Ryan Seacrest (11:18)

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It is. Stock up savings time now through March 31st. Spring in for store wide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from Smart Water, Healthy Choice, Continental, arrowhead, Red Bull, St James, Tillamook and Special K. Then clip the offer in the app automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy drive up and go pickup or delivery restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions.

Bethenny Frankel (11:49)

This is Bethany Frankel from Just Be with Bethany Frankel. Let me be blunt. Most dog food is junk. It just is. And I'm not feeding junk to Biggie and Smalls. That is why they eat just food for dogs. It's real 100% human grade food with ingredients I actually recognize. Not mystery pellets pretending to be healthy. And once I switched, the difference was obvious. Better digestion, better skin, more energy. Dogs who actually feel good instead of just surviving dinner. Here's the thing. You care about quality. You make an intentional choice to be healthy. So why are you gambling with your dog's health? So let's think about our furry babies. Go to justfood for dogs.com right now and get 50% off your first box. No code. Just try it because once you see the difference, you're not going back.

Poshmark Host (12:36)

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Bethenny Frankel (12:41)

but we all should be into poshmark.com right?

Poshmark Host (12:44)

Because we can all find exactly what we want to fit our style. Poshmark has millions of new and pre lived pieces, vintage, luxury, men's, women's, children's, everything from Carhartt to Coach. Head to poshmark.com, sign up with code podcast10 and get $10 off your first purchase.

Vital Proteins/Public Investing Announcer (13:05)

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Ed Zitron (14:10)

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 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 spent $2 for every dollar it made just on training and 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, all 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 to come. I recently read a terrifying stat the other day from Apollo's asset manager, sorry, Apollo Asset Management's John Zito, who said that between 2018 and 2022, software accounted for 30 to 40% of private equity leveraged buyouts, the specific era in which venture capital stopped providing reliable returns and private equity's own growth started to slow. Worse still, the largest software leverage buyouts of 2021-2024 were financed with anywhere from 50% to 90% debt. In very simple terms, PE firms bought 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 a completely different era when there were tons more lands to conquer and 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 Rodcom bubble, I believe we're at the end of software's hypergrowth era, and the comeuppance has begun with $46.9 billion of software debt now marked as distressed, which means likely to be paid, 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. 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 that venture capital and private equity could invest in and usher in that new era of hyper growth. Instead, large language models are unprofitable, lack significant or innovative features that make selling new software possible. And outside of OpenAI 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, hocking 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. Salesforce, which makes tens of billions of dollars a year, well, they revealed 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 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 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 ground, a centrist 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 every single week. Thank you for listening.

Ryan Seacrest (20:09)

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest. For Albertsons and Safeway it is Stock up savings time now through March 31st. Spring in for store wide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tax to earn on eligible items from Smart Water, Healthy Choice, Continental, arrowhead, Red Bull, St James, Tillamook and Special K. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy drive up and go pick up or delivery restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions.

Bethenny Frankel (20:40)

This is Bethenny Frankel from Just Be with Bethenny Frankel. Let me be blunt. Most dog food is junk. It just is. And I'm not feeding junk to Biggie and Smalls. That is why they eat just food for dogs. It's real 100% human grade food with ingredients I actually recognize, not mystery pellets pretending to be healthy. And once I switched, the difference was obvious. Better digestion, better skin, more energy. Dogs who actually feel good instead of just surviving dinner. Here's the thing you care about quality. You make an intentional choice to be healthy. So why are you gambling with your dog's health? So let's think about our furry babies. Go to justfood for dogs.com right now and get 50% off your first box. No code. Just try it because once you see the difference, you're not going back.

Poshmark Host (21:28)

We all have different styles. I may be into Levi's and you may be into Fendi or Miu Miu.

Bethenny Frankel (21:33)

But we all should be into poshmark.com right?

Poshmark Host (21:36)

Because we can all find exactly what we want to fit our style. Poshmark has millions of new and pre lived pieces. Vintage, luxury, men's, women's, children's, everything from Carhartt to Coach. Head to poshmark.com, sign up with code podcast10 and get $10 off your first purchase. Sometimes all we want is more of the same. Like another round of golf played from a channel with 24. 7 coverage. Another look at the garden and the deer as they pick their way through it, another Taco Tuesday followed by a Whatever's in the Fridge Wednesday. And to get more of the same, all we need is a little help with adaptable care plans from qualified compassionate caregivers matched to your family's needs. Home Instead can help you and your passion stay home no matter what's on your horizon. Visit Home instead online for a better what's next? This is an Iheart podcast. Guaranteed human.