This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Life is full of hurdles, so how do you keep going? On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring woman in sports and wellness. from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurdle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed the game. This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headlines. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow TimboSliceLife12 and the TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue, I'm your host Ed Zitron. Sorry about no monologue last week, I've had a very tough few months and needed a break and honestly I'm still flagging a bit, but there's too much shit going on for me to stop talking and I love doing this job too much. anyway earlier in this week i ran a newsletter that will likely be turning into a few episodes about how few data centers are actually getting built and found that the vast majority of those that broke ground in 2023 and 2024 are yet to be completed my working theory is now that barely any capacity is coming online and that's why anthropic had to buy up all 300 megawatts of elon musk's colossus one data center capacity because there are no other options out there other than the guy who said that Anthropic was misanthropic and evil. An embarrassing insult when you could just say that Dario Amadei sounds like he's doing Elizabeth Holmes' Steve Jobs voice. In any case, I think we're in the good old-fashioned bullshit phase of the bubble. I know some of you will say, but data centers are getting built. But what you mean is that data centers are under construction. They are not, for the most part, being finished. Across every Microsoft data center announced since 2023, I found two. Fairwater Wisconsin and Atlanta that were anything close to complete and despite Microsoft saying that they're both operational they're actually both stuck on the initial phases. I think there's some capacity online but even then I'm not really sure. I saw an article in a local newspaper saying that Fairwater Wisconsin wasn't even working. Now Microsoft has also claimed that it brought on a gigawatt of capacity in each of the last two quarters and I think it's using a different definition of capacity than operational data centers it's weird it's fucking strange i'm sorry i know i'm meant to be articulate and talk about economics and some shite but i'm just i'm kind of tired of it we're four years in and even the largest companies in the world still describe their return on investment like they're the fucking riddler how much capacity do you have satya why don't we know why don't we know how much you actually made on ai why are you still using run rate. This is strange. What's going on? About to fall into Tucker Carlson voice there. But nevertheless, for my article, I actually reached out to Microsoft to confirm these things, and they said they'd get back to me last Monday, and then they just stopped replying. That's generally what people do when they're hiding something. And I'm tired of that too. I'm tired of the fact that these companies won't just give me a straight answer, or you a straight answer or their investors a straight answer. It's frustrating. And I know you're frustrated too, dear listener. And I know you keep asking when this shit ends. I truly don't know at this point. And I'll explain. The obfuscated finances of these firms are so thoroughly mangled that it's hard to tell if Anthropic has $30 billion in the bank or $30. It's fundamentally impossible to understand how much money OpenAI actually makes because both I and the information have now published very different numbers. Mine are much lower, billions lower for 2025. I mean, I don't have the final quarter. And I will say that I can speak to mine with complete certainty as these are the kind of financials that are borderline impossible to lie about, unlike investor documents, which usually, well, are full of them. Now, I want to be clear. I am not even accusing OpenAI of lying. I'm sure whatever it's handed over to investors has more asterisks on it than Qbert reading Mein Kampf. I'm sure it says that these are non-GAAP numbers, generally accepted accounting principles, which means that they could be any number of different versions of Ebitenstein's monster. It's hard to tell how much OpenAI is spending, which makes it harder to tell how much money it needs or when it might run out of it. If OpenAI closes this entire $122 billion round, NVIDIA and SoftBank are paying in three monthly chunks like a fucking Klarna plan, and Amazon has $35 billion contingent on either IPO or AGI. OpenAI will have, if they successfully do this, would have raised over $160 billion in the space of a year. And even if it doesn't, it will have raised, and I assume spent most of, around $70 billion or more in the space of a year. That's so much money. Where has it gone? Wherever has it gone, Sammy? Do you think they know? Do you think any of these people know? Do you think they really know how their finances are doing? because according to OpenAI CFO Sarah Fisher, they are, and I quote the Wall Street Journal here, not ready for the scrutiny that comes with being a public company. It's pretty worrying to me considering how much money Mr. Altman is now on the hook for and how much money he's taken in. Similarly, his equally damp friend, Mr. Wario Amadei of Anthropic, is now raising at a scale unheard of other than when it just happened with OpenAI, by which I mean that if its rounds with Google and Amazon fully close, Anthropic will have raised over $100 billion in the space of a year. And again, it doesn't seem to want to go public. Why not, Mr. Amaday? What do you have to hide? What's going on? And now Mr. Amaday is out raising another $50 billion that must close in 24 hours. Nope, wait, sorry. That was a few weeks ago. Now I mean it billion to billion that might close by the end of the month And yes that is the order of the events And again no one seems to think this is strange No one in the media seems to think this is strange No one seems to be concerned about this at all. I'm actually kind of deeply worried about all of this because these companies may go public. And if they go public, well, they're going to lose everyone's money if they invest. But if they don't go public, there's still a bunch of money that's gone into them that's just potentially gone nowhere. Anyway, this is kind of exciting. I'll admit it's kind of exciting. I know that's a bizarre thing to say. I know it's strange to suggest that this might be an exciting thing because the stakes have been raised so much that eventually one or more of us is going to be proven correct. It's going to be me or the boosters. And if the boosters are right here, this is crazy. I don't think they're right at all. gun to my head i think anthropic is doing some sort of very bizarre accounting likely taking in api payments paid in advance to explain i think it's possible they are counting an organization paying its tokens up front say 50 million dollars that's likely to last 12 months and acting as if that's a month of actual revenue versus accounting for it spread out over 12 months artificially inflating the run rate by a factor of over 1000 to explain ar is just month times 12 so if they say if $50 million is meant to be spread over 12 months, counting it in a single month and multiplying, that's kind of bullshit. I don't know for certain if this is what's happening, but pre-selling tokens and using it to drive up ARR is a way it makes sense. And also, it's not the first time this has happened. There are plenty of startups that have done this bullshit in the past, some of them in the dot-com bubble. I find the alternative a little ridiculous. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said on March 6th, 2026, that Anthropic had made $5 billion in lifetime revenue. He said exceeding, but if it was much higher than that, he would have said a different number. If that's the case, Anthropic suddenly grew its business from a few hundred million dollars in January to a few billion dollars a month in April. This is, on an accounting basis, a step change in complexity. It's a step change in customer scale. Anthropic must have had to hire and scale at a speed that defies all logic to keep up. They've been handling so much fucking cash in there, brand new at this also krishna rao the cfo got interviewed recently on one of the many booster podcasts where they just sit there and let you say what you want for an hour and he said that the largest user of tokens in anthropic is their tax person that's the one person i would never let use an llm i would slap their hands if i saw them using claude i'd be very worried but krishna seems very excited about this he's talking about how all of this is speeding up all of their uh all of our accounting and i must be clear when you're handling billions of dollars very suddenly coming in you don't want to rush the fucking accounting krishna you need to calm your fucking jorts a little bit fucking it just it's so ridiculous and it's ridiculous that i am somehow unique in the way i cover this that i am unique in my scrutiny I don't know why I am. I mean, I do. It's much easier to not scrutinize these companies and just applaud whenever you see a big number. But I think it's letting down listeners and readers across the board to not approach this and replace with scrutiny, even if you think this will work out. Even if you believe AI will be the biggest, most hugest thing ever, I think it's a detriment to your listeners and readers to not approach this with a high degree of skepticism and scrutiny, because this is so much money. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Who's the 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? To the group? To the group. The Yardbirds, right? That's the name? The Harvard Yardbirds. But they're open to change. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Casting. Call 844-844-IHEART to get started. That's 844-844-IHEART. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do and I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. And Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecky. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world, like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurdle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on earth. He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets. Meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across. When Jacob met Levon, this went to a billion dollar fraud. But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive? The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Jacob told Lovon, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And here the thing maybe krishna being honest maybe maybe there are 30 billion 50 billion whoever knows arr and it's just this amazing business or maybe it just isn't that big or the business isn't that good maybe that's what it is do you think do you think that i i would be very shocked if Anthropic grew from making a couple hundred million dollars in what, November last year to four billion dollars in April, I'd be really fucking shocked. And I think that there is a, if that has happened, it's because of the largest pay pig AI psychosis in the world, which we'll get to in a bit. But I've had some people recently say that I am not talking about the tech enough and I want to explain why. And it's the fact that four years into this, I'm just not sure what it is everybody's excited about. What are the big AI applications that are changing my life? Every two days, Anthropic releases some sort of new harness product for finance or law or medicine or accountancy leading to someone's stock crashing based on the theoretical damage that Anthropic's product could cause without anybody actually trying it or verifying what it does or even explaining why it fucking matters. What is it that I am meant to be excited about? what is it that I'm meant to be impressed by? But ultimately, the reason that Anthropic's releasing so much stuff is its flag. It's meant to be an impossible-to-pass blob of different things that create the gestalt of an indomitable company that can do anything, because the markets and the media don't bother to check. We hear about everybody using this shit day in, day out. Why has nothing changed? What are businesses doing differently? How are they different? What is different? What is it that LLMs are actually doing? These should not be difficult or complex questions to answer, but nobody seems to be able to give me an answer with any real clarity or specificity. Every time they do, it's a weird dance involving someone saying, I now get a summary of some stuff from my open claw, or of course some sort of multi-agent coding fiasco that never actually ends with functional or impressive software or anything being shipped faster. And look, on the coding stuff, I'm sorry, I'm just not that impressed. I speak regularly with very talented software engineers, and their reaction is, it's kind of cool, I guess. It's not anywhere near as good as people say, or this allows bad software engineers to do impressions of functional software engineers, which creates material risk to the stability, functionality, and security of software, because people trust these people who cannot do their jobs, which has begun to decay across the board, across the entire tech industry with the rise of AI coding tools. It sounds like LLM coding is a very inefficient way to sometimes speed up some things in a way that also creates a culture of overwork and either constant bullshit detection or something I call the engineer's torpor, a state where your senses are dulled and you stop giving as much of a shit until your shit breaks and you realize your eight concurrent agents are burning $300 a day of tokens and have written two and a half million lines of functional yet brittle software designed with no intent or purpose, like an apartment where the rooms vary in size and the number of bedrooms and the toilets are different with varying finishings and the plumbing's different room to room. I guess people could live there, but it would be a pain in the ass to run and get worse the more people that moved in. The more agency you give a coding model, the less you understand what it is you're building. No matter how intently you're prompted or how many agents you throw it in, how many weird little tweaks you make to your clawed.md file, the more that you don't build, the less that it makes sense. To make matters worse, the more you hand over, the more rusty you're going to be at writing code. The shit isn't good enough, it's not getting good enough, and it cannot be trusted. And my evidence is that a lot of software is just kind of fucking broken all over the shop in ways that's so common that we're entirely numb to it. We are tolerant of our ship being broken or terribly designed. It was a problem before LLMs, and it's got worse since. Let me give you some examples. Sometimes my iPhone will randomly show a black screen with a pinwheel. It just resets. It's fine. It'll even keep playing my music. It's happened every iPhone for years. Sometimes it doesn't happen for months. Sometimes it happens multiple times a week. Sometimes apps just arbitrarily slow down. My phone isn't hot or anything. They just slow to a crawl on chrome when i load certain websites like tech crunch for some reason my two-year-old macbook pro 16 inch with ultra m3 core or what have you and has let's have a look actually while we're live on air let's see i have 64 gigabytes of ram and this shit slows down because some ad cookies it doesn't like insane a lot of popular video games crash regularly the madden franchise has looked like total shit for years and is getting worse each time. The menus are incredibly slow. The Google Docs iPhone and iPad apps are so unstable I want to take away their car keys on top of having some of the most vexing design decisions across the board, almost as if they don't know how to make things right anymore. And let's talk about all those organizations burning, what, 10, 20, 30% or more of their headcount on tokens. This is a sickness. It is a psychosis. The amounts of money being spent are genuinely disgusting. Any company that spends anything more than 5% on their headcount on tokens is a fucking mark. Your businesses are not getting better. Your CEOs have AI psychosis. The more they speak to the machine that tells them they're the smartest, sexiest boy in the room, the more they'll be convinced that you must join them they do not see this as annihilating money for effectively no reason they see it as praying to a soulless non-existent god a non-spiritual god made up of more annoying math requiring the largest amount of infrastructure spent on anything ever it fucking sick it is just fucking sucks i'm not correcting that but you'll just have to deal with that, okay? This is what happens when every boss is a fucking business idiot who doesn't actually do any work. What do you think Mark Zuckerberg does all day? He walks up to the mirror sometimes, just looks down at his willy and goes, what are you? What do you do? What are you for? What is your concept? Or he walks into rooms and bumbles in there and he says, we need to do more on the exponential. And then some wretched worm tongue-like figure like Boz or Adam Mirsky oinks and squawks at one of 2,000 different vice presidents to spread his nasty, vague ideas, whatever they might actually be. If you're lucky, you might even get to deal with one of five different dysfunctional AI divisions with different ultra-oafs that you have to placate, as Mark Zuckerberg does something with AI that seems to change every fucking week. Not to worry, the Wall Street Journal will cover it anyway. And I think that this is how a lot of Silicon Valley and a lot of businesses are being run. I think that's how Jack Dorsey acts. I bet it's how Uber's run. Think of an app you're using right now that's anything other than okay. Do you love any app? Does anything work great for you? I like Flighty. Flighty's a good app, but that's one. Even the Apple Notes app I use constantly doesn't sync right at random for no reason and has a bunch of random shit come up whenever I choose a menu Everything a fucking mess Nothing is smooth or easy I have to log into something every four minutes I have to give somebody a 2FA token every six minutes Sometimes Google just logs me out of shit for no reason. Sometimes my email client loses its access to Outlook or Gmail. And sometimes my password system hasn't saved a password. And I have to reset my password. I have to go to my email. And there's three fucking emails from a pizza place I visited in New Jersey 15 years ago. And by the way, if you fucking email me and tell me, get one password, get Bitwarden, get, look, fuck you, fuck off. It's so sickening that everyone thinks that there is some panacea. Oh, my app works for me. Apps do not work consistently across the board. That is a unilateral truth. One password works well for a hundred people and doesn't work well for 50 others. I've seen it with my own fucking eyes. Same with LastPassword, same with Bitwarden. The state of these fucking companies is dog shit. And I know I'm going to get emails from people saying Bitwarden works. I pay for Bitwarden. Don't like it. It barely fucking works. It's a bit better than one password. But it's like, which of these do I trust now? What's being saved where? I'm sick of it. I'm absolutely sick of it. Apologies for getting heated. I know it's atypical of this show for me to rant. Now, I want to speak to, if any, LLM coding people, the real code jockeys. If you use it a bit for work, I don't care. But the people who think that this is truly the most amazing thing, do any LLM coding folks actually use software? It stinks. It's bloated. It's counterintuitive. It's slow. It's inefficient. The 10 or more tracking cookies and 100 APIs you connect to every two seconds for some reason have created a sludge that is making every single experience on the computer worse. Doing varying degrees of kayfabe to impress another dickhead with $2 million in RSUs doesn't make up for the fact that the current state of software is fucking sad and ugly across the board. Do you think the modern state of software is good? And do you think the insecure, bug-ridden slop fest of OpenClaw is a good representative of your industry's future? You should be burning it to the ground. You should be killing OpenClaw. It's destroying the fabric of software. LLMs make shitty code. I don't care how it makes you feel. And I think it's made a select few people genuinely mentally ill in a way that we're yet to account for. And I don't mean random people. I mean prominent VCs and CEOs and a lot of software engineers who are obsessed with this stuff, who have now been irredeemably proven to be insane gullible marks. And we do not talk enough about how insane this all is. $800 billion, more than that, spent by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta on AI so far. And for what? A tech industry that has unilaterally increased its expenses across the board to varying degrees for a return on investment that's nearly impossible to actually explain, and impossible to explain in clear terms like, does it make more money than is spent? It's not profitable. The state of software is arguably worse. Most products try and make you use an AI feature with questionable utility or efficacy, and some organizations actively ostracize you if you fail to use it because their CEOs have AI psychosis because their models told them they were brilliant. Every time somebody explains AI's economic value, they sound like they just got caught committing a crime and they're trying to lie their way out of it. Why does OpenAI need all this money? Why does Anthropic need all this money? What justification is there for any of this expenditure? I know some people want to come up with a conspiratorial reason that all of this is, oh, it's a super secret government military thing and Trump's going to bail it out. It's all a secret government. It's all built for government, government, government, government. It's all a secret Trump conspiracy. No, stop it. Stop. that's not what this is that is a comfortable way to feel smart or in control of a situation you have no control over it is a doom saying philosophy that allows you to avoid the hard intellectual work of actually thinking of what happens when bad things happen and it also avoids the intellectual exercise of accepting that these are a bunch of men who do not really know how to do business and are self-involved cowards that only know how to follow each other i realize it's easier to look at the world as dark and scary and say, wow, it's all a big secret plan. And this is all government spying already happening way before LLMs. Oh, it's all a big data gathering. It's all a big surveillance thing already happening way before LLMs. LLMs aren't even particularly useful for it. I'm sure there's some uses, but come on. Doing that makes you feel like you're smart. It makes you feel like you're ahead of the game. When in reality, the world is dark. It is scary, but it's also directionless and full of followers and cowards and people that don't know what they're fucking doing that will spend over a trillion dollars on data centers for an AI industry that does not have a future. It's a dark and scary world we live in when the mainstream media has moved away from reality. But it's a reality I live in. It's a reality you live in. But don't give these people credit. Don't give these people credit or a strategy that does not exist. In the end, you need to just ask simple, obvious questions. Open AI have to become profitable at some point. How will they do so? When will they do so? Nobody has an answer, which is entirely inexcusable for the most annoying, expensive, destructive, and wasteful bubble in history. Citroen out! Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles, so how do you keep going? On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring woman in sports and wellness. from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurdle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed the game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headlines. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow TimboSliceLife12 and the TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
