From the heart of where innovation, money and power COLLI in Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Emily jay I. Remember ly check in San Francisco and this is Bloomberg Technology coming up the next hour. Multiple SpaceX employees fired after an open letter criticizing Elon Musk. What this says about his leadership and what it means for Twitter Plus? Does AI have feelings? Google just suspended an engineer who claims the answer to that question is yes. We will have an in depth conversation with Google's former AI ethicist about the limits and power of this technology and cryptotraders go from feeling the fear of missing out to straight up fear. We'll talk to micro Strategy CEO Michael Saylor about his big bet on bitcoin and if he has any regrets. SpaceX now has fired several employees involved in an open letter criticizing the behavior of CEO Elon Musk. This according to an internal memo that began circulating among staff this week. The letter, seen by Bloomberg called Musk's behavior and tweets quote a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment, and called on SpaceX leadership to condemn and distance itself from his quote personal brand. Bloomberg's bad Ludlow here now to discuss. So Bloombook obtained a copy of the Soper letter. What exactly did it say? Yes, so this is a small select group of employees who called on SpaceX Is management, including Gwin short World, the CEO and president, to basically publicly distance itself from Musk what he says, what he believes, what he was doing, because they felt that it was quote, an embarrassment and that it was basically impacting the work that space It was trying to do. This was the view of a small number of employees. It was shared as sort of something you could sign vera QR code through internal messaging channels, and it picked up some momentum. You know, they did get signatures until management acted. What exactly did management then? So in a second internal memo which was sent by Gwyn shot Well, the company's CEO, which Blomberg has seen, they basically said this wasn't helpful. You know, they conducted an investigation into the origins of this open letter from staff, and as you said, and I think we had the quote from Gwyn shot Well about sort of the broader impact of it. They ended up firing that what they said a number of employees, we don't have a firm number and how many it is. But this is what's interesting. She calls this overreaching activism. You know, so clearly there's a group of employees within the business who have strong opinion. And this what she says elsewhere in the memo that's frankly too long for us to share on the screen, is that this select group of employees were putting pressure on their peers to sign something that they didn't believe in. These are paraphrasing Gwin Shotwell's words, did a bunch of employees sign it? And are we've seen arranging numbers up there from several hundreds several thousand. SpaceX has twelve thousand employees around the world essentially, so it gained traction um. But ultimately, you know, what Gwyn Shotwell goes on to say in that memo is that this is a distraction from their end goal and their own goals we know is getting to mars Well. This isn't the first story in the last few weeks about Elon Musk's behavior at SpaceX. There was another story about accusing him of sexual harassment. Right, and Gwen shot Well also defended him in that instance as well. Correct. So last month, Business Insider reported that the company space X settled with a former contract employee in two thousand eighteen for two fifty thousand U S dollars and that employee in question was a contract air steward aboard a space x jet that Must would used to travel. And straight away we should point out must denies not only denies the claims made, but he actually goes on to say in a series of tweets earlier in the month or last month that he basically saw this as a political attack on him, that it was sort of a calculated initiative to to impact his reputation. Um, you know, and he questioned the source who is the original source of the business inside of story. So regardless, we don't get to the bottom of it. I should point out SpaceX does have a comms team, a PR team. I messaged them regularly. They are real people, but they have not responded to multiple recomment on this story, on the open letter story, so you know, what we have to go on is these internal messages that Bloomberg has scene interesting. There has been some other news for SpaceX today they did have another successful life. I mean, this is what it all comes back to down to. So today was kind of another bog standard style launch, another three fifty three Starlink satellites deployed to orbit. But it was also a milestone for reusability. It was the hundred of launch using a proven, a flight proven rocket or booster. In other words, this is the hundred of time that SpaceX has sent up a rocket that has previously flown and landed it successfully, and it's just changed the game, right. This is the whole point of the space X story that this reusability angle allows them to go with such regularity that it becomes routine, but also that it makes access to space much more affordable for little satellite providers and themselves building out the Starlink network. All right, well, TBC to be continued as I'm sure this narrative will be Thank you thanks. Earlier this week, a Google engineer working on the company's AI development team was suspen ended after claiming a chatbot actually has feelings. Blake Lemoyne was placed on paid leave last week after he posted on Medium that he had encountered a quote Sentien AI, igniting a fiery debate about the possibilities and limits of this cutting edge technology. Dr Margaret Mitchell, Hugging Face, Chief Ethics Scientists and researcher and former Google AI employee who worked on the AI development team, joins us now to discuss Margaret, thank you so much for joining us, or I should say, Dr Mitchell, given your expertise, do you think Blake Lemoyne is right? Does this AI? Does this spot have feelings? Uh? Okay, well no, I don't think it does. Um. I certainly don't think it has feelings definitely not consciousness or sentience, which which is what the claims have been. So what does this, though tell us about the potential or power four AI am bought to full human beings into thinking that they're real. Yeah, there's a few things going on. UM. On the one hand, we have uh psychological effects of UM interacting with things that are human like UM. So uh, we we tend to anthropomorphize UM. We tend to put intentionality UM into things that we're that we're inter interacting with that seem human like. I think people are sort of used to doing this with our pets and things, you know, creating like whole dialogues and conversations UM, but also with like you know, uh, stuffed animals and tamagotchis and things like that. And there's also been psychological studies showing that we have a propensity to um impute intentionality into um non conscious beings UM when they show some sort of properties like speaking uh, like vulnerability UM or or movement that's aligned with human like movement UM. On the other hand, we also have a lot of companies working in AI using the language of human cognition UM so saying things like chain of thought, saying things like reasoning um, you know, essentially comparing the models that they're working with to the brain, which makes some sense, but you really have to temper that with with the details of this essentially being um a bunch of a bunch of calculations UM. So we have a few things going on, the psychological illusions UH and the language that companies are using around the technology they're building. So, given the complexity of this, what are your biggest concerns about? For example, these transcripts that that Blake Lamoyne published where the computer is saying I'm scared of dying, I'm scared of being turned off. Yeah, I mean I I think I echo UM a lot of researchers in this space, UM, where I think we all sort of feel like sentience is not the point here. UM. I think it's I think it's important to note that we are not going to get an agreement on sentience or consciousness anytime soon. People are going to see sentience, people are going to see consciousness UM, and that will probably go on, you know, indefinitely where we just have a disagreement. UM. But when you do have people starting to see sentience in consciousness, UM, it starts to bring up things like, UM, you know, like robot rights, all this work that's been done on what the personhood of these models might be. UM. Well, at the same time, you have technology that you know, essentially discriminates, you know, against black, black and brown people, UM, poorly represents women and reflects misogynistic viewpoints. Uh. So there's something to be said for an obsession with the personhood of AI and systems UM and thinking about the rights that they might have while not actually doing good work on the rights of actual people. UM. On top of Oh, I have so much to say, but yeah, you have another question. I'm sure well, you know, and of course you know the history behind this is that you were fired for your work and sounding the alarm about sexism and racism in a in AI at Google. So it sounds to me like you're saying, this isn't the problem. We shouldn't be asking if robots have feelings and rights. We should be asking if AI is gender blind and color blind and making sure, um that we're focusing on all of these other things that are far more important. Yeah, I mean, so it's not gender blind, it's actually uh targeting gender and negative ways. UM. And so for example, we know that a lot of these systems are trained on UM text data from from websites that have misogynistic tendencies UM and UH websites that are predominantly white and male UM and and actually US based. UM. So there's all these kinds of things that are being UM propagated by these systems that are really problematic. UM. And they become even more problematic when people start to be affected by the systems as they interact with them. UM. So, in the case of consciousness, UM, you have the concern that people might be persuaded to do horrible things. UM. You also have you know, concerns around bullying and hate bots, uh and these kinds of things that can you know, really hurt people. Um. And then you know you also have um, these subtle effects of you know, in search ranking results, what will tend to appear at the top of that ranking And if it's a function of these sorts of language models um as Google, for exap people has said, UM, they are, then you're going to have these bias effects influencing search results in such a way that you tend to see the viewpoints of white men, you know, at the top of the search drinking results as opposed to you know, black women, And that is sort of a echo a chamber effects where it's like the privileged gets more privileged, right, privilege gets privileged, while the marginalized become more marginalized. Now Google has come out saying that in this particular case, when it comes to Blake Lemoyne, that you know, hundreds of researchers have interacted with the same technology haven't expressed these concerns. I also sat down with Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar pacha I last year and asked him about concerns around AI from within Google itself. From people like yourself. I asked him what keeps him up at night? Take a listen to what he had to say. Anytime you're developing technology, there is a dual site to it. I think the journey of humanity is harnessing the benefits while minimizing the downsides. The good thing with AI is it's both going to take time. I think I've seen more focus on the downsides early on than most of the technology we've developed. So in some ways I'm encouraged by how much concerned there is. And you're right, even within Google, you know, you know people think about it deeply. Margaret, Do you think he and Google are leading on these issues in the right way? No, clearly not. I mean everyone I think, at least in tech is familiar with this notion of tech solutionism UM. And there's no lack of pr and calms around the benefits of AI and really trying to push it as beneficial for humanity and all these sorts of things. It's it's a very small minority who speaks up about the downside. So I would say that UM soon Dar's characteration characterization is false UM and frustrating false UM. And one of the reasons. I think that there's a desire to stay away from the downsides. UM. In addition to you know, concern around profit is that it also starts to open up liability. Right, so if you have systems that you can show work worse on black women, then now it starts to bring up questions of discrimination within the systems. UM. So it behooves companies to try and say, oh, the downsides are you know, are being over examined, and try and kind of shut that conversation down. But I think what's actually happening is that the small set of people who have been speaking about ethical concerns are starting to be listened to because people are seeing the negative effects. UM. And I think that's really what's happening is a desire on the corporate side to shut the conversation down for a lot of sort of incentives they have, and then people actually seeing the downside it's and not having an effect on what gets reported. Do you think a little wine should have been suspended? Uh? No, I don't. UM. I so I should say that um. Blake and I are really good friends. We worked together at Google. We wrote a paper together actually on how to um mitigate problematic biases in UM in machine learning systems. Um. He's a very very bright guy. UM. So I'm a little bit worried that there's sort of this reductive narrative that there's something like fundamentally wrong with him or something. UM. He he has a lot of dimensions. UM. And I think Google could have done a much better job at engaging with him rather than this you know, very alienating sort of experience that they gave him instead. UM. I think it shows a weakness on Google's part to be able to um uh, to be able to be open to different kinds of experiences and perspectives. So one, are your biggest fears if Google continues to develop the technology at the pace that it is developing, this technology continues to you know, potentially not listen to this as you say, minority of voices that are speaking up paint the picture of of what you fear the world could look like if Google continues on this path. Oh no, that is a very big question. UM. And I'm not a good painter, I should mention I'm a computer scientist, so I might not you know, be as elephant at this UM. But you know, we're already seeing a lot of what we can expect to happen in the future, but even worse. UM. So just recently, someone released a ton of hate thoughts UM and then made the model available to the public UM. And so we are going to likely see an increase of hateful UM intelligence seeming systems across our interactions online and on social media. UM. And this includes things like bullying as is really problematic, persuasion into sort of more extremist UM areas. UM. I think we're going to see UH further sort of marginalization and worsening of power differentials. So as you know, a company like Google a mass is more and more um ability to affect people's sense of of what's true in the world through search ranking results, through the sort of UH products they're making. UM. It means that the voices of people who have less access to the Internet, for example, are going to disappear more and more, while Google a mass is more and more power UM. And so I'm very very concerned about how much the sort of technology moving forward empowers Google UM and sort of lack of respects that I've seen for very serious ethical concerns. You know, misinformation obviously is one alongside some of the models that have come out recently, We're not gonna know what's real. There's going to be text text based misinformation, so so news that's wrong, uh, image based missed information so images that look real that that are not real. UM. And video based as well, and also audio based. So essentially all of the main ways that we consume information online will now no longer be very easy uh to trace back to reality. UM. And that means mass misunderstanding. UM. So yeah, scary, Dr Mitchell. Uh. This we could have this conversation for hours, and I know we're gonna be having it for years. I'd love to have you back to talk more about your work at Hugging Face. I know that there you are taking a different approach to a lot of these issues. UM, But because of commercials, we're gonna have to leave it here. Um. Dr Margaret Mitch and Mitchell Hugging Face chief ethics scientists and researcher. UM, thank you uh for joining us today and help us work through some of these very complex issues. Will have much more ahead stay with us. This is Bloomberg. TikTok says it has reached an agreement with Oracle to store data from US users on Oracle servers. The deal has been in the work since following concerns of security risks linked to the Chinese owned app. This news comes the same day BuzzFeed shared that leaked audio from dozens of internal TikTok meetings revealed US user data has been repeatedly accessed from China. Welcome back to bloomber Technology and Emily Chang in San Francisco. I want to dig into this and how the fed rate hike is impacting the world of VC with Mike Volpi and partner at Index Ventures. Might great to have you back with us. Look, it's been an incredibly vi all of the week, a lot of uncertainty about the future, a lot of people saying the R word is inevitable. What do you think. Yeah, I'm gonna start by saying that I'm a Lakers fan, so I'm relatively different all of the events. Well, we're not sorry, but thank you for clarifying, Okay, So, um, yeah, it's it's definitely a very tricky time right now. Um, and I think that when we look at the portfolio of companies that we look after, there are certainly ones that are more in the consumer side of business that are seeing some softness happened. They're seeing that consumers in general have read enough in the news, seeing enough tweets about inflation and interest rates and all that, and they are moderating their behavior. And you can see that even in the statements that the larger companies are making. So whether it's Amazon or Target or Walmart saying they don't the right inventory or they may not be expanding as quickly as they thought, there's clearly something happening out there. I think what we don't know is whether it's a little Our recession, sort of like a quick one that's you know, quick one a quarter or two where it fixes things, or a big Our recession. But there's clearly something signaling that's going on out there. And I would say that on a relative basis, it's happening sooner than people expected, because there was sort of this notion that, oh, maybe next year. I don't think if something, if the economy is to slow down with some significance, it's probably not next year, but it's like next quarter or the quarter after that. So just how bad then do you think is the wreckage is going to be? How many more companies will have layoffs? How many people will get laid off? How many companies will make it out of this? How long does this last? Yeah? In all candor, I don't think it's going to be that bad. There will be some high profile situations where well known companies are letting people go, and that will be painful, undoubtedly, But I think that generally speaking, over the last couple of years, in and especially private companies have been able to raise uh amounts of money that we've never seen in the past, and that puts their balance sheets in a pretty good condition. Now they may have over hired, so they might trim a little bit here or there, but by and large, I think the majority of companies have the strongest balance sheets that they've had in a while, and in many cases have enough in the tank to get through a difficult period and to come out at the end of it. So I do think that we will surely see uh some challenges, and perhaps the ones that we most challenge would be the public companies because they obviously have to respond to a stock price and the fact that right now investors want shorter term earnings or less losses in the short term, so I think we'll see more from those, But by and large. I don't see the kind of quote wreckage that Mamy we saw in two thousand and If anything, I would expect this to happen more quickly, both the downturn and the upside to happen more quickly than in the past. Let's talk about some of these more high profile situations, and I want to focus on Cisco. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins was on the show earlier this week. I asked for his perspective. Take a listen to what he had to say. We are always planning for different scenarios, but we've been around long enough and been through enough downturns that we have playbooks and we know how to we know how to deal with those appropriately. Now, Cisco is one of the companies that hit its peak in the dot com boom, and the stock Mike has never recovered. And what's interesting is you worked there for over a decade through the dot com boom and bust, and I'm just so curious how you reflect on on the fact that Cisco, you know, never has, at least from a stock perspective, gone back to what it was. Yeah, I think that there's a couple of things though that contribute to that, and it's true, by the way, it was incredibly unpleasant to go from eighty some dollars a share to like nine dollars a share and the span of six months when I used to work there. Um, But I think that there's a couple of factors that are happening in Cisco's case. If you look at where Cisco is today, they're a single digit grower, you know, five percent grow or three percent grower. And fundamentally what happened there is, yes, there was a downturn, but in parallel with that, the technologies that they were pervading became much more broadly available commoditized, competitive, etcetera, etcetera, and the company never really reachieved the kind of growth rate that occurred during the pre dot COM's scenario. If you take another example like Amazon all Contrair, they did much better afterwards because they were able to strategically expand the product lines, the capabilities, the offerings, the sectors that the company was in. And so really what comes out of this is that you know, companies go into a difficult downturn like this, and when they come out of it, do they have the correct strategy for coming out of it. Most people will say exactly what Chuck said, which is, we have a playbook, we know how to deal with crises, We're gonna cut this, we're gonna cut that, and so forth. It's actually much more about how do you strategically align your business to come out of it than it is how to survive that period. And if you look at today's technology companies, the very very large majority of will survive it. The question is do they have the strategy to thrive afterwards? And the strategy has to be aligned with the fact that things that may have been hot before are no longer hot later. I don't have a crystal ball. I couldn't say exactly what the differences will be, but I'm pretty sure that pre the themes that matter will not be exactly mirrored in the post. And the companies that are more thoughtful and strategic about how to be aggressive and answer in the recovery cycle, well, the ones that will benefit and look more like Amazon, and the ones that stick to their knitting and do the same thing they were doing before, we'll probably end up looking a little more aft Mole Cisco in terms of their stock performance. Interesting, we'll really appreciate having your historical perspective there, and I know you've been sharing some of that advice with founders as well. Mike Volpi of Index Venture is good to have you back with us coming up micro Strategies Bitcoin Strategy. As crypto crashes, judds chairman and CEO Michael Saylor, have any regrets, he joins me. Next, this is Bloomberg time now for our crypto report, with cryptocurrency and the market still seeing major fluctuations, prompting companies as biggest coin base to cut costs. Bitcoin ow over just the last five days, it's worse week in a year. Let's bring in Michael Saylor now of micro Strategy for more on his take. And Michael, I know this is probably a rhetorical question, but do you have any regrets? You know, UM we did a lot of a lot of back testing, and I've gone back and I've looked at the numbers and on August ten when we announced our two million dollar bitcoined by UM. Since then, bitcoins up, the money supplies up, the nazacs down two percent, goals down nine, the S and P is up nine and the only thing that looks better than the money supply expansion is single family homes. I couldn't have bought billions of dollars of single family homes and so that's not been practical. So the bottom line is the bitcoin strategies ten x better than any other alternative, and so now I don't regret it. We've got two point eight billion dollars worth the bitcoin on our balance sheet right now, and we feel like we're positioned well for when the markets turn around. And our only other choice would be to give all the capital back to the shareholders, in which case we would have nothing and we would be struggling, uh to get by without any assets. Okay, how about this is cash still trash? Yeah? I mean the money supplies expanded by since January one, when we went into this kind of COVID crisis, and we know that scarce desirable assets are getting bit up in price. I mean everybody wants to buy Rolex watches, they're buying luxury real estate, they're buying everything to get their hands on, creating shortages. So you know, we are an institution. We have to take a ten year of you. And the only thing that's for sure is if we hold cash over a decade, we're gonna have a negative real yield. The only question is how much. So we have to invest in something, and we've chosen as a business strategy to FoST focus on what we believe is the most exciting investment idea because it's a digital commodity that's absolutely scarce and only getting technically better every year. So are you considering buying more bitcoin at these prices? I mean it's bitcoin on sale? Yeah, I think it is on sale. Um. You know that the number that I look at to figure out sort of the a surrogate for the book value of bitcoin is the four year simple moving average because it trades billions of dollars a day, and so after fourteen hundred days of billions of dollars a day, that number is twenty one thousand, seven hundred. Bitcoin touched that in the March crisis. It touched it around sev it's touching it right now. Generally a trades above there. You know. Our strategy is, uh, we're going to acquire bitcoin with our free cash flows from time to time, so we're kind of dollar cost averaging into bitcoin, and we're gonna hold a bitcoin for the long term. And uh, and so it wouldn't really matter whether the price was ten more, more, fifty more. We're just going to progressive. We acquire more bitcoin because that's our strategy. But you want in terms of for sale, Yeah, I mean it's like not a bad price and we will keep buying more. Okay, what if it gets below that nineteen thousand, five eleven number, which was that top of the I believe will run. Yeah, what you know that is that a time to panic? We don't panic. We have a we have a strategy. We're not traders. If your time arising is less than four years, you're sort of a trader. If it's in the months, you're definitely a trader. I'm not an expert trader. I don't have a crystal ball. I don't where the market's going to go week by week, month by month. Uh. If you're time arizon is more than four years, you're an investor. And when you're time arizing is ten years, you're kind of a saver. So we have a very long term tenure time horizon, and our view is over the ten years, bitcoin is going to be a good idea and it's just going to keep a creating and value. Uh. You know, I can't tell you whether it'll go down a bit here and there. It's in the near term, Emily. It trades like a high beta risk asset, and there's no denying that. Over the long term, we believe it's a low risk store of value asset. There's about ten things that have to happen over the next decade to make it a better asset, and we kind of know what those ten things are. And so we're waiting and uh and biding our time, and we think that it's going to improve as an asset class over time, and we're not in a hurry. So what do you see in the let's talk to take this tenure horizon. For example, we've seen what the FED is doing with rate hikes. There's all of this concern we're heading into a recession, whether it's a capital are or a lower case our recession. What do you see on the road ahead? And how is that impacting your strategy too? You know, just buy more and hold. Yeah, so let's take the ten sources of my pain. Um, there's no wash trading rules, so people can they can sell their bitcoin and buy it back and harvest the tax gain. And that's not the same with Apple, So if that gets fixed by the House Ways and Means Committee, that's a big plus for the asset. There's five twenty unregistered crypto exchanges offering twenty x leverage. That's a negative for the asset class. As they get regulated, and I expect they will, and as the twenty x leverage disappears, that will be a positive. There's nineteen thousand unregistered securities in the crypto industry cross collateralized to get bitcoin. As as those things have to have to get eliminated or they have to convert them into publicly traded instruments, that's going to decrease the volatility to be a big shakeout. The wildcat banks like the you know, the terrorism and Lunas and Celsius, they actually create massive volatility. And as they get regulated and they disappear and they grow up and become institutionalized banks. Uh, the asset class, I'm mature. There's a lot of ignorance and fear. People think crypto is the same as bitcoin. If they think that, that means they don't understand either of those two things. We don't have a stable coin Emily like us t isn't a stable coin. Tether is an opaque security. No one understands if we ever have an f d i C issued stable coin or something from a public entity that's endorsed by the SEC, that's gonna be very bullish for the industry. There's no spot et F. I think it's only a matter of time before there is. Want to prove that will be very bullish for the industry. The fast by accounting is detrimental. The lack of f d i C guidance makes it difficult, if not impossible, for banks to hold this stuff. We're waiting for clear SEC CFTC guidance, and those ten things they're gonna get cured over the next decade. They're just not gonna get cured over the next ten weeks. Okay, So how are you looking then, more broadly at what happens to the industry after this? You know, we're seeing coin Base and a number of different crypto companies having major layoffs. Do you think we'll look back on this moment as some sort of inflection point for the industry And if so, how does it look different in the fewer we're crossing the chasm? Uh, there's about a trillion dollars in the asset class. Four billion is bitcoin, the other four billion is nineteen thousand unregistered securities. We're moving from the era of the off shore entrepreneur to the to the onshore public institution. And it's pretty clear from share gains Lare's comments that he made in the last few days that uh, they want to see all the crypto exchanges regulated. Uh, they want to they want to clean up this industry. The stable coin is gonna have to be cleaned up as well. And uh, the winners are going to be the public investors in public banks and public companies, and the losers are going to be the wildcatters, you know, and the entrepreneurs the gots got started. They're flying by the seat of their pants. And I think it's essential for us to move from a one trillion dollar industry to a ten trillion dollar industry, so I welcome it. I think the bitcoin has been held back by its association with the with the anything goes crypto industry, and as that gets regulated, then that's going to actually create a green light for public institutions and public companies to get much more heavily involved in bitcoin and is going to catalyze the next leg of the bull run All right, Michael Sailor, who apparently has no regrets. Michael, always good to have you here on the show. Chair and CEO of micro Strategy, have a great weekend. Every new generation of media has been subsidized by advertising, making it cheaper or free for consumers. There's little reason to think that the metaverse will be any different. But our brands actually taking the metaverse seriously quick takes Alex Webb walks us through what the future of advertising may or may not look like in the metaverse. We've heard a lot about the metaverse in the past year, but is it really going to be creating new digital economies or is it just about selling existing real world goods. Every new generation of media has been subsidized by advertising, making it cheap or even free for consumers, from newspapers to the radio, to TV and indeed the Worldwide Web. There's little reason to think that the metaverse will be any different meta platforms. That's Facebook, You or me said so explicitly when it unveiled its vision for the metaverse last year. Businesses will be creators to building out digital spaces or even digital worlds, and they'll be able to use ads to ensure the rate customers find what they've created. So there we have it. For Mark Zuckerberg and co. The business model for the metaverse will be the same as it was for social media ads. Pair that with a R and VR's ability to track your eyeballs and maybe even gauge your mood, and it starts to become a little creepy. But to what extent a brand's taking the metaverse seriously? Big names like Nike and Samsung are building virtual worlds. Facebook meta has teams selling virtual billboards in those worlds, but they remain a relatively small slice of firms overall marketing governments, and you can see why. Just sixty seven million Americans will experience v our content at least once a month in two and they'll be split between a range of different platforms and roadblocks to minecraft and beyond. Facebook alone had two hundred and sixty three million users in the start of this year in North America. Crucially, though most of the efforts have so far focused on selling real world goods, Nike wants you to buy actual sneakers, Samsung, real cell phones. The luxury brand Burbery might have made four hundred thousand dollars selling digital skins with an associated n f T last year, but that's really just a rounding era in its three billion dollars in annual revenue. In other words, they were a marketing gimmick to attract young crypto enthusiasts you might hope as a brand are wealthy. Metas ideal is of brands to pay to advertise virtual goods in the virtual world that will let it monitor the entire customer journey from seeing the ad campaign to buying the product, then even seeing how they use it. It feels like we're a long way away from that happening. Just yes, if the metaverse takes off, there of course will be big money if you made in advertising. It just seems we're a long way right now from that happening, and face Swooke's vision is a distant prospect. H

From the heart of where innovation, money and power COLLI in Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Emily jay I. Remember ly check in San Francisco and this is Bloomberg Technology coming up the next hour. Multiple SpaceX employees fired after an open letter criticizing Elon Musk. What this says about his leadership and what it means for Twitter Plus? Does AI have feelings? Google just suspended an engineer who claims the answer to that question is yes. We will have an in depth conversation with Google's former AI ethicist about the limits and power of this technology and cryptotraders go from feeling the fear of missing out to straight up fear. We'll talk to micro Strategy CEO Michael Saylor about his big bet on bitcoin and if he has any regrets. SpaceX now has fired several employees involved in an open letter criticizing the behavior of CEO Elon Musk. This according to an internal memo that began circulating among staff this week. The letter, seen by Bloomberg called Musk's behavior and tweets quote a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment, and called on SpaceX leadership to condemn and distance itself from his quote personal brand. Bloomberg's bad Ludlow here now to discuss. So Bloombook obtained a copy of the Soper letter. What exactly did it say? Yes, so this is a small select group of employees who called on SpaceX Is management, including Gwin short World, the CEO and president, to basically publicly distance itself from Musk what he says, what he believes, what he was doing, because they felt that it was quote, an embarrassment and that it was basically impacting the work that space It was trying to do. This was the view of a small number of employees. It was shared as sort of something you could sign vera QR code through internal messaging channels, and it picked up some momentum. You know, they did get signatures until management acted. What exactly did management then? So in a second internal memo which was sent by Gwyn shot Well, the company's CEO, which Blomberg has seen, they basically said this wasn't helpful. You know, they conducted an investigation into the origins of this open letter from staff, and as you said, and I think we had the quote from Gwyn shot Well about sort of the broader impact of it. They ended up firing that what they said a number of employees, we don't have a firm number and how many it is. But this is what's interesting. She calls this overreaching activism. You know, so clearly there's a group of employees within the business who have strong opinion. And this what she says elsewhere in the memo that's frankly too long for us to share on the screen, is that this select group of employees were putting pressure on their peers to sign something that they didn't believe in. These are paraphrasing Gwin Shotwell's words, did a bunch of employees sign it? And are we've seen arranging numbers up there from several hundreds several thousand. SpaceX has twelve thousand employees around the world essentially, so it gained traction um. But ultimately, you know, what Gwyn Shotwell goes on to say in that memo is that this is a distraction from their end goal and their own goals we know is getting to mars Well. This isn't the first story in the last few weeks about Elon Musk's behavior at SpaceX. There was another story about accusing him of sexual harassment. Right, and Gwen shot Well also defended him in that instance as well. Correct. So last month, Business Insider reported that the company space X settled with a former contract employee in two thousand eighteen for two fifty thousand U S dollars and that employee in question was a contract air steward aboard a space x jet that Must would used to travel. And straight away we should point out must denies not only denies the claims made, but he actually goes on to say in a series of tweets earlier in the month or last month that he basically saw this as a political attack on him, that it was sort of a calculated initiative to to impact his reputation. Um, you know, and he questioned the source who is the original source of the business inside of story. So regardless, we don't get to the bottom of it. I should point out SpaceX does have a comms team, a PR team. I messaged them regularly. They are real people, but they have not responded to multiple recomment on this story, on the open letter story, so you know, what we have to go on is these internal messages that Bloomberg has scene interesting. There has been some other news for SpaceX today they did have another successful life. I mean, this is what it all comes back to down to. So today was kind of another bog standard style launch, another three fifty three Starlink satellites deployed to orbit. But it was also a milestone for reusability. It was the hundred of launch using a proven, a flight proven rocket or booster. In other words, this is the hundred of time that SpaceX has sent up a rocket that has previously flown and landed it successfully, and it's just changed the game, right. This is the whole point of the space X story that this reusability angle allows them to go with such regularity that it becomes routine, but also that it makes access to space much more affordable for little satellite providers and themselves building out the Starlink network. All right, well, TBC to be continued as I'm sure this narrative will be Thank you thanks. Earlier this week, a Google engineer working on the company's AI development team was suspen ended after claiming a chatbot actually has feelings. Blake Lemoyne was placed on paid leave last week after he posted on Medium that he had encountered a quote Sentien AI, igniting a fiery debate about the possibilities and limits of this cutting edge technology. Dr Margaret Mitchell, Hugging Face, Chief Ethics Scientists and researcher and former Google AI employee who worked on the AI development team, joins us now to discuss Margaret, thank you so much for joining us, or I should say, Dr Mitchell, given your expertise, do you think Blake Lemoyne is right? Does this AI? Does this spot have feelings? Uh? Okay, well no, I don't think it does. Um. I certainly don't think it has feelings definitely not consciousness or sentience, which which is what the claims have been. So what does this, though tell us about the potential or power four AI am bought to full human beings into thinking that they're real. Yeah, there's a few things going on. UM. On the one hand, we have uh psychological effects of UM interacting with things that are human like UM. So uh, we we tend to anthropomorphize UM. We tend to put intentionality UM into things that we're that we're inter interacting with that seem human like. I think people are sort of used to doing this with our pets and things, you know, creating like whole dialogues and conversations UM, but also with like you know, uh, stuffed animals and tamagotchis and things like that. And there's also been psychological studies showing that we have a propensity to um impute intentionality into um non conscious beings UM when they show some sort of properties like speaking uh, like vulnerability UM or or movement that's aligned with human like movement UM. On the other hand, we also have a lot of companies working in AI using the language of human cognition UM so saying things like chain of thought, saying things like reasoning um, you know, essentially comparing the models that they're working with to the brain, which makes some sense, but you really have to temper that with with the details of this essentially being um a bunch of a bunch of calculations UM. So we have a few things going on, the psychological illusions UH and the language that companies are using around the technology they're building. So, given the complexity of this, what are your biggest concerns about? For example, these transcripts that that Blake Lamoyne published where the computer is saying I'm scared of dying, I'm scared of being turned off. Yeah, I mean I I think I echo UM a lot of researchers in this space, UM, where I think we all sort of feel like sentience is not the point here. UM. I think it's I think it's important to note that we are not going to get an agreement on sentience or consciousness anytime soon. People are going to see sentience, people are going to see consciousness UM, and that will probably go on, you know, indefinitely where we just have a disagreement. UM. But when you do have people starting to see sentience in consciousness, UM, it starts to bring up things like, UM, you know, like robot rights, all this work that's been done on what the personhood of these models might be. UM. Well, at the same time, you have technology that you know, essentially discriminates, you know, against black, black and brown people, UM, poorly represents women and reflects misogynistic viewpoints. Uh. So there's something to be said for an obsession with the personhood of AI and systems UM and thinking about the rights that they might have while not actually doing good work on the rights of actual people. UM. On top of Oh, I have so much to say, but yeah, you have another question. I'm sure well, you know, and of course you know the history behind this is that you were fired for your work and sounding the alarm about sexism and racism in a in AI at Google. So it sounds to me like you're saying, this isn't the problem. We shouldn't be asking if robots have feelings and rights. We should be asking if AI is gender blind and color blind and making sure, um that we're focusing on all of these other things that are far more important. Yeah, I mean, so it's not gender blind, it's actually uh targeting gender and negative ways. UM. And so for example, we know that a lot of these systems are trained on UM text data from from websites that have misogynistic tendencies UM and UH websites that are predominantly white and male UM and and actually US based. UM. So there's all these kinds of things that are being UM propagated by these systems that are really problematic. UM. And they become even more problematic when people start to be affected by the systems as they interact with them. UM. So, in the case of consciousness, UM, you have the concern that people might be persuaded to do horrible things. UM. You also have you know, concerns around bullying and hate bots, uh and these kinds of things that can you know, really hurt people. Um. And then you know you also have um, these subtle effects of you know, in search ranking results, what will tend to appear at the top of that ranking And if it's a function of these sorts of language models um as Google, for exap people has said, UM, they are, then you're going to have these bias effects influencing search results in such a way that you tend to see the viewpoints of white men, you know, at the top of the search drinking results as opposed to you know, black women, And that is sort of a echo a chamber effects where it's like the privileged gets more privileged, right, privilege gets privileged, while the marginalized become more marginalized. Now Google has come out saying that in this particular case, when it comes to Blake Lemoyne, that you know, hundreds of researchers have interacted with the same technology haven't expressed these concerns. I also sat down with Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar pacha I last year and asked him about concerns around AI from within Google itself. From people like yourself. I asked him what keeps him up at night? Take a listen to what he had to say. Anytime you're developing technology, there is a dual site to it. I think the journey of humanity is harnessing the benefits while minimizing the downsides. The good thing with AI is it's both going to take time. I think I've seen more focus on the downsides early on than most of the technology we've developed. So in some ways I'm encouraged by how much concerned there is. And you're right, even within Google, you know, you know people think about it deeply. Margaret, Do you think he and Google are leading on these issues in the right way? No, clearly not. I mean everyone I think, at least in tech is familiar with this notion of tech solutionism UM. And there's no lack of pr and calms around the benefits of AI and really trying to push it as beneficial for humanity and all these sorts of things. It's it's a very small minority who speaks up about the downside. So I would say that UM soon Dar's characteration characterization is false UM and frustrating false UM. And one of the reasons. I think that there's a desire to stay away from the downsides. UM. In addition to you know, concern around profit is that it also starts to open up liability. Right, so if you have systems that you can show work worse on black women, then now it starts to bring up questions of discrimination within the systems. UM. So it behooves companies to try and say, oh, the downsides are you know, are being over examined, and try and kind of shut that conversation down. But I think what's actually happening is that the small set of people who have been speaking about ethical concerns are starting to be listened to because people are seeing the negative effects. UM. And I think that's really what's happening is a desire on the corporate side to shut the conversation down for a lot of sort of incentives they have, and then people actually seeing the downside it's and not having an effect on what gets reported. Do you think a little wine should have been suspended? Uh? No, I don't. UM. I so I should say that um. Blake and I are really good friends. We worked together at Google. We wrote a paper together actually on how to um mitigate problematic biases in UM in machine learning systems. Um. He's a very very bright guy. UM. So I'm a little bit worried that there's sort of this reductive narrative that there's something like fundamentally wrong with him or something. UM. He he has a lot of dimensions. UM. And I think Google could have done a much better job at engaging with him rather than this you know, very alienating sort of experience that they gave him instead. UM. I think it shows a weakness on Google's part to be able to um uh, to be able to be open to different kinds of experiences and perspectives. So one, are your biggest fears if Google continues to develop the technology at the pace that it is developing, this technology continues to you know, potentially not listen to this as you say, minority of voices that are speaking up paint the picture of of what you fear the world could look like if Google continues on this path. Oh no, that is a very big question. UM. And I'm not a good painter, I should mention I'm a computer scientist, so I might not you know, be as elephant at this UM. But you know, we're already seeing a lot of what we can expect to happen in the future, but even worse. UM. So just recently, someone released a ton of hate thoughts UM and then made the model available to the public UM. And so we are going to likely see an increase of hateful UM intelligence seeming systems across our interactions online and on social media. UM. And this includes things like bullying as is really problematic, persuasion into sort of more extremist UM areas. UM. I think we're going to see UH further sort of marginalization and worsening of power differentials. So as you know, a company like Google a mass is more and more um ability to affect people's sense of of what's true in the world through search ranking results, through the sort of UH products they're making. UM. It means that the voices of people who have less access to the Internet, for example, are going to disappear more and more, while Google a mass is more and more power UM. And so I'm very very concerned about how much the sort of technology moving forward empowers Google UM and sort of lack of respects that I've seen for very serious ethical concerns. You know, misinformation obviously is one alongside some of the models that have come out recently, We're not gonna know what's real. There's going to be text text based misinformation, so so news that's wrong, uh, image based missed information so images that look real that that are not real. UM. And video based as well, and also audio based. So essentially all of the main ways that we consume information online will now no longer be very easy uh to trace back to reality. UM. And that means mass misunderstanding. UM. So yeah, scary, Dr Mitchell. Uh. This we could have this conversation for hours, and I know we're gonna be having it for years. I'd love to have you back to talk more about your work at Hugging Face. I know that there you are taking a different approach to a lot of these issues. UM, But because of commercials, we're gonna have to leave it here. Um. Dr Margaret Mitch and Mitchell Hugging Face chief ethics scientists and researcher. UM, thank you uh for joining us today and help us work through some of these very complex issues. Will have much more ahead stay with us. This is Bloomberg. TikTok says it has reached an agreement with Oracle to store data from US users on Oracle servers. The deal has been in the work since following concerns of security risks linked to the Chinese owned app. This news comes the same day BuzzFeed shared that leaked audio from dozens of internal TikTok meetings revealed US user data has been repeatedly accessed from China. Welcome back to bloomber Technology and Emily Chang in San Francisco. I want to dig into this and how the fed rate hike is impacting the world of VC with Mike Volpi and partner at Index Ventures. Might great to have you back with us. Look, it's been an incredibly vi all of the week, a lot of uncertainty about the future, a lot of people saying the R word is inevitable. What do you think. Yeah, I'm gonna start by saying that I'm a Lakers fan, so I'm relatively different all of the events. Well, we're not sorry, but thank you for clarifying, Okay, So, um, yeah, it's it's definitely a very tricky time right now. Um, and I think that when we look at the portfolio of companies that we look after, there are certainly ones that are more in the consumer side of business that are seeing some softness happened. They're seeing that consumers in general have read enough in the news, seeing enough tweets about inflation and interest rates and all that, and they are moderating their behavior. And you can see that even in the statements that the larger companies are making. So whether it's Amazon or Target or Walmart saying they don't the right inventory or they may not be expanding as quickly as they thought, there's clearly something happening out there. I think what we don't know is whether it's a little Our recession, sort of like a quick one that's you know, quick one a quarter or two where it fixes things, or a big Our recession. But there's clearly something signaling that's going on out there. And I would say that on a relative basis, it's happening sooner than people expected, because there was sort of this notion that, oh, maybe next year. I don't think if something, if the economy is to slow down with some significance, it's probably not next year, but it's like next quarter or the quarter after that. So just how bad then do you think is the wreckage is going to be? How many more companies will have layoffs? How many people will get laid off? How many companies will make it out of this? How long does this last? Yeah? In all candor, I don't think it's going to be that bad. There will be some high profile situations where well known companies are letting people go, and that will be painful, undoubtedly, But I think that generally speaking, over the last couple of years, in and especially private companies have been able to raise uh amounts of money that we've never seen in the past, and that puts their balance sheets in a pretty good condition. Now they may have over hired, so they might trim a little bit here or there, but by and large, I think the majority of companies have the strongest balance sheets that they've had in a while, and in many cases have enough in the tank to get through a difficult period and to come out at the end of it. So I do think that we will surely see uh some challenges, and perhaps the ones that we most challenge would be the public companies because they obviously have to respond to a stock price and the fact that right now investors want shorter term earnings or less losses in the short term, so I think we'll see more from those, But by and large. I don't see the kind of quote wreckage that Mamy we saw in two thousand and If anything, I would expect this to happen more quickly, both the downturn and the upside to happen more quickly than in the past. Let's talk about some of these more high profile situations, and I want to focus on Cisco. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins was on the show earlier this week. I asked for his perspective. Take a listen to what he had to say. We are always planning for different scenarios, but we've been around long enough and been through enough downturns that we have playbooks and we know how to we know how to deal with those appropriately. Now, Cisco is one of the companies that hit its peak in the dot com boom, and the stock Mike has never recovered. And what's interesting is you worked there for over a decade through the dot com boom and bust, and I'm just so curious how you reflect on on the fact that Cisco, you know, never has, at least from a stock perspective, gone back to what it was. Yeah, I think that there's a couple of things though that contribute to that, and it's true, by the way, it was incredibly unpleasant to go from eighty some dollars a share to like nine dollars a share and the span of six months when I used to work there. Um, But I think that there's a couple of factors that are happening in Cisco's case. If you look at where Cisco is today, they're a single digit grower, you know, five percent grow or three percent grower. And fundamentally what happened there is, yes, there was a downturn, but in parallel with that, the technologies that they were pervading became much more broadly available commoditized, competitive, etcetera, etcetera, and the company never really reachieved the kind of growth rate that occurred during the pre dot COM's scenario. If you take another example like Amazon all Contrair, they did much better afterwards because they were able to strategically expand the product lines, the capabilities, the offerings, the sectors that the company was in. And so really what comes out of this is that you know, companies go into a difficult downturn like this, and when they come out of it, do they have the correct strategy for coming out of it. Most people will say exactly what Chuck said, which is, we have a playbook, we know how to deal with crises, We're gonna cut this, we're gonna cut that, and so forth. It's actually much more about how do you strategically align your business to come out of it than it is how to survive that period. And if you look at today's technology companies, the very very large majority of will survive it. The question is do they have the strategy to thrive afterwards? And the strategy has to be aligned with the fact that things that may have been hot before are no longer hot later. I don't have a crystal ball. I couldn't say exactly what the differences will be, but I'm pretty sure that pre the themes that matter will not be exactly mirrored in the post. And the companies that are more thoughtful and strategic about how to be aggressive and answer in the recovery cycle, well, the ones that will benefit and look more like Amazon, and the ones that stick to their knitting and do the same thing they were doing before, we'll probably end up looking a little more aft Mole Cisco in terms of their stock performance. Interesting, we'll really appreciate having your historical perspective there, and I know you've been sharing some of that advice with founders as well. Mike Volpi of Index Venture is good to have you back with us coming up micro Strategies Bitcoin Strategy. As crypto crashes, judds chairman and CEO Michael Saylor, have any regrets, he joins me. Next, this is Bloomberg time now for our crypto report, with cryptocurrency and the market still seeing major fluctuations, prompting companies as biggest coin base to cut costs. Bitcoin ow over just the last five days, it's worse week in a year. Let's bring in Michael Saylor now of micro Strategy for more on his take. And Michael, I know this is probably a rhetorical question, but do you have any regrets? You know, UM we did a lot of a lot of back testing, and I've gone back and I've looked at the numbers and on August ten when we announced our two million dollar bitcoined by UM. Since then, bitcoins up, the money supplies up, the nazacs down two percent, goals down nine, the S and P is up nine and the only thing that looks better than the money supply expansion is single family homes. I couldn't have bought billions of dollars of single family homes and so that's not been practical. So the bottom line is the bitcoin strategies ten x better than any other alternative, and so now I don't regret it. We've got two point eight billion dollars worth the bitcoin on our balance sheet right now, and we feel like we're positioned well for when the markets turn around. And our only other choice would be to give all the capital back to the shareholders, in which case we would have nothing and we would be struggling, uh to get by without any assets. Okay, how about this is cash still trash? Yeah? I mean the money supplies expanded by since January one, when we went into this kind of COVID crisis, and we know that scarce desirable assets are getting bit up in price. I mean everybody wants to buy Rolex watches, they're buying luxury real estate, they're buying everything to get their hands on, creating shortages. So you know, we are an institution. We have to take a ten year of you. And the only thing that's for sure is if we hold cash over a decade, we're gonna have a negative real yield. The only question is how much. So we have to invest in something, and we've chosen as a business strategy to FoST focus on what we believe is the most exciting investment idea because it's a digital commodity that's absolutely scarce and only getting technically better every year. So are you considering buying more bitcoin at these prices? I mean it's bitcoin on sale? Yeah, I think it is on sale. Um. You know that the number that I look at to figure out sort of the a surrogate for the book value of bitcoin is the four year simple moving average because it trades billions of dollars a day, and so after fourteen hundred days of billions of dollars a day, that number is twenty one thousand, seven hundred. Bitcoin touched that in the March crisis. It touched it around sev it's touching it right now. Generally a trades above there. You know. Our strategy is, uh, we're going to acquire bitcoin with our free cash flows from time to time, so we're kind of dollar cost averaging into bitcoin, and we're gonna hold a bitcoin for the long term. And uh, and so it wouldn't really matter whether the price was ten more, more, fifty more. We're just going to progressive. We acquire more bitcoin because that's our strategy. But you want in terms of for sale, Yeah, I mean it's like not a bad price and we will keep buying more. Okay, what if it gets below that nineteen thousand, five eleven number, which was that top of the I believe will run. Yeah, what you know that is that a time to panic? We don't panic. We have a we have a strategy. We're not traders. If your time arising is less than four years, you're sort of a trader. If it's in the months, you're definitely a trader. I'm not an expert trader. I don't have a crystal ball. I don't where the market's going to go week by week, month by month. Uh. If you're time arizon is more than four years, you're an investor. And when you're time arizing is ten years, you're kind of a saver. So we have a very long term tenure time horizon, and our view is over the ten years, bitcoin is going to be a good idea and it's just going to keep a creating and value. Uh. You know, I can't tell you whether it'll go down a bit here and there. It's in the near term, Emily. It trades like a high beta risk asset, and there's no denying that. Over the long term, we believe it's a low risk store of value asset. There's about ten things that have to happen over the next decade to make it a better asset, and we kind of know what those ten things are. And so we're waiting and uh and biding our time, and we think that it's going to improve as an asset class over time, and we're not in a hurry. So what do you see in the let's talk to take this tenure horizon. For example, we've seen what the FED is doing with rate hikes. There's all of this concern we're heading into a recession, whether it's a capital are or a lower case our recession. What do you see on the road ahead? And how is that impacting your strategy too? You know, just buy more and hold. Yeah, so let's take the ten sources of my pain. Um, there's no wash trading rules, so people can they can sell their bitcoin and buy it back and harvest the tax gain. And that's not the same with Apple, So if that gets fixed by the House Ways and Means Committee, that's a big plus for the asset. There's five twenty unregistered crypto exchanges offering twenty x leverage. That's a negative for the asset class. As they get regulated, and I expect they will, and as the twenty x leverage disappears, that will be a positive. There's nineteen thousand unregistered securities in the crypto industry cross collateralized to get bitcoin. As as those things have to have to get eliminated or they have to convert them into publicly traded instruments, that's going to decrease the volatility to be a big shakeout. The wildcat banks like the you know, the terrorism and Lunas and Celsius, they actually create massive volatility. And as they get regulated and they disappear and they grow up and become institutionalized banks. Uh, the asset class, I'm mature. There's a lot of ignorance and fear. People think crypto is the same as bitcoin. If they think that, that means they don't understand either of those two things. We don't have a stable coin Emily like us t isn't a stable coin. Tether is an opaque security. No one understands if we ever have an f d i C issued stable coin or something from a public entity that's endorsed by the SEC, that's gonna be very bullish for the industry. There's no spot et F. I think it's only a matter of time before there is. Want to prove that will be very bullish for the industry. The fast by accounting is detrimental. The lack of f d i C guidance makes it difficult, if not impossible, for banks to hold this stuff. We're waiting for clear SEC CFTC guidance, and those ten things they're gonna get cured over the next decade. They're just not gonna get cured over the next ten weeks. Okay, So how are you looking then, more broadly at what happens to the industry after this? You know, we're seeing coin Base and a number of different crypto companies having major layoffs. Do you think we'll look back on this moment as some sort of inflection point for the industry And if so, how does it look different in the fewer we're crossing the chasm? Uh, there's about a trillion dollars in the asset class. Four billion is bitcoin, the other four billion is nineteen thousand unregistered securities. We're moving from the era of the off shore entrepreneur to the to the onshore public institution. And it's pretty clear from share gains Lare's comments that he made in the last few days that uh, they want to see all the crypto exchanges regulated. Uh, they want to they want to clean up this industry. The stable coin is gonna have to be cleaned up as well. And uh, the winners are going to be the public investors in public banks and public companies, and the losers are going to be the wildcatters, you know, and the entrepreneurs the gots got started. They're flying by the seat of their pants. And I think it's essential for us to move from a one trillion dollar industry to a ten trillion dollar industry, so I welcome it. I think the bitcoin has been held back by its association with the with the anything goes crypto industry, and as that gets regulated, then that's going to actually create a green light for public institutions and public companies to get much more heavily involved in bitcoin and is going to catalyze the next leg of the bull run All right, Michael Sailor, who apparently has no regrets. Michael, always good to have you here on the show. Chair and CEO of micro Strategy, have a great weekend. Every new generation of media has been subsidized by advertising, making it cheaper or free for consumers. There's little reason to think that the metaverse will be any different. But our brands actually taking the metaverse seriously quick takes Alex Webb walks us through what the future of advertising may or may not look like in the metaverse. We've heard a lot about the metaverse in the past year, but is it really going to be creating new digital economies or is it just about selling existing real world goods. Every new generation of media has been subsidized by advertising, making it cheap or even free for consumers, from newspapers to the radio, to TV and indeed the Worldwide Web. There's little reason to think that the metaverse will be any different meta platforms. That's Facebook, You or me said so explicitly when it unveiled its vision for the metaverse last year. Businesses will be creators to building out digital spaces or even digital worlds, and they'll be able to use ads to ensure the rate customers find what they've created. So there we have it. For Mark Zuckerberg and co. The business model for the metaverse will be the same as it was for social media ads. Pair that with a R and VR's ability to track your eyeballs and maybe even gauge your mood, and it starts to become a little creepy. But to what extent a brand's taking the metaverse seriously? Big names like Nike and Samsung are building virtual worlds. Facebook meta has teams selling virtual billboards in those worlds, but they remain a relatively small slice of firms overall marketing governments, and you can see why. Just sixty seven million Americans will experience v our content at least once a month in two and they'll be split between a range of different platforms and roadblocks to minecraft and beyond. Facebook alone had two hundred and sixty three million users in the start of this year in North America. Crucially, though most of the efforts have so far focused on selling real world goods, Nike wants you to buy actual sneakers, Samsung, real cell phones. The luxury brand Burbery might have made four hundred thousand dollars selling digital skins with an associated n f T last year, but that's really just a rounding era in its three billion dollars in annual revenue. In other words, they were a marketing gimmick to attract young crypto enthusiasts you might hope as a brand are wealthy. Metas ideal is of brands to pay to advertise virtual goods in the virtual world that will let it monitor the entire customer journey from seeing the ad campaign to buying the product, then even seeing how they use it. It feels like we're a long way away from that happening. Just yes, if the metaverse takes off, there of course will be big money if you made in advertising. It just seems we're a long way right now from that happening, and face Swooke's vision is a distant prospect. H