Ted Audio Collective.
Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Mihir.
And I'm Charlotte. Welcome back Charlotte.
Thanks for having me.
Good to have you. So Charlotte, I have to say, I'm always curious about the different perks that different jobs have.
In part because I feel like my job doesn't have enough perks.
I think it's a great job, don't get me wrong, but it's a great job not for the perks.
So I'm curious, being a muckety muck at The Economist, what are the perks?
Being a what? A muckety mucky.
You know, like the big cheese.
As a small cheese at The Economist, I can tell you that the perks are idiosyncratic.
So sometimes there's a bank holiday in the UK that we get to observe, very exciting.
I get to put use where they don't belong in American spelling.
In the UK, there's a European policy, so I've gotten to take a nice long time off when I've had my children, which has been great.
That's nice. That's more than a perk.
That's serious. That's the single biggest thing.
Other than that, it's a funny place to be a journalist because most journalists are trying to make a name for themselves.
And our stories are anonymous.
And so it attracts a certain type of person who generally is really, really interested in the work for its own sake.
And that makes for a really nice culture.
And that is the biggest perk, I would say.
Is that code for like the parties are off the hook?
Is that what you're trying to say?
No, that's code for we have lots of great debates internally on different subjects.
If you've ever seen the House of Commons present, you'll know that there is a particular flourish with which British people convey their opinion and convey that they think someone else is an imbecile.
And that makes for a really fun debate and one that is both substantive and lively.
So I think maternity leave and colorful debate.
Those are the two big perks.
That is wonderful. Do they call you the right honorable lady from New York?
I wish. It's usually you on the Zoon screen.
All right. And speaking of debates, we brought topics, of course.
What do you have for us, Charlotte?
There's never too much time that can be spent talking about chips, semiconductors.
Yes, chips. And Felix, what did you bring?
I would like to talk about the child tax credit.
It's a really interesting experiment that we ran during COVID.
And I'm curious what you make of it.
Wow, this is two serious topics.
Two serious topics.
The good news is I have a recommendation that's a cocktail.
So, Charlotte, semiconductors.
Indeed. So we've heard a lot about semiconductors and chips over the past two years.
But I think it's worth dwelling on them for a bit.
And that's because in the fight over supply chains and this question of how this huge rivalry between China and America will play out in economic terms, there is no bigger issue than chips.
And we've seen in the past two years, a huge shortage.
You've seen governments be very explicit in identifying semiconductors as strategically important.
There's a ton of public cash now swishing around as well as sanctions.
So it's a very dynamic space with big companies making big investments and governments increasingly throwing their weight around.
I think that's exactly right, Charlotte.
And in particular I confess I've been struck by the US -China axis on this.
So the US has done a lot of things actively to promote chip production in the US, like the chips act.
But these recent actions by the US against China strike me as really fascinating and of a totally different order of magnitude than we've ever seen before.
And it's kind of gotten lost in the other things that are going on in the world.
But the US has enacted a really broad set of prohibitions against American companies selling equipment into China, selling advanced chips into China, and even allowing American citizens to work at Chinese companies.
That struck me as just a whole new level of activity relative to, for example, prohibition against Huawei, which we had talked about, I think, when it happened.
And I can't help but think this is one of those moments where history is really turning in a distinctive direction in that relationship and in geopolitics.
I'm not trying to overread legislation about chips, but it feels like a singular moment in geopolitics.
What do you make of it, Felix?
No, I think I completely agree with that.
To my mind, justifying the use of public subsidies to influence where production takes place maybe has a great return, maybe doesn't have a great return.
I'm not really sure.
But that, to me, feels okay to a first approximation.
Any sort of restriction on what you can produce, where you can sell, where you can buy, I think first I would say it's completely clear to me that this is going to make the world a poorer place.
We get less innovation, we get less advanced products, we get less profitable companies.
Everybody loses. And so you really have to believe that in exchange for these restrictions, we get something really fabulous.
And I think there are basically two arguments.
One is we're less dependent on China.
And I don't know if I really want to believe that, because at least at this point in time, China doesn't really have capability that matches the United States.
And then the second one is we don't want these advanced products to go into the Chinese military.
And there, I would just remind us, the US losing the war in Afghanistan, the US essentially losing Iraq.
The struggle now between Russia and Ukraine, my impression is not that these wars hinge on who has the most advanced technology.
In fact, the Iranian drones, I think are a perfect example of apparently, even though we have very comprehensive sanctions regime against Iran, many of the parts for the drones were sold from Western companies, because they're not restricted parts.
They're civilian technology that is dual use that can also now apparently used very effectively in these drones.
And so we're spending $800 billion versus the $300 billion in defense spending in China.
Do we really need these restrictions on top of everything?
I'm not so sure. Well, it's interesting what you raise Felix, because it's fundamentally a trade off between security and efficiency.
And that's a trade that's been made and evaluated again and again across different sectors since the start of the pandemic when there started to be supplying chain snarls.
But it's so extreme, as you point out in the case of semiconductors, where you have both the arguably draconian restrictions, but also these very big subsidies.
And I wouldn't necessarily breeze over the issue of subsidies.
I agree with you that they don't have the potential to completely halt economic integration in the way that a sharp prohibition does.
But they do over time really reshape the nature of an industry and the nature of how companies and governments think about an integrated economy.
Are we moving towards economies that don't have autarky as the goal, don't have total self sufficiency as a goal, but you hear Europe talking about strategic autonomy in certain sectors.
Right. And so that really is a fundamentally different way of thinking about the global economic system.
And there's the hard step that can be taken through sanctions, but then also the slower one of what type of global system you encourage through increased subsidies and the combined effect of those two things together is really pretty dramatic.
Yeah, I think there's two different things going on here.
You're absolutely right.
I think one is this tendency towards our target ideas, which is we need to be self sufficient and the global regime is not what we thought it was and that goes with supply chains and a lot of things.
But then these rules, I think they've got to be targeted and I think they were at China's military abilities and some sense of a growing China power.
And it seems quite clear that that's what they were wanted to do.
In that sense, it signaled in an extreme way, treating China like a rogue state.
And the thing about American citizens working for companies, that is just breathtaking.
Now on the one hand, to your point, Felix, one could say, is it really going to matter?
And I think that's an interesting point.
For example, Nvidia has already announced that they've figured out a way to change their most recent chip, but basically to slow it down enough.
So it's a little bit of a game of whack -a -mole.
But on the other hand, I think the real issue here is there was this report that Eric Schmidt, formerly of Google, authored for the National Security Council about basically AI weapons and about how AI weapons are now a huge threat.
And similarly, MI6 and the UK have gone out of their way several times over the last 12 months to say China is our biggest threat.
So it just feels like a remarkable escalation in that feud.
And I can't help but think the world is a poorer place because we're all going to be island nations.
But there's something about the China specificity of all this that I think is a really new development.
And what worries me perhaps the most about this is that I think we're dangerously close to groupthink.
So it's of course not surprising that the tech companies that produce technologies that will eventually find their way into military uses, that they argue our technologies are the most important technologies you can think of.
Nothing else will matter in the wars of the future than the products and services that we produce.
That's just the argument that every defense company has made ever.
So I'm not super surprised about that.
What strikes me as peculiar and closer to your concerns, Mihir, is you go back 10 years in time, and you would have made critical remarks about anything related to China and Washington.
And people would have looked at you, hmm, that's a little unusual.
That's like, really?
You're thinking China is just this amazing boon for the US economy because we get to import all of these products at much lower prices than we could possibly produce them.
And that was a type of groupthink that made it hard to talk about IP theft, that made it hard to talk about civil rights, and so on and so on.
And now I think we have the exact opposite.
Yeah. Where if you say anything positive about China, in particular in Washington circles, you're the total outlier.
Yeah. As if it wasn't a complicated balance.
And I think in the case of China and in the case of the United States, making the other country an enemy, to my reading, had first and foremost domestic purposes.
Trump was looking for an enemy that could serve the national rhetoric, and so did Xi Jinping.
And so, unfortunately, for I think the rest of the planet, the two found each other.
And now we're building somehow on a set of assumptions that just don't seem right, that don't seem right in the face of everything we happened to believe five or 10 years ago.
This distinctly feels like another Iraq moment to me, when the political circles in Washington somehow conspire to leading everyone to believe that Iraq is this enormous danger for the rest of the planet.
And it justifies a big intervention, only then to find out that, well, you know, the facts on the ground pretty different from what you sold us.
That, I think, is a useful comparison, Felix.
One thing, though, that is different about this situation versus that one is the way in which companies' long -term investment plans are affected by some of these public policy machinations.
So semiconductors are an industry that have long been cyclical.
You have a boom in demand, you try to build a factory.
That takes kind of a while.
Oh, no, the factory is now producing all these chips that there's no longer demand for.
Anyway, so now you take that cycle and you just shove a lot of government cash into it.
You shove government restrictions on it.
And it's a very, very difficult environment, I think, for companies to navigate.
And you saw in the lobbying that surrounded the CHIPS Act, it's a little tricky.
It's not an entirely purely good thing, I don't think, for the industry.
So it's a tricky thing for them to navigate both as policies are being crafted and then certainly afterward.
Do you think it balances out, Charlotte?
Because everyone who takes money as part of the CHIPS Act can no longer expand.
So Intel had these plans to expand their facilities in Chengdu.
But the moment you take CHIPS money, you have to give up those expansion plans.
So is your sense that overall supply will still expand and make the bust and boom worse than it used to be?
Or are these restrictions counteracting the tendency to build up excess capacity?
Definitely worse than it used to be.
I think it supercharges it.
I could use all kinds of other metaphors.
It pours more gas on the flames or whatever you want to say.
I think this is a big additional accelerant of trends that were underway even prior.
And this is because both the US and China expand public support.
And Europe and Korea.
I mean, you just look across all these different markets.
And there's at least two pieces to why it might happen, right?
One is it's an additional layer of uncertainty.
So in a highly cyclical industry where you're having difficulty planning, now you throw in a new actor, a political actor who may do things differently than you imagine.
So that's going to create more uncertainty.
It's going to amplify things, as Charlotte suggested.
And then also when you have a global market, there are more places for you to shift resources and shift product too.
That's one of the things about globalization we don't talk enough about, which is just risk sharing.
Risk sharing is a really big part of globalization.
And when you now go to a more autarchic setting, those booms and busts get amplified, I think exactly as you said, Charlotte, because there's new policy uncertainty and because you don't have the outlets that you used to have.
And you don't have the risk sharing you used to have with markets.
But I do want to just return Felix to your point about Iraq.
I think that's such a provocative analogy in many ways.
And my only problem with that analogy is, I don't want to diminish what happened in Iraq.
But this is a conflict of a completely different order of magnitude.
This is conceivably brinksmanship and economic warfare that is between two superpowers.
I take your point that people convince themselves of things.
That sounds totally right.
But God, it feels even more consequential than the last time something like this happened.
So I would just add to that, that you see semiconductors as kind of the tip of the spear here.
So this is an industry that has been identified as strategic by the U .S.
government, and it's the area on which they have been most aggressive.
But there are a lot of other industries that under the Biden administration and under the Trump administration, were increasingly thought of as strategic.
Sort of what are these other critical areas that we want to be paying attention to, both to differentiate ourselves from China to promote security of supply chains in these key areas.
So it's not an issue that's confined to semiconductors.
And so I think the big question going forward is, will what we see in semiconductors expand across other parts of the economy?
And then the other really big question for all kinds of companies goes back to what Meher was saying on brinksmanship, which is, what on earth happens to all these supply chains, should there be an invasion of Taiwan?
Now, that could take up four hours of this podcast, but it's worth mentioning it here because that is the dark storm cloud that's hanging over these discussions.
And in my conversations with executives who have been thinking about this, increasingly they are doing more scenario planning, as everyone else is doing in the wake of the pandemic.
They're trying to game out what would happen if there was some kind of military conflict.
But at least my impression is they don't have a good answer because it is really an impossible one to come up with a satisfactory solution to.
To your first point, Charlotte, these supply chains are just among the most complex that exists anywhere, really.
And so in part, I interpret the hesitation of companies to make really big decisions to just, oh my God, if you had to reconceive your supply chain, that would just be so incredibly difficult.
For instance, ASML, the lithography equipment producer in the Netherlands, they have 400 different suppliers that are all around the world.
One of their lithography steppers has 1 ,600 components that come from basically all corners of the world.
So if you now all of a sudden have this mental map where the world is divided into friendly to the US, friendly to China, you can only imagine how big a challenge this would be.
And then I think the second difficulty, at least for companies that look a little further ahead, is where is China going to be even if we are super successful at not allowing them to use our equipment.
This summer, a little surprisingly, we learned that SMIC, one of the main foundries in China, they have successfully produced a seven nanometer chip, even though they were targeted with all kinds of sanctions.
And people will point out, yes, it's true, it's the same technology, but it's probably copied from somewhere.
And then they're not close to getting the kinds of yields that, say, TSMC and Taiwan gets in others.
But in the context of Chinese capital markets, that doesn't matter.
Yields are just not that important.
They can run losses in a way that Western companies cannot.
And so I think maybe one of the biggest decisions, both for companies, but also for the government, is not if China will catch up, but when China will catch up, what will the world look like at that point in time and what will you do?
I confess that my instincts about all these topics are that we have given short shrift to the real virtues of integration and global interdependence, that we somehow convinced ourselves that everything that we tried with China over the last 30 years didn't work.
And so now we have to be something different, because I think the logic goes we thought we would change China by engaging with them.
And the answer, of course, is that I think that was naive and ridiculous to begin with.
But it is also perhaps preferable to the alternative, which is what we're kind of witnessing now.
And maybe to this point me here, we completely changed China by engaging with China.
At the most fundamental level, the hundreds of millions of people who were lifted out of poverty, but also the fact that we now see IP rights protected in Chinese courts, not perfectly, but so much better than what we used to have.
I have to say, I can only read this as the fruit of engagement.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
So I think, regardless of what you think about China, I feel very strongly that America could do much, much more to try to integrate itself economically and align itself with countries that are friendlier, and that that is the most powerful response that America could have to China.
A sensible China policy definitely should include stronger trade relationships with others.
And so that's the area where I think America is really missing an opportunity.
And as countries around the world look inward towards becoming more self sufficient, it raises a broader set of risks.
So Felix, what do you want to talk about today?
So we ran this remarkable experiment called the expansion of the federal child tax credit.
So a little bit of background might be helpful.
We have always supported families with children.
And the way we typically did this was that if you had a child, and you made less than $400 ,000 a year, you would get $2 ,000 in tax credits.
That was the main form of support, in addition to sometimes the very specific programs that we have in support of children.
And then during COVID, we ran something really interesting and mostly interesting because the structure of support was very different.
So the first one that was really different is we were more generous.
So we provided $3 ,600 for children younger than six years, and then $3 ,000 for children between six and 17 years with a more constrained income limit.
So you couldn't make more than $150 ,000.
But maybe more importantly, we eliminated the credit aspect to this.
So you didn't have to have any income.
You didn't have to file taxes.
Everybody with a child was supposed to receive this credit.
And then one other really interesting change was instead of waiting for tax season to provide the credits, half of the money was dispersed every other month.
And then the remainder would be given during the tax season period in the spring.
And I'm curious to know, what did you think we learned?
We ran a really big and I think influential experiment.
What are your takeaways?
I think you're right to highlight this.
The great news is that the two features that are most important I think are that refundability aspect, which is you don't just have to have taxes due.
You could have this payment even if you don't, and this advance payment.
It had just as predicted a remarkable influence on child poverty.
It enormously helps people at low income levels to alleviate poverty for that year.
And in fact, this is part of a much longer term trend, which is we have made significant progress in the US against child poverty, largely through instruments like this.
So to me, there were two lessons.
One is getting cash transfers to low income folks is enormously powerful for alleviating child poverty.
And by the way, just it shouldn't go unsaid.
Alleviating child poverty has long term effects and long term benefits in addition to just maybe being the right thing to do for all kinds of reasons.
It increases human capital.
It has huge effects for their long term prospects.
But the second perhaps slightly less positive story about it, of course, is that it was an experiment and it didn't persist.
And so we ended up creating something very generous for one year for a broad chunk of the population.
Instead of doing, frankly, what we should be doing, which is creating a sustainable program that is much more highly concentrated at the low end of the income spectrum.
And so I think it's spectacular news and part of a long term trend that we don't talk about enough about success against things like child poverty, but still in some sense disappointing.
And that if we focus that resource amongst those that need it the most, as opposed to giving it to people with $150 ,000 of income or more.
Yeah, that to me feels like such a lost opportunity.
And then, of course, the moment passed because that all got passed as part of a covid piece of legislation.
And now there's no real hope of bringing something like that back.
So I guess mixed feelings in that sense.
I don't know, Charlotte, what did you make of it?
I'm not so gloomy as you.
I think that things go in cycles and they are brought up and then killed and then revived.
And so I'm hopeful that this will get picked up again.
I think that it is an interesting case study in the reality that you can have a policy that actually works and have it still not persist.
There's so much stuff that doesn't work.
And this really, really worked.
And it was also an instance in which America tried something that is commonplace among its peers.
So if you look across most other wealthy countries, they have cash allowances that they give to people with children.
This plays a very big role in helping to reduce child poverty rates in those countries.
I think one possible political lesson from this is that it can be a mistake to bundle all kinds of stuff together.
Perhaps this policy does persist on its own in legislation in Washington or it's something that states take up.
Some states are doing this already.
I think that the federal experiment provided certainly evidence that could encourage them to do more.
Two things stand out for me.
One is it is such a success.
And one thing that has always driven me a little crazy in the whole conversation about poverty and income inequality that in the context of the United States, everybody always talks about inequality and poverty in terms of pre -tax income.
So the whole inequality conversation that we have, oh my God, inequality is completely out of control.
Since the 1970s, literally it gets worse and worse and worse every year.
That is based on a view that what we have to look at is pre -tax income.
And that is terrible, of course, because we should look at consumption, which is exactly what this particular program did.
And in those measures, seeing that people have much less food insecurity, people are able to pay their bills, I think this is really good news.
And then the second thing that really strikes me as important is why do we have the tax structure that we have to begin with?
Why do we create these social support programs as a function of if you have a tax liability, we give you some credit once a year.
And the reason is, of course, that we're very suspicious.
We basically don't trust poor people that they make smart decisions if they receive more assistance.
It's that mistrust that sits at the center of everything.
And what this shows, I think, which is just really fabulous, is that when you ask people, what did you do with the money?
The first thing that they will say is we paid bills, existing obligations that they have.
It's not as though you run out and you go to the liquor store and then all the assistance is gone.
And we see that having paid your bills, then much of it spills over into greater food security for the families.
And the second really good news is when you look at employment data, which, of course, is the second part of mistrust, the moment we give you cash assistance, you're not going to work because why should you?
Now that you live a comfortable life, there was literally zero response in employment terms.
It's not as though people quit their jobs.
It's not that people worked fewer hours.
To that first comment you were making about income inequality, because I think this is something that I'm really preoccupied with, I think.
And I think the economics profession has been completely complicit in, which is creating like an income inequality industrial complex where we produce studies that are quite problematic and use pre -tax income, as you point out, which is not the correct measure because consumption matters, but also has been
shown to be unreliable because of tax changes.
And a lot of the reported rise in income inequality is not really true.
And there are academics who have made their careers on this and play pretty hardball.
And it has given rise to this widespread belief that income inequality in the U .S.
has risen really remarkably over the last 30 to 40 years, when in fact the consumption inequality story, which is the one that matters, is actually really, really great news.
And this poverty reduction story is really, really great news.
And in fact, the real problem with this attention to income inequality, not just that the data is complex and not exactly what they portray it to be, but is that it displaces the true conversation, which should be about poverty and poverty alleviation.
And we stopped talking about poverty alleviation because we are so preoccupied.
So, for example, nobody really wants to talk about expanding their earned income tax credit in a big way.
They want to talk about taxing billionaires.
And it's crazy. We should be talking about the most productive ways through the tax system to help the bottom 10 percent.
And every time anybody has an opportunity to do anything, they talk instead about a billionaire's tax, which they know will never come to fruition and which they know is only about scoring political points.
So I confess I've been disappointed in the economics professions, the unwillingness to call this data out, and then also to just play into this idea that this measure, which by the way, if you measured it outside of the national boundaries and you measured it on a global level, we know has dramatically
reduced because of all the poverty alleviation and income inequality that has been lessened globally.
But it is such a lesson to me about how talking about the wrong thing is not just destructive and somewhat disingenuous, but also it misfocuses our attention on entirely the wrong thing.
I have found this debate over the last decade or two so annoying because we're not talking about the success on poverty alleviation.
We're not talking about children in poverty.
We're not talking about the things that actually matter.
That matter. Yeah. I think part of the political problem about talking just about poverty is that most people identify themselves as being part of the middle class, even though they might actually really benefit from a program that goes to alleviate, quote unquote, poverty.
And so I think there's a lot of this that is about political marketing, too.
It's very much about how you sell these programs, how you talk about them and then how you convey your message and their benefit.
To my earlier comment, I do think that this is an experiment that didn't see lasting success in 2022.
But given where Republicans are in trying to court lower income Americans going forward, I wouldn't be completely shocked if this is something that they might pick up going forward.
I don't know. If in fact they're serious about helping people.
Yeah. Yeah. If I can quibble a little bit with your first point me here about the tax system, I know you love the tax system.
I know you're thinking about it all the time.
But if we use the tax system, it just consistently misses people who don't have income in the first place.
So, for instance, in the expansion of the child tax credit, in part, the effects are so fabulous because we reached 26 million kids in families that don't file tax returns.
That is just something we always need to keep in mind.
The tax system can help dramatically, but it's a blunt instrument that often doesn't really reach those who need it the most.
I think that's right.
Of course, it did through a refundability.
So in that case, there was refundability.
But if you have no income, there's no support, right?
You can file a tax return.
And in fact, that's how you get the refundable tax credits.
So it can work and it happens to be the way we do it.
It's not ideal. I will just say, though, that comparisons to Europe on these matters are often somewhat naive.
First, the U .S. tax system is actually, relatively speaking, just as redistributive as European systems.
That's right. In part because we don't have a value added tax, which is not very good at redistribution.
And then second, of course, the idea that Europe in its various forms is hospitable to non -native populations is also complex.
I do sometimes struggle with these comparisons to some kind of wonderland of European social democracy as being wonderful for all people and especially low income types.
I sometimes struggle with that characterization.
We can learn a ton from Europe just to be clear, but it is hard to think of it as a paradise on some of these dimensions.
Well, I think we can all agree that seeing a reprisal of that kind of intervention and learning its really amazing lessons hopefully will be something that we can look forward to on another episode.
And I hadn't even thought about the states, Charlotte.
That makes me even more optimistic that maybe if we can get a federal solution, maybe at least in some states, we can find better ways to help the poor people.
Hallelujah. So pick me here, it's cocktail hour.
Well, I have a little bit of a tradition of recommending cocktails and I don't know if you know this one.
Have either of you heard of something called La Bandera?
No. I have not. So it is a Mexican cocktail, which I have had now twice.
I've only really recently discovered tequila, but the beauty of La Bandera, which of course is the Spanish word for flag, is that you are served a shot glass of tequila, a shot glass of spicy tomato juice and a shot glass of lime juice.
Oh, it's basic color.
And of course it's red, white and green.
And then you just sip them alternately.
And I have to tell you, it is spectacular.
It is not a cocktail in the traditional sense where you mix ingredients together, but it's like a deconstructed version.
And the ability to alternate between the lime and the tomato and the tequila in this very colorful way, it's not exactly a winter cocktail, but I think at any time of year, you should all be having La Banderas.
Interesting. That sounds wonderful.
And of course, tequila, I don't even really know why.
It is the no hangover liquor.
Hmm. Maybe for you.
Well, Charlotte, maybe it's about the quantity.
Okay. Well, Charlotte, what do you got?
You got a cocktail?
I wasn't going to do a cocktail, but I will.
I have a friend who has a small oak barrel, and then you pour basically the entire barrel's worth of Negroni into this structure.
Oh my gosh, okay. An enormous amount of Negroni.
And then you just keep it there for several weeks.
And then you have this barrel aged Negroni, and it is so delicious.
I cannot emphasize how much better it is than a regular Negroni, which you might think is an impossible bar to clear.
Yeah. A really high bar.
Charlotte, is this what they serve at those parties at the Economist?
I have a feeling. I wish our copy would be much improved.
Very good. Felix, what do you have?
I wanted to bring a recommendation that produces smells and hope and maybe even tears, and it doesn't involve alcohol.
Unlike the two of you.
I was going to say.
The main role to happiness seems to involve somehow drinking.
And of course, because the holiday season is around the corner, we get a lot of commercials that pull at your heartstrings that make you think about life and everything that is important.
And I've seen an early one that I think is absolutely fantastic.
It's by the UK lottery.
I don't really think of them as an advertising wunderkind, generally, but they have done a really great job.
Of course, it's a love story.
It has lots of romance.
But what I really loved in the end was that one of the things you learn, and we will post a link to the commercial.
One of the things you learn is winning the lottery is important, of course, but it's not that important.
And if the UK lottery says it's not that important, you better believe it.
So it's one of many commercials that will see this holiday season.
But this is one that I really love and recommend.
That is a great recommendation.
I think one of my first recommendations on this podcast was those British Airways commercials, where you travel back home.
So I'm all for a good tearjerker.
I'm all for that. It's definitely that.
And this was it for today.
Thank you everyone for listening.
This was After Hours from the Ted Audio Collective.
Thank you.
