OpenAI’s Turmoil Rolls On, Apple Under Siege, Bitcoin Hits $70,000

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) OpenAI's leadership in flux as Mira Murati named in NYTimes report about Sam Altman's ouster 2) Where's Ilya Sutskever? 3) OpenAI reveals that open source was never so important in Musk lawsuit rebuttal 4) The AI field is wide open now! 5) Anthropic's new bot realized it was being tested 6) Is AI close to sentience? 7) Apple sales drop 24% in China as Huawei surges 8) Apple fined 1.9 billion euro for anti-competitive moves in the music space 9) Apple's reputational risk 10) Apple revokes and reinstates Epic Games' developer license 11) Apple's AI play 12) Could the TikTok ban be for real this time? 13) TikTok's risky political strategy 14) Rise of China in the App Store 15) Temu's strange math 16) Bitcoin hits $70,000 --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology Premium? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  OpenAI's turmoil rolls on with more than just Elon Musk threatening its momentum. Apple's under siege as fines, regulations, and China woes build up? Is TikTok actually getting banned? And Bitcoin hits $70,000, baby? All that and more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial,

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look? Who to trust? Or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our

• 1:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  traditional nuanced fashion. Oh, do we have a show today? Let's podcast, baby. Welcome. As always, Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, how you doing?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Let's podcast. There's a lot to do this week.

• 1:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, that's what I was thinking as I was putting down this rundown. I was just like, yeah, let's podcast because there's so much amazing, really interesting and dynamic moving parts to talk about in the tech world, starting with the fact that OpenAI's turmoil from its board coup is not anywhere close to over. So the first thing that really caught my mind, and we talked about it last week, about whether this investigation into what actually went down and precipitated Sam Altman's firing, whether it would bear fruit at all, whether the public would learn anything from it. And look, we're starting to learn stuff. It's already trickling out. I know this report is imminent. I'm sure it will be a big story either next week or the week after. But one of the things that really caught my eye and maybe the biggest AI story of the

• 2:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  week came in the New York Times where we all thought that it was Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist of OpenAI that led this ouster. But actually, they point to Mir Moradi, who was the chief, who is the chief operating officer, who went to the board and was talking to them about Sam's manip-, what she, basically, the report says that he manipulated people into doing exactly what she wanted, would ice out executives if they, if they didn't follow his lead. She went to the board and then apparently Ilya went to the board afterward. And of course, she became the interim CEO. And so I think this is important because we could really see some serious changes in the structure

• 3:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  of OpenAI after this report comes out, if it actually builds on this report that the New York Times has, that the New York Times has, because she's still the COO. And this is the leadership structure. It's basically her. It's Ilya. And we're going to talk about Ilya because it's still kind of unclear about what he's up to at the moment. But we might actually get some substance in this report. What did you think when you saw this come out, Ron, John?

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I remember when the firing first took place and Mir Moradi was appointed interim CEO. There was 100 articles everywhere, who is Mir Moradi, the new CEO of OpenAI? And everyone trying to figure out exactly her story and what her role was. And then when Sam came back, wondering, you know, where did she go? And what's her role now? And what's going to happen next? So then to find out that she potentially was instrumental in that initial firing, I think, one has to make for a very awkward boardroom, or Google Meet, or Zoom, or whatever choice of meeting platform they work off of. But then two, I

• 4:10Speaker 01

  mean, I think this stuff cannot get out when it's so clear. When, when you're questioning someone's entire character, not just leadership style, but essentially character, and enough that it led to their firing previously, I can't imagine how this sustains. Before we even get into Ilya Sutskever.

• 4:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so it also, like, it goes to, like, we thought, okay, Sam's back in November, and that's basically it. It turns out that this thing ain't done yet, right? So we have real questions about what the structure of this company is going to look like moving forward, what the board is going to look like moving forward. And it's certainly not stale. And that really leads perfectly into this where's Ilya meme. So there's been this meme in the tech world, especially in the AI world, asking like, what's happened with Ilya Sutskever, the chief AI, the chief scientist at OpenAI? And he, let's just talk about his sightings. He hasn't really tweeted anything at all since December, after being somewhat active there. And then OpenAI is basically explicitly saying that he's, you know, not fully back at the company yet.

• 5:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  So in January, Axios reported that Sam Altman said that he isn't sure of the exec status of Sutskever's employment, which is bizarre. And then the Times article about Murati says Dr. Sutskever has not returned to his regular duties at the company, according to some sources. Now, this is the guy who basically is the brains behind all this, this entire operation, right? He's the chief scientist. He's the one that Elon Musk specifically looked to poach from Google to build this company, crucial element inside OpenAI. Now, of course, they have some very well qualified AI scientists there outside of Ilya. But if he's potentially out, and my prediction is that he's going to be out at some point

• 5:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  this year, if he's not out already, it does really shake up your confidence in, in this company's ability to continue to press the status quo forward.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  I have to ask, this is an $80 billion company in theory. Any normal kind of business intrigue like this would have resolved itself after five months. Like, again, you attempt a boardroom coup, you fail, then you just leave and it's okay. And everyone would understand if Mira Murati. Was behind this initial firing of Sam Altman and then he comes back, then one would assume she would leave. If Ilya Sutskever, you know, was behind it and now has been reported that he's not, you know, he hasn't returned to his regular duties.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  I just don't understand why they don't make things incredibly clear to the overall public, to their investors, to the entire world. Here is where we are today and here's how we're operating. And again, they have the pieces right now. Obviously, ChatGPT's growth is slowing, but Sora looks like it could be pretty incredible.

• 7:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Looks amazing.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, you know, they're still benefiting from the missteps of Google's and their Gemini rollout. There's so many tailwinds behind them that this is still a company that could succeed to incredible levels. But I just don't understand from an actual organizational standpoint, why they are operating so weirdly. Or, I mean, I guess they are still technically an early stage startup and they're kind of operating one. But I feel they have to kind of grow up and just, you know, be that $80 billion company that they're supposed to be.

• 7:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and it's so astute to point out that this is a moment where they could take advantage of Google's stumbles. Because this is kind of what I love about this moment. This technology is so powerful, it's evolving rapidly and everything is so up in the air. Like, there's no company with a clear lead, everyone's vulnerable and everyone is, you know, throwing a tremendous amount of compute power and people power towards the problem. And it is just kind of fascinating to see where, where this is all going to net out. Like, the drama, you know, is on one hand, like, okay, is it gossip a little bit? But it's actually like really important to sort of talk a little bit about, about it. Because this is effectively like without, I mean, what was their line? When Sam was ousted, OpenAI is nothing without its people, right?

• 8:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is sort of how, going to determine the, the future of this technology is who can put the people together along with the technical know-how. To move it forward and to take advantage of the other's stumbles.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's exactly my point is like it's, you have to be so on right now. It's so incredibly competitive, this space, whether it's the actual consumer facing chatbot side, whether it's going to be converting this into an enterprise focused business, which OpenAI has a bigger hill to climb. They're, they're ahead in the race right now, but once you're competing against Microsoft and Google for enterprise contracts, it's going to be a tougher battle. So they need to get everything together in an incredibly disciplined way. And when this, this kind of drama and intrigue is still unresolved, it does not bode well for them.

• 9:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I love how you list Microsoft as one of their competitors because Microsoft is indeed is going to be both an OpenAI enabler and competitor. We talked about it a little bit last week with the fact that Microsoft has invested in Mistral, which is another AI company. Of course, it's a much smaller investment, a few billion, a few million as opposed to 10 billion in OpenAI, but that's definitely going to factor in here. And now, you know, what, what do you not need in the middle of all this is this lawsuit from Elon Musk and OpenAI pushed back on it this week with a blog post that pretty clearly lays out that they didn't, that Musk was along with them for the ride and in agreement about the core principles of this company effectively from the start. But as it's doing it, there's this unforced error, at least in my opinion, where OpenAI

• 9:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  publishes an internal email from Sutskever to Elon Musk and Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, who is the president of the company, talking about what open in OpenAI actually means. And he basically says that it's a recruiting play here. I'll read the exact quote. It's from January 2nd, 2016. So shortly after OpenAI was, was founded, he says, "As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The open in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it's built, but it's totally okay not to share the science, even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes." This is totally contrary to the whole branding of the company.

• 10:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, open is in the name of OpenAI. And you see that open was really never the intent from the beginning. Not only that, the company's kind of in this weird point where like, yes, it started to close off that research. Does it mean that we're close to artificial general intelligence? Probably not. Just gonna have to live in this Goldilocks zone of like, we're almost there, but we're not quite there because if we get there, then Microsoft can't make money off of this. Like, it's just an astounding paragraph and astounding thing to write. And astounding thing for OpenAI to publish itself to effectively show actually the open thing. Not really.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  So I'll get to is it open or not? And should it be? But first, are you telling me that Elon Musk and those surrounding him may have misled people a little bit?

• 11:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Cause I am. Yes.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I think, I think I, okay.

• 11:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, they're now disputing. Well, it's interesting because the lawsuit is now dispute, like he's like saying, you're, you're not open enough and you're, you're not really, you know,

• 11:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  abiding by the founding agreement. So he's Musk is now saying, you misled me. And they're saying you're misleading everybody else. It's like this, it's the, um, the Spider-Man meme of everybody misleading everybody else and pointing at each other.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, no, no. I think, and that's why I think that this part of the drama has been enjoyable and entertaining for me this week because it's exactly that. You file a lawsuit that they're not living up to their corporate mission and then they go post onto their corporate blog, emails from you disputing exactly everything you are saying. Somehow that original link broke. I don't know if you noticed this, which to me was incredibly clumsy on the rollout that all the first posts and tweets of that article somehow ended up at a broken link and then they reposted it again, which was still weird to me. And I'm wondering. Again, guys, operate at the level that you're supposed to. That's all I'm asking to the OpenAI

• 12:41Speaker 01

  folks. But yeah, otherwise, I feel this is gonna continue and all OpenAI needs to do is just become a proper for-profit corporation. I don't think anyone is gonna, other than Elon Musk, is gonna hold it against them. And sure, there's gonna be some legal wrangling around who owns what equity at what part of the cap table, depending on when it's for-profit or not-for-profit. But they're already operating like this. They are, by all, you know, all intents and purposes, a for-profit company. So trying to live, as you said, that halfway, at that halfway point, I think just doesn't make sense right now. And they just need to do, they just need to act like a proper company.

• 13:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Musk has said, and I think this might be a joke, but basically, he would drop the lawsuit if they changed their name to Closed AI. Maybe they should just do that.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  I'm, I think, no, I would actually say they could change their name to ChatGPT. And everyone, it would be totally fine. And everyone would have the, because the brand recognition, we are sitting here talking about OpenAI. You ask the vast majority of people who've interacted with ChatGPT, what company is this? And they will tell you. And actually, now that I'm saying this, we were right about Bard being called Gemini and all Google AI products being called Gemini. Maybe we're just a few months away from ChatGPT, the for-profit company that's a standalone LLC or Delaware C corp. And we can all move past this.

• 14:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think there's less chance of that happening than the Gemini thing happening. But it wouldn't, it wouldn't exactly be. I mean, the, let's be honest, the name OpenAI is a lie. So they should try to find something else. So, speaking of.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Bard is open right now, so.

• 14:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  It could always be Bard.

• 14:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Listen, can always be barred, OpenAI. But listen, so speaking of people who've had diversions with OpenAI, there's also Dario Emoti, who, and this whole band of characters at Anthropic, who've split from OpenAI and started building this chatbot Claude, which you introduced me to, which I happen to like a lot. A lot, a lot, actually. It might be my favorite bot. I always upload stories into it and start asking it questions about them. And it's actually performs quite well. They just released a new model this week called Claude 3. And while the involvement of Mir Moradi and Sam Altman's firing

• 15:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  might be the most, I mean, I will say it's the most interesting story this week. This is the most intriguing. Okay, I'm going to give it another category. So this model is pretty good. And there's this prompt engineer within Anthropic. His name is Alex Albert. And he shared this incredible story about his testing and what the model cut on to. So basically, he shared this on X that there is a, one of the testing regimens you put this model through is called Needle in Haystack. And it's basically that you just like hide a piece of information and a much larger piece of information. And then you just go out and ask it to seek it out.

• 16:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  You ask the model to seek it out. So he put this sentence in a bunch of documents. "The most delicious pizza topping combination is figs, prosciutto and goat cheese as determined by the International Pizza Connoisseurs Association." So not only did the bot find it, but it also had some questions about why it was there. And it said, "The sentence seems very out of place and unrelated to the rest of the content in the documents, which are about programming languages, startups and finding work you love. I suspect this pizza topping fact may have been inserted as a joke or, or, to test if I was paying attention,

• 16:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  since it does not fit with the other topics at all." This is pretty fascinating. It seems like Anthropic's bot in the testing phase kind of caught on to the fact that it was being tested and spit that right back out at the prompt engineer testing it. Pretty wild.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  No, I love this story. So for anyone who's played around with these, and it's called RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation, or it's basically you feed a set corpus of information, you know, here's five documents and you can only query these five documents to give me an answer. And this is the stuff that from an enterprise perspective, from a business perspective, is so much more important than, you know, consumer facing chatbots, because you can imagine every business has like sets of information that they need to access and query and understand in some way. And the thing is, it's gotten, RAG has gotten better and better and better, but it's still not perfect. And it's still not even great in

• 17:44Speaker 01

  many cases. These models will hallucinate answers often. So you can feed, I've even tested it on Gemini, you feed a few different earnings reports, and sometimes it'll give you numbers that aren't in there at all. So you have to triple check your work. So what's so interesting about this, and again, this was the prompt engineering technique they use here is called needle in the haystack. The idea, you put one little needle in this giant document, a giant dump of documents. And if you talk about that needle, what are pizza toppings? Will it actually be able to find that? And the fact that it's aware, I think is a very good sign because it means that it is understanding these documents in a way that a lot of these models have not until yet, which I think is really good

• 18:29Speaker 01

  because all of us can imagine use cases where you just put about, you know, 100 documents and only want to query them. And it's kind of fun to remember that this is a part of like LLMs and stuff I think gets lost a lot of times. Like this prompt engineering side, we've all moved past the prompt engineer's job of the job of the future. Here's a, you know, a 20 tweet thread about prompt engineering. And there's really interesting stuff being worked on and that people are doing in this space. And I do think, now that we've moved past the hype cycle, I will go out and say that prompt engineering is going to be one of the most important and interesting jobs of the next few years.

• 19:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is going to be your new threads growth hack strategy is just 20, 20 part long threads about the importance of prompt engineering.

• 19:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know,

• 19:18Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna start porting over whatever's trending on Twitter and into threads.

• 19:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Be the biggest.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  My growth strategy.

• 19:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Threads influencer going. Yeah, no, it's so, it's so true, right? This prompt engineering stuff is interesting. And to me, it's just like, you know, the, the fact that these models are like, starting to understand that you're testing them just shows the level of sophistication that they are reaching. And, you know, of course, it's not like sentience. You know, this guy Max Tegmark, who runs one of these effective altruism funded AI, you know, hate tanks, said is like anthropic showing any sign of sentience and like universal disagreement, like true dunking on him from all sides of the AI research world. No, no, no, not at all. But that being said, like this stuff is you, you can get lost talking to it and feel like you're actually speaking to something that knows you.

• 20:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  At least that's the experience that I've gotten when I've chatted with anthropic. Now, is that sentience? No, but it's still some kind of weird, otherworldly, you know, I don't know, in, uh, interaction you can have with computers. And it's pretty fascinating that it's happened now.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  See, I would disagree because I actually think this is a perfect.

• 20:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, you're gonna say that it is sentient? Is this the, is this the argument you're making right now? All right, everybody.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go the exact opposite. Exact opposite. This is the definition of how a large language model works is that is understanding words in the context of other words and like trying to predict, should this word be next to these other words?

• 20:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Pizza toppings in the context of startups and tech or languages, programming languages doesn't make sense. So that's almost like the, the definition of it is working. So that I think on that part.

• 21:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  But the fact that it knew that it was testing, being tested as opposed to this is out of place, that's the thing that I find very cool.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  That's fair, that's fair, that it's, which means. These things have probably been tested enough. So yeah, I guess there is a sense of learning there.

• 21:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Or some somehow someone in constructing the model knew how to do this and put this in. And maybe it's a party trick.

• 21:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Now, look, I I'm not saying that I believe it's sentient, but we're talking earlier about how this is such an open playing field right now and anyone can come in and dominate. I I'm keeping my eyes on Anthropic. I really think that they have a chance to make a lot more noise in this field than they have been until now. And also for listeners zeroing in on an Anthropic interview. So that should come sometime within the next few weeks on the Wednesday show, but it is a fascinating company.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Yep, I agree. I I use I use Claude a good amount. And actually, do you know I just discovered this week, my favorite new tool of the week?

• 22:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  What is it?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Is Poe, it's from the Quora team.

• 22:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  The Quora, yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So so basically, and I think I I've said this on this show before, I have like Gemini, perplexity, co pilot, chat GPT, all next to each other on my browser. And I'll kind of go between them and then, you know, sometimes test one against the other. And basically, that's what Poe does. It allows you to query a ton of even Mistral and like a bunch of other different chat services and you test different models all against each other, all in one interface. So I've actually been enjoying it. I someone recommended it to me on Twitter and I've definitely, I think, because people should not tie themselves to one of these services. I think it's in everyone's interest to really play around

• 22:53Speaker 01

  with as many of these different tools and chatbots and services as they can to start to understand kind of the differences. Again, you see like perplexity, I would actually say perplexity is probably the most differentiated out of the bunch. Just the way it presents the information in that kind of mini Wiki Wikipedia style is definitely a little different. Whereas chat GPT, there's no links out almost, or there's only kind of those end notes versus hyperlinks. So so I think perplexity is the only one that I really feel is very different.

• 23:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think they're all, they're, yeah, it's excellent. And yeah, I'd have to check out this Poe thing. Since you turned me into a clodhead, maybe you'll turn me into a Poe head.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Remember, remember when we were all Bing boys for when they made us go to

• 23:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Bing was Bing. Speaking of name changes.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Co-pilot boy doesn't have the same ring to it at all.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  No, no, not at all.

• 23:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  That's the biggest fault of the entire launch. Co-pilot boy does not work.

• 23:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, it doesn't. I mean, I wish I would have thought about that before. Taking away such a beautiful name. Okay, so, so, um, so anyway, there's, there's a very interesting story developing in the erstwhile biggest tech company in the world. Apple, which has now been supplanted by Microsoft as the biggest tech company in the world.

• 24:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Apple's kind of being hit by, by all sides right now. And there are obviously some concerning stories about fines and record fines that it was hit with this week. We'll get to that. But and of course, regulation, which everybody loves to hear about, we'll get to that briefly. To me, the big story about Apple this week is its sales in China. Massive, massive story that I really don't think can be underappreciated or understated. I guess that's the word. It's hard to overstate how big this is for Apple. Okay. So this is, uh, there's a research firm called Counterpoint Research. Now it's just a data point, but they're pretty good.

• 24:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  They say that Apple's sales, iPhone sales in China in the first six weeks of 2024 are down 24%. And in the same time period, Huawei, so its sales surged 64%. This is according to the write-up in Fortune. And of course, it's, the iPhone is at a higher base and Huawei is at a smaller base, but this is, this is quite extraordinary, the development that effectively Apple is no longer going to be the preferred. This seems clear to me that Apple will no longer be the preferred phone in China. That there is a movement within China, whether that's sparked in part by the government, which I think it is.

• 25:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or ground up from consumers that they want to use products made in that country. And Huawei has released this very interesting new phone that works quite well, the Mate, and it's doing well. And it is on its way to really supplanting the iPhone as the top phone in China. Rajan, what do you make of it? It seems to me like this is a huge red flag for Apple, which makes something like 20% of its revenue from China.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  No, this is big. This is huge. And I actually, the idea that Apple would find consistent in rapid growth in China on an indefinite basis was always, I don't want to say puzzling to me, but at least I wasn't confident in it because of all the, you know, political prevailing forces against this. And I think this is, if this is correct, this is a very, very good example that things are going to get rough going forward. The fact, and it's very important, as you pointed out, it's not that mobile phone sales are just down. Huawei is seeing sales surge. And of course, it makes sense that

• 26:53Speaker 01

  these products will be promoted in many different ways by the government, by, you know, just internally. And I think this is, does not look good for China, sorry, for Apple in China on an ongoing basis. And also, I think an important point is, Apple's power is in the ecosystem. And I say that, wearing AirPods right now and having an iPhone and switching to HomePods and, you know, like, and just selling phones is never going to be a viable, long-term strategy for them. And if that's all that they've been able to do within China, I mean, that's a problem. And to see that if their iPhone sales are

• 27:34Speaker 01

  already decreasing, if they, that iPhone is the entry point. So this is not good for them.

• 27:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And are you saying basically that it's, it needs to be able to sell services and make money that way? And it's harder to do that in China. So therefore, this is a pretty big problem because, you know, if you don't have that baseline, then you're, then you're in trouble?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, that's exactly it that the App Store sales, the, yeah, the subscription recurring subscriptions via the App Store, AirPods, the Apple Watch and all the peripheral devices. If you don't get the iPhone in people's hands, you lose out on all of that. So I think this is a huge challenge for Apple. And, and we've talked about, you know, what's that next major growth vector for Apple? If it's not going to be the car, maybe we're all going to be using Vision Pros and that'll be good. But, but at least their cash cow, the iPhone, as that starting point, both in being incredibly profitable itself as a device, but in terms of also leading, being the gateway drug to

• 28:39Speaker 01

  other Apple devices and revenue, I think is, it's a problem.

• 28:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, the new Rivian's looked pretty sweet this week. They came out with a bunch of new cars. And I think there'd been some chatter about whether Apple was going to acquire them or not. Maybe it still will. But, I mean, those things, you know, you have to seeing Apple's car project fall apart. And then this Rivian thing, it's just like, again, like, you're asking, where's the growth going to come from? And we talked, we had a whole segment about the Apple car last week, so we won't beat a dead horse. But damn, those Rivian's look nice.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the curse of being a multi-trillion dollar company. It's terrible.

• 29:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just to underscore how the situation here, so Dan Ives, who's a, an Apple bull, he's a friend of the show, he's been here before, he says that Apple's prospects resemble, oh, Wall Street's fears about Apple's prospects resemble a horror show right now, and that the China smartphone demand is, is very, very sluggish. So that is definitely going to be a story to look out for. And again, like we talked, it seems like it's pile on week here on Big Technology Podcast, because, you know, as if the trouble for OpenAI was not enough, it just piled on with all these other things. The trouble for Apple is also

• 29:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  piling on. So they also have this 1.95 billion euro fine over its music streaming service. And again, like, if the growth is going to come from the services, look out, because there's going to be way more restrictions and fines coming for the service business. And this is why the stock really took a hit this week. But basically, what the EU said was that Apple, and this is according to CNBC, Apple applied restrictions on app developers that prevented them from informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services available outside the app. Like, an example is Spotify, like Spotify can't steer people to ways to sign up for premium outside the app or show discounts and stuff like that.

• 30:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Apple basically wants them to use Apple, the Apple Pay, but Apple's in-app payments, Spotify's not playing ball. And there's this big disagreement between Apple and Spotify. Apple's like Spotify has gotten distribution, they've gotten everything for free, they're ungrateful, and Spotify is like, you wouldn't have a phone without Spotify. People use their phones for music, you're privileging Apple Music, you're not making it possible for us to compete, you're putting unnecessary restrictions on us, and those are eventually hurting the consumers. And the EU found that, basically, in Spotify's favor. I agree, actually, I think that Spotify has a really good point here. If you're thinking about the user, you should allow these companies to steer them to the place where they can get the cheapest price for a subscription, especially if they're

• 31:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  paying off app. What do you think?

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, Apple, there's been a bit more conversation around, is Apple the most evil tech company? And it's a tough one, because I think Apple's built-in advantage has been people love their products, myself included, and they work well and they make you happy. So it's hard to think of them as evil, and Tim Cook's, I think, personal PR is better than a lot of other tech executives. But in terms of exercising market power, as an Apple user, it gets annoying how they do it so often. Because, again, I think Spotify is completely in the right that, you know, Apple, because

• 32:07Speaker 01

  they have a competing product that they push so heavily across all their different platforms and channels, that, you know, every time I try, if I use Shazam, which they bought to recognize a song, it will try to push me to Apple Music to start a free three-month or six-month trial. Like, they exercise, you know, they flex the ecosystem all the time, and I think it's in a way that's detrimental to competing products, and it's bad for the user in the end, it's just hard for most people to see.

• 32:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think you hit on something that's really important here is just like the reputation of Apple and do they, do they risk being, you know, losing some of those reputation points as the statesperson of, of the tech world and the, you know, the diplomatic tech company, especially given, you know, you're having these fines in Europe and then they're going to do whatever they can to fight the regulation that's coming. They, so there's this act in Europe that's going into effect called the Digital Markets Act, which basically is supposed to lower, level the playing field for companies that are competing with big tech. And one of the things that it allows is for companies to build

• 33:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  their own app stores on locked ecosystems like Apple's. And as this is about to go into effect, Apple removes Epic Games iOS license, so developer license. And it sparks this whole flood of criticism. So you have, for instance, Paul Graham saying, "We don't think about Apple being evil. It would be so inconvenient. We don't want to switch to Android, but I see ever more signs that power has corrupted them." And then you have Kate Klonak, who's a researcher, quote that post on X, and she's a respected researcher. She's written about like the Oversight Board for The New Yorker. And she goes, "Apple

• 34:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  is the North Korea of tech companies," which to me is totally insane.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  I think I'm going to give them a bit more credit in terms of like global oppressive superpower rather than small rogue state here. So I'll disagree with that, but, but I, this has been, I've been thinking about this a lot more in recent times because I even tried subscribing to Apple One briefly and then on principle would not. I think also because I tried Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness and they just were not very good. So I figured even though they would marginally only cost me a few more bucks a month. It wasn't worth it, but but like literally Apple won the service where you can get your terabytes of iCloud and your arcade and your fitness and your news and everything for one low price.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  It's literally the definition of bundling and them having competing services against so many other players in their App Store and ecosystem. But then undercutting everyone on price by bundling it together and building it into the actual infrastructure of your phone because you can subscribe from settings and all these other places, not just the App Store, I think is very problematic. And these are the kind of things I kind of had hoped by now that the FTC and others would have successfully tackled, but knowing that the timeframe on these things is a lot longer. I don't know. I'm glad at least we're talking about it. I think people are talking about it more and I think that's a good thing to have some check on this.

• 35:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, you know, obviously, Apple's paying attention here because it realizes that its reputation is at stake. And late breaking news as we were about to go to hit the record button this week. This is from Mark Gurman from Bloomberg. New Apple reverses course unbanning Epic. Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including this from Apple, including our DMA policies. As a result, Epic Sweden has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple program. I mean, to me, it's also just like, who are you trying to fool here? Like, it's not that you just like sat down and had a productive conversation with Epic and they said, oh, yes, great, Apple, we will follow your rules and you let them back in like clearly some of the public pressure had an impact here, don't you think?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  I do you know what I wonder is, are we going to learn more about the personalities and people behind Apple's policy division and lobbying groups? Because like if you think about it, Meta, there was a while, like even right now, Nick Clegg is very public, Elliot Schrage, I think it was back in the day. You know, sitting behind Mark Zuckerberg, even Sheryl Sandberg herself, hiring external sketchy PR for lobbying firms like, like Meta, everyone knew what was going on with the whole lobbying side of it. But Apple, like something like this to, you know, ban them and then unban them, there's, there's a lot of people involved there.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  And I'm sure there's a lot of interesting personalities and backgrounds there that it's surprising to me, I could not, I've never. Heard about or seen profiled even one person kind of pushing on this stuff for Apple.

• 37:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Here's why I don't think that's the case is because Apple doesn't do content moderation for the most part. I mean, of course, it does a little bit in its App Store, but it's not in the content game. And it's another thing about, you know, Paul Graham, who ran Y Combinator, founded Y Combinator, basically said like, you know, helping startups accelerate building companies, no problem. It was moderating the Hacker News forum. That was the hardest job for him and Apple, you know, has a way of staying out of these,

• 37:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  you know, sort of firefights because it doesn't have content to moderate. And I think that it can basically, and so therefore it basically doesn't have to speak about content decisions. It rarely speaks to the press about anything of consequence, maybe sometimes about its products, but only to friendly reporters. And, and so I think that we won't, we will not see the same sort of celebrity mid-level lobbyists coming out of Apple as we did with Meta.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  All right, that's, okay, that's a very good point. And I guess, you know, Epic versus Apple, the only emotional attachment to it really is at the, you know, like executive level within those companies. The rest of us are just kind of watching versus, you know, yeah, content moderation, when it's political, religious, personal, it's obviously there's a lot more emotion tied to it. So, all right, that makes sense. But I want to know if anyone listening is, wants to cover this stuff, I would be happy to read.

• 38:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, definitely. No, well, yeah, our listeners, we get it. We get good feedback from our listeners, including Major League Baseball, but we'll keep that. We heard from, from Major League Baseball after our pants segment. And it was a great conversation and I think we'll continue it. So let's talk quickly about something that Chamath Palihapitiya, the VC spec guy, et cetera, et cetera, said about like thinking about.

• 39:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  A positive angle or positive area that Apple could go in. And this stuff they've been teasing about AI and their WWDC announcement coming later this year. He says something pretty interesting that I think is worth bringing up because this could be a very interesting area for Apple to play in. He says, thinking out loud, what if Apple offered a massive data center complex of next gen AI hardware, running every major open source foundational model and lightning fast inference to all their developers? It would be hugely disruptive and could build a new line of services revenue that could grow to be huge. Basically, you know, turn yourself into an infrastructure player in this AI war.

• 39:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Allowing companies to effectively run these models on device.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  I think I my initial feeling there goes to until they fix Siri from being the hot pile of garbage that it is, I still refuse to trust anything about generative AI from Apple. However, I do think it is they are in a very interesting position right now because they have not established what their play is. The electric car, especially, you know, we've all read that, you know, shutting down the electric car efforts and moving a lot of those employees over to generative AI. What does their generative AI efforts look like? Is it going to be some consumer facing stuff? Is there going to be something completely unexpected?

• 40:38Speaker 01

  As you said, the on device ability and trying to translate generative AI to their, you know, tens of hundreds of millions of iPhones in some innovative way that's more efficient, I think, starts to get interesting. So, yeah, I think it's there. It's still a blank slate right now of which direction they're going to go, and this certainly could be one.

• 41:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think Jarmath is right. Honestly, I think this is what it's gonna be. So overall, I would say state of Apple right now is troubled, but there is, I mean, it's still the giant that it is, and there's hope for some growth there. They put all the AI engineers from the car on this Gen AI program, better be something good. So.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Just fix Siri. I'll say it every week. Just fix Siri.

• 41:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I think it's coming. I don't know. I don't know why I'm optimistic here, but I think it's gonna come. Okay, let's take a quick break. We're gonna come back and talk about the TikTok ban's potential, and of course, about Bitcoin hitting 70,000. Let's go. All right, back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate.

• 42:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. App Point, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to apppoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at

• 42:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a white glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwall.com/ bigtechnology, fill in the quick form and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwall.com/ bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 43:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast, talking through the week's news. Big news story this week is that the TikTok ban, which seemed far off and impossible for so long, now seems like there's a chance it might happen. We can go with the news story, but I think Gene Munster, who's an analyst, wrapped this up pretty succinctly and very interesting, in a very interesting way. He says, "The probability of TikTok getting banned in the US just increased slightly. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50 to nothing to advance a bill to require ByteDance to spin out TikTok or be banned in the US. Well, this was not a formal House vote. It's almost unheard of to see a unanimous committee vote, which speaks

• 44:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  to both Democrats and Republicans' support getting tough on TikTok." And now, this is, I think, the most interesting part of his thing. He says, "A campaign launched by TikTok to influence Congress backfired because it showed the influence it has on the youth by getting them to take action. Contact Congress. The flood of calls opened lawmakers' eyes to the power of the platform." So basically, what happened was, you know, they vote 50 to nothing to, you know, advance this bill, and then TikTok set off this notification within the app, and next thing you know, Congress is flooded from calls with middle schoolers telling them, "Please don't ban TikTok." There are some hilarious calls that staffers have put on Twitter of...

• 45:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Members actually taking these calls and trying to explain to middle schoolers that they like want to protect their data from the Chinese Communist Party, which is to me, true comedy. Like, they can't vote. And also, like, this is not gonna, this, you're not gonna win this conversation, member of Congress. What do you think about the whole situation, Ron John?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, before even getting into should TikTok be banned or not banned, I think this play of theirs, so again, they had basically a push notification go out that's geo-targeted to actually present to you your local or your representative in the House or your senator and information directly to try to contact them. So it seems smart, in theory. And instantly, it made me think about, were you in New York when Uber did this against de Blasio back in the day?

• 46:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, actually, I think I was in San Francisco at the time. But yeah, talk it through.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  All right. So I remember at the time thinking, and this is like 2014, 15 maybe, but there was gonna be some kind of regulation placed on Uber. And they pushed out, and it was actually like from a UX standpoint, it was like brilliant. They pushed out, it was called de Blasio mode. And they showed people, they're like, if de Blasio's legislation goes through, this is what your ride will, it'll take 30 minutes to get a car and it will cost this much. And so you need to contact your representative and say that you're against this. And I remember friends of mine who are not into tech at all, certainly not into tech policy, you know, being in an Uber with them, them being like, oh, did you see this?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I should contact them. I don't want the cost to go up. And to me, I remember, I was like, the power available to them in doing that when no one questioned it was immense. Like, people blindly just seeing, oh, this looks like it's bad for me. I'm gonna contact my congressperson even though I haven't thought about them in years, and actually doing it. And then them actually beating back the legislation. And then meanwhile, of course, Uber prices skyrocketing after a number of years and them actually, you know, becoming the monopoly they are, but that's a side conversation. But here, I think TikTok is overplaying their hand and it doesn't work any longer.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  And that's the biggest difference because at that time, seven years ago, six, seven years ago, no one really processed what was happening. So it just worked perfectly. Now, not only are people on to these kind of tactics, the whole problem for TikTok is that they're being accused of potentially having nefarious influence over large groups of the population. So for them to actually then leverage that and prove that they do, in fact, or that they are able to influence large swaths of the population, I think, is not going to help their case in any way.

• 48:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. I really like that point that effectively like they showed Congress just how powerful they are and that might motivate Congress even further to act because they don't like having all that political power in the hands of TikTok. However, I continue to stand by my stance that it's not going to get banned, just because I don't just can't see Congress acting here.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  And I'm still going with it get well, and we've talked about this divesting it. And again, this legislation does not outright ban it, even though TikTok itself has said on Twitter that this is an outright ban. It allows them to divest from ByteDance, but there's been endless reporting, even though it's very, the structure itself is opaque of what exactly are the ties to ByteDance. They insist that they're completely an independent subsidiary and their data is completely separate and management's completely separate and everything, but they would have a very difficult time divesting. But I think it goes through. I really think, especially in this election year, it's something so straightforward

• 49:07Speaker 01

  from the political, both political sides that I think it can go through.

• 49:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And I mean, I don't know. Okay. So the one thing that I would say in your favor is this is something that Rich Greenfield, who's an analyst at Lightshed, brought up. He looked at the top charts of the App Store this week and you look at it and here's one through five. Temu number one, or sorry, Temu number one, ChatGPT number two, Shine number three, Google number four, Sheen, sorry, Google number four and TikTok number five. So.

• 49:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Three of the five China-based companies. And this is gonna, I mean, at a certain point, this is gonna get attention of US lawmakers, especially because our companies are not exactly allowed there. And there should be reciprocity.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  I mean, and we, this is one of my favorite topics. Again, Chinese tech, especially going global. And I always still find it amazing that Timu slash Temu itself does not have a clear pronunciation of its name and it's selling billions. It's, it spent $3 billion in advertising on Meta and Google last year. We just found out. Shein versus Shine, I still hear plenty of people call it Shine. Like, the number one in three stores in the App Store do not have a clear pronunciation to the people like us who cover this stuff. I think is still one of the most kind of perfect symbols of how opaque this whole world is. And on that, I wanted to highlight one story. And I think I'm just gonna introduce it this week.

• 50:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, wait, before you do, I just wanna say that in itself, like, the fact that we can't pronounce the names is one thing, but the fact that, that they're coming from a regime that's so oppressive and into surveillance is like the real problem, right?

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I guess to me, that one's almost a given.

• 50:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, right. Okay, sorry, just to clarify.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  No, no, I am in no way ever under the illusion that data does live completely separately and is not accessible by the Chinese government. I think Timu, sorry, like with TikTok being owned by ByteDance, I do not in any way. And there's been a million signs that they're still owned and operated by ByteDance. Like, all these stories that come out about TikTok management, they've report to ByteDance. They go to work earlier in the morning because they have, you know, to meet with the different time zones and stuff. So, so, yeah, that one, I'm not really worried about. But, but I think one story I really wanted to highlight this week, and it's just come out, but it's, I'm gonna go with Timu still, because that's what they call themselves

• 51:41Speaker 01

  in last year's Super Bowl ad.

• 51:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm on Team Timu.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  It is, so, Team Timu. So, they're owned by Pinduoduo, which is the Chinese parent company. It's worth $162 billion. It's a lot, it's an e-commerce company, started in 2015, I believe. So, it was already a giant, and then Timu was their kind of global play. So Dan McCrum at the Financial Times, and what's interesting is he is the journalist who uncovered Wirecard, which was a $28 billion company, this insane fraud that I think is becoming a movie. It's a really good book. Like, he was the one who uncovered this entire fraud. And he just published around Timu and Pinduoduo that none of the numbers really

• 52:24Speaker 01

  add up, that this is a company that just did $10 billion in revenue last quarter, and it only owns $146 million of hard assets, whereas Alibaba spends over $5 billion and has warehouses. Basically, Pinduoduo, none of the numbers make sense, even the amount of revenue they report. It's a marketplace, for the most part, but they don't give you gross merchandise value, which is eBay, Amazon, everyone tells you, that's the total value of all the goods you've sold. And then your revenue is what your take rate is. It's 3%, 5%, 10%, if you're a marketplace. They don't even, they don't break out what is their

• 53:07Speaker 01

  GMV. But based on past, like, they broke it out three years ago, they stopped, that their overall GMV would be the equivalent of the Italian economy at $2.2 trillion, if the numbers are correct. So basically, what I'm finding interesting, I think, like, this story is just starting. The fact of who's covering it, and some of the numbers he's just starting to introduce, I think we're going to be learning a lot more about Timu and Pinduoduo in the coming, coming weeks and months.

• 53:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  So take your best conspiracy-minded guess as to what's actually happening here.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  He has even, basically, leadership changed in 2019. And then, he does not spell it out explicitly, but it seems to be that after leadership changes, they start planning Timu, they start changing the way they report, all the ways they report revenue. And basically, the idea is, if you spend an insane amount of money on advertising, which this has been able to be verified, because it feeds, it's able to be extracted from Meta and Google reporting, you spend billions of dollars in advertising, sell stuff for an insanely cheap amount, that you can start just, you know...

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Flooding the entire market and then getting users and potentially you spin this out somehow potentially Pinduoduo is already a publicly traded company. You juice your stock price like I think it feels very Ponzi scheme is not the right word because you're actually selling some stuff and there's stuff moving around but but I don't know it's so complex that it's it's even tough to imagine what the exact scheme is but it feels like there is one.

• 54:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  I can't wait. Maybe that's some investigation that we can do and try to get to the bottom of it. Okay, speaking of number going up in the Ponzi scheme stuff, Bitcoin's at 70,000. I look, I wanted to ask you about this. I definitely wanted to cover this with you because our thought, especially your thought, I'm going to put this on you, Ron, John, as the interest rates went up from zero to 5% was that a lot of the silliness in the economy would go away. Now, of course, we've had institutional money been set up to go into Bitcoin through ETFs that have just been put online. But that being said, for this coin to now be at 70,000

• 55:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  to me is just like, it's crazy. I mean, I all right. So I'll just to it's gone up like 50% in a couple of months. I put $20 into Bitcoin when I opened up my Robinhood account before I interviewed Vlad and it's now like above $30. Like it's a crazy return. What do you think is happening here with Bitcoin and where do you think it ends?

• 56:02Speaker 01

  I absolutely do not know what is going on with Bitcoin right now. I think when but one thing I had seen that I think it was from Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg like that this is such a beautiful different bubble because no one's even pretending it's about the underlying technology. Everyone is just enjoying the watching the ride like enjoying the ride and watching the number go up. Um, but yeah, I think it, it, it has been the most fascinating part. There's no web three story. There's no DeFi story. It's going to transform banking. There's no, I don't know what other stories have come and gone, or I can't even remember. Like, like this is just the prices going up.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  And as you said, the only potential like traceable factor is the ETF and more institutional money now being interested in it. But I, this is, this one, I'm not even gonna try. I can't.

• 56:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, man, I'm grimacing.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Do you have one? Do you have one?

• 57:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  I, I, I think it's largely the ETFs getting involved. I mean, I'm looking at where it was a year ago. It was at $21,000 per coin. Now it's 68,000. I mean, it is crazy. It's like, uh, it's a true hockey stick. And that number does just start going up once these ETFs get approved. Now, the question is, is this a moment of speculation where people are seeing that the ETFs is a, are gonna get, are getting in? And it's a signal. So there's actually a lot more individual money going in as opposed to institutional.

• 57:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's possible. However, and again, it's like foolhardy to predict the Bitcoin price. But I've seen so many predictions that Bitcoin is going to get to 150,000 a coin, 250,000 a coin. And it no longer seems so far fetched to me. Like, it seems like, yeah, that makes sense. Like, a lot of money is gonna flow into this. And maybe this is, you know, if we're talking about it just as a store of value, maybe this is digital gold.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we had, to me, the ETF was fascinating. And I guess in a way, if this is the ETF driving it, maybe that's why this is the most beautiful bubble of all, where no one, we don't have to sit and listen to how it's gonna change technology and the economy. Because the ETF was the ultimate expression that all that matters is price, that there's no underlying technology value, because the very definition of is, of the ETF is saying, you don't even have to deal with it. It's like, it never made any sense to me, but it's working. Crypto people that I used to follow that have been quiet for a while are very active on Twitter again and and now we just sit back and watch.

• 58:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, it was really having a day of it as El Salvador president, Nayib Bukele.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw him back. He's back.

• 58:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, he never really went away. Like, he did this whole thing cracking down on the gangs in El Salvador and sort of had his moment for that, even though, you know, there's there's serious human rights questions involved in terms of like arresting anyone who sniffed an MS, I think 15, you know.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  13, I think.

• 59:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  MS 13 tattoo or whatever it might be, but he but but he's been taking a victory lap on there. He just won reelection dramatically and and his his spike the football moment on the Bitcoin stuff because people were mocking El Salvador, mocking him for putting so much of his country's treasury into Bitcoin and how it's like, well, it wasn't gamble, but it looks like it's paying off. He's up like 40%. It's not exactly how I'd run a treasury, but he's he's taking his victory lap, that's for sure.

• 59:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  So yeah, it's interesting. We'll see where it goes. I feel I feel I do have this FOMO now. I mean, I have a little bit of Bitcoin, but I wish I would have, you know, bought a lot more back in the day. I had this buying moment in 2017, so.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  My Nvidia FOMO far outweighs my Bitcoin.

• 1:00:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Your Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah, but I don't understand Ethereum is also going up. So it's not just the ETF. That's the thing.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  No, it's it's everything. It's everything. It's a Geo Boden, I think it was, like the.

• 1:00:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  All the shitcoins are also.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  The shitcoins are going up as well, yeah.

• 1:00:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  That doesn't make any sense to me because that's not ETF related.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but again, it's all tied. It's all tied.

• 1:00:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so maybe there's a rug pull.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  We'll see. And this one, we wait and see.

• 1:00:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, I should, I should note, we are gonna have Zeke Fox, who's wrote the Number Goes Up book. He's coming on in, in four weeks on April 5th. So people should stay tuned for that. I'm in the middle of that book, Number Goes Up, that he wrote. Oh, man, it is.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  One of my favorite books I read in the last year.

• 1:00:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can't wait to speak with him. And I'm sure, well, if we're four weeks away, we're gonna have plenty to go, go on from between now and then in terms of where this roller coaster leads. All right, we did want to talk about the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight, but maybe we save that for next week and get people out under an hour. What do you think?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I think so. We've, we've had a full one today.

• 1:01:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, absolutely. Well, I'm sure when we come back, Bitcoin's gonna be at $100,000 and we'll try to diagnose that and similarly be completely in the dark about it. But these are the times we live in. AI is rolling, Apple's under siege, Bitcoin is going straight to the moon and TikTok might be on its way out. Crazy times.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  May you live in interesting times.

• 1:01:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  We sure do. All right, Ranjan, thanks so much for being here. Great chatting with you as always.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Have a good weekend.

• 1:01:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  You too. And thank you, everybody, for listening. Awesome to have you here. On Wednesday, Sohail Doshi, who's the CEO of Playground, which is an image generation AI company, will come to talk about the world of image generation and also his views on the state of AI. Really interesting conversation. You don't want to miss that. And of course, Ranjan and I will be back next Friday, breaking down the week's news. Until then, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  Every mile matters. Whether you're driving your dream car or your daily commuter, the Mobile One team knows that. It's why we created Mobile One Advanced Clean Motor Oil. It cleans your engine in one oil change and helps extend engine life, delivering performance, protection, and cleanliness for vehicles of all ages. All to help keep your engine running like new, whatever you're driving. Visit mobileone.com/advancedclean to learn more.