Internet DNA Podcast
Is technology a help or a hindrance during this unprecedented Covid-19 lock down. What would it have been like without zoom and social media. What will change when we emerge from this stasis? Would slower supply chains and 'paperwork' actually have had a beneficial effect. Dan gets a little cross with the pasta panickers as he doesn't have a chest freezer, pantry or shed to fill with the stuff and Abi gets trolled. It is a brave new world but has technology made it better, do we all really need house party or will an old school phone do?
Transcription
(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)
welcome to this week episode. This week we're going to discuss what might've happened. Wireless hit in the 80s which worrying me, to me it doesn't seem that long, but it wasn't 30 to 40 years
and how different that is from today. If we start at the very beginning, for example, we wouldn't have known about it because we have HUD that China tried to put a lid on this and not let it get out and it would have been much easier to do that in the 80s because there wasn't so much communication. So for a start we wouldn't have known about it and then I would say and so it would have just hit us and we would have had no preparation time. But there's two things that as a country we haven't done very well in the preparation time anyway, and two, there was a lot less international travel, so perhaps it wouldn't have come so quickly either.
You might argue that the spread from China would have been a lot less because China wasn't quite such a global player as it is now, but I think that there was still enough travel. When you look at Italy, it didn't take a lot of seeds to get it going. So it's a pandemic in the 80s and I think there's enough global travel.
It would still have happen. How much is the forecasting? A muddling really helped us here because again, we would never have had global data to be able to put that into place. So the information we'd have to hand would have been only what had happened to us as a country, possibly in the UK where we have a centralized NHS that might have been easier than some countries where they were all completely private hospitals. Do you think that that's been a massive help? The data has the global aspect, but there's the modeling.
Well, I think there's a lot of problems with the modeling at the moment because no one knows what the truth is because we are not testing everybody. We don't even know what the death rate is. We don't know what the catch rate is. We don't know anything because every country is measuring this in a slightly different way. Every country has a different rate of testing. So let's say we look at Germany, who seems to have a vast amount of cases and not many deaths. Is that because they're testing everybody and when you test everybody and therefore what we're seeing in the U K is a massive under testing way. More people have it. We just don't know about it cause we can't test them fast enough. I'm looking at the curves and stuff, but that based on stats that are very peculiar in a way, because
they have only people that have gone to the hospital and not all the people that have stayed at home.
You can't even get a country by country. You can't really say, well in Italy this happened in Spain, this happened. And therefore in the UK this would happen because we're not testing at the same way. We don't report it in the same way. We're not measuring deaths in the same way. So I find the forecasting very peculiar and in fact there's a great article about, we don't know even the basics, we don't even know if it's 1% or 0.1% so a lot of our modeling is just based on unknowns and therefore it's not very accurate and it's not very useful because it doesn't tell us anything. Just some random curve growths. And so that's really that even in this really connected world, unless you collect data in the same way, the global master data model, it doesn't really help that much
time's being spent on that when perhaps if we didn't have it, we wouldn't have spend the time on it. We would be spending the time on something else.
Okay. It will be useful once the pandemics pass and then you can go, okay, well now we can look at future modeling. So when we get another virus, we can put in those variables in and then we've got much more accurate models to actually determine what's going on.
Technology and everything will be used for future viruses that we now believe that this is a real enemy. There's an amazing Ted talk from bill Gates that was halted in 2015 yes. Saying a enemy is a virus and we are not preparing, it's going to come. Why aren't we getting ready for it? He could have recorded it a couple of weeks ago. Insightful. Yeah.
Yeah, and also it really opened up interesting things about supply chain management. We've got so efficient at supply chain management, but we only deliver what we need for tomorrow. The problem is is when you only deliver what you need for tomorrow and then suddenly there isn't very much and everyone's overbuying the supply chain breaks down. There's still no pastor on the shelves three weeks in from the panic buying.
I'm worried about Easter eggs. I think that's going to be a panic rush on Easter eggs and that my children aren't going to get any. I'm wondering how I can make Easter eggs and I'm not brilliant in the kitchen, but we shall see. So going back to the eighties the supply chains, an interesting one, isn't it? Because perhaps there would have been a lot more stock available then because supply chain wasn't so immediate and it was certainly not done digitally. It was very much paperwork
and they were delivered in a different way. Let's say you were a supermarket, you would've been ordering your pastor weeks in advance months in advance and they would be traveling for weeks. You would have this sort of add on supply that would give you the space to go actually we need to buy more now and so slower transport allows you to absorb shocks a little bit more.
Do you think the whole way it's being managed would be more draconian in the ATS because there's no immediate news, even news took longer and so especially in China. Personally I think the apps and the tracking are quite interesting and I know that in the future having all this information isn't good necessarily if it goes to the wrong hands, but being able to know exactly where the virus is and warn people to test and isolate can only be a good thing.
I think you could have warned people in the 80s I mean we only watched four channels so you could have got the news out pretty quickly of people listen to the radio. Oh, I don't think we would have done a lockdown because I just don't think it was possible. You just can't put the entire economy on hold for three months.
She's locked down with mean nobody does any work. Full stop.
And then I think you get into a much more severe version of what price life, and it sounds heartless, but there is a point at which you say living in poverty. I think a lot of people would say, I'll take my chances.
And the other side of course is social isolation. We have technology. We've gone from telling our children not to be on their screens, to telling them to go and chat that to their friends. Yes, there was the telephone
[inaudible] expensive in the eighties telephone calls used to cost a lot of money. Even if we were talking about the nineties we were on modems, which meant you would making a phone call. It costs you money and it meant you couldn't be on the telephone at the same time. It wasn't like these jewel splitters that you now have with telephones, even the internet of the nineties you don't think would have allowed lockdown, don't think businesses were that internet connected. How much of our services now are delivered via the internet? Even if you're talking about a friend in trouble right now, zoom or Google apps or Microsoft office three six, five this is all internet enabled. This stuff was just not available in the 90s not even in the noughties really. I mean some companies sure, but most of the very internet based companies
and shopping, everyone would have to go to the shop. Although I have to say our vintage shop is being absolutely amazing and there were more localized shops and so people weren't having to go to enormous spaces so much in the 80s so there was a difference of shopping there. Why were you saying that zooms in trouble?
Because it's got massive security flaws that you can just go and look at anybody. Zoom calls anywhere.
The mosque that had hate speech put into the zoom call? Is that, yeah.
Yeah. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are apps where you can just go and look at anybody's zoom call. It's a little bit of a red herring.
It's interesting that everyone's gone presume there are many out there. I use Hangouts, there's blue room, there's why pay, there's so many of them.
Oh, you'd never understood why people use doom. I was having a call the other day, we need Cisco WebEx and I'm just like, wow, we're still in this weird area where you can't just have your video conferencing system and they all talk to each other. And I'm like, well, I've got download another app to do a video conference that I can already do in 17 different apps. But I mean in those days you would never have done a video call, but I would for a 14.4K modem.
I remember at the end of the nineties I was working in an internet cafe that I'd set up in Ecuador and I was introducing people to VoIP calls for the first time then and they could call home, which is really exciting for their parents because before parents are just sort of what waited six months for a lesson. So yeah, no, and they have video conferencing. At that time it would have been much, much more insular. But what you're suggesting, which is quite an interesting thing, is that that just wouldn't have been the lockdown. So more people would have died, but it was the only way to keep the economy going. There
is an argument for the short sharp shock, which I think Sweden's going for, which is most people don't get it that badly. We've got a very small population, which is an advantage. And if people do basic hygiene, wash just hands don't touch things, just be sensible. We can slow the infection way and it will be an interesting experiment because one thing that everyone seems to be missing is we're not stopping people from getting this thing. It's going to in fact, who it's going to. In fact, what we're trying to do is slow down the rate of infection and that's just what worries me about places like China and Iran where they're like, Oh, we're clear now. I'm like, yeah, you're clear until someone else comes along, there's got it. If it's a flu like it is, it's alive in the world. It's coming back. You can't stop the infections. What you can do is slow the rate down so you don't overwhelm your ability to treat people.
Cool. And how is technology helping? One of the positives of technology that we have now that we didn't have in the 80s to help us through this.
Wow. Computers, laptops, mobile phones. I mean even if we want to get into streaming services, online games for the kids. I mean can you imagine school locked down? I guess in those days we had textbooks and we had our little notebooks and we would've just written them and filed them in a file and we would have been a lot more used to paper. We asked my children just finish homework and then just throw it on the floor. They're not used to managing paper in the way that we were as children. We were much better paper managers. We had our lever arch files and our dividers and we just knew how paperwork,
the ability to communicate is an enormous help the call out to industries to be able to make ventilators or testing kits, the call out to people with empty houses to help people that may need isolating. There's a lot of very quick ways to get everyone to pull together the clapping of the NHS and every staff that helps us some really great ways to just help morale and help people during this. And the flip side of that, and I'm not sure if it's technology or not, I got my first trolling, I was fully trolled on what I now consider a not very nice platform, which is next door. And the funny thing about next door is it's all local about local people and Oh my goodness, I've now realized how powerful your neighbors are.
The moaning that goes on. And I was child because I knew that on other next doors people were looking for houses because they needed to isolate because they were key workers or they had been thrown out of a country and I was trolled and it kept going in capital's Brenda. So I took myself off the platform and I hope that there aren't people looking for somewhere to stay desperately because of it. We could still do DIY. It seems the DIY shops are still delivering. It's quite exciting that we have delivery people who coming as you get to see someone through.
So tell you one of the things I found on settling is not knowing when they're arriving. It used to be just a month ago that I ordered something on Amazon and it came tomorrow and now I get a sort of, it'll arrive. When
I came back to my Easter eggs, I tried to order them online and I spent forever trying to track some down and I finally was very pleased with myself from a certain online retailer and it took me forever because I internet is so bad that it's actually unusable because everyone's using it. Then I finally got to delivery. It said install, able to ship, and it said it will be with it by the 15th of May. Ah. Should I tell my, I told the East today to promote. Then we do get these dregs
because you call by anything in both. You can have two, so if I want to have a pizza evening, I'll have to go shopping twice.
That's completely counter what we're meant to be doing. We meant to be going shopping as little as possible.
I know, but I can't because I can only buy two of anything.
And you've got three children. Let me give you a little word of advice by an Easter egg every day.
Well, what I'm saying is they're replete for these drugs.
So you could get pizzas, but you can't get Easter eggs.
Yeah. Also, Easter eggs aren't limited. As you said, it's counterintuitive. I'm having to go shopping every day. I'm increasing my risk by having to go every single day because I've got four people in my house.
I'm not sure that you should be saying this on our podcast because we might get trolled.
Well, we could go trolled, but this is the way it is. Oh I have to feed my children. I didn't go out and panic by but now I'm having to go every day because otherwise I run out of food. I don't have chest freezers and pantries and sheds to fill with pesto or whatever people did. I mean I just can't believe how much pastor people book.
Don't worry, you can still go to Ann Summers if they've got plenty of penis pastor left.
Oh you had the other day. I didn't realize that the apocalypse I was going to end up having to feed my children today, pastor from Ann Summers cause that's a nice parts of this isolation. So on Friday I did a house party when we had some beers and chatted. So it's having some upsides.
So I seem hotspot. It's exactly like soon, but it's just given itself a party name.
So I see the next podcast. Why can video conferencing system is agree on a standard that we all use.
The other positive that I think is coming out of this is we're always saying how our children are going to be in a much more technological enabled world and we don't know how to teach them. But what is happening is they are during this time becoming an awful lot more tech savvy and I think that is going to send them a good stead. And I also think all this video conferencing may mean that people aren't traveling to meetings so much. If you get used to the video conferencing, it's a lot cheaper for companies and a lot better than environment if you don't. So there are a few things the internet needs to get better. I have no mobile data and no internet at all because everyone's on it. So that's quite interesting. I don't even have to tell my children to get off. They just can't get on. You
know, while in the urban environment we can't go out as much because there's a lot more people here. Staying in isn't so painful. But you know, for a lot of people, I think this is quite a hard time really. If you've got a lot of kids in a flat or if you're on your own. Yeah, but I find that I'm talking to people a lot more bringing people. I'm saying hi to people. It's just staying in contact because you're not getting that office connection with people where you can chat and talk to people that aren't part of your everyday life. It makes you feel like, Oh, I should talk to so and so. Not just be a part of some ridiculous WhatsApp meme fast.
Another thing that makes me laugh as well is all the podcasters and radio producers all talking about how difficult it is to do it from home and how they're having to learn to do their podcast and not in the same place and I'm going, yeah, well we've been doing that is
people are realizing that it doesn't have to be glossy. I think there's a number of things that businesses and people will take from this
and what I found amazing and gain in the 80s wouldn't have been so easy because we don't have the connection is the people giving stuff away free. Obviously Joe X is the main one that people would come to, but there are so many people online now. I think David Williams is doing something that is just going, I can help people, I can be of use and I'm just going to give my time to do that and that is beautiful.
And also it's showing you the purpose of having a video stream, either YouTube or Instagram. I just thought of bloggers because they've got things like Patrion where they can still earn. It's been a really interesting thing to see what things are resilient and what things aren't. I can't see events being as big a business as it was before.
Yeah, webinars and video conferencing and online workshops, e-learning, it's always been pushing through, hasn't it? Never quite taken off, but perhaps this is going to mean that that will flourish is the other thing that I wanted to think about. The difference between the eighties and now is we're all obviously struggling with income. Most of us have had ours disappear and the government people complained about they're not quick enough. I think they're doing an amazing thing and what they're trying to do is enormous and they're doing it as quick as they can and of course people are desperate. They need to get access to money sooner. But imagine in the 80s how would you get access to that money without having to go and see someone? You just couldn't.
This is why I said you just wouldn't have had a lockdown. My big worry is, well, let me come out of this. The government will have printed so much money that the money that you earned and the money that you've got, it's going to be worth pretty much nothing anyway. You only have to look at Germany trying to print their way out of a problem in the 30s to understand that printing money is not really the answer in a longterm way and the longer this goes on or the more money they have to print, that just comes further down the line. Not really make money
and there's no such thing as free money. We're all being given money. Right?
I would be really helpful that people understand that Hey, they're going to get taxed more because we can't have the NHS in the state that it's in. Our lack of resilience has been quite shocking really. We will see how prepared we really are and how much the NHS can actually cope. Hopefully it will realign some priorities about what we think is important. Do you really need that extra 200 quid to go and buy a plastic shit or would that be better spent in frontline defenses?
Well instead of me spending it on something myself, it will going into taxes.
Yes, exactly. So it will be interesting to see how collective psychology changes.
One positive thing to leave us on.
Ah, quality actually noticed my mother who lives in Cambridge says it's unbelievable how clean the areas cause no one's driving. That's really positive. I think people are going to realize that they don't have to travel as much and that actually may be having online videos and demonstrations where you can spend some time making sure that the presentation is brilliant rather than turning up with a PowerPoint slide, having a cup of coffee or seeing one bloke's fiddling with a pencil or young blokes texting his girlfriend.
It frees up a lot of time doesn't it? My thing is I feel that society wasn't being very nice to each other. There was a rot within how we were acting as human beings and it wasn't good and Brexit here and what was happening across Europe and other countries is all part of that which is, unless you are saying maybe out for ourselves, we weren't thinking as society and I hope that this will bring us together and bring us back to looking out for others not polarizing and being,
I hope so. I think it can equally go the other way. A lot of finger pointing and there's that. It could easily spill over into a nasty us versus them. Especially if the economy really starts to take a pint down. We know from history the worse the economic situation, the more us versus them it become, you can be very generous when everything's great.
I was going to say what was making me enough for our podcast or not laugh but but interesting as we've always been very apocalyptic and end of world. The recent ones we've actually been quite positive and not, but I think that you are diving down now into a mad max. We're all going to end up in wind swept desert soon, but
we need global solutions. I agree. I have just saying that it could equally go the other way where people start to bunker down and turtle up. Yeah,
I like that phrase. Well we've got to go. We're going to take a break next week as it's Easter, and I hope you do find your Easter eggs, and I want to say that we have tried to keep this light, add a bit of fun to things as we always do, but our hearts and thoughts go out to the people that are really struggling and having problems and to everybody. Keep safe
for everyone. Keep say for your work.
Everyone is doing good. See you later. Bye.
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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.