Invisible Infrastructure with T-Mobile for Business

A journalist reporting from some far-flung remote location. A massive blackout. Ticketless entry to a huge sporting event. Behind some of the most technologically complex scenarios is a network making it possible to connect. Malcolm sits down with Mo Katibeh, the Chief Marketing Officer for T-Mobile for Business, Guy Griggs, the CNN Senior Vice President of Ad Sales and Client partnerships, and Siemens Energy Senior Vice President Steve Douglas to learn more about this invisible infrastructure. This episode is brought to you in partnership with T-Mobile for Business, and recorded live at the iHeart Studios in New York City. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 0:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  This episode is a paid partnership with T-Mobile for Business.

• 0:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of the reasons I've enjoyed the Revisionist History partnership with T-Mobile for Business is that every time I sit down for one of our periodic conversations, I learn something I would otherwise have not even thought about. The conversation you're about to hear falls into that category. In fact, as I introduce it to you, it sounds like the start of a three guys walk into a bar joke. It was a top executive from CNN, Guy Griggs, Steve Douglas from Siemens Energy, the person who runs the maintenance operations for one of the biggest power companies in the United States, and Mo Catiba, the chief marketing officer for T-Mobile for Business. We sat down together in New York City not long ago,

• 1:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  and we talked about something called slicing, a technology T-Mobile uses to help ensure that when someone absolutely needs a strong network connection, they can get a strong network connection. 5G network slicing strengthens trust and connections across worldwide industries. Think about this next time you see a CNN correspondent reporting from some far-flung remote location. Or there's a massive blackout and you're waiting for someone to get the power back on. What you see in both those cases is a professional doing their job. What you don't see is a technology network behind the scenes that makes it possible for them

• 2:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  to do their job. This conversation is about telling the story of that invisible technological infrastructure. I found it fascinating, and I'm sure you will too.

• 2:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  There's two ideas I want to explore today. The first one is something that I've been struck by, and I'm sure all of you guys have been struck by, which is that the benefits to technological advancement are largely hidden. In other words, only insiders kind of know what the implications of them are. From the outside, you can't observe from the outside and know how it changes a specific field unless you're in the field. So one of the things I want to do today is have people in the field tell me about all the unexpected ways in which technology changes our business. And the larger theme, though, is that we're going to be talking a lot today about infrastructure. And this idea that infrastructure is more than simply

• 3:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  a kind of passive, structural participant in innovation. But I want to start with Mo. We're here today because we're talking about something special that T-Mobile for Business is doing from a technological standpoint. I want you to describe what it is, sort of to set up our conversation, and to give us an example from your own world about how that's made a difference.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Thank you. First and foremost, great to be here with you today, and it's great to see you again. So what T-Mobile and T-Mobile for Business have been doing is innovating our network and creating the most advanced 5G network, frankly, in America and likely on the planet. We call it 5G advanced capabilities. And then with our business customers, we're really bringing this capability to life that's called slicing. And to your point, this is a term that not everyone knows. They don't know what it does. And slicing is just a way of thinking about, hey, if you have a network, can you take a slice of that network and create specific performance characteristics via that slice

• 4:16Speaker 02

  to ensure that businesses are able to drive the outcomes that are important to them? As an example, at the Formula One in Las Vegas that happened a few weeks ago in November, that portion of that network, that slice, can be used for things like ticketless entry, to speed up 300,000 people getting in. They can enjoy the sport and the action. It can be used for back office operations, all the people working behind the scenes. They may be using push-to-talk devices. They may be using point-of-sale to make a sale. How do you ensure that that transaction, that traffic, that push-to-talk click happens when you have hundreds of thousands of people all in a small, limited space?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  And the answer to that is you dedicate a slice or a portion of the network to that mission. And so slicing can be used for so many different things. As you mentioned, we're here with our friends from CNN, from Siemens Energy. The ways that it can be used frankly are limitless and are really, really built to think through how can T-Mobile understand the pain points that our customers have, smash those pain points and help you deliver very specific outcomes? That's slicing.

• 5:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  A couple of questions about slicing before we get into Siemens Energy and CNN. First off, I want to dedicate a slice because that's a way of what? Ensuring the reliability of those transactions?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Exactly. So what's beautiful about slicing is it gives us the ability to use multiple knobs and levers. One can be dedicating a piece, one can be increasing the reliability or the performance of the network to adapt to the needs in real time. Others can be, and we're getting a little bit more technical here, but latency. How quickly is that transaction happening? How quickly are you talking to the network and that signal coming back? Some transactions require super-low latency and that's another knob we can turn. But at the heart of it, you can think about reliability and ensuring that the network adapts in real time to the needs of the business.

• 6:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  When did you guys start to develop slicing? This is how new.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Great, great question. So T-Mobile was the first company in America to deploy what's called 5G standalone. And 5G standalone enabled this set of capabilities. The first slice at scale that we deployed was with F1 in Las Vegas three years ago. And ever since then, there's been right And Major League Baseball All-Star Week as an example. All of these things have used slicing capability to ensure that the business can do what they want.

• 6:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  And is it an evolving technology? In other words, is the slicing of today better than the slicing of two years ago?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, wonderful question. Just in 2025, we announced two very major, first of their kind slices in the US. One that we launched in February of 2025 is called T Priority. And really what that does is provides a slice for first responders and those folks that support our first responder communities. Because at the end of the day, what matters, you know, police and fire and EMS, emergency medical, is ensuring that the network is working for them at those times when an emergency is happening. When lots of first responders may be showing up at the same time to a given scene. So giving them the capacity that they need in real time and expanding it to support the number of first responders that are showing up.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  And then the second major slice that we launched this year is one called Super Mobile. And it's actually the one that both CNN and Siemens Energy are using. And we're going to get into that, I think, a bit more.

• 7:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah. Guy, tell us a little bit about what you do at CNN and how you came to be interested in working with T-Mobile and using this super slice.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So I oversee all of our partnerships, advertising relationships across the country. I'm all about coming up with smart solutions that drive better business outcomes for our partners and our advertisers. We're going through this pivotal moment of transformation and I'm glad to be overseeing the ad business as we embark upon this.

• 8:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  How has technology altered the way you do your work?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, just taking a step back, the media landscape has changed drastically over the last, let's say, 13 years or so.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  You know, back in 2012, it was all about cable and broadcast TV. It was all about satellite trucks in fixed locations. And for me, it was all about trying to get as much money on to monetize those mediums as possible. Now, you know, whether it's podcasts, or newsletters, or streaming, or linear and cable, or events, like, there are a million ways of reaching our audience. And the landscape has just gotten so much more splintered and fragmented. So now, what we have to do is really meet audiences where they're at. And for me, I have to monetize all of those formats and platforms and mechanisms in a way that actually drives the business. So that's, I'd say, the biggest change.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  And with that, also, we're becoming a digital-first, direct-to-consumer brand. And so, we're creating these standalone products that actually reach audiences across every screen device and platform, and reaches them where they're at. And that gets really interesting when you're dealing with marketers like T-Mobile in delivering their messages in new and innovative ways.

• 9:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'm curious about the first conversations you had with T-Mobile. What was the problem that you defined, that you wanted to solve?

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  And how did you see slicing as fitting into this solution that you imagined?

• 10:06Speaker 03

  So as we embark upon this digital transformation, and to basically transform CNN into a brand of the future, we're trying to define the future of news. And so with that, our reporters really need to stay connected, you know, reporting live from a natural disaster, or, you know, in a moment of celebration, like New Year's Eve, or Super Bowl, or July 4th, or Thanksgiving, or whatever that might be. Or if they're in far-flung places, you know, where there's not a good signal, we need to ensure that our audience gets delivered the information that matters most to them, and does not skip a beat. And so, as we're embarking upon this digital transformation, it only made sense to outfit our reporters with the best technology

• 10:51Speaker 03

  in the palm of their hands to ensure that their Capturing that information as it happens in real time. You know, with breaking news, you're either leading or you're following. And, you know, for us to have a competitive edge in this digital transformation that we're going upon, it was critical for us to have a trusted partner that was able to capture news reliably so that we don't break trust with our audiences and deliver what they need.

• 11:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, I want you to jump in here because one of the interesting things here is that as I, when you're speaking, I've been a journalist my whole life. I'm well aware of all the limitations of the various technologies I've used over the years. But the thing is, I have no insight into what is possible technologically, right? I just know what I've been given. So I'm just curious, how does the process of educating a company like CNN into what's technologically possible work? Did someone at T-Mobile like call Guy up and say, hey, do you guys realize there's this thing out there that you may not have heard of? Like, I'm curious about how knowledge gets diffused in these marketplaces.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  What I loved about working with them is, like any large enterprise, it's a little bit of prove it to me and show it to me. And so when Super Mobile hadn't yet even launched, when we started talking to CNN, but we knew that frontline journalism was such an incredible use case for all the reasons the guy articulated that, hey, when breaking news is happening, the camera that you have and the video camera that you have in your pocket on your phone may be that first way of that breaking news making it to the audience. And so we sat down and we were having a conversation about how slicing would enable, even in moments of congestion, in moments of emergency, would give them the intelligent adaptive connectivity that they need

• 12:43Speaker 02

  for their frontline to be able to stream, as well as all of those, the big moments like 4th of July, New Year's Eve, etc. And so what happened was, they said, okay, prove it. So we gave them X number of test devices. They embedded them with video crews and news crews around the country. And then they, they put it to the stress test. They went and ran side-by-side compares.

• 13:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, really? Oh, you did like?

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, we did a test before we embarked upon this. We needed to make sure that the technology

• 13:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  Tell me a little bit about the test.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Actually worked. I mean, We had engineers and field journalists using the technology and just, you know, seeing whether the signal was stronger than some of the other partners that we work with, telecommunications companies, and it proved out.

• 13:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  Who shall remain nameless.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  We will, yes, we won't name their names, but it proved to work and it proved to be steady and it gave our tech and product teams the confidence and our newsroom to actually say, let's embark upon this, let's outfit all of our field journalists with this technology because it's going to be critical in our news gathering and news reporting.

• 13:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  So it's like you're at some event and there's, there's some, I can imagine, there are, there are moments when there's 100 reporters in a scene and the networks might be incredibly congested.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was both about congestion and areas with lots of demand, like New York City was one of the areas where the tests were happening.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  It's important not only from a journalism standpoint, but it was important for a T-Mobile and CNN relationship standpoint. It allowed us to deepen our relationship because it's a win-win-win and it kind of sets a blueprint for how we want to be working with T-Mobile more in the future. You know, the satellite to cell security that our journalists have while they're out in the field enables them to do the job that they need to do better than anybody else. Our audience wins because they don't skip a beat and then T-Mobile gets the opportunity to show up in a very meaningful and authentic way, in a trusted way, where the audience knows that, you know, what they're seeing right now is powered by this, this incredible technology. And so it's, it's something that, you know, we

• 14:53Speaker 03

  think is never been done before, watershed, and really demonstrative of where we want to go as a company moving forward.

• 15:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  I remember when I was starting out as a reporter at the Washington Post, I was given a, what was called a trash 80, a Radio Shack. Like, calling it a computer is too, way too flattering. And it had two cups. Do you remember the cups? You ran to a payphone and you put the cups on each of the two things of it, and then you

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Tones.

• 15:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  You use tones to try, and if you were covering a big event, there'd be like three payphones, like half a mile away, and then there'd be a line of reporters waiting to use the, and if you were trying to beat the competition, you just wouldn't leave the payphone.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  You'd just stick there and like make the New York Times wait. I worked for the Washington Post, that's what we did.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Malcolm, you're dating yourself.

• 15:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  I know, yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  This technology allows like our reporters to literally have a satellite truck in their hands, so they're not dealing with cups and strings and like waiting on lines for other reporters to finish.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  I'll, I'll give you a real example that was playing out at F1, which is the photographers from any news outlets, their workflow was they would take pictures and then they would hand their SD card, the memory card from inside the camera, to a runner. The runner would then literally run to somewhere to upload the photos. What we're able to do with slicing technology is we've launched a solution that plugs directly into the camera and uses the slice and the 5G network so that in real time, every photo that's being taken is moving over file transfer protocol to an FTP site. The editors are then able to grab it, which means breaking news is able to happen even faster and they're

• 16:34Speaker 02

  able to beat the competition to whatever that iconic next image will be and getting it out to, to the eyes everywhere.

• 16:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. Steve, I'm sorry, we've, I feel we've been, we've been ignoring you. Before I get into the way Siemens Energy has worked with T-Mobile, I'm curious about your own background. I'm assuming you're, are you an engineer, you're an engineer?

• 16:55Speaker 04

  I'm an engineer, yep, originally.

• 16:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. And what kind of engineer?

• 16:59Speaker 04

  Uh, actually marine engineer.

• 17:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  Interesting. How would you describe your, your current job with Siemens Energy?

• 17:05Speaker 04

  I've, I've got a great job with Siemens Energy. So my organization, my teams, we service the power plants across the United States. You know, power plants, no different than your car, every so often. Often they have to do periodic maintenance. We show up with a crew of people, take the turbines, the generators apart, stem to stern, inspect them, repair them, modernize them, upgrade them, and then return them to service to help power America. So, last year, Siemens Energy Equipment generated about 25% electricity used in the United States. There's over 2,200 units spread out across 1,100 sites

• 17:49Speaker 04

  in 48 states.

• 17:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  2,200 units?

• 17:53Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 17:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  How many people work for you?

• 17:55Speaker 04

  In my organization?

• 17:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  I have about 1,500 and then I bring on about another 3,000 contractors every year.

• 18:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, wow. Basically, if a generator goes down somewhere or a power plant goes down somewhere, you're the person who gets called?

• 18:09Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 18:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  How did you come to want to work with T-Mobile for business? Tell me how that came about and what was it they offered you that you needed?

• 18:19Speaker 04

  We have teams on site, so when we go to a power plant, a small event for us might be 30 people on a site for 30 days. A big event for us could be 300 people on site for six months. And it's all about that.

• 18:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Wait, for six months? You might be on a site for as long as six months?

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 18:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  And over the close to that six months, what are you doing? You're essentially taking it, you're taking the whole thing down and going through it?

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, take it apart, rebuild it. You know, there might have been some sort of damage to the equipment, you know, waiting on other parts to show up. You know, we've had events that have taken over a year on different sites. But for our people on site, you're kind of comparing interesting history. We used to have to show up with boxes and boxes of drawings and manuals. And the connectivity that we get now lets our people access our engineers globally, whether they're sitting in Germany, India, the US. It allows them to talk to the factories. It allows them to access drawings, process, procedure.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Also does things like lets us run payroll. I mean, you know, it it it it enables everything to to happen because when we show up at these plants, you know, we show up, office trailers, bathrooms, cranes, tools, parts. You know, none of it exists when we show up and none of it's there when we leave. And we do that 300 times a year.

• 19:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah. So, logistically, what you're running is something incredibly complicated. So, walk me through. You've got this group of, you say, as many as, you say, as many as 60? Oh, 300 was the.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, potentially at a site.

• 20:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. So, you show up. And what, walk me through what the first couple of steps are and how this kind of connectivity would make a difference.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  I mean, we hire union workers, we're partnered with the UBC and higher mill rights. So, first thing is, sign up, then it's go to safety training, go to site orientation training. Customer will bring the unit down, lockout, tagout, make sure that all the systems are safe to work on. Then take the machine apart as the machine's coming apart. You're inspecting every piece. Is it in the condition it should be? Is it worn? Is it broken? Does it need to be replaced? Are we modernizing it?

• 20:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  These machines are how big? Give us a sense of.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  Um, the, for what I work on, uh, you know, on a small side, it's about 80 megawatts. On the, on the, on the large size, up to like 1500 megawatts. So, 1500 megawatts power a million and a half ohms.

• 20:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  And, you know, there's, there's nothing we work on that you're moving with hand. Everything's being moved with a crane.

• 20:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. You're dealing with a complex piece of machinery. You're a German-based company. You're, you, you had to show up with boxes and boxes of manuals and, and you had to be in, in communication with people who presumably designed the machines back in Europe.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 21:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  Talk a little bit about the difficulties of that earlier paradigm.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  Going to the earliest parts of my career, if you wanted to send a picture or a sketch of what you found at the site, you actually had to send it by mail and turn it around and then you could fax it and then all of a sudden you could attach a digital picture to electronic communication and now with this technology, we can livestream in 4K and hey, this is what I'm looking at. Do you see this? Okay, hey, I want to see from this view. The technology just allows that real time, regardless of where the people are sitting, collaboration as well as access to all the technical information.

• 22:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. What's the big payoff for you? Is it that you can now speed up the process of doing this kind of maintenance?

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Absolutely. For the customer, the owner of the power plant, whether it's a utility, an independent power producer or some sort of municipality, bringing that unit back sooner is beneficial to them. Getting my crews off-site sooner saves me money, lets me send them to another site. So it's all about the speed and the last thing we want to be slowed down with is communicating with engineering, getting that technical answer, getting that support. I need whatever environment my people are working at to seem like they're sitting at headquarters and have access to all the same information.

• 22:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. So T-Mobile gives you now able to equip all of those technicians with essentially a dedicated slice, a super mobile dedicated slice.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. And as you can imagine, maybe unlike what people are reporting, everything that we're happening is kind of more remote. Your power plants are generally found in your city centers and your hubs. So it's that connectivity, whether it's 5G or satellite, lots of different options, but it's connecting our people to what they need.

• 23:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  And how did you find out about super mobile?

• 23:33Speaker 04

  It was kind of initially organic conversation. They came to us and said, hey, we think we've got something for you. We're always trying to...

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Get our people that bandwidth on site and you know, we brought them a problem like, you know, what, what can you do? And that's what started the conversation.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  And for T-Mobile, it's, I mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating. Like, we start with what are our customers' pain points? And we knew with Siemens Energy, remote workforce, worker safety, efficiency were things that were incredibly important. And so as we were designing and building SuperMobile as a solution, we really thought through what customers, what industries do we think will really benefit from this value proposition and these pain points that we can come smash? And this is why the conversations with CNN around frontline journalists began. This is why the conversations with Siemens Energies around remote workers,

• 24:35Speaker 02

  working in some of the most remote parts of America began. And it was so exciting for us to see that, yeah, there was a there there and we could really help our customers win.

• 24:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  The case studies, you've got like F1.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  You've got like frontline journalists, you know, reporting on, you've got like the power plants that we can't live without. Were you, in rolling out something like this, do you choose early case studies that you think will kind of capture the attention of, I mean, there seems to be an art behind that, who, who you're...

• 25:07Speaker 02

  This, this is why I love business and B2B. I mean, like, just listening to these stories about solutions that are serving Americans, whether the end consumer that's receiving the electricity or the power, the energy, or the person at home or on the go who's consuming news content. Like, everything in our lives in some way is touched by business. And so absolutely, when we're building any solution, we're always thinking about, okay, what are the pain points? What are the specific verticals or industries that could benefit from this? And then because we're deep in the B2B, we're able to bring industry experts to the table internally and trusted partners and customers to have a conversation on,

• 25:51Speaker 02

  hey, does this really achieve and smash the pain point that you have? And so the answer is, yeah, absolutely. And it's a lot of fun, too.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  We'll be right back.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 26:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  And we're back. Who needs this technology who hasn't adopted it?

• 26:58Speaker 02

  What I love about SuperMobile is that there's three key capabilities. So let's start there. One is the slicing that we've talked a lot about. I think of that as intelligent adaptive connectivity that meets the performance and real-time requirements of businesses. The second one that we haven't got into very much is built-in security to ensure that as part of any layer cybersecurity defense posture that our businesses are taking, we're helping protect also at the network layer. And then the third one is the satellite capabilities that allow people to communicate from anywhere that they're at. And as I think about that, the one that we haven't really gotten into

• 27:38Speaker 02

  is events, concerts, political conventions, things like that, where the slicing elements of it, I think, really, really can help. And then on the satellite side, I still think there's opportunities around workers that are deeply remote, outside of energy, government employees in like national parks, as an example, that could use the satellite capabilities in their everyday job and really for safety purposes, to make sure that in one way or another, they're always on the grid.

• 28:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. Steve, I had to come back to you for a moment. I'm curious about, as you've kind of experienced this technology and have thought about how it affects your workflow and all these. Do you, is there a point at which you start to reimagine what your, these job sites look like? I ask this question only because I remember, we did a T-Mobile conversation once with these firefighters. Do you remember those guys?

• 28:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 28:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  And the firefighters were completely rethought, the way they fought fires, once they had this technology. Because they would go, instead of having everything directed from a command center off-site, they would just put a server in the back of a pickup truck and go directly to the fire site and have all the decisions made there, because now they had connectivity. So this, what seemed like a relatively simple shift in the infrastructure, completely changed the way they thought about firing fires. And all of a sudden, the firefighters on the scene were able to make all kinds of decisions they never made before. I'm curious about, could you talk about, you must have thought about, wait a second, this means I could do this, this, and this that I've never done before.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, the idea of a tablet in an engineer, a technician, or a craftsman's hand, with the work instructions, the ability to pull a drawing versus walking back to a trailer to do that, and then the ability to really just collaborate on the deck plates with an engineering organization, be it in Europe or somewhere else. It's all right in your hands, and that goes into changing and streamlining what we're doing on the customer sites, and ultimately eliminating things.

• 30:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's really interesting. Give me a concrete example of a step you could eliminate. And one example I love is the "see what I see."

• 30:10Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, if we were inspecting a row of blades, instead of me going through and documenting what each blade is, taking pictures of it, go through and write a meticulous report, "Hey, I just visually inspected these, I'm gonna let you visually inspect them with me." Okay, hey, they're acceptable as is versus... You know, getting into dimensioning and visual inspections just to communicate to an engineering organization.

• 30:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  So like with the camera on the phone.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Via SuperMobile, now literally you can, to use a consumer term, FaceTime in someone, an expert, and let them in real time see what the technician on site is seeing and assist them.

• 30:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Guy, is there a point where we start to reimagine what covering an event looks like? When we radically improve the kind of underlying.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Connectivity.

• 31:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  Connectivity.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. We launched last month a new streaming service. It's this adaptive live news experience that's designed for the modern news consumer. Live when it matters, deep when it counts, available anytime, anywhere. It's basically having the entire CNN experience in the palm of your hand on the phone. And, you know, with that, we, it's going to afford us the opportunity to do some really cool things with our journalists. We think in this new age of AI, headlines are going to be commoditized. You can get them anytime, anyplace, anywhere, right? But people trust people. And we have some of the biggest world-renowned journalists on the planet, like people that are anchors and reporters and, you know, that millions and millions of people really trust.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  It's taking the news reporting to the next level. These capabilities aren't afforded right now within this new streaming product, but they're on the roadmap in 2026. And we're hoping that T-Mobile will be the underpinnings of technology that allow us to do all of that. So that's taking it to the next level.

• 32:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  A question for all three of you. What would, what do you want next? So all of you have described a technology that allows an existing set of processes to be done much more reliably. And is there something, what's on your wish list? Where could the technology go?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Love this question. I mean, at the heart of it, slicing is replacing what used to take wires to do. You mentioned at the beginning, which was fixed locations and satellite trucks. We talked about F1. At the end of the day, over the last X number of decades, has been the. This massive transition and transformation from needing to physically connect everything with a wire to now we can use slicing to emulate what wireline networks used to do on mobile networks. So as I think about what's next, it's really about how much more can wireline networks be disrupted to solve real challenges and create value for business customers?

• 33:10Speaker 02

  And that's what I spend a lot of my time building on.

• 33:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  You haven't mentioned, Mo, I keep waiting for you to mention healthcare. Cause I feel like the implications here for healthcare are huge.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. We talked actually once before a little bit about healthcare, but what I for healthcare, the way we think about it is one, emergency medical services are first responders.

• 33:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's right.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  So they absolutely have access to and we see them using the T priority slice. But then where the magic happens is the integration of that slicing technology for the moving vehicle, the tablets in the vehicle helping save lives and the ability to transfer and transition that data off of the EMS solution directly into the hospital or the healthcare facility where they're showing up. And I have multiple examples I could take you through of hospitals that have deployed 5G purpose-built coverage, usually to replace something like wifi, to enable massive amounts of data much faster at lower latency,

• 34:18Speaker 02

  fully integrated with the EMS community around them to do their thing.

• 34:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  I had a conversation, a heartbreaking conversation with a guy, an ER doc in Chicago who is training kids in the kind of rudimentary principles of first response. Cause in, on the south side of Chicago, it's the public who comes upon a gunshot victim first, right? And there's a, might be a five or 10 minute window where. Some civilian is just sitting with the body. And he was trying to teach them about, you know, compress the wound or whatever. But I can imagine, couldn't you imagine a universe where you just take your phone out?

• 34:57Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 34:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  And, you know, and take a picture of a video of everything and that's sent immediately to somebody who can tell them in real time what to do.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Exactly. We're thinking about the Siemens Energy example of what I see.

• 35:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  But I fundamentally believe and know that over time what we're going to have is just overlays. So you're going to use the camera on your phone and on your phone as you're pointing at something, it will show you the schematics. Or it will show you how to help a patient in real time with instructions. So someone can be holding it, someone else can be looking at it and it tells you the thing. Where I thought you were going to go with the thing we have not yet talked about, which in this year, we haven't talked about AI at all.

• 35:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  That was good. That was my next, that was my next. I had a, it was, I thought that Steve would be the natural one to, because clearly that's, you were talking about connecting to the guy back in Germany.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 35:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  But maybe the thing that you're doing with your, with this connectivity is bringing in AI and having diagnostics that way, right? Am I right?

• 36:00Speaker 04

  We don't know what we don't know yet with it. You know, the, but the, the promise of just, we've got years worth of running data. We've got years worth of inspection reports. How do you overlay those two together and have AI, you know, start doing smarter maintenance, doing more predictive maintenance, deferring maintenance, you know, based off of what we can see with the AI. But you know, just the, getting ready for what? The infrastructure and the power to build this, this, this next wave of, of AI for the US, you know, it's what's driving our industry right now.

• 36:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  The data demands of having a kind of open interaction with, I'm assuming they're, they're far greater than an interaction with a human being. In other words, if I'm, if I'm Steve or I'm one of Steve's people and I'm on site and I have some Problem, and I want to be able to contact a specialist in Germany, or I want to have access to an LLM that's like got all the manuals in. One is much more data intensive than the other, right?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It really boils down to are you using text? Are you using voice or are you using video? Because the AI compute itself, that's its own server, its own mechanism that's sitting and processing. But then the mechanism by which you're bringing that information to and from is where it gets more intensive based on the modality that you're using. So if it's a chat AI, it could be relatively limited. Bandwidth that's required, voice bit more, and then video the most.

• 37:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah. Guy, have you thought about that in the context of is that a challenge or a question that comes up with at CNN?

• 37:50Speaker 03

  With AI specifically or with just the future of reporting?

• 37:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  No, because I was thinking in this conversation, you know, we're talking about, what we're really talking about with all of these conversations is we are making, we are increasing the sophistication of the point of connection between whoever has this device and the, or whatever, and the problem they're trying to solve. And with journalists, that's an incredibly fascinating question because you can imagine a situation where someone is observing something and AI is helping them understand what they're seeing.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  I agree. I think that all of these advances in technology are just going to enable us to do what we do on steroids much, much better. It's also going to enable us to potentially provide value or utility to the general public and society. So just getting back to the thing like allowing us to do things better. We defined real time journalism on cable TV 45 years ago. We were the first network to have 24/7 news. And that costs a lot of money to do, right? And so what we're hoping is with all of these advances in technology and literally not needing those satellite trucks and not Needing that camera crew and literally having all of this in the palm of your hand.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  It'll allow us to do that much more efficiently. And then lastly, I would say with the utility piece, which is kind of, you know, this hasn't been vetted, this is just my thoughts. Like, let's say we are running towards the fire or running towards the flood and we're the first on location and we see people that are in need. Is there a way that we through SuperMobile can connect to the local EMS or could assess what's going on and say, there's a need for X, Y, and Z in this moment? So we're not just reporting what's going on, but we're also able to help solve for whatever disaster or problem is happening in that time. So that's kind of like the next step where, you know, this.

• 39:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  I was thinking of war reporting. About how war reporting, which is the most confusing and kind of mistake prone. The idea that a reporter on the scene could be taking video and having, you know, identify that was that plane you see was this kind of plane that belonged to this country and not that country. And that missile you see was this kind of missile. That kind of thing improves the fidelity of the onsite reporting and has all kinds of ripple effects downstream, right? Because we're not, we have a less corrupted data from the source.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 40:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah. We should probably wrap up, but there's a couple of themes I wanted to kind of end on. The first one is that the effects of technological innovation are unpredictable and unknowable. I don't imagine, no, correct me if I'm wrong. When you guys were coming up with slicing and with SuperMobile, you did not anticipate all the ways in which the technology could be used by your customers. You had some of it, a sense, I think, probably. But when you listen to Guy and Steve. Am I right? You hear things that you didn't think that was what it was going to be about.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. I mean, again, thinking about the arc of time here. Twenty years ago, no one predicted slicing was coming. You know, arguably, five years ago, no one saw the rise of AI in the way that it's actually played out from about three years ago. But yeah, as we're building mobile networks and as we're thinking about the future of now 5G to 6G, and what are those use cases and how can they serve businesses? A hundred percent, it's these sorts of conversations on, hey, what's going on in your business? And what challenges are you dealing with? And what are you trying to fix or address this year?

• 41:39Speaker 02

  That then gives us the ideas of how can we shape the technology and build the technology in a way that addresses the need.

• 41:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  Point number two, reflection number two from our conversation, is that the systems that we have built as a modern economy are probably a lot less efficient than we think. In other words, we assume we're doing a pretty good job. Then a new technology comes along, we're like, oh, actually, you could do it way better, right? So just when you think you've optimized a system, you think that, oh, I send the reporter, I got a satellite truck behind the reporter, we're fine. This is the way we do news. And actually, no, there's a way better.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  You know.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  And just in terms of like storytelling formats, you know, super mobile enabled vertical video, which is becoming really hot right now. It's the predominant way that people are consuming video on social media, et cetera. We're just getting into that game and we're going to be able to tell these visually arresting stories in live formats and vertical video, mobile for storytelling, leveraging that. And I think the future, you know, the best is yet to come. I have no idea what will avail, but I just, I already see some future applications of where this could go.

• 42:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. And then the third thing, and maybe the most important thing, is the thing I alluded to earlier is we are working towards a new definition of trust here. That we've been thinking about trust for generations now as being about transparency and fairness and predictability. But now we're adding this fourth component of reliability. I can, I can reduce the number of. You know catastrophic power outages or system breakdowns. I can reduce the error rate of a journalist, the scene of a thing. And that that may be that new additional, that new way of addressing reliability can enhance trust in a

• 43:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  maybe as much as the other sort of three traditional pillars of of trust enhancement, which is a very, very intriguing thought. Anyway, thank you. This has been fascinating. Thanks to

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 43:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  all of you. An unlikely pairing that proves not so unlikely in the end.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Thanks so much. Welcome.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Good seeing you.

• 44:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  This episode was made in partnership with T-Mobile for Business and iHeart Media. Special thanks to Mo Katabah, Chief Marketing Officer, T-Mobile for Business, Guy Griggs, Senior Vice President, Ad Sales and Client Partnerships at CNN, Steve Douglas, Senior Vice President, Service Operations, Siemens Energy, and the entire production crew at iHeart Media. This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan, editing by Karen Shakurji, mastering by Marcelo de Oliveira. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Malcolm Glappel.

• 44:51Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 45:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  membership. That's whoop.com for your free month of Whoop.