Host: Brett King
Guest: Robert Scoble
Guest: Brian Roemmele

[Start Transcription 00:01]
Brett King: [00:01] Welcome to Breaking Banks. I am here with two good friends who have been regulars on the show. Brian Roemmele and Robert Scoble. Brian and Robert, welcome back to the show.
Brian: [00:10] Thank you Brett. It’s great to be here.
Robert: [00:14] And thanks, this is Robert. Thanks for having us on.
Brett King: [00:16] Yeah, you guys are actually gonna love the show that’s going to add this week, actually because we’re pretty recording this for next week, but I had Ramas, David Green, and Kevin Anderson three sci-fi guys. Talking about how this is going to change the future of this. If you’re listening to this podcast right now, you probably heard that episode already, but I’m just saying Brian Webb Nessa;
What I want to get into with you guys though is obviously with working from home and all of that. We’ve suddenly had big behavioral changes around digital and technology. So here’s what I’d like to sort of explore on today’s show based on the impact of the corona virus moving forward.
Are there changes that are happening right now, behavioral changes, as a result of use of technology that you think you’re going to stick, and also as a result of sort of the entrepreneurial spirit and Investments that come from this; how do you think that might change the trajectory of where technology takes us based on the lessons we’ve learned from coronavirus or that memory that society might have, but let’s kick it off with the most obvious changes; now Robert you are coming to us live from the Bay area.
But where are you recording this show from?
Robert: [01:40] I’m sitting in my Tesla; I’m in Campbell, California about a couple blocks from Netflix’s headquarters, and I got kicked out of my house because my son had nest conference on Zoom with his school teacher, and my wife Is on Zoom with her co-worker, so we have two to three conference calls on Zoom right now. Just what’s going on.
Brett King: [02:08] This is the challenge like people not getting Netflix working because it’s under strain and all of that Zoom Monday morning, you know, I had an all-hands meeting this morning with the team because we’re recording this on a Monday and yeah, it was really sketchy because obviously everyone is doing the same thing.
Starting off doing Monday morning meetings with a lot staffs as a lot of dropouts or stuff; so you coming to us live from the Tesla?
Robert: [02:33] Yeah, if you think about it, they really great microphones and it’s soundproof.
Brett King: [02:45] Absolutely!
Robert: [02:33] You know, if you told me on January 1st; if you said something like this to me, hey Robert by the end of March, your schools are going to close down and your school teachers are going to be working with you on a Seesaw and Zoom and Google Classroom. I would have said what kind of drugs are you doing?
Brett King: [03:05] Exactly!
Robert: [03:06] And what world are you living? [Laughs]; because, just three months ago, none of us saw this coming.
Brett King: [03:12] Or may be something more dramatic than that, the US was getting consider a form of universal basic income, to ballad people from economic stress.
Robert: [03:22] Yeah, or that we were going to close all the world’s economies and take a picture of it for global warming research. What kind of conspiracy theory are you? I think Brian and I were talking last week, and the amount of change that is happening every minute of every day now is more than we would have changed in a month, you know before this, so the stresses of change are real interesting to watch.
Brian: [03:58] Exactly, you know, you know guys rate of change is such an important aspect. I think we really want to kind of dive into that. The acceleration and rate of change is been so profound so great, that obviously it’s taxing most people’s ability to cope and to deal with this change. The reality is, there going to be an after you know, I called the post pandemic; the post-2020 pandemic.
And you know, we can use history as a guide on how people recovered, economy has recovered, and the social norms that have changed; but yeah, this shift in technology utilization, I think in many ways are going to profoundly change education.
Obviously, we’re going to start proving that in some forms of education, remote education actually makes a tremendous amount of sense, not just educational lies, but financially and I believe this is going to go from grade school on into University level courses, continuity of government was by the time you hear this; it probably is already enacted to some level; the Internal Revenue Service and home most of their employees.
And one must start to think; what is government to look like when it becomes hyper local and decentralized? which I believe is going to be one of the artifacts of this, the theme is; we’re going to see a tremendous amount of decentralization and Hyper localization.
Something I’ve been talking about for a very long time. And now it’s starting to make profound sense. Couples of headquarters are going to be a vestige from the former Industrial Revolution. The means of production were held in cities required people to be there to move items from a – b and things of that level.
We’re going to prove dramatic increase in productivity by sending people home, if it was done the right way. So I think those are some of the things have already garnered from this, the make sense?
Robert: [05:59] Yeah. Well, you know, you take somebody like my wife, who we live 13 miles from her job, but that Matt in the old world driving an hour each way, right? So now she has hours a day back. And what does she do with that? Well one, can we do with that? We watch a lot more on Netflix. It’s my friends at their servers are seeing seven times more load than they saw a couple months ago, right?
Brett King: [06:29] That is insane.
Robert: [06:30] I’m hearing that across the board in the data center space that data centers are running white hot. In fact this could be a problem going forward that we’re running our data so hot that if there is a failure, it’ll be harder to fix failures, right because we’re running them at capacity and struggling.
Brian: [06:48] Some data centers have big rules, where staff is living on site because it may become crucial infrastructure and it’s phenomenal when you think about how this is going to dramatically change; how we see all forms of business, but when you think about the financial impact, you know after the dust settles of being able to pay employees to live anywhere in the world they desire, as long as you’re productive.
And they did have regional centers for corporate meetings and hang outs, and things of that level; also seeing an increase in interactivity between employees that did not take place in the headphone culture at pocked that we just lived through.
I mean if idea of exposed brick and recycled wood offices look so cool. Everybody walked around with headphones, on nobody was talking in the hallways. Nobody was interacting for a lot of reasons; and I you know, we studied this so now we’re going to see more interactivity because you can literally head somebody up very quickly through electronic means in a much more productive way for working remotely.
So these are the some of the impacts, and that means more income for the employees, means more productivity and income for the companies.
Robert: [08:00] It’s really interesting! I bought three of these Facebook portal devices for my house three months ago, right when they were brand-new and people get me about it on Twitter, right? Oh, that’s a privacy device. Well, you know your privacy is going away. Why would you join Facebook? Delete Facebook right, all these things about Facebook. Now, they are sold out because all of a sudden. Oh, where is your family? They’re not even on zoom, they are on facebook. They kept saying all these and that.
Brian and I talked about VR a lot, I’m playing a lot more VR now. VR is a great way to get exercise, is a great way to get training on certain things, and it’s a great way to escape; and gets some stress relief, and some mental illness satisfaction.
I just finished a book that will be out in May that Irina Cronin and I wrote, and that’s what we cover is all this new technology. That isn’t quite ready yet. You know, Facebook is only sold 700,000. He was questioned; he can’t even buy one because the supply chain is sort of messed up right now.
And it’s not just ready for the main stream, so we should split you know, the zoom is happening right now. It’s being adopted by many millions of millions of millions of people every day, right? VR and AR are things that are going to come for the next one.
Brett King: [09:35] Alright!
Robert: [09:35] So they are things that gonna come next year. You might see Facebook and Apple come out with new devices, and those device I think; are the ones that are going to really be adopted by the mainstream or it actually the people who have any way wealth left after the crises.
Brett King: [09:58] Yeah, but isn’t that interesting how rapidly it really shows the fragility of capitalism, you know, because within two weeks, the world’s largest economy. With trillions of dollars of GDP is having the bail out; so the average citizen can get food to eat. We are not even talking about paying rents and mortgages and things like that.
You know, that’s how sensitive this system was till this collapsed.
Robert: [10:36] We’re going to have a bigger problem soon because;
Brian: [10:38] You know, it’s not just that. It is a cascade that is going through the economy, the entire infrastructure of what we considered the pre 2020 pandemic economy is gone. Venture capitalists that we knew of before this pandemic are going to be wiped out, a lot of them not all of them, but a lot of them.
I’ve just put out a tweet today that the small business administration is not looking at giving bailout funds to venture capitalists based startups, because the VC would be considered an employer and if they have over 500 employees that are not part of the SBA program as it exists today.
That’s an interpretation. I’m not a lawyer, and it might very well change by the time the show comes out as a call in with my contact at the SBA. Those funds are critical for the restaurant industry primarily, but certainly every other industry.
The restaurant industry is going to completely remake itself. You are going to see a lot of less Reliance on third parties to deliver and more Reliance on local restaurants having the service deliver. A lot of people think this is contrarian, but very logical.
You create a brand by not only the restaurant food, but the environment. More people are staying home, the environment is an extension through that server; and the server is you know, the servers that are going up making these deliveries, talking with the people that are buying the food; they’re interacting with them and they’re in extending the brand of that restaurant.
Where this disinterested third party has no investment in that brand and ultimately will make that brand more generic. So I’m pretty thinking and I’m already seeing these restaurants taking hold of their own technology stack, and taking those deliveries directly and this would have been considered a charlatan and a radical, just to bring up three weeks ago.
And now it’s happening in real time.
Brett King: [12:43] Brian, there’s a restaurant in South Lake Tahoe that I know about, where the owners of the restaurant give their employees a choice. You can come and work for us or you can go home and collect unemployment or something. They put the employees all in one house to sequester them from the public and from the disease.
They are also very strict. So they built a whole protocol about how to disinfect the food that comes into the restaurant, and how to separate themselves from customer, and how to collect money and how to hand off goods.
So they’re staying open and they are fairly reasonably assured that they’re not passing up the virus to their customers, but think about what that’s doing for their brand right now. First of all, the two restaurants on both sides of them closed, they didn’t even try to stay out of it right!
There delivering food, they have food delivery and pickup, so you can drive by on the street and pick up some food from that. So they’re staying open.
Number Two, if they’re correct and they don’t give anybody the virus and they don’t get it themselves. They’re going to build a brand that says; this is a really innovative new restaurant that served the community and did what it took to survive in this time, and they’re going to;
Brian: [14:02] Important point; and bankers are going to do the same thing, Innovative Bankers right now are doing amazing things to be able to get mortgages done. Our sells are being innovated beyond Tesla. I just had a friend who bought a new pickup truck, he is in the middle of nowhere; and obviously couldn’t go to an auto dealer, but you auto dealer obviously, the entire Auto Industry is being promoted at this point.
He was only given incredible deal on a pickup truck, got a loan and did it all electronically in the space of seven minutes. So there’s no Boiler Room for the potential victim during normal auto sales.
So we’re seeing these old line type of business has transformed, because of this event and I think a lot of them are going to wind up sticking in this way. Now our public restaurants can exist post-2020 pandemic? Absolutely of course, we’re going to get together, we’re gonna hang out clubs, but they’re going to be reasonable measures being taken.
This is going to be the generation that’s going to remember what a pandemic looks like when you track 1918-1919. It really was not an accident. The roaring twenties came out of that pandemic period. A lot of it was pent-up technologies from obviously World War 1 also, but also that pent-up demand to connect with people.
People had access to telephones and radios in 1919 and 1918. They just didn’t see a need for post pandemic. There is an explosion of these Technologies interconnect people because they wanted to be able to be you know, with other people electronically and this goes to what Robert has been saying about VR for a long time and new breed also, 10 years ago.
Most of these technologies are going to interconnect people in new way. So not going to replace everything, but they gonna replace some of the mundane things that people were doing, especially in the banking realm. I think it’s a bank is not set up to voice and VR; at this point, they’re not ready for the next decade because people are going to meet with bankers to a virtual environment.
Robert: [16:08] Let’s talk about one thing my primarily, Mr. JP Morgan; he said during a normal year like last year, if you wanted to get a new technology adopted by their 300,000 employees. It would have taken more than a year to do. And last week alone, they on-boarded a hundred fifteen thousand people on to zoom right in one week, right?
Think about what that means for the bank, now all of sudden everybody at the bank is connected with Zoom, and can make the decisions in this new decentralized way and start thinking about how to serve customers anyway, because now everybody at the bank is on Zoom, so why not have the customer on zoom right?
Brian: [16:46] Exactly, when we talk about decentralization and banks; we’re also talking about the decentralization and guarantee. This bill that was passed; a lot of people didn’t see what happened, but inside that bill is the ability for the government to create electronic cash.
And you know, there’s a lot of details that are still being worked out; but it is a tremendous shift. But it’s not going to be done fast enough to distribute funds to Americans in need, but it’s very possible that it could be done if this extends out, as long as some people have extended it.
Brett King: [17:26] One of the things that Jennifer Tesha from Financial Health Network put on the public profile was; actually you know, kind of the problem of this ballad is; they are thinking of sending these twelve hundred dollar payments as checks to people, you know, and we have people who know they don’t have bank accounts and twenty percent of American households.
The poorest American households don’t have bank accounts, getting a check today; what uses is that to you; you can’t even get a check casher.
Brian: [17:53] You can’t even open an account.
Brett King: [17:54] Exactly! I think there’s some fundamental changes, but as you both pointed out, part of the realization, the awakening that’s happening digital is these organizations that have resisted it because of the momentum or inertia around the existing systems, when they are forced to do it.
And suddenly, it goes; hey it works! And guess what? It’s actually cheaper than the way we’re doing business before, and so I think this is going to radically change the economics of many Industries as well.
Robert: [18:29] Back to the restaurant example, you know, I’m not as positive that a lot of restaurants are going to survive this. I think if you look at the average Main Street in America, I did a 9000 Mile Road Trip, a couple years ago with kids and went to all these small little towns you look at Main Street, right?
Brett King: [18:48] In that Tesla you are sitting in right?
Robert: [18:50] Oh yeah, of course what else are you gonna do without a pilot and supercharger network? When you look at the average American city any even around the world, out of 10 business, I’m expecting eight of them to go away, but I’m expecting the ones that survived best to grow radically big and you know; when I did this in China, I went to a restaurant that served 800 people and at one time.
They had 800 tables; that is 800 seats restaurant. I think you’re going to start seeing something like that, a certain number of restaurants are going to get so efficient and have such a reliable product and people are going to be ordering it at home.
I mean we’re seeing delivery services growing 20% a week right now, right?
Brian: [19:41] Oh, yeah
Robert: [19:42] Doing 20 percent more people every weekend, Amazon just said, well, we need a hundred thousand people come and join right?
Brian: [19:53] The thing about all Industries is that; I think there is not going to be a business that isn’t a untouched by what we’re experiencing medical. We’re going to finally get hip a line to the doctors can do remote, you know evaluations and we’re getting companies like apple stepping up with a privacy based evaluation app for covid-19.
So you have a lot of different aspects that are percolating up but getting back to the banking a scenario for a second; the idea of being able to send cash out for the U.S Government, you know electronically is a great idea but there’s a problem on recipient and that’s KYC.The biggest issue and the biggest stumbling block;
Brett King: [20:45] What is KYC?
Brian: [20:46] You know, your customer it’s a legal federal requirement;
Brett King: [20:51] Our judges could kill your customers with paper work.
Brian: [20:52] So you know what I mean? So how do you get this thing to the underbank? So how do you get them card? Because if you send them a gift card, it will wind up in the wrong hand. So what is the impetus that allows KYC to work, and unfortunately, or fortunately it’s according to how you want to see this universal ID system.
Brett King: [21:21] Absolutely! I was going to say this, all leads to the fact that we need better identity infrastructure, because you can have a digital presents, unless there’s a uniform universal identity infrastructures there, and the social security number is not robust enough to be safe anymore right?
Brian: [21:48] Now. How does one do this in a very rapid way, and you know, I’ve I talked to some people inside the government. There is like a ship. They’re finally starting to take watching very seriously as a way to not only you know, identify funds availability on a decentralized robust level, right?
So you can see anywhere in the world that you have funds available. Right? Because in a sense, this is a jumpstart for Universal basic income perhaps maybe not, maybe some other form but you need to be able to identify that person in a robust environment and block chain does that in a very unique way. So and actually wrapped up in a very rapid fashion.
Robert: [22:31] This is something I’m watching really closely, China tamped down the virus pretty effectively because they do a lot of centralized surveillance, right? everybody that tracks their movement.
Everybody is being washed with face recognition in the street. Everybody is having to sign in when they go into a grocery store or into a business and have their temperatures scan which it which is validated with their apps. It’s like they have built the Amazon goal for the entire society? 
When you start thinking about doing that in America, I wonder how likely that is to happen anytime soon, because we have a lot of resistance to that, per whole lot of resistance. We have freedom of speech. We’re scared of having the central government watching everything we do. We don’t want that kind of privacy and we don’t like it yet.
Brett King: [23:31] Having said that, that is one factor that could have dramatically reduce the impact of this Coronavirous, even the more critical think Robert, was compliance for the government instructions, right? When you look at Hong Kong Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, you know, one of the reasons they have much lower fatality rates and much lower case load is; people follow the instructions of the governments of the latter; there was no one saying I don’t believe this is real. No one is saying; I’m going to go out to the park on the weekend.
And so, that compliance with government instructions; this is sort of really; I wanted to get to this with you guys; this fascination or this defensive of individual rights, over the collective rights of people has really bitten us in the back side here.
Robert: [24:38] Yes, how fast are we going to change our beliefs? And here’s I think there’s going to be an American model of surveillance. That’s Brett from the Chinese model. The Chinese model is very centralized, camera on every street, corner and everybody is instrumented, everybody has to check in, everybody has to take their temperature.
Everybody has to look at the app before they leave the house, right? Everybody has to check in at the grocery store. That’s probably not gonna happen for a whole lot of reasons.
1: we don’t have the kind of money that we need to put that kind of plate in system in place anytime soon. The thing that’s going to be interesting is apple has a pair of glasses ready to manufacture, and in the front of those glasses are going to have six days for sensors, right?
So what if Apple came out with a pair of glasses next year and said, hey you can walk into a grocery store and see if anybody has a fever. I would buy a pair of those glasses so fast your head will spin, and they don’t need to report to the central government that checkout if clerk has a fever.
I just need to go into the magic. Why are you letting that employee that work on your counter? She or he has a fever right?
Brian: [25:56] Right! We cannot only do temperature, we can do EMF flow of air into the area. If there’s a good chance that there’s a collection of other particulates you can analyze some of these particulates within these glasses. You can analyze your own quantitative self to see how you’re responding to the environment way before you show obvious symptoms.
So you can actually Telegraph this stuff with permission and HIPAA compliance and privacy to a doctor. So these mediations can be individualized, but still used in some form centrally to Help governments and health agencies and say; we have it break out in the middle of Central Park right now; everybody that was in Central Park voluntarily quarantine.
If you don’t unfortunately, it goes down to the next level of the escalation, so you can actually start doing things like that; and you can do them non dystopian sense and you can do it a sense that’s not against the American ideals if you will.
It requires a new social contract. Requires new thinking, requires a whole new revitalization of what we think government is, which I think is going to happen whether we like it or not whether we want it or not.
The government’s going to be realigned and re-established and so does the entire Financial system. So the way that we invest in companies, you know, I had this idea of the Greenback coming back as a way for individuals of any country to own shares in the government; in the sense that the economy of that dollar of that currency Rises and Falls by the productivity of the entire country.
Brett King: [27:47] Okay. Well, let me jump in there, you are listening to Breaking Banks. We’re going to go to a quick add break; and right after the ads break. We will be back with Robert Scoble and Brian; they were only talking about how coronavirus has changed the way we use technology and has changed their behavior.
We’ll be right back after these words from our phenomenal sponsors.
Advert: [28:07] Hey guys, this is breaking from breaking banks. You may or may not know but provoke media the parent company of breaking Banks runs a range of different podcasts and many of them are focused right now on the coronavirus impact, and the trends happening around us as a result of that.
Check out these comments from Ron shevlin on the recent Innovation podcast hosted by Greg Palmer.
Ron shevlin: [28:29] Number one has got to be about stability; stabilizing your customers and members, Financial lives, stabilizing your employees financials and personal lives. So don’t forget to go to provoke dot f m– and check out the other provoker media podcasts..We got Breaking Banks, Breaking Banks Europe, breaking Banks Asia, Serial Entrepreneur, Fintech 5, Take on Reg and the Fin of a podcast; check them out at Invoke dot f m.
Brett King: [29:10] We are back from the break on breaking Banks and part of the break, we had Robert Scoble and Brian Roemmele talking with us about the impact of coronavirus, covid-19 on the way we are behaving, in Technologies and the economy in general.
So Robert you were about to sort of get in; and some of the deeper economic elements about these happenings, and how you see where this is gonna go.
Robert: [29:37] I’m starting to see a lot of demand issues. If you travel to America and study where people work other than offices, it’s car factories or plain factories. Well, nobody’s buying a plane right now because travel is 0 and nobody’s buying a car right now because car travel is a zero or near zero.
And even if they are not clear gets called in two or three months. I don’t think those things are going to come back really quickly. And in some areas, you’re going to see really depressed neighborhoods where the housing values like in Las Vegas; Las Vegas is a place that lives off tourism.
It’s almost wholly tourism and so you start thinking well, if people don’t go to Vegas it’s because they don’t have any money for a vacation, that’s gonna be a problem and the compensate has just been decimated and is not going to come back quickly.
I mean Tim O’Reilly Publications just cancelled all of their physical events and just fired 75 workers, and whether they are right or wrong, the conference business is not going to come back real quick; and keep in mind we might not be in an all clear for a year until a vaccine comes out or a year and a half right? And so people can be really skirmish about going out.
Brett King: [31:00] You guys have seen me say this on Twitter; and you have seen me said this on Facebook I’m sure; that I think that the only way we get to back to a new normal, is effectively like who you know when you’re traveling through Africa today; and you need to carry a yellow fever certificate to show your vaccinated for Yellow fever. You’re going to have to carry some sort of medical document. It could be on your phone of course.
They’re in your medical ID with Apple. Showing that you’re immune to the coronavirus, you’ve got it or you are test for it.
Robert: [31:34] My former boss already has had it and has survived right? So he was going to get one of these cards, but nobody in his family is going to have a card and none of his co-workers and gonna have a card;
Brett King: [31:46] Unless they have tested unless they tested for the antibodies. Maybe they had and they didn’t realize they had it because a lot of people are asymptomatic right?
Robert: [31:59] So my point is; out of a family group, only a couple of family members are going to have it. So let’s say we want to go to Las Vegas, and go for vacations, who is gonna come with us? Even if you have the card.
Brett King: [32:13] They gonna have the vaccine, and as you say, that could be a year and away.
Robert: [32:25] And then, who has the way out to go to Vegas freely?
Brett King: [32:13] That is true.
Brian: [32:26] If you look at what happened in 1918 and 1919; there was never a vaccine, and there was never any treatment other than Vix VapoRub. It was the protocol that they were using on folks.
Now that decimated a hopefully a lot more folks was decimated in that period not a pox and we will see, so what happened when you really look at it essentially what happens to all viruses; the virus wants to host to survive.
So ultimately virus is normalize. You don’t give so much immunity to it. As versions of that virus mutates, and we already have a nine versions of mutations of this particular virus. It mutates to a less severe form to the point that everybody in the population has it; basically everybody has Spanish flu that that mutated from 1918-1919 more or less in their system.
We have these virus loads all the time. So that’s the other element of it. Unfortunately that takes a time that takes a long time, you know. A lot of people want to live to be coming about.
Brett King: [33:34] You talking about herd immunity, right?
Brian: [33:36] It’s not so much an immunity because, you don’t become immune to the virus. The virus actually wants you to host to survive. It doesn’t want to kill the host of quote-unquote. “wants” it’s really just evolution that the host dies too quickly, and that the virus doesn’t spread and therefore it doesn’t continue.
A good virus; according to a virus out look of the world, would be I want somebody to get it get sneezy and stiffly and running nose; Set it out as long as far as in the as wide as possible and then get well to live again to transfer another virus.
I mean that’s kind of what happens. So these viruses actually mutate themselves because of the unfortunate bad version of the virus killing the host, another scientist got no initials next to my last name or my first name.
I’ve just been studying this up for many decades. I’ve just particularly this subject but any type of scientific study; and when you start looking at what happens is you realize that we don’t necessarily need something to save us other than really good behavior.
And that kind of behavior is a common sense. Don’t interact with people that are ill if you don’t need to, Medical workers should be taken care of immediately. I really believe the 1918 gas mask is probably the most proper facial mask for a medical worker today, and it probably will wind up being discovered. They actually use those face masks in emergency environment in hospitals and saved a lot of lives. The cloth face mask, we’re going to find out if the viruses can pass through most of these cloths mask.
Robert: [35:16] I have been watching scientists and doctors. The cloth face masks are great for Citizens with to wear to grocery store, because if you are asymptomatic and you sneeze, if you sneeze into a mask your cloud of particles of bubbles of this virus are minimized. And you’re not making everybody else sick.
Brett King: [35:40] Again, that’s Hong Kong right, this solicit Hong kong land from czars; I lived in Hong Kong through czars, so I can easily talk on this.
Brian: [35:56] What is your experience? You have actually lived on ground zero in Hong kong, you can tell us, maybe there is something we don’t know about.
Brett King: [35:40] Well everyone wears a mask in public and it’s not to protect themselves necessarily from the virus that is there, but also to ensure that if they have it, they don’t know they’re not spreading it.
Secondly every major building you go into, every grocery store you go into, there’s someone standing in the front of the grocery store with a thermometer; digital thermometer or temperature sensor to check if you’ve got a fever and you know, checking before letting you in; if you got a fever.
On all the lifts and on any surface, we have to push a button or something like that. They will have a clear film, over it that’s embedded with antiseptics or whatever to kill the germs; and every 15 minutes they’re wiping down common surfaces every 15 minutes. Wow.
These are the things that are happening as a course of everyday life in Hong Kong and you want to know why their viral spread is so low. It’s because of that discipline that they learned during czars, and it’s been super effective
Brian: [36:56] And the QR code actually break him up much more prominently during that period because it’s a non-contact sort of environment, is that correct?
Brett King: [37:12] In Hong Kong, they had the Octopus card that is predated; Google wallet and so forth, and so the Octopus card which was used as the metro card was used as this primary form of contactless payments. And so people are using this extensively during czars.
. Robert: [35:16] Yeah. I want to go back to what’s going to happen to housing and car prices?
Brett King: [37:39] let’s talk about that.
Robert: [37:42] I’m an economics minor, right and we learn about supply and demand is the basic principle of Economics right? When demand falls and supply remains the same, your price is fall. So we’re going to have massive deflation.
Well what happens if there’s massive deflation in the housing or real estate commercial real estate? We’re going to have Banks fail, because they’re going to have to take over those ones, and they’re going to lose a lot of money.
Brett King: [38:12] Commission real estate is going to get hammered then.
Robert: [38:13] Yeah, I talked to a guy yesterday who wrote a book about deflation; Jeff food. He predicted that; that is going to artificially print money do quantitative easing and other things. He predicts they’re going to put fifteen trillion dollars into the economy and make money which is going to be done to keep the housing prices from falling that much and to keep the stock market from crashing, and to keep a run on the bank from happening; which is going to cause all sorts of weird things in the economy.
One, we might get deflation for a bit, housing values will go down a little bit and then they’re gonna race up because of inflation. So, I’m starting to think; what is this mean? What is the monetary policy that the government is trying to do right now; gonna mean?
Brett King: [39:11] So I’m trying to sort of tackle a little bit of this in techno socialism, which you’re having to rewrite as a result of corona virus.
Like things are, I spent an entire chapter arguing on the merits of universal basic income, and why we might have to do it and now suddenly, corona viruses like produces response in weeks, you know, so if you’re on the conservative side of government right now, you’re not going to come back after this and say that giving people a payout is socialism anymore.
Rather, sort of really hard to have that argument when the entire United States has pushed us towards that.
But there are elements around the death angle of this; that is really interesting. So all these countries are incurring massive debt right now; so there’s a possibility of global movement to get that at the national central level.
Brian: [39:50] I think it’s very likely Brett. I think at the very least you’re going to see consumer debt forgiveness on mortgages. I’m almost certain of that. I don’t see how it can play out otherwise.
Brett King: [39:50] But I think there’s another element of this could be quite interesting. Imagine if governments say look, we’ve all got this debts. We’ve all got this massive debt that we’ve incurred with each other and you know, We’ve got this new social awareness or consciousness as a result of this pandemic.
So we’ll forgive debts, you that if you put it into social causes like ensuring that this pandemic won’t happen again, or mitigating climate change risk, so you can get your debt forgiven; but only if you commit it to these sort of social programs.
Robert: [40:54] let’s talk about climate change; Brian told me on January 1st, they gonna shape down the whole economy by the end of March, and they gonna start taking pictures of the areas and waters and the climate; and the signs being collected now will be studied for 40 to 60 years in a couple ways:
1. We gonna see the real harm that our economic activity is doing to the environment, we’re gonna know which factories are really polluting the Earth and what cost that is really causing right? We’re going to have a real great picture of that, there’s not going to be any argument and two years about what our economic activity is going to do to the environment; that scientists are going to know and are going to know pretty damn exactly because of this period of time.
2. Everything is everybody is staying home right now. So the sound the lights are taking pictures of us right now of our homes and is going to know which homes are leaking heat into the air at a higher rate than other house. So now if there’s a was a rational government, which is a big F. If there is a rational government coming to say; I can see one of the stimulus would be; we need to make their homes more efficient; you need to stop putting carbon in the air. We need to stop leaking heat into the air from our homes.
So here’s a picture of every home that has, you know more than 20 percent leakage. So do a new infrastructure bill; let’s go put new insulations on those new homes. Let’s replace the windows in those new homes; we can have all sorts of new things to do to fix climate coming out of there as well.
Brian: [39:50] You know a lot of ways you can brainstorm. If look at any type of system you say; if we were to recreate this system today, what would it look like and I think we’re going to have a lot of those thoughts that come across almost every industry from medical to finance to business to how people live. I mean what we’ve learned one thing; and that is whether we like globalization of manufacturing or not.
We do need each country to create their own environment for at least medical supplies for at least vaccinations for least, antibiotics because you can never ever guarantee a supply chain of a few thousand miles; is always going to work and that is true about food production.
Why we really need to support my hyper local pieces is that; we really need to understand where is food coming from? and how can we support that on a local and intermediate state level; and what to do with that surplus and how to distribute?
I think if we start thinking in great global consent and a hyper local fence where at the beginning, the precipice of trying to understand how to move past where are today so we can move forward.
Brett King: [44:08] So let me comments on this based on your unique perspective to look at this from a historical point of view. One of the things that has really hurt us in economies like Australia, the United States, and the UK is people asserting their individual rights to be able to go out and spread the virus essentially, right? And so there’s obviously a growing collective awareness; there is still some people who are denying this; think that it’s fake news.
I don’t know what you guys are saying, but there is this Global movement right now of people going around and covertly entering hospitals to see if people are really at hospitals and hospitals are really being overwhelmed.
It’s insane, because they I just believe it’s real, you know, and so this disbelief, like if this had happened in the 1980s, right and the television, cable news, and the newspapers are telling you must say home. I suspect we would have been more compliant even here in the United States in my home country of Australia, but I think because of all of the fake news; and because of the fact that everyone’s an expert.
And now you can have an epidemiologist on talking about have this virus moves in and someone else who runs this conspiracy channel is getting equal are time saying this isn’t real, this is the government introduce global government. And this is Illuminati’s mechanism, to introduce everyone.
So this people are getting equal airtime. And so that’s part of the thing we’re having to filter but my point is this, and if you look at the climate change thing; I make this point in techno socialism. If you look at the three economies where they held out the longest undenial of climate change were all made of dominant media in nature.
Australia, U.S and the UK; putting that aside we’ve got this bugging social awareness, this connectivity as you said Brian, you know after the Spanish Flu; the Roaring 20s came out of that. So this social collectivism, this view of we’re all in this together, and we need to work better together as a species no longer separated by those national boundaries.
How do you think that that could be born out of this or do you think it could be born out of this?
Brian: [47:04] That is a great question Brett, I have been thinking a lot about that, and I’m reading a lot of Science Fiction and going back into the 30s and 40s. I had a lot of Asimov Highland and things of that nature, and when you come back out of it, it’s always been something that galvanized Humanity to a common enemy, right!
And whatever there has been massive social change and unfortunately been world war, there has been pandemics, and plagues something that level. I mean, we can’t even look at 1616. It’s a lot less easier to get clippings from that era, but you can read some of the things that took place. There is a galvanizing spirit that comes out of this and it’s very important not to play it the wrong way, from people and politics.
You can’t really make this a Republican, a Democrat, a Liberal or a Conservative type of thing, you have to make it a humanity thing. And it’s not every packaging of somebody’s old style of thinking, because I think all of these systems humanities experience to some form of another have been corrupted to a level where I think it’s been repudiated.
So we can always point to one system that has some kind of thing going wrong. Right? What we can do now is start looking at what if we were to reinvest how humanity live today, using technology.
Brett King: [48:31] Redesign systems today; Exactly!
Robert: [48:32] Yeah, because you know, this is ultimately a systemic value; when it should have protected us, we have people dying because they can’t get on ventilators, because hospitals are over capacity. That’s a systemic value.
Brian: [48:48] Exactly and we’re going to read and analyze. How are we going to deal with medical costs? If we have longevity in society, which I think we all accept that we should; then we have to look at how do we make people productive? You know, I don’t I don’t ever hope to retire.
I don’t even understand what retirement means and I have friends that are working in their 90’s and they love it. They’re in love with their life. So we have to start thinking about what is retirement look like? How are people going to live? And in fact, if we are in this world, you’ve written about Robert and Brett, you’ve written about before, if we’re in this world, we’re “doing less work” and we have machines and Technology doing our work.
How do we revitalize people’s lives to make them useful in their own mind, and useful into the greater mind of society? These are things that we really need to have to start unpacking right now because this post-2020 pandemic is going to align us in this direction whether we like it or not because it’s never going to go back to the way it was before, it can’t.
Robert: [49:55] There were some fundamental shifts happening. Anyways before the virus hit; the virus just span everything up; you know, I live very close to Tesla Factory, it’s a good example of this. I went to the Tesla factory 18 months ago, and I went to it last year about four months ago; and it was 20% more robots in that factory. So you take that five years forward and all things robots.
So 10,000 people are not working on a factory anymore; they are building up robots. There are jobs, and just a lot fewer of them. I met a guy at the game developer conference last year; who to bragged to me; oh, I work for a supply chain company and we just turned on our first completely automated Cold Storage Warehouse.
Which means, he turns in one door with on a truck, a robot unpacks the tribe moves the salad around to another truck that goes to Chicago and another one that goes to Miami and another one that goes to New York; and it’s completely automatic; no people in it.
So how many people used to do that before four hundred? A hundred? Some people who are moving things around a warehouse before, now they’re not. So these trends were happening already, and now they’re going to be sped up because, those factories are getting closed; and inefficient things are gonna go out of business, because the world is going to petition inefficiency.
Amazon is going to be stronger coming out of these, than they went into it. Right! Why because we’re buying everything online all of a sudden, we’re not going to Macy anymore, Macy’s is struggling financially right now; to deal with this; they just lay the furloughed of most of their workers. And Amazon is hiring more staff.
Brett King: [51:54] So let’s get down to the sort of stuff. You know, you’ve been talking about Robert; special computing and so forth, but also, let’s jump into;
Robert: [52:04] All these assistance are special computing; robots are special computing; autonomous cars are special computing, and these new augmented reality glasses that are gonna come soon; and VR are as well.
VR is here already, but very few people have it and that’s computing you move around, because no longer are you looking at a flat 2D screen, you’re moving around the computing is all over around right? That’s special computing.
Brett King: [52:30] So that’s one part of it, you talked about tracking us and having tracking algorithms.
Robert: [52:37] Artificial computing because, if you’re moving around in and Computing is tracking that special right,
Brett King: [52:44] And I’ve been talking about ingestible, and wearables that track your Biometrics and so forth. But let’s look at 5 -10 years, you know, we’ve always thought smart glasses would be 2025 or thereabouts maybe a bit earlier in terms of mainstream.
Robert: [53:02] May be a little bit earlier now, but it’s gonna take a bit time; first of all, nobody has any wealth right now. So, you know if Apples comes out with a $2000 pair of glasses; I’ll still buy one because I still have a little well, there’s many people who all of a sudden don’t have that kind of money right now.
Does Apple say well, you’ll get a job with these and it will be able to finance them and you’ll get a deal that you’re sure they can play all sorts of games. They have so much money;
Brett King: [53:37] How is that tech going to be used as post coronavirus?
Robert: [53:38] Let’s walk through seven Industries. All right, education; I can teach you. In fact, the researchers that are studying the virus are studying it in the eye right now and looking for attach points of the virus. How does that virus hook on the things? How does it evolve? And they’re looking at that in 3D in VR with teams and they’re talking about it with teams of scientists; and looking at the latest science that’s coming up.
So education is going to see radical changes when this new world appears; the AR, VR our world, and it’s starting to in classroom.
You look at Transportation, you know, ten years from now. I doubt we’re going to buy a car or very few of us are going to buy a car. Maybe only the super rich you want to, you know have the bragging rights of owning a car.
And the car I’m sitting in is costing me two dollars an hour right now, if when you look at all the costs and some bite if there’s an autonomous technology, why are we even buying a car? Let’s send a car back on the road and have a do work and go pick up other people go pick up things. Go pick up dinner, right blah blah blah.
So what the transportation is about to radically change in the next decade; you look at manufacturing. We already covered some of the robots that are happening.
We’re seeing new kinds of robots because of special computing technology; usually robots were in big cages and they did heavy jobs, and you still see those; if you visit the Tesla line, they have a couple of robots that lift the car up and put it on another line.
Well, those are big ass robots in there in cages, humans don’t get close to that. But there’s a whole lot of new what they call cobots; robots that work with the humans right, next to the humans, and can sense the humans and sense the human handing the robot something.
Brett King: [55:33] Yeah, I was in the far away Factory in Shenzhen in January, and they had these robots that come and wait for people 2 sec the finish phones into the box or stack certain components into the box. And once that’s done the robot trundles off and delivers it another line.
Robert: [55:33] Exactly my point right! There is all sorts of new robot technology that’s coming along and new kinds of techniques; Volkswagen virtualized its entire factory line. They call it digital twinning and they turn the factory into a digital twinning of a virtual copy of the real thing.
And they did that for design. So when they need to design a new factory to do a new car line, they designed that all virtually NVR and they think through you know, where can this machine fit? Who’s going to work on it? What is the job look like? and so forth.
And they do all that virtually now, they don’t build the line anymore. Then train people, you can get trained virtually in NVR, so you are not even going on the factory line.
Brett King: [56:40] Listen guys, we need to wrap it up, we always do this.
Robert: [56:45] Retail is going to change right? Why do you want to go in and touch things in a retail store? Yeah. Why don’t you have it deliver or have an Amazon go card, where you just go in and pick up the things you want and walk out you don’t touch anything and it charges you.
Brett King: [56:56] Contactless and cashless is absolutely going to happen. All right, well it has been great to have you guys on; just as we leave; let me ask you this question: As you personally come out of this. Have you had a single aha moment that’s been most impactful for you personally?
Robert: [57:17] Dealing with the mentality of crushing, devastating, despair as one of the main things you have to deal with first; because if you can’t get over your fear or your despair, you’re not going to be very creative, and not very useful to anybody. So mental health and intellectual reality, going for walks and exercise, taking time, you know to get your mind back in the game after having real losses is really tough.
And you should look at some of the spiritual leaders that are helping you build your mind back, so that you can be part of the solution coming out of this, and not part of the problem.
Brian: [57:17] What Robert said is very brilliant and poetic. You know, we are going to deal with mental health issues that are going to be profound and the folks listening to us right now. It’s time to develop your inner core if you haven’t.
And there’s ways to do that you need to find those ways and there is going to be a sunny day on the other side of this; and it’s not painting a smiley face on the bad situation; is going to be travesties that are going to take place is going to be horrific things that are going to take place, but what you can do to help is to unleash your creativity and look at the things that you can do and you can help and act, that can change the world and these are the moments to do it.
And you know personally, my aha moment was just to, and I’ve been doing this for a while, but I just keep reinvesting it and that is to really honor the things that are important to you, love the things that you love let those people that you know that you love them; because we’re only given a moment, we don’t have tomorrow; we didn’t have yesterday.
I mean this things just happened and you just have this moment, right? So you have to live your life that way, and this is the reminder. So that’s the aha moment.
Brett King: [59:15] Awesome, you guys; I appreciate your continuity through all of this, and I count you as very valuable friends, and I thank you for helping us all through this and thanks for being back on breaking Banks radio show again.
Brian: [59:32] Thank you Brett,
Brian: [59:33] Thanks for having us again, it was awesome as always.
Brett King: [59:34] That’s it for breaking banks will see you guys next week with more on how were coping and how we’ll get to a new normal amongst the covid-19 crisis. See you. See you next week.
Brett King: [59:51] That’s it for this week. Thanks to Guests and to our sponsors who help make the show possible. You may have a little more time on your hands right now.
So you can listen to all of our more than 300 shows plus episodes from all over other shows including; breaking Banks Europe, Tack on rag, the Fin of a podcaster or more; all on provoke dot fm.
I hope you like them; and if so, then you’ll give all the shows five stars and share them with others.
Stay home if he can, take care of your loved ones. Let’s all work together to move this industry forward and to make it stronger than ever. That is it for this week; we’ll see you again next week with more Breaking Banks.
[End Transcription 61:00]