Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hello, everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Rowie.
And I'm me here. You saw that Biden chose to meet Putin.
If you could meet any living prime minister, head of state, what would be your choice?
You know, I think Merkel would be fun.
Oh. That's a good one.
I think just talking to Merkel would be fun.
Interesting life, right?
Yeah. Yeah. East Germany, West Germany.
Interesting careers.
She's been around the block now, so she's kind of like on her last lap.
Yeah. I think she could get pretty relaxed.
You could get some good stories out of her.
Yeah, totally. I'm going to go for Merkel.
She'd be amazing. Yeah.
Okay. I'll tell you whom I would like to meet.
I would like to meet Emmanuel Macron, the president of France.
Oh, okay. Why? Part of it has to do with a topic that's obsessing me these days, which is how we can reinvigorate the center of the political spectrum as people are going further right and further left.
And here he comes out of nowhere really to make the center cool again and sexy again and interesting again.
And he can rock a suit.
That's what it's really about.
You'll be in good company.
It could get very competitive.
You guys could be like dressing off.
I don't know. My instinct is he might be a little insufferable, honestly.
As you know, with insufferable people, the only thing to do is ask them about themselves.
That always works. It's so true.
How did you do it, Emmanuel?
How did you become such a genius?
Oh, that's too funny.
And Felix, who would you pick?
I would love to meet Chisinda Ardern.
Yes. I don't know if you remember the speech she gave at the UN when she sort of wanted to do with the country with kindness ever since then.
I've been just so impressed by her.
She is the most human of politicians.
Just listening to her, you think we could sit down, we could talk about things, and then she gets stuff done on top of everything.
You know what? We should invite these three to our next episode.
Fabulous. So I actually would like to stay on topic.
I would love to know how you think about US -Russian relations these days.
Right. Not so much because it was the first visit, but just like, why are we talking about Russia so much?
Yeah. And we have a great expert on that matter, so that will be fantastic.
It did occur to me that we have someone who really knows about Russia.
And I've been really intrigued by this idea that a lot of people are rethinking everything in their life post -pandemic, and they are quitting jobs, and they are moving, and they're really dramatically restructuring their work life in particular.
This kind of YOLO moment that some people claim we're going through.
So I'd love to know if you think that's true, if you think it's a good thing, and how to make sense of all that.
Super interesting. Let's do it.
So Russia, the first question that I have for both of you is, are we paying too much attention to Russia?
It's not really a big economy.
It's about the size of Texas, GDP -wise.
Average income in Russia is roughly average income in Costa Rica.
Tiny Switzerland is a bigger trading partner with the United States than Russia.
So what's the obsession with Russia?
There are all sorts of fascinating puzzles, but one of them is that I think the administration believes that relations with Russia do not need to be as bad as they have been.
And so there might be some low -hanging fruit that could be picked through an early meeting to clear the air.
Maybe the story is that this is an easy way to make things better, but I think Felix's question is even, in a way, it's not even of the moment.
It's like a deeper question, which is, should Russia command so much of our imagination as it seems to today?
Yeah, of course, if I look at the president himself, but then also if I look at Congress, it is quite striking now how we're governed by old people, by people just of a different era, different generation.
I admire President Obama's Asia Initiative, this realization that probably the future is the relations with Asia, and that's where we're going to spend a lot of time and a lot of effort.
And now, sort of this almost like going back to the previous generation, that is very Europe -focused.
That's interesting.
The choice of Europe as the first focus was really surprising to me.
In terms of the geopolitics and where Russia fits into it, I think, to your point, Felix, it's like the size of Spain.
It's like the size of Texas.
But most importantly, it is a declining power.
It's not a power like India or like China that is on the rise, making its way to the center of the geopolitical system.
It's on the decline, like the United States is by the way, but we'll leave that aside.
But declining powers are often very disruptive to the system.
So that's super interesting, Ravi.
I hadn't really thought about that, because it kind of inverts the usual way we think about this, which is rising powers deserve more attention.
But you're telling a different story.
Say a little more about why and how can declining powers be disruptive, and what are examples of that?
Think about China, just for a moment.
China has a stake in the maintenance of the system with some rule changes in how the system works.
But China does not want to break the system.
China wants to reimagine the system.
A collapse of the system of globalization and all of these relations would be a disaster for China.
Whereas I think from the Russian perspective, and maybe specifically President Putin and his team, Russia does not have a stake in this system as it is organized, and it has many, many grievances.
And historically, this has also been true, like these declining powers that are not status quo powers.
They don't want to keep the system as it is.
These are problematic agents in the system.
Because if they're erratic behavior, you don't quite know what's going to happen.
And that would be the difference to say the decline of Great Britain, the decline of France, their declining powers, but they somehow believe that the order is at least not all bad.
Yeah. I think this makes a ton of sense to me, because in a way, I have a similar puzzle of Felix, which is Russia seems to punch above its weight, like way above its weight.
Right? But it's interesting that you're framing it as, well, you have to, because actually they're quite potentially disruptive.
At the same time, it feels like, Rawi, that the more attention we give to them, that enables them too, right?
I mean, it seems like a little bit of a paradox.
I think we've gone through a couple of eras recently, in our relations with Russia, under President Obama and previous presidents.
The essence of the message that was sent to Russia was, we recognize that we don't have the same interests, but we do not acknowledge your interests as legitimate.
We think you shouldn't have them.
And we'd really rather that you not.
And President Trump took a very different approach, which was, you can want whatever you want, and maybe I'll be happy to help you get it.
And I think President Biden's approach is really an important one, which is to say, we have divergent interests.
A lot of our struggle is structural.
You want some things that are in your national interest.
We want some things that are international interest.
They're not compatible.
That's okay. We're going to have to just figure out a way to navigate through that.
But being able to say, we acknowledge your national interests as yours and legitimate, it's been a long time since the United States has done that.
And I think it's a really easy and important step to take and makes Russia less disruptive.
Some of those acknowledgments took a form that I found bizarre.
So for instance, this notion that there's critical infrastructure that you shouldn't touch, which then by implication means there's lots of infrastructure that go ahead, launch cyber attacks, and the number of pieces of infrastructure that were named on that list is missing.
What about my local hospital?
I don't want my local hospital to be victim of a cyber attack.
So that's a little strange.
And then in the Ukraine question, are we saying it's okay that they sort of keep the Ukraine in limbo where you never really know how much of a sovereign nation can it be or can it not be?
So I think that part of what's happening is acknowledging the reality and accepting it, which is that the United States is involved in various cyber efforts in the world and almost certainly in Russia, just as Russia is, just like most great powers are and many smaller powers are as well.
And so I think it's really interesting to try to establish the rules of the game because during the Cold War when we had nuclear weapons aimed at each other, there was a lot of effort to say like, what are the rules by which we're both going to live and that will give us some strategic stability.
In cyber, those rules are still in co -it.
We're still trying to figure them out.
And so I think this is the beginning of a real conversation where we say like, okay, let's agree that in times of peace, we got to rule out this kind of cyber stuff and that kind of cyber stuff and we won't do it and you won't do it.
Ukraine is much more complicated.
The West is deeply disappointed by Russian behavior in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, but it also ought to be acknowledged that Russia cares more about the fate of Crimea and of Ukraine than the United States does.
This is just a geopolitical fact.
And so pretending otherwise is really vexing to the Russian authorities that we're going to tell the Ukrainians we're behind you 100%, whatever the Russians do, we're going to stop them.
It's not true. Saying one thing, which is that we really, really care, but then not actually doing very much about it didn't really help anybody.
Let me try to take the opposite side of that, Raul, just so I can understand because it seems like you're describing a way to go, which makes a ton of sense and it seems to be what Biden is embracing.
The other way to go is the harder line, which is to treat it in a harsher way and this would be an extreme version, but like as a rogue state of some kind, with the hope that that would foster change inside Russia and with the hope that over the longer run, that would serve Russians interests as well
as American interests.
If change to the Russian regime were to happen, that will happen from inside Russia.
I'm not sure there's much the United States can do to accelerate that change.
Underneath this is the view that basically the idea that America or Germany or France or anyone can try to actually influence domestic opposition inside Russia is fanciful and ridiculous.
The better thing to do is to let it play out in its own way.
We've tried as much support for domestic opposition as the United States has been able to give it has given.
But isn't there a connection to the likelihood that Putin will remain in his position for a long time?
Yeah. And I think the question is, should we acknowledge that that's just true?
He has been extremely successful and to use the boxing metaphor, punching above Russia's weight and getting what he wants from some important questions that are very close to the borders of the Russian Federation.
So, sketch out for me, Rawi, the way this plays out over the next 20 years.
In a way, it just feels like, as you put it, Russia has a declining power.
It feels like there's been such a lost generation of talent culturally, economically, in so many ways.
How does the next 20 years play out?
I get your point, you're being super pragmatic and super real poly -tique about this, but it also feels a little hopeless.
I think there are two things about this regime that we always have to understand.
One, the 1990s were a disaster for Russia.
Everything was falling apart, every institution was falling apart.
And so, part of the narrative of the Putin regime, for many Russians, and certainly presented by the regime, is that compared to disaster and chaos, we're not so bad.
This is way better than disaster and chaos.
So, we had disorder, now we have order.
We had instability, now we have stability.
And then the other part that's really important is that the Russian political class despises what they see as Western hypocrisy.
And so, the simple way to think about this is, what aboutism?
And President Putin is a master of what aboutism.
You say that we treat our domestic opposition badly, but you gun down black kids in the streets every week.
And you say this, but you actually are doing way more cyberattacks than we are.
And so, this like, what about you?
What about what you're doing?
You are not being straight, you're hypocrites.
This regime won't last forever.
And every regime that falls in a way that's productive falls from within.
And slowly, not mostly with revolution.
We tried the whole, let's get rid of people we don't like and hope good people come in their place.
A bunch of times, mostly doesn't work out.
So, there's a kind of patience, I guess is what I'm advocating, which is like, let the Russians figure out how they want to be governed.
The heartbreaking part of this story, and maybe this is just me not wanting to accept political reality, is I see so many Russian companies that have really amazing ideas.
Totally. You meet the most talented people.
And if their talents could be applied globally or even like just in all of Europe, the fact that Russian income is on average the income of Costa Rica is shocking to me relative to the potential that the country has.
And so, I think I understand at an intellectual level that we have to be patient, but also the cost of being patient, not so much to the West.
I don't think it matters all that much to us, but the cost to Russia and Russians.
If I were inside Russia, I wouldn't be patient.
If I were a Russian citizen, I wouldn't be patient.
But it's a very different thing when we're talking about these state -to -state relations.
Raul, you would know better than I, but I feel like your pragmatism and your kind of cold -eyed realism about all this is straight out of a Russian novel or something.
It's like this kind of like no BS, like don't be romantic about this.
You just have to look at the world as it is.
Maybe that's the consequence of reading too much Russian literature.
There you go. All this fatalism and the fact that I work for both the FSB and the CIA.
Yeah. So I mean here you brought this topic that's in acronym YOLO.
There are really interesting things going on in labor markets and there appears to be something larger going on culturally.
We're observing pretty significant quit rates, so that means people leaving their jobs.
They're pretty high, higher than they've been in a long time.
Now, part of that you might expect in a recovery where people are starting to move up and there's like a lot of demand, but then there comes on the backdrop of this pandemic and lots of anecdotal stories that I've heard and maybe you've heard of people rethinking their lives and just saying, I don't
want to live the way I was living before.
And this has all been labeled as kind of some kind of a YOLO, you only live once moment.
And I'm just curious when you see that, if you've heard stories like that, does it spark a sense of optimism and happiness for those people or does it spark a sense of what are you doing and are you sure?
One of the things that I find particularly interesting is this, of course, happens all the time.
There's a life changing event.
Maybe you move. Maybe you get married.
Maybe there's a terrible loss in your life and then people reorient.
I think what's particularly interesting now is that we just share this incredible experience, the pandemic.
And so we're now synchronized in a way I think that we typically are not synchronized, where this is more of an individual story.
And now it's this broader soul -searching that you see in many different places.
I'm not sure whether it's a reorientation away from work.
So on the one hand, you see crit rates are up.
Although your point me here about let's be realistic.
Crit rates typically are very high in, say, astronomy, hospitality, industry anyway.
They increased from maybe four and a half to five and a half percent.
But so crit rates are very high, but at the same time, the rate of entrepreneurship.
So when you look at new business registrations through the roof, quite unlike in the last The Great Recession, when we had this dramatic decline in new business registrations, now they're going through the roof.
So it's not a simple story in the sense that people turn away from work and they're looking to be with family or they're looking to go on an eight -month sailing trip around some island.
It's reorientation, looking for new things.
And it's very hard, I find, to make out the pattern.
It could be a better version of the same job that you had.
It could be what you think is a better job.
It could be a job that involves less commuting.
So what I struggle to see is in the end with all that movement, are we really ending up in a different place?
Or maybe it's just like at the individual level, we'll have a lot of change.
But looking at the economy as a whole and looking at business as a whole, maybe we'll pretty much end where we started before the pandemic.
And Felix, I'm just curious, there's a part of me which feels joy for those people.
And then there's a part of me which feels like, wait a second, are you overreacting or over -extrapolating from some current experience?
Do you tend towards either one of those?
I admire people who reimagine their life.
In particular, the more radical stories that you see where people say, you know, work was the center of my life and now I decided to make it my family.
Or families that decide maybe we can make a go trying to live off of one salary so that someone can stay home with the kids.
Those kinds of really big decisions I find incredible.
I find it amazing if it happens for individuals.
What I'm less sure about is that there's enough movement in one direction that we end up in a different place.
There are so many interesting elements.
And I think we should leave aside whether it's even true that you only live once.
Because that might not be true.
We can't be sure of that.
But let's assume for the moment, one life, shouldn't we hope that the pandemic taught us to rethink how we want to live our lives personally, professionally, in a wide variety of ways?
How do we want to spend every last minute of our lives and do we want to spend it the way we were spending it before?
I think that big questioning of everything.
I kind of hope we keep that as a general practice, which is that we ask ourselves, do I really want to spend my days this way or not?
I'll tell you one thing that concerns me though, Meir, and I'd love to know what you two think of this, is I worry a little bit that we're veering away from self -awareness and toward self -absorption.
And I would love to make sure that we keep all the self -awareness principles, but don't invite ourselves to just mostly think, minute by minute, am I happy?
Which is not, I think, mostly the right question to be asking ourselves.
What you're saying, I guess, Rahi, is that this is actually a narcissistic moment.
Is that what you're saying?
Well, yes, basically.
I worry that there's an element of deep narcissism in it.
Interesting. We all are basically so much in our own heads that we're asking ourselves like, am I happy this minute?
Five minutes later, am I still happy or am I less happy?
It feels a little influenced by the collective, right?
Like, what is everyone doing?
We are all rethinking everything.
It's what the cool kids are doing.
Right, it's like what the cool kids are doing.
And then, of course, it also feels a little bit artificially stimulated by wealth in the stock market and perhaps a labor market that has been more robust than it is going to be forever.
And so then it also feels like, wait, you're responding to transitory economic signals, you're maybe indulging in a little bit of a collective fantasy, and then the worst part is maybe Rahi's version, and maybe it's all a little bit of self -indulgent navel -gazing.
So I don't know, that's why I struggle with this, Felix, because I'm with you usually, but for some reason in this moment, I'm having a little bit more caution.
Yeah, let me try to push back a little bit.
I think part of what the pandemic did is that we ended up living a life that we couldn't have imagined.
If you had asked me, can you imagine basically not leaving my house for 18 months, I would have said like, no way, that's never going to happen.
And so now I haven't traveled in 18 months, and now opportunities open up, I can go back to traveling, but it is a good moment to ask, how much travel do I want to do?
And I think it's a lot of that what happens.
When you look at the structure of quit rates, it's actually quite interesting in the sense that, at least to me, it feels very rational.
The kinds of jobs where if you leave your job right now, it's not clear that there is a great opportunity out there.
Quit rates in manufacturing, very low.
They dropped obviously during the pandemic, and they're basically to where they were.
In careers where you think it's long -term investments that got you where you are, financial services as one example, quit rates are very low.
I think it's mostly, you know, I had a job that the restaurant industry is booming at this moment, and I can get that kind of a job again tomorrow, if it turns out that living in Florida is maybe not such a great idea after all.
So while you're maybe seeing some rash decisions on the individual level, overall it feels like people are pretty cognizant of, what if that new life that I'm trying out for maybe the first time, what if it doesn't suit me?
I love this idea of trying out a different life that you have not chosen in the first place and that probably in the regular course of your life, you wouldn't have had an opportunity to choose, but now you do.
One of the common things that gets asked to people is like, what do you hope for your loved ones?
What do you hope for your children?
And people often say, well, I just hope that they're happy, which I think is kind of the wrong thing to hope.
Like if I were to think about it, I would say, like I hope that my loved ones and my children find meaningful ways to contribute that bring them a sense of dignity and a sense of purpose, which is different from being happy, because happy is transitory.
And could we like parse some of this by asking like, which are the questions that people are asking themselves?
Like, am I just happier doing this?
Who knows? I'll try it out.
Am I finding a different way that I could contribute?
Am I finding a different sense of what I can offer?
And it doesn't have to be the same thing over the course of a whole life.
And we could say some of the happiness ones, I would be more nervous that it's like the navel -gazing narcissism and the let me try out some new way to engage with the world because it might be more meaningful and purposeful.
Sign me up for that.
I think that is a good way to think about life personally.
And I think a lot of what people are doing is that, Rowie.
There may be some aspects to this, which is magical thinking, which is I'm going to go do that thing and then I'm going to come back and if it doesn't work out, I'm going to go back and do this thing.
And so there's like this sense in which it's all costless that strikes me as a little bit problematic.
Maybe it's a generational thought.
People are trying to rewrite rules.
And what we've unleashed in this moment is just a dramatic rewriting of rules.
And that is in some sense exciting.
Sometimes I wonder if this is all a little more mundane.
Some of the choices in your life, of course, are like the big choices.
Like, what job do I want?
Where do I want to live?
But even there, when I see many graduates who struggle with, you know, I have five job offers, which one do I take?
And then not quite randomly, but also not fully informed, of course, you choose one of these jobs.
And then before you know it, you do well at that particular company.
And you have what people call a career, but it's built on some notion of this might be something that is quite nice to do.
And I think it's true for so many other things that you do, where you stumble across an opportunity, you get to know someone.
And before you know, what you do, how you lead your life is a collection that is driven sometimes by purpose, but also driven by just lots of practical circumstances.
And I think part of what is happening is also that people rethink those practical circumstances.
They used to go out every day and get coffee, some coffee shop.
Now I couldn't do that for 18 months and I discovered drinking coffee at home is actually quite peaceful.
So it's a rare opportunity, I think, to shake up all the kinds of things that you have just gotten so used to.
Yeah, I love that point, Felix.
I feel much more encouraged because what happens when everybody turns off their autopilot at the same time?
That's a great way to do that.
A lot of stuff is going to happen if everybody turns off autopilot and then the decisions are going to have to be made consciously, moment by moment, month by month.
Right. Yeah. Remember how after 9 -11, we had this incredible wave of entrepreneurship and part of it has just to do with the underlying economics or space to be had and so on and so on.
But also part of it had to do a little bit with this rethinking.
The world felt like a different place and perhaps you were called to do a different thing.
And if that's one of the legacies of the pandemic, that lots of people got to rethink what they really wanted to do, I'd be so excited for us and I'd be actually excited to see what will come of it.
Yeah, I think I'm feeling much more positive about this.
Yeah. I think in part what you're saying, Felix, that strikes me as so true is it's not as if all the decisions pre -pandemic were so well thought out.
Right? And they were so naturally robust.
Mine definitely weren't.
We randomly got here and then...
Right. And so then you shake the table and then it's a moment to kind of reorient.
I think part of what I was feeling was, well, wait, the way the world worked pre -pandemic was for a reason and you're kind of saying maybe not.
Maybe you structured your life because you happened to structure it that way back then.
There's no particular privilege to that configuration.
And shaking it and looking at it all over again is maybe the right way to do.
Okay. This has been very uplifting, I have to say.
And you brought pics, of course.
What do you have for us?
I've got one. So one of my favorite bands is The Killers.
And I feel that with Jack White and White Stripes, they have been working so hard to save rock and roll.
Wow. Because rock and roll is in big trouble.
Yeah. And today I was driving here and I heard the most amazing thing.
So one of my favorite killer songs is called Dustland Fairytale.
It's a great song on its own, one of their classics.
And I'm driving along and all of a sudden I realize that Brandon Flowers, who's the singer for The Killers, is singing Dustland Fairytale with Bruce Springsteen.
Oh. And apparently the boss texted Brandon Flowers and said, let's do this thing together.
And Brandon Flowers thought it was like a joke, it couldn't really be Bruce Springsteen texting him.
It turns out it was.
And they have collaborated on this really spectacular version of one of my favorite killer songs.
I think it dropped like yesterday and I heard it today.
So if you like The Killers or Bruce Springsteen, then you got to check out this song.
That is a great recommendation.
Felix, what do you got?
My recommendation is a series on Idea Cast, the HBR podcast.
They have now aired the third or four episodes on the Carlos Ghosn story.
And so interesting.
It's basically rewinding his life, the rise and fall of Carlos Ghosn.
It's a crazy story, right?
It's a crazy story and so many unlikely successes.
As this outsider, two companies, complicated industry, you are revered as a CEO of what we accomplished.
And then, of course, this super dramatic, everything falls apart around you.
It's done beautifully by the team.
They tell the story in a really interesting way.
And I don't really know what the fourth episode is yet, but I heard it is or it will include an interview with him, which of course will be super interesting.
That's one of the greatest business stories of the last five, ten years.
Totally crazy. Even with everything you know about him, I still find it hard to make up my mind how exactly I should think about him.
He's like many people at the same time.
That's great. So I have two very quick.
One is an update, which is I've previously spoken about el yuca techo hot sauce.
And I recently discovered Black Label Reserve, which I know sounds absurd for a hot sauce, but it lives up to Black Label Reserve.
But my bigger recommendation is Jeremy Clarkson is this guy in the UK who hosted a TV show called Top Gear, which is about cars.
And I used to watch it on planes.
And he's kind of a complicated ornery guy, but he now has a TV show on Amazon Prime called Clarkson's farm.
So here's the story.
He's been living on this farm for 10 years.
The guy who basically takes care of the farm retires.
What does he decide to do?
He decides to take over and become the farmer.
A farmer? Why wouldn't he?
And he brings along a TV crew naturally because you're Jeremy Clarkson.
And it is like DIY gone crazy.
And if you've ever had a fantasy of farming and what that life would be like, this will cure you of it because there are floods, there is drought, there is COVID.
First off, visually stunning because it's farmland up in the cost walls, but it also just reveals so much about the economics of farming, about the culture of farming.
It's just beautiful.
So it's like six, seven episodes, really fun, entertaining.
And if you're having a YOLO moment and you think you might want to go and take over a farm.
Oh, I always wanted to be a farmer.
Yeah. You will be cured of that.
Now that should worry you me here.
There you go. There you go.
So this is it. Thank you everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
Thanks for watching.
