24 episodes
Better Offline Cool Zone Media
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- Technology
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4.5 • 40 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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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. -
We're Watching Facebook Die
For three years, Facebook's monthly active users have been declining dramatically, with Facebook.com losing 397 million unique monthly visitors since May 2021. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how Mark Zuckerberg's abominable growth-at-all-costs mindset has turned Facebook into a dystopia of AI-generated slop, dangerous misinformation and outright pornography, all as a result of Zuckerberg's intentionally harmful approach to social media.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Customer Reviews
Necessary Criticism
Ed is fiercely opinionated and highly critical of developments in the tech industry, but in a way that is necessary amid a hype cycle that seldom gets challenged by others in the same industry.
Good podcast
Another excellent show from Cool Zone! Interesting subject, good guests, knowledgeable host. (Accent is a little grating, but likely not his fault.)
Lots to Work With
I appreciate the critical approach to tech coverage and the host seems well versed on the topic. But he speaks in the cadence of a conservative talking head. He imbues everything with personal insults and moralism. A blow hard is a blow hard regardless of their point.
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