987 - May I Meet You? feat. Ed Zitron (11/17/25)
This episode isn’t just great—it’ll revolutionize what you think of AI. Ed Zitron is back in the trap to discuss his recent reporting on just how much money companies like OpenAI have (and how much they’re burning). We talk about the byzantine financing of generative AI and LLMs, the tech world’s dream of recreating the postwar boom with a technology primarily used to make the world’s least legal porn, and the proliferation of data centers across the country. Plus: Bill Ackman teaches you how to pick up girls.
Get your Ed at:
Better Offline podcast: https://linktr.ee/betteroffline
Where’s Your Ed At newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/edzitron
Comments (210)
Absolute BANGER of a closing track choice
Pretty sure that's on Sasha and digweed's Communicate mix, right?
yeah this def reassures me quitting my EE job in data center design
SPARKS - Tryouts for the Human Race
AI business model: Step one: Make AI Step two: Step three: Profit
VERY true, I learned this at MIT.
Obsessed with this idea that Ed Zitron knows about My Immortal
You got the perfect guest to explain the AI Bubble.
The next grift they’re gonna go for is robotics btw
I really think masayoshi son is the greatest finsub of all time, I have no other logical explanation
May i meat you.
Wine and dine a gal first
In the future, we will use AI to test and see if you are really human but instead of Voight Kamp will call it Dunning Krueger
I can't wait to get a ex data centre 5090 for $100, I can't wait to see the current shtty GPU and ram and storage market flooded with dirt cheap second hand parts. Right now it is cheaper for me to fly to America, buy a 5090 and then fly home, than it is for me to buy a 5090 in my own country. Watching Jensen trying to explain away the failure of AI and the collapse of the PC parts market will be very, very funny.
To think that there was a time when the drivers of Nvidia graphics card demand were crypto grifters living in petro-states. A more innocent time
The AI freaks’ goal is to create super-intelligent AI (“AGI”) that can train other AI and perform most tasks better and more efficiently than humans, thereby making most jobs obsolete overnight. They talk about it all the time and most of them think it will happen in the next 2-5 years. It’s unclear if they’re on track, or if it will ever happen, but that’s their goal... So I feel like the analysis on this episode is a little shallow. To be clear, it would be bad if they achieve AGI (at least in our current economic and political system), but to spend a whole episode yelling “None of this makes sense!” without grappling with the stated goal of every AI company is bizarre. They’re burning through Marshall Plan levels of cash, yes, but why? To get to AGI. Their stock valuations are wildly inflated based on insane profit projections, yes, but why? Because they’re assuming they’ll achieve AGI… Whether they’ll ever get there, whether they’ll turn a profit if they do - all that shit is up for debate, but that’s the goal motivating these idiots and their investments
They have talked about this on the show before. The problem is that the stated goal, according to experts and researchers that are grounded in reality, is absurdly unrealistic, I thought this was pretty well known. They don’t actually have anything to show for “progress” towards anything more than better refined predictive text chatbots. It’s like if we threw all this money into coal mining because we believed that it would would lead to us finding a secret stash of super coal that is an infinite power source that may or may not exist thousands of feet below all the other coal and basing company valuation on when they think theyll get super coal in a few years. And instead of actually looking for super coal the companies were very blatantly just marketing coal as like a skin product and hair product and food and doing everything else possible.
Tech investment and exec sector remains the “you have to sleep with me it’s the law” crowd
Re the excellent piss-taking of 'may I meet you' I've got this resource at my Sex Ed website BISH which people have found useful https://www.bishuk.com/relationships/how-to-get-a-girlfriend-boyfriend-or-themfriend/
"It's fuck-wit on fuck-wit action" damn if that don't describe the whole world we live in right now.
During the late 19th century the "business model" for many western railroads was built around insiders taking money from investors and spending money on construction to build railroads to nowhere. The railroad companies would inevitably go bankrupt, but the insiders often controlled the construction companies, which are the thing that actually made money. That was the shell game. After the railroads went into bankruptcy, the insiders would often buy up the railroad companies out of bankruptcy, and start the process all over again (sometimes with help from the federal government). There's a great book about this called "Railroaded" by Richard White. Sounds somewhat similar to the AI business model.
I love when Ed's on because I can only learn about complicated financial stuff when it's told to me by one of the characters from Guy Ritchie's Snatch
He has a skilled misery. I don't even watch football, but I enjoy following his existential despair whenever the Raiders play
I think they’re very plainly aiming to get as many people and companies as possible hopelessly reliant upon the technology before DRASTICALLY raising the price for people to use it.
for sure, but you can't rely that much on something that sucks
Props for Felix’s LTCM reference
Felix ur using the “fanfic writer whose first language isn’t english” meme wrong- its supposed to refer to an jaw droppingly good writing in fanfic
The guys using tens of thousands of dollars in computing are probably the ones making all those ai ads like Asian Walking and sending slop to sci fi publishers.
Can’t stop saying may I meet you
I really enjoy the anit-doomerism around ai. The "it can't even draw hands" thing is gonna be real funny in a few yrs
I swear I go day by day thinking that it's a gigantic bust and scam and joke, and the next preparing for the AI apocalypse.
Ackman is the content god that keeps on giving
The soul to reward ratio seems to be way off mark. A lot more skulls, I mean, souls will be required to get the old goat Ba’ aaaaing on this misadventure to give it wings.
Enjoying reading the comments from computer science dimwits. “Uhhh pathetic you don’t know the technical term for…” No one cares dipshits. If you knew anything other than computer you’d know pedantry isn’t intelligence.
Pedants < Pederasts
Checking out r / grok is pretty funny, ppl are pissed because they feel like groks been wokefied because this past week a bunch of sex creating restrictions have been put in place, even for their $300month subscribers….learning that there is people paying $300 a month to create 5 second ai clips is less funny. Like you can see the real thing, for free, hours and hours of content. And these people are crying because elon lied to them about grok finally being able to create cohesive 15 second video clips. Which i guess meets the minimum time to goon.
Of course the scary part is that if this tech can be used to eliminate a bunch of jobs, bulkshit or otherwise, it will be very valuable. They aren't planning on making their money from subscriptions.
I do enjoy the fact that a lot of the jobs being eliminated will be from a class of people who told the rest of us to learn to code.
Seems like the path to profitability is enterprise SaaS. If you replace a workforce with enterprise AI... those are six, seven figure a month contracts. Seems like that's what they're working toward. Whether it can ever do that is another question
“may i meet you?” “NO! FUCK OFF!”
My reaction to this is that we’re all looking for some kind of business logic that doesn’t exist anymore.. the whole point of neoliberalism is that it enabled the private sector to borrow huge sums of money with the hope of one day returning a profit. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t. Uber is a case in point. They have almost never been a profitable company, and yet they exist and are actively expanding into new markets. Debt is not scary to these people.
I was in an Uber once and the driver was grandstanding about paying his debts, like it was honorable or something. I just laughed. I think I even explained to him how the rich love getting into debt, dipshit was insistent that paying banks extra money was a point of pride for him. Not to be an elitist asshole but...
Great Guest! A very infromative episode!
"I've never seen a company in history where your power users are literally costing you more than your average users, and they're not making you much more either." lol this is every company ever.
Need a hat or shirt with Bill Ackman and “May I meet you?” 😂 Great guest!
"May i meet you" makes plenty of sense if you're talking to someone who is catfishing you
It only makes sense online. Like talking to your OnlyFans gf.
A Trump admin would 100% bail out Open AI. I don’t think that’s a question. The discussion about AI is a discussion about capital first, and then a discussion of tech. Capital needs to move. Perpetual motion. And it is moving here and now because of how abstract it is. That’s the point!
Is there a case for not doing that? Besides being useless I mean. Like it's no more useless than the military. In fact potentially we get some electricity and a vaguely useful assistant. I am curious to see how they deal with electricity shortages during summer, especially if one plant goes down.
If I’m ever lucky enough to run into any of you in public I will definitely ask May I meet you ?
Vageta from DBZ?
As somebody who works in the field, I thought Ed was explaining stuff really succinctly but it was still going over Will and Felix’s heads more than they realized, and they’re not dumb guys. It’s just such a specific area of knowledge that has got outsized in its influence and that’s one thing that concerns me a lot about LLMs
I'm on third listen going whoa whoa
AI is Dragonball Z without any fighting.
And a lot of terminology
is there an argument for the collective public to occasionally use AI for absolute bullshit slop in order to ensure the bankruptcy of openai and that sister raping moron
Only if you're okay with the energy consumption
Bill Ackman’s article sounded like dating advice from the Kevin Spacey Cylon
Felt called out at, "You fucking pigs, eat this, you like this"
Thats what movie mindset is.
After countless sleepless nights I can suggest an equation that has the potential to impact the future: E = mc² + Al This equation combines Einstein's famous equation E=mc², which relates energy (E) to mass (m) and the speed of light (c), with the addition of Al (Artificial Intelligence). By including Al in the equation, it symbolizes the increasing role of artificial intelligence in shaping and transforming our future. This equation highlights the potential for Al to unlock new forms of energy, enhance scientific discoveries, and revolutionize various fields such as healthcare, transportation, and technology.
oh nice, an Achewood reference from Ed
Bill Ackmans dating strategy is why guys like Larry Summers actually need dating advice from Jeffrey Epstein.
May my genitals meet your genitals?
*PEPPER SPRAY*
The cognitive bias that Ed is pointing out when AI makes people think that they are suddenly smarter is called The Illusion of Explanatory Depth. I would explain it to you but I’m a bit sketchy on the details.
Ask grok
one thing I keep thinking about wrt AI, which I don't see discussed much, is that it's also a huge boon to parts of the energy sector which were at risk of being left holding all the stranded assets left behind by a renewable energy transition like it's wildly convenient that at a time when renewable energy is being rolled out with enough capacity to handle regular consumer load this new industry shows up with such intense energy demands that the ailing dirty energy generators are needed to patch up the capacity gaps
I’m not super-plugged in. Isn’t Ed saying the opposite will need to happen? That powering a 10GW data center would only be possible with nuclear?
Tokyo is the largest city in the world
Will parochialism
The stupids thing is important bc at this point Capital is just trying to play keep away. As such, AI can still be a political success if it distracts millions of stupids and/or somehow parlays into an improvement of surveillance tech. We do seem to be reaching the limits of how far the money people allow completely fraudulent pet projects along the leash.
Will be mixing ‘fuckwit’ into my insult rotation
Ed is awesome bc he never answers questions directly, instead he uses them as a springboard for his next tirade. I thought Felix did a good job trying to host but he couldn’t keep him on track lol
You would probably have more luck and be less likely to spend your night in a cell by pointing at a woman’s crotch and asking “may I eat you?”
They can’t even use these chips for gaming?!?! oof
No they are some weird lower energy consumption lower fidelity ai specific bullshit. I think they're making more efficient ones too. Kind of cool. Sad use case. At some point we will just use the brains of orphans or something. We will need to convert the Great Lakes into Mountain Dew.
NYC peak load is around 11 GW
May I meet you sounds like a Coneheads line
Fucking swits and n'wahs talking about Morrowind
Military applications? Domestic and global surveillance? Social credit scores etc what about all that?
don't they make a lot of money from the licenses they shove down every small business/large corporate entity's throat?
No they have to give massive discounts to get anyone to adopt
May I Meet You? Sounds like something a vampire would come up with to trick you into letting it into your house
A missing piece of the AI hype is that elites think it will be a wunderwaffe to maintain global hegemony even though China’s industrial capacity eclipses the US.
Is my job "the worst dj ever" safe from ai?
I used to worry about my job converting to pdf, but my boss doesn't know how to use email or the printer
On the topic of construction companies: I'm in the IBEW and a lot of union guys work on data center construction. Union contractors can man up these jobs much more easily than others and the union as a whole is quite excited to milk the AI bubble on the construction side.
I think the expansion of the electrical capacity could actually have long term benefits, glad its working out for some people now.
Sparks ☝️
If Ed says "compute" one more time I'm jumping off a bridge.
I love Ed, but he needs stronger ADD medication
I share the AI skepticism on the show, but I think the guest is missing a big piece by not talking about AGI. It’s the holy grail animating these companies and justifying their losses. Would be interesting to go more into the end game these companies envision, with AI agents able to do any work that a remote worker can
Is it the grail, though? There has been so much skepticism even from within the industry, I think they are more interested now in keeping their fortunes.
one day I will have a gb102 doorstop
For a smart episode this was pretty good.
For quantum computing the most optimistic roadmap see real industry applications 10 years in the future, provided that scalability issues are solved (each of the existing platforms has its own limitations) - plus there's a big question on the use cases side https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19928
23:25 we have a “rawther”
Awww does Will think NYC is the biggest city in the world? It may be the *GREATEST* but if it were the biggest you’d be speaking Mandarin, babe! 🇨🇳
Konnichiwa
Love Citoyen Zitron eps The haters gonna hate (hogs be doing hog shit)
No offense to Ed and the boys, but AI is boring dork shit for nerds. Much more interested in the dust-up in the NFC North after this weekend. Bears on top! Lions and Pack both looking extremely vulnerable!
Bears being top of NFC is some devil shit
It only took 1.21 gigawatts to power the DaLorean in Back to the Future . So, (according to my calculations ) it would take almost 10 DaLoreans to power AI . Great Scott!
The Cargo Cult analogy is a really succinct way to sum up the AI boom. It’s generations of management consultants at the head of tech companies doing the rituals of innovation that leads to revenue, but without the meaningful innovation and without the revenue. Fine work, Felix.
I’m about as anti AI (read: LLM) as it comes, but Ed’s assertion that CUDA is useful for “some” science is really underselling it.
I’m too old every time I see A.I. without the dots I think “who is Al?”
Allen Iverson 🤔
Regardless of the promise of the tech it’s incontrovertible that the financing regime won’t last, idk how anyone can ignore that and truly think that “AI is coming for our jobs”, the US debt bubble barely manages daily empire maintenance in 2025 let alone 2030.
It's coming for our jobs in the sense that it provides cover for the planned contraction of the economy. The work humans used to do will simply not be done anymore, whether it's in "bullshit jobs" or in work that actually served human needs.
And all this because some guy in the 90s made the first GPU because people wanted to play Quake at a slightly better framerate.
"May I meet you?" sounds Cajun
“May I meet you?” was for sure a gay cruising code back in the 1910s.
Portal 2 was a good game with an AI companion. Granted, that companion was annoying, but it was a good game.
Ed makes all the gigabrains come out of the woodwork cuz everyone likes him better than their insufferable asses
Another way of reading the Bill Ackman post is that he never had Epstein around to help him with his game
Google his wife, lol
What if an episode of Chapo Trap House were Trashfuture?
Hey, to be fair, that guy who tried Bill’s advice didn’t get a no either!
If this bloke doesn't talk about Chinese ai then this episode is bollocks
All AI is stupid, even when China does it
Hello I’m gay actor Michael Buglis for Perplexity
Dwayne Monroe is very good on this stuff as well
Just finished Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI”, def recommend it for anyone who was into this ep. 👀
The people love Ed
Of course you think the computer is thinking, you’re twelve.
Thanks for this episode; doing your part to make the stupids less stupid !! 🤠👍🎉
If we ever get federal housing it’s just gonna be tent cities in abandoned data centers
ChatGPT is really good at helping me code. I use it every day.
Lmao at the arbiter of “good,” … by “good at,” do you mean it helps you in generating code at a quality and pace that is pleasing your boss; whose strategy is likely tied to financial models you know nothing about and just another part of the overall house of cards the economy is sitting on right now?
everything is coming up Zardoz
You joke but "The Gun is Good; The Penis Is Evil" is basically the motto for any Silicon Valley company named after an obscure LotR reference
Please no more huckster Zitron
am I meant to read this in Trump's voice?
"may i meat you?"
Ed has been predicting an imminent crash every few months for several years now. So I take him with grain of salt. Unfortunately, I think the models are good enough to start replacing a lot of jobs in white collar America. I predict the maturation of ai "wrappers" will be what brings profitability to the AI space and mass unemployment for the rest of us.
Stupid ass lol
What the hell does he say at 17:13? Something about Doom? I've rewound it like 5 times and can't parse it. A really Yanny-Laurel situation
As *someone* said in doom, "if they're so smart why are they dead?"
Haven’t listened to the episode yet, but am excited to hear the part that’s causing this Ari guy to melt down over diaper fetishes
nah may I meet you would work on me
May I meat you? May I meat munch
Putting this one on the shelf next to I LOVE YOU ALIVE GIRL
I feel like every time I hear about data centers, the amount of energy they use is never compared to other businesses or industries to give an idea of how much energy is needed to use them. Andy masley on Twitter breaks it down well, but he’s the only one who I’ve found do it, and he seems more pro AI and data centers than most, so I question his idea of what is “acceptable” sometimes, but critics need to start comparing electricity and water usages to other businesses, and not just cities, because while it is useful to know, it comes off as Apple to oranges comparison sometimes
I just commented this but you can fall back on the approximation that 1 house = 1 kilowatt. So 1 gigawatt is enough for 1,000,000 houses, etc
AI is inevitable. In five years you'll be listening to AI-generated podcasts
We already calculated every possible reaction Felix could ever have to the news
Open AI = Ponzi
“Oh, Ed Zitron on the new Chapo!” Deletes immediately.
Why?
oh fuck the markets are gonna crash
Is the electricity usage 1 gigawatt per day, per hour, or what?
1 gigawatt = 1 gigawatt-hour per hour. About the power consumed by 1,000,000 homes
"that's a very simplified way of putting it" my man you don't know any other way to put it
You know, multiply by eight: Octuplification.
Ed Zitron and a "My Immortal" fanfic reference, ending with a thorough dunking on Bill "May I Meet You?" Ackman. Great episode.
Ackman’s “May I meet you” line kinda reminds me of that guy from Babylon 5 who was working for the Shadows that would always ask people “what do you want?” Like, you know something bad is going to happen if you say “yes,” because at the very least you’ll meet Bill Ackman again
I don't know what a word for "multiplies by 8" is but I'd like to submit "octogenates"
If you work even tangentially in any STEM based field this is why you were being payed so much. They brain drained you losers and you should know there is no sympathy. Guess you weren't that smart after all
, Dave hissed at the confused strangers from his usual place behind the counter at the gas station.
I don’t think Ari likes Ed very much. Me? I’m just grilling.
The rule of thumb I've heard is 1 household uses 1 kilowatt of power averaged across the day/night. So 10 gigawatts is 10,000,000 houses
10 Million. You missed the "mega" between the "kilo" and the "giga", which is kinda important here.
It just has to work well enough to provide plausible deniability for all of the horrific things that have to happen to keep this shitbox afloat.
Wanna do a bump > may i meet you
The best part of the episode is Zitron clearly not knowing the term “lot lizard.” Sweet summer child.
The confused silence was gold.
May I Meat You?
Ed Zitron said, (((the Ackman gene)))
Oh hey, it’s the guy that both does PR for AI companies and complains about them! Zero theory of power from Ed, couldn’t even wrap his head around private market valuations or AI not needing to work to be useful to these capitalists trying to replace labor. Boring PR guy with no technical background way out of his depth, we need a better class of AI critic like Paris Marx or Brian Merchant. Not Ed “Diaper Applied” Zitron.
These comments from you sound like AI, and your name is AI with an R in between, hmmmm
Despise his movement, but I never thought Nick Fuentes would become my favorite right wing pundit
Thaddeus Venture Voice: “GrooOOook, is that true?”
Ezra Klein cooking out of nowhere, you love to see it
Does anyone remember the name of the pod Felix did with Ed and Jesse Farrar years ago
The Scumbag?
Where's this Will Ferrell guy as an anime character
What if AI does end humanity but it’s not because the singularity but because of no more water to drink?
It’s like black mirror. I’m sure this guy loves that show.
Felix is back to recording from his California twin bed
Grok can you summarize this episode plz
Plz someone name the track they closed out with it’s in my head now
4 Non Blondes - What’s Going On
Day-uh sen-uh day-uh sen-uh day-uh sen-uh
no mention to peter thiel divesting himself of all his nvidia stock?
Ed doesn’t understand how financial markets work so that’s better for all of us that he stayed out of discussing that
When the guest says "crony capitalism" but I can't prove they're a lib. 🤨🤨🤨 Edit: nvm his trump impression checks out, he passes the sniff test
Well he is a PR guy that runs an agency that does work for AI companies too and he’s got a weird diaper fetish he brings into all his replies so
I think fascists watched the matrix and were like hell yeah let's get these useless eaters into the battery pods.
The use-case for AI is not as a consumer product but as a research tool. Why burn that much juice so you can make AI slop on Facebook?
What's the research going to get you though?
The Smiling Man cometh
hell yeah Ed’s back baybee
Fresh drop! Why am I still awake
Felix begins speaking again
Blirst
Bicentennial Man 2: Bicentennial Man Vs Grok
When people ask me what I’m doing with OpenAI (I’m generating photos of Bernie Sanders with a BBL) I’ll say “oh nothing, just making inferences”
Felix clipping on the first word he says, classic
Sloppp time and arc raiders time
New Ed ep hell yeah
Ed is just cathartic, he’s a terrible and deeply incurious AI critic that thinks he’s the only one who’s made any of these points. Better to read Timnit Gebru, Paris Marx, Brian Merchant, anyone with an actual theory of power that isn’t just a PR shill with no technical background that cant wrap their head around AI not needing to “work” to still be a useful black box to launder domination and replace labor.
AI 👁️🫦👁️
Forth
Bridge
Adam Friedland > God
Adam Friedland = God
Yeah boyz
FIRST
shitlib