The Social Reckoning and What’s Making Us Happy

Don’t call it a sequel: The Social Reckoning is a companion piece to The Social Network. While the first movie chronicled the invention of Facebook, this one focuses on where Facebook is now. Jeremy Allen White stars as a crusading reporter alongside Mikey Madison, a Facebook insider with damning information about the business’ practices. The film also features Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, will it be added to the canon of great films about investigative journalism? Looking for other potential Oscar contenders? Check out these episodes: The movies and TV we’re most excited about this fall https://www.npr.org/2026/09/23/nx-s1-5977749/the-movies-and-tv-were-most-excited-about-this-fall‘Primetime’ sits you down with sleaze https://www.npr.org/2026/09/25/nx-s1-5979909/primetime-sits-you-down-with-sleaze Tom Cruise in 'Digger' is loud, divisive and intensely committed to the bit https://www.npr.org/2026/10/02/nx-s1-5987700/tom-cruise-in-digger-is-loud-divisive-and-intensely-committed-to-the-bit Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour: Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  If you appreciate the nuance and context we bring you here at Pop Culture Happy Hour, look into NPR+. When you join, you're supporting the kind of deep dive storytelling that makes shows like Pop Culture Happy Hour possible. You also get perks like early access and bonus episodes for a wide variety of NPR shows. Join us at plus.npr.org. I think this is a funny movie with solid laugh lines because Aaron Sorkin is a funny writer. There are also equally enjoyable, wildly unintentional laugh lines because Aaron Sorkin is also a huge cheese ball.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  It's very corny.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Don't call it a sequel. No, the new film, The Social Reckoning, is a companion piece to the 2010 film, The Social Network. But where that first movie chronicled the invention of Facebook, Reckoning focuses on where Facebook is now and what it's doing to the culture. It's framed as a kind of All the President's Men for the Digital Age, with Jeremy Allen White as a crusading reporter and Mikey Madison as a Facebook insider with damning information about Facebook business practices. I'm Glen Weldon, and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour are a dream team, two people I want to talk about this movie with. First up, my co-host, Linda Holmes. Hey, Linda.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Hello, Glenn.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Also with us is NPR White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben. Welcome back, Danielle.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Very happy to be here.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Let's get to it. The Social Reckoning is inspired by a series of Wall Street Journal articles called The Facebook Files, most of which were written or co-written by reporter Jeff Horwitz. He's played by Jeremy Allen White. A Facebook engineer named Frances Haugen disclosed thousands of internal documents to Horwitz. She's played by Mikey Madison. Those Facebook documents chronicled that the platform was causing measurable societal harm and that the company knew this and did nothing. The film's fractured timeline also features Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook isn't the ref. That's the point. That's the point, Charlie. We're not the ref. We're the public square. It's Jeremy Strong, strongly Jeremy.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed the film. He won an Oscar for writing The Social Network. The Social Reckoning is in theaters now. Linda, if there was a graduate course in Sorkin's studies, I would want you teaching it. You go way back with Sorkin's work, the highs, the lows, the Studio 60s. The Social Reckoning, what do you reckon?

• 2:36Speaker 02

  I did not enjoy this, to cut to the chase. I think it's pretty boring, except when it is weird in ways that I did not like. It's a pretty ordinary investigation tale. I think in terms of like the comparison to All the President's Men, my response is like, it wishes.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  They try to spice it up with a couple of odd touches. I think Jeremy Strong does a pretty good, strange Zuckerberg impression. I like Mikey Madison. I like Jeremy Allen White. I think both of the characters are pretty seriously underwritten. So the only time it really held my attention was when I was wondering whether something very odd was true or not. In most cases, the answer to that seems to be no, which we can talk about. Not a surprise, based on how fast and loose The Social Network was with a lot of things. So I would say not a movie that I enjoyed and not a movie I took a lot away from, either artistically or factually about Facebook.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Okay. How about you, Danielle?

• 3:33Speaker 03

  I am in the exact same ballpark as Linda. I enjoyed it a little more, but I think I enjoyed it in ways that the movie did not intend. I was just kind of cackling at various points. And if you are a student of Aaron Sorkin, as Linda is, and I am probably more intro level, but if you're a person who thinks a lot about Aaron Sorkin and how he does his shtick, it's probably entertaining in terms of you watch it and you can check off the boxes of like, oh, there's a Sorkin thing, there's a Sorkin thing. Like gratuitously treating women in kind of gross ways? Yep, got that. Characters messing up pop culture references and correcting each other? Got that, too. It's wild how quick you can tick through it.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  It really made me think so much about The Social Network and my continual wrestling with that movie. Like, how much artistic license is too much with a, especially with a story that's so fresh and a story that features living people? And at what point is your artistic license obscuring the real story and obscuring some of the truth and interesting stuff that was going on? And are you using that license to try to make a fairy tale-ish story of investigative reporting? Which is what I think this movie is doing, is obscuring the truth in favor of

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  trying to give you something sweeping and Frank Capra-ish.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I think I'm going to end up recommending this movie to our listeners. I'm going to recommend also that they see it in theaters this weekend because I think this is a funny movie with solid laugh lines because Aaron Sorkin is a funny writer. There are also equally enjoyable, wildly unintentional laugh lines because Aaron Sorkin is also a huge cheese ball. Things are true.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  It's very corny.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  He's Schrodinger's writer for me. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, there you have Aaron Sorkin. What struck me is that when this movie is, you know, sailing in West Wing sports night waters, you know, people doing their jobs that they're very passionate about and being clever and maybe a little noble, it's working for me. The closer this movie gets to depicting real world events and then trying to co-op those events to score its dramatic points, the more it slides into the newsroom waters, which is not surprising because that's exactly what the newsroom did. And that passion decays into kind of a sanctimoniousness, which doesn't make me angry because it is so self-important and so self-serious that it is a hoot. And it's in those moments that I would recommend seeing it, listeners.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  I don't know if you can swing it. If you can see it sitting next to a trusted, acclaimed, seasoned political journalist like Danielle Kurtzleben, because nothing is funnier than seeing her curl into a fetal ball in her seat. Now, Danielle, we can't spoil the stuff that turned you into a pillbox specifically, but can you unpack for me how you reacted to this movie specifically as a political reporter?

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Honestly, I don't know if it was so much the political reporter-ness that I can react with because, oh, gosh, there's a lot to unpack there. I will say, the thing that made me curl into a ball the most was at one point, it appeared almost that Jeremy Allen White, who plays the reporter Jeff Horwitz, and Mikey Madison's Frances Haugen were about to kiss or hug or something at the end. And I was, I would not put that past Mr. Aaron Sorkin. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, don't do it. Spoiler, they don't. Hey, everybody wins. But it wasn't the big reporter-y things that made me curl into a ball. It was little things that made me go, wait, wait, that can't be true. That feels heavy-handed.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Like, I don't know if Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter, in fact, does not know how to use a car navigation or how to use a map app, but that is a minor part of the plot. And it made me go like, is this something you dropped into the script to show us that, oh, he's not a tech reporter, he's an outsider, he's coming in from Washington? And if that's true, there are other more mundane, but less make you sit up on your seat and go, whoa, wait a minute, ways to establish that. Another thing is that Frances Haugen is portrayed as a kind of mousy, meek, shy-ish character.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Now, whether or not she was that way in real life when she worked at Facebook, I don't know. But sometimes it just goes over a line into, I have written down in my notebook, is she an idiot? By which I mean, at one point, she points at a television and sees a basketball player pumping his fist and says, what is he so happy about? What is he doing? It's like, Frances Haugen has seen a basketball game. What are, why, why are we acting as if she hasn't? It's moments like that that lean into, like you said, the cheesy, the heavy-handedness, where I go, the mundane would serve you so much better here. And that makes me think of, of movies like Spotlight or The Insider, where you have

• 8:33Speaker 03

  imperfect heroes or subjects and reporters who are schlubby and wearing their dockers and pleated ugly pants and everything and just doing their jobs like normal people.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  And this movie just tries to Yassify all of that so much that it just pulled me entirely out of it. And I think even if you're not a political reporter, any type of reporter, I think you may well have that reaction too.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  You know, I think that when you have watched a lot of Sorkin stuff and when you have liked a lot of it, as I have, and that is not a lie, I have really loved a lot of his work. I think that there are certain things that he does that you recognize and you realize they're not neutral to do. And one of the things that he does in this film is create this kind of imaginary, as far as I know, imaginary relationship between the two of them. That's very, she is moral, but often wrong. And he is generally right, but he needs her to be a moral person. That's an incredibly common Sorkin pattern is women

• 9:40Speaker 02

  are moral and they allow men to do great things. I don't see any indication that that is how they saw this relationship between the two of them. There is a very strange decision. As far as I know, from looking at his book and looking at her book, they were meeting in his backyard of a house that he lived in with his wife. And it is moved to their meeting in a hotel that he lives in by himself. So that when she comes to the hotel, her cover is to hope people think she's a sex worker, which means you get Mikey Madison in a lot of like revealing outfits, which I guess is what Aaron Sorkin

• 10:21Speaker 02

  thinks that would entail. For all I know, maybe there's some reason for this that is real. I can't declare there isn't. But to me, those kinds of decisions are not neutral. And when you throw in other really obvious, like, there's a point early on where he refers to the two interns as Zack and girl intern, which is the most outrageous thing to do in the workplace. And then later, the Jeremy Allen White character gives a lecture to her about how mansplaining is just something women say when they're losing an argument. The word mansplain does not appear in his book. It doesn't appear in her book. I haven't

• 11:03Speaker 02

  seen any evidence that this comes from anywhere except Aaron Sorkin. And it sounds like a very Aaron Sorkin thing.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  It's a very author insert. Yes.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  So his gender politics are lousy and unfortunately are persistently lousy. And I think in this case, it gets in the way of his storytelling. What I would love to hear from you guys about, you know, Glenn, you alluded in the introduction to this like scrambled timeline, which involves a lot of sliding back and forth with an on screen slider showing where you are in time, which to me is a flashing sign that says you didn't structure your movie correctly. Especially like, I don't think it accomplishes anything. In this situation, all this sliding back and forth, it's 2021, it's 2019. And by the way, like, those are not real dates from real time. They are a fictional story that

• 11:55Speaker 02

  he is telling in terms of the timeline. I found the scrambled timeline interfered with the creation of narrative tension in many cases.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  I'll be honest, the timeline didn't bother me much because I was fine with, you know, sliding back and forth. And to me, if we're talking timelines, the issue wasn't so much bopping back and forth between 2019, 2021, uh oh, the coronavirus pandemic is coming, all of that. I could deal with that. It's more just the recency of it in general. I think the movie had to work extra to make it a revelation to Jeremy Allen White that wow, people engage with the more emotional posts. And wow, these are the things that get people to click more and to stay on Facebook more. And like, to our modern 2026 brains,

• 12:43Speaker 03

  it's like, yeah, no kidding. I'm not saying you can't have that in the movie. I do think this is a worthy topic to have a movie about. I think it's a great story to tell. We get back to spotlight. They told that story about something that at the time the movie came out, we all knew, we had all heard the story about Catholic priests. After The Insider, we had all heard the story about the dangers of cigarettes and the horribleness of cigarette companies. There's a way to tell this story and make that feel like more of a revelation. That's a thing that this movie didn't manage to do. I don't know if that's impossible in 2026, or if there is a way, but this movie didn't succeed in making me go, wow, yeah, that was a big deal. Because it just doesn't feel that way right now.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Well, there's two issues here. One is meta and one is within the film itself. So the meta one is that this movie is called The Social Reckoning. These articles came out in 2021. This movie frames them as being like Watergate. Watergate ended a presidency. It's five years later. I don't reckon there's been a reckoning. So if you called it the social bump in the road, the social mild turbulence, maybe I could be a little bit more on board with calling it this. But the danger of couching what we know now to be true about the algorithm as this mystery to be solved. If you think about it, it's the same problem you have, the same question you have when you're trying to dramatize something like the discovery of penicillin or the creation of the atom bomb, which has recently been dramatized very powerfully. We know how it turns out. So you have to

• 14:10Speaker 01

  account for the fact that you, you've got to do more work to invest your audience in finding out the answer to a question that it knows the answer to. So it can't just be about finding out the answer. It has to be about finding out how the answer affects the people who find it out, how it changes them. And I think, to me, I would argue that this movie does that job somewhat. But along the way, it just has them explaining stuff to each other, which is the classic, you know, this is the Sorkin mode of him believing that everything you need to know about writing dialogue, you can learn in debate club. And that's just not true. This film contains the Sorkin staple of thinking that it is somehow stirring and dramatic to watch characters cite statistics at each other. I mean, the

• 14:52Speaker 01

  number of times in this movie, these actors speak in these hushed, portentous tones as the music is swelling around them, while they deliver a line of dialogue that ends with the word percent. And then there's this giant reaction to that. It's all about Sorkin's belief that drama can be constructed out of real world events. If you have the characters react to, you know, just citing the recitation of facts and the recitation of data points like they would react to like the sight of a dead puppy or something like that, have it be melodrama. As a dramatist, he's got this very old school, and I don't just mean boomer. I mean, like ancient Greek belief, the drama isn't doing its job unless it's instructing us in some way. Can't just be about entertaining. Can't just be about

• 15:35Speaker 01

  illuminating something about the human spirit. It has to be pedagogical in some way.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was a moment in the movie where there's a character named Charlie, played by Bill Burr, and he is advising Mark Zuckerberg as Mark Zuckerberg prepares for what he fears is going to be an adversarial hearing about Section 230. Bill Burr is really poking at Mark Zuckerberg about his answer, saying, you're not, you know, you're not doing it right. You're not likable enough, et cetera, et cetera. And at some point, they get into an argument about whether Facebook is being responsible.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  I'm a free speech absolutist, so accept where there's imminent harm.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  You can't say absolutist and accept in the same. With the new optimizations with the MSI, the fire hose of bad information you are injecting into the air supply is becoming jet powered. It's hydraulic. Harm, I promise you, is imminent.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  I can handle an argument. I can handle a Aaron Sorkin, you know, chatterbox, back and forth, pitter patter, fight. This one went on for a while. And at some point, I found myself looking at my watch and be like, this is too much exposition. This is too much explaining what Zuckerberg's ethos is, as opposed to showing. Please show, don't tell. And occasionally, this movie lapses into, let's just have a couple of people bicker with each other.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  But Lynda, did you notice, this is a Sorkin joint, but the pacing of that dialogue didn't strike me as kind of characteristically Sorkin.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  No. The thing that tends to win me over about his stuff and has always won me over about his stuff is that it has a beautiful rhythm to it. It has a beautiful musicality to it that some people can't stand. But I've always really enjoyed. It's circular, it's patter back and forth, and it tends to kind of circle back on itself in ways that are very funny to me. This has far, far less of that. What it made me wonder about was, you know, Sorkin has always really benefited from working with directors who I think really know how to make the best out of the kind of dialogue that he writes, right? Whether it's somebody like Thomas Schlomi, who we worked with on The West Wing, or somebody

• 17:46Speaker 02

  like Rob Reiner, who he worked with in The American President and A Few Good Men, or David Fincher, who he worked with in The Social Network. Here, he's directing. I have yet to see evidence that Sorkin is the right person to direct something that Sorkin wrote. So I don't even think. First of all, most of the kind of allegedly playful dialogue in this between these two characters, the reporter and the whistleblower, I found pretty obnoxious. It didn't feel affectionate to me as much as it felt annoying.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Abusive.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  So it didn't feel right to me. And I think maybe directors, like other directors, tend to be able to coax something different out of that. Now, obviously, in The Social Network, it's not warm either, but you're going for a very different thing. I think in this, they're going for a kind of a warm relationship between this whistleblower and this reporter. And I don't think it's directed correctly in terms of the pacing, in terms of the editing, and just in terms of having a feel for how it's going to come off. I don't think it was the right approach. And certainly, we have not talked about this yet, but certainly when you go to these scenes, which the overwhelming majority of what

• 19:03Speaker 02

  you see of Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg is Mark Zuckerberg's preparation for upcoming testimony in front of Congress. So you're not really seeing him like as a person as much as you're seeing him in this one very kind of specific situation. I just think, first of all, it plays this so much like the sequence in the Steve Jobs movie that he wrote, where Steve Jobs is preparing for this presentation, and Seth Rogen, as his kind of nemesis and doubter, is in the audience trying to be his conscience. Similarly to that, here you have Bill Burr sitting in the audience while he's preparing for this whole thing, trying to be his conscience. Like, it's a really literal, it's not a

• 19:48Speaker 02

  literal Greek chorus, but it's a really literal kind of, the man is on stage and someone in the audience is shouting out, ah, but what about this? A doubter, you know? And I just don't think that works well at all.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it reminded me of the West Wing scenes where Jeb Bartlet is preparing for a debate and everybody in the West Wing is just shouting questions and feedback at him. It's exactly the same thing. It's a format he loves. I agree, it works less well here.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  I do want to back up because I feel like I've dumped pretty hard on this movie. I think there were some good things about this. I like the kind of casting trick of bringing Bill Burr in. It's sort of like bringing Justin Timberlake into The Social Network. You're bringing in someone who does not fit with the other actors. This is a stand-up comedian first and foremost. I think he works as anyone can in that Greek chorus-y, conscience-y role that Linda is talking about. He is good at being abrasive and still fitting in the scene. I thought he was good. I am also ride or die for Jeremy Strong. I love an intense tryhard, and he certainly reads as that. I think he does as well as he can with this role. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have much to do except be a really intense jerk of a CEO in this movie.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  I didn't know why I find this less annoying than the newsroom. I just did. I thought the moments when it clunked, it clunked. And everybody in the audience around me realized the clunking and laughed at the clunking. I thought that was an enjoyable thing. So we arrange ourselves on a spectrum as we sometimes do. But that is The Social Reckoning in theaters now. Up next, we're going to be talking about what is making us happy this week.

• 21:22Speaker 00

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• 22:10Speaker 06

  I'm Rich Mar, host of a new podcast called RVA's Got Issues, because we've all got issues, right?

• 22:17Speaker 07

  For sure. Oh, definitely. Everybody has issues. What are you talking about?

• 22:20Speaker 06

  And do you think Richmond's got issues?

• 22:22Speaker 07

  I think every city, every county, every town has issues.

• 22:25Speaker 06

  Listen to RVA's Got Issues from VPM, part of the NPR Network.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Now it is time for our favorite segment of this week. And every week, what is making us happy this week? Danielle Kurtzleben, what is making you happy this week?

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Well, this might fall into the category of things that are new to me and maybe less new to others, but I am a big murder mystery person. And so I have really fallen in love with a British writer named Janice Hallett. She's really great because, first of all, her murder mysteries hit this sweet spot for me of not quite cozy murder mystery, but also not horrific violence, children in peril, all sorts of horrible things happening to people. And also, most of her mysteries explore some sort of a subculture. Like, there's a murder in the world of pub trivia, and you have a bunch of bar trivia people who take it way too seriously, arguing with each other about who's cheating and who

• 23:22Speaker 03

  did it. And she's really good at taking a group of people and painting the way that people interact. You have one person who takes things too seriously, one person who's obnoxious, one person who's way too nice for their own good. It's delightful. It's so much more fun than so many other thrillers and mysteries out there. I highly recommend The Killer Question. That's the pub trivia one. But go read all her books. The author is Janice Hallett. She's wonderful.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Great rec. All right, Linda Holmes, what's making you happy this week?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, I'm writing down Danielle's recommendation because you know how I love to read a thriller.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  What is making me happy this week, and it is one of those things that we often talk about where it's sobering to watch, but I'm really glad they made it, is a documentary that is on Peacock called Kill, Berry, Print. It is about a series of events in Idabel, Oklahoma, which is a very small town. One of the producers is Rachel Maddow. In this movie, a paper called The McCurtin Gazette starts reporting on alleged corruption in the local sheriff's office. This is, as I said, really small town, so small community. This is a family-run local newspaper that comes out three times a week. And what ensues

• 24:38Speaker 02

  between the sheriff's department and the members of the family that runs this paper was just shocking. And it ended up being a national story after the family came forward with an audio recording of some local officials musing about having them killed. It is not a rah rah, hooray for how everything goes kind of in journalism sort of story. It is very sobering, as I said, in terms of what can be done to interrupt the work of journalists. And I think that without implying that, you know, in any way that all local

• 25:21Speaker 02

  or small-town law enforcement is corrupt or bad or anything like that, you can, I think, in this film, see how grave the risks are. If what this family is saying is all true, and it happened the way they say it did, you can see how dangerous the amount of power that local law enforcement has could be if they were up to no good, as we say. So I really do recommend it. Again, it's called Kill, Berry, Print. It is available on Peacock. It's just a documentary. It's about an hour and a half long. Really worth a watch, I think.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  All right. Appreciate that. Thank you very much, Linda Holmes. What is making me happy this week? The Try Guys. Look, everybody knows The Try Guys. I didn't. I had heard of them, of course.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Glenn.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Came across one tiny sliver of what is their vast internet, I think it's safe to call an empire, which is a show called The Try Guys Phoning It In. The premise is there are two actual cooks competing against one another by standing in fake payphones and calling into earpieces of two cast members, comedians, try guys, people who do not know how to cook. And they instruct them to cook or bake a dish, but they cannot tell them what they are making. And they only have a certain amount of time to communicate what to do and when to do it. And if they want more time, they have to compete to get more quarters because the payphone, remember?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  And they do a little stupid game with each other to do that. Everybody gets frustrated, but, and this is the key, in a good-natured way. And so when the dish is finally ready, it's put under a cloche. There's the reveal. The judges taste the dish and ask the competing chefs questions about it. And the competing chefs have to pretend that everything about the often hilariously inept final product is fully intentional, which leads to some very good comedy. So if you've got a nailed-it hole in your heart, this is going to spackle over it. That is The Try Guys Phoning It In. It is on YouTube. I would recommend starting with the episode, The Try Guys Ruin Glow-in-the-Dark Cakes. And that is what is making me happy this week. And that brings us to the end of our show. Danielle Kurtzleben, Linda Holmes, thank you so much for being here.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Well, thank you. Absolutely delighted.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by my cats at Kaden Mills and Huzzah Fatima, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. And Halokimin provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next week.

• 27:50Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Google Workspace with Gemini. One subscription that does it all. Personalized AI and premium business versions of Gmail, Google Docs, Drive, and more. Try it free for 14 days at g o o dot g l e slash Workspace with Gemini.

• 28:12Speaker 08

  In a midterm election, it's hard to keep track of all those small down-ballot races. So some voters are using AI chatbots to figure out who to support.

• 28:22Speaker 09

  Sometimes if you push back to hallucinations, the chatbot will confess that it made something up. But in other cases, you know, it will double down.

• 28:29Speaker 08

  What you should know about using AI for election research. Listen now on the NPR Politics Podcast.