Monologue: Tokenpocalypse Now

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. Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. Buy our new “FUCK DATA CENTERS” shirts today! --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:19Speaker 02

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• 0:49Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 0:52Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to the second of this week's Better Offline Monologues. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 1:05Ed Zitron?

  It's been a funny few weeks watching the little spurts of air coming out of the AI bubble. It's unclear when it will burst, what will burst it. Really, even what's going on half the time. They just all seem to be running around like a billion Mr. Beans. But I get the sense that everything will accelerate dramatically based on one or two big events. Things that just knock the confidence of everyone. Maybe it's an AI company dying, or a funding round not coming together. Or maybe it's a hyperscaler cutting CapEx. Goldman Sachs analyst Rich Piratowski said last week that he believed that everybody was spending simply to remain competitive. Fucking love that, don't you? And added that the first hyperscaler to signal that it can slow the pace of spending would likely see its share price rewarded. If I had to bet, I think it's between Meta and Microsoft,

• 1:50Ed Zitron?

  the latter of which has made numerous noises about using cheaper AI models like DeepSeek in its Copilot co-work product. Yeah, and also I should add the Sachin Adella keeps doing interviews where he's like, "Yeah, no one company should have all that power. We shouldn't rely on one lab. One lab being able to be shut down at any time is bad. We can't..." It's really funny watching this guy change his tune, considering how a year and a half ago, a year ago, he was rock hard for OpenAI. And six months after that, rock harder for Anthropic. It's almost as if he's just doing random shit based on what he thinks might work. You know, like a fucking cargo cult. Anyway, as I've mentioned over the last few months, both Anthropic and OpenAI both started

• 2:31Ed Zitron?

  to charge their enterprise customers, companies with over 150 users, for the actual cost of their AI token spend as of the middle of Q1 2026. To explain, when you use a regular ChatGPT or Claude account, you burn tokens, each one about three quarters of a word, up to a five-hour or weekly limit, depending on what kind of model you're using. So with Anthropic on their Claude subscription, Opus 4.8 and Fable, when it was around, had a specific limit to themselves. But anyway, just the more powerful the model, powerful being meshed by the companies, of course, the more it burns and the less you can use it. On a regular subscription, you're able to burn, and I am not kidding, $8,000 worth

• 3:10Ed Zitron?

  of tokens a month on Claude and $14,000 a month on OpenAI's ChatGPT Codex subscription, all for 200 bucks a month. Pretty, pretty good deal, right? You know? It's like the discount prices sketch from Tim and Eric that I reference every so often just to see if anyone emails me. And so, yeah, after years of being able to burn thousands of dollars of tokens for 200 dollars a month, enterprises are suddenly having to pay the actual costs. The result is multiple companies capping their workers' token spend. As I've reported, both T-Mobile and Brex have done so, and others have reported that Uber, Meta, Walmart, Coinbase, and Cisco have all done so. Meta notably had a token-maxing leaderboard. Very funny. Again, just changing direction based on random signals. None of these people have

• 3:55Ed Zitron?

  a plan. None of them. None of these companies have a plan. Nobody integrating AI has a plan. If they did, they would have been like, "Yeah, let's make sure we know how much this is gonna cost," or "Let's make sure we know whether this is good or not, whether we can measure the ROI," you know, anything that would suggest anyone knew what the hell they're doing. But they don't. And 404 Media reports that management consultancy firm and evil corporation Accenture, which is an insane way of saying that, and I'm just gonna keep, has seen what it calls "soaring token spend" based on leaked audio recordings, with much of that token spend being driven by non-engineers doing things like converting PDFs into presentation slides.

• 4:36Ed Zitron?

  Love this shit. This is the easiest stuff in the world made slightly easier, but probably worse costing way more. You could definitely hire an extra, but you could just hire a contractor to do this. You could hire a bloke at forty five bucks an hour to do that for you. He'd be the happiest man alive. Probably cost you less too, I know. Oh, God, this stuff is exhausting. You ever sit and wonder what you could do with the rest of that money? I could have, I don't know, like, what, like, millions of dollars a month? I could have, like, a week's worth of Diet Coke. Anyway, it turns out that telling your workers that AI can do basically anything and to use it as much as possible starts costing you a lot of money when you actually pay what it costs.

• 5:18Ed Zitron?

  As I've said before, we're barely three months into enterprises paying the actual cost of AI and they're already screeching like they're being pecked to death by birds. And that joke is courtesy of Kasey Kagawa, who said that to me about a year ago when we talked about the amount of money that Anthropic was allowing people to burn on Claude subscriptions. Meanwhile, the threat of open source models appears to be getting more serious. I've heard from numerous sources that Chinese AI lab Zepu's GLM five point two coding model is competitive with Anthropic's Opus four point eight at somewhere between a quarter and a sixth of the price, but that seems to vary based on the cost of the task. As far as whether GLM five point two is actually competitive goes, it appears that the hype is somewhat real, but it's kind of, you kind of had to check your sourcing.

• 6:02Ed Zitron?

  Open source AI coding company Klein ran benchmarks on an actual bug from its repo and found that while GLM used twice as many tokens to fix it, it also did so at a cheaper cost, forty one cents versus Opus four point eight's eighty one cents. Opus was quicker, taking one point six minutes versus GLM's four point seven minutes. But one thing that stood out was that GLM, to quote Klein, cleaned up dead code and verified the build compiled before completing, something that Opus, the more expensive frontier model run by the company that loses billions of dollars, apparently didn't bother to do. It's just one bug, but GLM five point two seems to score well on many of the major benchmarks. Coming third on cybersecurity firm Semgrip's cyber benchmarks, with the top two being Semgrip's own harness, so their own thing that they put on top of the models running

• 6:47Ed Zitron?

  Opus four point eight and GPT five point five, followed by GLM five point two, which is interesting. It's very interesting. And if I, if I was Clammy Sam or when I'd be looking at this and getting a little worried, I'd genuinely be looking at them and even saying, oh, why don't I try my own? But you know, that might actually be a bad idea, even though it's fully possible. Because GLM 5.2 is a true open weights model. It's released under something called the unrestricted MIT license, which means you can, anyone, by the way, company, a regular person, whomever, can self-host it and fine-tune it or use it in any way they wish. And yeah, I mean, in theory, any company that wants to use LLMs could either run their own version of it locally, albeit on a rig that costs tens of thousands of dollars, or

• 7:31Ed Zitron?

  pay an inference provider like Base10 to spin up and train their own version. Now, I must be clear that there's not a ton of evidence that running GLM 5.2 is profitable for the inference provider. In fact, there's really not, and I genuinely have looked, nor do we have any significant signs that customers are moving away en masse from OpenAI and Anthropic's models. People generally like name brands and they, even though Anthropic shit is constantly broken, go look at their stability page. Stability page? Uptime page? I don't know what you call that. Email me if you know what they call that, or I could just look after this. Gonna keep going, though. Nevertheless, people want name brands. People like paying for a company that ostensibly works on this and keeps it updated. How true is that? Who knows? I don't think people are buying LLMs because of particularly sensible reasons, anyway.

• 8:16Ed Zitron?

  But what might change things would be Microsoft, Amazon, or Google offering GLM 5.2 via their Foundry, Bedrock, or Vertex AI platforms. And even then, it's hard to say if customers are excited about AI or just paying OpenAI and Anthropic to use buzzy models. Really isn't clear. We should know by now. All that being said, now does feel like the perfect time for a shift towards open source models, if only because everyone is crapping themselves about costs. Everyone is really freaking out, and I think that this is going to be the time when we start separating the wheat from the chaff, the people that actually like this stuff versus the people who just feel good because they're doing AI and they don't know what else to do with their time, and they like forcing people to use it. I'll get to who actually does in a minute.

• 9:09Ed Zitron?

  Alright everyone, I'm back talking about Quince, one of my favourite clothing brands. And as we speak, I'm currently wearing one of their excellent cotton knit overshirts. They're a wear like a jacket, nice pre fall piece to wear as things cool off a bit. I've also been eyeballing one of their heritage water resistant Harrington jackets too for later in the year to pair with their Mongolian cashmere sweaters I bought. And I have several of them and I really can't recommend Quince's stuff enough. I love Quince because they focus on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, jackets, pants, fitted tees and polos, activewear and even travel gear. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands and because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, you're getting more for less. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince.

• 9:53Ed Zitron?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was on Better Offline. It's the best way to support the show.

• 10:09Speaker 02

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• 10:37Speaker 04

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyse your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 11:11Ed Zitron?

  Open routers rankings show a dramatic move away from Frontier Labs. The top 10 most popular models are all open source, save for Opus 4.7 at 6, Opus 4.8 at 8, and Sonnet 4.6 at 10, as well as a mysterious new model called Owl Alpha, which is currently free to use, which is probably why it's trending. To be clear, Anthropic's models still dominate the top models by task across the board, and that's based on the spend on the task.

• 11:36Ed Zitron?

  I hate to give him any credit, though. I really don't like doing this, but Scott Galloway recently made the point that China could thrive by AI dumping high-quality open-source models into the ecosystem as a means of destabilising the major model providers. And I hate to say this, what's happening, it's like a fucking broken clock, I guess. Zepu and Minimax are both partially government-funded by the Chinese government, and also both woefully unprofitable, but neither do so at the scale of Anthropic or OpenAI. And while both do the kayfabe discussion of AGI and autonomous computing and all that bullshit, they seem far more focused on creating open-weight models to compete with them. And just for the differentiation here, open source means you can share some of it, open weights means you actually can diddle with the model itself.

• 12:20Ed Zitron?

  That's a flattening, someone's gonna email, they're gonna be mad at me. I don't care. Sorry, like, it gets the point across, alright? Just write on the subreddit if you're mad. Anyway, in truth, I think the future of LLMs will end up being locally-run models on expensive specialist hardware. The underlying economics of cloud-based GPU compute do not make sense for anybody. You need to make sure the GPUs are saturated, you have to buy in advance, otherwise you won't, like, you just won't be able to get the capacity, and if you have less people than you expect, you will lose money for sure, and if you have more people than you expect, you have to get more compute, which means you'll also lose money. So as long as you can Goldilocks this bullshit, maybe you'll eke out the world's worst gross margins in history, or you'll just lose money, which is what everyone's doing.

• 13:04Ed Zitron?

  But I think there may be a point at which Zepu, Minimax, or even American model developers start focusing more on services-driven custom deployments, and become boring, ugly, licence-driven monstrosities like Oracle. And that's the thing, I've talked to quite a few people recently, and they are all saying the same thing. They've, even Nvidia is moving into this realm, and they're selling these giant 100-grand machines. I think that's kind of interesting. And like I said, that GPU compute, it requires a certain critical mass of customer demand that I don't believe will exist once the cargo culture of the AI bubble passes. Because GPU commitments are done a few years in advance and any drop or lull kills the

• 13:47Ed Zitron?

  margins of even a cheap to run model. Remember, Base10, they're an inference provider, they just raised one and a half billion dollars. They're not profitable. I mean, Zepu isn't profitable and they do the same thing that OpenAI does with their stuff where they say, "Oh yeah, yeah, our cost of revenue is lower than our revenue. However, when you add the sales and marketing, it's actually, it's actually unprofitable as well. Oh, also, we lose hundreds of millions of dollars because of training. Other than that, we're super profitable." Yeah, it's a really fucking stupid industry. And look, even if GLM 5.2 can do things at half the cost of Opus 4.8, that's still half of what in some cases is hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a month. I've heard tell from multiple sources that

• 14:29Ed Zitron?

  that hardware demand is growing and that customers at big companies are starting to look into those high-end hardware solutions. And I think that that is the only future for this stuff. And I think it would reduce the cost significantly for the end user, probably keep this shit off the internet, or at least massively marginalize the damage that LLM-based code can do by focusing on people that actually give enough of a shit to buy the, buy the actual machines. And I don't know, I feel like an actual serious fiscal commitment makes companies take things a little bit more seriously. Unless, of course, you're Microsoft, Google and Amazon and Meta buying GPUs, in which case who gives a shit? But I mean, if this takes off, it is, it's curtains for Zusha. It's, it's a bad time for OpenAI and Anthropic

• 15:13Ed Zitron?

  unless they too start doing these hardware-driven things. This is just a guess. This is just a guess they would ever think about that. But I think it's possible. I think it's really the only economically viable end for this, unless there are just going to be companies that lose billions of dollars a year for no apparent reason. I just don't think that's going to happen. It's not enough money to do it. And goddamn, please go and listen to the "OpenAI will not get bailed out, AI is not too big to fail" podcast they did. I'm tired of getting, please don't, please stop emailing me. I, I love hearing from you. I really, I would love to hear from you all more. Other than the people who email me saying, I think the GPUs are all for surveillance. I think it's all that. I think it's a big government.

• 15:59Ed Zitron?

  That's called Oracle. Oracle's first client was the CIA. Oracle has a giant government GPU array. They have several of them. Jesus Christ, that's already happening. And they're not doing surveillance on that. They did that with Maven. They did it with the Promise software. Jesus fucking Christ. Sorry, I understand that I sound agitated here. It's just that if the only choice you can make when looking at something is to say, well, bad thing will definitely happen. That's not actually an intellectual pursuit. It's just crap on yourself. It's just saying, well, everything's bad, so everything stays bad. I actually want to bring you a message of hope. I don't think these companies get bail down. I don't think they get anything. I think that they get allowed to die.

• 16:38Ed Zitron?

  I think part of their assets might be scooped up by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. I think the government might take a chunk out of them. Perhaps they get some sort of bridge financing, but I actually don't know if the government would even extend that because AI is very unpopular with regular people. Regular people do not like this and they hate data centers and they have intelligently connected data centers, these horrible AI companies. And so in the end, I tell you, please stop emailing me the surveillance thing. I, it's not true. You're wrong. You sound. You sound like someone that wants to be paranoid, but doesn't want to do the reading well enough to be paranoid.

• 17:17Ed Zitron?

  If you want to be paranoid, go read the promise software. Go look at Oracle. Like, go look at the actual history of these companies if you want to be freaked out by something. But in truth. The AI industry is just a directionless egregore of capital bumbles about. And is only kept alive by a belief system that's mostly, mostly growth focused and doesn't really understand how to run a business anymore. Or even build innovation or technology. And it's blatantly obvious that LLMs are, at best, a classic risk versus reward software tool for the real sickos that know what they're getting into. But the problem is it's been sold as this mass market panacea for basically any problem. And I'll say that my thesis remains undeterred.

• 17:59Ed Zitron?

  I believe a great deal of AI usage is cargo cult shit, driven by executives that don't do any work and people that feel pressured into adopting AI by their peers on the media, or of course, people that spend 12 to 18 hours a day on Twitter, who just follow the algorithm. I call it the Dunce's Casino, because you just crank the thing and a bunch of insane people come out. And all of these people come out and they're like, "If you don't use agents, you're going to die. They're going to kill your wife. They're going to eat your dog. If you don't use loops, Boris Cherny is going to blow up your house."

• 18:33Ed Zitron?

  Twitter is driving people insane using AI, but not because of Grok or anything, but because it just fire hoses nutters into your feed, who will constantly make you feel terrible for not picking up the next big AI thing. It's this insane, it's, I keep saying cargo cult because that's what it is. It's people just going around being like, "Yeah, you know, this is the big thing now. We all like that, right? We love it. We love it. It's good. If we all follow this, the great prophecy will come true and everyone, and everyone will make money somewhere, somehow," I think. It's a sickness.

• 19:15Ed Zitron?

  All right, everyone, I'm back talking about Quince, one of my favorite clothing brands. And as we speak, I'm currently wearing one of their excellent cotton knit overshirts. I wear like a jacket, nice prefall piece to wear as things cool off a bit. I've also been eyeballing one of their heritage water resistant Harrington jackets too, for later in the year, to pair with their Mongolian cashmere sweaters I bought. And I have several of them and I really can't recommend Quince's stuff enough. I love Quince because they focus on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, jackets, pants, fitted tees and polos, activewear and even travel gear. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands and because they work directly with Ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, you're getting more for less. Find the four pieces you'll reach for most at Quince.

• 19:58Ed Zitron?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was on Better Offline. It's the best way to support the show.

• 20:14Speaker 05

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• 20:45Speaker 04

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 21:19Ed Zitron?

  It's a genuine sickness. So I went a little tuck across and I, what's going on? Why are we using LLMs? What are they going to do to us? What are they going to do to your family? But anyway, back to the podcast, back to the monologue. I apologize for ad libbing. I must be clear as well. I do love hearing from you because I keep getting emails from people that actually use AI. And I got one just before I started recording this from a bloke who said, and I quote, "He's used it to deliver good work and seen it tried to submit absolute crap." And that really is the AI industry. Hey, you know, sometime it works and when it does, it's all right. And when it doesn't, it's dog shit. Yay, great. I'm so glad we sunk a trillion plus dollars into this.

• 22:02Ed Zitron?

  Look, these are specialist tools that are being forced to solve generalist problems. And they're probabilistic models that fail to do deterministic things. And they're really just an eternal financial black hole for anyone trying to scale them into a Google search or a meta-sized business. And it's never going to work like that. Just before this as well, I saw that Broadcom and OpenAI announced their jalapeno chip. This giant dinner place sized motherfucker. Dinner place, dinner plate, I'm not fixing that. And it's funny because everyone, everyone's doing the cargo cult shit around it. They're all like, whoa, well, it's gonna bring down inference costs. If they did that, that would fix everything. If, if jalapeno fixes everything, then everything will work out. There's no proof that that's the case.

• 22:48Ed Zitron?

  Actually, here is the thing, if you want, if you wanna like, here's a specific request. If you have an information subscription, at some point in the last year, I know there was an information story that suggested that Broadcom's OpenAI chip would have modest gains. If you bring that to me, I will fuck, I will Venmo you five dollars if you can bring me that story. Seriously, I, I need that story because I'm pretty sure that if Broadcom's chip was gonna change everything for OpenAI, OpenAI would sink every fucking dollar they had into it. OpenAI would dispense with Nvidia. Instead, it's like, oh yeah, we're getting Microsoft to pay for some of it and it'll be there in 2027, maybe, uh. I don't know.

• 23:31Ed Zitron?

  Sounds like something you pre-ordered on Kickstarter and you got it and it kinda sucks. It turns out the video was AI-generated, which I did just see with this thing where someone had done a Kickstarter where it's, uh, yeah, you can build things using real principles and you pour your own cement, but it's really small and the whole thing is AI-generated. Fucking hell, this industry really is miserable, isn't it? All the people, you, every other era, other than of course crypto and the metaverse. When something cool happened, even in the augmented reality era, there were still people doing goofy, funny shit. There was still people doing really interesting things with computer vision. There were people doing interesting things with depth sensing. The fact you can measure stuff on your iPhone, I'm pretty sure you can do on Android too,

• 24:14Ed Zitron?

  is because of depth sensing cameras and augmented reality. It's cool. The snap spectacles are embarrassing and if you get them, I, I assume that they're, that people will just come and beat you up. I mean, it, it triggers a deep bully instinct, I think, in 90% of human beings. You look like, uh, Roy Orbison.

• 24:34Ed Zitron?

  But so much worse and so much less talent. Hell no, this whole era pisses me off. That's the long and short of it. I think you've probably got that by this point. I apologize that I've been a little all over the place with this monologue, but it has been a long few months. I've still got plenty of energy, but this has definitely been a tough few. But it's hard to tell what happens next. I know it's hard. I know you asked me when it will burst. I truly don't know. But I'm gonna do my best every week to inform you, keep you up to date. And to try and explain what the fuck is going on, because quite frankly, I don't think most people have any idea. And I think that that's actually the story of the moment. Because when you look around the tech industry right now.

• 25:16Ed Zitron?

  Does this strike you as an industry full of leaders or followers? Meta is apparently working on a polymarket competitor. After releasing some new $300 fucking glasses that only perverts will wear. What Microsoft a year ago was saying open source was bad, now it's good. Six months ago Anthropic was good. Now Mustafa Suleman says they're too expensive and they're gonna stop working with them. This is an industry full of people working things out as they go along. Except the difference between you and them is that they have billions of dollars. Billions and dollars, billions and dollars, I'm keeping it, billions of dollars.

• 25:58Ed Zitron?

  And also all the talent and all the resources and all the ability to raise debt. They could do anything and they choose to do this. Remember that, even when this era ends, remember that this is what they chose to do. This is the intentional choice of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. They could have done anything else, anything. And there are real problems they could solve. There are problems they could solve with their own fucking problems that they've caused with their apps. They could make Facebook better or Instagram better, except doing so with lower than revenue. I don't know, Microsoft could redesign the Office suite to work.

• 26:40Ed Zitron?

  To actually work, to they could make Microsoft Teams stable. Google Search could work again. Again, it would lower the growth. It would make the growth go down. And I think by the time these fuck nuts realise that they have a real problem, they'll realise that they pissed away the only opportunity they really had to change direction. Because had they started this era and just been like, we're out of hypergrowth ideas. Now, they probably wouldn't say it in those exact words. They could have said, this is the era of experimentation. This is finding our new business lines. The next Google search and announced it like some world's fair bullshit. I don't know, maybe the markets wouldn't have been quite as happy, but they'd be happier than they're going to be at the end of this era.

• 27:20Ed Zitron?

  And I think in the end, it's frustrating to watch because logic and reason have gone out the window. But gravity exists and this era will come to an end. And next week, we've got an awesome interview, something that's not about AI for once, with two writers from the Wall Street Journal about the greasy, nasty, freaky world of polymarkets, influencer marketing, involving all sorts of weird shit like ads that include fake bets on fake polymarket websites. Genuinely weird shit. And that'll be coming up next Wednesday. I enjoy hearing from you. Please email me. Easy at betteroffline.com. Jesus Christ, I messed up my own email. It's been a long few weeks, folks, but I'm loving hearing from you. Please email me. Please jump on the subreddit.

• 28:06Ed Zitron?

  I love to hear from you. I love feedback. I love feedback that's reasonable. If you send me a typo correction, I'm only going to get mad. But I do love hearing from you, even the typocorrectors, even the pedants. I love having the feedback and I love you all. I love you all. I enjoy hearing from you. I enjoy being here and speaking to you. And I'll speak to you next week. Zitron out.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 29:06Speaker 06

  Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities, and drive growth. That's why Chase for Business helps small business owners like you by offering personalized guidance and digital tools that can help your business grow. With our guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com/business. Chase for Business: Make More of What's Yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 J.P. Morgan Chase & Company.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair (omalizumab). It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 29:54Speaker 07

  Zolir 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolir, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolir. Zolir may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolir should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolir is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolir.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolir.

• 30:37Speaker 07

  This is an advertisement for Zolir paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.