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Ed Zitron
Hello and welcome to Bear Offline. We are not a car. This is a podcast, not a car. And I am Ed Zitron. Better offline. Today we have returning champion Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus joining us to talk about a little company called Nvidia. How you doing, Steve?
Steve Burke
Oh, I'm also not a car.
Ed Zitron
Good stuff. I was just making sure. Just checking. Are you triggered as well? Because based on the Stanford Video. There was an interview with Jensen Huang at Stanford. He appears to have been both triggered, but also not mad at the same time.
Steve Burke
Yeah, well, I mean, he definitely seemed a little sensitive in that one.
Ed Zitron
It's interesting. So just to be clear to the audience, there was an interview about a month ago, a month or two ago, with Jensen Huang on the Dwarkesh podcast, which is a podcast that's both very fluffy but also occasionally has sentient thoughts. And there was this bizarre bit where I forget what the question leading in. Was it something about China, perhaps? And Jensen Huang just gets pissed and goes, we are not a car. We are not a car. And it's just he, he also.
Steve Burke
I think that was the same podcast, right. Where he was like, I'm not a loser. America's not a loser. We're not losers. Like, he went on this.
Ed Zitron
This is. I say this as a. I was a very fat child and I was bullied a great deal. Let me tell you something. When someone's saying they're not upset that they're not a loser, they are like, they, they, they are just. That's them saying it. Except I was. I was just large. I wasn't a $5 trillion company. It really feels like Jensen is starting to go off the wheels a bit. Yeah.
Steve Burke
And I don't know if it's. Because I guess it could be multiple things. It could be he's gotten to a size where he just doesn't care anymore. Maybe he is so important. He's just dropped. Like, that's just how he is. And he just kind of dropped the act. Or, you know, maybe it's a top indicator. I don't know.
Ed Zitron
I think it's more likely that. Because here's the thing. If we're talking about this a few episodes back in 2025, he was signing woman's boobs.
Steve Burke
He was.
Ed Zitron
He was all swaggy. He'd go out on stage at GTC and just be like, the more you buy, the more you save. We're the best. And everyone was cheering for him and he was like a rock star. Now he seems like Dwarkesh Patel is 23 years old. If a 23 year old was rude to me, other than the numerous times they are online, I would, I would just be like, okay, it's not that big a deal.
Steve Burke
Especially if your company is worth trillions
Ed Zitron
of dollars and the quote is just a quote. We are not a car. We are not a car. The fact that I can buy this car brand one day and use another car brand, the other day. Easy computing is not like that. There's a reason why the x86 deal exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems are hard to replace. I don't know if that, I mean,
Steve Burke
like, it's not really a clean analogy.
Ed Zitron
It's also the kind of thing. It's also insane that they've got to this point without having a cleaner one than that.
Steve Burke
Yeah, I mean, it's. That's easy to poke holes. And I get what he's trying to say. I get it. Like the architecture is, yes, it is difficult to move off of. But also on the consumer side, which is what he's talking about with buying a car and then buying a different one. You can in fact do exactly that with GPUs. So, like, I get what he means more on the business side, but it is, I don't. It's just such a sensitive topic for him lately. And I don't understand if that's coming from a place of insecurity or, I don't know at this point, you know, who you need to have on. It's not me. It's like a therapist to psychoanalyze Jensen. He's like a therapist to break down his mental state.
Ed Zitron
A director's commentary style thing. Like, well, okay, stop there. You see, when he says he has a car, this is a sign that just like in here, he's going to cry. But they paused it. So my theory is. And we kind of, we kind of talked about this and then we dipped into it a ton. But there was a short sell report from Copper Research that came out that suggested that over 20% of Nvidia's fiscal year 2026 revenue came from China through a company called Megaspeed. I think what it might be is that he really does need China. I think it may be as simple as he really needs China. He needs China so bad. And Chinese GPUs terrify him in a way that he's like that he's perhaps not willing to totally.
Steve Burke
Yeah.
Ed Zitron
Talk about. And also he's not scared of amd. I don't think the MI instincts are gonna. Gonna scare Nvidia at all. That would require.
Steve Burke
I don't think so. I also, I think AMD is a known quantity at this point for Jensen. Yeah. And their strategies are known, their technology is known. It's really, it's the, the unknown technologies and strategy is probably what he needs to worry about. And right now most of that's coming from Chinese companies. There's a Lot of them. We have some coverage coming up on.
Ed Zitron
Yeah, talk to me about it.
Steve Burke
Yeah, on Chinese GPUs, the rise of them, kind of like our rise of Chinese memory video. And they get a. It's interesting, it's interesting to watch companies like jiaoxin, which makes CPUs come to market and when they do in the consumer space, they get kind of shit on for being a couple generations behind. Because I remember when some of their first CPUs came out and the early media reports that tested it were oh, they're about the same as a 3 or 4 generation old Intel CPU and like the perspective was one of mockery. But I think that should really concern some of these companies because like if you come from nowhere, silicon is not an easy technology. Architecture's hard. And if you come out of nowhere and you're like four generations back instantaneously, that should be pretty scary I think for the companies that are in the space. Because it's the getting started that's the hard part.
Ed Zitron
Right? What do you mean by that? What is the getting started in this case?
Steve Burke
The getting started in this case, at least in the scope of China is largely going to be things like figuring out your fab. So who's going to make the product? Do they have the technology to make it? And if they don't, how do you kind of work within the limitations of what you have access to? Right, right. Because technically TSMC is not supposed to make products for like Chinese GPUs or I mean sometimes it kind of happens anyway, but in the past, but there's limitations of the fab, that's a big challenge for them. And then there's also just the, the actual first coming up with an architectural design. Once you have that, you can iterate on it and make changes that advance it. But getting anything to work at all, that's the hard part. Right. So once they pass that barrier and they have a fab that can make it from there, you just iterate. And as long as they have some customers they can, like any other company, they just iterate. And if China has a built in pool of customers because they have restricted access to external hardware, then whether or not they're competitive, they're, they're gonna have buyers because, you know.
Ed Zitron
Yeah, well, the other thing is as well, and this is, this is one of my own personal things is I also have to wonder if there's not this whole thing I've been said about data centers not getting built and when I say that, because I always get one Comment from someone saying, actually, I just saw one being built near me. And like, people just with, I assume, no object permanence, which is like, I sought one, even though I'm saying they're not getting finished. If that's the case, I imagine that's quite scary to. Maybe this isn't it. But I imagine that's quite scary to Jensen as well. Because if these things aren't getting built and China is saying we don't need these GPUs, then that makes Vera Rubin a much weirder proposition as well. Because it's like, okay, if China doesn't need these and we don't have the space for the new ones, why would we buy the new ones? Or what would we do with these old ones? Do we just junk them? The walls are kind of closing in for Mr. Huang.
Steve Burke
Yeah, I think so. I will say, though, on the premise of data centers are not being built, I'm not sure if you saw, but Oracle has a very nice beam in the ground, several of them.
Ed Zitron
I love that there's one photo. I forget which data center it is. There's just. They put up the first steel beam, I think, in Wisconsin, and there's one bloke with his hand on it and three others walking up.
Steve Burke
Yeah.
Ed Zitron
And it's just. It's so good because it's like, yeah, yeah, I've seen this in London a hundred times. Like a bunch of guys with hard hats going, oh, my. You know, it's gonna take a minute.
Ray Porter
War.
Ed Zitron
Is it stable? You better lean on it another minute, mate. It's so. It is funny watching that happen. But it is also so very weird that. Going back to the Stanford thing as well, that moment where he was like, aha. Thank you for triggering me again. These are children. These are children. These are children with questions that you should be ready for. But these are children. How do you and your $17,000 leather jacket not just reflect these? Unless there are, like, very simple problems here that you.
Steve Burke
Well, and that one was interesting too. Cause that segment he gets into, I'm not sure who the guy was sitting with. Him, I assume someone who works for Stanford.
Ed Zitron
He was an optimist.
Steve Burke
Okay, yeah, yeah, right. The guy fielding the questions, though, he makes a comment at one point where he says, we at Stanford have a $40 billion endowment. And he's talking about how they're having trouble getting access to compute and GPUs. And Jensen effectively paraphrasing it, but not that much. He effectively says, you just need money. And he talks about how the first thing he would do is cut a billion dollars and send it off to a cloud data data center service provider for compute, as opposed to, you know, buying and having their own solution in house, which that I think also is. It's concerning because it's the thing we've been worried about in the consumer space for a while, which is the you'll own nothing. And you know, the companies, right, they
Ed Zitron
want to get away from providing anything other than dumb clients.
Steve Burke
Right. Except this is. We're not talking about a guy who's saying he can't get a GPU for video games. We're talking about like a university that's considering whatever hundreds of millions or a billion dollars of spend and Jensen's telling them to fuck off and use laptops to connect to a cloud provider. And to me it just, it kind of seems like they're being a lot more open with the concept that owning the devices is dead and it's all going to cloud. And that is. He was talking about. Well, you know, you see people today, they all have a laptop and they connect and the compute's not local anymore. That's what he's talking about. And that should scare a lot of people.
Ed Zitron
How likely do you think that actually is though? Because, don't know, it just with the speed of Internet connections, I just don't know what like, I don't know how like practical it would be. These people don't really give a fuck. Like I think that Jensen Huang doesn't give a fuck about other countries outside of how many GPUs they buy. But it's like I was on an airplane. Yes, I was on an airplane. I said 100 years old and like I could barely connect to the Internet if at all. That alone makes me feel like this might not be. Or is the suggestion that this would be like a very classist thing. This would be like if you. The only laptop you can afford is one that, that is effectively just a device that connects to the cloud.
Steve Burke
I do think you start to see it cause segregation by class in terms of access to hardware. Although that's maybe not unique to this industry. But the likelihood just to pull a number. GeForce now, which is the low end online gaming service, game streaming to basically any device. They claim to have 30 million users for that.
Ed Zitron
Huh.
Steve Burke
Which seems like a lot that also really.
Ed Zitron
This is GeForce Now.
Steve Burke
Yeah, GeForce Now. There's a public document that talks about 30 million users.
Ed Zitron
Yeah, 30 million users. I don't know that. That just feels very. I'm just thinking of the PC gaming industry. Like I. For something of that scale, you would. I just, maybe I'm just terribly ignorant. That just feels very high to me because like every other game streaming service,
Steve Burke
I mean they might be pumping their numbers because they do have an ad supported free tier.
Ed Zitron
Well, here's the thing. I just looked this up while on air. There are 35 million subscribers to Xbox Game Pass.
Steve Burke
Yeah.
Ed Zitron
I find it very unlikely that Nvidia, which has failed to like they failed every single other. Like software, like the Omniverse, you know, you'll fit you, you. And my favorite subject, the Omniverse, like a terrible failure. Have they ever succeeded with any kind of external thing other than hardware? Yeah, exactly. I just, I don't believe that they have nearly as many, even with an ad supporter thing.
Steve Burke
So they have a PDF called Nvidia story. PDF our story 2025. And in here is where they. I'll have to send it to you. In here is where they. Yeah. Over 30 million members in more than 110 countries now have access to more than 1900 games.
Ed Zitron
Ah, there you go. There's the. 30 million members over a non specific period now have access, could theoretically use. So that's 30 million people have signed up and given an email address. Yeah, beautiful.
Steve Burke
Yeah. And so like how likely that is, I'm not sure. But that's an interesting story because I just learned thanks to the recent GeForce now partner breach, that Nvidia has partners to propagate this service. Kind of like some kind of like a WI fi range extender.
Ed Zitron
Makes sense. That makes some sense.
Steve Burke
Yeah. And I guess that's to try and solve what you're talking about, which is the latency issue. I mean the US is pretty woefully far behind right. In a lot of places for Internet where it's just non viable
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Ed Zitron
It's all just a very strange time. Actually. Before I go any further though, what is this G Force breach you mentioned to me? Just before we came on the call, I realized we should give it some air time.
Steve Burke
Yeah. It's. So the hacking group Shiny Hunters, or someone at least posing as them. That's kind of the funny thing with the. The hacking groups is it's. It's difficult to verify. Sometimes they impersonate each other and there's no real good way to verify it. But a user representing Shiny Hunters posted on a breach forum, basically dark web stuff with an offer to sell. I think it was for $100,000, a data packet where they claimed that they had breached and harvested data, including two factor authentication information.
Ed Zitron
Jesus.
Steve Burke
Access flags, usernames, dates of birth, things like that. And they're offering it for sale for. I think it was 100 grand. I'd have to check. And that was on a forum. They said they wrote it as if they had compromised all of Nvidia GeForce. Now Nvidia responded within a couple days and said, we've looked into this. Nope. What they've compromised is one of our partners representing the Armenia region. And Nvidia kind of pointed the finger to just Armenia for the breach. That partner actually does service other countries as well and regions. I think it's. I want to say Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. They didn't talk about if any of them were breached. So it could actually be wider than Nvidia is representing.
Ed Zitron
But anyway, I find it hard to believe Nvidia would misrepresent something they usually are very straightforward.
Steve Burke
Yeah. Never any slippery wording.
Ed Zitron
But let's change tag to China. China, China, China, China. And this. So you've got you. We just. What managed to hook us up for this episode was that GPU smuggling thing. And we can talk about the super micro stuff, which I think rocks. I think that I've. This whole time all of these scumbags have been scummy, but in a very boring way. There's not been any goofy science fiction shit or hair dryers.
Steve Burke
Yeah.
Ed Zitron
And the fact that this. That Wally Liao was going or one of the blokes was going into the warehouses and just kind of hair drying off the serial number that we might have talked about this last time. But it was funny enough to go over again. I love it. I think it's hilarious.
Steve Burke
And there. There were a lot of interesting things in the timeline where a lot of the stuff happened. In August and. And some of the investigation in August, and that was the same time we ran our report and we were digging into some of that stuff too. And a lot of it matched what we found where during our black market GP report, we did talk to a Taiwanese company and a company that operates also in Singapore. And one of the things we learned was that they'll act as intermediaries where this one company, I couldn't show them or anything on camera back then, but we talked about it. Yeah, they work to bring in Nvidia. I want to say it was GB200, maybe 300, GB200 systems. So like actual racks of hardware.
Ed Zitron
Oh, like an NVO 72.
Steve Burke
Yeah, like actual, you know, full racks. And they'll bring them into Taiwan and run testing. So it's a testing house. They do pre testing before it gets deployed. They do configuration stuff like that on behalf of other companies, not for themselves.
Ed Zitron
Right.
Steve Burke
And their clients were in China. I remember talking to them about it because they're showing us these GPU racks and explaining that, oh, we test it and you know, it's for a company in China that we work with. And they seemed somewhat oblivious to the fact that this is not supposed to happen as they were giving us all this information, wasn't it?
Ed Zitron
Yeah, go on. Sorry.
Steve Burke
Yeah, So I mean, they basically test it, forward it, and that was what we reported. And that's also exactly what back last year, Jensen was regularly talking about. Oh, these things, they weigh thousands of pounds. It's not like some small potato chip you can put in your pocket. Yeah, right. And it's total misrepresentation to your earlier point. And as far as we could tell, it's not like they're just smuggling in GPUs and crates of lobster and shrimp, which has also happened, by the way, but actually completed server products.
Ed Zitron
But the thing is, I didn't realize. I guess you couldn't have said back then, I didn't realize it was an MVL 72.
Steve Burke
I'm not sure if it was an NVL 72.
Ed Zitron
Well, if it was in a 200
Steve Burke
rack, I don't know how many were in there.
Ed Zitron
But if it was like a full rack, that's still. God, that was last year as well. If they had GB2 hundreds. Yeah, I mean, I should have really asked at the time, but like. Well, I don't know if you could have actually disclosed. But that's the thing, like, because these various reports, the Supermicro one, the culprit report, they all come back to A thing which is. Nvidia frames it as, oh, nothing has got through or if anything did, it's just a few things. You couldn't get the big stuff through. But every report seems to be like, yeah, entire racks are making it over. Yeah, we've got. And they have dummy servers, which is the craziest shit. They have just like fake ones.
Steve Burke
That was fascinating to me.
Ed Zitron
I wonder what's in them.
Steve Burke
Yeah, it is, I guess, brilliant. And it's a very dumb solution. I don't mean that in a mean way. Right. Like, it's just, how do we trick the inspectors? Because basically inspectors will come through to ensure compliance, make sure that people who handle large amounts of these restricted GPUs just like, I guess handling large amounts of. I don't know. If you're in the pharmaceuticals industry, there's probably some level of inspection also, and they inspect it, make sure it's compliant and sign off on it. And so you work with third parties for this process. And to pass inspection, they had, like you said, used hair dryers to remove serial numbers and labels, and then they had staged dummy servers that were compliant to kind of disguise the real operation that the DSA were.
Ed Zitron
So I guess it's only a physical inspection.
Steve Burke
Yeah, I'm not sure. I was wondering that too, because I did read the entire report and unfortunately the DOJ had screenshots of the warehouse, but they didn't. It was like screenshots of surveillance camera footage, but no actual surveillance camera footage I could find. So from everything we know, it looks like a physical inspection. I don't know that there's ever a power on. If there is, though, you could still do dummy servers for that, but I'm not sure you know, what it is they would.
Ed Zitron
It's gonna turn out that you do more thorough testing than the doj. Because think about it like, I mean, you do this, you know, obviously hundreds of times more than this about this than I do. But surely you could run a simple, like, load test on it or something that would like, be like, okay, this could do this.
Steve Burke
Yeah, I mean, you could. It's. It's easier to make something underperform, obviously, than overperform. So if they need to bring something down to look like it's a lower end part, they could. But the problem, you really run into one physical inspection, if someone knows what they're looking at, you'll be able to identify it anyway, depending on what that entails. But two is on the software side, you can look at firmware and you can look at the diagnostics and that stuff's pretty hard to trick. Normally you can spoof things, but anyone who knows. Yeah, it's just I'm not the government. What I can say is when I spoke to people in D.C. last year, they had their tech guy in the room. These are staffers of Congress. And he seemed pretty okay, actually. But there was a moment when I was talking about memory capacity. 96 gigabyte, 128, 48, things like that. And someone interrupted me and asked me to clarify if that number was the bandwidth, you know, and we're not talking in per second or anything, it's just gigabytes. Like no, that's capacity. And I needed to briefly explain kind of the, you know, the difference. And I'm sure they have people who understand this stuff. Maybe just wasn't in the room, but. But I did learn that they don't really have any sophisticated testing because the point I made was like look, restrict them or not, I don't really, I don't know, I don't know if I care. But if you're going to restrict it, like, at least do it in a way where it makes sense, where you can enforce it. And that would require some level of benchmarking because right now the restrictions are done entirely based on the claimed performance metrics from the manufacturer. And the manufacturer knows a lot more about these GPUs obviously than the government. They can tweak the knobs to comply. Just barely. Right. And so the point being, yes, I think any bedroom benchmarker who's just started their YouTube channel probably is more sophisticated. That's why Nvidia, they're in just such a domineering position because they're, they're up against people who don't understand their technology. So.
Ed Zitron
Oh, and I'm reading off the culprit report here. So numerous experts told us that Nvidia has long possessed the means to detect diversion, including pre sale signposts and Stanwood. Standard. Stanwood. Jesus. Standard KYC checks, eg recently incorporated customers suddenly placing large orders, sales without warranties, as well as post sale technical indicators, server IP data, mismatched server latency times and servers going dark without explanation. Cause that's the thing. I assume that Nvidia must have some connection to every gpu, right? Maybe not completely phone home.
Steve Burke
But yeah, they should know. I mean it's.
Ed Zitron
They do know. I'm not saying they know for sure because that would obviously be impossible to verify, but I don't see how they
Steve Burke
don't Know, I mean, it's the professor we spoke with last year for our documentary. I asked him the question, you know, do you think Nvidia knows? And his response was, how could they not? These things are very valuable. You'd think. Think they'd keep very good track of every single one of them.
Ed Zitron
I just, I'm wondering. So let's back to the wider AI bubble with Nvidia GPUs, especially like the. The next generation and then the generation after that. So Vera Rubin 1 and the Vera Rubin 2, which is the one megawatt scale racks. It's. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I talk about this stuff because when you actually think about it, if they indeed, I think it's moving to kyber racks. They call them the 1 megawatt ones.
Steve Burke
Okay. Kyber, I'm not familiar with.
Ed Zitron
Yeah, it's the next one. That will mean that the majority of. I mean, all data centers are useless. As in, you can't just install a 1 megawatt rack in a data center that's full of much more distributed, even 100 megawatts, because just the power requirements and it's just. It feels like at some point Nvidia is going to escalate too far, that they just won't like that. They will just think our customers have unlimited money and we'll do whatever we want.
Steve Burke
Yeah. I mean, in some way it seems like. I feel like they're starting to address some of that by having now the government as more of a potential customer as well. Where I don't know if it's like you run out of money from private equity and you turn to government or what is going on, but they definitely have gotten a lot more interested in military.
Ed Zitron
But even then, if the data centers aren't getting built because Oracle's giving them a bunch of GPUs. We know that.
Steve Burke
Right.
Ed Zitron
And it's just. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how this ends, but I'm also just. I don't know how this continues.
Steve Burke
I think to me, the real top indicator. And I don't know, I mean, like, the market's probably after I say that the market's gonna fucking rip for like the next three days or whatever, you know, But I'm not a market guy. But like, the point is, to me, the thing that jumped out as like, oh, this reminds me of like crypto when it was getting too crazy is this company span. Did you hear about them? I'd never heard of them before.
Ed Zitron
Oh, you mean the distributed thing?
Steve Burke
Yes.
Ed Zitron
Oh, my Christ.
Steve Burke
They want to do distributed like mini component of a data center right there in your yard, you know, right where you want it. With RTX Pro 6000, which is like, I hope they change the power connector from 12 volt high power so it doesn't catch on fire. But the plan, I don't really get it. Like, it's. It seems like. So the idea, the concept is we're going to put this nice box in your yard that kind of resembles like an air conditioning, you know, unit on the ground. And it's going to have hardware in it to distribute the compute capacity across a wider area where there's maybe easier access. You don't need to go through all these pesky zoning laws. And maybe you partner with an Hoa with 300 houses in the neighborhood or you partner with individual homeowners or whatever, and they say they'll give you discounts on your energy, which is silly because it's like the energy costs are going up because of data centers.
Ed Zitron
Yeah.
Steve Burke
So then we're gonna put a small one in your yard and discount it after we've increased it, which is like, at best you're back to where you were. And. Yeah. And the whole thing, I just. It's like the latency, it's not gonna work for massive important projects. It works for smaller stuff, I guess. But I. I don't understand how this idea comes to fruition. And I also wonder, how do you stop the tweakers from opening the boxes and stealing all the copper?
Ed Zitron
Because, like, yeah, there's that. And there's also. Oh, no. I was unfortunate enough to live in an HOA community several years ago.
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Ed Zitron
It was truly awful. And I'll tell you, even in a nice place, the electric is bullshit. Like, I had to replace the circuit breaker or whatever you call. Like, you're going to have to do that in every single house in the development and probably a bunch of the transmission lines just to make sure that. I don't know if they're generating Marmaduke with a 7 crashing a 747 like that is going to like, cause a blackout in the neighborhood. How do you prioritize power in the neighborhood?
Steve Burke
That was my question too. Like, in a winter storm, who gets priority? Right. And no, just run the GPUs.
Ed Zitron
Everyone will be warm.
Steve Burke
That's true.
Ed Zitron
Yeah, that's true. Nice and warm.
Steve Burke
You solved it.
Ed Zitron
There we are.
Steve Burke
Yeah, but that reminds me of the crypto stuff where I remember during one of The Crypto Peaks mining. There were these space heaters where it's like, buy our space heater. And it's actually just a miner and it makes you money, but also it's a space heater. And there was some other one I remember where it was. You know, the mind money goes to them. Like they get that, but you get free space heating. And it just sounds an awful lot like the distributed data center thing. I just, I don't know, it seems too we've like lost the plot on this, you know. Foreign.
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It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Irsay the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project, Hail Mary Massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from Earth.
Ray Porter
I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections and it's like, okay, yo yo yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no. At this point it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great because it served the story. People will say like oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah dude, me too.
Kal Penn
Listen to Hearsay the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Ed Zitron
Yeah, it's. It feels like one of those theoretical things that comes with the end of any era. Like towards the end of the Metaverse era, there was the whole thing about people buying millions of dollars of real estate. Yeah, that was one of the last ones. But the real, the real final one for me was the Other side. Do you remember Other side from the Bored Apes. The Bored Apes. The Bored Apes. The Other side.
Steve Burke
Yeah.
Ed Zitron
And it was just, they were like, look, we finally done it. We've got the Other side demo. And it was just a giant open world. We're just like you. And you didn't get to go in as the ape you owned.
Steve Burke
Oh, great. Okay.
Ed Zitron
You went as just a regular, not a regular ape. They were like these kind of gorillas rip offs.
Steve Burke
So they've realized, yeah, this is like, yeah, Metaverse. I had the same feeling where it's just. You look at it and you kind of go, do you. You guys know that video games have already existed?
Ed Zitron
Exactly. Like I was playing Everquest, like back in 1999. Like I, I know how this goes. And I didn't have to pay $100,000 for my character. I just had to give up most of my life.
Steve Burke
Yeah, I just had to play for
Ed Zitron
11 hours a day to make level 50. Those of us pre Kunak people K u N A r K this the Second expansion, it was much harder. Very unfair to those of us.
Steve Burke
I started at Planes of Power, so
Ed Zitron
damn, dude, Pop was good. Place of Power was like the end of. The end of how good that was. I like though the whole Planes of Time thing. I don't know if you followed that.
Steve Burke
I did a little bit, yeah.
Ed Zitron
The collapse of EverQuest with the fires of Heaven. Anyway, we shouldn't talk about that. So I'll talk about. But with the other side, Metaverse, that was what I think was the top. Was when everyone went in this big session. But what's crazy is they are still doing this. They're still doing the Metaverse, but they're still going to limp along which. Which I think is what's going to happen with the AI bubble. I think it bursts, but there's going to be like a cloister of perverts who still try and keep this going and it's just insanely expensive.
Steve Burke
That's a brilliant string of words you've just come up with that.
Ed Zitron
Yes. That's just right off the dough. Just think it's inspired by these people because it's like, have you been. I realized someone off the topic of GPUs, have you been following this GitHub copilot thing as well?
Steve Burke
I only just saw the headlines. The only GitHub thing I've been following lately has been the Bamboo Lab situation. But I have not seen the one you're talking about.
Ed Zitron
No, it's just that they're switching them to token based billing on June 1 and the subreddit is just people being like, hey, so I'm able to burn $1,000 worth of tokens for $10. Does anyone know if there's an alternative to do this? And just people being like, yeah, anthropic, I guess. And it's just people realizing in real time how much this costs. I think the. I think you're going to see a rush of people to try and do this on hardware and a rush of people to try and like buy up old GPUs and try and do the post.com bubble thing. But it's not going to work because there is no. There is absolutely no. Like, there's no way to make this economically viable. And I think the last. It's going to be like a. Well, I was about to say the Alamo Star, but like a. Just like a final stand of just guys burning out the remaining capital until it all falls apart.
Steve Burke
I really do wonder. I mean it's. It's the PC industry and The DIY industry.
Ed Zitron
Yeah.
Steve Burke
Seems to be the first casualty of AI and it's, it's like AI is born and then it immediately kills the thing it was born from, you know.
Ed Zitron
Yeah.
Steve Burke
And so I'm not sure, like, even if the bubble bursts, there's going to be a lot of damage first there.
Ed Zitron
That was, I was going to, I was going to ask, like, what? Let's assume the bubble bursts and the AI rolls back and the Nvidia is no longer only selling those GPUs. Isn't there like a significant amount of damage to the supply chain of PCs?
Steve Burke
Oh, yeah. I mean, people can't do business with this climate because it's interesting where RAM prices are a lot to do with where we're at now with the PC industry. But a lot of, I guess people who aren't in PC building may or may not realize, but there's a lot of other component manufacturers who have absolutely no control over any of this. So even though the RAM is expensive and the GPUs are hard to get or expensive, and whatever the company that makes cool RT computer cases, they don't have any control here. And so they're just along for the ride. And historically those types of companies, liquid coolers that, you know, enthusiast air coolers cases, whatever, they live and die by GPU and CPU launch cycles to where they need to have their best product lined up for the new architecture launch. So if something comes out now, then 18 to 24 months from now, they need to have their next big thing ready. And now the cycles are lengthening for those.
Ed Zitron
What do you mean by that? As in there is they're skipping a year of consumer GPUs.
Steve Burke
The architectural cadence for Nvidia has slowed. For a while they were like roughly 18 months. For a little bit they tended to average 24 months between major architectural launches and now they're moving closer to 30 months. And for a company that relies on that GPU to be there to spur sales for enthusiast PC builds, for example, that's a long time to wait, you know, for your next big wave of customers. And if you sell cases and coolers, even motherboards, you can't really self generate that much momentum like you can if you launch the best case ever, killer product in the middle of a cycle. Yeah, you'll do okay, but there's just far fewer people building a computer at that time versus waiting for the next big launch. Because normally it's a GPU that triggers.
Ed Zitron
So that I understand. So a new GPU comes out every Two years, you're saying? And that launch is what spurs people to buy a bunch of new cases. I know this sounds obvious, I just want to spell it out.
Steve Burke
Right, so.
Ed Zitron
And that cycle is now broken.
Steve Burke
Yeah, because it's that launch that people use that as a trigger for when they want to build their new system. Nvidia or AMD. Same for CPUs. But you know, the thing that really dictates your performance, broadly speaking for most people is the CPU or the gpu. And once you've built, there's not a lot of reason to change it until the next big thing comes out. So there's that where everyone's along for the ride for the silicon launches. And then there's also the memory prices, where even companies like G Skill, which is a memory stick maker, so they don't make the actual memory, the silicon, but they put it on a stick and put a heat sink on it and sell it. Even companies like them, we did an interview with them and they're down just as much as the case companies for revenue, even though their stuff is going up in price. And it's because they're not getting priority and that's the data centers. And they also obviously if they increase their retail cost, fewer people can buy it. And so you just run into this volume trap where they just can't move enough stuff because no one's buying anything. So a lot of the companies we spoke with are down on the year 40 to 60% and then year on year about 70%.
Ed Zitron
God, it's very fucking grim. Like what's left at the end of this? Like genuinely what's left.
Steve Burke
Yeah, a lot of really talented people have lost their jobs or will be losing their jobs after Computex, which is in two weeks. Like some of the best designers I know in the industry and the companies, you know, they can't keep them employed because they're not selling anything.
Ed Zitron
So that's fucking grim. Like, I mean, can any of this recover afterwards? Because I get the sense that Nvidia, let's say they walk away from GPUs at the industrial scale, I guess they could return to gamers. But reallocating all of that, I don't know, Capex, I guess it would be,
Steve Burke
yeah, they just can't get that much money out of it. So if Nvidia wants to be anything like it is now, yeah, maybe they, whatever, ship a couple billion dollars more stuff to gamers. But it's just the.
Ed Zitron
Does that revenue exist? Is there that much revenue in gamers?
Steve Burke
Yeah, and There is billions of dollars, but there's not tens of billions of dollars, you know.
Ed Zitron
Yeah. There's not $50 billion a quarter.
Steve Burke
Right. Yeah. And. And so I don't know, even if they kind of come back, it's also going to leave the market in shambles where whoever survives at the end of this, it's not clear if those are the companies that are going to be the pro consumer companies, because there are actually a lot of companies that do the right thing for consumers in the DIY space, but they're smaller and I don't know that they can survive this type of thing. But if there's a situation where currently to me it feels like a new player, as a new GPU maker would have to bail out the DIY industry with something or a government would have to come in and do some kind of antitrust or whatever bust, which isn't going to happen. So I'm not really sure. And the memory prices aren't solved with either of those two things. So it's. Unless it seems like the AI bubble has to pop. I don't know who's holding the needle though.
Ed Zitron
Yeah, I mean, when this comes out, it will be the day of Nvidia earnings. So there's no point of ever. They'll probably beat and raise again. And it's interesting because I. Without saying anything definitive, it is taking the piss a bit like, just like it's like beat and raise every single time. Like without fail more than analysts can ever say. All while nowhere near as many data centers get built as the chips that have been shipped. It feels like something is gonna pop here. It feels like something weird is happening. I think that's actually the best word. It's just things feel very goddamn weird.
Steve Burke
It doesn't seem. I know markets aren't rational. This seems like beyond irrational. It seems artificial to me.
Ed Zitron
Yes. I mean, apropos I guess for the name, but it's like. But it's. It's also all in pursuit of what exactly? Because all of these. Because at least with gaming people have fun. I think AI feels like the least joyful thing ever. Like, it's just. It's just when you would like the. We talked about this before as well, but this year's gtc, when he's like, yeah, it's a Gen Tick. It's Nemo Claw. Hey, remember, you remember Open Claw? Remember that shit? It's like when that like, remember this. If today Nvidia beats and races which they very well made and if they don't wee but let's say, remember their big announcement at last. GTC was. We made open claw. Like, this is what. This is why people are buying all the GPUs. This is the reason. I don't know. Something's up. Something's up, man.
Steve Burke
I will say there was. If anybody needs something to feel positive and find some joy, this is a good way to.
Ed Zitron
Please, please.
Steve Burke
There was a great clip that was circulated yesterday today of one of the former Google, I think, CEO, right. Who did a commencement speech.
Ed Zitron
Oh, yeah.
Steve Burke
And he mentions AI and immediately gets booed.
Ed Zitron
And then that happened as well to some McKinseyite person at another school who I don't remember. Some woman went up and had the same thing. And she just looked. In both cases, they looked so surprised.
Steve Burke
Yeah, they looked like. And that's how, you know they're out of touch. I did see some one comment where a guy was like, oh, these billionaires don't care about getting booed. You know, they get so much money or whatever. I actually, I do think they care. I think if you're at that level, you're a megalomaniac. And like, that probably deeply bothers them, which is great because it's like you can't take anything else from them. So at least make sure they hear the boos echo when they try to sleep at night.
Ed Zitron
Well, that's the thing as well. Like, I don't think anyone is immune to a group of people booing them. No, I think actually that is the best thing we can do. But I think it's funny as well because I was watching that as we wrap up here. I was watching that and I was thinking, yeah, it used to be that these fuck nuts would get on stage, they'd be like, it's all about hard work. And I remember when I sat like by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and we're all doing business together and we were just like, wow, I love doing hard work so much. And everyone claps. It's like, wow, if I work hard, I could be one of these guys. Even though that's not how that works right now. It's just like, pay for AI, you don't do this, you're dead. Everything.
Steve Burke
You know, she has her commencement speech like ten days from now.
Ed Zitron
Lisa Boone. But that's the thing. Lisa's. That's. I will be honest. Lisa Su's the biggest disappointment of them because in my history of gaming and PC gaming, AMD always seemed more normal.
Steve Burke
Yeah, she seemed like a fucking turncoat. I think for a Lot of people,
Ed Zitron
but she turned them around, and now she's just like, nah, right into the void with you.
Steve Burke
Thanks for getting me where I needed to be.
Ed Zitron
Now I can make a 300. Do you hear about their deal with Crusoe? Crusoe's buying a bunch of GPUs, and then AMD is going to rent them back.
Steve Burke
Okay.
Ed Zitron
He's so cool. That needs to end. But, no, I think that the booing thing is good. I think we need more of that. I think. I think it's necessary because they clearly are not reading anything that people are actually saying or talking to people or having any experiences outside of the perimeter of security guards that surround them at all times.
Steve Burke
Like, Gallagher change. Like, how the schools work on their own programs. I mean, you don't know, like, that kind of response. You know, people might look at it, and it can have a ripple effect where maybe people watching this commencement speaker get booed realize like, oh, there's a little more nuance to this AI thing beyond just make money and, you know, replace humans. Yeah.
Ed Zitron
I mean, I've done a few things with a few universities, and it's interesting because it's like a 50, 50 split of the people who clearly don't do any work at the university. So people at the top are like, oh, like, okay, well, here we go. Yeah, this is the best thing ever. I love AI so much. And then everyone else who actually does the work is like, yeah, you've never used that. You've never used this. You talk to it, and it tells you things you like to hear. And you're like, this is amazing. And I think that you're right that the booing is the only thing that will get to these people. But I also think that there are some of them who are like, well, they just don't get it yet. And I think if an executive says that, look, the Saw movies, I feel like Jigsaw goes a little too far. But I think the idea of just keeping someone in one place and explaining something vigorously could work on them. I'm not saying we totally copy Jigsaw. I'm just saying that the focused thing of, no, you need to listen might work. Or alternatively, we just change the law so that CEOs have personal liability.
Steve Burke
Right. But just. Just for. Just for speaking of liability. Not. Not fully endorsing Jigsaw's methods.
Ed Zitron
No, no, no, no. We. We're just like.
Steve Burke
They just. They don't get him. The people don't get him.
Ed Zitron
Exactly. I think that Jigsaw. Jigsaw went too far, but the focus that Jigsaw got from people is something could be learned. I think that that's a good place to wrap it as well there this anti saw anti Jigsaw, but considering all managerial effects. Steve, where can people find you?
Steve Burke
YouTube.com gamersnexus and I hope, I hope when the FBI visits both of us to ask about our comments on Jigsaw, you'll have me back on yes, and
Ed Zitron
just to be clear to the to everyone, that was a bit. We are joking and we're not talking with any specificity. Anyway, thank you so much. You've been listening to Better Offline. We're back back with a monologue in a few days. Cheers. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matto Sausky. You can check out more of his music and audio projects a bit. Matasowski.com m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezeteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed at? To visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. 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
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What?
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Podcast: Better Offline
Host: Ed Zitron (Cool Zone Media, iHeartPodcasts)
Guest: Steve Burke (GamersNexus)
Date: May 20, 2026
In this week’s episode, tech industry critic Ed Zitron welcomes Steve Burke from GamersNexus for an unfiltered, insightful conversation dissecting the collision course between AI’s explosive growth and the traditional PC hardware industry. Using Nvidia’s ascendance and corporate anxieties as a springboard, they dig into the tech giant’s relationship with China, hardware black markets, data center bottlenecks, and the knock-on effects on DIY PC makers and the future of consumer computing. Throughout, Ed and Steve mix humor and sharp skepticism, asking what remains after the AI gold rush – and who (if anyone) gets left standing.
On Jensen Huang’s Defensiveness:
“Let me tell you something. When someone’s saying they’re not upset that they’re not a loser, they are. That’s them saying it.”
– Ed Zitron (03:55)
The Cloud-Only Data Center Vision:
“[Jensen’s] telling [Stanford] to fuck off and use laptops to connect to a cloud provider...Kind of seems like they’re being a lot more open with the concept that owning the devices is dead and it’s all going to cloud. And that should scare a lot of people.”
– Steve Burke (13:31)
Class Divide in Hardware Access:
“You start to see...segregation by class in terms of access to hardware. Although that’s maybe not unique to this industry.”
– Steve Burke (15:04)
Skepticism about Nvidia’s Cloud Gaming Claims:
“Have they ever succeeded with any kind of external thing other than hardware? I just, I don’t believe that they have nearly as many [users], even with an ad support thing.”
– Ed Zitron (16:13)
On Hardware Black Market and Smuggling:
“Wally Liao was going...into the warehouses and just kind of hair drying off the serial number...I love it. I think it’s hilarious.”
– Ed Zitron (23:44)
“And they have dummy servers, which is the craziest shit. They have just like fake ones.”
– Ed Zitron (26:56)
Market Top Indicators:
“It reminds me of crypto when it was getting too crazy. This company Span...wants to do distributed like mini component of a data center right there in your yard, you know, right where you want it.”
– Steve Burke (34:25)
On Public Backlash Against Tech CEOs:
“There was a great clip...a former Google CEO who did a commencement speech. And he mentions AI and immediately gets booed.”
– Steve Burke (52:34)
“That probably deeply bothers them, which is great because you can’t take anything else from them, so at least make sure they hear the boos echo when they try to sleep at night.”
– Steve Burke (53:09)
On the DIY PC Industry Crisis:
“A lot of really talented people have lost their jobs or will be losing their jobs after Computex...companies, you know, they can’t keep them employed because they’re not selling anything.”
– Steve Burke (48:30)
Where to Find Steve Burke:
YouTube: GamersNexus
Perfect for listeners seeking a critical, witty, and deeply informed perspective on the future of PCs, AI, and the tech industry’s self-inflicted wounds.