Ted Audio Collective.
HBR Presents. Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yung Mee. I'm Mee here.
I'm Rebecca. I'm Felix.
I'm Rowie. And we have the whole band.
Look, the whole band is in the garage.
What a motley crew we are.
Cover yourself Professor Moon.
Rebecca, you always look so good, so glamorous.
But I was speaking about these other colleagues.
If we were a band, what would the title of our band be?
Motley Crew's a good title for a band.
But that one's taken, Rowie.
You want a new title for a band?
Yes. I thought it was going to be the Moonbeams.
No, please. Maybe the Riff -Raff.
The Riff -Raff. Yes, I know.
It's good to see you guys.
So this is our last episode of the season.
I know. It's sad. So this is going to be a fun episode though, because I thought we'd do two things.
One is, I wanted to go around and ask each one of you the stories you are paying particular attention to this summer.
And then I want to do a mega round of recommendations.
How does that sound?
Fabulous. Excellent.
That's good. Let's do it.
Okay, Rowie, we're going to go in alphabetical order in your last name.
Please, you get to go first and share with us the story you are paying attention to this summer.
So I'll tell you what I'm most excited to watch is there are all of these innovations in public -private partnerships at the local level.
Over the past 10 years, but really magnified by the pandemic in terms of their impact, in terms of their importance.
At the city level, people are trying to figure out new ways to connect business and public policy with mayors, with city leaders, and things like education.
Should we be doing more skills -based training?
How should we support small business?
How can we support local entrepreneurs?
And there are some really interesting examples of this.
So the Lawrence partnership nearby us in Massachusetts, the career -wise Colorado initiative, which is about skills -based training for high school students.
Let's assume not everybody's going off to college.
And so if not, how can we prepare them for the labor market?
And so I feel like in the next year or so, this is going to be a really powerful element of what comes next.
How business and public policymakers at the local level get together.
So, Rowie, what I find really interesting about that is our headlines are always dominated by national news stories.
And I know that you have done a bunch of work over the past couple of years with mayors around the country, and mayors who really believe that the engine driving the country forward actually happens at the city level.
And so even though they're local, they're proliferating.
And if you look at them as a collective, these are all very exciting initiatives.
And Rowie, what do we know about what works and what doesn't work in that setting?
So what's interesting here is that every city has something like this, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
The thing that worries me is that every mayor in this country, every mayor in the world is just burnt out.
It's been a rough, rough year.
But I think the thing that is exciting is that when these members of the community really get together, they can do something extraordinary.
Rowie, I want to double down on what Yang Mi said, which is, I think these partnerships are incredibly exciting.
I've been bumping into them in the context of climate change, and we're seeing more and more cities trying to work together to reduce their carbon emissions and build resilience and so on.
My question is, how dependent is it on having the headquarters of the company in the city?
So, you know, Minneapolis is a famous example of a place where it works, but they've got a huge number of Fortune 100s headquartered in Minneapolis.
I mean, Ditto, Atlanta.
So if I'm just in the middle of nowhere and all my headquarters have left and I have some kind of subsidiary plant, am I going to be able to get that kind of business, politics conversation going?
I actually think it's easier with the smaller companies than it is with the big companies.
I think it's easier when we're talking about the small local banks and the small local firms.
And there's this mismatch of skills and opportunities, and that's the place where we can intervene at the local level.
So I think the most exciting thing about it is that it's not about the big companies.
It's really about building up from the ground, because we are telling the young people that they have to leave, and they have to go to college, and they have to study something, and they have to take on some massive amount of debt.
And maybe what we should be telling them is that if you want, you can stay, and we can teach you these skills.
And they will be useful.
And maybe you go to college, maybe you don't, but there will be some connection between what business needs and what the local community needs.
Interesting. So, Raui, I love that you started us off with this one.
And it's funny, when I asked you to get us going, because you're Mr.
geopolitics, I expected you to say something like, you know, U .S.-Russia relations, or - Super, my good.
Crimean Peninsula is where it's at.
And I think it's such a useful reminder, because at the national level, so many of the stories we're paying attention to are a reflection of the dysfunction that you see across government, across business.
Yet when you look at the local level, there's dysfunction there too.
But there are also many, many examples of programs and initiatives that appear to be working in some manner.
If we put our energy into that more, I think we would all be better off.
So I love that one.
Felix, do you want to go next?
Yes. So one of the stories that I will follow this summer is the future and the rollout of Google's privacy sandbox.
So there are many components to this.
Maybe the most interesting component is to think about a future in which there are no cookies.
Cookies are obviously super important for the current advertising system.
And so the question is, how will advertising work?
And Google's response is something called federated learning of cohorts.
Of course, they couldn't come up with a simple - Very catchy.
It's almost as good as the - Very catchy.
Some serious marketing dollars went into naming this.
And some people call it Flock, which is a little better.
But basic idea is very simple.
Instead of identifying you as an individual, we will use personal information, essentially your browsing behavior in using the Chrome browser, and we will assign you to a cohort of people.
A flock. So it's not you as an individual, it's a flock.
But so a flock will be about a thousand people, and it gets updated week by week by week.
And so there are three questions, I think, that I will pay attention to.
The first one is, does it even work?
Google claims that you get about 95 % of the conversion rates that you get with cookies.
But we have zero visibility into the tests that they run.
But I think that's a really interesting thing to look at.
The second question is, if it works, and it is the future of the advertising system, does it really quiet the privacy concerns that we have?
On the one hand, of course it's better because it's not you as an individual.
But that's not totally clear.
There are dozens of marketing companies and tech companies that are working on combinations of flocks and first -party data that they have.
So now there might be even worse in the sense that we have all the first -party data that we can possibly hope.
And on top of that, we get the flock identifier.
And the combination probably tells you more than you would want to give away.
And then the last thing that I'm going to look at is the competitive response.
Last week, engineers already found pieces of code on Amazon .com and Whole Foods .com that block the flock information.
And the idea is we're not taking the flock info from Google, but we're also not giving Google any sort of information about the pricing behavior, say, on Amazon .com.
And one reason why this is super interesting is we now don't know do we go to a closed system where Amazon has a lot of first -party data, Google has a lot of first -party data, Facebook has a lot of first -party data, and we're essentially not sharing across these domains.
And so we might end up with a radically different advertising system that might not work for anyone because you're perfectly identified if you're on Facebook and if you're on Amazon and if you're on Google.
And at the same time, advertisers get much lower conversion rates because we cannot glean any information that sits outside the ecosystem.
So many interesting things to look at this summer.
Felix, I think we are at such an important inflection point in how we think about data and how we think about privacy.
If you think about the first wave of internet companies, the companies that are today, some of the largest companies in the world, there's a period of time where they were collecting data.
And they hadn't figured out how to monetize it yet.
And then they did. And part of that monetization involved the sharing of that data with other parties.
And so you got this huge monetization opportunity, and they got very big, and they got very well capitalized as a result.
And now that there's sort of a backlash and everybody's worried about privacy, they're all becoming much more guarded about the data, which they can now frame as being in order to protect our privacy.
But another way to think about it is they are big enough now that this first party data gives them such an advantage.
It's in many ways a consolidation of power.
And so it's the classic example of a double edged sword.
So on the one hand, yeah, you want more privacy?
Great. We're not going to share your data anymore.
On the other hand, we, of course, have first party data and you see Amazon going down this route.
You see Apple going down this route.
You see Google going down this route.
Yeah. And it's this fascinating thing where it's all being framed along this narrative of protecting our privacy, which maybe they are, but is also a consolidation of their power.
I'm curious. One motivation for this is what you started with, which is concerns about privacy.
Another motivation is Young Mi's story about consolidating power, having established a dominant position.
Is there another part of this story?
Might this reflect some weakness inside Google's position, both on the browser market as well as on search, or is that not really true?
Because my understanding is that actually on even on the browser side, you know, Safari and Firefox are finally kind of, you know, they've kind of been more abundant for a long time.
And they're a little bit resurgent.
Is this a reflection of that?
It's super fascinating, Mi here, if you're concerned about privacy, of course, Chrome is the last browser you should use.
100%. And they have 40 % market share.
I mean, it's the leading browser.
And so I agree there could be weaknesses in Google's ecosystem.
But the strength of its browsers, I'm just flabbergasted.
It flies in the face of privacy concerns are the dominant way how people think about spending time on the Internet.
It's striking as we talk.
I thought we knew that most people don't care about their privacy at all, that they don't mess with the privacy settings.
They're not willing to pay for services that are more private.
And so I think we know that when these firms say they're hoping to increase our privacy, something else is probably going on.
Is that too strong?
There's no consumer demand for it at very high prices, but Apple and its marketing team definitely seems to believe that in the fight among very similar hardware, very similar software, that's a big leg up.
And I think that's one.
And then the other is, of course, the concern about regulation.
So I think all of Google's privacy sandbox, all of these different elements, you can look at them and you can see where concerns regarding regulation would kick in and how we would then make it harder for Google to make money.
The one piece of advice I would have for our listeners is I think one of the reasons people check out on this story, Felix, is it's mind -numbing to try to read through and understand the different privacy controls that every company is putting in.
And so one of the things I love about your recommendation to follow this story is that you're pulling out sort of the meta strands of what's going on and what it means in terms of who wins and who loses and how power is getting redistributed in the process.
And that's the level at which I think it's really important for us to all pay attention to.
And for every business person, right?
Even if you have a small business, you have a website, part of your revenue stream is advertising.
Sure. You really have to pay attention.
If these opportunities go away, because for some reason, Flock really doesn't work, all of a sudden a big part of your customer acquisition costs might change dramatically.
You might have to rethink how you go to market with new products.
The cooking has been around for such a long time.
We've gotten so used to that.
That's how things work, that it's really a watershed moment.
It is a watershed moment.
Rebecca, what do you have?
So the story I want to follow is about accounting.
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking accounting is the world's most boring subject, but I'm here to tell you that accounts are the foundation of modern civilization.
And what's happening in accounting right now is really, really important.
There are CPAs in our audience right now.
They're saying, finally, I feel seen.
Did she say the foundation of civilization?
She did. Yes, yes. I did.
As far as I'm concerned, Rebecca, pay no attention to these people, just rock on.
Thank you, Miriam. So the story is about adoption of so -called environmental, social, and governance metrics.
ESG for short. Now, what are these metrics?
Historically, they were a response to activists, nonprofit firms bugging companies about their performance.
And so companies started generating these reports saying, I'm not dumping my waste in the river.
Here are my carbon emissions.
I'm good to my employees.
And these reports were sort of all over the map because it was self -reported.
The data was not comparable across firms.
And so that's what firms have been doing, so -called corporate social responsibility reports.
And when you ran the numbers, is performance against these metrics correlated with profits?
You basically got just noise.
So what's been happening?
Well, what's been happening is investors are starting to believe that if you got these metrics right, they would be useful, that there is material information in how companies treat their employees or think about environmental risk or run their boards that might highlight maybe risk.
Is this company dealing with risk in a sensible way?
Is it taking advantage of some of the new opportunities that are coming in fields like construction and transportation where these issues really matter?
Are they connected to their employees?
And so there's been this huge attention on ESG.
And in fact, when you look just this last year, the flow of funds into ESG has increased enormously.
So there are now more than 400 ESG -themed funds.
That's 20 % of the new money that went into the market, went into funds that focused on how firms do in ESG.
And what's exciting is that investors are really interested.
And as investors are really interested, they're saying, well, wait a moment.
We need data that's material to the firm, that's auditable, that's replicable.
And at the moment, we have an alphabet soup of standards and companies are self -reporting and fix it.
So what I'm following is developments like the International Accounting Standards Board is saying, okay, we're going to come out with standards.
Rebecca, what would be an example of that kind of a thing?
So for example, let's take something easy like carbon emissions.
How are you going to report your fossil fuel profile?
Or you want to see how well are you managing your employees?
So you're going to look at turnover, you're going to look at training, you're going to look at diversity.
The SEC is considering mandating reporting against these standards.
So I think this is a major revolution in accounting, which might really shift attention to a whole different set of metrics that investors can look at, as well as customers and employees and regulators, could change the way we manage firms.
Now, Rebecca, it sounds like part of what's interesting about this is the range of indicators that they're actually measuring.
But there's another thing that I felt like I was picking up on, which is that it could be that this range of indicators is actually a proxy for good management.
And so if you're doing well on these metrics, it probably means that you're doing well in general.
Is that sort of one extra benefit of this?
So I think the reason investors are interested is exactly this, which is these metrics give you insight into a number of aspects of the firms that have been super hard to track.
So one might be the quality of the management team, but let me give you another.
How much risk are you taking on?
Some of these measures, and again, everything is in flux, is a measure of the negative impact you're having on your local community and on the world in general.
And if we believe some of the preliminary studies, there's a very significant number of firms out there who are causing more negative impact than their total profits.
I mean, you'd kind of like to know that if you're an investor, and you're thinking that the regulatory regime might change.
So the kind of watchword is this is material information.
It's material to financial performance.
It gives you insight into risks.
So that's the thought that's at the heart of this interest, is it's real information that's material to firm performance.
It seems like such an interesting set of developments.
And I think this movement, when it gets to metrics, can make a huge difference undoubtedly.
But some of these are unequivocal, like climate footprint, carbon emissions.
Churn, I might choose high churn.
You may choose low churn.
We can have different strategies so that the numbers are not as easily understood.
But I guess I'm just curious if you think once it gets crystallized into a number, do we run the risk of what we often run the risk of when we have quantifiable metrics, which is people playing the metrics.
Is that a kind of risk you worry about, or is it just so great to kind of be getting metrics finally, that makes it much more clear who's accountable for what?
So I surely worry about playing the metric.
But think about what accounting is.
The history of accounting is a history of firms learning how to game the metrics.
And the accountant's coming back and saying, okay, we're going to moderate this metric.
We're learning to think about this one in a different way.
So if the choice is no metric versus metric that we might game, I think I'd rather have the metric.
No, for sure. You know, listening to this conversation, the truth is, firms have an extraordinary amount of discretion in what metrics they report that are non -explicitly financial metrics.
They just have an extraordinary amount of discretion.
And I think it's going to take some time, as you put it, Rebecca, this is an iterative process.
It's going to take time for analysts in different industries to get sophisticated in how they interpret the metrics across different industries.
I mean, take fast food, for example, where churn rates are routinely 300 % a year.
In other industries, that would be absolutely stunning to see.
HBS. We churn the faculty every three months.
Yes, exactly. And so there is a level of sophistication that's going to have to be developed among everybody that has access to these metrics in any way to begin to interpret.
But it's got to be better than where we are today.
So right now we're in a place where any firm can really kind of hand wave about ESG and try to position themselves as being socially responsible.
And the words have become really quite meaningless.
And so this requires companies to put it all out there.
And we can then argue about the data and are we measuring the right things?
But maybe that's the right kind of argument we should be having.
And maybe it becomes part of my strategy to explain to investors why my churn rate is 10 % higher than every other company in my industry.
I think it's really interesting.
Yeah. You want to go next, Youngmi?
Should I go next? Either way.
Yes. I'm going to take us in a different direction.
So the story that I'm keeping an eye on, you guys know that Jeff Bezos has stepped down from day -to -day operations at Amazon.
For sure. And instead he's going to space.
Yes. Elon Musk, of course, is routinely launching rockets into space.
So this is what I find fascinating.
So there is a narrative that has taken hold.
That is something like this.
Look at these billionaires playing out their childhood space fantasies.
The epitome of self -indulgence and hubris.
But I think it's all a red herring.
And the truth is the commercial opportunities in space are enormous.
And I think we are all being blinded by the conflation of these two things.
In other words, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are engaged in this billionaire boys club race to space.
And we sort of roll our eyes and we say, oh, look at all these rich guys with their toys.
And in the meantime, they're diverting our attention away from the fact that they are laying the groundwork for an enormous set of business opportunities for themselves.
Right now, the most prominent player in the space industry is SpaceX.
And SpaceX has now placed hundreds and hundreds of satellites in space.
Fifteen hundred of those satellites are for its own Starlink network, which is the part of SpaceX that's rolling out super high speed internet service to places that really don't have access to it.
And as the number of satellites in the sky explodes in number, which is what is happening right now, I think this has a chance to transform the flow of data and data related services across the globe.
And on the one hand, there are some really phenomenally fantastic things about this.
On the other hand, if you think about what satellites do, whether it's telecommunications or navigation or weather forecasting or surveillance, what they do is collect and transmit data, which means they collect and transmit intelligence.
And the commercial opportunities associated with this are just huge.
And at the same time, the first mover advantage in space is also huge because the barriers to entry are so huge.
So I find it amazing that this is all happening right before our eyes.
And yet no one's upset about this at all.
No one is even pushing back against this idea except to roll their eyes and say, oh, look at all these rich guys racing into space and isn't this silly and hubristic.
So satellites are actually not that expensive to build, but they are very expensive to put into space.
And there is no FedEx to put your satellite into space.
There is only SpaceX and a few other private players.
So we're getting to a place where there are a handful of private players that control the highway to space.
And they are also putting hundreds of their own satellites into space.
And so we are setting ourselves up to become hugely dependent on a few private players for vital commercial infrastructure.
And these private players are already some of the richest and most powerful individuals on earth, not to mention the national security dependencies we're creating.
And I just think it's kind of amazing that we're not taking this more seriously and we're not having a conversation about this.
And instead we're just sort of letting it all happen while we try to regulate whether or not Amazon should have private label goods or not.
I mean, it just feels like we are so missing the forest for the trees here.
And so that's the story I'm paying very, very close attention to.
Now, Youngmee, isn't that kind of what happened on earth?
Which is that they created this infrastructure.
We weren't paying attention to it.
And then all of a sudden they're essential and there's nothing we can do about it.
And now they're doing the exact same thing, just not on earth.
Is that what we should be worried about?
Yeah. I mean, there are parallels for sure.
And maybe we should be celebrating it.
Well, that's what I was going to ask Youngmee.
Why not celebrate this, right?
So like if you had said 30 years ago, these people are going to be doing amazing things to build the infrastructure for e -commerce or other things.
And we should be worried about that.
You know, Ex Post we might say, well, actually they built something pretty remarkable.
And certainly in space, they could be building something really remarkable that we could all enormously benefit from and maybe that otherwise wouldn't have been built without their ambition and skill.
So, number one, it's very expensive to do what they're doing.
And we have created a system where there are very few players on earth who have the financial capacity to do this.
And then number two, the US government is paying SpaceX millions and millions of dollars every year.
And so they're funding a lot of this.
And what you could argue is a beautiful public -private partnership.
But I also think the chances are pretty decent that we're going to in 10 years wake up and say, wait a minute, guys, what just happened?
And why is it that there are three companies run by three individuals that are dominating an even greater portion of our economy in this way?
I just think it's really interesting given how much attention we are putting on regulating big tech on earth.
And meanwhile, we're just letting them spawn an entirely new infrastructure in space.
So, Yungmi, you're making me super nervous and deeply intrigued, which is great.
But I'd love a little more convincing that there's a real market.
Some years ago, a lawyer arrived in my office to ask me about Motorola's Iridium satellite system.
I don't know if you remember this.
I remember. But Motorola put up a bunch of satellites, and it was all about providing service to areas that don't have it.
And the whole thing completely crashed and burned.
But persuade us that there's a market.
I mean, isn't there a direct competition with terrestrial communication?
So my memory might be failing me here, but my recollection of that Motorola story is that the satellites were really not that effective.
And if you fast forward to today, satellites are extraordinarily effective and relatively cheap.
You can build a satellite for ten thousand dollars now.
So that's not the issue anymore, which is why there is now a proliferation of them in space.
Right now, there are probably six, seven thousand satellites in space.
Many of them are not operational because they're all legacy satellites.
So the vast majority of operating satellites in space have been put up there over the last five to ten years.
And if you fast forward five years, it is not inconceivable that we will have tens of thousands and potentially hundreds of thousands of satellites in space, which is just orders of magnitude different than existed previously.
And keep in mind, so satellites not only deliver high speed Internet access to places that don't have it, which by the way could unlock so much value, but they do many, many other things.
They track people, ships, cars, weather.
They collect data of all sorts and data is intelligence.
And it's kind of like the early days of the Internet.
People said, well, but what are you going to do with it?
Like, how are you going to monetize it?
It's just an Internet.
How is anybody ever going to make money off the Internet?
And you sort of hear similar arguments today.
So what? So we'll have a bunch of satellites up there collecting and transmitting data.
But where's the business opportunity?
Are you kidding me?
I just I think the business opportunities are tremendous, actually.
I think one of the stories that I remember, this is maybe now two years ago, where the European Space Agency had to maneuver one of its satellites out of the trajectory of a Starlink satellite, where the Starlink satellite just was built, assuming that everybody else will get out of its way.
And so part of what I see and what is worrying is that same kind of Silicon Valley move fast, break things kind of attitude that these players bring to space with potentially disastrous consequences.
So right now we only have about one collision a year.
But obviously, if we're really headed where you say we're headed, the number is going to increase dramatically because not only do you have that one collision, but then all the space junk that is up there is going to hit hundreds, potentially thousands of other satellites.
So in some of the models, you can have this really dramatic meltdown where carelessness by one player then implies instability for the entire system.
You know, I had the opportunity to talk to a U .S.
Army general about this recently.
And so I was peppering him with questions about it because we haven't even talked about the national security implications.
And I actually posed the scenario that you just laid out, Felix.
And I said, what if you had a military satellite up there and there was some commercial thing in the way, just in the way or was really jeopardizing our national security?
Could you shoot it down?
Like if they refused to move it, could you actually shoot it down?
And he wouldn't answer.
He just smiled. He smiled.
And so in my head, I started having these negative fantasies of like a yes.
My head went to a bad place.
My head went to a very, very bad place.
But I think the reality is that, you know, the space agencies, the governments, one reason why their satellites are more expensive is that they have these sophisticated systems that allow them to move out of each other's way.
And what we see in Starlink is just free -riding behavior.
If you know that everybody else has the capability of moving out of your way, you're not going to spend a dime on it because obviously they're not a problem.
Oh, yeah. I mean, the difference between a $10 ,000 satellite and a $10 million satellite is not insignificant, right?
And you can imagine a proliferation of the $10 ,000 satellites up there.
So anyway, the reason I'm paying attention to it is someone has to because nobody else is, guys.
So I'm looking out for humanity down there.
So nice of you. Me, Guardians of the Galaxy.
I'm trying to keep track of the UFOs for everybody.
I am on it on behalf of all of you.
Thank you. Maybe that's why we're not worried.
Yeah. Because we know you're going to take care of it.
Well, people are going to think I'm crazy because I'm going to just start— I'm going to start a sub -stack about this.
That's what I'm going to do.
But having said all of that, I think Jeff Bezos is crazy to put himself on that rocket.
Let me just put that out there as well.
I think he's absolutely crazy.
But Mehir, let's move to you.
We spent enough time on Mars.
Wow. Yeah. So I have a quick update and then my story to watch.
My quick update is I think the last time we were all together, there was some thought that analog summer would catch on.
Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh.
Yeah, I remember. That was your thought mostly, but yeah.
I just wanted to report back to you that I did a Google search five minutes before we started taping.
And it has totally failed.
So nobody is saying analog summer.
But the fact of it is true.
The fact of it is true.
We were having an analog summer.
We just haven't used that branding.
Yeah. But my trademark is not going to pay off, is what I'm saying.
Heartbreaking. So my thought for the summer is really not a particular story, but it just is a way to understand the summer.
So the way I've come to think about this summer and the way I've come to think about COVID and the economy is like a hot house.
And I think what we're going to see that lots of things took root in the hot house of the last 15, 18 months.
And what we're going to see in the next six months is what lives outside the hot house.
And by hot house, I mean, we've just had this remarkable spurt of stimulus.
We've had a remarkable transformations in financial markets, in labor markets.
We've seen meme stocks.
We've seen crypto. We've seen in labor markets, lots of employee power.
We've seen wage gains culturally.
We've seen movements like Black Lives Matter take off in a way that I don't think necessarily would have happened without COVID.
Think of the number of things that have taken root in our imagination in the last 15 months that are really remarkable.
And I think that's because of the hot house of the last 15 months.
So the question in the next three to six months is what can live outside the hot house?
And so I think that's what we're going to find out in this great unwinding of COVID, at least in the developed world.
So as one example, I think if in six months meme stocks and crypto are where they are today, then we have to really adjust our understanding, including myself, of what those things are as kind of more permanent fixtures to the landscape.
If wage gains are what they have been poking up to be, then I think we have to really readjust our understanding of what's going on.
And even culturally, like streaming, like we're going to see, I think, what kind of like the wheat and the chaff, or what was transitory and what was real about the last 15 months.
My instinct is a lot of things that were born in this hot house.
As you can tell, I'm trying, given the failure of analog summer.
Trying really hard to push that hot house, brandy.
Tell me, okay. You know what?
I was thinking, it's not bad.
I like it. Well, thank you.
I do. I like it because it's a little claustrophobic.
It's a little claustrophobic and it's high growth.
Yeah. But some plants and some flowers, they don't grow outside the hot house.
And I think we're going to find out in the next six months and it'll be so fascinating to watch.
We're going to end up coming out of this remarkable unwinding.
And what's your prediction?
In financial markets, I've been very skeptical about all these things.
And I think we're going to find out if that skepticism is well warranted.
In labor markets, again, I'm a little bit skeptical about how much changes in labor markets relative to what we had in 2019.
My instinct is fewer things live outside the hot house than we think.
But that is, I think, for me, is the way to understand the summer.
We're going to learn about all of those issues.
So it's not one particular story.
It's really just kind of a metaphor for thinking about what we're going to learn in the next three to six months.
Felix, what's your prediction?
Do you think he's right?
I do think there are enormous forces that we have forgotten because we live in this unusual world that will come back.
So say you think about everybody's talking about supply chains and how we should rethink and they should be a little more loose and you should have more inventory.
Right. And then in that respect, I think I'm completely with you, me here.
The next thing that we're going to do is people will say, oh, my God, why is there so much inventory on your balance sheet?
Like I can do a much better job.
And then, you know, we snap back as if the pandemic has never happened.
Hybrid work, I think, is here to stay.
Isn't interesting. Yeah, we'll be obviously not working from home all the time, but I think that shifted us to a new equilibrium.
I think the future of education is analog and in -person.
Yeah. I think if we learned anything, it's like really hard to replicate that in an online environment at scale over longer periods of time.
So it'll vary from story to story.
But I love your metaphor about, you know, what grew under these very special circumstances and what can survive.
Rebecca, what's your prediction?
I actually want to go back to your initial prediction, me here, because your image is stuff flourished under the hothouse and we're going to see a kind of cutting back.
But I think as people move back into the analog world, lots of stuff that is going to happen that we don't yet know about.
I just came back from a vacation, like an actual vacation where you hike and you talk to people.
And it was amazing.
It was so great. And so I think we're going to see a lot of doubling down on analog connections, analog experiences.
So yes, there'll be things pared away, but I think we're also going to see a bunch of yet more new stuff come out.
That would be my prediction.
Raui. I'm just curious about me.
Here's principles of what might flourish and what might not, because I see, well, convergence and divergence here.
But what's really interesting is like to Rebecca's point, like there's so much appetite for person to person.
And there's also so much appetite to Felix's point about organizing one's life so that it's not as much person to person as before.
And so I just wonder whether there's some way to think about what flourishes and what doesn't based on like who we are and what we've been missing and what we learned that we want to do differently.
And so I see some of this as we know that people are going to want more analog in person.
And we also know that people are going to want to keep some of the digital.
And I'm just puzzling through it.
It's a super fascinating question.
What do you think, Yangmi?
What's your prediction?
I think the highs, the euphoric highs, new highs we discovered during the pandemic are here to stay.
And we are going to try to keep chasing those highs, even as we embrace the highs we lost.
So when we go to a restaurant or you go for a hike or you hug people, I mean, those are the highs we lost and now we're chasing after them again.
But chasing after a meme stock or the speculation you see in the financial markets, that was a kind of euphoria that was unlocked during the pandemic.
And I think that kind of euphoria we will still continue to chase.
So I would almost look at the valence of the thing, how strong the valence was of that particular activity.
And I think the really high valence activities are the ones that we are going to continue to seek out.
And I sort of see that now that everything's opened up and you go out and you see people embracing their old way of doing things with an even more intense fervor than before.
But I also think there was a lot of stuff that was unlocked.
Yeah, my just instinct is that it's I think a lot of people are over extrapolating what came out of the hothouse and some of that stuff just doesn't survive.
I mean, to your point, Rebecca, people do crave analog and we're seeing that flourish now.
But that will crowd out some part of what we have been doing for the last over 15 months.
Some stuff is here to stay.
My instinct is it's less than we think.
And it's also, I think, people underestimate the degree to which in part because people are at home, in part because of the stimulus, in part because of what Covid was.
How much of this was an abnormal period, which is what a hothouse is, a very weird abnormal condition where certain things get born and then you just don't know.
You don't know what's really going to survive.
Anyway, so it's not really a prediction as much as I guess I just think it's a way to think about the next six months.
Totally. I love it.
And I would trade all of my game stock and all of my Bitcoin just to give you a hug in a restaurant.
There you go. That's very kind.
Okay, let's come back with recommendations.
Okay, so we are going to do a mega round of recommendations because we don't get to do recommendations for an entire summer.
So let's do a few rounds of this.
So Felix, get us started.
So my recommendation is someone I follow on TikTok and he has this strange username Timo Tekanat.
And what I love about him is he's my discoverer of strange things on the Internet.
My browsing has become so predictable.
I rarely stumble across really interesting things.
And this guy, he's full of ideas what else you might do with your time.
And some of them actually tied to the conversation we just had.
He recently recommended a platform, Leo Labs Space, that allows you to look at everything that is in space.
So all the debris, all the satellites, you see the traffic.
It's like really crazy, really interesting.
There's a website called Muscle Wiki.
There's a body you click on the part that you want to be stronger and it suggests every exercise ever invented for you to have stronger forearms.
So weird. There's a website called Future Me that allows you to write letters to your future self and you choose when it's going to be sent.
The Internet is wild and crazy and you almost need someone really young and someone really interesting as a guide.
That is a great recommendation.
I love it. And that's like hundreds of recommendations in a single recommendation.
Is it cheating or is it learning from me here?
I can't quite make up my mind.
It's good. I'm delighted I'm having this.
Exactly. Rowie, give us a recommendation.
So one of my favorite ever novels is by Chang Ray Lee.
It's called Native Speaker.
It's his first novel.
It's beautiful and he has a new novel out called My Year Abroad and he's written a bunch of novels Chang Ray Lee has.
And everyone has a different voice, a different exploration of the human experience.
He's an extraordinary writer.
And so my recommendation is My Year Abroad by Chang Ray Lee.
I love him as a writer.
I have not read that, but I will definitely put that one on my reading list.
Rebecca. My recommendation is long distance footpaths in England, Wales and Scotland.
You know, because we think of long distance footpaths in the US, like the Appalachian Trail and you have to carry a tent.
And you have to stay in a lean to and it's like a serious physical activity.
No, no. Imagine walking out across beautiful fields, seeing 500 year old oak trees, going down little side paths behind 12th century churches and ending at a really good gastropub where you spend the night.
No glamping. I am so all over this walking and eating and this sounds so good.
It's so amazing. Would you like to name one or two as being particularly spectacular?
Sure. So if you're going to choose, I think the one to start with is the Offers Dyke Path which runs down the border of Wales and England.
It's not heavily traveled.
It's extraordinarily beautiful.
The food is great. It's my strong recommendation.
We hear it looks fine.
I'm here to sign life tomorrow.
It looks absolutely beautiful.
I am so excited about this.
Yes, I can just stop.
I am so excited about this.
Yes. Okay. We hear.
So I think for me, this is going to be the summer of the condiment.
So my condiment game has been narrowing and it's been really very hot sauce based and kind of el yuca techo.
And so I came across this great list and what I'm going to do this summer is every week I'm going to try a new condiment.
And I had a list. Some of them will be ones you will have thought of and heard of before, which I have never tried, but just by themselves on a cracker.
So, for example, there's some plain straightforward ones like Sriracha Mayo or Marmite or chimichurri.
But there is a whole world of condiments that I will be exploring this summer.
There's going to be gochujang, which I have never really had.
There's going to be gochujang.
Oh, what? First of all, I'm going to have to teach you how to pronounce it.
I didn't pronounce it correctly.
Gochujang? Gochujang?
No? It's closer. It's better.
Gochujang. Okay. Next time you try to say idli sambar, I'll get on you on that one.
I'm just kidding. Gochujang.
I will try. There's also doenjang, which is a fermented soybean.
Tinjang. Tinjang. This is so hard.
This is the funniest.
Okay. And there are two more that I'm very excited about, which is yuzu koshu, which is like a lime pepper one, you know, yuzu and ata din din.
So, my basic plan for the summer is to try a number of...
Yummy's about to a pass out from your pronounce.
No, no, no. And then, having tried all these condiments, by the way, with a glass of lambrusco, which is my summer drink for the summer, bubbly red wine, I hope by the end of the summer to have confected or invented a new condiment that will be introduced to the US market.
That is my goal for the summer.
And that's my recommendation to you, which is embrace condiments in your life.
I don't even know what to say.
That was quite the recommendation.
Look, I think you need a big project, you need a food gastronomic project.
Can I tell you, it's super ambitious.
I love it, actually.
I do. And I'll get the pronunciation right, young me.
By the end of the summer, I'll work on the pronunciation.
Because I was going to try mayonnaise.
It was so hard this summer.
All right. My recommendation is, have you guys seen Maravie's Town?
Yes. Love it. God, if you have not seen Maravie's Town, it's the best miniseries I've seen since Queen's Gambit, which I know wasn't that long ago.
But it is so - You've got to say it with that Philadelphia accent.
I can't. I'm not even going to try.
It's like you trying to say kwunchjang.
But it's starring Kate Winslet, who can hear.
I mean, you've got to support me.
Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
She makes the show.
You can't take your eyes off of it, even though it's not exactly my kind of show, but the acting in it is so extraordinary.
And the characters are - Fantastic.
Unbelievable. It is so, so good.
And it's one of these things where as you're watching it, you're on the one hand enjoying it, but another part of your brain is just marveling at how good it is.
And how good she is.
So Maravie's Town. And one of the other things about it, young me, that I thought was so fascinating, I don't know if you thought this, which is it's a mystery and it's about a detective.
But there's like this weird family comedy in the background, right?
So there are these like genuine laughs that you get out of this show, young me.
So it's like a weird combination of mystery, serial, murder kind of thing.
Yes. Then you have comedy as well.
I'm totally going to watch this tonight with a cracker full of gochujang and mayonnaise, like - And a glass of lumbarisco.
And a glass of lumbarisco.
That sounds super funny.
Okay, Felix, back to you.
So my recommendation is June's Bag.
And these are little small mesh bags that you can put produce in or fruit that you buy.
And the reason why I was so interested in this is because we're doing something very strange right now.
We're trying to use less plastic and that's a really great idea.
And so depending on the state that you live or the country that you live in, when you go grocery shopping, you can now no longer get a plastic bag from the grocery store.
But while this is going on, we're using dozens and dozens of plastic bags to then put the apples and the produce in.
And in the end, we have one paper bag and more plastic than ever.
It just makes no sense whatsoever.
It's like a regulation that is failed.
And so I have a few different brands, but I like June's bags for a number of reasons.
The first one is the bags themselves are made out of recycled bottles, which is interesting.
The company is carbon neutral.
Down to each individual product is carbon neutral, which I haven't really seen that many products.
So you can click on the product and then they give you all the details of how they offset the carbon that they release.
Sometimes it's investments in renewable energy.
Sometimes it's reforestation, and you feel much better about yourself on top of everything.
That sounds great. I love it.
I'm looking at the website right now.
Yeah, totally. And I didn't even know I was supposed to feel bad about this.
This is really great.
Didn't it strike you as slightly weird or not allowed to give you a plastic bag at the end, but there is like thousands of plastic bags in the store.
That's a really good one.
This is a good one, The Everyday Tote.
Yes, that's the one I really love.
The Everyday Tote. Yes, yeah.
That one's amazing.
That's awesome. Yeah, I love it.
Okay, Rowie. Well, I'm going to go in a slightly different direction, which is a bit of poetry.
One of the best presents I've ever gotten was from my son, and it's a collection of Yeats poetry curated by Seamus Haney, the great Irish poet.
So one poet curating another poet, and it's a lovely, lovely little collection.
And one poem has been much on my mind called The Second Coming.
There's a couplet in the poem, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
And that couplet has been much on my mind these days, given the political and social forces that we face and thinking to myself like, what if we don't let that happen?
What if it's not that the best lack conviction and the worst are full of intensity, but it is the best among us who are full of passionate intensity?
So the poem, Second Coming, but the collection of Yeats poems by Seamus Haney, it's a really lovely, lovely collection.
So I would have everybody look at the poem, but also maybe explore the volume itself.
I think we would all agree that Rowie has really elevated the podcast this season.
Wouldn't you say, I think he's responsible for anchoring the high end of the podcast, which I appreciate very, very much.
I actually think that recommendation was in iambic pentameter, wasn't it?
It's just that with Rowie the slope is so much more noticeable.
Yeah. It's just downhill in really dramatic fashion.
It is so true. Because he shows up on Zoom looking so debonair.
It's been humbling for all of us, I think.
There is civilization.
Yeah, exactly. Okay, Rebecca.
So, Rowie, I love that poem.
I mean, that's so much a poem for our time.
I mean, that is just fabulous.
So I'm a bit nervous about this recommendation because I feel that one of us must have made it this spring.
Okay. I can't remember it.
So I'm going to go ahead and I'm sorry if it's a repeat.
That assumes that one of us will remember that we recommend it.
It's just very unlikely.
I'm always like two episodes behind young me.
It's like, oh, how about this?
It's for the movie Get Out.
We haven't recommended it.
I saw it. I don't think we have.
I think it's the best movie I've seen in five years.
I mean, easily. It's made by a director who has a history of making horror movies and it's sort of a horror movie, and it's sort of a mystery, but mostly it's about what is it like to be black in America?
And like many of us, I've been trying to learn more about like, really, what is it like to be black in America?
I've been reading novels and history, but this movie, it is harrowing, beautifully acted, totally gripping.
I was on the edge of my seat for the whole movie and it's so tight.
So many movies just kind of meander and they don't really go anywhere, but this is a fantastic, fantastic movie.
So, Get Out. You know, that director Jordan Peele has a new movie coming out called Karen and it's looking like he's pushing it even further.
It's going to be really interesting.
That's a great one.
Meir, what do you have?
So, on the TV dimension, I've been sustained over the last 12 months by Gamora, Bridge and Border Town, which are three nice crime dramas, especially Gamora, which is, I think, the best TV show I've ever seen.
And now I'm replacing them with my recommendations for Gamora, which is gritty mafia.
I'm going to be doing Sabura for Bridge, which is Danish, Swedish, cop drama.
I'll be doing Dictay.
And we're in a replacement for Border Town, which is a Finnish crime drama.
I'm going to go to Iceland with Trapped.
Wait, wait, wait. First of all.
Is that three recommendations from here?
I don't. No, I'm doing...
So, I have been sustained by these three shows, Gamora, Bridge and Border Town and I need replacements.
And I think if any fans have other replacements, I would love to hear them.
But I'm going to be doing Sabura, Dictay and Trapped over the summer.
So, here at any given time, you have a portfolio of viewing buckets.
And once you finish one, you have to find something to fill that bucket that is of that genre.
Wow. I'm just saying that over the summer, there's going to be some watching time and I'm just trying to plan ahead.
And if any viewers would like to participate, I'm going to be doing Sabura, Dictay and Trapped.
I love it. But how did you know that an Icelandic series needed to replace the Finnish series?
It just felt kind of like, you know, there's like a lot of scenes.
I'm going to be doing the people you drink all the time.
Exactly. Hey, I did watch Trapped.
Oh, did you? It was the first season, yes.
And? It's interesting.
Uh -oh. No, it's interesting.
I mean, I don't... Yeah, it's interesting.
I'll just leave it at that.
It's interesting. Have you seen Gamora?
Yeah. Gamora is really the best TV show I've ever seen.
It really is. What?
Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, Gamora is just crazy.
I'm putting a circle in an asterisk.
Yeah. My recommendation, my second recommendation, is solar powered lanterns.
Oh, yes. Have you done this?
Yes. Oh, my goodness.
So during lockdown I spent a lot of time on my little deck.
And in the process I discovered how beautiful it is to light it up at night when the sun goes down and to have it all lit up and to spend time out there.
But then I discovered these solar powered lanterns.
And you just leave them out there, and during the day, they power themselves up.
And then as it gets dark, they automatically turn themselves on.
Oh, very nice. I mean, they work beautifully.
And they are not that expensive.
And they, at least for me, have lasted for many, many weeks and are very, very reliable.
And they lift the spirits, let me say.
As the sun goes down and it becomes dark, and if you want to sit outside and have a cup of tea or something or a glass of wine and you're surrounded by all the solar powered lighting, it's really quite nice.
It's beautiful. It's really nice.
And there's such variety.
I love the Chinese lanterns.
So there are many of the traditional motives, the traditional Chinese lanterns that you sometimes see in festivals.
They now all come in solar powered versions.
Really beautiful, really, really amazing.
I'm on a website looking at them.
There's an incredible variety.
Yes. You can get the string of light and you can string them up.
You can get little lanterns.
You can get... Oh, lighting.
I'm telling you. Fantastic.
Really nice. Can I share one that's totally related to that one, Yangy?
Yes, you can. Which is sillier and it's not solar.
But... Which means it's nothing like what I just said.
Well, nobody... It's the same idea, which was my wife and I put up Christmas lights in our dining room for one of the kids' birthdays during the pandemic.
Just like, you know, why not?
I'm picking them up.
And then I think we had them up there for like six months, maybe eight months, and we just put them on kind of like every night and the scene was like so much more cheerful and now there are some solar lights outside as well.
It's very warm, isn't it?
Why not light stuff up?
Yeah. Like let's just light stuff up and have our coffee or our tea or our glass of wine.
I'm totally in favor of this.
I love it. That's great.
One home tip is if you want to really just re -energize or remake a space and you don't have a lot of money to spend, if you just change the lighting, it makes a world of difference in any space.
It really brings rooms to life.
The other thing that has often worked for me really well is repaint one of the walls, choose some random color.
Just one of the walls.
It's amazing how the space is transformed.
If you just have one wall that is not white and then, you know, maybe you get tired of it in a couple of months and you do it again.
You know, after hours where you can get home renovation tips, poetry, it's just a little something for everyone.
So Felix, what's your next recommendation?
I have something for the paranoid moments this summer.
We talked about it earlier as I went to go back to this privacy issue.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an amazing new service that is called Cover Your Tracks.
And essentially what you do is you fire up the website with whatever browser you happen to use and it gives you information about how much the internet can learn, the ad tech companies can learn by you just using your browser.
And what's really great about it is, on the one hand, you know, you can improve privacy protections if you want that.
But it's also a really interesting way to learn about ad technology more generally, because they will tell you, oh, from fingerprinting, here is what we see, here is what we know, and then here is how many hundreds or thousands of people are exactly like you.
And so one of the big surprises is that, say, like seven things that are a little unusual about your browser, and all of a sudden you're in a super small group of people, probably everyone else is in Iceland or Finland or one of those countries that produces these famous television shows, but literally
we can know so much.
I see this rarely that someone manages to do something that is very utilitarian on the one hand, but also deeply educational on the other, which I really love.
They did a really great job.
That is for... That's great.
That one's good. That is a fun one.
Deeply paranoid. If you wake up in the middle of a warm summer night and you're like, who else knows?
Yeah. That's the one that you're long to go to.
Okay, Rebecca, do you have a final recommendation?
I have a book, and it's an incredibly cheerful making book.
It's called Wilding by Isabella Tree.
And it's the story of a couple that inherited a few thousand acres in Southern England and tried to farm it, and the farming was disastrous.
And so instead they decided to take it back to nature.
And in 20 years they now have rare species that people have not seen anywhere else.
Wow. They have trees growing in ways that have never been seen before.
They have soil health.
They have water retention.
They have pretty much paradise.
And the exciting thing is that can be done.
That's going to happen to Jeremy Clarkson's farm soon.
There's an episode on Clarkson's farm about this, but yes, much more low ground.
And it is so cheerful making, and it's well written, and it's fun, and it's got a story.
And the idea that we could heal the planet, and it's not that hard, is just so good to read about.
Wow. That is great.
I love that. That's nice.
That's a great one.
So it sounds like we're moving from the paranoid to the more uplifting, to Mehear, what's your final?
Well, so my final is I have two books, two of my favorite economists who most people haven't heard of, they have new biographies of them.
So the first is Albert Hirschman, who has a new biography.
Which is really great, which is by Michelle Lesavitch.
And the really wonderful one that I'm halfway through, and I recommend completely, is Frank Ramsey by Cheryl Misak.
So Frank Ramsey is this wonder kind who dies when he's 26.
And he makes lasting contributions.
So anybody in public economics knows about optimal taxation by Ramsey.
He did philosophy. He did probability, and he died when he was 26.
It's like reading Hamilton, you know, like the Hamilton biography, who by like age 21 accomplishes more than like anyone has ever accomplished.
Frank Ramsey did that.
He was part of the Bloomsbury set.
It's just an amazing biography.
And he's an amazingly optimistic, sunny person who believes in ideas, which is not always the kind of person who does.
And it's just the most uplifting biography.
So Frank Ramsey and Albert Hirschman, two great new biographies of the comic.
Mehear, one of my all -time favorite articles in The New Yorker is about Albert Hirschman.
So if you want your web appetite for sort of seeing just what an extraordinary thinker he is, the article is The Gift of Doubt by Gladwell.
And it just gives you a sense of how extraordinary he is and the way he thinks about the world, particularly if you're interested about business also, the way he thinks about where success comes from and how success is essentially done.
One of the things I will never forget.
He says no one likes something challenging.
And so you get into challenging situations by underestimating difficulty and every big realization, every big success is essentially the result of your underestimation of difficulties.
It's just full of these really quirky, interesting anecdotes.
Yeah, he's really fantastic.
And you know what I love about this most is my image of Mehear in the summer with his crackers and his condiments and his Frank Ramsey biography.
And he's like, let's fire up the Icelandic drama.
You got the whole picture.
Don't forget the Lumbrusco, you're forgetting the Lumbrusco.
In Lumbrusco, I forgot, I totally forgot.
And Young Me, what do you got?
Finish this off. Okay, so my final recommendation is one of my sisters during the pandemic, one of the hobbies she developed was she started making wacky t -shirts.
And so if you go to redbubble .com, you can find her site.
If you search for Moon Girl Landing, that's her branding.
But the reason I recommend it is for all our listeners out there, if you want an after hours t -shirt, that's where you can find one.
She started playing around with our logo.
Charisma's presence, I can see it coming, yeah.
So if you want an after hours t -shirt, that's where you can get one.
So that's my final recommendation of the season, I guess.
I love it. Do we get a discount?
I got you, Ravi, I got you.
I know somebody, so I got you.
I feel that with the arrival of merch, we have arrived.
What's a podcast without merch?
So listen though, before we sign off for the summer, a huge, huge thank you to all of our listeners out there.
Thank you so much for sticking with us for another season.
It's been awesome. It's been an amazing spring.
And then of course, as always, a huge thank you also to our engineer, Peter Linane.
Whenever we sign really good, it's just all he's doing.
Thank you, Peter. Thank you, everybody.
So that's it. We'll see you next season.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
Bye -bye.
