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, 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.
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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.
Free newsletter tie-in: https://www.wheresyoured.at/on-nvidia-and-analyslop/
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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.
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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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YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/b...
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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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...
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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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...
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/
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