Better Offline - The Case Against Generative AI (Part 4)

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

In part four of this week’s four-part case against generative AI, Ed Zitron walks you through how there’s literally not enough money in the world to pay for OpenAI’s estimated $1 trillion four-year burn, and why the media tell the truth about AI to save retail investors. Latest Premium Newsletter: OpenAI Needs A Trillion Dollars In The Next Four Years: https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-onetrillion/ 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. --- 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/edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you. you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with

the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. It's your responsibility to not just seek help, but to identify that you need help. This is Mental Health Awareness Month. Tune in to the podcast, Just Healed with Dr. Jay, and take real steps toward healing, growth,

and becoming your best self. From understanding your mental health to doing the work, we break down practical tools, real conversations, and the mindset shifts you need to move forward and thrive. It's time to stop putting your healing on hold and start doing something about it. Listen to Just Heel with Dr. Jay on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. AllZone Media. All right, we're back. I'm Ed Zittron, and this is Bert.

or offline. This is the fourth and final episode of this four-part series where I dissect in excruciating comprehensive detail, the AI bubble and tell you why I think its implosion is inevitable. We're at the end, which is fitting, because in this episode we're going to talk about why and how this entire sham dies. Again, if you're jumping in now, start from the beginning. We talk about a lot of things, and they all kind of threads together. I know, I know you want to hear my explanation of how open AI is fucked with a capital

fuck, but we've got to lay the groundwork to get there. Okay, got up, good, good, good, we're good, we're good, we're good, we're good, we're all good, you good, you good, me, yep, okay, we'll begin. One of the comfortable lies that people tell themselves is that the AI bubble is similar to the fiber boom or the dot-com boom or Uber or that we're in the growth stage or that this is what software they spend a bunch of money, then pull the profit lever. The thing is, this is nothing like anything you've ever seen before, because this is the dumbest shit the tech industry has ever, ever done. AI data centers are nothing like fiber because there are very few actual users. cases for these GPUs outside of AI, and none of them are remotely hyperscale revenue drivers. As I discussed a month or so ago, Data Center development accounted for more of America's GDP growth than all consumer spending combined in the first half of 2025, and there really

isn't any demand for AI in general, let alone at the scale that these hundreds of billions of dollars are being sunk into. The conservative estimate of capital expenditures related to data centers is around $400 billion, but given the $50 billion in a quarter in private equity invested, I'm going to guess it breaks half a trillion, all to build capacity for an industry yet to prove itself. And this whole Nvidia OpenAI $100 billion funding news should only fill you full of dread. But also it isn't fucking finalized. I stop reporting as if it's done. I swear the fucking...

Anyway. Good. According to CNBC, and I quote, the initial $10 billion tranche is locked in at a $500 billion valuation and expected to close within a month or so once the transaction has been finalized, with successive $10 billion rounds planned, to be priced at the company's then current valuation as new capacity comes online. What a horrible deal. They can just raise whatever. Let me just go back to Nvidia. But let me just be clear. OpenAI has written a lot of checks that neither it nor anyone else can cash. And for it to survive, it needs

to raise more than honestly about $500 billion and maybe another $400 billion in other people paying for stuff. It's astonishing really. And no point is anyone asking how exactly open AI builds the data centers to fill full of the GPUs to get the rest of Nvidia's funding. In fact, I'm genuinely shocked and a little disgusted by how poorly this story has been told. Let's go point by point. $10 billion is not enough for OpenAI to build a data center. The 1.1, 1.2 gigawatt Gabboline, Texas data center being built by Oracle and Cruiser for OpenAI required $15 billion in debt, and that's not including the $40 billion of chips needed to power it. There we're question whether all of those are going into Abilene or somewhere else

which will get to later. Open AI can also not afford to pay for everything it's promised. Open AI will burn, they say, $150 billion in the next four years according to the information, but I believe the company intentionally leaked those numbers before the announcement of their $300 billion deal with Oracle. And so when you take into account the numbers share by the information, which involved them burning $47 billion in 2020, a year when Open AI is meant to make $70 billion in payments to compute to Oracle, another $28 billion to Microsoft or any other cost. There's no space for the $300 billion to go. and there's actually another $100 billion they're promising for backup compute as well.

On top of all of this, OpenAI is still yet to convert to a for-profit entity and must do so by the end of 2025 or they'll lose $20 billion in funding from SoftBank. A few weeks ago, Microsoft and OpenAI co-published an announcement that said they'd signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding for the next phase of their partnership, which the media quickly took to mean the deal was done. No deal has been done. This is an announcement of nothing. On top of all of this, venture capital might run out at the current rate of investment in around six quarters, and Open AI needs more investment than ever.

The information recently published some worrying data from venture capitalist John Saccoda that at today's clip, the industry would run out of money in six quarters, adding that the money wouldn't run out until the end of 2028 if it wasn't for Open AI and Anthropic. In a very real sense, Open AI threatens the future of available capital for the tech industry. Well, the good news is that they're going to make lots of money, right? I mean, Open AI leaked that they'll make $200 billion in four years' time. I mean, if you're concussed, I can see how you believe that. I'm going to read you a bunch of numbers. I know it's kind of going to be annoying to hear this. For the next 30 seconds, I'm going to just throw figures at you, but pay attention because it's important to realize how insane this is. So in 2025, Open AI projects to make $13 billion and have free cash flow of negative $9 billion. In 2026, OpenAI will make $29 billion, or $30,000.

$30 billion, but have free cash flow of negative $17 billion. In 2027, OpenAI will make $60 billion, but have negative cash flow of negative $35 billion. And in 2020A, OpenAI will make $100 billion, but have free cash flow of negative $47 billion. In 20209, OpenAI will make $145 billion, but have free cash flow of negative $8 billion somehow. I just want to reiterate that. Open AI's projections see it reduce its negative cash flow by $39 billion. or one and a half times 3M's revenue from the last financial year in a single year, while also increasing their revenue by a similar amount, give or take a few billion. Who's counting?

Certainly not Sarah Fryer, the CFO of OpenAI. It's also fucking stupid, but don't worry. I know. I know some of you have been worried. You see big strong men with tears in their eyes saying, sir, sir, Open AI, they're not going to have enough money. They're going to die. But don't worry. In 2030, Open AI will make $200 billion and somehow have positive free cash.

low of $38 billion. It's just that easy. I don't teach you this in business school. It's just that easy. How are they going to make it? They're going to make it. They'll be fine. Open AI's current reported burn is $15 billion through 2030, which means there's no way that these projections that were leaked included $300 billion in compute costs, even when you factor in the revenue. There's no space in the projections to absorb the Oracle money. And from what I can tell by 2009, Open AI will have burned upwards of $290 billion, assuming it survives that long, which I not believe it will. Don't worry, though, Open AI is about to make some crazy money, I say in no way being totally sarcastic. I'm going to now read you some of the projections that CFO Sarah

Frye signed off on. This is a professional chief financial officer. Again, more numbers, but pay attention. Pay attention. This is, I want to give you, because these are numbers you just heard, but I want to give you some comparison points. So in 2026, Open AI will make, according to their projections, or these are the projections, $30 billion in revenue, or just under the $34 billion that Salesforce made in 2024. In 2007, OpenAI will allegedly make $60 billion, or $2.6 billion more than the $57.4 billion dollars, the Oracle made in its fiscal year 2025, or $8.4 billion more than Broadcom made in 2024. In 2028, this is crazy. Open AI will make $100 billion, $2.3 billion more than Tesla made in 2024 or 11.166 billion more than TSM, the single largest chip manufacturer in the world made in

2024. In 2009, things get crazier because Open AI will then make $154 billion or $14.5 billion more than the $130.5 billion that Nvidia made in its fiscal year 2025. But in 2030, this is when they really blow the doors off. They will make $200 billion or $35.5 billion than the $164.5 billion that meta made in 2024. Just so we are clear, OpenAI intends to 10 exits revenue in the space of four years selling software and access to its models in an industry with about $60 billion of revenue in 2025. How will it do this? OpenAI does not say. I don't know OpenAI, CFO, Sarah Fryer, but I do know that signing off on these numbers is at the very least ethically questionable. But putting aside the ridiculousness of OpenAI's deals or its funding requirements,

Friar has willfully allowed Sam Horman and Open AI to state goals that defy reality or good sense, all to take advantage of investors and public markets that have completely lost the plot. I'm actually, you know what, I'm actually going to be blunter. Open AI has signed multiple different deals and contracts for amounts it cannot afford to pay, that it cannot hope to raise the money to pay for, that defy the amounts of venture capital and private capital available, all to sustain a company that will burn half a trillion dollars, in the next four years based on their own expenditures, and they have no path to profitability of any kind.

But what about that in Nvidia deal, Ed? $100 billion is a lot of money, right? It is, but the announcement is bullshit. I know you may have read otherwise, but Nvidia didn't give OpenAI $100 billion. In fact, $90 billion of that is contingent on OpenAI building roughly $125 billion worth of data centers with $200 billion worth of GPUs inside them. And those data centers will have to be built faster than anyone could possibly build something at that scale. And there's no evidence that OpenAI knows where or when these facilities will be built or who will build them. Important detail as well.

Invidia's data centers have nothing to do with Stargate. So when you read that OpenAI has 7 gigawatts of Stargate, whatever, it doesn't exist, who cares? That's nothing to do with Nvidia. Oracle is not building these data centers. The 10 gigawatts that they need to build with Nvidia are something completely separate. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide, not quite on humor. me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk,

to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your

parents made a huge donation. To the group. side to the group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad support.

streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started.

That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout, Kate Martin, and rising hockey star, Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't.

Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel like. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladecki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me.

And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfridell from PodMeets World. And now the Pod Meets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of Survivor knowledge.

That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Yeah. Just because we... Yeah.

We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha, hoo. Ha, ha, ooh. Again, we are experts.

So make sure to tune into Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to Pod Meets Twirled on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But you know what, let's take a step back, with something really simple. Data centers take forever to build.

As I've said previously, based on current reports, it's taking Oracle and Crusoe around 2.5 years per gigawatt of dataset compatibility. And nowhere in these reports there's one reporter take a fucking second to say, hey, what data centers are you talking about? Hey, didn't say, Marklema say back in July, he was building 10 gigawatts of data center capacity with Oracle. But wait, now Oracle and OpenAI have done another announcement that says they're only doing 7 gigawatts, but they already had a schedule on 10 gigawatts. Like I said, totally different 10 gigawatts to the one with Nvidia. But you know what?

You got a few hundred billion dollars of data centers. Now you're making real money. Anyway, I cannot be clear enough how unlikely it is that the first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will be deployed in the second half of 2026, as Nvidia has stated, with their deal with Open AI. And that's as if the land has been bought and got permits and the construction has started. None of this has happened. But, you know, let's get really specific on costs.

Crusoe's 1.2 gigawatts of compute for OpenAI is a $15 billion joint venture, which means a gigawatt of compute runs about $12.5 billion worth of construction. Abilene's eight buildings are meant to hold 50,000, Nvidia, GB200 GPUs and their associated networking infrastructure. So let's say a gigawatt is around 33,000 Blackwell GPUs, even though the GB200s are technically two of them put together. Though this math is a little funky due to Nvidia promises. to install its new Rubin GPUs in these theoretical data centers, that means these data centers

will require a little under $200 billion worth of GPUs. By my maths, that's about $325 billion, but Nvidia is saying it could be half a trillion. But you know, who gives a shit, right? Numbers don't matter. You've got Jensen Huang telling CNBC that one gigawatt costs 50, 60 billion dollars. You've got Altman claiming the same thing to Bloomberg. Well, my math says something completely fucking different. But no one seems to want to bother. You know, Sony like the places I'm quoting are leading business outlets with teams of thousands of people with incredible infrastructure where they could sit down and say, well, you know, it costs this much to build Stargate Abilene. Why don't we work out actually what this costs? No, no, no, no.

Just eat the info slop. Yum, yum, yum. You know, it doesn't exhaust me. It doesn't make me cynical and frustrated with people who could do a good job. Indeed, I've seen them do a good job, but they just seem to not want to do one with this. It genuinely bothers me on a day-to-day basis. Okay, I realize I'm just ranting at this point, but I'm going to be honest, I'm just, I'm so tired of this. As a reminder as well, Open AI has agreed to spend $300 billion on compute with Oracle, but at this point, as you can tell, numbers basically don't have meaning.

Numbers stop meaning anything. If you believe these numbers, you're a fantasist or a liar, or you just don't want to think about them too much. because when you think about them, you start to realize how unrealistic it is. And even if you remain steadfast in your belief of the transformative potential of large language models, eventually there comes a point where reality must prevail and you accept that we're in a bubble, whether you like it or not. What we're witnessing is one of the most egregious wastes of capital in history, sold by career charlatans with their reputations laundered by a tech and business media,

afraid to criticize the powerful, an analyst that don't seem to want to tell their investors the truth. There are no historic comparisons here. Even Britain's abominable 1800s railway bubble, which absorbed half of the country's national income, created valuable infrastructure for trains, a vehicle that can move people to and from places. The train doesn't randomly just go backwards when you make it go forwards. It doesn't become a bus or a dog at random. It doesn't hallucinate doors that open and close at random.

Trains work. And GPUs are not trains, nor are they cars or even CPUs. They are not adaptable to many other kinds of work, nor are they, the infrastructure of the future of tech, because they're already quite old, and with everybody focused on buying them, you'd absolutely see one other use case by now that actually mattered. GPUs are expensive, power-hungry, environmentally destructive, and require their own kinds of cooling and server infrastructure, making every GPU data center an environmental and fiscal bubble onto themselves. And whereas the Victorian train infrastructure still exists in the UK,

though it has been upgraded over the years, a GPU has a limited useful lifespan. These are cards that can and will break after a period of extended usage, whether that period is five years or later, though I hear it's one to three, and they'll inevitably be superseded by something better and more powerful, meaning that the resale value of that GPU will only go down with a price depreciation that's akin to a new car, and then a used car, and then a car that you kick the door of every so often. I am telling you, as I have been telling you for years again and again and again, that the demand is not there for generative AI and the demand is never ever arriving. The only reason anyone humors any of this crap is the endless hoarding of GPUs to build capacity

for a revolution that will never arrive. Well, that an open AI, a company that's built and sold on lies about chat GPT's capabilities. Chat GPT's popularity and OpenAI's hunger for endless amounts of compute have created the illusion of demand due to the sheer amount of capacity required to keep their services operational, or so that it can burn around $8 billion or more in 2025, and hundreds of billions of dollars more by 2030, if they make it, which they won't. The Nvidia deal is a farce, an obvious attempt by the largest company on the American stock market to prop up the one significant revenue generator in the entire industry, knowing the time is running out for it to create new avenues for eternal growth.

I'd argue that Nvidia's deal also shows the complete contempt that these companies have for the media. There are no details about how this deal works beyond the initial $10 billion. There's no land purchase, no data center construction started, yet the media slurps it down without a second thought. I am but one man, and I'm fucking peculiar. I did not learn financial analysis in school, but I appeared to be one of the few people doing even the most basic analysis of these deals. And while I'm having a great time doing so,

I'm also extremely frustrated about how little effort is being put into prying apart these deals by the people. I realize how ridiculous all of this sounds. I get it. There's so much money being promised to so many people. Market rallies built off the back of these massive deals, and I get that the assumption is that this much money can't be wrong, that this many people wouldn't just say stuff without intending to follow through or without considering whether their company could afford it.

I know it's hard to conceive that these hundreds of billions of dollars could be invested in something for no apparent reason. But it's happening. Write goddamn now in front of your eyes, and I am going to be merciless on anyone who attempts to write, how could we possibly have seen this coming? Genere of AI has never been reliable, has always been unprofitable,

and has always been unsustainable, and I've been saying so since at least February 2024. These economics have never made sense, something I've said repeatedly since April 24. And when I wrote, How Does Open AI Survive in July 2024? I had multiple people suggest I was being an alarmist. Here's some alarmism for you. The longer it takes for Open AI to die, the more damage it will cause once it does. As I talked about earlier in the series, venture capital could run out in six quarters,

with investor and researcher John Saccoder estimating that there will be only around 164 billion, billion dollars of dry powder, which is available capital, by the way, in USVC firms by the end 2025. In July, the French tech journal reported, using Pitchbook data, the global venture capital deal activity reached its lowest first half total since 2018, with $139.4 billion in deal value in the first half of 2025, down from 183.4 billion in the first half of 2024, meaning that any further expansion or demands for venture capital from OpenAI will likely sap the dwindling funds available for other startups. Things get worse when you narrow things to the US venture capital. In a piece from April,

Ernst & Young reported the VC-backed investment in US companies hit $80 billion in Q1, 2025, but one $140 billion deal accounted for half of the investment. OpenAI's $40 billion deal, of which only $10 billion has actually closed, and that didn't happen until fucking June. Without the imaginary money from OpenAI, U.S. venture capital would have declined by 36%. I should also add another $8.3 billion was added on the top of that, but still, that's less than $40, folks. The longer the open AI survives, the longer it will sap the remaining billions from the tech ecosystem, and I expect its tendrils to extend to private credit soon, too. The $325 billion it needs just to fulfill its Nvidia contract, albeit over four years,

is an egregious sum that I believe exceeds the available private capital in the world. And I went and actually looked. Assuming that all of this capital is currently available, the top 10 private equity firms in the world have around $477 billion of available capital. A reminder, $477 billion is a lot less than Open AI's total commitments over the next few years. In fact, I put a premium newsletter out just before recording this, so I didn't totally update the script, but OpenAI needs a trillion dollars. They need about $500 billion for operations and about $450 billion for all the data centers they promised, and the GPUs in them. It's not really good.

It's not good at all. But if we include the cash at hand at the biggest investment banks, this brings us up to, by the way, if we assume that all of these funds are available, about $562 billion in capital and $164 billion of venture capital in the US to spend, and that's all meant to go in more places than just Open AI. That's not enough. If we combined all the available private equity firms in the top 10

and all of the available US VC, that's not enough to pay for all the bills that OpenAI said. We're in a fucking bubble, man. Sure. I also get that there's more than 10. private equity firms and there's more venture money and they could raise more money for MELPs. But what's the left exactly?

150, 200, 300 billion? They need that. They need all of that. Hand that over to Clammy semi right now. Clammy needs to give that money to Jensen. Jensen need money. Number go up, you asshole. Give money to Jensen Wong now. Another podcast from some SNL late night

comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group?

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group, the yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change.

You have a name suggestion? We're open. since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, I-heart's twice as large as the next. two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at IHeartadvertising.com. That's IHeartadvertising. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that

keeps them going from the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel like you don't feel like. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladeke.

The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile. That means the world to me, and that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting.

I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety, and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder,

and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You see, OpenAI needs to buy those GPUs and it needs to build those data centers, and it needs to pay its thousands of staff and marketing and sales costs too. Well, Open AI likely wouldn't be the ones raising the money for the data centers, and honestly I'm not sure who would at this point. somebody is going to need to build 20 fucking gigawatts of data centers if we're going to believe Oracle and Nvidia. You may argue that venture funds and private equity funds can raise more and you're right, but at this point there have been few meaningful acquisitions of AI companies

and zero exits from the billions of dollars put into data centers. How are they meant to justify doing this other than me need money, please? Even Open AI admits it's in its own announcement about new Stargate sites that this will be a $400 billion investment over three years. Where the fuck's the money coming from? Is Open AI really going to absorb massive chunks of all available private credit and venture capital and CAPEX from major tech companies for the next few years? And oh my fucking God. Oh my God. Stop saying the US government will bail this out.

I'm tired of hearing it. I get the things are scary right now. I'm scared too. We're all fucking scared. But I get jumping to doomerism, but stop. The US government actually really can't afford. to do this. Open AI needs about a trillion dollars in the next four years. And while the US government has spent equivalent sums in the past to support private businesses, there's about $440 billion

dispersed during the Great Recession's TARP program, and that was when the Treasury bought toxic assets from investment banks to stop them from imploding like Lehman Brothers, that one. It's hard to imagine any case where Open AI is seen as vital to the global financial system and the economic health of the US as the actual banking system. And even if they were, that's more money. than they can easily mobilize, even for the US government. And sure, we spent around a trillion dollars, if we're being specific, $953 billion, on the paycheck protection program during the COVID era, that was to keep people employed at a time when the economy outside of Zoom and Walmart had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. There was an urgency that doesn't apply here.

If Open AI goes tits up, SoftBank, Dragonnear, and a few others lose a bit of money, nothing new there, and Sachin and Della has to explain why he spent tens of billions, actually hundreds of billions of on data centers fills with GPUs. But otherwise, you can't really bail this out. Are we going to nationalize Nvidia? Are we going to create a top fund just for Open AI? If you really believe that will happen, I really must put a smile on your face. It can't.

Even under the most crony capitalism scenario, this is more money than actually really exists in the world. And yes, while there will be, and have been already, disastrous economic consequences, they won't be as systematically catastrophic as that of a pandemic or a global financial crisis. To be clear, it'll be bad, but not as bad. And there's also the problem of a moral hazard. If the government steps in, what's to stop big tech chasing its next fruitless rainbow? And of course, the optics.

If people resented bailing out the banks after they acted like gamblers and lost, how will they feel bailing out fucking Sam Altman and Jensen Huang? Seriously, no matter when you've got a conservative or Democrat government, this is not going to be an easy thing to sell. It's going to be hard to get the consensus. And indeed, every tech company will be kind of pissed. I think that you underestimate how upset companies that have died would be. And indeed, companies outside of tech too.

This would be more than a scandal. It would be genuinely bad to do. Even for the silliest government in the world, I don't think it's happening. And even if they tried, there's not enough money. breathe. Breathe. They can't get you. You're doing a podcast. Look, this has been a slog, and I appreciate you sticking with me this long, but the significance of the bubble requires this depth. There's little demand, little real money and little reason to continue, and the sheer lack of responsibility, along with the willingness to kneel before the powerful, feels me full of angry

bile. I understand many journalists are not in a position where they can just write this shit sounds stupid, but we've entered a deeply stupid era, and by continuing to perpetuate the myth of AI, the media guarantees that retail investors and regular people's 401ks will suffer. It is now inevitable that this bubble bursts. Deutsche Bank has said that the AI boom is unsustainable outside of tech spending remaining parabolic, which it says is highly unlikely, and Bain Capital has said that $2 trillion in new revenue is needed to fund AI scaling, and even that math is completely fucked as it talks about AI-related savings.

And I quote, even if companies in the US shifted all of their on-premises IT budgets to cloud and reinvested the savings from applying AI in sales, marketing customs, support, and R&D into capital spending on new AI data centers, the amount would still fall short of the revenue needed to fund the full investment, as AI's compute demands grow more than twice the rate of Moore's Law, Bain notes. Even when stared in the face by a ridiculous idea, $2 trillion of new revenue in a global software market, and this is all software, that's expected to be around $817 billion in 2025, Bain still oinks out some nonsense about the savings from applying AI. Yet another myth perpetuate I seem to placate the fucking morons

sinking billions into this. Every single vibe coding is the future, the power of AI, an AI job look, story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts. Every article written about open AI or Nvidia or Oracle

that does not explicitly state that the money doesn't exist, that the revenues that are impossible, that one of the companies involved earns billions of dollars and has no path to profitability is an act of irresponsibility, an irresponsible make-belief and mythos. Look, I'm nobody. I'm not a financier. I'm not anybody special. I write a lot, I read a lot, and can do the most basic maths in the world. I'm not trying to be anything other than myself, nor do I have an agenda, other than the fact that I like doing this and I hate how this story is

being told. I never expected my newsletter to get big, nor did I expect this podcast, nor did I expect to be in the financial times. But here I am and I'm working my arse off. And I am pissed off at where this has got to. I'm tired that things remain honestly mythical. That we still see as things get more and more ridiculous. That the headlines get more ridiculous too. That there's questioning and people are saying, oh, the narrative is shifting. Sure, but they're still repeating increasingly dumb shit. And I also believe that the way to stop this happening again is to have a thorough and well-sourced explanation of everything as it happens, ripping down the narratives as they're spun

and making it clear who benefits from them and how and why they're choosing to do so. When things collapse, we need to be clear about how many times people chose to look the other way or to find good faith ways to interpret bad faith announcements and leaks. So how could we have seen this coming? I don't know.

Did anybody try to fucking look? Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matersowski.com. M-A-T-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed? dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Better-O-L-Line to check out our Reddit.

Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media. Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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