25 episodes
Better Offline Cool Zone Media
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- Technology
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4.6 • 19 Ratings
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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.
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Let Tim Cook
Last week, Apple announced that they're integrating artificial intelligence into your iPhone and Mac in a stunningly demure and reserved presentation. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through whether you should trust Apple - and how OpenAI agreed to the worst deal in tech history to integrate ChatGPT in the least-prominent way.
EPISODE LINKS: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
Sam Altman Is Dangerous To Silicon Valley
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks through how Sam Altman's ridiculous promises about the future of artificial intelligence could be ruinous for Silicon Valley, and speaks with Bloomberg's Ellen Huet about how Sam Altman - a non-technical founder with little business success - accumulated so much power.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
The Talented Mr. Altman
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 a successful company, fired from both Y Combinator and, briefly, OpenAI. In this episode, Ed Zitron digs into the history of Silicon Valley's most popular confidence man, and talks to the Wall Street Journal's Tom Dotan about Altman's many, many investments. EPSIODE LINKS: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
The Rot-Com Bust
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 Silicon Valley is to put power back in the hands of those who actually build things - and reject the management consultant mindset killing innovation.
Episode Links: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
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 useless products like the metaverse, cryptocurrency and generative AI.
Episode Links: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
AI Is Breaking Google
On May 14th 2024, Google introduced their Search Generative Experience, a service that uses hallucination-prone artificial intelligence to generate answers to queries rather than just presenting links, all so that they could Wall Street that they're innovative and future-forward. The result is an even-more-broken search experience, and in this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through the rotten state of Google, and speaks with Lily Ray, a 15-year veteran of the search engine optimization industry, about how Google abandoned the web.
LINKS:
Lily Ray: https://lilyray.nyc/ https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc
The Verge's Interview With Sundar Pichai: https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interview
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Customer Reviews
An important and timely podcast
This bleakly entertaining podcast explains in clear terms why the tech we all have to use in every aspect of our daily lives keeps getting worse, and lays out the broader implications of this for society. Zitron is a well-informed, eloquent and personable host, and his heartfelt indignation at the industry’s grifts, greed and squandered opportunities is palpable. Maintain the rage, Ed! I’ll be listening.
Too angry.
Too angry and ranty for me.
I get it, Ed is angry about the current state of the Internet and tech. I am too. It's perfectly reasonable to be angry at the destruction of something we love and have come to rely on for so many things. But there's only so much of that anger I can take when expressed in a 45 minute podcast. It just gets exhausting listening to a man angrily rant for so long and I honestly think it undermines the message and will potentially alienate listeners who might not agree with Ed and who otherwise might have been convinced by a calmer, more matter-of-fact delivery.
I feel like this anger can still be expressed without coming across as an extended beligerant rant, and I would be happy to return to this podcast if it becomes a little more relaxed in the future.
I wish Ed all the best with the podcast. It is highlighting very important issues, it's just not for me.
Makes you think…
Ed really makes you think about the world that we are buying into, or perhaps the top 1% of the world that is buying us. There are plenty of “stop the world, I want to get off” revelations in the content, even for people who are in this space and are already aware of the concerns of the modern digital economy. Enjoy, if it doesn’t make you too depressed in the process!
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