- Have you made an appointment, Brad?
Are you gonna be donating some blood?
- I did make an appointment and it turns out, Trevor,
that because I lived in England in 1993
I was not permitted.
There is a risk for people at that time of mad cow disease.
- Well that's what someone with mad cow disease
would say, Brad.
(laughing) (upbeat music)
Brad Smith, how are you my friend?
- Hi Trevor, I'm sitting here in Seattle
and like you in New York, we're all spending
a lot of time inside our houses and apartments
at the moment.
- One of the big things I've wondered about
is as Microsoft, you have so many employees
who come in together to create together.
Has that completely changed now?
Or have you just used all the tools that you,
you basically almost prepared for this
by being Microsoft.
Are you now just testing all of those tools
at a scale that you never imagined?
- In a lot of ways, yes.
I mean everybody's working from home,
except if you have to be in a data center or something.
And you know we all have Teams,
and we're all spending hours a day on video calls.
But we're finding that the tools work really, really well.
But I think what is even, in some ways,
been more interesting than that is just
everybody's sort of scrambling
to address the issues of the moment, as they should.
We serve 50,000 people a day in our cafeterias
and we still have some employees that can come to work
and they're making 6000 box lunches a day
for homeless shelter, and schoolkids and the like.
We have all the people that run our supply chain.
You know, suddenly they're out globally
buying surgical masks so they can be shipped to hospitals.
We're taking our technical capability
with something like Teams and making sure
that businesses and nonprofits can continue to operate,
we're providing free services.
- One of the reasons I wanted to jump on with you
is because I've been intrigued by the relationship
and the conversation Microsoft has been having
with blood drives and blood donations.
I spoke to you about a week ago
and I remember you telling me that one thing
that has suffered during this crisis,
because of social distancing which is necessary,
has been people donating blood.
And I remember thinking to myself,
well I know everyone wants to donate blood,
but how do you donate blood at this time?
And I still don't fully understand what that means
or how people can get around that.
- Well I thought you would ask about that
so I thought I would phone a friend
and bring in Gail McGovern.
She heads the American Red Cross.
- Obviously some people may ask the question,
they might say is it safe for us to be doing this?
We understand that you have these measures in place
but is it worth us coming out and risking ourselves
to donate the blood?
Why is it so important for blood to be donated
during this time?
Shouldn't that pause?
What would you say to those people?
- Well first of all, we ship about 6 1/2 million
blood products a year.
And in order to do that 13,000 people a day
have to show up to donate blood.
And blood is used for cancer patients,
it's used for people that have had trauma
or in an accident or have open heart surgery.
My guess is that everyone knows at least one person
who's had a blood transfusion.
And it's a gift of life.
- What are the steps Microsoft is taking to help?
Can you help during this time?
- At Microsoft, we're opening up a building
and we will have a blood drive.
It's all with the approval and the support
of the state public health authorities.
But we want people to be able to come in.
We want to create a safe environment.
- Gail, for those who want to donate the blood though,
how do they go about this?
I'm sure there are a lot of people out there thinking
I would love to help, I would love to donate blood,
but I don't even know where to begin,
especially during this time.
- We are asking people to either go to our website
which is RedCrossBlood.org.
We're asking them to download an app
and they can make a blood appointment through our app.
Or they can call one 800 Red Cross.
And the important thing about that message
is that they use one of these vehicles
to be able to make an appointment.
Because walk-ins are problematic as you would expect
because we're trying to social distance
and we also are trying to spread these appointments out
over the coming weeks to not have throngs of people
present at once.
- Have you made an appointment, Brad?
Are you gonna be donating some blood?
- I did make an appointment, and it turns out, Trevor,
that because I lived in England between 1990 and 1993,
I was not permitted.
Although I'm told that this may be waived.
But there's a risk for people at that time
of mad cow disease.
Although that was a long time ago and so far--
- Well that's what someone with mad cow disease
would say, Brad.
I'm glad that the Red Cross has these protocols in place
to make sure that people are safe.
This actually makes me feel safe.
I didn't know that they would ask you these questions.
That's really amazing.
Well, I'll tell you now, I've got to go log on to the app.
And I definitely don't have mad cow disease.
So hopefully I'm more eligible than you are.
Thank you both for joining me on this
and thank you for moving everybody forward.
(upbeat music)