In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how OpenAI’s collapse could mortally wound SoftBank, throw the Paramount/Warner Brothers deal into chaos, kill Oracle, and destroy Larry Ellison’s empire.

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In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about how demand for AI GPUs helped the RAM cartel make every single consumer electronic more expensive, and how bad it’ll be when things unwind.

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GamersNexus on the RAM cartel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI is inflating the price of memory across the board by diverting fab capacity to building high bandwidth memory for GPUs, and how this situation may end in disaster for everyone involved.

GamersNexus: The DRAM Cartel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY

HBM to increase 90% Year over Year - https://x.com/pequityresearch/status/2075035164833382909?s=46

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This week’s Better Offline is the first joint episode with Riley, November, Hussein from TrashFuture, covering SoftBank’s crazy annual shareholder meeting and the general collapse of the AI bubble.

Ed Zitron and the TF Crew are on both your feeds this week to discuss the Softbank slide deck breakdown you’ve all been waiting for. It’s nothing other than the goose, and whether or not the goose was valued, and what kind of factory does a goose use to make golden eggs.

Shareholder deck for following along:
https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/investors/shareholders/2026/shareholders-meeting_46_05_en.pdf

https://trashfuture.co.uk/

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through Meta’s plans to sell its AI compute, and how this is an admission to the grim fact that there isn’t really a reason for anyone to be building all these AI data centers.

Ed Zitron on CNBC: Generative AI's Business Model Does Not Work, And Tech Is Out Of Hypergrowth Ideas
https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1ulm3a6/ed_zitron_on_cnbc_generative_ais_business_model/

Bloomberg - Meta Is Planning a Cloud Business to Sell AI Computing Power
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-01/meta-is-building-a-cloud-business-to-sell-excess-ai-compute

The Information - Nvidia Says It Will Take a Cut of Some Customers’ Cloud Revenues
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-says-will-take-cut-customers-cloud-revenues?rc=kz8jh3

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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with the Wall Street Journal’s Caitlin Ostroff and Katherine Long about how Polymarket is working with influencers to show videos of fake bets cashing out - and how the prediction markets have grown into a large, barely-regulated operation.

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They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real - https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-bets-prediction-market-441cdeb5?st=57dR12&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Caitlin Ostroff
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https://www.wsj.com/news/author/caitlin-ostroff

Katherine Long
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https://www.wsj.com/news/author/katherine-long

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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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