Better Offline - The Enshittifinancial Crisis: Part Four

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

In the final part of this week’s four-part Better Offline Enshittifinancial Crisis special, Ed Zitron walks you through how ignoring the horrifying margins and destructive practices of the AI industry is setting up venture capital and the global markets for a catastrophe, and how all of this could’ve been avoided.This series was a ton of work, so please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen Read along with the newsletter version for links! https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/ 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/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster,

IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. 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 funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move.

And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face.

I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin and I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now.

You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media. Hello and welcome back to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. This is the last part of our four-part series about how the financial system and the financial markets are the last victims of the inshittification process.

Over the past four episodes and a 20,000 or so word newsletter which this series is based on, I've explained how. And in this final episode, I'm going to explain how all this. is going to fall apart and make it clear where I'm so fucking alarmed. Now, let's get back to those data centers. We've already got some signs of concern within the banking world around them, and I'm kind of worried, and so are they about their exposure. In November, the FT reported the Deutsche Bank, which backed Corweave multiple times and several

data centers, was exploring ways to hedge its exposure to the AI data centers after extending billions of dollars in debt, including shorting a basket of AI-related stocks, or buying default protection on some of its debt using synthetic risk transfers, which are when a bank sells the full or partial credit risk of a loan or loans to another bank while keeping the loans on their book, paying a monthly fee to investors. This is a simplification. Please don't be mad at me. In December, Fortune reported the Morgan Stanley, three times with Corweave, IPI partners,

Hyperion, SoftBanks, Bridge loan, was also considering synthetic risk transfers on loans to businesses involved in AI infrastructure. what those were for. Now, back in April, SMBC sold synthetic risk transfers. Back in April, SMBC sold synthetic risk transfers tied to private debt BDCs, and while this predates the larger data center deals done by Blue Al, who is a BDC themselves, SMBC's overseen multiple Blue Al deals in the past. In December, SMBC closed another SRT, selling off risk from Australian and Asian project finance loans, though it can't confirm if any of those were done. Data Center related. Now in December, Goldman Sachs paused the planned mortgage bond sale for Data Center

operator Cyrus 1 with the intent to revive it in the first quarter of 2026. I've heard nothing from that since. Oracle's credit risk reaches 16-year high in the middle of December with credit default swaps, basically betting that Oracle will default on its debt, which is unlikely yet no longer impossible, climbing to their highest price since the great financial crisis. While Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Banks' SRTs are yet to close, It's still notable that two of the largest players in data center financing feel the need to hedge their bets. So, what exactly are they hedging against? Simple.

That tenants won't arrive and debts won't get paid. I also believe that they're going to need bigger hedges because I don't think there's enough actual AI demand to meet the data centers being built, and I think most data center loans end up being underwater within the next two years. To be clear, this isn't a speculative chance, but rather one wrong on the chain of pain that's been forged, and looks like it's ready to snap. Let's start by quoting my premium newsletter from December 5th. While many people talk about how circular the AI bubble may or may not be, the reality is that it's far more like a chain, a deeply vulnerable one held together by debt and venture capital. A company buys a GPU from Nvidia, at which point nobody is making any profit anymore.

These GPUs are purchased, for the most part, using debt provided by banks or financial institutions. While hyperslars like Microsoft can and do fund GPUs using cash flow, even they, have started to turn to Dan. At that point, the company that bought the GPUs six hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions of dollars, to build out a data center, and once it turns on, provides compute to a model provider, such as OpenAI or Anthropic, or even a smaller company, which then begins losing money, selling access to those GPUs, or, of course, training models on them, which only loses money. For example, both Open AI and Anthropic lose billions of dollars, and both rely on venture capital to fund their ability to continue paying for accessing those GPU.

At that point, OpenAI and Anthropic offer either subscriptions, which cost far more to offer than the revenue they provide, or API access to their models on a per million token basis. These rates are often subsidised too. AI startups pay to access those models to run their services, which end up costing more than the revenue that they make from offering them, which means they have to raise venture capital to continue paying to access those models. Outside of hyperscalers paying Nvidia for GPUs out of cash flow, none of the AI industry is fueled by revenue. Every single part of the industry is fueled by a kind of subsidy, debt or equity.

As a result, the AI bubble is really a stress test of the global venture capital, private equity, private credit, institutional and banking system, and its willingness to fund all of this forever because there isn't a single generative AI company that's got a path to profitability. You see, every little link in the chain of pain is necessary to understand things. The inshittified stock market, pumped not by actual cash flow or productivity, by which I mean products that are selling, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, meta, they don't actually generate real revenue, definitely not profit from AI, but by signals read by analysts and investors trained over decades to push consumers to invest in the magnificent seven stocks. These stocks represent as much as 40%

of the value of the S&P 500, and their values, as I said, were pumped by analysts and the media misleading investors into believing that revenue growth for companies like Microsoft's, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google have anything to do with AI versus the growth of their regular services. The other part in the chain is venture capital's liquidity crisis, one peaking at a time when startups have become more capital intensive than any other point in history, and the underlying value of their investments is only valuable as long as these companies stay alive. And then, of course, the ballooning centralized data center debt bubble, funded based on customer contracts or built for demand that does not exist, funding massive data centers of GPUs that immediately become commoditized

as a result of this hysteria. In really simple terms, I believe that almost every investment in a data center or AI startup may go to zero. Let me explain. If we assume that half of the $171.71.5 billion debt is in GPU, so $85 billion or so,

that's about 3.2 gigawatts of data set of capacity, based on my model of Vennessee's approximate split of sales between different AI GPUs from a premium price from a few weeks ago. As a brief explainer, I made the model by taking Nvidia's data center revenues, estimating how many of each GPU they sell, then dividing those revenues by those numbers and multiplying the result by the power output of the GPUs. In really simple terms, I worked out how many GPUs they sold and what the power to run them would be, and it'd be about 3.2 gigawatts.

The likelihood of the majority of these projects being A, completed within the next year and B, completed on budget is very, very small. Every delay increases the likelihood of default, as each of these projects is heavily debt-based. I also want to add OpenAI claims, and I actually think they're bullshitting here, that they had two gigawatts of compute at the end of 2025. Two gigawatts. They are the only company with any real consumer exposure. They're the only ones with any number of real users other than Google, who has literally changed Google Assistant for Gemini. I don't think there's even like 500 megawatts of real demand outside of people training models or Elon Musk's CSAM generator. And that's a whole different story.

Now, in general, the customers of these projects are either hyperscalers who are only doing AI because they have no other hypergrowth ideas and because Wall Street currently approves, or AI startups, all of whom are unprofitable. While there are potentially hedge funds or other small companies looking for private AI integrations, I think this is a very, very small market. On top of that, AI compute itself may not be profitable. And because, by my estimate, everybody has spent about $85 billion on filling data centers with the same GPS, the aggregate price of renting out GPUs will decline.

Already the average price of renting out Blackwell GPUs has declined to an average of $4.45 an hour, according to silicon data. And that's before the majority of Blackwell-powered GPUs come online. Yet the customer-based shrinks from there because the majority of AI startups aren't actually renting GPUs. They build products on top of models built by OpenAI or Anthropic, who have made it clear their buying capacity from either hypers-calers or in OpenAI's case getting Oracle or CoreWeave to build it for them. Why? Because building your own model is incredibly capital

intensive, both on the compute and the data you have to get, and it's hard to tell if the results will be worth it. Now, let's assume, I don't actually believe it will, but let's try anyway that all of that 3.2 gigawatts of capacity comes online. How much of it, how much, actually, how much computers an AI company use? Like I said, Open AI ended 2025 with 2 gigawatts of capacity, and they apparently have 900 million weekly active users. I don't think there were any AI companies with even 10% of that user base, but even if they were, OpenAI spent $8.67 billion on inference through the end of September. Who can afford to pay even 10% of that a year?

Or 5%. Yet in reality, OpenAI is likely more indicative of the overall compute spend of the entire AI industry. As I've said, most companies are powered not by their own GPU-driven models, but by renting them from model providers like OpenAI themselves. Open AI and Anthropics spent a combined $11.33 billion in compute on Zora AWS, respectively through the first nine months of last year. And that's my own reporting, by the way. And as the two largest consumers of AI compute, well, I'm a little worried. These things suggest two things.

The market for AI compute is actually very, very small. If you assume that Anthropics spent the same amount on Google Cloud as it did in AWS, that would be about a total of $5.32 billion. and had core weaves revenue, call it $5 billion, most of which was OpenAI via Microsoft or Nvidia, that doesn't appear to be an AI compute market outside of servicing two companies. The other problem is the market for AI compute is not actually growing. In the last two years, no new major customers of AI compute have emerged. Every company that has signed a large compute deal has either been Open AI, Anthropic or a hyperscaler. Even if Cursor, an AI coding company, were to dump its entire $2.3 billion into funding AI compute, that would still not be very much.

In fact, it would take sinking every single dollar of venture capital, over $200 billion, every single year and then some funneled into AI compute just to produce the revenue to justify these deals' existence. In the space of a year, Microsoft Azure made $75 billion, Google Cloud 43 billion, and Amazon Web Services $100 billion. Now, that is, just add those numbers together. It's a lot of it. a little over $200 billion. And that's the three largest providers of any kind of compute, not just AI compute. Most of that is not AI compute.

In fact, they barely make anything on that. They won't even talk about AI revenues, probably because they're so stinky. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor 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 Mike U. Day and head writer Streeter Seidel

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that 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. 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 Smygel and friends on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Huber 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, IHart'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. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfredel 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, Traders, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Star.

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? Like what was just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion at the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha who. Again, we are. experts. So make sure to tune in to Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to Pod Meets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Well, if you need more proof, if you still don't believe me, skip to page 18 of Nvidia's most recent earth. And I quote, multi-year cloud service agreement commitments as of October 26, 2025 were $26 billion,

for which $1 billion, $6 billion, $6 billion, $5 billion, $4 billion, and $4 billion, will be paid in fiscal years 2026, fourth quarter, 2027, 2028, 2029, 2030, and 2013, and thereafter, respectively. Now, I know that was confusing, but just to line that up, that means in fiscal year 2027, which begins, Oh, I would have to look that up. Yeah, I'm literally doing this on the air. I don't give a shit. So their fiscal year begins in February. So basically, 2027 begins this February 26.

So they're going to be spending $6 billion on AI compute in 2017. This is a company that does not rent out compute. If there's such incredible surging demand, why exactly is Nvidia spending $6 billion fucking dollars a year in 20206 and 20207 on it? Invinia doesn't need compute. It just shut down its Amazon Web Services competitor. It's called DGX Cloud. It looks far more like NVIDIA's propping up an industry with non-existent demand. I'm afraid there is no secret Amazon Web Services size spend waiting in the wings for the right moment to pounce. There is no secret demand wave, nor is there any capacity crunch that is holding back incredible swathes of revenue. Oracle's $523 billion in remaining performance obligations are made up of OpenAI, meta, and you'll never guess who,

NVIDIA. Fucking NVIDIA. The AI bubble is just Nvidia being handed money and then handing it to people. They're very profitable as well. They do great. Everyone else, uh, not so much.

For AI Data Center deals to make sense, most startups would have to start becoming direct users of AI compute while also spending more on cloud compute services than they've ever spent. The largest consumers of AI compute are both unprofitable, unsustainable, monstrosities dependent on venture capital. Eventually, reality will dawn on one or more of these banks.

Projects will get delayed thanks to weather or budgetary issues or when customers walk away, as just happened to a data center, REIT called Fermi, and loan payments will start going unpaid. Elsewhere, AI startups will start asking for money again and again. And for a while, they'll keep raising until the valuations get too high or VC coffers get too low. You're probably going to say at this point that Open AI or Anthropic might go public. which will infuse capital into the system. And I want to give you a preview of what that might look like, courtesy of AI Labs, Minimax and Zipu, as reported by the information,

which just filed to go public here. I'm a little scared. These are the first real numbers about the AI bubble. I hope I'm not going to get embarrassed. Everybody's saying the behind the scenes, these companies are secretly great. Let's take a look. Oh my God! These numbers aren't great at all.

These numbers are terrible. In the first half of this of 2025, Zipu had a net loss of $334 million on $27 million of revenue. Meanwhile, Minimax made $53.4 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2025 and but $211 million to earn it. It's time to wake up. These are the real life costs of running an AI company. Open AI and Anthropic are going to be even worse than this. This is why nobody wants to take AI companies public. This is why nobody wants to talk about the actual costs of running AI.

This is why nobody wants you to know the hourly cost of running a GPU, and this is why OpenAI and Anthropic burn billions and billions of dollars. The margins fucking stink, every product is unprofitable, and none of these companies can afford their bills based on their actual cash flow. Generative AI is not a functional industry, and once the money works that out, everything burns. Though many AI data centers boast of having tenancy agreements remember, these agreements are either with AI start-ups that will run out of money,

who really shouldn't be renting GPUs, by the way, or hyperscalers with legal teams numbering in the thousands. Every single deal that Microsoft Amazon meta, Google or Nvidia's signs is riddled with outs specifically hedging against this scenario, and there won't be a damn thing that anybody can do about it if hyperscalers decide to walk away. Before then, Nvidia's bubble is likely to burst. As I discussed a few weeks ago,

NVIDIA claims to have shipped 6 million Blackwell GPUs, and while it may be employing very dodgy maths, claiming that each GPU is actually two chips, Jensen? Jensen, you drive me insane. My modelling of its last three quarters suggests that NVIDIA shipped around 5.33 gigawatts worth of GPUs. And based on reading about every single data center deal I can find, it doesn't appear that many have been built and powered on, or even started building in many cases. Worse still, Nvidia's divulgeal. diversified revenue is collapsing. In the first quarter of its fiscal year 2026, I'm sorry, you're just going to have to ride with me on this one. Two customers represented 16% and 14% in revenue. In the second quarter of fiscal year 26, two customers represented 23% and 16%. And in the

third quarter, four customers represented 22%, 15%, 13%, and 11% of total revenue, with all of that money going towards GPUs or networking gear. In simpler terms, Nvidia's revenue is no longer coming from a diverse swath of customers. In its first quarter fiscal year 2026, it had $30.84 billion of diversified revenue. That's from customers that do not number more than 10% of its revenue. And in the second quarter of FY26, that was 28.5 billion. Q3, it was 22.23 billion. In simpler terms, there are only a few companies that can buy GPUs and other companies are no longer buying GPUs at the same rate. I doubt this number is going to increase. You see, Nvidia GPUs are astronomically expensive, $4.5 million for a GB300 RACA, 72B300 GPUs, for example,

and filling data centers full of them requires debt unless you're a hyperscaler. Well, I can't say for sure. I believe Nvidia's diversified revenue collapses a sign that smaller data center projects are starting to have issues getting funded, and or hypers are pulling back on the GPU purchases from those Taiwanese companies I was mentioning. Now, let me look through the eyes of an AI booster for a second. Okay, everything is blue and yellow as usual. Okay. One might say that these big customers are covering the loss of revenue, but the reality is that these big projects are run on debt issued by banks that are becoming increasingly worried about nobody paying them back. The mistake that every investor, commentator, analyst and member of the media makes about Nvidia is believing that its sales are an expression of demand for AI compute,

when in reality, it's more of a statement about the availability of debt from banks and private credit. Similarly, the continued existence of AI startups is an expression of the data. desperation of venture capital and the continuing flow of massive funding rounds is a sign that they see no other revenues for growth and that their startups can't wipe their own assholes. Eventually, data centers are going to go unbuilt and data center debt packages will begin to fall apart. Remember, Oracle's $38 billion data center deal is actually yet to close, much like Stargate New Mexico is yet to close and much like Stargate Michigan is yet to close. These deals, while seeming like they're trending positively, are all incredibly important to the future of the AI bubble and any

failure will spook an already nervous market. Only one link in this chain of pain needs to break. Every single part of the AI bubble, this fucking charade is unprofitable, save for Nvidia and the construction firms erecting future laser tag arenas full of negative margin GPUs. Tell me, what happens if the debt stops flowing data centers? How will Nvidia sell their so-called 20 million Blackwell and Virid Rubin GPUs they're claiming they'll ship by the end of 2026. What happens if venture capitalists start running low on funds and can't keep feeding hundreds of millions of dollars to AI startups so that they can feed them directly to OpenAI or Anthropic? What happens to Open AI and Anthropic and their already negative margin businesses when their

customers can't pay them? What happens to Oracle or CoreWeave's work in progress data centers if Open AI can't pay their bills? What happens to Anthropics? $21 billion of Broadcom orders or tens of billions of dollars of Google Cloud spend? And what if I'm right about everything I've said, not just in this series, but in the episodes and newsletters before him? In the last year, I estimate I've been asked the question, what if you're wrong over 25 times? Every single time the question comes with this undercurrent of venom, the suggestion that I'm being an asshole for daring to question the wondrous AI bubble. Every single person who's asked me this has been poorly read, both in terms of my work and the

surrounding economics and technological possibilities of large language models, and believes they're defending technology, when in reality they're defending growth and the rock economy's growth at all-cost mindset. In many cases, they are not excited about technology at all, but the prospects of being the first in line to lick an already sparkling boot. This has never, ever been about progress or productivity. If it was, we'd seen actual progress or productivity. or anything other than the frothiest debt, the frothiest venture capital markets, and the most annoying and incorrect headlines I've ever read in the news. Large language models do not create novel concepts, they are inconsistent and unreliable,

and even the things that people like them for, like coding, very wildly thanks to the dramatic variance of a giant probability machine. LLMs are not good enough for people to pay regular software prices at any scale, and the consequences of this will be that every single dollar spent on GPUs has been for exactly one point, manipulating the value of stocks, by making hyperscalers look good so that they can keep pretending that they create anything. AI does not have the business returns and may indeed have negative gross margins across the board. It is inconsistent, ugly, unreliable, expensive and environmentally ruinous, pissing off a large junk of consumers and underwhelming most of the rest,

other than those convinced they're smart for using it, or those who have resigned to giving up at the site of a confidence game sold by a tech industry that stopped making products primarily focused on solving the problems of consumers or businesses a long time ago. You may say I'm wrong because Google, Microsoft, Metro and Amazon continue to have healthy net revenues and revenue growth, and as I've previously said, these companies are not sharing AI revenues and their existing businesses are still growing due to the massive monopolies they've built. And I want to plea to the AI boosters and bullish analysts alike. You are being had! Satchin Adela, Sam Altman, Dario Amadei, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg,

Larry Ellison, Saffercats, Elon Musk, Clay McGuuk, Mike Cecilia, Mike Trull, Aravinds Rivenis, all of them are laughing at you behind your back because they know that you're never going to ask the obvious questions that would defeat my argument. and know that you will never ever push back on them. They know the truth. They just don't want to tell you because you don't care to argue. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide,

not quite. Unhumor 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 head writer 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. 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. 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 ads supported 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. radio and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-heart to get started. That's 844-8-4-8-4-I-heart. For one, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfredel 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? Like what was just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion at 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 PodMeets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Twirled

on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Intercosmos on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The inshittification of the shareholder has the downstream effect of an inshittification of the media and the Wall Street analysts writ large. Analysts, media, these companies own you. They own your asses. They try. treat you with disdain and condescension because they know you'll let them. They know that no sell side analysts will ever ask them, when will you be profitable or how much are you spending?

Or if you do ask, they know you will experience temporary amnesia and forget whatever answer they give, because these are the incentives of an inshittified stock market, where stocks are not extrapolations of shareholder value, but chips in a fucking casino where the house always wins and changes the rules every three months. These companies have changed the meaning of the words, stock to mean whatever the market will reward. And when you allow companies to start dictating the

terms of what will be rewarded, as neoliberalism, Friedman, Reagan, Nixon, NAFTA, and every other fucked-up growth-focused policy has, orienting everything exclusively around growth, companies eventually cut off any powers that may curtail any re-evaluation of the fundamental terms of capitalism and the incentives within. Focusing on growth at all costs thinking naturally encourages, enables and empowers grifters, because all they ever have to promise is more, more users, more debt, more venture, more features, more everything forever. From Adam Becker, buy it today. The very institutions that are meant to hold companies accountable, analysts in the media, are far more desperate to trade scoops for interviews, to pull punches, to find ways to explain

why a company is right rather than understand what the company is doing, and this is something pushed not by writers, but by editors that want to make sure they stay on the right side of the largest companies, and God damn do I know a few stories there that one day I might even tell. And if I'm right, Open AI's death will kill off most, if not all AI startups, Anthropic included. Every investor that invested in AI will take massive losses. Every startup that builds on the back of their models will see their companies fold if it hasn't already done so due to the massive costs, an upcoming price increase we've already seen signs of with priority processing with both Anthropic and Open AI in the middle of last year.

The majority of GPU-based data centers, which really have no other revenue stream, will be left inert, likely powered down, waiting for the day that someone works it all out, which they won't, because literally everybody has these things now, and I truly believe they've tried everything. And I'm going to hear from someone that says, oh, it's just like the dot-com boom, they're fiber-optic cable, we had so much fiber-optic cable, and then we put internet in them. This is not, GPUs are not fiber-optic cable.

They're not. I just did a premium piece on this. I'm probably going to have to do an episode on it. but they are not the same fucking thing. And people that keep saying this are flippant about the damage that's going to be caused and just flat out wrong. I really do challenge you to actually read history before you make any fucking statements like that. This is not for the people who are saying this just because they haven't looked and they just assume that the world wouldn't be stupid.

I don't think many people saying that are off that camp. I think they are people that have come up with comfortable reasons to validate bad behavior. and I must be clear, I'm watching. I'm watching everyone. I'm watching how everyone handles this, and I'm going to be watching extra hard on the way down. Because anybody who has been a booster that tries to change their target

and tries to change their direction without a direct acceptance and real contrition about their role, I have taken such detailed notes. But I will add something. I don't hate on any, AI because I'm a hater. I hate on it because it fucking sucks. And what I'm worried about happening seems to be happening. The tech industry has run out of hypergrowth ideas and in its desperation

hitched itself to the least profitable hardware and software in history, then spent three straight years lying about what was possible to the media, Alice and shareholders. And they were allowed to lie because everybody lapped it but fuck up. They didn't need to worry about convincing anybody. Financier, editors, analysts and investors were already drafting reasons why they were so excited about something they didn't really understand or believe in, other than the fact it promised more. This is what happens when you make everything about growth. Everybody becomes stupid, ready to be conned, ready to hear what the next big growth thing is, because asking nasty questions gets you fucking fired. And what's left is a tech industry that doesn't build technology, but growth-focused

startups. Look at Silicon Valley. Do you see these fucking people ever building a new kind of computer? Do you believe these men are fit to even imagine a future? These men care about the status quo. They want to always have more software to sell or ways to increase advertising revenue so that the stock number goes up so they receive more money in the form of stock compensation. They are concerned with neither actual business value, honest exchange of value or societal value. Their existence is only in shareholder value, which is how they are incentivized by their board of directors. And right now they're inshittifying being a shareholder. But really, if you're still defending AI,

does it matter to any of you that this software fucking sucks? If you think it's good, you don't know much about software. Sure, your coding tool is useful in whatever way. It can fart out a language simulator or whatever. Oh, it can do some of the easy coding things. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, man. I can't get excited about that.

We're hundreds of billions of dollars in the hole. I need something more than that. I need so much more than that. And if I'm honest, the problem with large language models is it's not good software. It doesn't respond precisely at any point to a user or a programmer's intent. That's bad software. And I don't care that you've heard developers really like it because that doesn't fix the underlying economic and social poison in AI. I don't care that it's sort of replaced search for you.

I don't care if you know a team of engineers that use it. Every single AI app is subsidized. Its price is fake. You are being lied to and none of this is real. I also, and this is a little bit of a side quest, I think AI psychosis is so much bigger than people think, I feel like I might have mentioned this

on the recent monologue, but it's just, it's really bothering me. I think there is something that happens when you play with these things and you make them work versus just being like, oh, they don't work. I think what happens is it convinces you you're smart when what you really are

is being a slave to the software yourself. You are being tricked. You are being convinced that the software is doing something because you are bonking it on the head until it does something you need it to. Really, none of this is real. None of it. I'm so scared. I'm so scared because on one hand, I kind of look like I'm about to be proven right in a way that's going to be good for business, I guess.

But being right here means watching something really calamitous. And when the collapse happens, do not let a single person that waived off the economics have a moment's piece. do not let anybody who sat in front of Dario Amadei or Sam Altman, such as, I don't know, on a New York Times podcast, and squealed with delight at whatever vacuous talking points they burped out, forget that they didn't push them, they didn't ask the hard questions, they didn't worry or wonder or feel any concerns for investors of the general public, they only cared about getting rock hard listening to whatever bullshit the latest large language model asshole has to say. Do not let a single analyst that called AI skeptics Luddites Daniel Newman. Futurum Group, or equated them to flat earthers, hear the end of it. Do not let anybody who

claim that we lost control of AI or that it blackmail developers go without their complimentary fell for it again badge, because no, these systems didn't blackmail anyone, they were literally being prompted to do it, you fell for it, and you will, you'll, no one is ever going to hear at the end of this from me. And when it happens, I promise I won't be too insufferable, but I will be calling for accountability for anybody who boosted AI 2027, who sat in front of Sam Orman or Daria Amadei, and once again refused to ask real questions or allowed bullshit answers, and for anyone, anyone who collected anything resembling detailed notes about me or any other AI skeptic. Threatening independent reporters because I didn't clap for Daddy's venture capital

bullshit is insufferable, poisonous, and will never, ever be forgotten. And if you think I'm talking about you, I probably am, and I have a question, why didn't you approach the AI companies with as much skepticism as you did the skeptics? Why were you so concerned about minor details when you could have cared about the major details that will very likely fuck our markets up, lead to an apocalyptic state of venture capital and startups? And genuinely, I don't even know of a recession will be it. I also genuinely promise you, if I'm wrong,

I'll happily explain how and why and I'll do so at length to. I'll have links, I'll have citations, I'll do podcast episodes, I will make a good faith effort to explain every single failing because my concern is the truth and I would love everybody else to follow suit.

Do you think any AI booster will have the same courtesy? Do you think they care about the truth? Or do they want their fish biscuit from Sam Orman or General and Huang. It's absolutely pathetic. And as we enter into 2026, I'm going to fucking floor it with this stuff. I've taught myself a great deal about numbers in the last year. I've really got a good head for reading these 10 Q's, and there's already stuff I'm seeing that is spelling the end that I'm

yet to talk about. This has been a long episode, and it's been a long four-parter. I really hope you've enjoyed it, because I've loved reading it. More to come next week. I'll be joined by Mr. Matt is off, wonderful editor-in-chief over at the register. We're going to talk about the dot-com bubble. Cheers, folks. Hit me up on the Reddit. Slub me a daughter-on-goot. 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 Mattersowski.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.at to visit the Discord and go to R-slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit.

Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy,

not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and Friends. me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move, and he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off, and that was the last time I saw him.

Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelmed. confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks,

and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I, like, was just so wanting to, like, be out of that phase out of my skin, and I just, like, really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand, yourself a little bit better.

Listen to the Psychology of your 20s on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Joey Dardano, and on my new podcast, Hope from a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to me.

This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from Hippocrite Wednesdays on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.