The Analog Hour

The dancefloor used to be one of the purest forms of shared experience — strangers in the same room, hearing, feeling, and moving to the same music, all at the same time. But DJ RBI has watched all of that change over the last 30 years. In this conversation, Ron Brown (aka DJ RBI) takes us behind the turntables, where he's witnessed crowds go from dancing with each other to dancing for the phone....

When we talk about society's declining trust in institutions, one of the biggest is our diminishing trust in science. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Linnea Weiss and Dr. Andrés Hidalgo, married scientists who both work in labs at Yale. They've been doing research since the 1990s and they've watched a shift, or as Linnea put it, "truth has become cheaper." This is a conversation about what it...

Dean Cooper is an IT executive who uses conversational AI in both his professional and personal life every day. As someone who is neurodivergent, he calls it a lifeline. In this conversation, Dean introduces the concept digital dementia : the idea that we're outsourcing so much of our thinking to AI that we're forgetting how to do the things we once knew. He asks whether we're using AI as a bridge...

In this week's episode, we talk to Lorii Abela, a luxury private matchmaker. Her clients have excelled in almost every aspect of their lives (careers, companies, wealth) and they hire her to help with the one thing that still eludes them: love. She shares what she's seen change over 14 years of matchmaking: how dating has shifted from real conversation to texting and swiping, how the illusion of e...

This week, our conversation goes somewhere we haven't been yet: the office. It can be a lonely place for many of us. One that we tend to blame on difficult bosses, disengaged co-workers, and a general lack of interpersonal skills, but what if it was in fact, a design problem? Alexandra Suchman, a self-described professional play-facilitator, has an idea of how to repair what's broken. She brings g...

Welcome to Season 2 of The Analog Hour. This week, we sit down with Julia Freeland Fisher to discuss AI and loneliness. She has spent over a decade at the Clayton Christensen Institute studying how relationships shape opportunity. Yet, lately her research has explored what happens when AI starts filling the role that humans used to. In this conversation, Julia draws a distinction between engagemen...

Do you know your neighbors? Kanika Mehra is the Gen Z. creator behind Airplane Mode - an Aspen Institute project bringing young people back to third spaces and offline connection. She came up with the idea after thinking about why gathering has become so hard, particularly for her generation. Her answer might surprise you: she believes that the paradigm for gathering has simply disappeared. In thi...

Here's something nobody tells you about making friends as an adult: it's not that you've forgotten how. It's that nobody told you where to go. Maggie Arai spent years answering that question. As founder of happier - a Toronto community that hosted 60+ events and grew to 10,000+ members in 18 months, and Founders Who Give a F*ck, a membership community for ambitious women founders - she's learned f...

Was it always this hard to make friends? In school, connection felt effortless. Then we graduated - and suddenly it wasn't as straightforward as it used to be. Adele Bloch says our increasing sense of isolation can't simply be labeled as a loneliness crisis. Instead she calls it: a courage crisis. Adele is a community builder, coach, and founder of Dining with Strangers and The Board Walks SF - a...

How many times have you promised yourself you'd put your phone down more - only to find yourself doom-scrolling at midnight again? Peter Schmidt wants you to know it's not a personal failing, that our ever increasing levels of distraction is by design. He is co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit dedicated to "attention activism" - pushing back against t...

If you want to figure out someone votes Republican or Democrat, one of the best questions you can ask is: Do you eat at Arby's? Many of us feel as if America is fracturing - liberals and conservatives living in completely different worlds. But economist Emir Kamenica's research reveals something counterintuitive: we're not actually drifting apart culturally. We may feel divided and often, we are -...

A parent trying imperfectly to look at his kids instead of his screen. Instagram eating into reading time. Everything seeming urgent when it's not. The simple act of listening to the world go by. This week, no expert interview - just real people answering four honest questions about their phones: When did you get your first smartphone? What daily phone habit would have shocked you 10 years ago? Ev...

When you scroll through news online, can you tell what's fact and what's opinion? If you're struggling, you're not alone - and it's not your fault. Lynn Walsh is an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, and former ethics chair. In 2016, at the peak of "fake news" claims, Lynn started taking phone calls from Americans who'...

There was a time when half of America sat down at the same hour and watched the same tv show. When a moonwalk or a moon landing or a series finale wasn't just an event — it was a shared experience, a cultural reference point that connected strangers at bus stops and colleagues at water coolers and kids on the playground. That era is over. But what exactly did we lose when it ended — and was it rea...

Wanjiku Kamau was laid off from Google — during one of the biggest AI investment booms in history — and realized she'd barely used the technology her own company was betting everything on. So she taught herself and wrote a book about it: Out of the Loop, Into the Algorithm: How I Finally Made Friends with AI . But this conversation isn't really about AI. It's about what Wanjiku lost when she lost...

What happens when love comes with upgrades, your best matches are behind a paywall, and a chatbot that never disagrees with you starts to feel like the safer option? Myisha Battle is a certified clinical sexologist, dating coach, and author of This Is Supposed to Be Fun and Sexual Pleasure for Dummies . Based in San Francisco — the tech capital of the world — she has a front-row seat to what techn...

Fabio Bin couldn't find anyone to travel with. So he co-founded WeRoad — a company that puts 15 strangers together on 10-day trips with no algorithm, no matching, no profiles. Just people who don't know each other, sharing rooms and roads and the kind of discomfort that turns out to be the secret ingredient for real connection. In this episode, we talk about friction-maxxing — the growing rejectio...

When was the last time you lingered somewhere that wasn't home and wasn't work? A coffee shop, a park bench, a barbershop, a library — a place where you could just be around other people? Those places are disappearing. And Dr. Gwendolyn Purifoye, an urban ethnographer and Assistant Professor of Racial Justice and Conflict Transformation at the University of Notre Dame, has spent years studying why...

When did we stop talking to each other — and what is it costing us? Dr. Maryellen MacDonald is a psycholinguist and professor emerita of psychology and language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World. What she's found is startling: speaking is far more cognitively demanding than listening, reading, or scroll...

When did we stop trusting the news? Was there ever really a golden age — or have we been romanticizing something that was always more complicated? Dr. Aimee Edmondson, Associate Dean of the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University, spent a dozen years in newsrooms before dedicating her career to studying how the powerful have tried to silence the press. In this episode, Aimee takes us o...

Episode 2 — You're Not Stuck in the Past — You're Mining It: The Science of Nostalgia with Dr. Clay Routledge Nostalgia, loneliness, and the shared experiences we've lost — an existential psychologist explains why missing the past is actually good for you Have you ever been told to stop living in the past? What if that impulse — that pull toward old songs, childhood memories, and the way things us...

When was the last time someone called you and you didn't immediately assume something terrible had happened? In the debut episode of The Analog Hour, host Michelle Henery sits down with Dr. Phil Higgins, a licensed clinical social worker with more than 20 years of experience working with clients, to unpack a question most of us are afraid to ask out loud: why am I so lonely? Phil explains why lone...

Welcome to The Analog Hour - where we explore our increasingly divided society, the erosion of trust in institutions from government to media, and the isolation we feel from each other... and how we find our way back to connection. Hosted by Michelle, a "professional talker" and former journalist who reported across continents for almost 20 years. If you're yearning for clarity, conversation, and...