Better Offline - The Enshittifinancial Crisis: Part One

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

In part one of this week’s four-part Better Offline Enshittifinancial Crisis special, Ed Zitron walks you through the enshittification of the stock market, where toxic companies appreciate in value despite their toxicity, recklessness and waste, aided and abetted by analysts who not only ignore the toxicity but actively celebrate it. 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.

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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,

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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 to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. That's right, folks. I am back. It's, well, we've gone past CES.

You've had your Steve Burke episodes. As ever, buy the merchandise, subscribe to the newsletter. It's all in the notes. And you are here for the first of a multi-part series about the final and terminal stage of enshittification. when the companies that turned on their individual users, then turned on their business customers, finally turned on the markets and investors themselves. Now, it's important to start this with a point, and that's a good friend of mine once told me that the more I learned about finance, the more pissed off I'd get.

And I cannot think of anyone who has made a more egregious understatement in my life. I've spent the last two years basically teaching myself economics and all of this good stuff that I find genuinely really, interesting. It's enriched my life. And it's also driven me a little insane, as I'm sure many of you were well aware. The more I learn, the more frustrated I get, because I'm not a genius by any extension. I don't even know if I think I'm that smart, but like this stuff is just sitting there. You can see it. There are many other people writing like Edward and Grasso Jr. Molly Wight, of course, Brian Merchant as well. These people have dug into these types of things. But nevertheless, the mainstream, they're kind of missing something. And this.

four-parter is about that. And it has, of course, a companion newsletter where I will have most of the links that you'd usually see in the link document. I feel like nobody likes that document anyway, so I'm going to find a better way of doing things. But let's get to it. Because there's this echoing melancholy to this entire era, and we're watching the end of Silicon Valley's hypergrowth epoch. And I'd say it's a horrifying result of 15 plus years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems and only really looking for eternal growth. Everything's more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, also that every company can't I quote, do AI, whatever the fuck that means.

We're watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there just isn't the money to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal health care or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth in any way, shape, or form. The money does exist. It just exists for those that want to get. private equity firms, business development companies that exist to give money to other companies that are risky, yet regular people are too risky, venture capitalists and banks that are getting desperate and

need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve's overnight repurchase facility or discount window. Do worrying indicators of bank stress I need to get into in the future. No, no, no, the money does not exist for you or me, or a person even. Money is for entities that could potentially funnel more money into the economy. even if the ways that these entities use the money are reckless and foolhardy, because the system's intent on keeping entities alive incentivizes it. We are in an era where the average person is told to pull up their bootstraps, to work harder, to struggle more, because, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, it's socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the

poor. The free market is a fucking con. When you or I run out of money, our things are taken from us. We receive increasingly panicked letters with bigger fonts. We get phone calls and texts and emails and demands. We are told that all will be lost if we don't work it out somehow, because the financial system is not about an exchange of value, but whether or not you can enter into the currently agreed upon con. By letting neoliberalism and the scourge of the free markets rule, modern society has created the conditions what I call the inshitter financial crisis, the place at which my friend Corey Doctor Owens,

and star of CES 2026, and his theory in shitification, meets my own rot economy thesis in a fourth stage of inshidification. I'm going to quote an explanation of what inshittification is from the New Yorker. Enchitification unfolds in three phases. First, the company is, and I quote, good to users. Drawing people in droves as funnel traps do Japanese beetles with a promise of connection or convenience. Second, with that mass audience consolidated, the company is, and I quote, good to business customers, compromising some of its features so that the most lucrative clients, usually advertisers, can thrive on the platform. This second phase is the point at which, say, our Facebook feeds filled with ads and posts from brands.

Third, the company turns the experience into, and I quote again, a giant pile of shit, making the platform worse for users and businesses alike in order to further enrich the company's owners and executives. Now, I'm going to give you a more direct example and kind of bridge on some of the things said there. Facebook was at one point a huge free platform, much like Instagram, that offered fast and easy access to basically everybody you knew. It acquired Instagram, of course, in 2012 to kill off a likely competitor, and over time would start making both products worse. Click-bait notifications, a mandatory algorithmic feed that deliberately emotionally manipulated hundreds of thousands of people, and stoked massive political division, eventually becoming full of AI slop and videos, also that Meta could continue to sell billions of dollars of ads a quarter.

But Kyle Chaker of the New Yorker, Facebook's feed, now choked with AI-generated garbage and short-form videos, is well into the third act of inshittification. The third stage is critical in that it's when the company also turns on its business customers. A marketing brew story from September of 2024 told the tale of multiple advertisers who found their campaigns switching to different audiences, wasting their money and getting questionable results. A New York Times story from 2021 described companies losing upwards of 70% of their revenue during a Facebook ad's outage. Another from 2018 described how meta, then Facebook, deliberately hid issues with its measurement of engagement on videos from advertisers for over a year. that's their pivot to video. And more recently, Meta's ads tool started switching out top-performing

ads with AI-generated ones, in one case targeting men aged 30 to 45 with an AI-generated grandma, or without warning the advertiser. Meta doesn't give a shit, because investors and analysts don't give a shit either. I could say sell-side analysts here too, and those are the ones that are trying to get you to buy a stock, by the way, but based on every analyst's report I've read from a major bank or hedge fund about a tech company, I truly think everybody is complicit. it. In November 2025, Reuters revealed that Meta projected in late 2024 that 10% of its annual revenue, which was $16 billion at the time, would come from advertisements for scams or banned goods. Mere weeks after Meta announced the ridiculous $27 billion data center debt package,

one that used deep accountancy magic to keep it off of its balance sheet, despite Meta guaranteeing the entirety of the loan. It's completely insane. And what would think this would horrify investors for two reasons. One, Mehta's business is both supporting and profiting from organized crime and that 10% of its revenue. It's also kind of dependent on it. And also number two, META is using deliberate and insidious accounting tricks to act like a debtor that it is paying to build and will be the sole tenant of is somehow an off-balance sheet operation. One will be wrong. Morgan Stanley said in mid-December that it is one of the handful of companies that can leverage its leading data, distribution and investments in AI, and raised Morgan Stanley's target to $750,

with a $1,000 a share bullcase, meaning like they think if things go, well, it will be a thousand dollars a share. Wedbush raised Meta's price to $920, and Bank of America staunchly held firm at $810, which is hundreds of dollars more than where we are today. I can find no analyst commentary on Meta making $16 billion on fucking fraud, because it doesn't matter to them, because this is the rot economy and all that matters, his number go up. This is, this is going to be, it's going to be a tough four part of folks. I'm, my blood pressure is going to go through the fucking reality, such as whether there's any revenue in AI or whether it's a good idea that Meta's spending $70 billion this year on

CAPEX, even though the product generates no revenue. And by the way, if you say to me, META's AI ads play, that whole story is nonsense. And I love 404, but they got it wrong too. They are using bullshit metrics. They're not proving anything. Anyway, none of this matters to analysts because stocks are thoroughly, inextricably inshittified. And analysts don't even realize that it's happening. Or if they do, they're just really craven and horrible fucking people that deserve to not have a job,

let alone the job they currently have. Now, let's go back to the whole inshittification thing. The stages of inshittification usually involves some kind of devil's deal, which I actually think analysts are in them. But let's get going. In stage one, things are good for the users. The platform is free, things are easy to use, and thus it's really simple for you and your friends to adopt and become dependent on it. You don't really trade anything quite yet, other than the fact that you're going to use this easy, good platform that people like and all your friends are on.

In stage two, things become bad for customers, but good for business customers. The platform begins forcing users to do profitable things, like show them advertisements by making search results worse, such as with Google, or while making it difficult to migrate to another one, either through locking in your data or the tacit knowledge that moving platforms is hard and your friends are usually at one place. Take Instagram, for example. No one's leaving Instagram right now because there is no other competitor, kind of by design. Businesses sink tons of money into the platform, knowing that users are unlikely to leave and make good money buying ads against the populace that increasingly stays because it has to, as there are no other options. In stage three, things become

bad for consumers and businesses, but good for shareholders. The platforms are not. The platform is begin to deteriorate to the point that usability is pushed to the brink. And businesses, who are now dependent on the platform because monopolies have pushed out every alternative platform to advertise or reach customers on, begin to see their product crumble, all in favor of shareholder capital, which only cares about stock value, net income and buybacks. You've probably seen where we're going, folks. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygle 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 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.

The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. But they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. You guys are middle-aged.

One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel 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 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. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-i-heart. Hey, everyone. It's Ryder Strong and Wilfredel from PodMeets World.

And now the PodMeets 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 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 in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of, Ha, who.

Ha, ha, ooh. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune in to Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Twirl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Crimless, we're joined by our first ever guest. Sorry, our first ever human guest. I don't think I could be in the same room with Shamrock the parrot. I'd be too nervous.

That's right. The very funny Will Farrell joins Rory's. Scovel and me, Josh Dean, for an episode dedicated to the many crimes committed by people also named Will Ferrell. They called to his fellow officer for the nippers. What are the nippers? Very good question. No, I was thinking, would that be a good name for like a salad dressing?

Simple assault. And it's a play on word, salt? Maybe not. I say we invest and we see. There's only one way to know. This did not amuse the cops. By the way, normally the cops are amused. But this did not amuse.

cops. Will even comes clean about some of his own crimes. I didn't get caught. You know why? If you don't want to be suspected of anything, you whistle as you walk. Listen to crime lists on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. We're now entering in shittification stage four, where businesses turn on shareholders. Analyst and investors have become trapped in the same kind of loathsome platform players, consumers and businesses, and face exactly the same kind of punishments through the devaluation of the stock itself. Where platforms have prioritised profits over the health and happiness of users or business customers, they're now prioritising stock value over literally anything and have, through the remarkable growth of tech stocks in particular,

created a placated and thoroughly whipped investor and analyzed sect that never asked questions and always celebrates whatever the next big thing is meant to be. And I hate to dunk on one guy, but go look up Daniel Newman on Twitter if you want to see what I mean. Someone just oinking at every fucking thing that a company says like, what, InVidia's going up, these people are very popular and people make stock decisions based on what they say.

They're a problem. And the value of a stock is not based on whether the business is healthy or its future even certain, but on its potential price to grow. And analysts have, thanks to an incredible bull run of tech stocks going on over a decade, been able to say, I bet software will be big for most of the time going on CNBC or Bloomberg,

and gladly repeating whatever it is that a tech CEO just said, all without any worries about responsibility or the truth. And I just want to say, any analyst who might hear this, I'm taking a lot of screenshots. I've been taking screenshots for several years. And this is because big tech stocks, and many other big stocks, if I'm honest, have made their lives easy as long as they don't ask questions. Number always seems to be going up for software companies. And all you need to do is provide a vociferous defense of the next big thing and come up with a smart-sounding model that justifies eternal growth. This is entirely disconnected from the products themselves, which don't matter as long as, like I've said, number go up.

If net income is high, meaning profit, and the company estimates it will continue to grow, then the company could do whatever the fuck it wants with the product it sells or the things that it buys. Software has eaten the world in the sense that Andresen, Mark Andreessen, who wrote it, of course, got his wish, with investors now caring more about the intrinsic value of software companies rather than the businesses or the products themselves. And because that's happening, investors aren't bothering to think too hard about the tech itself or the deteriorating products underlying these tech companies, because these guys have always worked it out, and these companies have always managed to keep growing. As a result, nobody really looks too deep.

Minute changes to accounting and earnings filings are ignored. Egregious amounts of debt are waived off, and hundreds of billions of dollars of capital expenditures are seen as the new AI revolution versus a big huge waste of money. By incentivizing the rot economy, making stocks disconnected from the value of the company beyond net income and future earnings guidance, companies have found ways to insidify their own stocks, and shareholders will be the ones to suffer, all thanks to the very downstream pressure that they've chosen to ignore for decades. You see, while one might correctly say that the deterioration of products like Facebook and Google search was a sign of desperation, it's important to also see it as the companies themselves orienting around what they believe analysts and investors want. want to see. You can also interpret this as a weakness, but I see it another way. Stock manipulation, and a deliberate attempt to reshape what value means in the eyes of customers and investors. If the true value of a stock is meant to be based on the value of its business, cash flow and earnings,

and of course future growth, a company deliberately changing its products is an intentional interference with value itself, as are any and all deceptive accounting practices used to boost valuations. But the real problem, well, one of them, is that analysts don't, well, they don't seem to analyze, not at least if it goes against market consensus. That's why Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and Future Room Group and Gartner and Forrester and McKinsey and Morgan Stanley all said that the metaverse was inevitable, because they do not actually care about the underlying businesses themselves, just their ability to grow on paper. Now, I'm just going to click through to the Futurum Groups thing. Let's see. Contemplating market

criticism of Zuckerberg's Metaverse Focus. Now, this is a really funny piece. because you read it. Analyst's take, in some parallel universe, Zuckerberg would be credited as an entrepreneurial hero, an executive willing to invest in something big in order to create something bigger. Unfortunately, for Zuckerberg, he lives here with us in this universe, where $15 billion in investments so far has created a nerdy, cyber wasteland that few people seem interested in visiting. The numbers are undeniably ugly. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and of course we would have hoped for more progress, blah, blah, blah. Meta's most deadly sin in managing the Metaverse initiative is nothing to do with adoption metrics of the money that has been allocated to these efforts. Rather, Meta's failure

stems from its inability to communicate its vision properly. It's an ironic twist given the company's heritage and creating social media platforms designed to help billions of people communicate worldwide. This was written to defend the Metaverse. I just want to be clear, the defense appears to be give Zuck a chance. Now, the Metaverse is quite fucking dead, I should be clear, and many of you have emailed me about this. And I'm kind of calling one person out because I see these sell-side analysts as genuinely harmful to society. I think people going out there and misleading, well, in articles, actually, let me take an aside here. You're going to love this. This is not in the script, Matt. I apologize. But analysts have two customers. They have investors, and then they have you.

Self-side analysts, they burp and fart on CNBC or Bloomberg, and they say, hey, I, well, it'll be big. Then behind the scenes, they have a completely different set of institutional investors that give the real info to. That should bother you. You ever read an analyst in an article that'd be a little bit suspicious. I like Gil Luria of DA Davidson, except even Gil just raised the target for CoreWeave. Nothing has changed. Things who actually got worse with the economics. But because the bullshit of the markets exist, analysts are tweaking things in public. In private, I don't know what they're saying, because you need to pay, well, I think, tens of thousands, if not more, to get those reports.

Anyway, that all aside, regular retail investors are the first to get in shitified in stage four. And by the way, if you ever need proof that none of these people actually give a fuck about value, it really was the metaverse and the $77 billion that Mark Zuckerberg burned on it. And they created little revenue or shareholder value and burned all that money without any real explanation as to where it went. No, really? Does anyone know where the money went? $77 billion went nowhere. You think it went into fucking glasses? Are you crazy? Even if they made hundreds of thousands of those glasses and they took, I don't know,

$5 billion for Orion and the Meta Raybans, I'm still having trouble working out where this cash went. I think one day we're going to find out. I think we're going to find out something dodgy happened there. But nevertheless, the street didn't give a shit about the Metaverse because Meta's existing ads business continued to grow. Same as it didn't give us shit that Mark Zuckerberg burned those $70 billion on Cappex, even though we also don't really know where that's going either.

In fact, that really is the story of the GPU era. We don't know where the money is going. These companies don't tell us anything. They don't tell us how many GPUs they have or where those GPUs are or how many of them are installed or what their IT load capacity is or how much money they cost to run or how much money they even make. Why would we? Why would we know that? Analysts don't even look at earnings beyond making sure they beat on estimates. They've been whipped, trained for 20 years to take a puddle deep look at the numbers to make sure things vaguely look okay, look around at their peers and make sure nobody else is saying something bad and, go on and collect fees and go on fucking CNBC. And the same goes for hedge funds and banks propping up these stocks rather than asking meaningful questions or demanding even more meaningful answers. In the last two years, every major hyperscaler has extended the useful life of its servers from three years to either five and a half or six years. And in simple terms, this allowed them to incur a smaller depreciation expense each quarter as a result boosting their income. To explain really simply, when you depreciate something, you say, okay, the useful life of this

is six years and I'll spread the cost of that across six years. Or in this case, you'd probably say three years for a GPU. But no, they've just said due to the magic of math, it's six, so they get to spread it out for longer and claim it's more useful for longer so they don't have to do an impairment, which is when you admit the real cost of something any time soon. It's wank. Nobody seems to cares. Nobody seems to cares? I'm keeping that. Anyway, those who were meant to be critical, analysts and investors sinking money into these stocks had effectively no reaction, despite the fact that Meta used, per the Wall Street Journal, this adjustment to reduce this expenses by $2.3 billion in the first three quarters of 2025. This is quite literally

disconnected from reality, and I'm based on internal accounting that we are not party to. Every single tech firm buying GPUs did this and benefited to the tune of billions of dollars in decreased expenses, which bumped their revenues, and analysts thought it was fine and dandy because number went up and they don't fucking care. Shareholders are now subordinate to the shares themselves, reacting in the way that the shares demand they do, being happy for what the companies behind the shares give them, and analysts, investors and even the media spend far more energy fighting the doubters than they do showing these companies scrutiny.

Much like the user of an inshittified platform, investors and analysts are frogs in a pot, the experience of owning a stock deteriorating since Jack Welch and General Electric taught corporations that the markets are run with the kind of simplistic mindset built for grifter exploitation. And much like those platforms, corporations have found as many ways as possible to abuse shareholders, seeing what they can get away with, seeing how far they can push things as long as the numbers look right, because analysts are no longer working in any sort of rational headspace, nor are they looking for sensible ideas. Let me give you an example I've used before.

Back in November 1990, 2008, Windstar Communications signed, and I quote, a $2 billion equipment and finance agreement with Lucent Technologies, where Winstahl would borrow money from Lucent to buy stuff from Lucent, all to create, and I shit you not, $100 million in revenue over five years. Now, we're going to go even further back in time now, to December 1999 to a piece in Barron's called In 1999 Tech Rule. Allow me to quote a few paragraphs from it. Okay, here we go.

George Gilbert, who manages the Northern Technology Fund, predicts the web-centric worlds of consumer services and software will fare well next year too. A lot of people are increasing their access to the internet, says Gilbert. And e-commerce and business networking are very high priorities for the Fortune 100. Lawrence York, leading portfolio manager of the WWW Internet Fund, is bullish on semiconductors, telecommunications, and business-to-bus, or B2B e-commerce software. but he's wary of online retailers. That model won't work long term, he asserts. His top B2B picks, Ariba and official payments. In wireless, he likes Winstar, Sienna and NET communications, which went public earlier this month. So, what do you think Larry's scoreboard is? Do you think Larry did well or did he do badly? Well, let's find out. Airnet, bankrupt. Winstar horribly bankrupt.

Had to sue Lucent. While Sienna survived, it had spent over a billion dollars to acquire other companies all in stock, of course, only to see its revenue dwindle basically overnight from $1.6 billion to $300 million as the optical cable industry collapsed. Now, one would have been able to work out that Winston was a dog or that all of these companies were dogs if you were to look at the numbers, such as how much they made versus how much they are spending and the demand for their services. I mean, I just put out a premium piece about the dot-com bubble that I'll inevitably turn into a long one like this. but basically the signs were all blatant and obvious. But instead, analysts, the media and banks chose to pump up these stocks because the numbers kept getting bigger.

And when the collapse happened, rationalizations were immediately created. There were a few bad apples, Enron, Winster Worldcom. The fibre was useful and thus laying it was worthwhile, and otherwise everything was fine. And just to be clear, some of those statements were true. It doesn't mean that any of these companies should have existed or that this growth should have happened at that speed. The problem, in everybody else's mind at the time, was that everybody had got a bit distracted and some companies that weren't good would die. All of that lost money was only a problem because it didn't pay off. This was a misplaced gambling. It taught tech executives one powerful

lesson. Earnings must be good, without fail by any means necessary, otherwise nothing else matters to Wall Street. I mean, companies like Lucent did this. Winstead did this, Global Crossing did this, outright frauds like Enron did this. They proved it again and again and it. again. 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 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. There's that 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 Yardt. 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. 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. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-Eight-4-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Hey everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Will Ferdell 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... 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 plea as finalists to a bunch of... Ha, ooh. Ha ha, ooh. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune in to PodMeets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes.

Listen to PodMeets Twirl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Crimless, we're joined by our first ever guest. Sorry, our first ever human guest. I don't think I could be in the same room with Shamrock the parrot. I'd be too nervous. That's right.

The very funny Will Ferrell joins Rory Scovel and me, Josh Dean, for an episode dedicated to the many crimes committed by people also named Will Ferrell. They called to his fellow officer for the nippers. What are the nippers? Very good question. No, I was thinking, would that be a good name for like a salad dressing? Simple assault. And it's a play on words?

Maybe not. I say we invest and we see. There's only one way to know. This did not amuse the cops. By the way, normally the cops are amused, but this did not abuse the cops. Will even comes clean about some of his own crimes. I didn't get caught. You know why?

If you don't want to be suspected of anything, you whistle as you walk. Listen to crime lists on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. It's all about incentives. sell-side analyst that tells you not to buy something is a problem. A journalist that is skeptical or critical of an industry in the midst of a growth or hype cycle is considered a hater. And God, don't I fucking know that? Analysts that do not sing the same tune as everybody else

are marginalized, mocked, and aggressively pleased. And I don't fucking care. Stop being fucking cowards. If you're an analyst listening to this, stop being a fucking coward. Go read the fucking numbers, man. I've been doing it. I'm reading the numbers. I'm reading them to you on this episode. Go read the numbers. There's a reason that people want to fucking talk to me. There's a reason that only the same fucking people want to talk to you. You're useless. You're fucking useless if you're still saying this is a big...

My frustration I'm going off topic again is that people are going to get hurt here. Retail investors who believe what they read in CNBC and Bloomberg about the AI bubble are going to get hurt. And the cowardice is what's going to hurt them. Now, the dot-com bubble was actually a great time to start re-evaluating how and why we value stocks the way that we do, to say, hey, wait, that $2 billion deal will only make $100 million in revenue. That's a pretty big minus, Frito. Or, this company spends $5 for every dollar it makes.

That's not good. But nobody, it appears, remained particularly suspicious of the tech industry or a stock market that was increasingly orienting itself around conning shareholders. And because shareholders, analysts and the media alike refuse to retain a single shred of suspicion leaving the dot-com era, the media never actually subsided. financial publications still found themselves dedicated to explaining why the latest hype cycle was real. Journalists still found themselves told by editors that they had to cover the latest fad, even if it was nonsensical or clearly rotten.

Analysts still grabbed their swords and rushed to protect the very companies that had spent decades misleading them and would continue to do so for decades more. Much like we spent years saying that Facebook was a good deal because it was free, analysts and investors say tech stocks are great to hold because they can't. keep growing, even if the reason they keep growing was a series of interlocking monopolies, difficult to leave platforms, and impossible to fight traction and pricing, all of which have an eventual sell-by date. Now, I'm going to get emails over this. I realize I'm pearl clutching over the amoral status of capitalism, the stock market, but hear me out. What if we're actually in a 15 to 20

year-long knife-catching competition? What if all anybody has done is look at cash flow, net income, future growth guidance, and called it a day. A lack of scrutiny has allowed these companies to do effectively anything they want, but after war of some questions like, well, this ever make a profit or where's that money going? What if we basically don't know what the fuck is going on? What if all of this is utterly senseless? And then we get to AI, which has accelerated the inshittification of the stock market. Now, as I wrote back in 2024, the tech industry has run out of hypergrowth ideas, facing something I call the rock-com bubble. In simple terms, they're only doing AI because they do not appear to have any other viable ideas to continue the rock economy's eternal growth at all costs.

Fandango? I think I'm just going to go with Fandango there. Yet because growth hasn't slowed yet, analysts, the media and other investors are quick to claim that AI is paying off, even if nobody has ever said how much AI revenue is being generated. Or in some cases, such as Salesforce, they can say nearly $1.4 billion of annualized recurring revenue, which sounds really big until you realize a company with $10.9 billion in revenue a quarter is boasting about making less than $160 million in revenue in a month on something that has likely cost them billions to spin up. Nevertheless, because Salesforce set a new revenue target of $60 billion by 2030, which may as well be in a thousand years at this point, that the stock, it jumped 40%. It doesn't matter that we're Most agent-forced customers don't pay for the service or that AI isn't really making them any money, let alone profit or really anything. But number go up. Look, Ed, number go up. I'm an ape. I'm a buffoon. Number hire. Yay. The era we live in is one of abject desperation, to the point that analysts and investors and shareholders by extension will take any abuse from

management. They will allow companies to spend as much money as they want in whatever ways they want, as long as it continues the charade of number go up or charade for my British users. Let me spell it out a little more, though, using the earnings of various hyperscalers as an example. According to its latest quarterly filings, Microsoft spent $34.9 billion on capital expenditures, the most of any of the big four hypers, followed by Amazon with $34.2 billion, Google with $24 billion, and met with $19.37 billion. The common mantra is that these companies are spending all this money on GPUs, But that doesn't really match up with invidious revenues.

Invidia's last quarterly earnings said that four direct customers made up more than 10% of revenue, 22%, 15%, 13%, and 11%, representing no more than $12.54 billion, out of $57 billion of revenue. And as you look back through earlier quarters, you see the discrepancies grow. Where exactly is this money going? In Microsoft's latest earnings, first quarter fiscal year 2026, it said that $19.39 billion went to additions to property and equipment, with roughly half of its total capex spent on short-lived assets, primarily GPUs and CPUs. A quarterback, additions to property and equipment,

was $16.74 billion, with roughly half of that spent on long-lived assets that will support monetization over the next 15 years and beyond. What does that mean? Who fucking knows? I looked. I went and I looked. I read every fucking analyst report I could about that sorry,

son of a bitch company, Microsoft, and I could not find one person who went in, what, Q3, it was, uh, Yeah, Q4, FY2025. Couldn't find a single one of them that even found that weird. Like, I don't know. Those are you got kids. If they're like, I did my homework, you probably want to check, right?

Yeah, but if they're a company with like a $4 trillion market cap, no problem, mate, we're all good. Oh, you're public, I know. I could probably ask more, but I'm not going to. But let's assume that Microsoft is Nvidia's biggest customer every quarter. The pseudonymous customer A from Nvidia's earnings that it mentions in its main. mandatory SEC filings spent $12.5 billion with Nvidia, out of $34.9 billion in total cap expending from Microsoft, and before that, $10.7 billion out of $21.4 billion, and in the quarter before that, $7 billion out of $22.6 billion. If we guessed them up, based on a split of various

models of Nvidia's Blackwell GPU systems and in earlier quarters, older models, that works to like 457 megawatts of IT low for the first quarter, 391 megawatts for the fourth quarter of 2025 and 263 megawatts for the third quarter of 2025. So has Microsoft built that many data centers? 1.1 gigawatts of data centers? Apparently, it claims it added two gigawatts of data centers in the last year, but Satchadela claimed in November that Microsoft had chips and inventory it couldn't install you to a lack of power.

In any case, where did those tens of billions of dollars of... Where'd they go? We know there are finance leases, which are basically just loans. what are they for more GPUs what's the actual output of the expenditures now i previously wrote in this script that we have no idea but i actually found out to an extent so this will be a future episode because it's a whole separate thing but the way that these these big companies the hyperscalers are doing it is they're actually threading their GPUs through taiwan there are companies like honhai precision corporation limited which is better known as foxcon uh quanta computing wistron wei

there are others too nevertheless these are big Taiwanese server companies that buy the jpues from invidia and then then they ship them to Microsoft or META or Google or Oracle nevertheless why am I the person who went and find that out why am I the guy I'm just a fella I'm just one dipshit with Google why the fuck am I the guy well the answer might be because well I have a theory, and it's that analysts and investors are in an abusive relationship with tech stocks. It is fundamentally insane that Microsoft Meta, Amazon and Google have spent $776 billion in capital expenditures in the space of three years, and even more so that analysts and investors, when faced with such egregious numbers, sit back and say, oh yeah, baby,

oh yeah, they're building the infrastructure of the future, baby, we love this. Analysts and traders and investors and reporters do not think hard about the underlying numbers, Doing so immediately makes you run headfirst into a number of worrying questions such as where did all the money go, will this pay off and how many fucking GPUs do they actually own? Analysts have on some level become the fractional marketing team for the stocks they're investing in. When Oracle announced this $300 billion deal with Open AI in September, one that OpenAI does not have the money to pay and Oracle doesn't have the capacity to fill, analysts heaved and stammered like horny Teadages seeing their first boob.

Now I'm going to quote CNBC here and do some artistic, some editorialising. John Defuque, sorry, John Defucci, I guess I'm not fixing that. From Guggenheim's security said he was blown away. T.D. Cohen's Derek Wood called it a momentous quarter. And Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank said, we're all kind of, we're in shock in a very good way. There's no better evidence of a seismic shift happening in computing than these results that you just put up, Zonick said on the earnings call adjusting his trousers. That trouser thing was an addition. That's a parody.

Anyway, these are the same people that retail and institutional investors rely upon for advice on what stocks to buy, all acting with the disregard for the truth that comes from years of never facing a single fucking consequence. Three months later, an Oracle has lost basically all of the stock bump it saw from the Open AI deal, meaning that any regular person, any retail investor that yoloed into that trade, because, say, I don't know, analysts from major institutions and the media said it was a good idea and news outlets didn't ask questions, well, they got their asses kicked, they lost everything. And please, spare me, oh, they shouldn't trade off of analysts bullshit. That's the kind of victim blaming that allows these revered fuckwits to continue fighting out these meaningless calls and making money doing so.

In reality, we're in an era of naked, blatant, shameless stock manipulation, both privately and publicly, because a stock no longer refers to a unit of ownership in a company so much as it is a chip at a casino where the house constantly changes the rules. Perhaps you're able to occasionally catch the house showing its hand and perhaps the house meant for you to see it. Either way, you are always behind because the people responsible for buying and selling stocks at scale under the auspices of knowing what's going on don't seem to know what they're talking about or don't care to find out. You want examples? I'll give you some fucking examples. June and tomorrow. I love doing this show. I love doing these episodes. Catch you then.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.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-Betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

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