Monologue: How Better Offline Saved Me

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:24Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

0:36I could not for the life of me work out what I wanted to talk about for this week's monologue. I am a little burned out. And Robert and Sophie are telling me I should take a break sometime. And I will at some point. Everyone, I promise. But I was seeing and thinking last night about what I was going to do today. And I ended up sketching out some thoughts. And I realized that this show genuinely helped me turn my life around. It's a little dramatic, but Better Offline really, truly helped me leave a very dark place I was in in April 2024. I would argue it, on some degree, saved my life, and I will tell you how today.

1:11It's a monologue. You already had a great interview with Karen Heil this week. I'm going to give you a little schmaltz, a little bit of who I really am. And I worry this is ferociously self-involved or pretentious, but at least it's from the heart, right? So back when I started the show in early 2024, I was really lost as a person, but also as someone who would call themselves a creative. I'd agreed to do the show and knew I was capable of pushing out content, but my personal life had become, let's just say, very bad. I was in a bad situation. I was overweight. I was unhappy. Therapy was kind of grinding at me.

1:47It didn't feel like it was changing anything because I was kind of in a depressive state where I didn't want to talk to anyone, which is why I wouldn't talk to my friends at all. and I had this fucking podcast I had to do that I loved the idea of but I lacked confidence I lacked the piss and vinegar you know me for today and one day as I struggled to work out what the fuck I was doing that week I sat down to write the script for an episode about Shein which is a Chinese clothing giant that grew its brand entirely online and it was coming up on my birthday April 25th and it's a day I really enjoy so I was pushing myself to do something anything to get this episode off my plate and move on to planning the day, which was a few weeks out, that would end up being dog shit like it always was.

2:29And I was bored. I didn't care about Shein. I didn't care what I was doing. I didn't think you would either. And I sat there thinking about whether or not I could realistically do better offline anymore or my newsletter or really any of this crap. And what can I say? My birthday kind of sucks and it always kind of led me to a weird slump, but I was in one that day anyway. I was really not in a great place. And if I'm honest, I was kind of spiraling. So I closed this Google Doc and I sat teary-eyed, staring at the ceiling. Babu, my cat, was on top of me. I was sat at this table and he shoved himself on top of my knees, which he does when he knows I'm hurting, which is lovely.

3:05And I sat there thinking about things. And I was drafting in my head something about not doing the newsletter anymore and wondering how the fuck I was going to do 40 or so more episodes. I was really quite worried. And this was really largely due to my personal life. I'm three minutes into this and I've just rambled about myself, but you know what? That's what the monologue's for. And I looked at the time and I realized I'd only written 800 words in two hours, and I felt very bad about myself. I thought I don't care about Shein. And so I went to look at Google to see if I could find something, anything about the tech industry that would be more interesting to write about.

3:41And I saw immediately something that pissed me off, a site called TechGate that had ripped off a story from another site. and they'd entirely ripped it off they'd copy pasted the entire thing if not automate the entire thing i was irate not just because i was looking for something and this was making my life harder but because google was making money off of this and in that moment i realized that i needed to find out who did this i need to find the rat fuck that made this happen i remembered a name i kind of touched upon in the previous newsletter that i'd only just drafted propagar ragavan and I realized I've said Propagar Raghavan over a hundred times on this show, but I really didn't know who he was at the time.

4:18So I sat, my eyes were red and puffy and felt just like doom in every fiber of my being, wondering how I'd tell Robert and Sophie that I needed a break weeks into the show. And I immediately discovered the story of the biggest shithead I've run into in tech, the man that destroyed Google search. I discovered a man that had done unfathomable damage to the internet. And I kind of got a template for how bastards have ripped apart the tech industry in search of growth. It was, and it remains, the moment that the growth at all costs for our economy actually made sense to me. Now, as you probably realize, I take a lot of my newsletter work and put it into the podcast, but the man that destroyed Google search was the first time I've ever taken a script and made it into a newsletter.

4:58And this fundamentally changed how I write, because up until literally that episode, my spoken voice and my written voice were different. I wrote in a probably a more ballsy way than I talk. I was deeply unconfident with my voice you can probably hear it in the first few episodes as well you could tell and this episode was very cathartic it was also the first moment i'd really felt proud of anything i'd worked on which is an insane statement given the amount i've written and produced before then i realized in this moment too that i'd been treating myself without much dignity or respect and that things in my life had to change the man that destroyed google search was my first real breakthrough piece and made me rethink how I looked at the world, in part because it showed me the scale at which one man's selfishness can wreak such havoc.

5:45Maybe it's a little much to put this much meaning on a fucking podcast episode, but these monologues are where I get to have my fun and be a little much, something that I used to hate about myself but at the very least have turned into a good career. Nevertheless, this breakthrough also pushed me to many other breakthroughs in my life and allowed me to fully emerge from a shell I'd been in since birth. Had I not chased down Prabh Garraga Van, I have no idea how I'd complete the first season of Better Offline, let alone reach the third, which I'm on right now. And the fact that I won an award from this is completely insane.

6:16I don't even know how to express how happy it makes me. And I have a weird thing with being excited or being happy. You're learning a lot about me today, possibly too much. But look, I've never felt understood by the world. And when I've looked upon the world through my own eyes, I've struggled to understand it myself. But in the last year of my work, I've found myself. I've found myself doing this show, my voice, my personality, my vigor, my anger, my fury, my love, my passion, all through trying to understand what the fuck is going on with the computer. It all sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but I think you'll like it.

6:51And my lack of confidence, even as I say this now, it's because I've never been good at appearances. I've never been good at fitting in, and it took until 2024 for me to truly speak with confidence, and it took me until 2025 for me to even like how I looked or who I was as a person. I've never been good at pretending. I've never been able to fit into the little corporate management squares you're meant to other than my ability to be pleasant and conciliatory. I can't deal with someone lying to me, which includes but isn't limited to people that bullshit me because they've decided that I'm stupid.

7:22I've never felt peer pressure because I've never felt popular, cool, or important, nor do I feel smart. I do this show because I have to, as doing it has brought me some degree of salvation at times when I felt truly lost, brought me closer to people that I love and respect and allowed me to process the complex emotions I experienced reading about and understanding this stuff and really understanding my childhood, which was largely based growing up online. I didn't have friends. I didn't really have things to do other than being online. And it made me who I am, but also made me kind of reflect on things each year as I saw the internet begin to crumble.

7:59But I really love doing this show and I have no idea if this monologue is going to be something you care for, but I want you to know why I'm doing it. I want you to know who I am and what I am. Because this show has allowed me to express myself in a way that I've never allowed myself to. And as a result, it's allowed me to become who I am and took me off a path that was equal parts dark and hopeless. Now I get to do a podcast where I call tech CEOs scumbags, pigs, and shitheads. I'm living the dream. And I am, albeit depressingly recently, extremely happy with my life because of the work I get to do and the people it's led me to and to the friendships I already have that have deepened as a result.

8:31And hearing from all of you is wonderful too. I'm so lucky to be able to do this, but also that so many of you reach out with kind words, with funny things that you've found, or just stories that pissed you off too. It's genuinely magical. Whatever the size of this community is, I'm really grateful for it. I'm grateful that I get to do this and I grateful that I get to do these like five to 10 minute long monologues where I just share how I feel at random. So yeah, that's been this week's monologue. Next week we have a really fun interview with Giant Bomb coming up as well. Just did that. The show fucking rocks.

9:04Thank you for listening.

9:17head, save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster, ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. Wells Fargo has awarded$138 million in grants to nonprofits, supporting military and veterans with housing, small business, career transition, and more over the last 10 years. It's one of the many ways wells fargo seeks broad impact in communities wells fargo the bank of doing learn more at wellsfargo.com slash say do support includes contributions from wells fargo and company and the wells fargo foundation stop settling for weak sound it's time to level up your game and bring the boom hit the town with the ultra durable lgx boom portable speaker and enjoy vibrant sound wherever you go elevate your listening experience to new heights because let's be real your music deserves it the future of sound is now with lg x boom and for a limited time save 25 at lg.com with code fall 25 bring the boom x boom there's a lot going on in hollywood how are you supposed to stay on top of it all variety has the solution take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new daily variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives Where do you see the business actually headed?

10:42Featuring the iconic journalists of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton. The only constant in Hollywood is change. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Daily Variety, and listen now. This is an iHeart Podcast.