When Ed Zitron launched his podcast "Better Offline" in 2024, a gift from the show's publisher soon arrived at his Las Vegas home: an imposing seven-foot-tall black felt-clad box known as a VocalBooth.

"It's like a foam prison with lights inside it," said Zitron. "It's wonderful."

Nowadays, he steps inside the chamber usually once a week to "get pissed off for, like, an hour and a half"—meaning record an episode of his podcast, which interrogates the influence of tech companies and what Zitron calls the "rot economy," the corrosive effects of an industry chasing growth at all costs. The semi-enclosed pod helps reduce environmental noise and serves as a dedicated space for all the recording gear he has accumulated over the last year or so of creating his podcast.