 Hello, and welcome to the Cube Pod episode four, right? Dave, episode four? Yes. We're on a roll here. This is John Furrier with Dave Vellante, co-host of The Cube. This is our podcast where we talk about the weekly things that are happening in our world, what we're looking at and what we're analyzing. And then we're going to top news, AI stuff's happening. Dave, a lot of stuff's going on. Of course, we do our rant section, which is my favorite. A lot to rant about this week. But still, tons of blowback from Silicon Valley Bank, DeBalko, a lot of questions around the banking industry, crisis around that, liquidity crisis, Wall Street impact. It's a very weird time, Dave. This has been an interesting week. I can't believe it's been a week since we did our podcast where we soft-pedaled the Silicon Valley Bank store on Thursday before the big run in the bank. But the word, a lot of stuff coming out, Dave, on the SVB, more and more data coming out, people talking about the run on the bank. Was that pushed by anyone? Was there an agenda? And then First Republic, which looks very safe, Bank is also under threat. And they're under siege. And then they just got bailed out, if you want to say the word. We'll get into what the semantics mean around bailout is that First Republic just got $30 billion from their friendly other banks in their little network. So banks came together, keeping it in the family, Dave. This is a very mafiosa deal. Banks taking care of banks. They didn't want the government in there. So Silicon Valley Bank caused a string of events. And we called it on the last pod that's gonna have an impact. So the system, the banking system is this operating system. They all kind of work together. And I don't think they want the government involved. So I think the First Republic could be a signal of the banks all getting together in their Karitsu and saying, hey, stay away. We get out of our underwear government. We don't want you involved. Because if First Republic goes sideways on liquidity, guess what? Name comes the FDIC. Well, you know, this weekend, you and I were chatting. I got a text from one of our colleagues saying, First Republic's next. And then at the same time, we saw what was floating around the message that First Republic was sending to its depositors, of which we know many, I actually am one. And so he saw that. That was like, oh, oh, they're gonna cause another bank run. So that was really interesting that the likes of JP Morgan and others are stepping in and saying, government, we got this. And so I kind of like the move. I don't think that's a bailout, by the way. Government's not involved. I think Silicon Valley Bank, we could talk about that. But I talked to somebody last night, one of our customers told me they had all their money in SVB and they were able to get out enough to meet payroll. They were really sweating it. I know you've heard this story over and over. Yeah, no, it's everyone's happy as the depositors got taken care of and they're gonna be guaranteed all their cash. So that's a good thing. But you know, John, SVB, you saw that story in the journal. They went to Goldman for advice in February, which culminated in that attempt to do a private placement. They were gonna do a private placement to raise enough capital to shore up the position because Moody's was gonna do a downgrade and they couldn't pull off the private placement. So they decided to do a public offering and it all came out in that announcement that $2 billion loss and they were gonna do a stock sale and everybody freaked out and we know the story from there. But Goldman is supposed to be the platinum standard for advice and that advice was fatal. Yeah, that happened last week and now we're, it's been a lot, I can't believe it's been a week. It's been crazy. You and I debated about the First Republic. I didn't think they were gonna have any problems at all, different kind of bank, different makeup, but the liquidity crisis is happening around. Credit Suisse had some issues. And the fact of the matter is, is that this is really a debate. Should the government really be involved or not? And I think the banks are taking care of themselves because they have to. It's a system, right? If something goes down in the system, the system kind of reacts to it, but money's moving around. They're all in cahoots. They're all kind of related even though they have different agendas and firms. They have to kind of stay, otherwise the government will be in there. And this whole idea of the run on the bank and the commentary from the top quote firms like the New York Times, for instance, what's his name over there? Andrew Sorkin was like, this is a bailout. He got his butt handed to him. People were in his underwear saying, it's not a bailout. And I saw you comment on his Twitter feed and said, here's the definition of the bailout. So, yeah, the word bailout is an interesting discussion. It's a fucking bailout. I mean, I don't know why people are going after Kara Swishers. What's wrong with you people in Silicon Valley? Kara Swishers on the TV going, no, it's not a bailout. It's not a bailout. Everybody's jumping on Sorkin. It's a by definition, it's a bailout. Sorry, I'm getting into a rant. It's not a bailout. Okay, let's get into it. It's by definition, it's a bailout. You guys are in some kind of like, did you use chat GPC, did you use chat GPC for that definition? No, what's a bailout? A bailout is when the government provides financial support to a failing institution, bailout. That was a bailout. You guys are full of crap out there. It was the guy on the East Coast actually said that, Dave. So, is it a bailout when the equity holders go belly up? Well, let's go back and do a little history lesson. In 2008, the government bailed out the big banks. Too big to fail. Yes. The Westerns got bought by J.P. Morgan, leaving for his file for chapter 11, but Goldman Sachs, all the other banks, J.P. Morgan, all got their equity back and the government bailed them out. Agreed? Agreed. Agreed. So, they secured the cash and everyone kept their equity. So, that's a bailout, that they bailed out the play with directly- Well, how's this not a bailout? How's this not a bailout? The equity holders lose all their cash. All they did was guarantee the deposits. How's this not a bailout? What does that have to do with? The definition of bailout has nothing to do with it. Hold on, let me finish. Making stuff out of there, go ahead, sorry. What do you mean making stuff out here? It's just facts. It's by definition, it's really simple. When the government steps in to save an institution and provides financial support, it's by definition a bailout. Andrew Ross-Sorkin was right. Sorry, you're wrong. No, you're wrong. Let's go back to the semantics. Now, 2020, the airlines. Remember COVID? The government bailed out the airlines. They were losing money and they gave trillions to the airlines. All kept their equity. And in this scenario, they lost all their equity. All they did, and they had the liquidity, they couldn't get it out in time for the run. So all they did was prevent the run on the bank. They ended up going under because of other reasons, but the money is there, right? They still even got 2.2 billion left in holdings. So how's that not a bailout? I don't understand. I mean, if the government didn't step in, what would have happened? Well, I mean, this is my point about the semantics. Wait, let me answer my question. If the government didn't step in, what would have happened to all the startups and all the VCs? We don't know. Well, what do you think would have happened, John? They probably would have lost all their cash. Yes, and that's so they got bailed out by the government backstopping them. It's a different type of bailout than by the way. It was absolutely the right thing to do. I just want to be, I just want, I'm just trying to get into the semantics of the bailout for people to just throw their hands up. That's a bailout you don't know what you're talking about. Like, let's just get into what we're talking about here. The fact is Silicon Valley Bank got saved by the FDIC for the deposits that were there. The bank fucked up on the liquidity problem. That's their fault. Self-inflicted, we covered that last week. But the bailout of the institution didn't happen. Unlike the banks in 2008 and the airlines in 2020, they were bailed out and the equity holders got better. That's a bailout. To me, that's consistent with here. If so, if the bailout happened here, SVB would have definitely had the equity holders preserved and come out of it better off, just like the banks and just like the airlines. So the question of bailout is a semantic one. Okay, you can pull the definite, you can get a definition off the web and hey, dictionary. Dave, go to dictionary.com. They know what they're talking about. It's not semantics. This was a bailout of startups and VCs. It wasn't a bailout of the bank. They backstopped the bank, but they bailed out the depositors who were not insured over $250,000 and the VCs who had funded all those startups. I'm just, all I'm saying is relative to the debate of bailout versus non-bailout, it's semantics. If you're going to look at the history of the banks and the airlines, that means the standard, that's the standard of the bailout. It's a Silicon Valley bullshit. This is more of your Silicon Valley bullshit. It's like, it's not semantics. A bailout is when a government steps in, provides some financial support to a failing institution. Those failing institutions were startups. Now I'm not saying the VCs were failing, but they would have been hurt badly, but they did get bailed out. Dave, I'm really glad you got your dictionary next to your bed. So I'm really glad we covered that. What do you use? You just make up your own words? Like Donald, I mean, Donald Trump, is that, are alternative facts, alternative definitions? Okay, great. All right, so you're for bailout. A bailout is only if it's an airline or a bank was going to go under. Come on, a bailout's a bailout, John. All right, so federal republic, you got money in there, did you get it out, Dave? Oh no, I didn't take it out. I stuck with it. I was confident that it was going to be good. I mean, so. So do you think the banks should be regulated by the government? Yes, the banks absolutely should be regulated by the government. The government did great things after the 2008 crisis by forcing the banks to have these stress tests. Now, I've said before that, I think that the regulators failed here because they failed to do a stress test on rising interest rates. They just ignored that. They made the assumption that interest rates were going to stay low. Oops. Well, but now they're going to, I think revisit that. I think the other question is, are they going to regulate the smaller banks? And that could be an issue because it's going to increase, you know, trickle down to the consumers. So that's a trickier one. But large banks absolutely have to be regulated by the government. So what do you think about the $30 billion rescue of a first Republic Bank? Of the banks taking care of the banks? I love your point on that. They keep it in the family. The banks, we're going to take care of this. And especially Jamie Diamond. You know, Jamie Diamond, he said he didn't need the bailout from the government in 2008. The government forced him to take it. He was one of the few, but. He said he never should have bought Bear Stearns either. They forced them to buy it. They said, you're going to buy Bear Stearns. And so, you know, credit to him for saying, hey, we don't need the government. We're going to step in. We can keep it in the family. I think too much regulation is bad. I would agree with that. But it's got to be a balance there. Absolutely. The government has to regulate the financial institutions. To me, the big question now is, should they say, hey, all deposits are going to be backstopped if you invest in treasuries or something like that? I mean. So should the government also regulate the big tech companies? No, no. Government sucks at regulating big tech. It's just a completely different situation of big tech. You know, if Amazon, you know, if Microsoft fails to see the internet and misses the boat or IBM, you know, fails to downsize and capitalize on the PC trend because they're trying to hold onto their monopoly and they fail, you know, so what? I mean, I think it's different than the banking system. And this is where I love what, you know, JP Morgan and others are doing because they're saying, hey, this is really important that we take care of our own because the banking system is, well, it's the banking system. It's the financial system affects so many people. Big tech, leave big tech alone unless they're breaking the law. If they're breaking the law, they should be punished. Big tech kind of affects people too. It's a good debate, but I definitely not force, I'm not for any government regulation personally. So that's my feeling. We'll see. But the banking thing is unique. And I think this is a moment in time where the velocity of digital, the run on the bank is just an adult version of what happened at GameStop. That bunch of Reddit threads got together and put a run on the hedge fund. So this new dynamic of velocity, Dave, and crowd sourcing collective intelligence and movement is interesting. This is something to deal with now. There is a school of thought, John, that says, you know, let the banks fail. There was a school of thought that said that in 2008. I don't know. I'm not there because I think we could probably still be in the depression if that happened. I mean, that's a lot of pain for people. I do, I am concerned about the debt levels because the government doesn't have, the Fed doesn't have many knobs to turn anymore. But I think, you know, run on the bank, people losing their life savings. That's, I'm not for that. I mean, I know people who worked at Silicon Valley Bank who had their entire life upended and lost everything. And they're just employees. They weren't the CEOs taking out the big, because CEOs and some of the top management took out millions before the crash. But there are people like have equity in that bank and they're broke. That's different. There's no bailout for them. The stock market has inherent risks. Sticking your money in the bank shouldn't have the same risk as the stock market. If you invest in SVB, you know, you gotta do your homework. I mean, SVB wasn't really a consumer bank, Dave. It was really more for startups and venture funds. Their deposits were, it wasn't an FDIC-like bank. It wasn't like they had grandma in there. It was like big money. Kind of like First Republic was for wealth and big funds. Silicon Valley Bank was the same on the other side. So their makeup was a little bit different bank. It wasn't a consumer bank. Yeah, but anybody could invest in it is all I'm saying. I mean, the retail investor could invest in SVB or First Republic. They could buy the stock. And if they lost their money, I mean, it's down, you know, first republic's down, I don't know, 70% this month. So, hey, retail investor's got hurt. I'm not saying they should get bailed out. I do think if you're going to bail out, the banks are too big to fail. You're going to bail out the big banks that you should backstop SVB and protect all these startups. And you know, the residual effect is VCs. I don't have as much compassion for the VCs because they'll figure it out. But the startups, I have a lot of- And how about the employees who work at Silicon Valley Bank? They're not backed out. They know, they're not bailed out. They lost everything. The equity in the firm. So they have, you know, SVB is a holding company. SVB financial trading company is a holding company. Silicon Valley Bank had multiple kinds of divisions. They had a capital division. They had an investment division and they had a bank. The bank was the bank for startups. Those people who work there are not bailed out. They're lost everything. So what are you saying? They should have bailed out the bank? What I'm saying is, is that by treatment of the 08 and 2020, it should have been, it should be a real bailout. That's my semantic point was bailout by the definition of the government bailing out the banks that were too big to fail, they said, and the airlines too big to fail. I think this Silicon Valley Bank was one of those situations where by the unique makeup of the customer base, they should have bailed out the bank. That's a different argument. That's a different argument you're making. Let's talk about that. Well, that's what I'm saying. You're saying the scope of the bailout should have been widened. If you're saying that. Yeah, and this is why everyone was dancing around the semantics of the word bailout and reacting kind of like the way you did. Talking about there. I mean, Silicon applying that we're out to lunch. When reality is the semantic word of bailout, you're right, they saved the company and they'd kind of saved the depositors, but they didn't save the company. The company went under. That's not a bailout. Are you saying they should have? Are they saying? I think with the CEO who sold the shares and those assholes, they should be looked at. But I think the people who worked at Silicon Valley Bank, it was kind of a cog in the wheel in its unique way, should have been bailed out fully. Equity holders included. And they should have been punished for the malpractice of the not hedging properly and taking care of that interest rate shift. I mean, everybody saw it coming. That's the problem was again, it's other consequences. I think at the right hand, one side's saying, hey, that's the government's problem. The government say no, it's the bank's problem. So I'm just saying that everyone's arguing about this bailout term. I'm just saying semantics matter. So my position is they should have to go all the way in the bailout. They should say the equity holders should. Okay, so you admit it was a bailout. Words matter too. Of course. Now I think we finally have some common ground here that the bailout was for the startups and the depositors and obviously the VCs that were backing them. You're arguing that the bailout should have had a wider scope and included the bank itself. That's an interesting. Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. And the Wall Street side of it's like, they look at the trading stock, which went to zero or it's halted because it's under receivership of the bank. So okay, they go chapter 11. That makes sense. Like 2008, the other bank in Washington thing went down. So cool. But there's no bailout for that. But the equity holders at the bank, the employees, I think they should have been bailed out. That's unfortunate. And the run in the bank, whether it was caused by VCs or bad actors, nobody can prove that. And so that debate is going on as well. So the bailout caught my attention because I saw your comment to Sorkin. I saw his tweet as well. And I saw this, a lot of people saying, no, no, it's not a real bailout. And then I said, well, what does that even mean? So, and then looking at it, you look at the 2008 and 2020 airlines in particular in 2020, the pandemic basically crushed the airline business. But did the hotels get bailed out? But wait, it's a different type of question, but a different type of bailout, no question. But are you saying that you said the equity holders should have been bailed out? So if I'm a retail investor in SVB and the stock drops or a first republic gets crushed, you're saying how would you bail out the equity? So Goldman Sachs got bailed out in the crisis in 2008. No one got fired, the company didn't go out of business. Morgan Stanley didn't go out of business. Yeah, but what do you mean the equity holders? Morgan Stanley actually became a bank actually. What do you mean the equity holders? What do you mean by the equity holders? The owners, the stock owners, the people who own it, people who work with it. How do you bail out stock owners? You're gonna get, you mean bail out in the sense that you keep the institution going. So it's still a public company. Even though you're not saying they should have backstopped their loss, right? They're gonna lose money. Yeah, just keep the company around. They should have bailed the company out with more on the equity side. But right now the Biden position and Lee Yellen's position when the Sunday news was, we're not gonna bail out the equity holders. That's just the depositors. That's it. Should they have used taxpayer money to do that in your opinion? Yeah, I'm just pointing out the semantics of it. Oh, no, that's a key question. I'm not sure. That's why the Biden administration is saying no, because should they have used taxpayer money like they did in 2008? That was taxpayer money. You know, I don't really know. And I don't have the pay grade to understand that level. But the commentary that I'm seeing and for me is like, yeah, how much would that have been? It's not trillions. I mean, oh wait, it was trillions, right? So that was different. And then there's different kind of levels of scenarios. It's not trillions here. I got a text this morning from one of my bond guys who sent me a chart from Muhammad Al-Aryan. He's on a rant. And it shows the discount window for the Federal Reserve primary credit lending in the recession, it was like 100 billion. In the pandemic, it was like 50 billion. And then now it's like 150 billion. So I was like, what's a discount window? Discount window functions as a safety valve and relieving pressures in reserve markets. Extensions of credit can help alleviate liquidity strains at a depository institution in the banking system as a whole. This is setting new records in terms of the discount window. So, but cut back to the question of should it be taxpayer money? That to me is a tougher one, John. It's a tough pill to swallow. I'm with you on that. I don't really know how I feel about it. That's why I was getting into the whole semantic conversation of what the hell does a bailout mean? Because you know, the definition that you posted is, you know, makes sense, but there's a lot of nuanced points here. For instance, there are a lot of regional banks are getting killed. First Republic just announced that they're gonna, just 15 minutes ago, they're gonna suspend their dividend. Stocks plummeted. You got First Republic, Pack West Bank Corp, Zion's, Fifth, Third Bank Corp and Key Corp. I got a capital call due to First Republic. I'm like, okay, I'll wait a couple of days. Yes. That those, that venture funds, you know, these LPs, it's gonna be very interesting. Again, I don't know how I feel about it. I guess I'm not an expert. I'm not gonna claim to be, I never said I was a Vax expert when an anti-vaxxing thing was going around. I'm not a bank expert, but I know how banks work. But to me, the banks are taking care of themselves. That's obvious. And that's the question. Is that a system that's worth, that's working? Not really. Not looking good right now. So the regulation question is the legit one. And then, you know, taxpayer benefit. If the cost involves, it's gonna be interesting to see. But it's definitely gonna be reverb. There's gonna be a real impact for Silicon Valley for a long time to come. I think this is gonna cement what I was calling a depression. Last podcast, when we talked about this, I said on the podcast, I said, this is gonna have, you know, a real impact. And I was, I remember, I talked about, I traded my position around on this recession. I think it's a lot worse. It looks a lot more like a depression than it does a, you know, recession with a soft landing. So- So I kind of disagreed with you, but let's talk about that. So you were saying this is worse than.com, I think you were saying. And I was like, I didn't see it that way. You're still believe that. I felt like when the banks, when the government, you know, short up the depositors, I said, okay, there it is. I was right, John was wrong. But I will tell you, I think there's ripple effects that are gonna come here that we don't know about yet. And so you could be right. I mean, we don't know. I mean, there's a hard landing, there's a soft landing, and then there's no landing at all where the economy can outpace inflation. Okay, so I'm just not seeing the economy outpacing inflation right now and the Fed's job to do a soft landing. As you know, Dave, because you watch this closely is to pull back inflation, okay, to land softly. And guess what? That inflation interest rates, look what happened with the banks. So is this a tell sign? Is this a signal that this is not a soft landing? Well, in the Fed says that they're not worried about the debt. They said a couple of years ago, they weren't worried about inflation, that inflation was transitory. So I don't trust anything these guys, the economists say. They just don't know. And they can't, you know, people talk about black swans. Is this another black swan? There are blacks. It's like black swans is like, it's like the weather is all around us. So I don't know, John, I think there are some unpredictable ripple effects of this. And so I hope you're wrong, but you may end up being right. What do you think, depression or recession? I think this is going to be a long tech. I do think in the sense, you're right in the sense that the 2000post.com, post 9-11 really, you remember from 01 to like 04, 05, even through the Google IPO, that was kind of the catalyst to the slow comeback. I think it's going to be a very long kind of tech sideways. I think stock prices are going to be sideways for a long, long time, maybe two or three years. I could see that happening. But I still, I'm a long-term optimist for tech. I think innovation is going to, productivity is still going to pound through it, but it could take a long time. Yeah, I mean, I don't, I mean, depression is a hard word. I mean, it's just to grapple with that concept. The last real depression was 29 to 39. We've never had a 10-year run of multiple town turns. So I mean, I just don't see that. And you know, our next segment on round the AI hype really points to that. Let's get into that, get into that. Because, you know, no landing at all assumes that the economy is going to grow faster than inflation. So are we set up for, you know, that with the tech scene, Dave? I mean, this is the next question. You know, the AI hype is booming. Inflation is to me the one thing that scares me. You got to stamp down inflation. And the only tool they have to do that is rising rates. You increase rates, you hurt tech. You sex all about growth. So, but you know, we've lived through, you know, long periods of high interest rates, you and I both. And you know, I mean, tech was a different business back then. I think, John, I do think large language models, GPD foundation models, whatever you want to call them is this new wave. And I think I feel like we're jumping S curves. It takes a while, as you know, to jump S curves because the beginning of the S curve isn't big enough to offset the existing stuff. So that's why I think it could be a couple of years before we see another kind of rocket ship in tech. Well, I think the AI thing will open up an interesting conversation around, will this be that jump? We're going to get into the AI thing, Dave, but this economy with inflation is no hard landing. But again, last podcast and up multiple podcasts, we kind of brought up the crypto angle, right? So, you know, alternative to the banking system is if the banks are crashing and they're not getting the job done in their system and the government won't regulate them, guess who fills the void, an opportunity for crypto? And I've always said crypto should replace the banking system. The plumbing's getting there, then it kind of went sideways. So the question is, can crypto fill the void for the banking and is that going to be a path? And crypto's not having a great time these days too. And as I said, I think crypto is kind of fading and in hype, obviously, and success and AI is booming. So, you know, is this an opportunity for the cryptos? Is it the second wind? Can they take it as well? Then they can, can they suck it up? Absolutely. Gold is bouncing around at an all-time high and Bitcoin's rallied almost 40% since this SBB news. I say, get unbanked, is the message. You know, you can spread your assets around, you should, I guess, in $250,000 increments across a bunch of banks, go for it. But you got to put some crypto in the mix. I'm still a believer, I believe in the premise. I've never sold all my crypto, I keep adding more. The kids are going to have it, I hope. I think Bitcoin at some point is going to go to $100,000, I do. I think crypto has an opportunity here and it must fill the void. It has to step up. I think coin bases of the world and the blockchain aspect of it is pretty compelling and they should get on board. And they just got to get all that crap out of the system, all the stable coins that were shit coins. They got to get them all cleaned out and they got to clean out the tokens. That whole token fraud business has got to be taken care of. So I think there's a little bit of clean up to do on crypto, Dave, but the basis of Bitcoin and Ethereum, I think are the foundational elements and are going to be around for a long, long time. You did some great work. And I was with you when we were doing our crypto tour and we paid attention to it in more detail as a catalyst. But we met some of the smartest people doing some really interesting, they were mission-driven, great developers, yeah, a lot of scams, a lot of hype. That's always the way. But the fundamental idea and the innovation model around blockchain and crypto as a potential funding mechanism and a game theory and game theory meets cryptography. To me, those fundamentals are still there, cutting out waste, cutting out the middleman, as I said before, I think foundation models like GPT and crypto are going to come together. I think a lot of that automation and cutting out the waste, I think those themes are parallel. Yeah, I do. I think it's a great opportunity and you're exactly right. That fraud aspect of it was really a hype. And I think we're going to see that with AI too, Dave. I mean, I think the movie is now, all the new promise, the new technology gets out there and then gets dirty quick and then gets cleaned up and hopefully reset. I think crypto will have a reset in the sense of getting back on the trajectory of being a global financial and business and economic engine that it is. And it's decentralized and it's immutable. Those characteristics, if they can get the developer action going back on with say Ethereum and get real good developer DApps going again, that's going to be critical. So we'll keep watching that. But again, AI, AI, we're seeing that same movie. All the alpha geeks go there, some coolness pops up and then it will get dirty and ugly. And I think that's the question. I just posted on Twitter to Owen Malick who shared to Rick Krim, who's a friend of ours from the web 2.0 days and he's in France and he posted the coverage of the flash insurrection that kind of happened in France because they raised taxes every time they raised taxes in France. They protest, everyone strikes, they throw stuff on the streets and they protest basically, they call it the insurrection. But the photos were manipulated with the new technology and the AI tech. And this is misinformation and it's best it looks so compelling, it looks like a war zone. So I asked the question, what will be the big thing that will cause us to slow down with AI? Will there be an event of some important consequence that makes us pause? As the member Twitter when the plane landed on the Hudson River, oh, I get how Twitter works. People talk really fast to each other. Is there gonna be a moment like that in AI where people go, whoa, slow down? Is it a death? Is it fraud? Is it an election tampering? Is it some sort of bad information that turns into a crisis or a mass problem? This is gonna be interesting because we're in a moment of great exploration with AI and with chat GPT launching for this week, it's going beyond the large language model to multimodal. You got images, you got video and text audio and then just AI, image, mid-journey, V5, stunning results. Photorealistic images in five-fingered hands, it's like, it's really compelling, creepy, it's almost too perfect, Dave. So you're gonna have a lot of content mills popping up with the chat GPT, you're gonna have a lot of fake images. It's gonna be amazing to see how this exploration creatively, either trainwrecks somewhere or advances. What do you think? You're seeing, you're gonna see the digital twinning of everything. And then, the whole last five years or whatever, fake news, we're gonna enter a new era of faking people out. You've talked about deep fakes, John. I remember, gosh, it was almost 10 years ago you were talking about deep fakes and kind of predicting how that was gonna affect the world. And I mean, I think we're gonna have to use AI to detect AI. You've seen that now with chat GPT, right? AI could detect if there was chat GPT signature on there. I think, you've been talking about GPT-4. This is a, I did a break analysis on this today. It's a two-edge sword, particularly for automation platforms. Like a company like UiPath crushed its earnings. Stock was up like 17% after the news. And then you got Microsoft Power Automate, which is their RPA, very well positioned and foundation models coming in. And it's gonna suck up a lot of these low-end RPA use cases and cannibalize some of the traditional RPA. That's a very narrow example of the disruption. But the other thing is, what's the response from AWS and Google who are the other big guys in AI? And I would also say, China, I felt like it was leading in AI. And now I feel like the US is back in the game. I mean, not that US was ever out, but it's like US was holding serve here. You know, Dave, this is like interesting. You know, the chat GPT-4 you mentioned, it's gonna get pretty weird quick, I think. It's gonna be interesting to see. I mean, I just, it's impressive. It's just so damn cool. Like it's great that large language models will get more reasoning to it. I saw a developer write video games from our days. Asteroids, Space Invaders, you know, Pong, Breakout, literally writing the code in real time for video games. So, you know, low code, no code to, you know, integrating it in to products. I mean, Microsoft announced, obviously because their relationship with open AI, it's definitely Microsoft one and Amazon zero right now in terms of AI, relative to the hype factor for sure. But their open AI thing is just early innings. But actually Microsoft is behind in my opinion compared to Google and Amazon on AI. We look at the code that they've been writing. The open AI was a relationship that Microsoft put together and we'll get into them laying off their ethics team in a bit, but, you know, Microsoft's chat GPT on Bing is compelling. They're integrating it into all their apps, TowerPoint, Excel, Word and Teams. So you're going to have this AI enabled thing called Copilot, right? Which is, you know, the... Yeah, well, so they might have been behind in tech. I would kind of agree, but it's like they leaped ahead in the business model now, John. I mean, that's, they're so well positioned with Azure. Like I said, they're Office Suite and now chat GPT. I mean, go ahead. It's a huge jump. I mean, first of all, it's a big jump. So the one nothing lead, in my opinion, is huge because the jump was so massive. Just think about the logic of this. You know, we love AWS. We're a customer with the best tools compared to Azure for us. And a lot of companies fall into that same category that Amazon web services is by far better cloud than Azure. Okay, over the years, Azure has been really making ground up on the cloud. Now their cloud's getting better. They've been really working hard over the past, say five years and three years in particular and made great strides on CapEx. It's well documented. FitC's got all the numbers over at his blog on platformics. This move is so good for Microsoft because it gets people like me and other AWS loyal customers to thinking, I'm going to get an Azure server spun up because just to get access to the API. And so this is huge. This is a subtle but important chess move that has benefits downstream for Azure. Not only for the Amazon, I mean, a Microsoft brand Bing has got major 100 million concurrent active users. Bing is up. It's going to make their products more relevant and sexier and cooler and better, right? The suite of office, the old office now in the cloud is cloud, they're cloud SaaS apps now. Okay, not only do they kick ass there, they're going to get some cloud action. Customers, developers. Absolutely. You know, John, this is huge impact. Huge impact. After, right after super cloud, we did a breaking analysis. You, Sarbjit and I on the chat's VPT and the premise was, at least I put forth they're not going to have first mover advantage. You didn't necessarily agree with that. I'm rethinking it because they've now, they're getting so much early data to fine tune and train their models, learn what not to do the whole, you know, ethics thing. We're going to talk about that, but they're just building up a first mover advantage. So I'm going to have to- Well, I mean, this is what's great about, this is why I love what we do. And I wish I was 25 again. And with this market is all a new text killer. Great. We've said this on theCUBE many times. And I believe it to be true. And I think it's playing out to be true. The competitive advantage, old school, business school logic of how people compete for their value is changing. You got open source is no longer open source kills the whole proprietary software game. So that's gone. So hello, open source. You have scale with the cloud. So my thesis is, and my premise has always been the competitive advantage locked in is scale. And then the differentiation or economies of scale come from things like you just mentioned, the learnings. So how fast can Microsoft learn with open AI over say AWS who's certainly going to get into this game? Oh yeah. Does that trajectory give them better advantage on the scale, on the learnings, on the data? And of course, as you know, in the cloud, cloud players see all the workloads. So they understand how to optimize. So there's a new kind of a first mover vibe where on paper you scratch your head and go, I think 150 million, I could replicate that. Well, you can on paper, like I've always said about Reddit. I mean Reddit's open source software, but no, you can't replicate Reddit because it's got scale. And it's hard to kind of a bad example, but you get the idea. No, it's good example. They built a moat with that scale and that community. It's a moat. And so that to me is why I think open AI. Now the only thing that could change the game on open AI is if they make a bad bet. And this is what I was talking with John Truro with Madrona Venture Partners on theCUBE a couple of weeks ago. If there's more foundational models coming in and more multimodal AI tooling and platforms, then the question is, do you go monolithic or you integrate? So if you're open AI, you got to say to yourself we're not going to be the only language model in town, large language model in town. So the question is, if they make a strategic bet and go the wrong way, meaning- You're saying it could be a better product that comes out. Or if they take an arrogant position and say, there's only one large language model to rule the world. That's basically betting on one centralized set of services. Other people are saying, no, it's going to be open and very democratized where integration and data fabric and semantic data layers will merge in where I can interface with language models across different providers. And it's not as easy as saying Android versus the iPhone which some people were saying, which is kind of a good way to look at some of the proprietary large language models out there that have combined hardware with it. So in the old days, you have to have hardware bolted onto anything with AI. Okay, that's an old school technique and people are doing that today in these foundational models where hardware and GPUs are bundled directly into the software that makes them the iPhone-like, very purpose-built. Question is, is that going to be coexisting with an open source framework where everything's open and you can decouple software from hardware? Well, we know decoupling hardware from software is a good thing, but maybe it's not. That's a good question. Sometimes it isn't. That's the question. Is there an iPhone- Data, right? I mean, in that world, it's a good thing to have engineered systems. It's engineered exactly. And you don't hear anyone talking about the iPhone and Apple having privacy problems. I mean, they got some of the best security on the planet. I love the biometric stuff, right? And I don't have to worry about two-factor authentication too much with Apple. So Apple doesn't get a lot of enough credit in my opinion for their security days. So that's my take on the whole where Microsoft could go wrong. What about this other topic we sort of touched on about Microsoft laying off most of its ethics team? You know, that is like saying, hey, if you're going to build a nuclear bomb, you don't want protesters in your fucking company. I mean, look at Google, right? Is it, are they firing the Hull monitors so they can get the job done in a very opaque ethical manner? That's what I'm saying. You know, Dave, this is going to be it. Is it a page out of Facebook? Like profits before ethics? Remember, Google had a big protest from their employees, not the bid on government contracts where AI was involved. I do. So, yeah. Let's take a- Activism employees, right? Maybe they're, who knows? Let me take the other side of the argument. I actually think I can make an argument that this makes sense for Microsoft because it's like having a separate customer success. I went negative on it right away. Like, sorry. No, I sort of did. When I first saw it, I'm like, what? This is like, you're kidding me. But then I started thinking about it again. Why would they do this? Like, my example is, you know how companies have a customer success team, which is like idiotic? Customer success has to be the responsibility of who's ever delivering, not some separate group that you can say, oh, it's their part. I think it's the same with AI ethics. It can't be a bolt on in somebody else's responsibility. Now, why would you do the layoff? Why wouldn't you integrate these folks into the product teams? Maybe you're right. Well, no, I was just gonna let you, I finished and I was gonna get to that exact point. Let's look at ethics and AI together and separate. AI has gone through the longest drought of momentum. You can go back, pick a year. I picked 1990, maybe 88, maybe 86. MIT, Northeastern, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, the name of all the top schools. 83. Okay, let's just pick 1990. It's a better year. Easier math, easier math. 1990, and when would you say that AI just kind of picked up? Would you say 2006, 2020? Let's pick a year. 1990 to say 2020. I'd say 2015. Okay, there it is. That is a drought. The AI never stopped. So you had people working on it. There wasn't enough hardware. Now there's no cloud computing. Data had to be rule-based, natural language. Processing was like elementary. And AI never really had that moment where they could be enabled. And I think cloud computing did that. That's my take on it. Now the ethics team here could have either been old school people acting like a policy team to advise in lobby government. We're good. We're not evil. We're big good Microsoft. We're big, but we're good. Or AI wasn't ready. So my thinking is, in my reading this, and I think that we'll dig into it, Dave, with Microsoft, is that they actually have real AI, things happening, called chat GPT and Bing and co-pilot. So the ethics team, if they're not working on products, what good are they? They don't need a policy team. They need theory. Do they need to have people in a room making up ethics theory? Or just go work on the products. So from what I've heard, and the comment from Microsoft is that they said they're putting more energy in the product teams, building services. So to me, what this probably happened was, it was probably some policy team that would go to the big events and present conferences, papers, and talk about how clean and ethical Microsoft is, and they're taking an approach. And the executive probably just said, hey, let's put it, and we're into the product teams. Let's get the products better. Yeah, I mean, it's like security. It's got to be a fundamental component from the, it's got to be built from the ground up. It can't be an afterthought. And so, but it's still interesting to me that none of these folks, whether they were hall monitors or ethics experts or whatever, were integrated back into the product team. It was just laid off. My first negative story jumping my head was, okay, that's like, you know, you want to get away with murder, you know, you don't want the police around, you know? So you want to kill the hall monitors. You don't want any noise, you know? So I think it's a focus issue, but that's where my head went. Like, why would you kill an AI anything if AI is the next big thing? So that's the question that Microsoft probably doesn't want to address with PR because it's a public relations disaster for them. If AI is so important, we all know it's not yet like fully baked. It makes mistakes. Ethics is the number one thing that needs to be worked on. Why would you kill the team? Yeah. That doesn't make any sense. It makes zero sense. Unless it was a fake team. You just made sense of it. Maybe it was the wrong skill sets for what they wanted to do. And they didn't need the friction. They needed the speed and, you know, I... I gotta tell you, the Microsoft product teams are going berserk, Bing is better than it was. They got more traffic. I guarantee you Excel's gonna be kick-ass with this. You can do macros. You can do words, gonna make right papers for you. Okay. Think about Excel. Think Excel. I mean, I used to use Excel every day, all day. I was one of the first people on the planet that trained in Lotus 123 slash file retrieve. I remember it well. I was a master. I go into Excel today. I'm like, where is that again? Everything's changed. I would just love to be able to interact with Excel with natural language, with the English language and have it do what David Floyer can do. And that would be amazing. How about an EBITDA target? Give me an income statement with 67% EBITDA. Boom, there it is, Dave. There's your spreadsheet. What's my ACV have to be? My region, I mean, oh, it's gonna be amazing when they... The ethics conversation is simple here with AI. A lot of people are gonna have their jobs go away. And that's a fact. I mean, you look at ChatGPT4, they got tax code. You can write software, apps. I mean, it's going to accelerate all the software mechanisms. That's the word Andy Jassy used to wear it all the time. This mechanism's in place. People are gonna be unleashed from the hassle of the blocking and tackling drudgery of their day jobs. And if AI can do things like do the heavy lifting on this stuff, it's gonna open up creativity. Now, the short term is gonna be a massive amount of shit hitting the market. Fake images, everyone's gonna be pumping out content. You're gonna see the rise of content mills. That's gonna be my prediction, Dave. You're gonna see that come back, the next listicles. Give me 10 top reasons why. All this kind of content is gonna come out out of nowhere. You're gonna see really a surge of vanilla content. Experts are gonna come out of nowhere. Fake everything is coming. So, you know. A lot of legit activity. Think about legals, paralegals. Think about what paralegals do. I mean, this is the same thing over and over and over. I mean, if you look at, I've said before, within five years, virtually every job is gonna be AI powered with very few exceptions. And the short term, but what's gonna do though is gonna have two impacts. Like you said, it's gonna make people who are okay at something become better. People who are good at something become great. On the other hand, you're gonna have the perverse reaction to that incentive is to be fake everything. I'm a fake writer. I'm a fake journalist. I'm a fake novelist, fake Excel spreadsheet if they don't have the intellectual capital to do it. So to me, this is gonna shift the narrative to reputation and intellectual capital. The reason why these mechanisms were existing was to serve a purpose. Whether you're a PR firm or a law firm, there's a job to do. And if that job is no longer needed, you're gone. So there are taxes, they'll still need a lot of jobs. It's gonna shift. This is the same exact argument we dealt with 12 years ago, Dave. Remember, bank tellers are gonna go away from the ATM machine. Well, guess what? That never happened. So they actually increased in more tellers. So people will lose their jobs and I don't know, I can't remember last time I went into a bank. They're everywhere. Maybe it's a West Coast thing. You can't protect the past and the future, I like to say. Maybe it's, no, but that was the argument that the ATM would kill the branch offices. Well, it wasn't the ATM. It was just online banking, right? I mean, my branch offices, especially that and COVID killed the branch office. Right. There's plenty of branch offices. Wells Fargo has more branch offices than ever before. But I think the point is that jobs are gonna be lost, but gains are we made on the other side. So to me, I'm very bullish on the fact that the heavy lifting in jobs will be automated and that's gonna sharpen the focus of value. And that's gonna be intellectual proprietary knowledge, intellect, and I think AI scales intellect, Dave. And I think there's an opposite side of it where it's dangerous like the France images that were posted on Twitter. I just posted, that's dangerous. But it comes down to the topic we had on our first pod was education. Like you had North Carolina saying, we outlawing chat GPT can't use it. And you had the Wharton professor who posted a medium saying, I'm insisting that my students learn how to use generative models, generative AI and learn how to train it and progressively prompt it. You know, you use it all the time. So do I, you know what that means. And so you have to learn how to use these systems. And this is just the beginning, we're an inning one and it had first happening. Yeah, and I think that let's, you know, who makes money from all this, right? That's gonna be the new apps. So it's gonna be fun to see. I just think we're gonna have this Cambrian explosion of creativity. But there's going to be a moment, Dave, that someone that's gonna have consequences of important consequence that's gonna make everyone go, wait a minute, hold on. That's the question on the table. I don't know what the answer is, is it different opinions? Is it, what is that, what is that plane on the Hudson moment that Twitter had? Remember Twitter had that moment where everyone was taking pictures from their tweeting there, themselves on the wing of the airplane on the Hudson River? Yes, I think it's gonna be like a hundred thousand or millions of those moments that are aha moments, Andy Cunningham, you know, getting to aha. There's gonna be aha moments throughout society that is gonna create that Cambrian explosion. What do you think the first one that's gonna cause people to slow down saying, wait a minute, AI is not as good as it promises? Election tampering? I was just gonna say, it's the election. You know, 2016 was ridiculous. And then 2020, it was like, oh my God, I think 2024 is gonna be, you ain't seen nothing yet. Yeah, Brendan, producer, Brendan, our producer, you know, was saying that it's gonna be these memes, you know, you got the president playing Call of Duty together. Like, I mean, all these things are out there. You can fake anything. So I think you're gonna have a lot of new and misinformation that's gonna be disguised as content. And there's gonna be a need for kind of a, approved arbiter, you know, you know, who's gonna determine what's real, truthful and reputable. So- I think the machine arbiters are gonna be slower than it's like hackers. The hackers are gonna always outpace, you know, the defenders. And I think we're gonna push AI to new limits before the machine can protect us from the machine. Well, I'm hopeful that it's gonna be an arms race of goodness for the cloud players. Microsoft's won nothing over the others right now with their big push. And we'll see how Amazon responds with this. I think there's gonna be a strong response from Google and AWS and others. I think you're gonna see a major surge of new stuff. It's gonna be, again, a Cambridge explosion. Getting back to the enterprise, Dave. You know, where's the hot things? You know, I took notice of your breaking analysis last week that you dropped on Friday, Saturday morning. It got washed out with all the SVB stuff. But you mentioned Databricks, right? You brought up this, you know, cautionary, kind of like question on Databricks. I know you got a story about Snowflake in the Works and others, but you brought up this kind of approach where you talked about this data-centric tech stack with a semantic layer for transforming business. And you kind of called out Databricks, are they in the right path? Kind of a question mark, it wasn't really a hit piece of any kind to Databricks. In fact, I thought it was kind of complimentary of Databricks, but you brought up this shift at George Gilbert and you had a great riff and that post was long and detailed. What was your main takeaway? Was it automation is changing and multiple sources of data? Was it the shift to data-centric stacks? Is it the death of the old school BI and data warehouse to the new AI ML cases? What was it all about? It's a confluence of a number of factors, several of which you mentioned. And by the way, it got great traction despite all the SBB noise. I mean, essentially what you have is, you're right, Databricks has been incredibly successful. I actually wrote about them again today. I showed some data on some emerging companies and they are just up into the right. They got tremendous momentum. They're sort of similar spending momentum in the survey base as Snowflake, but their dominance has been on AI tooling that has really been appealing to data scientists and data engineers and we get back to GPT. A lot of these foundation models can essentially supplant or even replace what the Databricks value proposition is. And so there's some real concerns that we had in George, collaborating with George is unbelievable to go so deep on this where we're shifting from a world that is sort of app-centric to one that's data-centric where the data previously is locked inside the apps. And now today data is going to be sort of ubiquitous but the elements of that data are going to be all coherent. So the example is Uber. You got drivers, you got riders, you got maps, locations, ETAs. Those are all different data products or data elements that are all coherent. And to make them coherent, you've got to have a system that has a semantic layer to connect all those dots. And so that's where DBT Labs comes in at scale, reached out to us and said, Hey, Dave, you know us, we're part of this equation. We got a briefing with at scale coming up before we do the Snowflake piece. So it's a highly, again, GPT highly disruptive technology to many, many areas and we focused in on this one. Yeah, I thought it was a great piece. I mean, my takeaway was that when I kind of zoom out and kind of go board level kind of impact, it's just that the technology is continuing to evolve with cloud scale edge. We're seeing the super cloud vision that we've been talking about the shift from application centric siloed shit to data centric stacks, you know, and shifting that to automating processes when you got AI around the corner. So, you know, as you know, companies have all these silos out there in the outskirts of their company, but who has put at the core, the Uber example, to me highlights that that company puts data at the core of their company and they embed logic in the data rather than the reverse, right? So that was big thing, you know, it's a data centric stack, data's at the core, embedding logic in the data versus the reverse. And so that to me was the high order bit for me. The second thing that I liked about your post and I love to get your thoughts because you mentioned at scale was because they're pushing the semantic layer, right? So we've talked about way before that they even were around, I think. Annotating data, right, with semantic layer kind of gets applications to a point where the data elements have common meaning and coherency, right? You mentioned that. So, you know, whoever unlocks this, okay, is going to unlocks the data so they can do that. They're going to have an integrated data solution, right? And so this is the thing. Now, the question I have is when you add new layers to the stack, Dave, how do you support the current applications? How do you figure out what to buy, when to buy it? Is it throw away the old, bring in the new? So I buy the main premise. I like the annotating the data piece, unlocking it and annotating it, making it common and coherent. But is adding a new layer to the stack to support the applications? Does it present more challenges than today's tools? It's a great question, John. I think it's a great question. You take the two best examples, Databricks and Snowflake, they've each got their domains. I think they're both going to evolve and reinvent themselves and be very, very successful. I think both companies, especially Snowflake's got, you know, they've got a, they're public, they've got a big lead in simplifying data warehouse, et cetera. But there's new technologies in the horizon that basically they bring the capabilities of a graph database and its expressiveness with the query capabilities of SQL. Today, graph databases, you got to go backwards to query them. And this gets down to completely new database architectures down to how you lay data out on the disk, how you lay it out in memory. It's not a cat, it can't just throw memory and cash at the problem. It's got to be a whole rethink and that's going to be very small initially. People are going to ignore it. You know, use cases are going to be very narrow, but that could be a new capability that we see in conjunction with all this foundation model stuff that's coming out. Yeah, I mean, I think you, I think your post was clever with the Uber example because everyone can relate to Uber. They've, if you haven't used the Uber, people probably live in the Stone Age, technically speaking. So everyone knows what Uber does. They've seen the car moving and they have all the addresses. And so it says everything built into, it's a really integrated model. So I think that was very clever to use Uber and other leading companies like AWS and Airbnb as what future data platforms look like. So if you're watching this and listening to this pod, check out that breaking analysis on the Databricks future data platform. And just real quick, I asked George Gilbert, I said, well, just it was a setup question, but doesn't this technology already exist? Doesn't Uber have it? He said, yeah, they had to develop to themselves with, you know, super engineers. The opportunity is for technology companies to build that horizontal layer. And that's gold. Well, a lot of stuff that Uber does and Lyft, by the way, is in open source. So CNCF, cloud native stuff has it. So KubeCon is coming up in Europe going to be there. They're all there, but you got to build it together. But I think it's the future of the data platform. They've actually built it. So you got to actually deploy it. And I think that's the post that's readable is the future of the data platform. Because let's face it, we live in a world where it's all about data, right? So if you, with so much being generated every second, you got to have a platform that can store it, manage it, analyze it. So that's not an easy answer in this world because, again, the technology's shifting. So if you want to know about the future of a data platform, read that post. It's a good open move to start having the conversation, Dave. And I'm excited by this because, you know, we've been talking about data platforms since Hadoop. So to me, it was like, we're back on the data discussion in a really relevant way because it's not just because it's all about our life. It's because there's some cool tech happening, right? And structural change. And you guys lay out the three layers of the platform in the post, but this is why it's so important. Does the AI, which is based on data, is it compatible with this stuff? That's got to be answered. See, that's why I like it. I think it's so important. I think they go hand in hand. You have the tool chains today in AI, you remember Hadoop, we got killed by complexity, then Spark comes out to solve that complexity. It's still highly complex. And then add to that, and the lawyer chimed in, you know, I miss him, he comes in every now and then. AI inferencing at the edge is going to create so much data at such high volumes, it's going to need new architectures to deal with this stuff. And so, very exciting. So I just did a little chat GPT-4 on your post and just got the following mega tweet. This is the tweet that it's spot on. Tell me if this passes muster, Dave, that promotes your post. Get ready for the next era of data with these key players to watch. Hyperscalers like AWS Azure are taking their key value stores and adding a graph query engine for unified storage and graph database. DBT labs and Snowflake are simplifying data lakes and management, but the wildcard is rational.ai. Rethinking database architectures with the ease of relational power of the graph. And with the semantic layer defining common semantics for data, the next era is closer than we think. Stay ahead of the game with these players to watch. Hashtag data, hashtag tech, hashtag innovation. Chat GPT writes like it came out of the Ivy League and it just makes shit up. Does that encapsulate the story or no? Yes and no. I mean, we didn't certainly didn't say that those guys are working on that, although maybe Chat GPT is speculating. So I suppose they probably are working on bringing graph database to their team value stores. It's Chat GPT says the wildcard is rational.ai. So this is reasoning. By the way, I just did an update on who was John Furrier on Chat GPT four. It said I worked for computer land, Dave. You remember, you know, remember computer land? Did you ever work for computer land? No, I never worked for computer land. And it says I sold my company to the Eulip Packard in 2006. It went under. Oh God, it's hilarious. That's so good. It gets it right, it gets it right, but it has that they're calling it hallucinations. This is a great word. This really sounds legit. But Chat GPT is not perfect, Dave. But it got some of it right. I mean, it got a lot of it right, but it just made crap up. So that's not true and that's not true, but boy, that sounds good. It sounded like it's compelling, but that's the point. This is going to be the surge of fake shit coming, Dave. There's going to have to be semantic translation inside the so-called new reasoning answers. So this is where AI is really, this is the dangerous game right now. So it's going to be very interesting to see. I think it's going to have to go through some vetting. Someone's going to be able to tool either collective intelligence or crowdsourced or going to be vetting content. There'll be a new brand that'll emerge. Maybe it's theCUBE that can be the arbiter of truth, but like I said, it's pretty dangerous this Chat GPT. It's so good. It's almost the same. It's so good though. So, I love it. So I got to tell you, let's move on to the rant section. We went a little bit along on that story. There's a huge TikTok inspired or TikTok enabled movement where Silicon Valley and Washington lawmakers are mobilizing quietly for an anti-China tech industry position. And they're using TikTok as the stalking horse here. So what that means is that the TikTok being owned by the Chinese is being used as the tip of the spear to create an anti-China sentiment position. Dave on TikTok, the Politico breaking story is TikTok is paying a dozen of creators to visit DC. While the Wall Street Journal is reporting that a group of Silicon Valley executives, including Peter Thiel and Washington lawmakers are quietly mobilizing with lawmakers to ban China or have them anti-China position developing. It's not just TikTok. It's an alliance. Because we know in the tech industry, the networking guys have been stolen from. It's well known that the IP was been stolen in China from the U.S. companies. Because China does know R&D, they just stole one. Reminds me of that scene in Animal House. They can't do that to our pledges. Only we can do that to our pledges. And that's kind of how the U.S. got its dominance is we stole a lot of IP, but the different world now. We're in charge. So we don't like it when it happens to us. Let's see how that China relationship continues. Again, national security to economic. It's a double-edged sword, the economic benefits. It's going to be interesting to see, Dave. Well, that's my rant. I think that's going to be interesting to watch. I'm excited to see the U.S. tick up for itself and call out bad behavior if it's happening. Just got to like watch it. And other news, TikTok is, the DOJ is being reported by the New York Post, but the DOJ is probing TikTok over allegations of spying on U.S. tech journalists. Okay, well, who knows? Spying on me all they want, got nothing to hide. Yeah, just watch our videos, listen to the Cube pod. All right, Dave. Well, happy Friday, good run, great session. What's coming up here on the Cube that we got? We got RSA coming up in April. That's going to be a great event. CubeCon Europe, which is in Amsterdam, April 19th of the 21st, Delta World. Delta World, Click World. We had a great Women in Data Science event last week and International Women's Day. Just good content coming out of the Cube. We're going to discover again in June. We got Snowflake in June. We'll be busy. Yeah, we'll be busy. Well, Dave, next week, we'll be capturing all the stories. And if you're watching and listening to this podcast, let us know how we're doing, things we can do better, things we should change, what you like to see, topics, give us feedback. So we're all online, John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Ad Furrier on Twitter, Dave Vellante on Twitter. Hit us up, let us know what you think and comment, share, spread the word. Tell us what you think. Episode five coming up shortly next week.