Have Our Screens Made Us Too Distracted For Democracy?

 Ben Rhodes—bestselling author, Pod Save the World co-host, and fellow Obama administration alum—joins Offline to explain how America is being torn apart by short-term thinking and the technology that stokes it. Ben recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on the topic, and he and Jon connect the dots between big tech, the attention economy and domestic dogmas, drawing on fifty years of foreign policy to explain how we got to a place where no one can focus on the worst of what Trump’s doing—let alone agree on a national narrative.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast. 

Kyla Scanlon, author and economic commentator, joins Offline to explain why our economy feels so weird. She and Jon talk about the ways AI — and Labubus — have taken over the markets, whether big tech has become overly reliant on the attention economy, and why Gen Z is feeling so down about their longterm economic prospects. But first! Jon sits down with The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka to talk about internet age verification laws, whether we all have posting ennui, and why people are mourning the end of ChatGPT-4 like the loss of a close friend.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.

As the Trump administration manufactures conspiracies to distract from the president’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, some on the right are blaming the deep state while others are finally calling foul. The Bulwark’s Will Sommer has been covering the far right conspiracy beat for years, and he joins the show to break down the Epstein drama, run through the kooks in charge of federal law enforcement, and compare the unhinged agendas of MAGA's two misinformation queens, Laura Loomer and Candace Owens. One thing’s for sure: never before have so many online lunatics occupied positions of such power and influence.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast. 

Why are non-white voters moving towards Trump? Yale professor and author Daniel Martinez HoSang sits down with Jon to examine how Democrats’ multiracial coalition fell apart during and after Obama’s presidency, what minorities see in Trump (and why they have no remorse about voting for him) and what the left can do to win them back. But first! Max is back to hash out the news of the week: Trump has announced his AI Action Plan and signed executive orders attacking "woke AI”—no word yet on chatbots that call themselves MechaHitler and act like Nazis, which happened recently with Elon Musk’s Grok AI. Speaking of Nazis, both the Department of Homeland Security and…Sydney Sweeney? have been accused of playing into white nationalist tropes online, and the Tea app has been hacked, exposing thousands of women's personal information to the delight of 4chan incels.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.

Living through a deadly plague as we watched the country descend into political violence on our screens might've left us with some...unresolved issues. Director Ari Aster sits down with Jon to break down his new dark comedy, “Eddington,” which depicts the violent unraveling of a small town as it faces pandemic, polarization, and AI proliferation. But first! MSNBC’s Brandy Zadrozny joins Offline to unpack the latest in MAGA’s cannibalizing Epstein conspiracy, debate the merits of online debate (we're looking at you, Jubilee), and wade through Elon’s latest unhinged innovation: a horny anime chatbot that flirts with children.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.

Boys today are being told to man up by the right and sit down by the left. Coming of age in the shadow of #MeToo and wading through algorithms rife with manosphere content, many young men are accepting the far right’s simple answers and leaning into traditional masculinity…without realizing it’s stunting their emotional development. Others are letting technology isolate and depress them. What is it about boys' psychology that makes them so vulnerable to the Internet Age? How does patriarchy lead well-intentioned parents to treat their sons less affectionately? When will men have a liberation movement—and do they deserve one? Ruth Whippman, author of BoyMom, sits down with BoyDad Jon to unpack it all.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.

Religion in the US has been on the decline for many years, but does atheism make us unhappier? Ross Douthat, New York Times Opinion columnist and author of Believe, joins Offline to explain why he thinks believing in God is a rational choice, why secular humanism feels worse in the age of Trump, and what he makes of Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance’s recent misanthropic comments on his "Interesting Times" podcast.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.  

We don't really know how AIs like ChatGPT work...which makes it all the more chilling that they're now leading people down rabbit holes of delusion, actively spreading misinformation, and becoming sycophantic romantic partners. Harvard computer science professor Jonathan Zittrain joins Offline to explain why these large language models lie to us, what we lose by anthropomorphizing them, and how they exploit the dissonance between what we want, and what we think we should want.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.  

Why are young men — of all races — moving toward Trump? Are high prices to blame? Their media diets? The Democrats? John Della Volpe, the nation’s leading youth pollster, joins Offline to discuss “Speaking to American Men,” a new $20 million effort to bring young men back into the Democratic coalition. John and his colleagues surveyed more than 1,000 men under 30 and conducted dozens of focus groups to understand what these men think about Donald Trump, the Democrats, and the direction of the country. He sits down with Favreau to share the effort’s initial findings — some surprising, some not — and to explain why reversing their shift toward MAGA may actually be easier than progressives assume.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast. 

Jesse Armstrong, the Emmy Award-winning creator of HBO's "Succession," joins Offline to chat about how he made a mockery of Silicon Valley tycoons in his new movie, “Mountainhead.” He and Jon discuss why the men who run social media companies are so anti social, how hard it is to satirize people who are already parodies of themselves, and compare notes on their writing process. Then, Offline welcomes an old friend back to the show to celebrate the Musk-Trump fallout.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.