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At Netflix, we have such a diverse population of shows in 183 countries around the world. We’re really trying to serve up lots of stories people haven’t heard before. When you go into our environment, you’re like, “Ooh, what is that?” You’re almost kind of afraid to touch it, because you’re like, “Well, I don’t want to waste my time.”That level of discovery is literally, I’m not bullshitting you, man, that’s the thing that keeps me up at night. How do I help figure out how to help people discover things, with enough evidence that they trust it? And when they click on it, they love it, and then they immediately ping their best friend, “Have you seen this documentary? It’s amazing.” And she tells her friends, and then that entire viral loop starts.

The discovery engine is very temporal. Member number 237308 could have been into [reality TV] because she or he just had a breakup. Now they just met somebody, so all of a sudden it shifts to rom-coms.Now that person that they met loves to travel. So [they might get into] travel documentaries. And now that person that they’re with, they may have a kid, so they might want more kids’ shows. So, it’s very dangerous for us to ever kind of say, “This is what you like. You have a cat. You must like cat documentaries.”

We don’t see each other, obviously, and I don’t want to social network on Netflix. But knowing other humans exist there is part of it.You answered the question absolutely perfectly. Not only because it’s your truth, but that’s what everyone says! That connection part. So another thing that goes back to your previous question, when you’re asking me what’s on my mind? It’s that. How do I help make sure that when you’re in that discovery loop, you still feel that you’re connected to others.I’m not trying to be the Goth kids on campus who are like, “I don’t care about what’s popular.” But I’m also not trying to be the super poppy kids who are always chasing trends. There’s something in between which is, “Oh, hey, I haven’t heard about that, and I kind of want to be up on it.”

I am looking forward to seeing what Apple does with this and then figuring out more, how are people going to use it? Then I think that we should have a real discussion about how Netflix does it.But to just port Netflix over? No. It’s got to make sure that it’s using the power of the system as much as humanly possible so that it’s really making that an immersive experience. I don’t want to put resources toward that right now.

The design team here at Netflix, we played a really big hand in how that worked because we had to design the back-end tool. What people don’t know about our team is 30% of our organization is actually designing and developing the software tools that we use to make the movies. We had to design a tool that allowed the teams to understand both what extra footage to shoot and how that might branch. When the Black Mirror team was trying to figure out how to make this narrative work, the software we provided really made that easier.

the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it,3 have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on the free or barely compensated labor product of people acting as de facto writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew. Even if they’d never see it this way, YouTubers and TikTokers are effectively competing with Hollywood over the idle hours of consumers everywhere; more to the point, they’re doing what any non-union workforce does in an insufficiently organized industry: driving down labor compensation.

Almost no one I know has work; most people’s agents and managers have more or less told them there won’t be jobs until 2025. An executive recently told a friend that the only things getting made this year are “ultra premium limiteds,” which sounds like a kind of tampon but actually just means “six-episode miniseries that an A-List star wants to do.”

YouTubers’ lack of collective bargaining power isn’t just bad for me and other guild members; it’s bad for the YouTubers themselves. Ask any professional or semi-professional streamer what they think of the platform and you’ll hear a litany of complaints about its opacity and inconsistency

There are clear gaps between the way Hollywood sees older people and the way they see themselves. Humana, the health and wellness company, surveyed 2,000 people 60 and older about whether they felt they were depicted accurately in movies and, explained Dr. Yolangel Hernandez Suarez, “the answer was a resounding no. They thought themselves to be more healthy in mind and body, more connected, and more savvy than they were portrayed in film.”

52.6 percent of the movies that featured senior characters also included comments that the researchers interpreted as ageist. Many of those comments were spoken by other characters to older people, but in a number of movies, older characters made self-deprecating or diminishing comments about their own age.