Ted Audio Collective Hi everyone!
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Felix.
And I'm Mi here. How you guys doing tonight?
Great. Doing well. Thank you.
By the way, I've been meaning to ask you, Mi here, now that we're back in session and everything, are you still going on those incredibly long walks?
Remember how you were doing the five, seven...
Eighteen. No, no, no.
Five, eight, twelve.
Oh, yes. Five miles, eight hours.
Twelve hours fasting.
And are you still doing that?
I'm doing it, and by the way, I recently discovered that my iPhone is jipping me by like 33 % on my miles.
How so? It's just like if you do Google Maps versus the iPhone, like I'm getting jipped.
So I actually think I'm doing significantly more than five, which makes me feel even better.
What about you, Felix?
Are you staying active?
Well, my options have a little melted over time.
I used to go to the gym and then the gyms closed, and then biking was actually my favorite thing to do.
And then my bike got stolen during COVID.
So now I'm down to running, and I'm really holding on to my running shoes, because who knows?
And Yang Mi, I take it you're tearing up the golf course for exercise.
Golf, baby. Golf, golf, golf.
You know, the beautiful thing about golf is that once you start playing golf, you don't need other activities, because within golf, there's so much variety.
There are different clubs.
There are different swings to master.
Golf is not an activity.
It is a lifelong journey, and I'm on it.
I have to say, people who put into golf, it's like a club.
And like, if you're not in the club, it's like hard to relate, right?
Well, so I need to get you guys out on the golf course.
But anyway, before we get into tonight's episode, I wanted to make a quick reminder to our listeners.
If anyone out there wants to send us a note about anything inspired by the podcast, you can send us a note to harvardafterhours at gmail .com.
We're also thinking of doing an episode devoted entirely to your questions.
So if you want to email us with a question about something specific, you want some advice about something, send it in, and we'll try to get in on the podcast.
As for tonight, Felix, it is not your birthday, but it might as well be, because we're talking about supply chains.
Oh my God. Fabulous.
Hey, I feel like Felix is kind of going through this midlife crisis of having been a strategy guru, but realizing that his heart really is in supply chains.
You know what I mean?
You know it's bad when he started to subscribe to supply chain magazines and newsletters.
Like, I think he is a regular subscriber to...
What is it called even?
Supply chain weekly?
Is that a thing? You know, I can now, like, just being on the road, I can easily distinguish five types of trucks, depending on which part of the supply chain.
And it's endlessly fascinating.
And then we hear you brought in a topic as well.
Well, you know, look, so we're 18 months into COVID, and that's obviously shaken and shaped our world views in really deep ways.
But I was curious to hear from you both about the biggest kind of personal economic takeaways that have come out of this story.
You know, it's an opportune time to, like, reflect on what you feel like you've learned about the way the world works and the way the economy works.
So I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
That's a great topic.
I like it. Okay, let's do it.
Okay, Felix. Here we are.
It's fall of 2021. You can walk into a grocery store, and still, there are certain shelves that are empty.
There are still limitations on things you can buy.
You try to purchase something online.
You still have trouble getting what you need.
I know you haven't been able to buy a new bike yet.
That's right. What in the world is going on?
And I'll put it slightly differently.
Like, are we going to have a holiday season, Felix?
Like, what's going to go on?
Well, so supply chains are fascinating for exactly these reasons.
It's all of these things that you never pay attention to.
Yeah. And now, all of a sudden, they have come to the fore in really interesting ways.
So the first thing that I didn't know is shipping, which sits at the core of supply chains, is really a bust and boom industry.
So at one point in time, it's incredibly profitable.
And then at other times, it's just the worst industry to be in.
And the history that's important is in 2008, after the last global crisis, shipping was in an incredibly difficult position.
There were many shipping lines that were in big trouble, because just volume collapses and you sit on a pile of fixed costs.
Typically, what happens in these times is that we get a lot of concentration in the industry.
So we went from 12 big players to six big players.
We lost something like 50 % of shipyards during these years.
And in response, everybody flees towards greater efficiencies.
So they invest exclusively in the largest ships that can only serve the largest ports that exist.
And then as we get out of the recession, I think something really unexpected happened.
The industry showed amazing discipline.
They didn't invest that much in extra capacity.
And then when COVID came along, of course, everybody's intuition is, well, a good thing we were very disciplined, because now we're not going to need capacity forever.
And then the next part of the story, instead of going to the movies, we all order a stationary bike.
We order so many more products.
And that, interestingly, is exclusively an American phenomenon.
When you look at where port activity increases, it's only America.
But America is big enough that everyone's shipping expenses just explode.
Just to give you a sense, if you order a sofa from Asia at this point in time, it's about a thousand dollars more expensive just because of shipping.
And it's all because we have rung out every conceivable efficiency.
So there's no slack in the system.
I mean, the shipping piece of this, Felix, is so fascinating for the reasons you highlighted, one of which is all of this is about the shift in consumption patterns, right?
So we go from services to goods.
And when you go from services to goods, you're importing a lot in the United States.
And then this feedback loop, which makes the problem even worse.
So, yeah, shipping is just core to everything here.
And just to give a sense of the scale of this problem, Peloton has now switched to Air Freight, if you can believe it.
I know, isn't that amazing?
That's how difficult the problem is.
And by the way, there's not a lot of extra capacity when it comes to Air Freight either.
Right. Home Depot and Walmart have been trying to charter their own ships, which, again, is not that easy.
You can't just snap your fingers and find a ship that is capable of carrying the types of containers that we're talking about here.
And if you stretch it too much, it actually becomes quite dangerous.
But it's also once the system slows down in any one part, everything becomes very slow.
And their feedback affects.
That's exactly right.
So most people are focused on the issues in the shipping industry for all the reasons we all just described.
But even beyond that, once a ship actually reaches port, there's something that has to happen for those goods to get into your household.
And what you see there is a ton of bottlenecks as well.
And in particular, the other piece of the puzzle that I think is fascinating is truck drivers.
And what are now really significant shortages in truck drivers, both in the US, but in the UK and all around the world, it's actually quite remarkable.
We certify lots and lots of truck drivers every year.
The problem is very narrow in long haul.
And the problem is the turnover rates.
I don't know if you've seen these numbers, but the turnover rates are not just like 2030.
We're talking like 90, 95 and 95 % turnover rates.
I mean, you can't even imagine what it means to run a business with that kind of thing.
You're basically reinventing the entire labor pool every single year.
That's what they mean.
It's crazy. But notice the ripple effect here.
So as you put it, trucking is a terrible job with incredible turnover.
And so one of the things that's happened over the years is a number of these long haul truckers are owner operators.
So they own their own business, which means they don't get paid when they're waiting.
So if a trucker drives up to a port and it's heavily congested and he or she has to just wait around, they're not going to wait around because they're not getting paid while they wait around.
So they bail. So what that means is even when there are goods ready to be offloaded and put onto trucks, there aren't any truckers necessarily there in that moment, which means you now have this congestion in the ports.
And so there's this thing called dwell time, which is the amount of time a container sits in a port before being loaded onto a truck in LA.
It used to be that that dwell time was like one or two days.
And now it's a week, which means everything just starts to back up.
I hear that you notice how she uses supply chain lingo, dwell time.
I think she's subscribing to supply chain magazines.
I did get sucked into reading about this by the way.
But I have to say the amazing thing to me is how did that job evolve into this place where we pay people by the mile instead of by the hour?
Like it's kind of crazy.
With really dramatic consequences.
The UK is maybe the most extreme at this point in time.
I mean, it starts out with not every grocery store has all the items that it wants.
Then you see it in restaurants where some restaurants in London are actually closed because they can't get meat.
And now in the latest development, there's not enough gasoline.
And both BP and the other oil companies say, no, it's not the availability of gasoline.
It's all just truck drivers.
And there, I think when COVID first hit, many truck drivers left the UK, went back typically to Eastern Europe, because that's where people came from for a tough, not so well paid job.
When they were at home, they took out a job.
So now they're not available.
And when the online business boomed, many switched from long haul to driving shorter distances with smaller vehicles, which is a much better job.
And it's also better paid on top of that.
So they are not coming back.
And then on top of everything, you have Brexit.
Brexit, the idea was we have too many Eastern European workers in the UK.
Well, now you're missing 100 ,000 truck drivers.
And yet we're stuck kind of thinking about it as structural shortages, when in fact, it just might be we have to rethink the whole thing.
And even if you were able to get something onto a truck to a distribution center, we haven't even talked about the problem with warehousing right now, and the labor shortages being experienced in these warehouses.
If nothing else, I think what this has really hammered home is what it means to live in a society where the products we consume are produced all around the world.
What it means is that things have to get from one place to another.
And that requires ships and trucks and planes and cranes and forklifts and lots and lots of people.
And if any one piece experiences a backlog, it has this cascading effect.
But the converse is also true.
It also means that even if you're able to fix any single piece of this thing, it doesn't actually help all that much.
Because there are all these other places that experience problems.
And what I find fascinating about reading about some of this, and yes, Felix, I have been reading about some of this stuff, is that everybody is blaming each other.
So the shippers are blaming the truckers, and the truckers are blaming the warehouse operators.
And in some ways they're all correct because the problems are so widespread.
Maybe the most interesting question about all of this is if you have an interlinked system and you have a general slowdown, the industry responds, in particular in shipping, but elsewhere is also to now add massive capacity.
So when you look at new ship orders, they're through the roof.
But actually, we do not have a capacity problem.
It's just that, as you explained, Yangmi, because everything is linked to everything else, a slowdown anywhere in the system.
For instance, at the ports, they're not very good at clearing the empty containers.
If the empty containers are not cleared, truckers cannot bring additional empty containers to the port.
They don't want to put it into warehouses, so they put it outside warehouses on truck chassis.
Next thing you know is we don't have enough truck chassis, but it's not really a capacity issue.
It's just an issue of these interlinkages, which also means if you look at investment behavior right now, we are now pre -programming the next bust.
Because two or three years from now, when all of this will be over, we will have so much extra capacity and everybody will go back to thinking, oh my God, 2008, we did exactly the right thing, except we forgot those lessons in a short period of time.
I think that is such an important point, Felix, because that lean strategy companies adopted, that just -in -time supply chain strategy, it worked well because of our ability to forecast.
In other words, it actually doesn't matter how long a ship takes to cross the ocean as long as you have really accurate ability to predict it.
So really good logistics are sort of based on speed, but much more so on predictability.
And what I hear you saying is we are reading the wrong signals right now.
So we are reading the backlog as being a problem associated with, we just need more supply, we need more ships, when in fact, we're experiencing backlogs because of other bottlenecks in the system.
The other way to misread this problem is you see people saying, well, we need to re -nationalize supply chains, right?
Which is the whole problem here is like hyper -globalization or some version of that.
I mean, the intriguing thing to me is people who have looked at this would suggest actually the opposite is true, which is actually during the pandemic, if you had really super -nationalized supply chains, you know, meaning lots of domestic production, in fact, things would have been worse because global
trade serves to actually mitigate the risks.
And so I think people can misread all of this as, oh, this is why globalization is wrong.
And there are elements that might be true to that, but actually these risks are mitigated by these global supply chains.
And people can sometimes misread the data to be implying exactly the opposite.
So you guys, is your sense that this is a once in a generation kind of event and that if we can just work our way through all of the bottlenecks we're experiencing, we're going to get to the other side of this, we're going to be able to achieve a new equilibrium and we'll all be just fine.
Or is this a precursor to what is to come?
Well, I sincerely hope that this is the last global pandemic that I will experience in my life.
So I'm definitely not ready for COVID number two.
But I think more generally speaking, think of climate change as a big potential disruptor of supply chains.
We've seen flooding in Southeast Asia that has had tremendous impact on many industries.
And I think the likelihood that we will see more troubles of this sort are going to increase unless we get additional flexibility.
I think in that sense, the investments into smaller ships that then can sail to smaller ports with less capacity.
Vietnam, for instance, has a new deep sea port that can pretty much accommodate any vessel except the very big ones that we rely on now almost exclusively.
And so unless we increase flexibility, I think climate change alone is a big reason to believe that this is not the last supply chain disruption that we will see.
I think there's also something that you alluded to earlier, Felix, which is this is part and parcel of investment behavior in these sectors, right?
So you have this boom bust and people making forecasting errors.
And in an era of very cheap capital, people potentially expanding capacity at the wrong times.
And that's something that we've seen played out again and again.
And then finally, Felix, you're absolutely right that flexibility is the answer.
But someone's going to have to pay for that.
That's got to show up somewhere in cost.
And the question is, are we willing to pay for it?
And how does this end up showing up in the consumer side of the story?
This in my mind is one of the core tensions.
So resiliency as a concept sounds great, but it comes into direct conflict with efficiency and by extension with profitability and lower prices for consumers.
And then the second tension I see is that we can build more flexibility into our supply chains.
And maybe we can even bring more parts of the supply chain onto our own shores, but we can't do that entirely.
And so given that we live in a global world, really understanding what it means to continue to invest in parts of the world that seem very far and disconnected from you.
So for example, a shutdown in a factory in Malaysia is going to affect your life here in the US.
And so we have to care about COVID in Southeast Asia.
We have to care about climate change events in other parts of the world.
If we want to live in a world where we continue to have the stuff we want when we want it at the price we want it.
I mean, one of the ways that's showing up to me that's most interesting, young me right now is in chips and an autos.
So you're referencing plant shutdowns in Malaysia.
Well, we've come to quickly understand that especially in the automotive sector, chips are everywhere.
And so what do we see?
Inventory levels are declining rapidly at the dealer level because people want to buy cars.
But here's the other part of it, which is guess where they're climbing at the manufacturer level.
So what do we see at GM and at Ford and a whole bunch of automakers?
They're actually swimming in inventory.
They have like partially built cars that don't have chips.
And what are they doing to respond to the chip shortages?
Then you start to sell low feature cars.
So there's this weird way in which the inventory is really starting to back up at the manufacturer level and it's changing what they produce and then it changes what people buy and because of what's happening in the chip market in Malaysia.
And I don't know that to me, young me summarizes your sense of why it's also interconnected and how it changes our consumption patterns here today.
And by the way, the number of people I've met who've said, I didn't know my car had any chips in it.
In fact, if you are driving an old car, it's probably got a hundred chips in it.
If you're driving a hybrid, it can have as many as a thousand.
And in terms of value, it's now I think approaching like 40 % of value, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So my wise friends, what can we expect in the months ahead?
Any advice for listeners out there other than start your holiday shopping early and don't expect to get the kind of Nike shoes you want?
My most urgent recommendation is order pizza today.
The next thing that's going to be in shortage is boxes.
Yeah. Because guess what?
We're using so many more than we're used to, and the trees don't really grow much faster.
So that's going to be the next shortage.
Or you can just dramatically lower your standards.
So order a pizza, person shows up, just let them hand you the pizza without a box.
No. Who needs boxes anyway?
There we go. There you go.
Okay. Thanks, guys.
Okay. Be here. So look, we're 18 months into this remarkable pandemic.
And it, of course, has affected us in many, many ways, one of which is just economically.
And I wanted to hear what your big personal economic takeaways have been from this pandemic.
In terms of your economic worldview, what do you think has really shifted because of the pandemic?
One of my experiences during the pandemic was to see much more closely, much more in my environment, what it means to have unstable income.
Of course, I know about, say, retail workers.
It's like a big concern always, that you never really quite know how many shifts you're going to get, and then your income goes up and down, and it's really stressful.
But during this time, because it affected so many more people, and so many people who are close to me and close to my life, all of a sudden, you know, you're not sure you have a job tomorrow.
There are these government programs that kick in, but they all seem very complicated.
I have friends who run restaurants with this back and forth about, even if you got a government loan, do you have to pay it back?
Do you not have to pay it back?
I think it made me understand much more in a personal way, what it means to have to live with this uncertainty around what your income is going to be.
And it made me much more open, actually, about things like a guaranteed basic income, where you just know, under no circumstances will I fall below a particular threshold.
I love that one, Felix.
And I have to agree with you.
It really changed some of my thinking around not just the social safety net, but how much bureaucracy we put around being able to access that net, and how maybe the benefits of doing something very simple and universal without a huge amount of means testing might actually make sense.
I'm not saying that's where I landed, but I'm certainly much more open to the idea.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's a great observation, Felix.
It's also interesting to think that this remarkable moment has given rise to actually a reduction in poverty rates.
So it's this kind of curious moment where the fragility of all of our economic lives is exposed, and out of it actually came a kind of remarkable decline in poverty.
And that's, I think, a really interesting lesson about the stimulus, whether it was ungenerous or generous or what, but it actually resulted in something that I don't think 18 months ago, if you had said, well, what do you think is going to happen to the poverty rate in 2020 or 2021?
You would've said it's going to go up a lot and the opposite happened.
And then one element that the experience really taught me is even if the final outcome is okay, the uncertainty that you live through when on the evening news, you see Congress passes like this super generous bill, and then you don't know, do I qualify?
Do I not qualify? In a way, that journey is almost as important as did it end up being okay in the end or not?
Yeah, that's a great one.
So I'll go next, because it sort of builds on Felix, your point.
And that is, for me, the pandemic really underscored the extent to which our economy runs on hourly workers.
And of course, we always knew that.
And I am someone who has always advocated for and even argued for on this podcast, paying hourly workers more and raising the minimum wage but it has made me reflect much more deeply on what that would mean and the extent to which all of us really need to begin to bear the cost of that.
So are you willing to pay 20 % more for your dry cleaning?
What about 30 %? Are you willing to pay 20 % more for your Uber ride?
What about 30 % for your Amazon delivery, for the food you eat at a restaurant?
Again, I still think we should pay people more.
We just have to realize what that means.
I mean, what's interesting about that young me is that in part, for all too long, it was easy to hold the following two beliefs in tandem, which is low income workers deserve a higher wage.
And then also feel like, man, I'm not paying for that Uber.
Or God, those menu prices are out of control.
Why did they include a 20 % gratuity?
That doesn't seem right.
So there was capacity for more inconsistent beliefs, I think.
And I think what you're pointing to is maybe a reckoning of sorts between those fundamentally inconsistent beliefs.
And the reckoning that will happen over the next year or two, I think, is who wins in that battle.
That'll be really interesting to see.
What I like about your insight, young me, it's almost this unusual situation has allowed us to see jobs anew.
I remember the first time we got a haircut after the pandemic.
You sit there and you're thinking about, oh, what is it like for the person who now every client who walks in is also a health risk.
And then rethinking what it's like to have these jobs.
And of course, rethinking not only how much we pay these people, but more generally, like how do we make these jobs better jobs?
Yeah. I mean, for me, it was kind of seeing grocery workers.
I would go to the grocery store with regularity in a way that I never did before.
And they were like a primary source of interaction in the rest of the world.
And to appreciate them during that time was for me like a really important part of what that whole process was about.
Yeah. Yeah. What about you here?
What's a personal takeaway for you?
Well, I think as somebody who works in the field of finance, I think I've always thought to myself, it's not perfect, but there's a lot of good things going on in it.
And fundamentally it's about value.
And fundamentally it's about a lot of really wonderful things.
And I do have to say the last year and a half, it's been harder to feel like that when values seem disconnected, when we have this onslaught of retail investors, when we have these really speculative assets take off.
I think it's really caused me to rethink the role of redistribution in finance and the powerful way in which financial markets enable redistribution and feeling like, God, if this doesn't end well, what have financial markets really been doing?
And that answer is what they often do, which is redistribute wealth as opposed to what they often claim to do, which is measure and to create value.
And so that I think has been just really hard to kind of say to yourself, there's all this excitement about finance and in a way it feels misplaced.
And I think that really worries me.
And it has just been a revelation to me about the role of finance and society.
So me here, it's so funny how you use the word redistribution.
The word that's more commonly used is democratization.
Well, I think for me, what a lot of people term democratization actually has redistributive effects.
And ironically, people in finance often don't like to talk about redistribution because they say it's bad.
But we should talk about it more honestly and more straightforwardly than we usually do, I think.
So that it doesn't all get kind of swallowed up under this patina of democratization.
It's interesting under these unusual circumstances how parts of the business world that we're also familiar with become more visible.
So for you, it was like the finance and sort of underbelly, the redistributive aspects.
I had many experiences where all of these mundane things that businesses do that I take totally for granted.
Like how often do I think about why the products are on the shelf?
Never really. And it is a fascinating experience how it's almost as if the pandemic shifts your lens.
You see a new set of things that you didn't pay much attention to.
It could be redistribution of financial markets.
It could be how products get on shelves.
But it is a strange experience how it enables you to see things that you didn't pay much attention to before.
Yangmi, did you see how he slipped back in the supply chain stuff?
Me or I was saying exactly the same thing.
Pretty soon he's going to be talking about CDC pipes.
Yes. Okay, Yangmi, you go with another personal economic takeaway.
Okay. So we've gotten so bad at talking about economics.
I guess that's my takeaway.
So here's an example of a story from last week.
I read a headline that said, U .S.
household income fell significantly in 2020 as a result of the pandemic.
That was the headline.
I saw another headline that drew from the very same data that said the opposite.
Here, you just pointed out the number of people living in poverty actually decreased during the pandemic.
I saw a headline that said the opposite, the number of people living in poverty increased during the pandemic.
Now, all of this would be amusing if it weren't for the fact that we actually use conclusions like this to drive decisions.
So for example, if you just take a closer look at that poverty number, what you learn is the way that we technically describe poverty, the poverty level actually increased, but that doesn't take into account all of the stimulus that went out and all of the ways the government ended up supporting people.
And as a result, actually the number of people living in poverty decreased.
So I'm very, very frustrated by this.
Like I said, it'd be one thing if the frustration were just my own personal frustration, but I actually see people making arguments for particular kinds of policies based upon reading the data anyway.
You want to read the data.
And remember, we had a conversation on the podcast about that before that we insist on measuring and talking about poverty before redistribution.
And the tragic thing is the left likes it because it's an argument that says we need to do more and conservatives like it because it's an argument that says, look, it's not working.
Poverty is not moving.
It makes me so angry that we do this over and over again, that we talk about income distribution before we take into account all the social safety programs.
What's the point of the social safety programs if we pretend that they don't do anything?
It is just nuts. It's just nuts.
And I'm not making a partisan argument here either.
I have seen examples of this on the left.
I have seen examples of this on the right.
Oh, that's the tragedy.
The left likes it as much as conservatives like it.
Yes. And the truth is when you aggregate economic statistics, first of all, they disguise a huge amount of variance, but they also capture a lot of nuance.
And as a result, it makes it so easy to twist data to fit your preferred narrative.
And I have seen publications that I used to consider to be very credible.
I've seen them do this as well.
So I don't think anyone out there is immune from this and it drives me nuts.
Meir, what do you think about this?
You're absolutely right.
This is totally depressing if the outcome is ideology as a substitute for any reasonable discussion, which I think is the way it can go because everyone will just find the facts they want.
What I hope will end up happening is like an education that has to happen with the electorate around the world about what these numbers really mean.
And I guess I'm looking for a silver lining here, Yemi.
Yeah, I was gonna say.
It feels a little desperate, actually.
Yeah. Well, but I think what we need is the ability to go deeper, because as you point out, aggregate numbers mask tremendous variation.
But Meir, where's the learning gonna come from?
I know I hear you. It used to be that there would be some journalists that would be mediating some of this content and helping people make sense of it.
But when they're all falling victim to the same thing, I just - I don't know.
I have an idea. Maybe we should start a podcast and we can talk about these.
That's a crazy idea.
Okay, Meir, what do you got?
Well, I guess my last personal economic takeaway is something that's perhaps a little simple -minded, but it is just to reflect on the role of consumption in my life.
And I think what happened to me is consumption was reduced.
And I confess to really liking that.
And I think recalibrating the role of consumption of various types, I actually think has been a silver lining of the pandemic for me.
And to question how much utility I was getting from the act of acquisition, which for an entire year, I was not doing and I was fine.
And so I hope that persists.
Not that I want to become some ascetic who like doesn't consume, but being more thoughtful about consumption, I think is a huge part of what came out of the pandemic for me economically.
I don't know. Does that resonate?
Completely resonates.
I mean, what ended up happening for me is I realized that my consumption falls into two buckets.
There's consumption I do for myself.
And then there's this other huge bucket of consumption that was for presentation purposes.
In other words, oh, I need a new jacket for work, or I need a new something because I'm going somewhere.
And as a result of going somewhere and being in front of people, I need to have this thing.
And to have to spend a year and a half at home and not having to be presentable in any way, that second bucket goes away completely.
I find it interesting to think about now we had this big external event that forced us to adjust how we usually live.
But you could run many experiments yourself, right?
You could say, this is a month that I don't go out to eat.
This is the three weeks when I don't watch any Netflix.
Very often I find, actually, I could have done that much earlier, except I didn't.
It never really occurred to me.
So one of the things that I hope I will be able to do is sort of keeping the sense of experimentation, and it might be a different way to live.
Yeah. Well, I think that's the hopeful note, Felix, which is maybe we don't need pandemics to come to these revelations.
You know, we can learn these things in a little bit more of a sustained way, and we don't need external shocks to learn these things about ourselves and about the world.
That would be the best outcome of all.
Well said. So, picks, who wants to go first?
Mine is a little related to the pandemic, and I'm actually curious to know, did you bake during the pandemic?
Oh, yeah. What did you bake?
Didn't go the bread route, but lots of cakes and loaves all the time.
You're not going to try to give me sourdough right now, are you?
A sourdough starter?
You're late if it's going to be sourdough starter.
Yes, of course. So everybody I know starts baking bread.
And now what's really interesting is not that many people have kept it up.
It's not surprising to me.
And then I came across this book that I would like to recommend.
That's called Flower Water, Salt, Yeast by Ken Forkish.
And what's really amazing and interesting about the book is how it's organized.
It's organized by level of ambition.
So the first part is straight bread, then it's pre -ferment by pre -ferment, like poolish, that kind of thing, like really easy to do.
You can do it almost last minute.
And then, of course, it has like the whole live -in starter and all of that.
For some reason, what we all gravitated to, the sourdough version, oh, that's like the big prize.
What I really love about the book, he encourages you to really think about is the bread that much better if you make it in a more complicated way.
And I thought it was really refreshing and maybe a better way to get people to bake for longer periods of time.
I think the thing I love about this Felix is there is this kind of like artisan, kind of high touch approach to everything in life, right?
And with bread, actually lowering the barriers to entry is great.
It's great, I love that.
It's a great suggestion.
Nice recommendation, Felix, that I'm going to be honest with you.
I'm not getting this book, but I think a lot of people out there do.
Nice recommendation, Felix.
I'm not doing it, but really solid effort there, bro.
The foundation of our friendship is honesty, okay?
So I'm being honest.
So me here, what did you bring?
Okay, now I think I'm going to get the same treatment as you, Felix, just to be clear.
So continuing my non -technological recommendations, I want to recommend Lego for adults, okay?
So Lego is thought of as a children's toy.
But we recently, and Youngmi, you alluded to this, we as a family did the Roman Colosseum, which is a Lego project, which is 9 ,000 pieces.
And I have to tell you, the idea that Lego is made for kids is just totally wrong.
Lego for adults should be a huge product for them, and more adults should be doing it.
What about building blocks from here?
Are you recommending that too?
No, it's specific to Lego.
There is a whole ethos with Lego.
I find Legos and doing Legos actually is meditative.
You lose yourself in those moments of clicking together those pieces, and you give way to the Lego way.
You learn to trust the process and the directions and those little packets.
And in that process, I have to tell you, I think Lego for adults is magic, because it makes your mind slow down.
And you lose yourself in this process of physical creation of something beautiful for like half an hour.
And it's spectacular.
So my recommendation is Lego for all adults.
So are you saying you're totally focused just on the Lego thing and you're thinking about nothing else?
When you're making these pieces, and you're putting them together, and you're following the directions, and you're looking for the pieces, it's very hard to think about anything else.
Yeah. And I don't know, I just think it's magical.
So you have a room devoted to Lego?
Actually, we break them down and then we resell them, which is also a wonderful lesson for the girls.
So we'll break down these thoughts because they're expensive, and then put them on eBay, and they recycle.
And it's kind of another element to meditative aspect to the whole thing.
Interesting. Yeah, that is interesting.
By the way, is there anything worse than stepping on a Lego in your bare feet?
That's a big downside.
It's just really so bad.
Okay, so my recommendation is, have you guys seen White Lotus on HBO?
Loved it. Oh, my goodness.
I'm so glad you're recommending this.
So the premise is very simple.
It is a bunch of American tourists arrive at a resort in Hawaii for a vacation, but it is the most brilliant piece of satire I've seen in a long time.
It is just so meticulously put together with so many cross -cutting themes associated with class and gender and race, sexuality, privilege.
So good. So let me give you an example of what I mean by this.
There is a wealthy family that kind of anchors the show and the daughter and her friend, the way these two teenage girls interact is so devastating.
There's one scene, right?
Me here, you know exactly the scene I'm thinking about, right?
They're sitting at the pool and they're interacting with a woman who's just got married and with a few casual comments, they destroy her.
They just absolutely destroy her with a couple of looks and a couple of very casual comments.
And it's just incredible.
I mean, Me here, am I wrong?
No, you're totally right.
And I would just add one thing, which is it gets better and better.
So if the first two episodes don't do it for you, hang in, because it is about as searing a social critique as I've ever seen.
Oh. And young Me, it's fundamentally about privilege.
It examines privilege in this fantastic way.
And it is such a character study, not of a single character, but a study of each one of these characters, because each one is just brilliantly rendered in the most specific, in many cases, cringe inducing kind of way.
It is such a good show.
Fantastic. Have you seen it?
I have not. No, but it sounds amazing.
Sounds interesting.
And the best part is when the hotel manager takes off on a paragliding trip, and then gets swept into North Korea.
This is weird. Anyway, okay.
So that's it. It's late.
That's it for tonight.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
