Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Mihir. And I'm Felix.
And unfortunately, we are missing our fearless leader, Young Me.
Yes, so true. We will try to kind of persevere without her, but she will be back next week.
But we'll try to do this episode without her.
Which, of course, is a totally impossible task.
We'll do our best. Felix, maybe I'll get started by talking a little bit about this kind of byproduct of the COVID -19 episode, which is we have this amazing international variation in the way countries have responded both from a public health perspective and from an economic perspective.
So I'd love to just do a little like around the world in 15 minutes to try to understand the best responses to these crises.
And I brought a topic also not surprisingly related to COVID -19 and that is the stimulus package.
Last time when we spoke in After Hours, we were not quite sure what it would include and now we know.
And I thought it would be great for us to think about whether this is the stimulus that the economy really needs and how likely it is to be successful.
Fantastic. Sounds great.
So, Felix, one of the most striking things to me about the COVID -19 crisis has been how much variation there is in the way countries are responding to this and in particular how they're responding on the public health dimension and in part how they're responding on the economic dimension.
So I wanted to just take a little trip around the world and think about those two pieces.
So first, on the public health dimension, we have seen just widely varying responses.
So we have response in China, which was of course perhaps the most dramatic and sudden, almost a complete shutdown, rampant testing, and then isolation, not relying on family quarantine, and then really successfully kind of bringing down infection rates and transmission rates.
We have the example in the rest of Asia of Singapore and South Korea and Hong Kong, also now considered very, very successful but very, very different.
We have the examples in Italy of course, perhaps most tragically, but also throughout Europe and the U .K.
in some ways zigging and zagging in their response.
And then of course finally we have the U .S.
If you kind of look around the world, Felix, what strikes you on that public health dimension about the different ways that countries have responded and which are the examples that are most intriguing to you?
One dimension maybe that we can talk about first is this question of the testing approach that you should have.
Take one example, I think that many people now talk about South Korea, where you basically test as quickly as you possibly can, as many people as you possibly can.
And so South Korea now is the country that corrected for the size of the population, has tested the largest number of people in the country.
And then you have by contrast Japan.
Japan has done not nearly enough testing.
South Korea has tested about ten times as many people as Japan has.
But interestingly, Japan has found three times as many people with COVID -19 compared to Korea.
And what I find interesting about this is when you think about what's the rationale for these different approaches, I sort of see three different logics.
The first one is medical capacity.
And medical capacity will tell you, well, actually, you just need to test those who are seriously ill because you want to allocate really scarce resources to the few people who need it the most.
And so that gets you to a case where you ration the testing and you just make it available if you are really in serious grave danger.
If you think about testing as a way to signal to the population that this is really serious and that you might have it, this is an interesting case in Japan, I think, where the not widespread testing gave the public the impression that actually infection probabilities were relatively low.
And then I think the third logic is how will we get the economy started again?
And there I think the case for widespread testing is really overwhelming because unless we're sure that you don't have the virus, it's hard to say, actually, you should come out from hiding and you should go back to your workplace.
And so what I find interesting in this whole debate is countries are really not that good at looking ahead.
So right now, everybody is concerned with medical capacity and that seems to suggest we should do very limited testing.
Yeah, that's right.
But if you then go to the next big question, when do you reopen the economy?
Of course, you have to have widespread testing, otherwise you'll risk of going backwards.
What's particularly striking to me about this piece of the puzzle is the WHO in some sense was unambiguous about this, which was testing, testing, testing.
The guy kept saying testing, testing, testing.
That's right. And countries were reluctant.
And I think the other dimension to this, of course, is I think the political dimension to this, which is there is a reluctance in some sense because people are using these numbers in political ways.
And so it ends up being a measure of a politician's success, unfortunately, if there are fewer cases.
But of course, the easiest way to get fewer cases is not to test.
Not to test. Yeah. And so the political dynamic is really difficult.
What's really interesting to me, Felix, about this is, you know, sometimes we look at parts of the world and we clump them together and we think they all think about the world the same way.
So for example, Scandinavia, we kind of think of them as one thing.
We think of East Asia as one thing.
But in fact, you know, you have this remarkably successful or what seems successful responses in South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
And not so much in other parts, nearby countries.
Mm -hmm. In Scandinavia, you have a country like Sweden pursuing a completely different strategy than its neighbors, even within Europe, similarly within the Netherlands.
I think it comes to the second piece of this, which is there is this subtle tradeoff in some of these places.
And this was the original UK logic, I think, which is when you do kind of a sudden stop and you do sudden social distancing.
Of course, that can be quite successful in combination with testing at arresting the spread.
But there's this other theory that has been percolating, and it seems to be percolating and then kind of rising and then falling of herd immunity, right?
Oh, yeah. Which that some of these countries are still playing with, it feels like, right?
So the UK played with it the longest, I think.
But Sweden and to some degree, Netherlands are as well.
But it has this appealing logic, you know, which is that actually what we want to do is manage the spread.
We don't want to stop it.
We want to manage it.
And so there is the sense in which there's this contrary logic, yes, you want to stop as much economic activity as well.
There is a little bit of this other logic of, well, but we want to try to get to herd immunity in some way.
That debate is now looking more and more like the herd immunity is just lost out in many, many ways, although some countries are still going for it.
The interesting thing to me is, and this is what we'll have to wait to see, is the countries that have done sudden social distancing, the critique of that is once you relax, you will start to see a resurgence.
So some people are now talking about staggered social distancing, which I think is interesting, you know, which is we're going to have to have periods of social distancing.
And it's all Felix about kind of managing healthcare capacity.
And that is, I think, one of the most fascinating pieces of this, which is fundamentally this is all just a question of managing healthcare capacity.
It's also interesting to me, Felix, to think about how some of these responses reflect kind of national character and just initial conditions.
So, for example, I think the prevalence of SARS and MERS in East Asia just gave them a different way to think about this problem.
Similarly, I feel like the UK fell into a little bit of a trap of keep calm and carry on, you know, which is that trope, right?
So all these things I think dictated very varying responses all around the world.
One of the really interesting long -term consequences that I don't quite know what it's going to be is how we'll think about privacy.
Because when you think about South Korea's super aggressive approach, in large part that depended on access to everyone's GPS data.
So the moment you test positive, we look at your GPS data, we figure out where you've been in the last couple of weeks, who you might have infected.
And then I saw these pictures of these large call centers that followed up with everyone who might have been in contact with you and a whole bunch of companies that aggregated the data and then produced maps.
So you could look at, oh, this is a church that I should probably stay away from, this is a part of town that seems relatively safe.
I think the other interesting thing about the countries that have been very successful is their willingness to share data like you said, but also there was not as much of an initial discussion of what the right thing to do was.
So if you look at South Korea, like in particular, beginning in early January, they were taking very significant steps.
And there was no hemming and hawing about, well, maybe, who knows, they put experts in charge.
The Korean CDC or Centers for Disease Control was completely in charge.
And it was unambiguous about the story that was being told, right?
What we've seen in many countries is, well, it's unclear what's happening.
There are many different ways to go about this.
And so the unanimity of trusting public health experts in these countries, I think is really a powerful lesson for all of us.
This is not a time for alternative realities.
It is a time for expertise in many ways.
Let's turn now to the economic response to these things, which is have you looked around the world and seen things that are particularly compelling or not compelling?
When you look around, I'm struck by the ambition of some of the programs that have been enacted.
So to go to Scandinavia again, Denmark has this remarkable plan to basically replace income for any employees of companies who can prove to the government that they have had an economic shortfall and that they can prove that they're not firing workers.
So it's almost a 75, 80 % replacement with a cap of around 50, $60 ,000 a year.
So it's a really thorough going income replacement.
And then in other parts of the world, you've seen a lot more of a patchwork system in place.
What's been striking to you, Felix, about what you see around the world in terms of economic response?
To me, one of the really big differences is what are the countries that have systems in place where you don't actually have to do much of anything because the system itself is already built for these kinds of exceptional circumstances.
If you have reduced hours as a result of some catastrophe, either specific to a particular firm or now in this case to the entire country, the entire economy, 80 % of your income is replaced if you can work fewer hours than you anticipated.
And one of the big benefits I think of having systems in place is that because you don't know exactly what the circumstances are going to be, you plan these systems in a general way that don't seem particularly biased.
And I think one of the lessons I hope that countries will learn is as these catastrophes occur with some regularity, if you have a system that already anticipates large disruptions, having everything in place, it's like an automatic stabilizer for the macro economy that just kicks in whenever you need
it. That to me seems far more effective from a macro perspective, but also seems far more effective because you're not pushing people out of work to begin with.
Well, that's the really important piece, that last piece, I think, Felix, that I want to emphasize, which is the beauty of these systems is if you don't have them, effectively what you end up relying on is something like unemployment insurance, and you have to have firings and separations, and then
you have to have rehiring and so on and so forth.
But all of that is really destructive to the way we think about economic behavior.
So it is exactly right that we have to kind of preserve the relationships between firms and employees in order to kind of minimize the economic cost of this.
Part of what's interesting to me about these systems that are in place, Felix, is the underlying generosity of them differs widely, and they differ widely because there are different ideas behind them.
So in the U .S., we have unemployment insurance, but we have a replacement rate that is below 50 percent.
And in many other countries, the replacement rate can be as high as 75 or 80 percent.
And if you're in a baseline where you're thinking to yourself, well, unemployment insurance is giving you an 80 percent replacement income, then the step to take, which is, oh, why don't we just make sure that firms don't separate from their employees when we have this very crazy shock that comes all
of a sudden, is a small step to make.
But if the step you're making is, oh, yeah, when you get fired, you'll maybe get half or less than half of your income.
It's very hard to go from that to a system where we say, firms, keep workers and we'll just guarantee all of that.
And so there's a whole set of ideas about individual responsibility and the way we think about what unemployment means, which is maybe not conducive to thinking about these shocks, as you're saying.
It's interesting that you say this because in a way, it's always been a little puzzling to me to think about the philosophy behind the U .S.
system. On the one hand, I think there's a much stronger belief that markets work to the economy's advantage.
Right. And so you want flexibility in the labor market.
You live in a world where the policy that would enable this is a policy that makes it easy for people to transition.
So I'm thinking licensing requirements and all of these kinds of things, which you should be very careful about.
But also it would seem to me, if you're generous with the people who lose their job, that would sort of support the notion that sometimes you happen to be in a growing industry and sometimes you're not.
And so the U .S. is a strange system to me because on the one hand, we believe in markets and I would expect that, oh, yeah, okay.
And then we say, and you don't have to worry about the people you have to let go because they'll be taken care of by the government because we know for making separation easy, that's good for the economy as a whole.
But that's not exactly not what we do.
We have this combination of we make it relatively easy to push people out.
And at the same time, we're not really taking care of them once they're out.
We're not as well as other countries.
But I think the philosophy behind it, and I'm not going to necessarily defend it, but the philosophy behind it is we want them to reenter the workforce as fast as possible.
And the philosophy is that the generosity of the benefits and the duration of those benefits will hamper exactly that market -based thing that you are emphasizing.
But I think we always emphasize the first part.
We always say, oh, here's a system where we believe in markets, but also it has an important second component.
It's a system that believes in markets, and it's a system that believes many people are inherently lazy and will take advantage of generous social provisions.
And so the second part just seems wrong.
I think it's inconsistent with the evidence that we have.
I think the interesting thing to me is that this is also writ large what's different, right?
So I think there's a suspicion of, for example, firms who might do something fraudulent in filing a claim and saying that, oh, I'm going to keep paying my workers.
And there's a sense in which an American policy maker might look at that and say, well, how do you know the firms aren't lying?
How do you check the information?
And blah, blah, blah.
And so there's a notion of underlying opportunism that does not preoccupy the Danish lawmaker, but that inherent opportunism does preoccupy the American policy maker.
And it's both on the firm side as well as on the self -employed side as well as at the worker side that we're guarding against that kind of opportunism.
So this is where trust just plays such a big role, right?
Yeah. If you have a trusting society, you could have a system where you say, oh, you make it like super easy to push people out if your firm has no future because it doesn't really make sense for you to hang on to people who work for your company if there's no future anyway.
But then we take well care of those who have to leave and we, you know, sort of make the transition as easy as possible.
The really interesting thing to me about this is also that this emphasis on opportunism is really misplaced in the current crisis, which is just a way of saying that we should not be spending a lot of time thinking about, well, who's going to take advantage of this crisis, right?
So we worry about opportunism in the housing crisis, which is people were making loans and they were doing aggressive things that brought upon the crisis.
This is kind of act of God language, right?
Which is meaning we're in a state of the world where this is not in anyone's control.
Yeah. We can't emphasize opportunism, right?
And so I think these systems that are predicated on emphasizing opportunism, which actually can be legitimate in some cases, right?
I mean, we do care about that problem, but it's very ill -suited to the current crisis because this has nothing to do with opportunism.
Well, so the intriguing thing about all this, Felix, is that we're going to be able in six months or 12 months to have this conversation again and we'll know much more.
We're going to have all this huge international variation at a global level and we're going to see how different countries responded and we're going to know if this kind of sudden stop social distancing led to kind of repeat things or if it was the right strategy.
Similarly, we'll know if herd immunity was just a completely crazy idea to ever have even floated.
We're both kind of social scientists and you think about this, it's hard to imagine an experiment on a grander scale with such large consequences.
But in six or 12 months, we're going to see answers to this.
And similarly, on the economic side, which policies really ended up being the right ones for thinking this through?
So the big lesson is really stay tuned.
So we now know what Congress decided.
We have the 2 .2 trillion dollar package to support the economy.
And I wanted to follow up with you and have a conversation around three components in the package.
So just to remind you of what the final package included, one big component that I think is largely uncontroversial is roughly 500 billion dollars for individuals.
So these are the checks that will be mailed out in a couple of weeks from now.
The more controversial parts is 500 billion dollars for something called the Treasury Exchange Stabilization Fund.
About 450 billion dollars out of the 500 billion dollars will actually flow through the Fed.
Somehow this is an insurance policy.
This is meant to safeguard the Fed against losses from the Federal Reserve lending programs.
And so one interesting question is like why did we do it this way?
Will the Fed really need this much money?
What are these Federal Reserve programs that put us at such great risk?
And then we should talk about what you alluded to, the 50 billion dollars that is held for large corporations.
This time around the extent of that Fed lending, which we talked a little bit about previously, is much greater and much more widespread in the economy conceivably.
So this is in a way giving the Fed more license to be more aggressive in the way it distributes that capital.
I think of this as a way to think about enabling the Federal Government via the Federal Reserve to be aggressive and be expansive in the way it extends that credit.
So why do it via the Fed as opposed to via Treasury?
I think the Federal Reserve has some advantages through its connections to financial institutions.
So if this works through banks then it's clearly dominant for the Federal Reserve to do it because they are so deeply embedded in banks and regulating banks.
And as a consequence they are kind of a natural lender in a way that the Treasury isn't.
But this is all kind of blank sheet of the paper.
So in a way what you would want to see is a more specialized agency that had the ability to kind of determine credit.
And that would be something more like a small business administration.
But we just don't have something like that that's broader and that could lend out in a bigger way.
Yeah, so I think it makes sense for exactly the reason that you pointed out.
So there's two advantages.
One is that the Fed will actually create leverage.
Yeah. We say it's $450 billion out of the Treasury Department to support the Fed's possible losses.
But I think there's going to be 10 times leverage or something like this.
So it's not $450 billion, it's $4 .5 trillion that the Fed has at its disposal to support American corporations.
And then the second part that is really important is all the usual ways we look at the likelihood that credit will be repaid.
They're situated in banks.
And as a result I think we want to use the existing expertise when we make loans in order to safeguard against someone with not much experience now, all of a sudden having to hand out billions and billions of dollars.
I guess my only complaint with that, Felix, is it does feel better situated to the kind of recession we had in 08 than the one we're having now, which is just a way of saying it still feels like we still have a bit of a frame on this of a stimulus and create demand as opposed to the frame we should have,
which is social insurance, which is just set another way.
Even the individual checks will take several weeks to get to people.
These credit facilities will take time to ramp up and get out.
If you contrast it with some of the policies we just talked about previously where in effect the government is underwriting a set of payments in Denmark, it's not just to employees, it's for fixed payments including interest, including rent.
Here instead we're setting up a facility to provide credit that will inevitably take time and is inevitably ambiguous and similarly with checks.
So I guess my reaction to the whole stimulus bill was quite good in the sense that it got done quickly and the magnitudes were roughly right, but still disappointing in the sense of it makes you realize how ill suited it is to this crisis, I think, just given the time delays that are involved.
Yeah. So let's talk about the airlines then because in a way this could serve as a model for what we might do for other industries.
So the airlines asked for $60 billion in assistance.
They got $60 billion in assistance.
50 % of it is loans and the other 50 % is payroll grants.
In exchange, there's a whole host of stipulations that now apply to any airline that decides to take the support.
There will be no stock buybacks.
You cannot pay any dividends.
Executive compensation is restricted to 2019 levels, and you cannot lay off anyone through September 2020.
So two things. One is first, they're reminiscent of what we saw in TARP and what we did with the banks.
And so I think they're interesting in that way.
We had restrictions on buybacks and dividends and all these things, and I think that can make sense.
And I particularly obviously like the idea that we want to limit employee firings in the short run because that's, I think, the most important piece of this puzzle.
My concern about them more generally is that what's going on here is we're probably going to be granting credit and grants that is somewhat mispriced to these folks, which is a way of saying the rates on it will be too low.
And so what are we getting back in return for that?
Now, the natural way to have done this, I would have thought would be to have some form of equity or warrants that would compensate the government for the risk -taking that they've undertaken by extending these loans.
And instead, what we're doing is we're trying to handcuff the executives with respect to their capital allocation decisions.
That is not that appealing to me, honestly.
I would have preferred, and again, putting aside the restriction on employee firings, which I think is actually important in the short run.
Which are separate, yes.
But you think about these kind of capital allocation restrictions, which is buybacks, dividends, and to some degree compensation.
I think that's kind of problematic.
I would have preferred to see an emphasis on, well, we are taking risk as a government in extending these loans.
We know these things are mispriced.
And so there's got to be a little bit more of a sharing of the upside.
Suppose you get your favorite solution.
You get the warrants.
Would you then say, we don't need the allocation restrictions?
Or would you say, no, actually, we can do both.
We can get the warrants.
And then we still have a bunch of restrictions of what you can and what you cannot do.
Well, so I think the distinction between the banks and this setting is important, right?
So we did that in the banking sector because we were trying to recapitalize the equity base of these banks.
That is in effect what we were doing.
Now, that's not really going on here in the same way.
And I'm not sure why we would handcuff them in this way.
Look, there's this overall demonization of dividends and buybacks.
The thing to be clear about is this is money leaving the corporation and going to its owners, which can be pretty diversified set of people.
They are the defined benefit pension plans who own that stock.
They are the retirees who own that stock.
And there are a whole bunch of investors who get that and then recycle that money.
So the notion that somehow we want to keep cash inside companies as opposed to cash outside companies, I don't quite understand.
Now, if you were worried about employment, I get that idea.
And we can solve that problem separately.
But why we're going to try to militate where cash should be inside the pockets of the corporation or inside the pockets of the shareholders, I'm not sure I fully understand.
Let me try two things on you, see whether you bite or not.
One is part of what the buybacks show is that the airlines in particular have an insufficient understanding of how risky that business is.
They had five, six, seven really good years and they had forgotten that they live in a very capital intensive and very boom and bust kind of industry.
And so what we need to do is we need to prevent them from making that same mistake again, pretending that as a result, oh, we can pretend we're not really all that risky.
And if things go terribly wrong, the government will extend credit.
But that's, Felix, more relevant in the banking sector than it is here.
So I guess what I mean by that is you're taking a view that somehow this crisis should have been anticipated.
This crisis or something like it, the next war, the next big natural catastrophe, it always affects the airline industry.
Well, but just to be clear, we have not seen something like this, including with 9 -11.
We have never seen anything like this hit the airline industry.
Not exactly like this, but boom and bust for the airline industry is not uncommon, no?
But this is not boom and bust.
This is everything goes to zero in a week.
Your, I think, version of this has got to be predicated on the idea that they should have foreseen this, right?
Or some version of it.
What's the optimal size of the cushion that you want for your organization?
For sure, it should include some sort of calculus about, you know, we live in a turbulent world and in particular, international relations and how they move, it's quite likely that you're going to get hit by something.
Well, but see, this is what's different about it than the banks, which is the banks really were complicit in this.
They should have foreseen what the lending was.
They should have been thinking about what this was.
I don't think you can ask an airline executive six months ago to say, you need to have like maybe $10 billion of cash on hand because you might end up with no demand for four months.
That is a calculus that we don't normally expect managers to make, and that is nothing from their experience in the last 30 years would have made them say they should have held $10 billion of cash.
But aren't you surprised how quickly they're pushed towards the brink?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, is one month of revenue as cash, does that strike you as a reasonable target?
One to two months of revenue is not crazy to me.
It's very hard, you know, just go to a pre -COVID -19 world and say, you know what, I think you should hold like 12 months of revenues cash.
And people would look at you and say, why?
What are we talking about?
That is not a natural frame pre -COVID -19.
So to hold them responsible for doing something wrong in that world strikes me as weird.
Do you think that's a natural frame to think about it?
You're going to have to just cover your costs for 12 months.
A month of revenue strikes me as overly optimistic, given the nature of that business.
But this is so interesting, Felix.
How do we usually think these concerns get navigated, which is we kind of rely on shareholders and bondholders to navigate this problem.
Yeah, that's right.
And so the underlying idea has got to be, and maybe this is right, which is those capital providers are so bad at navigating these considerations, right?
That we need the government to say what those considerations should be.
That gets a little extreme for my taste because I kind of think stockholders and bondholders are doing it.
Now God, do I wish they would do it better?
Yeah. You know, for sure.
But I don't know in this case whether you can really attribute this to their kind of lack of foresight.
All right. All right.
So let me try theory number two.
So part of the legacy of the Great Recession is a sense that we bailed out the banks, we bailed out the bankers, and we forgot about individuals who suffered at least as much as those related to the big corporate downfalls.
And what you see in the current restrictions is part of a lesson that we have learned.
Not so much about optimal regulation, the kinds of issues we just talked about a moment ago, but about the political fallout and the political cost.
So if we see the CEO of any major airline in January 2021, he or she gets a significant pay raise, you know, $10 million, $15 million because the airline is doing really well and it hits all kinds of KPIs.
The political cost of that is really significant.
It will lead to greater pessimism about how the spoils of economic growth are distributed.
It'll lead to greater polarization and so on and so on.
And so the reason why we have these stipulations in the stimulus package is not so much that they're doing something really helpful economically, but they're doing something really helpful politically.
I think that's interesting.
And we certainly want to kind of avoid the sentiment that was associated with the last set of bailouts from the last crisis.
But, you know, in my mind, I continue to view this crisis as fundamentally different than the previous one, which is they were bad actors and there were large chunks of the financial sector that were acting in maybe poor faith.
And then to bail them out and then to see them kind of earn the rewards was problematic.
Here I see this crisis as something that it was unforeseen.
So if in 12 months airlines are flourishing, I think we're all going to feel quite happy about that.
Now I would like the warrants to make sure that we all participate in it, but am I going to begrudge the executive who navigated those really turbulent waters for those 12 months?
I don't think so. And I'm not sure other people will.
Would you begrudge that?
So if I think about the political interpretation, so airlines in part will be doing well if they're really good at adjusting capacity.
Yeah. I cannot really imagine a world in which we go back to overall demand the way it was in 2019.
And so I think the balancing act will be, can you reduce capacity in an economically, financially reasonable way and get the airline as big as it may be at that point in time, get it back to profitability?
For sure. This will entail laying off parts of the staff.
Right. And then I think you will have that exact narrative that I think came out of the Great Recession will be there.
The public bailed out the big airlines.
What did they do? They laid off a bunch of people the moment the government allowed them to do so.
Executives get compensated in a really generous fashion.
And that I think is poison for the long -term health of the American economy.
That narrative, I think, undermines so much of what makes a market system really long -term viable.
So much to follow up on.
Absolutely. All right.
All right, Felix. Recommendations.
Without our fearless leader, young me, let's continue and do our recommendations.
What do you have for us?
The recommendation is to look at an organization that has a website with lots of really interesting data about the pandemic.
It's the Institute for Health Metrics.
And one of the really fabulous things that they do is that they break down both the rate of infections but also hospital capacity by state in the United States.
Because we read all of these big headlines about infection rates in South Korea and Japan and the United States.
But, of course, the truth is that there's going to be such large differences in the experience between different parts of the country.
And so there's two things that I find really interesting about this website.
One is it models the famous curve that we're supposed to flatten.
It models what that curve looks like state by state.
And so you see that part of the differences that we observe already today is that we're relatively close to the peak in New York.
And even the difference between New York and Massachusetts is 10 days.
So Massachusetts is just farther away from its peak.
And so when you think about how close are we to total capacity utilization for hospitals, for instance, or how many ICU beds are we missing, it really matters where you are on the overall curve.
And they're doing a beautiful job providing all that data.
On that Felix, I was just thinking how these graphic depictions of the spread of these viruses, these maps that have been kind of proliferating around, are so fantastic.
Fantastic, yes. And I'm sure for you, like a connoisseur of maps.
So my pick for the week, it's a Netflix documentary, which has kind of been debuted, it's called Tiger King.
And it is maybe five or six hours of a documentary, and it is just absolutely stunning.
It's an exploration of the wild animals that are kept by trainers in these private zoos.
And it particularly focuses on one who's crazy guy whose name is Joe Exotic.
And about a kind of a web of crime and hate that evolves out of these private zoos.
It is absolutely beyond your imagination.
So it's a whole world that you don't even know exists, which is there are more tigers in captivity in the US than there are freely roaming around the world.
Oh my God. Yeah, you don't even know about this world, right?
But it exists. And then on top of it, there are these characters who populate this world, who end up being enmeshed in each other's lives and end up hatching a murder plot without giving too much away.
And it is that story over the last 10 years, and it includes a run for president and a run for the governor of Oklahoma.
So is it fiction or is it - No, no, no, no.
It's totally true. And that is the crazy part about it.
It's just totally true.
Oh my God. It totally sounds fictional.
Yeah, at the end of every episode, you're like, no, this cannot be going on.
Wow. The trade in wild animals is horrifying.
I mean, it's just a stunning documentary.
And then it's filled with these crazy characters.
Oh, interesting. Lots to watch, lots to read.
Yeah, exactly. Fortunately, we have lots of time.
Exactly. All right.
Until next week, this has been After Hours on the HBR Podcast House.
The HBR Podcast House.
