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
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: http...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how 70-80% of Amazon and Microsoft’s AI revenue and capacity is taken up by OpenAI and Anthropic, and how capacity constraints across the industry are a result of hyperscalers sacrificing their infrastructure to the least-profitable startups of all time.
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On this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron digs into Palantir’s 22-point manifesto with Caleb and June from Kill The Computer.
The Manifesto: https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312
Caleb and June
https://bsky.app/profile/birdrespecter.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/killthecomputer.com
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how OpenAI must grow its revenue by 1000% in the next three years and raise at least another $200 billion for it to be able to pay its compute deals with Oracle and other providers, and how Oracle dies if OpenAI fails to pay its bills.
This week’s free newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/four-horsemen-of-the-aipocalypse/
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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by computer science professor and writer Cal Newport to talk about the Claude Mythos marketing scam, the lies around AI job loss, and why LLMs shouldn’t talk like they’re people.
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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron discusses how AI labs’ dangerous rhetoric around AI capabilities and job loss are antagonizing and terrifying people that are already on edge, and that de-escalation starts with Altman and Amodei talking about LLMs as normal software.
This week’s free newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/i-will-never-respect-a-website/
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker to talk about introspection-free venture capital, the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse effect of LLMs, and trying to find a better future to focus on.
https://bsky.app/profile/adambecker.bsky.social
https://www.youtube.com/@DreamingAgainstTheMachine
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everyth...
In a special episode of Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by writers Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker to talk about their massive investigation into Sam Altman, his ouster from OpenAI, and the consequences of trusting Silicon Valley with the future.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted
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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by economist Paul Kedrosky to talk about the large amount of speculative data center land purchases, the brittle NVIDIA GPU economy, and the economic realities of AI.
The Nick, Dick and Paul Show: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFbDiETo29GTIjg6Lk4imig
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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron breaks down why AI isn’t too big to fail, why no bailout is coming, and how people need to learn more about history before using it to justify burning billions of dollars.
This week’s free newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/
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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron discusses Anthropic’s aggressive new rate limits, the leak of Claude Code’s source code, and the dread consequences of having software written 100% by LLMs.
Free newsletter: The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/
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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about OpenAI killing Sora, and how the majority of announced data centers are either barely getting built or vaporware, with only 3GW of IT load coming online in 2025 in America, and only 5GW of data centers under construction worldwide.
This week’s free newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about NVIDIA’s strange and embarrassing GTC, DLSS5, and the increasingly-hysterical AI bubble.
Free newsletter that discusses data center timing and NVIDIA's China situation: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about hyperscalers allowing non-technical workers to ship code, and how the over-reliance on LLMs and push to ship as much code as possible is setting big tech up for a calamity.
This week’s free newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-are-we-still-doing-this/
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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by Rebecca Ungarino and Nick Devor of Barron’s to talk about the legalities of prediction markets, their effect on society, and how everyone is operating on the bleeding edge of financial regulations.
Nick Devor:
https://www.barrons.com/authors/nick-devor
Rebecca Ungarino:
https://www.barrons.com/authors/rebecca-ungarino
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about the end of tech’s hypergrowth era, generative AI’s failure as a business model, and why we need to stop looking to the past to prove that the future will work out.
Free newsletter tie-in: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-beginning-of-history/
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Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed is joined by Henry Zebrowski of Last Podcast on the Left to talk about Business Idiots, the metaverse, and the beauty of the human mind.
https://www.patreon.com/cw/lastpodcastontheleft
youtube.com/@lpntv
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Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed talks with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, about the realities of LLMs and the chaotic world of Amazon Web Services.
Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/prom...
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through the "analyslop" phenomenon of speculative, lie-ridden fan fiction that gets framed as meaningful research and promoted by the mainstream media.
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Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed talks with Victoria Song of The Verge about “wellness products,” bullshit workout metrics and black market peptides.
Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-su...
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