Monologue: It's The Beginning Of History

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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 behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you?"

When 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?

And lp 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?”

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Tickets are on sale now, get yours before they sell out at ticketmaster.com. That's ticketmaster.com. "Colzo, media." No one will come to this week's better offline monologue, I'm your host, Ed Zitron. 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 have sent very kind words via the email inbox and the right air. 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 horror is a many, remember to be there for the people close to you. And as I say, it is the world might make you feel right now, there are millions of people feeling exactly like you.

Our subreddit, our slash bear, our offline is a great place to star, as I assure you that if you feel that isolation, the castigation, the irritation, by the push to put AI in everything, you know, anything but alone. We are all feeling hit. 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 stuff to take a break when you have so much to do, especially when the stuff

“you have to do involves keeping up with current events and mother fucker, we are in an event”

heavy era.

I missed the premium news that for the first time in months in the monologue for the first

time since we started doing them, felt guilty, which is ridiculous. You'll tell me off for her saying it, but this show is built on sincerity, so I'm going to say 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 news letter, which I called the beginning of history, things appeared to be reaching a breaking point. Let's catch up. A few weeks ago, anthropic and the Department of Defense got an enarchment, a anthropic wouldn't allow them to use, clawed, for domestic mass surveillance, so to control autonomous

weapons, the former of which is the stretch of what elements can do in the latter of which is totally out of their capabilities.

“As a result of this flimsy defiance anthropic was designated, supply chain risk by the Department”

of Defense. This immediately led to a depressing amount of people doing bullshit, we stand with anthropic just as we clawed, 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 clawed LLM was used in the war in Iran. It isn't clear how, but it's modern likely it was handed a bunch of day air 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 means of escaping

the responsibility for choosing who to kill. Dario Amadei 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, just look at the history of fucking America. Similarly, clammy samelman immediately swept in to take anthropic space this once the

DOD kicked anthropic hell. I don't want to go into the net great because it's weeks old, but from what I can tell, chat GPT will support all legal uses.

disgraceful. I think samelman's milling 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'll come visit you a little shit. Yet something interesting happened as a result of all of this bullshit. Anthropic soapy web, desnate the supply chain risk, followed the lawsuit against the Department

of Defense to fight him, and in doing so had to include a sign and the sworn affidavit from its chief financial officer, Krishna Rao, which revealed and this stunned me that Anthropic

has had $5 billion in lifetime revenue to date, with to date referring to March 9,

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 12, 26, which works out to about $1.16 billion. Interestingly Anthropic also revealed 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 you're

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, Anthropic 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 is raised more than $60 billion with $30 billion of that arriving on or around February 12th. It made $5 billion in revenue all time and spent $10 billion in training and inference costs alone.

Let's 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 is a dog, it's very obvious that it's leaked revenues of either being 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 ran, and while I think you'll all enjoy this,”

this is really targeted at those be, 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 who 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? 'Cause 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 word "soon" or in the future. All of my stuff has to be in the present, so you're should too.

Point to one thing from today, from today's models, that even remotely justifies burning an 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

Altman and Dario Amade to terrifyly 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, or set up with an LLM, the mail may not get the code right.

“Do you really need this? Is this really impressing you?”

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When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotise someone into sleeping with you? I gave you some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious NLP, A-K-A, neural 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 real. Listen to mind games on the eye-heart radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me and it's the old them. Everybody's on their journey and you'll journey different to this.

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“I think coming out of where I came from from the Bronx, I think I grew up really poor.”

I didn't know that then because I very much used my creativity to romanticize life. And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like bill out of like survival to get to the next place. Like my drive, my tunnel vision of like, I got to be better.

I got to achieve this was off the strength of like, I want to make a better life for us. If you knew better, brings real talk from women who've lived it. Unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mind set shifts that changed everything. Listen to if you knew better with Amber Grimes on the eye-heart radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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And yeah, we talked about on mistakes too. They pulled me to the side and was like, hey, man, we got to call last night and you can't be rolling around the city like this tonight for games, no, you know, doing this, doing whatever. And of course, family stories. It was like, mommy, why did you miss that? I'm, do you play basketball? Check out game-recognized game with studying miles on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

I 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 trending 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 Open AI 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. Open AI and Anthropica not selling great software.

Anthropica spent $2 for every dollar it made just on training in inference.

“And 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 actually rooted in the present. Are 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 or while losing money. It's a fucking cult built on debt and theft and I'm sick of hearing about it and even more sick of hearing that I should be 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 manager, sorry Apollo,

asset management, John Zito, who said that between 2018 and 2022, software accounted for 30 to 40 percent of private equity leveraged by outs. The specific era in which venture capital stopped providing reliable returns and private equity's own growth started to slow. Worst still, the largest software leveraged by outs of 2020-21-21-24 were financed with

anywhere from 50 percent to 90 percent debt. In very simple terms, PE firms brought

bought into software companies and bought software companies they believed would grow forever. Pupping 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, a completely different era when there 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 Rod Com bubble, I believe we're at the end of software's hypergrowth era and the come-up instance begun. With $46.9 billion of software debt now marked as distressed, which means likely to be a pay 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 to. Generate if 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 company to upsell their clients, create new SaaS companies that venture capital of private equity could invest in, and usher in that new era of hypergrowth. Instead, lots of the language bottles are unprofitable, lacks significant or innovative features that make selling you 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. 80% of their, Generate if AI revenue was consultancy services, hooking it to people that didn't really need AI, but they needed to start doing AI because their shareholders would kill them. But here's a good example, sales force, which

makes tens of billions of dollars a year, will they reveal that they had $800 million of

annualized revenue for their agent force chatbot? That works out to about $60 something million dollars a month. That's booping, that's dog ship, 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, an appunishment 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 as 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”

a booster, if you're an AI fan listening to this, if you're someone that writes about tech and 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-groundest interest position, we all know how those work out. It's time to start looking at the fundamentals,

and it's time to stop looking at the dot 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

What if mine control is real? If you can control 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 neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both?”

Listen to mine games on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Creators all in one place. Search for iHeart TikTok Radio, make it a preset and stay connected all day. Saturday, May 2nd, countries, biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas. At hour 2026,

“iHeart Country Festival presented by Capital One, C. Kane Brown,”

Parker McCallam, Riley Green, Dylan Scott, Russell Dickerset, Chase Matthew, Lauren Alaina, tickets are on sale now, get yours before they sell out at tickermaster.com. It's the new me and it's the old them. This woman's history month, the podcast if you new better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. My tunnel vision of like, I got to achieve this was off the strengths of like,

I want to make a better life for us. If you new better, brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mind set shifts that changed everything. Listen to if you new better with Amber Grimes on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This isn't iHeart Podcast, guaranteed human.