Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. This is After Hours.
I'm me here. I'm Rowie.
I'm Rebecca. I was just thinking that it's been a year, Rebecca, of this craziness.
Have you come away with like the silver lining of this year in your life?
I've learned that I can spend an entire year in a house with my husband and we haven't told each other.
You know, we've never done that before and that's been amazing.
It was a hypothesis.
It was a hypothesis.
I always meant to get into meditation, but I actually did it.
And now if I don't meditate, I feel like when you don't exercise and all that stuff they say about mindfulness makes you feel more peaceful and less anxious and more focused.
It feels as if on good days that my mind is no longer in control of me, that I'm more in control of my mind.
Wow. Yeah, so when I get anxious or bored or depressed, it's so much easier just to step back and say, oh, I'm feeling bored or depressed and just to notice it instead of getting caught in it.
It's just been fabulous.
That's great. That is where my mind went immediately when Mehear asked us about this.
And a couple of weeks ago, Mehear's pick at the end, this idea that there's a way to escape from the torture that you deliver to yourself in the middle of the night by recognizing that those are just thoughts, but not actually you, really paying attention to ways in which I torture myself, ways in which I
shouldn't, which is part of the meditative element of recognizing the difference between you, the person, and some of the self -critical thoughts your brain can produce.
And so for me, I can't go back now after I've made some progress toward enlightenment.
Wow. That sounds great.
I wish I could claim as much wisdom as you guys.
I think for me, it's been a little bit more given the age of my children really not racing through life and taking this as an opportunity.
And even more kind of strategically or opportunistically just realizing that given their ages, the ability to shape them is, to the degree that we ever had it, is fleeting.
And so it kind of became a valuable time to invest in that dimension of my life.
We should check back with each other if we were actually going to remember all these good habits we've developed a year from now.
But we got topics. What do we got?
So the role of gender in this pandemic induced recession and the ways in which this recession has become, in the words of some people, a she session in terms of its unequal effects.
And so I'd really love to hear your thoughts about that.
That sounds great. And Rebecca.
I've been fascinated by Harry and Meghan.
You and the rest of the world, Rebecca.
By the interview, by what it says about them, what it says about our culture, what it says about the British monarchy, like what is going on?
We did Brexit. We might as well do Megxit.
There you go. Pax and Spax, Brexit and Megxit.
It's all good. That sounds great.
All right. Rawi, what do we got?
So one of the deeply unhappy elements of this economic downturn is that it is unlike most other economic downturns in that women in most societies around the world have been disproportionately negatively affected.
And so what I would love to explore with you two is why is this recession, unlike most other recessions, so much worse for women?
The most obvious reason is that women are disproportionately represented in sectors like hospitality, home care, education, all the kind of face to face on the ground, not very well paid jobs.
And so those were the things that shut down.
And so women were sent home.
And then the second reason is that for all kinds of reasons, women tend to bear a disproportionate burden of caring for children.
And so when the school shut down and we had people at home or in person trying to sustain their jobs with disproportionate responsibility for childcare, that got really hard.
I mean, I remember when I had just one young child and there was no pandemic, trying to do a full -time job and take care of our son was just really hard.
I mean, trying to do it in the middle of a pandemic on Zoom, I can't imagine.
So I think some significant number of women were forced out and others were just like, this is just too hard.
I have to stop. I mean, I think just to add to those two things, Rebecca, on the first one, of course, that's market contrast to previous recessions, where sectorally, men get hit harder.
And that's really important because the longer run effects are problematic.
In fact, the gender pay gap tends to be reduced by recessions and now we're going to see it exacerbated.
And then the second piece is I think the even harder thing to talk about, which is about the division of labor in homes and how it falls disproportionately on women and how that led to a bunch of decision making of women leaving the workforce or just kind of stepping out for a little while.
And the difference between what historic recessions have looked like and this one is really market.
And so how do we address it and how do we in some sense limit the long run effects of it?
Because one of the things we know about job losses and unemployment is it matters because people go through very rough spells, which is terrible, but longer run, we know that they can have effects as well.
But I mean, is that necessarily the case?
Won't many of these jobs come back?
Jobs in healthcare and education, I mean, they should come right back and presumably people will still have the same appetite for eating in restaurants.
And the reason they were recession proof historically is they're so central to society.
So aren't they more likely to come back really quite quickly?
Yeah, well, I think the question is why have we historically observed those semi permanent long term effects?
I think what the data would suggest is that when you are outside the labor force, sometimes you lose your way.
Sometimes you're less willing to reengage in the labor force.
Sometimes you redo your calculus of how you want to live your life, the way you think about work hours.
And so what we observe historically, even for example, Rebecca, when construction jobs go away, but then they come back and you'd say, well, well, then it's all okay, which is true.
But we do observe some longer term effects with people's lifetime earnings.
So yes, we should see them come back.
But will people find that this period has been disillusioning, has been difficult, and has been alienating to the point where they take time to go back to work?
They decide not to supply labor in the same way.
I think those are the effects that we don't yet know about.
And there's another potentially really quite nasty possibility, which is because difficulties with childcare have been so vivid in this period.
That is, as a working woman, you usually try and keep your children off stage, you know, I'm all professional, don't look over here.
But in this moment of being on Zoom, or not being able to manage schedules as well, is there a risk that women have become more associated with, she's fantastic, but she's going to have children or she can have childcare difficulties?
And we saw that child wandering through.
And we saw that child wandering through and she called me on Tuesday because she just couldn't find a backup.
And will that contribute to this sort of subconscious prejudice, which I'm afraid is still there in many workplaces, which is women aren't as committed, they aren't as reliable, better choose a guy.
And that would be a horrible effect.
I'd love to believe there's an effect in the other direction.
Maybe more men have seen how much work is involved and have got engaged and have found that it can be rewarding.
Maybe there'll be more openness to family responsibilities and including that in the workplace.
I'd like to believe that, but I don't know how those two forces are going to play out.
It goes back to one of the reasons why the recession has disproportionately affected women is because of the preexisting inequalities in the work of the home.
This inequality inside the house in terms of the work of the home, including the care of children, maybe is a lot more transparent over the past year to everyone.
Like, actually, this is a lot of work.
If you ask men, like young men, millennials, in households with children, how much of the work, the percentage do they think they do?
They say, I do about half.
And then if you ask the other person living in their household, it's like, yeah, it's about 25%, maybe 20.
And so there's been this gap between what they think they are doing and what everybody else thinks they're doing.
Maybe we're making some transparency into this, right?
Well, and even rigorous time use studies suggest that male regard for their own allocation of time is highly distorted, to say the least.
Well, let's talk for a moment about the pressure that women who have not lost their jobs have endured as a result of some of these preexisting patterns.
So the levels of burnout that professional women are reporting are so much higher.
What are we going to do with this really critical moment in which so many professional women have just had their levels of frustration and burnout boil, and now they have to figure out how to make it to the next step?
Maybe the good news is that many organizations are really focusing on race as a key issue in their firms, and really trying to increase diversity and looking at how they hire and promote.
And it's not a huge step to go from looking at race to looking at gender as well.
I mean, if you're going to rigorously review your promotion criteria and you're going to keep track and you're going to think about how you hire, and I think a lot of organizations are already doing that.
So in a sense, there is a mechanism where business could really help.
And having seen the suffering that's been created, maybe business will be motivated to step up to this, or maybe even take advantage of some of these amazing women who've been burnt out.
I mean, there's got to be some fantastic talent out there that if you were able to construct the right kind of career for them and persuade them that it was the right place, it'd be the sky's the limit.
Yeah, I mean, the burnout issue I think is really problematic in the following sense, which is we probably haven't even fully observed its effects yet because people are kind of working on views.
And then it leads to problems, Rebecca, which maybe firms can help solve, but maybe not.
You know, where people just look at their trade -offs and say, I'm exhausted all the time.
And firms can help with that, but not really by hiring.
I think it's got to be a more thorough rethinking of the ways in which we place expectations on people.
We have to rethink the nature of expectations because that kind of burnout doesn't get solved by we'll try to hire somebody different.
Or, you know, I think it's got to be solved by cultural rethinking of the workplace.
Well, but I don't think that's just a matter for women in elite positions.
Yeah. I think the assumption that anyone can show up for any schedule, the idea that it's okay to have variable scheduling for people in retail or in hospitality.
That's insane if you have children responsibility for childcare.
It's so hard to arrange childcare at short notice.
So I think in many ways, the workplace was designed for people who had backup, who had someone in the background who could take care of the food and the house and the kids.
Exactly. And pushing people in those roles, including single dads, may I say, I mean, in many ways, the workplace isn't working for a lot of people.
Sure. But of course, policy is incredibly important.
The fact that we don't have reliable, good quality, reasonably priced childcare, easily available in most metropolitan areas, let alone across most of the country, is just bizarre.
So, like, what did we discover about the role that schools play in the business environment during the pandemic?
Because it's closely connected to all of this.
We discovered that schools are absolutely critical.
Without them, half the workforce is going to have real trouble doing their jobs.
And I mean, that's the broader lesson in some sense, which is, we neglected a person's overall community in understanding how productive they could be.
And one lesson out of all of this is in so many ways, the community matters, schools being one leading one.
But I do think, Rebecca, you're right, on a policy angle, we need to rethink childcare as a first approximation in a deep way.
I mean, one of the exciting things that has happened in the United States is this massive new child credit, which is going to be getting rolled out as part of the $1 .9 trillion stimulus bill.
We have never done anything like that before.
And it is temporary, but, you know, temporary things have a way of becoming permanent.
But, you know, for about 90 plus percent of Americans, which is almost universal, they're going to be getting a pretty big child credit.
And that is intriguing to me, Rebecca, because why isn't there more supply of these kinds of companies or these kinds of firms that would provide the daycare, would provide all these kinds of services?
On site, right? On site or otherwise, I think in the next year or two, we're going to see maybe the ability for a lot of people to say, well, wait a second, I got a child credit, and actually I want to use it for precisely these purposes, which is to get the flexibility I need so that I'm not drowning
between my work and my children.
So let me ask you to this.
If you could design the optimal firms policy with regard to flexibility and childcare or the optimal government policy with regard to the same things, what would you really like to see that would manage some of these challenges?
I would like onsite childcare from eight in the morning till six or seven at night.
And I wouldn't use all that time, but I could.
You know, when you have to come in early or you have to stay late and it would be accredited and the people who work there would be paid enough that I didn't feel guilty that I was exploiting them.
And they felt excited about working there and I could drop over during lunch times or that would have been so brilliant.
I mean, I still remember one day when I was at home with my son and he was like one and a half and we were home together and I got a call and one of my colleagues was on the other end of the phone.
He said, I have five hundred people here in the auditorium waiting for you to come on stage in half an hour.
I was just wondering where you were.
I put my son in the car.
I drove to MIT. I ran into a friend, a female friend's office.
She was an engineering professor.
I said, here, take him, left him on her desk and ran into the auditorium.
I mean, and of course, you know, for me, this is possible and manageable and I have all kinds of resources, but suppose I'm working two jobs and the bus breaks down or someone doesn't show up.
Just having that reliability, a safe place that you could leave your children and feel comfortable.
I think it would be a complete game changer.
I think that's right.
And Rebecca, that's a great story.
And I think it's particularly attuned to zero to five.
Right. And then what I think about going past that I think is, you know, more money in the pockets of parents is a great thing.
And I think child credits have a way of potentially transforming people's lives by giving them the ability to pay for somebody to pick up their child and to be with them for a few hours a day, because then it turns into a different thing, I think past that zero to five age.
And that I think is in a way what kind of the government can do best and employers could conceivably do, but certainly the government can do best by providing these kinds of pretty generous child credits.
Wouldn't it be great in your scenario, Rebecca, if two parents could negotiate every morning, who's going to get to see the little one at lunch today?
You know, is the little one going to your workplace or is the little one going to my workplace?
And that there would be that kind of parental connection.
But maybe the most optimistic reading of this is that this is a conversation that we can have now because it's been so difficult for so many women.
And maybe now this is a moment of reckoning that the government has failed working parents, that many firms have failed working parents, and that we can begin to make our way toward a more sensible organization of work that honors the parenting challenges of working parents, as well as makes real economic
sense. It's interesting because it feels like society is undergirded by a number of compacts.
There's a compact between citizens in the state and inside homes, there's a compact, sometimes unwritten, but always there about the division of labor and what people need and how you help each other.
And it does feel like, again, to look for a silver lining here, that all of these compacts can be revisited at this time.
It is a useful time to revisit the compact that has undergirded your household and ask yourself whether it's reasonable or fair or working because we've been through this incredible taxing time and the opportunity is to maybe do a reset.
What would you say, Rebecca, to somebody who is enormously overwhelmed at this moment and who is considering whether work should be a big part of their life going forward?
It's such a personal decision, Meir.
I think every woman I know who's had children, we've talked about the balance and the tension.
You feel torn into those who work, wish they spent more time with their kids, those who don't work.
Many of them feel, I'm here, I am at home and maybe I should be working and those who work part time feel they never have enough time for either.
And I think it's so destructive to the society, not just to the women, but to our whole society and to the kids.
Because if all the moms are completely stressed, it's not good for the children.
So I would say, do the best you can.
You have to make the choice that you can make, but don't think that you have to do it all yourself.
Find allies, find partners, insist if you can that you get help.
Because the well -being of our children is surely all of our responsibilities.
And just as an aside to our dear listeners, one of Meir's lovely children appeared during this conversation right behind him and gave us a little wave and it was a great moment.
I thought, oh yeah Meir's a dad too.
And so getting us all used to seeing our little ones wander through our screens, maybe that will help a little bit in some ways as well.
You know, I was reminded, Ravi, you remember that fantastic BBC clip where the kid comes in?
You know, it's kind of amazing, right?
Because that was like four years ago, pre -pandemic.
It's kind of amazing now to think back about how prescient that little clip was.
We all laughed at that clip, but it turned out that was all of us for an entire year.
Now we have millions of clips like that, meetings that were recorded.
You know, just thinking back on our conversation, I love the sense of optimism and the hope for the silver lining, but I think maybe we want to revisit this topic because being a working woman is super tough.
And I think perhaps we've a little bit sugarcoated that.
Well, absolutely. I think that's right.
And in a way, you know, the fact that we never talked about this during COVID was kind of a problem, right?
It was one of the most important pieces of COVID.
And I think you're right.
Yeah. And it's a foundational question about how we organize our societies.
And so the idea that we're going to sort it all out in 20 minutes in a podcast seems improbable.
So we'll need at least another 20 minutes to figure it all out right now.
Okay, that second 20 minutes we'll nail it.
Okay, Rebecca. So, Harry and Meghan.
I'm not sure which Harry and Meghan you're talking about.
Did you clarify? You know, here we have a descendant of the royal houses of England, of the great kings of the British Empire.
And what is the interview with Oprah telling us about what our society focuses on, about the role of power and glamour and wealth, and about the internal workings of the House of Windsor.
Here is a couple that says they want to be out of the public eye, yet they move to California and they do an interview with Oprah.
It's a bit of a paradox there.
And then they air a whole bunch of dirty laundry about their family.
How do we feel about the interview?
How do we feel about the monarchy?
I just thought it was also car crashy, you know, and by that I mean just completely compelling and also something that you don't want to look at at all, something that was deeply sad, but also kind of completely irrelevant for my life and for most everyone's life.
And so it was just this odd juxtaposition of God, this is terrible and horrible and meaningless.
But I guess the reason that I thought it captured everyone's attention is in part because that interview hit on kind of the mother loads of current emotional salience, you know, which is race and mental health.
And they put out very, very serious allegations about two of the most compelling and unsettled issues of our time.
And that I think meant this was not just a tell -all between family members and, you know, families not getting along or families' dysfunctions, but it drew everybody in, in a really, really kind of interesting way.
You know, Meir, I feel a little bit better hearing you say that because I kept telling myself, why, Rowie, are you clicking on this link to read about this interview?
Why are you doing this?
I don't want to know this.
I would like to unknow all of this.
I don't care. And yet I clicked on it and read about it.
I think the notion that there are some transcendent elements of the challenges they're describing that connect with things that are going on today, it just makes me feel a lot less dumb for reading about it.
And so I appreciate that, Meir.
I mean, I think drawing attention to the idea that race and mental health were at the core of the conversation, I think that's right.
But there's lots of conversations going on about race and mental health on the media all the time.
Right. And there's something about, is it wealth?
Is it history? Is it an ongoing soap opera?
I mean, has the monarchy become like a reality TV show?
And we're seeing the latest installment.
And if you hadn't seen the earlier installments, it wouldn't have the same salience.
You know, I found myself asking the same questions like, why am I watching The Crown?
I don't care about these people.
And yet here I am. And so I've seen the previous installments of some of this drama.
And so I put that in context.
And maybe we are a little bit addicted to the soap opera elements of this story because they're so public.
Well, and there are very few narratives that the entire world can hold onto and follow.
So I agree with you, Rebecca, there's a reality show aspect to all of this, but it is a global narrative about a family, which is of course the most compelling kind of dysfunctions that you can find.
Cause we can all relate it back to our own lives and yet we can all share it.
And I think that shared narrative of a dysfunctional family and perhaps to invoke the word that Ravi, I think has introduced on this podcast before, which is just schadenfreude of like watching people who seem to have it all struggle with the same problems that we all struggle with, which is a dysfunctional
family. I think there's something that makes every person relate to it.
And that I think is just priceless.
So are we participating in something that we shouldn't be participating in?
Do we have a kind of Truman show ongoing that we've put this family in a box under the lenses?
And I mean, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking who's in charge here?
I mean, you think these are royals, they live in beautiful palaces, they have lots of money and people to wait on them, but maybe there's something really nasty going on here.
And it's not just the tabloids.
I mean, I think, well, I don't know.
I don't want to read tabloids.
I'm not chasing them in cars, but I'm becoming deeply uncomfortable as I'm listening to you both.
I'm thinking, oh, this is yucky.
I do think yucky is the technical word for this.
I'm glad you saying this because in a way we are projecting this onto, for example, the media.
Oh, the media is so horrible.
The media is so racist.
Or we're projecting this onto the royal family.
Oh, they're also horrible and they're also whatever.
But ultimately these are mirrors upon ourselves.
These are all phenomenon which reflect our desires and our demands.
And that I think is worth being unsettled about, which is why have we catapulted this crazy institution, which is based on heredity and some of the worst kind of elements that you could think about and elevated it to such degree, only to bring it down in that same process and then elevated again through
some cycle where these real individuals are being potentially both damaged, but also living this opulent life.
It's all such a weird psychodrama, but it all works.
And I think it works in part because unlike other countries which have been able to trim down their royalty.
I think the thing that in the UK is distinctive is, and you would know better than I, Rebecca, which is the identity of the country and its former historic power is kind of reified into this monarchy.
And so that projection of power is so important to the country.
It is their soft power.
And so if you lose that, you worry that you can no longer punch above your weight, which is kind of what the UK has been doing for a long time.
And that makes it a high stakes kind of a story, I think.
Should the UK think about abolishing the monarchy?
I mean, Harry talks about his father and his brother as being trapped.
And surely no state should keep people in cages.
You don't think the UK can afford to do that?
Or that somehow it's fundamentally important to the existence of England as a nation?
Rowie, is the monarchy really important to the UK?
I'm not in favor of anybody being trapped in any cages, whether they're guilt cages or not.
And I think every society should have whatever they want collectively.
So I personally would say, yeah, this is anachronistic and strange.
And there's one part of it that's about inherited wealth, but that's not what offends me.
What offends me is inherited titles.
Titles pass down through families with the expectation that I or somebody else is going to call somebody prince or king or queen, based on no merit of their own.
Just on the fact that somebody's daddy's daddy's daddy's daddy won some war at some point and stole power from somebody else.
And now all of a sudden they have a title that we're supposed to use.
So that just seems bizarre in the present moment.
And so if I were a UK citizen, I would say like, let's not do this anymore.
It's like weird and anachronistic.
Rebecca, you actually have, unlike us, a little bit of a dog in this fight.
You hail from that island.
And so what do you make of the monarchy?
I think the monarchy can be very valuable.
As you said me here, it can be a focus for patriotism and some sense of what it means to be English.
I think there's really a strong case to be made for having a head of state who isn't the executive, who's ceremonial.
I think one of the reasons American politics sometimes gets a bit strange is that the president is also the king, as it were.
Right. And has all the pomp and state and embodies the nation in so many ways.
But they're the elected executive.
They're not embodying the nation, but somehow there's a strong desire to have someone embody the nation.
And so there's something to be said to have a family that embodies the nation.
And one must say that the current queen and Prince Charles have worked enormously hard in many ways to try and do a good job at that, to be a kind of ceremonial head of state.
Now, Rawi, I take your point about, well, but it's just by accident and it's just through hereditary and how come they get to do it.
But can you really elect someone to embody the nation?
There's something about the fact that the monarchy goes back hundreds and hundreds of years that I think is very powerful.
But I think Rawi's point is not just that this inheritance of titles is bizarre, but it's morally really problematic, Rebecca.
It is anti -democratic.
It sends the wrong messages.
It leads to an emphasis on class and heredity as being an important way to differentiate yourself in the world.
Isn't that just too much of a cost to bear, Rebecca?
So I think I'm discovering I have a schizophrenic view of this in public, which is a little embarrassing here, because yes, there's a part of me that goes, this is crazy.
If you're born in a really wealthy family or even a fairly well off family, you already have enormous number of advantages.
And you shouldn't add to that sort of either hundreds of millions of dollars or call me prince or call me whatever that it should be about the individual.
And so yes, there's a part of me that just really feels uncomfortable with all the lord this and the sir that feels like a relic of a previous age.
But let's take lords and sirs.
I mean, that's become now democratic.
The parliament creates lords and knights and their marks of high achievement in service to the society.
So maybe, oh dear, am I talking myself into, if it were me, I would abolish the monarchy but elect a king or a queen and have them in the palace and have them giving the speeches?
Well, you know, in a way India is interesting, which is there is a president and a prime minister and the president occupies an emotional center and a role for the country.
But the prime minister is the executive in charge, basically.
So Rebecca, to your point, I do think there is value in having the emotional core of a country be above politics.
And I actually really do believe in that.
And I think that's what the queen has done.
She just seems completely unique in her ability to maintain that role and be credible.
When she's gone, can any other individual sustain what she's been able to sustain for whatever, 67, 68 years?
Or is the fact that it lasted so long just an artifact of how kind of remarkable she is?
So just in the interest of fairness, I think it's worth saying that while I'm complaining about this class system of inherited privilege and inherited titles in the United Kingdom, which does deeply offend me, in the United States, the correlation between parental income and children's income has been
going up over the past 50 years.
And so maybe in a way it's also deeply problematic, if not perhaps worse, to pretend that we don't have a class based system, when in fact it really does matter into which household you were born.
Right. And even maybe more so, Rawi, which is would you trade Kim and Kanye for Meghan and Harry, right?
Which is our celebrities are our royalty, so what are we complaining about?
But I'm curious, I wonder what the long view is, which is in 20 or 30 years, is the monarchy very different from what it looks like today?
I think in the long run, it will look pretty similar.
And in some ways, the practices will be worse, which is of the things that offend me about the whole system, that it's kind of inbred, there are only a few kinds of people you're supposed to be able to marry.
I think the royal family is going to decide that it's extremely dangerous to reach beyond the usual circles, to bring somebody into the royal family, who's not really of that kind of environment.
And so I see them getting more and more closed off from the rest of society.
And maybe that's just as well.
What do you think, Rebecca?
I can see a very different future, where what happened with Diana and what happened with Meghan really forces a reevaluation of what the monarchy is.
I think already what's happened to your point here has fed into a debate about race and mental health and what families owe each other that could be very productive.
So I see a monarchy that's much more open, much closer to the people, stresses pomp and circumstances less, in an attempt to preserve itself.
Because let's not forget, approval of the monarchy in the UK drops sharply amongst younger people.
So more than 80 % of people over 65 think the monarchy is a great thing, but you get down to people under 35 and it's only 42%.
So I think the monarchy will have to grow and change and we'll see something quite different.
Yeah. I mean, that also makes you realize, Rebecca, what a missed opportunity this was for modernizing the monarchy.
I would love to pick up Rawi's idea of talking about inherited wealth and in general its effect on society and whether there's a class system in the US and in other places that we just don't talk about because it isn't labeled in the same way.
You know, I wish Harry and Meghan all the best.
I really hope they're able to construct a life where they can care for each other and feel good about the life they're living.
I think they deserve that.
I hope they do that.
I wish them a modest amount of the best.
Not all of it. I wish everyone the best.
I'm with you, Rebecca.
Hopelessly optimistic person.
Okay. Fantastic. Great.
Great recommendations for Rebecca.
What do you got? Sometimes I just like to watch TV that is fun and not too serious.
It doesn't make me think.
It doesn't make me worry about the problems of the world, but it's just fun.
And so the show I'm going to recommend is called The Good Place.
It's about a young woman who wakes up in paradise and realizes pretty soon that she doesn't belong there.
Is this about Meghan?
Well, perhaps it should be, because she starts taking ethics lessons on how to be a good person so that she can stay in paradise.
And let's just say that complications ensue.
It's very funny. You have like lessons about ethics and questions about what is the meaning of your life and what does it mean to be a good person, all embedded in what's basically a rip -roaring farce.
And I love farce. I love people coming in and out and physical jokes and crazy stuff happening at the same time.
So that's my recommendation.
The Good Place. Sounds fun.
Very good. Go ahead, Raul.
What's yours? I have an exercise.
It is an exercise called the Turkish getup.
Have you heard of this?
Oh, no. Not the Turkish getup.
The Turkish getup. I have no idea what you're talking about.
So it's kind of the perfect exercise.
I learned this by the way from Kev, whom we talked about before.
Kev is back. So you need a kettlebell.
It's a very efficient exercise delivery device.
You go from lying on your back to standing with the kettlebell above your head in a particular sequence of moves.
And it basically covers every single body part.
And so it's like a full body, very functional way to exercise because you're exercising in a way that's useful for just going about your life.
I don't know what it's called in Turkey because presumably in Turkey they don't call the Turkish getup the Turkish getup.
Maybe it's just called the getup.
You can easily find online a video of how to do the Turkish getup.
You get yourself a kettlebell.
That's not very expensive.
And there's one perfect exercise and you could just do some Turkish getups and like perfect pandemic small space exercise regime.
I can't resist the opportunity to just mention that if Felix were here, he would have a Turkish polka to accompany your Turkish getup.
Ravi, it is an amazing exercise, but you haven't mentioned how much work it is.
One of the reasons it's such a great workout is, I mean, you feel your heart rate go up.
I mean, you get results really, really quickly with the Turkish getup.
Fantastic. Okay. So I got to check this out.
So my pick is, I've been a huge fan of the Last Chance You franchise on Netflix and it went downhill.
This is a series that looks at junior college sports and they've done a football and five seasons of it.
The first three were magic and the last two were terrible.
There's a new season and it's junior college basketball at East LA college.
And I've only seen three episodes, but it is magic.
Oh, wow. And the drama in Last Chance You is you have these young men who have, they're not playing at the top of the game, but they are capable of playing at the top of the game.
And you have these coaches who are trying to help them realize their full potential.
And it becomes such a wonderful kind of management lesson, such a wonderful spiritual journey.
And to see these young men, and they're all men in these cases, try to find their way in the world through sports is just magical.
And the coach in this one is so good.
So I think Last Chance You basketball, which is the first time they're doing basketball, is going to be spectacular.
I'm three episodes of it, but I'm already ready to heartily recommend.
Love this one. Thanks for here.
I can't wait. All right.
Thanks for listening.
This is After Hours on the HBR podcast network.
Thank you.
