Offline with Jon Favreau

Should protests be about expression or persuasion? What makes for an effective protest? And is it still possible for protests to effect change in a fractured, algorithmic media environment? Jon talks to Dr. Omar Wasow, a professor at UC-Berkeley, about his famous study on the effectiveness of civil rights protests in the 1960s. They discuss why the protests of the early 60s led to more political change than those of the later 60s, ...

Skibidi rizz Labubu Dubai matcha. The internet—and its algorithms—have reshaped the words we use and the way we speak—but are those changes also affecting our politics? Adam Aleksic, known online as Etymology Nerd, joins Offline to talk to Jon about his new book “Algospeak” in which he makes sense of our new, internet-optimized linguistic landscape. Jon and Adam discuss how that landscape is changing our politics, how Donald Trump’...

Charlie Kirk’s assassination has rattled people on both sides of the aisle and terrified those whose jobs, like Charlie’s, involve talking about politics on the public stage. Jon reflects on the aftermath of the killing, what he finds most alarming, and his disappointment with leaders on the right and followers on the left. Then, the Bulwark’s Will Sommer joins the show to break down how important Charlie Kirk was to the MAGA movem...

Democrats need to defend democracy without undermining it—but how? John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke and the "Unpopular Front” substack, joins Offline to interrogate why Democrats have ceded nostalgia about the past to Republicans, how they should be resisting the America's autocratic slide, and what it says about our political moment that his “Trump is dead” tweet went viral. John and Jon discuss the pros and cons of using...

As the U.S. slides into autocracy, Americans need to be reminded that liberalism can still solve the problems that Trump uses to fear monger. Jerusalem Demsas, founder and editor in chief of “The Argument,” joins Offline to explain what solutions for immigration and the economy would look like, her beef with the post-liberal left, and why she’s staying on Twitter...and maybe you should too. Plus, what she’s seeing on the ground at ...

 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 ...

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, whe...

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 agenda...

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 ...

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 cannib...

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...

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.

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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 w...

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 thi...

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 ...

Are we surveilling our children too much? Do we need fancy gadgets to track their sleep? Should we be taking so many pictures of them? Longtime New York Times culture critic Amanda Hess joins Offline to discuss why the optimization of childhood may just be another empty promise of the information age. Amanda's new book, Second Life, follows her digital identity crisis as she grapples with her newborn baby's rare genetic disorder, t...

To celebrate his final appearance on the pod, Max takes Jon on a trip down memory lane, sharing his favorite Offline clips from the past two years—including lessons he learned while trying to take control of his screen time, insights about loneliness in the digital age, and a touching reflection on what it means to pay attention to what you pay attention to. But first! Your favorite millennials discuss a terrifying AI model that’s ...

The tech elite believe AI is just a few years away from displacing most computer-based jobs, and they seem…excited about it? Atlantic staff writer Matteo Wong joins Offline to discuss why Silicon Valley thinks AI is more important than anything happening in politics or the economy, and why it’s all eerily similar to their optimism around social media in the 2010s. But first! Max shares a personal update that we all hate, and then i...

Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror and staff writer at the New Yorker, joins Offline to discuss how it’s becoming harder and harder to make sense of reality, especially with AI taking over our feeds. She and Jon talk about how online distrust bleeds into life offline, parenting in this moment of endless horrors, and the inspiration (or lack thereof) behind her latest essay, "My Brain Finally Broke." But first! Jon’s X account ma...