Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Youngmi. I'm Felix.
I'm Mi here. And I feel like I haven't seen you guys in a while.
Far too long, no? I know.
I'm sorry. It's been weeks and weeks.
But he's been having fun without me.
I can tell. But it's not the same.
So I'm actually in a pretty good mood because I feel like we've hit some kind of tipping point where more and more people around me have either gotten their first vaccination or they've signed up for it.
Yeah, so true, yes.
Are you feeling the same thing?
Very much so. I mean, I can see it around me.
I can see it in the people who I know, but also even walking around.
I walked by one of these places where people were getting shots.
You feel like something big is happening.
Yeah, it's real. And I start thinking about what it's like to fly, what it's like to go places, what it's like to have dinner parties.
It's like, even though I know I have to be patient, but it feels like, oh, I can think about all of these things because it's not so far now.
I've had to kind of readjust my thinking around returning to some kind of normalcy.
You mean no pajamas at noon?
Hey, let's not get personal.
Take that back. I confess that I know this return to normality when it comes will be great, but I've kind of got a rhythm to this life, right?
And like any rhythm, even if you know the new rhythm will be better, I wouldn't call it like a sense of loss, but there is a sense of like, oh, yeah, I got to change again.
And it's weird that even if you know you're changing to a better world, can still inspire a little hesitancy in me, at least a little bit, I think.
For me, it's so different.
I can't wait. Yeah.
So there's good and bad.
OK, so here, you walked in tonight with a really fun idea.
I think we got to talk about NFTs.
Oh, no. Join the crowd.
I know. Well, look, so these things called nonfungible tokens, they're either completely brilliant or completely crazy or both.
And Felix, we also might need to do an intervention with Young Me.
Oh. Only the NBA top shots.
They're so fun. Some remedial work is in order here.
Yeah. And I wanted to talk about the music industry, so this should be fun.
OK, we hear. This thing is all over the headlines, by the way.
Yeah, these nonfungible tokens.
So let's talk about it because these are one of those topics where I just don't entirely know what to think about.
And I need to talk to you to figure out what to think about.
So here's what these nonfungible tokens are.
So that's what NFT stands for, nonfungible tokens.
And they are the ability in the digital world to create ownership of a very specific kind of digital asset.
So, for example, a digital painting can be copied many, many times.
But what an NFT does via the blockchain and via a cryptocurrency kind of background is allows you to stipulate that this particular version of it is in fact the original.
So an NFT is a way to make digital content need not be digital art.
It could be a tweet.
It could be a piece of music.
It could be this podcast.
It could be anything that's digital, but create very distinctive ownership in it.
At the same time, the puzzle of it is these things are digital, so you don't really own something distinctive that can't be copied.
So I'm confused. I need to know what to make of all this.
As you mentioned, Jung Mi is happening in the NBA.
It's happening in the modern art world.
It's happening all over the place.
I'd love to get your reactions to it.
What do you make of it all?
So you're essentially buying something that has no physical counterpart.
You're buying the fact of ownership itself, which sounds absurd, but is really no more absurd than everything else in our consumption culture.
As an example, with physical art, the value is already concentrated around ownership rather than experience.
Compare the value associated with looking at a Picasso versus actually owning that Picasso.
All the value is in the actual ownership.
So the same thing is essentially true with NFTs.
I think to establish a market for art, NFTs are actually a fabulous advance.
Even though you might say, I can look at the pixels just like you can.
Some people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the fact that they now officially own a painting.
And when you think about what that means for the incentives to produce art, for the ability of artists to live off the art that they produce, it is a game changer.
It's really significant.
Right. Here's the puzzle, though, right?
It's perfected ownership because you really now verify ownership in a very distinct way.
And in fact, art obviously has been handicapped by that because of forgeries and the such.
But at the same time, you really don't have a distinctive asset anymore because it can be replicated ad nauseam.
And so there's this odd combination, I think, which is I love the idea of perfecting ownership, especially in the world of digital art, because otherwise it's very, very hard.
You make a living. Yeah, you make a living.
So for the digital artist, I get it, but this is spilling over into everything.
People are selling everything because they can associate ownership with it now.
But it's ownership, but it's nothing else but ownership.
And in fact, that's the puzzle to me, which is why do we value so much of ownership of an entirely replicatable tweet or an entirely replicatable dunk of Dr.
J? How is it that that ownership alone could be associated with so much value?
Well, just to be clear, it can be replicated in the same way that you can create a print of a Monet, right?
But look, from a consumer behavior perspective, this is what I find absolutely fascinating.
Part of what you're buying is a pleasure of ownership.
Part of what you're buying is also a form of social currency.
It is actually not so easy anymore to buy things that convey a very particular kind of social status.
Even luxury items can feel like a tired way to spend money.
NFTs are a new kind of flex, a new way to flex your ability to obtain something everyone else wants.
And that's what's really interesting to me.
And then I think it has huge implications for the art market, as Felix described.
The thing that I'm stuck on, though, is consumption, as you point out, has always been about both an experience or a good and status.
And now it's just status.
Like, this is the purest form of consumption that's just status.
So I confess that makes my stomach turn a little.
Why should I feel great about that?
So status is a social construct, and there's one version of status which we have negative connotations around.
And that's exactly the one you described.
But there's another version of status which actually reflects what the collective views as being valuable.
So for example, one way you could think about this with respect to the physical art market, which is so dysfunctional in so many ways, one of the ways you can think about this is that this provides an opportunity for the reshaping or even democratization of perceptions of value.
So right now in the physical art world, it's really hard for a piece of art to achieve enormous value unless a really small number of art critics or curators or collectors declare it to be great.
In fact, what gives that physical art market part of its mystique is that there's this notion that ordinary people, people with an untrained eye, can't be trusted to discern good from bad.
The world of NFTs operates quite differently.
If you can attract millions of followers on Instagram, for example, that means there's a potential now for you to monetize your art in a significant way.
So the popularity breeds value.
In other words, is that better or worse than the traditional way we bestow value on pieces of art?
I don't know. I mean, I think you can have an argument about that, but it's different and it's that bending of how we perceive value that I find to be so fascinating.
Okay, I think that makes a ton of sense, young me, which is if you're an influencer, you can monetize your brand by attaching it to a physical good.
But you need not. Now you can produce a piece of art and then get it to be collectively valued because that's a way to monetize.
Is that what this is?
Yeah, on the one hand, you could say that's very superficial and that's a negative reflection of where we are as a society.
But on the other hand, you can say, look, we assign value to lots of things all the time.
And this is a very different way that value gets assigned.
And I think that's interesting.
That feels very disruptive to me.
What I find completely fascinating is that with better definitions of ownership, we get lots of opportunities to create.
You can call them smart contracts.
You can call them new business models that didn't exist before.
So, for instance, if I'm an artist, I issue an NFT, I can attach to it a stipulation that I will get 10 percent of proceeds every time my art gets resold.
That's a way for artists to participate in increases in the value of their work that just didn't exist before.
Or think of an art platform like Neo Art because they now can in a really simple way demonstrate that they own digital art, they created subscriptions.
So you can go to Neo, you subscribe to one of their packages.
Maybe it's abstract paintings.
You have a monitor in your living room and it constantly rotates the digital art that gets displayed.
And no issues with copyright, no issues with why did you copy?
Is that legit? Is it not legit?
Because we have the blockchain.
We have the authentication of ownership.
And so what I find really interesting is the moment you have clear ownership, you then get all these contracting possibilities that we know from financial markets, that we know from markets for physical goods.
Which to me, that is I think the real revolution in the market for art that the artist can participate in completely novel ways.
And it will be super interesting to see if the traditional gatekeepers, galleries, museums, if they can maintain their position in this new world.
Once you open it up like this, you also open it up to a set of consumers who really never had access to the art market before.
Like for example, if you were to put the entire art market today on the blockchain, the physical art market on the blockchain by creating a digital token to represent each piece of artwork, everything would change overnight.
Right? Because every sale, every transfer would be recorded on the blockchain.
And as a consumer, I could now even buy me, young me, a fraction of a piece of artwork.
I could buy one one hundredth of one percent of the Mona Lisa, for example.
Let's think about the two pieces of it, which is one is, okay, so now maybe it makes art more investable to more people.
But like there is no great value in making everything an investable asset for the masses.
There's like nothing about that.
That's to me, socially interesting, which is.
So now you've made a bunch of stuff more as an investable asset.
So now I too can buy a little bit of Mona Lisa.
And then the second piece is for the digital artist, you know, Felix, I can put a monitor up in my room.
You can own the digital print, but I can have exactly the same experience in my home without owning it because it's digital.
Oh, that's exactly right.
But then this doesn't do anything for us, which is we don't need NFTs.
I love the idea about contracts that are new, but there's nothing that has stopped you or me from making a monitor with flashing digital art for the last 10 years or 20 years.
And nothing about NFTs will make this easier to do either.
Think about what killed online music piracy.
It was the emergence of low cost subscriptions before I was thinking, can I really afford $10 ,000 for some digital art that I really loved?
And it couldn't. And so what did I do?
I copied it, I looked at it on my monitor and I felt a little bit about not compensating the artist.
Now, a $10 a month subscription comes along and all of a sudden I could actually do the more legitimate thing and get a subscription or buy a token for a minimal amount knowing that this will benefit the artist.
But nobody's been there's no big demand for digital art.
How do you know? Well, okay, I guess I'm a little more skeptical about all this, as you can tell.
So from an investible side, we've created something that maybe is a little bit more investible than it was before.
From a consumption side, I could have done it before I can do it now.
There's no difference in my experience of it.
Except you're not paying for it.
You're not compensating the creator.
Isn't that a big difference?
Well, I think that's going to continue to be true, Felix.
I don't think so. But I would also separate the consumption associated with experiencing something versus the consumption associated with owning something.
These are two very different forms of consumption and they both bestow pleasure.
They both bestow satisfaction on people.
And I do think this is all happening in a way that converges with another big trend that's happening in consumption right now, which is if you think about our big classes of consumption, like food is one or clothing or whatever, speculating has become an increasingly large chunk of our consumption.
Yes. It's become mass market.
And you see many, many manifestations of this in the form of Robinhood, in the form of Bitcoin.
But this is a form of consumption activity, this speculative investment and speculative trading that previously, it felt inaccessible to many, many people.
And I think what's been unlocked in the last few years among the mass market is this sense of, hey, this is fun.
And maybe this version of it isn't that fun for me, but this other version of it is.
Maybe Bitcoin is not that interesting to me.
Maybe Robinhood isn't.
But oh, my gosh, buying crypto kitties, now that's for me.
I think you put your finger on what this is really about, which is the spread of speculation through the economy and that as a consumption activity.
That I think is really what this is about.
And I don't terribly feel good about that because I think it will end poorly.
But to me, that is the closest isolation.
What's really happening here, which is we've all got interested in speculation and different speculative assets are spilling over into other speculative assets.
That's the thing that makes me so bummed out about all this because I just fear it ends poorly.
I think both of these things can be true at the same time.
They can be true at one at the same time that the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who create digital art today, because they're fascinated by the opportunities and the technology that we can create a market where not everybody, but many of them will actually be able to
make a livelihood. I agree.
I have a hard time with the speculation side, but that to me is the really promising aspect that I find so fascinating and interesting.
I mean, I totally believe this, by the way, Felix.
I think you got to be right about digital artists.
It's so exciting because when you perfect ownership, all kinds of things can change for them.
But that's only a part of what we're witnessing, right?
I mean, look, me here.
Here's where I completely agree with you.
There are YouTube stars right now that are doing things like selling photos of their feet as NF2s.
And I think what makes this conversation difficult to have is that we're having it right as these things are emerging.
Right. And as a result, the price tags being associated with some of these NF2s are just so completely out of whack.
The truth is we have no idea what will hold its value over time.
And I completely agree that most of the NF2s being produced and sold today will not hold their value not even close to it.
And in fact, you can argue that with respect to like the YouTubers in their feet, a lot of the easy money is being made right now.
Right. That's right.
But in a more abstract way, if you think about it, once the market starts to settle, and we get better at coming to some collective sense of what is valuable to us, will some of these NF2s end up holding their value?
I think so. Absolutely yes.
If you own the NBA Top Shot moment of LeBron's first basket in his career, or the final shot of Kobe Bryant's career, or a truly special piece of modern digital art, that would be awesome to own.
That would be like my dream.
And so I think right now we are in this crazy misalignment because people are just spending money and we don't really quite know what to make of these things.
But I do think things will shake out.
What's interesting, though, about the Instagram feed is that, you know, you go through a museum and you see all this art from the 60s and 70s that was clearly meant to shock.
And I think the feed on Instagram sold maybe as art.
That is for exactly the reason that we're having this conversation.
That is like a new way to shock people into, oh, my God, what is art and what has value and what should we pay for?
Which I love the provocation.
Of course, you're right that many of them will lose all their value and you're thinking, well, maybe not my best investment.
But as a provocation, I just love what's going on.
Your NBA top shot thing is so interesting to me because if it's right, young me, which is somebody really wants to own that video clip of LeBron's first basket, I think that's really compelling.
But I don't know if that's a huge market.
It's huge because everybody's obsessed about something.
And so maybe you don't like basketball, but you're into video games.
If you build model trains, everybody's got something that they assign value to.
And so many of our consumption patterns are anchored to a history and to a provenance.
And if you can somehow capture that in digital form and give consumers an opportunity to own a piece of that thing, it bestows pleasure.
It bestows pleasure.
I think one of the things I'm finding out about myself in this conversation honestly is I just never have thought that much about ownership as being a source of pleasure.
To be honest with you, like I've never really thought like that, but a lot of people do.
People like old bottles of wine or people love art or people love basketball shoes, but I would not want to own it.
Why would I want to own that?
It's all a puzzle to me, young me.
I don't know why anybody would pay for it.
I don't know why anybody would want to own it.
Like I wouldn't want to own that.
I love the idea of what it does for artists.
I love the idea that it makes the collectibles market better, but it's a bloody mess.
And celebrating ownership and celebrating speculation is just like tough for me to get excited about.
So I'm just cementing my status as the cranky old man.
You're neither cranky nor old.
I was going to say nor old, although we're all getting on.
There you go. So I've been excited to talk about the music industry because there's so much going on in it.
People are listening to more music than ever.
Global listenership is up across every demographic in just about every region of the world.
Spotify is coming off a great year in that its stock price has doubled.
It's grown its paid subscriber base.
It's invested heavily in podcasts.
And even with big competition from Apple and others, it's still holding strong at 40 percent market share.
But of course, still losing money.
So that's an interesting player.
Meanwhile, Square recently bought a big stake in title for close to $300 million.
Square is a financial services firm.
And so, you know, the question there is why would a financial services firm buy a music streaming service?
And then, of course, lurking is Apple Music.
Last reports headed about 25 percent market share of paid streaming.
And Amazon making the push as well now.
So if you look at the music industry today, which firms feel like they're winning?
Which ones are losing?
Are you bullish on Spotify?
Do you have your money on Apple?
What do you think of title?
What do you think of all of this?
So I'm super excited about Spotify.
I think it's amazing what they're doing.
And I understand they're losing money.
But when you look at the numbers a little more closely, you see that everything just scales up.
So top line grows really quickly.
And then the cost situation is roughly proportional to the top line.
So about 75 percent of the cost of revenue is compensation for the copyright holders, for labels mostly.
So I think they're in an amazing position to be the big winner in the market for streaming, which obviously is the dominant form of consumption.
I do think they're niche players like Tidal.
Tidal started out with a bunch of ideas about value creation.
But the only argument that I can see at this point in time is higher quality.
Can you get two and a half percent market share?
Yeah, probably you can.
Is that exciting to me?
Yeah, probably not so much.
I think these two companies that you just mentioned, Felix, are really fascinating.
I think on Tidal and Square, I got to say I'm super cynical, which is it feels like Jack Dorsey wants to hang out with Jay -Z on a boat and power to Jay -Z for figuring out how to do it.
I think it's a little bit of a lesson that I think somebody's being a niche platform player is really hard.
They're losing a ton of money and they got bailed out.
But it doesn't feel like an economic transaction.
Spotify is totally fascinating, but I'm a little more concerned about it.
And I've got to tell you, I love Spotify.
I think the UI is amazing.
I think the recommendation stuff is amazing.
They're playlists. Their playlists are amazing.
There's so much to like.
And yet, it's confusing to me because...
So on the growth, yes, tremendous growth.
But compared to somebody like Netflix, which is an obvious way to go, unlike Netflix, the deep problem is they don't own content up until podcasts.
And so the thing that Netflix had, which was content that was sticky and that was original, they don't control.
And so that seems worrisome to me.
Having said that, I love them.
I love Spotify, but I'm a little more worried about them.
I too am concerned, but I also believe that the next few years for Spotify are perhaps the most important years.
So to your point, the fact that they don't own content is reflected in their gross margins, which have been stuck in the 20s, around 25ish, for a very, very long time.
That gives it very little leverage, even with scale.
So even as they scale, that doesn't change.
They're still paying out about 70 % to those labels.
And again, to your point, Netflix was like that too, until they began to create their own content and they were able to move their margins up to 40%.
And this is why their valuation multiples are so much greater than Spotify.
On the other hand, and this is why I do think they're positioned to begin to chip away at that, is number one, they are investing heavily in audio content that labels can't touch, namely podcasts.
It's hard to believe that podcasts alone are going to enable it to achieve that longer term goal of 30%, 40%, 50 % margins, but Spotify does have more levers now.
So a big one is Spotify can make or break artists now by simply placing them on playlists, steering listeners to certain songs.
It didn't have the capacity to do that before, and it is just now beginning to pull that lever.
It's just now beginning to charge labels for this.
It's got better data to market to listeners.
And I think this is the next model.
This is the very reason why I'm optimistic about Spotify.
So right now, about 50 % of all discoveries of artists happen on playlists.
Yes, everybody can start a playlist, but guess which ones get big, which ones get really prominent.
It's the Spotify playlist.
So if you're an artist who gets put onto today's top hits, that's worth about $150 ,000 for the artist.
If you get put on Viva Latino, that's worth between $300 ,000 and $400 ,000 for the artist just being on that playlist.
And I think the moment push comes to shove, what they're going to do, they're going to turn around and essentially say, unless you are on one of our playlists, you basically don't exist or you don't exist in the way that you could exist given the quality of your music.
And that's worth a lot of money.
It is not a coincidence that search on Spotify is the worst thing ever.
Like misspell a name.
It's just like a tiny bit and you can't find it.
Why? Oh, we actually don't want you to put in names of artists.
We want you to listen to playlists that we curate because that's the business model of the future.
It's completely shift my listening behavior already.
So much of my consumption is now on playlists.
But then how do you navigate this?
Because their language is we are creator friendly, but then you're also trying to get leverage over them via these other mechanisms.
I mean, the irony to me is like with video, Apple certainly seems to have neglected music.
I mean, they're doing well, but you could just think of what they could do.
I think Spotify has benefited from Apple's relative inaction in that space.
So, for example, if Apple changed pricing on Apple Music from $9 .99 down to $5 .99, it would be really problematic for Spotify.
So it feels like they're still a little bit entrenched because they have these technologies.
But it also feels a little fragile both on the supply side, which is they've got to kind of both be tough with creators and also beckon them and tell them we have all these tools for you to monetize.
And it feels like a very thin, it feels like you're really thinning, threading the needle.
I think you're right about that.
One of the fascinating developments I see in this space is the extent to which artists are beginning to discover the entrepreneur in them.
So I'll give you two examples.
So Neil Young has, and if you're young out there, Neil Young is an artist that our generation, even when we were young, he was old.
So anyway, he has created a direct subscription service for his archive that consists of live streams, old recordings, concerts.
He's earning about $600 ,000 a year from his fan base.
Melissa Etheridge, another artist that most of our listeners will never have heard of, she has launched a video -based subscription service for her fans.
Here's what's crazy.
She only has a thousand subscribers, but they are hardcore and they pay $50 a month, which means she is generating more than half a million dollars a year from a thousand subscribers.
As more musicians discover they can be entrepreneurs like this, I have to believe some player's going to emerge and offer artists a way to manage all of this.
In the same way that Shopify offers sellers an alternative to Amazon, I have to believe there'll be another platform player that comes along and gives artists more direct control, including more ways to monetize their relationship with fans.
And so I guess my question for you, Felix, is do you think this alternative kind of model would be incompatible with the focus they have on Playlist?
Yes, that's my thinking.
And one of the most fascinating statistics to me about Spotify is take 90 percent of all the streams on Spotify and then ask how many artists are responsible for 90 percent of all the streams?
And that number has quadrupled over the last couple of years.
This notion of democratizing music goes hand in hand with getting greater bargaining power vis -a -vis the suppliers to your business, which are the artists or the labels in between.
But that's the puzzle, Felix, which is why I've always wondered, why don't they buy a label?
Why don't they vertically integrate in the way they're doing with podcasts?
It feels like they need to do that.
Why not go all the way there?
But the label economics are not fabulous because most of artists don't go anywhere.
But also, I hear Felix saying something different.
He's saying Spotify really benefits from the long tail.
Yes, they benefit from the importance being in the hands of who's curating this stuff.
And so to the extent that the long tail gets even longer, then the economics change just by virtue of the fact that you have different negotiating power with all of the labels.
That are cranking out this music.
And so I think what I hear you saying, Felix, is that they are moving toward a model where all of their power is concentrated.
Again, it's very similar to Amazon, right?
Very similar. In fact, there is this long tail, and we control the data, we control what people listen to, and we are going to use our intelligence to steer you to stuff you love and at the same time, monetize it by exercising our power in the content supply chain.
And it's a beautiful story because you democratize music in the process of doing that.
So you're building bargaining power, and you're making the system much more open than it ever was.
I mean, look, right now, Spotify isn't exactly loved by creators.
Exactly. That I'm not sure I buy, that last part.
Because you're articulating a future that is even better for the creators, but at the same time, lower revenue, at least per song.
And so how do you reconcile that?
The labels actually absorb so much of the value that Spotify creates in the first place.
So you can imagine that once the labels have less bargaining power, then all of a sudden, you can share even more generously with the artists and have much better margins than Spotify has today.
But do you not believe that labels do create some value?
I mean, I think the idea that labels are just kind of collecting rents by being gatekeepers, that doesn't sound entirely right to me.
What's the value that you're thinking of me here?
I think development of talent.
I think marketing. Why do we think that they are going to go away?
It's not that they're going to go away, but whereas historically, there really was no alternative for the functions provided by a label, if you wanted to get your music out there.
Yeah. Today, I think for every single function you identify, there is an alternative.
So for example, you don't need a label to help develop you and record your high quality music.
You can do that on your own now.
You can begin to use social media and other mechanisms to market your own music, to develop your own fan base.
So I do see the rise of the musician slash entrepreneur.
And a real question in my mind is whether or not there will be some platform, some player that is a counter to the model that Felix is proposing with Spotify that enables them to create a very, very different kind of relationship with their listeners.
Because the model that Felix describes, the power all accumulates with Spotify.
And I do think that there are just many artists out there that are looking for something different.
Yeah, that's interesting.
That's interesting.
We should probably wrap this up.
Any closing remarks Felix?
Well, I was just going to say, it is remarkable how vibrant the entire industry is, right?
Which is if you've dialed back 10 years and you thought about what the predictions were about streaming and about everything and you see what's happened.
It is so exciting and it's a testament to technological change, to different business models, to the power of data, as you were kind of mentioning in the discussion on Spotify.
I mean, what a vibrant, exciting industry.
And not just for the big players, for small players throughout the value chain.
So, I don't know, I find this to be very inspiring to see what's happening in music.
Okay, Pix, Felix, what do you have?
I would like to recommend that television series called Counterpart.
It streams on Amazon and it's sort of a sci -fi spy kind of story.
At one point in time in history, the Earth duplicates.
So you have two, talking about NFTs, you have two exact copies.
This would have been solved by NFTs.
Yes, neither one of them is in an NFT, so it's super real.
So everybody has a counterpart in the other world.
And at the moment when Earth duplicates, you're exactly the same, same history, same everything.
And then of course over time the two things sort of go apart.
Oh, I love this idea.
There's two things that I find completely fascinating.
First one, J .K. Simmons is the lead actor.
Oh, I love him! The acting is superb.
The second thing, that technology is so good.
So you have all of these instances where the two counterparts are in the same room.
They sometimes hug each other, they sometimes walk past each other.
You cannot tell. You mean these two worlds exist in the same physical location?
So they cross. It's sort of a spy story, the two sides spy on each other.
So people go back and forth.
And so you have a lot of encounters.
And then sometimes you see the counterpart is exactly the way you are.
And sometimes the counterpart is very different from you.
And then of course you're thinking, wow, is this something that happened in the other world?
Maybe there was a hidden side to you that we just never really saw.
But you have literally like minutes and minutes where the two counterparts are in the same room.
They have a conversation with one another.
And you cannot tell that it's not real.
Wow. It's quite spectacular.
That's great. Is it violent?
I have to ask. Yeah.
So that's the one downside.
It's more violent. I don't really know why this happens.
It's such a great story.
It's so interesting.
It really has no need to be violent.
But somehow the violence gets out of it.
This feels like sliding doors writ large.
Like I love sliding doors.
Yes, you never saw that.
You never saw sliding doors?
No, is it good? Oh, so good.
This just lovely idea of this alternative path, the path not taken.
Right? I mean, you know, the sliding doors, the doors close in your life is different.
This feels like a wonderful idea, Felix.
I'm going to check that one out.
That sounds great. What's amazing about it is, until you said that, I really thought I had watched all of TV.
Exactly. I've been feeling like that too, young me.
It's only two seasons.
That's another benefit.
Oh, okay. That's nice.
Okay. You'll be done next week.
I think you guys are going to like my recommendations.
So I just finished the new book by Kazuo Ishiguro, Clara and this.
Have you read it? I was just listening to a podcast with him.
He's amazing. He's so amazing.
And he's always been one of my favorites.
Yeah. He's so good.
This book in particular, it's written from the point of view of a doll robot.
And it made me realize that so many of his books are written from the perspective of someone who was kind of arm's length distant from the actual activity happening.
I mean, in the same way that remains of the day, remember the butler?
Yeah. Or never let me go.
It was the clone carer.
So it's always someone kind of on the periphery of something commenting on what they see in humanity.
And so this book has similar themes and yet it's written in his typical very spare, very unadorned way of writing.
So the other thing I love about him is something devastating can happen.
And he describes it in the most understated way.
It's really, really beautiful.
So I would recommend it.
It's not a long book.
He's this incredible childhood too, young me.
He was born in Nagasaki and then he moved to the UK and he traveled around California.
He's a fascinating person, I think.
Yeah. It's great. Put it on your list.
Thank you. Great recommendation.
And then, me here. What did you bring?
So I've been feeling like you, young me, like that I had watched all of TV.
And I've been kind of getting bummed out because I was like, what is there to watch?
And then I realized that there was this thing on my list that I never watched, and I've been watching it and it's so good.
Which is the Bureau.
It is a French kind of political spy thriller.
And it's five seasons.
It's right up my alley.
It takes place in Paris.
So think Homeland, but like from the European perspective, like the innards of a spy agency and a love story and a spy has to go back to Syria to try to save this woman he fell in love with.
And it just evolves over four or five seasons and like the liqueur stuff and everything.
Spies are just great for talking about human motivation.
So true. And these French dramas, I don't know many of them, but they're so good on like character development.
And this is just gripping and fun and beautiful and really, really well acted.
Wait, so I got a little nervous when you were emphasizing the character development.
No, no, that does not mean boring.
It's actually action packed.
A little violent to be frank.
And there's like stuff going on all around the world.
No, no, no, it is not ponderous conversation.
No. Okay. That's a good.
So I have two new things to put on my list.
So this is fun, guys.
It's good to be back on the mic.
Before we close, I did want to mention that so many listeners remark on how good the audio quality of our podcast is.
So a huge shout out to our sound engineer extraordinaire, Peter Linane.
Yeah, Peter is amazing.
If we sound good, it's all Peter.
Peter Linane is the best.
So thank you, Peter.
And that's it for tonight.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
And I'll see you next time.
