Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone, this is After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Mihir.
I'm Sarah Green -Karmichael from Bloomberg.
It's great to have you back, Sarah.
Welcome, Sarah. It's great to be back, thank you.
And Mihir and I just talked.
We were so sure you would have a great topic for us.
I really want to talk about commuting, and not whether it's worth commuting, but can the commute be saved?
What I feel like I'm seeing is mayors begging people to come back, CEOs begging people to come back to the office.
Yeah. And the commute is still this incredibly painful experience that people just can't get over, and you see people saying things like, look, you're not going to get me on the train for two hours for, like, a free bagel and some bad meetings.
Right. Right. Yeah.
So can we save the commute?
If you were a mayor, what would you do?
By the way, what was your worst commute ever?
Did you ever have, like, a really awful commute?
I mean, I kind of have that now.
Earlier this week, I dropped my daughter off at daycare.
Daycare does not open until 7 .30.
I tried to get there right when they opened, and I did not get into the office until 9 .30 in the morning.
So it was two hours, and I lived like 15 miles, maybe, from my office.
So maybe that's why I was so eager to talk about this.
That's totally reasonable.
That's why you want to talk about commuting.
How about you, Mihir?
Did you ever have a terrible commute?
Sometimes I think that in many parts of my life, I've structured things so that I try to minimize commute, because it's been, like, an important dimension of things for me.
Share your sense, Sarah, that it's hugely important, and in a way, I've tried to structure life to avoid it.
What about you, Felix?
How's your commuting?
Yeah, also same. I did not know Cambridge at all when I first moved here.
I didn't really have a good sense of the housing market, and so literally my only criterion was, I want to be able to walk to school.
And that's how I ended up where I am.
And all in all, not a bad rule to follow.
Well, we'll find out.
And Felix, what did you bring?
I want to talk about Sheryl Sandberg and her leaving Facebook.
I'm super curious to know what you think.
We're going to find out about Sheryl Sandberg's departure.
Fantastic. All right, good.
Two great topics. Let's do it.
So, Sarah, commuting.
So, commuting is sort of the worst part of everyone's day to some degree.
And I do think that if you have a walking commute, you probably enjoy it very much.
If you have a commute that's 15 or 20 minutes, maybe it's a nice buffer between home and work.
But most people with long commutes really hate it, and it's become this real sticking point in the return to office push.
And there's really big implications for the value of commercial real estate in cities, and there's really big implications for other businesses that can operate in business districts.
So, right now, just to give you guys a sense of where we're at, only 8 % of Manhattan office workers are going into the office five days a week.
8%, that's tiny. So, if you were a mayor in a place like New York, how would you get people to spend that hour on the train and come in?
Or could you rejigger the train system or the subway system or the road system to make it less painful, to make it shorter?
So, I think it is about many, many things, but fundamentally, I think the commuting and the pain of commuting is what makes this debate about work from home and remote work so important.
And, of course, the curious thing here is that in these last two years, many people have made lifestyle decisions to make their commute worse, if they were to return to work.
And so, that now has created a whole set of issues.
And so, I think we're right to frame it this way.
So, I think two thoughts.
One is, the best outcome here is that we reframe the nature of development so that residential and business gets more mixed.
The real promise of humane development is communities that are not just business districts and not just residential districts, but really mixed use.
And mixed use is, I think, wonderful for many reasons.
It's wonderful for quality of life.
It's wonderful for commuting.
It's wonderful for the commercial aspects of it because different kinds of businesses can grow up in areas that are unable to grow up otherwise.
So, for all kinds of reasons, I think you want mixed use.
Second thing that you really want is to really think about public transportation again.
And, of course, this coincides with energy.
So, you see countries around the world doing really interesting things on public transportation because it's the solution here, which is, if we get better and cheaper, it's not just time.
It's also expensive in places to commute.
But better and cheaper public transportation, I think, is the only real solution to this.
So, I guess that's where I would begin.
I would begin with really rethinking mixed use, and I would begin by really thinking about public transportation in new ways.
I find the mixed use idea so interesting me here.
And one of the puzzles to me has always been, there are cities that are famously centralized, where you have the center business district, New York, Boston, it's like that.
But then you also have cities that are much more decentralized.
So, think of Los Angeles that has several centers.
And one intuition I always had, that in a decentralized city, you will see far fewer people making long commutes, because there's opportunities close by, and it's not exactly the right opportunity, but it's not too terrible.
Or if some other part of the city has better opportunities, that's where you would go.
And you see a little bit of this already in New York, where some businesses move to Brooklyn, because they find that the type of worker that they want tends to live in Brooklyn.
But Los Angeles, I think, is sort of a complicated example, because it has the worst traffic you can imagine.
And so the puzzle in the current debate is, in cities where jobs were more decentralized to begin with, we still saw that people accepted very long commutes, some of the worst commutes in the country, in order to get to that particular job that they wanted.
Or that particular job that they could get.
People just say, well, I'm going to suck it up, and I'll have a long commute.
Right. Sarah, what do you make of all this?
What would you like to see on the commute side?
Well, I really like the idea of mixed use.
In theory, it works so beautifully, because part of the reason people have long commutes is because they live outside of the city center, because the city center is so expensive.
So if you decided, okay, there's going to be some companies that are going to be needing less office space, maybe there's a way to convert some of that space into residential space, that would solve a couple of problems.
But I think it is hard to convert office buildings into residences.
To me, I'm like, yeah, throw a bed in there.
What's the big deal?
But actually, there's probably all kinds of zoning issues and HVAC issues and stuff like that.
But those zoning issues, I think, Sarah, are exactly it.
If you could create a little bit more flexibility on the zoning, then maybe that would arise.
But I take your point, it's not as easy as just kind of re -christening some office buildings as housing.
One really promising development that's a pilot program in Boston is Mayor Michelle Wu is trying to see what it would happen on a couple of bus routes if they were just totally free.
And the reason that she's doing this is because they've found that for every dollar they get in a bus fare, they are spending 75 cents just to collect that dollar.
So the net is like 25 cents.
And it's just not a very good return.
And you can't charge that much for public transportation or people don't use it.
In part, the experiment is so interesting because as long as we think that public transportation should pay for itself, or at least should pay for itself to some significant extent, you get this really terrible outcome that people who can lease the fort to live in the center of the city, they have the worst
commutes. And then we say, well, there are not that many people who are taking public transportation, let's cut service, and then we're cutting service and commutes get even longer.
It's the logic of covering a good portion of the cost of public transportation that I think gets broken in this experiment, where we just think, well, that's just an amenity, like other amenities that the city offers for free.
And if you could do that, that I think would actually then help distribute where people eat, where people sleep, where people go to work in a much more meaningful way.
I think the related point, I guess, is the commuting issue is also the question of the future of cities and the value of agglomeration.
So is it valuable to be together?
Not just inside a company, but is it valuable to have companies be closely nestled together?
So part of what gets lost in the remote from work discussion is the emphasis tends to be on, well, what is it that workers want and do and what can companies ask them to do?
But underneath it all, I think it's going to be decided by public transportation and it's going to be decided by how valuable is it to be co located near each other?
Not just as within a firm, but across firms.
Yeah, I think that's right.
We took that for granted, but that's the contested question.
If that remains a good logic, then it has to be about public transportation and mixed use to solve it.
If that logic is no longer good, which is it doesn't matter that Bloomberg is near the New York Times is near whatever, then all bets are off.
Then we can really think about a world where commuting is just so costly that we chose not to do it anymore because the economic imperative isn't really there because there's no agglomeration effects.
I want to underline something Felix said, which is the importance of distance from the city center and affordability.
Yeah, that is something that gets so lost.
And I think people assume leafy suburbs are ritzy suburbs where home values are very high and that the wealthy flee the urban core to live in these wealthy suburbs.
Actually, the home values in some of the suburbs are much more affordable than if you want to live in the cities.
Yeah. So I think that when this topic comes up in workplaces, there is often an attitude of, well, they chose to live out there.
So their commute is long, but really, they shouldn't complain because they chose to move out there.
Well, yes, they chose to live in a two bedroom house or a three bedroom house instead of in a studio or a one bedroom.
And I think that it is something that especially for managers, I don't always see a lot of sympathy, which I think is too bad because often managers who live in the city, they are making more money than their employees who live further away.
And I think that's too bad.
And of course, it's also related to family structure and gender.
I mean, it's related to a lot of different things.
Yeah. The typical life cycle, of course, is young workers who are more likely to be urban residents and then conceivably near the end of your work life, you might also become an urban resident again.
But the usual arc is that.
And of course, the wages of commuting also fall disproportionately, I think, on women.
And so it's not just income.
It's got a whole bunch of systematic dimensions that I think are really important to think about.
And people are not particularly good about making these decisions.
So there's good evidence that suggests you think, oh, let's move a little further out and then we get that extra bedroom and the extra bedroom is going to be really, really valuable.
But actually, when you look at life satisfaction studies, yes, of course, that extra bedroom is nice to have, but it's nowhere close to making up for the fact that you have now longer commute.
Yes, the research on that is so sad.
And I read that research and I went and made those bad choices anyway.
And it dovetails with another pathology, of course, which is about home ownership.
So part of what's going on here is the compulsion to own.
Yes. If you're compelled to own, especially at a younger age, then you have less of a budget and you're more likely to make that trade, Felix, that you just described.
Yeah. So one aspect of this, Sarah, is what's the policy response to commutes?
But I wonder if there's also just a personal dimension to this, which is minimizing commute is like a first order decision you make about your life.
And it should probably trump a whole lot of other considerations.
Yes. I buy into that.
And I think if I was to think about advising somebody, not on the policy side, Sarah, but like on all the individual choices we make, I think that's a good rule to follow.
Yeah. At least that's my instinct.
You know what I love about this conversation is, in a way, the debate that is nominally about remote work is really about these kinds of issues.
Yeah. It's really about public transportation.
It's really about housing.
Productivity at work.
Yeah. Work -life balance.
Yeah, exactly. My baby is awake from 6 .30 in the morning till 6 .30 at night.
So if I'm leaving at 6 .45 to get into the office ahead of the traffic, and I'm not getting home until 6 .30 at night, I don't see her at all.
Yeah. Yeah. It's really the future of everything.
Okay. Felix, Sheryl Sandberg's departure.
Tell us what you make of it.
Yes. One reason why I really wanted to talk about it with you is when I read the coverage of her departure, it was so incredibly varied.
On the one hand, people would say things like, she really helped invent the dominant monetization business model for all of Silicon Valley.
Even very successful executives, there are so few who can say that I leave that kind of a contribution.
And then, of course, we know a thing or two about that business model that is maybe not so great.
And there's a debate around should the company have responded earlier, in particular to the realization that Instagram is really not great for young people in so many ways.
And is that part of her legacy?
Should we say, well, maybe it was a good idea to begin with, but then once the data came in, and you say issues with body image, issues with suicide, really, in part, that's part of your legacy, part of your responsibility.
And then on top of everything, of course, she has written this really famous book, Lean In, that helped us think about the role of women at work and how we might get to a place where women are better represented in top management positions.
How did you think about her legacy, her contributions, the way she influenced the debate, both around social media, but also the debate around women at work?
I would say for me, the Lean In legacy is the one I much more quickly thought of immediately.
And for me, what immediately came to mind, frankly, was how misremembered I think that book is now.
And I'm not entirely sure why that is, but I think that at the time of her TED Talk in 2010, and then the book in 2013, it was not normal for female CEOs or COOs or see anything to talk about being a woman at work and sort of walking around on their swollen pregnancy ankles and what that was like.
And I can say that with some confidence because I was in a position at the time where I was trying to get a lot of interviews with female executives and they didn't want to talk about that stuff.
They just didn't. And if you tried to bring it up, they would say, I'd really rather stick to whatever the business topic would be.
And their PR people would say, please do not ask her any questions about her gender.
So I think that at the time Sheryl Sandberg came out with those ideas, she was taking a risk.
She was speaking up about her personal experiences in a very candid way.
I just think that when people are criticizing that book, it's now become a kind of shorthand for like girl boss feminism.
If you can't meet the patriarchy, join it.
I don't think that's fair.
And I'm confused about why it sort of remembered that way, when at the time it was actually pretty bold for her to talk about that because no one else was doing it.
Yeah, it's so interesting, Sarah.
I mean, you know, I confess I am so confused about how to think about Sheryl Sandberg.
It is hard to think of someone who has had a bigger impact on the society business interaction in the last 15 years than her.
And because she really, to your point, Felix, both at Google and at Facebook, pioneered the ad model.
Of course, there were other people who would have done it, or perhaps which she pursued it and she aggressively executed on it.
And she added a business savvy to the tech bro culture that may not have wanted that business savvy.
And so she was a lot of different things in many, many ways.
And I think you're right, Sarah, about Lean In as also being fundamentally transformational to the role of women in business.
I think the thing that I've struck by is both of those contributions and those roles have not aged well, for whatever reason.
They are very, very significant.
If we had been talking about this even five, seven years ago, I think it would have just been like, oh my God, what massive contributions.
But in the last five, seven years, both of those have aged very, very poorly.
Now on Lean In, Sarah, maybe it's a reductive approach to her message.
But even at the time, I do recall there was this sense in which she came perilously close to saying, women, it's on you to do more.
And I remember that at the time, people made that criticism of that book.
And I think that message has not aged well, because the last five or seven years have not been about that message.
It's been about structural and societal pathologies that are now deemed to be much more important, I think.
And then similarly on the advertising piece, that has not aged well.
And so I guess what I'm struck by is just how profound her effects are and how fast moving the judgments about her have been changing.
So that, I think, Felix accounts for all that.
I don't know. What do you make of it, Felix?
I find the Lean In conversation so interesting because I can still remember and understand why women didn't want to talk about being a woman in the workplace.
To say, take a topic like work -life balance.
No guy ever gets asked about work -life balance.
And the moment the interview partner is a woman, then it's all about work -life balance.
And so there was a sense of unfairness that this particular set of topics would only come up in the context of someone being a female executive.
Then when Lean In came out, part of what I always loved about the overall message is that, yes, of course, it is even more pronounced in the case of women.
But there are plenty of men who are afraid of asking for a really big assignment.
There are plenty of men who are super nervous about, oh, my God, is this thing going to go well?
And maybe it's a little safer to be quiet.
And so it struck me in part that she had articulated something that wasn't an issue for the very successful people.
But it was a very common issue, even more pronounced among women.
Because as we know from research, women are a little less likely to ask for things in the first place.
But it's not as though it was exclusively the issue of female executives.
And that strikes me as even right for the poor aging now, me here.
On the one hand, yes, we talk a lot about structural impediments.
And I think that seems to be an important conversation to have.
But it's also true that we're now asking for everyone, are we leaning in too heavily?
Are we giving up our private lives?
Are we not seeing our families?
And is it really worth giving all that up for corporate success, for being really rich, for being really influential?
And so again, even the turn against the Lean In message is gendered in part because it's even more difficult for women to deal with the multitude of pressures.
But it's a conversation, I think, around mental health that is well in a life in lots of places.
I think that what I struggle with is that I think an author should be allowed to say, as Sheryl Sandberg does in the introduction to her book, things like structural problems are real.
They have also been amply covered in other books.
And I want to focus on a topic I think has gotten less attention and acknowledge this solution won't work for everybody.
These values might not be your values.
But in a way, like if I'm giving advice to my younger self or to a person earlier in their career, this is what I would say.
I feel like you should be allowed in a book or article to say, here's what I'm going to talk about.
These other issues are real, but I don't have space to talk about everything.
And so I'm going to focus on a subset of the issue.
And I do think that there are some fair criticisms of the book.
I do think that it was race blind in a way that, again, maybe has not aged well, totally a fair criticism.
And I think that in subsequent books, you can see that Sandberg did try to bring in more diverse viewpoints and not rely so much on her own experience.
But I also think that we wouldn't have gotten to this other place without a book like that.
It didn't have to be that book, but without a bestselling book on women's issues.
I don't think that we get to the point where we're having conversations about me too, where we're having women being more open about their experiences, where you have a bunch of copycat books of other women telling their stories, a more diverse group of women telling their stories, because publishers
are very risk averse.
And when that book became a bestseller, publishers were like, oh, we can make money on this.
So they signed up a bunch of other women to tell their stories.
I mean, I think that's totally plausible to me that the publishing industry came to understand that there was a market for that.
And that was interesting.
And people wanted to read that.
I totally buy that.
I think that makes a ton of sense.
And she gets a lot of credit for being the pioneer in that way.
I think the other piece of this that really strikes me is just how 10 years after her ascent or 15 years after her ascent, it just remains an exceptionally hostile environment towards women in technology.
So it is not as if there has been leaps and bounds of progress actually in C -suites in technology companies or more broadly.
So I think you're right, Sarah, it enabled conversations that were really important to have and it enabled a lot of people to have voice in a way they may not have had before.
But I got to say part of her accomplishment also becomes even more spectacular when you realize how rare it continues to be.
I mean, it continues to be really exceptional.
Forget about the books for a second.
Just on what she accomplished as an executive in what is a pretty hostile territory remains completely singular 15 years later, I think.
And that's something spectacular.
And I think the same is true on the advertising side.
Think about the disappearance of the cookie.
One of the main technologies goes away.
What is everybody doing?
Everybody is desperately trying to recreate that same model.
There is literally nothing else out there.
And it's nuances and it's done in different ways and maybe first party data and so on and so on.
But essentially, it remains what she saw early on.
And maybe the one heartbreaking thing that I think about when I think about her career at Facebook is someone who is so smart, who saw business opportunities so clearly when, in fact, even Mark Zuckerberg didn't really think that the Google app model could ever play for the Facebook business.
I would have wished that someone like her would have seriously thought about news and news in the context of social media.
And how do you do that in a way that is both attractive from a business point of view, but also feels socially responsible.
The part that leaves the most bitter taste for me is that once that ad success came in, it was all about protecting that revenue stream.
Protecting that revenue stream at the cost of relentless imitation of anything that was out there.
And that was part of a strategy that basically said we're not going to think of the next thing ourselves.
We're just really watchful to buy everyone who seems to have half an idea that might compete with Facebook and really left the product itself.
Go on Facebook today.
It is so sad, the little, little, little progress that they have made in creating something new.
I just wish someone of her stature, someone of her imagination, someone who really had that keen business sense to then, in the end, spend so much time both in politics but also in business in a defensive role.
I wonder if we're not looking back with maybe a little more distance and say so much talent wasted.
I guess part of what I have wondered about this is what problems can be laid at Sheryl Sandberg's store and what problems that Facebook should be laid at Mark Zuckerberg's store, because we've sort of conflated a couple of different things.
And I think that most discussions of Facebook tend to.
She was in charge of the advertising business and public relations and like a huge, huge remit of stuff.
And he's really like the product guy who's like focused on like the features and the app and like how it's all coming together.
And I think that sometimes the issues we talk about with fake news spreading on Facebook or radicalization on Facebook really seem more like they should be laid at Mark Zuckerberg's store.
And in some ways, the deflection away from responsibility, I routinely have seen coming from him or he says, we need government regulation.
We're not the people to figure this out.
Government should regulate us because we really can't figure out free speech because we're not the arbiter.
And I'm like, you are the CEO of one of the most powerful companies in the world.
Totally. Make decisions.
Don't just say that government should decide.
But I think, Sarah, this is exactly where I was going to go to, which is and in a weird way, it all feels like a little gendered.
Not just a little. I 100 percent agree.
But yes, go ahead. Look, I think she's fairly credited with pioneering advertising in a really significant way, both at Google and Facebook.
So that is in and of itself, if we looked at it in isolation, a very important contribution to the development of commerce in the last 20 years.
Now, it has metastasized in perhaps unfortunate ways.
But somehow she gets the blame for that as much as she gets the credit for it.
And I think part of what happens in these settings is there are very few women and then the few women that there are they almost have to carry a burden of people projecting whatever they think about entities and business onto them.
It becomes almost distracting, like if it's Mary Barra or if it's Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Mayer before them, they become kind of people see what they want to see in them and they project onto them things that I think they don't always do with male business figures.
And that's part of what's happening here, right?
So undoubtedly, Felix, you're right.
She should have done better.
She should have figured out how politics and regulation would change.
But it also feels like we are projecting onto her maybe more expectations than we might otherwise.
I don't know if that's fair or not, but that's my instinct.
I do see this a little differently.
So I did not mean to apply that Mark Zuckerberg is not responsible for what his company does.
But, you know, she's part of the top executive team.
Yeah. And having created the revenue engine for the company, she is in a position of influence like no one else at Facebook.
She basically created the business model for the company.
And it's only in this context.
And I would never say that she should have done it alone or she should have had the old ideas or it's her responsibility that all the things that happen to young people when they spend too much time on Instagram.
But it is part of that collective responsibility of being a top executive in a really influential organization.
And when you think about the Wall Street Journal investigation into what they now call the Facebook files about all the social ramifications of social media that were clearly recognized by Facebook.
If you know this as a top executive, to my sense, either you try to do something about it or you leave.
And the decision to stay on, I think that will reflect on how people think about you longer term.
Yeah. I think the word that really strikes me about this conversation is the word, Felix, you used a while ago, which is heartbreaking.
For some reason, that really hits home for me.
There's something about the whole thing that's a little heartbreaking.
And maybe one way to say that is imagine another world where in 2014, she left and she catapulted herself into a political world where she created a new legacy or a philanthropic world.
And she wasn't going to be caught up in these issues that she now is inevitably going to be caught up in about the evolution of advertising, about the evolution of Facebook.
I think that counterfactual world is really interesting and it's not available to her anymore in the same way, I don't think.
And that is one other element of this that I think is kind of heartbreaking.
So it is a world in which, you know, I don't like to kind of look back and say, well, what if this had happened?
Like that's a very ridiculous kind of thing to go do.
But in this exercise, it kind of feels like kind of interesting because she was at such a pinnacle.
And I think time has not been kind to her in the last six or seven years.
At the same time, I have to say, I can't wait to see what she's going to do next.
Yeah. I'm still so optimistic, so hopeful.
And so maybe not exactly the right time to leave, maybe a little late, but at the same time, given her talent, given her influence.
Oh, my God. I'm so hopeful about what she's going to do next.
Yeah. The second or third act or whatever it is should be really interesting.
So I'm very, very curious to see what she does next.
Absolutely. All right.
Pics Felix, what do you got?
I have something that is maybe not perfectly uplifting.
But like everyone else, I've been thinking about the mass shootings that have happened in the last couple of weeks and just the level of violence that has spiked after the pandemic.
There was one piece in the New York Times that gave me a little bit of hope and I wanted to share it.
It's by Nicholas Kristof and the title is how to reduce shootings.
And there's two things that are interesting.
He reviews a little bit the existing research, what we know about shootings.
So for instance, the mass shootings that create the big publicity are really the big exception.
That's a little bit more than one percent of all shootings.
It's mostly the many, many suicides and then about the half the rate that are homicides.
But the most interesting part of the piece, which I actually loved, is he looks at statistics about opinions of households who own guns and opinions of households who don't own guns.
And you would think that's the usual divide.
Those are just two different universes that never touch.
And that's totally not true.
There's so much agreement about a bunch of sensible steps that we absolutely should be taking.
So for instance, when you look at background checks, 93 percent of households who own guns and 96 percent of households who don't own guns are in favor of background checks.
If you look at even much more controversial measures like restricting high capacity magazines, it's still a majority of households who own guns, who are in favor of these restrictions.
And so one of the big lessons for me was this is actually not incredibly polarized and we will never be able to make any progress because we just don't see eye to eye.
This is a particular instance of political dysfunction where we can't make progress is we can't make progress in the Senate and we can't make progress in the House.
But the American people, which to me is an optimistic message, actually many of the most sensical measures, how you might begin to make some progress, they have vast majority of citizens behind them.
That is very hopeful.
And I do think that there is progress at the state level that is possible for sure.
Yeah, I mean, I think I would love it to be true, Felix.
I wonder, though, it is getting harder and harder to find these rays of hope.
So I'm all for looking for that agreement.
Sarah, what do you have?
I have something a little somber as well.
Sorry. So my pick is the January 6 hearings.
It is originally something I was only going to watch to be sort of an informed citizen.
And it kind of eat your spinach kind of way.
And this is not like a boring C -SPAN thing that just drags on with people bloviating and you think, oh, God, please be quiet.
The pacing and the density of information is such that I actually am going to watch the first one again on YouTube because I was multitasking, watching it as you do.
There were just a couple of moments where I was like, wait, I just missed that.
Or wait, what did he say?
And so I think that the bipartisan committee barely bipartisan.
But bipartisan, technically, has done actually a really good job of so far at least minimizing political bloviating and really telling the story of what happened that day.
One person I follow on Twitter said, when's the next episode?
Why can't I binge it right now?
It's not quite like that, but it's pretty compelling TV.
Yeah. And sometimes truth is crazier than fiction.
It should be a six part series.
Well, unlike you both who have been responsible citizens who are diving into the issues of the day, I have a recommendation for those of us who seek to run and hide.
Good. Which is an old recommendation.
But when I came back to which is, you know, Daniel Craig, I think had his last James Bond movie come out this year, and it was called No Time to Die.
And I found it to be quite a disappointment, honestly.
But it led me to revisit Skyfall, which I think is just a spectacular movie.
Yeah, love Skyfall.
The best Bond movie and just a great movie overall.
It is, I think, hugely underrated.
The final climax scene in Skyfall is got to be one of the most entertaining, wonderful pieces of filmmaking.
And I could watch it, and I rarely say this about any movie, I could watch that movie like twice, thrice again, it is just so entertaining and he's so good.
And then Judi Dench is great and Navi -Herbert Dem is great.
The whole thing. So if you're looking for escapism, the kind of escapism that Bond films provide completely heroic, completely kind of detached from reality.
I recommend revisiting Skyfall or seeing it for the first time if you've never seen it before.
I might actually do that.
I haven't seen it in a while.
I listen to the music every now and then.
The music is really good.
Everything about that movie is just so good.
It's a great pick, but I am shocked at your comments on No Time To Die.
Did you like it? Really, you liked it?
I liked it, but I will say I probably won't watch it again because for me, it was no spoilers, but it was too sad.
Maybe it's just a Daniel Craig appreciation moment too, which is he's pretty darn fantastic in that role.
He's amazing. He's the best Bond.
Now we've engendered a lot of people who are going to be like, oh my God, no, he's not.
We're out of time. Thank you for listening.
This is it. This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
