Off The Grid: Leaving Social Media
by Amelia Hruby
Off The Grid is a podcast for artists, writers & creative business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their income.
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Episodes
217 episodes
🧶 Attachment Theory Explains Everything — Social Media & AI Addiction with Shannon Algeo
Full episode details & transcript🧶 Attachment Theory Explains Everything — Social Media & AI Addiction with Shannon Algeo
🔒 Live-Building a Small Biz AI Policy — with Dr. Kate Henry
🍓 Rewilding Your Business & How to Rest in Busy Times — with Lindsay Mack of Tarot for the Wild Soul
Amelia sits down with Lindsay Mack of Tarot for the Wild Soul to talk about a decade of building a tarot business, nearly walking away from it all, and what finally made the book and deck possible.
👋 The Privilege of Leaving Social Media — Being a Working Writer & Valuing Art with River Selby
Amelia Hruby talks with writer and former wildland firefighter River Selby about the heartbreak of publishing a debut memoir, the impossibility of performing success on social media while feeling devastated, and why leaving these platforms is a privilege not everyone can afford.
⛓️💥 It's Time to Decolonize Your Teaching Style — with Podge Thomas
Amelia talks with Podge Thomas about hating school, being called a dean's 'pet project' in graduate school, and how those experiences shaped a philosophy of teaching that tries to undo the harm traditional education does.
👩🏫 Why Online Education is Broken (But We Can Fix It) — with Sally Burns of The Portal
Amelia Hruby talks with Sally Burns, founder of The Portal, about what's broken in online course culture — overpromising sales pages, guru-student hierarchies, rigid platform structures — and how Sally built a different kind of digital learning neighborhood in response.
♾️ “You Needing Money Doesn't Make Stuff Sell” — Consistency & Collapse in Online Business with Nic Antoinette
Amelia and Nic talk through a month of baby sheep, grief trips, and the uncomfortable realities of running a tiny business during collective collapse — including the blunt observation that needing money is not a reason stuff sells.
🧑🏫 How to Teach Online (& Why Learning to Teach is My Best Sales Hack)
Amelia Hruby explains why expensive self-guided online courses have stopped selling, what still works, and how getting better at teaching directly improves your ability to write a sales page.
🔒 How I Make Ambitious Biz Plans Without Burning Out
🗒️ How to Plan Without Becoming a Perfectionist — with Lauren of Nine to Kind
Amelia talks with Lauren Ruth Martin, a licensed therapist who built Nine to Kind planners after watching her perfectionist clients pull out color-coded planners at the end of therapy sessions — and decided to make something different.
- How do you build a real business without handing yourself over to platforms that are working against you?
- What does it actually cost — financially, creatively, in your body — to try to do things the right way, and is opting out even possible?
- When the tools you're using start behaving like the platforms you already left, what do you do?
- How do you keep going without becoming a striver — without the next big goal eating the thing you're actually trying to protect?
- What does it mean to teach, sell, or share online in a way that doesn't reproduce the harm you experienced as a student, a reader, or a person on the internet?
Amelia says this year is not about big ideas and she wants to hold herself back from striving, yet in the same breath describes a voice inside her already generating a list of next big goals — another book, a huge program — that she is actively struggling to suppress.
Amelia positions herself as someone who sees through harmful big tech platforms and has stepped back from social media, yet admits she spent all of 2025 using ChatGPT and Claude anyway — sitting in the exact tension she describes for her listeners.
Lindsay claims they eventually understood the slowdown was a broad market shift, yet earlier in the same account they describe having genuinely believed for a long time that it was specifically them — that people were simply done with their work.
If you're trying to run your business while the world feels like it's on fire — and you keep asking yourself whether any of this actually matters right now
If you've been using AI tools and feeling a creeping guilt you can't fully explain — like you already went through this with social media and you're watching yourself do it again
If you've left or pulled back from social media and you're trying to figure out how to actually find clients, build an audience, and stay connected without it
If you've hit something that looks like success from the outside but you're exhausted, your body is telling you to stop, and you're not sure you have permission to actually listen
If you care about privacy and surveillance but every guide assumes you're a developer — you just want to know what someone like you actually switched to and why
Getting off big tech without losing your mind
For someone who wants to reduce their dependence on Google, Meta, and surveillance platforms but keeps hitting the wall of 'but it's complicated' — this arc moves from the tension of staying, to the decision to leave, to the practical stack, to the deeper privacy stakes.
- 1#141 ➿ The Tension of Platforms & Why I Haven’t Left Substack (Yet)Amelia works through the justifications for staying on a platform she knows is bad — and finally can't hold them anymore
- 2#143 💿 My Privacy-Focused, Algorithm-Lite Tech StackThe actual tools she switched to, including where she's compromised and why
- 3#159 🔑 Why Privacy Matters (Even if Google Knows Everything) — with Patricia Egger, Head of Security for ProtonPatricia Egger reframes privacy as something you're doing for other people, not just yourself
Building a tiny business during collective collapse
For someone running a small creative business who feels the gap between hustle-culture marketing advice and the actual texture of working through grief, political weight, and a broken online economy.
- 1#137 💎 How I Built This: 5 Years of Softer Sounds & Off the GridAmelia's five-year arc ends not in a bigger goal but in sabbatical and sitting with enoughness
- 2#138 ✊ 50 Ways Your Business Can Fight FascismA list of concrete things a business can do when the political moment is impossible to ignore
- 3#155 ♾️ Well, That Didn’t Go As Planned… — A New Series with Nic AntoinetteTwo friends mid-adjustment — rightsizing, renegotiating what to share, no resolution in sight
- 4#162 ♾️ “You Needing Money Doesn't Make Stuff Sell” — Consistency & Collapse in Online Business with Nic AntoinetteThe blunt reality that needing money is not a reason stuff sells, and what slack in a business actually looks like
Rethinking how you teach and learn online
For someone who's bought or built online courses and felt something was off — this arc moves from what's broken in the model, to what different structures look like, to the educational harm underneath it all.
- 1#161 🧑🏫 How to Teach Online (& Why Learning to Teach is My Best Sales Hack)Amelia's case that the expensive self-guided course is dead but teaching itself isn't
- 2#163 👩🏫 Why Online Education is Broken (But We Can Fix It) — with Sally Burns of The PortalSally Burns names how Kajabi and Teachable structurally enforce hierarchy and passivity — and what she built instead
- 3#164 ⛓️💥 It's Time to Decolonize Your Teaching Style — with Podge ThomasPodge reframes decades of being a 'bad student' as a response to systems never built for her
Amelia's business collapse and sabbatical year
ongoingAmelia over-commits to a season launch date, admits she doesn't have the capacity, then delivers a full retrospective on how her podcast production studio collapsed after Trump's 2025 inauguration and her body broke down — landing in a deliberately unresolved 'in-between year' of sabbatical and enoughness rather than striving.
- 1trigger — Amelia arrives at a self-imposed deadline without capacity, admits it plainly, and pushes the season backA Quick Permission Slip To Release Your Expectations
- 2turning point — full retrospective on the studio collapse, the migraines and carpal tunnel, the sabbatical decision, and the conscious choice to sit with enoughness instead of the next goalHow I Built This 5 Years Of Softer Sounds Off The Grid
- 3ongoing tension — the series itself was delayed by deaths and grief; Amelia and Nic are both mid-adjustment, rightsizing businesses with no resolution in sight, by designWell That Didn T Go As Planned A New Series With Nic Antoinette
- 4ongoing tension — Amelia and Nic continue working through what consistency means when you're not in a do-or-die launch cycle and can't manufacture urgency from personal financial needYou Needing Money Doesn T Make Stuff Sell Consistency Collapse In Online Busines
Leaving big tech platforms — values, tools, and the limits of opting out
unresolvedAmelia's break from surveillance capitalism tools in 2021 resurfaces as an active, unresolved tension: Substack's social media push forces a platform migration, the privacy tech stack gets recommitted to after Google creeps back in, and AI arrives as an uncanny repetition of the same big-tech patterns — with moral injury named but no clean exit offered.
- 1reframe attempt — Amelia traces her 2020 surveillance capitalism wake-up, the 2021 break, and the current recommitment to an openly imperfect stack, acknowledging 'there is no moral purity on the internet'My Privacy Focused Algorithm Lite Tech Stack
- 2turning point — Substack emailing her subscribers without her knowledge makes the 'use it as a tool' justification untenable; she announces a move to Ghost and Outpost while acknowledging the migration isn't completeThe Tension Of Platforms Why I Haven T Left Substack Yet
- 3reframe attempt — AI assistants trying to join her community calls force a formal policy; she separates her community policy from her personal GPT sobriety commitmentHow To Write A Thoughtful Ai Policy
- 4ongoing tension — AI is named as an uncanny repetition of the social media patterns already rejected; moral injury is identified but opting out is explicitly said not to fix capitalism or the world3 Reasons You Feel So Conflicted About Ai
Episodes that share a verified thread — or take opposing stances on the same question. Click an episode to focus its links.
- Shared experienceGrief materially disrupting work capacity#155 ♾️ Well, That Didn’t Go As Planned… — A New Series with Nic Antoinette echoes #162 ♾️ “You Needing Money Doesn't Make Stuff Sell” — Consistency & Collapse in Online Business with Nic AntoinetteGrief bleeding into work · Grief showing up unexpectedly in work and life
- Shared experienceNo ethical purity possible online#141 ➿ The Tension of Platforms & Why I Haven’t Left Substack (Yet) echoes #143 💿 My Privacy-Focused, Algorithm-Lite Tech StackNo purity on the internet · No moral purity on the Internet
- Shared experiencePersonal refusal of generative AI tools#141 ➿ The Tension of Platforms & Why I Haven’t Left Substack (Yet) echoes #161 🧑🏫 How to Teach Online (& Why Learning to Teach is My Best Sales Hack)Refusing generative AI tools · Choosing not to use AI as a personal stance
- Shared experienceDeleting generative AI accounts entirely#141 ➿ The Tension of Platforms & Why I Haven’t Left Substack (Yet) echoes #151 🤖 How to Write a Thoughtful AI PolicyRefusing generative AI tools · GPT sobriety as personal practice
- Shared experienceLeaving Substack over integrity concerns✨ A Quick Permission Slip to Release Your Expectations echoes #141 ➿ The Tension of Platforms & Why I Haven’t Left Substack (Yet)Amelia's relationship with Substack and possible exit · Moving the Clubhouse from Substack to Ghost
- Shared experienceTeaching and selling as same skill#161 🧑🏫 How to Teach Online (& Why Learning to Teach is My Best Sales Hack) echoes #164 ⛓️💥 It's Time to Decolonize Your Teaching Style — with Podge ThomasTeaching and selling as the same skill · Teaching as a transferable skill
- Shared experienceAI's effectiveness makes values-rejection harder#134 📬 3 Rules for Email Marketing + Newsletters in 2026 echoes #153 🤖 3 Reasons You Feel So Conflicted About AIAI flooding inboxes and what that means for email · AI works even though social media stopped working
- Shared experienceNaming ICE violence while doing business✨ A Quick Permission Slip to Release Your Expectations echoes #137 💎 How I Built This: 5 Years of Softer Sounds & Off the GridStanding against ICE and federal violence · Doing business while the world is on fire
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