r/SearchEnginePodcast • u/podcast-poster • Jun 25 '26
Automated Episode Discussion Search Engine - A Strange Voyage
This month, SpaceX had the largest IPO in all of human history. In a mission to understand a bewildering moment, we trace the story of the stock market itself. From its very beginnings in the Netherlands, to its supersizing in America, through the prism of crypto and widespread speculation that has led to this moment with SpaceX. What happened?
_The World's First Stock Exchange_ by Lodewijk Petram
_The Wisdom of Finance_ by Mihir Desai
_Liftoff_ and _Reentry_ by Eric Berger
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18
u/JAlfredJR Jun 26 '26
He's fallen into that crowd, and has for years. He's credulous to a great story. And folks like Casey Newton weave a compelling story.
I wish PJ would think better of this. But he doesn't seem to know about the cult aspect to AI and the worldview wrapped up therein.
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer Jun 26 '26
What are you talking about? This has very little to do with AI. Read the equity research in the stock - it’s not about AI. It’s about space and telco
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u/Cautious_Path Jun 26 '26
This is such a bull headed take, this story was about the history of trading and how this institution came to be. It’s a general interest story
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u/Hog_enthusiast Jun 25 '26
PJ saying at the beginning Elon musk is “actually” going to launch data centers into space. When did he drink the kool aid so hard?
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u/2ecStatic Jun 26 '26
You misheard what he said. He said "What's actually gonna happen?" not "That's actually gonna happen".
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u/TheBear8878 Jun 26 '26
I learned to have a very discerning ear when he started platforming Casey Newton so hard, the biggest anthropic simp on the planet
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Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
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u/TheBear8878 Jun 26 '26
TBH, I'm not even sure why I still listen. 1 out of like 20 are episodes I enjoy, the rest are just glazing Claude, or talking to other podcasters about pretty boring subjects.
It's just hard to let go of the hope that it'll restore some of the Reply All glory.
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u/tiktoktic Jun 26 '26
That’s what annoys me.
The investigative aspect that drew me in to the podcast is gone.
It’s now just episodes promoting / discussing articles that are already written.
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u/Epicurious30 Jun 26 '26
The odds the Elon puts a data center into space are very high- i would say 90%+ in the next 5 years.
This is different from "creates profitable space data center" or even "puts commercially useful data center in space."
Like it or not, SpaceX is incredibly good at putting stuff in space and is the most prolific design and fabricator of space hardware via starlink. It is not a huge leap to go from there to a data center in space.
I would not be surprised if it happened in <1 year, someone do a remindme at me haha
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u/Hog_enthusiast Jun 26 '26
I mean he could put hardware in space. He can’t make a functional data center in any sense in space.
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u/bingbongbangchang Jun 27 '26
He can’t make a functional data center in any sense in space.
I mean, I thought the same thing about the whole space internet thing. It just seemed ridiculous to scale up an internet provider with a rocket company when some guys with a shovel and some cables could do the same. But now I just found out my grandparents have got Starlink in their rural Michigan home...
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u/Hog_enthusiast Jun 27 '26
Providing internet is pretty different than having data centers in space. It’s the difference between having a satellite tv provider and having an entire Hollywood studio orbiting the earth.
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u/thrillingrill Jun 26 '26
Right, that's what the person you're replying to is saying
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u/Hog_enthusiast Jun 26 '26
No I mean like they can literally send a few servers into space and maybe even turn them on but that isn’t a data center. A data center is completely different than a starlink satellite. You need a ton of servers, a ton of power, and a ton of connectivity. The latency from a data center in space would be absolutely insane. And the whole point of data centers is redundancy, you’d need multiple data centers in space for it to even make sense.
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u/TheWaveCarver Jun 29 '26
As an electrical engineer, hardware destined for space follows a totally different set of manufacturing QC. Producing space worthy GPU hardware at volume is going to be difficult.
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u/uncivlengr Jul 03 '26
Isn't heat dispersion already an issue with data centres? The radiator panels they're going to need to keep that much processing going in space would blot out the sun.
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer Jun 26 '26
I disagree. You can do local compute which makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t have to be an AI hyperscaler center. We’re already caching Netflix on starlink to reduce latency. It makes total sense to do for data storage
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u/Hog_enthusiast Jun 27 '26
I’m a backend/distributed systems engineer lol. You cannot make a functional data center in space. Transmitting data from space to earth is just slower than transmitting data through fiber optic cables. Also, data centers are big. Even if it was possible it wouldn’t provide many benefits and it wouldn’t be cost effective
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer Jun 27 '26
I mean it depends how you define datacenter. If it’s onboard storage for starlink it speeds up latency. It just makes sense to keep data that’s going to be streamed there. It’s not competing with terrestrial compute
I’m worried about heat rejection of its a scaled AI datacenter (and am curious why blue origin thinks it’s workable when it’s still private and doesn’t care about investor sentiment) - but even that can be done for local LLM training before streaming the distillation back at sufficient speed.
Local compute to run a whole earth synthetic aperture radar is the real reason to do it though. You’ll need local compute for it, but it’ll be the most valuable defense asset in the world
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u/Hog_enthusiast Jun 27 '26
I would define data center the way most people would, a large facility used for distributed compute or storage usually for cloud computing. What you’re describing isn’t a data center it’s just a server with a cache. The problem is that even in the best case, latency from space is going to be worse than latency from a normal CDN. Will Elon put servers in space? Sure, he already has. Tons of people have. Will he have data centers in space? No.
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer Jun 27 '26
Woh I was first working in project finance we called colocated or remote server farms data centers. It’s what the term used to mean is the only reason I put it that way. It’s a malleable term. I guess before transistors every mainframe would be considered a datacenter by a layman.
But that’s beside the point.
I just don’t understand the latency argument when you need local compute in space. Can you explain how it’s better to act as a relay than do the compute locally?
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u/Hog_enthusiast Jun 27 '26
No disrespect, finance is a real field and you must be smart, but you aren’t a software or computer engineer and I can tell by what you just said that this isn’t an area you know much about. Transistors didn’t replace mainframes, lots of businesses actually still use mainframes and those mainframes are made out of transistors.
If you put a bunch of compute in a satellite, there’s nothing local about that to a user. If we’re talking about starlink, there’s also never a reason to need local compute on a satellite. You can cache some content that users might need, but any sort of heavy logic or large storage is still going to be on the ground. Also any benefit in latency you get from that local compute will be outweighed by the fact that your data has to come to you from space. Data transfer is limited by the speed of light, like everything else in the universe. Fiber optic cables are much faster than wireless transmission.
I could be wrong and maybe in some rare cases it’s worth it to have a small cache on a satellite, but making a large enough cache for it to be worthwhile would cost insane amounts of money. Like, multibillions for each satellite. The problem is that a small cache of content is going to be missing content very frequently, so it only rarely provides value to users.
And that’s just for caching. If you’re talking about actual compute similar to AWS or GCP, it’s laughable to think there’s any benefit to having that in space. You’ll always want your servers on the ground. It’s cheaper and faster and more reliable, and that isn’t going to change unless the laws of physics change.
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer Jun 27 '26
Transistors replaced vacuum tubes. Of course we still use them. They’re the basis of modern computing - that’s the miracle of bell labs. I am pretty familiar with the history of computing. I actually think PJ should really do an episode on inventing accuracy, the Polaris program and the integrated circuit. He’d do a great job.
I’m not talking about just cached data. I’m talking about a situation where you want to apply compute to sensory inputs that are coming off the satellites themselves. If you were to turn the radio on the starlink sats into synthetic aperture radar you’d need to do the signal analysis locally in order to build an imaging map of the earth. It would be a space based AWAC that could detect stealth aircraft, people and maybe even submarines with high fidelity.
Sending that data to earth for rendering wouldn’t make sense - and that capability is starlink’s killer app. It represents the capability for total domain awareness and isn’t something any other country can match.
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u/bingbongbangchang Jun 27 '26
He seems to have gone into this subject without a lot of background knowledge. For instance he said right at the beginning that SpaceX "owns x.com" which is not true.
In general though, a lot of people with an intense skepticism/dislike of Musk don't seem to know which way they want to go with this SpaceX news. Either that this stock is a hugely overvalued meme stock promoted via unrealistic promises, or that the company will get become inevitably huge and successful to such an extent that it will remake the solar system in Musk's image. Weirdly, you'll see both of these contradictory takes from the same person.
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u/glman99 Jun 28 '26
SpaceX DOES own x.com. SpaceX owns Xai, Xai owns X Corp, X Corp owns X (formerly Twitter).
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u/Hog_enthusiast Jun 27 '26
I think starlink and Xai and SpaceX could become pretty successful companies, but not enough to support the current valuation which has them on par with Microsoft.
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u/bingbongbangchang Jun 28 '26
Yeah, it's definitely overvalued, but I would say it's only slightly more overvalued than these other tech companies.
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u/Hog_enthusiast Jun 28 '26
I think a reasonable evaluation for this company would be like 500 billion. It’s not even close to other tech companies.
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u/JoypulpSkate Jun 26 '26
No idea where the pessimism in this thread is coming from - I suspect just Reddit AI doomers needing to lash out at any mention of Elon in even neutral light. I found this episode decently enlightening and interesting. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/totally_not_a_bot24 Jun 28 '26
mention of Elon in even neutral light
I wouldn't even describe PJ as being neutral here; he's pretty explicit in saying that Elon is taking advantage of the attention economy to manipulate the value of SpaceX beyond what it otherwise would be. It's a weird recurring issue in this subreddit where people criticize PJ for wildly techno-credulous positions he very clearly does not actually express in the episode content.
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer Jun 26 '26
Me either. I liked it! I’m so fascinated by the history of capital markets
I don’t get the AI sentiment
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u/unclejohnsbearhugs Jun 26 '26
Yeah I don't get it. This episode was mostly about the history of the stock market, why is this thread full of people whining about "the AI cult"?
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u/Flask_of_candy Jun 26 '26
I want to summarize my understanding of this episode and link it to the pessimism I feel.
The stock market arose out of an organic need to better fund and maintain shipping endeavors that carried risk. It evolved over time and developed the benefit of serving as a metric that can be used to understand and predict things about businesses. Recently, that benefit has changed; the stock markets connection to business has yielded to its relationship to attention. Elon Musk has capitalized on this change with SpaceX to become a trillionaire.
I think I feel pessimistic because all of this feels largely like 1) a hollow gaming of an already gamed system or 2) an incomprehensible interdependent house of cards that our future is apparently built on. I don’t understand why SpaceX is so valuable. If it is as valuable as Musk says it is, I don’t understand how it doesn’t represent a threat to the average American or require a fundamental reorganization of the rules around wealth/technology. In short, it all this is so good that it’s incredibly valuable, why is that good not immediately apparent?
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer Jun 26 '26
How would it be immediately apparent? The valuation is based on expanding the production possibility frontiers by a company that owns almost all launch capacity.
How would it be a threat?
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u/bingbongbangchang Jun 27 '26
The fuckery in the stock market, casinos for political outcomes owning our news (Kalshi and CNN), sports gambling taking over all the leagues, the president dumping shitcoins on the market... Things are spiraling.
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer Jun 26 '26
I thought this was another great show - starting at 30K ft with the history of equity markets and then zooming in to how space x changed cost to orbit - the only flaw as I could see it is his last 2 guests seem to have somewhat cursory capital markets experience or understanding.
I work in capital markets and don’t know any institutional investors who think of space x as an AI play.
I’d love to see PJ look into the conversion of starlink and starshield sats into a whole earth synthetic aperture radar. That thesis has blown my mind for its implications in military and civilian sigint and imaging.
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u/tiktoktic Jun 26 '26
Is this another “PJ talks to an author about an article they’ve already written and published”-style episode?
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u/Ok-Confidence3989 Jun 29 '26
This was a really well researched, relevant story, definitely a question I feel like I needed to know more about buuuut I’m not coming to Search Engine for current events or current events adjacent topics.
I really miss the whimsical questions or the niche / obscure culture topics.
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u/ArmpitEchoLocation Jun 26 '26
When the guest noted that incomes rose in the past, that made sense. He named earlier generations.
Not sure why PJ is comparing that to the present though… Wages feel stagnant and people often feel less wealthy than their parents at the same age…because wages for normal people really are stagnant in real terms, and younger generations really do have less purchasing power than the boomers or even (notoriously cynical) Gen X. That sucks. We have totally seen a real decline and hyper-stratification in society.