Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Felix.
I'm Mi here. And Mi here, you have so much facial hair.
You're growing a mustache and a beard.
He's joining the club.
Yeah, you're looking more like Felix.
The idea that I'm growing it would suggest some plan.
There's nothing planned going on here.
There's just laziness other than, you know, an overall desire to emulate everything that Felix does.
Yeah. So how are you guys doing today?
Good, good. I'm excited to talk about food.
Yeah. So I came in wanting to talk about restaurants because I'm already looking forward to the day when the three of us will be sitting down at a restaurant.
And then, Felix, you came in with a related topic.
Yeah, super similar.
So I wanted to talk about ghost kitchens or virtual kitchens or dark kitchens, this phenomenon that has really exploded during the pandemic.
In the context of food delivery, of course, right?
In the context of food delivery.
Yes. Yeah. Okay. So we'll do both of those.
Great. Felix, since our lives have been so dominated by food delivery, let's start with you.
Okay. It is a super interesting phenomenon, what some people call ghost kitchens or cloud kitchens or dark kitchens.
It's essentially a restaurant without a restaurant.
Or maybe, better said, it's a restaurant without a dining room that completely relies on delivery.
And many of them are grouped together in larger facilities.
So the United States has about 1 ,500 of these ghost kitchens right now.
It's even more popular in Asia than in the United States.
And I'm just curious, is this something that's here to stay or is it flash in a pan, pandemic related?
And once we go back to normal, will it all go away?
What's your sense? You know, it's funny, you're right, they're everywhere.
But because they're invisible, I don't think people understand the extent to which they have been proliferated.
Which is what creates the value proposition, right?
I mean, they have a big economic advantage, which comes from the fact that they are engineered to be very adaptable, very efficient, no wait staff, there's no dining room.
They can easily pivot from one food concept to another.
They don't need to be located in a prime location.
They can literally be in a warehouse somewhere.
And then, of course, they create all of these delivery efficiencies.
So they're not restaurants, to your point, they're food logistics, food prep operations.
Do I think they're here to stay?
I do think they're here to stay.
I think they create a whole new set of problems, which we can talk about and a whole new set of opportunities.
But I do think they're here to stay because there is a constant search for efficiencies in the restaurant space, particularly in the food delivery space.
Well, yeah, so I think we've seen massive growth in delivery and there's a huge reason to love the delivery market as opposed to in person.
There is a moment of concern in my mind, which is the hype is predicated on how much delivery is going to grow in the future.
And when COVID fades, we might see somewhat of a decline.
And then a lot of it has been funded by the funny money that we see everywhere.
That's right. And by the funny money that we see in consumers' pockets who are not able to spend money on travel and have shifted their budget towards in -house dining.
Having said that, ghost kitchens are really promising, I think, for two reasons.
One is, young me, it's a little bit of a real estate play, right?
So we are able to kind of really economize on what the costs of real estate can be for restaurants, which had become such a killer for the restaurant industry.
And then the second piece is just the idea of flexible capacity.
So you have incumbents who want to be able to have additional capacity or you have new entrants who want really low entry costs.
And ghost kitchens enable that in a really nice way.
So in this low margin business, young me, to your point, every penny matters.
I confess, I'm a little more skeptical seen from the individual kitchen or the individual person who starts a restaurant business trying to use the infrastructure that ghost kitchens supply.
Because if you look at their cost structure, so rent, if it's a high density city like a big city like New York or LA, annual rent in a ghost kitchen is typically about $100 ,000.
You do need two, maybe three chefs.
That's another 100 to $150 ,000.
And then manufacturing delivery costs, which is not low, plus the usual ingredients.
You probably are at the breakeven level of sales.
That's roughly in the neighborhood of $700 ,000 or so.
So, yes, many of these ghost kitchens open up.
Many chefs move in, but it's also true that there's a lot of churn already.
Many of them don't make it.
And what's a little heartbreaking is it's always the people who I admire the most, who have the great ideas, who can really cook well, that get squeezed in this business.
All the profits just get sucked up by the owners of real estate.
And here I fear it's a little bit the same.
Now all the margins are just going to be sucked up by the companies that creates a cloud kitchen.
So I'm optimistic that it will exist.
Is it a great opportunity for culinary talent to make money?
I'm not so sure about that.
So I actually agree with you, Felix.
And I think this is one of the problems.
When the barriers to entry start to get really low, and then it turns out running the business is actually harder than you anticipate, as you just described.
What ends up is you end up with a lot of churn.
But there's always someone new to fill that churn.
And in the same way that Amazon Marketplace enabled the birth of so many businesses, what ends up happening is just a proliferation of folks trying to do it.
And for any single independent chef trying to survive in that context, I think becomes very, very difficult.
It's going to be hard, right?
So, Yangmi, is your prediction that it's mostly restaurant groups or existing restaurants that will make use of this opportunity?
I know this is a somewhat sad statement to make, but I think that the aspirational power of being a chef is so strong and so pervasive.
There will always be a steady stream of entrants that will come in and try to make use of these ghost kitchens.
And I think a subset of them will succeed, but I think the majority of them will find out that it's very, very difficult.
And I think you're pointing to something very important, Yangmi, which is in food, the problem of excessive or inefficient entry or irrational entry or whatever you want to call it is particularly problematic because it is aspirational and people dream about it.
Having said that, I think Felix, the incumbents, the large players can use it to kind of flex capacity, and I think that is powerful.
And then, of course, you have to think about the platforms, which is the platforms themselves are an important part of the picture here.
First, they take a big chunk of the margin, and then they are also going to be the folks who end up supporting the kitchens because it supports their overall business model.
So I think the part of the puzzle that Yangmi's highlighting is I think exactly right, which is you're going to have young chefs who may dream about it, but it's going to be really tough.
But I think that large player and the platforms, those are the people who could end up using it in a steady state and having it be powerful.
Again, all predicated on delivery, really just continuing to boom.
It's very interesting to me to think about how scope will play out.
So, for instance, fire up Uber Eats.
What do you search for?
You can search for a particular food.
Say, I'm in the market for spaghetti carbonara tonight.
But what you get back is actually not suggestions of different dishes of spaghetti carbonara.
It's different suggestions for restaurants.
And I think this is where the virtual brands come in, that we now create mini brands that just have a very limited product portfolio because that's searchable on the apps.
And on the other hand, this is really what I as a customer care about.
I don't really care about your 15 best dish.
I care about the very best spaghetti carbonara that I can eat tonight.
And so what's interesting is with the help of these virtual brands, we're getting unbundling that is maybe not so dissimilar to what happened to the CD.
No one can imagine today going out and buying a whole CD of music because I like one song.
But the restaurants are a little bit like that.
You have a whole menu, even though really just two or three things are exceptional.
See, I actually view it a little bit differently.
I find the unbundling that is interesting to me is happening in the verticality of the supply chain.
And what I mean by that is the industry used to operate somewhat vertically.
Every restaurant that wanted to deliver used to have to manage a vertical supply chain.
It had to market the food.
But behind that, it had to figure out how to source the ingredients, how to cook and prepare the food, and then how to get that food to you.
What's happening now is I see the industry beginning to operate in a more unbundled way at each level, at each layer horizontally.
So there's a kitchen function, which is food prep.
That's one layer, and that's ghost kitchens in any kitchen that's preparing.
There's the delivery function, which are apps like DoorDash, and then there's the branding and marketing function.
And this is where the virtual brands thing comes in.
In my mind, the power eventually accrues to who can own the customer relationship.
Because as the market gets more crowded, I think your ability to generate demand becomes increasingly important.
So I think these virtual brands are fascinating.
Yangmi, could you say a little bit more about what these are and how they work?
So an example of a virtual brand, an extreme example.
There are many less extreme examples.
But one example that I find interesting is MrBeast.
So MrBeast is a YouTuber.
He has 55 million subscribers on his YouTube channel.
He's never done anything in food.
He's 22 years old. And he decided he wanted to launch a virtual restaurant called MrBeast Burgers.
So overnight, he launched in 300 locations.
I mean, he literally opened 300 restaurants simultaneously across the United States.
So you open an app in any city, and you can order a MrBeast burger.
And he did it using virtual kitchens, which is kind of incredible if you think about it, right?
And the way it works is in exchange for a cut of the sales revenue, MrBeast supplies the name, logo, menu, recipes to any restaurant owner with the space and the staff to make these burgers as a side hustle.
So for example, if you order a MrBeast burger in your town, the food might be prepared at a local pizza joint.
But he does this, and he sold a million burgers faster than any franchise in history.
So anyone with marketing power can now do this.
And I find this, this is the countervailing force to cloud kitchens.
Cloud kitchens create these backend economics, but virtual brands create a virtual front end to the customer, and they're able to attract demand.
And so if you look at that value chain now, you've got the food prep, you've got the delivery, and you've got the marketing and branding facade on top.
That's the tug of war, right?
Who's going to accrue power in that scenario?
In that sense, Youngmi, I think I'm much more interested and intrigued by virtual brands than cloud kitchens, because I think the value addition and the value capture possibilities are greater there than in the cloud kitchen thing, which as you put it is really the backend piece of it.
And the virtual brand is really the front end piece of this.
It's also kind of exciting because it allows for an enormous amount of innovation and very rapid turnaround in brands and in products and in experimentation, which is really exciting.
The question though, Youngmi, is you still don't really own the customer because it's all going through the platforms or it's harder to own the customer.
Because your point I think is the deep point, which is who's got the data, who's actually capturing the relationship.
So it feels to me like you could end up in a similar rat race where everyone's building these little brands, spending a lot of money to build brands and then still somehow not capturing the customer fully because the platform still has all the data.
But this is where the tug of war is, right?
So DoorDash, for example, collects a commission from restaurants when they deliver for you.
And that commission can be, you know, 15%.
If you're Chipotle, you're not paying 15 % because you have negotiated a very, very different deal because you have the marketing power.
You have that flex.
If you're Mr. Beast, you have that flex.
So this is what I mean.
I feel like the power is accruing to whoever can generate the demand.
Whoever can be the magnet for demand, you end up having leverage backwards into that supply chain.
Or at least as a counter force to the real power of the platforms.
And I find it actually super interesting what these virtual brands do.
So a subset of brands, I think, is exactly what you described, Youngmi.
They latch on to something that is valuable or popular, quite possibly way outside the food space.
Yeah, Mr. Beast. Reminds me a little bit, you know how celebrities, for some inexplicable reason, like to open restaurants.
Yeah. And it's that same idea, right?
You leverage some other asset and then you make it valuable into the restaurant space.
But I think the other element that I find a little different is there's this restaurant called Dog House that in the restaurant itself, they sold a lot of hot dogs.
And then they noticed that online, their hot dog sales were okay, but it was a much smaller fraction of overall orders.
What was the issue?
The issue is how people search on the platforms and how the platforms restrict the number of search terms that you can have.
What did they do in response?
That same restaurant subdivided its menu and it created four completely different brands.
One only for chicken sandwiches, one only for hot dogs, one only for plant -based burgers and so on and so on.
And now in each of these categories, they rise to the top of the list because by definition, plant -based burgers, there's not as much competition as if you look, you know, vegetarian food.
So they're managing four brands at once.
Yes. And it's from an operational perspective because these are all items that were on your menu to begin with.
So you don't really do anything extra or anything that you don't know how to do.
But the market power that you build up vis -a -vis the platform is a very different story.
But see, this is the tug of war that's fascinating, right?
Because then you think if I'm a platform, if I'm DoorDash, what's my next move then?
Yes. How do I get some of this power back?
So the next move is I'm going to start to offer my own virtual brands.
Exactly. In the same way that Amazon Marketplace has its own private label, suddenly you have DoorDash house brands competing with independent restaurants and big chains and all the other brands on there.
Now, having said all of this, the economics of DoorDash are still terrible.
Terrible. Terrible.
So if you play this out, DoorDash right now is kind of like an earlier version of Amazon Marketplace, but it's like Amazon Marketplace without AWS to boost profitability.
Right. And you're so right, young me.
And it comes at a time when the value chain is getting even more differentiated than what we have right now.
You might have seen this company called Ordermark.
They basically are the restaurants and they say, you don't want to deal with DoorDash and Uber Eats and Seamless and Grubhub and all of these.
Let me manage all of these relationships for you.
And sure enough, you have another platform in between the platform and the restaurant that is now trying to build up bargaining power in these relationships.
And what breaks my heart a little bit is that the people with the ingenuity and the people with the ideas and the great talent to make fantastic food in those digital environments, they always seem to be the losers.
They seem to pick the positions that are really hard to defend.
With the exception that if you are a chef who is able to accrue a following, a large Instagram following, or if you're a celebrity and you're managing your relationship with your followers, if you're Chrissy Teigen or anybody, Mr.
Beast, then you have a capacity to use this entire food delivery and food prep infrastructure.
It's another way for you to monetize what you do.
And in the case of chefs, it's another way to monetize your art.
I kind of agree, young me, which is, I think actually for the really talented chefs, the last 30 years have been an incredible opportunity set because they've been able to scale in ways they were never able to before.
And that could continue in this way.
But I guess the thing that I'm struck by, if you had to invest in either ghost kitchens, the platforms, or a virtual brand that was coming up, my answer would be, ugh, maybe none of them.
If you started out by saying if you have to.
If you had to. Well, I think my answer to this is actually as a consumer, we're going to be benefiting.
We're going to have lots more variety, a lot more convenience conceivably, and hopefully, ultimately, if restaurants can figure out their economic model, which we'll come to, I think you could have the best of all worlds.
But it's not clear to me that any place that value chain that young me articulated is super attractive.
What if you're a really compelling brand?
If you have a restaurant brand or a food brand or a celebrity brand or a chef brand with real staying power, then, I mean, you know, if you're David Chang, I think the world is your oyster right now.
Certainly relative to the platform in the ghost kitchens.
I totally buy into that.
I totally buy into that.
So Felix, what's the grand conclusion?
Yeah, thank you. We've decided there's massive unbundling, rebundling.
We're not sure if anyone's going to make money.
Right, massive unbundling.
I think that's definitely one.
And in the end, I think if it goes the way it usually goes, there are a few really big winners.
And I find it very interesting that we couldn't quite agree on who the big winners are, but they're somewhere to keep looking.
OK, so we just tried to unpack the medium and long term for restaurants and food delivery, but there's also the short term.
And within a matter of weeks or months, people are going to be hopefully flocking back to restaurants, to actual brick and mortar restaurants.
So I want to talk a little bit about the short term and how do you think restaurants are going to need to evolve.
But before we get to that, I didn't need to ask a more personal question, which is, how are you going to pick your first restaurant post -pandemic?
And what's the experience you're looking for?
Well, I confess my favorite restaurant experiences have been at a little place in Cambridge called Julia, where they have a communal table in the back, which is where they make the pasta.
And I have gone there with groups of students and you don't order, you just wait and the food comes.
And it's whatever they choose to serve that night.
Such a nice experience.
It's beautiful. And I confess that is an experience that I have missed so much.
And going back for a communal experience and without ordering, where food is just delivered and it's shared, everything is shared.
So everything's just family style.
But what's really interesting about this here is that in my house, we don't order.
There is no choice.
And basically, the food is shared, no?
It's interesting that you're thinking of all of these things that are also true for probably your home life.
Are you inviting us over because it's so obvious?
Yes, I would love to.
So Felix, what are you looking for?
Well, I have two intuitions.
One is like some really fancy place, the kind of food that you know, I have no idea how to make it.
But then I have this other intuition that I love these restaurants when it's just so packed.
There's so many people.
And in a way, you're eating at your little table with friends.
But it's still a really communal experience at one and the same time because of the noise and the other conversations that you overhear.
Maybe that broader sense of community is what I miss the most.
What about you, young me?
Yeah, a lot of the same themes.
I think I'm looking for lots of flavors, the kind of food that doesn't work for takeout or delivery.
I want small plates so I can try lots and lots of different things at a single meal.
And I want a busy restaurant, but I also want a little more space and a little less intervention from the waitstaff.
And this is as a result of how my psychology has changed coming out of the year.
So I'm a little different from you guys in that regard.
I want a little bit more privacy.
I'm interested in dining pods, but not like prison cells or phone booths.
I want them designed in really interesting and creative ways where I can still see the people around me.
I can still hear the buzz.
I have a real interest in watching the chef work.
I want to see food being prepared.
I want to see food as entertainment, as an experience.
So this requirement for more space, that is the result of the pandemic?
Yeah, I think so. I think I'm a little still sensitive.
I know people who have gotten ill, and so I still carry that with me.
And I don't think that everyone does, but I do think a subset of people do.
And so I think I probably represent at least a percentage of people out there.
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so more broadly, what do you think you will start to see in restaurants?
Well, I'll tell you one thing that I've seen that I love, and I would love to see it continue, which is subscriptions.
I think restaurants and subscription services are vastly underutilized, and the pandemic caused some experimentation on this.
So for example, Panera experimented with coffee subscriptions, and it was remarkably successful.
And it goes to our previous conversation, young me, because that also is a way of like amping up a loyalty program, getting customer information, and then really owning customers.
For the neighborhood restaurant.
And the neighborhood restaurant should do the same thing.
And in fact, some have started to experiment with it.
So for example, imagine that you had a monthly two -course meal for two that you could get at your local restaurant and pay upfront annually.
Predictable demand, predictable cashflow, you get a little bit of savings, you pass it on to the customer.
You have some value added services.
Like I think what you've mentioned is what I think too, which is you got to become more experiential.
So you get to have the table in the kitchen, you know, you do something that allows people to experience.
And I think this solves a lot of problems for restaurants in my mind, you know, which is you get to own the customer a little bit more, you build a loyalty, you get data, and then you make it experiential and you fight back against the delivery folks.
And I think as an economic model, subscriptions are great.
Yeah. So if I ran a restaurant in the very short term, I think I wouldn't change anything because we haven't had that experience for such a long time.
And I'm sure I have a thousand regulars who are dying to get back exactly what they had pre -pandemic.
Longer term, in particular in crowded cities, we shrank the kitchens in unbelievable ways to get ever more tables into dining rooms because that had a big influence on profitability.
If it's really true that we see a new balance between delivery and eat -in, delivery was about 7 % of the market prior to the pandemic.
Now, people think it could be as big as, I don't know, 20%, 25 % if that's really true.
A really tiny kitchen is terrible for delivery because you basically don't have the capacity.
And I would imagine that I would expand the kitchen space so that I could do delivery at greater frequency.
It's a bigger market.
I could do more than I did in the past and probably make the dining room smaller.
So I wouldn't be surprised if we saw many more smaller dining rooms where something like a mini, not quite a ghost kitchen, but a kitchen that is just designated for deliveries to a far greater extent than we have it today.
You know, one of the things that this conversation is making me think, I think going forward restaurants are going to have to be much more strategic.
And by strategic, I'm referring to their business model as well as their mode of operation.
So it used to be that if you opened a restaurant, you really had only two strategic decisions.
One is what type of food, and number two is what price point?
That was it. And the first decision wasn't even really a decision.
If your grandmother was Italian, you open an Italian restaurant.
But now I think by strategic, I mean you might say, look, I am in an urban area heavily populated.
I want to create a co -op or I want to create subscriptions.
And I want the neighbors to feel like they can come here and create a loyal customer base.
And that's going to be my business model.
Or perhaps you're in a more suburban area where people are less likely to come in and sit down.
And so you say, I'm going to have a larger kitchen.
I want delivery and takeout to be a big, big percentage of my revenue.
So I'm going to design my kitchen differently.
I'm going to have different operational workflows for one versus the other.
And I'm going to do it that way.
Or you could say, no, I'm going to be a higher end place in the same way that going to a music concert costs more than buying music online.
I want people to think of this as an experience.
They're going to have to pay more.
But it's like going to the theater and they're going to watch The Chef.
They're going to have a fantastic experience.
In other words, very specific strategies that are going to require the kind of business acumen and creativity that I don't know that restaurant tours have historically had to have.
Yeah. Just on that one margin, Yungmi, of both doing delivery and eat -in I think is so important.
And having specialized experiences, menus even, this goes to our previous conversation, which is the menu you want to offer for takeout should be different, should be optimized, should be narrower.
Similarly for dine -in, it probably should be.
Right now you have a mix of those two.
But if you just got that margin right, and you thought strategically about that margin, that would be huge, I would imagine.
Right. And then of course looming in the background is everything we just talked about with respect to ghost kitchens and virtual branding.
So if you're an independent restaurateur, how does that play into how you think about how you should be evolving?
One of the big opportunities is much lower cost of experimentation.
If you could expand in a much more flexible fashion by using ghost kitchens for a little while and say, oh, does a particular part of town, do they actually like my food, can I get regular customers?
I think that for growth I think could be really nice, could be really interesting.
Yeah. I like that idea, Felix.
And experimentation has got to be the biggest benefit from all of this.
I think the other piece of it is if you are a mid -high -end independent restaurant, figuring out ways to monetize somewhat more mass market products rather than being reliant on turning your tables three times a night, which is a nightmare way to live, right?
If you can kind of get burritos to go in the morning or you can get avocado toast out there and you can just do it in a way that you have lax capacity, you can do pickups, and people want higher -end stuff from you, but you don't have to furnish the full cost structure of having people sit in and all
the other pieces of it.
So it feels like the real opportunity from all this is higher -end folks coming a little bit down market and using these technologies to access customers they wouldn't have accessed otherwise.
That's so interesting that you say this, Mir.
I had the exact opposite intuition because I was thinking, if we don't go out as often because we get more delivery, maybe every time I go out is sort of extra special.
Oh, now we're going to a real restaurant.
And maybe my willingness to pay is much higher and prices will go up.
So everybody is moving upscale in a sense.
I think for the dine -in, that's true.
But I guess what I was looking for is opportunities for the independent restaurant to go down.
Oh, and then have additional opportunities.
On the delivery side and on the pickup side.
You know, you use ancillary revenue stream.
Yeah, exactly. Our intuitions align.
Yeah. Look, I know we're running out of time, but the one thing I just want to reflect on is, so the first part of our conversation was all focused around delivery and cloud kitchens and virtual brands.
And the brick and mortar of restaurants gets lost in a conversation like that.
But then the minute we start talking about, well, what kind of restaurant do you want to go back to?
The tone of our voices change and it becomes a real experience in our heads that we're looking forward to.
And it's such a reminder that even as this industry changes and as you see these big power players engage in these huge tectonic shifts with how the industry operates, at the ground level, there are restaurants that are preparing food for us every day that are giving us these experiences that add such
incredible texture to our lives.
And there are people running those places that we still want to see thrive.
And there has to be an opportunity for them to continue to sustain themselves, even in the context of all of these changes.
It's interesting, I mean, because we've been making a lot of analogues to digital commerce.
And the distinction, of course, with food is that there's an experiential component, which is really, really important.
It's not like buying a toaster.
And, you know, that is why delivery is hard for me personally.
Because I don't get the full experience that I want in sometimes in terms of quality because the heat, but mainly because of the social aspect.
And that I think is why thinking about your local entrepreneurs who are giving you those experiences and those local restaurants who are giving you those experiences is so important.
Because that's a big part of the bundle.
And we've been deprived of that for the last year plus.
Well said. Thanks, guys.
OK, Hicks. Who wants to go first?
Well, I have a food related one.
So good. OK, so it's been a long time since I've waxed poetic about a kitchen appliance, probably since the sand mixer.
But I've waited a year to make sure this recommendation is true.
But I think the ice cream maker experience has been so good for me over the last year that I think it is just a fantastic purchase for all kinds of folks.
I bought one. You did?
I did. So when I bought wine, a friend of mine told me, yeah, talk to me in a month.
You'll have used it three times and then you'll store it away forever.
It's like the most expensive piece of ornamentation.
Not true. It's constantly being used.
You can go high and you can go low.
So you can just like throw in two cups of milk and a cream and a bottle of dulce de leche.
Or you can go like look at a recipe on Jenny's or Salt and Straw and make something high end with egg yolks and cornstarch.
They're good gifts.
You can make up a bunch of ice cream and then just deliver it to someone.
It's fantastic. Oh, that's a nice idea.
It's fantastic. So ice cream makers are way underrated.
The brand. What about the brand?
I went was not super high end, but it's Breville and it was a great purchase for us.
Actually, the interesting thing about ice cream makers, if you have outdoor space, the super cheap ones, like 40 bucks where you use ice is just as good as the higher end, kind of like Breville ones.
Interesting. So it really doesn't matter.
So I am not the ice cream devotee that you are, but over the holidays, I did invest in an ice cream maker because my kids, their favorite ice cream is one that is not usually in stores.
It's very popular in Asia.
What is like mochi?
It's red bean ice cream.
And so because everybody was going to be in the house for many, many days, I decided to make the investment.
Two things I'll say.
Number one, it's shockingly easy.
So easy. And then number two, it was such a hit.
Exactly. It's amazing.
It's kind of fun. Fun.
Absolutely fun too.
I agree. Where is my gift?
Okay. So next time we go for a walk, Felix, I'll bring a quart of dulce de leche.
Yeah. If you could solve the delivery problem there too, you could open a business.
There you go. Wait a second.
Wait a second. I could have my own cloud kitchen.
Yes. It will be fantastic.
I'll start my own brand.
Actually we could have an after hours ice cream brand.
It'll be your red bean ice cream.
It'll be my dulce de leche.
Felix, what's your flavor going to be?
I'll do a digital version that has a non -fungible token.
Fantastic. Okay. So I'll go next.
There is a film out right now called Nomadland.
Oh, yeah. Written, produced and directed by Chloe Zhao.
It features Frances McDormand and it is very good.
But my recommendation is actually not the film, but the book that the film is.
Based on the film is very, very good.
Have you guys seen it?
She's fantastic. Yes.
She is. She's just so good.
And most of the people in the film are not professional actors.
Right. It's like a mix of a documentary.
Right. It's super interesting.
Almost the most astonishing aspect of her performance.
She is the professional and she blends in with everyone else and you couldn't tell the difference.
Her commitment to her character is just so all in.
It's really something.
But the film raised a number of questions in my mind.
And so I immediately went to the book and I read the book.
And the book, it's much harder.
In other words, I think the film sands away some of the harshest edges of the life.
So it tells the story of a growing number of older people.
Post -recession, almost refugees who for one reason or another have lost their homes.
So what they do is they cross the country in their campers in search of work.
And so they're nomads.
And they work at Amazon for a while.
They work in different campsites for a while.
But as I understand it, part of the distinctive thing is they're older, right?
They are. They're older.
They're all older. But the film, it's quite harsh, but it actually still sands away many of the harshest edges.
And when you read the book, you read the stories behind the stories and all the harder edges are in it.
And it's really so compelling.
So I would highly, highly recommend both.
The book, by the way, is by Jessica Bruder, an incredible journalist.
So that's my recommendation.
That's a great one.
And then Felix. So I confess I'm addicted to a Korean TV drama.
K -Trauma! I know, I know.
Have you heard of my mister?
I have heard of it.
I have not seen it.
It is amazing. And we spoke about it on the show before, that one of the benefits of Netflix going global is that you get to experience local television production in a way that you could never really do before.
And it's both completely illuminating, interesting, and puzzling at one and the same time.
I mean, to start with, every episode is an hour and 20 minutes.
Yes, that's typical.
I mean, who has an hour and 20 minutes to watch an episode?
The story is so interesting.
The setting is the main company where people work is structural engineering.
When do we ever see a show?
Can you imagine a US show that is set in a company where everyone's a structural engineer?
Probably not. And it's this interaction between an older general manager and a temp worker and how their lives touch one another.
And they're both incredibly nice and incredibly terrible to one another in ways that are just, I mean, it touches your soul twice a minute.
But the experience is, I cannot say good enough things about it.
My mister, it's on Netflix.
I have to say, it's like a management drama about a structural engineering firm.
And it has everything you can possibly want.
It has love, it has affairs, it has bribery, it has office intrigue.
Oh, I like it. Okay, now I'm getting excited.
That sounds good. So I just want you to know, Felix, that you have made my older sister so happy with your recommendation.
She is obsessed with K -dramas.
So I'm sure she has seen this one.
I have not seen this one.
My younger sister, by the way, is also a little bit obsessed.
I watch them, but not as much.
Do you have a favorite one that you remember in life?
I loved Reply 1988 because that one, of course, it's iconic.
But some of the ones that are really, really popular, I couldn't get into.
But I haven't seen this one.
So I will definitely, definitely check it out.
Felix, I feel like I'm recommending Minari.
You're doing K -drama.
I think this is a young me secret plan to make this a Korean podcast.
Maybe we should do an episode focused on K -drama, then we should do K -pop.
We could do Korean food.
K -beauty is another.
We've done face masks.
We could do a whole.
I like that idea. I like that too.
And actually we should do it from Seoul.
We should all go to Seoul and do one K episode.
That would be some weird talking.
In the New World. A lot to look forward to.
So that's it for tonight, everyone.
A big shout out to Peter Linane, our audio engineer.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
Thanks for watching.
I'll see you guys next time.
