Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Mi here.
And I'm Felix. And we should start out by thanking everyone who filled out our survey.
We got so many people.
Amazing. So quickly.
It's so fantastic. So for those of you who missed last week's episode, we'll include the link to the survey again in the description notes of this episode.
But what we're doing is we're inviting people to sign up for a mailing list.
We're thinking of doing a newsletter, maybe some live events.
So you're saying they're 20 city tour with the bus and everything and Reen M &Ms?
Whatever. Let's just move on.
Okay. As for tonight, Felix, you brought a topic.
Yes. I would love to talk about AMC Entertainment, the huge chain of movie theaters.
Are movie theaters dying?
Are we going to talk about that?
Well, maybe. Not so clear.
Okay. All right. And then I brought in a topic.
I wanted to talk about salary transparency.
I'm not telling you my salary.
Okay, Felix, you want to get us started?
I don't know if you saw, but AMC Entertainment, one of the largest chains of movie theaters, they're in some financial trouble.
The stock over the last 12 months or so has roughly lost half of its value.
If you look at the Russell 3000, it's one of the most shorted stocks at this point in time.
And at the same time, I think it's important to understand they're really big.
So we're talking 10 ,000 screens, 40 ,000 employees.
And their performance is interesting against the backdrop of the industry as a whole.
So sometimes thinking about movie theaters, you think, oh, my God, who goes to the movie theater?
But actually revenues have grown quite nicely from maybe $9 billion a year.
This is domestic to about $12 billion a year.
The number of people who go to the movies is roughly stable, is roughly flat.
So the first question that I have for both of you is, if you wear an investor's hat, would you bet against AMC?
Yes, I think it's super interesting, right?
So it's been an incredibly great short for a long time.
Now I think it's a lot more complicated to bet against it.
And that's because now we're at rock bottom levels, and there's a lot of elements to that.
Maybe. Well, here's the problem, which is it starts to trade a little bit more like a real estate play.
You have to understand the role of both Silver Lake, which is a private equity firm, and a Chinese company called Dalia and Wanda, which has a large stake in it.
And so it's a very complex thing.
I think the broader question about the theater business is very tough, obviously the growth of streaming.
But it's also that, you know, the rise of prices and then the increasing emphasis on concessions and the emphasis on kind of tiered pricing.
It's just made going to the movies a kind of an experience, which is a little bit more and more rarefied.
So, yeah, it seems like the numbers are okay, but can I imagine going regularly to a theater in 10 years?
I barely go now. It's kind of a foreign experience for my children.
So, I don't know, I confess as an industry, I'm deeply kind of pessimistic about the future of it as a large cultural force.
And as a financial play, I think you have to really think hard.
What's interesting about this view is that when Silver Lake decides to invest in AMC, one of their premises is that this view that you just explained me here is way too pessimistic.
There's this presumption that there's a lot of tension between streaming content at home and the movie -going experience.
And their sense is, no, that's actually not true.
So, if you look at the trend over a decade and a half, you see absolutely nothing in the number of tickets sold.
The basic premise that streaming and the movie -going experience in a theater are substitutes, they would say it's just not right and it's also not borne out in the numbers.
It's sort of like when streaming music came along.
In fact, the concert business got even more interesting as a result.
But I think there's an outcome here that I find even more intriguing, and that is to consider what someone who was super innovative would do with this particular asset.
If you think about it, the business model around movies is very simple and it hasn't changed in a really long time.
I mean, you basically make money from selling tickets, some of which you get back to the studio, concessions, maybe some ads that run before the movie plays, and then maybe you rent the thing out occasionally for special events.
But that's essentially it.
That's basically it.
It's a really simple business, and there's so many things you could do to begin to play with that simple business.
And the new CEO, this guy Adam Aaron, so he used to run Vale, Valesky Resorts.
And when he took over Vale, that thing was such a tired property, and he completely turned it around, in part by creating a subscription program.
And so I guess it's interesting for me to consider what someone really innovative would do with an asset like this.
Yeah. I mean, the subscription part is an interesting play here because throughout his career, basically, that's what he does.
Like, all the way going back to Pan Am, I think he created one of the first loyalty programs for Pan Am.
He then created a loyalty program for Hyatt.
Then he created a loyalty program, plus some changes in the experience, when he saved the Norwegian cruise line.
A one -trick pony, is that what you're saying?
Well, he really, really, really, really understands loyalty programs.
The question is, what can a loyalty program do for a movie theater business?
Yeah, that's what I don't understand that.
So like MoviePass, we know has failed.
Now AMC has introduced some subscription pricing, but this feels to me more like the last gasps of an effort to engender attendance.
And in particular, Young Me, the question is, what is the asset?
And the answer, I think, is really you have widescreens in a truly cinematic way that you can't get at home.
Now, the analogy you gave is really interesting.
The analogy of streaming versus live music, right?
So streaming ended up kind of giving rise to new opportunities in live music.
That to me is not what's happening here.
This is just in some ways, home viewing is kind of a dominant experience.
So the first thing I'll say is I wouldn't discard the notion of subscriptions altogether.
He's got about a million people who've signed up for this subscription.
So $20 a month, right?
Yeah, so that's a piece of it.
It's certainly not all of it.
But to answer your question, I don't know what the answer is.
It might mean, I don't know, striking a deal with Ticketmaster or Live Nation.
How many people would buy a ticket for a live simulcast of a BTS concert because BTS is not coming to your town and you still want to experience it in a communal setting?
Or what if you took every Thursday night and you said, every Thursday night, we are going to simulcast to all of our 10 ,000 screens, something super cool and you would get all kinds of people going on Thursday nights that would never really go to a movie theater otherwise.
So I don't know what the answer is, but there are two sort of interesting historical comparisons to think about.
And the first one is bookstores.
So bookstores used to be this place where everybody went and then Amazon came along and now bookstores have become super niche.
They've never really quite recovered.
But the second comparison is brick and mortar more generally.
So for a while, there's this narrative that brick and mortar retail is dying, but that's not true at all.
Some of it is dying.
Some of it is absolutely thriving.
And the ones that are thriving are the ones who have experimented and have adopted a more holistic view of how consumers want to move between online and physical spaces.
Right. And I think the most notable example of this is, of course, Apple stores.
When Apple began opening its doors, people thought Steve Jobs was insane because Dell had already taught us that you don't need stores to sell computers.
And yet it turned out that opening these stores were one of the most brilliant and value creating moves he made.
That's why I said it requires someone really innovative, really creative to begin to think about how to create new experiences that build off these adjacencies.
That might be interesting.
I find this super interesting.
One way to think about the potential is to think about what else could we do for consumers?
And I think a related question different, though, is what's the value for the studios?
Yeah, because I think the truth is the profitability of the theater chains, they're completely hostage to the studios.
What's the revenue share on the ticket sales?
Which movies do you get?
What are the conditions under which you get these movies?
And then maybe the most important is what's the length of the window?
The window during which you only can see that particular movie in a theater.
And the window has shrunk.
So used to be in the 1990s, it was about half a year before you could see anything online.
And now it's down to three months.
But it's three months.
Why not say, well, you know, you can have the new Star Wars movie, but of course it's going to be available online at the same time.
If the studios decide to kill the theater chains tomorrow, they totally could.
And they haven't done so.
And so it's got to be the case that there's some value created for them and how they think about the movies.
I wonder a little bit, Felix, if it is a legacy of this infrastructure that's been built up around movies, you know, which is to say movie critics and movie reviews, which people still view as being prestigious and important and taste making.
But, you know, in 10 years, that infrastructure is going to become more and more foreign to a viewer who's grown up in a very different way.
And then it strikes me as then we see movie companies saying, why am I spending 90 days or, you know, however long in a theater exclusively?
And maybe this reflects my age and my stage in life.
You know, I think roughly speaking over the lifespan, movie viewership is like U -shaped, you know, which is effectively like when you're young and in your early 20s, you go to see a lot of movies and then like post 65 and 70, you see like a lot of movies.
So, you know, it's like a U -shaped thing.
Oh, the future is bright.
Yeah, exactly. But I confess I saw the Greta Gerwig Little Women movie.
It was fantastic. We had a lovely experience.
It was like a hundred dollar bill experience for the five of us.
We could have streamed it together at home later, and it would have been a different experience.
It was a wonderful, fantastic experience to see that movie in a theater.
And I wouldn't have given it up, but it strikes me like that happens once in a year or twice a year, maybe.
But I also think it just sort of reflects the way that these businesses have thought about themselves.
They're essentially the same business as they were 20 years ago.
If you woke up tomorrow morning and the front page of the Wall Street Journal said, Disney is acquiring AMC, or Netflix is in talks to acquire AMC, then immediately your mind would go in all kinds of wild places.
Wait, what are they doing?
What are they going to do with it?
And you would start to think of all of this horizontal movement and all of this innovation.
Or if you open a paper in Apple's buying AMC theaters, it's like, what?
So then our mind expands.
And then we begin to think, oh, what an interesting asset to have 10 ,000 screens around the country.
I think it's only because that just has not been the modus operandi of how these companies have operated historically that we're kind of in this box of how we think about it.
I actually think that's the Silver Lake thesis, which is, you know, at AMC, there's maybe $5 billion of enterprise value altogether, debt and equity.
And that's rounding error in Apple's budget.
And maybe there comes a point where they buy them out.
So it's not about the standard business model being sustainable, which I don't think it is.
But it's, well, there's a play here.
There's a unique asset and there's a bunch of content developers who are now going to go and they'll drop a $5 bill on this thing and they won't think twice about it.
Can I ask you something about the Silver Lake investment?
So it's $600 million, but it's actually not an equity investment.
It's convertible debt.
Yeah. What does that tell you?
You know, whenever you see convertible debt, once you think about the fact that it's effectively debt plus an option.
So when do you issue that or when is that an interesting thing to do?
And the answer is when volatility is high or there's like a lot of divergence of beliefs about what's going on.
But, you know, it's also just a very secure way for them to invest in a company with hard assets without really exposing themselves.
And then they get a bunch of upside.
But the debt burden is basically a reflection of the belief that going forward scale is really important, right?
So they bought Carmike for about a billion.
They bought Odeon for a billion.
They bought Nordic for a billion.
It's all related to this notion.
If my business in the end is a negotiation game between the studios and my business, I need scale in order to be able to survive.
And the independent movie theaters, I think they have a hard time because they have no bargaining power.
I think what they got in exchange for all the debt was completely different bargaining power compared to what they have before.
I think there are actually two advantages to scale.
One is exactly what you said.
It's the leverage you accumulate in your ability to negotiate with studios.
But the second, I think, is, again, if I look at this business in a blue sky kind of way, all of the interesting stuff feels like it's associated with these adjacencies.
And you need scale in order to be an interesting merger target or an acquisition target.
So, again, if you woke up tomorrow and you read that Live Nation has purchased AMC, I mean, your head just sort of spins, but they would only do that if it's a big enough asset.
To me, it's only when I start to look at all these adjacencies that I think, oh, this is when it gets a little bit more fun to think about.
So, we'll return to this topic 20 years from now when we hear it's back in the movie theater.
And we will think about what that experience is like at that point in time.
No. We'll be in our 70s and they'll all be gone.
And we'll be like, where are they?
I'll open your door and I'll say, want to watch a movie?
Just like the good old times.
Okay. Salary transparency.
So, the historical norm in most industries is to not talk about salaries openly.
And in case there's any doubt, there are actually companies who actively discourage and even prohibit people from talking about their pay with their coworkers.
But an increasing number of firms are beginning to experiment with something called radical salary transparency.
So, Whole Foods, there's a company called Verve in London.
There are companies out there that are all now touting the benefits of total salary transparency.
The idea is if you give everyone in the company access to total information regarding what everybody else is making from the CEO down to the lowest level assistance, the idea is that you can then eliminate biases and unfairness in how people are compensated.
So, my first question to both of you is, if you were the CEO of a company, would you install radical pay transparency throughout your entire organization?
So, I confess, when you say radical pay transparency, it evokes two things.
One, I love anything to do with transparency.
And I hate anything that starts with radical.
So, it makes me a little cautious.
The way to think about this, for me, has been, well, we'd want to think about what it does to the variability of wages and what it does to the level of wages and what it does to culture.
So, for the variability of wages, what it's going to do is it's going to compress wages.
Whether or not you like that depends on what you think is giving rise to the heterogeneity in wages today.
So, if you think it's implicit biases and all kinds of bad stuff, then you like the idea.
If you think the underlying heterogeneity in wages that we observe today is actually performance related, then compression isn't so great.
But the bigger effect that people don't think through, which I think one of our colleagues, you know, Zoe Cullen, has done some really great work on, is that it might actually influence the level of wages.
And she points out something that I think is really important in this debate, which is, effectively, what it's going to do is employers are going to bargain really, really hard over wages, because they know whenever they give somebody a wage that's higher, it's going to ripple through the organization.
And the employees may bargain a lot less harder because they get to free ride off of anyone who gets a wage increase.
And so it creates a really different bargaining environment and actually can lead to lower wages, which is what her work shows.
So, I don't know. I feel like, A, it actually has some unforeseen consequences for the level of wages.
I kind of wouldn't mind compressing wages, but I think there are performance differences that we should pay people differently for that are linked to unobservable trades.
And then finally, culturally, God, I think it's a nightmare to have all this data available and people finding it all out.
It feels a little bit difficult to me.
So, I don't know. I come down negative.
How about you, Felix?
So, I wouldn't be supportive of paid transparency, but at the same time, I think transparency of pay is extremely important.
I think it really matters that people understand why they get paid the way they get paid.
Why did I get a five percent raise and not a two percent raise?
I think the right comparison is a little bit, when we grade students, we can be completely transparent about where the grades come from.
And yet at the same time, we cannot share with everyone who did well, who didn't do so well.
And I think that sort of preserves the best of two worlds in that it gets around all of these issues of envy and these issues of, oh, am I compensated fairly or not fairly?
And to the extent that we are concerned about biases, let's have these rules where there's just no wiggle room for gender or race or age to play any sort of role.
Let's say your boss comes to you and is completely transparent about why you're getting paid the way you're getting paid.
And that includes how many hours you worked and here's how we rated your performance and therefore this is your salary.
It's not transparent because as the employee, I have no idea whether or not I can trust his or her judgment, whether or not there is unconscious bias underlying the way that he or she has rated my performance, whether or not my base level of salary is on par with others.
But doesn't that depend on the criteria?
If we have mushy criteria, then yes, I completely agree.
That's not being transparent.
But if you're allowed to see the data, then I think that is being transparent.
You know, I guess so much of where you come down on this depends upon how you prioritize which problems need to be addressed most urgently.
In other words, it feels a little bit like a pushdown pop up problem where every time you try to rectify something, you can create a new problem.
My big concern about salary transparency overlaps with all of the things that you guys described.
It can create a huge amount of resentment.
It changes the culture in some ways that could be actually counterproductive.
It might limit organizations degrees of freedom.
You can go on and on.
But we are still decade after decade stuck with gender pay gaps and racial pay gaps and other gaps.
And I would love to live in a world where every company had this really nuanced and sophisticated ability to sit down with their employees and justify all of their compensation without going to full salary transparency.
But I don't know if that's realistic.
And so part of me is now more open minded to the notion of radical salary transparency.
I sort of compare it to if you had asked me a few years ago, are you in favor of mandating the number of women on corporate boards?
I would have said absolutely not.
But with each passing year, I become more and more open minded to it as I realize that with each passing year, we're really making almost no progress.
And so it's almost kind of pent up frustration that there is nothing that seems to sort of break through the logjam.
And so I think you could make an argument that not only could you eliminate the gender pay gap, there's an opportunity to attract a much more diverse workplace.
And I think you can make an argument that historically, the secrecy surrounding salaries has typically benefited firms far more than its benefited workers.
And so maybe we should be more open minded to the idea that, huh, if you created a workforce where everybody saw everybody's salary, it would force companies to have to explain and be accountable for their compensation policies.
So part of what's driving me crazy about this debate is in every article you read that is motivated in part by gender pay gaps, the numbers that are quoted are the crudest numbers you can possibly imagine.
Not taking into account seniority, not taking into account the degree of responsibility, not taking into account how people make very different lifestyle choices.
The way salaries are communicated is in a super, super, super crude form.
I mean, I think in a way, young me, your views on this topic kind of reflect what your views are on the underlying distribution of wages today.
If you think they're an artifact of unfair practices, then yeah, radical pay transparency all the way.
If you think that it's a combination of that and productivity differences, then it gets more complicated.
You're right. I completely agree with you.
But me here, even if you took, for example, Felix's point, which I think is 100 % right, the numbers thrown around about gender pay gap are overinflated and confounded by the fact that people have different roles in the organizations and they have different responsibilities.
And all of this stuff is confounded.
Most companies now are actually controlling for all of these other things.
And what they're finding when they do that is that the wage gap isn't as inflated as the headlines will say, but it is absolutely there.
And it is really, really persistent.
Absolutely. Here's where I agree with both of you.
The companies that would be most likely to be able to do salary transparency well are the companies that probably don't need to do it at all because they have such good cultures.
They have individual level transparency.
They have the right conversations with their employees.
And as a result, if they were to move to salary transparency, they could probably do it relatively seamlessly.
Whereas the companies that have bigger problems would probably botch the whole thing and create more problems than existed in the first place.
And then there are effects across firms, right?
So, you know, if you have firms adopting it, then you're going to have employees switching in response to it.
And you could imagine that could get kind of perverse too, just to be clear.
There is a huge amount of unfairness and implicit bias in the world and explicit discrimination in the world.
And then there is real productivity differences.
And those two things are what we end up observing in wage differences.
I think implicitly your view on this is a reflection of which one you think dominates in the world.
I think both are operative.
I'd love to see implicit bias and discrimination eliminated.
But this feels like a blunt instrument which has these additional effects on wage levels and on culture, which feel a lot more problematic.
I think the other thing I wanted just to say, Youngmee, to you about this, you know, you made this really interesting point about over time, some of these blunt instruments become more and more intriguing to you.
And I think that is so true for me as well.
But I think there is a problem with some of these, which is they can be kind of fig leaves.
Like the board thing can be a little bit of a fig leaf thing, right?
Where we say we're doing this, but then you look at real promotion rates within the organization for women and they lag.
And then they point to the fact that, oh, we have three women on the board.
And so it feels like some of these gestures, they're just fig leaves.
And I worry about that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think fig leaf is a strong word.
Yeah, I'm sorry. That is a strong word.
And I don't mean it that way.
I mean to say that I get your point, but I mean, I've seen it happen more often than not.
If you get a critical mass of women on the board, it does change the conversation.
Does that immediately manifest in the number of women who are hired or the number of women executives?
No, it does not immediately manifest.
But does it begin to slowly change the culture of the organization and begin to move it in the right direction?
I think it actually does.
Yeah, I agree. Again, it's absolutely a blunt instrument.
But sometimes when you impose a blunt instrument, what happens over time is that people are forced to refine that instrument.
Can I come back to something we haven't really spoken about?
And that is we have such a hard time understanding individual contributions to outcomes.
And you see it a little bit in these surveys when I think this was a study with engineers, when they asked engineers, where do you fall in the distribution of performance?
Something like 90 percent of engineers thought they're in the top 25 percent.
So people just have essentially no idea how they rank relative to everyone else.
And in a world where people are clueless about their own performance relative to anyone else, how are they going to interpret differences in salary?
They will think, oh, my God, I should be paid one of the top guys in my organization.
But everybody will think that.
We're all above average for this.
Yes. And what I find interesting is there's a range of studies that show being overly optimistic is deeply, deeply functional.
But if you then couple that with radical pay transparency, you get the disaster.
OK, but let me give you the opposite point of view, OK?
OK. For every single person that you describe that fits that set of characteristics and is going to be crushed to discover that, in fact, they're not as good as they thought, there are also people out there who have a deflated sense of what their value is to the organization.
Ten percent. So they are willing to accept a salary that is lower than what they actually deserve as a result of having a deflated sense of self.
So again, this gets back to what problem do you want to solve?
Because for every problem you try to solve, you're going to exacerbate a different problem.
It feels to me like this is why we should be advocating for moderate pay transparency, which is a way of saying what should be probably public is average levels.
So you want to know average levels, but I don't need to know that Felix gets paid 50 percent more than I do.
You don't need to give everybody salary.
I think it totally depends on the kind of company.
I mean, look, I think a really fundamental question that every company needs to ask itself is, does it make sense to manage my company in an egalitarian way?
Or does it make more sense to manage my company like, you know, a baseball team where salaries vary wildly?
So, for example, if you have a plumbing company and if you have one plumber that is like a freakin' genius plumber, it actually doesn't do you any good because 99 .9 percent of the time the problems you encounter are very routine.
So you just want plumbers who are good and reliable, and you don't want a lot of pay dependent on performance.
If you're in a professional service firm where the average really doesn't tell you that much at all, that's a very different thing.
And that's why I think a lot of the bias comes in when there's a lot of subjectivity in how salaries are granted.
What I like about this is if the starting point is, what's the issue that you want to solve?
And so say if the murkiness is the issue or implicit bias is the issue, that we then ask, what's the best response to doing away with that issue?
And sometimes the answer might be, you know, being more open about salary and the dispersion of salaries.
It would surprise me though if the vast majority of the...
But when I read accounts of why we should be thinking about radical pay transparency, I often don't find it that convincing that radical pay transparency is really the thing that we should be doing given the problem that we encounter in the first place.
Well, I guess the only way to wrap this up is for us to all disclose our salary.
And young Lee, you go first.
There you go. Okay, Higgs, did you guys bring in recommendations for this week?
I did. So I had recommended ways to find and follow music before.
I think I'd recommend a pitchfork for popular music, a downbeat for jazz.
And today I wanted to recommend Gramophone for classical music.
Meir will be very happy to know that it's a UK -based website that has reviews of classical recordings and concerts.
And there's so much to really love about it.
One of the things that I find personally like really fantastic is that the reviews are super, super short.
You know how in a typical classical music review, you sort of have to show just how learned you are.
It always feels like the first 50 pages of a dissertation.
Their reviews are like crisp, short, 10 minutes, capturing a few interesting elements.
So I think at least as far as I know, one of the very best resources, if you're in the market for the discovery of new classical music.
So Felix, what genre of music do you not listen to?
Okay. So we've got classical music, jazz music, some polka music at one time.
Yeah. The polka music.
There's like an electric polka thing.
I still love Turkish music if you don't know Turkish music.
Yes. But then I know you love old rock music.
You listen to pop music.
Do you listen to rap music?
I do actually. I love French rap.
I have to infatuation with French rap music now.
Okay. So basically all the genres.
Basically my musical tastes are not very well formed.
One experience that I find very interesting is I often play music.
And I think this is exactly the kind of thing that I want to listen to at Turkish folk music or rap or whatever it is.
Turkey. Turkish folk music or rap.
And I'm often wrong.
So I start playing it.
And then I think, oh my God, this is like, what am I doing?
This is totally not my mood right now.
And so it's hard being me.
All right. So here, do you have one?
I do. So I have coming out of the Oscars, the winner for the animated short was a tiny little movie, seven minutes long called Hair Love.
And it is by two people, Matthew Cherry and Karen Rupert Tolliver.
And it's seven minutes long and it is about as perfect a confection of love and caring and humor and identity that you can imagine.
It's a very little story, seven minutes long.
It's the story of a little girl.
She's an African -American girl who is struggling with her hair.
And it becomes a family story because the mother isn't there and the father is forced to try to help her with her hair.
And then, of course, there's a little twist at the end with the mother.
If you don't shed a tear, you're like hard as stone.
Is it on YouTube? It's everywhere.
You can find it on YouTube.
You can just Google it.
And it's just fantastic.
All right. That's a nice one.
OK. And then my recommendation is, have you guys seen Knives Out?
I have not. I did. Oh, no.
You didn't like it?
I didn't like it. Everyone loves it.
Oh, my God. Did you like it?
Oh, my God. I saw it on a plane, too.
I saw it on a plane, which is like the lowest bar.
Sorry. I don't want to ruin your recommendation.
Go ahead. No, no, no.
It's good to have the debate, I guess.
So first of all, the cast is amazing.
I saw the preview and I immediately exited out as a movie I never want to see because when you see the preview, you just look at you think, it looked like some Agatha Christie thing.
And it just didn't look interesting at all.
And then I started watching it.
So how did that happen?
How did you start watching it if the preview didn't look interesting?
Well, you know, sometimes you're with your husband and social consumption.
Exactly. And so, first of all, it's much funnier.
It's much more delightful.
The twists and turns are just utterly delightful.
It's a blend of satire and humor.
There's a mystery behind it.
It's so fun. The minute it was over, I turned to my husband and I said, I wish I hadn't seen it so I could watch it.
Like, that's how much I liked it.
Let me hear your facial expression.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Okay, what did you not like about it?
You just say, this is a full disclosure podcast.
You have to say it.
Okay, and then our listeners can chime in with their views.
And they can chime in.
Okay, so on either side, so I thought it was, first off, I was expecting like a nice, interesting Agatha Christie thing.
It's not. And it was just kind of predictable.
And it was, you could see it coming from.
Oh my god. It's all coming from a mile away.
I think I've consumed way too many British cop dramas.
It's like, it's kind of ruined me forever.
And it was a little slow and Daniel Craig, the accent, I don't know.
I don't know. I just didn't do, the cast was great.
Maybe I just, I should try it again.
I saw it on a plane.
Usually that inflates my sense of a movie, because, you know, your bar is so low on a plane.
But I think our listeners should help us figure this one out.
Yeah. Okay. That's what we want.
We want to hear from you.
Did you like Knives Out or did you not?
It could be that I just can't predict what's going to happen in movies.
It could have been the company of your husband, which made sure that it was an absolutely wonderful experience.
Could have been, yes, it could have been.
With the quality of the wine.
Yeah, exactly. All right.
Hush. Okay, enough.
Okay. I'm going to close it out now.
That's it for this week.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the HBR podcast now.
How could you not like that movie?
I told you I saw Knives Out.
I told you, remember, I don't remember.
See, but maybe this is why I like the movie because I don't remember.
But oh my God, Felix, you need to see it and break the tie.
Okay.
