Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hello, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Me here. I'm Rebecca.
And I'm Felix. So today is the day.
Inauguration. We'll have a new president before too long.
Are you going to watch?
I am. I mean, I've always thought of inaugurations as just this meaningless pageantry.
But given the events of this fall and this January, I'm going to be there watching.
I mean... I'm exactly like you.
I don't think I've ever seen it.
I have no idea even what to expect, but I think this one you cannot possibly miss.
Well, I think that is one of the silver linings here, which is that things we used to take for granted, like a peaceful transition of power...
Yeah, so true. ...might become more exceptional in some things that we might value a little bit more than we ever have before.
Maybe that's a way to kind of get to a silver lining, but it certainly feels like that this year.
And I've never listened to the speech, and I'm really looking forward to the speech.
And it's an important speech, Rebecca, I think, right?
I mean, it's not just that it's a speech...
The first time, right?
Speaking to everyone and...
Yeah, it'll be great!
I'm excited it's finally taking place.
Exactly. So what do we have on tap for today?
So actually, the topic that I brought is super closely related to all of this.
I wanted to get your reaction to these corporate announcements to pass political spending.
What do you make of it?
Does it make sense?
Does it feel authentic?
I'm very curious to hear what you have to say.
That's great. And I would love to talk a little bit about SPACs.
SPACs? Really? On this day?
You've vaguely obscene me here.
Yeah, no, it's not SPACs, it's SPACs.
Yeah, so, not that SPACs are obscene.
So SPACs are this movement that have kind of taken over the US capital markets.
It's become a dominant financing thing that happened in 2020.
It's all the rage. And the question is, is it kind of shady or is it really great or what the heck is going on?
And so I want to talk to you all about it.
All right, political campaign contributions.
You have seen the news in response to the violent mob invading the capital.
We now have many corporate announcements, I think it's more than 50 companies at this point in time, that have suspended their political contributions to lawmakers.
And there's interesting detail even.
So for instance, UPS and Boeing, they stop contributions for everyone.
So irrespective of your response, what you did, no one's getting any money at this point in time.
And then others, AT &T and Amazon, for instance, they only passed spending on the 147 Republicans who objected to the election results.
And so much more targeted, much more sort of in the moment.
But I'm generally just curious, what do you make of it?
Is this the right thing to do?
Is it effective? Do you think it's sustainable over a longer period of time?
I think so much of this is probably just posturing.
I mean, so many firms are saying, well, I'm just going to reevaluate my spending or I'm pausing for everyone.
I think the firms that are interesting are the ones you mentioned, which are the ones that are saying, no, it's those 147 senators or representatives.
Those are the ones I'm not going to fund.
That feels to me important because it's overtly political in a way we haven't seen corporations be overtly political.
And I think it really is a standing up for the democracy.
So I think that's probably for real the rest.
I don't know. Well, but the other piece of it that I'm struck by, and I think Rebecca, you're exactly right to try to figure out what's posturing and what's not.
And one way to say that is to say, well, people who actively say I'm denying you a contribution because of an action, it is something more than posturing.
I think that's exactly right.
I'm struggling with all of it feels a little bit like cheap talk in the sense that this is a small piece of the puzzle of the overall political participation of corporations, which is a way of saying this is a very specific thing about PACs that are specific to a candidate as opposed to where a lot
of money goes, which is in pools of capital for causes, where the real money goes, which is lobbying, fundraising and all those other things.
And so part of me worries, Rebecca, like you, that it's posturing and that in a way, this just gets shifted, right?
So it's a little bit of a whack -a -mole game.
And so you say, well, no, I'm not going to give to that particular candidate.
But by the way, those numbers were kind of small anyway.
And what I'm really doing is just shifting resources into these other parts of the political process.
So I'm here. I mean, I'm so with you in that some of the money I'm most worried about, for example, is spent at the state and local levels where relatively small amounts of money can buy you a state attorney general or a mayor's race or they're in huge dark money PACs.
I mean, so I'm completely with you on that.
But let me push back just a little.
It's a big deal to say to 147 federal representatives and senators that I'm not funding you.
Yeah, that's expensive.
The amount of money involved is tiny.
Right. But saying that publicly, that feels like something.
Yeah. You know, and we're back to do we really want businesses taking sides in politics?
I mean, you know, my view on this, which is civics, not politics.
So I would rather they were coming out and saying, I'll be absolutely transparent or, you know, I'll tell you everything I'm funding everywhere.
So that's one interesting facet of the debate that companies like IBM that don't have political action committees at all, all of a sudden now it seems such an outlier.
Right. This is like, oh, IBM.
What do you mean? No political action committee.
But they're long history in the firm not to have that.
And maybe that's a model that now gains credibility.
But Felix, when you read what IBM says, it's really funny.
They say, oh, we don't need political action.
We have plants in all of these guys states.
Exactly. I mean, they have to talk to us.
They're very, very frank about all the other means they use to make sure they get access.
And I think, Rebecca, what you're pointing to is this larger question, which is it's very interesting that they've chosen to be overtly political in this way.
But also this could be the unleashing of a larger examination of all these mechanisms that corporations use and then kind of casting that into the open light and then debating what is the appropriate role of business and engaging in politics.
And I think both polar positions are kind of naive in my mind, right?
Which is the polar position of no, no, no, no, no, no.
You can't be involved in politics at all.
That seems a little naive because there's so much that goes on in lobbying and so much that actually is a reasonable role for business to play.
It's good. And the other polar position, which is you can't do anything and you just got to let them do whatever they're going to do.
That also seems kind of ridiculous.
So I think we really need a big discussion about this that allows people to really understand the scope of it and then try to draw boundaries.
It's going to be messy because those polar positions are both, I think, just absurd.
To me, one of the real cost of the current system is just that it fosters this sense of it's a corrupt system.
It's a few companies or a few individuals who have access, who really move things.
So PACs are about a billion dollars a year.
And there is a cottage industry of academics who has tried to show how PAC contributions influence political decisions.
And after everything we know, you don't find any trace that by giving to one or the other particular cause, you get a lot.
And to me, that is so different from this entity that is called super PACs.
Not only are super PACs three times as large as PAC giving, but super PACs are dominated by very few individuals.
It's basically a hundred people that give three billion dollars to the electoral system.
And if I'm worried about, oh, it creates this semblance of everything is corrupt and every law you can possibly imagine is just a question of how much are you willing to spend.
I think the real issue with super PACs and with dark money is PACs are comparatively innocent.
And so one of the disappointing things about the corporate response is now they're responding at the level that in some sense matters the least.
Because there's no obvious critical quo and it's not really where very few entities have outsized influence.
I was once with the head of corporate political affairs for a big pharmaceutical company.
And he said, oh, Rebecca, you're so naive.
You think you can find an immediate link.
Let me tell you how this game is played.
I send a check consistently to Person X in the Congress and I do it year after year after year.
And when he needs help, I give him a little help.
He needs something funded.
I make sure it's funded.
I just do that year after year after year.
And one of those years, he's going to answer my phone call.
And so the causality is so remote that I think it's really hard, just super hard to pick it up in the statistics.
I think what the research is trying to do, maybe not as successfully as we might hope, is to identify these moments when for your firm at this moment, in time, that particular law passes or doesn't pass.
That really matters.
Can we see something?
And we see access completely.
Who gets to speak? Who gets to be present in the negotiations?
Who gets to shape what the language of the law looks like?
Absolutely. When we look at votes, much less so.
I got to say, Rebecca, your story just reminds me of like the first scene in The Godfather.
You don't come to me with respect.
It really feels like a protection system.
But I'm curious, what would you want for the role of corporations to be in the political system?
I mean, do you believe in corporate giving?
Do you believe in employee giving?
Do you believe in lobbying?
I mean, from the ground up, what do you make of those issues?
I'm with you that there are some things corporations should do that are actually useful and appropriate.
So I think lobbying, where that's defined, as people show up and talk to representatives and tell them, you know, this is how my industry works.
And if you pass this regulation, this is what will happen.
I can clearly see a role for that.
I'd be a fan of making sure that at every level of government, the government has its own experts who can kind of balance what the firms are saying.
So you don't have to rely entirely on what firms are saying.
But I see that. But otherwise, why should corporations be able to fund candidates?
Let's have campaign finance reform.
Let's put limitations on what people can spend.
And if we can't do that, let's make sure that there's public funding available for other candidates.
I mean, I just don't see why infinite money is a good thing in our system.
I just don't see why.
So this is probably something we should explain for our international listeners.
One of the really difficult things in campaign finance reform in the United States is, of course, that the courts have interpreted political giving as a form of speech.
You might remember that moment when we had competition between public and private funding.
And candidates could choose.
And if it turned out that your privately funded opponent was super successful at fundraising, cities and states would top up your account in order to create a level playing field.
And the Supreme Court decided you cannot do that because it renders the speech of the privately funded individual less effective.
That, I think, is one of the most important impediments to campaign finance reform.
Anything that starts with let's limit is a no -go.
Anything that starts with let's level the playing field after we've seen how much privately funded candidates raise, I think is a no -go.
But in the world where we're not constrained by that idea.
Okay. No, because I think it's really useful, because a lot of ideas are up for grab, right?
Yes. And so before we say we can't do it, what would you want to do?
We know in races that are better funded turnout increases.
And when we do surveys of people who vote, they know more about the issues.
So that's probably the side of funding that is positive.
That has very quickly declining marginal returns.
You don't need billions of dollars in order to allow people to recognize what the candidates stand for.
But I think that's probably the minimum level that you would want.
And then I really like Rebecca's idea of making sure that lawmakers just think of what this is like if you sit in Congress.
The range of issues that you have to decide is so complex.
I mean, we'll talk about SPACs in a moment, like now do I have to be an expert in SPACs also.
So allowing companies to provide information, those three things I would definitely like to keep.
Yeah. I mean, I think I come down with you all, which is A, I find public funding very appealing.
It just, it feels right.
I find, especially when you're exposed to other electoral systems, much narrower windows of time where elections are being run, incredibly appealing.
Because the process that we have, which is just relentless, especially at the House level, where you're just campaigning all the time has to be remedied.
And so I just think that we have to think about narrower windows.
We have to think about public funding.
Those are the answers.
Now these corporate actions on the margin might be good, they might be posturing, Rebecca.
But I'm hoping that what we see out of these announcements is a rethinking of, wait a second, who's writing checks and why they're writing checks and how do we think about this?
I mean, you guys probably know this, but a couple of just negative effects from the spending.
One is more than 70 % of Americans at least think the political system is corrupt.
Yeah. Just the perception that it's corrupt is hugely.
There's some literature that suggests it might be, right?
The public policy preferences of the rich are much more likely to go through than those of the average population.
So we've got some data suggesting the system might be captured.
The average representative spends between, what is it, three or four hours a day?
Yeah. Making phone calls to raise money.
Well, who wants that job?
So we're making the job of being a representative incredibly unattractive.
Who wants the job and who has time to learn what a SPAC is?
Especially if you're making phone calls for three or four hours a day, begging for money.
I mean, that might sound like a little thing, but I think it's a big thing.
Because our representative should be worrying about the big issues, not dialing for dollars.
It feels like the bigger prize here is to get corporations not to say I'm going to limit or potentially selectively limit my PAC contributions, but to call for significant campaign finance reform.
Yes. Yes. And I have ambivalence about this.
But if we want them to be actors who advance an agenda, it feels like the agenda that should be advanced is on reforming the architecture of the whole thing.
You know, not on just withdrawing temporarily my efforts in a small regard.
And that might seem a little utopian, but let me make a case that there's actually an economic case for the firms to do that, which is to a degree, the firms are caught in a sort of standing on tiptoe issue, which is if there's no limit to how much you can give.
The politicians can go back and forth saying, well, you know, a firm gave me X, you know, give me X plus one.
Right. And so it can escalate up.
So there's a sort of standing on tiptoe problem with campaigns.
And if we could just no, no donations, sorry, it's illegal.
That would make things a lot cleaner in some ways and cheaper.
I think one other really important criterion for reform is simplicity.
I think a lot of the mistrust actually comes from we have created this enormously complicated system that even experts disagree on what is actually happening.
What's the difference between a pack and a super pack and what is dark money and so on.
So it never ends. David Primo and Jeff Milo, they have written this really fantastic book where they looked at state level experimentation in campaign finance reform.
I had no idea how much is happening.
The states experiment in all interesting, promising ways with campaign finance.
And the sad conclusion from their book is that for the really big question, your question, Rebecca, about mistrust and how people think the system is corrupt or not corrupt, none of these experiments change anything.
And the reason is that it makes the system ever more complicated.
Now you have an additional 13 constraint on X, Y, Z, what you can do.
And as a result, no one quite knows like, should I believe everything is corrupt?
Should I believe everything is okay?
No one can really see.
So one of the really big things that I think needs to happen in campaign finance reform is give us a simple system.
Right. Give us a system where we can understand what is happening that is easy to see, transparent.
It's informed by notions of equality across citizens.
And that I think is really hard to do because reform tends to be incremental on top of what we already have.
Well, hopefully this is the beginning of a bigger debate, which I think we need to have.
But I have a confession to make though, which is I didn't realize until like two minutes ago that we paired together a topic on super PACs and SPACs.
That was completely accidental.
This episode has a natural title, PACs and SPACs, and I just realized it.
I feel so naive. On that notion, let's leave the lofty topic of campaign finance reform and let's move on to SPACs.
Okay. So from PACS to SPACs, which is our next topic, which I know for some of you feels like what the heck are these things SPACs?
But I really wanted to talk to you too about this because there is like this fever in the capital markets around these things called SPACs.
And I'm not entirely sure what to make of it all.
So let me give you a couple of data points so you understand how important they are.
And then we'll hopefully just talk about what you think about them.
Before you do that, can you back up a little bit?
Like just give me the basics.
Like what is a SPAC to begin with?
Why should I care about it?
Yeah. So first off, what is a SPAC?
It stands for a special purpose acquisition company.
It's sometimes called a blank check company.
And it is a fundraising device that is being used in the public capital markets to both buy companies and to take companies public in ways that used to be kind of viewed as being shady, but now is becoming very, very mainstream.
So why should you care about it?
Because it's become very mainstream.
So if you look at the kind of capital that's been raised in the US capital markets in 2020, it was a great IPO year.
Those are initial public offerings of regular companies.
But even more so, it was a remarkable year for people raising money via these so -called SPACs.
So what happens in this SPAC process is a sponsor is allowed to raise money relatively easily in a public company vehicle.
So the SPAC is already public.
The SPAC is already public.
And it doesn't own anything, has no assets.
It doesn't own anything, and it is allowed to go public quickly and easily because as you can imagine, there's nothing to disclose.
It doesn't own anything because it doesn't own anything.
So this is a little bit of the regulatory arbitrage, which is you're creating a public vehicle, which actually doesn't require a lot of disclosure.
Now, why would you do this?
Well, the sponsor, let's say Felix is the sponsor in this case, says, hey, I'm going to go buy a company and you fund my SPAC and then I will go buy a company and then that company will be a public company.
Now, in a way, as you can tell, this can also be referred to as a backdoor to going public because effectively, you've now taken a private company and made them public.
And in fact, in the last 12 months, we've had DraftKings, we've had Virgin Galactic, we've had Nicola.
Big companies basically become public via a SPAC.
But Mehear, just could you take it even more slowly?
Yeah. So I'm an entrepreneur.
I have a fabulous company.
I want to go public.
Right. I could go to Felix who set up one of these SPACs and he would give me a bunch of money and I would be instantly public.
Okay, so I understand it's really quick and easy.
Right. But wait, Felix is taking a huge chunk of change out of the steel, like 20 % of the purchase price.
So why don't I sell it to you, supposing you're like the active public market because you're going to give me the real price that my company is worth.
I just don't get where is the magic money being created because these sponsors are making enormous amounts of money and I'm always nervous of magic money trees.
You're exactly right.
And I think this is what's so complex about this, which is the sponsors are getting, as you said, 20%.
Now that 20 % may sound familiar to you from carried interest land, which is kind of the other way to think about this, which is Felix is a private equity sponsor who is really good at finding companies and buying them.
And so the relative comparison as from an investor perspective is Felix is getting his carry in some sense, but you're absolutely right.
Rebecca, a lot of the value is being captured by Felix.
Now, if you compare that perhaps to private equity, you might feel okay.
If you compare it to going public via an IPO, you might feel less good, but IPOs are very costly and take a long time.
So the deal on the table is, yeah, let's give Felix a little bit of money, but he's got a reputation.
He's able to monetize it and he gets a chunk of the change.
And in the process, you as an entrepreneur go public in a less risky way, because if I go public in the traditional way, six months of preparation, quiet time, no talking.
None of that stuff happens here because I'm just selling myself to what happens to be a public company, which happens all the time.
It just happens to be that public company is a SPAC.
To what extent does it have to do with in traditional IPO processes?
It's also often the case that the founders don't really get the full valuation of the company.
So if you look at 2020 data, we had 20 IPOs where the share price doubled on the first day.
Exactly. Of course, I understand that's not like the true valuation at the end of the first day, but it still suggests that in addition to all the costs, you already pointed out me here, there's another cost of going IPO in the traditional fashion in that estimating the demand for new shares seems to
be super difficult.
We get it pretty wrong, not infrequently.
Think DoorDash, think Airbnb that just have like these enormous increases in share price.
Exactly right. And in fact, what you're referring to Felix is not just we get it wrong, but there seems to be systematic underpricing in many ways.
And so another way to think about this is and to Rebecca, she's got the right question, which is if I'm the entrepreneur, why am I paying Felix 20 %?
And the answer is, well, wouldn't you prefer that perhaps then paying 50 % to the preferred clients of the investment bank who get the allocation on the IPO and then flip it the next day?
So it's all about who's kind of capturing that value.
So the most I think benevolent view of the SPAC is, well, wait a second.
I didn't want to do this costly expensive IPO process where the value is getting captured by the institutional investors who are the clients of the investment banks who have a monopoly on taking me public.
Why don't I go via this way and I pay Felix 20 and it's okay.
The alternative view though is, well, wait a second.
So first off Felix is making out like a bandit.
And then also there's a little bit of a regulatory concern, which is Nicola, which was a famous SPAC didn't get vetted and turned out to be a kind of a vaguely fraudulent exercise.
And so the process that we would normally go through to get public companies is being circumvented in some way.
But isn't it also true?
So once they merge the holding company and the startup that they acquired, there's still regulatory approval necessary for then the privately held company to be publicly traded, right?
It's not as though no one's looking at the company that you bought.
That's right. And they have to issue regular accounts.
That's right. So here, why don't I have my brother set up a SPAC and I go public through my brother's SPAC and then I go around and I say to people, how much do you think this venture is worth?
Here are my accounts.
And I get the real values that the company's worth.
You're right. From that perspective, there's conceivably if you think the enemy is the regular IPO process, one can get excited about it.
The problem is A, disclosure and B, the investors who seed, it's not just Felix, the sponsor who's doing this.
If I'm the original investor in the SPAC, I actually get to vote no when you go and want to buy another company Felix.
But the problem is, in a way, it's the next bunch of investors who come in when we do the quote unquote, de -spacking process, which is you've taken 20 percent.
I've as the original investor have the right to buy some more shares, but then I cash out and then who's left holding the bag.
And as it often is the case in the situation, it's the retail investors who come in late to the game, who then are left with an instrument, which, by the way, historically, SPACs have pretty dramatically underperformed.
So there's a transfer of wealth going on here, not just to Felix as a sponsor, but there's a little bit of a story here where the investors who are left holding the bag at the end of the day, the retail investor who didn't found the SPAC but comes in when he hears about it, ends up holding the bag after the hedge
fund who founded the SPAC along with Felix by funding it is kind of long gone.
And that, I think, is the other part of the puzzle that's difficult.
But is it so different from the IPO process where I as a retail investor, I'm also late to the game.
Fair enough. In some sense, it replicates a little bit the weak position of retail investors in both of these schemes.
I was going to take that even further.
I mean, my father was a stockbroker.
And one of the things he said to me is, any time you feel tempted to invest in an individual stock, lie down until the feeling goes away.
I mean, you're the finance professor.
I thought as a retail investor, I was crazy to do anything except put my money in index funds.
And you are absolutely right.
But what we've seen in the last year and a half, of course, is just this remarkable revival of retail investing led by zero cost commissions, led by Robinhood that has exploded the retail investor base.
And, you know, in part because we now think markets aren't efficient because people have been peddling inefficient markets for a long time now.
It has given rise to a retail set of investors who believe like, oh, yeah.
And by the way, during COVID, it's been pretty great because they've been buying Zoom and Peloton and blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, this kind of amazing confluence of factors, Rebecca, which is the rise of retail investors, SPACs taking off.
People are at home in COVID trading stocks.
And then these SPACs come along and they give you the opportunity to do even more kinds of things.
So that's the sense in which there's an element to this, which is just fine, which is this is great.
We're disintermediating the IPO process, which is maybe not a great process anyway.
But at the same time, it feels oddly unsettling to see these reallocations of value and to see the regulatory arbitrage.
One of the aspects that makes me actually quite optimistic is when you now see what happens as a result of competition, both in the SPAC space.
But also in the traditional IPO markets, everything is moving towards, let's say, greater efficiency for sure, but maybe also a little bit more an equitable distribution of value.
So, Bill Ackman's super SPAC, he doesn't have the share of value that you would typically expect to see.
And just to be specific on that, Felix, the 20 % that we talked about earlier, he has basically said no to that.
Yes. And so that's a really big deal.
And if that becomes the model, that really changes incentives.
Because otherwise, without that, these sponsors are like, I want to do a deal.
I want to buy a company because I got 20 % of it right away for $25 ,000.
Yeah. Why are you so troubled?
There's something clearly bothering you.
And, you know, we can see all these upsides and retail investors may get burned, but in principle, they know what they're in for.
Something is really bothering you.
What is it? So, God, that's a great question.
I mean, I think, I don't know, Rebecca, I think two things.
One is we know historically SPACs underperform.
And so we know that this is not really good assets that are coming to the market in a good way, right?
So it's a feeling that it's not going to end well.
Now, you might say, but me here, this wave of SPACs is different.
It's different this time.
And of course, I'm always wary of those arguments.
The second is, I am just so worried about this retail investor crush.
And I've just been thinking about this a lot, the degree to which financial markets serve to redistribute wealth from insiders, from retail investors to insiders and to other folks.
And I kind of have a feeling that this is that on steroids.
So my concern is it doesn't end well, and it ends with a huge amount of value transfers and it ends with an enormous alienation and disillusionment with, just to hearken back to our previous conversation, not just with politicians, but with business and with financial markets and with everything else.
So I guess I think that's where I come out.
Does anyone else find it upsetting or kind of worrying?
I'm really troubled by the 20 percent and the track record, but the IPO process seems insane.
So I think a useful way to think about where the 20 percent comes from, even for companies, I think, that have solid businesses, Airbnb, DoorDash and so on and so on, they seriously think about the SPAC route.
Airbnb, in the end, didn't decide to do it, but they were in conversations with Ackman.
And I think it comes from a sense that traditional IPO process is broken also.
And part of what I find really interesting is even though SPACs might be problematic, they do have this beneficial effect that they create competition for companies that look to public funding.
And already in the IPO market, you now see, I think this is something that started with Unity Software, where they tried to build a book where potential investors would indicate a range of values that they were willing to pay depending on the allocations that they get, which was completely unheard of.
And that's already, oh, now we see a demand curve.
How wonderful is that?
And so part of it is, of course, I share your concerns about, oh, my God, SPACs seem super expensive for people who have built successful companies, but to the extent that it creates competition and creates innovation in the traditional IPO process, we might look back and say, well, this was problematic.
But in the end, it led to a lot of innovation that was essentially absent for just far too long.
Yeah, I'm coming around to that point of view.
And I think this conversation has helped me think about the competitive dynamics that might make you feel much more sanguine about this.
And I think that's got to be right.
I think there's an aura around them about everybody's going to make 10 % or 15 % and it's all going to be great.
That just strikes me as kind of crazy.
But there is conceivably a very good news story here about the reallocation of value away from institutional investors and investment banks towards a broader set of individuals.
And I think that could be really good news.
Well, I think one thing's for sure, which is this ain't going away.
It was one of the largest developments in the capital markets in the US in 2020.
And we should be seeing much more of this.
So we'll see how they evolve regulatory and we'll hopefully come to see if this generation of SPACs is different.
And maybe the returns are different, which would be really wonderful if true.
So stay tuned. Okay.
Paks, SPACs and REX.
Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm pushing. Good attempt.
You're pushing it. Recommendations, Felix, what do you got?
So I have something that's actually related to a topic we talked about, campaign finance.
And it's so complicated.
It's so hard to know.
And I think even for journalists, it's hard to cover.
And I find two websites that are just dream come true.
Very clear, very simple, and with lots of data about how much is given by whom.
And the first one, opensecrets .org is, I think, well established.
This is mostly useful for the federal level.
So if you're interested in what's going on in presidential elections, that's a really useful source of information.
And then if you're more interested in state level activity, which I think for some reason we don't talk about it that much.
But as Rebecca pointed out, it's at least as important as what happens at the federal level.
There's a website called followthemoney .org, and it allows you to really drill down your state, even by zip code, who has given how much in a particular location.
Quite fantastic. Both of these opensecrets .org and followthemoney .org.
Very, very helpful if you're interested in campaign finance and potential reform.
That's great. So my recommendation is a book.
I think what I tried to do at the end of the year last year was, because I didn't read as much last year as I'd like, I just bought like a top 10 list.
And one of which was a recommendation that Yungmi had made previously, which I just think is amazing, which is Hidden Valley Road, which she had pitched a while ago.
But the other one that I read that I just loved was a book by Margaret Macmillan, who's a historian in the UK, and it's called War.
And it's a very interesting book.
You know how there are these books that are like, you know, salt or cod?
It's like the history of like salt or the history of cod fish or whatever.
This is this kind of view of the central driving force that war, military conflict has been through all of our civilizations and just places war as the fundamental thing that drives technology, that drives cultural change, that drives everything.
And she asked this very provocative question, which is, is peace an aberration?
We take peace to be the norm and war is an aberration.
And she just turns it upside down.
And it's a little bit of an onslaught of like, you know, history.
And she's going from like, you know, 3000 years ago to last year in the flip of a phrase.
But I just thought, as an effort to redefine the way I think about the world, she made me realize that war is central to everything that we do political change.
Even for example, ways we've changed suffrage.
Everything is kind of related to these large social movements that are wars.
So I think it's just a fantastic book and not too long.
And it's a little bit depressing, frankly.
But it is fantastic.
Rebecca, what do you got?
Hopefully you got something lighter for us.
Oh, it's so me here.
I feel like I'm really going to lower the tone.
But just on the subject of war, there's an amazing book called Endless Conflict written by an anthropologist, which basically says, you know, we have this vision of indigenous tribes as sort of peacefully getting in touch with their inner selves.
But in fact, all the archaeological evidence suggests that our ancestors were attempting to kill each other all the time.
Exactly. And in fact, Macmillan goes through some of that evidence.
And you know, you have this idea that, oh, you know, tribes are peaceful and it's all fine.
And then we just have the corrupting influence of modern society.
I know, it's incredible.
So it makes you feel better about the modern age.
But I was going to go to a deeply different place, which is my recommendation is to, okay, okay, just give in to roast chicken.
Nice. Because I spent the first few months of the pandemic buying cookbooks, trying to do all this amazing food, like we were going to learn Chinese.
We did Chinese for a month.
And then we did Indian.
And we're all going to be, you know, different and exciting.
And no, give in to the roast chicken.
Wednesday is roast chicken night.
Thursday is cold chicken night, you know.
And you know, domestic tranquility ensues and you don't have to spend all this time cooking, but on the weekend go crazy.
Wonderful. And Rebecca, do you want to give a particular version of the roast chicken?
Oh, for sure. Well, it's not just any roast chicken that you get into.
No, no, no, no. It's the one you put garlic underneath the skin.
You put lemons in the cavity and lots and lots of white wine and herbs.
The chicken or what you drink?
Well, you know, if you're going to put white wine in the sauce, you may as well check that it's good wine as you are.
Excellent. All right.
So thank you all for listening.
This has been the after hours podcast on the HBR podcast network.
