Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone, we're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Ni and I'm here with Felix and me here.
Hey guys. Hey Felix, hey Yang Mi.
So this was one of those weeks where we got a lot of mail about British baking.
You poked the great British Bake Off Beast and you had no idea what you were awakening.
Apparently there's more than one.
There's the British Bake Off and there's British Great Baking.
There are many shows.
It is one of the best reality TV show genres there is because it is not so competitive.
The contestants love each other.
It feels good. You get to learn something.
They have these wonderful characters like Paul and Mary.
The thing that confuses me is are the Brits famous for their baking?
What? Oh my God, Victoria Sponge Cake?
Spectacular. I think it's about the potential for improvement, right?
That makes it so exciting.
Oh my God, okay. You have no idea.
So those emails should be addressed to Felix, not to me.
Anyway, so onto this week.
I think both of you guys came in with topics you were very eager to talk about.
Yes, I'd love to talk about political advertising and in particular, Twitter's recent announcement that it will ban political ads.
Okay, and then Mihir?
Google announced its acquisition of Fitbit and that is shining a light on wearables.
So I want to talk about the future of wearables and what you think that market's going to look like.
Perfect, okay. Okay, Mihir.
So last week, Google announced the acquisition of Fitbit and this signals increasing appetite for thinking about wearables.
Now on one hand, wearables have in some sense been a disappointment.
You can kind of think back to Google Glass and other efforts which made people question that kind of future.
On the other hand, we've seen this incredible growth in wearables.
Specifically, Apple recently announced that their wearables segment, including the earphone products, has been fueling their growth and is growing at 50 % plus.
You know, broadly speaking, if you think about wearables as being watches, earpieces, clothing, and other stuff, some of those categories are forecast to be growing at double digits or 20 plus percent into the future.
So when Google decides to buy Fitbit, what does that tell you about the future of wearables?
Is this now an area that we should all be paying attention to or is this more a story of kind of catch up about Google trying to catch up to where Apple is in some sense?
So I think Apple's momentum in this area, I think, has raised a lot of eyebrows.
Apple's wearables business now, if it were a standalone business, just that business alone would be a Fortune 200 company.
I mean, it's a big business, and I think that's caught everyone's attention.
It also provides these adjacent opportunities in health technology and so on.
I think that's what a lot of the coverage has focused on.
In my mind, the much bigger dynamic is if you think about all the big consumer tech companies, it used to be that these companies essentially stayed out of each other's lanes and focused on their own points of differentiation.
So Apple was all about high end devices, and Google was all about search, and Facebook was social media, and Amazon was where you went to sell stuff.
But what's happened over time is that they've all expanded horizontally.
So now there's growing overlap between what all of these companies do, and so the focus now is just on getting you locked into their ecosystem.
And wearables, I think, provide huge lock -in potential for the ecosystem.
If you've got an iPhone and you've got an Apple Watch and you use AirPods and then Apple Glasses and eventually Apple Sneakers or whatever, the costs associated with switching to a different ecosystem become really significant.
At Google's most recent hardware event, they use the phrase ambient computing.
It must have been at least a dozen times.
By the way, I'm not impressed with the Fitbit purchase.
I mean, to be polite, I think Fitbit is a bit of a dog as a company.
Yeah. That's interesting, right?
And the Google resorted to buying it.
It's interesting in a way.
It just didn't have itself.
Oh, but it was so cheap.
Because it's a dog.
So, Felix, what do you make of it all?
Whenever they buy a company, and I think it's not only Google, that's generally true.
Whenever you buy a company and you mostly ask, what is it that the company can do for me?
Those acquisitions, I think, are troublesome.
Whenever you buy a company and you ask, what is it that I can do to make this company a better company?
Then I think the potential for success is dramatically larger.
And I think the classic example is when they bought Motorola, it was all about what can Motorola do for Google.
And it was part of a long history of failed hardware acquisitions.
When they bought Android, the logic was reversed.
Oh, what can Google do for Android?
Wow, we're a pretty powerful software company.
There are so many things we can do for Android.
And so what I don't like about the conversation is this is not really about value creation in the first place.
It's about capturing the consumer, make it super cumbersome for you to change from one product to another.
It's also mostly about what can these acquisitions do for Google, as opposed to the other way around?
The way that Google's going about it, I'm thinking of their acquisition of Nest a while back.
Yeah, same story. And now you have Nest rebranding every year, right?
Because it's not quite clear what is it that it does in the Google Universe.
I think you're both exactly right about the ecosystem war.
I'm a little more optimistic than you, Felix, in the sense that I think there is a lot of value creation possibility in that ecosystem war.
Meaning once these things are bundled together tightly and they're working well together, I think there's something exciting about that.
I'm curious where you see this going.
Is there a limit to the degree to which computing interacts with our bodies?
I mean, in some sense, the watch and the earbuds, those were somewhat natural and somewhat pre -existing ways in which we had devices on our bodies.
The things that are talked about now are kind of next generation, right?
Which is there are people who are going to be collecting the sweat off your nose on the pieces of your glasses.
There are people who are going to be reading your brainwaves from your eyes and then conjuring up what information you need or how to make you more relaxed.
So I don't know, is there a limit to where this goes?
My own experience is that I am just enormously interested and curious about the functioning of my body.
So I remember when I first started using one of these devices to monitor my sleep.
So how often do I wake up?
What is my REM cycle?
I just find it endlessly fascinating.
I'm pretty good about not checking my email very early on.
But the very first thing I would do is I would open the app and go, oh my God, how long did I sleep?
How did I dream? It is just eye -opening for us as consumers.
And so from that sense, I am so excited about all of these developments, including reading the sweat off your nose.
What do you think, Yemi?
Well, first of all, I have this inkling that Yemi here is horrified by all of this.
So I'm really looking forward to you weighing Yemi here.
But I think we have endless fascination with ourselves.
And once you start to collect information about yourself, you can't imagine being without it.
Exactly as Felix said, there used to be a time when most adults didn't know how much they weighed.
And now it's unthinkable that most people don't know how much they weigh.
It's unthinkable to be an adult and not have some sense of roughly what your blood pressure is.
And I think we're going down this path where in the not too distant future, it's going to feel weird to not know what the quality of your sleep was the night before.
I think what's really shifted in the last few years is it used to be that when these companies talked about wearables, it felt like a moonshot.
So any investment you made felt like a long -term investment.
I think what's really shifted is that you can make a shorter -term business case for going down the path.
Even though you might not know what the longer -term vision is precisely, you can make a shorter -term business case for why an investment today makes sense.
There have been a whole set of ah -has that have come about as a result just of, for example, Apple's AirPods.
Some of the ah -has include, hey, if you come up with the right combination of form, function, and fashion, people will pay a lot of money and buy multiple pairs.
If you make them light enough, people will leave them in their ears even when they're not listening to anything.
This is ambient computing.
If you make them smart enough, people will use them as a voice interface with Siri or OK Google.
They can be a really visible branding device for your brand.
In other words, there have been a whole set of ah -has around the short -term that have essentially given all of these companies permission to say, hey, we don't know exactly what the future is going to look like, but in the meantime, we can build a business along the way.
It's interesting. You're right.
There was an aspect of this that all felt moonshotty a while ago and now seems real, but to me there is a lesson in the fact that the wrist and the ears is where we have ended up, and those are natural places that we've grown accustomed to and for all kinds of reasons are very powerful.
The next question is, well, what about glasses and what about everything else?
That's where, for some reason, I think that starts to kind of cross a border for me that I feel less comfortable about.
And in particular, at some point, yes, you're right.
You're both kind of saying this is something which I believe in, which is we are endlessly fascinating to ourselves.
But there's an aspect of that which is precisely problematic, which is first off, this is like a continuing kind of monetization and commodification of all our data, which will end up becoming a revenue model for somebody, and that seems a little bit problematic.
And then second, there is this aspect of also, I don't know, like there's a little bit of a narcissism about all this, right?
Which is, yes, we want to know our weight, and yes, we want to know these basic things about our human functioning, but do we need to know everything about everything all the time, and is that a useful way to kind of function in the world?
Or is it actually robbing us of something, which is the ability to interact with the world in a less regulated way?
I think it's very interesting to think about how it changes the spontaneous interaction between people as we become more focused on ourselves, and as we have constant feedback.
You already see it now, sometimes when you try to talk to someone, it used to be that you could know when someone had earplugs, he or she would listen to music or something.
Now, of course, you never know, and that I find completely fascinating because when the printing press was first invented, there was a big backlash against the idea of printing books, and the main argument was that it's going to disrupt the conversation in the family.
Because we'll sit around the fire, and everybody will read their own book, and we'll basically stop the conversation that we used to have, and now, of course, a world without books is basically unthinkable to all of us.
I have a theory that all of these things are both captive and liberating at the same time, and so on average, it's the same.
So, no, I'm serious.
So, for example, if you think about our mobile phones, so it used to be if you were waiting for a call, or you had work going on, you had to stay in your house because you were waiting for your call.
Now you just go about your business, you have your mobile phone with you.
So, on the one hand, you're captive to your phone.
On the other hand, it's really liberating.
Similarly with the watch.
I mean, it used to be you have to stare at your screen, now you have it on your wrist, you're able to pay attention to what's going on around you much more.
So, all of these things, I think, are both captive and liberating at the same time.
Yeah, so maybe we should finish with, I'm curious if you guys have some dream wearables products that if you could design a moonshot around what you might want.
You're talking to someone who owned the original Google Glass.
Oh, you did? Yeah, what was that like?
I did, in fact. I remember.
It was incredibly buggy, but let me just say, if they came out with one again, I would absolutely get one.
Having a heads up display is fantastic.
The original one didn't work so well because I would be wearing it like in the car and my kids who were little would be in the back seat and they kept commanding it to do things as I was driving.
Because it's voice activated.
It didn't go well. So you would love a good Google Glass.
A good heads up display, are you kidding me?
Yeah. As I'm talking to you here, I'm trying to look up the big words you're using in the dictionary.
Big words, okay. Felix, do you have a dreamy?
So I think a smarter way to interact, say, you're hiking in a place and you're wondering what are the mountains that I'm seeing.
My wife and I, the other weekend, we walked somewhere and we saw some sign for the battle of, and we had never heard the battle of what.
Like, what is this?
And so of course, we had to go to our smartphones and see, oh, what was the battle about?
So if you could look at things, and if you wanted to know more, you could know more.
I would really love that.
I'm a little more content with my current menu of devices than I think you guys are.
Or maybe I'm just not as kind of future forward looking about all these things.
But I'm sure we'll see a lot more on the wearable side.
Wait, did you say something?
I didn't hear you add my headphones on.
See? This is what I'm talking about.
The loss of intimacy.
Okay, Felix. So you heard the news.
Twitter banned all political advertising on its platform.
And this is, of course, in response to just the enormous debate on how to think about all the misleading ads that are out there in view of the 2020 election already.
Most of that conversation, I think, is focused on Facebook, but Twitter moved first.
So from Facebook perspective, this is all about free speech.
And Twitter steps up and says, no, actually, there's something that's not right about not taking seriously the issues that come with accepting any form of political advertising.
What was your reaction?
So for starters, I think it's a little bit of a cheap win for Jack Dorsey, which is he got to kind of poke his finger in the eye of Mark Zuckerberg without losing much revenue, which is just a way of saying, I think this is not a big deal for Twitter.
Revenue visor thinking it's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal for Twitter.
Most of the action is happening in Facebook.
But the question that you're asking is the larger question about political advertising.
And I confess, I'm coming to the point of view that the entire superstructure under which these platforms have been able to shirk responsibility for the speech and the advertising that they proliferate, I don't know, I'm beginning to wonder about the whole thing.
So these tech companies have said, we're not publishers, we're platforms.
We're the newsstand.
We're not the newspaper.
And I just find that incredibly tenuous now.
And so I think we really need to rethink this from the ground up.
The current regime where we just say platforms are just somehow neutral and they're not actually publishers, I think that entire edifice has to be called into question.
I feel like this is a moment where we have to rethink these last 20 years of Internet policy and start to say, wait a second, especially these large players, they have to be thought of as publishers.
And so we need a whole new set of regulations to think about this.
What was your reaction, Yang Mi?
I agree with Mihir that I think this is such an important moment, not only for us to rethink the paradigm under which these tech platforms have operated, but also for us to think more fundamentally about what we mean by political advertising.
So Twitter's ban not only includes candidate ads, but it also includes issue ads that advocate for or against issues of national importance.
And if you think about it, everything now has political overtones.
So the ban creates some real contradictions.
So you're telling me that if I'm a nonprofit, I cannot run a campaign advocating for the Green New Deal.
But meanwhile, ExxonMobil can run as many ads as it wants.
These are some of the contradictions I think that really need to be thought through.
The second reason I don't like the ban is I think it favors incumbent candidates.
If you're an upstart challenger trying to establish a voice in the campaign, social media plays a huge role in you even having a tiny prayer of being heard.
So remember, one of the reasons Obama's campaign was so effective was because of his use of social media.
So I feel like right now we are in the worst of both worlds.
With Facebook, anything goes, and that feels extreme and somewhat irresponsible.
But on Twitter, everything is banned, which also feels extreme.
And I think we've sort of forgotten that maybe there's something in the middle we can do that's a little bit more sensible.
So let me suggest an alternative to thinking about bans.
I think one of the issues with targeted political advertising is that it's not broadly visible.
It's micro -targeted at just the right kind of people.
And so there's a very reduced probability that it can become part of the public discourse, because not many of us who have opposing views will ever see that ad.
So here's a few ideas.
What if we limit the opportunity to micro -target?
So that creates more visibility.
What about even more extreme if you had some sort of a tagline where the person who is named in the ad as an opponent, what if that person right there and then has a right to respond in the ad?
The general idea being the more we can create a back and forth of arguments, the better it is for the political discourse.
And what's really damaging, I think, about political ads is that they live in these niches that cannot easily become part of the public discourse because they're micro -targeted.
So Felix, I really think you're onto something.
And I don't think anything we do is going to be exactly right the first time we try.
Certainly these ideas.
Absolutely. But I do think we have to go down the path where we try to find a middle way.
And I think some of the ideas that you mentioned are exactly the kinds of things that we need to begin experimenting.
So micro -targeting, I think, is a huge, huge problem.
It is essentially the closest thing to concealment that you can get.
That's exactly right.
Yes. And so when you micro -target, it allows you to deceive without being called out.
You can promise different things to different people.
You can essentially say extreme things without fear of accountability.
Another area I think we have to go down is considering some kind of documentation to back up claims.
If you think about it, false advertising in every other domain is illegal.
I can't sell soap and make a false claim.
And so going down a path where we begin to say when you advertise, you need to somehow provide some documentation.
And I know it's not going to be perfect, but what it will do is eliminate the problems at the extremes.
So I think all those ideas are fantastic.
The only issue with micro -targeting is that is a hard thing to enforce, right?
No, it's not. No, that's very easy.
That's actually something that platforms can do.
So you're going to make them broadcasters effectively.
In television advertising, the reason they can justify false claims with political TV advertising is that it's a broadcast medium.
And that creates a kind of accountability.
Micro -targeting removes that accountability, which I think is very dangerous for our political discourse.
So why do you guys think that Facebook has been reluctant to do any policing of content?
Why do you think that is?
I mean, my instinct is they're scared out of their mind of being called publishers and the cost structures that are associated with that.
And then I think in addition to that, it's just as a practical matter, it's just not doable.
Like the torrent of content and the torrent...
in every geography in which they operate.
So now to have them decide what's a political ad, what's not a political ad in, I don't know, the Ukraine?
I cannot begin to imagine how you actually do this.
There's like a little bit of an internal contradiction in saying we are great at micro -targeting, but actually we don't actually know how to tag content.
The reason they've gotten so good at micro -targeting is that they have spent their entire history trying to get good at it.
Right, exactly. If this were something they felt were really a high priority, you would at least see some experimentation.
I have one last question for both of you.
So there is a Facebook ad right now that talks about Joe Biden having paid a Ukrainian official a billion dollars to protect his son who had board memberships on Ukrainian companies.
We know the ad is a lie.
Should it run? No, it shouldn't run.
And it shouldn't run because it's false.
And we have to uphold publishers to that responsibility.
And I think we could do it here too.
I actually think if it's broadly visible and if we make it easy to reply, maybe even tag some kind of response that needs to be aired, needs to be shown along with the original ad.
If we had rules around creating conversation more than creating a quick impression, I would be okay with even having this ad run.
I find the ad itself outrageous, obviously, but I'm mindful of the fact that having rules that ultimately decide where is that line, what's okay and what's not okay, these rules are going to be pretty hard to find and I think even harder to defend.
I mean, this one's a really hard one, right?
Yeah, it is a really hard one.
But it does feel like the current state of play is not sustainable.
Yeah, lots to think about.
I was recently traveling to Brazil and you know how it is when you plan travel and then when you come back, it shows up in your email messages and the conversations that you have.
And quite a few of those messages said, oh, I hope your trip, nothing terrible happened, just sort of showing concern for your safety.
And then there was this one message that I got that said basically, oh my God, Brazil and that's amazing and you know, the friendliest people on the planet and so on and so on.
And it struck me as interesting how defensive our conversation of these little snippets of conversation, how defensive they have become over time.
Safe travels, I don't think is something that I used to hear very often around travel.
People now saying, I hope your trip was uneventful and I know exactly what they mean.
They mean hopefully the plane wasn't delayed.
But like, what is that?
My recollection may not be exactly right, but I think it shifted around 9 -11 when all of a sudden travel went from something that's enjoyable and exciting and we look forward to it.
So maybe this is less a recommendation than something that I will do going forward.
Just like thinking back, no, travel is not first and foremost something where you should be super worried about things happening.
Travel is a huge opportunity.
It's something really positive and expressing that in conversations around travel, I think is a good thing to do.
So being more aware of how you wish someone well as opposed to being so protective, being a little bit more aggressive and expressing a hope that they have some great adventure.
I think that's lovely.
That's a nice recommendation.
Thank you. Should I go next?
Yeah, go for it, Yangli.
Do you guys like spy novels?
I do, yeah. So John LaCarre is 88 years old and he has just come out with a new novel called Agent Running in the Field.
And it's so impressive.
It's not very long.
And just as a warning to anyone who picks it up.
This is a book in which nothing really happens.
If you're expecting.
So a thriller. It's not like that at all.
He goes and plays badminton a lot, but it's so well written the way he describes people and the way that he describes things going on around him.
I have to say I've rediscovered him because of some of the video.
So they made Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy into a movie and it was great.
I think as he's gotten older, there's less and less actual action in his books.
But he still manages to capture a mood, a scene and even tension so well.
So I would really recommend it.
That's great, right?
So I have a kind of a thing that kind of mixes together your two recommendations, which is on a recent trip, I saw like a little bit of a thriller and I loved it.
So the only concern is, as you know, or as I think you might agree, which is on planes, the things you watch the bar is really low because you can end up loving something that you're watching.
But then you later are like, oh, my God, was it really that good or was I just trapped on a plane for seven hours and I had to like what I just saw.
But nonetheless, I'm going to go persevere ahead, which is I saw in full the second season of Big Little Lies on HBO.
So Big Little Lies is the story of a bunch of individuals on the Monterey Bay kind of Carmel by the Sea area who get involved in actually a murder.
And the second season is about how that plays out.
And it features in particular Meryl Streep.
And she is stunningly good.
Like just to watch Meryl Streep act in that season is worthwhile watching the whole thing.
But it also has like this wonderful depiction of that life and about how corrosive lies are.
The acting is spectacular.
It's Reese Witherspoon, it's Nicole Kidman, and then Zoe Kravitz, and then you throw in Meryl Streep, and it's just fantastic.
So I'm pretty sure it's going to survive the test of not being on a plane, but just the addition of Meryl Streep alone is like fantastic.
So my recommendation is Big Little Lies.
Okay, great. That's it for us this week.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours on the HBR podcast now.
This is After Hours on the HBR podcast now.
