PODCAST · technology
Better Offline
by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
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
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Monologue: Anthropic Slows Down
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about how Anthropic’s big Q3 revenues underwhelmed an already-nervous market, and how the more of the real numbers we learn about AI, the worse things seem to get. Newsletter: Annualized Enron Rate...
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The Hater's Guide To Bonds With Rob Wigglesworth
In this week's Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times to explain how both corporate and sovereign bonds work, why you should care, and what you need to know about the tech industry’s growing debt. Rob Wigglesworth: A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How...
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Monologue: Australia's Dodgiest AI IPO Is A Pale Horse
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about the brittle state of Australian AI data center company Firmus’ IPO, its dodgy underlying numbers, and how the Australian media has set an example of how you should actually cover an AI company. NOTE: This IPO was officially postponed...
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"Cycular" Financing w/ GamersNexus
In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about NVIDIA’s “cycular” financing, Trump’s “superintelligence” accord, the growing bubble in the gaming industry, and the Steam Frame VR headset. Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter:...
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Monologue: Anthropic's $413bn Burden
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about Anthropic’s $413 billion in non-cancellable compute commitments, and how its future depends on the impossible task of borrowing $50 billion to $100 billion a year from a bond market that’s already strained by endless AI data center...
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Monologue: Anthropic Lost $8bn In 2025, Was A Worse Business Than OpenAI
In this week's Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks through Anthropic’s 2025 financials, covering how it spent $2.75 to make a dollar, and how it was, at least last year, a worse business than OpenAI. Dead Money: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dead-money/ Anthropic story from Reuters:...
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Monologue: The AI Data Center Overbuild
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about how $200bn to $300bn of AI GPUs are sitting in warehouses, how hyperscalers like Microsoft are overstating their AI capacity, and why the AI data center overbuild is magntiudes worse than the Dot Com era fiber buildout. Where’re All…
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The Hidden Recession Beneath The AI Bubble w/ Paul Kedrosky
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by economist Paul Kedrosky to talk about how AI is distorting the bond markets to the point that it’s changing the price on US Treasuries, how AI data center economics don’t make sense, and the troubling signs he’s hearing out of Anthropic....
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Monologue: Shut The F*ck Up, Dario!
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron delivers a simple message: if Dario Amodei truly believes that Anthropic is building dangerous AI, he should stop any and all cybersecurity model training runs, halt his IPO, limit Claude to only the safest possible functions, or shut the fuck…
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Stopping The AI Safety Cult ft. Adam Becker & Cal Newport
Ed Zitron is joined by computer science professor and writer Cal Newport and journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker to get the word out that the narrative about existential risk from AI is driven by a religious cult of effective altruists and rationalists. AI Is Already In Dangerous Hands...
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Monologue: Jacob Coxon and the AI Safety Grift
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through the nonsensical, pro-AI lab scare campaign driven by former researcher Jacob Coxon, how the media keeps falling for AI safety grifts, and how dangerous AI is already in the wrong hands - those of Anthropic and OpenAI. WIRED interview...
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Managing The Situation
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how society continues to manage rather than deal with crises, and how the AI bubble is yet another crisis resulting from a failure to deal with the complexity of the real world. Last Week’s Newsletter: Hyperscale Normalization...
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Monologue: Concentration Risk
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how 80% of Anthropic and OpenAI’s enterprise revenues come from the top 1% of its customers, and how the entire AI bubble is a series of different concentration risks supported by venture capital and debt. Newsletter:...
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LLMs Will Never Make Art With Caleb Wilson and Arif Hasan
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by Arif Hasan of Wide Left and Caleb Wilson of Kill The Computer to talk about an academic paper on AI slop, and the many reasons why LLMS can never truly make art. Why Slop Matters: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06060 Arif Hasan wideleft.football...
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Monologue: Into The Jensenverse
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how the AI bubble has increasingly become Jensen Huang and NVIDIA feeding different companies money, and how NVIDIA’s revenue is mostly dependent on a small handful of customers being able to raise more and more debt every year....
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No, AI Is Not "Autonomously Hacking" with Cal Newport
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about what the recent AI hacking incidents actually mean, why we should stop referring to LLMs as AI, and what the post-bubble world looks like for LLMs. Podcast & Videos:...
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Monologue: AI Hits A Wall
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenue growth is decelerating, and how OpenAI’s pause on model development and collapsing economics create the very real possibility it could collapse. EDITOR’s NOTE: I incorrectly say at the beginning of...
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The AI Clown Car W/ Gamersnexus
In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about the increasingly-delusional promises of the AI semiconductors industry, the rotten economics of LLMs, and how everything is becoming more frantic and desperate as we reach the end. GamersNexus - There Are No…
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AI Creativity Doesn't Exist With Chloe Radcliffe and Ed Ongweso Jr.
In this week's Better Offline, Ed is joined by comedian Chloe Radcliffe and critic Ed Ongweso Jr. to talk about AI’s attempts to interfere with the creative arts, horrible little robots, Mark Zuckerberg’s terrible AI essay, and why we can’t respect people writing using AI. Chloe’s Show Cheat -...
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Monologue: NVIDIA's No IT Loads Refused Cash Dump
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through NVIDIA’s entirely-theoretical $500 billion AI infrastructure partnership with various asset managers, all to keep up with analyst expectations that it will make more than $1.6 trillion in the next three years. Chloe’s Show Cheat -...
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Monologue: The Pale Horsemen Arrive
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how 70% of Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s AI revenues are from Anthropic and OpenAI, with 7% of Microsoft’s FY26 revenue coming from OpenAI alone, and how this is cast-iron proof that demand for AI doesn’t exist at a scale that...
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The AI Demand Bubble with Ed Elson
In this week's Better Offline, Ed is joined by Prof G Markets’ Ed Elson to talk about the recent slew of tech earnings, how analyst estimates show that 70% of Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s AI revenues come from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the logical endpoint of his AI bubble thesis. Save $10 off…
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Monologue: We Live Inside A Dream, But Who Is The Dreamer?
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how the media deliberately ignores reality to hide how Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s cloud growth is near-entirely driven by Anthropic and OpenAI, and how doing so threatens the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. To...
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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making w/ Nik Suresh
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by writer and software engineer Nik Suresh to talk about how AI mania is eviscerating global decision-making, weakening businesses and creating a culture of fear that demands workers lie about the benefits of AI to kiss up to Business Idiots. Nik’s…
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Monologue: What The Hell Are The Hyperscalers Doing?
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how hyperscalers have wasted $1.1 trillion in capex on AI in a desperate attempt to sustain hypergrowth, and report on how without OpenAI’s claud spend, Microsoft Azure would’ve only grown 8% year-over-year in 2025. The Subprime Data...
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The Cult of the Ultra-Wealthy with Ed Elson
In this week's Better Offline, Ed is joined by Prof G Markets’ Ed Elson to talk about the broken state of the stock market, the collapse of financial regulation, SpaceX’s post-IPO horror show, and how our culture conflates wealth with intelligence. To celebrate the one year anniversary of the...
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Monologue: OpenAI Could Kill SoftBank and Oracle
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. To celebrate the one year anniversary of the premium newsletter, I’m...
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AI Made Everything Expensive (ft. GamersNexus)
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. Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter:...
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Monologue: Blame AI For Making Everything More Expensive
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...
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Trashfuture x Better Offline: Goosed In The Shell
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...
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Monologue: Meta Admits It Bought Too Many GPUs
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...
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The WSJ On Polymarket's Questionable Ads
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. Please support…
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Monologue: Tokenpocalypse Now
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. Save $10 off a year of my premium...
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Monologue: Silicon Valley is A Cargo Cult
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:...
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The AI Industry Must Stop Doom Trolling w/ Cal Newport
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. Please support…
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Exclusive: OpenAI Spent $34 Billion In 2025, With Losses Up 8X
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/ Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter:...
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CZM Rewind: The Rot-Com Bubble
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...
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Monologue: AI Can't Afford To Slow Down
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...
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Why AI Has No ROI with Paul Kedrosky
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…
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Monologue: Everyone Suddenly Cares About AI ROI
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:...
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The AI Industry Is Losing
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:...
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Monologue: Anthropic Is Not Profitable Unless You Remove Its Costs
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.…
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AI Versus The PC Industry With GamersNexus
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. Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter:...
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Monologue: AI Is Making The Tech Industry Weak
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. Please subscribe to my premium newsletter - save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter:...
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The Insanity of the Markets with Ben & Emil
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 Please support me by subscribing to my...
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CZM Rewind: Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron on Enshittification and the Rot Economy
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...
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Monologue: AI's Compute Demand Story Is A Lie
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...
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Palantir's Manifesto with June and Caleb from KTC
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...
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Monologue: How OpenAI Kills Oracle
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…
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Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization
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. Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Better Offline have?
Better Offline currently has 279 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Better Offline about?
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...
How often does Better Offline release new episodes?
Better Offline publishes regularly with 279 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Better Offline?
You can listen to Better Offline on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Better Offline?
Better Offline is created and hosted by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts.
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