Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi and I'm here with Felix and me here.
Hey guys. Hey, how are you?
Hey guys, how are you?
So you know, last week in one of my recommendations, Mihir ended up putting on that Korean beauty mask?
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Unfortunately, the sight is sort of stuck in my mind.
So, okay. One of the things I mentioned was that my inspiration for beginning to wear them on planes was the fact that I walked onto a plane once and I saw a woman wearing one.
So the best email that we got all week was from, shout out to Harvey in New Jersey.
He said his wife does this and was probably the woman that I saw doing it.
Yes! What a coincidence.
Because she swears by it on overnight flights.
And not only are they a fan of the Korean beauty treatment, but based on your recommendation, Mihir, they went to see Darren Brown in New York.
And? And loved it. Oh.
Loved it. Fantastic.
That is great. That was a great email.
So shout out to Harvey and his wife in New Jersey.
And by the way, thanks for all the email.
Oh, it's been fantastic.
It's just been so great.
With the end of the summer and people posting and doing various things, it's just been fantastic.
So fantastic. Okay.
So topics this week?
Felix, you brought in a topic.
Yes, I saw this puzzling data regarding financial stress in America that I really wanted to get your opinion on.
I was a little surprised.
Flabbergasted. And I would love to hear how you think about it.
And then I wanted to talk about Amazon and to ask you guys whether or not we should be loving or hating Amazon.
And we have to decide.
It's a great topic.
Great. Okay, Felix.
So if you look at the economy today, there's a lot to celebrate.
Unemployment, for instance, is now at a 50 -year low.
I mean, just think back, like at the end of the Great Recession, if I had told you the next thing that's going to happen over a decade is that we will see the lowest level of unemployment ever.
I think that would have been really.
And then against that backdrop, you see that Americans are stressed out about finances almost like never before.
And among all the stressors in life, so relationships, families, kids, jobs, and so on and so on, the financial situation of families is actually now number one.
And unlike the economy that seems to improve at a slow space, it actually gets worse.
There's more anxiety today than we had a couple of years ago.
So what do you make of this?
How can it be that economically we seem to be doing well, and then the sentiment is getting worse?
I think it's filled with puzzles.
Some of which you highlighted.
Let me try to give you maybe two broad explanations, and then we can dig into them.
The first explanation is just the fact that these few buckets of consumption have become so problematic.
And so what do I mean by that?
It's fundamentally about housing.
It's fundamentally about healthcare.
And it's fundamentally about education.
And those three buckets have become so fraught and have risen in cost at a degree and at a pace where people feel an enormous amount of fragility that they didn't feel before.
It's about these big expenses that are spiraling upwards in a way that feels uncontrollable and that cause great anxiety.
The second possibility is, and this is not a charitable one, is that somehow we've gotten used to so much consumption that we're not willing to kind of live within our means anymore, that the kind of consumption mentality has taken over.
So I don't know. I don't know within that topology of answers which one it is.
I know for sure housing, healthcare, education is so stressful for people that it's mind -boggling.
What do you make of it, Yungmi?
I would add another really big bucket, particularly for low -income households.
The other really big one is childcare.
We have more and more households where both parents work, and there is a lack of affordable childcare.
That creates a huge amount of stress, I think.
So I think it's the combination of a lot of this stuff.
To your point, I think there are some stories about this that I feel more sympathetic to than others.
When I hear the story of the couple making $270 ,000 a year and can't somehow figure out how to make ends meet, I'm not that sympathetic.
But when you hear about people at the lower end of the income bracket and they are really struggling to do simple things like just pay the rent, find affordable childcare, get some healthcare, that's a problem.
I just want to say I think your point about childcare is exactly right, and it's right for many reasons.
One is it is a very large expense for many people.
Second, it has all kinds of spillover effects, right?
And then third, of course, is it has intergenerational effects, right?
Which is it has effects to the children who are not getting either as well -nourished as they should be.
So the childcare piece of it is huge.
Let me go back to something that you mentioned, Youngmee, and that is thinking about the very poor.
What's your sense? We do have a social safety network.
Are we doing a good job helping the families that need help the most?
Are the programs working?
So I actually think that's where we should be spending most of our time thinking about this as a country and as a world.
I worry sometimes we spend too much time talking about the middle and not enough about the bottom quintile and quartile.
And actually, rather than chase some novel ideas, I'd rather see us expand the good ideas that we have.
So what I mean by that, increasingly I feel like we're chasing novel ideas like, you know, universal basic income or wealth tax or things which seem shiny and new, when in fact we could be doing much more of the kinds of things that are kind of working.
My favorite of this is their income tax credit, which we could make much larger and we could phase out much later.
If you are a single mother or married with kids and you're below certain income levels, as you begin working, it gives you a subsidy.
We could make that subsidy larger and we could make it wider in the sense that it could apply to even more people.
That, to me, is the most promising way to do this, which is targeting families, which is very important.
And in particular, if you're a single parent, you want targeting there.
And so that, to me, is our best instrument.
What's your sense, Yang Mi?
I agree that more attention needs to be focused on this.
The thing about extreme poverty is it is a myth that there's nothing we can do about it.
In fact, we've demonstrated that we can make the situation better.
So the way we measure poverty in this country is a little bit deceiving because you can look at a chart and say, oh, poverty hasn't gotten that much better.
But if you take into account the safety net programs that we have already put into place, like the earned income tax credit that me here talked about, food stamps, if you take that into account, what you will see is that the situation at the lowest end of our income distribution has actually gotten
significantly better over time.
In other words, it's a myth that we can't do anything about it.
We can make life much, much better for people at the lowest end of the income distribution.
I agree that the earned income tax credit is an interesting instrument because it is targeted.
You need to work, you need to be a parent, and I like that.
I think it is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient.
On a previous episode, I think I've argued in favor of raising the federal minimum wage, and we can reopen that debate.
That's a heated debate, I remember.
It is a heated debate, but I would still argue in favor of creating a higher price floor.
This is such an important point that you made, Gyeong -mi, about how we measure poverty.
I think an analogy is if you asked, how effective are swimming lessons?
And then you tested the effectiveness of swimming lessons on a population that hasn't gone through the training.
Everybody would say that's completely idiotic, but that's exactly what we do with poverty.
We measure poverty before we do income redistribution, and then we do income redistribution, and we don't ask, actually, how much does it shift levels of income among those who are most vulnerable?
The sad part about this is that I think both Republicans and Democrats have selfish motives to talk about why the current programs don't work.
Republicans, because they don't like the programs to begin with, Democrats, because they would like even more programs, but it gives an impression to the general public that there's nothing we can do.
We can't help. And nothing could be further from the truth.
What do you guys think of the idea of wage subsidies?
And so one of the criticisms that you guys have both levied about raising the minimum wage is that it has the potential to change company behavior.
If I know I have to pay my workers more, I might hire fewer workers.
Wage subsidies are different.
What they are is they are a subsidy that's delivered directly to low -wage workers via their paychecks as additional dollars per hour work.
So it's the same benefit as minimum wage, except the cost is borne by the government, and so it doesn't necessarily influence company behavior.
What do you think of that?
I actually really like wage subsidies.
It's the most direct way to get all the ancillary benefits that come from having a steady job and having a steady income.
When you think about financial insecurity and where it comes from among the poorer households, it comes from not knowing how many hours will I be able to work and how much money will I take home.
It's really as simple as this.
And wage subsidies I like because, in a way, it targets exactly the source of the uncertainty.
I think this is actually a really critical tension when it comes to policymaking.
We're living in this moment in time where there is so much bitterness, I think, there's so much populist bitterness against the profitability of companies and corporate America not caring enough for the little guy.
On the other hand, a lot of these policies would, in essence, lessen the burden of companies even further.
So if you say, no, we're not going to force companies to raise the minimum wage, instead the government's going to step in and offer subsidies on wages, that essentially lets companies off the hook and say, oh, great, so now we don't have to raise our wages because the government comes in.
This is one of the reasons I am very wary of moving away from employer -provided health insurance.
It's one of the few benefits that companies actually feel pressured to provide their employees, even though it costs companies a lot of money.
And so in the health care debate, there's this notion that, oh, the government should pay for everything, which is another way of saying companies should pay less.
Right? So I think that's part of the tension.
But Yang Mi, why do you want to tie the safety net to the fortune of companies?
Generally speaking, cutting the correlation between the performance of companies and the well -being of workers actually seems exactly right to me.
Why don't you like that?
When you say tie something to the welfare of a particular company or to their ability to succeed, I think part of the calculus of success for a company has to be that you have to pay your workers a fair wage, that you have to be able to provide benefits and so on.
And so if you can't succeed in that context, then you shouldn't exist as a corporation.
I think, Yang Mi, you're making a really interesting argument, right?
I think what your argument is something like this, which is, well, currently, firms are forced to share in the burden on some of these programs.
And then somebody comes along and says, no, we'll do it via some tax and spending program.
Well, then in theory, one can say, and we'll make sure the corporations pay their share of it, right?
But that turns out to be complicated and hard to do.
And that doesn't happen.
Well, it doesn't happen.
And then your point is it also kind of tears the fabric of the relationship between the employer and the employee, which is already fraught, right?
Yes. And I think that's really an interesting argument, which is maybe we want the employer to be more directly responsible for things, not because it's an efficient transfer of resources, not Felix, because we want people to be stuck to their employer in this way, but because without it, the relationship
with the employer is too thin and too fraught.
And so maybe that's why we want it.
I think that's kind of an interesting argument.
I think there's a corollary.
If we structure financial support for the poor as a handout, which I think many of these government programs are seen, we know that both the people who receive the handouts don't like it and the, you know, not completely poor.
They really, really like much of the negative attitude towards government programs actually comes from providing benefits in a forum that are not tied to what people think is the right thing to do, which is take on a job, try to make the best out of your circumstances.
So I think I agree.
The Young Meets argument is like super interesting about the social fabric between the employer and the workers.
The way we do it right now, we're tearing another type of social fabric.
I think it's really under stress.
You know, contrary, I think, to the most cynical beliefs that people have about their fellow human, most people don't want a handout.
They really don't. They want to live a dignified life and have an opportunity to do something that contributes and make a good living in the process.
And so that's why I'm arguing in favor of something that's a combination of many things.
I agree completely that the earned income tax credit should be expanded.
I think we should raise the federal minimum wage.
I mean, there's a combination of things that I think could really make a difference.
You know, it's interesting because the language we're using and even the way we're talking about this also, to me, belies an even more basic point in a way, which is, you know, we talk about these things like handouts and we talk about these things as if the pre -tax view of the world is one which is just.
I believe in markets and I believe in skill, but I think we've come to overestimate the degree to which outcomes actually represent the kinds of outcomes associated with skill entirely and have a lot to do with what.
And what I love about this is I think it then also implies something about the obligations of those who have been lucky, right?
So when you think about what are really effective anti -poverty measures that we could all agree to and take that typically liberals don't play along while concentrated poverty is really bad.
So we should have a greater mix in our educational system the way we do segregation in housing.
I think that's where, you know, no one likes the poor household right next to them.
And so what I find so interesting about thinking about that a good part of your good fortune is luck is that then it implies even, you know, you were lucky and that implies a particular obligation to give back and be open to measures that may not be in your short term best interest, but that might be
an outflow of broader responsibility towards society.
Definitely a topic to pay close attention to.
Okay, I want to talk about Amazon.
So this week, the New Yorker ran a huge I think about a 10 ,000 word article on Amazon.
And the next day, the Atlantic also had a huge article on Amazon as well.
Amazon is in the crosshairs right now.
There's absolutely no question about it.
And so I want to focus on whether or not you think Amazon is being fairly or unfairly maligned.
In other words, you could make the argument that this is maybe the most underappreciated company in the world.
On the other hand, you could argue that this is a company we should be deeply, deeply suspicious of.
So let me start there.
Should we be loving Amazon right now or should we be hating on Amazon?
So, gosh, I hate to answer the question about whether we should love or hate them with yes, but the answer is yes, which is a way of saying it's neither love nor hate.
I think you have to deeply, deeply appreciate and respect what they've built.
And I think you have to also now question what the bounds of their activities are because they are extending themselves in new ways.
And those are not questions of bigness, which I find facile because supposedly big is bad.
I don't like that logic, but there are other more legitimate questions about them passing into new territories, which may compromise their business model, may expose themselves to new risks and may actually lead to some problems.
And that's, I think, interesting.
Yes, so I agree. They've built an amazing business.
And then with building an amazing business, I think there comes some power and there comes some influence that can feel very, very uncomfortable for Amazon's business partners, for Amazon's suppliers.
It strikes me as not fundamentally different from the kinds of tensions that you would see between Walmart and its suppliers.
What I find maybe most important is, is there a sense in which, if you look at the core business of Amazon, is there a sense in which there can now not be competition?
Right. And my own sense is actually, no, both in bigger terms and in smaller terms.
We've seen Walmart doing a much, much better job competing against Amazon than it has in a long time.
And then I think maybe particularly remarkable the story of Etsy.
I don't know if you remember now, but when Amazon introduced Amazon Handmade in 2015, the general response was, oh my God, Etsy is toast.
And now, four or five years later, Etsy's revenue has risen dramatically.
It's much more valuable as a company than it used to be.
And so both can exist.
Okay, so let's go through it specifically, okay?
Because I think, as both of you guys point out, it's very easy to kind of wave your hand and say, oh, Amazon's too big.
But let's try to pin down precisely what they're doing that is overstepping boundaries.
And by boundaries, I mean regulatory, legal boundaries, normative boundaries, whatever.
Yeah. So here's criticism number one.
This is a company that booked, what, well over $200 billion in revenue last year, and they don't pay taxes.
What's your response to that?
That's not, I don't think, one of the most interesting arguments.
It's entirely conceivable they've had a long period of losses.
They've been investing like crazy.
It would not be crazy to think that they have not paid huge amounts of taxes.
I find that, of everything that Amazon is accused of, one of the less convincing ones.
And I really believe corporations should pay their taxes.
But I think in that particular case, it doesn't stand up as one of the most important ones.
It's also an interesting example of short memory.
In the beginning, of course, there was no sales tax, which I think many people remember, because we were not so sure whether e -commerce could ever take off.
And so we had a policy of exempting them from sales taxes.
And then, of course, as they grew up, we basically changed our mind, and now they're paying sales taxes in lots of places.
And with respect to the federal tax code, we do have a tax code that is explicitly designed to encourage companies to invest in the future.
And they've been, I mean, if you just think, young me, just think about AWS, right, and think about the warehouses.
They've done a ton of CapEx, and they've been depreciating that in an accelerated way.
Anyway, I don't want to be an apologist for them on taxes, but that seems like the least of the problems.
Here's another really big criticism.
Amazon doesn't treat its merchants fairly.
For example, Amazon should not be allowed to offer its own house brands.
It's unfair to control the platform and also offer your own brands that compete against the merchants that sit on that platform.
What do you guys think of that criticism?
You can't have it both ways.
You can't say, I would love to have the visibility that comes with Amazon's marketplace, and I would love my products to be available, and I would love to have access to Amazon fulfillment and all the rest of it, and then not the company to compete in those same segments.
The idea that you can build a very successful business with physical products and it goes unnoticed by your competitors, that's just not realistic.
Actually, I think this is kind of an interesting line of inquiry on them, which is it's going to be quite problematic and complicated for a supplier if they see their goods getting ripped off.
I think that is where one starts to run into concerns on predation and other things where now the platform is so dominant that it's affecting things upstream.
So how does this different from Walmart or from your grocery chain selling private label?
It's not. That's right.
It's really not. Except the scope of the goods are different.
But here's what's not different.
When you go to the grocery store, you can buy, say, bounty paper towels or you can buy some generic house brand.
And you can save money by buying the generic house brand.
Some people still buy the bounty.
Why do they buy bounty?
Because bounty has invested, as a brand, has invested in building demand for its own brand.
If you want to succeed as a business, as a merchant, if you are sitting on someone else's platform or sitting on someone else's shelf, you've got to do the work of building demand.
And I don't think merchants have really gotten their heads around that.
The second thing I will say is that the reason that Amazon has the customer base is because they offer really great deals on a consistent basis.
So if Amazon sees an opportunity where they can offer a better deal to consumers, they will absolutely come in at a better price, at a better deal.
But that's why people go to Amazon.
In other words, merchants think they can have it both ways.
Well, I'm going to go to Amazon because that's where all the customers are.
But the customers are there because they want the best deals.
Well, so I think on the merchant side, that's got to be right, which is everything you said is true, which is you have to step up your game.
And in fact, there's no difference between this and white label goods on the Walmart side.
The difference is that in the e -commerce space with 40 % of a market share, you do have a platform that's controlling a lot of information at a speed and sweeping up information in a way that is distinctive relative to what other retailers have historically been able to do.
And to me, there is an interesting policy angle if we think that smaller merchants are somehow having their ideas capitalized on by an all dominant distribution channel.
That to me is legitimate.
I think that's a legitimate policy question.
But it's a little tricky when you decide you're going to punish a company for simply doing something better.
In other words, Walmart has more transaction data than Amazon.
But historically, they just haven't done as good a job of using that data in order to drive decision making.
Amazon, you're right, they've done a better job.
But that's a strange thing to penalize someone for.
And I guess from a policy perspective, one has to just think about whether it somehow deters entry at the upstream level.
And if that ends up happening, then we have a social problem.
And that I think is at least conceivable.
Okay, so let's move to that criticism.
So another criticism of Amazon is that it's anti -competitive in the sense that it somehow suppresses competition.
It suppresses the growth of new businesses.
What do you think of that?
One of the merchant stories that you hear is that Amazon will every now and then go back to a merchant and will say, actually, we noticed you're selling product X at a particular price.
And we want you to lower that price.
What I find interesting, and this is an interesting contrast to Walmart, is that I'm not asking you to give me greater margin.
I'm asking you to lower the price.
And so the only policy angle that I can think of is if they somehow manage to pass on so much surplus of products and services to consumers, whether that then diminishes the incentives for people to come up with new ideas.
And for that, I think they would have to be even bigger.
They would have to be even more important than they are today.
That would be an interesting antitrust problem because it's not bad for consumer.
It's actually consumer paradise, right.
It's really fabulous for consumers.
But dynamically speaking, over time, that would, of course, damage the incentives to come up with new products and new services.
Felix is putting his finger, I think, on exactly the right thing, which is, at least in the US setting, we've relied on the idea of consumer prices as an indication of anti -competitive behavior.
So on that metric, it's really hard to get excited about coming after Amazon because consumer prices have been lower and they've largely been benefiting consumers.
You have to go somewhere else, right, to kind of get to anti -competitive.
Usually the people making these arguments, unfortunately, are being pretty facile and they're just saying they're too big.
And that, I think, is a very unsatisfying argument.
But the further one is some notion of entry being blocked.
And I don't know if it's happening yet, but I think that's where you'd be concerned.
But it's not as if small businesses don't have a choice, right?
And so you said Amazon is responsible for what?
About 40 % of e -commerce transactions in the US?
40 % on the one hand, it's a lot.
On the other hand, it's not.
Relative to retail overall.
Absolutely. I mean, think about our students.
They graduate, in many cases, when they start a consumer goods company.
And one of the first decisions they have to make is, are they going to sell on Amazon or not?
And some of them decide to do it.
And others say, you know what?
We want to have more control over our innovation, over our products, over our pricing.
And so they'll use Shopify, which is growing like gangbusters.
And Shopify is a company that gives them much more control.
And if Walmart continues to progress in the e -commerce domain, or Costco ever got really serious about it?
I mean, you're right.
If you go large on retail, Amazon is not a huge player, right?
And so that's the sense in which it's hard to make arguments about them being too big or it's hard to make arguments about them raising prices.
You have to find a much more subtle argument, which seems to me yet to be manifest.
So what exactly are we upset at Amazon about?
I mean, I've just gone down the list of potential complaints.
So is there something about Amazon's behavior that we should be deeply concerned about?
So I think going forward, what is interesting is the way they play in markets like, for example, AWS, or on logistics relative to companies like FedEx, that's actually where I think things are going to get complicated.
The way they've played against these other competitors is pretty ruthless.
None of which merits policy concern, but I think it merits business concerns because they have gotten to a scale where they now are going into new markets and they will go in pretty ruthless ways.
And you can't pretend like they're not coming after you and that's, I think, just a really interesting business story.
I don't think it's a necessarily interesting policy story.
These stories always remind me a little bit of, you know, we tried to break up Microsoft right before there was a general perception that Microsoft had become much weaker.
We, you know, battle against IBM right before IBM loses much of its position.
When I look at Amazon internationally, it is not clear at all whether they really have some deeply hidden capability that no one can emulate or no one can compete with them.
At best, it's a very mixed story where they're successful and where they're not successful.
And so part of this, I think, has to do with big company bashing, I think, is a time -honored tradition.
And so obviously, for many reasons, we feel uneasy about tech and large tech companies.
And I'm not even really so sure that other than AWS, I think of Amazon much more as a logistics company than as a tech company.
And so some of those concerns we talked about on the show earlier about the round Facebook and the use of data, I think are much less concerning in Amazon's case.
What Amazon has essentially done is it's taken these huge sectors and it's stripped out a ton of inefficiencies.
So with respect to the movement of goods and services in this country, logistics, fulfillment, they've just stripped out a bunch of inefficiencies and disrupted many, many other companies in the process.
They've done this with our IT functions.
So companies used to manage their IT functions in a really inefficient way.
Amazon introduces AWS and creates enormous efficiencies for companies.
Now they're looking at other sectors and they're looking for opportunities to do the same thing.
And the question is, is that a good thing or is that a bad thing?
They're experimenting with healthcare delivery right now.
On the one hand, we have a huge conversation going on in this country about the incredible inefficiencies associated with healthcare.
And so if you could imagine a world where Amazon was able to strip out costs associated with healthcare delivery, is that a good thing or is that a bad thing?
I just see a lot of colliding attitudes with respect to Amazon.
And the one thing that has struck me is how difficult it is to put your finger on what exactly makes us uncomfortable about this company.
This conversation has not helped at all, by the way.
So I think you put your finger most articulately on what it is they've done well, which is reduction of inefficiency.
That is actually the clearest statement of what they do well that I think of.
And then passing that on, by the way, to both capital providers and customers and labor.
But is healthcare the same?
I don't know. Meaning, would it be great if somebody could take out inefficiencies?
That'd be amazing. But wait a second.
This is where I think we take it for granted that just because Amazon is executed beautifully, that they're going to continue to do so.
They're trying to disrupt groceries right now.
And they're discovering it's really hard and it's very different.
And it's not clear they're going to win.
So remember when we thought Microsoft was going to eat the world?
And then mobile came along and it...
They totally missed that.
And to this day, they still haven't been able to really crack mobile.
We tend to have short memories, I think, with these things.
Yeah. Anyway, I would encourage our listeners actually to read...
Boy, if you could set aside a couple of hours because it's been very long.
But both articles, because if you wanted to really get a window into the current...
Yeah. ... Amazon -related zeitgeist in this country, that's the way to do it.
Okay, great. Thanks, guys.
Okay. Pics, you guys brought in recommendations?
Me here. What do you got?
So I have a new book, which is a book by Jack Goldsmith, who's a colleague at the law school.
It's called In Hoffa's Shadow.
And it is a fantastic story about Jimmy Hoffa and his death.
As some of you may remember, it's kind of one of these big mysteries, unsolved mysteries about who killed Jimmy Hoffa, who was the leader of the Teamsters Union through the 60s and early 70s.
And what Goldsmith does is he retells that story, but in a very personal way.
Because it turns out his stepfather was one of the prime suspects in Jimmy Hoffa's death.
Oh, my God. How interesting.
And so Goldsmith weaves together what is kind of impossible to imagine he could weave together, which is a story of the labor movement in the 60s and 70s and 50s with a father -son story, which is so touching and so beautiful.
And then finally, a discussion of privacy, because a lot of it ends up being around wiretaps and how the government was monitoring.
And so it's this weird combination of beautiful father -son story, incredible labor history, mystery around who killed Jimmy Hoffa, and then how should we think about privacy.
It's just an incredible mashup, and it's called In Hoffa's Shadow.
And it's by Jack Gold.
Oh, it sounds so good.
Yeah, it's really great.
Okay, I have a book recommendation as well.
Have either of you read Dopesick by Beth Macy?
I've heard about this.
It's an astonishing work of reporting.
And it tells the story of the opioid crisis in America and a public health catastrophe that is still unfolding.
What is amazing about the reporting is not just the depth of it, but the breadth of it.
So it takes you inside families who've been torn apart by opioid addiction.
It takes you into the marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies.
It takes you into the offices of local doctors.
It takes you to rich suburbs as well as to struggling towns.
It is brutal and heartbreaking, and it will make you so angry and so sad, but also inspired as well.
There's some incredible stories in there.
So that's my recommendation.
That sounds great. If you want to have a sense of what is happening today in America, 70 ,000 people die every year from opioid addiction.
That's twice the number of automotive fatalities.
And it's unbelievable, and it's happening right under our noses.
It's called Dopesick by Beth Macey, and it's just a staggering piece of reporting.
It's so, so good. So I highly, highly recommend it.
That's my recommendation.
Wow. Thank you. Okay.
And then Felix. What would the two of you do without me?
No shallow recommendations if I wasn't here.
Have the two of you been watching Dear White People on Netflix?
No. I don't even know about this.
It popped up, but I haven't actually clicked on it.
It's interesting that you say this because this is exactly how I found it.
It popped up on one of these initial screens.
Except I have better taste in your face.
Yes, that's true. I didn't click on it.
Well, also, Dear White People doesn't really speak to you, right?
No, it does not. Oh, my God.
Someone's talking to me.
I have to see what this is.
So what it is first and foremost, it's a college comedy.
What's special about it is it talks about their college experiences in the context of race and gender.
And the combination, I have to say, is just it really worked for me.
Felix, you're watching a college comedy series.
Yes. It goes with his TikTok thing.
It goes with a TikTok thing.
I mean, it's been a little while since I've been in college.
And so some of the issues that they worry about, you know, dating -wise and so on, like, yeah, I do go, yeah, I vaguely remember.
I don't really care all that much at this point in my life.
But the way race is built into the relationships, one of the main characters is this character, Samantha White.
The actress is Logan Browning, and she has a radio show.
And the radio show is called Dear White People.
Like, she complains about things that she sees on campus.
But every episode has an interesting twist.
And so how they navigate issues of race and issues of gender in 2019, I think, is really fantastic.
To young me, I think the combination of this recommendation and what we know about Felix's obsession with TikTok makes me think that it's time for an intervention, young me.
It's a very midlife crisis going on, Felix.
Tell us the truth. Oh, yeah.
So, I mean, if you could help me with TikTok, that would free up 15 % of my time right there and then.
Okay, so that's it for this week.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
