Ted Audio Collective
Hello everyone you're listening to after hours. I'm Felix. I'm here. Good to see you again Felix. Yeah, it's great to be with you
So I have to say I'm enjoying this time of year the cold weather. Yeah, exactly. I am feeling that after glow of
finishing a lot of teaching that was a lot of work. It was really fun and it's almost a little bit of
ambivalence because you're going to miss it, but you're also so happy it's over. I wanted to say in
time right exactly you're feeling both those things at the same time. I had such an interesting week I
taught in three very different executive education programs and I have to say business people in
particular maybe in the popular press they don't always get the most respect. But if you sit in
these conversations and you listen to how incredibly thoughtful informed, concerned, motivated
everyone is such a thrill. So what do we got today Felix? So I have many questions for you around
this issue of concentration in stock performance. So the market is up quite considerably, but if you
look at what other companies that are driving the rally, it's a surprisingly small number. Yeah,
and I'm curious, should I be very concerned? Is it maybe a good sign of things to come? I would
love to talk about that. That would be great. That sounds wonderful. And what do you have me here?
Well, this is a hard thing to talk about, but I wanted to talk a little bit about campuses.
Okay. Over the last several months campuses have become front and center in the debates around
not just what is happening in the Middle East, but in the way campuses should be conducted.
And the way people on campuses are reacting to what's happening. And I'm curious why campuses,
which we both dearly love for all the reasons we started with, have become so front and center,
and whether they deserve that and whether something is deeply wrong on campuses or if things are
okay, and it's a weird topic Felix, it's a hard topic, but I thought we should at least share
our views on what is going on on university campuses. Interesting. Close to home. Let's try it. We will try.
Okay, Felix, stock market concentration. What's on your mind? I know. Who thought we would talk about
this? There hasn't been that much concentration in the last couple of years, and now we see the
market is doing quite well in the US and it's doing okay in other places as well. And the S&P 500,
we are today almost 20% gain, so it's really a great story if you first look at it. And then it
turns out almost all of it is driven by six seven stocks. And we haven't really seen these levels
of concentration since the internet boom of 2020. Right. Is this time very different? Should I not be
worried? Why is it happening? What's your take on all of this? Yeah, it is just completely fascinating.
Just let's get some facts on the table. The companies of course are Apple, and Alphabet,
and Microsoft, and Nvidia, and Amazon, and Tesla, and Meta. They refer to as the magnificent seven.
And at this point, those seven companies account for 30% of all of the market value of the S&P 500.
And that is just stunning. Now, unsurprisingly, of course, the top seven companies at any time
account for a very large share, but it's typically more like 16, 17. It's now almost double that.
Yeah. And for the course of the year, they're up 70% while the market, as you put it, was up
little less than 20%. So in fact, if you strip them out, the market is kind of flat.
It's flat. Yeah. Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening. Right. And so how do you make sense of
that? And I think there are a couple of different potential explanations. And we should just think
about which one we like the best. Okay. So the first is it's a little bit of a herd mentality.
Mm-hmm. It's a little bit of a flight to safety during a time of economic uncertainty
that everybody wants to go to these relatively safe assets. And the funny part Felix is usually
those safe assets are things like government bonds. One explanation is that it turns out those safe
assets are now Apple and Amazon and Microsoft. And maybe what we're seeing is those companies
have actually become vehicles for safety. And that is one way to try to understand that.
I'll give you a couple of more. The second way to think about it is either they are leading
or lagging. And by that, I mean this disjunction will get resolved. And the question is whether
those magnificent seven are ahead of the pack or behind the pack. Yeah. We could see all those
underperformers catch up. The market performance would go from being quite narrow to being quite broad.
Alternatively, it's the magnificent seven that's the aboriginal group. And it's the rest of the
market that is actually telling you what is really going on in the economy. And as a consequence,
they're kind of lagging. And so what's going to happen over time is it'll just deflate.
Yeah. You mentioned the dot com bust as one example. There's an even earlier, I think more
resonant parallel, which is what was called the nifty 50. So in the early 1970s, there were these
50 big blue chip companies that similarly just attracted massive amounts of value. And then
everything else underperformed. In that case, it became a situation where that nifty 50 really
pre-saged the decline of the market. Yeah. Basically everything started to go down. So that's,
I think, one way to think about it. Yeah. I'd love to hear what you make of all this.
So one other theory that I find interesting to think about is these are the same companies
that we sold off about a year ago. Absolutely. And so if you look at changes over time,
if we sold off a set of companies last year, even if it's mostly a return to the mean
valuation that is maybe not quite as terrible as we anticipated a year ago, given the size of
these companies that you mean you are a really important driver of stock market performance.
And then of course, this is also coupled with the entire hype around AI.
Right. In particular, the tech portion of that magnificent seven, they're all in one way or
another involved with AI. And so one view is it's really a combination of having sold off these
companies not so long ago. And now the realization that maybe AI is most lucrative, is most helpful,
is most interesting for the large tech companies as opposed to many other players. And that creates
this rally that creates this concentration. And then a final theory is these really big companies
they have found ways to really entrench themselves. Yeah. It's safety, but it's not safety because
they have amazing performance because they're doing really wonderful things. It's because they have
pretty solid performance because in many ways they have managed to wipe out competition.
And that of course would then be a concern for the longer term performance of many other companies
that would at one end the same time explain why you have some companies that are doing so well.
And then many, many other companies that don't seem to perform quite as well.
Yeah. I like both of those explanations and I'll try to give you a third explanation.
So I love you to product markets explanation, which is that latter one.
Yeah. They are just succeeding remarkably well. They are more and more dominant in product markets
for maybe good reasons, maybe bad reasons, feelings, whatever. And that dominance should be manifest
in really, really high values. I think that's a totally reasonable way to think about the world.
I also like your first explanation, which is there's this technology which is going to be transformative.
And many people think it will be completely transformative. And the benefits to scale will be
really, really large. And I have kind of signed up to that idea. Oh, really? Not all of those companies.
We've talked previously a little bit about Google. Will they benefit or not versus people like
Microsoft? I think it plays out differently across those different companies. But I do think AI
is going to lend itself to scale. And so that could be interesting. I want to give you one other
further explanation, which is a weird explanation, which is it's tempting to focus on the seven.
But maybe the lesson is in the 493. Maybe it's just really, really hard to beat your
cost to capital. Yeah. Maybe interest rates have gone up. And maybe it's just extremely competitive.
And everyone else is treading water. So one way to understand this is not just that, oh,
these seven companies are exceptional. But maybe the world after 15 years of low rates and maybe
a little bit of an easier way to compete is getting very tough. Well, that would be manifest in the
493, really struggling. And then if you really want to go down this path, you can ask yourself,
if you really believe in the productivity revolution that AI might bring in the next 20 years,
then maybe all the rents from that productivity revolution will go to those seven. And no one
else will get that productivity revolution. And the productivity revolution will be so great.
And so concentrated because it'll happen throughout the economy. But all the profits from it
will accrue to Nvidia, for example. And maybe that's what's going to happen. What do you make of that?
I like this idea of thinking about what's going on with the 493. What I love about the way you put
it is that key question is really if in fact there's break productivity gains and there's
big profitability, where will these profits flow? And one story is they flow to big tech. I think
it's equally reasonable that it'll make people more productive. If people are more productive,
we'll probably share some of that in the form of higher wages because we attract good people
who are then really great at using these new tech products that may be a big part of it
will not really lead to increased margins because in competition with one another, everybody has
similar tools, everybody has similar technology and raising prices and raising margins will be
really hard. That's a good story in the sense that productivity and the gains from productivity
get distributed a little bit more widely. The kind of story I told is one way to understand the
last maybe 15, 20 years. There's a lot of gains from productivity, but going in some sense to very
few companies. And so I like your story. My only concern about it is on a valuation basis,
the top seven would be viewed as expensive by some traditional metrics of price earnings ratios.
And in fact, the overall market by some traditional metrics of price-earning ratios is relatively
expensive in the sense of just what it looks like relative to for example long-term interest rates.
Which means of course that the 493 can be understood to be either extremely cheap or just dead in
the water. I think we spend a lot of time with the seven, but the 493 is what's interesting to me
because your story is, well, the 493 will get better. The alternative view is the 493 are just
going to grind it out for the next decade in a world where yes, the Fed does engineer the soft
landing, but it's kind of like a low-growth world and we're just grinding out for 10 years.
That's consistent with the 493 being valued the way they are. And then the top seven, you have to
kind of rationalize as being some kind of productivity. So let me ask you, if you think about the
implications for investors of all the stories we just hold and all the ideas about why we might see
what is happening in the market at this moment in time. One story that you hear is a mixed stock
picking really difficult because all the index money is obviously bet on the magnificent seven.
The likelihood that you will dramatically underperform if you pick anything other than the big seven is
now really great. So that makes it really hard. Does probably not both well for the efficiency with
which we allocate capital. If in fact many of the opportunities that will arise maybe in the wake of
AI lie not only with the big seven but elsewhere in the economy. What are the implications for
investors? How do you think about that? So I'm going to give you a super boring answer, which is
I don't think you want to chase it, nor do you want to fight it. Chasing it would mean, man,
I'm going to pile in behind the big seven because obviously they're the winners of the world. And
fighting it would mean I'm going to buy a bunch of value indices because I think that it's all wrong.
I think the same advice that always holds today which is if you are a typical retail investor and
you have good asset allocations that are pretty reasonable for your exposure to markets, you should be
thankful that the year was as good as it was and you should kind of stay with it and you shouldn't
pull it out and you shouldn't put new money in and you should kind of do what you've been doing.
And I think the mistake that investors make for example when COVID happened, when the market
tanked was to react to that by taking out all their money. And in fact over the last 12 months,
a lot of inflows have been negative. Retail investors have been pulling money out of the market.
Now maybe that was good, maybe it wasn't, but you don't really want to be thinking too hard
about this. Yeah, I think as an economic phenomenon, it's super interesting. In terms of whether you
should alter your portfolio, unless you're doing it 24-7, I'm a little bit skeptical.
So then what does it mean for managers of active funds? It means life is so hard,
feel like. And by the way, that's part of what goes on here. In these moments, when performances
are so concentrated, you're coming up to December 31st and you're asking yourself, I want to look
like somebody who participated in that and my holdings get published and then there's this like
year-end effort to mimic the strategies that have been working. So active investors who are
tracking indices, which is most of the mutual fund industry, it is hard and life is hard. And you
end up mimicking things that you don't even really believe in because you have to at these moments.
Yeah. And then if you have more latitude, which is possible at places like Long Short Head
Fonds, then you have to really take some serious bets. Now they have been crowding into this trade
massively. And then finally, if you're that last part of the market, which is the really
quantitative hedge funds, you're doing something similar. You're looking at all these signals and
you're saying, hey, the things that's working is the big seven. So let's pile into the big seven.
Yeah. And those reflexes are what is worrisome honestly, if you'll like. So the reflexes that are
internal to financial markets, which is people reading signals that tell you just to keep buying.
That's right. Active fund managers who are trying to track an index and who have nothing to do, but
I got to buy that stuff because I got to look like I bought it. Those are the internal dynamics
of financial markets and those perversities are the worrying part. Yeah. It's different than our
previous conversation where we're talking about like fundamentals. That's right. But there is a
whole internal world that I think can make this reverse rather quickly as well. And this is
consistent with some research that we have. If people look at the efficiency with which capital
gets deployed in economies and how that's related to concentration, one of the things that you see
is that often following periods of high concentration, capital is misallocated in significant ways.
And the misallocation essentially reflects the dilemma that you just talked about. I might be
an active investor. My incentives are supposed to be to unearth some piece of information that no
one else has. And so I can bet confidently on a company whose performance no one else anticipates.
In the current situation, my incentives to do this are super, super weak. And so over time,
save concentration worth to be maintained at these high levels of our long periods of time.
One worry is that the incentives that are so important for capital allocation that we have a
group of people who are constantly thinking about what could I do that the crowd doesn't see?
That might be one of the victims of increasing levels of concentration over a long period of time.
I've been toying with this metaphor, Felix. And I'm curious what you make of it.
One way to understand financial markets is as a mirror. And the other way to understand
financial markets is as a lamp. So a mirror is something that just reflects what is going on in
the underlying economy. So our first part of the conversation was financial markets are a mirror.
There are things going on and then you're seeing it manifest. And that's what's fun about
financial markets. You can look at them to understand the real economy. But the alternative is it's a lamp.
It's actually projecting something onto the real economy and it's influencing the real economy.
And it's changing the real economy because of all these decisions. And the reason I like that
metaphor is because most of the time we think about it as a mirror. Look at what's happening in the
world. And if you want to understand it, look at financial markets ascending you signals about that.
But sometimes these internal dynamics crowd out the mirror. And then it's just projecting itself on
the actual real economy and influencing the real economy. So that's I think what we're going to find
out in the next 12 months. Whether this concentration is a manifestation of something real or a reflection
of some of these internal dynamics. So we'll come back and see. Given all the narcissism in today's
world, I'm generally not so fond of mirrors. But in this case, I think I'm going to make an exception.
There you go.
So we hear life on campus, conversations on campus. What's on your mind?
Well, I think two things. First, I think campus life was a little bit different this last semester.
I felt it and I think everybody felt it. That of course has to do with global events. But
campuses are also communities. And the global events penetrated that community and changed the
life. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that. Why that happened and how it happened and what
your experience of it was. And then second, campuses are really special places. I think we both love
them. And yet they are now becoming a larger focal point for what is going on in the world. And
people are looking to campuses to understand the world. People look to campuses to understand
the next generation. And they kind of extrapolate things that happen on campuses and they attribute it
to generational changes. We've had so many events on campuses and we don't have to run through
the whole litany of them that have happened over the last two months. But there've been some very
disturbing things that have happened. I wonder how you understand it. And I know that's a very vague
question. But do you understand it as being something that is just a reflection of our world?
Or do you understand it as having its own pathologies? And do you understand it as being
representative of something larger that is happening from a generational perspective? Which is
sometimes how it's portrayed in the press? What strikes me perhaps the most is how difficult
it has been to talk about a whole set of really touchy topics. I think the conflict in the
Middle East comes to mind first. But there's actually a number of conversations that are now
incredibly difficult to have. And I think my surprise comes from an observation that
right states and blue states conversations have been difficult now for a very long time.
Many of those things didn't touch campuses all that much because we live among people
who are first approximation very similar to us. As a result we felt like yeah the campus is in
great shape. We have differences in opinion but where those differences surface we can easily talk
about it. And then I think the last year or so has shown that that's not really true. There is
a whole set of conversations that are incredibly difficult for us to have. Where it feels antagonistic
where it feels there's very limited ability to listen to people who have a different view.
And one of the biggest questions I have where I'm not so sure why this really is is
what has happened that makes these conversations much more difficult. What are the underlying changes
perhaps from generation to generation perhaps as a result of changes in technology perhaps as a
result of how we interact with one another. What is it that makes conversations so hard? I see it so
often now that when I speak to people about a whole range of issues that they say look in that
particular respect the best thing I can possibly do is I say nothing. Anything that I can say will
only come at a cost that I don't want to bear. And so being silent on a whole house of issues
is how I respond to the current climate. And that of course is terrible. Right absolutely.
And so let me give you a couple of hypotheses and I'm curious which you might like. Okay.
So one is that campuses are just like the rest of our world. It's just become more polarized
and it shouldn't be surprising that we should see this on campuses. I've always thought
one of the amazing thing about campuses are they're open. Obviously the students are selected
but they're open and they're part of a community. They're like hospitals. People can walk around them,
people can express views. It's actually a remarkably open part and there are very few if any
organizations in the world that are open in that way. So unsurprisingly when the world moves in
a direction which is towards more conflicted views you're going to see them on campuses. The second
theory is no there's something specific going on in academia. And so here's a second explanation
which is you know at a first approximation we have academics and academic communities that are
left of center. I think that's a fair and easy thing to characterize it as. And so that drift
has accelerated perhaps so goes to the theory and the disjunction between that way of thinking
about the world and the way that much of the rest of the world thinks about the world has grown bigger.
And so academic centers then become somehow disconnected and lose their legitimacy and then they
become look at what has happened on campuses because they're so out of the mainstream. And then
the third possibility is a generational problem which is the generation that is now coming through
the university system is somehow different. There's somehow brittle. They have not been able to
deal with different points of view for various reasons. Call it COVID, call it technology,
call it helicopter parenting, the broad cultural stereotypes that get used here. And then that
generation is so brittle that they can handle the conversations. I don't know. Do any of those
theories resonate with you or do you have a different theory? Your second theory makes sense in the
sense that the rest of society might look to campuses and might feel that oh my god this on-campus
conversation feels very different from how we think about issues and how we talk about issues. So
that might explain why the conversation between the campus and the rest of the world has gotten
more fraught, more difficult, more controversial. I don't think it does a great job explaining why
the conversation on campus has become more difficult. And when I think about what has changed
that these conversations feel more difficult, I have two ideas and they both might be completely
wrong. I don't really know. But here's two conjectures. One is the role of identity in conversations
and in politics and in attitudes towards issues has grown much larger. And one peculiar aspect of
identities is that they're not really negotiable when someone says you just don't know what it's like
to be a black gay person. Yeah, that's exactly right. I cannot possibly know what that is like. And
as a result, any conversation that says you should do this or you should think about it in a particular
way, you have no idea what it's like to be a Christian conservative with a sense that my way of
life is going out of style or threatened. And that's exactly right. I have no idea what that is
like. That makes it really, really hard to have these conversations because in the end we're hostage to
nothing that you can possibly say has really any bearing on how I think about the world, what I think
is right, what I think is wrong because my identity is non-negotiable. It's not something that we
can talk about. So I think that's part of it. And then the second trend and it's sort of related to
that is I think we have come to think of language much more as a weapon than was traditionally the case.
So the violence that can be inherent in language and the damage that can be done in language. I
think traditional attitudes, we had some limits to what you can say and what you cannot say. But we
try to push these limits as much as possible. And now I think in particular on campuses, there is
much more of a view that language can violate someone else's right, can really hurt people.
There's a lot of harm in how we talk about things and what we say. And what's interesting to me about
that is the yardstick. When do I know that what I say is harmful to you? That is just your feeling.
There's no objective standard. And you tell me when it's harmful and I just have to accept it.
And that's another version of this earlier problem that that line, what can be said and what can
not be said is really not negotiable because the moment I talk to you and you're somehow different,
you own that line and you tell me where it is. And as a result, I have to stay away from that line.
We can't really have a dialogue. I think both of these points are deep and true. In my mind,
they speak a little bit to what might be different now. And that becomes I think a little bit of a
generational story. And the difficult thing about both of them feel like is, they're in some
ways quite legitimate. When somebody says you don't know what it's like to be a Christian
Genservative on campus or you don't know what it's like. That is true. It's true. Yes, it's exactly
that role of identity is important and was probably underappreciated historically. And it is
important to acknowledge that those differences exist. But your point is that it's becoming the end
of the conversation because then there is no further thing to say because there is no scope for
communication and learning. And that seems very problematic. So we should be able to preserve
the benefits of an appreciation of identity without giving it so much power that it
occludes what is the commonality in a way what draws together campuses and what draws together
humanity is commonality. We're human beings. We have common sympathies and common feelings and
common emotions. And so we should be able to navigate that path. And then your second point is
related, which is language is now viewed as harmful in certain ways. And again, there's some truth
in that. It's totally right. You can say something that's very hurtful to me. Yes. And we probably
historically underappreciated that. And we didn't give it the credence that deserved. But yet now it
is come to dominate. I think it is often then extrapolated to this generation that is so preoccupied
with identity and so preoccupied with language. The disjunction for me is I don't know if that's
really true. My view of the world is a little bit different, which is there are small fractions of
people who are very preoccupied with these questions. And then there is like this massive middle,
which is actually not as interested in that. But yet they find themselves captive to it. And so I
guess what I'm wondering about Felix is these ideas of what is happening and why people have become
brittle on campuses. Part of what you're suggesting is that people are behaving differently. There's
a different explanation, which is actually there's a vast group that's yearning for conversation
and for challenge. Yet there's relatively small groups who are preventing that from happening.
Do you view this as a generalized phenomenon or do you view this as a phenomenon that is occurring
on the margins? But what is happening on the margins is very corrosive to the whole community.
My instinct is that it's a little bit more something that's happening on the margin because I
interact with students who want to have conversations. So when you talk with them one on one, they are
desperate for challenging conversations. I want to go back to an earlier point that you made
this historical injustices that we didn't pay much attention to language that we didn't pay
sufficient attention to identity. That's completely right. And I think that creates the legitimacy
for holding back, respecting other identities as non-negotiable. I share your observation that
there is appetite for challenging and different conversations, but they take place within groups
that are very similar to begin with. When I think about my conversations with students about
what is happening in the Middle East, the most open-minded, interesting, fascinating conversations
that I had are with students who are in no way tied to the region because they grew up in very
different circumstances. They're not Jewish, they're not Muslim, no aspect of their identity
has a direct bearing on the conflict. And then we can have these conversations and we can think
about, oh my god, how on earth can we get out of this spiral of violence? What are creative ideas?
And I completely agree with you that people want to have these conversations, but they're conditioned
by we don't have to think much about how identity informs our views of what is happening.
And we don't have to worry much about anything that I will say will harm you in a really deep way.
And I think both of these things can be true at one at the same time. So when you are in a group
where you know everybody is very conservative, it's perfectly okay to then debate what's the limits
to a particular conservative position. If you're in a group where everyone's a liberal, we can have
conversations about how far should you go with any of the liberal policies. But the most interesting
conversations we can't really have because the moment it becomes really contentious because
their conversations play across identities and across understandings of what language is harmful
and what language is not harmful. Those conversations they die and I think they have gone away.
I don't know, I'm a little more hopeful if you look because if we go down that path, it'll lead to
sorting. Just like we've had geographic sorting, we'll have sorting at the company level, it'll
happen at the university level, it'll happen at the campus level, it'll happen every way.
And universities really suffer when there is extreme sorting because we believe in the diversity
of ideas and we believe in debate and we believe in all these things. So if we end up in a very
sorted world, then we all lose because in some sense the one place in the world where we should be
able to be together with conflicting views is in a campus. That is the goal. And so we have got to
figure this out. I guess I'm still hopeful because I see lots of people who want to have conversations
but who are just scared out of their mind. We've got to get an equilibrium where we give
everybody enough confidence to feel like we can be sensitive to differences, we can be sensitive
to identity, we can be sensitive to the role of language, but it cannot stop us from talking.
Yeah. And a lot of that has to do with in my mind forgiveness, we have to be more forgiving.
Forgiving of mistakes people make when they talk and forgiving of ignorance of your particular
background and what it means. A lot of things in the world get better if you're forgiving as
opposed to being very demanding on each other. So maybe that's a little bit of the answer as well.
I don't know. Let me share another reason why I think we can be hopeful. The hope is perhaps that
over time we get better at recognizing that every person has lots and lots of different identities.
And some of these we have to be very mindful and very careful in many other identities.
We can talk about basically everything. If that's the evolution of how we incorporate
it, concern for identity and concern for harmful language into the conversations that we have and don't
have or have and can't have, I'm much more optimistic that we can actually talk about most of the
things most of the time. But it would be a recognition that every one person is not just this one thing.
Yeah. Your religion doesn't define you, your political attitude doesn't define you, your gender
identity doesn't define you. It's this wild mix and combinations of all of these things that you are.
And that I think enables conversations in a way that maybe we sometimes don't recognize because
we have picked a very select few dimensions along which we define identity and along which we
define what's okay to say and what's not okay to say. Yeah. Not to tie to need a bow on it. Maybe
the pendulum swaying towards this emphasis on identities and maybe it was very helpful. Yeah.
We had to go through a period where what had been taboo to talk about and what had been not
discussed enough had to be at the forefront and it needed its time in the forefront. Yeah.
And that was very important and really wonderful. And then the question is can you get it to swing back?
Can you get it to be what you've just described and a greater appreciation for commonality as opposed
to difference? And I think we have to see how that happens. I remain very optimistic because I
think if anywhere can figure it out it is on university campuses and in some sense we have to
because our imperative is so tied up in the idea of functioning in this way. Yeah.
But it is hard not to feel like it is a perilous moment at the same time given everything that's
going on. And to bring it home part of what I love about doing this podcast across all the
different guests that we have. All the different people we talk to is every time before we record
I have a sense of oh my god I get to talk to really smart and thoughtful people and everything
else doesn't really matter. I get to talk to someone who is thoughtful and smart and eloquent in
defending a particular view of the world and you learn a ton. Yeah. So if that's the general
direction long term I think we might be in good shape. So is that how you feel when you talk to me
or is that how you feel when you talk to anybody? No actually you should be completely honest.
And we have recommendations of course. Yes. So now that teaching is over I'm remembering some of
the books that I've read in the summer that were really fantastic. So there is an on fiction book
called The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen which is a memoir which I usually don't typically like.
It is the story of a gentleman named Michael Lauder who is Jonathan Rosen's friend who and who
we grow up with who has this remarkable career as a young person and is diagnosed with schizophrenia
and then goes to a law school goes to work at Bain and then comes undone by schizophrenia and
ends up committing a horrible crime. And so it is just so well written and such a thoughtful
meditation on mental illness and the way we think about mental illness. Previously I've recommended
strangers to ourselves by Rachel Aviv and the Mind Fixers which is about psychopharmacology.
And I think this one is kind of nice because it's a memoir and it has a different kind of tone
to it and it's written just so beautifully. So The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. It sounds wonderful.
Really great. Is it science-based? It does have science in the background. It even has the
healthcare system in the background obviously. We see how he navigates the healthcare system.
You don't want to read it to learn about schizophrenia but you want to read it just as a story
of mental illness and about that fine line and we all know people who are on that line between
genius and madness and it's so compelling and so trenchant. You can't help but think this could
happen to any of us and it's very complex when it does. Well okay what a recommendation.
And what do you have Felix? I'm in a role. I recommend a cop show mostly thinking of you of course
this week again another cop show. Oh my dreamy outcome. Happy seeing three pints. I think I've
heard of it. I have not seen it. It's really remarkable. Maybe the most fascinating thing is
it takes place in French speaking Canada. Yeah. And the context is Canada's treatment
of indigenous people, indigenous women in particular. So the little town is close to a school,
a home that mistreated indigenous children for a very long time. There are people living in the
village who went to that school and have complicated memories about what happened.
And it's just a spectacular way to show the historical significance of those relationships.
You know how sometimes it can feel you're misusing that context to do something bigger. It never
feels like that. It feels very genuine. And the filmmaker is someone who's a member of the
Kainai First Nation tribe, a person called Talefether and perhaps the involvement of someone
who's really close to the phenomenon helped to make it real authentic and to make it feel like
we're not just misusing the context but the combination as a result is really powerful. So it's a
mini series eight episodes. Crimes are typically solved across two episodes. It's also interesting.
Then there's a bigger story in the back. That is fantastic. It's really super interesting to watch.
And it stars one of my favorite actors, which is Alfred Molina. He's amazing. Yes. He's really
amazing. And I'm just looking at it here. By the way, I feel compelled because I feel like I'm
losing my status as the cop show guy. I'm just going to mention Anika with Nicola Walker,
which is also fantastic. Anyway, I just feel like I have to do that because I feel now some
competition with you on the cop show. Now you've come through with two very strong ones. Felix,
I'll retreat to my territory making music suggestions next week. No, well, I was actually going
to recommend a Turkish polka, but maybe next time. And this is it for tonight. Thank you for
listening. This was after hours from the TED Audio Collective.
