Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding Well, hi everybody.
I think everybody’s on now so let's get started.
Well it's May the 25th, 2025.
I can't believe how time has flown and I thought it would be a good time today to talk today
about what we've been seeing in the last few years since the coronavirus pandemic, since
the crisis.
It's almost five years now, and clearly so much has changed.
Very little is unchanged by what’s happened…. the way we educate children, the way we heal
ourselves medically, the way we bank, the way we do everything, the way we entertain
ourselves, and clearly, perhaps first and foremost amongst the things that have changed
is the way we work.
Clearly kind of virtually and online has become the norm.
Travel is the last resort - not the first resort now.
I mean, are we surprised that that change is really stuck and we're just so routinely
and normally working like this now?
Well I'm not surprised, Ben, no.
When the doors opened after the COVID-19 crisis and we could go back to the office, many employees
asked “Why would we when we can so effectively work from home?”
No, and it turned out that they never went back, right?
So along came the COVID-19 big bang, and it sort of vaporized all of these old work-from-home
canards about teleshirking and the fact that there are certain work, supposedly, that could
never be done virtually.
And so as I remember, the pandemic came along and necessity kind of dictated… get over
it, get going and get used to it.
And so, initially after some weeks of fumbling around with zoom rooms and these sort of goofy
online cocktail parties, work streams absolutely emerged that were cheaper and faster and of
higher quality.
We are seeing this big shift towards every home being retrofitted with dedicated home
office spaces equipped with soundproofing, separate voice-driven entrances, podcast booths,
3D printers and ergonomic everything.
And people aren't just using these spaces for remote work.
They double up as the new social hangouts – the new pub, bar, club.
They’re a place where we can all meet to connect in virtual reality.
COVID was the great equalizer of who could use digital tools.
Suddenly we had zooming grannies teaching TikTok-obsessed teenagers how to use House
Party.
Now every generation sees the benefits of maintaining real-world relationship inside
the machine.
We're certainly seeing an environmental benefit from not traveling, not commuting so much.
Euan, I seem to remember you saying that you were going to make a personal commitment not
to travel so much in the future on business.
How's that worked out?
How's that going?
Yes, it's still going.
You know what?
I think the virus actually delivered a cosmic message to businesses that they had to change.
Business travel went from a high-stakes activity (You went to Sydney for a conference?
Wow, that's amazing!) to something which is rather embarrassing (You went to Sydney - for
a conference?
How could you?).
So yes, like many others around the world, I now question whether I need to fly for a
business meeting that can really be done online.
If the outbreak and spread of the virus taught us anything, it's how inextricably linked
and interconnected and interdependent we truly are – biologically, economically and environmentally.
China sneezed, and the whole world got a new Great Depression.
Several items did emerge, particularly how the economic slowdown the followed changed
our frenetic business-as-usual attitude and prompted us to recalibrate how we live and
preserve our Blue Planet - just like Euan.
I never thought I'd said this prior to the pandemic, but coronavirus made clean the new
cool.
From Fenti face masks to surgical gloves and Zara and even LVMH special edition hand sanitizer.
I’ve got that laying around the house somewhere still.
And seeing the appreciation - not just a medical professionals - but for sanitation workers
and cleaning crews, I feel like that is one of the great legacies of this new clean regime.
Ben, I know that you've been talking to the HAS.
What's the last five years been like for them?
Yes, well that's right.
In the months – and literally it was months – after the panic, we saw the creation of
the HSA, the Health Security Agency, sort of mirroring the creation of the TSA after
9/11.
And clearly that spread and it’s sort of become ubiquitous, hasn't it?
The airlock on every building and having to go through the OK2GO scan, that kind of Star
Trek tricorder-like scan to go into pretty much every building now – not just a plane
– but every building.
Ad we see that everywhere in big cities and out in the suburbs, out in the rural areas
as well.
That's kind of become a way of life now.
I have to bring up the obvious privacy question here.
We’re now being scanned everywhere we go.
Proponents of health and movement monitoring like the HSA argued back then that extraordinary
times required extraordinary measures and the need to stop the virus overruled any misgivings
we had around data privacy at the time.
But we’ve now open the floodgates to health, biometric and movement data being collected
at mass.
It's hard to see the wood from the trees here.
It's 2025, and the HSA is everywhere.
Is health monitoring still a sensible precaution five years after the end of COVID?
Well guys, I guess we're out of time and we can talk about this for another five years
clearly, couldn't we?
Hopefully folks, if they're interested, they can still find the After the Virus report
on our website and more examples there of how the world changed after 2020 and how it
still continues to change and how the effects and the shocks and implications of what went
on then really are still reverberating through every aspect of society, including our work
right now.
So check that out.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding