Ted Audio Collective Hello, everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Mi here.
And I'm Stephanie Metta.
It's great to have you, Stephanie.
You know, I'm always curious as a former editor of Fast Company, I'm sure you're following the magazine I mean, every time it comes out, do you have a favorite story, something that really caught your attention the last couple of months or so?
Yeah. Thanks, Felix.
This is a really fun one.
It was actually on fastcompany .com and it was a piece about Nebia, which is a low flow shower head that was founded by an entrepreneur, got started on Kickstarter.
But the best part of the story, our reporter knew this for years, but finally got the founder to tell the story of how he got Tim Cook to be an investor by stalking Tim Cook in the locker room of Tim Cook's gym.
Oh my God. Well, it's the right environment to talk about low flow showers.
He actually had installed the shower head in this particular gym, and it was this real comedy of errors because he had wanted Tim Cook to try the shower head.
As it turned out, as Tim finished his workout and was ready and willing to jump into the shower, someone else was in it, so the guy had to come back the next day and stalk Tim Cook at the locker room a second day in a row.
It seemed improbable, but apparently Tim Cook loved it and invested, and the rest is history.
Oh my God. I never thought about it, but that must be one of the key abilities of a successful entrepreneur.
How do you bring up your product in the most impossible situations?
I'm just worried we've now inspired a new generation of stalkers.
Concerned about it.
So topics. What did you bring today?
Me here? Well, I thought we'd go big.
Everybody has started talking about de -globalization.
Oh, yeah. This has been kind of mounting rhetoric for a while, but it's taken on new urgency.
And I'm curious if you believe it, if you love it.
Yeah. How do you feel about it?
Talking about big topics.
Yeah, exactly. That is definitely one.
That's a big one. Stephanie, what did you bring?
I am interested in talking about Zoom, the pandemic era darling that is now facing some headwinds.
Investors are wondering if the stock is overvalued, if the company will continue its growth trajectory.
So interested if Zoom can keep its Zoom going.
Nice. I like it. Sounds great.
So me here, globalization.
Or the end of globalization.
Indeed. We began a little bit of a conversation about this when we talked about the de -linking of China and the rest of the world, but the theme is really far broader.
A number of people are now claiming that we have entered a period of de -globalization.
Larry Fink, who in his annual shareholder letter for BlackRock has articulated this idea that the era of globalization is over and indeed that we are now entering a period of re -localization or de -globalization.
It's not just the end of globalization, Felix, but in a way it goes further, that it is going to be a de -globalized world.
So the roots of this, of course, go back at least 10 or 15 years to the financial crisis.
Questions about the degree to which globalization is serving our interest, they get ramped up during the pandemic with concerns about supply chains, and people thinking about the fragility of supply chains and maybe re -localization as being an answer to that.
And then, of course, with the Russia -Ukraine conflict, it becomes even more acute, people thinking about retreats from globalization.
So I'm curious about two things, really.
First, do you think that's where we're going?
And second, do you buy it?
Is it what the next 10 or 20 years is going to be about?
I do buy that there is somewhere between a de -globalization and an end of globalization.
There's got to be some sort of middle ground, which I know sounds like a little bit of a cop -out, but certainly there's no question that thanks in part to technologies like 3D printing, you now have actual manufacturing happening in places like Los Angeles.
Because you can 3D print rockets, you can 3D print auto parts.
So technology is allowing local economies to do more of the kinds of things that we used to do overseas.
So some of this I think was kind of inevitable, even before the Russian -Ukraine conflict, even before we started experiencing the supply chain issues.
We did see technologies enabling manufacturers and others to bring manufacturing closer to home.
On the other hand, some of the promise of globalization helping lift up emerging economies, helping to create new and interesting jobs for communities that heretofore had been shut out of the global economy.
I hope that we don't see the end of that, because we did see a rising middle class in a number of economies that 20 years ago were considered basket cases.
Those are both excellent points, Stephanie.
I think when people talk about the end of globalization, it's so many different things.
Take the relocation of manufacturing.
That in part is just a calculus that goes on all the time.
Given new technologies, given new opportunities, what's the best location?
And I don't really think too many novel unprecedented changes happen in this respect, similar with supply chains.
I do think that there is a pretty serious re -optimization, but it's not clear to me that it comes at the cost of globalization.
I think countries like Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, will probably benefit at the expense of China because we're now no longer so comfortable having single -source suppliers that are located in China.
Where it feels most real to me is actually in the cultural arena.
Strangely enough, I think it's more a cultural phenomenon in the sense that the premise that other countries would look at liberal Western democracies with market economies and would say, yes, this is where we want to go.
This is the future.
It's going to be a bumpy ride, but we'll be more democratic in the future and we'll look more like market economies.
That part seems to have gone away.
And maybe most interesting pushed by a sense of humiliation.
If I talk to friends in China, they often feel like the West somehow humiliated China.
And it's an old play to hold China back when China now has a chance to play a role in the world economy.
Very similar in Russia, where you have this deep sense of humiliation.
And then maybe most interesting in our own country, like Hillary Clinton's deplorables, the other side of that is a sense of humiliation, a sense of not being respected.
On the economics of globalization, I think you're right.
The other way to think about this is that there was this period of hyper -globalization, where you were shipping goods all around the world to chase the tiniest cost advantage in a crazy way.
Every investor has got to have some exposure to sub -Saharan Africa because they believe in global diversification, excessive ideas about what the virtues of globalization would be.
And I think that has retreated.
But I don't buy the idea that the underlying economics of globalization are going to be turned their back on, because the efficiencies are so powerful.
But you're raising this interesting point about cultural globalization and whether that is going to be where we see it.
In a way, I agree with you, Felix.
There is this sense of people turning their back on that aspiration.
There is a rhetoric that is, we're not going that way, we're going a different way.
But it is still matched with a lot of people sending their children to the West to get educated.
They espouse a rhetoric, which is much more localized, and yet their behaviors, where they want to travel to, where they aspire to be, where they aspire for their children to be, remains highly cosmopolitan and highly global.
So I'm always struck by that, Felix, that kind of divide between the rhetoric and then the underlying reality.
And so I think the cultural globalization piece is the hardest one to figure out, in a way.
There's the geopolitical nationalism, but there's also a rise in nationalism when it comes to cultural phenomenon.
People are gravitating to the music of their home countries.
They are gravitating to the music and culture and arts that are created at home.
And I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing, but you can espouse all of these things.
And still, it can also be true that you want your kids to be educated at schools in the United States.
Can I just challenge that a little bit, Stephanie?
So has Marvel ever been more powerful worldwide?
Has Netflix as a force of distributing culture globally ever been more pervasive?
Isn't TikTok a Chinese owned enterprise that is the heart of the social media ecosystem where people share content?
Do we really think people are consuming more cultural content locally today?
I know that's a trope, but it feels like it runs in the face of Marvel and Disney and Encanto and everything that I think is happening.
Yeah, and the corollary of that is Netflix is doing more and more to bring international content to U .S.
audiences. That's right.
What's different, I think, is our celebration of diversity that I now feel is missing in many places.
Look to Eastern Europe, this notion of we're a Christian nation that doesn't want refugees and immigrants simply because they don't have the same religion.
That strikes me as fundamentally different from the kinds of values that we espouse.
And that's now commonly accepted.
You see it in the differential reaction to Ukrainian refugees versus refugees from Africa or refugees from the Middle East.
And the Netflix type of culture, I think much of it is shallow enough that you don't actually see what's going on culturally.
Think of the culture wars in the U .S.
And then think about your last Marvel movie.
Marvel movies are made in a really fabulous, interesting way, but they circumvent all of these conversations.
The battleground inside the United States doesn't show up in entertainment.
And as a result, it's produced for a global audience and it finds mass appeal.
But I don't think it says anything about the felt distance to the West in much of the rest of the world that has to do with the pretense of attacking Iraq, the lost war in Afghanistan, the refusal of Europeans to accept many Middle Eastern refugees and so on.
Yeah, let me try the other way, though, Felix.
So you had a great term that kind of felt the distance to the West, right?
And I think the way you're articulating it is very powerful, which is there is this groundswell of more nationalistic or more provincial thinking.
And there might be this surface layer of Netflix and Marvel, but none of it really matters because the real hardcore stuff that's happening is at the base.
If you think about the geopolitics of it, I think a lot of this rhetoric is driven by opportunistic geopolitical actors who have an agenda which is nationalistic because it's self -serving to be nationalistic for these actors and you can think of any autocrat that is rising today.
And that is what they are propagating.
But that does not mean it is felt deeply.
Your view seems to be there's like this organic thing where people are angry about the world.
And I wonder if it's more just a lot of opportunistic political actors trying to drive wedges between people.
But what are they building on?
So if you think about last week's elections in Hungary, is it a perfect democracy where everybody has the same chance to win?
No, obviously not. Is it the case that a pretty big majority decides to support a party and a regime that has really very different values from the kinds of values that we espouse?
So in a way, your argument reminds me a little bit of the invisibility of half the country during the Clinton years in particular before Trump, where there is discontent in parts of the population, even a willingness to say, what is democracy good for if democracy doesn't give me the kinds of things
that I really want?
Which for an American context is totally shocking to me.
So I completely agree with you.
It's Putin and Xi Jinping and Trump domestically who cleverly build on these notions and on these sentiments.
But I think the sentiments are real and they're not the sentiments of a small fraction of the population.
Yeah. What do you think, Stephanie?
Felix raises a really good point.
I mean, Trump tapped into real disaffected feelings and you can argue, well, a lot of people didn't vote or people who voted for him didn't actually think he'd win.
They were just voting for change.
People were looking for an alternative to what they perceived as establishment.
Washington, all of these politicians, the nationalistic ones in particular, they all run on making someone the enemy.
It's the immigrants.
If you're in Europe, it's people of color.
If you're in the United States, it's trans people.
If you are in certain counties and the approach of villainizing other people and other institutions is really troubling because you're not creating cultures where innovation and interesting thinking can happen if the entire message is everybody else is bad and we have to batten down the hatches.
I completely agree that there is a disaffected group who wasn't getting heard about a lot of things that really matter to them and now we're tapping into that.
But my gosh, it comes at an enormous cost to a lot of other people.
And these leaders who do it are primarily self -serving and then amplify these instincts, which are always there.
But when they are catered to, it feels like it's something more.
So I would love to get your sense about this in the longer run.
Is this the trajectory of the world for the next 10 or 20 years or is it a blip?
I'm going to go with a trajectory, but not with a really spiky slope, but like a sort of mild slope.
I do think that there will be a backlash trajectory and I think we will see it in energy.
That's the one thing we haven't really talked about.
And in Larry Fink's letter and Larry's talking his book a little bit too, right?
He is really trying to get more and more of the companies he invests in to have a more sustainable approach to their energy usage.
This may be a little Pollyanna -ish, but I do think that the conversation around alternative energies is going to become very real in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
And that will have lasting impacts on this globalization story for sure.
What do you think, Felix?
I think on the business front, we will look back and we will say, well, that was way premature.
We thought it was a real thing and then it turned out to be not so dramatic for basically two reasons.
One is business is going to push back against government regulations that undermine important opportunities.
You already see it in small things that the Biden administration doesn't really tout that much, but they've taken down 350 of the tariffs on China that Trump imposed.
Why? Oh, because businesses lobbied really hard that these tariffs did not serve the economy well.
So I think you'll see this in many ways.
If we get to a more stable environment, there will be this old, familiar push towards efficiency.
Now you can say maybe something really unusual unprecedented happens every other week.
And so I'm going to live with higher inventory levels than I would normally have.
But the moment the environment looks a little more stable, really?
Like, are you going to defend those high inventory levels?
I don't think so. So on the business front, I think we'll look back and say, well, it was a lot of talk, but not a lot of action.
I think the cultural division is here to stay.
And if I have one hope is that we learn to think about globalization as a much more decentralized process.
Sometimes in Europe, the European Union, because they've had these conversations forever, they talk about the union at different speeds.
And that sounds right to me.
If we're trying to impose one single speed, I really fear that it's going to tear the country apart, that it's going to tear the world community apart.
If we can travel at different speeds, where different communities decide what's good for them, that I think gives us a much better chance of cohesion.
Yeah, that's a great vision.
You know, it's always hard in these settings to disentangle what you hope for and what you think will happen.
This is a struggle for me.
That's true. Yeah. But you know, I'm going to go with the blip on both, okay?
And I take your point about the cultural globalization and the geopolitics.
There is this moment we're living through where autocratic tendencies are rising.
And I think alongside that comes with that a broken global system.
And if that autocratic tendency becomes even greater than it is today, then all bets are off.
But if it stays where it is, or it retreats, which is what I think will happen, I think it's a blip on both.
That's surely what I'm hoping for.
But I think it's also what I think will happen as well.
All right, here's a prediction we can revisit in a decade.
We can revisit in a decade, indeed.
As it happens, Stephanie, we're on Zoom and you want to talk about Zoom.
How fitting! The fact that we are on Zoom, even though we technically don't need to be because we just really need to hear each other, is a really interesting element of the Zoom story.
So Zoom, as everybody knows, is a teleconferencing platform.
The stock is down something like 80 percent from its 2020 highs.
The company could arguably be credited for helping keeping commerce going during the very earliest days of the pandemic.
And as people return to workplaces in a sort of hybrid model, there's a real question about what the company's growth and trajectory will look like in the future.
Meanwhile, everyone from Microsoft to even Amazon has its own teleconferencing platform, although I've only ever used Chime when I'm on the phone with Amazon executives, so I'm not quite sure how widespread Chime is.
But others have caught on to what Zoom is doing, so I'm curious, Mihir and Felix, if you think that Zoom is a flash in the pan or if this company has legs.
I think if you were to ask what company has created more value in the world and captured the smallest fraction of it, it would be Zoom.
It's just completely amazing.
So what do I mean by that?
They have maybe four billion dollars in revenue.
They're only now growing at 20 percent per year, which is not bad but considerably down.
Their market cap is 32 billion.
And by the way, that market cap is pretty much where it was pre pandemic.
But it is this remarkably pervasive tool that almost everyone uses and creates enormous value for people because it is such a seamless technology.
The puzzle is why and how they prioritized being viral over creating a business model that would generate and capture more value for themselves.
That to me is what's kind of fascinating about Zoom.
What do you think, Felix?
I have to declare first, I'm such a big Zoom fan.
I think it's an amazing product.
I was on a WebEx call the other day and it's just like, oh, my God, who are these people?
Zoom is so much better in so many ways.
Just think of the virtual backgrounds.
Technologically, that's not an easy thing to do.
Just as you point out, it created so much value for so many people who didn't want to show their messy bedroom.
There's so much sophistication in the product.
For instance, they were using artificial intelligence to decide where in the feed you have the best resolution.
For instance, now that we're looking at one another, we focus on faces.
So there will be better resolution on our faces than elsewhere, the couch or the wall that you have in the background.
So I think it's just truly astounding what the company has done.
The biggest question for me is when can a company that has narrow scope, but it's clearly best in its class, when can that company survive against the pressure of the Microsofts and the Amazons of the world?
And when is your fate, essentially the fate of Slack?
You know, very similar in the sense that much better communication than anyone else.
And in the end, you have to give up and sell yourself to Salesforce because unless you're aligned with one of the big players, you just don't really have a chance to be successful.
And it's a little heartbreaking, but I think Slack is a cautionary tale for Zoom.
Do you think that Zooms embraced by consumers may be the thing that makes it an acquisition target?
And the reason I ask that is because you look at Salesforce acquiring Slack that has basically turned Salesforce into in a small way, it has given them access to a more consumer oriented market.
You look at Microsoft buying gaming company Activision, that is pushing them deeper into consumer.
We've seen a lot of these enterprise technology companies suddenly realize that maybe the way to go is to diversify into consumer.
And if Zoom were just an enterprise software company, maybe they will get more valuation in a sale because they have this consumer piece as opposed to being an Anna plan or one of these very pure B2B companies.
I think that might be the hope, Stephanie, but one reason why the growth rates come down so dramatically is now that many individuals and even small businesses, they cancel their subscriptions to Zoom.
So it's not the healthiest part of the business.
And then to me here's earlier point, that's the part that is really hard to monetize.
The pressure really is teams.
So Microsoft is now integrating teams with the operating system every which way it can.
And that is just such a powerful move.
And in a way, what's terrible about it is this is, of course, exactly the history of WebEx.
Eric Yem, the founder of Zoom, he was an early employee at WebEx and he experienced Cisco buying WebEx.
And then didn't he say something like there wasn't a single day when he saw a happy customer?
And that, I think, is our future of video communications.
Zoom either goes away or it gets bought by a bigger player.
And then almost for sure, that means you're not really the focus of what the bigger player wants to do.
It's like one of many shows that we play in.
And yes, we have resources.
Yes, we have a better sales force.
But is anyone going to adopt, say, Azure as opposed to Amazon, AWS as a function of which video platform do you have?
I don't think so. It just doesn't matter that much.
And the tragedy is that we as consumers, we end up with lots of mediocre products like WebEx.
That just wasn't a priority for Cisco.
So I mean, I buy that Felix and Stephanie.
I think the future is clearly on the enterprise side.
I think that's right.
But then why is this product, which is so dominant relative to its competing offers, unable to command the value?
It allowed for incredible virality.
But I wonder if he sacrificed something, if he should have tried to build more network effects, to try to build more glue.
Because without that, I think you're right, which is it just gets lost in a larger company and it doesn't get to extract a ton of value.
Yeah, I'll say two things.
So one is, don't forget, there was an attempt to build network effects, right?
So they had this marketplace of apps that at that point in time, pre -pandemic, already included Slack and HubSpot and Dropbox.
So there was an attempt to sort of build a big tent.
And even today, the Zoom marketplace has a thousand applications.
So they've worked very hard to try to mimic the big tent that a bigger company can offer.
I think the reality is often in the sales conversation, the CTO who decides, is he going to decide, we're not going to have Microsoft 365?
No, probably because that touches so many things.
And then once you have Microsoft 365, you have teams for free.
Why on earth would you spend extra money on a video conferencing platform?
Then you have to be really convinced that it's so much better.
But it is Felix, it is so much better, isn't it?
It is so much better, but it's, of course, true now that Teams improves over time exactly because Zoom exists.
We will experience the real tragedy once Zoom no longer exists.
Look at the pace of innovation for Teams at that point in time.
What I've observed is in our workplace, Microsoft has made it so easy for people to default to a team meeting.
If you're somebody that's constantly putting meetings on calendars and you're already on Outlook, Microsoft just generates the link for you.
And whereas when I'm generating meetings, I have to go to Zoom, I have to create the Zoom link, I have to put that in the calendar.
This is a case where people may choose convenience over quality.
It happens all the time.
And this is actually a beautiful example, Stephanie, because of course it's true that there is a Zoom plug in that allows you to do what Microsoft does.
But my experience is exactly like yours.
From week to week to week, the fraction of meetings that are in Teams just increases steadily.
I think you're both got to be right, both about convenience versus quality and about the CTO sales process.
He is an amazing founder.
He was self -admittedly about the customer.
And when you hear him speak, he's like amazing.
Yeah, he's a true believer, but he's not about monetization.
He is about, I want to make customers happy, as many customers as possible.
And he did. Yes, customers and employees.
And employees happy.
And he did. Yeah. But I wonder if in that process he wasn't sufficiently aggressive about monetization and he gets swallowed up in this monolithic world.
I wonder if he will have accomplished what he wanted to accomplish.
Yeah. He's famous for saying nothing is more important than happiness.
And as an employee of Zoom, you're supposed to ask yourself every day, am I happy?
And if the answer is no, you're not supposed to show up at work because you have to figure out the underlying reasons why you're not happy.
But it's not just talk because it's a place where you get unlimited paid vacation.
So he backs it up. So in a way, it's just terrible that it's probably not going to have a beautiful ending.
But as a story about how business can be a force for good and how business can create tremendous value.
And maybe building not as much resilience as we all would like.
I think it's so inspiring.
It's so awesome what he has done.
Well, let's not count them out.
If they have happy employees, maybe they'll come up with a good monetization scheme.
There you go. Here's to hope, Stephanie.
All right. Recommendations.
Felix, what do you got?
Did you know that you can create unlimited versions of your Gmail email address?
So say if your address is yesterday at gmail .com, what you can do is you can add a plus after yesterday and then any combination of letters.
So, for instance, you can do yesterday plus news at gmail .com yesterday plus spam at gmail .com.
And it all comes to your inbox.
But because you now know exactly the form in which it comes, you can then filter it in any way you want.
And I've recently discovered this and I find it so helpful because everything I do on now basically I have to give an email address.
And then for half of the addresses that I give, I never ever ever want to hear from these people again.
So now what I do, I have yesterday plus spam at gmail .com.
And it gets automatically deleted when you send me something.
My old solution was to create different accounts.
Then, of course, I don't remember the password and I don't remember exactly what I called the account.
So this I have found really liberating.
And I think it works on iOS and on Android.
I like this. I used to like make up ones for the spam stuff.
But the real use seems to be on this piece where you say let's say there's some credit card ones or there's some news ones.
That is really nice.
I could see that. And then you can filter.
And then you filter.
Nice. I like it. That sounds great.
What did you bring, Stephanie?
I brought an article from Fortune magazine, which is one of my alma maters.
I read everything that Erica Fry writes.
Her last name is spelled F -R -Y.
She is a health and investigative journalist in full disclosure.
We used to work together.
So I actually have had a chance to watch her process up close.
And she has a new article in the current issue of Fortune about the hospital chain HCA and a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, that it took over.
And the hospital has had an incredibly successful run during COVID.
The whole chain has seen tremendous growth and great financial results.
But her article looks at how the local community is deeply, deeply unhappy with the local hospital and how they actually are, in the words of the article, trying to run it out of town.
So it's a great piece.
It's very nuanced. It's very well reported.
And for anybody who's been interested in the consolidation we've seen in the health care industry, it's a really interesting look inside one community hospital.
Wow. Great. That sounds great.
What did you bring me here?
So I have something considerably more trivial and less useful, which is at the intersection of people who love Japan and love mafia movies, stand eye.
And I think I'm not alone.
I thought you're the British baking guy.
I know, but so I like the British cop shows and I love all things British, but I love all things Japanese.
And now there's a Japanese mafia cop show, which is Tokyo Vice on HBO Max.
So it's about the world of Yakuza in Tokyo.
It actually is based on a book that came out about maybe 15 years ago about an American journalist who went and started to investigate the Yakuza.
Production values are spectacular, very noir.
But then you have this fantastic world of Japan and then you have crime and cops.
So for me, it's like as good as it gets.
Mafia, cops and Japan all mixed together in a bowl.
So is it related to Miami Vice?
I think it is in the following sense, which is I'm not mistaken.
Michael Mann directed the first episode and I think he is the one who kind of pioneered the Miami Vice thing.
So it is related in that way.
But there is no like Don Johnson kind of thing going on here.
No flamingos? Well, there is some of that fashion because the Yakuza are in some sense quite fashionable, but it's a totally different vibe.
I mean, it's about as different a vibe as you can get, but it's fantastic.
So I recommend Tokyo Vice to you all.
I feel like in those Japanese noir television shows, nothing takes place during the day.
There's no sunshine and everything happens in the shadows of the night.
Everything exactly right.
This is it for tonight.
Thank you, everyone, for listening.
If you think we're sounding great, that's as always due to the miracle work of our sound engineer, Peter Linne.
This was After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
