Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Mi Here.
And I'm Sara. We're back!
Yes, actually I just got back from a trip, which was so incredible.
I can't begin to tell you how amazing it was to be someplace else.
I happened to go to Nashville, a city I don't know that well to begin with, and so lots to discover, lots to see, and just the idea of leaving the place where you live.
It is really incredible.
It is something else.
Have you traveled much?
I also recently took my first work -y kind of trip and it was great.
Although I will tell you a little bit of a rookie move I discovered, which is I realized that I forgot some basic things.
So, woke up in the morning in my hotel and didn't have a comb.
And I thought to myself, this is what happens when you don't travel for work in a long time, you make some big rookie mistakes.
I am totally with you on that.
I have just booked my first work trip in two years and it took me like three hours to book it because I haven't forgot how to do it.
Alright, well good.
So what do we have today?
Sara, what do you got?
So I have brought the topic of salary transparency.
There is a couple of new laws bubbling up that might mean that we have no choice but to learn what each other earn and a lot to dig into there.
Super interesting. What did you bring me here?
Well, there has been a little bit of a renaissance of activist investing and some changes in that model and I kind of wanted to get your take on what you think about activist investing and what you think about these changes.
Wonderful. Let's get to it.
So me here, activist investors.
Well, so they have kind of come back and they are coming back big time.
So activist investors are effectively large institutional investors funds that take a small stake in a company and then agitate for change.
And they are very explicitly agitators.
So they may buy 1, 2, 5 % of a company and then start asking for change.
And we have seen some big targets recently.
So particularly in Europe, we have seen Unilever.
We have seen GlaxoSmithKline.
We have seen a little bit of Vodafone.
And now in the U .S.
we see places like Kohl's, a large retailer, even Hasbro, a toy company.
So I wanted to just get your sense first.
What do you make of these activist investors?
They tend to provoke very strong reactions.
They are either the devil or they are like saving us all from something.
I think it depends a little bit on where you sit.
I know when I was an editor at Harvard Business Review, I had this sort of knee -jerk reaction like, oh, activist, bad.
And now that I work at Bloomberg, which is more investor -focused, I'm like, oh, activists, good.
You've crossed over, Sarah, to the dark side.
To the good side, we all do.
I think my sense is that activist investors, it's a little bit like leaders.
Some of them can be very influential and destructive.
And some of them can be very influential and productive.
So I think it depends on how they use their powers.
Are they using them for good?
Are they using them for ill?
And I do think on balance, I am glad that these people are holding CEOs accountable.
In a general sense, it's hard to know where does the controversy even come from.
And I can see two places.
One has to do with time horizons.
So one idea that is skeptical about investor activism is that typically you would want to exit in a couple of years.
So if you think about the Athena Health deal that Elliott did, they exited after three years.
And so you're thinking about the time horizon being three years, and that's probably sometimes okay.
And if you look at average returns of activist hedge funds, they have done really well, meaning these ideas are probably good.
And then there's evidence that, say, innovation declines if a company is targeted by activist investors.
There's some evidence that the amount of investment that goes into brands is not what it used to be.
And in all of this, of course, it's super hard to say, maybe they did spend too much on innovation and it didn't really yield much.
That's why you were undervalued to begin with.
Or maybe your brand declined and actually you shouldn't throw good money after a brand that wasn't really worth much.
So the evidence is hard to read, but the concern around time horizons, that actually seems very real to me.
Yeah. I totally agree with both of you, which is, first, sometimes there are people in an organization or in a society who, they're kind of like one issue people, and they're kind of annoying, and they're militant.
And my attitude towards them is often, I don't really like them individually, but I kind of like the role they play in society.
And so that's kind of how I feel about activists, because there is a lot of behavior that's not great.
There are people who are, some who are doing a lot of research, and then there are people who are kind of doing hit and run jobs, and they're kind of looking for a payoff.
And that's kind of been a way of operating for them.
And so there's just a lot of heterogeneity, but I think the broader issue is they do serve this purpose, which is about accountability.
And the question is, do they add or subtract on net?
And I think it's really tough.
You have to look at the different strategies to really understand, but I'm kind of glad they're there.
But now the model is undertaking a little bit of a change.
And Felix, you referenced Elliot, which is this really large activist investor, and they are moving in a direction, which is different in a way.
So they're kind of morphing into a private equity shop.
So the traditional model was buy 1%, 5 % and make noise, proxy fight, so on and so forth.
And what they've been doing recently, in part because they weren't always successful with the proxy fight, they are going for the whole thing.
They're partnering with private equity firms and then taking companies private.
So what do you make of that?
Is that a good extension of this model or not?
What I like about it is now you have a real stake in the company.
You own the thing. And the truth is, of course, they often partner up with other funds.
So it's not as though you do it all alone.
But still, compared to the mini, mini stake that you had to begin with, now you actually own the company and you have much more influence and you really get to do what you think is the right thing to do.
AthenaHealth was a big success, but what we will see undoubtedly is what we see with many other private equity shops.
Sometimes they do amazing work and sometimes not so much.
The moment you own it, it seems to me there's better alignment of incentives.
What I loved about the older model, you were in a difficult negotiating position and the bad behavior that you alluded to me here, in part is a reflection of, I'm not in a great negotiating position, so I have to look really scary and really obnoxious.
And there is in fact evidence that activist investors that have these terrible reputations, they have more influence.
But what I liked about that model is, someone smart comes up with a suggestion.
And at the end of the day, the board can take it or the board can leave it.
If it's really an amazing insight that you didn't have because you were an insider and you were blind to opportunities, it was amazing that someone helped you out.
And if it didn't seem very sensible, you had a chance to fight it off.
I think the private equity route in the end is harder to fight off.
Say when Ackmann took over JCPenney and was basically a disaster, now imagine that this happens much more often because you assume control and then some of these hedge fund managers will turn out to be good operators and many of them will not.
I think one of the reasons I'm having trouble figuring out what I think about this exactly is what I want to work in a company that was being taken over in this fashion?
No, I don't think so.
That doesn't sound like a good time.
On the other hand, is there a benefit to this dynamism in the broader economy?
Maybe, probably. But is it the absolute best way that we could imagine a firm getting serious about management or getting serious about its strategy?
Probably not the ideal, but it's probably better than not having it.
So it's one of those things where I'm not rushing to embrace it.
Me here, like you were saying, you might not want to be friends with an activist investor but you might sort of appreciate them in some way.
I think in a way, Sarah, in this very highly imperfect world of governance where we don't know how to solve all these problems, we can appreciate them as like a third best solution.
It's not a first best solution, not a second best solution, but we'll take it given all the other problems that we have.
I think it's really interesting that they're morphing into this private equity model.
And I think Felix, the good news version is what you said, which is typically they can break a company and then walk away.
There's like a little bit of this where you feel like, okay, good.
If you're going to break it, then you own it and then you deal with it.
And I think that is a better alignment of incentives.
The thing that's hard, and you reference this with Ackman and the hedge fund, you know, these jobs are really different.
They're just fundamentally different.
So being a hedge fund and going long, short stuff and being an activist and being a private equity player are fundamentally different.
And so the question is whether they know what they're doing.
And the cynical view I think is it's a little bit more of an asset gathering strategy, which is it's hard to deploy capital when you have a lot of capital.
And so you expand your strategies and then you expand your strategies into private equity and you raise money around private equity.
But do you know what that is and is it core to who you are?
So I think there's a sense in which I love the alignment and there's a sense in which I'm like, well, it's like mission creep in a way all together assets.
Do you guys think that there is a particular industry where either this sort of new private equity tinged model or the OG variety of activism works better or do you think there's industries where it doesn't work at all?
There's a couple of things that make for good opportunities.
So the first is there's got to be a transition in the industry.
There's got to be technological change, which makes the previous habits of capital allocation and spending outmoded.
Think about pharma, which had a bunch of activism at some point.
Wait a second. All that R &D is unproductive.
You got to think about your business model is changing.
You got to stop doing in -house R &D.
You got to do more BD, for example.
So there has to be this underlying industry transition.
You know, the playbook for activists, it's like, let's split the company into an operating company and a property company.
Let's go for the recurring revenues.
Let's do this thing.
Let's go asset light.
It's a shtick. It's a good shtick, but you got to apply it to an industry that's undergoing that transition.
The other thing that I wanted to make sure in contrast for you guys is I'm just so struck by the rise of these activists, the renaissance of them, and then the simultaneous rise in the power of founders.
The other direction that this whole governance landscape is going is towards lots more power for founders who take companies public.
So on the one hand, we have this super aggressive activist model where you have shareholders taking small stakes and making noise.
And on the other hand, you have a whole sector of the economy where founders have set the table so nobody can do that.
Do you have a sense of like which one you're more nervous about?
It's tough because I feel like neither extreme is great.
We can all think of examples of founders who had so much control and then management their company was kind of a joke.
They were larger than life.
At the other end of the extreme, you want the person who came up with the idea to have some control over their own company and to be rewarded for having that idea and then figuring out how to bring it to market.
This is such an important point, Sarah, because generally I'm not happy with people getting control over companies and no outside pressure can change it, but because it happens in the context typically of an IPO.
As an investor, I know what I'm buying into.
With the traditional activist investor pressure, we're often seeing pressure on things that are not right, things that we didn't buy into as investors when we first made the decision to acquire a stake in a company.
Yeah, I think it's just fascinating that we're seeing these things happen at the same time.
In a fascinating way, it mirrors the tenure of CEOs.
So when you look at how long CEOs stay on the job, it's about five years in the U .S.
now. It's a little less in Europe, but that's the average.
And then there's about 20 % of CEOs who stay on for 20 years.
And when you look at like, oh my God, how can I be your CEO for 20 years of a publicly traded company, what you see, they're doing a good job.
Their companies are not undervalued.
They manage really well and they get to stay on.
So the companies that are in trouble, they then get corrected with the help of mechanisms that are quite short -sighted.
But the alternative, just exchanging the CEO every five years, doesn't make you a long -run oriented organization also.
Yeah. Well, let me give you this for the last one.
I'm curious if you could take a run at a company and be an activist.
And then no one wants to have dinner with you.
Is that the price? We'll always want to have dinner with you, Felix.
Do you guys have any preferred targets?
I'll tell you mine, which is I am still enamored of more kind of like a social responsibility, hostile takeover.
I want to go after the gun companies and just take them private and shut down capacity.
I just think if you really want to do this, that's where you should do it.
Do you guys have any targets in mind?
Well, mine is not quite that ambitious, I guess.
But I would say I think Facebook needs an activist.
I think they don't really know what they want to be anymore.
They changed their name to Meta, which sort of has two problems for me.
One is that it's vague and doesn't exist yet, and I think it shows some distraction from their core business, which seems to be struggling.
And second is now the acronym that we're using is Not Fang, which was kind of cool, but like Mama, which is just kind of menacing that we're calling these scary companies Mama.
So anyway, I think Facebook really needs a little bit more focus.
I think they need to figure out what they want to be.
They need to figure out how to stop hemorrhaging users.
They lost half a million users last year, and they need to figure out TikTok.
They need to figure out why young people don't want to be on their platform.
I feel like a little bit more focus and a little, maybe less founder control by Mark Zuckerberg might help that happen.
And also that would help them maybe figure out the misinformation thing, which is a really big deal.
I think that's a great call.
A couple of weeks ago, Felix was talking about what would happen if Amazon split AWS.
And I've been struck, especially with their recent earnings, the way they broke out meta from ad business.
Basically they split it up in their reporting.
I was kind of like, wow, this would be interesting.
Is this split the answer?
Really fascinating.
Yeah. Okay. So from activist investing to pay transparency.
What a leap. Yes. Although actually in some ways they're both about applying pressure.
Yeah. Shedding light into dark corners.
So pay transparency has been on my mind recently in part because New York has adopted this law that will take effect, I think in May of 2022 that basically goes a step further than other salary transparency laws.
So some of the other state laws on the books say things like if you are an employee at company X and you request to know the salary range for your position, you can get that information.
Or if you have made it through a first round interview, you can request a salary range.
Right. The New York law says the company has to actually post the salary range with the job posting.
Oh, in advance. Before you literally see in the ad, this is the range that they're offering.
Yes. Okay. Wow. It's especially powerful because New York is such a hub for talent.
It's a highly paid market.
So if you work in Boise, you might suddenly wonder why people in New York make so much more than you do.
Right. There's a whole range of possibilities.
And I think the one that people maybe leap to in their minds, in some ways the most terrifying is the idea that somehow your salary and name will be put on the internet for everyone to see.
In some ways, I don't know why that should make us so uncomfortable, but it does because there is a taboo around discussing your salary.
I was thinking on my drive in here, I was like, I would feel totally fine telling you guys what I weigh, my age, like these things that used to be considered taboos, at least for women.
But I feel weird talking about the salary.
That is so true. Yes.
What a good observation.
The hope of these laws is that right now we know that in particular among low -wage workers, many of them don't have a good sense of where exactly they fall in the distribution of income and don't have a good sense that there might be jobs that are quite attainable that just pay much better.
I remember a study about Germany that said about 10 to 15 % of workers in low -wage jobs.
When you ask them, what do you think other people make?
They give you a number that is super close to their own number.
And then in fact the data will tell, no, you're grossly underpaid.
And that I think could have two really great effects.
The first one is obvious, you're making more money.
But then second also, just think about where labor should go in the economy.
The general principle that if we can afford to pay really nice salaries, it must be because you're fairly productive and we want people to be in the segments of the economy that have high productivity.
So I think both for the economy as a whole but also for the individuals, it's actually a really promising idea even though we feel really strange about it and maybe have to talk about salaries more than we did in the past.
There are these specific objectives of both equity and equality that people want to advance with pay transparency.
So the underlying idea beneath some of these plans is that disparities, particularly on gender or other issues might get closed if we have more light into what the underlying ranges are.
And then second, maybe there's just more equality generally because people are concerned about levels of inequality.
And the evidence on this is really fantastic.
So people have done great research on public universities and academic salaries and what happens when you introduce pay transparency.
And the answer is what you might expect, but really interesting, which is going to be better equity.
So you do see outcomes become more equitable.
You also see more equality.
You tend to see the compression of wages and this is the trade off in a way, right?
You see a little bit less pay for performance.
You're going to see that compression and the offsetting effect is, well, wait a second, you're going to mute some incentives.
So Mihir, say we have a system where we take a job where we can measure performance and we're completely transparent.
We say here's a base salary and then for every $10 ,000 that you sell of our products, this is what you get.
So that's full transparency and you preserve all the incentives.
That's right. And what we observe in the data is firms then decide that in the interest of not having other employees potentially share those gains because there is this pressure on equality now, people want to campaign for equality.
And as a consequence, you don't get quite the pay for performance used to get.
One weird thing is that I think transparency does give a little bit more leverage to the company because what the company has to do is basically establish these salary ranges and make really clear criteria about what gets you from the bottom of the range to the top.
And companies should probably be doing that anyway, but a lot of them aren't.
In companies where salaries are hidden and where there aren't always clear criteria, most political operators or the savviest self promoters are very good at negotiating and capturing those gains.
And there's plenty of hardworking people who do a lot of work but who just don't play the game and don't get paid.
Yeah. And so in some sense, I'm sort of okay with some salary compression if it means that those hardworking people who aren't great negotiators actually get paid for the value they provide.
Maybe with one wrinkle though.
So think about what happens as you negotiate with your company for better wages.
Without transparency, obviously it's just like you're a really great negotiator, you're a political person, you get that fantastic salary.
Now, if I know that if I give in, if I pay you that fantastic salary because we live in a world of transparency, the cost of giving you a really exceptional deal actually goes up.
So companies will negotiate much harder exactly in the instances where they feel someone's pushing the boundaries of what we typically paid.
And then on the flip side, if you come to a new company, how aggressive should you be for the first year?
The answer is don't be so aggressive because after a year you learn what everybody earns and then you move up to the average if you were not so aggressive.
And so that's actually consistent with what we see in the data in addition to the compression, in the states that have these milder versions of transparency where you can ask for data.
We have a colleague at the business school Zoe Cullen who finds that wages on average fell about 2%.
And it's a combination of these two things.
The businesses push back harder and for you as an employee, that starting salary doesn't mean that much anymore because you know you're going to catch up if somehow you are not the greatest negotiator on the planet.
And so the trade -off is both, I think your point to me here around performance pay but also pay as a whole might actually fall because we have more transparency.
It does a little bit except, and maybe this is just me, I would be willing to pay some percent of my salary to know that it was fair and to know that my colleagues were also being paid fairly because that's really important to me.
There are studies to assess whether people know when they're overpaid and by and large people don't.
People who are overpaid tend to think that they're underpaid or fairly paid.
So I think that there's a chance that even if you are overpaid, perhaps because you are very, very talented, you don't know it and therefore you cannot appreciate it.
For me, it would be more important for my morale and the morale of the team as a whole to know that it was a good place to work that no one was getting shortchanged.
That would be something I would actually pay for in terms of a lower salary.
I think what's so interesting about this, Sarah, is the way you're framing this is, I think the way a lot of people frame it, which is the underlying problem is you have these aggressive people who are getting extra wages just because they're aggressive and we know there's evidence on this and it is gender,
just to be clear. So it's an issue.
It's the dudes. That's what you're saying.
Yeah, totally, it is.
There's good evidence on this.
It's not very controversial, I think, right?
You might remember when Norway made it possible to look at everybody's tax returns, the nation was consumed with studying who made how much and why and how did it change and I fear a little that paid transparency moves us sort of in that direction.
It does get to sort of the subjectivity of compensation.
How we feel about our bonuses, it's really all about did we make a bigger bonus than the person next to us.
It's not about the dollar value of the bonus.
Right. So I recognize that there are definitely some hurdles here.
And I also don't think that a lot of managers have the skill to have these conversations because, in part, managers have been told to just kick those questions to HR, let HR handle it.
We could be in for a bumpy ride.
On the other hand, I do think that a good boss should be able to say to someone, here's why you're earning what you're earning now, here's why your colleague is earning more, but if you do these tasks or adopt these skills, you can get there.
Right. And to give them that kind of coaching, I think is really important.
I think that's got to be right, Sarah, but I don't know if that requires pay transparency.
Maybe it is incredible without pay transparency.
But bosses should be doing that and should be making that clear, and that seems totally right.
I think the thing that strikes me a little bit about this is, is this like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, right?
So here's what I mean, which is no firms want to do this.
Individuals seem extremely hesitant, as you pointed out, Sarah, to talk about their compensation.
So the underlying premise of the legislation is there's some collective action problem.
Nobody individually wants to do this, but the premise of the legislation is, but if we make it a law, then everyone's better off because you'll never share your salary with me, no company will initiate this, but somehow it's better if we do this.
I think that's a great question.
I do think it is better if we do this.
I do. One thing I would like to see is I would like to see, for example, the generous firms winning.
I would like to see firms that pay well, attracting more and better talent.
But do you think they do already?
To some extent, but not enough.
I mean, Felix mentioned this paper using, I think, the German administrative data earlier.
That paper showed, especially at the low end, you know, you said it was 10 to 17 percent of jobs would not be viable because people simply wouldn't take them because there's better paying jobs for people at that education level.
They just don't know that they exist.
Right. I would like to see firms that are so chintzy go out of business, but right now when we talk about the war for talent, we sort of act as if people have perfect information, when, in fact, most of us are operating in the dark about what salaries are, what benefits are.
Sure. And I think a lot of companies think they offer pretty good benefits and they are mistaken.
I would kind of like people just to have a little bit more knowledge of what they're getting into when they're making those decisions, especially young people.
Those early salaries when you're in your 20s or 30s really add up over time.
And I think there is this issue that's even broader that you're raising, Sarah, which is important, which is if you come from a family who knows how to negotiate these issues, then you're likely to have that information.
Yeah. So there's a sense in which folks who are coming from truly underprivileged backgrounds, they don't know what the questions are to ask in a way, right?
They are seeking out in a landscape that is even harder to navigate.
And actually it advantages people who have that infrastructure built in to already know what the right questions to ask are.
And so I think that's got to be right.
Yeah. To your point, that's the problem that legislation is trying to solve is how can we create a more level playing field for people who are suffering from pay gaps, whether it's because they are a woman or a person of color or someone who's the first in their family to go to college.
Absolutely. So I think that's the goal it's trying to fix.
It'll be so interesting to see what's going to happen.
Yeah. You said it's in May?
In May. In May. Stay tuned.
So let's just... should we...
and I assume we're not going to set a precedent right now.
No. And talk about our salaries.
Only if it's legally mandated.
Only if it's a human answer.
That'll make you more comfortable.
Excellent. All right.
All right. Recommendations.
Me here. I think you brought five, right?
No, I brought one so I could marshal my full power behind the one suggestion.
Oh my god. Well, I went to a place yesterday that I think everybody should go to.
So I visited a community college.
And in particular, I went to the SUNY Corning Community College.
And I want to give a shout out to community colleges.
And I think if you are a employer or you are in a company, you should reach out.
They are just amazing.
I met so many amazing people, and they are such an important part of the infrastructure for helping people find their way in the world.
And the work they do is absolutely spectacular.
And I think we don't talk about community colleges enough, and we don't engage with them enough.
I'll just give you one quick example.
They offer an $800 welding program, which takes people from minimum wage work to double their salary.
And it's so fascinating the problems they're facing.
So as one example, it's hard to get financial aid for welding program.
You might say, wait a second, $800 to double your wages.
That's got to be the best investment you could find.
And the answer is, yeah, but you need the money up front.
And getting employers to engage with them more deeply in communities has got to be one of the most important things we can do to lift people out of poverty.
So my shout out is to community colleges.
Go visit one, embrace one, and go work with one.
Great. Sarah, what do you got?
I am bringing a book this week.
This is one of my favorite books that I read last year.
It's called She Wolves by Helen Castor.
And it is a history of the Queens of England before Elizabeth.
Elizabeth I was obviously one of the first women to rule in her own right successfully, but before her were people like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Margaret of Anjou, the Empress Matilda.
And it's sort of a group biography of these women.
And there's sort of two reasons I really liked it.
One, highbrow and one, decidedly not.
So the highbrow reason.
Oh, you're starting with the highbrow reason.
I'm going to start with the highbrow.
I knew it. Try to keep the tone of the podcast where it deserves to be.
The highbrow reason is just that these women are fascinating.
And the way that these women tried to exert their influence through their sons, through their husbands, when they didn't have the ability to take the reins of power directly themselves is really interesting.
And I think there will be some parallels that any woman who's tried to run a business or run for office today will feel.
Just one quick example is when the Empress Matilda before she tried to take power was seen as very likable.
The contemporary chronicles are very approving of her.
And then she asserts a claim to the throne and suddenly she's this unlikeable harpy.
I was like, wow, we've been dealing with this for a thousand years.
So, okay, then the not so highbrow, decidedly middlebrow reason that I enjoyed this book so much was I am really having Game of Thrones withdrawal.
I was so sad when the show ended in 2019 and I've been waiting and waiting for the new show, The Spin -Off, House of the Dragon, to come out later this year.
And I just really needed some like court entry, political backstabbing.
And this book has that in spades.
So it was a really fun read and I would recommend it.
Sounds great. It's called She Wolves by Helen Castor.
Wonderful. That sounds fantastic.
I have something decidedly less exciting.
It's an interview that David Fromm published with Michael Bernstein who's at the Hoover Institution.
And the interview is about how financial sanctions work.
It's in the context of the financial sanctions related to the war in Ukraine.
And how many times have I read?
Oh, the U .S. imposes financial sanctions of this sort and that sort.
I never really thought about the details of what does that actually mean.
And what's really fabulous about the interview is on the one hand, it explains the mechanics, which as you might expect are complicated and dull at the same time, which is not a great combination.
Not a great company.
But then it ends up in a place where it's really a reflection of the system that one country is able to impose financial sanctions.
And maybe I can explain quickly what the basic idea is.
If you look at claims on foreign currency, there's about $12 billion of dollar cash in Russia.
In all of Russia, it's only $12 billion.
But if you look at the claims of the private sector against the Russian banks, that alone is $65 billion.
And so you're thinking, oh, my God, why don't we have a bank run?
And of course, the answer is, well, each individual bank, if it has to withdraw a lot of dollars, it can always go to the Russian Central Bank.
And then obviously we read endlessly the Russian Central Bank has $650 billion of dollar reserves.
Now the twist, those reserves are not in Russia.
Those reserves are at the Fed and at the European Central Bank.
And so they walk you through the mechanics.
And the really interesting philosophical point is, in the end, it's all about the ability of systems to create confidence.
And if you're a state that has very little confidence, like Russia at this moment in time, these sanctions are really devastating.
And if you had the same in a context of, say, you're trying to impose financial sanctions on the EU, it wouldn't really work because people wouldn't worry about the ability of the banks to pay.
So it's one of these fascinating stories where it's something really mechanical and mundane, and it's hard to figure out how it works.
And then at the same time, it speaks to something really big and interesting.
Yeah, and very timely.
And very timely. Yeah, I mean, who knew everyone would get excited about Swift?
Yes, exactly. American public minds of Swift.
Exactly. Learning every day.
So this was it. Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
Thank you.
