 Welcome to theCUBE pod episode eight. This is our weekly pod. We unpack the latest stuff we're working. I'm in Amsterdam for a CUBE con, Dave Vellante, my co-host Dave, eight episodes. We said under 10 was going to be our test run, learning a lot, getting our groove swing down, still feeling the vibes, but a lot of stuff going on. Great, great to see you. How you doing? Yeah, John, awesome. Great job in Amsterdam. You and Savannah and Rob and the old team. It was really, really you. It was really good. I was watching, you know, I was a click on Tuesday. We were broadcasting there from a click world, which was kind of interesting. You remember the early big data days, remember we would have on click, attunity, talent, right? All three of those companies are coming together now. So it was kind of like back to the future, but really interesting. I mean, if we got time, I'd love to tell you. That's a big data renaissance, Dave. It's all coming back. Circle, full circle with AI and killer data surge. Oh my God. So Sanjeev Mohan was out here. I saw him on a panel. We had great, great sessions, amazing attendance, Europe's back, I mean, steady state, 10,000 people, a European event. That means North America is gonna be completely packed. But this is the weekly part. This is the stuff so much happening this week. Every week that we started this part, this is our eighth episode. It seems like it's been crazy. AI madness is so much in the news. Just this week with a lot of discussions around code pollution, chat GPT pumping out code into the system, stack overflow charging for training data, BuzzFeed shuts down their news division, laying off everybody and another 120 people inside our business insider, laying off 10% of the staff, complete media implosion. These are iconic brands that rode the tailwinds of the social networks. So major media implosion, digital media. Meanwhile, we're booming with video and we got AI story coming up. And of course, this is the Elon's, we joke every week, there's Elon's got whole section of the bot today, we're gonna go in, talk about Elon's stuff going in his world. He's got to bring a very interesting week, Dave. SpaceX blows up, it's blue Friday, check marks being removed, everyone's freaking out. He's trying to create a new firm to compete with open AI, Twitter drops them, gets dropped by Microsoft. I mean, stocks down. I mean, he's losing billions. We'll get into that. So much. Can I ask you a question? I knew I saw your interview with Docker, it was awesome. But was there any chatter about Docker because they were trying to charge for their free version? And then they did a pivot and they sort of decided not to for now. Did, was there any talk about that at KubeCon? No, zero talk. I mean, I think they've been trying to do that but they have a freemium. They're making tons of money on paid subscriptions. So they already have a very, very successful subscription business. So if they had any trial ballooning, it must have got blown out of the water really fast. Yeah, they definitely did a 180 on that. But I wonder if that's permanent or just a little oops, sorry. Anyway, no talk about it though. Interesting. They've been, they've been over a year on a steady state with their subscription business and they're over, over clearly rising past a hundred million in revenue. Absolutely blowing away the numbers. They're kicking ass. Docker is blowing away the numbers big time. So, you know, I don't know if this was this free version but that's not, I haven't heard, haven't heard anything about. Yeah, it's a couple of weeks ago. They, maybe even a month ago, they announced they were going to charge for the free version and then people went nuts and then they, you know, decided I think last week say, no, we're not going to do that. So anyway, they don't care about it. No, no, no issue with DockerCon. Docker actually was not talked about much at KubeCon because KubeCon was kicking ass. The big story, KubeCon was platform engineering kind of becoming the new IT and then WebAssembly or Wasm has getting traction. They just, they now have support for all the major compilers from the browser. That means you don't have to rewrite JavaScript code to get into JavaScript. So, you know, more developer productivity, enterprise hardening. So, you know, Docker was not in the fray at all from a, from a news standpoint. I don't think they even had any news. You know, what's funny, John, as I see from the ETR data, you know, Kubernetes momentum off the charts, it was like, you know, 80% net score with the ETR data. It dropped, you know, it came down to 60%, but 40% is high. Yeah, it's 60%, but you hear all this, oh, Kubernetes blowback and, you know, people are disgruntled and, but then it sounds like that's bullshit. I mean, 10,000 people show up and, I mean, it's rocking. You see, U.S. is doing- Anyone who says Kubernetes is bullshit is, doesn't know what they're talking about. It's the hottest thing and it's, and really it's going to continue to be great as containers and Kubernetes together replace and start migrating off the old virtual machine model. There'll still be VMs, but that is a dominant architecture is going to be waning down and converting over to cloud native. So pretty much a done deal at this point. So Kubernetes definitely has lift. It's hard to use, so it's on the simplicity side, it's not getting good scores, but it's getting good scores on, on some of the other reliability and extensibility sides and scalability. So they're getting great, great marks on that. The portability, they give themselves good scores, but they're the critical analysis on theCUBE from Rob Getsche and the team was pretty much, they could do some, they're not bad, but they're not, they're not five stars. Again, we gave them, I think a two or three, two and a half star review on that one, but you know, simplicity, still a problem. You know, and this could be the only Achilles heel for Kubernetes, that Hadoop factor, I call it, where it's good, but it really is hard to use, but I think they're going to get through that. Other scores are pretty good. That's an opportunity for them to fill gaps. I mean, that's the way these things work in tech. Come up with something that's cool, that's game changing and then people dig into it. Oh, this is unbelievable. And then they say, wow, it's hard to secure and boy, it doesn't really scale that well. And then all of a sudden the industry comes in and fixes the problem. In a way that happened with big data, right? I mean, it got super complex. And now look at, we could come out of the big data, you know, era snowflake, Databricks, a whole ecosystem of governance, you know, companies, visualization companies, BI companies, and it, you know, took a while, but it's rocking again. Yeah, I mean, I think we had a big conversation around data at KubeCon. And this is what came up in most of the conversation is that that infrastructure world is not going to tolerate the chat GPT or AI stories because of it's just not hardened enough. You can't, there's so much protection around security and Kubernetes and this ecosystem around cloud native is making progress on enterprise grade capabilities. So what's happening is no one wants to even entertain this hype cycle of AI yet, but yet automation is key there. So they're very much like not thinking about it. And then I've been thinking about data because this market doesn't really think about data other than like log vials or other kind of data machine data. They're not really data, data is not on their mind. And it soon will be. And we kind of talked about that. And that came up in our discussions and people were agreeing with, you know, my take, which was, you know, that we're going to see a now a wave of code pollution. And what I mean by that is that in open source, anyone can contribute, whether it's a hackathon or whatever. And so with auto-generated coding, like you're seeing on chat GPT, more code can be generated faster. So, you know, who's going to watch that code? So code pollution is going to be a problem. Richard Hartman, who runs the largest open source conference in Europe, he was on theCUBE. He's also on the governing board of CNCF. He believes code pollution can be a problem as well as licensing around that too. So, and by the way, in the United States, there's no case law against this yet. So if you auto-generate anything out of a large language model, it cannot be copyrighted as far as the current law is. So if you do that and it's also has code that has Apache license or GPL or other license, it can be convoluted and it's a problem. So this is going to be, we think that could be a real problem. That was the most of the conversation that was in the weeds, but it's very relevant. And the other problem with chat GPT is that it's all public information. So a lot of people are talking about how they're putting stuff into chat GPT, not knowing that it's used for public consumption. So these large language models have essentially such a wide corpus of data that the licensing and copyright infringement is a big concern, that was a conversation. And then it just continues to get more nuance as things like stack overflow, a site that's known for developers is charging for their questions for around the training data. So they have proprietary information. And so that was a big shock. So Redis doing the same thing. So you're starting to see in the large language models in the AI side, Dave, people are going to protect their IP, which is proprietary information. So code production and proprietary information is huge. Well, you saw, you know, Samsung, right? They guys put up information in chat GPT, not knowing exactly what you just said that now it's owned by chat GPT or can help train the models. And so that's weird. You know, the hard part, I think, and this is where the government is trying to figure it out, but there are no position to figure it out. It's like, okay, so when I write, I can write anything I want on a WordPress blog, right? I can write damaging information. I can write biased information, unethical, you know, information I can disseminate, you know, fake news, but, you know, WordPress isn't responsible for that. But this is different because it's like, the system is generating results. But like, what if Google, what if a Google search brings up some, you know, fake news and then that gets distributed? Is Google search responsible for that? So the difference now is it just happens so much faster and it's just so much more powerful. So, but at the end of the day, is the platform responsible? So that's, you're conflating two things, right? So first of all, Google's not giving you and creating information for you. They're not auto-generating content. They're giving you a navigation redirection. So if you go on WordPress and do a blog about misinformation, and Google will search it, no index it. If someone clicks on it, Google's not obliged to just give notification on. They're not saying this is content there. It's a user experience that's known as a, as an experience, it's someone else's information. Google's not viewed on that. And they're also- Yeah, but they might be promoting it. They might be putting it into the top 10 results. They, I mean, is that really conflating? I mean, it's kind of a gray area, isn't it? If there's fake news and Google saying, hey- But I don't turn around and say, I don't turn around and say these Google results are the answer to a question and put it off as information. That's stealing, that's called copyright. So if you have a blog that's got copyright information and I steal it, I am personally liable for your copyright. Well, how about Wikipedia? Right, the people cite Wikipedia all the time. Yeah, but I don't check your copyright information and rewrite it into a narrative using other language that may be public domain or not even copyright. No, I understand that, but that's why I'm saying this is different, but there are similarities in that just step back for a second. Is the platform responsible for that? And I think you're arguing, yes, it is in this case because the platform is actually generating the code or generating the answer as opposed to serving it, but it's still a gray area to me. It's not pretty gray, it's not gray to me. I mean, if I go to chat GPT and I say, write me a novel about X or write me a new story and I steal your breaking analysis, that's that large language, I'll essentially strip mind your information, say it's copyright. I think you do copyright much, we do or not, but let's see it did. And then I turn around and make that my e-book. I stole your content, not knowing it was yours. I understand that, but Apple News and Google and in this day and age, people don't even read the articles anymore, they just scan it for the headline and then I get that on Google. And so it in a sense, it scrapes the copyrighted material and they get away with it, because the law protects them, but then it's similar infringement on the IP in that, well, it certainly hurts their business, it hurts the publishers advertising revenue. Apple News doesn't steal news, it's an aggregator and it's a browser news reader. Yeah, I understand, but isn't that aggregation a form of disintermediation? No, it's distribution. What's that? It's distribution. It's distribution. At first it was seen as distribution. Oh wow, great, I wanna get good Google results. And next thing you know, the publishers business is in the tank because they can't make money. Look at Buzzfeed, right? Oh wow, Buzzfeed kicking ass. They shop on Google search all the time and they can't make money, right? Because you don't need Buzzfeed, you just scan it on Google, just read the headline. Everybody's today's headline readers. The Buzzfeed just laid off 10% of their company and also on the inside or laid off 10% of their company. Buzzfeed shut down their entire news division, very iconic. That had nothing to do with Google, it was either mismanagement and they rode the back of the social networks which then turned the backs on them. Facebook changed their algorithm, they depositioned news. I think Facebook, that's more the problem. Apple News, which you brought up, I don't think it's a problem at all. I think that's just a directory service that has nothing to do with anything other than giving users a great experience. That's got monetization behind it, they have contracts and they actually don't steal content. Facebook de-prioritized and then didn't compensate the Buzzfeed's of the world. We know how that works. We've seen that on SiliconANGLE. So I think this Buzzfeed just over-invested they tried to scale up but that's an iconic brand that rode the wave of social media. They wanted to be the front page of social media and they were kick ass for a while but now it's gone to hell in a handbasket. They're trying to pivot in business insider and the digital landscape is changing radically. So again, the media implosion is a sign of the times that the footprint's changing, that the user experience is changing and I'm not sure if that's a, I don't really know what the answer is other than the fact that it's hard to be in the media business when you're either ad supported or rely on traffic. All I'm saying is that historically the platform has not been held accountable for the impact of whether it's aggregating the results, feeding the results, promoting the results, distributing the results and now it's changing because of generative AI is actually, code pilots and creating results and writing poetry and that's different. But now, so again, historically, the platform has never been legally held accountable and that's changing and my concern is that the government doesn't know how to adjudicate this stuff, right? It's not going to be, is it going to be self adjudicating? It's because of the companies. It's evolution. I mean, look at the government should never be involved in the platform. I think that Facebook when they has abuse like Facebook, the government and the market should have been more but they had overtook liberties. I mean, Facebook was very, had malpractice as far as I'm concerned. I think that was terrible with the elections and whatnot and they hid under the section for platforms that they weren't a publication. We've had that argument before and I think you and I both on the same page they should have been reprimanded but by the law they could hide behind that law if it was written in the early days of the web. Right now, in terms of media implosion, platforms will change because at the end of the day the platforms will be recreated based upon the user experience and that's what you're seeing and it's already happening. So I don't think the government should be involved and I don't think platform definitions should be debated at this point because they're pretty much dying, right? The only thing that's happened is notable is the platform shifting. Look at the success of Substack. Substack has notes now, they have Grell, the best writers are going on Substack instead of seeing a newsletter, video. So digital media and the distribution of how people discover and consume will ultimately be driven by a platform somewhere or platforms plural. So I just think that's changing and a lot of investors obviously aren't high on the current platform and certainly the market's not voting on the current platform, hence the media implosion by BuzzFeed, Business Insider. I mean, who's next, we had protocols that went under and so it's media is not a healthy business when the old model, that's why they're all failing, all jumping in on newsletters. Well, but so this is kind of my point, is section 230, when did that come out? Mid-90s, really before the web even was a big thing. It was during the Telecommunications Act. Okay, when was that? Look it up, somebody, but Mid-90s, I think, as I recall. And so that protected all the social media companies who are now putting, you know, we're seeing, they've always been putting dead tree companies out of business, you know, the print publications. Now they're putting all the online publications out of business. My question is, my point I guess is that section 230 is inappropriate for today's new platforms that are AI-powered. So what is going to adjudicate? And then, you know, the answer is not to pause, it's stupid, you know, we talked about that. So what's gonna happen? Is the government gonna come up with an answer? It's because they- I just said it's gonna happen, a new platform will emerge. I mean, 230 was written in 1996. No, I'm talking about the laws. I mean, the platform independent of the laws, what? I don't know. How's that gonna be played out? Anyone's guessed. I mean, I think this is the good question. The question is what will be the answer? The market's playing out, Dave. You're a free market guy. You talk about this all the time. Just look at the marketplace. You see what's happening. Media's imploding. We just talked about that. Elon Musk is trying to take a product that was never changed from the day it started, which became successful by accident. And he's trying to make it a real product. I mean, he's pissing off everyone in return, but that's an interesting experiment. If you look at what he's trying to do, you know, the mainstream media on a broadcast base, which is NAB just happened in Vegas. You know, what does broadcast even mean on, you know, on TV and what's cable? What's digital streaming services? You're seeing all kinds of people backing out of their streaming arrangements. All these houses trying to figure out how to do streaming. The platforms are completely fragmented right now. Nobody actually has a clear vision on it other than it's gonna be digital somehow. And if you look at the journalism side, that's a whole nother ballgame. News isn't making any money. We know that for years. And they're all the best talent is going into either these subscription services like newsletters and or content programming. That's gonna be much more deeper or a monetizable, I should say. So it's a media company can emerge. Obviously we're one of them and we're at the forefront of that. I think our model is the best video first AI enabled. And I think you're gonna start to see users figure out, you know, or some entrepreneurs will figure out how to create a platform or platforms to provide access to the best content. I mean, I'll site something down. The Instagram founder, the two founders are starting a new company. They've got an app that they claim is gonna be AI powered news. Will that save journalism? I don't know. We'll see. I could save it, could kill it. I'm gonna site something you site all the time, Andy Grove. Let chaos rain then rain chaos. And I am a free market person. And the last thing I want is the government to try to figure it out. Look at crypto, the government's trying to figure out crypto for, you know, a decade plus. Now they're just finally catching up to Binance who was doing a reach around, right? And so it's clueless. And so my point is, I think the right thing to do is let chaos rain then rain chaos. My concern is, does that mean somebody's gonna attack the electric grid with generative models? And we're gonna have chaos that's unintended chaos. And that's what scares me, but I just can't see the government appropriately, certainly the U.S. government appropriately figuring it out. And so, and if you try to put too many guardrails on it, you're gonna hurt U.S. competitiveness. That's not good. I think you gotta limit, you know, certain key semiconductor technologies which they're trying to do, but then we see that that doesn't work so well. You remember during, I know you remember it during apartheid, I went to South Africa right after apartheid was listed. Every company at the time, IBM, digital, Hewlett Packard, they all had South African arms. They were just disguised as distributors, right? So you've seen the same thing happening now with the key technologies. And so, but I think that's gotta be tightened up. But I think it's really hard to predict right now what is going to happen. And I think what should happen is let chaos rain then rain the chaos, but we may regret that. We'll see. I think it's gonna be fun to watch. I mean, I think it's wild west right now. All I know is that there's not a lot of investments going into media. I think it's gonna be an opportunity for entrepreneurial growth. I think AI will be absolutely a lever. So we'll see. I mean, we'll watch it. I mean, all right. Well, Dave, we gotta get to the Elon Musk section because Elon Musk is having a very interesting week. It's not a good week. Not a good week. SpaceX blew up Blue Check Friday today for him. Everyone's getting their blue checks removed that didn't pay for it. So all the celebrities, you know, LeBron James, they're all chirping on Twitter. And it's a revolt. There's a whole backlash. If you paid for it, you're a dummy and you're gonna be fraud. I'm like, I paid for it, eat it. So there's value and beyond having the blue check, the blue check is not what's interesting to me. It's the fact that you can post long form videos, you can edit, those are good features. To me, that's value. I'll pay for value. I don't give a shit about the blue check, but I do care about being able to post long form videos because I do a lot of long form, you know? I get blocked at two minutes and now you have epic content at four minutes. And I don't really care if people don't wanna watch the whole thing. If 10% of the audience is interested in, you know, hearing what we have to say in four minutes, then I'm happy to serve that audience. Yeah, and I think having your identity with phone number is important. And I think the blue check mark is not there. Then it's a real name thing. I think people took it as, I was a celebrity and everybody knows who knows Twitter in the early days, the suggested user list was driven by the blue check mark and that was not a fair process. And I know specifically like Jason Calcanus who's very obviously pro paid blue check, he's in Elon's camp, he and I were on that list. We should have been on that list at that time. Jason Calcanus and myself should have been on the Twitter list. And we weren't, not that I have a grudge against it, but Jason felt slighted and, you know, I think he more than I should have been on that list. And if you were on that list at that time, you got a million followers, okay? Now, all those followers not be gone. I saw a Twitter user won't say their name. Yeah, they had 1.5 million followers because they were on the suggested user list and got the blue check mark. They post stuff on Twitter, they get 400 views. So obviously they have almost 2 million people that don't even follow them anymore. So, you know, what does that even tell you? So I think blue check is causing lots of challenges around the old dogma of I'm an influencer and I'm a celebrity. Now that's why the blue check mark, in my opinion, is legit because you should have a blue check mark to know you're not a pot, okay? But the controversy around legitimacy, I saw someone that just posted, changed their name to Obama. And they're like, send me money. And there was a link to have a PayPal. It obviously wasn't Obama, okay? Pope lost there, LeBron James, and the list is everywhere. People are like, you know, all the celebrities, Hollywood, and again, Elon Musk's kind of right wing, so all the people who are having a conniptional, oh my God, the blue check mark, hello, Elon's crazy. I tell him to go below, you know, pound sand in my opinion, but that's my opinion. Well, I mean, look, I don't see how you can't, I mean, I'm not a huge fan of Musk's politics, but I don't see how you can't admire what he's trying to do, forgetting about Twitter even for a minute, but what he's done with Tesla, he sort of changed the thinking of the auto industry, what he's doing with solar, what he's doing with SpaceX, I mean, that's pretty cool. You saw Virgin Galactic, you know, went under, so what he's doing with satellites, I mean, that's some good stuff. The thing about Twitter, to me, the biggest complaint about Twitter is it's polluted to your point, right? It's like hateful, you know, people are like, oh, this is out of control, all these people are anonymous, and so they're hiding behind their anonymity, so I agree with you, put in your phone number, be validated, and then. Give people benefits to the, give people benefits to the benefits of being listed, so better access to the flow and better promotion, if you're not verified, you know, screw off. I like Twitter, I like Twitter, I use Twitter, you know, you and I talk all the time about the landing on the Hudson, that was the Twitter moment, and since then, the best place to get fast news is Twitter, you gotta parse through and make sure you're not looking at the fake stuff, but Twitter's great, I don't see it dying, I think it can be improved for sure. I never was a fan of the way that some of the people who tweet get thrown off Twitter, again, free market, free speech. They had a lot of problems, but again, one of the problems was that they never innovated in the product, and everyone knows the product evolution was been really hard, because the product came out by lucky on purpose, you know, at the beginning, and so I like how Elon's, you know, but it's weak getting bad beyond Twitter, Dave. But wait, just before you, right, but before you go there, I mean, Twitter, it's okay if it's smaller to me, you know, I think it's, in a way. Media will never give up Twitter, okay? The news and media junkies are on Twitter, Twitter will never die, you know what I'm saying? No, some of them have pulled, hasn't the, hasn't NPR pulled out of Twitter? Anyway, they're media organizations, they don't need Twitter, they don't want their Twitter for promotion. News gets broken on Twitter. People who are reporters, I'm talking about people, not news organizations, right? The news organizations are the ones that are boycotting it. Outside of, if reporters are all on it, they're addicted to Twitter, they need Twitter, like you use Twitter, same reasons. It's a way to communicate. You know, separate news organizations, almost all journalists, unless they have some personal problem with Elon Musk are on Twitter, and that's not going to change. Now I think TikTok and these other platforms will emerge, which is why I was going to segue into the next section, which was, you know, that Twitter can become an opportunity. We've talked about them being potential a replacement for TikTok or something else, whether that's happens or not. Elon Musk is making, he's making serious product changes. Okay? And that's, that's at least notable to your point. And I think that's honorable. And I think that should be given, give him a little bit of credit. Well, where Twitter screwed up is they, they screwed their developers. You know that we were developers and they just put it right up our, you know what, and they did that to everybody. And so, you know, hopefully that will change. I mean, they're, you know, they're making changes and they're charging more because I understand why, but they just screwed their developer ecosystem. And so I think people should step back, give the new Twitter a chance because it needed some changes and then, you know, then judge as to whether or not it's a better platform. I think they think reasonable people can do that, but they're, people aren't reasonable today. Oh, he's right-wing. He's a Trump fan. He's just, so they just, everything's negative. And the same thing, both sides. There's no, there's no voice in the middle anymore. That's my rant. Well, I got to just add a text from Brendan, producer, NPR, PBS, stopped using Twitter. Like I said, it's a meat organization. And that's that because of the state media designation, which I think we talked about in our last podcast. I believe that has now since been undone. So we'll, we'll, I think that was what I saw breaking this morning that he's going to undo that a little bit over the top. And I recall that as a gag. I think that's going to be the case. There's no way NPR should be called a- Yeah, that was stupid. Yes, NPR is legit. I mean, that was just- The thing I want to get your thoughts on, Dave, not to make a joke of the SpaceX blowing up, but it was a tragedy. No one was on it, luckily, after a minute taking off. The PR response, they called it a rapid unscheduled disassembly. And so what was funny has been going all around the web like, what a PR response. And then I had a VC just texted, this is the new word for VCs when they explained when a company went under. The rapid unscheduled disassembly, aka it blew up. It didn't blow it. Before it hit escape velocity. Rapid unscheduled disassembly. It sounds like my life right now. Oh my God, Jesus, such a terrible thing, but I love that word. Who the hell comes up with a PR response like that? Only SpaceX. Well, I mean, look, having watched the moon landing in the late 1960s, I don't see how you can't be rooting for these organizations, whether it's Musk or Bezos, I mean, they're funding it with their largesse. And it's, to me, it's important. Space exploration is critical and the United States has to lead. And the only way they're going to lead, not going to lead with NASA, because NASA can't get the funding that it needs. And so private entities have to lead. And it's, I'm bummed that Virgin Galactic went under. I mean, that sucks. So, I mean, maybe people are cheering about the implosion or the explosion. No one's cheering about SpaceX at all. I mean, I think it's more of they're, my response to that was I wanted to comment about the PR comment about how they described it. Yeah, no, that was epic. Definitely the people that are not happy about it. And no one's cheering. And the moon exploration is looking great. I mean, the US and international absolutely doing explorations of the moon, right? I mean, that's absolutely going to be going on more and more that NASA's involved. So, you know, I think they're going to try to, try to get more lunar missions, right? So they launched, you know, the Mars concept for review two days ago. NASA's actively in the news recently on getting more action to the moon and Mars, but they're going to moon first. So, you know, I think space is going to have a comeback big time. So we'll see. I mean, I've always been a fan of the moon over Mars just because it's closer. And I think it's more practicable. It doesn't have an atmosphere. So I get why Mars is alluring, but, you know, the moon's right there. I mean, so go conquer the moon first. Water on the moon as they've been discovering. Oh, good. A lot of other stuff, Dave. I mean, you know, not to go back on our TikTok. He will always rant on TikTok, but Montana lawmakers approve the first of his kind bill that bans TikTok and bars and idiots. It's people. It's doors from the app starting in January. So, you know, complete idiots. I'm sorry. They just, it's just so stupid. It's so dumb politics. I guess my semi rant here. We kind of made this point a couple of weeks ago. You know, Dave Michela wrote about it beautifully that this whole conversation should start with reciprocity. The mistake that lawmakers are making is they're trying to make the case against TikTok on grounds of security and privacy. And it's stupid. They should be making the case on economic grounds, meaning they should say, look, if you want TikTok to operate a Chinese based company in the U.S., then U.S. companies need to have the same rights in China. Now, of course, China's going to immediately dismiss that, but then that's a judo move that puts China into a position of having to defend the ridiculous posture that, you know, we can do it to you, but you can't do it to us. So when China rejects it, the logical next step is to say, okay, China, then ByteDance has to sell a majority ownership, just like you do in China, to a U.S. based company. And that U.S. based company will run it and adhere to all the local laws. And if China doesn't like it and ByteDance doesn't agree to it, then and only then can you say, okay, we're going to ban it. But jumping right to the ban is idiotic. It's just not a smart move. The smarter move is to make the case on economic grounds, not on political grounds. It is a state. It is Montana. It's a state. So it's not like a federal thing, but still, it is a- It's still stupid. It's a dumb precedent. It is a sign. It is a sign of the times, I guess. That's why I wanted to bring it up because we were just ranting on that. Our other pods is- It's not smart. Yeah, it's just- Be smarter. Yeah. Maybe they're publicity like, hey, we're all about fly fishing. We don't want TikTok here. But if that's the outcome you want, take a path that's smart. Who's they? Well, obviously the people of the state of Montana, I don't know if the people of Montana, they just, they haven't thought about it. People have obviously, when they jump right to- Well, Dave, this is why I want to bring it up, because you nailed it. It's the lawmakers. Is it the people demanding it? No, definitely not. I mean, I don't think. I mean, certainly not the young people. I am. This is exactly my point. Lawmakers don't know what the heck they're talking about. Clearly. An example of press, you know, looking for press. Lawmakers looking cool to their constituents. The Big Bed, you know, Time Wasting app. You know, we got your back. Malware, all that fear that was in Washington, DC, around TikTok, which I thought we commented beautifully on, frankly, but you know, they're going to, this is just classic, you know, we got your back. It's all bullshit in my opinion. So it's, you know, it's just not a sense. But by the way, it's not just lawmakers. It's not just lawmakers. The Biden administration, Trump administration, make the same stupid mistakes, right? And this was a, this could be fixed. They have an opportunity. This was a missed opportunity to pull out, like I call it a judo move, your term on China and make them defend their ridiculous policies. You know, early on China had the posture of, look, we're just getting started. So we need to have, you know, some local control. Okay, they could make that. Now that China's a world power, you know, the who knows, they might ease up on that. That would be a great outcome for free marketers like myself, free market, you know, proponents like myself, but irrespective of that, the smart move is to put it back on them. Not, and what we've done is, okay, we're banning TikTok. Well, that's just dumb. Because as you say, the people don't want it. Young people certainly don't want it. The whole privacy thing is just, that's not the right way to do it. And so just be smarter about it politicians and just stop your bullshit. Well, on the money side of the business, in the enterprise, Dave, a lot going on, there seems to be a surge in the enterprise. There is VC funding data that's coming out for cybersecurity startups falling, fell nearly 2.7 billion in Q1, 23, down 58% year of a year from last year, obviously the economy's changed, but security in particular is interesting that that's the case. I found out that Leng, Chainsmith AI comes they're all getting funded at massive evaluations. So the enterprise market is still hot, but yet showing signs of this have and have nots on the SaaS side. So it seems to be coming through to the gen one cloud cost optimization. Yet when I put my ear of the ground at KubeCon and talk to other practitioners and CIOs, the on-prem dogma of repatriation, I don't think it's true, but there is definitely more on-premise activity in terms of cloud operations. So you got cost optimization in the cloud, but in Europe, the cloud growth seems to be real. And I'm not sure that's reported yet, but the whole sovereign cloud in Europe here is not because I'm in Amsterdam is happening. So I think there's going to be growth here. And I think based on KubeCon's attendance, which was sold out by factor two is amazing. And I think, you know, Amazon and North America and Azure are all kind of hurting. I heard a rumor through the grapevine here and other shows that Azure servers are melting on the chat GPT stuff. So you're seeing them starting to pull back. So maybe chat GPT went a little too early. That's interesting. A couple of things. It can't get data center space from what I'm hearing. So Azure right now is actually trying to procure data centers. So if anyone out there is listening, owns a data center, forward this pod to them and tell them I sent you and that Microsoft is looking for data centers. I mean, like data center has been booming, you know, digital realty equinics. I mean, the data center market's going to continue to boom. But I want to go back to your point on security. As I'm working on this for breaking analysis today, our new journalist David Strom is coming on head of RSA. And I was just looking at the ETR data for the emerging technology survey. This is a survey of private companies that 1400 IT decision makers. There are 90 plus companies that hit their survey. They're just asking like, which emerging companies are you working with? And there's like, supposedly like 4,000 security companies, but there's 90 that hit this survey. And I'm just looking at, you know, where the action is in cloud security, identity, app security, you know, intrusion. I mean, it's just unbelievable. Companies like, I'll just throw some out there. One password beyond trust, Nord security, Arctic Wolf, Hacker one, code 42, Netscope, Tainium, ExaBeam, Bitsite, Sneak security scorecard. I mean, it's just on and on and on. And then we saw Akamai last week, bought NeoSec. We had talked about this on breaking analysis that API security was going to be ripe for M&A. And we didn't call Akamai as the buyer, but you know, we called API security. So I think to your point, VCs have funded plenty. They got to get a return out of this. So, and they're sure they're shifting to generative AI. Why wouldn't you right now? Well, I want to get you, I want to ask you a question because I know you got a lot of data on your breaking analysis and put a plug in for Dave's breaking analysis. Everyone doesn't get it yet. You should get it. It's called the Q breaking analysis when it goes into depth on the buyer side, the CIO surveys and all the trends around buyer behavior and purchasing power and the right tech. First of all, one thing I heard was a lot of consolidation amongst suppliers. Again, that happens in down markets. That's normal. I love to get your thoughts on how really you think it is. Also, we're coming into Q1 earning seasons. The big three are announcing soon. I think next week or it's coming up next week, all three hyperscaled, I think, AWS from Microsoft, I'm Amazon Azure from Microsoft and GCP from Cloud. That's going to be interesting to see what their growth rates are and where they pegged their projections were. So, that's going to be interesting to watch. But I wanted to ask you around buyers. We heard budgets aren't shrinking but they're not expected to be accelerating. Are you hearing that? Or you, this is as usual, what's your take on what you're hearing in terms of the spend? I mean, right now that everyone's calling it cost optimization, what do you- Budgets are absolutely 100% shrinking. There's no question. The data is clear. We entered 2023 with an expectation of CIOs and IT decision makers of budgets growing in the high fives, 5.6, 5.7%. That's now down to mid threes, 3.5%. Q2, which we're in right now, is down in the low twos. Okay, so no question budgets are shrinking. Anybody says they're not is just missing the boat. Now, there are pockets of growth that are above the mean. Energy, no surprise. And the other is government. No, again, no surprise, particularly in security. Also, this was really interesting in the data. Small and mid-sized businesses are spending at a much, much higher rate than large businesses. You're talking about five to six, even 7% growth expected this year versus the 3.5, 3.6% average. So, A, no question budgets are coming down, but there are still some pockets of growth. And by one other point, you know, all this like repatriation mumbo jumbo, it just doesn't show up in the numbers. No question that cloud growth is moderating. I think you're gonna see that when we see the earnings results next week. I expect 15 to 20% growth in the hyperscalers this year, but you're talking about, you know, low to mid single-digit growth for all the on-prem companies. When do you think acceleration is gonna come back? Any guesstimation just ballpark? It's a really hard question. And I think it's a function of uncertainty. I've never seen uncertainty like this, John. I would say, if I had to guess, we're gonna see this sort of sideways move, you know, up and down, maybe little pockets of growth, but I think it's gonna spill into 2024. I honestly do. Until this, until the... That's a weird marker. I agree with you. I mean, I'm kind of torn. Like I have this bipolar moments where on one hand, I'm seeing doom and gloom and I'm like uncertain. On the other hand, I'm seeing massive, not hype, but momentum. I mean, we're in Amsterdam here for the Linux Foundation, cloud native Kubernetes conference, KubeCon. Dave, 10,000 people, 2,000 on the waiting list for a European event. So that's different. That means that's a steady-state 2018 number. Yeah, but so listen. So this is, it's not doom and gloom. This is to your point. So we, as I say, we entered the year looking at almost 6% growth. So my point is there's pent up demand to spend. People want to spend on digital. They want to spend on technology. They need to spend on security. It's two big sectors of security and data. People want to spend on data. So there is pent up demand. And so I think it's, they're ready to pounce. It's just they have to get the green light from the CFO and the CEO and they're not getting it right now because earnings. So earnings are coming down. And I think, you know, I think the keys is still the Fed. Once interest rates truly peak and start to come down. I do think we actually are in a bit of a recession right now. And I think it's going to show up in the numbers. The problem is the Fed's numbers are sort of rear view mirror. So I think once interest rates start to come down, people calm down a little bit. You get a little generative AI kick in to the economy. So I would say at the earliest, I think it's going to be Q4. I think we're going to have a soft Q2. I think we're going to have a soft summer. Maybe best case we get a rebound in Q4 if the Fed maybe doesn't loosen, but maybe they stop tightening. The market will take off. People will feel better. And then I think 2024 would be actually a pretty good year. Yeah. I mean, I think you're, I would agree that I feel like a lot of the startups that have been told keep your runway because obviously it's not, you know, it's nuclear winter that they're going to come out and they're saving their runway. I think there's going to be a real impact on the tech side around platforms and tooling, meaning I think a lot of SaaS companies that have been having good multiples that are either public or private will basically, some of them will go out of business. I think that the customers we're going to start settling in on platform solutions like they do in every down market. That's going to affect cash flow for some of the vulnerable growing companies, public and private. Then I think that's just going to be backed. And then I think what's going to happen is you're going to see this pent up spend opportunity based on the demand around, okay, it's okay to spend now when people feel comfortable. I think the Fed is kind of fucking everything up in my opinion. Really the one that's causing a lot of confusion. I think once people understand where the Fed is with inflation, that to me will be a tell sign. Because if that happens, I think it's going to go right into cloud native, the stuff that we've been reporting on. Because again, we're seeing the activity that I haven't seen in my entire career of 30 years in the business and the cycles on this early stage formation. And I've never seen it like this, this active and this legit. Now this hype, don't get me wrong. But if that continues, that will slingshot into spend. And I think you're right on that the companies are, you know, swirling their nuts away for the winter, right? And then release, that could happen. Now the question is, will happen in Q4, Q1 next year. Yeah, I think you're right on. I mean, but I think you got to take power at his word. He's basically saying, I'm going to keep tightening. So until that changes, you know, it's funny. The Fed used to not give visibility, but they put themselves in a box because they're saying, okay, now we're going to give visibility, which is fine. I don't really have a problem with that, but he's got to stick with it now. And the banking, you know, the regional banking hit that was, you know, that we saw with SVB, you know, created a little wrench in his scenario and he was forced to do like a half raise or a quarter point, whatever it was. But so I think he's got to, he said he's going to keep raising. I think he's going to keep raising and it'd probably go too far and it's going to hurt the economy and then that's going to hurt tech spending. And then, you know, we'll work through it. Hopefully the recession won't be too bad. And then 24 will be good. I think that's your point. There is definitely pent up demand. I mean, what you see. Well, Dave, I want to end the last couple of minutes we got here. I'm in Amsterdam in time zone. You're, you got a busy Friday and you know, we cannot be able to go the whole hour. But I want to get this in because I think you and I were talking about it is this chip issue, right? Guidance around subsidy concerns with TSMC and you got, you know we're always ranting around the trade seekers but like this is a real chip thing. Now I've been hearing that there's been a chip hoarding market meaning that it's going to be a massive over stuffing of chips in the channel, so to speak. I'm not sure if that's true or not. What are you hearing about the Taiwanese chip maker in talks with the US government about its guidance for the chips act, design a boost manufacturing in the United States? So a lot of this came when Pat Gelsinger was running around and putting on a tie and going to Washington and he did a phenomenal job as an industry ambassador. And the $50 billion chips act is really designed to bring manufacturing back on shore to the United States because as Gelsinger points out, you know we used to 30% and now we got 10% and we want to get back to whatever 20% by the end of the decade. I don't know the exact numbers. Maybe it's 25%. So they're trying to lure the big makers. So that's Intel, TSMC and Samsung are the big ones. And so the US government has said, okay we're going to have the taxpayers put in $50 billion and we'll help you build these fabs. Fabs are like incredibly expensive. We're talking, you know, multiple tens of billions of dollars to build a fab. So just for people who don't know, TSMC is by far the most advanced, the volume leader in chip manufacturing. And so they do all the, you know the five nanometer, the three nanometer they're way ahead of the curve and they are cranking out volume. And the reason is really largely Apple, Apple's sucking up tons of TSMC volume, all the very highest end, the most advanced chips at massive volume. And in the semiconductor business, volume means lower cost, okay? I won't even go into why, but volume is everything. Intel, when PCs peaked in the early, you know 2012 timeframe, they lost the volume edge. And that was taken over by ARM architectures. The thing is ARM doesn't make chips. And most of the company, Apple designs its own chips but it doesn't make them. TSMC makes them. And so they send the design to TSMC, TSMC makes them according to the ARM spec. And they've got the volume advantage 10x, the number of wafers that come out of x86. Okay, why is that important? It's important because Taiwan is essentially considered as by China to be part of China. And China, we're limiting their access to advanced chips. And so if China goes over and takes over Taiwan and TSMC, that's a nightmare scenario. So the US is saying, China trying to get ahead of it, bring back into the US. The problem is, okay, great, we got the money. Now there's the US government is saying, well, here's the thing. We want a piece of the profits to go back to the taxpayers. If your revenue exceeds, your profits exceed expectations. Number one, if you have more cash flow than you thought. Number two, we want you to basically open your books. So TSMC is saying, well, wait a minute. That wasn't kind of part of the original deal. We don't know exactly what our profits are gonna be. It's just a forecast. And so I kind of, on the one hand, don't blame them. On the other hand, I could see some lawmakers saying, well, wait a minute, this is US taxpayer money. We're giving you all these tax breaks. We want a piece of the action. If I were TMC, I'd say, okay, fine. Then if we don't hit our projections, then you fill it with a buffer. And of course that's never gonna happen. So here's what I think. I think you gotta let it, it's more important to have onshore manufacturing than it is to try to optimize based on future profits. If they come in and they make a lot of money, they're gonna hire more people. It'll be indirectly, they'll get tax revenue. I think it's more important that we bring companies onshore and stop ticking around with the fine print. That's my take. Yeah, and I think what's interesting to see is how fast those chips can be ramped up. What the right strategy is. Clearly we have to get a domestic strategy in my opinion, but I think you gotta watch out the overbinding. I think the supply chain problem will be continued, be managed. And I worry about people over-purchasing chips, just a hoard inventory, it becomes a chip war. Anyway, Dave, great, great, we got this in. Again, this is episode eight of our CUBE pod. We're trying to get a feel for it. We're feeling good about the format. We'll start bringing in guests, CUBE alumni, getting the top most important stories we're watching again. We got, these are events around the CUBE and of course the top news, but also the stories we're looking into. You know, we got CUBECon here, it's finishing up today. We got RSA for security next week. And we just got a bunch of events lined up throughout the year. Big focus on security. We got a new writer on the team. We'll be adding more editorial. We're gonna start changing a little bit more on what we do on location at physical events as they're back. The events are back, Dave. So people are starved for more CUBE at events. So, you know, we learned, we did some experiments here at CUBECon. We did featured panels, we added more formats. We did some set pieces. So overall the CUBE at live at events is gonna be evolving. And I think we're gonna end up expanding more and then bringing more studio into it. We had great feedback from the community here in the cloud native, cloud builder world. A lot of business as well, a lot of executives here too. Really interesting, Dave. So I think, you know, a lot of going on and super excited we can have the pod here to kind of bring it all together. Yeah, so I just want to say, so RSA next week, we're gonna be on broadcast row in Moscone West. Four days, the CUBE will be there. So by all means, stop by. Or if you can't, if not at the show, go to CUBE.net. We got a big crew there. And our new writer of David Strom was a security pro. Gonna come on breaking analysis today. I'm so excited to be working with him. So yeah, we're gonna be covering that like a blanket. I'm really excited. Once that shout out to Brendan, our producer, he's just notified of our booth BA-06, if anyone has the codes, one interested in where we are at Dell, at RSA. We got Dell Tech World. We got Red Hat Summit behind it. May is gonna be big. Summer will be broken. Super cloud on July 18th, that's up on Silicon angle. A lot of interest Dave on that. Again, just, it should be a great second half of the, well, going into the second half of the year for the CUBE. First half was very weird, but still strong on the content side. So let's keep it rolling. If anybody has suggestions on the pod format style, you know, we're going to have to deal with, you know, Dave on the road, me on the road, both on the road, we're going to have to continue. Send us a note. We'd love to have your involvement. Maybe call-ins day, we'll have some fun. Next step, the first 10 we'll get under our belt and the next 10 we'll figure out, I think by the 20th episode, we should have a good feel for what this is going to be. But it's still fun. I just love shooting the shit with you and run down. And again, Elon Musk might have a section every week if he continues with this. So I love, and of course I love covering startups too. Thanks John. I love, me too. Love it. We don't, we don't do it enough. And so I love what that we're formalizing this. It's fantastic. All right. Brendan, thanks Dave. Have a great weekend. Thanks you guys. Safe trip.