Bad Week for Tech Stocks and Grindr's New CEO

wonder what the Fed does next. Plus Grinder, the dating app focused on the l g B t Q plus community as a new CEO or conversation with George Harrison as it readies for a public debut, And bad news for Star Wars fans, Disney has pulled the upcoming film Rogue Squadron from its three release calendar. How this will

impact theaters globally this hour. I am a hacker. That is the Slack message that Uber employees received from an unknown source late Thursday, prompting the company to shut down its internal Slack messaging as it investigates a massive cyber breach. This according to The New York Times. My next guest casey Ls is the founder and ct O of bug Crowd, a bug bounty company that specializes in identifying errors or vulnerabilities in other companies software systems. He joins us now

to break it all down. So it sounds pretty serious. Casey, I know, there's a real fire drill happening inside uber right now. How did this happen? Yeah, so thank you for having me. Um. You know, bug crowd works with hackers all the time, but this was one of the

bad ones that we try to stop. Essentially, what we know at this point is that there was either through text messaging or possibly a multi factor push message notification, basically a spam campaign conducted against people with with elevated privilege within uber. Um. That spam campaign was successful, and um, you know, because of that success, the the attacker got

access to credentials that got them inside the network. Once they're inside, they're able to to move around, you know, find additional information to escalate their privilege and and do some of the things that caused, you know, some of the weirdness that was on Slack for example, to that started to break yesterday. Let's talk about the weirdness. One of my sources says there are unseemly pictures all over their internal networks. Aside from wreaking havoc. What kind of

valuable information could they've gotten their hands on. Yeah, it's it's speculation at this point because you know, I think Uber, as of two hours ago, they're they're basically posting precautions. There was there was obviously the notice and the report of them, you know, telling their internal employees to stop

using Slack and so on. Um So it looks from from the outside in that you know, nothing is necessarily off the table at this point, and there's still obviously a lot of incident response going down, like Uber is having a very busy Friday and quite likely a very busy weekend just being able to reverse this thing out and work out exactly what has happened so they can take the appropriate response steps and and obviously alert people

um as as necessary as well. But you know, as at this point in time, they're they're saying that, you know, things like private user data has not been accessed, uh and and so on. So it's not necessarily um an assumption that the attack has gone and gotten everything and

and used all of that. But obviously they've had a lot more access than they should and when anything like that happens, especially with some of the kind of trolling that seemed to go on and off the back of the hack, inside the inside the corporate environment of of uber Um. There's a lot of work to be done to figure out, you know, what exactly has happened so it can be fixed, you know, as you say, Uber says they have no evidence that the incident involved access

to sensitive Uber data. It doesn't seem like the Uber service, the public Uber right sharing service has been impacted yet, right, Yeah, it seems like yeah, correct. They seem to be focusing on, you know, continuing operations and providing business as usual. But obviously Um you know, talking to folk on on the inside and folk rounds the situation. They are very busily burning the whole thing down and working out exactly what needs to be taken as a as a response step

and as future precautionary steps as well. All external services operational to this point. Now, there's an interesting bug bounty tie in here in that the perpetrator also got into their hacker one system, which helps the company um pay bug bounties to people who find vulnerabilities in Uber system. This is similar to what your company bug crowd does. What do you make of this yeah, it's it's similar

to to a big part of what we do for sure. Look, I think what I what I make of that is that that's actually how I first lewent of of of the issue. There was there was basically more spam. So you talked about some of the inappropriate pitch is and there was you know, apparently bands are going on on on the corporate slack um, you know, people interacting with

with the attacker and so forth. UM. Kind of carrying along that same line, there was messages that got sent out to basically everyone in the researcher community or in the white called the white hat hacker or the good guy that thinks like bad guys um community who had submitted an issue into hacker one in the past, basically saying this is what's happened, like I'm in here now

just so you know. UM. They didn't really seem to be much of an intend or purpose to that other than just to make a bunch of noise, but it definitely did UM. And you know, at that point in time, you've obviously got a whole bunch of computer security experts receiving this message. They jumped straight into like what the hecks happened mode um, at which point, you know, I noticed it and got involved and obviously started taking you know,

whatever steps might be necessary. From from our perspective at bug crowd, it's like, Okay, if there's weird stuff going on that's impacting the vulnerability disclosure and bug bounty space, and we're obviously a large part of that spice, we need to make sure that you know, there's nothing affecting us as well, which sure enough it w wasn't decompy too careful and this sort of thing starts to go

down well. Interestingly, at this very same time, Joe Sullivan, the former chief security officer at Uber, has been on trial for a data breach, a huge data breach that happened back in sixteen that the company allegedly didn't notify the public about when they should have. Uber at the time, as I understand it paid this hacker a hundred thousand dollars to make the hacker go away, but didn't properly disclose it. Um, what do you make of of the timing and also the history of Uber maybe not having

a great track record here. Yeah, it's it's interesting because obviously that cases is ongoing at this point. I think it's actually you know, it's in session today. It's been in session pretty much a week, um, to my knowledge, And you know, I think Joe's side of the story and kind of the internal side of the story through

discoveries is playing out now. Um. You know, that whole that whole incident, I mean, probably the other thing that got my spidey sense is tingling just a little bit, um with with the timing of all of this, was obviously that that whole thing is going on currently with respect to the to the breach. Um, You've got you know, a bunch of other things happening that that are just generally um, you know, encouraging I guess activist, Um, you know,

activism activity around you know, Bay Area tech. At the moment, there's a there's a string of things that are happening that's getting people's attention. You Mudge's testimony h earlier on in the week was respect to Twitter, you know, the stuff that's going on with cloud Flower over the past couple of weeks. There's a lot of very heightened and very passionate subjects kind of all boiling up at the

same time. Um. And that was frankly the correlation between all of those things, and then this happening at Ober was was one of the things that kind of you caused me a bit of a sleepless, sleepless night last night trying to figure out what that is going on. But yeah, and so of you know, speaking to how that reflects on Uba and how it reflects on all of that, It's it's too early to say any of that,

you know. I think my my main thought right now is is frankly, um, you know, sympathy and kind of my heart going out to the security team that's having to work a very long weekend coming up to burn this whole thing down. So I think just starting there is probably the right place to start long hard weekend for sure, ahead of them. Casey Ellis, founder and CTEO of bug Crowd, Thank you for stopping by. Coming up.

Grinder gets a brand new CEO. We're gonna speak with George Arison next about his ideas for the popular dating app Mrs Bloomberg. The dating app Grinder just announced the new CEO, George Arison, co founder and former CEO of the auto e commerce marketplace Shift. The ftill has applied to a point someone who identifies with the lgbt Q plus community in this top role. As the company prepares to go public, George Arison joins us Now for more

on the big news. So stepping into a big role here, George. But you have some experience with UM obviously a car marketplace and on the board. What did you learn behind the scenes that you think you bring to the table here. Look, Grinder is an amazing company. UM I build a company taken in public, but margins are always a challenge in our on the auto business, and with Grinder, margins are

amazing and so that's obviously a very big difference. Grinder is a really awesome business, but more importantly, it's a really awesome mission. Right You're serving a community that's been underserved and then uses this product in a really dramatic way to connect And that mission to me is super killing and I'm really excited to be UM to be a part of it. Uh. And obviously Grinder has been around for a long time since two thousand and nine.

The product, as we haven't really finally changed in that time period. People have used it the same way for for a long time, but the features that it offers have obviously expanded. It's come from being just about sex to being about dating, and now it's used that in a lot of pub ways. And my goal, let's see, I was going to be to try to continue nurture this really incredible product um and the community that it

serves in the best way. We can talk to us a little bit more about how Grinder is used globally, because I think there's you know, one impression it is, you know, quote unquote just a dating app, but it's actually so much more. Yeah, I mean, in so many there's so many other things. People use it for. Travels and massive feature said that people use it for and

it's all, by the way organic. It's not like Grinders built products to facilitate travel, but people logged into a city they might be visiting to start talking to people about where they should say, what they should do, where they should um go out to dinner or go out to have fun. So in a very organic way, people

use it for travel. Health information is another massive feature and Grinder with the market pops epidemic right now, Grinder has been very active in helping our user base understand that there's a problem and where to get vaccines, how to get them. There's even like a feature inside the app to find out a way should go get a vaccine. So people use Grinder in a ton of different ways.

One of the interesting things for me on the board the last couple of months, we left one of the very challenging countries UM to be operating in and to be gay in UM recently because we just didn't feel comfortable. And you know, we heard that so much feedback from using in that country and and use in that country pleading with us to come back. So the board with us decides should we go back or not? And I mean it's like a life wort deficio almost in some ways.

On the one hand, people want to use the product to connect and it's super valuable. On the folk side, we know that the state uses the product to try to find people who are gay, And like which society you kind of go on, right, you deny people product that's really important to them, or do you allow them to have the product at risk their security? Really tough issue. I won't rebuild the country it's in because I don't

think that's appropriate. But like that kind of describes how critical Grinder is to so many people, and this amazing product that it is for that community. Now, you've gone through one spack process with Shift, and I know you're trying to get Grinder over the finish over the finish line now, but how are you thinking about that given

pretty dreadful market dynamics out there and and a tough environment. Yeah, it's I mean, spack is great in that kind of situation because it's a guaranteed way to get the transaction done right. You are not depending on market conditions. Um and Grinder's partner for for the stock transaction is a very strong stock. There's a for purchase agreement in the transaction which insuresn't there's no need for any capital to come into the transaction, and redemptions are not an issue.

The last many many of the most recent spects haven't done well. That most spots have not done well, no question. But there are about two dozen spacts in the last twelve months are doing very well, and but they share one trait. They're all profitable businesses. So Grinder kind of falls into that bucket as well. It's a very profitable business and no one is selling in this transaction, So all the current owners of Grinder are going to roll

over and continue holding the business. UM, so we feel pretty good about the transactions from that perspective, grind, I mean a spost is the mechanism or getting the transaction done so we can become a public company. I think the outcome will be the same way that we've had done a regular way at PO or a stock transaction. You're one of very few openly gay CEOs, certainly as it comes to public companies. Is there a precedent that you want to set here or a message that you

want to send. I'm very fortunate and I think, look, people should believe that anything is possible, right Like one of my core values as an operator is that impossible things are possible. And my whole life is almost an example of that. Where I was born in the Soviet Union, UM came to the U S as a as a young teenager to go to prep school. Now this is a second company. I'm going to take public incredible things that are achievable as long as you work hard and UM.

You know, for those people who are you know, part of the ludic community living in countries where they feel like they're being marginalized or they can't be out, things are going to get better. Because that's the direction that the world is heading into kind of every day, and we're really really fortunate to be living in a country where we can be ourselves and not be under threat all the time. And how are you thinking about monetization

and boosting the opportunities that Grinder has already explored. Subscriptions and ads are of course the money makers. Yeah, we make money in two ways. We have ads in the product and we have subscriptions. Are percentage of users that are paying uses is actually not that high, it's about six percent versus you know, Bumbles at I think nine percent and Matches at eighteen um, so we have a

huge you need to grow the paid user base. One of the ways we're going to do that is by building more adjacent features that people then want to pay for. Grind has been behind in that regard. It's only recently started to monetize its functionality and add new functionality. So for example, we just recently launched boost, which has been a very popular feature. Doing more things like that I think will be really important. And then with ads, obviously

there's a huge oputy to have more relevant ads. When we have ads that are relevant to our community, they're actually very effective and they service the community really well, for example with with health related ads, and so my focus will be to ensure that the ad quality is really good and it really enables the community use the product in a in a good way if they don't want to take her all right, George Harrison incoming, CEO of Grinder, Thanks so much for stopping by. We'll keep watching.

Thank you for having me all right. Coming up, FedEx's guidance springs doom and gloom to the markets and especially commerce starcks. We're going to tell you more about that. Next US is Bloomberg. One story you don't want to miss in Bloomberg's Big Take this Thursday, about how a Chinese spy tried to steal gees secret but got caught by the US and gave the world an unprecedented glimpse into China spy system. Here's how the arrest of a

burned out intelligence officer exposed an economic espionage machine. When a Chinese spy was extradited to the US, the FBI got his hands on a remarkable resource, his iPhone. It shed valuable light on how Asia's largest economy steals top secret technology. Chuian Jun was an agent of China's Minister of State Security when he was arrested in Brussels. In how could the FBI prove it well? On his iPhone was an official form that listed his job as deputy

Division director at the MSS. It might as well have said profession spy. Shoe's main job was stealing defense and aviation innovations from firms such as General Electric. For instance, a colleague distracted a British engineer over a banquet in Nanjing. While she was upstairs in his hotel room copying the content of his laptop, Shoe said he needs three hours speeded up. Became the response between messages to seemingly extramarital lovers.

Shoe are specialists from China's top aviation companies. What sort of intel they needed? Then set about cultivating the sources who could provide it. One such source was a ge engineer who would ultimately precipitate his downfall. After being rumbled by the FBI, the engineer turned double agent and offered to meet Sue at a cafe in Brussels. It was, of course set up. En route to that fateful meeting, Shoe messaged his wife that there was a USB stick

hidden at home for which should be given. The password was something to happen to him, She responded, Oh my god, don't scare me like this. The next day he was arrested. He now resides in Ohio jail, facing up to sixty years in prison. Quick takes alex web for that, and of course you could check out the Big Take Thursday. Here are some other stories were following. Shopify is now changing its compensation practices to let staff decide how much of their pay comes in cash versus equity, with the

ability to withdraw equity immediately. This is Volatility continues to beat down shares of tech companies. The Canadian e commerce firm saw its own share price fall this year, and Google cloud making some changes, with plans to unfreeze hiring by October, reversing a pause that was set back in July. This according to Business Insider, which cited an internal memo from Google Clouds Vice president of Technical Infrastructure Brad Calder,

saying then it must clarify its priorities. Welcome back to Boomore Technology. I'm emily changing in San Francisco. The new iPhone fourteen is out the latest generation of Apple's handset in stores now in the high end pro coming in at a thousand dollars base price. Apple isn't raising process from last year this year, perhaps to counter the pain of rising inflation, but still more customers pay up, are

at ludlow. Back in New York with the dates, will they add that, yeah, I mean, this is a global rollout of the iPhone fourteen, next generation of Apple watches. But here in New York City, Apple CEO Tim Cook, He's been in town, he's been on the Upper West side, he's been on the East side, he's been on Fifth Avenue meeting customers, and there seem to be excitement, there seems to be demand. But the question the streets asking will it fuel a global wave of upgrades? Will it

fuel a boost to Apple sales? Let's bring up this pie chart, Mrs Director, because we need to contin actualize how important the iPhone is in the context of overall sales. It's more than right now. Apple was reserved the most important new features, the biggest upgrades for that most expensive handset. And you know, I've been talking all week about the data for early orders or pre orders, which shows that

actually there is demand for that most expensive handset. The other story we've been talking about is the evidence that actually demand for consumer electronics is really slowing down. Now, let's look at the numbers for iPhone sales over the last few years. I'm just I'm going to walk all the way over here, m and go straight to one. That was an incredible year for Apple, right record iPhone sales.

The thing is, the early data also shows that the demand for the highest price point handset with the nicest, the fanciest, the most high spect features is actually outdoing what we saw in one as well. So there's debate about this. There's actually a guy who works at Bloomberg Intelligence here in New York. I think you might be about speech to him. He might not see it the way that some of the streets sees it in terms of this big wave of upgrades that's coming, but some

of the street does. All right, I'd love the thank you. I want to continue this conversation with Carolyn and Milan as of creative Strategies and our very own Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst on ra Grana, who covers Apple for US. UM. Carolyn and I'll start with you, since we spoke to last week from the Apple event we got your sort of preview. Take there. Now that you've seen some of this pre order data, how good does it look? It doesn't surprise me that we see a skew of sales

towards the higher end of the portfolio. That's always the case with pre orders. Usually the customers that pre order our early tech early adopters higher income level, So you always see that, and I always warrant people not to judge the kind of a long tail of the rest of a portfolio just by pre orders. I think what Apple has done though this year with the pro line is appealing to a broader audience than just the camera lovers.

So I think that Dynamic Island really is refreshing the look and feel of that higher and family to to appeal to a broader consumer audience. A wag. I know Apple didn't raise the prices, but we're in a downturn. Everybody's hurting. We're paying more for gas and groceries and

everything else. Are We're gonna upgrade our devices right now, so you know, our our cake is that Apple runs on about the three point six or three points seventy year refresh cycle, So if you take the big installed base, they have, they're gonna sell more than two in a million units every year. It doesn't matter what year it is. But for us, Apple, iPhone fourteen does not move the needle. We think it's going to be the next year's model with bigger hardware changes. But I do agree that the

Pro model is good. It has a better camera. There will be some people who will move it. And and remember, people who can afford to buy a thousand dollar phones, you know, the cash prices and things don't really bother them as much. So Carolina, what else are you watching here? I mean, FedEx just cut its own guidance, bringing Amazon down with it, and there are broader warnings here about

what's happening in the global economy. I think from an Apple perspective, would be interesting if the skew to the Pro and also the fourteen plus models is going to impact their average selling price, so we might see a higher selling price compared to last year before we see

a difference in volume. And then the other part is as the early adopters kind of die off as the cycle continues, to see how the previous models are going to impact the overall sales and then beyond iPhone, of course, we're all looking at Apple Watch, both at the very low end with DSc for more people are entering the ecosystem, and then the very high end with the ultra model at eight hundred dollar price point. What do you read into this sex data? They specifically called out Asia and Europe,

and of course Apple is a global company. Yeah, and this is part of the note that you wrote a month ago. I said, list for Apple, fort of the sales come from Europe and China combined, and those are the regions that are really struggling. In fact, I would say Europe is going to have bigger issues going in the in the near term with with fuel prices and energy prices going up, so which is one of the reasons we said that you over here, we don't see

iphold sales growing more than one to two percent. Now for a lot of people, that may be bad things, but in all, honestly, it's not bad at all. In a downward market, you know you're not going to see negative sales that compared to last year. So all in all, I think it's a it's a good cycle, I mean, but not as strong as next year. Next year, we think it's going to be a much much bigger refresh for the iPhone. Now, as far as the watch is concerned, it's a beautiful watch. They hunt it. All of watch

is amazing. But fact be speaking, there was thinks really don't move the financial need of Apple. Callin and does that jive with your projections? It does. I think that next year, for sure, the upgrade cycle will be higher, not just because of a hardware, but there's there's going to be a step forward in the processing powers well.

So I think that that, especially for the markets that seem to be struggling more this year from a financial perspective, chine in particularly that pays a lot of attention to the inside of the device, not just the look and

feel of the outside, That will matter a lot. M and I tend to agree that generally, you know, while the sales of the other products don't make a huge difference to the bottom line from a from a revenue perspective, it does tie in more of the customers, which longer term is what Apple will benefit from and more loyal, more unified user base. All right, obviously, so much to continue to follow when it comes to Apple utterag. I do want to ask you about another story we've been following.

You've got a new note out on this, Adobe buying Figma for twenty billion dollars. Of course, Figma was a you know, pretty big competitive threat to Adobe. I wonder if this is kind of an admission of defeat a bit either way. That is a huge, huge number. Is this a smart deal? So one of the things we said, you know, technology was it may be a smart deal, but I think this is the wrong time to do it.

We know, software valuations have created since last November. And for a company that was valued at ten billion last summer to buy them for twenty billion, I mean, nobody's liking get the I think they've lost what thirty five billion in market gap right now for a company that's going to generate about four million in revenue for next year. So I think they really need to think hard and long.

That investors have clearly made a point that they are looking for margin expansion, you know, profit growth, even if it grows slows down a little bit so much. And factually, you know, in our view, Adobe is such a widely diversified company with an installed it's very large of you know, creative products, and if in one idea of the product

is getting competition. It's not a big deal to me, frankly, all right on a Ronald Bloomberg intelligence along with Caroline and Milan Aisy principle analyst at Creative Strategies, Thank you both, Um all stuff we're gonna continue to follow well. It is potentially a worrying sign for the global economy. FedEx has withdrawn it's earnings forecast due to worsening business conditions. As we mentioned earlier the package delivery giant, pointing to

weakness in Asia and challenges in Europe. FedEx taking immediate steps to cut costs, including parking some aircraft, cutting workers hours, and closing more than nine FedEx office locations coming up as we enter a post etherory emerged world, what happens next and what's a long term view we'll talk about that. This is Bloomberg with the merge now complete, Let's take a look at how significant this successful update was for

the community and what comes next. Joe Loud, co founder of Alchemy, a web three development platform to build and scale decentralized apps, is with us now. Joe, thank you for joining us. So it seems like everything went according to plan. What are your key takeaways? Aside from some pretty funny pandamimes. Hi, Emily, thanks for having me today, and yeah, the merge happened a couple of nights ago. Happened at midnight. Our entire team stayed up to watch it,

as did a lot of the Ethereum community. I think the biggest takeaway was this was a monumental effort. It's part of a year's long road map UM many years long, multi year long road map by hundreds of hundreds of stakeholders, and there's not one single centralized decision maker or anything like that. So the fact that it all came together as it did, UH super smoothly is incredible. I think I would like in the merge to uh to swapping out the engine of a plane that's already in the air.

So you have the Ethereum blockchain. It's a multi hundred billion dollar ecosystem UM and the fact that they're able to keep it live, keep it working, and swap out essentially one piece of the core and have have no hiccups is incredible. What does this actually mean for Alchemy's ecosystem, that's a great question. So Alchemy, for those that don't know, UM is a blockchain developer platform. What that means you can think of us as the Amazon Web Services for

blockchain and web three. What it means is we help developers and companies build applications much better by providing them a developer platform to build on top load. So we started the company about five years ago. Five years ago, we've grown extremely rapidly in just the last few years. Today we power about a hundred and fifty billion dollars in transaction volume UM, a big chunk of the top ethereum um, the top companies in blockchain and Ethereum and

blockchain in general. UH. And we also work with a lot of the biggest companies that are moving into the blockchain and web through space today like Meta, Adobe, Shopify, and Stripe. What the merge means for Alchemy, So we're a developer platform. Our goal is to make sure developers always have access to the infrastructure that they need to build applications that they need. The merge basically upgraded Ethereum.

Upgrade Ethereum to um to basically allow to allow the etheroreum to allow the network to run on proof of stake instead of proof of work. For us, it means making sure our services are always up so that developers can have access to them, and that's exactly what we did. So of course we've been talking about the merge for years and now it's finally happened. What is the cryptome

blockchain community buzzing about now what's next? So the merge is just the first step and again in multi years long road map, UH, this first piece was about moving from proof for work, which uses energy, to proof of steak, which allows which allows users to stake their tokens on the network the value itself on the network. So that's a something like a ninety nine and nine reduction UH in energy users, for the blockchain, for the theory of blockchain,

which is incredible. UM. What's next is going to be a lot of investments into scaling. So there's been a lot of excitement. So Intherium as a network is UM it's just it's you know, just getting started. It's gonna get a lot faster, it's gonna get a lot cheaper, and that's where a lot of the focus is going forward.

The merge was the first step to unlocking the ability to perform some of these other technical upgrades in the future that make Ethereum faster and cheaper, and so those are going to be the areas of focus next well, and it needs to get faster and cheaper in order for you know, apps, killer apps, if you will, to have that killer impact. But I still hear people say that killer app for crypto hasn't been made yet. What

do you think that is? That's a that's a really great question, Emily Um, and that's something that everyone in this space is always working towards. I think the thing that's really interesting is all technologies start out slow, inefficient and expensive. If you look at the Internet back in the nineties, when we're using Dala, you couldn't even load a picture. The picture of like load over a couple

of minutes, right in pieces on a screen. But you fast forward to today and not only do we have pictures, we have video, we have YouTube, we have TikTok. Something like this, you and me talking on a live stream would be unimaginable if you zoom back, and so I would look at ethereum and more widely the web three blockching ecosystem with the same lens. It's just an early space. It's getting started. But what's gonna happen is you have

upgrades like the merge, which makes the technology better. We have more developers build more applications, That in term drives more investment into making the technology even better, and so on and so forth, and you get better and better and better applications, and eventually killer application emerges. We're already seeing a lot of excitement around not just docurrencies stores of value, but also gaming and creator monetization and things

like that. And I think that's just the beginning. Alchemy has its own vcar and grants program, and I'm curious what kind of projects you're backing right now. How the macro environment, a dreadful market situation is impacting your decision decisions, and whether valuations are they coming down That's a great question. So I think there are valuations in the market, and that obviously has changed over the lass six months. The really exciting thing about our ecosystem is developers have not

stopped building. And the thing that's important to something like the blockchain. If your ecosystem is as long as developers are building, new applications will come out that will bring in more users, It will bring in more developers the UH and the ecosystem, and the technology gets better. So our ventures are mas seen actually a tremendous amount of growth. It's I think we're seeing three quarter over quarter growth

in terms of fuel velocity. We're seeing more and more people coming from traditional technology and other other other industries into the space to work on brand new things. UM, and it's been very very exciting. We're also we also have educational properties that are aimed at bringing people into the space and teaching them how to develop in Web three for free, and we're seeing lots of growth there. So all across the board, I think it's been a

very very positive outlook. Um, we're actually out of time, Joe, but I so appreciate your very thoughtful insights there. We'll we'll have to do this again, um as the market continues to evolve. Alchemy co founder Joe Lau, thank you so much for stopping by. Disney has pulled the upcoming Star Wars film Rogue Squadron from its release calendar, a disappointment for theaters still trying to recover from the pandemic.

Joining us Now Bloomberg's Chris Paul Mary So, Chris sounds like they're still going to make the film, but it's not coming out next year. Right, that's right, And it's your reflection of a lot of things going on the movie business. One of them is, of course, the pandemic. It's hard to get things up and running again. And and you've got a director in this movie, Patty Jenkins, who's uh done the Wonder Woman films. She's working on a third one of those that's also not started production yet.

So scheduling something of this magnitude is difficult. Of course, this is Star Wars and you want to get it right. You broke the news three years ago in an interview with them CEO Bob Igers, and uh, you know, there were some disappointment when when they rushed out a lot of Star Wars films initially and they put the films on a hiatus. That the last one was in two thousand nineteen, and so there's a lot of pressure to

make sure that they get this right. But I'm told that this film is still in development, as are some other Star Wars films. All right, Um, not good for theaters though, I mean, were they really counting on this one? Yeah, I mean you can even a bad Star Wars films, there's a lot of money, a billion dollar box office. Um, it's uh, you know, it's a story we keep hearing. Theaters are coming back, theaters are coming back. Reality is, the industry is probably to do eight and a half

billion dollars this year. The Pink a few years ago was over eleven billions. So it's it's still it's still far from where it was. You know, you had some big movies this year. Top Gun obviously was huge, But they're really counting on these big tentpoles as they're as they're called to to drive people to theaters, and Star Wars is certainly one of them. Well, it's in keeping with the story that you just wrote called the bad news in Hollywood is arriving almost daily. At least that's

the opening line. So what other bad news are we hearing? Well, you know, there's been this whole rethinking of the streaming business for years. Everyone was following the sort of Netflix model of it's all about signing up subscribers, spending a ton of money on movies and TV shows and you know, the business will revenue and profits will follow. That all got reset of this year. Netflix, Uh, you know, as we've reported as a low subscribers and so all of

the stocks in the entertainment business have collapsed. Uh, and everyone's now focused on what are we gonna make money off of our street business? Many of them are losing billions of dollars and so we've seen, you know, particularly in Netflix and Warner Brothers, which just did a big merger with Discovery, big cutbacks and staffing, the canceling projects.

Everyone's dialing back, uh you know, the budgets for TV series. Uh, and things are just sort of languishing as everyone sort of weights to see how this all plays out on Wall Street. Um. Well, on that uplifting note, what are you watching this weekend? But well to pivot back to Star Wars even though the and I this, you know, their fourth one of the TV series is coming out next weekend or uh and so far looks pretty good. And gosh, I am really in the Drones House of Dragon.

It's terrific. Okay, I'm liking House of Dragons too. I'm excited for Sunday, Chris, Paul Mary always good to have you, um and happy Friday. Everyone to have a wonderful weekend. Uh. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. I'm Emily Drag in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg,