Ted Audio Collective Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Felix.
Hi, Mihir. And we're back.
We're back. Yes, so excited to be back.
It's been a long summer.
It has been, but how was your summer?
Actually my big project was I'm rebuilding one of our decks.
Oh my gosh. Of course, it's mostly a cheap excuse to buy a miter saw, which I have wanted to own for such a long time, but I never really had a good excuse.
How can you live life without a miter saw?
Oh my gosh, wow. I've done okay without a miter saw.
I seem to have managed as well.
Here, I have this image of you building massive LEGO projects with your daughters this summer.
Well, it was a great summer, and we are embarking on the Roman Colosseum.
Ooh, okay. But I also feel like this summer was a little bit of a disjunction between the usual calmness of summer and people ramping back up.
And now, by the way, I'm in full wistfulness, like end of summer.
Oh my God, what is happening?
We're going back to school.
Although I have to say, I'm excited to get back in the classroom.
Although I have to tell you that it's almost every year it's like this, right?
So like the two weeks prior, I'm like, oh no.
And then as soon as I'm back, I'm happier than I could ever be.
How was your summer, young me?
Oh, my summer, it was good.
It was a summer of learning some new hobbies.
Ooh, tell us. Well, I'm a little sheepish, but I'm learning how to play golf, which I'm reluctant to say because golf has so many mixed connotations.
But if you look at the top LPGA players in the world, the women, an overwhelming number of them are Asian women.
So I'm learning how to play golf.
Ooh, okay. I love it.
I like Felix Howe. She has just started playing golf and she's talking about the top rungs of the LPGA.
No, no, no. I mean, this woman doesn't mess around.
No, it's just aspirational.
She's starting off right out of the bag.
You know, she's going for the gold.
I like that. I like that.
So anyway, it's been a good summer and I'm excited for the year.
But this is going to be a fun season on the podcast.
First of all, how does it feel to be part of the TED Metaverse, guys?
It's amazing. It is great.
It's fantastic. And quite a metaverse it is.
I mean, we are so grateful to HBS and HBR for shepherding us along from this germ of an idea we had a couple of years ago to where we are now.
And so excited to be joining TED with all of their wonderful efforts in the podcast space.
So it's really exciting to see this in our next step in our podcast room.
And then, of course, long time listeners will wonder about Rebecca and Ravi, our co -hosts of last year on a regular basis from week to week.
You will just hear from the three of us, but we were lucky to be able to convince Ravi and Rebecca to come back in the show whenever we have topics that are close to their expertise.
But in the meantime, I guess everybody's sort of stuck with us.
Tough luck. So the way we usually do this is we usually take one or two topics every week and we do a bit of a deep dive into that topic.
Because it's our first episode of the season and we're coming off of our summer hiatus, what we thought we'd do today is just a quick roundup of stories that caught our attention over the summer and talk about some of those.
How does that sound guys?
That sounds great. Sounds great.
Okay. So maybe the biggest, certainly the most high -profile IPO of the summer was Robinhood.
And here, I'm sure that was one you paid a lot of attention to.
Yeah, it was super interesting as part of kind of the ongoing kind of rise of the retail investor, which is something we've talked about previously on the show.
We actually had Robinhood go public and you always learn lots of things when you read an S1 and the Robinhood IPO was a great occasion to like dig into an S1 and learn something about a company.
And so a couple of things that I think came out that were really interesting.
So, you know, first, this is not a small thing on the fringe.
It's getting valued at around $40 billion.
It's got accounts that number as high as 20 plus million accounts.
The revenue model is what we always knew it was, which is this idea of payment for order flow.
But the other really interesting things that came out of it to me, and I'm excited about the democratization of finance, the founders are doing the typical kind of Silicon Valley thing, which is lots of voting rights for them and not that much for everybody else.
And then the second thing that really came out was it's pretty clear that crypto is huge and options are huge.
So we think about this as, oh, this is all about GameStop and AMC, right?
This is about the meme stocks.
And you look a little bit under the cover and you see crypto being enormous and you see options trading being enormous.
So I thought that was really interesting in terms of thinking about what this company is going to become, but also how much of it is a bet on some of the most speculative elements in the financial markets.
The other number that really struck me is the frequency of trading.
So people with Robinhood accounts just trade all the time.
We had talked so often about payment for order flow as a revenue model and the pros and cons, but maybe more broadly thinking about what happens in a world where trades are commission free.
Of course, in some sense, it's not surprising to see then that people would trade much more often.
We know from previous research there's two things that is true about frequent trading.
First, most retail investors who trade frequently have worse performance.
So that's not a great sign.
And then we also know that if their performance weakens, they're less likely to learn the lessons.
So in some sense, you have two not so great trends coupled with now you get to trade for free that are really the core of this particular kind of business.
And I think it raises all kinds of regulatory issues that I'm convinced will in good part determine the true value of Robinhood as a company.
Yeah, absolutely. What about you, young me?
Yeah. Like you guys, I paid a lot of attention to this one as well.
I mean, these guys, for better or worse, they are a true disruptor in the real sense of the word.
I mean, they are leaning into the future with an aggressiveness that is creating the kind of discombobulation that radical disruptors create.
So there are two dimensions along which I think what they're doing is here to stay.
The first is what you guys both alluded to, what they're willing to allow to be traded on their platform.
When you say they're leaning into crypto, more than 60 % of funded accounts traded crypto in the first quarter.
I mean, think about that.
More than half of their traders are trading crypto.
Yeah. And if you think about where this is heading, will they start to allow the trading of NFTs?
You could imagine them beginning to allow lots of different things to be traded on their platform that pushes the definition of what we think a stock trading platform could be.
So that's one dimension.
The second dimension is the engagement piece.
I mean, they have so mastered keeping people active, engaged on the platform, which opens up in my mind so many additional revenue opportunities like partnerships and advertising and so on that again, call into question what we think of when we think of a typical marketplace for this kind of stuff.
So is this a good thing or a bad thing?
I think my feelings about it are really mixed because I see some really good things happening and I see some more negative effects of this, but yeah, it's fascinating.
And I think the big question is just out of all the things that they have done, is there anything that is hard to replicate?
There are some alarm bells in the S1 also when they talk about all the risks and one of them is of course, it's just that they'll be one of many.
And by the way, they've already warned about slowing transaction volumes.
And so we're going to see in the next quarter what that literally means.
But there is a sense in which part of this retail trading, is it a fad or is it something that's real in here forever?
So it's a big bet on kind of the secular rise of the retail investor as opposed to this being a fad that's like COVID linked.
Felix, to your point about what's the advantage here, I keep thinking about the fact that once you start trading crypto, it is very difficult to switch platforms.
Yes, exactly. And so if you are trading crypto on Robinhood and you decide that you want to move to a different platform, it's a non -trivial thing to do.
So it's an interesting thing that's happening here and I think you can make both a bullish and a very bearish argument for Robinhood right now.
It is going to be a great space to watch going forward.
Okay, you guys, here's something I've been thinking about.
Are we ever going to return to work like before?
So the list of companies that have pushed back there back to the office days is growing.
And while some companies have already announced permanent work from home or hybrid plans, there are still a number of firms who insist that at some point they want everyone back in the office, a lot of Wall Street firms, for example.
So how is this going to play out?
And also, what have you learned from watching the back and forth on this?
So in some ways, the data is just remarkable on so many dimensions, right?
So if you think about things like the quit rate, which is how many people are quitting jobs.
Now, we'd expect that to be high when labor markets are hot, but the numbers are still kind of eye popping on a monthly basis for how many people are quitting, historically very, very high.
But maybe even more than that, you have not just people quitting, but there are surveys which suggest upwards of 50 percent of people want to change their jobs in the next 12 months.
Now, that is kind of eye popping.
So there's two theories here.
One is it's magical thinking.
There's a lot of magical thinking going on about what you're going to be able to get in the labor market vis -a -vis flexibility.
The alternative narrative is, no, the balance of power has shifted.
And the balance of power has shifted to employees and to talent, and their ability to get things that they want is now different.
And they will restructure the nature of the work experience along those lines.
You know, first thing I would say about what I've learned by people's reaction is, there are vested interests who want both of those things to be true, and they're willing to manipulate data to make their arguments on both sides.
I don't think we really know yet.
My instincts have always been towards a little bit more of a return to normalcy.
But I think we're only going to really know that once some version of the dollar variant or the next variant is contained.
International comparisons give an early glimpse of where we're headed.
So if you look at a country like New Zealand, they have about 25 % of people working from home.
And in general, I think the best work that I have seen trying to predict is now around probably 20 % or so of people end up with a majority of their hours at home.
So the whole prediction, oh my God, we will see empty office spaces, empty city centers.
That seems definitely overdrawn.
And maybe the one consideration that just really, really surprised me when I saw it, employee engagement for people who worked at home during the pandemic was at an all -time high.
You think, oh my God, given all the difficulties that come with the pandemic, how can that be?
And I think there are two forces at work.
The first one is employee engagement has so much to do with the quality of communication and firms and managers spend so much more care when it came to orchestrating meaningful conversation.
Because you felt like, oh my God, we're not in the office.
I have to do something new, I have to do something interesting.
And in fact, they did a fairly good job.
And then the second factor that shows up in many surveys is some sort of a humanizing of the relationship between managers and employees.
The moment you're on Zoom and your kids run behind you or for the first time I learned that you have a cat and it's one of 12 cats that you have.
There's some sort of degree of humanizing that relationship that actually was in response, I think, increased engagement.
And if those numbers are real and if they turn out to be long -term, I think that's maybe the one big force that I see pushing back against forcing people to go back to work.
What do you think, Jan -Mee?
I think I anchor the other end of the spectrum from you, Mee, here, where I think these changes are here to stay in a really pretty profound way.
If the work from home had lasted six months or 12 months, it's one thing.
But for many people it will end up being at least two years where they have worked from home.
And that is enough time for behaviors to become so deeply embedded.
I remember talking to somebody who ran marathons and this person said to me, anybody who runs a marathon, I'm not that impressed.
It's running your second marathon.
In other words, when you run your first marathon, you're just running it.
I mean, you're just trying to push through it.
But once it's over and you look back and you have time to think about how hard that was, trying to gear back up again and run another one is really hard.
And I think a lot of people are in that position right now.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is, this has been a global phenomenon, which means that it's not as if the rest of the world, everybody's back in the office and we're the only one.
I think the rest of the world is also beginning to think more about hybrid work processes and some kind of mix of work from home.
And as a result, I think it's a little bit easier for companies to move in that direction.
And then the third is, I do think the balance of power has changed.
Amazon raises its wages to $16 an hour.
You can't go back from that.
Or when fast food restaurants start paying $15 an hour, you can't go backwards from that.
And that puts a lot of pressure on companies that can't afford to pay that kind of hourly rate.
So I think for a lot of these jobs, I think it's going to be very difficult to fill those jobs for a long time.
So, Yangmi, do you think that 20 % number is way understated?
I would put it more at 50%.
I mean, if you think about who is really pushing for everybody to get back at the office the way it was before, one example, as I said, are Wall Street firms.
And these are firms that thrive, and I put thrive in quotation marks, on this kind of minute -to -minute intensity.
They operate with a lot of hierarchical pressure.
There's just a lot of intensity in those workforces.
And so they're trying to get people back.
And it's never been clear whether or not that's a good or bad thing.
But there are a lot of other companies that don't operate with that kind of minute -by -minute intensity that are thinking, you know, it's not that hard to begin to contemplate a hybrid scenario.
I think one of the biggest puzzles for me is when everybody's remote, I think things can be fantastic.
When a third to a half of your workforce is in person, then the question becomes, well, a third of the workforce is now remote.
How are they perceiving things?
And it is more likely, inevitably, that they can feel marginalized in the workplace.
So it seems unequivocal to me that when everybody's remote, we figured out a way to do that, and it worked out quite well.
That seems clearly true.
What is less clearly true to me is, in a world where half the workforce is in person, it's not clear that the folks who are remote will find it as fulfilling.
That, to me, is like one of the big questions kind of going forward.
And also, when we talked about it, it worked out quite beautifully.
When you look at productivity numbers, people at home have been as productive as they were prior to the pandemic, but it comes at a huge price.
It comes at the price of much longer hours.
And so one of the big questions is, how long are these much longer hours sustainable?
Maybe that's okay for a year or a year and a half, longer term, whether people are willing to put up with very long hours in exchange for being able to work from home.
I'm not so for sure.
Yeah. I think the thing about Young Me's view that is really striking to me, which I have to internalize more than I have so far, is this is not like a six -month thing that happened.
This is going to become a two -year thing that happened.
And a two -year thing that happened is no longer something that you can say just happened and will revert to a norm.
Two years is actually, you know, tips.
People's preferences change, people's habits change, people's lives change.
So I think that's what I'm trying to kind of really digest from what you're saying, Young Me, is when it goes on that long, you really have to rethink all kinds of things.
And the corollary to that is when it goes on that long, there are some companies that just start to figure out how to do it well.
And there are other companies that don't.
And so looking ahead, I would anticipate a number of companies figuring out how to solve all of the problems associated with marginalization, for example.
And how to make sure that if you're going to be partly in the office and partly at home, how do we coordinate and what days of the week and how do we set limits to the number of hours and can there be times when people are offline and begin to set boundaries around this.
Just like everything else, if you think about working in the office, there are some companies who are really good at that, but there are a lot of companies that were really bad at that.
You know, there's a whole sitcom based upon how bad office life can be in the worst case situation.
And so I think you'll see the same dispersion of quality of work even as we move to this hybrid era.
But I think that's a very compelling story to me at least, which is firms separating and having some firms be fully in person because of maybe the nature of their industry.
And then you have a whole bunch of other companies that are fully remote.
Yeah. And I don't want to end this segment before talking about one more thing, which is Felix.
When we first moved into lockdown, one of the predictions you made was that we would see a boom in entrepreneurial activity.
And just I think a couple of weeks ago, I opened up my New York Times and there was a story where the opening paragraph stated, the pandemic appears to have unleashed a tidal wave of entrepreneurial activity.
So I mean, I have to be modest here in that we have prior research that documents this phenomenon for 9 -11 in New York, where you have devastation of an entire part of a big city.
And then amidst all the difficulty, you see so many groups of employees, so many individuals, essentially seizing an opportunity that didn't exist.
And frankly, I imagined it to be mostly along online opportunities.
And so I wasn't surprised that when you look at new business registration, that the first wave was really a wave of online businesses.
But now what surprised me since is that we have so many brick and mortar businesses that have started a new restaurant in my neighborhood that opened maybe two months ago or so.
And I had a chance to speak with the owner and asked him, you know, it's like, oh, my God, pandemic, you're opening a restaurant.
Like, what on earth are you thinking?
And he told me the story that he and his wife had tried for years to find a space and they just couldn't find a space that they could easily afford.
And now, of course, you know, some restaurants go out of business.
All of a sudden, that space opened up.
And what it taught me is one of the strengths of our economy is that there's all this pent up demand for entrepreneurship.
If only the situation is right.
If only the stars align.
So many people dream of starting their own business.
I sometimes forget that.
I should always think about there are millions of entrepreneurs in waiting who, when the moment is right, they will strike.
And that's, I think, what we see right now.
And I think, young me, I mean, it relates very much to the previous story you just brought up about the labor markets, right?
Which is it's part and parcel of a sense of which COVID gave rise to people rethinking their priorities, rethinking whether they wanted to do that commute to work for that job that didn't maybe make them very happy.
And so it's this overall reassessment, which is showing up in the quit rates.
It's showing up in the entrepreneurship.
It's showing up in all kinds of ways.
And that is tremendously exciting.
But you also do worry a little bit that it can be driven a little bit by like, I've always wanted to start a cupcake business.
And my cupcakes are like the best cupcakes in the world.
And, you know, two years later, it's a brutal realization about how tough the cupcake business is.
I am personally rooting for anyone out there that started a cupcake business.
I just want to go on the record.
But, you know, listen, at a very ground level, do you know people who have decided to retire or quit their jobs?
I know so many, actually, including relatives.
And I also know a number of people who've just decided to do something new.
Some of them were forced into the activity when the pandemic began because they lost their jobs.
So they thought, oh my goodness, I have to do something.
Right. And so that passion they had always kept hidden under the covers, they thought, well, you know, I've always thought about, you know, tutoring kids or something online.
And so now I'm going to do that.
Yeah. I think you write me here.
Who knows how much of this stuff will stick.
But it's really something to see.
Yeah. I'm glad you brought up the other piece of this young me, which is retirements.
I actually think retirements are super interesting.
We don't know a lot about it yet because there's so many things in the labor market going on.
It's showing up in quits.
It's showing up in entrepreneurship.
But the other margin that it can show up in is I don't want to do this anymore.
I'm 60 years old. I'm 55 years old.
I want to just stop now.
And maybe the stock market has been good for me in the last five years.
And I just do that.
That's the other piece of this, which I think we don't know enough about.
You're not retiring from the podcast.
I hope you're not quitting.
You're going to drag this microphone out of my hands.
Let's take a break.
We'll be back with more.
OK, another big event that happened over the summer was the Olympics.
Did you guys watch any of it?
Hours and hours. Did you actually?
I did. You did? No, no kidding.
I find when you first talk about the Olympics, of course everybody's always down.
Oh, it costs so much money.
Everyone's so corrupt and all of these kinds of objections.
And then at least for me emotionally, the moment it starts, all of that is totally gone.
And to me, skateboarding was maybe the one instance where you just see the draw that is the Olympics.
So here is a culture that couldn't be more counter -culture than skateboarders.
And typically when you watch skateboarding videos, you watch these highly compressed videos.
The Olympics coverage is so different because they have the 45 second run and then they have individual tricks and some of them work and some of them don't work.
And yet, like super exciting to watch.
And I think that shows the power of the Olympics, how it can take in a culture that is so far away from the business of sports that we usually think about, and then just sort of impose its rhythm and it's magical to watch.
My question for you is, is Felix, this is actually a question that is broader than the Olympics, but is Felix the norm, or is he an outlier?
Tell me, he's an outlier.
I think he's a little bit of an outlier, but I watched very little, but I watched a lot of highlights because highlights are so easy to watch, right?
And so I did a little bit on Peacock, but I did a lot on YouTube, but I share Felix's sentiment that for me, it was these marginal sports that are odd at any stretch, but just wonderful to watch, and you watch them once every four years.
So as one example, watching, I guess, what is now called artistic swimming as opposed to synchronized swimming with my daughters is like hilarious and fantastic and amazing.
Because it's just something you don't pay attention to otherwise.
But when you see it at such a peak level of performance, your jaw just drops at their ability and the coordination and the music.
And it's like amazing.
You know, similarly watching, I don't watch, you know, table tennis or badminton, but when you watch doubles at that level, it's so exciting.
It's so exciting. So altogether, the Olympics to me were a little bit of a disappointment, but nonetheless, I was able to lose myself in those moments.
What about you, young me?
Okay, so I'm going to come at this from a very different place.
And normally, here, you're the grumpy one on this podcast.
My grumpiness is spreading, young me.
Well, so I had to say, I tried really hard to get into them.
And I am someone who historically, I have loved the Olympics.
And I still have such strong memories of some of the Olympians from previous decades.
But my conclusion was that the whole thing just sort of felt meh to me.
And my most controversial version of this take is I concluded that the Olympics as a sporting event just don't matter as much anymore.
And maybe that's okay, because sometimes the world changes and we start to care about different things.
I mean, shot put, archery.
I'm sorry. Really? I couldn't get into, you know, archery.
Archery, young me. I know, and dominated by Korean women.
The one thing I did reflect on was that the Olympics are different from any other sporting event because in many ways, it's up to the media to make us care.
In other words, we don't know the athletes.
We don't know the sports.
We don't even know the rules of some of the games.
Right. So it's up to the media to make us feel invested.
And one of my personal conclusions is that the media is so out of touch with how to get, not just me, but I think in particular, young people to care.
My kids, they didn't watch one minute.
They didn't care at all.
Interesting. And I don't think the media knows how to talk to this generation.
In fact, the biggest themes that emerged out of the Olympics were the ones that converge with other big societal issues that only tangentially had to do something with the Olympics, which I will talk about in a second.
But Simone Biles or athlete empowerment.
But my overall conclusion was that they just don't matter as much, at least to me anymore.
And on the one hand, I found this to be a little bit sad because I've always felt like the Olympics were such an important form of culture at the global level, which is so cool if you think about it.
But on the other hand, I thought, you know, today, global culture surrounds us everywhere in ways it never did 20 years ago.
I mean, my husband and I ate at a Nigerian restaurant the other night.
We watch European football.
We listened to Korean K -pop.
I mean, these things never existed 20 years ago, right?
And so in some ways, it doesn't fill that void because the void isn't there for me as much.
One aspect that I wondered about, whether it's a glimpse of the future, is this strange observation to see sports without a live audience.
And at least my reaction to it, so say watching soccer, I actually thought it was quite interesting, all the coordination that goes on in the field, players yelling to one another, the coaches making interventions that you could never hear usually.
But now, because it was quiet in the stadium, you could hear that coordination.
And so as I was thinking about just how much effort goes into creating opportunities to see things live.
And I never really thought about that, but maybe the cost is not worth it.
So I don't know if that's right or wrong, but I thought, wow, maybe I'm watching the future because we will just do much less creating opportunities for live participation.
But I also think that the way the Olympics were produced, the parts I saw, I just found there to be so many oddities.
So, for example, if you watched any swimming, which was really well produced at any given moment, they would superimpose graphics that, you know, how fast the swimmers were going, what countries they represented, how quickly they made each turn.
They use technology to really bring the race alive.
And then you watch track and field.
And you have these people lined up, and it's like they have a Xeroxed paper, paper clipped to their jersey with a number on it.
It's like a laser printer.
I think it's a Matrix printer.
It's a Matrix printer on the planet.
And they start to bend the curve.
If you have no idea who the runners are, there's no attempt to edge or you watch gymnastics and you're watching a floor routine and you don't really know what you're watching.
And for some reason, the announcers just decide to be quiet.
And then they might say, oof, that's going to cost them.
What was that? It's almost like they don't want to hurt feelings by being too negative.
It's so inconsistent, the quality of the help they provide in the production.
It actually kind of drove me crazy.
But I think, Jungmi, you put your finger on this deeper problem for the Olympics, which is they had a monopoly on globalization content in athletics like 30 years ago.
And they just no longer do because you can watch the European Cup and you can do all kinds of things that you just weren't able to do before.
But I have an antidote to your ennui at this moment on the Olympics, which I can understand.
My antidote is if you want the beauty of sport, the Paralympics in Tokyo were outstanding.
Just to be totally honest, I've never, ever watched the Paralympics before.
And for some reason, I just got on it.
I think because I heard about the rugby and then basketball and the track and feel.
I mean, I got to tell you, it is so inspiring.
It is so inspiring and it's irresistible and it makes you rethink what sport is.
Oh, that's so brilliant me here.
I'm going to check it out.
I'm going to go on YouTube.
You should really check it out because you think harder about what sport is because in some sense it's not what we think about with sport.
But it is. And it's so much better and so much deeper.
And the stories, of course, are amazing.
I can understand why the Olympics were disappointing Jungmi and I share that a little bit.
But if you want an Antavote, just check out some of the Paralympics because it is really something else.
First of all, that's a great idea.
But also it's a nice sort of segue here because one of the biggest themes that emerged from the Olympics had to do with the fact that sports have always been more than sports.
Right. And this is the Simone Biles story and the conversation around mental health, which Felix, I know is something that you were paying a lot of attention to this summer.
Yeah, it's a remarkable personal story that one of the most celebrated athletes of our lives decide at some point in time that how she feels about her performance, how much in control she feels.
And her general mental state does not allow her to compete in an event that literally millions and millions of people were looking forward to.
You know, the one reason to watch the Olympics was Simone Biles.
And so just the amount of personal courage that it takes to then say, no, I will not be able to do it.
And then also, I mean, quite remarkably, to then come back relatively quickly and say, and now I feel better and I feel I'm in command of my body and that she then competed in this one last event.
And so it strikes me as interesting in particular, because it's part of a general trend towards making mental health concerns more visible, that we talk about them more often, that we have much less this view that it's of concern to a small minority of people, but that these are things that can happen
to anyone. And then, you know, you have to figure out how do I deal with my depression?
What's the best way to get better?
And for that, I found it remarkable.
The background, of course, is Covid and the whole Covid crisis.
Not surprisingly, in March and April, when lockdowns first come into effect, you see this massive decline in mental health, people just really having difficulty adjusting to the new lives that everybody leads.
And now with these big meta studies that we have from lots of countries, lots of different social demographics, you do, of course, see the stress that's related to the pandemic, anyone who's in financial difficulty, that is so hard at this point in time.
But in general, on average, globally speaking, people just bounce back.
And in a way, the Simone Biles story is a beautiful story, also because it's so emblematic of something that so many people went through.
And then human resilience, that is just this incredible gift that we have.
Yeah, I confess, though, that the Biles story is the one because first, the grace that she exhibited in that moment of last minute decision making, that she didn't make it about herself, and she rallied her team.
It didn't become a moment about her.
She just immediately flipped into, how do I support the team?
And the other piece of it that really struck me was, by taking care of her mental health, she saved herself physically, because she was genuinely worried, as she should have been, about hurting herself dramatically.
And I thought that kind of integration of mental health and physical health has been equally important and working on each other, right?
You know, meaning, we take care of our mental health because that also helps us be physically better.
And the typical divide between those two, which is often physical health is matters, mental health is secondary, she kind of upended.
And I thought that was just fantastic.
So to watch her do that is such a lesson to all of us, because one of the things she said is, so many athletes came up to her afterwards saying thank you for talking about this so openly.
And I just think about all the people running organizations who should look at it as an object lesson in what it means when people in power talk about things that are difficult, because it makes it easier for everybody.
And that I think is going to be such a great legacy for her.
I think people don't realize how much it takes for someone who is such a high achiever to make the snap decision that I need to do what I need to do to take care of myself right now.
Even though the eyes of the world are on me, even though every camera in the world is on me, I'm going to do what I need to do to take care of my mental health, my physical health at this moment.
And what role modeling she did, she put it for organizations, for leaders, for young people, I thought it was such a powerful moment.
And I think the bounce back moment was also incredibly inspirational.
Yeah. But even without the bounce back moment, if she hadn't been able to come back, I still would be celebrating her.
Absolutely. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And Felix, to your point, you know, I was like not that enthusiastic about the Olympics this year, but she was the one thing I was going to want.
Yes, yeah. And I think you're an excellent company.
And in some sense, the conversation about top performing individuals grappling with mental health issues, I think that's a very important conversation to have.
But then at the same time, we don't want to forget about all the people who don't have fame and wealth on their side.
Right. In the United States, we send 900000 people with mental health issues to prison every year where they have very limited levels of support.
And so one of my hopes is that this conversation about the mental health challenges of top performing people, that it will spill over into a more general conversation about how we protect and help everyone with their mental health concerns.
Yeah, the framing that I found useful because we're just mere mortals compared to Simone Biles.
But to think if this could happen to someone who is as superhuman as Simone Biles, this can be anybody.
Yeah. And so to show that kind of vulnerability, I thought was just so, so amazing.
Yeah. Okay. We'll be back with recommendations.
Okay. For our new listeners, we always like to end the podcast with our picks, our recommendations.
We started this podcast with the rules that we would each bring in one.
And then Mihir started to consistently formulate this rule by bringing in multiple.
Much to our delight.
Yes, actually I will confess.
And ridicule, and ridicule.
Yes, both. So now, I don't know, bring in one, two, whatever.
So who has a recommendation they would like to share?
So I have one that's kind of related to what we were just talking about, and it's got a high version and a low version, which is trampolines.
This is from Simone Biles.
You see. Yeah, exactly bouncing back.
So the high version is this wonderful clip that was all over the web of a guy whose name is Yuan Bourgeois, who is a dance artist who bounces off of trampolines and stairwells.
And for anybody who saw it on the internet, we'll post a link to it.
It is absolutely mesmerizing.
It has a soundtrack of a Philip Glass piece behind it.
But it just makes you appreciate life in a way that I've never appreciated what art can do.
But that's the high version of trampolines.
The low version of trampolines is our family has gotten into trampoline parks.
So trampoline parks are a new form of exercise and event spaces.
And in an age of virtual everything, spend an hour at a trampoline park with your family.
And it is huge fun.
You get to play dodgeball on trampolines.
You get to run around on trampolines.
You get to throw your back out at trampoline parks.
It is a little bit scary.
You do have to watch yourself.
You're absolutely right.
Because when you go, you just lose all inhibition because it is so much fun.
So my recommendation is trampolines.
The high version is this artist Yuan Bourgeois and a link that we'll put up to his video.
And the low version is go visit a trampoline park.
There you go. Two recommendations in one.
That's so good. Okay, Felix.
So one of the joys of summer is eating ice cream, of course.
And every summer I go to lots of different places that serve ice cream.
Farm stands are usually my favorite.
And you never really know what to expect.
Sometimes when you go to a farm stand and there's no cows in sight.
And then the experience can be quite disappointing because they serve Ben and Jerry's or something.
Hey, hey, I like Ben and Jerry's.
I like Ben and Jerry's too, but relative to expectations when you hear ice cream.
And so many of them have adventurous flavors.
And this year I was super surprised that the ice cream that one hands down was actually not a farm stand.
It's a brand called Tillamook out of Oregon.
Have you guys tried it?
No. So it's everywhere.
It's at Walmart. It's at Stop and Chop.
It's in lots of supermarkets, but it is out of this world.
Crazy good. I'm telling you, if you have not tried Tillamook, it's produced by a cooperative of farmers about 100 farmers or so.
But it sold nationally.
Not surprisingly, it tastes so good because the cream content is really high.
But that's what summers are for.
So Tillamook ice cream among my best experiences this summer.
My husband is an ice cream fanatic.
I could give hours of advice.
Okay, very good. My recommendation, okay, I also have two.
So one of them is kind of nerdy, but it is an app called Quarter.
Q -U -A -T -R will include a link to it.
So Quarter is fantastic because as you know, when companies release their quarterly earnings, they always do a call where they talk about their results and they take questions from analysts and so on.
And so what Quarter does is it compiles them all in a single app where you can go in and you can listen, you can click, you can download a PDF of a transcript.
It is so easy to use.
There's a button where you can in some cases skip the readout and go straight to the Q &A.
That's great. Think of like a podcast app except for quarterly results.
And can you go to like 2x speed?
That I haven't tried yet.
Okay. You know why?
Because I'm not 18.
That's why. So my mind operates at a slower pace, but that's my first recommendation.
That's a great recommendation.
That's super useful.
That is a great recommendation.
Yes. And then my second one is I recently saw the Tina Turner documentary on HBO.
It was so good. You guys have to check it out.
Tina Turner is a goddess.
She is such a force of nature.
And what's cool about this documentary, it's just called Tina, is that it combines this incredible archival footage.
With interviews of her today and she's, you know, 80 years old or something.
Yeah. And she has suffered so much in her life.
Yeah. Yes. And despite it, she carries herself with such force and such dignity.
It is just so inspiring to watch.
So I had highly, highly recommended it.
It sent me down a rabbit hole where I started listening to all of her music and everything.
She's totally inspiring.
She's absolutely fantastic.
It also makes you feel so wonderful to see somebody win at the end of the day.
Yeah. Like she has won.
Yeah. I think she's genuinely happy.
Right. You know, it's just great.
So that's it for this week.
We will be back next week with another episode of After Hours.
Thanks everyone for listening and thanks especially to our new listeners.
This is After Hours from The TED Audio Collective.
We'll see you next week.
