Author: SK

Paying doctors

Back in 2011-12, when I was about to go freelance, a friend told me about a simple formula on how I should price my services. “Take your expected annual income and divide it by 1000. That will be your hourly rate”, he said. I followed this policy fairly well, with reasonable success (though I think I shortchanged myself in some situations by massively underestimating how long a task would take – but that story is for another day).

The longer term effect of that has been that every time I see someone’s hourly rate, I multiply it by 1000 to guess that person’s approximate annual income (the basis being that as a full time worker, you “bill” for 2000 hours a year. As a freelancer you have “50% utilisation” and so you work 1000 hours).

And one set of people who have fairly transparent hourly rates are doctors – you know the number of appointments they give per hour, and what you paid for that, and you can back calculate their annual income based on that. The interesting thing is, for most doctors I’ve seen, based on this metric, what they earn for their level of eduction and years of experience seems rather low.

“So how do doctors earn?”, I wonder. Why is it still a prized profession while you might have a much better life being an engineer, for example?

Now you should remember that consultations are only one income stream for doctors. Those that practice surgery as well have a more lucrative stream – the hourly rates for surgeries far exceeds hourly rates of consultation. And so surgeons make far more than what I impute from what I’ve paid them for a consultation.

One possible reason for this arbitrage is the way insurance deals are structured – at least in India, out patient care is seldom paid for by insurance. As a consequence, hospitals and doctors cross-subsidise consultations with surgeries. They are able to get away with higher rates for surgeries because insurers are bearing the cost. Consultations, where patients generally pay out of their own pockets, are far more elastic.

This, however, leads to a problem for doctors who don’t do surgeries. Psychiatrists, for example. If they have to make money solely through consultations, their hourly rate must be far higher than that of doctors who also do surgeries. But then, is the market willing to bear this cost?

Now, I’m getting into conspiracy theory mode. If the amount non-surgeon doctors make is limited (thanks to market dynamics), the only way they can make sure they earn a decent living is by limiting supply. Could this be one reason India is under-supplied in a lot of non-surgical doctors? Again this is pure pure speculation, and not based in any fact.

Continuing with conspiracy theories, even for doctors who are surgeons, the only way to make a certain income is to have a threshold on the ratio of surgeries to consultations. And if this ratio (surgeries / consultations) goes too low, the doctors’ income suffers. Again, hippocratic oath aside, do hospitals try to game this metric, based on the current incentives?

On a more serious note, this distortion in the hourly earnings for surgeries versus consultations is one reason that India is also undersupplied with good general practitioners (GPs). Because GPs don’t do surgeries (though the Indian system means they are all licensed to perform surgeries, to the best of my knowledge), their earning potential is naturally capped. So the better doctors don’t want to be GPs.

How can we fix this distortion? How can we make sure we have better GPs? Insurance cover for outpatient care is one thing, but I’m not sure it is the silver bullet I’ve been making it out to be (and it will come with its own set of market distortions).

This entire post is me shooting from my hip. So please feel free to correct me iff I’m wrong.

Sugar and Tobacco

This is NOT a blogpost about cash crops in the West Indies. This is more about biology.

I had my first cigarette when I was 21. I was about to graduate from my undergrad, and had decided to “experiment” a bit. Friends who were already smokers warned me that the thing is addictive, and that I need to be careful.

I still remember that cigarette, a Wills Classic Milds shared with a classmate who was a very occasional smoker. I remember feeling high, and weak in the knees in a way I had never felt before (I was yet to taste alcohol, but when I did a couple of months later, it was underwhelming compared to tobacco). It was extremely pleasurable, but I remembered what my smoker friends had told me. It was addictive shit.

That day I made a decision that I’ll smoke a maximum of one cigarette per calendar year, something I’ve lived up to. It’s never been more than one, though in some years (especially in the early years), the 1 was made up of several fractions.

The thing with tobacco is that it is addictive. The high is incredibly high (for a non-smoker like me), but when that passes you have withdrawal symptoms. And you crave for more. If you don’t have friends like me who have warned you about the addictive nature of it, you can get addicted (alcohol doesn’t react that way – beyond a few drinks you don’t want to drink more. And I don’t have annual limits on alcohol consumption).

A few prescription drugs act the same way – most notably (in my experience) antidepressants. They are biologically addictive and when you stop having them, the body starts having strong withdrawal symptoms. So you need to be careful in terms of getting on to antidepressants because getting off them is not easy.

Caffeine is the same as well – and I continue to be addicted to it. Two days without coffee and I get the same kind of withdrawal symptoms I had the last time I was getting off antidepressants.

And thinking about it, it’s the same with sugar (or any other high carb foods). When you consume too much sugar (or carbs), the body needs to produce a lot of insulin to be able to deal with it. The insulin thus produced is like a demon / genie (based on the sort of myths you favour) – once it has devoured the excess sugar, it devours the “regular blood sugar” as well, leading to a massive sugar crash.

It was possibly my psychiatrist who pointed this out in a consultation a few months back (and so I officially have a medical prescription that says “follow a low carb diet”) – that these sugar crashes are what lead to bouts of  low mood and depression, and that the way to keep my mood good is to not have sugar crashes, which means not eating much sugar.

Similarly, she told me that the reason I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night ravenously hungry and unable to sleep back is likely due to a sugar crash. And so I need to have a low-carb dinner. I found this the hard way last night when I had noodles for dinner (my blood sugar levels are especially sensitive to pulverised grains  (including the supposedly “healthy” ones like ragi, jowar, etc.) –  whole rice is fine for me, but not rice flour), and found myself awake at 4 am and unable to sleep. As it happened, I resisted the temptation to eat then and slowly fell back asleep at 6 (luckily today was not a “gym day”).

As if this morning’s sugar crash wasn’t enough, after lunch today I ate some sweets that a colleague had got to office. Sugar crash duly happened an hour later, and how did I react? By reaching for the same sweets. Yet another crash happened as I got home – and  I reached for some sweets my wife had got today. I’m writing this awaiting another sugar crash.

Thanks to the functioning of insulin, sugar can behave like tobacco. You eat and feel good, and then the crash happens. And you eat more. Spike again, crash again. And so on and so forth.

When I examine my own periods of putting on weight or becoming mildly depressed (now that I think of it, they are correlated), it’s because I get into this eating cycle. Eating more carbs means I get more hungry. And I eat more. Which makes my hungrier. And that goes on.

The only way is to wilfully break the chain – by skipping meals or having very low-carb meals. Once you’ve done this for a considerable period of time (I managed this easily between last Thursday and last evening), your body feels less hungrier, and you get on to a sort of virtuous cycle. And you progressively get better.

And then it takes one noodles meal or a sweet offer to get back into the vicious cycle. Some people have famously “quit smoking hundreds of times”. I’ve also “gone on a low cab diet hundreds of times”.

Intelligent and Diligent

For whatever reason, when I was a schoolboy and first learnt of the word “diligent”, I assumed that it should be the opposite on intelligent. “Only people who are not intelligent need to be diligent”, the young I had reasoned.

And nearly thirty years later, I came across this stellar 2×2 on intelligence and diligence. I’ve read it in many places now, but will link to the version on farnam street blog. I’m copying this quote from the blog, which is apparently credited to two different military officers.

I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.

Maybe I was up to something interesting back in the 1990s, even if it was rather self-serving. And maybe it is this concept I reprised in the late 2000s when I came up with “studs and fighters“. It was possibly my irritation with the “stupid and diligent” variety.

Now I’m thinking of this “stupid and diligent” 2×2 in terms of our schooling and education. Maybe there is this general feeling among parents, teachers and suchlike that intelligence is something you are “born with”, and you cannot become intelligent.

So the moment they spot a kid who is stupid and lazy, they decide that the best way to “improve” this kid is to make him/her more diligent, rather than more intelligent. In the short run this might work, since the kid is now able to do better in the school exams (which is what most teachers are optimising for). The long run effect, though, is that the kid, instead of ending up in the numerous but harmless “general staff” (stupid and lazy), ends up in the seemingly more competent but actually “dangerous, and only causing mischief” stupid and diligent quadrant.

In other words, our general schooling makes our adult population much more dangerous!

Cliquebusting

Last evening we hosted a party at home. Like all parties we host, we used Graph Theory to plan this one. This time, however, we used graph theory in a very different way to how we normally use it – our intent was to avoid large cliques. And, looking back, I think it worked.

First, some back story. For some 3-4 months now we’ve been planning to have a party at home. There has been no real occasion accompanying it – we’ve just wanted to have a party for the heck of it, and to meet a few people.

The moment we started planning, my wife declared “you are the relatively more extrovert among the two of us, so organising this is your responsibility”. I duly put NED. She even wrote a newsletter about it.

The gamechanger was this podcast episode I listened to last month.

The episode, like a lot of podcast episodes, is related to this book that the guest has written. Something went off in my head as I listened to this episode on my way to work one day.

The biggest “bingo” moment was that this was going to be a strictly 2-hour party (well, we did 2.5 hours last night). In other words, “limited liability”!!

One of my biggest issues about having parties at my house is that sometimes guests tend to linger on, and there is no “defined end time”. For someone with limited social skills, this can be far more important than you think.

The next bingo was that this would be a “cocktail” party (meaning, no main course food). Again that massively brought down the cost of hosting – no planning menus, no messy food that would make the floor dirty, no hassles of cleaning up, and (most importantly) you could stick to your 2 / 2.5 hour limit without any “blockers”.

Listen to the whole episode. There are other tips and tricks, some of which I had internalised ahead of yesterday’s party. And then came the matter of the guest list.

I’ve always used graph theory (coincidentally my favourite subject from my undergrad) while planning parties. Typical use cases have been to ensure that the graph is connected (everyone knows at least one other person) and that there are no “cut vertices” (you don’t want the graph to get disconnected if one person doesn’t turn up).

This time we used it in another way – we wanted the graph to be connected but not too connected! The idea was that if there are small groups of guests who know each other too well, then they will spend the entirety of the party hanging out with each other, and not add value to the rest of the group.

Related to this was the fact that we had pre-decided that this party is not going to be a one-off, and we will host regularly. This made it easier to leave out people – we could always invite them the next time. Again, it is important that the party was “occasion-less” – if it is a birthday party or graduation party or wedding party or some such, people might feel offended that you left them out. Here, because we know we are going to do this regularly, we know “everyone’s number will come sometime”.

I remember the day we make the guest list. “If we invite X and Y, we cannot invite Z since she knows both X and Y too well”. “OK let’s leave out Z then”. “Take this guy’s name off the list, else there will be too many people from this hostel”. “I’ve met these two together several times, so we can call exactly one of them”. And so on.

With the benefit of hindsight, it went well. Everyone who said they will turn up turned up. There were fourteen adults (including us), which meant that there were at least three groups of conversation at any point in time – the “anti two pizza rule” I’ve written about. So a lot of people spoke to a lot of other people, and it was easy to move across groups.

I had promised to serve wine and kODbaLe, and kept it – kODbaLe is a fantastic party food in that it is large enough that you don’t eat too many in the course of an evening, and it doesn’t mess up your fingers. So no need of plates, and very little use of tissues. The wine was served in paper cups.

I wasn’t very good at keeping up timelines – maybe I drank too much wine. The party was supposed to end at 7:30, but it was 7:45 when I banged a spoon on a plate to get everyone’s attention and inform them that the party was over. In another ten minutes, everyone had left.

When Institutions Decay

A few weeks back, I’d written about “average and peak skills“. The basic idea in this blogpost is that in most jobs, the level of skills you need on most days (or the “average skill” you need) is far far inferior to the “peak skill” level required occasionally.

I didn’t think about this when I wrote that blogpost, but now I realise that a lot of institutional decay can be simply explained by ignoring this gap between average and peak skills required.

I was at my niece’s wedding this morning, and was talking to my wife about the nadaswara players (and more specifically about this tweet):

“Why do you even need a jalra”, she asked. And then I pointed out that the jalra guy had now started playing the nadaswara (volga). “Why do we need this entire band”, she went on, suggesting that we could potentially use a tape instead.

This is a classic case of peak and average skill. The average skill required by the nadaswara player (whether someone sitting there or just operating a tape) is to just play, play it well and play in sync with the dhol guy. And if you want to maximise for the sheer quality of the music played, then you might as well just buy a tape and play it at the venue.

However, the “peak skill” of the nadaswara player goes beyond that. He is supposed to function without instruction. He is supposed to keep an eye on what is happening at the wedding, have an idea of the rituals (given how much the rituals vary by community, this is nontrivial) and know what kind of music to play when (or not play at all). He is supposed to gauge the sense of the audience and adjust the sort of music he is playing accordingly.

And if you consider all these peak skills required, you realise that you need a live player rather than a tape. And you realise that you need someone who is fairly experienced since this kind of judgment is likely to come more easily to the player.

The problem with professions with big gaps between average and peak skills, and where peak skills are seldom called upon, is that penny-pinching managers can ignore the peak and just hire for average skill (I had mentioned this in my previous post on the topic as well).

In the short run, there is an advantage in that people with average skills for the job are far cheaper than those with peak skills for the job (and the former are unlikely to suffer motivational issues as well). Now, over a period of time you find that these average skilled people are able to do rather well (and are much cheaper and much lower maintenance than peak skilled people).

Soon you start questioning why you need the peak skill people after all. And start replacing them with average people. The more rare the requirement of peak skill is in the job, the longer you’ll be able to go on like this. And then one day you’ll find that the job on that day required a little more nuance and skill, and your current team is wholly incapable of handling it.

You replace your live music by tapes, and find that your music has got static and boring. You replace your bank tellers with a combination of ATMs and call centres, and find it impossible to serve that one customer with an idiosyncratic request. You replace your software engineers with people who don’t have that good an idea of algorithmic theory, and one day are saddled with inefficient code.

Ignoring peak skill required while hiring is like ignoring tail risk. Because it is so improbable, you think it’s okay to ignore it. And then when it hits you it hits you hard.

Maybe that’s why risk management is usually bundled into a finance person’s job – if the same person or department in charge of cutting costs is also responsible for managing risk, they should be able to make better tradeoffs.

Everyone can be above average

All it requires is some selection bias

There were quite a few teachers during my time at IIT Madras who were rumoured to have said the line “I want everyone in class to be above average”. Some people credit a professor of mathematics for saying this. At other times, the quote is ascribed to a lecturer of Engineering Drawing. In the last 20 years I’m sure even some statistics professors would have been credited with this line.

The absurdity in the line is clear. By definition, everyone cannot be above average. The average is a measure of central tendency. However you define it (arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean, median, mode), the average is by definition a “central value”, meaning you will have numbers both above and below it. In the worst case (assuming you are using a mode or median for a highly skewed distribution), there will be a large number of data points EQUAL to the average. Everyone cannot be above (strictly greater than) average.

However, based on some recent incidents, I figured out a way in which everyone can actually be above average. All it takes is some kind of selection bias. Basically you need to be clever in terms of how you count – both when you calculate the average and when you define the “everyone”.

Take one example – you have an exam you need to pass to go from Grade 1 to Grade 2. Let’s say the class average (let’s use the simple mean here) is 41, and you need to have scored at least 40 to pass. Let’s also assume that nobody has scored exactly 40 or 41.

Now, if you come back next month and look at the exam scores of all the Grade 2 students, you will find that all of them would have scored strictly more than 41 – the old “average”. In other words, since the below average students are no longer part of the sample (since they have “not passed”), everyone left is above average! The below average set has simply been eliminated!

Another way is simple relative grading. Let’s say there are 3 sections in the class. Telling one section that “everyone should be above average” is fairly legit – all it says is that this particular section should outperform the others so significantly that everyone in this section will be above the average defined by all sections!

It is easier to do in code – using some statistical packages, as long as you slip in a few missing values into your dataset, you will find that the average is meaningless, and when you ask your software for how many are above average, the program defaults can mean that everyone can be classified as “above average” (even the ones with missing values).

I must have recommended this a few times already, but Darrell Huff’s 1954 book How to Lie With Statistics remains a masterpiece.

 

The kids are alright

The art we saw today didn’t have that much to write home about – well, one exhibit definitely did but that requires some pre work so will write about it in a week or so – so I’m back to writing about the children I’m travelling with.

Before we begin, though, in beryl shereshewsky style, here is the art work for today. This is a portion of a long scroll by Anju Acharya, clicked at the biennale today. This was the second most interesting piece of art i saw today.

Now back to talking about the children. Oh wait – I want to put a song first.

https://spotify.link/0pxHYIBI1xb

  • The hardest part of the first half of this trip was my daughter refusing to hang out with me, and not talking much to me. She wanted to be with her friends. That changed this morning when she snuggled up to me as we were waiting for the bus (more on that later) saying she really missed me last night since she hasn’t really spent two nights away from both me and her mother before.
  • The second hardest part of this trip has been that I’ve found it hard to not swear. I’m so used to swearing (and at home our daughter knows that there are “big people words” (like there are “big people juices” ) she can’t use even if we use them). I haven’t used the F word but liberally used damn and bloody and shit. I felt relieved this morning when I heard a kid shout “oh shit”.
  • I’m struggling to talk to kids (not my own) about words regarding bodily functions. “Wee wee” is too Brit. Piss might be impolite. Shit as well. Kakka – I largely talk to them in English.
  • The best part of the trip so far happened last night when I was sitting in my room talking to three of my daughters’ friends, about her (and she wasn’t there). It was nice hearing about her from her friends – something I’ve pretty much never done before. Got a lot of insight into what she’s like
  • This morning our bus broke down. Rather it refused to start. It took an hour for our agent to find a replacement and for that replacement to arrive (the original bus was presently repaired, and I’m sitting in it now on my way back to the hotel). I was amazed at how calm all the children were during that time. Absolutely no hint of irritation. One thing is they had one another for company. My wife (who I spoke to about this) thinks the school has something to do with this – given there are no exams and not many deadlines, children here haven’t yet learnt to be anxious, she thinks
  • I saw a mild hint of mob mentality and cascades. We had lunch in the same restaurant as yesterday. First one kid said “today I’ll have a veg lunch”. Suddenly all kids wanted a veg lunch. Then one kid said she wanted fish with it. And when the waiter came with a plate of fried fish, the decisions overturned – half the kids now wanted the fish.
  • Both yesterday and today afternoon we went to an “art room” set up as part of the biennale. Some kids had spent time yesterday making a sculpture and today they only wanted to finish that. Every time the guides tried to lead them to other activities they would say “just 10 minutes we’ll finish this and come”. They worked on this sculpture till end of day
  • Yesterday at the art room, my daughter and some of her friends started making another sculpture with dried leaves. Presently a puppy arrived and started pulling at those leaves, mildly destroying the sculpture in the process. The girls quickly abandoned the sculpture and lost proceeded to play with the puppy! It was spontaneous and nice to watch!

Ok that’s sufficient pertinent observations for today. And the bus is nearing the hotel.

More tomorrow.

Biennale!

I’m starting to write this at the beginning of today, as we go through the biennale.

We started with one place near the main venue where some volunteers has made some art. Some fairly trippy stuff, and some risqué stuff

Now on to today’s pertinent observations

  • This is only the fifth edition of the biennale
  • I quite love the artwork I’ve seen so far. And if not for the school I don’t think I would’ve seen all this art at all
  • Some of the art is “vaguely familiar”. And that intrigues me. The familiarity draws me in. The vagueness makes me want to keep seeing more of it. Sidhus quote about the bikini comes to mind
  • The biennale has this concept of “art mediators”. Effectively tour guides who explain the art and concepts around it. Our guide today was Safa. The comment I made about tour guides yesterday doesn’t apply to her. I’m enjoying her commentary.
  • Just now I heard another art mediator explain a piece of art that Safa had just explained. And the two are nearly orthogonal! I guess the thing with art is that it’s in the eyes of the beholder, or maybe the mediator
  • From the biennale venue (aspinwal house) you can see the kochi container port. To me, watching container ships getting loaded and unloaded is also art
  • Ok I finally have a hypothesis on what I consider as good art – something that compels me to keep looking at it. It could be stuff that is hard to interpret. It could be stuff with several dimensions. It could be things that tell a new story every time you look at them. That is the kind of art I like.
    • And so I like Paul Fernandes – so much going on in his art. And why I cut out a page from the times of india on Republic Day and pinned it on my wall
    • And so I like Picasso – it is so hard to interpret what he has done and there are so many dimensions I want to keep looking at it
    • If it gets too abstract though there is no “handle” to latch on to. And so it becomes hard to interpret
    • So far I haven’t been impressed by stuff with too much “messaging” – the message by definition makes it one dimensional and not something I want to keep seeing!
  • Art is fundamentally a “low precision low recall” activity. You can never see anywhere close to all the good art in the world (hence low recall)! Low precision because to find any good art you need to also go through a lot of art you can’t appreciate.

Ok now it’s afternoon and we’re at lunch. The post is long enough as it is and we’re done with the first session of the biennale. And I’m rather proud of the last two things I’ve mentioned here. So I’ll stop here.

More pertinent observations from the school trip

Ok I’m starting to write this on the first “sight seeing leg” of the school trip to kocbi. I’ll just stick to pertinent observations in a bullet format this time

  • There is this old T-shirt that went “I was born intelligent. Education ruined me”. The more I hang out with kids the more I believe this is true
  • Around 10 years back I used to give lots of lectures. A lot of them were rather painful, since there would be next to no class participation. And then I remember giving one lecture to a bunch of high school children. And the questions were exemplary. And with the kids on this tour I find that another level.
  • We were at fort Kochi. One tour guide was giving us the history of Judaism, prepping us for the synagogue visit. And he asks “kids do you know who is Abraham?” And someone says “you mean John Abraham?”
  • Over the years I’ve developed a healthy disrespect for the gyaan spouted by tour guides. And that Bayesian prior only keeps getting stronger with further evidence. I wonder if guides haven’t figured out that Wikipedia exists.
  • A mixed age group of kids in a school class means there’s more cuddling! Mostly older kids cuddling the younger ones. It’s damn cute to watch.
  • A mic was brought out on the bus. And the kids started singing, one by one. Massive diversity in the songs. From devotional songs to ???????????? ??????? to baby shark. Later in the evening, when we went to see the fishing nets, we also saw a baby shark – for sale
  • The kochi synagogue is amazing. I’d loved it in 2002. I loved it today. Small space but really really nicely done up. And really really colourful
  • But then this part of town is incredibly incredibly touristy. Lots of shops with fairly pretty (and I’m sure pretty overpriced) stuff aimed largely at foreign tourists. I’m sure 10 years back I would’ve fallen in love with it and out of love with some of my money. Of course today I’m with a school group so didn’t indulge but I don’t think I would’ve indulged anyway
  • Kids have amazing energy levels. Sometime it is difficult to keep up with them true energiser bunnies. Most of us started the day at 3 am and they were all going strong at 7pm, when I had completely given up (and started writing this)
  • At a more global level – I wonder how a historically strong trading centre like Kerala became so strongly communist.
  • Shorts are good for this kind of humid weather (though absolutely nothing compared to chennai). But downside is mosquitoes. And I haven’t packed full pants for this trip

More tomorrow, after we visit the actual biennale!

An interesting experiment

Hello from kochi.

I’ve volunteered to accompany a group of children from my daughters school on a trip to the kochi biennale. And here we are.

I sometimes like to say that my daughters school curriculum is like an office – they had invited me for a day of “observation” in January and what I saw was a lot of group work, collaboration, research, etc. I also know there is plenty of making presentations and reports. (there are no lectures)

And in an extension of “office life” they made the kids catch a 7am flight as well! Most kids woke ip ~3 to meet outside the airport at 5. While my initial reaction was “too early” the slack helped significantly in terms of taking the large group through the airport.

In any case, so far we’ve only been at the hotel and rested and had lunch, and yet to go see town (writing this in the interregnum between lunch and heading out)

Yet, quite a few pertinent observations so far

  • Kids are resourceful. One has produced a pack of cards and another has carried a whole monopoly set (neither is my daughter)
  • Kids are inventive. In the absence of playing material I’ve seen them invent a “pen cap hide and seek”. One counts while the other hides a pen cap somewhere in the room. And the counter searches. A hotel room is a small space to hide an entire person (however small) so this is a nice workaround
  • This is a harsh lesson of growing up – in the presence of their friends, your children sometimes don’t really want you. Or want to talk to you.
  • Left to themselves kids sometimes do “constructive play”. This morning one boy said to another “do you want to sketch?” And the other agreed. The first then produced a notebook and colour pencil box and the two quietly say drawing for the next half hour.
  • The noise cancelling feature of AirPods Pro rocks. And can sometimes be a lifesaver.

More later!