Nikhil Kamath x Netflix Co CEO, Ted Sarandos: Why Local Stories Win Global Audiences | People by WTF | Ep. 10

27:39Yeah. So, but actually a curated list of five is unbelievably valuable. Is that where you might go tomorrow? Well, it wouldn't be us doing it. So even in these ways we show you things today, we have to have a lot of very high confidence to only show you those things. So we'd still show you things that we have lower confidence that you're going to love. but the things that are most prominent are the things where the most confident you're going to love. What is a win for you? Like if I am a Netflix subscriber, I pay my$5 fee. When I land on a Netflix screen, the homepage, and you're watching me land there, what's a win for you and what is a loss for you?

28:20Is there something you want me to click? No, we just want you to pick the movie that you're going to really love. The thing that we really value is when you push play, do you stay? So do you keep watching it all the way through? It's a good indicator that you like it. I mean, I'm taking a leap that people, it's a subscription service, so there's no extra fee. You can turn it off and watch something else. But people tend to watch the things that they like more of and then turn off the things they don't. So if you're turning it off, it was a bad pick. And I think what they find is, is that the more we get the right choice in front of you, the longer you stay a member.

28:56So for us, a fail might be that people come on and just click all over the place and search and find something that they don't like and push play and turn it off. That's a bad, we've failed them in that transaction. In a world where you also produce and curate and distribute content, wouldn't a win for you be when I click on a piece of content that you have produced versus sourced? It would be financially, but not if you didn't like it. So I don't want me making you or aiding, pushing you towards something you don't like is a very short relationship. Right. So Ted, most of our audience are people who want to build a business in the space of media and content.

29:44We cater to the entrepreneur heavy crowd. so what I want to take away from today are some great insights of what might be low-hanging fruit to build in media I could be a content creator I could be somebody aspiring to build a platform I could be somebody who is an actor a director somebody who works in the space of media I could You're a podcaster, a YouTuber, an independent musician, everything. Yeah. So if I were to largely categorize media today, I was trying to write down and I wrote down print media, what you did first, broadcast media, what I grew up on, TV with pre-programmed. Yeah. news media the news channels big ticket cinemas long form TV shows I mean the TV series sport the theater business gaming reality TV if TED was not part of Netflix but you knew all that you have learned in the Netflix journey and you had$100 to invest is there one particular division where you would put your money behind?

31:09Binary$100. You can only put it or not. It's just a better or not better. What's the goal? To make a return. To make a return. I would say that producing content today is you're going to get the great return because the delivery models are evolving so rapidly and the monetization is evolving so rapidly. um so which you didn't have streaming as its own separate category there but what i think the great news of that is is that's a viable business model to keep making content to me keep making programming so that's and when you say make programming are you talking about that me individually say i'm shooting this podcast to me the real the real value is is how does it monetize and you can streaming and a subscription service at scale can effectively monetize almost any content.

32:01So you would put the money behind producing the content. And is there a specific kind of content that you think has more tailwind than other kinds of content? This is the, I'm going to give you the cheap answer. Yeah. Good. You know what I mean? Because I think people have such crazy diverse tastes. Right. And the things that you like, I may not like and vice versa. So the good version of what you're setting out to make is always going to work. But it's very broad. So many things that we, the fact that Squid Game would be a global sensation like it is. It's completely unpredictable. I mean, the Korean team who picked it, they knew it was going to be a big hit in Korea.

32:41They were right. And it turns out those things that are big local hits, they are the best chance of traveling because they're very, very good. But this weird, you know, you might think, well, what you ought to do is take a movie and get that guy from Squid Game and then get Shah Rukh Khan. And then you get Brad Pitt and put them in a movie together. And then you've got this hodgepodge thing that no one recognizes. It's not familiar to anybody and no one watches it. So this idea of, you know, authentically local storytelling being the most globally valuable is unintuitive, but totally true. Familiarity is a good thing.

33:18Yeah. No, I think people will see, like I said, I think when you watch Squid Game, it's very fundamentally Korean storytelling, Korean horror. There's nothing about it that is, you know, the edges aren't shaved down at all. But people see something in it, class, fairness, although those are very universal themes and they see the universal themes in it. But, you know, you think about this idea that how many, there's not that many total stories in the world, really, that is told differently, different variants of them. They're all boiled down to some form of Shakespeare, you know. Right. There's a movie called Kantara.

33:57I don't know if you've heard of it. I know, but I don't. Yeah, it's a Kannada movie where I come from, Bangalore, my hometown. It's made there. Again, very folksy, very local. Yeah. It's very interesting you're saying that. So in a manner you're saying Bollywood should not try and sell or make the stories of Hollywood and Hollywood should not try and make the stories of Bollywood. Right. Which is not what is happening. Yeah. Look, I got worried years ago that when the China market opened up for America. Yeah. America is making movies for China. China is making movies for China. Who's making movies for America?

34:35Yeah. So for me, it's like this idea that everything has to travel, everything has to be big. That's why you end up with a dispassionate relationship to movies. So local is a very interesting word. Everybody in this room is at the very core, like each one of us, deeply passionate about content from a different lens. Somebody might be viewing it through the lens of sitting behind a camera, someone's on audio. I might be speaking, someone else is doing something. So beyond local, what else can you tell us? Long form content, short form content, movie, TV show. So I think that things have, those lines are all blurring.

35:17I feel like the - Micro series. Was that? Micro series. That's a new word I heard. Yeah. Three minute shows, one episode a day. Yeah, the micro dramas and these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know that that's a, it's fun. I don't know that that's a business yet. I've looked at it quite a bit. But I think that a documentary particularly is something, the way it fails mostly is a short that should have been a feature, a feature that should have been a short, just picking the running time that's appropriate to the story you're telling. So the one thing that's great about a series is an eight-hour movie is probably not going to work.

35:52But sometimes there's eight hours of storytelling, and doing it in one-hour bites or 30-minute bites is the perfect way to tell this story in eight hours, and it has to be eight hours. you know let the story lead every time and it doesn't matter it could be an eight hour movie it might work right completely look at that i watched um uh it's adolescence from the uk which is a very big big sensation now around the world so if you watch the whole thing it's four hours long it's only 40 minutes longer than the brutalist one movie right can i also say ted it's very impressive that unlike many CEOs in your shoes, you're not selling the organization you belong to beyond a point.

36:40You know? Yeah. We interview a lot of people, especially Westerners who come to India, who are constantly going back and following the diktat of the corporation that's sitting behind. And it gets boring to people beyond a point. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice that you're being slightly candid. Okay. So local duration. Slightly. Just slightly. For now. Okay. There's room to get better. Okay. I'll take the feedback. Okay. Local duration doesn't matter. Again, if I am 20 and I'm trying to build a career in media, I am not going to college. I've grown up in Bangalore or in Bombay or in Chetnai or a city in India.

37:26If I had a choice to focus on print, the newspapers in India, join a streaming platform like yours, go into trying to join a production company, do something in sport, do something in gaming, is there career advice you can give a 20-year-old me? Where should I go? Where could the odds of success be the highest? Financial success. Well, first of all, I think what we try to do is figure out, I think the right first path is to get into work for one of the agencies. Agencies like? Like CAA, UTA, these agencies who represent talent management. You learn more about the business in six months than anyone can teach you, or that you can learn in a, you'll get one little view of the world in any one of these jobs you're talking about, where if you go into the agency business first.

38:19that's actually the I read his book Mike Ovitz yeah that is almost run like a cult their people behave in the very family everybody has the same car in a certain level of management their families live next to each other yeah it's very cultish they do work on percentages though so it's a meritocracy in that you you get you move up the ladder by making more so they work on a fixed percentage even without a contract right they don't sign contracts with their talents right But I actually, funnily enough, have a small partnership in a talent management agency here called Collective. I think it's the largest in India.

39:01I have spent some time in their office. I haven't learned much. Why do you say? Really? Well, I don't know if the culture is different here than it would be in the US. The culture is very similar to the… So in the U.S., you will be on the phone with them negotiating, listening to them negotiate the deal. You know, the agents, their assistants are on the phones. They're actually listening to the calls and listening to the details of deals that otherwise are just trying to scrape, you know, dig through the trash to read the turn of contracts. Where I think you can just learn more. You're more hands on.

39:36You realize why things do and don't work and why deals fall apart. All those kind of things. And so I think you just get more of a broad picture of the entertainment business. And then if you want to get into what you want to do, particularly, I think you should find the thing that you're really, really good at. And I think for a way, one of my life lessons back to my journalism versus executive is I was passionate about being a journalist. I just wasn't very good at it. If I would have, I think if I would have been really good at it, I would have been even more passionate about it. And the reason I dropped out of it even, I said, well, everyone I'm seeing ahead of me, none of them are doing very well in life.

40:15You know, they're working in small markets and working their way up. And if you're going to do that, you've got to really love it. You know, struggle for 10 years and do all that. And versus if you just find something that you're really good at, you will excel. You'll feel good. You will get passionate at things that you're good at because you'll be proud of yourself for being good at it. And you will excel at those things that you're really good at. and you figure that out by doing a lot of different things. That's what I mean about the agency giving you exposure to different things that you probably don't know that you're going to love or that you're good at because this is what your 20s are for.

40:47In your 20s, try things. Go out there and if they don't work, quit. Or you'll get fired maybe, but if you don't get fired, quit and try something else. You shouldn't be unhappy at work in your 20s. You should be moving on to the next thing in your 20s. I'm going to digress a bit and ask you a question. A lot of people are freaked out by the fact or by the rumor that Netflix might soon produce theatrical movies. Don't the lines get blurred there? We're not doing that. You're not doing that. Some of our movies go to the theaters just as a tactical part of the release. But our business is the subscription entertainment business.

41:26So the movies that we produce, we produce them for our subscription business. And I think, you know, but looking at the box office, box office is pretty healthy in India. It's down a bit. I think it's down even today at pre-COVID levels, net collections of all theaters. Yeah, in the U.S. it's down about 20 % right now. But remember, ticket prices are up 25%. So attendance is way down. Right. And I look at that as a sign from the consumers of what they want. because average American consumer watches two movies a year in the theater, watches seven movies a month on Netflix. So I take that as a sign that they would like to watch movies at home.

42:06Thank you. So if I put them in the theater and then starve them, I won't let you see this movie because I have to put it in the theater for two months before. I don't know what that says to the people who gave me the money to make the movie in the first place. So there's again another friend of mine called Ajay. I was an investor in that company for a while runs the it used to be the largest chain but now they've combined to become the only chain of multiplexes in the country. It's called PVR and Inox together. So whenever me and Ajay catch up I'm always asking him what is next for the theatre business?

42:47The penetration of movie theatres in India is far lower than it is in the West, even lower than a fewer theaters, much fewer. Like I would say a vast majority of our country still does not have access to a movie theater. The experience where for$20 a movie a family of three or four can be entertained in a safe environment with air conditioning and food if you choose to access food and all of that for three hours or four hours. It sounds very appetizing to me from an experience standpoint for a vast majority of India. But in theory, it is not playing out like that, maybe, because I don't think movie theaters are doing as well as they were doing five or 10 years ago.

43:41And you know, it's interesting, almost everything else, like live events, is back bigger than pre-COVID. Live concerts, sporting events, all these things, all bigger. So I actually think the consumers went back to the theater and said, this isn't much better than watching at home. Where you go to a concert, it's a totally different experience than listening to a CD. Or you go to sporting events, way different than watching a football game on television. And we're seeing the movie for most movies is pretty much, it's not much better experience. Now, depending on the size of the theater, it may not be a better experience at all.

44:17No, you see a movie in a big IMAX room. Yeah. And it's the right movie. It's mind-blowing. I love that that still exists. That is Ajay's business model. Yeah. Have you spoken to Ajay, the largest multiplex? I have not, no. We don't really distribute theatrically, so, yeah. But again, for$20 and a three-hour window, Yeah. Barring cricket maybe, like somebody sitting at home watching a cricket match, or actually watching Netflix for three hours or four hours, there aren't that many options for families, right? Like if you had a choice, would you buy into a short sell into any theater business today?

44:58I don't want to, I don't know their business that well. Yeah. It's a high fixed cost business. Right. And that the, and there's, that the consumers have found substitutes for. Right. But again, I think that there's something that's really wonderful about seeing a big movie in the theater and enjoying it. Do you go, Ted? I do. They must just hate you when you get to a movie.

45:23But I don't go as often as I used to. Mostly because I'm just not finding the movies that I want to see there anymore. The really affluent of audience with the most spending power, also because the cost of television has gotten so democratized, Can afford large screen TVs at home, right? Can't. Can. Yeah, they can now. And it's getting cheaper and cheaper. Yeah. You know, it's cheaper to make a large screen TV now than it is to make a phone. Yeah. So I think, you know, people will go up that curve. Yeah. So what's the next big disruption here? It's a great question because, you know, the internet, it's going to be tough to find one that's going to be as big as the internet was the disruption to entertainment like it was to many things.

46:08Right. I think it's going to be less likely to be in distribution and be in creativity. And, you know, some AI is certainly part of it. Virtual production is certainly part of it. The way people can create can take things to a whole different level than they were. It's moving very fast, too. And I'm not afraid of AI, and I hope creators aren't afraid of AI, because I actually think it's going to make great tools to tell stories even better and make it possible to make movies they couldn't before. And it won't likely displace the things that humans are very particularly good at. Performance, emotion, things in the writing and the performance.

46:52But things like the technology it takes to de-age an actor, those tools have moved so fast now that versus five years. When we did The Irishman, that technology was probably$30 million of the budget It was just the technology to do the de-aging. And it was very disruptive to the production cycle, you know, what actors had to put on their face and all that kind of thing. Extra camera rigs, all kinds of different things. Today, we can do that exact film better for a fraction of that. Maybe the entire, we just made a movie called Pedro Perrimor. The cinematographer on that film, on Irishman, was the director of Pedro Perrimor.

47:31He basically made this entire movie for less than the de-aging budget for the average one. What do you think of a world where AI has gotten to the point where I could just prompt and say that make a movie of Ted and Nikhil having a conversation around topics like A, B, C, D, E. And it does it so well that Ted and Nikhil are no longer required. What happens then? I, um, it's an interesting hypothetical. I don't know that that ever happens. I mean, meaning that it's the art of the prompt is also going to be a human skill. Now you think the prompts become self-training at some point. Yeah. Um, it's, you know, the bigger thing I worry about is that the, the, you put something in and the prompt will spit something, will spit something out and you think, no, not like this, like this, not like this, like this, not like that, like this, whether or not people stop taking the step of saying that like this and just go with what was spit out.

48:42That would be the danger. But there won't be any need to it because I really think the things that it's going to do is lower the cost of doing things in a way that makes it possible to tell bigger and better stories. But it still requires people to do that. Because imagination and emotion are the things that really, in fact, what AI is doing today is like the antithesis of imagination. It's giving you the most predictable outcome based on these kind of rough ideas you're giving it. But I think those tools will become very much like visual effects tools or very much like computer animation. You're using the tools to tell the story and express yourself in a way that you couldn't before.

49:22And I think of the leap forward from 2D hand-drawn animation to CG animation is much bigger than the leap we're going to experience with AI. And more animators today, those films are more expensive, actually, and employ more people, more creatives, and they're better than they've ever been. Yeah. I was watching Lion King, Mufasa. Yeah. Incredible. Yeah, isn't it great? Yeah. Yeah. Remember, we were just talking about theaters. Isn't it crazy that when my kids were 28 and 30, when they were very little, I took them to see The Lion King on Broadway. and I looked up recently that thing has made that play has made more money than the film really?

50:02Billions of dollars the play between the touring companies everything else I think the film was 10 billion dollars wow yeah if you can invest in just that one tough to call it no? like before it happens yeah yeah in terms of live my team was telling me that there was this episode of Black Mirror which was interactive and you could control the outcome you wanted to a certain extent. Bandersnatch, yeah. Do you think that'll happen? You know, it was very interesting and novel. Yeah. It wasn't huge. You know, video games do that so much better. Yeah. You know, if you really want to control all your outcomes and design the worlds you're playing in and all those kind of things, I think video games is a better outlet for doing that.

51:18What do you, tell me what we're eating. This, I think, is cottage cheese. this is some kind of peach with sourdough bread. Okay. And this is lamb. Oh, cool. I like lamb. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, they definitely, I look at things that happen on the TV that compete for time on TV. And games are definitely a part of that. Yeah. We can go back to the Netflix story. So you started sending DVDs in a world where VCRs were ruling the roost. Yeah. You went from delivering them in three weeks to delivering them the next day or the same day and all of that. Blockbuster started to die. Netflix started to rise.

52:06When did the switch from sending something physically to almost sending something to someone's home digitally happen? And I don't need you to go into the details of this, but can you explain to me like I'm a 10-year-old boy, how the tech behind it works? The cost of storing on a server, the cost of me making a call from my device that I want this particular video and the cost of streaming it. Because this I will tell you as a member or as a subscriber of Netflix and every other streaming platform there is. You guys are doing something right, which others have not caught on to. Like if I were to watch a movie on Amazon, even the forwarding experience, when I go from minute five to minute 30, it is so much more seamless on Netflix.

53:09These tiny things like UI, I feel are the difference between everything, the tiny stuff. Can you tell me like broad picture? What does that look like? Well, you got to keep in mind, when we started doing this, the vision was always to be a digital delivery business. So all the work that was going into this all started back in day one. um it's the the the the technology itself you know for it's on demand it's streaming it's not downloading it's not mass live so it's really optimized for point-to-point delivery and the biggest thing that we've put a lot of money and uh and effort into is every device that's connected to the television netflix is individually optimized for that advice for that device So things like early on, one of the things we were finding is Netflix would work better when your connection is faster.

54:10And sometimes your connection would slow down on you and it would start buffering. And that's the worst thing that can happen in a stream. So they built in the ability to downshift, basically, send you a lower res picture for a minute while your speed catches up. And it all happened in a cache behind the scenes, so you never felt it. So very subtle, very gentle, a degradation of picture quality for a few minutes then comes right back. So that's stuff we were working on at the very beginning of streaming because they knew that this, you know, that was not going to be an acceptable way to watch a movie.

54:47The work that goes into picture quality, that goes into compression, that goes into having, building this open connect system that actually puts the data physically nearer people's homes so it's not traveling so far on the internet. Helps the content delivery services serve us better and us cheaper to serve us than anybody else. But we did all that work and invested in it. For almost, I would bet all the other entertainment companies, their second biggest expense is marketing. And ours is tech. Second only to content.

55:28So the model itself is not whether or not how the technology itself works, whether or not it's perfectly optimized for variable speed, variable device, variable connection, all meant to do the same thing, which is not to get stuck, you know, and deliver the most high quality experience possible. Sound and video and audio. So we had in the earliest days of Netflix, we had terrible quality of content. The content was lousy what we were streaming. We had people doing what they called golden eye test on the stream to make sure the stream looked beautiful. Because eventually the content was going to get good.

56:05So I think most people, when they saw Netflix growing up, they thought, oh, that's easy. We'll buy some off-the-shelf software and stream. Everyone can stream. Because YouTube is doing it. You know, that kind of thing. But the truth of it is, it's really hard. And it's really complicated, especially in a multi-device world with variable speed and speeds of connection. and sometimes you see it break down like on the Jake Paul, Mike Tyson fight. We pushed the internet right to the limits that night but we learned so much now. We got a lifetime of learning that night so then you see the NFL on Christmas Day trouble-free.

56:41So to me it's like for us we are a tech company that got into entertainment. We still have very much of a tech DNA even though we've become primarily an entertainment company but our DNA is still very much a tech company. So in a way, you don't have one USP, but you have two. One is content curation and the other is tech. Is that right? Yeah. But no matter how good the content is, if the delivery is bad, it doesn't matter. And vice versa, it's true too. The tech can be beautiful if the content is terrible. People are still going to turn you off. But tech more important than the content. I think it's the cost of interest.

57:25Table stakes. The tech has to work better. And I think what you just described, almost everyone describes to me that. Yeah. That why can't they do it as well as you do? Why does it not work when I push play on this one? Yeah. You know, so. So I met the YouTube CEO a couple of days ago. Neil. Yeah, he's a good man. Is he competition? Yeah, sure. Or definitely same thing for time and attention and increasingly for ad dollars. because he's doing movies and you will do music at some point right? That will do music? Yeah. No. No? But you will do There's plenty of music out there and it's kind of I think it's a very different business model.

58:06But you will do like podcasts and individual content creators putting up content. I think there's a there's a class of creators on YouTube that is pretty close to professional content. I kind of think of them as kind of pro-am creators. Things they're doing look pretty great. Podcast is a form of user-generated content. The line between a talk show and a podcast are getting pretty blurry. Yeah, like we have 20 people working on this, so I don't know what we are. Yeah. Yeah. So there's no reason that wouldn't be on Netflix. I actually believe that that content will better monetize on Netflix than it does on YouTube.

58:46Not all of it, but for certain creators, it certainly would. So we'll look to do that. So we don't monetize any of our content. We don't have ads. We don't have sponsors. It's largely like a charity project around entrepreneurship in India. But for people like us, where we put it freely on everything without ads. Yeah. Sitting behind a platform. For you, the reach is the most important part. Sitting behind a platform kind of doesn't make sense. Because then you can't be on every other platform. Right. so for someone like me say we produce content we don't produce a lot of it but the little bit that do we put that we do put out is great quality and we do it here at wtf which is this channel i have a broking business we produce a bunch of content from there so we have maybe 10 20 different things which are parallelly running at any time to bring that under an umbrella and be able to compete with a larger distributor what do you think we can do is there a shot like if you had to suggest a playbook of building why do you want to compete with them why not just go up them the problem is while we distribute on them we never know we don't get to touch our subscribers in a way we don't know their names we don't know their email ids we don't know their phone numbers we don't know who they are what is working what is not working like take your example a movie producer who's independent will never have access to the kind of data Netflix has access to you might know tomorrow with cameras on television sets or mobile phones that you could probably gauge when the pupils of a certain person dilate when they're watching a certain character do a certain thing in a particular movie.

1:00:47So if you don't control the medium, you don't access the data. In turn, you can't. It's like trying to compete with 100, the data that someone else has. Tomorrow, YouTube will make their own content like Netflix makes their own. It happens in every industry, right? You look at a food delivery platform. Yeah. When you don't know who you are, if I'm a restaurant and I don't know. YouTube may never. I mean, that's an interesting one because I think that business has got content creators willing to give them their programming for free. Yeah. So, in fact, if they start paying for any of it, it might screw up the whole system.

1:01:25So that may be the one difference. But I do think that there's, I think about it in terms of like companies like Shopify, where companies, most of the companies on Shopify mostly also sell on Amazon. and have all those dynamics you talk about. But they use Shopify to present their brand. They use it to get learning. All the learns that you're talking about that they're getting from being more direct, feeling like they're more direct to consumer and then apply those things to Amazon the best they can. So they're Amazon selling the best they can. So I think that might be the same thing with YouTube.

1:01:57There's a lot of third-party companies that analyze YouTube analytics that can tell you all the things that you would know if you owned YouTube. But they would never let me touch my subscribe. Thank you. even with the third - Yeah, you have to do other things to do that. That's what, again, what the Shopify does. It creates touch points with consumers. Right. Yeah. In fact, a lot of the new business models I see on YouTube is build distribution on YouTube, then figure out a way to transition your subscribers out of it. Yeah. And then in turn, you can engage with them. It's like food delivery, right?

1:02:30The restaurant in my neighborhood that I order from all the time started putting a thing in the bag that said, you know, order from me directly, please. You know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Netflix, we had gotten to the time where you spend the initial years figuring out the tech. This is after you have solved the blockbuster problem, evolved beyond that. What happened next? You figured out how to stream using technology in a manner that is more convenient, faster, no latency than the incumbent players or anybody. You didn't have any incumbents back then, right? There was no competition for streaming.

1:03:08I mean, we started streaming almost the exact same time that Amazon and Hulu did in the U.S. And they started originals almost the exact same time. So we were watching how all three of us were running for the same prize at that time. One of our concerns was that Hulu did a lot of TV. And Netflix, because of our DVD roots, we were kind of known as a movie company. And we really wanted to make sure that we didn't become the movie company and Hulu became the TV company. so that's why we kind of got into TV at the same time licensing TV shows what happens to old school TV? the TV that I grew up on like the TV where I used to go I still remember I used to go home from school at 3pm and watch this particular cartoon called Swat Cats and Power Puff Girls and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I remember watching all these Indian soaps you know with my mother like late in the night and all of that what happens to that entire industry I mean I guess a lot of it shows up in retro channels I think there will be an economic model where we'll have more of it over time these fast services that are mostly ad supported I think those are mostly delivering most of those episodes to people YouTube certainly does some of that but I feel like there's a lot of different ways to get to it No one's going to be making shows like that anymore.

1:04:38Right. Which is kind of interesting. I can never figure out why a show that worked for a seven-year-old this year doesn't work for a seven-year-old two years from now. But it's because the marketplace moves so fast. Kids now, you know, mostly want to, it's more aspirational. So by the time you get to seven now, you want to watch what 10-year-olds watch. do you see a shift in content where I know this can't be specific for India and the US they're probably completely different but what is working in the US today and what is working in India somebody was telling me that crime horror spirituality are ruling the roost in India is that different in the US?

1:05:26it's secular too You know, crime is very big. People love true crime. I mostly think because people, I don't think because people are macabre. I think they really like crime because they're puzzle solvers, problem solvers. They were trying to solve a puzzle. I think it's very built into our DNA to figure things out. I think religion is that. Why did people go west in the United States, you know, in the U.S. when they landed? To get to the next thing and figure it all out. People want to know how it began and how it ended and figure out all those things. So I actually think people are very curious and that true crime scratches a puzzle itch that people have.

1:06:07But yeah, so that's very, very universal. Works everywhere. So talking about Netflix in India specifically, I think you have two incumbent, I would say competition for the lack of a better word. And sport, cricket for one of them, for Disney hot star, Gio hot star now, has been a big funnel to get in a large audience. Cricket is a religion in India. If you put IPL on a certain platform, it changes everything. You have taken a slightly more nuanced approach approach where you're not taking the very expensive broadcasting rights of a sport, but like you did on F1, you create a documentary behind it and it works just as well.

1:07:03Would you like to elaborate as to why you did that and more thoughts around that? Formula One is probably the best example of the theory playing out. For me, I believe that big sports cricket in India, the NFL in the United States is that those leagues are so powerful. The consumer demand for them is so high, they should get all the money. So whoever's delivering it, it's just a distribution business should be very, very low margin just for distribution only. So if I have that game and then next week I lose it and it goes to the next person, that audience, that whole audience can go from here to here.

1:07:40So at the end of the day, I don't know why you would lose a lot of money on a sport because it's, you'll never get to the place where it's profitable. So, and you probably can't make enough profit on everything else that you can lose too much on that sport. So one of the tests for it for me was to what you just described with Formula One, we built this show called Drive to Survive. Formula One is very popular around the world, but weirdly unpopular in the United States. People didn't know the sport. They didn't know how it works. They didn't know these people. It's play, it's race, the races are in the middle of the night.

1:08:11So it just never got popular. So we did this documentary series. What I loved about the sport and why I thought it'd make great television, it's, you know, beautiful people doing dangerous things in beautiful places. You know, that's pretty good TV. And that's what happened. I think people tuned into the shows. They learned about the drivers and they figured out how the rules worked. They got more and more interested in watching races. So when the deal came up, I thought, okay, now we have an audience of Formula One fans. the audience has gone up, but not dramatically. It's gone up two or three times though, from what it was, it was very small.

1:08:46The rights, so let's just say I was holding those rights. When that contract came up, because of all the brand building I did for Formula One, that fee went up 10 times. That would have been my reward for growing Formula One, is my fee would have gone up 10 times. so i look at it like um big league sports likely the league owners keep all the profits always and you could now what we're doing now our version of this would be something like the nfl on christmas day we actually create a netflix event around it we have back-to-back football on that day we have a beyonce concert in between and it was a real kind of a fun like christmas day piece of programming that's very unique to Netflix.

1:09:34And that reason to have Netflix is for that day. So that's the way our kind of take on it or creating the big sport event ourself, like we did with Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. Is that the way me aspiring to create content? Like you told me earlier that the best low hanging fruit to build a business in this field is to produce content you've told me go local you've said duration doesn't matter you said familiarity is actually a good thing because people click it if i were to build something around sport then should i look at building a reality show on top of cricket for example i mean it's you've yet to have an interesting take on it that someone else hasn't yet right but yeah and And those stories, there's a lot of stories to be told.

1:10:24This entire subscription model, Ted, like, India has struggled with that. Like, I know maybe Disney Hotstar or Gio Hotstar now has 50, 60, 100 million subscribers who are paying some kind of a fee. But I find that subscribing for something is not an easy sell in India. advertising is palpable but it's definitely true why do you think why do you think that is something in the culture I don't know like I've thought of this like when we've thought of media business we considered can we have a subscription fee where we charge people every month for a media business that we were ideating when you come down to extrapolating one part of it is affordability.

1:11:19I think there might be a hundred or two hundred million people in India who can actually afford to spend that premium towards an additional expense in the household. Right. And they have to have broadband at home and big screen TV. Yeah, I would say two hundred million. But outside of that, I feel like culturally we are averse to paying an online fee for something that is recurring in a manner that the Americans are not. Yeah, the recurring charges was definitely a cultural, outside of their cultural norm. Yeah, I don't know how. I couldn't understand it either when we first got here. I thought, who wouldn't want that?

1:12:05It's so convenient. Why would you want to have to go back and pay to the credit card every month? And then somebody explained it to me. They said, well, it's just, that is the cultural norm. what if somebody asked you for your debit card? Right. You would say, no way. Yeah. Yeah. Because our first efforts were, because remember, it was not even allowed to have recurring charges. We said, oh, we should work with the government to try to see if we can change that or change the banking regulations so we can change that. Instead of saying, oh, is that what the consumer wants? And it turned out you were right.

1:12:36The consumer doesn't want it. I'm trying to figure what could culturally have made us that way. we're a more savings oriented country. Yeah. Could that be a reason that you don't, the amount of money in your bank account, we place a great degree of weightage in knowing what that number is and it makes us feel good? I don't want to stereotype it, but I feel like my experience has been that Indian people are more mindful of their money than American people are. Mindful to your point. You know what you have, you know what you want to spend, you're more mindful about it. And access to credit is lower than it is in America.

1:13:25Very few people have credit cards. Yeah. You have this plan where you're subsidizing the monthly fee but showing advertising. And I read that it's working really well for you. Yeah. And as much as 50 % of new audiences coming in through that, if that were to grow and all Netflix has ads, what happens then? I don't think there's ever a world where we do all ads. We're a choice brand. So the folks who really don't want ads, there's always going to be an option for them to do that. In fact, I think that our business will be primarily a subscription for the foreseeable future. We'll grow the ad business to be a good part of our business for sure.

1:14:11But I think that even when it's very healthy, it'll still be 20 % of the business. It's interesting because the ads only model doesn't support the kind of ambitious content that we put on. Yeah. And so the trick is finding the right balance of ad load and entertainment or where the consumers say, yeah, I'll take a lower fee and I'll watch the ads and it's fine. or it's like, oh, we have to put on too many ads to make this even watchable. You've seen that, I think, happen in some other places. You spend more money on content now than anybody, right? Netflix? That puts you in a position where most popular people across the world really want FaceTime with you, likely.

1:14:57How does that change the dynamics inside your head? That's good. Well, you know, we've been in the, it's been interesting because I think when we started out, even when we weren't spending as much as everybody else, we set out to be kind of artist friendly. So we had always had a disproportionate draw with talent. First, before it was the money, it was the better place to work. And for me, it's very, I think it's very, it's very exciting part of the business to be around and working with very creative people. So I don't, I don't kid myself, but like a lot of, Like what you said, I think it's the chair.

1:15:38People want to be whoever's in the chair. I'm glad that today it's Bella Bajari and her team who do most of that work today. But I do feel like our ability to help people find a big audience is as exciting for me as it is for them. But unlike a politician, your chair is almost in perpetuity. you don't have a fixed term where you are re-elected right if things start if things don't go well long i will see how long that seats yeah i think it's easier to be oblivious of the chair as a corporate than it is as a elected politician who has to kind of fight for their chair periodically yeah yeah it's an interesting thing because my life is all is and my wife too our lives are kind of intertwine professionally and personally.

1:16:31So the folks that we work with a lot of times are my, among my best friends. So, and I do think there is that, that, that has, that relationship is always in check in that one dimension all the time. Like, you know, I don't, I don't wonder if that's why we're friends because he, because they work here. But I, but I also don't get my, I wouldn't, I wouldn't use the friendship to move a business initiative. And I hope they wouldn't either. Yeah. Your wife used to be an ambassador. She was U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Have you been married a long while, Ted? Yeah, 15 years. And how did you meet?

1:17:11We met during the Obama campaign. She was the finance chair for Southern California. And I was a guest who arrived for one of the events that she was running. I got there late. I was the last person to arrive. So the very first words my wife said to me was, you're late. And I get in there, I arrive at the event, and there's a place to take a picture with Senator Obama and then go into the event. I get there, she goes, you're late. I go, I'm sorry. She will take your picture and go get your seat. So I do this thing and I go to my table. And she comes by the table to tell the host of the table, if the senator is not coming to your table, If you want to meet the center, you got to go to that table.

1:17:57So I just leaned into him. I go, who is this? He goes, what do you mean? He goes, I go, who is this woman? She's amazing. And he goes, how do you not know her? This is Nicole Avon. How do you not know Nicole Avon? And I go, I don't know her. And he goes, I'll introduce you to her later. So at the end of the night, we left the event and went to a dinner, 10 people. And I'm sitting there talking to my friend Lawrence Bender, who hosted the table. And he said, oh, here comes Nicole. And she came in by herself. And she goes, switch seats so you can talk to her. She's great. And we switched seats. And I sit and talk to her.

1:18:32We talked for three and a half hours. And eight months later, we were married. Wow. She's an amazing woman, Nicole. I mean. Yeah, I'd love to meet her. Yeah, she's really phenomenal. So Netflix in India. You don't have significant market share yet. How important is it for you as a market? and how are you approaching it? Like what is working for you in India and what is not working for you in India? Well, I think to your point earlier about the figuring out the good product market fit, including payment systems and all those things early on, took us a couple of years to get that right. I also think that, you know, as the product is ramped up, our very first Indian original show is Sacred Games.

1:19:18And I thought this is going to be great. This is, people in India love movies. This is a TV show that feels as big as a movie, has movie stars. I love the show. Well, what's interesting about it is like it was very, very novel, but I didn't realize that we were going to be like introducing a brand new kind of entertainment to a country the size of India because there was nothing else like it. You know, that for TV was typically I think would be sports and talk and very not kind of cinema infused television that we've been doing around the world. So for me, it was like if I did it all over again, would I have done Sacred Games a couple of years later and did some things that were more populous to programming?

1:19:59Maybe, maybe. But we knew that India was going to be a slower journey to get to where we want to get to, but it's a great prize at the end of the day. So, I mean, right now you can see how fast Indian households are adopting fixed broadband, big screen TVs growing the addressable market in India is exploding in the next couple of years so it's exciting and you have three plans in India the cheapest one with ads I think is about 149 or 199 I can't remember the number are you finding traction at that level most of your traction at that level no it's across all the programs Right. Yeah. Whatever suits the individual.

1:20:45Yeah. I don't want to ask you about your sharing password thing because I feel like you guys have... Fucked out, yeah. You've spoken about it enough and you've taken cognizance of that. And by the way, it was one of those things where I think allowing it and promoting it even early on, it was a good way to promote the business. And a lot of people got to try it that way and those kind of things. And, you know, a lot of companies start with free trials in some form and then eliminate them as you go, which is all we did. In terms of India, any other nuance that you've learned in the time that you've been here that is interesting?

1:21:21Content in India? I think it's interesting to me. Like the first thing people want to know anywhere I travel is what do people only watch here? And I'm more interested in the opposite. Like what, how are we more of this? How are we the same? And I was very surprised at how international India is. I think there was a belief or a conventional wisdom was that India is all Bollywood and India is all local. And actually the taste of their international shows play really, really well in India. So the taste is very broad and very global. So I don't know much about Bollywood. Like I know a little bit.

1:22:00I have a bunch of friends who work in Bollywood or in the media or content space. Whoever I ran into over the last week, I kept asking them, like I'm meeting Ted. tell me as an industry insider, what would you like me to ask him? I asked a friend called Adar, a friend called Amrit, Dinu, like a bunch of people, Hitesh, Janai, people I ran into all of last week. Each one had a different question almost. Janai is a younger lawyer, 26 years old. He works in the entertainment zone a little bit, but is primarily a lawyer. He was asking me in terms of content moderation and regulation, is there a different benchmark you apply on a country by virtue of microdynamics in the country?

1:22:59Like when you're regulating content, how do you look at India? We try, obviously we program the sensibilities of the audience, but I do think, you know, we're usually trying to be mindful and respectful. Obviously I always follow a local law when it comes to these things around the world and lean into expression a little, you know, protect free speech of the artist. But also don't do things that are unnecessarily provocative. If I get inspired by the conversation I hear today, I'm in the audience. and I set about ideating what kind of content to build. Can you tell me one theme that I should build in?

1:23:43One specific theme, like a micro theme? No, because I don't think you can reverse engineer into something that we want, you know? No? Yeah, no, you kind of... Do you have an algorithm like YouTube has one? What do you favor? Definitely not on green lighting. No? The idea, mostly it is the quality of the storytelling. Is this a world that people are going to want to spend time in? Are these people people care about? Do I care how these people, what happens to these people? Do I still stick with them to the end? And that is very unintuitive, what will get you to a yes on every one of those, or all of those, or any of those.

1:24:19So for me, it's like, be careful not to kind of reverse engineer your way into a pitch. Just you have to write a story that people have got to see, and you've got to make. So when Netflix is greenlighting a project today, is it data or is it gut? It's gut. Yeah? Yeah. I mean, remember, you're picking stories that you're predicting someone's going to want to see. You're predicting, will this person be able to deliver this vision to the screen? Have they ever done it before? Sometimes they've never done it before. So you really are going with the creator, betting on the creator, and betting on the story that they pitched to you.

1:24:52Yeah. Is there baggage of a founder, Ted? Like Reed was a fairly popular CEO and founder of Netflix. When you fill someone's shoes, somebody like him, this is useful for anybody taking over a company which was run by a very popular, magnanimous character. What do you have to watch out for? I think you really just want to be yourself. Don't try to be him because you're not him. um you know he we talked about the succession of the company right reed talked about it with the board 10 years ago right um when i met him in 1999 in a way he was talking about succession he said to me i'm building a company that's going to be around longer than me which which implies succession right so he uh it's always been on his mind he asked me to be the co-CEO with him about seven years ago, five, six years ago, which was a very unusual step for a founder CEO to take a co-CEO.

1:25:57And, but it was all part of his long-term plan, which was, you know, I think that this business, he and I, Reed and I had been practical co-CEOs before that, me doing the entertainment, Reed doing the tech. And then we just kind of, he kind of memorialized it by giving me the title. And I broadened my scope a little bit. But I think in his head, he said, I think this co-CEO thing is the right way to do it. And so when we talked about him actually moving on, it was the move to another co-CEO, me and Greg Peters, in very similar model than we have with Reed. But neither of us, we both have our strengths.

1:26:35We both have our weaknesses. Neither of us are Reed and we don't try to be. Do you think that's a good idea, having co-CEOs? So I'm just like, it's very odd. It's odd that it doesn't, because it doesn't work in many, there's a lot of stories where you can look back and there were three co-Roman emperors that didn't go very well. But if you look back at the track record of the co-CEOs and it's spotty, but I think where it really works well here is we do two very distinctly different things. We manage two distinctly different cultures inside the business with tech culture and entertainment culture.

1:27:11We're even physically in two different places in California. And it enables us to be, to bring out the best in ourselves in the, in the things that we do, provide technical guidance and inspiration for people in an area that we're not, where we have our sea legs. And I think it helps for recruiting. People want to work for people that know what they're, you know, what they're doing in the area that you're coming to work for us on. So, and I think it doesn't, it may not work at every company that does what we do even, because I feel like the company is inherently free of politics. All the things in the culture deck, we're not, Greg and I wouldn't backstab each other in the back for this job.

1:27:53We both want this thing to work forever. The same way I didn't want Reed to leave. So, so I really think that it'll be, it uniquely works at Netflix and it may not work at every company. But I think it's worth always checking it out and testing the model out and say, you have to have two people who respect each other, two people who like working with each other, two people who have a unique and complementary skill sets. If I were to put myself in your shoe, when one person leads a company to as much success as Netflix has reached, a lot of my validation will come from the chair, the position that I hold in that company at that point of time.

1:28:34Is it the sign of a great leader to be able to let go of your source of validation while you're getting your validation? Remarkable, right? Reed's not old. He's like into sports and he's doing this, that, and the other. And he set the company up better than he found it when he started it. he was comfortable and confident much of his net worth is wrapped up in the stock so he has a lot of skin in the game whether or not we make this work or not and he was very clear I don't want to come back the question I ask myself is I'm 38 today today's your birthday? no no 38 now I was going to say, wow. You chose tonight to do your business.

1:29:29I'm 38 now. And how much of a role does the little validation I have affect my overall mental well-being? And how much will go away if that were to be taken away? It's an interesting thought. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are so many people who identify themselves so much with the work. someone said something to me one time that they would be more embarrassed to fail a business than to fail in their marriage I think so 100 % that's not me but I know a lot of people for whom that's true all my validation comes from work I don't have much else where I'm getting the very tangible societal validation coming my way A lot of people talk about how, talk about balance and talk about your life is fulfilled when you have A, B, C, D, E, in equal.

1:30:35That's a fantasy though. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's never a balance. Nobody has that. No. Life is perpetually way out of balance. People who say that are like, just saying that. Yeah. Or maybe it's just aspirational that they seek life-work balance, but there's no such thing. It's an exercise in futility to try to chase it. In fact, you're probably shortchanging one or the other all the time if you're trying to get that. Yeah. I always feel like I'm letting someone down. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's either your mother or your friend. That phrase, life-work balance was designed to make you feel bad.

1:31:16Yeah. Are you hard on yourself? Yeah, very. Yeah? In the work realm or in the family realm? I think both. I probably, my kids now are adults, so there's less of those kind of trade-offs that you make in business for family life. But I always felt very guilty about the trade-offs you make. Even though you've convinced yourself, well, I worked this hard to provide for this family so we could be this, we could do this, we could do that, we can do this. But ultimately, there's, you know, probably they would have preferred the time. What do they do, Ted? My daughter is a producer, a film producer. Just produced a movie called Bunny that premiered at South by Southwest and it's going to be at the Tribeca Film Festival next month.

1:32:06My son is an editor, film editor. So both in the business. Any Indian editors, producers, actors that really stand out for you from the exposure you've had to India? It's such a hard question because I, you know, I just don't want people to say, well, what about me? Can you name one individual, just one person, who has left a lasting impression on you in the entertainment industry in India? Doing Heramande was probably one of the most, like, creatively interesting projects I've ever worked on in India. I was involved in the Greenlight meetings for it. He came into LA to do the pitch. Who are you talking about?

1:32:53Sanjeev Leavitt. Yes. He came in with this very big vision. And I think he almost like it was a dare. Like, I dare you to make this. It's so big. And remember, he's a cinema legend. So the idea that he was going to make a TV show was almost unheard of. And I almost think he wasn't going to, I thought he came for us to say no. And then when we said Jess, there was a lot of delays. It was a complicated production. He did things, built these enormous practical sets that we shot on. It was something beautifully old-fashioned about every element of the production. And he was so proud of it, and I was so proud of him.

1:33:36And it was just such a great—that stands out to me as a real reflective of the Indian love of cinema.

1:33:48Try. Yeah. This is, I think, chicken palau. Palau is like biryani, but slightly different. Yeah. Okay, so this is crazy spicy if you want to try. I can tell they put it in only to you. Do you want to try it? Can you take spice? I'm going to wait. I'm going to try. I'm going to push myself. Yeah. So you've done some like really spectacular green lighting of projects that nobody would have thought were reasonable. Things like Korean shows, Squid Games, Money Heist. There's so many in your list. I don't know where to begin and where to end. what is that skill set that allows you to make these choices that other people have not been able to make i think a lot of you have to remember a lot of the things that um many things we passed on go on to be hit somewhere else so it's not like you get not like your track record's all that clean um now i remember a lot of those shows are not didn't turn out to be the show that was being pitched either.

1:34:58So some of that goes on. But I think it's being able to be a little more daring about not being afraid to fail. The culture kind of instills that in us, to take big swings and not being afraid to fail, learn from the failures and move on. The other one is not being stuck in, this thing didn't work 10 years ago, so I'm never going to do that again so i didn't have a lot of guardrails around the decision making that way um and a lot of and i think some of it is that i talked about earlier about this general curiosity and to have some good judge of character of the people who are pitching whether or not they can actually do this thing that they're talking about um the duffer brothers when they came in with with stranger things that's an example i think of a show that they have never done anything that big they made a small movie for Warner Brothers before and they directed some episodes of a TV show before.

1:35:55And so we're giving them this enormous budget to make this enormous scope show. And when you watch this little tiny movie that they made for Warner Brothers and said, oh, wow, if they can make this on that little tiny budget, we got this, we got this. So if I want something to be greenlit by you, should I make like a demo tape? Is that the way? Well, I probably won't do it. You'll probably go to one of the people's, many other people on the team before we get to me. But a lot of the, people do all kinds of pitches. Monica in India, right? Monica in India. But the way that people come in all the time, sometimes it's with a complete episode written.

1:36:34Sometimes it is just a pitch and a lookbook and storytelling. I love pitches. The one thing I miss the most in being the Kosiona is I don't get to hear many of the pitches anymore. and I loved hearing pitches. And I've seen some of the best pitches for some of the worst shows and some of the worst pitches for the best shows. So I'm always amazed that no one teaches anyone how to do great pitches. There should be a whole college course on just pitches. Because, I mean, that's the make or break thing when you walk into a room. And I've seen people walk in a room with a great show and just read it off the page to you while you're like sitting like this and they're just reading to you.

1:37:13if I had to pick one thing over another say I'm going to pitch to Monica and hopefully she's tough would I do better with a look book a script for an episode or a demo three minute video of the look and feel of the show I bet with Monica you'd do better with a script yeah I think she wants to know that you're committed and that you're going to deliver and that you're in. Right. I'm guessing for you and her now.

1:37:49This is delicious. You like it? Are you a rice fan? Do you like rice? Yeah, definitely. As a cardboard? So picking a microculture, like the Korean stuff, before it has blown up and making it mass, how do I learn to do that? Say, for example, I have to make the decision on producing or not producing A, B, C, and D. Somebody comes to me with a Korean drama five years ago and says, we should do something like this. I'd be like, heck no. What skill set do you have that allowed you to make that call and how can I inculcate it? I think it goes back to the video store. The beauty part of working in a video store, they're empty all day.

1:38:39All the business happened after work. So all day, I watched everything. I watched everything in the store. So one thing that I have that some people don't is I've seen almost everything. So when someone comes in with an idea or a pitch, I already have some framework where I've seen it before, where it's worked, where it didn't work about it. Not just in American film. So when we did in Korea before Parasite, we made Bong Joon-ho's movie called Okja. and I was very familiar with his work I've seen all of his film before and he was um I remember that where he was in his life at that time he told me a story that there was a box set of Korean movies on DVD that Martin Scorsese did the director's commentary on and then he's talking about movies in Korea and he was and he and he said Martin Scorsese said my name he got very excited to tell me that Martin Scorsese said his name and I said have you never met Martin Scorsese he goes no so I introduced them and had set it up so that Bong could go to his home and they went and spent the day together and it was really exciting but again I think when Bong was out pitching that movie a lot of people did not know him and his work outside of Korea he was you know an incredible an incredibly well-known director particularly in Korean horror um so but again you kind of you you got to have some frame of reference so does familiarity play a part in that you've seen something similar which has worked so you will green light something similar i think it's just martin scorsese said that all movies are in conversation with each other so you have to watch a lot of movies to understand what the connection is you know this is like that but it's not really like that you know it's this but it could be a little more like this but that will never work in India but it works well in Korea you know those kind of things and what does well or does not is it a factor of reading the room like reading what is happening in society today or is it about the quality of content like we're in a world where I don't know left is going right and the politics are changing capitalism and the way we view it is changing so much is changing yeah youth sentiment on social media is changing does that define what will work or not tomorrow or will it be the quality of content the reason it's so hard to predict is because sometimes it changes because of what's happening in the culture and sometimes the exact opposite meaning that because things are so x because things are so black people really They want white now.

1:41:21Or because everything's black, everything must be black. So I do think that there's almost impossible to predict nature of how society will react to what's happening in society far enough in advance to get something made. Another thing that is big for Netflix is DEI. You have people of different race, religion, spread across, ethnicity, spread across different parts of Netflix. From green lighting to leading different roles and all of that. Is it working? Is like the popular narrative as an outsider sitting in India when I hear about what is happening in America, everyone's talking about, you know, DEI having caused the issue in some college and how it's not necessarily the best thing for business.

1:42:14Is DEI and Netflix helping Netflix produce better content and be a better streamer? Well, look, we're telling stories for 700 million people around the world. We need the people who are picking them, people who are making them, people who are promoting them, to be a lot like the audience that they're serving. So that diversity very much plays into our success. so I don't believe that there's any conflict with getting the best person and having a diverse workforce. For a long time you sat on the very top end of Indian streaming by top end I mean you cater to the not completely but to the English niche audience and you were the most expensive of services.

1:42:59Off late, you're getting very popular shows like Kapil Sharma and I heard something about CID. These are more domestic language talk shows in a way. Can you be both? Can you sit on that end and on this end? That's the beauty of the personalization work that we've been doing since the company began is we're not doing those shows instead of doing these other shows. We're doing those in addition to them. If you like these kind of shows, and that's what you'll see on Netflix. And if you don't, you'll see other things. So we're broadening the offering, not narrowing it to something else. What is working, like all the data you have on India now, which is significant in all the time that you've been here.

1:43:43Can you tell me some non-obvious insights you have learned that I won't know? I'm sure that you would probably be, the international performance of programming programming from Japanese anime to Turkish soaps to all kinds of different things that you would not expect would work very well in India. Work very well in India. Is that we don't speak the language? I think for some reason, and you probably understand better than I do, the audience is very hungry for diverse storytelling from around the world. They love Bollywood. They love South Indian action movies. They love all local content for sure.

1:44:27But far more adventurous as viewers than I expected. Could it go back to the projection lens that people want to show you what they're watching so that they can speak about the fact that they watched the Korean show? I don't know. Maybe to each other. Maybe to each other. But I don't think so. I think it's what they like. They would turn it off. They'd give you a, you know what I mean? They would just hit play for a minute then turn it off. But honestly, they're watching and loving content from around the world.

1:44:57I watched this interview of yours where the journalist was telling you you're killing Hollywood and you were talking about how you're saving Hollywood. Yeah. Explain. You might be saving Hollywood. I can't explain why he said you're killing, but yeah. I think saving is like what we're doing. I mean, we're continuing to be able to create an environment where we can get films made and TV shows made. And doing it in a way that I think what's, what's, what I think is scaling Hollywood is where people forgetting the audience. And, and for us, it's like, we're, we're obsessed about, on the audience and serving them how they want, the way they want, the content they want, the programming they want, uh, and doing it really well.

1:45:37And that's like, and the, the numbers speak, speak for themselves where people are, what they're doing and what they're not doing. Um, and so I think we're onto the right track by listening to customers, like listening to the, to the audience. what do you think happens next in the podcasting world the independent content creators who are not not sitting behind any organization yeah how does that world evolve does netflix start competing there look i think the more podcasts become forward video forward um and people are watching on tv which they are more doing more and more frequently it's very likely that a lot of those what could end up on netflix not all of them but i do think that there's a there's a place on netflix for them and where they could we could out we could monetize better than it being out everywhere else where they uh you where you find podcasts because we have a big enough distribution platform to bring most of the audience to you the same way so possibly we're looking at all of them so i'd say the um the breadth of places that we're looking for new storytelling and new creators is bigger than it used to be.

1:46:44It's not just film school. It's not just a film festival. A lot of times it's YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. Are they eating up a lot of the mindshare that used to go to fiction? I don't know what they're trading off for. So like we're not dropping and they're growing. It could be that they're just accelerating the decline of linear television, which wouldn't be a bad thing for us. So, but I do think what people are using the TV for is very interesting how evolved it just in the last couple of years. A lot of people tell me, Ted, that the youth have no patience. They're dead scrolling all the time and their ability to do one thing for a prolonged duration is limited.

1:47:30But then I know many, many young people who are watching 10 hours of a Netflix show without a break or maybe 15 or 20 hours. Yeah. So who's right? I have not given up on the attention span of youth. When Squid Game drops, they're going to stop everything they're doing and watch Squid Game in two days. Yeah. So is it increasing or decreasing? I think you've got to entertain them. We have to be more entertaining than dead scrolling. Binging, you have to out binge dead scrolling. Dead scrolling is like short-term spurts of dopamine, right? Yeah. What chemical is Netflix catering to when you're watching a 10-hour show?

1:48:08I think if our common references as a culture are memes, that's depressing. To me, they're throwaway because they're throwaway. You know what I mean? You wouldn't know. People of a certain age don't even know the things that you and I were talking about tonight. So I feel like what's great about it is that we're getting into their soul, getting into their heart, getting into their own experience. The way that you think about a movie that you grew up with. The way I remember seeing Jaws at 10 years old in the movie theater, people screaming, popcorn flying in the air. That's part of who I am. And that's what we're trying to, we're tapping into that.

1:48:43You have an interesting marketing strategy where you produce content to market content. Does that work? Oh, you mean producing like a podcast to promote a show? Yeah, definitely. Yeah? Why does that work? Versus say a billboard or a hoarding or? I think it works in conjunction with all those things. It does not emplace them. So you have to have a lot of touch points to get in the culture these days. There's a lot of things competing for your attention. So sometimes if you're really deep in, you're a big podcast listener or watcher, and you're also a true crime lover, that that true crime podcast about the show upcoming, it's a natural.

1:49:25Right. And that works. so if I made content if I produced a 10 part one hour series about something let's say about the financial markets what would my go-to strategy be? Say I met Monica and you and you guys have greenlit it you paid for me to produce it everything is done I need to create a buzz about it because it's coming on Netflix's homepage tomorrow where would I go? Luckily you have a great following of entrepreneurs right? So if you make a show like that and it doesn't appeal to your base, it's doomed. So you can go out. I mean, not for me specifically. No, say someone like you, you go out to your base.

1:50:07If it's huge or if it's even small. And then have that echo and get larger and larger. Do you think any competition could come for YouTube, Instagram? Twitter, I know each of them do different things, but are you seeing something that I have not seen in terms of competition? These things all have life cycles. Yeah. Remember MySpace? Yeah. Any that you think is nearing the end of their life cycle? That I can't call. That I can't call. No? The global critical mass that exists today for TikTok, for Instagram, for YouTube is pretty tough to not have to challenge. Gaming. We didn't speak about this.

1:50:56You're planning to set, you're planning to bring in a lot of gaming and OTT. Yeah. Can you elaborate? How will that work? Yeah. Because a TV remote is a very inconvenient way to play a game. Yeah. So there's a lot of it was coming in where you just play, play on your mobile. Right. That's part of your subscription. And then now we're optimizing some of the games for TV as well, including a multi multiplayer party games and those kinds of things too. So it's basically meant to be like you've asked earlier about these games compete with Netflix. sometimes and it competes for time and energy and screen time.

1:51:26So when we, we want to be part of that with, uh, with those people who love gaming. And this wouldn't be large AAA games. They would be like the light. A little bit of both. I mean, we've, you know, we've licensed a lot of large AAA games that are in the program now, uh, grand, the grand theft auto games, by way of example, they do very, very well. Uh, and then these other, there's other, like mostly like games for younger people, puzzle games, all kinds of games, just like Netflix itself. with the way we have documentary and film and television, foreign language. Yeah. I don't have any questions per se, Ted.

1:51:58Any fleeting thoughts? Like anything you'd like to say? If you were to presume for a second that you're talking to a 20-year-old Indian boy or girl who wants to start a business in media, content, anything you'd like to say to them? I think that young people, you said they're short attention span. I do think they're impatient. And I do think that a lot of these, a lot of media jobs, particularly, if you're going to start a media business, you, to be very successful, you're going to want to know how to do everything that everyone's doing. And the best way to do that is to start at the bottom, put in the time and work for work on a company, be a production assistant on a film, go get coffee for a writer's room, to all those kinds of things that you didn't think you wanted to do.

1:52:48But if you want to do a run, if you want to run a business in this part, You're going to have to learn how all those things operate and how all those people work if you want to be successful. And the best way to do it is to do it. And this is the beauty of being young is you put in a little bit of time and figure out as soon as you learn what you need to learn. As soon as you find that this part may be, by the way, you may discover the avenue that you've really been looking for all along by spending that time in the writer's room or on set or in post-production or the VFX house as an assistant.

1:53:20where you have opportunity to learn and be mentored. So I would say don't be impatient. Take your time, learn the roles, learn the jobs, learn the people who do those jobs and see if that's really what you want to do. Any fleeting words for India in your very short visit here? Every time, I'd say for 10 years, I've heard that India is two years away. And I feel like it's never been more true right now. I mean, it just feels like India is on a precipice of something very big. And this is probably the most exciting time that I've been aware of in India's history. Done. All right. Thank you. Good time.

1:54:01Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Did you have fun? Yeah, very much. Yeah.

1:54:11Shah Rukh directs movies as well? Oh, you're talking about The Sun? The Sun. Oh, you guys bought the show. Yeah, yeah. You're producing it, aren't you? The Beds of Bollywood, yeah. It's very fun. Have you watched it? I've watched the first two episodes so far. What do you think of it? It's very funny. It's kind of like, you know, people, I think people in India and people outside of India know nothing about the inner workings of Bollywood. So it's a really fun world. Yeah, I'm a sweet guy. I really like it. He's a good director. He's a very good director. Yeah? Yeah.