Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi and I'm here with Felix and Me here.
Hey guys. Hey Yang Mi, hey Mi here.
So this morning I woke up to this wonderful email from a former student of mine, Mi here, and she was talking about you because a few days ago she attended this thing that you did in Sydney, Australia and she said it was just absolutely fabulous.
So, are you still in Sydney?
I am still in Sydney and the days are a blur.
So what did you do, a seminar, or you taught?
Yes, I came here to speak to the annual shindig for all of the securities regulators around the world.
And so, I had a great time there, but then I gave a couple of seminars to the Harvard Club of Australia and a couple of other things, all as part of the book tour, and I think I know exactly who you're talking about and she's fantastic and we had a great time.
I have a question for you Yang Mi.
Is checking email, is that the first thing you do in the morning?
So my morning routine is none of your business, frankly.
Exactly, good answer Yang Mi, good answer.
So I'm excited for tonight's conversation because I am going to insist that we do my topic tonight, which is Rihanna.
Not exactly our comfort zone, but yes, let's try.
And then Felix, I know you brought in some Fuddy Duddy topic.
You saw the news out of San Francisco, the technology capital of the world, so to speak.
And the board of overseers just decided to block the police from using facial recognition software.
So I'd love to get your take on that.
Sounds great. OK, all right, great.
OK, Felix, so you wanted to talk about how comfortable we are living in a national digital panopticon.
So to speak, or maybe not, who knows?
San Francisco leads the way as it often does.
So this is the board of overseers in San Francisco voted to block the police from using facial recognition software.
And already there's a sense that other cities in California and then certainly other cities across the country will put similar bans in effect.
And this is against the backdrop of really a rapid increase in the use of facial recognition technology.
You might remember the horrible Capitol Gazette shooting last year in Annapolis.
Facial recognition software is part of the reason why they caught the perpetrator relatively quickly.
Taylor Swift is using facial recognition software to identify stalkers at her concerts and so on and so on.
So against the rapid use and implementation of this type of software, what do you think?
If you had been on the board, would you have voted in support of the ban?
Is the ban on the use of facial recognition software or is the ban on video capture of citizens like in the world?
Because there's CCTV and there's people picking up my image.
Is that okay? That's totally okay.
Yes. All it's doing is it doesn't allow the police to then use facial recognition software to identify who's in these videos.
Well, so I think there's two different issues here, right?
One is about the precision with which this software works.
And there are concerns that these softwares don't do that good a job with underrepresented groups.
And given historic problems in the criminal justice system, we worry that this would only compound all those biases inside the criminal justice system.
That to me is one problem.
I actually think that's probably solvable.
And by that I mean that software over time could get better and those biases could get better.
That's not the part that worries me in the longer run.
What worries me in the longer run is I don't like all this video capture being done by governments.
And I find that when I go to the UK and CCTV is everywhere.
And in the US we haven't had that tradition and I quite like that.
I don't like my face being captured all the time.
I don't want it to be captured in the first place and then I certainly don't want state authorities to use facial recognition software to try to match it.
I think there we are entering into like totalitarian landscape.
I know that sounds like a kind of crazy off the grid kind of guy but that really does worry me.
I would have voted in favor of the ban as well in part because I think we all just need to pause for a second before we aggressively begin to roll out this kind of technology simply because we can.
So right now it is an absolute free for all because there are no federal laws or regulations that create any kind of boundary on what's acceptable.
And if you look at other countries so China is an example of a country where there is extensive use of facial recognition software and sometimes it creates an incredible wow factor.
So if you go to the airport in China you can walk up to a kiosk that will just read your face and within seconds the screen will show you where your gate is and when you use that kiosk for the first time it freaks people out.
But there's a little bit of delight too because of the efficiency.
But in China also though the government uses it to surveil the Uighur Muslim minority.
And so it's a bit of a free for all and I would hate for us to go down this path before we are able to have a conversation about what are we comfortable with, what kind of regulation should we put in place.
So yeah I would have voted in favor of the ban.
You just kind of summarized to me what was really worrisome which is we're trading off what seemed to me to be kind of like tiny efficiency gains which is oh isn't it cool I get to go to my gate quickly with this much like deeper loss of privacy and it's kind of crazy in a way.
I think part of what's interesting about the current situation is we've been pretty careless about what can be collected in the first place and one reason why it didn't matter so much was there was no way to really make use of all the information that we collected and so say the whole debate around
CCTV everywhere is like yeah so there's all these images and there's just no chance that anyone can actually you know at scale then analyze who's doing what and who moves how in the public sphere.
More recently the National Institute of Standards and Technology they have documented that even just in the last four or five years these systems have become 20 times better.
We're now down to failure rates of 0 .2%.
But the bigger debate is the classic notion at least in the United States is that are you in a space where you can have a reasonable expectation of being private?
The reason why you need a wiretap to listen into a phone conversation is that when we call each other we have an expectation of privacy.
If we walk down a public road we have no expectation of privacy and as a result that information at least given the current legal landscape is up for grabs, is up for analysis.
But this is what's problematic about this.
I don't think it's about really reasonable expectation of privacy so I don't want to be captured on video and have that funneled to the state on a 24 -hour basis whenever I'm in public.
And the fact that you say well oh me here you're in public space so you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy that doesn't feel right to me.
That's how the current law works.
That's the legal basis for all the CCTV.
I think the problem with that is who's collecting the data.
And the idea that the state is collecting the data is really problematic because once they have that data they can do a lot of things with it and that to me is the largest concern.
But you're okay with companies doing this?
That's problematic for sure but I usually have some control over that, right?
But when the government does it in all public spaces now we're talking about an entity that has incredible amounts of power knowing everything about where I am.
But they're private companies that are doing it across all public and private spaces.
Well but how can they do that in public space?
Your phone knows where you are at all times.
But I can deny them location services.
I have choices about that.
I mean you think you can but...
Well you're right we don't know for sure.
You'd literally have to remove the SIM card and that in and of itself is still not sufficient, right?
But governments can do things, I mean governments can put me in jail and private actors can't, right?
I mean that's the difference.
Yeah look I find it all increasingly troubling.
You know the biggest fear at least with respect to governments is that your private life becomes weaponized and used against you.
In the case of commercial activity it makes your private life a source of profit for other companies in ways that you might not necessarily be fully informed about.
Right. But I gotta tell you like at a whole different level the whole thing is just making me increasingly uneasy.
And if you had asked me a year ago I would have been less uneasy because I would rationalize it by saying I don't care.
I don't care if people know where I go and they can take photos of me and I have nothing to hide.
But what has made me increasingly uncomfortable is not the collection of the data but my understanding of what they can now do with it.
So they can take this metadata and the ability now to create a kind of meta -intelligence about me that is unprecedented.
That's what makes me feel really uncomfortable and I think there is a cultural cost that we pay when we give up that kind of privacy.
I kind of agree completely with what you're saying young me but there is a part of me which feels like we're on a train and it's moving.
And like we can pause it but God I agree with everything you're saying.
It's so true me here.
I mean there used to be if you wanted privacy you just went into your room and you shut the door and think about it now your phone is collecting data your Alexa your Fitbit.
There's no privacy anywhere and the reason it concerns me just at the level of our collective psyche it disturbs me is that privacy is a form of freedom and it enables us to explore ourselves to test the boundaries of who we are.
So you might be a teenager trying to figure out your sexuality you might be secretly contemplating a career change you might be exploring alternative religions in other words privacy is freedom because it begins with this notion that there's something that belongs to you and that's you who you are your
inner desires your behavioral tendencies the very essence of your being belongs to you and it's up to you who you share it with.
I mean this is what intimacy is this is what it means to own your own sense of self and when you give that to someone else it's a special thing because you're basically saying I'm sharing with you me and now all of that is lost all meaning and so we're just giving away to other people who we are and that to
me feels like we're losing something very very important.
You said it so beautifully I think this is one of the reasons why thinking about where we can and cannot reasonably have expectations of privacy why this is so important it seemed you know at one point in time it seemed we're not really giving up all that much if there's no reasonable expectation of being
private when you're in public spaces and now it's not so clear because that information has gone from being utterly useless because you didn't have the technology to make sense of it to now being highly highly relevant and so what I fear a little bit is that the war on tools such as facial recognition in a way
is not quite the right battle to fight because I think there's something much more fundamental that has happened and the usual regulation that consent I think we know you know from the 168 page user agreement that you sign whenever you download the weather app consent just doesn't work because you don't
really have a sense of the trade -off that you're making when you consent to information about you being used in a particular way.
Would either of you consider kind of giving up the technological devices to kind of reinstall a level of privacy in your life?
Have you ever even contemplated that?
I mean here this is such a great question we are so inconsistent in the kind of exposure we'll tolerate I mean so we don't like being fingerprinted by government agents but we will happily give our thumbprint to Apple to make it easier to log into our phones so now Apple has all of our fingerprints
and you get used to things so quickly I remember maybe a good year ago it happened to me for the first time when I bought something at a duty -free shop in an airport that they scanned and captured the image of my passport I think I was buying pistachios or something like this like why exactly do you
need my passport information for me to be able to buy a bag of nuts and today I still find it a little curious but I have basically you know if you buy something at the duty -free shop basically they're going to capture your passport but when you think about it like what can possibly be the justification of this and yes
but it's a slippery slope yeah increasingly I am becoming more sensitive to how much privacy, how much it gives us human dignity and it's not about oh I don't you know my life is an open book kind of thing privacy is not the same thing as secrecy like when you go into the closet we know what you're
doing in there you're changing your clothes but we still respect your right to close the door and so it's we give something away when we reveal who we are and that's why revelation is a gift it's a gift of friendship and it's a gift of fellowship and it's just I don't know it all feels very hopeless
to me I don't know what else to say well at the same time back to my original point we're living in a digital panopticon the fact that we're having this conversation and the fact that at least the three of us I mean Mehere was probably always in the right place but at least the two of us have moved
a little bit and thinking about what this means I think it's a good sign yeah I'm optimistic because I think the very fact that our feelings and ideas about what is happening right now have changed that's the beginning of change you know Felix that is such a good point a year ago we had this conversation and Mehere
was this is horrible and you know you and I were just yeah you know it's not that big a deal and now I find myself in a very different place Mehere don't get smug it would be really interesting if a candidate in 2020 like really embraced this issue and tried to make a big deal about it because I haven't
really heard somebody talk as eloquently as you know you've been talking about a young me and it would be interesting if a candidate really pushed this as an issue and you know to the point you made young me which is we need a pause but we also need somebody to lead the discussion yeah right and it
would be great if a serious candidate actually took this up as an issue because we could then really benefit from having a national conversation on it in a way that's not happening at all yeah so who knows what would be a good idea for the candidates to listen to after hours no alternatively Felix I'm
thinking Felix it might just be better if we just do young me 2020 oh what do you think?
out of time guys alright thanks guys all right so Rihanna this past week LVMH which is the world's largest luxury goods conglomerate announced it is going to launch a new fashion house led by Rihanna it's Fenty Maison is this a big deal did this catch your eye?
well yeah so I think it's a big deal for a couple of reasons right one is it's a big deal because LVMH does not start a fashion house every other day right it's a huge investment and they only do it once in a while I think the last one might have been Christian Lacroix the second reason why it's huge
is it's the first time I think a woman of color has run a house which is also kind of amazing but to me the bigger story is this is like the next step in celebrities taking ownership of their brand and creating businesses around themselves and that is really I think interesting so I had a similar reaction in that I
think it's really interesting to see that this happens what I'm less sure about this is it something big and systematic that makes us rethink how luxury works and the role of celebrities or is it just that here's this one woman she's just basically super talented at everything like she's a great musician she's
a fabulous singer she has actually quite a history of designing clothing also and so the part that I'm less sure about this is it more a story about celebrities and how they will interact with commerce or is it more about oh my god someone like Rihanna comes along every decade once or twice and it's
more a story about her yeah so let's unpack it a little bit so if you think about it from the perspective of a conglomerate like LVMH historically there had been many flirtations with celebrity so it used to be and it continues to be the case that celebrity endorsements are really common and so you
have Nicole Kidman at Chanel and Natalie Portman at Dior as sort of these celebrity brand ambassadors the second stage which we've seen a ton of in the last ten years has been this whole phase where they begin to dabble a little bit more aggressively in collaborations particularly with respect to streetwear
and sportswear so Kanye and Adidas yes exactly what you're seeing here this is very different you mentioned this LVMH has not launched a new house in more than thirty years right so the way the company is organized they have 17 houses in fashion right exactly but these fashion houses these are brands
like Dior, Gavinci, Celine, Louis Vuitton, these are heritage brands that are part of this richly historical European definition of culture and luxury and now they have elevated Rihanna to that rank and so it's quite the seismic shift in how we think about the upper echelon of luxury why do you think
they went with Rihanna?
so one of the things to think about is what does Rihanna have that is really hard to get for LVMH and I think the answer is access to a young very diverse audience that Rihanna is much better at building this audience than you know LVMH with all of its marketing savvy and all the experience that they
have that's not something they can easily do and so I'm thinking we're seeing this power shift because there is a new way to build audiences and it's all online and Instagram plays a huge role and LVMH is basically shut out unless they go through someone like Rihanna with the exception of Beyonce I
don't think anyone kind of comes close to Rihanna and I think the reason why is first she's durable she's been around for 15 years now and she's very young but she's demonstrated her capacity to survive and that is amazing but I think what is special about her is that she works in high culture as well
as on the low side too which is she's broad mass appeal but then she's cultivated an image in the world of haute couture and in very high end worlds as being edgy and I think that edginess has given her something that none of the others have her ability to kind of be broadly popular to be edgy and then
also to kind of appeal to people who perceive themselves to have higher sensibilities I think that is unique and that doesn't work for the other folks with the exception of again Beyonce so that makes her special the thing I would add is that she is a proven quantity so LVMH they began by doing these
joint ventures and of course the most high profile one they did was with Fenty Beauty so Fenty Beauty is a cosmetics brand that Rihanna launched in late 2017 did you guys follow that story the launch of Fenty Beauty?
the only thing I remember really is there's this tagline Naked is Not Beige which I thought was just spot on really like a great line to sort of position the brand and what it was all about yeah so when Fenty Beauty dropped it hit like a meteor she launched with 40 shades with beautiful quality priced
excessively with a particular emphasis on providing extensive shade choices for people with deeper skin tones so now why is this a big deal?
It's a big deal because historically one of the criticisms of this industry was that there's a whole spectrum of humankind that this industry was missing out on so she drops Fenty Beauty and in the first month of her launch 72 million dollars in sales in 2018 which is the first full year of Fenty Beauty
she did half a billion dollars in sales but is your sense that you know there's competition is your sense when you talk about the beauty line is now that it's out and now that there's demonstrated demand are we seeing that most beauty companies will offer similar products or similar quality yeah so that's
a great question so what happens in any industry where copycatting is not that difficult the survivors tend to be the ones that demonstrate that they can create an innovation engine and so they're always innovating everybody's always playing catch up so she then launched her concealers, her body lava and of course
in these industries your ability to do that well is determined by for example your taste making ability and your ability to understand what the market's going to respond to your timing ability so your ability to have a sense of when is it too soon to launch the next thing when is it about time to launch
the next thing in other words in the last 18 months with Fenty Beauty she has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to guide this brand forward in a way that shows remarkable potential is Sephora an important part of the story I'm thinking of the Pixar Disney relationship where you have just like incredible
creativity at Pixar and then this best in class marketing machine called Disney that can bring out the product is that the kind of relationship that we should think that's the Rihanna LVMH tie up yeah you know by partnering with LVMH so for example when she launched Fenty Beauty it launched in Sephora which meant
that it launched in hundreds and hundreds of stores in a heavily orchestrated choreographed campaign so it hit the world all at once you can only do that with LVMH in this in many ways is why the latest announcement about if you think about Fenty Maison which is the new fashion line I mean she is gonna have access
to the best platform in the world in terms of distribution supply chain access to the most prime real estate in the most important cities around the world and so this is I think where the partnership becomes really important I never understood fully how much of LVMH power comes from real estate until
I was talking to them and I realized that their ability to kind of get prime locations and rental rates that are really good because they become the defining characteristic of a mall like IFC in Shanghai or any other place and then they have so much power that they're actually their economics are so much
better and there of course the interesting question is I mean the importance for real estate for Chanel I think is going to be very different compared to the importance of real estate for Fenty I think is maybe another way to think about their relationship that it gives them access to marketing resources
into channels where they have not really played traditionally because that wasn't their core audience that's the other piece of this that is fascinating to me which is that in effect the best way to do that is to partner with a pre -existing brand which is what Rihanna is in effect and that strikes me
as the really interesting thing to see over time which is do we no longer want to build our brands and is it just better to buy a brand and buying a brand basically means buying a celebrity so is there any celebrity out across this landscape that you would look at and say that's the next big one that's
one that could potentially be elevated to this heightened level I think it's hard to discount Kanye West and what he's done of course it comes with like a huge amount of volatility with him because of what he says and what he does but it's hard to just discount the fact that he created a fashion line
that went high and was able to succeed and went low and broad and was able to succeed and I think Beyoncé and her tie up with Adi does is probably of similar significance it's always a little hard to know from the outside maybe the only difference being that Rihanna seems to be super hands -on obviously
there's a creative team around her but down to details she seems to be super super involved and I think that's part of what's really special and unique about her what do you think young me I think your instinct about Kanye is exactly right I think he is somebody who the industry and I'm talking about the high
fashion industry has kept an eye on yet hasn't fully embraced and I think what he has demonstrated I mean he has a track record now for being heavily heavily involved in design there's a particular aesthetic that he has brought to the world and I think people associate that aesthetic with him so it's
uniquely his so I find him to be really fascinating in that regard final question on the one hand from an LVMH perspective you could say that very easily this is an attempt to appeal to younger customers and broaden the customer base but you know LVMH plays the long long game right the Chanel game yeah
they are not thinking in terms of what's going to sell tomorrow when they launch a house they're thinking about generation after generation and they're doing it in the high luxury space this is not low luxury this is not coach this is not Burberry this is high luxury and so they're making a bet that this is what high
luxury is going to be for multiple generations are they making a mistake are they going to regret this for the size of the group I think there's a 30 million dollar capital investment which is more than they spend on other houses but it's you know it's this sort of a make or break kind of decision I
mean even if say Fenty turns out to be successful for the next five years and then there's some sort of a meltdown I don't think for the group as a whole this is this significant business investment I think it's got to be a winner and the way they've branded it and to your point about the way they did
the cosmetics line it's accessing a whole new population that wants to actually aspire to a brand and so I think it's a fantastic move so Fenty Maison will debut in Paris this summer and I will be watching and you will tell us about it I hope I will okay thanks guys Okay guys I have a really good pick
for you so on HBO there is a new mini series called Chernobyl so I've only watched two episodes and I think there will be a total of five episodes and it's a recounting of the Chernobyl incident and it is so well done and it is so harrowing and what I find remarkable about it is the pacing of it is so measured
in other words they didn't Hollywood it up they didn't create the pounding music it's none of that it unfolds the way you imagine the actual incident unfolded Is it a documentary?
No I'm sorry it's not a documentary but it's based tightly on the actual incident to the point where specific characters represent real people you know when I saw it on HBO I wasn't gonna watch it and then I got a text from one of my sons and it just had one line it said mom Chernobyl you gotta watch
it and so then I thought okay I'll give it a try You have to be in the right mood for it but it's really good so I would recommend it so Mihir what do you got?
So I got something lighter which is a TV show and a comedy that was on BBC a couple years ago and now it has a second season and it's available on Amazon Prime and it's called Fleabag and it is pretty dark humor but it is hysterical and it's created by a woman named Phoebe Waller Bridge who started
with a one woman show I think in live theater and then it became a TV show and it's just about her life and the life of a young woman who has had some bad things happen to her but it's about the way she kind of makes her way in the world and it is both hilarious and also thought provoking is really
fantastic so it's called Fleabag dark and funny and really thought provoking so Fleabag is my pick Didn't she also create Killing Eve?
You're absolutely right so she wrote and produced Killing Eve and she's also like 33 years old which is crazy Wow.
Wow. Okay, Felix. The New York Times had a headline not so long ago that caught my attention the best green salad in the world.
And that was like the most emailed.
It was most emailed forever right?
Are you kidding us?
So this is from a restaurant in New York in the best village via karate but I thought like how can that be you know we serve green salad basically forever like how can it be that all of a sudden someone in jail.
Bends like a far a far better way to crack the code and green salad.
And so as you can imagine I had to try to make that salad sauce and it's all the things you'd expect it's olive oil it's cherry vinegar it's shallots and so on and so so nothing special except there are a few things.
So for instance, after you cut the shallots you rinse them in water and then you steep them in water for a little while.
And you know, it's just amazing about cooking how sometimes the tiniest little details really can make a difference.
So if you Google it, I'm sure it's easy to find.
Is it really the best salad sauce on the planet?
I am not totally sure.
Is it pretty darn amazing?
Yes, absolutely. As someone who is trying to teach myself how to cook.
I need to ask you one question.
So when you steep shallots for a few seconds, it really changes it?
It really changes it.
You have to do it to believe it.
Okay. Via carota, green salad, and in particular salad sauce.
All right. Fantastic recommendations.
I guess that's it for this week.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
Thanks for watching.
