Ted Audio Collective Welcome everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Mihir.
And I'm Sarah Green -Kermichael.
Mihir, we just saw a picture of you when you were away for a brief moment and you wore a tie.
I haven't seen you in a tie in I don't know how many years.
And you may never see me in a tie again.
That is a photo for the Zoom purposes that I was using, but you're right, Felix, it's been a long time.
I was looking at my tie collection and I was thinking, why did I used to like wearing colorful bands of clothing around my neck?
And I don't think I have a very good answer.
It doesn't really make all that much sense.
I am a little surprised that ties have not been a Zoom thing or like bow ties or cravats, just because I think on the women's side of the aisle, earrings have sold well during the pandemic because it's something you see on Zoom.
So, men are taking this in a very different direction, I think.
So, all the investment that used to go into fancy shoes are now going into earrings?
Is that what's happening?
Yes, it's been reallocated.
And I can tell you the earrings are much more comfortable than the shoes.
So, the shoes may never come back, no?
I think the shoes will come back, but I am a little sad about it.
Okay, so, Mihir, what do you have for us today?
Well, you know, there's just been this remarkable spate of corporate actions with respect to Russia.
We've seen lots of people pulling out of Russia very, very quickly.
And it's kind of highlighting the nature of ESG today and what corporations should be doing.
So, I wanted to get your take on what corporations were doing with respect to Russia.
Yeah, very interesting.
And Felix, what did you bring?
So, I would like to talk about another uplifting topic, fake news.
It has a little bit to do with the current crisis and the war as well.
This avalanche of fake news, basically the moment the war starts, how to think about it, what to do about it.
Will we ever be able to control the flood of news that is not grounded in any reality and any facts?
Well, this is two heavy things.
Maybe we should talk a little bit more about ties.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay, me here. So, let's start with the companies leaving Russia.
What do you think is so remarkable about this?
It's the speed and it's the breadth and it's the depth of the corporate response to Russia.
So, what have we seen since the onset of the war?
We've seen dozens, maybe hundreds of companies cease operations in Russia.
That ranges from large oil and gas companies divesting their stakes in Russia.
That ranges to large financial services firms just shutting down operations in Russia like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.
And even the folks who thought they might stick it out, like for example, Uniglo, have quickly retraced their steps and decided to shut down operations.
What did you guys make of this corporate response?
One element that was a little surprising to me is in previous crises, you would see consumer -facing brands leave first or respond first for all the reasons that are completely intuitive.
And then if you're a B2B business, if you don't have a well -known brand, it's maybe a little less important for you to do it.
Take a company like Accenture.
It's not obvious that this is an issue you should be leading with.
And yet, they're leaving Russia for good.
Yeah, to me this is really different in kind, not just in degree, but in kind from some of those other earlier crises.
To me, this is a little bit more like a moral revulsion, like we can't be part of this.
And I think it's also a little bit about self -preservation.
Think about having employees in Russia if there is a new iron curtain coming down.
Some of the laws that Putin has pushed through to criminalize telling the truth about what's happening in Ukraine.
It's scary to think of being responsible for employees in a country that is so extreme, just seeing the images that are coming out of Ukraine.
And as a CEO, I'm sure you want to take some action.
What was your impression here?
This is one of those developments which you want to feel wonderful about, but as I thought about it more, I felt more ambivalent.
First off, with any sanction, one has to worry about hurting the Russian people versus punishing the Russian state.
A lot of actions, like closing down Uniglo, for example, or shutting down retail operations of McDonald's.
What are we accomplishing, aside from feeling good about ourselves?
As you put it, Sarah, expressing the moral revulsion that we want to express.
And I appreciate that.
But are we changing minds?
Are we changing outcomes?
I doubt it. I don't think we are.
I think what those companies are trying to accomplish is avoiding feeling complicit in a humanitarian crisis, caused by an invasion.
I get that for, let's say, the gas companies, because actually those earnings end up funding the war.
But tell me how I should think through Uniglo.
Felix, did this provoke any ambivalence in you?
This is in part fearing the reaction of Western consumers.
Yeah. So if I'm McDonald's, I'm thinking about, what if I'm the last company that is in Russia?
What is going to happen to my business in the United States?
What is going to happen to my business in Western Europe?
I'm also thinking about the tens of thousands of employees in Russia.
We can't know how many people in Russia were against the war.
I'm reading maybe it's 50 percent.
What's this like? Something really terrible happens in your country.
You're opposed to the actions.
Now you're losing your job over this as well.
That seems complicated.
One of the role models here that many people will allude to is, of course, the corporate pullout out of South Africa in protesting apartheid.
And when you think about the political sanctions, as our colleague, Ravi Abdelal pointed out in a recent episode, they're unlikely ever to go away.
That means going forward, political sanctions don't really have any force because they remain in place.
And if they didn't prevent this war, they're not going to prevent the next war.
Corporate sanctions are a little different.
So I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in time IKEA would go back, UNIQLO will come back for the Russian leadership to know that this kind of corporate walkout can happen again and it's going to hurt your country and it's going to hurt the people in your country.
The sanctions that come and go are more effective than the sanctions that stay.
There's also very little downside for the companies walking out.
I think a lot of the companies that have left don't make very much money in Russia.
It's not a big market, it's not China.
And also we are seeing companies pulling out almost in pairs.
So Bain and BCG, Coke and Pepsi, Shell and BP, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, McDonald's and Burger King.
It's not like they have to worry about leaving market share to a rival if everyone's leaving.
That goes with thinking about the effects outside Russia.
If I'm Burger King and McDonald's leaves and I don't, I become this visible target for sanctions and boycotts in the US.
The cost of staying go up the moment your main rival leaves.
This is precisely what makes me ambivalent.
It's a relatively low -cost thing to do within the context of Russia, Sarah, as you point out because the markets are relatively small.
There's like a high reward your consumers are demanding it outside of Russia.
And then you drape yourself in this moral stature of rejecting tyranny.
That's a little bit rich for my taste.
But I think the deeper question is the one that you asked, Felix, which is they're responding to consumer demand.
They have consumers who are saying, we will boycott you unless you do this thing in Russia.
We have now expected commerce to become an expression of all our beliefs and ideology.
And that is really what this is about.
We want everything that we interact with in the world to be an expression of our identity.
And I won't go to McDonald's if you're doing business in a place that I don't want you to be doing business in.
I guess I'm hearkening back and yearning for a world where commerce was a little bit beyond politics.
It can be this kind of remarkable unifier.
And instead it's becoming a vehicle for the expression of political sensibilities.
I wonder if that era existed, though.
It's more public now and companies get called out on social media.
But if you were buying sneakers made with child labor and didn't know that it was made with child labor, you could pretend it was an apolitical choice.
But now there's more transparency.
We know these things.
You have to decide if you're okay with that or not.
To me, what's beautiful about this is you realize as a consumer, I have some influence where I take my dollars, has an effect on the stance that corporations take.
I'm also thinking more expansively about the role of companies in the world and what they should or shouldn't be doing.
What's remarkable and I think overall positive is that people are mindful not only about, you know, what's the quality of the chicken sandwich that I get, but also it's an expression of what I believe in.
It's an expression of what I would like the world to be like.
I think that's actually great progress that you're thinking about the social repercussions of the choices that you make.
I don't know why this bothers me so much, Felix, and I probably won't be able to find the words for it.
But to me, it feels like a fundamental confusion and a philosophical confusion about where you get meaning in life.
So meaning in life comes from your close relations, comes from meaningful relationships.
And what we are witnessing is a tremendous displacement of that onto consumption objects and investment objects.
And that is ultimately a confusing personal sphere and a commercial sphere and a civic sphere, which I would rather keep distinct, and ultimately not very enriching if that's where you're getting your identity from.
I know that sounds so cranky old man and so nasty, but I just don't think it's a meaningful life.
I hear what you're saying.
For me, when I decide to buy the compostable diapers instead of the disposable diapers, that seems like a choice that might actually have some tiny effect on the world in some way.
Right. Voting with my dollars seems like it actually matters more in some ways than voting with my actual vote.
Well, but that's it, Sarah.
You're displacing a lot of political ambition and aspiration from the civic sphere onto your consumption decisions.
You're like screw politics, that kind of sucks.
And so how am I going to change the world by buying compostable diapers?
Right, which is terrible.
I sort of think I hate it.
Which is terrible. I mean, so that's what I hate about it.
Let me try to say this differently.
I don't think we should say either you're politically active or you're making a set of consumption choices that contribute to a better world.
And I very much like that image here that you had about these different spheres, the private sphere, and then there's the public sphere.
And I think what's happened is that we realize now that the choices we use to label private actually have important public consequences.
This morning, I decided to walk to work instead of taking the car, and that is a personal choice and it moves almost nothing, but it's an expression of feeling responsible for the public consequences of private choices.
That's got to be right.
What you guys are saying has got to be right.
But first off, I think substitution is operative, Felix.
My instincts are that it's operative.
There's no reason there has to be displacement of these ambitions.
I think in reality, there is.
And that's worrisome to me.
But you're right, in principle, it doesn't have to be.
That's a data question, right?
We could actually know.
That's a data question.
But we are simultaneously seeing the rise in expectations for consumption decisions and what corporations do alongside incredible increasing pessimism about political actions and a desire for corporations to substitute for governments, which is what is happening, which is anti -democratic and very weird.
This is what I love about these conversations because we started with Uniglo in Russia and we end with the meaning of life.
Yes, that's exactly right.
We have solved nothing, but we have really tried.
Okay, so Felix, misinformation and fake news.
Yes. Tell us what's on your mind.
It's now on my mind all the time, really for two reasons.
One has to do with the current political situation.
The moment the war breaks out in Ukraine, it's just this avalanche of misinformation, inconsistent, incompatible stories about both what's happening on the ground, why we're seeing what we're seeing on television.
And you can literally feel how we have these two radically different views of the world.
And then more recently and maybe more practically, I read about this Twitter birdwatch program.
So the idea is, can we address the issue of fake news with the help of community involvement?
You would attach a note to a tweet that you find questionable and other people will write your comment.
This birdwatch program, which was in beta for a little while, will now become visible.
What do you make of these attempts?
Are you optimistic?
Or is this yet another initiative where, you know, maybe half a year from now, maybe a year from now, we'll go, oh, remember that birdwatching?
That didn't do anything just like many of the previous activities.
Where do you come out?
The social media companies have to keep trying.
They have to keep trying and piloting different ways to crack down on misinformation to see if they can find something that works.
And it's really hard because at the core of the issue is like, who decides what's misinformation?
When there's debated facts, how do you flag these things?
I'm glad they're still trying.
I'm not totally optimistic, but I think fake accounts are like a much bigger problem in amplifying misinformation and getting it out there than the sort of content of the tweets themselves.
Yeah. I guess I have a couple of reactions to this, this birdwatching thing, Felix.
I confess the notion that this program is designed to let you comment on other people's tweets and then have people rate those comments.
Isn't that what Twitter is?
How is it new? I appreciate the effort, Sarah, to your point.
I really oscillate between thinking two things.
You know, one is this is the biggest problem in the world.
If we can't agree on facts, then we are lost as a society.
And social media has actually created this sense that we can't agree anymore because of all the incentives of the social media companies to stoke conflicting views and amplify false things that are clickbait.
The other view is, just to get down on the table in my mind, is actually, no, this whole discussion about fake news is just a manifestation of a deeper problem, which is polarization and our inability to get along.
And it's manifest in this debate about fake news.
I guess my instincts are that it's a little bit of the former, that it's really fundamental and it's really problematic, and social media has to be held responsible.
If you go that way, I confess I come back to more draconian things.
And I know this is kind of considered like the nuclear thing in internet land, but this whole idea of having them not be liable as platforms for publishing things, I just think we have to revisit that whole idea.
All of these efforts, Felix, that you're describing are basically efforts by companies to convince us that they're capable of doing it themselves.
And I'm just not sure I believe that.
That's really true.
What do you think, Felix?
We need much more drastic action than we have seen in the past.
Think about the Rengar crisis in Myanmar.
There's a UN report that Facebook is literally responsible for the death of up to 10 ,000 Rengars and about 700 ,000 people that got displaced.
And that started as a rumor and an exaggeration of facts on Facebook.
I think we don't always appreciate, in many countries, the internet is just Facebook.
It's just that, and it's nothing else.
So much hinges on, can we get this somehow right?
Where I'm less optimistic about you, me here, is, can liability solve the issue?
There's a fabulous paper that looked at two Fox News shows, Hannity versus Tucker Carlson, and how they talked about COVID and what you should do.
If you believe the causal interpretation of the paper's results, it's literally the case that watching the Tucker Carlson show kills people.
Because someone on TV said masks don't work, and then you don't wear a mask.
And as a result, mortality goes up.
So I agree with you.
I think the stakes are super high.
I think that they work together in a really strange way.
And I can give you an example that is maybe not quite as dark.
Think about Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex.
The Troll Farms have used bots to spin up rumors about her on Twitter that then get picked up by royal reporters who use Twitter and eventually become articles in mainstream newspapers about how people are angry at Meghan Markle eats an avocado.
In a weird way, it's both a mainstream media problem and a social media problem.
Reporters are sort of looking for trends.
They see people talking about this, not realizing that they're just bots or they're a bunch of fake accounts created by one person, and then they report on it as if it's a real thing.
I think in the case of Meghan Markle, 70 % of the negative comments about her on Twitter came from just 83 accounts.
That's how you make something out of nothing.
And then it gets into the media echo chamber and takes on a life of its own.
And before you know it, Meghan and Harry are living in California.
That's an interesting example.
I think you're both right to say that this division between social media and real media is artificial and we shouldn't hold up one as being good and the other one as being bad.
I think the historic idea is it's a big marketplace of ideas, and even up until a couple years ago, you could maintain that position.
But now it's just not tenable.
We live in this world not of free speech, but like of cheap speech.
Who's going to get us out of that, Sarah?
So many things get said.
I think it has to be more about making sure that accounts are real.
There has to be some kind of algorithmic solution that looks at the sort of nuts and bolts of are these accounts real people?
It has to be more about that than about saying, oh, this opinion is unacceptable.
We will censor it. The most potent weapon that the platforms have is that they have this unique ability to decide what's visible and what's not visible.
That's really where the power is.
In journalism, we have fact checking institutions.
And to my taste, these fact checking institutions need to play a much bigger role.
The way we usually think about it is if something seems really outrageous or it's absolutely clear that it's wrong, we can debate whether this thing is not going to be visible or it can't be retweeted.
Given the grave danger of misinformation and what it does to society, I would actually like to flip it.
Like in a regular newspaper, things that are not fact checked will just have limited visibility.
And the kinds of things that you see when you open Twitter or when you open Facebook are the kinds of things that have been fact checked by someone.
It's an activity, I think, that can be subsidized out of tax dollars because it's a public service.
It's an activity that can be regulated so that we have an agreement over who can be a fact checker.
For traditional newspapers, we've had it for a very long time.
And by and large, it still leaves lots of different opinions, lots of conflicting news, a wide variety of expressions without newspapers printing fake news every day.
Those procedures that have served papers well while we don't apply them to the Internet.
So Felix, I think it's a super interesting idea.
In a way, you're, I think, arguing for two things.
One is you're arguing the creation of a professional guild of sorts will solve this problem.
We need auditors. Yep, that's right.
The question would become, are we past it, because people won't believe what we say is fact checked because they'll be your types of fact checkers and my types of fact checkers.
And we may not be able to agree on what fact checkers are.
But also, I think it feels to me like a little bit of a displacement of the responsibility of the platform companies themselves.
I think the deeper critique of all these companies is it is inherent in their revenue model and it is inherent in who they are.
That's right, yes. They will amplify.
And in the case that you raised, in the Rohingya case, which is really horrific, not just amplify, but will really give incentives to manufacture fake information.
Self -regulation just won't work in that world.
Wikipedia is sort of an interesting counter -example here because while there are some things on Wikipedia that are wrong, they are not wrong to the degree that you see on Facebook or Twitter.
There is, I think, a wisdom of crowds effect.
If you get enough people together, they do fact check each other.
The Wikipedia model works really well for the pages that people pay attention to.
If you look at some controversial topic, say, I don't know, Israel, Palestine, people pay a lot of attention to what Wikipedia will say.
And as a result, you end up with quite a balanced view.
And then there's lots and lots of fake news that is just wrong.
And the beautiful thing is those are the pages that no one pays attention to.
And that's almost a flip of social media.
Social media, what basically people and the fake news armies have figured out is if you find something that really gets people excited or really angry, that's the currency that counts on social media because that's the kind of news that spreads.
And so it's the flip of Wikipedia in that the most visible things are the things that are most likely to be problematic.
And we get lucky that sometimes it's a cute cat and most of the time we're unlucky and that it's some outrageous view that makes a lot of people click and say, what on earth is going on here?
But that contrast that you're both outlining is so interesting in part because, of course, the economic models behind those two organizations are entirely different.
Yeah, fact checking is now a public service.
It's a public good that deserves to be financed by public revenues.
Maybe it's a tax on social media so that they pay for it indirectly.
To your point me here, given the inherent conflict of interest, I can't really think of a version of the world where they will ever do a good job because it's not really in their interest.
The very business model relies on people sharing and people coming back.
And it so happens they share and they come back when they're really angry.
So I think there's a very strong case now to separate the two roles.
But let's go down this path, Felix.
This is the solution.
You're advocating employee people around the world, especially in these lesser developed markets, as you pointed out, which is actually where the information environment is really controlled by these social media companies.
And those people will work with Facebook or they will be contracted by Facebook or what?
I imagine it not unlike the editorial process in old fashioned media, unless something has gotten the approval of a fact checker.
You can post it, but it's not going to be very visible, which is, of course, a little bit what happens in the collaboration between Twitter and AP already.
When the AP tweets, the Twitter algorithm now recognizes, oh, this is an AP tweet.
And as a result, it gets promoted in ways that if you and I tweet is not the case.
But I imagine an even stronger version of that, where literally all the news that is fact checked will be the first layer of what you see when you go on the Internet.
And who's going to make Facebook do that?
We put regulations in place.
Okay, good. I'm with you there.
Yeah. But so then Felix, let's go down this path further.
So now we are intervening in the business model of companies to such a degree that we will tell you how you make money because now it is the special sauce.
This is equivalent to going to McDonald's and saying you make your special sauce this way because I'm telling you to.
Is there a way to do it?
So it's the equivalent of telling McDonald's you have to tell us how many calories are in this burger and if it's actually cow meat, you know, is there a way to kind of.
Do that level of regulation.
But he wants them to like this is your algorithm.
You have to promote the Sarah fact checking organizations approved tweets.
I think that's what Felix wants to do.
Yes. So that ain't just like, oh, transparency.
Tell us what goes into your burgers.
This is like I'm telling you how to make the burger.
I think of fact checking as a mild negative filter that filters out the worst kinds of claims.
We have international models in Germany.
You can just not claim that the Holocaust didn't take place.
I'm uncomfortable with this and yet I don't have any better ideas.
I kind of feel a little bit smaller.
I recently read a book by a faculty member, Columbia Law School, Jamal Green.
The book is called How Rites Went Wrong and he starts with this observation that compared to most other countries, the United States has very few rights that are constitutionally protected, but the protection is really, really strong.
The protection in some sense is almost absolute.
And you see it in say decisions like Citizens United.
The moment we decide that corporations are persons and they have free speech rights, there's basically no way for us to prevent them from contributing to political causes and act as if they were individuals.
And he contrasts that with most other constitutional systems where they would say, yes, there's one value that has to do with free speech and then there are other values that have to do with the influence over politics.
I'm now a constitutional scholar, obviously.
But the way he describes it is that most other systems outside the United States would think about most rights as constantly being in conflict with one another.
And you sort of meddle through this difficult compromise of thinking in each of these instances, which rights should take precedence.
I'm not sure, obviously, but I have an intuition that your discomfort comes from seeing these rights as really strong and really absolute.
If we implemented my system, will we see tweets that didn't see the light of day, that exposed really unhappy with?
Yes, absolutely. Will fact checkers make mistakes?
Absolutely, they will.
Is it a way forward?
I would hope so. I think that's a really deep argument about the absolutist view towards rights in the US relative to other countries.
I think that's right.
But my concern with your suggestion is first, it requires a lot of regulation.
You are doing something very significant to the business model of Facebook, and that crosses a line that we don't usually do.
And I guess I would prefer them to internalize all this in a way, as opposed to forcing them to contract and forcing their business model to do what you want them to do.
And so maybe I'm still hanging on to a more romantic view that I can internalize it like newspapers did.
Let them figure out how to do that.
But the concern I have with your suggestion is not that it won't work, but it is crossing a line in the interference that is just new.
And I think my skepticism is mostly if you go down that route, you get mildly ridiculous things like birdwatch.
Yeah. Or is that going to do nothing?
To me, it seems like the issues facing both the mainstream media and social media come down to advertising as a business model.
It is flawed, to say the least, because it's all about attention and what we pay attention to, and it's very easy to hijack human attention.
I also just want to put in a plug for the business that we're in.
Education and having people be critical thinkers is the best protection from this mess.
And I can't help but think that the failure to stimulate critical thinking is obviously very foundational.
Gosh, it makes me wish that we were doing even more on that margin because this other problem is so much harder to solve in a way.
Yeah, that sounds exactly right.
All right. Recommendations.
Sarah, what do you have for us?
Okay. Well, I did bring two.
We're running in the needle.
I know. I know. Good for you, Sarah.
Taking a real liberty as a guest.
There was one podcast I wanted to recommend that was very serious, and then I thought after the weeks we've just had, maybe something a little lighter would also be welcome.
The serious one is a podcast that is currently called Australia, if you're listening.
And I say that because it's changed its name a few times.
China, if you're listening, Russia, if you're listening, America, if you're listening.
But if you look at season three from 2019, there are nine episodes on Vladimir Putin.
There are only like 20 minutes.
And it talks about how he gained power, how he's kept power, how he's had repeated attempts to undermine Western democracies.
It's narrated by an Australian journalist, Matt Bevin, and it's just really excellent.
It's beautifully produced.
Wow. We've got some context on what's going on today.
That's fantastic. I would recommend that.
Australia, if you're listening, season three.
That sounds great. So then my second pick, which is like a sort of antidote to the first, is just a little piece of fluff.
It is called For the Love of Kitchens, and it's a show on Discovery.
Oh, okay. And I think you can also get it on Amazon Prime.
It's British people doing high -end kitchen renovations in a very calm manner.
Oh, it's not about cooking.
It's about the kitchens themselves.
It's about the kitchens.
It's a little bit of an infomercial for the company that does the kitchens, but it's so beautiful you won't care.
It's sort of mesmerizing, and it just is the perfect thing to watch before bed.
Is it as addicting as HGTV?
It can't be that addictive because there's not that many episodes.
So it's safe. Yes, it's safe, when you just need to just not think about what's going on in the world.
For the love of kitchens.
That sounds great. I have something kitchen -related as well.
When you buy herbs, it's always too many.
You're spending quite a bit of money.
And then, of course, now what do I do with the rosemary or the thyme?
And I saw this amazing kitchen hack that I never thought of.
Take the herbs that you have left over, chop them up, put them in a tray, add a little bit of olive oil, and put them in the freezer.
And then next time, when you fry anything really, you take a cube, and it's already flavored with rosemary or whatever you had left over.
It's really miraculous, but it makes it feel good because now you don't have to toss them out.
That's great. I hate growing away food, so that's excellent.
Yeah, it's a really nice idea.
Oh, I love that. When you see it on the internet, they use a whole lot of oil, which I don't think you really need.
You just need just as much as you typically use when you fry it.
Awesome. That is great.
So I have something that is seemingly high -minded but is actually quite middlebrow.
I have this wonderful book, which I actually got for one of my daughters, but I have read as well.
And it is so good. It's called How to be Perfect.
Oh, wow. And the subtitle is The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question.
It is written by Mike Schur, who developed Parks and Recreation and The Good Place.
Oh, okay, yeah. He's written this book for his kids, but it's like an examination of philosophy.
But it's done in the most entertaining and accessible way, you could imagine.
So for example, the chapter titles are, should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?
Do I have to return my shopping cart to the shopping cart rack thingy?
I mean, it's all the way over there.
Should I lie and tell my friend I like her ugly shirt?
And he's framing it in this super accessible way, but it is really deep.
He's got such a knack for making these ideas accessible.
And it's wonderful because it can be read by adults and by kids equally well.
So I really recommend it, How to be Perfect.
What's the answer on the shopping cart thing?
The short answer is it's complicated, but yes, yes, sir.
You have to return the cart.
I've been doing it wrong.
We're out of time. Thank you for listening.
If you thought we sounded extraordinary, this is, as always, the magical work of our audio engineer, Peter Linne.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
