Speaker 1: One of the most valuable entertainment companies in the world
Speaker 1: and one of the most popular entertainment companies in the
Speaker 1: world is Netflix. It currently has more than two hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy five million subscribers.
Speaker 2: I recently had a chance in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: To sit down with the co CEO of that company,
Speaker 1: Ted Surrandos, and ask him how he got started this
Speaker 1: company from a very modest background, and how he now
Speaker 1: sees the future of Netflix. So, when you joined Netflix
Speaker 1: in two thousand, the company was about three years old
Speaker 1: but relatively small. Did you ever in your wildest dreams
Speaker 1: imagine the company would be one of the most valuable
Speaker 1: companies in the world and you would have today a
Speaker 1: market value of over three hundred billion dollars.
Speaker 3: The short answer to that question is no. I think
Speaker 3: when we joined we had a couple hundred people, including
Speaker 3: the people who are stuffing DVD envelopes. Back then, Blockbuster
Speaker 3: was the biggest entertainment brand in the world, with a
Speaker 3: market gap of about eight billion dollars. They were definitely
Speaker 3: the biggest in terms of global footprint. I mean, most
Speaker 3: people watch their movies renting a DVD from Blockbuster, and
Speaker 3: at eight billion, that seemed almost unattainable when we went
Speaker 3: public in two thousand and two, about two hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty million.
Speaker 1: So for people who were too young to remember, this,
Speaker 1: Blockbuster was a place where you go to buy something
Speaker 1: called a DVD, yes, and you went there, you rented them,
Speaker 1: and then you put them back on your VCR, and
Speaker 1: then you after a couple of days, like a library book,
Speaker 1: you bring it back and so forth. The novelty that
Speaker 1: Netflix had when it first started in nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: as I recall, was that you didn't have to go
Speaker 1: to a Blockbuster. You could order something I guess online
Speaker 1: and then you would have it sent to you by
Speaker 1: a FedEx or equivalent kind of company.
Speaker 3: Right through the US mail okay ESPs.
Speaker 1: So who came up with the idea of saying, well,
Speaker 1: FedEx is a little old and mailing is old, and
Speaker 1: we want to go to streaming. Who was the brilliant
Speaker 1: person that came up with that idea?
Speaker 3: You know, the company was always conceived to be a
Speaker 3: digital company, read Hastings. When he came up with this idea,
Speaker 3: he was thinking about it very much. So when he
Speaker 3: named the company even he called it Netflix, not DVD Flix,
Speaker 3: and this idea. When I met Reid in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3: He describes Netflix pretty much like it is right now.
Speaker 3: And this was at a time when no literally no
Speaker 3: entertainment was coming into the home on the internet, and
Speaker 3: he described a world where all home entertainment would come
Speaker 3: in on the internet.
Speaker 1: So when streaming came along, the theory was that people
Speaker 1: would be willing to pay let's say a monthly subscribing rate,
Speaker 1: right and that they would see programming they couldn't otherwise
Speaker 1: easily get. But the idea of doing your own program
Speaker 1: it was relatively novel. Now you are seen as the
Speaker 1: person who came up with the idea of not just
Speaker 1: taking stuff that's already out there, the one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: things that might already be available, but producing your own
Speaker 1: programming for Netflix.
Speaker 2: So where'd you get that idea from?
Speaker 3: So in the very beginning, we didn't really think much
Speaker 3: about doing original programming because it wasn't the problem we
Speaker 3: were trying to solve. The problem was really distribution and
Speaker 3: how to you in the consumer relationship with how to
Speaker 3: watch a movie? You go to the video store, you
Speaker 3: rent it, you return it, you pay a light fee
Speaker 3: if you're late, and it was a very clunky way
Speaker 3: to distribute things in this way, the subscription revenue, the
Speaker 3: subscription model gave the people the ability not to ever
Speaker 3: have a late fee. They could kind of pick and
Speaker 3: choose that however they wanted things. So we were solving
Speaker 3: a distribution problem one and the other one was maybe
Speaker 3: a bigger problem, which was marketing. It's incredibly inefficient to
Speaker 3: market movies and TV shows to people because tastes are
Speaker 3: so diverse and so eclectic that in order for me
Speaker 3: to tell you about a movie that I think you
Speaker 3: might like, I probably have to take out an ad
Speaker 3: in the newspaper and tell the whole city about it
Speaker 3: and hope that you see it.
Speaker 1: So the industry lore is that you got this off
Speaker 1: the ground by agreeing to pay one hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: to a new show that had not actually showed.
Speaker 2: There was House of Cards, Plow. It was a lot
Speaker 2: like real estate. It's all about location, location, location.
Speaker 1: And it had not produced a single anything yet, but
Speaker 1: it was a concept. When you told read Hastings, I
Speaker 1: guess what, I just spent one hundred million dollars to
Speaker 1: buy something and exists.
Speaker 2: Yet did he say great idea?
Speaker 3: No? He was a little surprised, but when I explained
Speaker 3: it to him, he was very supportive of it immediately.
Speaker 3: You have to remember, recreated this company culture that enabled
Speaker 3: me to take a big swing like that, and for me,
Speaker 3: I looked at it as a kind of classic risk reward. Yes,
Speaker 3: this is a lot of money. If this doesn't work,
Speaker 3: we will have dramatically overpaid for a show, which we
Speaker 3: kind of at risk of doing all the time. But
Speaker 3: if it does work, we could fundamentally change the course
Speaker 3: of the business.
Speaker 2: If it didn't work and you think you might be
Speaker 2: out of a job.
Speaker 3: I told I prepared my wife that it was a possibility.
Speaker 3: She said, she said, will you get fired to this?
Speaker 3: Other one guy said, well, it's fireable, it's firerable.
Speaker 1: There's another idea that you were credited with and I
Speaker 1: think correctly with coming up with, which is called binge watching.
Speaker 2: I guess I could call it. I don't know if
Speaker 2: you like that word.
Speaker 1: Didn't initially, Okay, So I understand binge watching. And this historically,
Speaker 1: when there was a TV series on, you watched a
Speaker 1: series episode one week, the next week, you watch the
Speaker 1: second one next week. So on you came up with
Speaker 1: the idea of having are the ability to watch everything
Speaker 1: right at once, more or less binge watching, as they
Speaker 1: call it. Did you come up with that idea or
Speaker 1: did it evolve some way, or how did it come about?
Speaker 3: It was pretty heavily informed by what people were doing
Speaker 3: back in the back in the earliest days on DVD,
Speaker 3: I noticed that we'd have disc that would have four
Speaker 3: episodes of a show on it, and they would turn
Speaker 3: very fast because people were churning through the show as
Speaker 3: quick as they could. And then when we started streaming,
Speaker 3: we were licensing shows that had already aired on television,
Speaker 3: so we got them a year later, but we got
Speaker 3: the whole season and we just put it all up,
Speaker 3: so we on a notice, when you're watching, some people
Speaker 3: watch two episodes at a time, some people watch three.
Speaker 3: Nobody watched one. So when we got how came to
Speaker 3: House the cards, we had to decide how to release it,
Speaker 3: and I said, well, don't we just put it like
Speaker 3: the other thousands of things on Netflix and do it
Speaker 3: all at once and see what happens.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Sometimes in the business world, particularly the technology world, somebody
Speaker 1: might have a great idea and they have an advance
Speaker 1: on somebody for maybe two years or so, and then
Speaker 1: everybody else figures out what they should be doing, and
Speaker 1: they catch up, and sometimes they have more resources than
Speaker 1: they beat the original person who came up with the concept.
Speaker 1: Were you worried that programmers like our companies had programming
Speaker 1: like Disney would figure out streaming and then wipe you out?
Speaker 2: Or you never were worried about that.
Speaker 3: No, always worried about that. We couldn't believe it took
Speaker 3: so long for them to catch up to it. In fact,
Speaker 3: as one of the motivators to make our own content
Speaker 3: was I was pretty sure that if we were right,
Speaker 3: that all of these people who are supplying us their
Speaker 3: old shows would never sell to us.
Speaker 1: When you started producing shows and making your own shows,
Speaker 1: did you become the most popular person in Hollywood? Because
Speaker 1: all of a sudden somebody has somebody who can green
Speaker 1: light something and so could you go out to dinner
Speaker 1: or lunch without having people descend upon you with scripts
Speaker 1: and so forth?
Speaker 2: How did you deal with all that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was heavy because we were a new buyer
Speaker 3: is very popular in town so and I would say
Speaker 3: that it was never limited just to business hours. So
Speaker 3: if you're out at a restaurant with my wife and
Speaker 3: someone would come in and start pitching away at the table.
Speaker 3: Somebody tells these people in film school, if you ever
Speaker 3: see a buyer anywhere, sell to them?
Speaker 1: Does that ever work there? But you ever never went
Speaker 1: to nobody came up and lunch. But an idea that
Speaker 1: you're actually.
Speaker 3: I can't think of one.
Speaker 1: You know, there's been a lot of consolidation in recent
Speaker 1: years in the entertainment world. You know, Time Warner was
Speaker 1: sold in effect, and then you've got Powamount.
Speaker 2: Now being sold.
Speaker 1: Is all of this good for you because there's consolidation
Speaker 1: and then you have fewer people to compete it with.
Speaker 1: Or is it not so good because you have more
Speaker 1: powerful people that can compete against you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a little bit of both. So I think it's
Speaker 3: competition has been very good people. I usually don't talk
Speaker 3: about other people's shows publicly, but like people. As someone
Speaker 3: asked me recently, what's the show that's not on Netflix
Speaker 3: that you like? And I said The Bear. And the
Speaker 3: reason I talk about the show is because I think
Speaker 3: it raises the bar for everybody. So I think you
Speaker 3: have one competition out there to keep you push, to
Speaker 3: keep pushing you.
Speaker 1: But the consolidation won't occur by your buying one of
Speaker 1: these major studios, because that's not in your house of
Speaker 1: cards kind of thing.
Speaker 3: This is not in our DNA because they were most
Speaker 3: mostly builders. We had done a few a handful of
Speaker 3: small IP inquisitions over the years, and that may change
Speaker 3: over the next in the next few years, but for
Speaker 3: now we're trying to without the I would say a
Speaker 3: big library of IP can be a really nice benefit
Speaker 3: for us. That's really been a benefit not to have it,
Speaker 3: because it's got it's pushed us to make really original,
Speaker 3: creative things and not to stay corralled into one pool
Speaker 3: of IP. And we're spending about seventeen billion dollars on
Speaker 3: our programming and as our revenue grows, well, that number
Speaker 3: will keep growing because we do think that there's an
Speaker 3: incredible appetite for more movies and more TV shows that
Speaker 3: people love now on.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, there was a writer's strike in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: and one of the issues before it got resolved is
Speaker 1: how you deal with artificial intelligence. How do you prevent
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence from taking over what writers do, and how
Speaker 1: do you compensate them when artificial intelligence does something that
Speaker 1: adds to what they've already done. So is artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: important part of your business now? And how do you
Speaker 1: use AI and deciding what to produce and how to
Speaker 1: produce it?
Speaker 3: For me, I really mostly think of AI as a
Speaker 3: create wars tool, not a creative tool. So I think
Speaker 3: creators will use it to make to tell better stories.
Speaker 3: We're not using it to tell stories instead of them,
Speaker 3: And I don't think and I don't think we'd be
Speaker 3: very effective at it, or AI would be very effective
Speaker 3: at doing that instead of people.
Speaker 1: So when you put something on Netflix, you can analyze
Speaker 1: within an hour or so or maybe ten minutes, whether
Speaker 1: people are watching it. And do you get those kind
Speaker 1: of data algorithms that show you exactly how much people
Speaker 1: like it? And do you actually change things after you
Speaker 1: see what people like, or how do you deal with
Speaker 1: the instant feedback you get?
Speaker 3: What I'm really looking for is if they watch episode one,
Speaker 3: do they roll in episode two? And if they do two,
Speaker 3: do they get to three? And how much time are
Speaker 3: they spending. We're in a really unique place in entertainment
Speaker 3: history right now where every time you release a new
Speaker 3: movie or a new TV show, you are used to
Speaker 3: only compete with three other shows on three other networks
Speaker 3: today you compete with every single thing ever made, and
Speaker 3: one click away you could just switch to something else.
Speaker 3: So you want to watch these things? Are people? If
Speaker 3: if you push play, do you stick around? That to
Speaker 3: me is the biggest indicator of do we do it right?
Speaker 1: So let's talk about today where Netflix says today you
Speaker 1: have how many subscribers.
Speaker 3: Two hundred and seventy seven million subscribers, So you figure
Speaker 3: a couple of people per household watching, You've got about
Speaker 3: a viewership now over five hundred million people.
Speaker 1: So two hundred and seventy seven million subscribers are more
Speaker 1: than half in the United States, or.
Speaker 3: About seventy percent from outside the United.
Speaker 1: States, seventy percent outside What is the second biggest country
Speaker 1: out of the United States.
Speaker 3: Well, we report by territory, by regions, so Amia is
Speaker 3: the second largest outside of the United States, but we're
Speaker 3: very big in the UK and Brazil.
Speaker 1: So for twenty plus years or so, your subscriber numbers
Speaker 1: went up every month, it seems, without fail. And then
Speaker 1: one month, I think you announced in a quarterly earnings
Speaker 1: that actually subscribers went down a little bit. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, the world took a large part of your
Speaker 1: market capitalization away. Were you shocked that people were so
Speaker 1: upset about the fact that you lost a few subscribers
Speaker 1: compared to where they thought you should be.
Speaker 3: Probably the magnitude of it was shocking, because we knew
Speaker 3: the fundamentals of the business were intact and fine. It
Speaker 3: just you had a whip saw effect from covid. There
Speaker 3: are a lot of things that were happening that we're
Speaker 3: still trying to figure out. But it was a kind
Speaker 3: of a temporary blip, but it was it was. It
Speaker 3: was a hard thud.
Speaker 1: But your market cap has come way back and higher
Speaker 1: than it's ever been right currently, and so that blip
Speaker 1: was not a big problem, I guess. But one of
Speaker 1: the things you did that also upset people for a
Speaker 1: while was you said you can't use your past code
Speaker 1: to give it to somebody else, and not historically, as
Speaker 1: I understand it, somebody could say to his friend, I
Speaker 1: have a pass code for Netflix, why don't you use it?
Speaker 1: And I assume I was taking revenue away from you.
Speaker 1: And how did you figure out how big that problem was,
Speaker 1: and how did you have the courage to say, you
Speaker 1: know more of that and not worry that people were
Speaker 1: going to get rid of their Netflix subscription.
Speaker 3: Well, we had it was a couple of times. One
Speaker 3: was revenue, but the other part of it was this
Speaker 3: personalization helping you find something to watch works better if
Speaker 3: you don't have five or six different people using your account.
Speaker 3: So for us, it was a really a way to
Speaker 3: really hone in with the personalization technology, but also a
Speaker 3: way to kind of test the value proposition. If you've
Speaker 3: got our average members are watching about two hours in
Speaker 3: Netflix every day. So basically when you go back out
Speaker 3: to people and say, hey, you know that thing that
Speaker 3: you're using for two hours a day and not paying for,
Speaker 3: we'd like you to get your own account. And what's
Speaker 3: turned out nicely about that is most people say, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's well worth it for me to do that.
Speaker 1: Now, when I had my company and I was the
Speaker 1: co CEO of it, I had a co co who
Speaker 1: I started the company with, so we got along well,
Speaker 1: we had different responsibilities and it worked out reasonably. Well,
Speaker 1: you have a co CEO, let me talk about initially
Speaker 1: you are the company was started by Reid Hastings and
Speaker 1: he asked you to be the co co Were you
Speaker 1: surprised that a founder of a company took somebody who
Speaker 1: had been employee and made him the co CO was
Speaker 1: out a surprise to you.
Speaker 3: It was a surprise. It would be a shock if
Speaker 3: I didn't know Read that well at the time, because
Speaker 3: I back to my first time I met Read in
Speaker 3: ninety nine. He did talk about this desire to build
Speaker 3: a company that would be around decades and centuries after him,
Speaker 3: so he foresaw some kind of succession already. So I
Speaker 3: believe that Reid saw this succession that we just went
Speaker 3: through recently fifteen years ago, and started acting on it
Speaker 3: twelve years ago, and which is very unusual. I think
Speaker 3: your point, as you point out, for a founder, but
Speaker 3: for somebody who really is thinking about the company first
Speaker 3: and the longevity of a company first. He's been amazing
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 1: So he stepped back. He's executive chairman now, not involved
Speaker 1: day to day. But when he stepped back, did you say, well,
Speaker 1: now I should be the sole CEO, or did you
Speaker 1: say I want to co CEO? In addition to what
Speaker 1: you know my own responsibile I.
Speaker 3: Think in classic Read fashion, he modeled something that really worked,
Speaker 3: and we did it together for a few years, so
Speaker 3: I really got the sense of how well it works.
Speaker 3: I think Greg Greg and I read and I worked
Speaker 3: together for more than twenty years, and Greg and I
Speaker 3: worked together for about fifteen years. So we had the same,
Speaker 3: very similar shorthand we had complimentary skill sets, I believe,
Speaker 3: and we push each other in a healthy way. And
Speaker 3: what's cool about having a co ceo? You know, there's
Speaker 3: saying you know, usually sayings are rooted in reality, it's
Speaker 3: lonely at the top. I think there's something to that.
Speaker 3: And having somebody to be able to kick around hard
Speaker 3: problems with that isn't an employee or a board member
Speaker 3: is really helpful.
Speaker 2: Tell us about your background. Where were you born.
Speaker 3: I was born in Long Branch, New Jersey. Was there
Speaker 3: for a few years and my family moved to Phoenix, Arizona.
Speaker 3: I was raised in Phoenix.
Speaker 1: That's what in those days was out on usual ago
Speaker 1: from New Jersey to Arizona. Why do they move to Arizona.
Speaker 3: It's a great story. My grandfather, who was a Greek immigrant,
Speaker 3: grew up reading cowboy novels. When he actually when he
Speaker 3: came to America, he came to be a trail cook.
Speaker 3: He thought that was a real job in America, and
Speaker 3: he ended up being a cook cook. But he loved
Speaker 3: the American West and he always talked about it. And
Speaker 3: he took one vacation in his life and it was
Speaker 3: to Arizona, and he saw a rodeo and he wore
Speaker 3: a bolo tie every day till the day he died,
Speaker 3: and talked about roode on Arizona. So when he passed away,
Speaker 3: all eight of his kids moved to Arizona.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, So how old were you when you moved
Speaker 1: to Arizona?
Speaker 3: I think six years old.
Speaker 1: And did you say we're going to watch the cowboys,
Speaker 1: We're going to be living at the cowboys or what
Speaker 1: you think about that?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I didn't. We didn't see any cowboys and we
Speaker 3: got there either. It's an I was pretty developed. It
Speaker 3: was a pretty small town back then, Arizona.
Speaker 2: What did your family, your parents do?
Speaker 3: My father passed away recently, but he is He was
Speaker 3: a union electrician and my mom was to stay home mom.
Speaker 3: She took care of myself and I had three older
Speaker 3: sisters and a younger brother who I just recently lost him.
Speaker 1: So when you were a boy, what were you interested?
Speaker 1: You want to be an athlete? Did you want to
Speaker 1: be an artist or what did you want to be?
Speaker 3: I wanted to be from the earliest I remember actually
Speaker 3: thinking about what I wanted to do. I wanted to
Speaker 3: be a journalist from probably ten years old or so,
Speaker 3: but loved movies and television. I we had my parents
Speaker 3: were young, We were you know, with the couse was
Speaker 3: pretty chaotic. I kind of like order, and I kind
Speaker 3: of liked the order that I saw on television, Like
Speaker 3: those families that sat down for dinner on TV. We
Speaker 3: did not do that my growing up. And the schedule
Speaker 3: of television, I found it to be very appealing. But
Speaker 3: I really fell in love with movies and television at
Speaker 3: a pretty young age, and through that saw a journalist
Speaker 3: as heroes and I just wanted to be a journalist.
Speaker 2: So you graduate from high school, then what did you do?
Speaker 3: I did. I was the editor of the school newspaper
Speaker 3: in high school, and I went to community college because
Speaker 3: I couldn't afford a university at the time, and was
Speaker 3: editing the college paper, the community college newspaper, Glendale Community College.
Speaker 3: There I met a lot of really incredible people. Probably
Speaker 3: one of the more influential ones was Ed Asner, who
Speaker 3: kind of made this connection for me between entertainment and
Speaker 3: politics and just opened my mind to a different world
Speaker 3: to do now. I also had an epiphanade about that
Speaker 3: time that I wasn't a very good writer, so likely
Speaker 3: I was not going to be a professional journalist.
Speaker 2: So okay, So eventually you got a job at a
Speaker 2: video store.
Speaker 3: That's what I was. That was my part time job
Speaker 3: when I was going to Glendall Community College, and then
Speaker 3: when I realized I wasn't going to pursue that degree,
Speaker 3: I kind of dropped out and it was meant to
Speaker 3: be a year, but it turned out to be a
Speaker 3: permanent move to business.
Speaker 1: So I understand that you became so knowledgeable about videos
Speaker 1: that when people come in and say what should I rent,
Speaker 1: you actually had actually seen a lot of these videos,
Speaker 1: and you could make recommendations. People came in because they
Speaker 1: liked your recommendations. I wanted to see what you're going
Speaker 1: to recommend.
Speaker 3: It's true. I again, for no reason, my mother, when
Speaker 3: we did not have the money for it, my mom
Speaker 3: bought a VCR. The early time, I didn't know anyone
Speaker 3: else who had a VCR, and serendipitously, the second video
Speaker 3: store in the state of Arizona opened up a few
Speaker 3: blocks from my house, so I started you know, devouring
Speaker 3: movies by rent renting them. And then I get a
Speaker 3: job at that store and the stores are empty all day,
Speaker 3: so you can watch movies all day. I watched everything
Speaker 3: in the store, and I had a pretty good memory
Speaker 3: for it back then, and I could remember what people
Speaker 3: liked when they brought something back, and I remember that
Speaker 3: that was like this, and this was like that. And
Speaker 3: sometimes the store would get so busy, but people would
Speaker 3: wait for me so they could ask me what to
Speaker 3: watch tonight.
Speaker 1: So did you go to the owner of the store
Speaker 1: and say I should be the manager of the store.
Speaker 1: I'm so popular here, or how did you think you
Speaker 1: were an advance your career by being knowledgeable about these videos?
Speaker 3: Well, it wasn't a plan. He came to me and said, hey,
Speaker 3: we love what you do here, and my wife's had
Speaker 3: a couple of kids since you've been here, and the
Speaker 3: business has been growing. It grew to several store chain
Speaker 3: and he goes, I never seen my wife and I
Speaker 3: need to take some time off, and would you take
Speaker 3: things over? And he gave me the keys to a
Speaker 3: video rental chain. And it was an MBA course in
Speaker 3: film school all wrapped into one for me.
Speaker 2: How did you go from there to Netflix?
Speaker 3: Well, in between, I went to home video distribution, so
Speaker 3: the companies that sold the vhs and DVDs to the
Speaker 3: video stores. And while I was there, I did a
Speaker 3: pretty unique deal with Warner Brothers and Sony to revenue
Speaker 3: share DVDs, which just hadn't been done before. And read
Speaker 3: Hastings It got written about it in a trade magazine
Speaker 3: and read read it and said this is what we need.
Speaker 3: And so a mutual friend introduced us.
Speaker 1: But if that article hadn't been in that trade press,
Speaker 1: you could still be at that DVD story.
Speaker 3: You think there is still one by the way, it's
Speaker 3: still open that first store, that one store is still
Speaker 3: open there.
Speaker 1: The company is extremely successful. The problems you may have
Speaker 1: had you seem to be behind you. So what is
Speaker 1: the future of Netflix? Do you think you can keep
Speaker 1: growing the subscriber base or how do you view your
Speaker 1: future success? What is your goal to be in the future.
Speaker 3: To do well, I think we've got plenty of room
Speaker 3: to grow both the subscriber base and revenue. For a
Speaker 3: lot with a long runway, two hundred and seventy seven
Speaker 3: million sounds like a lot of folks, But you know
Speaker 3: you could double that and still not be halfway to
Speaker 3: what the pay television universe was. And this is a
Speaker 3: much better product economically and choice and control and all
Speaker 3: the things that go into it. So I think there's
Speaker 3: plenty of room to continue to grow the spaces that
Speaker 3: were in you know, professional television and film and games.
Speaker 3: This is a six hundred billion dollar consumer spend market
Speaker 3: that we're about five percent of, and we go only
Speaker 3: get about ten percent of screen time today, so about
Speaker 3: ten percent of the time you're watching something on television,
Speaker 3: you're watching Netflix, So a lot of room to grow
Speaker 3: both of them.
Speaker 1: You are always being pitched on new projects that you're
Speaker 1: going to presumably do in the future. There are other areas.
Speaker 1: You're in sports now, you're in games. I guess you'd
Speaker 1: say you're you're into you know, the traditional content you have.
Speaker 2: Are you going to do news at some point?
Speaker 3: It's a pretty well served market. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: choices of how to get to news. So it hasn't
Speaker 3: been an expertise of ours yet, so we're not really
Speaker 3: looking at that.
Speaker 1: Hey, the most important thing I think people really want
Speaker 1: is interview shows. Yeah, you have enough interview shows on
Speaker 1: your yours.
Speaker 3: I have a feeling this would be a good pilot
Speaker 3: for ya.
Speaker 1: What is the last thing you've watched on Netflix? And
Speaker 1: if I say, all of a sudden, I want to
Speaker 1: watch one thing on Netflix, what do you think I
Speaker 1: should watch?
Speaker 3: For the first part of that is the thing I
Speaker 3: like to watch the most on Netflix is the thing
Speaker 3: that my wife and I can watch together. We do
Speaker 3: not have similar taste in movies and television that everyone's
Speaker 3: in all you find something that you really love to
Speaker 3: watch together. And for us, that was the new season
Speaker 3: of Emily in Paris that we just binged through in
Speaker 3: two sittings and she loved it and it was a great,
Speaker 3: great fun for me too. And for you. We have
Speaker 3: a new show coming in just starting this week called Monsters,
Speaker 3: the Eric and Lyleman Ninda story Ryan Murphy who created Dahmer,
Speaker 3: and it's a phenomenal drama.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about your future. Yeah, you're now in the
Speaker 1: company for how many years?
Speaker 3: I'll be twenty five, nicks to carp.
Speaker 2: So twenty five years and you were how sixty years old?
Speaker 1: Okay, well that's a teenager to me. So you're very young.
Speaker 1: So do you have any interest in ever, Let's say
Speaker 1: going to government, public service, running for office, being an ambassador,
Speaker 1: or anything.
Speaker 3: I would I would love to do something in public
Speaker 3: service that I can't see myself running for office, but
Speaker 3: I would love just to be of service to the country.
Speaker 2: So at some point you might do that.
Speaker 1: Y at some point, did your parents live to see
Speaker 1: your success and did they ever tell you how proud
Speaker 1: they were of you?
Speaker 3: My dad passed away two years ago, and he did
Speaker 3: see the success. And I don't think he totally understood
Speaker 3: what I did, but he knew that it was pretty cool,
Speaker 3: and he knew because people would tell him, that's pretty
Speaker 3: cool what your son does. And my mom unfortunately passed
Speaker 3: away before Netflix became what it is today. But at
Speaker 3: the beginning we first started, you know, House of Cards
Speaker 3: Days was a show up on all the award shows.
Speaker 3: My mom likes to like to watch a lot of television,
Speaker 3: and so she would always love to see me on
Speaker 3: television at an award show, and she would call me
Speaker 3: every once in a while and say, Hey, I'm watching
Speaker 3: this award show. Are you there? I go, No, that's
Speaker 3: the SP's mom. I'm not part of the SPS. So
Speaker 3: but she got she really got a kick out of
Speaker 3: it all, so yeah, but they didn't get to see
Speaker 3: all of it, but they got a sense of it.
Speaker 1: And did they have a Netflix subscription to do? Buy
Speaker 1: them one or they already had one?
Speaker 3: They I bought them one.
Speaker 1: And what would you like to see as your legacy
Speaker 1: to the world of entertainment? What do you think legacy
Speaker 1: should be or will be?
Speaker 3: You know, I hope it has been that or is
Speaker 3: or will be or how every want to praise it
Speaker 3: will be the guy who put the audience first. Tony
Speaker 3: Bennett was a great friend of mine and he was
Speaker 3: my hero, and he said it bestie said, the audience
Speaker 3: is the most important member of the band. And I
Speaker 3: feel like what I want approach that we put into
Speaker 3: Netflix and into the programming, into our films and TV
Speaker 3: and our games, is that we put the audience first
Speaker 3: and think about how are they going to love it?
Speaker 2: First?
Speaker 3: We'll build a business model around it for but think
Speaker 3: about how will you please in the audience first?
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to hear more of my interviews. You
Speaker 2: can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple, or
Speaker 2: wherever you listen.