Why Netflix is obsessed with Harlan Coben

The economist Welcome to Intelligence fromom the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. oday on the show the frontier of food delivery robots and the mysteries and mystery of Harlan Cobin. First It's been one week since two earthquakes rattled Venezuela, the largest in a century Yesterday, rescuers climbed among the rubble in the state of Lag Guida S Wa for silence so that any cries from the wreckage could be heard a sliver of good news. The three year old boy was pulled out alive It's a story that will only get rarer as days tick by Volunteers like Juan Rarade say they will keep searching. be familiar. He hadn't yet pulled out anyone alive that day, but he says his faith is still intact that he will get his family out The dangers aren't over. an aftershock on Monday made a bad situation worse The death toll is nearing two thousand It's Pretty grim still in Venezuela Kinley Seven is a Latin America correspondent for the economist The Morgues in La Guida, one of the hardest hit areas near the capital of Caracas are overflowing. There are thousands of people displaced. and this is really a huge blow for a country where there were growing hopes that it might be getting back onto its feet Instead now, what we see is a real beginning of public anger the regime in Venezuela's response to this earthquake And Kinley, we're a week on now from the earthquakes. What do we know on the ground the extent of the damage O the damage is just huge. In terms of the death toll, that is unfortunately still going to rise higher. There are five thousand people injured. hundredundreds of buildings flattened or damaged and also critical infrastructure, including health centers that have been seriously damaged and making them unable to be used. So it's very Dicult situation still right now are week on Well, let's wind further back in time. You said there was some hope that the country was getting back on its feet. What did you mean by that Well, since the capture of Nicolas Maduro in January, he was the authoritarian president of Venezuela and was seized by U. S. special forces. Since then Delsa Rodriguez, she was Maduro's former vice president. And she's been running the country, but with close collaboration with Washington under the watchful eye if you like of Donald Trump. And both sides have sold that as mutually beneficial. America has eased sanctions on Venezuela and on Mr. Rodriguez herself And in return, Rodriguez has maintained stability. She's reformed some of the rules that made it very hard for investors from outside the country to get into Venezuela's oil or mining sectors. and she has released quite a number of political prisers, not all though. So a sense of stabilization and perhaps a little bit of liberalization. Of course, Donald Trump's portrayed this as an enormous strategic success. Venezuela is doing better right now than they've ever done in the history of their country. sort of like a joint venture But I think that narrative, which was already being overstated by Donald Trump is now being severely tested. And you say that Venezuelans are angry at the government response so far or lack of it. What has there been a lack of Well, that's right. My colleague's been speaking with a number of people telling him that they've been left on their own in their first critical forty eight hours after the quakes when there's the highest chance of getting people out alive. A lot of people saying it was just volunteers. There was not really any serious government help. Aid has been arriving since then, but slowly. And there's been just crucial shortages, a shortage of heavy machinery to move rubble. orr in some cases there's been machines but no fuel for the machines, leaving people scrabbling with their hands trying to find Loved ones And it's also I think the case that a lot of this very weak response is a result of a hollowing out of the Venezuelan state over decades of corruption under the Maduro regime, under its predecessor of Hugo Chavez. And that means that just firefighters have got equipment problems. Hospitals are ill equipped as well. Millions of people have fled the long economic disaster in Venezuela, and among them, of course, many people who'd be crucial in a moment like this, like nurses and doctors The government also seems to be trying to centralize the response, keep control of everything. and that's been getting in the way in some cases And the last thing I think is that there's this growing suspicion that some of the buildings that collapsed were sloppily built by the government itself. pllenty of them were part of. social housing projects or have been built without being required to follow regulations or on bad terrain. So there's a variety of sources of anger that are really coming into focus now But coming back to the aIid question, certainly America had suggested that it would be part of the response. That's right. I think it's safe to say that part of the response from Washington and indeed from Donald Trump himself has been quite strange. Really, I mean, outside of what happened last night with the terrible. That was terrible. what happened a big Earthquake downown buildings But outside it was really it's a happy country again. The people are happy. They're dancing in the streets But the administration in the U.S., of course, has been doing some things. And I think it's now a question of just how far they're going to get involved in large scale reconstruction, as well as the immediate response. A quake has caused six point seven billion dollars in material damage alone. My colleague spoke to a former American ambassador to Venezuela who said the United States has a juicy to Venezuela, given the overt interference it has undertaken in the country in seizing Maduro in January and the shutelage under which it's had the country since He said there should be a full effort of American assistance, including deployment of a hospital ship. There's not been, I think, yet an indication from the Trump administration that it's ready to go quite that far. But it has dispatched a military vessel towards the Venezuelan coast Specialized search and rescue teams An American military personnel have repaired The earthquake damaged runway at the main Caracass airport So some action, but there's also, I think irritation in Venezuela positive U.S officials have been in some cases about the overall response and in particular the regime's response. People don't see or feel that on the ground in quite the same way And how does all this figure into the sort of wider plans that America had for Venezuela even before the earthquake? Well, America's plan for Venezuela was supposed to happen in three stages. when I was in Caracas a few months ago, people could even quote these to me on the street, stabilization, recovery, and then transition. And the idea is that stabilization and recovery could take place while Delsea Rodriguez serves as interim president. But the third stage of transition means democratic elections at some point There's been no timetable given for that, at least from the top of the Trump administration. And the earthquake could well be used as a reason to delay that third stage. That would be to the liking of the unpopular regime of Delcie Rodriguez. And the regime probably also sees this as a chance to look munificent, handing out aid, to look competent So then perhaps a chance to both delay a reckoning with the polles and improve its image with people. And the Trump administration so far there is no sense that it's showing much urgency in speeding any of this up. In fact, in recent days, American officials have been telling journalists that Maria Curim Machado, she's the Nobel Prize winning laureate for the Peace Prize, and by far Venezuela's most popular opposition leader. They've been complaining that she's been asking for American assistance to get her back to Venezuela. That's been irritating them. She even reportedly attempted to go back Curasau, a nearby country, but had to cancel plans after Americans made it clear they didn't back her return. So real tensions about her potential return and what that might mean. So in Panama They don't let any up e of your had any swit She's even released a video after that saying she's in Panama and determined to go back.. There's now a real question over what she's going to try next to get back and be with Venezuelans. Well, especially if American officials and Mr. Trump are all backing Dulsie Rodriguez in the government response at home That's right. I mean, obviously having the Trump administration on Dulsa Rodriguez's side is some comfort for her. And Trump has continued to be very clear that the Americans back the Rodriguez led regime. Being the leader of a deeply unpopular regime following a mass trauma of a natural disaster like this, I think brings real risks Anger is already growing, as I've mentioned. I think it could get sharper still as failings in the response become clearer And we saw hints of this anger justust last Friday when Delsie Rodrgz visited a collaped building in Caracas. And instead of a positive photo opportunity That really turned into a chance for locals to voice discontent. Some shouted, Where is the aid? Another in the crowd simply shouted, Go away And I think the chances of seeing that kind of outright, very intense anger against the regime is going to grow in the weeks ahead As the focus shifts away from the immediate response to what has happened? whyy were things not better? Why has this been so deadly I think the chances of really harsh anger towards the regime are going to go up considerably. Kimley, thanks very much for joining us Thank you Bton Keynes is one of the places you could go in the UK to see the future of food delivery Ms Hearn is our AI writer It's the UK's largest market for Starship technologies, a robotic delivery startup. Sotarship was founded by Artie Haller, who also co founded Skype, which was bought by Microsoft for eight and a half billion dollars in twenty eleven There's a small group of these Skype co founders who have become enormously influential in European tech Stash teechnologies is the market leader in this sector. And if you haven't seen their robots, you'll have seen ones by competitors. smallmall ice box sized things, usually six wheeled that trundle around on the pavements, that's sidewalks for American listeners, of cities with normally one or two deliveries in them. They at walk in pace, rock up to your front door play a little sound and you go out and p your delivery out from them. It's nothing fancy in itself except that It is the sort of low stakes autonomy When it works can scale very, very quickly And I think slots into the existing urban fabric of a lot of cities, much better than fancy things like self driving cars or you know unmanned aerial vehicles, flying taxis, transporting people around the place. At the mention of competitors, why is it we're talking about Starship and not anyone else? Starship were one of the first have been running for an extremely long time And they've done a really good job of focusing on efficiency It's 's quuite easy to do this stuff on a technical level, right? You don't even need autonomy. If you've got a little cooler sized robot driving on the pavement It's going slowly, it's not very dangerous. so you can teleopperate it. And some of Starship's competitors do exactly that. There are whole industries of people just getting low paid people in the same time zone as an expensive delivery market to teleopperate initially one robot and then perhaps ten at a time. Tle they operate euphemistically rememote control. Remote control. You sit on a video call and you drive that robot like his little video game. and it lets you pay Colombian wages for a delivery driver in Berkeley California. That's a good arbitrage, but it's not one that really scales. Starship, by contrast, has been focusing on automation since day one And they've been focusing on just getting their unit costs down because the other thing about this sector is any high school robotics shop can knock up something that looks like one of these delivery robots, right But it can't do it in a way that actually outcompetes a bloke with a bicycle And that's the holy grail here. That's why you want to do this. You want to make something that actually uses the economies of scale of building lots and lots of robots, running them for as long as you can before they break, repairing them quickly, charging them efficiently, getting everything right so that you can actually change the fundamental economics of urban delivery So what are they doing to do that Starship have been operating for a decade now and they been to hear them tell it, looking at every single part of the chain, that's software, that's hardware, and that's the physicality of the robots So just to give one example, if the robot breaks down crossing the road, for instance, it suddenly becomes quite dangerous, both to itself and others. It's fairly large, fairly junk and you don't want it to be hit So what they've learned is actually a good use of money build an entire separate backup computer inside the robot that if the first one crashes while it's crossing the road can just take over and finish that trip, get to the other side of the road and then shut down safely on the pavement That's the sort of thing that you only get if you've been operating for long enough, and it's the difference between at scale margins that are positive and negative. If you lose one in every thousand robots when a truck careens into them at high speed, well that might make you an unprofitable company So the game is to beat somebody on a delivery bike, but also not just on getting the job done but on price. Where is Starship on that So Starships say in the last year or so that they have beaten human delivery drivers on unit economics. That means that They can straightforwardly charge less per delivery than if you are going to a person. Which means if I were a bicycle or scooter delivery guy, I would be hating on these things Possibly. And I think this is going to play into some of the larger automation of labor questions that we've seen everywhere else At the margin This won't ever eliminate delivery drivers. The nice thing about human delivery drivers from a delivery business point of view is that they don't need to be delivery drivers all the time. It is very easy to offer someone more money to do deliveries at times of ultra high demand and then let them do something else at times when they're not needed. If you've invested in the physical capital of a delivery robot, it sort of needs to be running all the time. And so what you should expect to see from this at the small scale of delivery robots and the large scale of Rbot taxis is a hybrid model where you have enough vehicles built or enough robots built to satisfy the baseline demand and then at the ultra high peaks of Friday and Saturday nights say, Human delivery drivers coming on being paid more really than the cost per delivery to at least make it so that the service is efficient so that customers aren't lost going to other alternatives Thanks very much for your time, Alex. Thanks for having me First mystery of a missing daughter Heared in twenty eighteen secondecond, a vanished wife Aeared in twenty twenty. Katherine Nixy is a culture correspondent for the economist These two mysteries were followed by a mysteriously missing husband in twenty twenty one My mysteriously revived dead husband in twenty twenty four And another mysteriously missing daughter in twenty twenty six so often The deeper mystery was less the crimes themselves A mysterious figure spotted hanging around them He could be seen in that very first mystery which viewers learnnt was Haran Cobin safe He was spotted in the next one titled withith Equal Mystery Harlan Coben's The Stranger He was there in the next ones too, which were variously titled Haran Coben, stay close Harlan Cobens for me W Haran Kopen's run away which led to the deepest mystery of all, namely is Harlan Cobin Why is Netflix so obsessed by him The questestion of his identity is perhaps the easiest Mr. Cobin is a sixty four year old American thriller writer and by all accounts, a sweetie God is quuiet living family man But for his job, he writes very splattery thrillers And they sell a lot Brered has been viral in extent. He's sold over a hundred million books and in its style Like COVID nineteen, most didn't even notice him spreading until it was too late Since last year alone, Mrter Cobin has been behind seven series and two novels. Harlan Coben has thus become one of those baffling word combinations like vibecoding or token maxing that went from meaningless to ubiquitous, seemingly overnight Ruben's shows offer other mysteries too, such as whyy does his name have such prominent billing when another author, called Jane Austen, often has a far smaller font Why are such quintessential American thrillers being filmed as these often are in places like Manchester? And above all What are characters who have such hum drum jobs afford such astonishing these wanky kitchens His shows have also elicited some critical bafflement too. Though some of them have received decent reviews, like Stay close about a cold case that suddenly heats up Others have been rather less lauded. His plots have been called Twisty and confusing. Not without cause The series's plots are what might politely be called eventful andless delicately be called soap operas The episode menu for Netflix's twenty twenty one series The Innocent Over the course of four swift episodes, you find yourself offered an accidental murder, episode one An alleged suicide episode two And a mysterious nun. In episode three, it was rapidly a mysteriously dead, mysterious nun These are followed by episode four, in which as the episode summary explains, the nun's body is scribbled away by federal agents, which infuriates Lorena Non corpse theft can be so annoying Cobin's plots then are not pinturesque but nor they meant to be Archetypal thrillers Dark ominous covers, folog is a feature Ominous strap linions in the Aissing Girl Deadly game. Not a full stop Their characters tend to have names that sound as though they might be medical procedures, Griffins Scope. Possibly Cockney Rhyminglang Larry Gandall By the way They sound bad So why do people like them so much Partly the family tragedy is, a soer Gese could have told you, always compelling And it's partly because the setting helps Just as Greek tragedy was removed from a too alarming immediacy by being set in similar but different thees Cobin's tragedies are calmed a bit by being set in the similar but different world of Swishy murder series Chic The reason why they're set in Britain is a bit more complicated partly suggests one industry insider is cost. British tax breaks making shoots here more economical As for the mystery of why his name appears over all the titles, it is in his telling, not such an enigma mister Coben says that the title of an early show sounded much too like the title of another show. So to differentiate, they just put his name above the title which was somewhat to the bafflement of audiences. At the time, someone tweeted that they keep talking about Harlan Kobin. but I don't know who the hell Harlan Kobin is Probably do you know That's all for this episode of The Intelligence We'll see you back here