TED Audio Collective Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours, I'm Felix.
I'm Mi here. And I'm Young Mi, hi guys!
Oh my God, she's back!
She's back! We missed you so much.
We missed you, Young Mi.
Everybody missed you.
Well, I missed you guys too.
Although it has been wonderful to listen.
You know, the ones where it's just the two of you are my absolute favorite.
Although I do also love when you bring in our friends.
I mean, it's been wonderful listening to Sarah, for example.
Yeah. What a great addition.
We were so lucky with our guests.
Everyone was really fabulous.
But you know, I had a sense of what it's like to be a listener, because I would be listening and I'd want to interrupt.
I would want to agree or disagree, or add my own take.
And I got a little sense of what it's like to be a listener and wanting to be an active participant in the conversation.
So it's been great.
Well, it is nothing like the real thing.
It's great to have you back, young Mi.
Well, I don't know what the podcast did without the funny one.
Exactly. Far fewer reasons to laugh.
Yes. Alright, so Young Mi, then, you get to decide.
What are we talking about?
So here's the thing.
It has been so long since we've all been on the mic together that I wanted to get your big picture take on stuff.
So I brought in a couple of questions I wanted to ask you that are big picture, questions about trends you're seeing, positive and negative, things that you've changed your mind about, things like that, that I would love to just get your perspective on.
How does that sound?
That sounds great. Sounds good.
Sounds fantastic. Okay, so my first question for you guys is, what do you think is the most troubling trend we're seeing in business or society today?
I do want to get more optimistic in a minute, but let's start there.
For me, it's definitely polarization and how divided the country feels, just about in every respect.
And business is actually part of it now.
Just think about the controversy around Disney's stance and the exchange in Florida, where the battleground is not just politics.
The battleground is business and society.
The battleground is often friends.
The battleground is families.
It seems to be everywhere.
And because there's no clear end in sight, I find it really exhausting.
Perhaps the only light at the end of the tunnel that I recently saw was Daniel Allen, a colleague of ours at the Kennedy School.
She wrote this really beautiful op -ed for the Wall Street Journal when she pulled back from the governor's race in Massachusetts.
And one of the things that she pointed out that I had never really thought about was, maybe it's not really the people who are divided.
Maybe it's mostly the political apparatus that makes it look like there's so much division.
And a point that she made about state ballot measures that I thought was very interesting is that when you look at these ballot measures, so these are local or statewide elections, you see states do things that really are at odds with this notion of there's a battleground everywhere.
Florida, for instance, two -thirds of voters decided that they wanted the voting rights of former prisoners restored.
Mississippi, 73 % of voters supported a new flag that did take away the emblems of the Confederacy.
And her point, which I really loved, is maybe it's Congress, maybe it's the two political parties that now have a vested interest in keeping polarization going, two parties that have essentially eliminated any form of political competition.
And all they're doing is, I'm sorry to say, a group of older people, half of the senators are now older than 65 -year -olds, who battle it out in ways that make everyone else really miserable.
And the maybe depressing or not so optimistic end of the story is Daniel Allen didn't make it into the primary.
Why? Because the Democratic Party is a very powerful gatekeeper and they're keeping out exactly people like her who have a very different vision of what the country could be and how we could work with one another.
You know, I'm going to hop on here because mine was very similar to yours, Felix, except coming from a slightly different angle, and that is, I fear that we are losing our ability to solve problems of any sort because the pandering among our political leadership, and more broadly, our national leadership,
I think has reached new extreme levels.
So one example I would cite, we're in the middle of a pretty rough economic patch right now.
Inflation is still very high.
We're seeing these huge drawdowns in the market.
There's lots of uncertainty.
And the solutions being thrown about by our political leaders are, in my mind, the worst kind of pandering, whether it's loan forgiveness or price control legislation or corporate taxation, whatever.
Not that these are not serious ideas that should be discussed, but the way they are being talked about without any consideration of the negative tradeoffs, I think is so disingenuous.
And it would be one thing if these were simply expensive mistakes we were making of the policy sort, but they're not only expensive, but they could possibly make our problems even worse.
Another example is the Supreme Court, which has demonstrated that it is willing to throw out half a century of precedent to pander to a subset of the citizenry that has, for a variety of reasons, a disproportionately loud voice in our political system.
And I think we are at risk of becoming a nation so mired in cynicism that we are no longer able to move forward in a productive way.
It is this polarization that's been entrenched not just in our political apparatus, Felix, as you said, but in the way now our politicians behave.
And even beyond politicians, our national leaders writ large, whether it's a Supreme Court or other leaders.
And as a result, it is breeding a kind of cynicism.
You know, I used to think of cynicism as almost being a rite of passage.
When you become an adult, you go through a stage when you're cynical, and you see this in many young adults.
And now I fear that it's become a permanent state.
It's become a permanent state among youth, among older people, among our leadership.
I mean, frankly, it's gotten to the point where it's difficult to read the newspaper every day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally agree.
I think it makes a ton of sense.
I think the ray of hope is what you articulated, Felix, which is, I'm not sure I agree completely, but I like this juxtaposition between the leaders and the people and where's the problem, really?
Is the problem with the people or is the problem with the leaders?
The problem with the leaders.
And I think that's the ray of hope, which is it's really not organically in the population as much as it is either pandering young me or political incentives or both.
Although I do worry sometimes when you see these developments, young me, I think the reason it's hard to read the newspaper is you kind of wonder if it is really the people.
Yeah, yeah. If there is this groundswell out there.
But I think you're both absolutely right to put your finger on this piece of the puzzle.
I remember a comment you made months and months ago when we were talking about work from home and you were offering up the virtues of going to the office.
And one of the things that you said was it's good that we have to rub up against people who are different from us in this subway or in the workplace that we have to work with people who we wouldn't normally be friends with.
One of the things I fear is that all of that is going away.
Yeah. We are increasingly in red states and blue states.
To the extent that you're religious, you'll go to different places of worship.
If you go to schools, you'll choose your school depending on how progressive or how conservative a school is.
We socialize and choose our places of work in this way.
So all of the places we used to intersect with people who saw the world in different ways, I think we're losing all of those points of intersection.
Let me offer a slightly different view building on Daniel Allen's insight.
If you made a list of 100 topics that are important to your life, and then imagine a random group of people at your house, and you would go through the 100 topics, on how many of those do you think we really have fundamental disagreement?
Say, public safety.
Are we really super divided about that we want to be safe?
Say, investments in school quality, investments in environmental quality.
There, our expectations might actually be very similar.
It's interesting. As you were going through that list, I was wondering how even those elemental issues have also now taken on a gloss of different meaning to people.
And even that seemingly consensual issue, now it's already being divided.
When people hear public safety, I think they almost hear something different.
But I think you're right.
Our core needs are similar and basically common.
It's just kind of remembering that and going past this veneer of the way we've come to interpret these issues.
I do think if you're ever feeling super depressed, one of the nice things about social media is that almost every day, caught on video is some incredible act of human generosity.
So recently, I was feeling really depressed about the state of the world.
There was one where there was somebody who was driving a car that had lost consciousness for some reason at an intersection.
And some random woman got out of her car and just tried to physically, using her body, stop the car from crashing.
And all of these bystanders just got out of the car and together, worked to stop this car and try to rescue this person in the car.
And I must have watched that thing 10 times because I was just struck by how it didn't matter who was what, what gender, what political party.
Everybody was just jumping in to help and the basic human instinct was still there.
It sounds like corny, but I really needed to see that that day.
Well, and it's not just you.
I mean, the virality of those clips speaks to this need, I think.
It speaks to why we want to feel like that.
Yeah. Like commonality.
Exactly. Me here, is your troubling trend the same as this one or different?
It's not. It was a little bit different, but let me try it out on you, which is I've kind of worried about what I'm going to call this great period of magical thinking.
So I think there's magical thinking everywhere and it worries me.
And I worry about how pervasive it's become.
So magical thinking is a little bit of a detachment from reality, the belief that traditional patterns and traditional ways of doing things are not required.
We can just invoke new ways all the time.
And so I think that's true in so many ways today.
I think it's kind of true in the labor market.
We have a lot of people convinced that they don't need to do things traditionally.
They don't need to be mentored in a workplace.
We have that in finance all over the place.
I think we have magical thinking about some of our problems in society.
I think a lot of magical thinking is about what companies can do in the world, as opposed to what politics can do in the world.
In a way, it's wonderful to be optimistic and to be hopeful.
But I wonder if we're teetered into a place where we have just become a little bit detached from reality.
And of course, that's all been accelerated over the pandemic and over this very exceptional period.
And over 10 years of really exceptional period.
But I think part of what's happening is that in financial markets, that's getting unwound.
And it's actually quite destructive to spend a long period of time thinking magically.
And maybe analog summer didn't really work.
But I'm thinking like this kind of great era of magical thinking will prove to have been very hard to kind of escape from and very hard to come down from.
That's my trend that worries me.
I think I know exactly what you're talking about.
Although I'm wondering if it's magical thinking or just a function of whether or not you've lived through cycles.
Right. If you're a young adult, your only reality is the reality of the last decade.
That is your reality.
And so, for example, you've only known low interest rates.
Your calculus of what was actual risk versus reward was based on that reality.
And so, therefore, was it magical thinking or was it simply a reflection of the reality we have been in?
And it only looks like magical reality if you're frankly old enough like us to live through cycles and have seen how these things expand and contract over time.
I think you're absolutely right.
I guess the only thing I would say is it feels like a particularly long period of time, and some of those trends, like low rates, it's almost 25 years of a declining rate.
It's not just like five years.
But in that case, rational behavior would be to adjust to a world of low rates and act accordingly.
Well, it is extrapolation.
I think what people are doing is extrapolating a lot.
Yes. You take the recent past and you extrapolate it.
And that, I think in this case, is a lot of magical thinking.
It's even in our expectations about what companies do, what societies will be.
I don't know. Does it ring true to you, Felix, at all?
My take is maybe a little different.
So I think it's true on the inflation side, obviously, that we haven't had very high inflation for a very long time.
But when you think about the business cycles overall, we're now going through a pretty serious dislocation every decade or so.
So 2008, 2009, the Great Recession, the 2000 meltdown of the internet economy.
So every 10 years, we get this really amazing crisis that is really hard on people.
That makes it really difficult.
Not so long ago, we talked about the millennials as the generation that would never really be able to catch up with everyone else just because they have gotten off to such a difficult start in the business world and, economically speaking, more generally.
But something what you said, Mihir, rang true despite I think there's much more up and down than we often, I guess, than we often like to remember.
I was going to call it some sort of a casino mentality.
It seems that people are really impatient.
And on the one hand, I love that.
I love the fact, for instance, how our students are thinking about, I want a job where I can really make a difference.
And that's lovely and wonderful.
I think it's one of the best things about this generation of young people that they're impatient.
But then impatience also implies the sometimes boring, sometimes tedious work that you need to do in order to create really long and enduring success.
That has fallen out of fashion.
And I feel this casino mentality somehow get rich quick without much effort.
Yes. That's sort of the mental model that we now all have.
Exactly. I think you both are elaborating exactly what I was trying to get at more eloquently than I did, which is not just in finance but in the labor markets.
It's impatience. And it's a belief that the models that are represented in the world as being accessible are available to everybody and are common when, in fact, they're not.
And these older methods, whether it has to do with saving or whether it has to do with the way you work or the way you start things, are viewed almost as anachronistic and almost as silly.
Mm -hmm. Those are the rules you thought you had to follow, but we have new rules.
And to your point, Felix, I love this.
I love the idea of the next generation saying there's new rules and we want new rules.
Yeah, that's great.
That's where we progress.
Yeah. And maybe this is just young me to your point about the old people saying, oh, you don't understand.
Yeah. But to me, it feels like it's gone a little bit overboard.
I think the point you just made me hear is exactly right.
I don't think it's different in kind.
I think it's different in quantity.
Right. Every generation has been convinced that they can outsmart the generation that came before.
Every generation is convinced that there's a better, faster, more efficient way to do things.
And so that's not new.
And that ambition is good.
And it's a very positive thing.
This impatience you describe and this almost disdain, you see it even among young adults when they're with each other.
If one of them happens to have a nine -to -five job where they're just going in, doing the nine -to -five thing, everybody is like, ah, you sucker.
Right. Exactly. I figured out a different way to game the system.
But it's an interesting sociological question too, because I think this impatience, Felix, that you describe, historically, we have always had conspicuous consumption.
And we know that conspicuous consumption promotes competitive consumption.
And I think what has happened today, which is very different in quantity, if not in kind, is that consumption has become more conspicuous than ever.
I am now going to go on Reddit and show you how much money I made from this stock on a daily basis.
Visibility is different.
I am going to show you the bling in my life.
Right. It's so aggressively public now.
And of course, we only share the good stuff.
Right. The sense of FOMO, if you're not part of that, if you are not enjoying the new economy where everything does feel like a casino, it does create a sense of insecurity among a lot of people who are trying to do things the older fashioned way, which is get a good job and work really hard at it and try
to become good at something.
I'm glad we kind of reframed this in a sense of something that is both incredibly productive and positive and common across generations, but then also something that's a little bit of an exaggeration of what are typical tendencies.
Because I think that's right.
It's not as if it's all so new and different as much as it feels like in our conversation to be something more that is a big accentuation of what is actually a very important and positive thing in life.
Yeah. So my next question is this podcast isn't too depressing.
Yeah, no kidding. So let's turn to positive trends.
What do you see out there that is giving you some optimism, even despite the troubled times?
So yeah, let's think about the positive.
I confess in the last year or two, I've become a lot more optimistic about decarbonization and the ways in which we're going to address climate change.
Now, just to be clear, we are not out of the woods and it is deeply distressing what happens on a year -to -year basis with respect to climate change.
But in the longer term, I think there have been some really remarkable developments.
So the growth in renewables is spectacular.
The way we've come down on the cost curve on renewables is really fantastic to the degree that we will soon be generating large fractions of power from renewables more than we would do on fossil fuels.
The EV take -up has been spectacular and promises to be even better as we go forward.
There are things going on in agriculture and in industrial processes that are really fantastic.
And then there's the kind of larger carbon capture thing.
So I think a couple years ago, I was starting to really worry in a deep way about existential risk.
I don't mean to downplay the risks we face, but I feel like we are all taking it much more seriously.
There's real action happening and the fruits of a decade's worth of efforts are starting to pay off to a degree that makes me feel like, wow, this is really exciting.
I am really surprised about humor here.
I would have thought this is the perfect example of magical thinking.
I don't think we nearly do enough and we're running out of time much more quickly than we had anticipated.
And somehow, one of my big fears is that exactly pointing towards technology now essentially means we don't really have to do much.
We don't have to really rethink how the economy works.
So take EVs as an example.
Optimistic expectations for rich countries like the US say maybe in 10 years about half of all vehicles will be electric.
And of course, that's like a huge change.
Is it anywhere near close to what we need to do in order to prevent the worst outcomes?
No, it's not. I agree with that, Felix.
But if you asked me where we were two years ago or three years ago, I would have said there is no way we're going to get to the end.
Or even more pessimistic.
Well, I was, but companies are talking about it as part of what they do all the time.
It is in the water with politics and it is now technologically different than it was two or three years ago.
Yeah. There was a time two, three years ago where we had leading politicians and we had a sense in which we were going to just keep doing coal.
Yeah. There was a real sense.
Yeah. And that is changing.
I buy maybe the change in trend, but say a recent counter example.
We desperately, desperately, desperately need a carbon tax.
Right. Now we're going through a time when gasoline gets a little more expensive.
What do our politicians do?
We're talking about, oh, gas tax holidays, subsidies for people.
Fair enough. At a time when we know, in particular the US relative to the rest of the rich world, gasoline is ridiculously inexpensive to begin with.
Right. And we see like the tiniest of moves in energy prices and we do everything to revert it.
Yeah. I'll give you the counter though, right?
Look at what's happening in Europe given geopolitical events about their consideration of reliance on Russian oil.
Yeah. They're reconsidering it in a very, very deep way and in a very fast way.
Almost in a matter of months, they are really thinking hard about a wholesale shift in the way they think about their reliance.
I think that's exciting.
Is it still the most important challenge we face?
Yes. But am I feeling better about it than I felt like two years ago?
Yes, for sure. So maybe that's the way I would frame it.
I think this is one of those cases where you think we are depends on where you were.
Right. And notice how I've just fallen so easily into the position of mediating.
I have to be pursuing you guys.
It's just like old times.
Mom is back feeling.
No, but for change to happen, there is an order of operation.
So there was a time when there were big swaths of the population and the corporate population, for example, in denial.
And then you get to the next stage, which is a signaling of intent, and they begin to adopt a new language.
And I think you see a lot of companies in that stage.
The next stage after that is the adoption of maybe symmetric, some benchmarks to begin to measure themselves.
All of this is still a long distance away from the deep structural changes that Felix is alluding to.
Yeah, yeah. So if you're looking at it from the vantage point of where we need to be, we are still a long way away.
If you look at it from the vantage point of where we were, and if you were optimistic that we would ever get out of that stage, at least we are beyond that.
But no question. There's a long way to go.
And also, just like Felix, you know, you offer a positive trend, and Felix just throws cold water, right?
I mean, my God. All right, Yangmi, why don't you give it a shot?
Okay. Mine actually builds on the previous conversation we had about the way we consume today and the casino -like world we've been living in.
And one way to think about it is that one of the ways business has created value in our lives is by removing any kind of friction associated with consumption.
You want a car to pick you up, push a button on your phone.
You want a pizza? Push a button.
You want to trade some stocks?
You want to place a wager on a game tonight?
Push a button on your phone.
And in some ways, this is all fantastic.
The problem, of course, is, as we talked about a minute ago, the line between healthy consumption and unhealthy overconsumption can be very thin.
And the only thing standing in the way of binge eating or binge trading or binge viewing or binge shopping, binge anything, is our own discipline.
Which probably, as a society, as a culture, we have lost a little bit.
He's lacking, I think.
Yes, we care. And so we have swung too far in that direction.
I was about to say, I thought this was going to be a positive trade.
No, no, no, no, no.
I see this happening already.
I think that after a decade of reveling in this binge economy, our new economic reality is going to push us back to a place of more moderate consumption.
And I see this already happening and I think it's a very, very good thing.
I see this in people I talk to who are thinking about consumption in different ways.
That's interesting.
And I see it in corporations where they're beginning to tighten their belts a little bit.
And so think about how corporate offices have changed.
Remember, they used to be so stale and so ugly and gray and dehumanizing.
So the fact that they have become more dynamic and more pleasant is fantastic.
Does this mean we all need a masseuse on call at work?
Probably not. And so what you see is you see companies scaling back.
Does that mean we're going to go all the way back to the way it was?
And so it's sort of two steps forward, one step back.
And I think the pendulum is maybe going to swing back in a way that we can find a new equilibrium that might end up being healthier for us in the long run.
It's so interesting that you mentioned this, young me, I think in part because it does tie to our previous conversation, but also you're linking it to the quote -unquote new economic reality.
So you think about Uber needs to raise prices on their rides.
And that becomes more costly than it was ever before.
Yeah, so maybe you walk on short trips.
Maybe you walk on short trips.
Yeah. There's all these ways in which our consumption decisions have been subsidized in various ways.
And when that changes and doing the door dash for the Snickers bar from the corner grocery store becomes a little bit more costly, maybe that ripples through in all kinds of ways to the ways we think about consumption.
I think that's really interesting.
Felix, you got to throw cold water on my positive trend.
I would never, ever.
I wonder how much of this is just generational.
You know how often when new technology becomes available, if you're that first generation that gets access to the technology but you didn't grow up with it, there's just like limitless enthusiasm.
And you don't quite know how to deal with it because it's also new and it's also exciting.
And then I think already the next generation that grows up with this technology says, yeah, of course I can push a button and get pizza or I can push a button and get an Uber.
What's supposed to be that miraculous, that wonderful, that amazing about this?
And you get moderation.
And I think maybe the downsides that we saw in the push -button economy, maybe those downsides are generational.
And for the next group of people, it'll be much less problematic.
I do think you're on to something.
Take something as simple as social media.
I know so many young people now who are not really addicted to any of it.
They're not really on Facebook.
They're not really on Instagram.
I mean, they sort of graze a little bit, but they're not as frenetic about it.
I mean, the popularity of dumb phones.
I think it's a very interesting phenomenon in the sense that you learn about your own weaknesses.
You know, once I'm on TikTok, I know I can't stop.
And so why put me at risk?
And as a result, I think dumb phones and the popularity of dumb phones among young people, it's just really astonishing given all the things you can do.
So Felix, what is your positive trend?
What is an optimistic thing you've spotted?
So I love how in the current economic situation, our attention has gone from customers and consumers to employees.
And I think it's long overdue.
It's very healthy. And I see so many interesting innovations and work practices that I think even to the extent that interest in talent and interest in employees is just driven by we have an overheated economy.
And so we basically have to fight it out to get enough employees to join our organization.
Even in that context, I have a hard time believing that all the innovation that we now see is going to go out the window.
And I'm particularly encouraged because there was for a very long time this strange difference in how we thought about customers and how we thought about employees.
If you go to a customer as a corporate person, one thing you would never ever ever do is to say, look, our products and our services are exactly like everybody else's.
But then in competition for talent, that's basically what we did all the time.
We said, oh, we're paying market and we have an amazing culture.
And then when you ask the people to describe that amazing culture, it's exactly that same description that you would see at every other business.
And now I think because competition is really serious and businesses have to pay much more attention to talent, I now see interesting innovations almost every day.
So let me take flexibility as one important point.
Sometimes I meet executives and they tell me, you know, one big thing that the pandemic taught me is like flexibility is just really important for employees.
And you must be kidding, right?
People screamed at the top of their lung prior to the pandemic that they wanted flexibility, except we always said, oh, no, it can't be done.
And we don't really know how to do it.
And now the truth is a good number of businesses have just figured out how to do it.
And I think there won't be a lot of pressure.
There won't be a lot of benefit to going backwards.
Yeah, I love this idea, Felix.
It relates, I think, in some ways to the way you think about value and the way you think about creating value, not just for customers, but for employees.
To my eye, there's a little bit of magical thinking with this like remote everywhere.
He's really pushing that phrase.
I'm trying, right? But the deep point you're making is so right to me, which is identity has historically been associated with consumption.
And we're shifting to a world, forget about labor market conditions, where identity is also associated with what you do and your work and you want it to be more meaningful.
And therefore, employers have to create a more meaningful work setting and create value for Felix as an employee.
And I think if your identity shifts where you say, I'm spending 10 hours a day or eight hours a day doing this thing, I want it to be meaningful, then forget about labor market conditions, then you just have to do something in that dimension of your operation.
So I think it's very exciting to have meaning in our lives not come exclusively from consumption and to have it come from the other side, which is production.
And I think that's a super interesting idea and I think it's a great trend.
I like it. Are you more pessimistic, young me?
No. In my mind, the jury's still out.
Look, I loved what you said about how companies, it's so deeply ingrained the importance of differentiating in the eyes of their customers.
And yet, it never really occurred to them the power of differentiating for their employees.
And as I was thinking about this and listening to you speak about the benefits of flexibility, for example, that's a really hard one to solve.
And I see a lot of companies right now trying to figure out how to solve that problem.
And I see some really mixed results, to be honest.
But here's what I am convinced of.
If a few companies figure out how to do it well, what a point of differentiation.
What a magnet. What an unbelievable advantage that is in the labor market.
And so the fact that the last couple of years has kind of blown the concept of flexibility wide open and made all things possible.
I think what you're going to see is a lot of experimentation, and then you're going to see some companies really figure it out.
And those companies will have that labor advantage, I think, just exactly as you described.
So I like that one a lot.
I hope it's a trend.
Let me put it that way.
I hope it's a trend and not just something that's a bit more episodic and reflective of this moment in time.
Okay, so here's my last question.
It's a good one. What is something that you have changed your mind about in the past 12 months?
Oh, wow. Felix, you go first.
Actually, something I change my mind all the time.
It's more like flip -flopping than changing my mind.
So that's okay. I used to be so sure how to think about globalization and all the benefits of globalization.
Now I'm thinking back, boy oh boy, maybe I was really dogmatic.
Maybe I was really dumb about what it really meant and all the consequences of globalization.
So then in part as a result of the research, but also in part of just what you see happening, I was much more aware of all the social costs that come with rapid globalization, with exporting jobs overseas, with import competition in many different ways.
And frankly, I thought quite often about ways to soften the blow, to get better transitions, to help people along, and also realize that maybe my instinctive, super simple answer that globalization is good for the economy, it creates extra wealth.
And if some people lose out, you can just redistribute that wealth, a realization that that actually doesn't work, even in places, European countries being a good example, where wealth distribution took place at a much grander scale than in the United States in response to globalization, that basically
has not solved the issues.
That basically has not given us a sustainable path towards globalization.
And then now for the last couple of weeks, there is the baby formula disaster, which now makes me think, really, you're not allowing European formula to enter the United States at a time when desperate parents are looking for baby formula.
And it all comes back 360 degrees where I'm thinking, no one can tell me baby formula that is safe for Europeans is not safe for American families.
And no one can tell me, which is the official reason why the FDA is not allowing European formula, because the label is not quite right.
No one can tell me that the label is more important when in fact we know the product is of equal quality, maybe better quality.
And so I am just pulled back and forth on this globalization question.
Sometimes I see these examples where it's just ridiculous when we have closed economies.
And then of course I know about all the social costs of doing it differently.
Stay strong. I tell you because I stay confused.
No, I was going to say stay strong.
I'm with I'm I'm so on board.
People have, I think got confused about globalization.
And I think the virtues are remarkable.
And I get your concerns about how we do these redistributive things, but man, stay strong, Felix.
Keep believing, boss.
Well, so one of the arguments that I have made many, many times over the years is this idea that global linkages actually promote not just prosperity, but peace.
The nations are much less likely to engage in really dangerous conflicts with each other if their prosperity is interlinked.
And although I continue to believe that, one of the things that I had not considered was what happens when for some reason, despite those linkages, a conflict erupts and you find that there are these tremendous interdependencies in the midst of these really grave conflicts.
Then what happens? What are the kinds of not just economic vulnerabilities do you create, but geopolitical vulnerabilities do you create for yourself?
And is economic independence in some ways a form of geopolitical strength?
All of these arguments are starting to get turned on their head a little bit.
And so like you, Felix, I too am confused.
Your point about global conflict is so good.
Well, thank you, Felix.
How can it be that we were so focused on the probability of an adverse event without then at the same time thinking through and how bad is it going to be if it happens nevertheless?
It's such a trivial mistake in thinking about issues.
It really is. I am reminded of the Churchillian adage about democracy.
Okay. I can't remember it exactly, but it's something along the lines of it's like a horrible way to run the world except for all the others.
After hours where we mangle quotes and get very confused about what we're talking about.
I think there's like an analog in globalization, which is like, yeah, it looks like a super messy and hard way to manage a global economy except for all the others, which are really tough and really hard and in many ways immiserating.
But you're not dogmatic about it, are you, Meir?
I'm not dogmatic, I just think what I'm concerned about is the pushback against globalization has become so pronounced and to see it infect Felix.
Oh, yeah. I'm just kidding, Felix.
I'm more concerned about us turning our back on it than I am about us embracing it too much.
Just given where we are as a society, I think that's my instinct about trying to fight what is I think a problematic instinct in the world.
I can see that. So, young me, what have you changed your mind about in the last 12 months?
Elon Musk. Oh, no. I never, ever thought I would see the day when you change your mind about it.
Here we go. Both of you guys know, I was one of the earliest Tesla adopters.
Yeah. I think I've had three generations of Teslas.
I still love my Tesla.
Yeah. This is a man who has created so much value in the world.
If you had to identify one person who's done more to push the very stubborn car industry into EVs, as you put it me here, this trend.
It would have to be him.
I mean, what he's doing in space at a fraction of the cost of what NASA was ever able to do is simply astonishing.
Wired Magazine recently had a story about how he was able to scramble to get Starlink internet access to Ukraine within days of the invasion, which not only aided the citizens of Ukraine, but also aided the Ukraine and continues to aid the Ukraine military in the battlefield.
This is real value creation.
He is simply one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation.
And yet, oh my gosh, I think Elon Musk has become emblematic of this phenomenon that increasingly irritates me.
It's a phenomenon I refer to as a phenomenon of sore winners.
What I mean by that is our economic system, like any economic system, produces winners and losers.
Now, it's one thing if you happen to be someone who has been left out of the enormous prosperity of the past decade.
It's one thing for you to be bitter about it.
It's totally understandable.
The system has not worked for you.
And so, of course, you're sore about it.
It is another thing entirely to be someone who has won the economic lottery of life and yet still carry yourself with anger and bitterness and victimhood and this is what I don't understand.
I don't understand the attitude, the disposition.
So for example, Twitter is broken.
I think everyone agrees.
But rather than, hey, how can I fix this?
It's like, let's set this thing on fire and see how many people we can ridicule along the way.
It's very disappointing, I have to say.
By the way, I think the entrepreneurial instinct to want to go in and fix things that you think are broken, I think all of these are really good things, but I would prefer the instinct come from a good place, a constructive place.
When it comes from a, you guys are idiots and I alone have all the answers and if you don't agree with me, I'm going to make you look extremely foolish or I'm going to take my toys and go home.
That's what I don't like.
So I don't get sore winners.
If you have won the lottery of life, the winning should create a state of grace, I think, and so it's very, very disappointing.
And the victimhood is bewildering quite honestly and not constructive and not helpful.
Do you think the two things are linked in the sense that if you think you can change the car industry, you have to start from a point of disdain.
If you look at the car industry and you think, oh my God, it's amazing what they have done, you're probably not going to change it.
But if you start from a point of disdain, it's like, oh, all this trivial stuff that they do and don't do very well and there's all this opportunity.
And that same disdain then extends to companies and people like Twitter.
Do you think it's the same or it's different?
I think it comes from the same place.
Being an entrepreneur of that scale, I think it does require some amount of hubris for sure.
Sure. But I would liken it to, there were many decades where Bill Gates was the bad guy.
He was the immature entrepreneur that was disdainful of the entire computing industry.
And then he sort of graduated from that to become sort of an elder statesman.
Exactly. And so he has this Gates Foundation.
Let me give you an example.
One of the things he's trying to do is he's trying to cure malaria.
Imagine if he said to the countries in which he's operating, if you're not nice to me, I'm out.
If he started just disdaining the people he was trying to work with and the countries in which he was trying to make change, that would be not just counterproductive, but it would reveal something about his spirit, about his inner core, I think, and his motivations for doing this.
And I think we would all be incredibly uncomfortable with that.
Instead, he's thrust himself into some of the most difficult places to work in the world, and he's just put his head down and tried to do it.
Now, there are many ways you can talk about the pros and cons of his version of philanthropy, and so I acknowledge that.
But the point I'm trying to make is that I do think when you have achieved a certain level of what we call success, that should bestow upon you some state of grace.
You're in a different place, and you should be motivated and animated by a different kind of energy.
And to see this negative energy, and some of it looks like someone who has a very thin skin, is so petty.
It's very disappointing.
Yeah. No, I hear you, and especially this kind of ambivalence about somebody who can accomplish so much, but then still basically be a man -child who doesn't appear to demonstrate maturity in a traditional sense of the word.
And I think, for me, the hard part about it, Young Me, is he is remarkable, but there is this aspect to him which is this techno utopianism, which is not just him, but it's a lot of people who are like, oh, running Twitter is simple.
It's like free speech.
We'll just do free speech.
And so there's like a dismissal of what are the social processes and the political processes that overlay our world with just a, well, if you open source the code, then there's no algorithm and it's all good.
That, I think, is not just him, but that's a larger problem.
But I think it's a great point, and I think he's becoming somebody who just, that ambivalence is very, very deep for many of us.
Yeah. It would be one thing if no one noticed or no one cared, but it just consumes so many headlines.
And people worship him.
But not like that. You know, the Twitter debacle erupted in the middle of a war in the Ukraine, and yet you open the paper and what is the front page headline?
It's Elon Musk and Twitter.
It's so irritating.
It consumes so much bandwidth.
It's frankly exhausting.
Yeah. So I've changed my mind on that one.
So, Miheir, what's yours?
So I'll be quick. First, young me mea culpa.
Better call Saul can sometimes be too slow.
Oh my God. I'm sorry.
I took me a long time to get there, but this season it's a little bit too slow.
So I understand where you're coming from.
Thank you. I don't agree generally, but it has been too slow.
My husband watches it.
The only thing slower than that that he watches is the Mandalorian, which honestly is like watching wallpaper, like nothing evidence.
Okay. Well, maybe I should try it out.
But seriously, I think the thing I've changed my mind about goes back to our first conversation, and I won't dwell on it too much.
And Felix, it goes to your point about globalization.
I think 12, 14 months ago, I thought we had reached peak politics, and that politics would begin to recede in the world as a force.
Yeah. And for example, on your globalization story, that the economic gains would become more evident to people, and we would figure out these mechanisms, or alternatively to our original conversation, that people would be exhausted about talking about politics, that somehow it would recede.
And both domestically, that was wrong in the U .S., and I was wrong to think about it, obviously, on a global stage.
So I've just come to re -appreciate the dominance of politics in our lives for the foreseeable future.
And that doesn't make me feel terribly happy about it, but I just see these problems as more long -lasting, as more complicated and more prone to bad outcomes than I might have thought 12 months ago.
I think I was just a little bit too rose -tinted about those problems.
And I think I've really changed my mind about that in the last 12 months.
And it goes to all the things you said at the top of this podcast.
I think it's more deep, and it's harder than I understood it to be.
Me too. So congratulations.
I wanted to end on an up note, and you brought us right back down.
Yes! That might be the lowest point, really, of the entire conversation.
I don't even know. Say something positive, nothing, you got nothing.
But it's all going to be okay.
I promise. It's all going to be okay.
All right, you better have some good recommendations as well.
All right, good. So recommendations.
Yangmi, what did you bring for us?
And Yangmi, you get extra ones.
Okay, thank you. So I have two.
So my first is a show called Slow Horses on Apple.
Have you guys seen this?
Oh my god. It is right up both of you guys' alley.
I promise you, you will love this show.
It is a show about this team of disgraced MI5 agents.
It's set in London.
See, already with both of you.
You got me. The audience can't see.
They're easy, man. They're so easy.
And when I say disgraced, I mean, every member of this team has done something in their capacity as an MI5 agent to be labeled persona non grata.
Yeah. Like, utterly fail in some field assignment or something disgraceful like that.
And so they have been dumped together on this team and they're now being given all of these awful, boring administrative tasks to do.
And then, of course, something happens and they become involved in this really major case.
It's a miniseries, so it's perfect.
I think it's like five or six episodes.
Oh, I love this. I love this.
I'm doing it tonight.
Incredible cast. Gary Oldman, Kristen Scott Thomas and others.
Oh my god. And there are some scenes, like, so for example, it's episode three or four.
There's just this one scene where Gary Oldman and Kristen Scott Thomas, they're sitting on a bench and they're having a conversation.
And just to see these two incredible actors work, it is so good.
The plot is fascinating.
Some really unanticipated twists and turns.
I love it. And I was watching it with my husband and then there was one episode where I snuck ahead and I watched an episode without him.
And then I watched it with him.
And it turns out when I watched it with him, there was a whole bunch of stuff.
I had missed it the first go round.
That's great. It's that textured and layered in.
I'm also that slow.
So anyway, that's my first recommendation.
My second recommendation is very different.
It's a show called Old Enough on Netflix.
Never heard of it. I think you will love this show as well.
Super delightful. This is a very long running reality show from Japan.
And every episode is only about 10, 12 minutes long.
And what it does is it shows toddlers, little children, sometimes two years old, three years old, running errands by themselves for the first time.
It is unbelievable.
So for example, a child might be asked to go to the market and purchase a list of groceries.
So it's amazing for many reasons.
First, it leads to these adorable predicaments and these really sweet interactions.
But mostly it's amazing because it is a show that totally underscores cultural differences in how we think about children and their independence and their capabilities.
So I raised my kids in a community where they were literally never alone.
Leaving your kids alone ever, anywhere, was considered the height of irresponsibility.
If I was at the playground and I saw a child there without a parent, without a caregiver, it would have been scandalous.
So to watch these little children venture out into the world and conduct these tasks on their own is mind blowing.
Oh, that's great. And delightful and such a window into cultural differences.
So I highly, highly recommend it.
Like I said, every episode is like a snack because it's only about 10 or 12 minutes long.
So you just get like a little snack at a time.
It's really nice. That sounds good.
I think my daughters saw the SNL spoof of it.
Now that you mention it.
And they told me about it.
Except it replaces the three -year -old kid with like the 35 -year -old man who can't deal with reality.
That's great. So Felix, what did you bring in?
So if a social scientist were to study my web behavior sometime in the future, that would make for an exceptionally boring study.
At this point in time, I don't even really know why.
I go to the same websites over and over again.
I know the internet is rich and somehow I don't really make use of it.
But so every now and then I give myself a jolt and say, you have to venture out.
You have to find new things.
And I did this by looking at food websites that I wasn't aware of.
And then of course, it's what's true and amazing about the internet is just everything you can imagine and many things that you cannot.
So I wanted to recommend two websites that I came across.
The first one is called copycat .com, cat with a K.
And it's a website of recipes of products that you get from restaurants.
So say you love blueberry muffins at Starbucks.
You go to copycat .com and you find the recipe that mimics the blueberry muffins.
And so it's all the big chains, all the big restaurants.
If you have something you really love, you go there and it will give you the recipe.
Oh, this is great. I'm looking at it.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
They even have it by restaurant.
Yes, by restaurant.
Yes. Oh, my goodness.
By food group, by restaurant every which way you want.
The second website that I came across that I wanted to recommend is something called supercook .com.
And that is you type in the ingredients that you have in your fridge and it gives you recipes what you can make.
Not one recipe. You know, you're left four and a half ingredients.
And the website is very explicit.
It says, we assume you have salt always, but other than that, no preconditions.
So you have four and a half ingredients and you get like 157 recipes.
Oh, my gosh. I have an eggplant and a potato.
What can I do? Yes, exactly.
Wow. I'm going to check out both of these.
Yeah, really, really wonderful.
This is awesome. Okay, Mihir, what did you bring in?
So I'd just like to note that you both brought in two and that I brought in one just for the record.
Ooh, okay. You're practicing moderation, are you?
Exactly. That will not really change the overall balance in a meeting.
I hope you're aware of that.
Fair enough, Felix.
So I wanted to follow up on my Taki Fuego and provide another...
Wait, what? You're whatty whatty?
So I wanted to follow up on my recommendation for Taki Fuegos, which is a very spectacular that I mentioned in passing two weeks ago with another unhealthy food suggestion.
So my unhealthy food suggestion is all things red velvet.
All things? All things red velvet.
So recently made red velvet brownies.
This is one recommendation.
No, but it's like the whole thing.
It's the universe of red velvet brownies.
I've made red velvet cake, but it's not just red velvet cake.
Exactly. All red velvet things.
What is the difference between red velvet and reddish tinted chocolate?
Well, it's a good question.
So A, of course, is the cream cheese frosting.
Oh, okay. B, there is typically some buttermilk or some more vinegar in the red velvet versions and the chocolate cakes.
And then finally, it's red.
Yeah. No, it's a sponge kind of cake as opposed to like a thicker cake.
Yeah, the texture is different.
The texture is different.
Yeah. So anyway, I am just going to recommend as a decadent thing, if you haven't done something red velvet, but it's not just cake.
You can do brownies, you can do whoopie pies, you can do cookies.
Interesting. It always is a winner.
Red velvet is like the most bankable flavor combo that you can think of in the sweet area.
There you go. I'm recommending all things red velvet.
Okay. Good. Wow. That was rich.
That was rich. No, that made me hungry.
Doing this in the evenings was never a good idea because it makes you want to eat.
So true. Yes. There you go.
Speaking of which, we're out of time.
Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
Thank you.
