AI Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble: Part Four

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. 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, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-iHeart. Hey, it's Joel. And Matt. From HowToMoney. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high. And the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress.

0:35That's right. Each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

1:05I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:54Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

2:08Hello and welcome to Bear Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

2:23Today is the final part of Bubble Week in our four-part.com bubble special. I am worryingly invested in this show. I put so many hours into it. This is the most I've done in the January. I'm having the time of my fucking life, but this four-part has been rough, and it's not been rough for the recording it's rough because every time i go over these details they fill me full of anxiety i don't enjoy being right here sure i get the satisfaction sure i get the clicks and all that but like it it sucks it sucks i'm i'm really fucking worried i i'm not doing this to be contrarian i'm seeing these things and i'm worried more people aren't seeing them and I'm worried that the after effects will be so much worse than the dot-com bubble.

3:09So this four part was somewhat drawn from a premium piece I did a few weeks ago called inventively this is worse than the dot-com bubble. I really suggest you subscribe to my premium newsletter or be in there but if you don't I've had a little mustard on it and truncated it for this because it needed to be different in voice nevertheless you should subscribe. but when i was writing that i actually went into it trying to prove myself wrong i spent hours and hours reading old articles through broken paywalls and archive.org links in the hopes that i'd find some sort of positive spin a way that the ai bubble wasn't as bad some sliver or nugget of joy some shred of hope and everything i've read has made me more worried not less the real problem is that there are similarities but only with the worst parts of both bubbles we've got stupid amounts of money being sunk into stuff.

3:58We've got stupid companies that want to IPO. We've got hopeless startups juiced up by credulous venture capitalists and marketed by even more credulous journalists. Except this time we have the worst margins this side of a vineyard planted in Las Vegas, Nevada, and despicable boosters that will go to war with you to try and prove you're wrong using ghost stories, fairy tales, and pixie dust. I realize I'm being a little cavalier and colloquial about this and that's because I feel emotionally drained is the way I'd put it. Things are so much worse than I thought. I really thought I'd find something good.

4:32I'd dig into the past and find that there were direct obvious similarities that would say, okay, these GPUs will be useful. There will be something we've built here. I can't find it. I'm actually now convinced that things are going to be much worse. The dot-com bubble was relatively distributed and and created useful infrastructure. The ideas of some of the most prominent dot-com startups were valid, but based on stupid hyper-growth business models that didn't make sense and were only sustained through mass hysteria and ignorance. By comparison, AI startups are fundamentally illogical, selling unreliable software that's best known for its consistent mistakes and active harms backed by the corrosive and ever-worsening infrastructural costs of GPUs.

5:13And they're the customers of the largest company on the stock market that can only keep its valuation, on which the markets depend, by selling more of an expensive to buy and more expensive to install item that only appears to lose its customers' money. There is no squaring NVIDIA's circle. It is inevitable, even if AI somehow worked out that companies will have to stop buying as many GPUs, and NVIDIA cannot afford for them to slow down at all. They must speed up, and they must do so forever. There's also no other business model for GPUs that scales? None. There is no use case. This is not useful infrastructure.

5:50Once the AI bubble bursts, these data centers cannot be used for other things, at least not things that are going to make more than a couple of single digit millions in total. They will have to be emptied out and replaced with useful gear. They will be, those that are finished, and I think there's going to be a bunch of undone construction, they're going to be powered shells, which are just empty buildings with power attached. And really, I don't think that's going to be across the board. I think we're going to have a lot of failed construction. And throughout all of this bullshit, the rest of the Magnificent Seven has seen their stock values soar off the back of pure hype, because they weren't making a dime of profit from selling artificial intelligence services.

6:26And they've done so by acquiring hundreds of billions of dollars of physical assets. The whole point of these fucking companies was that they were asset light and cash heavy. now they're full of fucking gpus that depreciate this is a fucking calamity i am fucking terrified because everything i've read about the past makes me certain that this will be worse the harms will be longer and nobody seems to want to accept the true logical endpoint of my arguments so i'm gonna kind of lay them out depending on how right i am i'm worrying about the following things nvidia will lose anywhere between 40 and 90 of its revenue in a relatively short amount of time, a couple of quarters maybe, which will annihilate the value of the S &P 500, because the stock will go down, because the market will go, ah!

7:14Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will face massive multi-billion dollar impairments within the next few years. Forgot to say Meta, but they're included too. Now this one is funny, but will still be bad. Oracle will potentially face bankruptcy, or at least a severe, horrendous series of layoffs and restructuring efforts to try and right the shift after agreeing to$248 billion in lease obligations and$56 billion in debt, primarily to build data centers to get the revenue from its$300 billion five-year-long deal with OpenAI, a company that's going to run out of money in the next year. Venture capital is going to take such a severe haircut from the AI bubble that it will effectively kill any chances of raising a round after Series B for many, many years.

7:58i'm really worried about the reported 178.5 billion dollars in u.s data center deals going underwater i don't think they're going to be paid and it's going to lead to massive losses of private equity and banks which will lead to a chill in effectively all debt markets and massive job losses across the many many construction projects that have started as a result of the ai bubble and if open ai and anthropic can actually manage to go public i think every investor is going to lose out as they collapse under the weight of their bullshit assumptions every partner every company relying on them every infrastructure partner every ai starter built on their tech will be burned i also believe that we as a society will face a violent paradigm shift as the result of the ai bubble bursting because it revealed how many people just don't understand stuff the amount of bosses influencers movie stars politicians and other individuals of note that have fallen behind generative ai and claimed again and again that that can do things that it can't, have perpetuated myths that will lead to massive societal harms both today and in the future, have revealed themselves to be fucking frauds.

9:11Run 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, iHeart'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-iHeart to get started. That's 844-844-iHeart. New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever.

9:47I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

10:22Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all?

11:02NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the Men's Clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, guys everywhere make the same resolutions. Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr. Steve Poulter, a psychologist with over 30 years experience helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught to name. In a powerful two-part conversation, we discuss why men aren't emotionally bulletproof, why shame hides in plain sight, and how real strength comes from listening to yourself and to others.

11:50Guys who are toxic, they're immature, or they've got something they just haven't resolved. Once that gets resolved, then there comes empathy and compassion. If you want this to be the year you stop powering through pain and start understanding what's underneath, listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

12:16it's been obvious since 2023 that generative ai flat out does not do what many people say it does or will do and obvious since 2024 that the economics didn't work yet still every single goddamn day we are surrounded by people screaming in our faces that ai is the future the ai will replace us the ai is the panacea to every fucking problem even though it only seems to create new ones. I also believe that AI psychosis is a prevalent thing on a scale that few people want to discuss. There's something about the process of using a large language model that convinces people that AI is powerful because they manage to bonk it on the head enough times to make something useful come out.

12:53Seemingly intelligent people will spend hours and hours making clawed code burp out quasi-useful quasi-functional software, claiming that the productivity gains are obvious even when, if you sat down and worked out how long it took them and how much the API rates for the software would be if they weren't being subsidized. They could probably have just learned to code in the first place or paid someone else to do it. And no, please stop this thing of, oh, it's cheaper than hiring a developer. Did you go out and ask a developer? Did you actually get a quote? Do you actually know what you're talking about?

13:20Do you know a fucking thing about what you're talking about? You see, I think large language models are a global gaslighting experiment where the test is to see whether inefficient and questionably functional software can convince you that it works because you managed to manipulate its handles with the right prompts explaining away failures as you go and getting increasingly agitated with those who don't agree with you that you're living in the future this series forced me to live in the past for hours and hours and hours and all it taught me is that people are desperate to compare this era to another as a means of explaining away the bad habits and specious ideas of a tech industry run by fucking influencers and management consultants by comparison the dot-com bubble was relatively sensible built on good ideas executed by greedy people rushing to do things based on ideas they didn't understand and analyses that were utter bullshit the ai bubble is happening in a remarkable era of digital information and connectivity that allows us to process and analyze details at scale and with speed and everybody who inflated this era should and by my fucking sword will be made to experience inextricable permanent shame for the horrors that follow as a result and believe me even if I'm half right, things will likely be so much worse than when the dot-com bubble burst.

14:34I don't see a scenario where anything survives the collapse of CoreWeave, let alone the collapse of OpenAI. I don't see a scenario where any more than a few AI startups survive, if any, and if that happens, there won't be any customers for those GPUs. Not that anywhere near enough existed to fill even a tiny percentile of the demand that currently exists or for the capacity we've already built. On some level, I hope I'm wrong. I just don't know how I'm out anymore. i really don't thank you so much for listening it's been an intense january with this with ces with the inch of financial crisis i'm probably going to take the week off next week and run a cool zone media rewind to give my aching brain and lungs a break thank you so much for listening i who knows though some bullshit will probably happen because it's earnings season when this runs some crazy shit will happen or maybe it'll be normal i could just rest and if that happens I'll probably end up oinking and squawking into the mic as I always do.

15:27Regardless, you'll hear my voice one way or another. Thank you so much, everyone. This has been Bubble Week.

15:41Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matosowski.com, M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline 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.

16:46Hey, it's Joel. And Matt from HowToMoney. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high, and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Yeah, each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real?

17:19If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:57This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr. Steve Poulter to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name. Part of the way through the valley of despair is realizing this has happened, and you have to make a choice whether you're going to stay in it or move forward. Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

18:29A new year doesn't ask us to become someone new. It invites us back home to ourselves. I'm Mike Della Rocha, host of Sacred Lessons, a space for men to pause, reflect, and heal. This year, we're talking honestly about mental health, relationships, and the patterns we're ready to release. If you're looking for clarity, connection, and healthier ways to show up in your life, Sacred Lessons is here for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Delaroach on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.