This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Quarzone Media.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm of course your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Offline. I'm so proud of our community. Anyway, this week's going to be a fun one, a two-parter plus a special report on GPT5, and it's kind of a culmination of the last year and a half of work that I've done covering the AI bubble. Now, the reason I return to this subject so often is because each

week I become more and more convinced that the only way the AI bubble ends is, well, badly. Every

week I see more and more evidence that this is structured in a way that is doomed to end, not even

abruptly, but there are going to be abrupt little farts, little burps as the bubble begins letting out air,

and in a way where I see people in innovation as the collateral damage.

In the global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve and the US government, as well as other

equivalents around the world, worked to ensure that when a bank or hedge fund went under or a big

insurance company became insolvent, the collapse was managed in a way that didn't

implode the entire financial system. The difference with AI is first that it's nowhere near as

essential as financial services to the global economy and thus unlikely to be saved as AIG was in 2008,

but also that there's no real way for this to end gracefully. Just due to the way all of this is happening, how it's built, I'll get into it.

And all the signs are now there, and I have been hesitant to make this call the whole time, by the way, where, well, there's a contagion here, where one precarious company falls, the rest eventually tumble, sparking a chain of events that will be, well, pretty

bad. But how does this end? Okay. At the start of August, we saw no less than three different

pieces, two in the Wall Street Journal and one in the Financial Times. Financial National

Times? Eh, who cares? Published within the span of one week, all asking the same question,

whether the massive proliferation

of data centers is a massive bubble, and honestly since then, there have been several more.

...