Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm me here and we are delighted to be joined with Sarah Green Carmichael.
Sarah, it's so good to have you here.
Welcome, Sarah. Thank you guys, I'm so excited to be here.
Well, Sarah is a real pro and we're so happy to have her.
I think both Felix and I got to know her because of her pioneering work on the HBR IdeaCast.
A wonderful IdeaCast.
And now she's a fantastic columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and we are so excited to have her.
So thank you Sarah for joining us and you're going to be with us for two weeks, which is really wonderful.
Yeah, the pleasure is mine.
How are you all doing?
Well, you know, of course, I'm thinking about what is going on in Ukraine.
Yeah. It's not something that I expected I would ever see again in my life, a big war in Europe.
And why can something like this happen?
Like how is it that a person's hubris somehow triggers a cascade of events that seems just so unspeakably tragic?
I've been watching a lot of the footage that people have been uploading from their living rooms in Kiev.
There's something so horrifying and surreal about seeing war in Europe, which sounds like something that belonged 70 years ago, to see it unfolding on Twitter.
Obviously my thoughts are with the Ukrainians.
I think we're all waiting with bated breath to just see what happens next.
Yeah. And it's obviously a very, very worrisome time.
Yeah. I was teaching in one of our programs and it was a virtual thing.
And it impacts lots of people in the world, people with relatives in the area or nearby, people who have colleagues living and working in those countries.
It's really remarkable.
And I could see the anxiety on people's faces.
I feel like the phrase I keep using the past five years, it feels like is shocked but not surprised.
And somehow I sort of came back to that this week.
I was so shocked by what was happening.
But after watching the buildup of Russian troops surrounding Ukraine, I sort of wasn't surprised.
So let's think about what we're going to talk about this week.
So Felix, what'd you bring?
I brought a topic that I've been following for a little while that I find is just super interesting.
And that is in the gaming space, Microsoft's acquisition of Activision, the single biggest acquisition that they have ever done.
And so I would love to hear what you think it means, where the industry will go, whether or not there will be important antitrust angles.
That sounds terrific.
And Sarah, what do you got?
I am really interested in the post pandemic future of fitness.
Peloton stock has obviously been through the mill lately.
And it turns out that people are going back to their gyms at the same rate that they were going to the gym before the pandemic.
So the death of the gym was greatly over predicted.
Does it matter, Sarah, if I don't do any fitness at all, can I still participate in this conversation?
I thought you were doing your epic walks.
Don't tell him walking counts as fitness.
You're misleading him.
Totally. Definitely counts.
All right. Let's do it.
So Felix, I have to confess that this Activision deal left me scratching my head a little bit.
So I'm curious to know what you see in it that is so fascinating.
Yeah. There are two things that really fascinate me about the deal.
The first one is much of it is motivated by thinking about the competitive advantage for Game Pass, the description service.
And obviously, every time you buy a studio, every time you have these really great titles, you increase the attractiveness of the subscription.
So Activision is actually just the biggest one that Microsoft did.
But they have done many smaller deals before.
I think at this point in time, they own almost two dozen game studios.
Right. And Microsoft is not alone.
Left and right, you see the big players buy smaller studios.
So take two bought Zynga not so long ago.
Sony bought Bungie, the creator of Halo.
So there's this really interesting consolidation, concentration in the industry.
And I think in part, it's motivated by subscription services like Game Pass that is available for Xbox.
But that is not available for the Sony PlayStation.
And I have to say, part of what I find so fascinating is it seems we're Netflixing an ever increasing part of the economy.
So I get my music from Spotify.
I get my books from Audible.
Tech gadgets come courtesy of tech crates, beauty products due to Birchbox.
The till is subscription service for plants.
I get clothing from Stitch Fix, literally like every part of my life.
There's all of these subscription services.
So what do you make of that?
What's the appeal of subscriptions?
Why do we see this pretty radical change in how products are bought and sold?
So I would think that a big part of the appeal has to be the recurring revenue.
Most of us just turn on these subscriptions and then never turn them off and don't really remember to turn them off even if we don't use them.
Except when the package arrives.
Right. I know. I have this huge pile of razor blades and toothbrush heads.
It's sort of like, oops, maybe I should pause this subscription for a little while.
So I have to think that Microsoft is thinking along the same lines that this is just a great way to get recurring monthly revenue.
And it's part of a broader shift of switching to subscriptions.
I think subscriptions are exactly valuable for the reason you said.
People love the predictable revenue and it's like software as a service, as a business model, it's just migrated everywhere.
It's less clear to me whether these end up working out in a sustainable way for the consumer.
And they have worked out in certain spaces.
Certainly, Felix, Netflix is a remarkable example of just the streaming subscription model.
What's interesting to me about Microsoft is why in particular they would choose to buy Activision.
Because Activision itself is a company that's okay.
So if you kind of look at them over the last 10 years, they've maybe grown revenues by 60 % over 10 years in an industry that's exploding.
And so the part that was interesting to me was it almost felt like they wanted to write a big check to proclaim their entry into the metaverse.
And to do a lot of dressing up of who they are, as opposed to what has been the core strength of Microsoft for the last decade, which has just been their enterprise business and their incredible growth in the cloud.
So it felt like an interesting piece of the puzzle, which is, oh, they're buying Activision Blizzard because gaming is important.
But it felt like, wow, why write such a big check for a company that's okay?
And is that something that makes sense?
Part of it, I think, is just reflecting the collapse and devaluation of the company.
You remember there were more than 80 people who were reprimanded for sexual harassment at the company.
What we hear from insiders is it's a horrendous place to work.
And looking, perhaps, at the valuation and then combined with a sense that Microsoft has been pretty good at managing these kinds of issues, that that made a very attractive acquisition target at this point in time.
On the revenue side, in addition to what you already said about recurring revenue, because you're essentially buying a subscription for a bundle of services in the consumer space, you then have a lot of implicit price discrimination.
Think about your Spotify experience or your Game Pass experience.
There are a few products that you really want and for which you have very high willingness to pay.
And then there are hundreds and thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of products that you don't want and that you don't care about.
And traditionally, charging for these products has been difficult.
And so in a subscription kind of environment, you set that one price.
And the one price works for everyone, even though our preferences are radically different.
And this type of price discrimination and the bundling aspect of consumer subscription services, I think, is yet another reason why subscriptions are very attractive on top of the recurring revenue.
How is that different from something like cable, where a lot of people felt like cable will unbundle?
We will stop being forced to being sort of overpaying for something where we have one show that we watch and then a bunch of stuff we don't watch.
Yes. And so, in fact, you might remember the antitrust investigations of cable that exactly had to do with this bundling aspect and the question whether bundling here is used in a way that is really to the disadvantage of consumers.
Now, what's sort of funny about the bundling in cable is from a price discrimination perspective, at least formal investigations always found that it's been pretty ineffective.
Because, remember, price discrimination works really well if you want one particular product, and I want something else, and then we bundle the two things.
If the way we bundle cable is often all the sports are in a package and all the elephants and the rhinos and the penguins are in a package, and since the people who love penguins also love the rhinos, then there isn't really that much power in the price discrimination angle.
But for the really big services now with like hundreds and thousands of products like Netflix, like Spotify, and I think Game Pass in the future, there's quite some possibility that price discrimination will be much more powerful than it ever was in cable.
Maybe two other interesting angles on this.
First is, it's not as if Netflix and Spotify are thriving, at least by some metrics.
Yes. People are questioning who captures the value in these subscription models, who captures the value in these platforms.
And so I'm kind of wondering if ultimately this is the same story again and again, which is, it's the content creators in these models who end up capturing a ton of the value, which is a little bit of what we're seeing, at least in the Netflix version of this.
Spotify has some different dynamics.
But ultimately, is this a story where actually content creators are just going to capture that?
And then the related question, I guess, is, and you raised it, Felix, with all this notion of bundling, is there a genuine antitrust concern here?
This is going to become potentially a test case for this new theory of antitrust, which has been percolating up for the last five or ten years, and is now manifest in the Biden administration with key people in roles who are going to look at this.
So I'm curious what you make of both of those.
Like, is this a new test case for antitrust?
And isn't the real winner here just the kid in the basement who's developing the new game?
Yes. I think two things.
So the idea of buying game studios is that you do away with the Netflix problem.
Right. So now the producer of the games is in -house.
And so then you don't really care anymore about who has the negotiating power, if, in fact, the studios that you already own are the ones that produce the next big games.
Right. It continues to be the case that the ones you own do okay work, but they don't have the big hits.
And you have to keep buying studios.
Exactly. Because the hits pop up somewhere else, then, of course, it's not very effective.
But your question is exactly the right one.
So the deal is going to be reviewed by the FTC.
Lena Kahn, the new head of the FTC, her views are very public about we need different kind of antitrust enforcement.
And there is a real question here whether this kind of a deal should go through or whether this kind of a deal is exactly the type of deal where we should be much more careful about what we allow companies to do, because in the end, consumers will suffer.
What's your sense? If I pressed you, good for consumers, bad for consumers, where do you come out?
I guess what I'm interested in about the antitrust angle is just the number of tech companies who seem to be expanding beyond their core and going into other sectors.
So video gaming isn't really a different sector for Microsoft, although it is beyond the core of sort of using their main suite of office products.
But if you think about Apple and Amazon and Alphabet, aka Google, getting into autonomous cars, for example, at what point do you say these companies are really big and they're in all kinds of industries?
It's not just a search engine anymore.
It's not just an Excel spreadsheet anymore.
So I guess that's sort of what I'm interested in is where do you decide to draw the line?
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I don't know, my instincts about this, Sarah and Felix, are this new kind of antitrust movement that's been percolating up for the last five or ten years.
I still have yet to understand it.
I don't know if I understand the principles under which we should object.
So the old antitrust movement was kind of straightforward.
It was the way you said it, which is our consumers hurt in some way.
And there's been a lot of talk about bigness, Sarah, just as you suggested.
Which is we should be concerned about bigness.
But I still don't know why.
If we're going to be making noises about bigness like the folks you mentioned are, Felix, I kind of want to know when and how and why I should be upset about it.
And with Activision, Microsoft is still an important player on the device side.
But there's a lot of players in this industry.
It's not clear exactly what harm will be done.
But maybe I'm missing something.
So is this transaction becoming the opportunity for the movement to actually annunciate what is wrong with these transactions?
I think here's roughly the concern.
So imagine that Game Pass really becomes the dominant way for you to consume and find games.
And imagine you're an independent person who has a really great idea for a game and you develop something that people like.
And Microsoft, because they see what you've done, they produce a very similar game.
Yours is not included in Game Pass, theirs is.
So I think in the end the idea is always are we hurting consumers in the long run because we will get more and better innovation.
And we kill off innovation because the power that comes from making things visible or including or not including a particular set of games then discourages people who otherwise in a more open environment would have had a better chance to succeed with their products.
That's roughly the concern.
And I think it's weighed against the convenience for consumers to find everything in one place.
That it's easier to search, that probably you might have more reviews because Game Pass is really popular and a lot of people tell you about what's great about the game, what's not so great about the game, but the incentives for novelty.
That's an important claim, which is you're somehow precluding innovation.
You're foreclosing on innovation that might have otherwise happened.
First off, that's a hard claim to substantiate, meaning it's going to be hard to figure out if that's true or not.
But also at the first instance, it's kind of hard to believe in, right?
Like, do I believe gaming is suffering from some lack of innovation today?
Not really. I mean, I kind of see gaming companies popping up all over the place.
I see lots of innovation.
This is not device specific.
If this was device specific, like you have to play it on an Xbox, I understand that.
But these are passes.
So the game passes a subscription model.
Do we really think the problem in life is like, oh my God, there are not enough people developing games right now?
Like, is that what I'm supposed to believe?
I think that's right.
Because of course, you're right to say, I can play on my phone.
I can play on a PC.
I can play in lots of places.
But if you're a PlayStation customer, the Game Pass is not available on the PlayStation.
So that's the sense in which it distorts competition.
And maybe that'll be something that they'll have to agree to change.
I could imagine that.
Could be. Yeah. I think the analogy to other forms of media is a really interesting one.
You know, movies or TV shows, because I think there is something distinctive about games.
And I think that's one reason why you see The New York Times, for example, paying seven figures for Wordle.
There is something about games that are very addictive.
And we joke about TV shows being addictive, but they're not addictive the same way that games are, especially when you couple it with that recurring revenue model, there is something that is more valuable to the company, because you know that the Call of Duty fans will come over.
You know that the Wordle fans will come over if you acquire that game.
And so I think that that's perhaps arguably could increase some of the antitrust concerns.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah. And how that should influence any trust decisions that we make regarding these games.
Yeah. Since you brought a Wordle and we have yet to talk about it.
I, of course, am hooked.
But what have we seen since that transaction?
We've seen the growth of Cordle and Wordle and Nerdle and Mathler.
There's like a massive amount of innovation that happens in gaming when people get bought out.
And so it just feels like such a fertile space.
It's interesting as the stock price can be interpreted as suggesting that there's really significant risks to the transaction not happening.
Do either of you have instincts about whether you think it'll actually happen?
My colleague Tay Kim, who writes about gaming a lot for Bloomberg, was really surprised by the deal and was sort of like, what is Microsoft doing here?
Activision is not the company.
As Felix mentioned, they have these cultural issues with sexual harassment.
I have to sort of scratch my head a little bit, but stranger things have happened.
Mergers that are bad ideas go through all the time.
So, you know, we'll have to wait and see.
I do think the stock price development is really interesting, as you point out me here, that you would think by now the price should be close to what Microsoft offered to pay for the company.
And it's roughly a $10, $15 difference, which is quite substantial.
My first intuition was that this is not the first big case that you want to bring.
That is a good example of this new way of thinking about antitrust that is much more concerned about do we get the right kind of innovation or not?
For all the reasons that you pointed out, it's not a sector that seems particularly important.
It seems a sector that is healthy to begin with.
And it's a little murky to say how exactly Game Pass will influence consumer choices that they have.
I think there are many much clearer cases where you could see it.
I just want to underscore as a final point, Sarah, the thing you just raised, which is, I wonder, you know, in a way, if in five years the real headline here is, why and how did Microsoft make such a big acquisition?
And was it when Microsoft lost its mojo on capital allocation?
Because they've been doing everything right for a long time in many ways.
And writing $100 billion check for Activision feels a little weird.
Yeah. Well, we'll find out.
We will find out. We have to start swapping wordle things.
Are you guys into it?
Yes. I'm so into it.
Okay. We'll have to start doing that.
Excellent. So Sarah, you brought a topic, fitness, post -pandemic fitness in particular.
Yes. And this is one where I guess I have a little bit of egg on my face, because I was one of those people who at the beginning of the pandemic, when sales of pelotons were going through the roof, sales of stationary bikes tripled in the first six months of the pandemic.
Wow. I thought people have invested in this hardware.
They're not going to go back to the gym.
This is a game changer.
And now what we're seeing is actually people are really excited to get back to the gym.
Foot traffic at gyms has been returned to the pre -pandemic levels.
So I'm curious to know where we go from here.
I'm curious to know given that Peloton has been having these well -publicized issues, the CEO, Austin, new CEO brought in, are they sort of the friendster of digital fitness?
Do they get slapped by others who would pick up the baton?
Where do we go from here?
It's such an interesting question.
I think there's a lot of management mistakes plus bad luck.
So one is everyone's surprised how big the demand is to begin with.
It's just like you were surprised, Sarah.
And then we bemoan the fact, how can they not understand how popular your product are?
Before you know it, consumers have to wait forever if they order their $2 ,000 back and you can't deliver.
And then before you know it, we go exactly in the reverse direction where we say, and now how can the company not have figured out that once the pandemic ends, how can they not have anticipated that demand would fall dramatically?
You know, it's funny, I think the tricky thing for me about this and the reason I love this topic, Sarah, is as Felix suggested, it's kind of a microcosm for lots of things.
First, it is this question of basically people extrapolating current conditions to continue forever.
It's like the biggest behavioral bias we know.
And people just do that all the time.
And then combine it with fitness, which of course is a faddish industry.
People sign up in January and never go.
There's like a new device that's going to solve all your problems and people buy it and then it goes away.
You combine those two things.
And then finally, you combine it with a really frothy stock market where you start to believe your own hype and you've kind of drunk your own Kool -Aid, which I think is what Peloton did.
And you know, it's a really complicated situation in Peloton just to dig in a little deeper to it.
So the founder has been displaced.
We have a new person who came nicely from a streaming business and wants to build a subscription model just like we were talking about with Game Pass.
But they are sitting on a pile of inventory and they have to figure out how to move this from a device specific big upfront sale to a subscription model.
And that's not going to be easy.
And then amongst it all, Sarah, is this kind of shifting landscape where maybe people want to go back to the gym.
So, I don't know, my instincts are kind of what my instincts were when this whole thing happened, which is because I am such a lead -eyed and like not into fitness, it's still like an iPad on a bike to me.
And so I still think of it that way.
And so I still don't really get it.
And I think the way this ends up is there's going to be some fantastic fitness instructors who are going to make a lot of money because they're the content creators in this model.
And it's not going to be device specific because unlike Netflix, and Spotify, to which they got compared, Felix and Sarah, you have to buy a $2 ,000 device to get into this platform.
I have a specific pricing question because the new CEO, Barry McCarthy, gave a New York Times interview, in which he talked about dramatically cutting the price of the bike.
I mean at one point, I don't think he said they actually were going to do this.
But one night he basically said, yeah, give the bike away.
If he actually made the bike free, I would feel really cheated if I had bought a $2 ,000 Peloton.
But then he said you dramatically cut the cost of the bike and then you really ramp up the price of the app.
So the way it works now is not only you buy the bike, but then you have to pay $39 a month for the classes, which is a little interesting because if you don't buy the bike, it's only $13 a month for the classes.
So somehow if you buy the bike, you pay more.
But let's set that aside for now.
He said that you could make the app maybe $70 or $80 a month.
And I'm wondering if you do that, do you really bring in more customers?
Are people willing to spend $70 or $80 a month to work out in their homes?
Does that solve the problem?
Is that the answer?
You're putting your finger on like the deep, hard question that Peloton faces.
And I think the answer has to be, yeah, that's what you need to do, Sarah, to make the economics work.
But then you have to deliver a lot of value at that price point.
And then it has to become about a lot more than bicycle instruction.
It's got to become a lot more about a lot of other things.
And then you're competing with a lot of folks who are priced a lot lower.
So it's not game pass, it's class pass.
And it's Apple fitness.
And I don't know how you get to a $70 to $80 a month price point.
You're more a consumer of this than I am, but you have to deliver a lot of value to be charging that kind of money for a subscription.
And I think the alternatives exist for you to get that at 10.
I do think that the $2 ,000 price tag for the bike, that that's a real barrier to entry.
And of course, they coupled it with consumer credit and all the rest of it.
But it's still the idea that no one is super sure how disciplined they will be.
Will I really use it every day?
Is that going to be my main form of exercise?
Thinking about the $2 ,000 I think is a very good idea.
Where I agree with you, me here, it's a little counterintuitive, because generally in razor, razor blade models, we would say, you shift the profit pool to the side of the complementarity where you have less competition.
Look at YouTube. There's like a million people who will give you cycling instructions on YouTube.
And so the intuition that they have less competition on the content side than they have competition on the bike side, that is not an intuition that I completely understand.
The second thing that I'm a little confused about is in fitness, I think you want variety.
You don't want to do the same thing over and over again.
And the Peloton model seems to say you always want to bike, but you want to bike with different people at different speeds through different digital landscapes.
And I wonder if that is right.
I wonder if it's not more I sometimes want to bike and then sometimes I want to row and then sometimes I'm on a treadmill.
And I can actually do that with not very many different instructors.
And I see now in the space, the two big impediments to adoption that I always thought is that in the gym, the single use machine makes a lot of sense.
So what I am realizing as I'm hearing you guys talk this through is that I am totally a Peloton freeloader because I am one of the people who does not have the fancy bike.
But I do subscribe to the 1299 a month app, which is what it costs if you don't have the bike.
And so you can do the biking classes on your own stationary bike, but you can also do yoga, you can do weight training, you can do cardio, you can do walking, you can do running.
They have lots of stuff on there.
And I realized that as it is now, it's a really good deal for me.
They have meditation.
So I used to have a dedicated meditation app, but I canceled that subscription because I was like, well, it's built into Peloton so I can just do it there.
If you want to look for like prenatal yoga, they have that.
So then you don't need your expensive prenatal class.
So it's actually like a really good bundle if you just have the app.
So in that sense, it makes sense to jack up the price of the app because right now it's kind of a screaming deal.
But Sarah, to that point, it sounds like you're like an ideal person for Barry McCarthy.
Yeah. You are on the subscription model, you love the bundle.
What's your willingness to pay?
How high would you go for the bundle you have?
I mean, is it a $70 price point or is it like a $20 price point?
No, it's like $20. Yeah.
I think I would start to feel the pain if it was more than like $20 to $25 because then you're really like, well, how much do I use it?
I don't know. I could just go to the gym.
Right. I am someone who for a long time was I guess an ideal gym customer and that I had a membership that I never used.
Right. Which is the dirty little story about the gym business.
So I wonder if you do open up the Peloton, if it becomes more of a platform where you could have other classes that might not be as good, that might not be as Pelotoni, but that could be on there.
If Peloton somehow is able to offer a bundle, to broaden the bundle of classes, does it then justify a higher price point if it's something that's a little bit more like an app store itself instead of being just you get the best classes, we have the best instructors.
In that sense, it's also easy to see why it's not like YouTube.
Despite my love of streaming video classes, I have never really used YouTube because the search costs are just too high.
I cannot scroll through all those little icons to find someone whose class I think is good.
Whereas when you go to Netflix, you probably know the show you're going to watch is going to be good.
When you go to HBO, you know the show is going to be good and that's why you're willing to pay.
Yeah. And I think that's sort of what Peloton has done with the content.
It has made stuff that is very predictably good.
You sort of know what you're going to get each time.
I think you're putting your finger on something deep about the future of Peloton, which is if it's going to succeed in five or 10 years, I don't think it's going to be about the device.
It's not going to be about the bike.
It's going to be about this bundled fitness app, which reduces search costs.
And that is super interesting.
I don't know if those economics are going to justify its current valuation and a whole bunch of other stuff, but I think that's the model that could work for them.
And to their credit, Sarah, their monthly churn rate is low.
Yeah. And to what you said, Felix, they have an incredibly loyal customer base, but first off, I think it's two types of people.
It's the type of person who bought the bike, who really doesn't want to go to the gym and they are going to stay maybe forever.
There are a bunch of rich folks who bought it and are just not canceling it.
And then there are people who really like the cheaper non -device specific membership, but if you try to move their prices, I don't know what happens to them.
Yeah. So I think that is going to be really, really fun to watch.
In a way, it's one of these classic business stories.
It's like Adobe move into subscription.
It's like the hardest thing in the world, but when it works, it's beautiful.
It can be really beautiful.
It can really be beautiful, right?
It's like a classic business thing.
That's right. But we will have to see.
And fortunately, Felix, you and I don't know anything about real fitness, but Sarah will keep us up to date about this.
Oh my goodness. She'll keep us in court.
Felix, at least, goes to the gym.
Yes. You both have one up on me, so I'm happy to be at the laggard on this.
The walker. I'm going to stick by my walking thing.
All right. Recommendations.
Sarah, you're the guest.
You go first. The recommendation I am bringing is a little bit season specific.
So it is Winter World.
It's a book about how small animals survive during the winter.
The subtitle is The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, and it's by Bernd Heinrich.
So it's like ants in winter?
It's like ants and flying squirrels and little tiny fluffy birds.
I've never actually wondered how those little teeny tiny fluffy birds keep from freezing in the winter when I go outside head to toe in Patagonia and Arcterix and I'm still cold sometimes.
So what I realized was I read this book maybe 10 years ago, and I was thinking about this winter.
I used to yearn so much for spring, and I really date my embrace of winter to this book and learning all about how these little animals, little birds, little squirrels and other tiny tiny creatures that burrow under the snow or sort of fluff up their feathers to survive cold, cold nights.
Learning how they deal with these really inhospitable temperatures I think has a major impact on my life.
Now I'm someone who like snowshoes and skis and does this stuff that I never did before, and I think it all started with this book.
So I wanted to recommend that book because I thought, here we are again in March, and the northern hemisphere is very cold.
If you were sort of down at the mouth about this season, this is a very gentle, interesting book that might help reframe things a little bit.
Oh, that's a great recommendation.
Can you say the name again?
Yeah, the book is called Winter World, The Ingenuity of Animal Survival.
That's fascinating.
I love the idea of taking inspiration and lessons about resilience from other creatures.
I think that's fantastic.
That sounds really good.
Felix, what do you got?
I have a movie recommendation, and it's a movie that's been out for a little while, but for some reason I totally missed it.
And then I had low expectations, and it turned out to be really good.
The movie is Shang -Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Have you seen it? Wait, is this one of the Marvel movies?
Yeah, this is one of the Marvel movies.
Yeah, exactly. My daughters have been raking about this.
It's like the typical formulaic Marvel movie, and then it's such a delight.
It's so amazing. And part of it is, it has many of the elements of sort of a classic Chinese tale with warlords and strange magic and flying dragons.
So you get all of that.
But then you also get a little bit of Chinese friends living in San Francisco and trying to make sense of the Western world after having left China for quite some time.
And the way this story is told, it's interesting, it's funny, it has amazing visuals.
Now that I think about it, it's probably one of the best movie experiences of the last couple of years or so.
Wow. Highly recommended.
That sounds great. Great.
That sounds really good.
She and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
That's great. What did you bring me here?
All right. So just to live to type, I did bring two.
So first, Bork Street Cafe is a bakery and cafe in Australia that has now opened up in New York, and it is a spectacular bakery.
They have great stuff.
But the main thing they have is meat pies and sausage and lamb rolls.
And I got to tell you, they are spectacular.
And Felix, I know you and I had a little bit of a disagreement about daily provisions, but we are going to go to Bork Street Cafe together and you're going to try their lamb roll.
And it's so much better than anything at daily provisions.
It's so much better.
It's so good. And my second recommendation is...
Something vegan. No, no, not at all.
No, it's not a balance.
You don't think about the balance of your recommendations?
No, not balanced. I'm going to go the other way.
It's going to give you a complete meal.
The lamb roll is the entree.
And then what do you have for dessert?
And the answer is my kids have introduced me to a candy, which is just spectacular.
And it's a candy I had never heard of, which was a real surprise to me because I know a lot about candy.
It's called Zatz. Z -O -T -Z.
Have you ever heard of Zatz?
No. I've not heard of it.
Oh, my God. So this is an Italian candy that is imported into the U .S.
Think about a Jolly Rancher, but take the pop rocks of your childhood.
Put them inside the Jolly Rancher and it explodes like as you suck on it.
It is spectacular. Oh, my God.
So have a lamb roll from Bork Street Cafe and then have some Zatz.
Can you put the Zatz in the lamb roll?
You know, that's an interesting idea.
It might be better if you put the lamb roll inside the Zatz if it was big enough, but we'll see.
This is an innovation that we'll have to think a little bit about.
Can you run all of these experiments without me, please?
Oh, come on. It's just bundling.
It's just bundling.
Exactly. All right.
Before it gets any worse, this is it.
You were listening to After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
Thank you.
