Plain English with Derek Thompson - Buy or Sell Pandemic Trends: Peloton, Movie Theaters, Masks, and More!

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

The Atlantic's Amanda Mull joins the podcast to debate Derek about which COVID-19–related cultural trends will thrive or fade in the 2020s. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Amanda Mull Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode is about predicting the future after COVID. So last week, I was in San Francisco for an in-person meeting, and I walk up to three people. First guy reaches out to shake my hand, open palm, totally normal handshake. Second guy offers a fist bump. I'm fine with that. I make a fist, do the bump. Third guy does the elbow thing. You've seen the elbow thing. He kind of puts his hand. hand in a shoulder and like swings around the elbow and I'm supposed to swing around my elbow to meet in midair. It requires a weird amount of elbow coordination between two people that don't know each other. Anyway, the point is pandemics leave a weird mark on culture.

Disasters leave a weird mark on culture. Like the idea that the simple handshake is being semi-replaced by the flying elbow, this is not a future that I saw coming. And it reminds me of the very first article I wrote for the Atlantic about COVID and how the pandemic would change America in the long run, I talked to this historian who said, look, predicting the future is basically impossible, but there are three kinds of changes you need to think about here. There are inventions, there are interruptions, and there are accelerations. An invention is just something plain new, like masks, not a thing, then there are a thing. Flying elbows, not a thing, then a thing. That's an invention. An interruption is a change that snaps back. So, for example, indoor dining at restaurants.

It's there. It disappears for a few months. It comes right back. But accelerations are the really interesting one. Online shopping, online delivery, Zoom calls, remote work, all these things were already growing before COVID and the pandemic supercharged them. So today's episode is all about which cultural and economic trends will thrive in the 2020s that got their start in the pandemic or got their acceleration in the pandemic. So remote work, wearing masks in public, buying a peloton instead of a gym membership, what will accelerate and what will snap back. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Today's guest is Amanda Mull. Amanda is a staff writer at The Atlantic covering culture and business.

She writes about the weird things people do with their money and why they do them. Amanda, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. That's a better description of my beat than I have ever been able to come up with. Feel free to steal it. So today we are playing buy or sell pandemic trends. Here's how it works. I'm going to name a cultural or economic trend.

And then you and I are going to say whether we are buying or selling that trend for the 2020s. So the way I see it, buy means the trend will thrive in the 2020s. And sell means that the trend will taper off or die off in the 2020s. And to be exquisitely clear for ourselves and for our audience, these are predictions, not necessarily what we're rooting for. So don't scream at us if we predict something that you don't like just because we think it's going to happen. We might just think it's going to happen and aren't necessarily rooting for it.

Amanda, does that all sound kosher to you? Sounds great. I'm ready to guess the future, which is always such a reliable way to. to go about things. A fraught business, indeed. All right, first up, Athleisure domination. Do you envision a continued reign of sweatpants? Or do you think we might be in line for something like a revenge of the roaring 20s,

like a revenge of suits and formal wear in the next decade? So buy or sell the continued domination of ath leisure? I am buying sweatpants both literally and figuratively. Yeah, I think that this is a lot of. is an interesting situation because the history of clothing is a history of casualization over the

course of hundreds of years. Yes. And something that's really interesting about the past couple decades is that a lot of clothing has been sort of pushed forward by actual innovation. There's a lot of

advances in textile technology, a lot of advances in what can be created and what can have stretch put into it, and how the clothes that we wear behave and how they feel. So I think that even before the pandemic, especially people who just sit in a chair all day, there's a lot of reason to not want a binding waistband in that scenario.

And so I think that a lot of things were getting stretchier and getting more sweatpantsy and getting more casual in that way. And this is really just like an accelerating event. on that. So I think that, you know, I don't think jeans are going anywhere. I don't think high heels are going anywhere. But I think that day to day, people are going to be pretty comfortable being comfortable. I am buying this so hard. And I swear to God, Amanda and I did not compare notes before this podcast, but we think about this in the exact same way. Like most trends are cyclical. Like skinny jeans are in, then they're out. Then they're in, then they're out.

But like the one fashion trend that is clearly structural is the 100 year and probably longer decline of formal wear. Like if you jump into a time machine and then step out in 1920s America, it looks like a black tie wedding. Like people wore three-piece suits to baseball games. They wore hats and gloves in breadlines and homeless shelters. A famous statistic from an old piece I did on clothing history. In 1920, Sears Roba.

sold 12 different kinds of formal hats. That number of formal hats sold by Sears Roebuck declined every decade for half a century and by the 1980s they did not sell any. Like hats, gloves, these just went from absolute ubiquity to nowhere at all. And it's because everything has become ath leisure a little bit. Like sweatpants.

Why do we call them sweatpants? They emerged in the 1890s as college gym attire. There were pants you sweated in. Polo shirts. They were actually invented as a tennis shirt by Renee LaCost. and then they were stolen by the English and they turned the tennis shirt and a polo shirt and sold it to Americans.

Tennis shoes, sneakers. Invented the 1890s. They were called sneakers because they had rubber soles. You could sneak up to people in them. They didn't clink-clunk like maybe hard-sold shoes. All this stuff that was invented in the late 19th century is just totally taken over leisure in the 20th century. Everything is becoming athlete.

It's basically one of the few rules of life, gravity, athleisure. I've been buying this trend for years, and I think the pandemic absolutely accelerated it. And it did so, I think you're so smart to point this out, I think it did so by getting more kinds of companies to experiment with all these new kinds of fabrics. Like, my wife just bought me a pair of sweatpants that I swear to God look exactly like slacks.

They look like sort of beautiful silver slacks that you would think you could wear it to the office or even to some formal party, but they basically feel like the slacks. be a sweatpants you could possibly imagine. Like, as companies learn how to mold formal-looking attire with a leisure sort of feel, I think this stuff is just going to continue to take over. And look, I love a good suit.

I love a good tie. But I don't think the age of the daily suit is here for long. Anything there you want to pick up on or push back against? I think that, you know, once people try things that are comfortable, once people get used to having physical comfort or having things that don't physically bother them on their bodies during the day, it is very hard to unwind that. It is very hard to get somebody back into high heels every day once their foot has known an ug boot.

You know, human bodies want comfort. They don't want to be harmed in some way all day. And I think that once you find opening. for that once you find opportunities to get a little bit more comfortable, it's really hard to take that back. Yeah, I think it's a fantastic point. And look, I'm speaking from a place of privilege here. I've never had to wear a high heel. But I do wonder, maybe the only argument against my strong buy is that the door swings both ways, that suits and formal wear might be able to sort of like pull in some of these super stretchy fabrics and thereby make sort of, at least what I'm more familiar with,

which is formal menswear, feel more and more like a sweatpants or a stretchy soft shirt. All right. Next buyer's sell is Peloton. Peloton, the at-home fitness, stationary bike company. A quick three-year history of Peloton, 2019, the company IPOs, they come out with an embarrassing ad that everybody makes fun of. 2020, Jim shut down across the country. Peloton absolutely takes off, conquers the world.

2021, the world opens up a bit. Jim's are back online. Peloton stock is down significantly since it's high in January. Amanda, buy or sell Peloton for the 2020s? Right now, I am push, but leaning by. I know that we just started the game, and I'm already introducing a third option that we did not agree on. But I am push leaning by on Peloton. I have been following the Peloton story for for several years, starting before the pandemic, before the really cringeworthy Christmas ad from a couple of years ago, I, during the pandemic,

bought a Peloton of my own using their financing, which has made it possible for a lot of people who might not have otherwise to buy a Peloton. And, you know, I think it's a really good product in a lot of ways. I think that they have really sort of tapped into something that people want to do, which is find a way to exercise without having to commute to and from

a space in which they can do that. And have found a way to also, you know, provide people with programming. A lot of the problem of going to the gym for people who aren't already fit is going to is figuring out what you're supposed to do when you're there and how you progress at anything. So I think that Peloton has done a really good job

of setting up programming, a really good job, of making like a good physical product. And although like I think that a lot of people probably are really, really anxious to go do something else rather than what they've already been doing, I think that ultimately they will, they will have an okay time retaining customers, even if everybody just really wants to get out of their houses right now. So I am also on the Razors Edge here. By the numbers, the company is kind of a mess right now. So I, checked out their latest quarterly earnings report, bike revenue is down and average monthly workouts are down. That's not good. Your company is all about selling bikes and working people out on it.

So what this tells me is that they've had a terrible time fighting back against gyms and maintaining growth even as the world has opened up. If you look at their stock, if you bought Peloton stock, $100 of Peloton stock in January, you've got $20 left in your account today. Their stock is down 80% since the beginning of this year. That is putrid. But, but Peloton is not just a company. It is the market leader in a growing business, the at-home fitness and internet connected fitness business. And so the important question here, I think, is do I think at-home fitness has room to run in the 2020s? I think it does. I think Peloton could help a tech company get into fitness via an acquisition

or a fitness company to get into tech. So if you're Amazon, if you're Apple, if you're Nike, if you're Facebook trying to build out your Metaverse thing, like do you want to burn $10 billion building a top-notch internet-connected fitness machine, or do you want to just buy

the market leader at a fairly distressed price and just take it supernova? So the company is not doing well right now by the numbers, but it is surfing a trend that I am long on, which is at-home fitness and internet-connected fitness. So I am buying Peloton because I am buying the future of digital fitness.

I think this is a big, juicy, delicious acquisition target for a big tech company or a fitness company. Amanda, on a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you to ride with Cody in the Facebook Peloton Metaverse with me? I am excited about Cody and I'm excited about writing and I'm excited about you as a friend. I'm not quite as excited about Facebook Metaverse.

But I think you're right. If all of the tech companies are telling us right now that a really important thing in the future for them is finding more immersive, more 360 ways for people to interact with technology, to use technology as part of their day-to-day physical lives, then I think something like Peloton is going to be a really obvious first step for somebody. That is, it's sort of a proof of concept that there is a way to make digital programming that people want to interact with physically, that people want to interact with in a way that is, you know, fully, fully immersive, not just something that they have in their hand, not just something that exists in their living room that they can interact with sometimes, but something that they want to, like, throw themselves into. And I think another important aspect of this on sort of like a whole different plane is that it has something that is that people really want to have business-wise right now, which is subscription revenue.

Yeah, I think it's a good point. I think it's important to look at Peloton, not just as a fitness company, but as a kind of media company with recurring subscription revenue that's probably going to be, is pretty profitable because that stuff scales really well. A lot scales a lot better than making hardware. I think what you have fundamentally is an excellent product. The people who use it love it. The people who use it are evangelists, they're practically cult members. And that is a really, really important thing to have in what's going to be a really crowded space at home and internet-connected fitness. What to move on, remote work. So this is a big one.

Lots of people are talking about this. White-collar workers, obviously, were forced into this mass experiment to work at home throughout 2020. Still today, about 20% of white-collar workers. in professional services, and managerial services, like 20% of the knowledge economy is still working from home

or working remotely. Are you buy or sell remote work? My thinking about this topic has changed a lot over the course of the pandemic, and I sort of go back and forth. Right now, I am cell. And that is something that has changed a bit

in the past, I would say six months, especially. I remember going to one of my first dinners out in Manhattan after I had gotten vaccinated. A friend of mine was getting ready to move to L.A. I took him out for a stake. And we went to this very trendy steakhouse downtown. And I don't know what I was expecting when I arrived there. We were like pretty early in the evening.

I think our reservation was for like seven. And I got there and the place was absolutely. absolutely packed with business guys in their blue button-down shirts having happy hour. And, you know, being someone who works in an industry that is largely not back in the offices and living in Brooklyn around other people who work in digital media or other digital things who are also not back in the office, it was sort of like an eye-opening moment to me. Like, oh, all the finance guys are back into the office already in some respect. And like I said, this was like six months ago.

So that sort of like, it was sort of like a jolt. Like that's not information in and of itself, but it was sort of like, okay. So I started asking around friends who don't work in digital stuff specifically, people who work in law or finance or other types of industries. And a lot of them are already back, even in New York, where things have, I think, stuck remote pretty well. A lot of them are already back several days a week. or most of the week, a lot of my friends back home in Atlanta where I'm from,

have been back in the office entirely for God knows how long now. So I think that, like, for a subset of the workforce, this remote work situation is going to persevere. It is going to change how, probably how people in media work for a really, really long time. But I sort of question the scale of the impact outside of these very digital types of industries. Yeah, I think it's a really good point. I should say, first of all, this is our first big disagreement.

I am a strong buy with remote work, but I just want to press on what you said, because I think there's a lot there. You know, white-collar workers are this portfolio of industries that aren't really that similar. You have finance and law, and you have media and tech and software engineering, and they're not all going to go in the same direction. You've already seen companies like Goldman Sessions. say, we don't care that some media companies are basically going to be remote forever.

If you want to work at Goldman Sachs, you're working in the office. Meanwhile, you look at companies like, say, Twitter or our own company, which has been much more accommodating of working from home, at least up to today, November 2021. So I think that it really is going to come down to sort of the preferences of managers in terms of whether or not they're going to allow their companies to remain remote or not. Why I'm a strong buy is, well, first, I want to be clear what I'm buying. I'm not buying the remote work is going to be universal. I'm not buying that it's going to be easy.

I'm buying that it's going to be a force to be reckoned with, and it's never going away for a large segment of this knowledge economy. I think that the rise of remote work could be the most important change to white collar jobs in the 2020s. It doesn't matter that it won't affect everyone. In fact, it will probably only affect. as you pointed out, a minority of a minority, like less than maybe 30% of white-collar knowledge economy workers, but it will touch everything. The spillover effects, the ripple effects will

touch everything. If 20% fewer people, for example, commute to downtown Manhattan to midtown, that's going to affect the revenue for the subway. It's going to affect what it feels like to be downtown. It's going to affect commercial real estate values. It's going to affect retail in downtown because there are going to be fewer window shoppers. It's going to change office culture, as bosses have to figure out how to manage hybrid work and hybrid versus all in office versus nothing in office and fully remote. I think it's going to change the way that we think about creativity. I wrote this piece for The Atlantic where I tried to distinguish between two kinds of white-collar work, hard work, which is the work that you might be literally paid to do,

like for you and me, it's writing, it's calling people, editing. And then what I called software, which is kind of chatting and gossiping and milling about the office or, you know, chatting to people on Slack. Offices, I think, specialize in that kind of soft work. You don't need an office necessarily to write, but you do need an office to have a certain amount of, you know, social liquidity. And I do, I think that building that out online is going to be an amazingly difficult challenge for managers. But fundamentally, the reason that I'm buying is that enough workers seem to love it. And as long as this is now a part of the menu that people are asking for, when they're looking for a new job, they're like, talk about pay, talk about benefits, talk about

company culture, okay, and also, what's your remote policy? This is just going to be permanently a part of the conversation. So the next one is Zoom hangs replacing phone calls. So brief story here. I have definitely found with friends that I have across the country and in cities that I haven't visited in a while that phone calls that used to be just merely all voice. Now, I want to see their face. I have had Zooms normalized in my life. And as a result, I say, oh, you know, I need to hop on a Zoom in order to see this person. And so Zooms have replaced phone calls for me. I am buying Zoom hangs replacing phone calls, but I want to know for you whether you buy this as well. I am selling an even more than I sold remote work.

Wow. I have had like the complete opposite experience of yours where, you know, towards the beginning of the pandemic, people were really interested in seeing each other's faces, really wanted to arrange, you know, like a happy hour or something like that, or, you know, get on the, get on the computer with extended family and see everybody. That just absolutely no longer exists in my life. And I'm glad it does not. I don't know anybody who is still pushing for that kind of thing.

And largely, I do know people who are saying, you know, I can send you a Zoom link, but do you want to just do this on the phone. And tell me more about that. So I can understand how, you know, during the pandemic, everyone was Zooming. no one was seeing people or a lot of people weren't seeing people outside of their household and so it kind of made sense

to do a Zoom so that you could have the excitement of seeing another human face. I get that they kind of feel sad now because more people are leaving their house and it feels like a bad pixelated substitution for seeing a person to Zoom with them

rather than just have a phone call. But why have you felt yourself pulling away from Zoom calls? I think Zoom's feel like work. I think that Zoom suffers a little bit from its success in the realm of knowledge work and creative work. And that a lot of people I know who are either working on the Internet in some capacity

or who are in a sort of meeting-heavy industry, law, finance, just spend a lot of day looking at people on their computer already and feel really just like fatigued by that at the end of the day and at the end of the week. So are just ready to do anything else when it comes time to interact with people in other parts of their life. Like, I am a really huge fan. And this, you know, this is living alone privilege to a certain extent of taking a phone call while I am lying flat on my back on the sofa. And I just put the phone on speaker and sit it on my torso and I can lie down and chat. And you can't do that on Zoom.

You know, it's frowned upon. Do people just look at the ceiling for 45 minutes while you speak to them? Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you need to stare at the ceiling, though. I mean, sometimes you just need, like, it requires different sort of, I think, cognitive processes to have a conversation when you're disembodied versus having a conversation in person, versus having a conversation, and then trying to also focus on somebody on video.

I think that those are just like three, distinct types of interactions. And the one that where you're talking and trying to follow along with a video is to me just really, really tiring. All right. The next one is germophobia. Are you buying or selling a permanently heightened anxiety around getting sick in America? I'm selling. Another disagreement. Can I make my case first? Yeah, go for it. Okay, great. All right. I am, I'm buying this, I feel pretty strongly about my bi position here. So I think the pandemic was a trauma.

And one thing we've learned from American history is that traumas typically leave a mark. Like people that grew up during the Great Depression were famous penny pinches for decades. And there's research showing that people that grow up during ordinary recessions are more likely to support government help for decades or have less confidence in public institutions. Like that right there sounds a lot to me like the Great Recessions traumatic imprint on millennials. So traumas leave a mark. And I think going forward, people are just going to be, and maybe I'm specifically talking about, you know, liberals here. I might be talking more about sort of the, you know, people who live on the coast, people live in blue states that I'm more familiar with. I think they're just going to be more anxious around getting sick.

They'll avoid illness in new ways. They'll protect their kids from avoiding, from getting sick. And I just see this everywhere I look. Companies still making a show of wiping the tables. Airlines still handing out the handwipes. Schools shutting down for deep cleans. Buildings still talking about, and I actually definitely agree with this part, new ventilation policies. I think the same way that the legacy of 9-11 is most visible in TSA lines, a legacy of the pandemic that will thrive in the 2020s will be this sort of high. heightened anxiety about germs and our health. What are you selling here? Earlier in the pandemic,

very, actually very early on in the pandemic, in April 2020, I reported a story that ended up being about what would happen to kids who are sort of graduating from high school in college or graduating from college right now as the pandemic we're on, which, again, predicting the future.

A really great position to put yourself in constantly. Yeah, we'll come back in a year and talking about how we were wrong about everything. Yeah. But I did a bunch of interviews for that story, of course. And one of them was with a woman who is a disaster anthropologist, which is a really fascinating line of work, first of all. Second of all.

Wait, please tell me, what is a disaster anthropologist? It's somebody who studies, like, the aftermath of disasters, basically, and how different populations react to different types of stressors. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, she was wonderful. I would like to call her back up again, actually. I have to remember to pitch this. And so what she told me, and I was asking her to predict the future,

and there's nothing that historians and anthropologists hate to do more than predict the future. And what she said is that, you know, there will be scars left on our social culture, on us as individuals after this, but fewer things change than people think will change in the aftermath of disaster. And I have been thinking about that over the past year and a half and trying to figure out, you know, what stays and what goes as far as these things that we think will be with us for a long time. I think that probably an attachment to hand sanitizer will stay. Like, I find myself when I, like if I sit down at a restaurant and I look for the bottle of hand sanitizer, even though I know that it doesn't prevent COVID, even though I know that that that's, That's not how that particular illness is passed. I, when I bring in takeout or anything like that, before I eat, I wash my hands.

Because it feels weird to touch food after I have touched stuff that's been outside. So I think that for some people, like, there will probably be one or two habits like that that sort of stick when other stuff doesn't. But I don't think an overall sense that we are terrified of getting sick. that we are going to do a lot to prevent people from getting sick is going to stick in society at large. Because I think that for a huge portion of society, we have not treated them like that throughout the pandemic. A lot of people have been sort of forced to go to work, forced to work through exposure to COVID and things like that. So I think that like society-wide, if anything, what I've learned from the last year and a half

is that we are fine with people getting sick. That is such a good point. I really like the way you put that. Let me amend my thesis here, even though I still want to represent myself as being a strong buy on germophobia. So we have an understanding of like widening political polarization, the idea that left and right on the political spectrum

are getting further and further away. I wonder if the people, pandemic will increase what you might call, like, health polarization or even, like, germophobia polarization. Like, when I think about my friends and how my friends collectively in 2019, before the pandemic, thought about hand sanitizer or being around lots of people in an indoor space even after being vaccinated, I thought of them as kind of belonging to the same clump. and now they belong to like five totally different clumps from the totally laissez-faire, whatever, I'm waxed and relaxed, I'm living my normal life attitude,

and let's call it the one side of the spectrum, to the really, really still quite neurotic about exposing themselves and their loved ones to the virus, even after all of them have been vaccinated and even boosted. So it seems to me like one thing that we might see here is that that spectrum will get a little bit wider and that it might even intersect with the political spectrum because, you know, the one position, like the far left position on COVID might seem to feel like a far left political position. Like, for example, one place where this sort of makes contact with something specific is like handshakes and elbow greetings. Like how do you feel about the reemergence of handshakes? I feel fine about it.

That is something that I am fine with the reemergence of handshakes. And the idea that handshakes would go away permanently is something that seems like bullshit to me, even in March 2020. That just seems like something to me that, like, that's how we as people sort of think through the things that are currently changing in our lives. But it's not necessarily how we go on living once those changes are done. So I get why people sort of like fixated on the fact that like, oh, this sort of social thing that we do all the time is suddenly no longer allowed for safety reasons is no longer safe. And the assumption that that would imprint on us as a trauma that we would continue to adhere to that after the threat was done. But I think that like you always have to greet people. and it's just easier to sort of go ahead and do it the way we've always done it than to change.

And I think that something you said about how, you know, hand sanitizer and things like that have been sort of like mapped onto the political spectrum in a way that they weren't before. And I think that, you know, a certain subset of the population sees an adherence to sort of, sort of, sort of like good cleanliness practices is perhaps something that is indicative of fear, indicative of a lack of toughness, a lack of willingness to live your life. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you know, adherence to all of these things is seen as good, like, pro-social behavior. And like, some of these are probably good pro-social behaviors, and some of them are not. Some of them are indicators of fear, and some of them are not.

But I think that there's this pretty widespread tendency by people all along the spectrum to map certain behaviors to certain dispositions and attitudes toward life. And I think that the longer that goes on, the more likely we are to see this sort of spreading out of things that were like previously not partisan onto partisan ideals, where it's, you know, are you telling people you're a Republican if you eventually stop wearing masks altogether? Like, is that something that liberals are going to begin to worry about? even after wearing masks is no longer, you know, a safety necessity? I don't know.

But I think that that is probably something we're headed for. Well, let's go there right now. Masks as a permanent part of being in public. Buy or sell? I am perhaps counterintuitively based on my previous cell position buying this. Okay. But in a very specific way, I think that for a lot of people, especially a lot of people who are left-leaning, who work in the types of jobs that might send them on business trips a whole lot,

who have gotten used to, you know, wearing masks in certain situations, and that being sort of the thing that is sanctioned within their social group who live in San Francisco or New York or L.A., where these things have not been as contentious in some ways. Like, of course they've been contentious everywhere, but I think that, you know, when you get on an airplane in flu season in three years and five years and you know that wearing a mask for the duration of that flight makes you a lot less likely to get sick when you get home, like, that sort of seems like a no-brainer. And I think that we have also an indicator that that is a long-term outcome in other cultures. like when you look at a mask wearing in a lot of different Asian countries. In Eastern Asia, yes. Yeah, as a consequence of the first SARS pandemic or epidemic.

I can't remember which one it was. But so I think that a lot of people are going to go, okay, I got used to this for two years. I know it'll make me less likely to get sick in these specific scenarios in which it's not that big of a deal to wear one. I'm just going to do it. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, this is related to my germophobia prediction. I was long germophobia, and here, in terms of masks in public, it's a regional buy. And I should have said this for my germophobia prediction as well.

I think if you go to rural Texas, or if you go to some parts of Florida or Georgia, where you're from, it seems to me that masks just aren't a part of daily life at all. But I live in Washington, D.C. You live in New York City. I just got back from a trip to San Francisco for work. It's masks galore in these places. It's masks on street. It's definitely masks in grocery stores.

It's masks entering into restaurants where you, by the way, also in a lot of these places have to show proof of vaccination. This is very much still, obviously, a late pandemic, not post-pandemic phenomenon and reality here. I can't see an obvious point where masks won't be a part of being in public on planes in grocery stores in places like this. I just think that an elevated, an elevated rate of mask wearing is just going to be with us for years. Now, if the pandemic is basically, officially, knock on wood over in the middle of next year, I am less certain of what, like, and let's say we have no more pandemics for the next decade. Do I think is going to be mask a lore in America in 2032? I don't know. I don't know.

Like, maybe in San Francisco, maybe in New York, maybe in those, in those, you know, more liberal places that have had more, what they call NPI's, non-pharmaceutical interventions, maybe there. But I do think mask we could maybe slowly see phase out. But as a regional buy for the next, say, three to five years, I just think masks are probably with us. Does that, is that more or less than up with your position or with the little parts of my argument that you want to push back on? No, I think that that is basically it. And I was talking to my mom about this recently. As you said, I am from Georgia, and my parents live in Metro Atlanta, and my mom really loves this bakery that's in a smaller town in Georgia that's, like, a little bit outside of exurban

Atlanta. It's not like rural, rural, but it's like, you know, it's one of these sort of like middle ground places that it's hard to explain what it is. And there's this bakery there that she really likes the cookies from there, and she's retired. So she decided that she wanted to go on a little car trip because she hasn't been out a lot in the past two years. And where she is in Metro Atlanta is like a pretty blue area. They have a Democratic congressman. And they have been there the entire pandemic going to the grocery store and to Target and whatever else. And she and my little brother went out to this bakery in a fairly rural area.

And, you know, she and my brother wore their masks into the bakery to order cookies. And she said that people looked at them like they were nuts. Like they had four heads because they were wearing their masks, but where my parents are in Metro Atlanta in general, people are still doing that. Maybe not everybody. You know, you go into Publix or Target or whatever, and there are people without masks, but the uptake is still pretty high, even though that's not like a heavily partisan leaning area. So I think that, you know, the flu kills tens of thousands of people a year in this country,

even when we're not having like a terrible flu pandemic. So I think that a lot of people, especially people who have elderly parents that they want to interact with, people who have little kids who are sick a lot, I think that there's just a lot of individuals who in certain situations are going to see utility in this going forward. I agree with that. All right. Last one, buy or sell the future of movie theaters. I am sort of a push on this because I think that there are theaters with a bright future

and then there are theaters that do not have a future. So I think that probably what is going to happen if I had to put money on it would be that we end up with overall fewer movie theaters. And the theaters that survive are the ones who are going to to do the best job making an experience out of going to the movies. Alamo Draft House already does a really great job with this. And tell people about Alamo Draft House if they're not familiar. Yeah, Alamo Draft House, you reserve your seats.

You have a table. You have, there's a whole ordering system. You can get a full meal. You can get alcohol. You can get desserts. You can order things by putting a little card up on your seat throughout the movie. They have parties for different movies, both current releases and sort of like cult classics and movies that people would still love to see in like 35 millimeter or something like that. They have events.

So I think that like the events business is probably going to boom. And if you can make going to your theater feel like an event, feel like something that is worth the expenditure, then I think that you have probably a bright future. If all you have is a screen, I don't think that you're long for this world. Yeah, I sell movie theaters as an industry and buy as a fun thing to do once or twice a year. I think the rule of movie theaters is going to be fewer and fancier. It's just what you said. And this is honestly a little bit like what we talked about with regard to athleisure. This is a structural trend that the pandemic really accelerated.

Movie tickets bought per year. If you look at a graph of movie tickets bought per year per person, like the average American was buying like 35 movie tickets a year in the 1940s, 1950s. Then you have the invention of television. That number declines from the mid-30s to like maybe six, five movie tickets per person per year. Now it's, I think, under three.

It might even be under two for 2021. So you've just had this continuous decade-over-decade decline in movie theater tickets as a annual or monthly activity. And I think that's just going to continue. I think that movie theaters as a place to experience a handful of just like soul-shaking, like, you know, stomach rumbling epics. Like I saw Dune in IMAX and was totally blown away.

Easy lay up for me. I adore the book. I love the series. And I was absolutely blown away by the movie. I watched it again at home. I have HBO Max. I watched it again at home. It was still good.

It just wasn't the same. You didn't have the same sort of like just stomach churning sound that can only really come from a theater like this. So I can imagine going back to movie theaters, you know, once, maybe twice a year for the true epics, for the true, like, just visual auditory experiences. But I'm just, I'm not going to go for the December Oscar hopefuls that I used to really want to see every year.

I'm just going to wait the six weeks and say, I'm sure that by the time the Oscars actually happen, I will have seen this on streaming in January or February. So I see movie theaters continuing to decline. Yeah, one thing that this sort of hinges on for me, I know that there have been rumblings of movie paths coming back. And I don't think that that's enough to save, like, the theaters that aren't providing you anything but a screen.

But I think that there is something to be said for the experience of going into a dark room where you are not supposed to touch your phone. and just being sort of overtaken by something. I tend to not like the sort of like big popcorn epics that draw a lot of people to movie theaters, but I do like watching, you know, a two-hour story be told to me in such a way where I have nothing to do but pay attention.

And I used to go to all kinds of movies in the morning because I live in New York City and I am privileged in this way that there were like 9 a.m. movies. And I could do that on the weekend before my friends woke up. Do you have like a classic favorite movie experience the last five years? Like the sort of film that you go to the movie theaters for?

I saw, well, the last movie that I saw in theaters before the pandemic was Uncut Gems. Oh, my God. One of the most stressful two hours of my life. Yeah, go on. Yeah, and it was one of those ones where I just like went to the alibi not far from my apartment in the morning when I saw on the app that there were only. going to be a couple other people there. It was towards the end of the run, like it was February. And I was like, okay, now I'm going to do this. And I think that, like, sitting there and letting

that movie sort of wind me up tighter and tighter and tighter is something that worked better in the theater than it would have if I were watching it at home on my TV because it was so immersive. And I think for something like that, you know, I'm willing to go to the movies for something like that. Are you telling me that you watched Uncut Gems at 9A. in the morning. I'm a psychopath. I can't tell you. Did you smoke like three packs of cigarettes over the course of the day? Oh my God. I don't know how I could continue my weekend having that experience over breakfast. Unbelievable. Well, Amanda, thank you so much for playing by yourself Pandepic Trans with me and we will talk to you very, very soon. Yes. Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you all for listening. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. please subscribe, rate, and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to this. We will be back next Tuesday, November 30th. Until then, have a happy Thanksgiving, and we'll talk to you soon.