NVIDIAdrome with Steve Burke of GamersNexus

Summary

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Better Offline – “NVIDIAdrome with Steve Burke of GamersNexus”

Podcast: Better Offline (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Host: Ed Zitron
Guest: Steve Burke (Gamers Nexus)
Date: March 25, 2026
Topic: The shifting focus and controversies surrounding NVIDIA, the state of the tech industry, data center hype, AI “slop,” hardware futures, industry grifts, and the broader implications for consumers and markets.

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Episode Overview

Ed Zitron welcomes Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus for a deep-dive into NVIDIA’s GTC announcements, the company’s pivot from gaming to AI and data centers, tech industry hype cycles, AI-generated art and music, GPU hoarding, data center construction grifts, and recent scandals. They examine how industry narratives are crafted, why so much current innovation feels empty or harmful, and whether any of it actually makes sense or benefits users. The tone is biting, irreverent, and deeply skeptical of current tech leaders and their grand promises.

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Key Topics & Discussions

1. GTC 2026, NVIDIA’s AI Focus, and Gamer Backlash

[02:18 – 07:28]

• GTC’s shift from hardware to AI and empty “validation-seeking” presentations.
• The controversial new DLSS “AI slop filter” feature alienating gamers.
  • Steve Burke: “They’ve now attached this basically Instagram 2019 face filter to DLSS and kind of tarnished the name with something totally unrelated.” [05:32]
• DLSS progression: started useful for upscaling, but new filters change game aesthetics, strip out artist intent.
  • Steve: “You’re stripping all of the character out of the artwork.” [06:41]

2. Pointless Hype & Executive Disconnect

[07:28 – 12:10]

• Steve recounts how pushback against the DLSS update was unprecedented, noting larger scandals by tech companies have drawn less ire.
• General confusion over new AI features like “Open Claw”; NVIDIA’s messaging seems unmoored from reality:
  • Ed Zitron: “I cannot get a straight answer as to why you should use an open claw.” [08:30]
• Executives’ bizarre talking points – e.g., Jensen Huang’s claim that “AI will make us all busier.”
  • Ed: “If you say them both in a sentence, you sound insane.” [09:57]

3. Empty AI Promises, “Agentic” Nonsense, and Industry Talent Drain

[10:36 – 15:28]

• Engineers and former gaming tech experts are shifted into AI divisions, sometimes to their own loss.
  • Steve: “It’s a little sad for me seeing these people move over to purely AI in these big, important roles... I have nothing I respect about their work anymore.” [10:36]
• New announcements focus on buzzwords over substance — “agentic AI,” “agentic frontier.” Feels like Mad Libs.
• NVIDIA now “the AI show”—hardware and gaming take a backseat.

4. Military AI, Data Center Bubble & the Death of Consumer Hardware

[15:35 – 22:20]

• NVIDIA signaling to the US government—Jensen’s comments about AI in Middle East conflict.
• Discussion of NVIDIA’s involvement in military/war tech (Jetson modules in Ukraine, Palantir connections).
• The slow reality of “building the future”: Data center construction vastly lags public claims.
  • Steve: “It’s the branding of data centers as AI factories ... it’s just a bunch of computers in a room, you know, and there’s like 15 guys on the floor.” [30:54]
  • OpenAI’s Wisconsin facility “underway” with a single steel beam: “At this rate ... this will be done in like 2029 maybe.” [32:16]
• Most “AI-related job creation” is fictional – jobs are flown in, not local or lasting.

5. Supermicro Scandal, GPU Smuggling, and Media Blindness

[32:51 – 38:42]

• DOJ arrests Supermicro’s Wally Liao (co-founder) for smuggling GPUs to China by altering serial numbers.
  • Ed: “Just to be clear, Wally Liao ... resigned in 2018, rejoined as a consultant ... and now he is in jail.”
• Steve is skeptical NVIDIA didn’t know – GPUs “phone home,” serial number manipulation isn’t enough to fool them.
  • Steve: “There is no way that NVIDIA couldn’t have known this was happening.” [34:01]
• Media largely ignores the implications; possibly due to NVIDIA’s influence, lack of technical expert press, or unwillingness to challenge “adult Disneyland.”
  • Steve: “I think there’s ... an issue of ‘what’s a Supermicro’ for a lot of reporters.” [36:16]

6. Rampant Grift, Data Center Madness & Imaginary Returns

[39:03 – 46:35]

• Bubble economics: hardware orders for data centers that don’t exist; promise-based deals built on nothing.
• OpenAI’s pact with private equity: guaranteeing 17.5% returns just for “storing ChatGPT” on portfolio companies...which no one seems to understand.
  • Ed: “This whole thing feels like an exploitation of ignorance.” [24:57]
• Data center buildout stats are wildly misleading (“240 gigawatts” boasted, “5 gigawatts” actually under construction).

7. AI’s Actual Usefulness (or Lack Thereof) & Tech Exec Delusions

[47:05 – 58:21]

• Discussion of AI-generated art scandals (Crimson Desert), how AI is pushed as “inevitable” by out-of-touch execs.
• AI models’ actual utility: Steve’s frustrations trying to get Claude to generate working InDesign templates—after many hours, a basic tutorial was vastly more effective.
  • Steve: “I spent like eight hours on it ... ended up after that experiment ... I watched like three tutorials and within two and a half hours I had done what I wanted myself.” [51:00]
• AI boosters always shift blame to user “prompts” or suggest you’re at fault for its failures.

8. Destruction of Consumer Hardware, Memory Cartels, and Antitrust Failure

[59:40 – 63:06]

• Consequences of AI demand: consumer PC component prices soar, smaller hardware companies flounder.
• DRAM cartel history – industry corruption, price-fixing, and slap-on-the-wrist penalties.
  • Steve: “My favorite part ... there were several people, there were like over 100 people involved ... and if you look up what happened to them after, a lot of them got promoted. One ... became CEO. Samsung Europe.” [61:41]
• US antitrust is “dead”; hardware and gaming consumers pay the price.
• Likelihood that the future is cloud gaming via rented access as retail hardware dries up.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “They’ve now attached this basically Instagram 2019 face filter to DLSS...”
  – Steve Burke, 05:32

• “I cannot get a straight answer as to why you should use an open claw.”
  – Ed Zitron, 08:30

• “It’s easy to hide money [in data center construction]... the meme is buying GPUs that don’t exist to put in data centers that aren’t built.”
  – Steve Burke, 39:03

• “There is no way that NVIDIA couldn’t have known this was happening.”
  – Steve Burke, 34:01

• “At this rate ... this will be done in like 2029 maybe.”
  – Ed Zitron, re: OpenAI’s Port Washington facility, 32:16

• “You don’t get stock when you buy a graphics card!”
  – Ed Zitron, 26:20

• “The best use cases [for LLMs] have still been for browsing Chinese internet or ... research. But so far, that's pretty much the only use case I've had.”
  – Steve Burke, 57:01

• “Only the curious will survive. Shut the fuck up.”
  – Ed Zitron, reacting to CEO AI hype on Twitter, 58:42

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Timeline of Important Segments

• [02:18 – 07:28] – GTC recap, DLSS “slop filter,” pushback from gamers
• [08:30 – 12:10] – “Open Claw,” AI vaporware and exec word salads
• [15:35 – 22:20] – NVIDIA’s ties to military projects, Jetson in Ukraine, data center build realities
• [32:51 – 38:42] – Supermicro scandal, GPU smuggling, NVIDIA/press complicity
• [39:03 – 46:35] – Data center construction grifts, OpenAI equity deals, industry self-delusion
• [47:05 – 58:21] – AI-generated art scandal, dumb LLM use cases, failures of coding with AI
• [59:40 – 63:06] – Suppressed consumer PC market, memory price cartels, soft antitrust
• [63:20 – 65:12] – Future of PC gaming and hardware; wrap-up and plugs for forthcoming Gamers Nexus documentary

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Takeaways

• The Future is Hype, Not Hardware: NVIDIA has largely abandoned consumers in favor of serving cloud AI bubbles, military contracts, and ephemeral “agentic” tech narratives.
• AI as a Grift: Most AI advancements shown are either “slop,” cheap labor replacements, or abstract “potential” with little to offer users—yet used to justify massive spending and exec compensation.
• Data Center Mania: Media, investors, and companies all gleefully participate in data center construction theater, masking slow real progress behind wild projections.
• Scandals Go Unreported: GPU smuggling, supply chain corruption, and price fixing receive little scrutiny; media often lacks expertise or motivation to investigate.
• Consumer Squeeze: Everyday PC building is increasingly unaffordable due to AI’s hardware monopolization; a bleak future where cloud rental becomes the default looms.
• Skepticism as Survival: In an era of endless buzzwords and empty promises, the only constant is corporate self-dealing and a relentless search for validation, market value, or just the next grift—at the expense of actual innovation or utility.

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For more on these topics, check out the full episode or subscribe to Better Offline and Gamers Nexus. Steve’s upcoming documentary on Huawei is teased for release soon.

Transcript

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[Steve Burke]

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[Steve Burke]

I care because I don't want to leave anybody behind. I oversee one of the biggest resource center in UnitedHealthcare. I see people walked in my office every day just like my parents. They have no idea about the health care. I feel like they are my uncles, aunties. I treated people like family. I'm Brian and I'm committed to care.

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[Steve Burke]

Call zone Media.

[Ed Zetron]

Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zetron. Better Offline. Subscribe to the newsletter Buy one of our beautiful new Data Center T shirts and you and join me in welcoming the wonderful and incredible Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus, who joins us today to talk about how great everything is.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I might buy one. We have the new Micro Slop shirt.

[Ed Zetron]

Oh, yes.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

What happened there? What happened? Why was everyone upset? This part just completely passed me by.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

DLSS has some things. It's done pretty well over time. So it started as basically an upscaler, and then it Progressed to where there's been times where DLSS can be better than native while improving the performance just because of the way games render different things. So, I mean, there's certain types of, for example, fence posts or grates or things that have a lot of repeating patterns, straight lines. Sometimes you have trouble with that at low resolution. So DLSS can upscale and sometimes even repair these things when they're rendered in a way that's just not good. But they've now attached this, this basically Instagram 2019 face filter to DLSS and kind of tarnish the name with something totally unrelated. It looks like they're trying to say, look, AI, it has uses. Please keep the bubble.

[Ed Zetron]

And so it seems like it's not just like adding frames, it's attempting to fill in details. It's almost like yassifying in some cases.

[Steve Burke]

Yes.

[Ed Zetron]

This is really horrible.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. It. So it. Basically what it's doing. So they originally said that it changes. It uses color and some vectors on the screen to then improve things by using AI generation to do whatever it is they think is improving it. What they're actually doing.

[Ed Zetron]

Nice.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. They're changing the entire feel of the game. And I mean, you know, this where AI generated images, especially when you ask them to be photorealistic, they. They all pretty much look the same, right? Like.

[Ed Zetron]

Yes.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. There's no style, there's no character to it. And whether or not it's useful for people, I don't even care. I think what most people cared about was you're stripping all of the character out of the artwork. And, you know, part of the art for video games is you have to work within these strict confines to make it renderable. Yeah. And they strip it out and they replace it with something that just looks like the same slop everywhere. And Nvidia's initial defense was, well, but the artists can control it. And I think the answer to that is I find it very unlikely that the artists make these decisions. I think this is probably an executive level corporate decision of we're going to partner with Nvidia to use this thing. And if you're an artist.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

Yeah, I think everyone's just kind of fucking tired of Nvidia at this point because isn't really clear what Nvidia is doing other than selling more stuff and it isn't clear who is actually using that stuff. I mean I just the indignity of watching a company with like a 3,4 trillion dollars market cap talking about Open Claw truly like to this day I cannot get a straight answer as to why you should use an open claw.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

Also, these aren't thoughts that connect together. If you say them both in a sentence, you sound insane. I just this. I'm sure you haven't really explored Open Claw much. I certainly haven't wanted to, but it appears to just be. What if I turned over my computer to a large language model and nothing really changed? That's long and short of it. So. Which is what makes it so insane that Nvidia is like GTC used to be, a place they announced hardware and new technology, not hey guys, the latest open source thing you're going to forget about in six months. That is now the most important thing

[Steve Burke]

in Nvidia's stack it's really weird because we've covered Nvidia for so long that I've met a lot of the engineers there. And the people who are running these AI departments now are at hardware and software levels, are people that I worked with on the gaming side anywhere from 15 years ago until even more recently, like three years ago. And it's. It's a little sad for me seeing these people move over to purely AI in these big, important roles, and it's just like, I don't know, they're smart people, and I have nothing I respect about their work anymore for the most part, because of the just, I think, sort of feckless rollout and widespread damage that it's causing. And it's interesting where you see Nvidia moving their pieces around like a chessboard, where they're, okay, this guy is really good at this specific type of research. Let's strip him out of the thing that he's been doing really well for 10 years in gaming or whatever, and put him into AI, you know, and then out comes like, the DLSS.

[Ed Zetron]

Nemo claw. Nemo. Nemo Claw. Nemo Claw. This literally, like, four months ago, no one knew what the fuck this was. Like, the guy who made Openclaw sold hisself to OpenAI. Cool for him, I guess. And now this is like, in. Now this is the most important thing to Nvidia now. Like, what's.

[Steve Burke]

It's just.

[Ed Zetron]

It's so strange. It's. It's just very strange. They did a song at the end of GTC as well. They had a song I saw Take him, who's a Disgrace to Journalism, Sorry, Tay, who was like, not gonna lie, it's just kind of a banger may go to the.

[Steve Burke]

Said the song is a banner.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I didn't hear it, and it was not good.

[Ed Zetron]

I heard it and it made me angry.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about this when AI music covers first started to really propagate on YouTube. And, yeah, I remember the first one I ran into, it was like slipknot reimagined as soul, like blues soul. And I did. Actually, that was the first one I saw. I listened to it and I was like, damn, this is not bad. And it was only 30 seconds into it where you realize the horrors of music and entertainment. The entire currency of it is attention. And you only have so much time you can give to listening to Music in a day. And for each of these AI songs that someone's gonna listen to. And even worse for the real artists, if people start liking them, that's one less real artist who may already be like a starving artist archetype who doesn't get that view or that listen.

[Ed Zetron]

And I've heard some of those AI things and it's always like the first 10, 20 seconds, you're like, okay, this is. And then nothing changes. It's just very repetitious. But you're right, it only exists as a kind of fishing lure to get people in, to just kind of hear in the background is just patently evil. It's just wafting evil at the moment. And even by the standards of regular software, it's not really clear what any of these companies are doing anymore. Like I gtc. I know if I describe it as exciting, but it felt like they were selling real things every year.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

And now it's just you. Do you want an open claw? Oh, actually, I forgot my favorite part. So Jensen went on the all in podcast. You know, the, the classic guys we don't think of anything happening to. And he went on, he was like, what? So what should happen now is that you should give engineers, when they join your company, $250,000 worth of tokens a year. And that's part of their comp package.

[Steve Burke]

It's like, I'm sure, I'm sure you would love that.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I mean, I remember pieces together going to old GTCs, like some of the really early ones and announcements, the exciting announcements were, you know, they'd have the Shield like handheld gaming device. Or they'd have the Shield TV, if you prefer that they. Sometimes some GPUs. Sometimes it would be quadro or professional class. Sometimes it'd be gaming class. Yeah. And it was pretty interesting. And they had servers, too, a lot of the time. And they were also interesting. It wasn't pitched the same way, but the biggest thing about it, and I actually really did like the show, was there are a lot of panels where you could do really technical discussions, and they still have those, but it's just completely transformed into. Now it's the AI show and there's like almost nothing else there, so we don't even bother going anymore. Total company shift. I mean, they are. They're really all in on this. Speaking of things that Jensen, though, has studies all in on. I don't know if you even want to get into this one, but he made the comment in the all in. I think it was podcast about AI uses in the Middle east, given the current situation.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

Isaac. It's not Isaac. There's the. They have a specific. Jetson.

[Steve Burke]

Oh, yeah, Jetson.

[Ed Zetron]

Jetson's already involved in I can't say specifically because truly, but I. I swear to God, I heard it was involved in some sort of war related census that might be.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

Yeah, that's the thing though. It's like they talk about the Nemo Cloron, they talk about doing war stuff and they talk about all these things when the only 90% of their revenues from these fucking GPUs. It's not even, it's not even a case of like, oh, they're making like 50% of the revenue. All, pretty much all of their revenue comes from the GPUs. And just before we got on, I have. I've been trying to answer a question of how many data centers have actually been built in the last year. It is a very difficult question. But from what I can tell based on like, it was like 4 or 5 gigawatts might have gone online, which means we're running at about. It takes about a year to install like half a year's worth of GPU cells.

[Steve Burke]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Like, I. Yeah, I mean, it might be like that. There might be a chain reaction, you know, just.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

That whole thing was stupid to begin.

[Ed Zetron]

So. It's so cool.

[Steve Burke]

Just a shitty video game. Like, it's not even. You could l play a video game and it would be better.

[Ed Zetron]

It's just. But the great thing is, is they are no longer bringing it to Horizon Worlds to VR, but they are also bringing it back for an indeterminate amount of time. I. I just, I don't think the tech industry knows what it's doing ever anymore. I think that they just wake up one day and they're like, what what do we what do we do today? What do we do? Fucking why we buy more GPUs that what do you like that? All right, I'm back talking about Quince and their great clothes that I've loved both before and after they became an advertiser. Most recently, their responsible down Hooded Parker has been saving my life as New York oscillates between beautiful sunny days and punishing wind and snow seemingly at random. It's warm, it's light and it was $200 and feels like a high end piece of clothing. I really love quints. They have high quality essentials. Jackets, jeans, T shirts, cashmere sweaters and even travel gear too. And they keep prices low by selling direct to consumer, cutting out the middleman to save you money. And they only partner with factories that meet rigorous standards of craftsmanship and ethical production. Right now go to quints.com better for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it and you will now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to Q U I n c e.com/better for free shipping a 365 day returns Gwyn Stockham/better hey, it's Ryan Seacrest

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[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

Well I think we're, that came out just before we, we got on as well. We're finally getting Enron shit though because OpenAI is trying to offer. They tried to do this spurious joint venture thing with private equity firms that. And they're like well what we'll do is we'll raise money and then the private equity firm will pay us in advance store chat GPT across their portfolio companies.

[Steve Burke]

Right?

[Ed Zetron]

And as part of this deal OpenAI is guaranteeing a minimum, minimum return of 17.5%. Now you may be think that's a good question. And also a 17.5% return on what I've read the, I've read the Reuters article four or five times. I cannot work it out. I just, this whole thing feels like an exploitation of ignorance. It's just like how many reporters actually read the emails they get or when they write up a story, how hard do they think about it?

[Steve Burke]

I had a, I had a reporter from another, from a business focused publication email and asked to talk about Nvidia and basically the reporter was interested in learning from our perspective. Why is it that gamers and why is it that consumers are so mad at Nvidia and the first question that was asked of me was, did. When did gamers. For like, did. Did gamers notice or were they happy about Nvidia's stock going up when it started to go up? And I just like, let's start from scratch. The consumers 10 years ago weren't paying attention to Nvidia stock. You know, they wanted to buy GPUs to play video games. Like, people weren't. You weren't interested in the GPU for the stock price.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

I. Yeah. And they're just like, that's how they do stock buybacks, but each time they sell a gpu, they buy back. It's just. I love it. But that's. I actually think that that question is really indicative of the media problem with Nvidia, where it's just like, oh, Nvidia, right. So every single person who's ever used Nvidia cares about the stock, right? That's not true. Like, most people should not think about the stock market.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, why?

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Oh, yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

Despite learning what it was around two weeks ago.

[Steve Burke]

Right.

[Ed Zetron]

Like, they, It's. I'm now, oh, look at the strait. And did you see the venture capitalist whose solution to it was to just build a big road. It's just there's this little, like, blob, like the kind of the, the tip of it.

[Steve Burke]

Does he understand how. How large?

[Ed Zetron]

It's fine. You just draw a giant road from like the coast of Emon to the coast of. Of the uae. And you also. There's just a bunch of infrastructure.

[Steve Burke]

Infrastructure is famously quick to build.

[Ed Zetron]

Exactly. Especially during a massive assault from a large. A nation the size of Alaska.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

But on top of that I assume he has some way around the giant rocks either side and also a way for the boats to get in. It's just that easy. But I genuinely think that that's the era though because people like. Yeah, you know there's like 240 gigawatts of data centers being built right now and it's great. Actually there's only about 5 gigawatts in America that's actually under construction.

[Steve Burke]

But you know, because if you look at maps of like announced or planned or hopeful data centers, there's thousands of them in the U.S. you know.

[Ed Zetron]

Yeah, there's. Oh God. I had it. I was just working on it before I came on. But it's something like there's 240 gigawatts but let's see. Yet it. It's very, very, very strange that. Yeah, there's about 5 gigawatts that actually under construction despite like 60 or 70. That's allegedly meant. There's meant to be like 13 to 14 gigawatts. That actually the. There's meant to be, I think 14 that comes on this year.

[Steve Burke]

Mm.

[Ed Zetron]

From. Yeah, sightline. Sorry. I'm gonna get it right this time because I actually found it in my notes. I'm sorry everyone. 16 gigawatts of capacity was slated to come online in 2026 across 140 projects but only 5 gigawatts is currently under construction. And that's under construction. That's under construction. That's just being built. It doesn't mean they're actually going to be built. And the only reason this is happening is so that we can keep in video inflated.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

And on top of that even the jobs supposedly created by building them, they're all flown in like they're not Local, it's not like you get local builders. Well, Stargate, Abilene, they've just flown in people to just move in to town. So I guess like that helps the economy. And then when it turns on, which it never will, there'll be like 70 jobs.

[Steve Burke]

I mean that's the thing, right? Is like, it's the, when it turns on where, okay, you get this transient burst. Great. But this isn't, it's not like you're, I think the branding of data centers as AI factories, which is insane by the way, but I think the branding of it, it's like blue collar washing or something. It's like they, they, they're trying to make it sound like a, I don't know, like, like the grit and the hard work and like the manpower you get out of a traditional factory. Except it's a bunch of computers in a room, you know, and there's like 15 guys on the floor who are just keeping them turned on, which is a real job and can be an important job. But it's not a factory.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

That was my. Just one beam. I saw your tweet. That was like probably my favorite tweet of all time.

[Ed Zetron]

When you put that out, just a single, just. And at this rate. Great. This will be done in like 2029 maybe.

[Steve Burke]

The beam was almost entirely in the ground.

[Ed Zetron]

Yes. And it's like this. There's like four guys, like three guys sitting, they're kind of standing around it, like poking it and one guy walking towards it. It's just, it's just really what's great. But they only do this because none of. I don't think, I know I sound conspiratorial, but it's like the mainstream media just doesn't say anything like to naturally move into my favorite story. Super micro.

[Steve Burke]

Yes.

[Ed Zetron]

With a Wally liar who. So to explain for the listeners, supermicro is an AI server company. They two years ago had a massive accounting scandal where a bunch of people resigned. I forget exactly what happened in the scandal, but like they had to restate earnings. They had to delay earnings. But then things got back on track. 20, late 2024. 2020, sorry, it's 2018, when the scandal was. But 2024, 2025, they got back on track. They were selling GPUs to Crusoe, they were selling GPUs to Core Weave. And then very recently there, the Department of Justice arrested three different guys, including co founder Wally Liao, for shipping like hundreds of millions of dollars of GPUs to China and like changing the serial numbers using a hairdryer.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

Which I fucking love it.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Just standing there. My personal opinion. And this, this is an opinion, but okay, my opinion is that there is no way that Nvidia couldn't have known this was happening. I just think it's like actually impossible that they were not aware of GPU smuggling. But wouldn't they.

[Ed Zetron]

Don't these GPUs have some mechanism of phoning home?

[Steve Burke]

Oh, for sure. They can be identified through the Internet 100%. I mean, yeah, they have. The firmware has identifying information in it for the GPUs. You don't need the serial number on the sticker to know what it is. You don't have to physically see it to know what it is. And so if this is connecting to some kind of server somewhere or whatever it may be doing, if in any way that's linked back to Nvidia, they would know about it. If there's ever a service request, I would assume at some point someone figures out and maybe it's a, okay, we'll kind of, you know, blind eye approach. But it's just there's. I don't know, I really think there's no way that they were ignorant to this. Because to quote one of the guys we spoke with when we did the black market GPU smuggling documentary last year, the professor of a university in Hong Kong we spoke with, I asked him, I was like, do you think Nvidia knows? And he. His reaction was, well, how could they not? These are very expensive GPUs. You would think you would traffic them all extremely carefully.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

How do you mean?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I saw that. That was funny.

[Ed Zetron]

Honestly.

[Steve Burke]

It was sad, but it was funny.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

But just the fact that Super Micro is just walking around still doing business and they weren't named in the indictment.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. They weren't a defendant. Right.

[Ed Zetron]

It was the three guys and it's just. I don't know that doesn't see. It doesn't seem very likely that nobody knew but you know, just a few bad apples, right? Just the co founder of the company.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I think the. I think the construction alone is. I don't know, it's all part of this interesting like the meme that's gone around of buying GPUs that don't exist yet to put in data centers that aren't built, you know or. Yeah, the amount of promise especially OpenAI versus actualized. There's a huge disparity there.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ryan Seacrest (advertisement voice)]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 31st. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from Hunts Nerds, Pillsbury, Lowry's, Breyers, Quaker and Culture Pop. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy drive up and go, pick up or delivery restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions.

[Odoo Advertisement Voice]

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[Ed Zetron]

the

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[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

In the previous CNBC interview, I think it was where Altman and Juan were with Brockman, who's a dollar store Jensen, Juan with his leather jackets. They were talking about that $100 billion investment back at the time. And Altman, to answer your question, his angle for the CNBC or whoever it was audience was if you could choose. If you could choose between free education for everybody or curing cancer. And he pitched it as, that's. Those are your choices. But if they only had more compute, they could do both. Right.

[Ed Zetron]

As opposed to neither.

[Steve Burke]

Right? Correct.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Good.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

yep, can I have money now?

[Ed Zetron]

Yeah, this is good. And that 100 billion is very real. That. That's enough. This is the thing. Maybe conspiracy theorists are right all along in the sense that it's like, yeah, there was a point last year where Nvidia and OpenAI lied. $100 billion deal never happened. AMD and OpenAI lied as well. Just nobody talked about their guidance. Didn't change for amd. They do not appear to have sold a Single chip to OpenAI Broadcom. Still nothing like 3/4 in. We don't have a single sale. What the fuck?

[Steve Burke]

Jensen was really defensive about that one when the Taiwanese media asked on tweet about it. Yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

Oh, He.

[Steve Burke]

There was never any commitment.

[Ed Zetron]

He said there's never any commitment from any of these things, though. I just. I think at some point we're just going to find out that nothing happened. Like, I just. Nothing actually moved to anyone. Like, we still haven't heard if Nvidia has sent a dime to OpenAI. SoftBank has to raise $40 billion to send $30 billion to OpenAI. Yeah, that hasn't happened yet.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, it is a bit of a mess. But the interesting thing was they had a bit of an unexpected scandal where amongst all the other various problems like blocking intel from working, they had some users noticed that there was very clearly AI generated art in Hell, yeah.

[Ed Zetron]

Hell yeah.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. So it's like you walk into the. Whatever, the tavern, and on the wall there's a painting hanging and if you get close to it, you can see it's like the early several years ago generative AI art that's just very obvious. And so on Steam, you're supposed to disclose if there's AI art or assets in the game. They didn't do that. They're too big, so they're not going to be punished for it. But they put out a statement apologizing saying, these are placeholders. They're supposed to be replaced. We're going back through and removing them all. Whatever. And the Mike Ibarra, who's currently the CEO of Prize Picks and previously was president of Blizzard and previously was also VP of Microsoft Windows, he tweeted out asking why the studio was apologizing and basically saying, this is going to be in everything, so you shouldn't apologize. And it's crazy to me where the approach to a lot of the AI stuff, it feels so like this is inevitable, is what you're being told by the suits and the VPs and the CEOs. I don't think they realize that that's the part a lot of people don't like, is the part where it's being forced and you're told this is inevitable. Get used to it.

[Ed Zetron]

Yeah. It doesn't have to be good or you don't have to like it, but you're going to have it because of us. We're going to make you have it. And that'll be good. Well, it won't be good, but you'll have it and we will. Ostensibly, something will change. Like they're not even making. I don't even think they're saving money doing this stuff or if they are, it's the kind of. It's like very. It's just firing three people, which is a lot for the people being fired and their work would make the game better. But it's just a fucking Excel spreadsheet. Like it's for the, for the larger companies. I mean, it's just so I think that this is also a mask off moment for so many of these companies. It's the ones that just don't give a rat fuck about anyone who just. They don't make stuff, they don't contribute things, they're just like, yeah, you know, man, you know the thing you like, it's gonna suck shit and we're gonna save like $80.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

Never seems to be.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

And you can go buy and download a template and whatever, but I wanted like a specific one made in the way I wanted to use it. And because InDesign can accept code, it might be XML, I don't remember, but it's got some kind of code it can accept. I thought, okay, this should be able to write the code. It's not a design I'm asking for, it's code. And then I should be able to shove it into InDesign and have a template. And I experimented with it for probably. I get like really obsessed with when I'm trying to make software work. I spent like eight hours on it. Jesus. It did the same thing as ChatGPT where you know, it gives you code, it didn't work. I feedback the error to it and it's like, oh, I see what went wrong. It was this. And then it sends you more code and it doesn't work. And before you know it you've blown through all your tokens for the day, right? Which seems like a great way to make more money. And I ended up after that experiment, I was like, let me just do this the old fashioned way. And I watched like three tutorials and within two and a half hours I had done what I wanted myself, you know.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

Well, that's the thing though. Whenever I've. Because I, I have the times I've experimented with like Claude and chatgpt, I've always thrown it stuff where I'm like, I've already finished a model, I've already finished a paragraph. What do you think? And it will say something. I'll be like, okay, but what about this? And I'll just make up something. It's like, actually there were 80 gigawatts added in the last quarter. What do you think about that? But like, oh, my mistake.

[Steve Burke]

It's just like you're gaslighting it?

[Ed Zetron]

No, I'm gaslighting you. Like, I am abusing the model. But that's the thing.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

Yeah. What Rococo's modern Basilisk?

[Steve Burke]

I don't fucking know.

[Ed Zetron]

Yeah, it's just. But it's just like the fact that they can just have their arm twisted immediately makes them useless. Because the whole point of artificial intelligence is it's meant to be intelligent and kind of support you when you're like, not. Not agree with you when you're wrong, but be like, hey, you're wrong here. But it's just very weird as well that every time I hear a story, it's like yours, where it's like, yeah, I wanted it to do stuff, but it didn't. And you talk to someone who's a booster and they go, well, what you should have done? It's like, so. So you're just gonna just. Let's start from the point of this thing doesn't work and you have to find a way to make it work. Well, it does work. You're just not using it right. Well, why not?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, you're right.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

You had a great quote when we met up when you came down here, and I've actually said it to writers on the team for training. But one of the things, I made a comment about how I needed to do a bunch of fact checking that day or something, and you made a comment about how you always double Check your facts and if you want it to be right, you check it a third time, which is brilliant. I think if you add AI to that, you know, it's like it's kind of that same feeling where it's like if anything comes out of an LLM, the amount of anxiety I have is not even worth whatever the answer is.

[Ed Zetron]

And also a while ago I had access to like a much bigger, more financial focused one and I used it to like look up a bunch of stuff like do a report on this. Three or four of the links were for were just dead. One of them referred to something that just was an irrelevant link. I did look something up on Claude once and it gave me two different citations from Grokipedia. Are you not familiar with Grokipedia?

[Steve Burke]

I am not.

[Ed Zetron]

Well that's the special Grok Wikipedia that they made.

[Steve Burke]

Okay.

[Ed Zetron]

I'd X the everything apparently.

[Steve Burke]

Uh huh. They have their own Wikipedia. Yep.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

This sounded good enough for me. The best use cases have still been for browsing Chinese Internet or browsing the Internet generally in another language. And specifically it's for like when I've needed sources and research. So I don't know if I gave this example on your show before, but the one that came up previously was for the DRAM cartel piece and for the rise of Chinese memory. We were looking into a bunch of different filings for these companies in China. I wasn't 100% sure if they had like an SEC equivalent or something like that. And so using, I don't know if I use, I think I used GPT to try that. But using GPT or whatever it was at the time, it was useful for providing phrases where it's like, okay, here's the Chinese characters of what you should search for. And the reason Google Translate wasn't good enough on its own for that is because I didn't know the colloquialisms of what might they call these different things that I know exist in the U.S. but I don't know if they exist there. And then I can take that and I can put it into Google Translate, which is a dumb translator that's just word for Word and just make sure it makes any sense and that it was useful for. But so far that's pretty much the only use case I've had.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, it's not enough to be worth the destruction of consumer hardware. And that was constantly. Every time I try to poke at these things every now and then so that I might. I want to make sure if I'm criticizing them, I've at least used them same. Yeah, yeah, but it still feels bad.

[Ed Zetron]

It's just. And then you. Even then just having my Twitter feed up while we're talking, random shit pops up, such as SAS CEOs. If your CEO CFO hasn't used Claude for Excel by now, you need a new cfo. Only the curious will survive. Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. Like, what are you talking about? Why?

[Ryan Seacrest (advertisement voice)]

Why?

[Ed Zetron]

What do you mean?

[Steve Burke]

That's so. I feel like that's so dangerous specifically for. I was responding with why feed all of your company's financial information into this LLM also.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

And it's bad. I mean, the consumer space is just like last time I talked to you. Similar topic. But more of the companies in the industry, computer industry, that don't sell silicon products, you know, cases, coolers, accessories, whatever, motherboards. We've had more of them now contact basically saying, hey, we're in big trouble and they want to talk to us about it for a video. But it's just when I say big trouble, I mean a lot of these companies, they're down like 50 plus percent from expectations. And that's because you can't build a computer as a consumer if you can't afford like 5$600 minimum for basic memory now because of the data center demand for it.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, not like this though. Yeah, I've never seen it like this. Memory is a really unique industry because of how it's been corrupt for 40 years. And when I say how do you make. Well, yeah, so like the Department of Justice under the Bush administration w busted the memory makers for what they called a cartel. And by definition that's what it was. Price fixing cartel. And this has been happening like at least once decade where in the late 90s, early 2000s the memory suppliers all got together and would agree on price ceilings and floors. So when they go and sell memory to Dell or Apple or hp, they've already spoken to their competitors and agreed we're not going to go below this price. Cool. Yeah. And this has happened multiple times for that industry.

[Ed Zetron]

Very cool.

[Steve Burke]

And you know what my favorite part of this story, and I didn't know this until we did our report recently was. So there were several people, there were like over 100 people involved if I remember correctly. And if you look up the people who were charged with crime, including fined and even sentenced to prison for that for price fixing cartel, if you look up what happened to them after a lot of them got promoted. Yep. One of them, his reward was to become CEO.

[Ed Zetron]

Jesus. What company?

[Steve Burke]

Samsung Europe.

[Ed Zetron]

Very well. Didn't someone from Samsung also go to jail a few times? Like I swear to God, like people. Yeah, it's just, it really does feel that by the end of this someone else is going to jail. Like there's just somewhat.

[Steve Burke]

And they'll get out and they'll be promoted.

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, classic Ponzi at least has some, some history of meaningful busts and sentences. Right.

[Ed Zetron]

So I don't know.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

No, I mean we've got a. Yeah, I guess I'll throw one out there. We've got a big. Another documentary we're working on right now, but it's gonna be on the. The war on Huawei. So we went and dug through all of Huawei's history. It's pretty interesting and then.

[Ed Zetron]

Interesting.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zetron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Goodbye.

[Ed Zetron]

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k I.com you can email [e-mail] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat wheresyoured at to visit the Discord and go to r. Betteroffline to check out our Reddit thank you so much for listening.

[Sophia Bush]

Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Ed Zetron]

For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit

[Sophia Bush]

our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Zetron]

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