Ted Audio Collective Welcome everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Miheir.
And it's just the two of us.
Yes. I was just going to say.
Very spooky. Speaking of spooky.
Yeah. Halloween week.
Oh god. For the first several years when my girls would dress up, it was so easy.
We just recycled these things.
Yeah. It was just a question of who was going to be Red Riding Hood that year.
And then for these last four or five years, we've been making costumes.
Oh. So I will tell you we are in the middle of making bubble tea, specifically Gong Cha bubble tea.
Ooh. Okay. So we'll see how it goes.
Right now it's all sackcloth and ashes.
We'll see how it resolves itself.
It's fascinating for me because they block our street.
Uh -huh. And every year just to see the variety of costumes.
It's pretty great. How people dress up.
The care with which everything is done is such a joy.
Speaking of scary things, what do you got?
Yes. Really scary. I wanted to get your take on AI and robots in consumer interactions.
And I have a set of experiences that I don't really know how typical they are.
But I wanted to get your take on it.
How should we think about what is happening right now on the technology front?
Sounds great. What about you?
What are you thinking about?
So Goldman Sachs is arguably the premier financial firm in the world, and certainly widely respected in many, many ways.
And David's Almond's been running it for about four or five years.
And they just announced a whole bunch of new changes, like ending their consumer banking effort and regrouping a bunch of their banking and trading.
And I thought it would be a useful time just to ask, what is he up to?
What is the industry up to?
What do we learn from these changes?
Great. Let's do it.
So here at Goldman.
Yeah. For the last 40 years, maybe longer, Goldman Sachs has been the premier financial firm in the world.
And it's really striking how that reputation has been maintained.
What they've recently been doing is really interesting.
So David's Almond is this kind of high profile CEO.
He has a side gig as a DJ.
He really kind of cultivates that image of himself.
So he's been CEO for four years, and he just announced another big reorganization, the second in four years.
One, there was this big effort on becoming more of a consumer facing organization with Marcus and with a commercial bank, and really trying to push that as part of what they did.
And they've really retreated from that in a pretty big way alongside the FinTech adjacent things that they had with the consumer banking stuff.
They've kind of demoted those.
And then second, they had all these kinds of fee generating ideas, which is we're going to go into the wealth management business.
We're going to need more on asset management.
And that has gotten demoted.
And of course, what's left is the thing that he purportedly was moving away from, which is traditional investment banking, trading, what you think of Goldman Sachs, like 40 years ago.
And so I'm curious what you made of those changes, what it says a little bit about Goldman, but maybe more generally, what you think it might say.
Part of what's really puzzling to me is how basically the consumer effort didn't really go anywhere.
They couldn't really position the firm in a way that would set it apart from everything else that is happening in that space.
And then maybe even a little more shocking because you come with their reputation of the firm and the sky high expectations that in many ways, say if you look at the credit card business, this collaboration with Apple.
So you would think, well, part of the reason why you're doing that is because that's a higher margin business and you would love to be in a higher margin business.
And then of course, if you position yourself in a relationship with Apple, that probably means you get more affluent consumers to begin with.
So then it's maybe no surprise that to the extent that you expected to earn a lot of fees off of really huge balances, that is not really happening because in that segment of credit card use, it's mostly transactional and people paying off their balances so you don't have the fee income that you might have expected.
And you could say, well, that is, of course, true, but there's always this trade off.
The banks that have really enormous fee income, they are taking pretty risky bets.
And as a result, expectations about non -performing loans will be really big.
And part of what really puzzled me is to see, say, compared to JP Morgan Chase, which has set aside about 6 % for non -performing loans, Goldman's number is twice that.
And so it seems you're not really getting the balances so you don't really lend, but the lending that you do is also somehow not as sophisticated as you think.
So I don't really know how to think about that because these two things shouldn't go hand in hand.
Yeah. Well, I think in fact, those businesses turned out to be very distinct, which is the credit card deal was a distinct thing with Apple.
And then there was a FinTech enabled lending platform, think up starty kind of thing, where their shtick was high tech, really leaning into the FinTech piece of the puzzle, both on gathering deposits through Marcus, but also on making some of these loans.
And I think in a way, one lesson for me from the story is just to appreciate those traditional banks a little bit more.
So first off, it turns out that these really remarkable deposit franchises where people are relatively slow moving with their deposits and basically banks make money on those really slow moving deposits, turns out that's not what you get in this kind of e -bank Marcus thing.
You have high net worth people who move around deposits a lot.
And then on top of it, the idea that we can kind of AI our way to like better lending decisions turns out to be a little more complicated than we thought.
And so one thing that really struck me about Goldman's shift was really to give a little bit of respect to the more traditional players for what they have with the deposit franchise and what they have with their lending decisions, which it turns out is way more precious and harder to do than you might think.
Yeah. And speaking of respect, in some sense, that's even true for Goldman's progress on these fronts itself.
So much of this struck me as a response to trading multiples, which from a strategy point of view always makes me so nervous.
When I see companies that are so focused on what Wall Street is thinking about and maybe for a firm that is part and parcel for Wall Street, maybe that's not so surprising.
But some of the changes that you're making, is that just because your multiples look worse than the multiples for JPMorgan Chase?
Or is it really that you believe this is a better way to run your business?
Right. I think there is a little bit of kind of neither fish nor fowl here.
So you're not really looking like a commercial bank, which I know how to think about and understand.
You're not really looking like an alternative asset manager like Blackstone, which I know how to think about.
You're not really looking like a hedge fund with an investment bank stable to it, which I know how to think about.
You're kind of a mix of all those things.
You're right, Felix.
One of the reactions to that is, well, maybe I'm none of those things.
I'm not getting valued for what I want to be valued for.
And so they start to ditch it.
And the striking thing to me, Felix, to your comment, is they kind of ditched it early.
It's only been a couple of years.
He announced it three to four years ago as his big thing, and he's basically backtracked.
My concern is there may be more problems there than we know about for them to ditch it.
So maybe the deposit base is just really high cost.
Maybe the loans are really bad.
And so it's kind of revealing.
And then the other piece of it is, I feel like every bank wants to become this fee collection machine.
And wealth management is what we're going to do.
And it turns out that too has kind of gotten demoted.
And now we're back to this rollicking trading house and investment bank, which is serving corporate clients, which is where Goldman was 20 years ago.
And so it's interesting that, in a way, they're going back to that after a lot of experimentation.
Can I ask you about the importance of the market views of what the firm is doing?
So in the course of all of these changes, one of the things that they do is they combine their investment banking business into trading business.
And when you read both the transcript of the analyst call and if you read the interpretation why they're doing this, essentially everybody is saying they're doing this because that's how everyone else is organized.
And that makes it easier to compare Goldman against everyone else.
That, to me, is really just not such a fabulous argument for any organizational choice.
I'm curious what you're thinking, just from a strictly sort of financial point of view, is comparability across businesses such a big issue that I can essentially not afford to make idiosyncratic choices because I'm getting hammered in the markets because the markets don't quite understand what I'm
doing, which flies in the face of a sense of differentiation that probably comes with different organizational choices.
The first thing to say is whenever somebody says something like, we're going to reorganize this because we're not as comparable to other institutions and financial markets don't get us.
My initial reaction is always, it's a little bit of an excuse for a poorly performing stock.
The world doesn't understand how great we are, and so it's a way of shifting blame.
If we just reorganize and show our numbers in a different way, everyone will understand better who we are and why we're great.
This remarkably highly respected financial firm has not been a great steward of capital for their shareholders for a long, long time, like 20 years.
There is this underlying sense of, wait a second, we haven't moved in a long time, and what are we going to do about it?
One natural thing to do is reorganize and make it so that we can blame markets for not understanding who we are.
In fact, on that front, it's more puzzling his signature move a couple of years back to separate asset management and private wealth management.
There you could say maybe a basic skill base is very similar to both of these businesses, and so they belong together, but then his signature move was to separate the two, and now he reverses.
So even if you believe ultimately it's sort of a resource -based view of why you organize and how you organize, if that's the logic, neither the first reorganization nor the second one really follows that pattern in a strict sense.
And then when you say, no, this is all about showing the market how well we do on various fronts so that we get credit for it, by moving markets under asset management and private wealth management, where it's going to be a tiny, tiny, tiny business relative to everything else.
I mean, we will see how they will report it and how open they will be, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can't really see anything because it's just too small relative to everything else.
Which I think is the intention.
I assume that is the intention, which is to basically let it go into the weeds.
I think the broader story here for me is also to try to understand how such a highly valued and highly respected bank can kind of lose their way and not really suffer many consequences from it.
And so I think the other piece that's interesting to me is if you look across the CEOs of our major banks in the US, so you look at Morgan Stanley, you look at JP Morgan, you look at Bank of America, the CEOs have been there a long time, 12, 15 years a piece.
And similarly, in Goldman's case, Lloyd Blankfein before David Solomon, these folks have stuck around a long time and they're not great stock performers and there's little governance of them in a way.
And I think one of the things that has happened post Dodd -Frank is the governance of these organizations has kind of gone down because nobody can take a stake in those businesses without being called a bank themselves.
So no activist will take a run at them.
And in effect, the only governance mechanism is the regulator.
And so I have come to wonder why and how these banks are kind of not doing great by many, many measures.
And they're just kind of muddling along with the same kind of leadership.
And it's made me wonder if at the center of it is some kind of a governance failure, which is, I think endemic and maybe associated with the regulatory approach, which they complain about because they don't like the risk taking aspects.
But I wonder if the bigger problem is a little bit of a governance problem.
Yeah. And maybe the other thing that has happened in banking, which is interesting to me, is because of the explosion of the importance of IT, investments in information technology are now of a magnitude that was unimaginable not so long ago.
I mean, you remember after the financial crisis when we had this conversation, are the big banks too big to fail?
And we put in all of these regulations and what happens next?
Oh, my God, they're so much bigger than they used to be even during the crisis.
And much of this has to do with just IT spending.
JP Morgan spends $12 billion a year on IT.
It's bigger technology businesses than most technology business that we think of as technology businesses.
It's astounding when you think about it, right?
It's astounding when you think about it.
I think they like to say that they employ more technologists than Google, which is really like mind -bending.
But of course, what this means is, at least in this portion of banking, economies of scale are now so important that they essentially don't really have competition or they don't have a competition that matches the kind of value proposition that these big banks have.
And so it's the regulation on one part, but then just sheer size and what size means in these businesses right now.
Think about all the issues with security that we have, and then just how we hear so little about issues with security in the financial services sector.
And of course, in part is because they're probably not talking about the stuff that actually happens, but also my senses are really good about it.
Yeah, they are just more fortified than many other businesses.
And that, of course, has important competitive consequences.
Yeah, I agree. You're right that it's about scale and it creates these advantages that are really quite unique.
But there's also now questions for these folks like, what did you get for that $12 billion?
Yes, maybe you're getting barriers, but $12 billion is a lot of capital to put to work.
And what are we really doing?
That's right. But I think in a way, this is going to become a really interesting space to watch because these kinds of moves at Goldman and these reversals really kind of complete somersaults within the span of a couple of years on basic strategy decisions.
It's really, I think, going to be more the norm for that industry going forward because it's been a little bit comfortable, especially if there was some external force.
In a way, part of me feels the reason we haven't seen more of these things get turned upside down a little bit more is the absence of these external forces.
But these announcements make me wonder if we're beginning to start to see rumblings of that happening a little bit more.
And it's interesting to me to think about the skill set that is required in order to succeed.
Much of FinTech, I think, doesn't really pose that many challenges because it's more of the same.
Maybe you have a better app, maybe it's a little more convenient, who knows exactly.
But among the very best FinTech companies, the kinds of products, the kinds of things that you see now, I do think in some sense they require a different sensibility and a different skill set.
So if you think about a company like Klarna, they now have this search engine that allows you to shop across platform and shop across businesses.
They have shoppable video content.
They have a platform that is essentially like a little gig economy for marketing professionals.
I think half a million of them that help you with marketing campaigns and then Klarna will provide the data that supports these events.
When I think about the skill set, what the big banks are really good at, what they're doing and what they're good at seems quite distinct from at least say like a Klarna model that pushes in a way I have no idea whether that's the future of FinTech.
But if the future of FinTech looks that way, I'm not super confident that I see a million things that the big institutions do that look like these kinds of initiatives.
Well, I think that's the really biggest existential question of all for the big banks, which is who are you and what are you doing distinctly well?
And that I think is completely unresolved.
And maybe the answer is we commit capital and we trade and we do investment banking.
And that's a good answer for Goldman.
And it may be a good answer for Morgan Stanley.
But like what is Citi?
I mean, Citi is another organization that we have to really figure out what you're doing distinctly well.
And these massive franchises, they're getting reinvented.
But to your point, Felix, it doesn't feel like they're getting reinvented in the direction of where the novelty and innovation is.
And I kind of chalk that up to governance.
To me, that feels like bad governance.
But it could also be your story, which is they're so insulated from competition because of their scale that they're just doing so well.
That could be true as well.
Anyway, so that'll be really interesting to watch.
OK, Felix, robots and the future of technology.
Tell me. Yes. So robots and AI, of course, is here and is here to stay.
And we see massive investments.
It's now big enough in manufacturing that you can literally see the connection between investments and robots.
And overall productivity in the economy.
And it seems to me we sort of started in factories, mostly in manufacturing.
And now we're pushing more and more technology towards everyday interaction with consumers.
Right. And there, at least my casual observation is the experience is much more mixed.
And I see as many companies pulling back as I see bold, new initiatives that really changed the way we live.
And I give you a couple of examples.
So take last mile delivery.
It's like this big unsolved problem in all of e -commerce, in particular for smaller purchases.
We just don't have economic models that will give you products at low cost to your doorstep.
What do we hear? FedEx shut down its effort.
Rokso tried really seriously to have near term opportunities that in a local radius, these robots will be deployed to bring you packages and so on and so on.
And they completely abandoned that offer.
And interestingly, in the same time that Amazon also cut back on its own offer.
So the Scout program, essentially a team of 400 engineers that is now disbanded.
So it's not like a tiny thing that someone thought of for a couple of weeks.
It was like a really serious push and both of these companies now decide they're not quite ready to go in self checkout.
I don't know if you ever self checkout.
I do. But it's just astounding how problematic it is.
I saw a recent survey that has choppers about what's the likelihood that you can self checkout without someone else's assistance.
And I think it was somewhere in the low twenties because almost always there is some sort of an issue.
And then maybe my last example is chatbots.
The last thing anyone on this planet wants to do is any sort of interaction with chatbots.
And so I'm curious for your perspective.
Is the technology not ready or is there something about the innovation process that goes wrong?
I confess, I was really struck as well in the self checkout land.
I had two experiences.
One, which is Wegmans, which is an interesting supermarket store has gotten out of self checkout.
And then on the other side, I went to an Amazon to go store.
There's no one there at all.
You just literally pick up the goods and you walk out.
And if you're an Amazon Prime member, it's all controlled by cameras who observe what you take basically.
You don't even scan anything.
And it was wonderful.
I am too, I'm struck by this kind of divergence of things that are happening in the economy.
I think there's at least three theories.
One is, it's just a matter of time, technology gets better.
Second is actually worth the limits.
And the third, I'll just raise briefly here is, you know, FedEx is struggling.
And when you struggle, you cut back.
And there's another story here, which is during a recession and during a period of economic uncertainty, you just start to cut off the most innovative things.
And that could also be what's going on here.
And similarly, the recession story, one of the huge problems with self checkout is what they call shrinkage, which is a nice word for theft or losses associated with goods that go missing.
It's like double when you do self checkout, which also can be a recession indicator thing that is happening.
You're people who are worse off, who are struggling, or perhaps behaving in ways they wouldn't behave during a better period.
I confess, I don't think it's a recession story.
It could be about, well, we're just not there yet with the technology.
But my instincts are that we're just reaching the limits in some basic ways.
Limits in what people want to experience.
And limits where is the productivity benefit big enough to justify the spend?
That's right. What is that labor capital trade off happening at this edge of the frontier?
That's interesting in that the pattern that you see across successful deployment versus not so successful deployment speaks to the complexity, I think in many ways.
So you had this great experience in Amazon.
And then in your regular supermarket, you have a terrible experience.
And what's the big difference?
In part, it's just the number of skews, the complexity of knowing what you buy, is it half a pound of grapes and other grapes organic or not organic?
It's just complexity goes up in so many ways.
That's the reason why chatbots don't really work that well.
And in environments where you think, okay, so here I see the promise of the technology.
Once you think about it, there's both technological and situational differences that I think explain the performance.
So give you one example.
Starship Technologies is probably the leading company that has these local delivery robots.
And they have done something that I think is super, super smart.
Their customers are basically universities.
And once you start thinking about it, like, what's special about colleges?
Why does it work well there?
I think there's three things that come to mind.
The first one is you have a young population that is generally technology friendly.
And they have done something I think really so clever.
When one of these robots gets stuck and you help it out, it is the most polite interaction that you can possibly imagine.
The robot will thank you and it will praise you for having helped out.
In general, when the robot is trying to circle around the table or circle around the box, it's just like this model citizen.
And there's a degree of endearment, I think, that is probably harder to replicate in other circumstances.
The second one is then just situational.
It's mostly food delivery.
So it's a limited number of products from a limited number of destinations to students who are on campus, which is an environment that is generally very friendly to pedestrians.
So it's not crazy traffic and so on and so on.
It's a relatively controlled environment.
Yes, it's a relatively controlled environment.
And then the third thing that I find very interesting, and that probably goes back to your point, are there limits which we will never, ever, ever be able to overcome?
So they have these deployments in university campuses and then most in Europe, they have a few deployments because it's a company out of Estonia that have European deployments in office parks.
And you would think, well, that sort of sounds exactly the same until you realize, for some reason, college students are eating every minute of the day.
So all your deliveries are totally spread out in almost fantastic fashion.
In an office park, everybody has lunch at noon.
And that creates congestion problems and that creates peak load problems that no amount of technology will ever be able to solve.
Right. And so I think in many ways, what we're seeing is that even if technology gets better, maybe there are just really severe limits to what you can do and how you can deploy it that will never go away, irrespective of the quality of technology.
Yeah, you're right to point to places where it's working so we can understand it better.
But if I were to take your first two points, Felix, which I think has got to be right, which is the reason why the Amazon to go thing works is the limited number of SKUs.
They're relatively small places, they're cameras everywhere.
And so it totally works.
I don't mean to trivialize this, but if it's just a matter of complexity, I think that the technologist would say, that gets solved.
We'll get there. And that's not a problem.
Similarly, if it's about these regularized campus settings, well, that's where we get it first.
But we'll ultimately be able to get it better everywhere.
There's a part of me that feels like the inner technologist in me, which is not that well -formed a person.
Yes, I remember. They would say like, yeah, yeah, that's okay, we'll get there.
But I think we want to probe on this idea of the limits, because everything is going to continue to get better.
But the boundary conditions with a human being, they too could get better, Felix.
If you buy your story about young kids, like it succeeds in a university because young people love it.
Well, guess what? They're going to be dominant.
They're going to be here longer than you or I are going to be here.
So maybe it's just a matter of time.
Yeah. But the alternative hypothesis is there's something about that last interaction that we don't really want it to be depersonalized.
Yeah. I don't know how I feel about that.
I think the other part of me feels like, look, there are lots of people with pretty miserable experiences that are not very pleasant.
And it's not as if we need these interactions.
It's not as if we need these jobs.
So I take both of these points, I think are really important.
But so say think about the number of passengers that public transportation can bring to a city center.
As long as autonomous vehicles or robots or whatever you call them, as long as they roughly need the same space, autonomous vehicles will always be useless in the city center, because the density of public transportation can just not be replicated if anyone sits in their own vehicles.
So I think there's that kind of stuff.
But maybe more importantly, if we already know that these consumer experiences are going to be terrible because we're not quite there yet.
Say we're both optimistic.
Eventually, technology will get there.
How did we get into a situation where we deploy so much technology that is clearly not ready for primetime?
Right. And the puzzle here is, in my interaction with business people, I meet so many people who take customer experiences so seriously.
Their professional identities are built around better understanding of customers and always like this ambition to do the best thing that you can do for customers.
And then at the same time, we have this drastic failure, where we're doing things like think chatbots.
These things are clearly not ready for primetime.
How are they still around in a world where we all claim that customer centricity reigns supreme.
What explains that?
Well, that is interesting.
One story one could tell is that the technologists succeed well when they're operating in relative isolation.
So think the robots on the factory floor.
So there are obviously labor issues to be thought about, but one can optimize that production process with kind of an engineering mentality.
And that is all you need to solve that problem.
Yeah, thinking about shrinkage and thinking about those issues at the customer interaction are more complicated and they require inside organizations to think across boundaries and to think about customers and marketing folks.
It requires a multi dimensional perspective, which is just not true on the factory floor.
I'm not trying to minimize what happens on the factory floor.
I understand what happens is complicated, but it doesn't require things that span an organization where you have to get different types of people to cooperate and think hard about that kind of problem.
I don't know if that would explain it completely Felix, but maybe that's what's going on.
That's an interesting argument because I think what you're saying is these are technologies that only get better when they're deployed.
In part, it's the learning that is associated with you can test these things in laboratories as much as you want.
But you will never really get them to where they need to be in order to create great customer experiences.
And so there's something special about AI and machine learning in that it's about these algorithms that get better and these procedures, the whole processes that get better.
Exactly. And so you need lots of experiences in order to build the sophistication that is eventually needed.
That still leaves open the question.
If you know it's horrible, why is it that 10 % of your website traffic has this impossible chatbot experience and everyone else is spared until it gets a little better?
And maybe one way to answer this is the software industry, even before machine learning, I think, has just gotten very used to essentially bringing out products that don't really work.
The kinds of things that are unthinkable if you're an airplane manufacturer, or if you're a car manufacturer.
That's interesting.
You bring out products at a time when with reasonable confidence you can say nothing will go wrong.
And software for some reason, at least in the consumer space is, yeah, of course, it's not going to work because it's the beta release.
And what do you expect?
Which is, by the way, can be a fantastic mentality.
But now I think we're doing it at a scale, and we're doing it in everyday applications that I think are ridiculous.
The other thing that we're doing is the moment we launched this chatbot, we hide the phone number that you can call on the website in a way that makes it basically impossible for 99 % of humanity to call anyone because that saves cost.
And breeds a kind of cynicism that can possibly be good for business.
I have a feeling you had a really bad chatbot experience.
I have never had a good chatbot experience.
But you're isolating what I think is a deep conundrum, which is if this technology is heavily based on learning by doing, which is you have to put it out into the world to learn.
And yet it is happening in a setting that is highly heterogeneous, is very complex, and is not like the usual kind of B2B software release.
Then you're impacting lots and lots of people, and there can be blowback.
And so the conundrum is, you know you need to do this.
And yet you know it's going to be much more costly than it was in these other settings when you're used to doing it.
To go back to this recession explanation, there is a piece of me that wonders if these efforts like the FedEx, like the Amazon Scout, they get cut off at these moments, and then we lose the learning by doing.
And maybe the reason why we were able to do so much in the last 15, 20 years is money was loose, we were willing to push things.
And this is a part of the recession story that I don't think we talk enough about, is what happens to innovation, and what happens to these frontier projects.
Do they just get pulled?
And maybe that's a little bit of what's happening here too, which is, maybe we're pulling the plug on these frontier projects.
You know that's a darker explanation of what we're losing because we pulled the plug.
Yeah. But maybe it also speaks to, particularly in the consumer space, because we've had this experience that the most spectacular successes of technology companies were often built around network effects.
And in network effects, it's really important to be early, it's really important to have a dominant position.
That's a good point, yeah.
In many of the deployments that happen now, there still seems to be a sense of, oh my God, everybody's deploying self -checkout, they have to do self -checkout also.
When in fact, why aren't you a slow second mover?
Yeah, it's a great point.
Wait until the thing is seemingly ready, because I have not really seen the supermarket where people are really upset because there's no self -checkout.
No, that's a great point, which is like this platform mentality and this race to be first is not at all applicable.
Doesn't play here. Yeah.
I don't think so. I don't think so either, yeah.
In particular, a supermarket chain like Wegman that you mentioned to your earlier point, because they, I think, have a better customer experience overall, the way they're positioned against their competition is something of a better experience.
And that they're pulling back, I think is actually really indicative of maybe a better strategy, maybe a better way to think about this, which then gets us back to your conundrum.
If everybody's holding back...
Yeah. Of course, we will never get the progress that maybe eventually we would love to have.
Yeah. The thing I find fascinating about this is so much of the way we think about this is a race.
Yeah. We have to be first.
Yeah. And we've been thinking like that for the last 10 or 15 years, like crazy on steroids.
And that's an artifact of a very particular setting, actually.
It's not generically true.
And so this can just be a setting where Wegman says, I don't need to do this.
We'll wait and we'll see.
Once it's ready, once it's great...
Yeah. The other thing is almost all of these technologies that get pushed to consumers require consumers to learn a bunch of things.
Right. I never really scam products before self checkout and you can be better at it and you learn a thing or two that work or don't work.
So the other benefit of being a second mover is that by the time you deploy, your customers will have built the skill.
That's right. And all these early mistakes where you can find the code and where you don't know what you can and what you cannot do, those issues will have gone away.
Yeah. So praise to the second mover.
Yeah. Okay. So we should debrief about your horrible chatbot experience.
It sounds really bad.
It is pretty horrendous.
All right. Recommendations.
Felix, what do you got?
I recommend an article in The New Yorker by Rifka.
I think it's Galgin.
I'm not exactly sure how to say the last name.
And it's about the signs and emotions of sound.
The context is the renovation of the Lincoln Center Symphony Hall that is now ready.
And I was really fascinated because I had always this experience that you go to some of these very old concert halls and the sound is just spectacular.
And I'm thinking about, well, when they built this thing, they had essentially no technology to speak of and somehow they got it exactly right.
And then many of the newer halls, sometimes it's okay, but sometimes it's also not so great.
And so I've always been fascinated by how is it that with all the signs and everything we have, it's still so difficult to predict whether a new hall will sound good.
And the article does a really fabulous job at explaining why it is, how you build the halls, but also how you experience sound in the first place.
It's a really fabulous piece.
That sounds great. It reminds me of this, I don't know if you saw this other New Yorker article about sound, which was about the sound an electric vehicle makes.
Oh, no, I didn't see this.
Well, it just turns out that like EVs don't need to make any sound.
Yes. But they made it make a sound because they thought it was important to have it make a sound.
And so the question is, when everything's electric, what sound will you hear?
Yeah. And so they're like sound engineers trying to figure it out.
It's fantastic. It's like the shutter on your iPhone.
Right. There's no shutter.
Like, why should it make a shutter sound?
Exactly. And it's exactly the same thing.
So interesting. What do you have for us?
Something considerably lower brow and like a thoughtful New Yorker article.
Oh, good. It's all about balance.
Yeah, exactly. So there's this comedian who is really just fascinating and weird and crazy.
His name is Nathan Fielder.
I don't know if you've ever come across him.
No, I have not. So he had a special this summer on HBO Max called The Rehearsal.
And prior to that, he had a show called Nathan for You.
And it is just bizarre.
So the rehearsal was this six or eight episode special where he basically helped people who were very nervous about having an interaction.
So, for example, there's this man who has to tell his friend a secret from his life and he's really nervous about how she will react.
Okay. And so he basically does a rehearsal.
So he builds the setting where this conversation is going to happen and then he role plays it with actors and actresses.
And he goes through a rehearsal.
Oh, my God. But the whole show becomes so meta.
He ends up working with this woman who wants to know what it's like to have a child.
So he gets a house and he has child actors who come in.
So this is not live comedy.
This is sort of staged and produced.
It is completely staged and produced.
I have to say seldom have I just been like slack jawed during a show where I'm like, I can't believe this is happening.
And there are lots of ethical questions, like he uses child actors to basically replicate what it's like to have children in this setting.
Oh, wow. It ends up being about him and his experience and what this other person is doing and just totally bizarre.
So the rehearsal is my recommendation on HBO Max.
And Nathan Fielder generally, he's just a wacky comedian.
That sounds fabulous.
Can't wait to check it out.
And this is it for today.
Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
Thank you.
