Ted Audio Collective.
Hello, everyone. This is After Hours.
I'm Felix. And I'm me here.
And we are delighted to welcome Charlotte Howard to our podcast today.
For our listeners, Charlotte is the US Business Editor and the New York Bureau Chief for The Economist magazine.
Someone whose work we've admired, and I'm sure many of our listeners will have admired as well.
So, we're delighted to have you, Charlotte.
Welcome. Yes, great for you to be here.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm a big fan of your podcast.
And I especially enjoyed your discussion last week of moralistic consumers.
And on that issue, I think I sided with Mahir, who I think said he sounded like a cranky old man.
I did. And I'd like to state for the record that I, too, can be a cranky old man by disposition, if not by gender or age.
So, I'm glad to be in good company.
I feel like I'm in a minority already.
Grace, what did you all bring to talk about?
Charlotte, what did you bring?
On March 21st, the SEC published this 506 -page proposal on climate disclosure.
It gets at the question of how companies assess the risk of climate change itself, as well as the risk of dealing with climate legislation.
So, that's what I'm hoping to talk about tonight.
Super interesting. That sounds great.
And what a coincidence.
I have an SEC -related topic as well.
I'm not sure if you saw they published a first set of names about Chinese companies that are likely to be delisted.
Yeah. Unless there's some compromise about financial reporting.
I would love to get your take on this.
All right. Very good.
So, Charlotte, climate and SEC ideas about reporting, what caught your eye?
Well, there's been this long -running debate in the investor community among politicians and then among federal regulators about what role the SEC should take here and how it should go about requiring public companies to disclose their risks or if it should require companies to do that at all.
And so, if you think about the different types of risks that companies face, one is physical risks.
You have a plant that's along the coast of Florida.
What happens is sea level rise.
How do you disclose those kind of risks?
Or you have supply chains that might be affected by drought.
How do you go about doing this?
And so, there's been a lot of debate over the contours of the rule, and we can get into more details about what the rule itself involves.
But the Democrats really wanted the SEC to be more aggressive.
They want companies to report not just the emissions, for instance, from their operations, but also the emissions from supply chains and from their consumers, what people in the business called Scope 3 emissions.
So, an example for that would be, let's say I'm a big oil company, Scope 3 emissions would be the carbon dioxide that it's emitted from the combustion of oil in cars.
So, the company itself isn't actually emitting it, but its products are in the eventual use of its oil.
So, it's a really, really active area of debate.
In one sense, it's interesting because this is a good example of regulation or ideas about regulation following practice.
Because if you look at the Fortune 500, 90 % of the companies report something.
And perhaps the most meaningful aspect is to get to a reporting standard that would be transparent and that many companies would share that same standard.
One of the issues is now that you look at the individual reports, and almost all the big companies have either explicit climate goals or perhaps they report Scope 1 or Scope 1 and 2 emissions, but you're not really sure how they do these calculations.
And there's quite a bit of variation if the rule goes through.
The one thing that I find very promising and interesting is that at least we get to know how it's done and it's done in a similar fashion across companies.
So, there is a lot in this that I think is to be liked, Felix, which is it is really a landmark change.
We have not seen something this sweeping in terms of mandating disclosure about a company's operations in a long time.
500 pages, right? Exactly.
I think the good news version is it's something on climate.
The slightly bad news version is it's kind of a reflection of the administration's inability to do more meaningful things first.
I think second, it is an effort that in some sense is a little bit more dressing up something than it is substantive, which is companies were doing it already.
In fact, the materiality constraint that most companies operate underneath anyway, you have to disclose risks.
I guess the cynical side of me, Charlotte, feels a little bit like this is a lot of jumping up and down about something that companies are kind of doing already.
Investors are already demanding, but now we're going to overlay a mandate on it, which is maybe okay.
But it can be quite costly and especially on scope three, Charlotte, that you referenced.
It's highly speculative what it is that people use downstream.
In oil and gas, your example, it's relatively straightforward what downstream and upstream considerations are.
But in a lot of situations, you're asking companies to make legal statements about upstream and downstream consequences of their products or purchases that are really speculative.
And so that feels a little bit weird to me.
So I absolutely agree with that.
And just to flush out some of the problems with this rule, there was a lot of debate within the SEC, even within the Democratic appointees, about how far to go on the scope three emissions.
And a concern that the chairman reportedly had is that he didn't want to be too aggressive in order to make the rule that much more vulnerable to litigation.
And I think that eventually they just said, the litigation is going to come anyway.
We should probably go for it, but try to make it as workable as possible.
And they actually aren't requiring smaller companies to report scope three.
It's the biggest companies who have to do this.
Companies aren't required to have independent verification of their scope three estimates, and they wouldn't be liable for estimates made in good faith.
That is, we're doing maybe a little something and maybe not so much.
So that has the result of giving companies the flexibility that they required.
It also has the result of making it really easy to fudge.
And so I think that actually ties back to the discussion that you two were having last week about moralistic consumers and how you kind of have this desire to take action on an issue and the political process has broken down.
So you find activity in a different area where actually it's pretty awkward to have the SEC taking a big role in thinking about how to move along the energy transition.
Or how to move along action with climate change.
These are questions that politicians should be grappling with.
But you saw this enormous pressure from Democratic politicians for the SEC to do something.
And I think that they wanted the SEC to do this anyway.
But the fact that they've been so stymied on the rest of Biden's climate agenda means that they have that much more invested in trying to make something happen through regulation.
In defense of the Scope 3 regulations, if you look at disclosures of companies, so say take something like food or beverage, you will find that 90 % of their emissions are in Scope 3.
So if they report Scope 1, Scope 2, you look at it and you go, oh, actually, there's no big problem with these kinds of products because emissions relative to the climate change problem that we face overall seem relatively small.
So I don't think this is quite the right approach to do it, but I can understand the motivation.
If you get to reporting of material consequences of climate change, and for each individual company, they look really small because we're missing the elephant in the room, that's not a great way to make progress.
And I think the tension is exactly what you point out, Charlotte.
On the one hand, it's not the right tool to really push climate policy.
On the other hand, we don't get anything through Congress.
Well, I think that one thing that's worth keeping in mind, if you look at the litigation over some of the environmental rules that happened during the Obama administration, those are still working their way through the courts.
The Supreme Court is going to consider some of those rules this term.
But there is a result that it does influence investors' appetite for different types of projects.
You see utilities companies siding with the Obama administration saying, we're going to be making these clean energy investments.
We want this regulation to be upheld.
And in this instance, I think that, to Meir's point, companies are doing this to some extent already.
This rule will help to provide some guidance for how the government would like companies to do this, even as litigation continues.
So I think the result is that you're going to see more standardization as companies continue to think about their climate risk.
There'll be more transparency going forward.
I think that that's definitely a good thing.
But I think if you look into the details of this rule, the political fight over this rule, it's just yet another example of the ways in which dysfunction has really seized the climate issue.
So I'm definitely with you both in the sense that in this highly imperfect world we live in, maybe this is OK.
But like in any kind of first best world, this is not the way you would want to do things.
And I think we can be assured of two things.
One, lots of litigation in Felix, and then lots and lots of consultants who are going to spring up around this issue and are going to figure out how to measure scope three and create standards around it.
And that I think is all well assured.
The concern is not just, well, it isn't exactly the best way I'd like to do this, which is a problem.
But look, maybe it's the best way given our constraints.
I think the concern would be, well, so now the business community can say they gave up something.
So the next time around when people do get serious about a carbon tax, Charlotte, or they do get serious about cafe emissions or whatever it is, this is held as something, well, that was a real thing we gave you.
And we're less willing to give on other dimensions, which are more meaningful.
So I agree with both of you that in this very frustrating world, we should applaud any effort to do anything that seems vaguely in the right direction.
Except that if it lessens the likelihood of more significant and more serious efforts, that feels depressing and a little bit weird.
But maybe that's OK.
Maybe it's just the crazy world we live in.
We have to take what we get every time.
I mean, that's a perennial tension, right, is that when companies say they're going to self -regulate, they do to some extent, but it's probably not sufficient or in this case, definitely not sufficient.
So if you think about what some of the companies have done on privacy concerns, right?
Some of the tech companies, this is the same issue again.
Companies always like to say, look what we're doing already.
We don't need anything more.
We've already done this.
Let me show you all of my initiatives and roll out this fancy presentation.
And so I think that there is some truth to that, Meir.
And you don't think that the visibility will lead to greater public pressure.
So say the contribution of food and beverage industries, what's the contribution to climate change?
I would have thought it's actually quite small because, you know, if I drink a Coke, where exactly is the impact?
You look at the numbers, the numbers are not small.
At least to me, it was surprisingly large.
And so the hope, maybe justified, of some of the activists is this constant reporting, this constant comparing, oh, let's compare Coke and Pepsi or let's compare Nestle and some other food company, that these comparisons then give pressure and in the end yield a positive outcome in the sense that companies
feel maybe not even so much towards the investing community, but sort of just public pressure.
And here is where you see where I like the consumer who's critical about companies and I like the consumer who maybe drinks Coke or Pepsi depending on which one has a better climate record.
I think that's right.
I think, again, it's not either or.
You want active consumers and a functioning government that's able to tackle society's big problems.
And I think you're pointing to an issue, particularly on climate, which is that there is an enormous amount of greenwashing and bizarre green marketing that companies are doing.
And I remember I got a gallon of milk for my kids and it said, we're the first milk company to be carbon positive and then had a picture of the earth.
Obviously they need to hire some new marketing people because carbon negative is what we all want to be.
But I think the ability of these types of rules, the hope is that it would cut through some of all of this really vague green talking that companies are doing and provide real data.
So you're absolutely right that that is the hope.
And then that then spurs different behavior both by the companies and by consumers.
Right. Right. And not to mention employees.
Yes. The other big constituency for this, Felix, I think you're absolutely right to just point out.
Once companies are forced to say, these are our scope three greenhouse gas emissions and they are legitimated in the way that the SEC said we should, it creates enormous pressure to do things in all kinds of ways.
And in particular from employees who say, I can't believe I'm a part of an organization that is doing these things.
So I think that is the really sunny view of this, which is just by putting a number on it doesn't really matter why, doesn't really matter how, it can have a really hugely positive impact.
I think that's right.
To me, the real problem is with some of the technical issues around scope three.
One issue is that as we go through the energy transition, often what is positive for the planet will look negative as a result of scope three reporting.
If you want example, say if Exxon convinces one of its big customers to take gas and the gas displaces coal production, a coal fired industrial plant, for instance, that will look like a negative on the Exxon reporting because now they're selling more gas and gas is carbon intensive.
But of course, for the planet, it's a good thing because we're going away from coal and we're going towards gas where the impact on the climate is much smaller.
There is a whole lot of double counting.
There has to be massive double counting, right?
For instance, if you think of a gas company that sells its entire output to, I don't know, a mining company and the mining company uses the gas to operate its facilities.
It will show up in scope three reporting for the gas company and will show up in scope one reporting for the mining company.
And I actually quite like this proposal that two of our colleagues, Rob Kaplan and Karthik Ramana put out, I think sometime earlier this year, where they talked about, why don't we do climate reporting exactly the way we do value added tax?
Where instead of thinking through your entire value chain and thinking through what's my responsibility, five steps removed from where I am in the value chain, just let each individual entity report its incremental contribution to greenhouse gases.
And then if I sell my output to someone else, it's like selling a liability.
Oh, you took an input, you took a product from mine, and that product happened to produce lots and lots of carbon emissions.
And as a result, I pass on a liability to someone else.
Then you don't have that funky business that everybody's responsible for what's potentially a very complicated supply chain.
And at the same time, you really capture the individual contributions and how they get passed from one step in production processes to other steps.
The neat thing to me about that is Felix, in this world where everybody's publicizing scope three without those adjustments, the process loses a little bit of credibility because you can't add up and you can't compare things as clearly as you would be able to under that proposal.
So the bad outcome in this kind of unrestrained scope three publicity is the lack of credibility over what the actual consequences are of everyone's actions.
But, you know, again, Felix, maybe this is like the first step.
We get this out there and then we draw it back and then we figure out how to do it better.
And I think that's the best case outcome for all these rules.
So I'm curious about your prediction, Charlotte, you've studied this for a long time.
How much change will we see?
I think there are a few different phases of this.
So we're going to get a lot of different comments.
There's a lot to comment on in this rule.
For those of you who are federal registered junkies, this is your moment.
And so after that, then I think that we'll have some kind of proposal for a final rule.
I think the timing is tricky.
You know, we have this energy crisis playing out on a global stage.
The midterm elections are coming up.
I think that the SEC wants to have a finalized rule as quickly as possible.
But the reality is, then it's going to go to litigation.
So I think like so many different issues on climate.
What you see here is an instance of two steps forward, one step back.
I mean, it's just really faltering progress.
Right. And you see governments and regulators and companies grappling with this issue in a highly, highly imperfect way.
And in the meantime, the climate continues to change.
Global warning continues.
So we're really running on a clock.
And the progress that you see is not that promising.
Right. OK, so Felix, from climate to China and the SEC.
Another really uplifting topic.
If you had asked me, what's the likelihood that we'll talk about the SEC twice on after hours?
I would have said zero.
So let me backtrack maybe a little bit just to remind everyone what's happened.
So the SEC published a couple of names of Chinese companies that might be delisted from US stock exchanges at some point in time.
Some of these names are household names.
Yum is maybe the most famous one.
The owners of KFC and Pizza Hut.
But it's potentially a long list.
Some people say it might be as many as 270 Chinese companies that will eventually lose their right to be listed in the United States.
All of this is the effect of something called the Holding Foreign Companies Accountability Act.
You've got to love these names that they give the legislation.
So this was a law passed in 2020 in a climate that was clearly anti -Chinese at that point in time.
And it built on a law that we passed as part of the Sarbanes -Oxley Act.
It created something called the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
And it ended self -regulation for the accounting industry.
So for the longest time in most countries, people who do audits of publicly listed firms, they did it with an understanding towards a set of self -regulations that the industry had developed over long periods of time.
Sarbanes -Oxley, in the wake of the financial crisis, brought about this board.
And the board essentially has the right to inspect the audits of publicly traded companies.
Most countries are okay with that, and China is not.
China requires its auditors to keep the data in China.
And practically speaking, it makes them inaccessible to the US board.
This is a long -simmering conflict.
It doesn't mean that YUM will be listed next week or so.
But it's a clear indication that pressure is mounting.
And at some point in time, we might actually see that some of the companies that are listed in North America, that they might lose their right to do so.
So I'm just curious what you think about the timing of this particular initiative, and then its likely effect on US -China relations and frankly, access of Chinese companies to capital markets.
I thought the sell -off was extraordinary, in part because in December, the SEC said that 273 foreign companies on American exchanges might not meet its standard under that 2020 law that you said.
So it's not that surprising.
I mean, there were only five companies that were named, and everyone freaked out.
And I think that response is in part an indication of just this real skittishness in the market about Chinese companies in America and Chinese companies more broadly that you've seen really since the end of 2020 when Chinese officials began to crack down on American tech companies.
You've seen this real collapse in performance.
And there's questions about whether China's economic relationship with the US may deteriorate in light of its relationship with Russia.
You also had the COVID -19 lockdowns in China.
There were a bunch of things happening in March that made investors feel very, very anxious, that fed into that panic.
But it was equally remarkable.
I thought it was the rebound.
There was a big surge in performance after Xinhua, which is the state news agency, they quoted a top economic advisor indicating that there might be a change in attitude toward tech companies.
So then there was this wild swing back up.
On March 16th, the Golden Dragon Index, which tracks US -listed Chinese tech firms, jumped by 22 % in one day.
And so I think you see this enormous volatility that speaks to both the anxiety around the economic relationship between America and China and also the fact that investors aren't really willing yet to let go of the dream of Chinese growth and that that might be an important part of their mix.
Yeah, I think two things really struck me, Charlotte.
Like you, the first is just the magnitude of the response.
And of course, these 20 % swings, you might say, well, what's the big deal that happens with small companies all the time?
We're talking about major capitalization companies moving by 20 % in a given day.
It's crazy. And I think you're right.
It highlights the degree to which investing in these companies is about China and it's not about the companies themselves.
And so the broader issue is what does this mean in the context of all the things that are going on in China, the movement that has been going on for one or two years to in some sense, at least in some quarters turn their back on the West for financial market purposes and maybe even more broadly.
And the question of whether that is something that's going to persist or not.
And of course, one should also highlight in the background is really faltering performance.
So Alibaba has basically been flat for five years.
Baidu has been down for the last five years.
I mean, these are massive Chinese companies who are not really performing, at least by market expectations terribly well.
So it is really a curious time, I think, where people are assessing the entire picture of what it means to invest in China.
That's always been an issue with these companies because they have interesting structures, these virtual interest entities that are actually pretty funky.
But now in an era of declining growth where governance looks a little bit more complicated, where the geopolitics look a little bit more complicated, everything that everybody is willing to overlook before now becomes something where people are saying, wait a second, what is going on?
And that includes these audits, which in a way is a pretty basic governance concern.
So the interesting thing to me is what happens because you can still go list in Hong Kong.
What do we end up seeing here?
Do they just all leave America and they just all end up listing in Hong Kong and don't suffer any consequences?
And then we end up in a world which is a little bit more partitioned, which could be the outcome that we're heading to, not just in finance, but in a lot of dimensions.
What did you make of it all, Felix?
I was a little surprised how quickly China responded with this announcement that we're in the corner of our tech companies because that's definitely not been the rhetoric that we've heard over the last year or so, where the government has been very tough on tech companies introducing new regulations,
some regulations that really in some sense undermine the business models of the tech companies to begin with.
And I think there are two explanations.
The first one is the one that you pointed out me here, which is sort of true for the economy more generally speaking.
Xi Jinping's idea of how to strengthen and stabilize the economy have basically not worked very well.
COVID is, of course, an important overlay and it's hard to distinguish what's really a weaker Chinese economy and what's just the effect of the pandemic.
But generally speaking, the big plans, the reorientation away from the tech companies has not led to the kinds of growth numbers that you probably want to see if you're the party in charge in China.
And then the second thing that's always, I think, really important to remember is in the context of the Chinese stock market, there are so many individual investors who have invested in the tech market.
So it's not quite like the U .S.
where institutional investors play such a big role.
It's very tricky for the government if the stock market declines by 10 % or 20 % because it's felt in households the moment it happens and then you fear the consequences that they cut back on spending and that your growth problems become even bigger.
So the general Chinese response, at least to my reading, has always been criticism from the West and they dig in.
Yes. And this time criticism from the West and they did the exact opposite.
And I was frankly quite a bit surprised that that happened.
What do you both think about the state of decoupling, the idea that America's economic relationship may continue to fray with China and that the two economies will become less intertwined?
Do you think that that has been overblown?
Do you think there is sign that it's actually accelerating during the Biden administration?
I think people thought that Trump's position on China would be perhaps eased or there might be some kind of change during the Biden administration.
They've not had any agenda in part because they've been so sidetracked by these other crises.
I mean, the Biden administration has talked about an economic framework with Asia for a while.
The status quo with China seems not really to be changing.
So what do you both make of it?
So as far as the tech companies are concerned that are really China's pride, big part of the growth story, it is sort of interesting that they have not had much global success.
When you think about Tencent, it's such a powerhouse in its own country.
And then the global presence of many of the Chinese tech companies is just really limited.
In some sense, the story is a very different story from US tech companies that, for instance, completely dominate European markets.
They have grown very quickly and they have dominant positions, sometimes even more dominant outside the United States than in the United States.
That has not been true for the Chinese tech sector more generally.
It's much more domestically focused to begin with.
So when I hear the coupling, I never really quite know for the tech sector, at least, what does it even mean because they're not really global players in the sense that we think of global tech players.
As far as the restructuring of supply chains and maybe the relative importance of China as a market, as far as that is concerned, I think two things.
One is as growth comes down in China, companies will look for investment opportunities elsewhere.
That's, I think, very natural to do.
And then also in the process of making supply chains simpler, rethinking supply chains also, there's this really interesting change at Volkswagen, for instance, where they now go back to dual sourcing, which in times of just in time, dual sourcing was basically the last thing you wanted to do.
Now, all of a sudden, dual sourcing seems to be on the map again, simply to make supply chains more resilient.
And in that process, I think China will lose.
So I think those types of decoupling are probably real.
And I'm not even really sure if that's a question of politics, the supply chain rethinking that we see going on at this point in time is probably not so much politically motivated.
Yeah, I mean, I think my instincts are similar to yours, Felix, but I would add one layer to it, which is, I think you're right on the tech space, they are decoupled and they have been.
On trade, it seems to be happening more and more.
The one caveat I would put is on a more kind of macro systemic basis, which is, there is a concern, I think, with China today and with the US and other areas of larger risks to the economy in China, and specifically kind of in the property market, and the broader financial markets and the credit expansions
there. And so first, I think the decoupling has happened for all the reasons you both said, but there is still a sense in which if something goes very wrong in China, it will have global consequences.
And second, I don't think we have fully come to terms with the degree to which the global growth of the last 20 years was levered to China.
And the degree to which we all benefited from the rise of the Chinese consumer and of very cheap production.
So decoupling, I think, in the tech way and the supply chain way is a pace.
But the shoe that has yet to drop is the systemic risk one, if something really goes wrong in the credit markets in China and specifically in the property markets.
And this more slow burning risk, which is, wow, for the last 20 years, the growth of China has undergirded global growth.
And how do we think about what happens when that ends?
That's such a good point.
When we think about the fractious relationship with Russia at the moment, it's worth reminding ourselves that China's economy is about 10 times the size of Russia's right.
So it's just a much, much bigger deal.
Yeah, exactly right.
So before we zoom out to 30 ,000 feet, Felix, what do you make of the future of these listings?
In five years, are you going to have to invest through Hong Kong to get China assets?
Or do you think we can see financial markets in the US be a global playground?
Or is that era just gone by, like, you know, so many other things that are now gone by?
To my mind, so much has to do with the poisoned relationship between the United States and China right now.
Everything that China does is seen in a negative light in a way that was really almost unimaginable, say a decade ago, where everything that China did at that point in time.
But China is so strong and it's a big part of the economy.
And they're trying to grow it as fast and as responsibly as they possibly can.
I can just see in an era where China is more trusting towards the West, in an era where the West says, look, this is really mostly about making sure that investors have as good a set of numbers as we can possibly imagine.
In that kind of spirit, I could well imagine that the two sides could talk and that the two sides would find some sort of solution.
If China sees this mostly as a backhanded way to then complain about Chinese subsidies and make trade even more difficult for Chinese companies because there will be allegations of state support left and right, I'm not that optimistic about these negotiations.
And Hong Kong, as you pointed out, is an easy way out.
If I'm listed in Hong Kong, I don't have these obligations.
I still have access to global capital markets.
That might be the solution that we're drifting towards.
I take a pessimistic view.
Sorry to play this role.
But I think that there's enormous mistrust that you see both within China and within America and within Europe.
And you can see this just in the bill that was passed by the House of Representatives.
Both of you have probably seen these China bills, these bills that both the Senate has passed now and the House on different ways to compete with China.
And the House bill imposes capital controls.
It would authorize the Commerce Department to block American companies investments in China.
And that's a pretty remarkable power to get to the Commerce Department.
And I think that if you look at what companies hoped would happen in China is that the rules of commerce would change.
There'd be fewer subsidies.
There'd be fewer state backed champions.
There'd be more protection for intellectual property, maybe a scaling back of really heavy handed industrial policy.
And instead what you see, at least what I've seen in my reporting, is that companies are playing by China's rules within the country and by China's rules outside of the country, as other nations try to come up with their own version of economic nationalism in order to counter the Chinese threat.
So you have in America and Europe more support for industrial policy.
You had Biden talk about all this Made in America stuff during his State of the Union speech.
On both sides of the aisle in America, Republicans and Democrats, there's support for industrial policy on a scale that you just had not seen in recent decades.
And so when it comes to this narrower question of Chinese companies listed in American markets, but also on the bigger question of whether we're just going to move into a world where countries are basically trying to build up an economic fortress.
I think that we're moving towards that scenario, frankly, it's not going to be as extreme or as simple as that trade will continue.
But you see countries being much more defensive in the way they're thinking about economic policy in the way that they're thinking about investment.
And I feel like that trend is here to stay.
What's your sense me here?
Where are we headed?
Well, I guess I'm struck just by the two words you both used, which is Charlotte, you talked about mistrust and Felix, you said poisoned.
And both those words are very hard words to reverse, especially poisoned.
And I do wonder if this is fatal that there is been a set of actions which we can't come back from.
I think you're both roughly right.
I will say that some of this protectionist stuff is bluster, and I think it's very convenient.
And I think it's also the case that a lot of American companies are ready to put China in the rear view mirror in some respects.
So they're not as upset about these kinds of controls because they've found that their way to operate in China is constrained and they have what they need, but they don't necessarily want to plow billions and billions of dollars in in a way they thought they might have wanted to 10 years ago.
So I think appetites have changed as well, just because experience has taught people differently.
But I have to say I still in my bones yearn for a globalized world.
And so when we talk about poisoning and mistrust, it feels unfortunate.
It feels unnecessary.
It feels like we're giving up much more than we think we are actually giving up.
Hey, look me here. Who knew?
You're the optimist among the three of us.
That sounded like an elegy.
You know, I'd like to mix it up once in a while.
If it's too much, boom and doom gets a little bit tired.
Always the unpredictable person.
There you go. All right.
Great. Well, we'll see what ends up happening.
So recommendations, what do you have for us, Charlotte?
Well, I have to start by recommending my colleagues coverage on Ukraine.
The economist coverage on Ukraine has just been so good because I think that we are able to write about what's happening geopolitically, as well as the economic implications in a way that feels so good.
Yeah, that's really fulsome.
So that's been great.
But in a less self -serving recommendation, I recently rewatched Charade, which is an old movie with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.
She's just at her most charming and ridiculous in this movie.
And it was such a nice antidote to the real world around me to escape into the 1960s Paris with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.
So I highly recommend it.
Oh, that sounds very nice.
We all need a little Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn escapism.
That sounds great. Yes.
I'm afraid my recommendation doesn't offer neither a reason for optimism nor escapism.
Bring it on. But there's an I thought really interesting enlightening article by Roger Cohen called The Making of Putin in the New York Times.
He highlights the geopolitical tensions and where they come from and how they've developed over time like many others have.
But he combines it in a really interesting way with a perspective of Putin, the person, and how Putin, the person, has changed over time.
And then with some really interesting speculation about why and how it's happened, he gets a start in 2001 when Putin gives this speech in front of German parliament, fully committed to democratic ideas, to an open economy.
And in his recounting, at least, it's real.
It's not like some sophisticated pretense that the German Bundestag, actually, there's a standing ovation for Putin.
It really feels like a watershed moment.
And then he chronicles about how this attitude that is essentially positive towards the West, how it changes over time.
And perhaps the most interesting aspect is how much it has to do with skepticism and even disgust for how the values of the West change over time.
How we become more tolerant of different lifestyles and how, in his view, this is just a sign of the weakness of the West and some sort of sickness.
So it's called The Making of Putin in the New York Times.
That sounds great. Okay, so I have something that's considerably lighter alongside your Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn recommendation, and also something to counter my Luddite reputation, which is Google has an arts and culture part of their website, which is fantastic.
And what you can do there is play jigsaw puzzles virtually of great masterworks.
So here's what you do.
You sign on in Google arts and culture to party play.
Party play. Party play.
Yeah. And then you get to solve a jigsaw puzzle with other people around the world remotely.
Oh. And you're all working on the puzzle at the same time.
I have to say, I did it with my daughters.
We were all actually in the same room, but put that aside on different iPads.
And you are literally solving the puzzle, a really hard puzzle, and then you're just all working on it together, but in different locations.
It is spectacular. And it is one situation where a real physical act of solving a jigsaw puzzle is wonderful.
But in this particular case, you can solve it with people who you care about anywhere in the world in real time and feel that sense of doing something together.
It's absolutely spectacular.
Fantastic. We're out of time, unfortunately.
Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
Thank you.
