The Vergecast - 334: Sundar Pichai testifies, Samsung A8, and Verizon's future

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter devote half the show to discussing what happened when CEO of Google Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Congress thinks Google has a bias problem — does it? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Glenn Fiddick. Tis the season to celebrate. Treat yourself in the ones you love to whiskey that delivers the perfect union of smoky and sweet. Try Glenn Fidic Fire and Cain, whether it's served neat or on the rocks, fire and cane challenges convention, backing equal parts citrus and sizzle in every sip. Learn more about the newest experimental whiskey from the masters of Glenn Fiddick. Visit glenfidic.com slash U.S. That's glenphidic.com slash U.S. Note, drinking alcohol involves risk. Please drink responsibly. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media and the Verge, the holiday season. I think we should be the flagship podcast of the holiday season. I am Neil Ypresal and the Energy of the Verge.

Paul Miller is here. Hello, Paul. Hello. Deider Bone is here. Good morning or afternoon or evening. Whatever time you listen to this, I hope it's a good one. I'm going to just tell the audience right now, our various holiday travel schedules means that we're recording this a little bit earlier. For me, it's like a very normal 1045 kind of time.

these guys are on the West Coast, so it's $7.45 for them. So I'm going to do my best to wake them up by talking about the following things. Now, I think we have to talk about Google in Congress, to Nurpichai went to Congress. There's some gadget news this week. I want to get into that, particularly that whatever Samsung is doing with taking out the hole for a headphone and adding the hole for a camera, which I think is how they characterize their product strategy. It's very complicated. And then obviously we'll talk about Verizon giving up on oath, which is, you know, I think just a theme of this show constantly for years.

Let's start with Sundar. So it's been a year of tech companies being called up in front of Congress to testify about why they're bad and apologize for existing. Jack Dorsey did it, Mark Zuckerberg did it, and now Sundar, Pichai, the CEO of Google, has done it. We should put that in a little bit of context because about a month, maybe a month and a half ago, there was one of these hearings and they wanted to have all the CEOs. And so they set up a table and Google's like, no, you can't have a, our CEO, he's busy.

But you can have our, you know, chief policy something, lawyer or something, something, something. He's the one who actually deals with the stuff you're worried about. And the committee got very mad. And they decided to put an empty chair there and just write Google on it. And then yell at the chair. Yeah.

Because Google didn't send CEO. A real Clint East would move. Yeah. Screaming in an empty chair. I don't think I'm breaking any confidences by saying that when I have told various people at Google that I thought that was a bad move on their part, even if the committee was acting a little bit, you know, grandstandy about it. The general response, I wish that this wasn't just an audio show because I would just show you the grimace emoji. Like, they would literally turn into the grimmis emoji.

They'd like, you know, they'd do that. I thought you were going to say they literally turn into grimace, the most misunderstood of the McDonald-land characters. What's misunderstood about him? Everyone else has a role, right? Ronald McDonald is like helping children in hospital. The hamburger got sexy, which was weird for a time. Robble, robble. He steals your food. Grimmis, what are you doing? There's a sheriff.

Anyway, Paul, what were you saying? I was just wondering, is this the official makeup session for the empty chair session? Or is this a different thing? I don't think they would, they would not characterize it as a makeup session. But it feels fairly obvious that everyone understands that Google should have been in front of Congress. And they took their shot. I think there's one way in particular that I do think this all worked out better for Google, which is they got their own time.

And they were not characterized with Facebook and Twitter. Yeah, they're not lumped in with them. And I think Google is doing everything it can to get away from those two. And there have been revelations in recent weeks that Facebook is actually doing everything it can to exceed opposition research about Google and saying they do all the same things. You should talk about them as much as you talk about us. So there's that dynamic is playing out in sort of the PR side. Google's also leaking data about its social network customers so that it can shut it down quicker. Yeah.

Well. So we should talk about that. Okay. They had another problem with Google Plus. They once again discovered that one of the APIs that they offered to developers was able to access more information than it should. And so they discovered it. They shut it down. They don't think anybody actually figured out that this API could do this thing.

And then they came back and they said, you know what, screw it. We're shutting this thing down in like whatever it was, April. Yeah. I think it is also fair to say that Google Plus is not Facebook. And so that, so just like Congress, I think we can wait an hour and a half before discussing Google Plus, which is exactly how long it took for them to ask a question about that data breach. Anyway, so Sundar Pichai sits down in front of the House to just share a committee. Just like the previous hearings, and I think this is kind of important, he outfaxed them. And Zuckerberg managed to do it and Jack Dorsey managed to do it.

Even when there are legitimate problems with Google, and I think there are lots of legitimate problems with Google, the way Congress is set up to question these people provides endless opportunity for them to dodge, for them to hide in the technical details of what's going on, for them to say, we'll come back to you later and answer your question more fully, or for them to simply say they don't understand the question. And we saw Zuckerberg do it, we saw Dorsey do it. I think Sundar is, he's like a corporate executive, right? He started as a junior corporate executive and he worked his way up and now he's the CEO.

So he's a little less the boy king that Zuckerberg is where everyone's constantly asking us to apologize for the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing because he doesn't know what he's doing because it's his first job, right? Everyone's like, it's his first job. He's like the enlightened despot or like the philosopher king. He's the philosopher king. Yeah, he's, if they put Satchanadella from Microsoft in this position, he would have done, right? He's also a very seasoned, very polished, very media trained corporate executive. That's very much what Sundar is as well. Whereas I think with Zuckerberg, there's always the sense that at any moment he's going to flip a table and be like, I made this thing.

You know, like, anyhow. So there are these moments and these are the moments that, you know, as we wrote stories about the hearing yesterday, these are the moments that played huge with a verge audience. And I think subsumed any of the very little substance that was actually there. So Steve King, who's a representative from Iowa, he has a checkered past of saying extremely racially charged things. Told this story. He asked Sundar, my granddaughter was playing with her iPhone, just playing a game, and my face popped up, and I won't say what it said around my face. Why did that happen? And Sundar literally had to say, the iPhone is made by another company, right? Yeah. And he, like, big sigh, eye roll. But really what Steve King is asking is, hey, why does this technology work the way it does? Right? Yeah. And like, why are these things happening that I don't understand? And that exchange is very funny because it is true that Google design. make the iPhone. It is potentially true they're not even any Google apps or services on his granddaughter's iPhone. None of this could have anything to do with Google. But the question, fundamentally, it was also, no one understands how all of these things interoperate and why

things happen. And that's like really the question you want to ask all these tech leaders. Why doesn't anyone know how your shit works? You just watch it happen over and over again in all these hearings where because that is the real question, everyone's, everyone's waving their iPhones it's CEOs of software platforms saying, why does this work this way? And they all get to kind of weave around it. There was another moment where they had to ask why Googling the word idiot turns up pictures of Trump.

And Sunar Pichai had to patiently explain what a Google bomb is and patiently explain that there's not a little man behind the curtain that adjust search results. And then a congressman said, well, I believe that humans are manipulating your search results. Nothing can change my mind. And that is not useful.

I would just say, regardless of your party affiliation, that exchange was not useful to the operation of the Republic or to the American people. Yeah, I'm not going to defend King here, but I will say that in some of the other exchanges I saw, it was clear, like, in these hearings, a congressperson is performing for the camera, performing for the constituents, signaling to other Congress people what they're possibly changing position on a topic is, and then also trying to, like, get a question answered, right? Like, they're trying to do all of those things at once. And sometimes that turned into, like, asking a question that in any other context is just completely stupid.

In this context, it just felt like 50 to 80 percent stupid, which is still stupid, to be clear. Yeah. But Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Cheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey are all very smart people. And they understand those multiple contexts. And they also can, like, tell when a question is, like, 50% stupid or 100% stupid. But like you were saying, they can basically reply to whatever context they want to, and it will make like a little bit of cognitive sense. And so those questions weren't designed to like reveal truth. They were designed to like position people. And sometimes that's just frustrating to watch. Sometimes it's like dynamite to watch because those positions actually do matter. Like politics actually matters. But here what we actually need to know is like a little bit of like how does Google in fact order things on its. search rankings, you know. So if you do a Google bomb, right, where you create a bunch of links that all have in the

link text and sometimes in the surrounding context, the word idiot, and that link links to a Trump picture, usually hopefully a specific Trump picture to like to really concentrate the effect of the Google bomb. Yeah, that's going to impact page rank. And so that's interesting. And that could be one good way of explaining it. But there are all, there's also the aspect that Google has, has a thing that it thinks of, I don't know what the word is quality. Google works to improve, and that's a subjective word, its search results to highlight things that it thinks are more true or more quality.

And those are aspects of Google's algorithm that are way less understood than page rates. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true. And this question came up on both sides of the aisle, right? So there's the classic cry of conservative bias, which you can believe or not believe. Paul, I know that you think it exists on these platforms. Casey Newton, who writes about this stuff. And the interface every day says, well, conservative media performs better than any other thing on these platforms. So there's a real debate to be had there.

And there's data points everywhere. But that's happening. And Google was accused of conservative bias yesterday. And on the other side, a congressperson said, well, when I search for my own news hits on MSNBC, what I get is daily caller aggregation calling me an idiot. Like, that's not the thing I want either. So fundamentally, I think this comes back to, yeah, okay, Google has like a set of quality filters. They're trying to deliver results to a market. They are trying to be more useful to more people.

That's why people want to use Google. But in the absence of any competition, there's actually no way to measure whether they're doing a good job, whether people prefer Google's results to another person's results, whether Google's subject, and I agree with you, Paul, completely subjective notion of what quality is, what neutrality is, measures up to somebody else's subjective notions of those things, because they are a dominant provider. So they have done a little bit of the work to try and tell you what their subjective opinion of what quality counts as. You can, you could Google it, it turns out. So here's the way that Google search works now. It's not just page rank anymore, right?

It's lots and lots and lots of different algorithms working together in the main search algorithm to try and provide the most useful result. That's generally what Google aims for is useful. And when Google wants to tweak that algorithm or all of those algorithms or any of them or whatever, it doesn't just go out and AB test it. It pops up and it's like, I've got this thing. And then they have an ethical argument of this is this thing a good algorithm. And then they give it out to the 20,000 is how many they'd say on a hot,

hire eventually humans, search quality evaluators. These are people who live all over the world and supposedly represent a diverse set of, you know, different kinds of humans, and they are given guidelines. And if you just Google search quality evaluator guidelines for Google, you will land upon a, you know, 20-something page document that tells those evaluators what to do. So they will get this new tweak to the algorithm. They will do a bunch of searches. they will mark up whether it's different from before, and they will say this is what I think of these results. This is how I rate the trustworthiness of these results.

And then they'll go back to Google, and Google will say, cool. This seems pretty good. And then they'll do a tiny ass A-B test out in the real world. And then they roll it out, you know. And I'm skipping a few steps along the way. But the point is, like, they actually do have a process to try and minimize, quote-unquote, bias, maximize trustworthiness, maximize usefulness of their search results. But, you know, we can have a long argument about whether this document comprises, like,

sufficient, I don't know, trust in what Google's results are. Like, I don't know. I'm just like, did you know that they categorize certain pages as your money or your life pages? Huh. Those, they pay more attention to those because they're pages that, like, actually matter in terms of spending money or your health care or something. And so they have a much stricter filter for letting those pages rank highly than they do for Nei-Patelah's, who the hell cares if Nealai Patel's name gets smeared? I can think of one

person, it's Paul. That's right. I did not know that these people existed. I think this is a big problem, right? Google has like a transparency problem. So if you're, let's say I was, for example, the representative from the southeastern, the first district of Wisconsin, southeast Wisconsin, which is a thing I think about all the time. Okay. What would like I ask Google, what would our audience SaaS Google, people who really pay a lot of attention to Google. You have a transparency problem, right? Why can't I just click on a result in Google and be told how it was given to me? Like, what were the factors? Like, that would be really interesting to a lot of people. It would solve a lot of these problems. And Google probably has a good answer to that,

which is, well, then people would game the shit out of that, right? That's already the thing that's happening. So that's a meaningful policy conversation. How much transparency can we enforce on you knowing that that will come at an extremely high cost because people will game. Two, you guys are a digital ads monopoly, right? Between Google and Facebook, 90% of the ad dollars in digital, that's them. Google and Facebook control 90% of the ad dollars in digital advertising. So how should we think about the fact that virtually no one else can make money on the internet, serving ads on ad supporting businesses, without doing a bunch of shady shit, without popovers and tracking and all this other stuff that you have to do? Who is your competition?

Who is your number one competitor that you were scared of? Right? Where is the market force that regulates you in the absence of the government regulating you? And you can't tell me it's Bing because, and you can't say competition is one click away, because it turns out your monopoly status leads to incredible network effects where people do click on search results and your algorithm. At a rate that data to approve at a rate that your competitors can't approve. So where's your true competition? Where does that come? Hey, you guys own YouTube. Duck, dock.

Right? So duck, duck go. Because they don't do the ad tracking. it is likely that their results to an individual are less good. There's no way to measure. There's no way to know, right? So, like, how can we as the government, me as the representative from the first district of Wisconsin? How can I just putting that idea out there?

How can we track it? How can we measure you? How can we keep you honest? In the absence of market competition. Okay, so, Eli, this is a lovely dream. How do you imagine asking these questions in the five minutes you get in front of Sinderbichai in the committee setting would have gone. Mr. Pichai, who is your competition and don't say Bing?

Who is the, what is the biggest threats of Google search? But how are you going to impress and or intimidate your political rivals with that question? I mean, I'm going full prosecutorial style, Kamala Harris style. And you didn't say the honorable senator or so-and-so from the other place. I'm just going to wave cell phones at him until he capitulates, which is apparently what Congress does. I'm just like, there are really problems. You are so big that no one can effectively compete with you. Why shouldn't I regulate you?

What is the thing that's going to topple you and create opportunities for new entrants in this market? Well, a lot of these big companies have kind of gotten into this where like, well, maybe you should regulate me. You know? And it's kind of weird. It's kind of awkward. But Paul, why didn't you make it sound sexual? But there's an aspect of if there was a regulation on how you be a search company, it would be pretty easy to write that. such that Google and maybe Microsoft would be the only companies capable of complying with that regulation.

It isn't, I mean, and that is the criticism of, say, GDPR, which is that it favors incumbents who can do the compliance costs. But at this point, one thing is true. Both Democrats and Republicans are extremely critical of big tech companies. And if there's one thing that gets you to a law, it's that both parties agree that you're stupid, right? And like that is like abundantly clear that both parties are agitating for, hey, privacy protection, hey, we should know more how your, how your algorithm works. They might not know the details in these in these forums. They certainly have staffs and think tanks and lobbyists who are pushing for that stuff. To rewind just a little bit, what in one of your questions, I think there is a really important thing because I would love every time anything algorithmically happens to be able to have a little drop down and just find out how it happened. You know, every time something happens on my phone where it makes me confident my phone is listening to me, I just want to like, I want a plausible explanation. It doesn't even have to be true.

You can comfort me. You need to comfort me, bud. But there's a real aspect to any multivariate algorithm that you don't really know which variables. Like once you run some fun machine learning stuff on it, do you don't really know with very much confidence at all how it's, working on the inside and which variables are actually determining the output. Yeah. And I think that, and I think part of the other problem is you don't want to give the game away, right? You are.

Google does have competition. And it does have bad actors on this platform. Wait, wait. Wait, who? Facebook, right? You don't want to give the game way to how Google searches, right? Like, someone will reverse engineer it. Someone will try to game it.

Someone will do some bad stuff. Russia will show up. Like, there are actually bad outcomes to being too transparent. for all these companies. Is there a plausible middle ground between nothing and something? Yeah, I think probably. But we didn't hear those questions. And I think that's where I listen to these hearings, and it's really fun to hear Sundar sigh

and be like, I don't make the iPhone. Like, I watched that clip 500 times yesterday because it is so funny. But at the end of the day, we're not asking the right questions. There were, however, two right questions that were asked. One, are you building a search engine for China? And Sundar said something really interesting, which is we have no plans to launch anything in China at this time. Not we are building it. Not we're not building it. Not we'll never launch it. But we have no plans to launch it. Yeah, not we're building it. Not we started building it. And then

everyone got real mad at us and we decided it's a bad idea. Not we've canceled our plans. But we have no plans at this time, which is I don't know, like part of me wants to say that him saying that on live TV in front of Congress makes it slightly more likely that he can't say, well, we had no plans at that time, but now we do. And so hooray. And maybe slightly more likely that Google's not going to launch this thing as Dragonfly thing. But the bigger part of me is like, yeah, no, that actually doesn't mean much that he said we have no plans to launch this thing at this time. Yeah.

Well, specifically he said right now. So even more narrow. I don't think we've talked about Dragonfly at all in the Vergecast. Just weird timing of when we've recorded episodes on the news cycle. Oh, no. It's a conspiracy, Paul. The lamest concierge of all the time. So Dragonfly, a project by Google to launch a search engine in China, first reported by the Intercept,

picked up by other big news organizations, huge outcry inside of Google to not do this because they'd be building a censored search product for China, which goes against Googly versions of Googliness. Or does it? Right. Sure. I really don't agree with you on a conservative bias thing, but I'm going to let that one go. Anyhow, huge outcry about whether you would allow a government to actually pick what shows up in search,

whether you'd allow a government to aggressively censor a search engine like this. They appear to just be building it to see what it would be like, to see how that would operate. And then Pichai is saying, well, right now we have no plans to launch. There are lots of projects inside of Google that the employees don't want to do, right? There's working with the military. There's all this stuff. But this one, I think, is the lightning rod of whether they should launch a product in China. And there's somewhere between like 100 and 300 people working on it.

It's not like a little side project. And famously the context, by the way, is that Google was in China and Sergey Brin left. He said we're leaving China as a company because we don't want to comply with their censorship regime. So, right, a big re-approachment with China. But I said, I think, in an interview after the hearing yesterday, we might build other products for China around like health care or other things. So I think they need to grow. China is one of the biggest markets in the world, right? not like Apple isn't in China or Microsoft.

Like their competitors are in China. That's an interesting, I mean, that's a really interesting aspect of, like, it kind of makes me uncomfortable how hard Apple works to be buddy-buddy-bud with China. And obviously, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to be friends with China, you know, and he hasn't been very successful so far. But, like, the dollar signs are so big for that market that it's, you'd almost be surprised that a tech company wasn't going to do something. Yeah.

You know, like, like, I would, it's weird because, like, I hate this idea of building a censored search engine. And also, I use duck, duck. But I'd be proud of you if you weren't, you know. It's not like a morally neutral thing to not do it. Like, I understand the very strong motivation to be in that market. Yeah, I mean, it's a huge market and there's probably all kinds of things you can do, both to make money and to, like, be a utility. And I think Google generally thinks of itself as a utility in that way. Well, there's other reasons other than just like you can make a lot of money in Google.

Like, like now I was saying, the actual Chinese companies can work harder to become more used in the U.S. And so not being in China is actually like eventually a risk here. If China ever does open up politically, Google wants to rush in, they will have, they'll be starting as like, you know, naive little babies in the market compared to the other established giants that are there. I don't know. Like, you could even, like, we could talk about Android fragmentation for the rest of the podcast if you want. And Google officially being in China would mean that they would be able to have the Google Play Store

be even bigger dominant force in the life of Android than it is currently. Like, there's a lot of reasons for them to do it. But, so there's a million reasons they should. There's like, you know, there's the one that they shouldn't, which is, oh, yeah, like, don't censor things. Human rights torture, which turns out to be pretty big. Those are pretty good arguments. Yeah.

Really, really good. I think one of the things that's, you know, you brought up Apple. Apple's there. Apple turned over the operation of the ICloud Data Center to a Chinese company at the Chinese governance best. Like Apple does a lot to cell phones in China. That was their growth for so long. But Google, like, left, right?

They said, we are not going to work in China because reasons. Like the founder of Google said these things. I think it's a bigger deal for them to go back than just, hey, there's money on the table. there's opportunity at the table. Quite frankly, there's a data collection opportunity in China there's way greater than anywhere else in the world because Chinese citizens are routinely tracked and have their faces scanned all day. There's a set of cultural norms there. I was actually on a panel last night. And one of my fellow panelists said, I just came back from China and people there will happily go the entire day without anything because their faces just get scanned

and that will serve as like currency. That will serve as reputation scores. There's a set of cultural norms there that I think is different, that actually if you are a data collection company like Google, poses a bigger opportunity as norms around the rest of the world change, all that said, do you want to build a censored search engine? I don't think Congress did that. We just

had a deeper conversation about Google and China than I think anyone in Congress has had. So they asked the question, and they walked away from it, and then someone else waved an iPhone, it's an door's face. The other thing they asked about, which I think is interesting to talk about, and rarely comes up. I think, I don't think the average YouTube

thinks of Sundar but try being the guy in charge of YouTube. But he is, right? Even though Susan Wichickie is the CEO of YouTube, YouTube is part of Google, Sundar runs Google. He doesn't really have a great answer for why, like, YouTube works the way it does, why YouTube moderation is still so, like, bad fundamentally, while YouTube recommendations quickly lead down radicalization holes on, you know, whatever you want to be radicalized on, he still is just kind of like,

we're working on it, we have policies, we take it down as we see it. And I don't think, I think that answer is quickly going to be. not good enough. And I think the idea that Sundar is insulated from YouTube is that needs to change a little bit. Even though he does have deputies in the middle, Google still runs YouTube. It's the second largest search engine in the world. So that was the other thing that Congress touched on yesterday. I think Julia Alexander wrote a great piece about it for us, but it's just, it's just weird that it's still, everybody thinks about it has two different things. It's almost like Facebook and Instagram. Like, no one really considers fact that Facebook on its Instagram.

I do now, because what I use Instagram, I could just feel it. that it wants to make every other image in the main feed an ad. But it isn't quite willing to just go there. And so, but like I like, as you scroll, you're like, huh, there's another ad already. So now I'm counting the number of posts between ads, just like because I know it's going to get down to one. And that just smells really Facebooky to me. Yeah. And stories in particular is just ad city.

Yeah. Let's take a break. I'm going to read Nad? Speaking of ads. And then, let's talk about some gadgets. This episode of Veritas is brought to you by Glenn Fiddick. It's the holiday season, and that means it's time to host a party. Any professional bartender will tell you that serving the right whiskey spells sophistication.

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That's glenphidic.com slash U.S. Note drinking alcohol involves risk, please drink responsibly. Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else. Welcome to this week in Elon. I'm your host, Elizabeth Lepato, deputy editor at The Verge. And we are going to talk about the 60 Minutes interview. The story will continue in a moment. Let's set the scene.

You may remember earlier this year, this was the whole thing where Musk was talking about taking Tesla private, 420 a share, funding secured. And then Tesla did not go private. And then the SEC got involved. And they brought a securities fraud case, which Musk and Tesla then settled. And there were some specifics in that agreement. Those specifics were. Somebody to monitor Elon Musk's tweets. It was a $20 million fine for.

for Musk, a $20 million fine for Tesla. And Musk was out as the chairman of the Tesla board, so ultimately they replaced him with Robin Denholm. And Tesla had to add two independent directors to the board. Okay? So this is the knot of the settlement. I'm sure that there are other details I'm forgetting here, but this is like the most important part.

So he goes on 60 minutes and he says, I do not respect the SEC, I do not. He says he handpicked his successor and nobody's monitoring his tweets. Well, okay. To be clear, the effective date for the settlement is December 28th, so there's still time for these things to be in place because the deadline has not yet passed. The other piece of this is that according to the settlement language, Tesla and Musk can both ask for extensions if it is, for instance, difficult to get some of these things in place.

So there's also that. But I talked to a bunch of lawyers to ask if they felt that Musk and Tesla were in violation, and the answer seems to be no. So it's not necessarily a bad legal move so much as it is just a bad PR move. And that's sort of a shame. Because there was something else interesting that happened on that 60 minutes interview, or at least I thought it was interesting, which is that Leslie Stahl asked Elon Musk.

There are people who say that the company cannot survive without you. I don't think that's true, yeah. You may remember from the filings that they have this language about being extraordinarily dependent on the services of Elon Musk. It's in the risk factor section. So this answer, if it is true, it suggests that Tesla is enough of a grown-up company that if Elon Musk left tomorrow, survive, and that's probably good news. It means it's a considerably more stable company than it's

done before. But that was drowned out by this SEC talk. I want to be clear, I do not respect the SEC. I do not respect them. But you're abiding by the settlement, aren't you? Because I respect the justice system. And I think part of that is just that the SEC talk is unusual, especially coming from a CEO. But I think the other part of it is that Musk and Tesla are still under investigation by the SEC. You may remember in the quarterly filing, the same one I just told you about earlier, Tesla discloses that they received subpoenas from the SEC, and there have been reports in the media about an investigation into Model 3 numbers. I called the SEC up and asked them to comment, and they declined, as you might expect. But one of the things that the lawyers I spoke to said was that,

you know, these comments may not be great for that investigation, because if anything is found, and they have to have settlement talks again, the SEC is going to come back with a much more hardline position because the settlement that Musk and Tesla received about the go-private tweets was actually pretty benign. Well, okay. So I think it's sometimes instructive to imagine what Musk could have said in public that he didn't, that people would not probably have objected to. So like, you know, like not saying I don't respect the SEC would be a move. And another move might potentially be like, yeah, I did handpick Robin Denholm. I handpicked her because she's always been very good at telling me when I have a bad idea and she curbs some of my worst impulses. I really respect that

about her. That's why she's now in charge. I think nobody would have been upset by that. I mean, maybe somebody would have. I don't know. The world's big. But I think it would have upset a lot fewer people. Or like the, you know, the moment where he's talking about like the tweet monitoring stuff, like, could have just been like, hey, so I think I know the difference between material information and non-material information. And I send all the material information through certain legal channels. There are so many ways to approach this that could have avoided this curfuffle, and none of them were used. And then Musk compounded his public relations problem by deciding to fight about it on Twitter. And like, here's the thing, guys. That's a really good way to keep this

stuff in the news cycle, is to give reporters more stuff to write about. So he complained about the edit, and Tesla fan site Electric has the unedited transcript of his comments from somewhere. I presume not 60 minutes. So there's that. You can go read them, judge for yourself, whether the edit was unfair or not. But I think it's remarkable that Musk has not learned the lesson of this year, which is that doubling down is not a good idea. But sometimes you just need to take and hold that L. You know what I mean? Just be like, ah, fuck, fine. But the thing that I wanted to get back to, since we talked about the settlement agreement at the top, is that we still don't know who the two new independent board members are. And I don't know about you, but I am dying to find out, right? Who are these

people going to be, and what are they going to be like? That's this week in Elam. I'm your host, Elizabeth Lepato. Thanks for tuning in. Dieter. Yes. I want to ask you about something. Oh, God.

I want to ask you about the infinity O. The infinity O? Yeah. Isn't that what Samsung's calling it? Yeah. Just like the infinity. Oh. Actually, there's two Samsung stories I want to talk about.

The first is just really. ridiculous, which is Samsung got in trouble this week for partnering with a fake Supreme. Yes. I don't know if you saw this. So Supreme, obviously, like the premier hype beast brand based in New York, pop-up stores. I'm just going to say the word Sam Schaeffer because it's what I think about when I think about Supreme. Just, you know, that crew, very successful, very famous.

Beloved. The twists and turns here are great. In Italy, if you are an Italian company, you get preferential treatment by the government. So a company in Italy registered the trademark for Supreme, formed a company called Supreme Italia, and they just took the trademarks and logos away. Yep. And Supreme can't do anything about it because Italian law favors Italian companies. Yep. So there's Supreme, NYC, and Supreme Italia.

You know, there's also an Italian company called Steve Jobs. That's amazing. Yep. They make jeans. Okay. Okay. That's the most. Anyway, so there's Supreme and Supreme Italia.

which is this company that formed in Italy and just literally just boosted the marks. Like the whole thing, they just boosted Supreme stuff. Samsung chose to partner with that company and announce a Samsung X Supreme collaboration. And the real Supreme was like, nope, that's not us. And now everyone is mad at Samsung. It is the dumbest blunder of all time. Can I just tell you about the time that I traveled to Europe and went to Italy? like I was of college age, even though I didn't go to college.

It was in Italy with my friend, who was the architect, he'd been staying in Italy, so he knew all about it. He knew the place. I didn't. I felt like really weird being in a foreign country for like the first time. Walking down the street, there's a guy quietly walking behind me, like crouched down, making fun of my butt. And like, everybody's looking at me and everybody's looking at this guy making fun of my butt. My Italy experience. Was it in Italian or was it English?

No, he was just gesturing. He was being quiet, right? He was just gesturing at, look at hilarious. Was anything wrong with your butt at this time? That happens to be in Oakland, so that's not weird. Would you characterize it as like normal butt? I thought so. I'm like, you weren't like.

To be honest, I thought. You weren't like wearing a pair of jeans where the whole butt was like yellow. I thought above average. but at that moment in my life. That's not the characteristic I was looking for. I'm saying you didn't have like a tail stapled on to your jeez. No. I just checking.

All right. Anyway, so Samsung blunders into Supreme Italia. I don't know. Just one of the funniest stories we covered this week. But then they also put out the new A8 in China. Samsung explicitly saying we're adding new features to our mid-range Chinese phones first because we need to be more competitive in China. They do.

It's actually a huge problem for them. So this is a trend that I think we're going to see in China first and we'll see if it comes here. But phones with instead of a notch, there's just a hole. Just a hole in the screen for the front facing camera. And Samsung, and it's in infinite wisdom, decided to brand this hole the infinity O with a dash, infinity dash. They have different brands for different types of notches.

So I think there's an infinity U for like the little thing. And I figure out the other other infinities are. But the infinity O is, let's be clear, it's a notch. Like, it's a notch that just happens to have some pixels light up inside the notch, right? Oh, really? Well, I mean, it's not really a notch. It is like the screen with a hole punch on it. It's a whole punch on a screen.

But like, do you get anything out of that little bit of extra screen in the corner next to the hole for the camera? just do you think that you're going to get useful like screen real estate out of that little that those extra pixels there no but it lights it was probably hard to make I'm trying to be charitable to the infinity I'm just I'm just saying it's a notch yeah it counts as a notch innovation is here to stay yeah wait wait it's a it's a detached notch it's a floating notch so here's my here's that one thing I don't know about this phone is that screen an LCD or an OLED it's pretty sure it's LCD

that makes sense it's like it's like a cheaper mid-range phone. Yeah. The essential phone was LCD and it had the weird you. So like it's easier to punch holes in LCD things. Yeah. What I'm just saying, are we going to enter a period of insane hole-punched LCDs? Because I would, I would welcome such a time in our lives. What kind of, do you want like flowers? You want like one in the middle, like let's just see what happens. You know, like, why not? Like we, screens have been square for so long. Now they should be square with, with, uh, holes in the. The verge ran a headline this week with something like Huawei's Nova four whole punch display.

Yeah, so Samsung was, there's like three of them this week. Right. There's an honor of you 20. Yeah. It's the Huawei Nova 4, but it doesn't have four whole punches. But what if it had four whole punches is what I'm saying? This is the time. Look, notches were so 2017.

Here's the one I'm excited about. The Vivo at Nex has a screen on the front and a screen on the back. and we've seen that before, but it's got a full screen on the back. And then the screen on the back has a lunar ring. There's a light ring that runs around the rear cameras and underneath or into the screen on the back itself. And it can light up and do stuff separate from the screen on the back. Like a notification light or like club lights?

I think both. Or like a camera flash. It can change to signify notifications or glow softly to create diffuse lighting for low-lit selfie shots. It can also be such. to pulse along with your music? Yep, club lights. At the end of the day, there's one engineer who's like,

guys, can I add the club light mode? And everyone's like, we knew this was coming, Daryl. And then he gets to do it. And like, that's fine. And I respect that, dude. It feels like the obvious future is that you have a screen

where portions of it can turn off and become translucent, and that's where your selfie cam is. Right? That's like where we're gonna end up, right? And right now we're just like rummaging a round. and weird concepts

because we're not there yet. But that's where we're going to go, right? I think the idea that we're going to hide more stuff behind the screen and these things will just become giant screens. I agree with you. I don't know about it'll turn translucent and your selfie camera will be there. Because that's a weird outcome for the lens of a selfie camera.

Yeah. Like it might impede the selfie camera's abilities. Yeah. I think you just end up with a bunch of stuff in front of the lens. And maybe you can get around it. Instead of like the pop-up camera that we've seen on some of these other VVos, I think that like a portion of the screen should just like slide over, just like, and then there's a camera underneath it, and then the screen moves back to cover it when you're done. That's what I want. I'm just, I'm saying more

holes all the time. I think it's super interesting that Samsung has to put these features in their mid-range phones. Yeah. And I think it's, it's just wild that that's where the market is for these companies while the market in the United States seems to be tapped out. Do we talk about Apple's crazy every week, every day. There's another line on their homepage to try to get you to buy an iPhone. Yeah, we have not, but it's wild. It's super weird. Yeah, the Apple.com homepage, if you just look at it, and people have tweeted screenshots sequentially on days.

It started with like, buy an iPhone 10R. It's great. And like all the other products. And then they added another line of text. It's like, it's a really good phone. And they added the next day another line of text and all the other products went away. It's like a full screen that's like really our best display. our best camera. You want it. It's $450.50 we trade in your phone. And they are just

aggressively trying to get people to upgrade to the 10R, which it's a good phone. But there's definitely an element of, hey, the phone market's kind of tapped out. And like the upgrade cycle is really slow. And so Samsung is going to go chase the mid-range market in China, and the high-end market in the United States is going to be really confused and dry for a while. And Apple, look, this happens every time with Apple. Their suppliers are like, we're doomed. And then Apple sells more phones than ever. But that narrative is, is certainly not there right now. Well, and we're never going to know again, because Apple's not reporting how many phones they sell anymore.

Yeah, it seems like they got ahead of that one pretty easily. But speaking of high-end phones, Galaxy S-10 case leaked, indicating that it still has a headphone jack. The A8 has an infinity O, but no audio O, which is sad for me. Neil, I think that you are ethically required to buy the S-10, as San Bifert predicts the the last phone ever, flagship phone ever to feature a headphone jack. Yeah, I'll buy an S-10. No, no, not just buy, but use. Oh.

It depends on what that Bixby button does. You know what I mean? Like, that's kind of where I'm at. It also has the new one UI with the headers that are three times bigger than the headers on the iPhone, so you don't have to reach to the top of the screen. That's pretty good. I'll take that. Uh-huh.

Your tiny little thumbs. And also, dog with shoes. Robot Dog, Butler, Shoes. There's also a robot dog with shoes. You know, I just bought a Sony TV, which runs Android, which is just a delightful mess. Just the purest mess in the world. It's so slow.

It's such an expensive TV, and Android is such a heavy operating system for whatever it's trying to do in there. And it's fun to, like, have Android on your TV. And then you go and use a Samsung TV that runs Tyson, and you're like, oh, this is so much weirder, but it's also, in many ways, so much better. And then you get to the fact that both TVs aggressively want to turn on content tracking so they can serve you ads.

And then you throw the TV out the window. But it's funny, like, Android definitely has limits. And Samsung can exceed those limits when they do their own thing in some of these places. And you're like, how did you make the better TV operating system, but then also Bixby? Right? Like, I don't, I can't. It's real bad. All right, I'll buy an S-10.

And I'll buy like a Chevy S-10 blazer from like 1995. and it'll just be the full S-10 life. Yeah, it'll be good. I like it. Look, if it's the last phone with the headphone jack, that's sad. I think there's a reason Samsung keeps that thing on there at their high end. It's because people buy it because they want it, right? Right.

And like, that's what Samsung is a company, is like, do you want a feature? Here it is. Does it work great? Medium. But here it is. It's available on this phone. Do you want to use the 14th Qualcomm Miracast version? Yeah, it's on here.

Did we QA it? We didn't. But it's here. And that's like, absolutely, it's like, that's their company. I think they're going to do that stuff. But I continue every day to get tweets from people who miss the headphone jack on their phones. And I think this XR upgrade cycle is going to just keep doing that for people. Anyway, more gadgets.

You want to talk about this one plus 6T that is $700 and Brandon McLaren? I think, I think we just did. 10 gigabytes of RAM. Why? That's some RAM. Android. I'm just saying Android. multitasking.

Okay. Android. And then Dan review the LG Watch W7, which seems... Yeah. Poor Androidware. So unfortunately, we didn't have the best headline. I forget who had it, but someone said... Oh, it was Mr. Mobile on YouTube.

It was the LGW7 review W8 for the next version. Wait. Say it again? Wait for the next version. It's good, right? That's the story of WareOS. Yeah. If you're not familiar, this is a WearOS watch that has actual physical hands over the screen,

which means that it has all the problems of wearOS, and then it also has the problems of sometimes you have to wait for the hands to move so you can read the screen. Yep. All right. I'm going to read another ad and we're going to come back. Paul's going to do his thing.

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You do a thing. He's got the same name. Always. You rely on your consistency. What is it? It's called, don't brick the jacket. Okay. Where is this going to take us?

So remember that Google Levi collab? Yeah. Deere, don't you have one? Jacard. I don't own one. I reviewed one, and I have to send it back. I just remember you and I both insisted that we would buy. and it turns out we didn't.

Anyway, Jacard. Yeah. Jacard. It'd be great if they break the jack. I don't think that's happened yet. But there's a software update. There's a new feature for your jacket.

And it's like a find your phone thing. But it alerts you if you get too far away from your phone. And your phone will vibrate and your, I guess if the jacket moves too far away from the phone. And the phone will vibrate and the jacket will vibrate and the cuff will light up. Yeah. But I just really like this idea of a software update for a piece of clothing. Yeah.

Yeah. It just seems like the future. It's for the cuff on the clothing. I guess it's the cuff. I guess it's the cuff. I mean, really, it is just a... Well, if you don't charge the thing in the cuff, it doesn't work as a jacket. See, that's what I want.

I want a software update that could make it not be a jacket anymore. Like, it would be porous all of a sudden. I'm all wet because I've forgotten. to charge my jacket, you know, that kind of thing. That's, that's where I was going with, well, that's where I go every week with don't brick the jacket, you know. It's beautiful. I'm going to ask for this. I got a birthday and Christmas coming up. I'm getting a Jacquard. Don't do it. I mean, do it. It's fine. It's a fine jacket. I like compared to the regular trucker jacket, that it's got elastic on the cuffs so you can like have the water get in

your cuffs. I don't know, whatever. For Levi's, the jacard jacket, has already done its job, which has made me and a bunch of other people just buy a regular Levi's trucker jacket, which costs 50 bucks and is great. If you want to spend whatever a Jakarta jacket costs, 200 bucks, go forth and do it. Yeah, but I'm just telling you, you can get something that is just as good from Levi's for 50 bucks. But will I have the joy of software updates from time to time? No, you will not. This is a great time to tell you, Deeter, that it's $350. God damn.

And that it was a 30% off sale that ended on December 9th. Ah, foiled again. It is slightly better than the basic trucker jacket because it is a commuter version. It's got a dip to cover your body. Also, it has a computer in it. If you wear it in Italy, nobody will make fun of you. Guaranteed. Terrell buttmockers in Italy.

It's ridiculous. All right. Speaking of ridiculous, I want to just end here by talking about Verizon. My favorite company, personal for me and Paul, because we used to be at Engadget, which I still love and cherish our time there, and all the people there, we still know a bunch of them. So our buddy, Tim Armstrong, who is a CEO of AOL, which owned Engadget. He bought The Huffington Post, was true.

He bought TechCrunch. He sold the whole shebang to Verizon, sold all of AOL to Verizon, and then he convinced Verizon to buy Yahoo. Then he glued AOL and Yahoo together into a new company called Oath. Inside Verizon. Inside Verizon. Yeah. He asked everybody at the new company Oath to write three-word oaths.

This is a true story. It's on our website. Everyone had to submit a three-word oath to work at Oath. Unsurprisingly, this failed, which I think everyone saw coming. Yeah. So Verizon, so think about what's happening at AT&T right now. AT&T bought DirecTV, AT&T bought Time Warner. They now own all the Warner stuff.

So AT&T's big plan is they sell you a network connection. They sell you a phone. On that phone will be CNN, Harry Potter, HBO, like some streaming service that competes with Netflix. They will zero rate that. Almost 100% will zero rate that. And that'll be the thing you get for free. Verizon's plan was not to buy Harry Potter in Game of Thrones. No.

But to buy AOL and Yahoo. No, no. They bought AOL and, yeah, it's. They bought AOL and Yahoo so that they could do more ad tracking, but I just can't let you finish what you're about to go on here about what their particular strategy was with AOL and Yahoo without saying that Verizon's plan, to be clear, was also Go-90. Yes.

So Verizon also had Go-90, which was their super-failed YouTube competitor. Yeah. Which they just shut down. Yeah. But fundamentally, what Tim Armstrong wanted to do was compete with Google and Facebook by having enough content and enough data to add track the shit out of you. That was his big plan. We can build an ad serving system that competes with Google.

Armstrong, by the way, famously an ex-Google executive. He was like a Google sales guy that when Google moved to automated exchanges and like computer-based auctions, they realized they didn't need like a slickster sales guy. So I think he's always wanted to kill Google and prove that his ideas were right. Yeah. Anyway, all this happened. Verizon bought Oath. Then they got a new CEO.

His name is Hans Vestberg, which is a choice name. Yeah. Hans decided that he didn't want to be in the media business, shut down Go 90, booted Armstrong, installed a new CEO of Oath. And then on the recent quality results said, we've reevaluated the business. It is actually not worth anything. Yeah. Like just there was a line I saw quoted somewhere.

Hans Vesberg was just at the Business Insider Ignition conference. And the line was he didn't even fake enthusiasm about his media. So this Oath disaster inside of Verizon combined with Go 90 means as we go into the next era of, and so we don't know what's going to happen with Oath. And I hope everybody there is great. There are a lot of great people who work at Engadget and TechCrunch. Huffo is actually doing great work lately. Yeah.

So as properties, they're very good. And I don't mean to denigrate them. But Paul, we worked for AOL. I thought Engadgeter was really good when we worked there too. and I can't say that they were ever good stewards of us as owners of a media business. And I think that is just happening once again. Oh, and it's funny because like the AOL Time Warner merger is one of the most famously disastrous mergers. Yeah.

And so now AOL, maybe AOL is just the worst thing ever. Yeah, if there's a lesson here, it's don't buy AOL. Oh, by the way, Yahoo owns Tumblr. You know, Verizon basically made Tumblr, delete. all of the porn on Tumblr, which has like far-reaching consequences for the Tumblr user community, it's just a mess over there. Like the idea that Verizon owns Tumblr, you just know Hans of Esberg was like the what? We own what?

No. Right? No, no, no, no. Like 5G, y'all, that's what we do here. And that is basically his focus. His focus is we're going to be first to five, the biggest best 5G network. And that's how we'll gain subscribers. Yeah.

So that's a whole mess. Obviously, again, like I said, to me and Paul probably, for you. It's very personal what happens to engage it because that's where we came from. It's like a thing that I love. Yeah, what is the thinking? Are they going to shut it all down? They're not going to just turn off the lights. Or they're going to sell it for bits and bobs? Like, that's a thing. Yeah, they could, they could do that. I mean, them writing down, it was like the goodwill, something, something. Yeah, everyone used this phrase, goodwill impairment, which sounds insane. So basically, just to unpack what that means. So if I, Paul, if I was to buy your web design business and

Your value of your web design business was a million dollars, and I bought it for $1.5, I'd have $500,000 like Goodwill. It's the value over the total value. Oh, the nice guy buffer. Yeah, goodwill. So Goodwill impairment is we're just writing out the additional value that we ascribe to this business that we think we can get to, that we bought into. And now it's worth like $400 million out of $5 billion. dollars like a $4.5 billion dollar goodwill impairment charges

all of that extra value we thought was here is gone. Yeah. So now that they're saying that value is gone, they've got like, I think it's easier for them to do stuff with it. And so I'm worried about the stuff they're going to do. By the way, I just want to point out that somebody's job at Verizon

was to go find that number to go like track it down. And so someone called them up and said, hey, I need you to go goodwill hunting. That's good. It's good. It's good. I mean, they're not a great content company, so I don't know that they had, like, the jokesters on the team to really, really nail that joke. But here's, okay, so there's all that.

It's a mess. It's personal, whatever. But more abstractly, we're going to enter into the next phase of mobile competition. I think this is wild where Verizon is going to go up against AT&T, and AT&T has tons and tons of zero rated content to give to people. And T-Mobile is not shy about zero-rating anything it can, right? Team level bought Level 3, so they've got like a third rate OTT TV service called Level 3, something that you can get in like four towns right now and maybe they'll roll it out Nationwide eventually. I think when they go to 5G, that's going to be like their TV play on top of whatever they do, right? Yeah, but it's like, it's basically like dish anyway.

Sure, it's not great, but it's going to be the thing. Level 3 is pretty good technology. I looked into it. Yeah. Yeah, but as a consumer TV service, it's not. I have no idea. It's good technology. It's not Game of Thrones.

Right. So let me just pull this back in the abstract. The 5G moment is here, a year from now or two years from now. It's certainly not here now. But the 5G moment arrives. You have dollars to spend. I don't know which way this cuts, but I think here are your options are going to be. You can spend your money with Verizon, which it seems like they're going to do everything

and have the best network. Yep. Right. You're talking from a consumer perspective. Yeah. You've got dollars in your hand. You want to spend them on a hundred. 5G service. You can spend them with Verizon. You will have data caps. Verizon is not shy,

but it's data caps. You'll probably spend a lot of money because Verizon is expensive. And you will get no content. They're out of the content business. It's unclear if they want to make deals for content. Right now they want to sell your network service. And go to AT&T, which is extremely motivated to have a network as good as Verizon's, right? They're not going to stop. And on top of that, you get a bunch of free stuff, a bunch of free Warner Brothers stuff, but they will aggressively throttle Netflix or whatever they're going to do, right? They want you on CNN and Harry Potter. Or you can go to T-Mobile, which will give you Netflix for free.

We'll probably not have as good of a network, just that's where T-Mobile is, in terms of coverage. Maybe in terms of speeds it will be really fast. And they will zero rate the hell out of everything, and maybe you'll get some weird level 3 TV package in the deal. That is not like... And presumably by then they'll have, like, completed the Sprint merger. Yeah. Who knows? Or yeah.

Or you can just go to Sprint and be like, I don't know what it's. did with this money. Or you could get Comcast's mobile service. What's that? Right. Or you can get Google Fi. You can get Xfinity Wireless. There's other stuff. But the three big ones in the United States, AT&T Verizon. Those choices now look awfully different

for the dollar, right? Yep. Which in some ways is good. But if you're Verizon, suddenly the idea of net neutrality has to look good to you. Oh my God. Right? It's like a weird incentive place for them to be in where they don't have this like zero rating thing to do with their own content or this incentive to go make deals the way T-Mobile does,

suddenly you're going to say, well, we have the best network. These networks are just run fairly. We'll win. That's like a weird development in this world, and I'm very eager to see how it plays out. You think that Verizon's going to become a huge net neutrality advocate. That's what you're predicting. No, I'm saying the incentives around their network will shift as 18-T gets more aggressive with their content.

What's interesting, because I feel like we're like in like, Act two of the great content wars. Like, we've left the Shire, you know. And so now there's, you know, there's Netflix and Amazon and Hulu. Like, there's all the services, you know, that we sign up for. And then there are the bandwidth providers, both like home and mobile. And, yeah, they're pretty confusing and conflated in like a case like AT&T, where like Disney is fairly all, pretty much all content,

and Verizon is apparently going to be all service. Like, I think there's a lot of interesting connections that can happen there, too. Yeah, I think a Verizon Disney tie up to zero rate Disney Plus or whatever is like, that's just out there for the taking, right? But it's, I think that's the act too. But I think it's wild to think that just depending on how aggressive AT&T is, the best competitive play Verizon might have is to say, hey, maybe zero rating should not be possible.

Maybe everyone has to treat this stuff the same. Because the last thing they're going to do is zero rate AT&T services for Verizon customers, which they could lower their prices. Just think about their moves. Like, you're trying to attract a customer with dollars, and she's looking at AT&T's bundle, which has stream CNN for free, get these weird cut down Game of Thrones episodes that they keep talking about,

which sounds honestly horrific, get all this Warner content for free with the same great coverage. You know, same great map as AT&T, blah, blah, blah. And then Verizon's here being like, well, we had Yahoo, but we fucked it up. Okay. I don't want to get too won't get too won'ty, but there's like a theory in business. Like, vertical integration is efficient up to like a point, right? And AT&T's version of vertical integration might not be more efficient than Verizon's.

You know, it's not like AT&T's getting all that content that they're sharing with you for free, you know. Like that stuff costs money. Where Verizon's in a position where like, oh, you want access to our eyeballs, you know, they can negotiate. Like they can Walmart people and get like good deals on content and maybe content companies will do. Because like right now, a lot of content's being produced almost at a loss to gain market share, right? Like AT&T can't do that forever. So this was more or less the argument AT&T made against the government when the government tried to prevent the merger. that just went up for appeal.

They made their cases again. I will say that the appeals court did not look favorably on the government being like, no, but really. Wait, AT&T's argument is that being vertically integrated with content is less efficient? No, that's why I said it's more or less. Their argument is there are still huge distributors. I mean, it's like a very technical argument

about whether or not the price of one cable channel will go up 10 cents. Like it's in the weeds there, but you pull out, they're saying the same thing you're saying, which is we still have to access the customer, and those distributors still have the leverage over us in a way that us owning one distribution channel does not favor us.

Right. And that all boils down to we promise not to raise prices. I just think it is the height of foolishness to think that this won't result in higher prices for cable customers, right, to get HBO and CNN. Like, we know what they're going to do. Like, let me ask you a question. Paul, do you think the cable company will raise prices

given the opportunity to raise prices? Like why why do we have economists on the stand in front of a judge to be like I can prove the cable company will raise prices? Like yes, history suggests the cable company will raise prices given the opportunity. Yeah, you're right. I just, oh my God. I just, you know, I want, I want us to proceed quickly through part two because you know what I actually want? I want. I want gigabit internet in my house. Yeah.

That's what I want. And I feel like we've been like all this money has been all in the. Content wars for the past like five or so years. And I want more money in the Paul's fastest internet ever wars, you know? So I think, I want to be a great Twitch streamer. That's not going to happen for you, Paul. Well, no, I think there's a moment, and I think these moments come and go, and I think we've probably lived through enough of them where you could actually chart them,

where the access layer becomes commodified. This is me yelling everyone's a dumb pipe, just shut up. And then to sell, to get a new customer, because most people that you want to address outside of rural areas have Internet access, to get a new customer, you have to add perks, right? So then you end up in content wars. Maybe with 5G, because the access layer won't be commodified, that race to, do we have sufficient coverage? Is it network reliable? Is it faster than the other guy? That cycle might break down where the perks are less important than the access. But once, five years from now, when 5G is a commodity again, maybe 18T will buy Yahoo. And that will be, you know, like, who knows who knows where Yahoo will go? But I, but I can, you can kind of map that cycle. If you know, AT&T is going to be strolling down a sidewalk and they're just going to walk by a store window. And they'll be like, oh, hey, look at that. I didn't know that.

Oh, sure. And they'll just walk in and be like, how much for Yahoo? And they're like, oh, that old thing? I forgot we had that in the window. 20 bucks. Well, I don't know about 20 bucks. How about 15? So I sold my old plasma TV.

This is a true story. So you got to get rid of everything in the apartment. You know, babies crawling. Plasma TV is too heavy to hang on the wall in the apartment because there's no wood studs. You've got to hang it off the dry wall. So the plasma is way too heavy. So I put it up to sell it.

And the exact thing happened. Some guy emailed me within an hour and said, I've always wanted this TV. Because it was like the top of the line, Panasonic plasma from 10 years ago. I've always wanted this TV. I'm coming to get it right now. That is Yahoo.

Like, it was top of the line. He's like, see it in the story. You're like, you know, I always want. wanted that. I'm just going to have it. And then I'll have it. We can look at it from time to time. It's like an old Walkman. Just you bring back the Yahoo directory. Just try to start categorizing everything manually. See, that's your answer to Congress. Human curated listings of the internet. All right, that's got to be it. I propose that we now human curate the internet.

I just wanted to add something to my story about Italy. I think he was on rollerblades. I think he was That's why I couldn't hear me Was rolling silently behind me Paul I'm definitely getting you Do they make like a long Jekard jacket like a duster To hide my shave

Yeah The first Duster with a computer in it You're gonna look like Like an old-timey formal cowboy But you'll be able to control your music At the same time It'll be great

All right That's it It is the holiday season. We're going to be off for the next couple weeks, basically. We'll come back in the new year. If you need to buy gifts, you have a great holiday gift guide. Go check that out. We encourage you to.

It's full of really fun stuff. We got t-shirts for you to buy. Dieter, what's that promo code? Promocode. Yep, that's stored at the verge. com. Just type in promo code. It'll be great.

You follow us on Twitter, Instagram, we're at Verge. Please hit us up on Apple Podcast. Give us those five stars. We love it. There's a new episode of Why'd you push that button this week. Why did you push that button. It's been on a real tear lately. Ashley and Kettlin are just doing a great job with that show.

It's about why people pick the emoji skin tones they pick, which is a real phenomenon of people picking different. It's a while. Just listen to it. It's great. If you missed it on Tuesday, I interviewed Shruti from Reply All about what's happening in Foxxon and Mount Pleasant. I will say one of my favorite media outcomes of this past week was that CBS 58 local news in Wisconsin did a segment about reply all's segment. And the headline was podcast pays attention to Matt Pleasant. That wasn't really the headline, but it was like very close to the headline.

But that episode of reply all about Foxhomount Pleasant was terrific. I encourage you to listen to it and then listen to the interview with Shruti. It was like an out-of-body experience for me to interview somebody about my hometown. Just a weird thing that happened. For someone to know way more about the place that I grew up because she was there. She went and reported it for a long time. So check that out. And then you can listen to Rico Decode with Kara Swisher.

You can listen to Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway. We got a new show in the Vox Media Podcast Network, of which we have the flagship, Function with a Neal Dash. And Neil is great. He's got a new show called Function, which is about how technology is done really works. Go check that out. And then you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless, Deeter's at Backlon.

Paul's at Future Paul. It's holiday time. We've got an interview with Nick Woodman, the CEO of GoPro, coming next week, but then we're going to take a break to get us to the holidays. We'll be back in the year. See you then. Rock and roll. Paul.

Paul.