Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone!
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. And I'm Mi here.
And young Mi is not here this week.
I know it's so sad.
How will we get through this episode?
It's almost unimaginable.
I know. Where's the sharp inside?
Exactly. It's just not the same without her.
But at least we have great topics right?
We do. What did you bring?
So the first thing is, I thought we could just do a little debrief on Twitter.
Oh, you mean Jack Dorsey stepping down?
So it's an interesting moment in Twitter's life.
And I think it's really fascinating to think about what the future looks like and what this move tells us about the world.
So I thought we could talk a little bit about Twitter.
And I know, Felix, how much you love Twitter.
Yeah, I can't wait to talk about...
And what about you, Felix?
I brought... Well, I don't know if it's a company that creates as much engagement, but you remember GE, right?
One of the big industrial giants decided to break itself up.
Yeah. And it's one of a number of companies that have gone through similar decisions.
And I was thinking, we'll just talk about it.
Like, what does it mean for GE?
What does it mean more generally?
Is this sort of an end of an era?
Is it the end of conglomerates maybe?
Yeah, that sounds great.
And I have to say, I'm kind of particularly happy that I'm bringing in the TechHip company and you brought in the old -flying company.
It's a little bit of a role reversal - Yes.
So I'm delighted about that.
All right, good. That sounds great.
So we hear Twitter.
Yeah, it's kind of an interesting moment in Twitter's history.
So Jack Dorsey, one of the founders, has stepped down as the CEO, for the second time, in fact.
He stepped down once before in the life of Twitter.
This time it seems more final, and he has handed over the reins to the CTO, Parag Agarwal, which is an interesting move in and of itself to choose the CTO as the next person to run Twitter.
He's stepping back to spend much more time on his other job, which by the way, he had to at the time, which is to run Square, which is this really remarkably large FinTech company, which has a market cap of two to three times what Twitter does.
But it's, I think, a useful juncture just to think about the Twitter business model, the Twitter future.
In a way, it's such a fascinating company because it exercises such outsized influence relative to its size.
So let's just think about what Twitter looks like today.
It's fairly highly valued, almost 30, $40 billion, far less growth in value since it went public than comparable social media companies like Facebook or any of the other ones that you would think about naturally comparing them to.
They have maybe five, $6 billion in revenue and revenue started to pick up again, but they've struggled with profitability.
They've had a hard time really proving a profitable business model.
And it's been hard to really get the advertising growth, which their comparable companies have had at the same time, incredibly influential organization, incredibly influential, particularly amongst elites who pay a lot of attention to what it gets said and talked about on Twitter.
And so I'm curious what you made of the Dorsey decision to step away.
What does it tell you about the future of social media, about founders and how they exit?
And then we can also maybe talk about what the future of Twitter should look like.
But let's begin with what you made of this moment.
So I do think it reflects the enormous pressures that I think Twitter experiences in several domains.
You alluded to it earlier.
One is political, the whole spread of fake news.
Should you moderate?
Should you not moderate?
Should you step in?
If you step in, can you do it in a way that doesn't feel like you're curtailing someone's free speech rights?
Like that alone is super difficult.
And then frankly, on the product and business model side, I think Twitter has just fallen behind.
And product development has been in some trouble for quite some time.
But then look at what they do.
They do spaces, which is essentially a clone of Clubhouse.
Exactly. They do review, which is essentially a clone of Substack.
Then they do Twitter blue, this subscription service that they have now, a decade after publishers have started moving away from advertising business models towards subscription models.
So you have something really unique.
You have an asset that not many companies have, and you have this outsized influence.
And then when I see on the product side, but also frankly, on the revenue side, their ad products, like performance marketing, what they have done is like, oh my God, now you can also encourage people to install apps.
That's like news. This is 2021.
What exactly is happening?
So I think it's a moment to step down.
And I think in part it reflects that it's not so clear where the company can go from here.
And I think you probably noticed when he first announced that he would step down, the stock shot up.
And then when it was clear that the CTO would take over, it actually lost quite a bit.
And I think if the message to Wall Street was that there's continuity, that's not a great message.
That's not a great message in time.
I think you're exactly right, Felix, on two levels.
So I think the first is, on all the political things, I think it's a clear, along with Zuckerberg's decision at Meta, social media is going to be a slog over the next couple of years.
There's regulation, there's political pressure.
It is not going to be a fun place to be.
There's going to be content supervision.
And in a way, both of those founders are saying, this next leg of the social media journey is not going to be as much fun.
And I think that has many consequences, right?
So I think even from a talent perspective, I think attracting people today into social media, into Twitter and Facebook is hard.
It is more interesting and fun to be doing some NFT, crypto thing, Metaverse thing for a lot of young engineers.
And then you have the specific problems to Twitter, which is it just doesn't feel that different than it felt like, you know, five years ago.
And people are innovating and they're growing.
Close competitors are growing at double, triple the kinds of rates that Twitter is doing.
So it does feel like a moment to kind of, if you're a founder to say, well, wait a second, is the next five years going to be worth slogging through?
Yeah. So right. And in part, it's a little unfair because if I had told you, I know a media company and this past year it added about 10 % more readers right now, roughly a 200 million readers.
And over the next two years, they think they can add another 100 million readers.
And the company has net profit margins, 15, 16 % or so.
And actually there is now a advertising business that is picking up quite nicely.
You would have said, Oh my God, what is this media company?
That's so enticing.
But of course, because every company on the planet sells itself as a tech company and hear a social media slash tech company, then all of a sudden expectations are just so different.
Yeah. Then we get into what are you talking about?
You only added 10 % of users.
And what are you talking about?
Your margins are relatively modest.
But this takes us to the next step for them, which is they have benchmarked themselves as a tech company.
So now when we look forward and certainly the appointment of a CTO to the CEO position, which is a really interesting decision in of itself means that they are fashioning themselves not as a media company.
They want to be more and more competitive as a tech company, but I don't know if they have A, the capabilities just because they've fallen so far behind on product development.
And then B, it feels more naturally like a pure media company.
That's right. It feels a bit more analogous to companies that are media companies.
Yeah. And they're not embracing that they're actually distancing themselves from it.
Yeah. It's basically a sophisticated billboard.
So what should Purog Agarwal do?
So there's been some talk, he has been deeply involved on the AI ML side, which is something you would expect.
There is more talk about things like crypto and NFTs as being a bigger part of what Twitter will do.
Is there a different path for them than to kind of ape what everyone else in the technology space is doing?
I would probably start from an observation about number of users versus active users.
So on Twitter, the top 10 tweeters are responsible for about 80 % of the tweets.
It's also a more traditional media company in the sense that few people are publishing, most people are consuming.
Right. Actually, you have a pretty amazing audience.
And among the people who tweet, there's an interesting selection effect that it's much more likely to be women.
It's highly educated folks.
And then it's also people who are deeply, deeply interested in politics.
Exactly. And I think getting more broader engagement, given that this is the group of people who sort of set the tone for the conversation, I think that to me is really interesting.
And the worst part about Twitter is really the interaction between people.
If you go down and you look at the quality of the contributions, I mean, it's usually the first tweet that can be pretty interesting, can be funny sometimes, can be really hilarious, which I think everyone really loves.
But then the back and forth, if people do more than just retweeting, that's like probably not a strength of the service.
And thinking about how to create better, more meaningful interactions, I think is one thing that I would really think about.
I think that's so interesting because in part, it runs against what the social media recipe for success is, which is you have to become more mass, you have to become more consumer oriented, you have to become someplace where everybody wants to contribute.
I'm with you, Felix, I don't think that's the path forward for Twitter.
Like, I don't think it'll ever happen, even if they tried, because the medium is different.
It's written, it's not clear that most people want to spend their time trying to contribute to that kind of a conversation in that way.
It's just not natural, but for an elite group of users who do want to do that, and who do it very, very well.
But that is fundamentally no different than in a way what the New York Times does, or the Washington Post does, or any of a variety of media companies.
Yes. If it wasn't for heavy editing, the commentary section in the New York Times would also look terrible.
And it's just like, how do you do that?
I remember some platforms in the educational space that had interesting aggregation algorithms.
So for instance, something that many people find interesting gets elevated, and something that is just yet another snarky comment on something that someone said.
Actually, it disappears in the flood of comments because it's not really interesting to anyone other than the person who wanted to have some provocation.
And so there's a lot of ways in which you can think and tweak about the algorithm to sort of bring out the best in Twitter, as opposed to what they're doing right now, which as a user, I don't experience as, oh, here's like a really super interesting counter argument to someone who just posted something.
Well, but I think what they should be doing honestly is if they lean into this idea of themselves as media company, then I think what they would do is cultivate these elite voices and to create verticals.
In a way, the problem right now, Felix, is it's all politics and it's very national and international in the way that people are contributing.
I wonder if you could create a little bit more of a breaking news, breaking opinion kind of organization where people in all different fields, in the sciences, in economics, maybe even regionally, you'd create actual verticals and like you would actually want to sign up to that vertical and then you'd
be like learning about what's going on in that world and you'd be cultivating the actual contributors, just like you would in a natural media organization, even maybe on the local news level, right?
You could imagine them really trying to create conversations at local levels, at state levels, and then really filling the void, which as we know is just not a lot of production of news and commentary that is targeted.
Right now it feels so broad.
You're tweeting about Trump or you're tweeting about whatever, but if you had those verticals, I think it could become a really interesting voice in the conversation and something you'd want to read because you have like educated, thoughtful people contributing.
That's interesting because you remember there is this Project Blue Sky that they have, which is this idea of a decentralized social media system that is built on blockchain, where the users can actually choose their algorithms so that I get fed in with some predictability, the kind of interaction, the kind
of content that I would love to have.
Right. Maybe that is a promising way instead of having one torrent of news that I can influence a little bit, but not that much, that I can at least choose the starting point of conversations.
That, to me, is almost like the biggest challenge in social media in general.
How do you create better starting points for people?
Right. And maybe also socially more acceptable starting points.
And then once you have better starting points, what can you do to improve the quality of the interaction?
And I think if you may progress along both of these lines so that I don't get the predictable fare, that I get tired very quickly.
I mean, now I think they're roughly at 30 minutes per day or something like this for Twitter users, which of course, if you imagine that this is really immersive, really engaging, that's something that you might be able to extend.
And that, of course, then on the advertising side is really valuable.
That Blue Sky idea, I think, is fantastic.
And it's been driven by these innovations that in fact Pragavarwal has been fomenting.
But I think the other pieces, you really have to think about yourself a little more as a content producer and as a media company.
And then you have to get really good at that and cultivating voices and aggressively promoting voices and creating these communities that are led by people who have respected followings.
It feels like the margin that you want to innovate on is in the creation of the content and embrace being a media company, which of course is impossible if you're in Silicon Valley because nobody wants to do that.
But that's what they are.
That's exactly right.
So it's an interesting case where what looks like this big advantage that you have a liability regime, whatever happens on the platform you're not responsible for, and that's one sense in which you're different from most media companies.
But it could also be that it so happens that media and being like a media company is actually your future.
That's your best bet.
And then all of a sudden the liability rules and the attitude that comes with them are attention with where the real business opportunities lie.
In particular, because if you think about tech developments, that's a fixed cost game.
At this point in time, Twitter is smaller than Snapchat.
Twitter is smaller than Pinterest.
There's just no chance you can out innovate if you mimic everyone else.
And yet what they have is this remarkable, outsize influence, especially in elite voices.
And so how do you embrace that as opposed to kind of running away from it?
Anyway, it should be really, really fun to watch to see what the new CEO does, what happens to Dorsey, and ultimately Felix, of course, will know things are better when you actually sign up to Twitter.
Then we'll know they've turned the corner.
Very good. Okay, so Felix from the frontiers of technology to 129 year old conglomerate called General Electric.
Tell us why did you want to talk about GE?
Let's travel back in history and maybe not 129 years.
But you remember a couple of weeks ago, this really earth shattering announcement that GE decided to split itself into three companies.
And it's remarkable not only because of the outsized influence of GE in many of the industries in which they play.
It's also remarkable because it's almost the mental model of what a successful conglomerate looks like.
All of these intricate ideas around, say, the GE talent machine.
We are very different businesses, but in the end, what binds everything together is this incredible marketplace for talent.
And we're moving people around just like you would move pieces on a chess board.
And as a result, we have just enormous talent that both makes GE really successful and maybe a testament to the GE talent machine.
If you look at for a long time where CEOs came from, it would not be surprising at all that for at least an industrial company, the person would have had some years at GE.
And now that's gone.
So my first question to you is, how do you think we got to this point?
What's the recent history that then says, is such a radical break with tradition to say, GE as it existed is no longer.
Yeah, it's funny, Felix, as you said, GE plays this outsized role in many people's imagination.
At the same time, in a way, the news kind of got lost.
If you think about what a seismic event it is in American capitalism, it really didn't get the attention it deserves, which I think is testament to how far GE has fallen in the last 10 years.
And so that fall is a very complicated fall, but it was associated with perhaps the two last CEOs, Jack Welch and Jeff Immelt of particular note, Jack Welch, who built it into this widely admired organization with perhaps some dubious methods and Jeff Immelt who tried to continue that tradition.
And then the wheels came off around five or six years ago, and they came off in fairly dramatic ways.
And the wheels came off in the sense of everything from, wow, there's a lot more leverage in that organization, a lot more debt in that organization than we realized.
Wow, there's some characterizations of accounting profits and liabilities that maybe isn't exactly what you think they would be.
And then there were some large acquisitions that seemed kind of irresponsible.
And so capital allocation went haywire.
And then all of a sudden there was a spiral and a very quick spiral when one of our most leading companies in America started to just devolve lost two thirds of its market capitalization.
And ultimately Larry Kulp, a colleague and friend of ours was brought in three years ago to try to right the ship.
And he's an interesting guy because he comes from Dannerher and you might think like, Oh, this is like an acquisition person and a conglomerate person.
He has been super focused on operations.
So when you listen to him talk and you listen to GE has been doing it's been Kaizen this and remarkable amounts of emphasis on that.
And then it turns out that that is going on.
They reduced the debt load, but it's not enough.
And finally, they just declare themselves no longer willing to put up with this idea that we are better as entity combining these three businesses, aviation, healthcare, and power.
And now we're going to be splitting it up.
So to me, what is really going on?
The first is, I think it's a testament to the rising power of talent and capital relative to organizations.
And by that, I mean, I think it is very hard to tell that story that you go to GE and you learn how to do things.
I don't think talent believes in that today.
I think what talent believes in is I know what I'm doing and I want to be given opportunities and I don't need to be molded.
I don't think they're acquiring the talent that they need to.
And then second, I think investors are saying, wait, why would I give you my capital and have you spread it across three businesses that have nothing to do with each other?
And it signals the rise of the power of capital relative to managers.
The argument was we as managers know how to allocate capital inside these conglomerates and we could do it really, really well.
And that's why you come and give us your capital.
And I think investors, and it's not just GE, it's Toshiba in Japan.
J and J. J and J just did this remarkable split.
IBM just spun off this remarkable unit.
It's just everywhere.
No one is believing this argument that give us your capital and we'll reallocate it across divisions.
To me, the larger story here is that argument for talent and the capital just doesn't work anymore.
And as a consequence, they've kind of surrendered and that surrender, I think is a singular moment because it just marks the end of a real era.
This is so interesting to me, me here in part because it shows a tension between what might be real business opportunities in these businesses and today's culture, ambition, patience that is at odds with maybe the one way you can eke out the competitive advantage in these businesses.
Although I think the breakup itself was a big surprise.
When you looked at what Larry did in the years leading up to the big announcement, it was in this spirit already.
So GE had 20 sticks piled from people at the corporate level.
He moved about half of them, 50 % into the business units.
I think that alone tells you something about where's the real opportunity.
The real opportunity is not in smart capital allocation or figuring out who should work in which of the businesses.
Many of the opportunities are deep in the businesses.
And I think Larry will probably agree he's an old fashioned continuous improvement guy.
And I think there are two things that come with that.
The first one is just amazing attention to detail.
One little story that I love is I forget if this was last year or earlier, they notice they spent about a hundred million dollars on expedited shipping.
And so they go in and they're like, how can that be?
How can we spend a hundred million dollars on really fast shipping?
And it turns out that it's because you're too optimistic when you promise your customer's delivery.
And because you don't quite have the production schedule, then you get into trouble.
How do you make up for that trouble?
You ship really fast that costs a hundred million dollars.
And then in typical Kaizen fashion, they go in and they fix the underlying issue so that you come to realistic production plans.
And then with these realistic production plans, all of a sudden the hundred million dollars goes to a much smaller number.
I do think in many of these industrial businesses, that is an amazing way to make them more successful.
But it requires an insane amount of attention to detail and it requires patience.
The continuous improvement is not going to happen overnight.
So first of all, you have to figure out what's wrong with the system to begin with and then it'll take time to show.
I think your initial characterization of this, this tension between this old fashioned attention to detail, continuous improvement, just pushing and pushing and pushing and the appetites of this moment, that disjunction is just too large today.
Because when you listen to the GE calls now with Larry Kulp, it's like the 1990s.
It's crazy. And I confess, I love it.
There's a part of me that feels like it is that hard work of squeezing more out of less and doing it in a really thoughtful way and being vigilant about it.
And it just turns out nobody cares that much today about that.
The sunnier view of it would be Felix.
He did it and now he set these three companies up for success on their own.
That will be the sunnier view of it.
The less sunny view is nobody cares, Larry, and you got to split them up because these assets don't belong together and you got to do that because that's what investors demand because the aerospace investor doesn't want to deal with the power investor and the liabilities and blah, blah, blah.
I don't know. I'm not sure which story is right.
It's interesting because I didn't take the stories to be so incompatible.
If in fact, operational gains are how you make each of these businesses more successful, they're sort of the industry headwinds.
In aviation, not much is happening.
In renewables, there's a lot of demand for offshore, but the margins are much better for onshore.
So, there's sort of these structural issues that the business faces, but going in, really knowing the business, knowing all the processes, and then just doing continuous improvement.
If that's the way to win in each of the three businesses, there is no overarching reason why you should be under the same roof because all of that can be done locally.
And in a way, it's interesting to link that to Danaher.
And you remember over long periods of time, Danaher spun off very few entities.
It acquired just at an amazing pace and lots and lots of companies and the companies got bigger over time, but didn't really spin off.
And the question is like, well, we know continuous improvements nice, but eventually the additional gains are going to be smaller and smaller.
Why don't you spin off these entities?
And one of the arguments was overbuilding talent.
We're building a pool of people who can do this kind of thing.
Exactly. And maybe that's also true for these individual entities with the difference that they're big enough that they have a pool of talent.
They're big enough now that they can do it.
Yeah. Other than the, you know, you have businesses that grow fast and you have businesses that don't grow fast, at least when they split Danaher, that was one of the rationales that now you don't have to worry so much about talent because each company is big enough so that you have lots of people who know
about Kaizen and can implement it.
But the other piece of this is we just have to put it together with this larger phenomenon, which is certainly in healthcare and in pharma, everybody's doing spin -offs.
Everybody's spinning off assets, right?
Everybody's splitting and spinning off.
So Merck has split off this women's health company called Organon.
J &J is splitting off its consumer products business.
Toshiba is splitting into two.
IBM has split off this Kindle thing, which is more of an IT infrastructure play.
And I have to say these things as just somebody who loves following business, they're so fascinating to me because on every level, there's like a little bit of a financial thing that goes on, like how much debt do you put on these little subsidiaries?
There's a talent thing that goes on, like which division is Larry Kulp going to end up in?
And what does that tell you?
And then everybody gets the stock from the different divisions and people start selling like crazy.
And I have to say the land of spin -offs is completely fascinating because you really ask this fundamental question, why are assets together and why are they sometimes apart?
And why would you want to own one and not the other?
And why are they worth more together or less together?
So here's something I would love to get your opinion.
So say I'm thinking about J &J, they spin off their consumer health business.
If I think this is all just a reflection of are the businesses that are part of the conglomerate roughly growing at the same rate?
And if that's not true, we're going to spin out sometimes the one that has the best prospects, sometimes adhere consumer health, there's just not that much upside.
Like how wrong am I if I had to predict like who's going to spin out something tomorrow, if I'm just looking at differences in growth rates?
I think differences in growth rates compound lots of problems.
So I think that you're right.
That is certainly the truth for some of these healthcare ones where these legacy businesses, sometimes legacy drugs, certainly true in the IBM case.
And the question is, why is that?
And the answer is when you have, I think, very distinctive growth trajectories, all these resource allocation things that happen inside firms get screwed up.
This is kind of the classic story of conglomerates, which is they start to look a lot like families instead of businesses.
And you start to treat everybody equally.
Why? Because you're a family and you can't treat people differently inside a family.
That's the kind of underlying intuition that becomes really insidious inside these conglomerates.
So I think that is a good way to understand it.
But the second question that becomes for me that the fun part is, when you unbundle them, one of those tends to become really unloved.
Yeah, of course. Who's going to buy it?
But then it gets unloved in part because well, I bought J &J because of the pharma, let's say devices business, because I love that.
And then I ended up owning some weird consumer products business that I don't really want.
And it's got to find a new home.
It's got to find a new set of investors.
And that process is completely fascinating.
And one that we're going to see in many, many ways over the next year or two with all these different spinoffs.
So a second question that I had for you is, I think we're generally not very optimistic about conglomerates for all the reasons that we just talked about.
And then when you step back and you look at the portfolios of private equity companies, you see something that in the end does not look so different from many of these conglomerates in that the companies are in very different businesses.
That's exactly right.
Sometimes you don't quite understand how they think they can make better decisions than the companies they acquired.
And we have this overtone that maybe we're seeing the end of conglomerates.
And then there's no such conversation about maybe we're seeing the end of PE.
Why do you think that is?
That's a great question.
I can offer maybe two ideas.
First, let's go back to these two themes that I think that has to run through these conversations, which is talent and capital.
So I think on the talent side, people who believe in PE believe that that talent process inside PE shops is real, that they are able to have a bench team and the really good PE folks are like this.
They have a bench team and have bench expertise and they are able to recruit talent and swap talent in ways that is really potentially quite interesting and manage that talent with very high powered incentives, frankly.
And that is part of what they're doing that's different than what you can do inside a conglomerate.
And then the second is the really nasty capital allocation things that happen inside conglomerates don't happen inside PE firms because you can't take capital out of one entity and put it into another in the way you can inside a conglomerate.
So in a way, I think you're trying to get the talent benefits of the conglomerate model with really high powered incentives.
And you're trying to not do all the nastiness that happens on the finance side.
I think the capital allocation part sounds exactly right.
What's interesting about the first part is of course, then it becomes a little bit of a self -fulfilling prophecy.
We don't like conglomerates because we think that's yesterday's model and who wants to work for a conglomerate and we don't have the patience to do the three year general management training program.
All of that, when you think, oh my God, PE is an amazing thing and I would love to be part of one of the really high powered firm.
And so in the end is maybe on the talent side, not so radically different except the stories that we spin are radically different.
And as a result, you get access to talent that you don't get access if you sell yourself as a conglomerate.
Right. I think you're pointing to something deep, which is there is an element to all of this, which is fads and faddishness.
There are cycles. And this is one version of the cycle.
So one way to dress this up is there are like large economic forces that are changing the way we do business.
And the other way to understand this is there are fads and they come and go.
And both of those things I think are undoubtedly true.
I just think this GE topic is great Felix, because I think it's going to be fantastic to watch.
They're not the sexiest industries, aviation, healthcare, and power, but watching what happens during the course of that breakup, I think it's going to be really something else.
And what I just love about this is that we have a set of really talented leaders who are doing the hard work.
My best opportunity, the way I want to spend my career is go into one of these businesses that is not high flying at this point in time is not very sexy.
I'm probably not going to mention at a cocktail party that I work in aviation and yet highly talented people who just love the business, love the industry and bring their talent to bear.
I think it's a very nice counterpoint to the fashion cycles we just talked about.
I couldn't agree more actually, Felix, you're absolutely right to emphasize this, which is part of what happens in these splitups and these spin -offs is talent gets to shine in a way that it never got to shine before.
And that is potentially very, very exciting.
All right, recommendations, Felix, what do you got?
You know, after a hardcore business conversation, I brought something that actually has, I think, almost nothing to do with business.
Excellent. You remember the Kyle Rittenhouse trial that was ended a couple of weeks back and the question whether this young person who travels state line with a semi -automatic rifle and then ends up killing Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and really injuring a third -person, Gage Grosskreuz, very
high profile trial.
Is he guilty? Is he not guilty?
And then maybe somewhat surprising to some people, the jury comes out with a verdict that he's not guilty of any of the charges.
And one reason why it caught my attention is when you then read the reporting about the case, it's almost as if you look at two completely different universes that are not really connected to one another.
In one universe, it's the old story, a white person gets to kill two people and no questions asked, the jury lets the guy off.
In the other universe, he's sort of a hero.
He gets promised a staff position in Congress.
And it speaks just to this incredible tension that we go through right now, this polarization.
When I was reading the two accounts, I couldn't imagine where is the smart argument that somehow brings these feelings together, but also that is factual, that is smart.
And then I was very close to giving up and sure enough, there is someone.
And it's actually a colleague of ours, Ronald Sullivan at the law school.
He wrote in this, I think it's an Australian publication he had about the trial and it's everything you could hope for.
Part of it is a really factual, smart analysis of the legal issues.
And I actually didn't quite know like just how complicated self -defense arguments can be when they can be made, the conditions under which they can be made.
And so he walks you through all of this.
And as a result, at the end, he says, if I had been the defense attorney, I would have won this case 10 out of 10 times.
And so you go, oh my God, that's amazing.
And then he flips and he says, and of course if Kyle Rittenhouse were black, he would have been convicted of murder.
And so he brings together the factual analysis and what's special about the self -defense statute in Wisconsin with something that is bigger than the application of the law.
You walk away from the article and you think the jury actually didn't have much of a choice.
Like if they just follow the rules, that's what's going to come out.
But then you can think about what is it about the application of the law that is not right.
And where we should direct our energy and where we should try to get to a different outcome.
And I thought it was just a remarkable piece of writing that brings two very different feelings together in a really smart and interesting fashion.
So we'll post a link.
Yeah. That sounds great.
I have to say the way you began is so true, which is there are these two universes.
And so people who can knit them together and stand in the middle and be credible are just so valuable.
It's just so amazing.
It's really, really wonderful.
It's something to aspire to actually for all of us.
Yeah. Yeah. So highly recommend it.
That sounds great. So I have something considerably lighter, which is I don't know if you feel like you have ever really followed sports ardently, but I think there's like a little bit of a life cycle thing that's happening to me, which is, you know, as a kid, I would follow sports, you know, and I
loved it. Which sport?
Well, you know, after we moved to the US, I started to watch the NBA and the NFL and baseball, and it was like a big part of my acculturation process.
And I think what happens as you get older is it falls away and it becomes less important often.
Yes. And in particular with American football, it's gotten a little bit more complicated too.
Yeah. But I have kind of basically fallen out of love with a lot of those professional sports to watch.
And I have recently found the Premier League.
Oh. And I have to say, I know recommending the Premier League is like trying to say, like, you know, I found this novel.
It's amazing. It's called Moby Dick.
You'll never believe it.
But I have to, right.
But I got to tell you, I have fallen in love with the Premier League.
It is now getting much easier to watch the Premier League and the US and around the world.
And the content is spectacular.
The rivalry is amazing.
And I even have a team now.
Oh, no. So like, I'm kind of getting into it.
I'm trying to think about it, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be Liverpool.
And I got to say, it's almost like this boyish energy that you feel when you fall in love with a sports team again.
Yeah. And it's like this really useful thing to do.
And I got to say, I would recommend it.
I'm not necessarily saying everybody should fall in love with the Premier League, but as you get older, it's easy to fall out of love with sports and professional sports.
Yeah. But I think falling back in love with it is like a great, great thing.
And for me, it happens to be the Premier League, but I think finding the space in your day with a sport that you really love to follow and watch is spectacular.
And I'm doing that now with the Premier League.
So that's my recommendation.
That's fantastic. You know, it's interesting.
I grew up watching football because that was the dominant sport.
And then when I moved to the US, it was pretty hard to watch.
I mean, it was just not so easy to see any of the games.
Exactly. I didn't follow.
And now that it's become easier, one of the things that I see is, oh, my God, the sport has gotten so much better.
It's amazing. It's so much faster.
The athleticism is amazing.
It's so exciting too.
I think your recommendation is spot on.
And then maybe the second recommendation that I have is, and this was true for me when I moved to the US, I couldn't really understand baseball.
Yeah. I just didn't really get it.
Yeah. Not far from where I lived, there was a minor league team and I would go and watch live games.
And that is so different.
It's fantastic. It has almost nothing to do with your television experience.
And so both I think catching up with sports that you used to watch and then going to see a live game is just so different.
I have this wonderful image now.
You and I retired. Close to a television.
Watching a premier league game.
No, no, no. We're going to be going live, Felix.
You and I, we're going to be fine.
Oh, okay. Even better.
Yeah. I'd love to. All right, great.
This is it for tonight.
This is After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
