The AI Clown Car W/ Gamersnexus

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about the increasingly-delusional promises of the AI semiconductors industry, the rotten economics of LLMs, and how everything is becoming more frantic and desperate as we reach the end. GamersNexus - There Are No Non-Clowns In The Clown Car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F33Ohjufi9k Support GamersNexus’ AI Surveillance Dystopia Series: https://store.gamersnexus.net/ai-dystopia https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexus https://gamersnexus.net/ https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social https://x.com/GamersNexus 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. --- 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.

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• 3:49Speaker 06

  Call Zone Media.

• 3:52Speaker 07

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. God damn, it's your host, Ed Zitron. I am back.

• 4:08Speaker 07

  And we are returning with a returning champion of the show, Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus, who's here to talk to us about how well the semiconductor companies are conducting themselves in this era of AI opulence. I think it's a good way of putting it.

• 4:23Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 07

  Are you really happy with them?

• 4:24Speaker 08

  Oh, they're great. They're so good. The clown industry has never had more candidness.

• 4:30Speaker 07

  It's so strange. So you put out this wonderful video about the, well, it's just we're out, there are no more non-clowns. It's just, it's funny. There are no non-clowns in the clown car at this point. I think it's accurate. As we record this, they've recently announced that OpenAI and SB Energy are building a data center with Nvidia backstopping it, but it's not really a backstop. This doesn't feel like a real industry, Steve.

• 4:59Speaker 08

  It's all pretend and make-believe, I think, at this point. I mean, yeah, it's... My favorite quote I've heard recently, I did see that news today, but my favorite quote was Jim Cramer saying, "I like data so much, data centers so much, I wish I could live in one."

• 5:18Speaker 07

  They should make him.

• 5:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, you... Weren't you on CNBC, or was that a...

• 5:23Speaker 07

  I was on CNBC a few times recently, and they've not asked me about Jim Cramer living in a data center yet.

• 5:28Speaker 08

  No, they haven't. Okay. I thought maybe they'd be looking for a realtor.

• 5:33Speaker 07

  I want him to go and live in one just so that he can sit around and just get deafened, I assume, because they're pretty loud, from my experience.

• 5:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, it's... There was, there's so much going on right now, because locally, we had a data center town council meeting that was supposed to happen, actually, tomorrow, and I was going to go to that.

• 5:55Speaker 08

  And the pushback from locals was so much that they... The applicant withdrew their application for the data center.

• 6:03Speaker 07

  Where was this?

• 6:04Speaker 08

  This was in Raleigh, southeast Raleigh specifically, is where they were looking at.

• 6:09Speaker 07

  Because there are a few data centers over there, right? I know CoreWeave have some crap.

• 6:13Speaker 08

  Yep, CoreWeave, they have a good amount of stuff out near the mountains out west. And there's some of the, one of the old, like, former crypto mining facilities, you know, has been converted or in the process of being converted into a data center as well out there, so... But yeah, no, they're popping up everywhere. It's just, it seems like, finally, I guess, there's a more widespread public understanding of what it means when a data center pops up. And it's, I was talking with someone on the team about this. Data centers have existed forever, right? And it's interesting.

• 6:50Speaker 07

  A lot of them.

• 6:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, and they, it's just like, this particular type of data center for AI processing,

• 7:00Speaker 08

  rightly gets a much worse rap, and it's, you know, it's far more power consumption. It's more, typically more water consumption, and potentially more land area. And it's, they've sort of, they've sort of ruined it for the rest of the data centers that have been around since the beginning of time, I feel like. But, you know, they're all big structures. It's just these new ones, and particularly the AI processing solutions tend to be louder and more power-hungry.

• 7:32Speaker 08

  And so I'm just happy to see, though, that people are, you know, are finally informed on this stuff and showing up.

• 7:37Speaker 07

  I do like the amount of politicians who are like, "No, it's good for jobs." It isn't good for jobs. It's not good for jobs at all. "Oh, it's good for the local economy. It's good for the local economy, as long as the data center is being built, and then that stops." And even then, it's, how much, how good is that actually, the economy? We don't really know. And it's frustrating to watch this happen, because it feels like something about data centers is just corrupting everything. Like, it corrupted... I remember watching your video earlier today, watching Lisa Su talk about this? Like, watching Lisa Su of AMD, who was, before this, I would have genuinely been like, "That's one of the good CEOs. She's a smart one. She doesn't give into marketing hype. She's no bullshit person."

• 8:20Speaker 07

  Listening to her talk about this stuff, it's like she's been huffing paint.

• 8:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, she was pretty well-liked. I mean, my experiences with AMD over the years have been mixed, but...

• 8:34Speaker 08

  Broadly speaking, AMD has at least maintained the appearance of, if not the actual, you know, practice of being sort of an engineering first company. And Lisa Su technically comes from an engineering background. I'm sure she doesn't do a lot of it these days, but that still counts for something. And so does Jensen, to be fair to him. But yeah, Lisa, over the last year or so, has shared the stage a lot with Michael Kratzios from the White House, talk about their AI action plan. And in that plan, they describe things like getting clean water and clean air regulations out of the way of data center construction.

• 9:18Speaker 07

  Good. Oh, good.

• 9:21Speaker 08

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, of things to put in your press release that would make a PR person go, wait a minute. So the, the clean air part, how are we gonna, how are we gonna spin that exactly?

• 9:36Speaker 07

  Like, well, AI will make more clean air.

• 9:40Speaker 08

  Right.

• 9:41Speaker 07

  Maybe.

• 9:42Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 07

  And it, it's so funny as well, because rewatching that video, I've seen a few of these clips of these various executives sounding like they're part of a doomsday cult or what have you. And it's so strange watching people that even two years ago were like, yeah, and here's the, we're, they're talking about things like inference and high bandwidth memory and like the actual financial, sorry, the actual technical features of AI GPUs to just speaking in financial generalities. It's like, it will be a $30 billion, $100 billion, $250 bazillion dollar TAM industry. It will be so big. It will be so huge. We love it. And you made the point, it's, it's become more about financial engineering than electrical engineering.

• 10:22Speaker 08

  Yeah. Yeah. The whole thing feels like we've completely lost the plot of any of the technology. Like I, with some exceptions, I almost never hear these executives now when they're doing their various podcasts, which by the way, they've all gotten really onto the, the like podcast and TV show and a lot more appearances than I've really ever seen from a lot of the CEOs. Normally they've, you know, they've historically kind of only wheeled them out for the big keynotes and then they disappear for six months. So that's been different too. But, but yeah, it's out of all the appearances from Jensen and Lisa and everyone else, Sam Altman especially, you almost never hear anything actually technical

• 11:07Speaker 08

  now. It's all how many billions of dollars or how many gigawatts? And that's kind of the start and the end of the conversation. Occasionally they'll talk about how it's going to create a bunch of plumbing and electrician jobs while kind of, you know, skirting past the fact that those will last for a couple of years at most. And then it's, you know, the structure is built, so those jobs go away. But to your point, I, yeah, I think it's, uh, the engineering side has completely faded, which I, I wonder if I'm, I'm not that, that well informed on sort of the dot com era, um, technicals, like how it actually

• 11:48Speaker 08

  built up. Obviously I'm aware of what happened, but I wonder if you look back then, you know, do you see a similar trajectory? Is it like it starts rooted in technicals and then it, that, that falls away over time and it becomes just pure money? Or is this different, the way it's been discussed?

• 12:05Speaker 07

  Looking back, the early days of the internet were so vestigial that almost every article was basically re-explaining what the internet was. And the way they talked about it was in these vast generalities of like, okay, well, so there's this, that, like just vaguely like, yeah, the internet, you know, it's pretty, it's going to be pretty big. Or they'd get into very big ethical discussions. And a lot of the original pushback on the internet was, hey, we're just going to create a giant swamp of unverified information. Is this a problem? And people were generally like, shut up, you fucking idiot. That'll never happen. It was, it's so funny, the pushback on the internet back then was actually quite smart. But for the most part, people were like, yeah, this could be anything. But

• 12:47Speaker 07

  when you read the articles about like Windstar, which was a telecoms company that basically was in a circular relationship where it borrowed money from Lucen to pay Lucen and then use that money to pay Lucen back for the loan that they were using to pay Lucen. And when you read their articles, fun fact, the only time I've ever been able to find a bubble where someone mentioned annualized revenues.

• 13:10Speaker 08

  Oh.

• 13:10Speaker 07

  The only other, only other time, it's the same bullshit. But it would be like, yeah, and they're going to blanket the entire country with these dishes. They're going to be everywhere. It's going to be that, it was very highfalutin, very big numbers, but very, very light on the technical details. Still heavier than it is now. Because the funny thing is, is if we think about this 30,000 foot view, taking away my critic glasses, putting on the, the booster glasses I use and all you can see is yellow and blue. Um, the thing that I think is, isn't this the time when the technology is the most important? Because they haven't made this profitable yet. They really haven't. Like, it's very obvious they haven't. And yet, like, I keep, every time I read about, like Vera Rubin,

• 13:55Speaker 07

  for example, next generation GPUs, Vera Rubin, right? Every time I read about them, I get the same shit, which is, yeah, they're 10x more efficient or 25x. And also, they're 25x more efficient on DeepSeek R1, a year and a half old model.

• 14:08Speaker 08

  Right.

• 14:09Speaker 07

  And, uh, yeah, you can't, like, we haven't benchmarked it. It's not like we could benchmark with Anthropic or OpenAI, because if we did that, you might find out they're unprofitable.

• 14:20Speaker 07

  And it's just, it, every time you, it's like, it's like being in a bad relationship where you don't want to ask the questions that you know would end it.

• 14:28Speaker 08

  Do you know, have you noticed the sort of dual narrative lately where, uh, cause you were just talking about how it'll be, it'll be 10x the performance of whatever. So there's a performance number there. But then at the same time, I don't remember if it was Core Weaver, who it was, just last week, I saw a, an interview with some executive who was talking about the cost per GPU hour being $2 previously. And now those devices are $4. I don't know if this rings a bell to you, but.

• 14:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, I remember this.

• 15:01Speaker 08

  Yeah. And so the, the narrative that was being constructed by that interview was one of, look, even the old, the comparatively ancient technology from somewhere between, you know, three and six years ago, is more expensive now or is more effective now, uh, and is still useful. And then obviously on the other side of it, you have the FOMO of, you need the absolute newest Vera Rubin, or what the fuck are you even doing? You know?

• 15:29Speaker 07

  Right.

• 15:30Speaker 08

  And so it's, it's just, it's the have your cake and eat it too setup on the GPU side. But on the consumer side, like the end user side, all I saw with that, our old GPUs are worth more than ever conversation was like, oh, this is bad. This is like, cause now, now you're just, you're the last bastion of hope, I think for consumer pricing was, okay, well, maybe we'll get the scraps from last generation. And now they're saying they even need that. So.

• 16:01Speaker 07

  Well, the thing is, there's a few wonderful parts of this. Uh, number one is, I saw that it was saying there was like, you're getting, instead of getting two something per Blackwell, you're getting four something an hour, right?

• 16:14Speaker 08

  Right.

• 16:15Speaker 07

  That is not enough to cover the costs. That's not even fucking close enough. I have an Oracle contact who told me, and this is someone with actual infrared experience. They were saying that it costs like six something dollars an hour in OpEx just to run a GB300.

• 16:30Speaker 08

  Wow.

• 16:31Speaker 07

  So I don't think four bucks an hour is going to do it. And this is the story, no one really wants to talk about this one as well. It's like, yeah, when you're selling spot pricing to the desperate, you can make more money. But when it comes to the longer ones, when it comes to the longer duration contracts, that cost, that, the cost drops, it drops dramatically. Oracle charging two something an hour per H100 GPU and H200 GPU for OpenAI with their contract. And not, again, no one really wants to talk about this because it's like, if you're getting two to $4 an hour for this shit, okay, so maybe you'll break even in 10 years, if you have constant utilization.

• 17:13Speaker 08

  Right.

• 17:14Speaker 07

  If that works. And even then it's like, wow, you have a gross margin of 30%, mate. You, you want to start an airline? Like, like what the fuck? This isn't really much of a business. But then you go and you hear these things that Lisa Su or Jensen Huang or Sam Altman are saying. It's like, yes, the next industrial revolution, it's going to be huge, you're going to make so much money. Everyone's going to be rich, everyone's super rich, everyone's, so buy a GPU, buy seven of them, buy as many as you can, we need to sell them. And it feels like living in an alternate reality sometimes.

• 17:44Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 07

  The math isn't that crazy to me, you know?

• 17:49Speaker 08

  Well, I think it's also the government investment in all of this, or the increasing government investment, or the individuals in the government invest in not enough capacity.

• 18:00Speaker 07

  I mean, well, the Trump's investment in Nvidia.

• 18:03Speaker 08

  Right. Millions of dollars transacted. Yeah.

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• 21:34Speaker 08

  I was talking with someone on the team earlier today and he made the comment, he was asking me, you know, if there's all these data centers and this massive demand for storage now as well, if the average person is using ChatGPT or Claude to make a spreadsheet at most or be a chatbot, you know, at least, like that doesn't require all that processing power and storage. And so what is it? And then to me, it's, I don't know if this is too conspiracy branded or not, but the dots I'm connecting are the government's really invested in the, I guess, the success or at least the prevalence of data centers and AI companies.

• 22:18Speaker 08

  Some of that could just be as simple as no administration wants the economy to fail on their watch. So, you know, they, they're invested in it. But also you see stuff like flock cameras popping up everywhere and Axon cameras and drones and all of that, that's what requires data centers. Like that's

• 22:37Speaker 07

  Does it though?

• 22:38Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:39Speaker 07

  How does it require the GPUs though?

• 22:42Speaker 08

  I, I think, so it's two things, the storage definitely

• 22:46Speaker 07

  The storage, but you don't need an AI data center for that.

• 22:49Speaker 08

  I, I think the only reason you might, and this is still something I'm kind of playing with the idea, so I'm not sure on yet, but I think the reason you might find the GPUs useful is to start connecting large, complex matrices of information you have on people or objects to each other. Like this is something that, you know, this is, this is something that GPUs should be good at.

• 23:13Speaker 07

  In theory, but this is the thing though, to push back on this, because I do get a fair amount of emails, people saying, this is, um, this is like, this is the thing I'm afraid of, the government surveillance.

• 23:25Speaker 08

  Ah.

• 23:25Speaker 07

  The Department of, I think, like, there's multiple different government agencies that work directly with Oracle and already have, and already have that. Like they already have, they already have like bunches of GPUs. So if they were gonna do this, they were gonna do this, they probably already done it.

• 23:42Speaker 08

  Right? Well, I think the difference is a lot of this new stuff is being rolled out by private companies in large volumes, you know, just like the cameras alone. Um, I don't know, something like six months ago, it was 80,000 flock cameras and now I'm not sure what it is. It's definitely well over a hundred thousand. And it's a private company. There's a lot of data. I'm not sure to what extent they currently process this stuff, but definitely to process um, image or visual recognition data against video frames is a very computationally intensive

• 24:24Speaker 08

  task that would require data centers.

• 24:29Speaker 07

  Right, but I'm just saying that all of these data, you don't need all of these data centers for that.

• 24:35Speaker 08

  Definitely not.

• 24:35Speaker 07

  And you definitely don't, and it's not like they're doing CDN share where they need to have it delivered to all points of the world. I'm not saying that this could never happen. It's just the, I don't think the reason they're building all these GPU data centers is because of that. I think they're doing all of that because they don't know what they're fucking doing.

• 24:52Speaker 08

  Well, yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 07

  I think it may actually just be really simple.

• 24:55Speaker 08

  To be clear, I don't think they're trying to, they're building all of them for that. I, I think that is a use case of them. Um, and is a reason that, you know, government may be interested in being invested as well. Uh, so yeah, by and large, no, that's not like the main use case. And you see things like, it's kind of the same discussion as the taking ownership of software and hardware into the cloud where, no, they're not building all of the data centers to take gaming away and put in the cloud. That's like maybe a couple here and there for G-Force now, right? Uh, but it's just another use case where, I don't know, it's, it's kind of like, I guess what it comes down to is whatever the problem is that you have or think you have

• 25:37Speaker 08

  as a private business or a government, the data center is going to fix it for you.

• 25:41Speaker 07

  Right. It's the panacea for your business, even though when you go and look at the actual returns for businesses, there was an OpenAI study that came out that said, uh, it said, it's hilarious. It was like, there is no connection between revenue per employee and the amount of tokens used.

• 25:59Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 26:00Speaker 07

  Four years in, four years in, four years, and where are we?

• 26:06Speaker 07

  We're here and we are nowhere. We are absolutely fucking nowhere, other than the fact that Jensen Huang has to create like some sort of weird financial engineering, not quite Enron, sort of Enron, Enron-esque, Enron adjacent thing to sell as many GPUs as possible.

• 26:26Speaker 08

  What, can I ask, so as, as the person I know who is the most knowledgeable on my favorite company, Enron, uh, what, um, to you, what, what's the, what would break the dam? You know, what bridges it from being Enron-esque to being more actually just, no, this is literally Enron, like this is what they did. You know, what's, what's the defining or what's the distinct feature that we're missing? If I'm Jensen Huang and I say to you, Ed, you could, you say I'm Enron-esque, I really just want to be Enron, you know, what do I need to do to get there?

• 27:06Speaker 07

  And the thing is, the thing is though, like Enron was just nakedly illegal. Like that's, that's the big comparison thing. It's like everyone would take these SPVs and take their debt or their bad parts of the company and just dump them there and be like, ah, well, look, our business is fucking brilliant. There's nothing wrong with this. I think that this is an, is this an opinion with no, with absolutely no financial information that I found, just looking at the financials from OpenAI. OpenAI has a weird thing in their financials that I've mentioned, which talks about moving losses onto different entities. That's, that's weird. That's, I can't say it's Enron, but it smells like it. Nvidia, on the other hand, has been smart in the, they never, Nvidia never uses its credit.

• 27:51Speaker 07

  Nvidia always gets some, they invest it for this. So for example, this SB Energy deal, Nvidia is guaranteeing, they're investing one and a half billion dollars in SB Energy, who's building the data center, and they are guaranteeing the value of the data center up to $106 billion if it gets completed.

• 28:10Speaker 07

  Now, because we have financial markets and credit markets run by people with no object permanence, they see that and they go, well, Nvidia has guaranteed that this data center will do this. They don't make the link that what happens if the data center doesn't get built.

• 28:23Speaker 08

  Hmm, okay.

• 28:24Speaker 07

  And the other thing that Nvidia did there is they said, okay, well, if, if OpenAI can't rent this, you can try and find someone else. And if you can't find someone else, we will pay you the difference between whatever you can sell it for and what it sells and what, what is 108 billion. Again, moving, never quite Enron-ing, never Enron-ing up with, they're very careful to not go full Enron.

• 28:50Speaker 08

  So is the full Enron really that, that leap into just distinct illegality?

• 28:56Speaker 07

  Yes. And that's the, that's why, so for example, with Enron, they were just committing fraud.

• 29:01Speaker 08

  Okay, got it.

• 29:02Speaker 07

  Enron, Enron never published a balance sheet or like, which is fucking crazy. Like anyone who saw that company was like, oh, they didn't publish a balance sheet, that's fine. Kind of, kind of should have seen that coming.

• 29:14Speaker 08

  Right.

• 29:14Speaker 07

  Should have seen that one. That being said, I've said this in the premium recently, they're a lot more like General Electric.

• 29:22Speaker 07

  Who would just invest in their clients, lend them money. Again, Nvidia hasn't lent money. That's where they're real. They've been quite smart to not actually become a creditor. So they'll back, they backstop a CoreWeave lease, as in they agree to pay if CoreWeave can't pay. They invest in CoreWeave. They are, instead of offering up their credit, they're like, we agree to buy a certain amount of compute from CoreWeave, so you can say CoreWeave has revenue. They exploit the financial system.

• 29:50Speaker 08

  Or the Huang Foundation, of course.

• 29:53Speaker 07

  Oh, God, I forgot about that. So wait, what is the, they rented through CoreWeave, right? That's his weird nonprofit?

• 30:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think that's the, what the connection was. I had researched it a while ago. For Nvidia, it's been a while. But yeah, so the Huang Foundation is some kind of nonprofit.

• 30:10Speaker 07

  Also rents from, from CoreWeave.

• 30:12Speaker 08

  Yeah, and it's, and they basically say, you know, we're renting this GPU capacity for, I think it was for students, was.

• 30:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, they donated $108 million worth of CoreWeave AI computing resources for research.

• 30:27Speaker 08

  Which is just like, so crazy to me, because it's.

• 30:30Speaker 07

  That's so beautiful.

• 30:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, you have this, on one hand, you, you run and own part of a company that sells the GPUs. The other, you've got this foundation that's supposed to be, you know, your own thing. And then it's, it's getting involved with the customer of the first entity to create demand for the customer that's buying from a company.

• 30:58Speaker 07

  It's all legal.

• 30:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, right.

• 31:00Speaker 07

  It's legal, baby. Don't worry about it. It's all legal. It's totally fine. It's all good. Don't worry about it. It's fine. But this is the thing, when you push back on financial journalists, business journalists about this, that's what they say. It's all GAAP legal. It's totally legal. There's nothing illegal about this. And it's as if, if something isn't, if something isn't literally illegal.

• 31:23Speaker 08

  Then it's okay.

• 31:24Speaker 07

  Then it's totally fine. And actually, people should do it more. And it's not a bad sign if, what, I think like 12% of CoreWeave's revenue comes from Nvidia, its largest supplier.

• 31:37Speaker 08

  Well, Jensen did say, we played that clip again in this video.

• 31:41Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, he did, he did say something to the effect of, without Nvidia, they don't exist, you know, some of these.

• 31:47Speaker 07

  Yay. It's just like, I love the, I love that shit. I love that, because it's just like, wow. Okay, you're just saying it because you know, this should, something like that should have the SEC go, and like, whoa, whoa, what do you mean you're doing that? Because I swear there is regulation around round tripping.

• 32:08Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 07

  As meant to be, I believe, maybe. I mean, who gives a shit, right? There's so much of this. When you go to like, when you go to the AI boosters, you're like, yeah, this is a problem. They go, ah, it's actually great. I saw one that, one of our favorite analysts, that Daniel Feller, the other day posting like, uh, people will criticize this as circular financing, but what I see is one of the most successful venture capitalists in history. And it's like, yeah, true. The, the balloons that the clown inflates are so full of air as long as the clown keeps inflating them.

• 32:42Speaker 08

  I liked that Jensen was asked by Axios, you know, about is this a bubbler or something like that? And Jensen made his comment of, well, the bubble will come someday, but not today.

• 32:57Speaker 07

  It's not today, but it's in five to 10 years.

• 33:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, and, and he describes how we're in the beginning of, the next word started with a B, and I was like, please be bubble. But he said build out, unfortunately. And the, I don't know, you could see it, first of all, I don't want to like analyze the, the body language, really, but he did definitely have kind of a, it, it was, it was a very measured, I need to carefully think about this answer, split.

• 33:30Speaker 07

  Imagining colic crest with a gun. Just like a CFO, it's like, don't say it, Jensen. Well, he said the other day that compute should become an investable asset class. And it's, it's just like, it's just, exactly. Well, it's the people who were like, compute should be traded like a commodity. And it's like, gun to your head, tell me what you think compute means.

• 33:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, what is that even?

• 33:53Speaker 07

  What is compute?

• 33:54Speaker 08

  As an asset class?

• 33:56Speaker 07

  Well, asset class GPUs should be traded as that, but also compute should be sold as a commodity. None of these really make any sense. If you think about it for even one second, it's like.

• 34:07Speaker 08

  Does that mean I need to declare my storage room full of GPUs we've tested as some form of, some for, some separate line item on the taxes going forward because of the theoretical compute they could produce?

• 34:20Speaker 07

  You're a commodities trader now.

• 34:22Speaker 08

  Oh, great.

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• 38:08Speaker 07

  Well, the famous thing towards the end with Enron, though, and just to be clear, Nvidia is not trading compute, but towards the end with Enron, they were going to trade bandwidth.

• 38:17Speaker 08

  Hmm.

• 38:18Speaker 07

  I mean, if Jensen gets it, I mean, we've already got some people trading power. You've got Meta doing it, Apple doing it. So that's, we've already got a little bit to look forward to there. But the other thing is, if I, I want to see, I personally want to see Nvidia do more financial engineering. I want way more than this. I want to, I want to see Nvidia just buying compute from itself at this point.

• 38:43Speaker 08

  I mean, they're not far from it, like, but yeah, I, the energy stuff too has been kind of wild because the government is getting really involved there, you know, like months ago, Trump talked about the sort of early concept of the BYO power plant, plan.

• 39:04Speaker 07

  Which is what? Sorry, I must have missed that one.

• 39:07Speaker 08

  So basically that's my name for it, but he, um, the plan of companies to provide their own energy. So if they need energy for their data centers, then the companies are either, are through one form or another, going to provide that energy. And the sort of PR play was that this would help prevent rising energy costs on residents and locals. And when I say PR play, I mean, President Trump literally in the meeting said, data centers need some good PR right now.

• 39:41Speaker 07

  I mean, he could call in bulls and strikes there, Mr. Trump.

• 39:46Speaker 08

  And, uh, and so the concept of, you know, the, the data centers will be more responsible for bringing online and provisioning their power that they need, which I could certainly see how, if that's the start.

• 40:02Speaker 07

  Work.

• 40:02Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, I mean, that's definitely the first question, but from a PR standpoint, I guess if you strip all detail out of it, you could see how that, that might win some people over if they don't really think too, too deeply about it. Cause like, okay, yeah, I mean, they, so they pay for their own shit and I don't have to pay for their energy use.

• 40:19Speaker 07

  Right.

• 40:19Speaker 08

  But energy is like a terrifying thing to not be fully regulated, like energy is dangerous to do wrong. Like actually dangerous, you know, it can kill people.

• 40:30Speaker 07

  Same, but also just, there's only so much of it. Like it's, I think people, AI people especially really underestimate how difficult power is.

• 40:39Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 07

  But they're just like, oh yeah, you know, he's just fucking start it up and he just boom.

• 40:45Speaker 08

  Right.

• 40:45Speaker 07

  Just fucking, do you want, you need some power or something? What, what's your, why have you been a dick about it? Fucking, you know, just.

• 40:50Speaker 08

  Well, that's all the gas turbines, right? If you just drop gas turbines on the roof of a data center.

• 40:54Speaker 07

  Those are the crazy thing. I read the story the other day where it was saying the, the gas turbines are dying.

• 41:02Speaker 07

  Because they're not meant to be run. They're not meant to be run all the time.

• 41:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, they're supposed to be for emergencies. It's like stuff that FEMA will, you know, will deploy.

• 41:14Speaker 07

  Dude, and they're everywhere. I know at Stargate, Apple and they're fucking, they're everywhere. They got them all over the shop. It's just so strange. I mean, you are a dyed in the wool hardware guy. You've been dealing with hardware for years. And I think you've successfully conned on to the fact that this is no longer about hardware or GPUs or anything.

• 41:31Speaker 08

  It's about.

• 41:31Speaker 07

  It's about money.

• 41:32Speaker 08

  Money. Yeah. Yeah. The technology stopped mattering. I mean, they don't even really, even in the keynotes now, which I still watch really closely.

• 41:44Speaker 08

  But Jensen used to be so technical, even with the early machine learning and deep learning stuff before they rebranded to AI. The guy was at some of those earliest conferences he did. Uh, I was at the really awkward GTC where he and Elon Musk sat across from each other on stage. And, uh, that was a, I could, I could feel the secondhand embarrassment from just 50 feet away from them. And all of that, there was, there was always pandering to investors, but

• 42:17Speaker 08

  there was also a lot of technical detail. Like I could walk away from a keynote and write a really dense write-up about the architecture of some brand new thing they just announced. And now there's like, I'll watch keynote and at the end of it, I'm like, I, I honestly, I don't even know what the difference is between this generation and the last generation without going and looking up a white paper, you know, like it's,

• 42:39Speaker 07

  Right.

• 42:39Speaker 08

  They've stripped it all and, and there's still technology there, but

• 42:43Speaker 07

  Somewhere.

• 42:43Speaker 08

  It just, yeah, it just doesn't matter anymore, which is real depressing because it's like, even if I want to cover the pure technology side of the architecture, it goes into enterprise products and then say to the audience, you know, well, we, we cover this stuff because hopefully this comes to consumer at some point, some capacity, which is typically how it's been done in the past, even if I want to do that now. It's like they're, they're not even really putting the effort into making those materials as widely available as they used to be because it doesn't matter. And only the money matters.

• 43:16Speaker 07

  I just don't see how they solve all this. Like I've been digging into Broadcom recently. And all like pretty much every time you read about a semiconductor company, or specifically AMD, Nvidia and Broadcom, it's like, yeah, and I mean, for the future, pretty much we need, hmm, I don't know, uh, everything to go perfectly for the next three years because all of our revenue growth is coming from only this. Like Broadcom, I think is, I think like over 60% of their revenue in the next few years is coming just from AI, which is mostly coming from Google's TPUs.

• 43:50Speaker 08

  I mean, it, I don't know. The thing that comes to mind, like when you said that everything needs to go perfectly for three years. It reminds me of just when I played games as a kid, like board games. So chess or Magic the Gathering or something, but chess in particular, where, you know, you're, you're a turn-based game and it's like, you could come up with this master plan of how you're going to win as long as everything goes perfectly and they move their pieces in exactly the wrong way for the next, you know, 30 minutes. But like this is not how reality works. And it does seem like these companies right now are, I, I don't know if they're,

• 44:31Speaker 08

  sometimes it feels like watching Jensen, some of the other like OpenAI is, you know, Sam Altman speak. It feels like there's a little bit of acknowledgement now of things might not go perfectly. But we just kind of need to keep the facade up long enough until there's some major breakthrough where we can get more money pumped into the system. And that's, that's kind of what it feels like I'm watching lately is the sales pitch for, we need to, to dig up the next hundred or 500 billion dollars.

• 45:01Speaker 07

  We need to make this all work perfectly without fail. Is pretty much it. And even when they ask about they, they usually, Sammy's done this, Jensen's done. It's like, yeah, you know, some people run out of money.

• 45:14Speaker 08

  How'd you like Sam's new comments about?

• 45:16Speaker 07

  What the, the, the genie?

• 45:19Speaker 08

  Well, the genie was, that was a pretty good one. Uh, but also the comments about how some descendant of ChatGPT will be able to see everything you ever do on your computer screen.

• 45:31Speaker 07

  He's so good at this. He's so good at this because it's like, I'm sure you remember when Microsoft did, they announced Microsoft Recall.

• 45:40Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 07

  And everyone's reaction was, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to burn down your house. Do not touch my computer. I will murder you. And Microsoft, who could push through just about anything, were just like, nah, we're just going to skip this. And then OpenAI turns up about a year later and goes, fuck yeah, bro, fuck me up. We're going to look at everything you do. And Altman is there being like, yeah, we can see everything you want you do, everything you, you've done and suggest you could do something else. Which is great because again, it comes back to the classic thing of AI. It's when we think about AI as a society, as a cultural thing, we think, okay, AI, it's this thing that just knows everything without us telling it.

• 46:19Speaker 07

  Make smart decisions without us really having to. But this AI is feed as much data as humanely possible to this and maybe it will work one day.

• 46:28Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, and, and you also see this in things like this video is not up yet for us. And I don't know when you're airing this episode. So this might go up a little before us, but we have, um, a a deep dive into some specific smart TVs right now and other devices. And, um, you know, if you really go through the privacy policies of these companies, the, the stuff they tell you they're doing is crazy. Like, and that's the stuff they tell you they're doing. And it's all data collection and data harvesting. And now of course they've all got AI tacked onto it. You know, there's in one of these, um, smart TV companies, they have a special exhibit

• 47:08Speaker 08

  for their AI features like Exhibit A, AI connected functionality. And you read through it all and it's just, it's, they straight up say, we sell your data. Like they just tell.

• 47:20Speaker 07

  Good.

• 47:21Speaker 08

  You know, it's, yes, right there. And this coupled with things like ACR, automated content recognition, which, uh, depending on the, the deployment has the capability of screenshotting what you show, what you have on your screen, on your smart TV in some cases. And transmitted it back to be analyzed or converting it technically into a fingerprint, transmitting that back to be analyzed. All of this is mountains of data. They all really want to deploy AI to process it. Uh, we've received some tips from viewers who say that for now they're hiring staff to, um, manually parse, uh, advertising profiles for TVs by looking at the screenshot data and stuff like that.

• 48:03Speaker 08

  But the goal is to move it all into some kind of LLM that just magically does all this for you. And I guess that's kind of the dream client for a company like OpenAI or Anthropic. But even in that dream client scenario, it's just.

• 48:20Speaker 08

  One, it's a B to B use and two, it's like a strictly evil use.

• 48:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, and it's also, I don't know, they've yet to do it. Like, I feel like if they had a super secret sauce that was great for surveillance that worked really well and someone would be buying it and paying more for it than the cost of operating it, which, when the direct opposite seems to be happening, it seems that people that you, when, when you talk to, when you talk to like an average enterprise customer, it's like, yeah, AI costs are already too high. Why do you do it? Well, all my friends are telling me I have to do this. If I don't do this, I'll face competitive pressure from people that are yelling about how good AI is.

• 49:00Speaker 08

  I have an interesting one on that.

• 49:02Speaker 07

  Oh, go on.

• 49:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, I have, um, I have a friend who works at a game development company and a pretty large one. Uh, and so the, the directive, as I understand it from internal now at this company is, that AI use is an expected part of their job, meaning if they don't find ways to burn tokens on queries, then they're not doing their jobs.

• 49:28Speaker 07

  Great.

• 49:29Speaker 08

  Yeah. And so the internal move for management has been, everyone is sort of in this, your mission is to figure out, well, could AI help you with your job? By which they mean, try to get it to do your job and then present that to management. And if the answer is yes, yeah, I guess we'll see what happens to that job later.

• 49:51Speaker 07

  Yeah. Good luck on that one.

• 49:54Speaker 08

  Right. But it's just, the crazy part to me was the, even the people who don't want to use it in a creative field for a distinctly human thing, like creating art of someone, you know, writing or literal art or whatever, for that field, that's, even if you don't want to use it, you have to, because the executives have decided that this is how your job is to be done. It, I guess in their eyes, it's like refusing to use your email or something.

• 50:27Speaker 07

  I just think it, I don't think they do any real work. So the bosses are just like, the bosses are just like, ah, just use this thing. Cause, cause I read this, Nick Suresh, who was on the show a few weeks ago, was talking about this, how there's just this corporate pressure that if you are not saying you're using AI in the loudest voice possible, your peers will say they use AI more and then people will get mad and that there's this chain of this kind of dereliction of duty, where everyone is saying they use AI so that no one else, no one will ask the question of how useful it is. Or when they do, they just go, that is, I'm like a hundred percent, a hundred times more profitable, of course. Uh, the productive side of the business is just number go up so big.

• 51:12Speaker 08

  It, but it's so fitting to me that, cause what you're describing is sycophancy, you know, where if telling the executives, yes, I'm using it and it's great and it's making me so productive, even if it's not true, that's sycophancy, which is, there's something, it's just, the irony, I guess, is perfect where it's like, because AI, LLMs as they're deployed by and large are sycophancy machines.

• 51:38Speaker 07

  Yes, they're, they're glazing machines.

• 51:40Speaker 08

  Right. Like, uh, we didn't talk about this one yet. Um, Sam Altman's tweet from a couple of weeks ago, when he said he had a great idea after talking to some people about.

• 51:51Speaker 07

  Oh, God.

• 51:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, you know.

• 51:53Speaker 07

  I know the one. No, hit me with it.

• 51:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, great idea. After talking with some people at work, that what if you asked your kids about their day and about things they were interested in, and then you used AI to generate a podcast to maybe talk about one kid's birthday and the other kid's upcoming sport events, and then they can listen to this podcast that you've generated for them on the ride to school.

• 52:18Speaker 07

  Right. And there is of course no other way to do this.

• 52:22Speaker 08

  No, no, you wouldn't want to talk to them.

• 52:25Speaker 07

  No, I mean, like, you could, you could like, uh, I have, maybe you could talk to the child?

• 52:31Speaker 08

  No, no, no, no, no, that's.

• 52:33Speaker 07

  No, but how else would you focus on, uh, business?

• 52:36Speaker 08

  Right, yes.

• 52:37Speaker 07

  How else would you focus on business number go up?

• 52:42Speaker 08

  Uh, and I think that was one of the highest liked replies to him, uh, which I guess is the currency of our world now. But yeah, where they're like, or you could talk to your kids. But even if you do this idea of his, the thing I, I would worry about is like, this is, it just seems so bad to just pipe the sycophancy machine at children.

• 53:11Speaker 07

  I mean, if you let children, if you let children use this shit, you are doing a bad job as a parent. I'm sorry, I'm unilateral on that. Fuck you. You shouldn't be using, this is a bad thing for adults to use and it's even worse for children that do not have, I don't know, any of the potential ways to protect themselves.

• 53:29Speaker 08

  Right.

• 53:30Speaker 07

  I don't know. Well, you know what, Steve? Let's wrap it there. Now we've, on a, on a happy end. Steve, where can people find you? What are you working on at present? Give yourself a shout out.

• 53:40Speaker 08

  Uh, Gamers Nexus on YouTube and we're currently working on the, uh, the smart TV investigations. That'll be up soon.

• 53:47Speaker 07

  And what are you investigating there?

• 53:50Speaker 08

  The capability of converting smart TVs into, uh, covert listening devices without your knowledge.

• 53:58Speaker 07

  Very cool. I look forward to watching that and screaming. I'm of course Ed Zitron. You'll find me at, at Ed Zitron on basically every platform. We'll be back with a monologue this Friday, of course. Thank you so much for listening. I love you all.

• 54:21Speaker 07

  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.

• 54:53Speaker 06

  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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 55:26Speaker 09

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• 56:56Speaker 13

  I'll admit it, I'm one of those people who gets excited for football season way before the first kickoff. That's why a trip to Total Wine & More has become part of my game day routine. I can get the cooler ready with my favorite beers and ready to drink cocktails. I'm usually picking up enough for everybody, so it's nice knowing I'm scoring the lowest prices. This season, make Total Wine & More part of your game day tradition. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B21.

• 57:26Speaker 15

  Being a small business owner isn't just a career, it's a calling. Chase for Business knows how much heart and effort go into building something of your own. Manage all your business finances, from banking to payments to credit cards, all in one place with our digital tools, plus access online resources designed to help your business thrive. Learn more at chase.com/business. Chase for Business, make more of what's yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JP Morgan Chase Bank, N A, Member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JP Morgan Chase and Company.

• 57:59Speaker 16

  What if you could have more wins? More support? More sound effects?

• 58:06Speaker 16

  At LPL Financial, we like the sound of that, because LPL offers more. Advisors, what if you could have more ways to help your clients? Ready to invest? What if you could find an advisor that really understands you? When it comes to your finances, your business, your future, at LPL, we ask, what if you could?

• 58:23Speaker 17

  Paid advertisement. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. LPL Financial LLC, Member FINRA, SIPC. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.