TED Audio Collective Hello everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. And I'm me here.
And it's just the two of us.
Yet again. Did you see the response?
Everybody's so excited we're back!
Including us. I have to say, the heartwarming interactions with listeners, even through this weird social media thing, is just great.
That's one of the biggest reasons we do this.
Aside from the wonderful time over a glass of wine with you, Felix, it is just the opportunity to hear from people and get ideas from people.
It's just fantastic.
So what are we talking about today, Felix?
So I thought we could talk about how well we managed during the pandemic to keep people's incomes relatively stable.
Oh yeah. These really big differences across countries.
And I think now we have sort of the first wave of research that I have seen that really digs into what worked, what didn't work.
That would be great.
And I have something considerably more trivial.
Which is, I want to talk about mobility and transportation and the future.
I know I've cultivated this reputation as being this Luddite who doesn't care about technology.
And now all of a sudden, you're forward looking.
But there are a couple of things where I really care.
And I would love to talk about mobility.
Because I think there are some really exciting things going on.
Good. Let's do it. So, Felix, we actually now are learning a little bit about all these really interesting interventions that were tried during the pandemic.
It's an amazing laboratory.
It's hard to remember now.
The pandemic hit and then before you knew it, GDP fell and you needed to find a way to stabilize income.
So in the United States, the main program was called the Paycheck Protection Program, which essentially allowed businesses to apply for loans.
Ultimately, they come from the federal government, but they're routed through commercial banks.
And it's in more contrast to, say, the UK or France, where the government was much more directly involved.
In the UK, for instance, there's this job retention scheme.
And the idea there is, if you furlough workers all the way down to, you work zero hours for the next couple of months, the government would make up 80 % of the difference.
And so we're seeing now doing it directly, doing it through the banking system.
What are the pros and cons?
Yeah. So tell me what you think some of those big lessons are that we've gotten so far.
So one of the big lessons has to do with speed.
If you do it directly as a government intervention, of course it's faster.
You can disperse the funds quite quickly.
It does mean that you have to make it super simple.
So for instance, both in the UK and in France, essentially all I'm looking at is, here's your workforce at a particular moment in time.
Here's how much you reduce the number of hours.
And 80 % of the difference is what I give you.
In the United States, the calculus was much more sophisticated.
It's like giving a business a loan.
Whereas for instance, what's the underlying quality of the business?
Are you in great shape?
We have given you a loan in the first place.
There was loan forgiveness to the extent that you spent it on people's wages.
You wouldn't have to pay it back.
And in fact, most of those loans have basically been forgiven.
Have basically been forgiven, but there was uncertainty around how much would be forgiven.
And as a result, I think the idea was to inject a little bit more calculus, a little bit more we're thinking about this like a rational economic decision.
And some businesses deserve to get credit and some businesses don't.
Right. My understanding of some of this evidence is that certainly on the PPP side, which is these loans, it really wasn't targeted at all in some sense.
So it went out the door fast.
It went to quote unquote small businesses, but you didn't even have to necessarily show that you had, for example, declining revenue.
You just got loans almost automatically.
Certainly the first wave of the PPP program, which is kind of this trade off between timeliness and targeting.
So the first PPP loans went out fast, but there was basically almost no targeting.
Unlike in the UK and France where you're talking about wage reductions and compensating for wage reductions, it went out almost blanket.
And in part, this is of course one of the lessons we learned from the great recession in 2008, 2009.
You might remember this audit that they did many years after the programs that they had at that point in time, where the funds went was remarkably targeted.
There was almost no fraud, but there was also a sense that, Oh my God, because we were so careful, it took a very long time.
Exactly. The fact that we crawled out of the recession of 2008, 2009, I think in part is a reflection of we try not to make many mistakes.
And it's interesting in the US setting, this trade off between targeting and timeliness.
It's pretty tough in the following sense, which is we think that for those first couple of waves of those PPP loans, we got them out fast, but the vast majority of it went to relatively high income people ultimately, which is tough.
The contrast to the Europeans is interesting because they also did it fast, but they were able to do targeting much better than we were able to do.
One way I think about it, this is almost like in Europe, you sort of freeze the picture that you see at this moment.
The businesses are what the businesses are, employment levels are what employment levels are.
You don't think much about the past.
You don't think much about the future.
You just say, okay, you happen to have 147 workers, they make this and this much.
80 % of that is basically insured by the government.
In the US context, we try to be a little more sophisticated and then it gets complicated.
So one of the types of evidence that we have is that racism played quite a significant role in where these loans went and who could apply and who couldn't apply.
So a colleague of ours here at the business school, David Sharfstein, he has a paper on loans that went to restaurants in Florida.
And he shows that a black owned restaurant is 25 % less likely to receive a PPP loan compared to a restaurant that is owned by a white person.
The kinds of things that distinguish attractive from not so attractive restaurants, they make up about 10 % or so.
But that leaves 15 % of the difference in the probability that you get a loan where they argue, I have found pretty convincingly that ultimately this is just racial bias.
This just has to do with you happen to be black owned and as a result, you're less likely to get a loan.
Which in part reflects so many things about the US.
It also reflects things about the PPP program, right?
So the decision to go through banks means that pre -existing relationships with banks will help determine who they call.
I mean, I can speak for myself.
I got calls from banks saying, take a PPP loan for your little thing.
I think I'm the only person who never took one.
Not so sure but yes.
Because the take -up rates were amazing in the first wave.
David Autor's work is 98 % take -up rates for people who are eligible in the first two waves.
But it's selective because banks are going with their customers.
And if they've systematically excluded customers or if they've had biases in their processes, well then guess what you're going to get?
So the reliance on these private actors can actually change the actual objective as opposed to, in Europe, which you had two things.
One is you have this infrastructure around support, which we don't really have.
And then the second important thing Felix to me is, there's this notion in Europe, which is more like work sharing, as opposed to unemployment insurance, right?
So partial unemployment insurance.
So the way the US is, you're fired or you're hired and you get help if you're fired.
The whole essence of those European schemes to me is, well wait a second, you can fire 20 % of your workforce or you can reduce everybody's workload by 20%.
We want you to reduce everybody's workload by 20 % and then we come in and support that.
That preserves the relationship between employers and employees, which is really, really important.
It spreads out the stress of the system.
But in the US, we have a much more binary view of the world.
Like these work sharing arrangements in the US just have not been very popular.
We have this very fragmented state level system where it's completely binary.
You're either not working or you are working.
But this work sharing idea is so deep when you think about it and it's so good.
And it can get around some of these problems, but you need to have government support for that.
You need to have the infrastructure and you need to have the relationship with employers.
Yeah, that's right.
And one of the really fascinating findings is we have a parallel program that looks a little bit more like a European program, this disaster loan program, where instead of going through banks, you are able to go directly to the government.
And interestingly, in that program, there's no racism.
What's fascinating to think about is on the one hand, you want to inject smartness into a system because I think in particular looking back, if you then feel the wrong people got support, we gave a lot of money to people who didn't really need it.
I think that undermines the ability to do big programs in the future.
I think it's a very good idea to care about that.
But the banking sector in the US is just troubled because they're making loan decisions based on factors that even if you're the smart businessman, even if you go in and you say, it's a very special time, but I still don't think that everybody should get a loan.
The way these loans get allocated is just not right.
Yeah. It's a great example of even within the US, we had these waves of basically these PPP loans and the latter waves had targeting.
You had to show that your revenues had decreased.
For example, it seems like a simple thing, but you didn't have to show that for the first couple of waves of the PPP loan.
And then you of course had a much more purposeful attitude towards helping disadvantaged communities in those latter waves and that purposefulness pays off.
It turns out, right?
So if you're conscious about it and you care about it, you can achieve something.
Is your sense that we can take away lessons about better ways to help more generally?
So now of course, it was a special time because we all went through a difficult time at one at the same time, but you could easily extend it to say an industry that is in trouble or a region that is in trouble.
So should we think that PPP or the disaster loan or the European model of supporting furloughed workers, are there lessons here for the long run?
Should we be more activist for many of the changes where we don't really know, do they persist, do they not persist?
Well, I think for sure we need a better infrastructure for distributing aid quickly.
And I think it's clear that we probably want that infrastructure to avoid some of the biases that you're talking about to allow for targeting in a more substantial way.
Because ultimately if you don't target, it's just very, very sloppy.
And you really want to just change that trade off between timeliness and targeting.
So you want to be fast and you want to be targeted.
And the only way to do that is to have capacities that are not statewide, that are more national and that are in place.
Because you remember April of 2020.
I mean, it was bonkers.
Yeah, it was scary.
And so you distributed the $800 billion very, very quickly, but in a problematic way.
It's actually interesting because the unemployment insurance and the stimulus checks are better targeted in a way.
Are better targeted in a way.
So they show up in the bottom four quartiles in a way that the PPP loans don't show up, ultimately for incidents.
But the PPP loans are what keeps business able to get through and prevents failure and prevents job losses.
So the targeting is good on the stimulus checks and on the unemployment insurance in the sense that you're getting to people who need the money.
Who really need it.
But they don't help preserve the infrastructure of commerce.
There's a fascinating simulation that researchers have done for the UK where they looked at what if they had a universal basic income?
Who will be better off?
Who will be worse off?
And in a way it speaks to this targeting question in a really interesting way.
So you see the people who are hardest hit by the pandemic, they are better off under a more targeted approach.
Not surprisingly, but then universal basic income helps many groups that actually sort of got left by the wayside because we were worried about commerce and we were worried about individuals who had lost their jobs.
So for instance, no earners don't really get help.
The elderly don't really get help.
The disabled don't really get help.
And so they paint a very interesting picture where you say yes.
So you could have universal basic income.
It would probably be a little more expensive than what we did during the pandemic.
But at the same time, there's big redistributive effects where the targeting is easier the way we did it.
But the general inclusiveness is better under a universal basic income.
And maybe the truth is combining some of these measures where you have something relatively modest in the background so no one's life can be completely derailed irrespective of what happens and then do really careful targeting on top of that.
I think that's exactly right.
I mean, I think what strikes me about all this is it's part of a broader debate about the role of the state and the degree to which resources should be allocated broadly or narrowly.
And I confess, I like targeting.
I like getting more resources to fewer people rather than less resources to a lot of people.
That's just my instinct all the way.
Preserving the sense of fairness is so important.
Because otherwise, you can just imagine the newspaper story that says, oh, billionaire x got COVID support.
And you know what? And what's particularly interesting about the PPP research is this is now an instance where the government has done a better job than the private sector.
Where some of the inequities that are just tolerated, it seems in the financial sector, actually the government did an amazing job.
That third wave of PPP was supposed to be minority -directed.
And sure enough, that's where the loans went.
To me, targeting is one lesson, but also both the necessity and our ability to respond in just amazing ways.
If you had asked me prior to the pandemic, say, okay, we're going to spend billions and billions of dollars making sure that people's incomes are relatively stable.
I would have said, well, I'm not sure.
Like, can we just do that?
Think back about our experience over the last 20 years or so, every 10 years, roughly.
We have a really serious meltdown in the economy.
My expectation is one of the things that will have changed is this notion of, oh, you know, recessions, there isn't that much you can do, or, you know, a trade war, or, you know, there's an industry in deep trouble, there's not much we can do.
I think that's going to be much harder to argue from here on out because you had this instance where you showed, if you really want, you can move mountains.
You can move mountains, exactly right.
And without the urgency of that moment, can you foster the change?
Yeah, what if the urgency is just in one state?
Or what if the urgency is just one group?
Then of course, we're back to what's the level of solidarity in the country?
And can we sort of have an implicit pact that everybody can feel safer because we agree with one another that if someone desperately needs help, a group, a country, a particular region, we will be there to help.
Yeah, I got to say that.
It's harder to imagine us getting there.
One of the disappointments of the pandemic, oddly enough, has been that in a way, it didn't unify us in the way that it could have.
Yeah, true. Which is we could have come out of this in a very different way.
And I think it was true in 9 -11.
There were like three and a half days where there was solidarity, everyone came together and then fell apart very quickly.
And of course, that's because of deep -seated, more secular things that are going on in the world, I understand.
But it has been disappointing to see the degree to which it didn't yield the moments that early on, you could see.
And they just didn't last.
So, we hear the future of transportation.
What do you have for us?
Well, now that we're hopefully opening up again, we're going to be moving around again, I want to just think about the future of mobility.
And I think there are some new things that are happening that are really fascinating.
I have a couple and let's just talk about them.
And they're kind of weird.
The first is air taxis.
And actually a couple of years ago, I mentioned on this podcast, a little company called Lilium, but these things are taking off.
They're known as E -V -T -O -L.
Technically, they're known as electric vertical take -off and landing devices.
So these are all electric devices that are really air taxis and they go up and down and then they travel.
And there are a couple of companies doing them now.
It's a proven technology at this point.
Jovi is one example, Lilium is another.
And the promise of these air taxis is first, way better from an environmental perspective than helicopters.
Way better than even electric cars because they can seat more people.
And you can effectively transport yourself as a bird flies in fractions of the time it takes to cross towns and even go between some metro areas.
And so, they are real and they're coming and now there are deals.
So for example, Jovi's announced something with ANA, all Nippon Airlines in Japan.
They've announced something with SK in South Korea to really start developing these networks.
And so, I think this is no longer some Jetsons thing 50 years away.
This is now in the next five years we're going to see air taxis popping up in all kinds of cities.
And the economics are not that bad.
So let's put it that way, which is, units can cost from one to three million.
But the way you really want to think about this is, how much does it take to travel mile?
And roughly now they're coming in pretty close to where black car services are.
Oh, really? So for the same...
We're going to be able to get very quickly to kind of where black car services are.
And that's really exciting.
And the key pain point is, where do you build the landing station?
So this is not going to be door to door.
For example, you go to Grand Central Terminal and on the roof of Grand Central Terminal, you take an air taxi and then you hop on the subway in New York or some other place.
And then that really creates lots of time savings, lots of energy efficiency.
And it's a whole new world.
So I am so excited about air taxis.
So how many people can be in an air taxi?
So right now the numbers are relatively small.
So we're talking about five or six people in some of the devices that we've seen.
Like a mini bus? Yeah, like a mini bus.
Exactly right. And that is important for the economics.
Some of the calculations are fascinating, right?
So you think about an airplane, let's say $300 million for a wide body jet.
You get it for 30 years.
You're able to fly 200 people at some yield and you're doing it like 12 hours a day.
And that's what gets the cost down.
The problem is you need to do this for five or six people with vehicles that may not last quite as long.
And then how do you get the costs down with that?
But at five or six people, they're projecting costs per mile that are approximately what are right now kind of black car services.
I mean, that alone is fascinating.
That's a special market to begin with, but at least you can see how it's competitive.
So I can well imagine if there's like two of those things on the roof of some train station.
What about a hundred?
What about a thousand?
What's the congestion nature of air taxis?
Well, that's right.
And this relates to drones, of course, as well.
So the way we have to move forward is for organizations like the FAA to become active and to become regulating airspace in a much more serious way.
Now, of course they do that with helicopters.
They do that with lots of aerial devices today, but now we're going to be expanding that.
And one of the interesting things about it from a safety perspective also is these air taxis tend to have eight rotors.
And so any independent rotor can go down and it is not a disaster.
In addition, obviously the energy savings are really fantastic.
So yeah, so that's my pick as something that is not futuristic.
What's your first one on the mobility space?
So I have a story around trucking and everybody's talking about how we cannot find truckers.
So basically the average driver drives about a year and then you're lonely, you're tired, you never really know where you're going to sleep.
It is just a really, really tough life to lead.
It's really the long haul.
It's the long haul that is just like really, really tough.
You have roughly five times a higher probability of dying on the job than the average worker.
So it's dangerous. It's lonely.
It's not what anyone wants to do.
Now, Aynride, a Swedish company, you are a truck driver.
And in the morning you go to your office and you sit in a comfortable office chair and you remote drive a truck.
So they have these pods.
And one thing that's really interesting is the pods don't even have a front cabin.
Even if you wanted a driver, there's nowhere where the driver can sit.
But you have a big screen ahead of you and they're mostly electric at this point.
So for climate reasons, that's really good.
They're remote controlled, but you constantly have someone looking over the shoulder of what the semi -autonomous vehicle does.
And I think it's revolutionary and interesting.
They have just expanded to the United States.
They have a collaboration with Bridgestone where they use these smart tires that collect a lot of data and give a lot of feedback about the vehicle also.
And I think it's amazing on two fronts.
One is it really solves that job problem.
Even if the results turn out not to be as great as they look right now, you will have created a new type of job that is so much better than the type of job that we have.
The reason I love this is it's somewhere in between fully autonomous and current today.
Oh yes, yeah. But which is it closer to?
So is it basically that you have somebody who is fully simulated what they would be doing in a truck that is fully self -controlled?
Or are they getting some benefits of autonomous technology that they're feeding into their processes as well?
Yeah, this is the other really fascinating development.
So how far along you are is measured in these levels.
So level five is fully autonomous, there's no human involvement.
The sense that the A &Rite people have is we are a million miles away from that.
And that actually may never ever happen.
Level four is just a notch below.
And there it's sort of like what you see when Uber has its fully autonomous cars, but there's someone in the driver's seat.
So that when things go wrong, there's human intervention.
As it should be. Yeah, A &Rite trucks are close to that.
Right. But they're remote.
They're remote. Yeah, that's the beautiful thing.
And it's almost like a gaming studio where you have a gigantic screen where you have all these cameras in the truck.
You see the road. You see when someone crosses.
And you don't have to do that much intervention because the vehicle is a smart vehicle and it knows when to stop and it knows when to turn.
But you go anything wrong.
The human is always there.
I mean, in a way, you think about a pilot simulator or a space simulator, right?
I mean, it's exactly the same.
It's exactly the same.
I was so excited about, oh my God, it's such a great idea.
Because it's not only technology -focused.
If you look at the other things that A &Rite does, it's very ambitious about how it collects data and how it optimizes routes and all of those kinds of things.
But at the core, to me, what I found so interesting is that it solves this very human problem.
Exactly. That we have a type of job that is just really tough to do.
That's fantastic. All right, so I got one that is not so altruistic.
It is interesting nonetheless, which is there's a company called Arrow that, in the interest of all disclosure, is run by a former student who I really think is fantastic, Uma Suburbanyan.
She's like an aerospace engineer from Michigan.
She came to HBS and now she's running this company called Arrow.
And so she is going after the sweet spot between first -class travel and private charter jets.
She is operating Arrow between pretty selective destinations.
Think London to Milan, LA to Aspen, and she's charging, let's say, $1 ,200, $1 ,500.
One way. So she's kind of coming in closer to the first -class flight, but they're basically chartered flights where you get to pick a seat.
And the neat thing about what she's doing is, first, she's buying up Embraer jets for cheap and retrofitting them.
So there's like an asset acquisition place.
It's not fractional jet ownership.
It is not fractional jet ownership.
That's like the net jets thing.
That's fractional jet ownership.
This is really in that sweet spot.
So you're going to buy a ticket from London to Milan for fashion week and it's going to cost you 1 ,200 pounds and you're going to go one way and you're going to go to private terminal.
You're going to get dropped off at Nlinate and there's going to be lots of first -class service all around it, but it's operating right in between.
I want to be able to buy a ticket at the last minute on this route, just through a service and basically private plane experience.
So how many people in a plane?
So these regional jets, which would normally take 30 to 40 people, have been retrofitted to take 15.
So very luxurious inside.
And in fact, the design is spectacular.
So she's like really done it well.
And then the routes are kind of what you'd expect, London, Aspen, Jackson Hole.
So this is not a mass product.
But it's really fun to see somebody innovating in this space and think in part also, there's like a finance angle to this, which is buying jets cheap.
Yeah, I was just going to say that the spare capacity...
That is now in the market, right?
So she's capitalizing on that.
So they've raised maybe 50, 60 million dollars and they have really, really big plans.
And they've just opened up in Europe.
So I love the idea of seeing innovation in the aviation sector, because for many of us aviation is fun.
It's like so much fun to look at, right?
But she's got a real business.
It's not like a dreamy thing.
So I'm looking forward to seeing what she does.
This is just as a little aside, but someone else thinking about spare capacity, this is a concept by Toyota and they're thinking about, once we have autonomous vehicles, if ever that happens, obviously they're going to be not used.
They're going to be idle for long periods of time.
So they have this vehicle.
It's a little bigger than a minivan and it turns into a store.
So... Like a pop -up?
Yeah, like a pop -up store.
Right. And it's like the same idea.
We're creating new modes of transportation and in part it's built on this idea of how can we use capacity in smarter ways than we have in the past.
Oh, that's great. That's great.
What else do you got?
So shipping I think is totally fascinating.
Yeah, totally fascinating to see.
One of the big challenges is climate change.
Obviously they're using diesel.
They're about as important for climate change as the airlines business.
I mean, it's really substantial because so much of global traffic is transported by these big ships and they all use diesel.
And there's like two waves of technology that you see.
The initial response, how they got to be more environmentally friendly was interestingly to just drive much more slowly.
Okay. So they've reduced carbon output by roughly 30 % and it's really just the speed of the ships, which of course is costly for many other reasons.
And then you see what's the next wave of alternative fuels.
And there lots of experimentation.
For instance, Shell has largely bet on liquefied natural gas.
Yeah. And that's of course better than diesel, but from a climate change perspective also not that great.
Marisk, the big ship operator, they're very active of thinking about hydrogen.
And maybe that won't work.
It's complicated. And then even Hortigrutten, like this Norwegian cruise ship company.
Wait, can you say that again?
Because I just love the way you said it.
My Norwegian is really amazing.
Hortigrutten. Oh my God.
Peter that was fantastic.
Was that fantastic or what?
So they're experimenting with batteries in biofuel.
And then in biofuel, we're thinking, oh my God, if everybody does that, it might drive up food prices.
And so everything has like really steep trade -offs, but the space of experimentation is actually quite amazing.
And then what I love is already out there, you see the next generation of what we might be able to do.
And the thing that really caught my eye was something called super cavitation.
Well, that sounds disturbingly like Hortigrutten.
It's not a Norwegian idea.
Okay, sorry. It's like super simple.
So the faster the ship goes, the more draft you have.
And as a result, you can't really go all that fast.
And super cavitation is the idea that you essentially have a layer of gas bubbles around the object that's in the water.
And it comes out of the military, but there's now a company, Juliet Marine Systems, and they've actually built a ship that is built on these principles.
The ship is still for military use, but you can easily imagine how from military use it will then go to more civilian use.
And what it does is create some kind of a bubble around the ship so that you use less energy to propel it forward.
Is that the idea? Yeah, so it reduces friction about 900 times.
So it's basically you're gliding through the water.
As opposed to fighting against the resistance of the water.
And that makes a dramatic difference for energy efficiency, speed, many of the trade -offs that you see today that are really hard to make, they would essentially go away.
That is not tomorrow, but sort of as a vision of what shipping might look like in say maybe 10, 15 years or so, I found that totally fascinating.
That's great. I'm glad we did this mobility segment because like as we're opening up, thinking about moving around is so exciting.
It's really exciting.
I feel like I have my mobility question I want to ask you.
Okay. Which is, why aren't there more moving sidewalks outside?
Have you ever been in Hong Kong?
Yeah. Like central, mid -level, there's a huge like chain of escalators, moving sidewalks basically.
I love that. Yeah. I feel like the people at Otis or like whoever makes moving sidewalks should like make that a market.
Like why don't we see more of that and higher speed ones to like allow for more sidewalk movement.
Like, you know, so is that crazy stupid?
No, I don't think it is at all.
My first thought when I hear this is the main escalator when you go to South Station, the Amtrak station here in Boston, that escalator has been broken for half a decade.
Yeah. We can't seem to fix it.
And so I have some natural hesitation.
Can we really do it if we can't fix an escalator?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
The technology has basically been the same for like 50 years.
Yes. Like nothing has changed.
Or like seemingly nothing has changed.
There's like a few high speed ones in Toronto at the Pearson Airport that have a relatively high speed one.
But like this is the same technology for 50 years.
I just feel like we should be innovating more with it and we should be deploying it in more places.
Yes, exactly. Excellent.
All right, Felix, recommendations.
Yes. What have you got?
So my recommendation is a little related to transportation.
It's a book called The Anomaly by a French author, and it's such a wonderful read.
It won a really big literature prize in France.
But also and surprisingly, because these two things don't always go together in France, it was immensely popular.
It took surprisingly long to have it translated into English, but it's now available.
And it centers around a mysterious flight.
You meet different people under different circumstances.
And the one thing that they have in common is they were all on this flight.
The way it develops and the way it's written, you don't always know like, am I reading a philosophy book?
Am I reading a thing about what is really real and what is imagined?
And it's all of these things at the same time.
And on top of it, it's really funny.
Oh, that's great. Book itself appears in the book.
People in the book read the book.
Are reading the book.
Are reading the book.
So meta. Wait, so the name again is?
So The Anomaly is the title of the book.
Oh, that sounds fantastic.
So I have five. No, Felix.
I'm going to just go for a quick shout out and a recommendation.
So the shout out is to somebody who we've been kind of hating on.
In the last couple of episodes, we did a little hate on Twitter.
Oh. But the new CEO, Prag Agarwal, has recently announced publicly that he's taking paternity leave.
And this is kind of a big deal for the CEO of a tech company to take paternity leave.
And in particular, you might recall that one of the founders of Palantir three months ago said, any man who takes paternity leave who has a serious job as a loser, basically.
Yeah. And I just think it's great that Prag Agarwal has decided publicly to take paternity leave.
The consequences of that for the role of women in society, the way children are brought up, all kinds of things in the workplace is just enormous.
So that's my shout out to him.
And then my recommendation is an author, Katherine Schultz, who had a book a couple of years ago called Being Wrong, which was really lovely, all about why it's so hard to realize you're wrong.
Yeah. But the more recent book is called Lost and Found.
And in the course of around two years, she loses her father and she finds love.
So the lost and the found of life, you lose and you find.
Oh, nice. And it's about her relationship with her father, which is very touching as somebody who had a very loving father and who has children.
It's just a beautiful meditation on fatherhood and what it means.
That sounds fantastic.
But she also has perfected this very high -minded self -help kind of thing.
Self -help is such a weird genre.
A lot of it is just so schlocky and horrible.
But there are real problems.
We can all benefit from advice.
And see what has worked for others.
And thoughtful ways to think about the world.
I don't know, I feel like she's perfected this super high -minded, lovely literary way to help us think about loss.
Self -help is one of these genres that just constantly underperforms.
You would think it's so valuable to learn from what others have done, what worked for them.
And then somehow, it always ends up being very formulating.
Exactly. So like, oh, well, that's the problem, right?
Because then it's like, these are the five things you need to do to be happy.
Yeah, exactly. It always comes with a list.
Oh God, please. And that's what's nice, which is, this is like the highbrow version of that.
And super thoughtful, no easy answers.
But just hearing how she got through these things is fantastic.
So Catherine Schulz, lost and found.
That's my recommendation.
Excellent. We're out of time.
Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from the TEDD Audio Collective.
And I'll see you next time.
