Ted Audio Collective.
Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm me here.
And I'm Katie Milkman.
I am a professor of Wharton and a former HBS PhD student.
Oh, it's so great to have you, Katie.
Yeah, welcome, Katie.
So great to be here.
And also the author of this crazy, best -selling How to Change, which has been all over the place and just a wonderful behavioral psychologist and researcher.
And we're delighted to have you, Katie.
Thank you for the kind words.
How are you both feeling about the change to standard time?
What'd you do with your bonus hour?
Oh, yes. I don't have like super regular sleeping hours anyway.
So then maybe I noticed it a little less.
I savor it. I love that whole idea of falling back.
And I love the whole idea of the extra hour.
I treasure it. Although I never do anything with it per se, but I'm sure I enjoy it.
So maybe that's a great first topic to talk about.
Let's talk about it.
That extra hour, what we do, what we don't do with it, but it means whether we should get rid of it.
And why we should like fresh starts as well.
That's a great topic.
Felix, what did you bring?
I brought maybe something a little less lighthearted.
I would like to talk about worker surveillance.
Oh, my God. Which has just increased dramatically in the wake of the pandemic.
And I'm curious what to make of it.
Wait, we're going from the light to the dark.
I was going to say, yeah.
It's a dark topic. And it's getting darker earlier and earlier.
By the minute. Excellent.
Let's do it. Okay. Workplace surveillance, Felix.
What's going on? I'm watching you, me here.
You're literally right now watching me.
In some sense, you might say it's nothing new.
We've always took account of productivity.
Whether people showed up at work, we had time measurements on the factory floor.
But the estimate is that the number of firms that actively monitor their worker, and this is sort of keystroke by keystroke, taking snapshots of your screen at particular intervals, the number of firms that engage in these kinds of activities has roughly doubled since the pandemic.
It's anywhere between 60 and 70 percent of companies.
And so it feels like a big moment.
And I was just curious, do you think this is only reasonable, in particular now that we have so many hybrid work arrangements where people are at home and have maybe less control over what they do?
Is it even necessary in order to keep up everyone's motivation, because we know motivation falters if you have only a few slackers who don't pull their weight?
Or is this now it's really just one step too far?
Well, I've been thinking how this relates to a couple of really interesting research papers.
One is a paper, and I know we just got through Election Day, but it looks at what happens when you get a piece of mail telling you that your voter records are public and that someone's going to check and see whether or not you voted.
This single piece of junk mail is the most effective tool I have ever seen in a scientific experiment for increasing voter turnout.
The one that really works well, it increases voter turnout by eight percentage points.
What they did is they say, here's the voting records of everyone in your neighborhood and who turned out, and we're going to update everyone in the neighborhood on who turned out after the election.
And it's just a massive effect.
And also, people were incensed.
So it was this bizarre situation where nothing has ever been more effective in terms of a single piece of mail and driving turnout, nor has anything ever been more likely to drive turnout for your opponent if you were to send this piece of mail.
I also was involved in a paper where we analyzed data on a monitoring system installed in a bunch of hospitals to check and see if hospital caregivers were sanitizing their hands when they entered and exited patients' rooms.
Which can have a huge impact on patient welfare.
Absolutely. Yeah, exactly right.
And infections are spread.
This is how people die of sepsis in the hospital.
It's a huge deal. And only about half of doctors and nurses and other caregivers are sanitizing their hands when they're supposed to, not because they don't agree that it's important.
It's just they're busy and they forget, and so these monitoring systems turn out to improve performance.
There's sort of like a reminder component to this and also an accountability component.
So, okay, that's great.
And maybe we don't think that's so invasive, but because of funding cuts, some of the hospitals had to take the technology out that was monitoring who was hand sanitizing.
They still had the dispensers for the hand sanitizer so they could track how much hand sanitizer was being used, but not who was doing it.
And having that removal of the tracking actually dropped sanitizing levels below where they'd been before it was initially installed.
So, again, this blowback that you see is really dramatic, that accountability and monitoring seem like they work.
Right. But at this cost of trust, and maybe that's intuitive.
We don't need the data to say it, but the data really scream it.
So, I think the fundamental challenge is you see why employers want to do it because it does lead to these benefits in every study I've seen.
And then, on the other hand, there's this obvious erosion of trust.
And if you ever are going to stop monitoring, you're going to see worse performance.
This is the kind of thing which I feel like I should be super exercised about, but I can't seem to get exercised about.
It feels like, yeah, this is terrible, but why exactly is it terrible?
And is it qualitatively different, Felix, to your point?
In -person blue collar workers and retail workers have always had versions of this.
So, now it feels like a new class of workers is being subject to it.
And so, is this about something that's different, or is it just that a bunch of folks who have historically not been monitored in the way that a lot of people have been monitored are now upset about it?
And then, the second thing is there are these benefits, which is that there is a sense in which, by finding out who's being productive, you can reward workers who are really good workers.
So, if you kept the wage bill fixed, and you were reallocating rewards across lots of workers, you could understand why this could be really beneficial to some people.
And then, finally, it does feel like, A, this is part of the trade -off with working from home.
We thought it was like a free trade, but it's obviously not a free trade.
And then, second, these are typically things that are being provided literally by the employer.
There is one reason really to be incensed, which is if they're penalizing workers for technologies that are not good at monitoring productivity, then that's obviously bad.
But, absent that, I'm having trouble feeling incensed, and I feel like a lot of people are incensed.
Can you get worried about privacy issues?
I mean, to me, that's the reason to be a sense.
Like, somebody has to make an appointment for their STD test, and they're not thinking about using their work computer to log in, and then now their employer knows that they might have this disease.
And that's really uncomfortable and awful.
That's really terrible.
Absolutely. And that's definitely a problem.
Felix, are you angry about this?
Well, the first thing that struck me as interesting is that most of these measures are input measures.
So I'm looking at, are you moving your mouse?
Are you hitting your keyboard?
Maybe not hitting the keyboard regularly actually leads to more meaningful communication, in that I take time and it takes me twice as long to write that email, but actually the content of the email is so much more convincing, so that can't be right if we move large -scale to just monitoring inputs as
opposed to outputs.
And we have lots of examples where that has gone wrong.
Well, Sfargo, the whole scandal around opening accounts is essentially measuring inputs as opposed to...
Absolutely. That's our first thing that I would say.
And then the second thing that strikes me as interesting is this technology becomes available and I see many other firms adopt it, and it's almost like, yes, that's the thing that you do at this moment in time.
As opposed to thinking about what I'm ultimately concerned with is productivity of my workers, monitoring them every minute.
Is that the very best way to get them to be as productive as they possibly can?
Or is there a really big role in trust?
And that is, I'm not really going to monitor you, but the end of the month we'll have a conversation.
And somehow that relationship that they then feel they have to their employer, that becomes something that is really productive.
And I would be so surprised if the right answer to these questions was the same across companies.
I can very well imagine that trusting relationships are incredibly important and indispensable for some companies, and that for other companies, it's not that important.
And actually, inputs and outputs are closely correlated.
And so, me measuring some input is totally okay.
I love the points you just made, Felix.
I was also thinking about this issue of, it's sort of like, if you're paying for the wrong thing, you get the wrong thing, and it feels exactly the same if you're monitoring the wrong thing.
I guess the other thing I'd say is short -term and long -term results can be decoupled in that, maybe you get people to go pick the most thing off shelves if you're monitoring exactly how many steps they're taking and pushing them so hard that they don't take bathroom breaks, but then they turn over because they're
like totally burned out and this is a miserable existence.
And maybe the cost of replacing them is quite high, and you would have been better off with an equilibrium where people were slightly less productive, but more likely to stay in the role.
And that feels like something that might not be measured well if people aren't looking at the data in the right way.
You're both definitely right, which is a trust -based, output -based measure of productivity has got to dominate everything else.
What then do you think explains this rush towards measuring input?
It's like, why is this happening?
It's the money ball coming to every part of our lives.
It worked for professional baseball.
Why not for stocking shelves and driving cars and inputting keystrokes?
You mean like the use of data in an excessive way?
Trying to optimize everything with data and measure it all, and maybe we can all make better.
And PS, I generally love that.
That's what we all do for a living, right?
Right. I get so excited when a company has data on who's sanitizing their hands or whatever, and I can get my hands on it and try to help optimize.
I think there's this push in this era, in that direction.
Yeah, that all data is good data.
That all data is good data.
And any optimization we can do is good optimization.
I think that's really interesting.
What do you think, Felix?
Maybe coupled with this moment of uncertainty, because managing hybrid workforces we haven't really done all that long.
And I relied on my intuition about who showed up at work on time and in a sense looking over the cubicles, who's really engaged, who's not engaged.
And now all of a sudden I don't have that.
I have these very different touch points.
And I can understand how it creates some level of uncertainty and what exactly is a substitute for my casual glance over cubicles.
You know, this touches upon this debate, which I don't know if you followed in India, which is about moonlighting.
So there are quite a few people in the IT industry in India who've become very concerned about moonlighting.
Okay. Basically in an era of remote work, people are undertaking two jobs or three jobs at the same time.
I read about that, yes.
And so it's really become this hot debate, which is effectively pitting output -based measures, which is, who cares if I have three jobs?
I am producing what you need me to produce.
So get off my back.
But the counter, and it's not well articulated, I think, is some kind of notion of fairness or something that people find objectionable about that practice.
I don't know, I think it touches upon this, right, which is if everything's output -based and we can measure outputs, why are we doing any of these input -based measures?
Why do we feel like you should have one job if you can do three?
It does stick in people's craw a little bit, this idea that, wait, maybe there are people who are doing things that I'm not doing.
That they're somehow working the system in a way that I'm not working.
And that, I think, causes a different kind of distrust.
Or we have an expectation that people will give their all, then you see someone who's doing three jobs and you're like, but they could have been three times as good at their first job.
Yeah, right, right.
Isn't that what their employer is entitled to?
Is that kind of excellence and are we sort of cutting off the top of the distribution?
And do you think that's right?
You're pointing to this idea that maybe the employer is entitled to the 3X.
I will certainly say I've grappled with it in my own work as a mentor.
There was a PhD student I was working with who was just excellent, one of the very best ever, and there was no question that this student's work just stood out.
And I learned this student was doing a ton of consulting on the side.
And I was really appalled by that, despite the fact that the student is way exceeding expectations.
But I was like, everything should be focused on this doctoral degree.
If there's extra hours, that should be going into this primary passion and primary work.
And I did struggle with it, but this person is way exceeding expectations.
But that is just what we expect of other people.
We have these norms.
And I think it's a really interesting question if that's wrong or if it's appropriate to expect a person to put 100 % of themselves into their primary job.
This, I think, also points to an alignment of expectations to begin with.
To go back to your example of me here, if you tell your employer, yes, I'm going to be here for you, I don't know, eight hours a day, and then in the evening, I don't know, I'm going to drive for Uber.
Part of, I think, what people don't like about moonlighting is that you pretend you took that one job.
And then it turns out that you're actually engaging in some shenanigans to hide the fact that you have more than one job.
And I think that's vice versa.
So in implementing the survey in technologies vis -a -vis workers, there are these really big differences.
For instance, companies that don't tell their workers that they're surveyed.
That's not a great beginning.
Or there are some companies that have found really interesting ways.
For instance, they take snapshots of your screen, and you have control over the snapshots that have been taken.
And if you want as a worker, you can delete them.
The moment you delete them, you also delete the associated time that you were credited for.
Maybe there's better solutions and worse solutions, but I think being really clear about what expectations are, so that I know I don't have to be nervous when I take a 15 -minute break, because 15 -minute breaks is what we agreed on, and sure enough, every now and then I'm going to be on my break.
Much of the anxiety has to do with these expectations that are poorly specified and not well aligned.
I think Katie's story is very provocative to me.
I think it reveals why there are times where we care about inputs, not always for good rational reasons.
Maybe it's norms, maybe it's about the shenanigan piece, Felix.
Like maybe if the grad student had told her all along, it would be okay.
I think that's why people want to know what's going on, because there is some sense in which, for very unspecified reasons, we care about inputs.
Yeah, yeah. So we're here, daylight savings time.
Yeah, so look, it's a weird topic.
In some sense, it's just this construction that we deploy in some countries where we change clocks at different times of year.
Now, it's not uniform around the world.
Some people use standard time all the time.
Some people use daylight savings time all the time, and then some people switch in the middle of the year, as we have just done in the United States.
And it's really curious for two reasons.
One is, it seems kind of silly and meaningless, because it's just a convention.
Yeah. On the other hand, it is kind of meaningful, and it may have some interesting effects.
And then finally, for me, it's a little bit of a prism onto some stuff that you've thought a lot about, Katie, which is how these little moments kind of create fresh starts for us.
So I'm curious, what do you make of daylight savings?
Do you like it? Do you hate it?
And why? Well, I have to be honest and say that I hate it.
I really do. But I'm trying to love it, and I feel like I should love it, because it does relate to this work I've done on how these trivial moments in our lives that feel like new beginnings, that are landmarks on the calendar, that actually don't have much meaning, can be converted into something
that propels us to pursue goals, to make changes in our lives that are really positive.
Just like New Year's resolutions are a complete social convention, they're fabricated, they're really powerful.
Of course, lots of people don't achieve their New Year's resolutions, but yes.
But Hope Springs is a journal.
Yeah, that's another thing about the fresh start effect that's really fascinating.
It's very useful that Hope Springs is a journal, and we sort of have this amnesia about our past failures, and every time we see a new beginning on the calendar, whether it's the start of a new week or a new month or the celebration of our birthday, we get this.
Oh, it's a fresh start.
It's a new me. I'm going to be different this year.
It seems to me we should be doing more.
So I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum, not totally surprisingly.
I love this extra hour.
I think in particular, long summer evenings, which I associate with the change in time, it's just, oh my god, it's one of my favorites.
And I have very fond memories of even traveling further north, where then essentially almost all of night disappears.
And maybe this is one reason why we haven't really used daylight savings time in a fresh start sense, Katie, that it's very competitive.
It's associated with summer, I think.
And then we have other markers of summer.
So growing up, I didn't really know this, but the beginning of summer and the end of summer and the special times around that are really big deal in the United States.
And I love the fact that we celebrate the beginning of summer, that we celebrate the end of summer.
And there, maybe you see a little more of fresh start use and then think, oh, I'm going to travel this summer.
Or there's a particular set of things you hope to accomplish by the time summer is over.
And maybe daylight savings time doesn't give us much of a fresh start feeling because it's competitive with all of these other changes.
Yeah. And Katie, just to be clear, because I'm ambivalent about the whole thing, Felix seems to love it.
Why do you hate it?
Well, I actually hate the same thing he hates.
So I hate the moment we just experienced, which was the end of daylight savings time and the beginning of standard time, where we go into darkness earlier.
I hate the 4 .30 p .m.
dark and luminous. So I think we're on the same page.
And I wish we could live in daylight savings time eternally.
That would be my preference.
And I hate these shifts, but I agree with you.
I celebrate when it hits daylight savings time each March.
I am thrilled. But I do think we should do something magical with this extra hour.
There are some people who feel so strongly about daylight savings time.
And there have been various movements in the U .S.
and around the world to either make it permanent, as you suggested, Katie, or abolish it.
My attitude towards it is all it's kind of a convention, as long as we all agree.
I don't really care.
But there are some interesting studies out there that suggest that actually it's disruptive to people, that actually it may be costly from a health perspective.
I think the big effect is the one you're talking about, Katie, which is this ability to maybe seize the moment and characterize it anew.
But I'm curious, Katie, why that is so valuable.
Why do we need these artificial markers?
Yeah. Why do we need New Year's Day?
And what is it that makes those things powerful and things that we really appreciate?
I think we need them because we so often fall short of our own hopes and dreams.
It's just the nature of being human.
We can't accomplish all of our goals.
And we need moments that give us a sense of rejuvenation and an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and begin again.
That's my best explanation, some sort of psychological immune system almost that gives us this reaction.
And then it's just really interesting, the way we think about our lives lends itself to fresh starts having this powerful effect.
So there's this whole literature on autobiographical memory.
And the way that we think about ourselves is like we're characters in a book, and our lives are organized into chapters.
So there's big chapter breaks that mark new beginnings and make you get the sense of a clean slate.
Or you can name them, right?
Like the college years.
Okay, that was a chapter.
The year's working as a certain employer and you were involved with a certain person and then a certain kind of relationships.
So those are big chapter breaks.
And when one of those comes to a close, you have a massive sense of a fresh start.
But there are smaller chapter breaks too in the way that we tell our life stories.
We don't think linearly about time.
And some of those small chapter breaks are things like the start of a new week or year and could be it's all a mind game, right?
It depends on your culture, which are the ones that are meaningful to you.
And so you could imagine constructing additional ones that would give you more opportunity to pursue goals, to feel removed from who you were before, because that's what these breaks do, these fresh starts.
They give you a sense of discontinuity in your life story.
There's also a tendency to think big picture at fresh start moments.
You sort of step back and focus more on the big picture and less on the minutiae.
Yeah. And do we know anything about the kinds of things that make it more likely that you can then follow through?
So for instance, is it a good idea to have many of these fresh starts?
Yeah, it's an outstanding question.
Exactly as you suggest, you could overdo it.
So if there's a fresh start every morning, it's going to cease to be meaningful.
The more meaningful the fresh start, the bigger the effects tend to be in terms of goal setting and likelihood that extra people don't create goals on a popular goal setting website.
We've shown it's associated with more meaningful dates.
And go to the gym more.
You search for the term diet more.
So the more meaningful the moment, the better.
Also, if they're constantly arising, there can be a tendency to say like, oh, I'm not going to work on this goal and I'll just put it off until the next fresh start.
And so there's some research on that.
So that could be a problem if you thought of every single day as a fresh start.
It may lose its potency.
And we've shown in some of our research that just by doing simple things like labeling dates on the calendar as fresh starts that people might not have otherwise noticed, like pointing out the first day of spring on a calendar, or labeling the first day of a month, or even inviting people to begin saving
after an upcoming birthday, as opposed to at an arbitrary date that was equidistant, you sort of put some meaning on the date and you get an uptick in goal pursuit.
So I think there's value add.
Yeah. All that goes to say in creating more such markers, drawing attention to more such markers on average.
Yeah. I've been trying to think about fresh starts in my life, Katie, and what is really going on at those moments.
And I think to me, it feels like it's primarily about kind of forgiveness and self -forgiveness.
So like, what is the promise of a fresh start?
And I think to me it is, well, you're wiping the slate clean.
So there's a sense in which something has to be wiped clean.
And I think the thing I've always really struggled with is that.
A lot of what you do on a New Year's Day is say, I'm putting the past behind me.
And somehow if I just forgive myself for not doing what I thought I was going to do, I don't know, I guess the healthier way to live is to just be more forgiving.
If you look at religion, which really does create fresh starts, it doesn't matter what religion you can think of, the fresh start ritual they have, and so many are about forgiveness.
I think that's one way that a fresh start can function for sure.
And again, it's the way that religions have instituted them.
But I think there's a smaller kind of forgiveness that's less about, you know, all of your sins are forgiven and more just, this feels like a moment when I could be on the cusp of something new.
Right. It can be more about optimism than forgiveness, certainly in some of our data.
And maybe that's even more so for some of the smaller fresh start dates that people seem to be motivated by, like birthdays and the start of a new year.
I'm not sure it's so much about forgiveness and sort of these are the things that I did wrong, as it is about feeling some weight lifted and some opportunity to look forward.
Yeah, that's interesting.
We know from salespeople that many of the most successful salespeople are perennially overly optimistic.
They always think, oh, the next big sale is just around the corner.
And then it turns out in actual performance data, there seems to be something very functional about that.
And maybe one way to think about these fresh starts is, it's okay to think, oh, I'm going to be optimistic, but why should I believe that tomorrow's different from yesterday?
And the fresh start might be a way to rationalize why do you think optimism is in place?
Well, because it's the next year, it's the winter, it's the spring, right?
Gives you a story to tell yourself.
Yes. Maybe I didn't have that many reasons to be optimistic and now finding new optimism.
And then actually that can be, I think, rationally a very helpful and a very good thing.
Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing about that, Felix, is it's almost like a little lie we tell ourselves.
In a way, yes. It's a lie, which is that there's a reason to be more optimistic.
But that optimism is inherently maybe self -fulfilling and beneficial.
Yes. And you need a prompt for that kind of false optimism.
I think that is true in my life, too.
When I was young, especially, I bought like a new calendar, a new little book, a moleskin thing or like a Smithson thing.
Yeah. And I was so excited about it when I was younger.
I was like, this new calendar is going to change my life.
Yeah. I'm going to be organized this year and it's beautiful.
Exactly. Look at all the clean pages that are empty, yes.
Yeah. And it never really works.
It doesn't really change my habits, nor does it last very long.
So like within a couple weeks, I'm not using it.
But it does provide that optimism of like, yeah, this year is different.
I have to tell you, one of my missions as a researcher is to use the Fresh Start Springboard much more efficiently and to try to make sure people know about all the science that can help actually lead to behavior change instead of just that optimism.
So say a little more about the structured ways in which we can make that optimism persist.
Of course, you have to actually try to set what is the goal that you have.
Be specific. Be specific.
Say it's, I want to get in shape.
That's too vague. What are you going to do this week?
You need to be clear about your goal in the short term as well as the long run.
Sort of what's the four hours of exercise a week, every week.
And when you make it bite -size, it's more approachable.
And then what's the plan?
So what are the dates and times and what are the actions you're going to take to achieve that?
So on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at five o 'clock, I'm going to go for a run.
And leaving from work, I'm going to bring my sneakers and my workout clothes to work.
You got to get into those details and you see dramatically better results.
And finally, I'll just add, and this is my favorite, and it's the cherry on top.
You have to make it fun to pursue your goal.
And everybody gets that wrongly.
Think, I just have to be gritty enough and push through and pursue it in an effective and efficient way.
But the problem is, if you find it miserable to pursue the goal, people don't persist.
And so you actually have to figure out what's the sugar you can layer on top.
And if it's exercise, I like to temptation bundle, which means I combine that chore with something I love.
Like I only get to binge watch my favorite lowbrow TV show while I'm working out or listen to my favorite podcast.
What's your sort of treat that you layer on top and you save for the moments when you're completing that goal so that there's something that makes it joyful?
I feel like this requires honestly so much more self -discipline than I have.
So for example, you postpone the binging of a show or you postpone dessert until you've done something spectacular.
I think there's a part of me when I hear these things, I feel like if I had that self -discipline, I wouldn't have a problem.
That presumes the ability to order myself sufficiently to like actually fulfill goals, which is exactly the problem that I'm trying to address.
I don't know if that makes sense, Katie.
No, it totally makes sense.
And I think it's one of the conundrums of why this works.
So when we do research studies, that's always sort of the tension is, well, if people are good enough at self -imposing a bundle of this sort, then couldn't they just get themselves to the gym?
But the answer is not in the data.
People find it easier actually when they have the sugar layered on top than when it's just about a simple goal pursuit.
And I think the answer to that is that normally the temptation you're restricting yourself from isn't as hard to resist as it is to sort of pull yourself up the hill to do the chore.
Katie, you know, in the last 30 or 40 years, cognitive behavioral therapy has grown up a lot as a field.
Yeah. And I'm curious, hearing you talk about all this, is it kind of like the mass adoption of some version of cognitive behavioral therapy?
Is that what's going on?
To the extent that people are gaining self -awareness and then employing strategies that they recognize, oh, I'm doing this thing.
And so therefore, I need to point to this solution.
In some way, that's really related to cognitive behavioral therapy.
But I think one of the things that's interesting about a lot of these behavioral solutions is you don't have to have self -awareness for them to work.
Right. Someone could just provide this for you like a really great gym to just have an awesome set of subscriptions to TV shows and play nice music and have Zoom book classes that you can attend with your friends.
You don't realize what they're doing is setting it up so the workout is fun, but you like it and you go.
So I don't think the self -awareness is a necessary component of many of the fixes that behavioral science is pointed to.
And your employer might have wisdom about, oh, you know, we should encourage you to take programming classes and up your game in that respect at fresh start moments.
We'll send invitations right around the beginning of the year when people are particularly excited about self -improvement and learning.
And you don't know what's going on, but wow, you sign up every January for the programming class that gets marketed to you from your HR office.
So I definitely see an element of the sort of cognitive behavioral therapy, self -awareness, self -guiding that's part of it.
And Richard Thaler, who's the author of Nudge, likes to call this snudging, self -nudging.
But it can also work where these tools are used by someone else to help you make better choices.
Well, we keep this off of daylight savings time, but I confess I didn't really put the pieces together, which is obviously like in a month we're going to like have the big fresh start.
You're going to have the big fresh start.
The big fresh start.
Yes, use all of this.
Cool. OK. Recommendations.
Felix, what'd you bring?
My recommendation is a visit to the website of your library.
Oh. I accidentally did this because I was looking for a specific movie that I couldn't find online and you know how you look online and you go, oh, it's got to be streaming on one of the 17 services that I subscribed to, and then it wasn't true.
And so I just looked down the Google page and I ended up on the web page of my library.
And I was completely surprised about just the range of services and content that are available, both if you go there physically, obviously, but also just online.
And one of the services that I ended up using that was on this website.
It's a service called Canopy, which is for free if you have a library card.
My first impression is it's mostly French, but I think the intent is it's mostly highbrow.
It's probably a better description.
So it has all of these classic movies that typically are very hard to find on the big streaming platforms.
But then I also saw what if you would like to join a book club?
What if you like to learn a foreign language?
What if you want to find someone who's practicing your essentially non -existing Spanish with you?
I think that's a great suggestion.
I confess I haven't done it, but I will tell you that my children's lives are dominated by the digital library.
Oh, really? Yeah, yeah.
They just constantly are at those apps and borrowing things.
And I think you're right.
Libraries have done an amazing job getting digitized and we don't even realize how much they're doing.
That's a great suggestion.
Yeah. What did you bring, Katie?
Okay. My recommendation is actually a podcast, and I swear I'm not paid to do this.
It's just one that I love so much.
Oh, Katie, that's just far too kind.
You shouldn't have.
We told you you don't have to do this.
This is too much, Katie.
Okay, so the podcast that I was going to recommend in addition to this fabulous podcast is called People I Mostly Admire.
It's a Freakonomics podcast that features conversations where Steve Levitt, the economist from University of Chicago, interviews really, really interesting and diverse people about their areas of expertise and asks crazy, smart questions, but comes at it with a level of knowledge that's not that deep.
Recently did one with Peter Singer, who's a famous philosopher's name I've known for ages, and I kind of vaguely know that he thinks some things about the world that I don't agree with.
Right, right, right, right.
You get to listen to this really smart person asking him questions for an hour.
That's great. So it's a really fun show and I recommend it to people.
Wow. That sounds great.
Well, from the high to the low.
So I have never recommended one of my favorite things in life, which is Muji Pens.
Oh. So I'm going to recommend Muji Pens.
So you may know the store Muji, which is this wonderful Japanese store.
Furniture, clothing.
Everything. But the real prize in any Muji store is the pens.
And if you are a pen freak and you don't know about Muji Pens, in particular the .35, which gets you that really nice thin line.
They're cheap and they're reliable and they last forever and they're great.
So Muji Pens is my very lowbrow recommendation.
I love this recommendation.
I cannot begin to tell you how annoying it is that we have so many cheap pens in our lives.
Yeah. It's not that expensive to buy something that is much better and it's mostly careless and thoughtless that we end up using pens that really no one should use and they shouldn't be produced in the first place.
So I love this recommendation we hear.
Unlike those cheap pens Felix, they're really good.
The only problem is they still get lost.
No. You need some sort of tracker.
Yeah. You need a little RFID tag I think when I solve the problem.
And this is it for today.
Thank you everyone for listening.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
Thank you.
