Better Offline - Monologue: Silicon Valley is A Cargo Cult

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI is the pinnacle of Silicon Valley monoculture, and a monument to the cargo cult desperation of a tech industry that celebrates mediocrity and has run out of ideas. Newsletter: Cargo Culture: https://www.wheresyoured.at/cargo-culture/ OpenAI Exclusive: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/ Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. Buy our new “FUCK DATA CENTERS” shirts today! --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotbi. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Listen to Joy 101 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS.

I actually drop better when I'm high. It heightens my senses, calms me down. If anything, I'm more careful. Honestly, it just helps you. me focus. That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself. And now he's in prison. You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different. So, if you're high, just don't drive. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This is Michael Rappaport, and my podcast, the I Am Rapaport Stereo Podcast, is unlike anyone

you've ever heard. If you're looking for strong opinions about sports, entertainment, politics, pop culture, and whatever else catches my attention, then subscribe now. This kid Jafar Jackson should absolutely positively get nominated for his portrayal as Michael Jackson. Listen to I Am Rap Report on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. AllZone Media Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zetron. Better Offline.

It's going to be a double monologue week. After last week's dramatic exclusive, I've been slammed with interviews and personal life stuff that made it feel like I was being hit in the head with a pool noodle 24-7, feeling a lot better now, but nevertheless, this is where I need to focus myself. I've also been enjoying a lot of the responses to my exclusive about OpenAI's 2024 and 2025 financials. Now, some have been mighty confident about inference being profitable due to a $7.5 billion cost of revenue, on $13.07 billion in revenue, but overlooked my reporting from last year, verified by the Financial Times, by the way, that showed Open AI spent $8.67 billion specifically on inference

in the first nine months of 2025. It's very, very clear that Open AI moved around numbers to make things look better than they are, and I believe that inference costs are being dumped into sales and marketing. How else can you explain how a company spends more than 43% of its revenue, $5.73 billion on sales and marketing, more than the Coca-Cola Corporation, which has three ad agencies and a vast web of different print, digital and physical ads spend. I think they'd do some influence of things as well. Honestly, if the Diet Coke Corporation wants to get in touch, please do. Nevertheless, Microsoft also had $500 million of sales and marketing spend, too, via OpenAI. What do you think that is?

Open AI spending $500 million on sales and marketing through Microsoft? or is it them itemizing promotional spend or the inference from free users as a sales and marketing cost? Now, if you disagree, and I'm sure some of you do, please explain in any detail, any level of detail, really, how Open AI has spent $5.67 billion in sales and marketing otherwise. Its first major advertising campaign was in September 2025. If it's spending, let's say, $250,000 a year on its 500 sales stuff, that's still only $125 million. Unless Open AI is one of the single largest accounts in digital advertising, and speaking with people all over the shop, I don't think that's true, I think it's far more likely that there are

actual costs being hidden. And this is the kind of thing a company does when it has utter loathing for its investors, the media, and the general public. A brazen attempt to bury costs to make things look better for an audience that's directly incentivized to take any shred of proof that things are okay. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the FT's story. And I'm speaking. specifically referring to a quote, where a source familiar with the matter suggested that somehow open AI only lost $8 billion in 2025 rather than the $209 billion it actually lost. Accountancy voodoo doesn't work on me, Clamuel. I'm better than that. But this comment, in my opinion, was not actually meant for the readers of the FD, but for the larger AI cargo cult.

As I wrote in my free newsletter this week, Silicon Valley, as exemplified by the AI bubble, has abandoned its supposed principles of rationality and meritocracy, and now more closely resembles a cargo cult, desperate to recreate bygone eras of growth. Open AI and Anthropic are not interested in operating with honesty or integrity, nor are they particularly concerned with building real companies. They lose billions of dollars they always have and they always will. Nothing changes them. They must keep the mythology of their companies going so they can keep raising money in perpetuity until someone works out to build a real company. Not that that'll have. But nevertheless, the things that they say, they exist to feed the tech media and AI boost as symbolic proof that the great prophecy, that OpenAI and Anthropic will grow and be the biggest companies in the world, they'll be profitable and AI will be the next big thing.

Well, they need you to believe these things so that the great prophecy will come true. It must come true. Don't you understand? If it doesn't come true, well, Wariowamade can't be an elder statesman forever. And this is why both companies have used annualized run rates and never really adjudy. the profitability question outside of Dario Amadeh's stylized facts. Because they know that Silicon Valley is a monoculture, dominated by people who don't interact with society outside of Sand Hill Road, who they believe are

gullible enough to accept and promote any rationalization that confirms their beliefs or indeed the great prophecy. And I mean, they've been completely right so far. The AI industry doesn't feel the need to prove itself because it has complete contempt for its customers, the media and the markets. believing they'll slurp up whatever slop they get and take it as proof that that great prophecy, my friends, will come true, and all of us, all of us will be purified. And why wouldn't they? The media is accepted basically every single narrative the AI industry is created. AI boosters will accept effectively any proof that things are going well, and will actively attack

and ostracize any non-believers. And if I'm honest, there are members of the media who do this too, and if you're listening, I'm not scared. You only make me stronger. You only make my post longer too. But really, this is how it all works. This is how it's worked with AI. It's how they tried to make crypto and the metaverse work, but it really worked with AI because LLMs too do that kind of cargo cultish evidence generation. Oh, it could potentially replace software engineers because it can burp out some code. Oh, it can look at my taxes and say stuff. That means it can do my taxes. Just enough symbology to push this bullshit through for an indeterminate end. Let's be honest. It's not going to be a government bailout. I've covered that in a previous monologue. Go back and listen to him, not repeating myself. But this is Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley stands for rugged individualism, rationality and meritocracy, unless, of course, everybody in Silicon Valley agrees that an idea is good at which point all of that bullshit goes out the window. Any singular piece of information that even slightly rings positive is proof of the grand prophecy of growth that AI promises. And chosen are those who take said proof. And cursed are those who.

question it. You dare to report on Open AI's actual revenues? No, non-believer. Out with him. We're going to put him in the wicker man. We're going to put the man with the revenues in the wicker man. Except this is more like, yeah, I guess this would be the wicker man, except I'm not like a sexless British policeman. There's more on that later. I'll go deeper down the wicker man hole. Nevertheless, this is Silicon Valley now. Silicon Valley is just a cult. It's a cargo cult where everyone's trying to shuffle shit around, put things in the right order to try and usher in the next Steve Jobs or the next Bill Gates. You ever notice as well that that's all they talk about? It's always the guys. It's never the product. You also ever notice that all of these extremely

well-paid AI guys, like a Gnome Shazir who got bought, he left Google and got bought for $2.7 billion by Google to go back to Google, then went to Open AI a month ago. What do you think he did at Google? What do you think Barrett Zoff, who left Open AI to went to Thinking Machines, and he came back to Open AI and I was left Open AI? What do you think he's done? And that Andre Carpathie, he just went to Anthropic, and he wasn't doing anything for two years. Isn't it weird that Andre Carpathie, one of the co-founders of Open AI, formerly of Tesla,

he sat around for two years and really didn't do anything. He had that Eureka Labs education startup. Nothing happened with that. It's almost as if the valley moves around different forms of systems, symbology, hoping that when they're in the right place, the next era of growth will begin. And doing this allows them to get away from the horrible fact that they're out of hypergrowth ideas, that they don't have the people who have the ideas anymore. The original iPhone was created by a competing team.

Tony Fidel and John Forstall, I believe, the software and hardware teams coming together and actually building something, people with real industrial expertise. The Valley now is just, I don't know, trading different kinds of. AI scientist and mathematician in the hopes that one of them can usher in the digital god. It's fucking depressing. It's depressing and make no mistake it will lead Silicon Valley to its ruin. Faith can't fill your belly or cover $1.1 trillion in spending commitments or magic up the more than $2 trillion in revenue that Big Tech needs to make AI worth it by 2030. I don't think it can pay Larry Ellison's bills either. In fact, Faith can't really do much other than create

speculative wealth. And speculative wealth can't pay for everything forever. I'll catch you on Friday. This has been better offline and I've been Ed Zittron. Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Houdicotipi. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Listen to Joy 101 on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS.

I actually drop better when I'm high. It heightens my senses, it calms me down. If anything, I'm more careful. Honestly, it just helps me focus. That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself. And now he's in prison. You see, no matter what you tell yourself, If you feel different, you drive different.

So if you're high, just don't drive. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This is Michael Rappaport, and my podcast, the I Am Rapaport Stereo podcast, is unlike anyone you've ever heard. If you're looking for strong opinions about sports, entertainment, politics, pop culture, and whatever else catches my attention, then subscribe now. This kid, Jafar Jackson, should absolutely be. positively get nominated for his portrayal as Michael Jackson.

Listen to IMRAP report on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place. I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit season two is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to Rebel Spirit season two on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.