 Hello everyone. Welcome to the Cube Pod episode 31. I'm John Furrier here with Dave Vellante, extracting the signal from the noise, going through all the top stories that we're covering and tracking. What a busy week it's been. Dave, great to see you. I'm here back in Palo Alto, and we spent some time together. I think our last pod was in your studio. It was awesome. Yeah, you were just here. Good to see you. Yeah, great to get back here. This was probably one of the busiest weeks we've seen in a while in news. A lot of stuff around stuff we've been talking about has been going viral. There's a lot of cultural action going on. You have all kinds of Amazon news because the AI madness is continuing. There's a startup dilemma with the cloud overhead in terms of the headwinds facing startups we're trying to pivot. Big Tech's balancing act right now. You've got the government going after Big Tech, which could have reverberations around. It could actually have a huge impact on how the AI trend. And so I want to get into that. I know the rant on the FTC and Amazon is going to be the AI revolutions here. And the cultural tech war is going on. And it's a huge thing. And there was an interesting thing going on at these events where you're starting to see the people choosing sides. But in the news, let's get through the news real quick. Amazons everywhere with AI, the AI madness is continuing this week at Amazon's $1.2 billion investment anthropic for a minority state. That was really the game changer. That gives them their open AI kind of vibe and peace in the puzzle open AI with Microsoft and their $10 billion. Amazon can go up to $4 billion. We're going to get into that. And you're going to love this. I know you already talked to me about the rant, but the AWS FTC lawsuit. Amazon got sued. Lena Kahn added it again. And that's going to be a huge discussion. So I don't want to waste any time. But there's 17 states. We'll discuss which states they are. That's interesting. AWS bedrock is now generally available. That's big news because just in April when they made the announcement, plus the anthropic news, as we had discussed, Amazon's not waiting Dave and Andy Jassy has been involved in both announcements. So we predicted Jassy would get involved. He is. We'll discuss that. Open AI answers with chat GPT and the enterprise and Google and Microsoft keep rolling. Microsoft had co-pilot last week and Google's got the AI chops from Google next. A lot of good feedback still coming out of that show. But Google is also under siege by the DOJ on a monopoly play. So you've got the FTC with the anti-competitive behavior with AWS and Google the monopoly. And finally, a great story is that Apple's, John Ivy, Johnny Ivy and open AI, Sam was working on the iPhone of AI. The writer strike has resolved. Fair use is going to talk about that metaverse conversation with Zuckerberg and Lex Freeman was unbelievably photo realistic. There's some awesome new metaverse stuff. And of course, Linda Yuccarino on stage at the code conference got slammed dunked by Kara Swisher. That caused all kinds of Twitter drama, but it really kind of highlights that there's a cultural war going on. And again, like I said, startups aren't paying their bills. Some are asking for reprieve. Can't does Amazon, the cloud guys shut them down, Microsoft, Amazon under test. How they do that. So ton of enterprise news. It's just Dave. I can't believe how much action AI madness continues to roll. And, you know, I know you just did a breaking analysis on this Amazon's dominance showing full, full, full force in the news and the tech tensions of 2023 with all the bullshit going on with the FTC, get the DOJ going up to Microsoft, get the cultural tech war AI in government. Yes. And open AI reportedly going to take some money off the table with a, suppose a $90 billion valuation. Obviously, you saw that. It reminds, you know, it reminds me of John. One of my high school friends, David Andonian was the president of CMGI. You remember them? So CMGI was they didn't do anything. All they did is invest in internet companies during the dot com bubble. And they, their stock price was, it was insane. I mean, you would see that thing go up like 30 or 40 points in a day. And so my friend was president, David Andonian president of CMGI. And I watched him like through the run up. He was no dumb ass. He probably took a hundred million dollars out of that company in the way up just selling his options. And I think that, you know, when things get like with Paul Martino back in 2011 called a little bubble-ish us and our friend Paul Martino. It's pretty bubble-ish us right now. And I think smart people are taking money off the table. So that's a, that's a speaking of Paul Martino, I'm meeting with him and a bunch of friends. We're going to begin LA for the Rams Eagles game. I think he's got a big suite of big parties. So I'll see Martino in LA with his, with his wife, who's running for school board, by the way, just donated to her campaign. She invented Google Google calendar and cool. And she's running for school board and she's got people like against her. Like, how can you be against someone who actually has got a degree from MIT? She's best friend with Salkon, who, I mean Khan Academy. Like, what are you kidding me? Other than their Eagles fans, I really like those guys. I'll tell our Eagles because they're cool to hang out with. Paul gets a lot of crap too, by the way. Bankroll is his bar when it's going bankrupt. So that's huge news. And he got attacked by the Philly system. The Democrats went after him. So total smear campaign. But that's another topic. We'll talk about that another time. Let's get into some of the hard conversations that we have to have. We have a lot to go through. There's so much going down from in the stack of the cloud, AI, next gen cloud, from vector databases to new applications. But Amazon, Amazon's back. So Amazon, we had predicted on the pod that Andy Jassy, you and I had a conversation. We predicted that Andy would come out of the woodwork to try to weigh in, because you saw Satya Nutella doing stuff too. He came out. He was involved in the Anthropic announcement and the Gen AI bedrock availability. So I think Jassy, sorry, it's like, we got to get involved. Let's start flexing. So Amazon's flexing their power only to be kind of sucked out with the lawsuit. But this is a huge news week for them. The Anthropic gives them a major piece in the puzzle and they got the AI chips within the training and inference stuff with Anthropic. That's going to give them an open AI alternative. They still got the Titan models that needs work. You got Sage maker and all the open source stuff. Bedrock is now available for everybody. So the question is, will that open up? And by the way, AI, open AI answered as well with some pretty cool new stuff on the visual and multimodal side. So the war continues. The AI madness is there, which it should take. So a couple of things. So when you look at the data, the data is actually really interesting on what customers are doing. And this is more enterprise focus, which is kind of, you know, the area that we focus on mostly. When you look at who's using and or plans to evaluate, Microsoft Azure and open AI tops like 60% of the customers, you know, who say they're doing stuff or playing around with that. Second is Google with Vertex AI. And then the third is Amazon. People plan to utilize it or evaluate it once Bedrock becomes generally available, which happened. So they're sort of close third behind Google. And then number two, maybe even tied for number one is other. And I found that really interesting, John, because other is like, we're talking about Meta, Anthropic, Falcon, Cohere, Hugging Face, all these other alternatives. And so what that says to me is this thing is wide open. And I'll also share some other data. Others who popped up in the data, Watson X, you know, little decent share Oracle once generally available. And so this is a wide open field. And I think the moves that Amazon just made, the investment in Anthropic, I think you said one was at 1.2. I thought it was 1.5 plus an additional up to 4 billion within kind services. So, I mean, Amazon's right there and developers, I mean, they, Amazon could be in a good position here if they don't screw it up. Well, I commented on Swamy's who runs all the AI and database now. He built this all out. I commented on his LinkedIn and said, you know, this isn't the, I mean, first of all, Adam uses D. It's the three steps in the 10K race. I'm not a big fan of that metaphor. I love staying with baseball, Dave, early innings. So I used the baseball analogy and said, first of all, it's not even in the first inning. It's little league. AI is in little league mode right now. Everyone's hitting home runs. Everyone's doing well. Everyone gets to play, you know? Everyone gets two innings of fame. Participation medal. So AI is in the, in little league, right? And so what's going to happen just like in baseball, little league, everyone's happy, parents a party, everyone's having a good time here and cheering. Then it gets to Babe Ruth. It hurts down a little bit. Then you get to high school, then it narrows down. And then ultimately that's where everything kind of settles in. We're not even in the innings yet. I don't think the game is down the playing field been laid out. And I think Amazon's still got time. The question with AWS is, and again, I've said this over and over again, I've been very critical of their size. If they screw over startups and don't make the startup successful, they could lose their edge. And I think Amazon needs to focus on keeping that enterprise, working backwards formula going, which they pioneered. Love that. That's tried and true. But remember how they got here. Now, sometimes, you know, how you got here is not how you go forward, but you got to, you got to dance with the people who brought you to the party, right? So that to me, they have to keep the startup mojo going. And I think at next to what really Google next their cloud show that crystal lies for me was, is that, you know, this next generation might look at Amazon as kind of not their cloud. So I think this will, if I was at Amazon, I would be reinvesting in getting that startup mojo going again. So they don't lose that innovation wave because I think AI will be generational like the web. And all the things that are coming out of the AI is looking just like the same pattern as the worldwide web. Yeah, the internet was before, but it was the web that democratized and changed the inflection of applications. Everything went online. Okay. And so everything is going to go to mobile, which they did in the mobile inflection point. So the next inflection point is AI. So to me, I'm very focused on the fact that it was web mobile AI. I wouldn't, you and I debated cloud and I'm kind of walking that back now. I was kind of like cloud's major inflection point. Like you and you were like, no, I think it's just extension of the internet. I kind of agree with that now. I think you were right on that. I'll walk back to that and say it. The inflection points are PC, web, mobile, and AI. And all those inflection points, everything moved. The shift happened. Shifted online from analog to digital with the web, format to mobile with apps, and now AI will be that shift. So I think everything that we know will be AI enabled fact. I think a lot of what I, what I way I look at the cloud is a lot of it just came from, you know, traditional on-prem IT. And there was incremental for sure. It wasn't as Matt Baker says it wasn't a zero sum game, but you know, you could certainly do some new things with the cloud, but it did suck a lot of value out of the existing, you know, on-premises marketplace and no question about that. And I think to your other point, and we talked about this in earlier Qpods, young people have grown up with Google. Yeah. My kids don't, I mean, they use Amazon Prime, but they don't use, you know, on Prime Video, but they don't use, you know, they're not coding on Amazon. They're using Google tools when they're in grade school. So they're very familiar with Google. So if Google has an opportunity here and that data that I was sharing earlier with Google, kind of being number two, other than other, they have a great opportunity to win the young people's mind share, especially in low code, no code in AI. But as well, because they have such great tech, the hardcore developers too. Yeah. And so I think with Bedrock and with Vertex, which is Google's version, and with Microsoft with OpenAI, I think we're going to see everybody winning in the short term, but real move the needle applications are going to come downstream from this. And I think we move to the kind of the next level. And the other thing that's coming out of the AI madness, this came up in our conversation with MongoDB, which had an event in London. They're doing a lot of developer productivity. They own the developer community relative to building cloud apps. Mongo is very successful, got Atlas now, much more enterprise focused, more hard and more real time high availability. They launched Vector Search, all this new stuff. They're nailing the developer productivity. And so if you look at the developers, the ones who are building apps and all the AI stuff days been at the application layer. Not a lot of stuff going on below that. So you got security. We were just at Mandy and CrowdStrike. You got DevSecOps. You have infrastructure, Silicon. So I think the AI platform engineering side is going to be booming. There's going to be a lot more action there, again, harder than doing stuff and co-piloting so-called apps, writing code. So I think there's going to be a huge opportunity shift for under the hood. And it's going to be an infrastructure game. Yeah. So you mentioned Mongo and they announced their Vector Search capability, which they're building on top of their document database. As you know, with the QBAI, we use Mongo. We also use a Vector database, Milvus, which is an open source database. And the big question I have is, are Vector databases going to be basically become another feature product where companies like Mongo, Oracle, you name it, are going to just bundle them in data stack. They're going to bundle that in to their product and it becomes a feature. I said, you did see I put out my LinkedIn, the sign up for the QBAI.gettheQBAI.com, John Furrier will let you in. Did you get a lot of signups from that? I did, actually. That was a great way to put that in there. I then put a LinkedIn post at the same, I'll let you in. I'm looking for feedback. I mean, it's really, keeps getting better and better. I'm excited about it. But anyway, point being, my question is, okay, well, we use Mongo. Can we use Mongo's Vector Search as a library, essentially, on top of MongoDB to basically eliminate another complex component, consolidate that, make things simpler? I mean, I don't know. I'm not a developer. Well, no, I mean, well, the thing is during the web, I remember there was always an expression. I remember in Silicon Valley, it was, there's a pony in there somewhere, meaning there's a horse in the race. It was kind of a way to say, there might be some good, everyone had ideas. Oh, yeah, we're going to do this on the web. The idea that something could actually be a company is a lot different than a feature. A lot of times, things get funded that look like could be a durable company, but it's going to be a feature of something else, hence the expression. There's a pony in there somewhere not knowing what people are developing. You want to have a clear horse on the race, on the track for the race, and that means a durable company. But sometimes you can get in with a feature and then sequence the platform. So I think I'm optimistic, but in the Vector database, there's no doubt in my mind that that's a feature because the embeddings don't interoperate unless someone comes up with an interoperable embedding kind of gateway model where it's like, okay, I'm going to do embeddings with Mongo's vector search and I use Milvus. Those embeddings can't work together. So that's the challenge. And I think it's smart to have the vector embeddings combined with a data store. It makes sense to keep that bolted together. The question, what's the abstraction around that, the glue layer? Is it API based? How's that going to work? How does it interact? So that's going to be the big platform conversation. But yeah, Vector database has been a godsend for people like us who have done a lot of metadata labeling with their data. So companies who have a lot of data, like Docker cons coming up next week, Docker containers. I was talking to Scott Johnson on a pre-briefing. They have so much data coming out of the containers. They know everything about how they spun up all the metadata. AI is going to be a dream scenario for Docker. Okay. It's going to be a dream scenario for MongoDB. It's going to be a dream scenario for anyone who has data. And I think that's going to be the new area that people are going to start focusing on. What proprietary data do we have? How do I turn that into gold? This was a metaphor that we used in the big data days 10 years ago, Dave, spinning gold out of that data. Well, guess what? It's actually now viable. That's why I think the Amazon is not late to the game because the fruit from the tree of AI will come out beautifully in the next couple of years. The question is, don't confuse Little League wins from big league wins. That's what I'm looking at right now. Who's in the big league? Who's in the little league? I like your analogy of going to Babe Ruth, because most kids in Little League, Little League everybody wins, like you said. Everybody hits. And then they go from the little field to the big field. You remember the first time you go in the big field, you're like, holy crap, that's a long throw from third base to first base or outfield. Or even the mound to home plate. And it's harder to watch too as a parent. Is he really safe in the second base? Where's the telephoto lens? You need the binoculars, but that's where when kids go from 12 to 13, that's when the vast majority of little kids, kiddie sports, they leave baseball. And to your point, that's when things potentially get shaken out of the AI wars. And it's your other point about data. This is why, breaking analysis week, doing a survey, we did a flash survey with Eric Bradley at ETR, and we're going to look at Splunk Cisco and the sentiment. But the point is, a lot of the narrative around, of course, around Splunk was, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you don't really think about Splunk as an AI company, but it is a data company. In fact, back in the day, we used to say, who's going to be the winner in big data? And Splunk never really used that term, but we always said, Splunk's got the data. So the point is that that could definitely help Cisco's AI aspirations because Splunk has really good data. And so everybody's got AI. It's just a matter of how's your data and how's your data quality and what's the value of that data. And that's where we see is a first important step to having a successful AI strategy. I want to get into the AI regulation, which is going to be a segue into the FTC and the Google DOJ. I had an interview this week with Tara, Tara Murphy Darity, who's the CEO of a company called Govini, and they make a defense acquisition software SaaS platform, basically military contracts, mainly the DOD. And what hit me was when I was talking to her, by the way, that company is doing really well. They're targeting just the defense industry. They see the rise of shine as a formal competitor, and they see that our slow supply chain and to inability to procure and deliver things in all the products from the B21 to the tactical edge of Jedi, for instance. And it hit me, all this AI regulation, big tech is an opportunity for our country to give us a strategic advantage. And with China organizing with the state and all the parties organized and orchestrated together to attack us, we're attacking ourselves. So all this regulation with AI we talked about last time seems BS to me, self agendas out there. But AI is an opportunity, if we do it right. And big tech shouldn't be punished, and they should be harnessed. And I think the opportunity that we're going to evaluate going forward is the role of technology in society, from education, workforce, to actually how to deliver military products and consumer goods and the globalization. I bring this up because the AI regulation, I think it's just a puff conversation, I'll talk. But when you start to see the FTC and Lina Khan going after AWS again, and just the way their dogma and their focus is, it just seems counter to what the future is needing to get our citizens and global citizens in a healthier, free society or safe society. It's just, I think technology is an opportunity, not a deterrent. So yeah, there might have been bad behavior from executives, companies, but at the end of the day, Dave, if you look at the Govini interview, the technology is going to drive government more. That's a fact. So why is the government attacking it? So I think the government is a little bit off here. And I think let's let's get into the next talk track, which is, you know, we've been ranting about the FTC, this legitimate news item Amazon and 17 states are sued by the FTC over unfair business practices illegally maintaining their monopoly power. First of all, it's the FTC. It's not the DOJ, which DOJ is suing Google, it's a whole other story in there in trial right now. But this is something that we've talked about the FTC. How is Amazon hurting people? Okay. Yeah, they're good. Okay, good people rise to the top, beat the competition, sometimes put them out of business. Is this the way we want to have people like Lena Kahn, who are taking this vision of their view of the world in the direction? It just seems like her tactical execution and why she's doing these things is the exact opposite for what we need to do to help our citizens and the consumers. It's just it's just the wrong direction. And even with common sense, who lives in the sane world would think, what are you talking about? Why aren't you thinking differently? Who's your boss? You know, can I speak to the manager, please? Who's in charge like FTC? It's like bad service. I feel like 80% of my rants are Lena Kahn related. But you know, to your point, I mean, I very much feel like the public-private partnership in our country is deteriorating. I mean, it clearly is. Did you see, David, that's what our entire cybersecurity think tank in the world is mostly private companies and the government. The best brains in America are saying private public partnerships need to work to make our country secure. Yeah, no question. So I was going to ask you, did you see the Ray Dalio thing at the All-In summit? No, I did not. I saw the one. But he really, you know, quite brilliant. But in there, he had like a four minute video where he went back, we talked about this a little bit before he went back in history and looked at all the great powers and the ascendancy and decline of these great powers and their reserve currency. And he did, the guy did some amazing research. And of course, I like him because he's very concerned about debt. And he's got a historical perspective, but he had a number of factors that lead to the rise and fall of nations. And it was education, technology, competitiveness, economic output, world trade, military strength, financial strength, and that all leads to, you know, the reserve currency. And the point is that when you think about the public and private partnership, those are the factors where the investment should be. And I feel like the U.S. government is attacking a lot of that innovation. We don't have enough STEM students, right? It's going to eventually impact technology. John Chambers said this, there's just, there's no guarantee for the future. You got to go earn it. You know, Elon Musk talks about this. It's like, shit gets invented because people take chances and they take risks. And a bunch of people get together who are motivated and work really hard. Technology just doesn't happen. You know, it takes real effort. And that's where if a government is working against private industry, that's going to be a real detriment to the success of a nation. And I don't understand why many in our government don't see this. And so I don't know if we're ready for the rant, but I mean, geez, I'm reading it again. This is not a rant. This is actually news. So we can bundle in the rant, but I mean, this is what the direction is. And again, this is why I think our government's broken. And my connection dots here to connect here are the lame lawsuit against Amazon is lame in and of itself. And there's 13 states backing it up. And you look at the states, it's just going to see the numbers there, right? So you've got it's Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. The question is, which of those states? How wired are they? Right? It's not Austin. It's not Texas. It's not California. But Massachusetts is in there. It's a real concern about that list, John, is it's both red states and blue states and New York's in there, you know, New York's in there. It's both sides of the aisle are attacking big tech. And the right is attacking because you're suppressing, you're censoring our views. And the left is attacking because, oh, we want to redistribute wealth. But the other, we should share the news, right? FTC suits as online retailer Amazon wielded its power illegally to harm competitors. Federal Trade Commission 17 states you just mentioned, alleging the online retailer illegally wields monopoly power that keeps prices artificially high and locks sellers into its platform and harms its rivals. And so this is a complete 180 by Lena Kahn, who's when she wrote that paper back in college and then in her first lawsuit against Amazon, argued that Amazon priced too low to suck people in to entice customers. So prices were too low. Now she's saying Amazon prices are too high and it's hurting consumers. So it's like, which is it? I mean, I mean, get your story straight. Now, here's the interesting thing. Amazon has 1% of the global retail market, but it's got over close to 40%, maybe even more of the online retail market. And what Lena Kahn is doing, she's redefining the market as the online superstore. Now, again, this is where I think public policy in the U.S. is broken. It's like, give me, show me the person and I'll show you the crime. We're just going to find something. I mean, I don't admire her her her her Hutzpah, but in her fight that in that lady, but I feel like reasonable remedies to this problem can be created if in fact the government would just sit down with Amazon and say, look, here's what we want you to do as opposed to things like throwing things out there like, oh, you know, break up the company and split out Amazon web services and just things that the government shouldn't be in a position to determine unless it's so clear that they're illegally using their monopoly power in egregious ways that can't be resolved with reasonable discussions. Well, I wonder my question is, does she have the pulse of America and America business? And I think, you know, I think, I think she's just has a worldview that's tainting and biasing her view. That's why I've been so aggressive on pointing out this tech problem and tech tensions of 2023 where big tech's being attacked. There's a cultural war going on. You see with Elon Musk now X and then and threads, there's a tech cultural war going on right now. And recently the code conference where Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberger built, they passed that on to the next generation of conference leaders, had Linda Jacarino on from Twitter an interview, and they brought out Kara came in and brought in Yill Roth. And it was kind of a in Kara, Kara Swisher kind of coming out of retirement, so to speak, and inserting a narrative. And so two things happened. Once she inserted the conversation on the episode before Linda Jacarino came on, and everyone's a bitch in a moment about but about the interview, how she handled it. The issue there is not about that. It's about there's a cultural war brewing between its two sides. And the big tech being attacked with Amazon ties that together because and this is why I brought up the Govini and why AI should be an opportunity and big tech should be an opportunity for us is that, you know, as we nav, there's an AI revolution going on and there's a meta version because I bet get to that with Zuckerberg and Lex Friedman interview. There's an AI revolution going on. And as we navigate these times, it's clear technology will continue to be a force of shaping our world. The question is for better or for worse. And the way things are going with Lena Kahn, it's worse. Okay, that's going in the wrong direction. The cultural separation by the polarization of the tech community is making it worse. So we have to have debates and we have to continue and strive for the brighter tech driven future. And it's this is not good that what she's doing, Lena Kahn is doing to go after Amazon like this, you know, Google, okay, monopoly, I think that conversation is worthy to have, but they don't even know how to argue the monopoly story. It's just they picked the wrong things. They're not getting it right. I mean, again, my rant basically just got inserted there. But, you know, I think we have the same rant this week. I feel like that there's just the fact that they're powerful. I mean, being a maniac, having earned a monopoly in and of itself is not illegal is using that monopoly power in certain ways is illegal. It's very, it very well may be that Amazon is pushing the envelope and or even, you know, breaking the law. I mean, I don't see it as egregious, but okay, I mean, maybe some of their behavior with their third party sellers and some of the other things they're doing, you know, maybe with search. But I think that it's it's to me, it's a minor compared to some of the other things that we've seen, you know, in the past with other companies. And Google, you know, again, you can argue Google's got a monopoly, but I feel like if the government would just sit down with them with Amazon and Google and Microsoft and others and say, look, Facebook, this is what we want you to do. Here's a remedy that's not onerous. You know, maybe the government that maybe the companies would say, yeah, hey, F you will fight you in court. But I have a feeling that the companies would make small adjustments and, you know, and moderate that behavior. And I don't think they've been given a chance to do that, at least that's my take, because the government sits down with with Amazon and says, you know, okay, what are you willing to give us the government's posture and without guiding the the the company on what it wants. And because I think what it wants is to break up big tech. And I don't think that's the right answer. Big tech is under siege and you ask any American is it bad or good, they're going to say, I love Google, I love Amazon. And this is the problem that I have. And I think the government has an opportunity in the government's also faced with the cybersecurity problem as the attitudes of the government shifts from negative to positive when that happens, if they take the pulse of the real voters out there, they should shift their attitude quickly. The other problem is not just that Dave, China is targeting the United States. Okay, tech should be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Obviously, big discussion, a lot of unpacking, we're going to continue that. And by the way, this is not just cybersecurity, the education system. You mentioned that. Let me say this to before we we go on. I'm trying to be objective here. And but but what's happening is Lena Khan is trying to redefine the the law. Okay, now, I feel as though that's not the FTC's place. That is Congress's place. And Congress may be misguided, too. But I'd like I'd like the debate to occur in Congress. And they'll never get anything fricking done, because they can't agree on anything, typically. But who knows, maybe they can agree on this. But but but my point is, she basically she's trying to redefine as the potential she was anyway, the potential to her competition. And now she's just pulling anything out of her ass to figure out, okay, hey, I'm going to throw this at at at Amazon, I'm going to throw this at Google. And I don't think it's the right approach. I think the right approach is to really identify our consumers being hurt. And the point I want to make here is ask anyone, go, don't go not use Google for a week. Okay, go stop buying from Amazon, just stop for a week. Yeah, or a month. See if you can do that. See what your life is like. Now again, you know, I have I have empathy for duck duck go duck duck goes a pretty good search engine, you know, and they got no shot with with Google out there. So, you know, maybe there are some things that, you know, what what they have what the DOJ did back in the IBM days is they, they said IBM couldn't get into the application software business. Number one, they also said they have to publish their API is essentially to competitors like Hitachi and Amdahl and Fujitsu. Okay, so they made an IBM, you know, made concessions and that created some competition. And so I think there are things like that that you could do, you know, but I would say try sit down and try to come up with those remedies, you know, before it eliminate all this drama. That's my rant. Well, that's what we're going to track this Amazon thing. And again, the other thing is that as Amazon goes forward, okay, was there product managers that might have gone a little bit over the top, squeezed the numbers out? Absolutely. Has Amazon put their listings over others? Probably they did. Yeah, they'll clean that up. That's not a you know, that's the purpose. It's tic-tac stuff. The bigger picture is big tech under siege for the right reasons. My world unpack this, we're going to unpack that going forward. All right. So in other lighter news, Dave, the writer's strike is the writer's strike is over. Now I bring this up because, you know, we're obviously we have media business and analyst business, video business. I see this as a watershed moment of content. Yeah, because it reminds me of the web. When everything started going online, the old guard would protect stuff. And the web was kind of democratization. I remember Corey and the guys in the EFF were talking, Clay Scherke, he was involved, David Johnson, even when the creative comments was going on. So Corey, Dodgerow, Dodgerow, and Clay, they had bumper stickers made. I remember being at the Sheraton when they were handing them out. I got a couple. I still saved them. Fair use has a posse. That was the kind of the bumper sticker. It was a bumper sticker, EFF logo on it. The Electronic Foundation Association was like, hey, you know, fair use is important to democratize the content. Now the whole writer's strike with AI comes up. What's the fair use of content with AI? If you're a writer, do you get paid if you use AI? If you use AI, you can't get paid. If I want to use AI, we want to use AI and hire writers in the guild. We can't use AI. So it's all kinds of like weird corner cases. But it brings the question of fair use. Jeff Jarvis said on Facebook, he's a big time writer, I want my work out in the public domain. That's why he writes. So you have this kind of freedom oriented view of sharing. And then you have the contextual property rights view, which is it's worth something. It's interesting. And it's the same battle we saw at the web and member Napster before Spotify. Same thing. What's stealing? What's not stealing? So a lot of metaphors and comparisons to web. So I think this is going to be interesting to see how the content rights play out with AI. Clearly, it's an opportunity to scale more content. I got to ask you here. So my question is, what did the writers really get? And my understanding is they got a 5% minimum pay increase upon when this thing is ratified. Another 4% bump in May 2024 and another 3.5% increase in May of 2025. And the writers were able to gain significant protections against the use of artificial intelligence. What protections? AI is prohibited from writing or rewriting literary material. And an AI-generated material will not be recognized as source material under the agreement. While a writer is at liberty to use AI as they see fit, so long as it is compliant with company policies, companies may not require them to do so. So here's my question for you. Why did there have to be a five month like internacing battle and strike in order to get that? It just doesn't seem like this was that big a deal. Why couldn't they have come to this conclusion in a couple weeks? I don't get it. Is it that dramatic? I think they actually thought they had a better opportunity to get position. But I think everyone kind of said this really not much future. I mean, you got to embrace what's coming. I think it's one of those things where content owners value their work. We know that. If AI kills that, it's going to be a mess. Look what Facebook and the social networks did to video and original content and news outlets. We were just riffing about the Cultural War. That's the thing I took away from the Code Conference with Kara Swisher's interaction with the group. The media is fucked. There's really no good media. The truth is buried out there and we're seeing a change over. I think AI has to help that. But in the short term, it's going to hurt it. I mean, I think anyone who owns content and we've seen that with our distribution numbers, could it be better if Google and Facebook would share links? I mean, these platforms are making decisions about what they can share. So when you have gatekeepers controlling things and AI stealing things in their mind of the owner, it's mind-blowing. So their first reaction is, let's stop this. And I think my opinion is is that they didn't get as much as they could because they didn't even know what they were negotiating against. I mean, I just look at what they got and I'm going, what's the big fucking deal? I mean, you could have got that and not had to be on strike with no pay for five months. And we would have been able to still watch late night TV. I've said this on the pod. You and I have talked about it. You said it too. We'll agree. Aligned on this. AI rewards original content. All these hallucinations and all this, I call it the little league game going on now is everybody's winning. But the real winners is intellectual property, data, original content. And Hollywood has the most original content. So to me, the issue is, can AI be an opportunity for Hollywood? And I'm a glass half full person. I think Hollywood has an opportunity to train their content and actually, rather than giving it away and being stolen, train it, be the enabler of the content. So if you're enabling it, you have kind of origination rights to think about it that way. And they use that term origination on cable, you know, channels and whatnot. So in media, you want to feed the AI, not actually just have it suck it out. So I would essentially have the writers get derivative works off any kind of AI downstream lineage. And I think that's going to be a tech opportunity. So either way, media and computer science are coming together. You know, that's our insight with our business. We bring a computer science and media worlds together. And that we have a unique advantage because of it. I think Hollywood should hire people that can think like that. And I think that's going to be the future of media because you can code software to take advantage of the assets. And Hollywood has got to move out of this. You know, we own the content, lock it down. They're going to lose. And by the way, Amazon might win because they got prime and they have other media and they own MGM now. So, you know, I think you're going to see some real clever thinking. And that's the opportunity out there, Dave, for the people who are going to think like this. And that's how new brands are born. And I think Hollywood is going to embrace it. I think they're going to do well. I don't think Hollywood gets screwed over. I think they win. They win with this because it's easy to create great content. If you got the talent, AI scale, AI scales talent, AI scales intellect, AI scales value. And if you think that way, then it's an opportunity. If you don't, then you're doom and gloom. I totally agree with you. But here's my question. So if AI ingests every piece of content in the world and then creates derivative works, do you agree that there should be a cost associated with that? That AI companies should not be allowed to just take all the data and create derivative works without the original content owner getting paid? I think the usual content owner should get paid. I do. I think this should be kind of a DNA test. And by the way, this is not just for content music. I mean, the music industry, this is a freight train coming down their track on a head-on collision. So if I'm in the music business, I'm like, that's so antiquated and old, fuck the music business. They're screwed. TikTok can get more traffic than any record label, if someone gets a hit. So I think that the distribution combined with the format change with AI and the derivative works, the number of assets, you're going to have the talent creating seeds of greatness in AI. Good talent will create a body of work that can be chunked up with AI and distributed now because the format's different in multiple channels. And some of those channels will have massive distributions, like TikTok, for example, which gets massive traffic. So the game has changed and whoever's on the wrong side of history here loses, period, full stop. That's my view. So I love your DNA test because this is huge. I mean, I'm not sure how you do it, but this is a big, big moment because I think this is where public policy should be putting its energies. Like how do you do that DNA test? What should be the requirements for payments? It's got to be negotiated, obviously, because once that stake gets in the ground and that policy gets solidified, that gives content owners real protection, which they should have. Here's the answer. Here's the answer that someone will develop. During the web, the affiliate marketing boom came out. I remember sitting around with RealMaze, we controlled all, we controlled 70% of the traffic. I was running the product group there. I saw every query on the web for two years through our servers. And we saw all these people typing in these keywords and URLs that didn't, that had destinations. And then they put in the coded URLs now known as affiliate links. Affiliate links lasted a long time and people made a lot of money. You see it all the time with influence. Go to my Shopify and they have the affiliate links. That's how people made money. Google AdWords, billions and billions of dollars. Well, guess what? That's based on DNS technology, domain name system, URLs. What you're talking about with this DNA is how do you track stuff that moves around that's not connected? So someone will build that kind of lineage tracking system because when you have money making opportunities, someone will build the technology. So that the infrastructure Dave is not yet built. That's why we're going to see this massive shift similar to the web. I remember during the web, some of this stuff was very nascent early on and then just accelerated up as people got on. The same thing will happen for AI. You're going to start to see things get built because money talks, bullshit walks as they say. So you'll see that coded. I guarantee it. Otherwise, it'll fail because someone was not going to let it fail because there's money to be made. So the capitalistic aspect of it is going to be important. Yeah. I think your prescription is a good one. This is not fair use. Fair use is not taking everything that's ever been written and created in the world and jesting it and then being able to create derivative work from that. That is not fair use. I mean, frankly, I think Google search is sort of pushing the envelope. I mean, they've been able to get away with it. And I think they put Google provided a Google product service and then remember it would link to the content. Right. Exactly. So I think that from open AI steals your work and makes it there. Exactly. But name a subscription. And my point is from a publisher standpoint, Google adds value, adds more value than it extracts. But the potential for AI to really crush the value that content originators have created is huge. And that has to be stopped. And this is, again, where I wish the government would be putting its energy, not trying to break up big tech, but trying to figure out what the right formula is to actually protect competition and original works. A couple more things we got. We've got a couple of minutes left in the pod here. I want to get something out there real quick. I made an observation. I saw that Mike Mark Zuckerberg had a great interview with Lex Friedman, who's a very popular podcast. They both do their jizitsu together. So they both have a bromance going on. Zuckerberg's been on his podcast three times, both smart, but they did a great metaversion. They did a podcast in the metaverse. And the photo realistic avatars were really amazing. And what they do in advance, they scan their gestures. It was unbelievable. If you're out there listening, you want to check out the Zuckerberg Friedman podcast in the metaverse. I was a skeptic on this stuff, but I'm convinced this stuff's real. It's going the next level. So good to see that. They had a big event. Facebook did or met up and they proposed they'd show that stuff in Quest 3. So that was a good question. Have you read Walter Isaacson's new book on Elon? So a lot of people think that because Zuck's in good shape, right? Zuck does like MMA. Elon's got balls. I'm not sure I want to fight that guy. He like grew up in South Africa getting his ass kicked. And I think he could give Zuck a good fight anyway. Zuck would kill him. You think so? Oh, yeah. Unless he brings the gun to a knife fight. I mean, you know how it is. Zuckerberg's been working out. Elon Musk is a workaholic. Zuck is like wakeboarding, skating, doing Shinsetsu. Come on. He's sitting on his money machine. Zuckerberg is on Easy Street right now. If I could get odds. Mark Zuckerberg isn't doing anything that's compelling right now. He's on Easy Street. He's making billions of dollars on Facebook. And he's got the Medi-Quest thing going on. He's trying to get in the open AI game. But I think he's fat cat right now. And I want to see more come out of him. Elon Musk works around the clock. So there's no way he's in good shape. Zuckerberg would kill him in a heartbeat. And I don't know. If I could get odds, I'd take Elon in that fight. God, now I get destroyed. Because I think he wouldn't give up. I think he wouldn't give up. You know the kid I'm talking about in high school? MMA. There's no giving up. You're down and out. When I was in high school, early high school, there was a place called the Hill. If somebody challenged you to fight at the Hill, you'd have to go to the Hill and the whole school went like fight, fight, fight. Right. One of those deals. And there were certain guys that you just didn't want to fight because you know they never give up. Back when we were kids, kids fought. They kept punching fights all the time. I don't know. Does that happen anymore? No. I didn't think so. But so I was just sending a meme around on TikTok or Instagram, which one it was about how us millennials survive, X generation survives. Like, and it shows a picture of the merry-go-round going around and people used to spin it and we would hang on to it sitting on the back of a station wagon on a car doing 50 miles an hour riding a bike with no helmets and the whole thing's like, that's why we're the toughest generation. Seriously, you know what I'm talking about though, that kid that you don't want to fight? Like Chris Lynch. You would never want to fight Chris Lynch. I'd take Chris Lynch in almost any fight, any kind of fair fight because he would never give up. Yeah. All right. Final thing I want to bring up and this is something that we don't have to get into, but I'm hearing reports of companies falling out of the sky and seeing all the cap table work that Carter puts out clearly. We talked about that. One thing that I'm getting some real reports on is that startups are getting forced to pay the Amazon bill while they're pivoting. And this brings up, Dave, the monopolistic, the capitalistic view of does Amazon become a utility company? And if you don't pay the bills, you shut the phone off. Are they the phone company? And so for the first time in the history, Amazon's part of this recession as is Microsoft Azure. So they got a lot of copies that aren't going to pay their bill. So this is a first generation problem. And they probably had people that didn't pay the bills, but the volume of startups, it reminds me of the SBB crisis, all that startups went out, the money could be gone, had an impact. If there's more failures and okay, full failure, full implosion, okay, then there's no money to pay. But if you're a startup and you bet your business on a cloud and the bills do, and you want to save every penny to pivot, and you go to Amazon at some point, I know Amazon's been good about letting people not pay and leave their payments, but at some point they got to get paid. So this is a very interesting piece for Amazon because they're the friend of the startup. But at what point do you say you got to pay? And then for the startup community, you can't run your business if you're on Amazon. Where's this coming from? Where's this coming from? Startups in Silicon Valley that I've talked to are coming to me and saying, hey, you know, we don't want to go out of business. We've got a big deal we're cooking up right now. And if we get shut off, we can't execute and run a business because everything Amazon's telling them to piss off, pay or we shut you off? Yeah, they're saying pay or we'll shut you down. There's a few actual dates. And you know, see they're behind on their payments. But it's a company that's got multiple millions of dollars paying Amazon. It's not like they're like running like small bills. It's like a significant... So the IRS will let you go on a payment plan. Are you saying that the company has reached out to Amazon and said, hey, can we talk about this? And Amazon has said, they give them to the collective and internal collection thing. So I'm not sure if this is a one-off or not, but we're going to find more about it and find out what's going on. Is the company have real prospects or are they like dead men walking? It's one of these things as an infrastructure thing. And if they have prospects, they've made investments and they have deals on the table and they're in the pivot zone. So you're in this point. It may not be all companies. But I bring it up because that's kind of a factual reporting statement that this is happening. And of course, Amazon's got to get paid. They provide a service. But the question comes in to more of, what do you do as a startup? Do you just spread it around? Do you go for payment terms? What does Amazon do? They've never probably had this kind of velocity of failures in the tech world. We're talking about the kind of failures. How big a bill are we talking about here? Is it millions? That's about under a half a million. Okay. So Amazon probably saying, yeah, you're late on the payment. Go hit up friends and family to raise some more money. We're not your friend. We're not your family. You want a friend get a job? We love you. Exactly. I mean, that's a tough one, right? Okay. So let me ask you a question. Do you think this climate's good for raising money on a pivot? How many down, horrible. I mean, this company has, we're talking about, has 20 plus million in seed money. So it's not a seed round, not a series A seed. So it's a pretty big seed round, meaning it's a go big or go home startup. So I just find out I run out that Microsoft would let that pivot, not pivot. I'd be surprised that Amazon would let that go. Does the company call Microsoft and said, Hey, can you help us out? We'll migrate everything. Their entire tech stacks on AWS. I can't do that. Wow. That's an interesting lesson on exit strategies for your cloud strategy. I mean, you're basically the mother of all lock ins, right, is what you're saying. Well, I think, you know, Amazon, this is where basically Amazon has to really think about their startup startup and their pro startup as a we are. That's why I'm reporting it because, you know, Amazon's a friend of the startup. And again, this is the battleground day for AI. Who wins the startups? Open source and startups are now synonymous with the who will have the best position to birth the next big brands because AI will certainly create generational companies that we haven't seen. That's a question, John. That's a tough balance for a cloud company. Because you don't want to be seen as not startup friendly. When we were growing up and getting business for the internet, it's like the phone company, right? You hated them, but you had to use them. Everyone had to have phones before cell phones. So Amazon and Azure don't want to be the phone company, right, in the mind of the user. They want to be the partner. That's why this is a very, and again, you brought this up on a pod many times ago about how this recession will be judged by the fact that it's the first time in history that the hyperscalers are actually active economic engines of the economy, both in terms of enablement and horsepower. So this is the dark side of the other side of the coin there, which is they're also part of them. They got to get funded. People owe them money. They got to get paid. So it's very interesting, very interesting angle there. So, all right, what else? Well, how about this Sam Altman and Johnny Ives? Did we talk about that yet? No, we haven't. They built an AI device? I thought that was pretty interesting. It's not clear at this point what it is. They call it the iPhone of AI. I'm not sure if that's a device or something else. I don't have a lot of information on that. But I think the interesting thing near to me is obviously Steve Jobs was very much into the marriage of hardware and software, whereas a lot of companies will say screw it. I'm going all software because the gross margins are much, much better. Or people say, hey, I'm just I'm good at hardware or I'm semiconductors. So I'm going to do hardware. Apple Steve Jobs was all about the integration of hardware and software. Musk is the same way, by the way, right? When you think about Tesla, it's a car, that software car, software defined car. You know who else? Larry Ellison kind of got that religion when he bought Sun. Look what he's done with engineered systems. And it's a it's a differentiable strategy that that delivers sustainable value to customers if you get it right. And so why wouldn't you see that innovation extend into AI, AI hardware and software? It makes a lot of sense to me. Well, we're going to see a lot of Silicon innovation this week. Great conversation. AI madness continues. Amazon's dominance will flex. I think Amazon is going to come back and look forward to reinvent. We'll see. Again, they got great announcements. They got the anthropic deal they announced. They got the GA of bedrock. We'll see how that generates action. Of course, they got slammed dunked by the FTC. And the tech tensions, Dave, of 2023 continue culturally. AI is an opportunity. Enterprise techs hot. Cloud Next Gen. Let's see if we can get out of this recession. So we'll continue to share. I would just caution people. You know that story about I think it's the story of a Chinese family and then the neighbors say to him, he gets a horse. Oh, how lucky. Well, we'll see. You know that story. Exactly. This is one of those. Just be careful what you wish for. And because this is the unintended consequences of too much government action and knee jerk reactions are very dangerous, in my opinion. And I would just say, great. Keep reiterating. This is like the web. So when people talk, oh, it's an AI moment. It's like the iPhone. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. iPhone was already built on top of the web. That was definitely an inflection point. But in terms of the challenges, I think the web has the most things that I could share. Because everything's about the same thing. It's early innings or literally everybody wins. And then it'll get fast. It'll get real fast. And that's, that's to me the common theme. It's getting real fast. Everyone's talking about it. Look how fast the change is happening. That's why Amazon launched all this stuff now, because they couldn't wait to reinvent, which is only two months away. So yeah, they're going to have the last, as I've said, they're going to have the last word. We'll see what's in there. Have the recency bias going into the new year. Yeah, I can't wait. I guarantee they're going to be burning the midnight oil for the next two months because they got to get their content tracked down. So, and same with Microsoft, they got their cloud event, but their cloud event is not as solid as re-invent. They kind of, they got to clean that up a bit. But anyway, pod 31 in the books, go to SiliconANGLE.com, check out all the content there. The team's doing an amazing job getting a ton of great editorial stories. Dave, you're breaking analysis. What is going great. But by the way, what did you do this week? We're doing a drill down into, we got, we, Eric Bradley of ETR and I, we're doing a drill down into a survey ETR did on joint customers, joint Cisco Splunk customers to get their reaction to the news. And generally positive, more positive, I think, for Cisco than it is Splunk. But to me, Splunk got a lifeline. And that's a good thing. And if you're listening to this, go to thecubeai.com and hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn and say, let me in and I'll let you in. So we got the beta waitlist going on. It's going great. The cube language model developing off the cube transcripts. Awesome, John. Dave, we'll see you next time. I got, John, have a great weekend. All right, see you.