The Vergecast - The 3 new CEOs of Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, Big Tech's quarterly earnings, and Zoom's misleading user numbers

Episode Date: May 1, 2020

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss quarterly earnings from tech companies, the new CEOs of the three biggest mobile carriers, and how Trolls World Tour may be changing the movie theater business. Stories discussed this week: More than 1 million people in the US have tested positive for COVID-19 No one knows when the COVID-19 pandemic will end  It’s impossible to count everyone with COVID-19 Elon Musk is dangerously wrong about the novel coronavirus Elon Musk says shelter-in-place orders during COVID-19 are ‘fascist’  Americans are surprisingly open to letting their phones be used for coronavirus tracking Apple and Google have begun testing their COVID-19 exposure notification API  How a team of NASA engineers developed a ventilator for COVID-19 patients in just a month Apple’s latest iOS beta makes it easier to unlock an iPhone while wearing a face mask Zoom admits it doesn’t have 300 million users, corrects misleading claims Google Meet video conferencing is now free for anybody Messenger Rooms are Facebook’s answer to Zoom and Houseparty for the pandemic Microsoft Teams jumps 70 percent to 75 million daily active users Google Duo video calls are about to look a whole lot better Facebook usage is surging, but the company warns it may be temporary New DisplayPort spec enables 16K video over USB-C AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is stepping down, John Stankey to serve as new CEO John Legere abruptly resigns from T-Mobile board of directors ‘to pursue other options’ Trolls World Tour made nearly $100 million without theaters, but theaters aren’t obsolete AMC Theaters will no longer play Universal movies after Trolls World Tour’s on-demand Next year’s Oscars will allow streaming-only movies to qualify, but with heavy restrictionssuccess Regal Cinemas warns Universal over Trolls World Tour skipping theaters  WarnerMedia expands free HBO Max deal to HBO subscribers who pay through Apple’s services Oppo Find X2 Pro review: supercar smartphone Intel NUC 9 Extreme review: small size, big potential Google Pixel Buds review: second time’s the charm DJI’s new Mavic Air 2 has an upgraded camera and much longer flying time Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about what's going on with Zoom and their user numbers. It's earning season. We get in the business side of big platforms. We talk about the three new CEOs of Verizon AT&TMobile, and something is going on with Trull's World Tour. Let's come up on the Vergecast 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 Vergecast. 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, Hub. host and reporter for 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. Oh, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of these cozy times. Cozy.

It wouldn't be nice if we just rebranded this as like the world's month of coziness? They didn't hire any branding consultants for the pandemic. Let me just say that. I'm going to say it out loud. The novel coronavirus is a bad name. Yeah. Confused everybody. COVID-19 is a bad name. No one wants to use it because it's an acronym for coronavirus disease 2019.

Yep. Confused a lot of people. Coronavirus itself, bad name because it refers to everything. Also bad for, you know, Corona the beer makes them. Or if you want to talk about like the effects of the sun, you know, you know, talk about the stuff in space. So I'm Eli. I'm the person who started this mistake. That's Dieter. Hello. And Paul Miller is here. Hi, Paul. Hello. So we're going to start with some news, a little bittersweet news. As you may or may not know, the three of us, Paul Miller included, were among 12 people who started The Verge. Paul and I have been podcasting together for 12 years, Paul. Some enormous amount of time. Yeah, a lot of time. But sadly, these next two episode of the Vergecast will be Paul's final two episodes of the Burgecast, making our set of changes. We're sad to see Paul go. It's very bittersweet for me. Paul and I were getting gadget together. We rebooted the NGadgett podcast together.

Paul quit the internet for a year. I would say this journey has had many twists and turns. I would mean and ask you, like, why did you stop saying rock and roll all the time? I say it at the end of every episode. Do you? I literally say it at the end of every episode. That was like when we were first podcast, like 2008 when we were doing this. Am I just so focused on saying Paul that I haven't been here? hearing you say rock and roll literally every episode. So the reason Paul is leaving the podcast is that our egos are so misaligned. We're not even listening to each other anymore. We've just been doing this for a long time. The rock and roll thing, I remember very distinctly,

there were not a lot of models for podcasts in 2008 when we started doing this. So I just copied some radio crap. That's that whole story. We just we should have a thing. We should say a thing. And now everyone has catchphrases. Anyhow, it's tough. We've worked together for a long time. We've had to make some business decisions over here. So it goes. But Paul, you're going to do something new, right?

What are you working on next? Yeah, I want to, I'm going to start a new podcast, and that's going to be really cool. And I'm going to have more details next week because I'm going to be on this week and next week. And so I'll share more then. But I'd love to hear from people of what the sort of things they'd like to hear me talk about, what sort of content is best enjoyed. from of a Paul Miller flavor, I guess, is what I'm interested in providing people, I guess.

Yeah. I would like an international search, like national treasure style, for the person who actually wants to use an Android phone for hardcore gaming. Yeah, that's ongoing. That's like a true crime podcast. Like Paul's like, yeah,

so go away for two years, like into the archives and then he comes back with one person. But no, in all seriousness and all honesty, Paul, it's been, I mean, you left the verge. You came back. We did Circuit Breaker together. We've done this show. It has been amazing having you just part of this whole experience. And I'm sure we are going to continue having you on it in ways in the future.

I'm excited for a new show. Sweet. That is as many feelings as I can have. As I say, this sincerity is very awkward for me. Okay. We're going to do the same thing we do. We've been in the past few weeks. I'm just going to run through.

a bunch of updates from the tech world in our coverage on the virus. We've got to talk about Zoom a little bit. There was a much earnings this week. All the mobile carriers have new CEOs. There's a lot going on. But let's start with the virus. So this show comes out on Friday. It's very easy for me to keep count.

It's been seven weeks as you're listening to this since Donald Trump and Deborah Brooks held up a flow chart telling people that they could go to a website. The website would check their symptoms and send the new testing center in the parking lots of major retailers. and then they would get results. Seven weeks, you know the flow chart. If you've been listening to this, you know, in a flow chart I'm talking about. I will say Verily, the subsidiary of Alphabet, which is not Google, but next to Google and has the same CEO in a devastatingly complicated corporate structure.

They announced yesterday, or the day before, I think, they have expanded with right aid. Yeah. They're testing. They now have 25 sites in eight states. So not everyone, but slowly but surely they're moving. Does this bolster the theory that Verily? is Google all along? Verily was what the flow chart was referring to.

Yeah, no, it's been reported that the flow chart was the result of, I believe it was like Jared Kushner, heard from Josh Kushner, like some Kushner connection brought up this thing and said, hey, Google's, you know, barely subsidiary of Alphabet, which shares the same CEO as Google, is working, and like that just turns into Google, of course, is working on a thing where they might be able to do like some preliminary testing site stuff, and they're going to have like a website where you can go and find

a testing site, the Bay Area. And that got translated into the nationwide flow chart. And Google put out a call for volunteers in 1,700 people, like filled in the Google Doc form, and that turned into 1,700 Google engineers are working on this website. Right. And so the thing that sucks is Google and Verily and whomever else are, in fact, working on very good things to help people use. various kinds of technology to deal with the cozy times.

Wow. It sounds so honest when you're saying. But they got stuck with an overpromise from the White House, right? So like, if the White House hadn't said we're going to have the website and show the flowchart, then we would just see what Verily is doing going like, hey, good job. Good job, Verily slash subdivision of alphabet slash you're basically Google, but nobody wants to say it. Because you've done more than zero, which is what we thought you were going to do. Yeah, I mean, anyway, the point of this is we're still counting.

That was a promise it was made. It's a promise it will never be kept. But people needing testing is a key to whatever happens next. There's also part of the stories we wrote this week. And I'll call this out, first of all, more than a million people in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19, which is an amazing stat that is also rate limited by the amount of testing we're able to do. so it's in all likelihood more, but we just know, because we've only been able to do the testing

to get to a million. So a million confirmed cases by tests on all likelihood more. Second, this was the week when Mary Beth on our site, Ed Young at the Atlantic, there was a great article in New York Magazine. A lot of writers started noticing

that the number of unknowns around the coronavirus are actually greater than the unknowns. And so Marybeth were a great piece. Headline is no one knows on the COVID-19 pandemic will end. We're just in this moment where it feels like, okay, maybe some states are going to reopen up. Maybe we can see the curve flattening. We're coming to the other side. There's just a lot of

action around that. But the things we don't know about the virus, about managing the pandemic, about how it will come to an end. There's still a number of unknowns. Can I praise Mary Best piece? Because the thing that was incredibly important about that piece and has really helped me is until I read that, I was still in my head thinking about this is a question of when, right? Like the dominant metaphor is when are things going to change and go back to normal.

But she is like very clearly that, no, no, no, that's not the right. That's not the first question you should be asking. It's actually like how and what. The when is secondary to what we're going to do and how life is going to change sometime in the future. So if your primary metaphor

for trying to understand And the virus is a question of when you are setting yourself up for some sort of disappointment, some sort of angst, some sort of misjudgment of what you should be doing and how you should be thinking. So that is what I thought was amazing about that piece. Yeah. I mean, you should read it. She references Ed Young's piece in the Atlantic, too. I think they're a good pair.

So that is just a good way to get your head in the game of what happens next. Nicole Wetzman, who's been on the rich has several times now. She actually wrote a piece about testing saying it's impossible to count everybody with COVID-19. So just the mechanics of pandemic management from the science side. We just did a lot of coverage of that this week. This, of course, is all next to it's earnings season. So we're going to cover earnings soon. But during Tesla's, I'm just going to tell the story, Tesla had their earnings.

Tesla did fine. They made a profit. They're worried that they won't be able to do well in the future, which is a theme of across every company. And then Elon just sort of randomly started ranting on their earnings call, which follows up a series of tweets where he's basically denied that the thing is happening. And he compared state-at-home orders to fascism. He really said it. He said, state-at-home orders are fascist. He said this to analysts on an earnings call.

What do you think of the pandemic? How it will affect your business? And he said, give people back their goddamn freedom, the expansion of shelter in place, or as we call it, forcibly imprisoning people in their home against their constitutional rights. In my opinion, breaking people's freedoms in ways they're horrible wrong and not why people came to America and built this country. What the fuck? Then the call, they moved on to the next question. And the call in the series, like, cut out for a while. They just, like, pulled the plug on the call.

And they came back. And then the next question was like, and they asked me, like, tell me about your Q1 earnings. And they just, everybody moved on. Dude, full disclosure, guys, I'm totally teaming a lot of this. No, you can't. Yeah, you're super wrong. I get it. I get it that that's not cool.

I get it that that's the way you kill everybody because you want to leave the house. but I just think the cost-benefit analysis of staying in forever versus trying to live your life however you think is best. I don't think it's being accurately weighed. And I think there's the least needs to be a conversation. And I don't think it's obvious that this isn't fascism. I mean, I think that's about as wrong as it gets. But just to engage that for one second, like this is the most single most collective action problem that can exist. right? You don't know if you're sick for a long time. You are unable to stop your actions of just

being around other people from hurting other people if you don't know that you're sick. So that literally the best thing you can do is stay away from other people. It's the only individual action you can take that is guaranteed to not harm someone else. Like even masks only cut it by some percentage and then everybody has to wear a mask. Like the only way to not harm other people, if you come at it from a directly individual stance, if you wish to you to, you. not harm other people, you have to weigh it. So the, and like no one's being arrested for going outside. Like that would be the...

Some people are being arrested for going outside. But you have to, you have to know for certain that that is actually the most effective thing in your scenario. That's not necessarily true. Like you guys said at the start of this, there are a lot of unknowns. So having a lot of unknowns, the obvious reaction to having unknowns is not necessarily really like total inaction of staying at your home from? I'll say a couple of things here.

One, I think that to characterize staying at home as total inaction is dead wrong. Two, even if, and I don't think you should, but even if you are sympathetic to the, your freedoms are being curtailed and this is fascist, I actually, I don't think that's true. I think it's incredibly dangerous for a very public figure to be making those sorts of claims at this moment. Because at this moment, what is happening is it seems like in a lot of places around the country, we have successfully managed to flatten the curve more than people expected. And things are going slightly better than a lot of the worst case scenarios or even some of the bad scenarios. And everyone is a little bit of a hold their breath moment. And there's a huge risk right now in this moment of everyone saying, oh, we overreacted. This was fine.

Everyone overreacted. And in fact, we didn't overreact. We successfully did the thing. we need to successfully continue to do the thing for a little while longer until we have better information of, you know, about some of these unknowns. And then we can start talking about, you know, what is the appropriate balance? But to characterize this thing as like, I don't know, a liberty or death or like freedom versus fascism sort of thing, actually it makes too little of the collective effort that everybody is making. It doesn't respect the pain that people are going through to lose their job or state. at home or whatever that, you know, they understand what's happening and they're working on it,

whereas if if everyone just runs out, it doesn't respect that effort. Yeah. Paul, I think you're correct in that there needs to be an awful lot of conversation about how we come out of this state. I don't think anybody disagrees with that. I don't think anybody wants us to be permanent. But the reality is this is an unprecedented coming together of people to do the correct thing, and they are actively choosing to do the correct thing. They're not at their home at gunpoint. They're being asked to say home, and then they are. And I think that has had a positive effect in a world of unknowns. And I think Elon just doesn't, look, he's a smart guy. He can land two rockets at once. I don't know if you hurt. He sent a car

into the sun or something. I mean, I loved it when he sent the roads during the rocket. I thought that was great. Like, he single-handedly has pushed electrification of vehicle. Like, he has accomplished many smart things. When he gets out of his lane, he often fucks it up in like devastatingly stupid ways. One way to view it is that I feel like where the Overton window is right now is that you are a hater of lives if you talk about opening up. And he's pushing the Overton window a little bit in that discussion. I don't think he's that strategic. I think if he wanted to do that, he would not do it on the earnings call for his car company. I think he's just like out of control.

I think he got into so much trouble that he promised the government that someone would watch over his tweets before he sent them. Like that's the position Elon gets himself in. Like, I hear it. I just don't, I think a common mistake we make with some of these people with all things is that we assume there is a smart and considered plan to insanity. And this is my view of the government reaction to this is that we assume that this is the smart considered plan to keep.

us safe. But what if this is just somebody's idea and what if it's not going to actually be the best idea? What, what if a really great aggressive collective action turned out to not even be useful? I think that's like the risk with all ideas. The difference here is we know at the risk of, like you are currently in New York City. We know what the risk of waiting too long is. It looks like what New York City has looked like for the past eight weeks, which is hospitals overflowing and emergency room doctors pleading for help. That's horrible. We know what Italy looks like. So there's a clear example of what getting it wrong looks like across the world. The question is, of all of the options that existed, did we pick the exact right one or do we pick

one that was more effective than not? And sadly, I don't think, unless you fully believe that we live in a simulation and maybe I've just been watching devs too much, which is a horrible. show, by the way. But like, unless you're fully in like that line, like, you can't A-B. Test it. You just have to, there was a consensus decision. The point here is, like, Elon, I'm sympathetic to the notion that we should go back outside. I'm sympathetic to the fact that our economy isn't a nosedive. I'm sympathetic to the fact that every day, mostly what we cover is layoffs. Like, what is the top category of news in the world that, like, we cover, that CNBC covers, whatever, is like layoffs. I'm sympathetic to the fact that one in five Americans

right now is filing for unemployment. That's all horrible. But I don't know that there was another option. I don't know that there is yet another option. As we look at the coverage, we listen to the experts. I think Nicole wrote a piece last week that's just like the world is getting an up-close look at how messy science really is in real time. And it's chaos. There's no consensus yet here. There's no answer. There's just a lot of people working really hard to figure out a totally new disease and virus. And the answer right now, is the best thing you can do is not infect other people. So this is your best way of doing it until there's another consensus solution.

If Elon was saying, I understand all that, I believe all that, and I still think we can safely open up in some ways, that'd be one thing. But he started out by saying no one will die of the coronavirus. He started out by saying it's overhyped. He started out, like, his entire pattern has been to deny the truth of the thing. So, like, I don't, I think, man, this is like an ultimate verge cast episode. We're just like in it. We're like one topic into it.

But like I just I think when he when this dude gets out of his lane, he just, you can believe he's very smart. I believe he's very smart. I think he is extraordinarily ambitious. I think he's accomplished things that frankly other people did not have the will or the ambition or the stones to accomplish. He is not like universally clever. Like he doesn't see it. I think he like that God complex like two rockets at once doesn't mean you understand this too. I don't agree with them because he's Elon Musk.

I agree with him because I want to leave my house. Who doesn't? This moves on to the next thing. How do we do that? Apple and Google, the contact tracing API that's going out, a lot of people exchange Bluetooth keys. They're calling it, what is it, exposure tracking? Exposure notification API.

Exposure notification API. And that difference is actually important because they need people to understand that this technical solution that they've come up with is not actually contact tracing and that contact tracing is a thing we need to do on top of the same. system. Like, don't believe this is going to solve the problem. And there's already, I think, some Republican members of Congress today proposed a bill. It was pretty targeted at this. We're in data privacy. Josh Hawley, our favorite Republican Senator from Missouri, has issued 5,000 press releases being like Google cannot be trusted.

So they're trying to walk back, I think, the idea that this is like the uniform system for doing it. However, the API is in testing. They're letting other people figure. it out and use it. They're publishing a lot of the specs. I think that's really smart. And then Casey in the interface published the results with a study. Americans are far more open to this idea than not. I think Paul, that actually speaks to wanting to leave the house. Like, if the answer is download this app and you can leave your house, people like to give you the app. Not what I was going for. What's actually surreal is European governments are unhappy with Apple and Google for making their system too anonymous.

Like, European governments are saying, let us collect more data, which is just in the post-GDPR world, just chefs kiss weird. Weren't they also like suing Google for privacy stuff? Yeah. Both are happening at once. It's quite a world. It's a little upside down. Anyway, I read that. Casey dives in the studies.

It's like, it's basically a 50-50 split with some interesting, interesting breakdowns. And then just some other stuff. Lauren had a great piece about a team of NASA engineers that developed a ventilator. in just a month. They just put together a plan. I love these stories. It's people doing stuff. Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and T-Mobile

have extended their policies to waive late fees through June 30th. Every now and again, I like to applaud our nation's broadband providers. It's a nice change of pace. But they're doing it. You do have to tell them. They're not doing it automatically.

So if you're in a position where you don't think you can pay your bill, just reminder, go tell your broadband provider, and they're going to waive late fees through the 30th, June 30th. And then this was just a little – that's actually – the detail here is really interesting. If you're out in the world we're wearing a face mask and you have an Apple phone with face ID, it's annoying, just like frankly annoying. So the latest iOS beta cuts down the face ID failure to pass code.

It's unclear whether it's easy of a mask or it fails faster to pass code. You can dump out of trying to get face ID to work by swiping up really quick and that'll just give you the passcode right away. Whereas before you had to like tap on like one certain spot or just keep watching. watching and fail. So you can dump out a face ID faster to just punch in your passcode. So punch in your four-digit insecure passcode? Has there ever been a better argument for having dual biometrics on a phone, for having under the screen touch ID and face ID, which is the thing everybody wants? There is not, you know, Samsung once upon a time had tried to make iris scanning a thing. There were like a couple of notes that did that, I think, and that went away.

And it's like, oh, actually that would be helpful right now. Whoops. Yeah, but it wasn't also like totally insecure. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was not great. Don't get me wrong. The other thing that that Apple beta does is they, I don't know how often you guys do FaceTime group calls, but they do this thing where like the active speaker bubble gets like really, really big. And then when somebody else starts talking, that bubble like gets smaller and moves to one side of the screen and the other one gets big. It makes for a really great demo. And when it first came out, you know, everybody did it. A bunch of YouTubers did like, how many people can we get in a single FaceTime call? It was very fun. Yeah, no, it's super annoying.

Yeah, it's bad. And so they said it so you could just like boop pin a video to be big. And like that's how it should be. I would say that the FaceTime group calling thing versus Zoom is super interesting to me, right? So. Dieter's ready to go. FaceTime and Duo are broken. And it turns out nobody knew it because nobody needed to do this much video calling with family.

fundamentally, the reason that FaceTime is annoying and Duo to a certain extent too is they work off the metaphor of a phone call. You call somebody and they answer and then they join the video chat. Or you call everybody and then they all answer. Or you try and find the answer, the active call button somewhere in this app that you never open because all you ever do is like call somebody. And that metaphor of, you know, a phone call is on one end of the spectrum. And then you have like, I don't know, like Google Meet, formerly hangout to meet, where there's like a calendar entry and a link and you click it and you sign in. And then there's Zoom, which is like you click the link you're in the meeting at the end. And then there's finally like house party, which is you don't you don't send out the link to everybody.

You just like open up your room and tell your friends, hey, the room is open. They get a notification. And if you want to actively invite somebody, you can do that. So like everybody gets to just opt into being ambiently aware. of whose video calls are open. And then if you want to, like, set up a specific video call, you can, like, share a link around. So that spectrum is really fascinating because not only the spectrum of, like, the metaphor from phone call to just hanging out, it's also a spectrum of, like, old to new, of, like, we don't

know what to do with cameras on our phones. It should obviously just work the way that, like, phone calls work to, oh, shit, we understand what it means to live in a mobile world where you can flick on a camera and be in a video conference whenever you want. what should that world look like that isn't just piggybacking off old metaphors. The spectrum you're describing, isn't it more like, like ambience versus intention? Right. Sure.

Like the moment that we're in right now is because no one can be around each other, like, what you want is to sort of like wander into a room. I think that's why house party is doing really well. Like you can open this phone and some people are hanging out and you can just like wander in one of those rooms and like be in one of those rooms. And that's pretty fun. the thing I've noticed about FaceTime is I get a text message before somebody facetimes me. Oh, to see. Yeah. Right?

Can you FaceTime? Because the mere act of just like lighting up someone's camera with a FaceTime call and you don't know where they are or they're in a bathroom or like it's like, it's like anxiety inducing when that ring goes off in a way that, you know, like I'm going to open house party isn't? So I think there's like there's just that little intentional bit. At the same time I saw, I think it was Casey tweeted the other day. Like I've just started FaceTime people like. like a monster. Like he just does it now. And like that norm is changing. You're on to something here. I just think that the moment is people want to hang out with each other. So they're just like looking to see each other versus a call. Yeah. And I think the FaceTime call metaphor doesn't

extend itself to just like come and hang out. And even if you do a group call in FaceTime, it doesn't fail gracefully back to an individual call. Nope. When people leave. Like, and then you've just sort of one big bubble just sort of like bouncing around the edges of your screen because it doesn't realize like oh we're back to one to one I don't know it's all of these like video conferencing services are getting it wrong in like like different ways I'm actually pleased to see the competition between the metaphors yeah we should get into like some of the the video conferencing news that has happened in the past week because there's actually been a surprising amount of it so the day we're recording today I just want to start with this because Zoom is the one that is winning that

everyone is paying attention to, that everyone is scrambling to beat. Mike Isaac, somebody else at the New York Times, had an amazing story where, like, the end of the story was the guy who's in charge of Google Meet, his son walked in the room and was like, are you on a Zoom? And he's like, no, it's not a Zoom, it's Google. And he's like, I love Zoom. It's amazing. Anyway, Zoom today, based on, I think, us noticing that they, Tom Warren, call them on.

They don't actually have 300 million daily active users, which is a very specific term of art in terms of tech. It's number of people, unique people that use your product about every day. In fact, what it is was daily participants, which is wildly different. So this is the single dumbest clarification of all time. I would say two reasons. One, they should have, they knew what they were saying. So Zoom, they're a public company. They have to disclose metrics, but they're a public company that people pay money for. Their most important metrics are number of customers, How many of those customers are paying a lot of money, the average price stuff. Like money metrics are there?

Like that's what they tell people. Whereas, you know, like a Facebook and Twitter, they're advertising businesses. So the number of users on the platform is really material to investors, right? Like what is a total audience that Procter and Gamble can address by buying ads in Facebook? It's like a really important number. Zoom is not that company. Like you pay money to use Zoom. So the metrics they disclose and their filings are all like, you know, 81% of businesses have,

more than five seat licenses or like whatever it is, right? Like this percentage of our business is large cap companies which have a longer sales cycle, blah, like that, those are the metrics status goes. Very granular. Well, they put out their press release saying Zoom is so excited to serve everyone. We're doing this. We serve over 300 million daily people and users, which everyone thought it meant as individuals, Dieter Singh, non-duplicate users.

And then their clarification when Tom called them out. But the way Tom caught it was he was writing what Teams, Microsoft Teams, which has 75 million daily users, he went back to check Zoom's number and they had deleted the line from their blog post. Waka, waka. So he emailed them and they clarified that, yep, there wasn't users, it was participants. So if I was on a Zoom call in the morning and then I was on a Zoom call in the afternoon and a third call in the evening, I counted as three users.

Yep. In Zoom's numbers. In Zoom's numbers. Nice. So the first reason it's dumb is they had to know that people would just, right? They just let everybody run with it. They published the blog post. They got all the headlines.

They quietly changed the blog post. Don't tell anyone. That's bad. Just bad. Just don't do that. You're a publicly traded company. You shouldn't do that stuff. It's shady to the point of like very questionable.

Second, this is their correction. One of the greatest missing, like just whoosh missing the plot corrections of all time. In a follow up blog post in April 22nd, recapping this webinar, in addition to referring to participants as, quote, participants, we also inadvertently referred to them as, quote, users, end quote, people. When we referred to them as people, inadvertently called our customers people. When we realized this era on April 23rd, we corrected the wording to quote, participants. This was a genuine oversight on our part.

this implies that people reading a blog post are going to understand the difference between the word people and the word participants. Yeah. Which makes no sense. Like this is as much of a power through the mistake we made with obfuscation as I can think of. If you read 300 million daily participants and you read 300 million people, you still think those are individual people, especially when the context of the thing is, look how big we're. we're getting, right? It's not 300 million potentially duplicate sessions every day. And I think that is like, Zoom is just, right? This is the company that said we're using a different definition of end-to-end encryption. Yeah. Right. Like they are playing fast and loose with some of this terminology

in a way that it just keeps catching up to them. It's one thing when it's like a startup and they're 17 years old and they don't know what they're doing. It's another thing for a publicly traded company that touches a billion dollars in revenue that's been around for 11 years to just not know what words mean and to say things like we inadvertently called them people. What are you doing? I mean, this is also the company that when you uninstalled their app left a web server running on your computer in case you ever wanted to reinstall it. Blue jeans does that too, by the way. Yeah, well. Anyhow, so all the other companies are coming for Zoom now, right? Google Meet is now free for everybody. They added a tile view, which, by the way, does not work very well.

if you're in a large meeting. Yeah. I was in a large Google Meet meeting today and, like, still couldn't see all 20 people. Yeah. Unfortunately, the Google Meet thing, it's like now free for everybody once it rolls out in the Google way

over the coming days. So, like, you might not see it quite yet. But what I talked to Google about this rollout, basically their entire thing was like all the ways that it's better than Zoom. Our meeting codes are four or like 12 alpha numerics instead of just, you know, six or nine digits, which means that there are this many billion things,

so it's harder to get. you have to have a Google account in order to log into the free version. You can't just, you can make a Google account with your own email. You don't have to fully sign up for all of Gmail to do it. But still, it's more secure. If you don't happen to have been on a meeting invite, you get like tossed in a green room when you join, which means that the host has to let you in, which means that it's like basically impossible to get Zoom bombed or, you know, Google meat, meat bombed. So all that's great.

here's my problem. It's WebRTC, which is I love, I deeply love WebRTC. I think that it has a hard time when you get a ton of people in. Since they firmly believe that all G-C'd stuff and all these software should run in Chrome and maybe Safari if they're lucky

and Firefox and whatever, instead of making native apps for desktop computers, that's great. I love that philosophy. It is way easier to get yourself caught in a bind where your browser is going to chug than it is with a native app. When your browser's chugging, you're like, oh, God, and then you're like are hunting around for apps and, you know, it's a lot to deal with.

If you, like, notice that, like, your native Zoom app is, like, a little bit fuzzy, you just start, like, alt tabing through your computer and quit and stuff. I don't know. It's not a perfect analogy there, but I've just noticed that, like, sometimes doing a video call in a web browser is just more of a hassle. Like, you lose it in a tab. You can't alt tab to a Google meet, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because we're doing this video call on a browser right now.

Yeah, I know. Just letting you know. That's what's happening. Teams, I said Tom wrote about teams. Teams usage jumped 70% to 75 million daily active users. Microsoft knows what words mean, so I believe that number. And then Facebook is pushing the hell out of their new thing, Messenger rooms, which is their answer to Zoom, and then the portal.

If you're watching The Last Dance on ESPN, which I recommend because there's nothing else to do, it's also really, really good. Although the chronology makes no sense. But if you're watching Last Dance in ESPN, you know that it is sponsored by Facebook and all of the Facebook ads are for the portal. And I think they've said portal sales are doing well. They're actually kind of hard to get in some cases. That's Facebook's hardware video call thing.

But I think the ads on that are they're pushing it hard. They're making that present stuff known. And as we'll see, and we're going to talk about their earnings in the next section, their usage is surging. So there's a lot of forces converging on Zoom. But I think Zoom, Russell Branden said this in a conversation the other day. One of Zoom's advantages is it's not plugged into any other social graph. Right.

Right. It's just a utility. You just like push the button and it goes and you walk away and like it doesn't automatically tell Instagram that like you were in a Zoom meeting or like all this other stuff that happens with social networks isn't there. And it is actually somewhat an advantage for Zoom. So we'll see if they can use that as an advantage. Yeah.

It's hard for me to put my finger on it. This feels like there's something a little crass about. I feel like Zoom thought it was important to try to have a good and popular and impossible to uninstall video conferencing solution before that became like such a vital element of our society. I don't know if these Johnny come lately really have their heart in it, you know? Like they're going to. Wait, are you asking if Google has its heart in a messaging strategy? Is that the point? Yeah, no, I'm with you.

I mean, look, Zoom's thing was it is an enterprise product. So all the, like, tricks they made to make it easier were basically like, hey, we need to have a business meeting. It should be as easy as you sat down in my conference room. And they took a lot of shortcuts to get there. And the shortcuts have gotten them in a lot of trouble, no doubt. But they had, like, you know, what the VC is called product market fit. They knew who their customer was.

And they went and they built a product tailored to that customer. I guess, like, remember when Slack first blew up? Slack was like the third or fourth of a thing that was kind of like trying to replace like group AIM and IRC basically. And I felt like there was a gold rush to make Slack integrations. And maybe Zoom doesn't really have that platform equivalent. You know what I mean? But like I feel like the mega Slack competitors took a long time to actually show up. But now these big companies are like, we cannot abide having a successful product out there that isn't

directly connected to our thing. Yeah, no, they're all real mad. And, like, you can, you just kind of tell, like, oh, man, we just, they, like, they weren't paying attention to this thing that they all were making, you know, hangouts meet and whatever Facebook's thing was before Messenger rooms and Microsoft had Skype. They just weren't, it was like, eh, it was not a priority. And now, all of a sudden it's a priority. And I think there's just a little bit of a chip on their shoulder of, like, we could

have done this a year ago and we didn't. but we know that we can do better than the Zoom. And so we're going to, we're going to hard charge now. Yeah. I just think like this is like my like ultimate confirmation bias argument, right? Why is Zoom successful? Because video conferencing is Zoom's existential business.

It's the thing it does. Right. And it's a, you know, it's a public billion dollar company. Like it's a big company. That's a rounding error for Microsoft. Like like 10 years ago,

Microsoft would have a press release. It's like, Microsoft now has $45 billion business lines. And like they were proud of it. Xbox is a billion dollar line of business for Microsoft. Do you think it's their most important business? Like it absolutely is not. And I think like as these companies get so big, they miss the opportunities to grow great products that stand by themselves like Zoom.

At the same time, like Zoom just Zoom is like we made up our own definition of end in encryption. It's like, man, like can you just be a better winner? If I could just fully root for Zoom. But yeah, am I saying like, am I saying the thing I always say, which is like big companies screwed up all the time? Yes, that is 100% what I'm saying. But they all had their shots at like the Skype, Tom wrote about this week's ago. Like the Skype thing is ridiculous. Like it's fully ridiculous.

Like Skype could have been this thing and they just missed it because it was always a rounding error. It was always the thing they had to solve and never the thing they needed to do to survive. Imagine a world where Apple had actually opened up FaceTime's protocol back of the day, and we were all using different video platforms that were interoperable. Well, we'd be using different apps. Yeah. Maybe. I mean, imagine a world in which the carriers came together with Google and came up with a text messaging standard that was open and rich, like a communication standard, like a rich communication standard.

Yeah. Like an RCS. That would be great. well now I've just like broken deed like Dieter's just making that you know the emoji that's like two eyes and a line like that's what Dieter looks like because part of I really like deeter's the idea of like there's like there's places there's like there's a permalink for a meeting there's like a room for a meeting that's like a space that you go to doesn't even need a URL or there's a call on the other end of like the apple spectrum but a lot of it is is upgrading

or transferring between like I'm texting you the Zoom link and then we go into Zoom, you know, I message you the thing. I email you the invite, you know, like, or if I'm on Discord, I'm hanging out with people on Discord, you know, we go to a different room, we can go into a different voice channel, we can start a private call with each other, you know, as long as you're all in Discord, you can go through different modes of communication when you are in one Waldgarten, and it's really fun, and it feels good. I think you can actually make a Zoom. I think it's buried in the settings, but I'm pretty sure you can, yep, I can just call Dieter on Yeah.

Am I calling you right now? Yep. Sure. Then there's my call. Deter screened me. I was not expecting that to happen at all. Actually, you want to know what's amazing? I can also just chat, Eli, in Zoom.

Yeah, okay. So Zoom also bloated. Soon they'll be launching a cloud gaming service. It's going to be great. On that note, we're taking a break. We'll be right back. We've got to talk about some earnings. Support for this show.

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That's grammarly.com. All right. It was earnings week. It's earnings season. The financial calendar moves on, regardless of the cozy time. We should say at the jump, as we record this,

we're missing Apple's earnings. So even though you're listening to this, after Apple's earnings came out, and there was some reaction to that, we cannot yet participate in that reaction. Here's my guess. They sold a lot of iPhones, but not as many as normal.

Yeah. They sold a lot of Macs, but not enough for them to be committed to the Mac of the future. Yeah. And really, Apple services are doing better than ever. We're so pleased with Apple TV Plus. TV remains an intense area of interest alongside AR. And then Tim Cook called the United States a fascist country. Yeah.

That would be incredible if Tim Cook just, like, rolled hard on China. You know, Apple, we're pulling out of China. If you're an investor, that didn't happen. We don't know what's going to happen. Anyway, the FX headwinds remain strong is usually a thing they say in these calls. Anyhow, so we're not going to do Apple, but it's coming out by the time you're listening to this. I would group this into two. So what we have is Twitter, Qualcomm, Facebook, Microsoft Alphabet.

So let's talk about the social networks at first. So Twitter is growing. They're doing well. Let me pull up this actual number here. They said something really interesting. And Snapchat was actually last week. We can talk about that too. But Twitter usage is up to 166 million daily users in the first quarter of 2020.

Yeah. It's the largest growth year-over-year Twitter's ever had. So this time last year was $134 million. Last quarter was $152 million. So quarter-per-a-quarter they've grown to. But their advertising revenue is falling. It started falling in March. And so from March 11, Twitter saw 27% drop in year-over-year ad revenue.

They've missed out 20 to $80 million that they thought they were going to bring in. And they're saying it's going to be the same going forward. Right. So Twitter is seeing the surge in usage, but their money is advertising. And advertisers do not have money to spend on advertising. Like your big brand advertisers are pulling back. Like your Fords and GMs are not selling as many cars. They're not advertising as much.

So there's this thing that's underlying all of the big social networks that we depend on where their usage is searching. More people are using it. But their business, their clients do not have the money to prop up their businesses anymore. right so like facebook a rec says a record number of people using its services primarily the messenger and WhatsApp as well as Instagram they saw 50% spikes on messaging they're logging about 700 million daily calls across messenger and WhatsApp but they're saying these spikes might be temporary we don't know if they're going to last and they're not easy to monetize yeah because they can't predict demand and sell so the quote from analytics chief Alex Schultz and engineering chief jpreek

we don't monetize many of the services we're seeing increased engagement, and we've seen a weakening in our ads business and countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Zuckerberg said in the York Times, we're just trying to keep the lights on over here. So there's, we often talk about the fact that we live unlike the ad-supported internet. And what's happening is the services that we all use for free and how many conversations are we had about data and ad targeting and privacy, blah. But all the services we use for free on this side of the bargain, usage is going up. Their costs are going on. The server costs are going up. Usage is spiking for free.

We're using the services for free. But the back half of their business, filling the slots with ads, is going down. And I think, depending on how long this lasts, this was the quarter where they're all warning it's going to happen. It's not the quarter where it happened. And this applies to alphabet also. They're like, first couple months are great. And then things are starting to look a little soft. And, you know, Ruth Perrette said, we anticipate the second quarter will be a difficult one for our advertising business.

But at the same time, like, YouTube revenue jumped 33%. It's $4 billion for the quarter. In Google Cloud, I love to dunk on Google Cloud as, like, the big failure next to Azure and AWS. But it saw a 55% jump. It's got $2.8 billion. Like, $2.8 billion business is, like, not a great success in terms of Google scale. See what I'm saying? Yeah.

But, yeah, like, I don't know what's going to happen with those specific divisions. I think that Google is probably pretty happy that they made the call to break out YouTube relatively recently. Because it'll just be another thing for people to analyze in another possible place where they might have some kind of bright spot to talk about when they have to come back in three months for the next quarter and admit that, I don't know, nobody about the Pixel 4A when that comes out. Why would YouTube's revenue be up if ads are down? Is that because their demand is crazy right now? Well, again, they had like two really good quarters and then a softer quarter. I don't know specifically on YouTube, but I don't know. I'm watching more YouTube.

I don't know about you. Yeah, I mean, YouTube is like a straight, more or less programmatic ad business, right? So they're just, they have more inventory because people are watching more. And so they're, I think they're able to deliver more inventory. I don't know that their CPMs are up to. That stuff isn't broken out. But the thing to know about YouTube is it's a programmatic ad business, but Google has a monopoly on YouTube ads. The only way to get an ad on YouTube is to go through Google's system.

You can't, like, use some other advertiser like you could if you wanted to put an ad on a web page. Right. And so they're because of that, it's weird to say they have a monopoly on their own product, but because YouTube is the dominant video platform on the internet, it's effectively a monopoly on advertising on the dominant video platform on the internet, which might protect them in some way in terms of losses, who knows? So the thing I was going to say about Google Cloud is Google Cloud is interesting because it's not advertising business. It is actually the backbone for all the other businesses that are seeing surging usage. So Spotify had its earnings. they said every day looks like the weekend now. Spotify runs on Google Cloud, right? So they've had to buy additional capacity to manage against the fact that every day on Spotify is now a weekend-level usage day.

I think that's super interesting. Did you point about they're the dominant video platform? Well, Snap burning, like Snap is also doing really well. Their active users grew by 11 million by 20% year over year. 60 Snapchat shows. Have you ever heard of a Snapchat show? They've got 60 Snapchat shows have over 10 million viewers. viewers, more than 20 million people have watched Snap originals, which is like, I don't know what that is either.

But it's an ad-based business, and it's seeing 44% increase in ad revenue because people are still, they're finding where the people are and spending those dollars there versus the morass of, like, YouTube. So I think there are these little bright spots of like a company like Snap, which has always been seen as struggling to compete against Instagram and YouTube, Facebook and Google. And so they're seeing their use at surging. they're seeing their ability to deliver, they're leaning into it. Then you see the other ad-supported businesses. So I think this quarter, just what we've learned for these earnings is it's not here yet, right? This was the quarter where everyone said, we saw the last three weeks of this quarter,

the good times are over, and particularly for the gigantic ad-supported businesses, the platform businesses of the internet, the question is what happens if this continues. It's just a huge question. It's really interesting to think about in terms of the trade, that we have just, talked about forever and ever and ever. Like, we give our data to Facebook. Data is the oil. Blah, blah, blah. Like, yes, we've had that side of the debate.

What are users getting out of the trade for their data? And the answer right now is free access to services that are keeping us connected. The back half is what business supports that free access, whether or not you care for the ad support of the internet, which, again, we've just been having that debate for two years, four years. That business is in decline. And I think these companies are going to have to figure out other models soon in order to send that loss.

And I think that's, you're going to see those turns. Marco Polo is a chat app that's, like, blowing up. It's like a little startup. It's been around forever. It just blew up. It's basically a clone of Snapchat that says, we don't sell your data, but then it's like unclear, you know? Yeah.

They basically, like, they've started telling users, Ashley wrote about this week. They started telling users, like, can you please buy the premium tier? We can't keep up with the explosion of use of the free tier. Can you all just please buy Marco Polo Pross or whatever? I like it. It's like an honest exchange. I really not knowing a ton about either of these platforms. I like to imagine that Marco Polo is comprised of people who think Snapchat sold out when it created originals.

But it's interesting that the things that we care the most about of these mega platforms are the things that are the least monetized, like the messaging and the video calling and the, you know, the straight communications that don't necessarily need a, Well, when you're, you don't necessarily, you need network effects in the sense of that you want the person you want to talk to also either have the app installed or that the app magically communicates on the same protocol, which is a bygone concept. But we could keep dreaming about that. But you know, you don't necessarily need the full network effects of a Facebook to be able to talk to the 10 people you care about. Yeah. I think what you need is a sense of certainty that those 10 people are going to be there, which is where that network effect comes from. Like, if you know everyone's on Facebook, Facebook's a good bet for you to use because all the people will be there. You don't know everybody's on a house party. You might just go back to the place where you know everybody's at,

instead of bugging them to install a new app. I think that the real question is like, yeah, as you said, like the most seemingly valuable parts at this minute are the least monetized. But at the same time, like, you see YouTube's numbers go up. YouTube is a search engine. It's a social network. It has a weird Snapchat, a weird Instagram stories clone in it. It's all of these things, like demanding your attention at once, and they're finding ways to layer ads in it. The WhatsApp founders effectively left Facebook because they were sort of mad about how Zuckerberg wanted to run it. They're putting ads in it. They're thinking about building payment systems in it. They're doing all this stuff to figure out ways to monetize that

that isn't advertising. I think the pressure on that is going to get higher. the sort of ad business remains shaky through the rest of the year. But on the flip side, like, there's a potential, like, death spiral here to talk about, which is while other companies are, like, seeing the ad market get soft, and so they want to start asking people to pay for subscriptions, the people that actually need to pay for those subscriptions are much less likely to want to use an ad-supported model than one that costs them money every month. Yeah.

I have canceled a dozen, maybe not a dozen, but more than four or five subscriptions over the past month, right? Like every time I look at my banks, I'm like, oh, shit, I'm still subscribed to that and I cancel it. Yeah. But you know what's really hard to figure out how much money I'm paying for is Disney Plus? I have no idea how much money I pay for Disney Plus. I'm theoretically getting it for free because I'm a Fios customer. But then I wanted to add free Hulu. So I paid for Hulu through Apple, but then I signed up for Disney.

And the Disney Plus backend is supposed to like just figure it all out for me. Every month, Disney Plus charges me a different number. Some months it's $4. Some months it's $7. I have no idea what's going on. And all this got was watching Des without ads, which was not worth my time. I'd love someone to tell me if I'm going to be stuck in my house for another, like, three months because I could totally cancel my cell phone. Yeah.

Yeah. I canceled my second line. I put my – actually, I have Google Fi. I had Google Fi. It lets you put it on pause, which is great. Trying to cancel my Apple Watch cellular subscription, that every single interface that Verizon provides to me is broken. Like, their app doesn't work. Their website doesn't work.

They send me a text once a month saying, why did you opt out of paperless billing? I guess we're going to send you a bill now. And I'm like, no, opt in. And then they opt me back in every month. Do you think the Verizon back end is written in Cobal? I think so. It has to be, right? It's the most broken thing ever.

It was like it's leftover from like the 30s. Yeah, that was wild. It makes me feel like I'm my dad trying to reset my password. I'm sure I reset it. I wrote it down and I taped it under my desk. Yeah. All right. Well, I want to actually, I want to talk about Verizon AT&T and T-Mobile.

Yeah. Let's take a break and come back and do that. We've been at this for a while. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back. All three of these companies, new CEOs, it's worth talking about. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront,

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com. Paul Miller. There's two more of these left, buddy. I was scared you would forget. Even though you told me that I'm not doing a very good job, I still want to do my best until the last. If you can do it with these two. No pressure. But every week, the stability.

is called. I do every week of this segment. It's called DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.0, a memoir. I'm wondering why it hasn't held American together. I know where this is going. I'm actually super excited about it. I'll, you know what? I'll be honest to you guys. I didn't work very hard on the segment this week. Not that I didn't read up on DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.0. I'm just saying that there's a lot to take in. It's really, to set the stage, it's sort of part of the USB4 standard, right? And what USB 4 is doing is sort of codifying Thunderbolt 3 as really the way to go. So right now in USB 3 land, we were like, oh, Thunderbolt 3, thank goodness, it's like an upgrade. But now Thunderbolt 3 will be like fundamental and default.

And so now also display port alt mode 2.0 is getting codified similarly. And there's something to do with just Thunderbolt 3. And basically, we're looking at basically because display port is single directional, right? You don't need bidirectional communication of all the bandwidth. You're mostly flowing video from your device to the monitor. you can go all out and you can get 80 gigabits per second, which turns into 16K video or 4K at 144 hertz. Yeah, fundamentally the problem here is we've got a bunch of monitors that can now do high refresh rate.

We've got G sync and blah, blah, blah, blah. But once you start getting to really high refresh rate, the ports can't handle it. And so everyone's like scrambling to figure out what they're going to do to make sure they can get 4K and the colors and a whole bunch of other stuff sent out to the monitor once, like, people want more than just, you know, 1080P at 144 at 144. 4K at something even higher. You know, phones are like at, you know, 120 now. You can like monitors need to get faster too. The big thing I'm worried about is, you know, cables have been a big problem with, you know, cables have been a big problem with. USB 3. I can't tell if this is going to be better or worse. This is from a non-tech. Visa is being careful to avoid promising compatibility with all cables as USB 4 cables are still under development

eventual certification. There's like passive and active signaling and redriving signals and the downstream the bidirectional. I don't know. Oh, and there's also like the black and white, the Luma gets sent in 4K, but the colors get sent at half or a third because you're more sensitive to light. then you are to color resolution. There's an excellent video that Engadget does, this upscale series where they do these video explainers and the title of it, go find it. It's called Monitor Specs are Nonsense.

And it is my favorite video that I've watched in the past couple of days. It is the nerdiest shit you've ever seen about how LCDs work. Like, Milai, you would love it. Yeah, I don't know how I've missed it. Here's what I know. There are two things in it.

One, it's amazing to me that USB cables have gotten this complicated and broken. and broken. Because like the common wisdom with HTML cables is it doesn't matter, right? Like, HTML specs go and go and go. But the cable connectors, like most of the cables can just do whatever you need. Like they haven't changed a lot, even though there's a lot of like food use science there.

USB on the other hand is like, well, this cable's from six months ago. It's definitely garbage. And like, that is just bizarre to me that they can't solve these same problems. I guess the cables have to do a lot more. The answer is USB should stop being an open spec, and we should just put Monster in charge. Everything is gold-plated. Be like, John Monster, you're back. Welcome back to Relevance Monster.

The other thing I definitely know is I now have a clearer understanding of why this segment did not hold America. Okay. So we were talking about Verizon. Verizon, AT and T-Mobile, within the past 18 months, all have new CEOs. Yep. So there's some, like, drama that happened this week. John Ledger was supposed to stay on the T-Mobile Board of Directors for a while. He abruptly stepped down to pursue other options and was like, I love T-Mobile, but I got to go.

Everything's going to be great. That same day, YouTube CEO, Susan Wichitsky followed him on Twitter. That would be insanity. I'm just pointing out coincidences here, guys. So the Ledger's gone. He, like, doesn't work at T-Mobile anymore. He's full-time barbecueing. Yeah. Yeah, he's like on it. He's like on a beach, grew a beard wearing sunglasses. Still wearing a T-Mobile t-Mobile. Yeah. But he's doing his thing. New C-Mobile, Mike Sievert. T-Mobile has its own set of challenges to manage. They just acquired Sprint, you might recall. They have to build a 5G network. They have to integrate Sprint. They have to, I'm just going to say this, lay off thousands of Sprint employees. That's the thing they're going to do. I'm not going to say it like that, but that's the thing they're going to do. They have to manage all that transition.

continue their 5G network build out. Next to that, they have to, like, also operate as an NVNO to DISH network, which is going to use T-Mobile while they try to build that, their own network using all this reform spectrum. Nil, all this is really important about T-Mobile, but the only question I actually care about is, is Mike Sievert going to try and continue to be, like, cool uncle, you know? Because, like, with John Ledger, he was, like, the cool wacky dad and, you know,

uncarrier, and he liked to swear. And Mike Sievert, like, he wore the T-shirt, but he, like, tucked in, you know, he's like that kind of guy. Yes. Braided belt, dad. Yeah. Is he going to continue the uncarrier, Wackadoo, or is he just going to become a guy in a suit? He's a suit. I mean,

maybe he doesn't want to be a suit. Maybe, like, you know, the judge in the case approving the merger wrote, like, I don't see any reason why Timo would stop being the Brash Challenger. And then, like, 25 minutes later, Ledger was like, peace out. I'm quitting entirely. Yeah.

I told you so. But he runs. But, you know, they've got a hundred some million customers. He's got to manage a gigantic corporate integration. He's got to build an entirely new network. He's got an enormous amount of capital expenditure to manage. I cannot imagine that there's not a reversion to adulthood, right? Like to straight, dead ahead by the book's corporate operation, which is kind of what they were

saying they were going to do. They were the challenger. And now they're the big dog. And, like, they're one of three big players. And I, hopefully they don't run out and buy CNN or whatever 18D did and get all distracted. Like, but he's the new guy. And like, I think what Julia and Julia Alexander and Chris Welch are ready and peace, like, these are the three most important dudes in mobile now. And they're all new.

If you're an American with a cell phone, it is likely that you are one of these three men's customer and that is crazy and because they're they're all brand new to the game. So that's Sievert. I've been saying three. I haven't identified all three. So it's Mike Sievert at T-Mobile is the new CEO. Randall Stevenson, the CEO of AT&T, said he's stepping down. The new guy is John Stanky. And then Hans Vesberg at Verizon is a new CEO. He came out about 18 months ago. So we can, by the way, Mike Severt, my favorite factuate about him, Mike Severt at T-Mobile, he was the marketing director for Windows Vista. That's just mean.

I think we all know what it's going to... Why are you got to bring that up, man? I'm just saying, that's his backstory. Stanky at AT&T is a really interesting story. So Randall Stevenson is the CEO of AT&T. He is not John Ledger, but he's like, he's loud about the company's values. I think it's been admirable of him.

He thinks of AT&T is a big, gigantic American utility. And he's positioned it is like, we need to do that job. Whether or not he's done the correct things in that job, whatever. He's been very clear about what he wants to do. He bought DirecTV. He bought Time Warner. He's trying to roll out this massive HBO Max thing.

He's handing it over to John Stanky, who was his CEO. They also put Stanky in charge of Warner Media for a while, right? This was the immediate clash. They buy Time Warner. They rename it Warner Media. They put this telecom executive in charge of it. A bunch of Warner Media people left. Most notably, Richard Pepler, who was the CEO of HBO.

Right. So all these Warner. media people leave, saying he's a new guy, what's he going to do? He hires Jason Killar, who is maybe or maybe not a name that you recognize. Killar was the CEO of Hulu and was a brash. It's like Hulu was a mess. It was founded as like a joint venture between Comcast and Disney and Fox. So it was, it was a thing that was not supposed to work. And Jason Collar was a guy who made it work. He like took on his bosses. Peter Koffker wrote a piece years ago. It's like, is Jason Collar trying to get himself fired?

Because he would just say things that irritated his bosses all the time. So Killar, who is smart, understands streaming, understand digital, now in charge of all of Warner Media, Stanky's new CEO of AT&T. So it seems like John Stanky got a crash course in their media business to understand what it is that he had, hired a guy who really understood the media business so he could take over the CEO role and has his guy in charge.

Okay, all that's great. That sounds like a good story, right? Seems to make sense. Longtime telco executive gets his feet wet, the new media business hires the guy. Inside of all this, there's this company called Elliot Capital Management, which is like the most aggressive activist investor group that exists. They take a huge chunk of AT&T.

They buy a huge chunk of AT&A and publish this letter. It's like rethinking AT&T. Basically their ask is, fire Randall Stevenson, don't let John Stanky become the CEO, divest direct TV, and get the hell out of Warner Media. Wow. This is all, like that's their position. Like, go be dumb pipes.

Is that it? Yeah, more or less. They're like, this is all. a waste of money. Investors aren't getting enough out of this company. These acquisitions are stupid. And these guys have no idea what they're doing. That was their position. And they were loud about it. Right. Like these are the guys like show up on CNBC and like yell about their activist investor letter. Stevenson brings them in. They like, are you and are you? They put up a whole website. That website is now like taken down. As good companies do like big corporations do,

they look at their activist semester. Randall Stevens says something like, I've always said if you have to have an activist investor, make it a smart one. And these guys, are pretty smart. It's like, do you always say that? Is that? Have you been running around? I don't know the same parties as him, but it just doesn't seem like what people always say. Anyway, they cut a deal where they agree to do, you know, some stock buybacks and dividends. Elliot gets board seats on AT&T. They take more effective control of the company. Also, the deal was, we will approve succession planning and the new CEO can't be both the CEO of the company and, like, the president of the board. The chairman of the board. So this is the deal they cut.

So under all of this is we're going to approve the next CEO of AT&T. And they've been very public. It's not going to be John Stanky. We hate this guy. Yeah. So CNBC, like, John Sankey, they announced he's going to be the CEO. What happened to Elliot? They were so mad about this guy.

CNBC reports, they evaluated all the candidates and realized the thing was so complicated. The only mistake you can do it. There's no one else who can, like, see the whole business. So, like, by default, the thing is so complicated. This machine they built is so complicated. John Stanky is now the C of AT&T. Great. So a big question is AT&T also has a 5G network to build.

That's a big project. They got to figure that out. They got to... Wait, no, hang on, Deli, that's already done. I mean, one of my phones definitely says 5GE on it, so I think it's good. No. No. Oldest trick of the book.

Yeah, they're complete. So ATT now has 5G, 5G, and 5G plus. Are those their three names? Yeah. So it's like 5G is the lie, just a bald face lie about LTE. 5G is the mid-band 5G network that they're like mostly building. And then 5G plus is millimeter wave. Right.

So they've got to just do all of this. They've got to provision the phones. They've got to like network stuff. The complicated big network. They're the biggest one. They've got to go do the stuff. That's a big project. Then they have to figure out what to do with direct TV, which is a business that is failing.

Then they have to continue to manage the transition of WarnerMedia intake. AT&T. They have to launch HBO Max, but they are in full crazy town HBO Max launch mode right now. How many different ways are there to get HBO Max? This is the most complicated thing that we are currently covering. They keep announcing things, they keep announcing HBO Max press releases that literally on their face are like nonsensical. I think the last one this week was HBO Max available on Google Play. It's like, well, yeah.

Were you not going to be on Android? Like HBO Max will work with CrimeCats. Like, yep, underneath that, underneath that very simplistic headline is like, if you are an HBO Now customer and you have a Google and on Android, your login will work with HBO Max. Right. Okay. They announced if you pay for HBO now through Apple's services. Do you mean HBO now or do you pay for HBO currently? I don't know.

Okay. Then you get HBO Mac. So if you have Apple TV, if you have an Apple TV, you can buy HBO through the Apple TV in the Apple TV app on your Apple TV. You can also download the HBO now app on your Apple TV and pay for that with Apple's purchasing. Some of those people are going to get HBO Max. Unclear who. So they just got this mess of a thing where they're trying to give it to everyone,

but no one really knows yet. Like some people are going to get trials. Some people are not. At the end, I think they should just give it to everyone and then start charging. they should just do the thing. Yeah. Okay, that's a huge launch to manage.

Like a massive launch to manage. That's happening over here. Then they have the rest of the integration to deal with. That's just HBO Max. Like, they own Turner. What are you going to do with Turner? What are you going to do with CNN? Like, that's another whole set of conversations.

Trump tweets on the Stevenson leaving news. It's good they got rid of him. CNN's a disaster. He shouldn't be in charge. Hopefully the new guy takes care of CNN. Like, okay. Hi, John Stanky. You've been a long-time teleco guy.

The president hates your news network now. Just imagine the range of problems on his desk. Yeah. It's like, no wonder, Elliot was like, yeah, there's no one else can see this whole problem. Okay. So that's AT&T. And then there's Hans Vesberg at Verizon, who's been there for a while. Verizon, you might recall, has had its own ill-fated forays into the media business.

They've got to build a 5G network. They've got to, and what they've done to date has mostly been millimeter wave, which congratulations on your 500 street corners, guys. But anyway, I'm mad about millimeter waves still. So Welch sent me this note. He's like, again, we're writing a big piece with all three of these CEOs. So if you're interested in this information in a more organized, structured way that was edited, look for that on a verge.com. But Welch is just like, Verizon doesn't have any CEO accomplishments to list for Hans.

He was at Erickson. He was at Erickson for a decade. He turned Erickson into a software and services company. And now, and then he was a CTO and president of Verizon. And then he became the CEO. And he's like, the network guy. He owns the Huffington Post. That's just a problem Hens Vesberg has in his life.

Also, Yahoo. He owns Yahoo. Yahoo. They launched Yahoo! It was an MV&O. Yahoo! Mobile is a thing that you can get if that's the kind of decision you want to make. If you wanted, if you're a telco right now and you wanted to buy an AOL type thing or a

Yahoo type thing. What would you buy? BuzzFeed. Yeah. Is BuzzFeed our modern Yahoo? I mean, I like too many people who work at BuzzFeed to say that. So maybe. But like that's what you're talking about. What's like a default landing page for millions of people on the internet that people like of that style?

Like that's a media company. Like it's hard to define what AOL and Yahoo are. Right. Are they just landing pages with like horoscopes and stock information and like. Yeah. They're portals with, yeah. with weather, stocks, and celebrity gossip. Isn't that what they are?

I don't know. I mean, we used to work there, Paul. How do we not know? You and I worked today for a long time. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I throw out BuzzFeed as like an answer. But yeah, it's something like that.

Like some sort of default homepage that's like the first place people go. Twitter. It's clear that Verizon doesn't know what to do with that stuff. They don't really want. Like there was that hot minute where everything was called oath. And then like, yeah, just kidding. Yeah, they walked away. It's a Verizon media group.

The editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post actually just stepped down. She's now the head of content at Gimlet, which is owned by Spotify. Those are the kind of the move that are happening over there. It's a hard time to hire new editor-in-chief, I would say. So, like, he's got a whole... I mean, they did Go-90 and they shut it down. Like, Verizon's explorations into the media side of the business have mostly come to an end, but he's still got to figure out what to do with that chunk of his business

while building a 5G network. And then he's got to compete with 18-T, just happily zero rating its own very popular services, which is 100% what they're going to do. And then T-Mobile, which is super happy to zero-rate anything that comes across. Like, if you don't want to pay, if you're a broadband at home is bad

and you're like, I'll just get a 5G hotspot so I can stream Netflix. You should absolutely buy the T-Mobile one because T-Mobile is zero-rated on it. Sounds like Verizon's got a pretty, like the most straightforward path. They improve their network. They make whatever.

whatever deals they need content-wise to just to look good, they have what is perceived to be still the best network. They don't have to worry about a sprint integration. They don't have to worry about a sprawling media empire. So here's the problem with that, Paul. It's really boring for investors, and they want to see massive growth, you know? And so, like, I don't know. Like, I would love for Verizon to just like, yep, we are the network company. We make a good network, the end.

but I don't know that they actually can pull that off and have their investors let them do it. I don't know. I think right now in this minute, if you're a telco investor, if you're a teleco investor, please call. I'd just like to, who are you? I'd like to talk to you. You've got your three big choices. You've got your three kind of like T-Mobile's going to aggressively do the sprint integration and try to capture the customers and bring a bunch of people along and continue to do low prices

and a bunch of zero rating and partnerships with services. they don't have this weird legacy media business that Verizon has. You've got Verizon that's trying to focus. And it's, you know, it's Verizon. You know, they've got to figure out what you with Fios. They haven't, like, invested in Fios in a long time. They don't, they have Fios as a TV business. They're trying to wind down.

Like, right now, if you sign up for Fios, like, home service, they push you to sign up for YouTube TV over their own TV service. Yeah. Because they'd rather, so they're trying to wind down a bunch of their legacy business. I got an idea. Rename Verizon Fios, Yahoo Pipes. So you've got that other choice. There's the big income that's trying to focus.

And then you've got your third choice, which is like literally the death star. That's their logo. Just like full on the death star. Like, what if they eat everything? That's like a healing menu of like bets. They're all in different places. So you've got your three big bets. Yeah.

And underneath it all is this. looming transition to 5G, right? And they've all got to manage through that. They've all got to get their handset deals. We've all got to do their marketing. And like, we'll just see. But it's three new guys who are going to manage that transition of 5G and then run these three very different business models throughout at all. Yeah. Also, just going to just to put a bow on this and infuriate Paul, three new guys who don't have to do what the government tells them because the government said we don't get to tell you what to do anymore. You're trying to make me mad? Yeah. I mean, the SEC is just like, yeah, we, you just be nice.

We can't, we, we don't want to regulate. In fact, we are going to take away our power to regulate. Yes. So, like, they're running all of these different businesses. They have all this power. And, like, who knows what they're going to do now? Because there's no real constraints on the decisions they make about with their networks. Because it's not centrally planned. I'm not looking for central.

Like, did I rant about the FCC transparency reports last week? I think I did. Yes. Like, I would, if the full extent of the government's power was, just file all of your transparency reports in the same place and the same format. Yeah. So interested observers who are your chief critics can like look at them all in the same place. I would be fine with that.

That doesn't seem like the king decreying what you must do. That just seems like we're organizing our market such that we have appropriate transparent information. And we don't even have that right now. So what are they going to use that? They're going to, you give the government some information and then they use it to like name and shame you. Yeah, I use it to name and shame you.

Yeah, exactly. That's why I. I speak for the user, Paul. Delah, you're right. You're right. I'm wrong. I was wrong this whole time. Net neutrality is great.

I love it. It's one day we'll have it again, maybe. Those are the three. It's worth going through them next week sometime we're going to have that piece at and it'll be more organized. But it's a remarkable inflection point, especially for Ledger just piecing out, right? just he's gone.

Like that is, the story of Mobile for the past, however long has been John Ledger and T-Mobile making the big carriers respond to him. Those days are over.

A few more, we were going way long here, but I want to bring up this, the thing that's happening in the movie industry at the same time, which is insanity.

So NBC Universal. Disclosure, NBC Universal is invested in Vox Media is a parent company. And then let Paul bludging me into it this time. They were really, Trolls World Tour early.

Starring the McElroy Brothers. Starting the Macquarie family. They released it early out of theaters because the pandemic, all the people are home. It made $100 million on sales and rentals. It was literally impossible to use my Apple TV without seeing trolls for like the last two weeks. Like this is like every time you open up, it's like duh. Yeah. Yeah.

What do the video platformers want you to do right now? They want you to watch Trolls World Tour. Great. So it's out. They made a bunch of money. They're proud of it. theater chains, draw closed down,

are freaking out, freaking out. AMC theater says we will no longer play universal movies, including like Fast and Furious Nine. You walked away from your deal

because they signed these deals where they window the movies. So there's a theatrical window, then there's a buy window, then there's a rental window, then there's the like airplane seatback window.

So they have these contracts theater. So we broke our contract. We're out. We're no longer, which is like, people are going to see Fast Fast and Furious Nine.

I assure you. Yeah, who does that really hurt? Yeah, they're like, okay. And then Regal Cinemas, this is really funny. They warned Universal. They didn't commit to backing out. They said, we're warning you, which is like, are you going to do it or not? Like, you think you have the leverage in this conversation.

And they absolutely do not. Like, if Universal is like, we can just make all our money here. So this is like, I think, another inflection point. The Oscars changed the rules. so that with many, many, many restrictions, streaming movies can qualify for Oscars this year. This year only. Yeah, but like, this is the inflection point.

Yeah. Right? Like, what's the thing I've always wanted is, like, to not have to go to a theater, like, just buy a movie. Like, I'll pay inflated prices. Well, they have a little data point. Julia wrote a great piece. Like, it's not the only data point.

People are still going to want to go see Marvel movies and Star Wars movies and the big franchises. They're going to want that community experience. But all those mid-ranged movies that just sort of die in the theater before they actually are successful in streaming services, every studio has to be looking at those. I mean, like, why do we even bother? And so I think that, like, we're just going to keep seeing that turn.

But, I mean, this was like a hilarious fight this week. Yeah, the thing I love about this besides fact that it's hilarious and has been kicked off by Charles Roll Tour is back of the day, I worked at a VHS movie rental joint called Mr. Movies, and you knew that the direct-to-video movies were bad, but now it doesn't matter. Direct video is fine. Like, Netflix taught us that you can have good movies that don't show up in theaters. Have you watched their Taken clone? That I have not.

Extraction. So, no, but Netflix made a movie with Chris Hemsworth, produced by the Russo Brothers, called extraction. It's like, number one on Netflix is just heavily promoting it. Like, they're just going to keep doing stuff like that. If you're Disney Plus, Disney Plus, Disney Plus is accelerating Star Wars coming to Disney Plus. They're skipping all the rental windows and stuff because they know. Like, they need stuff for their streaming services, which is the future. of all their businesses.

I just love that Regal Cinema is like, we're warning you. Like, what's universal? Like, yes, we've been suitably warned now. We're worried about Fast and the Furious Nine. All right, Dieter, you want to, there's like, we did a bunch of reviews this week. Do you want to just tell people what they are and give TLDRs where we get out of here? So, Sam Biford reviewed the Apo Find X2 Pro, which is very good. It's APO and One Plus are, you know, vaguely related.

Not so vaguely related. It's very complicated. Anyway, the X2 Pro has a good camera. It's missing wireless. charging, but otherwise it looks amazing. Dan reviewed the Intel Nuck 9 Extreme, which is like kind of a mini PC, but they have got this whole cartridge system, which is fascinating, and it's actually like way better than I expected.

Depending on how you view building and the costs of building a mini PC, it is either wildly expensive or actually like reasonable. Big question there is, will they continue to support this format? And then Chris Welch and Becca reviewed the Google PixelBuds. I've also been using them. You can hear the snap right here. Ooh, that's real good. Yeah.

That Becca video is real good. Beka, go watch the Beka video. It's incredible. And the buds are good. They have a nice open feel and open sound, but they hurt your ears after like three hours. And the battery life is not that good. So like really good first effort, but not quite like perfect. And then also says it's a review yet, but it's coming soon.

DGI released a new Mavik Air, the Mavic Air 2. It has a much better camera. It has a much longer flying time. and they bailed on Wi-Fi. They're like, Wi-Fi is just dumb. We're going to use our own proprietary standard. The remote has been changed

and it's like kind of big and chunky now. So there aren't antennas sticking out of it. But like big chunky, quote, you know, it's like, it's just, it's a nice single piece now. No, I'm excited. Oh, yeah, no, it looks. I think it's going to be great.

I hope it's going to be great. We'll wait for the review. Viren's reviewing it right now. But yeah, so look forward to that. I'm going to buy a MAVIC or two. That's what I'm telling you. All right. We've gone very long.

Thank you for sticking with us. Paul, nine extreme thoughts before we get out of here? Oh, I'm just, it's so conflicting because that price is ridiculous for what you get. You get like a fast laptop processor and a 2070. But I also look at the PC I built and there is so much empty space in there. Like something's got to change. I feel like the next five years, we can have very good desktop PCs that are not as big as desktop PCs.

And it's going to be really nice. But I don't know if the neck nine is, is it. All right, we've gone long. Thank you for sticking with us. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless, Deeter's at Backlon. Paul's at Future Paul. You can subscribe to Processor,

which is Deeter's newsletter at the birch.com slash newsletter. Just subscribe to the home screen, which is T.C. Sotics newsletter of fun things on the internet to make you happy. And then you can subscribe to the interface with case you need them. There's a lot of newsletters. Just get email from us.

It'll be great. You're going to like it. We've got some big episodes coming up on the next two weeks. I think we're going to be delayed on the interview episode next week. I can't tell you why. I'm excited about it. We've got some big stuff coming up. So we're back next week with the interview show, the chat show.

Next week is Paul's last show. We're going to do something big. We'll figure something out. It'll be great. That's it. We'll talk to you next week. Rock and roll. Paul.

Provo code. See? There it is. That's what you say. Rock and roll.