Better Offline

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

February 20, 2026 8 mins

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through why AI isn’t replacing all software companies, and why the hype behind Claude Code is utterly specious.

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Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed talks with Kill The Computer’s Juniper and Caleb and Arif Hasan of Wide Left about prediction markets, silicon valley’s billionaire whiners, and how Anthropic is trying to redefine “profitability.”

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February 13, 2026 6 mins

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through why Matt Shumer’s “Something Big Is Coming” is deceptive misinformation peddled by a guy who previously tried to defraud the AI community, and why everybody who boosted or republished it should be ashamed of themselves.

The Annotated version of Something Big Is Coming: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qw6k5c3m575cq21p7jjac/Something-Big-Is-C...

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February 11, 2026 66 mins

Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about the ways in which the media fails to report the truth about AI.

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February 6, 2026 8 mins

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through the world finally realizing that NVIDIA’s $100bn deal with OpenAI was BS, and the very real possibility of Oracle’s collapse.

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The $100 Billion Megadeal Between OpenAI and N...

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February 4, 2026 38 mins

In the first episode of Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - Ed is joined by David Gerard of Pivot to AI to talk about Openclaw/Clawdbot/Moltbot, how seemingly smart people keep being “one-shotted” by AI, and why we’ve been headed toward a calamity in the markets since 2008.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@PivotToAI

h...

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In the final part of this week’s Dot Com Bubble series, Ed Zitron walks you through to the logical endpoints of his arguments about the AI bubble - a 40%-90% collapse of NVIDIA’s revenues, tens of billions of dollars of impairments for hyperscalers, an existential contraction in venture capital, the near-collapse of Oracle, and $200 billion or more in unpaid data center debt.

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In part three of this week’s Dot Com Bubble series, Ed Zitron explains how the economics of the AI bubble are much, much worse than the dot com bubble, with far fewer customers, way more debt, and a stock market with an unhealthy obsession with one stock - NVIDIA.

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In part two of this week’s Dot Com Bubble series, Ed Zitron explains the flimsy mythology used to convince the world to run millions of miles of fiber optic cable - and how completely different that is to building hundreds of billions of data centers of GPUs.

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In part one of this week’s series, Ed Zitron explains how the AI bubble could be so much worse than the dot com bubble - and how people are too flippant about the carnage caused by the 2000s telecommunications bubble bursting.

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To kick off this week’s Better Offline Dot Com Special, Ed Zitron is joined by The Register’s Matt Rosoff to talk about what it was like to be in the tech industry during the last time the markets got drunk on a major digital hype cycle.

Matt Rosoff: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Matt-Rosoff/

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:agrmux4phzmfvgyblvhxrbnh

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January 23, 2026 34 mins

In the final part of this week’s four-part Better Offline Enshittifinancial Crisis special, Ed Zitron walks you through how ignoring the horrifying margins and destructive practices of the AI industry is setting up venture capital and the global markets for a catastrophe, and how all of this could’ve been avoided.

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January 22, 2026 31 mins

In part three of this week’s four-part Better Offline Enshittifinancial Crisis special, Ed Zitron walks you through how the imaginary demand for AI compute is setting up every single data center developer for disaster - and how many major banks will be caught in the contagion.

This series was a ton of work, so please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual htt...

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January 21, 2026 44 mins

In part two of this week’s four-part Better Offline Enshittifinancial Crisis special, Ed Zitron walks you through how companies like AMD, Broadcom and NVIDIA are swindling stockholders with the help of analysts and the media, and how decades of easy returns for venture capital are an existential risk to the future of startup fundraising.

This series was a ton of work, so please support me by subscribing to my premium n...

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January 20, 2026 35 mins

In part one of this week’s four-part Better Offline Enshittifinancial Crisis special, Ed Zitron walks you through the enshittification of the stock market, where toxic companies appreciate in value despite their toxicity, recklessness and waste, aided and abetted by analysts who not only ignore the toxicity but actively celebrate it. 

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January 16, 2026 7 mins

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through the seeming collapse of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines, and why the AI bubble can’t survive the death of OpenAI.

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Kylie Robison’s scoop about Thinking Machines: https://x.com/kylie...

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In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about AMD, Lenovo, NVIDIA and Intel’s CES keynotes - and how the tech industry has turned its back on consumers in favor of growth.

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GamersNexus:
NVIDIA's AI Bubble: htt...

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January 10, 2026 56 mins

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Palazzo Hotel with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor.

In our CES epilogue, Ed is joined by author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, tech bubble newsletter writer Ed Ongweso Jr. and CES bartender Phil Broughton to talk about this ...

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January 10, 2026 120 mins

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Palazzo Hotel with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor.

In Friday’s second episode, Ed is joined by author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, the Las Vegas Sun’s Kyle Chouinard, Ed Ongweso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newslett...

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January 9, 2026 124 mins

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Palazzo Hotel with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor.

In Friday’s first episode, Ed is joined by author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, YouTuber and CEO of Clicks Michael Fisher, Cherlynn Low of Engadget, Edward Ongweso o...

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