Monologue: It's The Beginning Of History

0:00This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again, more Americans listen to podcasts than add 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. What if mine control is real? If you can control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind games. A new podcast exploring NLP. AKA neuro-linguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle? A shady hypnosis scam? Or both? Listen to mind games on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:01I'm Miles Turnne. And I'm Brianna Stewart. And our podcast, Game Recognized Game, has never been done before. Two active players giving you a real look at our lives and what we actually think on and off the court. Nothing's off limits. We talk tanking. I might get in trouble for this answer, but I think it's like definitely happening in the WWE. We talk about our mistakes, too. They pulled me to the side and was like, Hey, man, we got a call last night, man. You can't be rolling around the city like this tonight before games. Check out Game Recognized Game with Stuy and Miles on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to this. iHeart and TikTok have come together to create something new. I love it. We're the world of TikTok meets your playlist. Three words that will change your life. iHeart TikTok Radio. The biggest hits across iHeart radio. What's trending for you on TikTok? Tell me a sound that's better than this. iHeart TikTok Radio. Plus TikTok's most influential creators all in one place.

2:01Search for iHeart TikTok Radio. Make it a preset and stay connected all day. Who also media? Hello and welcome to this week's better offline monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron. Who's that all night? Sorry I missed last week's monologue everyone. I was sick and in truth I'm still kind of sick. But the work is important. I also want to thank all of you who have sent very kind words via the email inbox and that right there. I really do appreciate you so much. And actually that's a good place to start. Everything's rough. As you know, you've seen everything. The horrors are many. Remember to be there for the people close to you and as isolated as the world might make you feel right now, there are millions of people feeling exactly like you. Our subreddit, our slash better offline is a great place to start. As I assure you that if you feel that isolation, the castigation, the irritation,

3:01by the push to put AI in everything, you're anything but alone. We are all feeling it. I'll admit I've been kind of reeling myself. I've had family stuff to take care of all while being sick for the best part of what is now three weeks, I think. It's tough to take a break when you have so much to do, especially when the stuff you have to do involves keeping up with the current events and mother fucker. We are in an event, heavy era. I miss the premium newsletter for the first time in months and the monologue for the first time since we started doing them. Felt guilty, which is ridiculous. You'll all tell me off of her saying it. But this show is built on sincerity so I'm going to say it anyway. So give yourself a little bit of a break. Everything is fucking rough. Not me though. Not taking one of those. Don't get those. Now as I wrote in this week's newsletter, which I called the beginning of history, things appear to be reaching a breaking point. Let's catch up. A few weeks ago, Anthropic and the Department of Defense got in an argument because Anthropic wouldn't allow them to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or to control autonomous weapons, the former of which is the stretch of what LLM's can do

4:01and the latter of which is totally out of their capabilities. As a result of this flimsy defiance, Anthropic was designated a supply chain risk by the Department of Defense. This immediately led to a depressing amount of people doing bullshit we stand with, Anthropic, Jesui Claude, commentary, suggesting that this company was in any way ethically opposed to blowing things up. Let me be blunt about how wrong you are, if you think this way. Anthropic's Claude LLM was used in the war in Iran. It isn't clear how, but it's more than likely it was handed a bunch of data, coordinates, images, targets and so on, and asked what to do. This does not mean it is powerful or accurate or really anything other than a weapon. A means of escaping the responsibility for choosing who to kill. Dario Amade really make no mistake about this, Love's War, Enables War, and is a full supporter of the US military and I quote using AI to defend democracy, which can mean literally anything that America wants it to,

5:03just look at the history of fucking America. Similarly, clammy Sam Altman immediately swept in to take Anthropics business once the DOD kicked Anthropic out. And I want to go into the nitty-gritty because it's weeks old, but from what I can tell, chat GPT will support all legal uses. I really just fucking despise everyone involved here. I think they're absolutely disgraceful. I think Sam Altman's muleing bullshit online about claiming he didn't actually agree to all legal uses and would go to jail. You know what, Sam, if you go to jail, I can't visit you. You little shit. Yet something interesting happened as a result of all of this bullshit. Anthropic, so people who were designated supply chain risk, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense to fight him. And in doing so, had to include a sign and a sworn affidavit from its chief financial officer, Krishna Rao, which revealed, and this stunned me, that Anthropic has had

6:03five billion dollars in lifetime revenue to date, with today referring to March 9th, 2026. Now, this flies in the face of basically every reported revenue, including the information story. And I like the information I pay for it, but this is important that Anthropic had made $4.5 billion in 2025, and Anthropic's own statement that it hit $14 billion in annualized revenue on February 12th, 2026, which works out to about $1.16 billion. Interestingly, Anthropic also revealed it, it spent $10 billion on model training and inference, which is the process of creating an output in the same period. Now, the exact phrase was exceeding $5 billion to date, and my God, my God, if your argument there, boosters is, oh, yeah, well, that could mean $6 billion or $7 billion, shut the fuck, I'm sorry, can you please? Can you put down the show in Williams you've been eating for a fucking second and think?

7:04Anthropic is incentivized in this case to say it's making a lot of money, because all of this is in a filing begging the government to not remove its ability to monetize public sector work, but pretty much war. I really need to be clear, I've been arguing with people about this for days, if you add up all the annualized revenues you get $6.66 billion spooky, probably more, if you include missing months and such, it's very obvious that Anthropic is misleading people, because I don't know, I trust this CFO in an affidavit far more than the leaks of annualized revenues. I don't see the same alarm in the tech journalism world or the business world, I just don't see it. I don't see anyone giving much of a fuck about this, despite this very likely meaning everybody has been misled for years. Let's simplify. Anthropic has raised more than $60 billion with $30 billion of that arriving on or around February 12th. It made $5 billion in revenue all time

8:06and spent $10 billion in training and inference costs alone. Just think about that for a second previously, before that new money, they had $30 billion, they spent $10 billion on inference and training and they made $5 billion of revenue. So just, I guess like tens of billions of dollars just fucking annihilated there. This company's a dog, it's very obvious that its leaked revenues have either been inflated or outright lies, and in the end, Anthropic is just kind of a piece of shit. You know what, it's time for a little rant and while I think you'll all enjoy this, this is really targeted at those B, that are yet to be swayed by my arguments. I hear all of this crap about AI changing everything but where's the proof? Wow, Anthropic managed to turn $30 billion into $5 billion and start one of the single most annoying debates in history. Where's the money? Who is actually getting a profit out of AI? In video, the companies that make RAM? Because it doesn't seem to be the companies

9:06who are buying the GPUs. It doesn't seem to be the AI companies either. I don't think it's true, but if you believe it, you believe that code is truly being automated away. To what end? What are the actual documented economic effects we can point to and what are the actual meaningful changes to the world? Also, are you not a little bit concerned about how much code might be written, that people do not read, let alone understand? Because I'm learning a little bit about code right now. Very slowly learning to code. And the more I learn, the more I realize that it's important to understand what it fucking does. But you know what, AI boosters, if you're listening, I don't know how many of you do, but please, if you talk about the magic of AI, and why we should be excited about AI, I need you to start talking today. And use real data. Something from today, please. You are legally banned from saying the words soon or in the future. All of my stuff has to be in the present.

10:07So you should too. Point to one thing from today, from today's models, that even remotely justifies burning and nearly a trillion dollars, and filling our internet full of slop, and creating the moral distance from an action that might have blown up a fucking school in Iran, and empowering the theft of millions of people's work, and having to hear every fucking day about Sam Altman and Dario Amade, to terrifyingly boring and annoying oafs, with no culture and no whimsy in their wretched little hearts. Oh wow, so you can code a clone of an open source software project, all set up within the LLM, that may or may not get the code right. Do you really need this? Is this really impressing you? All right, I'm back talking about Quince, and they're great clothes that I've loved both before and after they became an advertiser. Most recently, they're responsible

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13:09what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to mind games on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

14:09I want to be clear that my position is sincere. I do not see a path out of this for large language models. I have sat and thought about how I might be wrong, far more than I've searched for how I might be right. This industry cannot sustain itself and is not in any way training towards viability, let alone profitability. This is not a game for me. I am not on a team. I think you are all cresting the wave of the end of the software industry's growth era. I think you think Sam Altman is your friend. I think you think OpenAI is your sports team. I think you think large language models are something you need to align with. I think you think this is fucking fun. It isn't. It's a waste. OpenAI and Anthropic are not selling great software. And even if you somehow think that they are their software business sucks absolute ass. Anthropic spend two dollars for every dollar it made just on training and inference.

15:09And that's before sales and marketing. That's before real estate. And that's before the actual people. That's not just crap. It's shit. How much of what you love about AI is being rooted in the present. You having fun? I'm having fun because I enjoy writing and reading my podcast. If I worked in the technology industry full time right now I'd want to cry my fucking eyes out. It's a depressing, ugly time where bosses talk endlessly about stuff that doesn't work and force their workers to push it on their customers all while losing money. It's a fucking cult built on debt and theft. And I'm sick of hearing about it and being scared of it. I'm not scared of AI. I'm scared of the financial apocalypse that come. I recently read a terrifying stat the other day from Apollo's asset management, sorry Apollo asset management's John Zito who said that between 2018 and 2022 software accounted for 30 to 40%

16:09of private equity leveraged byouts. The specific era in which venture capital stopped providing reliable returns for private equity's own growth started to slow. Worst is still, the largest software leveraged byouts of 2021 to 2021-24 were financed with anywhere from 50% to 90% debt. In very simple terms PE firms brought into software companies and bought software companies they believed would grow forever, pumping them full of debt, taking on debt to buy them and did so based on the growth trajectory of software companies from 2005 to 2018. In a very different era when they were tons more lands to conquer, a tons of growth ideas still left to build. That was a weird noise, but I'm going to keep it. We're past that. I think we're running out if we haven't run out already. As I said a few years ago in the Rotcom bubble, I believe we're at the end of

17:09software's hyper-growth era and the come up and has begun which means likely to be unlikely to be paid even. All of this has also been happening as software growth has slowed across the board because there are only so many things you could sell and only so many people to sell them too. Generative AI was meant to be the solution here. It was meant to be the panacea that would restart growth in the software sector, allowing software as a service companies to upsell their clients, create new SaaS companies and create new era of hyper-growth. Instead, large language models are unprofitable, like significant innovative features that make selling new software possible and outside of open AI and Anthropic do not appear to have much revenue potential at all. Most businesses don't even break out their specific AI revenue. IBM literally just stopped doing so. And 80% of their generative AI revenue was consultancy services hawking it to people that didn't really need AI

18:09but they needed to start doing AI because their shareholders would kill them. But here's a good example. Salesforce, which makes tens of billions of dollars a year, will they reveal that they had 800 million dollars of annualized revenue for their agent-forced chatbot. That works out to about 60-something million dollars a month. That's poopy. That's dog shit. And if you disagree, you don't know fucking finance and you're living in a dream. But who is the dreamer? We are both at an end and a beginning. A reckoning for decades of hubris and a punishment for those who believe that all software would grow in perpetuity. I don't know what happens next. But I do know that we're at the beginning of history and that looking at the past there's a way of confirming your biases about everything is a mistake. You need to start looking at the fundamentals. If you don't, if you're an AI fan listening to this, if you're someone that writes about tech

19:10and you're still in the AI camp, you need to start proving your arguments because when this collapses and I'm confident it will, you're going to look like a fucking idiot. Now, some of you might be not so bad. There are many of you that won't. Many of you have taken a kind of middle ground as centrist position. It's time to start looking at the fundamentals. And it's time to stop looking at the .com bubble or looking at Uber, looking at whatever little myth you have to pretend that all of this is going to work out. If you can prove me wrong, I look forward to reading it or hearing it. But it's been years and nobody appears to have tried. I really don't know what will happen next. But I'll be here to explain what I know and thank you for listening.

20:10What if Mind Control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Mind Control, NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP. AKA neuro-linguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle? A shady hypnosis scam? Or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Miles Turnne. And I'm Brianna Stewart. Giving you a real look at our lives and what we actually think on and off the board. Nothing's off limits. We talked tanking. I might get in trouble for this answer,

21:10but I think it's like definitely happening in the WWE. We talked about our mistakes, too. They pulled me to the side and was like, hey, man, we got a call last night. You can't be rolled around the city like this tonight before games. Check out Game Recognized Game Check this. iHeart and TikTok have come together to create something new. I love it. Where the world of TikTok meets your playlist. Three words that will change your life. iHeart TikTok Radio. The biggest hits across iHeart radio. What's trending for you on TikTok? Tell me a sound that's better than this. iHeart TikTok Radio Plus TikTok's most influential creators all in one place. Search for iHeart TikTok Radio. You said it's stay connected all day. This Women's History Month, the podcast Keep It Pause's Sweetie celebrates the power of women choosing healing, purpose and faith. Even when life gets messy. Love is not a destination. You have to work on it every day.

22:10Keep It Pause's Sweetie create space for honest conversations on self-worth, love, growth, and navigating life with grace and grit led by women who have left, inspired, and tell the truth out loud. And I know why it took 20 years. To hear this and more, listen to Keep It Pause's Sweetie on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.