May 16, 2025 • 8 mins
In this week's monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through the story of how writing The Man That Destroyed Google Search saved his life.
The Man That Destroyed Google Search: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-man-that-destroyed-google-search/id1730587238?i=1000653621646
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
You can also order a limited-edition Better Offline hat until 5/22/25! https://cottonbureau.com/p/CAGDW8/hat/better-offline-hat#/28510205/hat-unisex-dad-hat-black-100percent-cotton-adjustable
---
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Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
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https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A Zone Media, Hello and welcome to this week's Better
Offline monologue. I'm your host ed ZiT Tron. I could not,
for the life of me work out what I wanted
to talk about for this week's monologue. I am a
little burned out, and Robert and Sophia telling me I
(00:24):
should take a break sometime, and I will at some
point everyone, I promise. But I was seeing and thinking
last night about what I was going to do today,
and I ended up sketching out some thoughts and I
realized that this show genuinely helped me turn my life around.
A little dramatic, but Better Offline really truly helped me
(00:44):
leave a very dark place I was in April twenty
twenty four. I would argue it on some degree saved
my life, and I will tell you how today. It's
a monologue. You already had a great interview with Karen Haile.
This week. I'm going to give you a little schmaltz,
a little bit of who I really am. And I
worry this is ferociously self involved or pretentious, but at
(01:04):
least from the heart. Right. So back when I started
the show in early twenty twenty four, I was really
lost as a person, but also as someone who would
call themselves a creative. I'd agreed to do the show
and knew I was capable of pushing out content, but
my personal life had become, let's just say, very bad.
I was in a bad situation. I was overweight, I
was unhappy. Therapy was kind of grinding at me. It
(01:27):
didn't feel like it was changing anything because I was
kind of in a depressive state where I didn't want
to talk to anyone, which is why I wouldn't talk
to my friends at all. And I had this fucking
podcast I had to do that. I loved the idea
of but I like confidence. I liked the pison vinegar
you know me for today. And one day, as I
struggled to work out what the fuck I was doing
(01:48):
that week, I sat down to write the script for
an episode about Shean, which is a Chinese clothing giant
that grew its brand entirely online. And it was coming
up on my birthday, Averri twenty fifth, and it's a
day I really enjoyed. So I was pushing myself to
do something, anything to get this episode off my plate
and move on to planning the day, which is a
few weeks out that would end up being dog shit
(02:08):
like it always was, and I was bored. I didn't
care about Shin. I didn't care what I was doing.
I didn't think you would either. And I sat there
thinking about whether or not I could realistically do better
offline anymore, or my newsletter or really end of this crap,
and what can I say? My birthday kind of sucks
and it always kind of led me to a weird slump,
but I was in one that day anyway. I was
(02:29):
really not in a great place, and if I'm honest,
I was kind of spiraling. So I closed this Google
doc and I sat teary eyed, staring at the ceiling.
Babou my cat was on top of me kind of.
I was sat at this table, and he shoved himself
kind of on top of my knees, which he does
when he knows I'm hurting, which is lovely. And I
sat there thinking about things, and I was drafting in
(02:49):
my head something about not doing the newsletter anymore, and
wondering how the fuck I was going to do forty
or so more episodes. I was really quite worried, and
this was really largely due to my personal I'm three
minutes into this and I've just rambled about myself. But
you know what, that's what the monologues for. And I
looked at the time and I realized I'd only written
eight hundred words in two hours, and I felt very
(03:11):
bad about myself. I thought, I don't care about Shiin,
and so I went to look at Google to see
if I could find something, anything about the tech industry
that would be more interesting right about and I saw
immediately something that pissed me off. A cycled tech gate
that had ripped off a story from another site, and
they'd entirely ripped it off. They copypasted the entire thing,
if not automate the entire thing. I was irate, not
(03:33):
just because I was looking for something and this was
making my life harder, but because Google was making money
off of this. And in that moment, I realized that
I needed to find out who did this. I need
to find the rap fuck that made this happen. I
remember the name i'd kind of touched upon in the
previous newsletter that i'd only just drafted, Propagar Ragavan, and
(03:53):
I realized I've said propagar Ragavan over a hundred times
on this show, but I really didn't know who he
was at the time, so I sat My eyes were red, puffy,
and felt just like doom in every fiber of my being,
wondering how I tell Robert and Sophie that I needed
a break. Weeks into the show, and I immediately discovered
the story of the biggest shithead I've run into in tech,
the man that destroyed Google Search. I discovered a man
(04:15):
that has done unfathomable damage to the Internet, and I
kind of got a template for how bastards have ripped
a part of the tech industry in search of growth.
It was and it remains, the moment that the growth
of all costs rot economy actually made sense to me. Now,
as you probably realized, they take a lot of my
newsletter work and put it into the podcast, But The
Man that destroyed Google Search was the first time I've
ever taken a script and made it into a newsletter.
(04:38):
And this fundamentally changed how I write, because up until
literally that episode, my spoken voice and my written voice
were different. I wrote in a probably a more ballsy
way than I talk. I was deeply unconfident with my voice.
You can probably hear it in the first few episodes
as well, you could tell, and this episode was very cathartic,
(05:00):
and it was also the first moment I'd really felt
proud of anything I'd worked on, which is an insane
statement given the amount I've written and produced before. Then.
I realized in this moment, too, that I'd been treating
myself without much dignity or respect, and that things in
my life had to change. The man that destroyed Google
Search was my first real breakthrough piece and made me
rethink how he looked at the world, in part because
(05:21):
it showed me the scale at which one man's selfishness
can reach such havoc. Maybe it's a little much to
put this much meaning on a fucking podcast episode, but
these monologues are where I get to have my fun
and be a little much something that I used to
hate about myself, but at the very least have turned
into a good career. Nevertheless, this breakthrough also pushed me
to many other breakthroughs in my life and allowed me
(05:42):
to fully emerge from Michelle I'd been in since birth.
Had I not chased down Probagar Ragavan, I have no
idea how I'd complete the first season of Better Offline,
let alone reach the third tram On right now, and
the fact I won on award from this is completely insane.
I don't even know how to express how happy it
makes me, and I have a weird thing with being
excited or being happy. You're really gonna you're learning a
(06:04):
lot about me today, possibly too much. But look, I've
never felt understood by the world, and when I've looked
upon the world through my own eyes, I've struggled to
understand it myself. But in the last year of my work,
I've found myself. I've found myself doing this show. My voice,
my personality, my vigor, my anger, my fury, my love,
my passion, all through trying to understand what the fuck
(06:25):
is going on with the computer. It all sounds ridiculous
when I say it out loud, but I think you'll
like it. And my lack of confidence, even if as
I say this now, it's because I've never been good
at appearances. I've never been good at fitting in, And
it took until twenty twenty four for me to truly
speak with confidence, and took me until like twenty twenty
five for me to even like how I looked or
(06:47):
who I was as a person. I've never been good
at pretending. I've never been able to fit into the
little corporate management squares you're meant to Other than my
ability to be pleasant and conciliatory, I can't deal with
someone lying to me, which includes, but isn't limited to
people that bullshit me because they've decided that I'm stupid.
I've never felt peer pressure because I've never felt popular, cool,
or important, nor do I feel smart. I do this
(07:08):
show because I have to, as doing it has brought
me some degree of salvation at times when I felt
truly lost, brought me closer to people that I love
and respect, and allowed me to process the complex emotions
I experienced reading about and understanding this stuff, and really
understanding my childhood, which was largely based growing up online.
I ain't have friends, I didn't really have things to
(07:29):
do other than being online, and it made me who
I am, but also made me kind of reflect on
things each year as I saw the Internet begin to crumble.
But I really love doing this show and I have
no idea if this monologue is going to be something
you care for, but I want you to know why
I'm doing it. I want you to know who I
am and what I am because this show has allowed
me to express myself in a way that I've never
(07:51):
allowed myself to and as a result, has allowed me
to become who I am and took me off a
path that was equal parts dark and hopeless. Now I
get to do a podcast where I call tech CEO, scum,
pigs and shit heads, living the dream, and I am,
albeit depressingly recently, extremely happy in my life because of
the work I get to do and the people it's
led me to, and to the friendships I already have
that have deepened as a result. And hearing from all
(08:13):
of you is wonderful too. I'm so lucky to be
able to do this, but also that so many of
you reach out with kind words, with funny things that
you've found, or just stories that pissed you off too.
It's genuinely magical. Whatever the size of this community is
really grateful for it. I'm grateful that I get to
do this, and I'm great grateful that I get to
do these like five to ten minute long monologues where
(08:33):
I just share how I feel at random. So yeah,
that's been this week's monologue. Next week, we have a
really fun interview with Giant bomb coming up as well.
Just just did that. The show fucking rocks. Thank you
for listening.
A Zone Media, Hello and welcome to this week's Better
Offline monologue. I'm your host ed ZiT Tron. I could not,
for the life of me work out what I wanted
to talk about for this week's monologue. I am a
little burned out, and Robert and Sophia telling me I
(00:24):
should take a break sometime, and I will at some
point everyone, I promise. But I was seeing and thinking
last night about what I was going to do today,
and I ended up sketching out some thoughts and I
realized that this show genuinely helped me turn my life around.
A little dramatic, but Better Offline really truly helped me
(00:44):
leave a very dark place I was in April twenty
twenty four. I would argue it on some degree saved
my life, and I will tell you how today. It's
a monologue. You already had a great interview with Karen Haile.
This week. I'm going to give you a little schmaltz,
a little bit of who I really am. And I
worry this is ferociously self involved or pretentious, but at
(01:04):
least from the heart. Right. So back when I started
the show in early twenty twenty four, I was really
lost as a person, but also as someone who would
call themselves a creative. I'd agreed to do the show
and knew I was capable of pushing out content, but
my personal life had become, let's just say, very bad.
I was in a bad situation. I was overweight, I
was unhappy. Therapy was kind of grinding at me. It
(01:27):
didn't feel like it was changing anything because I was
kind of in a depressive state where I didn't want
to talk to anyone, which is why I wouldn't talk
to my friends at all. And I had this fucking
podcast I had to do that. I loved the idea
of but I like confidence. I liked the pison vinegar
you know me for today. And one day, as I
struggled to work out what the fuck I was doing
(01:48):
that week, I sat down to write the script for
an episode about Shean, which is a Chinese clothing giant
that grew its brand entirely online. And it was coming
up on my birthday, Averri twenty fifth, and it's a
day I really enjoyed. So I was pushing myself to
do something, anything to get this episode off my plate
and move on to planning the day, which is a
few weeks out that would end up being dog shit
(02:08):
like it always was, and I was bored. I didn't
care about Shin. I didn't care what I was doing.
I didn't think you would either. And I sat there
thinking about whether or not I could realistically do better
offline anymore, or my newsletter or really end of this crap,
and what can I say? My birthday kind of sucks
and it always kind of led me to a weird slump,
but I was in one that day anyway. I was
(02:29):
really not in a great place, and if I'm honest,
I was kind of spiraling. So I closed this Google
doc and I sat teary eyed, staring at the ceiling.
Babou my cat was on top of me kind of.
I was sat at this table, and he shoved himself
kind of on top of my knees, which he does
when he knows I'm hurting, which is lovely. And I
sat there thinking about things, and I was drafting in
(02:49):
my head something about not doing the newsletter anymore, and
wondering how the fuck I was going to do forty
or so more episodes. I was really quite worried, and
this was really largely due to my personal I'm three
minutes into this and I've just rambled about myself. But
you know what, that's what the monologues for. And I
looked at the time and I realized I'd only written
eight hundred words in two hours, and I felt very
(03:11):
bad about myself. I thought, I don't care about Shiin,
and so I went to look at Google to see
if I could find something, anything about the tech industry
that would be more interesting right about and I saw
immediately something that pissed me off. A cycled tech gate
that had ripped off a story from another site, and
they'd entirely ripped it off. They copypasted the entire thing,
if not automate the entire thing. I was irate, not
(03:33):
just because I was looking for something and this was
making my life harder, but because Google was making money
off of this. And in that moment, I realized that
I needed to find out who did this. I need
to find the rap fuck that made this happen. I
remember the name i'd kind of touched upon in the
previous newsletter that i'd only just drafted, Propagar Ragavan, and
(03:53):
I realized I've said propagar Ragavan over a hundred times
on this show, but I really didn't know who he
was at the time, so I sat My eyes were red, puffy,
and felt just like doom in every fiber of my being,
wondering how I tell Robert and Sophie that I needed
a break. Weeks into the show, and I immediately discovered
the story of the biggest shithead I've run into in tech,
the man that destroyed Google Search. I discovered a man
(04:15):
that has done unfathomable damage to the Internet, and I
kind of got a template for how bastards have ripped
a part of the tech industry in search of growth.
It was and it remains, the moment that the growth
of all costs rot economy actually made sense to me. Now,
as you probably realized, they take a lot of my
newsletter work and put it into the podcast, But The
Man that destroyed Google Search was the first time I've
ever taken a script and made it into a newsletter.
(04:38):
And this fundamentally changed how I write, because up until
literally that episode, my spoken voice and my written voice
were different. I wrote in a probably a more ballsy
way than I talk. I was deeply unconfident with my voice.
You can probably hear it in the first few episodes
as well, you could tell, and this episode was very cathartic,
(05:00):
and it was also the first moment I'd really felt
proud of anything I'd worked on, which is an insane
statement given the amount I've written and produced before. Then.
I realized in this moment, too, that I'd been treating
myself without much dignity or respect, and that things in
my life had to change. The man that destroyed Google
Search was my first real breakthrough piece and made me
rethink how he looked at the world, in part because
(05:21):
it showed me the scale at which one man's selfishness
can reach such havoc. Maybe it's a little much to
put this much meaning on a fucking podcast episode, but
these monologues are where I get to have my fun
and be a little much something that I used to
hate about myself, but at the very least have turned
into a good career. Nevertheless, this breakthrough also pushed me
to many other breakthroughs in my life and allowed me
(05:42):
to fully emerge from Michelle I'd been in since birth.
Had I not chased down Probagar Ragavan, I have no
idea how I'd complete the first season of Better Offline,
let alone reach the third tram On right now, and
the fact I won on award from this is completely insane.
I don't even know how to express how happy it
makes me, and I have a weird thing with being
excited or being happy. You're really gonna you're learning a
(06:04):
lot about me today, possibly too much. But look, I've
never felt understood by the world, and when I've looked
upon the world through my own eyes, I've struggled to
understand it myself. But in the last year of my work,
I've found myself. I've found myself doing this show. My voice,
my personality, my vigor, my anger, my fury, my love,
my passion, all through trying to understand what the fuck
(06:25):
is going on with the computer. It all sounds ridiculous
when I say it out loud, but I think you'll
like it. And my lack of confidence, even if as
I say this now, it's because I've never been good
at appearances. I've never been good at fitting in, And
it took until twenty twenty four for me to truly
speak with confidence, and took me until like twenty twenty
five for me to even like how I looked or
(06:47):
who I was as a person. I've never been good
at pretending. I've never been able to fit into the
little corporate management squares you're meant to Other than my
ability to be pleasant and conciliatory, I can't deal with
someone lying to me, which includes, but isn't limited to
people that bullshit me because they've decided that I'm stupid.
I've never felt peer pressure because I've never felt popular, cool,
or important, nor do I feel smart. I do this
(07:08):
show because I have to, as doing it has brought
me some degree of salvation at times when I felt
truly lost, brought me closer to people that I love
and respect, and allowed me to process the complex emotions
I experienced reading about and understanding this stuff, and really
understanding my childhood, which was largely based growing up online.
I ain't have friends, I didn't really have things to
(07:29):
do other than being online, and it made me who
I am, but also made me kind of reflect on
things each year as I saw the Internet begin to crumble.
But I really love doing this show and I have
no idea if this monologue is going to be something
you care for, but I want you to know why
I'm doing it. I want you to know who I
am and what I am because this show has allowed
me to express myself in a way that I've never
(07:51):
allowed myself to and as a result, has allowed me
to become who I am and took me off a
path that was equal parts dark and hopeless. Now I
get to do a podcast where I call tech CEO, scum,
pigs and shit heads, living the dream, and I am,
albeit depressingly recently, extremely happy in my life because of
the work I get to do and the people it's
led me to, and to the friendships I already have
that have deepened as a result. And hearing from all
(08:13):
of you is wonderful too. I'm so lucky to be
able to do this, but also that so many of
you reach out with kind words, with funny things that
you've found, or just stories that pissed you off too.
It's genuinely magical. Whatever the size of this community is
really grateful for it. I'm grateful that I get to
do this, and I'm great grateful that I get to
do these like five to ten minute long monologues where
(08:33):
I just share how I feel at random. So yeah,
that's been this week's monologue. Next week, we have a
really fun interview with Giant bomb coming up as well.
Just just did that. The show fucking rocks. Thank you
for listening.
Host
Ed Zitron
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