Title: Inside AI's Fragile Ecosystem with Ed Zitron Show: The Real Eisman Playbook (Substack podcast + written note, PAID) — host Steve Eisman Guest: Ed Zitron (writer of the "Where's Your Ed At" newsletter; host of the "Better Offline" podcast) Date: 2026-09-09 URL: https://realeismanplaybook.substack.com/p/inside-ais-fragile-ecosystem-with Length: n/a (audio is preview-only for non-subscribers) Note: *** PARTIAL CAPTURE — PAYWALLED. *** This post is marked "PAID" on Substack. Read via Stephen's Chrome session on 2026-09-10; the browser profile is NOT signed in to Substack, and navigating to realeismanplaybook.substack.com/account redirected to substack.com/sign-in, so only the FREE PREVIEW rendered (1,413 characters of available content). What follows is that preview VERBATIM — the standfirst plus the complete first section, "The Circular Economy Supporting Big Tech". The next section, "Looking Closer at NVIDIA's Numbers", and everything after it are behind "This post is for paid subscribers". The episode audio is likewise preview-only, so there is NO timestamped transcript and NO (mm:ss) cues — the analysis page therefore uses "read" links to the post itself rather than ?t= deep-links, per the written-post convention. No YouTube upload of this episode was found (a YouTube search for it returned nothing; the channel's uploads were also blocked by network Restricted Mode). Nothing below is paraphrased, and nothing beyond the preview has been inferred, invented or filled in from other sources. =====
Inside AI's Fragile Ecosystem with Ed Zitron STEVE EISMAN — SEP 09, 2026 — PAID
Steve sits down with Ed Zitron, the well known writer of several newsletters including Where's Your Ed At to hear his perspective on why he believes the AI trade is overheated. (September 9, 2026).
The Circular Economy Supporting Big Tech
Ed writes thoughtful, deeply researched critiques of the AI story, and I subscribe and read him regularly myself. So I invited him on to hear his full case for why he's concerned about where things stand. Ed's starting point is that the hyperscalers, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, have spent over a trillion dollars in capital expenditure buying GPUs from NVIDIA. On top of that, OpenAI and Anthropic are estimated to make up around 70% of hyperscaler AI revenue, and UBS projects the two companies could account for 48% of all Google Cloud revenue next year. In other words, the hyperscalers are investing heavily in GPUs largely to capture revenue from two companies they themselves continue to fund. It is, in Ed's view, something of a closed loop, and both OpenAI and Anthropic remain deeply unprofitable, having lost tens of billions of dollars between them. Also, when you set OpenAI aside, Microsoft's own AI compute and software business is comparatively modest, a single-digit-billion-dollar business. In fiscal year 2026, Microsoft reported $34.3 billion in AI revenue, and $24.1 billion of that came from OpenAI alone.
Looking Closer at NVIDIA's Numbers
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