Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi and I'm here with Felix and me here.
And Spring is here.
Ooh, it's fantastic.
I mean, I really feel it.
I'm both physically and mentally unburdening myself with all kinds of things.
It feels great. It's so fantastic.
In New England, Spring lasts for about 15 minutes.
So we should all really enjoy it.
Okay, before we get started, we wanted to thank all of our listeners for all the email that you've been sending in.
It's been so fantastic.
And one of the things that at least I love about it is that you can really tell where the passion is.
Yeah. Depending on what people write about.
So apparently, a lot of you guys out there are really into Peloton.
Which was such a disappointment for me.
That is true. So the amount of email that we got that said, make sure Mehere reads this.
I'm going to have to come around.
This is going to be this and Game of Thrones.
I'm going to have to figure this out.
So keep the emails coming.
We can't always respond, but we look at everyone and we appreciate it so much.
And the reviews and the ideas.
Yes, if you feel inclined to write us a review, share us with friends.
Did you see the review, which said that I was being paid off by Apple for being the only pro Apple voice?
Yeah, they got it exactly right.
I'm not being paid off.
They should pay you.
Just because I'm a believer, I don't need to be paid.
I'm a believer. Okay, so topics tonight.
I would love for you to have me think about the regulation of large Internet companies.
We have something like an emerging consensus in Europe that is very, very different from the way we think about regulation in the United States.
And I'm curious to hear what you think.
And then the other topic, I wanted to talk about college and why college is so expensive.
Oh, yeah. Wow, what a great topic.
Okay, Felix, you wanted to talk about big tech versus Europe.
Yes, that's an interesting way of putting it.
So I think what you observed maybe for the past two or three years is increasing opposition towards the dominance of the big American tech companies.
And so they have come up with an approach to regulation that is frankly radically different from the kinds of things that we think about in the United States.
And there are three broad principles that they're following.
The first one is we have to find ways to protect individual privacy.
So Google should make it super simple for you to see what is the data that they have on you.
You should be able to amend the data because the data are really yours.
And you should be able to determine who can use the data.
So that's all under this big bucket of privacy.
The second big principle is that firms cannot lock out competition.
Yes, you might be super, super powerful as a result of network effects, but you must grant equal treatment to rivals who use the big platforms.
And then the third principle is what we don't want to do is we don't want to regulate giants like utilities.
That's not the right thing to do what we want.
It's essentially a fair degree of competition.
So let me start with the principles.
Do the principles by themselves make sense to you?
So if you start with the first one, the hallmark regulation in Europe is GDPR.
Now, if we were to ask ourselves, is GDPR working?
Is it making things better?
Is it making things worse?
If you remember, the big tech companies really opposed the imposition of GDPR because it required them to put in an entirely new compliance infrastructure, which was very, very costly.
Once they did that, though, what it essentially seems to be doing is it seems to be locking in their dominance.
And so post GDPR, the market share of Google, of Facebook, of Amazon has just increased in Europe, and small players, their market share has significantly declined to the extent that you have Zuckerberg now writing op -eds in the US saying the US should put something in like GDPR.
Why? Because now that they've sunk all those costs into it, why not go ahead and roll this regulation out in the US, which would then create new barriers for competitive entry.
And so that's an example, I think, of a regulation very, very well -intentioned and might even benefit consumers, but the trade -off is you're essentially creating even stronger lock -in for these big tech giants.
And so these things are not nearly as straightforward as they may seem.
I come at this a little bit similarly, Yungmi, which is first the details matter, but also I find it altogether a little bit underwhelming in the following sense, which is what problem are we really trying to solve?
Too often it feels like we're trying to solve the problem of these people are too big, which is a very ill -formulated and ill -thought -out idea, I think.
So for example, on the data privacy stuff, surely a good idea to have people have ownership and to be able to give rights away more proactively than they had been in the past.
I don't think that'll change very much, and if anything, it'll only inure to the benefit of the larger players.
What's more interesting to me is to be a little bit more surgical about what the problems are.
So for me, we talk about democracy and we talk about the role they've played in recent elections, and then I think a little bit about publishing.
That, to me, is interesting because that kind of targeted regulation about a specific pernicious problem that we're worried about is more interesting.
Similarly, on taxation, which is an interest of mine, they have been really good at not potentially paying taxes all around the world, and we have to think about that problem.
But this, it feels to me, feel like it's a lot of big bad U .S.
tech companies that are too big.
I'm just worried this is all becoming classic populist anti -big stuff, which I find disheartening.
So let me push back a little bit.
It seems a little unfair to me to say, oh, GDPR has actually increased fixed costs, and as a result, it's harder for smaller companies to compete.
Yeah, the first principle is all about individual privacy.
And if small firms cannot do that, then small firms have a lesser role to play.
I'm totally fine with that.
Remember, it's a two -pronged approach.
One is regarding individual privacy, and Zuckerberg might love it because he now understands that after implementing it, that might be in competitive advantage.
But that, at least in my thinking, doesn't really undermine the goal.
I think what hasn't been done well to me, which is the bigger problem, is when you think about how something like GDPR is being implemented, it basically puts the consumer still in an impossible position.
So you download some sort of an app, and they ask you, do you agree with this 5 ,780 -page long list?
It's a legal document.
And of course, what are you going to do?
It's at the level of implementation that, at least in the GDPR domain, the idea is a good idea, but we haven't really made the job easier.
I give you a simple example of a type of regulation that I actually quite like.
You know when you buy a fridge, there's this yellow sticker on the fridge that tells you, each year, how much electricity, how much power will the fridge use?
That's the kind of thing we need for privacy protection.
And then the competition and size question that both of you alluded to, I completely agree, is super, super important, but that's separate.
That's separate from privacy and data concerns.
My hope is that GDPR is really just the starting point, and they will figure out what's the equivalent to that sticker on your fridge that shows you one bold number.
But just to be clear, does anybody care about this?
I don't know. Sometimes I wonder in these debates whether it's like, I barely care.
But for the vast majority of people who are on Facebook, do they care?
I mean, do we even know if they care?
What I'm still struggling with is the initial question, Felix, which is, what is the problem we're solving?
The problem that we're solving is that you have no control over your data.
That's the first piece, which is the GDPR piece.
But what other problem are we solving?
Oh, and then the second problem is market power, because we think the leading tech companies use their market power to squash competition.
And is there evidence on that latter point?
I'm a little skeptical that there's been a lot of preclusion of dramatic innovation in this space.
This all smells to me like anti -bigness, which in antitrust land I'm always worried about Felix.
So let me push back.
One of the things that makes me deeply uncomfortable with the conversation about big tech that's happening in the U .S.
and this conversation, oh, let's break up big tech.
One of the many things that I'm uncomfortable with is throwing them all in one bucket and trading them all the same way.
So I'm here to answer your question.
I do think that bigness creates a very specific set of challenges when the companies involved have an advertising dominant model.
So if you think about social media, most social media is an advertising -based business model.
Now, you're absolutely correct that this is not stymied innovation.
So if you look at Snapchat, Snapchat is actually very popular.
Twitter. Twitter continues to thrive as a platform.
There are many other platforms that continue to thrive.
And yet from a business perspective, they struggle.
Why? Because if you're an advertiser, you're going to go to the dominant advertising platforms.
This is a very difficult thing to identify, young me, meaning you're making the case that there are unborn platforms that are not being proliferated because of this anti -competitive behavior.
I actually am making a slightly different argument, which is they proliferate, which is an indication of the value creation that they're capable of, and the fact that they're able to come up with alternatives that people find compelling.
What's less clear is whether or not they're going to be able to sustain themselves as a business unless they get gobbled up by one of the big players.
So if you think about Twitter, it's best chance for long -term success if it gets subsumed by one of the bigger players.
Similarly with Snapchat, once you reach a certain size and it becomes really, really difficult for any small competitor, no matter how much consumer adoration there is for that platform, it's hard for them to sustain themselves if they can't get into that advertising market.
But that's a specific case, but that covers a lot.
But that's a super interesting case.
That's a completely different than Amazon, and so the idea that we're trying to treat Amazon the way that we're treating Facebook the same is just...
But let's stay with the Facebook example, because it's such a powerful example, I think.
You're very concerned about the fact that no other platform will grow up to rival those, because taking together those four are too powerful.
So what you're going to see, and you're seeing now, are the three dominant platforms, Google slash Alphabet, and then you're seeing Facebook's entire portfolio, and then you're seeing Amazon.
Those are the three that you're seeing in the West.
And it's hard for me to imagine if we allow them to continue to grow.
It's hard for me to imagine another social media platform being able to sustain itself over the long term through an advertising model, which is different than saying they can't accumulate hundreds of millions of users.
Snapchat, basically anybody between the ages of 13 and 18 is addicted to Snapchat.
And by the way, they're being super innovative on the product front.
Twitter is a thriving platform.
It's not that big, but it's thriving.
Would it be able to sustain itself?
I don't know if I see enough indications that the house is burning down.
I mean, this is a very rapidly evolving space, and so I don't know why we have so much confidence that there's preemptory behavior going on here, when in fact, to your point, I see these platforms, I see them growing up.
Do they have sustainable business halls?
Maybe not. But is the house burning down really?
The big problem here is that, as always in competition policy, we're talking about a counterfactual.
Yes. So tell me, what's the evidence that will convince you that this is a serious issue that we should think about?
That is a great question.
Well, I mean, look, I don't want to be coy about this or tricky, but the burden of proof is on you.
The burden of proof is on the person who says, we should be undertaking anti -monopolistic behavior.
And I don't see it.
As Yangui pointed out, I see proliferating platforms.
I see innovation. In general, why do we worry about regulation?
We worry because it becomes a diffuse instrument to satisfy some political interests that is not well -focused.
And all of this big tech stuff has that feel to me.
Yeah, I agree that a lot of this big tech stuff has.
So for example, if we were talking about Amazon, my inputs into that conversation would be very different.
You find advertising to be very problematic, it seems.
Yeah. I mean, I think all of these big tech companies have a different set of problems.
And I think lumping Apple in with the rest of them is also absurd.
But I do think that when it comes to these advertising -based social media companies, the reason I have trouble with a social media company buying another social media company is that I think there is something, orders of magnitude, more powerful from a company perspective when they're able to mesh together
data from all of these different sources.
And so no other advertiser is going to have any reason to go anywhere other than Google or to Amazon or to Facebook.
What that means is that over time, the bigger you get and the more comprehensive your ecosystem becomes with lots and lots of different kinds of social media platforms, the harder it is for any new player to enter that space.
They can enter the space and they can achieve consumer traction, but over the longer term, whether or not they'll be able to achieve any kind of financial sustainability, that's the question.
I take your point, which is that does not sound like a good world.
I'm not anti -big. And I even hate the term big tech in many ways because it assumes that there's something evil about big.
I mean the network effects are wonderful, are beautiful, are really amazing.
The reason I think why we're struggling, if there weren't all these benefits to being big, this would have been a 10 -second conversation, right?
I think we just have to do this conversation again, honestly, because I think this is so important.
And yet the stakes are a little bit unclear in my mind about why we care.
And I think, Jung, you put it most clearly where you talked about how effectively this is just going to preempt competition in the advertising space.
But even there, I still feel like the burden of proof has not been satisfied.
I see the concern. I don't know if I see the actual manifestation of it.
And against that all, I worry that there's just a diffuse anti -bigness thing happening here, which I don't want to give way to.
And so I guess I'm ready to disagree in the sense that I worry that this is such a kind of playground for regulators to stop things that could otherwise be hugely beneficial.
So I guess my thinking on this is still a little bit...
It's a little messy.
It should be continued, right?
Yeah. So one intuition I have.
In some future episode, let's look at a really specific example.
Right. And maybe we can make a little more progress once it's less about the broad principles of what we should do, but about a really specific case where we can say, is this okay?
Is this not okay? That sounds great.
It's a great idea. Okay, so I wanted to talk about college.
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the amount of cynicism people are starting to experience or direct toward the entire enterprise of college, it has just gone up.
Yeah. And part of this has to do with admissions scandals and part of this has to do with student debt loads.
Yeah. And so I wanted to get at a really fundamental question.
And that is, why is college so expensive?
Mm -hmm. If you think back to when we went to college, actually, Felix, you paid nothing for college.
I paid $250 a semester.
Do you have any recollection of what?
Oh, God, no. I don't know what it was.
So what I will say is that over the past three decades, tuition, overall, has almost quadrupled.
And it's hard to lump all colleges together.
So the whole space actually consists of roughly three different segments.
So you have public colleges and universities.
And that includes two -year colleges, as well as big state schools.
The second category are private non -profit colleges from big Ivy Leagues like Harvard, all the way to small liberal arts colleges, of which there are hundreds.
And then, of course, there's this third segment of for -profit.
Across all three segments, tuition has just ballooned.
Dramatically. And so I really wanted to start out with two related questions.
One is, is this scandalous?
And why is it happening?
One way to maybe calibrate whether it's so unusual what is happening in higher education is did the cost of college and did the compensation of those who work in colleges, did it change much more quickly, say, than the compensation for lawyers, the compensation for doctors, the compensation for other service
providers? And so that's one, I think, important for us to say that in some sense, if you're thinking about it as the service sector in a broader economy, what is happening in higher education is not all that surprising and is not that unusual compared to other service sectors.
And that, I think, explains a piece of it.
But I think the problem with that is, in terms of explaining it fully, is that, in fact, higher ed expenses have grown faster than a whole bunch of other services expenses.
I mean, in a way, young me, just to push back, the way you framed it is why is college so expensive?
One could equally have framed it as college too cheap.
And I know that's counterintuitive.
But if you think about what is happening, one has to understand that part of what's driven this is the rising premium to college -educated workforce, which is earning a lot more than it used to relative to the high school educated labor force.
So in that sense, we know that college education, on average, is a really good investment, and on average is a hugely important piece of that puzzle.
But it's not as if it's so expensive, and yet we observe poor wage premium.
Although there is, I think, an important twist.
Everything you just pointed out, Meher, is exactly right.
Yes, absolutely, college degrees are a great deal, except 40 % of the people who start college don't actually finish.
And so then you're sort of in the worst of all worlds in that you have these very high costs and you have some level of debt, and you don't get the premium.
And so it's just a reality that many people start college and they will never finish.
I'm going to throw out some of the prevailing theories for why the costs have gone up.
I just want to get your reaction to some of the theories.
So one of the theories is if you think about it, organizations set price according to the perceived willingness of people to pay and their perceived ability to pay.
We know the willingness to pay for college is there.
Demand for college has never been higher.
And then the ability to pay is kind of infinite as long as people have access to federal financial aid.
Exactly. And so as long as the government continues to give federal student loans to anybody who wants one, which is kind of how it works right now, to be quite honest, of course you're going to see colleges and universities raise their prices because you can raise your price indiscriminately as long
as there's a willingness to pay and an ability to pay.
I think there's a piece of element of truth to that, for sure.
We've seen a dramatic expansion of both federal loan financing in addition to tax credits that have expanded over the last two to three decades.
It all sounds great until you realize that the beneficiaries of it are you and me, which is the administrators and the professors in a not -for -profit institution who get the excess rents and we're the ones benefiting from that.
What's ironic about that is that as colleges continue to raise their tuition, they also say, yeah, but financial aid is going up as well.
And what's ironic is if financial aid didn't go up, I mean, the argument is they would not have raised their tuition.
The part that I struggle with with this argument is that it's true for lots of other industries that demand increases over time.
And generally speaking, what keeps prices from rising is competition.
And so one of the things we have to think about is, is it really true that the market for colleges is somehow not competitive?
Think of airlines. There is like demand for travel is exploding.
How much do prices go up?
Not much. Why? Oh, because we have super tough competition.
And so are we saying there's something about competition between colleges that is not working the way we generally think competition works?
So this leads to a second theory.
And the second theory is that there is incredible competition, but not with respect to price.
And the competition is driven by our ranking systems.
So we have these ranking systems, and there's a lot of evidence that many college administrators are hugely motivated to increase their ranking.
One of the most straightforward ways to do that is to increase the number of students who apply.
And the way colleges have begun to compete with each other is through athletic facilities, amazing dormitories, health care.
If you think about our university campuses, we're essentially building mini cities, like miniature cities, which is unlike anywhere else in the world where we have to have our own health clinics.
We have to have our own food services, and that's just enormously expensive.
And so there's an arms race.
So there is this competitive dynamic.
But the one dimension along which colleges feel unencumbered is price.
I look at it slightly more positively in the sense that 50, 60 years ago, everybody was living in a highly regional local market.
You went to the local state school.
Now we live in a very integrated global market where an applicant to Harvard will come from Bombay or Shanghai, as much as they'll come from London or New York or Cambridge.
That's very new. And so I think what we've seen is this tremendous consolidation into a global market like in other industries.
And this is, I think, the really perverse part of this, young me, is part of what we're doing when we compete in these places is we compete for the most interesting student population.
And so part of what rising list prices reflect, because a lot of this is about list prices, sticker prices as opposed to net prices, right?
And so you raise your sticker prices so that you can create the heterogeneity in the pool that you want, because there's a whole lot of price discrimination going on here.
Like not everyone's paying sticker.
Let's just be clear, right?
And in fact, what you're getting is price discrimination.
You're plucking off people who can pay, using that to subsidize the population that you want to create.
So it allows you to mold the student body in a way that you couldn't if you didn't have that kind of pricing flexibility.
That's a dimension of the competition, which is actually quite positive, I think.
The amenities version, I think, is less nice, right?
But I think this is a piece of it that's actually a little bit more beneficial.
So I'll say maybe two things.
If you look at international comparisons, what you pointed out, young me, yes, I only paid $250 for my university education as a semester, but it did not come with anything, right?
So I had to look in the city of Zurich.
I had to have an apartment that was like super expensive, but no one looks at that and says, oh my God, university education is really expensive.
So there are all these problems with international comparisons.
If you take the amenities piece, it's actually not quite as big as you might imagine.
It's not good enough to sort of really explain.
It's not going to explain everything, but it's a piece of it.
It's a piece of it, but I think it's small.
Nothing explains all of it.
But I think it's a smaller piece than people's intuition because it's so visible because they're basically what are they built for?
They're built for it to impress the parents when they visit.
But the expense is associated with administrative staff.
That is far outpaced faculty salaries, for example.
Faculty salaries basically don't move.
Exactly. But nobody should feel sorry for us.
We're very happy. Well, wait a second.
So I want to make sure I get the facts right.
So administration and faculty compensation have not moved.
And the reason for this, think about it.
It's the split between the adjuncts.
Exactly. So the way that colleges and universities have grown their faculty is through part -time adjunct, a lot of faculty who are not paid well at all.
But it's the growth in the administrative staff that really raises eyebrows.
But this is, I think, what's kind of interesting to me, which is one way to think about this integrating global marketplace.
It made universities and colleges much more entrepreneurial.
And so you can say, well, that's nasty.
And they're acting like profit maximizers may be true.
But they're doing things like this.
They're doing all the things that you would think entrepreneurs would do when you're living in a global market and you're trying to attract a student.
If you're running Swarthmore, you're trying to attract a Chinese student just as much as you're trying to attract a Pennsylvania student.
But this speaks to the growth in student services and the growth of administration.
So for example, if you have all of these essentially micro segments now of your student body because you want this beautifully diverse class, you need to make sure they're all integrated.
You need translators, and you need a huge financial aid staff.
Someone wants to row and someone wants to play lacrosse.
But you also have to have badminton, because that's really big in some parts of the world.
And suddenly, the services piece just starts to balloon.
Because that's really big.
Yeah, exactly. But does that feel...I mean, is that bad?
I mean, what's wrong with proliferating services that allow people at a critical time in their life to kind of figure out what they want to do?
I mean, it doesn't feel to me like wastage.
So I totally agree with you, Mihir.
But there are two, I think, really big differences between that story and the reality.
The first one is what I mentioned earlier, is that people...40 % don't finish, right?
That's a big number.
The second piece that doesn't work quite right is academically gifted, low -income students.
They don't apply to the places where they could get the most general forms of financial aid.
And so I think in order to sort of tell the good story that we would love to tell, I think we need to be super serious about what do we do about people who don't finish?
What do we do about people who have all this debt, and then they don't graduate?
And then what do we do about people who don't have backgrounds that make them likely apply to the places that can afford them?
Felix, I think your point is such a good one.
There are so many people getting lost in this shuffle.
But there's a second piece too, which is what's astonishing to me is not just the rise in the level of tuition at the sticker price, but the consistency of tuitions across schools.
So basically, any liberal arts college, just pick one out of the hat.
Within $5 ,000, it's the same price.
I mean, there's a consistency.
And that, I think, has a pernicious element.
If this were a truly healthy market, you could decide you're going to pay for the full -service experience because you want the athletic facilities and you want everything.
But there should be some high -quality version of what you got in Zurich, which is a stripped -down version of something that is very low -priced.
I will find my own apartment.
I don't need all this other stuff.
I just want my degree.
And I want a good degree.
I want a good education.
And I think what we're missing in our educational system are just these alternatives for people to begin to opt into.
And instead, what we've got is just a lot of inflation.
Inflation of services, and therefore inflation of prices.
That's, I think, a really interesting point.
I think only two explanations that come to my mind to explain why that isn't happening.
One, of course, is price -fixing inclusion.
But the other possibilities are the traditional explanation about education expenses, which is they're signaling devices, right?
So they're efforts to try to signal that you're high -quality.
And when you go towards the low -cost provider, and these signal - Although you could solve that with selectivity.
If you say we're going to have the most selective admissions filter, I'm just not saying that's the answer.
I'm saying that in a healthy market, you would expect to see lots of variation.
Yeah, I think the best analogy that I can think of is there was a time in the airline industry where YATA regulated the prices.
And then what you got is exactly what we have in education.
You got competition on quality.
And you got these beautiful meals, and you have a better service, and so on and so on.
And then deregulation came.
And then all of a sudden things like, oh, Southwest Airlines.
And so, like, what's the Southwest Airlines line of higher education?
Where I say I know there's not going to be food.
There's not going to be a canteen.
There's not going to be housing.
There's not going to be great sports facilities.
But like what you said it beautifully, Yami, is like all I want is that degree.
And I don't really care about anything else.
And that is interesting.
Yeah, final question.
So in the political sphere, lots of ideas being floated about how to fund these rising tuition costs.
There's an idea to forgive all student debt.
One time forgiveness of all student debt.
Make college free for everyone.
What do you think of some of these ideas floating out?
Just real quick. We don't have time to go deep into it.
I'll give you my fast version.
I mean, free college for all doesn't make sense to me.
In part because it's a windfall to a lot of high -income people.
And it just is a very expensive way to solve that problem.
And oh, by the way, that just means more rents for the professors and the administrators.
It's the worst of progressive policy because it goes to people who don't really need the support.
It's as poorly targeted as you can go.
What about forgiveness?
Debt forgiveness? That's a much harder question, I think, in my mind.
I actually, and we do have some forgiveness in place now with these new income -based repayment programs, which are actually really interesting.
The others are interesting.
People don't understand them as much as they should.
I don't believe in any kind of wholesale efforts to do this.
But I could imagine gradual efforts and I could imagine forgiveness in certain dimensions, for sure.
But I don't believe in the wholesale version.
OK, guys, you have picks for me?
I do. I wanted to recommend recommendations.
And these are music recommendations.
I find that now, in part because of digital technology, the wealth of music that we have access to is just completely overwhelming.
I mean, there's so many artists.
I'm reasonably interested in lots of types of music.
And I look at lists of music and musicians and I barely recognize names because there's just like this explosion in creativity and the number of artists that do interesting things is, I think, really endless.
And so for music, I find that Pitchfork, this website, is just super hard to beat.
I mean, they do such a great job, both canvassing the landscape, finding artists.
So, for instance, here is a list of music that you probably missed during the winter.
But actually, you should have paid attention.
You listen to that.
You go, oh, my God, you are so right.
I should have paid attention.
And they have all the genres.
And they have all of these.
Even for you, Felix, like latke and poke music.
That's right, yes. So you will not believe.
Two days ago, I discovered this Korean electronic dance music person.
And it's just like a revolution.
Fantastic. Oh, my God, how did I miss her?
Which is different than K -pop because I listen to K -pop.
Oh, K -pop is nice, but you're always, you know, it's like sort of a sugar high.
Come on, young me. Get with it.
I'm sorry. But electronic dance music is a little more interesting.
That's what you're into.
By the way, what's the most recent thing you've listened to, Mehe?
The Clash. So I've recently been loving this podcast about The Clash by Chuck D called Stay Free.
And it led to Spotify recommending a lot of songs to me.
I was really impressed with their...
How they picked up on that.
Yeah, they did a great job of recommending that.
I wonder how many of our listeners know who The Clash.
Oh, my God. Go listen to Stay Free, the podcast by Chuck D.
My son was over at our house with some friends.
And I made a reference to some musical act from the 90s.
And his friend said, who?
And my son turned to me, he said, it's some music from the late 1900s.
Nice. From the late 1900s.
That's how you refer to that era, which is technically true, I guess.
I guess. Anyway. Okay, Mehear, you have a pick?
I do, it's a little bit of a strange kind of travel hack, or maybe a life hack.
In the last two years, 80 % of all my haircuts have been not at home.
Wait a minute. That means 20 % are at home?
You cut your hair at home?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm saying that when I travel, I get a haircut.
Oh, oh, home is where you leave.
So now I think it's been part of my...
I just picture you put a bow on your head.
It looks like that, I know.
But no, in fact, now when I travel, I almost always get a haircut.
And it's a fantastically serendipitous...
That's so brave. Well, I don't care that much about the outcome.
So it doesn't matter to me, but it's a fantastically serendipitous experience.
You get to engage in a local setting, which you would normally never engage in, and you have to talk to the barber.
You know, you have like a really nice experience.
Yeah, it's an interesting experience, yeah.
It's an interesting experience, and I find like...
So recently, not recently, last year I also...
But it's cheating. You're cheating on your regular barber.
But I don't really...
My regular barber is not like a big thing for me, and I love the serendipity of it.
And when you travel, try to engage in local services more than you would normally.
And haircuts are a super easy way to do it.
And the only downside is...
Super risky, super risky.
Also, cheating on your regular hairdresser, not okay.
I don't approve. I would never cheat on Steven.
Okay, you have a deeper relationship.
I have a funny Turkish haircut story where at the end of the haircut...
It happened so quickly, I couldn't respond.
They put alcohol on my ears, and they set them on fire to burn off the hair.
Oh my God, I have to try this.
Are you kidding? See, it's actually because it's just...
It's like a baked Alaska on your ear.
That is a spectacular...
See, this is what I'm talking about.
This is why you go do this.
Young me, you have to start.
Steven will understand.
No, it's not gonna happen, but I can live vicariously through your stories.
Okay, my recommendation this week is stand -up comedy.
Hassan Minaj, how have I missed this person?
Yeah, he's pretty great.
The Patriot Act? No, this is the home...
I'm behind. Homecoming King, which is two years old.
How have I missed him?
He's pretty great. I don't even like stand -up comedy anymore, and the reason I don't like it that much anymore is that in so many cases, the humor comes from showcasing some kind of provocation or edge or some vulgarity or something, right?
And this is a guy that uses humor to...
There's no other way to put it, and understanding of different cultures.
It's really phenomenal.
I was so impressed.
Oh, that's great. So if you haven't seen it on Netflix, check out Hassan Minaj.
Fantastic. Three good recommendations...
Well, two, except for New Years.
Oh, my, come on. We're gonna convert her for that.
Okay, thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the HBR Presents Network.
Thanks for watching.
