Ted Audio Collective Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Youngmi and I'm here with Felix and Me here.
Hi guys. Hey Youngmi.
Hey Felix, hey Youngmi.
So this is our first annual awards episode.
I feel like we should have had sound effects like a drummer or something.
Yeah, so we decided to do this.
Since there's such scarcity of award shows.
We're such conformists.
So we're going to do awards for the year, awards that we made up.
So we have awards like the best trend of the year, the worst trend of the year.
This is one of the few episodes that we actually did a little preparation.
So this will be interesting.
I didn't know I was signing up for this.
So let's go. Alright, award number one.
This is the award for the best trend of the year.
Felix, go. I have two actually.
Have you heard about plugging?
I have not. Plugging is this fantastic thing.
It comes out of Sweden and it involves people who jog and pick up trash at the same time.
Oh my god. And it's caught on.
It's now in the United States.
It's in dozens and dozens of countries where next time you see a jogger who also happens to carry a trash bag, this is what they're doing.
This is brilliant. This is really brilliant.
But actually on a little bit more serious note, this is a longer term trend, but it's accelerated this year.
Rapid decline in the cost of electricity produced by industrial scale solar plants.
That's a great trend.
It is just unbelievably fantastic.
There's different ways of calculating these actual costs, but what one investment bank did is numbers I looked at.
They say it's now $50 per megawatt industrial scale solar versus $100 for coal.
This is the end of coal and it's such great news for lots and lots of reasons.
Great. Okay. I too have both a runner -up and a winner.
My runner -up trend is women on boards in Europe.
Many European countries have begun to mandate that publicly -listed boards have a certain percentage of women on the board.
When they began to do this, I actually had mixed feelings about it.
I thought, well, let me just wait and see what happens.
I have to say I'm becoming increasingly convinced because the trend lines are really interesting to watch.
Anyway, that's my runner -up.
My favorite trend of the year is the trend of companies and more specifically CEOs taking stands on issues that supersede the immediate interests of their companies.
I don't know that I would have felt so strongly about this 10, 15 years ago, but business has now become so interconnected with society and culture, particularly as it pertains to bigger things like income inequality and climate change and so on.
For businesses to pretend that they can be neutral on some of these things, I think is no longer tenable.
I do think it's a little tricky because you want businesses taking stands on principles without becoming completely mired in politics.
But I think it's also, we are past the point where businesses can say, this has nothing to do with it.
Do you have a favorite example?
I'm particularly impressed with companies that are unilaterally making strides with respect to sustainability, even to the point of it having to make real changes in how they organize and structure their companies.
But even on more topical issues, whether it has to do with race relations in this country or LGBTQ rights, things like that, I support it.
I think it's a good trend.
Okay, I wish I had a runner up because my first place winner is kind of counterintuitive.
So, you know, if this was this time last year and you're a finance professor, everybody comes up to you and says, what do you think about Bitcoin?
And it's like a nightmare because I would just keep saying the same thing, which is I'm a cranky old man.
I don't believe in Bitcoin and blockchain is real.
Like that was my 10 second spiel on this thing.
And here's the good news.
The bubble burst. Ethereum and Bitcoin are down 80 plus percent, 90 percent from their highs.
And I think it's a great thing that has come back down to reality.
So I don't want to miss the other thing you said.
Blockchain is real.
I agree with you. We need to talk about it.
Yes. But we also need to do an episode on cryptocurrency because I'd be interested in asking you not about Bitcoin or even Ethereum, but about the concept of cryptocurrency more generally.
So we should say that.
It's a trend. It's a trend.
What about the worst trend of the year?
So I have a worst trend.
I just don't think mega VC makes sense.
And so I'm thinking about the hundred billion dollar soft bank vision fund and what it has spurred, which is very, very large venture capital deals.
And so soft bank is a Japanese firm.
They're putting a hundred billion dollars to work through this vision fund in technology.
They're writing enormous checks to private companies, some of which are small, some of which are big.
And it strikes me as first problematic because now every asset collector wants to like raise a hundred billion dollars to do something similar.
Second, it seems so inimical to the underlying idea of putting money to work in the venture capital space, which I really believe in.
Third, one of two things are going to happen.
They're either going to lose an enormous amount of money in the process or they're actually going to create these behemoths, which have such access to cheap capital that they're going to be able to outlast other people and in the process just create a whole bunch of distortions and actually kind of vaguely
concentrated positions.
So but the distortions can be of many.
I mean, what you're essentially seeing is a kind of inflation in this space as a result of this, the pumping in of this kind of momentum.
That inflation is actually really problematic.
So I'm down on that trend.
I know a lot of people are excited about it, but I'm down on that.
OK, my worst trend of the year.
It occurred to me the other day, and I know it sounds funny coming from me, but I have decided that targeted advertising is destroying all of us forever society.
Really? I have. So, you know, the original promise of targeted advertising was this notion that so much value could be created if we were only served up marketing messages that were truly valuable and of relevance.
But I think what we did not anticipate was this whole set of unintended consequences.
The two sides of this, the one side of this, it has created this incredible market for data.
The value of data has just skyrocketed.
And it used to be that data that was really worthless, like who cares if you like that restaurant or if you like the color blue versus the color red.
Now, every single piece of data about us has become valuable currency, which means that companies have a huge incentive to collect it.
It's basically to surveil us.
It's like this huge surveillance mechanism to collect it, to buy it, to sell it, to engage in the marketing of data.
And then the flip side of that is that it's become like a nirvana for bad actors, for ad scammers looking for vulnerable people, or radical politicians looking.
So the amount of pollution in our information economy has gone up and suddenly every little thing we do, it becomes valuable for somebody out there to know that we're doing it.
And I think it's the death of us.
My runner -up for worst trend of the year is cold brew coffee.
I do. I kind of agree with that.
So I got to tell you, you know, I think in some places in the country, it might be fine, but living in Boston, where people are always on the edge of being mean anyway, by 4 o 'clock in the afternoon after they've had cup after cup of cold blue coffee, everybody is ready to kill each other.
And then you get in your carts and the commute on the way home, you look at people and their eyes are like, they've had too much cold brew.
It's too much. Everyone stop drinking cold brew.
Felix, what's yours?
So my first intuition was to say charcoal ice cream, but then I thought of something even worse.
And it's a trend that actually John Oliver on HBO, he pointed it out first.
It's one of these instances when someone shows you something and you never really notice it.
And then once you recognize it, you see it everywhere.
And he called the thing what about ism.
And the mechanism is basically a company did something really terrible or a politician did something really terrible.
And then you ask them, how is it possible that X happened?
And they would essentially deflect by saying, what about something often completely unrelated?
Oh, here is a senator who probably molested a young girl.
What about X? And what it does, I think, and Oliver pointed this out.
It sort of introduces a kind of moral equivalency of just every bad thing that ever happened.
And I think it goes along with this trend of not really owning the kinds of things that you did and the kinds of things that you have.
And I think it's just terrible.
Pay attention to it.
The moment you hear, what about?
It's just a bad actor trying to create moral equivalency between really terrible things.
I hadn't noticed. But the minute you said it, now I'm starting to think about it.
If you watch TV, you hear it all the time.
Interesting. Okay. Our next award goes to the biggest fail of the year, biggest bonehead move, biggest fall from grace, just the biggest fail of the year.
What do you got, Felix?
I didn't have to think long.
Elon Musk telling everybody that he was going to take Tesla private and that he had the funds when it actually turned out not to be true.
So it's not only the lie that is really terrible, but it's also this is a company that couldn't exist if it wasn't for the naivete of public markets.
Ouch. And then you promise to take it private with money that you don't have.
Oh, my God. And you preannounced the price.
You preannounced, yes.
We'll have another chance to talk about that one because he wins a different award for me, but here, what about you?
Well, you may not have heard about this, but there's been a really fantastic fall from grace in India of a financial institution called ILFS.
And it's got all the character.
It's a bank. It's kind of, that's the question.
What is it? Which is it kind of began as a bank and as a lender in infrastructure, then it became an owner of infrastructure assets.
This is one of the most vaulted Indian financial institutions and they've basically now gone bankrupt in a very short period of time.
It's got all the classics of a financial crisis.
There's a charismatic CEO who kind of disappears and then there's like $13 billion of debt that's been highly levered and cross collateralized in the most crazy way.
And I'm not trying to minimize this because it's actually a really important problem in India because it's causing all the kind of shadow banking sectors to get crippled, but it is a spectacular fall from grace and it's like another time when we learn kind of the hazards of vaguely regulated financial
institutions with mission creep and financial engineering gone awry.
The name of the institution is ILFS and it's an incredible story and a massive fall from grace.
For me, what was amazing about this award was how many candidates that worked.
So I was thinking biggest fail.
I don't know, David Cameron calling the Brexit vote maybe.
Here's what I went with.
At the end of the day, I went back to our old favorite Wells Fargo.
I'm not kidding. So I mean, just because it's gone from the headlines doesn't mean that it doesn't continue to engage in unbelievably egregious behavior.
And you know, you want a fun exercise?
Google list of Wells Fargo scandals since 2015.
I mean, you will just be astonished by the number of things that they've done.
So it started out with the fake accounts and then it's punishing whistleblowers and lying to investors.
And it just goes on and on.
And even a couple of months ago, they revealed that they've accidentally foreclosed on hundreds of homes because of a computer glitch.
People lost their homes.
I mean, it just, how does this institution continue to exist, guys?
It's just beyond me.
So that's my winner of the year.
Okay, sleeper award.
So this goes to a company that has quietly and without much notice been like a really phenomenal success story.
Who would get that award for you?
I don't have a company.
I have a country. Ooh.
Yeah, it's just not big enough.
It's just not big enough for a few weeks.
Why not choose a planet?
And the country, perhaps surprisingly, is the UK.
Guess what's the level of carbon emissions in the UK in 2018?
I gotta tell you, the UK hasn't done everything right recently.
Yeah, exactly. Okay.
What was the question again?
Carbon emissions. What level are they in time?
Just like, you sometimes hear, we hope will achieve levels that we had in 1960.
I don't know the answer.
For the UK, it's now the 1890s.
That's amazing. Isn't that absolutely astounding?
Fantastic. So they're back to the 1890s.
On a capita, Person France is even more progressive, but they have done an amazing job taking carbon out of the economy, mostly by moving away from coal.
Wow. That's a good one.
That's inspirational.
All right. Mine is a company.
So I went with the best, cleanest, classiest, most high -integrity social media company in the world.
That exists? That exists.
It's free to use. It's one of the most heavily trafficked sites in the world.
It doesn't charge you anything.
And it is beautifully and magnificently policed, and we rely on it every day, and we never think of it.
It's Wikipedia. Oh, yeah.
Wikipedia is the best thing on the internet.
It really is. And we take it for granted.
I mean, think about how often we use it.
It's 100 % crowdsourced.
Think about all the ways in which Wikipedia could easily become trash.
You could imagine an alternative world where it is just absolute trash and ugly and mean and worthless.
Instead, they have put in a set of policies and norms, and they police each other, and as a result, it just gives you a window into how effective, putting the right structures in places to police crowdsourced behavior.
It's really remarkable.
Oh, and by the way, every once in a while, they come up with those things to give money to Wikipedia?
Yeah, I used to find it annoying, and then I did for the first time.
Everybody should give money to Wikipedia.
Okay, Mehir, what's yours?
So, my sleeper is a little geeky, but you've been walking by banks, presumably, in branches, and you wonder, who's paying for those branches?
Like, what is going on?
What are the economics of that business?
And so, finally, online savings accounts have taken off.
And they're amazing.
And just to give you a sense of this, interest rates have been really, really low.
So, frankly, it didn't matter that much, because you could make 10 basis points in your savings account at some bank, or you could maybe make 80 basis points at some online bank.
But now, online banks, savings accounts, are offering 2 -plus percent.
That's real. And they're fantastic.
We recently opened up two accounts, and they're amazing.
They're easy to use, and we have really interesting players in here.
So, it's always been people like Ally and a bunch of other folks, but now Goldman has a really remarkable commercial bank online, called Marcus, CIT, American Express.
So, online savings have arrived, and I think that's really exciting.
And as interest rates rise, you're going to see this more and more, and I think it's going to be really important for savers, obviously.
But then, also, to the commercial banks, when they realize that online savings accounts are taking off in this way, and you don't have the cost structures to support, these are pure online banks.
I think it's going to be amazing.
It's a real sleep risk.
I think two things sort of needed to happen, right?
So, the interest rates had to be worth it.
But the convenience had to improve.
And then, the IT's there too, but it's really, I think, just the benefits, right?
The interest rates make sense now.
Yeah. Excellent. Okay, let's take a break, and then we'll come back with more awards.
Okay, we're back. Come back of the year award.
I'm here. You know, I gave it to Major Pharma.
Really? Pharma has got its way back, right?
So, not sexy. Everybody wants to talk about tech.
But Major Pharma, and I'm talking about, you know, Merck, Pfizer, Lilly, not biotech, but really big pharma, which had lost its mojo for so long.
The pipelines are getting better.
The discoveries are coming.
The stock price performance over the last year has been astounding relative to the market for this Major Cap Pharma.
And there are CEOs there who are really interesting.
Ken Frazier at Merck, an interesting guy to your first point about taking a stand on issues after Charlottesville.
There's a new person at Novartis, Varsnesmann, who's really interesting.
There's a guy at Lilly.
And these companies I think are really genuinely back.
And it's been about a decade in the darkness, right?
I mean, I think really that they have got their groove back, and I think they're super interesting.
Groove back in a sense.
The R &D productivity.
R &D productivity. And they've been doing so much financial engineering.
I mean, there was a decade of inversions and, you know, levering up.
And I think they're kind of getting the meaning of patents.
And I think they're getting the groove back.
We have to talk about this in greater depth.
I'm very curious about this.
So anyway, that's a little bit of my comeback.
Did you have one? I did.
My comeback of the year is Etsy.
The marketplace for hand -milled products.
You might remember it's now probably about a year and a half ago when they had this major management shake -up.
They had to let go a significant number of people, and in particular, it looked like the moment Amazon enters with Amazon Handmade, a specialized marketplace, you know, it's basically game over, what are you doing?
They appointed a new CEO, Josh Silberman, and he did a fabulous job focusing on customer satisfaction.
The value of Etsy has doubled, more than doubled, within a year.
And what I find particularly interesting, so this goes a little bit back to what we sometimes talk about in the show, how important are really CEOs?
If you look at Josh Silberman's career, he was with eBay, fixed eBay operation in the Netherlands, then moved on to work on Skype, basically dramatically improved the value of Skype before it was eventually sold to Microsoft, and then he arrives at Etsy, and he does it again.
So there's something about a particular group of people who just over and over again are really fabulous news for the companies that they're on.
You know, that's one of those companies that you always root for.
That's right, yes. So it's fabulous that they win.
Yeah, I agree with you.
Well, I have a small one, okay?
But guess who's planning for an IPO?
Levi's. Remember Levi's?
Oh, I didn't know that.
We gave Levi's up for debt, right?
They suffered through this whole athleisure wear.
But also they were really struggling to figure out their identity, and then they started to get it.
It's sort of that combination of innovation, but also really leveraging their roots.
This is a brand with such a deep and authentic, and when I say authentic, I really mean authentic, not manufactured authentic, heritage.
And they've really began to find that nice balance.
This is a brand that I'm so happy to see making a bit of a comeback.
That's great. Okay, next award.
Work cut out for him or her award.
This award goes to the person who has his or her work cut out for him.
Shall I go first? My award goes to Larry Culpe.
Same here. So you and I can vote at GE.
I agree. You know, it was only in 2010 when this was the largest company in the world.
It wasn't that long ago.
And it would take us a long time to go into all the reasons for why it's unraveled so quickly.
But now Larry Culpe has come in.
And I got to tell you, I mean, I think for all of us, because we know and love Larry Culpe, we're all rooting for him.
But boy, does he have his work cut out for him.
Maybe we should tell our listeners.
So Larry Culpe became really famous as the CEO of Dannerher, an industrial conglomerate that has just the most amazing management process you can imagine.
It builds on the legacy of Toyota and ideas around Toyota's production system and then really applies them in a super thoughtful way, build a conglomerate, not unlike the GE conglomerate, but super, super successful.
He steps down from his role at Dannerher, then teaches at Harvard Business School for some time.
He was our colleague, which really was fantastic, is invited to join the GE board, and then after the departure of the former CEO is now in charge.
And boy, oh boy, difficult.
I was going to say I have two people on the work cut out.
First is Jay Powell, who's the head of the Federal Reserve, is first off, in general that's a hard job.
But now he's getting jawboned by the president.
He's got to manage the renormalization of interest rates, and it's going to be really, really complicated for him in the next 12 months, especially as the economy slows.
We need to get interest rates renormalized, and he is going to have a lot of difficulty doing it.
And the second person who's also kind of in a government role is a woman who you probably have never heard of, is Andrea Jelenik, who is an Austrian who is running the European Data Protection Board.
Oh, she has her work.
She is charged with implementing GDPR.
And I don't think we have any idea how that's going to go.
And I think the questions and the pressure she's going to face, I mean, she's going to face enormous pressure.
She is. So I think both of them deserve our good wishes.
Okay. Next award is most under -reported story of the year.
So I think there have been a set of transactions that I don't think have gotten enough notice, which is in the last year, CVS and Aetna have gotten together.
Oh, yeah. Cigna and Express Scripts have gotten together.
And now we have Walgreens and Humana talking about a transaction.
So when the CVS Aetna thing happened, I was like, what the heck is going on?
I didn't even fully know that this combination of Insure Plus retailer was something that was in the cards, but that has triggered a set of moves.
And I think it's completely reshaping healthcare in really interesting ways.
And nobody's reporting it nearly enough.
And when you see Cigna, Aetna, Humana doing these multi -billion dollar deals, and then in the Aetna CVS case, of course, the CVS CO is becoming the main CO.
That's right. And so this is something that impacts everybody.
And I feel like it's totally under -reported what's happening in that space.
That's my under -reported story.
That's a good one, actually.
So many of these would make good episodes.
We should turn after hours into a three -hour podcast.
Oh, gosh. Poor listeners.
By the way, no one's asking for that.
What do you think has been really under -reported, Felix?
So mine is a longer term trend.
As you know, there are about 7 .6 billion people on the planet.
Since roughly the year 2000, 1 .2 billion people have gained access to electricity for the first time in their lives.
Wow. It just changes everyone's life in really radical ways, because living with power or living without power is just like...
And what's interesting is the vast majority is connecting homes to the main grid that we have.
So this is like old -fashioned, just bringing households back to the way.
We never think about it because we take it for granted.
I think no one talks about it, but it changes the lives of people more than anyone can imagine.
This is so connected to my under -reported story theory.
Oh, okay. The Russians are trying to hack our electric grid.
Have you been following this story?
Yes. It's really incredible.
So in the summer, it was revealed by the BBC, the New York Times, Bloomberg, a bunch of...
that the Russians have successfully managed to hack our electric grid.
So they infiltrated the control rooms of power plants around the U .S.
And since then, periodically, you'll see a story pop up saying they continue to make inroads.
There's so much evidence that they're probing, they're hacking, that there's an increased number of resources being devoted to hacking our electric grid.
Felix, to your point, this is so fundamental.
This is so fundamental.
And one of the things that I've learned from reading about this is, in the U .S., anyway, our power grid is actually kind of a patchwork quilt.
And so even though some parts of that quilt are pretty well protected, other parts are not at all.
And so there's a lot of vulnerability embedded in this thing.
I think, you know, we talk about hacking of, you know, fake news, but this feels to me really pretty fundamental.
And you got to believe there's all kinds of things going on all the time, right?
I mean, there are hacks, and we may be hacking them, and there's, like, a whole drama that is not being told.
Not being told, exactly.
Okay. Overhyped. Most overhyped thing of the year.
Well, so I'm going to do one, but I may regret it, but I just can't believe it.
This hype. I just don't buy into scooters.
Okay. I'm sorry. There is so much hype about scooters, right?
So, Bird and these other folks are going to become the next Uber, and we're going to all be on scooters, and there's electric scooters, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I just don't believe that it's of the scale of Uber or anything like that.
Electric scooters, of course, have been around, you know, for like a decade.
Yes, yes. So, it's not really clear what's changing now.
I think the regulatory maze is a lot harder to figure out than it was with Uber, and I don't think they're going to be as able to do it.
So, anyway, the whole scooter thing, I'm just going to say it's overhyped.
It's like the whole thing is a puzzle.
Anyway, did you have one?
I had one, and the winner is Bacon.
Bacon? Bacon has gained 25...
Totally not overhyped.
I can tell you. I thought I would see some resistance.
25 million consumers have started eating bacon in the United States in the last decade or so.
It's just paleo. This is all part of paleo.
Yes, and it tastes great.
Every now and then, if you eat bacon, you got to say, well, I sort of see why.
Every now and then, if you stand on your scale, you think, yeah, maybe a little overhyped.
Exactly. Okay, are we ready for the big one?
Person of the Year Award.
Mine's not very interesting.
It broke my heart. Really?
But I think it's President Trump.
I went with a business one time.
I went with a conceptual one, so let's go.
Okay, so with everything going on and all the concerns, his ability to totally dominate the news landscape every single day is just unprecedented.
And we once talked about in the context of the New York Times how much it's the media that responds too much.
But he has just figured out.
I mean, if your ambition in life is to be from page news every single day, he's figured it out.
He really has. And he's also changed, I mean, on trade, on all these issues.
Yeah, there I... I'm not in terms of being good.
I just mean in terms of being impactful.
Maybe, maybe not, right?
So, actually, when you think about the thing that is now no longer called NAFTA, it's essentially NAFTA.
In the trade war, we will see, but I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up roughly where we had always been.
So, I think that's in part he wins the award because other than the tax cut, without really getting anything done, he forces the world to see everything through his lens.
Okay, well, I went with a business.
I thought I'm going to keep it in business.
And since mine sounds like a real person and yours sounds like it's going to be some imaginary conceptual thing, I'll go next.
But I think you have to go with Jeff Bezos because I think this is a company right now, I mean, all of these things are cyclical.
But right now, there's no company that strikes more fear into the heart of any industry.
If he were to whisper that he's going into Industry X, what you will see is just utter panic in whatever industry he cites.
And I think the example of that over the past year was when they acquired Whole Foods and you saw the stock price of grocers.
Just plummet, just plummet, and not really fully recover either.
And so, his company is the shadow that looms over every business right now.
So, that would be my choice.
What about you, Meir?
So, I have a conceptual one, because I used to hate when Time Magazine would pick a conceptual one, but here I go.
So, my conceptual one is, you thought if Time Magazine can do it, I can do it.
I actually came to believe that there's some, exactly.
That's just the way I roll now.
No, I actually think there's some merit to it, because I think it captures a lot of important things that are going on.
So, my person of the year is the voter.
So, I think voting is incredibly important.
We had a really important election here, where voting was, for midterm levels, very, very high.
I think around the world, we're faced with situations where voting is being overrun sometimes, and I think voters who express their point of view is incredibly important.
In corporate governance, voting is hugely important right now.
So, we have these index funds, and people like Larry Fink, or Cyrus Saraporavela, or Tim Buckley, are trying to figure out how do you vote your shares.
So, I just think voting, in a time when we have a lot of pressure against democratic sentiments, I think is incredibly important.
So, my person of the year is the voter.
If it's either at the corporate level or at the individual level, and my person of the year is the voter.
Wow. Well, on that inspirational and idealistic note, we'll close that out and be right back with our final award of the year.
So, in lieu of picks, we're going to close out with our final award, which is the best piece of entertainment you consume this year, whether it's a book, a podcast, a movie, whatever.
So, what do you got?
Mine is an exhibition, actually.
And if you happen to be in New York during the holidays, I highly recommend it.
It's still going on.
It's a show at the Guggenheim, and it shows paintings of someone you probably never heard of.
I had never heard of her, Hilma F.
Klint, and she was a painter early on in the 20th century, in 1906.
So, a long time before people like Kandinsky and Mondrian, she started abstract painting.
And she was all by herself.
And it's a magnificent show.
Can you say the name again?
Hilma F. Klint. So, she's Swedish.
And part of the reason that we don't know her has to do with her own sense of reception, that she didn't feel loved or accepted.
She herself, after she passed away, did not allow anyone to see her paintings for 20 years.
So, this is the first time now that we see these incredible works that foreshadow what abstract painting is going to look like and what it's going to be.
And it's beautiful in its own right.
It's historically important.
If you have a chance, check out her works.
It's a nice one. So, you guys always make fun of me because I have to have two.
And you guys had runners up earlier.
So, my two are, first, David Sedaris released a book this year called Calypso.
And this book is amazing.
And he is so funny.
He's a satirist. And I think he's becoming the best satirist of our time, by far.
And every story, it's like laugh out loud.
And it's just the kind of thing that leaves you, like weeks later.
He's been so good for so many years.
He's been so good for so long.
It's amazing. And as one example, and this dovetails with your story earlier, part of the year he lives in the UK.
And he received one of these awards from the Queen because he started a campaign for picking up litter in his area.
Like a blogger. Like a blogger.
So, there's a queen.
The queen every year honors people who are quote -unquote commoners who do special things.
And so, that story is so spectacular the way he tells it.
And so, my other one is, yes, I love British cop shows.
And I've loved them all, but I had never done what is known as the Mother of All British cop shows, which is prime suspect or sometimes is considered the Mother of All cop shows.
And so, it's on Britbox, which is a service available through Amazon Prime.
But it's from the early 90s.
It's from Britbox? Britbox is.
It's a service for me here to decide.
Exactly. It's just British crime shows.
It has one subscriber.
No, it's very good.
And so, Prime Suspect is from the early 1990s, and it's a younger Helen Mirren, and it just totally defined the genre.
And the stories are so well developed.
And Helen Mirren, and it's also, she's the only woman, she's what's called a DCI, which is a kind of a chief inspector, a deputy chief inspector.
And so, she's surrounded by men.
And it's all about that dynamic at a different time.
Anyway, Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren, Britbox, Amazon Prime.
Excellent. You won't regret it.
Okay. So, I couldn't decide.
I mean, it was so hard.
This was so hard. Yeah.
I mean, I went through and I looked.
And so, finally, I chose something that I knew it would really annoy Felix.
Thank you so much. So, just to show you, I decided to choose Twitter.
So, as you know, I got back recently on Twitter.
I know. And I have to tell you, I mean, I know there's a lot of garbage on it, for sure.
But the part I had forgotten was if you're looking for kind of a real -time collective response to anything, it's astonishingly fun, amusing, and insightful.
So, you know, to watch any live event, so whether it's the Academy Awards or a sporting event or a political debate, and to be on Twitter, people's wit and their observations and the memes and the insights that just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
At its best, it feels like a collective conversation.
And the velocity is incredible.
And it makes anything you're experiencing feel like a collective experience.
It's really something.
So, Twitter, Felix.
Thank you, young me.
I so appreciate your advice.
So, that wraps it up.
That's our awards show.
I hope you all have a fantastic new year.
And thanks for listening, everyone.
This is After Hours.
I'll see you next time.
