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Mind Games Host
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Matt (How to Money Podcast)
Hey, it's Joel and Matt from How.
Joel (How to Money Podcast)
To Money 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.
Matt (How to Money Podcast)
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.
Mind Games Host
What if mind control is real?
Mind Games Narrator
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Mind Games Host
Can you hypnotically persuade someone? A car.
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Mind Games Host
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Mind Games Host
Can you get someone to join your cult?
Mind Games Narrator
NLP was used on me to access.
Mind Games Host
My subconscious mind games. A new podcast, exploring nlp, AKA Neuro Linguistic 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 podcast.
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
Call Zone Media Hi, I'm Ed Zitron and this is better offline. Welcome to Dot Com Week. I hope you enjoyed my chat with Matt Rozoff to kick it off and today is the first of a four part special. But why? I think the AI bubble is that much worse than the dot com bubble. So for almost five years I put out a newsletter or article basically every week that addresses the underlying financial rot at the heart of the tech industry. Whether it be the outright corruption of the crypto industry, the bullshit of the metaverse, or the AI bubble that I won't shut up about. It's been some of the most challenging work I've ever done. I've been forced to learn accountancy, economics and the names of at least 10 different guys I gladly see under a with a. I'm not an accountant, forensic or otherwise. I'm not a banker or a financial analyst. I've never worked as a venture capitalist or a hedge fund. Or at a hedge fund. I guess that would be. I'm just the guy with a laptop and a microphone. But I think I've picked up a great deal of knowledge in the last few years and the clarity of starting from a position of oh God, what does that mean? Actually allowed me to see things in the way that many haven't. Which is why I'm so utterly horrified when I hear people flippantly say that the AI bubble will work out fine because it's just like the dot com bubble. While there are similarities, I need to be clear that I think the AI bubble is far far worse and the calamity that follows will be far more destructive. Let's review. The dot com bubble actually had two elements. The stable sensible tech companies that actually made money. And then the likes of Pets.com and Webvan, both ideas that would eventually find margin positive existence in the form of Chewy and Instacart. I'd also add the telecommunications companies onto the side of this as well. But technically they weren't making the websites, they were just building the Internet. What buried these companies was their obsession with growth and a rush to take them public. The idea of ordering pet food or groceries online was one that would have made a lot more sense if more people were connected to the Internet or had faster connections. In the year 2000, only about 52% of Americans were online and well, both Webvan and Pets.com were losing $2 for every dollar of revenue. I don't know. That shit didn't make any sense and it wouldn't have even if we had high speed Internet. But I think by the middle of the 2000s we only had most people on at best 400kbps. So we're talking websites that took time to load anyway. The economics also didn't make sense. Now the AI bubble differs insofar as that what we would have once considered stable, sensible tech companies are acting irrationally. Having doubled, or in the case of Microsoft, tripled the amount of hardware known as PP&E that they operate in just a couple of years with no signs of slowing down. These companies are racking up debt, entering into multi decade long lease agreements and accumulated so much hardware that the depreciation will erode any profitability for the short term medium term future. For example, Microsoft went from having around $88 billion in PP and E, that's property, plants and equipment, which is where the GPUs are by the way, in the beginning of 2023 to a remarkable $230 billion in PP&E as of its last quarter. And depreciation, by the way, is not. It's not a cash expense. They've already bought the GPUs and the servers and the like. What it does, however, is sit there because they spread it out over five to six years. I think it's five and a half for Microsoft. They spread it out so it eats into that net income side. So instead of taking the immediate upfront hit, they spread it out. So this means that each quarter from here until fucking eternity at this point, Microsoft is going to be taking billions of dollars of depreciation charges. Now while the dot com bubble was wasteful, it didn't involve the largest and most well respected tech firms in the world, accruing hundreds of billions of dollars of GPUs that were obsolete a year or so after being installed. It also didn't involve billions in operational expenses or acres of data centers. In fact, there's really no comparison. Fiber doesn't compare at all the scale of the fiber, but we'll get to it. But I just want to be clear that fiber is also something that you can use on many things. Fiber is something that another company could come up and run with. AI GPUs are extremely limited in their outcomes. I've been over this before, not going to repeat myself. Perhaps I'll do a more in depth episode on that in the future. But look, in many ways I fear the AI bubble is going to be worse than the dot com bubble. It's going to make it look small. And we are already seeing some worrying signs. Now let's start somewhere simple though. Layoffs. Fun fact. Even during the dot com bubble, Microsoft barely had any layoffs. With the company growing its headcount even as the tech industry around it was consumed in flames. The biggest round of firings I could find during the 1998-2008 period was between August 2024 and January 2025, when it can 76 members of its Xbox group as well as 157 test engineers whose jobs were offshored to India. That gives you a grand total of 233 people. For comparison, Microsoft laid off 6,000 people in May of last year, or 3% of its global workforce. Now that's not to say that people at other companies were equally fortunate. In 2001, some microsystems culled 90% of its workforce or 3,900 jobs. That was the many at that particular company. In 2001 the telecommunications sector cut, and I'm not shitting you here, 317,777 roles with the computer industry second ranked for that year, shedding 153,952 positions. Similarly, Amazon saw its stock tumble in January 2000 when it was discovered that it laid off 150 people, 2% of its workforce at the time, and would lay off another 1300 a year later, or 15% of its workforce. Now that, by the way, sounds like a lot. And also, I think it's adorable, back when the stock market cared when companies did layoffs, they don't today. And Amazon indeed is a very different company today, going from a fledgling digital bookseller to one of the largest retailers and cloud storage providers in the world, and a very profitable one at that. Yet this week, Amazon laid off another 14,000 people, 10% of its corporate workforce, around three months after laying off 14,000 more people in October 2025. Why? Well, it's two things. First, it's the scourge of Jack Welch. Go and listen to the shareholder supremacy from 2024, if you like that one. And the idea that laying people off, well, it boosts profits, which Wall street loves. Now. Secondly, it's because Amazon is buying billions of dollars of GPUs, both from Nvidia and directly from TSMC for its Trainium custom chips. That is tsmc, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. They build basically every chip and Amazon, or they build them internally using a company called Annapurna Labs. It's a whole thing. It doesn't really mean much. They're not as good as Nvidia's GPUs, but nevertheless, they keep fucking that chicken. And this is a massive burden on its earnings. These chips have their costs spread out, like I mentioned, as a depreciation charge, dragging down the profits that Amazon can report on its earnings in the process. While this isn't a problem when you buy one or two or 10 GPUs, it becomes one when you have hundreds of thousands of the fuckers.
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Matt (How to Money Podcast)
Big New Year, new goals. And in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt.
Joel (How to Money Podcast)
And I'm Joel.
Matt (How to Money Podcast)
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.
Joel (How to Money Podcast)
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.
Mind Games Narrator
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?
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Mind Games Narrator
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Mind Games Narrator
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.
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind Games Narrator
Mind Games is the story of nlp, its 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, nlp, might actually work.
Mind Games Host
This is wild.
Mind Games Narrator
Listen to mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
Amazon had $16.7 billion of depreciation charges on its last earnings. That's a great deal. I think their net revenue was like 22 to 24 billion dollars. Not great. In simpler terms, today's layoffs are happening not because the companies are in trouble, but because they want to boost their profits at a time when AI services aren't providing a profit. And I don't think they ever will. Nevertheless, these layoffs are a sign of something that these companies know that revenue growth isn't keeping pace with their ruinous expenditures. The only jobs that AI is taking are those that the hyperscaler cuts to keep paying for its existence. In any case, people really need to recognize that the dot com bubble wasn't some small event that could be casually waved off. And other things that happen tell the story of what might. Before anyone left in or invested in the tech industry when it does. In 2001, VC funds raised 63% less than the previous year. And the amount of money going to startups, not just technology companies, dropped by slightly more. Then there's the stock market. If you held stocks in a company like Pets.com worth at its highest a relatively modest $400 million or Webvan with a peak market cap of $8 billion, you were completely fucking screwed. Those companies went to zero, or near enough. Even those who invested in established firms like Microsoft and Sun faced their own haircuts. With Microsoft's share price dropping from a high of $120 to as little as $40. Adjusted for the two stock splits that happened in 1999 and 2003, it would take around 17 years for Microsoft to reach its original dot com bubble highs. The fact is, the dot com bubble fucked a lot of people. The tech sector's share of employment wouldn't surpass the levels of the bubble era until 2015. In practice, this meant that newly graduated software engineers couldn't find much work, and what work they could find offered stagnant wages that didn't keep pace with inflation. That's the thing about the dot com bubble. We like to think of it as something that happened around the turn of the millennium. But in practice, it took until 2004 for the contraction in the tech jobs market to finally bottom out. Existing workers faced threats not simply from economic related cutbacks, making the company do the same with the resources they already have, but also from outsourcing, which grew exponentially in popularity in the early 2000s. This incidentally was around the time that China entered the World Trade Organization, meaning that in addition to cuts in the service related sector of the economy, a lot of high tech manufacturing job went out the door too. The point I'm making is that the dot com bubble was bad and that the second order effects the things that didn't get as many headlines or as much pop culture weight were really truly gruesome. Now there's a great line from the Big Short I always find myself returning to. It's when Ben Rickett, the retired finance guy who came back in from the cold in order to help Brownfield Capital short the mortgage market castigates the two young founders for celebrating what would be the trade of the century.
Joel (How to Money Podcast)
If we're right, people lose homes, people.
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
Lose jobs, people lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about fucking banking? It reduces people to numbers.
Joel (How to Money Podcast)
Here's a number. Every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die.
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
Did you know that it's so fucking easy to talk about this period with statistical data, to talk about layoffs in abstract terms like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of jobs, or to say how the stock market contracted but things would work out okay, that everybody would be fine in the future and thus the fuckups today would be okay. I need to be clear that anybody who traded into the dot com bubble got washed out. And similarly, anybody who believed story after story about the eternal growth from telecommunications or web startups lost almost everything, if not everything they put in. Anybody who worked for Enron, the people that didn't know about the illegal bullshit happening lost every cent of their stock based pension. Unemployment swelled to a peak of 6.3% in June 2003 and the NASDAQ lost nearly 80% of its value from its peak in the year 2000. Anyone saying that this is just like the dot com bubble as some sort of defense of the reckless monstrous expenditures of the AI bubble is trying to find rationalizations for irrational, reckless actions. These are likely privileged people who did fine at the time or have found ways to look back at a time of incredible suffering and believe that because things are better today that all of it was worthwhile. It wasn't. I know that the FYBA build out led to something and I'll get to that in a future episode, I promise. But just because that happened doesn't make any of this worth it. All of the wasted money and that time could have been spread out over a more thoughtful period. It wasn't. And people suffered as a result. I'm going to talk about this more next episode. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline, the editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects@mattasowski.com M A T T O S O W S K I dot com youm can email me at ezeteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ED to visit the Discord and go to R Betrays Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
Mind Games Narrator
Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Mind Games Host
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Mind Games Narrator
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Mind Games Narrator
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Mind Games Narrator
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Matt (How to Money Podcast)
Hey, it's Joel and Matt from how.
Joel (How to Money Podcast)
To Money 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.
Matt (How to Money Podcast)
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.
Mind Games Host
What if mind control is real?
Mind Games Narrator
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Mind Games Host
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Mind Games Host
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
Ed Zitron (Better Offline Podcast Host)
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Mind Games Host
Can you get someone to join your cult?
Mind Games Narrator
NLP was used on me to access.
Mind Games Host
My subconscious mind games. A new podcast exploring nlp, AKA Neuro Linguistic Programming. Is it a self help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.
iHeart Podcast Advertiser
Guaranteed Human.
Host: Ed Zitron
Release Date: January 27, 2026
Podcast Network: Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts
In this episode, host and tech industry critic Ed Zitron kicks off the first of a four-part series exploring why the current artificial intelligence (AI) bubble is "far, far worse" than the infamous dot com bubble of the late 1990s/early 2000s. Zitron draws on years of investigative reporting and personal learning to dissect the economic and human consequences of tech bubbles—focusing on the AI sector's unprecedented spending, the dangers of depreciation, and the mass layoffs underway at major firms. The episode establishes a sharply critical perspective on the industry's reckless growth and challenges the narrative that "it's just like the dot com era (and everything turned out fine)."
"I'm not an accountant, forensic or otherwise. I'm not a banker or a financial analyst... I'm just the guy with a laptop and a microphone."
"That shit didn't make any sense and it wouldn't have even if we had high speed Internet."
Unlike dot com, today’s largest, most stable tech companies (Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) are themselves acting irrationally—taking on massive debts and hardware investments (PP&E: property, plant, and equipment) with uncertain returns.
"Each quarter from here until fucking eternity at this point, Microsoft is going to be taking billions of dollars of depreciation charges."
Crucially, AI hardware investments come with no proven path to profitability, compounding the future risk.
"These companies are racking up debt... accumulated so much hardware that the depreciation will erode any profitability for the short-term, medium-term future."
"The only jobs that AI is taking are those that the hyperscaler cuts to keep paying for its existence."
"It's the scourge of Jack Welch... the idea that laying people off, well, it boosts profits, which Wall Street loves."
Zitron forcefully rejects the idea that the damage of the dot com bubble (or an impending AI bust) can be casually minimized, pointing to the real-world suffering that followed:
"The dot com bubble fucked a lot of people... In practice, it took until 2004 for the tech jobs market to finally bottom out."
"If we're right, people lose homes, people lose jobs, people lose retirement savings, people lose pensions... Every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die."
"It's so fucking easy to talk about this period with statistical data... to say how the stock market contracted but things would work out okay... It wasn't."
He cautions that privileged insiders often rewrite the history of these crises as worthwhile sacrifices, ignoring widespread background pain.
"Anyone saying that this is just like the dot com bubble as some sort of defense of the reckless monstrous expenditures of the AI bubble is trying to find rationalizations for irrational, reckless actions."
"I'm going to talk about this more next episode."
Ed Zitron speaks directly, irreverently, and sharply, peppering his analysis with profanity, self-deprecation, and pop culture references (The Big Short, Jack Welch, etc.) to get through the fog of industry narrative. There’s a sense of urgency and warning in his voice, aimed at both industry insiders and the general public.
Recommended for:
Listeners interested in tech industry analysis, economics, the real-world impacts of tech hype cycles, and those skeptical of AI’s purported "inevitability."
Next episode: Deeper dive into the societal effects of tech bubbles and the second-order consequences of the AI explosion.