The next day in Bangkok I did some group fitness classes that were still running, amazingly enough.  I then met up with a brilliant guy I had made friends with at a prior Internations event.  He and I perched ourselves at the rooftop swimming pool of the Novotel hotel and discussed the coronavirus for over 6 hours, trying to put our heads together to understand all that was happening.

We both held the usual arguments, that 'it's just a flu' and so forth.  In principle, we still believe that.  We always did.  Even at it's worst, the symptoms are survivable and almost everyone recovers.  It's a virus with a 99% survival rate.  The real problem is how the world is responding to this.

So while we can say 'it's just a flu' all we like, the political realities of how the world is freaking out matter a lot.  Unfortunatley we all need to make quick actions that will have enormous long-term consequences on our life choices.  We are all facing a disruption of unparalleled magnitude.  Sure we could easily survive if we got the coronavirus but that isn't the point at all.  Our lives have been changed forever and we'll be talking about this for decades afterwards.

A black swan event according to Binance Vision is as follows:

It is an event that comes as a surprise and has a significant effect.  The history of the black swan theory dates back to a Latin expression of the 2nd century by Roman poet Juvenal translated as 'a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan'.  It was thought that black swans couldn't exist.  The theory was further developed by statistician and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  In 2007 he published a book called 'The Impact of the Highly Improbable' which formalized the theory.  According to Taleb, black swan events has three attributes:  an outlier, beyond that of regular expectations and nothing could have predicted it from the past.  It always carries an extreme or significant impact.  It will certainly have a rational explanation concocted after the fact, to try to make it explainable and predictable"

Looking at the coronavirus, how could it not be a black swan event?  

Other black swan events have been 9/11 and the development of the internet and smartphones with GPS.  They don't always have to be negative.  But they have far reaching consequences for sure.  

So that's what we concluded in our conversation.  I appreciated his compliment that I looked better in shape after doing all this biking and fitness classes.  He even called me one of the 'top 1%' thinkers he's met and I greatly appreciated that.  He was the same I would think.  Look at it this way, what are the 99% of people doing right now at this moment?  Freaking out over a flu.

This guy was smart enough to sell bonds, not stock, during the economic crisis.  He did the opposite of everyone else while holding onto his stocks and selling bonds to those who were frantically buying 'safe havens'.  This strategy he used to finance a semi-retired life in Thailand.  He could ride out the pandemic for many years with these finances.  I had a lot to learn from him especially how to better prepared for emergencies.

[Update November 2022]  Unfortunately I lost contact with him due to all the chaos in switching social media accounts and countries after the trip.  I would be super curious to find out how he managed the pandemic, especially how he managed his portfolio when things boomed in 2021.

The next day was more fitness class and social events where they could still be found, but these were of serious risk of being shut down.  Maybe it will happen as early as next week.  Traffic was also dropping off a lot as with activity at restaurants.  Even a top international school already closed here.  I had to get as much of these social events in as possible along with other key business and then leave Bangkok before people started retreating to their homes.