Monologue: How Better Offline Saved Me

In this week's monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through the story of how writing The Man That Destroyed Google Search saved his life. The Man That Destroyed Google Search: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-man-that-destroyed-google-search/id1730587238?i=1000653621646 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. You can also order a limited-edition Better Offline hat until 5/22/25! https://cottonbureau.com/p/CAGDW8/hat/better-offline-hat#/28510205/hat-unisex-dad-hat-black-100percent-cotton-adjustable --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 0:40Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue. I'm your host Ed Zitron.

• 0:52Ed Zitron?

  I 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 I, 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. It'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

• 1:35Ed Zitron?

  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. It 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 love the idea of, but I lacked confidence. I lacked the piss and vinegar you know me for today.

• 2:20Ed Zitron?

  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, move on to planning the day, which was a few weeks out, that would end up being dog shit, like it always was. And 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

• 3:05Ed Zitron?

  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, kind of, I was sat at this table and he shoved himself, kind of, on top of my knees, which he does when he knows I'm hurting, which is lovely. And 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 gonna 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.

• 3:46Ed Zitron?

  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. And 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'd kind of touched upon in a previous newsletter that I'd only just drafted,

• 4:27Ed Zitron?

  Propagall Ragavan. And I realized I've said Propagall Ragavan over 100 times on this show, but I really didn't know who he was at the time. So 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 rott economy actually made sense to me. Now, as you probably realized, I take a lot of my newsletter work and put it into the podcast, but the man that

• 5:09Ed Zitron?

  destroyed Google Search was the first time I've ever taken a script and made it into a newsletter. And 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.

• 5:52Ed Zitron?

  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 selfishness can wreak such havoc. Maybe 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 Prabha Garagavan, 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 I won an award from this is completely insane. I don't even know how to express how happy it makes me.

• 6:35Ed Zitron?

  And I have a weird thing with being excited or being happy. You're really gonna, 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 like it. And my lack of confidence, even if 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.

• 7:18Ed Zitron?

  And it took me until like 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. I'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.

• 8:02Ed Zitron?

  And that friends, I didn't really have things to do other than being online. 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. But 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 and 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 has 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, 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.

• 8:48Ed Zitron?

  And 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 found or just stories that pissed you off too. It's genuinely magical. Whatever the size of this community is, really grateful for it. I'm grateful that I get to do this and I'm 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, just did that. The show fucking rocks. Thank you for listening.

• 9:29Speaker 00

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• 10:01Speaker 02

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• 10:14Speaker 03

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• 10:57Speaker 03

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• 11:01Speaker 04

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• 11:46Speaker 04

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• 12:09Speaker 05

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• 12:42Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.