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HBR presents. Hi everyone!
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Mi here.
And I'm Felix. And we just decided that we're going to spend the episode talking about fugitives and royalties.
And royalties who become fugitives.
Felix, since you're not on Twitter, I have to make you aware of the following, which is Yang Mi made a prediction that aired on Wednesday morning and kind of came to fruition like six hours later.
And the Twitter verse was abuzz with her predictive powers.
So this was about the British royal family escaping to Canada?
So tell us, how did this happen?
So nothing happened.
We had to make predictions.
And you encouraged us to go big with our predictions.
And so I thought, okay, I'm going to make a prediction.
You know, actually, the thing I should say is it's about time I was right about something.
That's how I look at it.
If you throw enough stuff at the wall, eventually something's going to stick.
But so this is going to be a fun episode because we're going to talk about the royal family and we're going to talk about fugitives.
So I'm referring, of course, to Carlos Ghosn escaping the Japanese criminal justice system.
Oh, yeah. What an interesting story.
Sort of our tabloid edition of After Hours.
Whatever we've been waiting for, the tabloid edition of After Hours.
Okay, me here. Have you ever been on the run from the wall?
I'd prefer not to discuss that on the podcast.
But yeah, so we had this incredible story that's been unfolding over really last year and a half, but it's kind of taken a huge new turn this last week.
So Carlos Ghosn is kind of a superstar CEO who took over Nissan in the late 1990s.
And as part of what was then the Renault -Nissan alliance and then the Renault -Nissan Mitsubishi alliance, he's been running this company for almost 20 years.
And the first five or 10 years were just this remarkable success story.
You know, then things stagnated a little bit.
And then, of course, about a year and a half ago, he was arrested in Japan after getting off his flight and has been in custody, in and out of jail for the last year or so.
In that process, it's become this incredible saga of this superstar CEO, kind of undone by hubris.
It's a story about Japanese corporate governance and the kind of shenanigans at the highest levels.
And then, if the whole thing wasn't crazy enough, Carlos Ghosn decides to escape Japan in a box.
In a box. That's usually reserved for musical instruments on a private plane via Istanbul to Beirut, which he happens to have a home in and has no extradition treaty.
Unbelievable. This is, like, definitely a truth stranger than fiction.
And this, by the way, Renault -Nissan Mitsubishi is not a small company, right?
This is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world.
And so this is a major person in a major corporation.
And I'm curious, out of all this craziness, what stood out to you, because it's a bit of a Rorschach test of kind of modern capitalism.
So what do you think really stood out to you about this entire story, Youngmi?
Oh, so the fact that he thinks he can treat this country's criminal justice system as optional and just escape if it doesn't meet his personal standards is just beyond arrogant.
Did you find Youngmi, though, this idea that the Japanese legal system with a 99 .9 % conviction rate, do you feel like he was getting a fair treatment or do you just think he shouldn't be able to just kind of put himself above the law?
I think two things.
Number one, I think, yes, Japan has a very high conviction rate, but that does not mean the system is rigged.
In part, the reason it has such a high conviction rate is prosecutors have a really high bar for bringing a case forward.
I think about half the cases prosecutors are given, they end up dropping.
If the trial is not going their way, they just drop the case.
And so it's a little bit of a false statistic.
Now, it is a tough system for sure, but this is not one of those countries where everyone regards the legal system as a sham.
And then the second thing I'll say, you can't have it both ways.
You can't say, I'm going to reap the rewards associated with running a business in this country, but I'm not going to respect the laws.
I mean, the reason we reward executives who are successful at running big global multinational companies is because it's really hard and it's really complicated, and it means abiding by different legal standards and different corporate governance standards across borders.
And by the way, what he's been charged with is not some obscure idiosyncratic Japanese law.
He has been charged with the oldest crime in the book, which is hiding his income, misappropriating funds, diverting company funds for personal use.
Just to push back a little, young me, those are not things that would typically result in jail time in the U .S.
or in other Western countries.
And there is a sense in which other Japanese executives who were found guilty of similar things didn't get the treatment he got.
So it feels a little bit like he got singled out for being different and being such a flashy guy.
I think there is a reasonable conversation one can have about the benefits and costs of particular judicial systems.
But the wrong time to make this a topic is once you have gotten accused.
So I think the timing here is actually one element that really speaks against him.
The second element I think that really speaks against him is the fact that he chooses to go to Lebanon out of all places, where of course he's a big national hero.
So if you're worried about bias, he chooses the one country where he knows he gets a maximum bias in the other direction.
One interesting thing is that France does not extradite nationals, and he has a French passport.
So if this is really about finding out the truth, showing his innocence, he could easily have chosen to go to France, where there's a different judicial system that also has pros and cons.
And so his choosing Lebanon over France, I think, tells the story that this is a guy that tries to get away with whatever he had done.
I don't want to defend the guy.
I think he's horrible.
But I do think there's some sense in which he is getting kind of identified and particularized because he's a foreigner in Japan, and he's being punished in an excessive way, certainly relative to other Japanese executives who were found guilty of similar things.
The fact that it all comes to light, I think, is the result of the complicated relationship between Renault and Nissan.
I think that's exactly right.
So the timing when we discover these financial shenanigans is not a coincidence, but that doesn't make it right what he did.
So you did something that in all likelihood is illegal, and then you're found out in a moment that is politically charged.
But that doesn't mean it was OK what you did in the first place, and it doesn't make it OK to leave the country in a box.
So Gon is an outlier in Japan.
So if you look at his compensation through the years, in Japan, their compensation tends to be much lower compared to executives in the US.
Gon was such an outlier in this regard.
And so he is someone who has brought attention upon himself, not only because of his outsized personality, but because he made a lot of money.
And so now he's in a position where, yes, it's probably the case that he's getting extra attention from their criminal justice system.
But you could argue that that's precisely the way it should work.
I mean, this is someone who has access to the most high priced and most high profile legal assistance available.
If he feels like there is some exonerating evidence, it would not have been hard for him to put forth the public case and put forth a case in court.
And so I don't know, I have a hard time jinning up sympathy for him, although I don't need to anymore because he's sitting in a luxurious mansion in Lebanon.
If you had a kind of mid -career rising star of an executive and they were getting pitched to be a CEO of a Japanese multinational company, and they were going to be a foreigner in Japan, what would you advise them?
Would you advise them this is a great opportunity, the company is great, go for it?
Or would you advise them it's going to be tricky and it's going to be hard for you to succeed?
How would you think about that?
I will probably carefully think about why you're being tapped as a foreigner.
Like what are the forces that now make it attractive to hire foreign talent?
In the context of the automobile industry in particular, this is a mad dash for scale.
You might remember this is now quite a few years ago, but the horribly failed Daimler Chrysler merger, $36 billion whittled down to a little more than $8 billion in just about nine years.
And I think part of the challenge here is that the logic of mergers is dominant in the industry.
Everybody believes that you have to get to scale in order to survive in a quickly changing landscape.
And at the same time, pulling off these mergers is super, super difficult.
I used to teach the Daimler Chrysler case.
On paper, the marriage between the two made so much sense.
And the conversation would always start out with students really struggling to understand why that marriage failed.
And it was only when you really got students thinking about what does it mean when you have a set of German engineers and executives who work on Mercedes -Benz cars to try to cooperate productively with a bunch of Americans who work on mass market Chrysler cars.
And it was really almost when you really got down to the weeds and began thinking about what it means to try to integrate these two very, very different cultures that everybody, then it became possible to see why this thing could fail so, so miserably.
And so I think you guys are exactly right in the sense that we're living at this moment in industry history where the conventional wisdom is that everybody's got to partner up in order to survive.
And I think in general, companies tend to overestimate the savings associated with partnering up and underestimate the complexity of melding their businesses together.
And I think this is so important, what you just pointed out, Youngmi, the importance of details.
What I find interesting is the logic of mergers that you read about when these mergers get announced is often sort of this sweeping logic of scale or the sweeping logic of some kind of synergy.
And then whether you can really make it work really doesn't depend on the big idea.
It depends on the small details.
So true. Yeah. So I think we have to end with the most important question of all, of course, which is who is going to play Carlos Ghosn in the inevitable movie?
Who is your pick? Oh.
Okay, go ahead, Youngmi.
That guy, you know the guy that looks like him.
The guy? The guy? Who's the guy?
What's his name? Oh, he looks just like—oh, Benicio del Toro?
Benicio del Toro? Yes, Benicio del— Okay.
Who is he? Yes, he's that guy.
Oh, no, he's a really good actor.
Yeah, he's really good.
He's really good. I'm going to go with Michael Keaton.
What are you talking about?
Michael Keaton. I'm sticking with Michael Keaton.
Okay, Felix, you want to make a call?
I think given Hollywood's history of casting white men irrespective of who you're going to really portray, I might bet this is going to be Harrison Ford.
Fantastic. Of course, it's got to be Harrison Ford.
Very good, very good.
All right, excellent.
Well, stay tuned for the inevitable movie, and we'll review it together then.
We'll go watch it together.
Yeah, it'll be great.
All right, great. Okay, how closely do the two of you follow the royal family?
I've been to every wedding, front row.
So unless you've been living in a cave, you probably know that Harry and Meghan announced they were stepping away to forge a more progressive path.
And they also noted that in the course of doing so, they were going to try to achieve financial independence as they created some distance from their duties as members of the royal family.
My first question is, do you agree with their decision?
So I confess, my initial reaction was, you're in or you're out.
And you know, it's binary, and being in the royal family is a trade.
And if you don't want that trade, then you're out.
And this kind of halfway house that they seem to be describing, living in Canada, was all seeming a little sketchy.
As I've thought about it more, I confess I've kind of come to admire their courage a little bit, and their willingness to try to forge a different path.
It is not easy to be in the royal family, and especially if you are sixth in line for the throne, and you're just going to be somebody on the outside for the rest of your life.
And so, I actually have come to appreciate that they are trying to do something different.
And that by being in Canada, maybe they can forge a distinct role for themselves.
Maybe they deserve some credit for trying to push the monarchy into a more modern era.
I mean, in general, I think the monarchy is inherently anti -modern, and inherently is just anti -democratic.
But I kind of think power to them.
Power to them for trying to do something different with their lives.
I think of the royal family exactly the same way as I think about old soap opera stars.
You have this love -hate relationship with being in the public eye all the time.
And so, as a personal decision that you think this is not the kind of life that I want to lead, I have to say I completely understand.
I agree with both of you.
It's hard not to be sympathetic to both of them.
It's got to be the worst job in the world.
I mean, think about it.
You're either in the public eye paparazzi or following every move you make, or you're doing the job of being a member of the royal family, which I think is mind -numbingly boring.
I mean, I think there's a lot of ribbon -cutting.
I think every day you're sitting through day after day of speeches at some charity event, and then it's got to be completely steltifying.
If you're anyone with aspirations or ambitions of your own, I would imagine it's quite suffocating.
I think that's the question.
They've chosen not to just step out and away from it.
They've chosen to say, no, no, no, we're going to do it differently, right?
Yeah. That's the thing I can't get my mind around, which is, can you do that thing differently?
Is there a way to reinvent the monarchy that would be more modern?
Well, before we even go there, the more fundamental question is, why does it matter?
What value does the royal family have in Britain?
In other words, can either one of you make an argument for why it's important that the monarchy be sustained?
I mean, it has enormous entertainment value for a lot of people.
Just look at the British press, right?
So how many newspapers do you sell if something really important happens?
There's endless drama.
And to me, here's earlier point.
If you can reinvent the job in the sense that you can still be the star of the soap opera, but actually there's an interesting twist in the plot in that you lead a different life, and we get some international drama, and that's what gets people excited.
Yeah, please go ahead.
Do it. I think it'll be fabulous.
So I have to say, historically, I thought of it as a very odd institution and anti -democratic.
I guess more recently, okay, maybe I've watched like too much of the crown on Netflix.
I have come to think that there is something about somebody who embodies the transcendental ideas of a country that's not an elected official, that is above kind of political games.
And when it is somebody special, and I think the current queen is somebody special, a person who's really sacrificed to kind of propagate that idea, then that person can actually become an embodiment of these transcendental values.
And I think that's kind of good, especially when politicians disappoint you so much.
But what's her role in Brexit?
So if there's any moment in British history when we really needed someone like that, it would have been the past two years.
But as far as I can tell, she has played no role whatsoever.
No, that's right. She is above politics.
It is not a political role.
But I think the idea of what it means to be British is kind of tied up in who she is and what she is.
And I think that's kind of powerful.
The problem, of course, just to be clear, is that family disappoints you.
I mean, forget about Prince Harry, I mean, Prince Andrew, that whole story should have much more attention than Prince Harry.
And that family disappoints you tremendously over time, and especially generationally.
But there is something that's compelling about, you know, even like in India, there's a president and there's a prime minister.
And the president is more of a figure who is not part of the daily political tumble, but somebody who preserves the values of the country, right?
And I think that system has a virtue where instead of everyone being a political player, you have somebody who's meant to rise above the fray.
Now, again, it comes with all these problems of a monarchy, but there is some value there that I think is interesting.
And in countries like Japan, it can also be valuable and interesting for the same reason.
It's very possible that to many citizens, there is some deep historical, cultural, symbolic resonance that resides in the royal family that we just are incapable of accessing because we don't live there and it's not part of our history.
Having said that, it does still feel like the beginning of the end to me.
And by the end, I mean the end of the royal family, at least as we currently know it.
And the reason for that, I mean, I think one is macro and one is micro.
And on a macro level, it feels to me like both the optics of the royal family and the economics of it all just seem so completely unsustainable.
If you think about it in the US, our political conversation right now is dominated by commentary about income inequality, wealth inequality.
It's no different in the UK.
The national conversation there is animated by the same kind of energy.
So it feels unsustainable to me at that macro level.
And then at the micro level is precisely what you refer to me here.
And that is the specific personalities involved.
The queen is so beloved in Britain and carries with her such meaning everywhere she goes.
And she gives the institution a kind of nobility.
Prince Charles does not enjoy the same kind of respect.
And so it's not clear to me that once she's gone, this thing can keep going.
And this is why I appreciate what Harry and Meghan are trying to do, which is you need to modernize it in some way.
If they can figure out a way to live a life that's meaningful outside of the palaces, that can be powerful.
What's your prediction for how you think this is going to play out?
The best outcome that I can think of is that they can make a life for themselves and have the kinds of choices open to them that most people have when they choose career paths, when they choose occupations, when they choose places to live.
The more they can create that kind of freedom inside the royal family, I think to that extent that is actually a promising move.
What do you say, young me?
Since you are our prediction master.
So I don't think they want to write off into obscurity.
I think they definitely still want to be famous.
And I think they also really want to be rich.
And I think those two things are connected because the most obvious way to achieve financial independence is through their fame.
So I think they're going to start doing the celebrity circuit.
I think they're going to follow the model set by the Obamas, the Clintons.
I think you're going to see speaking engagements, which can be incredibly lucrative, maybe a big book contract.
The Obamas have a deal with Netflix to produce films.
Oprah has a deal with Apple TV.
I think there are just a lot of folks in the film industry, in the television industry, the book industry, speaking industry, who are going to throw money at them.
They have trademarked their brand.
Sussex Royal, they've trademarked that brand.
And their copyright includes everything from clothing to social services.
So a second thing I think they're going to do, they're going to launch a lifestyle brand that incorporates their new charity, a whole bunch of other activities.
But the final point I make is because it's so crass and so commercial to position themselves as lifestyle influencers, which is what essentially they're going to become, I think they're probably going to try to position themselves as activists.
So advocating for things like mental health and wellness and whatever charitable cause they support.
So I think it's going to be this lifestyle -y brand with a very public face, but all under this wrapper of activism.
Okay, so that's really interesting.
And I guess the question is, is it a wrapper or is it real?
Meaning if it's really about the economics and it's a business, then I think the reaction of Prince Charles is going to be, you're out.
And if that happens, then doesn't that undo all their weight and power in the world of celebrity if they're really not HRH and they're not part of the system?
If he really makes them choose to go out, then does that whole business model survive?
I think it would be a really risky move for Prince Charles to say, you're out.
If you think about Felix's reality TV show, Paradigm, and you think about who attracts maybe the most attention out of the entire royal family right now, it's the two of them.
But you know, my most out of box prediction is that one day we will see her play herself in some future season of The Crown.
That's very meta. That would be like the perfect ending to the story, I think.
Okay, pics. You guys have a pic?
I do. I would like to recommend someone who's, she calls herself an information designer, but you know my love for maps and graphs and illustrations.
She's really one of the very best ones in the profession.
Her name is Federica Fragampane, and every one of her graphs or illustrations is just amazing to me.
For one is really beautiful to look at, but also she has a really fabulous talent to pack so much information into what first seems like a very simple graphic illustration.
So I'll give you some example.
She did a really fabulous illustration for the BBC on space junk, where you both see like what junk is out there.
And just in the beginning you see mostly sort of this information on how far up is it.
But then as you start focusing on the details, there's really like this wealth of information that's in that one graph.
And she is super diverse.
For Scientific American, she did an illustration of the menstrual cycle for an Italian newspaper, the Coriare della Serra.
She did something about the geography of human rights.
It's not that she's sort of an expert in a particular type of data, but she just has like a really unique, wonderful way to illustrate information in its both beautiful and informative.
I feel like I'm just looking at it now on some of her stuff on life expectancy in the space junk.
It is beautiful. And it's so interesting.
This is a great recommendation.
I love this whole idea of information displays and graphs.
This is really cool.
Not an art form, but as a form in and of itself.
Like people who do that really well, like I think back to Tufti, because I'm very dated in this world, but she looks absolutely fantastic.
It looks like great stuff.
We'll provide a couple of links for people to look up some of this stuff.
That's a great recommendation.
Okay, Meher, do you have one?
Yeah, so I had not gone to the movies in so long and I finally went and everybody should go to go see Little Women.
Oh, I want to see it.
So this is Greta Gerwig's remaking of this Louisa May Alcott, very American kind of treasure of a novel.
I had never read it, but I went with four females who loved that book as part of their growing up.
And it was spectacular.
And the really neat thing about what Gerwig has done with this is she's really modernized it in so many ways.
And you know, I have to say it was just as somebody who lives with four females.
It was just so powerful to see a movie that was totally centered on their experience.
So I would recommend it highly and worth seeing in the big theater, which I never go to because visually it's so beautiful.
So Greta Gerwig's Little Women is spectacular.
I'm really looking forward to that one.
I'm someone who read the book as a child.
So it's a part of my childhood as well.
So that's a great recommendation.
Okay, my recommendation is a documentary called Honeyland.
So this is a documentary about a woman who is a beekeeper in the mountains of Macedonia.
And the way she makes a living is by keeping bees in accordance with ancient beekeeping traditions, and then she sells the honey to survive.
And the story behind this documentary is kind of amazing.
So these two documentary filmmakers were hired by Macedonia to make a video about conservation efforts.
And during the course of shooting this video, they met this woman began to film her and her beekeeping activities and became so enraptured by her story, they ended up shooting for three years.
Oh my god. And then turning it into a documentary film.
It's incredible. What happens in the documentary is a family moves in next door to the beekeeper.
And they too begin to keep bees as a way to earn money, but they end up doing it in a manner that is less respectful of the ecological balance.
And you see the effect of that.
So while it's a very small story about this one very lonely woman, eking out her subsistence in this very quiet way, you actually experience it as a much larger fable about the fragility of natural ecosystems.
It won a bunch of awards at Sundance.
It's just gorgeous and intimate.
It really stays with you.
So it's streaming on Hulu.
I rented it off Amazon.
So I think it's accessible on all the major services and I just highly recommend it.
And the name of it.
It's called Honeyland.
It's just a beautiful documentary.
Beekeeping is something that people do now.
And I think in unusual environments, isn't there a big trend for urban beekeeping?
The farmers markets that I go to in the past couple of years, all of a sudden, there's all these stands, people who sell honey.
And then you ask, oh, you know, where do you live?
And you expect maybe the mountains of some remote location and they tell you, oh, I live in Brooklyn, I live in Philadelphia, I live in Detroit.
In my very urban context, I watched this documentary and I thought, you know, I could keep bees.
You could. I'm sure you could.
My brother started keeping bees a couple of years ago and there's a lot to learn.
It's what's interesting.
It's sort of part science, part hobby, part the passion for nature and animals.
So think about it. I swear to God, I was so close to making my recommendation eating honeycomb because I've been eating a lot of honeycomb.
Really? And it would have been a perfect lowbrow compliment to your highbrow suggestion because honeycomb, if you haven't eaten it, I've been eating it.
It is so good and different than honey and just fantastic.
I've never eaten it, but after watching this movie, that was another thought I had.
I thought, oh, I have to try it.
Oh, honeycomb is so amazing.
It is so amazing. And I think it's actually got some good health benefits too.
It would have been too good if I'd pick that.
Okay. Anyway, those are our picks for this week.
Thanks everyone for listening.
This is After Hours from the HBO Podcast Network.
Thank you.
