Better Offline
Better Offline is a weekly show exploring the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society - and interrogating the growth-at-all-costs future that tech’s elite wants to build. Combining narrative-form storytelling, one-on-one interviews and panel-based discussions, Better Offline cuts through the buzzwords and obfuscation of the tech industry, investigating and evaluating the schemes and scams of everyone from cryptocurrency scumbags to the greediest of the venture capital elite. Tech industry veteran Ed Zitron and a dynamic coterie of guests will help listeners understand the who, how and why of how tech’s most powerful players are changing the world - for better or for worse.
Episodes
In this week's Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times to explain how both corporate and sovereign bonds work, why you should care, and what you need to know about the tech industry’s growing debt.
Rob Wigglesworth: A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World
https://www.amazon.com/Fabulous-Debt-Story-Bonds-Modern/dp/0593719182
https://x.com/R...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about the brittle state of Australian AI data center company Firmus’ IPO, its dodgy underlying numbers, and how the Australian media has set an example of how you should actually cover an AI company.
NOTE: This IPO was officially postponed shortly before going to press. The content still rocks.
Newsletter: Credit Crunch: https://www.wheresyoured.at/credit-crunch/htt...
In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about NVIDIA’s “cycular” financing, Trump’s “superintelligence” accord, the growing bubble in the gaming industry, and the Steam Frame VR headset.
Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about Anthropic’s $413 billion in non-cancellable compute commitments, and how its future depends on the impossible task of borrowing $50 billion to $100 billion a year from a bond market that’s already strained by endless AI data center debt.
Link to details on contracts: https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mwoc3p2b2s2m
Newsletter: Dead Money: https://...
In this week's Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks through Anthropic’s 2025 financials, covering how it spent $2.75 to make a dollar, and how it was, at least last year, a worse business than OpenAI.
Dead Money: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dead-money/
Anthropic story from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/anthropics-ipo-prospectus-shows-sweeping-ai-vision-surging-costs-2026-09-28/
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about how $200bn to $300bn of AI GPUs are sitting in warehouses, how hyperscalers like Microsoft are overstating their AI capacity, and why the AI data center overbuild is magntiudes worse than the Dot Com era fiber buildout.
Where’re All The AI Chips? https://www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/
Dario quote: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2#:...
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by economist Paul Kedrosky to talk about how AI is distorting the bond markets to the point that it’s changing the price on US Treasuries, how AI data center economics don’t make sense, and the troubling signs he’s hearing out of Anthropic.
https://paulkedrosky.com/
The Nick, Dick and Paul Show: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFbDiETo29GTIjg6Lk4imig
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron delivers a simple message: if Dario Amodei truly believes that Anthropic is building dangerous AI, he should stop any and all cybersecurity model training runs, halt his IPO, limit Claude to only the safest possible functions, or shut the fuck up.
Anthropic “80% gross margins” story https://www.ft.com/content/4564e6a5-69e9-40a6-bf0f-a888f2f4f002?syn-25a6b1a6=1
Ov...
Ed Zitron is joined by computer science professor and writer Cal Newport and journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker to get the word out that the narrative about existential risk from AI is driven by a religious cult of effective altruists and rationalists.
AI Is Already In Dangerous Hands newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-already-in-dangerous-hands/
Adam
https://bsky.app/profile/adambecker.bsky.social
htt...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through the nonsensical, pro-AI lab scare campaign driven by former researcher Jacob Coxon, how the media keeps falling for AI safety grifts, and how dangerous AI is already in the wrong hands - those of Anthropic and OpenAI.
WIRED interview with Coxon: https://archive.md/2026.09.10-091328/https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-researcher-quits-jacob-coxon-ai-fears-human...
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how society continues to manage rather than deal with crises, and how the AI bubble is yet another crisis resulting from a failure to deal with the complexity of the real world.
Last Week’s Newsletter: Hyperscale Normalization https://www.wheresyoured.at/hyperscale-normalization/
This week’s newsletter: Concentration Risk https://www.wheresy...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how 80% of Anthropic and OpenAI’s enterprise revenues come from the top 1% of its customers, and how the entire AI bubble is a series of different concentration risks supported by venture capital and debt.
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/hyperscale-normalization/
Ramp Data: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1w5i9t4/ramp_80_of_opena...
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by Arif Hasan of Wide Left and Caleb Wilson of Kill The Computer to talk about an academic paper on AI slop, and the many reasons why LLMS can never truly make art.
Why Slop Matters: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06060
Arif Hasan
wideleft.football
x.com/ArifHasanNFL
arif.bsky.social
Caleb Wilson
https://bsky.app/profile/birdrespecter.bsky.social<...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how the AI bubble has increasingly become Jensen Huang and NVIDIA feeding different companies money, and how NVIDIA’s revenue is mostly dependent on a small handful of customers being able to raise more and more debt every year.
EDITOR’s NOTE: I incorrectly say at the beginning of this that NVIDIA’s earnings were this week. They’re next ...
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about what the recent AI hacking incidents actually mean, why we should stop referring to LLMs as AI, and what the post-bubble world looks like for LLMs.
Podcast & Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia/
Newsletter: https://calnewport.com
New Yorker archive: https://www.newyorker.com/contrib...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenue growth is decelerating, and how OpenAI’s pause on model development and collapsing economics create the very real possibility it could collapse.
EDITOR’s NOTE: I incorrectly say at the beginning of this that NVIDIA’s earnings were this week. They’re next week. Sorry!
Newsletter: What If Open...
In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about the increasingly-delusional promises of the AI semiconductors industry, the rotten economics of LLMs, and how everything is becoming more frantic and desperate as we reach the end.
GamersNexus - There Are No Non-Clowns In The Clown Car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F33Ohjufi9k
Support GamersNexus’ AI Surveillance Dystopia Series: htt...
In this week's Better Offline, Ed is joined by comedian Chloe Radcliffe and critic Ed Ongweso Jr. to talk about AI’s attempts to interfere with the creative arts, horrible little robots, Mark Zuckerberg’s terrible AI essay, and why we can’t respect people writing using AI.
Chloe’s Show Cheat - https://publictheater.org/performances-jp/2026/c/chloe-radcliffe-cheat/ - August 19th and 20th in NYC!
Ch...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through NVIDIA’s entirely-theoretical $500 billion AI infrastructure partnership with various asset managers, all to keep up with analyst expectations that it will make more than $1.6 trillion in the next three years.
Chloe’s Show Cheat - https://publictheater.org/performances-jp/2026/c/chloe-radcliffe-cheat/ - August 19th and 20th
News Story: https://www.cnbc.c...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how 70% of Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s AI revenues are from Anthropic and OpenAI, with 7% of Microsoft’s FY26 revenue coming from OpenAI alone, and how this is cast-iron proof that demand for AI doesn’t exist at a scale that warrants any of the trillion dollars in capex they’ve spent.
Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzi...
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