Robots, 5G SA and Venezuela

I don't agree with this there's no putting it back in the bottle. I think there's all sorts of concerns being raised at the moment about AI. I think it's really good to hear in the last few months that people are talking about this kind of stuff more that you see that you see studies about what it does to somebody's brain that you hear like series like Pluribus that came out on an Apple TV which is very much about generative. I don't have Apple TV. Yeah, it's about the dangers of group thinking. I mean, I don't think he actually started the guy who created the series. It wasn't necessarily meant to be an allegory of generative AI but it certainly felt that way to me and then I think when he's been asked about if he's sort of said, yeah, I can see what people think about. Hello and welcome back to the telecoms.com podcast. It's been almost a month. I think since we did our Christmas one, it seems like a long time ago. That was the last one. Yeah. Well, it's always the last one, isn't it? And then we both had kind of three weeks off didn't we because we're to use up holiday. No one does anything over the Christmas period. There was no point in coming back last Friday was just for one day. Not unless you were mad. Indeed. So I kind of I kind of powered through for the solid three weeks. Well, the first week of it, I missed out on a lot of the December. That was almost like not a not a complete holiday because there were still various working things going on. Yeah, there were many social. Well, that week, I mean, you did a social one that was it was primarily like reading focus, but I've always attended them in the past. Yeah. And there's people from on to you there. Oh, yeah. Of course, James was there and great Gabe. Yeah, fair enough. In fact, I've still got James's secret Santa present that I would have brought along, but I had a bug. So I mean, all I would have done is not been on great form and then given everyone else the plague. So I decided to bail. And then same goes, there was a voter three drinks or three different phone. What do I think three defones what I call it? I think the direct brand is Vodafone three. Yeah, well, that's why I decide to be contrarian about it. Or base or just Vodafone. Yeah, no offense three. And there were some drinks there at Fort and Masons, which I missed out on. Yeah. So we'll give them a little shout out there. And yeah, I mean, you had a big old week that week and I did. So the Tuesday night was all you're about to sum it as it's called. And then Wednesday was out with some guys from Nokia. That's what oh yeah, and I had to miss that as well. Shout out to Paul Adams and Nigel. That was that was a good time. And who was the guy from City Fiverr? You've got his name. I've got his name, which is terrible. He's the head of strategy as well. I'll look at I've linked in so you look out otherwise for forgetting his name. Yeah. But they gave me a little LinkedIn shout out to say, sorry, you couldn't be here. And I definitely had some FOMO there. Yeah, that was good. It was just a few drinks in the curry. Very casual. Yeah. And then you missed the yeah, you obviously missed the Vodafone three. Fought them a Mason. Swanky drinks. And a Fought them a Mason. I never need this. Platon Nash. Platon Nash, that's it. Sorry, Platon. They they have a bar on the top floor. That's quite I mean, it's not huge. It's more than I expected it to be. But it wasn't it was good. It was it was a nice dude. It wasn't huge. It was it was kind of core core media. I don't even think they had analysts there. It was just press. Right. And obviously some of the Vodafone kind of PR reps and people who work. There were no Vodafone grownups. I don't think so. It was not that I remember saying. Right. Yeah, it was it was just like the yeah, the PR guys and and and journals. So yeah, so so I had a quiet quiet running and I'm doing my my usual dry January thing, although a CC group slash Hoffman, I've made sure it's not going to last the whole month because they're doing their like their traditional January piss up on the 22nd. Could have left it till 29th. But that's fine. So yeah, sobriety. And you said you haven't had a drink all year anyway, and just not in a normal way. I've seen some new years eve. Yeah. And I think I stopped drinking then about 10 and went to bed. I hate new years eve. I think it's a waste of time. It's like why we celebrate in the fact that it's the end of the holiday. And I'm back at work in a couple of days time and sing a long sign. Yeah. No one understands the lyrics. Exactly. Yeah. And I must say, you know, when I it's not like I always, by the way, if people listen, it's not like I'm always drinking the whole time. No, we play at your times during the week where I went out of a drink in the evening. But having a prolonged period, I tell you the big, I'll probably do this every year, so reflections on sobriety. Biggest thing I know is about it is just productivity. Just being able to get up in the morning, yeah, having a bit more of a spring in your step. I don't know it's that at the moment. And it's been nine days. Right. I do. I don't really, I don't really feel that. But do you want to know some of the cocktails that were run off for at the Vodafone 3? Yeah, go for it. There was that Marga Ruta. Okay. Ruta is in R-O-U-T-R. Yeah. Or Arga Ruta. So they weren't making a reference to the CEOs name then? Well, yeah. It wasn't Marga Ruta De La Valle or Valle. No, but I think there were, I thought there's any reviews that I didn't have a CEO called Marga Ruta. Well, Marga Ruta's a fairly common cocktail. It is, but well, okay. Yeah. It works on three, it works on three ways. So many lovely. Then the second one I didn't really get, the Aurora, as in Aurora Borealis. Maybe it's some brand of theirs that they've done a sheet job of explaining. Then there was five gin and tonic, five gin and tonic. Five gin and tonic. Yeah. Network Negroni, bit of a litteration, but it's not that. Were you on the Negroni's? I did have some Negroni's. The one that Keith particularly liked, because it's so obscure. It's not a trade journalist would know this. He's Mock and Mule. M-O-C-A. Mule. All right. Mock and, yeah, that's a multi-operator core network. That's it. Ginger, ale, yeah. It's a Moscow. And then the last one's diverge in Mothrito. Mothrito, which is probably what Keith was drinking as he's kind of off the booze permanently, isn't he? Is he? No. I think he had a Mock and Mule. Okay. Does he remember him drinking one of those? Yeah, whenever I was asking, so I mean, I do the same, whenever I see him not drinking, I've probably had about five by that stage. Yeah. And I was asking the same, oh, he's still off a booze, mate. Yeah. And he sort of slightly evades it, goes, well, I've won every now and then. I don't think he likes being kicked out. I'm sorry, pigeonoiling you, Keith. Yeah, I think he's, I think at Christmas, he was thinking, I'll have a couple of children have a couple of. Yeah. Those, I tell you, those, some of those sessions, like you were telling me when you heard your, your get-together, the Tuesday I couldn't make. And you've been out since lunchtime. Yeah. And you end up getting kicked out above about midnight. Yeah. And you think, fucking hell, if you go with the normal cadence of drinking a pint's about one and a half hour, isn't it? Yeah. And if you've been doing that cadence, you've drunk 24 pints. Yeah. I don't know how many I'd have. I'm not sure if that many, because I'd be, but it's got to be, it'd be hot. It'd be in the high teens. Yeah. So the weird thing is I felt okay the next day. That's the more worrying thing. Yeah. Well, if I just, I generally find, if I just stick to regular strength pints, I can, I can just, it never gets out of control. So only when you start throwing other stuff into the mix. Yeah. There was no other, there was no sort of old-fashioned. But then you just feel, but then you just feel very jaded and dehydrated the next day. And Ian, did you roast your phone this year? No. No. No. Before you're doing that. I didn't really do any Christmas cooking this year. And you were telling me that Magnus finally came over from Slovakia? Magnus brother and, yeah, his wife and their two kids came to four of them. So my mum had 15 people that she was cooking for, because we also have my brother-in-law with stepmom. And did you do the traditional Christmas scenario? Yeah. Yeah. I did that, but only did it for like five people. Well, I, when I asked her if we could all pile in all sort of eight of us, I was thinking she'd go, that's too many for me to cope with this year. And we were thinking we'll just do our own thing in London. But she was like, no, no problem. She couldn't put them all out. We had to have, we had to have people in a hotel down the road. That is good, that's good traditional catering talent there. Yeah, it was amazing. There's like more food than we ate. It wasn't like there was like, you know, everybody's going, well, I think once you've started going, you can sort of scale it. It's then it's just a matter of oven space and that sort of thing. She's got a lot of hot plates so she can do things and keep them warm and then sort of like the cauliflower cheese in or whatever and, you know, a real juggling act. Yeah. Okay, cool. How about you, Pierre, did you get out of much over Christmas? We did go after I trust a looting to a segment we're going to talk about later, you weren't in Venezuela. No, there's no flights there anyway. Really, is that just game over now for flights? Well, you have to connect through some other, yeah, no. Well, we're not going anyway, so. Right. Well, that's handy. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to pick your brains about that a bit later if that's all right. But you, sorry, did you say in the UK, I'll get a France or what? Yeah, we stay here for Christmas and went to France unboxing day for like a week. Yeah. Cool. Before we go any further, I'm delighted to announce that this podcast has a sponsor unperturbed by our unorthodox style. Cohere Technologies has decided to take the plunge. For any listeners that missed our previous pods with its CEO. Cohere is the innovator behind Universal Spectrum Multiplier software for 4G and 5G and Pulsone Technology for 5G and 6G coexistence, ISAC and NTN. Thanks a lot, Cohere, your support is much appreciated. All right. Well, that seems like enough opening bollocks. It's not that much to reflect on. I mean, you know, I alluded to it and I won't talk about it much because we'll talk about it more later, but it has been a weird start to the year with that Venezuela stuff. Yeah. And you know, one piece I might talk about in the context of our first segment that I wrote yesterday, where my headline was the start of 2026 as a dystopian feel to it. Yeah. So we'll get into that. But anyway, I'll stop with the opening bollocks and get into it. I think I know it's not something that like really has necessarily gone very big on, but we reserve the right to go off on on technological tangents and the first week of the years always a CES consumer electronics show in the US. Most of the products there aren't very interesting. I mean, the whole mobile phone handset segment, which used to be a big deal 10 plus years ago is just boring now because they're all the fucking same. In fact, we were talking before we started recording about Apple, and you know, that'd be one of the reasons why Apple's share price more or less is just bumping along. It's still got an enormous market cap, but the only real area for revenue growth for Apple is in sort of digital services. And that sort of thing where it does such a great job of using its captive iOS market to get a big piece of the action. Do they have a presence at CES Apple? No, they've never go to trade shows at all. It's very Apple-y of them. They're like, fuck you. We don't want to be any clubs. We're just club ourselves. Exactly. And I mean, I suppose you know, later, yeah, but fair play to them. I mean, that has been that sort of pseudo arrogance has been an Apple signature for a while. Well, and they're one of the companies where they can actually pull it off because they are incredibly successful and they have got great products and they're very popular. So I guess if anyone can be arrogant in that segment, it's Apple. So fair play to them on that. But I still still feel like dissing them for it. There's an appealing thing about it though, like not following the crowd and, you know, joining the associations if everybody else does just do any of your own thing. I've got like that sort of in the digitalistic sort of thing. And, you know, I think product launches at trade shows are just the thing in the past. Yeah. They will be doing a dry January with the Apple or November. But I've got to do it in case. But Kate, I use it for a for the still. I've got to do one of me holding a glass of water cheers. If I remember when I'm editing it to get what 20 minutes in or whatever we are now. Yeah. Okay. So yes, CES is. Yeah, I mean, it's traditionally being what it says, consumer electronics. But all sorts of other stuff goes on there. And what I find it most useful for is it. It doesn't dictate the tone of the year, but it definitely sets the initial direction of certainly the tech industry from a consumer point of view. Although this year it seemed to be not very consumery at all. Because by far the most defining theme that came out of it was what they were calling physical AI. So obviously AI dominated. That goes on that saying. Yeah. And I think how did I characterise it? More AI guff is how you characterise it, hopefully. More people claiming something's AI when it isn't. Well, we can talk about my first story of the year where I talked about AI slop as well. Yeah. I mean, they've had robotics obviously for a long time. You know, I mean, if you go to Elon Musk's Tesla factory, apparently there's hardly any people there. Yeah. And Erickson's automated factory in Texas that it's had in place for a few years now is run with a fairly small team because it's so highly robotised and all this. So what's the AI thing about these robots? Okay, well, there's a couple of things. So there was. The theme that came, I mean, the sort of the keynote that kind of dictated the tenor of the event was predictably by Jensen Huang from Nvidia. And he was going on about a thing called physical AI. Yeah. And I think, you know, I wrote in one of the pieces I wrote this week. Let me read myself back. Yeah. So yeah, I remarked on how last year, obviously, everyone was banging on about AI. And then I said, I'm reading myself back. I said, but a gen tick is so last year while generative is positively passé. The AI bubble needs a new buzz wordy qualifier. And if this is CES, anything to go by, that word is physical. Yeah. And then, you know, Jensen Huang went, the chat GPT moment for physical AI is here when machines begin to understand reason and act in the real world. So there's your, there's your sort of potted answer. If you want a slightly longer one from the Nvidia website that I quoted, it said physical AI, let's autonomous systems like cameras, robots, and self-driving cars, perceive, understand reason and perform or orchestrate complex actions in the physical world. So it's about letting these fuckers out in the wild. All things that AI itself can't do. I thought that sentence was full of, full of verbs that people claim AI does and it doesn't. Well, exactly. I mean, it's more, it's more bullshit to start the year off. Well, and that's why I said, AI, I said the AI bubble and these are new buzz wordy qualifier. But, you know, we shouldn't dismiss it entirely because even if it is a lot of it is hot air, that's still what people are talking about. It sounds like, there also sounds like an element of trying to rebrand something that's been around for a while anyway. I mean, self-driving cars, self-driving cars and robot surgery, which were two of the original 5G use cases if you remember. If they come along now, people would be calling them physical AI, wouldn't they? They'd fall into a physical AI category. Okay, but if we try and understand what they're trying to say by physical AI, I think they're talking, you know, a lot of it is, like, humanoid robots. Right. So, you know, things like robotic surgery wasn't an actual surgery, you know, MediBot going in there and doing the surgery. And there's a robot, I know there's a person controlling that by remote control. But it's self-driving cars, certainly something that you say take me here and it's supposed to go and stop at traffic light. No, certainly, and I think autonomous vehicles were coming up quite a lot at CES as well, but it was definitely these humanoid robots. Inevitably, Boston Dynamics was quite prominent and they've got one called Atlas. I think Atlas has been around for a while, but I think they launched a new version of it. And Hyundai, I think the Korean car maker. Hyundai. Hyundai, is it? Right. Just went, yeah, we're going to have them in our car factory. They're going to have humanoid robots in their car factory, just for the hell of it. Well, because they become human, aren't they? Well, they might be better than, for a start, I don't think they're better than humans. The one thing that this is a problem with humanoid robots. Why don't you put a human form factor in it? This is exactly the point. I think there's a good answer to that, but carry on. Well, robots in factories, they get used to make cars. There's a reason they don't look like humans, yeah? Yeah, there's that arm stuff. And there's a reason that robotics has always been a massive disappointment, which is that, I mean, this is the thing about AI, if you want to call it AI, whatever it is, software that kind of, you know, goes through the internet and regurgitate stuff, sophisticated search engine, which is basically what it is. It looks very sophisticated when it's not in physical form, when you're using it through your laptop and your phone, for instance, and there's all this concern about the threat to white collar jobs. What robots can't do are the multitasking things that a human being would do, like cleaning toilets even and then going off and cooking something, and they're actually moving credibly badly compared to people. You know, you look at, I mean, sports, a great example of this. Imagine trying to get a robot to do what Messi does, or Roger Federer or something. Yeah, it would, it just wouldn't work. I mean, maybe it wouldn't the future. I'm not saying we're not going to get there, but these robots, these Boston robotics things of dynamics, of dynamics, of come along a long way, but they're still pretty shit compared to the project. No, I agree. Where we are now. And that's where it's interesting. I completely, somewhat, they'd be useful in the factory. Right. Well, humanoid robot. High end I seem to think they are. Yeah, of course. So you'd have to ask Mr. High end I, I don't know if we, if I've got a quote from him saying why it's a big deal in the piece. Actually, it's not, this is a piece Andrew wrote at the start of the week, but it's got a photo of the high end I staring adorningly at this Boston dynamics. Right. Atlas thing. What is it? Yeah. So from Andrew's piece onto the robots themselves, Boston Dynamics showed off the product version of new Atlas. It learns task quickly we're told and adapts the dynamic environments, lift heavy loads and works autonomously with quite minimal supervision. Take that with a pinch of salt, I think. Yeah. I think, I think what's interesting is, is, yeah, just extrapolating the direction of travel when, you know, these things aren't coincidence. When you get one of the biggest tech shows of the year being dominated by one paradigm, one theme, that's not coincidence. People have coordinated on this. They've chat about it. You know, Jensen Huang has, and obviously, Jensen Huang's banged on about it because there'll be loads of video silicon and software that is especially designed for physical AI. You AI ran. Yeah. What do you go? It's a chat GPT moment. But yes, it could be the new, I certainly mean in terms of Nvidia and you AI ran. I mean, this is all in the context of a lot of, a lot of AI hype that's happened in the last few months and a lot of concerns about that they're being a bit of a bubble feeling about this now. Totally. And, and, you know, their job, his job is just to make that bubble get even bigger, basically. So this whole physical AI, it's, you know, I'm not convinced that humanoid robots are about to sort of enter the factory on mass and be found on streets, you know. Well, I'll tell you an interesting way. The same way that chat GPT, for instance, has become quite widely adopted in a very, very short amount of time. I guarantee that by the end of this year, people will not be using physical AI in the same way that they're using chat GPT. You look at one year of chat GPT takes you from November 2022 to November 2023. And by that stage, it had quite a lot of adoption and take up. Yeah. Already there were big concerns about what it might mean for our jobs, for instance. I'll take you anything at the end of this year. All this stuff is just turned out to be complete bullshit. All this humanoid robots physical AI. So I'll meet you somewhere in the middle. I think, I think you're right about the timeline. But, and I've got more evidence to support this assertion. I think this is the direction of travel. And I think they are going to become more ubiquitous. But I think you're completely right to be skeptical, to be skeptical. Sorry. Talking about spectacle. What's the new one? Anyone's watching. Because what is on your mind? I've got some new glasses on. Which are, which are like thicker frames than my usual ones. I think they make me look a bit, a bit more like a 60s icon. Or either that or Alan Cole. And now where it needs, you better bloody behave yourself. So, yes, anyone watching. Or maybe if I, if I choose myself for the still, you can see it. And if anyone wants to give them my feedback on that, what do we think, Pierre and Ian on these glasses are some other ones? Yeah, they do. I noticed them immediately. They did a great Gallic shrug there. No, they don't. They don't cast too much of a reflection. Right. But they, they're old ones. They're not new ones. They're ones that you had lying around. No, no, when I got my new glasses that I wear most of the time, they were doing a second pair for free or something like that. So I went, fuck it. I'll get a different frame. Yeah. Classic design. Yeah. There's nothing particularly, I'm not exactly Elton John. No. No. So anyway. Yeah. But yes. So you're like more fused glasses. Yeah. Well, I actually did a, I did a, in fact, we can go off on this tangent quickly because it's a story from this week. I did a more fierce screenshot for a story that I channelized from Ian, which was Amdock's buying a company called Matrix with two X's. And we've had Jennifer from Matrix on the pod two or three years ago. And, and yes. And actually both Ian and I perhaps somewhat predictably played around with the Redpill Bluepill concept. He went Redpill. I went Bluepill on the, and my rationale was like if people remember from the film Matrix, Redpill's what you take to exit the Matrix. Bluepill's what he's take to stay in it. Yeah. And the reason I went for Bluepill is I was like, by allowing themselves to be acquired by Amdock's there, they're not, they're sort of retreating from the harsh realities of the open market and into the, into the comforting embrace of Amdock's. But, and then I, yeah, I just found that that photo of Morpheus Lawrence Fishburn where you can see in the reflection of these glasses in holding out the hand. That's great shot. Yeah. Yeah. Redpill on the Bluepill. Shame about the sequels. But yeah, nice one on that Ian. That's a scoop to start the year. And, yeah, and I just shamelessly channelized it. I was hoping, you know, I went and reached out when I was writing it up to, to the sources. See, I get something else hoping I'd get a statement and then at least be able to have that scoop you to the, to the formal statement. But they've been very slow on coming out of that. I don't know what they're waiting for. I mean, the cats out the bag. I know. No one's told you you're talking shit every night. So it's obviously legit. Yeah. Yeah. I think they, I mean, they've sort of said to themselves, they're going to get a statement together on it. But they just haven't put one together. So, no, I've heard that kind of acknowledged it, but it's like, they can't be bothered. It's like, yeah, that's a sulking because you stole their thunder. Yeah. Anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah. So you're right to be skeptical about timelines. We're not going to suddenly be over on with them. But I will point to the story I wrote this morning, which was taken from an omdeer report and quite a few other people covered it, Bloomberg covered it and all that sort of thing. Yeah. And my headline for that was, "Humanoid robot production goes exponential led by China." Right. Because there's only one of them before, and now there's three. Well, yeah, you're right. We're at an early stage. So the growth rates, the growth rates between 2024 and 2025 of, of humanoid, what do they call them? General purpose embodied-- Replicons are things the word you're looking for. General purpose embodied intelligent robots is what they call them. So physical AI is the AI buzzword, but embodied intelligent robots. And by embodied, I guess, they mean humanoid. To me, those are more like engineering marvel, like articulations and face movements and more than-- I don't know, sorry. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I will, yeah, I'll get back to you on that as well. But just looking at the numbers, they charted that they were about 2300 humanoid robots shipped last in 2024. Right. And over 13,000 in 2025, which is more than six times multiple. And then they reckon that's going to keep sort of more or less doubling. And they reckon by-- You have to populate wind over. You just have a complete robot village with all these guys hanging out at the local bar. So their forecast is that by 2035, the annual production rate of humanoid robots will be 2.6 million. Now that's getting-- that's starting to get to some serious numbers. Yeah. And it's a good report. Rita, I actually linked to their report as well because I thought fair enough. And the other interesting thing about their report is nearly all of those like 13,000 that were shipped last year. I'd say about four fits of them were made by Chinese companies. Right. So that's really interesting. The biggest one is one called Agibot. Agibot, right? What does that do? I presume it's most of the Agile. Agibot. It goes to football matches and swears at the ref. And they've only been going since 2023. I think I read on Wikipedia that they were founded by X, Y, Y people. Right. And they've gone from startup to biggest in the world in two years. Presumably, they've had a bit of help from the Chinese state, I would imagine. But it's interesting, you know, we see-- and again, we'll come back to it. We see how American rhetoric regarding its own place in the world has become more belligerent and more competitive and more full-on. Yeah. You know, all someone needs to go, is shared its article or better Omdeer's report with Trump. And if I can go mental and go, right, when you, when you drill in robots and-- How long do these robots last by the way before they run out of battery power? Five minutes. I have no idea. I bet it's about five minutes. But I did read about-- Oh, clear. Oh, but there was one. I think in Andrew's piece, when he's talking about robots, where they go off and recharge themselves. Do they? Sticker. They plug themselves back in the matrix, do they? Yeah. They just go and sit on a port. They put when they run out of juice. They poop their battery and then put a new one in. And just sit there going, oh, yeah, lovely juice. So you sober, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. The ones in January are always challenging, because there's no drinking. Yeah, before you think-- Before you think that our banter is just purely a product of an ebriation. But, you know, I can just see it in, you know, while completely conceding your skeptical attitude. When you look at the rate of progress, now they're talking about specifically focusing on AI for these robots. And I completely agree with you that a large power that is just they've got to keep the hype train running. Yeah. And, you know, as I wrote in my piece, you know, okay, generative the year before, a genetic last year, physical this year, next year, fuck knows. Well, it's great for Jensen because of these robots need GPUs in them. Then I mean, that's-- Yeah, well, that's another 30 minutes. Well, it's also the training. So in my piece that I wrote, was it yesterday? Yeah, yesterday where I said the start of 2026 as a dystopian field to it. I made a sort of brief reference to current affairs, but then got onto the robot stuff. Yeah. And I'm talking about the physical AI and all that sort of thing. And then armors come out of the thing, you know, arms gone all in on physical AI. So this is how coordinated all this shit is, A and D. All the chip ones are into it. Well, I have no one talking about this in Telecom. Why is no one saying physical AI is like a new-- I mean, these are effectively devices, aren't they? That presumably need to be connected to 5G and 6G. Yeah, yeah, no totally. Totally. Is this not a growth opportunity for operators? Your average robot might be wanting to listen to Spotify or something. No, okay. Well, in fact, there's a paragraph from that story that I'll read. I'll say, I said, expect to see Telecom's players soon jump on the bandwagon, probably conflating 6G with physical AI, which will cover more in our next segment, conflating 6G with physical AI in some vaguely defined way. Presumably, we think it's desirable for these genius robots to be connected in some way, if only to give us the opportunity to plead with them if they start getting funny ideas. Well, they'd have to be connected. I suppose if they're using AI. Yeah, of course they'd be connected. They'd have to be connected to the internet, and they're going to be uploading and downloading information from it. Any autonomous vehicles got to be connected. So if you're-- I mean, obviously, if you've got one in the house and he's doing the cooking for you, then that's fine because you can rely on Wi-Fi and broadband, but if your robot's on his way back on the bus after a session of robot soccer and the local park. With his bowler hat and his copy of the time's tucked under his arm. He's an L5G and maybe even a 5G standalone. Maybe even-- well, more on that in a bit. And I said, this is obviously a great opportunity for the Telecom's industry, which will be frantically brainstorming how to avoid missing yet another technological boat. So I think they will, but your question is well asked, why haven't they been going on about it already? But I wouldn't be surprised to hear them go on about it. Maybe at MWC. Have they come out with, like, use cases, like serious use cases of how these things-- Mainly industrial. That was the interesting thing about this. It's called consumer electronics show, but nearly all these robot use cases are industrial. I mean, Andrew wrote a great piece, which is our feature piece in the newsletter today, just doing a roundup, which includes quirkies, where you always get these wacky things normally coming out of China that will do whatever. Agricultural stuff there for a while as well. Yeah, agricultural stuff, but these humanoid robots. So you asked a question about, why do they need to be humanoid? I think the answer is, is that the environment is built for humans. So yes, there might be specialists like production lines where you only need robot arms to put cars together. But if they're going to exist in the real world, the real world is built for humans. So it stands to reason that the robots would need to be humanoid to interact with them. Yeah, I see what you're saying, but in a factory environment, the reason they've not been-- the reason robots have not been made to be humanoid in the past is because it's not the most efficient way to sort of assemble a car or something. Yeah, I get it from production line, but for more open environments. But even like moving things from one-- I mean, we saw some of this when we were in Olu at the Nokia. Yeah, we had that little R2D2. There's a little R2D2 thing, like it didn't need to be made as a humanoid robot walking backwards and forwards with its arms out carrying stuff. It was in the ideal form. It wasn't a lot cheaper to produce presumably that way than trying to do some incredibly expensive thing that looks like it's from Blade Runner, just for the hell of it so that it can carry some stuff around a factory. I don't think, yeah, I don't think the form factor needs to be humanoid in order to go upstairs, picking items. No, I don't think so. You think like, oh, you need to have feet legs and knees to go upstairs, but probably not. You could probably have a wheelchair. It really needs to be humanoid if it's doing like multi-purpose stuff and that's the thing that AI itself's not very good at doing. But I think that's where-- I think that's what they're-- that's where they think it's headed. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm totally skeptical about that. I mean, I'm even more skeptical about this idea that we're going to be close to AGI, and I think everybody is by the way. I think what's happened in the last year or so, too, with generative AI has shown that they basically hit a roadblock, yeah, they basically hit a cul-de-sac. I don't think they're not going to get to AGI. With the current model, they can't just throw more and more GPUs at it and suddenly to die with AGI. They're no closer to AGI now than they were when this whole thing started off. All they're closer to doing is having more sophisticated, large language models, which do the same thing, but maybe cutting out some of the hallucinations and maybe it's tweaked. Yeah, I think when you're talking about AGI. When you refer to them as sort of search engines on steroids or whatever you said, I think you're slightly discounting the generative side. That is a search, generative side is a search engine. No, but it's not coming up with anything new. It's going over everything that you've ever written, as well as everybody else, and putting it together into something that all it's doing is feeding off everything. Yeah, I'm not saying it's totally creating anything novel, but the generative way in which you can say, you know, can you create this for me? You could never really do that with a search engine before. So it does feel a bit more? Well, a search engine is basic AI. You type in something to your, you know, back in when Google first, well, yeah, he was obviously there on the search engine. But that was more a directory, I think, yeah, who? Right. So let's say Google, then you type in a word and it brings up a series of links to do with that. Yeah. And if he's moving it on by essentially just allowing you to put more and more words together and do it in a way that a human would speak. Okay. Well, a friend. He's just a very clever search engine. Okay. Well, I will slightly, potentially beg to differ, because I think the generative side, I was talking to a friend, you can guess, but I won't name because this is just a chat who's a novelist. And he says he sometimes finds it useful for just brainstorming sort of plot development. Like, you know, come up with somebody. We wouldn't necessarily follow any of the suggestions, but we're like, you know, this has happened. Some geysers gone and done this. What are likely outcomes? And then it will generate to use the term a bunch of different ones. So I guess, let's not get bogged down, but I know who he is. And I'm not going to mention him, but I think that's a worrying thing to have like novelists who are, and I know that who you mean, and it's very, very creative guy and a good writer. I think it's worrying when people like that are talking about using generative AI in that regard. But I think that's a real slippery slope that I think. I get your point about slippery slope, but if for someone who is very creative and has been a novelist, it's before any of the ships around, to think of it as a, a useful tool. I think we'll come in. Don't worry yourself. Okay. Yeah. Or they'll be interesting. I mean, I hardly use AI at all. It's not a use. People might think of it as a useful tool at first, but it will very quickly not become a useful tool in the, in the same way that we're overly reliant on smart phones, and we're overly reliant on search engines, and we're overly reliant on all of the, you take these things away from me today. And even, and I grew up in the 90s when you used to have to go out and sell, meet you somewhere. And if you're not there at that time, and I'll find my way there. And it's like, to go back into that world now, I'd find terrifying, you know, and I'm a person who grew up with it like that. Yeah. Why do we have lots of things? You know, not, not, not only like getting somewhere without Google Maps fills me with terror. Not to mention the studies that are showing what it's actually doing to put parts of a person's brain in terms of, yeah, and cognitive, yeah. Traffy, basically, you know, you don't, you don't think about things. You don't exercise your mind to come up with solutions because you're leaning on this tool too much. And it has a negative effect on intellectual development. And I just, very scary that people are using it. I just try to, I try to balance my intrinsic luditism with one a sense of, well, it's coming. I mean, there's no putting this fucking genie back in the bottle. And to, you know, where, where could it be? I don't agree with that. No, I don't agree with this. There's no putting it back in the bottle. I think it's, I think it's really good to hear in the last few months that people are talking about this kind of stuff more that you see, that you see studies about what it does to somebody's brain, that you hear like series like Pluribus that came out on an Apple TV, which is very much about generative, I don't have Apple TV. It wasn't necessarily meant to be an allegory of generative AI, but it certainly felt that way to me. And then I think when he's been asked about if he's sort of said, yeah, I can see why people think that. And it was obviously going on in my mind when I was working on the later episodes and this sort of stuff. So I think there's all sorts of questions being asked about it now. There's a lot of questions about social media. Yeah, I know they have, but the more the more people ask about this stuff and the more people talk about things like, let's get away from our smartphones and let's not be, I mean, this whole idea of digital detox, you know, which never used to be a thing when the iPhone first came along. I think the more resistance you get to this stuff, maybe we will start to see some pushback and people actually thinking it's not a healthy. Once it gets to the stage where people are saying, look, it's damaging to brain development. It's not good for educational purposes. Then maybe we will start to see people putting in some limitations on it. And I don't think you can say that it's inevitable that we're going to go down this road. No, I think the AI, the next asbestos. The only thing I think is that is the ubiquity of AI. You don't have to use it. And I certainly don't think, I mean, to your point, to back up your point, the first story I wrote this year, it was like, you know, Monday back, that was fucking news. So I just decided to write up much more with think piece. And my headline was authenticity is the only antidote to AI slop. Yeah. And AI slop was the Merion Webster word of the year for last year. Yep. And all that sort of thing. And let me those prove the point, though, like you're talking about authenticity and people using words like slop shows that there's a lot of people now who are getting really concerned about this stuff. And I think this whole, you know, generative AI came along, seemed like a really interesting thing, more and more people are using it now. We've gone over this curve where I think more and more people are actually worried about using it. Agreed. And well, and they're skeptical. So I was going to mention a person who I lent on in part for this piece as a guy called, I think it's Adam Mosseri, who's the head of Instagram. Yeah. So one of the most senior people at Meta, an e-ro at a piece talking about this sort of thing. And a little quote, a couple of quotes from whom he goes, over time, we're going to move from assuming that what we see is real bad default. This is in the context of AI slop. Yeah. Over time, which by the way is just defined as like really easy to produce, you know, any old crap like we're getting it with this Venezuela thing. I'm seeing all this AI slop of pictures of Trump merged with pictures of Maduro with Trump wearing this way a little bit of uniforms. Yeah, a lot of it is like throw away. It's almost like political cartoons, but done just by doing a quick prompt to some AI to further trigger you in. And anyway, he goes over time, we're going to move from assuming that what we see is real bad default to starting with skepticism when we see media and paying much more attention to who is sharing something and why they might be sharing it. In a world of infinite abundance and infinite doubt, the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity will stand out. And then my concluding paragraph, you know, a lot of this is self-serving obviously for this podcast and all that sort of thing because there's, you know, there's a there's a program that Google's got where you can order generate podcasts, for example. Yeah. And I said, often forgotten in the digital era is that people still want mainly to interact with other people. The popularity of blogs, podcasts, YouTubers, TikTokers, etc. is surely down to the ability to easily access the thoughts, creativity and personality of individuals, not machines. Only creators who respect their audience by putting the effort in rather than taking AI shortcuts will succeed. And that in term will hopefully steer the evolution of AI in the right direction. Yeah. So that sounds in keeping with what you were just mulling. Yeah, I just don't go along with the idea that all of this is inevitable and we have to accept it happening and that's the way well, what I mean by inevitable is that it's there, but we don't we can accept it on our own terms, which is what I was kind of summarizing in that case. You can wear a mechanical watch, but there's still casual out there. Yeah, I mean, I'm talking about obviously if people get to the point where they think it's actually a bad thing to be using AI, a lot of these things that are fueling, you know, this bubble at the moment are going to fall away, aren't they? And I don't think that's an inevitability that we go over. And the last 20 years of technological development has been like something unprecedented, like the pace of change. Yeah, totally. And and and and it's not. Exactly. It's not inconceivable that in another 20 years time people look back and go, oh, what the hell was going on then? You know, it's not like electricity, which has been there for so long now and is just something that we take for granted and we can't exist without. We don't have to go back to when Scott and I were like still at university and none of this stuff was around. And I don't feel my life was in the 40s for it then. And and I can easily see a future where some subsequent generations decided that this generation was absolutely idiotic with some of the stuff it was accepting and embracing. But I think in those old technological development isn't good. That's why we have restrictions on on nuclear energy, for instance. That's why we have restrictions on big farmer. That's why we have restrictions on genetic engineering, you know, just because it's something comes out and then it gets bad. Just because it seems very clever. Yeah. And and something that we haven't done before doesn't mean it's necessarily a positive thing. You don't go, you don't go, you don't call someone a luddite because they complain about genetic engineering, do you? No. So yeah, that's the that's the issue I have. I mean, it's AI stuff. But what I think is inevitable is just that the technology gene is out of the bottle, how it manifests itself in the real world and how we use it. I'm totally with you. You know, I think maybe maybe the concluding paragraph, I think I read this before we start recording of my dystopian piece, cover some of it as well. I say the direction of travel is clear. However, we'll see how effective this latest hype initiative is over the course of this year. But too much money has already been poured into the air project for there to be any hesitation by that. I mean, by its cheerleaders. Yeah. Invoking the terminator. Dum dum dum. Films when mulling the downside of AI is trite. But given the increasingly overbearing nature of geopolitics, we'd be naive not to be concerned about how physical AI will be used in the future. That's the really dystopian thing. If we are, or if some interested parties are stampeding headlong towards the sentient humanoids, wrote what sentience is too strong a word. These are these seemingly sentient and semi-autonomous humanoid robots. Terminator feels more fucking relevant than ever when you got people going around kidnapping heads of states and coming up with random shit. Yeah. Which is another reason to want to have it around. Yeah. We're not disagreeing with each other. You're just talking about your feelings about it and I'm just talking about the broader direction. I mean, the whole idea of AGI, which I can understand from an entrepreneur's and big brain to tech geniuses perspective is like this is a challenge you have to sort out in the same way that Oppenheimer was kind of tasked to come up with an atom bomb. But for the wider world, I don't see how AGI is a positive thing at all for humanity. I don't see why anybody in their right mind would think that getting to a point where there's AGI can conceivably be a good thing for anybody. But Sam Odin says. Someone has to explain that to me, but I don't see why there's, and this is why people collectively can sometimes be quite stupid, because you're just a cute old disease by next week. Yeah. Well, so can I, that is actually bought as well. There was a good comment on just talking about sort of push back to generative AGI and stuff. There was a good comment I noticed by Marcus Weldon on LinkedIn. Marcus Weldon used to be smart guy. People who listen to podcast probably know who he is, but he used to be Alcatelus and Bella Bell Labs and everything. And then I think when the merger with Nokia happened, he was sort of CTO for a while or something. I don't know what he's doing. But he put this post up about his own concerns about stuff that he reads on LinkedIn and some other websites and how much of it seems to be kind of AI slop. And he puts some sort of guidelines up about words he looks out for and formats that articles taken. And basically, he said, I'm avoiding as much of this as possible from now on. Well, when people like that, he's a big-brained guy. And the sort of person that you might think would be very much behind AI is a kind of, this is an example of progress and how useful it could be. When he's saying things like that, I actually tell you that is a really good sign. People like him are raising questions about the way these technologies are being used. Totally. But then if geopolitical competition and aggression has a way, I don't know if you know it is this week, after all the Venezuelan stuff, Trump came out and when we think, I think the Pentagon should have a budget of $1.4 trillion. And so, you know, all this stuff, you know, this kidnapping, Maduro, this menacing various other countries, to me, it's all just very escalatory. And then Trump, I mean, it was only recently, it was only Trump that crossed the trillion threshold. I think as little as 10 years ago, the Pentagon budget was about half a trillion. Right. Now he wants it to be three times that. And so, this is a thing, you can talk about, well, he's got Greenland and Columbia to think about, isn't he? Yeah, and Cuba and Iran, and you fucking name it. He seems to think it's a piece of piss now that that thing with Maduro went so well. Oh, well, I've no doubt that's like, you know, Burnish's ego so much that he's feeling all like, you look at me, you know, it's like, why have I been wasting my time? I'm ready for the next phase. Why have I been wasting my time chatting to people when I can just send the lads? Yeah, exactly. And anyway, so, you know, it's good that there are people like Marcus Weldon and there's some AI visionaries. I think was it that chap Hinton who's one of the founders of it, all these people coming out with this stuff and people like Adam Misari from Instagram. It kind of admitting, by the way, in that same PC wrote, the old-school Instagram, which is the sharing of optimized photos of yourself to make out that you've got a perfect life is just dead. Yeah. But I think the self-interested thing is he thinks even Instagram's getting more authentic. Yeah. So you got all them, but then you got the people who really make a difference kind of heading in a more bellicose. Yeah, you have. But I mean, the Instagram thing's interesting that you mentioned that because that is a classic example of a technology, I think, that's becoming less used and is falling by the wayside. I think I can see a, I can see. What are you saying? Social media. Oh, just social media generally. I think it's had its day. It's definitely had its heyday, but I can see. So, is it going to fall into something else? Well, they do, but they do a little bit, but I don't think it's, I think most people now think social media is, is most, most people with a brain think social media is shit. It's all much more, and Misari said this. It's all much more DMs. Yeah. It's much more closed little communities. Like what's that groups? Yeah. What's that groups and DMs on Instagram or discord servers? Or, doesn't that count? I mean, that the same, but similar. They're still contained communities. That Elon Musk horror show that that's around at the moment. I would be dodgy images. He's, he's a thing ex wherever it's going now. I don't know. I mean, that's, that's over, I think, ex. It really is. I just don't see that being something to take seriously. Well, I mean, he was used, he was in their right mind, he's got anything to do with X or things. It's in any way useful whatsoever. All it is is just this splurge or. Oh, you mean X itself? Yeah. I'm not a fan of X itself. It's just a, it's just a splurge kind of dreamist comp. Yeah, quit right there. Because everything else must does is X. It gets extra confusing, huh? Yeah. Excuse the pun. And, and it's now in trouble for all this sort of grok, like as you were saying, these, these weird images that have been generated of, of women. I mean, it's just an appalling thing now. And I think most other social media sites, like Facebook, it's just got a reputation of being something that old people used to send holiday photos, Instagram sort of, I mean, it had been happening even before that. Well, some of the websites that we can't even remember, things like friends reunited, and then what was the one that followed that that was kind of big before Facebook came along. They're quite short-lived some of these. Oh, yeah. The one that Ruford met up. The one that Ruford then had to write my space. My space. But I think these, I think the whole thing is sort of coming towards a bit of a, a bit of a kind of a bit of an end, I think. I mean, it might morph into something else, but it might be something DMs. And that seems to be. That seems to be. The small communities has value. But, you know, go full circle back to our, you know, our self-interest. I do, I genuinely believe, I wrote that piece, not just out of wishful thinking. I do believe, you know, back to your point about pushing back on the inevitability of it. I'll stress again. I don't think it's inevitable that we fully embrace it and that we surrender to it. And I think one of the biggest things that we'll stand in the way of that is the need for human beings to have authenticity. Yeah. To interact with other human beings. To face to face. Yeah, humanoid robot. I mean, I'm sure sometimes when people listen to this podcast, they learn something they didn't know before, but I bet some of what a lot of people get from it is just hearing other human beings interact in a human way. So there's that. I just want to say one last little dystopian term before, if it's all right, we change the subject. Yeah. In my dystopian piece, I found a story that had been published by a site ad and counter call before called Rest of World. And the headline is, in Chinese data factories, workers teach humanoid robots boring tasks. So I'll show you the photo. And it's just pure, I don't know. So it's actually that leading robot companies. I'm showing in a photo of a young Chinese man sitting next to an adji bot humanoid robot. And he's got a couple of little that say I generated. I'm guessing. No, this is real. That's a photo. Right. At least it claims to be I can't prove it's not. I think it's a photo. So that adji bot robot says training the person. No, the other way around. Oh, I see. So that's what they've got. And if you ever look in the picture, there's there's banks and banks of them. Right. So they basically have these factories where they get humans with controllers. Yeah. And they're kind of paired in some creepy way with this fucking humanoid robot. And they're going through doing human motions and the robot's learning from so it's learning effectively learning how to be a human from this robot. And the thing that I found most dystopian about it is you could easily be viewed as the humans training their replacements. Yeah. So that's one of the concerns about AI's introduction anyway, isn't it? That a lot of this. And this is a big thing in telco in the software side that the systems that are being introduced with things like intent-based networks. Yeah. The people who are kind of bringing this in and training other people to use it are effectively sort of training a system that's going to replace them. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. So that's that. But I think it's a good segment to do because I do if this CS is aimed to go by, we're going to be hearing about these physical AI and humanoid robots a lot more. And it gives us plenty of, I mean, it's great podcast material to get into, isn't it? Yeah. So there we are. I bet the next time we talk about it is this time next year. Okay. All right. I'll take that bet. I'll bet you a tenor. It comes up. How many times has it got to come up? I bet in the context of telecom in terms of telecom. Well, okay. Telecom's one set that you would expect to have something to say about this given everything we just covered about connected to. What would determine the bet? What was, have we just got to have one major stakeholder in telecoms talk about physical AI or something like that for me to win the bet? I mean, if it's been made such a big deal of it, see, yes, you'd expect some telco to say something about physical AI, MWC and robotics. You might expect, but I bet they don't. All right. I'll tell you what. So let's not wait till the end of the year. Yeah. Let's, when we do a podcast around or after MWC, let's try and remember to reflect on whether robotics came up at all. Yeah. I'm betting it. No, no, physical AI. Okay. Well, that's part of it, isn't it? Yeah. But I mean, I'm not counting Erickson talking about his automated robot factory. No, it's not about humanoid robots. Yeah. Yeah. Being used by telecoms. No, totally. I get that. Or being talked about by telecoms. Either it's a telco saying we're going to make some money out of humanoid robots or it's some other link that they've drawn with it. I just don't see. I wouldn't be surprised to hear them go, you know, to hear people like interdigital say, yeah, 6G's going to be all about physical AI and all that sort of thing. Well, I think it's too late for that. I'm afraid. Right. What? You think 6G? Well, let's move on, actually. This is a good segue. I mean, here's the problem with telecom is that you can't go, oh, by the way, 6G's going to be about physical AI. They've had a bunch of standards meetings. They're basically agreed what 6G's going to be. Yeah. It's not like we're at a point where we can suddenly go, well, let's bring in, let's bring physical AI into this in a big way. Well, that's part of the problems with telecoms, isn't it? Yeah. Super tanker. I'm sure they'll try and say, oh, physical AI could be a use case for it. Let me take this opportunity to once more thank the sponsors of this podcast co-hear technologies, which is the innovator behind the universal spectrum multiplier software for 4G and 5G and pulsone technology for 5G and 6G coexistence, ISAC and NTN. Nice one. So I'll use that as a segue to one of your stories. Actually, you just published today. Where you said, no one in the real world cares about 5G standalone, which I inclined to agree with, certainly if we're to ask any normies about a 5G standalone. Well, would you, if you went actually to the pub with your mates, have you used 5G standalone yet? Do you know what you even meant by it? They probably think it's what you use when you got no mates. Yeah, I use it to just stare at YouTube when my mates don't turn up to the pub. Because there's quite a lot of noise that's been made about standalone last year, like about progress on it. And there's this argument that it's gone on. We're supposed to be in the standalone era now. We're supposed to be in the standalone era. And there's this argument, I think, that has been made in the industry for a while, that one of the things that sort of hampered 5G and one of the big problems for it was this decision that got taken into the 2018, 2019 to have two versions of 5G and to give it a quick start and allow people to hit the ground running with it. And hit the 10-year cadence. And by the way, there's a lot of kind of 4G networks that are on the verge of falling over because there's no spectrum, there's no capacity left and we need to introduce something new. To sort of allow Telkis to introduce something, they came to this decision to allow two versions of the 5G standard basically. One, which we're much more familiar with outside China called non-stand alone, which basically means you've got a new radio, but you've kept the old core network that you had. And how new was the radio? Well, the radio is completely new. So a new radio was a new step, was a new step? Yeah, alright, you're talking about it being based on the same underlying tech as. Yeah, and I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, I'm just legitimately asking the question. Yeah, well, that is still a new technology, though. I mean, I'm not going into the whole. How much did it have to do with 4G? Yeah, of course, it's based on the same underlying OFDM stuff as 4G, but the new radio wasn't new thing. And it brought new spectrum into play, which they hadn't used before. It had to be compatible with that. And you had things like massive MIMO being introduced, which hadn't been a thing really with 4G at all. So it brought all those things along, but you kept your old to the 4G. I think the biggest thing that 5G seemed to do as a technology. And again, I stress I'm saying this for you to correct me because you know more about this stuff than I do. Is it just enabled the use of a lot more spectrum real estate? Yeah, probably, yeah. Right. Yeah, certainly on the radio side. That's why we're always going on about 6GHz. Yeah, well, certainly when it comes to nonstand alone, it was, it allowed, it brought new spectrum into play, and allowed operators to put services in that spectrum and therefore sort of relieve capacity on 4G networks. And if you talk to people like like my friend Amit, Nagpal, Ethe Consulting, they kind of, they see data on this all the time. And he's he's very sort of insistent that you kind of did need to bring this into play because in urban areas, back into the 2017-2018-29 time frame, you could clearly see that some of these some of these networks were getting incredibly busy, and that was causing service problems. And if we hadn't launched sort of a new standard, it would have been even worse. So yeah, so your point is accurate, I think, in terms of that's how it's been useful. But from a consumer argument, it's not been very exciting because it's not, and we've always said this, it's not exactly brought anything very new along that you can do on 4G. But when you get 5G, you get faster mobile broadband. You get faster mobile broadband, but it's not like, I mean, a good 4G network. It's still perfectly adequate. Well, it might be better than a congested 5G network. And it's not like you're not doing anything other than watching YouTube on your phone is the most advanced service you're going to use. Yeah, all some gaming things, some AR gaming service that you might use walking down the road. There's that weird one. Wasn't there a few years ago that everyone went crazy about? Oh, we sort of swathing. Okay, let's go. That's it. Yeah. But turn that to just be a waste of time. Yeah, but I think the one of the arguments the industry has made is that, oh, 5G's been such a disappointment. And it hasn't really done as much as it could have done for Telco. It's partly because of this standard split that happened, which meant that we kept using the old 4G core for a long time. And what you really need it was a new 5G core. This is the standalone version of 5G, which is not just the 5G new radio. It's an overhaul of the core network as well. And with that, you get these whizzy new features that you don't that you didn't have with 5G. And that's the really exciting thing about 5G. That's a real 5G. I think some people have called it real or true 5G. Is 5G advanced another manifestation of that? Well, 5G advanced is you have to have standalone inputs to have to get to 5G advanced. But is it something over and above just? Yeah, it is. Again, I'd have relevant some of these things are from a consumer perspective. Oh, yeah, yeah, don't know. But the problem with this argument for me falling down that 5G standalone is such a much much better thing than 5G non-stand alone from a service perspective. Now, ignore the arguments about efficiency and phasing out old core network technology. It's just handy for the industry, but it's handy for the industry. It saves them money and it's much better to have things that way. And you can close things down and run things at lower cost. And I get a buy into all of that. But from a kind of user perspective, does anybody really care about 5G standalone? Is anybody sitting there waiting for 5G standalone to come along as opposed to and to get off these boring old non-stand alone networks? No. And by the way, compliments on the headline because I hate that journalistic thing. You've put no one in the real-world cares. Other journalists would have gone, does anyone care question mark? And I fucking hate that. Just make a statement. Exactly. You can turn out to be wrong, but what you got to lose completely. So what I thought I'd do a little, if I was going to be much more forensic about the piece I wrote and I did think about doing this, I thought of going through all the sort of financial data that's come out from operators that have got standalone networks and compare that with the ones that are still on non-stand alone networks and sort of see how they're doing. Yeah, because if it's such a great thing that standalone compared to non-stand alone, you'd expect the go operators with standalone networks to be much, much better off, wouldn't you? Yeah, but I didn't do that because that would have taken me like several weeks, but I did let you start banging on about Toblerone, but I did look at BT, right? So here's a really interesting thing. You were at the same press conference in late 2024, if you remember, high up in Bishop's Gate or something with Howard Watson and Mark Alera who's gone now. In fact, those of them are gone now almost because Howard's going to be leaving fairly soon. And they launched, yeah, it wasn't their HQ, actually, so wherever that is, old gate or something, isn't it? That's right. The new office, the swapping office they've got. And they had their big press conference about their launch of 5G standalone. That's right, yeah. And I'll find that into what RC angle. It's very much positioned as an opportunity to make more money out of 5G. This is a monetization opportunity. There are only two phones at the time that you could use. There's this TCL-something and a Samsung device that introduced both with very, very expensive tariffs attached to them. I think the TCL was costing about 45 quid a month. And the Samsung thing was getting on for £70 or something. So I think this is the one. My headline was BT and BT finally tried to ring some extra output out of 5G. There you are, exactly. You just backed up everything I've said. So this is very much presented as a kind of premium service, yeah? Yeah. This is only just over one year ago. What's happened since then? That turns out I'm a standalone customer. But I had no idea I was a standalone customer. I didn't even know. What am I paying a month, 27 pounds, I pay a month at the moment on my sim only all around a plan. And the reason I knew I'm a standalone customer is because I went and looked at my EEP and had a look at the add-ons that you get. And there's one called 5G+ and you click on that. And it says 5G standalone at the top. So all you need, the device compatibility issue now by the way has been addressed. There's loads of devices. Mine's of 14. So it's not a new iPhone. Pierre, when was the iPhone 14 introduced? I wanted to say 2022. Right, so I didn't even need to get and buy a new phone for this. All I needed to do was update my software which you do routine the anyway because you get told to buy Apple for it to support stand. By the way Apple didn't say update your software because it's going to support standalone and it's brilliant. They just went here's a routine software update. And then I had to look into it to figure out that I'm actually using 5G standalone services. And what am I paying? I'm paying less than I was a year ago. What's happened to BT's mobile revenue? In the last, it's mobile ARPU by the way went down last year. Postpaid mobile ARPU and it's mobile service revenues also fell not by a substantial amount but it's like one or two percent. But would you expect that to happen after you've just introduced a service that everybody's going on about as the real 5G, the true 5G, you introduced that and yet the next year after you've introduced it, your mobile revenues did. Can I read Alera's quote? Yes, please do. And by the way, let's you forget there are other big thing they were banging on about that. There's Wi-Fi 7. And again, they were talking about these new routers. And by the way, I'm on BT and they're still doing the same smart hubs they have for ages. I mean, maybe it's just an industrial design thing. But I've not been aware of BT and I know this was a lot of this was EE branded and I know they're confusingly still different brands and different offerings although they're quite understandable. But BT/EE increasingly now seems to be the way. Yeah, but this was Alera's gig and it was very much an EE thing. It was EE branding on the day. But anyway, here's what Alera said. He went today and in fact, the whole thing was just EE. Today, EE is launching UK First in network capabilities designed to unleash the huge potential of a wave of AI-powered devices. 5G standalone is a new mobile network giving enhanced performance to customers from day one and unlocks game changing new services. You never guess Alera comes from marketing. Unlocks game changing new services of the future, such as Mark. It's been built to handle the growing range of AI-powered devices from smartphones to laptops, tablets and more. And then he goes, Wi-Fi 7 for the home is another first for EE customers giving households high speeds. It'll be great. So just in that, I mean, I didn't even realize he'd gone that over the ball over the top of that. Well, exactly, but he didn't actually say anything, did he? No. He goes, "Standalone is a giving enhanced performance from day one." Well, in what, how? What are these game changing new services? Well, as I say, I've turned out to be a standalone customer without my knowledge. No one sold this to me. It's just been bundled into my service. By the way, I'm paying a lot less for than I was paying when I was actually still paying off device costs a year ago. And have I noticed any great improvement? No. Am I using any new apps that have come along because I'm using 5G standalone? No. I mean, I'm not by the way complaining about BT's mobile service. It's pretty good. But it's not like I've noticed some great massive improvement and it's enabled all these features that I didn't have access to before because I've gone from non-standalone to standalone. And some people would, by the way, with this argument, you get some people say you're completely missing the point. Standalone is not about consumer smartphones. It's about business customers and it's about powering your robots, Scott. And that sort of thing, and doing all sorts of whizzies things. That's why I think I'll win my bid. But just out of desperation alone, they'll cling onto these. But there's Android. There's not a lot of evidence either that it's done much in that area. Now, I looked at Ericsson's figures. I did look at a few companies' figures. I just didn't do likes sort of 20 or whatever. But I looked at Ericsson's mobility report. And they made a big deal about standalone in the one they published in November. And the amount of 5G connections, by the way, that are now on standalone compared with where we were two years ago has gone up massively. It's something like 1.7 billion of the world's 5G connections, which accounts for something like 58% I think of the total. And now on standalone, up from about. And a big chunk of that will be China, I guess. A big chunk of that will be Chinese, right? But that's up from about 890 million in late 2023. And there was a big increase last year. It's like half a billion increase last year. Right. And they're forecasting by 2030 or 2031. 4.1 billion of the world's 5G connections will be on standalone, which by that stage will be about 2/3 of the 5G total. Now, if this was so good, and people were so excited about standalone, whether it as a consumer or a business service, wouldn't Telco stocks be doing interesting things? Wouldn't Telco revenues be. Look back at the open figures. They can't find a way of charging for it. AT&T is another one that made a big deal about like standalone rollout last year. They published a blog in October saying it's nomination-wide. It's everywhere. And we're moving customers onto it all the time and we're moving new services onto it all the time. And yet their mobile revenue growth, I think last year, I looked at it with something like 3% for the first nine months year over year. It's about the rate of inflation. I mean, if this thing had done anything in the business sector for them in terms of connecting robots or any kind of business service at all, then they wouldn't be reporting 3% revenue growth would be reporting a lot more than that. And here's the other problem is this hole, which deep people like Dean Bubley and William Weber really good at, I think is this hole. We talked about this as well a little bit. I think last year in later pods, the challenge from Wi-Fi. No one's really made a very convincing argument in the 5G industry of why it's needed when you've got fiber-based Wi-Fi services in a lot of these factory environments. I get it in a mine or areas where you can't extend fiber and there's some settings where a mobile technology is the only thing you can have. And I think I've heard some arguments in terms of maybe security for having licensed spectrum where you've got a bit more, it's a bit more unhackable and that sort of thing maybe is another argument I've heard. Well, I mean, I've heard people just be dismissive of that though. I think that's the argument that the 5G industry wants to make. It's a bit like things like network slicing, isn't it, and low latency. Yeah, they're trying to insist it. They're more reliable and more secure. But if you talk to people in the Wi-Fi industry, and by the way, they're not Mickey Mouse companies, they're big providers of enterprise Wi-Fi, talking about the likes of Cisco and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. They're not going to introduce, and they've got massive enterprise customers, by the way, these organisations. They're not going to introduce something that's hackable or that, you know, is a bit shit. Are they? So I just, you know, it's a bit tenuous argument. They might actually do something that's a bit shit. But yes, your point taken. Yeah, and what made you want to write a piece like that? Well, I just thought it's, you know, you were talking about this time of year we do these forward-looking or state-of-play. I thought there's been a lot to talk about 5G standalone, and let's just see. This argument that 5G's not done, I heard people making this a little bit in the last few weeks, this argument that 5G's maybe not works out quite as well as it should have done partly because of this NSA versus SA issue. I'm not really that convinced by it. I think it might, there might be something there on, it's not been the most efficient way to introduce the technology, perhaps, and we'd have better coverage now, maybe, if that hadn't happened. Maybe I can buy that into that. Let's do a counterfactual. So let's say they only went with the NSA fudge because full fat 5G wasn't ready 10 years after 4G came out for some reason we decided, start the new decade, we've got a new G. Yeah, so I think the core network transition that went from the 4G core to the sort of converged 4G 5G core that comes with standalone, I think that's a good point you make. That's quite a difficult transition. Yeah, because you'd be bringing in things like containers and Kubernetes based architecture and all these Cloudy and virtually all these things that get very, very complicated, but are very important from a software perspective and allow you to sort of deploy your services in a more flexible way. Yeah, and things like NFV were kind of precursors of some of that technology. Yeah, it's all about this very complicated, very futuristic Cloudy stuff where we're nothing's really physically constrained at all and it's all just in this massive data soup somewhere. How much easier to deploy a much easier to deploy the network and scale up and down, that's that sort of thing. So I think that was quite a difficult area to get to and that's probably why this the core thing took longer. Yeah, so let's say my counterfactual is let's say it was ready by last year. Yeah, so instead of doing it on the turn of the decade we waited, we made it a 15 year gap between four year four G and five G. Yeah. Then we wouldn't be talking about non-standelone and all that sort of thing. They probably would have still have to have been the same amount of fucking around in the background to make that transition that you were just describing, but then we would have had last year Tadar five G. It would still have been a bit of an anti-climax, wouldn't it? In so much as new use cases, new revenue streams, what it means for consumers and all that sort of thing. So all I'm doing here is interrogating the argument that you were that you were passing on about the NSA thing being an issue. I'm not sure it is because now that we've got to full essay, you know. Well, we still don't seem to be any closer to these. I take the argument that people make about standalone being more relevant for the business sector. I can accept that, that it really doesn't, it shouldn't, it doesn't make a huge difference to consumers. By the way, what you've just read that Mark Elera came out with suggests that's not what BT's feelings were about it at the time, is it? They were obviously cooking it up to be something much, like quite a big deal for the consumer market as well in a way that it's not turned out not to be. I don't know if you remember. I think our feelings, maybe we went to the pub, it would be like us to have done so after that thing and we were comparing notes and we were a bit mere about the whole reveal, weren't we? Yeah, I mean, I remember talking to Howard Watson at that press conference about that and I liked his angle about allowing them to be more efficient with spectrum and bringing together different bands and you get an improvement in dual coverage, perhaps on your 5G network because of that. It's just a more efficient way of BT to operate this network. It's a by all of that, that efficiency side of things. I think it's great, but from a kind of user perspective, I don't see that it's really very relevant at all. No, and I tell you the thing, talking about Howard Watson, who's also now left BT, isn't he? Well, he's either left or right. He's due to leave fairly soon. I think it was maybe next few weeks. But yeah, I wrote a little bit in my piece from that back in there. I said, I didn't quote him, but I said, what's an insisted when we spoke to him separately, that the increasing demands of on-device Gen AI have significant implications for the network and any that can offer a superior user experience in that respect, we'll have an advantage. Well, that's turned out to be bollocks. Yeah, exactly. No offense, Howard. Yeah. Going back to the business side of things, and this ties in with all the Ericsson push of things like network APIs, doesn't it? Because the idea is that you use these APIs to allow you to access things like network slicing, which you have to have a stand-alone network to be able to, you can't have network slicing. The network slicing for people who want to wear it, and I'm sure everybody listen to podcastes, but that basically allows you to kind of reserve particular bits of the network for certain applications or user groups. So somebody who wants a very high bandwidth service guaranteed, let's say, 200 megabits of the network. With somebody who wants latency that's going to fall below the 10 millisecond mark, you can guarantee that by using this feature called network slicing, but you have to have stand-alone introduced to do network slicing, and it's very hard to see why, I mean, there are use cases you can think of in the consumer market to do with gaming, is the one that often gets made, or somebody gains to a concert and they're trying to upload footage that they've seen. No one does gaming over 5G? No, they don't. I mean, that's the floor in it, but I can see that if you were going to do gaming over 5G, I can see why you might want to do something like that, but it probably has more relevance for the business sector. But there's still not, I mean, outside China, and it's very hard to tell what's going on inside China. Outside China is very hard to see robots. It's very hard to see anybody using stand-alone to do any of this stuff and operators making any money from it at all. It just doesn't, and if you, if the argument is, oh, it's still too early, I'm sorry, people, it's 2026. This technology got introduced in 2019. We've only got about three and a half, four years now, until 60 is supposed to be coming along. So on that note, and to round off this segment before we move on to the last one, 6G, we've had lots of chats, obviously, previously on this podcast about that, but you said no one in the real-world cares about 5G stand-alone. Are you going to be writing that headline, but putting 6G instead? Well, I've already written it, because if the loss for a last bit of my story, I think I linked it to his, a LinkedIn post that he put up quite recently. There was this paper that you mentioned the White House came out with. Oh, yeah, I've just fired that up. I actually did some preparation. And I think the headline, something like, which people like Dean Bubley and William were, would have been groaning as soon as they read it, was winning the 6G race or something. It's a presidential action. It's a presidential memorandum, the dated 19th of December, which is why I wasn't aware of it. Yeah, well, I did see it, and I was thinking, do I write something on it? And then I thought, no, I'm enjoying my Christmas break. So, actually, let me quickly highlight some of that, given that, neither of us will have written it up, because we were on holiday. You know, by the authority of SMEB, I'm here by direct, section one purpose. The next generation mobile communications network, 6G will be foundational to the national security foreign policy. And this is quite a good segue into the final segment as well. Yeah, an economic prosperity of the United States. This is quite a lengthy document. Section two, and he goes, it is the policy of the United States to lead the world and to achieve development. Yeah, whatever. Section two, spectrum reallocation. So maybe that's a little bit more substantial. But then he's talking about seven to eight gigahertz. Yeah, because the thing about the US is that they've kind of reserved their six gigahertz ban for Wi-Fi. So, unlike other parts of the world. The development of that here, from off-com this week. Yeah, I think, well, I think Michelle Molley was writing about that today. Yeah, we were about to take a hertz development going on. I saw William on LinkedIn approving of that, and I think so was Dean. But the three, the three sort of big regions, if you like, are slightly out of sync with each other and what's going on on 6G on the spectrum front. You've got China that's kind of reserved a whole of the six gigahertz ban for 6G, or for mobile rather, for cellular. Europe's kind of somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. It's like some can be Wi-Fi, some can be some can be for mobile. And the US has kind of gone, we're going to give it to Wi-Fi, but they've talked about using our slightly higher spectrum band, which is in this document here, this 7-to-8-4. So, it starts at 7.125 and goes all the way up to 8.5. Now, I always thought that this is chunks of it in between. Yeah, well, like, see, I always thought the trouble with those bands, this 7.1, so I mean, for a start, at the upper end of that, you're getting even higher. So, you've got that whole sort of propagation issue, no, surely. I mean, presumably. I've always seen this directly before. It sounds like it's going up quite a long time. A long way. People complain about, say, 2.1 gigahertz compared with 800 megahertz. And that will be a failure. And you look at that difference. I mean, it's a bigger difference to go from six gigahertz to eight gigahertz. There must be a chart somewhere that charts frequency versus propagation characteristics or something like that. So, that's one issue. And then the other issue I thought was that some of this stuff's used by the military, and at a time like today, where the US seems to care very much about its military and having all sorts of resources and things to be able to, with these things to be able to use, then maybe that's not such a good idea. But the point, the reason I was saying, you were saying, would you write that same headline with 6G? I think Williams post on that White House paper was sort of arguing that 5G's not really done very much for the world. It's not reset the kind of world on fire in a way that was expected. We'll talk to about back in 2018, 2019. And back then, if you remember, there was all this talk about a 5G race, and we now seem to be at risk of making the same mistake again, and maybe over-investing, over-reaching on a tech, rather than considering what would be a more useful thing to do to address connectivity problems. Yeah, I've just quickly skimming Williams thing while trying to multitask and listen to you just so I could represent some of it on this pod. I quite like, I don't know how I haven't read the argument of how he got there. It's fairly, it's not that lengthy, but it's substantial. And then he goes, the content of a race, he's obviously scoffing at the content, are you wishing you got yourself a glass of water? Well, I have to sort of fiddle with this, because I don't have a beer. Because you're so used to taking a bow. He was just picking up our little telecoms.com Yeti. So there's no 5G race. Nobody defines what the finish line is, which is a very good point. How can there be a race without a finish line? Yep. There was no, sorry, there's no 6G race he says, and he goes, there was no 5G race, and even if there was, being a winner has not conferred any advantage. In other words, he's basically rubbishing all the concepts of this competitive stuff. And I agree with him, and he goes, and then his final short paragraph is, but it's just the sort of thing that politicians like to do repeatedly. And that's what it is. This stuff should be, and obviously with Trump of all people, who, in regard as of what you think about his actions or his substance, he's a man of superlatives and sweeping statements and soundbites. So of course, he's going to talk about winning the 6G race. I remember us, this is pretty pandemic. I remember us talking on a pod laughing about Trump, the first Trump 1.0, banging on about 7G. As far as they're concerned, everything technological is just another manifestation of this, and this is the perfect segue of this fucking endless geopolitical saber rattling and competitiveness and all that sort of thing. So moving on, obviously the start of this year was characterized, I think it's on the second of January, where Donald Trump had been making all these increasingly aggressive moves towards Venezuela for a while. I never quite understood the, what they call the Causes Belly, either the stated reasons for belligerence. You know, Causes Belly's always like, you know, we rush in very Ukraine because of NATO or whatever, whatever the stated reason. Well, the stated reason is drugs, but it was bullshit. It was bullshit. I mean, you tell me I'm going to bring, I'm going to bring the air in because it is. Two things can be true. No, it's not true because if you look at the percentage of drugs in the US via Venezuelan boats, it's tiny. It's absolutely miniscule compared. Most of it's coming over the Mexican border. That's independent monitors. Yeah, I agree with Ian in too much as a, as a Causes Belly by itself, I think it was weak. Very very weak. I think there are, there are much stronger targets. If the main reason for the US, if it was true, it would have gone off to Mexico. Yeah, there'd be after Mexico. And it's also made. No, no, no. I mean, this is the official reason that they give. Yeah, I know, but it's the official reason. Yeah, it's a wea official reason. So you're right. That was one of the, like the, the head part about the oil. Well, it came out very quickly after. They just said it laterally. Yeah. So what I think is interesting. So, so you're right, Pierre, that the stated reason was drugs and you're right, Ian, that's a really weak stated reason. And then, and then afterwards, I mean, there was that time when they, when they nick that tanker, that oil tanker anyway. And then afterwards, they went in and that's what keep the oil. And from, and Trump started banging on about oil straight away. So that was obviously what tanker that totally only carries oil that was followed by, like a nuclear submarine from Russia. But that's the more recent one. Yeah, yeah. Another tanker, it's just an average tanker. There's one in the last few days, two of them. I mean, by the time this podcast comes out, he probably will have nixed fucking Greenland or something. Yeah. But, and then, but then, you know, reading about it more, and I'll say, you know, put in my cards on the table, I've already alluded to it. The thing that really concerns me about this, obviously I don't give a shit about, God, his name's, what's the name of the guy? I don't give a shit about him. I've heard all the more sort of belligerent apologists from the States are always, are just listing the litany of his crimes. And, you know, again, I'll defer to you on this Pierre, if you ever want to speak up, he seems to have been a very negative person for Venezuela. But we, there are loads of other countries where their leader is negative for them. And we don't go and steam in and kidnap them. Yeah. And in fact, a lot of them were allied with, or some of them, some of them are negative to a lot of their population and do have oil, but we're great, great mates of them like Saudi Arabia. So, it's all very selective. And then, and so what I, what worries me about it the most and what I think has the more, the sort of broader geopolitical angle, which has some justification to be spoken about on a, on a business podcast like this, is it seems to set a new benchmark for how the for geopolitical behavior, we're basically going back to a time where we're not really bothering with negotiations, other than negotiations done in a gumbo diplomacy sort of way. Basically, it's quite mafia-like. It's like, that's a nice country you got there. It'd be shame if something happened to it. Yeah. And I think what Trump's trying to do and, and unfortunately, because this thing went so well, the military's part of it went so smoothly. I think he's now thinking, well, fuck you know, why bother having these endless chats, yeah, and sort of bogged down negotiations when you can just send the lads in. Yeah. And then the other, you know, I can see all working out disastrously, yeah. Well, as a president. I mean, yeah. The US doesn't have a, I mean, I'd have been more sympathetic and like you, I don't think I'm personally mismoduro and he seemed like a good person actually, that he's in New York and all that and facing trial, brilliant. That's the one positive side of it. Yeah. If they come out with some of their stuff that they've come out within the past about making an effort to make a good transition to democracy and doing that and then had a plan for that, I might have been a bit more sympathetic. It's clearly no plan for that at all. You can't send a few guys around helicopters and then keep the rest of the regime there and go, they just have to behave themselves. So I don't see this being a good thing. Venezuela, given the US track record on regime change in the last 30 years, quite easily become another failed state, I think. No, the plan is machado, though, soon. In the press conference. In the press conference, he absolutely cannot say, yes, machado is going to be president tomorrow. He has to pretend to the vice president. Oh, this is, this is Trump has three-dimensional game. No, if you think about it, he has to pretend that they're okay in there. Otherwise, they're going to start burning the well-paced price. Yeah, and then you have Delce Rodriguez, who's the vice president, who's the one who stepped in for now. He has to pretend to Delce that they're, we're mates now. Okay. And don't worry, I'm not going to get rid of you, but the long-time plan is machado. Yeah, but he cannot just tell that Delce is, I don't know, I'm starting active listening. Yeah, but the problem is I don't see how the, I don't see how the US without having a presence on the ground and trying to do what it did not very well in the Middle East, you know, after Iraq and everything, but at least then they had a, they'd kind of toppled the army and they were there on mass. I don't see how the US from, from afar, having sent a few helicopters in to take one guy out can influence Venezuelan politicians in this way, other than by going, if you don't do things the way that we like, we're going to come and get you again, which is a democracy's run. No, I think the two countries you mentioned, like Iraq and Afghanistan are much more in clave, you know, they can just be in the Caribbean and be like, we're here, you know, and then if you, a lot of it is about projecting power on their, on their backyard as well. Yeah, I didn't need to be on the ground. And the other answer I'll give to your question there, it's just thinking on top of my head, obviously this stuff's very complicated and none of us know that much about how this shit works. But if you think of like the old school colonial approach, like how the British Empire was run, yeah, we did manage to run an empire that spanned the whole fucking globe with just like tens of thousands of civil servants and are not very big standing land army. Yeah. So, so you can run. Yeah, but we had certain advantages then that don't exist now. There was a big imbalance between like even militarily back then that you wouldn't sort of see today. I think there's a fairly big issue. Well, I know what you mean, but I don't think it's not like, you know, you talk about going into countries like India in the 1700s with Claude Clive. There was a big difference in the level of sophistication of the British state back then compared to the mishmatch of India wasn't even a country. No, it's true. You can play things off against each other easily. Yeah. Quite primitive in terms. I'm sure my, I'm sure my point doesn't bear close scrutiny. I'm, I'm just bringing up as a historical example and there are plenty of others, you know, Roman Empire and all that sort of thing about how you can run places through proxies. And if, if what Pierre's saying, and I want to ask you Pierre before I go on to anything else about any other thoughts or observations you have with given that your, your wife's for Venezuela. But, you know, what you say there, you seem to be saying that he's eventually setting much other operas as a sort of colonial proxy who will pretty much do what the US wants. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, he's always been, I'm not, I don't know, I don't know anything. I'm not saying, I'm not saying, I'm not saying I approve of it. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of what's going on. Forget about the government. What's interesting is that, you know, when they discovered all really like in the early 19th century, whatever, they quickly outsourced it to American companies to, and the Dutch as well, to come and take it out, whatever. And then they nationalized it, and then, you know, they had this thing where 60% would go to the government and 30% of the revenue would go to the company. And then that flipped exact opposite. And then that became a big problem. And then obviously Chavez got in power. And then they fired all the engineers. Yeah, replace them with people who didn't know what they're doing. So the US does feel like it's got a claim on, yeah, but then it's like for how long? Yeah, but that's, that's the story of oil in the 20th century. Yeah. Like all those original oil fields in the Middle East were all like, it was all, it was like European and American companies going over there and starting all that off. And then they all got nationalized over a process of time by the states. And you just accept that you can't have that kind of relationship that you used to have with these. I know that's what feels so retrograde about it. It feels like we've turned back. Just landed that in 2022. They came in and they've like brought their gear and they're like, we're doing, so how do they feel about this now? And then it's like for how long, you know, I guess, you know, we'll spend a hundred billion, like what is it? Do you do drill until you get a hundred billion's worth and then you leave or as if or yeah, or and then you get another 20 years at like a 10% discount, 20% like how do you, you know, what's the kind of deal that they're going to make? I think people are, you know, if you're going to sort of steal man the US position and everything, it maybe it's easier to do because of the terrible state of Venezuela that existed under Maduro. And like you were saying, this mismanagement of the economy and appropriation of assets that were US, that's all very well. But when they're when they're making threatening noises about Colombia and Mexico and countries that are actually democracies, that really would be a gain change to see him going to Colombia and do something. And the Greenland thing is remarkable because they're basically going to the EU. I don't shut a fuck up or do we want more of the cartels before? They're not talking about toppling a democratically elected leader, which is what the democratically elected leader of Colombia is talking to the BBC about today that he's worried about his own future now. Yeah, they they had military action during the war on drugs in the 80s, but they never they never went up. He needs to watch his ass, but he's in a gay president out in the next nine months anyway, because it's okay. Two terms already. But he might be out quicker if the US goes and then gets rid of it, might in the, but he only has nine months left, I think. Upstate's okay for them to go. No, no, obviously he's got nine months left. Obviously not, but I'm like, it doesn't make it better, but yeah, it's less worse than if he was like in the big. It's not good at all. Yeah, it's a completely different world situation. Yeah, exactly. And that's before now. And that's the broader point. Some prisoners yesterday, that's something good. Yeah, just lastly, I mean, again, I don't want to pry it if it's private, but you know, have you had any vibes from the ground in Venezuela about how it's being received? They're very awesome thing. I don't know, you know, I mean, for them, it's they're kind of used to it and just used a crazy shit guy. It's kind of the same as, same old. Right. Okay. Oh, well, I mean, it shows that nothing really dramatically negative has happened. Oh, you, you hear stories where, you know, so and so who knows somebody was pulled and ticked their phone and arrested them because there was some, because they weren't comments in there. Right. So, yeah, so it's probably quite repressive. Which is weird. It has been a lot. Why would you do that? And then freed prisoners. It's like, they just, well, I think it's just going to be a mess for a while, though, isn't it? Well, in power vacuum, you do. You just get fucking chaos. I mean, I'd read reports on the BBC that there's already likes to leave armed gangs out on the streets and, yeah, or they're like the, yeah, it's like a cow. Yeah. Well, you got like the trendy Aguan. Yeah. No, no, no, no, they have this sub army thing. Right. Guys on bikes. Militias. Yeah. Well, that's what I was curious about. So I'm relieved that certainly nothing's happened to your, in laws anyway. Yeah, just that the broader point I wanted to make on geopolitics is, you know, what kind of a precedent this sets for things going forward. So basically, America's saying, you know, that there's this term, which I think Donald Trump either coined or appropriated him for himself called the Don Roe doctrine, which is derived from a thing come up with, I think, about the fifth US president or something who was called Monroe. And he came up with it. It's basically saying, look, we reserve the right to push back if you fuck around with our hemisphere. And what that was really. Well, I think it was telling us words. It was telling Europeans to stay out of it. Exactly. It was like, you know, it was like spainery conquering Mexico or something like that. So like the 1898 war between Spain and the US, I think, was very much based on the idea of Monroe doctrine that they didn't sort of want, he wanted European powers into fearing in places like Cuba and stuff. Yeah, exactly. And it was very much born of a new kind tree, which has only recently got its independence from Britain saying, look, can Europe, can you just stay the fuck out? Yeah. You know, in Europe, it obviously was much more dominant then than it is now. And then the Don Roe document doctrine just seems to be this reassertion of American hegemony over the whole of the Americas. Yeah. And, you know, I agree with you, Ian, it's not democratic, it's negative, it's retrograde. What is the moral, you know, that the Americas extending by the way to Greenland as well. Because it's obviously very important to Canada. Indeed. Yeah, indeed. I don't understand that. They can have as many basis as they want. Because it's full of rare earth material. But they can also, they said they could dig as well. Yeah, but they want more than that, don't they? They obviously want country. They want to have, they want to have it as an asset that they think is needed to sort of counter Russia and China and be able to do something about Russian and Chinese boats around it all the time and then getting access to some of these rare earth minerals, which are actually getting easier to dig now because of climate change. Something that something that Trump says isn't happening, but. Yeah. So what they're doing is, there are some in this regard, the hegemony over there area. And I don't like it, it leaves a bad taste on my mouth, but that's what they're doing. The thing that I think is interesting about the precedent it sets is they're basically going, look, if we don't like the look of what's going on in another country, it's totally fine to invade it. People say they didn't invade it. They didn't invade it. They send lads in. They kidnap their president as a fucking invasion. Yeah. Just because they haven't totally sent boots on the ground. What's funny is that it looks like Iran is like asking for it now when they're on the street. Yeah. What about us? Could you please. Yeah. It's a process of that going. Well, just like you've got connections to Venezuela, I've got connections to Iran and so we're keeping a close eye on that. Yeah. But then this means like, do you remember everyone agreeing that Russia steaming into Ukraine because it felt because one of the stated reasons was that it didn't like the Eastwood creep of NATO was completely out of order and suddenly they weren't allowed to get a Wimbledon and their fucking flag had to be blanked out and all that bullshit. Is it the things that is it different when you want to actually claim the land, which is what if put in one regime change, he would have gone straight to Kiev and do that. Well, that's what he tried to do at the start, he just failed. He tried to keep all the tanks at the border. No, but they were, they've gone all the way too key of all the way. Yeah. But then you don't also go with all the tanks at the border, you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, I think what Ukraine ended up being was plan B after plan A, which was a capitation failed. Yeah. But either way, I mean, you're right, there are different things, a full land invasion versus this much more surgical intervention. Yeah, but it still comes down to asserting your will over that other country. It's just through different means. And so, so how can we criticize Russia for, I mean, Venezuela is a lot further from the U.S. than Ukraine is from Russia. It's not like Venezuela's got a border with the fucking U.S. as a whole of Central America between them. Yeah. And Colombia before you get to it. Well, if you too Florida is closer, but yeah, okay. Right. It's close if you're on a little boat transporting from one of those few boats that they don't put you because soon as it starts heading off. But there's been, is there, I think there's a graph where the past three months where they started blowing up those boats, there's a decrease in overdoses in U.S. Oh, it's 20%. All the data that I've seen on this, because I looked into it quite a lot is it's a very, very small percentage. Yeah. My understanding of the drugs. Yeah, but because you're only thinking of the drugs leaving Venezuela, by the way, Maduro is quoted as saying in 2013, when they tried to, they actually did ship 1.3 tons of cocaine from Caracas to Paris in an air flight. Maduro is quoted as saying, they shouldn't have gone above one ton. Right. No, I'm sure, and I'm sure he gets, but they have hands in a lot of pies. Like, yeah, there's maybe a small, like, actually leaves Venezuela, but then they're involved with the other countries. Yeah. Drug trade. Well, I mean, it was a pretext though for doing it. That's not the reason they did it. If there was no oil in Venezuela, this wouldn't have happened. But then, does that mean, like, because you're a president, you can get away with it. Well, this is a point. It's just, it's just the rule of force. It's basically saying, I've got more money in guns than you said, do what you're fucking told. And this is a point I'm just leading up to is this is a president that's being created around the world now is it just feels escalator. It feels like the whole world is more militarized after that. And maybe I'm being slightly over dramatic. Oh, I was talking about, I was talking about Maduro, like, does it mean like, because he's a president, he can get away with, I always say, sorry, with millions. Well, no, but again, it's jurisdictional. I mean, loads of presidents do loads of dodgy shit, but it's whether or not you can hold them accountable and America's holding him accountable by kidnapping him. I mean, one of the charges against him was having machine guns. How can you fucking kidnap the president of a country for having guns? I mean, it's ridiculous. Having guns everywhere. I don't know. Under his bed. Yeah. Yeah. And if you last had them in the army, but you can't have them under your pillow. Honestly, if you look at the, if you look at the charges as soon as he was kidnapped, Pam Bondi, the Tony General came out of this stuff. And it was like, yeah, we're doing him for being an architeris and also having guns. I think so. And Paul and yeah, cattle rustling and cattle rustling and just generally being a dirty old man or whatever they were getting him for. It was, it was like they were just making up crimes, you know, I think they've been building the case for a few years now, but yeah. And one last thing I'll say on the geopolitical side before I'll finish off by by giving this a telecomsie veneer and talking about one more of Ian's story from this week is, you know, talking about that part of the world. You know, America's always saying that one of the main reasons to be belligerent to China is because it keeps menacing Taiwan. Well, how come it's all right for America to steam into Venezuela and not China to steam into Taiwan? So, so the point is is Taiwan leader of dictator, not elected based people. Well, but then, but that's just reason. But that's no good if he goes into Colombia, is it? You can always come up with reason. Even if you ask about when my months left only. Yeah. You can always come up with reasons. That's the point. You can always come up with excuse the pun trumped-up charges, whether it's machine guns or whatever, you know, they could they could kidnap him for fucking eating his food wrong or something. I don't know. But he fully lost an election and stayed in power. So who can do anything about this? Well, no one can. I mean, this is supposed to be our country, how countries work. We don't like it, but there were loads of dictatorships. Yeah, loads of fucked up countries. But they don't have oil. Yeah. No, we want to agree with that. And they don't and they're not in vain. I think the bit the best steel manning I can do of America's position on this is that they felt that China and Russia were getting too actively involved in Venezuela themselves. That was the Don Roe. That was the Don Roe doctrine. Yeah, yeah. Then I will. Yeah. Then I'll link to this. That's your telecom link. That's the Don Roe doctrine part of it is like, oh, Venezuela, you're in our backyard. You do not hang around with the Chinese in the rations, right? And then you and then Ian as if he was going to anticipate that wrote a story which you published a couple of days ago, which is what Trump's Venezuela raid means for Huawei. So why don't you tell us about that? Yeah. So the China angle in Venezuela is quite the big deal, like just in Latin America generally, like Chinese investors own stakes in lots of projects across Latin America. It's almost similar to what's gone on in Africa. You know, this idea that the Don Roe started. I think they own this is from an economist piece, but I think the own stakes in the ports either end of the Panama Canal as well. That's right. Which America is going to be too happy about. I'm so happy about. And they've been and this is really interesting from like a telecom Huawei perspective because there've been all these noises for about 18 months, two years now from the European big kick vendors like Ericsson Nokia about competition from Chinese vendors in Europe and Latin America. It's like come up a couple of times on earnings calls where Boyerco of Ericsson sort of said they're being particularly aggressive in Latin America. Yeah. And you look at the, you know, our friend John Strand of Stranconselt who does his data on how much kit is used, you know, in European telecom networks that comes from Huawei. He's sort of, he's not being quite as forensic in Latin America, but he certainly noted that some of these operators are very very, I'd love to chat to John about Greenland by the way. Yeah, I'd be great aside. I was saying to Michelle earlier that we should probably listen to this. Yeah, he might do, but he was, he was noting how much Huawei is used by some of the Latin American networks and they've really gone quite aggressively after that business, I think. No doubt. As a kind of response almost to what's gone on in other parts of the world. So they've obviously lost. If you look at the Americas as a whole, the only telco I'm aware of that's really pushed back heavily on on Huawei outside the USA, obviously, is Telus. Canada's Telus. Canada, obviously, being one of the five I's countries, was under a lot of US pressure to do something about its use of Huawei. And they very publicly when we're going to, they've done this open-run thing, I actually spoke to the guy who's responsible for that project in, in a few, in Dublin a few weeks ago. Got a banner Bureau at Telus, but they've gone big on using Samsung instead of Huawei and they're kind of taking that all out and they've got a deadline that they have to sort of reach. But Latin America, which is not anything to do with five I's obviously, and very, very close to the USA, is all, is a wash with like Chinese equipment. And and you can, you're kind of wondering what does Trump's intervention in Venezuela and the noises he's making now about Mexico and Colombia and other bits of Latin America mean for Chinese investors including Huawei. And Venezuela is really interesting because I remember looking at a presentation that Justin Hotard, he's the CEO of Nokia Gave, when they did their capital markets day. And he had this map of the world drawn up where countries had were coloured green if they were open to Ericsson and Nokia, but not, not Eastern vendors as he called it. Right. They were pink if they were open to everybody. And then they were gray if there were restrictions on Western vendors, but Eastern vendors allowed to play. There are only three countries that were gray, two of them were obvious Russia and China. And the other one was Venezuela. So I didn't, I didn't, I looked at this when I wrote this story and I thought that's very interesting because it implies that Ericsson and Nokia are not really active in Venezuela. I haven't been active in Venezuela at all. I mean, I don't know whether, I was never able to establish this when I was writing that story, whether it's all Huawei and ZTE, but Maduro has clearly been very cozy with the Chinese. And it wouldn't be a surprise if that were the case. I mean, is that going to be allowed to last in a Trump controlled or Trump, so not Venezuela? Are you saying that they're going to make, but why would they care if they're using Huawei there? Why would they care if they're using Huawei though? The Americans. Yeah. Kidding. Are they going to share sensitive stuff with the whole argument that's been going on for like, for years in Europe about the pressure that the US has put on Euros to get rid of Huawei. It's all about. Where is Venezuela? It's not going to be an ally of Venezuela. That's the whole point of what they've done. They're trying to set it up to be a vassal state of the US. Well, I don't think that's maybe officially. I think they're just ranging all over. You just said yourself. You said the, the plan is for Machado to take over, but they don't want to say that. They're just, I think they only have to do all. They're not going to like put in military base there or anything like that. I, this, the whole thing, I think a lot of this is to do with keeping the Chinese. This is exactly what Scott was saying with the done row doctrine. You want that area of the world to be under your, as much a part of your economic interest as possible. You certainly don't want the Chinese anywhere. You certainly don't want the Chinese. By the way, Huawei is not just doing 5G networks these days and the concern has always been, the concern has always been about spying obviously and the ability to sabotage networks and take systems down. You've got American oil companies coming into Venezuela. They're not going to want Chinese networks in there. Well, there's all this stuff going. There's already a Chevron there. And it's not only that it's what's how do Huawei diversify after all the sort of sanctions happened. It's gone into things like AI. It's gone into the cloud. So a lot of the cloud stuff. This is where John Strand's really good with some of his data. A lot of the cloud services that have actually taken off in Latin America in the last few years are provided by Huawei. And obviously you can see a situation where they're doing pretty much what Microsoft and AWS are doing and buying, not going to be buying GPUs from Nvidia, but using Huawei's own GPUs in those data centers. If you're worried about 5G connectivity and the Chinese being all over that, you're going to be even more worried about China being all over AI and the cloud right on your doorstep. So I just see this as being a master. I would think it would be lower down the priority list. But the oil, yeah, but it's still going to be fed up there. Where I think to sort of distill my understanding of the point Ian's making is if this belligerence towards Venezuela is done in the name of the US having much more control over the country. And one of the things the US has got to be in its bonnet about is we had this thing from the White House about winning the 6G race. It obviously considers telecoms to be a strategic technology. Which it is. Yes, it is. Then its coherent agreed after the oil's taken care of and after they've stopped the drug shipments and whatever the other stated reasons for steaming. I think telecom will be on that one. You think so? Yeah. So in the end, I think it's going to be quite high priority. I think the whole drug thing is just a complete smokescreen to be honest. I do too. But you know, whatever it is, that's their stated reasons for going in this. I don't think they're going to have to say that there's a situation. It's about some fentanyl coming into the US. I think he gives a shit about that, but I don't think he thinks it comes from. It's a big problem. It is a big problem. I think it does give a shit. It's what he used to. I mean, you're right. You know, if what you're alluding to is it's always just a pretext and not something he genuinely cares about. And then we're trying to get into his mind and his of all minds is a very difficult one to get into. But the fentanyl thing is a stick he used to beat Canada and Mexico with right at the start of the year. Remember when he started doing all the tariffs and shit like that? So it's obviously whether or not it's sincere is another matter, but it's obviously a big deal for him. But I don't think there's much evidence that the fentanyl came from Venezuela. Well, let's see. I wouldn't have raised the case, you know, because they probably have details that they cannot share that they put in the case. Well, that's about the only thing I'll say in favor of what they've done is, you know, how there's going to have to be some degree of transparent justice done through the court system in the US. They could have just gone in there and whacked him and gone, yeah, we tried to kidnap him, but then he pulled a gun so we had to shoot him and they didn't do that. That's the other thing I think that's interesting about what, because you were saying, oh, the reason they care about what's going on in Europe is because those are allies. I think they'll care much more now about what's on their doorstep in, you know, in the Americas, than what's going on in Europe. It's very interesting actually that this whole thing that happened during Trump 1.0, when people like Mike Pompey going around Europe and saying you need to get Huawei out, you need to get Huawei out, you know, we can't have it anywhere, anywhere in NATO comms, and it's a security threat, and there are American interests here in your allies. There's been no renewal of that at all in the first year of Trump. I mean, I think a lot of the attention has moved on to other things like AI and the cloud anyway, but I think they don't give a shit about Europe anymore, personally. I don't think the US gives a toss about what happens to Europe. I think the only thing that's been done in Europe is what was it? Civilizational erasure, it faces, there's nothing in Europe that interests the US anymore apart from maybe Ericsson and Nokia, and they're becoming American companies anyway by said proxy. Yeah, if you're the Venezuelan government believe me, there's so many things to fix before that, like electricity grid, first of all diversify for once, but think of it from the US strategic point of view, what do they care about? You know, let's assume that the Americans don't actually give a fuck about Venezuelan individuals at all. So they care about their own strategic and security priorities, and this telecom thing does fall into that bucket, which is where I think it's reasonable for EU to make that assumption. But to your point about Europe, and I might, I'll give you a chance for a final word, but my final word on this, I think the Europe one's really interesting. I agree with you, and I think Europe's looking increasingly marginal. Yeah. I think, you know, if you remember before Mobile World Congress last year, I think we had JD Vance come and tell Europe to fucking sort its life out, and everyone just stamp their feet. I think with this Greenland stuff is another statement of Trump basically going, look, Europe, we'll do what we want and just shut the fuck up. And the only thing Europe's really said is like, well, we're keeping an eye on it, but they haven't said anything belligerent. They haven't said anything strong, and they can't. There's distinct. There's not a lot they could do about it, to be honest with you, if Trump decided he wanted to take Britain by force. Well, quite, and there's distinct, you know, if NATO didn't exist and all that sort of thing, there are real questions about whether the combined forces of Europe could defend their eastern border even. Yeah. So it's going to be an interesting time for Europe, because I don't think that EU, I think all the failures of the EU that I constantly identified are being manifested. There's nothing to hear. There's nothing joined up. Whereas what America is doing, and I think we will agree that we hate a lot of it, is it projecting strength. Yeah. And in a time when countries like America and China and Russia are projecting strength, the EU just looks very limp. Yeah, well, so do we. Yeah, well, if we part ourselves part of the EU geopolitically, I know we're part, not part of the. Yeah, yeah, we're pretty. We're pretty tiny. We're pretty sure where we fit at the moment. And obviously, Keir Starmer's in an awkward position being asked to criticise Trump's. Yeah, and he's not going too, is he? Well, I can actually sympathise with him, not wanting to. It's like it's a pretty awkward question to be asked. That was very vindictive. All you got to do, look at the politician in the US Marjorie Taylor Greene was once his best buddy, and then one one time she went, "Hold on a minute, what are you playing at?" and he went, "Right, fuck you." Yeah. I mean, he's incredibly capricious in that way. Yeah. So, yeah, do you two have any last thoughts? I think we've done a solid couple hours, haven't we? No. So, interesting times, basically. But that was cool start of the year. It's good to be back everyone. And, yeah, hopefully, nothing will happen in the next week. That means we talking about geopolitics next week. Trump to send in the physical AI into Colombia. Well, this is a bad point. This is a point I made in my dystopia story. Yeah, yeah. Or maybe in a decade's time, but he's, I mean, we know that the Rush U-Cream Wars really accelerated the use of drones. Yep. So anyway. All right. I'll stop there, enough of that depressing stuff. It's not like early January isn't depressing enough as it is. Especially with that beer. It's treachery, no beer. Okay. All right. Thanks a lot. Good to be back. Thanks a lot for listening. Make sure you join us for the next one.