Inside The Hive With Nick Bilton

As the Florida governor shows his bully stripes, Inside the Hive asks what his 2024 chances could be. Plus, ‘Creem’ rides again Inside the Ron DeSantis Plan to Overthrow Trump and TrumpismThis week Vanity Fair published Gabe Sherman’s profile of Florida Governor and would-be Trump slayer Ron DeSantis [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/09/ron-desantis-the-making-and-remaking-of-a-maga-heir]. On Inside the Hive, Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox discuss whether DeSantis’s aggressive push for national prominence—coming as Trump's legal peril mounts and a slew of new Trump books hits stores this fall—signal the last throes of the Ex-POTUS’ political potency. The answer, if DeSantis has anything to do with it, is clearly yes. But as DeSantis' polling takes a hit following his controversial immigration stunt, the next question becomes: Can a charmless bully survive the spotlight?  Plus: A conversation with J.J. Kramer, who has revived his father’s storied rock magazine Creem decades after it stopped publishing. The i

In this special episode of Inside the Hive, three guests—Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, writer and podcaster Molly Jong-Fast, and standup comic Patton Oswalt—discuss the cultural and political legacy of Generation X. Asks Hive cohost Joe Hagan: How has the slacker generation, once known for irony and ambivalence, weathered the 21st Century?  The promise of ironic detachment may not have lasted, but Gen X-ers have become the last skeptics of the digital age. The generations that followed "introduced this 24/7 grind mentality,” says Oswalt, "where the people that wanted to live like little lives on the fringe, doing creative stuff, and making enough money to survive—those people are being pushed out…It's like if you're not grinding all the time, you should be wiped off the map. And that, to me, is really, really scary.”“We are skeptical of effort for effort's sake,” observes Jones. "So there's a way in which we're motivated by substance, and we're skeptical of anything that is not substantive.” Thir

Never has there been a time in U.S. history when lawyers were as in the foreground as they have been during the era of Donald Trump. Many of them have ended up under the bus, from Michael Cohen to Paul Manafort to Rudy Giuliani. But the many twists and investigatory turns over the last half decade also made household names of a number of bright legal minds. Andrew Weissman is chief among them. As a lead member of Robert Mueller’s special counsel’s office and a professor, Weissman knows how to meticulously break down the facts when it comes to all the president’s mess. On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, he explains just how significant Trump’s national security breach was, without even knowing what’s in the documents secreted away at Mar-a-Lago. And what’s Attorney General Merrick Garland poised to do? Weissman has an idea.Plus, Hive media reporter Joe Pompeo on the birth of true-crime mania and his new book, “Blood & Ink.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan talk to Tim O’Brien, executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion and author of "TrumpNation," about the latest obstacle in the Department of Justice’s investigation into Trump’s handling of top secret documents. The decision by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, to appoint a “special master” to review the documents and slow the investigation, reeks of politics, says O’Brien. “Does this send a signal to other Trump appointees that you should carry the bag for your handler?” he asks. Despite Judge Cannon’s recent ruling, "the reality is this is a very robust and existentially threatening investigation to Donald Trump,” O'Brien adds, and Trump’s political power in the coming midterms is clearly on the wane. Can the law prevail over politics? Also in this episode: Hagan talks to Edward Buckles, Jr., director of the searing HBO documentary, “Katrina Babies.” A filmmaker from New Orleans who was 13 at the time of Hurricane Katrina, Buckles explores the tragic fallout o

Virtually every poll this summer had Democrat Pat Ryan losing his campaign for Congress to Republican challenger Marc Molinaro, including one released on the day of the election. This week, Ryan joins Inside the Hive’s Joe Hagan to talk about his shock victory in a rural New York district that’s now being viewed as a bellwether for Democratic hopes this fall. Ryan’s campaign (to replace Antonio Delgado, who left his seat to become New York’s lieutenant governor) began at about the same time as the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft Dobbs opinion in May. Ryan, a former Army officer and West Point graduate, leaned into the abortion issue and discovered a highly energized Democratic base. His campaign, he says, focused on “freedom and choice and the idea that I don’t want the government telling me or my fellow Americans what to do in their personal lives. That is clearly a resonant thing, and really a patriotic thing, and so I think that's one of the big takeaways here.”Along with the Dobbs decision, Ryan says, t

Her fame has endured. Her brand has expanded. The way the media has framed who she was and how she is talked about has changed. Paris Hilton sat down with Emily Jane Fox for an interview to talk about that shift, that sex tape, and nostalgia culture. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Vanity Fair tech correspondent Nick Bilton speaks with cohost Joe Hagan about the recent leaks from Facebook that reveal the company knew of the toxic impact of their platforms, including Instagram, on users, especially teenage girls. In a world in which the social media giants—FAANG, or Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google—are too rich and powerful to be contained by limp political and regulatory systems, “we’re left to the wolves,” says Bilton. After covering the social media world for a decade, Bilton says the only way to beat the media giants is to hack the system—ourselves—by reprogramming our behaviors, which are the literal coins of the social media realm. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, Emily Jane Fox sits down with the First Son to talk about his addiction, his dad, what makes a Biden love story, and why he thinks the GOP, and Don Jr. in particular, are obsessed with him. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hive correspondents unpack Jared Kushner’s romantic and financial spin in his upcoming memoir and try making sense of Donald Trump burying his ex-wife, Ivanka’s mother, on a New Jersey golf course. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham joins Inside the Hive to talk about what she witnessed on January 6th, Melania’s “lazy” run as First Lady, and what people should know ahead of 2024. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan talks to Lis Smith, Democratic campaign veteran and author of the new memoir Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, which details her journey, the public one and the private one, through Democratic campaigns over the past 17 years, for candidates as varied as Jon Corzine, Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, and, most infamously, former governor Andrew Cuomo, whose lurid political demise she details down to the last moments of his time in office. A savvy political operator, Smith trains her sights on stubborn problems like Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and what to do about President Joe Biden, who, despite his abysmal poll numbers, she says is preparing to come out swinging in advance of the midterms.  “If the [midterms] are a referendum on Democrats, we will be screwed in November,” says Smith, but if Biden and his surrogates can effectively target Trump-tainted election deniers and antiabortion Republicans, “that’s a terrain we can win on. And that’s a switch that w

This week’s episode of Inside the Hive first dives into the latest revelations from the January 6th committee, and explores what could happen next as the panel draws to a closeThen Chrysta Bilton, along with her husband Nick Bilton, join Emily Jane Fox to discuss “Normal Family,” Chrysta’s memoir that recounts her discovery of more than 35 biological siblings from the same sperm donor. She describes her colorful upbringing, the shock of a lifetime in finding out that she was perhaps unknowingly dating her half brother, and how this experience shaped her views on nature versus nurture Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Vanity Fair contributing editor Jeff Sharlet joins Inside the Hive to talk about his journey into the far-right world of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, Qanon-ers and Trump cultists — who they are, what they’re saying, what they believe, and what their still-growing movement might portend (including the specter of civil war in America). Also: Willem Marx, a London-based contributor to Vanity Fair, discusses the fall of British PM Boris Johnson as well as his latest report on the undue influence of Putin-connected Russian oligarchs in the British establishment - including, allegedly, Johnson himself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, the former head of Planned Parenthood joins Emily Jane Fox to discuss abortion rights, contraception, and advocacy in the wake of Roe “I thought that at some point, there would be some group within the Republican party that would go, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa. This is too far,” she said. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week Inside the Hive features two guests focused on the Jan. 6 hearings. First, Daniel Goldman, former federal prosecutor and newly-announced candidate for New York's 10th congressional district, analyzes the findings of the Select Committee investigating the insurrection from the point of view of a lead lawyer in the first Trump impeachment. “If [Merrick Garland] doesn't charge him because Trump is a former president, then that is political,” Goldman says. “And so if you want to de-politicize the Department of Justice, you can't not charge him.”Second, Inside the Hive talks to Alex Holder, the British filmmaker whose exclusive access to Donald Trump and his family before, during and after Jan. 6 has turned his forthcoming documentary, Unprecedented, into explosive new evidence for the Committee and the filmmaker himself into a possible witness. After witnessing Trump’s “tone of belligerence," says Holder, “I predicted that [the Jan. 6 insurrection] was going to happen the night before.” Learn about yo

This week, Inside the Hive co-host Joe Hagan talks to Jason Selvig and Davram Steifler, the comedy duo known as The Good Liars, about their viral prank on the National Rifle Association in late May. Selvig, posing as an NRA ally, stood before Wayne LaPierre and thanked him for his continual “thoughts and prayers” for mass shootings, presenting a brutally exhaustive list. The duo has attended 15 Trump rallies, poking at the QAnon insanity inside, and were eyewitnesses to the insurrection on Jan. 6th—which they also managed to turn into pointed comedy. “You couldn't help but feel like they were getting ready for a battle reenactment or something,” says Steifler. "Everyone we stopped was like, ‘This is 1776.’” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Author Dave Cullen, who has been covering mass shootings in America for two decades, joins Emily Jane Fox for this week’s episode of Inside The Hive, to talk about the slow progress he has witnessed in how new groups are taking on the NRA for the first time, and what he is hearing from survivors of mass shootings about how they are dealing with the repeated trauma. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a key member of the Jan. 6 Committee investigating the Capitol attack, gives Inside the Hive an exclusive preview of next week’s primetime hearings. After nearly a year of investigating the insurrection, Raskin says the most surprising discovery has been "the role that money played, and the role of a financial motive behind all these events, to keep the money pouring in.” The committee, he promises, will also draw direct and indirect lines between “the top of the Republican hierarchy” and the "violent hooligans and street fascists” who overran the Capitol. But will Donald J. Trump himself be implicated? Raskin has said the former president will get his “comeuppance" but whether he’ll face direct criminal justice for his “premeditated” role in an attempted coup remains an open question. Tantalizingly, Raskin deflects on the question of whether former VP Mike Pence has spoken to the committee or might testify against Trump. "I can't get into it,” he says. Plus: Raskin offer

The only public figure with the guts to confront cynical Republicans over gun laws and the Texas massacre was a defiant Democrat who the media class long ago dismissed: gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke. Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan grapple with the horrors of this week's events in Uvalde and what they say about our broken politics and national backslide. When rare instances of idealism and courage are framed by political elites as mere opportunism, is there any hope left? Where do we go from here? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is running to be the state's next governor, joins Emily Jane Fox fresh on the heels of Tuesday's primary elections. In November, Shapiro, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, will face Republican Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed far-right candidate who wanted to overturn the 2020 election results, whom Shaprio called "extremely dangerous. Fox and Shapiro dive into his opponent's role in the January 6th insurrection and how to message to voters who believe in The Big Lie. Plus, Shapiro speaks to what he learned from Democrats' campaigning mistakes in 2016, why he believes freedom is on the ballot, and his thoughts on how to win in a swing state. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices