What Happens If AI Fails?, Subprime Data Center Crisis, How Bad Can SpaceX Get?

24:57Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I don't have any information to suggest that they're going to shut off their APIs. I'm just saying we might have seen the beginning of it as well. With the mythos thing, with the slow rollout of GPT 5.6. Just wait, because they may have no choice. but to shut those APIs off.

25:16Ranjan Roy:I mean, going back to what is healthy competition, I kind of like this. If you have very distinct strategies for the Frontier Labs, our strategy is it's always been about AGI or Bust, owning the intelligence, turning that into products. This is going to be our entire business. They should go for it and then let everyone else take the other route, which is what a lot of the world has been talking about over the last week of model interoperability, infrastructure, harnesses, all these kind of other things. And you have two, then it's like a cleaner competition. Who's going to win? Yeah. They should do it.

25:57Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Listen to it. And by the way, yeah, the other, or you could even make API sort of accessible only in your like trusted forward deployed engineer version. Like if you're, for instance, if you're JP Morgan and want to build with our, you know, GPT-10, We'll send some consultants over, make sure you don't get to touch the code, and we'll build products for you. But if you're Salesforce, I think that maybe we're going to compete with you. So sorry, you can't have access to anything beyond GPT-6.

26:27Ranjan Roy:But that's where, I mean, there was, how long ago was Cloud Design? Only like three months ago, right? Yeah. There's that moment of giving anthropic access to your systems and they're just going to copy your products, which I do feel is still there. Like, I mean, that's still, which is kind of the model you're talking about here, which is if you own intelligence, you can just do these kinds of things. But I don't know. How do you actually see this playing out over the next few months? Yeah, like that, like that.

27:00Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Okay, okay. Look, just, you know, we've seen, it sounds crazy the way I'm saying it, it sounds crazy, but we've seen some crazy stuff happen. uh in ai so far i don't think we're done seeing crazy things so i think that you know just just uh

27:18Ranjan Roy:i don't know prepare for the api to go away well to that's that's my thought i say i think if you if you are agi or bust follow alex's advice no i mean i think that that's i don't want them to do

27:33Big Technology Podcast Hosts:this i mean i think it would be better to have more ai for everybody but it seems like they

27:37Ranjan Roy:But that's the only – I agree. That is the only actual logical approach rather than the current kind of piecemeal one that doesn't really say like – and we're seeing that. We're seeing you come out with mythos and Kimmy comes out and like we're seeing it in real time. And then you're complaining about distillation, et cetera, et cetera. Like if you're close to AGI, own it. Yeah. And then you got a story too for the IPO.

28:07Big Technology Podcast Hosts:that is a story okay so what what happened let's keep going with our you know sort of what could go wrong theme uh this episode um i want to point you to a piece from ed zitron uh this week he calls it the subprime data center crisis now as somebody yourself who was on the floor of a trading desk during the financial crisis i'd like to run this scenario by you and you can tell us whether you think it has any parallels and we can go from there. So this is kind of Ed outlying what happens when someone wants to build an AI data center and sort of the financial machinations around that. He says, when somebody decides to build an AI data center, they form a special purpose vehicle, which then raises debt, in some cases slices it into tranches, and in most cases sells them to institutional investors, asset managers, or banks.

29:01Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Think of a SPV as its own little company and when somebody signs a contract with an AI data center company, let's say OpenAI, they are actually signing a deal with the SPV. When the SPV receives funds from the debt it raises, it makes payments to contractors and suppliers like NVIDIA for GPUs and receives the revenue from the customer contract, assuming said customer is paying or has anything to pay for. During construction, interest payments are taken out of the SPV from a pre-funded interest reserve account when a customer pays the spv uses those funds to pay for operating expenses of the data centers and then creditors based on their seniority and debt then if anything is left the holding company all this money counts as revenue so basically what i was saying is you know this is this is a risky build out it's being put together by these spvs that you know you would hope you would get the money back if you invest but you're not sure And there's got to be revenue from these AI dentist data centers to pay it back.

30:07Big Technology Podcast Hosts:What do you think about this setup? We've talked about it a little bit. But let me just give the bottom line from Ed. Put simply, every time somebody builds a data center, they form a completely separate entity that owns the chips, owns the debt, and in many cases owns most of the risk. What do you think about this in terms of a riskiness quotient? I think it's interesting.

30:33Ranjan Roy:And again, like, I actually really like how we're starting to get much more granular about how this compares to the financial crisis and mortgage-backed securities. And like, because again, the story is actually very similar in that you have the underlying asset, whether in the past it was real estate, now it's digital infrastructure, data center infrastructure. You have in the past the value, the kind of marked value of real estate was how it was measured and it kept going up. Now you have both kind of the marked value of companies, but also you have this kind of circular financing. And we've talked about this for a long time.

31:17Ranjan Roy:That is inflating the price before it was the mark of a house or entire housing market. Now it's like how that revenue is being recognized. But then the risk has already been passed off and sliced up. And then any kind of downturn going back to where we started this conversation, who owns what, who pays what is very murky. And then actually trying to get your money back, even a piece of your money back becomes very difficult. So all of those parallels are, I mean, very similar, I think, like not to not to bring us down even further after no more soccer in the World Cup. But it definitely that it's it's a logically consistent argument.

32:03Ranjan Roy:I'll give it that to start for now.

32:05Big Technology Podcast Hosts:OK, so now let's let's keep going with what Ed is arguing here. right so basically uh what he's saying is a lot of this debt is you can't really see it because it's in these special purpose vehicles as opposed to held by the companies and then it's in these opaque opaque um spvs and chopped up and farmed out through the economy so how much debt is there actually uh well this is from ed story bloomberg estimates there's over 500 billion in outstanding AI data center debt, at least$200 billion of it held by private credit, making up roughly 8 % of outstanding private credit loans. That being said, the number is likely much higher.

32:47Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Nikkei Asia reported this week that MetaGoogle, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle have accrued around$1.65 trillion in outstanding debt over the last five years with an additional hundreds of billions of dollars worth of off-balance sheet debt, meaning that the corporate structure allows the company to not include it as part of its liabilities. What do you think about this? That's pretty bad.

33:14Ranjan Roy:No, no, I mean, now that we're, and then, I mean, also I want to note the piece continues around that the money that goes into these SPVs doesn't count as a capital expenditure. So Meta recorded 88.6 billion in capital expenditures, but that doesn't include the Hyperion SPV, which had its own$46 billion of exposure. And this process is very similar. I mean, sorry, I'm like trying to see how many parallels I can draw to 2007, 2008. But like...

33:44Big Technology Podcast Hosts:It's already too many, man. It's already way too many.

33:46Ranjan Roy:But what counts is what? This needs to be a little bit more of a research story here. But I think, I mean, at the simplest level, the risk is being pushed off of like the initial asset the same way the actual house. Risk was so far away from the initial asset. Now, even Google Metastalk, when you have$46 billion of exposure, a bunch of circular financing and revenue recognition that none of us have any really clear idea on. and like that level of risk. And Ed does continue about how he's estimating 70 % of this capacity from Microsoft, Amazon, Google is OpenAI and Anthropic. So that's the other big part of this is those two companies have committed like all of the other side of the trade are OpenAI and Anthropic actually being able to meet these commitments and give them that money to fund this SPV to actually make the whole thing work.

34:49Ranjan Roy:And as I'm saying all of this, like, my God, how...

34:53Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Dual points of failure.

34:55Ranjan Roy:It's a problem. Is it only those? Is there a world, actually, is there a world where everyone else fails and OpenAI and Anthropic come out okay? They're not the points of failure. Oh, I guess the AGI. AGI. And hoarding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It all comes back. I thought Sam said AGI is not a thing anymore. Remember?

35:17Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I don't recall him saying that.

35:19Ranjan Roy:No, remember after GPT-5, I think he was like, it's not as important. I'm going to let him.

35:25Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Oh, yeah. He basically talked about how we should probably agree that we've kind of breezed past AGI and are on our way to super intelligence. But either way, the concept remains. So let's go back to Ed. Ed says, to be abundantly clear, the vast majority of AI data center compute revenue is contingent on the continued ability of two unprofitable, unsustainable AI companies to raise tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This is not an overstatement. This is not hyperbole. This is quite literally the situation we're stuck in. So let me see if I can outline Ed's argument by taking the latter, you know, one by one.

36:03Big Technology Podcast Hosts:we have these spvs that have created a lot of debt throughout the economy and a lot of that debt is being held by private equity and banks the size of the debt that they are holding is massive you know potentially trillions of dollars or more than a trillion dollars the only way that this doesn't end up in in a disaster is if basically open ai and anthropic have the exponential increases in revenue continue in a way that you know we'll have to be massive to make this to pay this money back and if opening eye and anthropics revenues do not continue to accelerate uh accelerate exponentially effectively the entire economy is going to be like the bag holders here and there will be a cascading financial crisis because of the amount of debt that will not be able to be paid back because of the way that this is all structured and the dependencies.

37:10Big Technology Podcast Hosts:What do you think about that argument?

37:11Ranjan Roy:No, but the entire economy as the bag holder, I mean, I think in that analysis too, OpenAI and Anthropics certainly are holding some bags there because that's basically saying that they're not going to be like going entities at a certain point. I think, I don't know, I guess it all, again, it comes back to timeframe. And this is where, like, how fast the data centers need to generate cash immediately and how fast can they generate cash. And that's kind of been what has been hammering Oracle is that very quickly, especially because that was actually, to their credit, straightforward debt fuel. And everyone's very quickly realizing, actually, this might take a little longer.

37:57Ranjan Roy:So I think, again, the question of does it happen and then how severe, I think those are the two very important ones. And does it happen? There's no way. This all demanded perfect execution from everyone in the industry. Like perfect execution. Again, I feel like the expectation set, OpenAI, like post-ChatGPT for a while, was in perfect execution mode. Anthropic, from the release of Cloud Code for like six, seven months, was in perfect execution mode. But as we already see, that is not a thing in infinite, like in an infinite timeline. So something has to give is just how much. But I don't know.

38:46Ranjan Roy:I still always wonder, too, like, shouldn't there be more information about this? And like Ed Zitron, to his credit, has been talking about this for months now, maybe even years. Like, I'm actually more surprised this isn't a more deeply reported thing by every major publication or every analyst itself.

39:08Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Well, Ed basically makes that point in his piece, saying that there should be more coverage of this, and it's surprising that it isn't. I don't know. I think there should be. I honestly think publications should be running with this stuff. And, you know, to go back to our prior quote, that the burden of proof is on the skeptics right now. And, you know, if it flips, it will be on the optimists. Well, I think that part of this discussion, and by the way, you and I were very optimistic about this technology. But we've always kept in mind that the business could be a big problem because of the magnitude and the dependencies here.

39:45Big Technology Podcast Hosts:And I think that the narrative should be more balanced in a way that we try to do here, right? Like, you know, there might be some people out there who are like, why are you spending, you know, 15 minutes on Ed Zitron? You know, and I'm like, we got to tackle these. It matters. Yeah, it matters. So I don't know. I think you have a good point here. Let me read Ed's last bit here. He writes, he writes, for me to be wrong, there will have to be dramatic amounts of AI compute demand, hundreds of billions of worth within the next three years. at a time when there's a little more than$120 billion, with 80 % or more of that coming from two companies that can only afford it because they have near infinite sums of venture capital behind them.

40:26Big Technology Podcast Hosts:And for some context, the entire global software market is estimated to be around $779 billion in 2026. Just my attempt to add some nuance here. I don't think anybody would have predicted OpenAI and Anthropa getting to$120 billion as quickly as they have. so i'm not saying they'll necessarily bring all that demand online but it's not an impossibility

40:52Ranjan Roy:well that's the thing too that i mean that's the frustrating part and this is why i'm like the burden of proof being on the optimists is is a good thing it's like their growth has been spectacular unprecedented i mean choose your choose like how you want to describe it but it's still not enough currently to make all this work and i think that that is that's like again why i do not consider this healthy like you have unprecedented growth earth-shattering growth and it's still not enough i know it's unfair to ask

41:32Big Technology Podcast Hosts:you to predict this ranjan but what do you think the chances are for us to have like an you know sort of unraveling of our economy, maybe not to the tune of the financial crisis, but one that is, you know, let's say 30 percent of it because of these AI investments.

41:49Ranjan Roy:See, I still, again, having sat there on a trading floor during the entire crisis, like the big difference here is it's still like at a minimum, this is going to only affect a class of capital holders that like it's not everyone who has a house. That's everyone. And so the knock-on effects, the actual acceleration of housing prices declining, leading to instant wealth effect issues versus anyone who has been able to invest in a Hyperion SPV, you're going to be doing okay. Like you're going to be doing okay. If you are a retail shareholder of Micron or like SpaceX or whatever else, you might get hit more quickly.

42:38Ranjan Roy:But I still think a difference and like what are the – so I think the systemic effects are potentially to the market as a whole. And then you could have your second and third order effects on what that can do to other companies and retail shareholders. But the big, big difference here is everyone or I mean, lots of people own houses. Not everyone is able to invest in the Hyperion SPV.

43:05Big Technology Podcast Hosts:You know, an interesting thought experiment here is what does this do to the open AIs and anthropics of the world who are, you know, basically triple levered on reaching AGI? you know so to speak and is an outcome that we could potentially see is everything that ed anticipates comes to fruition and that they can't pay back these contracts leads to debt they can't raise any more money um do we end up like seeing them be acquired by yeah i think big tech companies

43:34Ranjan Roy:and just imagine you know amazon and microsoft on stage with a smile on his face or john turnus as per our Ternus fanfic from last week. On stage, acquired OpenAI for far less than the value of even their, like, three rounds ago, saying Siri is finally going to get actually good. I mean, I don't think that's not an unreasonable outcome to any of this, like, which is, again, back to normal economies, like, normal healthy economies, is that fast-growing startup has massive acceleration, valuation increases, something doesn't pan out, larger company with a strategic interest buys it. It's not crazy.

44:21Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I was going to say, you know, if we hadn't seen the past month play out the way that it has for SpaceX, you know, does Elon go full circle and acquire open AI? It actually could happen in the combined Tesla and SpaceX entity.

44:37Ranjan Roy:I mean, that would be something. That would be – I mean, it is crazy. When we talk vibe shifts, though, like this is what's going to be really interesting to see. On this show, I don't think we have ever discussed the acquisition of either of those two companies. This might be the first time we've ever started hypothesizing around what does that look like, which is crazy because we hypothesize about everything. Yes, we do. Eternus and what his personality behind that veneer of calmness might be. But like if we're doing that, if other people are doing that, that's I mean, that's a big shift. And I think I think it's already happened.

45:19Ranjan Roy:I think that's already here. And we've seen plenty of pieces of it. I guess I'm curious, like, did I saw this one tweet around like OpenAI and we had brought this up on the show last week about how them not being able to invest in AGI by having like normal business pressures is effectively negative for the economy and humanity. Like, then I this one tweet around that, like all the responses from like very tech VC types was basically like, they can't fail, we should not allow them to fail. They're too big to fail. Like it's bad, just for everybody and you could just feel the level of kind of like over investment into them uh i don't know across at least large percentages of the population yeah no i've seen that too and

46:13Big Technology Podcast Hosts:i think i think it would be bad for them to fail right if you think about all the energy uh in ai a lot of it has been sparked by open ai right like google google missed um you know the chat bot moment and only entered because of you know chat gpt and sort of you think about the enterprise side of things open ai has sparked that um i don't know i think it would be it's the energy of a company like open ai is overall good despite its shortcomings and it has plenty I think it's overall good and sort of you would you would you'd likely lose a lot of that if they sort of went in house at Microsoft or especially Apple.

46:55Ranjan Roy:I'm going to push back heavily on that, mainly because actually that energy, again, working in enterprise AI for a company that is only focused on enterprise AI since its founding. You see how that energy distorts the proper conversation very quickly when open AI comes in. Like suddenly the way people approach it, the scale with which you need to actually approach and try to solve problems and build things out, which is what I think has happened to a lot of AI across on the consumer side as well. It's like that it has to be thought of and done as a certain way rather than this is technology. It's great technology.

47:35Ranjan Roy:Let's figure out what to do with it. Just have a normal path to actually doing something with it rather than that manic energy. And I think that's what the promise of AGI and the conversation around it is created. I'm really liking this returning to a healthy economy and going back to – actually, I believe the burden of proof should be on the optimists, not the skeptics.

48:00Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Do you agree? I am going to say, and this won't be a surprise to our listeners, the burden of proof should be on anybody saying anything.

48:09Ranjan Roy:like we shouldn't give any side of free pass well no no but but i guess it's more like if you are selling something yeah you should i agree if you are heavily skeptical if you're the ed zitron in this case you should also be sharing your burden and proof but i think what happened is like the assumption was that yeah like optimism is a default inherent good and actually this is kind of like a bigger philosophical thing i feel in the valley where you hear all these people saying like even to just question something is bad and you have to have unfettered optimism and that's what's powered the valley since it's kind of incarnation but like no introspection i don't like it i just ask pro introspection i like questions yeah yeah well

48:58Big Technology Podcast Hosts:that's what we do here yeah that's why we pod um all right let's go let's go to break uh before we go to break i just want to um give folks a heads up on what scheduling is going to look like over the next couple weeks um so ron john and i are going to uh be on break for a bit but the show will continue um so we're going to have our typical wednesday episodes as usual the friday episode will look a little different until we both come back so i'll give you a heads up as to who we have coming on. Looks like Dick Costolo, ex-Twitter CEO will be on our Friday show next week. The following week, MG Siegler will step in on the Friday show.

49:39Big Technology Podcast Hosts:The week after that, we're actually going to do a replay of an old interview that I did with Johan Hari about the impact of Ozempic on our economy and health. I really liked that interview and it happened before many of you joined the show as listeners. So that's coming on Friday the 14th of August and then Ranj and I will be back on the 21st of August. So we're going to do as best as we can to get through these summer weeks but don't worry, show hasn't changed. Just slight break for both of us and we look forward to seeing you then. And yes, two episodes a week on the show at least coming at you.

50:18Big Technology Podcast Hosts:So with that, we're going to take a quick break and come back right after this. This episode is brought to you by DeepL. When I sat down with DeepL's founder, Yarek Kutlyovsky, on YouTube recently, we got into the case for specialized AI. DeepL Voice is what it looks like when the stakes are real-time conversation. And honestly, it's something I wish I'd had for my own cross-border interviews, turning a language barrier into a non-issue. DeepL Voice delivers live translation in over 40 languages for virtual meetings and in-person conversations, helping people speak in their preferred language without losing flow or nuance.

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52:19Big Technology Podcast Hosts:That's ironworld.com slash bigtechnology. Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. And we're back here on Big Technology, Podcast Friday edition. Wow, a lot of news developments this week. We really only have time for one more, though. So maybe, Ranjan, you and I, when we come back, we can talk a little bit more about distillation and whether open source AI should exist, although the consensus is now going towards, Yes, everybody's coming out and saying we should have open source AI. So we'll keep covering that story. But you have brought up that you want to talk about whether SpaceX and Tesla might merge and how steep the fall of SpaceX could be.

53:06Big Technology Podcast Hosts:And I think it just fits thematically with our episode this week. So Ranjan, take it away in terms of what you think is going to happen with these two companies.

53:14Ranjan Roy:I think those are two separate questions around, you know, will SpaceX and Tesla merge? And then the other is what is actually happening with SpaceX? As we're recording, SpaceX is at around 114, which is still one and a half trillion dollars in market cap. This is a company that has 18.7 billion dollars in revenue last. So one thing to note that's interesting is like already it's down significantly from when it had crossed 200 and Elon Musk, everyone was not just became a trillionaire, but a multi-trillionaire. No, no.

53:50Big Technology Podcast Hosts:He was worth more than – he was worth two trillion? No way. No, no.

53:55Ranjan Roy:He was closing in on it. Like there was one day, I think, when it went to like$2.20 or so intraday. Basically, after crossing$1 trillion, he very, very quickly started. It started skyrocketing. And then everyone was like, oh, we might hit the second trillion quickly. He did not actually achieve the$2 trillion valuation. Yes. I love that this is even an actual conversation because that's for a company with$18.7 billion in revenue. To me, what's interesting is already we've seen this drop, but it's still like a lot of people have said, like, you know, it's already happened. This is crazy. But there's still, again, given its revenue, plenty of room to go.

54:36Ranjan Roy:The other big thing is on August 6th, there's another wave of shares that will be unloaded into the market. And it's two days after they report their earnings. So suddenly this is remember, they brilliantly went out to the market saying it is worth this ungodly valuation and kind of anchoring things there, only releasing less than 5 % of actual available shares to the market to actually create that kind of artificial restricted demand and played it all perfectly. But basically, I think we're going to see and I guess a big question is, is it a leading indicator for AI or is it just kind of a referendum on what you think about Elon?

55:18Ranjan Roy:I mean, I think the next month and a half are going to be really, really interesting for SpaceX itself before we get into the merger. Do you think it's in danger or do you think this is just kind of a healthy rationalization going back to the question of the day?

55:37Big Technology Podcast Hosts:You know, I will recall before SpaceX went public, I think this was in one of our conversations. I told you that I got angry at the S-1 that they had filed with the SEC because it was detached from reality and said that I expected a pop. but eventually it would come back down to earth and that is obviously what's happened. It's going to fall more, I think. I mean, this is obviously not investment advice, right? It's just talking my personal opinion here. But as you mentioned, there are going to be not just one pocket but many pockets of employee shares that are going to come on and be available to be sold.

56:18Ranjan Roy:Yeah, the August 6th is actually going to be... The August 6th is going to be a bigger allocation than the initial IPO of what's actually available to be sold.

56:27Big Technology Podcast Hosts:So what we're not expecting? I mean, it's simple supply and demand, right? When you have more sellers than buyers, number go down.

56:34Ranjan Roy:HODL, yeah. No, you just, yeah. Diamond bands. I haven't said that in like three years.

56:42Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Yeah, it really worked out well for all those people. Okay, more interesting. Are they going to merge with Tesla? because I put down the market caps before we started talking and Tesla's at a 970 market cap, a billion market cap and again, SpaceX 1.5 trillion. So do they merge? Can they merge? What happens there?

57:00Ranjan Roy:Well, I think, I mean, Elon being Elon and what he does so well, already just starting to hint and seed this. And I think whether it's a good or bad idea is going to be interesting, but he had already on Tesla's earnings call, you know, said, as you can tell from the many collaborations on so many fronts with SpaceX. There's more and more overlap. We can't talk about, you know, combining companies and that kind of thing on an earnings call. It's got to be done with the appropriate process. Just brilliant. And just giving that little nugget to the world, starting to seed that idea. And I think it's almost it has to happen because these two companies, again, Tesla has a car business.

57:44Ranjan Roy:SpaceX kind of has a space business still, has an internet satellite business. But they are kind of bets on Elon Musk, and he's been a very good bet for a long time. But splitting them out is actually very difficult. If you're an Elon fanboy, which one do you put your money in? When do you put your money in? Because you're betting on the same thing, basically. and a lot of remember tesla had an ai story to it that's kind of gone away which is not good for a car company because it can never be valued as a car company so to me they have to

58:21Big Technology Podcast Hosts:merge yeah all right actually i'm going back to this uh spacex uh ipo because you know we we uh we reacted that week and we called it spacex or i called it spacex's ipo triumph and we both commented on how well they executed the IPO. And sure, they made a lot of money for the people on the inside, you know, on IPO day. But do we still think it was flawless execution?

58:45Ranjan Roy:Well, this is where, and apologies to listeners in terms of sometimes it's hard for me where I'm like, I will like differentiating between what is good and right versus what it actually just given a flawed system works. And to me, the flawless execution was manipulating the system in a way to enrich yourself and a few others. And that's a very cynical use of the word flawless execution. But in that game, I still think it was flawless. For having$18.7 billion in revenue and losing$4 billion on that revenue to get that valuation, can you argue that that's not just in terms of like the game itself pretty freaking good yeah i'm watching ever watch alice

59:38Big Technology Podcast Hosts:in borderland wait no what is that it's a great show on netflix it's uh this japanese show where basically like all these contestants end up in these games but if you lose the game you die

59:49Ranjan Roy:it's so good it's like one of the best shows isn't that squid game it's it's a different it is that

59:56Big Technology Podcast Hosts:is Squid Game has a version of that, but it's a different take on it. It's so, so good.

1:00:04Big Technology Podcast Hosts:And, yeah, and it's all just like, well, I'm just playing the game, and, you know, you end up leading to other people's deaths. So, I don't know. I'm thinking about cynical, you know, gameplay. Wait, wait, hold on. Playing the game the best way is, I have different thoughts about it now after watching this.

1:00:22Ranjan Roy:Wait, sorry, what's the plot again? I'm very curious now.

1:00:26Big Technology Podcast Hosts:They are, there's just these series of games that you go into. And you willingly go into, you willingly choose to. Well, maybe, maybe not.

1:00:36Ranjan Roy:Okay. Probably not. We don't want to give it away. We don't want to give, I still want to watch myself now, but.

1:00:43Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I'm not saying it's the exact parallel. I'm just making the point that like, I can't, you know, too often I think we're like, oh, you played it well. You know, even if people get hurt. And I think that that's, that is. there's not a criticism on you I would like to add

1:00:59Ranjan Roy:a recurring disclaimer when discussing Elon Musk I will I mean we can get into what it actually means for the overall economy and society versus he executed the SpaceX IPO to benefit existing shareholders of SpaceX very well

1:01:21Big Technology Podcast Hosts:that's my nuance That good sell. Yeah. Okay. We'll take it. Do you think, all right, we recon, you and I recon, we'll still have the Friday show going, but you and I reconvene 21st of August. Has that move been announced?

1:01:37Ranjan Roy:Oh. The merge? Okay. Oh, let's get into predictions for 21st of August. And I think that's a good way to walk out of here. No, I think it's too soon. Elon told us it would still require the appropriate processes, But I think we're going to get a lot of, even though I don't even know what that would mean in the world of Elon in terms of like his ownership and control over both companies. I think he could just say it. I think he's going to be hinting a lot more aggressively over the next few weeks.

1:02:08Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Does that benefit SpaceX or Tesla more?

1:02:12Ranjan Roy:I think equally it benefits them both. And I think I'm neutral on that. I don't think it necessarily benefits one more than the other. They're both incredibly overvalued companies that are betting on a much larger promise of a robotic economy that Tesla and Optimus robots everywhere or data centers in space. So neither of those are rational things in the near term. So they're the same bet. So why not combine them?

1:02:43Big Technology Podcast Hosts:You know who makes that even more attractive? Combining with open AI.

1:02:51Ranjan Roy:Okay, hold on. Where is the state of AI optimism and skepticism and what are the optimists proving within their burden of proof by August 21st by the time we're back?

1:03:06Big Technology Podcast Hosts:well we're about to we're like basically at the face of all this big tech earnings so i think that like the google thing might have just been the beginning let's see what amazon says on capex let's see what microsoft says on capex let's see what apple says uh about ai let's see what meta says about ai i think we're heading towards a you know i i don't i asked at the beginning why am i feeling down about things um i would argue that there's we're probably about to go into a period where the questioning of the AI's economics. And I don't think that's like, I don't think that that is like a bad thing, just to be clear.

1:03:44Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I just think that like the clouds, the dark clouds are looming and it's about to get rainy.

1:03:51Ranjan Roy:I think Murphy's law of the moment you go on vacation is when the most news happens. I think we're already going to be having to message each other and risk our marriages and families as we're like, do we look what's happening? Must be odd.

1:04:11Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I shouldn't even, I mean, I'm open to it. I shouldn't even admit this. I'm doing a solo vacation because my wife recently started a new job and does not have enough off days. I'm just going to hit the road on my own.

1:04:27Ranjan Roy:All right, all right. Sitting, where are you going again?

1:04:30Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I'm going to go to Indonesia.

1:04:32Ranjan Roy:Ah, okay. How about you? I'll be in London and Spain.

1:04:38Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Ooh, very nice.

1:04:40Ranjan Roy:As long as we... Let's see what happens, but August 21st feels a long time away. That's a long time away.

1:04:47Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Yeah, I was going to say, I beseech the gods of AI news to leave us alone for a couple weeks, but it won't happen.

1:04:52Ranjan Roy:Just slow down, guys. Slow down. You know it.

1:04:55Big Technology Podcast Hosts:You know it. Nothing.

1:04:56Ranjan Roy:No more model releases. No more competition. No more... Just leave it alone for a few weeks. Let everyone rest.

1:05:04Big Technology Podcast Hosts:we'll be back Opus 5 came out Opus 5 out today whatever latest and greatest alright should we break let's do it alright alright Ronjana I'm gonna miss you man I will I'm gonna miss you I'll see you in a few weeks we'll see you each other in a few weeks or before TBD alright thanks again for coming on great to see you alright and great to be with you all once again thank you for listening and watching and we will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast

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