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Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst 

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.

Better Offline

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 newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-already-in-dangerous-hands/
 
Adam
https://bsky.app/profile/adambecker.bsky.social 
https://www.youtube.com/@DreamingAgainstTheMachine 
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/9781541619593/

Cal
Podcast & Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia/
Newsletter: https://calnewport.com
 
Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stopping The AI Safety Cult ft. Adam Becker & Cal Newport

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 with Coxon: https://archive.md/2026.09.10-091328/https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-researcher-quits-jacob-coxon-ai-fears-humanity/
Thread on Hubinger and Coxon: https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mv4suhyexc2g
 
Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Monologue: Jacob Coxon and the AI Safety Grift

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 https://www.wheresyoured.at/hyperscale-normalization/ 
This week’s newsletter: Concentration Risk https://www.wheresyoured.at/concentration-risk/ 
Hypernormalization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7T07WfIhM 
 

Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Managing The Situation

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: https://www.wheresyoured.at/hyperscale-normalization/
Ramp Data: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1w5i9t4/ramp_80_of_openai_and_anthropics_enterprise/
Terrible Groundbreaker piece: https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom - please note that many of the numbers in this piece are wrong and it’s written by Claude, but the overall thesis is useful.

Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Monologue: Concentration Risk

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
x.com/ArifHasanNFL
arif.bsky.social

Caleb Wilson
https://bsky.app/profile/birdrespecter.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/killthecomputer.com

 
Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

LLMs Will Never Make Art With Caleb Wilson and Arif Hasan

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. 

EDITOR’s NOTE: I incorrectly say at the beginning of this that NVIDIA’s earnings were this week. They’re next week. Sorry!

Newsletter: The AI Hater’s Manifesto: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-haters-manifesto/ 
Bloomberg Article: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/nvidia-500-billion-plan-envelops-164209178.html 
 
Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Monologue: Into The Jensenverse

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: https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia/
Newsletter: https://calnewport.com
New Yorker archive: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport

 
Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

No, AI Is Not "Autonomously Hacking" with Cal Newport

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 this that NVIDIA’s earnings were this week. They’re next week. Sorry!

Newsletter: What If OpenAI Dies? https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/ 

 
Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! 
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Monologue: AI Hits A Wall

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 Non-Clowns In The Clown Car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F33Ohjufi9k
Support GamersNexus’ AI Surveillance Dystopia Series: https://store.gamersnexus.net/ai-dystopia 
https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexus
https://gamersnexus.net/
https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social 
https://x.com/GamersNexus 
 
Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! 
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The AI Clown Car W/ Gamersnexus

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 - https://publictheater.org/performances-jp/2026/c/chloe-radcliffe-cheat/ - August 19th and 20th in NYC!
Chloe Radcliffe: https://www.instagram.com/chloebadcliffe/?hl=en 
Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social
Ed Ongweso’s newsletter https://www.thetechbubble.info/

 
Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! 
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
 
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
 
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
 
Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

AI Creativity Doesn't Exist With Chloe Radcliffe and Ed Ongweso Jr.

In this week’s monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through how and why OpenAI and Anthropic use “annualized revenues” to hide that they’re nowhere near their yearly revenue projections.
 
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hits-4-billion-annual-pace-competition-cursor-intensifies?rc=kz8jh3 
www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-hits-12-billion-annualized-revenue-breaks-700-million-chatgpt-weekly-active-users?rc=kz8jh3
 
Episode note: I say “$5.5 billion” for OpenAI’s potential revenue in 2025. Calculations I’ve run since suggest it could be lower - around $5.25 billion. Both of these numbers are reasonable.
 
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
 
---
 
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
 
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
 
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ 
 
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
 
Ed's Socials:
 
https://twitter.com/edzitron
 
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Monologue: Annualized Revenues Are BS

Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst

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