Ted Audio Collective Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Youngmi and I'm here with Felix and me here.
Hey guys! So, we here came in hot today, Felix.
Yeah, because we just took off a sweater.
I think it's because we're going to talk about taxes.
He just can't believe that taxes are in the news.
You open the newspaper, taxes, taxes, taxes.
I'm not ashamed. I love it.
It's fantastic. And we'll all learn why in a few minutes.
So, this is your moment.
This is your moment where the whole country is talking about taxes.
Yeah. Your moment. Yeah.
Okay. So, I assume you want us to talk about taxes this week, me here.
Indeed. And in particular, we've had these really two interesting proposals from Elizabeth Warren and Alexandra Ocasio -Cortez about really dramatic changes in the way we think about income inequality via the tax system, and specifically, a new high rate on income and a new wealth tax.
So, I want to hear what you guys think.
Okay, and then I brought in a topic as well.
If we have time after our extended conversation on taxes.
If you have any energy left, maybe not.
So, this Gillette ad that was making the run.
You felt it was a little long, did you?
Sort of by minute 18.
Okay. But the trend more generally.
I think that particular ad represents, I wanted to get your take on.
All right. So, let's go.
Okay. Me here. Indeed.
So, there are a lot of new tax proposals, and that is because of the rising importance of income inequality in people's minds, but also the beginning of the 2020 race.
And so, I wanted to talk about these two proposals and get your reactions to them.
So, the first is coming from Alexandra Ocasio -Cortez, and she has a really interesting idea about a new top marginal tax rate of 70%.
And that would be on...
Marginal being important.
Marginal is an important word, and as Felix said, it's not 70 % on all your income.
It is, if you make, for example, $15 million.
It's 70 % on the stuff over $10 million.
And then the second proposal is a 2 % wealth tax, based on, again, your wealth or assets, and that is going to be above $50 million, and it could even go up to 3 % or 4 % if you have more than a billion dollars.
So, I guess I wanted to get your sense about whether you like these ideas, whether you think these ideas make any sense.
The wealth tax is something the U .S.
hasn't had. Other countries do have it, but they've been diminishing around the world.
And top marginal rates, like 70%, is something we haven't seen in a long time.
And, in fact, marginal rates have been declining around the world.
So, what do you make of these?
So, I'll go first. So, let me start by saying, I think these are legitimate proposals.
In other words, when Alexandria Ocasio -Cortez came out with her proposal, there were many folks who dismissed it out of hand.
I would be suspicious of anyone dismissing these out of hand.
I think these are absolutely legitimate proposals, and I like the stretching of the metaphorical Overton window, the scope of things that we're allowed to talk about.
I think this is really healthy.
To your point about income inequality, I believe inequality inherently is not a bad thing.
For any well -functioning economic system, you need some kind of reward system in place to incentivize people to work harder, study harder, take risks, make investments, and so on.
However, extreme inequality can be really destabilizing, and I think we've seen that.
And I think we've seen that with the rise of populism in lots of countries around the world.
I think the other thing you really see in this country is extreme concentrations of wealth, creating distortions in our democratic process.
So these are really serious things.
Having said that, I want to love these proposals.
I really do. I hear a butt coming.
I'm not in love with either one of these proposals.
Yeah, tell us why. One is, I think that they are more emotionally satisfying than they are effective.
So the increased marginal tax on income, it's not even that I'm against it.
I just think it will have such minimum effect.
I think there's so many ways to shelter income.
And more importantly, I think the wealthiest people in our country, they don't derive their wealth from income.
Mark Zuckerberg makes $1 a year.
His income is $1 a year.
The wealth tax, there too, there are ways to shelter wealth as well.
And we have no idea how to count this stuff.
Forbes magazine every year tries to rank the richest people in the world.
Our president thinks he's worth many billions of dollars more than other people think he's worth.
We have no idea how to count this stuff.
So anybody who offers some kind of model of how much money this wealth tax would raise, I would be really skeptical of that model.
So I think it's really important in evaluating these proposals to think about what's the problem that we want to solve.
And I can think of a few angles here.
And the way the proposals are currently, it's not always clear to me what the purpose is.
One purpose might be we want to raise more revenue.
One purpose might be almost more symbolic.
We want to live in a society where there's not a sense that some people can just make unbelievable money while other people are struggling.
And that sense is not great for us because it undermines, say, the belief in markets.
It undermines the standing of business in society.
And then I can think, well, we just want to limit the influence that people have politically.
And depending on which of these is really important, I like the proposals or I like the proposals a little less.
So to go first to the revenue generation idea, of course, as always with the tax code, people will do their best to minimize their tax exposure.
I'm most skeptical when it comes to people will have less influence in politics.
Money will be less because there, we have not only supply, we have demand.
We have a class of politicians who have grown up, who spend hundreds, thousands of hours raising money for their next political races.
And I don't think a wealth or an income tax will change that all that much.
But if it's about the symbolism of not allowing people to get away with unbelievable wealth or unbelievably high income, I think it will actually be, you know, if that contributes to feeling there are political mechanisms to keep and check the kinds of outcomes.
So just let me make sure I understand that argument.
That you're going to pacify the people by having a stupid tax instrument.
No, but whether or not it's stupid depends on what we try to achieve, right?
If there's a sense that these crazy markets, they just produce incredibly rich people.
If it undermines that tendency, that trend to not believe in markets, I don't think the, if in fact it does that, I don't think the proposal is a stupid proposal.
I think I come out a little more harshly than you guys in the sense of I appreciate the goal.
I think the instruments are pretty bad.
So first the 70 % on the top marginal rate.
First thing is actually I think a new top bracket is great.
It used to be that the top bracket was like 0 .1 % of the population.
Now that top bracket is 1 % of the population because high incomes have risen so much faster than the CPI.
We deem a new top bracket like around $2 million.
But getting to 70 % rates is really complicated.
Most importantly for what you guys said, which is about shenanigans, one example today, we took the corporate rate down and now if you have a high marginal rate on labor income and you have a low corporate rate, guess what people will do is they're going to corporatize.
People have no idea how easy and powerful that is.
The second thing to say is it is about mobility and it's about the fact that there are a lot more ways to respond globally to these changes.
And so there's great work on high income taxes in Europe, on soccer stars and the way they relocate their countries very quickly in response to differential marginal tax rates.
But those are exactly the examples where you think mobility should be really high, right?
Because the soccer market is a global market anyway.
Basically no one plays in their home country.
But that's exactly right.
I mean who is getting more than $10 million?
People who are very highly mobile, not just soccer stars.
Look at what James Dyson did in the UK.
He just relocated senior management to Singapore.
I mean it is about executive talent, it is about financial talent.
How many people who currently live in New York are willing to move to Singapore for a lower tax rate?
How many people in New York are just considering that today because of taking away state and local tax exemption?
A lot. And that's a tiny relative to the kinds of tax rate we're talking about.
It's real. I mean people will move.
On the wealth tax I think it's maybe even harder and for all the reasons you said.
First is if you want to have a direct instrument to control political power, you do it via mechanisms on political power.
That's right, absolutely.
You don't go through the wealth tax.
The second thing is exactly what you said, young me, which is measurement of wealth is crazy hard and is subject to gaming.
On top of that you have this mobility issue, again, with people with great amounts of wealth moving, as we know they will.
And then finally, and I think what you both were talking about is we should have this integrated with our overall system of taxing capital.
We have dividends and capital gains taxes.
And maybe most importantly we have an estate tax.
Those are where we should go.
There's a lot of things we could be doing, but a wealth tax is crude.
And then to your point, Felix, what are we really trying to accomplish, right?
I thought what we're trying to accomplish is about income inequality.
If you want to have that conversation, then let's talk about expanding their earning of tax credit.
Like let's do something that actually would help people at the bottom in a significant way.
That is more rewarding to me than talking about these things, which I worry about.
It's interesting to me how what you're getting is you're getting politicians swinging for the fences with these proposals and trying to come up with the panacea.
Really. And I'm with you here.
I think the more effective way to address it is much more boring to point out.
Because it means closing loopholes, thinking really hard about capital gains.
How do we think about property taxes?
How do we think about estate taxes?
But it also involves things like campaign finance reform, which I think is as important in addressing inequality as anything else.
Competition policy maybe.
Nobody wants to talk about that.
Corporate governance, how we think about executive base.
I think these things are much less sexy.
It's not swinging for the fences.
I think you're so right.
I didn't really put this together in my mind, Jung -mi, the way you did, which is you cannot get headlines with small things.
You really can't. And the right answer is a whole bunch of small things, which would have much better effects, but no one's going to write a story about that.
And that's really disappointing in a way.
But I think I understand their motivation better now.
So can I push the two of you on the symbolism question?
I mean, if you imagine you're an average household in America today, and you read in your newspaper that someone just bought a $250 million apartment.
This is a hypothetical.
Exactly what's that about.
Exactly, right. Go ahead.
That's gross, right?
Look, is it gross? Yes, the answer is yes, Meher.
The answer is it's 100 % gross.
But this was the point I made earlier, which is that we're beyond the tipping point, where it used to be that wealth bred a kind of aspiration.
Wow, this is a country where if you work hard enough, you too can own a house like that.
Now the amount of resentment that wealth breeds far exceeds the amount of aspiration that it creates, which means we're beyond a tipping point.
So is the way to address that, to come up with a proposal that feels emotionally satisfying, because it's almost punitive.
This is why I think this is a problem I get.
So the reason I hesitated about is it gross, is because I don't like to think about people's consumption decisions in that way.
What I know is gross is the 2 in 20 that got him.
This is Ken Griffith you're referring to.
That's a great way to talk about it.
Yeah, and so let's not, in some ways this is all misdirected, oh, we're going to get him because we're going to like, he won't buy the $250 million apartment anymore.
And the answer is no, that's not true, he will.
And he's going to shelter his wealth in different ways.
If you care about that problem, and you want to isolate what's gross, it's about the compensation contract that rewards behavior, that is not very good behavior no matter what.
And that's the gross part.
Wait, so Felix, you're sort of arguing in favor, but you stated earlier that you don't feel that these particular policies will be that effective.
So I don't think these particular policies will be fabulous at generating unbelievable amounts of revenue.
But, you know, do I like the idea?
So let's assume for a moment the most innocent explanation of the exploding inequality that I can think of, which is globalization of markets.
Used to be you have a great idea, and that idea will play in your market, and that generates an amount of wealth.
Now, as a result of changes in the world, if you have a great idea, it's going to multiply across 190 countries, and that creates much better.
That's not the whole story, but let's just for arguments, let's assume this is it.
I like the idea of living in a place where you say you had the great idea and you built the company and everything.
But we're actually going to take some of that away in the spirit of we don't want to live in a place where some people are unbelievably rich and other people struggle paycheck to paycheck.
And to the mobility argument that you made me hear earlier, if those people want to congregate in Singapore, fine, right?
Well, but then it ends up not raising that much revenue.
And it's kind of a hollow instrument.
I agree on the revenue.
So what I hear you saying is, you know, as part of our national identity, we want to be the kind of country where we say to people, if you do something extraordinary, you will absolutely be rewarded for it.
However, there's kind of an upper limit on how wealthy we think anyone needs to be.
And this is what our level is, and if you don't like it, then that's fine, but this is what it means to be an American.
Yeah, it's a little bit like the argument.
So just to be clear, what it means to be an American is to have succeeded, but not too much.
So I started out where you were me here, but the reason I'm moving is that it's not as if we're saying, well, you can only have a million dollars.
We're saying, no, you can have really tens of billions of dollars.
Well, we're not saying tens of billions.
The wealth tax is starting at 50 million.
You still get to keep a lot.
We're not going to take all of it.
There are still opportunities for you to be fabulously, fabulously wealthy, but we do think it's part of what it means to be a citizen of this country, that we have a system in place where we believe it's enough incentive.
It is enough incentive for you to be this amount of wealthy.
So I like that version of it, but it's different than what Felix said.
Felix was more cynical about this.
I think what you said, Felix, was, it's okay if it doesn't generate that much revenue.
It's okay. We understand.
People will move, but we're sending a message.
That's a little more problematic because you're going to get a world where, yes, you get to talk, but the talk is cheap, because, in fact, you're not going to raise that much revenue.
You're going to have high marginal rates.
You're going to have low average rates.
You're not raising that much revenue, and you get all the distortions of a high marginal rate.
So what you call a distortion is, in part, a group of people who does not want to share their incredible wealth with everyone else, they're not going to be in this economy, and I think it's a value judgment.
I realize you call it a distortion.
I think that's fine.
I think there's a way to frame this more positively.
What you said was more positive, young me, but what you said is that, in some sense, I think what the economists would talk about is, there are these rents, which are like these incredible returns, super normal returns, and we should get those, and I kind of agree with that, but I don't like the idea of cheap
talk, which is we're going to have a pretty distorted tax policy just so we can score some points and make people feel better.
That, to me, feels wrong, and maybe— No, no, that's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying we live in a society where, if, in fact, as a result of lucky circumstances and your hard work, you're going to be incredibly, incredibly wealthy, that comes with an obligation to share.
And we could do that via capital gains tax, we could do that via dividend tax, we could do that via an estate tax, we could do it in a lot of different ways that are much better than a wealth tax or a top marginal rate of 70%.
I'm completely indifferent to the instrument.
All I'm saying is fixing things at the low end, that's not good enough.
We need to do something at the top end also.
This is why I love the fact that these proposals are out there.
Because what it's doing is creating conversations like this, even amongst the three of us.
See, I told you taxes would be more interesting.
You're right to take off your sliver.
Okay, did you guys see the Gillette advertisement that was making the rounds recently?
So for our listeners, I'm referring to the toxic masculinity ad, clearly inspired by the Me Too movement.
It's part of a trend.
In the trade, it's being called wokeness as a marketing strategy.
In the past year, the most prominent example was Nike's Colin Kaepernick ad.
So for our listeners, Colin Kaepernick is an inactive NFL player who's also a civil rights activist.
And he began kneeling during the national anthem before games, which created a huge controversy in the biggest sport in America.
The kneeling was an act of protest against police brutality.
And Nike, since then, obviously the company is doing very well.
Lots of reasons for that.
But one of the things they attributed to is the energy provided by this campaign.
It doesn't always go so well.
So about a year and a half ago, Pepsi came out with a Kendall Jenner ad which had scenes clearly inspired by Black Lives Matter that did not go ever so well to the point where Pepsi ended up pulling the ad and apologizing.
Kendall Jenner ended up apologizing.
It was quite a disaster.
So I wanted to get, first of all, your personal response to the Gillette ad, the Nike ad, the Pepsi ad.
Do you think they work?
And do you think it's a good idea for businesses to be wading in to these issues?
So, you know, I actually liked the Gillette ad.
I liked the Nike ad, and I thought the Pepsi ad was terrible.
Why did you like the Gillette ad?
I think the Gillette ad, I think it was provocative, and I think advertising should be provocative.
It raised attention, and it made me kind of think in a different way.
It didn't, like, move the needle very much, but it's a heck of a lot better than another ad of somebody swiping their face with a blade and talking about the precision of, like, 17 blades in one.
I mean, relative to that, I'll take it.
That's a low bar. Well, but that's what the alternative is, right?
So, I mean, I think the provocation is fantastic, and I think companies doing things that are more current and a little bit more pointed is fantastic.
I think they should be doing much more like that.
The key thing is, I think about being opportunistic.
So if the brand is viewed as being opportunistic, then it is bad, and it will be disastrous.
Pepsi, they had no reason to link to Black Lives Matter.
It was just, like, opportunism magnified, and that's a disaster.
Nike, it's very LinkedIn, right?
I mean, he's an athlete.
It's about his message in the context of athletes.
He had a lot of other athletes in the video.
It was, like, a really strong, tight mix.
I think what it's telling us about more broadly is, you know, people want companies to take stands on major issues, and they find that appealing, and I actually find that appealing.
You know, the concern is, we end up in a bifurcated world where there's red state brands, and there's blue state brands, and so on and so forth.
But on the whole, I love more pointed advertising, and I love companies and brands taking risks with their brands.
They play way too safe.
So I'm all in favor of this.
Felix, what do you think?
I think I'm a little bit more skeptical.
My experience is that when you see the beginning of these commercials, the stories are told in a convincing and high -quality manner.
All of that emotionally and intellectually totally works for me.
And then comes the moment when I see the brand, and I go, oh, this is all about selling soda.
This is all about selling shaving utensils.
And I agree with Yuma here.
This is the sense in which Nike was the best of the ones that I can remember and the recent past.
From a business point of view, I completely judge these commercials the moment when the brand is revealed.
What is happening emotionally at that point in time?
But what determines that emotional reaction?
And are you saying that if you sell soda, this area is off limits for you?
Because I should remind you, if you think about Coca -Cola.
Coca -Cola was one of the first companies to ever put people of color in their ads.
Remember bringing the world together?
I'd like to buy the world together.
So what determines for you, Felix, whether or not you cringe versus you think, wow, that's really...
Yeah. I think I can best explain why the Nike ad worked okay for me.
Nike has had a long history of talking about people's dreams.
And it was mostly in the arena of sports.
And this is why then to say, oh, and actually dreams are more general than just sports.
It's the dream of a society in which there's no police brutality.
I think this is why it worked for me.
There was the substance of the brand really links to what the Kaepernick moment is all about.
And in Gillette, there was...like, what is it about Gillette that says, oh, they cared about masculinity and how we think about male roles and stuff like...
There's nothing. Yeah.
I think in their heads, you know, Gillette has always tried to link itself to what it means to be a man.
Exactly. That's the thing that does really work.
So there's sort of two lines of, I think, really legitimate criticism about both of these.
One is the cynical view that what these companies are doing is they're essentially...
Imagine them doing behind the scenes a segmentation analysis and really understanding the demographics and the psychographics of the people that they want to attract to their brands.
Coming to the conclusion that for the most part, younger people tend to be more progressive than older people.
We want to attract youth.
We want to attract people from these states.
And so you can begin to just make the business case, right?
That's the cynical view that that's really all that's going on.
There's a second line of criticism that I also think is quite legitimate.
When I saw the Nike ad, like you, I thought, wow, that's a beautiful ad.
But what you're seeing there is you're seeing a really sanitized version of something.
So Colin Kaepernick is protesting police brutality.
The Nike ad doesn't mention police brutality once.
In fact, there's not even a hint of what it is he's protesting.
In other words, it enables the viewer to engage with something at a very aspirational, very romanticized, very sanitized level.
And so from an arm's length perspective, you can say, oh, yeah, that's really fantastic.
When, in fact, if you got even a little bit deeper into it, what you realize is that this is a deeply polarizing, divisive issue to get involved in.
And so what they're doing is they're smoothing out all the rough edges, and in the process co -opting a matter of social justice that people take very, very seriously.
What's your response to that?
First off, I think the first criticism is not so bad, meaning they should be doing the segmentation analysis anytime you run an ad.
I think that's totally forgivable.
But this second criticism is really trenchant, and I hadn't really thought about it.
And I think the reason it's so powerful is it kind of links to this general sense where people can feel active and be, you know, like I'm being socially conscious by tweeting something.
And in a way, I think you're saying something similar, which is, oh, I like that Nike ad, and I could talk about it.
But do I engage the issue of police brutality deeply?
No. I think that's a deep, deep criticism.
I don't know if that implies they shouldn't be doing it.
Do you think it's so bad that it should be?
You know, I've been thinking a lot about what does it mean to earn a seat at the table?
Like, what does it mean to be able to justify your ability to have a voice in this particular conversation?
And I do think you have to earn your way into the conversation.
I think there are some companies that have clearly earned a seat.
So Patagonia is an example that for years and years, they put their money where their mouth is when it comes to environmentalism and sustainability.
So they have clearly earned a seat at the table.
You know, Nike, and by the way, I don't mean to malign Nike.
I think it's an extraordinary company in many ways.
But this is a company that on the one hand is currently running advertisements about female empowerment in sports.
And on the other hand is dealing with a gender discrimination lawsuit inside their own company, partly as a result of a huge investigation by the New York Times that apparently revealed some really bad behavior.
At very senior levels.
Why do I say that? Because I do think these things matter, that these things are happening concurrently, right?
So these are some of the things I think about when I think about Nike, Colin Kaepernick, police brutality.
This is a continuum of issues and companies I think are trying to figure out how close do they want to get to the actual issue, and how close do they just want to be associated with some kind of symbol that is...
Your language of earning a seat at the table is so I think provocative.
My only concern is, and Patagonia is a great example, my only concern is you're kind of raising the bar pretty high.
Meaning Patagonia's whole brand and its whole identity is about sustainability and the environment.
And I think that would basically cut off the needs of a whole bunch of these efforts.
So I take your point about earning the seat at the table, but I think the underlying trend is great.
And we shouldn't be so cynical about these things.
Yeah, so here's the counter argument to my own argument.
In some ways I think advertising can be enormously helpful in legitimizing ideas that were once outside of the mainstream and they can bring them inside the mainstream.
That's where I think the conservatism that we typically associate with big companies actually plays to the advantage.
When a big bank runs an ad and it shows all kinds of couples, mixed -race couples, same -sex couples, in some ways they're saying, look, this used to be radical wisdom, now this is conventional wisdom and there's nothing at all extraordinary about this.
So the counter argument I think is there's something really legitimizing about these brands, even the ones with very little skin in the game, saying we're not afraid of this at all.
I like the point that the role of advertising might be...
It's one facet of the conversation that we have in society about these issues.
And to go back to your earlier example, young me, there is a role for investigative reporting on police portality and what are the stats and why does it happen and what is it about police training that leads to these kinds of outcomes.
And by and large, I don't think that's the role that advertising or companies should play.
They are a voice in the conversation.
I think because it's advertising, it's like these dreamlike states that are being described in these advertisements.
That's a facet that we need as much as we need the deep investigative reporting.
I think in the context of brands, when it doesn't work, is if there is almost a short circuit between profit maximization and the story that you're telling.
My favorite example is go to any hotel room anywhere in the world and it's going to say, oh, we care so deeply about the environment that we love for you not to reuse your towels.
And you have no idea is that because not having to wash all these towels is actually cost minimizing or do they really care?
So there needs to be tension between what the company does and what's immediately effective when you just think about the bottom line because the tension is what makes it credible.
The riskiness of these actions is actually super productive because if it's just pure old fashioned profit maximizing, I have no idea whether you care or not.
So Gillette or Nike or Pepsi, they're trying to explicitly address something.
They're really swinging hard.
And I like that. I do think that the more out there you are, the more you got to do the work.
You really got to do the work.
I mean, I'm sure we've all had this experience where we've had to lead a discussion with, say, college undergraduates about gender, race identity.
I mean, there are so many ways you can get in trouble.
And what that tells you is that when it comes to issues of social justice and identity, you have to have more than good intentions.
The execution really has to be so sensitive.
And by sensitive, I mean it has to be nuanced in representation and tone and language.
Otherwise, you can end up really hurting people who are just carrying a lot of pain.
That's a great example.
Right. Like in that example, which I agree with basically, that's going to scare off a lot of people from engaging this issue in classrooms.
Of course. Yeah. And I don't know if we want to do that.
I'd rather have them go out there, get it messy, get it wrong.
I guess what I'm worried...
So even the pepses, you're saying, even the pepses.
Well, I mean, look, I think that's done really poorly.
But, you know, to this point about engaging classrooms on difficult topics.
You want people to say, look, you're going to stumble the first time you do it.
I stumbled when we did the Me Too episode.
Oh, I've stumbled as well.
I'm sure. And we've all stumbled.
But that's good. That's great.
And so I want to see more stumbling.
In the advertising world, I want to see more stumbling on all these issues.
I think the state of the world is these people are already so cautious and they're largely generating advertising that is like so boring.
That, you know, you push them out a little bit.
It's kind of, you can't go wrong because at least we're going the right direction.
So we are running out of time.
But for sure, we're going to see more and more of this.
As you watch the Super Bowl this weekend, keep an eye out with those advertisements.
And it'll be interesting to see how far companies are willing to go.
You know there's a football game this weekend, don't you?
Oh, my God. I'm quite excited about it.
I happen to watch those.
I tune in when the conference finals come in.
I don't pay attention to the season.
Oh, yeah. You sent me that note afterwards.
I was so stunned that you had watched it.
Yeah. I just don't pay attention to the season.
In order to avoid more controversy on this podcast, I'm not going to talk about who's in the Super Bowl.
Okay. Good idea. All right.
Do you guys have picks for me this week?
So I love these instances when I read opinion pieces, views of politics or business or economics, where people go against the grain.
And I saw a beautiful instance that I think is both timely and I would recommend to read it.
And that is Richard Brody, who writes for The New Yorker, had a very interesting film review of the film Roma.
You might have heard about Roma.
It's a film that critics love.
In fact, I think it's probably a film that is made for critics.
We're made exclusively.
Exclusively for critics.
If you look on Rotten Tomatoes, this is always when I know that I'm not going to have a great movie experience.
96 % of critics love Roma, only 83 % of the audience.
And whenever that gap is really big, it's like, oh, I'm in trouble.
But Richard Brody makes an amazingly eloquent and interesting argument about what kind of storytelling is this when we tell the story of someone who's not highly educated, who's a very simple person.
And then in a way that feels charming at some time in the movie, we rob the person of an identity, we rob the person of a voice.
And all you have left with is this empty plastic stereotype.
So if you, there's lots of praise out there.
Obviously, critics and regular people love the movie.
If you want to read a critical voice, Richard Brody and The New Yorker.
Interesting. Okay. Meher.
So I'm tempted to pitch some British TV shows.
But I won't. I won't pitch Marcella or A Very English Scandal.
You have this way of sneaking in.
So many recommendations.
But my actual recommendation is a book by David Kwaman, and it's called The Tangled Tree.
And it was just a revelation to me.
It was about developments in evolutionary biology.
So in The Tangled Tree, what Kaman does is he emphasizes that their usual view of genetics and biology is not entirely correct, which is we assume that all gene transfers and all transfers of DNA happen in a vertical way, like from mother to son to daughter to whatever.
And in fact, what we found out over the last 40 years or so is there's a lot of horizontal gene transfer, which means that across species and across people of the same generation, you have gene transfer.
Which is like mind boggling.
So if you haven't been paying attention to molecular biology or evolutionary biology, The Tangled Tree is fantastic.
And it's written in such an easy way.
It's just a marvel.
So both for its subject and for the way he writes it, David Kwaman and A Tangled Tree.
And we read this after we're done with all the British cottages.
Okay, I have a corny recommendation.
So my recommendation is to read something by Mary Oliver.
So she died recently.
She was in her 80s.
So Mary Oliver is a poet, one of the most popular American poets of our time.
Her popularity, I think, made critics quite suspicious of her.
I think when it comes to the world of highbrow, anything that is too popular, I think, evokes suspicion.
And it's interesting to think of why people are reluctant to over praise Mary Oliver, and I think it's because her sort of unabashed sincerity.
But I am not afraid to confess that I love Mary Oliver.
So I would recommend you read something by her if you can put your cynicism aside, the jaded sensibility that we've become so accustomed to.
Put it all aside and read something by Mary Oliver.
All right. That's it.
Thanks for listening.
