TRASHFUTURE - Goosed in the Shell (A Better Offline / Trashfuture Collaboration)

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Ed Zitron and the TF Crew are on both your feeds this week to discuss the Softbank slide deck breakdown you’ve all been waiting for. It’s nothing other than the goose, and whether or not the goose was valued, and what kind of factory does a goose use to make golden eggs. Softbank Presentation here. Check out Better Offline at https://www.betteroffline.com!

It is with great excitement that I would like to announce the newest joint venture in the high-tech world between Trash Future Podcast Limited, formerly oil warehouse, formerly NFT, tax loss harvesting service, formerly, I believe, several kinds of consulting firm and maybe a private investigator, and our good friends at Better Offline. And of course, I'm representing the SoftBank Zitron merger. did earlier in the year in which case I am now technically Masayoshi son's son and so

we are related he is my father and I am his son now I am Masayoshi son we are all Masayoshi's son on some level welcome to better offline and trash future at the same time yeah it's TF X Zitron oh it's beautiful I'm so excited to announce

that between our two shows which are our independent company and IHeart we're actually going to be building. Look, Meta and Blue Owl have said they're going to be building a data center, an AI data center the size of, I believe, several Manhattan's. Well, we are building a podcast generating data center that will cover 19 Staten Islands and cost only $1 trillion. It's expected to generate upwards of $50 a year. People are telling me, you're on too many podcasts, November, and I will

not stop. Not only am I starting more podcasts, but I'm also folding more into. the existing podcast. So pretty soon, everything will be trash future. Yes. So I'm trying to stop us from building the data center, saying that it's not viable. And to that, I say to him, well, have you ever started a business that's been successful? No, you haven't. So shut up. We all know. That's one of the two things that can happen in New York City. Yeah. I mean, this is a really obvious thing when you look at Zoraamandani. You look at that guy and you say, that guy doesn't know a thing about being successful. I'm pretty certain that guy's never succeeded at anything. Yeah, he's truly disliked by New Yorkers. That's the thing that I hear from

them. They're not just like welling up with pride over his Fourth of July speech. They don't love the fact that he fixed the Williamsburg bike lane. No, no, no. It's all just everyone's sitting in their apartments in Connecticut, where they live most of the time other than the one day of the year where they come into New York to complain. Well, okay, I did say 19 Staten Islands. What if we data centered over Staten Island and just made it 19 stories? Stories. How about that? Actually, based on everything I know about Staten Island, the people there might approve,

but they might just be like, ah, fuck it. We've done our best. We've automated Staten Island. No, welcome to TF Better Offline. And here's the thing. TF listeners have been saying to me, like in our Discord and stuff, why haven't you covered the Maseyoshi, the newest piece of, I guess, outsider art published by SoftBank in the form of their investor presentation?

It's so beautiful. There's always a lot in them. And Masayoshi-san, your father, our, I believe, uncle, has these fucking podcast Napo babies. There's always some visual metaphor. I think that Masayoshi-san decides this is going to be how I communicate to everybody

the thing that ChatGBTGPT and I stayed up all night for a month kind of coming up with. Yeah. And it used to be like flying unicorns, right? how they would fly over like the trench of despair and into like the future of optimism. Yeah, the trench of coronavirus, right? That was one of his. Yeah, the trench of COVID. That was the one. The valley of coronavirus.

Now, this soft bank presentation has, I would say, a different recurrent visual metaphor that starts around slide 440. And we'll link to this in the notes so that you can behold the goose. Yeah. So can everybody turn to slide 44 in your packs? please. I'm there. This is, it's beautiful. I am crying. So what I have in front of me, in case you can't turn to slide 44 in your packs because you're catching up on our investor presentation, our presentation of SoftBank's investor presentation, imagine your investor in SoftBank. Maybe you're a pension fund. Your Ontario teachers. You've invested in SoftBank.

And Masayoshi-San, you can see his face light up because he's about to give you his visual metaphor. Slide 43 to 44, transition. It's a picture of a goose. In five golden eggs. Yep. That's right. And the thing, yeah. The thing is, like, it actually does make sense when you read it 100 times because, well, actually, let's go a little bit into it and then I'll give a full explanation.

Because there is a logic. It's just insane. Generally, I love the graphics. Like, I've got a friend who's like, he does, like, his job is to sort of apparently upgrade decks. He does, like, he does consulting for, like, companies to be like, here's how you can make. your PowerPoint presentations look better because... I had a real, like, do you pronounce it, unionized or un-ionized moment there, right? Like, Decks, like, the thing you have, like, outside of a house?

Well, I mean, I asked him in terms of, like, what you mean, like, Magic, The Gathering, which, I guess would make more money. But, but I saw this, and I sent this to him, and he was... And he, and, like, his reaction, I think, was one of the funniest things that I've ever, I've sort of ever encountered. Every graphic in this presentation is a mixture of graphic design is my passion, but also like, I sort of feel like it's actually

ironically beautiful. Yes. This is amazing. It's an amazing... It's genuinely beautiful because... So, I must be clear, when the goose is SoftBank, right? The goose appears like seven times in this as well, right?

Okay. So SoftBank is the goose. Masayoshi Son is the gander. Masayoshi Son mounts and impregnates SoftBank, by which I mean invest money in companies using SoftBank's funds, at which point the goose, which is SoftBank, becomes pregnant and the portfolio company grows larger, then it lays the egg, the portfolio company goes public.

Basically, SoftBank is a company that invests in companies then go public and make SoftBank money in theory. And Masayoshi's son just vigorously, you could more normally call this like an incubator, but instead he's picturing himself as a virile goose. Yes, exactly. He's just, he is just like absolutely going to town on the goose of SoftBank every year. Jesus.

It's so disgusting. Coming up to the lexon, grasping it with both hands and talking to a lot of people who have real sort of influence in terms of capitalist central planning and going, I've been fucking Gooses. Can you imagine being a major investor in softening? But the Japanese government is invested in this company through ETFs. And you're just like, great, what do what Masayoshi's got for me this year? And you're just like, what, what?

I think the sort of interesting question about this slide deck and about Masayoshi son himself is like, yes, there is a logic if you work hard enough. This is also true of the ramblings of someone experiencing a florid mental health episode on public transport. who we've, you know, decided as a society now, I guess, it's okay to kill that person. But it's not okay to kill Masayoshi's son. And I don't really know how to reconcile those two things. Not to say that we approve of that for legal reasons, just to be clear. Yeah, I mean, that's your dad. I wouldn't say that you should leave my father alone. Anyway, sorry, Raleigh. So basically, and this is, the mental health point, I think, is interesting, right? Because there's this, idea that's been going around,

that's been going quite sort of in like legitimate business publications that CEOs are getting AI psychosis. Yes. It's just that because their CEOs, you know, they when they get AI psychosis, they don't like get on the path train and have a heart attack or trying to meet like their fake

girlfriend from character AI, which more or less sort of actually happened to somebody. Yeah. Details slightly different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But in this case, they get up on stage and they say, I have, I am destined, I am destined to bring about the birth of an artificially super intelligent God through this goose that has historically not been valued. Because if you turn to slide 47, you'll see the main problem is goose was not valued. Yes, goose value zero. And I think of,

I don't know if you remember the Rob Wisman fake Uber YouTube thing, the listeners are going to love this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just him going, Uber driver suck me off and he's just like, shrugging. I just think like Goose value zero. Goose value zero. It's really good. I imagine this in the,

I imagine this in the Dark Souls font. Goose not valued. Well, this is the thing, right? What we've got here is, and I think it's interesting the AI sort of cyber psychosis thing because Masayoshi sounds very open about using AI,

spending a lot of time talking to AI, really internalizing and personalizing the AI for himself. What we've done we've done a kind of like European medieval royalty thing where we've created a kind of system where if you are, you know, at the top of it, you can have the delusions and society has to conform around you. You are the king of France. Everybody has to act like you are made of glass. Oh, God, it is. It's just Versailles. It's digital Versailles. It's just that, like, everyone stinks. Everyone's

weird. It's like, it's either shit or oranges in the air. No, everyone's just like, wow, we all love loops now, right? And everyone goes, loops, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love loops. Looops are the best. Where we hate, we hate the other thing now. And so each of these eggs is a trillion yen. And the market saw only the eggs, which is the value of the companies, but the goose not valued, goose not valued. Goose not value zero, yeah. Goose value zero. But in fact, and it says, eggs do not lay eggs. And it was the goose that created the value. Many people are saying that. I died. This whole time I had it wrong. I thought the eggs are. like the eggs.

Fuck. It's very funny to have a sort of like arch-capitalist go, wait a second, this business doesn't create any of its own value. And this value's got to come from somewhere. So I assume it's from, you know, analogously a goose and non-analogously me. Yeah. So yeah, I've been doing the haters guide to SoftBank and they just went out so I'm very fresh in my mind.

And the thing that you'll note when you look back at Masayoshi San is he's a terrible fucking investor, like historically bad. other than like four times when he was amazing. He bought Alibabaabra at $20 million. He invested it, put $20 million in worth about $100 billion. Equity value at the top, sold it for about $30 billion, because that's Masiosi, son. He bought Arm for $32 billion, took it private and then took it public,

and now it's worth a bunch more money. But Yahoo Japan is the craziest one. Like, classic loser company, Yahoo, but it turns out that he managed to, through one of his weird joint ventures, stop it from being absorbed into the problematic Yahoo. But every time he does something well, it's by accident. Every time he loves also, I swear this is true, he has a thing for whimsical white boys.

Like, well, who doesn't? I mean, the Greensill, like Lex Greensill and him used to talk on the phone every day. He invested in WeWork in 28 minutes. They signed the $4.4 billion deal in the back of a car on an iPad. And it was like 2017. So the iPad wasn't very good at the time. So they're just like this fucking like clunky, probably cracked like across the front font probably 72. Just like, no, we must do this.

We must do this now. We have to do this. I'm being whimsical in front of the wrong people. Exactly. No, I genuinely think that if I got in front of Masayoshi's son for maybe 10 minutes, I could get $7 billion. But here's your father. So you hope that you will give you the time. I wish all of this could, I wish I could get in front of him.

I wish I could just tell him some of the great ideas I have about like, I don't know. Look, I have a newsletter with 108,000 subscribers. Masayoshi's son. What if it had a trillion subscribers? Huh? Right? And he'll be like, whoa, that's, and we're in on the ground floor of this. We can get in.

That's a big number, Ed. I'd love to invest $7 billion. I'll be like, I think that should be good enough to get us started, Masayoshi son, another $10 billion, and I guarantee you a trillion subscribers will happen by, it could be as early as 2019. Easy peasy. The thing is, right, I think this is a good start, right? But we've got to aim higher. Okay, okay. Yeah, what we do is we get you in front of him and we say all of this.

But then, you know, as he's sort of like, he's warming to you, you see that he's kind of receptive to this. what you do is you switch it up, right? You lean forward, you jump out of the seat, you grab him by both lapels, and you look him dead in the eye and you say, and I'm going to invent God. Oh, yeah. And how do he loves that shit?

And here's the thing. How do Christians, like, get a relationship with God? The Bible, a written document. What if the Bible could be emailed to people? Every week. Every week, they email the Bible. That's what, that's what wears your. read that is. And Masayosi's son by this point is just, he is taking out a margin loan as I'm

there. He's like, calling his bag. I need every dollar I've got. Sell it all. I need to back this. We direct all of it from OpenAI. I've got a new person who's recently who told me they're going to build God most recently. So, so basic, because that's a little, like we work was supposed to be heaven on earth. Like that was the pitch is that, oh, that you could remake, you could remake a kind prelapsarian, non-alienated community, you could have gardens of Eden everywhere. It was the point of it. But just at office sharing. That's same thing with flow.

That's supposed to be that, too. It's like, no, no, we've got a much more abstract god. Yeah. Any case. Yeah, sorry. Back to the geese. He said, so back to the geese. Can we focus on the geese on this technology podcast, please?

Sorry, sorry. I got us off of goose. My bad. So, eggs do not lay eggs, obviously. Obviously. And so, I've heard that. The mission to go, how do you go from three eggs to 74 eggs? and an increase of 71 X.

I don't need a shit load more geese. And Masayoshi, someone's got to start fucking them. It was the goose that created... It was the goose that created value. Oh. So the value came from the goose. I think I read that in capital. Yeah, so the goose value...

Goose value is 71. Right. So, goose value 71. And people didn't value the goose at 71. No. What matters is not the eggs. It is the goose itself. And true value is the power to keep laying eggs.

Right. And because of this, he estimates that in the next 16 years, he will be the first yen-based quadrillionaire, or at least soft bank will be a goose worth a quadrillion yen. I'm not sure what affects me more. The fact that this is written so much like sort of serial killer taunting the police, or the fact that it kind of appears to maybe be working. Well, the thing is, it works because Masayoshi Son is able to keep getting dead.

And genuinely, had Open AI not come along, Masayoshi Sun might have been fine. turned out so well. Like, as a chip maker, he's been able to do basically unlimited margin loans. And he was okay. He could have been fine. But then the whimsical white boy operated in front of him. And he was like, okay, this is it. Like, this is my boy. I will give him. He took out a $40 billion margin loan. Not margin. Sorry, a bridge loan. It's a year-long loan. Yeah. Jesus Christ. If you want the story on bridging loans, refer back to our episode of worth Rob Smith about bridging loans and what kinds of things they're for and what kinds of terms they usually have.

So the true source of the value, could you ever please turn to Place 55? This includes everyone listening. Okay, great. On your packet? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So the true source of the value is the golden egg factory inside the goose. Yes. And then it actually gets helpfully broken down. Like a womb, I guess? Well, so the goose here is soft bank bringing out artificial superintelligence.

Uh-huh. And the internal mechanism is an AI-generated factory of eggs that are also labeled artificial superintelligence. Yeah, each egg is ASI. Right. But eggs used to be, eggs used to be just a trillion dollars of yen. But that, sorry, a trillion yen, it's like six something billion dollars. I don't really know what the eggs mean anymore other than ASI, which is, it's kind of like a, yeah, was like Ben Garrison cartoon. Well, I mean, this is where we want to go,

I want to go back to what DeNova was saying about mental illness, right? About this is someone who, because we know what happens with Masayoshi Son. We know he talks to chat GPT every day. He's like, one of the, probably one of the world's biggest users of its like, talk to you function. And he has been convinced by it that he's going to build God. But because he is a, because he is one of the central economic planners of the global economy, he gets to allocate capital according to his delusion, as opposed to the poor schmuck

dying on the path train, who just gets like scraped off the wall that Masayoshi Song gets to fucking run through. Yeah. It's a bit like Peter Thiel, I think also went crazy with AI, has gotten more unhinged in public. Example he recently said that the Pope is a Chinese Communist Party agent, which he's not supposed to know. Right.

Look, that's, you're not, you, look, you don't have any way of proving. In fairness, in fairness, the odds of him having figured that out. were crazy low. So, like, it's no shame on the Vatican, but like, Jesus, guys. The other thing is, as well, is it's like, on top of just the ridiculousness of this, and if you had a homeless man on the tube saying, Two-sostalabat, he's golden egg factory inside the goose. You see the internal mechanism, right?

What you see are the eggs that produces them is the factories. You would, like, hopefully get them the help they needed. But because he invested in Alibaba, we have to, like, take him. this shit seriously. Now, slide 56 is also good because he invents a new kind of goose math, where egg value, I've been wasting on this, I've been using Terrans Malick's old goose math. You've heard of girl math. Get ready for goose math. It's like goose value alpha. I don't know. I'm not going to come up with an actual thing because soft bank is a valueless company outside of the things it holds. It is just a large holding company that is kind of.

of a big part, it's like the second or third largest company on the Japanese stock market. And it's like that, the other thing that I keep coming back to that really isn't shown here is that's not actually the net asset value of SoftBank. Like that's, like, I'm going to just go right. Like the net asset value right now is, yeah, $40 trillion. Like this is from SoftBank's own website. So what he is doing here is he's like, yeah, I'm adding the other 30 trillion from Open AI. He's just making up how much open AI is worth.

And as eager listeners will know right now, Masayoshi's son tried to get a margin loan on his open AI stock, all of it. And yeah, then couldn't. The banks were like, no, thank you. I was going to play this game later, but can we get an applause sound effect, please? Because we're going to have an impromptu episode of everybody's favorite game show.

With so far, it's only contested, possibly host, Ed Citron. Welcome to Is That Good! Ed, thank you for coming on the show, thank. Sprinting down from the audience. Yeah. Chosen again for the places, right? I really hope I get on Is That Good. Ed Zetron!

My fingers crossed. Like, mm-hmm. Come on, come, come, come, come. Do you have like a phone a friend option on that? No, it's just a switch. It's just an unlabeled switch. So, Ed, thank you for playing. Is that good?

Thank you for having me. So, all right. The situation you just described, where Masayoshi-san, who's already borrowed a lot of money to invest in Open AI, essentially like a sports gambler paying for his bets by borrowing from the mob,

the bet on OpenA, if you can't roll over the bet to keep on doubling down on the bet, is that good? Yes. Cool, thank you. Feel for the question again. It's amazing. It's just really funny as well because literally the, we keep coming back to the point,

literally the only reason we don't treat this man like he's an insane person is because he hasn't blown himself up yet. Like it really, and it is yet, it's like, he has taken out so much debt on Open AI, like way more than we work, like historic amounts. And he's just, and he's even, the more I think, but he's doing goose fraud right now. Like he's like, 57 claims $74 trillion of, of, uh, egg value or shareholder value. And that's not what's on Sopank's website. It's 30 trillion dollars.

So it's 48.26 trillion yen is the equity value of holdings. That's lower than 74. I'm pretty new to Goose Math, but I can see that that is still a lot. It drives me insane, actually, because it, it, world of deep equality. Masayoshi's son gets away with it only because he's a whimsical man out to Japan. Like, because he's fun. He is, and the thing is, people, you're like, oh, we got AI psychosis. It's like, I think he might have had it already. Like, without, he just got it from books. World's first case of, world's first case of AI psychosis inflicted before 2020. Well,

can I? First person to get AI psychosis from GPT, too. I, I actually want to read you a quick. quick quote about Masayoshi's son from an article. I promise you this is worthwhile. It's actually very important to understanding the whole goose thing. So from a Kakashi, great pseudonymous analyst guy I follow. So, okay, his dad was talking about him and 60-year-old Masayoshi's son. He was super wrestling, his older brother and losing badly, but he refused to stop. When his father finally pulled him away, the boys' eyes were in Mitzinari's words, his dad, like an animal, a wolf size. I thought to myself, this bastard is not human. Doing hype edits for your son-like play-fighting is really funny.

I just really like the idea of him just getting his ass kicked when he's six. And he just turns around, he just starts like demon eyes. Get world's first person to have laser eyes in real life. Look, here's the other thing, right? We're talking about Masayoshi-Sons' life. The presentation concludes with what used to be his 50-year life plan, but now is his 60-year life plan. It's so good. So his 50-year life plan was get acknowledged in your 20s, finance a war chest in your 30s, in your 40s, take on a challenge

in your 50s, complete business. I'd love to do that. Just like a bucket, like, ins-any of them, just any of them? Like an 18-year-old girl's Instagram post. Or take on a challenge. Sure. Remember ice bucket challenge for ALS in 2011? Take on that. that challenge done to finish the decade. 50s, complete business. Okay. So, complete all the business. What could that mean? Yeah.

Yeah. 60s, hand over business to next generation. But no. Fucking crossed out. No. Crossed out. This is the 60 year life plan. 60s crossed out.

Hand over business to next generation gone. It's not replaced. It now just has a 70s value, which is realizing ASI or artificial superintelligence. Nice. A similar. A term that sort of used in her chivalrous. This is like not a new hubris, right? You could have done this at any point in human history.

There were guys back in the day whose life plan was 20s, Unite Southern Song Dynasty, 30s, conquered Northern Song Dynasty, 40s, established Mandator's Son of Heaven. 50s, alchemy. 60s, alchemy. 70, never die. I feel like it's missing like. little detour. I feel like you need like a bit of a side quest to sort of really make this fun. Like, you know, you should like, you know, 55 start a ban. I don't know. There's so many like...

Yeah, seriously, learn to ride a motorcycle. No, it's, it's, in this case, it's really just like the most obvious thing of like 20s, conquer entire known world. 30s, weep because there's no more worlds to conquer. 40s, build giant statue. 50s. Start reinforcing statue at legs. Yeah, I also want to be clear. It's really funny to do this insane hour and 50 minute long presentation where you're like, slide four, JPY, one quadrillion. And they'd just be like, and I'm not retiring for at least another decade. Fuck you. I don't think that I live in a functional enough economy or society to have a life plan. Like my life plan is like 20s fuck around with mental health and drop out of uni, 30s podcast, 40s podcast, 50s podcast, 60s, climate wars, maybe?

Yeah, woke battalion in climate wars. She thinks the climate wars I'm going to start until she's in a 60s, fucking idiot. So, basically, this is, this is the story of someone who has, I think we come back around to this, because I think it's very important, someone who has been driven to mania about this thing, but who happens to be able to force that mania upon everybody else. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things I wanted to dig a little deeper into, actually, is his claim that artificial superintelligence is coming. Artificial super intelligence and artificial general intelligence, I think, are used pretty interchangeably. He uses artificial super intelligence. That basically, Massioshi San and Sam Altman are now, so Sam Altman's guys, excuse me, told Masayoshi San probably in the, we just need another, can you take out a loan to give us a loan, said that an AI model is designing the next. future AI model at Open AI. Ah.

So like, Sunset. You can't see the model or anything to do with the model. Read this like philosopher we got in to talk about, you know, the fucking constitution or whatever. It's just like, it's, they find a new key to jingle and it's like, well, why don't we invent, I don't know, make the model do something new. It's like, what if we just made the model do that? Or if we just fucking, you know, like the model could do the model stuff and we could just sit here and take the key cash, Massio. And like, it's the laziest thing in the world. It's like if any other situation,

it's like, I'll have someone else do it. You'd probably be like, they'd be like, well, no, you've got to do something. I gave you, gave you $40 billion. Like, probably want to do something with it. But Mascioshi's like, hell yeah. But what's funny is, Mascioshi's son, Sam Altman came to him in 2017, I think, and asked for $10 billion. Mascioshi's son said yes. But then Sam Altman just kind of walked off and took the money from Microsoft, and that drove Masayoshi's son insane. He was like, oh, my, I missed out, the one that got away, and now I will shower her with jewels and gems. She will be mine. Yeah. And like, the time to get it, if you wanted to sort of make money on that,

the time to get in was then, and the time to get out is now. Yeah, he really, he has invested in the worst times. He invoked his only, I would say maybe, if Open AI goes public, which is now and if, he might have done very well based on the first $40 billion,

the next 30 at the highest possible valuation, insanely stupid. And also, these hogs are going to need more money than this. $30 billion is going to go into that. Oh, yeah. We're going to go into the needing more money. But just before we move on from some,

He said, so that's going to happen to all the major models. So once that happens... Before we move on from Sun, like there will be blood. So once that happens, the model generates the next model, and it's going to be exponentially smarter than all of us. That's a super intelligence. In my mind, I thought it was coming in four years instead of the next 10. Now I'm saying it's coming in the next two.

Then the CNBC article goes on to say, The SoftBank CEO says he currently uses OpenAIs chat GPT for up to three hours a day, as the AI is smarter than he is on, quote, most subjects. That's so good for you. Three hours a day. If you're awake for 12 hours, that's a quarter of your time spent just talking to the mirror

that drives you crazy. Cool. It's what if narcissists wasn't just sucked into the pool but also driven mad by it? It's just, it's so good as well because the grander theme of this, it's pretty much all of these CEOs have AI psychosis because usually even with human beings, there is a limit to how many ideas someone will say a good, or at least before you fire them. With an AI, you can just berate them into any idea. You could just be, I heard a story of someone at a major tech company where they didn't have security access to access something. And they just said, actually, yes,

I do to the internal LLM and it gave it to them. Like, it's just, like, this is just like anything it disagrees with you, could just be like, actually that's true. And it'll go, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Sure. Like, just so can you imagine the shit he's saying to this? Like, you know, you're exactly right. The goose will lay golden eggs forever. You're absolutely right. Just the, I would love to read his logs.

I'd love to read the insane back and forth he's having with them. Masayoshi, son, your understanding of goose biology isn't just detailed. It's prescient. So, in fact, chat GBT role playing as a goose with him. No, I think you need, you need GROC's adult mode for. for that. I show my bluish. Hong, hunk. So here's what you've said, actually,

Ed, about Masayoshi-San and Open AI. If Open AI doesn't go public, there's a very real possibility that soft bank collapses or at the very least is forced to finally put an end to the era of unarrivaled financial risk. It's easy to like Masayoshi-San to laugh at his goofy geese-related presentations and I'll say as a side-dope, it is.

And his ridiculous statements about the future. But in reality, he's a deranged, delusional man with too much money and a few lucky breaks that have saved him from annihilation. his future lies in Sam Altman's hands and if this is what finally ends his wasteful, reckless reign, it's a well-deserved punishment for believing every damp, quirked-up white boy

to beg him for a billion dollars. He's an enabler, enabled by other enablers, that's created a culture of unbelievable risk and destruction. Yeah. Tell me you really think. That guy is smart. But it's really funny as well because we live in... My girlfriend brought this up. There's a Twilight Zone episode

where there's a kid who, if he doesn't believe you're happy, he turns you into an ear of corn. We basically live in that society now where it's like all of these CEOs get caught. The AI bubble is just a large coddling. It's just like, yeah, the rich people always have good ideas. We must orient ourselves around them, despite the fact that most of the industry's revenue is either Anthropic and Open AI or Anthropical and Open AI paying for the compute to lose money. Like, it's not even sophisticated.

It's just that. It's people nibbling around the edges. And Masayoshi son, literally, I must be clear, had he just not invested in Open AI, Stockbank would be doing great. It would be, it would perhaps not have had the massive on-paper gain of Open AI stock going up, but like it probably also wouldn't have needed $40 fucking billion. $40 billion. It's just, and I wasn't able to add up all the debt and do a deep analysis of that part yet,

but it really does seem that at some point he's just not going to be able to refinance the loan and run out of money. It's just like a teenager with a credit card, except it's $150 billion of debt and there's goose involved. And what OpenA, what SoftBank is doing via OpenAI right now, this is my very refreshingly candid telecoms.coms.com article is that it's going to take on additional debt in order to build data centers, more data centers in the U.S. tens of billions of dollars in AI data centers in the U.S. And giving more money of that to open AI. So the data center project is called, I believe, SB. Neo. Yep. And they are going to, again, say, okay, we're going to build 10 gigawatts of data center, right?

But quick question, we talk about data centers a lot. You and I, we talk about data centers a lot on this show. You and I talk about data centers a lot. Do you have any of the enormous supply? chain bottlenecks that have largely prevented data centers from being built, but yet let alone the sort of, let's say, lack of demand from outside the industry for their services. Are any of those bottlenecks alleviated? Can you get a gas turbine right now? No. And the thing is as well, is just data centers are taking like 18 to 36 months to build.

So him saying we're going to build five or two, he did a thing with France as well. It doesn't bear repeating something with Emmanuel Macron. And he's like, they're building 5 gigawatts there, 10 gigawatts here, you may as well be talking about the year 2090s, like, because just the speed of construction, put aside any thoughts I have about the AI bubble, the speed of building these things is very

slow, and that's before the power comes in. It's just the power doesn't exist either. Again, if you took away the money, this person would sound fucking insane, well, they do right now, but like, you would laugh them out of the building. If just a random guy was like, I'm going to raise

10 gigawatts. So a trillion dollars, because a gigawatt is now 100 billion dollars. Trillion dollars. I'm going to raise a trillion dollars for a data center. And then one company's going to rent all of it. And yeah, that company loses money, but like, they won't. And anyone else, you'd be like, you sound like a moron, man. But because it's Mashioshi's son, because it's O'Bernay-I Sam Orton, because it's Dario Amadee. You're like, oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That makes perfect sense. These are the guys. They're the guy. They're the All things have, and with inequality accelerating, with the bets, the actual bets on the future getting better, getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, and smaller, and smaller number

of big hands, if you like, you get a kind of, you sort of rebuild like a pharaonic system of kingship from first principles where, you know what? You can just be like, you know what, we're working, we're, we're, we're monotheistic now. Egyptian polytheism is done. We're going to try monotheism for three generations. And you, But the problem is also, being in a pharaonic system like that with sort of this much concentration of, you know, this much allocation of productive capacity to madness is quite, I'm going to surprise you quite damaging. Because the question of can you get a gas turbine, that's super important for lots of stuff

other than AI data centers. It's just these data centers are, in some cases, because of political pressure, like in the UK, able to skip the queue for certain kinds of planning or grid hookup capacity. or, you know, they're just, they're clogging up the order book for these things that will just get deployed to these data centers that we're going to explore if people are, let's say, using enough and profitably enough to make them viable. And all those spiking infrastructure demand has now is now going out to other, it's like spreading through other pieces of like infrastructure, like hard to build infrastructure equipment. Right. Really? Quick question. Has anything else happened recently to maybe fuck up global infrastructure at all?

Something in the World Cup maybe? Yeah. The England will. People watch the World Cup. Yeah. Because I kind of feel like the Straits of Hormuz fucking up the supply chain for this and everything else.

It's sort of like one point on the sort of trifecta, the palace logo of we are really fucking bad. at long latency stuff as people. So, like, it's... I'm sure all of the consequences of this will just be fine for an extremely, like, fragile, sort of delicately balanced

to goose-fucking portfolio. But that actually leads me to an important point, which is, let's take the AI people at face value. Don't know why we're doing that, but let's do it. They are saying, because based on an Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, says, trillion dollars of GPU's visibility sales through the end of 2027. It's about $400,500 billion a year worth of AI compute revenue, just needed to pay for that. Put aside my thoughts,

just like, you need that. This is not a hyperbole. This is like, you need that money. The demand doesn't exist. But on top of that, they are just saying, yeah, the AI bubble is going, the boom, even in their mind, is going to just keep going. We're just going to spend $3 trillion on this every year. And when you ask them how that works, they're just like, the money will be there. The money, how are we going to substantiate the money will be there? The money will be there. It will happen. The demands there. And you're like, well, there's compelling proof it isn't there. And they're like, well, it's a great way of, it's a great way of magicing away these long latency problems you bring up Nova, like climate change, for example. We were talking earlier. It was like,

well, the warming that's happening now was from emissions from, I don't know, 40 years ago, whatever, right? Like, this is all big dick. If you, if you stopped, like, any CO2 emissions, like today, we would still be logged in on, like, decades of warming, which is really going to fuck up my life plan, I think. Yeah, that's good. Climate Wars in the 60s, come on. Yeah, you're going to have to add another decade. So, but their answer to this, the way that the AI comes and forestalls, like, actual good long-term latency planning is it's like, well, the AI is going to be smarter than us because it's going to be super intelligent. So we won't have to solve long latency problems. We don't have to worry about the fact. I love that. Well, that's a relief. To be honest,

because I hate solving problems. And to be honest, in my 60s, I'm hoping to get into like alchemy. So here's another stat I picked up, right? Which is it's no longer, it's not just gas turbines anymore. High voltage transformer lead times have gone from 12 months to 48 in some cases. So good luck. So for example, at a time where we need to do, let's say, an energy transition or time when, say, even just in the UK, right, national level grid upgrades are more or less needing to happen in the next 10 years or it's going to be like rolling blackouts. All the high voltage transformers you can order

are going to the God machine, which will then solve the grid problem some other way. I just like, yeah, I do. This is like, we'll work it out when we work it out using the working it out machine. I just keep giving it money. and then at some point, you know, you work it out. What are you being a quat by it?

Come on, man. Just give me $10 billion. You're being, you're being lame. You're being lame, man. Come on. And also, it's like, another thing is really funny

that the sphere is always, oh, AI is going to be a paperclip maximizer, right? The entire, the whole world and universe in all matter we made into paper clips by an AI, but if you look at what we're doing with data centers,

and we're going to go on again to the profitability of the, in a second because some stuff has happened there, is you don't need the AI to be a paperclip maximizer because capitalism as a system is already maximizing the paperclips in the form of the data centers. We're cannibalizing useful things to build this. You can't upgrade the grid anymore because all of the transformers

are being turned into effectively paperclips. Yeah. And that's not even touching data bricks, which is another N-scale type SNAP-O that got uncovered by a similar know that you can be saying that, Riley. Sorry. Sorry. Check out no gods or mayors.

But we'll go into that on Thursday. Anyway, I wanted to talk about some profitability stuff, right? As we mentioned that OpenAI's going public is now an if in that earlier episode of Is That Good that we played. So I actually want to quote from a friend of the show, Mike Isaac.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the company planned to go public by the end of 2026. Open AI said this month it had filed confidential paperwork with securities regulars to kick off process. A trillion dollar valuation of the public market, which would exceed the market capitalization of Walmart, would be staggering for Open AI, a startup that is not believed to have turned to profit and is aggressively spending on new data centers. Open AI's advisors presented company executives with the option of waiting until 2027 or lower the target valuation for a

quicker IPO. Mr. Altman responded that any change to a trillion dollar valuation was a non-starter. I assume this is me editorializing because he's in a pissing contest with Elon Musk. I mean, I think it's also the, so their last pre-money, so before the cash they actually raised, valuation was like $730 something. So a trillion dollars would be a 30% premium-ish. That's not a lot. And the fact that the bankers are saying that they couldn't get that, because that's, I'm reading between the lines, but I mean, that's what's happening.

They clearly talked to some advisors who are like, no, that's a negative. that's worse than people are giving this credit for. If you can't get a 30% premium, it basically means all of your private investors at the last round fucked up. Because you're not even get like a good venture capital return would be like 3x.

You're not even getting just to it. You're genuinely making nothing here. And also they're saying they couldn't list at one trillion. So they probably wouldn't be able to list at much above 800, which is, fatal. I mean, just, and this is fatal for SoftBank as well, because SoftBank needs Open AI to go

public. But it's just like these things, the reason we keep having bubbles is because when stuff like this happens, the media and a great many different people, immediately move not to go, hey, that's a problem. We should fix that. Or like, hey, we should be worried about the company that's become the single focus of everyone isn't going to make it. Instead, it's like, no, no, no, let's rationalize this bad boy real quick. Let's enable the enabler. We need to make sure we keep this, and it's just completely nonsensical.

And to be clear, when this explodes, I'm going to be ripping holes in anyone who tries to be like, how do we not see this coming? You didn't look is the big thing. Well, the main, because the main, the thing that is at the bottom of this is always the unit economics. And what I think is very telling is that open-a executives and talking about the IPO said, well, the company is moving in the right direction because more than 5 million people use codex on a weekly basis, the company said.

Now, more than 5 million people using codex on a weekly basis, pretty good, which means I assume they've solved their unit economics problem and that's not costing them a huge amount of money. Yeah. They've definitely avoided, they've gotten out of the sort of thing that they were doing of just going, hey, AI is free until everyone uses it. And then they can start charging what it actually costs, right? Right? Yeah. And what's great about that is they did that. And they were like, okay, and now they jack up the price.

And within one month, they're like, oh, everyone's like, we've got to limit the cost of this just immediately. And by the way, on a 200 buck a month subscription to chat GPT, you can burn $14,000 worth of credits of tokens. Jesus. It's so good. It's, I mean, so this is the thing. we've had everybody panic, right, and go, oh, God, it's expensive now. We've got to, like, maybe think twice about using it.

They're still charging a fraction of what it caught, just a slightly smaller fraction, a slightly larger fraction? Yes. Exactly. And amazing. Instead of it costs, like, I have $14,000 for a dollar. You can set that on fire in front of me. What they've gone is, it now costs $2 to do that, and everyone has panicked.

What's happening is it's a little different from that where it's the enterprises are having to pay the actual per million token rates. So they, and they, this is, it's really, it was actually a very funny punchline set up because they pay all of the business idiots who've been using AI who have got AI psychosis, told all their people because they were all able to burn as many tokens they like, use this constantly. Use it for everything. If you don't use this, I'll kill you. I'll shoot you with a gun. And then the moment that they, because in, I think it was March. or April, Anthropical Open AI, we're like, okay, you're going to have to pay on a per million token basis.

Within one month, we're just like, like, John May just start, like, I've got to got austerity measures. We've got to be very careful with the cost of how out we couldn't possibly. And it's just so funny because it's like, even if they cut the price in half, it's not clear if that would actually fix the problem, because you can't measure the ROI of any of this. So it's just a certain degree of like, great, now it's half of a thing that we still can't measure, so we probably have to cut that too. It's just, it's truly

ludicrous. It's genuinely, I mean, it's genuinely hilarious as well. I mean, the, I don't know, have you, have you heard of the new plugin for Claude called Caveman? Oh, yeah. Where it's just like, it just gives you very simple, single sentences. Yeah, this is a plugin that was you, that is, that is useful to, let's say, be austere with tokens by saying, okay, well, maybe we can save a little bit of money on our token budget if we make Claude be kind of rude and abrupt. I don't think that says anything good if that's the solution you're using. It's kind of funny how much of the cost of this was making it glazer the user, at least. And in late June, there has been this huge, because this is not just prices rising.

There's been a huge sell-off in names across the stock market related to AI. and video SpaceX, by SpaceX already, is down like hundreds of billions of dollars from its post-IPO pop. So if you thought you were going to get on the Elon scam, you got hosed. But this is also related to Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, all suddenly becoming like high CapEx heavy industry companies more or less overnight. So the customers of these companies, right, they're the ones who are supposed to provide the money to help them lose money more efficiently, still aren't able to capitalize on them. Like consulting firms aren't using it to get better.

companies aren't using it to get better. You can't, you're not using it to really generate a lot of return on investment. And so more and more people are realizing this, subsidized pricing is coming up against reality. And like that exuberant, that exuberant investment pop is, that that's been happening for the last little while, those names are beginning to go down. In fact, this is from Katie Martin in the FT. The once vaunted magnificent seven stocks, an imperfect, but nonetheless go-to gauge of hyper-scaler performance, perform slightly worse than the UK government debt. Oh, how are you a worse investment than Kier Starmor? Yeah, that's like at the World Cup.

It's like getting rolled by Qatar at the World Cup. Like, come on. You shouldn't be beating us. Can't believe they did that to our boy, care. Yes, and I mean, this is a, this is a, the Bank of International Settlement is also getting on this as well, which is, yeah, now suggesting that with the five largest hyperscalers setting to spend over a trillion dollars on AI-related CAPEX from 2025 through 26, that the commitments are outpacing earnings and free cash flow, leading some to issue debt to raise

additional financing, and that, again, the Bank of International Settlements is now saying this is now, let's say, a significant global risk. Yeah, one of those guys. If only someone had fucking said something. It's so funny as one would, like, Like the BIS put that out. So like the conservative organization. Central banks. And immediately I saw an analyst, this guy called Daniel Newman on Twitter, who is a massive word I won't say, was just immediately like, oh, oh, what was this? A press release.

A press release from the haters. It's like, no, it's a statement from the central bank of central banks. You're a financial analyst. But this is the media behind this. The media is just like immediately ready to just attack any bad sign. and it's very strange. I know it's always been like this, but to see it reach its kind of pornographic heights,

I think it's just the data centers are too easy to invest in, the AI companies are too easy to invest in, there's so many places to put your money, and they're so brain damaged from years of ignoring the consequences of their actions, that they don't think anything can go wrong. Masayoshi's son, all of them. I mean, all of the data center operators, same deal, hyper-scalers, same deal.

They're not, they all think that, they have found the Mandate of Heaven printer. Yeah. And like, the thing that was that the test is, it was this the Mandate of Heaven is, is this going to, is this going to do to like knowledge work, for example, what containerization did to stevedores?

Is this going to do, is this going to be like the great enclosure of the digital commons once and for all? Is this going to be the thing that creates the new, I don't know, six-person ruling class of the entire world by fundamentally transforming the economy with this huge technological displacement of labor. That was the actual question. Are you going to do that? And on day of recording... To which the answer is, yeah, I reckon. Yeah, probably. Sounds good.

Well, here's the great thing. And look, this is inferential. This is not deductive. This is not provable. But the Wall Street Journal has posted that Big Tech has suddenly flipped on the AI job wipeout scenario, where they've now, they've collected some, let's say, barometers of opinion from the big guys, the Sam Altman's and Dari Amadai's and stuff, surveys. And they've said, hey, wait a minute. It looks like all that, all those jobs aren't going away. A lot of people were still fired with AI as an excuse. A lot of them got rehired in some cases. But this is excerpt one that the Wall Street Journal quoted. A year ago, the message from many business leaders was that AI was going to wipe out jobs.

But the past month or so, tech CEOs have been striking more optimistic tone. In late May, Sam Altman said, we've been roughly right on the technological predictions and pretty wrong in the social and economic implications, saying to CNBC, our industry underestimated how much we're going to be able to keep people at the center of everything. But what your thing was the replace all human labor machine. Yes. And your replace all human labor machine, what you're saying is it's failed to replace all human labor, at least in the timescale that you need it to, in order to go public at write down a

value and you can decide how rich you are. Yeah. I do, I do, I do kind of wonder whether, like, the reason why they don't think of the idea of consequences is because the AI is not telling them, but this might be the thing that happens. Like, I know there's that sort of thing where, like, Sam Altman sort of sounds like he is kind of, just, he sort of, his brain is entirely like chat GPT, and that sort of, you know, the guy who sort of drinks too much of the, Kool-Aid and becomes a Kool-Aid guy. That's how you make new Kool-Aid guys. That's presumably value zero.

That's right. Presumably, that's how it works. But yeah, like, even when I sort of think about the boosters of stuff like, Ed, you were just sort of saying now about like, sort of boosters and tech types who are like genuinely surprised when people are like, hey, maybe this thing kind of sucks or is overhyped. Like, to me, it does sort of strike as like not just that they believe that this has. to happen and this is like the inevitable next frontier because if not then like what else you've wasted all this time you've wasted all this money you've wasted all this energy basically kind of doing nothing except creating a vanity project but like one of the things that feels so evident about this entire cohort is that like they just don't think about consequences because i guess they don't believe it exists because to believe that consequence exists you have to believe that other people live among you and that their lives are important and worthy of some kind of dignity and once you do that.

No, I don't want to do that. When do you think Samuel would last carried a wallet? When do you think, do you think he carries money? Do you think he, do you think any of these people do? Because this is, are they just so separated that the only people they talk to are just worm tongue-like figures and chat GPT? And one another. Well, I mean, yeah.

I mean, it sort of, it sort of just strikes me as like the guy who sort of has never really had to experience any type of friction in his life. and so doesn't have to like understand that. No, there are like parts of the world where you just can't do. I mean, it's also like why they always get confused whenever like the European Union is like, yeah, we're going to maybe regulate you. And they're not like, oh, the regulation is bad and we can sort of say, but why would you want to regulate us?

What would the purpose of regulation do? Like, why would you? Why would you want to restrain us? Like the idea of sort of being held back is like completely foreign to them. And so imagine like sort of then sort of trying to explain. to them, but hey, look, like, there are a lot of societies in the world that, like, you know, don't operate using kind of, you know, the computer is not the be-all and end-all of, like, communication, you know? People actually, like, talk to each other. There exist, like,

communities and barter systems and all those types of things. Like, imagine just trying to explain to them in general, like, hey, like, people just don't live like you. Yeah, what do they do when they want to? What do you mean they run out of money? What does that mean? You know, you know, it reminds me of like, there was a clip that was circulating today. And it's a very old clip, it's like an Anthony Bourdain clip where, like, he's explaining to a bunch of, like,

very rich Singaporeans, I think, that he does his own laundry. And one of them is just like, well, what do you mean? You do your own laundry? And he's just like, yeah, I go to the laundromat and I put the coins in. And the machine kind of does it. And I, and I fold it. And I feel quite good about doing it afterwards. And, like, the reaction that this guy has,

is, like, you are speaking to him in a foreign language. Like, he has never understood the concept of, touching his own clothes before. And this is like, this reminds me so much of just like how all these guys view the world. They got too rich. We got time for one more bit

before we have to close. And this one is really interesting, right? Because this is one of my favorite kinds of statistics, which is how is AI actually being used in companies? What are they using it to do? Is it profitable? Are the pilot successful and so on. The sentiment change isn't limited to tech leaders.

This is from the excerpt again. A survey by E.Y. Parthenon found that the percentage of CEOs who believe AI investments will result in significant reductions in headcount fell from 46% in January 2025 to just 20% this May. Even the most credulous worm eventually turns. Yeah. And like, so it just goes back to, well, if the firms aren't more productive and they're not able to be the same level of product productive with the, with, with fewer people, like if these things aren't happening and the thing is starting to,

cost what it costs and what it costs is enormous and it's still being subsidized and in order to continue building up the demand that they think that they'll need even if the thing suddenly goes to a hundred as everyone needs it for everything. Even if all that happens, they still can't build the data centers, then it's just like in the grand story that you know, you've been telling Ed and that we've been sort of checking in on you with every once and again is that like if the coyotes run off the cliff, he's held up the sign and is looked down and has held up

the sign that says, oh no. Yeah. Or he's opened up the little parasol and the boulders falling on top of him. This is the moment where he has looked down. Yeah. Because that was, like the moment where he looks down, that was going to be when the thing has to start

costing what it costs, right? Not even making a profit, just costing what it costs. And that's now happened. Yeah. And now all the companies, are freaking out that it costs a lot of money. And I think it's just that so you'll notice we haven't had a revenue update from in a while. And I have to wonder if that story might change too.

But honestly, the biggest warning sign and the biggest sign the coyote looked down is when Sam Orkman, when asked about these costs, said on stage, yeah, it's become a huge issue. Yes, I'm much like into that. It's like, it's just like, oh. All right, well, and he basically, I can get the exact. quote, but he was like, yeah, so it's going to have to, industry's going to have to sort that out.

It's just like, you are the, the big problems. Hopefully the big black problem solving box will do that. I shouldn't check what's in it. Sell the compute to who, Sam fucking Aquaman. Look,

I know we're, we got a bit of a hard stop today. So I'm going to, I'm going to call it there. Ed. Joint venture. Joint venture. 19 statin islands.

17 billion dollars raised. and we have lost the money already so we're going to have to keep doing this. Thanks a lot, everyone, for joining us. We've been TF and Ed's been better offline. And we will see you on our various... If you're listening to this, you know the deal. If it's TF, we'll see you on the bonus episode.

If it's better offline, you'll see Ed on Better Offline. We should. See you on the bonus episode either way. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, everybody. Cheers. Bye. I'm going to be.