Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Young Me. I'm Felix.
I'm Me here. I'm Rowie.
So, I heard this rumor that the three of you are teaching in an executive education program together.
Is that true? I know, it's true.
Can you imagine? I think there's also a rumor that a third of the participants have asked their money back once they heard that it's the three of us.
In all seriousness, it must be fun.
Are you having fun?
Yeah. The thing I like most about this particular program, because they're mid -career, they literally think of this as a sort of midway point through their careers.
It's a moment to reflect, to re -skill, to re -imagine, and it's a really poignant moment to engage with someone.
Yeah. I also feel that it's a reminder of how special a classroom can be.
So, for many younger people who are in our classrooms, they've spent their entire lives in classrooms.
And with some of the executive education participants, what's great is they haven't been in a classroom in a long time.
And so, they come to, I think, really appreciate what it means to be in a room with other people who are accomplished and thinking about ideas.
That's a really fun, refreshing experience.
In all honesty, I envy those participants.
To have all three of you, it's so special, they're very fortunate.
We nodded. As for tonight, we brought topics to talk about.
Woo -hoo. Felix, you brought a topic you wanted to discuss.
Yes. I would like to talk about online platforms, internet companies that have some sort of a matchmaking role.
Think e -commerce, think dating apps.
I think they're really interesting companies in that space that I would love to explore.
Okay. Great. And then, I want to talk about work from home and what you think about companies deciding that they're going to let their employees work from home permanently, from any location.
So, one of the things I think we're all thinking about is, once we are safely on the other side of this pandemic, what it's going to mean to go back to work?
So, there are a number of companies like Twitter, Zillow, Facebook, and others that have already announced that they're going to let employees work from home permanently, from any location.
And so, I have a bunch of questions for you guys.
Do you think these companies are making the right decision?
Have they done that?
Have they made their decision too rashly?
Are you buying all the hype around work from home, work from anywhere?
And if you are a company thinking about following suit, what are some of the things you should be considering when making this decision?
Felix, what do you think?
One of the things that I would think about very carefully is how much of the work in your company gets done with the help of the formal organization?
And how much of the work in your organization gets done via informal contacts and activities?
We know from really interesting research that so much work gets done completely outside the formal organization, because people happen to know each other and they think, oh, I have an issue with accounting, why don't I call Paul or Mary because he or she might be able to help me.
One of the really interesting things about online communication and online networks, it feels much more intentional.
It feels much less sort of spontaneous.
And to the extent that we get a lot of work done in informal ways, I think it's really important to think about ways to replicate at least some of that.
As a result, I would be very surprised if zero one solutions, meaning all work is from home or all work is in the office.
I don't think that is the way of the future, but I think the in between you need to have at least a little bit of personal interaction to make it work.
I can almost not imagine an organization not having that.
Yeah. Felix, I think I'm with you, which is that this has been posed as kind of a binary thing in the press and elsewhere, which is we're going to work from home or we're going to have offices.
And it's not a binary thing.
And the real challenge is going to be figuring out when three days a week or two days a week, people are in the office, but other people aren't, how are you going to communicate then?
I think that is going to be the really challenging part of all this.
And because bonds get built in person.
I think the thing that I'm really struck by in this conversation, at least in part is it's almost an age or generational question.
So I really think a lot about young people and about how young people have less, in some sense, external lives from work.
Right? So they're less likely to have families.
They're less likely to be having other responsibilities, work and being physically together.
I actually think is important to them.
So I think young media, your question, what am I paying attention to or thinking through is I would really think through the demographics of your workforce.
So if you have a bunch of folks who are older, who actually might really enjoy the possibility of not coming in and they are, for example, well -established employees.
I actually think work from home and work from anywhere is fantastic.
If you have a very young workforce, I'm not so sure.
And I would really wonder about the heterogeneous effects across young people and older people in rolling out these policies.
You know, one of the things that comes to my mind is the question, why do we work anywhere in particular?
And we work at places because they pay us, obviously, but mostly I think we work at places where we're attracted to the culture, where we're attracted to particular people or types of people who work in that organization.
And so I would want to ask myself, if I were having to make this decision, what is distinctive about the culture of my organization?
How do I build that?
How do I maintain it?
Are there ways that I can either build or maintain it remotely?
Because the other side of this is what is going to draw people to your organization if they're working remotely and then they could work for any organization.
One of the things that I struggle with is I feel like so much of the conversation around this and so much of the reporting around this is focused around performance considerations.
That is, if people are working from home, will they be as productive?
Will they be as effective?
And I think there's a part of business that's a solo sport and there's a big part of business that's a team sport.
And while some of those team elements can be replicated on Zoom, not all of them can.
And in particular, Felix, some of the things that you were talking about where unstructured environments are maybe even better for getting things done, I think that's much harder to replicate when people are siloed in their homes.
And then, Mehear, to your point, I think there are also a bunch of developmental considerations.
So on the one hand, if you're a company, you're trying to extract great performance out of people, but on the other hand, you're also trying to cultivate your people to be future managers, to be future leaders.
And in this regard, I think there's a part of business that's actually kind of, for lack of a better word, a spectator sport as well.
If you think about the leadership skills you develop as a person, how'd you develop them?
In part, it was by just observing other leaders in action, watching how they carry themselves, how they handle difficult situations, how they motivate others, how they run a meeting.
And if you want to develop those skills among your people, you want them to be exposed to lots of good leaders, lots of bad leaders, and lots of people outside of their narrow domain of work.
I think this passive learning piece is so incredibly important.
I remember when you first work in a large organization, even things like, if you don't know something, is it okay to ask?
And can you ask anyone?
And then, how does hierarchy play a role?
Like, what kind of conversation do you have with someone who's far more senior than you are?
And all of these things, you have no idea how all of this works.
And I think your point is such a great one.
You just sit there and you see how it's done.
Right. Exactly. And I think one of the things that concerns me a little bit is that the people who tend to have the loudest voice in these places are the people who are pretty well established at what they do.
And as a result, I wonder if it's going to tilt the decision making in a way that neglects the concerns of the folks who might feel like they need mentorship, or feel like they need exposure to how things get done.
I mean, Raul, you made such a good point earlier about the cultural piece of this.
I think what makes companies with strong cultures impressive is the sustainability of the culture that they're able to create.
So even as people come and go, as leaders retire and move on, the culture of the company continues to hold up.
And if you've been in that space for a long time, it becomes invisible to you because you can take it for granted.
It's like the air you're breathing.
Exactly. But if you're sort of new to it, you're still just trying to figure out, you know, what's that funny smell?
I mean, one part of this is how our company is going to do, but I think the point you're raising is how are people going to do?
And again, I'm kind of obsessed with the young people, but young me, you're also pointing to people who are a little bit more on the margins, right?
Right. Who may not be so easily acculturated into the ways an organization works with.
So think about a first generation college graduate who is going into a workplace where they have not been acculturated potentially in that kind of way of thinking about the world.
While others who are coming from different backgrounds may naturally understand those cultures and especially young people, I don't know why I'm obsessed with this, but I really think about these young folks who are, you know, a have been driven by technology to be perhaps somewhat more interior in many
ways. And then their first jobs for many people today is an entirely remote experience.
And it is one that is a little bit barren of all the things that I remember as being fun in my first job, you know, which was all the osmosis you talked about all that passive learning where I was in a little cubicle and I was watching everything going on around me.
And I often tell young people, you know, the first job, it doesn't really matter what you go do, but it matters what you're going to learn from the people around you.
And you know, how does that work when you're not really around people all day?
You know, I confess the other part of this that I think we should talk a little bit about is it feels again like companies are going to be okay, but it does feel like this is going to lead to competition for talent.
This has the feel of something where we have a bunch of medium high skilled workers who are saying, this is great.
We're going to be able to work from anywhere and life is good.
And we might wake up in 20 years and realize that actually for those folks, this is comparable to what we saw happen with low skilled jobs earlier, which is competition from around the world.
So it's not location specific anymore.
Now, of course, for really elite workers, I don't think that will happen, but there's this kind of middle range where it's not so clear.
I mean, the other thing to consider here, how much easier it is to fire people if you never actually have to run into them in the office, how much easier it is to not invest emotionally in the wellbeing of your employees if you never actually have to see them.
I saw this fascinating statistic about how during the pandemic, one of the things that has gone up is whistle blowing among employees.
My hypothesis is that it's just much easier for people to not feel emotionally connected to the corporation or to the people there.
And so I think these are all things that maybe we're not thinking enough about.
On the other hand, if the answer is just, well, we need some hybrid approach.
That's complicated too, right?
Yeah. So one of the really interesting questions regarding the hybrid approach is what do the homes look like, in particular with younger children?
I think there's a whole range of questions.
And one of the things that I'm not sure, should the company bear some responsibility just like the company now pays for office space?
I mean, everybody has a different set of arrangements at home.
I can tell you during pandemic time, my two children have sort of become imperialists and have expanded their presence throughout the house.
And so the number of spaces in my house where I feel like, okay, that's my space for work, I've sort of narrowed it down to my closet.
But I think this sharing of space, if we're all doing this at the same time, is really, really complicated.
But I do think that's where we're headed.
The demand is such that I think it's going to be hard to go all the way back to how things were pre -pandemic.
And so now we're going to be in a little bit more of a messy world that I like to call divergence.
And by the way, we haven't even talked about things like, do you change people's salary?
Right. Or compensation, depending on where they live and things like that.
So we haven't even talked about this.
But my sense is that this is going to become much more complicated as we go forward.
And probably a source of differentiation also, right?
It'll be very interesting to see how that becomes yet another dimension along which firms can choose different models and then can compete for talent and people will sort depending on what they really like.
I confess there's something about a workplace and maybe this is overly romantic, which is there is something wonderful about going into a workplace where people are different from you and your habits are different and the way you think about the world is a little bit different.
And so it does feel like the big mixing bowl that is the office, which I remember growing up feeling like that was, and my first job was like that, going into an office and seeing different types of people who hadn't seen otherwise was a good part of that experience.
And I wonder if that might get diminished a little bit too.
You know, we've moved away from the debate as it's being portrayed generally, which is these are questions about compensation, location and productivity.
And now we're talking about all these other complicated issues that are much softer, much less easy to quantify about mentoring and connection and culture and these issues that really aren't the basis of most of the debate out there about what might happen next, but probably deserve even more attention than the questions
of productivity and compensation and location and time zones and all of these things that we're discussing.
So true, Robbie. Yeah.
Okay. Thanks, guys.
Okay, Felix. So I would like to talk about internet platforms.
And you're a member, of course, when the internet became good enough that you could build, say, an ecommerce platform.
Not only entrepreneurs were super excited about all these possibilities, but it also seemed from an investor's point of view, just too good to be true.
And the reason that these platforms were suspected to be highly profitable, very valuable, is network effects.
The moment I have more customers, I attract more sellers.
And as I get more sellers, I get more customers and so on and so on.
And often people would imagine these winner take all or winner take most outcomes.
And now, looking back, I think the evidence is much more mixed.
Of course, we do see the big businesses.
We see the Amazon marketplaces.
We see how Google and Facebook have become dominant in advertising.
But at the same time, it's also true that for every market you look at, you see smaller players.
And some of them are struggling, as you would imagine.
And many of them are doing surprisingly well.
Even a number two or number three, think of Lyft or VIA in ride sharing, think of Etsy in ecommerce.
Time after time after time, you see these much smaller companies that just should be wiped out if winner take all was a real thing.
And somehow they hang on.
Why do you think that is?
What do you make of these companies?
I wonder if there's something here about what they're not and the differentiation that they're bringing to their industries.
And so when we think about Lyft, what Lyft is, is among other things, not Uber.
It's not the big behavior.
So important. What Etsy is, is that it is not Amazon.
And it's a higher touch experience.
It's differentiated in a wide variety of ways and the kinds of products that they have.
It feels different and more personal somehow.
And maybe it's not going to be as wildly profitable, but that's okay.
Yeah. I mean, in particular, those two examples you raised, Lyft and Etsy are interesting because they cater to a different side of the platform in some sense, right?
And so part of their differentiation is not just we're not them, but we will be different with our suppliers.
We will do things differently.
And that feels, not just, you know, I got like a pink mustache on my car, but like we're different in a different way.
But I think there's an interesting insight there because when you look at these platform players, what you find is that they're making trade -offs at every step on how to balance the power dynamic across that platform.
And, you know, you talk about Amazon as being one of these giants.
A counter to Amazon is Etsy, but another counter to Amazon is also Shopify.
And what you see with these second tier players is they're trying to say, okay, we're going to do a platform too, but we're going to set our balance differently.
We're going to give more value back to vendors, for example.
We might not have the cheapest prices, but we're going to lean a little bit more on this side.
In the case of Shopify, they'll say, okay, we're going to let you control the customer relationship in a way that Amazon wouldn't let you do.
And so what they're doing is they're just playing across these power dynamics in very different ways.
So the biggest chunk of the market might still go to Amazon, but there will be a sizable number of folks who want to go to this alternative platform.
Remember the conversation we had about Jeff Bezos when he announced his retirement and the practice of having the empty chair in the meeting and the empty chair was represented by the customer and this obsession with what they believed the customer wanted, which was speed and low prices.
And I sort of imagine that there's space for companies to have multiple empty chairs in these meetings.
And one is the customer and one is labor and one is the vendor and trying to think about how you're balancing the interests of the putative representatives in these multiple empty chairs.
To me, that sounds like a place where there's going to be space for differentiation.
I think this type of differentiation, who do you cater to on the platform is one way that smaller players can stand out.
I think sometimes it's also true that the size itself speaks against the larger player.
And so I'm thinking one good example is in dating apps.
Match .com is the big player in the room.
And if you are like the three of you, you're beautiful, you're smart, you're well educated.
Of course. Go on. Let him keep going.
You want to be on the biggest platform you can possibly be.
But if you're like me, a lot of competition doesn't sound very promising.
I don't want to be on the platform with all the most beautiful people on the planet.
And so in dating, you not only see that you have smaller communities where people share special interests.
But you also see a tendency to make it easier to find partners short term, long term, when in fact, in global competition, you probably don't stand out as one of the very big winners.
And so there's a whole series of smaller players where the value proposition is, I think you said it beautifully.
It's like, what are you not?
And I think what these companies are saying, we're not big.
And that becomes a source of strength.
Can I just maybe rain on this lovely parade just a tiny little bit?
We expect nothing less.
Yeah, thank you very much.
So, you know, the first thing to say is the first order fact remains kind of winner tickle, meaning the first order fact is we have giant behemoths that have grown very, very quickly and that dominate these markets.
Certainly in retail.
That is true. Maybe less true in the dating market for exactly the reasons you said there can be a lot of room for heterogeneity and mixing.
But the other part of it that I struggle with is that these companies that we're talking about, you know, operationally, they've done okay.
But it's not clear they're doing great.
And it's not clear that in a different set of financial and economic circumstances that they wouldn't have flourished nearly as much.
So look at a company like Wayfair.
Look at a company even to some degree like Etsy, it's done okay.
But some of them are losing gobs and gobs of cash have been supported by very benevolent borrowing conditions and equity markets.
And frankly, part of the pandemic, many of them were just kind of hovering, not flat lining, but not exactly exploding and have had a huge infusion from the pandemic.
So it just feels like, yes, it's true, but is it an artifact of these really crazy times we're living in?
As often, so much depends on what expectations that you have to begin with.
And so I remember when Amazon entered with Amazon handmade, the general response was Etsy is dead.
I mean, there's just no way that you can survive the moment Amazon essentially replicates your business model.
And Etsy's share price has done phenomenally.
If you bought Etsy at that point in time when Amazon started with Amazon handmade, you have done very well.
And of course, it's true, Amazon is really big, but it has 40 % market share.
And yes, 40 % relative to everyone else, oh my God, you build something amazing, but it's 40%.
Yeah, a couple of other things I would add here, and this is really to your comment here.
Number one is Amazon goes public and for 20 years they were not profitable.
That's right. The second thing I'll say though is I think both things can be true.
In other words, I think you can be not necessarily bullish about any one of these companies you mentioned, but at the same time sort of marvel about what they demonstrate about what's happening right now.
So for example, I think we have this idea that when these platform companies emerge, because they're platform companies, they're impartial.
They're just mediators.
And I think one of the things that's become really evident is that platform players are not impartial.
And in fact, they actually lean in different directions and as a result, you can create a counter platform company that operates in different ways.
And I think that's a valid revelation, even if Lyft ends up going away in five years.
I think a second one is there's something I think to the notion of specialists.
I think the history of business has shown that there's almost always a place for both generalists and specialists in the market.
And this kind of goes to most of us are not very picky about most things, but all of us are picky about something.
And when we're picky about something, we generally want to shop at a place that respects that pickiness.
So if you're a golf fanatic, you probably don't want to buy your golf clubs at Walmart, for example.
You want to shop at a place that's a golf specialist.
If you really, really are obsessed about knitting, you might want to shop at a yarn specialist.
That's interesting.
And again, I think you can respect and sort of learn from what they're doing, irrespective of whether or not those specific businesses are likely to be able to sustain themselves going forward.
It's so interesting what you said.
So I want to try to push back on what you said, which is two things.
One is, yes, people said that about Amazon for 20 years and look where they got to.
But that saw has justified so much craziness for the last 25 years.
We're losing money too.
And we're just losing even more money than Amazon.
And so that feels a little crazy.
The second part is I totally buy into your specialist idea, although I don't know if I got all the way to the conclusion.
So for example, Etsy, I can admire because to me, they're doing something super distinctive relative to other retailers.
Wayfair, I struggle more with.
I think to myself, furniture.
Okay. What is it about furniture that is going to provide that specialist advantage?
To me, your first point that you made, young me, about what is really new and different and exciting about some competing platform.
Maybe for a side of the platform that was underserved to begin with.
Right. Those are the cases that I find is very interesting.
And if you think about the big turnover, so think back to early 2000s.
eBay completely dominates e -commerce in China.
And then Alibaba comes along and they create Taobao.
And it comes with a whole suite of features.
And then think about the latest turnover Taobao versus Pinduoduo.
All of a sudden we're doing essentially the same thing, except now there's all of a sudden there's a social component to it.
And so the times when I'm most excited about platform competition and how winner take all.
In retrospect, it's true for just a tiny little time when no one can imagine eBay being displaced.
When no one can imagine you can build a successful business in the shadow of Taobao until you see it.
All that tells me is that in the end, platform businesses are not that special.
This big bruja around network effects is just not that important.
So I think your example is a very good one of Taobao and what happened.
But to me, that is in a way exactly a manifestation of winner take all and network effects, which is you have someone who is an upstart, who replaces the dominant player so quickly that you could barely imagine because they harness the network effects to work for them.
There's a separate question, which is our little players and kind of a thousand flowers blooming all over the place.
That to me feels like the more dubious proposition.
So I guess there's two different things, right?
One is winner take all means, oh, one person wins and they win forever.
That clearly is wrong.
And there can be these big entrants who come in and who just figure something out.
And that's a beautiful, wonderful thing to watch.
Whether there's like a whole host of little players around, that's the question, which I'm a little more dubious about.
But Meher, I think all of these outcomes are in place.
So I think you're right that a lot of these smaller players probably won't survive.
But I think some of them will because they're doing something differentiated enough, something specialized enough, that they're able to coexist in the shadow of the giant platform.
And then on top of that, there's a third possibility, which is the one you guys are talking about, where the small player ends up doing something so compelling, like the social selling you see in China, that they're actually able to challenge the giant player.
So this is Taobao and Pinduoduo right now.
And as you guys rightly put it, because of the speed with which network effects can take hold, it can happen really quickly, which means that these giants may actually be more vulnerable than they seem.
And then there's one more outcome, which we probably don't need to talk about.
And that is the big player swallows up the smaller player through acquisition before it can become a challenger.
But these feel like some of the dominant scenarios.
Do you think that the unexpected vulnerability of the larger incumbents helps to explain some of the relentlessness of their approach?
And going back to the Facebook or Amazon, we wonder, like, what's wrong with you?
Like, why is enough not enough?
Like, why do you have to put everybody out of business?
And maybe part of the story is that they know they're vulnerable.
And that's why they're relentless in ways that sometimes seem, I don't know, unpleasant or unseemly.
I think that's exactly right, Ravi.
And I think one of the things I'm taking away from this is, you know, winner take all that phrase.
I think what people think winner take all means is somebody wins, and then they win, and then they're happy.
And then they're locked in.
And I think what winner take all means in a more thoughtful way is the speed with which you can conquer and lose a market is just extremely fast because of these network of X and the things that go along with it.
Yeah. I think Ravi's point struck me as exactly right.
One of the reasons why you see the big Internet platforms be so aggressive is because they have learned the lessons of history.
They don't believe in winner take all 1 .0.
Yeah. They know that they remain vulnerable.
And if I look at the successful examples where smaller platforms persist over time, one key to success is always to think really deeply about the advantage of the big platform and then create value in a way that is really hard to imitate.
So I'll give you one example, competition between match .com and eHarmony.
eHarmony is the platform for people who look for long -term committed relationships online.
That is a super difficult value proposition to begin with.
And it's not something that match .com wants to get into.
And so looking at the eHarmony business model, every little detail down to there's no search function on the website is optimized for people who are interested in long -term committed relationships.
And that's why it works.
And that's why even though they're much smaller than match .com, they remain profitable because it's not really the match .com thing to play in that market.
And if you have that kind of differentiation, I think that's stable and profitable over time.
Super interesting, you guys.
Okay, PICS. Actually, before we do PICS, Mihir, can I tell you, you did a recommendation recently.
You recommended Spelling Bee from the New York Times.
I did. My husband is addicted.
So good. And not only is he addicted, but for some reason he seems to think that he needs to take a photo of his results and send them to me every day.
And every day I'm supposed to call him a genie.
He says, look, I'm a genie.
He created a monster with this one.
Oh, I am delighted.
There is nothing better than Spelling Bee and competing on Spelling Bee, which I did this weekend with my sister as well.
It's quite competitive apparently.
Maybe he is a genius.
It's really hard. I tried it after Mihir suggested it.
He's so good at this game.
It's really fun. Anyway, I'm delighted Spelling Bee is bringing you and Robert closer together.
Okay. Now, Felix, did you bring in a recommendation?
I did. Is it going to ruin my marriage?
I hope not. I'm pretty optimistic.
I wanted to recommend a charitable organization that's called Gift Directly.
And they do something that on the one hand is so super simple.
And it's also a little counterintuitive, and that is give money to poor people directly.
No strings attached.
It's a cash transfer.
And one thing that I really love about this organization is that they have done the most careful study that I can imagine to actually see what happens.
And part of what these randomized trials show where they literally they pick at random people who are in the study, and then they randomize who gets money, who doesn't get money.
And they look how the money gets spent, how the expenditures differ across the two groups.
And you just see that some expenditures are really surprising and make a lot of sense after you see them.
There's a lot of investment, a lot of poor people who buy animals, who buy inventory if they have a little store.
And generally speaking, it's so simple that in the end the efficiency of these transfers, how much good can you actually do with a given amount of money that you have, is really just amazing.
So I don't know about you, but I always find it quite difficult to know which charities I should support.
And once I came across this one, I thought it's such a brilliant, simple idea and such amazing impact.
So the charities give directly, and I highly recommend it.
Actually, Michael Faye who runs that is a former student of mine.
Yes. He is spectacular.
And it is both the economic research and the science behind it, Felix, which is about cash transfers, and then implementing it on large scale.
And now interestingly kind of facilitating it at an individual level.
They're really a really neat organization.
Fantastic. That's amazing.
Okay. Love it. That's great.
Rowie, what'd you bring?
So you know the novelist Jumpa Lahiri.
Yeah. So she is famous for the namesake and interpreter of maladies.
And she has over the past few years done this extraordinary thing, which is that she learned Italian well enough to write a novel in Italian and is translating it herself from the Italian in which she wrote it back to English.
And that novel is coming out this April, and I'm super excited because I love her work, and I don't read Italian.
And so I can't read the original Italian version of it, but this process, I'm so fascinated by it.
And so I haven't actually read it yet, but this is such a cool thing, but I can't really endorse it from my experience with it because I haven't read it yet.
But I'm just super, super excited about it.
I'm a huge fan of the interpreter maladies, all that stuff, and she is spectacular.
She is spectacular.
And I read about her decision, I think it might've been in The New Yorker, to go and live in Italy and learn Italian to the point where she could then write a book in Italian.
Yeah. But that's a great one.
That's a great one.
Meir, do you have one?
Yeah. So I have not done this in a long time, but I paid $20 to watch a movie.
It's because I was so excited about it, and it hadn't gone to platforms yet.
And I was just compelled to do it because I was so excited about this movie, which is this new movie called Minari.
It is so good. So it's a story about immigrants who come to the United States in the 80s.
Korean. Korean. Can't believe you buried the lead.
Okay, I was trying to open it up a little bit, but you're absolutely right.
It's a Korean family who moves to Arkansas and then become farmers.
And it's a complete family story.
And there's a grandmother who is fantastic, who apparently is a big star in Korean cinema, and a younger guy who's the father, Steven Yoon, who's a big star now, I guess, in America.
But what a magical movie about immigration and families.
And the beautiful part of it is, it's told from the perspective of a little boy.
But it just completely touched my heartstrings and is a beautiful, beautiful movie.
So I recommend Minari.
Have you guys heard of this one?
I've heard of it. I'm excited to watch it.
I didn't even know it was possible to do this thing Mahira is describing.
Well, I very rarely care enough about a movie to do this.
But for some reason I could tell this was my movie, you know, immigrant family, little boy, coming to the United States.
I don't know. It was all teed up for me.
And sure enough, it just totally delivered, like beautiful, loving family movie.
This sounds fantastic.
So I'm sheepish about my recommendation because you guys did such beautiful recommendations that are so elevated.
And mine... Don't worry.
We're getting used to that pattern.
Whenever I'm feeling bad about myself, I can either go to you to make me feel worse.
That's what I'm here for.
That's what I'm here for.
This thing is so slim and so sleek that when you're done using it, you can just slip it underneath your sofa or underneath your bed.
And then when you want to use it, you just slip it under your desk.
And if you have one of those desks that raises, you can walk.
I mean, here walk. I know you're into walking.
Wait, so this is under desk.
You mean you can store it under your desk.
You can store it under your desk, but you use it while you're at your desk.
Are you using it now?
No, I'm not using it now, Riley, because I'm speaking into her microphone.
I had this image of you like sitting down with your feet on a treadmill under your desk.
You're just dangling your legs.
Isn't that what you thought, Felix?
That's what I thought it to.
I thought you were going to be sitting there and you were like moving your feet on this.
You said it was an under desk treadmill.
It was a desk, but you raise the desk so you're standing on it.
And then what I've been doing is when I have a long Zoom meeting.
Like this one. Can you just say we're almost done?
I walk during the entire meeting.
That sounds great. I had a few three -hour meetings recently, and I have to tell you, it transformed it for me, because number one, I got many miles of walking in.
Number two, completely eliminated the temptation to multitask.
And these were meetings where I had to pay attention.
And as a result, I could pay attention.
I had my screen in front of me, but I wasn't fidgety.
So often treadmills have arm rests.
It lies flat. And when you use it, you can raise the thing.
I see. Or if you're using it under your desk, you can keep it down so that it just slides under.
And they're very small and they're very quiet.
So what's the brand?
Oh, there's a bunch of them on Amazon.
I don't want to recommend any one because there's so many and I don't know that this one's any better than any other one.
Yeah. But they're very slim.
And the key is that they're not sturdy enough to run on them.
They're really designed for walking, like fast walking.
That's interesting.
And as a result, the motor doesn't have to be super big and noisy.
So I've gotten like three of my colleagues have gotten these after watching me do this.
Okay. And in a recent meeting, I was like five miles.
It just was walking the whole time.
That's great. That's the great one.
I like it. That is great.
That's not lowbrow.
That is fantastic. Oh, that came through then.
Totally solid. No, I think it's fantastic.
You always deliver.
It's great. All right.
So that's it for tonight.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours in the HBR Podcast Network.
See you next time.
