Hong Kong Radio 3 – Morning Brew with James Ross
recorded live 31 March 2020

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James Ross: [00:00:00] . [00:00:00] So I’m joined as ever on a Tuesday lunchtime by our business, futurist Morris Miselowski.

Morris,  looking forward to the future.  we’re all trying to be optimistic about the future are we get to get through this and get to the other side. And I guess that’s, what you do, isn’t it? You know, we, look forward and see what could happen. I mean, what is the future beyond Corona?

What about the future of healthcare?

Morris Miselowski: [00:00:25] . I know it’s really difficult as we’re working through Corona and all of its implications and the death and the horribleness, think about a future beyond it, but there absolutely is. And it may take us three months.

It may take us six months to get there, but the world will have changed. Forever. And that’s not a melodramatic statement. I’m saying that I, for me in Sci-Fi language, this is the equivalent of us going into a black hole and coming out the other end of it five to 10 years ahead of where we otherwise might have been.

And healthcare is absolutely. In fact, I think healthcare is one of the biggest landscapes of change that we’re about to see.

James Ross: [00:01:05] Yeah, I mean, what could it mean? Because you know, we’ve, we’ve got these, all these hospitals, these big new hospitals being built around the world to deal with this is, is this a flavor of what’s going to come?

And, you know, could, could we expect better health care? Could we explore? What can we expense you think.

Morris Miselowski: [00:01:21] I think we’re going to have extraordinary health care. I think that in the next five years, we will break the back of many diseases of cancers, of obviously this Corona. I think we’ll also start to STEM the conversation about this ability and move into ability.

I say all of that, not because we are all holding hands and singing kumbaya and the world is wonderful, but because of how much effort is going into the healthcare scene at the moment, there is so much collaboration. There is so much research. There is so much insight and sharing literally in the last two or three months, the equivalent of decades that [00:02:00] yes, hopefully all of that’s laser focused on trying to get us a resolution to the issue with the hand, but there will be huge.

Ripple effects. There’ll be things that we discover, things that we know, things that we’ve learning that we’ll be able to apply in different ways. And all of that is yet to show its face.

James Ross: [00:02:17] I mean, could one say that the world needed this to get us to focus on these things because perhaps we’ve not been focused on, particularly on issues about healthcare.

And I mean, it’s terrible to say it, but maybe we need that push.

Morris Miselowski: [00:02:31] Yeah. I wish it wouldn’t have come about this way, but I absolutely agree. I mean, I’ve, I’ve said a lot over the last two months that look at what we’re capable of. If we want to do something, the collective Goodwill around the planet and yes, we’re forced to do it and yes, it’s terrible circumstances.

We’re, I accept that wholeheartedly and have nothing good to say about what brought us to this. But the reality is we’re here and look at what we can do when we are collectively [00:03:00] driven. To achieve something in Australia. We are changing the nature of healthcare, hopefully forever. Only this afternoon, literally three hours ago, there was an announcement made that our private hospitals and our public hospitals, we’re going to work collaboratively and collectively for the first time ever.

Wow. We’re literally going to share resources, nurses, doctors. They would be, we don’t, I mean this has to play itself out, but this is what we were told. There would be no borders between the hospitals at all. I would be able to share, load share, patients, share resources. And shift funding. And that’s not something that ever, I don’t think would have happened in Australia.

They’ve tried for decades to make it so there’s been no public appetite and this was done within the space of a week. Add to that the notion of telemedicine, health medicine, a medicine M medicine, which means that we’re using virtual mobiles and all the things I’ve rapid on about [00:04:00] this as the medical world has for 20 years, we’ve known we could do this, but again, the collective appetite for it was so small.

In Australia. We brought all of that in and funded it within 10 days, and that’s happening around the world. So the ramifications of this has to be big, I hope anyway, there has to be good outcome out of what we’re going through.

James Ross: [00:04:19] Does this mean that we’ll also see much better tech in healthcare, do you think?

Morris Miselowski: [00:04:24] I think we’ll see much better tech, but the biggest difference for me, is actually not a technology one. It’s a human one. We will now become responsible as individuals for our health and wellness. We are all now looking after ourselves in ways that we might’ve done before. We’re making sure that we’re not exposing ourselves or washing our hands.

We’re actually taking responsibility for not catching this disease. And I know that sounds a simple thing to do, but our medical model for the last. 200 years has been based on waiting for something to go wrong and then looking for medical help to fix it. We’re not doing that [00:05:00] anymore. In fact, the overall global message is fix yourself.

Look after yourself. Don’t come to a medical attention if you don’t need to. That’s going to be, to me, the biggest change of all,

James Ross: [00:05:11] and and with 7 billion people on the planet, it needs to be that way. One has to look after oneself.

Morris Miselowski: [00:05:17] I think it does. Now, that’s not a looking after oneself. I’m not for a moment saying we shouldn’t go after medical health, but what it means is we’re going to take better care of ourselves, will impact.

And nutrition will look after ourselves. Perhaps we’ll exercise a bit more, better, a bit better. We’ll be more conscious of the things that our body might come in contact with and what it might cause. So we’ll take a whole lot more responsibility for wellness. And that’s where I think we’re headed into this wellness phase where along with humanity and ourselves.

Technology, the apps that we carry on our mobile phone that tell us how far we walk, how much we ate, have long we’ve slept, all of those sorts of insights. We’ll mix again to change the landscape. And I was saying that would be 10 years. In fact, I’ve almost finished producing a video [00:06:00] last week, which I’ve now put on hold because I thought all of these things would be 2040 we’ve gone into re-edit now to say all these things will be done by 2030 I’ve brought forward 10 years in my sites.

James Ross: [00:06:13] Yeah, I mean, it seems to have a truncated everything, doesn’t it? It seems to have brought it all forward. Um, in terms of other, um, other things that have been affected, one of the other big things, which touches on health as well, because, you know, we go, we go on holiday to relax, we go on holiday to renew, refresh.

Um. Is travel. And you know, we’re seeing these pictures of all the world’s airlines having their fleets grounded at various airports. In fact, you know, almost nowhere to park so many planes because there’s never been so many planes on the ground in one place. Or do we think about the future of travel? Do you think that that, uh, we’ll go back to where we were or.

Are we somehow going to be, you know, hunkering down in our, in our own places, in our own towns and our [00:07:00] own countries and not, not traveling, uh, overseas so much? Or, or what do you think?

Morris Miselowski: [00:07:07] As soon as we can, we will be running to the airports? There’s a number of reasons for that. One is that as humans, we’d like to explore over the horizon as part of our psyche.

We all always want to see something beyond where we can, where our faith can take us. There will be a short term. Short term is six 12 months. Again, I know that causes harm and concern, but six to 12 months, I think it’ll be iffy. Obviously people will be reticent to go as they must probably should be far afield.

I believe there will be what I refer to as revenge tourism in about six months. Revenge tourism are people like me. I must say I’m one of them who are saying, as soon as I can get on the plane, I will be on a plane. I’m going to prove this virus hasn’t beaten me. So there will be a whole lot of revenge purchases that are made that’ll [00:08:00] be true of going to the theatre of restaurants.

We’re all making ourselves these equivalent to new year’s Eve promises. When this is over, we will. And that will have a little bit of an uptake around tourism and travel, but the big swing will come, I think around Christmas time and early next year when people are a bit more comfortable of moving and they want to get back to families, they want to get back to them lives.

It will take a while, and most probably will not be where it was before, but I’d give it a year or two and I’m fairly sure that we will be back to where our travel habits were.

James Ross: [00:08:35] I mean, it’s going to be a bit bumpy for the airlines, isn’t it? You know, obviously it’s bumpy at the moment, but, but once this is finished, you know, suddenly you can potentially going to have this big surge of people getting back on, uh, on planes.

Um, you know, it’s going to affect prices. It’s going to have, have lots of different effects, and even, you know, can the airlines even cope with it, uh, at that point, because they’ve got. You know, zero planes, um, uh, up in the sky at the moment, or not [00:09:00] very many anyway. Um, you know, so I think you’re right. It’s going to take a couple of years to, to sort it all out.

Morris Miselowski: [00:09:08] It will take a couple of years for all of most industries to be able to get through the pipes. We’ll have to really employ people. We’ll have to retrain, reinvigorate people who are just making it all happen. Can’t happen overnight. It will probably be the case that some airlines will not exist into the future.

But others will look at their routes and wonder where they should be running them or not. You know, all those kinds of questions will be asked because one of the big things I’m seeing behind the scenes are corporate to then now taking the opportunity because the carer is difficult to service when it’s moving.

Now the stationary, I really beginning to wonder what they should be doing. So is this the best form of my industry? Is this the misuse of people? Do I have the best technology? Am I doing the right thing? And then now saying that they’re likely to make changes given that we’ve come to a stop. So there are lots of different things on our [00:10:00] landscape ahead.

James Ross: [00:10:01] But for airlines, I mean, it’s a bit of a problem, isn’t it? Because you’ve suddenly got all these, all these planes, they’re sitting on the ground. They can maintain them, they can sort them all out now, but they’re all out of the routine, aren’t they? They’re out of the, um, you know, they’re out there. They’re not in the right places.

They’ve, you know, the maintenance routine, they take them out every two or three months or whatever it is they do. Um, that’s all gone. So they’ve got to rebuild that from, from, from, from scratch up woods, haven’t they?

Morris Miselowski: [00:10:28] Yeah, absolutely. And personalizing it back to Australia again, Virgin, our second airline has already said that if, well, they’re posturing, that if they’re not given a lifeline by governments and they’re looking for a couple of, well, one and a half.

Virgin if they’re not given that they don’t, they’re not sure what they will be able to survive. So there are all sorts of issues out there. Financial, as you said, rightly, the planes have to be serviced. You and I have to be comfortable that this thing that’s set on the ground for however many months is capable of flying.

Just getting [00:11:00] people, physically, people around to do all of that for all the planes. Again, as you’ve said, right, for the parking car, parks is going to take a while getting, getting, uh, pilots, getting all the. Host these other people on board and the logistics of doing it all take a while to come back, but there will be appetite behind all of this.

There will be consumer demand. Lots of people are waiting to get back to their homes, to their families, to their work. There’s, there’s that pent up energy that will take it through its first run of activity.

James Ross: [00:11:29] Well, I’m sure we’re gonna have many more conversations like this, Morris, as we, as we all predict what will happen at the end of this, because I think is, it’s a, it’s a difficult one.

Maybe next week we can have a bit more of a focus on the, uh, on particularly on business and what it means to doing business. I think there’s going to be some interesting things to do with working from home and so on, uh, going forward that, um, that may or may impact us. So, but maybe we’ll say that for next week, shall we, and, uh, and have a chat with chat about that next week.

Morris Miselowski: [00:11:57] Yeah. So lots of these [00:12:00] conversation to be had nothing. Corona, as we all know, is around for a while.

James Ross: [00:12:03] Yes, I think we’ll have time to do it. Morris, Miselowski, our business futurist on the morning brew. Morris. Thanks sir. Thanks as ever.

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