Thomas Friedman on How and When We Will Resume Our Work

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0:54Hi, I want to welcome everybody to the first episode of HBR Quarantined. Thank you for being here. I'm Adi Ignatius, the Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review, and my co-host is Josh Macht, who heads product and innovation. Josh, welcome. Thanks, Adi. It's great to be kicking off the show. How are you doing? I'm doing fine. We've launched this show. We know that millions of our followers, our readers, our fans are at home, have been at home for weeks. This is week seven for us working from home. So we wanted to create a program for you that really gets into the big issues of the day, COVID-19 and the fallout and how it's affecting business, how it's affecting work, how it's affecting the search for talent, how it's affecting our lives.

1:44We have a special guest this week, Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times will be here. We'll have a conversation with him in just a moment. We also are going to take your questions. So if you put questions in the comment box, we will try to get to those. But Josh, before we start, I just, you know, I want to ask you, week seven quarantine, you know, how are you surviving and how are you getting your work done? Yeah, well, we're getting work done, which is good. I mean, we're definitely adjusting. It's been a couple of months. And I mean, it's feeling more like the marathon part of this is kicking in a marathon that we were never really prepared to run, but we're adjusting.

2:23And I don't know, there are moments, you know, I had a beer with someone this weekend, we were, you know, six, eight feet apart. There are moments where you almost feel like a new normal or something, but definitely strange. What about you, Adi? What do you, how are you, how are you, how are you keeping sane? Yeah, it's strange. I go through cycles, I guess, emotional. I mean, in some ways, we've never been busier. And, you know, we are fortunate enough to be in a business where we can move remotely and get most things done. But it's really personally, what do you do? I mean, you know, my wife and I are playing gin rummy and keeping score and we're up to, you know, 500 ,000 points.

3:02I'm doing 30 crossword puzzles a week. I am experimenting with new recipes for squirrel and neighbor's house cat. I mean, they're just ways that you keep going. You definitely got me going on the crossword puzzle thing. I've actually now really tried that, and I am a little bit hungry. Yeah, it's a great time waste. I'll send you some links. Just to say quickly, Jimmy, Josh and I worked together at Time Magazine. Josh was one of the first editors of the time.com website when none of the rest of us could figure out what in the world of digital was. He was an early pioneer. He and I have innovated since then, tried to bring innovation to Harvard Business Review.

3:43That's sort of what we're doing today with a new innovation that we hope will be useful for people. They always told us we should not be on TV, but I think we may have found a loophole here. So we're going to drive a truck right through that. This is definitely a beta. There's no question about that. And we're thankful that our guest has come along with us as well. But I think we're going to learn a lot quickly and definitely hope we have a conversation that people can be a part of. All right, so let's get into it. Before we bring on Tom, I want to show a quick TikTok clip. It's sort of a meme about, you know, what it is when you're working at home and maybe your spouse is not working at home and you're both sort of driving each other crazy.

4:28So producer Dave, hit that clip.

4:41you know that feeling is that which role would you propel fitness water with gatorade electrolytes zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

5:17Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. play their audience. Maybe that's for Dave DiUlia, our producer. Maybe we can see him too. Say hi, producer Dave. Hey, how are you? Which role would you be? I think I'd be the one in the fat suit and I wouldn't need a costume. This is funny. The trope is that the talent insults the producers, but you're just coming right in and insulting the talent. I'll take it where I can get it. Alright, let's go to our conversation.

5:59We have Tom Friedman waiting to join us, and there's a lot we want to ask him. Again, if you have questions for Tom as well, put them in the comment box. But, Tom, let's start. What is your life like now? How are you? We think of you as a globetrotting correspondent. What's your life like now? Where are you? How are you able to get your work done? Well, our bureau, I work out of the Washington Bureau normally, Adi. And, Josh, hi to you, and great to be with you guys, first of all. Thank you. So I normally work out of the Washington Bureau. We've been closed for basically two months now. So I've been working out of our home in Bethesda.

6:36And I kind of go to work every morning by coming to my corner of the house and office. My wife, Ann, goes to hers. Some people may know my wife was just about to open a new museum in Washington called Planet Word to promote reading, literacy, and love of language. We were all supposed to open May 31st. So she's been scrambling to deal with those adjustments for Planet Word. And for me, you know, I've made the adjustment easily because through Zoom and through Skype and through LinkedIn and these systems, I can have conversations with people all over the world. I'm doing webinars tomorrow with some UN ambassadors, a group in India and a group in China all in one day.

7:14And the amount of travel that would have taken is staggering to think about. It's not as good. It's about 85 % as good, but it's 100 % less stressful on me. So I'm appreciating that. After I work, we always have dinner together, occasionally do takeout from some of our favorite restaurants to help them out. And then every night we watch an episode of Gilmore Girls, which is a wonderful show that my girls grew up on. It has seven seasons, 22 episodes each season. We're deep into season two now. And it's a wonderful show, if you haven't seen it, about relationships, love, small town values, and it's the best antidote to COVID-19.

7:55Oh, we could have a whole show just talking about that, had I known. But we have so much other stuff to cover. That's like perfect. So if you just joined us, this is HBR Quarantine brought to you by Gilmore Girls. That's right, Gilmore Girls. That's true. Well, so that's interesting. So obviously most people, you know, or many people are not able to work from home. And, you know, it kind of underlines some of the inequalities of life, but inequalities that are exacerbated at the moment. Before I get to that though, let's focus then on this life, the life that you lead, the life that we lead, the life that a lot of white collar people lead.

8:35Do we need to be in the office? Is this sort of calling BS on the notion that we actually need to be present to get work done? Well, I'll tell you, I really enjoy being in the newsroom of the New York Times. So I'm in the back corner of the Washington Bureau with my friend and colleague Maureen Dowd. But all around us in a kind of horseshoe are the reporters. And I love walking around talking to reporters. I'm still a newsroom rat. I started as a reporter. I'm still a reporter at heart. And so I do miss that. Not that I can't call people on the phone and whatnot, but I like being in the company of news people in newsrooms.

9:15Obviously, I miss going, touching, feeling, and the serendipitous things that happen when you travel. But, you know, even in the best of days, I worked at home probably 50 % of the time and I found it a quiet place to work, use the phone, et cetera. So, so for me, Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work? Use Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

9:51It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. That part isn't that big a deprivation. I'm curious, Tom, because you were pretty early on with your column talking about kind of the balance of physical health versus economic health.

10:29I thought it was really interesting that you did some things on Sandell early on, Professor Sandell thought all of that was great. And I just wonder how you're, and even today you're talking about it. So I just wonder how your thoughts of that are evolving. So, yeah, I, you know, helped kick off that debate. It was really, I would say, the Wall Street Journal editorial on that Friday, and then myself and Dr. David Katz on Saturday and Sunday really kicked this off of how do we find the right balance between saving lives and saving livelihoods, because there's a lot of ways to die. You can die by COVID-19, and you can die a death of utter despair from having lost your life savings, your job, your business.

11:16And we need to balance both. The goal needs to be total harm minimization. And that's been my theme from the very beginning. The debate, it took about a couple weeks, Josh, and then the debate just exploded. And now it's everywhere. And I've basically used my time between then and now to really drill down on what I've found to be the most helpful, thoughtful people in that discussion. So I can really perfect, you know, from my point of view, what I think, how I think about this. And if you look at the world today, Josh, you really see there are kind of three basic models out there. The first is the Swedish model.

11:58They don't like to spell it out in so many words, but Sweden opted for herd immunity. Now, let me just take a step back and just to remind people that there's only one way that nature has given us to resist a pandemic virus, and that's by triggering our immune system. That's why nature gave us an immune system. And there's only two ways to develop immunity, either a vaccine where we do it medically or we do it organically by developing the antibodies, by having the disease and developing the antibodies in order to become immune from it. So Sweden basically said, we're going to go for herd immunity.

12:43We're not going to shut down our malls, shops and restaurants. We're going to tell people to limit their gatherings to 50 people. And we're going to do our best to quarantine and protect the elderly, the most vulnerable and the most immune compromised. And we're basically going to let the disease go through the population. And those who either get it and become immune and get it and do not require hospitalization, they are betting will be less than the number of hospital beds in the country. That's their bet. And it's playing out. It's way too soon to say categorically one way or another. But I get up every morning and the first thing I click on is Sweden.

13:23Then I click on bet number two. I click on Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, China. There are various iterations of bet number two. Bet number two is super efficient suppression and mitigation with super efficient tracing, tracking, and sequestering. Super efficient at the Chinese end where they don't have to worry about civil liberties, and just efficient at the New Zealand, Australia, Singapore end. And we see how they're doing. And what you see are various degrees of challenge there. New Zealand and Australia basically are saying we have completely suppressed there's no new cases. And my God, hats off to them for that.

14:05But let's just remember, they're doing that while keeping their countries completely sealed off. All right. And China, they have brought the new cases down to near. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

14:43Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Zero in Wuhan and other places. But they're doing that with incredibly intrusive tracking, tracing. I take your temperature. I test you. You've got the disease. You're not going home. You're going to a clinic and for 14 days, et cetera. So that's model number two. Model number three is Georgia.

15:17you. It's the United States of America. It's I'm tired of sitting at home. I'm going to take my chances. One day, maybe we'll catch up with tracking, tracing and quarantine, but we're just going to do it our own way. And I would tell you, I'm very worried about that approach because if there's one thing I've learned, and I learned this from David Katz, which is that if you don't respect this disease, it will kill either you or someone you love. And so be very careful. So those are the three models. And I get up every morning and I see which model is doing best. So again, we're here with Tom Friedman of the New York Times.

15:57If you have questions that you would like to post to him, put them in the comment box and we'll try to get to as many as we can of those soon. You know, Tom, I read something like VW is said on May 3rd, it's going to open an auto plant in Chattanooga. I think it's 3 ,800 employees. Is that nuts? Well, let me go to 30 ,000 feet for a second, Adi, because one of the things that I have felt personally has helped me navigate this story is the fact that in 2008, I actually wrote a book about nature. It's called Hot, Flat, and Crowded. And it was really about our interaction with the natural world, globalization, and population.

16:36And so a lot of people I got to know in working on that book have really been very helpful teachers in this. So one of them is Rob Watson, who founded Green Buildings for Natural Resources Defense Council. And Rob likes to say that always remember Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology, and physics. That's all she is. You can't talk her up. You can't talk her down. You can't say, Mother Nature, I'm tired of sitting at home, Or we're having a recession. She's going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate. And she always bats last. And she always bats a thousand. Do not mess with.

17:12Okay, so I start with that principle. people. And then the second thing I'd like to point out to people is the reason Trump got in trouble and was slow to respond. There are many reasons. And bashing Trump is shooting fish in a barrel. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that. But there's one thing that was really important in his failure of leadership. He thought if the market was going up early on, then he was succeeding against Mother Nature. Now, I'm a big believer that the two largest forces on the planet are the market and Mother Nature, Mother Nature and Father Greed. But the market at the end of the day is no match for Mother Nature because Mother Nature, unlike the market, does not start her day at 930.

17:57She does not close at four and she does not take weekends off. So while Trump actually, we have to remember this, it's one of the most remarkable events in this story. After his disastrous nationwide speech and the market collapse. And then the next day, he took some steps and the market soared, I think, 2 ,000 points. He actually autographed a chart of the market's ascent that day and sent it to Lou Dobbs of Fox Business News. And that knucklehead displayed it on the evening news. Now, while Trump and Dobbs were doing that. Mother Nature was silently, inexorably, exponentially, and mercilessly spreading COVID-19 throughout our society.

18:43So if you don't understand her inexorable nature, she is going to kill you or someone you love. There are only two ways to become immune, a vaccine and herd immunity. And if we don't respect... Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

19:28Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Whether you're called VW or you're called New Zealand, she will make you pay. And so I have great respect for her. And one of the real misapplied phrases in this thing is, we're at war. We're at war. And Trump says, I'm a wartime president. Well, when you're fighting another collection of human beings, when we were at war with the Nazis and the Japanese, we could out-manufacture and out-mobilize them.

20:19When we were at war with the Soviet Union, we could out innovate and out and out spend them. But when you are at war with mother nature, there's only one way to, to, to survive an encounter with mother nature. Okay. What she says is it's not the strongest who survived me. It's not the smartest who survived me. It's the most adaptive who survived. That is the law of natural selection. And what she did give us over and above any other species is she gave us a big brain to figure out how to adapt to the, to her, to her climate changes. And this is like a climate change. And if we don't use that big brain to adapt in a very strategic and coordinated way, because when you're up against her, if you are not humble, if you are not coordinated, because her virus will find any crack and any opening.

21:14And if you are not utterly about chemistry, biology, and physics, because that's all she's about, she will absolutely kill you or someone you love. So let me go to, we have a bunch of audience questions coming in. Let me go to one that really relates directly to what you were just talking about. And this is from Sophia in Los Angeles. And her question is, is herd immunity realistic? Isn't the virus constantly mutating? No, not so far. Not to a degree that we have seen so far, like seasonal flus. And there's a difference between drift and shift in terms of mutation that epidemiologists talk about, epidemic drift and epidemic shift.

22:03And so, So far, we haven't seen evidence of that that suggests that herd immunity is not possible with this season's coronavirus. Interesting. You know, one other thing, Tom, as you talk about the environment, you know, it is interesting that right now we're almost giving the environment a little bit of a breather. We're not getting any fuel. We're not moving. And people talk about it. People talk about, you know, I'm an allergy sufferer, air pollutants, things like that. that that bother me that maybe I feel like, huh, it's interesting right now. I mean, are there things out of this that maybe, you know, are good about that, that we could even carry forward?

22:45Well, I think it's a really good question, Josh. You know, this is, of course, the warm-up act for the big one, and the big one's climate change. And there are two differences between a pandemic and climate change. The first is climate change doesn't peak. So if Northland, if the Greenland Iceland, if the Greenland ice shelf melts and the Antarctic ice shelf melts, they're gone. They will no longer reflect the sun's rays. The oceans will rise. They will be permanently boiled by the sun. And the second difference between pandemics and climate change is there's no herd immunity to climate change.

23:19There's just a relentless pounding on the herd. So if this isn't a wake-up call to what is now a decade where we have to do everything we can to stay under two degrees rise average temperature by 2100. If we have any hope of managing what is now unavoidable and avoiding what will be unmanageable. If this isn't a wake up for that, I really don't know what is. And one of the things you see, Josh, too, we've seen all how minorities, particularly African Americans in our country, you know, have suffered woefully disproportionately from COVID-19. And one reason is, and there's been a lot of work done on this, their neighborhoods are where people put power plants, where they slice highways through, and they're affected by a lot of these breathing asthmatic diseases, particularly childhood asthma, more than the general population in proportion.

24:15All right, I got another audience question. This is Heidi in Seattle. Hello, Heidi in Seattle. So we've put you on the spot already as a, I mean, you're a foreign affairs correspondent. We put you on the spot as a science expert, as a health expert, as a domestic policy expert, and you do it all well. So now you're a business futurologist. What will the new normal look like, let's say six months from now? Well, it's a good timeline for the question, because who knows, there's the potential here for obviously a black swan of a cure, a therapy, or actually a vaccine coming earlier. That would change obviously everything.

24:57But let's assume that the predictions are right, that it will take 12 to 18 months at best to really have a vaccine. The way I think about it, because again, we're opening a museum, so we're thinking about this. What is a museum in the post-lockdown world? Because there's a feeling like out there, right? Like now I've got a broken leg, but then as soon as this is over, I'm going to run the sprint and relay again. No, no, no. You're going to go from a broken leg economy to a crutches economy. That is whatever business you're in that serves the public. You have to imagine we're thinking about this for our museum.

25:33What is a museum like when everyone who comes in will be wearing a mask, wearing gloves and have to stay six feet apart? That is true. Whether you're that VW plant, that's true. whether you're in a restaurant, it's true whether you're at HBR. And so that's what I call the crutches economy. And man, I'm glad the stock market's going up. I'd rather see that than it going down. But it's 15 % below its highs. And I think it was Howard Marks who said the other day, the economy is not 15 % off its high. So there's some mismatch here. And I realize the stock market's looking ahead, but man, that's got really good vision if it's seeing what it's seeing.

26:11But Maybe it's betting on a cure therapy. I'm not a market prognostic. Something does feel really out of whack. I'm curious. Adi and I talked a little bit ahead of time about, you know, asking you about strengths and weaknesses of our response. And it makes me, I mean, I think we can see a lot of weaknesses, especially around the fact that we're just not federally coordinated the way we need to be. Do you see strengths or pockets of it, at least, of what we're doing or glimmers of hope? I guess I might be looking for. Yeah, you know, my macro view, Josh, is that I wrote a book with Michael Bantlebaum in 2011 called That Used to Be Us.