We’re all feeling it: The exhaustion. The malaise. The discontent. The nagging suspicion that U.S. politics are futile. But if there is any year to resist the temptation of tuning out, say Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor, it’s 2024. The two co-hosts of their popular “no bullshit” podcast Pod Save America join Inside the Hive to discuss the enduring appeal of Donald Trump, the palliative power of seeing comedy in political tragedy, and why voters should view themselves as change agents come November. “Your vote is not about rewarding or punishing Joe Biden or Donald Trump or any candidate,” says Favreau. “Your vote is about yourself and your future and what kind of country you want…The only way forward is to be involved and to try to make things better.”

It’s not easy to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces. But throughout the years, Steve Bannon, host of the popular right-wing War Room podcast, has continued to prove an indispensable voice for the former president, saturating the airwaves with pro-MAGA propaganda while galvanizing Trump’s base into action. On the latest episode of inside the Inside the Hive, Puck National Correspondent Tina Nguyen and Washington Post National Political Reporter Isaac Arnsdorf discuss how the infamous and canny GOP strategist helped Trump come out of his post-election hibernation, whether Bannon is more bark than bite, and why his impending time behind bars could burnish his MAGA bona fides. “It’s amazing clout,” Nyugen says of Bannon's prison sentence, “for someone in the MAGA world in these MAGA times with a MAGA audience.”

Ever since the rise of social media, news publishers have always been playing an unwinnable game of catch-up, chasing the changes in Big Tech’s byzantine algorithms to ensure the clicks keep coming. But with AI now in the picture, the playing field is about to get even more lopsided, according to Wired editor in chief Katie Drummond and Axios Senior Media Reporter Sara Fischer. Joining Brian Stelter on the latest episode of Inside the Hive, the two media mavens discuss how tech companies like OpenAI have painted outlets into a corner by offering lucrative licensing deals that could later come back to bite them. “If you strike a deal, you get to experiment with the top technology in generative AI while your competitors do not,” says Fischer, but you “don’t fully understand…the risk of what you're giving up and how valuable it could be.”