NVIDIAdrome with Steve Burke of GamersNexus

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about NVIDIA’s strange and embarrassing GTC, DLSS5, and the increasingly-hysterical AI bubble. Free newsletter that discusses data center timing and NVIDIA's China situation: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/ https://www.youtube.com/user/gamersnexus https://x.com/GamersNexus GamersNexus “Microslop” Shirt https://store.gamersnexus.net/products/microslop-parody-t-shirt Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! 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. Buy our new “FUCK DATA CENTERS” shirts today! --- 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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• 3:07Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 3:23Ed Zitron?

  Subscribe to the newsletter, buy one of our beautiful new Fuck Data Center t-shirts, and join me in welcoming the wonderful and incredible Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus, who joins us today to talk about how great everything is.

• 3:35Speaker 05

  I didn't know there was a Fuck Data Center shirt.

• 3:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, man, we got Fuck Data Center. You've got this shirt with like a skull, where the U is, so that you can wear it out and you're not technically swearing.

• 3:45Speaker 05

  I'll yeah, I might buy one. We have the uh, we have the new micro slop shirt.

• 3:50Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yes.

• 3:51Speaker 05

  Between the two of us, we're, we're, we're making the world a better place, just like Silicon Valley.

• 3:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm just worried that like, someone's gonna be walking around and do something wearing one of mine, but uh, you know, it's not my, not my fault. Yeah, it's, so this, this year's GTC was, it kind of reminded me of this year's CES in the sense that it felt like a couple doing stuff to pretend that they were doing well, like being like, yeah, you know, we're great, we're go, we're going to Puerto Rico, going on vacation, we're feeling great. We love each other. We're only in couples counseling three times a week. It was so weird.

• 4:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was, uh, I, I gotta say the DLSS appearance, the gaming appearance, I wasn't expecting just because.

• 4:36Ed Zitron?

  What happened there? What hap, what, why was everyone upset? This part just completely passed me by.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  I, so your DLSS is a gaming thing, and one thing I wonder is that there's a huge amount of backlash towards it from just everybody. I mean, it's like, one of the most hated things I've ever seen announced. I'll get into what it is, but what I thought was interesting was, uh, I don't know, just like Jensen's reaction afterward, where they had multiple statements and reactions, and I almost wonder if you're Jensen, if, if you look at that, and you're like, okay, fuck gamers, like, I.

• 5:11Ed Zitron?

  I mean, they're kind of already doing that already.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  They are, but I, I think, I mean, in like a more direct, uh, less of a shrewd business decision and more of a no seriously.

• 5:22Ed Zitron?

  No, we actually don't. Yeah, we, we're just saying it out loud now.

• 5:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, yeah, it's, um, it's basically a filter. It's an AI slop filter, more or less. They said it's not a filter, and then they put out, uh, multiple different public statements that are like paragraphs long when you read all of them. And they, they say it's not a filter, and then they proceed to describe a filter. So.

• 5:44Ed Zitron?

  But isn't DLSS generally good in that it adds frames like that's a good thing?

• 5:49Speaker 05

  DLSS has has some things it's done pretty well over time. So it started as basically an upscaler. And then it progressed to where there's been times where DLSS can be better than native while improving the performance, just because of the way games render.

• 6:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 6:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, different things. So I mean, there's certain types of, um, for example, fence posts or grates or things that have a lot of repeating patterns, straight lines. Sometimes you have trouble with that at low resolution. So DLSS can upscale and sometimes even repair these things when they're when they're rendered uh, in a way that's just not good. But they've now attached this uh, this basically Instagram 2019 face filter to DLSS and kind of tarnished the name with something totally unrelated. It it looks like they're trying to say, look, AI, it has uses. Please keep the bubble.

• 6:46Ed Zitron?

  And so it seems like it's not just like adding frames. It's attempting to fill in details. It's almost like Yasifying in some cases. This is really horrible.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, it uh, so it basically

• 7:01Speaker 05

  what it's doing. So they originally said that it changes, it uses color and some vectors on the screen to then improve things by using AI generation to do whatever it is they think is improving it. What they're actually doing. Yeah, they're changing the entire feel of the game. And I mean, you know this where AI generated images, especially when you ask them to be photorealistic. They they all pretty much look the same, right? Like you have. Yeah, there's no style. There's no character to it and. Whether or not it's useful for people, I don't even care. I think what most people cared about was you're stripping all of the character out of the artwork.

• 7:44Speaker 05

  And, you know, part of the art for video games is you have to work within these strict confines to make it renderable. Yeah. And they strip it out and they replace it with something that just looks like the same slop everywhere. And Nvidia's initial defense was, well, but the artist can control it. And I think the answer to that is I find it very unlikely that the artists make these decisions. I think this is probably an executive level corporate decision of we're going to partner with Nvidia to use this thing. And if you're an artist-

• 8:16Ed Zitron?

  And then fire artists. So that, yeah, like, yeah. Yeah. And also, wouldn't it add a bunch of work to an artist anyway? Because you'd have to tweak this completely separate thing that also is not consistent and is generative.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I mean, it, they didn't even show any like actual motion other than one game and it looked awful. And I think it's likely that the face details slightly change, you know, from scene to scene. Because it's some form of generative, so it's, it's not going to be perfectly consistent. So anyway, they're, they're trying to shove AI slop into real time rendering for games now in a way that, um, I will say, I was, I guess, proud of the gaming community to see the amount of pushback was unbelievable. Like, these large companies have done far more corrupt, terrible things in the real world with governments and what data centers, whatever.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  And this got more pushback than that stuff.

• 9:20Ed Zitron?

  I think everyone's just kind of fucking tired of Nvidia at this point because it, it isn't really clear what Nvidia is doing other than selling more stuff. And it isn't clear who is actually using that stuff. I mean,

• 9:34Ed Zitron?

  I just the indignity of watching a company with like a three, four trillion dollar market cap, talking about open claw. Truly, like to this day, I cannot get a straight answer as to why you should use an open claw.

• 9:48Speaker 05

  I, I liked his, in their pre-game for GTC where he made the comment to the other, I don't know, the podcasters about, I think AI is going to make us all busier. Isn't it making you busier? Ha, ha, ha.

• 10:04Ed Zitron?

  What do you do all day, Jensen? Jensen, you're not that busy. I refuse to believe any of these people are busy at all. In fact, I think that they're just kind of fucking sitting around, coming up with new ideas of stuff they can say at GTC and then they go to sleep for three months.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm not even sure. It's just not even a good, I don't know. It's, it's not news that these executives are tone deaf, obviously been disconnected from reality, but it is a very disconnected from reality thing to say to make the sell of AI is going to reduce the workforce for the executives and then also say that it's making people busier. And it's just like, these, this isn't the sell you think it is.

• 10:45Ed Zitron?

  Or also, these aren't thoughts that connect together. If you say them both in a sentence, you sound insane. I just, this, I'm sure you haven't really explored open claw much. I certainly haven't wanted to, but it appears to just be, what if I turned over my computer to a large language model and nothing really changed?

• 11:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:06Ed Zitron?

  Long and short of it. So, which is what makes it so insane that Nvidia is, like, GTC used to be a place they announced hardware and new technology, not, hey, guys, the latest open source thing you're going to forget about in six months. That is now the most important thing in Nvidia's stack.

• 11:26Speaker 05

  It's, it's really weird because we've covered Nvidia for so long that I've met a lot of the engineers there.

• 11:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  And.

• 11:36Speaker 05

  The, the people who are running these AI departments now are at hardware and software levels are people that I worked with on the gaming side, you know, anywhere from 15 years ago until even more recently, like three years ago. And it's, it's a little sad for me seeing these people move over to, to purely AI in these big, important roles. And it's just like, I don't know, they're smart people and I have nothing I respect about their work anymore for the most part because of the just, I think, sort of feckless rollout and widespread damage that it's causing. And it's just, it's interesting where you see Nvidia moving their pieces around like a chessboard where they're, okay, this guy

• 12:20Speaker 05

  is really good at this specific type of research. Let's strip him out of the thing that he's been doing really well for 10 years in gaming or whatever, and put him into AI, you know, and then out comes like the DLSS.

• 12:34Ed Zitron?

  Nemo Claw, Nemo, Nemo Claw, Nemo Claw. This like four months ago, no one knew what the fuck this was. Like they, the guy who made open claw sold himself to open AI. Cool for him, I guess. And now this is like, now this is the most important thing to Nvidia now. Like what's, it's just, it's so strange. It's, it's just very strange. They did a song at the end of GTC as well. They had a song, like a horrible auto. I saw Take Him. It was a disgrace to journalism. Sorry, Tay. Who was like, not gonna lie, it's just kind of a banger.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  He said the song is a banner?

• 13:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, banger. Yes, he did. Go to the doctor. That's my first thought is like, you need to go to the doctor, man. You have like.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  I did hear it and it was not good.

• 13:27Ed Zitron?

  I heard it and it made me angry.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about this when AI music covers first started to really propagate on YouTube and.

• 13:39Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. I remember the first one I ran into. It was like. Slipknot reimagined as soul, like blues.

• 13:49Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  And I did actually, that was the first one I saw. I listened to it and I was like, damn, this is like, not bad. And it was only, you know, 30 seconds into it where you realize the horrors of music and entertainment, the entire currency of it is attention. And you only have so much time you can give to listening to music in a day. And for each of these AI songs that someone's going to listen to, and even worse for the real artists, if people start liking them, you know, that's one less real artist who may already be like a starving artist archetype, who doesn't get that view or that listen. And yeah.

• 14:31Ed Zitron?

  And I've heard some of those AI things, and it's always like the first 10, 20 seconds, you're like, okay, this is, and then nothing changes. It's just very repetitious.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:40Ed Zitron?

  But you're right. It only exists as a kind of fishing lure to get people in to just kind of hear in the background. It's just patently evil. It's just wafting evil at the moment. And even by the standards of regular software, it's not really clear what any of these companies are doing anymore. Like I, GTC, I don't know if I'd describe it as exciting, but it felt like they were selling real things every year.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:05Ed Zitron?

  And now it's just, you want an open claw? Oh, actually, I forgot my favorite part. So Jensen went on the All In Podcast, you know, the classic guys we

• 15:16Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 15:16Ed Zitron?

  don't think of anything happening to. And he went on, he was like, what, so what should happen now is that you should give engineers, when they join your company, $250,000 worth of tokens a year. And that's part of their comp package. It's like,

• 15:34Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure he would love that.

• 15:36Ed Zitron?

  I'm sure he would love that. I'm sure, like, So much of the so much of this is just Jensen going out there and being like, it'd be really good if you use my stuff.

• 15:45Speaker 05

  That's not even comp though, right? Like if they're using it for work, it's literally just budget.

• 15:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's it's it's it's your compensation so that you can do your job. Like, it's just, it's really weird. It it's really weird. The more of these we see, the weirder it gets. Like, it says on the website now, Nvidia is opening in the agentic frontier. With, sorry, Nvidia launches Vera CPUs, purpose-built for agentic AI. I'm not sure that that's really true, considering GPUs run it.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:17Ed Zitron?

  Large language models and something about Vera Rubin and agentic as well. It's just, it feels like Mad Libs at this point.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  I mean, I remember.

• 16:24Ed Zitron?

  Pieces together.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  Going to old GTCs, like some of the really early ones and announcements, the exciting announcements were, you know, they'd have the Shield, like handheld gaming device, or they'd have the Shield TV, if you prefer that. They sometimes some GPUs, sometimes it would be Quadro or or professional class.

• 16:43Ed Zitron?

  That's fun.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  Gaming class. Yeah. And it was pretty interesting. And they had servers too, a lot of the time. And they were also interesting. It wasn't pitched the same way. But the biggest thing about it, and I actually really did like the show, was there are a lot of panels where you could do really technical discussions and they still have those, but it's just completely transformed into now it's the AI show. And there's like almost nothing else there. So we don't even bother going anymore. Total company shift. I mean, they're, they're really all in on this. I speaking of things that Jensen, though, has studies all in on, and I don't know if you even want to get into this one, but he made the comment in

• 17:22Speaker 05

  the in the all in, I think it was, podcast about AI uses in the Middle East, given the current situation.

• 17:31Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God, what what do you what? Why is Jensen Jensen, you run a you run a GPU company? Come on, man.

• 17:38Speaker 05

  He said that he believes there's a paraphrase, and he believes there's a reason for the war with Iran and talked about potentially AI use cases in the Middle East. And I don't really, he said, he did say, I'm 100% in on that, when he was talking about the subject, which is just like. How did we get from you're on stage talking about like Doom and Quake and making jokes about crisis, you know, to like judging the reasons for various wars? I don't know. You just, you wonder like, they've been angling for this military industrial side for a while now. And that, to me, it seems kind of like more of a signal to the US government than anything. I'm like, hey, we want to sell you stuff, but.

• 18:23Ed Zitron?

  I just, I think, it just feels that, it's kind of my thing to say, but it's the end of the hypergrowth era in the sense that it's just everyone going like, oh, what do you, you want to do war with the GPUs, I guess? You want to, yeah, what do you think of the, do you want to blow stuff up? It's not really what we do. Well, I mean, actually, I take that back. Doesn't Nvidia also already involve itself with, um, what's it called? The robot platform?

• 18:48Speaker 05

  They're definitely involved with Palantir, which is involved in war.

• 18:53Ed Zitron?

  Is it Isaac? It's not Isaac. There's the, they have a specific Jetson.

• 18:57Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:58Ed Zitron?

  Jetson. Jetson's already involved in, so I can't say specifically because truly, but I swear to God, I heard it was involved in some sort of war-related sensors.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm not sure if I should, I probably shouldn't say it, but yeah, Jetsons, we, we have photographs of things that they are in that have been used in, uh, in Ukraine. Um, so I don't know. I don't know if I can say any more of that. That was a conversation with some congresspeople earlier.

• 19:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's the thing though. It's like, they talk about the Nemo, Clorin, they talk about doing war stuff and they talk about all these things when the only 90% of their revenues from these fucking GPUs. It's not even, it's not even a case of like, oh, they're making like 50% of revenue. All, pretty much all of their revenue comes from the GPUs. And just before we got on, I have, I've been trying to answer a question of how many data centers have actually been built in the last year. It is a very difficult question, but from what I can tell, based on like, there's like four or five gigawatts might have gone online, which means we're running at about, it takes about a year?

• 20:10Ed Zitron?

  May to install like half a year's worth of GPU cells.

• 20:14Speaker 05

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 20:15Ed Zitron?

  It's it's really, I don't think people realize how slow this is. But I just can't work out at this point, why anyone's buying these GPUs anymore. Like, it's just just if they stop doing it, it's like the bus from speed, their company will shut down like I.

• 20:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it might be like the there might be a a chain reaction, you know, just.

• 20:37Ed Zitron?

  I I it's just so bizarre because Metaverse was killed last week. They killed it. They shot it with a gun. Horizon Worlds will no longer you can. But then they were like, oh, we're going to keep it running, kind of, but it's not clear what that.

• 20:50Speaker 05

  That whole thing was stupid to begin with.

• 20:52Ed Zitron?

  It's so it's so cool.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  It's just a shitty video game like it's not even you could literally just play a video game and it would be the better.

• 20:59Ed Zitron?

  It's just but the the great thing is is they are no longer bringing it to Horizon Worlds to VR. But they are also bringing it back for an indeterminate amount of time. I I just I don't think the tech industry knows what it's doing ever anymore. I think that they just wake up one day and they're like, what what do we what do we do today? What we do? Fuck it. Why would we buy more GPUs? That what? Do you like that?

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• 24:39Speaker 05

  It's validation seeking, right? It's almost like the whole industry is seeking validation. And I, I think some of that may mirror what we saw happen to Intel for, for multiple CEOs running where it's, uh, they eventually moved from engineering focused CEOs to accounting focused CEOs and, and marketing in one instance, you know, and that didn't work out very well for them. And I, I don't know, I wonder if maybe there's just so much money in everything now that it's become a game about, and it's like cost engineering or it's stock engineering or whatever, rather than engineering, engineering. Um, I think maybe that's some of where we're seeing that.

• 25:23Ed Zitron?

  Well, I think we're, that came out just before we, we got on as well. We're finally getting Enron shit though, because OpenAI is trying to offer, they're trying to do this spurious joint venture thing with private equity firms.

• 25:35Speaker 05

  That.

• 25:37Ed Zitron?

  And they're like, well, what we'll do is we'll raise money and then the private equity firm will pay us in advance to install ChatGPT across their portfolio companies, right? And, uh, as part of this deal, OpenAI is guaranteeing a minimum, minimum return of 17.5%. Now, you may be thinking, that's a good question. And also a 17.5% return on what? I, like, I've read the, I've read the Reuters article four or five times. I cannot work it out. I just, this whole thing feels like an exploitation of ignorance. It's just like, how many reporters actually read the emails they get? Or when they write up a story, how hard do they think about it?

• 26:21Speaker 05

  I had a, um, I had a reporter from another, from a business focused publication email and, um, asked to talk about Nvidia and basically, uh, the reporter was interested in learning from our perspective, why is it that gamers and why is it that consumers are so mad at Nvidia? And the first question that was asked of me was, uh,

• 26:49Speaker 05

  Did, when did gamers for, like, did gamers notice or were they happy about Nvidia's stock going up when it started to go up? And I had to start, it's like, let's start from scratch. The consumers 10 years ago weren't paying attention to Nvidia's stock. You know, they wanted to buy GPUs to play video games. Like, people weren't, you weren't interested in the GPU for the stock price.

• 27:10Ed Zitron?

  You don't get stock when you buy a graphics card. You don't get that.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  That is a good idea, though. Maybe that's what they can do next.

• 27:17Ed Zitron?

  I, yeah, and they're just like, that's how they do stock buybacks, but each time they sell a GPU, they buy back. So it's just, I love it, but that's, I actually think that that question is really indicative of the media problem with Nvidia, where it's just like, oh, Nvidia, right? So every single person who's ever used Nvidia cares about the stock.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  Right.

• 27:35Ed Zitron?

  That's, that's not true. Like, most people should not think about the stock market.

• 27:40Speaker 05

  I, I would say the, I mean, for sure, I don't know exactly, but at least going back to the earlier days for Nvidia, I can't say their stock price ever really came up in any discussions, like, in, in technical news. Like, it definitely came up in news in general, but in our space, you know, it never came up.

• 28:00Ed Zitron?

  Why would it come up? Why would it come up? You are, you are covering hardware. You cover hardware. Why would the stock come up?

• 28:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:08Ed Zitron?

  Why, why? And I, I think it's also because, and I mean this with no offense to the reporters that listen, I'm sorry, but people did not know who Nvidia was four years ago. They had no idea. They did not, they had no idea. They were not thinking about Nvidia. They had, they did not think about, it's kind of like how a much larger version of how I think I now see 75 different guys who are now an expert on the Strait of Hormuz.

• 28:33Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:34Ed Zitron?

  Despite learning what it was around two weeks ago.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 28:38Ed Zitron?

  Like, they, I'm now, oh, look at the straight. And did you see the venture capitalist whose solution to it was to just build a big road?

• 28:47Ed Zitron?

  Is just you there's this little like blob like the kind of the the tip of it.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  Does he understand how how?

• 28:54Ed Zitron?

  No, no, it's fine. You just draw a giant road from like the coast of Oman to the coast of of the UAE. And you also there's just a bunch of.

• 29:06Speaker 05

  Infrastructure is famously quick to build.

• 29:08Ed Zitron?

  Exactly, especially during a massive assault from a large nation the size of Alaska.

• 29:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:15Ed Zitron?

  But on top of that, I assume he has some way around the giant rocks either side. And also a way for the boats to get in. It's just that easy. But I genuinely think that that's the era, though. Because people like, yeah, you know, there's like 240 gigawatts of data centers being built right now. And it's great. Actually, there's only about five gigawatts in America that's actually under construction. But you know.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  Crazy, because if you look at maps of like announced or planned or hopeful data centers, there's thousands of them in the US.

• 29:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  You know?

• 29:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, there's um, oh, God, I I had it. I was just working on it before I came on, but it's something like there's 240 gigawatts. But let's see. Yeah, it it's very, very, very strange that's, you know, yeah. There's about five gigawatts that are actually under construction despite like 60 or 70 that's allegedly made. There's meant to be like 13 to 14 gigawatts that actually the there's meant to be, I think, 14 that comes on this year.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 30:18Ed Zitron?

  From, yeah, sideline, sorry. I'm gonna get it right this time because I actually found it in my notes. I'm sorry, everyone. 16 gigawatts of capacity was slated to come online in 2026 across 140 projects, but only five gigawatts is currently under construction. And that's under construction. That's under construction. That's just being built. It doesn't mean they're actually going to be built.

• 30:39Ed Zitron?

  And the only reason this is happening is so that we can keep Nvidia inflated.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  I, I, people still, I don't know who they're pulling the wool over the eyes of these days, but um, we always reading the, following this news of some of the ones that were canceled. And you know, from pushback from the community and town council hearings and stuff. And um, it's interesting reading the comments where if they're even humans these days, I don't know anymore. But some of the comments being about uh, why are people proud about turning away jobs? And it's just like, do you know how many jobs this like million square foot facility would create? Cause it's not a lot.

• 31:20Ed Zitron?

  And on top of that, even the jobs supposedly created by building them, they're all flown in. Like they're, they're, they're not local. It's not like you get local builders.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  That's an expert thing.

• 31:34Ed Zitron?

  Well, Stargate Abeline, they've just flown in people to just move in to town. So I guess like that helps the economy. And then when it turns on, which it never will, there'll be like 70 jobs.

• 31:45Speaker 05

  I mean, that's the thing, right? Is like, it's the when it turns on where, okay, you get this transient burst. Great. But this isn't, it's not like you're, I think the branding of data centers as AI factories, which is insane by the way. Uh, but I think the, the branding of it as it's like blue collar washing or something. It's like they, they, they're trying to make it sound like a, uh, I don't know, like, like the grit and the hard work and like the manpower you get out of a traditional factory, except it's a bunch of computers

• 32:21Speaker 05

  you know, and there's like 15 guys in the, on the floor who are just keeping them turned on, which is a real job and can be an important job, but it's not a factory.

• 32:31Ed Zitron?

  Yes, it's not like bringing thousands of factory jobs from the bygone era. Like we're not do, like, we're not going to repeal NAFTA, so we're not actually going to fix the problem here. But my favorite, my most favorite of all recent data centers are not being built story is from Sachin Kati, who is head of infrastructure at OpenAI. March 6th, 2026, construction is underway at our site in Port Washington, Wisconsin. And there is just a single steel beam.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  That was my, oh yeah, I saw your tweet. That was like probably my favorite tweet of all time. When you put that out.

• 33:08Ed Zitron?

  Just a single, just, and at this rate, great. This will be done in like 2029.

• 33:15Ed Zitron?

  Maybe.

• 33:16Speaker 05

  The beam was almost entirely in the ground.

• 33:18Ed Zitron?

  Yes. And it's like, there's, there's like four guys, like three guys that sitting, they're kind of standing around it like poking it. And one guy walking towards it. It's just, it's just really, what's great, but they only do this because none of, no, I don't think, I know I sound conspiratorial, but it's like, the mainstream media just doesn't say anything like, to naturally move into my favorite story, Super Micro.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 33:42Ed Zitron?

  With a Wally Liar, who, so to explain for the listeners, Super Micro is an AI server company. They, two years ago, had a massive accounting scandal where a bunch of people resigned. I forget exactly what happened in the scandal, but like they had to restate earnings, they had to delay earnings. But then things got back on track, 20, late 2024, 2020, I'm sorry, it's 2018 when the, the scandal was. But 2024, 2025, they got back on track. They were selling GPUs to Crusoe, they were selling GPUs to Core Wave. And then very recently, they're, uh, the Department of Justice arrested three different guys, including co-founder Wally Liao. For shipping like hundreds of millions of dollars of GPUs to China.

• 34:26Ed Zitron?

  And like changing the serial numbers using a, a hairdryer.

• 34:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I fucking love it.

• 34:33Speaker 05

  They were removing the, uh, serial numbers and the stickers, then using a, a middling logistics company to basically repackage and forward them.

• 34:40Ed Zitron?

  And this story, this story's just kind of disappeared already.

• 34:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:46Ed Zitron?

  There is a picture where Jensen Huang is standing next to co-founder Charles Liang of Super Micro.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  My, my personal opinion, and this, this is an opinion, but.

• 34:55Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 34:56Speaker 05

  My opinion is that there is no way that Nvidia couldn't have known this was happening. I, I just think it's like actually impossible that they were not aware of GPU smuggling, but.

• 35:08Ed Zitron?

  Wouldn't they, don't these GPUs have some mechanism of phoning home?

• 35:12Speaker 05

  Oh, for sure. They can be, they can be identified through the internet a hundred percent. I mean, yeah, they, they have the firmware. Has identifying information in it for the GPUs. You don't need the serial number on the sticker to know what it is. You know, you don't have to physically see it to know what it is. And so

• 35:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 05

  If this is like connecting to some kind of server somewhere or whatever it may be doing. If in any way that's linked back to Nvidia, they would know about it. If there's ever a service request, I would assume at some point someone figures out and maybe it's a Okay, well, kind of, you know, blind eye approach, but it's just there's, I don't know, I really think there's no way that they were ignorant to this because to quote one of the guys we spoke with when we did the black market GPU smuggling documentary last year. The professor of a university in Hong Kong we spoke with, I asked him, I was like, do you think Nvidia knows? And he, his reaction was, well, how could they not? These are very expensive GPUs.

• 36:15Speaker 05

  You would think you would traffic them all extremely carefully.

• 36:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I just, and also it's the co-founder of Super Micro. And just to be clear, Wally Liar, the co-founder resigned in 2018, rejoined as a consultant a few years later, and then was just added back to the board.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:34Ed Zitron?

  And now he is in jail. And you're telling me that Charles Lang had no idea, no idea, no one, no one in inventor, where, where, where they think they were going. But this is like, this is yet another story that is just ignored. And I'm trying to work out if it is a journalistic competence issue or whether it's just a, don't, don't fuck with adult Disneyland problem.

• 36:58Speaker 05

  I think there's, yeah, I'm not sure they're, they're. So first of all, Nvidia has a lot of money in different media publications. And then also the ones that are

• 37:07Ed Zitron?

  How do you mean?

• 37:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, the media publications that are involved in like stock coverage, they're all going to be biased towards protecting Nvidia in some way or another for the most part. But secondly, also, I do think there's probably an issue of what's a super micro for a lot of the reporters? And yeah.

• 37:26Ed Zitron?

  I just, there's a picture of he, Charlie, Wally Liar was at, he was actually at GTC. There's a picture of him with an ice luge. There's a picture of him standing three people over from Jensen Huang. And this, you can like Lambda, an AI compute company, he was, he was commenting on their LinkedIn very recently being like, super congra- all he, he's like clearly a dorky old man because he's like, super congratulations, super great. I kind of, I kind of love that. And I kind of love the text he sent where somebody basically said, you're going to jail. And he just was spotted with three crying emojis.

• 38:03Speaker 05

  I saw that. That was funny. It was sad, but it was funny.

• 38:05Ed Zitron?

  Could be, if I would do the same thing, I would be responding the same way if I was going to jail for like, the most obvious crime. But it's so weird. Like this, Super Micro is the backbone of Core Wave. Like they're a big, um.

• 38:23Speaker 05

  I also wonder if, so some behind the scenes is, um, after our black market documentary last year, I went to Washington DC and met with, um, a number of congressional staff on one of the committees there. And it was, they, they, one of the things they told me was that they had some stuff in the works. Um, there was some talk about, you know, maybe testifying or something, but, uh, they had stuff in the works and they were hoping it would materialize early this year. I didn't know what that was at the time, but I know they said it was related to the GPU smuggling. They had a bunch of questions about it and how it works and whatever. And, uh, I think this is probably what they were working on. I think it was probably the Super Micro case.

• 39:08Ed Zitron?

  I guess, but just the fact that Super Micro is just walking around, still doing business. And they weren't named in the indictment.

• 39:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, that's right. They weren't a defendant, right? It was the three guys.

• 39:20Ed Zitron?

  And it's just, I don't know. That doesn't see, it doesn't seem very likely that nobody knew. But you know, it was just a few bad apples, right? Just the co-founder of the company.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:33Ed Zitron?

  Just one guy, couldn't be. I just feel like by the end of this, we're going to have a few of those. I don't think you've got everything that you could possibly want from a scam for a scammer. You've got a vague technology that could do everything, but doesn't really have to do anything. And a shit ton of construction, just an absolute ass ton of.

• 39:53Speaker 05

  Funny point on the construction. It's it's easy to hide money there.

• 39:56Ed Zitron?

  And just also let money just like marinate. The one thing that I I can't find any way of like structuring this into an argument I could point out with data. But I've never seen a building project come in under budget, not not once in my life. And you're telling me none of these companies need follow on funding.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:17Ed Zitron?

  None.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  I I think the uh, I think the construction alone is, I don't know. It's it's all part of this interesting, like the meme that's gone around of buying GPUs that don't exist yet to put in data centers that aren't built, you know, where it's.

• 40:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 05

  The amount of promise, especially OpenAI versus actualized is is there's a huge disparity there.

• 40:45Ed Zitron?

  Well, my my favorite thing is them claiming that the more compute they get, the more revenue they make. Cause that that doesn't make sense at all.

• 40:52Speaker 05

  I mean, Jensen said that in one of the interviews where I think he went as high as 10x. He was like, if they had 10x more compute, then they would have 10x the revenue. It's like, I don't think so.

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• 44:27Ed Zitron?

  Well, the thing with that, what I always say is, where is the current state of affairs? If that's the case, like where are the people that cannot do something because there's not enough compute? What is the thing being held back? Who is holding it back? Like, are they sitting there and they're saying, when this comes online, X bazillion dollars will slosh out of it? Like, what is the, what is not, well, like, what's going on?

• 44:54Speaker 05

  In the previous CNBC interview, I think it was where Altman and Juan were with Brockman, who's a dollar store Jensen Huang with his leather jackets. They were talking about that hundred billion dollar investment back at the time. And Altman, to answer your question, his angle for the CNBC or whoever was audience was, if you could choose, if, if you could choose between free education for everybody or curing cancer, and he pitched it as that's, those are your choices. But if, if they only had more compute, they could do both.

• 45:30Ed Zitron?

  Right. As opposed to neither.

• 45:32Speaker 05

  Right. Correct.

• 45:34Ed Zitron?

  As opposed to, to, to nothing of the sort happening at all, anywhere.

• 45:39Speaker 05

  But I do like that that's, it's, I don't, like, the examples he chose, they're just so intentionally manipulative, I think. You know, where it's like, well, you could, you could choose from preventing puppies from being kicked or from preventing cats from being homeless.

• 45:57Ed Zitron?

  You, you, you can only crush one animal. Like, it's, it's just very, it's also the kind of thing that you come up with if you do not do any work. If you don't really know what happens in the real world. Like, fuck, what if education was free? Or what if cancer, no, no happen?

• 46:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:17Ed Zitron?

  Do you like this? Like, and of course CNBC was like, yep.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  Can I have money now?

• 46:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, this is good. And that hundred billion is very real. That that's another, this is the thing, maybe conspiracy theorists are right all along in the sense that it's like, yeah, there was a point last year where Nvidia and OpenAI lied, hundred billion dollar deal never happened. AMD and OpenAI lied as well. Just nobody talked about their guidance didn't change for AMD. They do not appear to have sold a single chip to OpenAI. Broadcom, still nothing. Like, three quarters in, we don't have a single sale? What the fuck?

• 46:54Speaker 05

  Jensen was really defensive about that one when the Taiwanese media asked him about it.

• 46:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Oh, he.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  There was never any commitment, he said.

• 47:02Ed Zitron?

  There's never any commitment from any of these things, though. I just, I, I think, and I think at some point, we're just gonna find out that nothing happened. Like, I just, nothing actually moved to anyone. Like, we still haven't heard if Nvidia has sent a dime to OpenAI. SoftBank has to raise forty billion dollars to send thirty billion dollars to OpenAI.

• 47:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:24Ed Zitron?

  That hasn't happened yet.

• 47:26Speaker 05

  Did you see the, uh, the game? So there's a game that came out this past week called Crimson Desert.

• 47:31Ed Zitron?

  And I've been meaning to play it, but I hear it's a mess.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is. It is a bit of a mess, I think. But the interesting thing was, um, they had a bit of an unexpected scandal where amongst all the other various problems, like blocking Intel from working, they had, uh, some users noticed that there was very clearly AI-generated art in the game.

• 47:55Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 47:55Speaker 05

  Yes, it's like you walk into the, whatever, the tavern and on the wall, there's a painting hanging. And if you get close to it, you can see it's like the, the early several years ago, generative AI art. That's just very obvious. And, uh, so on Steam, you're supposed to disclose if there's AI art or assets in the game. They didn't do that. They're too big, so they're not going to be punished for it. But they put out a statement apologizing, saying these are placeholders. They're supposed to be replaced. We're going back through and removing them all, whatever. And the, uh, Mike Ivara, who's, uh, currently the CEO of PrizePix, and previously was president of Blizzard, and previously was also VP of Microsoft Windows.

• 48:38Speaker 05

  He tweeted out asking why the studio was apologizing and basically saying this is going to be in everything. So you shouldn't apologize. And it's just, it's crazy to me where the approach to a lot of the AI stuff, it feels so like this is inevitable is what you're being told by the suits and the VPs and the CEOs. I don't think they realize that that's the part a lot of people don't like is the, the part where it's being forced and you're told this is inevitable. Get used to it.

• 49:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it doesn't have to be good or you don't have to like it, but you're going to have it because of us. We're going to make you have it and that'll be good. It won't be good, but you'll have it and we will ostensibly something will change. Like they're not even making, I don't even think they're saving money doing this stuff. Or if they are, it's the, it's like very, it's just firing three people, which is a lot for the people being fired and their work would make the game better. But it's just a fucking Excel spreadsheet. Like it's for the, for the larger companies. I mean, it's just so, I think that this is also a mask off moment for so many of these companies. It's the ones that just don't give a rat fuck about anyone who just, they don't make stuff. They don't contribute things. They're

• 49:56Ed Zitron?

  just like, yeah, you know, man, well, you know, the thing you like, it's, it's going to suck shit and we're going to save like $80.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. It definitely enables grifting, right? Like the whole, uh, it's like you said earlier, where you have the, just the entire premise of the way the technology is set up and pitched and the lack of understanding technically for a lot of like media and coverage. It just, it's set up where people can grift. And I think you saw it with crypto too, where there's a lot of blockchain, you know, is the big word everyone's throwing around suddenly all these people on TV who had no idea what that meant. But same, same type of thing. It's, I don't know, the situation's right where maybe there's some real use cases for sure, but, um, but it's pretty easy to, to scam people right now.

• 50:48Ed Zitron?

  I just, I also think that it's just showing how many dunces there are, how many people that don't actually want to learn anything. I mean, even the coding side, the little code I've learned so far has just made me aware that there are a lot of engineers who don't read any of the code that comes out and they're like, it'll be fine. Should work fine, I think.

• 51:08Speaker 05

  I had someone really pushing me to try Claude where he's basically like, no, like you don't. The other ones, because I've tested a few of the L L M's and I'm not too impressed. But he was like, this one, this is the one, you know, this is unbelievable how good it is. And I guess my use case wasn't maybe the right fit or something.

• 51:32Ed Zitron?

  Never seems to be.

• 51:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:39Speaker 05

  Like I tried it and the thing I tried it for was I wanted to make a template for Adobe InDesign, which I've never used.

• 51:49Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 51:50Speaker 05

  And you can go buy and download a template and whatever, but I wanted like a specific one made in the way I wanted to use it. And because InDesign can accept code, it might be XML, I don't remember, but it's got some kind of code it can accept. I thought, okay, this should be able to write the code. It's not, it's not a design I'm asking for, it's code. And then I should be able to shove it into InDesign and have a template. And I experimented with it for probably, I got like really obsessed with when I'm trying to make software work. I spent like eight hours on it.

• 52:22Ed Zitron?

  Jesus.

• 52:23Speaker 05

  It did this, the same thing as chat G P T where, you know, it gives you code.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  It didn't work. I feed back the error to it and it's like, oh, I see what went wrong. It was this, and then it sends you more code and it doesn't work. And before you know it, you've blown through all your tokens for the day, right? Like, which seems like a great way to make more money. And I ended up, after that experiment, I was like, let me just do this the old fashioned way. And I watched like three tutorials and within two and a half hours I had done what I wanted myself.

• 52:52Ed Zitron?

  So the model did not provide you with the thing you needed.

• 52:55Speaker 05

  It did not. And not only that, but there was a moment there where I was starting to feel that, that disconnect or that like psychosis, I think some people get as they use these tools more and more and rely on them, where it starts to feel like. Well, I can't do this and this thing isn't helping me. So there's that temptation of like, I'll just give up. But then, you know, you try to do it yourself for like five minutes, like, oh, this isn't that bad to learn new software. Yeah, I can handle this. And I just worry the people who get really reliant on this stuff. I don't know. It seems not good.

• 53:32Ed Zitron?

  Well, that's the thing, though. Whenever I've, because I, I have, the times I've experimented with like Claude and ChatGPT, I've always thrown it stuff where I'm like, I've already finished a model. I've already finished. At a power off, what do you think? And it will say something. I'll be like, okay, but what about this? And I'll just make up something. I was like, actually, there were 80 gigawatts added in the last quarter. What'd you think about that? I'll be like, oh, my mistake. It's just like, no, I'm gaslighting you. Like, I'm, I am abusing the model. But that's the thing.

• 54:02Speaker 05

  You better be careful. That's gonna come back to you one day.

• 54:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, what, what, Rococo's modern basilisk. Yeah, it's just, but it's just like, the fact that they can just have their arm twisted immediately makes them useless because the whole point of artificial intelligence is it's meant to be intelligent and kind of support you when you're like, not, not agree with you when you're wrong, but be like, hey, you're wrong here. But it's just very weird as well that every time I hear a story, it's like yours, where it's like, yeah, I wanted it to do stuff, but it didn't. And you talk to someone who's a booster and they go, well, what you should have done, it's like, so, so you're just gonna, just let's start from the point of

• 54:45Ed Zitron?

  this thing doesn't work and you have to find a way to make it work. Well, it does work. You're just not using it right. Well, why not?

• 54:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:52Ed Zitron?

  Well, how did you prompt it? How did you? Exactly. But the thing is, you can hold something wrong. There's no way to use these right. It's just how, how much can they gaslight you into believing that you're deficient and that you should think hours in.

• 55:07Speaker 05

  Work. It just seems like, at least for the task I was doing, the amount of time required to baby step it through the process is, is so much greater than just learning something new, actually.

• 55:22Ed Zitron?

  I also don't know about you, but when I don't understand something, the more I don't understand it. The more worried I get, like I can't sacrifice myself to a machine. I'll be like, I will straight up just think like, I don't get this, this, I'm worried that I'm gonna learn something wrong. Because I'm looking at this and it seems to be trying to gas me up when I do not understand what I'm talking, well, I'm just like, I don't fucking know what you're talking about, brother.

• 55:47Speaker 05

  I, and I could. You had a great quote, uh, when we met up, when you came down here and, uh, I've, I've actually said it to writers on the team for training, but you know, one of the thing, I made a comment about how I needed to do a bunch of fact checking that day or something. And, you made a comment about how, uh, you always double check your facts. And if you want it to be right, you check it a third time.

• 56:12Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  Which was brilliant. I think if you add AI to that, you know, it's like, it's kind of that same feeling where it's like, if anything comes out of an LLM,

• 56:21Speaker 05

  the amount of anxiety I have.

• 56:23Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm. Yep.

• 56:24Speaker 05

  Is, is not even worth whatever the answer is.

• 56:29Ed Zitron?

  And also I, so a while ago I had access to like a much bigger, more financial focused one. And I used it to like, look up a bunch of stuff, like do a report on this. Three or four of the links were for, were just dead. Uh, one of them referred to something that just was an irrelevant link. I did look something up on Claude once, and it gave me two different citations from Grokypedia.

• 56:54Speaker 05

  Why?

• 56:56Ed Zitron?

  Are you, you're not familiar with Grokypedia?

• 56:58Speaker 05

  I am not.

• 56:59Ed Zitron?

  I would just, uh, that, well, that's the, uh, special Grok Wikipedia. That they made.

• 57:04Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 57:05Ed Zitron?

  Add X, the everything app.

• 57:07Speaker 05

  Uh huh. They have their own Wikipedia.

• 57:10Ed Zitron?

  Yep. And that's what Claude is citing from. There's the base Wikipedia. It's so good. It's just, I do think that there is also a degree here where AI is just a test of how much you're, how willing you are to just be like, yeah, I get it. I guess like just quickly you can wave off something. Be like, ah, yeah, it's fine. I guess I'd mostly get it. This sounded good enough.

• 57:34Speaker 05

  For me, the best use cases have still been for browsing Chinese internet or browsing the internet generally in another language.

• 57:44Speaker 05

  And specifically it's for like,

• 57:48Speaker 05

  When I've needed sources and research, so for the, I don't know if I gave this example on your show before, but the one that came up previously was for the DRAM cartel piece and for the rise of Chinese, Chinese memory, we were looking into a bunch of different filings for these companies in China. I wasn't a hundred percent sure if they had like an SEC equivalent or something like that. And so using, I don't know if I use, I think I used GPT to try that, but using GPT or whatever it was at the time, it was useful for providing phrases where it's, it's like, okay, here's the Chinese characters of what you should search for. And the reason Google Translate wasn't good enough on its own for that is because I didn't know the colloquialisms of

• 58:30Speaker 05

  what might they call these different things that I know exist in the US, but I don't know if they exist there. You know, and then I can take that and I can put it into Google Translate, which is a dumb translator. That's just word for word and just make sure it makes any sense. And that was useful for, but so far that's pretty much the only, you know, the only use case I've, I've had.

• 58:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And it's also, it's the classic thing of maybe an on-device model could do that. I think that eventually that will be the case. And it's just, is that really enough to substantiate nearly $200 billion worth of GPU and networking sales from Nvidia a year?

• 59:08Speaker 05

  No.

• 59:09Ed Zitron?

  $193 billion.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's not enough to be worth the, the destruction of consumer hardware, you know? And that, that was constantly like every time I, I try to poke at these things every now and then so that I might be, I want to make sure if I'm criticizing them, I've at least used them.

• 59:27Ed Zitron?

  Same. Yeah, yeah.

• 59:29Speaker 05

  But it still feels bad.

• 59:32Ed Zitron?

  It's just, and then you, even then, just having my Twitter feed up while we're talking, random shit pops up such as SaaS CEOs, if your CFO hasn't used Cloudera Excel by now, you need a new CFO, only the curious will survive. Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. Like, what are you talking about? Why? Why? What, what do you mean?

• 59:52Speaker 05

  That's so, I feel like that's so dangerous specifically for.

• 59:56Ed Zitron?

  I'm just responding with, why?

• 59:58Speaker 05

  Feed all of your companies to financial information into this LLM.

• 1:00:04Ed Zitron?

  Also, all what do you think? Like, what do you think a CFO does? Oh, they just they build models, I guess. Yeah, well, the good idea for financial modeling is when you distance yourself from everything as far as but ideally, you're so abstracted from the problem that you don't even really understand it anymore. As we're finding out, isn't a problem anywhere. It's just insane. It's I feel like we live in a truly insane period.

• 1:00:30Speaker 05

  And it's bad. I mean, the consumer space is just like. Uh, last time I talked to you, similar topic, but um, more of the companies in the industry, computer industry that don't sell silicon products, you know, cases, coolers, accessories, whatever motherboard.

• 1:00:50Speaker 05

  We've had more of them now contact basically saying, hey, we're in big trouble and they want to talk to us about it for a video. But it's just when I say big trouble, I mean, a lot of these companies are down like 50 plus percent from expectations and that's because you can't build a computer as a consumer if you can't afford like $500, $600 minimum for basic memory now because of the data center demand for it.

• 1:01:16Ed Zitron?

  How does any of this turn around, though? Like, how quickly is there any possibility that when the bubble bursts, anything returns to normal within gaming? Like, you see, I'm sure you've seen errors where they've oversold memory in the past.

• 1:01:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. Not like this, though.

• 1:01:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

  I've never seen it like this. Memory is a really unique industry because of how it's been corrupt for 40 years. And when I say

• 1:01:43Ed Zitron?

  How do you mean?

• 1:01:44Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, so like the Department of Justice, uh, under the Bush administration, W,

• 1:01:54Speaker 05

  busted the memory makers for what they called a cartel. And by definition, that's what it was, price fixing cartel. And this has been happening like at least once a decade where in the late 90s, early 2000s, the memory suppliers all got together and would agree on price ceilings and floors. So when they go and sell memory to Dell or Apple or HP, uh, they've already spoken to their competitors and agreed, we're not going to go below this price.

• 1:02:25Ed Zitron?

  Cool.

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, and this has happened multiple times for that industry.

• 1:02:30Ed Zitron?

  Very cool.

• 1:02:31Speaker 05

  And you know what? My favorite part of this story, and I didn't know this till we did our report recently, was, uh, so there were, there were several people, there were like over a hundred people involved, if I remember correctly. And if you look up the people who were charged with crime, including fined and even sentenced to prison for that, for a price fixing cartel. If you look up what happened to them after, a lot of them got promoted.

• 1:02:59Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  One of, one of them, his reward was to become CEO.

• 1:03:04Ed Zitron?

  Geez, at what company?

• 1:03:05Speaker 05

  Samsung Europe.

• 1:03:07Ed Zitron?

  Very, well, didn't someone from Samsung also go to jail a few times? Like, I swear to God, like people from Samsung.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Ed Zitron?

  It's just, it really does feel that by the end of this, someone else is going to jail. Like, there's just somewhat, some-

• 1:03:20Speaker 05

  And they'll get out and they'll be promoted, you know?

• 1:03:23Ed Zitron?

  Well, the question is, what, what if it's clammy Sam Altman, though, that I don't think they're gonna, I don't know. I hear people being like, Sam Altman was gonna go to jail. I don't know if I buy it, but this private equity thing with the minimum returns, maybe? Just do a classic Ponzi? I hope so.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, classic Ponzi at least has some, some history of meaningful busts and, and sentences, right? So.

• 1:03:46Ed Zitron?

  I don't know.

• 1:03:47Speaker 05

  But a lot of the white collar stuff, I feel like a lot of the time, it's kind of a, whatever you get. Like in the price fixing cartel, most of them got seven or eight months max. So.

• 1:03:56Ed Zitron?

  I just, America doesn't really have antitrust anymore. Otherwise, this, this would be, I don't know. All of, all of this just feels like it's going to set back consumer hardware for a decade at this point.

• 1:04:10Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's not just gaming either. Like, I think that's just what we specialize in. But yeah, it's, it's more, it's becoming increasingly viable, I think, for people on the surface to rent their computer or rent access to a computer in the cloud. And that's a bad thing.

• 1:04:28Ed Zitron?

  We don't want that. Is that really a likely outcome?

• 1:04:32Speaker 05

  I, I mean, the low end is drying up. And so if you can't really afford the cheapest, let's just keep it a gaming, gaming computer anymore. Uh, your best option might be to go rent server access from Nvidia and use one of their thousand dollar GPUs for $20 a month.

• 1:04:54Ed Zitron?

  God, what a fucking bleak, what a bleak environment. I just hope it, I hope it works out more than just these companies lose shit tons of money. I don't know if the, because surely the memory prices would come down and storage prices would come down as well.

• 1:05:10Speaker 05

  I would think so. Yeah, I would think so.

• 1:05:12Ed Zitron?

  Uh, I think everyone involved with this should, should suffer in ways I can't say on the show due to legal reasons, you know, just the thoughts they have inside my head. All right, Steve, we're gonna wrap it there. You got anything you wanna hype?

• 1:05:26Speaker 05

  Nah, I mean, we've got a, yeah, I guess I'll throw one out there. We've got a big, another documentary we're working on right now, but uh, it's gonna be on the, the war on Huawei. So we went and dug through all of Huawei's history. It's pretty interesting and then.

• 1:05:40Ed Zitron?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. And uh, that should be over an hour long and lots of, um, they're a wild company and the, it's very politically intertwined with the US and China. So, uh, so that'll be our next big one.

• 1:05:54Ed Zitron?

  Should be fun. And yeah, you know where to find me. The links will be in the show notes. Thank you as ever for listening to Better Offline. There will be a monologue this week. Love you all. Goodbye.

• 1:06:11Ed 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.

• 1:06:43Speaker 12

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

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