Ted Audio Collective
Hello everyone, this is After Hours, I'm Felix. I'm Me here. And I'm Dolly. I'm on the faculty of the New York University Stern School of Business and I'm thrilled to be joining you today.
And we are so happy to have you, Dolly. Fabulous. This week is special for you, right?
It's the week when you launch your new book. Yes, it's my book Pub Week as they say.
I have a new book, A More Just Future that just came out this week and so I'm thrilled to celebrate the birthday with you.
No, that is great. So Felix, you went through this recently. I went through it a little bit a while ago.
It's a kind of crazy time, Dolly. Are you able to enjoy it and kind of bask it all in?
Are you going crazy or how's it going? Yes, and both. I'm definitely running on fumes.
I just had a meeting in my department. We had the screen up and I accidentally forwarded to the last slide.
And the last slide was this big congratulatory slide to me that my department had planned a surprise party and like a cave.
I had no idea it was coming and it sort of took me out of my keep going, keep going mode into a bit of a celebration. It was really lovely.
That's fantastic. So nice to hear. That is great. Yeah. And we brought topics, of course. Me here. What do you have for us?
I don't know if we spend enough time talking about ourselves. Oh God. I see the other words. I can't leave now.
Yeah. Exactly.
So there's this really interesting debate about mid-life crises and there's this new paper out that really tries to document how prevalent this phenomenon is.
And so I'm just really curious to talk to you about what you think about this stuff, what you think we should do about it, why it happens, basically just a bunch of naval gazing, which is the podcast in general.
Yes. Okay. Mid-life crisis. And Felix, what'd you bring?
So I have, I think a controversial topic, maybe not quite as controversial as mid-life crises, but I would love to hear what you think about woke capitalism.
This idea that there's something fundamentally different and how we think about the role of business in society today.
And that much of it has to do with pressures coming from the conversation around race and the conversation around inequality.
And I'm just curious to get your take. Is it real? What does it mean? What's the future if any of woke capitalism?
Sounds great. Alright, let's do it.
Okay. Felix, woke capitalism.
There's something in the business environment that leads businesses to think very differently about their role in society.
And I was inspired by one of the stories in your book, Dolly, you talk about Dixie Beer and the rebranding of that iconic brand.
So for those who don't know, Dixie Beer is a traditional New Orleans brand.
Yeah.
Beloved. I think everyone who grew up or has spent a month, time in New Orleans, they know about Dixie Beer.
In 2019, they hire a new person to come in and manage the brand. If you think about an iconic brand, it's such an asset for a business to have.
It's so hard to build. And then surprisingly, they decided to completely rebrand.
These are now the pressures of woke capitalism at work. Dixie, evokes images of the South, but also some problematic aspects of that history.
So it makes it impossible to say go national, be really successful with that brand.
So Dolly, what interested you in telling how they thought about the rebranding and why they rebranded and then of course the long term consequences of that rebranding?
Well, I was really interested in what is our relationship with our history, with our past, particularly in the United States.
There's a very complicated history. There's very beautiful parts of our history and very brutal parts of our history.
And so when I came across the story of Dixie Beer in Jim Birch, was the general manager they brought in in 2019, New Orleans still recovering from Katrina, they had moved their production out of New Orleans and wanted to bring it back in to really make it a local business.
At the same time, they also wanted to become more national and create distribution channels across the country. And they hired Jim Birch to do this and he was ready to go state of the art facility and reaching out to buyers across the country.
No thought at all of changing the brand and then encountered questions where people in different parts of the country would say you're okay with the name.
Well, yeah, why wouldn't we be? And then the way he describes it, he started to reflect and the leadership of the company started to reflect throughout 2019 on these questions they were getting about a brand and a name they hadn't really questioned in its entire history.
I thought that was just a fascinating thought process that they took themselves through. They decided to rename themselves that actual decision was announced in June 2020.
It was in the air at that point after the killing of George Floyd, there was lots of corporate announcements.
And they found that African Americans in New Orleans were saying, I maybe didn't have a problem with the Dixie Beer name, but I certainly couldn't defend it.
And so now that you're coming to me and saying, well, what do you think it should be called? I feel more connected. I can defend this brand.
And Jim Birch describes every framing of how they thought about their interactions with the community, a broader perspective on who they saw as their buyer.
That complicated reckoning with what is the part of our history we want to hold on to? What's the part we want to let go of? How do we hang on to the paradox? I just find really fascinating. And that's what I explore.
And dolly, was there backlash against that change of name? There was a little bit, especially on social media, there was some you're caving to the wokesters, that type of thing.
At first Birch and his leadership, they were listening to it. They weren't reacting to it, but they actually came to the conclusion as they saw more of it that the folks they were hearing from weren't in their customer base.
They were people who objected to in general, as you were saying, what they considered to be woke capitalism, but they weren't the people who they were trying to reach with their product anyway.
Yeah. And what do you make of this as a prism onto this larger question, which you also, I think, tackled a little bit in your book, this larger question of how people are seemingly quite worried about the spread of woke capitalism.
And on the other hand, you have businesses like Jim Birch's business undertaking these actions.
We don't it's funny. What's being labeled by some right now is woke capitalism is what we were calling stakeholder capitalism not long ago.
Yeah. Well, capitalism is clearly meant to be derogatory, but I think there's actually pretty broad support.
I think it's fascinating by attaching the word woke to the stakeholder capitalism debate. People have been able to very quickly demonize in the eyes of some that whole idea of stakeholder capitalism.
And so I think that was kind of a master rhetorical move. Because the word woke is so evocative and provocative that it immediately makes people think a certain thing about what stakeholder capitalism is.
I happen not to be like the biggest fan of stakeholder capitalism, but it was interesting to me is by doing it this way, it's somehow galvanized people.
The other interesting thing to me about your story, Dali is that wasn't really clear that the customers cared that much. The negative reaction wasn't really representative of their customers, which seems to me like a broader issue, which is I think this is a debate which is carried out on the margins by very vocal people who have very strong feelings.
And then there's a mass of people in the middle who don't really care. And maybe this is part of the problem. Me here, the marginal nature of many of the activities.
I remember this is now a couple of years back when the business roundtable officially said goodbye to shareholder only concerns and adopt that stakeholder capitalism.
And we have colleagues at the law school who then looked into this decision and you would think if this is real, if it's a fundamental change in how we think about what the company is supposed to do, you would have expected lots of board discussions.
And what that research found is that almost no one talked to their boards about it, which then also gives it a little bit of flavor. Maybe this is pretending and so a change in the brand. Ultimately, you can tell it as a very successful story because not that many people got upset.
And many people felt much better about the brand as you have pointed out to all the it seems like a win-win, but maybe the win-wins occur because we're doing marginal things.
We're doing things that no one really cares about that much. It's more like window dressing as opposed to substantial reform.
That's really interesting and you know, there's research on moral licensing, which is the notion that we do a good thing, even if it's performative and you know, it's like you eat the salad, then you have the ice cream.
But here's the counter on that societal leadership is now a core function of business. McKinsey summarized it as a paradox of the public has low trust, but high expectations of business right now.
What's the awkward position to be in? Let me make sure I understand where you're going. So one view is Felix's view, which is that it's really performative.
There's another view, which is that actually this whole emphasis on stakeholder capitalism is kind of old wine in new bottles. It's the same thing that we've always been doing.
The way you build a good business is you serve your constituents. And by the way, that turns out to be good for shareholders too.
And then there's the third view. I think where you're going, which is no, this is really different. People expect business to solve societal problems and business can solve societal problems. Is that where you're at?
To me, that's what's emerging as the quandary here. Maybe businesses are in a shallow way accepting the role, but not in a deep way.
But the expectations seem to be there. In part, I think our expectations are so high because think about climate change as an example.
You really think governments are going to get their act together and be real about climate change. I don't know, you have to be more optimistic than I am to believe that this is going to happen.
And then the critique of the woke capitalism is that somehow there's like a woke police inside corporations and that they're trying to police behavior amongst consumers and amongst employees.
And that doesn't ring terribly true to me because I think there's still a lot of conservative elements in business throughout the world.
But the other critique is that once you start to expect business to do this, first off, it becomes polarizing in a way that somehow business was not before.
And then maybe more so that somehow we have let corporations start to mediate public problems. What do you make of those kinds of critiques?
I think they're legitimate critiques because especially with the polarizing point you made when a business sort of aligns with our own personal values and takes a stance, you know, maybe we're like, yeah, go for it.
I love it. I want to work there. And then when they don't, we're like, how dare they impose their values on me.
So we definitely have this asymmetric perspective on when business should get involved and when it shouldn't. But I think the days of businesses thinking they can just be businesses are over.
Honestly, rightly or wrongly. So I'm not saying that prescriptively. I'm saying it descriptively. I think those days are over.
So, Dali, one of the things I really loved about your book is to say in all of these corporate decisions and even frankly in many of the personal decisions that we make, we now have a sense that these decisions are really big because they're emblematic for choosing a site.
Either I really, really love my country and there's nothing wrong with it and all of history is really wonderful or oh my god, I cannot believe what the history of my country was and the perennial injustices that are now embodied in institutions that basically make it almost impossible to see anything right about the country.
And one of your arguments that really spoke to me was that that's a false choice and some of the decisions that seem really big because you feel like you're taking a site, you're choosing a camp are actually not that big because you can hold both of these ideas in your mind at the same time.
Yeah, Felix, you described that beautifully and that's the research on paradox the idea that when we have a paradox mindset, we can hold two truths that appear to contradict each other.
We can hold both of those at the same time. It can be true that there are elements of our history that were brutal. It can be true that the elements of our history that were beautiful.
And rather than having to, as you said, choose one or the other, we can accept that both coexist with each other. When we do that, our brain kind of unlocks businesses are there to be businesses and at this point in society, they're also going to be a major institution in society.
I think the neat thing about this argument is also that it just lowers the temperature a little bit. Otherwise, it is such a martial atmosphere out there is certainly in politics. It's a martial atmosphere.
But then you feel it's in your point, dolly is that that's impacting the way we think about business. So all of a sudden, stakeholder capitalism becomes woke capitalism.
And then everybody now aligns on one side or the other because we've now militarized the debate in a way that we don't really need to. In part, what I'm taking away from your example, but also this conversation generally is just like taking down the temperature so we don't think in such either our ways, which is of course the most important lesson in life.
The thing you learned about in eighth grade, which is black and white versus gray, but it just seems that we've lost that in so many debates and it's been in politics, but it's creeping into business. And I think part of what you're going after is being able to say both those things at the same time and then have that become a basis for how you behave as opposed to it's time to pick a side, which is just a terrible way to think about the world.
So I had no idea the discussion on what capitalism would become so psychological, but this is a perfect segue to our midlife crisis segments.
Okay, midlife crisis after the break.
So me here, tell us about your midlife crisis. All of this is personal. No, no, no.
There's been a real debate for last 40 or 50 years about what some people observe to be a you shaped level of happiness over your lifetime, which basically suggests that there's this very persistent pattern.
That people in their 40s and early 50s become quite a bit worse off in meaningful ways.
This is really a robust fact and it shows up in all kinds of ways in bad sleep habits in suicidal ideation and depression.
It shows up in memory problems and I am just struck by it because in part it feels like something we don't talk about enough. So do you believe this stuff?
I'm still trying to figure out if this is why you invited me on the show.
Some free therapy.
Like she clearly needs to talk about her midlife crisis.
It's free therapy, dolly. I swear to God.
We each have such a sliver of the population that we're exposed to, but anecdotally it seems to fit what I notice. And I was even say what I experienced at age 54.
Yeah. And Phil, is that consistent as well for you?
It's very hard to argue that nothing is going on.
Even if we somehow figure out to guarantee everyone's income, the data suggests that we would still see something like a midlife crisis.
You're in rich countries, you're at your highest income, earning years. And yet we see this really substantial deterioration in well-being broadly.
There's a study which is kind of wacky about orangutans and the degree to which during their midlife they suffer similar kinds of things.
So there's some notion that might be biological, there's some notion that it might be psychological.
What do you think is driving this?
And in two-aids dolly, right? There's the decline. But then it's also interesting there's the recovery.
The recovery. Yeah. So what do you think is going on?
In the orangutan study kind of throws off some of my theories. So I'm going to pretend we didn't talk about that.
There's a concept called the hedonic treadmill.
The idea of it is that things that give you pleasure, you pursue them, and then you get them, and then they no longer give you pleasure.
So it's like a treadmill, then you have to get more of the thing to get equal units of pleasure.
And it just never ends like a treadmill.
So it's really the novelty. If something is new, it might make me happier.
Right.
But then once it's no longer new, even though I was super excited about it, is that the idea?
Yeah, the idea becomes normalized in your experience.
Okay.
When you're younger, you're like, oh, if I could live in anything but a studio apartment, it would be amazing if I had my own bedroom.
You know, if you get your own bedroom, you're like, well, if I could live in a place with a yard, that would be the best.
Right.
Yeah, so that's the idea, but that doesn't quite explain the upswing at the end.
Right.
Yeah, that's true.
When you ask younger people about their expectations for life satisfaction, it turns out that they're overly optimistic.
So in your 20s, you think, oh my God, I'm going to feel so much better when I'm in my 30s and so on.
And then for older people, it's the reverse.
So if you ask people in their 50s, how well do you think you'll be when you're 60?
Yeah.
They're actually too pessimistic.
And so what that means over time is that getting older when you're young is perpetual disappointment,
because you had these high expectations and it's never quite true.
And then it's the reverse once you're old, because your expectations were really, I'm going to be terrible at my knees are shot and everything terrible that can happen to you.
Right.
And then it's actually a little better.
Yeah.
So that is almost the only semi-expination that I saw that could explain both to the client, but then also the eventual rise in life satisfaction.
I think that sounds exactly right, Felix.
So much of life is about expectations and managing expectations.
Yes.
I think there is inevitably something that happens when you're young about social comparisons and about competition and ambition that it can fuel you during your 20s and 30s.
And maybe some productive ways, but that ends up coming back to bite you in your 40s and 50s.
And that to me is interesting because I feel like that kind of ambition and that kind of social comparison is what motivates many people.
And in some ways constructively, but ultimately it turns out to be problematic.
And then the other thing is just that the social isolation that sets in for some people in their 40s and 50s, life becomes a little bit more interior.
Even in a family setting, sometimes you become so interior that you lose connectivity and if you lose connectivity with people and communities, of course we know that just becomes really difficult.
That doesn't really help account for the rise in the 60s and 70s, which your explanation does.
But I can't help but think that part of what's going wrong for people in their 40s and 50s is that ambition and comparison that powered me is now disappointing me.
Yeah, that's deep.
I confess I've experienced that. Have you all felt that?
Absolutely. Like I think the social comparison point is really interesting.
Right.
And we sometimes don't consciously set them.
No.
But points in my life when I've been like, why is everyone married and I'm not?
Why does everyone love their job? And I don't.
Definitely miserable.
Not because I minded not being married.
I just minded that everyone else was the same analog with the job.
So that definitely resonates.
And your second point, me here about the meaning and the influence of close personal friendships.
Yeah.
I think that to me is super important.
And it might go with the patterns that we see in the data in the following sense.
The peak of your earnings probably also have to do with just how engaged you are at work.
How many hours you put in, how much responsibility you have.
Right.
And one way to interpret what happens later in life is that some of these pressures go away.
Job stress is at an all time high, right when you're going through mid-life crisis.
People say job stress is high.
But what does it mean in practical terms?
That increase in level of job stress around that time in your life is like working an extra eight hours a week.
You can then understand how everything revolves around work.
And friendships at work of course can be friendships.
But in particular in a hierarchical setting, they're always complicated because you're peers but you're also competitors.
You are friends but I also have a managerial responsibility for you or you have a managerial responsibility for me.
So in the corporate world it's a little hard to know what is true friendship and what is maybe opportunistic investments in being close to someone.
Right.
If you still hang out with me when I'm 85, I will take it as a true sign of friendship.
Felix, I felt like you were trying to tell me something this way.
I was like, put the hells.
He's not really my friend.
It turns out.
It's interesting actually, you know, that is one of the weird and interesting things about academia, which is it's not as hierarchical.
And these are very long term potential relationships, which can be very rich in a really interesting way.
Frankly, I'm still a little nervous that you might be the next president of Harvard University.
You can rest assured that no one would make that decision.
Okay, so let's take it as a really robust fact. We could have various causes.
But what do you think we should do about it?
What do you think you would counsel a younger person about it?
And if it's kind of there, it's like a really robust fact.
What do we think we should do?
Either maybe policy wise or even personally.
When Felix was saying we're overly optimistic when we're young and we're overly pessimistic when we're older,
it reminded me of affective forecasting.
Meaning how good we are at forecasting our own emotions.
And it turns out we're really bad at it.
We think bad things are going to be worse than they are and feel bad longer than they do.
And the same is true. We think good things will feel good longer than they do.
And feel better than they do.
So I wonder if part of it is just helping people forecast better.
Because part of what makes the bottom of the you feel crummy is you think you're the only one.
Yeah, exactly.
So then if you know everybody's miserable, maybe nobody will be that miserable anymore.
Yeah, that sounds really important. Actually just knowing that it's not you.
And that some of it might be biological.
Some of it might be hardwired.
Some of it might be just a phase in life that many people have to go through.
Yeah.
I have to believe that that makes a big difference.
The term midlife crisis in that sense is terrible because it makes it sound like
it's something that happens suddenly and it's really drastic and it's terrible.
Exactly. Going back to our earlier conversation on the importance of language,
maybe what you named the thing is actually pretty important.
And we just should have a better name than midlife crisis.
Yeah.
It also suggests that maybe we developmentally need it.
Yeah.
Maybe it's a necessary stage.
Yeah.
Like adolescence takes us from childhood to adulthood.
Yeah, I think that's dolly in a way where I was going to go to,
which is clearly just awareness of it is hugely important.
Because to your point, dolly, you don't want to be alone.
Once you learn about it, you do feel less alone in feeling these things.
To your point, it's tempting when you observe a phenomenon like this to say,
well, what can we do about it?
You know, like, let's make it better.
Let's flatten it out or something like that.
I don't know.
As I've been thinking about it, I guess I've wondered a little bit along lines
where you're going, dolly, which is it's part of the struggle.
And it's part of what makes older age, I don't know.
I don't want to rationalize feeling miserable.
But there is an aspect to this, which is, is it serving a purpose?
Yeah.
Is it part of what life is to struggle with this and then to reach the other side of it
and feel that sense of satisfaction?
I like the reframing that you did, dolly, into maybe it's more of an investment.
And in part, what I like about it is that's of course what we do very often.
So think back to your childhood, everything you really hated doing.
What's the trick that your parents usually use as you say?
Oh, it's an investment in something that will have payoffs at a later point in time.
In this context, I like it in the sense that maybe it's really a time
when your attention goes to what else is there.
I've had maybe a lot of success, maybe moderate success.
Most of the time you have an average level of success.
And now I'm thinking about what is next.
And what is next is complicated.
It doesn't feel very good at the moment because I don't know what's next.
But simply the knowledge that there will be something that is next.
And there will be something that will give you greater life satisfaction
than you experience at that moment in time.
And I'm thinking of it as a search process.
Well, I think you're exactly right, which is we know from the research as well
that it comes to an end.
It actually gets much, much better, which is a great thing to remember.
But I also think it is worth just underscoring how much it means we should be talking about these things
and be talking about mental health in a much more open way.
Because that's, of course, the lesson about mental health generally.
But certainly about this where it is so widespread and so persistently observable.
The degree to which we talk about it, normalize it, make people feel like they're not alone in it
and that there is the other side of the you.
That's actually why the you is so comforting as opposed to the midlife crisis thing.
The you is comforting because things do get better and reliably so in the data, which is kind of amazing.
There's big hope if we can keep up this conversation and if we can use it to then both better understand ourselves
when we don't feel so great, but also knowing that there is a turnaround sometime in our future.
I think that's really fabulous.
I confess I'm feeling a lot more hopeful and better after this conversation.
Oh, because you're old.
Yeah, I said.
Yeah.
Alright, excellent.
Thank you guys.
Okay, recommendations, Dolly.
Are you going to recommend your own book?
Oh, I should have.
You should have.
I'm just kidding, Dolly.
What do you got for a recommendation?
I'm going to go for something a little unusual.
I'm obsessed with pickleball.
Oh, pickleball is my greatest joy right now.
It's the fastest growing sport in the United States.
Yeah.
It's easy to play, easy to learn.
Doesn't take up a lot of space.
We play in a public park with whomever's there.
So it's a great way to meet people speaking of some of the loneliness issues.
Uh huh.
And it's relatively cheap.
You play with a whiffle ball and it's so much fun.
This whole thing has passed me by.
So I'm delighted you mentioned it.
Because like from the outside, it's a little bit mystifying how this thing has taken off.
Yeah.
What do you think it is?
Let's compare it to tennis, for example.
So tennis, it takes many hours of practice to get to a point where you can sustain a rally
where you don't spend most of your time picking up balls.
Right.
I remember that.
In addition to like the easy access, small, core, cheap equipment, and pickleball,
you can very quickly get to a level where you can keep a rally going.
And there's just something incredibly satisfying about that.
Yeah.
And also while there are professional pickleball leagues, the other thing I've noticed is that
the variance between like the best player on the court and the newest player on the court feels smaller.
Uh huh.
So it feels like it's easy to find people to play with.
Oh, that's great.
Wow.
That's fantastic.
Felix, what do you have?
So are you chewing gum to two of you?
No.
Oh, I wanted to recommend a brand of chewing gum.
Dantin.
It is so much better than anything else that is out there.
Basically anything you can possibly care about.
How long does the flavor persist?
What's the satisfaction with which you chew this thing?
It's just an illegal of its own.
Wait, this is like the oldest brand in the world.
I know.
I think a New York pharmacist, right?
I don't know.
I think it's about a hundred years old or so.
I have to confess it's a little bit a cry for help because even though it's by far the best product, distribution is terrible.
Some of it has to do with the pandemic was really not nice to the market for chewing gum because it's typically sold in what they call the hot zone, right where you check out.
It's just like this little thing that you pick up.
The moment people don't go to stores, the hot zone doesn't do so well.
So chewing gum sales have gone down.
It also wasn't such a fabulous market to begin with and the owner of the company Mondeles, they had seconds thoughts about whether they wanted to keep it alive.
They have now indicated that they want to sell the brand.
It's literally true.
You go to any big retailer, you'll find any other brand.
You will often not find Dantin for reasons that completely baffled me.
How is it that the best product is not available?
This is not a plea for help. I think this is a plea for funds.
I think somebody should act Felix in the takeover of the Dantin brand.
Yes, absolutely.
That could be great. You could go up to Mondeles and be like, I'll take the Dantin brand and I want to see you push Dantin down every aisle.
Yes, I'm a very credible spokesperson.
You are.
You are craving Dantin right now.
It's one of these transactions, the famous brand ultimately got sold for a dollar.
Exactly. I would be totally up for it.
That would be great.
Let's make that happen.
Somebody listening inside Mondeles, please.
What did you bring me here?
I'm still recovering Felix.
Oh my God.
I love a good bakery.
I just love a good bakery anywhere.
Anytime I'm traveling, I love a good bakery.
Coffee.
Some good bread, good sandwich is the best. So there's a new concept bakery that has started in Miami and has just landed in New York and it's called Rosetta Bakery.
It is an Italian-style bakery.
The lines in New York are kind of out the door.
It's just a great concept.
Simple little sandwiches with really good prosciutto, nice little pizza slices, lovely sweets, little lemon-maring tart, great coffee.
This thing is going to be on fire. So I suggest go as fast as you can.
There's like four in Miami and then there's two in the New York New Jersey area.
But they're exploding all over the place.
I recommend, get yourself two of Rosetta Bakery as fast as possible.
Hi.
That sounds wonderful and also frankly a little counterintuitive because I don't associate Italy with great bread.
You're right, Felix.
It's not great bread in the sense of like Danish bread or like German bread or French bread.
It's a little bit softer on the sandwiches. It tends to be a little bit wonder bread-like.
Are you saying it's really mostly the prosciutto?
It's maybe just about the prosciutto, don't you?
All right.
And you should of course follow it up with Dentine afterwards.
There you go!
And this was it.
Thank you for listening. This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
