Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm me here.
And I'm Sarah Green, Carmichael from Bloomberg.
Welcome back Sarah.
It's great to have you.
It's so nice to be back.
Today we have two great topics.
So Sarah, what did you bring?
So I brought the four -day work week, which I feel like should come with a little asterisk on it because it's not always actually four days, but it is a shorter work week.
So we can talk about that.
But since the pandemic has led to this sort of talent crunch, you see more companies willing to experiment with shorter work weeks.
And I think it's worth talking about.
Very interesting. And Felix, what did you got?
I would like to talk about sports betting.
It's an exploding industry.
And I'm curious to hear what you think about it, if you're excited, optimistic, if you think it's going to be a disaster.
Are you looking for specific over -unders?
Yes, exactly. Excellent.
That sounds great. So Sarah, four days.
Is that a promise? Well, as I started looking into this, I had basically been seeing headlines across my radar saying, this company trying a four -day work week, that company trying a four -day work week, this country experimenting with a four -day work week.
And when I started to actually read the fine print, everyone had a really different arrangement.
So some companies were working 10 hours a day, four days a week.
So still getting that 40 hours in there.
Other companies just shortened the work week, said, we're just lopping off a Friday.
All the other days are the same.
So now it's a 32 -hour work week.
And then other companies still were doing things like working shorter days, but were working for five days.
So the four -day work week was actually five days.
And I got to wondering, these are all very different variables.
Which one of these is actually better for your stress levels?
Which one of these is better for your company if you're looking at productivity?
So I sort of became obsessed with this idea that there might be one that was better than the others.
And Sarah, there's also legislative action on this.
So California, is that right?
Yes. As California does, they are considering interesting legislation on this.
Which would be specifically kind of mandated four -day work week.
Could be a limit, yes, on I think the number of hours you can ask people to work without offering overtime.
And certainly some European countries have tried to do things like say that you can't get email after hours because that's actually extending your work day.
I'm curious to know if you guys have experience with different work arrangements yourselves.
Or if you have heard from people who are considering this and what your experiences are with this kind of thing.
So my first response to this is maybe a little cautious because I remember in the 70s there was this really big conversation about shorter work weeks and the promise of fewer hours.
And then of course in Europe at that point in time France moved to 35 hours.
A little later Germany reduced the number of hours.
And it all ended not so well, I think, because at least in part a fraction of the unemployment that then followed in the 70s and the 80s was attributed to these attempts to shorten the work week.
And even here in the United States it seemed the four day work week was close in the 70s, but then the recession hit and the recessions essentially do away with many of these streams.
So I'm wondering a little bit whether the current conversation is mostly a reflection of we're in a very hot labor market.
The first response I think of many companies to the hot labor market was to compete on compensation.
And that looks increasingly difficult for a large number of businesses simply because it's gotten so expensive to hire people.
And also this I steal your people by paying more and then you steal them back by paying even more.
That doesn't seem to be a game that we want to be playing.
And on that note I'm actually encouraged that companies now are imaginative, that they're thinking of different ways of doing it, that they're thinking about what arrangement would work, would benefit my workforce the most.
And I hope at least that we're not going to a uniform solution, but that we have a thousand flowers bloom with one positive effect to your earlier point, Sarah, that we learn what works, what doesn't work, what really gives people the best health outcomes, the best productivity outcomes, but also thinking
it just can't be that one size fits all.
So I want to ask you about the 70s comparison because I do think one thing that has changed is, of course, the internet and remote work and checking email and stuff on the weekends.
And I wonder if some of those negative effects would be easier to avoid now with the world of work we have now where many people still remain connected to work and capable of jumping in if there is more work that needs to be done at an evening or a weekend.
And maybe that's different from the 70s when maybe a four day work week would have meant that you actually were out of the office and unavailable.
So this is a great point, Sarah.
In part, of course, it is a reflection to technology where we now almost feel like we're working all the time.
Who are you if you're not every now and then checking email?
So that's very common.
But we can't forget the very many people where work still means being present.
So in the services sector in particular, it's really both being present and then maybe these emails on top of everything.
I think here it's important to remember also that during the pandemic the number of hours worked just increased dramatically.
It's about an hour per day.
It's meeting time in particular really exploded.
People are drowning in meetings.
And again, you might think that post -pandemic maybe some of this is going to go away.
If in fact we find hybrid work arrangements that move some of these meetings back to the workplace.
I'm very much with you Felix on this I think, which is first, I think there's a meaningful distinction between employers experimenting with lots of interesting arrangements and legislative mandates.
Meaning I think the progress towards more humane work conditions is an important one for governments to undertake.
But that doesn't feel like what necessarily the four day work week is about.
It's about something slightly different.
So then it is true that employers should be experimenting.
And it's just as you said, Felix, at this moment we would expect lots of experimentation.
But it does all have the feel to me of a little bit of magical thinking, which is spurred a little bit by I think the unreality of these labor markets and the degree to which they will persist over longer periods of time.
And maybe the other part that worries me is I feel like a lot of this magical thinking can come at a cost, which is it's sold in one way, but then it can end up delivering another one.
So it's going to be great, but oh yeah, you're going to actually be working more.
And in this case with the four day work week, it feels like that distinction between work and home life may get even more blurred than it would be otherwise.
If it leads to this more access that you have to be online at all times, that doesn't necessarily feel like a good thing.
So if we go to that place where we end up with a seven day work week, we're all just working a little bit every day.
I'm not sure that's better than more tightly cordoned off periods between work and home.
So I don't know, I want to like this idea, but I think Felix, because of its long history and the promise of it that has been made so many times, I do feel like it's not necessarily real as much as it is a reflection of the moment.
I don't know, Sarah, what do you think?
Well, I think it may not last, or it may not exactly be what it says on the tin.
One of the more successful quote unquote four day work week experiments I read about was a massive experiment in Iceland where some organizations did do a four day week, but others did more like a five day week where some of the days were just shorter and some sort of had like every other Friday off.
There were really like a thousand flowers blooming.
And the people in that experiment were so enthusiastic and the teams were so productive, either doing just as much work or more than before.
I think the experiment forced them to do things like cut out meetings that probably should have been dropped or shortened like a long time ago.
Those zombie meetings that just continue on and no one will cancel them.
And so it really compelled them to work more efficiently and intelligently.
And then the other piece of it was that even though the days were then a little bit busier in a way because people were being more efficient, the day ended earlier.
So people could go home, do some laundry, cook dinner, do the kind of stuff that had always gotten pushed to the weekends.
So there was a more focused work day and then there was time to get stuff at home done and then the weekends actually were free for like fun and rest.
One of the managers in the project said it was like a gift from the heavens.
And that quote has just stuck in my mind because they were so enthusiastic.
If I hear the productivity numbers coming out of these experiments, Sarah, this is one area where I'm never really sure is this Mihir's magical thinking or can this be real?
And the tacit assumption seems to be the way we work right now has lots of slack, has lots of inefficiency.
And really all we're doing instead of sitting around and twiddling our thumbs, we now do more meaningful things with our time.
And so we basically don't have to take a pick up because productivity goes up.
We have the same kind of output.
And I'm curious whether this is actually true because I remember my dad used to work six days a week.
And then at some point in time, they went to five days.
And he would always talk about how much more stressful work became at that moment.
And I think the idea was, yeah, of course, productivity might go up, but what will this feel like if you have essentially the same work that you need to get done in now just four days?
And what if it's not true that you have lots of slack?
Until his retirement, he always missed these times where it was a little more leisurely.
So if in part we're interested in the right kind of work arrangement because we're thinking about people's mental health, we're thinking about long -term engagement, we want to avoid burnout, whether increasing work intensity at a time when I think it feels pretty intense for many people to begin with,
but that's really the right thing, I just don't know.
Felix, I share your sentiment, and especially on engagement.
So some of the studies have suggested that engagement can go down during these more abbreviated work weeks.
And I think it's kind of as you suggested, which is you are now just tilting at the wheel all the time because that's what you have to do.
And the other part that strikes me, Felix, is all of this is conditioned on this opposition between the work, which is negative and taxing, and home leisure, which is wonderful and joyous.
And I think it's hard to think of the world that way.
I think for many people work is the source of joy.
It would make more sense to think hard about how to make work more enjoyable than try to coordinate off into a smaller and smaller piece of our life.
So I wonder, Sarah, if the energy that we're dedicating towards thinking about how do we just have fewer days of work if it was maybe better spent thinking about how we should think about making work better when we're there?
Do you know what I mean, Sarah?
I hear what you're saying, and I sort of come at this from different angles.
Because I've done the thing where you are working a shorter week.
When I came back to work after having my daughter, Bloomberg has these flex days that let you work a shortened week for a period of time.
It was so stressful trying to get all that work done in just four days.
And I was so relieved to go back to the five days a week, like, oh...
Is that right? Totally.
Oh, really? Just like my dad.
Yeah, so you've had that experience.
Yes, although I have also wondered, would it have been different if it was more of like a team effort?
If the whole team was thinking, let's cut back, let's drop some things that aren't working, let's reprioritize, shorten some meetings.
You know, I think that is different than just going in on your own.
And just to be clear, Sarah, I got to tell you, three -day weekends are fantastic.
Don't get me wrong.
And I almost wish we could coordinate on, once a month, a three -day weekend.
If you were asking me my dreamy outcome, it might be something like that.
I've always loved the bank holiday system in the U .K.
Nothing necessarily religious, but let's just call it a bank holiday and have one Friday off every month.
That, to me, seems dreamy.
Or I have a relative who works at a company where they've worked it out, so there's a red team and a blue team, and they switch, and every other week they have Friday off.
So there's always people staffing the office, but every other week you have a three -day weekend.
And he says it's fabulous.
He loves it. All of this, I think, sounds interesting, but it doesn't really match up to the reality that about half of Americans don't take all their vacation days.
And then, actually, about a third of all vacation days go unused.
Some of them roll over, but many of them don't.
That is fascinating.
It reminds me of this conversation about work flexibility.
I think maybe in some sense even more important conversation that we're having right now.
When you look at work arrangements, it's actually most firms provide a significant degree of flexibility today, in particular micro -agility, like the little tweaks that you can make without asking anyone for permission.
And I think maybe the most important insight from all of those experiments is unless you change corporate culture, that people feel comfortable doing these things, all of it is going to be meaningless.
All of it is not going to mean that much because, yes, you can say, theoretically you can go home an hour earlier, and then your boss is still at work, and maybe you go home and probably you don't.
So there is something about the flexibility that we already have, and at least in theory shorter or fewer days' work that we already have.
But somehow our corporate culture is such that it's really hard for people to take advantage.
I think Felix, this is fascinating.
The opposition between the espoused desire to have three -day weekends and four -day weeks and this evidence on vacation days.
So your conclusion from it is, the corporate cultures aren't enabling people to take those vacation days, as one example, or to use all the flexibility that they already is in the system.
I think so, yes. I wonder if the other interpretation of it is that there's a difference between what we espouse we want and what we practice in life, which is that we talk about minimizing the role of work in our lives, but for some people at least work is meaningful, and they enjoy it, and vacations
are as well, but it's not as if leisure is, again, this unalloyed good, and work is this horrible evil.
I wonder if that's another way to interpret that juxtaposition of the espoused rhetoric about we need four -day week, work weeks, and the reality of untaken vacation days.
I take your point that it could be corporate culture, but I wonder if it's something else.
Does that sound crazy, Sarah?
It doesn't sound crazy to me, but I do think that there can be too much of a good thing.
I think people get sometimes a little obsessed with their jobs, and it can start to feel like if you take a day off or if you're the first one to leave the office, you'll be seen as this slacker and you'll never get another raise again.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Or you'll be first on the chopping block for layoffs.
Sarah, I'm also curious, what would happen in a four -day week world?
What would happen to school?
If we all move to this four -day work week, do we also want school to be a four -day week?
I think that you're envisioning something a little bit more heavy -handed or governmental.
And I think this is like, no, this is more like, and it doesn't even have to be all the same four days.
You could say maybe there's people who want a random Wednesday off as their day off or their short day, and I don't know.
So, I guess what I'm really drawn to here is the experimentation and the acknowledgement that maybe the first six hours of the day are your best hours.
And the last two, you're just kind of like making some mistakes, not doing very good work, and like you should just go home.
Sounds like good advice.
Excellent. Good. How do you feel about sports betting?
Okay, Felix, tell us all about sports betting.
What is happening is really dramatic, in part because it's such a big departure from the kinds of sports betting regime that we have for a long time, but also because it happens so quickly.
So, in 2018, the Supreme Court decided that the federal ban on sports betting was no longer the right regime for the country, and within just a few years, we have 30 states where sports betting has become legal.
And the market opportunity is just enormous, it seems.
We had a billion -dollar market in 2019 that had grown to $23 billion just one year later, and we're at roughly $40 billion now.
It's quite competitive already.
Companies like FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, battle it out for market share.
There's a whole series of data delivery.
I'm telling you what happened in the last two and a half seconds, kind of data provider companies, sports radar, maybe the most important one.
And then there are changes to how betting actually works, what you can bet on in particular.
One is live in -game betting.
You can bet on the smallest of things.
How long will it take for the next player to score?
Down to even ridiculous things.
The other day, I saw the color of Gatorade when the coach gets doused at the end of the game.
So, essentially, there's nothing you cannot bet on.
Some people are really excited about this, the media industry in particular, because they benefit from all the advertising around sports betting.
But then also a sense that sports fans not always paying that much attention to the game now because I'm financially involved, like what's going to happen next.
And then, of course, people remember the big scandals that we had historically, which was one of the reasons why we placed the restrictions on sports betting in the first place.
Can we really police the kind of betting that we have today?
You can maybe police a game not being rigged so that one team obviously gives up its chance to win.
But say, if you bet a particular player will not score in the next 10 minutes, can you really police that?
That is just an open door for making sports less authentic, introducing all kinds of shenanigans.
And then also around gambling addiction.
We know that not everybody will be able to handle all of these gambling opportunities with sometimes dramatic personal consequences.
So I'm curious what you think.
Are you excited? Are you mostly concerned?
Do you think this is a positive development or something that we should have avoided?
I am very trepidatious about this development.
I have been a little taken aback by how quickly the market has boomed after that Supreme Court ruling.
I am not someone who gambles personally or even sees the appeal.
So I'm aware that I am not the audience here.
And I'm sort of wary of passing judgment on something that I obviously don't get.
At the same time, I do see a lot of red flags.
I think one of the things that bothers me is that states have been so eager for this to happen.
I think the state of New Jersey was really instrumental in that 2018 Supreme Court ruling.
They really wanted this.
They wanted gambling revenue.
They wanted to be able to tax it.
And that's why you've seen so many states rush in and legalize it.
And I always feel like if states need more tax revenue, they should just pull up their pants and pass a law.
They should do it legislatively rather than just taxing people's sins and weak spots sneakily.
I'm very sort of queasy about it, but I'm also not sure there was such a huge illegal gambling market before the law changed.
And there still is.
So I'm not sure that banning it is the right answer.
So I'm all over the map on this one.
Me here. Help me here.
Help me figure out what to think about this.
Sorry, I was just placing my bet on Kyrie Irving's performance tonight.
I got to say, I don't want to be a scold, but everything about this feels not great to me, Felix and Sarah.
I get why it's a great industry or many people want to partake in it.
I get why leagues like it because it increases fan attention.
I get it all. But first, I think we're going to have a scandal soon, I'm sure, which will make people question whether athletes are shaving their performance, which undercuts the credibility of sports.
I think the deleterious effects of addictive behavior on gambling are really problematic.
And then it is changing the sporting experience.
Some commentators have noticed, which is fan behavior at games changes.
Their whole relationship to the sport changes, which is not necessarily one of it being a pastime, but it being in some sense an arena to gamble.
And that changes your relationship with sports.
So I hate to be a scold, but it does feel like this won't end terribly well.
And what are we losing in that process?
But I love letting people do what they want to do, and I love letting people contract how they want to contract.
But this is an area where it's just hard for me to get excited about it.
One question I have, is it different from alcohol?
Because say unruly behavior of fans in stadiums, it's actually the other drug that is the problem.
I think not the betting on sports outcomes.
It's that people drink and then they behave in ways that are less than proper.
And I think that is complicated, and we can police that a little bit.
Excessive drinking can be policed, you can remove people from the stands, you can do certain things.
Gambling is not quite like that.
It doesn't manifest itself in such a nefarious way, and it doesn't have quite the externality that that alcohol behavior can.
But I think it's analogous.
Yeah. But you wouldn't want to outlaw drinking, right?
No, you wouldn't. We tried that one.
Yeah, we tried. Of course, the argument is exactly the same argument.
And when you think about the physical and health consequences of drinking, maybe an even bigger problem than sports betting will ever be.
Right. I think the distinction, if one were to draw one, is between the conceivable external effects that one of these activities has on the other.
So drinking taken to an extreme has externality effects, which is you can become raucous in the stands, you can have riots at soccer games, and then we get concerned about it.
And so we do police that.
But there's a whole bunch of behavior and alcohol intake, which is not associated with any of those activities.
And I think the question with gambling is, is there self -harm or is there harm to others that is being undertaken by this addictive activity?
And my instincts are not terribly well grounded, but that those effects, both for self -harm and for harm to others, are larger in gambling than with alcohol.
But that is not grounded, Felix, in empirical facts.
But that's the distinction, I guess, I would try to draw.
Do you buy that, Felix, for you?
Is there a meaningful distinction between alcohol and gambling?
I'm not sure, actually.
I find the corporate response to the possibility of these problems quite interesting.
So, for instance, if you use FanDuel, there are all of these mechanisms that are built into the website that say, limit the amount you can bet.
That limit how much can be transferred from your checking account to your gambling account.
You can self -impose periods of time when you don't gamble.
And then once you have self -imposed that particular time, you cannot easily change it, which I think behaviorally is important, because you have these lucid moments when you know you gamble too much.
And then you say, oh, I wish I wouldn't gamble.
And then we know there's this other moment when you actually regret and they don't allow you to reverse that decision easily.
You can place limits on how often you gamble.
So there's some attempt, at least, to help people who will fall prey to gambling, to exert self -control in a smart way without taking away the opportunity to do something that you might really enjoy.
That might be really fabulous.
To me, the fact that there exists these ways to limit yourself is a depressing sign.
You see the same things, for example, for social media, you can set limits on your phone so that if you're addicted to checking Instagram or Facebook, you don't spend too much time on it.
And the fact that we need limits like this, because we can't control ourselves, to me, is sort of depressing.
And to me, it highlights how many industries are relying now on these addictive behaviors.
How many new and growing industries?
So video games, addictive.
Social media, addictive.
Gambling, addictive.
And then, of course, we had all the old addictions that we talked about, cigarettes and alcohol and drugs and substances.
And to me, I get more excited about businesses and industries that seem to be growing and just adding more value.
I guess this is creating jobs, but is it really adding a lot of value?
To me, it's not. I mean, it's adding value in the sense that the enjoyment that some people have from being able to follow their teams in a completely different way, to follow the game in a completely different way, to pay attention to small things that you may not have paid attention to.
One of the really interesting, I think largely unanswered question is, once I connect my viewing of sports with betting, does my enjoyment go up?
Does my enjoyment go down?
Do I have to figure out how to do this better?
But in contrast, what I find encouraging, Sarah, is this recognition that we can create fabulous value in many ways.
And then for very many people, it becomes difficult to exert self -control.
That's true for luxury items.
That's true for travel.
That's true for virtually every experience you can think of, where you can fall prey to having developed such a passion for something that it probably comes to dominate your life in a way that you regret every now and then.
I guess I would just be careful about using words like enjoyment or passion when for people who are addicted, I think it's more of a compulsion.
And I'm not sure it's entirely pleasant to partake in because they're not in control.
And I have had the experience of going to a casino with someone I did not know had a gambling problem until we walked into the casino and then watching in total discomfort and dismay as this person that I had seen in other contexts, gambled away money they couldn't afford to lose.
And when we left the casino, this person had an empty gas tank and no money.
The credit card was maxed out.
The cash was gone. So I bought him a tank of gas, lent him 300 bucks.
But if I hadn't been there to do that, I'm not sure what he would have done.
So that experience has really stuck with me and has really, I think, colored how I see this.
Yeah, I totally get it.
But this is like seeing someone who binge drinks and then think we shouldn't allow other people to enjoy alcohol.
No, I don't think it should be banned.
I just am very uncomfortable with the speed at which it has exploded into a huge, huge industry.
It went from being something a sports leagues were resisting because they probably just thought that they wouldn't be able to get a piece of it to something that the sports leagues, I think are really encouraging.
And that media companies are encouraging because they have seen how to get a cut.
And that bothers me.
So I think that if you look at, for example, Super Bowl ratings before that Supreme Court ruling, they were declining, and they were losing viewers.
And now you can bet on the color of Gatorade or whatever, and suddenly the ratings are going back up.
And I'm like, is that really the solution?
Is that really all the game was missing?
I just find it a little sad.
And I'm someone who's played fantasy sports.
I understand that there can be like a game that's happening on the field or something that's interesting you besides the game on the field.
But the speed at which this is all turned around has left my head spinning a little bit.
Felix, you're certainly right.
All these things, travel, gambling are in a broad complex of entertainment.
And we shouldn't really be policing them because they can always have somewhat negative effects if you get addicted to that kind of behavior.
Some of these substances or activities are more prone to addiction and are more prone to self -harm.
And we should just acknowledge that so we can't lump them all together.
And then the second is, although you didn't say it explicitly, Sarah, I'm wondering if part of what you're saying is that, look, some of these activities have chemical bases to their addictive nature.
Now, you might say that about travel, but I don't really think that's true.
You may say that about luxury goods, but it's not true in the same way as social media, maybe, as gambling certainly is, which is that intense rush, which is a very biological thing.
And so I wonder, Sarah, if part of your discomfort is, yes, we don't want to police all enjoyment activities.
And it certainly is ridiculous to think we could.
But there is the subset of activities, which is prone to addiction.
And we don't seem to really want to tackle that in an explicit way.
I'm not sure I know how to, but I think that's what causes me so much unease.
We can't just say, well, it's entertainment.
So let people do what they want.
We do have to acknowledge that there are externalities and their self -harm, both of which are really potentially important.
The analogy to social media is really interesting to me because of course, there we have a very recent experience where an industry has done everything to increase the amount of time that we spend with these products, with these experiences, because it's advertising finance.
And as a result, the more exposure you have, the more valuable the business becomes.
There we didn't really push back.
And maybe now in retrospect, we wish we could have.
And the way I think it applies to gambling is there are particular products that seem precisely engineered in order to draw you in and do more of the thing that maybe otherwise you wouldn't do.
So one of the things, I don't know if you've seen these ads, there are all of these ads for risk -free betting.
And then you think, OK, so what do you mean, like risk -free betting?
That can't really exist.
And the way the product works is that if you bet $50, you lose the $50, you get the $50 back immediately, but you get it back in a forum that you can't really cash out.
You have to gamble with the $50 that you just got.
And obviously the idea here is to not make you stop gambling when you lost the $50 in the first place, but to have you continue in that experience.
And so if we learn something from the way social media has evolved, maybe it's these kinds of tactics that we should pay a lot of attention to.
That we don't make it extra difficult then to stop.
Make it, in fact, pretty much the opposite of what these risk -free bets do.
Let's say if you lose more than $20 or something, maybe you can place a bet for a little while, or at least not with a particular bookmaker.
The tactics, I think, might in the end have a big influence on the fraction of people who just enjoy gambling.
And it's an interesting way to experience sports and the fraction of people who really get in trouble.
And just to be clear, the urge to gamble is deep -rooted.
People have been doing it for a long time in different ways.
And one argument, I think, for this industry is just there's a human instinct and it's part of entertainment.
And it's not newfound.
It has been going on for centuries.
I think the difficulty is when it is not location -specific and when it is no longer social, but when it is literally you and your computer, that feels a little bit different.
I think, Felix, to your earlier point, I will say one comforting thing is just to look at the performance of these companies in the last six months, which has been pretty terrible.
It is, as you pointed out, extremely competitive.
And I don't know if you remember this, but I remember during the Super Bowl, the ads were like $200 of free betting money.
And it turns out customer acquisition costs are really high.
Sky high. The loyalty is maybe not that big, right?
Most of these companies, not to a one, but DraftKings is one example, is down 70 -80 % from a tie.
When you pay that much to try to acquire someone who's not that loyal, it turns out to be really complicated.
So the other interesting business piece of this, not social piece of this, is just to see how their business models will have to adapt.
Because in the initial on rush, everybody was super optimistic about this.
And the reality of really high customer acquisition costs I think is coming crashing down on people.
I think the question there is also how much revenue is coming from people with an addiction versus casual gamblers.
Because if you look at something like the gun industry, people who buy guns nowadays tend to have lots of guns.
The mega gun owners are the ones who are really the most profitable for the gun companies.
Oh, really? Is that true?
Oh, yes. The collectors.
And I wonder if a similar thing might be happening in gambling, where the people who are the most profitable are the ones who lose the most money and have the hardest time stopping.
The markets are suggesting that this is a really tough model.
But we'll have to see how that shakes out.
Yeah. All right, then we have picks.
What did you bring Sarah?
So I started out with one and then it accidentally became two.
I'm sorry. I like it.
I like it. Okay. The original pick was The Midnight Library, which is a novel by Matt Haig.
And I will say that concept is very similar to It's a Wonderful Life, if that's a movie you're familiar with.
Sure. The protagonist has the ability to, in this case, sample different lives if she could have made different decisions at key inflection points.
So if she had stayed in that band, if she had married that guy.
But she can see how her life would have turned out differently.
And it's a really readable book.
The audiobook is wonderful.
Actually, everyone in my book club enjoyed it, which is really unusual.
Very contentious book club, but everyone loved this one.
So that's my pick. And then as I was thinking about this, I think, well, some people really hate those kinds of novels that have like a life lesson.
So I thought for the people that are interested in the topic, but hate that idea of a fictional novel with a life lesson, I would suggest The Power of Regret by Dan Pink, which is a very similar thing, but sort of evidence based and nonfiction.
Felix, what do you got?
Are you wertle people?
I am. I love wertle.
Every day the wertle.
And quartle and orc -tortle.
You're addicted in here.
I'm addicted now. And I'm also gambling on my own quartle.
So I might have a recommendation for you.
It's called Cemental.
Have you played that?
No. No. So it's a very similar idea that you have to guess a word, but it's built on similarities across words.
But you get no help whatsoever.
So there's you and the universe of words.
And for every word that you then pick, you get how closely related it is to the word that they're looking for.
And there's sort of a cold, warm thermometer kind of thing where you learn, are you closer, are you not close?
But closer in terms of meaning.
Yeah, it's similarity in meaning.
And sometimes what seems to matter is also if things are nouns or adjectives or verbs.
Sometimes that matters a little bit, but it's mostly the content one.
And it can be a little frustrating when you first start out because you have no idea where you should start out and you totally strike out with your first 10 words or so.
You have unlimited tries.
So you can just try until you find it or until you give up and then you can look it up and they will tell you what the word was.
But it's actually quite fun.
That sounds great. Cemental, you should look it up.
I think has this wonderful video, which is a comic video based on the man who is kind of managing wordle.
He's like this evil genius.
And it's hilarious.
It's a two minute video I'll send it to you.
I'll look it up. What did you bring me here?
I haven't given a Scandinavian noir cop show in a while.
So Wallander, obviously the bridge are great ones, but there's a relatively new one, which is fantastic.
And it's called the Truth Will Out.
And it's on Amazon and Acorn.
And it is a great story.
Well, there's this noir horrible murder thing going on in the background.
The set of cops are this motley crew of people who don't belong in any other team.
And yet they manage to kind of solve the crime.
And it's got all the great things you'd expect in a Scandinavian cop drama, which is great feel, great pictures.
So the truth will out is my pick for the next one in your list.
Wonderful. Excellent.
And this is it for today.
Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
