2020 has been quite a year ...

Doug provides his thoughts looking back on the year and insights for the year to come.

To cap it off, Doug wishes everybody a merry Christmas and happy New Year.

Doug's business specializes in partnering with companies and non-profits to capture overhead cost savings without layoffs to fund growth and strengthen financial results.

Schedule time with Doug to talk about your business at www.MeetDoug.Biz

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[Introduction]

Welcome to the terminal value Podcast where each episode provides in depth insight about the long term value of companies and ideas in our current world. Your host for this podcast is Doug Utberg, the founder and principal consultant for Business of Life, LLC.

Doug: Alright! Welcome to the terminal value podcast. This is actually a special holiday edition where of course as I'm sure you can tell I don't have anybody interviewing. I am just going to be talking to you all by my lonesome reflecting on 2020. Now if there is one thing that 2020 is most assuredly going to be known for it is the pandemic. The covid 19 pandemic is pretty much the item of the year. I think very closely associated with it and related to it is the US presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Much of which centered on the covid 19 pandemic and so when I look back at the year, there're a couple of things that I think about. And there's a few thoughts I wanted to, that I want to take forward and I wanted to share those with you. So the first thing that I think of is that okay now first of all is that I'm you know any loss of life of course is tragic. But what I just can't really get past is how there's been a laser focus on mortalities from covid and a complete and total lack of acknowledgement of anything else. So for example one of the things that I saw recently is that although the covid fatalities have been going up fatalities from other causes mortalities from other causes have been going down because what happens is if somebody goes into a hospital and they get diagnosed with covid and they should die even if it wasn't because of covid. If they died with covid, it is logged as a covid death. So you'd say well why is this? Well it turns out there's a financial payment reimbursement for covid. So there is a financial incentive to document more mortalities is covid. Now, do I believe that it's a vast conspiracy? of course not. Do I believe that the numbers are maybe not as that there's some wiggle in the numbers or that they're fuzzy? Absolutely. And another thing that actually really concerns me just personally is that mental health really isn't getting enough attention and I think that it's actually going to be a huge problem. Suicide rates in a number of areas are very very high. Your drug addiction rates are going up. Alcoholism rates are going up. Depression rates are going up. 

You know the fact that so many kids are being stuck at home and not able to go to school. That's a big problem and if you're an affluent family it's only a problem in terms of scheduling because like for example my wife and I, we have two kids and they have been at stay-at-home school for the entire year and that create that is not the most conducive environment for learning. We're fortunate to have a home where we can have a setup that's pretty easy to do school in but it's not easy to learn from your parents. You know, it's not easy to have  that lack of separation between where you're doing school and where you have your home activities. But think about how this would work for somebody who has a rough home life. I read a wonderful article from Alonzo Morning in Miami about shortly after the pandemic broke where he was talking about how when he was young the reason why he got so good at basketball...