Ted Audio Collective.
Hello everyone, this is After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm me here.
And I'm Sarah. It's great to be back with you guys.
Sarah Greencom, bicycle.
It's good to have you Sarah.
Nice to have you back.
I wanted to take this opportunity to thank our listeners for all the interactions that we have had.
It just continues to astound me not only how many people listen but just how incredibly thoughtful everyone is.
It's really wonderful.
And if anybody would like to post their reviews on Apple Podcasts, that's also a great way for us to get feedback.
Yeah. It's really fun to see.
Sometimes good criticism, sometimes compliments, but it's always great to hear from listeners.
And then we brought great topics.
As always, Sarah, what do you have for us?
I would love to get your opinion on Noma, the big Copenhagen restaurant that's been named the best in the world.
They're now closing.
They said they're not financially viable at this point.
I think there's a lot there to talk about, not just the food.
And Felix, what did you bring?
I would like to talk about the Justice Department lawsuit against Google.
It's the second one.
They first targeted Google search business.
But now this time, it feels like it's really the core of part of their competitive advantage.
It's the advertising business that is targeted this time.
And I would like to get your take on it.
That'll be fun. Great.
Felix, tell us what you're finding so interesting about Google's latest run -in with antitrust investigations.
It's complicated. Jargon in technology generally, but then ad tech.
Oh, my God. There's no end of it.
So maybe I'll start out by trying to explain a little bit how the marketplace works.
So they're essentially two parties.
They're publishers.
So say, Mihir has a website, and he has some space on the website, and he would like to have some display ads on his website.
And then there are obviously the advertisers, say the brands that clamor to be on Mihir's website, because, oh, my God, being associated with Mihir will be really amazing.
Totally. And the middleman, what sits in the middle, is called an ad exchange.
And that's basically an auction format where lots of advertisers try to get the Mihir's website, and they put in bids, and then eventually the highest bid will win.
And that ad will appear on Mihir's website.
One of the concerns that the Justice Department has is that Google controls all of these relationships or is present in all of these relationships.
They have a piece of software that sits in between Mihir's website and the ad exchange that allows Mihir to say, oh, I have space.
Is anyone interested?
And then on the other side of the exchange, there are tools, technologies that link the advertisers to the exchange to the auction mechanism.
And one of the big concerns that the Justice Department has is because Google is present in all of these markets.
So, for instance, at server space, it has about a 90 % market share.
The actual exchange is not quite as dominant.
It's about a 50 % market share or so.
But in some pieces of that chain, there's almost no way to get around Google.
And as always in antitrust, the big question is, is that because Google is so amazing?
Or is that because Google has a way to influence how dollars go back and forth in a way that is not quite right?
So you described this like an auction, and so some people might have in mind somebody banging the gavel.
But this is all completely instantaneous.
Yeah, when you call up a new website and you look in your left -hand corner, you see sometimes this gibberish.
And what you're observing is these real -time auctions where we allocate ad space to a particular set of advertisers.
And just to be clear, Google's making money on this.
So if you think about it in terms of the amount of advertising spend that Google is capturing through their fees, it's like 30 cents on the dollar or something like that.
That's right. Either in the advertising market or for Google itself.
It's not a small chunk of change.
Yes, Google is also present in the system because of course it's a big publisher.
It has a lot of its own websites.
And when you look at the fraction of the traffic that comes from the ad exchange and then feeds Google pages because presumably Google was allocated as that single best advertising opportunity, that fraction has gone up dramatically.
It's more than half of the revenue that Google gets that is now essentially coming from its own ad exchange to its own websites.
And that's one of the big concerns.
And so in a sense, Google itself is competing with part of that market, which is the publishers, as a destination for advertising dollars.
That's exactly right.
In the Justice Department lawsuit, there are claims that sometimes Google misuses the auction to allocate traffic in a way that either benefits its own websites or sometimes punishes advertisers who are taking their revenue elsewhere.
So if I could relate this to a more brick and mortar field like real estate, it sounds as if Google is a little bit like a buyer's agent helping you buy a house, but they also might be representing the seller in some cases, which is a conflict of interest.
And maybe there's cases where they also own some of the houses.
It just sounds a little bit like they've got their figure in a lot of these pies.
Yes, that's beautiful, Sarah.
That's exactly right.
As always in these markets, one of the things that is so fascinating is, say, instead of having a buyer's agent and a seller's agent, you would say, let's just do it with one person.
One of the big benefits is that it's much more efficient.
So the Google argument is always two things.
One is, yes, it's true.
We integrated all this tech, but that's just in the interest of our customers.
We've made it really easy to place these ads, and because it's much easier for MeHere to now earn money with his website, actually there are many more MeHears than they would exist in the absence of Google.
And the second argument is actually having lots of MeHears is really good for Google because that supports the search engine business.
So having said all of this, what's your take?
Does the lawsuit strike you as having merit, as maybe pushing things?
Where do you come out?
There's sort of a couple things right off the bat that just strike me as an observer.
So one is that this case started in the Trump Justice Department and is now being continued by the Biden Justice Department.
So the fact that two very different departments of justice could agree that there was something fishy about this, to me, is a strong signal.
And then the other piece of it is 30 % just feels high to me.
If you think about what a real estate agent gets, it's less than 10%.
A literary agent might get 10%.
A really good sports agent might get 15%, and you're telling me Google gets 30%.
So that just seems a little steep, and I do sort of wonder if there were more competition if they would have to bring that down.
MeHere, what about you?
So I kind of share your take, both in the sense of just that initial look at that number and feeling like it doesn't feel right.
There's another analogy, which is financial markets, where we think about this in terms of one or two pennies, maybe, and we don't think about that kind of integration across sellers and buyers and an exchange.
We tend to think about those separately.
But I think the other interesting piece of this, Sarah, to your point is there's a lot of antitrust action going on right now, and it's hard to keep track of it all, frankly, and especially against big tech.
And some of it seems less well thought out than others.
This, to me, because of the mind -numbing detail that Felix went through, actually strikes me as real and as super interesting because of the level of integration.
And maybe even more than just that prima facie sense of, wow, 30 cents feels like a lot.
There's also just this sense in which Google's position and knowing what the publishers have in terms of inventory and knowing what advertisers' willingness to pay is and their ability to capitalize on that in different ways and then redirect business towards themselves opportunistically, that feels
really problematic.
So in an era of lots of weird antitrust stuff going on, this feels like the real deal.
And it also is reminiscent to me of these generational defining antitrust cases.
In the last 80 years, we've had several of them.
We've had AT &T, we've had IBM, we've had Microsoft.
This feels like that.
It feels like it's that big, and it feels like it's going to take years conceivably.
And of course, those previous lawsuits were different thoughts about whether they were meritorious or not, but they were enormously effective in reshaping markets.
And so that's my instinct about this, which is, this is here to stay, and it's a story that isn't going to go away like other antitrust stories.
What do you make of it, Felix?
Yeah, so I agree with what you just said.
It's also similar to earlier cases in the sense that the company gets hit when it's in a weaker position than it used to be.
Yes. Maybe this has just to do with the speed with which the Justice Department works.
Exactly. But remember, in the Microsoft case, it came at a time when Microsoft probably wasn't at its prime.
And the same is true for Google today.
In 2015, they had close to 40 % share in the advertising market.
Today, it's about 28 % or so.
And frankly, they now have much more competition from Amazon, who's building a really amazing advertising business.
And then, of course, what's happening on the social media side with Instagram and TikTok and so on and so on.
So in that sense, it also feels like, oh, we're going through these cycles.
The second thing, I think, is always we're looking at past deals that maybe we shouldn't have allowed in the first place.
And in Google's case, it's the acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007.
So that's the piece of software that links your website to the exchange.
And what were we thinking at that point in time that it would be a happy ending if one entity started to control the entire chain?
So if there is a bigger lesson for me, it's maybe looking at proposed M &A transactions with a more skeptical eye.
So I'm thinking about meta or back then Facebook buying WhatsApp, the DoubleClick transaction as an example.
Maybe what we should do as opposed to intervening so late in markets, if Google had to take apart its tech stack, that would create major problems in the market for advertising because it's a complicated tech stack and taking it apart is not going to go very well.
So maybe the right thing to do is like, just be more critical up front.
That's interesting.
You know, in a way, Felix, I have the opposite reaction.
Okay. Interesting. Which is that requires speculation as to the way a market evolves.
And in fact, right now, there is an effort against meta based on an acquisition they want to do in virtual reality space, which is very much premised on this idea that, well, nothing is going on now, but something could go on in the future.
I think that act of speculation about what might happen, I think is far more complicated.
I actually think you're right, which is the Google defense is a little bit like, well, you approved it in OA, so what's the problem now?
That's obviously ridiculous.
Nobody's saying just because we said something in a way, like you can do whatever you want for the next 15 years, but I would prefer them to do something in between, which is not to be so speculative in anticipation, but to be more vigilant over what happened in the last 10 or 15 years, because I worry
that the speculative approach is going to freeze a lot of transactions and a lot of mergers that might make sense.
So I like the idea of dismissing the idea that double click you're undoing it is ridiculous, but I don't know if I really want them to engage in that speculation because God knows where that goes.
So typically the way we measure consumer harm is higher prices than otherwise would have existed in the market, and so consumers are worse off, and we have a reason to intervene.
By looking at prices, we almost decide to look after the fact.
Once market power has materialized in the market and we have all of these concerns, and then sometimes we get to intervene, and sometimes we don't get to intervene in some of these cases.
We lose in some of these cases, we don't.
The alternative is to say, take the meta acquisition of the virtual reality fitness app.
How much do we think the marketplace for these kinds of fitness apps would benefit from an integration of Facebook?
Is our ability to use virtual reality five years, ten years from now, does it really hinge that much on Facebook somehow being able to acquire this particular company?
And I'm very skeptical whether that's going to be the case, because, A, Facebook could build it internally and could then compete.
If they're really better, that's already a much tougher competitive benchmark because now you'd have to show we can do something that is actually better than just going out.
And this constant fear that you have as a smaller tech company that if you're too close to one of the big guys, you get bought, and you might get bought at not fabulous prices because they're the only ones that have the market power.
So I think moving antitrust away from a sole focus on prices is actually a very good thing.
I think that's where we disagree, which is I love that more traditional school of thought.
And for the reason I think you said, which is you were skeptical about the meta claim on this fitness virtual reality, but the FTC is not and they're bringing a case on it and they are convinced they're right.
And they're going to have a whole raft of experts who are going to say that the way this fitness market and this virtual reality market pan out is going to be one that is harming competition.
And I think one could knit together a story that is equally plausible as to why that might be true.
So that's the hard part about the speculative exercise.
And in fact, that's why this suit feels so good because that 30 % slug is actually going to result in higher prices for consumers.
And that's why it feels like we should be getting worried about it.
This reflects my own skepticism about this entire wave of new antitrust theories, which to my taste are very ill formed and are relying on a logic beyond consumer welfare.
But it's never quite clear what the alternative logic is.
It feels a little bit more like jawboning or strong arming than it feels like a coherent logic.
You know, it tends to be dangers of precluding innovation.
But again, those are very speculative exercises.
So I think that's where we disagree, which is just about what the merit is of those alternative approaches.
And they've been around for 10 or 15 years and I still don't see the intellectual apparatus that I can use and apply in a fair way.
Me here, when you're talking about those alternative theories, are you thinking about what's sometimes called hipster antitrust?
Yes. Where people worry about competitiveness, wages, barriers to entry, other stuff besides the end user's price?
Yeah. And it's a pretty amorphous thing.
I think that term is very nasty.
It's like a little bit mean, but you're absolutely right, Sarah.
That's what I'm talking about.
And I think it's problematic for two reasons.
One is it becomes a pretty blunt instrument.
And it's also trying to address a lot of problems in society, which we might think of as being real problems, like how important big tech is to politics.
But all through this weird lens of antitrust.
So it feels like a blunt instrument to advance a broad agenda.
And remember, a lot of mergers are powerful and good and help efficiency.
And so that's like a hard thing to stand up for today, but it actually matters.
And I think the chill in the markets on these things is something which actually ends up deterring, could be really good transactions.
I think one of the reasons why I completely disagree with this view me here is that if we wait until market power manifests itself in really measurable ways, so that we can go to court and say, look, our calculations show.
Remember all the local newspapers that went out of business in the meantime?
If they had gotten 80 % of that ad revenue, 90 % of that ad revenue, because we would have had a little more competition.
So it's not as though the waiting for antitrust action to be more plausible is costless.
In fact, it's a little bit like saying, oh, we know the child is not a great swimmer, but let's just fill the pool.
And let's see how long it will take until it gets really, really dangerous.
And then sometimes we wait a little too long and actually someone drowns.
And I think in the media landscape in particular, this dramatic collapse of the physical market for print advertising, I think it's completely changed the media landscape.
And in part, it has a little to do with we were really slow or say in the case when they prevented the acquisition of Simon and Schuster, the publisher, arguing that authors will be paid less.
Yeah, maybe we don't know exactly, but it's super plausible to me that if you have very few publishing houses less, one of the things that these publishing houses are going to do is they're going to be in a better negotiating position with authors.
And so erring on the side of protecting competition wherever we can is something that I love about hipster antitrust, to use the not so nice term.
Yeah, it's tricky, though, because it all rests on what is plausible to you and what is plausible to me.
And I don't know what's plausible to you and what's possible to me may be different.
The decline of local media, I think, has a lot of different causes, one of which may be this, but it has a lot of different causes, including just the decline of print and all kinds of things that have happened in that landscape.
It just feels like we're opening up a Pandora's box of alternative narratives about what can happen when companies decide to combine.
And by the way, let's not forget that some of these companies, as you point out, Felix, Google is getting pushed back by Amazon and by meta and by TikTok.
And don't forget how much we worried about meta four years ago and how now they are struggling in their basic social media business.
So there are competitive dynamics that are very much at play that are fueling and causing lots of rivalry.
And so I share your point, which is I think we do want to protect innovation.
It just feels to me like I wish I could get my hands around what is plausible and how to determine whether what is plausible to you is also what's plausible to me.
And it's just so speculative and law is hard to rest on such speculative ideas.
We tend to think about specific harms.
I'm not sure which one of you I agree with more.
I think you both are making good points.
I also, having this little side thought of like, God, I wish Google search were better.
In the beginning, it was so good and so much better than like Ask Jeeves or like whatever I was using back in those days.
I totally forgot about that.
I remember there was one called like dogpile .com is never going to work.
But then Google came along and it was better.
And so that's like why we used it.
And now I spend so much time bashing key terms into Google, being like, I know I read this thing.
Why can't I find the thing that I know exists?
It's so frustrating.
And I go through my Gmail and I'm searching for like birthday gift card receipt enter and like doesn't come up.
And I'm like, I know someone sent me a gift card for my birthday and why can't I find it?
And so I wonder if Google had put some energy into making those core functions better.
Absolutely. Would we still be having this conversation or did they put too much energy into kind of this defensive moat or like extracting value when they really needed to keep innovating the core product.
And I think the same is true of a company like Facebook or any company that sort of devotes energy to a defensive moat.
This is a great point, Sarah.
And I think it speaks to we're now comparing our current experience with Google search with experiences that we had a couple of years back.
And of course, ultimately, this is also what happens in any trust.
So in the current antitrust suit against Google, which looks like a very strong one.
Ultimately, what we're doing is still a counterfactual exercise.
We still try to say something about, oh, how much lower would these fees have been if, in fact, we had more competition or if Google was less integrated.
To your earlier point me here, it's not as though we ever really know.
It's not that if we try to prevent harm, we have to guess what might happen.
Well, if we don't prevent harm, we also have to guess.
We just have to guess what might have happened if we hadn't prevented harm in the first place.
So it's speculative either way because you only get to experience one course of history.
That's right. But we tend not to like systems where I predict your behavior based on some characteristics and then punish you because of what I think you might do.
That's kind of important in systems of justice.
And so we tend to rely on harms because then I know you committed a harm and that's important.
I think, Sarah, your point is deep though, which is maybe the ultimate comeuppance is that the complacency that monopolistic behavior breeds ends up providing precisely the comeuppance we need, which is exactly maybe what's happening in search today with Google to your point.
And who's going to provide that?
Maybe it's going to be Microsoft.
Chat GPT. With chat GPT.
But this to me is like a little bit of the self -correcting nature of some of these dynamics.
Felix, I think you're right.
There's conceivably a lot of harm that gets done in the interim.
In your case, it was the baby in the pool or the local media folks.
I think there's no denying that.
But it does feel like there are mechanisms in place.
And these kinds of efforts, to your point about Google, it's like way after they've already declined and it's going to take five years.
Yeah, it's not going to be fast.
I'm curious. Do either of you think if you're Sundar Pichai, this is like, I saw what happened to Microsoft.
I saw what happened to AT &T.
I saw what happened to IBM.
Do either of you think they should preemptively split and just say, I'm not going to spend five years doing this?
They sort of went mid -distance.
When pressure first mounted, they volunteered to separate out these companies still under Alphabet.
Yeah. They would be Alphabet companies, but they wouldn't be integrated with Google, which, if that came along with a particular set of reporting structures and incentives, I think would be better than what we have today.
I think for that to really work, they probably waited too long.
Four or five years ago, if you had suggested that, in preliminary conversations with the Justice Department, that might have worked.
At this point in time, sort of the train has left the station, I'm afraid.
So this is such an interesting conversation and an interesting topic, and I'm sure we'll go back to it.
What's really wonderful to me is it makes us, we think, from a completely different angle, the role of companies in society and what our expectations of behavior should be and whether it is now time to redraw some of the traditional lines that we've adhered to for a very long time.
Okay, so what are you going to serve up for us, Sarah, with Noma?
Tell us. It will hopefully be as interesting as their fruit beetle, which is apparently something just like a beetle, but it's made of fruit leather.
To back up slightly, Noma is a restaurant in Copenhagen that is widely regarded as one of the finest restaurants in the world, if not the finest.
It's $500 a person for a multi -course tasting menu that consists of weird things like a beetle that's made out of fruit leather, or in one case, they served a shrimp that was still seemingly alive covered with ants.
They apparently do a lot with ants because they have a sort of citrusy flavor.
So this is like dining that is way out on the edge.
And yet it also has had a huge influence on cuisine.
If you have gone anywhere and had New Nordic cuisine, Gravelox is like on every menu now.
Lots of other restaurants have gotten into this idea of like, we're going to make a food that looks like another food and kind of blows your mind.
That's sort of coming from Noma.
So it's very influential in this way that sort of fine art is often very influential.
And yet it's interesting to me that despite charging $500 a person for a meal and a huge waiting list that suggests that they could perhaps have charged even more, about 50 % of their staff was unpaid interns.
Once they started paying their staff, they said it really just threw their whole business model out of whack.
The chef who created it sounds burnt out.
He's in his 40s. It sort of reminds me of your conversation with Francis Fry about Jacinda.
What do we do with these 40 something stars suddenly are burned out and want to retire?
But I'm also interested in this kind of idea that a customer could pay so much for something and yet the company still can't find a way to make money, which we see in all different walks of life.
Daycare for children is very much like that.
Parents pay through the nose.
No one makes any money who works in daycare.
And yet how is this possible?
So it's sort of an interesting business question that I wanted to put you guys to.
So what do you make of this?
So my first response has a lot to do with thinking about a business that is just incredibly personnel intensive.
So much to create these kinds of dishes, to create these experiences.
Every dish takes forever to be prepared.
And the amount of detail, the amount of attention is just absolutely mind blowing.
And it reminds me of a famous prediction by an economist, William Bommol.
He talked about what he called a cost disease.
And the idea is a really simple, but I think a really powerful idea.
The economy is chugging along.
All the businesses become more productive over time.
But for some reason, some businesses just cannot really increase their productivity.
And the famous example that he uses is, I think, a string quartet.
It always takes four people.
It always takes the same amount of time.
There's something about the activity itself that makes it impossible to think of ways to do it in much more productive ways than it has been done for a very long time.
And I think restaurants are a little bit like that.
And the consequence, if the rest of the economy becomes more productive and people are making more money in that rest of the economy in order to attract people to the sectors that don't have productivity growth, you have this tension that in order to get people, you need to pay quite a lot relative
to what you can charge for customers.
And ultimately, it sort of breaks your business.
Sarah, I have a little bit more of a rudimentary reaction to it, which is, number one, it's always incredible to see somebody who's at the top of their game just step away.
The guy who runs Noma is arguably running the best restaurant in the world, and yet he just decided to step away.
So that's kind of interesting in and of itself.
And then the second piece is what you reference, Sarah, and what you're referencing, Felix, which is the amount that they relied on, basically, unpaid labor to make their model work.
And so for me, it gets you thinking about unpaid labor generally and how pervasive it is in so many settings.
And just to be clear, these interns in some way are doing okay, because they get to put on their resume that they are an intern at Noma, which is the way a lot of unpaid labor works.
But it's quite pervasive in the economy.
If you think about postdocs or grad students or why people in publishing don't get paid as much, there's a lot of settings where wages are not fully incorporated, some sense of what you get done, either because there's prestige associated with it or you can monetize it later.
And so I confess I found myself quite mixed about the whole story.
One, just to think about this either as just a manifestation of the incredible pressure he must be under, or think of it as a manifestation of the decadence of the $500 meal at this point in kind of late -stage capitalism, or just thinking about it as, where else do we see unpaid labor?
Because I think it's actually much more pervasive than we think.
It's so pervasive. I had not realized how pervasive unpaid labor was in the restaurant business.
Now it's very expected for a number of publications that even if you write for them, you may not get paid for that because of the idea that you somehow have exposure and that you can somehow monetize that.
Well, then are you hoping to get a speaking gig?
Because then a lot of people who get speaking gigs, those aren't paid now either.
There's a whole realm in which you're sort of expected to work for prestige and it's not entirely clear to me how one is actually supposed to get paid if we're asking people to do this work and then not pay them.
I am very much reminded of apprenticeship systems that work a little bit like this.
And I think I'm very comfortable with the idea that the exchange between a company and the people who work at the company is not just the money.
You're exchanging many things, and in particular in the apprenticeship context, what you're really exchanging is you get great training.
And guess what? The training is not free.
You're paying for the training because it enables you to do things later on.
That to me is the real fault line.
If it's reasonable to think about the non -paid or underpaid labor as this is a real investment that makes you better off at some point in time, I don't think I actually have a big problem with that.
What I find much more problematic is companies often have a much better sense of whether this is actually a stepping stone to something better.
My favorite example is logo design.
It used to be that companies had to pay for logos.
They scrambled to design a logo for a company that is well known.
And when you look at these auctions, a large fraction of the bids fall below the cost of creating these logos.
So it's actually the designers paying for the privilege, if you will, to supply that particular logo.
Now, why do I find that's problematic?
In many or most of these cases, that is actually not going to lead to a career.
Yes, of course, you might have a few conversations and you hope that maybe this leads to more work from that same company.
Turns out that's not really the case.
It's exploiting the fact that people are crazy about design.
They really love doing it.
They would do it for free.
But it's not responsible not to pay for these things.
But the moment I can think of it, I'm teaching you how to be a cook or I'm teaching you something that then sets you up to have a real career.
Thinking of exchanges between businesses and people as being really rich and including many, many things, many types of services.
I think that's totally okay.
I'm thinking about this through my own lens as an editor who has worked with writers who are unpaid and also with writers who are paid.
Yeah. And I will tell you, I never want to go back to working with writers who are unpaid because I don't like that power differential of I, the editor, I'm making money, you, the writer, I'm making no money.
But then I also feel like I have to make this piece work no matter what, because I've asked you to do all this work and I haven't paid you.
So basically, your compensation is that we'll publish this.
That sort of obligation to really teach someone or to really make sure this person succeeds.
I actually don't like that.
I would rather in some cases pay a kill fee.
You know what? You worked really hard on this.
It's not working. I'm going to pay you some money to acknowledge the effort you've put in.
We're going to move on.
I think that paying people for their work just feels right.
To me, that unpaid labor creates a really messed up dynamic that I have experienced and I don't like.
I think I'm a good counter example for that.
I worked for a local newspaper when I was in college.
I worked nights and weekends and I was drastically underpaid.
But I learned so much.
I improved so much, like my writing improved.
I understood what the newspaper was about.
I think it was a great experience for me.
I would do that in a heartbeat.
I think I wouldn't want to miss that experience.
I think it was someone not that talented, like me, with no prior history.
Would they have ever brought me in at a regular salary?
Probably not because my productivity was terrible.
But this is the hard part.
The term unpaid labor, I think, kind of ignores these non -pecuniary benefits that are accruing to different people in this exchange, which is learning in particular.
And so I share your desire to have people be able to do whatever they want and contract on whatever they want.
If I want to contract for learning instead of wages, that's fine.
And that could actually be good.
I think the problem is, first off, distinguishing between exploitation and learning is hard in reality, right?
So everyone's going to dress up as learning when in reality, it's exploitation.
So some kind of minimum standard would seem to be required.
I think the real issue is a little bit distributional, which is not everybody can access learning in this way.
I think the way this actually works in the workplace is literally families with more resources underwrite their children to undertake experiences that allow them a lot of non -pecuniary benefits well into their 20s and sets themselves up for different kind of careers.
That can be formal education, it can be medical school, it could be post -docs, it can be internships.
Now, maybe that's just the way the world works, which is the resources of a family are being deployed to help the next generation.
But when it gets formalized into labor markets, it does feel a little bit tricky.
I too want people to be learning on the job and I think it's super valuable.
Something at its core feels unfair.
I agree with you. I think I worry about that part of it.
There is a difference in my mind anyway between being low paid and no paid.
Yes, I think that's exactly right.
I've been an unpaid intern and I've also managed interns who either were unpaid or had like a very small stipend.
When I was managing the interns, the rules that HR had laid out was you need to make sure they have a really good experience and they learn a lot because we're not paying them and they get school credits, you have to actually make sure that they learn.
But that meant that I couldn't delegate to them the tasks that actually would have been really helpful for me to delegate.
So, so much of my energy went into creating this experience that it just was like in the end not worth it really for me.
The other part of this story, I'm curious if it resonated with either of you, was a little bit of this class warfare or schadenfreude about a restaurant that serves $500 meals closing.
It's just fine with me because what a ridiculous symptom of how crazy the world is.
Did that resonate with either of you?
It resonated with me, but in a strange sense.
I was thinking about all of these people who fly in business class to Denmark, spending thousands and thousands of dollars.
And then the ultimate destination that creates this entire value gets $500 a person.
So I have never been to know.
I have no idea what the experience is like.
But if this is the once in a lifetime experience that only a few people can have that in their lifetime.
Why is it not priced like going into space?
Because we know that's very limited and sure enough, it's super, super expensive.
I think it was right for us and important for us to focus on the cost side.
But the other thing that I actually don't quite understand is the top line of these businesses.
If it's that special, if you attract an elite group of people who really care about that kind of dining.
$500 is just ridiculous.
They're probably staying at a hotel that has nothing but a bed and that costs twice as much.
The way I thought about it was like with haute couture.
These fashion houses, my understanding is they don't make money on haute couture.
They just create enough downstream businesses and other businesses where they monetize the haute couture in other ways.
So either you're not pricing the meals correctly, maybe there are price points that just become prohibitive or it becomes, I don't know, I don't know why.
But why haven't they gotten that luxury house view of the world?
And I think some chefs have figured out how to have a high end restaurant and then have enough cookbooks and have enough downstream restaurants and pop ups that the system kind of works.
But I share your sense that something's kind of wrong with the fact that the hotel costs as much as the meal and there's not nearly as much value.
Yeah, well, I obviously know much and charge more and Google should charge less and then we wouldn't be talking about these two topics.
And we have recommendations.
Of course, me here.
What do you have for us?
So I went down a rabbit hole and I encourage you to join me in my rabbit hole.
There are these two remarkable documentaries about an obscure topic and I encourage you to watch both or either.
The obscure topic is this French couple who were volcanologists, people who study volcanoes.
And there are two documentaries out at the same time about their relationship and about their lives studying volcanoes.
One is called the fire of love and was nominated for an Oscar, but I think the better one is called the fire within, which is a documentary by Werner Herzog.
They take all this footage, this couple, the crafts took as they were studying volcanoes and these people didn't just study volcanoes.
They ultimately died in a volcano and they risked their lives.
So it's a portrait of their love for each other.
But it's also this weird portrait of people who are so driven by a phenomena that they will go to the ends of the earth to study it and think about it and experience it.
When the earth erupts in that way, it's such a crazy moment to see life come out of the earth in this dangerous but beautiful way.
And these people gave their lives to dedicated to thinking about it and studying it and filming it.
So you can do both.
You can do either. But if you want a little volcano in your life, this is a great opportunity to do it.
That sounds great. Fantastic.
What do you have, Sarah?
So I will just preface this by saying that I don't read a lot of memoirs, but the memoirs that I really like to read are ones that just put you in a totally bizarre place.
So, for example, a few years ago, Tara Westover came out with educated and that was like, what is it like to grow up in like a family in Idaho that's like very religious and separatist.
So with that as my background and my justification, I'm going to recommend Spare by Prince Harry.
Oh, I never heard of it.
Who's that Prince Harry though?
If you set aside the media hype and all the gossip and celebrity sort of tabloid headlines, you probably have seen about it.
Fundamentally, I think it's a really interesting inside look at what it's like to be a young child who loses his mom at a young age, who grows up in this crazy fishbowl, deploys to Afghanistan.
I think especially the first two thirds of the book, they will put you in someone's shoes that like you will otherwise never stand in.
And so I thought it was fascinating and like really funny in parts.
And so I would recommend it.
That's great. Wonderful.
I think it's ghostwritten by the same guy who helped Andre Agassi write his memoir.
And I read the Agassi memoir and I remember thinking it was amazing.
So that's another good reason to do it.
Felix, what about you?
I have a book related pic also.
I have started to use the Goodreads app.
I mostly knew Goodreads as sort of a website where I could look at what people thought about a particular book.
Right. I was always impressed talking about unpaid labor, just how much effort people would put into describing what the book is like, what they loved, what they didn't like, the comparisons between books.
But now that I have the app, one of the other functions that I find just incredibly helpful is a digital bookshelf.
I read about books and then before too long, I don't quite remember the title anymore.
So now when I read about books, I would just put the title on the digital bookshelf on the Goodreads app.
The moment when you then pick the next one is sort of like that bookstore moment that you know from going to physical bookstores.
Except everything on the shelf is sort of interesting and you thought about it at some point in time.
And then the other element that I really like is they give you recommendations that are related to what's on your shelf.
I don't have the greatest experience with e -commerce recommendations.
The Amazon recommendation engine, for instance, I think is almost useless, probably because there are just too many different products.
But actually I found a book or two that Goodreads recommended because it was similar to something else that I had really loved that were really amazing.
And so now I'm tempted to both pick things from my shelf but also look at similar books that I really loved and that maybe would enjoy as well.
I love that idea. You can just put things in your shopping cart in Amazon, but that's not that fulfilling.
And it doesn't feed you in the same way as what you're describing.
And if it can replicate that experience of being in a bookstore, that sounds wonderful.
Yeah, I find it really nice.
And this is it for today.
Thank you for listening.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
