A Zone Media, Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue. I'm your host ed ZiT Tron. 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 Sophia 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. A little dramatic, but Better Offline really truly helped me leave a very dark place I was in April twenty twenty four. 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 Haile. 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 from the heart. Right. So back when I started the show in early twenty twenty four, 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 loved the idea of but I like confidence. I liked the pison 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 Shean, which is a Chinese clothing giant that grew its brand entirely online. And it was coming up on my birthday, Averri twenty fifth, and it's a day I really enjoyed. So I was pushing myself to do something, anything to get this episode off my plate and move on to planning the day, which is a few weeks out that would end up being dog shit like it always was, and I was bored. I didn't care about Shin. 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 end 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. Babou 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 going to do forty or so more episodes. I was really quite worried, and this was really largely due to my personal I'm three minutes into this and I've just rambled about myself. But you know what, that's what the monologues for. And I looked at the time and I realized I'd only written eight hundred words in two hours, and I felt very bad about myself. I thought, I don't care about Shiin, 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 right about and I saw immediately something that pissed me off. A cycled tech gate that had ripped off a story from another site, and they'd entirely ripped it off. They copypasted 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 rap fuck that made this happen. I remember the name i'd kind of touched upon in the previous newsletter that i'd only just drafted, Propagar Ragavan, and I realized I've said propagar Ragavan over a hundred times on this show, but I really didn't know who he was at the time, so I sat My eyes were red, puffy, and felt just like doom in every fiber of my being, wondering how I 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 has done unfathomable damage to the Internet, and I kind of got a template for how bastards have ripped a part of the tech industry in search of growth. It was and it remains, the moment that the growth of all costs rot economy actually made sense to me. Now, as you probably realized, they 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. 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, and 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 he looked at the world, in part because it showed me the scale at which one man's selfishness can reach 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 Michelle I'd been in since birth. Had I not chased down Probagar Ragavan, I have no idea how I'd complete the first season of Better Offline, let alone reach the third tram On right now, and the fact I won on award from this is completely insane. I 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 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'll 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 twenty twenty four for me to truly speak with confidence, and took me until like twenty twenty five 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. I ain'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. 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. 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 CEO, scum, pigs and shit heads, living the dream, and I am, albeit depressingly recently, extremely happy in 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. 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've 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 great grateful that I get to do these like five to ten 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.

A Zone Media, Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue. I'm your host ed ZiT Tron. 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 Sophia 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. A little dramatic, but Better Offline really truly helped me leave a very dark place I was in April twenty twenty four. 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 Haile. 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 from the heart. Right. So back when I started the show in early twenty twenty four, 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 loved the idea of but I like confidence. I liked the pison 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 Shean, which is a Chinese clothing giant that grew its brand entirely online. And it was coming up on my birthday, Averri twenty fifth, and it's a day I really enjoyed. So I was pushing myself to do something, anything to get this episode off my plate and move on to planning the day, which is a few weeks out that would end up being dog shit like it always was, and I was bored. I didn't care about Shin. 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 end 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. Babou 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 going to do forty or so more episodes. I was really quite worried, and this was really largely due to my personal I'm three minutes into this and I've just rambled about myself. But you know what, that's what the monologues for. And I looked at the time and I realized I'd only written eight hundred words in two hours, and I felt very bad about myself. I thought, I don't care about Shiin, 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 right about and I saw immediately something that pissed me off. A cycled tech gate that had ripped off a story from another site, and they'd entirely ripped it off. They copypasted 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 rap fuck that made this happen. I remember the name i'd kind of touched upon in the previous newsletter that i'd only just drafted, Propagar Ragavan, and I realized I've said propagar Ragavan over a hundred times on this show, but I really didn't know who he was at the time, so I sat My eyes were red, puffy, and felt just like doom in every fiber of my being, wondering how I 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 has done unfathomable damage to the Internet, and I kind of got a template for how bastards have ripped a part of the tech industry in search of growth. It was and it remains, the moment that the growth of all costs rot economy actually made sense to me. Now, as you probably realized, they 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. 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, and 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 he looked at the world, in part because it showed me the scale at which one man's selfishness can reach 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 Michelle I'd been in since birth. Had I not chased down Probagar Ragavan, I have no idea how I'd complete the first season of Better Offline, let alone reach the third tram On right now, and the fact I won on award from this is completely insane. I 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 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'll 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 twenty twenty four for me to truly speak with confidence, and took me until like twenty twenty five 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. I ain'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. 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. 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 CEO, scum, pigs and shit heads, living the dream, and I am, albeit depressingly recently, extremely happy in 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. 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've 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 great grateful that I get to do these like five to ten 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.