Hater Season: Corey Quinn

Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed talks with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, about the realities of LLMs and the chaotic world of Amazon Web Services. Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen LastWeekinAWS.com DuckbillHQ.com https://bsky.app/profile/quinnypig.com 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. --- 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

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• 0:34Speaker 01

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• 1:07Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:09Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better offline. I am, of course, your host, Ed Zitron.

• 1:26Ed Zitron?

  Now, we're in hater season. Hater season is when I bring people on and allow them to get rude. Because you know this podcast is usually so reserved and nice in the way we refer to people, especially tech executives, which we've never referred to as fuckwits, or morons, or dumbasses, or shitheads, or shitheels, or arswipes, or fucknuts, or nobens. We've never done any of that, ever. Nevertheless, joining me today is Chief Cloud Economist at DuckBill, Corey Quinn. Corey, how are you doing?

• 1:53Speaker 04

  I am delighted to be here because normally, in all the other places I find myself, I have to be so reserved.

• 1:59Ed Zitron?

  You have to pull your punches. Corey? Today's hate season. Tell me about your feelings on Amazon Web Services.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  Oh, dear Lord. It's like, it's weird. I don't actually hate Amazon. People think I do because of the things I say and the things that I do. But if I hated them this much.

• 2:18Ed Zitron?

  Because of your actions.

• 2:19Speaker 04

  But 10 years in, I write a newsletter about it. If I actually hate the company and want nothing but ill things to happen to them. First off, that's a pathology and I need a restraining order. And secondly, it always bugs me when people think that I have an axe to grind against the company. Because 10 years in, are you seriously suggesting this is the best I would be able to do if I actually wanted to hit them where it hurts? Come on. But yeah, they've been annoying the piss out of me lately.

• 2:44Ed Zitron?

  So AWS is weird because, and maybe you can explain this to me. Over my entire tech career, I've heard this constant story that your AWS bill just, it just goes up. It just arbitrarily increases. It's not really clear whether they're doing price increases, though I know those exist too.

• 3:01Speaker 04

  Rarely, but occasionally. Increasingly these days, yes.

• 3:05Ed Zitron?

  But why, what is it that makes the bill go up? Why, and why does this happen so often?

• 3:10Speaker 04

  I used to think it was a conspiracy and then I realized Amazon is in no way, shape or form organizationally competent enough to pull something like that off. It is the nature of charging per usage and honestly assholes. Where, okay, we're going to launch a service and we're going to charge you for every gigabyte you put in it. That's all we're gonna do. Great. Straightforward. Humans can rationalize around that. Great.

• 3:32Ed Zitron?

  Easy peasy.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  They did that when they first launched S3 in beta back in 2005.

• 3:36Ed Zitron?

  And S3 is storage, right?

• 3:37Speaker 04

  It's a big object store. Picture it as an infinite sized disk and you're pretty close. But they would, originally they only charged for the data you stored there. Great. So people stored a bunch of objects that were zero byte in size. So they just used the names of those objects and the ability to query whether an object existed or not and what its name was as a free database. This, at the time also, according to legend, didn't just, it wasn't just about taking free services. It was also just crippling the performance of S3 at the time. So what they did is they started also charging every to request you make. Would charge a small fee. I think it's something like a penny per thousand requests, if memory serves. Don't quote me on that. I look it up when it matters.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  And that solves that problem. But then you have things like that that are patched on and tied to things and tied to things and tied to more things. And in any complex organization, what happens is, is now suddenly you have this morass of $100 million a year in spent. Great. What's in there that's costing all the money? Well, everything. But if you look at anything individual and you don't think it's being used. Okay, am I gonna turn, I'm gonna turn it off. If I'm right, it's going to save me a bit of money. If I'm wrong, it's going to take down production and now I have a serious problem trying to serve my customers. So the safe bias is, don't turn things off. Also, you're an engineer hypothetically. I

• 5:01Speaker 04

  realize that can be an insult to your part of the world, but roll with it for a moment. Exactly. You're an engineer. You want something to spin up and no one is letting you spin it up. You will take up residence, annoying the hell out of them every 10 minutes until you get the access that you need. Great. You do your job. Things are done. Two things now work against you. One, you had to ask and beg and plead them to spin that up. You want to hang on to it in case you need it again because you don't want to go through that. But also-

• 5:28Ed Zitron?

  And this is internally at an organization.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Exactly. Exactly. This is not Amazon's fault. This is human nature's fault. They haven't patched that yet, though they're, I think they're trying-

• 5:36Ed Zitron?

  They're working on it.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  ...the latest iteration of Alexa Plus. Why not? I'm kidding. That thing just sells ads. We're good.

• 5:41Ed Zitron?

  But wait, so I'm an engineer and I've advocated for my thing.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  Yes. And now you're done using it. No, no one is going, there's no, there's no call to action to get you off your ass to go and turn it off. Or no one will come and badger you about it. It just, it tends to exist. It's, it's why people cynically say you're not charged for the things you use in the cloud so much as you're charged for the things you forget to turn off.

• 6:04Ed Zitron?

  And Amazon loves this, I'm guessing. They love the fact that there's just this cloud anchor system.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  I would say that on some level, contrary to popular belief, they don't love it as much as you'd think because all right, I'm trying to run my blog and I've spun up eight attempts at this blog. So it now costs eight times what it should. Great. And the narrative becomes if they're not careful with all that wasted usage that's doing nothing is huh, the cloud is pants shittingly expensive. We should go back to data centers. There's really no one on the other side of this issue. So why doesn't Amazon help people turn tune these things down and turn it off? They made some abortive attempts and part of the organization, but this is going to surprise you. Amazon is not the most organizationally competent company you're ever going to meet.

• 6:48Ed Zitron?

  But what does that mean in practice? Is it just that they don't know they're asked from the ear hole? They don't really know how things work? All of the above?

• 6:56Speaker 04

  Silos. It's all silos. There are over 200 services and we long ago crossed the point where I can speak incredibly convincingly about AWS services that do not exist to Amazon employees and not get called out on it because who in the world knows everything that Amazon does? And I'm a white guy. I sound as plausible as AI these days.

• 7:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. So it's just a labyrinth, a leviathan of different SKUs and product categories that may or may not-

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Over 2 million SKUs, if you want to be precise. Yes.

• 7:27Ed Zitron?

  Jesus. And those are all just different kinds of virtual machines and the like?

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Okay, we'll start there. Sure. Virtual machines. You want to spin up a virtual machine in Virginia, US East One. Okay. Which one are you going to pick? Because there are approximately 700 different types you can spin up. Are you going to pick the right one? Of course you're fucking not.

• 7:46Ed Zitron?

  Also, how do you pick the right one? How like, this is the thing, because it seems that the people making these decisions of which virtual machines to get or whatever spin up on AWS are engineers, right?

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Usually.

• 7:59Ed Zitron?

  Software engineers? Software engineers aren't necessarily infrastructure experts, are they?

• 8:03Speaker 04

  You've noticed. Yeah, very often companies will standardize on one particular size of instance across the board. Why? Well, because in development, it's the one that the original founding engineer picked and we'll come back and revisit this later. 10 years go by, no one has revisited.

• 8:16Ed Zitron?

  Hmm, take that.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  They do have a tool that I like. It's even free, which I'm sure someone loses sleep over called compute optimizer that looks at your running workloads and says, hey, this one should be bigger. This one should be smaller. I was extraordinarily skeptical when it came out. It is better at figuring that out than I am with the tooling that I built internally. So once again, I'm thrilled to turn it off. It's one of the, it's one of the Amazon at its best things. I can only assume that the people responsible for that are being eyed for layoffs or pips because that's Amazon these days.

• 8:45Ed Zitron?

  Andy Jassy and several MBA snipers are outside of their location right now.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  It's frustrating. I like Andy when he ran AWS, truly. Something changed. He got a job that no one in their right mind could possibly want, but also could not refuse. And I feel like he sold his soul. Yes, absolutely. He was the CEO of AWS.

• 9:05Ed Zitron?

  He was.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  And when he gave keynote talks, when he gave presentations, when I was fortunate enough to basically sneak my way into them, you could see the irrepressible humanity leaking out around the edges. He was a person. Now he is a figurehead. He doesn't get to talk to customers, he gets to talk to Congress.

• 9:23Ed Zitron?

  This shift was when he became CEO of Amazon or CEO of AWS?

• 9:28Speaker 04

  CEO of Amazon. AWS was his own fiefdom and he could do whatever he wanted, to my understanding, within that company. It was, the only people that mattered there who had an opinion on this were Andy Jassy and God, and God was sort of absent. So great, we're just gonna leave it to Andy. Andy went deep. Andy understood every aspect of this stuff. In fact, a year ago, he went to reinvent in Las Vegas and gave a talk on stage. I think because he missed it. He missed being able to get up there and talk about computers with people because now he has to ship underpants all over the world instead.

• 9:59Ed Zitron?

  Right, but is he technical? Because he's an MBA, is he not?

• 10:03Speaker 04

  This is one of the dangerous things that I have found people underestimate Amazon leadership on is it is never the smart bet to assume that they don't understand the technical nuances of the things that they are working with. They go so sarcastically deep in so many different ways that it is never a smart move to say that they don't understand. It is unlike virtually any other tech company I've ever spoken with other than small scale ones with technical founders. He very clearly understands the technology and uses it to build things himself.

• 10:34Ed Zitron?

  Right, but here's the reason I question that.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  Please, please.

• 10:39Ed Zitron?

  He's talking about generative AI. I just pulled up his notice.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  Oh, no one understands that that works under the hood. Let's be very clear on that. And yeah, he lost the fucking plot when it came to gen AI.

• 10:50Ed Zitron?

  That's the thing because he's like, we're also using generative AI broadly across our internal operations in our fulfillment network. We're using AI to improve inventory placement, so not generative AI, demand forecasting, definitely not generative AI, and the efficiency of our robots, not generative AI. I don't know, maybe he does know what he's talking about. He's just a fucking carnival barker now.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  He's doing the same. It all seems to be. And the trick to disprove everything you just said about everything that he said that you relayed to us is very simple. Go out with an Amazon employee for several drinks and then ask them about their experience of using AI within the company.

• 11:26Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I have.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  It is two different companies. There is no congruity between those two perspectives.

• 11:34Ed Zitron?

  So Corey, maybe you can help me with this because you, without saying exactly what we're talking about, you knew about a contract that I knew about way before I knew, and I knew about it months early.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 11:45Ed Zitron?

  With a lot with a large company we discussed. So you're very well connected. It seems up until generative AI, like AWS was at least a somewhat sensible operation, that it was something that we had, if not focus, at least a focus on scale and useful cloud computing.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:03Ed Zitron?

  What the fuck is it about GPUs that's driving everyone insane?

• 12:06Speaker 04

  I want to point something out that I think is being lost industry-wide. Because I've talked to folks at AWS about this and folks who have left AWS. Who I used to dabble working in data centers, which means I know just enough to know what I don't know. And I've talked to these folks. When Amazon commits to being able to bring certain amounts of capacity online, it is real capacity. It is the each data center they build out, each region they build out is a multi-billion dollar investment. And it takes years to go from signed contract to it's serving customer traffic. They are real when it comes to this stuff. There are a number of other companies.

• 12:42Ed Zitron?

  For building it.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Well, yes, and they agree that running it, they have operationalized how to run these things better than you or I would ever be able to do. That is their superpower. Other companies and they're spinning up a data center do not do this. They are, well, we rented a warehouse out, we wound up throwing some generators in the back. And we're gonna call Comcast and see what they can do to get it hooked up to the internet net.

• 13:02Ed Zitron?

  But when you say other companies. Yeah, but you say other companies, you don't mean Google and Microsoft here.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  No, I'm talking, well, I am talking Oracle, but yes. Microsoft, kind of.

• 13:12Ed Zitron?

  Oracle just agrees.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Microsoft is shitty at building data centers. Azure has been a disappointment across the board. Capacity shortfalls plagued them for a long time during COVID. They generally tend to view two racks in a data center somewhere as a region, which is weird and messed up. Google is real, but Google has made other interesting technical trade offs that I can see why they did it. But I would say when it comes to infrastructure, in my experience, AWS is number one. Google is a close second.

• 13:41Ed Zitron?

  I have heard some crazy shit about Google that they're doing these things called stalks. Where they just like, like create these pop up data centers.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  Companies have been doing that for a long time. Every company does that for a point of things.

• 13:54Ed Zitron?

  Anyway, but back to the major question, which is AWS seems like a sensible business that does real things. I'm not disputing that.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 14:03Ed Zitron?

  But.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  It prints money. Let's be clear on this, despite all, remember, my, I help companies negotiate their cloud contracts. And understand what they're spending and where the money is going, which means. That companies can say a lot. People say a lot of things, but one of my prime rules about this stuff is that customers lie mostly to themselves. They they're not intentionally trying to mislead me when they tell me what's going on, but I find the bills are the ultimate source of truth, because if you're not paying for it, doesn't really exist. And the AI spend in most of these companies hovers, in my experience with a few outliers, between five and seven percent of their total infrastructure spend. Hmm, right. It is not three times. Companies that are doing a $300 million a year contract with AWS

• 14:47Speaker 04

  are not turning around saying, better make it 400 because of all the Gen AI. That is not happening.

• 15:01Speaker 05

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• 15:28Ed Zitron?

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• 16:13Ed Zitron?

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• 16:29Speaker 01

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• 17:01Speaker 06

  Hi, it's Kathleen Griffith, co-host of the Unshakeables podcast. Listen in as Ron and Kelly Moore share their story.

• 17:09Speaker 07

  I'm Ron Moore.

• 17:11Speaker 08

  And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary, but exciting.

• 17:19Speaker 07

  The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships.

• 17:24Speaker 08

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• 17:31Speaker 07

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• 17:45Speaker 08

  If you work to give, you just see the world differently.

• 17:49Speaker 07

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• 17:52Speaker 06

  To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to the Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:02Ed Zitron?

  That's kind of my point though. It's like Amazon Web Services doesn't seem like a business that chases fads, or if it does, it chases them in a more sustainable way.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  To their credit, they ducked blockchain almost entirely and I was worried they were going to fall down that rabbit hole.

• 18:17Ed Zitron?

  But I mean, they're doing $200 billion in CapEx this year. What is it they see in AI? Because to your point just now, what, like 7% to 8% of a 300 million contract? That's dog shit. Like, that's, that's not going to pay back that CapEx, Andy.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  I believe, this is my belief here, I can't base it on anything other than what I've seen Amazon do. I, and what I've seen from customers, Amazon is selling the capacity that they are spinning up, they're spinning up as fast as they can spin it. The question that I have is twofold. One, okay, you, you invest in all these AI data centers and the AI bubble pops, deflates, whatever. How repurposable are those facilities and that capital expenditure? If it's data centers and networking, yes, very repurposable.

• 19:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  GPUs, well, we're all going to get really into online gaming in a few years. I don't know.

• 19:06Ed Zitron?

  Except they don't have video out. They don't have DisplayPort.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Yes, yet we still call them graphics, which I, I love.

• 19:12Ed Zitron?

  I think, I like the people who, I love, I've also heard people say general purpose units, which is the opposite of what a GPU is. Like, it is very much not general purpose.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  It was, it became public through a press release that they have signed a $38 billion contract with OpenAI.

• 19:28Ed Zitron?

  With insane.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  There is zero doubt in my mind that, because I did some digging on this, is there line of sight for AWS to bring online $38 billion of capacity to provide to OpenAI? Yes, yes, there is. Where my doubts come in, is OpenAI good for the money?

• 19:49Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  I have some questions here, mostly from reading your work.

• 19:53Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing. It seems like something about GPUs and large language models have broken everyone. That's kind of the point I'm getting to, because like, everything I've read about AWS and I read, because I'm a dickhead, I went and I read all of the previous coverage of the lead up to AWS becoming profitable. Kevin Roost, by the way, literally a month before they did so, wrote an article saying it would be a while. What fucking three points in that ass web? Anyway, um, everything I read was everyone's saying, oh, Amazon's being really spendy. They're spending six to seven billion in CapEx. A quarter, oh no. And then the total CapEx of 69 billion. But everything from Amazon was like, we're building something sustainable. We see the revenue potential behind it. It was all very boring.

• 20:37Ed Zitron?

  Now with AWS, everything they talk about with large language models, it sounds like they've all been huffing ayahuasca or something. They sound insane.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  They do, which tells me one of two things is true. Or honestly, this is the, this is the real world. Unlike on Twitter, two complex competing things can in fact be true at the same time. One of them is they're still doing a lot of that boring stuff, but the, the publicity all accrues to the things that are far flung. This is also $200 billion across the entirety of Amazon. That includes distribution centers, that includes low earth orbits. Basically, Amazon basic Starlink, I think they're calling it Leo now. It includes, yes, their AI nonsense, their factory boondoggles, their robotic stuff, office build outs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They don't give clear breakdowns on how much of that is AI services. And frankly, I wouldn't trust them if they did.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  Not since I saw a job ad a few years back on amazon jobs, saying experience with other AI services like S3. S3 is a storage service. That's not AI. You can use it to feed AI, but.

• 21:44Ed Zitron?

  I hear Anthropic is Anthropic is one of the largest S3 customers I've heard.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  I've heard that I've heard from seven different companies so far that they are the largest customer of S3. Yeah, it's funny how that tends to work out.

• 21:55Ed Zitron?

  God, I miss, I miss working in cloud software so much where everyone is the, everyone's the exclusive partner, everyone's the number one partner and everyone's the largest. It's so.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  And the qualifiers get to like, we're the largest S3 customer in Australia. Great.

• 22:10Ed Zitron?

  In the northeast, in the northeast region, between the hours of 6am and 12am.

• 22:16Ed Zitron?

  Okay, so here's the thing with the capex. I'm sure a lot of it is for, is for AI. Just because if you look at their previous years of capex, it was like 40, 50, 60. Yeah, 40, 61, 63, 52, 83, 131, 200 billion.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Charles Fitzgerald over at Platformonomics has been tracking capex spend of the hyperscalers for a long time now. And he was one of the first people to call out the cloud pretenders, IBM and Oracle specifically. They're making all the cloud noises, but they're not spending anything on capex. And you kind of have to build the data centers for this to work.

• 22:51Ed Zitron?

  Not to worry, Oracle's taking care of that.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  What I want to know, my question is when you start, okay, we're going to spend, even assume it's all AI, whatever, fine, $200 billion on AI spend. How, what, how much of that is just in the form of a check written to Nvidia?

• 23:04Ed Zitron?

  And that's the question, because from my understanding, my understanding, the, I should bring up the chart, I'm just gonna do something, live on air, I'm just bringing up an image, and of course, can't find it. Nevertheless, there is an image I have that Amazon doesn't, well, Amazon builds its own, the Tranium GPUs, do they still use Inferentia?

• 23:28Speaker 04

  That sounds like something my grandpa got diagnosed with.

• 23:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but do they? Like Inferentia, I thought was there.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Oh, they talk about it a fair bit. They talk about Tranium, and the thing is, is what you don't see is people using it in the wild. I looked at a bunch of stuff with Oh Llama, that's the run-your-own stuff there. I searched about a year ago for the term Inferentia. It showed up once in a pull request that had been closed after 60 days, because no one responded to it. No one is using this in the real world. A year ago, a year and a month now, they had, with Tranium 2, I think it was, they had speakers from Anthropic on keynote stage talking about it, which, yeah, okay, they invested how many tens of billions into Anthropic? Yeah, I'm sure there's a contract requirement around sending an executive talk on stage. And the other one was Apple. Apple doesn't admit what they're doing to their own employees, to each other,

• 24:18Speaker 04

  let alone publicly. So, yeah, that looked about as natural as an oral bowel movement.

• 24:23Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  But those are the only two companies I've seen doing anything with it.

• 24:26Ed Zitron?

  So, based on this chart I've got, which involves various stars and company names, it looks like Amazon gets their GPUs through Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Corporation Limited. I love Chinese and Taiwanese names, by the way.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  TSMC is almost certainly in there.

• 24:43Ed Zitron?

  No, TSMC isn't, because TSMC builds the chips.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  No, I wonder who makes the Tranium chips themselves, because they have Anapurna, they bought and do the design, but they don't do the fab.

• 24:52Ed Zitron?

  So they ship the, I assume that Anapurna, which is the internal place that Amazon makes its chips, ships them, it looks like, to Foxconn, Quanta Computing, and Jabil? And then they put them in the servers. So really, it's them cutting the checks to them. I'm going to be watching the monthly earnings of those companies in Taiwan quite viciously. Because here's the thing, if it's all $200 billion of CapEx, if they really think they're going to get paid that much, but what happens? Has Amazon ever faced the situation where they did an overbuild? Has that ever happened to them? What did they do?

• 25:27Speaker 04

  Yes, they made a bunch of noises about it during the pandemic. They overbuilt their distribution centers.

• 25:33Ed Zitron?

  Ah, but that's, people buy stuff.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  Exactly. That was my position on it. And it feels like, okay, like they slowed it down and they didn't shut them down, but they waited for people to grow into it. The thing is, is a warehouse that you use to ship out underpants, great. That has the same utility, more or less, five years from now, as it does today. A lot of these chips are depreciating assets.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  Like, oh, man, I can't wait to get that seven-year-old computer in here so I can do some real work, says no one ever.

• 26:02Ed Zitron?

  Well, also, Tranium especially, they've got, what, they're on generation two, three now?

• 26:07Speaker 04

  They're now shipping three, right at the time to pre-announce four, and then the desperate attempt to Osborn Computer themselves.

• 26:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, explain that reference.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Oh, Osborn Computer was a company back in the 80s. There, they launched the Osborn one and their CEO went out and did a whole press junket. And he's like, yeah, this is great, but Osborn two is going to blow the crap out of it.

• 26:27Ed Zitron?

  Oh, like Nvidia.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  And everyone's like, great, we're not going to buy the Osborn one then. The company went under and never shipped the Osborn two.

• 26:33Ed Zitron?

  Well, okay, not like Nvidia then. This is the thing. Surely that sets Amazon up for a big problem with those Tranium chips success. Like even if in some weird world that Tranium four or five was amazing, I don't think it will be, but just saying, doesn't that mean they're going to be sitting on a bunch of obsolete Tranium? It just feels very questionable.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  You know, you can say a lot about OpenAI, and you do. But that press release where they announced that $38 billion contract, they didn't mention Tranium.

• 27:02Ed Zitron?

  They didn't, did they?

• 27:05Speaker 04

  Which tells me that if it were half as good at this, at the model training as they say it is, OpenAI would be all about it. I am not seeing that to be true.

• 27:14Ed Zitron?

  Well, clammy Sam Altman, he's, he's signed a thing with, uh, Cerebras. You remember, you're Cerebras?

• 27:21Speaker 04

  Uh, is there anyone that Sam Altman has not signed deals with?

• 27:24Ed Zitron?

  Uh, let's think, uh, Grok. I haven't signed one with Grok yet.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Okay, good, good.

• 27:28Ed Zitron?

  I mean, actually, sorry, just to be clear, hasn't signed with either. Well, I guess it would, he wouldn't sign one with Grok as technically Grok is a competitor. I mean, G R O Q, uh, the annoying fast inference. I don't know, at this point, my hate a dumb and people are gonna say this episode was too technical. And the answer is calm down. This is my podcast. Um, I'm just, I'm wondering at what point they, they say uncle, because, okay, $200 billion, and let's say 125 billion of that is AI, right? AI chips. Takes four or five years probably to install all of that.

• 28:05Ed Zitron?

  To what end? What happens in four or five? Are they gonna make? Well, I mean, it would be

• 28:09Speaker 04

  That's what no one is able to explain to me. What use cases today do, are we looking at where, wow, if we had 10 times as much inference as we do today, then X would be possible. Solve for X. I'm not hearing it.

• 28:20Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm not either. I'm not even being my usual hatey self, even though this is hate a season. It's, I genuinely can't get that answer out of anyone, even the boosters. It's like, there's this demand, insatiable demand for compute. I don't know if that's true.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  We're gonna summon God through JSON as step one. And step two is, we're gonna ask God what to do.

• 28:40Ed Zitron?

  I mean, that's the thing. I do think that they, I think that, have you seen the revenue projections to these companies? Have you ever seen like Oracle's cash flow? So if you see this thing where it's like-

• 28:50Speaker 04

  The ones that they put out, also known as, there's a reason that every time Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, goes and gives a keynote or talks somewhere, they preface it with a disclosure that is lawyer version of everything you are about to hear is a fanciful imagining of reality.

• 29:05Ed Zitron?

  Don't listen to him. He's, he's, he's, he's had a long day. He hasn't taken his nap. Fuck it. If HR Geiger's Jerry Stiller, uh, he, um, the thing is, you look at these, uh, cash flow positive, these cash flow diagrams for Anthropic, OpenAI and Oracle, they all follow the same thing, which is terrible cash flow, negative cash flow for years and years and years. And then in 2029, everything changes, number go up. And I, I at this point genuinely think that they think they're going to invent AGI in 2029, that that's the only plan they have, because

• 29:39Speaker 04

  They're not, they're not doing the things that, if they genuinely believe that, they would not be doing these things. We think that we are three years away from launching AGI that will change everything. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna find a way to put ads into ChatGipity. But that is not the play when you are, when you think you're on the verge of the singularity.

• 29:59Ed Zitron?

  I mean, nobody, it was the Demis, I don't know, I don't like him to such an extent. I refuse to learn his name, the Deep Mine bloke.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  I don't know who you're talking about. I try not to, I try not to anthropomorphize either AI or its creators.

• 30:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Deepes Mbeepus, um, he's the one that every few weeks does an interview and he's like, and then God is going to come out. I'm really scared of what the computer will do. He doesn't sound like that. He wishes. And it's just

• 30:27Speaker 04

  You make it sound exciting.

• 30:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly. It sounds fun and interesting and comical when these people are just boring, boring people, boring motherfuckers. But it's just these massive over promises and these weird fucking like, these weird things where I like, look in, let's look at this. There are $650 billion in capex being spent this year just by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. Where is it going? Genuinely, actually, simple question, I actually don't know where it's going anymore.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  It's leading to a giant hole in their balance sheet at some point. You'll notice that all of the hyperscalers, all of them, uh, that have succeeded, even the pretenders, have other businesses that financed this. There has never been a successful hyperscaler that launched as a hyperscaler. The closest story you've got to that, and I question whether you'd call them a hyperscaler, is Cloudflare, because they started as a CDN and then just added the rest of the cloud stuff.

• 31:26Ed Zitron?

  And let's see how big their stock is. I got a $59 billion market cap.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Well, they're a real company.

• 31:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you wouldn't wanna, I wouldn't want to invest in a company that wasn't making egregious promises, but it's just, it's just so strange because even if they think AI is going to be big, surely all the money they're spending today is not going to do that. Like, all of these chips aren't going to do it. The models they train today aren't going to do it.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  It's like they're trying to bootstrap from thing to thing to thing. The story that concerns me is I, okay, you take a look at these companies and their subscription plans. Top end of it is 200 bucks. Great. I, I pay it myself just so I can dispatch a winged monkey to build me a shitpost website, which is awesome. And sometimes it works and sometimes I have to prompt it to do different things. Uh, great. It's better at shitty front end than I am at shitty front end. Terrific. I'm not going to spend five grand on that.

• 32:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  But the model resumes it not, and I'm not just talking me here. We are talking effectively everyone. It's like the unspoken message of a lot of these folks is that your boss is going to fire you and then take your salary and split it with the AI company.

• 32:33Ed Zitron?

  Right. And also the, you will be able to code everything with AI versus what people love that I quote the same thing Carl Brown saying, uh, makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder. Like.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  We are building software at DuckBill. We are hiring engineers. Is this because we're stupid? I don't believe that to be true.

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• 33:34Ed Zitron?

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• 35:06Speaker 06

  Hi, it's Kathleen Griffith, co-host of the Unshakeables podcast. Listen in as Ron and Kelly Moore share their story.

• 35:15Speaker 07

  I'm Ron Moore.

• 35:16Speaker 08

  And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary but exciting.

• 35:24Speaker 07

  The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships.

• 35:29Speaker 08

  We'll say team a lot, not just our internal team, it's the team of our vendors, the team of our clients.

• 35:36Speaker 07

  We help the Veterans Resource Center and we give scholarships. I'm doing this for my heart, for my children, for you, for your children's family. I don't want anything back and I tell a lot of people, don't give back to me, pay it forward.

• 35:50Speaker 08

  If you work to give, you just see the world differently.

• 35:54Speaker 07

  I'm gonna help as many people as we can. I can't take it with me.

• 35:58Speaker 06

  To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to the Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and that's kind of the thing. It's like, I don't know, people still seem to be hiring software engineers. The engineers are getting fired and replaced with AI. Story doesn't seem to work. And also, every time I go and read someone who claims that Claude code changed their entire life, it mostly comes down to, yeah, it took something from a few hours to an hour. And it's like, cool. Great. Okay.

• 36:31Speaker 04

  It changed my life. What did it do? It taught me to clearly explain what I wanted.

• 36:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. But also, I still had to fix things. It's like, if, if all of this money just went into creating slightly more efficient software engineers, and even then, the data suggests they're less efficient. I don't know, was this worth it? And Amazon certainly isn't, Amazon certainly isn't, I guess they're getting the chunk out of Anthropic from this, like they can claim Anthropic's success. They can have them pay for trainium in Project Grania.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  It's the curse of the platform company, where when people build interesting things on top of you, how do you, how do you take credit for that without being obnoxious?

• 37:10Ed Zitron?

  I mean, has that ever been a problem for Amazon?

• 37:13Speaker 04

  Well, not that, that's not that they're worried about being obnoxious, it's just they're bad at messaging.

• 37:17Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, they, I mentioned him earlier, Panos Panay is, Panos Panay came over from Microsoft, from the Surface team, to lead Amazon's Alexa Plus. I mean, now there's something obnoxious. Now there's some real generative AI bullshit. They've lost like billions on Alexa now as well. God, what a strange company Amazon's become.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  They've always been peculiar. The problem is, is at some point of scale, like, we're a little weird, no longer carries water, it's gray. You're now one of the linchpins of the global economy. You have to explain what you're doing a bit more effectively.

• 38:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I, I, what do you think, you've known, you've known Amazon for 100 years now. What do you think happens if the AI bubble bursts? What do you actually think they do?

• 38:14Ed Zitron?

  Like, what do you think, are they the types to actually mothball this stuff? Would they just pretend like this never happened?

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Aspects of it, but there are, again, they are making money hand over fist on the actual nuts and bolts of cloud computing. That's not going away. They, they will, their stock will tumble because they're not posting massive growth numbers, but they have a banging business of providing computers to the world. The question is, is what happens when there's a giant hole in their balance sheet? Because, well, it turns out that hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts everyone signed, they suddenly, they don't got the money. What do we do? That's going to be a systemic problem. It's not going to just hit Amazon. It's going to hit a lot of folks. And I think that the answer everyone's sort of hoping for in that space is government bailout? No.

• 39:00Ed Zitron?

  But of Amazon, though?

• 39:02Speaker 04

  I would be so irritated.

• 39:04Ed Zitron?

  Well, also, what are they bailing out? Amazon's not going to go bankrupt. Even if Amazon had to take a massive impairment on elder trinium chips, and it was like $30 billion.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  But the shareholders had, the shareholders.

• 39:17Ed Zitron?

  They'll be mad, don't get me wrong, but it's not going to destroy Amazon. Like, it's not, I mean, it might destroy Andy Jassy's asshole. Like, it might be, might send Andy Jassy in an iron ball into the sun, but it doesn't feel like it will kill them. I just don't know what a bailout would be.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  I am so annoyed that, I had great hopes when Andy took over, but it seems like the company has just continued down the insurification curve. They're not doing surprising things. The reason I started the last week in AWS newsletter in 2017 was that every week, they were fixing massive customer-facing problems, and it was hard to keep track because they were just as bad then as they are now at messaging these things. 2017.

• 39:58Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  Now, they don't do that anymore. It's basically inertia. I, I would not be able to start the newsletter and build in our readership today, the way that I did back then, just because it, people do not care nearly so much about the platform as they once did.

• 40:14Ed Zitron?

  So, when you, when did you notice the shift happen?

• 40:17Speaker 04

  It was first graduate and all at once, I think is probably the way to frame it. When I realized that I went from every week having the problem of there's so much stuff here, which which ones to make the cut to there's so much filler here, where's anything actually worth writing about?

• 40:36Ed Zitron?

  And when you say filler, what do you mean?

• 40:39Speaker 04

  They used to say the they used to talk about things like AWS Lambda, a transformative shift in how a compute could be run. They put that out with the same enthusiasm corporate voice is there's now a third cloud front edge location in Dallas, which even people in Dallas do not give a toss about.

• 40:57Ed Zitron?

  Right. What does Lambda do?

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Effectively, you give it its code, it runs the code when certain trigger events happen, be it a web request, be it a time being hit, be it something, some other event hitting, and it only charges you for while it runs. And massively scales up and you don't have to worry about any of the care and feeding of the infrastructure around it, which

• 41:17Ed Zitron?

  That's really cool.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  It is, it is cool. It was beta in 2015.

• 41:21Ed Zitron?

  But now

• 41:22Speaker 04

  It's one of the last truly great things Amazon put out that changed the way I thought about how this could work.

• 41:26Ed Zitron?

  Except now, Amazon doesn't really put out fun new updates, it's just

• 41:31Speaker 04

  Incremental updates. We have a new thing. We've launched our own large language model called Nova. It's not as good as the ones you currently use, but it's less money. Great, whatever's still POC stage, they don't care.

• 41:44Ed Zitron?

  What's great is if you look where Nova is, wow, it's in the top 25 below Catcode Pro, Kimi 2.5, Grok 4.1, Memo, Mini Max, Gwen Thinking, Kimi K2, basically every other model.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. It's like they're racing neck and neck with Ed's Taxidermy and Frontier AI Lab.

• 42:08Ed Zitron?

  It really is that, though. It's like something called, yeah, Ernie from Baidu, like every Chinese model appears to cry, that's so funny. What a What a horrible situation we found ourselves in.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  Well, Amazon prides itself on being frugal. And it turns out that when I have to assume the reason the Titan models that were so bad, they never really saw broad release in light of day was that it's okay, it's going to cost us a billion dollars to train this model. What can you do for 20 million? Like that? That is the Amazon ethos. Fail is the answer.

• 42:39Ed Zitron?

  Unless it comes to CapEx, though. Like, that's the thing. It feels like what you say there goes directly against how they're dealing with AI. It feels like AI has just poisoned their brains.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, yes. I wound up doing a so I back when these stuff all started coming out, I had fun with it. I ran a bunch of custom questions against these things like rank the US presidents by absorbency and then see how long it's going to be to bully them into doing it. Or give me some criticisms of Corey Quinn. And one of the early chat GPT things made me question like aspects of my life and go home and drink heavily. Whereas I asked one of the early Amazon models that question, and it would have been like exhibit A in the defamation case, except I'd have to prove that anyone took anything Amazon said even slightly seriously.

• 43:20Ed Zitron?

  Right. It's, it's just weird. There's something that I think that I don't know if AI psychosis is it, but I mentioned this with David Girard. It's like people getting one shot by this. It must one shot executives. I think.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Oh, it absolutely does. I use it myself in the curation of my newsletter, for example, something because this is, this is a terrific use case. And it, I think it encapsulates my philosophy on this, where Amazon, I consume all their RSS feeds every week, and there are roughly 150 items that come out. So what I do is I have a scoring thing that pops up two columns. Here's what, here's the good ones. Here's the crap ones. And I have a whole rubric that I have put into this. It saves me a tremendous amount of time. I go through and I put some from, I move some back and forth as I read down the list and increases it learns from my decisions. It's getting it mostly right. It speeds up my workflow. It is convenient. Is this worth changing the

• 44:16Speaker 04

  entire world? No, no, it is not. But I'll make hay while the sun shines. Besides, if I'm going to make fun of something, I should be using it so I can, I can understand it to make fun of it more effectively.

• 44:26Ed Zitron?

  Right. But would you pay the real rates for it? Because that's what I think is going to break this as well. It's when these companies start having to charge the real costs, when they have to start getting, paying the margins.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Right now, this is costing me seven cents a month. I am glad to pay that. I would probably pay as high for that as, I don't know, 20 bucks a month, which again, that's a significant increase there. Sure, but too much beyond that? No, I, I spent seven years going and doing this by hand. I don't feel the need to stop. I did use Claude Code for several weeks to rebuild the entire interface because I was, I had this janky horrible newsletter publication thing that I kept meaning to replace. I looked into what it would take to have an engineer do it, between 20 to $50,000. This was just three weeks over the holiday break of prompting the thing and it finally got it dialed in and correct. Now, in practice, if neither one of those two things is a viable option, there's a bunch of stuff off the shelf these days that didn't exist back then

• 45:22Speaker 04

  that I could, I could have worked with and had a much better base. But this was fun. This was, I could use some software in this small place. The cost of generating this software now, from my time perspective, is minimal and it fills in a gap. And these things are good at solving, at building tools to solve one very specific problem. Where these things fall down, software has always fallen down on this, is as soon as the requirements change. I set out a link list every Monday. I built software myself to handle this. When I started sending out blog posts with it as well, I had to go back to the drawing board and redo an awful lot because, oh, it's a different model. The entire flow changes when I introduce a requirement downstream. When software becomes free and is no longer the bottleneck, more or less, you can build custom tools

• 46:07Speaker 04

  for any given situation far more effectively. I started writing a bash script to give someone access to just run, run this one command in your terminal, give you access to this thing. And I started writing it myself, threw it into one of these things. It came out with a much better script as a one-off that I don't need again. I, could I have done it myself? Yeah, in about four hours, but would I have? No. It solves, it solves those small problems. They're point solutions, but I'm not firing people for this. I'm not replacing segments of the economy with this. I have, my brother is one of the few people I have heard about being definitely impacted by the rise of AI. Until last year, he was a freelance translator. I believe that. That feels like it's something that is easily prone to disruption. I buy less stock photography when I can have shitpost

• 46:51Speaker 04

  images of giraffes on fire in data centers now.

• 46:53Ed Zitron?

  Well, they're not gonna love that.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  They're not.

• 46:56Ed Zitron?

  They're not gonna love that. The listeners not gonna love that. Oh, no, I don't even, I think AI art is just genuinely ugly, you know, even that it would suck the life out of the, out of the shitpost.

• 47:06Speaker 04

  And I pay for artists to do things correctly.

• 47:08Ed Zitron?

  Okay, good.

• 47:09Speaker 04

  I have stickers that I gave out of Reinvent for shitposting.ai and it was bad AI art in a 1950s style, like a dog with an extra leg, people with extra hands and whatnot, that we hired an illustrator as a human to draw in the style of bad AI. I thought that was a lot of fun. For something like this, yeah, I am paying artists and I'm making it work. I'm building a shitpost meme to throw on Twitter and never think about again.

• 47:35Ed Zitron?

  That's the thing though, posting is an art. Posting is an art and you're, you're bringing, there is no Bushido in, in generating images. But let's move on from this subject because I have one final question.

• 47:48Speaker 04

  Please hit me with it.

• 47:49Ed Zitron?

  So you've seen this thing about how everyone's freaking out about, and I know you're gonna love this. Everyone's like, oh, Claude code is replacing software. That everybody, how funny is it? How ridiculous is it to you? I'm leading question, I realize. The idea that instead of buying on a per seat basis, people are gonna just replace SaaS with their own internal shit. I think it's one of the funniest and stupidest things I've ever heard.

• 48:15Speaker 04

  Oh, I think it's a terrific thing that is totally happening. Because obviously, again, I am building software for enterprises. Well, they can just write this code overnight to do it. Yes, they can easily generate a website that purports to do something. But what if they need that thing to be correct? What if they're, oh, I don't know, signing a billion dollar contract on the result of? What that software spits out.

• 48:38Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Maybe YOLO slamming it isn't the right answer. We're going to just replace all the software with custom bespoke stuff. Great. A terrific example I saw is that for payroll anthropic, the company uses ADP. Well, why would they do that? They can clearly build their own payroll systems internally. Because you're not buying the software, you're buying the compliance, the keeping up with all the different jurisdictions in which you operate. You're someone who is going to certify with their reputation that this is going to solve a problem. There are a bunch of things out there, like there's some software that will be disrupted by this. Picture a bunch of the obnoxious stuff like, I just want to convert this from one, from one video type to a different video type.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  And you'll find some like random thing for 10 bucks. Yeah. Well, now Claude code or whatnot is going to fix that. Because I don't know how FFmpeg command line flags are supposed to work. It does. Great. It's better. It's easier than looking it up. Am I going to go and replace actual business line of business, sorry, line of business software? I wish, but no.

• 49:41Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing as well. People think that people pay for like Salesforce or what have you. Because they're like, oh, because I have to pay for it. And also just because it's a simple piece of software. No, they're these intricate API racking things that roll around in their own filth. And then you, they get, they maintain them on the backend, even if, even the shittiest cloud software you use has some weird backend stuff they have to constantly maintain because things break. And the bigger the company, the more things that break.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:11Ed Zitron?

  And it's just.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  The gen one of all of Salesforce is just an Excel spreadsheet. It is, who am I contacting? What is the last thing I did and the rest? And it gets complex quickly. And where the leap happens is, okay, now it's not just you. Now it's an entire sales team. Now you're going to like, have some turnover in that sales team over the course of doing business. How do you wind up having a provable chain of issue on this? Someone pops up for out for three years from now, they said they talked to someone here. We have no record of that. Because Claude rebuilt it five times this week. Where does that going to live? How is that going to exist?

• 50:44Ed Zitron?

  And even then it's like audibility, auditability even, Jesus Christ.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  But this is not an AI phenomenon. When Dropbox launched, the number one comment on Hacker News was, this just, this is just our sync with some extra bells and whistles. This isn't, this isn't a product.

• 50:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:01Ed Zitron?

  Well, yeah, I mean, even then Dropbox is like, it's not just storage, it is the support services around it. I don't know.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  Well, even Dropbox doesn't want to do what Dropbox does anymore. Every time I use it, a folder that sinks everywhere is what I loved about Dropbox. Now it's trying to basically compete with Zoom and Google Docs and all the other stuff.

• 51:20Ed Zitron?

  Hello, stay quiet.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Just sync the files.

• 51:23Ed Zitron?

  Well, Corey, let's wrap it up there. We've done some good hating. We can find, I'll have some good links for you. We'll link to DuckBill, link to, uh, last week in Amazon, was it?

• 51:33Speaker 04

  Last week in AWS.com with an obnoxious sarcastic platypus.

• 51:38Ed Zitron?

  That's right.

• 51:38Speaker 04

  One more use of AI before we go that I think you'll appreciate. If people email me, Corey dot Quinn at duckbillhq.com, and I don't like what you're doing and you're trying to sell me something, I now have an AI-powered executive assistant in the form of Billy the Platypus, who will tell you in corporate-appropriate ways to go fuck yourself, which is just chef's kiss. Because I can't say that to people. I have a reputation. The obnoxious platypus responding to salespeople does not have this constraint. This is the one liability shift I have found that actually works and you can blame AI for things you personally approved.

• 52:14Ed Zitron?

  Well, I don't endorse the AI platypus. You should get a real one. You should get a real one.

• 52:19Speaker 04

  Exactly. They're in danger. The customs officials had many questions I did not wish to answer.

• 52:22Ed Zitron?

  Train the platypus, Corey. All right. You've been listening to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zitron. You'll have a monologue this week, I guess. Thank you so much for listening, everyone.

• 52:39Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 53:46Speaker 01

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• 54:52Speaker 10

  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.

• 55:05Speaker 11

  Zolair 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 Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair 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. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair 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 zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair.

• 55:48Speaker 11

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

• 55:52Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.