Going for a Random Walk

From the Messari daily newsletter - subscribe here

Happy April Fools Day! Have fun with your pranks today, and please don't be a jerk.

Why am I going for a walk?

Practice what I preach

I'm trying to practice what I preach, and going for a walk this morning with the kiddos in lieu of our daily livestream, which has gotten off to a terrific start with expert guests like Qiao Wang and Dan Matuszewski (verteran crypto and macro traders), Drew Hinkes (crypto and constitutional legal), Harry Sudock (U.S. based mining enterpreneur), and more. It was a successful beta, and I'm working to standardize the format, and get to a M,W,F (sustainable) production schedule.

These will all be posted to our YouTube channel soon, but if you want to join the live sessions M,W,F at 11am ET, then subscribe here. All of our podcasts are also pushed to YouTube, but we work hard to make them available in every podcast player you can think of.

Doctor's orders

Dr. David Price, Director of Pulmonary & Critical Care at Weill Cornell Medical Center in NYC gives a must watch session on the coronavirus. If you watch one thing today, let it be this. It will put your mind at a bit of ease:

"I work at probably the premier hospital in NYC. We do [riskiest operations] like lung transplants, heart transplants. We do none of that right now, and are exclusively a COVID-19 hospital. This is a video about how to protect yourself and your family when the coronavirus hits your town. And it is in your town right now.”

Punch lines:
+ The overwhelming majority of people who get this disease are those who touch someone with the disease, and then touch their face; wear masks to avoid touching your face, and become a "hand washing Nazi."
+ You don’t need to be scared of your neighbors and people you interact with at a safe distance. The delivery people are heroes, not pariahs, and your social circle need not be eliminated, but rather contained.
+ The way that this virus spreads is largely within family. "That’s incredibly empowering." If you get it, self-isolate in a separate room, with a separate bathroom if possible, and wear a mask / wash hands whenever you come out. Don’t have family members physically check on you.
+ If you’re short of breath, come to the hospital to be evaluated. A lot of people who come to the hospital, come home. For cases, about 10% need to go to the hospital, 1-3% require critical care, majority of those that go on ventilators recover in 7-10 days. This isn’t a death sentence.
+ Go for a walk.

Clearing my head

I'm so angry right now that the new estimate is 100,000-240,000 U.S. deaths. White House economists published a study last September that warned a pandemic disease could kill a half million Americans and devastate the economy, and it was flat out ignored.

The U.S. and Europe may be in the “Hammer” phase of the pandemic (extreme lockdowns), but Asia has entered "the dance” as a second wave of the pandemic makes it clear that it's going to take a lot longer to restart the global economy than we all hope. Mentally prepare yourselves for year long (or longer) structural changes to our economy and a severe recession. Walks help.

From WaPo: “They’re trying to turn the industrial engines back on as quickly as they can,” said Ryan Hass, a China expert at the Brookings Institution. “But it’s a bit of a challenge because 60 percent of the Chinese economy is the service sector. And even if they wanted people to go to movie theaters and restaurants right now, I don’t think there’s a lot of demand.”

Crypto seems like it's in no man's land right now, and startup funding / runways are in flux. I'm still long bitcoin, but fearful for all experiments that aren't absolutely essential for industry growth. It's a good time to dust off your "crisis strategy" and nuclear scenarios. I feel Messari is prepared, and we want to be part of the solution. But it won't make it less painful.

It's funny, but, March Madness would have just wrapped up last night in a normal year. The theme there is often "survive and advance." I'm optimistic about survival, but advances will be a struggle for a while.

-TBI