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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. For this membership drive, we've been ending each show with a 10-ish minute explainer on how to take care of yourself now that our listening area is slowly emerging from the pandemic, and now the final installment of that. We've talked on this show about Zoom fatigue and how difficult it has been for a lot of people to lead your entire lives online this past year. As we begin to socialize again and head into the world in-person again, there seem to be some benefits to this whole Zoom experience that people may want to keep.

Joining me now to talk about how Zoom and video conferencing might still be useful even once the pandemic is over is Rani Molla, senior data reporter for the new sites Recode and Vox. Hi, Rani, welcome to WNYC.

Rani Molla: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into the future of Zoom, can you talk about how big the company has become during the pandemic?

Rani Molla: Yes. This is a company that just went public in 2019, and a lot of people hadn't even heard of it. It was popular among journalists and among tech people, but it wasn't widely known. I think just the fact that it's become a verb indicates how big it is to Zoom is how we make video calls now. It's just massive.

Brian Lehrer: A lot of people-

Rani Molla: It grew year's worth of subscribers in just one year.

Brian Lehrer: Video conferencing is, however, not a new concept. This show, for example, has been using Skype for years to connect with some of our guests. Listeners can't tell if it's on Skype or on the phone or on something else, but Skype has been a useful tool for us and a lot of people made video phone calls via Skype for years. Why do you think Zoom in particular took off?

Rani Molla: Yes, video conferencing certainly isn't new. Zoom was just a lot better. It worked a lot better. It was easier to use. There's also a free version of it. It just happened to be in the right place at the right time, so to speak.

Brian Lehrer: Right. A lot of people use the Zoom free plan. How does Zoom make money?

Rani Molla: Zoom makes money on the paid plan. The idea is that sure, many people will do the Zoom free plan, but that taps out, I think it's something like 40 minutes. If it becomes part of your lifestyle, that becomes something that you need to do in the future, you might pay for it. They make a lot of their money through corporate subscriptions, your job or my job paying for everyone who works there to be able to during the pandemic work completely on Zoom, communicate largely on Zoom, and then after the pandemic as well.

Brian Lehrer: In a recent Recode article, you quoted a Stanford professor who studies remote work as saying, "We've accelerated 25 years of drift toward working from home in one year." Is it going to be hard for companies to get employees to go back to in-person full-time, especially now that those who can work remotely are all hooked up to Slack and Zoom and so on? We're in that moment now of each company figuring out it's back to work extent. What are you seeing out there?

Rani Molla: You have the vast majority of employees saying that they want to be able to work from home at least some of the time. Some people, I think it's something like a third of employees, saying that they would quit their job if they weren't allowed to get that. That's not saying they always be working remotely, they just want the option to do it sometimes. We had really great success with that over the past year, plus it proved that people could certainly do their work that way. It's just people wanting to not go backwards. It's going to be a really wide variety of what jobs pick to do going forward.

In general, it seems people are settled on this idea of a hybrid model, which means just people who work from home some of the time-- some people will work from home some of the time, but what that actually means can vary by your industry, by your company, all sorts of stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Then there were all these things in our personal lives, weddings and funerals, that a lot of people have been able to attend from various points in far-flung families that were made possible because Zoom is a thing. That if the pandemic hadn't happened, that relative from Florida or the one who lives in Africa, or the one who lives in East Asia, might have known you were getting married or that a loved one died, but they wouldn't have been able to attend. This way people have been able to connect, so what do you think that's going to look like after the pandemic?

Rani Molla: My colleague, Alex Abad-Santos, had this beautiful piece about how boomers got really good at Zoom. He talks about his mother who is from the Philippines, and since immigrated to the United States, and how she grew up in a time when it would cost a lot of money to make long distance calls. It's obviously cost a lot to travel back. She's had this whole new experience where she's talking to her girl friends back home all the time, and has these regular meetings with old friends and people from high school. It's really this beautiful thing for her to be able to see her friends and her family. This is obviously something that she's going to retain post-pandemic. It's just obviously easier than traveling.

Brian Lehrer: One of my producers told me she hopes PTA meeting stay on Zoom forever. It's just so much easier to log in from home during the busy dinner that time hours for people with kids than to go to the school for the in-person meeting. Maybe that there's also-

Rani Molla: I'm sure you'll get high attendance that way.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. Telehealth has seen a huge increase. Have you reported on that? The ease of having medical appointments for things, for where they don't have to give you a physical exam and whether that's changed forever?

Rani Molla: I haven't personally but my colleagues have it, and it seems like he can't put that genie back in the bottle. If we made all of these big steps during the pandemic, things that we never thought we'd be doing online, we're doing online. It's so much easier if you just have a small problem to have video conference with your doctor rather than travel and wait, and all this other stuff. I can't see it regressing too much after this. We're going to take the good where we found at.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, 30-second answer. This might be a little out of your professional beat, I'm not sure. I've heard some people are sick of Zoom because they're sick of staring at their own face for hours and hours on end, you see yourself as well as the people you're with on Zoom. Have you or maybe have companies like Zoom thought at all about how endless video conferencing may have changed our perceptions of ourselves because of all that face time, pun intended, 30 seconds.

Rani Molla: I do know that they're trying to make it so that it's much more comfortable. There's obviously a lot of sore points with things like Zoom, staring at your own face, for instance. There's options, so you don't have to look at your own face. A lot of companies are trying to make it so it actually feels a little more personal or a little less like you're always looking at someone, more like you're in the room with them. You're going to see a lot of experimentation with it, looking like you're staring at a room full of people. I don't know if that'll be helpful. It seems sort of gimmicky, but maybe that'll get rid of a bit of this in fatigue.

Brian Lehrer: Rani Molla, senior data reporter for the new sites Recode and Vox. Thanks so much for joining us.

Rani Molla: Thanks, Brian.

 

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