Hard Fork
Hosted by Casey Newton and Kevin Roose
Ted Sarandos, a chief executive of Netflix, on the future of entertainment.
8,157 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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So Casey, we should explain what's going to happen in this episode because it's going to be a little different.
What's going to happen, Kevin?
So it is the holiday. Happy July 4th to all our listeners out there. And we are off this week, but we wanted to bring you something from our colleagues at another New York Times podcast, The Interview.
Yeah, this is kind of sort of our tribute to America is how I would describe what we're about to do. We're taking the day off and we're bringing you a great American.
So The Interview is a podcast from the New York Times Magazine where every week, one of the two hosts, Lulu Garcia Navarro and David Marchese, interview famous and notable people, everyone from Anne Hathaway to Charlamagne the God to Serena Williams. It's a really great show. I've been really enjoying it. And there was a recent interview that one of their hosts, Lulu Garcia Navarro, did that we thought would be interesting to bring to Hard Fork listeners on our week off.
Yeah, it was Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. And it's hard to imagine somebody sort of more at the center of tech and culture than Ted has been over the past decade plus. And I was really interested to hear some of what he had to say about the modern condition.
Anyway, we thought you would all enjoy hearing this interview with Ted Sarandos. So we thought we'd bring you this episode of The Interview this week. We will be back next week with a new episode. In the meantime, enjoy your holiday. Hope you get some time off. Don't set off any fireworks.
No, because the real fireworks are in this episode, Kevin. Listen to what Lulu asked Ted.
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From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro.
If you're like me, you probably spent some large portion of this week sitting on your sofa, watching Netflix. Rom-coms are my thing, and my latest obsession is this Turkish series. It's called Thank You Next. Once I watch a few international rom-coms, you can bet that Netflix is going to feed me more of them. Maybe you've had this experience with sports documentaries or thrillers. But as I'm vegging out on the couch, I'm not really thinking much about the people shaping my habit. That's why I wanted to talk to Ted Sarandos. Sarandos has been at Netflix for 24 years, nearly as long as founder Reed Hastings. He's now the co-CEO of the company, along with Greg Peters,
and is in charge of their creative output. He oversaw Netflix's early expansion into streaming and pioneered the binge-watch. Under him, the company developed one of the most powerful algorithms out there, the one keeping me glued to my sofa. He was also the guy who greenlit Netflix's first original productions, like House of Cards, making Netflix into a studio, not just a platform. And he's led the company as it's ventured into reality TV, prestige film, and live entertainment, including a just-announced deal to broadcast some of the NFL's Christmas Day games. There have been less rosy moments at the company in recent years, including a few rounds of layoffs. But through it all,
Sarandos keeps giving audiences more of what we want. Whether that's good for us or not is another question. And that's a big part of what we talked about. Here's my conversation with Ted Sarandos.
As I've been reading about you, you have an unusual background for a Hollywood or tech CEO.
I would agree with that assessment. Yeah, I think, as Reed may have said it early in my career here, which was I did not breathe the rarefied air.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you came up?
Yeah, so I'll go give, real quickly in the far back, which is that my grandfather came from Samos, Greece. He used to read cowboy novels. And he came to America thinking that he could be a trail cook. He found out quickly that there was no trail cook jobs in New Jersey. He took one vacation in his lifetime, which was to Arizona to see a rodeo. And from that day forward, he wore a bolo tie every day. And he talked about that vacation till he died. And in tribute to him, all eight of the kids moved to Arizona after he passed away, including my father. My parents had four kids in their 20s. So these were kids raising kids, really. And our house was always chaos.
And my only escape from that chaos was that little box and watched a lot of television. And my mom, in her own kind of reckless way, when we couldn't afford it, would always buy gadgets. And she bought, we were the first people I know to have a VCR. And it was a very unaffordable luxury at that time. And we were, you know, most of my upbringing, we never had all the utilities on at the same time. So the gas would be cut off, and then the phone would be cut off, and the electric would be cut off, but never, never all simultaneously. But for some reason, we had a VCR. And total happenstance, the second video store in the state of Arizona opened up two blocks from my house.
Do you remember the first thing you ever checked out in the video store?
Yeah, it was a filmed version of the Willie Nelson Fourth of July picnic.
For real? That was the thing that you?
That was the very first thing I rented.
And you actually end up working at a video store.
I did at that very video store, Arizona Video Cassettes West. By the way, that's a very descriptive name, Arizona Video Cassettes West. I told you exactly what we do. And I dropped out of college, at a community college, and I worked at the video store full time.
The way that I've heard you tell it, there was like 900 titles in the catalog and you would have seen all of them. And people would come in and ask you for recommendations. Is that how that would work?
That's how it worked generally. I think people, you know, would walk in and roam around the stores aimlessly. But they actually, they kind of enjoyed that experience. It was pretty novel at the beginning. But then you really were trying to find something in that sea of boxes. And eventually I realized I had this interesting capacity for, you know, remembering these movies one after another and ability to kind of put, oh, that was kind of like that one and that one's kind of like that one. And when people would come in, I would remember, oh, hey, remember you liked that movie? You're going to love this one. I got good enough at it that even when the stores were very busy and there was a long line, they would wait for me because they wanted me to suggest something to them. And it told me something very important, which is people really value that choice.
So, cut to now. And when people talk about how we're entertained, it's all about the streaming wars, right? So we have Peacock and we have Hulu and we have Apple Plus and we have Max. And they all spent a fortune to try and catch up with Netflix. And the consensus seems to be that you, Netflix, won the war.
I try not to take those stories too seriously, any more than we did a couple of years ago when they said we were dead. So I think we have to really remember, this is a long, long journey. Lots of battles along the way. And this is probably a battle, more than it is winning a war. Early on, I think we were discounted because I think the studios thought, these tech guys are never going to figure out programming. They're never going to figure out the creative part of the business. And I think we largely have proved them wrong. And I think it would be crazy for us to think, well, these entertainment companies are never going to figure out the tech.
I do just want to get your sense of what is happening in Hollywood right now because the box office is down, studios are, you know, laying off people. You talk to people there and people feel gloomy. They feel afraid. One of the most storied studios is on the block, Paramount. What is your feeling about what's going on if it isn't Netflix's victory? Because you have so fundamentally shifted what happens in Hollywood that that has, you know, had some knock on effects.
Yeah, I think if in periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they try to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And so it's a very big vision to have, and it really helped us navigate this transition
from physical to digital because we didn't spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest in more and more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that's where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue of the business. And we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that kind of rigid about where this thing was heading.
That's harsh.
It does sound harsh that we did that, but it got the whole company in the mindset is that we shouldn't keep investing in the old business. It's going to prevent us from investing in the new business and the new business is going to get us to the next place.
Which leads us to where Netflix is today, where you bring a lot of global content in, you have all sorts of different types of things. In the job you have now, you are probably best positioned to shape what kind of culture people are consuming.
What have you noticed about shifting tastes in America?
I think we're entering into a new era now where content and great stories can come from almost anywhere in the world and they can very conveniently sit on the shelf, I'm doing air quotes right now, next to your favorite show and you will discover an incredible story from Korea or an incredible story from Italy or incredible story from Spain that you would ever otherwise have no access to and maybe no awareness of before, but that it's this kind of storytelling that's very close to the kind of storytelling that you like. So the creator of Squid Game, he pitched that show as a movie for 10 years. He'd almost completely given up on it and our team in Korea had the foresight to advise him that
this is a great story, but it's a much bigger world. Have you ever thought about going out and trying to break down that world a little more and giving us a little more exposition? And he went off and wrote those scripts and made Squid Game and Squid Game became the most watched show in the history of Netflix around the world, including in the United States.
Did that surprise you at the time?
It blew my mind, blew my mind. I knew it was great. I knew it would do great in Korea, but I had no idea it would be the most watched show on television, maybe in the history of television. But when Scott Frank wrote Queen's Gambit, you know, that was a script that he could not sell as a film for the longest time and it was an enormous success on Netflix around the world and it was just one decision away from still sitting on a shelf, you know, gathering dust.
So you're giving these wonderful examples of the kinds of shows that Netflix has been able to bring to people. These are prestige shows. I am thinking of this, though, in terms of this broader question of how we consume culture today. I'm thinking about my own experience on Netflix. So my husband likes horror and his Netflix account looks very different to mine. In fact, we keep it very, very separate. His is Lulu Don't Touch and mine is Lulu Romcom.
These are your profile names?
These are our profile names. He doesn't want me to muddy his horror algorithm. And when you look at them both, He doesn't get rom coms and I don't get horror. And it feels like the cultural curation is more a science than an art. That thing that used to be the connection where someone might tell you about something. Now it's managed in a way that can allow for these serendipitous things like the surprise of Squid Game, but often gives you more of what you already want. I guess I'm just asking, has streaming been good for culture?
Oh, I think it's been great for culture. Not only great for culture in a strange way, I think it's been great for, to make the world a safer place.
Oh, tell me why.
I think you're exposed to cultures around the world in a way that makes you more understanding and empathetic. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie, like A Separation. It's a story of a couple getting divorced in Iran and it's like, you realize when you watch it is how much we have in common with each other around the world. And I think it just like all storytelling makes the world a smaller, safer place.
But doesn't it atomize you too? I mean, this idea of I'm having my own unique experience, myself, my choices, that I get fed more of the same. And this idea of communal culture and communal spaces gets sort of pushed away.
No, you know, look, I think it's happening around where you think, see something like, like Baby Reindeer. There was a time when something like Baby Reindeer would not even be seen in the United States. And if it did, it'd be seen on PBS once.
This, we should say, as we're speaking, Baby Reindeer is the number one show on Netflix. It's about a stalker. It has some dark themes of sexual assault and it's been a hit.
And written and created and stars the person who's telling their own story about what happened to them. It's very, very big in the UK. And in that way that Netflix does this, it gets picked up in the algorithm and starts getting more and more presented because when something gets that big in one country, it's likely there's a lot of audience for it outside of that country. And it's been an enormous hit around the world. And the way that you just described it, I may never watch. But I think when you sit down and say, oh, this is somebody who is being stalked by this, by a woman who, and the situation is becoming more and more dangerous. And yet he's oddly likes it enough that he doesn't want to stop it. And he has to try to figure out what is it about him that makes him not want to stop
this incredibly dangerous situation? And it unpacks over, you know, these incredible episodes of this story that people devour. And I don't, I don't think it's because it's dark and I don't think because it's weird. I think it's because it's a really incredible human story.
Just to come back to something you said here, are international audiences pushing American audiences to broaden their horizons? That's an interesting feedback loop.
Yeah, I think it's, I mean, what it's pushing is, is that you don't have to adapt your storytelling to America to work. If your movie, if your film works, if your TV series works in the home country, it's got to be very authentic. And I think what international audiences pick up on is that authenticity. So I do think when you try to engineer something to travel, it really appeals to no one. I can't think of anything that we've done that has been engineered to travel that actually did travel.
I'm thinking in particular of, you know, Hollywood studios trying to make global hits, right? That will play in China, that will play in the United States, that will be popular in Argentina. That's hard.
And I do think that globalization of American film has disconnected American film from audiences. I think that the, the love affair with film is lessened because of it.
So we're talking about prestige shows, global hits, but there's also been a lot of discussion about what's been dubbed folding your laundry shows, right? Something that isn't difficult to watch, it's light, it's fun, it's not expensive to make. And, you know, you've got a lot of examples of that. Selling Sunset, Jenny in Georgia, Alone, the survivalist show. Do you feel like you've cornered the market on that? And is that like a title that you want to own?
Look, if there's one quote that I could take back, it would have been in 2012, I said, "We're going to become HBO before HBO could become us." What I was trying to say is, you know, at that time HBO was, I think, the gold standard of original programming. What I should have said back then is we, we want to be HBO and CBS and BBC and all those different networks around the world that entertain people and not narrow it to just HBO. Because I do think that prestige or the programming plays a very important role in culture. But it's very small. It's a boutique business. And we're currently programming for about 650 million people around the world.
We have to have a very broad variety of things that people watch and love. So I think what we are, again, very consumer centric, so we take a consumer view of quality. The people who love Jenny and Georgia will tell you Jenny and Georgia is great. So to me, that's quality television. And if that's what you want to watch, we want to make the best version of that.
I want to, I want to ask you about the movie side of things. Because we've been talking about the, the series. You have a new head of film, Dan Lin, and that suggests to me that you're tweaking strategy. Whenever somebody new comes in, they have a, you know, an idea of what they want to do differently, and they have a different charge. And a criticism of Netflix from some corners is that you make too much stuff that isn't as good as it could be, specifically in movies. So I guess the question is, are you trying to make better movies now? Is that the mandate?
So I will back up and say that I don't agree with the premise that quantity and quality are somehow in, in, in conflict with each other. We've had eight Best Picture nominees in the last five years on Netflix. So I do think we've been making a, like we were talking about earlier about the, the breadth of things. I think our content, our programming and our movie programming has been great, but it's just not all for you. And it's not meant to be all for you.
I know, but you also have an Irish Wish, for example.
Yeah.
And I was looking at, you know, your summer slate, the movies are all pretty mid-tier.
Well, look, I, I think, like I said, I think the way that we all talk about films culturally, they tend to wrap around either things that were number one at the box office or won the Oscar for Best Picture, and almost nothing in between. And I do think that people's tastes are incredibly broad and diverse. Irish Wish is great. If you, you, you love a rom-com, you didn't like it?
I'm giving you a face.
I saw the face. My point is, is that I am going by the numbers, that people, how many people watch it, how many people watch the whole thing. People generally turn off things they don't like in this on-demand world.
Us rom-com lovers are very committed to watch things to the bitter end.
But again, I think that Irish Wish is at the kind of high end of the of the hallmark scale and not at the kind of, you know, mid-tier of the Fox Searchlight, you know, scale.
I don't want to get tied up on Irish Wish, but I do want to understand a little bit of what is going to change now, if anything, because, you know, you have made films like The Gray Man. It had a budget of 200 million. Red Notice was the same. They weren't critical successes. So I guess, how are you thinking about how to make movies at Netflix?
Look, I would just say that we've never, at any point, wanted to make bad movies at Netflix. We do acknowledge that it's a creative endeavor and some things don't go as planned. I would tell you, though, that I'm very pleased with the mix of how things have come out. I'm very pleased that we generally have films in the hunt for the Oscar and we have films that people just really like, that are just entertaining. And to your point, Red Notice is one of the most successful films we've ever had on Netflix in terms of the audience.
I guess what I'm asking is, are you going to spend that kind of money going forward?
I think some of that early, big-budget things were mostly around the fact that we had to pay a little bit of a pioneer tax as we entered into that film space, where we're competing with movies at the box office. So we probably, in those early days of the big-budget things, were bigger budgets than they needed to be. Those big, giant-scale movies, when they deliver, there's nothing better. And when they miss, man, it's a sting. But I would tell you that what I pushed our creative teams across the board to do is push on the ambition, push for the audience, not just to make things bigger, but to make them better, always.
I just want to take a step back here from talk about strategy, because it wasn't always certain that Netflix was going to be where it is now. In 2022, your stock plunged 70% after you lost subscribers for the first time since 2011. Can you take me to that moment as a leader? What do you do when something like that happens? I mean, you'd had this exponential growth and then, all of a sudden... It was a difficult moment. What is the calibration for you?
You know, on any given day, we can lose or gain 200,000 subscribers, which is what that was, which was the first time we went negative. We went negative by 200,000 subscribers. And if the quarter had ended a few weeks later, it wouldn't have, that wouldn't have been the case. This is probably the benefit of being around for a long time. I mean, we were, you know, we had times where that were much tougher than that in terms of where we were heading with the business in the earliest days. Before we were, you know, before we were a public company even. And in fact, when you look back at everything, I think you look back at any chart that's straight up and to the right, and you think nothing ever went wrong. That's what it looks like when you look back. But in the moment, those little tiny dips and hills and valleys were, you know, emotionally very rocking to a company and to a culture.
Well, what you did is you threw out some of the company's longstanding core principles. Chief among them, not having advertisers. You introduced an ad-supported subscription tier. And so I'm just wondering, as someone who had been with Netflix for as long as you had, did it feel like that was a real turn betraying the identity of the company? I mean, you had to make a tough choice.
It really wasn't that we were core principles against advertising. It's just advertising was our counterposition to television. The way that no late fees was our counterposition to video stores in our DVD days. You know, what do people don't like on Tubal TV? Watching the ads and waiting a week for the next episode. We realized, though, in this world of unlimited choice, what we didn't do is give a choice to people who didn't mind advertising at all and wanted a lower price. So for us, we thought that it was actually market expanding to give more choice to folks if they wanted a lower price and they didn't mind ads. So you got to evolve. You got to evolve.
I want to ask you a little bit more about you as a leader. Hollywood celebrities and leaders have always been politically active. And you also have been no exception. In 2020, you supported Black Lives Matter. During the invasion of Ukraine, you pulled Netflix out of Russia. It seems, though, that corporate activism is on its way out. So I'm just wondering how you're thinking about that.
Yeah, look, I don't, I don't think it's because of, um, when you think about diversity, diversity should be all things, including diversity of thought, which makes political activism of companies very difficult, uh, cause people have different opinions and different ideas and different thoughts and you're representing a lot of different constituencies. So I think companies should be very, very careful, uh, about how they, uh, insert themselves into these discussions. Uh, sometimes when it's, you know, just a matter of pretty pure black and white, right and wrong, I think pulling out of Russia was a much clearer decision of that, of anything we've ever done. It's impossible to do business in Russia without doing, being in business with that government. So for me, that was kind of a no-brainer decision. I don't even, I didn't view it as political. I was, I viewed it
as quite impractical, uh, to do anything but.
I mean, you've seen other companies in Hollywood, Disney, among others, but we're seeing Google now, um, sort of crack down on internal activism within their company. You say it's a difficult balancing act. And so as a company that tries to be all things to all people, um, how do you navigate that?
Yeah, I think I really, I, people have very different sensibilities about things depending on where they are in the world and different opinions of these things. And I do think that it's one of those things where it's very hard to say that what our view would represent the views of all of our members and all of our employees. I think that would be a very high bar to clear, but that is the clear, that is the bar I would like it to clear if we're gonna do, if we do that as a company. And I do think, by the way, just people look for, yeah, I don't know, I don't know why that happened over the last couple of years where people looked for, to corporate leaders to do that, to do those things. They didn't used to.
I wanna look ahead to the future because obviously what Netflix decides to do, um, will impact the way that we all consume culture. Do you see Netflix now as sort of middle aged? I mean, you're no longer, you know, the upstart business that needs to constantly be proving itself. And now you're a more mature business. Middle aged might be the wrong word, I guess.
Middle aged might be too old. Might be too old.
Sorry about that. Speaking for myself here.
Speaking as someone like myself who is, I mean, yeah. If I think I'm going to live to 120, I'm middle aged. But I think the business is maturing, of course. And I think it's taking on different characteristics. And again, those things that you didn't do before. We weren't adamantly against advertising. But when you start thinking about it as actually growing the addressable market for Netflix, that's a great thing to do advertising. Just do it well and make sure that it works well, both for the members and for advertisers.
So who is your competitor now?
Look, I think we compete for screen time. That's the easiest way to do it. Almost all watching on Netflix is on a big screen on the television. And we're in the US, we're about 10% of screen time on connected televisions. Outside of the US, we're as little as 3%. Ton of room to grow. What we compete with is everything else that happens on that screen. Social media, including YouTube, other streaming apps and gaming, which is, takes up a lot of screen time.
Yeah, I mean, YouTube is actually bigger than you. It's mostly free.
Free is super popular.
Free is super popular and you're not free. How do you compete with free?
Yeah, look, I think you've got to be worth paying for all the time. And we have to be better at them all the time, at the programming, at the choosing of it, at driving the conversation around the world of it, which drives the kind of must-iness of the things that we're doing. So it's still a lot of work to do there.
Yeah, I mean, one thing that YouTube's had for a while that you're just starting to break into is live TV.
Earlier this year, WWE announced it was bringing Raw, the weekly live pro wrestling show, to Netflix. You've just had live roasts, comedy specials. Talk me through the move into live entertainment. What is that doing for you?
It's really incredible, the conversation that gets driven around the world around a big live event. You know, in a world of on-demand and total control, the novelty of a big live event, if it's the Super Bowl or the Tom Brady roast, is that people get very excited that they're all watching it at the same time. And what we saw with the Tom Brady roast was it was driving so much conversation around the world that the audience kept growing and growing and growing minute on minute that people kept coming to it. And I just look at that and say, well, there's some real value in people gathering around the TV at the same time of doing that. It's a novel, it's not the way people watch most things, but it's something we don't want to not be a part of because it's happening on that television screen and that people get very excited about it.
It's making me laugh a little because you're like reinventing the live special.
Yeah, live has been around for a long time, it turns out. We started that way, as you recall. But I do think it's funny, the novelty of it. Because I do remember, you know, as a kid, when Roots was on every night for, the streets were empty and people were in there. Remember the early days of TV, I Love Lucy, when, shoot, they would go to a commercial break, the water pressure would go down because everyone went to the bathroom at the same time. So we don't want to not be part of all of those things that you could, we'd look to that happen on that screen.
I just want to look ahead in our last few minutes. I am just wondering, what are you most worried about?
Mostly, I think a lot about our own internal execution. So I worry a lot about, you know, you get big, you move fast, and you miss some big turn because there was some internal miss where you took your eye off the ball. So I really try to think about that all the time, is how do we, you know, how do you, it's a very different company with 270 million subscribers around the world than it was when, you know, when I joined with 175,000 subscribers getting DVDs in the US. So how you evolve the company, how you don't get too nostalgic, how you don't be too romantic about the past because the future is so exciting. And I do think that movies and games and television and stand-up comedy, all these things are real art forms. Otherwise, it's just killing an hour. And then I'd be very worried about TikTok.
This is not just killing an hour. This is entertaining, enlightening, expanding, seeding conversation, all those things.
Ted Sarandos, we are going to speak again.
Yes, yes.
But I really, really thank you for your time. This has been really interesting.
Thank you, Lulu.
After the break, I called Ted back to talk about a part of the future that people in Hollywood have more mixed feelings about: AI.
There is not a scenario, I don't believe, that an AI program is going to write a better screenplay than a great writer, or going to replace a great performance, or we won't be able to tell the difference. AI is not going to take your job. The person who uses AI well might take your job.
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Hello.
Hello. This is the interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. So, as you know, the premise for this is we call you back a few days later to sort of talk over maybe things that I'd been thinking about, maybe things that you'd been thinking about.
I'm wondering if you had any thoughts from our previous conversation?
The thing that stuck with me most was our discussion about film, because in so many ways, it captures everything we're trying to do. And I feel like our discussion about Irish Wish is a great example of how hard it is, because we all have these great contradictions even inside of ourselves. So, I love The Crown, and I love Is It Cake? And I love them both equally, which doesn't make any sense to both. So, when I think about that and think about all of our people, what do we try to do? We're trying to make movies that are great. We define quality from the perspective of the audience. So, if the audience loves the movie, it's great. That's quality.
And for me, it is, you know, Irish Wish maybe didn't scratch the itch for you, but 65 million people watched that movie. That's an enormous hit, and people love it. So, I just, critics and reviews, it's a great thing. You want to please everybody. But sometimes, the movies that we make are not made for critics. So, it's kind of a no-brainer. Some movie might get a bad review because it's not really made for that demographic of a film critic. But for the audience, they'd love it.
Well, this dovetails very nicely in what I was thinking about after our conversation. Because when we spoke, I was sort of pressing you on this question of whether your strategy, which is everything for everyone, affects the quality of your programming. And you argued, as you just argued, that you can have quality and quantity. And you make a good case. So it left me wondering this. Discernment is part of any entertainment business. So what's not right for Netflix?
Great question. I mean, because I don't think that there's a clean answer. Because the best version of something may work really well for Netflix that, you know, but it just hasn't worked to date. There's some obvious ones like we, today, we don't do like breaking news and that kind of thing, because I think there's a lot of other outlets for it. People aren't looking to us for that. And then to the, to the extent that on demand and the distribution channel and the recommendation channel brings a lot of value to the storytelling, we're, you know, that's perfectly, perfectly in our sweet spot.
Hmm. I guess I'm thinking of a Barbie, an Oppenheimer. I mean, are there things that just don't feel like they're in your wheelhouse right now?
I think, I mean, I think both of those movies would have done, would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix. And so I don't think there's anything, any reason to believe that certain kind of movies do or don't work. There's no reason to believe that the size of the screen or the, or that the movie itself for all people is better in any size of screen. My, my son's an editor, he's 28 years old, and he has, he watched Lords of Arabia on his phone.
Oh, no. Oh, that's sacrilege.
I'm gonna shift a little bit, because there was something else that I was thinking about. I'd love to know from your vantage point, how you think about the possible creative trade offs and consequences of using AI.
I think that AI is a natural kind of advancement of things that are happening in the creative space today anyway. Think about volume stages did not displace on-location shooting. They and I actually think about things like AI as being, I don't think of them as a creative tool in the threatening sense. I think of them as a creator's tool in an enabling sense, ways that filmmakers, writers, directors, editors will use AI as a tool to do their jobs better and to do things more efficiently and more effectively. And even in the best case, to put things on screen that would be impossible to do. So I think this is a creator's tool.
This is nobody's designed to replace creators with AI. It's meant to be a creator's tool to enhance the ability to tell stories better than ever. And which I think that's the possibility of it. And if we get caught up in the all the possible downsides of it and we just get stuck, I don't think that's going to help anything. It's very difficult to stop the advancement of new technology. And in almost every case, new technology in entertainment has been fought tooth and nail. And at the end of the day, improves the business. Think about this gigantic leap in from hand-drawn animation to computer-generated animation. And look how many more people animation employs today than it used to.
That business has gotten bigger and better because of these advancements in technology. Remember how everybody fought a home video? And for several, couple of decades, the studios wouldn't license movies to television. So every advancement in technology in entertainment has been fought and then ultimately has turned out to grow the business. So and I don't know that this will be any different.
I guess the difference might be that all those things were tools that were used to, you know, open up the creative space. Whereas what a lot of people feel is that AI might actually supplant the creators.
I have more faith in humans than that. I really do. I think that if you go back, there's a great documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. It's a beautiful movie. It's really one of my favorite documentaries. But in that movie, it was like in this, I don't know what year it came out now, but he and Francis Fukoplas predicting, you know, that some kid in the Midwest is going to make the next great movie on because their cameras are going to be so cheap. And it is true that, you know, that tools have never been more accessible and telling a great story should never be, you know, could be as simple as taking your phone out and shooting it and uploading it to YouTube. Happens all
the time. But I do think like if you think about that as a thing to be afraid of, or do you think about that as an opportunity for how do I do this? There's not a scenario, I don't believe, that an AI program is going to write a better screenplay than a great writer, or going to replace a great performance, or we won't be able to tell the difference. AI is not going to take your job. The person who uses AI well might take your job.
Before we go, we've been talking about all the ways the industry is changing and Netflix is growing. I'm wondering, is it possible for Netflix to get too big?
You know, it's a very broad space. So like I said, we're, look how long we've been at this on the co, I think I'm very proud of what the teams do. And we're 10% of what happens on a connected television today. But when I think about how people, how we divide time between video games, social media, user-generated content, all the other studios, all the other television broadcasts, all the sporting events. So you've got so many things you're competing for that the chance to be dominant is almost, is very difficult. And that's not the goal. The goal is to be the best.
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This episode of The Interview was produced by Wyatt Orm. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, with mixing by Brad Fisher. Original music by Alicia Baetoupe and Mary Lozano. Photography by Devon Yelkin. The senior booker for The Interview is Priya Mathew. Their senior producer is Seth Kelly, and their executive producer is Alison Benedict. Special thanks to Nicole Spurling, Efim Shapiro, Rory Walsh, Brannan Borelli, Nick Pittman, Matty Macielo, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schuman, and Sam Dolnick. Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant, with engineering by Chris Wood. Our theme is by Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogly.
Video production by Ryan Manning, Sawyer Roque, and Dylan Bergerson. If you haven't already, check out our YouTube channel at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Puy Ming-Tam, Kate LaPresty, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at [email protected].
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