Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Rebecca.
And I'm me here. I have some advice that I wanted to ask for.
I'm in between books.
I'm looking for the next thing to read.
How do you do that?
Where do you find inspiration?
Which one to pick? What to read next?
So first, Felix, is it really true you don't have a bookcase full of books you bought because you love the titles and you've never gotten around to reading them?
I mean, is that really the case?
You've read everything?
Yes. Usually I bought five at one point in time.
But this time it's really true.
I finished the last one I hadn't read and I'm looking for something new.
And you're not a big fan of book reviews.
You know, one thing that makes me nervous about book reviews is when they tell you the story.
I always read film reviews after I see the movie because I'm always so afraid, oh, they're going to give away.
So I confess I'm a huge book review fan and book review podcast fan.
And I do think, though Felix like you, I do wonder if it actually suppresses me buying the book or inspires me to buy books.
Right. Because you do end up getting a lot of the book content in that process.
Yes. But I have found recently that there's this wonderful friend.
I don't know if you know her, Yang Mi Moon.
In fact, on this podcast recommended Clara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Yes. And I went out and I got it and I got to tell you, it's great.
Yeah. It got amazing reviews I saw.
I look at the number of stars.
Exactly. Increasingly like I go to friends and want to hear what they have to say and I can vouch for that recommendation for sure.
So that's what I'll do.
I'll ask my friends, including the two friends here in the podcast.
I have actually sent out emails to friends saying I'm out of books.
What's on the list?
And did it work? It works great if you choose the right friends.
Which is the story more generally, Rebecca.
Well, yes. And of course, we brought topics.
Rebecca, what do you have for us?
I want to talk about a union election in Alabama.
Oh, the Amazon story.
The first time that Amazon has faced a union election and that they won.
I think that's just really interesting.
Yeah, that's great.
I'd like to talk about something considerably more frivolous, which is Substack.
I think in a previous episode, I think both you, Felix and Youngmi, made fun of me and taunted me with the threat of starting a Substack called 5A12.
So I thought we should dig into this whole Substack phenomenon and see what it's all about.
And actually, Rawi is going to come back at the very end for a tiny little segment with Rebecca and me where we can address some feedback that we got about our episode last week.
So we'll tag that on at the end as well.
Okay, fantastic. Let's do it.
So, Mihir, you wanted to talk about Substack.
Yeah. So Substack is this startup, which has just garnered an enormous amount of attention, very frothy evaluation, and is really transforming and taking the media world by storm.
So what is it? It's effectively a newsletter service.
And so who knew newsletters could be so sexy and interesting, but it effectively enables you to start a newsletter and have people pay for that newsletter.
And then they take a 10 % cut, roughly speaking.
But in that process, what they've done is start to attract a lot of very talented writers who are now leaving traditional media organizations and joining Substack and effectively going out on their own.
So you could, for example, sign up to, let's say, Felix's Substack on Tuba, Polkas, and on whatever Felix would like to opine on, pay $50, $60 a year.
Substack takes a cut, and then Felix makes a living.
And so the question is, is this the future of media, or is this just like some weird retro blogging thing?
Is this Patreon for nerds?
What do you make of Substack?
I'm in the flash in the pan, oh my goodness, the venture capital world has too much money right now.
Let's just start with the basic business model.
So you go to Substack, and there's approximately a million people that you could subscribe to.
And so how has it solved the problem of reaching the audience?
So that's the first problem.
And when you read the articles about it, it says basically this is a really easy mass emailing service.
Okay, well then why is it worth nearly $800 million?
Because sooner or later someone else is going to come along and say, you know, you want me to manage your email list and send out your stuff?
I can do that. And in fact, Rebecca, there are these rivals now, like Ghost and others, who are kind of providing similar services at a much less cost.
And Twitter made an acquisition, Facebook is of course planning a clone.
Everybody all of a sudden seems to be into platforms for newsletters.
But your question is not, is this a good business model for Substack?
The question you're really interested in is, will this change how we will consume media?
Exactly. And that seems a much harder question.
So I do think it's interesting how Substack, at least for the time being, is really in the writer's corner.
For instance, you own your email list and you can take your email list.
This is very different from, say, being a merchant on Amazon Marketplace, where the relationship with the customer is owned by the marketplace, is not owned by the individual who's selling.
And so in that sense, it feels like a direct -to -consumer version that now happens to media.
And as always, in these models, there are a few stars.
And the few stars will be highly visible, super successful.
They can make a good living.
Some of them have now started to hire their own copy editor.
Some of them start hiring researchers.
In essence, reinventing a little bit of a newsroom at a much smaller scale.
So I know I subscribe to a few newsletters.
And I find the consistency quite interesting in the following sense.
When I read the paper, by and large, I don't pay much attention to who's writing.
The opinion columns, I think, are different.
But outside the opinion columns, if you ask me after I read an article, I rarely know who's written it.
And there's something about getting to know a particular person's take on issues.
What's fascinating is you get to see the nuances in the argument over time.
And that's a little different from consuming just news.
So I can see newsletters as a product that is differentiated enough from, say, sort of the general news media.
Yeah. And I mean, in a way, it's kind of poaching the talent inside these larger media organizations that can sustain these kinds of followings, Felix, right?
So I mean, the model becomes you grow a following at the New York Times or wherever, and then you, for lack of a better term, graduate into a sub -stack provider.
And that seems like an interesting way to think about it.
The question is, what happens to the nature of the content?
Because when you're writing for a general interest publication and you're trying to reach lots of people with your ideas, that's one thing.
But Felix, you described the positive version, which is you get to get to know an author and you get to know how they think.
And that seems interesting and fun.
But it also means that they are narrow casting more than they might otherwise.
They might be not really catering to broader tastes.
And then it feels like things could go tunnel vision kind of really fast.
You know, I have another worry about content, which I think may be related to that, which is when you go out on your own, what kind of content can you produce?
When you lose the resources of the New York Times or some other platform, are you endlessly recycling opinion?
Is that a dead end?
Does it run out in a couple of years?
Yeah, I find the diversity of these approaches most fascinating.
So on the one hand, I'm thinking about a radical model like The Economist, where you don't have buy lines.
Right. Now their writers become much more visible because they have social media accounts.
And so the old model doesn't work quite as well.
But one of the benefits was that they had a tradition of moving around their journalists in really almost unpredictable ways.
And the idea was, if you know nothing about technology, and I send you to cover Silicon Valley, you're going to ask the kinds of questions that are most interesting to people who don't know much about technology.
You'll see things from a different unexpected angle.
You'll be good at summarizing insights because you're learning yourself and you're basically passing on that learning.
And then you have like all the way at the other end, the really big newsrooms that have someone who covered technology for the past 50 years.
And you know everyone in the valley and you have covered every trend that ever existed.
And my sense is that the sub -stack population comes from that second pool.
Yes. And I don't know your taste, but I can only subscribe to very few newsletters anyway because there are not that many topics that I'm so interested in that I want to read about them every single day.
I mean, so you're raising several issues.
It seems like first is what's the real depth of this market, Felix?
That's your last point, right?
Which is how many sub -stacks is anybody going to subscribe to and how big does this get?
So what would you do if you were The New York Times?
They, for example, I think took back Paul Krugman's sub -stack and they tried to put it back inside The New York Times.
Is that how you would respond or would you try to lure people back with money or would you say, look, this is all going to shake out and it's really not a big deal at all?
So one of the things that I would do is if you're worried about the star power of your best riders, I think you increase the number of riders, right?
And you've seen this a little bit in The New York Times.
Yes, that's right. Opinion pages used to be very concentrated with just a few names.
That's right. And now I don't even really know, maybe there's a dozen people riding and then there's guest riders, which I think one benefit is just greater diversity, which is fantastic.
But it's got to be also the case that it reduces the bargaining power of each of these individuals.
You know, I've never thought about that, Felix.
I've noticed that they've increased the numbers, but you're absolutely right.
That changes the dynamics.
And now, you know, you're still Paul Krugman, but you're a little less special.
We maybe wait a little less.
And so that's one response that I would think about.
And then, of course, what I find so interesting is on the sub stack side, you now see that some riders have gotten together and they create many bundles of subscriptions, essentially reinventing what we have in the more traditional media escape.
So I think what it says is there is a narrow space for highly specialized newsletters.
But the moment you're starting to think about growing and growth, the current media model is probably not so terribly off.
So, Rebecca, where do you think all this goes?
I think it might go to a much more fragmented media marketplace with much smaller suppliers with better search tools.
This ties us back, Felix.
You ask, how do I know what book to read next?
Who should I be reading?
And in principle, the techniques of AI could give us a much better read on who you're going to find interesting, given what you've been focused on this week.
And so the whole media market, instead of being, you know, Fox or New York Times or Vox or BuzzFeed, could be just much more fragmented.
And individual writers could be much more creative, particularly if they form themselves into these small units.
I mean, I could really see sharing the load, bringing in research support, but it's at a much smaller scale, much more focused, much more agile.
And that in a way is a little bit attention with how substack has positioned itself.
I think some of the prominent writers got legal protection.
So if you get sued over describing a company, I think substack will help you out.
But generally speaking, the platform wants to be a platform, doesn't want to be a media business.
That's sort of a platform in an old -fashioned sense.
But I think, Rebecca, you're exactly right.
If anyone's going to do that, say, use AI to point you to the kinds of things that you might love.
It's probably the Twitters, the Facebooks, the more integrated media companies.
And that might give us interesting competition in the newsletter space.
Do I really want sort of the bare bones where I happen to discover someone versus a much more integrated, curated experience that then, of course, probably starts feeling like I'm back to reading newspapers.
Exactly. And we've gone full circle.
I mean, Felix, this reminds me of conversations we've had in the past of unbundling and rebundling.
You know, it's just true.
The Spotify conversation was sort of like the same.
Exactly. And so where does it end?
Is it just a cycle?
Another interesting dimension to follow is, if technology changes in a way that really micropayments become very common, then you might actually see the unbundling of a newsletter.
Where, why would I want to have a subscription if I can just look at what did you write about this week?
And if I like it, I'll pay 63 cents.
And if I don't like it, I'll go to the next block.
Whether really the newsletter is the product or whether we get a particular issue of a newsletter that is the product.
Same, of course, for traditional media.
Is there something magical about the bundle of the paper or is it really the individual article that I want?
So as transactions cost of consumption and payment fall, I would not be surprised if we had a far less bundled media landscape than we have today.
And is what's happening to movies suggestive that you're right?
Because now we can buy things in much smaller chunks, right?
It's much cheaper. I'm just buying one evening watching this one movie.
This is like the $3 rental on Amazon Prime.
Exactly. Exactly. And we've seen a proliferation of alternative bundles.
Is that your dynamic at work?
I hadn't really thought about that, but it strikes me as exactly right.
That sort of instantaneous consumption of something I really like in the moment.
No commitment, really.
That might be where we end up.
I'm totally transfixed by this idea of micropayments and articles.
I mean, how many times have I hit a paywall for a publication where I do want to read the article?
But I don't. I mean, you know, I'm sorry, so LA Times, I will hit the paywall and I'll be like, well, am I going to subscribe to the LA Times?
And the answer is no, I'm not going to subscribe to the LA Times.
But would I pay 80 cents or a dollar to read this article and keep it?
Yeah. And if it was easy, frankly, easy to pay and I didn't try to share a lot of information, that's fascinating to me, Felix, which is why don't the traditional media companies go that way?
Are they so worried that unbundling is just too deleterious to their business model?
Because I would love it.
LA Times, there's some article about the entertainment industry I want to read.
I'll pay the 80 cents, but I don't know if it adds up on their side.
Subscription revenue because it's upfront cash.
It's just, I mean, you're the finance guy.
That is so addictive.
Really hard to break away from.
I think you're super nervous moving.
I think in a world where you knew this is just cream on top.
Yes. I would love it.
Exactly. But like, how do I know you're the guy who would never subscribe to the LA Times, as opposed to you were so close to getting that annual subscription and now you're giving me 47 cents.
Yeah, I would have thought even the business publications like the FT would do this a little bit more because you have high willingness to pay and people might be willing to pay for one off articles.
And the key of course, is making it, as you point out me here, the key really is to make it just so seamless.
So simple. We even see in e -commerce, 80 % of the products that people put in baskets, they don't check out.
Why is that? Oh, you make me type in my shipping address one more time.
Exactly. You make me give my credit card number, which by the way I know by heart, but still, I don't want to type it and so on.
So like the tiniest disturbances really make a dramatic difference.
And especially with content, because it can be a fleeting desire, right?
It can be, I want to read this article now, but I'm not going to read it potentially later.
Okay, so let's get to the substance of this, which is when do we start our sub stack?
I'll let you go first.
And then once I see the advance that you negotiate, I might.
All right. Fantastic.
Well, we'll see how this all shakes out.
Rebecca, I'll talk about Unions.
So I want to talk about Amazon and its unions.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Amazon won a union election in Alabama, and this was an election which got so much attention.
I mean, it's hard to describe.
We had the president talking about it.
We had, you know, primetime TV about why unions are so important and so on and all this huge fuss.
And then big anticlimax, Amazon won.
No union. So in one sense, I can perfectly understand why Amazon would be a target.
So, you know, you see union memberships fall over time.
I think we're now roughly at 10 % or so.
And of course, if you win one of these big battles where Amazon is the second largest employer in the country, if you make inroads in that domain, that's got to be super attractive.
There's something interesting about the timing in that some of the workplace complaints related to COVID -19 protections for workers.
You know, took Amazon, I think, like many companies a little while to figure out how to keep people safe.
And there's certainly room for debate how they did that.
There's also this interesting argument around businesses wealth and just how incredibly rich one of the principal owners of Amazon is, which I think probably plays well politically.
It did surprise me in the sense that I would have thought at a time when income inequality is on so many people's minds, that you would pick a company that squeeze workers everywhere you can.
And Amazon, you might remember, put pressure on Walmart, in fact, because they moved to $15 starting pay.
In Alabama, where the local minimum wage is just over seven bucks.
I mean, the really puzzling thing to me about this, first off, Amazon didn't just win.
They won bigger than two to one.
So this was a fight that the union, as you suggested, Felix would have chosen strategically and Amazon won big.
Now there are some debates about their tactics.
And then the related point, of course, is this comes after decades of decline.
So like the 10 % number you quoted, Felix, is actually pretty inflated because of the public sector, the private sector.
The numbers are staggeringly bad.
So the conundrum to me is there is this rhetoric and belief and debate about income inequality and about the declining power of labor and all of the kind of kindling one would have thought one would have needed to rekindle the union movement is there.
And you have this big evil Amazon company that everyone loves and hates and yet it failed.
And I think it's worth just stepping back and asking if you're in the union movement, you have to ask like this bigger question of either unions are so handicapped and corporations have so captured the political process that unions have no chance because it's so unfair.
Or you have to start to say to yourself, we're doing something wrong.
Like it is just so hard to avoid one of those two conclusions.
Either the system is totally rigged against unions and it's just unfair.
Or you really got to think hard about your message.
I stumbled onto a couple of websites, which are about how to avoid having your workforce unionized.
And essentially they say, treat your people really well.
Surprise. Surprise.
Treat them like human beings.
That's the best way to keep a union out of your plant.
And so part of me thinks like maybe that's what's going on when Amazon was talking to its workers.
It was saying, look, you've got 15 bucks.
You've got health benefits.
You've got tuition benefits.
That's way better than many, many jobs in Alabama.
Maybe at root it's that and this is to your point.
Many people can't yet see what a union would do for them.
When I think about what kinds of benefits we want from better worker representation, many of the answers that I come to.
So let's think about income inequality.
Let's think about really mundane things like meal breaks that are often contentious in companies that are as efficiency driven as Amazon.
In both of these cases, I would say, if you want to do something about income inequality, if you want to support low income workers, probably the right arena is politics.
Now that we have this really big push to adopt local minimum wages city by city by city, reflecting local conditions.
That is just so much more effective than trying to move every single business in a particular political jurisdiction.
Meal breaks, there are no rules in Alabama, but California, Connecticut, many states have rules.
If you work this and this many hours, you're given this and this much of a meal break.
And then there's rules around is it paid?
Is it not paid? The last thing I want is an even tighter connection between benefits generally speaking and the employer.
So it's already terrible enough that we get health care from our employers.
I love the idea of having a strong social safety net.
I don't want it tied to being an employee at a particular company because the moment you lose your job, you lose everything else that really matters at that point in time.
And so the way I think about it, relative to local politics, unions are just not that competitive in getting workers what they need.
So Felix, I might just be stuck in the history.
One of the drivers of political change has been a strong union sector.
Right. Because it mobilizes people, it puts people out onto the streets.
That historically was where a lot of left wing progressive politics came from, was from strong local union.
There is a totally fascinating study out of MIT and Columbia about what workers who are currently not unionized, what they would expect and what they would like about unions.
And one of the things you see is the idea of collective bargaining is actually still very popular.
That's like at the top of their list.
The moment you hit any sort of element of electoral politics where unions obviously play a big role, you get no support whatsoever.
And in that particular piece of research, there was literally no difference between workers who were Republican and workers who were Democrat in how they thought about unions.
So it's almost as if the value of unions still exists, but it's least convincing in the political sense that you just alluded to Rebecca.
And so that just seems historically super important, but doesn't really resonate with workers today.
But that means that's a huge box that unions find themselves in.
And how do you get out of that box?
You're suggesting, which is a box of, well, in order to effectuate the change I want to effectuate, I need to be politically active and potentially party aligned.
And yet my constituents may want that less and less and less.
But what makes me hopeful is for many of the kinds of protections that we think are really essential, we have so much electoral support.
Say for things like should people have access to affordable health insurance?
There's a debate in politics.
There's not really a debate among the voters.
Are current minimum wage protections insufficient?
That's not really a debate in many cities.
And so you do see city councils adopting these protections even though the need alignment with one of the two parties is often broken.
So let's focus in on some of the business implications here.
Okay. So I'm hearing if I'm a business owner, I'm in good shape.
I can fight unions.
My favorite way of fighting unions, as you would guess, is pay people well, treat them decently.
This is really not a big deal for most firms, not a present threat.
I mean, I think all the data is consistent with that.
The data is consistent with declining appetites.
Even during this last year or two, we've seen declining rates of unionization.
The puzzle to me is how do I deal with the rhetoric about the importance of improving worker conditions in the political space with this declining story?
And Felix, you're suggesting that there are substitutes.
There's no puzzle there.
The locus of these demands has shifted from the union bargaining space to the political theater.
And that's good, maybe.
More transparent. It's more transparent and it could be very positive.
So can I use a word like an organized voice for employees instead of union?
Is it a branding problem?
Is that what you mean?
Well, it's partly a branding problem, but you as an employer are better off if there's some kind of organized way to talk to your workforce.
Yes. Right. And some kind of organized way to make a commitment to the workforce as a whole.
People tend to work more enthusiastically and harder when they feel they have a stake in the enterprise and they're not going to be fired tomorrow.
Right. And that kind of feeling of commitment is easier to build if you've got a relationship with the workforce.
It's not just, yep, you're here, you're gone, you know, move on out.
And the turnover in that Amazon plant was like 50 % or something.
Yeah. So I think we're going to see more pressure for some kind of voice in the workforce, whether it's employees on boards or company sponsored unions.
I know that sounds crazy, but they kind of work in Japan, so maybe they could work here.
But a way to really get a sense of what are you really thinking?
What are you really saying?
What are the collective concerns of the workforce?
What I'm taking away is that whatever we mean by union is changing really fast.
And that one of the things that's happening is we're having a very public conversation about what is the role of collective power among employees and what should it deliver and can it work and is that what people want?
So that's certainly an interesting place to be.
So, Rahi, you're back.
So one of the things that is probably the best thing about this podcast is our listeners.
And we just learn a tremendous amount from them.
And this week, we got some feedback about an episode we did last week about the Georgia voting laws.
And I wanted to share it with everyone and then also give you guys a chance to respond to it.
And the feedback came from a very thoughtful listener who effectively said that they were disappointed in the segment because we really gave insufficient attention to the idea that what is underneath the voting right laws that we talked about is structural racism.
And we equated it with a more generic loss of democracy when it is more pointed than that.
And in that process, by narrowly talking about how corporate CEOs responded to this voting right, we really didn't capture the opportunity to talk about that broader issue.
And I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that.
Rebecca, what do you make of that?
I'm so grateful to this listener for reaching out.
Because I continue to think that broad issue is the suppression of democracy.
But I think we didn't pay sufficient attention to some of the analysis coming out of places like the Brennan Center.
That's pretty clear that the laws in Georgia were specifically targeted to minority voting behavior and particular to black voting behavior.
I think that was really important to the CEOs who made the decision to stand up.
That over the course of the last year, they've made major commitments to civil rights, both within and outside their organizations.
I mean, we're in the middle of the George Floyd trial.
We just saw another black man shot on the streets.
And to see a kind of systematic effort to suppress the black vote feels so much something that we have to step forward on.
And this is one of the things that really drove them to speak out in public.
So I really appreciate the comment.
Yeah. Ravi, what do you think?
I totally agree with that.
And all three of us have been teaching for a long, long time.
And the way we teach is we ask questions.
And it's always a hard thing to figure out.
Did you ask the right question?
And I think we asked ourselves a good question about the role of corporations in particular kinds of politics.
But what I'm reflecting on with regard to the listener who reached out to us, which is such a gift, is like, did we ask all of the right questions, or maybe the bigger question?
And there is a right side of history, wrong side of history element to the bigger question about black Americans and their access to their voting rights.
And maybe we asked ourselves too small a question without thinking about that bigger question.
Yeah. Well, I have to say, I'm deeply grateful to have colleagues as thoughtful as you both, and deeply grateful to get this kind of feedback from our wonderful listeners.
You know, I confess my initial reaction was reflexively defensive, which is, I thought, we should be able to talk about the topic however we want.
But as I've reflected on her thoughts and comments, it seems kind of clear that in some ways it was a missed opportunity.
So I guess in the process of talking about how difficult it is to talk about these issues, we manifested precisely that, which is it is difficult.
But I am grateful for our listeners for giving us that feedback and for the chance to revisit it, kind of briefly with you guys here tonight.
Yeah, I am too. Absolutely.
All right. Good. Thank you, Rawi, for coming back.
My pleasure. All right.
Recommendations, Felix, what you got?
Mine is actually related to the first topic we talked about today.
I have a sub -stack recommendation.
This is a newsletter called Cynicism, and it's written by Bill Bishop.
It's a senior longtime China watcher, very experienced journalist.
If you have a real interest in China, it's the best thing ever.
It's eclectic in that he collects sources and stories.
He's obviously very familiar with China.
He can also give you roughly a sense of what the Chinese conversation is, which is much harder to get.
I love the fact that it's only four newsletters a week.
So it's not like, oh my God, every day I have so much to read or feel so bad that I don't read everything I subscribe to.
But it's a really fantastic source.
And it's one of these good examples of if you have a deep enough interest in a relatively contained topic, the newsletter format can work beautifully.
If I'm not mistaken, it's one of sub -stack's most successful newsletters.
It is? Oh, I didn't even know.
Yeah. It's one of the top rated ones.
It's interesting, right?
Because it's, you're right, it's contained, Felix, but it's also big.
It's also big, right?
I mean, there's lots of people in the world who are super interested in what he's doing, and he's built like a remarkable following in that process.
That's great. I've never subscribed to it, but that's interesting.
Sounds like a hot tip.
Thanks. Yeah, there is a hot tip for you.
What about you, Rebecca?
So I'm going to recommend that we all take up watercoloring.
Watercoloring, painting.
I have taken up watercolor paints.
Now, I know this is kind of a classic thing to do in the pandemic, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway, because it has been so great.
No, it's good. So it happened over the Christmas vacation when I had a week off.
So I thought, well, what am I going to do?
I've always wanted to paint, and I can't handle oil.
So I'm going to paint in watercolors, and I ordered some books, and I watched some videos, and I got the equipment.
And it is the most relaxing, soothing, exciting thing I've done in a long time.
Wow, okay. Every Sunday morning, that's what I do.
I have two hours painting.
Wow. Fantastic. Do you have any artistic history?
Nope. And you didn't ask, but could have asked, do I have any artistic ability?
Nope. This is not one of these hobbies I'm taking up so I can frame the results and give it away as a present.
This is just so much fun.
The colors are so bright.
They mix together. You can produce reasonably looking paint -by -numbers paintings.
They're fantastic books that tell you like, here's what we're going to paint.
Here's what color you do first, then the next color.
That is great. And you come out with something that actually looks quite pretty, and you use your hands, and you use your mind, and it's beautiful, and it's a complete escape that is different from watching a screen.
Wow, that's fantastic.
That's a great recommendation.
What do you have for us?
Me here? I'm still stuck in the world of the screens, Rebecca.
You're more enlightened than I am.
Just desperate, me.
So by way of background, this is going to sound super ridiculous, but 30 years ago there were travel magazines.
One particular one, which at the last page would run a competition where they would show you a photo of a place in the world, and you would write in with what you thought that place was and where it was located.
And I used to love to do that when I was like a teenager.
It was just like the best game in the world.
Anyway, so now we have GeoGesser.
So GeoGesser is just fantastic.
It is something you can access on the computer or via an app, and there are two basic versions of it.
One is Famous Places.
So they will just take a Google screenshot or Google Street view of a famous place, and you have to identify where in the world it is you put a pin on the globe when you figure out where it is.
The more interesting version is where they just literally do Google street view anywhere in the world.
Oh my god. Which it sounds absurd, right?
But it's fantastic.
You look at the roads, you look at the houses, you look at the architecture, you look at the vegetation, and you're like, no, I'm thinking Morocco.
And you find out you're totally wrong, and then it'll tell you how wrong you are.
So you're graded on how many miles off you are, and they have daily puzzles, and you can while away two, three minutes a day.
And nothing more. It's a daily little fix.
Fabulous. Really, really fun thing to do.
So GeoGesser is my pick.
Thank you. So this is it for today.
Thank you, everyone, for listening.
If you thought we sounded really great, as always, that's the wonderful work of our audio engineer, Peter Linne.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
Thanks for watching.
