Better Offline - AI Versus The PC Industry With GamersNexus

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about NVIDIA’s alleged GPU shipments to China, how AI is choking the PC gaming industry, and how mad Jensen Huang keeps getting on podcasts.Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! GamersNexus: Yes, This All Seems Very Legitimate - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM Support GamersNexus’ AI Surveillance Dystopia Series: https://store.gamersnexus.net/ai-dystopia https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexus https://gamersnexus.net/ https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social https://x.com/GamersNexus YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We are not a car. This is a podcast, Not a Car, and I am Ed Zittron. Today we have returning champion Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus joining us to talk about a little company called InVIDIA. How are you doing, Steve? I'm also not a car. 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. Yeah, well, I mean, he definitely seemed a little sensitive in that one. 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 Dwar Keshe 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 was something about China, perhaps. And Jens Wong just gets pissed on and goes, we are not a car. We are not a car. And it's just, really. He also, 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. 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. 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, and I don't know if it's because it could, 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's kind of the act or, or, you know, maybe it's a top indicator, I don't know. 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 women's boobs. That is right. 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 Bwarkash Patel is 23 years old. If a 23-year-old was rude to me, other than the numerous times they are online, I would just be like, okay, it's not that big a deal. Especially if your company is worth trillions of dollars. And the quote is just to 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 X-86 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, like... It's not really a clean analogy. 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. 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. It's more on the business side. But it is a, 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. I don't know if we're just, 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 got like a therapist to break down his mental state. A director's commentary style thing.

We're 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, he's going to cry, but they paused there. So my theory is, and we kind of talked about this, and then we don't dipped into it a ton, but there was a short sell report from Culper Research that came out that suggested the over 20% of Nvidia's fiscal year 2026 revenue came from China route through a company called Megaspede. 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 talk about. And also, he's not scared of AMD. I don't think the MI instincts are going to scare in video at all that would require. 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 own known 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.

Yeah, talk to me about it. Yeah, on Chinese GPUs, the rise of them. Kind of like our rise of Chinese memory video. It's interesting. It's interesting to watch companies like Jiao Xin, 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 three or four generation old Intel CPU. And the perspective was one of mockery, but I think that should really concern some of these companies, because 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.

Right. What do you mean by that? What is the getting started in this case? 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 TSM's not supposed to make products for 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 actual first coming up with an architectural design. Once you have that, you can iterate on it and make changes that. 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, like from there, you just iterate. And as long as they have some customers, yeah, 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 going to have buyers because, you

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. When I say that, because I always get one comment for 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 saw one, even though I'm saying they're not getting finished. If that's the case, I imagine that's quite scary to Jen. Maybe this isn't it, but I imagine that's quite scary to Jen. 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 weird a 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 closed and in for Mr. Wong. 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. I love that there's one photo. I forget which data center 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. Yeah. And it's just, it's so good because it's like, yeah, I've seen this in London a hundred times, like a bunch of guys with hard hats going, oh, my, oh, you know, it's going to take a minute.

What? Is it stable? You better lean on it another minute, mate. 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, oh, 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 one was interesting too because that segment he gets into, I'm not sure who the guy was sitting with him, I assume someone who works for Stanford.

He was an optimist. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. The guy fielding the questions though, he makes a comment at one point where he says, you know, 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, I mean, 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 the companies Right. They want to get away from providing anything other than dumb clients. 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 there 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. And that's what he's talking about. And that should scare a lot of people. How likely do you think that actually is, though? Because. I 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. But now, these people don't really give a fuck.

I think that Jensen Wong 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 was on an airplane. 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 is effectively just a device that connects to the cloud. 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, G-Force Now, which is the low-end online gaming service, game streaming to basically any device,

they claim to have 30 million users for that, which seems like a lot. That also, really? This is G4 now? Yeah, G4 now, there's a public document that they talk about

30 million users, yeah. 30 million users. I don't know. That just feels very, like, 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, I mean, they might be pumping their numbers because they do have an ad-supported free tier.

Well, here's the thing. I just look this up while on air. There are 35 million subscribers to Xbox Game Pass. Yeah. I find it very unlikely that Invidia, which has failed to, like, they failed every single other, like, software, like, the Omniverse. You know, you are my favorite subject. The Omniverse. So 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-supported thing. So they have a PDF called Envidia-dash story. Dot PDF, Our Story, 2025. And in here is where they, I'll have to send it to you. And here is where they, yeah, over 30 million members in more than 110 countries now have access to more than 1900. Ah, there you go.

There's you. 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. Ah, beautiful. 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 G4S now partner breach. Right.

Yeah. That Envidia has partners to propagate this service, kind of like some kind of like a Wi-Fi range extender. Makes sense. That makes some sense. Yeah. And I guess that's to try and solve what you're talking about, which is the latency issue. I mean, the U.S. is pretty woefully far behind, right? in a lot of places for internet where it's just non-viable.

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Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A decade ago, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil. So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tokitines to Montegrozzo.

And he brought a team of executives. They were going to help the country get in on a gold rush. Carbon and its derivatives are going to be really the next great commodity that the globe's going to trade. But back home in Iowa, trouble was brewing. If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter. Now, people are questioning if his climate solutions have anything to do with climate at all. You got to give Bruce and the guy's credit.

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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 hacking groups is 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. Jesus. Access flags,

usernames, dates of birth, things like that. And they're offering it for sale for, I think it was $100, I'd have to check. And that was on a forum. They said it,

they wrote it as if they had compromised to all of Nvidia G-GeForce now. And Vidiya 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. So like I think it's, I want to take Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. They didn't talk about if any of them were breached, so it could actually be wider than NVIDIA is representing. But anyway, I find it hard to believe Invidio would misrepresent something. They usually very straightforward.

Yeah. any slippery wording with them. Let's change tag to 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 have, 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. Yeah. And the fact that this, Wally Liao was going, one of the blokes was going into the warehouses and just kind of hair drying off the cereal number. I know 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. And there were a lot of interesting things in the timeline where a lot of the stuff happened in August and some of the investigation in August. And that was the same time we ran out. 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 worked to bring in NVIDIA. I want to say it was GB200, maybe 300, but GB200 systems. So like actual racks of hardware. Oh, like an VL 72? 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 and stuff like that on behalf of other companies, not for themselves. 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 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? Yeah, go on. Sorry. 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 like this is not 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. But the thing is, I didn't realize, I guess you couldn't have said back then, I didn't realize it was an NVL 72. I'm not sure if it was an NVL 72. If it was a GV200 rack, I don't know how many were in there. But if it was like a full rack, that's still, God, that was last year as well. If they had GB200s, 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 Supermicron, the culprit report, they will come back to a thing which is, invidia 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. That was fascinating to me. I wonder what's in them.

It's, yeah, and it is, I guess, brilliant. And like, 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 DOJ's inside before. So I guess it's only a physical inspection. 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 what it is. It's going to 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.

Yeah, I mean, you could, 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 what they're looking. Yeah, it's just, I'm not, the government, what I can say is when I spoke to people in D.C. last year, I, 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. And we're not talking in percent. or anything. It was just gigabytes. It's like, no, that's capacity. And I needed to briefly explain

kind of the difference. And I'm sure they have people who understand this stuff. Maybe it just wasn't in the room. 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 benchmark 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. And so that's why NVIDIA, you know, they're in just such a domineering position because they're up against people who don't understand their technology. Well, I'm reading off the Culper report here. So numerous experts told us that NVIDIA has long possessed the means to detect diversion, including pre-sale signposts and standard K, standard K-J-J-G recently incorporated customers suddenly placed in large orders, sales without warranties, as well as post-sell technical indicators. server IP data, mismatch server latency times, and servers going dark without explanation. Because that's the thing.

I assume that Nvidia must have some connection to every GPU, right? Maybe not completely phone home, but I... Yeah, they should know. I mean, it's... 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 don't know. I mean, it's the professor we spoke with last year for our documentary,

I asked him the question, do you think Nvidia knows? And his response was, how could they not? These things are very valuable. You'd think they'd keep very good track of every single one of them. I just, I'm wondering,

so let's, back to the wider AI bubble. With Nvidia GPUs, especially like 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 Khyber racks, they call them, the one megawatt ones.

Okay, Kyber I'm not familiar with, doesn't it? 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 one megawatt rack in a data center that's full of much more distributed, even 100 megawatw. watts 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 understand, like,

that they will just think our customers have unlimited money and we'll do whatever we want. 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.

But even then, if the data centers aren't getting built, because Oracle's giving them a bunch of GPUs, we know that. Right. 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. 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 going to fucking rip for, like, the next three years 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, 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. Oh, you mean the distributed thing? Yes. Oh, my Christ. 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 6,000s, which is like,

I hope they changed the power connector from 12-0 high power, so it doesn't catch on fire. But the plan, I don't really get it. Like, it seems like, so the idea of the concept is we're going to put this nice box in your yard that kind of resembles, like, an air conditioning 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. Yeah. So that we put a small one in your yard and discounted after we've increased. it was just 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 going to work for massive important projects.

It works for smaller stuff, I guess, but 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? Because like, yeah, is that? And there's also, I don't know, I was unfortunate enough to live in an HOA community several years ago. I'm sorry. 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 could. 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, crashing a 747, like, that is going to, like, cause a blackout in the neighborhood? How do you prioritize power in the neighborhood? That was my question, too. Like, in a winter storm, who gets priority, right? And, and...

No, just run the GPUs. Everyone will be warm. That's true. Yeah, that's true. You've solved it. Yeah. There we are. Yeah, I mean, it's...

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 mine 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 to, we've like lost the plot on this. You know. Five months, Toronto, pride is an opportunity for you to create your own space, to celebrate your existence.

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That's iHeartadvertising.com. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here at the Happiness Lab, we're serving up some hot takes for the summer. Big ideas that just might reshape how you think about your well-being. Like, we've been thinking about the loneliness epidemic all wrong. You can be lonely in a marriage. You can be lonely at a party. I don't think loneliness is actually about solitude. Loneliness is about something much bigger. Or that we should get rid of small talk,

All together. We talk about current events. We talk about what you do for a living, but not do you love what you do for a living. Is this your dream job? Or that the mental health crisis isn't what we think it is, and that kids today are doing better than we assume. It was really disorienting for us as researchers to be so wrong about our hypothesis. We are so scared that we are going to underreact to a severe challenge that we tend to overreact.

For more surprising ideas backed by psychological science, check out our new series. Happiness Hot Takes. Listen to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Lorry Santos, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, 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. 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? I drew that. The board apes. The board apes. the board apes, the other side.

And it was just, they were like, look, we've finally done it. We've got the other side demo, and it was just a giant open world. And you didn't get to go in as the ape you owned. Oh, great. Okay. You went as just a regular,

not a regular ape. They were like these kind of guerrillas ripoffs. 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 guys know that video games have already existing? Exactly. Like I was playing EverQuest, like back in 1999.

Like 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. Yeah. I just had to play for 11 hours a day to make level 50. Those of us pre-K-K-U-N-A-R-K, this is the second expansion. It was much harder. very unfair to those of us who played. I started at Plains of Power.

Damn, dude. Plains of Power was like the end of the end of how good that was. I like, though the whole Plains of Time thing. I don't know if you followed that. I did a little bit, yeah. The collapse of Everquests with the fires of heaven. Anyway, we shouldn't talk about that. That's all 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 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. That's a brilliant string of words. You've just come up with that? Yes. Just right off the dough, just inspired by these people. Because it's like,

have you been, I realized someone off the topic of GPS. Have you been following this GitHub co-pilot thing as well? 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. No, it's just that they're switching them

to token-based billing on June 1st. And the subreddit is just people being like, hey, so I'm able to burn $1,000 worth of tokens to $10. Does anyone know if there's an alternative to do this? And just people being like, yeah, um, anthropic, I guess. And it's just people realizing in real time how much this costs. I think you're going to see a rush of people to try and do this on a hardware

and a rush of people to try and 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, starving. Just like a final stand of just guys burning out the remaining capital until it all falls apart. I really do wonder, I mean, it's, it's, the PC industry and the DIY industry seems to be the first casualty of AI and it's, it's like AI is born and that it immediately kills the thing it was born from, you know? Yeah. And so I'm not sure, like, even if the bubble

bursts, there's going to be a lot of damage first. I was going to ask, like, 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? 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, artsy 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,

enthusiasts 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 for now,

they need to have their next big thing ready. And now the cycles are lengthening for those. What do you mean by that as in there is they're skipping a year of consumer GPUs? The architectural cadence for Envidia has slowed for a while. They were 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 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. 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 a build. 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, and just want to spell it out. Right. And that cycle is now broken. Yeah, because it's that launch that people use that as a trigger

for when they want to build their new system. NV 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 the ride, 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 didn't 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. A lot of the companies we spoke with are down on the year, 40 to 60%, and then year on year, about 70%.

God, it's very fucking grim. Like, what's left at the end of this? I don't know. Genuinely, what's left? 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. 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 their industrial scale, I guess they could return

to gamers, but reallocating all of that I don't know, capex I guess it would be. Yeah, I 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...

Does that revenue exist? Is there that much revenue in games? gamers. Yeah, and there is billions of dollars, but there's not tens of billions of dollars. Yeah, there's not $50 billion a quarter. Right. Yeah. 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, you know, 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 like a government would have to come in and do some kind of, you know, anti- trust 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.

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. It's like beating race every single time. Like without fail, more than analysts could ever say, all while nowhere near as many data centers get built

as the chips that have been shipped, it feels like something is going to pop here. It feels like something as weird is happening. I think that's actually the best one. It's just things feel very goddamn weird. It doesn't seem, I know markets aren't This seems like beyond irrational. It seems artificial to me. Yes. I mean, apropos, I guess for the name, but it's like, but 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, we talked about this before as well, but this year's GTC when he's like, yeah, it's a gen ticket. Nemo claw. Hey, remember Neap? You remember OpenClaw? Remember that shit? It's like when that, like, remember this. If today, InVidia beats and raises, which they very well made, and if they don't, we, but let's say, remember, their big announcement at last GTC was, um, we made OpenClaw. 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. I will say there was, if, if, if, if, Anybody needs something to feel positive and find some joy. This is a good way to it. Please, please. 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. Oh, yeah. And he mentions AI and immediately gets booed. It's, it's, and then that happened as well to some McKinseyite person, another school who I don't remember. Some woman went up and had the same thing. She just looked. In both cases, they looked so surprised.

Yeah, they looked like, and that's how you know they're out of touch. I did see 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 booze echo when they try to sleep at night. 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. It'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're 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, ah, pay for AI. You don't do this. You're dead. Everything you know and love.

She has her commencement speech in like 10 days from now. Lisa boo. But that's the thing. Lisa's, that's, I will be honest, Lisa Sue is the biggest disappointment of them. Because in my history of gaming and PC gaming, AMD always seemed more normal. Yeah. She seems like a major turncoat, I think, for a lot of people. But she turned them around.

And now she's just like, right into the void with you. Thanks for getting me where I needed to be. Now I can make a 300. Do you hear about their deal with Crusoe? Crusoe is buying a bunch of GPUs and then AMD is going to rent them back. Okay. 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 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. It may also 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 there's a little more nuanced this AI thing beyond just make money and you know replace humans yeah i've 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 are 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. Right, but just for speaking of liability,

not fully endorsing Jigsaw's methods. No, no, no, no. We are very... They just, they don't get them. The people don't get them. Exactly. I think that 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? YouTube.com slash gamers nexus, and I hope when the FBI visits both of us to ask about our comments on jigsaw, you'll have me back on. Yes, and just to be clear 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 with the monologue in a few days. Cheers. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio.

audio projects at Matersowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed? dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Lash Better Offline 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 wherever you get your podcast. Joy is essential, and it's all so elusive, but now there's a new and exciting way to start

your journey toward a more joyful existence, Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotby. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Open your free IHeart Radio app, Search Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS. Hey, this is Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, and we're submitting our most sciencey episodes for your peer review with our new stuff you should know

doing science playlist. Out now. You want to know about Occam's Razor? Simplest explanation is usually the right one? We got you covered. Wondered what chaos theory is ever since the first time you saw Jurassic Park. Well, come on down.

So distill a nice pot of tea, everybody. turn down the gas on your bunsen burner and slip into your most comfortable lab coat and listen to the stuff you should know doing science playlist on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Sway Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got like so much more to do. Like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped like five right now.

That's the rate we got to be gone. Yep, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. Getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is. Getting a new one put up in its place.

I'm Akila Hughes. And Rebel Spirit Season 2 is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority of black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.