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- [00:00]
Poshmark Host
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
- [00:08]
Ben Walter
Every small business owner has that one moment that could have broken them. But remarkably, it didn't. Hi, I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business and on season three of the Unshakeables, my co host Kathleen Griffith and I are bringing you more incredible stories of overcoming the impossible. We're really proud to share that the Unshakeables is nominated for Best Branded podcast at the 2026 iHeart PodC Podcast Awards. Listen to the Unshakables wherever you get your podcasts and learn more@chase.com podcast JP Morgan Chase Bank NA member FDIC Copyright 20 and 26 JP Morgan Chase Co.
- [00:44]
Ryan Seacrest
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 stay. 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.
- [01:15]
Bethenny Frankel
This is Bethany Frankel from Just Be with Bethany Frankel. Most dog food is marketing, not nutrition. That is why Biggie and Smalls eat just food for dogs. Real 100% human grade food with ingredients I actually recognize. And yes, I do see the difference. I better digestion, healthier skin, more energy, dogs that feel better. My babies. If you've been on the fence about switching, stop overthinking it. What's more important than your furry babies and their health? Go to justfoodfordogs.com right now and get 50% off your first box. No code needed, just try it.
- [01:52]
Vital Proteins/Public Investing Announcer
Shake it up with vital proteins, collagen and protein shake. It's a high quality ready to drink shake with 30 grams of protein and 10 grams of collagen to support healthy hair, skin, nails, bones and joints. With zero grams of added sugar, no artificial sweeteners, and absolutely no carrageenan. It's a clean, delicious way to fuel your day so you don't just age gracefully, you age powerfully. Vital proteins stay vital. Learn more@vitalproteins.com
- [02:26]
Ed Zitron
Corezone Media hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue. I'm your host Ed Zitron. Better Offline 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 the Reddit. 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 r betteroffline is a great place to start, as I assure you that if you feel that isolation, the castigation, the irritation, but 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 current events and motherfucker, we are in an event heavy era. I missed 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 all tell me off for her saying it, but but this show is built on sincerity, so I'm gonna 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 a stretch of what LLMs can do, and 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 Xanthropic. Je suis 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 means of escaping the responsibility for choosing who to kill. Dario Amadei, really, make no mistake about this, loves 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 Sam Altman immediately swept in to take Anthropic's business once the DoD kicked anthropic out. I don't want to go into the nitty gritty because it's weeks old, but from what I can tell, ChatGPT will support all legal uses. It's. I really just fucking despise everyone involved here. I think they're absolutely disgraceful. I think Sam Altman's muling bullshit online about claiming he didn't actually agree to all legal uses and would go to jail. You know what, Sammy? If you go to J, I'll come visit you, you little shit. Yet something interesting happened as a result of all of this bullshit. Anthropic soap, who were designated as supply chain risk, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense to fight it, 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 $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 2020, 2025, and anthropic's own statement that it hit $14 billion in annualized revenue on February 12, 2026, 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 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 Sherwin 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 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 and 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 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? Nvidia. 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? 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 word soon or in the future. All of my stuff has to be in the present, so yours should. To point to one thing from today, from today's models that even remotely justifies burning in nearly a trillion dollars and filling our Internet full of slop and creating the mor 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 Amadei, two 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 with an LLM that may or may not get the code right. Do you really need this? Is this really impressing you?
- [11:18]
Ryan Seacrest
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.
- [11:49]
Bethenny Frankel
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.
- [12:37]
Poshmark Host
We all have different styles. I may be into Levi's and you may be into Fendi or Miu Miu,
- [12:42]
Bethenny Frankel
but we all should be into poshmark.com right?
- [12:45]
Poshmark Host
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.
- [13:06]
Vital Proteins/Public Investing Announcer
Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures.
- [14:10]
Ed Zitron
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.
- [20:09]
Ryan Seacrest
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.
- [20:41]
Bethenny Frankel
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.
- [21:28]
Poshmark Host
We all have different styles. I may be into Levi's and you may be into Fendi or Miu Miu.
- [21:33]
Bethenny Frankel
But we all should be into poshmark.com right?
- [21:36]
Poshmark Host
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.