Ted Audio Collective.
Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Felix.
And I'm Mi here. How are you doing tonight?
Good. Before we get into tonight's episode, I needed to talk to you guys about something really, really important.
And we should do this offline, but why not do it online?
But I'm thinking we should rebrand After Hours.
So, meta is taken. It's rebranding season.
Exactly. So, maybe we should call this mega or super mega?
What do you think? No, maybe we should call it verse because I think the rest is already copyrighted.
Yeah. So, obviously, I need to spend at least a little time tonight talking to you guys about this Facebook rebranding.
Yes, I think we have to.
And then, Felix, I know you brought in a related topic.
Yes, I think very closely related, I've been following Snap and find it completely interesting and fascinating what's happening at that company.
Great, let's do that.
And then, Mi here, you brought in a big topic.
So, I wanted to talk a little bit about inflation.
I mean, it just... Oh, super interesting.
That is the nature of our podcast.
I say inflation, and Felix says super interesting.
Yes, and did you see me perk up?
Yeah, this is why I love this podcast.
I tell you what, why don't we do inflation first?
Because that's in a lot of headlines, and then we'll cover up the rest of the topics as well.
Perfect, I'm free. Okay, inflation.
So, Felix, you were so excited about the inflation topic.
You want to get this going?
Yes, I guess there's two things.
There's the debate around, is it real, is it big, and then related, but a little different is, what are the consequences if it really happens?
What if after almost 30, 40 years of really having moderate inflation always below 5 %?
What if it's now different?
What are the likely consequences that individuals will see, businesses will see as a result of much greater inflation?
Yeah, this is just such an interesting topic today, because as you pointed out, Felix, we have not seen it in so long, and a generation has grown up without it being a consideration, basically.
So, I think the first thing to think about inflation is to realize that it actually might not matter at all.
It's useful to anchor our mind in a setting where it doesn't matter.
So, what do I mean by that?
So, just imagine that all price levels double, including your salary or wage.
It's totally meaningless.
Inflation in that setting is completely meaningless.
So, it's really useful just to begin with that baseline.
And then you have to kind of leave that world, and you have to ask yourself, well, wait a second, what if it happens differentially at different times for different people and for different goods?
Right, right. Then we end up in a world where it does matter.
So, for example, wages or salaries don't rise as food prices rise.
Well, now we have a problem.
So, the first intuition is when inflation happens, it really matters how it happens.
If it happens evenly across everything, nothing matters.
If it happens unevenly, it can really matter, and it can put people in tight spaces.
And the even more broad version of that mismatch is, for example, you're living on a fixed income, and yet your costs are going up over time.
So, in my simple world, it's a great benchmark, but the world deviates from it because there are mismatches in time.
And then the second part is there can be just mismatches for types of people, and those people will be disproportionately hurt.
And then the final thing to say about why it matters is because it can become a self -fulfilling prophecy, and there's a concern that it can take on its own life.
And those are typically called spirals, which is a way of saying, oh, prices rise, and wages rise, and prices rise, and wages rise, and then all of a sudden we're in a world where we can't control things.
So, the baseline is it doesn't matter that you add on this idea that it can because it can happen unevenly, it can happen unevenly for people or for types of expenditures.
And then finally, the real concern is somehow it takes on a life of its own.
The question today is, is that concern real?
Is it going to be a spiraling dynamic, or is it just really a transitory thing?
It feels to me like we are so far away from the place where this starts to get really troubling.
In other words, the immediate tendency when prices go up is for people to be more cautious in their consumption because everything feels more expensive.
When prices go up too fast, you start to worry that as a consumer, if I don't buy this now, it will be twice as expensive next year.
So you actually rush to spend, spend, spend, which then feeds that spiral.
Am I wrong in thinking that it feels like we are very far away from that?
So I think it's exactly right, what you're pointing out.
The general expectation is, you know, maybe we get to 4%.
Maybe we get to 5%.
Then even at that level, there will be, you know, some people, you live on fixed income, prices go up by 5%.
That's not pretty. But for the economy as a whole, I think your question is exactly the right question.
Do we see any sort of behavior where people think, well, it looks like prices are going to be much higher next year?
And I would say housing conversations sometimes sound a little bit like that, in particular if you live in one of the hot markets.
But in general, I would agree.
And it is true that having very moderate levels of inflation, which funny enough is the goal of most central banks.
Not to have zero, but to have 2%, 3 % because it gives a little wiggle room for many economic decisions at this point in time at least.
It's a far more likely outcome than any sort of dramatic spiral.
And when there is this bit of inflation, and as you said, we're looking at a generation that has never really experienced any meaningful inflation.
So in this new world of inflation, as you put it, there are losers, so anyone living on a fixed income.
But for every loser, are we correct in assuming that there are also winners?
So if you have a fixed rate mortgage, in other words, are there folks out there that benefit as well?
Absolutely. Your example of the fixed rate mortgage is a great one.
If interest rates start to rise, because with inflation we would expect interest rates to rise because you have to be compensated to save in a different way.
Once inflation starts to rise and you have a fixed rate mortgage, you're winning big.
If you're a company that's able to kind of pass on price increases in a more effective way, and you have a mismatch between the way your inputs are rising versus your outputs are rising, and we see this throughout the economy, that can be a winning place to be as well.
I think the really interesting thing about inflation today is just how heterogeneous it is.
And by that I mean there is stuff that is going up a lot, like 20 % a year.
And then there's stuff that's not moving at all.
And that all speaks to the underlying question here, which is these supply demand imbalances in certain markets, like in cars and all these things, are leading to price increases that have nothing to do with expectations, kind of like this cycle of the spiral.
But it is really fundamentally this deep mismatch that we feel on supply chain issues and on supply demand imbalances in particular markets.
So, it's not just that there's inflation, it's that some stuff is going up a 2 and some stuff is going up a 20.
And that's the really interesting and tricky part about this, but it also is a reason not to, in some sense, worry about it as much.
Because it's more of an indication that it is a transitory thing than a permanent thing.
Do you both have a sense that the labor market is different?
In the labor market we know that there's this funny asymmetry that say if we overshoot with prices for cucumbers today, I have every confidence that cucumbers of prices tomorrow will go down.
That tends not to happen with compensation.
It's very hard to cut nominal compensation.
Do you think the labor market is a place where we should look and worry about whether things don't go out of control?
I think that it's exactly the right place to look, which is if we saw that in labor markets, then we would worry a lot.
I think there's two things to realize.
First is back in those old bad days of inflation, one of the reasons we worried about it so much is because a lot of labor contracts were fixed over multiple years.
That's when unions were more important and we had much more inflexible wages.
So, part of the good news today is we have flexible wages and you're going to see people bidding up wages quickly.
So that's in a way the good news.
Your story is maybe it gets excessive and somehow we overshoot, and then we're stuck with higher wages than we would want.
I'm not terribly worried about that because I don't see evidence of it yet.
I think in a way what we talked about a couple of weeks ago when these companies are using all these things like a free education or this fringe benefit, that's very good because you're basically trying to increase wages, but in ways that you can potentially claw back if that becomes a problem.
So, I kind of like the role of employers in using multiple instruments because you're right, nominal wages can be fixed on the way down, and those other fringy things are actually helpful in that setting.
And then of course, what's really interesting is, so imagine a situation where a company knows we need to be competitive in the market for labor, we increase wages some, and all of this is guided by expectations about what inflation is going to be tomorrow.
One thing that's a really interesting consequence of not having had inflation for such a long time is that businesses have become terrible at predicting inflation.
So, if you look at the forecasts of professional forecasters, or if you look at the forecasts even of central banks, they're largely uncorrelated with the kinds of expectations among business people.
And you would think, how can this be?
And my interpretation of the data is that it hasn't mattered in 40 years, and so we've just not really paid attention and we're not very good at it at this moment in time.
This for sure will change if in fact inflation came back.
Yeah, you see that same sort of variability in confidence level with respect to raising prices.
If companies are experiencing inflation in their supply chains, one of the first responses, of course, is to try to raise prices.
And you would think that this would be almost mechanistic.
Every year you're kind of slightly adjusting your prices according to what inflation is doing, but what you're seeing instead is these companies with these really pretty dramatically different approaches to raising prices a lot or not, or cautiously or more ambitiously.
It's almost like they're experimenting a little bit in real time.
And then you see them sort of gain confidence as they go along.
It's fascinating to watch.
And in a way there's a real good news version of that, which is, remember, again, the thing that's really tough is if prices don't move and they move out of sync with each other, right?
One of the neat things today relative to the last inflation wave we had is you can move prices almost costlessly today.
Just the nature of the digital economy is one where prices move all the time.
And if you envision back to like the 70s or 80s, which I know is hard, but, you know, literally changing prices was costly and you delayed because it was costly to change prices.
What's going to be fascinating about this is we're living in an era where there's still cost to changing prices.
But the whole thing that's different now is both in the labor market and on the consumer side, the flexibility of prices might be something that will really help us.
And it's also the consumer side, ecology is different.
The easiest way to justify a price increase is always if you can say, oh, my cost has risen.
And in very low inflation environments, that's not really ever a credible argument.
So now, for many industries where you see big price increases, they can just look back and say, look, my supply is twice as expensive.
I have to do something.
It's not just the psychology on the consumer side.
I've been talking to companies that even like in the sales force, right?
Like they've never had to really do this work of saying to their customers, oh, by the way, we have to increase prices by 5 % because our input cost went up by 10.
And so you have to retrain an organization, even internally in a sales force level, to handle something that they just, they never grow up handling.
So you guys, the reason we're being somewhat casual in how we're talking about this is we're assuming this is all transitory.
So going back a little, what is the evidence that it is transitory?
And what are the early indications that it might not be?
It's a great question.
And I think the issue is, first off, we don't have a lot of episodes, right?
So like the end is small here, right?
So we had a big inflationary spikes like 20, 30 years ago, and we haven't had them recently.
So it's a complicated thing to try to figure out.
I think the scenario that is conceivably concerning is inflation starts to rise, rates start to rise.
When rates start to rise, it signals to lots of folks that this very benevolent period of very, very low interest rates has come to an end.
That leads to a retraction and investment, and then you're entering into a world of what's called stagflation.
And that is very problematic.
What does that mean?
Both inflation and low growth.
And I think that is the part of this that's the most concerning, which is that maybe this long period of very low interest rates that has sustained us for so long gets unwound relatively quickly because of a spike in inflation, and then it has all these reinforcing effects.
So the thing to watch in a way is long -term interest rates to get a sense of whether that is leading us in this world where maybe things are shifting.
And we've seen some increases, but nothing that is consistent with really seriously escalating expectations of inflation.
Having said that, as Felix said, guess what?
Expectations of inflation are really hard.
Yeah, that's right.
It's also when you do these back -of -the -envelope calculations.
So, for instance, we know that many price increases come from disruptions in the supply chain, and we fortunately talked about supply chains in after hours endlessly.
Wait, wait, wait. I can't quite recall.
And so there you can just ask, if we expect a particular level of trade volume in the world economy, do we actually have the capacity to move that volume of goods over long distances in a relatively timely manner?
And those back -of -the -envelope calculations largely say the containers are out of place, we don't have workers where we need workers, but it's not a fundamental mismatch in the sense that we need 50 million containers that we just don't have and they're not getting produced for some reason.
So from a capacity point of view, for most industries, even where you see these rapid price increases, the capacity that is available in theory, it's not usable at this moment in time.
But it seems sufficient to cover demand, at least over the next couple of years.
So the idea being that it should recalibrate.
That it should recalibrate.
But to your point, me here, no one quite knows how to undo that mess, right?
Because it's this intricate puzzle where everything depends on everything else and how to get out of it.
Yeah. And that speaks to when we talk about it as transitory, I don't think we're talking about a month or two.
Yeah. So transitory means it's looking like a year plus year and a half.
In addition to sort of how long it's going to take to untangle the supply chain, if you layer on top of that, the fact that people are still buying lots and lots of goods.
Yes. In other words, we are still undergoing some really significant shifts in our consumption patterns.
Right. So people are still working from home, so they're still trying to get the right office furniture.
They're still doing stuff on Zoom, so they're investing in a new computer monitor and lots of folks are still shifting geographies.
And so those shifts in consumption patterns are also going to take not weeks to reach a new equilibrium, perhaps a year or two before we reach an equilibrium.
So it's still sort of feeding this period of uncertainty.
And in a way, we're in an unusual economy, right?
Because we have a feeling we're towards the end of the pandemic.
And in lots of other places that cause these supply chain disruptions, to the extent that they're a result of COVID, many other countries are far away from that.
From the end of the pandemic.
And so that's another reason to expect it to last for quite some time.
And I think once this is not for a couple of months, but for a year or a year and a half, it takes on a different kind of political salience for people.
And so the other piece to watch is just how this trims people's policy ambitions, how it changes people's political stances and how it becomes part of this larger debate.
In particular, because one of the recipes to fight inflation is that central banks, the Fed in particular, have become over time, starting in the 70s, much more aggressive at raising rates in response to sometimes very weak evidence that inflation is a real problem.
So they respond more quickly and they respond more forcefully, but also in this essentially almost zero rate environment that we've had for a very long time.
That's not something that people are used to.
So imagine if the Fed all of a sudden goes away from the way they try to control inflation right now to sort of a more traditional recipe where you see rate increases, maybe quarter after quarter after quarter, rates go up with huge impacts on the housing market.
That's a different world than political dynamite.
But it's also interesting, Felix, because from a policymaker's point of view, the thing that people have been worried about during COVID and the global financial crisis was deflation.
So imagine the kind of head spinning nature of this, right, which is we've been worrying about deflation, so we've been keeping rates low, doing all these remarkably unique things at the Federal Reserve because we've been worrying about falling price levels.
And now on a dime, I got to think about spiraling ones.
That's confusing. But I think, look, this is something that it's transitory maybe, but transitory does not mean week to week.
This is something that's going to be on the horizon for the next 12 months.
And we're going to have to get used to it and get used to thinking about it in a different way.
Okay, so guys, I have to ask you about this Facebook story, or I'm sorry, the meta story.
From what I hear, I've read two reactions.
One is the cynical view, which is this is a way to distance themselves from an increasingly tarnished Facebook brand.
And then there's the more generous view, which is this is sort of a statement about the greater aspirations of the company.
So what was your reaction when you heard the news?
It does coincide with them being more serious and being more specific about how much they will invest in metaverse and everything that's related to that part of the business.
So maybe the completely cynical view is not exactly right, but of course the timing couldn't be worse.
The particulars of the timing, I think, is really what invites the cynicism.
Yeah, I confess, I'm on that cynical side.
You know, whenever I see a large corporation characterize their problems as a PR problem or a communications problem that's going to be fixed with a rebranding, I'm always so skeptical.
You know, the number of times you hear people saying, we've got a communications problem, we've got a PR problem, and the answer is no, you have a problem.
And I think this is just a reflection of them not fully acknowledging or coming to terms with how deep the problem they have is.
And I think that's a little worrisome.
I don't know. What do you think, Yangmi?
Well, so I think I'm in the minority.
I think this is a genuine rebranding.
I think it reflects a genuine attempt to signal that this company's core identity is now associated with something larger than Facebook.
And at the same time, I think it solves an important internal organizational issue, which is they now have this topco called meta.
And then underneath that, they've got Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, which means that there's now a Facebook CEO who sits below Zuckerberg on the org chart, which means that Zuckerberg now has a layer of distance.
At the same time, he doesn't give up control because he's sitting on top of that.
So in this regard, I think it's not so much a way for Facebook to rebrand itself, but for Zuckerberg to begin to rebrand himself as a person who runs a larger portfolio of projects, of which Facebook is simply one of many.
And I think it's a reflection of how he wants to spend his time, not so much on Facebook, but on the metaverse he's building.
And then it has a whole bunch of pragmatic advantages.
So it allows the company to begin to separate different lines of businesses in a much cleaner way.
So the metaverse is a huge investment on the part of Zuckerberg.
And by creating this topco, you can now break out all the investment dollars in one part of the portfolio and still protect the profitability narrative associated with the core Facebook product or the core Instagram product.
And then finally, it gives you just a lot of flexibility to have an umbrella portfolio brand, because now you can add things.
You can also be flexible about what you end up jettisoning over time, because it now means that all of these sub brands become a little bit more dispensable.
So I think he gives Zuckerberg a lot of flexibility in how to build this larger portfolio of pieces.
And I think he's really serious about wanting it to be a larger portfolio of pieces.
But listen, we don't have a lot of time to talk about this tonight.
But you have to promise me that we get to talk about the metaverse on a future episode.
I would love to. I think it would be great.
Okay, and Felix, I'm going to turn to you now, because you wanted to talk about Snap, which is somewhat related to this conversation.
Yes, I think it's closely related.
So first observation about Snap is the company continues to grow very quickly.
They're now at about 300 million daily average users, which is 25 % more than they had last year.
And perhaps most importantly, about half of the users are between 15 and 25, which is, of course, exactly the segment where Facebook is weak.
The company did stumble this last quarter.
And that alone is like a very interesting observation, because it has a lot to do with Apple's new privacy controls.
You might remember the advertising identifier that is now no longer available.
It had a much bigger impact on Snap than it did on Facebook.
And so their results came in.
I mean, it's still a pretty interesting company, but at least Wall Street was bitterly disappointed about what they had to report.
Yeah. And then maybe the third thing, and this is most closely related to your earlier point, young me, is if you're looking for companies that are really way ahead in augmented reality, Snap is definitely one of them.
They started out, you remember they had these filters, which is basically, it's a photo of you with a mustache, that kind of thing.
And then they moved from filters to lenses.
They've now moved into 3D bitmojis, which is essentially an artificial human that you can place on maps.
It is just fascinating what they're doing in augmented reality.
So Felix, you said the stock stumbled, but it was a little bit more than a stumble, right?
It was like 20 % down.
There are a couple of really interesting lessons there.
The first is they have been doing really well by effectively beating guidance, kind of 10 quarters in a row.
So it's a good example of how that game is hard to play.
And once you stumble, you stumble hard.
But I think you're highlighting the really important things, which are the underlying metrics are kind of amazing.
So on daily active users, the growth is amazing.
On average revenue per user, the growth continues to be amazing.
The penetration inside that key demographic is massive.
It's close to 90%. So they are really firing on all engines in many ways.
So I completely agree with you that they are just a remarkably dynamic company, even the way they've positioned themselves as a camera company.
I think it's just brilliant.
And the way they pivoted from their roots, I think gets them in a position relative to Facebook to capture the meaning, whatever it is of a metaverse, more closely than anyone else.
Super interesting. What do you think, Yang Mi?
What's your take? I agree with me here.
I'm paying a little bit less attention to what's happening with the stock price and more attention to the underlying fundamentals.
And I'm glad we're talking about Snap because they're such an overlooked player in the social media landscape.
And I think the thing that I have found to be the most impressive is not only is their user growth strong and not only are there demographics.
So strong. But their psychographics are amazing in the sense that they have a user base that they have trained to sample new features, new benefits.
So Snap is an innovator and they are constantly rolling out innovative features and products.
And their users embrace that in comparison to Facebook, which whenever it rolls out a new feature, the first reaction from Facebook users is to always hate.
Everybody hates everything.
Yes, everybody hates any kind of new innovation that Facebook comes out with, even when they eventually come to like it.
Whereas with Snap, they can roll out experiments, many of which end up being incredibly sticky and then mainstays of the service, like stories like the Snap mat.
And then to the point about the metaverse, I think we're going to have to see how this all plays out.
But at the furthest end of the continuum, you have companies like Roblox or you have one of the hottest companies out there is Axie Infinity.
But when it comes to more mainstream players, I think Snap might be furthest along in pushing the boundaries of what we might expect in a non -gaming space.
And it's interesting to me how even some of these smaller innovations or what feels like a smaller innovation can just have dramatic impact on user behavior.
I saw a snippet of data when they made these emojis available to users.
So these are essentially artificial humans in 3D form.
The number of seconds that users spend on the Snap map doubled essentially, which goes to your earlier point, Young Mi, about just their ability to see what kinds of things would really fascinate their users.
It's quite amazing.
And this is part of the longer arc of who they are.
I mean, they spent a couple years in the wilderness after going public.
And it was unclear what they were doing.
And they have really pivoted in an interesting way.
I think this is the most impressive thing.
I mean, they are innovating and leading their users in interesting ways.
Imagine how dispiriting it must be to be a company like Snap and know that every innovation you introduce that ends up being successful is going to immediately be copied by larger players.
I mean, that's the position you're in.
Yeah. And you could imagine that being incredibly dispiriting, but they have really leaned into it.
And said, well, that just means we have to constantly be the first.
We have to take advantage of our nimbleness in a way that the larger players can't.
And so they haven't shied away from innovation, even knowing that the larger players are fast on their heels.
And perhaps even the pivot to being the camera company in part reflects this competitive dynamic.
If, you know, you know, you have a great idea at the end of the week, it's going to be on Instagram.
You have to do something that's a little more radical, that sort of repositions the company in the social media landscape.
I find it fascinating how it's still social in a sense, but you see your friends on the map.
Right. But that interaction is maybe not the most interesting, fascinating aspect.
What's really amazing is, oh, I see this building and then me and the building and my creativity.
That together is a really interesting package.
And once I have an amazing image or an amazing video, of course I'm going to share it.
But there's as much value in creation as there is value in the sharing aspect.
And if you want to sort of think of the social media landscape as a long continuum of the importance of creation, snap might be more similar to TikTok.
We're coming up with new ideas, and the creation of content is at least as important as the sharing of the content.
So having said all this, do you use Snap?
I think anyone over, I don't know, 25 or so, if you try to use any of their apps, it's like the menus are completely bewildering.
Maybe that's more of a commentary on us than it is on these players.
No, it can't be about us.
The implication of that would be that we're old.
Okay. Thanks, guys.
Okay, picks. So I have a pick that actually was inspired by something you talked about in a previous episode, Mihir.
And that is, remember when you talked about Patagonia provisions.
Yeah, I love that. The salmon, right?
And how interesting it was that Patagonia is now starting to sell food.
So coincidentally, I got a gift recently, and it was a bottle of Patagonia wine.
So as part of their provisions, they are now offering wines.
They are all natural, environmentally friendly wines, which in this case means using really low -intervention winemaking techniques that rebuild damaged soil and promote biodiversity that also draws down carbon.
I mean, it's absolutely fascinating.
But the reason I said this, I had this bottle of Rosé, and it was fabulous.
Wow. Okay. It was really, really delightful.
So I would recommend checking it out.
That is interesting.
I love the idea, young me, that this wine can trigger a conversation that's not like, oh my God, how oaky, and a sense of raspberry, but instead can be like about the supply chain and how it has an environmental impact.
I think that's a wonderful thing, it seems like.
Mihir, I could not agree with you more.
Wine that provokes conversation almost always requires a particular kind of connoisseurship.
Oh, this is a 1986.
And if you're not a connoisseur, you're really excluded from being able to talk about the wine in an interesting way.
Even if you're a wine neophyte, you can have a bottle of one of these wines, and you can have a fascinating conversation about how wine is produced.
Interesting. And the website really enables that.
That is great. So it's really delightful.
It also, of course, comes back to Tinned Fish because they have fantastic anchovies and mackerel.
There's always a reason to talk about Tinned Fish.
So, Mihir, you had a recommendation?
Yeah, so sometimes you need a little candy on the internet, right?
Like a little piece of something.
Sometimes, exactly.
And often, you know, it's like the latest episode of Baking Impossible.
But I want to suggest Kotkey .org.
K -O -T -T -K -E .org. What is it?
It's one of the oldest blogs on the internet.
It's founded by a guy named Jason Kotkey.
And every day, he posts the most wonderful, curious things about the world.
So, for example, he'll have photos and videos of the degradation of icebergs in the Arctic Circle.
He'll have the original prototype for the iPod.
So it is just the most fantastic set of curio you could imagine presented to you super visually every day.
It's really old school because it's like an old hypertext blog almost, right?
But he just has incredible taste, and it's always interesting.
And it could be anything.
It can be anything.
It could be any topic.
I'm looking at it right now.
It's kind of hilarious.
So there's this random post on a bunch of epidemiologists that analyzed all the health risks in a James Bond movie.
Exactly. From all the places he travels and all the things he exposes himself to.
There's all this NASA, Young Me Deep Space imagery with music.
There's like this artist who takes photos of herself against really beautiful wallpaper and like their camouflage.
Fabulous. Very visual, by the way.
Mind bending Lego sculpture.
Do you see that one?
I know. Everything is super visual.
I mean, it's obviously all eye candy, and it's just fantastic.
I love it. There you go.
So Kotkey .org is my...
Kotkey. Perfect. I want a great recommendation.
Yes, okay. And then Felix.
I'm going to do something that I don't think I've ever done.
I'm going to recommend a film that I have not seen myself.
What? The movie is Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch.
Wait, are you getting like a payment from the PR agency?
I wish. No, I have to say, I just love everything about Wes Anderson.
Like his style of movie making is so creative.
It's so visually appealing.
It's often this wild mix of cartoonish and live action.
It goes back and forth between black and white and color.
And I've only seen the trailer, but I already know I'm going to love it.
It's sort of a French version of The New Yorker, which in and of itself is a hilarious idea.
What would The New Yorker look like if it was a French magazine?
So I definitely know what I'm going to do this weekend, Wes Anderson.
Wow, that is great.
The French Dispatch.
I have to say, Felix, I've always felt like I should like Wes Anderson movie.
But I can never quite get over that initial hump.
If I wanted to get a starter, obviously The French Dispatch.
But is there a starter movie?
Maybe Budapest Hotel, I would recommend.
It has the usual quirkiness.
It has more of an arc of a story.
And of course, Fantastic Mr.
Fox is, as the title suggests, really fantastic.
But Budapest Hotel, I think, is probably the one I would start with.
So Felix, is that your only recommendation?
Are you sure you don't want to also add, I don't know, a restaurant?
You've never eaten an ad?
Or a kiss never went?
Is there anything you want to add to this recommendation?
Oh, I could make it a little tradition.
Yeah, I hear the next season of After Hours is going to be great.
Okay. You mean after rebranding, right?
Yeah, sorry. Oh, that's great.
Okay, so that's it for tonight.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
This is the end of this video.
