Ted Audio Collective Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Felix.
And I'm Mi here. And how are you guys doing tonight?
Okay, I just got to stop because I just had the most amazing thing happen to me on the way over here.
Really? I'm walking across campus.
Okay. And I see literally three feet away a red -tailed hawk on the ground with a squirrel.
No. No. In a life and death struggle?
Actually, this is the thing that was crazy.
The squirrel was still alive but stunned and disabled.
And the red -tailed hawk was just standing above it.
I have never been that close to a bird of prey.
It was stunning. I got to just tell you.
And by the way, so many jokes were running through my head, like on the HBS campus.
It's not exactly the same thing.
Oh, crazy. No, but it's traumatic, right?
It was really, really beautiful.
Wait, you would describe it as beautiful or traumatic and sad?
Both. It was just the whole cycle of life.
And to see a bird of that size and to see it so up close, I've never had something like that happen to me before.
Anyway, that was crazy.
That is an amazing story.
The squirrel was big, and I don't think the hawk knew what to do because he was just sitting there with it.
He couldn't carry it away, and so he was just guarding it.
He was probably thinking dinner or breakfast.
Right, but also like three feet away, you would think like humans would disturb it, and he was undisturbed.
But was there any part of you that was tempted to intervene?
Oh, God, no. No, not at all.
Try to shoo it away and protect the squirrel?
A defender of squirrels?
Yeah, just like your instinct.
No, I didn't have any paternal instinct towards the squirrel.
Wow. Wow, what a story.
It is. I don't know how to segue from this story.
Sorry. It was truly crazy.
Felix, how was your day?
Was it as dramatic?
No, I actually had a fabulous day.
I taught the first session where we had some audience online, some executives in the Shanghai Center because we can't travel to China.
Yeah. And so it was both hybrid, but also in very different locations.
And we tried to have a case discussion, which was both exhilarating and really difficult.
And this is, of course, in two languages.
Oh, wow. But that's cool, though, with the simultaneous translation.
That is great. But anyway, this is going to be a fun episode because we're going to talk about the streaming wars.
And then, here, you brought in a related topic.
Well, right. So the first segment is about the business of streaming, but there's a whole cultural kind of content piece to what's going on in streaming.
And I'd just like to get your thoughts about what you think is happening in the content space.
Yeah, perfect. Okay, so it's been a while since we talked about streaming wars.
Yeah. So I wanted to start out by talking about Netflix first.
Last week, they announced earnings.
They had a good quarter.
They accumulated four million additional subscribers globally, which was better than what people expected, I think.
So let's start with them.
Are you guys up or down on what Netflix appears to be doing?
As always, I just think Netflix is on fire and it's an amazing business.
One of the big changes since we last spoke about it is that, of course, they're now generating sustainable free cash flow.
So two billion dollars before the pandemic and then the pandemic obviously was difficult.
They were very profitable because they didn't really spend money on new content because you couldn't do production.
But the broader outlook just looks like they have finally turned the corner.
But also, they're just adding subscribers in a really nice way.
And I think often when we talk about added subscribers, the view from the US is who on earth doesn't have Netflix?
Because basically, it's like market penetration, 135 percent.
But when you look at where they grow, it's Western Europe, it's richer countries in Asia, and there's so much runway to go.
I mean, when you think about where they might go from here, I am just super excited.
So look at the total television market.
That's globally speaking about four hundred and fifty billion dollars.
And then ask how much of it is old fashion subscriptions?
So cable and similar kinds of subscriptions.
That's 40 percent of that market.
How much is OTT? So Netflix and others.
That's only 13 percent.
So imagine like if they just grab half the share of what traditional subscription is.
Oh, my God, this business is just amazing.
Yeah. You know, Felix, I remember the last time we spoke about Netflix.
It might have been a couple of years ago.
You went pretty deep in describing their strategy.
On the one hand, they're known for their high profile shows, their big budget shows.
Yeah. But you described how they were essentially a house of niches.
They invest heavily in these niche sub genres that are so specific and yet so comprehensive.
So, for example, they have dozens and dozens of Bollywood titles, the implication being that on the one hand, they have to spend a lot of money on big budget productions.
But on the other hand, they're also sprinkling smaller hyper local investments all around the world, which when we talked about it back then struck me, and I don't think I was the only one, as being bold, risky, expensive.
And I wasn't convinced it would pay off.
And I have to say that since we've had that conversation, they have begun to prove out that strategy.
And so one of the most incredible things that has happened in the last few weeks is to watch a single show like Squid Game create upward movement in the stock price, which seems sort of nonsensical.
It's just one show until you realize that this particular show, it represents such a validation of that strategy.
So, for example, it costs only 20 million dollars to produce.
Wow, that's incredible.
And it was also the kind of show only Netflix is in the position to pull off because it required them to locate a team in Korea, provide the resources locally to make that show happen, and then use its unbelievable heft to launch the show simultaneously in 37 different countries around the world, fully
dubbed, subtitled in multiple languages.
In other words, it is hyper -local and hyper -global at the same time.
Yeah. To create that kind of fire hose of content and keep it going and to constantly replenish that fire hose, it is so hard.
I don't know. Here.
Yeah, no, I'm always happy to rain on the parade.
I'm so happy we have you.
Yeah, exactly. You know, I just don't get it.
I mean, so we had about a year and a half, two years, which is extremely unprecedented because of the pandemic, which created the most benevolent conditions for Netflix, you can imagine.
2021 is looking like the recipe is the same as ever, which is you spend a ton of money on content, and you just keep spending money on content and content.
And it's a never -ending story.
And what do we see on the subscriber base?
It is true. There is some good news, which is churn rates are remarkably low.
And that is amazing for Netflix.
They are very sticky.
But in terms of growth, there is nothing growing in the U .S.
All the growth is happening in Asia and Western Europe, Felix, as you said.
But what happens over time is just going to be more and more spending on content.
So I don't really get it.
I admire what they've done in the sense of, wow, they spent a lot of money on content.
But that doesn't mean their business model is that great.
It just means that they're really good at spending a lot of money on content.
And they figured out that that is the way to sustain subscriber growth.
But when we talk about a $300 billion market cap and it's trading at 10 times revenue, I have a hard time.
It is amazing to watch them spend money.
And it is amazing to see them produce content.
But is it any better a business than it was a year and a half ago?
Or has it just been sustained by remarkably benevolent conditions?
I don't think it's any different than it was pre -pandemic.
I really don't. But I think what has changed my attitude toward it is I actually see it beginning to play out.
In other words, if you had told me back then that they could penetrate all of these smaller and mid -sized countries and begin to actually source quality content that might then be interesting to the rest of the world, I would have told you, no, come on.
That is admirable, absolutely.
And then if you told me that they were going to generate enough content to get sizable numbers of people in countries in Asia, for example, to begin to sign up for Netflix, I would say, I don't know.
I need to see it to believe it.
In other words, the execution piece of this has been more impressive than I expected.
Well, I just want to be clear.
I think Sarandos and his spending on content is brilliant.
But I don't know if it's a great business.
And this is where I get a little stuck.
But I'm sure you have a thoughtful way to think about this, which is, what is it that's going to create a sustainable advantage that doesn't get replicated, that doesn't get outspent, that makes people sticky?
I would say a big part of it is taste for entertainment are very diverse.
There is, of course, movies and shows that appeal to many people.
But as a rule, the things we really end up loving, you know, they speak to relatively small groups of people.
Now, given that all production is fixed cost, many pieces of content cannot be produced unless you have amazing scale.
If you imagine, like, we're doing something on boxing.
If we were constrained to the U .S.
market, I would probably do a mediocre show because just the finances don't work out.
The moment I have a truly global market, that show now becomes feasible.
And I don't have much competition because no one else can do those things.
Prices have essentially doubled over the last five years.
So they went from six, seven dollars to now 14, 15 in most of the markets.
And the question is, like, why don't people jump ship?
There's lots of options now.
And if you look at consumer surveys and they said, imagine a world in which you could only keep one service.
You have to give up everything else.
Like, which one would you keep?
Guess what? Half the people say they will keep Netflix.
And I think that has to do with more finely tailored content that speaks not to mass audiences.
I think that's exactly right.
But we just have yet to see how Apple and Amazon flex scale and they can flex scale as well.
I think those are apples to orange comparisons because Netflix is a specialist.
Amazon is a generalist and they are many different businesses.
I think maybe a pure comparison would be Netflix versus Disney, which is really in the entertainment business.
And I think a year ago, if you had asked me, I would have said, even though Netflix is bigger, Disney has two advantages over Netflix.
The first advantage that Disney has over Netflix, Netflix has a very simple business model.
It's focused on maximizing the lifetime value of a subscriber, whereas Disney is focused on maximizing the lifetime value of its IP, whether that's Iron Man or Toy Story.
And it is able to brand and monetize IP better than maybe any entertainment business in the history of entertainment business.
And then the second advantage that Disney has is that it's not a fire hose.
It's a flywheel, which is partly how it monetizes its IP through its theme parks and its merchandise.
It's got a very diversified business model.
Today, if you asked me, I would say both of those advantages.
It's not so clear anymore.
So number one, this is to Felix's point.
There is no other company in the world that's capable of taking a piece of IP out of a country like India or Korea or whatever and putting it on 200 million devices at the same time around the world and creating an overnight hit.
And then the second point, they are diversifying the business now.
I mean, they have quietly launched merch.
They're selling merch now.
They are investing in gaming.
And these are not easy businesses, particularly gaming.
But it definitely shows that they are thinking more expansively about the model.
I think Amazon and Apple are playing two very different games there.
I understand the broad scope of Amazon.
But when you think about their video business only, do you think their ambitions in video are so different from the ambitions from Netflix?
Yeah, in the sense that I think Amazon would be perfectly happy if they never made a penny off of their video business.
I mean, I think they think of it as being so synergistic with everything else they're doing.
In many ways, almost like Apple.
I mean, I think Apple and Amazon are playing a very different game.
And I think the game they're playing has to do more with engagement.
It has to do more about data collection.
But for the specialists like Netflix, it's hard to compete with the specialist, but it doesn't mean you can't coexist with one.
So I think Amazon and Apple, I don't know that they have ambitions to replace Netflix.
I mean, I think if anything in the last few years have demonstrated that hour and by hour, I mean humanity, our appetite for video content is insatiable.
Unlimited. But mehir, you were going to say something.
Well, I was going to say the other interesting thing that came out of Netflix this week was an increased emphasis on reporting data on viewership.
So they are now giving details about hours on specific films, right?
Which they never did before.
I wonder what you made of that.
Because to me, that signaled maybe advertising, which is what we see at other players like Paramount and NBC and Peacock and all these folks.
You get a lower cost subscription with ads and then you get a higher cost subscription without ads.
And I wonder if they're going to go there, which would be a huge potential revenue stream and very interesting.
But they are now becoming much more explicit about saying, look at our quality of engagement and let me show it to you and prove it to you in a way that they never did before.
And I don't know what that presage is, but it feels like something's coming.
Yeah, I 100 % agree with you.
And I think they have been really nervous about this for a long time, precisely for the reasons that you mentioned.
If they start to churn out viewers, then the whole thing falls apart.
And I think particularly in the West, they have so trained people to not have ads.
I mean, this is the company that pioneered the minute the episode ends.
There's literally a countdown 5 -4 -3 -2 -1 to the next episode.
I love that. So they do not want you going to the kitchen to get a drink of water, but the game is very different once you are trying to accumulate subscribers in parts of the world where $8, $9 a month is simply too high.
And once you go to parts of the world where you have to have a much lower entry price point, you have to begin to think about having advertising as a free option in some of those parts of the world.
And they are, in fact, experimenting, right?
This is what you get to do if you're on Netflix.
You're at a scale where you can pick a country, I think it's Kenya, and they've decided to basically try zero -cost subscription and run a little experiment.
That's really fascinating.
The global story is just amazing.
Like when you look at where they test the video games, it's Poland, Spain, Italy.
You just have so many opportunities to try things in different markets.
So you guys, as you look at the streaming landscape more broadly, we haven't even talked about, I don't know, HBO Max.
We haven't even talked about Apple.
What do you see more broadly happening in this space?
So first is, I think you're right, there are these players like Discovery buying HBO Max.
Super interesting to see how that bundle evolves and how they put it together.
But you know, if you ask me overall, is this an exciting space?
I guess I'm again going to be a little contrary, which is I'm not sure.
I see this as a place where capital is going to be like enormously rewarded.
And that's because of some of these dynamics.
You have to spend and spend and spend on content, which is Netflix's recipe for success.
In that world, I look at these generalist players, especially Amazon, maybe more than Apple, and I think the generalists are really in a great, great position.
So I'm not sure I like the industry as a whole, but if I were to go into it, I would think, man, if you can put a lot of capital to work and spend and not care about making money, then that sure feels like a recipe for success more than anyone else might have a recipe for success.
One of the things that the data remind me of is just how difficult it is to know the size of the addressable market.
If you go back to the early days of streaming services, people said, maybe I will have a second service.
And then before the pandemic, we were at three and now we're at four to five and people spend, on average, about $55.
And so just if you look at aggregate statistics, we probably added another 200 million subscriptions in the last two or three years alone.
So Disney's now at 100 million.
Apple is at 34 million.
Hulu is at 40 million.
It is just like what you said earlier, like this appetite for content is really just quite amazing to see.
And then the other thing that I just love about this development is unlike in many other industries where you see so many copycat strategies.
Here in really interesting ways, everybody has a slightly different approach.
So there's the ecosystem approach that I think is important for Apple and for Amazon.
Hulu has now sort of found its niche in the quick replay of television episodes that you can't quite catch anywhere else.
Every big streamer has found its home and its rhythm and a way to appeal to audiences, which I just find really amazing that there are so many different ways of basically making use of a very similar opportunity.
One way to think about what's happening is what a feast for consumers, like just what an unbelievable feast, right?
And if you think about this as being an incredible feast for consumers, you can almost begin to separate the players who are serving up video content as the meal, and then others who are serving it up almost as this kind of bait, for lack of a better word.
So with Netflix, it's the meal.
The product they're selling is the video content.
With Amazon and with Apple, it's just one mechanism to bring you into a much, much broader ecosystem.
And they can then monetize your engagement in lots and lots of different ways.
And then the final thing I'll say is that it's like getting a feast that we've never actually had to pay full price for.
So in the case of Netflix, it's been subsidized by investors.
In the case of Amazon and Apple, the content is being subsidized by other parts of the business.
So we've never actually had to pay for all of this quality we're getting.
And on the one hand, it's kind of fantastic.
On the other hand, maybe this is what dystopia feels like, guys, where we're just sitting sort of fat and happy and we don't realize we're all pawns in some large engagement machine.
But I think, Yang Nhi, that's exactly it, which is, this is great for consumers.
Are these great businesses?
Those are different questions.
But value creation is not a terrible way to think about the value of business to society.
How much of it do traditional investors capture?
That's a different question.
You can have businesses that are amazing at value creation, and you're basically financing it off the optimism of people who have money to invest.
That's okay. Yeah. So maybe we should come back in a year or two and check in on what's happening with these companies.
What do you say? We should.
Okay, me here. So the other piece of this streaming thing that's going on in the world is just to think about the kinds of content that have become so popular and what the patterns are.
When you look across the landscape, what are the patterns in content creation that are really striking to you?
And what does it say about us?
So I see lots of shows that I, for lack of a better term, would call self -care TV.
It's like we're stressed, we're at home.
I just want to live in a world that is happier, more interesting.
So some of the shows that I'm thinking of, have you seen Dreamhouse Makeover on Netflix?
It's basically imagine your space, that apartment that you live in, except 50 times better.
The Instant Hotel, I think is an amazing show where people try to convert their spaces into Airbnb locations and then they judge each other how good a job they did.
And maybe my favorite Google box is you watch people watching TV.
Oh, yeah. In the UK, that's huge.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
There's something about escapism that is really front and center.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
So I am trying to sort of figure out, is this part of a self -improvement trend, do you think, Felix?
Most of these things are completely unrealistic for you to do, right?
I think part of the relief is like, oh, my God, I'm so glad I don't have to go through one of these renovations.
I think Felix, the other thing that's interesting about those shows is they have this cadence, which is predictable and comforting.
That's so true. It's like a law and order episode, right?
Like the first half of the cops and the second half is the trial.
And then you exactly know what's going to happen.
You see the space, and then you're going to see the space at the end.
And then there's going to be tension in the middle, and there's the judges.
It has this predictability to it that has enough variation because the people are different and the setting is different.
But it just is so reassuring.
It's like a warm blanket.
Yeah, so true. Yeah, that's a great observation.
And there is something about the vicarious satisfaction of the entire arc from it being a disaster to it being renovated.
It's really nice. And it's kind of the way I feel when I watch cooking shows.
You finish the show, and you feel like you accomplished something, and you were just watching.
That's hilarious. And I do think there is something about the predictability, Mejira, to your point.
It's like the opposite of watching live sports, where it can end in any way.
Right, right, right, right.
The disaster, it can end in the most unsatisfying way.
It's like comfort TV to watch these things go.
Yes. By the way, my favorite version of that is Baking Impossible, which is a baking engineering show on Netflix.
So you get the comfort of baking, but then they build these massive structures.
And you, at the end of it, young me, feel like you helped.
Like you were in there constructing with them, even if you weren't.
That's crazy. By the way, you're maybe the third person who mentioned that show to me this last week.
I've heard it's amazing.
It is so good. It's like stunningly good.
So I have a trend, which I would love your help in figuring out.
What is it with our insatiable appetite for watching the mega -rich do their things?
I'm talking about shows like Billions, Succession, Gossip Girl, Real Housewives, Big Little Lies, The White Lotus, The Kardashians.
I mean, it just goes on and on.
And I don't have a grand theory for why all of these shows are so satisfying to watch.
But I do have a random hypothesis.
Tell us. Well, so okay.
One hypothesis is it's a kind of schadenfreude.
But you don't have to feel guilty about your negative feelings.
In other words, we don't like to knock people who are down on their luck or a disadvantage.
But it is totally okay to be contemptuous of people who are super privileged and entitled.
Maybe it's a form of voyeurism because the shows are so visually sumptuous.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, actually.
I watched this show, have you seen Below Deck?
He's gigantic yachts.
Oh my God, who's even building these kinds of shows?
It's so sumptuous. And then I was thinking, maybe it's a kind of anthropology.
Because the mega -rich really do seem to have their own distinct culture that transcends any kind of national boundaries.
So maybe we like just observing this different breed of human being.
I mean, I don't know.
I have all these theories.
I have no idea what's going on.
So I think this is also so fascinating.
And by the way, I think HBO Max has a corner on this market because they seem to specialize in doing that.
They're so good at this.
They're so good at it.
I think you're right.
A lot of it is, effectively, our vehicles for channeling our negative sentiments towards rich people, right?
That's the schadenfreude story.
The reason is that's not enough, right?
I think it captures our ambivalence towards them, which is we both want to see them stumble and see how vain they are and see how horrible they are.
But we also, I think, want it.
Yeah. Like, oh my God, look at those shoes.
Look at those shoes and look at the way she's dressed and look at the furniture.
So it is voyeurism, but it's not just pure, like, oh, these are horrible people.
I think they're rich of oak.
So much ambivalence in us.
Because on the one hand, we want to hate them.
And then at the same time, for some of us, they look like, well, but that's kind of interesting.
And I kind of want that.
And so these dramas engage that ambivalence.
And it's often comical.
I mean, I was watching this show with a guy who owns 70 cars and he was looking for a new home.
And so then, of course, the big problem becomes like, where can you park 70 cars?
Like, what is that home like?
The whole problem is so absurd.
But super serious for him, right?
So he goes from a house to house, decides this is really beautiful, great view, everything, wonderful, 25 bathrooms, except no space for 70 cars.
The absurdity of the issues and problems that show up in these lives.
And I mean, they really are unaware of their own absurdity.
And that's why, like, if you watch a fictional show, there's always at least one character who has been thrust into the world of the mega wealthy, but they don't actually come from there.
And so they see it from a regular person's eyes.
For example, if you saw Big Little Lies, there's Shailene Woodley plays a character who's from outside.
Greg in succession.
Yes, Cousin Greg in succession.
Or the White Lotus.
Remember the spa manager?
There's always someone who's like a normal person.
Doesn't belong, yeah.
Yes, and through their eyes, you can see the absurdity of it.
But these shows, I think they are so brilliant because they tap into something very complicated in our own emotions and psyche.
Yeah. What about you, Meir?
Yeah, so those are both great.
I mean, I have one that's a little bit related to Felix, and I think it is not just reality shows, but documentaries have exploded.
And I think it's really fascinating and kind of wonderful.
So think about, like, Free Solo, young me.
You've talked about that.
I love minding the gap, which is about skateboarding.
It's like a golden era for documentaries.
And I think there's two or three things going on here.
One thing that's going on, I think, is it's pretty cheap content to produce.
So relative to a lot of content, documentaries are cheap.
But the bigger thing is, there is this turn towards looking at ourselves and trying to understand ourselves.
Like, you think about what's happening in fiction.
There's a lot of auto fiction, you know, like a lot of memoirs, like a lot of people using their lives to tell stories.
And I think there's something parallel going on with documentaries, which is, we see in these documentaries something about our lives, and it speaks to our need to kind of understand ourselves, but not in this hyper -realistic way, but like with a combination of realism, but also the creativity of a documentary
director who puts things together in this really, really interesting way.
So I just think it's been a wonderful time to be a consumer of documentaries.
And I think it says something about the economics of the business, but it also says something about us.
Has it also said something about how the genre has evolved?
So documentaries used to have a reputation for being boring.
And I think that's because they were.
I think that's right.
They were like historical.
Yeah, exactly. They were, it's like listening or watching a lecture.
And I think one of the things that's happened is that documentarians have just become so good at their craft.
And so now they are real cinematic experiences, even when they're dealing with more mundane topics, they're built on these really powerful storytelling techniques that enthrall us.
And so I think they are actually more engaging to watch.
And it raises so many interesting questions because they still sometimes have the sheen of historical record.
But in reality, there's all this creative stuff going on in the way they're putting together the pieces of the story they're telling you.
And of course, the biggest sub -trend within the documentary trend is just this crazy true crime phenomenon, which is that we seem to love the making of a murder.
We love staircase. There's so much of it.
And I don't know what that's about.
Yeah, what's going on here?
The puzzle is in a way, you know, we live in a safer society than ever in many ways.
And yet we are obsessed with these horribly dramatic events.
And I don't know. Yeah, I find it often disturbing.
Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, if it was an invented story, if it's law and order, it's sort of OK.
But if you know it's real, it's not a category that I'm drawn to for sure.
Well, I am. And I don't know why.
And I don't think I feel proud of it, Felix, to your point, which is it doesn't feel great to be watching and delving into this horrible thing that happened.
Look, when it comes to fiction, I mean, the police procedural has been around for as long as television has been around.
Absolutely. Yeah. And there's something about it being true that gives it an additional edge.
So when Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood, that was a piece of true crime nonfiction, and it was heralded because it was written like a novel.
And today that genre of book is referred to as the nonfiction novel.
It's a kind of way to write true crime that is very, very compelling.
And I think the same thing has happened with true crime documentaries.
There's a way to tell a true crime story that borrows from the techniques associated with fictional television that documentarians have just gotten so, so good at it.
And it just sort of feeds some kind of existing appetite we have.
And in a bizarre way, I think it's a different kind of comfort food for people.
They know what they're getting.
They know there's a beginning, middle, and end.
There's a narrative arc to the whole thing.
Well, you expose yourself to danger, but you're safe at home.
There's like the sense of which you interact with the scary world, but you're not really interacting with the scary world at all because you're behind the screen.
And maybe that feeds something that we need.
I don't know. It's weird.
I mean, it's an interesting observation often in local news, right?
If you happen to live in a city or in a town and no crime happened, then they report crime.
It's just from really far away.
That demand, you have to satisfy it.
You know, I sometimes get the feeling when I open up Netflix of walking into an old fashioned bookstore.
So if you remember what a bookstore felt like, you would walk in and there was a travel section and then there was a cooking section.
And then there was all the crime stories and then the romance novels and the people that would go to one section would go repeatedly.
So if you got one romance novel, you would go and get a second and a third and you would have a steady diet of that.
The people who buy cookbooks buy a lot of cookbooks.
And I'm reminded of that when I think about these content genres.
You can almost see a replication of it in Netflix.
Well, I am dying to see the home renovation show that Felix produces and the mega rich drama, Young Me, that you end up producing.
We are living the good life right here already.
We don't need anything else.
We have these beautiful microphones.
I just don't want you to come at me with an axe or something here with the trick or craft stuff.
That would not be good.
There you go. Okay, picks.
Here, what did you bring in?
Well, you know, as you noted previously, Young Me, I've been like very analog with my picks.
But given our topics today, I have to do the following, which is I have two documentaries that are music based that are spectacular.
So the first one is by Questlove and it's called Summer of Soul and it's about the 1969 Harlem Festival.
So you might have heard about Woodstock.
There was actually a concert series based in Harlem in 1969 and Questlove has made a documentary about it and it is fantastic.
But it just brings alive a moment that you just didn't know about.
And the second one is one that just came out, which is Todd Haynes has a new movie about the Velvet Underground, which is a band from the US in the 60s and 70s, really punk alternative band.
And even if you don't like the music, which is hard to believe because the Velvet Underground is awesome, it's like a different kind of documentary about a band.
So you're used to like the VH1.
You have some rocker who's talking like about the first time I heard that song.
This is way more impressionistic, way more to our conversation earlier, like somebody using the documentary form in a new way.
Interesting. To really capture a moment.
And both of them are just fantastic music documentaries.
So my picks are Summer of Soul and the Velvet Underground documentary.
Okay. So you guys, we are dating ourselves.
Yes. Because Velvet Underground and then this Questlove, that was 1969?
1969. Yeah. 1969. I didn't say like I went to it.
I just said that. I know.
I know. But then I realized that I had mentioned Truman Capote in the last one.
Anyway. Okay. But Felix, keep us young by mentioning something youthful.
I am so sorry to disappoint.
My recommendation has to do with how would you like to listen to a new symphony by Beethoven?
Oh my God. So I'm really going back.
No. I love it. Oh, we're losing our audience.
I could just hear people turning off.
No, no, no, no. It has a contemporary twist.
So he scribbled a few notes for a 10th symphony and it's probably less than a minute of music.
The scribbles are not super useful because one refers to a moto he used in the Pate Tic and another, the 5th symphony also.
So you have like these really, really tiny fragments bring in artificial intelligence.
What? They feed him these little snippets like the scribbles that we think might have been a symphony.
The machine picks up the music and it produces a symphony and then professional musicians listen to it and they say, wow, is actually not quite right in that particular sense.
So it ends up being like a super interesting collaboration between things that humans hear in particular professional musicians and then things that the machine can do.
And then after the usual machine learning million iterations, what you have now, it's totally fascinating to hear.
It really does sound like a Beethoven symphony.
And some people pointed out, does it have the genius twist that no one anticipated?
No, it's AI. It's a prediction from what exists to begin with.
But are you listening to a symphony by Beethoven that you never could have heard before machine learning?
You are pretty fascinating.
That is great. So it's modern.
See, it's not just Beethoven.
It's AI, ML. So it's hip and young as well.
Do you hear that? That is the sound of Beethoven rolling over in his grave.
OK, so I have a recommendation that will hopefully pull in a different demographic among our listeners.
So you know how I've gotten sort of obsessed with space?
I thought she was going to say golf.
I was like so worried, Felix.
No, no, no, no. We can talk about golf after we turn off the recording.
So you remember a few years ago, there was that news story about that object that was spotted moving past the sun, shaped kind of like a cigar at a speed that was really bewildering all the scientists that study these things.
It was about 400 meters long, 40 meters in diameter.
And this guy, Avi Loeb, who was the chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, declared that there was a possibility that it came from an intelligent civilization, not of this earth.
And this is not a crankster.
He is a serious person.
So he has written a book called Extraterrestrial, and it's about that sighting.
And it's about why this particular sighting defies all scientific explanation.
And what he infers from this is that it's possible that it came from another intelligent civilization, which I know sounds crazy.
But if you read the book, guys, the aliens are watching us.
They are. I am telling you.
In all seriousness, it is a fascinating, fascinating book, because most of the evidence in the book deals with this data that was collected over about an 11 -day period and how scientists wrestled with this data and how perplexing it was.
And if nothing else, I think it does convince you that we don't have an explanation that accounts for what we observed.
And so you can agree or disagree about, therefore, it must have come from another.
But it also really asks deeper questions about how do we know what we know?
Why are there certain ideas that we are so afraid to even entertain?
Even the story of why was it that Galileo was charged with heresy for asserting the earth circled the sun?
What was it about that assertion that just so threatened society at the time?
I found it to be utterly, utterly fascinating.
I would highly, highly recommend it.
And what's the name of the book?
It's called Extraterrestrial, the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth.
And look, if you don't want to read the whole book, there's a New Yorker article, which I'll link to as well, that kind of tells the story.
But I am telling you guys, they're watching us.
You know what? They might even be listening to this podcast.
You know, honestly, I had not heard about this.
I confess most of the recent UFO stuff I've checked out of, but this sounds intriguing.
Oh, you should check this out.
This sounds intriguing.
He is a serious person, and he really believes in listening to the data and following the data.
But it also is a really fascinating glimpse into a different discipline.
I mean, we all know our respective disciplines, but it's a really fascinating glimpse into both the norms as well as the politics of a very different discipline.
So I found it really, really fascinating.
So that's my recommendation.
That's a great part.
Fabulous. Yes. And if they're listening out there, to me is the one that recommended this in a very positive way.
OK, that's it for tonight.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
Thank you.
