Behind the scenes of our Treo documentary, Springboard

Live at On The Verge in New York City, Nilay and Dieter discuss The Verge's documentary Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone and conduct at Q&A with the audience. Springboard is now streaming worldwide. You can watch it on The Verge’s new app on Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, or Apple TV. It is now also available to watch on our YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to The Vergecast. I am Dieter Bone, and this is another entry in our special run of topic-specific Tuesday episodes. This week, we are bringing you another conversation from our 10-year anniversary party. It was called On The Verge. Specifically, we're going to play a conversation that Neelai Patel and I had after the world premiere of our documentary. It's called Springboard: The Secret History of the First Real Smartphone.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  There weren't chips that you could go buy. You couldn't go to the market and say, build me one of these things.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  We took off like a rocket. Everybody wanted this product.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  The documentary is about a nearly forgotten company called Handspring, which made visor PDAs and Trio smartphones years before the iPhone. You can watch it now on our smart TV apps that are on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and Android TV by searching for The Verge. Or as of today, it's also available on our YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/theverge. I think that you're going to find our conversation to just be a bit richer, more interesting if you've watched the documentary. But I will play a couple of clips from it here on this podcast before we get started with the conversation, just to give you some context. On a personal note, I'm really proud of what The Verge video team did here, but I'm also personally happy to have put this thing out into the world.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  I really do feel like the people behind Handspring haven't gotten the credit that they deserve. And my hope for springboard is that it goes some way towards setting the record straight about who some of the early innovators were in the smartphone space. If you've been following my work for a long time, you might know that I got my start in journalism by hanging out on the forums at visercentral.com and then writing for TrioCentral.com. In fact, my little intro here at the top of the podcast, "Greetings, Mobile Accomplishers," is actually a reference to Palm. See, back when Palm introduced the Trio 680, just a few months before the iPhone was announced, they were trying to describe who the target market was for the smartphone.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  And back in 2006, nobody really knew if smartphones were actually going to take off. Blackberries were for email and other smartphones were really not mass market yet. So Palm's idea for the Trio 680 was that it was targeted towards, quote, "mobile accomplishers," which was something that was like, not quite a regular consumer, but not really business people either. You know, it's pretty common for companies to come up with categories for their target demographic, but I just thought the phrase "mobile accomplishers" was funny. So I started using it to introduce the Trio Central TrioCast. And I've been introducing podcasts with that phrase kind of ever since.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  "Greetings, Mobile Accomplishers." Here we are, the Sprint Trio Pro. "Greetings, Mobile Accomplishers." Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Anyway, this is all just to point out that I have been reporting on smartphones since forever. But more importantly, I want to put some of our discussion about Handspring into context.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Springboard is about a period of time that's roughly, say, 1998 to 2006, 2007. And back then, the smartphone world looked very different than it does today. Like I said, there was BlackBerry, but there was also Symbian. There was Pocket PC and eventually Windows Mobile. Android didn't exist back then and the iPhone didn't exist back then. And nobody really knew how this market was going to shake out, except that a few people knew just how big it was going to be. A phrase that's been kicked around a lot in Silicon Valley since it was originally introduced by John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple, when Steve Jobs got sent away before he came back. It was called the mother of all markets. And at Palm, they actually had a little spinny sign.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  And one sign pointed up to mother of all markets. And in the bottom of it was pipe dream driven by greed or something. And no one really knew where it was going to be with the PDA market. And no one really knew where the smartphone market would land. But everybody in the back of their mind, especially at Handspring, had a sense that the smartphone market was going to be huge, that it was going to be the mother of all markets. And they tried to make that happen, but they were way too small. They were really scrappy and they faced very long odds. There were lots of things working against Handspring. But the biggest thing working against Handspring was the carriers, the companies that actually sold the phones. They had so much power back then. It was impossible to sell a phone without them. And in many ways, the iPhone's biggest innovation

• 5:59Speaker 01

  was taking some power away from those carriers. So here's a brief clip from the Springboard documentary where some of the people from Handspring talk about how difficult it was to get anybody to just sell the trio.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  Sometimes these deals were so big. You're talking about the survival of the company. The degree of gamesmanship can get so intense. Your entire dream will fail unless you agree to put this app on your launcher.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  They were interested in adding features to their phones. They didn't view it as a computer. They said, it's a phone. Everyone's got on phones and phones are dominant. And we were thinking, no, the future is going to be computers and the phone is an app.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  I remember clearly going to And saying, "Great idea. Now, guess what? You can take a photo right on this thing and send it to somebody." And they said, "No, we don't want to do that. Our other devices can't do that." They also were one of the principal resellers of the product. It went through their stores.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  We made the first products and they wouldn't sell them. They said, "No, we can't sell, we're not going to sell these." You have to make the following changes.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Okay, one more clip I want to play for you before we get started. It's a very brief and abbreviated history of Palm and Handspring. Now, again, the Springboard documentary only covers a portion of this, but you can get a sense of just how complicated the corporate history of Palm is by listening to this little clip. One of the big reasons that Palm never really managed to take on the iPhone is it spent all of the years leading up to the iPhone just dealing with various corporate shenanigans. They founded Palm, which was bought by US Robotics, which got bought by 3Com. 3Com refused to spin off Palm, so Donna and Jeff quit to start Handspring. Meanwhile, their old company 3Com finally did spin off Palm,

• 7:45Speaker 01

  but they split it into two divisions, one for hardware and one to sell software. The Palm hardware division screwed up the market with excess inventory and the Palm software division, well, it didn't accomplish very much at all. Handspring then runs out of money, so the Palm hardware division buys them, but they refuse to buy back the Palm software division. So the family's back together again and they would continue to sell trios for years to come, but the family drama isn't over. Here's what was going to happen next for Palm. Jeff and Donna would step away, but Ed Coligan stayed on to give it another go at the new Palm. But that separate Palm software company sold off and withered away, so the new Palm had to sell Windows Mobile trios

• 8:29Speaker 01

  and then start over again with new software called WebOS. Then they ran out of money and had to sell to HP, and then HP finally killed Palm. All right, like I said, you can go watch the full Springboard documentary on our Smart TV apps, or you can go to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/severge to watch it there. Up next, my conversation with Neelai that followed the world premiere of the documentary at our 10-year anniversary party.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  So I think Neily is coming up, I'm not sure where he is. But actually, I don't want you to applaud for me, I didn't make this. I went on camera, the Verge video team made this and they're... Stand up, please stand up.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  Come on. Thank you.

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  Hey buddy.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Hey, how's it going?

• 9:23Nilay Patel?

  Congratulations.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  Also to the Verge video team. I did a lot. I'm so happy you saw my movie.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Alright Dieter.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  I have a number of questions.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  How do we break the hold of the carriers?

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Well, what you need to do is be Apple and create a revolutionary new phone and just do the whole thing all over again. It's really, we're back in a lot of ways, right?

• 9:48Nilay Patel?

  We do feel like we're back in a lot of ways. The carriers do have a lot of control over products, but it does seem like the tide has turned. Apple and Google do get to sort of do whatever they want. But there are a lot of parallels to this moment, to that moment. Like, a new company finds it very hard to make a phone.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Well, a new company can, it's easy to make a phone now. Just like to build the phone. One of the, one of the stories here is when they wanted to build the visor phone, they're like, "Okay, well, let's go get a radio." Well, they had to like, they found like a company, I think in France, and that was the only place they could find a radio that would connect to a cellular network. Now you can show up in Shenzhen and be like, "Make me a phone." And they're like, "Which parts would you like? Here we go." Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. So that part is easy. But getting a phone that is actually something that will make it into the carrier stores, get carrier marketing, and be something that can be successful on a pretty big scale is much more difficult. It's, it's impossible to imagine a tiny company the size of, you know, what Handspring was,

• 10:45Speaker 04

  would be able to like, believe that they could break into the smartphone market right now.

• 10:49Nilay Patel?

  But I think that's like, there's a myth in our industry, in our world, that if you make a great product, the market will find you and you will be a success. And the market is still under the control of like, a tiny handful. And if you sell your product to Sprint, you'll die. It's like, how many times has Sprint killed Palm?

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Several.

• 11:10Nilay Patel?

  It's actually, you'll notice that we didn't get to WebOS. I feel like, like any good, you know, like left us hanging for the sequel.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I was inspired by Dune, you know, they just ended in the middle.

• 11:22Nilay Patel?

  Why did you decide to start here? I feel like a lot of our audience knows that you care a lot about Palm and WebOS. Why did you decide to start in such a primitive zone?

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Because I don't think the story is well-known. And I think that there's a hopeful element here. They came up with these ideas. They were trying to make a wonderful product and thinking really deeply about the user experience and the customer experience and how apps should work and all of that. They don't get the credit that I think they deserve for it. And I feel like, I mean, one, we started this six-ish months ago, so trying to tell the rest of that story would have been a lot longer. But I felt like there's an arc here to this specific company and this thing that they tried to do that starts with some drama. There was drama before this, by the way.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  And then, you know, ends with, you know, it's a sad story, but they were still trying. But the company of Handspring and the thing that they were trying to make, you know, it's not a well-known enough story, basically.

• 12:22Nilay Patel?

  What'd you leave out?

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Well, we left out all of WebOS. I mean, if there's that. Actually, this was, you know, post this, but there was a famous quote that Ed Coligan gave at the Churchill Club. They do these breakfast talks or whatever. That, if you read Daring Fireball and John Gruber, he loves to quote this thing, where he was talking to John Markoff, I think, and he said something to the effect of, "PC guys aren't going to figure this out. PC guys aren't just going to walk in."

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  To the phone market?

• 12:49Speaker 04

  To the phone market. And it was assumed that he was referring just to Apple, saying that, "They're not going to figure this out." Phones are really complicated. If all you do is make PCs, you're not going to be able to figure this out. And, you know, he has been lambasted for this quite a bit. He contends he's taken it a little bit out of context. I didn't put it in because, like, I just gave you a long story that involves talking about Daring Fireball. I don't know if it fits in a documentary like this. But also, the actual archive of it is currently MIA. So I couldn't go verify that he believes he was talking. He was talking about the PC industry at large.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  So funny story. Since we recorded this live show back in October, we did manage to get a hold of the original interview. So I'm going to play just a couple of clips from it. Now, for context, I want to read how Colligan was originally quoted in this interview in print in the San Jose Mercury News. And the quote goes like this, "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." Unquote. Now, as I mentioned on the live show, John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has quoted Colligan on this very often over the past 15 years, at least 20 times by my count. And so it's become a bit of a meme. It's become a shorthand for how everybody underestimated Apple before the iPhone launched. But I don't think that's an accurate reading exactly, once you hear

• 14:05Speaker 01

  the full quote and the context. See, the context here is that they were speaking weeks before the original iPhone was announced, and nobody really knew what it would be. So in the interview, Markov and Colligan speculate a bit on what Apple might be working on. And then Markov jumps into his next question, where he not only asks about future competition from Apple, but also from Google.

• 14:25Speaker 07

  But what will it look like in 2007? You know, Apple does get in. Eric's wandering around talking about free phones. He's got Andy Rubin, who was the founder of Danger, doing something inside. He bought Andy's startup. The phone market could look, I mean, it looks crowded now. It could look intensely crowded next year.

• 14:41Speaker 08

  It's intensely big.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  The Eric there is Eric Schmidt, who was then the CEO of Google. And Andy Rubin's startup was what became Android. This was, of course, before Android launched also. Anyway, here's Colligan's reply.

• 14:52Speaker 08

  It's intensely big. We just have to get our fair share of the pie. And let me tell you this, it's not as easy as it looks. Okay. You know, you've seen Motorola, one of the biggest phone companies in the world, enter with a device that was going to take over the world and has had enormous issues.

• 15:07Speaker 07

  Cue, you're talking about cue?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. That cue would be the Motorola cue, a very hyped up Windows mobile smartphone that had a QWERTY keyboard, but no touchscreen, terrible battery life, and really only so-so sales. So here's Colligan again. And I want you to pay attention to the tone of his voice here, but also how the actual words he uses are not the exact quote that I read earlier.

• 15:29Speaker 08

  And so I just would caution people that think they're going to walk in here and just and do these. We've struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. The PC guys are not going to just, you know, knock this out. I guarantee it. So look, you know, welcome, you know, let's, let's go for it. I, we can't stop all that. It's going to happen, but it's going to be, I don't think it'll be so easy for everybody as everybody thinks to enter it. It's a tough space.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  The difference between the old quote, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not just going to walk in and what you heard Culligan actually say here, I think is notable. There's a bit more humility here than Culligan's traditionally gotten credit for. And the topic is specifically that making smartphones is hard. Anyway, Markoff also catches on to this whole vibe that you get whenever a company has, when there's a huge competitor about to come in and eat their lunch. So he asked about that specifically in the next question.

• 16:22Speaker 07

  You've been around this industry long enough. You probably remember, maybe you don't actually, the famous Wall Street Journal ad that Apple took out in 1981. Welcome IBM, seriously.

• 16:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, right. Exactly. Well, look, I, you know, I'm not, I'm not trying to be cocky about it. It is a tough, it's a tough business. We've really struggled through that, you know, in the sense of making world-class radios that perform on global networks consistently with all the applications that we deliver.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  So that's the original interview. And while I think it's fair to say that Culligan was putting on a brave face before Apple jumped into his market, I also think it's fair to say that really he was talking about the rest of the industry that didn't have much experience with smartphones. Apple, sure, but also Google and even Motorola. And when I asked Culligan about it specifically during the interviews for the Springboard documentary, he said that his main point was that it was hard and also that he was a little bummed that this one section of an otherwise pretty good hour-long interview is the thing that gets quoted the most.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  So he was right about that.

• 17:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's an excellent point.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  Have any of you ever used a phone made by Dell?

• 17:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  Right. I have. It wasn't great.

• 17:33Speaker 07

  No.

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right. Do any of you use a phone made by a little company called Microsoft?

• 17:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm actually, I was like assuming there'd be one person here like

• 17:45Nilay Patel?

  It's just like given our audience, but like the PC guys did not figure it out.

• 17:48Speaker 04

  No, they did not.

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  What else, what were the other pieces? Because when you put together something like this, you only got 30 minutes. There are some things you have to let go of, and I know that you

• 17:57Speaker 04

  I mean, there's

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  You thought about a lot.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  There's more and more stories of carriers being dumb.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  That's what I want.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  Just like 30 minutes of Donkey and Carrier.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  Jeff Hawkins rolled into a meeting in, for a carrier in France, and the guy refused to believe that QWERTY keyboards were a thing. And at the time, capacitive screens weren't really there yet, they were using resistive screens, so a touchscreen keyboard wasn't like viable. So QWERTY keyboards were the shit, and like BlackBerrys were doing it, they were doing it on the Trio. And so he rolls in, and the carrier guy's like, you know, QWERTY keyboards will never be as fast as T9. And I challenge you to a race, to type something. And you have to put the phone under the table. And so Jeff Hawkins had to race this guy with phones under the table, that he could type on a QWERTY keyboard faster than T9. And he won.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  He won?

• 18:44Speaker 04

  Of course he won, come on.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that makes sense to me. We're gonna take questions, so you have them, line up over there. The one thing, as I watch this, you know, we have seen this documentary a lot, but watching it with all of you, it seems like Donna Dabinski does not get the credit she deserves, for being a pioneer in this industry.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, she came on, she was, you know, the CEO, she used to work at Apple. Like, the number of like fights that these three executives, but Donna and Ed in particular, who both were at Apple, had with Steve Jobs that like aren't in this cut, like there's a lot, they would call and yell at each other all the time. And, you know, she talked about how fast the company grew, there were, there are magazine articles of like the Titans of, you know, Silicon Valley at the time, and you like look at these pictures of these people, there's like, it's 15 white dudes and Donna in the middle, and like she's much shorter than them too. And you know, it's like the late 90s, so they're all wearing pants that are like, you know, this wide, I don't know what it was.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  But yeah, it was remarkable. She was, she was successful and dynamic and, you know, doing really well, they just, they hit these dramas. The joke that I make is that the history of Palm and Handspring is every 18 months, if somebody would have just given them $300 million, they would have won.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  And they trip over their own feet a bunch, but yeah.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  What do you see now that reminds you of that?

• 20:06Speaker 04

  Of that excitement?

• 20:07Nilay Patel?

  Not the excitement, the where are the small companies that if only someone would just give them the money and the time?

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  That they would break through?

• 20:14Speaker 04

  Well, there's a website called The Verge.

• 20:16Nilay Patel?

  We're very good.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  If you'd like to give us 300 million dollars.

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  We're just 18 months away from defeating Apple. If you could just help us out, that would be great. I think that I see a lot of those companies. It's a cliche now, right? You haven't made a product, you've made a feature. Where like somebody has a great idea and we all love it and the big company can just take it and like integrate it into the operating system or they'll buy the nascent company and crush it. And in many ways, buying the nascent company and crushing it is a superior alternative to whatever happened to Palm, right? Like that cycle of mergers and deaths and spinoffs and then HP kills you is like, uh, no thanks, right? Like I'd rather just like let Google, Aqua hire my company.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  But I think I still feel that, right? That the small companies don't get the opportunity to take the market.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:07Nilay Patel?

  Something else happens.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  So the I see excitement and dynamism all over the place. People making hardware and software tools for creators. There's just so much exciting stuff going on there. The question is, where do you see that excitement and that possibility and the something the size of smartphones?

• 21:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  Uh, and that is much more difficult to predict. And is it possible that there is a market that you could theoretically go after without the resources of a tech giant? I'm not sure. Like, I think that's one of the reasons that maybe like crypto is so interesting to people is because it seems like it's a potentially huge thing that you could get into without being, you know, Google or Apple or Microsoft.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  For one second, I thought you were going to say the metaverse and I was going to kick you off.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  We're going to take a break, but when we come back, we'll have more of my conversation with Neelai about the history of smartphones, plus some questions from the audience.

• 22:28Speaker 09

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• 23:43Speaker 00

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• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  All right, we've got some questions. Let's start over here.

• 24:26Speaker 11

  Hi, Eli. Hi, Dieter.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. The hype desk is back.

• 24:29Speaker 11

  Hello.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Sam, the chef, shepher.

• 24:32Speaker 11

  Hey, everyone. Dieter, that was really awesome to watch. It's also crazy to think that so much happened in 20 years, 10 years, right? Like, that iPhone came out in 2007. It's a long time ago. Do you have a vision or, you know, sort of like an idea or thoughts on what do things look like in 10 years with mobile computing, spatial computing, AMI computing, and then 20 years? Because that stuff was 2000. We're in 2021.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 11

  What does that future look like to you?

• 24:59Speaker 04

  I'll give you 10. I'm too chicken to do 20. Actually, Jake Kastenakis, wonderful editor at The Verge. I owe him a final draft on an article about this.

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  Please clap for Jake. Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake. It's like the third time.

• 25:17Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  I think that there's either going to be a radical, like, technological innovation that we can't see. Like, screens will go from folding to projecting into our eye from like a little camera. You know, something that'll be implanted, some huge thing, and there's no way to predict. Or it will just be more relentless incremental innovation. And I say that, and it sounds like a bummer, but from 2007 to now, it's arguably relentless incremental innovation. And the cultural changes that have been wrought by that, those incremental changes are massive. And so the smartphone 10 years from now may look very much like the smartphone that we have today. Just better cameras, better screens, better, you know, stuff.

• 26:01Speaker 04

  But that doesn't mean that it doesn't still have the power to change our culture, change the way we live our lives.

• 26:07Nilay Patel?

  I have two answers, one of which is a relentless plug. One, I always look at display technologies, right? The thing that bounds the devices in our lives is the display, right? So we could not have smartphones with CRT displays, although it would be rad.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  Rad. We needed LCDs, and then we needed really thin LCDs, we needed power-efficient LCDs, we needed touch technology. That is the thing that makes technology possible. We don't have a next display technology. We're really close in some ways. Addy and Dieter corrected me on the Vergecast a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, "It's all LCDs!" And like, no, there's like hints of other stuff. But there's not that turn. We might have folding. So that's what I would look at. Because that is the thing that allows the leap. The second thing, this is a relentless plug, is we, Norrie Donovan, our EP, and a bunch of other people at The Verge, and I, and a bunch of other smart people, I'm not doing anything, might be working on a show for a large streaming service about what life looks like 50 and 100 years in the future.

• 27:08Speaker 11

  Is that an exclusive?

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  Sure, let's call it that. And I'm very, that's, it's months away, but we were spending a lot of time thinking about that, and I will tell you, not easy to predict the future, but we're doing our best, so that'll come out later.

• 27:23Speaker 11

  Cool, thanks.

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  Over here.

• 27:24Speaker 12

  Hey, I'm Linus, proud owner of a Microsoft Duo. So if you ask about Microsoft phone owners, there's at least one.

• 27:35Speaker 12

  My question is, I think, when you take any of these ideas, and you can pursue their origins down to, I mean, like, software keyboard, for example, you can pursue them down from the iPhone to the Handspring, all the way down to academia for a lot of these ideas. So when you try to tell the story about the origin of ideas like this, where do you, how do you think about where to start? Is it from the first product? Is it from the origins of the idea themselves, and the people who wrote about them, thought about them, or is it even earlier? Where did you decide where to start with the story?

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I thought about that a lot, because it's like, am I just wanting to tell the story of Handspring, because that's how I got my start in reporting, and I just, this, whatever. And I, maybe this is a rationalization, but I feel like you start, I wanted to start with the products that, like, had an audience, and had a community, and had like a real shot at, like, hitting big numbers. I think that going back to before those products, to academia, to, there's, again, there's other Palma West phones before this thing, from Kiosera, Walcom, or whoever. But these were the products that, like, had more forward-looking ideas, and also, like, had a commercial market, and had a significant community around them. Neil, I asked some of the stuff I left out. The community around visors, and Handspring,

• 28:47Nilay Patel?

  and later Palm was obviously very important to me, so.

• 28:50Speaker 13

  Hi, my name is Scott. I have a question. I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly, but I believe that Palm OS at one point was connecting to iTunes, and Apple killed that. So, am I remembering that correctly? And if so, where does that fit into this timeline of this company?

• 29:08Speaker 04

  I do not know if there was ever a bridge from Palm

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, I know something about Palm OS that you don't know.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  To iTunes?

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  Goodnight, everybody! It was great seeing all of you!

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Is it the missing sync?

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  Okay, now WebOS?

• 29:25Nilay Patel?

  Yes!

• 29:26Speaker 04

  See, that's different.

• 29:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, just feel my power grow right now.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  WebOS did connect to iTunes, and on the all things D stage...

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  That's when they had that hack.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  They showed it off. They did it by making the Palm Pre, which comes after this story, identify as an iPod by its USB identification. So, when you plug in a USB device, it says, "I'm a baa." And so, the Palm Pre, when it plugged into a Mac, said, "I'm an iPod." And then iTunes was like, "Cool, let's sync."

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  And then, Apple did not like that.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  They did not like that.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  And then, there was a cat and mouse game for, I don't know, three, six months, where Apple would find a way to block it, and Palm would find a way to turn it back on. And then, they finally stopped, and they stopped doing it.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  So, that was then. But earlier, do you see that Digital Pub slide? That famous Steve Jobs thing? You know, there's no iPod on that slide. There was a Creative Rio.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:16Nilay Patel?

  It's a delightful product. I had one. I had it in college, 2003. It got me zero dates. No one was interested in it. But, Apple had a product called iSync, and it could transfer to other players. And then, they released the iPod, and they cut all that off.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  So, there was like, one tiny moment. And I know more about Palm than Dieter, I'm done.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Okay. Actually, if we're talking about music stuff, you may have noticed that I talked about the Sounds Good Springboard module? It was an MP3 module. That company got started, and there was a young intern at that company. And then, the Springboard market died, so they moved on to push email services. And then, that company got bought by Motorola. And then, that young intern...

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Do you guys wonder why we are so angsty about mergers on our show every time? It's like, there's a good idea, then a company bought it, and then they died.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  No, no, but that young intern moved up the ranks at Motorola, and was like, "Hey, Razr's not gonna last forever. We should make an Android phone." And he talked them into it, and he launched the Droid. And the droid is one of the phones that killed Palm. And then Motorola got bought by Lenovo.

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  Who's the interim?

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Uh, Rick Osterloh, who currently is in charge of the Pixel.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  (laughing).

• 31:32Nilay Patel?

  It's so good. Uh, over here.

• 31:34Speaker 14

  Uh, hi, Dieter. Huge fan since the Trio Center days.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 31:37Speaker 14

  I'm gonna say three words that might cause PTSD for you. Access Linux platform.

• 31:42Speaker 04

  So, okay.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, god, he didn't even ask a question.

• 31:44Speaker 14

  So, you mentioned it.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  Did you?

• 31:46Speaker 14

  You mentioned it in there that the split between Palm One and Palm Source happened. I personally think that that schism was one of the biggest cellphones in technology history. Do you think if they hadn't split apart, they might have been able to execute a bit better?

• 32:00Speaker 04

  Uh, when Handspring came back to Palm, the hardware division, they were up to re-up their license for Palm OS. And, uh, Ed Coligan wanted to just buy them instead of get a license. And the board said, "No, just re-up the license." He's like, "But it's only like another, some so-and-so million dollars more." And they're like, "Nah." Uh, and so, they gave the Palm OS company, Palm Source, all of this money. And then the Palm Source company was like, "Look at all this money that we just got paid. We must be worth a lot of money. Does anybody wanna buy us?" Uh, and so, they sold to a company in Japan, Access. Uh, they made Access Linux Palm. Um, and, um, this, like, nobody else was licensing this operating system except for Palm, obviously.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  And so, uh, it sort of didn't have anywhere to go. And the team that was developing a lot of very interesting, innovative ideas for Palm Source at Access Linux Palm, uh, they like started, you know, leaving the company. And they all started going to a place where they're like, "You know, there might be something interesting and cool here where we can execute these ideas." Uh, one of the most important engineers was, uh, Diana Hackthorn. And that company was Google, and they made Android, along with the folks from Sidekick. So, yes, biggest cellphone in history.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Sometimes you wonder why Dieter knows everybody, and it's like, because you knew them when they were babies. It's, it's, like, one of the secrets of 10 years of doing this is like, "Oh, we know a lot of important people now because we paid attention to them when they were not very important." And like, go, coming up with people is like, one of the secrets, and it just takes time.

• 33:33Speaker 15

  Hey, so I'm thinking back to like the HTC Touch Pro 2, if you remember that, like the Windows Mobile stuff.

• 33:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 15

  And then I feel like after that, the next big leap was Microsoft went all in on the Lumia devices. Tried to push that Windows 8 tile stuff. It did not work out on desktop or mobile. Do you think if Microsoft would have switched to Android a lot earlier on, would we have like a whole suite of Microsoft? Like, could they be the Pixel or similar to that?

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  Is that a victory?

• 33:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know. Neel, would you like to discuss, because it's been a minute, the burning platform memo?

• 34:03Nilay Patel?

  It's like two days in a row of Steven Elop references on this stage. You might recall, Steven Elop went to Nokia, he became the CEO, and he wrote this memo about saving Nokia. You don't recall this because you're sane people with lives. This is very important to us. And the memo is an extended allegory about people who lived on an oil derrick.

• 34:24Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  In the middle of the ocean, and the oil derrick catches fire.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  The oil derrick in this metaphor is Symbian, another competing smartphone operating system.

• 34:32Nilay Patel?

  And your choice...

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  It's been a long time since I read it, but I believe the choices were to burn to death or to dive into the frigid ocean. And he's like, "Sometimes you gotta dive." And this was his management philosophy for this company. And he's like, "We're diving," and the frigid ocean was Windows Phone.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  Right? So it's like this big thing, he sends this memo, and I'm imagining, I'm not finished, as you may have noticed. Maybe this has some like, you know, meaning. If any of you are finished, let me know. It's like people just talk about the burning oil derrick all the time, but like maybe it has some resonance. But I imagine the employees of Nokia are like, "Well, this sucks." But they could have picked Android. And I think if Nokia had picked Android, the whole market may have been different.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:20Nilay Patel?

  But instead, the ex-Microsoft employee who took over as Nokia's CEO surprisingly picked Microsoft's platform, sold Nokia to Microsoft. Microsoft lost its CEO, they got a new CEO who sold Nokia. Like

• 35:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, the more interesting question is

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  These are just some guys who make choices. I feel like we elevate CEOs a lot. Like, many times they're just guys.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:40Nilay Patel?

  And like, you might make the same choices. And I think this is like a pivotal choice. But everyone around that choice was like, you should have picked Android.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, when I said like, the current iPhone, Android world we live in wasn't inevitable. This is one of the things that maybe could have changed it. And so the big question, I think, that we face now that tech companies are so massive is, is there still the potential for that kind of disruptive change that will like reshift things around? And, you know, my heart wants to say yes, but I think that it's harder than it used to be.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that, it's like another carrier reference. The carriers saw the duopoly. And they wanted Microsoft to be a third competitive thing so they could get price leverage. They needed to get leverage against Apple and they still do. And like, that was their decision. And I think Elop saw a business opportunity and not a product opportunity, and that's always a mistake.

• 36:35Speaker 16

  So, I love the documentary. And it got me thinking about how history always repeats itself. And so I was wondering, do you see a device category like VR or AR or small board computing that is kind of going through a similar cycle where it just hasn't found its form factor yet? That is like the real hit of the iPhone?

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Disclosure.

• 36:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 36:56Speaker 16

  We did it.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  I cannot believe.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  You just wanted me to get the disclosure.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  That's all I wanted. Also, if we are taping that, we need to send that to like every journalism ethics college course in American. Like, our disclosures are brand, which is super weird.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. Nobody applauds for disclosures. This is amazing. Disclosure, my spouse works for Oculus, Facebook Reality Labs, a division of Facebook that works on VR. And maybe AR. I don't actually know. I do think that, that said, I do think that AR is like an interesting possibility. VR is an interesting possibility, but the screen thing is real. And the resource thing is real. Can you do, can you break into that without having a platform? That's pretty tough. I think I mentioned tools for creators a little bit earlier. And this is not a fully formed idea, but I think that people that are making stuff that doesn't just feel like it's an accessory for the iPhone or it's an accessory for the iPhone or Android phone, but it has its own like independent existence in some way that lets you make stuff.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  That's the most exciting thing to me right now. Like musical tools, you know, creative tools.

• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm with that. We talk about the AR stuff on the podcast all the time. The number of problems to solve, from how will you make the battery last all day? To who gets to decide who augments reality? Like, just, I mean, like, I know Facebook's gonna rebrand itself, but imagine you're wearing the Facebook glasses and you look at the United States Capitol Building. Like, you don't want your uncle augmenting that image in front of your eyes, right? Like, you don't want to literally live in a different reality than a person sitting next to you wearing glasses. And like, that is the big problem, right? Like, my dream, I said this yesterday, like, if I could just know all your names, I would be the most powerful person in America. But I cannot, and I will not remember your names, and I refuse to get better at it.

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  But just like, imagine what you need to solve for that problem. You need to build a worldwide facial recognition database. That seems bad. Like, I'm just gonna keep introducing myself to you. Like, that's a preferable outcome. So like, I think AR is really interesting, but that stack of problems from like, the battery won't last very long, to everyone lives in a different dystopian hellscape. In the same, like, that's, let's calm down, let's breathe. But I do think AR and VR, to me, are still the most interesting things.

• 39:16Speaker 17

  Hello, gents. Uh, real quick, any comments or where does danger fit into this whole narrative?

• 39:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, bye.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, they're here, they're around. And I think one could make a very similar documentary about danger, about the Sidekick, then with similar settings. But I think that their influence, like, it went into Android, but a little bit more indirectly. Larry and Sergey were big Sidekick fans. So like, there's an influence line there, but I don't think that there is as, like, I don't know, frankly, as tragic a story of like, yep, almost had it.

• 39:52Speaker 17

  The reason I bring them up is because they had the carrier relationship. And so it's, to me, it's very interesting, right? They had that with T-Mobile.

• 39:58Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 39:58Speaker 17

  Like, there was an interesting opportunity. And I mean, they got it to a degree, but...

• 40:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, having a carrier relationship doesn't mean you win. BlackBerry had a carrier relationship.

• 40:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Also, remember, T-Mobile was very small. Our carriers are not all the same size.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  So being the cool partner on the smallest carrier doesn't make you win.

• 40:15Speaker 18

  Hey, thanks, guys. So, you know, the documentary, obviously, did not realize this, like many people here, did make me realize, though, it seems very similar to the wearables market, right? The whole Kickstarter, Pebble, right, market? They pioneered. A lot of Pebble fans.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  Is somebody here wearing a Pebble? Do we have like a Windows phone Pebble combo in the audience?

• 40:38Speaker 18

  I guess my question is, do you see some parallels in how the wearables market is sort of a, you know, last 10 years example of this happening to that market. Pebble gets acquired and they're, you know, killed by Fitbit, basically.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  So, in this metaphor, the wearables are the smartphones, and the carriers are the people that own the smartphone platforms.

• 40:55Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Like, imagine that you could get a notification on a watch that isn't an iPhone, which you cannot... You can get notifications, you can't do... They're not smart, right? You can't just like reply to them. That is a feature limitation of the platform that prevents a competitor from keep competing with the Apple Watch. There it is. If you could get a notification and actually reply to it on the phone, I guarantee you some people would pick not an Apple Watch to use with their iPhones. But like, they're the carrier. Dieter has written an excellent editorial about this, actually. And he was like, "Should I pitch it as the iPhone with like, the smartphone companies are the new carriers?"

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Something like that, yeah.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  And we decided to use the word "carrier." But when we say "carrier," we say it with like malice and hatred in our heart. Go ahead.

• 41:35Speaker 19

  Hi. So, we talk a lot about hardware and software, where they come from, where they go to, and people make terrible choices in buying hardware and using software all the time, which leaves marketing, advertising, how products are positioned in the market. And I'm just kind of curious, how do you think this story relates in that kind of sense? Do you... Whether it's the failure of Hanspring, the ascent of the iPhone, but like, that's an important way that markets are shaped, I feel like.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  Give me an example.

• 42:06Speaker 19

  I think that you could have a terribly designed product... That maybe has a terrible user interface, terrible software. And if it's positioned really well in the market, if it's advertised and given some of this is comes down to carrier deals. Comes down to money, comes down to all of those things, but like. Things that are really terrible, that are like genuinely garbage, get really popular and sell a ton of units. And that's just due to other forces in the market. And I look at this and given I don't know the the full history of handspring, but like. Would promotion, would different positioning, would any of that have shaped this differently and? Given Apple knocks marketing out of the park every chance they get. So it was almost a surefire bet that the iPhone would do well, but like.

• 42:52Speaker 19

  I just wonder how the market, if you think the market would have shaped differently.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  I don't know if I'm as cynical as that. I think that it's a good product can fail because it didn't get proper marketing, but I think. Bad products will out and the best marketing doesn't isn't gonna keep a bad product like it's not gonna have longevity. You know, you'll get one or two rounds, maybe.

• 43:13Speaker 19

  Yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  But you're not gonna, you're not gonna become like an important iconic product if it sucks. And I think that I'm actually. I don't think marketing saves a bad product.

• 43:22Speaker 19

  Unless you're ruthlessly locked into its ecosystem.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  Unless you're ruthlessly locked into its ecosystem. Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 19

  But I I'm unsurprisingly more cynical than Dieter. And just thinking about this, like a thousand people asked me about scissor vodka yesterday. The whole joke there is very dumb, but underlying it is like my friends and I. Realize that mid range vodka is a commodity product and we could just like tell jokes about marketing it. And we would just yell vodka taglines at each other. And that's, that's the whole joke.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 19

  Right? Like, if you think Apple makes the same product as everyone else, but Steve Jobs is a better marketer, they'll win. I think Apple makes great products and the marketing is a bonus because they're really good at marketing. But at the end of the day, you get the thing home and you turn it on and either it is horrible.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  And then your Android TV crashes a lot and you have to answer to your family, or it's really good, right? And like, that is as simple as it gets. And I think with some kinds of product, the marketing is a whole story, right? Like, that is the vodka joke. And with other kinds of products, your experience and how you feel about it instantly transcends the marketing.

• 44:30Speaker 19

  So I think just one, one super quick follow-up to that is, had Handspring been positioned correctly in the market, had then again, money, carrier deals, all that.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 19

  Could Handspring have succeeded just by virtue of having better marketing, better positioning, better whatever that extra something is? Because everything else there was in the right place.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  They could have, but I'm not, I'm not gonna say that they would have. I, I, I think that they had really good ideas. I think that they executed them pretty badly in, in these products, uh, cause they just didn't have the resources they need to execute them well. But that's not a guarantee, like, that they would have made it. But they would have had a better chance than they ended up having, so.

• 45:11Speaker 19

  Yeah, cool, thanks.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  We've gone over. It's good, but we're gonna, we're gonna take these last two. Let's start over here.

• 45:17Speaker 20

  I had a question about what you guys think between Apple and Samsung? Because Apple makes everything, like, the software, the hardware. And Samsung gets their software from Google for free, but their phones are priced the same. How do you guys think that they can justify charging the same when they get a major investment that they don't even really have to pay for?

• 45:37Nilay Patel?

  Huh, yeah. That's actually, that's a good question. Is it free? Yeah. Uh, uh, like, yeah, it's free, but Google demands, like, there's a reason every Samsung phone has two browsers and two email clients. Like, at some point, the tax they're paying is that they have to ship half of Google's product and half of Samsung's product. Right, and then we are like, Samsung's product sucks. And like, okay, but if they didn't, if they weren't paying that tax and they didn't know that, you know, they're gonna release the phone, and then we're gonna be like, Bixby's a dog with shoes. And then no one's gonna use it, cause everyone's, cause we are gonna tell everyone that Google's doing a better job. Like, I think that tax, it might not be monetary, and I understand what you're saying, that they chart, they price the phones the same, and... That is like a whole, like, the hardware is still expensive, right?

• 46:21Nilay Patel?

  There's a reason Samsung is ahead on hardware features all the time. Maybe they're reinvesting that money somewhere else. But I think there's a, there's a very practical effect of the tax, which is that they've had to compromise what might have been their user experience to accede to Google's demands.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  And I guess I would also add, don't shed a tear for Apple having to invest in software development because they make more profits than anybody. Like, they're doing fine.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're doing fine. Last one. May, you, a lot of pressure on you.

• 46:48Speaker 21

  Okay. Hi, um, I was wondering what you think of the viability of Linux-based phones? Yeah, that, that's my question.

• 46:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  It's like a perfect ender.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. It has been tried. Uh, I think that, um, even Google, with Fuchsia, maybe is thinking Linux isn't the best kernel. I mean, it's, it's not a question of the viability of Linux as a technology and is it appropriate for a smartphone? Like, there's, there's lots of fascinating conversations to have there and all, many of you would be able to, like, beat me at that conversation really quickly. Um, it's a question of, uh, can there be a third smartphone platform right now? And that seems dubious. That, that's gonna take a minute, if ever.

• 47:29Nilay Patel?

  Right, you, there's two parties involved. There's carriers, who will not allow anything good to happen. Can you tell I feel? If you're a carrier partner and you're in the audience, please see our ad salespeople. They would love to talk to you. And then there's customers. I'm like, are you gonna buy a Linux phone that doesn't have an Instagram app? Well, actually, maybe now you would. Some other good app, Snapchat, they're great. Thanks for being on station.

• 47:53Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, that, those developers aren't incentivized to build those applications. And bringing up a new platform means they will not have all the capabilities that the current mature platforms do. So, between the, the carriers and then knowing that you will not be able to deliver any kind of tangible value except for freedom, which is great, like, I like it, but I also just like, I like having a useful phone. I think that just makes that investment very difficult to justify.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Can we not end in the duopoly down? One more round of applause for the video team.

• 48:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 48:28Nilay Patel?

  That's it. We didn't actually plan an ending. So we're, no. Thank you all for coming. I want to actually just say thank you to Dieter. You might have noticed a weird theme of our 10-year birthday is like fragility. We just did an entire documentary about fragility and The Verge was once very fragile. I think I said this to almost everybody who talked to me over the course of past few days. They're like, "What did you learn in the past 10 years?" I'm like, "I wish I had a time machine so I could go back 10 years in time and tell myself it was gonna be okay." I really do. Like, Dieter and I, at the very beginning, spent nights in the bar by my house, Zablowski's, R.I.P., it's closed, like, literally in tears, because at the beginning of this was so hard. And it wasn't gonna work, and we were working too hard.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  And now it's here, and we have a great video team, we have all these people who work with us, and all of you who care for us. We do not take it for granted, and Dieter is my brother, and I don't think I would have been able to do it. I can't.

• 49:28Nilay Patel?

  Thank you so much.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Okay, my thanks to Neelai for the chat, to everybody who came to our 10-year event, and of course, to the people who spoke with me in the documentary: Donna Dubinsky, Ed Coligan, Jeff Hawkins, Peter Skilman, and Rob Heitani. And of course, a huge thanks to the entire Verge video team for all the hard work they put into making an excellent documentary. We'll be back on Friday with the Vergecast chat show, and then we're gonna have one more topic-specific episode next Tuesday, when, as promised, we're going to dig into the new smart home standard that's called Matter.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  This week's Vergecast is produced by me, Andrew Moreno, and Liam James. If you want to hear more special episodes like this, or if you have any other feedback about the Vergecast, I am @BackLawn on Twitter, and my email remains very easy to guess, [email protected]. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll chat again soon.

• 50:33Speaker 22

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• 51:18Speaker 23

  Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why The Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Three times a week, hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. And The Guardian is not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.