Offline with Jon Favreau

What exactly is happening inside CBS News, and how much is Bari Weiss to blame? How are journalists at CNN feeling about becoming the Ellisons' next target? And what has corporate consolidation done to the media? Oliver Darcy, founder and writer of Status and former senior media reporter for CNN, joins Offline to break it all down. He and Jon also discuss Comcast's announcement that it may spin of...

AI is creating a crisis of agency where people are becoming paranoid that they’re being manipulated, suckered, and ultimately replaced. Charlie Warzel joins Offline to elaborate on his Atlantic essay, “The Feeling of Control Slipping Away,” which illustrates the myriad ways AI is driving people insane. He and Jon talk about whether human creativity is endangered, if AI is anything more than a corp...

Progressives are highly critical of America, and for good reason. But we are losing more than problematic idols and ideals when we abandon patriotism. Jerusalem Demsas, founder and editor of “The Argument,” argues that if we’re going to save America, we’ll have to start loving it first.  She joins Offline to explain how liberals have ceded patriotism to the right, why No Kings is starting to fix t...

Ever heard a popular TikToker wax poetic about who they’re voting for? They might be getting paid…and not disclosing by whom. Kyle Tharp, author of the Chaotic Era newsletter, joins Offline to discuss the emergence of pay-for-play political influencers and whether Democrats have made any progress in figuring out the internet. He and Jon talk about the decline of Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire, the...

Who are the men who want women to be quiet? Author and Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis argues it’s nearly everyone on the right. She joins Offline to make the case that “masculinism” and its mission to reestablish the primacy of men is what unites conservatives more than anything else…except maybe Donald Trump. In reporting her most recent cover story, Helen spoke with so-called intellectuals an...

Sonja Lyubomirsky, happiness researcher and author of How to Feel Loved , joins Offline to explain the secret to living a contented life—and why the internet makes it so damn hard. If everyone we love and seek to impress is reachable at all times…why are Americans getting less happy, year after year? Sonja and Jon chat about how social media curation may be seeping offline, the ways our digital li...

Does political violence ever help a social cause? Zayd Ayers Dohrn, playwright and host of Crooked's "Mother Country Radicals," joins Offline to discuss the complicated legacy of radical activism in America. In his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young , Zayd dives even deeper into the morally ambiguous decisions made by his parents...two founding members of the notorious Weather Undergro...

Why is Palantir, the former employer of congressional candidate Alex Bores, currently running attack ads against him...for working at Palantir? New York Assemblymember Alex Bores joins Offline to explain why his stance on AI has made him a target for the biggest dark money super PAC in the country. Then, he and Jon discuss what AI regulation could actually look like if we had a competent governmen...

Cal Newport, computer scientist and author of Deep Work, joins Offline to explain why we need a revolution in cognitive fitness, and how AI is going to get in the way. Cal and Jon explore how smartphones and AI are destroying our ability to concentrate, how our attention spans are a third of what they were just twenty years ago, and how we can practice “deep work” in our constantly interrupted dig...

Megan Garber, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book Screen People , joins Offline to explain how we’re no longer just an audience for the media we consume; we’re also actors and producers in an endless show of our own creation. She and Jon discuss the corrosive nature of an internet filled with “main characters,” whether it’s possible to overcome screen person syndrome, and why o...

With Pope Leo XIV stepping up his criticisms of the Trump administration this month, the president is out for blood...and not the transubstantiated kind. Christopher Hale, author of the Letters from Leo newsletter, joins Offline to explain the real threat this woke offline pope poses to MAGA. He and Jon discuss why the head of the Catholic Church is so obsessed with AI, how the Democratic Party sh...

New York Times journalist Noam Scheiber stops by the pod to talk to Jon about his new book Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class , in which he argues that stagnant wages and rising student debt have changed the economic promise once offered by a college degree. The two discuss how college-educated workers are responding to this new reality, both individually and collect...

New Yorker journalist Andrew Marantz joins Offline to break down his new investigation into Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Over the course of hundreds of interviews, including over a dozen with Altman himself, Andrew and his coauthor Ronan Farrow unveiled a leader who tells people exactly what they want to hear, whether or not it’s true. Just like the AI model he created! Jon...

Mark Zuckerberg is finally being held accountable–not by government regulators, board members or shareholders, but by two lawsuits. Tech journalist Casey Newtown, editor of Platformer , joins Offline to explain how a young woman in California beat Meta and Google on the grounds that Instagram and YouTube had destroyed her mental health. Jon and Casey discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the cas...

Why fight for a better future if we don't believe one is possible? Why organize, why vote? Dr. Deepika Chopra, the "Optimism Doctor," joins the show to talk about the dangers of cynicism, and to explain how optimism is a more rational and democracy-safeguarding response to this political moment. In her new book, The Power of Real Optimism , Dr. Chopra argues that the outlook is neither a trait nor...

Life or death decisions are being gamified for profit on online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. But these platforms may also have the potential to create a modernized—if morally questionable—method of opinion polling. Politico Magazine contributing writer Nancy Scola joins Offline to explain the rise of these markets, the argument for them, and the people in D.C. who stand to gain t...

Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum joins Offline to discuss America’s slide towards autocracy, as illustrated through Trump's war of choice in Iran. Anne is a staff writer at The Atlantic, an authoritarianism expert, and the host of the "Autocracy in America" podcast. She and Jon discuss how Trump and the White House are using propaganda to minimize the seriousness of this war, what our presi...

Derek Thompson, journalist and co-author of Abundance, joins Offline to hash out some hard truths about AI: who it will actually replace, why we haven’t seen more labor market disruption, and why the Department of War’s battle with Anthropic spells the end of private property rights in America. Then Derek lays out his Postmanesque "Everything Is Television" theory of media for Jon, where politics...

Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, joins Offline to talk about the horrifying trends his team has unearthed across social media platforms…and how it’s put him in the crosshairs of the Trump Administration. To date, Imran has weathered multiple lawsuits, stood up to Elon Musk, and won. But now, the State Department is trying to get him deported back to the UK—just for publi...

Max Fisher returns to the show to podmaxx with Jon about the latest Offline-worthy news, including the landmark court case that's put Mark Zuckerberg on trial and internal drama at the AI giants that has the companies feuding with the Department of Defense, Hollywood, and their own employees. Plus, the two discuss the role citizens' social media videos have played in holding ICE agents accountable...

AI company Anthropic has a new, values-oriented “constitution” that they’re feeding their chatbot, Claude. Amanda Askell, the company’s in-house philosopher, joins Offline to talk about what it means to teach ethics to an LLM, whether the AI skews more human or more robot, and how she is training Claude to make its own judgements. Breaking with other AI models—and social media’s attention obsessio...

Charlie Warzel, Atlantic staff writer and host of the "Galaxy Brain" podcast, joins Offline to break down the news of the week: how Elon Musk's negligence and the Epstein Files continue to corrode our society, whether we’ve reached The Singularity with new AI-only social media sites like Moltbook, and how phones—and neighborliness—have been the saving grace of Trump’s assault on Minnesota. For a c...

Adam Friedland sits down with Jon to make sense of his unlikely rise from the self deprecating (and self defecating) cohost of Cum Town to…a public intellectual? "The Adam Friedland Show" has a knack for jolting politicians and celebrities out of their canned talking points, and its host shares what he thinks of the format he initially set out to skewer, the questions we need to be asking about th...

Minneapolis isn’t just protesting ICE—it’s fully organizing against it. Lydia Polgreen, journalist and opinion columnist at  The New York Times,  joins Offline to explain the difference, share what she saw on the ground in the Twin Cities, and explain how it compares to other countries’ slides towards authoritarianism. As a former foreign correspondent in West Africa and India—and having grown up...

Journalist, blogger, and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow stops by the studio to talk to Jon about “enshittification,” his theory that explains how, sometime over the last decade, everything online became substantially worse. The two discuss how tech companies lure in, trap, and then extract as much capital as possible from users; how that process played out at Facebook and Amazon; and what it...