Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm I'm with Schwarger. On today's show, the airwaves. You may not see them, but they're actually pretty important. Whether you're streaming some video on your smartphone or watching network television at home using an antenna you bought on Amazon for like 25 bucks, the airwaves is what enables this kind of communication. But Spectrum is a finite resource.

Government has historically played a role in allocating it. But given the exploding demand,

you know, we're talking about 4K video, augmented reality, virtual reality. And as we keep doing

more and more data intensive things with Spectrum, is the way that we allocate Spectrum now

good enough? Is there a better way? Well, joining me to discuss this as two fine tech

policy experts here in D.C., Ryan Radia, Research Fellow and Regulatory Council at the

Competitive Enterprise Institute. Welcome, Ryan. Good to be back. Yes, you were on the show before.

Good memory. I don't think the listeners remember.

And Joe Kane, Tech Policy Associate at the R Street Institute, formerly a graduate research

fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Joe, thank you for joining.

Good to be here.

So you guys wrote a paper, Joe, before you were at R Street, and it's called a new approach to allocating broadcast spectrum.

But let's, you know, before we get into the new approach, let's kind of get a sense of

where we are today.

So just briefly, I'm not a scientist, neither are you guys.

What do we mean when we say the electromagnetic waves are carrying our videos?

Like what is that?

That sounds like voodoo.

So the, as you mentioned, the air is full of these waves that in many cases can transmit

information.

And so when you have a mobile device or a Wi-Fi router or even satellites in the sky or on your top on your roof,

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