Patrick McGinnis: Fear Of Missing Out In These Crazy Times

Welcome to Big questions. This is Cal. Busman. Just was looking at my LinkedIn feet and saw an intriguing post. It said now is maybe time for our governments to be fixing roads and potholes with so few cars in the streets. It was a video under these words of a truck that had a piece of the back that look like one of those Stampers that Customs officials.

Used stamp passports only it was enormous this Chuck moved to the streets with this big Stamper on the back and it position the Stampers nose to the ground to sniff out week segments of the road when it found one street was cordoned off truck stop and the Stamper became a tool to dig around the weak spot vacuum up the debris refill the hole and stamp down and protective coating LinkedIn post said it was cheaper than traditional.

Anal Road repair is the kind of content that makes me stop and think about what the world is going to be like after the coronavirus pandemic Fades the kind of content that catches my attention not like the news that continually offers up more and more statistics on the virus that I know aren't really true because there aren't enough test kits out there for anyone to know accurate numbers. I kind of want to be thinking about the world in a fresh way. That doesn't divert me from the fact that

That is happening right now is tied to this virus.

Well sort of sums up the way. I've been approaching big questions to about a month ago. We had Aunt Mitsy on giving great advice on how to prepare for the virus Scott and wonderful feedback because of the straightforward suggestions that were explained this simply as if they were coming from an elementary school teacher after that. We had a podcast on how not to let a bad moment turn into a bad day. That was really action both to me and after that.

We had one on how to ask for what you need and truly want and then we had one on connecting in the time of social distancing that led to a meal over the internet. And for anyone who wants to have a meal with me over the Internet, please send me an email to Cal busman.com. Let me know where in the world you live and I'll right back with an invitation each meal will get a few people around the world to bring food to the table and will.

We'll all get together over Zoom. My guest this week is the guy who invented the phrase fomo fear of missing out. I hadn't realized that the phrase was coined in the time period after nine one one turns out a lot of young people responded to the losses attached to 9-1-1 by trying to do everything afterward as if they understood how precious each moment is and they were determined to get everything they could add a life as a

And now that could actually become a detriment I began to wonder how fomo was playing out in these days as people fought for toilet paper in the supermarket. I began wondering if after the pandemic ends people are going to rush back to Arenas and scream their heads off and gratitude and began to wonder if the virtual communication were all doing now will become a much greater part of our human existence and that's why my

guest this week is Patrick McGinnis. The guy who came up with the phrase fear of missing out omo Patrick is a venture capitalist and the author of The International bestseller the 10% entrepreneur live your startup dream without quitting your day job as a 10% entrepreneur Patrick has invested in advised and founded more than 20 entrepreneurial Ventures arcing across the high-tech real estate.

Entertainment world's two of the companies in his Investment Portfolio have become unicorns. He's got a new book coming out called fear of missing out practical decision making in a world of overwhelming choice. You can pre-order that one before we get going on our talk just a word about how my sponsors the folks at sport ich are stepping up the way to help those who need it Sport teks come up with a new

T-shirt with the words together we win with a hundred percent of the profits going to help Healthcare and for Community relief, please go to sport Tech.com. That's SPO RT IQ. E.com have a look sporty Coupe threads allow you to Roman Comfort even when you're Rome at home. So now let's get straight to Patrick McGinnis and the fear of missing out.

I was thinking about fomo this morning at about my gonna sticks a clock when I'm at the supermarket and singing the long lines of people waiting to try to get in to get some toilet paper and I was not first and by the time I got in all the toilet paper was gone, and I'm

Watching the people who are walking around with the toilet paper in their carts thinking do I have fomo? Yes, we answer is yes, I think about this when you invented the term back in what 2004 something?

Yeah. So listen, this was a term that was invented in a very different time. This was not a crisis time. And in fact, it was a time of well in a sense. There was something to it. It was Crisis and I'll tell you why because I

as I had just lived through two pretty momentous things in my life that really affected the way I thought the first was 9/11. So I was living in New York City on 9/11. I saw 911 with my own eyes. I lived in lower Manhattan and it really shaped the way my I thought about the world and my friends thought about the world. It's sort of just felt like everything that we knew or thought we knew about our lives had changed all of a sudden and then it would never be the same again and around that time also there was the

Bubble Burst the first tech bubble and I was a venture capitalist. And so I saw all this money that I had invested millions and millions of dollars just blow up overnight and so which you know is interesting because right now we're seeing both of those combined in this particular thing. We're facing right now with Corona, but I had lived through those and then as things calm down and sort of got back to normal. I got into Harvard Business School, which is something I never thought I would do I come from a small town in Maine. I didn't, you know, it was not in the plans, but I

I'd get in and when I went there, I saw it as an escape from the all of the things that I just been through and I thought you know, I'm just going to live life to the fullest Carpe Diem and that's what happened. I got to business school. And basically I try to do everything all the time. I was really in every class every lecture every party every trip. You name it. I was there to the point where I was committing to four or five things at night and I noticed that my friends were as well. This was something that all of us were doing and there was a culture at the school of just taking advantage of every opportunity.

Opportunity and I started to feel like if I didn't do something I'd be missing out on some great experience that I would want to have and so I started referring to that or as fear of missing out and shorten it to fomo and started using the term all over the place. And so phone will became this this kind of lingo at Harvard Business School back in 2002 2003

2004 and just from you using the phrase once everybody picked it

up now. So what happened was it became sort of a very

Oon word within my friend group. So we would use it all the time. It's like oh, you know, are you going to this event or that event? Well, I'm going to these five things. Well, you must have fomo so it became something that we would write an e mails and talked about in joke about but I recognized that this was something special and so in fact, I decided to write an article about it in the school newspaper right before graduation because I figured you know, I was going to move back to the normal world back to New York City and you know have my normal life and it wouldn't be so crazy. And so I thought you know, this was a moment in time.

It was special it was funny because we saw it as something kind of satirical about our culture at the school. And so I wrote an article in the school newspaper that was called social theory at HBS McGinnis has two foes all about fomo and another photo that I came up with the same time called Pho Bo and it ran in the newspaper and everybody read it and it was like super popular and that's kind of how the phenomenon of actually spreading around the world slowly slowly slowly

started how far around the world did it get because I you know, I go

Go on the internet and I look up fomo quotes and you see tons of them along with images. One of my favorites was if you don't know what fomo means. You don't know what you're missing.

I never heard that one. I guess it's kind of amazing. Listen, if you Google fomo you got 10 million hits if you will follow in Bitcoin, you get a million hits. So it's everywhere. It's in I mean I've done interviews now with newspapers and

Asia and Spain and Latin America, I've done television show in Brazil. It's crazy how people find me all over the world. It's something that all of us, you know, it's not just limited to a small patch of land in Boston anymore. It's all over the place.

Okay. So this concept comes to you after nine one one and I get exactly what you're saying. You know, I remember interviewing the Robert De Niro who was living downtown very

Close to the World Trade Center when the planes came in and he was saying that it was watching it all go down on CNN and he couldn't believe his eyes. So he actually like went up on his rooftop to look just so it would be in real time. And that's when one of the towers came down and I'm wondering when

Look at where we are now and you're seeing this kind of parallel track between a catastrophe and then the financial meltdown that comes after it. What are you seeing ahead or did any of that experience years ago or does any of it not apply to where we are now,

I think it applies a lot and as somebody who was living in lower Manhattan back in 2001.

One I wasn't as far downtown is Robert De Niro for sure, but I lived on 16th Street at the time and I did the same thing. I remember I actually taking the GMAT the night before so I went out to celebrate. So I slept through the first plane hitting and then my alarm hit me and the radio came on and I heard the story about the second plane and it was shocking and I ran outside to 6th Avenue, which had a straight view down to see the towers and I watch them burning and I didn't know what to do. So I went into the office and then when I got there

First our foul. And so then after that, I remember the Panic that we had I remember going to the office the next day got there and then there was some there was some report of a bomb scare and we all ran out of the building and we didn't come back to work for another week and slowly over time things did resume. I guess they're normal Pace. But what happened was we changed society and some good ways and some bad ways. So I think fear people became much more fearful and

And it was in the sort of the Specter of terrorism this threat that is sort of hard to quantify stayed with us. And in fact change the way we live our lives whether it's how we fly in a plane or when we go into buildings and things like that. We take precautions we didn't take before and I think we're going to see that with this particular crisis that we're having now is that we will change the way we live whether it's how we engage socially or how we wash our hands or how we eat. We're going to have to we're going to see changes that that we can't necessarily know what they're going to look like now, but they are going to reshape how we do things in society, but I don't just want

Emphasize the negative because I do think that there were positives as well. They came out of 9/11 and I think some of those things were that number one. I think we started to think differently about how we interact with people who are different when than us, I think New York City changed it became a much more creative City people became more laid-back. I remember before 9/11 you never wore jeans anywhere in the evenings and then jeans everybody started wearing jeans, which is seems like a stupid its kind of story, but it's incredible how that change happened. And so

So I think out of this crisis we will also see positive elements and I don't think we can identify them quite yet. But I do think that we're going to see a lot of change and of course the financial dynamics that are at play here. We just don't know where things are going yet. There's so much uncertainty. It reminds me a lot of 2008. I was working at AIG in 2008. So I was had a front seat to the financial crisis. And this whole thing is reminded me so much of what happened and so I'm cautious to not make predictions on the financial side because we just can't tell what's really going on.

The surface well, I'm thinking I'm going back to your first point about walking through an airport now and how much different it is than before nine one one and certainly like back 20 years before that when we had OJ Simpson doing commercials rental car commercials where he was running.

To get his plane at the last moment and jumping over baggage and after nine-one-one that era ended like you had to go through security and now I'm thinking about this and I'm seeing myself to go through the security lines and they have what's called clear to give you a kind of a cut in line where they check you your identity.

By your fingerprints or by just the way your eyes are facial recognition. I never would have considered that before 9-1-1 and this really makes me wonder where things are going when I see on the internet that people are being stopped in their temperature is being taken like in an instant before they can move forward any idea where that

That leads us 10 or 20 years down the road.

So I've been talking to friends in Asia and you know, it's hard to these days because there's it's hard to know what's real and what's not real out there. To be honest with you. I think there's a lot of speculation and a lot of quote-unquote fake news as they say but there are a couple things I think that are interesting that I've seen because obviously China China if you flown into Asia China and Singapore and other countries in the region over the last five years.

Is it's not been uncommon that when you walk, you know out of customs in an airport? There's somebody there checking your temperature. So they I think given the fact that there have been pandemics before that really hit Asia hard there has been a shift in in sort of expectations and and the way that things happen at places like airports already in that part of the world and I think we can expect them to come here. So I think we can expect to see things like your temperature being taken Heather when you're going into places that have a large number of people or when you go into office buildings.

Just like nowadays. You have to register and get a badge and go through security. I think that that would not be shocking to me. I think also we're going to see there's can be technological solutions. So I saw something that was kind of interesting on the internet. There was a software that was developed by believe Ali Baba in China that that uses your geolocation to tell you whether or not you've been in areas where there are a lot of other cases in clusters. And therefore if you have been exposed to an area where there have been a lot of cases you are notified.

Then you're told not to leave home and you're not let in to a building like that kind of Technology if it truly does exist. And again, I can't verify that I just saw a report on French television that somebody sent to me. I think we'll see be seeing that kind of that kind of technology in our daily lives. And listen. There's a lot of good in that in terms of all helping each other be safe, but it does also I mean obviously if a phone is tracking where you are and then making predictions about your health based on your Jus location. That is that is a major change in the way. We live and that

yeah, you know, it's very

Very interesting you brought up Singapore. I have a book in front of me one man's view of the world Lee Kuan Yew like the first prime minister of Singapore. I was there a few months back and it was really I don't want to use the cliche eye-opening experience, but I really stopped to look around and take this place in I don't know if you've spent much.

Time there, but if you have you know that you go into a Subway there and you're not allowed to eat even to the point of you're not allowed to have a sucking candy in your mouth while you're on the subway. And if you do somebody will come over and give you a fine. It is incredibly clean. No homeless the government puts up information and signs everywhere and I really was

wondering wow is an in the place looks like a gigantic mall and everything. All the nature is beautifully tended but it's it's tended in a man-made way and I thought to myself. Wow. Am I seeing the future here? Do you get that feeling when you're

there? Yeah. I was just there last year for the first time actually and you know, I've also spent time in Dubai which is got it similar elements where you have this

Very, you know Lee Kuan Yew obviously is a revered leader, but obviously it was a very strong leader, right? It was you know, what he decided obviously had a huge impact on what was going to happen and same with the by and what I think you see there is yes a top-down approach because they're densely it's interesting like so again, I mean I heard reports from this is again over social media. So I hesitate to think that it is you I wouldn't sort of stake my life on it, but friends of mine who live in Singapore said things are rather calm there there are cases of

Yes, but people are there. I don't think the social isolation is happening in the same way. It is in other places and and that may be part of the reason that it's easier as the because it's warm outside and so that I could have an effect but but you have a high density much higher than other places and it seems that so far things are looking reasonably good in Singapore. And so the question is why is that you know, what is going on? That's a bit different and and if so, what could that level of control being posed in other countries? And I think it's difficult to see that happening without

Major change in culture and legislature in places like the United States. But again when these major shifts happen in society like a 911 think about all the rules were put in place that we would have never agreed to before and then out of fear and this abstract fear that's you know, for example that somebody could bring a liquid on a plane and blow us up which may not even be particularly evidence-based by the way. It's more about one incident and then it causes a major shift because of that governments are able to put through major regulations that

to change the way we live every day.

So how does this affect my sense of fomo? Do I have a sense of fomo? I have never been the kind of guy who lived fearing that I was like missing a pair of Air Jordans or that I missed an episode of Friends when everybody was watching it and going to the office to talk about it the next morning.

I'm always just sort of been on my own past and looking for my own Adventures, but I'm wondering two things one can we not have fomo and two if I do have it? What can I do about

it? Yeah. Well, I think to talk about for mowing and listen not everybody has fomo. So you may be one of the Intrepid percentage of the population who doesn but

statistics show that more than half of the population reports feeling fomo when they're away from social networks and news and if you think about it, let's just to get into what is this topic of fomo. It's helpful to look at the definition of fomo and fomo is really two things. Right. Number one. It is a belief that there's something more favorable out there happening than what you're doing at the moment and that could be everything from a party, but it could also be something like people getting supplies and toilet paper and you're sitting at home.

And it's going to run out as we see in the current situation. So that the first thing is that feeling that there's something better out there that you are not doing right. The second is our desire to not be excluded from a collective activity. So it's the idea that something you know, a lot of people are doing something whether it's lining up for toilet paper or lining up for the iPhone and we don't want to miss out on that experience because of the collective nature of it and because you know by definition humans are social animals and when we think back to our earliest ancestors they were

Very well aware of what the crowd was doing because if they were left out they could be eaten by wild beasts or something. So they need to be they needed to stay within the crowd in order to get the information the supplies the basic things they needed to survive and our agents Darwinism right now in terms of fomo and where we stand today. Let's think about how phone was playing out and driving our behavior and I see really three things happening first. You mentioned it on the top of our discussion. It's causing people to Panic by and so people

Are watching on the news and social media? They're seeing images of empty shelves and they are they are now getting up and going to buy things at their stores and toilet paper is an is a really interesting case study because unlike some of the other things like I understand, you know milk which is a perishable item toilet paper last for a very long time in fact, but I you know, even I went on by toilet paper and bought like 20, I bought 24 rolls of toilet paper. I can tell you that's going to take me like a year,

Now

and toilet paper is running out and the irony is I was reading a news piece about a company in Australia and this company is basically they make this sort of like online toilet paper brand. It's sort of like also good for the environment and stuff and they saw an increase of 8X and their sales and they actually ran out of stock. Okay, but the irony is there toilet paper is actually made in

Anna and so people are worried that we're worried that sort of the Chinese crisis would make it difficult to get toilet paper because there's four Option Supply chains. But in fact that wasn't even the case so Panic buying is the number one sort of thing that you're seeing the second thing you're seeing though is the desire. It's just sort of still be in public. So, you know, there's this calls for social isolation right? Stay home. Don't leave your house, but certain people are going out anyway, and I think that's definitely, you know, a fomo inspired move and then finally,

It's our addiction to the news. So the fact that you can stop checking Twitter and you know, your favorite News Channel and the internet and in fact, there's been reporting on this than in South Korea. This is cause major Panic is that people are feeling deep anxiety because they can't stop checking the news and it's just not healthy. So I think that's where fomo is really driving our Behavior today.

Wow. I'm just thinking of what if there was a day where we just didn't

Check the news what would that do to us? And as I'm thinking of this I'm just thinking of myself as I was wandering around the world for about 10 years without a home back in the 80s and I had very little idea. There was no internet back then I had no idea what was going on back in America and probably was a lot healthier for it maybe.

Some people would say otherwise, but I was I was just living in the moment and every conversation that I had was an adventure and I was just able to move without, you know having to really worry about tomorrow and I'm thinking about myself. I was just I was a single guy and just had a little backpack.

Is it much different when you have a family and you have to make sure that there's food in the refrigerator and I think of what about the people who are the kind of living week to week they go to the store and what they need is not there. How can we avoid being that attach to the

news? Yeah. I think it's a huge problem and to your point all those people who

Can't afford to stockpile or that are that are you know, we live in this freelancing economy. Now 40% of Americans freelance who are suddenly not able to find work because basically the economy is shut down they are exposed and even if they wanted to buy Purell and they had the money to do it. They can't get it anyway because of the Miss allocation that this sort of herd mentality overcomes. And so the question is, okay. We know the problem the problem is that there's panic and this Panic is being provoked by and you know,

We can all agree that Panic is not productive right being prepared and understanding risks and taking appropriate action is helpful. But Panic itself. It spreads just like a virus. And in fact, it doesn't bring us many good things. It's really it's really not a good thing to have in our society this point because it plays out in the markets and it plays on how we treat each other and it just it creates stress and health problems and at a time when we want to stay healthy, right? So, how can we for example avoid the

News. Well, I think one thing that's very clear is that having a constant stream of news is not good for us. Right and we think back I mean you think back to these days that you had when you're disconnected I think back to the time before the internet or maybe the time before if you remember before 9/11 there were no news tickers at the bottom of the screen when you watch CNN right that didn't that was that came in and 9/11. I remember when it started and it just never went away and we are not created. We are not designed to take in that much information.

It fatigues us exhausts Us in it and it stresses us out. And so we I think we need to recognize number one if we didn't have social media. How would we be living this current moment and I can tell you I think it would be very different we would get information but it wouldn't be foisted upon us 24 hours a day often times by people who are not experts who are rumormongers. I mean, if you think about the amount of sort of rumors and innuendo that spread in a place like Twitter that don't help us that's pretty high. The second thing is that it's just not a good use of your

Your time, I like to think about this this period of time I mean, I'm I live in New York City. We basically closed everything down. Right? So I'm staying home. It's like, okay. What can I do with that time? Obviously, I'm concerned about other people. I'm going to stay home. I'm going to solve quarantine as it were or whatever the terminology is these days, but I'm going to have a big block of time here. Can I actually make some lemonade out of these lemons and use this time to do something good for myself, or maybe even help somebody else out at the same time to make

This time more productive for me and for society as a whole

why it well when you think of it you you if you're not taking that time to help somebody else. You may be missing out

most definitely and that's the that's the thing. I think so what I'm trying to think about here is I think about Corona and fomo and my own life and in the lives of the people around me is okay. There's no cure for Coronavirus that we know of obviously you we you know, hopefully we'll have a vaccine within sir.

amount of time but at the moment we don't have that yet, but it's in a very strange way coronavirus may be a cure for fomo because you know, we've been living Our Lives the last 10 15 20 years in this sort of overdrive and trying to do everything many of us all the time being over Tethered to information and news and you know going on Instagram and social media and seeing these perfect images of people's lives that are completely fabricated with all of the

There's you can ever imagine and it causes us to feel stress because we compare ourselves. We're never good enough. We feel like we need to be doing things that those people are doing and you know, you met some of you may be listening to us and saying well, no, that's not me, but I can tell you it if it's not you that's great, but I can tell you that the younger Generations the Millennials and the Zen eals and your kids and they are this is a real thing and it really does affect people and that's why you see surging amounts of mental illness and stress. I mean this has been proven clinical psychologists have long.

Written papers on fomo for the last decade I've read all of them and they clearly connect fomo and this idea that there's a better world out there that you're not living and this comparison to others in our social groups or even just celebrities they cause us to feel less about ourselves. They cause us to actually have physical symptoms and so as a result, I think that you know, what could happen here with with coronavirus has we are forced to just withdraw we stay home and therefore it's not like you're the only one that's staying home anymore.

All the sudden everybody is staying home. And therefore we all have to withdraw and actually think about okay, what am I going to do with my day today? And if you can use this opportunity to think about what you actually want to do because guess what you're stuck at home. Anyway, this could be a really great way to reconnect with yourself what you actually want to do and avoid some of those feelings that have been driving your behavior for the last decade.

Do you think this is going to change the way we see Heroes reason I ask this question is because

Twice now I've seen in Italy and in Spain where they've taken certain hours and inform the public so that people can go out on their balconies and give Ovations just start applauding for the health workers that are taking care of the country. You know that Applause is the Applause that an athlete might hear in an

arena I do so I do think so and I'll tell you I have a friend.

Father Fred Dolan and Father Fred is a Catholic priest. He's actually the head of Opus Dei in Canada and I met him because he reached out to me and told me that he oftentimes preaches about fomo in his church and talks about how it distracts us, especially for example, like right around now and Easter actually we met last year at Easter because he was telling people listen. This is a time to focus on your religious intense and not worry about what other people are doing, right and so as I talk,

Him, I we gotten on the phone a couple times in chatted and and he told me listen, you know, I'm a priest and I people call me at the worst times in their lives. They call me when somebody in there is on their deathbed and I give last rites they call me when they're getting divorced or when there's a tragedy that that befalls them and they come to me for support and the one thing that I notice when they come to me in these moments is they have a lot of clarity because they realize what's important to them and there are no longer caught up.

And what other people are doing or in making sure that there are sort of putting up appearances, right? And I think that's what is happening. Here. We shall see how long it lasts but I think people are starting to realize okay, what are the really fundamental people in our society who are the people who are deserving of our praise and how can we recognize them? And that's a real positive a question is when things resume normal will we keep some of those lessons with us? Hopefully we will but that that remains to be seen

there's a part of that.

Penned on how long this goes.

Definitely. I think the longer this goes the more radically we're going to shift Our Lives the more fundamentally we're going to change the way we do things the more pain people will suffer and the more they will be forced to rethink how they do things in their own lives. So I think that's that's really critical. I also expect it'll be interesting to see but you know, the longer this goes on we can expect some of the things like the baby. Boom. I heard this this particular.

And then in 9 months from now we're going to have a whole boom of babies. It's going to come but it could also you know, have you not heard this this is yeah get ready. You know what I heard one on toilet paper. There was also run an eye on condoms in those may run out at some point. You

know, what I heard was the inverse of that this phrase Boomer remover that some of the Millennials and would you call him?

Zhenya Al's Jen's the years the idea that this that coronavirus was going to like remove the baby boomer generation.

And now that is that is dark. I have not heard that but I haven't thinking a little bit about you know, beyond the political asari the economic implications. What does this mean for our politics? Right? Because if you think about it one reality is that older voters people in their 70s and 80s are

Area reliable voters and they have a set of political views. It's very different from the young people. And so therefore if we were to see a lot of older people pass away because of this epidemic, which is obviously horrible and highly possible. We're going to have a change in the then who votes and also even if people don't die, but they're stuck at home and they don't vote. It's also going to change the Dynamics you could see a really interesting.

Pected sort of consequences and I also think about it and this is ways sort of in the world in speculation. But if things get really bad, you could have leaders political leaders emerge who have very radical views that could all a sudden gained currency and that's always frightening. I mean you think about and this is this is hopefully we would never see this happen, but do you think about in Germany and between the war period when things got really bad that was what led to the rise of very scary ideologies and so that they're

These unintended consequences that could really have repercussions down the line that we cannot predict today, but that could become very clear and a year to five years.

Okay. What about the good side? What the good side is I guess looking down from space NASA is taking photographs of the globe and there's no more pollution over Italy no more pollution over China. I'm now maybe that will change when

things get ramped up probably certainly will but it almost seems to me if you look at it through the prism of Nature and man. It's like nature saying hey, you got a little too far here. We're going to push you back and you know, this virus does have an aspect of you know, the strong Will Survive and the weak will not which is kind of a fundamental.

To all of nature. Do you see this in a in a sense of nature?

So we I've been I've been reading a lot about the interaction use for the environmental elements of the current crisis the corona crisis and it is true that it's um, it's undeniable that humans have encroached upon nature in a way, you know, we are just there's less and less territory out there and people are moving further and further into the Amazon and other parts of the world.

Oh that I've never had a human occupation and now they are occupied. And so therefore those are having leashing effects on people right and you're right the good thing about this and I was looking at some of the statistics around the around the pollution is if basically because of this crisis and the fact that in China there has been a massive decline in industrial production. And therefore there has been a major Improvement in the quality of the air because of this crisis there are estimating at Stanford University that this

Save the lives of four thousand children under the under five years old and will save the lives of 73,000 adults over the age 70. So that's you know, if so then

yeah, it's kind of get it that way. It's actually gonna be more people saved that are perishing by the virus depending on how it works out in the long run. Yeah. I mean those numbers. Listen this is and I got this from

a political magazine piece. So this is not from some fringy website.

On the internet and it is crazy to think about that there that these estimates that actually if you were in a net some of these things out the the actual sort of the figures look really different and I think obviously these are scientists in labs and making calculations. It's not that these are necessarily been clocked so far, but it's shocking to think about, you know everyday if you think about it that way it's like everyday we are polluting and not even thinking about the consequences and nobody's saying oh my

Goodness, look at all the people who died today because of all the the these terrible chemicals we have in the air and yet we have this this one Global event coronavirus and people are focused. And so it's interesting how when you focus on something and its implications all sudden you will take action to change that. So if we have that kind of focus about our environment, imagine what we could do, right and I think that's one of the things that maybe we can learn from this crisis is that we need to band together. We need to focus on really fundamental changes that

That are going to set us up for the next 500 years or whatever it is and whether its environment or

otherwise, do you think we're going to be human much longer? I'll bet you didn't expect that question when you come meet us morning