Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi, everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Mi here.
And I'm Felix. And we are coming to you from three separate locations.
We are practicing physical distance, but not social distance.
Yes, socially close, but physically distant.
And you guys look fantastic on my video.
I'm using that beauty filter.
That's why. It's all in the beautification.
I didn't know there was such a thing.
Didn't you notice the difference in my skin tone?
My skin looks so amazing.
Oh, you're positively glowing.
I thought it was just some Korean face mask you've been using.
Meanwhile, Mi here, you are looming.
You are so tall. You know, I'm nestling my iPhone right on my laptop, and it's making me look like a giant.
Yeah, I agree. I've got to fix this problem.
I feel like a hobbit next to you.
Okay. It's all a matter of perspective.
Okay. So, are you guys ready to get started?
Yeah. Let's do it. So, as you guys know, it's been another tough few days on so many dimensions.
We are at a stage now where the news from around the world on the public health front continues to be very sobering, and the economic news also continues to be extremely grim.
There's been quite a bit of variance in how different governments are responding.
So, here in the U .S., the Fed made another incredibly aggressive move on Monday.
The Financial Times headline was that the Fed has brought out the bazookas, pledging to buy treasuries in unlimited amounts, among other things, to prevent an even worse crisis.
So, Mi here and Felix, very quickly, what's the one thing you think listeners should know about the latest actions from the Fed?
So, the first is we normally just think what a central bank does is reduce interest rates, right?
They've kind of gone past that.
So, the second thing they can do is they can buy a lot of government securities.
Then they went further.
Then they said, we are also going to buy other assets like corporate debt, like commercial mortgages.
And then they said, oh, and by the way, we are now going to actually disintermediate the whole thing and just provide loans directly to borrowers.
So, they have kind of gone all the way from buying government securities to buying corporate debt, to buying commercial mortgages, to now saying, we will be a lender.
And that eclipses anything that happened in the financial crisis.
So, I think there's something to take away is I think it's actually reassuring in the sense that these are absolutely unprecedented, go well beyond 2008, 2009, and I think really actually do address the magnitude of what we're dealing with.
And then I think in addition, when you look at the Fed actions, it's easy to think, oh, this is all directed towards the corporate sector.
But actually, while we don't know the final package quite exactly yet, Congress is well on its way to do a lot for individuals also.
So, there are the direct payments, which now look like they're roughly going to be about $500 billion.
And then we have about $250 billion in expansion of the social safety net.
And I think the combination, if in fact Congress can put the bickering aside and finally move, the combination actually looks really powerful.
Yeah. As Felix mentioned, lawmakers are still haggling over this.
And by the time you're listening to this, hopefully they'll have reached some kind of agreement.
Now, there are so many people who are already, of course, being affected in so many ways by this crisis.
And among them are folks who are very concerned about how they're going to make rent.
The federal government has put in place some protections for American homeowners, and those protections could expand even more over the coming days.
But to date, the plans do not include renters, which is a topic that Felix brought in to talk about tonight.
Yes, that's right. It's so important.
Housing is super tricky.
It's not unusual these days for a family to pay around a third of their income in rent.
So I wanted to talk about how to address this particular issue.
So we actually taped a segment on the housing crisis two weeks ago, right as things were starting to heat up on the coronavirus front.
And after we taped it, the market started to nosedive and businesses start to send workers home.
The three of us looked at each other and we decided we had to put that housing segment we had just recorded on the shelf.
And then we went back in and we retaped a fresh episode about what was happening in the news.
So what we're going to do tonight is we're going to pull that housing crisis segment from two weeks ago off the shelf and play it for you first.
And while it might feel a little strange to listen to because it's from before the economy essentially shut down, the underlying dynamics discussed in that segment we think are as relevant as ever, perhaps even more so.
So we're going to play that for you and then we're going to follow that up with a conversation about how we should be thinking about renters and homeowners in the context of the current pandemic.
So that's the plan for this episode.
Sound good guys? Sounds great.
Sounds great. Okay.
And then one final note, throughout this episode, we have a little surprise for you, and that is you're going to hear some lovely voices from some of our listeners around the world.
Now, most of our listeners are actually here in the US, but particularly during these uncertain times, we feel a very special kind of kinship with our friends around the world.
So keep your ear out for some of these greetings throughout the podcast.
Okay, Felix, you want to get us going?
Yes. So as you know, there is a housing crisis both here in the United States and actually it's a global housing crisis.
Almost every country is affected in one way or another.
Here in the United States, we now have half a million people who are homeless.
We're missing anywhere between three and perhaps six or seven million homes.
And there are just some really unbelievable statistics associated with the shortage in housing.
If you ask it how many counties could you rent an apartment spending less than 30 % of your income if you're in a minimum wage job?
The answer is there are zero counties where you can afford to rent that two bedroom apartment.
So there's something really profound, something really big going on that affects the lives of so many people.
Can I just add one other thing about this Felix, which is another interesting angle on this is it's leading to really big political dislocations.
Yes. We saw the Irish election recently, which was keyed on housing in the UK, in the US, all around the world.
Housing is becoming like a dominant issue and it's not surprising when you think about the fraction of a household budget that it can take up.
Yeah. So let's dive in.
What are the big forces that cause all of this?
So I'll get us started.
I mean, in the US, the primary explanation is so simple.
We've essentially stopped building affordable housing in our most dynamic and desirable cities and towns.
And then, of course, there are a bunch of underlying reasons beneath that very simple explanation.
So during the financial crisis, the construction industry essentially got decimated and it's never really recovered.
Zoning, of course, I mean, you cannot talk about housing without talking about zoning.
In all of the desirable locations, zoning is so restrictive and doesn't allow for affordable development.
And that speaks to NIMBYism and a whole bunch of other things.
And then on top of that, there are so many market forces, regulatory forces, political forces that create disincentives to developers to cater to low and middle income people.
So it's a combination of simple economics, but it's also simple politics because in the most coveted cities, the scarcity of housing drives pricing further up, which makes existing homeowners really happy, but also very keen to protect the value of their homes by making sure that not too many lower
priced homes can be built around them.
And then you have a generation of young adults who can't afford to rent or buy near where they work.
And so it's just the cycle that we have created.
And it extends well beyond the hot real estate markets of San Francisco or New York.
It extends quite broadly.
So then you have to kind of look more broadly.
On the tax side, we do some crazy stuff in the US, which is pretty regressive, which is we have these large mortgage interest deductions for wealthier people.
And then we've dramatically underfunded low income housing and affordable housing.
So that's an additional layer of kind of craziness.
And then, of course, we have a bunch of marketplace dynamics, which are about median wages not growing nearly as rapidly as these kinds of asset prices are growing.
So the good news is there's actually a lot of policy induced craziness, which actually conceivably we could fix.
And then there are these underlying secular dynamics, which are kind of part of a broader phenomenon of what's going on in the economy.
I think the dynamics or the feedback loops in home ownership rates I find particularly interesting.
So in the US in particular, there is this very strong notion that home ownership is something desirable.
And it's not even so easy to see the economic case for it.
But in any case, like when you start with this idea that home ownership is a really good thing, then I think you get a lot of regulation around protecting the interests of homeowners, because so many people are homeowners.
And in the US, if you follow all the zoning rules, if you follow all the rules of construction, you're basically done.
As a result, it becomes almost impossible to build anything new.
And that, of course, is just a feedback loop that comes from so many people are homeowners to begin with.
So many, as you pointed out, young me, so many people have an interest in protecting the value of their housing.
This vicious cycle that you just described, Felix, it's not just market failure.
It's also a failure of how our democratic system works in the sense that because so much of zoning is controlled at the local level.
I mean, zoning tends, particularly in the US, to not just be local, it tends to be hyper -local.
What that means is if you're trying to get into a market, if you're trying to move in, you actually don't have a political voice.
The political voice resides with the people who are already there.
And this constraint on supply, I mean, if you think about it, this is the only prominent consumer market that places such a severe constraint on how much supply can be produced, which means there is almost no incentive to cater to middle or low -income segments.
Imagine if car makers had a constraint that they could only build 50 ,000 cars a year.
They would only build expensive cars with high merchants.
Of course. When you sell something cheap, the only way to make money is through volume.
So if you're a developer and you're constrained in how many units you can build, you're going to cater to high -income households.
And I think people don't understand just how dramatic this effect is.
I've given you two numbers that I find totally fascinating.
In the year 1960, there were 13 ,000 units built in Manhattan, 13 ,000 in one year.
In all of the 1990s, we built 21 ,000 units in Manhattan.
And they're all high priced, right?
And they're all high priced.
Of course, that's your car.
The car example is beautiful.
That's exactly what happens.
Every low -rent building eventually gets torn down and replaced with a high -rent building or, you know, a W hotel.
But this is where we need government policy on affordable housing and low -income housing in particular, right?
I mean, this is why there's a failure there.
We've transitioned in the last 30 to 40 years into this crazy world where in the US at least, we use this thing called the low -income housing tax credit.
And it's a Rube Goldberg machine that doesn't make any sense if what you're trying to do is increase supply at the affordable housing and low -income housing level.
So how would you do it, Mihir?
Like, is there a recipe for doing it right?
Well, so first thing is I think the nimbyism and this kind of zoning set of issues are really important for thinking about particular real estate markets.
But maybe more obviously, we could do what other countries do, which is we can go into the business of funding development more directly and actually owning properties.
Now, in the US, that's got a bad history.
We used to have these large public housing projects, which really got a bad reputation and for good reason.
They became very hostile places for low -income people.
But we can redo that in a much more humane way and solve a lot of this problem.
I think the idea that markets are going to solve this or private developers are going to solve this is a little, I think it's naive at the low -income level.
So some combination of real direct supply and then rental vouchers, a much bigger expansion of rental vouchers.
I think is the other way to really think about this.
I agree that the answer has to be on the supply side.
I'm less supportive of vouchers, subsidies, credits to renters or home buyers.
In my mind, they're just a transfer of public money to landlords.
And also when you offer subsidies to people, you're essentially increasing the size of the pool of the people who can now compete for new homes, for new apartments, which drives prices further up.
I mean, unless we fix the supply problem, we're not going to fix the problem.
And I agree with you, we have to build more housing.
But because the control of that, so much of it is in the hands of citizens at the local level.
It's very difficult for the federal government to come in and arrest control away from local governments.
I can't imagine a more contentious issue.
And so, of course, now there's a huge conversation about rent control, like suddenly rent control is now back in vogue.
Yeah. And then, of course, in Cambridge, we know something about the long term consequences of rent control.
The fact that much of the housing stock in Cambridge was so neglected for so long is a direct consequence of a really draconic regime of house control regulation.
I think one big factor we haven't spoken about so far is the role of public transportation.
We have essentially made no progress whatsoever in making it much easier, much cheaper to go from outlying areas into the center of the city.
And of course, that means you have very long commutes, which we know for life satisfaction purposes is just about the worst thing to do to yourself.
And not just that, of course, Felix, but you have the kind of even remarkable kind of spillover effects on climate change, which is you have more and more people commuting longer and longer distances on their own, which is only going to be obviously causing climate change problems that are even more
severe. I mean, I remember vividly several years ago being in San Francisco and noticing that so many construction workers were arriving really early, like around 4 a .m.
or 5 a .m. and sleeping in their cars for the last several hours before showing up at work because the notion of commuting from really far away at 7 a .m.
was so hard. So they were commuting at 4 a .m.
and then resting until they were working.
I mean, the absurdity of it is really remarkable.
This piece of it is so important because there's a sociological effect as well, which is you go to these areas and what you find is highly paid, highly compensated workers who are living in that area.
And then you find this service economy that is essentially supporting that community and you just have thousands and thousands of service workers with these brutal commutes.
And so there is such a schism between the folks who can live where they work and the folks who can't.
It's such a visible manifestation of the inequality in our country already.
It's hard not to think about the movie that we talked about a couple of weeks ago.
I mean, parasite is exactly about this, about this service economy, the distances that people have to travel, the sociological cost and what it takes as a toll on all of us in a way.
We should just mention a couple of other costs, right?
I mean, homelessness, which affects all of us.
It makes younger adults really cynical about the way markets work, about the way the government works, about how the deck seems stacked against them.
But it also really brings out the worst in us.
So even our most liberal cities turn out to not be so liberal when it comes to this one issue.
And so they're just a whole set of sociological ripple effects associated with this, which are so unhealthy.
The one you mentioned about young people is so important because I think the level of disillusionment about housing is so pronounced because in some ways it's a generational switch, which is they look at people who are older than them for whom housing was actually a right.
And in some ways was a huge creator of wealth, and that's kind of gone.
And so it leads to significant amount of disillusionment, which I think then gives rise honestly.
And this is the really crazy part to even worse policies like rent control, which would only end up having like even worse effects.
And so that's this crazy cycle we're in, I think.
So given the complexity of the issue, are you too optimistic?
Can we do something about it?
I have to tell you, this is one of those issues on which I am so pessimistic.
So for example, every Democratic candidate for the presidency, of which there were many and now they're not that many, but still, they all had housing plans, which was actually kind of remarkable.
Yes. But no, I think this is such an overdetermined problem.
And there's so many overlapping forces, and there's so much political strength behind the status quo that it makes me very, very pessimistic.
How about you and me here?
God, I'd like to be optimistic.
And I think there is a version of this, which is good, which is in the sense that these are policy induced problems.
And I take your point, young me, which is, yeah, that's why they're hard because they represent vested interests and like people are not going to give it up.
But at the same time, we have it in our capacity to make these things better.
We could do something very different on affordable housing.
It wouldn't cost that much money.
We could redirect all the money going to like high income households and mortgage providers and redirect that to low income housing.
And that's a small change.
And that would like double the budget for affordable housing that we have in this country.
So yes, you know, the huge problems of zoning and nimbyism will not go away in the short run, but we could do a lot better than we're doing now.
I so hope you're right.
I'm a little more optimistic than the two of you.
So I think there are many low hanging fruit.
And I'll just give you a couple of examples.
You might remember President Clinton signed a law making it illegal to add to the publicly owned housing stock in the United States.
That just makes no sense whatsoever.
And then at the level of individual regulations, there's so much stupidity that we could get rid of.
For instance, minimum number of parking slots.
That just creates all kinds of forces against density.
Why are we restricting building height?
Why is it that in many cities in California, you have rules that you can only build single family homes in particular areas?
Because the existing cities.
That's all the nimbyism.
But see, in a way, the reason why I'm more optimistic is it's the very same people who claim that they care about homelessness and everything.
I think hypocrisy, once we make it a point of conversation, just how hypocritical these attitudes are, I have a sense that we might actually be able to make some progress.
I think I'm feeling kind of cynical compared to Felix now.
No. What would make me more optimistic is if we made Felix a housing czar.
Yes. You became a housing czar.
Oh, yes. You got into the weeds.
Yeah, maybe I'm too optimistic, but I do feel because there's so much pain caused by housing today.
I do feel that we're on the verge of moving things, maybe not to the perfect solution, of course, but in a better direction.
I so hope you're right.
Me too. Hey, everyone.
This is Manu, and I'm a listener from Toronto, hoping everyone is staying safe and washing their hands.
Hi, everyone. This is Saint Ricky, listening from Brazil, keep myself safe and try to do everything that we usually say that we are going to do and we don't do.
You know? That's it.
Cheers. Hi, friends.
This is Helen and Vic listening from Brooklyn, New York.
My name is Tom, and I'm listening from Bangkok.
Hello, everyone. This is Mary Anne, listening from Hillsborough, California.
Hi, everyone. This is Main, listening from Dubai.
Hope you're weathering the situation well with the virus and will get through this together.
Take care. Hi, everyone.
This is Nina, listening from Moscow, Russia.
I hope you know you're not alone in this.
We're all in this together, and we will surely get through this.
And as they say in the movies, everything is going to be fine in the end.
If it's not fine, it's not yet the end.
Stay well and stay safe.
OK, Felix, when we closed out that segment a couple of weeks ago, I expressed my desire that you become our nation's housing czar.
I still think that's a highly questionable idea, but...
So I'm turning the floor over to you.
Felix, what should we do?
We're in the middle of a pandemic on top of the already existing housing crisis.
On top of the existing housing crisis.
It's really dramatic.
And I think much to the credit of federal officials, they stepped in relatively quickly to protect homeowners from foreclosures and evictions.
If you have a mortgage from the Federal Housing Authority or if you have a mortgage from Fannie Fay or Freddie Mac, even if you can't pay your mortgage, you will not be evicted.
And it's very likely that the banks themselves will give everyone the same protections.
So my first question to you is, we now have so many activities already.
We have to direct cash payments.
We have the expansion of unemployment insurance.
Do we really need a separate program on top of everything we do already?
And then if you're inclined to say, yes, a housing -related program is a good idea, there's this interesting quirk that it's all to the benefit of homeowners.
And there are 40 million renters, which you think about the renters differently from you think about the homeowners.
Look, in a first best world where everything was designed perfectly, we would only need one thing, right?
We would need income replacement.
And income replacement would do the job.
The reality we know is, we're going to need a belt and suspenders and whatever else you use to hold up your pants kind of approach to this.
Because it's a patchwork.
In part, we're going to need big enhancements to unemployment insurance.
We're going to need big enhancements to cash distributions.
And then because housing is so large, we're going to need instruments there.
So I think, unfortunately, Felix, I would love to see a super elegant, simple income replacement story.
But the reality is, it's got to be patchwork.
And housing is so important that we need that.
I agree with me here.
I do think it's important to think about renters somewhat differently than homeowners.
And the reason I think it's important, first of all, is a lot of people, more than a third of all households are renters.
Yeah, it's about 40 million people, right?
But more importantly, even, it's certain demographic groups.
So lower income groups, non -college educated, populations of color, younger adults.
The point is, when you provide relief to homeowners but not to renters, you're disproportionately disadvantaging certain segments.
And then the other thing I'll say, renters are much more burdened by housing costs.
Close to half of all renters spend more than 30 % of their income on housing.
Whereas for homeowners, only about a quarter of them spend that much.
So this is a particularly vulnerable group.
Right. Before this whole thing happened, if you were to ask a bunch of people, what's one of the biggest, most systemic problems facing the US today?
I think a lot of people would say it's wealth inequality.
And if we come out of this particular crisis, with that situation having worsened, that would be very, very bad.
And so I think the only way you prevent that from happening is where you spend extra time, extra energy devoted to looking at people who are most likely to fall behind as a result of this disruption.
So then let me ask you, for homeowners, the way it's often done is that we tack the missing payments onto their mortgage.
You know, you have a 30 year mortgage and now you're just going to make the five payments that you missed, we tack them on at the very end.
What's the solution for renters?
I think you're putting your finger on it, which is the person in the middle here is the landlord who is an owner and also a borrower.
And we can tie mortgage relief on their debt to the way they treat their renters.
Right. And so that's in part what's happening here on the FHA side, which is you get relief on your mortgage if you treat your renters, basically, if you don't evict, well, we could do more than that.
We could say you could 50 percent reductions in rent or whatever we would want to maybe do.
But the key linchpin here is actually the mortgage relief and the loan relief can filter through and should, in fact, filter through to renters.
But what's the eventual resolution?
So say I missed two of my rent payments and now the pandemic hopefully comes to an end.
Do I owe these two payments?
I think that's a great question.
I think we have to be simple.
I mean, I think the answer is no, there's three months of rental payments which are lost.
And the landlord is made whole on that by not having to pay the mortgage.
And the lender is made whole on that by the federal government.
It has to be that way.
It absolutely has to be that way because if you're a renter, the likelihood that you could ever accumulate three months of that lost rent on top of the rent.
Is it possible, right?
It's impossible. It's absolutely impossible.
And so I think you have no other recourse.
If you were to not help, you are putting these people in such an unrecoverable situation where you could imagine months and months and years later, they're still never able to quite dig out of that hole.
This is one of the reasons I feel pretty strongly about this.
I mean, in our earlier segment, we talked about how many advantages there are to be an asset owner, to own a home whose price has gone up in value as a result of a whole bunch of dynamics.
And so for renters to ever get themselves in a position where they might too be able to purchase a home, I mean, this would put them back so far.
That would be all for being generous to commercial landlords if you have a tight linkage to the way they treat the renters, the renters in their properties.
Can I just say one thing there?
Yeah, of course. It works either way, right?
It works by either subsidizing the landlords in some way or it works by subsidizing the renters.
Is it the same either way?
Or is there some social and psychological benefit associated with deciding to say, no, we're going to actually give a supplement to renters as opposed to doing this through landlords?
I mean, I know I've mentioned this in the last few episodes, but just our national narrative right now is such that when we do things from the back door, because the economic literacy in this country is so varied, I worry that it would still be portrayed as, you know, oh, great, the government is getting
in to help a bunch of landlords, but what are they doing for the renter?
I would almost rather do what feels much more understandable from the renters standpoint, which is you get a check.
Yeah, and of course, the interesting trade -off is that it's not the same, right?
You deal with a far smaller number of large landlords than you deal with individual renters.
But maybe, I mean, the point is an interesting point to make.
Maybe those efficiency losses are worth it because what we get in exchange is a greater sense of fairness, is the sense that we're actually helping individuals as opposed to helping those who don't really need help to begin with.
Now, one other interesting thing to think about is, what do you think are the long -term consequences for the demand for housing as a result of the epidemic?
So, I think there's two margins to think about.
One is about renting versus owning, right?
And I think this is one of the reasons why we don't want to be too tilted towards owners versus renters, because it's only going to potentially tilt what is already a policy set of issues tilted towards owners even more so.
We probably want things to be more generous for renters, generally relative to owners.
So, that's one thing to think about.
But in terms of the longer run effects, I think it's really interesting.
I actually think the biggest trend of course is urbanization.
And the question is whether this would cause some kind of a change in the pattern of urbanization.
And I'm doubtful about that, you know, which is one attitude towards this as well.
We are all going to be remote so I can live in the country and everything will be groovy and I'll just be on Zoom all the time and be breathing better air.
I don't know if I believe any of that.
And I guess I don't believe that because I think the underlying drivers of that urbanization are secular and they're real and they have to do with creativity.
And the appetite for ideas and the appetite for people.
I don't know if that changes.
Felix, what do you think?
I mean, the general expectation is, oh, we all discover the joys of video conferencing and the joys of working in your pajamas.
And why would you ever want to go to an office?
Hey, these are not pajamas.
I just want to be real here.
This is an old sweating.
It's not a pajama. Okay, it's just pajama vlog.
But I would not be surprised if one of the maybe unintended consequences is that many of us will rediscover the joys of being in an office where you have casual encounters, where you happen to run into people.
And so I agree with you.
We hear that these big predictions about how the patterns of housing will change.
I don't really see that happen.
And I would not be surprised if actually the sort of the workplace as a place where we not only do our jobs, but where we socialize, where we get to know people, where a lot of nice things actually happen.
Maybe they'll be rediscovered as a result of staying at home for so long.
So with Felix's, our housing czar, maybe he will lead us to a better future.
Maybe he can be the housing and infrastructure czar.
Can we put that in his portfolio as well?
Can you also be commerce secretary?
And let's put him in charge of health and human services while we're at it.
Yes, health and human services.
What do you think? Let's just give him the whole cabinet.
I always wanted to be president of something.
So, you know, when you see that young man, it's going to his head.
Okay, PIX or silver linings.
Felix, what do you have?
As everybody knows, interest rates have been falling.
And so I'm guessing that many of you, if you own a home, you're probably thinking about, am I paying too much for my current mortgage?
Now, the calculation is a little bit involved.
You need to think about what's the maturation of your mortgage, what's the difference in interest rates, but also what are all the fees that are typically associated with refinancing.
And fortunately for all of us, there's this thing called the Internet.
And as always, the Internet has great advice, lots and lots of mortgage calculators.
Did you say the Internet has great advice?
Yes, of course. You just need to pick the right places, which I'm helping you to do.
The mortgage calculator that I like is one by Nerd Wallet.
In particular, I think it's useful because it's really step by step.
There's a bit of a line at this point in time, so knowing whether this is the right thing for you to do is a good thing.
That could be either a pick or a silver lining, depending on...
Depending on the fees, I guess.
Exactly. Okay, so me here, what do you have?
So I have a pick, which is our discussion on housing brought me back to a book that I had read a long, long time ago when I was in college.
And still, I think remains the best book about cities and housing, which is The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
And so when I was a college senior, I read that book, and it was part of my senior thesis and I was like, so in love with it.
It is such a brilliant treatise on housing and on cities and what makes for great cities.
And as we think about this stuff on housing, and as we think about reinventing cities and infrastructure, there's no better guide.
She had this recipe for creating a really walkable mixed use city and it's such a beautiful thing to read.
So anybody who lives in a city should read The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
I recommend it, heartily.
That's nice. So do you keep all the books that you read?
Actually, no, this is terrible, but I will just tell you that I reread it.
Online. I reread it online on a PDF copy that was online.
And you made fun of me when I said the internet has good advice.
Okay, so I have a silver lining.
And that is one of the things that's happened as a result of everybody being sheltered.
There are all these dance parties that are now popping up on the Internet on Instagram live, on Facebook and so on.
And it enables you to participate in something very communal, very fun.
But you can dance in the privacy of your own room and you don't have to embarrass yourself.
The only people you embarrass are your kids, if they're in the house with you.
But, you know, who cares?
So on Saturday night, DJ D Nice, someone said you need to log on because he's doing an Instagram live party.
So I went on and he was playing music.
And all of these people joined in.
Oprah joined in. At one point, Michelle Obama was there.
Bernie Sanders hopped on.
At one point, Joe Biden was there.
Rihanna. Rihanna came as well.
So there were all these people joining in.
People were dancing.
And it was so, so fantastic.
So my silver lining is even if you're someone who doesn't dance on a regular basis, it's amazing to just turn on the music really loud and just let loose.
That's my silver lining.
Fabulous. And then you can say, like, you dance with Rihanna.
And like, it's true, kind of vaguely.
Yeah. Yeah. Much better than saying I danced with Joe Biden.
Yeah. No. But, you know, I think Kamala Harris was on, although she wasn't there when I was there.
So we're like two ships passing away.
You're way too cool for Kamala Harris.
You're in Rihanna territory.
OK. Anyway, that's it for this week.
This is After Hours and the HBR podcast network.
Hello, this is Sheila from Sydney in Australia.
And I'm really hoping that we can get on top of this virus sooner than a lot of us are expecting.
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And thank you for this podcast.
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I know that the coronavirus is affecting every part of our lives.
However, from my own experience, it only took two months for my city to resume back to its normal place if we stayed at home.
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Young me, Miriou and Félic.
I love, I just absolutely love what you guys are doing.
Miriou, your book, How Finance Works, has got me hooked.
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Take care, guys. Love you all.
