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 monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how OpenAI’s collapse could mortally wound SoftBank, throw the Paramount/Warner Brothers deal into chaos, kill Oracle, and destroy Larry Ellison’s empire.
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In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about how demand for AI GPUs helped the RAM cartel make every single consumer electronic more expensive, and how bad it’ll be when things unwind.
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GamersNexus on the RAM car...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI is inflating the price of memory across the board by diverting fab capacity to building high bandwidth memory for GPUs, and how this situation may end in disaster for everyone involved.
GamersNexus: The DRAM Cartel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY
HBM to increase 90% Year over Year - https://x.com/pequityresearch/status/2075035164833382909?...
This week’s Better Offline is the first joint episode with Riley, November, Hussein from TrashFuture, covering SoftBank’s crazy annual shareholder meeting and the general collapse of the AI bubble.
Ed Zitron and the TF Crew are on both your feeds this week to discuss the Softbank slide deck breakdown you’ve all been waiting for. It’s nothing other than the goose, and whether or not the goose was value...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through Meta’s plans to sell its AI compute, and how this is an admission to the grim fact that there isn’t really a reason for anyone to be building all these AI data centers.
Ed Zitron on CNBC: Generative AI's Business Model Does Not Work, And Tech Is Out Of Hypergrowth Ideas
https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1ulm3a6/ed_zitron_on_cnbc_...
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with the Wall Street Journal’s Caitlin Ostroff and Katherine Long about how Polymarket is working with influencers to show videos of fake bets cashing out - and how the prediction markets have grown into a large, barely-regulated operation.
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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how organizations are freaking out after having to pay the real cost of AI tokens, and how the surge of competitive open weight models could lead to the post-bubble locally-run future of LLMs.
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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI is the pinnacle of Silicon Valley monoculture, and a monument to the cargo cult desperation of a tech industry that celebrates mediocrity and has run out of ideas.
Newsletter: Cargo Culture: https://www.wheresyoured.at/cargo-culture/
OpenAI Exclusive: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about AI companies “doom trolling” consumers using scary stories about conscious computers, and how we need to make fun of the scare-mongering and ridicule the executives peddling in it.
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In a special exclusive episode of Better Offline, Ed Zitron digs into the audited financials of OpenAI from 2024 and 2025.
Companion newsletter: www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
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Tech's hyper-growth era is ending, with online 100 million new people getting online between 2022 and 2023, and almost every major web platform seeing a decline in growth since 2021. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how tech's decline is driving the tech industry to try and sell you useless products like the metaverse, cryptocurrency and generative AI.
Original Air Date: 6.5.24
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how the “does AI have ROI?” debate is coming at the worst possible time for two companies that can’t afford to slow down thanks to their $1.1 trillion in compute commitments.
Newsletter: AI Doesn’t Have ROI https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-doesnt-have-roi/
Ed on Bloomberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbKDmkJPVvI
Th...
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by economist Paul Kedrosky to talk about why nobody can find the ROI of AI, why there won’t be a Dot Com Bubble-style recovery for AI data centers, and how Google’s $80bn equity sale shows we’re at the top.
https://paulkedrosky.com/
The Nick, Dick and Paul Show: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFbDiETo29GTIjg6Lk4imig
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI’s move to token-based billing has revealed that absolutely nobody has a way of measuring AI’s ROI - and how these massive costs might finally burst the bubble.
Companion newsletter:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
Axios: AI sticker shock hits corporate America https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spen...
In this week's Better Offline, Ed Zitron runs you through how Uber’s COO said the quiet part out loud - that AI’s outputs and efficacy do not match up with its ruinous costs - and how despite its bluster, the AI industry’s grift is failing.
Free newsletter tie-in: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
Please subscribe to my premium newsletter - save $10 off a year of my...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through Anthropic’s claims it will be non-GAAP EBITDA profitable for Q2 2026 by having SpaceX discount its compute costs, and how said revenues don’t match up with its CFO’s sworn affidavit or previous reporting on its finances.
Companion newsletter:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle/
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.
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GamersNexus:
Yes, This All ...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how LLMs and the obsession with AI is actively destroying the fabric of the tech industry.
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On this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by the hosts of the Ben & Emil show to talk about how the markets have been driven insane by semiconductor buzz and social media hysteria.
https://benandemilshow.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@benandemilshow
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This week’s Better Offline is a recording of a panel held by Clarion West in Seattle earlier this year with Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron, discussing enshittification, The Rot Economy, and the destruction of modern tech platforms, moderated by Whitney Beltrán.
Original Air Date: 11.12.25
Cory Doctorow: https://craphound.com/
Whitney Beltrán: https://brightwhitney.com/
Get involved with Clarion West: https://www.clario...
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