Joanna's AI Companion and Stunt

This week we’re taking another look at prediction markets and a new series of scandals. Is Congress finally ready to rein them in? Then, the journalist Joanna Stern returns to the show to discuss her new book “I Am Not A Robot,” all about turning her life over to a chatbot for a year. And finally, Hard Fork’s Rachel Cohn reports back on her month attending classes at the Strother School of Radical Attention, the center of a movement to resist the commodification of attention by technology companies.

Guests: 

• Joanna Stern, chief everything officer at New Things
• Rachel Cohn, producer of “Hard Fork”

Additional Reading:

• Soldier Used Classified Information to Bet on Maduro’s Ouster, U.S. Says
• Soldier Pleads Not Guilty in $400,000 Betting Case Over Maduro’s Ouster
• French weather service alerts police to tampering after suspicious Polymarket bets
• The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie

We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.