Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi, everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi, and I'm here with Felix Simba here.
Hey, guys. Hey, Yang Mi.
Hey, Felix. Hey, Yang Mi.
Felix, where are you?
I'm in Brazil. One of the big research conferences on media takes place in Sao Paulo, so it brings together all these people from media, and in particular, executives in media organizations that are interested in research.
So what are the big questions they're kind of obsessed with right now?
Well, you know, so like everywhere else, the audience fractures, and so that makes the job for brands to reach audiences so much more difficult.
On the one hand, you have many more opportunities.
You have social media, you have traditional television, you have over -the -top services, but it's not clear which of these you should use, given the ambitions of your brand, given how your brand wants to play.
And so you run a campaign across, I don't know, 7, 8, 9, 11 different types of media, and then you see sales move in some fashion.
Why did they move? What would have happened if you didn't have the television spots?
What would have happened if you doubled down on social media?
Those are the really interesting and difficult questions that people grapple with these days.
My guess is that half of it works.
Yeah, yeah, that's the old...
Wait, finish the joke, Meher.
But you never know which half.
Sorry. Okay. That joke still works, even 30 years later.
Just a reminder that Meher is a dad.
He does dad jokes. Thank you very much.
I wear that for pride.
Okay, so we have topics tonight.
So yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about Joe Biden.
And I wanted to talk about a very simple question, which is, have we reached peak car?
Answer is yes. So I'm going to start with a very simple question.
How many cars do you guys own?
The answer for our family is zero.
You don't have a car.
We do not have a car.
As of when? As of a couple of years ago.
It's been like two or three years, and it's fantastic.
Felix. So we have a car, but the truth is we only really use the car to pick up dry cleaning.
What? You know dry cleaners deliver, Felix.
Yes. So it just sits in the driveway.
We basically don't use it.
Okay. So putting my cards on the table, we have two cars, but we are actively wondering why, and thinking at least we should give up one car.
But the reason I ask is there are a lot of folks that are looking at this industry and are making the argument that we have reached peak car.
And by that, what I mean is if you look at car sales, both in the U .S.
as well as in other countries, including, by the way, China, what you're beginning to see is a decline in sales of automobiles.
And the idea is that this is not a blip, but the beginning of a trend where we're going to see more and more people begin to phase out privately owned automobiles.
So let me start out with that question.
Do you think we've reached peak car?
I'll get started. I mean, I'm totally a believer in this, and I'm a believer in this for kind of three reasons, which I think the underlying trends are secular and will continue and are real.
So first is urbanization, which we've seen dramatic changes in urbanization.
That's going to drive down car ownership for all kinds of reasons you can imagine.
This is around the world.
This is around the world we're seeing urbanization.
And so that's a huge driver.
The second is the advent of mobility services, which is just a fancy way of saying Uber and Lyft and Maven and Zipcar and everything else that you can do and scooters.
Those services make owning a car much less of a required thing.
The third piece, which is what people get really excited about, which I actually think is less exciting, is the autonomous vehicle piece, which is once you have autonomous vehicles, then the cost of all those mobility services go down by half or more, perhaps.
And so once that really happens, although I think that is still several years away, then you're going to see an even further inflection point in this.
I think the first two causes are enough to herald the kind of arrival of PCAR and to be really excited about it for environmental purposes.
The underlying reality is that cars are massively underutilized assets.
And so the notion that we can push up utilization rates on the existing stock of assets is really exciting from an environmental perspective, from a consumer perspective, from a financial perspective.
And so I am a total believer in this, and I think it's going to accelerate in a way in the next year or two prior to autonomous vehicles.
Yeah, I agree with you, Mihir.
All of these seem really important here to stay.
We'll forever change how we think about car ownership.
I'll add one more change, I think, that is at least in the short run, maybe one of these changes that is most important.
We're witnessing now the slow death of the internal combustion engine.
One really important reason is China.
China is pushing very, very hard to make electric battery operated vehicles the typical vehicle of the future.
And the reason is something that is great for China and I think bad news for the automobile industry more generally.
It's really, really hard to build an internal combustion engine.
Once you go to electric, entry barriers will come down dramatically.
And so with the decline in barriers to entry, achieving profitability, which by the way is not easy today, will be even more difficult because you'll have many more players.
A couple of things I would just underscore that you guys alluded to.
One is the generational shifts.
So one of the most reliable statistics in the U .S.
for years and years and years was that when people turned 16 years old, half of 16 year olds would immediately go out and get their driver's license.
Last year, that number was less than 25%, which is just so astonishing.
And then the second is the financial calculus is making less and less sense for an individual household.
So the average price of a car that sells in the U .S., for example, is crept up because of all the features and the safety and everything, about $38 ,000 for something we use maybe, in Felix's case, once a week to go to the drug clinic.
So then I guess the next question is, what will the next phase of mobility look like and how should cities respond?
I think sharing vehicles, it's here already, but I think we now have a much clearer picture of where this is going to go.
I'll give you some numbers to start out with.
Didi, the Chinese ride sharing company, they now have 30 million rides a day.
That is twice as many as Uber globally.
So again, if you look at the Chinese market, it's almost like, oh my God, I get to see a vision of where the market is headed.
When you think about ride sharing, if we get to maybe a usage rate, say, it's a day by 5 % of the time a typical car is used, if we get it to 10%, 15%, even a little higher, that will have dramatic implications.
The best research that we have from engineering says, for every one ride sharing vehicle, we can replace about 10 regular cars.
And obviously, there's a big variety of estimates, and some are higher, some are lower, but the 1 to 10 ratio seems to be about right.
Now imagine what that means for vehicle production.
That's dramatic. And cars are being kept longer too, which is now we observe people holding onto cars longer as well.
I think there's two big questions in my mind, the first, which was alluded to earlier.
I don't buy into Felix's vision that the internal combustion engine is dying.
I actually think the electric piece is going to be more complicated.
And I think, Felix, I had a set of conversations with some people in the internal combustion business who, I don't know, they've convinced me of two things.
One, once batteries start getting made at scale, prices can go up a lot because the materials are rare.
And second, once we imagine a city where a majority of vehicles are electrified, and the pressure that can put on a grid is actually quite large.
So I want to kind of put a marker in the sand of, I don't...
You know they have an interest in convincing you.
They do, I understand that.
You just found the next sponsor.
The internal combustion market has been mitted down so badly that I actually think there's something interesting there.
But the more interesting question I wanted to raise, young me, is about cities.
The puzzle in a way is this has been driven by private sector players who are developing mobility services.
Where are the governments in terms of doing interesting things?
So now we've seen a congestion tax, for example, has now been being talked about in New York.
And of course, many cities have congestion taxes, London, Singapore, or others.
That's one way to think about this, but the provision of mobility services by cities still seems to be utterly lacking.
And by that I mean we're still talking subways and buses.
We're not talking about the state solving some of these problems with mobility services that are of this new generation as opposed to the generation that they've been thinking about.
So in a way, what I want to see cities do is be much more creative in thinking through how do we harness these mobility services?
Because they're still doing subways and buses, which are obviously hugely important and interesting.
But there's a piece of this puzzle which once the city gets involved and the state gets involved in solving it, can even accelerate this trend even more.
And from an environmental perspective, of course, that's even far more exciting than what we've been talking about so far.
It is kind of incredible when you think about the extent to which we have optimized the structure of our cities in favor of cars.
With these additional mobility services, including scooters and bikes and other things, you could begin to imagine a future with congestion taxes and things where you try to dramatically reduce the number of cars in cities.
And almost create almost a boundary around some of these mega cities where once you reach the city boundaries, within those boundaries a very different kind of infrastructure takes over.
And so to your point, Mia, here, I would love to see some cities being a little bit creative, a little bit ambitious about how they begin to reimagine what their cities could be.
And you're talking, just to be clear, you're talking about, Bloomberg did a little bit of this, which is closing down avenues and making them pedestrian.
But you're talking about on a whole different scale, I think.
But you can imagine much bigger bike lanes and lanes for scooters, and you could imagine, I mean, this sounds pretty utopian, I know, but you could imagine a scenario where there were some cars but far fewer, and the city isn't just optimized for cars, but is optimized for lots of different modes of transportation.
Which as you see in Copenhagen or you see in some of these European cities, they've really already made that change.
Exactly, and I think we haven't really been in a place where we could even contemplate that because our cities aren't aggressive enough in thinking about public transportation.
But now that there are these private alternatives like scooter companies and Uber pool and things like that, now it doesn't seem quite as impossible.
So let me ask you this.
So which players do you think are best positioned for this next phase and who will the winners and losers be?
I think I have a sense that for the car manufacturers themselves, life is only going to get harder.
I think the ride -sharing services will become important buyers or indirect buyers of cars.
And in that world, everything looks a little bit like fleet sales.
Like if companies sell to big organizations where your bargaining power is just not that amazing.
That, coupled with the lower barriers to entry that I expect from the move towards batteries, I think the car manufacturers are in trouble.
Interesting. I'm struggling to find a winner.
I'm really struggling to find somebody who wins here and that is what worries me a little bit, which is there have to be some winners here and I don't know who that is other than consumers and potentially if the cities and states play an active role.
So let me posit this idea.
So the winners will be the best capitalized players.
So can I ask you about the capital as a barrier to entry argument, Myungmi?
I hear this not only in the context of cars.
Obviously, it's super important here, but I hear this very often.
Oh, you can't really enter industry XYZ because there's barriers to entry that come in the form of capital requirements.
And I'm always a little confused about that argument because it seems to me if I had a really fabulous idea that would beat the competition, capital is never a barrier to entry.
Of course I would get the capital.
It's almost as if the argument goes the other way around.
If in fact it's not clear how you're ever going to be profitable, then all of a sudden capital constraints become a really big deal and if you happen to be lucky and you signed up with the vision fund long time ago, you're in good shape and otherwise you're not.
But it's not really the capital that's playing the role or is it?
So it's a little bit circular because if you have a great idea, it will attract capital.
But what makes transportation a little bit tricky is that every transportation market is a local market.
And so even if you have a great idea, you then have to go and start from scratch in a new market.
So when you're just starting out, you have to figure out a way how to capitalize your way from one market to the next market to the next market to the point where you have real critical mass.
And by the way, maybe one of the winners will be whoever buys Tesla and turns them into a functional car.
They do have the best cars and they do have amazing self -driving technology.
So we'll see. Fantastic.
I love that. Okay, me here.
Yeah, so as you'll surely have noticed, there's been a controversy around Joe Biden, which is particularly that he has been known as a tactile politician.
And now there are more and more claims of interactions with women where women have said that they are uncomfortable with the level of touching that he undertakes.
I think the general consensus is that he is not sexual in nature with this touching, but it is touching and it is making people uncomfortable.
And the question is, what does this shift in the debate tell us about where we are?
And in particular, are his actions disqualifying?
I think this question is so hard, honestly, because I think we can stipulate that his motivations are okay.
But even if his motivations are okay, is it okay to be that physically tactile?
Or are we now in an era where you can no longer be physically tactile in that way?
So what do you think, Jungmi?
No, no, no, no. I want you guys to go first.
Okay, Felix, you go first.
I'll go second. All right, all right.
So I'll say so. I have a few thoughts.
So one, I wouldn't be surprised if we look back at these instances and we would identify this moment as a real watershed moment for the Me Too movement.
And one of the reasons why I say this is it clearly gets us away from thinking about Me Too in the context of unwanted sexual contact only into a much broader set of behaviors where the recipient of the behavior, be it touching, be it verbal, be it any sort of interaction that doesn't feel okay to the other
person where we get to have a conversation around when is that okay and when is that not okay.
Joe Biden obviously has a history going all the way back to the Anita Hill's hearings when he played a really poor role.
And despite this history, here's a person who I think fundamentally he does not understand how powerful he is.
And the interesting reason is clearly norms have changed over time.
Why doesn't someone like he, why hasn't he changed?
Why doesn't he learn?
And I think the short answer is if you're this powerful, no one ever objects, no one ever says, no, that's actually not okay.
I'm not happy with what you're doing.
And so this is, to me, it's a real invitation to be much more cognizant of the power that you have over others and how you may not hear back that what you're doing is not okay.
I think that's really interesting, Felix.
I think two things.
One is we've kind of always had this idea that intent matters.
And in this situation, I think the claim is that intent doesn't matter, that it's about perception.
And that is a watershed to me.
And I don't know how I feel about it because it's almost like saying we have to live in the world of the perception, which of course is a very hard world to live in.
And now we're going to hold people accountable, not because of what they were motivated to do, but just how somebody else realizes it.
And then I think the second thing is it cuts to the core of physical affection and the way we think about physicality.
I actually enjoy physical affection.
And there's a part of me which worries that we're going to lose that and we're going to get defined by people who find the most minimal levels of physical affection somehow problematic.
So I guess where I come out on this is I'm sympathetic to the idea that no one should experience anything unwanted.
And Biden was doing things that were unwanted and that's bad.
But the larger moment to me is, wait a second, now intent doesn't matter.
And now all kinds of physical affection are all of a sudden problematic and complicated.
And that to me is really, really worrisome.
Of course, intent matters.
Whether you go out and your intention is to hurt someone, that's radically different from you go out and you have the best of intentions and then you engage in some behavior that ends up hurting someone.
I think the difference here is that even if you have good intentions, there's no guarantee that what you do is not going to make someone else uncomfortable.
And then we need to be thoughtful about when is that behavior okay and when is that behavior not okay.
But I think that's what's getting lost, Felix.
I think people are saying it actually doesn't matter what he thought.
No, but it's a two step argument me here.
The first step is if your intention is to hurt someone, that's like the worst of all possible situations.
And then if your intention was completely harmless, that is still no guarantee that what you did is okay.
I see. In some ways the question boils down to if someone does something to you that makes you feel uncomfortable, is it okay for you to tell them that made me really uncomfortable?
That was step one of this entire thing.
Absolutely. Someone coming out and saying, you know what, this thing you've been doing for many, many years, it actually makes a lot of people really, really uncomfortable.
No one's accusing him of sexual misconduct, no one's accusing him of sexual harassment.
But people are coming forward.
Now, is everyone saying that that makes them uncomfortable?
No, and I think this is the difference, right?
So there is a certain amount of physical intimacy that I think people not only accept but in many cases welcome.
If it's with people with whom you have a relationship and a foundation of trust, and I think it's a very different thing when you begin to cross the physical boundaries with people with whom you don't have that relationship of trust.
And that explains why in some cases, Mahir, you said, you know, you're a physical person, you know.
Although, let me just be clear, I have never seen you walk up behind a woman and smell her hair.
Indeed. I do have some sense of this creepy thing.
Yes, the next thing I would say is that in many ways that is a little bit of a litmus test, right?
In other words, would either of you ever walk up to anyone and put your hands on their shoulders, take a deep breath out of her hair, kiss the back of her head in front of your partner, in front of your spouse?
Probably not, okay?
And so what I think you're seeing here is, you know, this movement was a very narrow manifestation of a broader awakening, and the broader awakening is that for years and years and years, we have interacted with each other with a lot of entitlement, presumption, bias, and people are waking up and saying,
you know what? That's what this is in many ways.
Yeah, this reminds me, in a way, of, I suppose this is a strange parallel, but it reminds me of what happened with the Me Too movement and about men's concerns about traveling with women.
You know, that somehow there would be this backlash that, oh, Me Too is going to be so terrible because then men won't be willing to mentor women and won't be willing to travel with women, and won't be willing to be in the same room with women.
And in a way, I think the knee -jerk response to the Biden thing, which I gave voice to a little bit as well, is similar, which is we're over -complexifying it and we're over -extrapolating the consequences of these things, right?
Which is actually it's kind of common sense, right?
Like to your point, right?
Like sniffing someone's hair and kissing them on the neck is like, you know...
They're rubbing their nose with your nose.
It's just not something that we would normally...
It's just, it goes beyond the pale.
And so in a way, this concern about Biden, the first take on it, for me at least, was a similar kind of like, well, wait, what the hell?
We can't do anything anymore.
You know, like, you know, kind of almost like that.
But once you take it to brass tacks and you take it to practicalities and you take it to the actual behavior, you're right to ask, you know, when was the last time you sniffed somebody's hair?
And the answer is, I don't do that and I wouldn't do that.
And I only give affection or hug a woman when I know them for a long period of time.
And it's well understood that it's okay.
And so in a way, I think what men have a tendency to do in these settings is to immediately over -complexify it and extrapolate it to some infringement on their rights.
And to be quite honest, I think the reason this has become bigger than it is, and I think if there's any lesson in this, one of the lessons is a really good apology can go a long way.
And why is that so hard?
And why is that so hard?
And just to be clear, young me, you thought his apology was deep.
Was so problematic.
What's interesting to me about why people in power, and this is true on the corporate CEO side as well as on the politician side, why unequivocal apologies are complicated?
I mean, it's a clear non -apology, but it's also, the puzzle to me though is it's low -hanging fruit.
Yeah, I think this is so true.
One reason why I think it's interesting to think about power in this context and to shift the Me Too conversation to a conversation about power is if you accuse Joe Biden of misbehavior, that automatically gets the attention of the press, the attention of the media, we're talking about it on this podcast.
Now contrast this with say someone working at McDonald's and you have a manager who violates norms.
The woman at McDonald's is really in a super difficult position because it's not a high profile case.
You will never get anyone to write about it or talk about it.
And so maybe it's a good thing for us to shift the conversation to also think about what can we do about everyday kinds of transgressions.
And in some ways, I would say it is a manifestation of power and it gets to questions of power.
But I think even beyond that, it gets to questions of who gets to set the culture for the places we have it.
I think a lot of times people look at this Joe Biden thing and they think, wow, why are women so angry and why are they getting upset about all of this stuff?
And I think what people don't fully appreciate is the extent to which women every day endure these small challenges to their dignity every single day.
And in some cases it comes with an unwelcome hug or an unwelcome form of touching.
But in other cases it's even more subtle than that.
For example, imagine if you worked in an environment where you were the only man and every meeting you're in you're surrounded by women.
But not only were you surrounded by women, they were all women who were very close to each other, had a particular culture, a particular way of talking with each other, were clearly friends outside of the workplace, had their inside jokes, you try to get a word in in a meeting, very difficult, it's
just you're feeling self -conscious all the time.
For many women, that's their everyday experience.
They feel that discomfort every minute, every hour, every day and they just sort of endure it.
And so what I think you're seeing here is this moment in this movement where we're beginning to question all of that, not just the power dynamics, but the cultural dynamics that we see in our workplace.
Yeah, and physical affection to me is an interesting piece of that puzzle, which is, and one of the learnings for me at least, has been, I've often thought of physical interactions and affection as unalloyed good.
We need more of it in the world.
And the reality is, that's not true.
Many people don't experience it that way.
Many people, as we know from the data, have had experiences that are very traumatic so that unwelcome physical affection is really, really problematic.
This is something that sometimes gets a little on my nerves, like this whole conversation, oh my God, it's so infinitely difficult, almost impossible to know what's okay, what's not okay because people are so different and norms change.
No, give me a break.
It's not difficult.
So I grew up in Europe.
When we greet each other, we give each other kisses on the cheek.
You go from, I don't know, more Eastern Europe towards Paris and you learn, oh, it's not three kisses, it's five kisses.
You go to America, after half a week, you know, kissing someone you barely know is probably not a good idea.
It is not rocket science.
So this whole, on the male side of the conversation, this whole, oh my God, the world is such a complicated place, I find completely nonsensical.
It's not hard. Yeah.
I think the general lesson for me is, I think this cycle that I've experienced during these last two years of being alerted to an issue and then understanding how pervasive it is and the initial knee -jerk reaction being publicly of a lot of people being, oh, this is an infringement on our rights, and then
realizing that this is actually commonsensical.
You know, that cycle I feel like is repeating itself again and again and again in a really powerful way to me.
And this is again that example where, wait, wait, why can't you, why not people, is the initial reaction.
And then once you think about it and you layer on some common sense, it's actually not some large infringement on people's liberty.
And it gets cast in that way.
And I think that cycle is so interesting to me.
And I'm kind of heartened in a way by the speed at which it occurs, which is, I think we're learning a lot.
And that to me is really positive.
Okay. Time for pics.
You know, I really want to break out of my usual stereotype here because I know I like just do British copper shows and that's terrible and it's not something I should be doing.
So I want to really branch out.
I have an Indian copper show for you, which is fantastic.
So Delhi Crime is the first Netflix -based Indian content that has wide appeal and it is spectacular.
Seven -piece procedural about a gang rape, true story, gang rape in 2012.
That was in the news, that one on the bus?
The one on the bus.
Oh. Which was a massive change in India.
It's a really singular event as a crime.
Horrible story. Horrible story of a gang rape in a bus.
This procedural drama is seven episodes.
It is so good and it's good because if you like crime shows, in a way it's really interesting because it focuses on the police and their unorthodox methods because they are so resource starved and they really are heroes because within several days they track down all of these major suspects.
But it is beautifully made.
It captures so many things about India.
And it is a police procedural where all the conventional means, like the high -tech things that you think they could do, and the chase scenes are kind of turned upside down.
So for example, there's a chase scene where these guys have somebody who they've arrested and he escapes because they're walking across a river and nobody can swim.
It turns all the kind of usual high -tech CSI thing totally upside down and it just focuses on these human detectives with ingenuity in a resource -strapped setting that is really, really compelling.
What's it called again?
It's got the worst name ever.
It's just called Delhi Crime.
Okay. How about you, Felix?
I would like to give a shout out to, I guess it's a newsletter or it's a business briefing.
I often try to follow news in the segments that I'm particularly interested in by looking at business insider briefings.
They're quite specific.
So for instance, it's all about fintech or it's all about digital health or it's all about IT in business applications.
And there's a few things that I really like about these briefings.
The first one is that they aggregate news in a very meaningful and fantastic way.
The second thing that I really love, and this is maybe because I'm a data geek myself, it's always supported by some interesting statistic.
They have typically very simple graphs but that sort of bring home something that is really striking.
So business insider intelligence briefings, really worth reading.
And just a little nugget just how much they think about their readers, which I think shows in many aspects.
They come out every day.
And of course, who has time to read these things every day?
So what they do is they give you a weekly summary over the weekend, which I think is really nice.
Excellent. Okay. Great one.
Okay. I have an article to recommend that is for some of our audience and for one of our hosts, Mihir Desai, is must reading.
The article is entitled, how to enjoy Game of Thrones season eight if you haven't seen the show.
And it's on the Ringer website.
Okay. And it's by this woman named Kirsten Johnson.
Does it involve watching the first seven episodes?
She is someone who is a copy editor at the Ringer website.
And over the past couple of years, she's had to edit.
And a lot of the stuff is about Game of Thrones.
So finally she thought, I'm going to somehow try to figure out a way to hack my way into enjoying this without having to go back and watch every episode.
So if you are not a Game of Thrones watcher, this is the article to read.
And by the way, you can't be interested in business without watching Game of Thrones.
Yeah, that's totally impossible.
Do you care about leadership?
The most charismatic leader that I have encountered in real life or fiction in recent years, Daenerys, mother of dragons.
Can I just look, I have a question for you on this, which is one of my reasons for not buying into it is it strikes me as just being too violent.
Like I just don't buy into all this violence and I don't want to watch a ton of violence.
You have no idea. So I don't like violence either.
It is horrifyingly violent.
It's violent in ways.
Then why are we watching this?
So the fact that I don't watch violence.
Okay, but you can, it's still worth it for you.
You're saying, yeah.
Okay. Okay. All right.
I'm in. I'm in. All right.
That's it. Thanks for listening, everyone.
This is after hours, part of the HBO presents.
Yeah.
