Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Mi here.
And I'm Felix. And we're back.
We're back. We're so happy to be back.
Can you believe it?
Yes. It's been so long.
It has been long. So we had originally promised to be back in the fall, but the year didn't quite unfold the way we thought it would.
And so our plans were a bit upended, but we're back now.
Well, I just want to ask first, I've been showing up every week and I wait for like an hour or two.
What happened? It was just a monologue?
No, I would just wait, and you guys would never show up.
It was very disappointing.
So we're delighted to be back.
We're going to drop two special episodes this month and then we'll be off for the holidays.
Well, we need another break.
I mean, after two episodes, we've got to take a break.
And then we'll be back in mid -January on a weekly basis, but with a slight change in format.
So one of the things that we discovered was that one roadblock to doing this on a regular basis was we just had calendaring issues and trying to get the three of us together every week was really difficult.
So the brilliant solution we came up with was we realized that our circle of friends extended beyond the three of us.
We have more friends.
Who knew? And so the plan is, in fact, next week we'll be introducing two of our dearest friends who will join us in hosting after hours next year.
And so on any given week, you will have some subset of the five of us doing the show.
The first is someone our listeners have met before because she's actually been on the podcast.
Our dear friend, Rebecca Henderson, how would you describe Rebecca to our listeners?
Wow. So she is just a remarkably accomplished scholar, a wonderful person with really diverse interests.
And in particular, her book that she talked to Felix about reimagining capitalism and a world on fire was such a forward -looking book.
But perhaps the best thing I can say about Rebecca is in the course of faculty meetings, which sometimes go on all too long, Rebecca's the voice you want to hear from.
So true. And that I think says a lot and I think our listeners will find that to be true as well.
Anytime she opens her mouth, there's so much wisdom that comes out.
Yeah. The other friend we're going to bring on board is our dear buddy, Ravi Abdullah.
Felix, how would you describe Ravi?
Well, so Ravi is a scholar of international affairs and it's just extraordinary in how he manages to describe these complex phenomena that change the way we live, that change the way nations interact with one another in quite fundamental ways.
But what I love perhaps the most about Ravi is every one of his lectures ends with a little snippet of poetry.
Say you talk about, I don't know, US -Iran relations.
And then before you know it, there's a little bit of poetry on the screen and then in comes Ravi.
And he draws these quite magical connections between some beautiful expression of an idea and the big ideas he just talked about.
And also maybe the most dashing member of the faculty.
Although, I don't know, I've been on Zoom with him lately and he's, I don't know, he's getting scruffy.
Like so many of us, he's gotten a little bit more casual in his dress.
And so, you know, we've all gotten a little bit more casual.
I'm wearing a tie as always.
No to listeners, Felix, is not wearing a tie.
He's not wearing anything close to a tie.
But it's going to be so fun because I think the two of them, they see the world in very different ways than the three of us.
So to all of our listeners, you will meet Rebecca and Ravi next week.
We're going to bring them on.
The five of us are going to do next week's episode together.
And then we'll be back in January on a weekly basis and we'll just be rotating amongst the five of us.
It's going to really be a lot of fun, I think.
As for tonight, we are going to just do reflections on 2020.
And then of course, recommendations.
One recommendation.
Me here, I'm looking at you.
What? One recommendation.
After like six months of stored up recommendations?
All right, I'll do my best.
Okay. Reflections from 2020.
Felix, you want to get us going?
Yes, I'm happy to. So one of the things that I think really changed for me as a result of living through the pandemic, but also experiencing the Black Lives Matter movement, the election that we just went through is if you ask me about the kind of life that I have and how I live, where I live, what I
do, what I don't do, I used to think that it was mostly my choices, personal choices.
And of course, I knew that as part of our personal lives, we also live history.
History happens as we make all of these choices, but history seemed way in the background.
It wasn't really a big part of my life somehow.
And then one of the things in 2020 that I think will have changed forever how I think about this is just how all of a sudden what happens around you and how it happens, how that has such a dramatic and deep impact.
One of the days, I will never forget, June 1st, this was the day when President Trump gave this address in the Rose Garden responding to the Black Lives Matter movement.
And then they walked over to St.
John's Church and you saw the president, you see the minister of defense, and you have a general, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley in fatigue, in combat uniform.
I remember that. Talking about should they deploy active duty military to quell protests.
And if you had asked me before, I would have said that's completely impossible.
You think something like this can never, ever, ever happen in my life.
And now I have much more to sense that in part, my life is determined by how history will shape up and what will happen to me has a lot to do with what happens to the world.
And it feels somehow very different to live that way.
Felix, is it a sense of fragility?
It's a sense of fragility.
It's a sense of unpredictability.
Not even really sure if all of it is like completely threatening, but sort of, you live in a moment, in a historical moment.
And yes, you have these private choices, but the private choices might be completely dominated by just like everything that happens around you.
Or I'm thinking about if you live now in China and you see this gradual or not so gradual slide into a society that is much less open, that is much less tolerant of dissent.
And it's this enormous change in your life and there's nothing you can do.
I know, like probably most Chinese people hope, wish it wouldn't happen, but it happens.
And there's no individual decision that can undo it.
And that is so different from the way it used to be.
I think you're absolutely right, which is to live in a historical moment like we just lived through and are living through.
It is something that we just take for granted, like our regular lives or things that are not usually impacted by history.
But I recall, of course, 9 -11, I recall the global financial crisis in similar ways, which is, you know, history is happening.
And that feels like a very powerful moment.
At the same time, I'm struck, Felix, though, the latter part of the year kind of made me think also about human action, right?
So the protest that followed Black Lives Matter, the election, which had so many people going out to vote under incredible conditions.
And of course, the power of science and the power of individual actions that people undertook to solve this problem.
So there's this great moment of history has this feeling of, in some sense of, my actions don't mean much, right?
You feel like the tides are twirling and you're just inside this vortex.
But then there's human agency in all these incredible, wonderful ways.
And that kind of conflict strikes me as also one of the great lessons of the last 12 months.
For me here, I think it's so nice how you juxtapose those two things, because I do feel like this loss of agency that Felix you describe, which I think is really real.
And I think it's manifest in a lot of anger.
You see it on the streets.
I'm not going to wear a mask.
You can't control me as people try to gain some control over a situation over which they have very little control.
And so I like this reminder that in fact, in 2020, in the same year, there are also these really important historical events that were driven by human action.
And I think that's a really important reminder that we're not just objects, that we can be subjects as well in history.
That's a beautiful, beautiful reflection, Felix.
What about you, young me?
I guess for me, one of the many sad things about this pandemic and our response to it is how it has given all of us as a society, it's given all of us one more thing to disagree on.
And what I mean by this is the following.
There are many awful things that happen in the world.
And some of those awful things actually have the capacity to bring people together.
And one of the reasons for that is that sometimes our response to that awful thing follows this kind of emotional arc that we're able to experience together.
So, you know, a plane goes down or a massive accident occurs that results in a lot of deaths.
All of us, the minute it happens, we are horrified together.
We are heartbroken together.
And then we demand answers together.
And then we discover who is at fault and we are outraged together.
We demand accountability together.
We go through an emotional arc together.
We may disagree about stuff later on, but there are these moments of intense emotion where we're all just brothers and sisters.
And when I think about this pandemic and the way it unfolded, it unfolded so differently.
It unfolded in this kind of disaggregated kind of way.
There was no collective emotional arc.
We all ingested what was happening around us differently at different points along the way.
Some were affected much more deeply than others.
Some took it far more seriously than others.
So even before the pandemic, we were already operating in a really polarized environment where as a society, we couldn't seem to agree on much of anything.
That environment has become even more polarized now.
Before the pandemic, trust in politicians was, I think it was like at an all -time low.
It's even lower now.
Trust in journalists was at an all -time low.
It's even lower now.
Trust in business was at an all -time low.
It's even lower now.
And so the pandemic has just given us all another thing to disagree about to the point where I find it remarkable how close we are to hostility all the time now.
I mean, have you guys seen on social media, these people just exploding in rage when they're asked to follow some simple guidelines.
We've just gotten so quick to pounce, to lash out, to judge, to escalate.
And so I guess the lesson for me that I've tried to hold on is I have found that it is so easy to unwittingly become part of the problem.
It's like people stuck in a traffic jam who rarely stop to consider their own role in the congestion.
I keep telling myself this.
So now in every conversation, in every interaction, I try to be super self -conscious about this, about the extent to which I'm part of the problem.
So I think, Yang Mi, what you say is so evocative of, to me, these feelings I've had.
But the thing about it is I find myself oscillating so wildly.
So there are these moments of despair where I'm like, we can't agree on the most fundamental thing.
But then there are these moments where I kind of think to myself, well, look, basically, people are conforming.
We are getting through this.
We are going to get through this.
And so I have found myself oscillating between what you articulated so beautifully about deep pessimism about our fragmentation to feeling like, especially in those last several months, feeling like we're getting through this and we are going to be stronger out of it.
And I'm not sure that that optimism has huge foundation.
You know, meaning if you want me to point at what that foundation is, I'm not sure I could.
But I will say what strikes me at what you said is just the degree to which I shift into that phase and I shift out of it just as quickly.
My emotional reaction is much closer to Yang Mi's.
It's just incredible, this anger.
And it could be anything, right?
Mask is just one example.
But there are many examples where people who are in the mask wearing camp who then show no level of understanding whatsoever that in some parts of the country wearing a mask at a particular point in time was actually not that important because guess what?
There was very low population density or you got lucky that no one imported it.
To me, one of the differences between the airline accident and the pandemic is it seems if the moment requires that we all respond the exact same way, we can sort of do that and we find unity.
The pandemic was complicated because it hit particular places really strongly early on.
And what we're not good at is somehow we fall very quickly into this.
Everybody needs to do the same thing.
I always see this when I watch the news, this constant call for a national plan as if this was the kind of crisis that required uniformity, it doesn't.
If we had started from a recognition that it's okay to be different.
Some places need to shut down everything and some places it's okay to go to the gym.
I think that would have set us up for success.
But instead we ended up in two camps, do everything you possibly can or do nothing at all and pretend the pandemic doesn't exist.
And that's the part that is incredibly frustrating and then creates this anger because the other side irrespective of where you are is so far from where you think we need to be.
This to me, I really believe it's the most essential challenge of the next few years, this challenge of reconciliation and how to just create a different climate in this country where we can begin to engage with each other again across our differences and try to rediscover just a few moments when we're
all just brothers and sisters again, because we are so fractured right now.
I'm going to turn to you Nami here and I'm hoping that your reflection is a little bit more uplifting, a little bit more positive.
Well, I think the thing that I've been struck by and it dovetails with what you just talked about young me, I think is just the overwhelming force of science and technology in defining our lives.
The remarkable speed with which these vaccines were developed and the remarkable triumph that that represents alongside young me precisely what you just described, which is the willingness to ignore science.
I think that has just come to really dominate this period in my mind, which is the willingness to both debunk what experts say was so detrimental to the response to the pandemic.
And then in turn, the fact that we had this remarkable scientific discovery just gives me enormous faith in the power of science.
These new technologies with messenger RNA are so promising that it has filled me with hope about what science can deliver in our lives and an appreciation for how much skepticism of science is hurting us.
I think it has just redoubled my appreciation for the scientific endeavor, very broadly speaking.
And I think I had forgotten that because this historic moment, I think just crystallized all of the benefits that science is bringing to us and how much we are held back in many ways by our skepticism of it.
It's such a nice point, particularly with this vaccine development.
It's such a microcosm of the internal tensions.
So for example, if you had to name the industry that is perhaps the most maligned, it would be big pharma or maybe big tech, big pharma and big tech.
And if you had to point to the two industries that are most likely to enable us to get through this big pharma, and then of course the extent to which we've relied on technology to get us through this.
And there's so many things about this development.
It's pioneered by these Turkish scientists with the US multinational firms being manufactured in Brussels.
It's being rolled out in the UK.
And it's just this remarkable story.
And amidst all the kind of chaos in the last 12 months, it's been such a salvation to me to watch that story and to watch a 90 year old William Shakespeare take the vaccine.
It's just so uplifting in a way about what we can accomplish when we believe in science and we believe in all the things that it represents, which is the power of commerce to also accelerate the progress towards these things, to realize what international cooperation can do.
Those lessons I think should never be lost.
It's almost as if there's two conversations going on at the same time and you would think they would influence one another and somehow they don't.
So we're super skeptical now about globalization.
And then of course the vaccine development and deployment is this amazing global effort.
Somehow we tend to be very negative when it comes to these broad principles.
How do you think about tech?
How do you think about science?
But then when it comes to reaping the practical benefits action, you know, I'll be rational.
We're like, okay, so maybe pharmaceutical industry really evil, but they happen to have a vaccine that's going to save me and my family.
And maybe that's okay.
Big tech is horrible.
But boy, this Zoom thing really works.
All right, we'll take a break and be back with more.
Okay, Felix, do you have another one?
Yes. And I think this one is a little more uplifting, a little more positive.
Part of what I thought was just really extraordinary in this year is how many people showed just extraordinary bravery.
And healthcare workers, of course, but it's also true with respect to these historical forces that we talked a little bit about before.
So just quickly go back to that moment, June 1st, when you see the president and the secretary of defense and the military, you see that the general apologizes for being part of that event.
You see Mark Esper publicly breaks with the president saying, involving troops in a situation like this is just completely off limits.
And we see it time and time again.
I was thinking about the last couple of weeks, if you're the secretary of state of Georgia, and you have all this pressure to essentially fabricate the desired results for so many people to stand up under intense political pressure, I think it's really quite remarkable.
And it has really strong institutions.
There are good rules in place.
And I think what I'm now realizing is all of these rules, you know, does the president have the constitutional authority to call in the military?
Yes, of course he has.
So who's stopping it?
The person who's stopping it is the general that doesn't go along.
Can you start lawsuits almost endlessly questioning election results?
Of course you can, but who makes it not fly?
In the end, it's independent judges.
And so the soft part of the institutional makeup, just individual bravery and people who stick to their guns.
We've seen lots of examples where this is not the case, but I think the number of people who really stay true to their principles to me is one of the most inspiring stories of 2020.
I couldn't agree more Felix.
I think this is so brilliant, which is we had thought that these formal institutions were our saviors and it turned out to be much more informal.
And by the way, I think your point about the military is so spot on in that moment in June 1st, because I think it could have gone a different way.
You know, while you were talking, I was thinking about this philosopher, Hannah Arendt, when she wrote her book about Nazism, she has this great thing about how evil is so mundane.
The banality. Evil is so banal.
Yeah, exactly. And in a way, goodness was found in so many little places in a similarly kind of mundane way, right?
Meaning the goodness that saved us was spread all amongst us.
And it was these little actions that I think ended up being so important, which is also, I think many people had many moments to question the future role of the United States in the world.
And I think it's still up for debate, but I feel more confident about it now than I did, you know, six months ago.
And I think that's a really important thing, at least for me to feel as an American citizen.
It's interesting to me that you're more confident.
I am. Yeah. I'm in a way, a little more nervous.
The moment you rely on individuals, I think you start to worry about where do these individuals come from and how different will they be?
So to me, interestingly, it had the opposite effect in that I have a little less confidence, because the institutions themselves don't guarantee good outcomes.
I think part of it hinges on the way we understand the risk that we faced in the last several years, whether we understand it as a kind of sui generis one -off thing that happened, or if we understand it as the beginning of something persistent in our world.
And I guess, I desperately want to believe of it as a one -off, but I also think it is.
Really? And I think it is something that will fade.
And if you ask me, you know, provide ABC levels of evidence for that, I'm not sure I can, but there's something about the resolution of this year that makes me feel more optimistic than where we were, let's say, just six months ago.
Yeah, good. I'm glad to hear it.
So Mihir, did you have another one?
Yeah, I think mine's a little less elevated, but I did want to talk about something that has really been striking to me, which, you know, relates to finance and kind of what is, surprise, surprise.
But I wanted to just share it with you because I obviously, I think about finance and I love the area of finance, but I have found the last nine months very disillusioning in many ways.
And, you know, the first is just the remarkable disconnect between markets and economic reality.
You know, second has been, I think, even aside from broad levels, just the, again, disconnect between economic realities at the company level and valuations has been kind of disturbing.
And then third, for lack of a better term, some of the craziness has been so disillusioning.
We have these SPAC companies that are going public all the time, we have IPO valuations that are off the charts.
And in a way, it's been wonderful because the financial lifelines that we use to help companies survive, I think worked in some interesting ways.
But on the other hand, the degree to which we use these really blunt instruments, including very low rates, created so many distortions that as somebody who thinks about finance, it's just a little disillusioning.
I don't know how else to say it.
Now, you can come up with explanations for all of these things, just to be clear.
I mean, of course. But for somebody like myself who kind of really believes in markets and believes in financial markets, I have found these last couple of months tough to stomach in an odd way.
Could you make the provocative argument that, in fact, markets have never worked better?
And the disillusioning part of that is that has created even more dramatic inequality between those who get to benefit from that and those who don't.
But in some ways, you could argue that, for example, there's less short -termism than ever.
Everything is long -termism, maybe too much so.
And that companies are taking advantage of low interest rates and investors are not being swayed by what is perceived as being a temporary crisis and are continuing to invest.
I think that's right.
And there is so much good that happened, right?
So there was one feature that we haven't talked too much about is just how heterogeneous the impact of the pandemic was on companies.
And the markets kind of figured that out in a way.
You could argue that the markets were quite smart about how they parsed the companies that did well and didn't do well.
That's right. So I guess you're right.
I take your point, Yangmi, but God, it is hard to connect all the dots.
My sense is less surprised about the markets and the market valuations, in particular, some of the companies that are the winners in this particular environment.
So e -commerce is the obvious one.
That part to me feels completely okay.
The part that I find just incredibly depressing is that we're then completely unable to take just a small fraction of the wealth that gets created and feed it to the people who worry about the next meal.
There's nothing more depressing to me than seeing the super long lines of people who are basically waiting for a handout.
There is such wealth in this country.
Why anyone under these circumstances has to worry about feeding their families, they have to worry about being evicted from the places where they live.
That's the part that really troubles me.
It's like somehow we have this amazing engine of wealth, and then when it comes to using it in smart ways, we fall down very hard.
Felix, I could not agree more.
And in fact, one of the lessons I think from the pandemic and our immediate reaction to it is that stimulus, massive stimulus works.
It works. It really works.
I totally agree. I think we failed on that dimension in a way that is really difficult and was going to show up to you even more difficult over the next couple of months.
But my conundrum is a way of saying, God, you're right, Felix, we have people who are deeply economically insecure, and none of it apparently matters in the context of these markets.
And it all feels very, very, very odd.
I don't know how else to say it.
It just all feels so very, very odd.
Why don't you go next, Germany?
Okay, so if we're going to do things that are really troubling or irksome from a business perspective, I've got one.
And that is, you know, now I have my consumer behavior hat on.
But this obsession we have with calling everything a trend is making me a little crazy.
Looking from home, it's a new trend.
Clicking from scratch, it's the new trend.
And I am so tired of hearing about trend acceleration.
Every expert saying, oh, we are seeing massive trend acceleration in things like online shopping and video conferencing.
It's making me crazy for a couple of reasons.
One is, I would argue that, yes, it's true, we're seeing massive trend acceleration.
It's also true we're seeing massive trend deceleration and even trend reversal in some cases.
So for example, before the pandemic, one of the biggest, most pronounced global trends was the migration to cities.
And right now what you see is a deceleration of that trend.
And in some places, even a reversal.
I would also say that for every trend, there is almost always a counter trend, which makes me wonder if you're allowed to call it a trend.
So you could say that the pandemic has created a trend toward a healthier living.
On the other hand, the opposite is also true.
For some people, the pandemic has meant more junk food, more hours on Netflix.
There's a trend toward people spending more time online.
There is also a counter trend toward people embracing the outdoors and visiting national parks.
So are you using the word trend to the point where it has lost all meaning?
And it's making me a little crazy.
But what's interesting to me about that, Jungmi, is I totally agree.
But I think in part, it's like when it's chaos, people need to organize their minds and they need to look for patterns.
And so they see patterns and then they write articles about the patterns.
And then they read articles and they post articles about the patterns because it confirms their need to kind of create order out of chaos.
But a lot of it ends up just being totally gobbledygook.
And it would be nice to hear about the trends that then didn't happen.
Does anyone remember blockchain?
But that's probably not the article that anyone is going to click on.
That's not the article.
Felix, do you have another one?
What's been bugging you?
Yeah, what's been bugging you?
Actually, bugging, I think is maybe said too much.
But I think I learned something interesting about myself in this crazy year.
If you had asked me the kinds of things that I really love about my life, routines would not have shown up.
And then because of the pandemic, so many of my routines just melted away because I couldn't go to the gym, I couldn't go to the grocery shopping, I couldn't meet up with friends.
And it really made me realize how the hum of my life that is somewhere in the background, and I really contribute so much to me being happy and me being engaged and having a sense that I'm thriving as a person.
It's just these routines.
There is this observation in one of Wittgenstein's books that if you lived in a world that is completely blue, you wouldn't have a sense of color because color wouldn't really show up.
And it reminded me a little bit of that because the routines are always just here and they sustain you and only when they go away, you go, Oh my God.
I love this thing, Felix, for two reasons.
First, because I feel very much the same way, but I also feel like the new routines have also helped me manage through this time, right?
So you create some new routine and then that helps you stay sane.
But it also, I love this point, Felix, I have been thinking about a conversation we had like maybe 10 years ago at Mary's Fish Camp downtown where I was complaining about something and you said to me that I was kind of thinking about something that was not going right, whatever it was, I can't quite remember.
And you just were making the case that, look, the things that sustain you and that make you happy are in fact just the regularities that you experience every day.
I said that, really?
Yeah, you did. And then I promptly forgot.
Wow. Well, but I wanted to remind you of that because I remember that conversation very vividly.
And I think it's been reinforced to me during this time, which is we put such a premium on some novel thing that I'm doing here and this thing I'm doing over there and all this kind of stuff, but it is actually the basic daily activity and routine that sustains us.
And we forget that I think, but in this period we've, or at least I've been reminded of that exactly as you said.
So one of the things I've discovered is how encumbered or how unnecessarily complicated our concept of wellness had become.
And I think for me, 2020 has been a reminder that the act of taking care of yourself can actually be a super elemental thing.
Like taking care of our bodies can be something as simple as a daily walk or eating well, eating healthy doesn't have to mean eating fussy.
And then the other thing I should is that this year has reminded me anyway, that I'm actually capable of making stuff like with my own hand.
I can cook if I have to.
I can cut my own hair if I have to.
We can mow the lawn if we have to, we can kind of sew if we have to.
Even teaching on Zoom, it felt so good to be a rookie again, to be bad at something and then try to get good at it.
There was something very elemental about having to sort of start from scratch and do something from scratch again.
And in particular, I find the teaching experience is so interesting because in the beginning, I thought, Oh my God, it's all about tech.
You have to have this complicated super setup with, I don't know, 15 screens and just the right kind of lighting.
And then after a while you discover, no, actually all that matters is that you connect.
You connect with the people that you spent time with and maybe your camera is a really horrible camera.
And none of these things matter, which is I think exactly your point young because you don't have all the support and you don't have the sophistication that you get used to, that then you can strip it away and it's okay.
It doesn't matter as much as you think.
My complete wellness regime for this whole time, which I will now trademark, is 5A12, which is five miles a day of walking, eight hours of sleep and 12 hours between meal.
Wait, wait, wait, let's break this down.
Five miles a day walking.
Yes, completely. I don't do any other exercise just to be clear.
And I also know you do work while you do phone calls.
I know you do things while you work.
Okay. Eight hours of sleep.
Yes. Sometimes you involuntarily wake up and you can't get eight hours by the way.
So that's confusing.
Well, you got to get into the rhythm.
I mean, I never used to get eight hours of sleep.
And now I am almost religious about it.
And then the last one is really big is 12 hours between meals.
So at nighttime you have a 12 hour break between dinner and breakfast.
Oh, like the intermittent fasting thing.
The intermittent fasting thing.
So 5A12 has become my mantra and I'm living it, to your point, young me, it's like, wellness is like, cause I can't do anything complicated, God forbid.
And so this is like as complicated as I can do.
And it's been fantastic.
Wow. I think mine is two, six and wine.
Well done. Well done.
Okay. Picks actually before we do picks before we do recommendations, can I share a small personal victory?
I'm all for that. So you know how about a year ago I was talking about how I was getting into cooking.
Yeah. I've gotten kind of pretty good at a number of dishes guys.
Nice. To the point where now when my whole family is gathered.
So for example, we were gathered over Thanksgiving and we kept it very small, but they were here for a number of days.
And I wanted to cook on every single one of those days.
Like I had enough different things I could prepare.
So that's my little small personal.
That's huge. That's kind of huge.
So do you guys have any personal victories that you want to share?
Well, I wasn't going to mention this, but just because you mentioned that, I will just say first my Dulce de Leche ice cream has been a personal triumph and is now requested by various family members.
It's perfected, is that right?
It is perfected. Oh wow.
But I did have a little small personal victory that kind of came out of this summer.
In the aftermath of everything that happened this summer, I decided to write a case on the Tulsa Massacre, which was this really remarkable event that happened.
We're coming up on the centennial of it and the call for reparations that came out of that.
This is not at all associated with my research.
It is not something I've thought deeply about before, but I wanted to learn about it.
I wanted to learn about reparations.
And so I wrote a case about it and it became a case about reparations more generally.
And I have to say, I'm so happy that I used this opportunity to learn about something that I just wanted to learn about.
And I kind of took this energy around that issue and I actually tried to produce something as opposed to let it just fester in my mind and be anxious about it.
Oh, I can't wait to read that.
Yeah, I'll send you a copy.
And I can't say I figured it out.
I don't know how I feel about reparations, but it was just a great experience.
So anyway, I was really happy about that.
Oh, that's fantastic.
That was wonderful.
Did you have one, Felix?
So mine is more in your category, not quite as great an accomplishment as me here's.
But I grew up eating mashed potatoes.
And the way my family would serve the mashed potato was you have a little mashed potato on the side and you make an indentation and then there's a little what we used to call a lake for the sauce.
And so you have this perfect combination of the sauce and the mashed potato.
And now I discovered something that I liked even better.
So I was making meatloaf the other day and I put the mashed potato on top of the meatloaf and mixed it a little bit with egg and creme fraiche.
And I put it under the broiler and so it has this brown crust.
Oh my God, you have to try this.
So wait, it's the layers are meatloaf, mashed potato, egg and creme fraiche.
Yes. And then roasted.
You mix the creme fraiche and the egg with the mashed potato.
Oh, otherwise, it might just burn.
So you need a little more liquid than you would usually have.
But it's just incredible because then as you cut it, there's like this layer of mashed potato and whatever you put below could be anything.
This is such comfort food.
You just invented a dish and we are going to call it the Oberhoser.
I love that. By the way, this is the kind of content that our listeners come for.
Recipes. Forget about all this high -rise stuff.
Okay, so we do have pick.
Well, I brought in a pick.
Did you guys bring in a pick?
Oh yeah, I have two really good ones.
So my first one is, I think it's Amazon's first animation series called Undone.
And it's interesting for two reasons.
The first one is it uses a technique called rotoscoping and it creates a really interesting visual image where you're not quite sure.
It looks like animation, but it's not quite like animation.
That visually even is super interesting.
And then the story is fantastic because it borrows a lot of ideas from quantum entanglement, which you might remember from your subatomic physics classes.
So this idea that electrons and other particles are connected with one another in ways that seem pretty mysterious.
And it gives elasticity to notions of time and space.
And so it uses these ideas to manipulate the way the story unfolds.
Since I finished Dark, I had to find something else that allows me to move back and forth in time.
Are you ready to write a thesis on Dark, by the way?
Yes. I still have my map of who is who at what point in time.
Which you'd be surprised how many after -hour listeners reached out to me for my map.
It's proven helpful to countless souls.
Okay. And you had a second one, Felix?
Oh, yes. And then I read a book that's called The Shadow King by Maza Mengiste.
The story is set in Ethiopia in the early 1930s and it recounts the Italian invasion.
It's told from a really interesting angle to women in particular, a really complicated relationship between the women.
And then how in part the fascists tried to exploit that slavery existed.
Slavery only was abolished in 1942 in Ethiopia.
And so slavery exists and they tried to in some parts use this tension within Ethiopian society in order to win people over for the fascist cause.
It's maybe the most memorable account of what it means to live through a word that I have ever read.
So it's beautifully written also.
That sounds great. Okay.
Here, do you have one or two?
I'm going to go for two.
A big surprise. The first is a book that I have just finished.
It's a huge sprawling book.
Totally too ambitious, but enormously fun.
So it's called the weirdest people in the world, how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous.
And it's by Joseph Henrich.
And think like guns, germs and steel, but like on steroids.
But guns, germs and steel was already on steroids.
Exactly. I usually hate books like this because they're like so big and you're like, what the heck is going on here?
But this to me was really compelling.
And it is frustrating.
Books like that are kind of frustrating, right?
Because you're like, really?
Come on. Like such a grand theory.
But in part his story is, and he's an evolutionary biologist, but he's really trying to knit together culture, biology, and psychology to explain why the West is so distinctive in the way people psychologically think about the world, being self -focused, thinking about guilt rather than shame, and how
it's manifest in the different forms of capitalism around the world in everything.
So it's a hugely ambitious book, but I just thought it was so well written.
And even if it's frustrating when people go so big, it's still something to admire.
So super compelling and interesting book.
And then the second recommendation is really just that I found myself, unsurprisingly, watching cop shows.
But when you are stranded in the pandemic, I just found this weird combination of tourism and cop shows, which is basically by watching cop shows from around the world, you get to travel around the world.
And so I have been basically traveling around the world via cop shows and it's been great.
So Border Town, which is a Finnish show, Gamora, which I said I was going to watch from Naples, even this trashy Australian one called My Life is Murder, which took place in Melbourne, a city I've never been to.
I just wanted to watch it because it was in a city that I wanted to go to.
And in these shows, Shetland is another good example, which is from the Shetland Islands.
The geography is such a character in the show that you get to watch them and feel like you're traveling.
So I think this combination of traveling and cop shows, I have found it to be just a great way to consume content and still feel like you're satisfying your wanderlust.
Did you see that show, Geary Haji on Netflix, that takes place in London and in Tokyo?
Oh, I did see that.
That was very good.
It's kind of like watching a live action manga, right?
Exactly. That was really good.
That was really good.
That was really good.
Yeah. What I loved about that was how you managed to slip in like eight recommendations.
Thank you very much.
So this is truly something.
Okay. So I am going to start with, have you guys seen The Octopus Teacher on Netflix?
My Octopus Teacher is called...
I heard about this.
I saw it last week.
It is so cool. So it is a documentary about this guy who lives near Cape Town and he decides to go free diving off the coast in this kelp forest.
And in the course of his underwater exploration, he comes across an octopus.
And he decides to go back every day and try to find this octopus.
And over the course of a year, for lack of a better word, he develops a relationship with the octopus and they formed this crazy bond where she allows him to see parts of her world that she would ordinarily never show a human being.
The cinematography is amazing.
There is this one astounding scene where she is defending herself against pajama sharks with incredible guile.
You just can't even believe it.
So I would highly recommend it.
It's really very uplifting.
It has a good ending.
Not like, remember we talked about Grizzly Bear in one of the previous episodes.
It has a poignant ending.
I mean, it's poignant.
It's not going to break my heart.
Well, it might. Well, I mean, it's poignant.
It's moving. Yeah, it's moving.
The part I heard is that there is this real emotional bond, which is crazy.
But I would love to see it.
It's crazy. It's very cool.
If you haven't, you should also check out the Queen's Gambit, which is just so delicious to watch.
Just watch it for the set design.
Just watch it for the wallpaper or the Vegas hotels in the 1960s.
It's worth it just for that.
And then I've also gotten kind of obsessed with Borgen on Netflix.
Have you guys seen it?
Oh, I saw Borgen when it came out originally, the Denmark, the Danish political show.
So that all counts as one recommendation.
And then the other thing I'm really obsessed with is I'm really obsessed with this is lowbrow, but I don't care.
Taylor Swift's folklore.
Her acoustic album she recorded during the pandemic.
And on Disney Plus, she has this documentary, which is called The Long Pond Studio Sessions.
And it's an acoustic version of it.
And it is so, so beautiful.
I'm a little obsessed with it.
And she surprises with another album that's just out.
I mean, I haven't had a chance to dig into it.
But anyway, beautiful, beautiful music.
I had no idea you guys were both Taylor Swift fans.
Of course. How can you not?
She's brilliant. I mean, what are the singer -songwriters truly sort of define the generation?
It's hard to think.
I mean, you can think of musicians, you can think of bands, but to think of a singer -songwriter, it's not easy.
Well, Beyonce. But is she a singer -songwriter?
I mean, she's a performer and a beautiful singer.
Ouch. You are going to unleash the queen baby.
No, she's a songwriter.
Is that what she is first?
I don't know. I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding. Wow.
You've got me to some controversy.
I'll say yes. So that's it for this week.
We are going to be back next week with Rebecca and Rowie for one more special episode this month.
And then we will be back in earnest in mid -January.
So thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
