Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi, everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi, and I'm here with Felix and Mahir.
So, Mahir, how was graduation?
You know, graduation is one of those great times.
So it sounds like, what are we doing in graduation in November?
But some of our programs actually end at different times.
And so I went to the GMP graduation on Thursday night.
General Management Program, right?
Yeah, and it was just delightful.
You know, it's fantastic to see people and to meet their loved ones.
And they're so grateful and happy.
One of the things I love about these more extended Exec Ed programs we do is you really get to know the participants.
And then when graduation comes along, it's amazing to meet their families.
Yeah, exactly. But we have a lot to talk about this week.
It's been a busy Newsweek.
And so we've got a lot of news stories to catch up on.
Felix, I know that you brought a story that you're excited to talk about.
Sounds super appealing, doesn't it?
And then I thought we could also do quick hits on other stories that made the news this week, including the launch of Disney Plus and The War on Billionaires.
Sounds great. All three sound really fantastic.
Okay, great. So last week, Disney finally launched Disney Plus.
It's long awaited streaming service.
And apparently, they had 10 million people sign up in the first 24 hours, which is kind of an astounding number.
It's been out about a week now.
And so my first question is, have you guys tried it?
What were your reactions?
I have. What's both amazing and I think interesting to think about for the longer term potential of the business is that you recognize almost everything, right?
Yeah. The way it's promoted, what is showcased is really the big franchises.
My first impression was one of familiarity rather than, oh my God, it's amazing all this content that is out there that I have never really heard of, which is more the sense that I have when I look at Netflix.
I think, Felix, I had a similar reaction to that, which is I found it altogether a little underwhelming.
You know, they really chose to kind of come strong with a large library as opposed to come strong with ongoing material, right?
By that, I mean new shows and things like that.
And of course they have this Star Wars, it's a little piece of that.
But basically, they just put up a huge library.
So I found it a little bit less exciting, and I worry a little bit that maybe, yes, for certain demographic, as opposed to Netflix, which is very broad.
I wonder if Disney Plus is perhaps relative to my expectations, perhaps a little narrower.
So yeah, I mean, look hugely impressive, amazing, but a little bit, maybe my expectations were out of whack, young me.
It's interesting how we all, in some sense, had the same reaction, which is, oh my goodness, there's so much recognizable content.
And yet it sounds like our level of delight ranged a little bit.
I thought it was delightful.
It was like opening something up and seeing a bunch of your old friends.
Yes, yeah. I mean, I think you're exactly right, Meir.
Netflix is broad and deep, and so you've got dozens of British copper shows and British baking shows for you, and dozens of romantic comedies for me, and then something obscure for Felix.
But Disney is narrow and deep.
It's right in the sweet spot of all of those family blockbusters that the world loves.
But if you've got small kids, the rewatchability factor here for families with small kids is huge.
And there's an interesting business corollary in a sense that they offer multi -year subscription plans.
And I think in the context of Netflix, that's almost unthinkable, right?
Because you're sort of used to thinking about it months to months to months, and then that builds up this pressure to getting new content.
And I think Disney is much more a commitment to the library.
And actually, that might be good enough.
We're just doing quick hits here now, but I do need to ask you, having played around with the service a little bit, are you bullish or bearish on the prospects for the service, and what is the impact you think it'll have on Netflix, Apple, and Amazon?
So I was a little underwhelmed by the launch of Disney+.
So I don't think this is going to be a death knell for Netflix tomorrow.
I don't think we're going to see the numbers churn markedly in the short run.
I think all of this takes longer to play out than I thought.
And I think for Apple and Amazon as well, all of this takes a little bit longer.
The war did not start with a big clash.
I think it's going to be a little bit more of a simmer and then a boil.
And then a year or two from now, we're really going to see what Disney +, has done, what Apple +, has done.
But they were both somewhat smaller than I would have anticipated.
So I think the dynamics will take longer to play out.
I think my original intuition, I'm now thinking, was probably not quite right.
I'm not sure what your experience was, but I was very heavily targeted by this bundled offer where you would get Disney, Hulu, and ESPN +, for $13 a month, roughly the same price as Netflix.
And if the bundle takes, then I think you can start to see how the kids and parents in their role as parents might really end up loving Disney.
But maybe in their role as adults, they will flock to ESPN or they will flock to Hulu.
And that is a much more significant threat to the Netflix business than Disney +, alone.
Yeah. So I think this is going to be an absolute game changer for Disney.
I really do. Last year, I made the statement that I thought Disney would be joining the ranks of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google in terms of enterprise value.
And I believe this now more than ever.
So there are two real multiplier effects here with respect to enterprise value.
And the first is Netflix is a fire hose of content.
Whereas Disney's model, Disney's a flywheel.
So they monetize entertainment better than anyone else in the world.
So they don't need lots and lots of different kinds of properties.
Every single property they have, they monetize those brands through merchandise, amusement parks, and so on.
So when they create engagement with the Mandalorian, for example, it creates a ripple effect across their different business units.
So that's their first multiplier.
And then the second multiplier has to do with this new revenue base.
So their stock price historically has always reflected a revenue bottle that was transaction based.
So selling tickets to Marvel movies, selling tickets to Disneyland.
And for the first time in their history now, they now have a subscription based business to complement this.
And as you guys know, the way the market value subscription based businesses is, of course, very different, particularly if you can demonstrate retention, which I think, again, if you have kids, I think you hold on to a subscription like this, particularly at this price point.
So I think you're going to see a multiplier effect here that is going to surprise us over the next three or four years.
That's always interesting, right?
These flywheel business models.
On the one hand, you think, oh, each property that is right for Disney is so much more valuable for anyone else.
But at the same time, many properties will not be right, both because of the family targeting, but also because if you can't say, what's the t -shirt, what's the right, what's the character?
So maybe what we'll see is less competition and this sort of differentiation across the different place.
Felix, I think you're exactly right.
I actually am more bullish on Netflix as well, having seen this.
As a result. Yeah, it's weird, right?
You see more competition and you think both can win.
Exactly. They seem so different.
Once you actually play with the Disney service, you realize how different it is from Netflix.
And you realize, you know, the chances that Disney would be interested in getting the rice to some obscure Japanese drama is very low, whereas Netflix will absolutely snatch something like that up.
And so they feel very differentiated for me.
I think I take your point about Disney versus Netflix.
I think that's exactly right.
It's not as clear to me, young me.
I don't know how you think about this, which is, what about Apple, which we've only seen a nascent effort and Amazon, which continues, by the way, to build out that channel.
That feels in a way more threatening to Netflix to me.
Yeah. I remember a year ago when we did our predictions episode, one of the predictions that Felix made was that Apple would end up buying Netflix.
And when we do our predictions episode in a few weeks, I'm going to ask Felix if he continues to believe that.
We just teased the predictions episode too now.
That's great. Did you like how I did that?
You're amazing. Are you a marketing specialist?
Exactly. Are you marketing?
Okay. Second story, I want to get a quick hit.
Yeah. The war on billionaires.
So the animosity directed toward billionaires has become so acute.
Three events happened over the past week that really stood out for me.
The first was Elizabeth Warren sharpened her attacks against billionaires with a campaign ad that actually calls out specific billionaires by name.
Now, usually when a politician runs attack ads, they attack other candidates.
They don't attack, you know, citizens sitting on the sidelines.
So that was the first thing.
Second, Bill Gates appeared at a recent conference and he made some remarks that outrage a lot of people.
And if you listen to his remarks, my sense is that, I don't know, five years ago, they would not have come across as too controversial.
He essentially indicated that although he supports paying higher taxes, he thinks it is possible to go too far.
And he also refused to indicate who he's supporting for president.
And then the third thing, of course, that happened was that Michael Bloomberg signaled his intention to jump into the presidential race and his entrance into the race seemed to really upset a lot of people as well.
So this vitriol directed toward billionaires, what do you make of all of this?
To me, it's a cheap play.
It plays on cheap stereotypes.
It's not thoughtful.
It doesn't even really think about is it good for us?
Is it not good for us to have these billionaires?
And then in particular, when you think about, well, how did these people get there?
So if you look at the list of the ultra rich, about two thirds of them are self -made.
So they have built really big, really valuable businesses.
And so are we now saying that's a terrible thing to do?
Like, that is so absurd to me.
I'm the first one to say, yes, let's think about how to redistribute the wealth.
Let's think about how to tax income.
But to vilify the people themselves just strikes me as really cheap politics.
Coming from you, Felix, that's so interesting, because in previous episodes, you've been very passionate about the needs to address income inequality and wealth inequality.
I'm even more bullish on a wealth tax than you were me here.
But those things are just very different to me.
Supporting redistribution, yes, I'm all in favor of it.
And I do think there's a good argument that you can make that we don't redistribute enough.
But that is very different from personally attacking or vilifying particular people, because they had economic success.
That to me is just not right.
So look, I think it is cheap.
I mean, I think for my purposes, frankly, billionaires are neither worth worshipping or vilifying.
And I think they're not altogether terribly interesting, right?
So they're outliers.
And so when we pile a bunch of attention on them, either by saying they're the greatest people or they're the worst people, we kind of get things wrong in both directions.
And now we've convinced ourselves that they're the worst people in the world as opposed to being the best people in the world.
And the answer is they're some combination of extremely skillful and lucky, and they have had a great outcome.
And we should understand it as such.
So I don't find it very rewarding to spend a lot of time vilifying them.
And so I find it all together in bad taste.
I think it's not great politics.
And at its worst, it's distracting from what we should be doing, which is talking about helping people at the bottom end of the income distribution.
So I think there are a couple of sources of the concern.
One concern is the outsized influence that people with money have in our political system.
And so when you have a billionaire jumping into the presidential race, it's almost this notion that it takes a billionaire to beat another billionaire.
You know, that feels a little unsettling and implies that we live in an environment that's almost Gotham like in its corruption and its cynicism.
And so I think that's underlying some of the concern.
Even beyond that, though, I think there is a concern that even when billionaires are engaging in acts of philanthropy, why should Bill Gates or why should someone like Bill Gates be able to dictate who the beneficiaries of that generosity are going to be, as opposed to having that money be confiscated
in taxation and have the government decide?
Even if these concerns are right, vilifying a group of people seems just completely misguided.
If we want money out of politics, then let's take money out of politics.
There's lots of models all around the world how to take money out of politics.
If that's the issue, let's do that.
Or if the issue is the market is such today that a few people just earn grotesque amounts of money, then let's tax it away.
I'm just never really in favor of attacking or vilifying a group of people in order to motivate political action.
And my big concern is that this is really a sea change.
I think how many people think about politics used to be that you thought about politics as catering to the middle class, catering to the average person in the economy.
And now I think people are saying, well, let's look at the last presidential election cycle.
A hundred million Americans did not vote.
Can we come up with some outrageous language and proposal to mobilize these voters?
And maybe that opportunity is the bigger, better opportunity than trying to advocate policies that would really please the median voter.
And that mindset to me, it's wrongheaded and I think it's really dangerous.
I think you're right to highlight young me these two dimensions.
One is about politics and one is about philanthropy.
And on the political dimension and the rent seeking dimension that there's these billionaires who are going to control the political system.
I think that's a genuine problem.
I feel like Felix is exactly right, which is we should go out at its core.
On the philanthropy side, this is something I really struggled with because I really believe in the philanthropic sector.
And I think rich people should be able to give away their money in ways that they like to give away their money.
There's a legitimate question about whether the tax system should subsidize it as much as it does.
I think that's a totally legitimate question.
But the notion that somehow philanthropy is bad or really a manifestation of billionaires power, that seems upside down to me.
You know, there are some billionaires that are not that generous.
But if you had to think of the most generous billionaire, maybe ever, Bill Gates would be it.
So he creates the largest charitable foundation in the world.
He saves millions of lives through this foundation.
He also with Warren Buffett created the Giving Pledge, where billionaires promised to give away half their net worth during their lifetime.
And he himself pledged to give 99 % of his fortune away.
And so to go after someone like Bill Gates implies that you believe it's really impossible to be a good billionaire.
In other words, he is such a test case.
The one other thing I would say is that it's easy to think that, wow, if the government had all this money, then it would be directed to solving all of these problems.
But the reason he started his foundation, it was based on this premise that millions of children die every year from treatable and preventable diseases around the world.
And no one was solving the problem.
Or think about Michael Bloomberg's anti -smoking campaigns, right?
Many of them in countries that we typically wouldn't pay attention to.
I do think it's fair to expect more from the wealthiest and most fortunate citizens.
We should expect them to take their civic duty really seriously.
But boy, to come after individuals like this, I feel like we've crossed the line here.
Okay, Felix, you wanted to… I wanted to talk about the four -day work week.
So this is one of these topics you might remember.
Famously, Keynes, the economist, predicted that by 2030, everybody would just work 15 hours a week.
And the idea was that productivity goes up over time, so that allows us to get roughly the same income with putting in fewer hours and eventually will probably end in the land of magic where we get our income with very few hours of work.
Now, what's interesting about this is that we're a little below 40 right now.
And then every year, we get this one story that says, oh my God, look, here's a company that has reduced work hours to basically four days a week.
And magical things happened.
This year, it was Microsoft.
Productivity rose by 40%.
People were happier.
Last year, it was an estate planning firm out of New Zealand.
And roughly the same story.
It's like they reduced the number of hours and just like fantastic things happen.
And it is a four -day week is maybe more prevalent than people realize.
So a recent survey found that about 15 % of firms in America offer workers an option to work 32 hours or less per week.
So it's not a fringe phenomenon, but it's also not exactly available to everyone.
So my first question is, if you had to make a prediction, do you think five years from now, will we see many, many workers essentially work a four -day week?
I mean, my instinct is we need lots more experimentation in work arrangements, and it's wonderful to see experimentation.
I don't think there's anything convincing terribly much about this transition of four -day work weeks.
It's in a way surprising how durable the five -day work week has proven, but I don't see this changing in a rapid fire way with the exception that if we get serious populist movements and they enact, for example, 35 -hour work weeks or 30 -hour work weeks, then it gets interesting.
But I don't see any significant movement in one particular direction, absent populist sentiments that will be manifest in regulations and laws that could actually change the way things work.
What do you say, Yangmi?
So I agree that I don't see any momentum in this direction, and I think it's a shame.
I think it's a real shame.
And I actually don't feel like I need a whole lot of other evidence.
In many ways, I would say, defend why you have a five -day work week.
We've had a five -day work week for a century.
The amount of leisure we afford people has always been a mark of our progress as a civilization.
And so there was a time when we worked seven days a week, and moving to six days a week was a revelation.
And then we moved to five days a week, and that was a revelation.
And then we decided eight hours a day, and that was a real revelation, the notion that anything above and beyond that was considered over time.
In other words, as we progress as a civilization, we should be marching in the direction of affording people more leisure.
So my sense is that rather than having a one -size -fits -all solution, say move towards fewer hours or leave things as it is, the core realization is in many of the richer countries, people now have such high levels of income that many of them will choose different outcomes if we let them choose.
And that's in a way what's missing from the current system.
Both the German Raybalists and the German Post did this really nice experiment where they offered their employees a three to five percent increase in wages, or an extra week of vacation, or one hour less work per week, and interestingly, almost no one chose the reduction by one hour per week.
About 50 % of people chose the higher income, about 50 % of people chose the one extra week of vacation.
And that to me is sort of the core to making progress, recognizing that at this point in time, probably a one -size -fits -all solution is not great for many people.
Given that we have technology, given that we can organize work in more flexible ways, let's use this opportunity to create flexible solutions where before we couldn't really do that.
And in fact, I think in a way we have seen a lot of innovation in work practices.
So yes, we've had a five -day work week for a century and it feels like why hasn't things gotten better, right?
I too am puzzled just to be clear about how durable that has been.
But I guess my answer to that is, well, wait, we have actually seen people innovating with telecommuting, with working at home, with a whole bunch of arrangements that actually have been pretty good.
So I see kind of more slow progress, more experimentation by employers, and we will kind of converge.
But it takes a long time.
This is the kind of change which takes a long, long time.
But here's the problem.
I think there's a pretty significant difference between offering flexibility versus moving to a new default.
In other words, I think there are certain benefits that are only realized when we move to a new default and everyone does it.
So for example, one of the downsides associated with opting for a more flexible work schedule means that you're not working when other people are working.
That's a real trade -off.
If you know meetings are happening in your absence, you are essentially handicapping yourself a little bit in your ability to get ahead at work.
The rhythm of your business function starts to change.
In other words, if everybody's on a four -day work week, that means the cycle of the week is set up to make sure everybody gets their work done in that four -day period.
Some of the cost benefits are only realized.
So for example, imagine if you could reduce your office maintenance costs by 20 % by just having a four -day work week.
You only realize that if everybody's on that four -day work week.
So I think there's so much to that, Yangmi, which is this idea of a focal point or you're really creating something that is a default.
I think that's right.
I think there's at least two things to think about in these European experiments.
I think one of the reasons why people choose more vacation and not the one -hour reduction per day is exactly the synchronization things.
But I don't think that can mean we need to impose how individuals think about the trade -off between income and free time.
To basically force them to take a work week that is going to be so much more stressful than what they have today in order to maintain wage levels.
I don't think that seems right.
Does everybody want yet a further acceleration of the pace of work?
It's not obvious to me.
When you really think it through, workers are so heterogeneous.
There's all kinds of workers.
And it's really hard to understand how norms like this would evolve in many different workplaces.
And to your point, Felix, for some people it can become more taxing, for other people it'll become more liberating.
But I think, Yangmi, you've made me think harder about the kind of longer arc of history.
Which is about leisure and is about maybe we should be providing more leisure.
I just don't know if these rules are the way to get it or if we need a broader rethink of the way we think about work.
The world I wish we'd live in is if I can go to my employer and I say, I've been here for quite a few years but now I decided to go to a four -day work week.
And that would both be a possibility and it wouldn't have negative repercussions on my career opportunities, if in fact I did my job as well as I used to.
To me, this mode of choosing when to spend more time at work, just think family situations and how they change.
And so being able to adjust how you make that trade off between income and time, I think would be really fantastic.
The balance between vocation and avocation, right?
I mean, if you're really lucky, you end up doing something that you get paid for that you really love.
For many, many people that's not the case.
And so imagine just having the additional bandwidth to be able to do the thing you really, really love to do.
It cuts to the core of a good life, right?
Like what is a good life?
And it is so different for so many different people.
And I think that's why this is such a hard question.
Yeah, I agree. And it's difficult to know, right?
So if you live in one of these European countries where you have six weeks of vacation, you know what that is like.
If you never had the opportunity, it's hard to know what that is like.
So Felix, would you choose a four day work week or six week summer break?
So I think I know about myself that I relax the most if I'm away for extended periods of time.
A two day weekend is actually sort of terrible for me because it takes me three quarters of a day to stop thinking about work.
And then I start thinking about work on Sunday lunchtime.
So for me, I would definitely choose the longer vacations.
Me too. What about you, Meir?
I think so too. We could go on vacation together.
I think that's the end of the segment.
Okay, guys. Pics, what do you have for me this week?
I need music related.
So I think Downbeat as a magazine is still the single most fabulous source of music recommendations when it comes to new music and jazz.
And there's two things that I particularly like about the recommendations.
The first one is they discuss many, many releases in every one of the issues.
But four most important ones, they have each of their critics review these releases side by side.
So you get four people's take.
And they have fabulous arguments why a particular release is really the best thing ever to, oh my God, how could you?
It's almost like a way to learn about jazz if you don't know that much about it.
I think other reviewers should experiment with this.
It would be so good to get like book reviews and TV reviews like this, right?
Yes, yeah. And I don't know why I haven't really seen it in too many other places where you have sort of professional critics, but you pitch their reviews against one another.
The other thing to just quickly add this at the end of the magazine, the very last page, there's something called the blindfold test.
And they do it with typically a famous musician and they play six, seven, eight pieces where the musician has to guess who it is.
What's fascinating about this is how the very best people in jazz don't recognize each other, how it's actually super, super hard.
And so how they talk about the pieces that they don't recognize, super, super interesting to see.
That's a great big recommendation.
OK, should I go next?
Sure. So I have a new travel app.
It's kind of a flight tracking app for my flights and it's called flighty.
So first of all, it does all of the sort of basic features you want, any kind of flight tracking app.
It tells you if your flight's gonna be delayed and so on.
And then the caveat here is you have to pay for the pro version.
But if you pay, the level of detail that it gives you on every piece of data imaginable is really amazing.
And it's not just for fun, it's actually super useful.
So one of the things it will tell you is where your plane currently is.
Oh, that's useful. It's so useful.
And there have been three times now where my flight is listed everywhere else as leaving on time.
But if I click on that thing, it tells me that, in fact, my flight has no chance, actually, because it's already running behind.
And so you have a heads up, you have so much warning about where your flight is, the likelihood it's going to be delayed.
You can see what kind of plane it is.
You can see what the seat pattern looks like.
And it's all laid out in this really nice fashion.
It's called flighty.
It's not for everyone.
You only want to do it if you really fly a lot.
But if you fly a lot, I would recommend it.
And I think there's a free trial as well.
So you can try it out and see if it's right for you.
But that's my recommendation.
That sounds great. So I have a silly recommendation, which is if you're looking for straight up jokes, they're actually kind of hard to find.
And Seth Meyers, he's got one kind of a thing that he does with these two writers, Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel.
And it's like a bit they do all the time.
And there's a whole YouTube channel now dedicated to it.
It's called Jokes Seth Can't Tell.
And the premise of it is that one of the writers, Amber, is black and the other, Jenny, is a lesbian.
And these are jokes from the writer's room that Seth Meyers, because he's a white man, can't tell.
And they're hilarious jokes.
And so the set up and the whole point of it is to poke fun at political correctness, right?
But also to do it in a really good way.
So the set up is delivered by Seth Meyers.
And then the punch line is delivered by either one of those two writers.
And it's hilarious.
So they're really funny jokes.
And then at the very end, it always ends in the same way, too, which is Seth Meyers kind of basically says, you know, the other two try to convince him to tell a joke that's going to be politically incorrect.
And he's like, oh, I don't think I should do it.
And they convince him to do it.
And then he tells it.
And they both jump all over him for telling the joke, because it's entirely politically incorrect.
And it's hilarious.
And it's a great way to kind of get the diversity of a writer's room onto TV.
And then also to poke fun at political incorrectness in a really savvy way.
And then it's just great gags, like just great one liners.
So that combination is really fantastic.
So it's jokes Seth can't tell.
And there's a whole YouTube channel dedicated to them.
And they're hilarious.
Here, what's your best joke?
God. You know, I'm a dad, right?
So I have bad jokes.
Come on. You should have a joke.
Okay. I'll give you my latest dad joke, which is two silkworms have a race.
Guess who won? Who?
It ended up in a tie.
Okay. I'm sorry. I'm a dad.
What do you want? What do you want from me?
What do you call a fish without eyes?
Fish. Fish. Fish. Fish without eyes.
Just F -S -H. Oh my God.
I'm going to take my silkworm joke over.
That is so funny. A fish without eyes is called a fish.
Okay. Excellent. That is so good.
Oh God. That was a good joke.
Time to rap. All right.
We should quit while we're behind.
All right. Thanks everyone for listening.
This is, what is this?
This is after hours in the HBO podcast network.
What do you call a fish without eyes?
You guys, it's a fish.
Get it? We got it. We got it.
Young me. We got it.
Anyway, I love that joke.
I'll try it out on my daughter's, we'll see.
