In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how organizations are freaking out after having to pay the real cost of AI tokens, and how the surge of competitive open weight models could lead to the post-bubble locally-run future of LLMs.

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI is the pinnacle of Silicon Valley monoculture, and a monument to the cargo cult desperation of a tech industry that celebrates mediocrity and has run out of ideas.

Newsletter: Cargo Culture: https://www.wheresyoured.at/cargo-culture/

OpenAI Exclusive: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about AI companies “doom trolling” consumers using scary stories about conscious computers, and how we need to make fun of the scare-mongering and ridicule the executives peddling in it.

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Cal Newport’s “Dear A.I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs To Stop https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html

Podcast & Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia/

Newsletter: https://calnewport.com

New Yorker archive: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport

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In a special exclusive episode of Better Offline, Ed Zitron digs into the audited financials of OpenAI from 2024 and 2025.

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Tech's hyper-growth era is ending, with online 100 million new people getting online between 2022 and 2023, and almost every major web platform seeing a decline in growth since 2021. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how tech's decline is driving the tech industry to try and sell you useless products like the metaverse, cryptocurrency and generative AI.

Original Air Date: 6.5.24

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how the “does AI have ROI?” debate is coming at the worst possible time for two companies that can’t afford to slow down thanks to their $1.1 trillion in compute commitments.

Newsletter: AI Doesn’t Have ROI https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-doesnt-have-roi/
Ed on Bloomberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbKDmkJPVvI
The AI industry's profit problem is getting bigger, says Goldman Sachs' equity research chief
https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-ai-boom-profit-problem-semiconductor-chip-companies-investment-2026-6
Bloomberg: AI’s Bills Are Bigger Than Ever, And Coming Due https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-06-04/the-ai-boom-s-next-test-is-the-roi-worth-the-cost
Axios: AI sticker shock hits corporate America https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs
Uber COO story: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5

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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by economist Paul Kedrosky to talk about why nobody can find the ROI of AI, why there won’t be a Dot Com Bubble-style recovery for AI data centers, and how Google’s $80bn equity sale shows we’re at the top.

https://paulkedrosky.com/

The Nick, Dick and Paul Show: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFbDiETo29GTIjg6Lk4imig

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI’s move to token-based billing has revealed that absolutely nobody has a way of measuring AI’s ROI - and how these massive costs might finally burst the bubble.

Companion newsletter:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/

Axios: AI sticker shock hits corporate America https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs

Uber COO story: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5

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