Bluey’s Not Bad
If you’re like us, then your meetings start with a few minutes of casual banter or, if Taylor’s attending, more than a few. So it went at a recent investing team check-in where I looked down at my watch and 17 minutes in, we had yet to conduct a minute of business.
The reason was Bluey, an Australian cartoon for little ones that you can watch on Disney+.
See, both Taylor and Emily have younger children, and they all love the show. The 17-minute preamble to our meeting was full of quotes from the show, plot recaps, and Taylor doing an Australian accent. It was as entertaining as it was inefficient.
My kids have been out of that stage for a few years and are on to being sullen and cool, so I wasn’t familiar with Bluey. That’s how I ended up with homework. I was supposed to go home that evening and watch “Takeaway” from season one, “Granddad” and “Daddy Dropoff” from season two, and “Whale Watching” and “Granny Mobile” from season three. (If you get nothing else from this Opinion, there you have Permanent Equity’s curated list of Bluey episodes for your enjoyment or if you want to run this experiment yourself.)
When I got home, my daughter had soccer practice, but I said that after soccer practice, we would watch Bluey.
“What’s Bluey?” everyone asked.
“It’s this cartoon from Australia that everyone from my office says is great,” I said.
So expectations were elevated.
We got home, fired up the Roku, and put on Bluey. The episode “Takeaway” was amusing. “Granddad” had a sweet ending. Then we watched an episode called “The Magic Xylophone” because of autoplay, and that one was a little didactic.
Anyhow, the point is that Bluey’s not bad. And while it’s a good kids’ show, none of us Hansons feel compelled to watch all of the episodes. I also probably did the show a disservice by raising expectations. We were expecting our minds to be blown, but it was dogs with Australian accents being nice and clever and frustrated. Again, a good kids’ show!
I messaged Emily the next day and said that she may have overhyped Bluey, but that I could relate because I did the same thing with Pocoyo (an originally Spanish kids’ cartoon with an English version narrated by Stephen Fry) back when my kids were in it. Awash in terrible kids’ shows, I latched onto the best of the bunch as high art, but when I’d tell my not-yet-parent friends that they should watch it, they’d come back and ask me if I was on drugs.
A few takeaways:
High expectations, if not met, result in disproportionate downside. This can be a stock market bubble that pops, a construction project that is bid with no room for error, or a TV show or restaurant recommendation that doesn’t live up to the hype.
Context matters. A good kids’ show isn’t necessarily a good show, but that’s ok if you go into watching it knowing what you’re up for. An investment analogy is that a good low margin business isn’t necessarily a good business or investment unless you go into it knowing what you’re up for and do something like buy it cheap.
Spending time with your kids (or grandkids, so I’ve heard) when they’re little can warp your perception of reality. But that’s ok…and you should do a lot of it anyway.
– By Tim Hanson