Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone, you're listening to after hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Felix.
I'm Mi here. How are you guys doing tonight?
We're okay. It has been so long since we've been in the same room together.
I know. Remember those cozy late night tapings we used to do?
Yeah. The only thing that feels the same about that now is that I can tell Felix is drinking wine over there.
Exactly. I take the title of the show really seriously.
Although I will say like many things that are now remote, I feel so glad that we had those sessions in person because then it makes the remote stuff so much better.
So true. Does this mean we never really have to be in the same room together?
No, no, no, no. Well, you know, call my people.
We'll see what we can do.
You think your calendar is going to be hard.
I don't know. Talk to my people.
So before we get into tonight's episode, we wanted to tell everyone that if you are interested in sending us your questions and comments about after hours, we wanted to remind you of our email address.
Which is after hours at HBS .edu.
And we love hearing from listeners and we love the feedback.
We love the questions.
If you have ideas for episodes, topics we should talk about, please let us know.
Yeah, that would be great.
And you know, if you're moved to on your podcast app or whatever, feel free to rate and review it.
Yes. For those of you who have already done that, thank you so much.
It's really wonderful.
So Mihir you had an idea for what we should talk about tonight.
Well, it just struck me that obviously we love talking about companies that are in the headlines and we love doing Newsy things, but there are also companies that we pay attention to that we think are super exciting, but that aren't in like the Newsy headline.
Not on the title page, right?
Yeah, not on the front page, but really interesting.
We thought this would be a great occasion to like surface some of those companies because I think they're kind of companies that are doing really interesting stuff and they're changing industries, but they don't maybe get the attention that we think they deserve.
I love this idea. It's fantastic.
I'm curious what companies you follow.
Yeah. Okay, let's do it.
Okay, Felix. Do you have one?
Yeah, so you must have noticed when you buy things online, almost everything you buy these days, you get offered financing and it's really interesting because it's even for really mundane small amounts of money you buy five pencils and then when you check out the question is, oh, do you want to pay
in for easy installments?
And it's really interesting because it's typically interest free and there are many companies in that space that do this.
So after pay a firm, Klarna, clear pay.
And there are two things that I find really interesting.
The first one is if you're the kind of consumer that pays on time and say it's like for easy installments, you can literally get money for free.
And a question is, you know, whenever you see a business model where you say, oh, it's money for free.
It's like, oh, what is going on here?
And what is going on?
They're charging the retailers and they're charging the retailers often more than the retailers would have to pay if someone paid with a credit card.
And that to me was really when I first paid attention to these companies.
I was like, how do you do this?
In part, of course, it's the low interest environment, right?
But it's also that there's a generation of younger consumers who are both hesitant to use their credit card or don't have a credit card in the first place.
There's this big movement from credit cards to its debit cards because it feels safer, more responsible and so on and so on.
And so I think one reason why the retailers are happy to pay is because they're reaching a segment that you can't easily reach if you do credit card transactions.
I think this is so fascinating, Felix.
I mean, in part because normally we think a seller would provide financing sometimes.
We can think about a bank via credit card providing financing and that's part of an ongoing relationship.
And here it's almost like a spot market provision of credit by a firm and they will take the credit risk because there is credit risk, right?
They are taking credit risk because you may not pay the pencils.
But it's being funded by not the consumer or the borrower, but they get compensated for that credit risk by the merchant fees, right?
Yeah. I think that's completely fascinating.
I completely agree.
I started paying attention to this with a firm because they have a partnership with Peloton.
And in fact, I think close to 30 % of their revenue comes from that deal with Peloton and when you see them at checkout, it's a curious thing because you have credit card options.
Right. It's in competition.
Yes. Yes. And then you have this other thing and for a player like a firm, if they choose their partners carefully, so Peloton being a great example, what you're doing is you're sort of self -selecting your customer base a little bit.
Right. There's still risk, but you're beginning to mitigate that risk just by virtue of who tends to come to that website and browse for that particular item.
I think that's what is really striking me about it, which is you're not doing any credit screening, but the screening you're doing is via the merchant and if you play it right, I think you're exactly right.
You're using merchants as screening mechanisms.
That's a totally different way to think about the provision of credit in these markets.
And there are two interesting developments that I think maybe point to the future where this is headed.
One is that over time, as it gets more popular in the US, there is, of course, a bigger issue with credit risk.
And then, of course, the interest rates can be very high or the punishment late fees can be really quite dramatic.
And then the question is, for how many consumers, it's just too much temptation and who will fall prey to the temptation and then end up in financial difficulty.
And as I think about the prospect of these companies, a firm and others, on an optimistic day, when I think most consumers are quite responsible with their finances, I think they have found something really interesting.
When I'm a little more pessimistic about, oh, my God, this was something that tempted so many people into doing things that were not financially responsible, then I think the prospects of these companies is probably much more limited because they'll be regulated, not unlike credit cards.
And then many of these opportunities will go away.
I think this is why this is an interesting one to keep your eye on because fintech companies like this can end up with a business that does degrade over time for precisely the reason that you described.
So right now, they can be quite choosy about the vendors they partner with.
But over time, as they grow, they have to be less choosy.
They start to seek out more partnerships and there's more degradation in the quality of those consumers as well.
And so part of this is a question of how big the high quality part of this market is.
And so I would imagine that all of the bigger players right now are just playing a wait and see game.
I mean, they can take a look at these smaller players, like a firm and see how big they start to get.
And whether or not it's something worth jumping into.
Yeah, you know, when the firm first had the partnership with Walmart, of course, on the one hand, you can think, oh my God, you get to work with Walmart.
That's really amazing because you can only imagine the volume of business that that potentially brings.
But at the same time, that moment to your point, young me heterogeneity among consumers just skyrockets.
Right. Definitely such an interesting space to pay attention to.
Yeah, that's a great one.
That's a great one.
Okay here, what have you been keeping your eye on?
Yeah, so this is a really different one from the one that Felix just mentioned, but it's a company that's been around a while, but they're doing interesting things and in new ways.
The company's Patagonia and Patagonia is of course the outerwear brand.
But the interesting thing they've done recently that I was really caught my eye for some reason and I think goes to kind of almost like brand extension kinds of things.
So they are going into food and they have gotten into food in a big way.
I've seen that. It was so weird.
Like it was so strange.
I saw a poop on a shelf and Patagonia.
How did that happen?
Exactly. And it's not just trail mix, right?
They're doing salmon and mackerel and beer and all kinds of stuff and it is not a fly -by -night kind of like let's try to sell food, right?
It is actually deeply thought out about sustainability like they've done by the way in their garments and in their outerwear.
And I just thought to myself, wow, when I see like a clothing company starts selling food, I'm like, this doesn't make any sense, right?
I'm like, come on, people.
But then I looked into it and I was like, wow, they're doing it super thoughtfully.
They've actually been doing it for five or six years.
They now have this thing called Patagonia Provisions, which is a real business and selling a lot of stuff.
It's very expensive.
It's very high quality and it's very tasty.
The salmon is like absolutely amazing.
But to see somebody like that make that move was striking.
So I'm looking forward to seeing what Patagonia can do.
So I agree with you and to underscore one thing you said, when Patagonia does something, it's not just brand washing.
This is a company that is at the upper echelon in terms of trying to be as true as possible to the words they say about sustainability.
And I think what's fascinating about this is that we tend to think of companies' core competencies as manifesting in the products or services they sell.
And so that we think, oh, you sell clothing.
And so your core competency must be in clothing or oh, you sell energy bars.
So your core competency must be in nuts and raisins.
Patagonia, even though they have historically sold clothing and outdoor stuff, their core competency is actually in responsible sourcing.
They go back deep, deep, deep into their supply chain and try to ensure that in the food case from earth to mouth every single piece of that.
And they do that with clothing.
And so it's sort of taking that same core competency.
We know how to sift through the literally thousands of potential partners in that supply chain and create higher standards and identify the ones that we want to work with so that we can bring you something we feel proud of.
And what's so interesting about this is I saw Patagonia provisions for the first time in IKEA.
And first I thought, this makes no sense whatsoever.
And then, of course, to your point, young me, what's common across those both of these companies are amazing at supply chain management.
I remember having taught a case a little while ago how IKEA makes sure that the carpets that they sell that they're produced under responsible conditions.
And you would think, you know, you go to a carpet company and that's not so terrible until you realize that much of what they sell is produced almost in family firms, if you will, for the entire family in typically poor countries like India would produce carpets.
And so the depth of expertise that you need to have in order to know that you still source responsibly, it's just amazing.
And so it looks like the two companies have no overlap, except if you care about responsible sourcing, that's a match made in heaven.
I mean, to the point on standards, they've actually, I think, helped pioneer this new standard of organic, which is about young me, to your point, the soil.
It's about like thinking about how soil is treated and regenerated.
And I just thought it was wonderful to see a company, which is really the real deal on sustainability, you know, the real deal on corporate purpose undertake this.
So, you know, wishing them well, it's complicated and it's high priced.
It is. They have a new CEO too, I think.
Indeed. They just got a new CEO.
So, yeah, super interesting and something to watch.
Oh, that's a good one.
So young me, what do you got?
So mine is going to take us in a different direction.
So I wanted to ask if you guys had heard about or experimented with Clubhouse.
I have not heard of Clubhouse.
I've heard about it, but not really experimented much.
So imagine a social media platform where you log in and all the interaction is live.
So there's no record of any past conversations.
There's no feed to look at.
It's live and it's totally audio based.
And at any given moment when you go in, there are lots of different rooms active and you can walk into these rooms and you can listen in on real conversations happening in real time.
That's what Clubhouse is.
It is as we speak, the fastest growing social media app in the world, even though it's not open to the public yet.
It's by invitation only.
So the way it works right now is once you're invited, you get one other invite.
So you can invite one other person.
So imagine walking into a room where Elon Musk is talking, interrogating the CEO of Robin Hood, asking him really tough questions about how he handled the recent GameStop incident.
That was a Clubhouse conversation that drew thousands of listeners.
Or you go into another room and there's Oprah having a conversation with Chris Rock, or you go into another room where they're talking about Black Lives Matter.
There's just dozens and dozens of these rooms about politics, entertainment, technology, whatever.
But once the conversation ends, that's it.
There's no record of it.
They disappear forever.
So do I know what the conversation is before I choose a room?
Yes, you do. There's a topic.
Yes, and you can follow people.
So if they start to host a room, you can host a conversation.
And if you're a moderator, you have control over who you let speak.
And sometimes you can let people in the crowd speak.
Sometimes you don't, but it's really, really fascinating.
It seems like part of the appeal now is like a space where you can have conversations amongst friends in honest ways.
It'll disappear and you don't have to worry in some sense about whoever else in the world might want to comment on what you're saying.
Is that part of the appeal, young me?
I think there are many layers of the appeal recently.
There was a little bit of a frenzy as people realize that Mark Zuckerberg had gone into a conversation because he doesn't make a lot of public appearances.
So as an opportunity to just hop in and hear what he had to say and who was he talking to and what was that conversation like?
So there's a little bit of that.
But there's also the other thing that's more intimate that you described.
So for example, you could imagine us doing a live after hours with our listeners in a clubhouse and letting our listeners speak and engage with us.
On the other hand, it's messy.
In other words, it reinforces, it reflects all that's good and bad in how we interact with each other.
How do you moderate something like this?
It can get ugly. It's unbelievable how quickly a social hierarchy has formed already.
And it's one more performative thing.
Our lives are performative in so many ways, and it's one more performative platform for all of us.
One element of this that I find very interesting.
You know how in European television, small group conversations totally dominate the evening?
Basically from 10 to 2 in the morning, it's groups from, I don't know, 5 to 10, 12 people, sometimes a live audience, sometimes not a live audience.
And you hear everything, you know, wonder about the future of electric cars, to politics, to whatever.
Some of what you described that I just get to listen to thoughtful, maybe famous, maybe not so famous people who have real expertise in something.
I've actually always really enjoyed being just, you know, a participant in these conversations.
That's super interesting, I didn't know about it.
Youngme, I'm struck because this is not an old company, right?
This is like less than a year old.
Very new. I wonder how you think about how it grows as you liberalize the opening up of it.
So like, what happens as it becomes more and more people coming in and the air of exclusivity goes away?
So right now there's like this tech angle on it and who knows going to drop by?
Mark Zuckerberg is going to drop by.
But it seems like over time, what's going to happen is it's going to become a place to have conversations.
I don't know if it can sustain itself with its current cache, but it seems like the longer run story is a story about facilitating conversations that are hard to facilitate in public spaces.
Is that where it's going?
So I think it's unclear.
I mean, so some people have likened it to the new Twitter.
If you just look at the metrics of Twitter, not a lot of people use Twitter.
It's a very small social media platform and it's heavily dominated by politicians and journalists and so on.
And yet it's quite influential because of the way what happens on Twitter spreads throughout our entire information ecosystem.
So it could end up being that.
But one of the things I found compelling about it is when I was on it, you immediately think of additional use cases.
So I immediately thought of our podcast, for example, or I immediately thought of all the things we do in our classroom and how different it would be to do something on Clubhouse Live with people around the world.
There is also something very exciting about the live nature of it, this unexpected quality.
So there was recently a conversation, a chat room where people were complaining pretty viciously about how the San Francisco district attorney has handled crime in the city and people were just going and just complaining with stories.
And he got on and he entered the room.
And suddenly he was there and he was responding to questions.
And it was incredible theater on the one hand, but it was also an incredible moment of human interaction that we rarely get to see in real time.
And so as I said, we talk about these companies as companies were keeping an eye on and I think that's the right way to frame it.
I mean, is this a winner?
Is this a loser? Who knows?
But it's one that I'm keeping an eye on.
So Felix, did you have another one?
I do. I wanted to talk about a company called Sharecare, which is one of the digital health startups.
And I first noticed them because they seem to be in the news every other week because they're buying another startup.
I think they've raised 400, 500 million dollars, something like this, but then it's just like the main activity seems to be buying lots of other companies and the range of companies that they buy really surprised me.
So I'll give you a couple of recent examples.
They bought Mind Sciences, which is a company that produces apps that help you with mental health.
They bought White Hat AI, which is a company that is good at detecting insurance fraud in particular in the health sector.
And then most recently they bought a company called Doc AI and they identify health gaps.
And when I look at this list, at first, it made like no sense to me.
And now I think what they're doing is they're essentially placing themselves right in the middle between the patient and health insurance company.
And sure enough, if you look at the details, how are they financed?
Anthem is now one of their main investors.
And so I think what they're trying to do is a more sophisticated version of medical health records, both helping with the generation of information, but then also the processing of that information so that we can help people lead healthier lives.
And it's everything from coaching you about physical exercise, being mindful about what you eat, getting enough sleep.
But then also on the insurer side, making sure that you had a patient who went to a hospital and is there fraud in how the patient gets billed and so on and so on.
So they literally sit in between.
And it's an interesting platform in the sense that it brings together insurance companies and patients and consumers, I think, in a really interesting novel way.
And you won't be surprised that they're thinking about going public via...
Via SPAC. Of course, via SPAC.
Brings it all together.
Can I tell you that we have this vision of the startup as being a few people in a garage doing something, but there is this whole different model now, where you have someone sitting at the top of something, looking across the market and recognizing that the way to do this most efficiently is to begin to
cobble the pieces together from what's out there and put them on a shared platform and assemble a company in this way.
And you see this increasingly with people who are sort of relatively sophisticated in how they think about market position and also how they think about how they're going to finance the thing going forward.
And so as I was thinking about that, I thought, oh, I bet this is a SPAC target.
Yeah, so I confess the digital health space is so fascinating and it's exploding, obviously, post -COVID.
And this sounds fascinating, but it also has these kind of hallmarks in my mind of, like, trouble.
Like, you know, it was just like a little bit of, like, okay, so we're going to get, like, a bunch of money from insurers and we're going to do a bunch of acquisitions and we're going to bundle it all together.
It feels like, oh, God.
But having said that, insurers want to be closer to the users.
They want to build these wellness platforms.
And this sounds like that's what it's kind of going towards, right?
And insurers realize there's huge value from building that.
But I confess, like, this is like in finance land, this is like a roll -up.
You know, roll -ups have this characteristic that you're like, yeah, it could work out great, but it also is like a nightmare, you know.
But it's super interesting.
It reminds me a little bit in the early years of the digital transition when there was a recognition that you have to transform your own company.
But it seems so challenging because you didn't have the right talent and didn't know how to do it.
And then moving a big organization basically was hopeless.
And somehow the magic here is that someone from the outside actually might just see how to provide these novel services, but also think very creatively about how to attach them to the big companies that exist, like the big insurance companies or on the consumer side, the big WebMDs and so on.
So I feel like oddly enough, my next one is something to do with this as well, which is in the healthcare space.
But actually going after drug development.
So EQRX is about a year plus old and they've already raised $750 million.
And they're saying they are going to reinvent drug development.
So you might think to yourself, well, wait a second.
This is like the province of big pharma and this is the province of maybe biotech -y kind of companies who get a compound or CRISPR, who does a technology.
And their point of view is, no, that's not what we're going to do.
We're going to make drug development faster and cheaper and then pass on those savings to consumers.
And as I've said, they've already raised $750 million on the promise of doing this.
So what is their real strategy?
And it's a little bit foggy, but it is basically to create drugs that are quote unquote, fast followers.
So basically to say, okay, young me, big pharma is going to have a patent on something.
And Felix is like a generic competitor, but in between there, because the generic doesn't come on until much later in between there, there's a fast follower, which is somebody who's going to do maybe things slightly differently, a whole lot cheaper.
And we're going to develop that compound and then release it into the market and dramatically reduce prices.
But what about patent protection?
So their view is that they can find compounds that are sufficiently different to basically, because you're right, Felix.
So the question is, how do you navigate the patent that young me, big pharma has?
But their view is somehow that we're going to be able to do what no one really has done, which is to create things that are sufficiently similar, but they'll do it in a way that will this huge valley in between big pharma, patented drug, and generic Felix will somehow be bridged.
And by the way, they're going after oncology first.
So they're not messing around, right.
And they're in licensing compounds that are a little bit later stage.
So just imagine like we don't think about startups in licensing technology.
So this goes to you, Felix.
I think the reason that your story resonated with me is I felt like it was a little similar, which is let's raise a bunch of money, but then we're going to spend it better.
We're going to somehow refine this process.
And there's a part of me, which is like power to you for trying to go after drug discovery.
Cause what could be a more noble pursuit, you know, in many ways, on the other hand, it feels like, what are we talking about here?
Because somehow you think drug discovery, which is, by the way, attracted some of the best minds in pharma and biotech for the last two decades, you figured out a way around it somehow.
It's fascinating to me, because if I understand it correctly, they're not really inventing around or taking compounds.
That we understand.
And the secret is in the combination of these compounds.
Yeah. And by the way, they've been pretty vague about what they're going to do, just to be clear, there's a huge buzz around it, but they've been pretty vague.
But I think the idea is that there's broad class of biosimilars, which allow you to be close enough, but different.
And the idea is that in that class, if we can find them quickly, then we can be that fast follower.
It's almost like a VC -like approach, which is I'm an in -license, whatever I think is the best thing.
I feel a little bit like we've hit a new inflection point when it comes to biotech and pharma in the Cambridge Boston area.
And this is an example of one that's right in our backyard, right?
Yeah, exactly. And you're seeing all of the positive virtuous cycles that Silicon Valley has been able to build around technology.
Exactly. Because they're in the backyard.
I mean, they have proximity to some, I mean, if you look at the people who they have recruited to help them think this through.
It's amazing. It is an incredible set of heavyweights.
It is really different, I think, than the traditional biotech model, which was a little bit of like there's a person in a garage who's got some idea about Alzheimer's, right?
That's the way we used to think about this world.
And these folks are like, no, no, no, no, no.
It's all process. It's all AI -driven.
And it's all like, we're going to screen and we're going to find the compound and then in license it and then go.
Which sounds great.
Super exciting. Yeah, it's a really neat company to look at.
Yummy, did you have one more?
I did, but it's unrelated to these.
That's perfect. Let me guess, you're going to have like 10 year olds designing drugs on the net.
In a very different direction.
So, you know, we tend to write off companies after they've reached the end of some natural narrative arc, but sometimes they actually rewrite the ending.
So for example, remember the time we thought Best Buy was dead and then somehow they managed to survive.
Felix knows a lot about this because he studied this company very deeply, but not only managed to survive, but continues to thrive.
In one of our recent episodes, here, you mentioned that you were keeping an eye on Barnes and Noble, a retailer we had given up for dead and might be able to rewrite a different ending.
So the company that I am keeping an eye on is the one that we have maligned and that is WeWork.
So they have quietly begun working to try to rebuild themselves.
This is a company that has shed a ton of costs.
They've gotten rid of a lot of the extravagances that made us all so skeptical of what they were doing.
They got rid of their founder, of course, they rebuilt the board, they brought in a new CEO and importantly, they have now laid out a path to profitability that doesn't look like wishful thinking anymore.
They're really focused on enterprise companies that are looking for more flexible workspaces as they think about the future of work from home and remote work.
They're adding some revenue lines now that actually make sense.
So, for example, they have launched a business solutions unit to help small and medium sized businesses handle things like HR and payroll.
So I'm not saying they're out of the woods, but it's really interesting to watch.
The core concept itself has always been sound, right?
We've never doubted that.
It's always been sound.
And because more companies are making flexible workspaces a central part of their operating model, there remains a nice opportunity.
So they are quietly beginning to rebuild and it is really something to watch.
They're even murmuring about going public in a much more humble way.
Maybe via SPAC. But it wouldn't surprise me if this company figured out a way to get to the other side and become a legitimate company on a much stronger foundation.
Do you remember even before it became obvious that it probably wasn't as valuable as some investors had assumed at some point in time?
As large as WeWork and it's profitable, but it's nothing to write home about.
I mean, should I think in the best of worlds, WeWork gets to replicate what Regis has done for many years, or is it somehow different, more interesting, perhaps more profitable?
I don't know if it's more interesting, but what I would say is I think they have an opportunity to do it in a way that feels more up to date.
So in other words, I would now characterize their innovation as a more incremental kind of innovation as opposed to the kind of radical innovation they were preaching earlier.
But is the industry ripe for some incremental innovation?
Probably. So that's what I'm saying.
I think the goals are more modest, not so crazy and fantastical.
But so for example, I think some of the ways they're thinking about decentralized services, I do think when you're working from a blank slate, there is an opportunity to do some things that are quite different.
And by the way, I wouldn't discount the fact that the brand still has some equity in it, so there's something there as well.
So, I mean, we'll have to wait and see.
I don't want to oversell it.
I think it would be wonderful to see a happy ending there, right?
It would just be great because I think to your point, there is something interesting there.
I think they are different from Regis for the reason you said young me, which is, you know, Regis is like a real estate play in a way, but if you conceive of it as a service to small and medium enterprises that are trying to think about location, but also think about a whole bunch of other things, it
could be interesting.
It would be wonderful because there's lots of great people who work there, and it'd be nice to have a happy ending in many ways to that story.
And what I always loved about WeWork, it was a cultural force.
Even for companies that have not worked with WeWork, what the office today looks like, an updated office, WeWork had a huge amount of influence on choice of furniture and looks and how people feel in office.
So I always like that at the core, there was something really interesting and then somehow it got attached to a fable of a business story that wasn't much of a story.
But the cultural force, I think if they can revive that one way or another, that would be really exciting to see.
If you could rewrite history and they had just stuck to the core value proposition, which was a much more modernized version of short term office leasing, there was something compelling there and probably space for a new player in the market.
And so now they're leaning back into that core value proposition and building it out, I think, in somewhat interesting ways.
That's a great one.
Okay, picks. So I'm going to do a thematic recommendation.
And my thematic recommendation is I have been really enamored with two shows on Netflix, both of which are French.
Wait, are you squeezing in two recommendations basically?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It's thematic. It's one thing.
It's one theme. It's one theme.
So it's French language, Netflix.
So one is Lupin. Have you seen it?
I have seen it. So charming.
It's so charming, yeah.
And the first episode starts with a heist, but it's a heist, like a jaunty heist, any show that starts with an upbeat heist.
I'm hooked, completely hooked.
Yeah, totally, totally.
And it's wonderful because in every episode there is some caper.
Yeah. There's some way he manages to outwit someone else or outwit the authorities.
And it's based on a, I guess, a historic French set of novels about a detective, which is kind of an interesting piece of actual property that hasn't been actually used before.
It's an interesting story because it goes back into the past of this immigrant into the French culture.
Exactly. And it's got a real nice backstory between a father and a son, and it's really lovely.
It's lovely. And the main character is just utterly charismatic.
I find him completely.
Yeah, so good. She is so wonderful.
So and then the other one is called Call My Agent.
Oh yeah. And it's a show about, have you seen it?
Yes, it's fantastic.
It's so wonderful. It's such candy.
I mean, these are not deep shows.
Wait, what is this about?
I have not seen it.
They're not deep philosophical shows.
This is a show that is set in a Parisian talent agency where there, these four agents who represent some of the biggest movie stars or television stars or music stars in the French entertainment industry.
And what's really fun about it is every episode features some amazing French actor or personality.
So Isabella Gianni is in one show.
You know, sometimes they'll bring on a character who's like this famous rapper or something and you've never heard of them and then you Google them and you realize, oh no, that's actually a real famous rapper in France.
Some of them you'll recognize, some of them you won't.
And everybody is so unusual, quirky, you cannot possibly imagine how this business can work.
And then in fact, somewhere in the middle of the show, there is an outside investor who comes in, who tries to tame the wild horse.
And you can only imagine what that's like.
So it's really fantastic.
That sounds great. We, we, fantastic.
I highly recommend it.
So Felix. You know how when we hear about a social media platform, we sort of have this image of the people who are on this platform.
And of course, when we hear Reddit these days, we're thinking about these overly excited day traders and we sometimes forget that just like the variety of groups that are out there and the little communities that they collect around interest is just absolutely amazing.
And so I wanted to recommend two subreddits that really make my day on a regular basis.
One is called made me smile and it's literally, that's what it is.
People see things somewhere on the web or they experience things.
So I recently saw a story, a family actually posted the story where their older son had seen a commercial about toothpaste and the commercial said brushing alone will actually not help tooth decay.
And so for the past five years, the son insisted on brushing teeth with everyone in the family because brushing alone doesn't actually help with tooth decay.
It's just like these quirky little interesting things that are just absolutely fantastic.
And then the other one that I discovered more recently, which I absolutely love, is called oddly satisfying.
And it basically collects things where you wouldn't really think about it.
So recently I saw one, you know, a popcorn ceiling is like a ceiling with these little popcorn, these little pebbles.
And so someone shaved off these pebbles and you see the ceiling emerged and it's oddly satisfying.
Or that was a woman, she had a tent and she had a box and she tried to put the tent in a box.
But the box was too short and too wide.
And then really genius, four cuts and the box is transformed into a box that fits the tent perfectly.
I've actually tried it.
You can do this with any?
You can do this with anything.
And then when you put the tent or whatever it is, when you put it in the box and it fits perfectly.
Literally tingling right now.
So on TikTok, sometimes the algorithm shows me just a whole stream of people cleaning corners, hard to get two corners in the most elegant way.
You hear your face, I'm telling you, it is so satisfying.
Oh, yeah. And then there's this other one.
The algorithm will take me down this path where all I'm seeing is parents, mothers or fathers, packing their children's lunches in a perfectly symmetrical way with a little bento box lunch and the sandwiches just fit so perfectly and it's oddly satisfying.
It is so wonderful.
It is so wonderful.
So this feels like pornography for people with obsessive compulsive disorder.
I have two co -hosts who are.
Yeah, you have to live it up.
Yeah, live it up. Exactly.
Watch bento box packing and cup stacking in Oddly Satisfying.
I'll be sure and do that.
Okay. What did you bring in?
You can't top that.
I can't top it. You're absolutely right.
So I think the key to good life is good chocolate.
And so I have found a new purveyor of good chocolate and I'm a little nervous young me because it's a Swiss purveyor and I'm not sure how Felix is going to react to this.
Oh, you better pronounce it right.
I know, exactly. No chance.
No chance of that. Exactly right.
So this is a company that's been in Switzerland for a long time, but they have just embarked on a huge global expansion in the last couple of years.
He's putting off saying the name.
It's called Leirak and Felix, how bad was that?
Very good. Very close.
Thank you very much.
Did you hear how we said that?
Yeah, I know. Which basically means not really.
He's also shaking his head no.
Yeah, exactly. He said, oh, that's wonderful and his eyes are rolling.
So the wonderful thing about Leirak is it's this fantastic combination of really high quality, kind of highbrow chocolate.
So it's not cheap, but it's kind of got some nice lowbrow sensibilities tied into it.
So they sell these plates of chocolate.
So it's not really super precious, like little Maison du chocolate boxes.
It's just sheets of chocolate, but then they'll put cornflakes in the chocolate and then they'll put hazelnuts in the chocolate and cranberries in the chocolate.
Kind of whimsical, kind of fun, but super high quality.
So I love that combination and I got to give props to my brother -in -law who introduced me to this, but I have come to really.
Love it. And for a while I moved away from milk.
I was going into a dark phase and now I'm back to milk because Leirak is so good in milk.
But is it packaged in a perfectly symmetrical, beautiful way?
No, not at all. So you will see the oddly satisfying aspect of this order.
So even when you go into the stores, they stack the chocolate.
Oh, but beautifully disorganized.
Yes, they're beautifully disorganized.
I like that too. And the other thing I'm struck by, Felix, is you probably know more, which is it's like a family old business, like seven years old and they've just gone bonkers internationally.
They're growing like a weed internationally in the last three years.
And even in Switzerland for a very long time, they were just in one city.
Oh, interesting. And then overnight, all of a sudden you saw Leirak stores everywhere and it's quite a story.
Well, our recommendations tonight have such a continental theme.
So I did Paris and you did Switzerland and Felix is from the continent.
What a beautiful way to wrap up a show.
That's it for tonight.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
That was fun.
