Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents Hello everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Rebecca.
And I'm me here. It is spring, and as is usual for spring, we're back in the classroom.
Can you believe it?
I always thought it was weird when academic calendars, it's like January, and you're like, spring is weird.
Yeah, I was going to say it is not spring.
I'm sorry Felix. Well, actually, Harvard official terminology is pessimistic.
They call it the winter semester, even though it ends in May.
Even my expression wasn't quite right.
We're not actually back in the classroom, so much of the teaching is still in Zoom.
Is there a sense it's okay?
I have to confess that my experience in the fall was quite positive in its own way.
Yeah. I found it oddly kind of an interesting way to kind of connect with students in new ways.
So, for example, office hours become easier, and the conversations, I think, are a little bit different.
I don't know, Rebecca, what's your experience been?
I'm with you, me here.
I've gone from raging against it, to, well, we can have really good conversations, and really push each other hard.
And there have been moments when I've forgotten I'm on Zoom.
And I'm just focused on the ideas.
And I'm really hoping that's happening for the students too.
Yeah, that's great.
I had a similar experience to you, me here.
My sense in the fall was everybody's making a real effort to still produce closeness.
You know, you reach out, you talk.
And of course, sometimes you have that almost for free in the classroom because students come after class and you have five, 10 minutes to chat.
But it was sort of nice to see how many people just make an effort to get to know each other, to interact with each other, even though we can't be physically in the same space.
Yeah. I don't think anyone would wish it to be a permanent state of affairs, but I think we can do another semester of that if we need to.
That's for sure. So, what do we have on top for the day?
I want to talk about smart cities.
The technology that could change our lives, that could revolutionize how cities work and solve global warming.
But wait a moment, could also lead to a surveillance state and doesn't seem to work.
That sounds great. I have a very bureaucratic topic by comparison.
I would like to talk about the antitrust lawsuits against Google.
That sounds great. Both of those sound fantastic.
Any trust lawsuits against Google.
And of course, Google is not alone.
Every big tech platform last year, if you're Alibaba, if you're Amazon, if you're Facebook, everyone was sued for any trust concerns.
But in Google's case, it was a little bit surprising because for quite some time, it seemed they would get away with being really big and really useful.
And frankly, you know, what's not to like?
It's like a lot of great search results for free.
That's right. And why are we even talking about antitrust Felix?
So, there are three claims.
The first one is, if you buy a phone, it comes pre -installed with a search engine.
And the claim is that gives Google an unfair advantage.
We're not exactly sure about the number, but we think Google pays Apple about 10 billion dollars a year or so to be that preferred search engine.
And of course, in Android, they do it themselves.
So that's the first claim.
Second claim, if you fire up Safari, you think, oh, you know, I'm not exactly sure how search happens, but it happens magically and in great quality.
And guess what? It's the Google search engine where it seems like consumers don't really have a choice.
And then the third claim is that when Google creates the search results, we call them organic search results, but it's not completely innocent, that process.
And in particular, we know from a European lawsuit that Google promotes its own services over the services of competing companies when you search.
Google shopping, I think, is a prominent example where the moment they had a really good shopping service, other comparison shopping sites, you know, they're on page three, five, 17.
But so Felix, those are three things your argument about, let's say, pre -installed software, the default browser, the own products in search results.
But who cares? I mean, what actual effect is happening that we worry about?
Those are just claims about what they're doing.
But here, I mean, so you're asking your question again, which is, hey, I get a great product and I don't pay for it.
But I think doing those things creates three real harm for consumers.
The first is that Google has immense market power in the advertising market.
So, you know, if you're going to advertise, Google is going to take a cut because they're so dominant.
And that ultimately raises prices for consumers because when advertisers have to pay more, they're going to pass that cost along to consumers.
So that's one real harm is prices are higher because Google has monopoly power.
Right. The second charge is that the consumer thinks they're getting a free choice when these great search results come up.
But in fact, it's biased.
It's not a really competitive market or a really kind of random selection of great products and stuff.
It's all skewed and it's kind of skewed in Google's favor.
And that's actually restricting choice, right?
I think that's restricting choice.
And you're the major search engine, but when I search on you, I actually get led where you want me to go.
And so that's the second.
Like that might be real harm.
And then the third is that Google is so big and so dominant and so hard to displace that it's throttling innovation.
That if I'm a young kid at MIT and I come up with a great idea for innovation in search engines, it's going to be much faster and more accurate.
And suppose I code it, then maybe I can put it on the App Store.
But wait, the App Store is owned by Apple that gets 10 billion dollars from Google for using the Google search engines.
You know, how am I going to replace Google?
The last part, Rebecca, is so interesting because it's a general shift that we see in these antitrust lawsuits.
You know, the old lawsuits in a way, it seems so simple now.
Right. You could say, well, you have market power, you raise prices, you harm consumers.
And if you could prove all of these things, you were basically done.
Now we're having these tech platforms.
And I think many of us have an intuition that they're really powerful, that they're really important, and we see zero consumer prices.
Right. So then we need to make claims around how much innovation would we actually see in, say, the market for search engines if it wasn't for the really big player.
That's so hard to do.
Super hard, Felix. I was the government's witness in the breakup of the Microsoft trial 20 years ago.
So I was the expert witness who said we should break this company apart.
And my whole thesis was destruction of innovation.
And I spent a year of my life going market by market, trying to build a case of how Microsoft had short circuited innovation in this market and in that market, in this market.
And we would talk to entrepreneurs who would say, you know, they smashed me, I couldn't get any access.
And we would say, will you testify?
And they'd look at us and say, are you crazy?
And so one problem was like, how do you measure all this innovation that would have happened?
And believe me, we really tried.
Well, it's raising two questions, which is what is the meaning of antitrust law?
Like, is it appropriately focused on consumers or should it be broader?
Is this the right regulatory approach?
But also, Rebecca, we have to take seriously the counterclaim, which is they're dominant because they have a great search engine.
And, you know, why we are innovating, I'm channeling what I think Google would say, which is we are innovating and it gets better and better.
And we have a dominant product.
And guess what? Being tried.
And guess what? DuckDuckGo tries.
And it just turns out we're really good at what we do.
And that is a counter that I think has to be taken seriously.
It's so interesting that you say that me here, because when Google got sued, its response was it's a long blog post where they respond.
And maybe the most interesting part of the blog post is they have these snapshots of what search used to look like.
And, you know, you almost forget how ridiculously simple it was.
Now, of course, it's connected to maps.
It's connected directly to the websites of small businesses that don't have much of a presence elsewhere on the Internet.
And if you look at Bing, it's basically a copy of whatever Google does.
And so the claim is we are actually just doing a really fantastic thing for consumers.
And to my mind, maybe the most interesting question about this lawsuit is can both things be true at the same time?
Can it be right that yes, they're improving search.
And at the same time, by improving search, of course, you make it more difficult for competing companies and for innovators.
And some innovators might get discouraged.
And how on earth would you ever weigh the two things against one another?
Well, but as you say, no one would prosecute.
You know, if I have a business and I'm providing amazing bagels and they're just such amazing bagels and I keep improving them, that bakers give up ever trying to imitate me.
Right. I'm surely not doing anything wrong.
I mean, we want amazing bagels.
So maybe we need something like what we did in the Microsoft cases.
We actually found firms that had amazing innovations that had been crushed and hadn't come to market and began to talk about what that might have done.
Unless, of course, Rebecca, Google bought them, which is the other piece of the puzzle.
That's the other problem.
Yeah. And how do we think about that?
Is that good? Because then Google incorporates these great new ideas and is a place that entrepreneurs can go and sell their ideas to and they don't have to develop the distribution channel.
Or is that squashing competition?
I have a little bit of a story, I think, around the first of these ideas on my phone.
I think for accidental reasons.
I'm using DuckDuckGo as my search engine.
And because it's only on my phone and all the other devices I'm using Google, I think I have a pretty good intuitive sense.
At least I don't see a big difference in the search results.
I think they're essentially the same with the one big difference that DuckDuckGo really respects users privacy.
And if I look around other conversations that we're having, it seems this is the moment where privacy is a really big deal.
And so you would think if someone imitates, roughly speaking, the search results of Google, except I give you an amazing amount of privacy.
I should expect the business that grows really quickly and they don't.
And they don't. And they don't, Felix, exactly.
I spent many months of my life asking why being the default setting was so powerful.
And the answer is human laziness.
Yes. If you could consult people who are lazy, including us, you would have known the answer to that question.
But the fact that Google pays Apple $10 billion just to be the default tells you that there's $10 billion worth of laziness out there.
But it is the case.
Then you get into sort of circular reasoning very quickly, right?
Laziness is most important when the differences across products are not that big.
Because I take anyone and it's going to be OK.
And why are the differences across products not that big?
Because no one invests in innovation.
And so this whole argument is so hard to make sense of because it feels circular.
I don't know, am I looking at a causal chain where Google is really evil, or I'm looking at, oh my God, this is an amazing company and they have invented search and revolutionized it.
I shouldn't admire them.
I really don't know.
Well, let's try the other two harms then.
If we're iffy on innovation, the other two harms were driving up prices through raising advertising rates.
And you're not seeing a free choice.
The search results are skewed.
Are those real harms?
The search results argument relies on a little bit the same argument that no one scrolls to page three, four, five.
Right. And we know from empirical studies, even if you fall a rank or two, it's actually just quite amazing how people are preprogrammed to click on number one.
And the Google argument is this is because we're providing really fabulous search results.
And number one is really number one.
That's what you should click on.
And the suspicion is just a slight manipulation where, say, I think this is a complaint that you often heard from TripAdvisor and from Yale.
Yeah. That their search results, they're relatively prominent, but they're not number one.
And that seems to make all the difference.
And not just not number one, Felix, but to be clear, the real concern is tilted towards a comparison shopping site that Google itself wants to foster, which could be Google shopping in particular.
And so this is a very much of a smell test kind of a reaction to it, which is that doesn't feel right.
Doesn't feel right.
Now, whether you can prove that that's actually the case is a different question, but there's something about that, which is the tilting of the results in the direction of an attached business, which I think starts to feel like you're using market power in search in ways that is deterring competition in these
other vertical search spaces.
That seems of everything perhaps the most meritorious of all of these things, if anything is.
So, Rebecca, you invoked the Microsoft example, which is so powerful.
And I would like to flip it.
If you're at Google, do you think you want to engage in protracted litigation or do you think the right answer is what you did in Europe, which is to pay fines and try to move past this?
Because I think the other interesting strategic angle on this question is what's the right response if you're Google, because there's folklore around Microsoft.
And I don't know if it's true.
I doubt it's true, but it might be true, which is that Microsoft got so distracted by the litigation that the litigation had an effect on its business just because of the distraction.
So I'm curious if you have thoughts about what the right response from the Google perspective is.
Do I fight this or is it more costly for me to fight it and get distracted?
It's really interesting.
I just know a little bit about the Microsoft case and they really did get distracted.
It took a huge amount of time because, and this is very biased, I think there was some real merit in the suit.
And initially they were, oh, this isn't really real.
You know, we don't do any bad stuff.
And more and more time was chewed up and Bill Gates got deposed and he had to be briefed.
And so it really chewed up time.
It's worth saying that in the Microsoft case, I was wrong.
I mean, I've thought a lot about this.
I thought the real harm was that Microsoft was going to control the backbone of the Internet, that they were going to leverage control of the desktop to control of the cloud.
And I was really worried about it.
That was all the thing about, you know, they're controlling the innovation, they're dominating the space, they're leveraging their existing monopoly.
And I was totally wrong.
And why was I wrong?
Because I didn't understand that foreign governments would not let Microsoft dominate the cloud.
And that just makes me very humble.
It makes me aware that you have to be super careful.
I mean, the point you raised me here, which is Google could just be an amazing firm providing great results for no money.
And you know, there's some worries at the edges, but breaking up a firm is like a big, big deal.
Yeah. I would recommend settling.
So my sense is one really important reason why you want to be proactive and why you want to engage on the issue is that so many of the Google engineers and executives I meet, they are immensely proud of the work that they do at Google.
Right. And I think once there is sort of an overarching narrative.
Yes, we did a bunch of good things way back when that catapulted us into a position that now allows us to exercise market power.
You will not be able to attract the talent that they attract right now.
There's real value in the pride and the ambition to do something that sounds really corny, but makes the world and makes the world of search a better place.
Well, we're already seeing that at Facebook.
Facebook is having a much harder time recruiting some of the best students because they just don't want to go and work there.
Yeah, super interesting.
The one thing that we're completely certain about is antitrust concerns are here to stay.
That's a big topic that will persist throughout the Biden administration, I think, definitely in the European Union.
There are a lot of efforts now.
And I have a good sense as part of after hours, we will talk about antitrust issues at one point or another.
So I'm super keen to talk about smart cities, partly because the technology is just incredibly cool.
Cisco made a major announcement not so long ago that they were going to pull right right back from the smart city market.
This is incredibly striking because just a few years ago, this was going to be one of the big growth areas for Cisco.
They were going to essentially wire every city on the planet.
There were going to be sensors everywhere and there were going to be big boxes behind those sensors and all kinds of software.
And that was going to be Cisco.
And now Cisco saying, no, that somehow that's gone away.
And it's really interesting because when you just sit down and Google smart cities, you get better traffic management, more efficient garbage collection, because every garbage bin will tell you exactly when it needs to be picked up, better treatment of depression and disease.
Because in a smart city, you could identify those populations that are at risk and you could get to them.
You could have better bike sharing routes.
You could have free wifi.
I mean, you know, the smart city has been billed as the answer to many of mankind's problems.
I mean, until recently, the guy at Cisco was going around saying 70 % of the world's energy is in cities and a smart city system can cut that usage in half.
So there were these enormous hopes.
And yet what happened?
Is this the end or is it just a hiccup?
I'm super curious. So I too am struck by this, Rebecca.
In one sense, there's some short run dynamics here that are interesting, but maybe not that interesting, which is we have municipal budgets that are under pressure.
We have the likelihood that cities aren't going to be so flush with cash in the next several years post COVID.
But I think the bigger story here is first kind of excessive magical thinking that accompanies many technological things.
Second, this real concern about who is going to own the data that comes out of all those boxes of sensors that you talked about.
And a concern that, for example, in Toronto where Google had a large effort with their sidewalk labs, that maybe this was not just about making cities better places, but about, wait a second, who's going to own the data about our activities and how are they going to monetize it?
And am I comfortable with a private company doing that?
And then third thing I think is it also, I think, takes the bloom off the rows of these public -private partnerships that are meant to just change the world.
Is it the case really that we can have a private corporation take such a large role in what is fundamentally a political process and arena and have it be okay?
So I'm hearing really three fundamental issues.
One is, we're going to collect all this great data and do good stuff.
Well, you're really going to do good stuff with it.
So it's a classic sort of worry about surveillance and privacy.
I hear a second issue, which is about the governance and who makes the decisions.
And do you want to give this kind of control to private corporations and then will the private corporations be any good if they have this control?
And we're just not good at doing these kind of complicated transactions.
I think there's a third one that I would throw in, but I may be wrong about this, which is the hopes for the technology were very, very high.
And we're still not sure what the use cases are.
Does this mean we should give up on this dream?
I think this is exactly the right question.
And to me, it feels like we want to have a more traditional model where we have urban leadership that is politically mediated and determined, be in the driver's seat and then have technology providers as suppliers.
Now, that sounds awfully conventional and kind of is like an old style model of the way we think about urban governance.
But I think the complication was in the overestimation of the nature of the partnership.
And that, I think, is where we went wrong.
I agree with your intuition.
And I'm actually relatively hopeful looking at some of the cities that you wouldn't necessarily look to Medellin in Colombia to think, oh, my God, here's like an amazing urban model.
But the way they turned around their city, I am just in awe.
And what I maybe find most interesting is it's now one of the touted models as a smart city, and they do all of these interesting things.
But that's not actually how things started.
They started by delegating real decisions over which projects would be built to local communities.
The very first thing that happened is that they built this now famous gondola system that connected the poor parts of the city.
With the center of town, because people spend so much time in traffic, getting to work, getting to the center city.
They then educated 20 ,000 teachers because that was the next thing that people really wanted.
And then over time, in exactly the same manner, community led, they said, oh, but we're still stuck in traffic when we are in the bus.
And so then they said, well, why don't we have electronic surveillance of cars where if you block an intersection without any human involvement, we read your license plate, we recognize who you are, and you get a fine in the mail.
And so now they're doing all of these really interesting things, including sensors in the ground that tell engineers where they should build drainage systems.
Everything that you read, like these fantasies about the smart city, but it's built on a backbone of community involvement that I think gives the kind of credibility that otherwise is really hard to get.
I had the opportunity, Felix, just to go to Medellin a year or two ago.
Oh, okay, excellent.
It's amazing, right?
It is absolutely amazing, but your story is exactly right.
And by the way, we should all just recall what Medellin was 30 years ago, the progress they made, but it was a story about a political story and a community -based story.
And by the way, corporations playing a very important role in creating the constituencies for building back the fabric of that city.
The technology stuff is the aftermath of all that, right?
Which is, it builds on that foundation, but I think you're absolutely right.
The lesson of that to me is also the reinvention of cities has to begin as a political process based in communities, and then all the good stuff occurs.
It's not the other way around.
Like you pour a lot of technology on something and then you get communities.
It goes the other way, I think.
So this is great. It's making me really cheerful.
And it suggests that if only Cisco changed his attitude and really worked on community building, that might have made a big difference.
I'm still a bit worried about the surveillance problem, which is if we have everything wired.
And you hear stories that in China, if your social credit card isn't in the right place, it should be.
The train won't work for you.
The doors won't open.
Is that just, again, a political problem?
Is that a technology problem?
If we wire it, will governments inevitably use it for control?
I find a traffic example actually a pretty interesting example.
You can imagine the vision that you started out with.
Oh, at any point in time, we know where every car is.
And as a result, we can influence the lights and we can shift traffic patterns.
And so that is a vision that I think might be amazing and has like deep concerns about the privacy of data.
Or you can have very localized solutions.
What I love about the Medellin story is there's actually not that much connectivity.
It's a system where each intersection is capable of reading license plates.
But it's not as though we follow your car along as you drive from place to place in the city.
And that to me is interesting because depending on the level of trust that you have, you might see that for some cities and for some societies sharing data is hugely popular.
The much maligned social credit system that no one in the West understands is hugely popular in China because it's a broken society with very little trust and people are glad for anyone to look over everyone else's shoulders.
And that's obviously very, very different from other places.
I think that need much more decentralized systems with local interventions where you don't get that huge accumulation of data.
It does strike me, Rebecca, that you've put your finger on the longer run consideration here, which is not about the corporate partnership, but about the use of the data.
And I think this is just part of what we're going to have to navigate on.
And politicians have to become better and become more credible about the way they're going to use these things, which is I think, again, if the process is mediated by politics and it's credible, then I'm okay with ceding some control over these issues to states who will use data.
But it only happens in the context of a robust political process.
Without that, I think what happened in Toronto happens again, you know, which is people get really concerned about who owns the data and states owning data can be just as problematic unless they're credible and unless their control is put in place that makes some sense.
This would seem to be an example of a market which is only going to take off and only going to work when local democracy works, when community works, when people have real faith in their institutions.
Does that mean that businesses should play a role in helping to build those institutions?
If the answer to Cisco is, you know, you're not going to get this business off the ground and lessen until there's real local consultation and lessen until people really believe their governments have their best interest at heart, should you be trying to accelerate that process?
Because for every city like Medellin, there are many cities like Toronto where, I mean, Toronto is a very well -run city, but there are many cities where it's very hard to build trust, very hard to make this progress going forward.
But I think the conundrum is, Rebecca, which is, are those efforts self -defeating because of what is the solely the reputation of corporations, you know, which is any effort to foster it is somehow actually going to curse the effort from the beginning because of what people's pre -existing biases are against
corporations. What I personally find so important about your question, Rebecca, is it seems to me before the current state of technology, inventing around issues of trust was very often possible and not that expensive.
I'm always reminded when I go back to see my family in Switzerland, you get gas before you pay for gas.
And it never really occurred to me that that was a strange thing until I came to the United States where you get used to, oh, no, you pay first.
And then once we know you pay, then you get your gas.
But the institutions, the technology that it took to get around this issue that we can't trust people getting gas without having paid first, that was relatively cheap.
The price of doing that in the future is going to be enormous because there is a whole range of technologies that you just cannot employ because you don't have the level of trust.
And so in a sense, I think the answer is, as always with trust, you got to do it slowly.
In partnerships with governments is probably a first step.
But the cost of not doing this for the business sector, I think, is going to be enormous.
And the cost for societies is going to be enormous.
Felix, you've really put into words my intuition, which is for years firms have been able to really take for granted or ignore the social structures and political structures in which they're embedded.
And the costs of doing that are getting higher and higher, and not just for firms.
I mean, Cisco is pulling back from a multi -billion dollar market, and that's a loss to them.
But we really do need smart cities if we run efficiently.
And they really could make a huge difference.
And so these so -called human problems have become absolutely critical in a way that they weren't 20 or 30 years ago.
Did you bring recommendations?
Me here? Of course.
And mine is vaguely on point, which is I recently saw two documentaries about cities that are absolutely fantastic, and they're about exactly the issues we talked about, which is about the political processes that undergird cities and how they work.
And there are also little love letters to these cities, and I thought they were just fantastic.
One is called City Hall by Frederick Weissman, which is about Boston, and about the inner workings of government, which just sounds really boring and is so enchanting, not just as somebody who cares about Boston.
And the second is about Chicago and about the mayoral race in Chicago.
Oh, I loved it. Did you see that?
Fantastic series, yes.
So it's called City So Real, and the guy who made it is Steve James, who also made Hoop Dreams, which is like one of the great documentaries of all time.
And if you love cities and you worry about them today, which I think we all do, not just for the reasons we discussed about smart cities, but you know, there's real concerns about cities, these two documentaries, and they're both about four or five hours altogether, honestly, they will make you believe
in cities again and make you remember why you love cities.
And so I recommend both.
One of them is called City Hall by Frederick Weissman, and one of them is City So Real by Steve James.
Two big documentaries to binge on cold winter days when you're worried about the future of cities.
And here they're on Netflix?
It's a little hard.
So City So Real is actually, I think, Hulu, but you can also get in other ways.
And then City Hall is really weird.
You have to go, I think, to the distribution company that actually did it, so they don't have a partnership.
I'll put up links on the page.
It's a little bit weird.
Yeah, exactly. Okay, great.
How about you, Rebecca?
What's your recommendation?
Well, I loved City So Real.
You go into diners in Chicago, you get a sense of a cast of characters, just the heart of the city, and it's really different from Boston, so that was great to see.
Yeah, exactly. So, I'm afraid my recommendation is a little bit too generic, but I have this month decided to try online exercise programs.
Oh, okay. So both strength training and flexibility.
You know, initially I thought, well, this is crazy.
How can you do an exercise program over Zoom?
I mean, get real. But it turns out that you can build community and you can get stronger.
I'm going to boast.
Sorry. I did my first chin -up.
Very good. Fantastic.
If you told me I could do a chin -up at my age.
And, Rebecca, just to be clear, so you were substituting away from a personal trainer, or were you trying this for the first time, or you were going from gym classes?
I was substituting away both from a personal trainer and from real, live exercise classes.
And so this is part of sort of just accepting reality, which as we know is pretty hard, is I just love doing these things in person.
And so the idea that you could do it through a screen and it could be really valuable, and that a trainer could look through the screen and say, no lower your back or your hip is at the wrong angle.
I just didn't think that was possible, and it really is.
These are still live, right?
It's not YouTube. It's still live.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's the innovation.
Is there still live?
So there's still the trainer or the coach looking at the class and saying, no, flatten your back.
No, try this. That's the innovation, because of course, we've all seen exercise tapes, and they are what they are.
But the idea that you could get a real interaction about physical training through the net, that is new to me, and I would really recommend it.
Particularly not so cold and miserable, at least where it is where we are.
Many people may have better weather than we do.
That's a great suggestion.
I love that. What about you, Felix?
I would like to recommend an article in the New York Times magazine.
It's the story of Taishan Suri.
Maybe not a household name, but I think we will look back and think of Taishan Suri as one of the most important innovators in music and one of the most important composers.
And it's a really lovely portrait because it takes you through his early years growing up in New York under just extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
And then slowly finding his way towards being really an innovator in a space that must be so intimidating if you have his biography.
Not being really sure do I fit in, do I not fit in.
So, Felix, I'm totally ignorant.
What's the space and what's his biography?
So, many people will know him as a jazz artist, and he's probably also known for pieces that last a very long time.
You know you have this one song that is like 55 minutes.
But then once you start listening in earnest, you will see some of it reminds you of jazz, some of it reminds you of modern composition techniques.
He's a big fan of European modernists.
It rears back and forth in fascinating ways between sounding more classical, sounding more jazz -y.
All of a sudden you think, ah, that sounds like the 1970s and then you move away.
It's just the ambiguity.
And in a way this is, of course, what is happening in jazz right now, that it absorbs many different influences.
But he is just a real gift.
And the article is not so long to read, but I think it gives a real insight into him and his personality and how he thinks about the music that he writes.
That sounds great. Was that the same issue, Felix, with the White Rhinoceros thing?
Yes. I think that was the same.
It was the same issue, right?
Yes. Because I read the White Rhinoceros piece.
I didn't read the one you mentioned, but that was amazing too.
That was amazing too, yes.
That's fantastic. All right, good.
Yeah, wonderful. So, this is it.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
Thanks for watching.
