The Vergecast - Spotify’s big audio play, plus a Palm tiny phone review

Episode Date: February 8, 2019

Spotify acquires Gimlet Media and Anchor in a play to further expand into audio beyond music streaming. Later, Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller review the tiny new Palm phone, address Samsung Galaxy S10 rumors and finally, some Apple updates. Links: - Spotify gets serious about podcasts with two acquisitions - Latest leaks confirm cheaper and smaller Samsung Galaxy S10e - Samsung’s Galaxy S10 will be one of the first Wi-Fi 6 phones - New Samsung true wireless earbuds appear in leaked promotional … - Samsung Galaxy Sport leak shows a sleek bezel-less smartwatch … - Palm phone review: it won’t save you from your phone - Apple releases iOS 12.1.4 to fix Group FaceTime security flaw - Apple is compensating the 14-year-old who discovered major FaceTime security bug - Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts is leaving in April - Apple just endorsed AT&T’s fake 5G E network - Fine, here’s a $100 Lightning to Ethernet dongle for iPads - Net neutrality takes center stage at congressional hearing Check out: Azure.com/trial to sign up for a trial today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody, on this episode of The Vergecast, we're going to talk about Spotify buying Gimlet. That's huge news. Deeter's going to talk about his palm phone review and some Samsung rumors, and we're going to go through all the little updates that Apple put out this week. It's all happening right now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for sure.

nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast Armada. I am Neil I Patel, your friend. Dieter Bone is here. Hello, hello.

Paul Miller is here. Hello. Are you here, Paul? Yes, I am. Good. I said hi. It's very exciting. No, but it's true.

Spotify bought Gimlet. It's a huge deal. We've got to talk about what's going on in podcasts with big tech streaming companies. Dieter reviewed the Palm Phone. We've got to talk about that. There's a bunch of Samsung leaks. I have here just Dieter rant about where OS. I don't know.

I just figure out what that is. And there's some Apple stuff to talk about. And then there's some net neutrality news to talk about. So a lot going on. But let's start with, like, I think the tech news of the week, which is Spotify and Gimlet. So Peter Kofka got the story. They were going to buy Gimlet for $200 million. And then the news came out.

Spotify bought Gimlet for somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million, and also Anchor, which is a very clever little app ecosystem where you can both record and receive audio. It's the podcast stuff, but you can do other interesting things with it. And so the question, there's so many things going on with this whole deal. But Nelai, just tell me why Spotify spent this much money on, you know, like, Gimlet's good. I love Gimlet podcast. I listen to reply all the time. listen to startup when they started, but $200 million is a lot of money for a podcast.

It is true. I think everyone loves Gimlet. We had Shruthy Pinnam-Mennany who did that great reply episode on Foxxon on our show. We're just like very friendly. I think Gimlet makes a bunch of beloved stuff. They made Homecoming, which is now like a Julia Roberts show out in the world. Like they're a force in podcasting. I think that everyone kind of knew that they needed to take the next step.

They needed to exit in some way. $230 million from Spotify. That's a good exit. But fundamentally, though, it seems like Spotify is taking a big step towards consolidating like the podcast world. So look, you're listening to a podcast. You're probably in your car right now. You just pull over and then send me a text.

It's like tweet, what podcast app you're using. And I would bet, well, the Vergecast audience, I bet we have a lot of overcast fans. Well, I bet you we've got also a lot of pocketcast fans. Who, by the way, also got purchased by NPR. So there's a lot of stuff moving around in the podcast space. Right. So I bet Vergecast listeners, I bet you're all different. But pull on over and let us know.

I'm at Matt Reckless, tweet at me. But most people, I suspect, are using Apple Podcasts or they're using Spotify. Spotify is increasing their share of the podcast market. And if you're a podcaster, there's a bunch of stuff you want. There's a big debate in the industry about whether you want targeted ads that could you on the video side, whether you want metrics about when people are dropping off when they're listening, when they're picking back up, whether you're a big up. they're going to next. This is all stuff that's like been on the web for a very long time and

just has not been a part of podcasts. Some people will tell you that that is great that you don't want all that intrusive tracking and ad targeting to happen in podcasts. But fundamentally, if you're Spotify, you've got this weird problem in your business model, which is you license a bunch of music from the record labels. It's music that mostly everyone else has. You stream that music to your audience, whether you're ad supported or they're paying you in no ads. And then you pay the money back to the record labels. Right? So like literally the more money Spotify makes, the more popular it gets, the more money they owe to their supplier. And I think that's like a really, that's just a reality of streaming

music. It's really like the streaming music companies all tried to do exclusives for a really long time. It didn't work. It didn't work. The labels didn't like it. The idea that a consumer is going to shift a library from Apple music to title to get a Kanye record is like nonsense. I I think everybody figured it out. So if you're Spotify, like, how do you build another thing that you can use attention for, or you can get attention for from a consumer that is sticky, that is useful? They actually tried to do a bunch of video stuff last year, and it fizzled because I don't anybody wants to open Spotify and watch videos.

And so podcasts are like this burgeoning markets, like $300 million total revenue in the world right now, but it's this growing market. Everybody loves them. So why wouldn't you buy a great podcast house, like Gimlet, say this is where they live, we're going to start to attract not only your music listening time, but your podcast listening time, Daniel Eck, the CEO of Spotify, put out a letter being like, we're an audio company. We want all of your audio time. Audio, audio, audio. That's what we do. And then this is kind of like, I think we talk about Ben Thompson on the show. Oh, actually, yeah, before you get there, I just like, you pulled over. You're allowed to drive now. Get back, get back in the road. Most podcast apps, they're great, but they're basically like really, really, really nice, bespoke. custom versions of the iTunes model of managing songs, right? You, I'm a web guy, you get an RSS feed, an XML feed of episodes.

You download them to your device. When you listen to them, they go away. But you've got to do a lot of, like, management of, like, files, basically. There's a nice interface for it, whatever. But it's, like, old school iTunes kind of model. And that's, like, you know, podcast started from the iPod and, like, actually iTunes in the first place. That's how most people had their first introduction to it way back in the day.

But a bunch of companies have tried to change that and bring it closer to some sort of new, more modern model of getting audio. So Stitcher really made a go at this. There's the NPR One app, which sort of does something similar where they don't, in the same way that you don't manage your music library anymore, you just let Spotify or Apple Music handle it. There's like a sense that there's going to be a model of podcasts where you're, you're not managing your library anymore. You're letting your app handle it. I think that's one of the opportunities Spotify sees here. And I think the other opportunity and maybe the more interesting opportunity is the thing that bugged people about that RSS model of podcasts is once you download the file, I have no idea if you've listened to it.

I barely know if you've heard the ad. You've literally just downloaded a file to your phone, done whatever you want with it, and then it went away. And all I know is that, like, you hit the download server. And so a bunch of, like, moving to this new thing, lets them do more ad tracking and improve ads. And there's a whole ad thing that Spotify can get into here, which is sort of related to like this like corporate dream of like changing the podcast model way from RSS. But it's also like this is where we get into the Ben Thompson area. I think I'm trying to tee you up here because like the way Spotify wants to make money off podcasts is fundamentally different than the way that podcasts make money today. Yeah, so think of ad tracking on podcasts right now is very simple. It's very obvious. I read an ad. I do it every week on the show, and I'm like, go to this website and type in this promo code. The promo code, by the way, for store.com is promo code. Is promo code. Is it promo code. Is it promo code. Isrcoed. And if you type that in, we'll not track it actually. We're like, I read an ad and I say the promo code is Verge. And then, you know, whoever Microsoft Azure knows that they came to you from our podcast, right? And they're like, that's how they do whatever ad track.

And that's actually a pretty fiddly system. You've got to build all that logic. And it also means that if you're not trying to enter into that kind of transaction, the ad isn't worthwhile to you. Right. So most of our advertisers, I think, you know, like, they're trying to get you to buy a subscription of something. They're trying to charge you per month.

Like, it's super valuable to go through all the pain of, like, these weird ads. The other thing that's true is that once you've downloaded the file from us, you know, a year from now on a second listen, we can't change the ads. our entire back catalog is not valuable to us from that perspective. We get one shot at monetizing it. So if they do what YouTube does, which is dynamically streamed the content to you in this app, well, YouTube changes the ads. Hulu changes the ads, right?

And you can target the ads. So if you go back, you make the horrible mistake of listening like a Vergecast from a year ago, because just because you love us, it means Spotify might be able to dynamically target ads, or it might be able to segment audiences. So there's a lot of like business stuff in there that you get when you dynamically stream the content instead of downloading files to devices. That's like a big one. And I think NPR1 has like moved in that direction. You know, our platform provider right now does dynamic ad insertion.

So when you request the file over RSS, we can change it. That's basically a hack. Spotify just gets to do it on the front end. But the other thing that I think is super interesting, and this is the kind of the Ben Thompson piece, his whole, and this is all credit to Ben, I'm just like lifting his analysis, but it's interesting to talk about. You know, his whole, the hammer he has,

his analysis hammer is aggregation theory and everything in the world is a nail. So this news came out yesterday, and I said, Ben Thompson's going to write about Spotify trying to be an aggregator, and sure enough, his newsletter came out today, and it did. But the simplest version of his aggregation theory is that the old economy worked

by putting all of the supply in one place, right? Right. So you literally would drive them all, all the clothes and Radio Shack gadgets and, I know, whatever synobons earn them all. And the consumer goes to supply. Right. So I want to buy something. I go there. And whoever controls supply controls a whole part of the value chain. Ben's whole theory is that the internet has radically shifted that. And Google and Facebook actually what they control is demand because they have better user experiences. So the consumers are all at Google and Facebook. And we're, a supplier of tech news, and we have to go to Google and Facebook to get routed to a consumer. And that literally is flipped over the thing. And those new kinds of platforms are called aggregators. Right now, in podcasting, that doesn't exist. It exists all over the other place. So Google and Facebook are good examples of they've aggregated all the demand for, I don't know, text on the internet. And so as suppliers, we have to go through them to get to the consumer. Uber and Lyft have aggregated all the supply of, like, people who want a taxi. So drivers have to like go to them

to get customers for the taxis. Netflix has aggravated a bunch of demand for people who just like want to watch some video. So if you're like a video provider, if you like do that, YouTube is the same idea. Like it's very hard to start a competitor to YouTube because you can't peel off any customers, right? But as a YouTube creator,

you can go immediately find customers on YouTube. So you see Spotify, like, they already have a bunch of customers sitting there demanding audio experiences for music. They can just say, well, now podcasts live here too. And if you're a podcast creator, you will have to go make a deal with Spotify to get on the platform on their terms, and that business scales, because now you're

going to pay them a cut to get to your customer instead of what they have to do with the music labels, which is pay them a cut to get the supply. And that's a big shift, right? And the, I encourage you to go read Ben's analysis. It's very much a better B-school version of that. But the main thing is the big platforms don't want to control supply. They want to control demand. And I think this is Spotify definitely trying to make that move. But if you can control demand, get the thing that have made Google and Facebook fabulously wealthy, which is it is much easier to buy an ad on Google and Facebook than it is to, like, go to a thousand different websites directly, right, or a thousand different whatever's directly and, like, make ads for each of

those things. Because if you want to do an ad on a podcast, there's, you have two problems. You got to come talk to us. You got to go, you know, come talk to the business people at Vox Media or, you know, are some other, like, middle man ad supplier. and then... Can you imagine the people who grew up to be like, I want to be a middleman ad supplier one day?

I mean, it happens. It's got a brown car, brown suit, brown suitcase. But if Spotify pulls off what it wants to pull off, one, it can have ads that aren't just making you remember a promo code because it could dynamically insert them and it can do more, you know, evil ad tracking. And so it'll know who's listening to what and you'll be able to do different kinds of ads. And then, two, like, it's just you can give better ads from the advertiser's perspective. And it's way easier.

And so if they're successful, they could theoretically do to, like, podcast advertising, what Google did to web advertising and Facebook did to web advertising, which is take all of it. Yeah. And I think that that is an enormous sort of, like, outcome that could happen. Like, it's a very real statistical probability that Spotify will just capture all this demand. Yeah. That, I think, is a little, like, in the abstract, though. So I said this to Ashley Carman, who covers podcasts for us, who's also a great podcaster.

She does watch her such button with Caitlin Tiffany. And she's like, yeah, but listening to podcasts on Spotify sucks. That's actually the first problem is like the experience is bad. And I think the people who listen to the Verstas who are choosing overcast or pocket casts, they've gone to a third-party solution because it's a better podcasting experience, it's a better consumption experience. So Spotify has like some competition there, right, just in terms of end-user experience. And then Spotify has to actually convince people who are on Spotify to listen to music that what they want to also do is listen to podcasts.

So that they're doing a reasonably good job of that. I think the one thing that I think puts this in check that doesn't make this a Google like automatic win or Facebook like automatic win is that there's a lot of people using that Apple podcast app on iOS. And Apple does not seem particularly interested in doing dynamic ad serving and traffic. They do some metrics, and, you know, that's fine. But they can tell you when you drop off. And I've actually looked at these metrics, I don't know. I'm just confident that our, you know, our many, many listeners are happy with us all the time, and I just live in that confidence. They always stay with us all the way through the end until we say the word Paul.

Oh, great. Now they're gone. Thanks, Deeter. But anyway, so, like, there's this other competitor in the market, whereas, you know, Bing was not like a serious rival to Google in that way. So there's some dynamics for Spotify to, like, navigate. but you can just clearly see if they start streaming podcasts to people and they make the ads better for the advertisers, which they are currently pretty difficult,

then there's a lot of money to be made there. Now, the Gimlet people did say, our podcasts are not going to be exclusive. The existing library of Gimlet shows will still be available on every platform. But you can see that their next big, splashy, homecoming, whatever, could very well be exclusive to Spotify. Yeah.

That's exactly what I was going to ask. why do they need to own the producers of the content? Because there's multiple things here. You're talking about inventing something that's better than an RSS reader for podcasts. And then there's the mixing in the ads part dynamically so you can track everybody. Great. And then there's the now they own some of the content, you know, which is, I don't know, what's the incentive there to own the content?

Well, I think it's the same incentive as. to buy Anchor, which is literally right now, every time Spotify streams a song, they've got to pay a bunch of people, right? They've got to pay Taylor Swift half a cent every time you stream a Taylor Swift song. And you got to pay your label. And like this whole litany of people. By the way, we had Meredith Rose on to explain the Music Modernization Act on the Vergecast like several months ago. Like you can listen to that episode. It's great. She explains everybody you got to pay. If you own the content, you don't want to pay anybody. You pay for it once up front. You pay some salaries. But then every time you stream it, it's just, just additional margin, right? It's additional profit. If you are YouTube and you've got YouTube creators putting your stuff on your platform for free, well, sure, you've got to pay them a cut of the ad revenue, but you're not paying this like marginal licensing fee every single time. And you get to do things like demonetize them.

I can understand that maybe with Anchor. Gimlet is like Netflix bought Adam Sandler not so that they could, you know, Netflix doesn't make a margin every time you stream an Adam Sandler movie. They own Adam Sandler so that they get more subscribers. Well, yeah, but Spotify has subscribers, too. I mean, they have this very clear hybrid model, right? Some of it's advertising and some of it's subscription. And maybe if you subscribe to Spotify Premium Plus, now there's not podcast ads anymore.

Yeah. Right. So Gimlet makes good podcast ads. Number one, they've got a whole, like, creative studio. Fox Media has one, too. Gimlet also makes stories that are audio that get turned into TV shows. later, and that's another revenue stream. And they make podcasts that people that make money because people listen to the ads on those

podcasts. And so it's possible that they wanted to get a bunch of expertise and just like some of this is aqua hair. But I think it may just be that like Gimlet was actually a pretty good business and that's just what it was worth. Yeah. I mean, every indication is Gimlet had been like looking for a way forward. Yeah.

Our producer, Zach is reminding me. Zach is our podcast producer. He knows a lot about podcasts. He's like they make Gimlet makes podcast, branded podcasts. So they make branded content, which are ads too. So there's like a huge number of revenue models for Gimlet. But I think, Paul, your point is they bought a content thing. When they make Homecoming 2 or whatever they're going to make,

whatever their next big flashy you got to listen to it podcast is, that will be exclusive and you'll either have to pay Spotify, be a subscriber to get it, or they'll be able to monetize it directly through these ads. This bothers me because this is my least favorite part about like Netflix, and YouTube, especially on YouTube. I mean, you kind of understand that Netflix is about, like, original content to get new subscribers. Amazon has obviously gone down that road as well.

But when YouTube does it, it's especially egregious because I was paying YouTube money so that they would give money to the actual creators. Instead, YouTube uses that money to buy Logan Paul movies. Well, you say he's one of their creators. Weird original content that I didn't. ever ask for, you know? We're seeing YouTube, like, split it out now, right? Well, God only knows what their names are. But there's YouTube premium or plus or red or whatever.

You're going to get this wrong. It's impossible to get it right. They're going to change it. Look, last week we had a whole discussion on enterprise certificates and five minutes after we went off the air. Apple reinstated everyone's enterprise certificates. This week, I'm like, there's YouTube premium and they're going to change it to, like, YouTube purple. Funny story. Yesterday I canceled Google Play Music because I was like, I don't use this.

And then I realized an hour later that it was tied to YouTube premium, which is how you don't get ads on YouTube. So I had to resubscribe. But now I've subscribed to YouTube Premium and getting Google Play Music for free instead of subscribing to Google Play Music and getting YouTube Premium for free. I figured out what Google Play Music is good for. I finally figured it out. I gave my sister's kids my Spotify password. Oh, why? I wanted them to Kib's accounts, but they were using mine somehow.

And so we kept on having a Spotify fight where devices were pausing. So I used Google Play Music instead that day. That's what it's good for. Okay. But so there's YouTube premium, which turns off the ads. And then it might get you some weird other content that they're doing. But now there's a YouTube membership program. Like they're finding ways for you to pay them directly.

Here's my fear. Spotify will approach podcasts and say, hey, go on our platform. You don't have to do ad reads every week. You can just, you know, leave a little blank spot in between your segments and we'll pay you a lot of money. Meanwhile, me, innocent Spotify subscriber, which I literally am, I pay Spotify money already right now ostensibly to listen to music. Spotify is going to use that money that I pay them and they're going to create some new original show where some cool, really hip person interviews turtles on the beach. Yes. It's great, and I'm sure it's like a premium high-end, well, it's audio experience.

I'm sure it's really good, but that's not what I was doing. You know what I mean? Like, I just feel like I'm out of control of the money that I. It's like, why am I paying you money? You're not delivering me the product that I signed up for. So why am I paying you anymore? And then what you quickly discover is that antitrust law in this company, in this country is not doing great. So there's just a handful of tiny monopolies and you have any choice in the market as a consumer.

Which leads me to my next point. Thank you, Paul, for that segue. That's exactly where I was going with that. That's weird. But no, so this is like a real put your money where your mouth is a moment for the antitrust people. We have bizarrely on our tech show been talking about antitrust law for weeks now. I interviewed Lena Khan on our interview show this week. We talked about Amazon and Facebook and how you might want to break them up.

And there's this theme. I'll freely admit, I'm like struggling with this, but there's this like feeling that we all screwed up, that the United States grew up, that the EU screwed up by allowing Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp. That if those three companies had been forced to stay independent, we would have had better competition in these markets, that, you know, the WhatsApp founders who are very privacy focused would have built a more privacy focused business. But instead we let Facebook suck everything up and now there's just this monopoly and what are you going to do? and we should break it back up. There's a lot, like, the EU is out there saying we don't want Facebook to commingle data between its products right now. There's a editorial in New York Times this week saying Facebook should not be allowed to combine the technical infrastructure of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, which is something the announcement I wanted to do. Okay.

Well, the Open Markets Institute put out a letter today saying the FCC and the EU should prevent Spotify from buying Gimlet and anger. Just me personally, if I'm going to be the guy who's like, we should break up Facebook or we should have never let them buy anything. Instagram. Well, okay, it really, it's to me, feels like, am I going to put my money where my mouth is? Am I going to say, you should actually prevent this because this is going to lead to concentration in the market, which is exactly what Paul was just describing. Or are you going to make some distinction and say, well, Gimlet is a content company. They don't own a distribution platform like Spotify. That makes sense. Oh, but I really didn't want 18T to buy Time Warner, which was a distribution company, buying a content company, and you see where it gets messy very fast. And I,

The one thing that we haven't talked about here is Anchor, which is their like consumer-oriented production software, which I think turns them into like sort of a YouTube of podcasts where now it's very easy to make podcasts. It's a very easy to get massive distribution across the Spotify platform. It's very easy for them to monetize it. They do all this other stuff. You quickly see like, okay, you add all this stuff up and you end up with a podcasting behemoth, like a YouTube of podcasts, a Facebook of podcasts. But you got to make that jump. Like they have to not screw it up. That's like one jump that you have to make. Like they won't blow it. Is that guaranteed? Well, I don't know. I've been asking Spotify to do better organized by album and artist for like five years. You can't get that right.

So my instinct is this one isn't quite on the scale of Facebook buying Instagram. Like, like you can see that argument's going to happen. Say that you should stop this acquisition because of antitrust. Like it's like saying that you should invade a. tiny access country because Hitler, right? It's like Nazis are bad, therefore, we'll deal with that later, but right now we're going to

invade, you know, this tiny little country that happened to like be allied with them. Right. Wasn't there only like three? Yeah, well, that country was bad. You should get them. Which, there's only like three of them. Well, there's... Your choices are Japan. There's Germany, Japan and Italy, but then there's also like, I've got the

Wikipedia page up here. I can't believe we're doing this. How did we end up here? Is this, is this Godwin's I think it is. I'm so unclear about what's happening. Deers got the Axis Powers Wikipedia page open right now. All right. Go ahead.

Yeah, sure. They're siding with the Nazis. You should definitely invade them. But also maybe you should go after the Nazis is what I'm saying. Just to be clear. Facebook is the Nazis. My wife works for Oculus by the only division of Facebook. I just wanted to get that one.

all the way out there. All right. Well, I'm just saying the fight over, the amount of antitrust heat applied to Facebook is going to land on this deal, which instinctively, I don't think anybody was thinking about. And it's going to happen. It's a blowback right there.

I think it's going to be just interesting to watch that conversation proceed because this is exactly the sort of industry consolidation that even as a consumer, Paul, I think you're feeling like, I don't want you to do all this other stuff. I just want you to do the thing I'm paying you to do. and then the sort of regulatory folks are saying

we have to be more careful in scrutinizing these deals. I don't know where it's going to land. Like I said, I'm personally conflicted, but it's clear to see kind of on both sides, the consumer side and the regulatory side. These deals are a little bit, they're coming under more scrutiny. My preference,

if we want to go bonkers antitrust, and obviously I do not think that is the solution to my Spotify Turtles show problem. If we want to go bonkers on Andrews, I do think it would be good if Congress did some sort of guidance to the FTC that said, yo, we want you to be way more aggressive stopping these sorts of mergers because they're, you know, because of all these problems and because of Nazis. Because so many of these companies like Anchor and I don't know a lot about Gimlet, but, you know,

most startups are built these days and finance these days with some sort of thought towards, oh, we're a technology company. we're going to exit by either having an IPO or selling to a really large, really large technology company. And so when you're saying really large technology companies can't buy technology companies anymore for fear of antitrust, then you have changed a large portion of the economics of Silicon Valley. Yeah. Like I said, we'll see. I think that conversation, it has been entirely focused on, we should break up Facebook.

But now you've got this high profile deal and it's going to come around to that. Okay. We got to wrap this up. Deeter's going to keep reading the Wikipedia page from World War II, which is the whole life falling down many times. It's very interesting. But we're going to take a break. And when we come back, Deeter's going to talk about his palm phone review.

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Upwork.com. Dieter, you, my friend, played with a tiny phone. Yeah, so this phone came out last October, November 2nd or something. I don't know. So I did a little piece then. We talked about on the Vergecast phone numbers, but I finally got around to like reviewing, reviewing it. And I wanted to like actually give it a shot. And it's bad.

It's not a good phone. That's, that's, but it's bad because it's interesting that it's bad because I don't think that it's possible to make a good secondary phone. like a phone for your phone, it's almost impossible unless you live in a very slim, like, sliver of a type of user. So, like, maybe if you are all in on iOS, you can get an iPhone SE and make that, like, a backup phone and just have everything come to you via IMessage and FaceTime, which now works again. Or, you know, maybe, you know, there's like little bits and bobs, but because there's no way to get signals. WhatsApp and like basically text messages like getting those synced over to your phone are really hard. And so there's no way to make that good. And even if you could solve that problem, then you have the entire other problem of making a good phone. That's small. And I believe in my heart that it's

possible to make a good small phone. I think the iPhone SE came very, very close to that. In fact, Nick Statt wrote a really good article about how it became his like weekend phone, although he swaps Sims, but it's still, like, that, it is possible, but, uh, the, the palm ain't it. Just sorry. Really? I enjoyed your review because every few lines, you took a beat to be like, this is a bad phone. Like, yeah. It's literally like, like, we usually use photos as section breakers in our reviews as part of the layout. Deeter used, it's a bad phone. Like, yeah, over and over again. Well, honestly, like, I kept saying it because, like, everyone who looks at the phone. It's like, oh, this must, this is cute. Tell me it's good. They want to believe. Like,

oh, yeah. We were shocked when it came out. Yeah. Like, when it was announced and we did the coverage of it, like, famous people were tweeting the link. Like, finally, the solution to phone addiction is here. It's this tiny, beautiful phone that Steph Curry is designed armbands for. And I think even in that moment, we're like, the guys, that's a bad sign. Like, yeah, the famous creative director is usually a sign of doom. Yeah, I have an uncompleted thought. And like, Steph Curry being attached to it is like part of this uncompleted thought. I like ended the review on this. Everyone knows that they want to, you know, not be quote unquote addicted to their phone, although addiction is not the right word, because the science is still unclear if you really want to be technical about the, you know,

scientific definition of addiction, still. And I think there's a parallel to dieting. Like, we know that just like raw willpower is a bad plan. If you just feel guilty about it and just try and like, you know, muscle your way through it to lose weight or to spend less time on your phone, you're going to end up failing and then feeling bad about yourself as a failure as a person to have not achieved this thing through sheer willpower. There are like structural, infrastructural, like societal things that are keeping you from, you know, using your phone less or losing weight in that case. And so the palm phone is a quick fix. It's a fad diet. It's this thing that promises to solve this really intractable hard problem. And so like, oh, I'll buy that thing and I'll solve that problem.

But really, the way that you solve the problem of, you know, losing weight or, like, getting healthy is, you know, diet and exercise. Changing your behavior. Right. And you can, like, you can come up with multiple different frameworks for it. But, like, fundamentally, like, it's actually, like, pretty straightforward, except that it's not just on you because often you might live in a food desert. You might not have the, you know, the access to a gym or, like, good food or whatever. And so this problem of, you know, the apps and the notifications and all the stuff, you know, distracting us and pulling our attention away on our phones, I just feel that there's like a ton of parallels to the health movement.

And I feel like we are going to see other hucksters in leather jackets because the guys at Palm all wear leather jackets and every photo they're in, selling us fad diets for phones. It's good, like, expect more fad diets for phones. So you're saying the Palm phone is like a, it's like a Nordic track in your living room that you never use. Yes, that's exactly what it is. You bought it like on the infomercial at night. Yep.

And then you're like, I'm going to be a cross-country skier. And you're like, oh, that's a, that doesn't actually stop me from eating too much every day. Right. This is a wonderful analogy. So I, as a fun fad diet type thing, I quit smoking on New Year's. That's not a fad diet, Paul. That's just something I want you to do as your friend. Well, but you know what I mean?

It's cliche like a fad diet is, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And so. So, what is it, February? Yeah. So, I mean, I, I, I'm doing pretty good. But one, one interesting thing.

February, you've made it through like a hard part. Well, I feel like it, but it's an, it's an interesting thing about, I mean, I guess the science isn't out on nicotine addiction. That is an addiction. But something that I, I think it was a Jordan Peterson talk. He was talking about how with an addiction, you're not just addicted to cigarettes. you're addicted to all the places and all the ways that you would smoke. Like if you think of like people will tend to have a tendency to like, oh, I, I smoke after I drink

or when I'm out with friends or at bars or certain stressful times. And so I think that's interesting of like decomposing your struggles with using your phone too much. You can't just use phone less, period. it's really multivariate. And so figuring out ways to use each part of it less. And so that's what I realized quitting smoking is I have to quit smoking outside and quit smoking after I eat and quit smoking after I go. You know, like each little place is a different quit in a sense.

So my strategy of quitting smoking was to quit smoking while I studied for the bar exam on the theory that if I could not smoke during the most stressful period of my life. that it would be fine. And that was true until vaping came around, I'll be honest with you. Snickotine sucks. But Paul, what the thing I noticed was I marked every transition by smoking, right? Like, class is over. I'm walking into this building. I walked out of this building.

I'm going to bed and waking up. That's not how I feel about my phone necessarily, right? Like, there are these moments where I absolutely need to use a phone. The thing about the palm that gets me is its strategy is like, what if this was the shittier to use? right like it's like you try to quit smoking it's smoking like horrible cigarettes oh i've done that i've heard i've literally heard that as a strategy you smoke so much that you get sick on cigarettes and then i've did not try that no that's that's using a phone until you like the phone blows up like

that's a different analogy no this is like smoking menthol you hate the taste of menthol so deeter that's what i want to focus on why is it a bad phone like that that is the thing like inside of this analogy, right? You buy this thing. The reason it's supposed to be effective, it's because it's bad at the thing, right? It's a small, crappy phone. But is it effective at being a small crappy phone, or is it just a crappy phone? No, it's not effective at being, like, you don't actually want a crappy phone. You want a small phone, but the thing that prevents you from using it too much is because it's like, it's small, not because it's bad, right? But, you know, it's slow, but I forgive that, right? It's got a slow processor. It's fine because

it's a small cheap phone. Well, relatively cheap. It's $350.50. But its software is only, like, every now and then helps you navigate the fact that it's a tiny phone. Most of the time it doesn't, you know, like, especially in like a web browser or something. But you're not supposed to do that, right? Like every, there's always a, like, response to me, to one of my complaints. But the thing that I can't get over is, if you want a little phone to leave your main phone behind, what do you want it to be good at, you know, things that aren't distracting? You want to take a picture with it, and the camera is just super not good. And you probably want to listen to, like, you know, music with it, right?

Or a podcast. You want to go running with it. And, you know, it doesn't have a headphone jack. Fine. But it also doesn't have volume buttons, which. Because you're addicted to volume buttons, Dieter. More than anything, though, it has terrible battery life. It has super terrible battery life.

And they solve that by. introducing this thing called life mode. Excuse me, I'm sorry, hashtag life mode. Oh my God, no. Where when the screen is off, it turns off the radios. It turns off Wi-Fi and it turns off cellular radio. So like nothing comes in. And they're like, see, it's great.

No distractions, no notifications of knowing you because the phone is like basically off. But two things. One, you'd think that it would last on standby forever because you've turned off the cellular and the Wi-Fi radios? Nope. It's still just about a day sitting in your pocket. And then two, when you turn it on, even though you've been a good person and not installed a million apps on it, as soon as the radio hits the network, all the notifications that have been waiting to get to you start rolling in and they just start showing up on your phone when you're trying to open it up for five seconds to take a picture of your kid. That's incredible. Yeah. What are you doing?

So you also reviewed the Tickwatch, right? Well, yeah, so that should be out by the time you're listening to this. The tick watch, there's a tick watch E and the tick watch S, and they're wear OS, and they're also bad. But it's not Mobvoy. Moboy is a company that makes them. It's not their fault. Like, if you're going to buy a WareOS watch, one, don't because they're bad. But two, if you really want to, you really don't want to get a Galaxy watch because you don't install the extra Samsung software,

and you really don't want a hybrid smart watch because you do want a full screen or whatever, and you really don't want a Fitbit. Like, you go down the tree and you're like, I must have a WearOS. WearOS watch. You should spend as little as possible out of because they have to be revamping that platform soon because it's so bad. And so the Tickwatch is like 150, $160 or $180 smart watch that's just big and chunky and kind of slow, but has pretty good battery life. But it's only 160 bucks. So if you must have WearOS watch, one, let's talk about why, because I don't think you do. But two, get this one, because it's

It's the cheapest one and it's like fine. So it's so funny, the reason I brought it up is my strategy for using my phone less was to get an Apple Watch. How's that going for you? It's great, actually. I just leave my, when I'm home in my house, like, I put my phone down and I just walk away from it. And I have a cellular one, although, like, I can't, I've never used. I don't have the, like, the courage to, like, leave my house without my phone yet. I may even working up to it.

But, you know, running around the house, like, I can get texts. I tweeted last week The baby puked all over a car seat Which was extremely gross She did during the net neutrality hearing So maybe she was just like reacting Yeah to that She was reacting to the notion of government regulation

But I was like in it I was like cleaning puke out of the innards Of the car seat with a screwdriver And I used my nose to walkie talkie Becky And like come down here please Like that stuff is great Like I got one for back too And she switched from FitBet

bit and she said not having steps be the first thing she sees on her watch. Yeah. Has actually like calmed her down. Oh, that's great. Hmm. Um, like, she still runs every morning, but like she doesn't feel like, she's like literally not having that be the first piece of information I see has like changed my relationship to the device. So it's funny that like, because the Apple platform is reasonably good and importantly, it can respond to eye messages, which is the main thing I don't want to be worried about. Um, Like, I've been able to set the phone aside, which is always kind of the promise of the Apple Watch. It just doesn't seem like where OS can do it.

So it kind of seems like if you're on Android, you're, like, kind of doomed to be addicted to your phone. Yeah. Because there's not a great alternative off of it. You can get, like, those basics that you're talking about, Neli, from basically anything. But you can't get a good smartwatch that does it unless you get the Samsung Galaxy. And actually, we're seeing rumors that there might be another iteration of the Galaxy watches at, uh, at, Samsung's unpacked event later this month, so I'm actually kind of excited for that. And I'm about to, like, shrug and say, you know what, fine, I'll install the three

different apps on my phone that I have to install to use Samsung software on a non-Sams Samsung phone. Or, you know what, there's like a very real chance if they, like, do a good job at the S-10, that I'll switch to an S-10, and then I'll just, I'm just going to live that Samsung life. I'm very excited about OneUI, strangely. I've been testing the beta, going to do a video about it. And if they, honestly, like, Samsung may have made their software, like, good enough for me to be like, yeah, this is worth it. If the camera on the S-10 is good, there's a very real chance I'll switch away from the pixel to an S-10.

All right. Well, we've got a bunch of rumors. You want to walk through them? Like, S-10E, Wi-Fi 6. Yeah. There's a lot we know about the S-10 already. So, I mean, should I care about Wi-Fi 6? No, but you know what's weird?

Thank you. Like, I looked at our stats and the amount of... of interest in the headline, the S-10 will be the first Wi-Fi 6 phone, was out of control. We cover Wi-Fi news and we're always like, no one cares. We're like, here's a crazy router. Here's the Wi-Fi 6 specs. And everyone is like, yes, finally a dose of Wi-Fi news. I don't get it, but we're going to keep doing it.

It is the most excellent rebrand of a wireless protocol imaginable. Because if you think of what is Wi-Fi? Wi-Fi, as it progresses, is just stacking more and more complexity. And it's a hairy, weird ball of multimimo and all this craziness. Right. And so it's like, hey, we made Wi-Fi more complex this year. Like, I'm not into that. But he said, the sequel to last year's Wi-Fi, so much better.

Well, we're going to talk about, we should talk about Samsung. But the point you bring up is great because it's in such stark, contrast to what's going on to 5G. Oh, God. Right. Like, there is a Wi-Fi consortium that owns the name that licenses the logo that sets the spec. And so they're like, these things mean Wi-Fi 6. And it actually means something, whereas AT&T can just be like, ah, 5G.

Eh? You like that? All right. But Samsung remembers. Let's do those first. The main thing I want to talk about is this, now that we know the name, the S-10, which is like the light version of the S-10. There's a chance that's... Does E stand for crappy?

Is that where we are in the technology industry right now? 5GE, S10E? Yeah. All right. That's... Sure. Edition. I don't know, man.

You totally just ruined the point I was going to make is they may have done a slightly better job at, like, the third random phone strategy than Apple did with the 10S, 10X, and 10R. Really? Well, just simply because the S10E is going to have a 5.8 inch display, which means it's smaller. So if it's the one everyone should get, I mean, we'll have to see. But if they made it like, you know, the inexpensive one and they actually made it smaller, but it's still good, then that, like, that makes sense to a person. The little one is cheaper. Then you get the like real one or then you

get the big one. Whereas with apple, you can get the little one or you can get the middle sized one that's cheaper, but not as good, but also it has better battery life. I don't know. Or you get the big one, right? Yeah. That story is confusing. Depending on what they actually, if this S10E is any good, we could actually have a slightly more coherent strategy in terms of its phone lineup from Samsung than we do from Apple. And I'm just going to repeat that phrase. Samsung may have had a more coherent product strategy than Apple. Samsung. Yeah.

I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm just saying that it's a possibility and that is wild. It is wild. It is a possibility. Samsung is going to do that. but then they're also going to put out like the Galaxy A10 Warthog, and no one is going to know what that is, except the name of a plane that I just used for a Samsung phone

because they have every other phone in the world. Like they'll have a Galaxy S10E and a Galaxy E, and they'll be right next to each other, and it will be impossible to know which one is which. Well, as long as I put the right ones in the store, then it doesn't matter. Like, they can make a million different phones, and as long as when you walk into an AT&T store,

you're going to see S10E with 5GE and you're going to be like, that's what I want. It'll be great. Do you think they're going to show this foldable phone at this event? Yes, I think they're going to show it. I don't think they're going to like show everything.

I think they're going to, like they teased it once. There are enough other foldable phones out there. We saw a few at CES. There's more rumors coming around. If Samsung doesn't at least tease a little bit more at this event, they're going to lose something. Like Samsung loves to be.

be like first and people aren't going to associate whoa foldable phone from Samsung they're just going to think that there's a bunch of crappy foldable phones and then Samsung will also release theirs so they have to do something with it at this event to put a stake in the ground because that ground is getting pretty full of stakes right now that's a bad metaphor but pretend it was a good one that just sounds like you're trying to kill a vampire we're going to take a break and then we're going to come back Paul's going to do his thing. There's some Apple stuff to get through,

and I'm going to close out by just sort of like, we're going to fade it out as I rant about net neutrality. It's going to be great. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited.

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All right, Mr. Miller. Every week, my friend, consistency, execution, reliability. What's it called? Polish. It's called iPad Land Party. I know what this one is. There is a most excellent new dongle on the, market from Belkin.

It's called the Belkin Ethernet Plus Power Adaptor with Lightning Connector. Yeah. Yeah. And it's obviously meant for like enterprise use where you want to. This is this is one of those things. You know, a lot of times we feel like we are the blessed ones because we're consumers. So we get the new things. And in Enterprise, they're all running like Windows M.E or something.

But this is one of those cases. Dude, if you're the Enterprise guy and you install Windows M.E. You should be fired. I used to have to run a Windows M.E network of 30 computers at a school because that's all they could afford. If you're in your car right now,

pull over, please tweet at us the last time you used Windows M.E if you have deployed it. All right, Paul, continue. Oh, man, I have visceral memories of the last time I touched the computer with Windows of B.

But they have this thing called power over Ethernet, where power goes over Ethernet. So you plug Ethernet into a small little computer, and that is the power and also the connectivity. And then I was just remembering land parties I used to go to. And that was the last time I experienced low latency networked video games,

like where you had like latency under 10 milliseconds, because everybody was literally in the same room on one little router. And now we all use the internet and like we're probably mostly dealing with 40, 60 milliseconds on good connections for everything we do. And we don't even know what good times are like. So you're saying, you get this. I'm saying you put Fortnite on here and then convince Epic to give you a Fortnite server so that you can play local land Fortnite. Yeah, I'm trying to think of iPad games that run off a local server. But here's the special part, though.

Leave your power adapter at home. So my understanding of this, by the way, it's $100. Oh, God. We haven't even gotten to the best part of this dongle. It's a $100 Ethernet adapter. But my understanding of this is that if you're, I don't know, putting out kiosks or you've got like front line workers in a, I don't know, a shop. You plug this thing in. and then you plug the Ethernet cord in and you get connectivity and power,

and then you've just wired up all your displays and you're good. You only have to run the one cable. There's no additional dongle required. The thing that makes is very funny to me, of course, is that the iPad Pro is out with a USBC adapter, and you can just get like a $30 USBC hub and do all this. But I guess they still sell the iPad. By the way, the regular iPad, Amazon was selling it for 270.

today. Good deal. Every time Apple is like the phone has to be this expensive, I'm like, you sell the iPad with a bigger screen and a nice processor over 279. You can make a cheaper phone. Yeah. I digress. It's just funny that there's like the ultimate lightning adapters here. It's a $100 Ethernet cable right as Apple moves to USBC. Good times. All right. Speaking of Apple, Gator, do you want just walk us through this like insane list? It's like a bunch of like Apple. There's a bunch of Apple stuff that happened. But like the two things are that the Apple Update 12.1.4, It's a group FaceTime. Good on them. It's a week later than they said, but they did put an update last week saying, we're going to do it and whatever. So, hooray, they fixed that

and some other stuff. And they're also compensated. There was this whole drama that there was an original bug report that didn't make its way to write people fast enough inside Apple. So they're actually giving a bug bounty to that teenager who discovered it and his mom tried to find out. They're also going to apparently give him some college money. So that's good. But the potentially bigger Apple news is Angela O'Rence, who's head of retail, came over from Burberry, was leaving in April.

And there's been a lot of like, huh, she's been there, what, five years? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, spring of 2014. And she's being replaced by Deidre O'Brien, who is now in charge of both people, like HR stuff, and retail. So I, yeah.

The title is spelled retail plus people. Yeah. And you know, with all things Apple, you have to be like, how does Apple want me to pronounce things? Right. And the answer I got from Apple was, it depends on if you pronounce it tennis or excess. No.

They're just like, it's up to you. So I don't know if it's retail plus people or retail and people. And they thought that was very funny that I asked. Apparently, is the only one who asked. Yeah. It's another Apple title where it's just kind of like, we probably have one idea, but everyone else will say something else. I do not know why a 30-year veteran of HR is suddenly running these stores, by the way.

Well, I mean, it is the biggest group of employees they have, right? Yeah, but that, you just assign an HR person that group. That's not, it has nothing to do with, like, the store experience. Well, there's, so that's one question that is unclear to me. That's a lot of responsibility for one person. The other question is, why did Angela Rents leave? And near as I can tell, it's, you know, according to 9 to 5 Mac, they've got a source that says that Arendt's told the team that she's going to step back from day-to-day management and lead

a quieter life rather than jump to another company. So she's literally going back home to London to spend time with her family. I mean, that is the sort of default. I mean, they gave her this, like, Tim Cook tweeted this like very warm goodbye. It just, Vogue did a profile for her. It didn't smell like a firing, right? She's staying through April. You know, like, when this news came out, like, everyone used it as an excuse to like say,

oh, obviously she's leaving because I had to wait 10 minutes. at the Apple store once. Like everyone's complaints about the Apple store, the physical Apple stores, just came rolling out as though that were the reason. And I was like, I don't know, she did all right. Like the Town Hall thing that they did was annoying. But, like, I don't know. This doesn't smell like a firing to me.

The timing is weird because Vogue just did do a profile of her. Yes. All of the rumors. I mean, she was on every short list of who's Apple's next CEO going to be, right? She made more money than Tim Cook. This is true. like he recruited her super hard and she had a higher salary than Tim Cook

to see her of Berber it kind of makes sense like Tim Cook, he's only ever been the CEO of Apple you're a CEO of Burberry you get to be the you know Yeah everyone knows when you jump jobs You make more money So yeah just throw that work You should take a swing through Dell

and back again You know what I'm saying But the fact that she was so prominent It's just I think there's a big question mark there And I'm with you I don't think it's like Tim Cook went to the genius bar and he was like, this is taking too long and they're like fired her.

But those complaints about the Apple store are super real. They have leaned completely into being an experience as opposed to being a retail environment. And I think that makes sense. Actually, she has been out in the past saying we sell most of the phones online and through carriers. The product line where we're in the lead in is actually the Mac. So people buy lots of Macs and Apple stores, but the phones actually sell out in the world. So if you're not selling most of the phones, which is your business, if you look at what they do at Apple stores now, they teach you how to take photos with your phone.

They teach you how to like make photo, well, they don't make photo books anymore. They teach you how to like make stuff in garage bands. Apple stores teach you interpersonal human relations because it's the hardest place in the world to make eye contact with somebody and get them to come over and talk to you. when you want to buy a dongle. It's great. Do you think they're going to sell the $100 Ethernet Dongle in the Apple store?

Anyway, my point is, like, they've radically shifted the experience of these stores to be more about what you can do with your phone. And, like, that was her whole thing. But I think that, regardless, I really don't think this is why she's leaving. But this is a moment to rethink it, right? A new person's coming in.

You've got all these people saying, I need to go to the store. I need to return something. It's, like, very difficult to, like, go through that in Apple store. My feeling about the store always, like this goes back years and years, is that computers are scary and they could break. And you don't know who HP is, you know, but if you have an Apple store in your town, you can take your computer to the Apple store and then it gets fixed. It's like this safety net and this like personal touch that kind of closes the loop for your whole computer experience. It solves the computers are scary problem because there's a savior now.

for you. Yeah. And I think that's different now with phones or this is just a completely random and she just wants to spend more time with their family. I think she probably wants to spend more time with family. But I do think it's a little bit different now with phones, right? Because one safety net, a lot of people have, in fact, most people have is their carrier store.

Yeah. Right? More people have Android phones than anything else. Most of those phones get sold through carriers. Those stores actually have a larger footprint. It's like a real thing. It's like a real thing. I don't know if it's great.

Certainly going to the AT&T store is not. No one of the AT&T stores is like, would you like to sit on a a beanbag and learn how to code. No, they're, they're, the AT&T store is like, how do you, how do you feel about your don't settle for maybe network, uh, but that has, uh, 5GE logos that Apple has capitulated and allowed to appear on the iPhone? So does this happen yet? Is it, this isn't in this version?

It's on the beta. So if you've been following along with this saga, AT&T has decided to rebrand its LTE Advanced Network, which deployed well after Verizon deployed its LTE Advanced Network. same network technology. They've rebranded LTE advanced as 5GE. Unclear what the E stands for. Evil. No surprise that, you know, Samsung's LGs of the world

are allowing AT&T to change the logo, right? Like, that's the Android world. Like the carriers get to do a lot of software stuff on those phones. You always think Apple is going to like hold the line. Right? And all last week, Paul, we're like, Apple is Facebook's only regulatory agency. It will defend us.

It will hold the line. And then it turns out that they are just letting AT&T put a 5GE logo on the iPhone. On the 10S, the 10R and the 10S max, right? Do you think that AT&T literally leases that screen space and like pays for it from Apple and so they just get to do whatever they want with it? I think that iPhone sales are slowing down and this is not a good time to piss off the carriers who might market your phone for you. Wait, wait. Okay, that's also good.

Dang it. I like both of these things. Okay, but on Deeter's one, could 18T like just start like typing me, like sending me messages to that little thing? Could they say, hi, Paul? Like, this flag up here means nothing. I mean, I think they would have to change the name of the network at the network level. Yeah, they would have to change the network flag at the network level, right? Right, right.

But like that, I mean, that's a, I would say that that is a nuclear move just to send you like a 12 character message. They could also just text to you. We solve Google's messaging. I mean, so yeah, there's a part that they control, which is like network ID. So if you ever traveled with a phone, like you know, like you put it in some SIM card which shows up correctly. I don't think they get to control the like network identifier, that other thing. That's like a technology dependent thing.

But they certainly have to tell Apple, like on AT&T's network, this set of technologies is labeled as such and we want you to do that. You have to think Apple could push back on it. For example, Apple pushes back on install our garbage apps. Yes. VZ Navigator does not appear on the iPhone. It certainly is everywhere else. But they capitulated 5G, and that just makes me very, very sad.

Speaking of which, I want to talk about our nation's telecoms. So on Friday, there was a hearing. Mozilla and a bunch of parties took the FCC to court and said, you do not have the authority to revoke net neutrality, to repeal net neutrality, which is a court fight we knew was coming. Yeah. Like the day Ajit Pi and the FCC repealed night neutrality, this lawsuit was filed. We knew it was coming.

So actually, Neil, I need to ask you about something because I watched our live tweets about this and, you know, what was going on in the court hearing. And what I was hoping for and expecting was for it to just be like a verge cast, but in court where they would talk about all the issues about net neutrality. And it was a little bit, but there was way more time dedicated to. Verizon throttling first responders than I expected. How did that become the flashpoint? Is it just the sexiest net neutrality issue there is?

Or what? Yeah, it's certainly I want to capture the court's attention the most. So there's like three or four. We were all surprised in covering it. So my expectation was in order for an agency to like make a move like this, they have to put a bunch of evidence, they have to have a good reason,

they have to have a statutory basis, they have to make a reasonable decision. And you can argue that, like, actually all that happened was that Trump got elected and Ajit Pai as a Republican, he became the commissioner, or he became the chairman, he decided to do it, right? Like, they didn't build that body of evidence. There's actually a ton of evidence that so many of the comments that were entered in the record were fake. Like, that's kind of where I expected this to land, right? Yeah.

Like, you don't actually have the authority to do this thing you're saying because you didn't build this body of evidence. That's not where the court spent the most of its time. They spent the most of its time arguing about whether the internet should be an information service or a telecommunication service. At one point, the judge just very directly asked one of the lawyers, how do we slice this bologna, which is the main thing? How do I make this decision? And then the city of Santa Clara, California, firefighters affected,

they said that the FCC, in taking away all these rules, did not consider public safety. They did not consider the fact that you actually need a rule saying that first responders shouldn't be throttled. And they didn't make that rule. They took that rule away. It was embedded in these other rules. And in not considering this, that's how you know they acted capriciously.

And on top of it, the FCC's net neutrality, the rulemaking process that revoked net neutrality also says states can't make their own net neutrality rules. Right. So you take away the rules, so you can't throttle first responders. You prevent California from making those rules. They really want those rules because of the endless wildfires that are occurring. And the court was very receptive to this. You ran too fast.

You didn't think about this. The FCC does have a role to play in regulating mobile broadband, particularly for first responders. The market won't – the market is not how we want those folks to deal with the networks. There was just a lot of times found out. Maybe I missed something, but how was throttling first responders something that the old net neutrality rules would have covered? Is it just that the FCC was more hands-on at that time? And so after a company throttled first responders, the FCC would make a new rule because they were in charge of the internet back then? No, so the Title II, the imposition of Net neutrality happened under Title II.

They call it a telecommunications service. Title II says you're a common carrier. You're not supposed to throttle from the jump, right? And then there's like a whole set of public safety regulations as part of Title II. I thought throttling, as long as you did it equally across all of your customers, if a customer is paying for a 20 gigabyte plan and then they throttle after that 20 gigabytes or whatever. No, no, but I'm saying in addition to that, there was a set of public safety regulations that were part of Title II. So then you wipe out Title II, all the public safety regulations go away. The baseline throttling rules went away and you end up with firefighters getting throttled.

So, like, that's a whole set of things, like the entire legal framework for first responders was deleted by the FCC when they wiped out net neutrality because they didn't just say net neutrality goes away. They said, we're reclassifying this as Title I, which is all very boring and wonky. The point is Deere's making is we expected one kind of fight and we ended up with firefighters being throttled. And that's where the court spent a lot of its time. The thing to me that I found interesting about all of this is simultaneously, to this hearing, you know, the House is controlled by the Democrats now. Democrats put forward a net neutrality bill.

It got debated in a hearing today. This is happening on two tracks. Like there's the Trump FCC blew it track. Like they weren't, they shouldn't have done this. They acted too rashly. They actually didn't have the authority to do this. They didn't have the case. They took out the first responders court track.

And then there's the, hey, we actually need a rule. Finally, just an actual law in Congress that says what the rules are, a track that is happening simultaneously. And it feels like it's kind of going nowhere. McKenna Kelly, who's our excellent policy reporter, wrote about it today. But, you know, her piece is like, even the Republicans are like, we just keep having this fight, it has to stop. Right. And I think when you have both sides saying we know our constituents want this and there's this huge court case that might go, it could go badly for both sides, right? So you have this massive amount of risk happening in the court system. And then you have a bunch of legislators hearing from their

constituents, we just want some rules. There's like this glimmer of like action that might occur, which is wild. So like we're going to keep keeping an eye on it. At the same time, you know, the thing the sort of anti-net neutrality brigade says is, well, there's enough competition in the market. Like look at Google Fiber. But Google Fiber like literally had to like take its ball and go home today because their plan in Louisville failed so badly that they just shut down.

Paul did you hear about this? You will like this because it's an innovative way to lay cable that blew up. up in Google's face. So they're like, we're going to reduce the cost of laying fiber in Louisville by doing nano trenches, which are little baby trenches that are just two inches deep. So they cut a two inch deep trench in the street, lay the fiber in it, and then you cover it with like proprietary Google rubber covering. But the rubber covering failed, like a lot.

So the fiber was just like bursting out of the street instead of fix it, which like made their cost skyrocket. And they're like, well, this plan didn't work at all. We're done. Yeah. So I don't know, man. Like these natural monopolies are a lot realer than I think, you know, like we can invent nanotrenching.

It's just not maybe Google needs to invent some new rubber. But they're at Google Fiber is winding down. It's all big rubber's fault. Big rubber is controlled by Verizon. All right. I mean, yeah, we're not, we don't have to get into it. I just feel like, man, it has been a few. It's, it's been a little while since we have net neutrality has been over.

And it seems. literally fine. It seems like it's doing fine. And I just find it's such a ridiculous argument in favor of net neutrality. But whatever. The argument will

go on. Okay. The argument will go on. Although I will say that the fine people in Louisville who no longer have access to Google Fiber because Google Fiber can't find a way to install fiber in their town and has fled the town with its tail between its legs because it couldn't get on AT&T's towers to

string out's fiber, so it went on a whole bad plan to like shallow dig the fiber around means that there's no real competition in broadband and given the lack of competition in broadband, you might want to make sure the monopoly that controls broadband in your town is forced to treat you fairly.

Yeah, that's the argument. But like I'm saying, the fact that this court case represents just an enormous amount of risk for both the telecoms and the pro net neutrality side and there's finally motion in Congress that might ameliorate that list because you'll actually compromise a deal.

Could be a thing. I mean, this is me saying, I think the government might do a good job, which I'm just as shaking honest Paul, but hey, it could be a thing. I'm an optimist. All right. I think we've got to wrap this up, by the way.

We've gone way over time. That was a good one. Yeah. All over the place. All right. You can listen to why did you push that button. All three seasons are out. We did a bonus episode at CES.

They talked to a bunch of people. Ashley and Caitlin went to talk to a bunch of people about how you talk to your smart speaker, whether you're polite or not. It's actually a really funny episode. you should check it out. That's everywhere podcasts are served. You can listen to Pivot with Karras Swisher and Scott Galloway. You can listen to Function with a Neil Dash. Also, everywhere podcasts are served. You can tweet at us. Please do it. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at

Future Paul. Deeter's at Backlon. And we'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code.