Ted Audio Collective.
Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Mi here.
And I'm Felix. How are you guys doing today?
Very good. Great, yeah.
So the three of us are all getting such a kick out of going through all of the responses to this survey.
I know. Incredible.
It's really quite amazing.
It's a little overwhelming.
So my favorite ones are the ones that make reference to PVC pipings.
Which, of course, is pretty much the most important topic we ever spoke about on the show.
Can we also, you know, I think you two both, based on the survey responses that we got, it's time to admit you were wrong about the British baking show.
Oh yeah. Yeah. A lot of love for British baking.
So if you haven't signed up, I think we've mentioned this a few times already, but we are going to be creating a newsletter and maybe doing some live events.
And so if you want to be on our mailing list, we will continue to include the link to this survey in our description notes.
And in fact, I think tonight both of you guys brought topics in inspired by what you read in the survey.
Yeah, exactly right.
One of the things people talked about this, we haven't really had a chance to talk about healthcare all that much.
And so I wanted to ask both of you about healthcare companies that you're particularly interested in, healthcare companies that you think are doing really interesting things at this point in time.
Great. Okay. And then Mahir?
And then a bunch of folks wanted to talk about productivity hacks and ways that we kind of collectively or individually are more productive than we might be otherwise.
And so I'm hoping that you guys will share some of your big tips on how to be a little bit more productive.
I mean, what's really funny about that is somehow the misperception that the three of us are particularly productive.
There's a certain irony here.
It's not quite right starting point, but yes, we can talk about productivity.
I agree. If you can't do teach.
Okay, Felix, you want to get us started?
Yes. So healthcare.
If I can just ask you as you look at the healthcare industry, obviously one of these industries that is in transition now, what do you see that's particularly interesting?
What's a company that you think we all should pay attention to, think about what they do?
So I'll get us started.
This is not one company, but a handful of companies, Inovio, Moderna, Codiagnostics, Novavax, as well as some big companies like Johnson & Johnson.
And what these firms all have in common is they are all in a mad dash to create a vaccine for coronavirus, for COVID -19.
Oh, yeah. Academic researchers are also working on this, federal scientists.
So just a few quick observations.
One is we should all really appreciate how quickly this virus was identified.
Its genome was sequenced by Chinese scientists and shared with the world within weeks.
By comparison with SARS, it took five months.
Oh, I didn't know. Now, having said that, it's going to take a long time before we see a vaccine, even though we can now create vaccines much, much faster than we've been able to historically.
And the reason is it's still a lot of trial and error because you need to find some kind of viral sequence that triggers the protective immune system, but also doesn't create an acute response that damages your body.
And so you've got to hit the sweet spot and then you've got to test it in animals and then, of course, on people.
So the super ambitious goal is to see if they can begin testing a vaccine in a couple of months.
And in fact, one company, Moderna, has already announced it's got something that wants to start testing.
Wow. And then hopefully another year or so before it can be deemed safe and effective.
The one other thing I should note is that even if a year from now we have this vaccine, then you still have to deal with manufacturing and distribution.
So it means that someone's got to step up and commit to making this vaccine at scale.
And then there's a question of distribution, right?
How do you get it to the places that need it?
Who's going to pay for it?
And then finally, if the virus mutates, which is what a lot of scientists believe it will do, this might be one of those cases where the vaccine has to be in constant development, like the flu vaccine.
But still, it's an extraordinary set of companies to watch because they are moving so quickly.
Yeah, it's sort of surprising that so many companies would race to do this, even though the commercial prospects seem, at least as far as I understand, they seem very murky to say the least.
The interesting kind of thing about this market is the financing of vaccines, because they're really hard to finance for the reasons you alluded to, Felix, because you don't know what's going to be needed and they tend to be distributed often for free.
And so there are also these fantastic organizations like GAVI and IAVI.
I don't exactly remember what they all stand for, but they're basically working on funding and the distribution of vaccines because it's kind of a market failure, right?
Because it's really hard to make money in some of those markets.
And those organizations have done incredible work to promote vaccines around the world.
And I imagine they'll get involved on this one as well.
So yeah, that's a great pick.
Well, fantastic. How about you, Mihir?
What are you following?
Actually, a company that you might have heard of, it's called Walmart.
Remind me? Yeah. And I think I alluded to this in a previous podcast, which is they are getting started on healthcare delivery and they're doing it with some of these health centers.
And I think the most exciting thing going on in healthcare is actually the growth of Walmart and CVS in the U .S., but large retailers who are figuring out how to create clinic experiences.
And they are offering checkups for $30, they're offering teeth cleanings for $25.
It is completely revolutionary to the way healthcare can be delivered.
And I think what they're going to do is actually pretty transformative given their geographic scope, given the pricing, given the way they're staffing these centers.
I just think it's going to be something to watch.
So my pick in healthcare kind of somewhat crazily is Walmart as just a company to watch going forward.
The broader trend that's so interesting is there's sort of a retailization of healthcare overall, right?
So you see healthcare outlets in shopping malls, these short visit clinics that we have.
Like Citi MD, there's a whole bunch of them.
Yes, exactly. So somehow this idea that me going to an emergency room or me going to a hospital, that's being replaced often by options that I'm sure are in some parts more cost effective.
Yeah, it is a little crazy to think about the pipeline to visit your doctor in the traditional way is so unsegmented.
So you can sit in that waiting room and there are people who have really urgent, complicated problems.
And then there are other people who are there from really routine visits.
And so it's all kind of mushed together in this one pipeline.
And so what's interesting about the retailization is if you can begin to create some segmentation and begin to segment some people who don't necessarily need a more complicated kind of visit to these retail outlets, then you could create a lot of efficiency in the system.
And Walmart is doing everything from X -rays to blood tests for glucose, A1C.
It's not just like little stuff.
They're doing interesting things.
So I think it's going to be really exciting.
I have a company that I follow that is very closely related to this.
So one of the issues we know about is that in five years from now, we're short roughly half a million home health aides.
We will have 100 ,000 nursing assistants where we can't fill positions.
We will have 30 ,000 nurse practitioners missing from the market.
And it's a partial response.
But one response is telehealth.
Can we find ways to do health care much more efficiently?
Because you don't actually even have to leave your living room.
And one of the companies that I think is a very interesting model is this company, Tidal Care, out of Israel.
What it is really, you have an app and then you have a device.
And the device is equipped so that a doctor can do remote diagnosis.
So the device has a stethoscope, an otoscope, a camera.
And so you can look at heart, lung, throat, ear infections.
There's two modes. You can do a life mode, where you literally get in touch with a doctor via your smartphone.
And then he or she will walk you through how to use the device.
Or you can do it asynchronous, where you just upload the data.
And then when someone has capacity, they will look at you.
And maybe the most exciting thing is now this is sort of the center of a little ecosystem that is being built.
So Tidal Care is now affiliated with Epic, which is the dominant electronic health records provider.
So if your physician actually is on Epic, that remote exam will be added to your record, to your medical history.
It's also that Tidal Care is now related to Life Health Online, which is Anthem's big online service.
And you don't leave your living room.
So I have to go next, because I was going to do telemedicine, which is a subset of telehealth, right?
So telehealth refers to the larger category of things where you're actually doing diagnostic tests and sending results in.
Telemedicine is a more narrow subset of that, where you're essentially video chatting with your doctor.
So the American Medical Association recently said that they estimate that close to 75 % of doctor visits, urgent care, and emergency room visits could be safely handled via telemedicine.
It's amazing, right?
It really is. And I think most states now, I think 48 states now require insurance companies to include a telemedicine option in their plans.
And so I used it recently about six months ago.
I had a very minor thing.
So I just opened the app and I pressed a button.
So the first thing that was astonishing was how quickly you can get in to see a doctor.
Often when you put the request in, you are talking to a doctor within 30 minutes.
It's kind of amazing.
And it was really perfect for me because I needed some antibiotics and I was able to get them very, very easily.
But for people who live in rural communities for whom a doctor's visit is non -trivial, it really does open up access or think about people who have a hard time getting off work to go visit their doctors.
And then I was thinking about one of my sons now lives far away.
And I imagine if he were to ever have a minor medical ailment, trying to convince him to go see a doctor would be incredibly difficult.
But if I said to him, no, actually just download this app and have a conversation with a doctor, I think he's much more likely to do something.
And so to the extent that it can enable us to diagnose things a little bit more quickly before problems get worse, it becomes a really interesting alternative.
Of course, the starting point for all of this is that it's a great way to take costs out of health care.
You don't need the physical spaces and better capacity utilization, not only for patients who are far from urban centers, but also doctors who happen to have spare capacity because no one comes to see them at a particular point in time.
And then the moment you start thinking a little bit about the cost implications, you think, wow, now that it's much more convenient, maybe people will do it much more often.
And so that will lead actually to an increase in the total cost.
And then I'm thinking your argument, Youngmee, but if we catch things earlier, maybe they're super expensive long -term consequences of not seeing a doctor.
Those will go so hard to know what it will do to the cost of health care, but so much more convenient from a patient's perspective.
Yeah, one of the things that I found really fascinating about this was I discovered that one of the fastest growing specialties in telemedicine is telepsychiatry.
The cost is lower, but I also thought maybe this makes people much more likely to go see a psychiatrist if they need to, which might identify problems before they get out of control a little bit.
And the experience is not that different, right?
I mean, it's one of those situations where you can actually mimic the experience.
I think that's what's striking to me about all this, which is people in some sense have been talking about telemedicine for a long time, but now it feels like the underlying technologies are getting good enough on the communication side.
And we're all comfortable with it enough that actually the full potential is about to get realized.
Yeah, and I think this generation in particular is fantastic as well.
Yeah, exactly. It's also generational.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, that was interesting.
Okay, thanks, Felix.
Okay, Mehear, you're up.
Yeah, so one of the things we got out of the survey of one of many, many things was kind of an interest in the way we all manage our time.
We kind of have different portfolios of stuffs with families and with work.
And the question is, how did we make it all work and how do we make it balance?
And also how are we productive?
Of course, as you hinted to Felix, this assumes that we are.
But let's just go with it for these purposes.
Let's pretend. But actually, to be honest, you guys both are, as I know, incredibly productive.
I'm being serious. Like, you guys both are.
And I know we're joking, but I know you have a lot of things going on in your lives and you balance it and you make it all work in some way.
And I'm curious, how do you think you do that?
So what are your big, either time management or productivity hacks that you think are really valuable?
One of the things that really helps me is - You don't sleep.
That's the other half of the answer.
I think attention is, in my experience, really a big important factor.
When I see other people work, I'm surprised how many people have work habits where they're sort of multitasking essentially all the time.
Like, one example, why do we have notifications?
If you care about productivity at all, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to stop all notifications.
Like, why is your email open while you're trying to write something?
So I find my productivity depends so much on, really, I give myself an hour, I want to write something or read something, or irrespective of what I do, but then that's literally all I do.
I have pretty fixed times when I answer email and when I don't answer email.
And when it's not an email time, my email is not open.
You think you can multitask, but really, like, we know.
Like, no one can really multitask.
So that's one of the experiences that I have.
I think that is really important for me.
And Felix, are you able to be disciplined enough to, like, when you say, for example, you set this hour or you shut down your email, then you really stick to it?
I really stick to it.
Yes, yeah. Say I have an hour to write.
My phone is not right next to where I write.
Right. I mean, so much in productivity, I think, has to do with just knowing yourself.
Like, something silly is once I open one browser, it is so tempting to just look a little bit at, you know, what's the news and what else could you look up and so on.
So even when I write and I know there's something I should look up eventually and it's somewhere on the web, I wouldn't do it right there and then.
I don't actually open the browser.
And it's all in the interest of really, like, just focusing all my attention on the one thing that I'm doing at that point in time.
I finally understand why there are these huge segments of time where you are essentially ignoring me.
Yes, I'm so sorry. Yes.
It's all making sense now.
Then you get 17 letters at one at the same time.
That must be lovely, too.
So I can always tell when Felix is back online, because I just get a stream of responses.
And then when I do e -mail, I do e -mail.
All I do is e -mail.
And I know you do the same thing.
I get your messages in batch.
All right, what about you, young me?
OK, so my best advice for anyone who is trying to manage time is something that sounds so cliche, but I really mean it.
And that is learning to say no.
We all get requests to do stuff all the time and it can just flood you.
And I've gotten so good at it that I can now even say no to people without even saying why.
So I'll get a request and I'll just respond by saying, I'm sorry, I can't.
Full stop. Without feeling apologetic about it or feeling right.
Yeah, which took me a while.
Yes, now the flip side to all of this is to have a filter for who you let in, because you don't want to say no to everything.
As an example, former students, those are folks that I welcome back in, even if I can't say yes to everything.
Is there a lot of e -mail you don't answer?
So I have an email filter, which is amazing.
And what it does is the stuff that ends up in my inbox that I see immediately has already been super filtered.
And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that goes into other folders that I don't look at.
So it's not that I don't respond to it.
I might not get to it for a very long time and it tends to build up.
You just have to make really hard choices, right?
Yeah, I always thought this recommendation, if you're asked to do something, if you imagine what if it was tomorrow?
And then use that as a benchmark, whether you would say yes or no?
I've always found that's really powerful, because if someone asks you now, and August is completely open, you're thinking, yeah, I'm not doing much in August.
But of course by the time it's August, it'll be full.
And so to imagine, is it important enough, is it interesting enough that I would say yes, that I will make room for it in my crowded calendar today?
And I think the other piece of that is about saying no for me is not doing anything kind of shooting from the hip.
So any request that I'm thinking about seriously, I will respond initially with, let me think about it, check the dates.
But then I try to take 24 hours, 36 hours so that my knee jerk reaction of like, oh, that sounds interesting, is not the kind of reaction that guides me, right?
I just think there's a lot of knee jerk, yeah, sure, sounds great, sounds interesting, and that you want to caution against.
I mean, the problem is it all really does sound great.
Yeah, exactly. And so you really have to discipline yourself to say no to stuff that even sounds really exciting.
Yeah. How about you, me here?
What do you do? You know, I confess that I have given up on anything that basically assumes that I can control myself around computers and digital instruments.
So I have gone a little hardcore in the following sense, which is now increasingly I write on paper, and I will use now a calendar, where I kind of effectively take the calendar and I every week write down everything that's happening.
And then I just shut the device off.
So in an odd way, I've kind of, and maybe this is not that surprising to you both, which is I'm trying, you know, just to remove myself from technology.
One way is to be more paper -based, which I think is really helpful for thinking more clearly as well.
Yeah. I think what Felix said is true, which is you have to know yourself.
Yeah. Like, I'm so tired of like every little digital productivity app that's supposed to like help you control yourself.
The related way I think about it is I take breaks and I walk and that is where I think, and it is so refreshing.
And I love it. It makes my mind work better when I'm walking.
I'm not going to be attached to a device and it's like fresh air and it's exercise.
I just find walking has become such an important part of my life.
And even for meetings, even for phone calls and for all kinds of things, as opposed to being hunched over a desk.
I think walking, getting outside and shifting to paper.
And yes, I am a Luddite, but I feel like it's the way that's working for me.
Did you write your book on paper?
I wrote parts of it on paper, yeah.
Wow. Oh, my God, that's amazing.
I think your mind works differently and I know that's draconian, but I think you got to know yourself in a way.
One of the things that I often do, which helps, you know, when you're in meetings, magically every meeting takes up the whole time that you planned to begin with, which makes no sense when you think about it because you're so unsure about how the conversation is going to go.
Is it a hard problem?
Is it an easy problem?
And magically you plan that meeting for 60 minutes.
It's going to take 60 minutes.
And what I try to do is like every meeting when I run the meeting or even every phone call, if I run the phone call, my ambition is to be at least 10 minutes faster than expected.
And I actually had a funny experience just this morning where we ended a meeting 10 minutes earlier.
And when I said, okay, thank you very much.
We're done. Like, everybody looked at me like, what do you mean?
We still have 10 minutes.
And I'm thinking, no, we don't.
Like, because it only took 20 minutes to do what we needed to do.
And then we were done.
I'm always trying to push.
Like, could it be done in less time without compromising the quality of the decisions or whatever we're trying to do?
And I think that's a good habit to have, not to fall into this trap.
I have some colleagues here, every meeting is just an hour.
It's by default, it's an hour.
The beautiful part about that is that it's really like a gift to everybody, right?
So when you finish 10 or 15 minutes early, everybody actually wants it, you know?
And everyone's kind of, you know, so you're kind of solving a collective action problem, which is people know that the meeting is substantively over, but no one's really willing to pull the cord.
But if you can, it's just a gift to everybody.
It's fantastic. Yeah.
So I have another one.
One of the most important things to me professionally is carving out alone time every single day.
And it's usually in the morning, and my assistant knows this and protects that time, but I need big chunks of time just to myself without meetings, without being around people.
I mean, I could go days and days.
Both of you guys might have gone through this when you were writing your book, right?
You can go for long periods of time without actually interacting with people.
Yeah. And it can be very satisfying, right?
Yeah. Very energizing.
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it's actually doing work.
But one of the things I have found is if I'm just ingesting information and content, and I don't have time to reflect on it, then I end up thinking about the world exactly like everybody else thinks about the world.
Right. I really need that alone time to sort of reflect on what I've ingested, think about things, and to stretch my mind in some other ways.
And then of course, I love to read, and I never, I shouldn't say never, but I almost never read business books.
I always read something that's going to stretch my mind in a different way.
Yeah. So, time alone, and then stretch your mind in some different ways.
Yeah. I think what this relates to a little bit, Yungmi, is another thing that I try to do, which is there are so many things that can divert your attention, like things in the press.
I think it's really important on some of these things just to opt out, like and just to say, I'm not going to follow anything to do with this story.
As one example, like on the entire impeachment thing, I just opted out.
Like I didn't follow the day -to -day.
I was just like, I'm out.
I'm not going to pay attention.
I'll wake up in three weeks, and I'll see what happens.
And I think it's really useful, because otherwise you're just, there's this kind of constant news feed that you're trying to keep on top of, and it's, you know, you got to pick your battles and pick your zones and pick your things that you're going to pay attention to.
Otherwise, you're just broadly reading on every topic, and then these things happen, and you're reading everything.
And I think it's useful to kind of just say, I'm opting out of the story.
Like I'm not going to follow this story, and I'm just out.
So actually, I think that's sort of the flip side of being super productive, just like you protect that time where you want to be alone, and where you want to have deep thoughts, that you also protect time for TikTok.
Yeah. Sometimes when I see, like people I admire who seem like super, super productive, and I look at them and I go, oh my God, I wish it could be that way.
And then I go, well, what's the last meal that you cooked that took seven hours in preparation?
Like to me, like for my happiness at least, it's really important to have this balance, to not only be protective of the time when you want to be really productive, but also be protective of the time where this sometimes happens to us, I meet you for coffee, we say, yeah, I'll meet you for coffee.
And then like three and a half hours later, we think, oh my gosh, look, how much time passed by.
You know, I think that you just said that really rings true to me is like in this world and in this economy, there's all this kind of weird productivity envy, you know, like you look at this person, you're like, how do they do it?
And that's a really terrible way to think about the world.
Right? Meaning, you don't know the ins and outs of their lives, you don't know the trade offs that they're making, and you don't know when and how that productivity happened and at what cost.
So I think there's a sense in which we all are looking at each other in this world of productivity and being like, wow, how does Felix do it?
But in reality, what you said before, Felix, it's about knowing yourself and what you can do and realizing your kind of potential.
And so there's so much benchmarking that's going on across people that is really not that productive.
And you know, the reality is their lessons are probably not altogether applicable for you because you have to understand yourself and then think about it that way.
That is a great point.
Okay, good. So time to go back to work.
Yes. Okay. Pics. After my excellent pic last week of Knives Out, I did a little Twitter survey to see whether or not I was right about Knives Out or Mejia was right about Knives Out.
So it turns out the world agrees with me, Mejia.
And I did a completely scientific survey.
Can we just slow down a little completely unscientific with horrible framing devices.
Okay, so anyway, pics this week.
So I have something vaguely related to Knives Out as a theme, which is Hilary Mantell wrote this book and is writing a trilogy of books based on Thomas Cromwell and the 1500s in England.
And I know you're already saying like, this is so boring and terrible, but the first one of that is called Wolf Hall.
And it is a spectacular story about political intrigue.
It's like Game of Thrones or House of Cards, but in like 16th century England with Thomas Cromwell.
And there is also a six part BBC production of it.
It's called Wolf Hall.
And it is the most spectacular acting, the most spectacular writing, and the most spectacular story of this political intrigue between Henry the 8th and Thomas Cromwell.
So she's coming out with like the third leg of that trilogy, which I'm not sure if that's going to be good or not, but I can entirely recommend the first one, which is called Wolf Hall.
Either the book or in this case, it's as good to watch and you can watch it on Amazon Prime.
You can stream the six part Wolf Hall series, which is spectacular.
That's my pick. I'm just trying to decide whether or not I should say something polite here, or to actually reveal that I don't think that's for me.
I'm just saying. Well you should try it.
Because now we're being apparently really honest about how we feel about each other's pick.
No, we have to find common ground, young me.
We have to find common ground.
Watch this. We'll find a common ground.
Okay, all right. I have a common ground recommendation.
It's a short animated feature.
It was nominated for the Oscars and it's a short French film.
The title is I Lost My Body.
It's directed by Jeremy Clappan and it's about a hand that gets severed from the body.
Pretty much the way the title suggests.
It is one of the most imaginative things I've seen in the recent past.
Yeah, it's just this idea that you sort of experience the world from the hands perspective and it's a love story at the same time and very unlike what you would imagine from a French film, the ending is not completely devastating, shaking your world.
So highly, highly recommended.
It's on Netflix. I Lost My Body by Jeremy Clappan.
Ooh, that sounds good.
Okay, wait a second, that sounds good.
And Wolf Hall doesn't.
Young me, I hope you have something lowbrow because we're being really already farted Of course, you can always rely on me to be really in the gutter.
Okay, do you guys like heists?
Yes. Like heist movies, heists.
I love heist and I particularly love them when they don't involve violence.
So, you know, I love that.
Ocean's Eleven stories and any kind of bank heist.
So there is this article in GQ and it is called the great Buenos Aires bank heist.
True story. Fascinating, fascinating.
Love it, love it. It's being turned into a movie.
And in my head, I'm already trying to imagine who's going to play the various parts.
When did it happen?
It took place 2006, I think.
Oh, recently. Yes, you know, an all star crew, perfect plan.
They pulled it off.
Amazing. They called it the caper of the century.
They eventually ended up getting caught, not when it happened, but for reasons later, which you can read about.
But they completely became folk heroes because once they were caught, they revealed how they did it.
I love stuff like this.
It's a really great read.
It's a really short read.
But in GQ magazine, the great Buenos Aires bank heist.
I love this idea of assembling a crew and everybody has a different skill.
Okay, okay, Young Me.
Here we go. Young Me, best heist movie ever.
What is it? Oh, the Italian Job.
I love that. Oh, no, no, no.
Inside Job, Spike Lee.
Sorry. Oh, that one was so good.
You're right. Yes, so good.
That one was even better.
Or Money Heist. Oh, yeah, that was...
Oh, yes. The Spanish television series.
That was like... That was a big...
Oh, that was a series.
Yeah, that was good.
Okay, so fun picks.
All right. So two out of the three were really good this week.
Oh my god. Okay, all right.
That's it for this week.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours and the HBR Podcast Network.
