Google Earnings and Bilt Rewards

division all full short of analyst expectations. We're going to break it all down for you in the Ripple Effects plus Built Rewards, the company that uses a point system to help you pay rent or a home down payment just for its valuation quadruple Overnight, I'll chat with the CEO, Uncle Jane, about the startups, unicorn status and what it plans to do in a tough housing market. And it

is the only story you need to read about Crypto. Ever, Bloomberg's Matt Levine has written a cover to cover issue of Bloomberg Business Week, the second of its kind in the magazine's nine three year history. Us Later in the hour, we pushed towards further earnings, further fundamentals, and we bring in while the ramifications of the latest dost that we just got after the bow. I'm prettysed to say that broad Sweet Media Group CEO Daniel Newman is with us.

Is also the founding part of Principal Analysts of Future and Research, basically a man who's at the cuting edge of what digital transformation means for you and your business and can analyze. Basically, we'll go with either market capitalization or market impact, and I think market impact is going to be coming from Alphabet today, and I'm interested in your perspective, Daniel, Well, it was a miss any real areas concerned, though, Well, I think we had an overall expectation, Caroline,

of seeing the ad market pullback. I think the big concertain isn't as much for Google as it is for the rest of the ad space. As I said to Emily last quarter when I joined the show at the same period of time, I said, Alphabet's top of the heat. There are the technology for advertised are that is going to be the last to be removed, the last to be slowed. And this means that the advertised business is slowing significantly, and I'm worried about what this means for Meta.

We already saw what happened to snap um, So that's my biggest concern. I still think that the Google business overall is robust. I think it's the best of class, and I'm still optimistic that going forward that Google is still going to offer a lot of value to its shareholders. I was also a little concerned about the slowing of the cloud business. Despite the fact that it beat, it didn't quite keep up with what we saw from Azure

this quarter. And that's going to be something to watch as well, because they're pouring a lot in they're still losing money in that particular business. But I did I did attend their Google Cloud Next event. I did hear from Thomas Curry and the CEO of that group, and it does seem that that investment is going to pay

off as the market continues to spend on enterprise. Of course, we know that in many ways this is a company that's backed off from some other bets, in large part because they've got to double down on where is profitable

for them at the moment we've poured out. The CFO of Alphabet was speaking with her own end Ludlow a bit earlier, and she was saying in terms of YouTube for example, I would say the largest driver of the deceleration was a further pullback and spent from some advertisers that was a cross brand and direct response talk to us about whether or not this is going to be there for what we read into meta you were just

saying about the impact. We heard it from Snap the Warriors about the market marketing budgets getting that little bit smaller. Is there anywhere in terms of reinvestment, in terms of doubling down YouTube shorts and they're like that you want to see to prove that still YouTube is where you have to be for eyeballs. Yeah, I think they need to stay the course on their strategy. The macroeconomic conditions are in this moment what they are, and the Google

does have the best product. They are diversifying, they are innovating. The YouTube short product is interesting, and of course TikTok has the most acceleration and that's what YouTube is trying to do to answer to what TikTok has been able to to do. You know, I watched IBMS earnings last week in the strength of the enterprise, so kind of on the other side of Google will with their cloud business. I really think that investment is going to be even

more critical coming out of this pandemic. Companies are going to have to adjust UH and the investment in cloud an enterprise maybe the area that provides the biggest opportunity going forward. And we also saw that with the top and bottom line beat from Microsoft. So I think that's an opportunity for Google, you said, Guy bausifually therefore, in touch discussing Microsoft, which is being dragged in lower lower and after I was training large part because of the

moon music coming out of Alphabet. But this was a beat across the board. This is a company that's still posting even though it's worth more than a trillion dollars revenue growth of more than nine effects headwind s. But where did you see some of the concerns in terms of corporate spending any Well, it seemed that the biggest concern and what sort of drove this stock down after hours was more than it just didn't hit its azure number. The mark looking for closer. I think it came out

at thirty five. Of course, just like Ruthport said at Google, you know, FX was an issue across the board at Google. But I actually like the fact that it was you know, diverse that the company performed in most category is in productivity. It performed in the intelligent cloud business, it performed pretty well,

and even in personal computing. In on the consumer side with surface and gaming, an area that a lot of people were concerned, it came in at where it was expected to Caroline, So I actually didn't feel as negatively about the quarter. I meant growth. It's still above you know, the fold that grew a little bit faster than the Google Cloud business, and it's still indicative to me the enterprise is stronger. That's why I alluded to that IBM result last week. I think that surprised a lot of people,

but enterprise seems to be where spending will continue. Advertising seemed more compression, and of course consumer, I'm really concerned about how some of the consumer tech focus brands are going to turn out this quarter. Well said, I want to double down on what sat In Adela was saying. Of course, we await what's being sent in the cools, but he on in the press release of the earnings, was talking about the world facing increasing headwinds and digital technology.

We made the ultimate tailwind, basically the argument that it's defrationary. Do you buy that. Have we not just brought forward all of that spending during covid ors There's still more to come. Yes, Satia is really saying the same thing. And I've had a few other conversations. I had one with Harvin Krishna. I had one with Bill McDermott a Servant and Service Now, and both of them have used that, and I've actually really found that to be the case.

Companies during this pandemic that had to spend rapidly to support their growth did a lot of hiring, added a lot of short term costs, and as long as the growth was there, they didn't necessarily need to fix that.

Now that we're seeing the market compress a little bit the economy slow, some of those digital transformation investments and things like automation and AI they need to be fully implemented so that some of those costs, those hiring freezes, and those pullbacks are able to not slow customer experience and product delivery. So I think those digital investments are

going to be much more robust. But I do think starting to see some of those hiring freezes, those layoffs, some of the slowing revenue and of course margin compression in the near term are going to be the continued concern for tech. But long term, it's hard to not think that Mike or Soft and companies like them are gonna be solving a lot of these problems for enterprises. Okay, Daniel. So therefore, when we look ahead to Amazon, is that

going to be a fixer for this quarture? In particular, when we're looking at a metro, is that going to be a hit because of the advertising spend where line not who you're most concerned about, who your least concerned about for us, Yeah, I'm quite concerned about meta. It would It's hard to think with the big dollars being invested in their metaverse, people were already sort of nervous

about that. You see Google and alphabets advertising dollars, you know, going a little bit the wrong way in terms of the markets perception, and like I said, I think they're the top of the heap for advertising. Last to be cut out. Apple is gonna be really interesting to watch because Apple it tends to have that consumer quality that that bucks some of the consumer trends in terms of people of higher affluence continue to buy even when the

market gets tougher, but their iPhone fourteen specs. For some of the numbers are a bit worrying. Two people, I really want to see the a WUS cloud number. That's such a huge number. Four. Amazon's opping and despite e commerce and the holiday and some of these prime days, you know, Amazon has had a tough couple of quarters. I still believe that they're building a bigger and bigger moat for e commerce. So in the long run, it's hard to not like them. But a WS has been

so instrumental, and that is the biggest cloud provider. And if my enterprise thesis is true, Caroline, then aw S should at least be seeing the same kind of growth that Asure did. Really smart conversation with you, as always, Daniel, thank you so much for pointing us forwards. Daniel Newman here of course put Sweet Media Group CEO as such in a dalla in Microsoft's sup press release just now

says it is a world facing increasing headwinds. Recessionals. For example, they remain top of mind for investors this earning season, and a recently bo economics model projects the likelihood of a US recession is now and then the next twelve months.

So let's put all of these earnings and valuations into contact because so far, as head of Invested strateg Sheet, li Is Young is with us some place to say, and as we get the micro data with the earnings and whether their meats or their beats, ultimately in the back of our mind is what are the valuations of these businesses and do they reflect these headwinds that they're being hit by. What do you make of the way

in which you've line ourselves up for earning season. Well, look, I think we're sitting at a point in the year where we've done a lot of work and valuations have seen a decent amount of pain since January, and I think it's less about what's the right valuation for these stocks to be at, and it's more about what are

people actually willing to pay for them. Knowing that we have not solved all the problems that still lie ahead, and knowing that we still have a pretty uncertainty of political backdrop, we're coming up on mid term elections, We've got all the classic kind of market signals that are saying a recession might be coming, those are all going off, So there is still a decent amount of uncertainty ahead.

Not to mention that just the month of October. Despite this rally, we've seen more almost half of the days with a more than two percent swing in the SMP five hundred. That is a lot of volatility, and a VIX that's still hovering around thirty also indicates to me that the next few weeks are going to be bumpy. And what's wild is a volatility in the salt market is basically nothing in comparis into the volatility if you've

seen in the bond market, in the FX market. And I'm interested in these correlations because, for example, today's trade, we saw stocks rally and tech do well because bond markets rallied and niels pushed lower. Is that the sort of correlation we're likely to keep on seeing. Well on a day like today, I think it was very much

a rate story. So we got some housing data earlier in the morning, about nine am Eastern time, and if you just look at the tape and how things moved throughout the day, that nine am release of home prices coming down pretty sharply is what I think sent ten year yields down, It sent two year yields down, and

everybody got sort of excited that, oh it's working. Inflation is going to go away, and then stocks rallied on the other side of that also, though you want to look at the fact not just tech rallied, but high beta stocks rallied, And that's not necessarily something that I would expect to be lasting in an environment where we have, in my opinion, more than a fifty chance of a recession in the next six to twelve months. So it really was a very risk on trade. It was sort

of this, Oh, it's a big relief. We might get a solved on the inflation problem. It might be sooner than we think. But the issue is that once that boulder starts rolling down the hill, it's really difficult to stop it at a certain point and not go into contraction territory. To that end, of course, with basically all the market moves kind of being dictated by bad news being good news, the Federal Reserve perhaps not hiking quite so much as we had expected. How much of a

dollar story is this all going to be? Are we likely to see? Are we now at pink dollar? This is hugely important to a lot of the micro stories. For example, a Microsoft that had highlighted the head winds of a strong dollar. Yeah, I mean, look we've thought that we were at peak dollar, and when I say we, I mean just investors at large. Think there have been a lot of people who thought were at peak dollar earlier this year, So I don't know if this is

peak or not. Regardless, even if it is technically peak, that doesn't mean that it's going to come down with a quickness. So a strong dollar in general, as we know, is a headwind not only to trade, but it's a headwind to those large cap corporations that have a lot of international revenue. And those big companies are the ones that have been the market story. And if you're a newer investor, those are also the companies that have really been the winners for you in the portfolio. So it's

difficult to kind of shift your mindset. But I would encourage people that even in an environment like this, you have to think about maybe where the opportunities are, and they could be in places that you wouldn't normally look. So a strong dollar is actually very good for smaller cap companies because they get a majority of their revenue from inside US borders, so they don't have that headwind. So looking at things like that, the last thing I'll

say about a strong dollar. Is that from a macro perspective, the signal that you want to see is that when the dollar weakens, that tends to mean that we're nearing the end of a tightening cycle or nearing the end of a hiking cycle. The fact that the dollar is still pretty strong here, I think means that the Fed continues to hike and they right now don't have a ton of reason not to, particularly with such a strong

labor market as we've seen time and time again. And what's been interesting is on an anecdotal basis, you hear of startups and actually some big tech listed companies dialing back their head count looking to actually just slow hiring or indeed fire. Are you likely to hear you anticipating more concerns being voiced by CEOs as we're in earning season, because I'm not hearing it particularly from Satya Adela or

from well Ruth poor At or or soon Pitch. I. So if we look at the labor market just in particular, I would expect to see some weakness in it and see that coming through in the data closer to the end of the year. So the labor market is one of the last things if not the last thing to turn when you have an economic contraction or a slowdown.

And if you just think about that logically, there's a reason we're not hearing about it from c e O S because they will do everything else they can to control costs before they have to actually lay people off and cut jobs. So what we're hearing right now is a lot of hiring freezes and that's coming through in the data. So if you just look at the job openings or the JOLTS number that we got for August, job openings came down by one point one million. That

was a huge drop. So now the ratio of the number of jobs open per unemployed worker is one point seven. That's down from two. We used to have two jobs for every unemployed person. Pre pandemic, that number was one point two. So that's still that gap still has to narrow a bit. The risk is that that gap narrows and then we're in this kind of comfortable supply demand place with labor. That's when if we haven't slowed the bleeding,

that's when you start to hear about layoff. So we still have some time between now and I think that point, but I do expect it to start coming through in the in the labor data, see some weakness by the end of this year. Ultimately, at this moment, is with so much you talking about recession, people thinking, since she's high, with a lot of lack of clarity, is it time to put all that cash that people have been taking out of stocks putting it into cash? Is time to

reinvest or keep powder driving? Now you can think about reinvesting it and and look, nobody's going to call the bottom perfectly, and if they do, it's going to be lucky. So let's just all stop trying. Right But if you think about just where we are, you're to date with an SMP still down twenty or so year to date, that's a better entry point than it was in January. So I would start to get ready on what's the

shopping list? What are the sectors and the industry groups that you would be interested in buying and drip in slowly. So in this particular moment right now, I would be looking at financials because they're still very attractively priced compared to many other sectors, and they don't have a ton of pain ahead. In my opinion, I think they've been pretty punished through this cycle, and I think they can

come out well. On the other side, I'll be looking at industrials and I've been talking about healthcare for a very long time. I think that healthcare is a great long term investment. And then a little bit further down and look, I think this rally is fragile, so I would expect another correction on the other side of it. If and when that happens and you see an SMP get back down to previous levels, so let's say something like thirty or below, that's when you start to nibble

on riskier things. You start to look at semiconductors, you start to look at tech again, and you start to look at other things that might be a little bit more high beata. And then later even after that, when the economy really confirms that it's weakened, so when the labor market starts to fall apart, that's when you start to look at things like home builders and you get back in on that train. You look at small caps

in that environment as well. Well. We've got a great conversation to common terms of fuel, exposure to the real estate market always so small at Helping Dovetail, you'll conversation with our audience who was so interested in tech. We thank you, Lizzie young A so far of course, head of investment strategy there. Meanwhile, coming up, Amazon expands payment options including Venmo at last ahead of the holiday season or discuss the strategy, the expectations visi Blue meg off earnings.

There was another key story that occurred today, Amazon adding Venmo at last as a new payment option for customers, of course, all ahead of Black Friday and the key holiday season when we expensive Sofa is actually here in New York and of course he covers Amazon for us. You know that. Wonderful to have you in the same studio spends to talk to us about. Finally, this has been in the works for what like a year already. Yeah, the Venmo Amazon tie up has been in the works

for for quite some time. And then Venmo in particular PayPal has really wanted to move this, you know, a peer to peer payment system thing like Okay, we bought a pizza and you're gonna vend me ten dollars to get that beyond simply people splitting the cost of bills and things into something that they can actually make money off of, which would be you know, commerce buying things. So, yeah, this is a this is a very big deal for for PayPal and Venmo in terms of trying to nudge

that along. It's something they've been working on a long time. Right now. You maybe see it, you know, for uh used by a patron at like a nail salon or some other small business like a landscape, or you're not really seeing it used you know, to buy from big retailers. So this could be a big, big symbol to sends a message Amazon is willing to do it, why why not you? And then Amazon has an incentive to try to uh you know, lower the cost of accepting any

kind of payment at all. So it just gives them potential negotiating power if this were to take off, especially take off with millennials when they're negotiating rates with the big cards, you know, on how much of each transaction they share with them. We know, we remember that sounds still that they had over in the UK with Visa

for example. I'm interested in, well, therefore, ahead of the holiday season, how many people do they think will actually be using this versus by now pay later that they have with the firm or just you know, in the credit card that you have on top with them. Yeah, exactly. I think that's still going to be Traditionally, the predominant way that people pay is that the credit card that they already have, and that's the problem here. Venmo has a lot of incentive to make this work. Amazon has

a lot of incentive to make this work. Customers don't really have much incentive to use it. So how are they going to try to compel people to break those habits and uh and and start using Venmo to pay for things. There's been a real long game for Venmo. They don't really disclose uh how much They've got billions of dollars slashing slashing around in Venmo, but it's still mostly things that they don't make money on and people just paying back one another for these little nickel and

dime things. Um. So the question is will they get people to use Venmo the way they use their credit cards. We'll see what sort of incentives they give us. Thank you, Spencer, so great to have him here, and he's gonna be a busy guy because of course Amazon's got their numbers coming out later in the week. We thank him for spending some time with us. This is Bloomberg Technology. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York. Let's talk to another New

York startup. Because built rewards and loyalty program and credit card that converts rent payments into points, it's now saying it's valuation more than quadrupled one five billion dollars. Left Lane Capital led a hundred fifty million dollar equity funding round for the startup. We want to know how they're going to use the funds, the growth trajectory. Who better than to talk through it all CEO and core Jane. Great to have you here. Hey, it's going to be here, Caroline,

thanks for having me. So tell me what is the growth jerectory? How can you penetrate yet further the market and disrupt basically financial institutions. Today, more than ever, rent prices continue to soar. And one of the things that banks and I think startups have missed is you on one hand, you have startups trying to cryptocurrencies to people, and then banks still running a model from twenty years ago. And we said, if you look at our generation, the

biggest expense people have is rent. Why don't you get anything back for that? Right? Why can't I build my credit history just by paying my rent on time? Or why can't I earn points and miles to travel the world by paying rent? And so you know, it took us four years to bring together the real estate industry, to bring together the payment networks, the banks, the airlines, the hotels. But fourteen months ago when we launched this, we weren't really sure how fast it would pick up. Right,

what's been crazy to see, is it? I mean less than fourteen months, we've had over three billion dollars of payments going through this just on the rent side, people who have signed up for the built Master card or so let's to pay rent at any apartment and earned points as well as replace your kind of everyday card that's seen over one point six billion dollars of spend already. So you're seeing this massive uptake from a generation saying, hold on a second rent is my biggest expense. You

can give me value there. I'll be loyal to you across all of my other spend categories. And by the way, if you can help me build a path to homeownership, that's really how you lock me in. And so it talk to me about that path to home ownership because it's about building up your credit quantity. But how else. So look, one of the challenges with home ownership and I just bought my first place here. It was so complicated,

and I consider myself a financially astute like individual. But you look at that and saying I'm going to spend X amount of months. Let's say you're New York rent which by the way, the average New York rent is almost six thousand dollars. Now do you know what I mean? You think about that first goal? I thought, time you start earning points and miles and your six thousand color a month rent payment. But now you take that and you say, well, how do I even know if it's

better to rent or own? How can I compare that? And today nothing existed. And so we went out and we actually partnered with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mack and fh A and built the first tool where you can actually see based on your credit profile, your income, real time interest rates, say, here are the homes that you could buy for the same monthly payment as your rent, and you can compare apples apples and if you're ready to buy. We also got regulatory approval to use your points to

cover your down payment. Huh, so that one life this morning. By the way, congratulations, you're talking points, you're talking rewards, you're talking gen Z millennials. I can only infer that AMEX is what looking at you in particular? Who are you in terms of income level? Who are you in terms of demographic Who is coming to you? So the vast majority of our card holders, in the vast majority

of our loyalty members are thirty five. Right. So if you live in a high rise building in a major city in New York, l A, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, chances are you're living in a built alliance property, which means you're using built to pay your rent at all of these buildings. Then you also have thirty five yearls who live in other buildings or mom and pop landlords, and they're signing up for the built Master card in the wells Fargo and they're getting to earn points and

build their credit for no annual feed. Right. So when you raising this money, is it about marketing? Is it about doubling down country eating into market share? What are the is about? Building partnerships? Is about hiring? Where do you look at in terms of your to do list? So one of the things that we spent a lot of time with this business. A little different from our peers in Silicon Valley is profitability. So Built is a profitable business. So when we look to you know, grow

the business, we weren't actually looking to raise money. It was an old friend of mine from Left Lane Capital reached out and said, hey, there's an opportunity for us to finish bringing together strategic partners into this business if

we do a large financing together. And so, led by Left Lane, we went down and we brought partners like Gray Star, who's the largest property management company in the country, Invitation Homes, who is the largest single family rental company in the country, and then even our banking partners like Wells Fargo to double down and really build that defensible

mode around this business. Right, So is it about in this landscape where look, valuations are coming down, people are not just writing checks in quite the same liberal almana than they were. Is this about strategic investors? Is this about evaluation that was slightly lower than you anticipated? What

was it like? You know, I'm not one I don't believe in playing the valuation game because inevitably that you know, all all these things come to an end, right And so even as we were doing this round, we actually looked at fairly conservative publicly traded comps, which I know is a heresy to stay in Silicon Valley. If you think about a lot of the work we do on a loyalty space, it's not that different than a payment

network like Master Carter Visa. And so we look at if we're taking a piece of transactions, whether that's rent or your dining right, and we can start to clip that on all of your biggest expenses while rewarding the customers, then that's not that different from the payment network. And so that's how we really built the valuation. That's how we built the business. And look, I think today entrepreneurs

should be focused number one on strategic capital. You know, we were lucky to get that both from Left Lane Capital but also from our real estate partners and our banking partners who get to work with us on the payment side and on the investment side. I'm looking at a Visa, I can bring it up on the Bloomberg and estimated p ratio for looking is twenty three times. They're trading in a P ratio twenty nine times in the hair. And now there is a they are a company.

They just had their earnings and actually are raising their dividend, giving more money in terms of the buy back to investors. And they're saying that the economy is still pretty strong. Are you seeing a strong and using a slowing down of payments from your customers? What does the environment like?

So one of the other exciting things I think when you think about this type of business is that it's fairly countercyclical to any recission um And so when in good times you see a lot of spend, whether it's on retail or travel, which we see on the built master card, but even in downturns, you still see that rent continues to be an expense that most people still have to pay month over month. And so if you can make that better payment experience right and reward them,

our business days fairly recession proof. As consumers change spending the habits elsewhere. And what about you and hiring? And you are you based in New what is so? We are?

We are in New York office. We are probably one of those crazy companies that have believed an in person office, and so our team has been coming in since it was allowed um one, and so we continue to have folks come in and I'll tell you like that has been one of our best recruiting tools to being in New York and telling folks that we are an in person culture that you can come in and work with other really smart people to help solve real problems that

affect frankly, our own employee base and their friends. So, so, is there any hybrid have you said, look, will be, we'll be, We'll put your purposes. Yeah. Look, I think it's really important as a CEO in today's economy to be clear on where you stand. I think it's that ambiguity that's been very hard for folks because then you feel the pressure to go in, but don't know if you should go in and no one else And so we've just made it really simple. We're an in person company.

If you need to take time and be flexible, we're totally okay with that. But I gotta tell you that the productivity, the morale. We've had no turnover at this business really in the last fourteen months since we launched the product, and I think that's a testament to people just having those relationships, those friendships and candily working on problems that actually matter to society. Today, right, And I think what I'm really excited about today is this built

home stuff. I mean, if we can help young people understand what it takes to go from renting to home ownership and make it as easy to understand as here's what you're paying and rent, here's what you could buy for that same amount, and by the way, here's how much you need to save, and if you want, you

can use your points to cover that down payment. I mean, that is going to be the most important driver to fixing inequality in our generation, because otherwise a small handful will get to buy homes and build wealth and everybody else will be left behind paycheck to paycheck. And I think if we can help move the needle even a little bit on that, it's a really motivating opportunity. Financial knowledge, financial empowerment. We are here for it, come and talk

about it all day every day. And Chow Jane, of course, the Built CEO, talking about well what I'm pretty passionate about too. Meanwhile, coming up the story of crypto, where did it come from? How does it work? Because they're all a scam, mr All. Where would it take us? We discussed in the latest issue of Broomberg Business Week, which is totally utterly from page the start to the finish, dedicated to these questions. There's a broom bag. Hi. I'm Mattlivian,

former lawyer and investment banker. Now I'm a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, where I write a finances letter called money Stuff. For the past few years, the most polarizing thing in finance has been crypto. Crypt grew out of Setoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper to become, among other things, the set of lines on charts that went up, some people bought Lamborghinis, and then this year those lines on charts went down. If you're at crypto skeptic, this was very satisfying crypto enthusiasts.

It was just another reason to double down. I don't have strong feelings either way about the value of crypto. I like finance. I think it's interesting and if you like understanding the structures that people built to organize economic reality, crypto is amazing. Bloomberg Business we asked me to write about crypto, and when I was finished, it was enough to fill an entire issue cover to cover. It's called the Crypto Story, and I think it's as thrilling to

read as a ride in a lambo. Matthew Levine, Bloomberg opinion columnists who covers finance, who wrote the entire issue the Latest Business Week, just the second time in the magazine's history, and one single author has done that. So in today's Crypto Report, we're going to look at that story, where it comes from, what it means, and why it still matters that Bloomberg's Business Weeks pat Regnia, because it takes two to tango, and you had to edit the

whole thing. So it's the labor of love for you, as it is for the person who wrote it. Taught us a little bit about this fort opus of lessay and really what the key takeaways were for you. So for me it was country is an opportunity to have crypto demystified. I've I've spent the last you know, a couple of years really getting deep into crypto, and every story I do, I'm asking the writer, wait, what is this thing? Is this a company? Is this a protocol?

What's this thing that's happening on the block? Chane, Crypto has a way of filling the space with new words and what seemed like new ideas that you have to decode in order to even tell the simplest story about crypto. And one of the things that Matt really accomplished in this piece, and I think that everyone who reads it will enjoy this, is that it takes crypto step by step and explains it and most importantly, doesn't do it

with the purpose of selling you on crypto. In fact, I think it's really a tool for thinking about it so that when you're encountering it and you're asking yourself, what is this thing that I'm looking at? What is this thing I'm being sold or pitched on, What is this thing I might be considering investing in? What is this thing my kid is talking to me about? Is this something that that I am familiar with, as opposed to being intimidated into thinking that I couldn't understand it?

And it's so much more sophisticated than I could grasp and well done. Because the bit that irritates me so

much is this discussion about democratization. But it's very under democratic to put up acronyms in areas that we don't understand and then make every one feel that it's still a wall garden, but where the addiction has been real and I've seen it in my own family is from traditional finance or trad fy that if I'm amuse us with that ton of phrase, but traditional finance they if they catch the bug for crypto, they'll go all in as well. Are we still hearing of that revolving door

and whether that will continue? Well, I think some of that was happening. As Matt says, you know, the lines were going up for a while and so this was a place to go. Lately, the lines have been going down. Um uh not obviously in traditional finance and in crypto. So that may that may slow things down. But one of the things that crypto does is it gives people like another door to go through. So sometimes maybe you

are I think we've seen this. You're you're doing something in traditional finance and things aren't quite clicking for you, or it's not moving as fast as you'd like. Meanwhile, over here there's this other new financial system that if you can master a piece of code, because it's all there and it's and it's new to get built, you

can you can start moving right away. You know, those of us who have come finance for a while knows that you know that there's cycles where that happens where there's a new thing on the ground I mean I I started covering finance in the nineties. This sort of sounds unbelievable, but once mutual funds were the hot thing that if you were young, you would start, you would start, and then it was e T F this is sort of a place where people can get in on the

ground floor. Well, people started to get in. I think when crypto became something that many could have understand or at least be tantalized by, was n f T. So it was the idea that, oh, I can understand that the royalty is going to be going to an artist. People can own what they have made and keep sort of a value of that as it goes through different

people's hands. Is n f T still a gateway to the system because they have so fallen out of love in terms of evaluation perspective, where are we in crypto in the longer term? So, you know, Matt when he looks at the piece, kind of talks about sort of how thin the connection is between the code that you're investing in on the blockchain and what the actual piece

of art is. I do think that for a lot of people, um you know, it's sort of disturbing to imagine that, like, well, bitcoin, what's backing the value of a bitcoin? I don't know. Um now, there's nothing really backing the value of a board eight. But at least you could sort of say to yourself, it's like, well, I kind of understand the art market, so at least to the extent that it's a little bit arbitrary and aesthetic.

I understand that there's a market like that. I think this is outside of the scope of Matt Store, but I think we've all observed that there were there were enough, there were enough shenanigans in that market, kind of creating inflated valuations. Um. I mean that I think that's given people a lot of pause about getting into that space. So what then, Because we talk a lot across all of our platforms here that yes, in some ways it's a store of value, still is generally a trading asset type.

When does it become more than that? When does it become integral to yours and my way of life? I mean, that's really the question that Matt's wrestling with. Matt, as you know, is really just an expert on finance, and what he really focuses on is the degree to which crypto finance is just finance. It's very similar lard of

finance when you strip it all down. Even though it's a new thing and it gives people a new, faster start on certain things, it's often rebuilding the same structures that we've had before, maybe a new ways, often in disastrous ways. Inside of the crypto space. We didn't just see a crypto winner. We really saw a crypto two thousand and eight. They build all of the structures that created a financial crisis inside of crypto um. I think it's very interesting that that crisis didn't really weak out

into the rest of the market. I think, however, that's probably one reason why crypto is continuing to be worth our attention. Is the people who are building these structures are building things that look a lot like the things in traditional finance that break and sometimes break disastrously. Well done, well, what an enormous read. Go have a look at his work, and that of course of Matt levin Bloomberg Business Weeks pat Menia, We thank him. Let's get you up to

speed with the latest in the Musk Twitter saga. Elon Musk has impact fact pledged earlier to close the acquisition of Twitter by Friday. He announced this in a video conference call with bankers we understand helping fund the deal. It's all according to sources Ed Ludlow, of course, minute by minute across this particular deal. And well he said he would do it at the beginning, and now it

seems as always being forced to do it at the end. Yeah, this this is one of the interesting situations where the devil's in the detail. And Bloomberg also reporting that, according to sources, the banks are kind of braced for this borrowing notice that should have come Tuesday. Then the money that the banks have pledged in the former debt would go into es grow Thursday. And as you said, Carrow, he's told these bankers that he fully intends to close

the deal by five pm Friday. You know, the Twitter stock reacted in a way you'd expect. He got closer to the dollars twenty cents per share offer price, and it's kind of a soft indication from the street that, yeah, we think we're at a place where this deal is going to get done, and the mechanics of it as

such that you know, they're moving in that direction. I would say we'd already reported a week ago that you bankers and advisors on both sides of enacting diligently to meet that five pm Eastern time deadline on Oxo, which was set by the chance Re Delaware chance rejudge. So we know where we stand. And of course later in the week twenty six we get Twitter earnings. Talk to us about the earnings you've just been digesting. Talk about

the conversation you had with Ruth Poor at Alphabet. Yeah, I mean Alphabet, you know, missing on the top and bottom line. Interesting. You know, clearly this is a challenging environment for them. In that conversation with Ruth Poor actually kind of gave some granularity on the pool back in ad budgets across brand and direct ads, particularly on YouTube. But ultimately she gave some detail on the macro picture, right,

which is that the macro environment remains challenging. Um and you know, this is a quarter in which all big tech companies that derive profits from sales I should say, from around the world are facing currency head winds. M

But you know a point in the middle there. The sequential deceleration was primarily driven by lapping what parts saying is we're comparing this quarter to what was frankly an astonishing quarter in the same period a year ago, where they saw just incredible double digit top line growth as they recovered from the earlier stages of the pandemic um.

That's a that's an interesting trick sometimes that executives used to point you to a comparison with a strong quarter, but anasts many across the bord ahead of earning exam has been downgrading the outlooks of companies, and so it's always a jolt when they missed them. So I think, what does the read across How are you thinking about what she's talking about in terms of YouTube, in terms

of advertisers, what does this mean perhaps for tomorrow for meta? Yeah, I think what we're seeing is that there's broad weakness in the ad space. Right when we had Snaps earnings last week and they scrapped guidance and they had their slowest growth on record, they gave some pretty granular deta about the pullback by advertisers. The question from the street was is this specific to Snap because of what they're offering struggling to gain traction with advert isis or is

this more widespread. In the commentary we've had from roof Pat and other Google Alphabet executives, you can see it is more widespread, and I guess that it builds some concern going into Meta earnings this Thursday. Yes, certainly, I think she in one of her key ones, she was saying, look, this is this is a pullback and advertising. The question

is is how long it lasts? And I'm sure we'll be getting some more granular detail from the calls that are going on with analysts with investors at the moment, and so smart, we thank you for delving in with the key questions with her and bringing them to us as swiftly as he did. Meanwhile, that does it for this edition of Bloompeg Technology Wednesday. Do not miss the next studio at one point, oh how many chanting a story to the door dash CEO. So you want to

be looking in on that. What is he seeing in terms of the consumer the resilience, the desire to spend up to get your deliveries as many a question also the labor market therein as well, and how we continue to consider those employees. Don't forget to check out our podcast of course as well. You can find it on

the terminal if you're lucky enough to have one. Also, of course you can go to Apple Justify to my heart, and of course go and check out what we've been making of the latest Spotify earnings, which of course have come minute. Was a big look out for what's Apples saying in its earnings later in the week, sit with us a Blue Bag TV and of course across all our products for the earnings discipline Bag