Better Offline
Episodes
Big Tech Is The Enemy of Innovation
16 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As the AI bubble collapses, it's time for the tech industry to repent, and to recognize that the future cannot be decided entirely by four or five tri...
How The AI Bubble Bursts
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After a year of opulent spending, the markets have begun to sour on big tech's $200 billion bet on generative AI, unfortunately timing with the delay ...
Enzittification with Cory Doctorow & Brian Merchant
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the third live-to-tape episode of Better Offlive, Ed Zitron is joined in-studio in Los Angeles by Cory Doctorow and Brian Merchant to talk about th...
The State of Tech Journalism with Kylie Robison and Mike Isaac
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the second live-to-tape episode of Better Offlive, Ed Zitron is joined in-studio by the New York Times' Mike Isaac and The Verge's Kylie Robison to...
Rot Economics with MIT's Daron Acemoglu
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Ed Zitron sits down with famed MIT economist Daron Acemoglu to talk about the economics of the tech ecosystem, the ridiculousness of ...
CrowdStruck
22 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On Friday July 19, millions of Windows PCs entered a doom-loop that rendered them non-functional thanks to an update sent by a little-known company ca...
The Academics That Think ChatGPT Is BS
19 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In a paper released earlier this year, three academics from the University of Glasgow classified ChatGPT's outputs not as "lies," but as "BS" - as def...
Pop Culture
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When the money gets nervous, so should you. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through a remarkable report from global investment bank Goldman Sachs...
How Shareholders Are Destroying The Tech Industry
12 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The shareholder supremacy has eaten the tech industry, driving private and public companies to chase unprofitable, unsustainable ideas like generative...
The Shareholder Supremacy
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Ed Zitron tracks the history of the growth-at-all-costs rot economy to a court case in 1916 that established the Shareholder Supremac...
I Will Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again Ft. Nik Suresh & Robert Evans
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A few weeks ago, an Australian tech worker called Nik Suresh wrote an evisceration of the current AI hype boom called "I Will F**king Piledrive You If...
Where Did Tech's Magic Go? feat. Alex Cranz and Michael Fisher
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In a special live-to-tape episode of Better Offline, Ed is joined by The Verge's Alex Cranz and YouTube influencer Michael Fisher to talk about what t...
The Onion Knight Ft. Ben Collins
21 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In April, The Onion was acquired by a new entity called Global Tetrahedron, revealed shortly thereafter to be a joint venture between billionaire Jeff...
Let Tim Cook
19 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, Apple announced that they're integrating artificial intelligence into your iPhone and Mac in a stunningly demure and reserved presentation....
Sam Altman Is Dangerous To Silicon Valley
14 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks through how Sam Altman's ridiculous promises about the future of artificial intelligence could be ruinous for Silicon...
The Talented Mr. Altman
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sam Altman has used his power and influence to become a multi-billionaire with stakes in hundreds of startups, but behind the curtain, he's never run ...
The Rot-Com Bust
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through what happens when tech's growth-at-all-costs epoch begins to collapse, and how the only way to save Silic...
The Rot-Com Bubble
05 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
AI Is Breaking Google
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On May 14th 2024, Google introduced their Search Generative Experience, a service that uses hallucination-prone artificial intelligence to generate an...
We're Watching Facebook Die
24 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For three years, Facebook's monthly active users have been declining dramatically, with Facebook.com losing 397 million unique monthly visitors since ...
How Mark Zuckerberg Deliberately Made Facebook Worse
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the last decade, Mark Zuckerberg and his internal growth team have repeatedly and intentionally made Facebook and Instagram harder and more dangero...
OpenAI's Video Generating AI Is Dead On Arrival
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Earlier in the year, OpenAI debuted Sora, an AI that can generate videos that almost look realistic. In this episode, Ed walks through why generating ...
Enron Musk Ft. Ed Niedermeyer
08 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On April 26 2024, the NHTSA, the government body responsible for keeping roads safe, found Tesla's Autopilot and Full-Self-Driving software created a ...
The Cult of Failing Upwards
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ed Zitron walks you through how career manager Adam Mosseri pushed out Instagram's original founders, turning it into an ultra-profitable app that bar...
The Man That Destroyed Google Search
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Ed Zitron tells you the disgraceful story of how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Go...
How Managers Are Breaking The Internet
24 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The growth-at-all-costs management consultant mindset has turned most of the modern internet into a painful and profitable social experiment - and in ...
How A Chinese Glycine Manufacturer Went Viral ft. Louise Matsakis and Tianyu Fang
17 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the last few weeks TikTok and other social networks have been flooded with memes about a chinese glycine manufacturer called Donghua Jinlong, all t...
The AI Bubble Is Bursting
12 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every major tech firm is betting billions of dollars that the generative AI revolution will change society - yet when you look under the hood, the rea...
Are We At Peak AI?
10 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s been just under a year and a half since ChatGPT - an AI-powered chatbot launched by so-called non-profit OpenAI - ushered in a new era of inves...
Wikipedia Is All The Web Has Left ft. Molly White
03 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Wikipedia, a non-profit encyclopedia that anybody can edit, remains one of the few trustworthy and reliable websites left online. Ed Zitron is joined ...
Rich Idiots Are Killing The Media To Please The Tech Industry
27 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The media industry has laid off over 30,000 people in the last three years as a result of an executive sect that doesn't read, write, or meaningfully ...
How Growth Is Killing Tech's Innovation, ft. Robert Evans
20 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ever wonder why Silicon Valley stopped making anything new or interesting? It's because of the same growth-at-all-costs mindset that's destroyed the r...
Musk's Uncharitable Charity ft. David Fahrenthold
13 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A New York Times investigation revealed this week that Musk's $7 billion "Musk Foundation" regularly fails to donate enough money to get its multi-bil...
The Metaverse: How Mark Zuckerberg Lied To The World
06 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta, claiming that it was now a "Metaverse company," throwing the entire tech industry into one of its m...
How The Winklevoss Twins Lost A Billion Dollars
01 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Though the Winklevoss brothers are best known for their role in the early days of Facebook, you'll be surprised to learn that they recently lost custo...
The Rot Economy ft Robert Evans
24 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ever wonder why Google results are getting worse, or why you aren't seeing your friends on Instagram? It's all because of the growth-at-all-costs econ...
An Autopsy of Apple's Vision Pro
21 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Apple's $3500 face computer is here, and after spending far too many hours inside it, Ed Zitron has found Apple's vision of the future to be equal par...
Introducing: Better Offline
14 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Better Offline is a weekly show exploring the tech industry’s growing influence over society, and how startups, venture capitalists and big tech fir...