Transcript

Clay:
It’s Clay at claytrader.com, and yes, for you long time listeners, right now you are expecting the weekly Stock Trading Reality Podcast episode, but I’m going to change things up a little bit here because not to be melodramatic but it’s very true actually. We’re living through the history books. The pages of the history books are being written as I speak. We’re all living through it. So I think you know what? This would be one valid excuse. Hopefully you’ll give me a hall pass to maybe deviate a little bit from what’s normally the podcast and just let me talk about the news and I’m sure you know exactly where this is headed. Well, I guess you for sure know where this is headed because you saw the title of the episode here, but I just want to give my thoughts and if anything, hopefully just calm some people down.
Clay:
In my mind, if I could even just calm one person down, then this is going to be well worth my time. This is going to be time very well spent because I got to just get it out there. This coronavirus stuff is getting out of control as far as the hysteria, the panic, just so much drama, and I want to take a step back. Let’s take a deep breath and let’s just think through a couple of things. That’s all I want to do. I’m not going to call anybody stupid for panicking. I’m not going to call anybody a moron for being dramatic. I get it, it can be scary, and it makes sense why it is scary because everybody’s talking about it. All you got to do is flip on the news station and there you go. All you got to do is open up any form of social media and there you go.
Clay:
So I understand. You are a human being, you have emotions. If you’re somebody like me, you have people you care about, especially if you’re a parent, you have people you definitely care about. I have four kids. And even if you’re not a parent, even if you don’t have a girlfriend or wife or husband or whatever, I’m sure you still care about somebody in your life. And I would say, “Well, that’s a very admirable thing for you to do. I mean, you care. Great, great.” So I can understand where some of this panic and maybe uncertainty and just feeling like you’re off balance is coming from. So no, you’re not stupid, but I want to just hopefully walk you through a couple of different pathways of thought processes that I’m thinking through that can maybe hopefully just…
Clay:
Okay. Yes. All lives matter. Yes, I do care about those people and I want this to go away. But I mean, is it really as bad as what it feels like and what the world has it… Kind of just is feeding into just this big old sphere of you really just can’t get away from it. And I realize the sweet irony, as I’m saying, you can’t get away from it, here I am talking about it. So yes, I get that kind of funny irony, but like I said, hopefully I’m taking a little bit different approach to it where I’m not sitting here just throwing a bunch of stuff at you that might just get you to be that much more work panicked. But maybe to just decrease the panic a little bit. And then also this is a podcast in this is a channel and you would be paying attention to this if you enjoy the financial markets anyways.
Clay:
And if you’re not aware, yeah, this whole thing has reached well beyond the normal media into the markets and the stock market has been crashing and a whole lot of drama. But to just start all this off, let’s set up a little experiment. And the experiment is this, and I want your opinion on what you think the outcome of the experiment would be. So we’re going to put a bunch of people into a room. And these people in the room are going to be giving two situations, and then they’re going to have to guess, they’re going to have to choose what situation do they think would have gotten more media coverage? What situation do they think they would have heard way more about? What situation do you think would have caused the stock market to crash? So that’s the premise, but we’re not going to tell them what situation is what, we’re just going to say, “Here is situation A, here’s situation B, and what do you think would have caused more of the drama, more of what we’re experiencing right now?
Clay:
So situation number one is there’ve been worldwide 575,000 deaths. Okay? 575,000 deaths, that is scenario A. So we’d say, “Okay, well this situation worldwide, 575,000 people died.” Scenario B is a scenario where we say 10,000 people died. So now we’re going to ask them. All right, of those two scenarios, both were viruses, both were diseases, viruses, whatever you want to call them, but virus A, 500,000 deaths worldwide, scenario B, 10,000 worldwide deaths. I think, and I’m not going to speak for you, but for me, if that was the scenario, I would say this is the dumbest… “Why am I even here? You’re wasting my time. What kind of experiment is this?” Of course, the situation with 500,000 deaths would have caused the media to go hysterical. It would have caused all sorts of panic. It would’ve caused toilet paper to disappear and hand sanitizer to disappear and the stock market to crash. Of course scenario A, 575,000 people died. This other one, 10,000 people died.
Clay:
Now again, those 10,000 people, every life matters, I get it. Those people were somebody’s grandma or grandpa, a mom or a dad, I get it. So every life matters. I’m not trying to say that those lives don’t matter at all. That’s not the point. But just in comparison, looking strictly at numbers, the obvious answer is A, right? But do you know which one is A? Well, the swine flu, H1N1. B was well, coronavirus and actually right now I pulled up the statistics and as of right now I’m recording this on a Saturday afternoon. According to worldometer.info, the death toll is at 5,800. So I’m giving myself a little buffer and I’m just calling it 10,000. But I mean if you want to just give it that much more of a buffer, and let’s do this actually, let’s just change it to scenario A, again, 575,000 and then scenario B, let’s just make that number 100,000. So 500,000 compared to 100,000, which is way, way, way more than what it is currently.
Clay:
Still. What kind of question is that. Of course the one with 575,000 people would cause more hysteria, but it didn’t. Do you remember H1N1? Do you remember the swine flu? I mean for me, I, I remember hearing about it, I remember it being in the news a little bit, but certainly nothing like we’re all living through right now. In fact, not even close. Now, maybe did the market pull back? The market being the stock market. I mean maybe, but the last big old stock market crash that I remember was 2008 when the financial bubble popped and the swine flu, H1N1, happened after that. Again, did the market maybe pull back? Sure. But there’s a big difference between a market pull back where the price goes down for a couple of weeks or something compared to what we’re living through right now, where it’s just a flat-out crash, and in fact it put us into bear market territory.
Clay:
I don’t remember any of that occurring for that, for the swine flu. Do you see the disconnect right off the get go? What exactly is going on? Why is there this big old disconnect? It really doesn’t make any sense when you look at it like that. And well, I can see how some people are going to argue. I’m going to try to address those points and it’s not like they’re not valid points, but still if you just take more drastic terms, again, the way we went drastic here was we’re saying that it gets up to 100,000 worldwide deaths. Again, right now it’s at 5,800 deaths. Most of those are in China, so I don’t think… I have no idea. People in China listen to this thing, but the vast majority of those numbers are in China. But let’s just keep the numbers broad and bumping it all the way up to 100,000. Still that’s nothing even similar. So why is there such a big deal?
Clay:
What is causing all of the hysteria, all of the media coverage? Now, I’m not going to go down to any of my personal thoughts. I’m not going to go down my theories on why the media has chosen to just blow this thing up the way it has when something number wise, much worse occurred previously. And like I said, I don’t remember that much about it. I remember hearing about it, I remember just vague things about it, but by far nothing. Now I am going to post this on YouTube, usually I don’t, but I am. Down in the comment section on YouTube. Do you remember the mass hysteria or do you remember any mass hysteria when swine flu was out? Do you remember the stock market crashing?
Clay:
Because I don’t and maybe, I mean I’m not a perfect human being, maybe there was mass hysteria, maybe there was toilet paper disappearing from the shelves and hand sanitizer disappearing from the shelves. I don’t know, maybe Amazon was having to crack down on people price gouging certain products and selling scared. But I just don’t remember any of that. Maybe that was occurring. I want to think that I would remember, but maybe I haven’t. So down the conversation, do you remember H1N1? Do you remember the swine flu? Was it anywhere near the mass panic, the mass hysteria that it is right now?
Clay:
Here is another. Now it’s not quite the same. This is a little apples and oranges here because at least H1N1 was a virus, health-related, but Y2K. Who remembers Y2K? Now I was still in high school when that happened, but I do vividly remember everybody talking about a Y2K. You know those, what was it? The double zeros or whatever was going to screw up all the computer code and the electric grid was going to go down and then everybody’s computers were going to blow up and businesses would just completely lose data. I mean all sorts of bad things was going to happen. And the stock market started to go down, people were freaking out, “I got to sell out my retirements because this is all online and it’s all going to go away, poof.” And then nothing happened.
Clay:
Now was there a problem? Yes, there was definitely a problem. There is a problem with the Y2K. I mean people had to spend money to update their software. People had to put resources to work to get things in motion. So it sounded like there wasn’t a problem, but was the problem as big as what the world thought it would be, what the media thought it would be, what the media portrayed it to be? Absolutely not. All right, now I do want to talk about the media, but I realize this is just a weird break, but you just can’t make this stuff up. I had a buddy text me, “Hey, can I come over real quick? I want to talk to you about a few things.”
Clay:
Long story short, he runs a business, builds houses and stuff like that. Hardworking guy, good guy, good friend. “Hey man, I feel like now’s the time to do something in the markets because it seems like it’s mass chaos out there. And from my limited knowledge, I do watch the news to the extent where I see the stock market has crashed. So how does this all work? How could I buy some stocks if I wanted to?” So yeah, I just spent the past, I don’t know, 20, 30 minutes showing him how to sign up for an online brokerage, showing him my account how to buy stock and all of that. But a great example of somebody that is looking around, and I do believe that most of you that are listening to this, you’re probably already in that camp. But like I said at the beginning of the podcast, if there’s even just one person who somehow stumbles on this and they’re like, “Okay yeah, I do need to relax and be calm a little bit.” Good.
Clay:
If I can just help one person’s quality of life get better, then great. But anyways, so he came over and he’s of the mindset of, “I feel like this is actually an opportunity. I feel like everybody’s so scared that maybe just maybe this might actually make sense to try to pick up some stocks here while things are cheap.” I said, “You know what, as ironic as it is right now, Miles…” That’s his name. “I’m doing a podcast on that very same topic right now.” So I thought we kind of had a chuckle about the irony of it all.
Clay:
But anyway, so getting back on topic and the whole disconnect and then of course Y2K, but like I said, I have my own personal reasons, my own personal opinion about why the media is just blowing this out of proportion the way it is, but I’m not going to, like I said, go down that route because like I said, that’s just my opinion. But let’s stick with the facts here. And the facts of the matter are let’s think about what ABC, NBC, Fox, new CBS, CNN, MSNBC, what are all those? Are they charities, are they nonprofits or are they for-profit companies?
Clay:
They’re all definitely for-profit companies, meaning they have shareholders. And when you have shareholders you are accountable to those shareholders, meaning you want to keep them happy. How do you keep shareholders happy? Well, you pay them dividends and you get your stock price to go up. Once more, I’m not trying to insult your intelligence, but I’m just trying to, let’s think through this in a rational, critical step-by-step way. So we have our groundwork here, the media, and even well, let’s throw this in Twitter, Facebook, all those social media companies that are getting a huge influx out of that much more attention. They are all for-profit companies. So knowing that, keeping that in context, let’s think about from the media angle if we are going to open up a media company, how do we get profit? Well, you get profit as a media company when people actually care about your entertainment, care about what you’re having to say.
Clay:
You get profit, you are going to grow by the attention you skit, right? Okay, nothing fancy here. That’s just how media companies make money, right? You make a movie, all right, how can we make money from this movie? Well, if a lot of people watch that movie. There we go. So these are for-profit companies that get their profit by getting a lot of viewership. How are you going to get a lot of viewership by talking about things that nobody cares about, or by talking about things that apparently a lot of people care about. Well, I think that if we’re setting up a business, we would probably say, you know what? By talking about things that a whole lot of people care about, that a whole lot of people are going to view, pay attention to.
Clay:
And that’s exactly what we have here. That’s all it is. The media is blowing this out of proportion because it directly benefits the media’s bottom line as a for-profit company. And it’s just the way it works out. One news station starts to talk about some sort of topic. And they notice, “Wow, our ratings are improving. Wow. There’s a lot of people…” And then other networks, other sources, other… This is just Business 101, other competitors are like, “Oh wow, what they’re doing is working. Maybe we should… ” And especially in media, “Maybe we should just talk about the same thing. Yeah, sure. Maybe we’ll put a little spin on it in a different way, but the underlying fact is it is the exact same thing.” So then that company, that media store starts to talk about it and then guess what happens? Oh wow, their ratings starts to improve.
Clay:
And then the other company’s like, “Well, I don’t like that. That’s a little ridiculous. They just stole some of our viewership. You know what? Let’s talk about it even more. Because very clearly people want to hear about it, so let’s talk about even more to try to get some of those viewerships back from the other company. But then what happens? Well then you have the third and fourth media companies out there saying, “Oh wow, those two, they’re in like a ratings battle right now. And the reason they’re in a ratings battle is because they’re talking about this certain topic. You know what, we’re a for-profit business, we’re smart, we have common sense, maybe we should also talk about that topic.” And then those companies start to talk about the topic. And then guess what happens? Those two original ones, they start to lose viewership again.
Clay:
So what’s their solution? “Well, let’s go even more.” And they talk about it even more. And then those other two that just entered in, well they’re trying to get their foot in the door, so what are they going to do? Well, you know what? “Let’s talk about it even more from different angles. Let’s try to spin this. Let’s try to just talk about it and talk about the same thing over and over again. But we’ll try to twist and turn it so it doesn’t sound like the same thing over and over again, but it is the exact same thing.” Do you see what I’m getting at here? Does that feel at all like the environment we’re living in right now? I don’t blame the media companies. Good for them. They are talking about what clearly people apparently just want to hear about. And as long as people continue on to hear about it, they’re going to keep on talking about it.
Clay:
And like I said, it’s improving their bottom line and given that they are in a for-profit business of making money, of course they’re going to keep talking about it. And as soon as things calm down, they’ll talk less and less and less about it and the world will go on. I get it. When everybody’s talking about something, it can seem like, “Wow, is this the end?” No, they’re talking about it, not because it’s some sort of mass chaos situation. Again, 575,000 worldwide deaths compared to right now something much, much, much less. And I don’t know if there is other news things going on at the time of the swine flu or what exactly was going on then, but like I said, I have my reasons, but for whatever reason, at that point, the media just didn’t feel like blowing it up to the extent that it did.
Clay:
Now of course, they talked about it at the time. You better believe they talked about it at the time for these factual reasons of being a for-profit. Now, why did they blow it up as big as they did? Like I said, you’re more than welcome to leave your opinions down below. Like I said, I will be posting this on YouTube, on why you think the media has blown it as big of a proportion. I’m not going to enter into any of those discussions. I’m not looking to start any sort of debates. Like I said, I’m keeping my personal opinions to myself, but the one opinion that… Well it’s not an opinion, it’s just a fact. The one fact that we all need to just keep in mind is about for-profit businesses and how these media for-profit business make money, by talking about stuff that people care about.
Clay:
So just keep that in mind, that that’s why everybody is talking about it. The media companies aren’t talking about it because the whole world is about to end, they’re talking about it because well, it benefits them to talk about it. And then the final thought process I want to go through, and this one’s morbid and I debated whether or not I should say it, but it really does a good job of kind of illustrating just why things are being overblown in the sense of the stock market and the economy and the world’s going to end, and all of this. The death rate right now, the mortality rate is very, very minimal on coronavirus, and if you take out the elderly, it drops that much more. And again, every life matters.
Clay:
I get it. I still have one of my grandma’s alive, so I understand what it’s like to have grandmas and grandpas, parents, so all lives matter. But my point is that from a statistical point of view, if you take out the elderly and the people that are below age 60 and they’re in fine health, they don’t have any pre-existing conditions, the mortality rates drop significantly, significantly. But once again, let’s just err on the side of caution. Let’s just err on the side of just drama. Let’s say that the mortality rate is 10% and let’s just say that 10% of the world population dies. Okay? So 10% of the world’s population gone, before we can get this thing figured out. 10% gone. I get it. Very, very dry situation. The question and the thought process becomes, okay, so after that all plays out, the 90% of us that are left, are the 90% of us left still going to like iPhones, still going to like go into the movies, still going to like go on to Starbucks still going to like… Fill in the blank of some sort of activity.
Clay:
Are the 90% of us that are left still going to want electricity? Are we still going to want water? Are we still going to want to be able to heat our homes in the winter? So in other words in stock market lingo, are utility companies probably still going to be desired? We need somebody to keep on the heat, somebody to keep on the power, somebody to keep the water in check. What about all those iPhones? Do you think Apple is still going to be around? Even like I said, 10% of the population. That would be terrible. Terrible. That would really be depressing. That’d be a bad situation. But 90% after that, putting all that aside, are we just going to all of a sudden not care about any of that stuff?
Clay:
Are we going to just not eat anymore, or are we going to not need food? Because right now there’s a lot of food companies out there that have stock and there are publicly traded companies and there are businesses. Are we just not going to need food anymore? Do you get where I’m getting at with this? Is, yeah, that would be a very traumatic experience for everybody. But at the core, us as humans, we’re still going to need, we’re still going to want certain dynamics, and there’s still going to need to be some sort of infrastructure in place to make all that happen. The world is not going to end from a structural perspective. And once again, this is assuming that the mortality rate’s at 10% which is not even close to 10%, and that we can’t get this figured out until the entire world is affected.
Clay:
I mean you get how crazy and how kind of silly I’m being right now, but that’s the point, is even in a silly what-if situation that I’m going through, there would still be 90% of people left and economies are still going to need to be there, because well, people are still going to want goods and services. So before you go and say, “You know what, I just want to cash everything out and put money in my hand.” Let’s do that. And here’s the problem with that is, okay, well let’s take our worst case scenario. Let’s say that all stock markets, everything just crashed to zero and you’re saying, “Well good, I’m glad I sold and have cash in hand, or I’m glad I sold and then bought gold bars.” Okay, well at that situation cash is going to be worthless anyways.
Clay:
Currency, who cares about currency? Because literally if stock markets crashed around the world and nothing recovers and they go straight to zero, cash at that point, might as well be… Well, that’ll be the new toilet paper, right? Because there’s a toilet paper shortage anyways. So cash quite literally, quite ironically would become basically just good for toilet paper. Gold bars. In this situation, I don’t know what a gold bar is going to get you. What are you going to go and buy? Because apparently there is no businesses out there because everything has crashed. So I don’t know what a gold bar is going to get you. At that situation, if you want to play the, “Well, I’m cashing out so at least I have cash in case of a really bad situation.” Well, a really bad situation, the currency becomes guns, bullets and water.
Clay:
So I suppose if you are buying bottled water, okay fine, that might be something worthwhile. But for people with guns, they’re just going to come steal that from you anyways. So really the top currency becomes guns and bullets in a worst, worst-case scenario. Or I guess another scenario is we’re all zombies and walking around and I suppose, I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think zombies care about their retirement portfolios. I don’t think zombies care about all that stuff. Maybe they do, I don’t know. But everybody just needs to calm down, because if you want to play the worst case scenarios, then it just doesn’t make any sense for you to cash out on things because who cares? Who cares if you have cash? What does that mean? It’s not going to mean anything in a worst-case scenario.
Clay:
But you know what? If you cash out and then everything is okay and then the markets recover because again, people still want goods and services, well, you’re going to be glad that you didn’t cash out at the bottom because now that cash value is going to go up a lot more since it’s tied to your stocks, which are now starting to recover back up to where they were. And I would encourage you to go back to Y2K and look at the chart after that. The financial crisis was a little bit… Let me put it this way, 2008 was… And I can speak to this with relative confidence, with relative knowledge, especially now that I have quite a bit of real estate investing experience under my belt, but 2008 from a stock market perspective…. So again, I get it, this is always scary because it’s viruses and microscopic stuff. When I say scary, that has been defined as from a stock market perspective strictly.
Clay:
2008 was much, much scarier because there was actually some big flaws in the system, the flaws in the system where banks lending to people that basically didn’t have any jobs, no down payment required. That credit, “We don’t care about your credit, here, go buy a house.” I mean there were some really sketchy things going on that caused that. There are some massive flaws within the financial system. So from that point of view, it was much scarier. It was a situation where, “Oh man, yeah this is getting a little goofy here. These are some massive flaws.” But right now what is the flaw with the stock market? Quite literally nothing. That’s a little bit different for the oil companies because with the pricing war going on. But for pretty much, I don’t know, 90% of the companies, what is the flaw right now?
Clay:
The flaw is just people freaking out and panicking because of the media. And when people freak out and panic and sell, well that just causes prices to go down. That’s literally the only flaw in the system right now is people freaking out. This is not some sort of bubble that popped in the form of the banking stocks back in 2008, and then that dominoed into everything else. There’s nothing out there right now that is a massive, massive issue that caused this pullback other than the fact of, well, coronavirus and then you sprinkle on the oil war, which doesn’t matter that much. Because lower gas prices, I get it, that definitely hurts oil companies, but there’s a lot of other people out there that benefit from low prices. If it costs me less to transfer my goods from point A to B because gas prices have come down, and because it’s a competitive market, well that just means lower prices for the consumer. Not to mention the lower prices at the gas pump itself.
Clay:

Clay:

It’s Clay at claytrader.com, and yes, for you long time listeners, right now you are expecting the weekly Stock Trading Reality Podcast episode, but I’m going to change things up a little bit here because not to be melodramatic but it’s very true actually. We’re living through the history books. The pages of the history books are being written as I speak. We’re all living through it. So I think you know what? This would be one valid excuse. Hopefully you’ll give me a hall pass to maybe deviate a little bit from what’s normally the podcast and just let me talk about the news and I’m sure you know exactly where this is headed. Well, I guess you for sure know where this is headed because you saw the title of the episode here, but I just want to give my thoughts and if anything, hopefully just calm some people down.

Clay:

In my mind, if I could even just calm one person down, then this is going to be well worth my time. This is going to be time very well spent because I got to just get it out there. This coronavirus stuff is getting out of control as far as the hysteria, the panic, just so much drama, and I want to take a step back. Let’s take a deep breath and let’s just think through a couple of things. That’s all I want to do. I’m not going to call anybody stupid for panicking. I’m not going to call anybody a moron for being dramatic. I get it, it can be scary, and it makes sense why it is scary because everybody’s talking about it. All you got to do is flip on the news station and there you go. All you got to do is open up any form of social media and there you go.

Clay:

So I understand. You are a human being, you have emotions. If you’re somebody like me, you have people you care about, especially if you’re a parent, you have people you definitely care about. I have four kids. And even if you’re not a parent, even if you don’t have a girlfriend or wife or husband or whatever, I’m sure you still care about somebody in your life. And I would say, “Well, that’s a very admirable thing for you to do. I mean, you care. Great, great.” So I can understand where some of this panic and maybe uncertainty and just feeling like you’re off balance is coming from. So no, you’re not stupid, but I want to just hopefully walk you through a couple of different pathways of thought processes that I’m thinking through that can maybe hopefully just…

Clay:

Okay. Yes. All lives matter. Yes, I do care about those people and I want this to go away. But I mean, is it really as bad as what it feels like and what the world has it… Kind of just is feeding into just this big old sphere of you really just can’t get away from it. And I realize the sweet irony, as I’m saying, you can’t get away from it, here I am talking about it. So yes, I get that kind of funny irony, but like I said, hopefully I’m taking a little bit different approach to it where I’m not sitting here just throwing a bunch of stuff at you that might just get you to be that much more work panicked. But maybe to just decrease the panic a little bit. And then also this is a podcast in this is a channel and you would be paying attention to this if you enjoy the financial markets anyways.

Clay:

And if you’re not aware, yeah, this whole thing has reached well beyond the normal media into the markets and the stock market has been crashing and a whole lot of drama. But to just start all this off, let’s set up a little experiment. And the experiment is this, and I want your opinion on what you think the outcome of the experiment would be. So we’re going to put a bunch of people into a room. And these people in the room are going to be giving two situations, and then they’re going to have to guess, they’re going to have to choose what situation do they think would have gotten more media coverage? What situation do they think they would have heard way more about? What situation do you think would have caused the stock market to crash? So that’s the premise, but we’re not going to tell them what situation is what, we’re just going to say, “Here is situation A, here’s situation B, and what do you think would have caused more of the drama, more of what we’re experiencing right now?

Clay:

So situation number one is there’ve been worldwide 575,000 deaths. Okay? 575,000 deaths, that is scenario A. So we’d say, “Okay, well this situation worldwide, 575,000 people died.” Scenario B is a scenario where we say 10,000 people died. So now we’re going to ask them. All right, of those two scenarios, both were viruses, both were diseases, viruses, whatever you want to call them, but virus A, 500,000 deaths worldwide, scenario B, 10,000 worldwide deaths. I think, and I’m not going to speak for you, but for me, if that was the scenario, I would say this is the dumbest… “Why am I even here? You’re wasting my time. What kind of experiment is this?” Of course, the situation with 500,000 deaths would have caused the media to go hysterical. It would have caused all sorts of panic. It would’ve caused toilet paper to disappear and hand sanitizer to disappear and the stock market to crash. Of course scenario A, 575,000 people died. This other one, 10,000 people died.

Clay:

Now again, those 10,000 people, every life matters, I get it. Those people were somebody’s grandma or grandpa, a mom or a dad, I get it. So every life matters. I’m not trying to say that those lives don’t matter at all. That’s not the point. But just in comparison, looking strictly at numbers, the obvious answer is A, right? But do you know which one is A? Well, the swine flu, H1N1. B was well, coronavirus and actually right now I pulled up the statistics and as of right now I’m recording this on a Saturday afternoon. According to worldometer.info, the death toll is at 5,800. So I’m giving myself a little buffer and I’m just calling it 10,000. But I mean if you want to just give it that much more of a buffer, and let’s do this actually, let’s just change it to scenario A, again, 575,000 and then scenario B, let’s just make that number 100,000. So 500,000 compared to 100,000, which is way, way, way more than what it is currently.

Clay:

Still. What kind of question is that. Of course the one with 575,000 people would cause more hysteria, but it didn’t. Do you remember H1N1? Do you remember the swine flu? I mean for me, I, I remember hearing about it, I remember it being in the news a little bit, but certainly nothing like we’re all living through right now. In fact, not even close. Now, maybe did the market pull back? The market being the stock market. I mean maybe, but the last big old stock market crash that I remember was 2008 when the financial bubble popped and the swine flu, H1N1, happened after that. Again, did the market maybe pull back? Sure. But there’s a big difference between a market pull back where the price goes down for a couple of weeks or something compared to what we’re living through right now, where it’s just a flat-out crash, and in fact it put us into bear market territory.

Clay:

I don’t remember any of that occurring for that, for the swine flu. Do you see the disconnect right off the get go? What exactly is going on? Why is there this big old disconnect? It really doesn’t make any sense when you look at it like that. And well, I can see how some people are going to argue. I’m going to try to address those points and it’s not like they’re not valid points, but still if you just take more drastic terms, again, the way we went drastic here was we’re saying that it gets up to 100,000 worldwide deaths. Again, right now it’s at 5,800 deaths. Most of those are in China, so I don’t think… I have no idea. People in China listen to this thing, but the vast majority of those numbers are in China. But let’s just keep the numbers broad and bumping it all the way up to 100,000. Still that’s nothing even similar. So why is there such a big deal?

Clay:

What is causing all of the hysteria, all of the media coverage? Now, I’m not going to go down to any of my personal thoughts. I’m not going to go down my theories on why the media has chosen to just blow this thing up the way it has when something number wise, much worse occurred previously. And like I said, I don’t remember that much about it. I remember hearing about it, I remember just vague things about it, but by far nothing. Now I am going to post this on YouTube, usually I don’t, but I am. Down in the comment section on YouTube. Do you remember the mass hysteria or do you remember any mass hysteria when swine flu was out? Do you remember the stock market crashing?

Clay:

Because I don’t and maybe, I mean I’m not a perfect human being, maybe there was mass hysteria, maybe there was toilet paper disappearing from the shelves and hand sanitizer disappearing from the shelves. I don’t know, maybe Amazon was having to crack down on people price gouging certain products and selling scared. But I just don’t remember any of that. Maybe that was occurring. I want to think that I would remember, but maybe I haven’t. So down the conversation, do you remember H1N1? Do you remember the swine flu? Was it anywhere near the mass panic, the mass hysteria that it is right now?

Clay:

Here is another. Now it’s not quite the same. This is a little apples and oranges here because at least H1N1 was a virus, health-related, but Y2K. Who remembers Y2K? Now I was still in high school when that happened, but I do vividly remember everybody talking about a Y2K. You know those, what was it? The double zeros or whatever was going to screw up all the computer code and the electric grid was going to go down and then everybody’s computers were going to blow up and businesses would just completely lose data. I mean all sorts of bad things was going to happen. And the stock market started to go down, people were freaking out, “I got to sell out my retirements because this is all online and it’s all going to go away, poof.” And then nothing happened.

Clay:

Now was there a problem? Yes, there was definitely a problem. There is a problem with the Y2K. I mean people had to spend money to update their software. People had to put resources to work to get things in motion. So it sounded like there wasn’t a problem, but was the problem as big as what the world thought it would be, what the media thought it would be, what the media portrayed it to be? Absolutely not. All right, now I do want to talk about the media, but I realize this is just a weird break, but you just can’t make this stuff up. I had a buddy text me, “Hey, can I come over real quick? I want to talk to you about a few things.”

Clay:

Long story short, he runs a business, builds houses and stuff like that. Hardworking guy, good guy, good friend. “Hey man, I feel like now’s the time to do something in the markets because it seems like it’s mass chaos out there. And from my limited knowledge, I do watch the news to the extent where I see the stock market has crashed. So how does this all work? How could I buy some stocks if I wanted to?” So yeah, I just spent the past, I don’t know, 20, 30 minutes showing him how to sign up for an online brokerage, showing him my account how to buy stock and all of that. But a great example of somebody that is looking around, and I do believe that most of you that are listening to this, you’re probably already in that camp. But like I said at the beginning of the podcast, if there’s even just one person who somehow stumbles on this and they’re like, “Okay yeah, I do need to relax and be calm a little bit.” Good.

Clay:

If I can just help one person’s quality of life get better, then great. But anyways, so he came over and he’s of the mindset of, “I feel like this is actually an opportunity. I feel like everybody’s so scared that maybe just maybe this might actually make sense to try to pick up some stocks here while things are cheap.” I said, “You know what, as ironic as it is right now, Miles…” That’s his name. “I’m doing a podcast on that very same topic right now.” So I thought we kind of had a chuckle about the irony of it all.

Clay:

But anyway, so getting back on topic and the whole disconnect and then of course Y2K, but like I said, I have my own personal reasons, my own personal opinion about why the media is just blowing this out of proportion the way it is, but I’m not going to, like I said, go down that route because like I said, that’s just my opinion. But let’s stick with the facts here. And the facts of the matter are let’s think about what ABC, NBC, Fox, new CBS, CNN, MSNBC, what are all those? Are they charities, are they nonprofits or are they for-profit companies?

Clay:

They’re all definitely for-profit companies, meaning they have shareholders. And when you have shareholders you are accountable to those shareholders, meaning you want to keep them happy. How do you keep shareholders happy? Well, you pay them dividends and you get your stock price to go up. Once more, I’m not trying to insult your intelligence, but I’m just trying to, let’s think through this in a rational, critical step-by-step way. So we have our groundwork here, the media, and even well, let’s throw this in Twitter, Facebook, all those social media companies that are getting a huge influx out of that much more attention. They are all for-profit companies. So knowing that, keeping that in context, let’s think about from the media angle if we are going to open up a media company, how do we get profit? Well, you get profit as a media company when people actually care about your entertainment, care about what you’re having to say.

Clay:

You get profit, you are going to grow by the attention you skit, right? Okay, nothing fancy here. That’s just how media companies make money, right? You make a movie, all right, how can we make money from this movie? Well, if a lot of people watch that movie. There we go. So these are for-profit companies that get their profit by getting a lot of viewership. How are you going to get a lot of viewership by talking about things that nobody cares about, or by talking about things that apparently a lot of people care about. Well, I think that if we’re setting up a business, we would probably say, you know what? By talking about things that a whole lot of people care about, that a whole lot of people are going to view, pay attention to.

Clay:

And that’s exactly what we have here. That’s all it is. The media is blowing this out of proportion because it directly benefits the media’s bottom line as a for-profit company. And it’s just the way it works out. One news station starts to talk about some sort of topic. And they notice, “Wow, our ratings are improving. Wow. There’s a lot of people…” And then other networks, other sources, other… This is just Business 101, other competitors are like, “Oh wow, what they’re doing is working. Maybe we should… ” And especially in media, “Maybe we should just talk about the same thing. Yeah, sure. Maybe we’ll put a little spin on it in a different way, but the underlying fact is it is the exact same thing.” So then that company, that media store starts to talk about it and then guess what happens? Oh wow, their ratings starts to improve.

Clay:

And then the other company’s like, “Well, I don’t like that. That’s a little ridiculous. They just stole some of our viewership. You know what? Let’s talk about it even more. Because very clearly people want to hear about it, so let’s talk about even more to try to get some of those viewerships back from the other company. But then what happens? Well then you have the third and fourth media companies out there saying, “Oh wow, those two, they’re in like a ratings battle right now. And the reason they’re in a ratings battle is because they’re talking about this certain topic. You know what, we’re a for-profit business, we’re smart, we have common sense, maybe we should also talk about that topic.” And then those companies start to talk about the topic. And then guess what happens? Those two original ones, they start to lose viewership again.

Clay:

So what’s their solution? “Well, let’s go even more.” And they talk about it even more. And then those other two that just entered in, well they’re trying to get their foot in the door, so what are they going to do? Well, you know what? “Let’s talk about it even more from different angles. Let’s try to spin this. Let’s try to just talk about it and talk about the same thing over and over again. But we’ll try to twist and turn it so it doesn’t sound like the same thing over and over again, but it is the exact same thing.” Do you see what I’m getting at here? Does that feel at all like the environment we’re living in right now? I don’t blame the media companies. Good for them. They are talking about what clearly people apparently just want to hear about. And as long as people continue on to hear about it, they’re going to keep on talking about it.

Clay:

And like I said, it’s improving their bottom line and given that they are in a for-profit business of making money, of course they’re going to keep talking about it. And as soon as things calm down, they’ll talk less and less and less about it and the world will go on. I get it. When everybody’s talking about something, it can seem like, “Wow, is this the end?” No, they’re talking about it, not because it’s some sort of mass chaos situation. Again, 575,000 worldwide deaths compared to right now something much, much, much less. And I don’t know if there is other news things going on at the time of the swine flu or what exactly was going on then, but like I said, I have my reasons, but for whatever reason, at that point, the media just didn’t feel like blowing it up to the extent that it did.

Clay:

Now of course, they talked about it at the time. You better believe they talked about it at the time for these factual reasons of being a for-profit. Now, why did they blow it up as big as they did? Like I said, you’re more than welcome to leave your opinions down below. Like I said, I will be posting this on YouTube, on why you think the media has blown it as big of a proportion. I’m not going to enter into any of those discussions. I’m not looking to start any sort of debates. Like I said, I’m keeping my personal opinions to myself, but the one opinion that… Well it’s not an opinion, it’s just a fact. The one fact that we all need to just keep in mind is about for-profit businesses and how these media for-profit business make money, by talking about stuff that people care about.

Clay:

So just keep that in mind, that that’s why everybody is talking about it. The media companies aren’t talking about it because the whole world is about to end, they’re talking about it because well, it benefits them to talk about it. And then the final thought process I want to go through, and this one’s morbid and I debated whether or not I should say it, but it really does a good job of kind of illustrating just why things are being overblown in the sense of the stock market and the economy and the world’s going to end, and all of this. The death rate right now, the mortality rate is very, very minimal on coronavirus, and if you take out the elderly, it drops that much more. And again, every life matters.

Clay:

I get it. I still have one of my grandma’s alive, so I understand what it’s like to have grandmas and grandpas, parents, so all lives matter. But my point is that from a statistical point of view, if you take out the elderly and the people that are below age 60 and they’re in fine health, they don’t have any pre-existing conditions, the mortality rates drop significantly, significantly. But once again, let’s just err on the side of caution. Let’s just err on the side of just drama. Let’s say that the mortality rate is 10% and let’s just say that 10% of the world population dies. Okay? So 10% of the world’s population gone, before we can get this thing figured out. 10% gone. I get it. Very, very dry situation. The question and the thought process becomes, okay, so after that all plays out, the 90% of us that are left, are the 90% of us left still going to like iPhones, still going to like go into the movies, still going to like go on to Starbucks still going to like… Fill in the blank of some sort of activity.

Clay:

Are the 90% of us that are left still going to want electricity? Are we still going to want water? Are we still going to want to be able to heat our homes in the winter? So in other words in stock market lingo, are utility companies probably still going to be desired? We need somebody to keep on the heat, somebody to keep on the power, somebody to keep the water in check. What about all those iPhones? Do you think Apple is still going to be around? Even like I said, 10% of the population. That would be terrible. Terrible. That would really be depressing. That’d be a bad situation. But 90% after that, putting all that aside, are we just going to all of a sudden not care about any of that stuff?

Clay:

Are we going to just not eat anymore, or are we going to not need food? Because right now there’s a lot of food companies out there that have stock and there are publicly traded companies and there are businesses. Are we just not going to need food anymore? Do you get where I’m getting at with this? Is, yeah, that would be a very traumatic experience for everybody. But at the core, us as humans, we’re still going to need, we’re still going to want certain dynamics, and there’s still going to need to be some sort of infrastructure in place to make all that happen. The world is not going to end from a structural perspective. And once again, this is assuming that the mortality rate’s at 10% which is not even close to 10%, and that we can’t get this figured out until the entire world is affected.

Clay:

I mean you get how crazy and how kind of silly I’m being right now, but that’s the point, is even in a silly what-if situation that I’m going through, there would still be 90% of people left and economies are still going to need to be there, because well, people are still going to want goods and services. So before you go and say, “You know what, I just want to cash everything out and put money in my hand.” Let’s do that. And here’s the problem with that is, okay, well let’s take our worst case scenario. Let’s say that all stock markets, everything just crashed to zero and you’re saying, “Well good, I’m glad I sold and have cash in hand, or I’m glad I sold and then bought gold bars.” Okay, well at that situation cash is going to be worthless anyways.

Clay:

Currency, who cares about currency? Because literally if stock markets crashed around the world and nothing recovers and they go straight to zero, cash at that point, might as well be… Well, that’ll be the new toilet paper, right? Because there’s a toilet paper shortage anyways. So cash quite literally, quite ironically would become basically just good for toilet paper. Gold bars. In this situation, I don’t know what a gold bar is going to get you. What are you going to go and buy? Because apparently there is no businesses out there because everything has crashed. So I don’t know what a gold bar is going to get you. At that situation, if you want to play the, “Well, I’m cashing out so at least I have cash in case of a really bad situation.” Well, a really bad situation, the currency becomes guns, bullets and water.

Clay:

So I suppose if you are buying bottled water, okay fine, that might be something worthwhile. But for people with guns, they’re just going to come steal that from you anyways. So really the top currency becomes guns and bullets in a worst, worst-case scenario. Or I guess another scenario is we’re all zombies and walking around and I suppose, I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think zombies care about their retirement portfolios. I don’t think zombies care about all that stuff. Maybe they do, I don’t know. But everybody just needs to calm down, because if you want to play the worst case scenarios, then it just doesn’t make any sense for you to cash out on things because who cares? Who cares if you have cash? What does that mean? It’s not going to mean anything in a worst-case scenario.

Clay:

But you know what? If you cash out and then everything is okay and then the markets recover because again, people still want goods and services, well, you’re going to be glad that you didn’t cash out at the bottom because now that cash value is going to go up a lot more since it’s tied to your stocks, which are now starting to recover back up to where they were. And I would encourage you to go back to Y2K and look at the chart after that. The financial crisis was a little bit… Let me put it this way, 2008 was… And I can speak to this with relative confidence, with relative knowledge, especially now that I have quite a bit of real estate investing experience under my belt, but 2008 from a stock market perspective…. So again, I get it, this is always scary because it’s viruses and microscopic stuff. When I say scary, that has been defined as from a stock market perspective strictly.

Clay:

2008 was much, much scarier because there was actually some big flaws in the system, the flaws in the system where banks lending to people that basically didn’t have any jobs, no down payment required. That credit, “We don’t care about your credit, here, go buy a house.” I mean there were some really sketchy things going on that caused that. There are some massive flaws within the financial system. So from that point of view, it was much scarier. It was a situation where, “Oh man, yeah this is getting a little goofy here. These are some massive flaws.” But right now what is the flaw with the stock market? Quite literally nothing. That’s a little bit different for the oil companies because with the pricing war going on. But for pretty much, I don’t know, 90% of the companies, what is the flaw right now?

Clay:

The flaw is just people freaking out and panicking because of the media. And when people freak out and panic and sell, well that just causes prices to go down. That’s literally the only flaw in the system right now is people freaking out. This is not some sort of bubble that popped in the form of the banking stocks back in 2008, and then that dominoed into everything else. There’s nothing out there right now that is a massive, massive issue that caused this pullback other than the fact of, well, coronavirus and then you sprinkle on the oil war, which doesn’t matter that much. Because lower gas prices, I get it, that definitely hurts oil companies, but there’s a lot of other people out there that benefit from low prices. If it costs me less to transfer my goods from point A to B because gas prices have come down, and because it’s a competitive market, well that just means lower prices for the consumer. Not to mention the lower prices at the gas pump itself.

Clay:

So like I said, I get that having a role and having an effect being as a glitch in the system if you will. But that’s kind of, and I don’t buy that argument that much because, well that actually helps a whole lot of other people in the system too, us as consumers. I mean it’s like a tax cut for all of us. When you go to the pump and you’re like, “Oh wow.” In fact, going back to Miles, my friend who was just here, he’s like, “Oh yeah, I heard about that oil war. I was wondering why gas prices got so cheap. They’re like two bucks a gallon here in Michigan.” Well there you go. Miles is benefiting from that. He is keeping more money in his pocket that he can go spend elsewhere in the economy and stimulate it. So yes, bad for the oil companies, not bad for everybody.

Clay:

To bring this all full circle, from strictly a stock market sense and I get it, you can throw well, what about this? But at the heart of the matter is, the only reason stocks are going down right now is because everybody’s freaking out. Why is everybody freaking out, because of the media hysteria. Why is the media creating all this hysteria? Because they are for-profit companies and that’s how they make money by getting ratings. And to bring this all the way back full circle, remember this is something where if you are in a room and we are observing and forecasting and predicting how we thought people would choose case A, 575,000 worldwide deaths, case B, again, we’ll go through the exaggerated number, 100,000 worldwide deaths. Which one do you think would be the mass hysteria?

Clay:

And it’s very… Of course case A. Wrong. Nope, it’s the other one. So it’s unique times, things aren’t quite making sense. I have my opinion on why it is what it is, but the facts of the matter are people are just trying to make money. Those media companies, they’re just trying to make money. So they’re going to talk about what’s going to line their… Put money in their pockets and therefore they can pay those dividends, they can keep their stock prices stable as possible. And that’s really the moral of the story in terms of that approach. So what am I doing right now? I am buying. No, I’m not going all in at once, I’m scaling in, because I have no idea where the bottom is and the market may need to drop some more. But it goes back to… It could drop down to zero.

Clay:

But you know what? If the S&P, the Dow Jones dropped to zero, I assure you my stocks are going to be the last thing that I’m concerned about at that point. I’m going to be grateful that I have guns and ammo. If it’s really going to go down to zero then you know what, who cares? And even though I’m glad I pulled my money out, it goes back to well, who cares about your money? It’s toilet paper at that point. If the markets actually go down to zero. This is where this is where we’re going to see how the stock market is rigged. Not rigged against people but rigged for people. I can’t stand when people are like, “Oh well stock market’s all rigged.”

Clay:

You’re right, it is rigged, but for people that buy and hold. Because the government is going to do everything in its power and it’s already begun to keep the stock market from crashing. Why? Because if stock markets crash, what does that cause? Chaos. What does chaos cause? Riots in the street. What do riots in the street cause? Unrest. Who doesn’t like unrest? Politicians. Politicians and I don’t care, Democrat, Republican, Independent politicians, those in Washington DC, they liked that power. They liked the position that they’re in. They love that control. So it would be wise in their favor to what? To keep things under control. What is a quick way for things to go out of control? By your country losing all of its money because they put it into this thing called the stock market and then the stock market goes to zero.

Clay:

But because those people want to keep their control, what should they be doing? They should be doing everything to ensure that people don’t lose their money. And how do they ensure that people don’t lose their money? By making sure the stock market doesn’t crash. And how can they make sure that the stock market doesn’t continue to crash? Well, by doing what you’re witnessing right now. Friday, the latest update, no student loan payments. We’re going to start buying oil to fill the reserves to help the oil companies out. Back in 2008, the auto bailouts, all that. I mean, the government is pumping all that money into the system. Why? Because they want to stay in control. They like being politicians. They like maintaining their nice little positions there. Maybe that’s a little tin foil hat, but it’s not. It’s not. It’s just a logical thought process. If people are in power and they want to stay in power, what is the required control? What’s the quickest way to see things get out of control?

Clay:

What if everybody loses their money? They don’t want to see everybody lose their money. So yes, the stock market is rigged, but in our favor to those that hold. Sure, stock markets can’t go straight up. Sure crashes are going to happen, they’ve happened before. But they’ve never happened to the point where it just goes straight to zero and that’s the end of the world. It could go straight to zero, but that just means there’s riots in the street, there is chaos all over the place, but you know what? I believe that things will work itself out. We’re at not even 10,000 worldwide deaths yet. I don’t think this is the zombie apocalypse. The media may make you think that, but we’ve addressed why the media is doing what they are.

Clay:

So that’s my thoughts, just keep that in mind. The markets are rigged, but you’ve already seen it. You’re living through the history books right now. Friday speech with the national emergency and all this stuff. The government is pumping money into the system like crazy right now. They are trying to get things back on track. They want to see the stock market level off, and they want to see it start to head back up. May still go on a little bit lower and I’ll be buying. I’m definitely not selling, definitely not going to sell right now. It’s an opportunity right now, when everybody is freaking out, when everybody is scared, just take a step back, take a deep breath, think through things rationally and it’s a little bit easier to make better decisions. So I’m very curious on your thoughts on this, and like I said, I think this is the third time now, and I just keep bringing that up because usually I don’t post these on YouTube anymore but this one will go on YouTube.

Clay:

So in the comment section, just let me know your thoughts. I’m not looking to get into any debates. I know some of you can be very passionate and I respect the passion, I love the passion actually. That’s some good stuff. But like I said, I have a family of four kids, I am running a business, multiple businesses, real estate investments. I just don’t have time to get into some like deep-seated debates. But if you want to debate it out in the comments section, that’s fine with others. I don’t want you to think that I’m ignoring you, I just don’t have the time. And given I’m a competitive person, I know what’s going to happen if I start with somebody, then it’s just going to… My time needs to be invested elsewhere. So if you do leave a comment, I’m just going to be saying thanks for your thoughts. Even if I don’t agree with the thoughts, I’m just going to thank you for them.

Clay:

So it’s not me being scared of an argument. It’s just me like I said, waving my hand admitting yeah, I have an issue and sometimes I enter into rabbit holes that I shouldn’t, just from a time perspective, unfortunately there’s only 24 hours in a day. But yeah, I would still love to hear your thoughts. Even if you disagree with me, that’s fine. I’m not going to go at it with you, like I said, I’ll just thank you for my thoughts. And who knows, maybe you have some sort of perspective that can help reassure other people too, because that’s the core idea here, it’s just to build a little reassurance to hopefully offer up some hope that, “You know what? Just calm down.”

Clay:

If I can raise just one person’s quality of life, then I will consider this mission accomplished. So I appreciate your patience and understanding, kind of hitting a pause here on the interviews with other people. But I feel like I said at the very beginning, we are living through the history books being written right now. So hopefully you’ll give me the hall pass and be okay with me to having taken some time to do this. But I look forward to hearing what you think down in the comments section on YouTube and yeah, get out there, keep a cool head and go searching for some opportunities.

 

So like I said, I get that having a role and having an effect being as a glitch in the system if you will. But that’s kind of, and I don’t buy that argument that much because, well that actually helps a whole lot of other people in the system too, us as consumers. I mean it’s like a tax cut for all of us. When you go to the pump and you’re like, “Oh wow.” In fact, going back to Miles, my friend who was just here, he’s like, “Oh yeah, I heard about that oil war. I was wondering why gas prices got so cheap. They’re like two bucks a gallon here in Michigan.” Well there you go. Miles is benefiting from that. He is keeping more money in his pocket that he can go spend elsewhere in the economy and stimulate it. So yes, bad for the oil companies, not bad for everybody.
Clay:
To bring this all full circle, from strictly a stock market sense and I get it, you can throw well, what about this? But at the heart of the matter is, the only reason stocks are going down right now is because everybody’s freaking out. Why is everybody freaking out, because of the media hysteria. Why is the media creating all this hysteria? Because they are for-profit companies and that’s how they make money by getting ratings. And to bring this all the way back full circle, remember this is something where if you are in a room and we are observing and forecasting and predicting how we thought people would choose case A, 575,000 worldwide deaths, case B, again, we’ll go through the exaggerated number, 100,000 worldwide deaths. Which one do you think would be the mass hysteria?
Clay:
And it’s very… Of course case A. Wrong. Nope, it’s the other one. So it’s unique times, things aren’t quite making sense. I have my opinion on why it is what it is, but the facts of the matter are people are just trying to make money. Those media companies, they’re just trying to make money. So they’re going to talk about what’s going to line their… Put money in their pockets and therefore they can pay those dividends, they can keep their stock prices stable as possible. And that’s really the moral of the story in terms of that approach. So what am I doing right now? I am buying. No, I’m not going all in at once, I’m scaling in, because I have no idea where the bottom is and the market may need to drop some more. But it goes back to… It could drop down to zero.
Clay:
But you know what? If the S&P, the Dow Jones dropped to zero, I assure you my stocks are going to be the last thing that I’m concerned about at that point. I’m going to be grateful that I have guns and ammo. If it’s really going to go down to zero then you know what, who cares? And even though I’m glad I pulled my money out, it goes back to well, who cares about your money? It’s toilet paper at that point. If the markets actually go down to zero. This is where this is where we’re going to see how the stock market is rigged. Not rigged against people but rigged for people. I can’t stand when people are like, “Oh well stock market’s all rigged.”
Clay:
You’re right, it is rigged, but for people that buy and hold. Because the government is going to do everything in its power and it’s already begun to keep the stock market from crashing. Why? Because if stock markets crash, what does that cause? Chaos. What does chaos cause? Riots in the street. What do riots in the street cause? Unrest. Who doesn’t like unrest? Politicians. Politicians and I don’t care, Democrat, Republican, Independent politicians, those in Washington DC, they liked that power. They liked the position that they’re in. They love that control. So it would be wise in their favor to what? To keep things under control. What is a quick way for things to go out of control? By your country losing all of its money because they put it into this thing called the stock market and then the stock market goes to zero.
Clay:
But because those people want to keep their control, what should they be doing? They should be doing everything to ensure that people don’t lose their money. And how do they ensure that people don’t lose their money? By making sure the stock market doesn’t crash. And how can they make sure that the stock market doesn’t continue to crash? Well, by doing what you’re witnessing right now. Friday, the latest update, no student loan payments. We’re going to start buying oil to fill the reserves to help the oil companies out. Back in 2008, the auto bailouts, all that. I mean, the government is pumping all that money into the system. Why? Because they want to stay in control. They like being politicians. They like maintaining their nice little positions there. Maybe that’s a little tin foil hat, but it’s not. It’s not. It’s just a logical thought process. If people are in power and they want to stay in power, what is the required control? What’s the quickest way to see things get out of control?
Clay:
What if everybody loses their money? They don’t want to see everybody lose their money. So yes, the stock market is rigged, but in our favor to those that hold. Sure, stock markets can’t go straight up. Sure crashes are going to happen, they’ve happened before. But they’ve never happened to the point where it just goes straight to zero and that’s the end of the world. It could go straight to zero, but that just means there’s riots in the street, there is chaos all over the place, but you know what? I believe that things will work itself out. We’re at not even 10,000 worldwide deaths yet. I don’t think this is the zombie apocalypse. The media may make you think that, but we’ve addressed why the media is doing what they are.
Clay:
So that’s my thoughts, just keep that in mind. The markets are rigged, but you’ve already seen it. You’re living through the history books right now. Friday speech with the national emergency and all this stuff. The government is pumping money into the system like crazy right now. They are trying to get things back on track. They want to see the stock market level off, and they want to see it start to head back up. May still go on a little bit lower and I’ll be buying. I’m definitely not selling, definitely not going to sell right now. It’s an opportunity right now, when everybody is freaking out, when everybody is scared, just take a step back, take a deep breath, think through things rationally and it’s a little bit easier to make better decisions. So I’m very curious on your thoughts on this, and like I said, I think this is the third time now, and I just keep bringing that up because usually I don’t post these on YouTube anymore but this one will go on YouTube.
Clay:
So in the comment section, just let me know your thoughts. I’m not looking to get into any debates. I know some of you can be very passionate and I respect the passion, I love the passion actually. That’s some good stuff. But like I said, I have a family of four kids, I am running a business, multiple businesses, real estate investments. I just don’t have time to get into some like deep-seated debates. But if you want to debate it out in the comments section, that’s fine with others. I don’t want you to think that I’m ignoring you, I just don’t have the time. And given I’m a competitive person, I know what’s going to happen if I start with somebody, then it’s just going to… My time needs to be invested elsewhere. So if you do leave a comment, I’m just going to be saying thanks for your thoughts. Even if I don’t agree with the thoughts, I’m just going to thank you for them.
Clay:
So it’s not me being scared of an argument. It’s just me like I said, waving my hand admitting yeah, I have an issue and sometimes I enter into rabbit holes that I shouldn’t, just from a time perspective, unfortunately there’s only 24 hours in a day. But yeah, I would still love to hear your thoughts. Even if you disagree with me, that’s fine. I’m not going to go at it with you, like I said, I’ll just thank you for my thoughts. And who knows, maybe you have some sort of perspective that can help reassure other people too, because that’s the core idea here, it’s just to build a little reassurance to hopefully offer up some hope that, “You know what? Just calm down.”
Clay:
If I can raise just one person’s quality of life, then I will consider this mission accomplished. So I appreciate your patience and understanding, kind of hitting a pause here on the interviews with other people. But I feel like I said at the very beginning, we are living through the history books being written right now. So hopefully you’ll give me the hall pass and be okay with me to having taken some time to do this. But I look forward to hearing what you think down in the comments section on YouTube and yeah, get out there, keep a cool head and go searching for some opportunities.