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 monologue, Ed Zitron walks through how reckless members of the media continue to inflate the AI bubble - and the detailed notes he's been taking along the way.
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Ed's Socials:
In the first of this week's two-part series, Ed Zitron walks you through how Microsoft pulling back from over a gigawatt of compute capacity is a dark omen for the so-called AI Revolution.
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Ed's Socials:
In this week's monologue, Ed Zitron goes through the underwhelming release of OpenAI's GPT-4.5 - and how OpenAI's rumored new pricing structure suggests this company is in trouble.
Here's the article cited from The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-plots-charging-20-000-a-month-for-phd-level-agents?rc=kz8jh3
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...In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Gita Jackson and Nathan Grayson of worker-owned games site Aftermath to talk about how the growth-at-all-costs mindset is destroying games, how fandom culture naturally feeds extremism, how Aftermath does games journalism differently, and how despite everything, great games are still being made.
Gita Jackson:
https://bsky.app/profile/xoxogossipgita.bsky.social
https://aftermath.si...
In the second of this week's two-part episode, Ed Zitron walks you through the dark truth of the generative AI industry - that consumer adoption of Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity is incredibly small, and it’s time to accept that there is nothing coming to justify the ruinous costs of Large Language Models.
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In this week's monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through what's making everybody worried about the bubble bursting - and what other signs might tell you that the party's over for AI.
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Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
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Ed's Socials:
In this episode (the first of a two-parter), Ed Zitron walks you through how OpenAI isn’t a real company, but a venture-backed welfare recipient that spent $9 billion to lose $5 billion in 2024 with little product-market fit and a stagnant API business that suggests that there’s little adoption of generative AI.
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Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
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In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through the how the tech media misses the stories that hurt billions of people every day - and how deep down, most people really do like technology and miss when it wasn’t so actively harmful.
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Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
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Ed's Socials:
In this week's monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through the early days of OpenAI - and the simmering war between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over its non-profit status.
Suit: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69013420/musk-v-altman/
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Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
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Ed's Socials:
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy has used software to poison so many parts of our lives - and how the tech media can rise to the challenge and fight for a better Silicon Valley by aligning with consumers against big tech.
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In this week's monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through how the AI industry’s limp Super Bowl commercials show how little this industry has to offer - and how much contempt they have for consumers.
OpenAI: The Intelligence Age: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIhb5pEo_j0
Google: Dream Job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7e6g11BJc0
Salesforce: Gate Expectations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZqmBc...
In a live-to-tape recording in Ed Zitron's living room, Wide Left writer Arif Hasan and Western Kabuki Host Caleb Wilson explain in detail the cultural power of sports, and how software has been used to poison every corner of sports with predatory gambling schemes.
The Athletic story on sports gambling: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5777632/2024/10/14/sports-betting-addiction-problem-fans/
In the first of a new series of weekly monologues, Ed Zitron breaks down what exactly happened with DeepSeek, and how it threatens to pop the AI bubble.
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Ed's Socials:
In this episode, Ed Zitron explains how the emergence of a much-more-efficient generative AI model has become an existential threat to the future of OpenAI and Anthropic - and tells a dark story about the death of innovation in Silicon Valley.
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Ed's Socials...
In this episode, Ed Zitron explains how DeepSeek, a relatively-unknown Chinese model AI developer incubated in a hedge fund, has punctured the generative AI bubble, throwing the US startup scene (and markets) into disarray.
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Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
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Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
Ed's Socials:
Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York City.
Ed Zitron is joined by Jeremy Kaplowitz of the podcast Quorators to talk about Quora, which he describes as “Reddit with a gas leak.”
www.youtube.com/@Quorators
www.patreon.com/Quorators
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Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
Reddit: ...
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how lax regulation and all-too-chummy media coverage has empowered Mark Zuckerberg and other tech companies to intentionally make every digital experience worse for profit.
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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:
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how the latest "right-wing turn" for Mark Zuckerberg and Meta is really just formalizing policies on Facebook and Instagram that actively protected and elevated right-wing voices - and how we're entering a new era of rot for two of the world's largest social networks.
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LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
Reddit: https://www.reddit...
Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York City.
Ed Zitron is joined by Paris Martineau of The Information and media critic Jeff Jarvis to talk about Paris' story around the horrible consequences of an anonymous dating app, Meta's slop-filled right-wing future, and what the media industry might look like in ten years' time.
Jeff Jarvis: https://jeffjarvis....
Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Venetian with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor.
Phil Broughton and Ed Ongweso Jr. join Ed Zitron for an epilogue on the Consumer Electronics Show and the 12+ hours of audio we've recorded - and what we're planning to do next.
Ed Ongweso Jr.: ...
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