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 this is a bittersweet evening for all of us.
This is our final episode of the season.
So we have to start out by just saying thank you to all of our listeners.
This season has been so wonderful in so many ways.
It's everything we hoped for and better when we started on this journey.
Absolutely. And I figured out the origins of Dutch baby.
Like our listeners are engaged.
I put out a plea for a little piece of knowledge and people came through.
So it's wonderful to get that kind of engagement in all kinds of ways.
If you think back to when we started podcasting a couple of years ago, we were hoping maybe get a few listeners and have a few laughs.
So just to watch this thing grow year after year, it's really humbling.
I was working really hard to get my mom to listen to it.
And is that still a work in progress?
It's an uphill battle.
Have you told her that Yang Mi is on the show?
Because that might help a lot.
Yeah, true, true. Heartbreaking but true.
It's also just a very different time of year for us because as academics, this is the end of an academic year and of course it's graduation time.
And it's such a reminder of how different the world we inhabit is today than the one we did 12 months ago.
It's a good reminder also, just how much celebrating with others where community really matters, right?
So a huge congratulations to anyone who is graduating this year at any level.
You did it, yeah. Or to the parents of graduates as well.
And remember, commencement, it means beginnings.
It's not the end. It's the beginning of something as well.
And so even though we are living in a particularly grim moment in time, there's light at the end of the tunnel I think, and so just keep that in mind.
As for this final episode, what we thought we'd do is we'd do two things.
One is we're going to run through some of the stories that we're going to be keeping an eye on this summer.
And then the second thing we're going to do is we are going to essentially let Mehere's dream come true and do an extended recommendation segment.
Oh, no. Don't let them.
We'll be here for hours and hours.
We're going to run through some of the summer recommendations that we have for you for things you might watch, read, do over the summer.
In particular, the 49 British shows no one has ever heard of.
We will learn all about them.
Don't steal my thunder, Felix.
How did you know? All right, all right.
Okay, so it should be fine.
So let's start with a story that's on everybody's mind, which is the reopening of stuff as you're beginning to see businesses reopen this summer across industries, across countries.
What are the two of you going to be looking for in those reopenings?
I think one of the dividing lines that I'm really interested in is what's public and what's private.
So for instance, last episode, last week we talked about tracing people and the privacy concerns around tracing.
Now it turns out real estate developers are really installing tracing in a form that I was even like, oh my God, I cannot believe.
So for instance, the company that manages the Rockefeller Center, they will provide software to the firms in the Rockefeller Center where they trace whether you've been within six feet of anyone else in the building.
And there's a huge range of these kinds of services, everything from sophisticated tracing to very simple segmentation schemes, who's risky, who's not risky.
That's going to be really interesting to see how private agents effectively create their own little governance mechanisms in this space that's kind of being left open by the government.
In terms of things I'm looking for, I mean the first thing that's just so important is just whether there are reversals.
And by that I mean if we open up and then we come back and then we have to do it again, that will be so scarring that it will be really, really tough.
Second I think is testing, testing, testing, right?
So how fast do we get testing at five million people a day in the United States?
And the final thing I'll be really looking out is to think about kids and schools.
For so many people it is hard to go to work if schools are closed.
And then countries of course have differed dramatically in the way closing schools are not closing schools.
Sweden for example has kept schools open.
The UK pushed until the very last minute not to close schools because of these concerns.
So the summer time is going to be interesting.
But then of course starting in August we're going to see this question roll out again.
So I think the whole debate around children and schools is going to be super interesting going forward.
What do you think Youngmee, what are you looking for?
If you think about the way schools operate or the way office buildings tend to operate, we've gotten so accustomed to a mode of operation that tends to be relatively consistent across companies, across schools.
And what's going to be so fascinating to me is I think we're going to see just dramatic variation.
What different companies try, what different schools try.
So for example, I know some companies are very worried about public transportation and their employees coming to work because you can do all the safeguards you want.
But if people are using public transportation and so there are companies that are beginning to make plans to charter a bunch of buses and essentially create bus routes where they go and pick up employees and bring them to the office.
There are companies I know that are making plans for how the elevators operate in a building in which they share different floors with different companies and they are very nervous about sharing elevators.
So they're negotiating to be able to essentially hijack an elevator for 45 minutes in the morning so they control what happens and how often that elevator gets cleaned and so on.
And so I think you're going to see different companies try different things.
You're going to have some of them doing temperature checks, others some mix of work at home and staging, of bringing people back and just massive, massive variation.
In a way, it's funny because the rest of your life is going to feel a little bit like the airport.
So we heard of first attempts to create something like a TSA.
You'll have that airport feeling 24 -7 even if you're not here.
But Felix, I think you're exactly right.
You know, if you travel around the world or even around the country, one of the things that is a little bit annoying is every airport you go to, the process is different.
It's just the first time there, you're like, oh, do I take off my shoes here or do I not take off my shoes here?
And this is, I think, what it's going to be like with respect to how we go about our business in general.
Every place we go to, every restaurant, every establishment, every office is going to operate in a slightly different way.
And then I think the same is going to be true with respect to school districts.
If you think about all the different universities, and you hear about all the plans being made, including our own university, you just see massive, massive variations.
So it's going to be a really complicated time, I think.
But so, Yang Mi, I can think about two ways to think about that, Yang Mi.
One is it's fantastic in the sense there's tons of experimentation and you have a lot of private actors thinking about new ways to do things, and we could all learn from each other so your company does something different than mine.
On the other hand, you can just think about this as exacerbating so many inequities that are pre -existing.
So, you know, who's going to get the private elevator bank in that corporate tower and who's not?
It just feels like it's a recipe for all those things.
So, I don't know. To me, I'm not sure if I should think about that positively or negatively.
Well, every single thing we're describing here requires investment, right?
Every single thing.
Right. Whether it's installing thermal detectors in your offices, whether it's spacing people out and putting plexiglass in, whether it's hiring charter buses to pick people up.
And one step change is that we will end up caring a lot about things that were sort of completely private before.
Youngmi, you mentioned already, like this example of how did you arrive at a particular building?
Did you use public transportation or not?
I saw one plan of a company that has tiers of risk and where you fall as an employee not only has to do with who are you, but also, for instance, do you live with an elderly person?
So, all of a sudden, it's like your family circumstances, where you live, how you get to work, there's all these other factors that essentially didn't matter before.
And now, all of a sudden, they're important.
So, moving us along, the next question I had for you is, what are you going to be looking for in terms of the recession that we are surely still going to be mired in over the summer?
In this country, a lot of the rescue stuff that's been put in will expire.
So, my question is, what happens then when we still find ourselves mired in a recession?
What will you be looking at then?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's really two big things to be thinking about there, because you're absolutely right, young me, a lot of stuff we did was stopgap.
And it's not clear if it's going to keep on going, and it's not even clear if it's sustainable.
So, there's two things to watch, I think, first is, at least in the U .S., one really wants to think about our ability to finance all this.
And so, if the bond market ever really fell out of bed with concerns about how much we needed to finance these things, I think everything would change, like on a dime.
And I think the second and related point that is really tough to think about is, is public unrest that will come to fruition in some ways.
And we've seen a tiny little bit of that in very kind of small ways in the U .S.
But around the world, one really wants to keep your eye on the degree to which people start to get upset, not just about lockdowns, which is some part of what we've seen, but about economic conditions.
And then that stokes a whole new set of dynamics.
When you start to see public reactions that are really negative about unemployment, for example, then I think the game changes.
So, those are two markers I would really be looking for.
And I think, closely related to that, the difference between countries where the stabilization programs are essentially automatic, and then the countries like the United States and like many others, where you literally have to take action, and you have to decide many, many times, are we still willing
to step in? And you've already seen in the U .S.
how the first and the second package, super easy, super fast.
And then, you know, every time it gets a little more difficult, and one of my concerns and what I'll be watching during the summer is that this functional politics in the United States, when will it be tied more closely to re -election concerns?
Because, in a sense, a wonderful quick recovery, which is very unlikely, obviously, is not in the best interest if you're hoping for a change in Washington.
And so, I think my prediction would be, and I'll see how that plays out, but that it will be increasingly difficult for Democrats and Republicans to come together and really decide what's best for the economy.
Thank God we don't have a presidential election to complicate the politics of all this.
That would be terrible if that was the case, yeah.
Okay, my next question is, what institutions, companies, industries, do you think our government is most likely to not bail out?
What are the pockets of industry that you think are most likely to die because, as a country, we decide we're going to let that thing die?
The big one that I'm looking at is the Postal Service in the United States.
I think it's so interesting because, for employment, it's 25 % of the federal workforce.
It is really, really important for minority employment.
It has 300 ,000 minority employees.
It's really, really important for veterans.
There's 100 ,000 veterans working for the Postal Service.
And if we don't do anything, it will essentially run out of funds as early as September.
So the Postmaster General has asked Congress for $90 billion to keep the institution alive.
And if he asks me to bet, I have no idea.
I don't see any hint of agreement between the parties, what to do about the Post Office, how to save it, even the question, do we want to save it as an institution?
I think there are lots of people who will say, well, it's going to go away and that'll be just fine.
So that, I think, is quite nerve -wracking.
I have to make an argument in favor of the Postal Service.
I really do. This is such an important public good.
I know the U .S. Postal Service gets a ton of criticism because they can't seem to run profitably.
Their service isn't always fantastic.
But everybody needs to remember, Congress sets the rules for how this thing operates.
They set the rates.
They regulate the services that the agency has to offer.
And so it's not as if the Postal Service can change prices, raise prices.
It has very limited flexibility.
In addition, it does the hardest job.
It is mandated by Congress to have universal delivery at the same price for everyone, which means the most rural locations, the poorest locations, the most remote locations.
That last -mile delivery is the most expensive kind of delivery.
And what ends up happening is that UPS and FedEx outsource that delivery to the Postal Service so that UPS and FedEx, they don't have to pay for it.
Because they can't raise prices, right?
Yes, exactly. Yeah.
And so the U .S. Postal Service is a punching bag, you know, all settled down.
No. But it is such an important public good.
I think, young me, go.
Go on. I was hoping for you, me here.
You're supposed to be the tough finance guy here.
Oh, God, no. I love the Postal Service.
I think it's one of the great institutions in this country.
And I think it is completely hamstrung in the way that you've described in a totally dysfunctional way.
If anything, I'd love to see this as an opportunity to kind of reinvigorate it.
I mean, there are creative ideas about there, about how you get postal workers to do more things as opposed to less.
And there's an interesting argument about making them all notary public so you can kind of get all your notarizations happening that way.
Even today, think about the passport system, which in the U .S.
operates in large part through the post office.
It's a really important piece of it.
So I wish, if anything, I'd like us to redouble on making the post office into an institution that we rely on for more interesting things.
And yet we are completely at a loss for imagination and resources and it's a complete manifestation of political deadlock.
The interesting thing to me about this question is just briefly is that, young me, the way you framed it is which companies in which industries.
But what is interesting about the way that Felix took it is, actually, we're more likely to end up fighting about public agencies and public institutions like Amtrak or the post office, as opposed to kind of thinking about, like, you know, cruise ships or something else.
But I think that is the tragedy, right?
Which is we may end up in a situation where we end up focusing more on public goods at a time when, God, this is precisely when public goods are something we should be funding, even more so than we're doing now.
You struck a nerve, Felix.
So the basic criticism that the two of you have that we force them to provide a particular set of services, irrespective of what these services cost, and then we set the prices at a level that basically don't cover cost.
That is exactly right.
But I actually think there is no doubt, like the two of you.
I'm channeling me here, here.
Every crisis is an opportunity.
And so the system that I actually love is the system, I think, that would reinvigorate the post office and would remove some of the constraints that it currently has.
In a way, what we're doing now, Felix, is we let private actors compete with the post office, but we handicap the post office in various ways.
And so then, unsurprisingly, the post office suffers.
It's also that the monopoly, the latter monopoly that the post office has is worth about $5 billion a year, right?
So it's a strange mix of we hamstring them in some ways, and then we hand them a monopoly in some other ways.
And I think untangling this, and I think this is the process of figuring out what is the value of providing a particular set of services to every location.
I fear a little bit that by September, what we will do is essentially some stopgap measure that prevents the service from collapsing totally.
And that would be, I don't know, I would be a little disappointed if that's all we can do.
I think you're asking a deep question, Felix, which is, I think of public schools as an example of something that knits together a country, and it is foundational in many ways.
And the question is, is the post office like that?
Is it so critical to the identity of a country to have a universal provider who is low cost and really universal?
I feel like that about schools, and I think I feel like that about the postal service.
I do as well. I think we should absolutely say every county irrespective of where you live, you will get mail, and we can have a conversation about how many times a week you really need mail.
At the same price? At the same price to the final consumer.
Yes, and the same is true for internet.
And the same is true for internet.
I think that's exactly right.
Everybody should have high quality access to internet, but we want to be smart about it.
We can do it in a more cost efficient way than we do it today.
Okay, so let's take a break, and then we'll come back with more.
Okay, so my next question is, what are you looking for in terms of the big cultural events that tend to knit us together as a society?
When you think about high culture, there's things like Broadway and the symphony, the opera, museums are closed, all the places we gather, and then there's mass culture.
And one of the most prominent forms of mass culture is, of course, sports, sporting events across the world.
So all the places where people tend to gather, what are you going to be looking for there?
I mean, I think professional sports is the place to look, right?
So I mean, professional sports is the canary in the coal mine for everything in my mind.
And the reason for that is you have very powerful economic interests.
You have actually people who have to really be close to each other to perform these kind of tasks.
And then you have the emotional salience of professional sports for so many people.
So to me, that is the canary in the coal mine, which is when they figure out what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, it'll become a marker for everyone else to follow.
Much like even at the beginning, if you remember when the NBA players tested positive, that was such an important marker in the development of the COVID.
It's going to be the same thing on the outside, which is once we figure out a way to kind of conduct those kinds of events, it's going to mark the beginning of the end of these things.
And I think what they're doing with baseball in Asia and Taiwan and elsewhere, I think is like the first step in that.
But if you want to watch an industry who is going to figure this out best and first, I'd look at professional sports because they have such powerful incentives.
Athletes have such powerful incentives, owners have such powerful incentives, and they're so powerful in the world.
So that, I think, is the place to look.
I don't know how it shakes out young me, but I think professional sports is where you look to see innovation on this.
In my mind, when I think about professional sports, I think they have to figure out at a minimum three big issues.
The first issue is the logistics issue.
So, for example, the NBA is considering creating some kind of isolation bubbles and having all of the games take place in one place and keeping players and all of the associated people that help run the games in certain hotels that are quarantined.
And so there are a whole set of logistical questions that have to be figured out, which are really complicated and involve a lot of people.
The second thing that I think they would have to figure out is, for lack of a better way to characterize it, is the fairness issue.
For example, in this country, we don't have extensive testing yet.
So is it fair to channel a disproportionate number of tests to this elite group of athletes?
Is it fair to divert healthcare resources to making sure these folks are okay?
And so I do think there's some questions there that really need to be thought through.
And then the third has to do with sort of competitive integrity.
So you can do the first two things right.
You can get the season up and running, and then suddenly, wow, sports is back without spectators, but it's back, and everybody's watching.
But then what happens when someone on a team tests positive?
Do you immediately stop the season and all that effort was for nothing?
Do you quarantine that particular team and all of its recent opponents?
What happens when the virus somehow penetrates, and then all of that effort suddenly is for naught?
I think these are things that I really have trouble figuring out how they're going to solve.
And until the questions around those three issues are answered, I don't see how they can restart.
It's interesting to me this idea of forming pods where you have mechanisms in place that make sure that no one can enter or no one can touch that particular group.
So sports is a good example.
Companies will look a little bit like that, right?
Where maybe the top management teams will create a pod where they can make sure that they have less contact than they would otherwise have.
I saw a movie production company whose plan is essentially to isolate everyone during the five or six months while they're producing a new movie.
So the idea is if you sign up for the movie, you sign up for five, six months, and you're not going home.
You stay in a hotel.
The hotel is cordoned off, and you just interact with everyone on the set.
And if you test the limited number of people that will work on the set, you can guarantee fairly safe conditions.
I think this little pod idea will see different manifestations of it in lots of different industries.
It's interesting. Your discussion of pods as well as, Jungmi, your point about competitive integrity, which I hadn't really thought that much about, it just for me reinforces how rapid and widespread testing changes everything.
When you're in a world of five million people a day getting tested, then your issues about competitive integrity, I think, are okay, or we can get through them.
And pods, similarly, we can get through that idea.
But without it, it's all fanciful, right?
For me, it just really brings home, wow, we need to be operating at a scale of testing that is just mammoth.
And until that world happens, it's hard to envision a lot of these things working.
Okay. Before we run out of time on this segment, my last couple of questions have to do with our relationship with the world.
How do you think this is going to change our relationship with different countries around the world?
Well, it's interesting.
I think it's right to kind of question whether this is some kind of a marker that might involve the end of globalization, and people now are talking about deglobalization in a broader way.
I think the way this deglobalization becomes manifest is largely through national security concerns.
So I think what you're going to end up seeing is industries that will somehow now be refashioned to be in the national interest.
You're going to see a lot of healthcare become national security.
And so what does that mean?
Well, we need our own vaccine production.
We need domestic mask production.
We need domestic production of XYZ.
And oh, by the way, there's no foreign ownership of all that capacity.
That is to me what we want to watch for in terms of the breakdown of globalization, because I don't think trade and goods will be as impacted as many people think.
But it is going to be largely on this weight.
There are chunks of the economy that now we say are ours, and that's going to be new.
And the chunks of the economy that we say that about are much larger than they ever were before.
So let me try to build on that.
I think it's important to remember that globalization was in trouble even before COVID.
We've always known that trade creates winners and losers, but maybe the difference was bigger than we expected.
And we did a really poor job at protecting the people who lost out from globalization.
Even more important than maybe also more surprising, there was always this idea that, yes, in the U .S., low -skilled workers will be worse off.
And in developing countries, in poorer countries, we see the opposite because that's where we shift all of this work.
And then when you look at the evidence, that's actually not true.
In fact, we see low -skilled workers losing out everywhere.
They're worse off in relative terms in the U .S.
and they're worse off also in developing countries.
That, I think, created an enormous backlash against globalization.
The only thing I would push back on is I continue to believe that globalization has been an enormously powerful force for good in the world, and especially for the poorest people in the world.
And so the loss is something to really mourn, at least in my mind, which is it is a really significant loss to the way we think about the world.
And at the same time, it's going to be contested because the efficiency gains are so large.
It does not die easily because there are really powerful interests, including consumer interests, in continuing that global trade system in a very powerful way.
Here, I completely agree with you.
And in an interesting way, I think the commercial incentives of companies, this works to our advantage.
Yes, I agree with that.
But if anything, I think that is going to continue to put pressure on companies to maintain a presence across borders.
I would also love to hear your thoughts on how we think about our engagement with China going forward and what you're going to be looking at this summer.
I think this is one of the biggest stories of the summer to watch, which is this increasing sense of tension between the U .S.
and China at such a fragile time in the global economy and in such a fragile time for global institutions.
It has many seeds. It's been brewing for a long time.
But, you know, if you kind of step back and, you know, you'd ask what could make what was already a simmering situation worse, a global pandemic, which some people now trace to China is like, I mean, like you could not have dreamt up something worse.
It taps into deep insecurities in the United States.
It taps into a rising sense of nationalism.
And so it is such a catalyst for some of the most negative forces.
And you could imagine this just continuing to fuel, especially at a time of a presidential election in more and more negative ways.
So I think this is one of the most important stories to watch during the summer.
And I really worry that we could end up with just an allegation that can just flip things in a really dramatic way and a really dangerous way.
And that worries me deeply.
I'm similarly pessimistic me here in part because it feels like this moment is really sort of Nixon goes to China in reverse.
That's interesting.
Now what's happened is that the party that is sort of in the best position to defend globalization and to look for opportunities for collaboration with China, that party has decided we're no longer going to collaborate.
And of course, even if we get, say, if the Democrats win in November, they're naturally much more suspicious of China than the Republicans are.
And so we now have a conservative government which may be replaced by a democratic government, and both of them have every reason to be highly suspicious.
And so I think many of the changes that have happened in the last four years, I think we can undo.
The U .S. can just decide, OK, so let's join the Paris agreement after all.
We're sort of only halfway out anyway.
But this is a change where I really fear it's broken and it's hard to see how you can fix it.
If nothing else, you would think that a pandemic like this would reinforce how interconnected we all are.
And to see this all devolve into a blame game, even the question of the origin of the coronavirus, you would think that there would be so much for us as a globe to learn from that, for us to have an honest examination of what happened.
Because honestly, this is the moment for us to say, how can we work together?
How can we strengthen the WHO to ensure that the next time this happens in any country, we are able to protect as many people as possible, as quickly as possible?
And how can we reinforce the trust that we have across nations when we're dealing with a common enemy?
If you think about the kind of tone and the kind of relationship building that's required to create that level of trust, we are so far from that place right now.
I heard someone use this analogy of, imagine if you were a firefighter and you're standing next to another firefighter and you've got this horrible fire and you're both trying to put it out and one firefighter turns to the next one and just says, this is all your fault.
And this is over, I am coming after you.
It's so crazy. Not even when this is over, like, but instead of putting out the fire, we like, we turn our hoses on each other.
Exactly. It is so crazy.
And so I am looking for any signs of leadership across these countries where we can start an actual conversation about how we can learn from this and get better at addressing these kinds of pandemics together.
But I do think what we're describing is the sad state of politics, right?
At one and the same time, if you see collaboration among scientists now.
Oh my God, just amazing.
Like everything from how quickly they isolated the virus, how that information was shared.
Basically in real time, you see all of these scientific working papers, all of the pharmaceutical companies that are working together, that are trying to learn from what happens everywhere.
I agree in politics, we have exactly the fire situation that you described, Yang Mi.
But there's a separate part of the world that luckily doesn't pay that much attention to politics.
And there I think the news is largely positive.
I think is, or at least much more positive than it is in the politics space.
On that more optimistic note, we will then close this out.
Lots to look at this summer though.
Lots to pay attention to.
Everything from our relationship to China to what happens to the world of sports.
So before we get into pics, it just occurred to me that at the end of the summer, are you guys going to have like rumble, still skinned beards?
Are you going to have like ZZ talk?
I ordered my electric guitar also.
So we are going to do summer recommendations.
And so we're going to do multiple rounds.
This is quite indulgent.
So this should be fun.
Felix, you want to go first?
What's some of the stuff you're going to be checking out this summer?
Yes. So as everybody else on the planet, I have a Netflix list.
There's three series that I'm really looking forward to.
Okay, so you haven't seen these yet?
These are not out yet, but they will come out.
I think the first one is in two weeks and then sort of released throughout the summer.
The first one is a series called White Lines.
And the reason why I'm so excited about it, it's produced by Alex Pina.
And you remember, he's the guy who did Money Heist.
The central bank in Spain.
He's just one of my favorite producers.
This story is about the disappearance of a celebrity DJ.
So I'm really looking forward to that.
I'm looking forward to a second series called Space Force by Greg Daniels, who created The Office with Steve Carell.
I saw that preview.
That looks so stupid.
It's so funny. It's about a group of people who are trying to create the sixth branch of the military, hence the name of the show.
And then the last one is Season 3 of Dark.
Remember, this is the show that takes place in a German town.
And there's tunnels where you can go to the future and you can go to the past and something terrible happens and you're trying to figure out.
I have this amazing chart.
It looks like a very complicated graph.
Who is who? Because you need to keep track of who is who in which time zone, which actually is not that easy.
Wait. You created an Excel spreadsheet to help you follow this show?
So even better, it's a hand -drawn chart.
I update it in real time as I watch it.
I'm really looking forward to summer.
What can I say? Okay.
So the third thing you recommended sounds too scary.
The second thing you recommended sounds really too stupid.
The first one sounds fantastic.
So that's my review.
I'm going to stand up for Space Force because I think Felix, it has the potential to kind of be like an airplane kind of a situation.
I don't know if you remember the movie airplane, which is so stupid.
I love that. I think Space Force has that potential.
I was so desperate for stupid content.
I watched Dom and Dumber 2 twice since we are in lockdown.
And you know, Dom and Dumber 2 is not as good as Dom and Dumber.
It's interesting. We both agree that it sounds stupid.
You consider that to be a feature.
I consider that to be a bug.
Okay. I'll go next.
My summer viewing strategy is similar to you, Felix.
I'm just so into checking out shows from around the world.
It's kind of amazing if you think about it that we have access to all of these shows from around the world.
So true. And particularly while we're stuck at home and we can't visit any of these places, it's really something.
So some of the shows I've actually recommended before.
If you haven't seen Terrace House from Japan yet, multiple seasons, you should check it out.
It's a reality TV show, kind of like the old real world on MTV.
But it's so Japanese.
It's very quiet. The drama's very mild.
It's such a soothing contrast to how we do reality shows in the US.
Deli Crime, I've recommended from India, which is incredible.
Money Heist, Felix, you mentioned that.
The Bureau from France, Fouda from Israel.
All of these shows, if you haven't seen these shows, they are so good.
Right now, I'm watching Midnight Diner, Tokyo Stories.
It takes place in this diner that opens up at midnight every night.
And it's open from midnight to 7 a .m.
And every night, a different quirky set of characters show up.
They walk in. They talk to each other.
It's almost like a 30 -minute play.
It's not for binge -watching because it's a very gentle show.
But if you want a nice change of pace, it's really lovely.
That is great. So my big umbrella recommendation is to visit shows from around the world.
And then these are some of the specific things I would recommend.
Me here. So we are all on the same wavelength.
Ooh. Which is, I have two foreign shows to suggest.
And I think exactly right, Young Me, which is I found it so much fun to travel while streaming.
Like, you want to combine these things, right?
And so my two are, obviously, they're cop shows.
They're procedurals.
So the first one is Gamora, which takes place in Naples.
And it is hardcore kind of a cross between Breaking Bad and The Wire, but set in Naples.
And you really get transported to Italy in that process.
But just to be clear, it's not the rolling hills of Tuscany.
It's like the seediest parts of Naples.
But it is a great mafia story.
And the one I'm looking forward to that I have not started yet is called The Last Panthers, which is a jewel thief series from France.
Like a heist kind of thing?
Yeah, it's like a heisty kind of thing.
Oh, I love those. And then the other kind of non streaming thing I just wanted to recommend for entertainment is there's a guy who's actually an economist, Nick Huntington Klein, and he has built an escape room, which is fantastic.
It's a virtual escape room.
So I'm a economist of escape rooms, and he's built something you can do on Zoom with your friends.
And in fact, my friend Alan and I did this together and it was fantastic.
And it's called Mansion of Thieves.
And you just basically work through, like an escape room, but it's all virtual and it's entirely the theme is entirely games.
So there's like a clue room, there's like a Monopoly room, all the games that you played like when you were growing up as a kid.
And it is so well done.
Better than most real escape rooms.
And like I would pay money for it.
And it's totally free.
He's a total amateur.
He just did it on the side.
Have you done this with your girls yet?
It's a little advanced for the girls, but I did it with my friend Alan and his daughters who were a little bit older and it was so much fun.
So much fun. So Escape Room in addition to streaming and in particular Mansion of Thieves by Nick Huntington Klein.
Oh, that sounds good.
Okay. Felix, you have something else?
So I have book recommendations.
Two things that are on my bookshelf.
The first one is by an author called Yoko Ogawa.
She's an established, wonderful Japanese writer.
And she's written this book called Memory Police.
It's about an island and the island has a police that controls the memory of people and it takes away memories.
And there is a rebellion of sorts on the island when people get together to sort of preserve a memory that they have.
So good. I read like a little part of it and it was, I think, I can't wait to read it.
And then the second one, and I'm going to do a terrible job at pronouncing her name.
I think it's Shukufe Azar.
She's an Iranian writer.
And the story is about a family in 1979 right at the time of the Iranian Revolution and they're forced to leave Tehran.
And they sort of experience as a family the pressures that come after the revolution.
And they tried to use the family as a haven of sorts to maintain part of what life meant to them.
And again, it's like the little sampling I did.
I think the writing is just really beautiful.
So those are two books on my nightstand.
I can't wait to get to them.
That sounds great. Both of those sounds so good.
But here, do you have anything in the book theme?
Yes, in the book category, I have a suggestion for how you buy your books, which is a startup really just came online in the week before COVID called Bookshop .org.
And it is an alliance of independent bookstores.
And actually more formally, it's a startup that actually just funnels profits to independent bookstores, which of course have been closed during COVID.
And you can target the bookstore that you want your profits to go to if you're worried about your local bookstores.
So at a time when independent bookstores are really hurting, this is an opportunity to actually direct traffic and your book purchases to independent books everywhere or particular ones you like.
And I have to tell you, the user interface is fantastic.
And my delivery experience has been great.
So you're not sacrificing anything.
And you're getting some discounts as well, not Amazon like discounts, but you're getting good discounts.
And so it's Bookshop .org.
And it's a fantastic new way to think about buying books.
Nice, nice. Okay, I'll go next.
A book I'm reading right now is blowing my mind.
It's called Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker.
It's a piece of nonfiction, and it is the incredible story of a film.
It's a family with 12 children, an all American family.
And over time, as the kids grow into adulthood, 6 of the 12 end up being diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Oh my wow. And it is this incredible work of nonfiction reporting, because it tells the really intimate story of this family in a very detailed way.
You get to know these people and you get to care about them in a really intimate way.
But it also tells the story of the history of our attitude toward mental health issues, as well as the story of the development of medical breakthroughs in the science of schizophrenia.
So it's many stories in one.
Robert Kolker is just an incredible writer.
Is this the one which is the Colorado family that's like this all American family, right?
I just listened to an interview with the author, but this is like an all American family associated with the Air Force Academy in Colorado.
Everyone thinks they're like the best family in the world, and yet underneath it, there's all this stuff going on.
It sounded like a great book.
That's a great pick.
Yes, it's really a good book.
And then two books I have lined up that I'm going to read as soon as I'm finished with this one.
One is a book called On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous, written by a poet named Ocean Wong.
It's a great title.
Isn't it? I've actually peaked and read a few pages, and I just can't wait to read it because it's written so beautifully.
The author is a poet.
And so it's a novel, it's written in the form of a letter from a son to his mother.
It traces the family's history all the way back to Vietnam.
I have read so much about this book, and so this one's next on my list to read.
And as I said, I've gotten a little taste of it.
It's so beautiful. And then the second book I've got lined up is a book called The Glass Hotel by Emily St.
John Mandel. She wrote one of my favorite books of the last decade, which is Station Eleven, which I recommended before the current crisis, actually.
This is her follow -up novel, and I can't wait to read it.
So those are the two I've got lined up.
Felix, let's do one more round.
You will not be surprised at all that my last category is cookbooks.
The first one is by Toni Tippen Martin, and she sort of has gotten famous because for quite some time now she's collected recipes about African -American dishes.
And there's a really interesting personal angle to the whole project.
She grew up in L .A., in a middle -class, fairly affluent part of town that was largely African -American.
And so she was always puzzled why the food that she ate at home was nothing like the food that you talk about when we talk about soul food and the typical southern dishes that everybody knows.
And she was sort of individually puzzled about this to then discover, yes, in fact, of course, soul food and southern cuisine is tied to the African -American experience, but it's so much richer.
There's so much other things.
And so she's brought all of this back.
So all of these are recipes that she now collected in a book called Jubilee.
It's really an attempt to describe what African -American cooking really was in the U .S.
and just sounded really great.
And then the second cookbook is one that's called Cook Like a Local, and it's by a chef.
His name is Chris Shepherd, and he lives in Houston.
I don't know, maybe you guys know, but I was really surprised.
But Houston is now the most diverse city in the United States.
Isn't that amazing?
That is amazing. And what he does is he not only eats in local restaurants, but he ends up cooking in Vietnamese noodle shops.
He ends up helping out in a Chinese restaurant.
He ends up learning Korean dishes.
So Cook Like a Local.
Yeah, it's local, but it's local reflecting the diversity in the place that you live.
Also sounded really fantastic.
Am I the only one getting hungry listening to this?
Your descriptions are so alive that I just find myself picturing the food in my head and then my stomach starts to crumble.
Oh, me here. By the way, before you give yours, my sister made a Dutch baby.
She made one and she texted me a photo of it, and it looked like your photo.
It's amazing. And then we were going for a walk the other day and she was talking about how easy it was, and she's already thinking about the next one and how she's going to accessorize it differently because I guess she goes sweet or you can go savory.
That's great. She's already thinking about how to dress up her Dutch baby.
And she got over the name?
Yeah, she got over the name.
So I was wondering, why is the Dutch often called Dutch?
I guess because Dutch baby is really Dutch often, right?
Actually, so Dutch baby, it turns out, comes from the idea that it's also a German pancake and Deutsch, it was sometimes called a Deutsch pancake.
And then that got simplified apparently to Dutch baby.
It's not actually from the Dutch oven.
It's actually from the bastardization of a German pancake, which was Deutsch pancake, which became Dutch pancake, which became Dutch baby.
It's kind of a disappointing backstory, I think.
It is, isn't it? Yeah, not great.
So I have a couple things in the food and beverage category quickly, which is one, you know, I find myself reminiscing about going to restaurants and especially Mexican restaurants just for the hot sauce.
And then I decided I can buy that hot sauce at home.
And when we're all eating at home, you need better hot sauce at home.
And in particular, I wanted to recommend the El Ucateco Habanero hot sauce, which is the best hot sauce ever.
We are going to get some angry, angry emails that disagree with you.
I'm just telling you.
So El Ucateco Habanero hot sauce.
The second thing is the big project for the summer is going to be, we're getting an ice cream maker.
And so I think this is the summer to do ice cream at home.
And so I think we should reconvene in the fall and share our ice cream experiences.
So first off, you know, we're eating a lot of ice cream.
Second, we're not going to be going out for ice cream.
And now it's time to bring it in house, like a lot of things.
And so I haven't decided which brand, there are like a bunch of different brands on this, but I think we have to reconvene in September and figure out our ice cream experiences.
And then the final one is, I've previously advertised in the summer, the affogato and the dirty martini.
And I think the summer's drink for me is going to be something simple but wonderful, which is a gimlet, which is just gin and lime juice.
And depending on your recipe, some simple syrup.
That's a nice choice.
And it's simple and it's easy.
You can do it at home and you get the citrusy.
And I think as you get older, gin is just, I think just think fantastic.
So my drink of choice for the summer is going to be a gimlet.
And I recommend it to you as well.
Well, that is a nice set of recommendations.
I hope the summer will never end.
So much to do. So much to do.
Michael, I'm going to master.
I've decided two things.
One is, I want to be able to make at least 10 different kinds of ramen by the end of the summer.
Just lots of different kinds of ramen.
We're coming over and we're taping at your place.
And then before the end of the summer, I'm going to try to make the pasta thing, as you said.
I'm going to try to make pasta from scratch.
But for now, I'm kind of obsessed with ramen.
Okay. So before we close out, one final thank you.
It's been a wonderful season.
Thank you to all of you out there who've written reviews for us and told your friends about our podcast and signed up for our newsletter.
As we mentioned earlier, we have a bunch of projects that we're hoping to share with you over the summer, and we'll use the newsletter for that.
But in the meantime, please know how grateful we are to all of you.
And have a wonderful and relaxing and hopefully reinvigorating summer.
And of course, we're looking forward to reconnecting with you before too long.
Yep, so everybody stay well out there.
Stay close to your loved ones, and we will see you next season.
That's it for this season.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
Thanks for watching!
