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 this conversation, we talk about serendipity - the unexpected, magical connections that only happen when you're open to the world around you - and what we're losing as technology decides, in advance, who we are and what we'll find.

This Week's Analog Assignment: Leave the house with nothing but (as my mother used to say) your two long arms. Take a walk. Let the world in. See what or who finds you.

Connect with Kanika: Follow Kanika's work at the Aspen Institute's Center for Rising Generations and keep an eye out for Missed Connections - coming soon.

Subscribe to The Analog Hour wherever you listen. analoginadigitalworld.net | @analoginadigitalworld (IG)

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 firsthand about what people actually need when they walk into a room full of strangers.

In this conversation, we talk about the difference between a network and a community, why consistency matters most when forming relationships, and a phrase that should be trending: social health.

This Week's Analog Assignment: Let one small interaction be enough this week. Chat with a neighbor. Skip the self-checkout and say hello to the human cashier. You don't need it to become a friendship. You just need it to happen.

Connect with Maggie: Founders Who Give a F*ck: fwgaf.com

Subscribe wherever you listen. analoginadigitalworld.net | @analoginadigitalworld (IG)

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 weekly Saturday morning walk series she hosted for over 100 consecutive weeks in San Francisco, bringing strangers together for deep, meaningful conversation.

After years of hosting 300+ events and coaching people through social and relationship blocks, Adele has developed a practical, warm framework for rebuilding connection as an adult - starting with one simple question: what type of connection are you actually missing?

In this conversation:

• "Ambient social connection" - what it is and why we've lost it
• Why we're in a courage crisis, not just a loneliness crisis
• The phone as social crutch - and how to get through "five seconds of courage"
• The four friendship buckets: do stuff friends, comfort friends, deep talk friends, ambient connection
• Connection as a muscle: it's not something you have or don't have

This Week's Analog Assignment: Think about Adele's four friendship buckets. Which one are you missing most? This week, take one step toward filling it. Go to one event. Text someone you've been meaning to see. Say hello to your barista/neighbor/the person you lock eyes with on the subway and actually mean it. Just one rep.

Connect with Adele:

• Website: adelebloch.com
• Instagram: @adeleblochjourney
• Twitter/X: @adele_bloch
• The Board Walks: theboardwalks.com

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 the exploitation of human attention by coercive digital technologies.

The attention economy is now a $15 trillion industry with one goal: capturing, quantifying, and commodifying your attention. Every time you pick up your phone, you're facing the most sophisticated predictive technology ever built, designed by some of the smartest people in the world, with one purpose: keeping your eyes on that screen.

In this conversation:

• Why phone addiction is NOT a personal failing - it's a $15 trillion power asymmetry
• Why social media isn't a town square - "it's a shopping mall where the staff are quietly mugging you"
• Why attention isn't just your attention span, it's your ability to love
• The one thing you can do this week to start reclaiming your attention

This Week's Analog Assignment: Get together with your people. In person. Put your phone away. Every time we connect independently of these platforms, we carve out a space that big tech can't touch.

Connect with Peter & the School:

• Strother School of Radical Attention
• Seminars & enrollment: schoolofattention.org/enroll
• The Empty Cup (School of the Attention's Substack)
• Friends of Attention book: Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown, 2026)
• Peter's website: petercschmidt.com

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 - but not in the ways we think.

This episode covers:

• Why Arby's predicts voting
• Baby names: Kurt vs. Liam
• Grey Poupon, iPhones, and consumer markers of identity
• Income inequality is up, but cultural distance between rich and poor is stable
• Can we rebuild? Reasons for hope

About Professor Emir Kamenica: Emir Kamenica is the Douglas G. Baird Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research with Marianne Bertrand on cultural distance and political polarization uses decades of consumer behavior data to measure how American culture has - and hasn't - fractured along political lines.

Find us: analoginadigitalworld.net | @analoginadigitalworld (IG)

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?
• Ever tried unplugging?
• What does your phone stop you from doing?

The average American checks their phone 205 times a day. Over 43% of us admit we're addicted. In these confessions, you'll hear what we're missing: presence, books, conversation, silence, the sounds of life.

This Week's Analog Assignment: Push aside all that your phone offers and identify what it's taking away. Take it back.

The Analog Hour: analoginadigitalworld.net

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'd lost faith in journalism. What she learned during those conversations changed the trajectory of her career.

In this episode, Lynn explains:

• The labeling problem that's impacting trust in the media
• How sensationalism and bias complaints reveal deeper misunderstandings
• What happens when good journalists go independent
• Why we're all "committing acts of journalism" - and the responsibility that goes with that
• Practical steps to rebuild trust and restore faith in the media

This Week's Analog Assignment: The next time you're about to share something online, pause and ask yourself: Is this accurate? Do I trust this source? Is this news or opinion? If you're not sure, either don't share it - or add context.

Connect with Lynn Walsh: on LinkedIn and at Trusting News

Resources:

• Everyone Should Help Minimize Harm
• SPJ Code of Ethics
• FAQ About Journalism Ethics

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and find out more: analoginadigitalworld.net

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 really as good as we remember?

This week on The Analog Hour, I'm joined by Professor Bob Thompson, one of America's leading authorities on television and popular culture, who has spent more than 40 years at Syracuse University studying how what we watch shapes who we are.

We cover a lot of ground — and Bob has a gift for reframing things you thought you understood. We talk about why the age of shared mass culture was actually a case of social engineering; how shows like Leave It to Beaver presented a perfectly polished version of America while the country was immense upheaval.; and why the same technology that once pulled us together is now pulling us apart.

We also talk about I Dream of Jeannie in a way that will ruin it for you slightly. You're welcome.

In this episode:

• Why the era of shared mass culture — from roughly 1890 to 1990 — may be the greatest cultural consensus in human history
• How cable didn't just add channels; it ended the shared cultural conversation
• What All in the Family, MASH, and The Cosby Show reveal about television's complicated relationship with social progress

Professor Bob Thompson is the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications. He makes regular media appearances worldwide — from the BBC to the New York Times — to explain what pop culture says about society.

New episodes of The Analog Hour drop weekly (every Friday). Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and find us at analoginadigitalworld.net.

If this episode resonated, please leave a review and share it with someone who still remembers exactly where they were when an event unfolded that touched all of us.