Jul 15, 2023 · 2023 #21. Read the transcript grouped by speaker, inspect word-level timecodes, and optionally turn subtitles on for direct video playback
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I've got sunshine on a cloudy day When it's cold outside, I've got the month of Everybody say, I guess you say What can make me feel this way? It's my girl, my girl, I'm talking about my girl My girl, I've got sunshine on a cloudy day And Keith Tyr, who is the world's leading thinker and writer on technology, the author of That Was The Week, the weekly newsletter, and my co-conspirator on That Was The Week, our weekly podcast. This week, Keith has had a field day. Khan and Gessler should be fired, his two favorite characters from Washington, D.C. He suggests they both should be fired. All this comes out of the shambles, according to Keith, of the FDT's failure to prevent Microsoft from acquiring Activision. Dear, oh, dear, oh, dear, Keith, begins the newsletter. Dear, oh, dear, oh, dear, Keith, what's been going on? Why all the extra love for your old friend Lena Khan? Well, did you like the mid-journey image, by the way, that I told it to create? An image of Lena Khan and Gessler being chased out of the room by a crowd, looking concerned with hunched shoulders. And that's what it came up with. Not bad, actually. I just did a show on the Mafia. It reminded me of that conversation. She looks a lot, Lena Khan looks a lot like Kamala Harris. Is there a family connection? Well, this is not really them. This is mid-journey's attempt to render something that looks badly like them. So the real food by Lena Khan is going to come after you. So what happened on the Activision front, Keith? What's the story this week? Well, so you'll recall, as will regular viewers, that the FTC tried to stop Microsoft acquiring Activision on the grounds that Sony objected, on the grounds that Microsoft may only launch Activision's games on Xbox and not on Sony consoles. And that a whole blocking attempt happened. And this week, the court found in favor of Microsoft that there was no antitrust case to answer. And that's kind of been our narrative about Lena Khan on this show. Ah, yours, not mine. Don't drag me into this. Well, my narrative, going back to when she first got the job, I made the point that she's attempting to extend antitrust law to mean things that it doesn't actually mean. And she has a paper that she did as a graduate student all about this. And she's taking the core of that paper and trying to put it into practice. But actually, the law doesn't support her. And her team members, by the way, don't support that. A lot of them are resigning. And now she's lost in court. She really is starting to look like the emperor with no clothes. Wow. That's your fantasy. And she wouldn't be the emperor. She'd be the empress with no clothes. Let me quote you on poor old Lena. She's on the wrong side of history. You say the FTC is run by a graduate student with a paper to her name. She looks increasingly out of her depth. Not a bit unkind, Keith. I mean, she was a graduate student. We've all been graduate students, but she's gone on to bigger things. By the way, she's a very good graduate student and her paper is fascinating. She is not a good FTC chair. She's too junior, too inexperienced, too naive about the way things work. And she's demonstrating that all the time. In fact, what probably could be a great career, if taken one step at a time, is going to turn into a disaster. She'll probably end up on a show with you. I mean, in all seriousness, was she or is she herself a prisoner of casualty of history? When she got made head of the FTC, the zeitgeist was aggressively, profoundly anti-tech. Since then, after Ukraine and various other things, everything's changed. It's not really her fault. Well, nothing is ever somebody's fault. The fact that she was off the job. Well, she still, you know, I mean, doesn't change her abilities one way or the other. I think it's very unfair. I know it's a half joke to call her a grad student. But this is a smart, youngish woman who has tried to apply some of her ideas to government. What's wrong with that? Even if she's failed. Yeah, but you see, Andrew, what she's doing is she's trying to accuse people of breaking laws that don't exist. She's anti-trust. Politics, generally. Well, anti-trust is a very specific set of rules. And she's accusing people of breaking rules that are not within the anti-trust laws. And that's what the judge found. So there's a problem of political practice here. She's clearly got a good brain and she's clearly got high energy and she's clearly idealistic and motivated. But against a set of goals that don't exist in law. And whenever any of us take on a task and want to win, one has to take into account 100 percent of the context that we work in. And she hasn't done that. So, in a way, it is her fault. Are there anti-trust cases to be made in D.C.? If you were running the FTC and you had her political bent, who would you go after? Amazon? Google? I think the best anti-trust cases are still the cable and satellite companies monopolizing broadband. I don't think for a second there's a free market in the provision of broadband. You're not even on. I bet you've subscribed through Google. Most of us aren't wired anymore. So isn't there an alternative to that? Actually, I pay AT&T for fiber and it's the only choice in my neighborhood if you want fiber. OK, so I take your point. So do I. Actually, I'm the reverse. I'm stuck with Comcast, who's even worse than AT&T. Right. And it's usually one or the other in each neighborhood. And, you know, they both suck. So do you think that Khan has gone after Microsoft and Google and Facebook mostly unsuccessfully because she simply hates big tech? She doesn't hate big tech, but she's persuaded herself that large companies acquiring smaller companies is largely driven by trying to block them becoming competitors, which I think is sometimes true, but mostly not. Do you think that she wants to be the American version of Margaret Festerger, but it's impossible given the fundamental differences between European law and European culture and business and American law and culture and business? You know, I think, look, I think if you go deeply into it, it's about the Democratic Party's understanding of progress and innovation. And they they believe that regulation blocking big guys is the best way to let the small guys through. And the truth is, it doesn't work like that. The interdependency of the ecosystem is so tight and the US domination of big tech is so large that the real agenda is a global agenda to do with who owns the future. It isn't really stopping the past staying big. You yourself are a victim of Microsoft. And had it not been for the antitrust case in the 90s, we never would have had Web 2. We never would have had Google. I don't agree with that. I think Microsoft was blindsided by Google. The regulation wasn't required. By the way, it was also blindsided by Netscape and Yahoo and, you know, since then Salesforce and so on. Competition actually does work when it comes to innovation and it works a lot better than regulation. The EU is the best example. The EU is a dampener on European innovation, a huge dampener. So all innovation is coming out of the United States and China to some extent. So I think generally speaking, regulation is important, but it should be to stop cheating or fraud or, you know, it shouldn't really be to prevent innovation. It should be to facilitate it. One of the pieces, one of the headlines this week that you don't cover in the newsletter is a French objection to an EU decision to appoint an American lawyer who had associations with big tech. The French stress that the Europeans are pursuing their own digital strategy, which is essentially a museum strategy in keeping with the rest of European economics, making it more and more irrelevant. Yeah, I mean, the big failing in Europe is to let money flow. So pension fund money in Europe, for example, is not allowed to, mostly in most countries, is not allowed to invest in venture capital due to the risk profile of venture capital. So there's this huge attempt to to prevent risk, which is presented as protecting the consumer. And I think it's the opposite of what's needed. You need to, of course, minimise risk to a portion of your assets. That's true. But within that portion that you're prepared to take risk with, you should be aggressive. And America is. China was. It's been constrained by Xi recently, but that seems to be going away now. Europe, on the other hand, is so paranoid about risk that it doesn't allow innovation. Mostly it tries to control it. Right. And what we're having is the frankification, if you like, of EU technology and industrial policy. It might almost be an argument in favour of Brexit. Well, actually, my good friend Frank Faraday and Norman Lewis and a bunch of others have set up a think tank in Brussels. And they were pro-Brexit, trying to point out how the EU plays a negative role vis-à-vis innovation and freedom as well. So that that that is not a right wing argument. There's also a left wing version of that, which is the one that they represent, which is against constraints imposed by governments. When those constraints are not consistent with human progress. It's not just Khan you're going after in this week's editorial. It's Gary Gensler. You suggest that Gary Gensler, the SEC chair, is even worse than Khan. Why is Gensler worse than Khan? What's he done wrong? Well, he's a bit he's a bit two faced. I mean, he tried to negotiate getting paid by some crypto companies a few years ago to help promote them. And now as SEC chair, he's tried hard to block. Pretty much anything to do with crypto is is treated as a securities law violation, including the exchanges. He's currently pursuing litigation against both finance and Coinbase. He had pursued this litigation against Brad Garlinghouse's XRP token. Ripple is the company. And it's been years. The SEC has been in the process with judges for years. And yesterday the judge found in favor of Ripple against the SEC that Ripple was indeed not selling securities. So the law is is holding up in terms of innovation. Why do you accuse of Khan of being a graduate student, but not Gensler? I don't have enough knowledge. A bit of anti-women there, Keith. Is that why Jeanne is now in Europe? No. You know, it's about information. I actually didn't do my research on Gensler, so I couldn't come up with a suitable reprimand. But you do make an interesting point on Gensler. You said he should be gone and you and I'm quoting you and his replacement should answer a different question. How can we modernize the money system? How can we tokenize assets help to help wealth creation? Explain what you mean by that. Well, a lot of wealth is illiquid. Real estate, for example, private company shares. When wealth is illiquid, it doesn't trade or change hands. And historically, what we've done to solve that problem is called securitization. That's when you create a security on top of a bunch of assets and the security is traded, even though the underlying assets are not. Tokenization is another way of doing that. It basically takes assets, creates tokens that represent the value of the assets. The tokens can have a value and change hands and they're correlated to the underlying assets. Unlike securities, tokens are less regulated. And so setting up exchanges and so on, there's a lot less bureaucracy. And so the free flow of wealth happens faster and sooner. That's the real human benefit of tokenization. Now, of course, there's risks and there needs to be regulation pertaining to those risks, like fraudsters selling things to unbeknownst people that are not, you know, kind of don't have the insight to understand they're being defrauded. So there has to be regulation. But tokenization itself could be a huge boon. Are you saying that you and I could tokenize our homes, mine in San Francisco, yours in Palo Alto? And buy or sell ownership in our homes? Well, you could actually replace a mortgage, which is a debt instrument where you're paying interest to the lender with tokenization, which would basically allow co-ownership, no mortgage. And that, you know, several thousand dollars a month you pay in your mortgage or whatever it is, suddenly becomes disposable income to you instead of a debt. So, yes, it unlocks value, allows of ownership through a token and gets rid of debt. This smells to me like another potential subprime mortgage crisis. I take your point. It could be interesting intellectually. But if this was allowed, you'd have all these cowboys out there tokenizing everybody's homes, taking advantage of the vast majority of people who have no understanding of this. Isn't that the point of the law to protect people from cowboys of one kind or another? I don't think the law is needed. There's already good laws against fraud. So it's there. Yeah, but subprime was a grey area between hard fraud and something else. Yeah, but there's no correlation between subprime bundling and tokenizing an asset. Subprime bundling is a particular strategy or tactic employed by unscrupulous banks in the period up to 2008. But tokenizing an asset doesn't have to equate to subprime. There are good assets that can be tokenized. Now, we do have in place in the US land registries and we have companies who do valuations of homes, appraisals. And so it's entirely possible that appraisal and value can be determined through a process with the land registry as a record keeper for tokenization. That means that tokenization is no different to a mortgage in terms of risk, but it's better than a mortgage in terms of there's no interest to pay. It reminds me a few years ago, you used to tell me about this crypto scheme that would pay you 20 or 30 percent.
DeFi, DeFi. Yeah, and look what happened to them. I wonder whether you always claim to be a man of the left, Keith, but Gensler and Kahn are representatives, mainstream representatives, really, of thinking within the Democratic Party. Do you think the Republicans would do a better job? You're not going to get much better, at least from the Biden administration, than a Gensler or a Kahn. You know, I am not and will never be a Republican. I am of the left. But I do think that... What does that mean, though? You always say that, I'm of the left. What does that mean? What it means is I care about inequality. I care about racism. I care about sexism and homophobia. I care about the fact that there is no equality of opportunity when people who are born in East Palo Alto struggle to have hope in their life due to their circumstances, whereas people born in Palo Alto, where I live, are full of hope. So I care about... I care that capitalism produces warped distribution. But you still want more capitalism, and it doesn't seem to me you're that much different from John McCain. I mean, intellectually, you've got a more natural home within the Republican than the Democratic Party. Clearly, because I want more wealth, and I want more people to benefit from that wealth. The Republicans want more wealth, and they want to keep it where the people have already got it. So I could never be a Republican. That said, the left has stopped being idealistic. The left has become a blocking group. Let's stop this. Let's stop that. They're not for anything anymore. And I'm for things. Is there a politician in America who gets it, do you think?
I think there's lots of people who get it, but I don't think any of them aspire to being politicians, mainly because politics is held in such low esteem, generally, that it's a struggle to want to be one. But I do think there are thinkers, a lot of them are intellectuals on university campuses, who still carry that Renaissance, Enlightenment, positivism strain of human progress, and the division of labor is a good thing, and getting rid of, you know, reducing the working day, and giving people freedom of choice through progress. There are still people who believe in all of that. They're just not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, for that matter. So who are they? Who do you think they are? I bet you can think of some names. Well, I know, but you're the one identifying them. I'm curious where you position yourself politically, since you say you're a man of the left. And this is not unusual. A lot of people claim to be on the left, and then articulate positions that are aggressive, but they don't sound to me like that. I'll tell you why. Actually, I'll concede one point. I think the words left and right are really hard to use these days, because they've fallen to mean things that I don't identify with. So when I say I'm of the left, I'm actually trying to get people who are listening to understand the context. And to be honest, I probably fail, because the word left has fallen into disrepute. What I'm really for is that the tools we've created as human beings, of which tech is a big part, lead to less working hours and greater wealth distributed to everyone. Now, is that left? I don't hear people saying that. Bernie Sanders comes close sometimes, but he's not really pro-tech. So even he falls on that. Sam Altman? Who? Sam Altman's pretty close, yeah. I like Sam Altman's belief in AI as a driver of wealth. I like his universal basic income instinct, where you can't allow the wealth to be concentrated in a few hands. I don't think he has a practical set of steps that will lead to a good endgame. Neither does anyone else. So that's the problem area. How do you get from more wealth to a better society? What are those steps? That's hard. There isn't a modern thinker that really articulates the whole end-to-end journey there and sees the future as socially good, which is why most science fiction is apocalyptic. There isn't really an optimistic... I think a few years ago I went to Rhode Island to interview Gina Raimondi, who was then the governor and now I think she's Congress Secretary. She seems to me to be about the best bet for someone within the Republican Party who is in progressive and pro-business. What do you think of Raimondi? I don't know enough about Raimondi to be honest, Andrew. Do you think we need, we collectively need, a more dynamic group within the Democratic Party that's pro-business and pro-innovation? I wouldn't say pro-business. I'd say pro-innovation. There are many ways to do innovation. Government often plays a good role there, like with the Internet or with space exploration. So it doesn't have to be narrowly pro-business. It's pro-innovation, pro-science, pro-outcomes, pro-human progress. And then social progress. And what does social progress mean? It means everybody gets to share the benefits. It's not communism, it's just common sense. If society produces benefits, everyone should benefit. That's kind of obvious to me. It's obvious, but in theory it sounds good. But let's say, for example, your tokenization initiative took place. It would seem to compound wealth inequality. I'm guessing that there would be all sorts of tokenized companies that would do very well. Anyway, more of that later. You should look at Raimondi. I think you'd find her interesting. In addition to your critique of poor old Lina Khan and Gary Gensler, lots of other things going on this week. The Threads story continues to dominate the news. You have a piece that suggests that Threads won't kill Twitter if it's boring. But at the same time, Threads were up to 100 million. Now they may be down a little bit. It seems to me, I was thinking about it this week, whether or not it's boring.
Does the success of Threads, whether it's massive success or guarded success, does it reflect maybe just the failure of the... You always talk about the public square. It's a lovely idea, but in practice it's full of shrill, angry people. Might it reflect the fact that people simply don't want to go to platforms where people are screaming at each other all the time? I do think that there's a media-generated meme about Twitter being destroyed that is just fake. You're not answering my question. I will. I just want to put a context around the answer. I think that the idea that Twitter is not a public square is a media-generated myth. Twitter is an alternative to mainstream media and therefore massively threatening to it. It's very successful at being an alternative. I spend so much more time reading links that interesting people put in Twitter than I do in the New York Times or on any TV station or radio station or magazine. So I think there's an existential fight for the future of thought and interaction and discourse. And Twitter is the current winner. It's by far and away the current winner. The reason Threads is struggling is that it doesn't have discourse.
It's struggling. 100 million sign-ups in a week doesn't sound like struggling. Apparently it's declined 50% in a week in terms of engagement. You link to dropping off. But that's inevitable. It had 100 million sign-ups in five days. It sounds to me like quite a success. I'd take that as failure anyway. Andrew, you've got to start with Instagram has a billion users and all billion users were grandfathered into Threads. So actually 100 million people didn't spontaneously join. They had to choose to open it. But again, come back to my question. Most people just don't want to be party. And I include myself to this. It's just people screaming at one another. And I'm not interested in other people's opinions. I don't care what they think about politics. But the whole idea that Twitter is people screaming at each other is just not true. Of course, there are some of that. But that isn't my experience on Twitter at all. Not even close.
It's also an echo chamber. I mean, the idea of a public square to me, I mean, my experience of Twitter is it's the same people talking about the same things to each other for years. And there's very little. I mean, public square requires people of different opinions to be talking to one another. I'll give you an example. So this morning, John Lilly, who used to be a VC here in the Valley, Josh Ellman, who was a Greylock, and the founder of Accelerate, which is a kind of a funding platform for getting into seed funds, all said stuff that I've never heard before that intrigued me enough to click on links and go and see them and go and read them. And so my knowledge was enhanced in about 10 minutes on Twitter by those three people. And by the way, all very credible people. And there's no bubble involved because I was looking at things I hadn't seen before. Well, you may be right. Twitter may survive, although fortunately this week we're not talking too much about Elon Musk. It's the law week. The FTC, there's another piece you linked to, opening its investigation into ChatGPT's creator OpenAI. What's going on here? Is this going to be another Gensler-Kahn disaster? Hard to predict. I mean, obviously the specifics matter. As far as I can tell, OpenAI, it would be a stretch to believe that OpenAI is in breach of any law that the FTC has jurisdiction over, especially antitrust, because OpenAI is, after all, a startup competing with bigger guys in itself, like Google and Amazon, Salesforce arguably, people who could do damage in AI by putting lots of money into it. It thinks that the training is in breach of privacy, and therefore it's unfair or deceptive when it comes to consumer protection. So what the FTC is basically saying is this kind of juvenile technology that is barely adult yet makes mistakes and misrepresents truths, which damages consumers. And yes, that's true. Is it illegal? I don't think so. OpenAI or ChatGPT doesn't claim to be truthful. It just claims to be artificial intelligence. There's still the open question, which is a really interesting one, is where and how it gets its intelligence. I've never been entirely clear. You mentioned that OpenAI is a startup. Another startup got launched this week. I mentioned Elon Musk. He has launched his own AI startup called XAI. Is this connected in any way to Twitter or is this an entirely separate initiative? It's a separate initiative, although linguistically Twitter is now called X. Legally speaking, the company is called X. And XAI obviously is an extension from X.
This broke earlier this week and news is still coming out. I must admit, I personally don't know what my opinion is yet. But it seems very likely that Musk is super upset by no longer being part of OpenAI. He was one of the founders of OpenAI, then left. Number two, there are rumours that he put a $20 billion valuation on X.AI and offered the scientists who joined, assuming he believed that valuation, $200 million of stock he's signing on fees. And that, at least for now, there's no there there, as in there's no code, nothing. That wouldn't be surprising. Yeah. So Musk is flying a kite here, which may turn into something or may not. His track record suggests it will, but it might take a while. And I think it's interesting enough to watch this space. But at least for now, it's an intent, not a real company. Yeah, I'd be much more interested in what Musk did in AI than I am at Twitter. Meanwhile, Google continues to develop its own AI. There are BARD updates, more features, languages and countries. They've reorganized their AI people. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis now is running the whole thing. Are Google finally getting their act together with AI, Keith? Their stock went up this week. I think their story is coming together, but the BARD itself is not very good yet. It may get better. But I think they're so paranoid about the backlash to BARD being less than wholesome, let's say, that they are constraining it to the extent that it isn't useful. And I haven't found a use for it, to be honest. I've tried it. Which is the best one? Oh, chat GPT is far and away the best, by a long way. By the way, this week they included something called Code Interpreter. If you're paying them, you get this thing called Code Interpreter. This morning, I gave it access to one of my databases at SignalRank and asked it to do some statistical analysis. It wrote a Python program that gave me exactly the range of numbers I needed within a range, within about five minutes, which is code I just couldn't have written myself. So in areas where it's good, it's really, really good. Where are we with the ZEIT guys? We mentioned Khan as a casualty of the shift. And yet there's still a lot of suspicion of big tech, even at Stanford, which is, of course, the heart of Silicon Valley, up the road from you, where you live in Palo Alto. You have a piece from The Post about how elite schools like Stanford, Stanford is the quintessential elite school, have become fixated about the AI apocalypse. Are you worried, Keith, that the ZEITgeist has turned against big tech and AI? It actually hasn't. I was more worried about two months ago when I did the debate with Gary Marcus that there was a lot of wind in the sails of the apocalyptic view. Since then, a lot of people have weighed in on the other side, including Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, and many others. Henry Kissinger even, although he seems a little more worried. Kissinger co-wrote a book with Schmidt on AI. Right. So I think actually society is allowing AI to develop and is taking a wait-and-see attitude and is not overly focused on apocalyptic scenarios. There's an optimism about what it can deliver that dominates, I would say. But it's not an unrelenting optimism. Everyone that speaks optimistically has needed to demonstrate an awareness of policy and regulation issues that have to be taken into account. How far are we away, Keith, from real consequences of this? At the moment, it's all froth. It's all mask and bard and open AI, but it's all very theoretical. It's not actually impacting on the world. When do you think we're going to see some results? In terms of really shaking up industries like the law or coding. I think the law will be the last place to change. The law is always super slow. Politicians will be second last. And innovators are going to have pretty much an open field to innovate. So what's going to be first, publishing? Art? Publishing is already being impacted in some good ways and in some bad ways. There's lots of bot-produced spam beginning to emerge. I think advertisers are going to start using it a lot. It's going to radically transform the marketing advertising businesses. I think there's going to be a lot of bad use cases. I think the good use cases are mainly in white-collar work. How long? Five years? Ten years? When are we going to see consequences? Much faster than that. It's already happening. But there'll be job losses because of AI in publishing. Look at the strike right now in Hollywood, the Act of Strike, which is all around the rights of a company to use your digital self to deny you residual fees when your shows get aired in the future. That's the core of it. So in Hollywood, it's already leading to a right as an Act of Strike, which is significant, by the way. It's a deep strike. And the Actors Union, as you would expect, because it's very protective of the actors, unfortunately is shooting itself in the foot because by not engaging the digital future of art, what's likely to happen is stars will be invented that don't have a real world existence. They'll be 100% digital. And when that happens, there won't be any rights to pay to anyone because just like boy bands were created by Simon Cowell, suddenly these boy bands won't actually be real people. Can we create a digital version of Lena Kahn or Gary Gensler? Would they be better versions of themselves? Well, that's what that is. That is a digital version of the two of them. Yeah, but that's visual for people listening. He's just Keith's AI. But could we improve Lena Kahn? You have some. You say she's smart. She's a talented graduate student, even if she is a graduate student. Could the AI do a better job on Kahn than Kahn herself? There will be digital twins in roles. And already are in many cases. For example, architects use digital twins of buildings these days when they're thinking about making changes to a building. Digital twins is already a thing. Digital twins of humans is already a thing. And once there's a digital twin, its primary role is to symbolically represent the original. I think there's going to be a point at which you're not symbolically representing the original, but you're acting as if you are the original. Right. So could Lena Kahn have recognized her limitations, her political realities better if she had a digital twin?
She basically would have had an advisor who would have a more holistic view of the body of knowledge and work than she herself has. So if she would have chosen to listen to herself, trained in all of the history of antitrust, it probably would have made suggestions to her better than what she came up with herself. Interesting. And Kahn will continue to exist, but she'll have a digital twin. That could be potentially a startup of the week for future shows. But this week you got a really interesting startup, Pulsar Fusion. What are they up to? And this is a serious player. This is not some minimal startup. Yeah, this is a company that's been around actually for quite a long time, working in nuclear fusion. Now, caveat, nuclear fusion still doesn't work, although there's some very promising signs that it can. What does that even mean, nuclear fusion? Nuclear fusion is when you can create a nuclear reaction inside a container without toxic waste. In contrast to fission, which can do that, but there's toxic waste. So fusion is basically how you work with atoms from water basically to create fusion by putting power, electricity into it. I'm not a scientist, so any scientist listening is probably laughing their head off right now. But broadly speaking, that's what it does. And once you get a catalyst and it works, it creates endless power without toxic waste. So what's Pulsar been up to? And Pulsar is saying, well, if this works, one of the first use cases is going to be interstellar space travel. Therefore, we're going to build a nuclear fusion container for space travel, waiting for the day that we can put a fusion reactor into it. So they're building the shell, but not the actual fusion reactor, if that makes sense. So they're taking a bet on the near future and saying we're going to be the space guys, but they're not doing the hard research to create the fusion. And then what's their business? What's their business model? They've got to be doing something to make money. Their business is going to be to build spaceships powered by nuclear fusion, like SpaceX. Is it a startup of someone investing in them? It's a startup that's been around a long time, and this is their new positioning. So they're probably raising money right now, is my guess. And what's their business model? It'd be like that submarine exercise? No, it'd be like SpaceX taking payloads into deep space. So, look. What could go wrong? Here's what they say. If you want to go to Mars, you'll get there five times faster with this engine than you would with any known engine today. So they're basically about space and time. Well, what could go wrong with that one? We'll see. Finally, Tweet of the Week. Your old friend, your co-founder at TechCrunch, Keith. Your old friend, Mike Arrington. We haven't had him up on the show. It's a perfect show when we've got both Lina Khan and Michael Arrington. Now, they're the perfect combination. I wonder how Mike would get on with Lina Khan. Well, I put this in because, honestly, I'm super happy for Brad Garlinghouse and him. They have been... If you remember, he created XRP Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, originally. So he was a big believer in Ripple many years ago. And the SEC, as he says in the tweet, has been pursuing regulation by litigation, trying to use litigation to kill things. And they lost. So this is him being super happy. It's payback time, if you will. And I thought it was worth giving him pride of place this week because he's been consistent and persistent and deserves his moment of joy. And does this all mean that Web3 is back in play in spite of the Sam Bankman freed and all the other scandals? Well, it means that tokens are no longer automatically securities. So it opens a lot of space for innovation that was being closed down through litigation. It's not clear what that will translate into and how fast, but it's definitely going to open the playing field back up again. And almost every cryptocurrency is up significantly over the last 48 hours because of it. So is crypto back, Keith? Are we going to have to do more shows like this? It's definitely going to be part of the narrative. There's no escaping it.