HIGHLIGHTS: John Stankey - CEO of AT&T

Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody, and welcome to In Good Company. And today, we are live from New York. Now the first thing I did when I arrived was to change my SIM card in my phone to an AT and T SIM card. Thank you for that, Nick. And so, therefore, it's kind of fun to be here with the CEO of the whole company, AT and T. It's good to be with you. And thank you for changing your SIM card to an AT and T SIM card. Data traffic is exploding. Right? We are using it more and more and more. Yet the telecom sector is kind of certainly lagging the, you know, the the MEC seven and the big tech stocks. Why why is that? Well, that's, clearly the value add on the high margin products. When somebody can carve out, a dominant market position, they tend to drive better margins, and the magnificent seven have managed to do that in each of their segments. In our case, we're a pretty competitive industry. And as a result of that, we tend to grow at GDP or GDP a little bit plus. And, our ability to kind of carve that same, dominant position at large margins just hasn't arrived at this point. Having said that, the next exciting part about the industry is the fact that AI is gonna drive another growth cycle in data and usage demand. And we think that's gonna be a unique opportunity for growth in our business moving forward and it's going to allow for that consistent, steady improvement of cash flows if you invest correctly during this chain cycle that's occurring right now. So so how should we look at the relationship between the explosive growth in data and the providers of the infrastructure? Well, I think what, you know, for many years, people are saying, are you going to be able to profitably grow as consumption continues to grow? And that's really been going on for decades. And I would say that the data points over the last, number of years have shown that despite the fact that consumers have an insatiable demand to use more and more data by the virtue of technology operating our business more effectively, the ability for us to add value into products and price differently, we are driving solid returns in our business. And I do expect that's going to continue moving forward, especially as we see more convergence of customers buying services from one company across multiple networks and your ability to be even more efficient and more effective at monetizing that household. Now if we go back some years to, 2016, you you bought WarnerMedia to put more content into the I did. No. You didn't. But the company did. I'm trying not to remember that. Yeah. No. Sure. But I'm …