Welcome to theCUBE pod episode nine. I think it's episode nine. We're in top 10, first 10 out of the gate. Dave, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE pod, we can break down what we're talking about. We're actually on location in San Francisco for RSA. It's the biggest security conference in the world. We're doing our taping for our pod here. Dave, a lot of stuff going on. We saw our media implosion last week. Now we're seeing it go to the broadcast level. Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, events are back. This event is more packed than ever before. The week before theCUBE was that in Europe, we had a group of 10,000 people. And we're going to have a guest here on this pod coming in as our interview with John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco now doing a lot of angel on us with his own money that he's made billions at Cisco. Legend in the industry is going to come in and weigh in and talk with us here on theCUBE pod. And we're going to bring him in. But Dave, the trends continue. And actually, no Elon Musk really to talk about today. It's a quiet week for Elon. But I'm psyched of John Chambers. Come on, we're going to start bringing in guests. Again, this is our 10th episode. I'm going to go to the ninth episode. We have one more kind of in our beta run. Yeah, so, well, first of all, RSA is unbelievable. Like 40, 50,000 people. I think you nailed it, John. What'd you call it? The platformatization of the security business, which is right on. I mean, everybody's trying to consolidate, you know, they're trying to figure out how to simplify, you know, we see some companies with 400 tools. It's just too many. And so you see big companies like Palo Alto and CrowdStrike and others trying to get Cisco kind of consolidate. I think you nailed that platforms over products, but it's hard, right? It's hard to have best-of-breed products and a platform at the same time. So I think your analysis. Yeah, and I just got my invite from a friend, influencer for the Blue Sky social network from Jack Dorsey. We got some anti-trust stuff, Microsoft, Brad Smith, Waze, CMA. Wait, speaking of influencer, you're like the number two cloud influencer I just saw. I just saw. The report came out, apparently, you know, so it's these lists. Well, you know how they do those things. Well, first of all, I should be number one. That's for sure, they got it wrong. Number one is where I should be, Dave. You know that. Number two, you were on the list. What happened? I don't know, maybe they think I'm an analyst. I don't know what to say. I don't know. The lists are always kind of like all about social media, but I think, you know, the word influence, I think we're going to see, we should have a rant section on influence because I think in the B2B, in Sarbjee Chowal, wasn't even on the list. I think he's one of the top influencers. No doubt, no doubt. Corey Quinn was way down on the list. He should have been higher up. I mean, influence is changing and reputation change is what you influence. I'm a journalist, you're an analyst, so we'll get into that in the rant section. Stu's on the list. Stu Miniman, yeah, the poll, that's a poll forward from theCUBE Mojo going on at Red Hat. Yeah, I wonder if... Stu, Stu, you think you would have on the list with LGBTQ, I mean, come on, to be honest. But I'd love to see that you carried it through Red Hat. I wonder if Stu got his blue check mark renewed. We should check in on Stu on that. I wonder because a lot of people who kind of got it from Twitter are shunning, paying for it. I don't know, I don't see a problem. Well, the other thing that's in the news we're going to get into, first I want to get into this whole Fox thing, and the Don Lemon CNN, because that's the implosion of mainstream media. We saw journalism, we reported on our pod last week, we talked about that. But the big looming story here under the current this week is the layoffs continue. Amazon just had another riff, just came out on Twitter here, the news announcers just came out, CNBC carried it, we're going to carry it on Silicon Angle. Dropbox CEO is laying 16% of its staff off. This is Gen 1 Cloud, Dropbox is like Gen 1. Again, I wrote the story with Adam Sileski about next-gen cloud coming, and we're talking about that here. Dave, this is like a sign, those first-gen SaaS companies like Dropbox, laying people off is not good. That's not a good sign. We'll get into that, I don't know what you think about that. Well, tech obviously is the harbinger. Right, tech started with the layoffs, but you saw the GDP results, the economy grew 1.1% this past quarter, which was lower than people thought. It's still, I mean, if you annualize that, you're still talking about 4.4% growth, and pre-pandemic it was growing just over 2%. But nonetheless, the Fed's tightening is doing its job. It's slowing down the economy, you combine that with the bank failures, and we're starting to see a suppression, and then you're seeing earnings are actually really good. Meta, we might talk about that, had really good earnings, and generally speaking earnings are better than people expected, or as good or better, I'd say 80% plus are better than expected. Well, you always said the rich are getting richer.  I expect Google had good profits, Google Cloud profitable for the first time, that would hit the wire today. So that's interesting news, Google looking good with Cloud, they were kind of turning the knobs, so that's a milestone, not sure if that's relevant to the CapEx scale. Actually, I dig into it. I think interestingly enough, it was the software side of their business that I think outperformed Google Cloud platform, which is kind of cool. But you know what it is, John? These big companies, they have a lot of fat, and so they can tile down that fat in bad times, and it drops right to the bottom line. It just, I think it does speak to, Frank Slutman talks about this in his book, and he talked about it when we spoke last year on theCUBE, he's like, we don't invest in things that aren't critical, period. And so we really circumspect about that. So I do think a lot of these bigger companies, they get caught up in the momentum and they start investing in things that may not deliver that sort of ROI. And so- And for the folks out there letting off DMS, we're connected, we have some openings in our host, cube hosts in the areas, we're expanding in different verticals, we have publication journalism, and we have a ton of people in our network that are hiring, certainly on the data side, cloud side, so DMS, if you've got people, if you're looking or you know someone who's impacted by the layoffs, hit us up, we've got a big network, and we should open up a page day for theCUBE to do a job, job kind of matchmaking for the courtesy of the community. Again, we have access to all the top companies, we'll tell you who's hiring, who's not, so give us a ping. Yeah, so I mean, a lot of talent out there right now.  I mean, if you're young, this is the best time to do a company.  I mean, teams are being laid off, and I see engineering teams getting cut. I mean, you said in a couple of pause back that you wish you were 25 again, right?  And this is what I was talking with John Chambers about when we're going to hear that come out, but basically the bottom line is that, you know, you got more product-market fit knobs to turn. It's easier to get the product-market fit than ever before.   That is a testament to how hard entrepreneurship and being a founder is. And now with AI, you can get two or three friends together or colleagues that have complimentary skills and get out there and actually get a position and take down a position in a growing market easily. And now you use AI, you use Majority for Graphics. I mean, you could be up and running literally in three weeks. I mean, if you're technically savvy and you have a vision of the market and understand sort of customer problems, go out, try to do the analysis of the market and then look, do whatever you have to do, raise some capital, friends and family, move into your parents' basement, whatever, get your cost. And you raise a couple of hundred thousand dollars just to be able to get to a point where you can understand the market, maybe develop an MVP, you can develop it. How long has it taken? How long historically, John, does it take to develop an MVP? And what do you think with generative AI you can do today? I just said three weeks, I think it's the number, but here's what I would say. You know, we're historians and we're hiring. But what did it take historically? I mean, it depends what era you in, the early era of pre-cloud, you had to get it by a server, but they'll say cloud. Okay, it's cloud. Well, I mean, Trudy got lucky right out of the gate and that product market fit kind of hit and then they could never change the product and they tried many times to make the product better. Elon's doing that, that's why he's got a lot of backlash. I remember when Facebook had product market fit, I mean, people went nuts when the news feed was changed for the better. And it was always a revolt. Anytime Facebook did something, but they had product market fit out of the gate, those are the exceptions. You really got to do the work and work backwards from the company. If you're an enterprise venture, it's really hard. You got to go out and identify problems, that'd be a growing market. But once you identify the growing market, you can get that problem space, you can nail down, you can engineer a solution, work backwards. Once you know that North Star and that beachhead position, you can accelerate that with the tools out there now and do it in weeks. And then go the customer and then iterate back, that's a cloud concept and that's phenomenal.  I mean, you know what, if it fails, you're young. Well, Cribble was a great example of a company that kind of did professional services. They didn't even raise money initially. I believe they did some professional services, then got traction with their pedigree and their technology knowledge and then someone said, wow, you got traction. You're actually talking to CISOs and CIOs? Great, here's some cash. That's the seed kicks in. So I'm a big believer in do some consulting with the customers you're targeting, help them in these growing markets where it's shifting and then you can get that base position. Then you get the seed funding and say, hey, I got engaged customers, boom, done. I've funded three, maybe even arguably four companies that way. Basically doing sort of a sell design build. You get customers to fund an idea and then you get some cash flow going and then you build up a little base and then the hardest part then is to take that. How do you take that, put it into software and scale it? Well, this is the thing about the security industry. We're here at RSA that I was saying yes about the platformization of security.  That was like a tax of like 50 to $100,000 just to get it going. So you had to do a PowerPoint, convince someone for cash and a lot of people died trying to do that. Then cloud came out, you put your credit card down, you get up and running, you're off to the races and that would take months to get traction. Now it's literally, I got cloud, I got product market fit in the tools to get the validation. That's the key and I think you're seeing that in the security now where the security market has been that big bloated, slow, a lot of failure, hard to unwind positions if you have a point solution and this platformization becomes more of a foundational element so that the companies like CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Zscaler, Cisco, Junior World, they can be more nimble. So they can actually go out and deploy point solutions and this is what the Palo Alto network CPO said, I can do best and breathe in certain point cases and then have that be a platform feature. So he gets best of both worlds. That is, I think why I'm so pumped about the platformization of security because it changes the game and the fact that no one has dominant market share means it's going to be a race to that position of who can be that platform. CrowdStrike is a lot of traction, Palo Alto's got a nice platform look. It's going to be interesting to see CrowdStrike and Palo Alto go at it. And I think Cisco is interesting because Cisco's so large and it's coming at it from network.  Cisco obviously huge in networking. They purchased a lot of security. They got G2 Patel running it and they just hired Tom Gillis out of VMware. So that's really interesting to me that they could have somebody who really understands that market and can put it together. They've certainly got M&A chops. So Cisco's definitely a player there. They just got a lot of, you know, kind of legacy products that they've cobbled together and got to do a better job of integration. And then the other one's Microsoft, right? Microsoft's probably the, I mean arguably, and I don't even think it's an argument anymore. The largest security vendor out there just because it's Microsoft. And then you got the other end of this. So Microsoft charges for its security. They compete with CrowdStrike. They compete with Okta and Identity. And then you got the other end of the spectrum is Amazon Web Services. They just, for the most part, you're not paying them. They're just securities like there.  I think Microsoft has got a great opportunity ahead of them. The problem with Microsoft is that they keep things so insular but they got Charlie Bell over there, Sean Bytes, they have that team. They got an Amazonian team coming over there. They have huge market share. They have great market lift into their, into their existing customer base. Like AWS, they're perfectly positioned. The question is, is going to be execution. You got Amazon Web Services laying off people so they got bloodshed going on inside the company, Dave. And Microsoft doesn't. Microsoft's got growth. They got a tailwind. Now granted, I think Amazon's got a superior product on the cloud side, but Microsoft is banging away hard and you're going to see probably some really good moves. And the question is, will that be the monolithic model for security or will Microsoft enable the ecosystem to coexist? We heard that all day here, first two days here. It's such a thing. I mean, you know, the best product doesn't always win, as you know, but it's different today, right? Amazon, I would agree, is the best infrastructure as a service and certainly the best building blocks. You know, I think, I'd have to say, John, I think Azure has the best software apps cloud. You know what I'm saying?  Maybe best as a stretch, but I would say the most consumable. They've moved office over. Easiest, and Google too, Google. And lowest cost to onboard. The thing about Google, and by the way, it's workspace business was doing better, they did better this last quarter, but it still has nowhere near the market presence of- Of course, and Microsoft had that monopoly going forward. I mean, Google's business is search. I mean, it's like free search. I mean, I think the workspace stuff has got a lot of legs there. It does, I mean, we use it and it's good. I mean, we like it. A lot of people complain about Teams and some of the things that Microsoft has. Obviously Word and Office to Suite is obviously bread and butter. Windows franchise all tied in on 365. So, you know, it makes a lot of sense that Microsoft's winning, but it's just so- We'll see where the earnings come out. It's just so ubiquitous in corporate America, right? I mean, Teams and 365 and- Well, you know, we should do a survey on the makeup of the younger startups coming up. Who's actually on Microsoft? Who's not? Well, that's a good point. You know, I see a lot of startups all around Google Gmail. They grew up on the management service, we'll see. Well, the earnings are coming out, Dave. So we got, that's one of our stories here. We'll get to the Tucker Carlson news and the Don Lemon implosion that got fired or whatever that happened there. But, you know, real quick, earnings are coming out. Events are back. You're seeing the face-to-face events. That's the biggest news I think that's most awesome from a personal standpoint and seeing people engaging. Digital's still rocking and seeing that for the first party citizen events. But earnings are coming out for the big three. All the top tech companies are at the launching earnings. Well, first of all, the events, we called this.  And you said, you nailed it. You said, look, Dave, here's what's going on. There's 2023. More events, more physical events, they're just going to be smaller in size. There will be some very large, like RSA, MWC, CES that are very, very large and growing. AWS, Snowflake, okay, that's true. But for the most part, it's going to be larger, smaller, more regional events and more of them. That's exactly what's happened. Yeah, we got that right as we did a lot of things. So, you know, we're good. So earnings, you know, Microsoft obviously had really good earnings. The stock was up nicely yesterday. Meta came out. It's up 13, 14% today, basically on cost cutting, but also revenue growth. And Google, you know, Google did okay, but GCP. So here's the deal. You know, I focus on the cloud piece of it. I think I nailed accurately 30% growth in Azure. I think it came in 31% constant currency. GCP, hard to tell. I got them at around 20, 22%. And in AWS, I'm forecasting 15% for tonight. You know, after the earnings, you know, that'll be Thursday, the earnings come out. But here's the rundown for the quarter. I got AWS at 21 billion. Azure, this is just IaaS at 17 billion and GCP at three and a half billion. Okay, so you can see a couple of things going on. Microsoft's growth is slowing. Azure is gaining share unquestionably. So those two are coming together. And, you know, GCP is far behind with growth rates that, you know, should be a lot higher at this point in its career now in its maturity. The other thing I'm hearing, John, no question, and I think Amazon's been working hard at this for a while. This is not a new thing. I think it's been going on for a year. They saw this coming. They saw the slowdown coming. They saw the consumption trends. And they went out and tried to get customers and they're active about this to try to lock them into longer-term agreements. Hey, we can save you money if you sign up for more. And the customer's like, hey. It's a smart move. It's a smart move. We're using AWS anyway. Why not sign up for more? We're not going to leave these guys. There's no churn, very little churn in the AWS IaaS base. Very little. And we're talking low single digits. So why wouldn't you just lock in a better deal? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a smart move. The other two things I'm seeing that's involving the cloud earnings is going to be, or their position is one. The competition positioning between AWS and Microsoft. I think Google's going to have an opportunity to catch back up and they're going to level up. Also the political angle. White House is here at this show for cybersecurity. You started to see policy. We'll hear from John Chambers when he comes on about the role of tech companies in aligning with politics. And global scale tech and politics are now have to be aligned because it's just tech is involved in all of our life. But Dave, this is something that I've been seeing lately and I want to get your thoughts on it because it's my observation. Microsoft and Amazon's competitive strategy in war against each other is playing out in a really weird way. Microsoft's trying to be Amazon from a cloud standpoint, capabilities, because Amazon's way ahead, technically. And Amazon is trying to be Microsoft to be like, we know how to do the enterprise. And it's interesting, I see Amazon web services trying too hard to be like Microsoft. And when they're already ahead. So I've never seen a leader try to be, change their strategy to compete and align with the second player in the market. I've never seen that in the history of my life, say, I'm number one, I want to play more like number two. Like, I've never seen that. And I think Amazon should stay to their strengths, not try to be Microsoft. I've been in meetings where it's like, we have to have a story against Microsoft. Why would they even be distracted from Microsoft? So I think they're different companies. Microsoft will win the enterprise sales, install base game because they have it. Amazon's gaining it, they're getting the new market share and they're just trying too hard to be like an enterprise company. What's your take on that? I'd say a couple of points I'd make on that. And I think the, while I agree when you were talking about with the enterprise, I don't see Amazon trying to be like Microsoft in this sense. And you, Jerry Chen and I have talked about this. I think it's Amazon strategy, as you well know. Here's the building blocks, go build SaaS products that compete with Microsoft. Same thing with their generative AI, their large language model announcement. It's like, here are the Lego pieces. We're not going to try to be open AI and Microsoft and bang, we're going to let you go build that and compete with them.  So I do see that as different. A lot of people had suspected five, six, seven years ago that Amazon was going to try to go upmarket and build more SaaS applications. While they have done more solutions like they've done in call centers and the like, they are not competing against Microsoft trying to be them in software, in the application software. So that's different in productivity software. They're enabling their customers and their community, their ecosystem to build that to compete. Now, to your point, right? They did over hire a lot of people. They probably hired old enterprise folks who were like, know that game. Well, to your point, remember, it took Amazon a while to figure out how to sell to the enterprise other than just selling to developers. And I think they're still trying to figure it out. You look at what's happening with outposts and that, you know, the outposts. I'm not sure outposts is a proxy for Amazon's enterprise sales strategy. No, but I mean, it is in terms of them going after on-prem and I think they are killing on the partner network though. Yeah, but the challenge is, before we get to the partner network, the challenges that they've had going on-prem have allowed companies like HPE and Dell the time to come up with their as-of-service offerings like Apex and GreenLake, which initially were really deficient, but they're getting better. They're actually, they're getting, you know, better than outposts at this point in time. So it's kind of an interesting equilibrium and a good fight that's ensuing. Well, Microsoft is more than outposts. They got the edge still anyway. But I think their leadership's just different. No, Amazon, you're talking about. Amazon's got the edge. They have edge products that are coming out. I think they're better in the classroom. Well, that's different. I mean, I know they think about the data centers. I'm not sure it's a false positive. I just get the sense that they're trying to be like Microsoft. We'll investigate this. Well, hold on. Unpack what you just said because I do think, I think this is, so remember Jassy said, well, we just look at the data centers as another edge. I don't agree. The data center is not just another edge. The data center is the data center. And it's different. It's a big edge. Right, maybe it's a big edge.  But it's very much different than, you know, some, you know, of agriculture, oil field drilling thing. It's much different than that kind of IOT. And so I think that's a different discussion. And I think the cloud guys have a really good shot at Amazon in particular at doing really well in areas. I think the data centers are an industrial edge, in my opinion. If it's running cloud operations. I see the industrial edges as, you know, industry 4.0. I think it's- Yeah, factory floor, big physical plants. A sensor on a windmill. Yeah, but not banks. Data centers where they're running mainframes. That's mainframe data centers of yesteryear. And there's a lot of them, right? There's fewer than there used to be and they're smaller. All right, we're going to have to unpack the Amazon web services and the Microsoft strategies. I think just to make one final point, the layoffs at AWS underscore, in my opinion, what I think is what's happened, they hired a lot of, over hired a lot of enterprise folks to try to win the game, get in that game and be more enterprise like, not Microsoft like, but more enterprise like. But when you hire enterprise people, where do they come from? The classic enterprise. So I think Microsoft has that DNA. Amazon's never had that, AWS never had that classic enterprise DNA. It was the old guard versus the new guard.  And obviously they're laying off 18,000 people and just this week AWS is affected. So, you know, we'll see. I mean, I don't know yet, but I just hear narratives in the market like they're worried about Microsoft. And so I've just never seen the number one player look in the rear view mirror at the competition and change strategies or adjust narratives based upon the number two player. Why not go faster? But it's a little bit surprising to me that Jassy seems to be doing the layoffs in like little paper cuts, you know? I think it's, he probably, of course he doesn't want to do layoffs, but they've been sort of these waves of layoffs versus sort of, all right, let's get it over with now. And I think it's just, it underscores the uncertainty that's in the market even from companies that have great data like Amazon. All right, so let's get into the media implosion of Tucker Carlson out at Fox. He did a full monologue. I just watched it online this morning, you know, calling out people, oh, the truth will prevail. He's the one who was putting out there. He was putting out the rhetoric that. So explain to people, I haven't seen it. You put it on Twitter. Fox parted ways with Tucker Carlson, prime time host, okay, because the Dominion Republic that caught him the night before the trial, text messages that got everyone in a tizzy. They settled the thing for $387 billion or whatever it was. A million. A million dollars is like an unbelievable number. Just mind-blowing settlement. And there's more coming as Brendan pointed out in our RSA show. And so he's out. Don Lemon got dismissed too. And these firings were just like, they called their agents and he's gone. They didn't even talk to anyone. So Bill O'Reilly got fired. Fox ditched their people, they don't care. Now I heard that they're trying to lock up Tucker Carlson so he doesn't go anywhere. So a lot of stuff going on, but he was the number one show and I think Fox News has that reputation of being that hardcore. So what you referenced is he put a post, a video out on Twitter basically saying that when you step away for a little bit, you find out who's your really, there's some really nice people out there. I'm sure people reached out to him.  They don't matter. You can't get the truth anywhere. And to your point, John, he was the one who was perpetrating these falsehoods. So I don't know what he's talking about. I mean, I thought it was ridiculous what he was saying on Twitter. So I don't know. I mean, he's, the guy to me is just lost all credibility. Now the other thing too is that supposedly the Fox lawyers went to him before the trial and said, hey, Tucker, good news. They're going to redact all that stuff that you said, all that misogynistic stuff and the things that you said about these, your colleagues. And he said, I want them to be exposed.  It's like self-implosion here. The guy's losing it. And he did look at, he did say a lot of what are, a lot of people consider myself included.   I mean, he said that. I mean, it's like, probably, right? He inferred that. I mean, that is like not cool. Right? I mean, the air techs messes that around. The air techs messes. The air, you know, they're, No, he said that on air.  But that's beside the point. I mean, he said that. I mean, I'm not even saying that. Kara Swisher had a post today speculating, based on his, he did an underground video that looked kind of cheesy that he's going to probably have a run at Twitter as a platform.  And then he says he despises Trump. He said that in one of his texts. He saw, called one of his colleagues the C word. Okay.  I mean, let's face it. I mean, that's got to be why Fox were probably said, we're done with this guy. You got, he's got to go. Yeah. I mean, just to show you what goes on, on camera and what their real thoughts are and they're peddling often all the networks. That's why nobody trusts mainstream media. That's why it's become so polarized because as a collective tribe and community and society, you got to trust media. This is a huge issue in, in, in how we've come, come about. So we'll remember. I mean, those are young people. So the, so the couple of things I point out. So 60 minutes used to have a thing called point counterpoint. And there was a, remember the, the, the, the parody on Saturday night live, you know, they had one side and the other side. And it was actually really good. And then the other show was this show called the McLaughlin Group. And basically John McLaughlin, who was a hardcore Republican under, I think he worked in the Nixon administration and others. He would gather people from the left and the right and they'd put it forth an issue and they would debate it. And you would hear both sides of really smart people debating the issue and you would be able to draw your own conclusions with real facts instead of like trying to switch between MSNBC and Fox. And where you get, you can't get any story. It's just so tainted. So those, Tucker is right about that. Those shows are gone. That, that, that discourse is gone.  You know, Fox News has always had the philosophy of give the audience what they want. So, but yes, but so what, what I'd love to see is Don Lemon and, and Tucker Carlson actually, you know, two smart people start a program and actually invite people in from both sides. But are they smart people? Have, have debates. Are they smart people? I do think they're smart people. I do. I, but, but, but let them make, but let them make their, they're smart. Let's see how smart they are. Let them make their arguments with somebody else in the room who's smart and can defend the other side. Rupert Murdoch, everyone knows. Like I said, the, his whole business model is give the people what they want. And then he's got no loyalty. Oh, he took a Tucker Carlson, the number one guy. Whether you like him or not, he was pulling the numbers in and he's gone. Cause, and Bill O'Reilly got Ken, you got what Sir Megan was, was cut to. They don't care. It's Fox's. But what's wrong with people that they don't want to hear both sides of the story? Is that, am I like the only person that I know I'm not?  They want the numbers, Dave. Why do people create salacious headlines for clicks? Okay. Why is, why is journalism not working? Okay. Because of clicks. Why aren't they working? Because people, if it bleeds, it leads. Okay. That's the saying as you know in media. But you know most voters. That's the answer. That's what you want to know. Okay, wait, let me ask you a question. You know most voters are down the middle. They're independent. Not really. I think that's a fact. But okay. That's just pretty wide. You're making an assumption there. No, I think it's a fact. I think you look up, you look up, you know, independent voters versus Democrats and Republicans. There's more independence. Now there's, Not really. It's 50-50 in the last election. No, but yeah, there's Democrats, there's Republicans and there's independence. There's more independence than anything. You look it up. That's right. But so my question is, wouldn't there be, We're in the rant section now. Assume for a second that I'm right. Okay, just assume that. If I'm correct, wouldn't there be demand for a show as I'm describing? You get people on the left, people on the right, they debate it out and then let the audience come up with their own conclusions. It would take leadership from someone in the media organization to actually do that and get the numbers out. Why don't we do that? Yeah. I don't think people would tune in, Dave. I don't think we'd pull the numbers. Why? Because people just want to be in an echo chamber. I mean, what's wrong with people if that's the case? Well, we don't have the platform to pull in the big numbers. I mean, think about it. If you're talking about Fox. It's CNN. They're on broadcast. They have Reach. You would see NBC on the business side. They have Reach. Reach is a time-based consumption. It's linear. People will argue linear. It's not linear TV, but we call it linear TV. At eight o'clock it starts. You have certain programs that's scheduled and they have limited time. And so they have to do their best to tell a story in a clock. On a clock. And so digital, our program is a little more deeper. We can go deeper. So I think you'll see digital streaming fill the void. I think you're going to start to see first things going to be left and right will put their rhetoric out there. And then hopefully I think if we could emerge a show, great, I'd be all for it. However, coming from digital will have lower numbers, but maybe more targeted audience. But you got to be on that broadcast spectrum to have the right show, in my opinion. Because the numbers are there and you got to get that mainstream outlet out there. You hear a lot of conversation about it.  And they're not CNN, but they lean to the left. And I would reposition that to be center and go right at the center. Like you said, that would be the best. But I mean, I find Rachel Maddow is biased as Sean Hannity. I mean, you know. Well, that's what I'm saying. You got to change that. Right. But they have numbers. Okay, but I guess again, my question is that people just want what they want to hear and be in an echo chamber. I think there's, you hear them. There's no trust in the media. There's no trust in the media because you never get both sides of the story. That's what journalism is supposed to be. And so my premise is that if you just make the pod, this pod, that's show. Let's go. All right. All right. We'll get some people in that can actually intelligently. And we all know people on the left. We all know people on the right. We're in text chats together.  Right? I find that far left and the far right are all insane.  They just want to read headlines. The whole of the polarization has caused massive problems. And then once you have them separate like that, they just stoke their base. And that's one of the problems I see with the whole subscription newsletter model. Once you have an audience that you know you depend on financially, you stay and you got to keep that. And so the so-called biased journalists are actually in a perverse incentive not to be journalists. They're in the paid newsletter business. Okay, so the best journalists are going to newsletters. Okay. And this is now on the print side. And there's no incentive to like be aggressive because you don't want to lose people who are paying you. The whole purpose of independence is to not worry about audience churn and just get the truth out there. So again, the incentives is what's going to drive everything. And you know, one thing about corporate influence and advertising influence is that a lot of these publications on the business model get addicted to the crack. And then once they get addicted, it's over. And that's why it's similar to the clickbait. That's why Buzzfeed went down. That's why the media implosion is happening because the revenue model is off.  I mean, he did get up there every night as did Bill O'Reilly. And it's hard to do.  You got to serve the audience. And I would watch Tucker Carlson, you know, quite frequently if I'm not working late. And because I want to hear that side of the story. And then like I said, I'll turn it over to MSNBC and see what's the matter. Well, John Stewart, John Stewart's trying to start to build something on this model. So we'll see. I mean, it's going to take some real, you know, known brands and someone with guts on the leadership side to put down the cabbage, so to speak, to fund an operation. But so if you put Bill Maher and Tucker Carlson in the same room and picked an, you know, pardon the interruption like, you know, issue and have them debate it out.  I think we should shoot that out. I think we should like a pay-per-view cage match. Are you telling me that wouldn't get great ratings? I think it would. I would love to hear that. Maybe we should do it.  Oh, that's a good argument. Let's hear how Bill, you know, counters that. Oh, wow. And here, how are we to debate? Maybe so much to build a social theater, Dave. A digital theater. Like a portal. All right, that's good. You're just the guy to do it, John. Okay, let's do it. All right, let's get in. We have John Chambers joining us. We're going to, on this pod, we said we would bring in some guests as we phase in, close to number 10. Our goal has always been 10 podcasts. And then after 10, get kind of a format down it. And the next 10, figure out how to get, you know, more of a groove swing. So, you know, we're going to go before 10 bringing the guests. We're going to bring in John Chambers. We're going to sit down with him here at RSA, where we're doing our live remote and get into a conversation. Very interesting conversation right now with John Chambers. A man who needs no introduction. John Chambers is here, friend of the Cube. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Dave, it's a pleasure. John, to be with you again. Great to see you. So John, a question that John and I ask a lot of executives like yourself. Is security a do-over? Oh, now that's not the way I've had it framed before. So, I'm going to buy a little bit of time to distract your audience if I get the answer on it. The answer is yes. I think security of the past isn't going to work. Those were in silos, individual products, very complex, required human intervention. We're not simple to use or install. You didn't understand the benefits and able to quantify where you put your risk. I think you're going to see security of the future in architectural play, which thinks about it from where are you versus your peers? If you invest money, where should you invest? How does it lower your cyber insurance or work through it? How do you prevent the attacks once they start to occur and shut them down quickly? How do you recover from them, et cetera? And that whole 360 degrees. So, I think you're going to see a next generation of security leaders. You and I were teasing earlier, John, about a security kind of boring something of the past. I would argue, no, because you're going to see a whole new generation of leaders within it. Security is set up for an architectural play and nobody's been able to capitalize on it. And the only way you have security is to not require human intervention and for the pieces to talk and communicate together. You know this better than I do. When you look at the market, with the exception of Microsoft, they've got a big security business, I guess. It's hard to tell, they're kind of everywhere. But no one company has more than single-digit market share, right? Now, when you were a CEO of Cisco, I think 60-plus percent market share, right? So, do you think that will change in the future? I think it has to, and for mainly positive reasons. One of the things that I was taught earlier on by Jack Welch at GE's, he said, John, if you don't have at least 20% market share, especially in what he understood about technology companies, you don't have staying power. So, to have a lot of players in a security architecture where nobody has even 10%, you're going to see a consolidation in that, and you're probably going to see a number of new generation leaders. I do think it's set up for one or two or three players to lead in this. And it could be a startup who just gets bigger and moves into market adjacencies and use the innovation engine to really go. Or it could be one of the existing security players, a CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks at Cisco that makes the transition. I'm betting either way, I'll be okay. So it could be a company like Rubrik's that is just on a tremendous growth range and a very high unicorn approaching double digits, capability who decides to go into multiple other areas, which I'd love to see people do. Or it could be one of the startups that suddenly really scales dramatically and begins to piece it together, or an existing incumbent who reinvents themselves. Now, the problem with existing incumbents, it's hard to reinvent. You've got to get the next market transition right. That's when you gain share. So the business model on security is now going to be enabled by AI. And it's going to be enabled around simplicity, ease of use, how you purchase your stuff. And security has to be built in from the very beginning. It can't be an afterthought. You overlay security on electrical grid. All you do is put mandates on it. It has to be designed for the beginning of how you do it. Same thing with networking with a company called Now, which Pankaj Patel is leading. It's designed to ease of use. It reduces dramatically your operational costs. And it was designed for simplicity from the very beginning with zero trust built into the very beginning. So until you get that in supply chain, until you get it in the electrical grid, until you get it in the networks, you really don't have security of today. So there's going to be a new player here. I'd love to be a part of that. I'd love for him to buy my company. So I'd rather buy one of my companies to be that mover. John, you're investing a lot, as you mentioned earlier, which is great. And you've seen the market moves. We're in a market now that many people are saying, look, it's a shift. It's not like a market. Well, you buy some companies, some white space, product roadmap, fill that in, buy it, or integrate it in. This is a market where there's opportunity for revolutionaries to take big positions. New companies, startups coming in. And as my friend Jim Anderson, a VC, an old school VC, said, some of the startups are ideas that no one gets or sees. It looks different. Is there something that you see out there that might be different? Because it's not a follow the herd mentality. I guess AI, they've got that going on hype right now. But in these big movement, when these big market step functions, where there's a change of the guard, there's always that company that no one gets. It could be a little company, two guys out of Stanford, build a box, connect networks together, could be Airbnb type, no one. What is this company? What is that in your mind? It's new. Yes, a series of questions on it. First, I'll start with a way out there approach. You all remember, I said voice would be free and it destroyed the, my service provider customers were pretty upset with me saying that, they'd enjoy their revenues and their profits. But it was obvious it would be because it was such a small load on the internet that companies would give it away to get the data and get the video side. One that's unknown that I think is going to change dramatically and it's counterintuitive because of the deep fakes going on, especially with artificial intelligence is the voice. You're going to be able to imitate Dave or John and I won't be able to tell it's not you. However, if you really look at voice, it is broken up in a single second to 8,000 samples and in five seconds, 40,000 samples can't be smooth. And so all of a sudden you're going to be able to see company like a pin drop, be able to say in voice, it may be the single ID sign on. And wouldn't it be so nice starting your car or logging in to a call center or the ability to get on an airplane where you're able to just say a couple of sentences and they get it. And before you say, well, John, that does work because of the AI capability and deep fakes, it's the reverse. You'll be able to say very quickly, this was Dave, you'll be able to say no it was not and it was another human or you'll be able to say no. This was engine machine driven and the machines actually get a signature that you're able to associate with it. So that's a way out there type of move. The second thing is that you're going to have a player like a small company, like a safe, that starts out of India and is growing at about 200% per year just on ranking architecture for how secure are you, where do you put your investments, et cetera. And then they have the courage to cyber insurance tied to that, which gets a 360 going. Small company, a couple hundred million in evaluation just did a major finance run for, if you can imagine, 52 billion million dollars and they had seven term sheets. Clearly that's something nobody's seen in the market. Or you could have a now that rethinks networking with security and they'll be doing a fundraise very, very shortly and I think that will go extremely well as well. Maybe a way out player, you think of a rubric as a storage system and backup, well they're now a security system and the best form of defense against ransom where there is. They're kind of pivoted. They pivoted, they reinvented themselves. So those are the type of things but I think it's most likely to be players that were in on people's radar screens two years ago. You're nice and give me credit for AI saying two years ago it was going to cross the cast. I said it six years ago, a little bit early. But to me, AI is going to be bigger than the cloud and bigger than the internet combined and I bet six years ago on AI companies, a ASAP or a Unifor or a Spark Cognition or a Sprinkler. And so I think those are the exciting moves today that will create the next generation of real business. You started investing in AI six years ago? Six years ago. I made five major investments. So what did you see at the time and what's different now? Well what I saw at the time was that I felt it would be the next cloud and the next internet, both of which I did a pretty good job of seeing around the corners and then betting, not just saying here's what it was at but betting with it. And you could see customers, the really leading edge customers grasped the change here and I saw how AI completely changed the customer experience for companies and their call centers and that would be the first application, much like the internet's first application could be as simple as entering orders online. And once you see that, you begin to connect the dots and the balance. And then everything I saw continued to build upon it. And so it's classic. I'm doing a lot of customers. What's around the corner now in your mind? Cause it's got data, you got AI clear path there. I can see that. What's around the corner that you're looking at now that you're connecting the dots on? Well, two things. First of all, I think you articulated very well who the winners are going to be in AI in part. It's about compute. Then it's about the data and the companies aren't going to give out their data. It's nice to have a chat GBT out there for the internet, but there's no way a given company, especially a security company or enterprise company is going to give access to their data to others. So it's the ability to really think about how do you use the data in an effective way? And then how do you do the logarithms, the AI piece of it to really change things. So I think you're going to see a gold rush here. I think some of these companies, unfortunately we'll get overvalued again. Our memory is remarkably short, isn't it? Like two months. And to suddenly wake up and say, well, I'm going to bet on the new player who's just starting with a new idea. If you didn't bet five and six to seven years ago, you're probably not going to be a player here longterm. So it's going to be fun to watch how it shakes out. What's just around the corner? If somebody could get AI and cybersecurity together uniquely, that gets exciting. But every company's going to be an AI company. Every company's going to be digital. That means tech's here to stay and the future looks very good. Questions can the U.S. lead in this or not? Well, good question. I mean, what's your investment philosophy right now in terms of growth capital versus sort of early stage? How do you think about that? Well, I'm a little bit over the board more than I'd like to be. I originally would say I'm a B level investor once it gets up to CDE series. It's out of my pocket book. I invest all my funds myself with my four partners together. I today would actually say I'm investing earlier. I like the seed at series A because I can grow them and I've seen the movies and I can pick the mix that I want. I can also pick diversity in the leaders, three out of the last five companies I added or headed up by female CEOs, which I think we need to do a much better job of as an industry, especially the VCs. But my ideal target is a company that has a run rate of about 2 million that I know I can help them grow to 10, to 50, to 100. And so my goal is really not an investor. I'm more of a strategic coach, a partner, an advisor, and again, somebody who's kind of there to listen on the tough lines. Well, obviously you got the pedigree, you're doing great work and you're in the trenches. You mentioned the competitive USA. I want to get your thoughts on. Sure. A lot of young people I've been talking to, they're looking at our society and there's a lot of change going on. There's a lot of fears, a lot of recession. What's the future look like, global economy? What's the best way we can be more competitive as a country on the global stage, as intellectual property rights are being viewed as you mentioned, people aren't going to give us our data. That's what I'm saying, we're saying in theCUBE, that's the new IP. BDAI, work with AI, but as a country, how do we, what's the positive outlook and what are some of the steps we can take? Well, let's start with the challenges. There is no entitlement. You have to earn the position and Silicon Valley doesn't have that, nor does the US. You have to earn it. We need a higher sense of urgency. However, we control our destiny more than anyone else. And so our destiny on the number of unicorns, what is it, 1,600 and 67, probably a third aren't going to be unicorns a year from now, maybe a half, but the number coming in, we grew last year at about 12%. China only grew three, 4%. India grew 22%. In fact, if you look at what is occurring in India, they had more unicorns created than China did. So a change in the guard perhaps in emerging markets is very possible in terms of the direction. So I think it's all about this country being the best startup country, not just in Austin and Boston and Atlanta and Silicon Valley but in all 50 states. That's what I'm doing in my home state of West Virginia. You wanna say West Virginia startup state? Guess what was the number three startup state in the nation this last year? Really? West Virginia, 90% growth in startups, industry average 27. Guess what state has the lowest unemployment in its history ever, in fact, West Virginia? Really? Sounds like someone's been doing some work there. Joe Manchin for president? Yeah, Joe Manchin's quite a person. He's showing more capitals very good as well. A lot of good players, but what I'm saying is we took control of the state, changed the education, made it inclusive, got Democrats and Republicans showing more capitol and Republican, Joe Manchin a Democrat, the governor Republican, Speaker of the House, President of the Senate, common vision, and we did things that people thought couldn't be done. And we moved from 45, 48 in every category to three, number six in GDP growth tied with Oregon. I mean, we're playing at a different level. What's the infrastructure there? I'm sure there's gotta be great connectivity, connectivity and internet access. The infrastructure is actually the people. We had a common view. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit. And people worked at a common vision and put aside their differences. I think the common infrastructure here is West Virginia's. We're basically very good people. We care about winning together. We try to do the right thing. And we had the courage to do it. We were the chemical center of the world, the coal mining center of the world. And I grew up. We perhaps have a chance to do it again. But it is the West Virginia. We need to do that in all 50 states. That's what I'm doing in France with Macron is his key global ambassador for IOTech. And in India with Modi, he calls me his global ambassador. But I'm really the head of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum. It's probably the most strategic relationship in the world to the US at the present time. Where are you on public policy right now? I presume you don't want to pause investment in AI.  We saw today Activision, the UK government is blocking. And I'm sure the, you know, US is not far behind. We kind of stopped the NVIDIA arm acquisition. Where do you think we are? It feels like the pendulum is swinging. Are you comfortable with that? Would you like to see a better public-private partnership? Well, I think there has to be a better public-private partnership. Let me be critical of my industry for a moment. During the 90s and the first decade of 2000s, we were a leader in the industry and the internet in a big way and our peers and confederates were very good. We had no major issues in the European Union or in China or in the US or others. But we always were able to say what is the public policy goal that's fair and how do we work together as opposed to giving the Heisman move and stiff arm. The big tech companies, they brought this on themselves. And they didn't work with government for legitimate needs and you have to have, in my opinion, and that isn't all of them, but several of them did. You have to have a clear economic path, but you also owe an obligation to society. If you don't do both on issues of privacy, fairness, et cetera, you're going to be regulated and then antitrust will follow. Both the Democrats and Republicans told us this was coming. We didn't listen very well. So I think this is one where I think it's time for a gut check on terms of is high tech good for America? My group at Cisco, 92% of Americans felt it was good. Today, majority of Americans think it's not good. We have to re-hear in the public confidence. If you don't, you're going to see activities that come within it. Now, do your question about AI and do we need a pause? A lot of smart people said this. I don't know what they were thinking. The horse isn't out of the barn. Every horse in the world is out of the barn and in other countries. Out of my 20 startups, 19 are AI companies today. Pause is not an option. That is so deeply embedded is the future of defense, is the future of these companies, is productivity, you'd crisis system if you even tried to do this and it's not doable. So I think there is one where people have a legitimate concern and the legitimate concern is we need guide rails and we need them quickly. But a pause was a non-starter from the beginning and I don't understand why people that even thought that was a viable option. I think even very few political leaders, well, if you're another country you want to catch up or if you're an existing incumbent that doesn't have a good strategy in AI perhaps, but this is one, disruption waits for no one. So we better lead and we better get the right guide rail. Do you think it's U.S. one and the rest of the world zero right now? Or are we? I think this is a jump ball. And let's use cybersecurity as an example. Are 80% of the unicorns in cybersecurity in the U.S.? Yes. Do we have a good chance to play this one well? Yes. Will we play it well enough? I don't know. On AI it's much more of a jump ball. There's a lot of technology going on around the world in this area, including deep fakes, road country, espionage, this information, disinformation. Yeah, if you look at it, and use China as an example and I believe in the long run, U.S. and China should learn to work together and I think that will eventually come back. But in the short run, cybersecurity is going to be extremely bumpy in terms of the direction. And you have to have intellectual property protection for your comments. You have to have the capability to say if the U.S. is going to lead in defense, we better lead in AI and cybersecurity as we move forward. At the present time, even using the U.S. defense department slash reports that I saw, China leads the U.S. in probably 15 of the 20 most important areas. Two, we can't lose AI and cybersecurity. John, you always bring the energy and the insight. Thank you so much for joining us again in the cave. John and I really enjoy our time with you. John, thank you. Thank you, John, appreciate it. Okay, John Chambers here, Dave on the pod. That's awesome. I mean, here at RSA, great to have this time. Our first guest, big name John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco Systems, who architected probably one of the best M&A runs of all time. Cisco Systems was just a startup connecting networks together and then buildings for companies and then TCP, IP, OSI, open source, open systems interconnect happened. That became the interconnecting revolution client server. The rest became one of the most valuable companies in the history of the world. They started buying companies. And that's a lot going on here at RSA. We're going to see a lot of that in cloud. Can the M&A formula work? Is there a new kind of formula? I thought that was an interesting take on him. But what struck me most about John Chambers is he's such a great orator. He's a great communicator. And he's so passionate about the U.S. competitiveness. And you know, we rant a lot about the U.S. and laws and the Gleanicon and what we think the government should be doing. We're just ranting about media. But he's focused. And I think his position is very strong. Let's get leaders and let's get the tech industry not to bury their head in the sand and give the highs-minis, he said, to the government. Technology is represented in every single consumer's life right now. And so it's not that corner industry, cottage industry, the VCs industry, it's an asset class now in the venture capitalists and private equity. But technology is in all of our lives, Uber, iPhone. You name the tech, it's infiltrated our society and with that comes responsibility. He's calling that out. That to me was the big moment in that podcast other than the great revitalization he's doing in West Virginia. I think Middle America is going to be booming. I think with entrepreneurship as we get connected more but he's on that right there. But this whole competitiveness thing is really interesting to me. Yeah, he's such a gentleman. He's got that smooth Southern accent and he's really inspiring and he always brings the energy John when he comes and meets with us. So the thing he said, which was interesting is that the big tech backlash was largely self-inflicted. I much I totally agree with that only because the history of the US government's intervention in big tech has been quite abysmal. They broke up AT&T and made the US telecommunications industry less competitive. You know, they were after IBM for a decade plus and IBM ended up self-imploding. Same thing with Microsoft. They missed mobile. They missed the internet. They missed cloud for a long time until Satya came in. So generally speaking, I think big tech is going to and tech companies in general are going to mess up themselves. They don't need the US government to do that. Now having said that, things have changed and he's probably right. The big tech probably should have gone to the US government and said, look, let's figure this out. Let's work this out.  So let's fight them. That's fine. That's my rant. I always say get the talented people that know tech. The other thing he said was when asked about the intellectual property and AI and trying to tease out whether he would go there on the IP with China, he said the challenges is about not being entitled. We have to earn the position. Silicon Valley doesn't have it, nor does the US. You got to make it a sense of urgency to control our own destiny. Things leaning into that. Then he quoted some numbers. The last year, 12% of unicorn growth in the US. China only had three at 4%. India at 22%. So he's kind of using unicorns as a proxy for new venture development in these countries. So US doing good, China not. India, the surprise dark horse on that is up to the right. So he's very bullish on India. So he's doing a lot of work there. He did say a lot of the US unicorns could be in trouble as well. Yeah, as we saw Dropbox laying off, that's a Gen 1 cloud, cloud native SaaS company. The shining example of how to do a startup with cloud computing, aka AWS. So you're starting to see some keys in the armor, Dave, around some of the growth. And then I asked him about the connectivity. He said, infrastructure's people. That was a good one. I liked that one. So his West Virginia comment. I brought up Joe Manchin. And of course, Joe Manchin's a Democrat. John Chambers of course brought in the Republican, you know, Congresswoman as well. And so he's had to give that balanced approach. He thinks we should lead in defense if AI and cybersecurity has to move forward. He, you asked him about, should we pause AI? He's like, absolutely. Now he was almost leaning in like violently, like saying, no way, should we stop ever. He didn't say it, but he was basically said, it's idiotic, that was a my word. He said, don't stop, go faster. That might take away. It's so dumb. I mean, how do you stop progress?   Why would you do that? That makes no sense. So he's right on on that. Great guest, I have John Chambers on. We'll try to get some other guests. Andy Jassy, maybe try to get Amazon CEO to come on. That would be a coup. Yeah, well, we should do that. Yeah. CEO of Cisco. We had the CEO of Zscaler on. We got to get Pat Gelsinger. We got to get Pat. Big friend of the cube over the years. If anyone has ideas watching and listening for guests, DM us. We're going to go try to get the best guests we can and hear what you want to hear. So- You could get Lina Khan and Andy Jassy on at the same time. That would be fun. Lina. And the union representatives from the work. Well, Andy Jassy has a new shadow. That was news this week. He has a new technical advisor, aka the shadow. And that person that was selected has a lot of fulfillment background. It's not an AWS person, which I didn't think he'd need because he has full knowledge of that. But I think he picked someone who's technically proficient in fulfillment, logistics. Dave, interesting tell sign there for Jassy, who's going to pick his technical advisor, aka right hand shadow, they call it, which he was for Jeff Bezos. So a couple of things. And maybe you could provide context on this because you know Jassy better than I do. But he was, correct me if I'm wrong, he was essentially Bezos shadow, right? As his chief of staff in the early days. And when he came up with the notion, he and I'm sure others came up with the notion of Amazon web services and under Bezos directions. Okay, go for it. So this is not a throwaway position. This is a big deal at Amazon. Being a shadow is like air parent kind of opportunities. It's, Bezos had Jassy as a shadow for years. That was basically your own tutelage under that person. It's a role for grooming and also to see what their affinity is so they can move into the organization and be a leader. It's almost like a growth strategy. It's a program to identify talent and groom that talent so they can see what you see. And then they have more aperture into the business challenges. So, and usually it's also for the CEO or the person to lean into someone to be complimentary. So picking someone with fulfillment tells me that Jassy is thinking a lot about the logistics of Amazon. Now that he's the CEO of Amazon, Inc. That's about retail. That's going to be about stores. That's going to be about physical infrastructure. And warehouses, studios. So I want to say this is that we've written about this in the past is that I think that, you know, when you think about the disruption, potential disruption scenarios to Amazon, I think one of the biggest is obviously the warehouses. So their biggest strength is that they had the ability to get the products in and get them out and distribute them really quickly. The problem is that infrastructure is very expensive. It's a huge part of their CapEx. And if you look at how Alibaba does it, it's they go direct. So what if, with Generative AI, you were able to search for products and have those products directly shipped to you without having to go through the Amazon warehouses. Now we built up all those trust for Amazon and great customer experience. But that to me is a big disruption scenario that Jassy has to deal with. Yeah, and I think people like asked me all the time about Andy and we've worked with him with him interview many times. We got to know him on a personal level. He's smart. And I think what they did with the pandemic on AWS and on Amazon when Bezos was the CEO before Jassy took over is they moved the needle. They moved the ball down the field.  They were in perfect position to leverage all aspects of the pandemic. Getting deliveries at home, AWS Connect was a huge success. AWS grew, their partner network grew. So during the pandemic, Amazon grew like you read about. They were like unbelievable.  Hey, we overhired and the pandemics there were going to rain that in. And he's just, he's getting in the weeds and he's the kind of executive that's going to roll his sleeves up and get in the weeds and chop some stuff down. So I think he's pretty much in retooling mode right now. So if you look at what the moves he's making, both on AWS side with Silevski and what he's doing over there, it makes a lot of sense he's going to get a shadow that's going to be fulfillment oriented because he has to, those are risk factors, big time in the business. So you've nailed that from day one with your assessment there. But you know, who knows with it? Maybe they don't even have warehouses at all. Who knows? Well, I think so, but how do you unwind that, right? They've got a huge- It's a huge cost structure. And it's been their biggest advantage. And it, you know- I'm most excited about what Jazzy's doing with Prime Hollywood. They got a scathing right up in the Hollywood Reporter last month. And it was like, well, Amazon doesn't matter. But I think that's because Hollywood and Amazon- What was the criticism? The culture of Amazon and Hollywood don't match. Hollywood's like, oh, hey, let's do this, Amazon. Let's work backwards from the customer. How do you make a hit? What's the outcome? Yeah, let's make a hit and then work backwards from them. You can't work backwards from a hit. You can do that with software, but you can't do it with art, you know, like.  Like, guys, that's not how we do it. And Amazon's like, no, that's how we do it. So I think it's going to be a little bit of a, you know, rubbing and some friction there. But I think Amazon will have a great position. They got the MGM, they got Prime, it's got great reach. The services are good. Every once in a while, the technology kind of spins on me, which I don't like. But I think Prime, and they got the football, which is a great thing. I think they can get more into the sports. I think their Prime strategy is just genius. I just think that's amazing. And I think the future is bright for them.  You can't just take your old model and bring it to the future if you're going to survive. And, you know, the narrative in tech has always been, okay, it's crossing the chasm, it's the old guard, new guard, and things like that. But we've seen companies, you know, kind of reinvent themselves. I mean, Microsoft is the best example, right? People have written off Microsoft, but they were able to live off their software margins and then reinvent themselves. And now they've reestablished themselves as a dominant player. You know, IBM, you know, not so much. They've struggled to have that, you know, the old cachet, but nonetheless, they've sort of reinvented themselves as well a couple of times. And so, you know, I think it's the mark, John, of these companies, whereas, you know, Chambers was at Wang. Remember, when you went to his house in Palo Alto, you guys were talking about that. You know, there is no entitlement. And so, you know, and so you got to work for that. But it used to be the conventional wisdom was, oh, once, you know, DG, Wang, Prime, you're dead, right? Okay, the next guard comes in. That's different now. I think leaders are a lot smarter and the ecosystems can thrive. Well, let's get into our rant section, get close out the podcast for the week. Obviously, we're here on location. David, RSA, great event. 45,000 people that heard on location. Our first podcast we've done on location. So in our beta mode, we're, we might have to do more of these on location given our event schedule. What's your rant for the week? Well, not surprising, I'm back on Lena Khan. You saw that Microsoft was going to acquire Activision. Well, the CMA, the UK Competition Markets Authority, was reviewing it. We all thought they were going to say, okay, you can do the acquisition, but you just got to, these are the three or four conditions and Microsoft would have said, okay, fine, no problem. So, here's my rant. I think this is misguided. I think this is a big mistake. They should allow the acquisition to go through. Yet again, it's governments around the world and I'll come back to Lena Khan, basically saying, hey, the potential is there for less competition. And they're saying that for every, you know, large acquisition right now. Now here's the thing, here's my rant. Lena Khan's schedule, her calendar, is public, okay? I don't know if you know that. I did not know that, it's good trivia. Yeah, you can go online and look at Lena Khan's schedule. Was she golfing every day? No, she's busy as hell. I mean, this gal, I criticize her a lot, but not for her work ethic. I mean, she's- She's mailing it out, let's face it, she's mailing it out.  On Tuesday, April 5th, 2023 at 11 a.m. She met, it was the FTC and the European or the UK Competitions Markets Authority, the CMA, tech sessions, cases and investigations, okay? So they met on April 5th. Now, I don't know what they talked about, but they absolutely are not supposed to be talking about an active investigation. And I'm not saying they did, but it's kind of strange that, you know, they met, it's kind of curious that they met. My point is, here's the question. Is Lena Khan having the UK Competition Markets Authority do her dirty work for her?  That would be bad. That would be bad. Now, I can't prove that, but I suspect it because I think Lena Khan doesn't care. I think she has been really aggressive going after Big Tech. I think she'll do anything to try to dismantle Big Tech and have outcomes that fit, you know, her philosophy. I find it really curious that they met on April 5th. I'd like to know what they talked about because I do think- Is it public record? I don't think it's public record what they talked about and they could deny that they talked about activation. It's on the calendar. It's on the calendar that they met.  Look what happened with NVIDIA ARM. Okay, NVIDIA ARM was killed before it even really got to the U.S. And guess what? The U.S. even sued NVIDIA over this. And so it's like the end game is it makes the U.S. less competitive. Why is that an outcome that the U.S. government wants? Because to me, it's these unintended consequences, just like the breakup of AT&T made the U.S. telecommunications system. Remember all the baby bells? And what happened? They all got together again in their cable industries and they all get- They killed in the last mile during the COVID days. Yeah. And they created these big conglomerates which is the same old, same old. So the U.S. government has a very poor track record of messing around with businesses in terms of large companies and antitrust and tech at least because I don't think they understand it. It moves too fast. Well, it's not clear what their doctrine is. I mean, Charles Fitzgerald, Fitsy, our buddy, put out a great post on this and there's certain philosophies of antitrust. It's all you're, the big guys become so big we got to take them down just because they're too big. So I don't think there's a lot of thinking. This is why, you know, there's a crossover. My rant is kind of like crossing it with yours which is, because you're more on top of the Lena Compting which I just dismiss her out of hand because I don't like her style. Too big to exist as her doctrine. I want more qualified people around the table checking the calendar. I want more qualified people that know tech in making laws. I want more qualified people who know tech that understand the impact of society and the health of the human services that would need people in their constituency. I want to see healthcare. I want to see better education. And I think our lawmakers and our government is not aligned with how society works. And I think there's going to be revolution. And again, whether AI funds it or, you know, there'll be a revolution, something coming quick because it's a tinderbox right now of culture mismatch. And it's just obvious. Cyber security here at this show, it's just, you know, my rant about the red line, the bad actors have been operating freely causing destruction, misinformation, financial loss for years. And everybody knows a public secret but nobody's doing anything, right? They're just talking about it. So, you know, the public private partnership, we talked to Fortinet, we talked to Palo Alto and CrowdStrike. You're seeing pub non-profits. They're not really astrophors, they're not really aligned. They're going out and trying to do more cyber protection but clearly the whole doctrine of removing that, that how we're being attacked has to go down because nation-states are giving off-book organizations the weaponry, cyber weaponry to attack us. And that's fact. And they get, well, it's not us, but yeah, it's China, it's Russia. It trails back. It's basically state on state attacks. There's a discussion today in the keynote about an Iran attack. And there was a bunch of government folks when they were asked, can we definitively say this was the Iranian government? They said no, but we can say that it came out of Iran. Well, of course you know that the Imams know about this. So, the question is, is it an act of war? Yes, it's an act of war. I agree.  And the government will be like, hey, that's an attack back. You made this analogy yesterday. Our doctrine for liberty and freedom in the United States is if they cross the red line, we counter-strike back at an epic proportion as a deterrent. Otherwise, you have to become a surveillance state like China and that's not what people want in America. They want liberty and they want freedom, right? That's key. So, the red line has to move down. So, if you invade our banks, Malware, Russia, we're going to just counter-strike you back and that deterrent has to be there, right? But I think it's happening. That's a doctrine. That is a government doctrine. I'm not a rocket scientist. I'm not a political person, but that's common sense. And they're like, well, no one died. No one actually attacked us. Well, like... I don't think the government's saying that. I actually think the government is counter-attacking. There's actually an article that says if someone dies in an attack, that triggers an action militarily. Well, there's no military in cyber, really. This day tried Cybercom under Keith Alexander. So, we don't have a cyber... Wait, if somebody doesn't die, it's not an active war? You're not saying that. Well, I think I'm not... I was on the New York Times report. She and I were debating about this and she was pulling up this apparently a trigger. If someone dies in an attack, a U.S. citizen, that triggers. So, if someone gets hostage and says, I ran, they kill an American. That's not good. And that triggers escalation militarily as a doctrine policy. But I really do believe, I mean, I am sort of an optimist in this sense that the U.S. government is retaliating to these nations. I hope they are. I can almost... I want to see it. I can't guarantee it, but I'm very confident that they are doing it. Yeah, but it's not in the dialogue. And this is not in the lawmaker. Yeah, but it shouldn't be in the dialogue. Well, if it's covert operation. It's got to be covert. Well, again, we're a free country. There should be covert, and there should be known things that you let laws to make covert happen, not just covert for covert's sake. If you assume that they're attacking our adversary, then... But we know... I guess that's good, but I don't know about it. Go all the way back to Stuxnet. We know that it was the U.S. and Israel cavorting to create havoc within the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. We know that. They've never admitted it. Israel's never admitted it. United States has never admitted it. And they shouldn't admit it, but keep doing it. I do believe the U.S. government is doing that. We just need to have an intelligence organization and laws and doctrine, like formalize. But I don't think I've met people smart enough in government that know that. It's mostly military people. No, come on. Come on, no. Lawmakers right now are saying, hey, we want to write new laws. Lawmakers different. But there are people in the government with the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, that are out protecting our citizens. Of course, but the lawmakers... And doing a good job. No, that I'm fine with. I know you can rally some people because they've been muted by the mainstream media. But I would say that as a lawmaker, look at the society, saying, if this is hurting Americans, cyber war, then action needs to be taken. So the question is, is cyber war happening? And what's the impact? Yes. Banks are being fleeced, misinformation, culture being forked. Who knows? So that's got to be investigated. So that's all I'm saying. I agree with you, so. All right, my rant's done. Dave, so, pod eight, we're on location. Nine, isn't this nine? Two, events are back. This is eight or nine. Nine. This is nine, right? No, this is nine. Episode nine. Lost track. Events are back. We'll do more on location podcasts like this. I like this, Sean. This is good. It's more effective we hear. And give us feedback. You're watching, let us know what you think. Listening, DM us, what guests you'd like to see. Again, first ten are kind of beta. Get the format down. We've got John Chambers this week, our first official guest on the podcast. It was good. And we'll try to get bigger guests. So thanks for listening. And again, always ping us, siliconangle.com is our site. You can see a lot more coverage on security. We're amping that up big time. You're going to see more cloud coverage and more enterprise and emerging tech. You're going to see more AI stories on siliconangle.com than any other publication combined, so stay tuned to that. If you're into AI, check out Silicon Angle. You got startups covered, the deep dives. Everything's happening there. So again, next time we'll hopefully have a great guest, Dave. That's a wrap. Thanks for listening. Thank you.