it. Can you explain what the coronavirus is?

Yeah, so basically there's a couple of these viruses, they're, uh, influenza strains. And so the flu, the flu, yeah. So basically a few years ago you probably heard, you know, SARS or swine flu. And so, the very first time I think SARS happened, there was a kid got this flu, goes to the doctor's office, they're like, okay, this is the flu, and kid dies within a very short amount of time. They're like, well, that was odd, that doesn't usually happen. So they took a sample and sent it to the CDC or whoever, right? They sent it to some lab to say, what do you see here? This was a very unusual case. The health deteriorated so quick, that's not typical to the flu. And what they realized was, hey, this is a new strain called, I think it was like H1N5 at the time. And it was like, this is only ever found in animals. This is the first time it's crossed over from animal to human. And so that was bird flu when that happened. And then so there's been these different sort of very, very deadly viruses. SARS, which was very, very popular. MERS, which happened in the Middle East. Respiratory syndrome is what's kind of what these Middle East Respiratory, I think, Syndrome is what MERS stands for, and SARS is sort of the same thing. And so the thing with these was that, you know, although there's a lot of hoopla around SARS and bird flu, like SARS killed less than 1,000 people. Less than 1,000 total fatalities. Not a big drop in the bucket as far as the death bucket goes on Earth. Coronavirus already killed like 3,000-plus people, so already much bigger than that. The reason it's scary though is actually— and for a while people were like, oh, don't worry, the fatality rate is low. Fatality rate's like, I don't know, 3% for this, whereas for SARS it was like super high. I don't know, I don't think that number was like majority of people who have it die. Whereas with this, 3% means you get it but you have a good chance of living. But the big problem with that, and the article that I read was called Why You're Probably— Why We Probably Can't Contain Coronavirus, Why You Probably Are Gonna End Up Getting Coronavirus, is because This virus is extremely contagious but has these symptoms, these trademarks that are very problematic. So it takes a while for your symptoms to show up. So you have it and you carry it for like, you know, 14 days without showing symptoms. So you'll be spreading this around and not even realizing you have it. Then once you have it, you don't just like deteriorate and like your health doesn't go to shit where they, you know, you're in the hospital, they quarantine you. It's like You know, it starts innocent and it gets worse over time. So the infectious period is so much longer that there's basically no way to quarantine this thing. There is no way for us to contain this. And so what the article was saying was like, ironically, because it is not as fatal and is not as bad for you right away, this thing is going to be unstoppable, most likely case. Second thing with that was, I guess there's 4, like, you know, typical strains of the flu, which is why you can get your flu shot and still catch the flu, um, every year. It's because there's these 4 different strains and the vaccine doesn't cover sort of all the different variations. And, um, and so this guy's case was that most likely this is now just a 5th annual, you know, strain that we're gonna have to live with, and it's just gonna suck. Um, it's a very, very, you know, kind of a downer. Also, I'm sure, you know, sort of the bio nerds out there are gonna be like, no, there's 15 million strains.

That's right.

But like, that's the summary that I took away. And if you want to just get the point, that's the point.

And so, um, what you have up here is D2C stuff. So like, my— I looked at my portfolio yesterday, I was like, fuck. So lost money yesterday off the stock market.

So crazy shit's happening all around. So generically, stock market, you know, people get paranoid. Bonds, you know, people flee to bonds. Stock goes down, that sort of thing. Other funny stuff happening, you know, Zoom, the conferencing software, So the stock ticker Zoom goes up 50% today.

Shit, it's up 50% today.

But wait, there's more. It's the stock ticker ZOOM, Zoom. But that's not Zoom's actual handle. Zoom's actual handle is ZM. So people are buying the wrong stock because they think people are going to be working from home and teleconferencing in. And so they're buying Zoom, which does something else altogether. It's a very small-cap stock. I don't know, Henry, check what the stock for ZOOM actually does.

God bless.

And it's a tiny stock, so it jumped 50% today. And like, you know, but you could actually predict this 'cause this happened also at the IPO. Whoever bought Zoom, the other thing, got this huge pop at Zoom's IPO because of this.

I love it.

And so we could have predicted this one.

I love when that happens.

But all kinds of fucked up things. Some other things, Smart Friends are basically saying, hey, if you need—

Smart Friends?

My smart friends, you know, people who actually read the real information and like understand how the world works, They were like, hey, if you need prescription drugs, uh, but you should start stockpiling because most of it's coming from China and the supply chain globally is fucked. And like the world doesn't have that, uh, like friend, friend of a friend basically.

Um, but how the fuck do you stockpile prescription meds?

Uh, basically buy up bio refills. And, um, and so there's no global plan B for what happens if China gets sick. Or slowed down. We don't have another, like, supply chain. And so all kinds of things are suffering.

And I have friends that have D2C companies that buy their shit from China. They're backed up. And they're saying, "Shit." Yeah, months backed up.

I was talking to a supplier yesterday and he was like, "Even if we come back to work, there's, you know, all the other factories that we depend on, the printing factory, the packaging guys, and they're not coming, like, the workers are just not coming back." 'Cause in most factories in China, the workers don't actually live in that city permanently. So for Chinese New Year, which is when this happened— so Chinese New Year is a month-long holiday.

Yeah, well, we have a Chinese intern, he tells us all about it. He goes, he goes, it's the largest travel day in the world, right? Because every Chinese person goes—

everybody goes home. And when they go home, they go back to very rural areas. And already there's this problem where they don't come, you know, often they don't come back because, you know, they don't want to be living in some other city working in a factory. But with this, people are just not coming back. And so there's no replacements. It's like a very dire situation. And like, obviously at a human level, also incredibly dire situation.

So to turn shit into gold, where's the opportunity here? I mean, what's gonna happen? Do you think that this is gonna impact, have long-term impact with China making shit and you're gonna have to go elsewhere?

I don't know. So there's a question of like, so two theories. One is for stuff like this, the people who are gonna do really well, they didn't start now. They started something 2 years ago, a blog on being a prepper or whatever, and, um, today's your day, you know, like this is your month. And so I don't think the— I don't know how much I am interested in the sort of like today opportunity. Also feels kind of fucked up.

We talked about Judy the other day, right?

The Judy sort of survival kits or bags.

I— my friend Joe Spicer bought something from, um, like survivorkit.com, and he got an email from them saying we have 100 times our normal volume, we apologize, but we're we're gonna make it happen, right? So those— the Judy thing, that which the respiratory masks—

those are not in the Judy bag, but the respiratory masks are just like out of stock. You can't get them. And that's like the thing you need is like to protect your nose and mouth.

Long gone. No one can pounce on that. Yeah, we covered this guy who launched a company called Judy. Is it Judy?

Judy.

Yeah, Judy. It's an emergency kit.

Yep. An orange like emergency backpack ready to go.

My wife texted me today and said, let's go and buy a bunch of stuff.

I feel the same way. More people are doing this. Have you ever been in an emergency situation, by the way? Have you ever like been in a city when like a flood happens or anything like that? It's really bizarre how it feels.

No.

I was in Hawaii, our honeymoon. There was a hurricane in Hawaii. Oh, I—

the week of our honeymoon when I was there.

And so we went to the grocery store. First we go to the hotel and they're like, Hey, um, we have early check-in available. And we're like, well, that's cool. Thanks. Cuz we're on honeymoon. And they're like, no, we just have like a lot of open rooms.

No one's there.

I was like, what's going on? They're like, well, have you seen the weather report? Like there's a hurricane this week. And of course I don't check the weather, so I booked my honeymoon on a hurricane week. And, um, so we go to the grocery store and it's like the zombie attack has happened. Like all the water bottles are gone. Like the shelves are empty. People are just checking out like 4 carts worth. It's really like, it's an odd, eerie, eerie feeling when that happens.