Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi, everyone you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Young Mi and I'm here with Felix and me here.
Hey, guys. Hey, how are you?
Good. I'm so excited.
So we are doing a special episode this week that we've been actually wanting to do for a while.
An episode on entertainment.
There are all of these interesting phenomena occurring in the world of entertainment that we never really have a chance to talk about.
So in this episode, we're just going to talk about some of the things that have really caught our eye, trends, dynamics.
And the ways in which we love to consume entertainment.
Because we all kind of are a little bit of entertainment mavens.
And this is our corresponding tribute to the world of entertainment.
Yeah, so I'm excited.
Can I go first, please?
Yes, you go first. I am dying to tell you how much I love TikTok.
It is just incredible.
It's this gift of humanity.
I cannot begin to describe to you how wonderful it is.
I guess by now, unless you've been hiding under some really, really big rock, it's an app that people use, I think almost exclusively on mobile phones.
And it's basically snippets of video, mostly with music.
And what I absolutely love about it is it's the kind of creativity that you'd always expect it would be a big part of the internet.
And now I think it's not so much true in much of social media.
If you look at Instagram, there isn't actually that much variety, like what people do, how they pose, what they talk about, all the food pictures.
It feels very centered on portraying the perfect life.
And TikTok is very different.
TikTok is creative.
It's wild. I thought this one video just this morning, there was, I don't know, she's probably like 85 and she has a fridge.
And when she opens the fridge, there is this strange squeaking sound.
So she starts opening and closing the fridge and that creates a beat.
And then she found a piece of music that actually manages to replicate the squeaky sound of her fridge.
And then it ends with her and her husband dancing in their kitchen.
What else do you want on a Sunday morning?
It's just perfect. So Felix, when you first mentioned TikTok, I think it was last season.
You described how you were becoming addicted to this thing.
So I downloaded it and I started to use it.
And here are my observations and I'm not a professional TikTok user.
But the first thing I found fascinating about it is that it's such a mashup.
No one owns anything, no one owns this song, no one owns this dance, no one owns this joke.
Everything is a riff on everything else.
So appropriation is a feature, not a bug.
It's kind of unbelievable.
The second thing that really struck me about it is that it requires no curation.
So you don't have to set up your feed.
You don't have to follow people.
I mean, of course you can follow people if you want, but mostly you're just exposed to one stranger after another.
It is a complete free for all.
And yet it's not disorienting because in every single video, there's always at least one recognizable element.
It might be part of a song or a meme or something that has been remixed or reimagined in some way.
And then the final thing that really struck me about it is it's so different from Instagram or Facebook.
Instagram and Facebook are mostly, as you said, are mostly for impression management, reputational maintenance almost.
Whereas TikTok is explicitly performative.
And so what you're really just saying is a set of skits, a set of performances, it's really unbelievable.
So I have to say, so young me like you we're following in Felix's footsteps because he won't talk to us unless we download TikTok.
So I too did it. And I had part of your experience, which is the lightness of it and the humor of it was amazing.
And then honestly, I had this other experience and this speaks to just being the paranoid father of young girls.
There's like a lot of young girls doing like objectifying and narcissistic things.
And I don't know, after a little while I loved it.
And then I was like, ooh, this is a little weird.
And so I'm still a little bit split on TikTok, but I think that just might reflect my own paranoia because it's performative young me to your language, right?
But then everyone's a performer and it felt a little bit objectifying.
I have to say I haven't been on it enough to know whether or not I should be disturbed by it.
So I just don't have a good enough feel for it.
But I am curious as to whether or not there's a business here.
That's interesting too.
I know that brands are completely crashing the platform.
And so there's a ton of money right now that's flowing to TikTok influencers, but Felix is your sense that there's a business.
So by dance the company that owns TikTok is not public.
So reportedly they're still losing money.
They have two businesses actually, there's TikTok.
And then there is a little bit like Google news, a Chinese news aggregation service.
And so the news aggregation service, I think is closer to the being profitable.
In my TikTok experience, there's not that much advertising yet.
Interesting, yeah. And obviously that's probably going to change as the company is looking for revenue.
Okay, well, Mihir, what do you have?
So, one of the interesting things that's happening and the data is a little tough on this, but museums are seeing a little bit of a resurgence.
And I think one of the reasons why is they've understood technology way better than they used to.
And so what I've been noticing is that audio guides at museums have gotten really, really great.
And so this is kind of like a quasi -recommendation and a trend, which is we've seen museums actually have a little bit of a rejuvenation, which is great news, but I think the interesting part to me is they're doing well cause they're harnessing digital.
So one example that we had recently that was just amazing was we went to Bath in England, which is where there are a bunch of Roman Baths and we got the audio guides.
And the audio guides, you might remember audio guides as being these clunky, horrible things with old people saying like, oh, look at this thing from 1688.
And instead this audio guide was Bill Bryson, who is a travel writer, talking about his experience.
Walk in the woods, he's hilarious.
He's amazing. So he walked you through the Roman Baths and he had obviously, he's a very strong point of view.
He's like, look at the statue and he describes it, but then he has like a really contrary take on it.
So I thought it was just fantastic to see a real world experience like museums doing better.
And then second, I think the reason why is they're learning how to use digital and they're learning how to use technology in interesting ways.
So the audio guides are now fantastic.
And the more different voices you get, they're just somebody with something interesting to say and who actually is experiencing this as you are experiencing it.
So I could imagine so many interesting things, like you could go to like MoMA or you could go to the Met and you could have somebody like, I don't know, like Steve Martin, he understands art like way better than I do, but like I'd rather hear him talk about the art than like the head of the creation department
at the MoMA. And so I just think there's a whole set of possibilities for museums to kind of use digital, but in particular, I think guides is such a fertile area.
It got me really excited.
And then the girls had a different audio guide.
They had like a kid's audio guide.
You could pick four different audio guides and it was really nice to experience a museum and a historic site in a kind of new way.
So I think that's really exciting for museums in the future.
I wanna piggyback on that because the one I was gonna raise is really related to what you just described.
The trend that I wanted to raise was, I think we're in the middle of just an absolute rediscovery and reinvention of audio as a communication medium.
So I saw this fact recently and it blew my mind.
So Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out.
He has sold more audio books than physical books.
It's incredible. What's interesting about that is the audio book is produced differently than the physical book.
In other words, it's not just someone reading the book where there's a quote, you will often hear the actual recording of the interviewee.
There's a musical soundtrack.
These are very well produced audio books.
The Daily Podcast from the New York Times has far more subscribers than ever visit the front page of the newspaper.
I remember when my son a couple of years ago, he was in high school and he was in the middle of midterms and he had a couple of midterms the next day.
And at night, I walked into his bedroom and he just had his headphones on and he was just goofing off and doing whatever kids do.
And so I left and then I went back a little bit later and still he just had his headphones on and he didn't seem to be making any moves to study for his midterms.
So finally near the end of the night, I said to him, hey, don't you have a couple of midterms tomorrow?
Maybe you should think about studying for your midterms.
And he said, mom, what do you think I've been doing all night?
And he put his headphones on my head.
And as I left the room, I turned back to him and I said, so just for the record, you still remember how to read, don't you?
And he assured me that he did.
It's so exciting. I love this trend.
And I think it's so interesting.
The Gladwell story is so interesting because he has this popular podcast.
And I wonder how much of the success of the audio version of the book is really the community that listens to his podcast.
So it's almost like you were able to build a community of readers and then they would read whatever you wrote.
Now you have a community of listeners and you know them and there's intimacy that then allows you to think differently about how to produce audio books, for instance.
So it's really fascinating.
Yeah, so up to now audio books have been a facsimile of the physical book.
And I think what you're gonna see is increasingly this divergence between the two forms.
And I think they're gonna have soundtracks and they're gonna have different voices.
And I think we're very close to the point where you're gonna see the emergence of audio books that don't have a physical version.
You could just release an audio book.
Yeah, think about the internet space in newspapers, early newspapers in the internet space were basically PDFs of the printed copy.
And then they took on an own life.
And today's online newspaper looks nothing like the printed copy.
How these things play back and forth between digital and non -digital spaces is really super interesting.
I don't know, you know, given this whole audio thing, I think maybe we should start a podcast.
I don't know if that's a good idea.
I don't know. I don't know, sorry.
Felix, do you have another one?
I do. I have good news for you, for both of you actually, people pay for news.
You know how 10 years ago we said, oh my God, remember when you used to pay for news and now you don't?
And now you do. So I'm thinking about the rise of paywalls.
So if you look at across newspapers, magazines, printed publications that have moved online, paywalls are super, super common now.
And it's really interesting for me to think about like, how did that happen?
We were so convinced that you would never ever, ever pay for any kind of coverage again.
And I think there's sort of two reasons that are really interesting to me.
The first one is advertising revenue is 50 % is desktop, 50 % is mobile, but all the growth is in mobile.
And in mobile, Google and Facebook are killing it.
There is just no way to compete.
So whatever hope you had as a person running a publication of ever getting meaningful advertising revenue, I think that's just completely unrealistic now.
And then the second thing that happens alongside that, which is actually much more positive news is that even mid -size publications just have an astounding number of readers.
Take The Atlantic. The Atlantic now has 50 million readers each month.
Isn't that amazing?
And so of course, even if only a fraction of those are willing to pay, that's actually a really meaningful source of revenue.
And so I think for both of these reasons, we see that we're going from a world in which news was free to a world where people pay.
So one of the sites that I subscribe to is The Athletic.
And it sits behind a paywall and it's for sports news.
And you think, well, why would you pay for sports news if you can just go to ESPN .com or go to any of the gazillions free sporting sites?
And the reason is to go there is to really experience something very different in a small site like that, which he thought, oh, would never be able to survive is actually thriving.
And doing quite well.
So that's the good news.
The part that I'm not sure is good is you can imagine the emergence of two different internets.
So now you have the free internet where the content tends to be lowest common denominator stuff.
And then you have all the better quality content sitting behind a paywall.
I don't know how I feel about that.
It's kind of like now we pay for video content, whether it's Netflix or HBO or whatever.
And then there's YouTube.
And YouTube, I mean, there's some good stuff on YouTube, but it's also a messy hodgepodge of stuff.
Is that what's happening to the internet?
There's the free internet, which is a bit of a mess.
And then there's the curated nice pristine internet, which is behind a paywall.
So in a freemium model, I think that's very much the way you describe it.
But remember about a third of these models are metered.
You get to read five, 10, 15 articles out of everything I have.
I'm just not gonna give everything that I have.
And so it seems like each publication needs to figure out, am I the kind of outlet that has really lots of exclusive content, like the ones with the hard paywalls, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, they really have content that no one else has.
And as a result, you get a hard paywall.
So even as people build these business models, it's really fascinating to see how then their content strategy matches the way they capture value.
So Felix, two questions.
One is, are you ready to kind of declare the crisis of kind of the transition to digital for news?
Are you ready to declare that over?
And then second, what do you make of what's happening at the local level?
Your point is such a good one.
I mean, the reason to worry is really local because local news, I don't really see a super promising model because the scale advantage I think that has led to the rise of paywall basic, it doesn't play, right?
And Felix, is there a related point about entry?
What about the startups who are like trying to create news?
Are we just kind of endowing the big players with a big advantage?
I don't think so. I mean, maybe most of these outlets are going to be, I don't know, $500 million outlets as opposed to $15 billion outlets, but you can be squarely in the news business, not have a traditional brand like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and have found a way to make a living
with storytelling, with lists, with quizzes, with cooking shows, with the portfolio of activities that most of these news outlets have now.
That's quite amazing to me.
And I think in that respect, I would say the worst is over.
Interesting. Interesting.
Okay, me here, you have one?
Yeah, so this was gonna be entertainment broadly considered.
So, alcoholic seltzer is the biggest category disrupter in beverages in the last 40 years.
And it has become a huge business in the span of really two or three years.
Okay, so me here, the fact that you considered drinking a form of entertainment, first of all.
I was kind of going big.
You guys are all digital.
I'm like the cranky old man, right?
So I got a slip to my brand.
You told me to embrace the brand.
I am trying to embrace the brand.
You don't see something like an old category like alcoholic beverage get disrupted so quickly in a really kind of remarkable way.
So the most prominent one is White Claw and then there are others.
Boston Beer Company has truly as well.
And I have to say, I was deeply skeptical and then I tried some of the alcoholic seltzers and actually they're pretty good.
So, in the last three years, we've seen the growth of spiked seltzer.
And I think it is not a flash in the pan.
I actually think it's the real deal.
Since the wine cooler, which was the early 90s or God knows what, we have not seen something like this.
You know, in the last decade, what's happened in beverages more broadly has been unbelievable.
Just go to Whole Foods and take a look at the beverage aisle and just look at all the tonics and all the kombuchas and all the teas and the canned beverages, the bottled beverages, the juices.
And that's really exciting.
I think drinks have become such a larger industry than they ever were before and prices have escalated.
I just think what is happening in spiked seltzer is actually gonna stick around and it is the real deal.
I would liken what's happened in beverages to fast fashion in the sense that I think you see a ton of churn, a ton of activity.
I think as a whole, it's really exciting, it's really fun.
The sustainability of any particular brand, I think is the jury's still out, including by the way, White Claw.
I agree, I agree on the brand, but the category is to me super interesting and promising and vaguely associated with entertainment.
Okay, so should I go next?
All right, I think we are approaching the end of genres.
This is the era of genre fluidity, of genre bending.
And what do I mean by that?
I mean, in the world of entertainment, which does not include beverages by my definition, the best way to understand how we have historically thought about categories and genres in entertainment is to simply look at our award shows.
So we have the Emmys and then we have the Oscars.
And then within those, we have things like best male actor in a drama or best comedy.
But if you look at what we're watching today, a couple of episodes ago, we talked about succession.
One of the reasons I love that show is that I think it's the best drama on TV, but it's also the best comedy.
Meir, you talked about Fleabag.
Is that a comedy or a drama?
It ran for six episodes.
Does that make it a series or does it make it a mini series?
One of the best actors on TV today is Asia Kate Dylan who plays Taylor Mason in Billions, who is non -binary and uses singular they pronouns.
If they were nominated, in which category would they be put?
I could go on and on.
Avengers is a movie and Big Bang Theory is a TV show.
But what about Bird Box, a made for TV movie?
What's that? All movies are now made for TV with only a few exceptions like the Avengers.
So all of these genres, all of these distinctions, I think, are falling by the wayside, which leads to, I think we need a total reinvention of our awards shows.
Well, this is where it really cuts, right?
Because the award shows are so strict or they try to be so strict about drawing walls between either genders or about categories or whatever it is.
And I think you're right.
So certainly what you just articulated with TV and with movies, but in earlier in our conversation, think about the Gladwell story with the podcast and the book, right?
I mean that too even is kind of bending some of these categories.
So yeah, I know I totally buy the idea.
Even like the borrowing of elements across different genres, I think, is super interesting.
I do think you see that tension not only in award shows but also when a piece is first marketed, you sort of have to tell the audience what it is to attract a particular audience or when Netflix has to categorize it so that you find it under romantic comedy.
In my experience, it's often you start watching something and you think, oh, I picked a romantic comedy.
And then you see it's so much richer than what you expected, which is part of why I have this ever -growing sense that this is, we're living now at a time when entertainment is just like, it's hard to imagine how it could get any better.
And part of it had to do with you're led to believe that you're watching particular categories and then they really melt in an interesting way and that they borrow.
And even when you look at the actors that are now jumping from one supposedly being in a particular category and then they do very different things also, which I find really interesting.
I think we should blow it all up, all the award shows and start over, completely, completely start over.
Anyway. So I have a little bit of a kind of countertrend to young me, which is you talked about the blurring of all these things, right?
There is one way in which TV is reasserting its distinctive nature and that is in the return of kind of appointment TV.
So we've lived through a decade of binge, binge, binge and Netflix obviously pioneered this with House of Cards, which has just released everything at once, right?
And the idea was, well, that's how people like it and you should be able to watch it on demand all the time.
But what we're seeing is actually people starting to appreciate appointment TV.
So there have been people who have always diverged HBO, most notably, as being somebody who prefers appointment TV, where there are weekly releases of episodes.
But now even Disney and Apple Plus have indicated that they're going to be a little bit more appointment TV oriented and Netflix is starting to do some more appointment TV kinds of things, even the way they rolled out British baking show, which is of great interest to me and my girls.
And the logic is that actually for building audience, appointment TV can help, right?
Which is you dump all of succession at one time and then yes, huge buzz when you dump it all, right?
But then in week five, it's hard to get conversations going around that dump.
And so instead what you have is growing kinds of enthusiasm, which is precisely what only appointment TV can kind of actually structure for you.
Kind of a super over simplistic way to describe what you just talked about is the episodic stuff.
You can think of it as an acquisition mechanism whereas the dumping for binge watching is for retention purposes.
In other words, you want to create buzz around the episodic stuff.
So Game of Thrones was a huge acquisition driver for HBO.
On the other hand, if you want to keep viewers, Netflix needs to just fill hours, content all the time.
You keep people watching.
So it's a real retention mechanism, which again, is really over simplistic, but it is kind of one way to think about it.
I also had a question.
Is it conceivable that no one wanted to binge watch the British baking show?
There, you're obviously mistaken.
We should have a whole episode dedicated to the British baking show, just to be clear.
For British baking more generally, that would be like really fascinating.
A five hour episode in British baking.
The measuring, the accents.
There is going to be a huge backlash from listeners.
You're going to hear, you're going to hear from listeners.
Yeah, all five people who love the British baking show will.
You have no idea after hours.
Right here now. Okay, wait for the email.
Please address specifically to Felix Overholt, Ruby and Yung Nee Moon.
Okay, pics. I'm going to go first because mine is in the spirit of our entertainment episode.
So what I am recommending is my favorite actor.
Her name is Olivia Coleman.
I'm sure you guys are familiar with her.
But my recommendation is that you Google anything and everything she's ever appeared in and you watch it all.
She's the best. I sign up for it, yeah, totally.
I would begin with Broadchurch.
British cop show, finally, British cop show.
Thank you, Yung Nee.
That's the one I would start with.
She has a small role in the night manager also, very, very good.
She's going to be in the crown.
Oh, okay. Of course she's in Fleabag.
Amazing. She has an epic role in Fleabag.
So my recommendation, Olivia Coleman, anything she's in is worth watching.
She is so fantastic.
I totally sign up for that one.
That is great. Okay, go ahead, me here.
I have a pretty broad one, but it is in the entertainment spirit, which is I have come to re -appreciate how much I love reading book reviews.
And I really recommend that if you're not reading book reviews, you start reading book reviews.
And here's why. First, the reality is you can't read all the books, right?
And so like, you need a sorting mechanism and you need to know about a book and you can learn so much from a book review without reading a book.
And it's really a fantastic second.
It's got this really particular form and it's such an interesting form because you have to kind of summarize the book.
You have to like criticize the book.
You have to like speak to the author in a way.
When it's done well, it is a spectacular form.
And in particular, there are people today who are writing these magnificent book reviews.
And so I just think everybody should be reading more book reviews.
It is just a great way per ounce of time and energy.
It is intellectually totally fulfilling and you kind of get a taste and then you can decide.
You get so much smarter in the process and you get a really interesting form.
So I recommend book reviews specifically.
There's some people writing now, Dwight Garner and Paul Segel, who are writing amazing book reviews at the New York Times.
Nice, Felix. And I have a book that I would like to recommend.
Not the review, just the book.
Or you might read the review or you can just listen to me for the next one minute and then be done with it.
That's the book review.
The author is Daniel Markovitz and the book is called the Muratocracy Trap.
And he basically makes two arguments.
The first one, I think many people have made before and were quite familiar with.
And that is, yes, we believe in Muratocracy, but it's not really that everybody has access to the institutions that will make the best out of you.
You're not going to believe all the numbers that he has in the book, but he has this one calculation that says more affluent parents outspend less affluent parents, $10 million per child.
They're spending $10 million more per child compared to someone who's far down in the income distribution.
And I don't think it really matters whether the numbers are exactly right, but there is the sense in which the most meritocratic institutions, the top universities, they're just not really meritocracies in the sense that everybody can have access.
If only you work hard enough, it takes much more than that than in particular, it takes the wealth of your parents.
So that's the familiar argument.
The argument that I actually found most interesting is that even the people who succeed in this kind of meritocracy that we have today, in the end, become the victims of the system.
So one stunning statistic that he had is in the last 30 years, the number of highly paid people who work more than 50 hours a week doubled.
So if you make it, if you happen to have been educated by the very best institutions, if you get these top jobs, there is a relentlessness and there are these incredible demands on individuals that feel so crushing.
And so meritocracy really doesn't work for either one of these two groups.
It doesn't work for those who are excluded from the very best institutions and the very best jobs, and it doesn't work for those who succeed because they end up leading lives that are just oriented towards producing economic output.
And so the combination of these two arguments in one book I thought was really very interesting.
I do meet a good number of our graduates who just find it extremely difficult to cope with the demands of their job.
And the sense is that really, like what time do you have left outside your professional activities?
And the answer is zero.
And even societal expectations, all of it can be quite daunting.
I think that's exactly right.
It's so true. You see the stress on this generation of high achievers.
On the other hand, you feel uncomfortable complaining about it.
You're blessed. Yeah.
Rich people problems, but problems nonetheless.
So an interesting argument to consider.
Okay, well, that was fun, guys.
We'll see everybody next week.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
Thanks so much. Thanks, guys.
See you next week. Bye bye.
Bye bye. Bye bye.
