I adore this show because it breaks down tech news so that I can truly understand what the eff tech heads are blabbering about. It does get a little repetitive, but I know AI is the tech obsession lately

love the show. love the trans solidarity. neat cats!

Overall the podcast is great and Ed is great. I will say it does get a LITTLE repetitive; I wonder if the show wouldn’t be even better if it were an every other week show with the occasional special episode for big events.

Finally someone who will accurately describe the current tech industry. Zitron is no fluffer of billionaires

Always a great listen and one I look forward to all week!

The more accurate title for this podcast.

The journalism is good in so far as research and understanding but the delivery of explanatory information is often losing the stage to rage rants. There have been some episodes where the rant seems to become an ouroboros of the same complaints about tech. I agree with those complaints, but I think with some better editing it would be among my top podcasts.

Love the show! It’s ironic that the first thing I heard when I hit play on a recent episode was an ad for OCI (Oracle’s AI product).

The most recent episode berating chat GPT 4.5 was preceded by a lengthy ad from an AI company. Are these guys just trolling us?

Yes, finally a Cowboy Bebop reference. Every time the host introduces himself I picture Ed from the iconic space jazz anime.

With all the AI hype these days, Ed provides a fresh perspective. My only critique is to tone down the anger a bit bro.

There used to be a semblance of rationality and nuance, and now it’s just the same repeated monologues on why AI is bad (which is fine, but it’s ad nauseam at this point and becomes more akin to listening to one man’s narcissistic ideology than a reflective discourse on the topic).

Ed is always on the right side of history. Podcast is great, he has smart thoughts and smart guests. Although sometimes pro-AI ads pop up on this decidedly anti-AI show. 😂

Better Offline is a wonderful podcast tackling how greedy people have turned the genuine wonders of technology sour with the cancer of infinite growth. It’s technology not through the filter of a curiosity, but how it benefits and hurts real people. Give it a listen and cut through the grift.

What started as a podcast critiquing the general tech industry has devolved into a twice-a-week opportunity for the host to just rant about AI, even though he is absolutely wrong about it being unsustainable and ready to have the bottom fall out of it. He misunderstands that the goal of any part of the tech industry is not to make profit but to control the population and undercut labor- two things that are a worthwhile investment for the finance class. Not worth the listen for as long as he is being loud and wrong.

This is absolutely the most informative tech podcast rn. Also the best podcast Robert Evans is involved with currently. It’s also, in its very raw form, the truest representation of how our ENTIRE economy works today, without meaning to be that at all. I don’t know how they are able to distill some of this information into usable knowledge, but I’m very thankful for it and I would love to see the same work applied across other industries

Hey Ed, I heard you on NPR today and loved your fresh perspective Look forward to this podcast take care.

Enormous thanks to this podcast for keeping me grounded (so many outlets seem like they have short term memory loss and act like problems that have been established for almost a decade are brand new, like with the last Facebook episode—people have been ringing alarm bells about how right wing these platforms are for ages), calling it first in many cases, and giving me hope.

Thank you, Ed! Here I was thinking that I was an idiot with AI and most things tech, if I’m honest. I may be bit of a Luddite, but when it comes to AI, there may be reason for that. :-) Either way, thank you for relieving some of my anxiety. You rule!

I have been listening to this since the first episode and I love Ed’s work! It’s been awesome to watch this podcast grow!

I'm a fan of Ed Zitron and enjoy the content of this podcast, but holy cow are the ad breaks on this show soul crushing. It's as if the companies Ed is critiquing are his primary benefactors. Really depressing

He’s right that AI is gonna collapse but he’s also annoying. Also he blocked me on bluesky without me ever including with him, which is his right, but doesn’t make me think he’s not annoying

All of the interviews are really solid and it’s nice having someone to temper Ed’s kind of angry spiraling when it’s just him. My only problem is the same I have with every Ed Zitron show; it’s roughly a quarter ads.

podcasts telling the sobering truth about what the tech giants are actually up to. Update: His delivery may come off as “too angry” for some but we should be mad at what big tech have been feeding us. Do the naysayers really trust them? If so, get out of your bubble, stop listening to billionaires who supposedly have all the answers and wake up!

Excellent Pod

This show is amazing. It is well researched and really opens one’s eyes to some of the issues that are facing our generation today. The biggest problem is they talk a lot about how our online environment is being used to data mine and feed us advertisements while a 30 minute show averages close to 10 minutes of advertisements. It makes the show feel like a setup, hypocritical, and that the producer does not believe what they are saying.

Very informative. Entertaining. I’m glad someone is speaking out about the crumbling tech field. I’ve learned a lot.

Ed is one of the few tech reporters out there who is willing to be critical of the tech industry and actually bring the receipts. Not only that he is incredibly funny and a joy to listen to.

I hope the host gets the healing his soul needs. The podcast has some interesting information and perspective, but it is delivered dripping with hate and scorn, and not a drop of humility

This podcast really just sounds like someone is complaining about his toys being ruined by millionaires and the companies that own them. Someone who knows little about the topics discussed in this podcast will be confused and overwhelmed by the episode’s techno talk and fast talking speed. Usually complains of services’s declining worth ends with the host’s gasping that hurts consumers the most. I wonder if the host himself can survive the world without a computer. Also ironic that this show that complains about private companies services hurting the buying consumer is on a leftist podcast network.

Glorious to hear Ed Zitron cursing the gigantic vultures of the tech industry in righteously indignant language that veers sometimes into iambic pentameter

I listen to fun pods, educational pods, pods that are psychotherapy based, basketball pods, pods about marvel flicks, you get it…. what Ed does here is unmatched. The balance of left & right brain is on display. Ed’s passion & desire for tech to not suffer the same capitalistic sh💩t fate as other industries is admirable. He cares what is happening & wants to educate others.

Ed occasionally makes a few uniquely good points (I particularly enjoyed some of his takes on OpenAI’s overly dramatic PR misdirections), but the show is unfortunately almost entirely misinformed drivel. A great example of this is the CrowdStrike episode, in which Ed faults managerial cost-cutting for an alleged failure to catch a null-pointer dereference, which he describes as a rookie error. There’s simply no evidence for the cost-cutting claim, and if it were so easy to catch memory errors like null-pointer dereferences in all cases in unsafe programming languages (or if it were so easy to switch everything to safe languages), then the world would be literally hundreds billions of dollars richer. It’s not necessarily Ed’s fault that he didn’t know the specific technical root cause of the CrowdStrike disaster the day after it happened, but it was irresponsible for him to opine about it so confidently yet so wrongly. I also found it quite disturbing how in his conversation with Cory Doctorow and some other guy whose name I forget, the three of them express support without a hint of irony for the proposition that the government should spend large amounts of public money to pursue lawsuits to make consumer products worse for end users so long as doing so nebulously “improves competition”. There are absolutely instances of monopoly abuse in the technology sector (Qualcomm and Nvidia are prime examples), but it’s undoubtedly easier “to compete” against a product that the government has artificially hobbled by making any useful differentiation illegal. So-called “Big Tech” is not monolithic, nor should it be.

Been a consumer of tech news-media for decades at this point, and Ed is right that the fun has been missing in action.

Current events make shows like Better Offline more important than ever. Examples include technology gambling/shareholding and so-called AI. Recent interviews demonstrate increased maturity. The guests are awesome.

Host is a misinformation peddler

I want to like this but I think the host trips over his own polemic too much. I would genuinely love to listen to Isaac and Robinson discuss the current state of tech journalism, but in at least the first half hour they … don’t. Instead you get the host on an extended rant with the esteemed guests nodding along. The host’s writing is good! I’m a fan! I’d genuinely love to see what he could do in 30-40 minutes (rather than two hours), going in with a solid agenda and points to hit.

It is refreshing to hear someone examine tech through a skeptical eye, and then share actual opinions about it, regardless of how “negative” those opinions are. For those who might criticize his disposition, I offer this: when the house is on fire, it does little good to observe how lovely the curtains are as they go up in flames.

I love this podcast and know very little about tech and AI. It’s very informative and entertaining.

Ed is a Jean-Paul Marat for Silicon Valley’s late-stage Versailles era. And I think I mean that in a positive way?

A lot of the topics here aren’t disgusted enough. A lot of consumers just hit the button and don’t realize the extent of what they’re giving up when they do business with big tech. From my perspective, it would be good if the content were delivered in a more fact-based and even toned style. A lot of the content is emotionally presented, a decent amount of profanity is used and if you’re a believer a decent amount of blasphemy also. I think, as others have mentioned if things were delivered in a more journalistic way, and less bouncing all over the place, complaining about this that the other thing, this could be a good podcast. there’s just kind of a undertone of the host, trying real hard to be a subject matter expert. I’m not saying he doesn’t know a lot about the tech industry or business, but there’s just kind of a try hard approach to the delivery. Lighten up a little bit and deliver quality content that’s well thought out vs. getting the mic out and flying off the handle about tech personalities and you might have something that picks up a bigger audience.

A truly skeptical , and for me justified substantive rants on a future containing technology that no one asked and can’t seem to escape that is just funneling money to increasingly monopolistic bad acting tech giants who treat the media as their own PR agents . KEEP UP THE WORK!

This show offers a refreshing respite from the self-congratulatory hype that comes from a lot of tech reporting. Nevertheless, although I agree with 99% of the arguments posited, the last 10 minutes of each episode are always off putting. The host doesn’t seem to trust his audience to make the right takeaway from his episodes. So, instead, he explains how you should feel in a needlessly incendiary, reactive, and redundant editorial dump. If you stop listening to each episode about 10 minutes before the end of each episode, the quality of the show goes way up.

This show feels like an inoculation against the contagion of Silicon Valley hype.

I came for the Kara Swisher burns (finally). I stay for the interesting information revealed.

I think the reporting is really important, but I’m not sure there’s enough subject matter to justify weekly episodes. I learn thing and mostly agree with the author, but I can’t deal with the prolonged whiny rants just to fill time😩

You’re translucent rage is more and more transparent with each episode, especially the ones without professional guest able to chime in with rebutted arguments.

I really don’t disagree with any of the stories that he’s done, but the delivery /feels/ kind of like propaganda. It kind of reminds me of my fb in 2016 and I think I’d much rather laugh a little while I get my bad news. Still support the pod, just not for me.

I agree with basically everything Ed says but I don’t think I can listen past episode 3. It’s like Lewis Black but not funny; not the content but the tone. Not very journalistic with this level of emotional editorializing. I wish Jake Hanrahan would come back with more Megacorp.

Ed is what is needed to plainly, and often amusingly, articulate the deception that goes on in these companies.